Hi res: Rally for QLD Civil Unions bill 2011 (M4V Video 25Mb 2min)

Low res: Rally for QLD Civil Unions bill 2011 (MOV Video 4Mb 2min)

The bill is being debated in the Parliament from 7.30pm. The fact that the Premier was prepared to speak at the rally suggests confidence that the bill will pass the floor of the House. Debate is proceeding.

Speakers at the rally included the Premier Anna Bligh, Deputy Premier Andrew Fraser (the bill’s sponsor), Brisbane Central MP Grace Grace, (and here is where I need some QLD locals to crowdsource a few names for me in the comments…) a ZZZ Presenter, the convenor of PFLAG in QLD, and several others (sorry, this citizen journalist pleads leaving for the airport at 5.30am in defence of missing names!)

Well, I never thought I would ever say this…GO QUEENSLAND!!

Author: Laurie McGregor (CC)

Good.

Good, I’ve started with a tendentious question that presents both sides of a story that actually has about sixty sides or, in this case, no sides at all. At least there’s not a blank page any more.

Should I mention a crisis? Something about pressure? How about an uphill battle? Senior sources inside the government have given the Prime Minister an ultimatum to defend the face defeat of momentum political calculus is definitely won the payback for favours delivered in the election promises a contest to be a for certain.

Oh God, I wanted to be an actor. So much.

Every audition, they’d say ‘you’re not what we’re looking for’. Or ‘we don’t think this role is for you.’ At least I was spared ‘we’ll call you’. They never said that.

Anyway, what they really meant was ‘you’re too short/fat/ugly, go to journalism school’.

Remind me — is a false dichotomy when I present two semi-compatible notions as though they are mutually exclusive, or is it when I force the reader to make a choice between two things that could actually go together? And would a false equivalence be like that time when I cooked toasties in the microwave because the kettle was busted?

Where was I?

Neologisms. Cute neologisms. I can haz one? Can I get some in the hizzy? Am I doin’ it rite? Doesn’t the PM remind you of that celebrity and that other celebrity in that brain-swap sci-fi rom-com of this summer? I know!? And aren’t these bon mots so adorable you could just puke?

I used to go to awards nights and get smashed. Or did I go to awards nights and smash people? It’s all a blur now.

What happened to us, man? We used to be cool. We used to kick arses and take names. We used to peddle, man. I wanna get back to peddling. Influence, that is. Have you got any? I saw you had some before. C’mon man, just gimme a bit, just to take the edge off.

I can be downright oracular, man, if you take a non-Euclidean view of time. I can be portentious, you know? Paww-tennn-shuss. Takes days to say, when I do it right. That one word used to last me the whole week between columns.

A week is a long time to string together a bunch of cliches. There’s no time like the present to seize the day. A wise man once said keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If you can’t take the heat, you should put it on ice.

Anyway, I’m getting the band back together.

School crossing

If we remain complacent, it is quite likely that children born this year will be the last to enjoy free, secular and universal secondary education in NSW.

(OH&S warning: Long and winding post. No overtaking for 2000 words. Snack recommended.)

By the time today’s newborns finish Year 12 in 2028, the service-delivery arm of NSW secondary education — its high schools, staff and students — could be re-configured into a soupcon of regionally- and specialty-based outsource contracts, to be operated by the lowest bidder using taxpayer money and who, after fulfilling the terms of their contract, can “keep the change”…

Sound far-fetched? Fair enough. But first, a gentle reminder on the impermanence of all things and the rapidity of change in late modernity. I am talking about a period of time 15-17 years hence. Think back to the years between 1994-1996. Think of all that has transpired since then, which you now consider to be routine; but which you would have thought outlandish in those callow years…

That great sage and observer of Australian public life, Nick Minchin, remarked last month in his Senate farewell speech, that ‘the Australian people will only ever accept incrementalism, not radicalism, when it comes to industrial relations reform’. Wise words, and a useful indicator of how the privatisers of education will set about dismantling the public institution that has so far educated some 5, going on 6, generations of Australians. Through a series of small steps, each one seeming plausible, even popular, the systemic integrity of public secondary education will be weakened to the point that a final push — outsource contracts — will be readily amenable for the policy makers of 2026-2028.

The model for privatising public education providers is already established. In short-hand, AMEP is gone, TAFE is going, and, if we fail to defend them, NSW High Schools will be next, in the mid 2020s.

