Ah. You’re still clearing the backlog. It really does take forever with you.

So, first argument, which is whether there has been a connection between “decreased” wages, and teacher competence. To assert this, you claimed the pay drop had fallen at the same time that entry scores had dropped. There were several problems with this:
1) You based this entirely on the Leigh study, which I pointed out couldn’t be correct (and if it somehow was, it couldn’t help your argument). You have (finally) addressed this, conceding “I misinterpreted it to mean “entry scores”. It is actually a percentile rank of ability”. So you were completely wrong, and 6 days after I called you out on it (and dozens of your posts later) you admit it.
2) The period of the study that you now concede is useless (after all, what is the basis of this claimed “ability rank”?) was also flawed. You claimed salaries had fallen from 1975 to 2011, yet your study begins from 1983, and goes until 2003. That’s not the studies fault, since the things it was trying to prove were not the same as the things you are trying to prove. It just doesn’t help your case, unless you’re going to use the average wages, inflation adjustment and skill drop from 1983 onwards. Since Whitlam was voted out in 1975, I’m sure teacher wages (and ridiculous super) had already been cut quite a bit by then, which is why it hurts your argument. It completely devastates your argument because the inflationary adjustment between 1983 and 2003 is nothing like the difference between 1975-2011, which makes your claims of underpayment look cherry picked ($11,400 in 1983 on the RBA inflation calculator comes up with a value of $25,470 in 2003… don’t you look foolish).

You take these AEU stats at face value, and are shocked when the dates are cherry picked. After all, why is 1975 the year when teacher’s salaries were correctly calculated? Why was the wage that year the correct one? You’ve never come to grips with these questions, or even tried.

So what of this new evidence you bring to support your claim. You argue a study shows “minimum tertiary scores for students undertaking Teacher education courses continues(sic) to decline”. Decline from what? From when? Let me remind you of what your argument is. You’re arguing that a drop in wages has caused a drop in standards. Saying that there has been a decline since 1990 (lol!) is as far from helpful to your argument as could be, not least of all since there are other factors, like the mass exodus from public schools since then.

All these statistics, and you still don’t know what causation is. Disappointing.

I particularly liked this (irrelevant) quote btw; “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.” I doubt you’d approve of most of what the BCA suggests, so I find you endorsement of them here highly comical. Btw, they’re not saying that education funding isn’t high enough, they’re saying you need flexibility in salaries. I’d have no problem paying a particularly awesome teacher more, because it’d be coming out of the salaries of tenured incompetents. I have asked you many times if you support the current wage structure in fact, and you never answer.

And btw, you don’t need an educational degree to work in a private school, so your claim they necessarily do the same training is simply wrong.

Second argument (which is not a response to one of the many I have previously raised, but something you throw out there in your second to last post), The “two good reasons for not breaking up the education department.” I didn’t actually suggest completely breaking up the Dept of Education, but it has definitely failed, and schools should definitely be run autonomously, so let’s cut to your reasons:
1) One is basically economies of scale: there are functions more efficiently performed by a larger entity than the individual school
Functions like what? Why can private schools perform them?

2) The other is consistency in all sorts of areas across schools.
Consistency isn’t good, it’s bad, because each student is different, each area is different, and each schools focus may need to be different. And that’s why you see the best public schools having the most independent MO’s and curricula, like the example of Narrabundah I noted before, or the selective schools in Sydney (should they teach “consistently” with the standards of other schools? Of course not). You even basically concede this, with your continual reference to how they’ve started to do it in Victoria. I have to say I’m not impressed by this ala carte variety of argument, dodging major questions of principle. If a little autonomy is good, there’s no reason to think a lot is good too. After all, we currently allow home schooling anyway, it’s not like crazy religious schools are an issue here, because people can ensure that for their kids now. This is a debate about kids who are going to mainstream schools now.

Thirdly, has the workload of a teacher increased since 1975. You never really tried to prove this, but since you again throw out the class size thing I’ll cover it briefly.

