Bell tolls for AEU on school reform

The Rudd Government has finally started to govern 15 months after being elected and the first task at hand is reforming the school education system.

This is an important tussle as it’s a test of the Government’s new co-operative Federalism model. It sets the scene for the introduction of the long over due national curriculum with an emphasis on literacy and numeracy.

The Rudd Government has pledged that the days of schools withholding information from parents on national tests for literacy and numeracy scores are over.

As Rudd and Gillard have found out, dealing with the Australian Education Union is no easy task. The union can be obstructionist and recalcitrant because it’s fighting for an ideological position and hell hath no fury like an ideologue scorned.

Yet one also suspects, grudgingly, that many teachers also side with the modernisation of the profession and a ventilation of old ideas for new ones.

The AEU has to fight the perception that in some schools (and TAFEs) there is an organisational culture in the predominantly older teaching cohorts, of being burnt out and of doing just enough to get by.

Rudd and Gillard are not alone in this battle (revolution, war: who coined these terms? Patton?). Their natural allies are parents and this struggle will be fought in the court of public opinion. So far Rudd and Gillard are winning.

In South Australia the AEU made a fatal strategic blunder recently that has helped Rudd and Gillard. The teachers union initially called rolling strikes for a 20 per cent pay increase (now dropped to 18 per cent) at a time when many parents, especially in public schools, are doing it tough.

The global recession means that parents are keen to maximise earnings and cannot stay home and look after kids because their teachers, paid from the public pocket on average $65,000 per year, are involved in industrial action.

Indeed the Rann Government has called the AEU’s bluff and the matter has ended up in arbitration. It has been a PR disaster for the SA AEU and it remains to be seen whether the union can recover.

In November the Adelaide Advertiser online site was inundated with hundreds of emails from parents who were ropable first at the AEU, second the teachers and third the state government for allowing the teachers to strike in the first place. That’s bad news for the union.

Further bad news for the union is the fact that Sharan Burrow, head of the ACTU and former head of the AEU, has effectively been silent on the issue. This is not to suggest that she agrees with the Government’s measures but that opposing its education reforms may “off side” the Government’s roll back of WorkChoices.

The Association of State Schools commissioned a survey in August revealed only one-in-five parents supports the teachers' industrial action over pay and conditions.

Many of the academic and teacher’s complaints deal with qualitative assessments of how the state will assess teacher performance. They ask "is a child's intellectual and scholarly performance the only measure of a 'good' teacher? Aren't other factors also at play in any child's development?"

The AEU believes teachers will be punished for teaching students who are poor and whose performance is unsatisfactory.

They’ve got it around the wrong way. Teachers will be rewarded for demonstrating initiative that improves the performance of students at the bottom end of the grades sheet.

These questions are born of fear and they miss the point. They’re anticipating some sort of Stalinist pogrom if the schools more become accountable.

The focus is on making teachers and their schools accountable for not only what they teach but also how they teach it. There is no hint of mass dismissals or downgrading of roles or salaries. But there will be changes.

The Rudd Government know that if the schools disclose how their students are performing, then we’re one step closer to addressing the disastrously poor performance of those at the bottom 20 per cent of the public school sector.

About 500,000 Australians aged 15 to 24 are neither in full time work or in education and each year another 50,000 early school leavers join them. This is a recipe for disaster.

“I cannot understand why public institutions such as schools should not be accountable to the community that funds their salaries and running costs. We do not have accurate, comprehensive information to allow rigorous analysis of what schools and students are achieving. This must change,” Rudd said.

This has nothing to do with league performance ladders. Everyone knows that an eastern suburb private school will out perform a western suburbs technical school in a high unemployment area.

The crux is addressing failure at both the coalface, within the school administration as well as in the state bureaucracy.

The Rudd-Gillard action plan means about $500,000 on average per school but slewed towards the more disadvantaged schools.

One of the major problems for Rudd is the Constitution. Secondary school education is a matter for the states. Rudd and Gillard are relying on the states to approve these changes otherwise the whole venture is a dud.

It will show that the inability of the ALP in every state except WA to work across the states-Canberra divide.