This year saw the demise of the former Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP) in NSW, with its staff and colleges replaced by the Federal LLNP (Language, Literacy, Numeracy, Program) operated through a range of outsource contracts awarded to various providers across Australia. A large chunk was awarded to the giant multinational educational firm — Navitas — which is able in some cases to use the same staff and infrastructure as the previous program, albeit on a private for-profit contract, using a combination of taxpayer money and fees collected from students.

The privatised model of education has bipartisan support in NSW, and the liquidation of the AMEP was set in train by the former Labor government. Having whetted their appetite on this soft target, the new NSW government is setting up the chessboard to ensure that TAFE loses its statewide systemic strength, so it too will be easy pickings for the outsource contract designers.

TAFE is the current privatisation target because it is now the very model of a modern, flexible (i.e. cowed and disempowered) workforce. TAFE teachers have already had their solidarity considerably weakened by mass-casualisation, un-coordinated working hours and other ‘flexibility’ measures. The result was that only about 1-in-4 TAFE teachers took industrial action during the last round of state Award negotiations with the former Labor government (it’s a bit hard to get motivated to join the picket line when you usually only work a Thursday 5-9pm shift and a Saturday 9-1pm).

Their reward for this outbreak of industrial peace and co-operation? The State government saw the weak flank and went in for the kill. TAFE jobs and campus operations are steadily moving into the hands of private for-profit providers. Not this year, not next year, but on current “progress” it will be perhaps only 1-2 Award and electoral cycles away.

The incremental (softly-softly catchee monkey) steps the privatisers will seek to take over the next 15 years, and which you must oppose if you wish to maintain free, secular, universal education in NSW are:
(1) empowering Principals to hire-and-fire staff,
(2) devolving financial management of schools to the local level, and
(3) removing the option for any constructive negotiating role for the NSW Teachers Federation short of strike action.

There are two main players driving the privatisation agenda. First and obviously are the for-profit operators; second and more insidiously are the democratically-elected politicians (excepting Greens and some independents) who are only too happy to become carpet-baggers for the privatisers. Why? Because a privatised system is one for which Ministers and politicians can evade any notion of responsibility or accountability. The art of modern political survival ensures that risk and blame be located anywhere but the Minister’s office, and devolving responsibility onto contractors ensures that, when things go pear-shaped (which they will) the Minister can simply re-assign the contract to a different provider, brave the cameras and assure the public that the system is working…

Meanwhile, the privatisers of education themselves have the same sense of public morals as 1980s corporate raiders, who believe the parts to be of greater value than the whole, and feel no compunction towards a smash-and-grab approach to public assets, and damn the consequences. They are free of any motivation to improve educational quality, they are untroubled by the social obligations of equity or fairness, they are fecklessly indifferent to the societal stabilising effects of a bedrock public system. Their sole motivation is profit, which means the less-profitable (read: more expensive to educate) children will not find a provider for their educational needs in the brave new privatised world…

Now, the privatisers would love to do it sooner, but in reality it will probably take some 15 years to soften up the NSW secondary schools system before it too can be broken up and its operations sold off (to clarify: I don’t foresee the NSW government will sell the campuses, but it will quite readily design operating contracts that let for-profit providers occupy and manage the schools on 5-10 year contracts).

What would a privatised secondary system mean for free, secular and universal education? Well, it certainly wouldn’t be free for most families. Fees will be set at a level that enables the operators to make a profit, even though they will also be getting taxpayer money under their operating contract. Of course, out of the goodness of their hearts, operators will also allow ‘concessional’ entry to their schools and set a certain level of families than can be fee-free (see how generous the private operators are? Aren’t we lucky?).

Would it be secular? Well, that would depend on the agenda of individual providers. There certainly wouldn’t be any guarantee of secularity, and when ACME Textbooks Inc. offers the provider some very nice, very cheap science textbooks that teach ‘both sides of the debate’ on evolution etc…well, the provider does have a bottom-line to maintain — and the bottom-line is not educational performance, it’s the profit margin…

Finally, would a privatised system be universal? Certainly not. The expensive-to-educate students (eg. poor, behavioural problems, with disabilities, non-English speaking background, Aboriginal) will soon be ‘let go’ from whatever contract covers them. And if your family needs to move to a different town in a different region of NSW, get ready to deal with a whole new provider, a whole new curriculum, and a whole new operating ethos. The great engine of social mobility and equity that is the NSW public secondary system will be dismantled…

When put so baldly as ‘we are going to make a profit from taking your taxes and also your fees, and then putting the cheapest teachers we can find in front of your children’, many people can intuitively see the flaw in privatised education. In Kantian terms, privatised education treats people as means, not as ends in themselves. But, if you can sauce it up a bit and use innocuous buzz-words like ‘choice’ and ‘individual’, and if you run the agenda for long enough, you can gradually help your hapless future customers to overcome their intuitive rejection and convince themselves that they really do want those shiny baubles. And remember Minchin’s words: the Australian public will always go for incrementalism — which is really just radicalism plus time.

