Rules of engagement for surviving schools debate

So, if you must talk about teacher quality, please attend also to the quality of students' and teachers' working lives and the need for work process and workplace reform. (And be ready to say where you will find the money to give teachers a very substantial pay rise.)

Seventh: if you must talk about Gonski (and we must) please note the following. Gonski is already eviscerated: by his riding instructions (no school will be worse off), by the Prime Minister's upgrade (every independent school will be better off), by the states' refusal to wear Gonski's proposed national schools funding body, by the Catholics' insistence that money for need should be spread across half of all schools, not Gonski's quarter, and by the government's idea of phasing it all in by 2019.

An eighth and last suggestion: whenever you write about Gonski, or equity, or productivity, or funding, or competition, or anything else to do with Australian schooling, please take a sentence or two to explain that we're in no shape to do anything much about any of these things.

For the first time, Australian schooling faces the common external challenge of international performance comparisons but it has no capacity for a common response.

The system is divided into three sectors in each of eight states and territories, subject to the close involvement of nine governments and their electoral timetables and annual budgetary games.

As Gonski's fate sadly demonstrates, the system is incompetent. It's the system that's letting the side down, not the schools. So, when you write about fixing schools, please remember to mention the idea of fixing the machinery that is supposed to fix the schools.