Teachers find the dark side uppermost

Yoda (while heading out to the real estate office where he now works), makes it clear to Luke that there is no real career structure for teachers - you either teach, or you move away from teaching and run the Education Department, progress in the Australian Education Union to a career in politics, or dispense with education altogether and join the Curriculum Corporation or Australian Council for Educational Research and write the National Curriculum. Alas! Too late, Luke realises he has already been consumed by the Dark Side of Force!!

With no improved teaching standards and with the wrong people in charge of the National Curriculum, how can improvement on the limited international testing results we worry about be achieved with a National Curriculum? Remember, TIMSS and PISA apparatus do not test every subject area, so how do we benchmark ourselves right across the board? Is it possible that we may actually deteriorate with a National Curriculum? (Thankfully, there isn't enough benchmarking data across the entire subject areas taught in schools to measure ourselves by, so we'll never know if the National Curriculum is an improvement across the board.

Yes, it's a new story - the Revenge of the Clones / Sith / Fad guys / Whatever!

Root and branch reform is really what is needed. A wise educator once told me to "take care of the basics". I can assure you that as a classroom teacher, it is mighty hard to take care of the basics if you are operating in a vacuum.