Teachers ‘phobic’ over test data (Murdoch press obsessed with it)

Or at least that’s how Tom Alegounarias, a board member on the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority and president of the NSW Board of Studies, sees it in a ‘hard-hitting’ (read self-aggrandizing) speech at a conference in Sydney somewhere yesterday as reported in the Murdoch press. No doubt over neatly wrapped mints, glasses of [...]

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Support good teachers

Earlier this year, in my Texas round-up of the ASCD  Conference (doesn’t Texas and Round-up sit nicely together in that sentence!)I attended in March, I posted the ominous ‘sack teachers’ Newsweek cover, which I thought epitomised something of the disregard lots of Americans have for the profession. So, good on ASCD and the latest (May [...]

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Education revolution ties funding to results

It didn’t work in the USA, it didn’t work in the UK, but let’s try it anyway. The Rudd government’s plan to ‘name and shame’ under-performing schools, principals and teachers is simplistic, populist stuff. Stuff that wont improve student learning. The Australian reports: KEVIN Rudd will demand states take tough action against failing schools, sacking [...]

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Schools in

All the journalists, academics and politicians must be back from their holidays because the media is abuzz this week with all kinds of what should be done to ‘fix’ schools and teachers in the process. The Federal Government’s rolling up its sleeves and unveiling its education revolution with, you guessed it, a national curriculum! Let’s [...]

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The trouble with VIT

You’ve gotta hand it to the Victorian Institute of Teaching, the compulsory union you’ve got when you haven’t got a compulsory union, although unions represent their constituents, not over-regulate them. When it was first established I was hopeful it would represent the professional voice of teachers in Victoria: advocate for teachers, put the teacher perspective [...]

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Merit pay for dentists

This arrived in my email this week from a teacher in another school. Considering I’ve been posting about this for a while now, I thought I should include it: Merit Pay for Dentists? My dentist is great! He sends me reminders so I don’t forget checkups. He uses the latest techniques based on research. He [...]

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What about performance based pay for politicians?

Now there’s a thought that might get some traction. As politicians help themselves to another 6.7% pay increase while teachers pays go backwards in real terms, AND it’s teachers who are in the spotlight for their performance! perhaps we should look at politicians pay in terms of performance? And in the areas of the truth [...]

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Performance Pay Deserves an F

I think this letter to the AGE today pretty well sums up my view on this one too. I’d just come out of a Year 11 English class discussing the analysis of language of the media and saying that whenever someone says something like ‘Pretty much everyone agrees..’ you should sit up and be suspicious!  [...]

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International Education Tests; an overview 2005

This document landed on my desk this week, a short and fairly uninteresting summary of the International education tests, presented by Betsy Brown Ruzzi from the National Center on Education and the Economy (US) What was interesting in the light of my post earier this month about ‘Is education really broken?’, is how this reports [...]

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Is Education really broken?

is education really broken? Julie Bishop would like us to think so. She may not have the acerbic unlikeableness of the previous Minister but most teachers reading through her address to the National Press Club will find something to dislike. Me? Well, simplistic solutions to complex issues for one, the oft-repeated complaint from the anonymous [...]

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