As background... I recently visited my old high school. They have the same staff levels that they had when I was there, but less than half the students. The outcomes are worse however. Gang activity is now a problem. This is consistent with figures I have seen across the board of a doubling of per student real spending since I left school, while outcomes have deteriorated. Can someone enlighten me about the rationale of the Gonski reforms? I got onto the government's web site http://www.betterschools.gov.au/ and tried to derive some content from what is mostly PR hackery. What I managed to glean was: * More money will be directed to underprivileged students, with the objective of achieving more uniform outcomes across the social classes. * More detailed policy direction ("uniform standards") and reporting to Canberra (referred to as "accountability"). * Numerous mandates such as Asian languages; each school must be paired to a school in Asia, each school must have detailed policies about bullying, each student must have a "reading plan" etc. * A more politicized process for selection of trainee teachers (eg based on interviews and assessment of applicants' "community involvement"). * Make it harder to become a teacher by requiring more training initially (and ongoing), although there are some nods in the direction of providing more assistance to beginning teachers. * Teachers may **optionally** be assessed in part based on student performance but it seems this will generally not happen. Some of these policies may seem plausible but in social policy plausible solutions often produce no results, and often make things worse ("drugs are harmful so let's ban them"). Most notably, attempts to level the social classes by spending more on disadvantaged students - above a very moderate level - have consistently produced minuscule outcomes. As I suggested above, throwing money at the problem has been a miserable failure in the past, yet we seem to be embarking on an exercise of "if it doesn't work, then do even more of it ". In all my reading on the topic over the years, the one thing that seems to matter in student outcomes, once you factor in the student cohort, is teacher quality, specifically intelligence. Class sizes, within a fairly wide range, don't seem to make much difference (though they do affect teacher workloads). Yet teacher quality, including getting rid of under-performing teachers, is conspicuously absent from the agenda. There is no mention of paying teachers in in-demand fields more and trying to get a higher quality applicant. Can anyone reassure me that my hard earned tax dollars are being spent wisely here? Tim Josling