What will it take to stop this? A few things: first, we can brook no complacency over the integrity of the public system. As parents, as families, as citizens and in some cases as teachers, you need to start and maintain a dialogue with your MPs that makes it clear that NSW public secondary schools are off-limits to the privatisation agenda. Make them sign their names to a promise that they won’t allow it. Make them publicly rule-out the possibility they would ever support it. Make it clear to them that your vote depends on their promise to keep secondary education public, free, secular and universal.

Secondly, you need to tell your MPs they should oppose any measures that would weaken the statewide systemic integrity of the NSW schools. In 2011, in their present form, NSW public schools are way-too-tough a target for privatisation, because there are statewide staffing rules that ensure a qualified teacher occupies every classroom from Balmain to Broken Hill. Furthermore, budgets and financial management are highly centralised. But, if you can weaken that — if you can devolve more responsibility to individual schools to scrabble around, find and appoint their own teachers, raise their own funds, you can weaken the links that tie the whole system together…and it becomes progressively easier….and by 2026 a near-certainty, that you can simply carve the whole lot up into regions and sell regional operating contracts to the lowest bidder (A company? A charity? A church? A local collective? Who knows?).

Finally, support your local secondary public school: send your children there, and let your teachers know you support their campaigns. Here is another newsflash for how the privatisers are getting ready to de-legitimise public school teachers in the industrial space. The laws which govern the NSW Award for state teachers have been amended by the incoming Coalition government to side-line the Industrial Relations Commission, and obviate any negotiating role for the NSW Teachers’ Federation. The NSW Education Minister can now change working conditions (including class sizes, casual relief and release time) at the stroke of a pen in the Regulations — no parliamentary vote is needed, no IRC blessing required, and no negotiation with the union is provided for.

The result of the O’Farrell public sector reforms is that industrial representatives have nowhere to go but straight to the ‘nuclear’ option of striking, because there is literally no negotiating pathway available. But of course, everyone hates strikes. They’re bad press. They’re hard on everyone. ‘Angry teachers’ is not an image that goes over well. But by taking away every possible negotiating avenue from the union, the NSW government is ensuring that the only possible form of power that the union can exercise is the most unpopular measure. This state of affairs represents a strategic victory for the privatisers of education, and must be unwound: talk to your local MP and make it clear that you want the IRC re-instated to its proper role as an independent arbiter of teachers’ Award negotiations — otherwise we deprive the union of the only peaceable route to negotiated outcomes.

To the eternal sorrow of the reds-under-the-bed freakazoids, the 5-6 generations of public ‘socialist’ education in Australia has failed to produce a Communist totalitarian dystopia. Instead, it has produced a stable, peaceful, civil Australia that is a conspicuous economic and social success by world standards. This is the status quo. We know that privatised education systems at best produce middling results (witness the USA, which achieves an underwhelming 30-somethingth place in worldwide educational performance stakes). As a matter of prudence, should we be so sanguine about placing that record and that stability at risk, purely to indulge an ideological fetish that posits ‘I’m alright Jack’ as the ultimate good, the chief standard of morals?

Brief declaration of interests: I am a NSW public school teacher and member of the NSW Teachers Federation. These are my private views. I would in fact stand to benefit greatly (in the short term) if Principals could hire-and-fire staff — it is an open secret that the Principal at my current school would appoint me as permanent tomorrow if it were within his remit. I still get emails from Principals at schools I last worked years ago, asking me to come back. But, if I step behind the Rawlsian ‘veil of perception’, I am led to conclude that the current statewide staffing system is the one I would choose, if I were divorced from the particulars of my personal circumstances, and simply taking an all-round view based on ‘not knowing’ if I am casual, temporary, permanent, rural, urban, new career, peri-retirement, etc… I also happen to be of the view that any step that makes it easier to privatise our secondary schools in NSW is a step too far.

