Nor has the shift to private schools in the ACT been limited to yrs 11-12.
b) If it was really true that public education was just as good, and that public kids are better taught for uni, then parents would be less likely to take them out of that system, since they want their kids to do well at uni too, and peer group mostly has a minimal connection to your performance. I have seem the dubious statistic on this claim, and have a different (more likely) explanation for it. It is that the number of kids who get to uni from the public system is smaller, and because the teaching at public schools is so bad, they have to work that much harder, and be that much more competent, to survive it and get to uni. For that reason, you'd see a higher performance from the (small sample size) of students getting to uni from a public (non-selective) school. I'm actually not convinced they exclude the selective school results though, which is another reason I'm dubious of such stats.
c) Kids don't enter the private system after they're awesome students, many enter at a young age, before they've had any other teachers. They don't sit any proficiency tests in most cases, to determine if they'll be allowed to enter, and in the case of many faith based schools like Daramalan the schools could care less about the educational background of the child when entering. Yet even religious schools like this are outscoring public ones. I doubt anyone who has seen the football culture of St Edmunds, or the tough culture of Daramalan, could really kid themselves that this is a school devoted to only letting socially charming flowers enter. Yet their scores are higher, and parents keep sending their kids there.

I personally do not believe parents are arrant fools, and that their leaving the public system despite a high cost is because they are unsatisfied with the results of the public system, and all the indications and logic available tell us they're right.

I made a number of points earlier explaining the many factors which are damning to the department of education and public schools in particular, and much like the other 6 or so points I referred you to earlier, there has been little response from you in regards to those flaws.

Much of the new claims you make are also exceptionally dubious. When you say that students would perform the same or better in public school, are you saying teacher's from the private sector (catholic schools particularly) are worse/the same as those in the public sector? And if catholic schools, who have more revenue to pay teachers with, are choosing to pay the same as public school teachers, doesn't that suggest that the payment they are offering is a fair reflection of their value? After all, why would teachers opt into the private system otherwise, when (according to you) the wage is the same, and yet they lack the many (unfortunate) protections offered by the AEU? Your ideas are very confused on all these counts, probably as a result of buying into AEU propoganda without thinking it through very much. Just be clear here, are the (identically paid) Catholic teachers better, worse, or about the same as the public ones?

Obviously you have alot of catching up to do in regards to unanswered points, can you give us some kind of timeframe as to when you'll clear the backlog of your unedited eloquence?

Riddler,

The 1983 to 2003 timeframe on the fall in the average ability of those entering teacher training was not “arbitrarily chosen” (4.47:23pm, 20/2) by me. It just happens to be the time frame used in one study I knew of. You say you “wouldn’t mind a reference to it”. I gave one when I first mentioned it with a direct quote (3.48:32pm, 15/2), so if it is obviously an inaccurate claim, take it up with the author. I quoted it correctly as “percentile rank”, but I misinterpreted it to mean “entry scores”. It is actually a percentile rank of ability, and other research does show the same pattern of decline in entry scores.

The Senate Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession quotes evidence saying,
“Information from the Department of Education Services shows that the minimum tertiary scores for students undertaking Teacher education courses continues(sic) to decline. Tertiary entrance data obtained from the Tertiary Institutions Service Centre (TISC) shows that since 1990 the cutoff scores for entrance to Teacher Education curses have dropped by around twenty to twenty-five points across all teaching areas and across all universities”
and
“There is evidence that students are being accepted into some teacher education courses with unacceptably low scores (eg some regional Queensland Universities accepted scores in 1996 of 19 on a scale of 1 to 25, where twenty-five is the lowest score attainable.”
(Senate Employment, Education and Training References Committee, A Class Act, March 1998, p 170)

Private school teachers and public school teachers do the same teacher training so your final comment, “I'd also like to know if your study is for public school teachers only, which seems impossible since the entry scores are too high”, is silly.

It’s not only parliamentary inquiries that say there has been a decline in entrance standards for teacher training. The business world is concerned too.

“There has been a significant decline in the minimum academic quality of individuals
studying teaching. In 1983, those entering Australian teacher education were in
the top 26 per cent of the talent pool.18 By 2003, this had slipped to the top 39 per
cent. Tight labour markets have recently contributed further to this decline, with
university entrance scores falling significantly for both primary and secondary
teachers (Chart 4). The entry level for students studying secondary school teaching
have fallen by even greater levels, with some courses entrance levels falling from
87 to 65 in their eligible Tertiary Entrance Rank (TER).
(Chamber of Commerce and Industry Western Australia, Building a Better Tomorrow – Education Reform in WA, September 2009, p13)

“ ENTER scores have recently been set as low as 56 (Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre, 2008).”
(Business Council of Australia, Teaching Talent The Best Teachers for Australia’s Classrooms, p23)

The BCA recommends in paying the best teachers $130,000, so it seems that some outside education are concerned to improve teacher salaries in real terms in order to attract and retain more able people.

The fall in entry scores for teacher training has been commented on in the press and in research for many years. It is not a matter of dispute among those who keep in touch with educational developments.

You accuse me of being opposed to “making public schools work to improve” (5.03:27pm, 20/2). I have a record of working to improve the schools I taught in. This will give you an opportunity for another insult, but I held leadership positions for 28 years in schools and worked assiduously to improve them every year in those various positions. In fact, I have a pretty good idea what makes schools work, which is why I oppose some of the current fads, whether performance pay from “the Right” or open classrooms from “the Left”. I continue that work now in retirement by, among other things, public advocacy for schools and the teachers in them, by putting submissions to inquiries and so on.

There are at least two good reasons for not breaking up the education department. One is basically economies of scale: there are functions more efficiently performed by a larger entity than the individual school. The other is consistency in all sorts of areas across schools. There has been a great deal of school autonomy in this state since the 1970s, even with the existence of the department. We have had elected school councils since 1975.

I don’t expect you to understand the logic that increased student numbers in a class increase teacher workload but the fact is that they do. There are not many teachers whose correction consists solely of “using a red pen to tick/cross the answers”. In fact, I’ve never met even one. Nor have I ever been in a school in which the education department supplied worksheets. There is a lot more to teaching than you describe.

You say, “the AEU is totally opposed to performance based measures”. It was the pre-cursor to the AEU, the VSTA, that initiated the measures for the Advanced Skills Teacher categories in Victoria. The problem here is that people use “performance based” and “merit based” to mean all sorts of different things. I will let the AEU speak for itself, but a system that pays a teacher a performance bonuses because that teacher’s students do better in tests is a narrow and useless idea, tried and abandoned in the 1890s. There are collegiate aspects to teaching, so that the success of a student in one teacher’s class can be assisted by the work of other teachers and by the environment of the school as a whole. A system which pays some teachers more than others because they are better is fine, and is not opposed by the AEU.

I don’t know what sort of data the education department restricts from the public. There is far more information (easily available on the web) now than there was 20 years ago, about individual schools and the system as a whole.

You say that I chose the base timeframe for working hours “merely because it suits [my] argument” (10.59:01pm, 20/1). This is not true, but why would that stop you saying it? I chose that period because I had it handy. I don’t have any figures from 1975, though I do have figures after 1992. But they are also from the source that you “sneer” at.

Yes, other professions work after hours. You have missed the point again. Even though pupil teacher ratios improved, teacher workload went up, so the relative pay cut was not justified by the improvement in PTRs.

As to your repeated points about relativities being irrelevant, I don’t accept that and have said why.