I don’t think much can be believed from anyone in education anymore.

It costs about $15,000 to educate a student per year.

Private schools receive about $5,000 from governments.

Public schools receive about $15,000 from governments.

To get more money going into education, the public has to earn more so they can pay more tax, and to earn more the public has to be better skilled and also export more.

That is unlikely, but I would like a member of the education system to state what area of government spending should be reduced, so that there can be increased spending on education.

Also “Society must work harder to educate parents, and teach them that dads who read to kids and mums who help with homework do more for their kids than any school can ever do.”

The education system taught the parents originally, and which dad is being referred to. The natural father or mummy’s current new boyfriend, and which mum does a child have when they spend most of the afternoon with their day care mother.

And here I was thinking this article was about something meaningful like the shutting down of any opinion different from the established leftist dogma pushed on campuses.

Just the other day in my politics course at Newcastle University I heard a lecturer talking about white Australians as though they are racist because we didn't want to accept the Afghani's on Tampa.

He had the gall to suggest that the Norweigan freighter's captain refused to turn back on humanitarian grounds, saying that the people on board were humans and needed medical care.

What utter garbage. He refused to turn back because he had knives to his throat.

Academics in general have always placed themselves upon so high a pedestal thus creating an apartheid solely based on intellect albeit a smokescreen one. In general they have an information intake much greater than most but sadly this information is rather devoid of substance hence the general uselessness of academics in everyday life.

I'm sympathetic to the points that the author made. But the dishonest comments of Benjam1n and the anti-academic comments show why its probably better in the long run that we don't allow the riff raff into our universities.

Thirty years ago, principals were perfectly capable of leading the teachers in their schools to achieve good results for their students without having the power to hire or fire, so the demand for more power by today’s principals seems misplaced. Perhaps the principals of the current era just aren’t that good.

I was the timetabler of Waterdale High School, a disadvantaged school in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, from 1976 to 1980. Its teachers were paid more than today’s are. Its classes had fewer than 25 students. The average teaching load was 15 hours 29 minutes in 1979 – well below the 20-hour maximum imposed by the use of retrospective legislation in 1992 and still in place. It was sufficiently staffed to employ 13 per cent of its teachers in literacy and numeracy programs. The Commonwealth’s Disadvantaged Schools Programme provided teacher aides and materials. Its staffing, conditions and approaches to teaching produced a measurable improvement in students’ achievement, as can be seen in the evaluation reports I still have.

It achieved this success as part of a system. It had principals who accepted the professional judgement of their teachers and who were capable of working with them, who did not need the bully’s power to fire to be effective leaders. It did not have to waste its energy on mission statements, charters, strategic plans, local selection of staff, performance pay, endless government reports written in Latinate abstractions, onerous and pointless accountability measures or box and whisper graphs. It got on with its job of teaching.

the philosophies of schools obviously has and always will create a form of apartheid. Many parents want their kids to have values at home reinforced at school. Many State schools work against these values because secular humanism produces the deluded state that we can behave however we want and get away with it. Leaving the Creator out of the equation leads to the very dumb conclusion that we are not accountable. Only those blind can't see that secular humanism has led to more immorality, more teenage pregnancy, more drugs and drunkedness, more suicide, more hate, more intolerance. No wonder parents are voting with their feet and money. Now the 'wise ones' in Victoria want to give 12 year olds condoms. Thankfully many are rejecting these social engineers who are bereft of conscience.

the 'wise ones' in Victoria want to give 12 year olds condoms.
Runner,
Actually not a bad idea to give condoms to the intellectual achievers.

Over the past 200 years or so, academic achievers and people at universities like those scorned above, churned out people like these:

Alexander Graham Bell- developed the telephone.

Marie Curie- discovered a treatment for cancer -using radioactive isotopes.

Louis Pastuer- discovered pasteurization (wine and milk) and developed vaccines against cholera (1880), anthrax (1882), and rabies (1885).

Alexander Flemming- discovered penicillin.

I am assuming then that people like Vanna, with such a serious dislike of all academics and anything to do with universities, does not avail himself of any of the multitude of life-saving and life-changing discoveries and inventions given to the world by these people and many others?

