Julia Gillard outlined the results of consultations and more of the shape of the policy which will be embodied in legislation soon to be introduced into Parliament in an address to the National Press Club yesterday. The transcript is here. Commentary is largely focused on the unfair dismissal changes for small business, and there’s a sample of the reaction in a good article summarising union and academic views in The Age. But equally important are the machinations going on in the Industrial Relations Commission over “modern awards”, where employers have been presenting what are basically award-stripping ambit claims, and some odd interventions from Gillard herself [the process was examined in a previous LP post by Senator Rachel Siewert of The Greens] and the rather weak protections for collective bargaining that have been outlined.

It’s all very well to say that Fair Work Australia will be able to make good faith bargaining orders, but if they’re only weakly enforceable, and if there’s no power to arbitrate in the face of, well, bad faith, then it seems somewhat of a fig leaf. The ongoing legal maneouvring Telstra have engaged in, which has just had a setback with employees rejecting a non-union collective agreement in a Commission ordered ballot, is a case in point. Differential pay offers (which have nothing to do with rewarding merit and performance and everything to do with de-unionisation), legal stalling, failure to recognise bargaining agents and “wait them out” negotiating are all weapons in the armoury of management strategy, and it’s far from clear from what Gillard had to say that these tactics couldn’t be employed by business under the new laws.

Many Labor MPs aren’t happy campers at the moment, among others. Kevin Rudd’s cosy meetings with Fairfax management have not gone down well, and MPs are concerned that their constituents have been let down. IR is going to be back on the political agenda in a big way in the very near future, and the sentiment in the community for employment rights and the union’s third party campaigning skills now represent as much of a political danger for Labor as they were a political plus in the 2007 federal election.

Ross Gittins:

Because the Rudd Government promised to leave the funding formula unreformed during the next funding quadrennium ending in 2012, McMorrow projects that whereas another four years will see annual grants to the private schools increase by 3 per cent in real terms, real grants to public schools will fall by 2 per cent.

All this will occur while Rudd is pressing schools to publish far more information about their performance and encouraging parents to “walk with their feet” if they don’t like what’s revealed.

The state education bureaucracies and their unions have their own reasons for continuing to resist federal pressure to publish performance indicators. But Rudd is giving them a valid argument that his competition is biased against them.

Chris Bonnor:

Information about schools informs government policy and parental choice. It’s just that the beneficiaries are usually those already well educated and with access to networks and money. It rarely improves all schools for all kids: it crams middle class kids together and leaves poorer kids, schools and communities further out on a limb — further worsening our equity gaps in schooling.

There are ways to solve some of these problems — and this is where we get to this larger unresolved profound issue: the corrupted and dysfunctional way we fund schools.

This proposal, and the prospect of a Federal Labor Government beating up on TEH TEACHER UNIONS, has attracted praise from Peter Hartcher, Michelle Grattan, the Opposition Organ and Terry Sweetman.

However, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has a different view. Its Improving School Leadership study finds that the kind of public reporting and ranking of school performance proposed by the Rudd government does not, on the evidence, improve school performances and may even be counterproductive.

Finland, which does not resort to such practices, has the world’s best schooling system by most benchmarks.

This raises the interesting question of why a Federal Labor Government should choose to borrow policy ideas (such as public reporting and ranking of school performance) from the US and UK rather than attempting to emulate world’s best practice as represented by Finland.

Some more perspectives and information on the Finnish schooling system are provided here, here, and here.

In reviewing this material one finds that the Finnish schooling system includes features which would scandalise “mainstream” protagonists in debates on schooling in Australia, yet which seem to have done Finnish kids no harm at all:

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7. Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world’s C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules.

The Finnish education system is an egalitarian Nordic system, with no tuition fees for full-time students. Attendance is compulsory for nine years starting at age seven, and free meals are served to pupils at primary and secondary levels, where the pupils go to their local school. In the OECD’s international assessment of student performance, PISA, Finland has consistently been among the highest scorers worldwide; in 2003 Finnish 15-year-olds came first in reading literacy, mathematics, and science, while placing second in problem solving. In tertiary education, the World Economic Forum ranks Finland #1 in the world in enrollment and quality and #2 in math and science education.

There are private schools but they are made unattractive by legislation. The founding of a new private comprehensive school requires a political decision by the Council of State. When founded, private schools are given a state grant comparable to that given to a municipal school of the same size. However, even in private schools, the use of tuition fees is strictly prohibited, and any private school must admit all its pupils on the same basis as the corresponding municipal school. In addition, private schools are required to give their students all the social entitlements that are offered to the students of municipal schools.

In this school, everybody knows each other, and the pupils call their teachers by their first names as is customary in Finland.

A final point worth making is that there appears to be a strong synergy between egalitarianism and solidarity in Finnish society, and outcomes in their schooling system – once again showing the benign influence of social democracy and feminism.

One can only hope that an “evidence-based” “education revolution” can transcend Anglosphere culture war obsessions and union-bashing, and base itself on the evidence about the world’s best schooling system.

As Bismarck commented on this thread, it’s an old trick. As old as Bill Clinton actually – who first trialled it in Arkansas when he wanted to demonstrate that he wasn’t a “traditional” Democrat. And, as we all know, Arkansas now has a school system that’s the envy of the world (ahem)…

Dennis Atkins:

It’s an agenda that will have those working families nodding around the kitchen tables. And it’s got the added advantage of a big stink with the education establishment, particularly teacher unions and some state governments.

Maybe so. I wonder if those same “working families” will be nodding vigorously when it’s their local school that gets closed down. Whatever you think about the ideological agenda behind this (and I’m just repulsed by the demonisation of teachers), there’s an enormous number of ways this could turn into a political negative for the Rudd government. But, in the short term, he’s got the media coverage he wants, and got something that could be portrayed as a positive back on the front pages.

Update: Blogospheric reaction at Road to Surfdom, Public Opinion and Blogocracy.

Update: More from Sam Clifford at Public Polity, while on the other side of the blogosphere, Andrew Norton and Jason Soon are Julia Gillard’s new biggest fans.

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/narrative.jpg"

Anyone wishing to join in the speculation, or to parse the narrative later on, is most welcome to do so.