The forces of the right have long decried expenditure on government school students but are silent when private schools lift their fees to $30,000. They are always smearing teachers, and they usually get away with it. The most recent example (from someone not even of the right) was Katharine Murphy in The Age, who claimed that the education system was run “by the producers for the producers” (“History repeats?”, 5/5/2012). My letter in defence of teachers was not published. More examples can be found at http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/462500.aspx. No one should be surprised by the Grattan Institute’s headline-grabbing teacher-bashing report.

The National Reports on Schooling in Australia report an expenditure of $8,115 per student in 1999-2000 ($11,731 in 2012 dollars) and an expenditure of $14,637 per student in 2008-09 ($14,637 in 2012 dollars). Thus the per capita increase between 1999-2000 and 2008-09 is $2,906 in real terms. That is a real increase over nine years of 24.7 per cent.

As the ABS says, “In the 10 years to 2007-08, GDP per person grew from $41,000 to $51,000 in real (chain volume) terms…” (1383.0.55.001 - Measures of Australia's Progress: Summary Indicators, 2009 LATEST ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 30/04/2009).

A real increase in GDP per head of 24.4 per cent over ten years suggests that a per capita education expenditure increase of 24.7 per cent over nine of those years is not much more than economic growth over a similar period.

Education spending has to keep up with overall living standards or able people will not stay in teaching. This is so obvious I am amazed that I even have to point it out.
It is also relevant that the starting point for the Grattan Institute comparison is immediately before the Victorian Labor government began reversing the destructive cuts of the previous Coaltion government in the state. In other words, the period chosen deliberately ignores the period of cuts that preceded the rebuilding.

Dean Ashenden says

'The Commission has begun from a misconception. It has assumed the 350,000-odd teachers and other employees of school systems constitute the 'workforce' of schooling. They represent, in fact, only about 10 per cent of it. Most of the workforce is comprised of students.
This is not a rhetorical point.
Students are the only people in schools who can produce learning.'

But this precisely a rhetorical device by Ashenden, and a fashionable one at that.

Are pupils in schools part of the workforce in the same way that patients are part of the'workforce' of hospitals - because patients are the ones who heal?

Are pupils in schools part of the workforce in the same way that shoppers are part of the 'workforce' in supermarkets- because shoppers are the only ones who can buy?

Sadly the 'education supermarket' in Australia offers little real choice and too much regulation and manipulation.

If you want central planning you are someone who would buy an obsolete East German Trabant motor car in preference to a free enterprise VW.

State owned schools are subject to rigid central planning. Misguided interventions such as reduced class size, poorly communicated syllabus material and lack of transparency are degrading our education system. Non-state schools battle attempts at overegulation ind interference with varying degrees of success.

It must grieve teachers in the classroom to hear self appointed experts in education pontificate and persist with the sort of rubbish we see here.

Learning will happen again in Australian schools when we let teachers get back to teaching.

CARFAX,

As I have pointed out to you before (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13226&page=0), state schools are not “subject to rigid central planning”. (I was proved right on my Gonski predictions there, so perhaps you will accept what I say about the current state of autonomy in schools.)

Victorian state schools gained curriculum autonomy progressively after 1968. We have had locally elected parent-majority school councils since 1975. We have had locally selected principals since the 1980s. We haven’t had a state zoning system since the 1980s, except that schools without room to take all-comers are allowed to impose a zone. We have had locally selected senior staff since 1992. We have had locally selected teachers since the 1990s. We have had local budgetary control since 2005.

The Tennessee STAR study conclusively demonstrates the benefits of small classes. The reason is obvious: the smaller the class, the more time the teacher has for each student, the more thorough the teacher can be in planning work and in assessing work and in communicating with individuals.

Teachers in the classroom are certainly fed up with fad-peddling “experts”, but they are also fed up with the unrestrained teacher-bashing that they have to endure, and they know that class size does make a difference

While one can agree broadly with Chris's summation. It is only that applied to just one state, which seems to lead? Albeit, one can always tell a Victorian, but one can't tell them very much. Ha ha.
Seriously, other states are manifestly overburdened with empire building bureaucrats, who know how to count and or ration beans, but simply don't understand Teaching or learning?
While one can agree, that there ought to be a universal curriculum; it ought to be one derived by comparative apple for apple modelling and or, best practise outcomes/teacher input?
Along with genuine Autonomy that removes the entirely unproductive perpetually pontificating overpaid parasites from the system! Rhrosty

Yes Chris I'm sure class size matters. I know we learnt a damn sight more in classes of 40 when I was a boy, than kids do today, in classes of 25. Of course teaches had control, with adequate discipline, denied to them today.

Of course back then a teachers scholarship was the only way many kids, no matter how bright, could get to uni. This involved a 5 year teaching contract at uni's end, so it is very probable, the teachers were a lot better than today.

Rhrosty I would like to see a fixed limit for the time a teacher can fill a bureaucratic position. If driving a desk was limited to say 3 years, after which a similar period of classroom work was required, bad ideas would be exposed more quickly, & teaching experience would be more in evidence in the management & planing.

Rhrosty,

Yes, Victoria does lead. As those of us paying attention predicted more than a year ago, the Gonski report has essentially recommended the national adoption of the Victorian funding system. Strangely, the NSW Coalition government is for it, but the Victorian Coalition government, even though it administers it for its own schools, is not.

Autonomy will work if it is autonomy for the school community. It will not work if it just means an all-powerful principal can spend money any way he or she likes. The real autonomy that schools had 30 years ago in Victoria was successful because it allowed teachers to work together and to get on with actual teaching. The fake autonomy that has been applied more recently actually bogs schools down in administration and accountability.

Sadly, the press is ever ready to give space to pontificators and airheads.

Has been,

The research evidence on class sizes is the reverse of what you say. I referred to it specifically in my first post.

You may have learnt a lot more in classes of 40, but it is unlikely you have any idea what your classmates learnt. The ABS Life Skills study shows that literacy and numeracy skills are much worse among older people than younger people.

There is a problem with the entry scores for teacher training. It won’t be fixed until teacher pay and working conditions are restored to the levels that applied 30 and more years ago.