The 'Education Revolution' redact

Yes, he’s spent massive amounts of money on the computer roll-out and the schools building program, but as Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of South Australia, Alan Reid, has pointed out, “The BER is a strategy to address the global financial crisis - it is not an education strategy” (Reid, A (2009) “Is this really a revolution? A critical analysis of the Rudd government’s national education agenda” in Curriculum Perspectives, Vol. 9. No. 3).

Gillard will continue to mention “new resources” to try and keep parents and education workers on side, but I suspect that it is the other half of the equation, “new reforms”, that holds the key to Stage Two.

These will be structural changes to things like teacher recruitment, bonus pay based on student results, lengthening of the school day and school year, replacement of “underperforming” principals and senior staff, the setting of “no excuses” targets for improvement, and even possibly the entry of private operators in public schooling.

The appeal of such changes to the Rudd-Gillard team is two-fold.

First, social democrats Rudd and Gillard seem to have swallowed hook, line and sinker the effusions of Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan, the “big three” of neo-liberalism in US education. Anyone who saw Gillard’s starry-eyed adoration of Klein, beamed in live from New York to SBS’s Insight program a few months ago, will know we have a total convert, a believer in the cult of standardised testing and transparency.

Second, structural changes either don’t cost much money, or they cost a bit but corporate backers can be found to bankroll significant parts of that spending, or the cost can be justified because it contributes to a weakening of those troublesome teacher unions.

One such “new reform” is due to be unveiled next year in Victoria. This is the altruistically- named Teach for Australia. Its website lists a star-studded cast of corporate backers. The scheme purports to place the “best and brightest” graduates into those schools that need them most.

It is a questionable scheme. Research in the US has shown that Teach for America appointees do not achieve any better student results than experienced and certified teachers. Like its sister scheme, Teach First in the UK, it has become popular with graduates, who have not trained as educators, because they are mentored by corporate personnel who offer to fast-track them into the much more lucrative world of corporate employment after they have served two years as teachers. During those two years they develop survival, planning and communication skills that will serve them well in the corporate world. They may or may not do much for their students, but they are under no obligation, after two years, to stick around and be accountable for their work.

Another “new reform” mooted by Rudd has been the “turnaround” model of Arne Duncan, implemented when he was heading education in Chicago (he is now Obama’s Education Secretary). Rudd has said “… where despite best efforts, these schools are not lifting their performance, the Commonwealth expects education authorities to take serious action - such as replacing the school principal, replacing senior staff, reorganising the school or even merging that with other more effective schools.” The literally fatal problem with this model is that the removal of staff who at least have some working knowledge of the sub-cultures of the youths with whom they are working also removes an important mediating influence that offers some guarantee of student well-being. The number of student fatalities has risen dramatically since the implementation of this reform in Chicago.

“Turnaround” philosophy is also “no excuses” philosophy. The prestige of Noel Pearson as a prominent Aboriginal lawyer has been used to fly this kite in Australian skies, just as he had flown the Teach for Australia kite. In October he published a long essay entitled “Radical Hope” in which he foreshadowed further changes to the curriculum and the structures for the education of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Speaking about the essay with Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report, Pearson called for “an extended day. So our proposal proposes to start school at eight and finish at five”. Asked where this idea had come from, Pearson replied, “Well the model that we are looking at is what Barack Obama calls the ‘No excuses Schools’. These are a set of public schools and charter schools that have a philosophy of no excuses. They believe that cultural background, socioeconomic disadvantage, poverty, these are not educational destiny, they do not prescribe a destiny.”

KIPP Charter schools are typical of “no excuses” schools: heavily regimented, extremely authoritarian, 7.30am-5pm school days extended to two Saturdays per month, with a curriculum unapologetically focused on teaching to improve standardised test scores and attracting plenty of corporate dollars. True to her faith (in neo-liberal reforms) based policies for education, Gillard told a November 5, 2009 conference that she supported “New reforms and resources for disadvantaged schools to improve, for example through extended school hours models like the one proposed by Noel Pearson in Cape York.”

Gillard has also fallen into line with the conservatives in dismissing that range of external factors that Pearson said did not “prescribe a destiny”. She has cited the work of Professor John Hattie to state that “teacher quality” is the “single greatest in-school influence on student engagement and influence”. No need, according to this viewpoint, for “blank cheques” or socio-economic “excuses”. If there are problems in student attainment, they reside in the quality and commitment of the teachers.