I certainly am not arguing to freeze the public system in aspic, and block any attempts at reform. Neither, incidentally, is the NSW Teachers Federation which, for example, supports reforms such as an Australian national curriculum (provided it is superior to what we have now!) and supports NAPLAN testing (provided the data is not abused to publish league tables!) My point is simply that whatever reforms are undertaken — and there are always improvements that can be made — must not be at the cost of weakening the statewide systemic integrity of NSW public schools. If we allow that to be weakened, we are virtually guaranteeing that the children born this year will be the last to enjoy free, secular and universal education.

Please — say, do, and support any campaign you can, that will ensure another 6 generations of Australians derive this essential public service. Understand that if teachers are opposing a short-term measure that seems plausible to you, there are important ‘big picture’ reasons why. Take the time to learn those reasons, and do what you can to keep the institution of public education going. In late modernity, when we can depend on so little, it is vital that we don’t sleepwalk our way through the next 15 years, only to find when we awaken that this great public institution has fallen into the hands of for-profit providers.

So, it is my humble honour and privilege to inform LP readers that today, at long last, the other two-thirds of The Goodies — Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden — got their OBEs (Bill Oddie got his in 2003).

Don yer Union Jack waistcoats, crank up the gramophone, mist up yer eyes, and salute Her Majesty! New South Welshpersons thank you Ma’am for the day off!

Following months of peer review, a University College London study which identified correlations between certain brain structures and political views in young adults has been published in the April 2011 issue of ‘Current Biology‘.

From the abstract:

In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.

Perhaps the most compelling finding was that, after noting the apparent correlation, the researchers were then able to predict with 75% accuracy, from a second sample, which political style a subject would lean towards (conservative or liberal), only by measuring the relative sizes of the relevant brain regions.

Directionality remains unknown — it’s not clear the extent to which our political views affect these brain structures, or the extent to which these brain structures affect our political views. But what is clear is that liberal political views are associated with a greater tolerance for ambiguity and novel experiences (that’s the “job” of the anterior cingulate cortex), and that conservative political views are associated with a greater tendency to recognise threats and trigger a fight-or-flight response (that’s the “job” of the amygdala).

Now, a misunderstanding or misapplication of scientific findings has launched a thousand dodgy political theories; but considering the preponderance of evidence for neuroplasticity over a lifetime, and the complex bidirectional interactions between our mind/brain and the social environment, it should come as no surprise that political thought has direct physical manifestations in the brain (poor Descartes, how could he have known that the mind/body dichotomy was a busted flush!?).

With the oft-noted tendency for people to grow more conservative with age, we are left wondering whether the change in voting preferences is neurogenic (do our amygdalas enlarge spontaneously over the years?) or down to experience (as we grow older, do we collect more scars and scares, causing our amygdalas to grow?). And what happens to the anterior cingulate cortex once people change their vote from Whig to Tory — does it shrivel away, shrinking every time we shout at kids on the lawn?

A follow-up study on older brains may be called for — anyone care to donate?

There’s only a couple of hundred hotly-contested preferences in it, so a recount would appear likely.

According to the currently declared figures, the Liberal Party candidate polled the most primary votes (32.6%). But the Two Candidate Preferred count currently shows the Greens candidate Jamie Parker as elected to the seat.

That noise you can hear is freshly-cracked eggs dribbling down the faces of those who claimed this state election was a “disaster” for the Greens.

And can you believe it – the ALP has apparently lost Balmain!?

Naturally, the first thing Aunty reports on this momentous event is what the Opposition Spokesflunky has to say about it.

Later this week, I’m attending a seminar on how to get videoconference up-and-running for our little country school to talk with classrooms in Korea and Japan, and also how this technology will be used in e-Medicine (I guess soon I won’t have to attend those seminars in person!). Good luck doing that with wireless, BTW.

But no, expect now a massive scare campaign on how this is all a “white elephant”. Enjoy your last open thread on this topic before the intertubes become a “government-owned monopoly”…

Oh, and how come “Demolition Man” failed to stop this essential piece of 21st century infrastructure HORRIFIC IRRESPONSIBLE LABOR WASTE OF TAXPAYER MONEY!!!!!11!!!

