Bravo, Ian – this is one of the best Donnelly critiques I have read. I know that such articles risk giving him oxygen but, what the heck!

Donnelly is wrong about so many things, especially about non-government schools being the most successful. Even the exhaustive ACER LSAY studies could find little difference and overseas studies can’t either.

He certainly uses selective evidence....‘evidence’ and ‘Donnelly’ is a rather oxymoronic combination. He is also adept at side-stepping equity issues. After all, equity is probably the least useful flag for any self-promoter to wave around. When PISA testing shows equity to be a big issue in Australia he turns around and blames the test…. Just like any precocious Year 8 student who doesn’t like the teacher’s mark.

You mention re-growth of public education in NSW. In NSW secondary schools the growth rate of private education is falling so significantly that it is about to meet the upwards growth rate of public schools. I wonder how Donnelly might explain this? How might he explain that more Catholic and Christian schools are declining than growing in NSW?

But there is hope – for a combination of reasons his star is falling. I think even Julie Bishop got sick of him in the end.

A few years ago I heard an examiner for the year 12 NSW English paper rank schools performance in the just completed exam marking thus

Government selective high schools
high fee private schools
government schools
catholic high schools
low fee private schools

I resented the way my high fee private school sucked up to the children of wealthy/influential parents leaving about 66% of the students feeling inadequate and second rate. I considered their academic streaming processes so unfair I would not send my children there, and neither did my classmates.

That said, I recognise that my school offered me wider subject choice than was available to me at the local high school so I was able to pursue my interests to the best of my abilities.

Like many families, my family send their children to fee-paying schools to get a better education than that available at government schools. Thus if government schools have low standards then the private schools can have low standards and still attract students. If government schools have high standards then private schools will have to raise their standards to attract students.

Correspondingly teachers in the catholic system have their pay lock-stepped into the government school pay scale so by freezing teachers pay, the government and the churches can save money. In Victoria teachers pay is so poor that casual and contract teachers forced to live on intermittent income are forced to find steady jobs in other fields.

ian wrote "The only valid way to measure whether one system is...carry out a longitudinal study that measures the social and intellectual attainments of individual students...they leave some years later"...wrong ian, that just prevents accountability to teachers who failed their basic job requirement to their students...

Just bring back the old method, exams...both broad base knowledge multiple choice and written exams on core fundamental knowledge at end of each term on the subjects of that term each part over three hours each...and same at year end but on all material learned during year...

the term exams set by each school, and end of year set as a common exam at federal level...and monitoring system that effectively picks out 'cheats'...like students answers grouped from schools and checked if they were pre-informed of questions...and the like...

sadly this is not only to assess the children and seniors anymore...but the teachers...for any school with the whole class/group doing poorly will be picked up quickly...and yes its the individual teachers failure...no excuses...cant allow a teacher who cant preform the basic job requirement but demanding payment and a raise...

after findings like some 50% and more in some schools were illiterate at year 12...Im not surprised a education revolution is needed...and please dont let the feminist dominate the outcome...or reasonably predict we will be having the same discussion in a few years time with little change or worse further deterioration in our eduction of our kids...

Sam

I have a new neighbor who has their son enrolled in the same school as one of mine. The history teacher had just told the class that it was Poland that had started WW2, and the new neighbors were thinking of complaining to the school about it.

My advice to them was that because it was a government school, there was basically nothing they could do, and if they wanted to complain to the school, they had best wait until their son had finished the year. In that way the teacher could not take it out on their son if they did make a complaint.

The public has minimal say in what goes on in public schools, and the teachers in the public schools know it. Hence the drain to private schools, even though many private schools have minimal resources compared to public schools. But at least the parents have some control over what is being told to their children.

Ian,

Well spoken! The public system needs defenders who keep reality before the public mind. The public system has serious problems. This cannot be denied. But ironically, many of the problems the Victorian public system has are a direct result of the attempt to make it copy the private system under the Kennett Government, a path which the NSW Government is now foolishly following. It’s as if you have to stuff something up really badly before it can be fixed.

HRS,

If your neighbours’ child has correctly heard the teacher, they should take it up with the school. Hitler pretended that Poland started the war by dressing Germans in Polish uniforms and pretending that they had attacked Germany, but any teacher of history that blames Poland is not a history teacher, and it is important that this be corrected. Of course, the child could simply have misunderstood. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Hear, hear, Ian Keese. Donnelly is a politically partisan opinion columnist and should never be confused with anyone whose priority is education.

He favours rhetoric over facts, rumour over evidence, and ideology over education. Still, every village needs its idiot I guess.