On Sun, 16 Jun 2013, Tim Josling <tim.josling@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
The more expensive private schools can pay teachers more than government schools do. It seems that if government schools offered higher salaries then they could compete for some of those teachers. But I don't think that would solve anything. There is a limited number of people who have the potential to be good teachers. Unless we start reducing visa requirements for skilled teachers from other countries (which is a real option) then we should focus on getting more effective work out of the teachers we have. I think that a large part of the solution to the current situation is in removing some students from the regular school system. I'm sure that everyone here went to school with some kids who never had a chance of going to university and probably weren't going to pass year 12. Having such students in school only make things worse for everyone else.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCL-R The first thing that they should do in terms of improving teacher quality is making all teachers take the PCL-R. Teaching is the ideal profession for a psychopath who has some control over their impulses. They have an endless supply of victims who probably won't be believed if they even realise what's going on. There were two psychopaths teaching at the high school I attended. I recognised one of them as being a moderately evil person at the time - but he was quite good at teaching when he wasn't encouraging kids to hurt each other. The other appeared to be merely incompetent at the time, it was only when I met him years later and he gloated about the bullying that I realised what he was really like. Both the psychopaths were employed as teachers 6 years after I had left the school. They were working at another school and hanging out together. I guess that they had the same hobby of tormenting children. There's been a lot of talk recently about analysing phone meta-data. I wonder how good that would be for identifying psychopaths. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/