Now, it’s much too close to the festive season to get into a serious round of cheering and/or harrumphing, so let’s enter into the spirit of things, and put together our wish-list for the new rights that are needed to cope with the modern festive season, secular consumerist frenzy, co-opted pagan solstice festival, the day before the Boxing Day test, Jesus’ Birthday, Christmas:

• The Right to Switch Off Your Mobile – Actually, this should be a 365-day a year celebration. Just leave it at home. If you’re at home, put it in a cupboard. Rediscover the zen of the Now.
• The Right to Have No Opinion – go on, be inconclusive, I dare you. When that barbecue-stopping issue comes up, just shrug non-committally and remark “it’s complicated” or “I like to mull things over”, and then maintain a Sphinx-like calm while all around you degenerate into hollering and back-biting.
• The Right to Calories Consumed When Nobody Is Looking = Zero – this is an obvious corollary of the rule that all the fat and sugar leak out of broken biscuits.
• The Right to No More Upgrades - As a former boss used to say, “if it’s working, don’t f*** with it”. Let your computer become a software museum, running un-auto-updated versions of operating systems past, with stable versions of programs that do one thing, well. You will spare yourself many, many wasted hours of failed patch installs, re-installs and configuration snafus.
• The Right to Call It ‘Christmas’ – In my community, we wish our neighbours a ‘gentle fast’ during Yom Kippur, in the full knowledge that they, or we, might observe no such practice. Likewise I feel no compunction to refer to Ramadan as ‘Auspicious Month for Dieters’. If Christmas is an important festival to you, I see no reason why you can’t or shouldn’t celebrate it your way, complete with a round of ‘Merry Christmases’ to all the non-believers you know. We’ve coped with worse, trust me.

What other rights and freedoms are now urgent priorities for modern living?

Following on from this recent discussion about effective spending investment in education, the CEO of the Australian College of Educators, Margaret Clark, has published a dissection of recent claims:

http://www.apo.org.au/commentary/jensens-class-size-claims-need-be-unpacked

Policy boffins, and those who would like to know more than the superficial treatment these issues get in the papers, are encouraged to take a look.

Readers may recall that this recent report from The Grattan Institute bemoaned the fact that, for all the extra money poured into education over the last decade or so, Australia’s performance had little improved (that  would be because we were already at or near the top, and always had been). On this point, Clark makes a useful observation (emphasis added)…

It is also worth noting that a significant amount of increased spending per student, over the last decade, is associated with increases in commonwealth funding for non government schools…

Strangely, that point didn’t get an airing in the media coverage of these issues — the subtext was allowed to run, unchallenged, that it was public schools which were increasing in cost for only a little extra performance…

Go read!

On Monday the Grattan Institute came down from the mountain bearing tablets which told us that:

1. Further reductions in class sizes are not likely to improve educational performance from here.
2. An increase of 10% in teacher effectiveness is required to raise our performance to best in the world.

The first claim is not news, and the second is imbued with the kind of naive positivism that imparts a plausible-sounding technocratic gloss to highly contestable claims. And both ignore the fact that the Australian education system already ranks among the best-performing in the world. Always has done.

It’s not clear why so many public commentators are hell-bent on sustaining our inferiority complex — education cringe — about the quality of Australian schooling when, as a former Prime Minister was fond of saying, we “punch above our weight” in so many ways.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask the Grattan Institute – pages 6 & 7 of their report explain that Australia’s aggregated PISA results are behind only 3 other countries at the level of statistical significance. That is, a statistically equal fourth in the world and in the excellent company of countries such as Japan, Korea, the Netherlands and Estonia. But why should that fact stop anyone from insinuating that Australian teachers are insufficiently effective?

Is the report’s author, Ben Jensen, writing in good faith and attempting a serious and constructive contribution to the education debate? Yes and yes.

Does Jensen acknowledge the complexities and nuances that make it so challenging to come up with a reliable method of measuring effectiveness in the classroom, and does Jensen steer clear of a “big dumb number” approach to performance measurement? Yes and yes.

But is the utility of Jensen’s report fatally compromised by a presumptive over-reliance on positivism and a framing error that overlooks critical considerations such as equity, welfare and political accountability? Again, yes and yes.

Regarding class sizes, the report is a non-story for anybody who has followed educational studies at any time in the last two decades. The empirical data from decades of studies began to converge as far back as the 1980s, and it’s a fairly reliable statistic that, all else being equal, a drop in class sizes from levels of 40-50 students to  fewer than 30, and hopefully around 20-25, has a great impact on improving educational effectiveness — but from there you start to get into diminishing returns. Again, not news.

