The Guardian 3 September, 2008
Rudd’s education counter-revolution
Bob Briton
Someone or something will have to be blamed for the unfolding decline in Australia’s economic fortunes. With his address to the National Press Club last week, Kevin Rudd served notice it could well end up being the public education system, teachers and their union.
OECD figures were trotted out as evidence (as if any were needed) that there is almost a direct relationship between years spent at school and income earned by individuals in later life. Higher literacy rates equal higher living standards for whole countries. But instead of making a clear, simple commitment to right the funding injustice of the Howard decade and repair the devastation left in its wake, Rudd took the opportunity to announce the transplanting of dubious US and British schemes to Australian soil. These involve rating and ranking schools, closing down the "under performing" ones and paying teachers and principals according to "outcomes".
Rudd knows the plans are way out on the neo-liberal fringe and is prepared for some "argy bargy" and "blowback". States that resist the new arrangements will miss out on strings-attached funding increases. "If various governments choose not to receive these additional payments, then I think the country will say ‘be it on their heads’", a combative PM told the Press Club audience.
The stridency of Rudd’s comments and the scope of his government’s agenda stunned many. Embattled Liberal leader Brendan Nelson complained that the "education revolution" was actually a knock-off of the Libs’ next step toward the complete privatisation of education were they still in government. State governments will buckle under, but administrators must be wondering just how much more probing, testing and reporting their schools and students can bear.
"There are some challenges, but with goodwill on both sides we can sort through the details", Acting NSW Education and Training Minister John Hatzistergos told The Australia Financial Review. "Our schools already do most of what the commonwealth is suggesting."
It’s true that the effects of Howard government’s mania for testing and reporting remain as an unwanted legacy but the Rudd/Gillard proposals take it to a whole new level. Australia will lift a controversial idea trialled on the schools of New York City. The scheme’s architect, New York City’s Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, offered words of encouragement to the Australian government on the ABC’s Sunday Profile program.
"All of our principals sign an agreement with us saying if their school gets a D or an F two years in a row, or three Cs in a row, we can remove them", he said. "We also reward those schools and those principals and teachers who get good results, by giving them additional pay.
"I’ve shut down 70 schools, brought in a new principal who selected a new team and they are operating in a more effective way … We had high schools that had a 30 percent graduation rate, I shut those schools down and replaced them with smaller high schools in the same building and some of those schools now have a 70 or 80 per cent graduation rate", Klein continued.
Not everybody in New York appreciates his confrontational approach or agrees with the claims of success. Business and neo-con politicians love it but teachers struggle to produce the masses of data the system demands. Parents are bewildered by the often-meaningless stats it spits out. Even very young children are held back in lower grades for years as they fail to meet rigid benchmarks for the three R’s. Behavioural problems like bullying have been exacerbated.
Schools in more tranquil and affluent areas are rewarded. Struggling schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are let fail. Private operators circle the dying schools waiting to establish "charter schools" that slug parents for things that used to be included when they were government run as well as owned. Poor communities lose an asset.
The Rudd government would say that its intentions are pure, that it wants to press an extra $500,000 a year on disadvantaged schools to attract the sort of principals and staff they need to turn their academic fortunes around. But the threat to merge schools languishing on the bottom of the league table with the higher achievers remains. And throughout the government’s pitch for the "education revolution" is the notion that teachers are standing in the way of a bright future for our kids and that a wall of secrecy is being maintained to hide the mediocrity of teachers.
"I cannot understand why public institutions such schools should not be accountable to the community that funds their salaries and their running costs. Right now, we do not have accurate, comprehensive information to allow rigorous analysis of what schools and students are achieving. This must change", the PM intoned.
Parents, the taxpayers must be informed in order to make a choice about where to send their children to school. What information are they not receiving? What choice do they need to make? When all the verbal gymnastics are done, the choice is between the local state school and a number of (usually religiously-aligned) private schools — schools that cleaned up financially under the skewed funding arrangements set down during the Howard era when monies meant for public schools were diverted into the private system.
The Rudd Labor government is doing nothing to reverse that imbalance. "It’s time to move beyond the outdated divisions between … public and private provision", Rudd told his Press Club audience.
The day before Rudd’s Press Club salvo on the public education system and the teachers who work in it, a report was released into the results of a decade of pro-private "indifference" under the Howard government.
Former adviser to Jenny Macklin, formerly opposition spokesperson for education, Dr Jim McMorrow, showed how the funding biases of the Howard years meant commonwealth funding for public schools declined from 43 percent to 35 percent of outlays in the Howard years and this share is projected to fall further to just under 34 percent by 2011-12. Unless there is major new investment, the public system will have to shed 1,000 teachers by 2012.
As the Rudd/Gillard "revolution" plays out, it is clear that the neo-liberal privatising agenda in education is being loyally adhered to. The Prime Minister dismisses demands from teachers for funding justice and an immediate injection of $1.5 billion into the public education system in order to reduce class sizes and improve services in public schools as "dishonest". The community will have to get behind the Australian Education Union in the looming argy bargy to maintain a universal, secular and free public education system.