If not for academics, think of all the health disorders that would have wiped out most of our ancestors- eg polio, diphtheria, anthrax,
tetanus and tuberculosis, just to name a few.

Who will you turn to when the next deadly virus or bacteria hits the world

suzeonline,
Aren't you confusing Academics with Scientists & Scholars & other people whose intellect enables them to be useful in society ? Don't for one moment believe that the bulk of Academics could fend for themselves or indeed achieve anything without heavily depending on the everyday providers of goods & services. The gist of this is not to portray academics as people who are so beneficial to society as to imply that they can do or be so without input from others. An efficient economy is run by pragmatists, an inefficient one by academic bureaucrats. A competent economist creates credit, an incompetent one creates debt, much like the various Governments in Australia in the past few decades. If you look closely you can easily deduce which administration has the greater %age of academics in its ranks. Then google & look up national surplus and national debt.

Suxanonline,
Only about 10% of worldwide research is now carried out in universities.

In Australia, most universities cannot fill maths and science courses, and in many of those courses, the majority of the students are now foreign students.

A look around any university will find that nearly every piece of equipment, textbook and piece of software is now imported, and so much for university research.

The author wants more money for education, but as more money has been poured into education, the standards have continued to decline, and it is now highly debatable whether or not one cent more should be handed over to those employed in Australian education.

The UK’s schools have devolved powers for schools – they have local boards made up of parents with local control. This leads to schools expressing the idiosyncrasies of those involved; and that can be extremely damaging. Total local control will produce schools that are disastrous for some students – the outcomes will be haphazard.

Bureaucracies’ primary purpose is to service the Minister of the day; to provide politically sensitive advice and form the backdrop to political ambitions (as well as be a vehicle for some bureaucrat’s ideological beliefs). Senior staff are on short term contracts increasingly controlled by the Minister – they will not go against the needs of their political master.

Bureaucracies will always exist, governments won’t become totally hands off and parents will not want it as schooling would become chaotic. It is better to invent a means to tie the fate of bureaucrats to that of schools instead of the political whims of Ministers.

Yes, there is a monetary divide occurring in education; but this reflects the belief of society that markets rule – or more precisely advantages to those with resources and control. Education as a leveller of opportunity does not fit to that mindset.

It seems the responses have slipped into looking at tertiary education and academics. Given the rise in participation rates at Universities initiated by Whitlam and the Dawkin’s reforms turning CAEs into Universities the absolute cost of tertiary education has increased substantially, but the real per head expenditure has decreased.

1. Setting someone up with a degree to have them become clerical staff is an absurdity. Once institutions had to prove demand for graduates before they could start a course, now with markets if there are jobs for 50 graduates and institutions turn out 200 then supposedly the market will sort it out – it hasn’t!

2. Turning CAEs into Universities was also absurd – the majority of students need scholarly training in a field. Having the majority of Academics also be researchers is adding to confusion.

Supposedly 4 exabytes of knowledge (4x10^19) were produced in 2008, equal to the entire accumulation of knowledge in previous human history. In technical fields what students learn in 1st year will be outdated by 4th year.

What is needed is not more who add to the noise but those who can take the noise and make sense – scholarship not research.

3. Universities being ranked on research output in terms of publications is counter productive; that which gives people rewards is what they will do. The plain English movement started because academics thought engaging with the general population was a good thing – it is time academics returned to that thought and Universities judged on the same basis

Getting back to the article...It states "comprehensive state high schools have become schools of last resort. By 2030 we will have more of the same. For most schools, it will be a pattern of private affluence and public squalor. And instead of attacking privilege, Federal Labor governments have entrenched it." I have to agree that this is what many parents fear - While I believe this view is way too pessimistic YET- as the reality is that comprehensive state high schools in middle class areas are NOT schools of last resort (even the Myschools website, flawed as it is, will show you that). However there is an increasing problem of equity of resources between public and private schools - in the disability area for example, read this -
www.saveourschools.com.au/funding/nsw-parliament-report-rejects-private-school-claims-on-funding-for-students-with-disabilities