Then there is this beaut example of “education cringe”, from the same summary:

Past investments to improve school education have not yielded results (Jensen, 2010, p.4).

If that were so, then how the heck did Australia manage the result presented only two pages further into the report – a world-class performance behind only Finland, Hong Kong and Canada? I guess it must be the extraordinary quality of our think-tanks and education commentators, because apparently our teachers just aren’t effective enough.

(Eyeballing the figures, there also appears to be an inverse correlation between the number of think-tanks in a country, and its educational performance. But I digress.)

However, the problems with Jensen’s report go beyond a misplaced hope that positivism will lead us to the Promised Land. The more serious errors in the study come from a frame that simply omits to consider issues of welfare, equity and public accountability.

The report’s silence on these points renders its central claims at best inconclusive, at worst ignorant. The report’s chosen focus of “teacher effectiveness” is steeped in a paradigm of atomistic individualism that entrenches the notion of education as a private positional commodity rather than a public good. It feeds Australia’s education cringe with its grass-is-greener, keep-up-with-the-Jonses mentality. It does not lead to a celebration of the good and the humane in education.

Student Welfare
If Jensen had looked up from his studies long enough to visit some schools and teachers, he might have realised that what happens outside the classroom is at least as important, if not moreso, in raising the character and, yes, “effectiveness”, of Australian schooling.

If you visit your local school and listen in on teachers’ conversations, you won’t hear much murmuring about class sizes. But you will hear an awful lot of conversations about the personal difficulties that students are facing.

Vast numbers of Australian children lead truly chaotic lives. In many cases, their schooling is the one island of order in a beastly collection of circumstances. But so long as our public discourse in other realms aims to heap blame for disadvantage upon the disadvantaged, to punish and straighten welfare recipients, it will become ever more difficult for “effective teachers” to overcome the corrosive effects of a disordered home life.

This cross cannot be borne by teachers alone. The greater responsibility lies with the Australian people, who bear the collective blame if our prevailing public, industrial and economic settings create and sustain an underclass who can maintain only sporadic engagement with education.

Schools Equity
Jensen’s report doesn’t even mention that the three countries which outperformed Australia all have more equitable education systems, and many of the countries which lag behind us have less equitable systems.

The question of equity extends far beyond the well-worn “public v. private” controversies, as important as they are. The new problem is that public education too is becoming less equitable. There are Federal Partnership Programs that pour vast sums into some schools, while passing over others, on a competitive selection basis. Academic selective schools are streaming off the highest achievers and putting some of the best teachers in front of them. The result is that some students in the public system are receiving a great deal more resources than are others who have the same or greater levels of need. Such inequitable distribution of resources is far more likely to erode our overall performance than to raise it.

Meanwhile, many of our illustrious think-tanks expound that a strategy of “picking winners” is a no-no in public spending on infrastructure and industry — so why are we trying to “pick winners” in education?

Instead of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, state and federal governments decree “from each according to the standards and targets we set, to each according to how many hoops they are willing to jump through to get a grant”. The outcome of present policies is that literate middle-class people who can navigate the bureaucratic maze get the assistance, while the people who most need it — the semi-literate, the most disengaged — are marginalised and discriminated against, as they always have been.

Public Accountability
Reports like Jensen’s also sustain the present fashion to devolve accountability away from the spenders of public money, and on to the recipients. The pea-and-thimble trick is almost complete, as we now expect anybody in receipt of public funds to explain and justify and be answerable for what they “deliver”, rather than the politicians and policy-makers who distribute the money and write the rule-book. Much of the public imagination has been captured by this exercise in consensual masochism.

If our democracy is guided by a principle of “no taxation without representation”, then why is our education system not also guided by an equivalent principle of “no accountability without authorship”? If teachers have no meaningful say in the factors of production, such as…

• Global education budgets
• Specific education budgets
• What curriculum and syllabus they teach
• What classes they teach
• What students they teach
• How often those students are out of class
• What resources they have to deploy
• The design and facility of their classroom(s)

…then what ethical and practical grounds exist to construct a meaningful measurement of their effectiveness?

In summary, Jensen’s report is a tunnel-visioned technocratic masterpiece that advocates a technocratic solution to a humanistic problem. Its prescriptions will fail because they misunderstand the ailment.

—–

The report can be found at: Jensen, B., 2010, Investing in Our Teachers, Investing in Our Economy, Grattan Institute, Melbourne.

Further reading:
ABC Interview – World Today