Dear Kevin,
You’ve changed.
Have you been possessed by the spirit of failed Liberal policies? What are you doing going on about all this performance pay for teachers and national league tables for schools?
Please stop. It’s not a revolution it’s a rehash.
These “crucial reforms” get blocked at every turn because they are illogical, unfair and unworkable.
Have you been into a classroom lately? And I don’t mean read a fairy story to a select group of Anglo-saxon kids at an inner-west school with cameras snapping.
I mean really heard to the issues facing schools and the teachers in them? Thought about the nuts and bolts logistics of delivering “quality education”? Talked to teachers about how stressed they are with increasing numbers of kids with learning difficulties, Autism Spectrum diagnoses, behavioural disorders, all needing more and more attention? Sometimes it’s hard enough to get kids to sit on their chairs let alone be model students.
I used to teach High School. At one of the NSW’s top selective boys schools. A whole bunch of kids I taught got a UAI of over 99 in their HSC. We had about 80 computers in the whole school. The private schools we compete with have a laptop and wireless net access for every kid. We still kicked arse. Except at Rugby.
Before that I taught at a school in the western suburbs where kids would come out of the detention centre across the road to come to school. Over 10% of the students had learning disabilities, more than 80% were from non-English speaking backgrounds.
How would you compare my teaching at those different schools? How do you get teachers to want to work in the poorly performing schools if they get paid based on their performance? How do you map out the performance of thousands of individuals against one another? Is it fair to base my pay on whether the kids in my year 9 Commerce class decide not to do their homework and fail their exam on personal finance?
When we give $50 textbooks to the kids they come back trashed in their bags, used as a football, a place mat to eat off or put through the washing machine, but you thought it was a good idea to give them a laptop each and let them take them home? Do you have shares in Facebook, MySpace and Warcraft? Because I can tell you, kids will use their laptops for that rather than school work… that’s if they don’t sell them to buy Ritalin.
Quality teaching? Yeah, I agree on that but until you start paying teachers decently as they work their way up the pay scale, you will never keep the good people in the job. People coming out of uni these days usually have double degrees and have to jump though all sorts of hoops to join the NSW Institute of Teachers. After ten years they hit the top of the pay scale and stay there forever, unless they go for promotion… but most leave the system before they get 3 years experience.
I’m now training to be a school counsellor. Now I deal mainly just with the really tricky kids. Trust me, generally it’s not the kids that are the real problem. It’s their parents.
If you’re talking about a revolution, sort out the national child protection issues. Let’s implement policies that create and establish real community support networks. How about helping people realise their dreams, not just by making more apprenticeship places but teaching people how to think, feel, make good decisions, take responsibility for their actions and become involved in their communities. Scrap the baby bonus, pay parents to attend programs which they talk about their experiences and know their neighbours.
Don’t penalise the people at the coalface.
Thanks for reading.
I am not a teacher, but I am a parent of five teenagers, all in High School.
There was a time when teaching was a highly regarded profession in the community. We need that back. Start by paying good teachers to stay in the classroom. It doesn’t matter if the managers and other bureaucrats are paid less than those teaching, increasing teacher pay to retain experienced teachers and improving their other conditions is what is needed.
And Parents can help to make classrooms a better place. Stop telling your children they have all these rights until you first teach them responsibilities. And don’t blame the teachers when your child goes off the rails academically – look in the mirror and ask yourself who can have the greatest influence on your child’s learning.
Finally, Mr Rudd, please move our Country further left, give us back a belief in a fair go and a desire to support our institutions. Create a system that rewards teachers for being teachers.
Jocelyn,
Like you I have fears that the ‘Education Revolution’ seems to be turning into hitting schools with a big stick (or with Liberal Party policy, which amounts to the same thing) to make them perform.
But I draw a line at criticising the laptops thing. In the state of Maine in the USA the state government gave every Year 7 student a laptop. Apple, the successful supplier, moulded the production run to indicate the student status of the machines (and reduce their value to pawn shops to nil). The educational outcomes of personal ownership were extraordinary, not just for the students, but also for their families and siblings. The scheme has now grown to other states…
I think that Guillard’s department will convert Kevin’s promise of ‘a laptop for every student’ to ‘a bunch more desktop computers in schools’, and I think students will be the poorer for the lack of knowledge that comes with control over one’s own computer, the lack of responsibility and trust, and the absence of the capacity to build their own working environment for their own education.
And yeah, I used to be a youth worker, and more often than not it was the parents…
Thanks for writing.
Dear Jocelyn,
You clearly haven’t changed. You start pushing your own political ideology three sentences into your missive. You want teachers to be better paid. But you want better pay without any accountability, on basis that any system would be too hard to implement.
I agree with your views that “helping people realise their dreams…teaching people how to think, feel, make good decisions, take responsibility…become involved in their communities” would be a good thing. But how about placing reding, riting and rithmatic at the top of the list – because guess what – as a taxpayer I thought I was paying you to provide the basic tools to achieve the lofty goals you outline. However, I am certainly not paying you to provide a political indoctrination !
I do agree on your comments that parental responsibility is a key issue – but if the system doesn’t have increased transparency then it is really easy to blame the teachers and the downward spiral will continue…
Dear Jocelyn, thanks for the letter. It is precisely because of the issues you raise — allegations of chronic under-resourcing, teachers’ stress levels, behavioural and developmental challenges facing students, etc — that the Government has decided that an ‘information revolution” is needed within the education sector.
Let’s get in there and get the information. Let’s crunch the data, pull it to pieces, analyse and argue about what it means. By making education information more transparent we can get academics, policy makers, journalists and parents in on the act and have a real community debate about education needs, instead of the usual merry-go-round of claim and counter-claim between teachers’ unions, private schools and politicians. I can understand the fear that teachers hold regarding these reforms; concerns about being hung out to dry, held responsbible for children graduating without being able to spell or read or count, being exposed by tabloid newspapers as ‘responsible for the woes of education when of course the issues aremuch deeper. But these are second-order issues that can be managed. We need to get the fundamentals right so we know where the money needs to go. And that means getting the information.
Sincerely, Kevin (ok, not really Kevin.)
Yes, I’m a teacher too, in a SW Sydney public school with 70%+ NESB kids. I would agree with most of the article, especially the difficulties of providing quality education in classrooms including special needs children. Many people don’t realise that their inclusion is relatively recent – another retrospective, cost-cutting measure that helps nobody, least of all the class teacher trying to cope with limited support. All the pollies need a reality check. Long visits into such classrooms might help. However, the effectiveness of any school does depend on the effectiveness of the principal and executive staff. Our school has just emerged from six years ineffectual leadership, easily measured by a sharp dip in basic skills results. Our new principal has introduced goals, inservicing, mentoring, focus on literacy/numeracy, and increased behavioural expectations. We’re working harder. We’re the same staff, but being appreciated and respected and working as a team is already producing results. So yes, I’d love it those ineffective, useless principals to be given a short,sharp lesson and introduction to the real world of accountability. Don’t dismiss all the government wants. Talk and work with them.