There are good teachers, just as there are good electricians, good sewage workers, etc. The specific remark I made about ticking worksheets was levelled at bad teachers, which assumedly we’re seeing more of under your logic. Again, everyone would love a small class size, but there is no reason to think the class size of 1975 was the “correct” one, in fact given the irresponsible spending that characterised the Whitlam government there’s every indication is wasn’t a good number to start with. There are many factors that go towards class size (higher education is more likely these days for one), but there’s no reason to think class size is a reasonable way to measure workload, and the box ticking example makes that clear. Do we measure the workload/salary of a sewage worker by how many toilets there are? Things are not that simplistic.

Assumedly with the decline of grammar and classics I could as easily argue the workload has gone down. You’re not making a reasonable argument, or even a consistent one (since you keep claiming the teacher quality has fallen, we’d expect a worse standard from them regardless of class size). It’s also unclear to me why we should hire more teachers for schools that are increasingly empty. Surely the reverse is true.

You’re claim that “A system which pays some teachers more than others because they are better is fine, and is not opposed by the AEU” is simply a lie. The AEU supports (and implements) a payment system based on tenure (the longer you’re there, the higher the salary). In order to believe that you’d need to believe that the older the teacher, the better they must be. That’s ridiculous.

Likewise, the fact there was even less data 20 years ago does not make the current dissemination of information good. The AEU opposes league tables, opposes myschools, etc. They clearly oppose more information for the public, and want to restrict it as much as possible, which is why they don’t even allow parents to choose where their kids go. The department does. I know I’m sick of seeing the only real basis for comparison between ACT colleges being the “median score” of students, which encourages no end of dubious belcurving (though our whole system is at fault there too).

You keep asserting teacher’s work harder (for other reasons than the ridiculous PTR measure). I think you’re slow, because:
a) Have their actual working hours increased?
b) Are numbers polled and collated internally by the AEU, based on asking teachers how much work they feel they do, objective?
c) After hours work, and total workhours, have doubtless increased generally through Australia since (whatever arbitrary date you’re using this time), probably because people polled in the initial sample in (arbitrary date) didn’t include after hours work, which oddly existed before 1975 too.

Riddler,

Your definition of “real terms” is correct (6.04:06pm, 21/2). It is exactly the way I used it. Nowhere have I said that teachers “were paid over $100K in real terms”, which is your assertion (4.32:37pm, 15/2).

When I have mentioned salary figures of over $100K, it has been in sentences of the following sort:
“In 1975, after seven years, a teacher reached the top of the unpromoted scale and was paid 166.6 per cent of MAWOTE - $116,825 now.”
The amount over $100K is the percentage of MAOTE, not a teacher’s salary in real terms then or now.

My whole argument is not “been that if we factored in changing monetary value, look at purchasing power, etc (albeit in an unscientific way) that the actual salaries of the 70's (well under 20K) should be worth over 100K in today's money.” That is not even part of my argument. If we factor in purchasing power, teachers’ salaries today are, in most of the examples looked at, worth now as much as they were in real terms in 1975. If we factor in purchasing power, teachers’ total salary packages are worth now less in real terms than they were in 1975. If we compare teacher pay relative to MAOTE now, it has fallen relative to 1975. These are all facts.

It is untrue of you to say that I “base all [my] arguments on documents produced by the AEU”. The CPI and MAOTE figures come from the ABS. The figures on falling percentile ranks for trainee teachers and on teacher pay relative to non-teacher pay come from research by Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan

It is untrue of you to say that, “the evidence for this claim, of standards radically dropping, has been abandoned by [me].” (6.14:31pm, 21/2) You then make various assumptions, as is your standard practice. I might even get around to discussing them when I have finished dealing with the way in which you misrepresent what I have actually said.

You refer to public education as “[my] product”. It’s not mine.

Your point about people paying for what they can get for free is, of course, the one I made in the letter I linked to (4.56;3pm, 11/2). As a matter of strict logic, it does not mean that the Catholic “product” is better, just that some people see it as better for them; e.g., there are still some Catholics who actually believe in their religion and who send their children to Catholic schools to get a Catholic education. They are not necessarily saying that the Catholic school is better academically or in discipline. They may be, and it may be, but it does not follow automatically from their choice that they are the reason for it.

You mention a “crash” in public school scores. Any evidence