RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: OZschwitz: Incompetent statist education  Sat Aug 16, 2008 8:36 pm | |
| THE world has had many revolutions - the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, to name just a few. Characterised by rapid and dramatic change, these revolutions altered cultural, socio-political and economic landscapes and uprooted the status quo.
So last year, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised an "education revolution", school communities, parents and students expected big things quickly.
The pillars of this revolution included putting a computer on the desk of every upper secondary school student and a trades training centre in all of Australia's 2650 secondary schools. But just nine months on, not only are these policies failing in their implementation, they are chewing up billions of dollars of public funding while other issues that need to be addressed in education go unnoticed.
Despite what we were told last year, not all students will be getting their very own computers on their own desks as promised. Instead, at best, it will be a computer on every second desk, with a ratio of one computer to every two students now the "national benchmark".
Meanwhile, there will not even be enough money for things such as installation, maintenance, software, teacher training, security and extra electricity. Some estimates have these costs blowing out to more than $3 billion with the burden likely to fall on schools and parents through higher fees and more fund-raising.
But it is not only the digital revolution that has been watered down, so too has the $2.5-billion pledge to put a trades training centre in every secondary school.
In reality, this plan amounts to an average of $900,000 for each school at some time in the next 10 years. This might update the woodwork room, but will not create anything that resembles a centre.
To make the best of what is on offer, schools are having to pool their funding, meaning there will not actually be a trades training centre in every school.
The implementation of these policies hardly resembles anything like the storming of the Bastille.
At best this is a part-time revolution, complete with coffee breaks, smokos, sickies and a siesta.
Meanwhile the real issues needing reform continue to go unnoticed.
Such as the teachers - particularly young teachers - who leave the profession in droves, fed up with poor pay, inadequate training and no incentives in the classroom. And the issue of teacher quality: we now recruit many of our teachers from the bottom third of graduates, with some university teaching courses accepting candidates who have barely passed their HSC.
These problems must be addressed because it is teacher quality "that matters the most" when it comes to addressing educational disadvantage or doing anything to change the fact that one in 10 Australian children fails to meet the most basic literacy and numeracy benchmarks. This situation worsens the longer they are in school.
The problems could be solved with serious structural reform, which would include giving principals greater autonomy to hire and fire who they want, a performance pay model that would reward teachers for exceptional performance and improvements in student results and a more flexible entry and certification scheme to encourage - rather than punish - people who want a mid-career change into teaching.
It could also mean supporting schemes similar to the successful Teach For America program and Teach First scheme in Britain, which have transformed the status of the profession by recruiting the best graduates to teach in the most disadvantaged classrooms for a no-strings-attached period of two years. It would mean having a more rigorous, back-to-basics curriculum.
As welcome as new computers might be, they will not create better teachers or dramatically improve educational outcomes.
Parents and students are waiting for a real revolution, a revolution that attracts the best and brightest into teaching and gives them a first-rate curriculum to teach with so that Australia can have the best education system in the world, not just win the race to have the most computers.
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