Education Reforms, Aussie Style

Does CER Include Julia Gillard?

Miranda Devine, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, reveals that the Labour Government is hard nosed and gung ho when it comes to its new initiative to rank teachers and schools, and to publish the results on a national website.

The Australians have muscled up. Not only does the government think it is a good idea that schools be graded and ranked nationally, it has set up a website where all the information can be available to parents. Guess what? Within an hour of the site going live, it was crashed by traffic volumes. Parents want to know. They want to know not only how their own children are performing, but how their school is ranking alongside others.

Julia Gillard, Minister of Education has told the Aussie teacher unions to go take a running jump.
She has got a bunch of academics and educational experts behind her, backing her up. She actively encourages parents to place pressure on teachers and schools that are shown up at not performing. Contrast this with limp wristed New Zealand, where the Key Government insists that this is the last thing it wants to have happen with its standards testing reform.

The most valuable information standardised testing can provide is the difference good teaching makes, allowing the lucky child with a good teacher to improve at a greater rate than her contemporaries stuck with duds or mediocrities.

This kind of information is, of course, anathema to a union culture hell-bent on preserving a false "see-no-evil" egalitarianism among its membership, where longevity of service is rewarded over excellence, ingenuity is crushed, and children, especially those without involved, competent parents, suffer.

To her great credit, Gillard, the federal Education Minister, is determined to empower parents and policy makers with as much information as possible about the performance of schools and teachers. Her MySchool website, launched last week, includes the results of national numeracy and literacy tests for years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in each of the nation's almost 10,000 schools.

''We would expect parents to have robust conversations with teachers and principals,'' she said. ''This should put pressure on people."

As in New Zealand, the teacher unions have been resisting the Australian "testing and telling" reform.

The Australian Education Union, purportedly representing 180,000 teachers, under its militant federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, has been fighting the website on every front, and threatens to boycott supervision of this year's tests. Gillard, admirably, is standing her ground. "If they don't reconsider, we will get it done by whatever means it takes.''

The war is on, and Gillard has the bottle to wage it.

The war against teachers' unions is on - only this time it is not from their traditional conservative enemies, who have proved spectacularly unsuccessful over the past decade in breaking union control of education.

A new resolve from the unions' old allies and enablers, the Australian Labor Party, and in the US the Democrats, unable any longer to ignore the disastrous effect of progressive policies of the past 40 years, looks like finally breaking their destructive dominance.

At last we can prove that demography is not destiny

What are the lessons for New Zealand? Clearly, you need a government that is in no doubt that it will face a fight with teacher unions. "Softly, softly" simply will not work. It is a fight that has to be deliberately picked, fought comprehensively, and won. There has to be no quarter at the end of the day, for the unions will not give any. Gillard and the Labour Government is clearly way ahead of our government on this front.

However, to be fair, Gillard has three key advantages. Firstly, she is a personal zealot for the cause. Passion is compelling. Thus, she is not prepared to be mealy mouthed. Everyone knows that testing will end up with league tables in one way, shape or form. Gillard's passion and commitment has made her stance far more transparent and honest and upfront. Our government's stance has been confused and unconvincing. It has argued that standards will not lead to official league tables. It has sounded naive at best, disingenuous and untrustworthy at worst. What is should be saying is, "Of course it will lead to league tables, but to ensure that the information contained is accurate and fair, we will run them on a website that every parent and teacher can access."

Second, Gillard is a Labour politician. The upshot is that the Aussie teacher unions have few political allies. Apart from the Greens, there are no natural political parties to stand up and argue publicly for them. In our case there is little that can be done about that. Labour and the teacher unions on both side so the ditch have been "living together" for decades. Realpolitik says that the government here has to expect NZ Labour to trumpet the teacher union's arguments and cause in Parliament and in the media. Strategies to achieve an effective division of the two have to be executed.

Thirdly, Gillard has another card not held by the New Zealand government. The government education system in Australia has never held the effective total monopoly on schools and schooling that applies in New Zealand. Consequently, the teacher unions in Australia do not have the controlling grip over the state schools that applies in New Zealand. Successive Australian governments have encouraged private schools, thereby preventing an outright monopoly of government schools. This, in turn, has led to weaker teacher unions there than here.

Recent surveys in New Zealand show that the vast majority of parents approve of the national standards reform--at least in principle. But a Weekend Herald survey, conducted by Nielsen implies that the support is soft.

But almost half - 48.4 per cent - of those surveyed were concerned that national standards would lead to schools focusing on publicly reportable subjects, to the detriment of the wider curriculum.

The survey also found that a majority - 56.1 per cent - believed that many of the subjects not covered by national standards, including social sciences, art and technology, were as important as or more important than reading, writing and maths.

This is how the teacher unions will play the propaganda campaign. National testing, they are going to argue, undermines true, well balanced education. Therefore, national testing is bad for your child. The unions are standing up for your best interests.

Frances Nelson said that while learning the three Rs was "critical" for children, existing standards guidelines drew from a wider range of subjects.

"Parents are concerned," the union leader said. "They want more for their kids than reading and writing."

To succeed, John Key and his government needs to meet this challenge head on: if kids don't learn how to read, write, and computate they will end up locked in a mental dungeon, unable to learn anything else. It is precisely because other subjects are so important that reading and writing and maths are essential. The proposition is almost self-evident, so the Government has an opportunity to make the case powerfully. But sleep walking won't do it. Nor will leaning on polls which say that 75% of people support the National Standards reform.

Maybe the government could borrow Julia Gillard for a couple of months.