Accreditation

We received the latest Pravda today. It's full of the usual useless propaganda aka rubbish. One article starts with:

"Schools working towards building a Performance and Development Culture and achieving the highly prized accreditation would do well…" blah blah blah.

Accreditation reared its ugly head last year and we were a long way off it. Nobody told us why we would want to be accredited. Do we get more money, more staff, better conditions, less paperwork (not that I do any!) or what?? Why would any school want to go to the trouble?

Accreditation is 'highly prized'??? By whom??

Pravda dishes up the usual slop.

So there is enough money…

In the letters to The Age (18/2/08) there is a sentence that sums up a previous post, and shows the hypocrisy of Bronwyn Pike et al.

The letter reads:

"Trade holidays for pay, teachers told" (The Age, 15/12). So there is enough money"

Lewis McCavour, Swan Hill

Sums it all up.

Trading holidays for pay

I had heard that this was on the cards a while ago. The story is here:

 

http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2008/02/14/1202760494720.html

 

VICTORIAN teachers will be asked to trade some of their holiday time and pupil-free training days in return for higher wages.
As thousands of striking teachers shut down schools across the state yesterday, Education Minister Bronwyn Pike said the Government was prepared to pay teachers more, provided they agreed to measures designed to lift performance and make the profession more productive.
Some proposals on the table include changes to pupil-free training days and annual leave. Victorian teachers have 11 weeks of holidays a year, 15 days of sick or carers leave and four pupil-free training days, which are used by teachers for planning or professional development.
As part of the wage negotiations, the Government is reviewing the time teachers have away from the classroom, and may shift pupil-free days — most of which are in school terms — to the start of school, before students resume class.
"We'd like teachers to come back to school before the students so they can talk together in teams, plan in teams, and improve the quality of their programs," Ms Pike said. "A lot of teachers already do that but we'd like that to be standard across the board, and then we're prepared to talk about how teachers can get extra money for that increased attendance at school."

 

A couple of things, how will making teachers come back in the holidays save money? Teachers are on a salary, no matter how many days they work. It won't make any difference to the budget. Where are the so-called productivity "trade-offs"?

 

I'd be quite happy to get rid of a couple of the pupil-free days. As I've said before, the whole school PD days are a waste of time. We usually get so-called experts in to tell us how it could be done. There is going to be a shortage of experts if they are all going to work in the same couple of days before school starts. They will also have nothing to do for the rest of the year. How will they survive?

 

Teams - how I hate that word. It's an import from the business world and should have been left there. 'talk together in teams, plan in teams, and improve the quality of their programs' - that's not going to happen. You can't shove a team together under duress and expect it to do some productive work, which is what is going to happen.

But Bronwyn Pike is all hot air and is more interested in looking good.

Bureaucratic Stupidity

I have very little time or respect for the ministerial bureaucratic sycophants. They are overpaid and are just there to save the minister from making a jackass of themselves. They make no productive contribution to our economy and the money they're paid could be put to better use.

 

This time it is Matt Nurse who makes an idiot of himself:

Matt Nurse, spokesman for Education Minister Bronwyn Pike, said the Government wanted to lift standards in schools and find better career pathways for teachers.
But giving teachers a 10% wage rise and better working conditions would cost taxpayers $8 billion, he said.
"If we agreed to this claim we would have no money left for new classrooms, new technology or libraries for our students," Mr Nurse said.
"We will continue to discuss a new enterprise bargaining agreement with teachers once they return to the table and many things are up for discussion."

 http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2008/02/11/1202578694347.html

 

The next day Stuart Brearley pointed out that Matt should have gone to school and done some maths.

