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.

'Parasites' deserve a place at the table

A Charles Spicer wrote a letter in The Sunday Age having a go at the teachers' union. It's reproduced below.

 

Although it does a lot of good, the Australian Education Union also does a lot of harm. I'm old enough to remember strikes they have called on ideological grounds, which have had nothing to do with teaching. I can sympathise with Charles. Because of the AEU, in recent years we have had to put up with the VIT (Victorian Institute of Leeches) and, as Charles pointed out, the appalling agreement in 2004. Like him, I voted against it, one of two in my school I believe. It was that agreement that put us so far behind. I know Charles is not the only teacher who was disenchanted with the AEU and gave them the flick.

 

I think one of the problems is that the union is run by non-teachers. When was Mary Bluett last in the classroom?

 

'Parasites' deserve a place at the table

Juliette Hughes, The Ethicist ("Should you go on strike if your union asks you?" 3/2), refers to non-union members of the teaching fraternity as "merely parasitical".

I doubt that the Australian Education Union represents half of all serving teachers in Victoria, and yet they hold all the power at the negotiating table during discussions with the government.

During the 2004 Schools Agreement talks, I contacted the government as I wanted to contribute to the discussion. I was told I had to speak to the union. I then contacted the union and they hung up on me when I told them I was not a member.

As this door closed I turned to my usual course of action and wrote letters to the minister.

Unfortunately, under the Bracks/Brumby Government, I only received the standard auto reply of "we'll get back to you", which they never do.

When it came time to vote on the agreement, I voted against it but was in the minority. I had no choice but to accept the umpire's decision, however flawed, in order to continue doing what I love.

Having been a member of a union, I believe the AEU has continually let its members down and therefore I choose not to join.

I do, however, continue to lobby the government and have been described by senior bureaucrats as an "activist", although none of these people have shown me the courtesy of actually speaking to me and finding out whether I am rational or otherwise.

It is my hope that all teachers, and not simply unionists, will be able to have more of a say in their working conditions in the future.

That way "parasites" such as myself can finally play a role in changing education in Victoria for the better.

CHARLES SPICER, Glen Waverley

Nurses in Schools

The teachers' union made The Sunday Age in a couple of articles. The first is for a nurse for every school.

 

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/union-seeks-allergy-nurse-for-every-school/2008/02/09/1202234230280.html

 

In a nutshell, that isn't going to happen. I was in a small school and it had a nurse three days a week. I'm in a larger school with five times the kids and it doesn't get a nurse. Some brilliant decision making is going on here.

 

All teachers are supposed to have been trained on using EPipens. We had a staff meeting mostly devoted to it. What a waste of time. We didn't get to try or even touch the EPipen. The presenter told us what to do and that was it. Our school hadn't even decided where to put the EPipens. If I had a case I wouldn't have a clue what to do except call for the assistant principal, which might be the best thing anyway.

 

When the government says all teachers will be trained in something you can rest assured that it will be poor (and cheap) and probably useless training.

Merit Pay

The education section of The Age brought up the idea of merit pay again. The article quotes Dr Andrew Leigh from the ANU. The link is here:

 

http://www.theage.com.au/news/education-news/push-for-trial-of-merit-pay/2008/02/01/1201801039692.html 

 

The Age article linked back to Andrew Leigh's web site but I couldn't find his original comments. Despite his comments, I have do not know of any place where merit pay has worked. The small example from Denver Colorado quoted shows the problem and has very little to do with merit.

 

It offers an extra 3% if the teacher goes to a hard-to-staff school. What has this to do with merit? And I would want a lot more than 3% to take on some of the schools in Victoria.

On the merit side it offers 3% if test scores exceed expectations. Does this mean all subjects are now tested? It will side effect of making teachers teach to the test. Does it mean every student has to exceed expectations? There will be a rush to teach 'good' classes. What about the 'unteachable' student. There are only a few but some students have no interest in doing anything with school. And despite the rhetoric by politicians a school is not going to be able to do anything with them.

 

They offer an extra 9% for extra degrees etc. Extra qualifications should be rewarded but it doesn't necessarily make a better teacher. Extra 2% for professional development (PD) - given the amount of rubbish PD we get shoved down our throats we deserve the extra for having to put up with it.

Criminal Teachers

The Herald Sun started the week with some front page teacher bashing:

 

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23154163-661,00.html 

 

Mind you, more column centimetres were spent on plugging their Monopoly game than on their so-called exposé on criminal teachers so things aren't too bad.

 

I'm not sure if the little paper expects teachers to be paragons of virtue or not, or whether it was just a bit of a beat up. Christian Bennett, writing in the letters to the editor the next day made the interesting comment: "Imagine the outcry if a school demanded full disclosure of its parents' past deeds. It would soon become a very small school."

 

Yes, teachers do have an influence on kids lives but parental attitudes are a far bigger influence. As a principal once said, we're trying to instill behaviour patterns in some students in the few hours we see them that parents have no ability to teach them.

Stop holding back top students

The new grand pooh bah of education, Professor Barry McGaw, says we are holding back our top students by concentrating on the weaker ones.

 

http://www.theage.com.au/news/education-news/stop-holding-back-top-students-curriculum-chief/2008/01/31/1201714153287.html

 

That will certainly put the cat amongst the curriculum pigeons. Unfortunately, with the way school are under-resourced and are set up it is difficult to cater for all abilities. Streaming has been tried and found wanting. No, I don't have an answer but I bet Prof. McGaw doesn't have one either.

 

He is quoted as saying, "Any plans to develop a nationally consistent curriculum could fail without additional resources for schools." I think he used the wrong word. It should be 'will' not 'could'. If it is like every other initiative, such as VELS, we'll get plenty of web sites to look through, as if we have nothing else or better to do but spend hours trawling through the Internet. Occasionally, we get bored to death by departmental apparatchiks doing their best to earn their bonuses. Somebody needs to teach bureaucrats how to produce a PowerPoint presentation. The coal face is not the place to be.

 

In the science area, schools have been gradually getting further behind in the technological area. Last year, for the first time in about 40 years as far as I can remember, money was actually allocated to schools to buy resources to help bring schools up-to-date. It wasn't enough and let's hope it's not another 40 years before it is done again.