Pedagogy is the bread and butter of a teacher. Being able to teach, support and challenge students is why teachers do the difficut job that they do - especially in the challenging and complex schools that they work in. Today teachers are expected to parent, counsel, ensure students have proper nutrition, ensure students have 2 hours exercise a week, make sure there is a working flagpole on the school grounds and still teach literacy and numeracy and the rest of the cluttered curriculum. And now we have to drop other much more important things to teach-to-the-test - the NAPLAN - a test that has no meaning to the students sitting it.

The problem with student achievement levels is that teachers can't teach - they have to take on the roles of every member of society - and yes in a large number of cases, things that parents should do - on a dwindling budget from Federal and State governments. The situation is ridiculous.

Barack Obama has recently asked two places in the world to advise his Education Secretary about their education system - one of these places is Queensland, and yet we are now being forced to implement 'high stakes testing', something that the PISA data shows has brought achievement levels down in any country using it - especially America.

Why can't the government and society allow teachers to do the job that they signed up for?

The whole point about publishing league tables has nothing to do with education but capitalist ideology: it is to import marketing mechanisms into schools. This, in a time when the markets have patently failed!!

I remember seeing a documentary in the UK about the extreme lengths parents were going to to get their kids enrolled in a 'good' school. Camping out in school grounds to be first in, moving home to be in the right catchment area, coaching kids on the right things to say and making 5yos swat for tests.

School gets good marks, high demand follows, ridiculous behaviour from all and sundry follows. If you think we have 'good' schools and 'bad' schools now, multiply that by 10000 once league tables are the norm. It's effectively a way of robbing the poorer schools of their best teachers and students to create ghetto schools full of teachers and students who don't have the resources to move. So 20% good schools, 60% average, 20% poor turns into 40% good schools, 20% average, 40% poor schools. A whole bunch of rich smart kids and poor dumb kids who have never seen how the other half live. Rich kids with no empathy for people from poorer backgrounds, and poor kids with no example of what can be achieved.

I'd much rather let them keep school ratings in house, where they can direct resources to where they are needed without the irrational panic of parents creating a moving target.

Weaken the teacher unions in some other way.

There is just so much bull dust in the education debate, & it's all so easy to fix.

All we have to do is bring back external exams, for tears 10 & 12, & make the results of these exams determine the students final result. All results, of all kids published, state wide.

Then we will know who can do what, & our unis wont spend a year weeding out the dead heads.

This way we may have some kids who have some idea of what they were supposed to have studdied, rather than forget every segment the moment the assignment, often done by mum, or the after school tutor, has been handed in.

We might also get some indication of how the student will respond in the real world. As an employer I found the most useless bits of paper was the stuff handed out by schools, claiming to be school reports.

I am only interested in how a job applicant will go, when given 30 minutes to do a half hour job. The spoon feeding, avoiding any hint of stress in schools is totally unfair to both the kid, & the prospective employer. So many kids fold up like a pack of cards, when they find they no longer have 3 days to do that half hour job.

Hasbeen,

I think there is a lot to be said for your proposal. After all, despite our ideals and dreams of turning children into citizens, the ultimate purpose of education - and the one that parents expect us to achieve - is to produce employees.

I just have two concerns. They are both pretty well-worn arguments, but I'd be interested to see your stance on them.

1) The old argument that if kids have a bad day on exam day, they are doomed to a life of failure. That is, students can be top performers for 12 years and then bomb out on one day. Perhaps they have a cold; perhaps a close rellie has died (or is about to); perhaps . . . well, the list goes on. A single set of external exams measures a student's performance on a single occasion, rather than determining a pattern of performance.

2) The other argument that when students learn for an exam, they put information into short-term rather than long-term memory and forget it immediately after. Assignments, on the other hand, at least involve a lengthy process by which information can be internalised. They involve learning by doing, rather than learning by memorising.

Like I said, I'd just be interested to see what your opinion is in relation to these arguments.

The link that was provided in the article, showed fairly conclusively that teacher quality above all else has a direct effect on the results of the children.

The implications of this are without doubt that the quality of the teachers needs to be be controlled very carefully. This is probably why the private schools do so much better than the unionised "promotion on seniority" public schools.