Since Victorian school find their own teachers, decentralised staffing, the are very vague numbers for numbers of graduates, number of experienced tteachers moving in, vacancies.

Without accurate statistics there are inaccurate numbers and poor policy with no ability to plan for the future systematically and improve the system

Until 2005 all vacancies longer than 2 weeks were published in the Teaching Gazette. Today only vacancies longer than 6 months are advertised. These vacancies are advertised on the Education Department online website. It’s not a copy of the very effective TAFE staffing website, its an American Peoplesoft mess.

For the past 20 years each year there more 8000 trained teachers looking for work than there are positions in Victoria. When principals say they can’t find teachers they mean they can’t find slender 25 year old Melbourne Uni graduates who studied at a western suburbs high school. After 18 months hunting for work I have developed a league table of where not to study for a Dip Ed and where to study – if you want to teach.

Yes, intelligent words from Miranda Devine — Teach for America must be the way to go, and when you need evidence, you should always ask the organization you are evaluating to provide it (or look at their web site, even easier). You always want unbiased independent evidence, after all.

If she’d bothered to do a better search, she would have found that at best tiny positive effects from these sorts of programs, even when you include teachers as inexperienced as the Teach-for-America ones into your control group (e.g., this publication). This doesn’t even take into account all of the other problems the program creates, like the 2 year turnover, dissatisfaction amongst the TFA teachers etc. .

The other strange thing about it is that she obviously doesn’t read the paper she comments for. Had she done that, she would have found out that negative results are found from these programs in some cases also (look e.g. here)

d

d