 

Number-crunching

I NOTE that Matt Nurse from the Education Department states that giving teachers a 10% pay rise would cost $8 billion (The Age, 12/2).
That figure presupposes that the wage bill for Victorian teachers must be $80 billion. Given that the average teacher wage is $55,000, we must therefore have 14,545,455 teachers in Victoria.
This figure is almost 3.5 times our entire population. It must be untrue.
It would cost $121 million to give teachers a 10% pay rise, to bring them almost level with NSW. This is 66 times less than the figure quoted. Just where does the Education Department get its numbers from?
Stuart Brearley, Box Hill North

 

I'll admit all of the $8 billion is going to wages but it would have to be most of it. And Stuart has ignored the extra costs such as superannuation. However, it does show what ministers and their toadies will say if they are desperate. I hope that one of the "many things (that) are up for discussion" is the reduction in the number of wasteful bureaucrats.

 

Education Times

We received the latest version Pravda (aka Education Times). This is the 16th year of the tripe. It is just a propaganda piece. Everything is rosey, there are never any problems and there is never any criticism of the minister or her policies.

 

I was at a school that was asked to contribute to the 'this is what we do' page. It was supposed to be about how we used AFL in our classroom. Every one of the contributions was rubbish, we did none of it. It was all how we 'could' have used the AFL. Ironically, the only person who did use the AFL was me, in computers - and there was no way I was going to waste my time to write for Pravda.

 

Normally, I go straight to the appointments to see if there is somebody I know and it's then straight into the recycling bin. I took a bit more time as I knew there'd be something useful for this blog.

 

Newspaper photographers regularly set up stupid shots, trying to make the material seem more interesting. There is a picture of a girl soldering a circuit board. Apart from trying to solder the wrong side of the board, the caption says they are testing robots they designed in class. Sorry, but I can't believe that there is any way that she designed that circuit board.

 

I really couldn't be bothered reading the rest of the tripe.

Teen performance decreases

Both papers today had a summary of the Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan paper:

 

 http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/teen-performance-on-three-rs-in-decline/2008/02/10/1202578601344.html

 

I couldn't find the online version of the Herald Sun article.

 

The original research article is here:

 

 http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/~aleigh/

 

I bet the reporters who wrote the articles didn't read all 47 pages of the report and just rehashed the summary. Overall, I am not convinced that the report proves anything. Students today certainly don't have the basic arithmetic skills that their grand parents had. The use of calculators have killed that - who does long division any more? I am dubious that the tests are testing the same thing and even the authors admit that there is a lot more that students today learn compared to their grand parents. The ability to adapt to new technology is one such area.

 

Education is different. Compare any subject now with what was done in the '60s. A student from today would struggle back then and vice versa.

 

As for class sizes, I find the ideal size is about 20. Too much smaller and you don't get the interaction that teachers like today and too much bigger you don't get to see the kids individually as much as you like. There is no way we could go back to the class size in the 30s we had when I first started. Besides the school rooms are not big enough.

Tough schools to get 'better' teachers

Saturday's The Age had an article that gives some clues as to what the government may want in the current wage negotiations.

 

http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2008/02/08/1202234169441.html 

 

Top teachers, including graduates, would get a bonus to teach in underperforming schools. Good luck to them. It'll be interesting to see if it works. My guess is that it won't. One, the government won't be willing to pay enough. Secondly, tossing the graduates into that environment is more likely to put them off teaching for good unless they get an amazing amount of support, which the government is unlikely to provide. Teachers tend to like to teach in areas similar to those they grow up in. How many teachers originally from the western suburbs are there in the education system?

 

Incidentally, if the staff succeed and pull up a school so that it is no longer underperforming, will that mean that their salary will then go down? If they don't, how does this accord with schools that already are performing to the correct 'standards'? That would be unfair on those teachers and schools already doing a good job.

 

One good thing in the article seems to be that the government wants a reduction in the number of pupil-free days. I've said before all-school pupil-free days are a waste of resources. Using a scatter-gun approach to professional development never works. They might want to also look a t the number of days some staff take off for PD. It is ridiculous the number of days taken off. I hear that there is a new process for applying for departmental PD that has a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through. That ought to slow things down a little. I'll have to investigate this.