Federal education bill doesn't fit the bill

As noted in a survey of school leaders around Australia carried out by Melbourne-based Brian Caldwell, schools are already drowning in bureaucratic red tape and government micromanagement. Expect matters to get a lot worse.

Central to the Gillard led government's approach, described by the Prime Minister as a national crusade and embodied in the Education Bill, is a command and control model of public policy. All roads lead to Canberra, illustrated by the fact that we now have a national curriculum, national testing, national teacher registration and certification and national standards for teacher training.

An approach that has been implemented in the USA and the UK over the last 10 to 12 years and that now governments are jettisoning. President Obama has replaced the centralised and punitive approach represented by President Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation by a new model based on empowering schools and districts at the local level.

In the UK, the Conservative Secretary for Education, Michael Gove, is also championing greater school autonomy and flexibility by ditching the Tony Blair approach that, much like Gillard's national crusade in education, forced schools to comply with intrusive and inflexible government directives.

The irony, of course, is that if the ALP government was truly interested in lifting school performance and strengthening student outcomes it would ditch its model in favour of the example presented by Australia's Catholic and independent schools.

Schools that are already achieving world's best results and that are in danger of losing funding and the freedom to mange themselves because of an Education Bill that embraces a statist model and a cultural-left view of equity that unfairly discriminates in favour of government schools.