It is not true that “the choice of where to send students is made by the Dept of Education, not by parents” (6.23:54pm, 21/2). Parents in this state are free to send their child to any non-selective government school that has room for them. (The four selective schools have entrance exams.) The Victorian government website provides far more information about schools than does My School. Schools have to issue annual reports on key indicators. There is an annual meeting for parents every year. There are elected school councils, which have parent majorities on them. If a school is doing badly, the education department intervenes. It does not just leave the school to slowly fail while the children in it suffer. Parents can take their children out of it too. If that happens, its funding falls. Victorian government schools are mostly funded on a voucher system ($5,922 for a prep student in 2010, $6,602 for a tyear 12 one). The education system you keep assuming exists is not the one that does and it hasn’t existed for decades.

You complain (7.39:33pm, 22/2) that I have not answered certain questions from you. I would have a better chance of doing so if I did not have to spend so much time correcting your false statements about what I have said and what my argument is. I could ignore them of course, but then a reader might assume from my silence that what you said was true. I choose to set the record straight. Even when you complain about my not jumping when you say, you can’t resist another false claim: “made up formulas”. The figures I have quoted have all been sourced. The CPI formula is the RBA’s one, the link for which you provided, even though you misused the calculator.

You say, “I can only assume you type a reply, find it's too long, and then slowly and agonizingly post it, bit by bit, over the days that follow” (2.14:26pm, 25/2). You are wrong - again. I don’t “type a reply, find it's too long, and then slowly and agonizingly post it, bit by bit, over the days that follow.” It might be useful if you stopped assuming.

When you declare that “it's probably beyond [my] skills to edit them down”, you are simply referring, in your usual sneering way, to the fact that I included precise facts and reasoning in what I say. That does take more time than inventing and abuse, but it helps convince the readers – if there are any left.

You then say, “The only reply you've given to anything I've said is that in Victoria they have selection, assumedly conceding that is a good thing. I actually asked for more information on this, queried the extent to which they allow it, as I've never heard anything about it, and you refused to answer, just told me to find it myself. You've been anything but responsive to arguments people have made here.”

The poster who belittles, abuses, invents and misquotes (“rambling, irrelevant, unthinking posts”, “you intentionally ignore the stuff you can't respond to”, “you're a joke account”, “take yourself off”, “your rants”, that I “falsely assert that [teachers] were paid over $100K in real terms”, etc) complains that I have been “anything but responsive”. Manners might help you. I could type out all the details for you, but I have already said, “It is the standard method, so it affects everyone” and referred you to the DEECD website (12.14:42pm, 10/2). You need to do a little digging because not everything is in the one place, but you could start here:
http://www.education.vic.gov.au/hrweb/careers/vacs/recruitinsch.htm

Chris, everyone else here is able to respond in real time (using 4 posts a day), it is only you who takes so long to reply to each post that you’re still on a backlog of posts the was made a week or so ago. It’s almost pointless to reply to you, because instead of responding to what I’m saying, you focus the meat of your post on a side issue from a week old post that you didn’t get around to replying to yet. It doesn’t make you or your argument seem more impressive; instead you come off as ridiculous, farcical, like a geriatric Rotarian, struggling to keep pace with the conversation. Instead of tediously replying to every word I write, why not focus on the themes and arguments I’ve made, as I seem to manage to do (and as everyone here has managed to do)?

While we’re on the subject of what is “real” I think I understand a better way to convey to you the real earnings/relative earnings point you continue to bring up, so it can dealt with. And in fairness, I assumed your argument was much less foolish than it now appears to be. The short version is the male average weekly ordinary time earnings (or MAWOTE/MAOTE as you continually refer to it as) is a crap measurement. In 1975 the workforce was very different, the % of male workers, and their income, was significantly different. There’s no reason we should be using it as a benchmark of anything, no more than we should be using the salary of a miner today to determine the salary of a teacher. You’ve had this sort of flaw exposed numerous times, and all you seem to say in reply is that you don’t agree. But you haven’t given one iota of argument as to why it is relevant at all. The average wage of an MUA worker today is different to 25 years ago, just as it would be different if we used MAWOTE or real terms or CPI or whatever.

It doesn’t prove the current wage on an MUA worker is wrong, and given the context there’s every indication it’s more accurate today.

The new point you bring up, that “parents in this state are free to send their child to any non-selective government school that has room for them” is a stupid one. You look to Victoria, who provides a part of the funding for Victorian schools, and say “it’s not far off vouchers”. If so, good, let’s have a proper voucher model for all of Australia, instead of a partial one for part of Victoria’s funding. You say there are lots of avenues of choice in Victoria. Good, let’s have total choice everywhere. This is not an argument against what I’ve been saying. I keep asking you balls out “do you support vouchers”, but you keep changing the subject by looking at outliers in Victoria. The reality is that many parents, even in Victoria, lack the choice I would like for them, because good schools may not have room for them, local students may well be preferred, they may not get into one of the limited selective schools. I want everyone to get a choice. Do you support that, or are you going to make more irrelevant points in reply?

The rest of what you say consists of a collection of irrelevant and random thoughts, much of which has been dealt with already, though very painful to read. I’m going to stop now because you haven’t actually said anything else new to respond to, and you still haven’t replied to my earlier arguments.

Riddler,

Your underlings may have to put up with your putting words in their mouths, pretending they have said things that they have never said, ascribing motives to them that they do not have, calling them names because they dare to disagree with you, complaining that they have not responded instantly to your demands, claiming that they have changed their words when they haven’t, asserting that they get their information from only one source when the facts show that have not, issuing instructions that they go away, etc. I’m not one of your underlinings. My first priority is to correct the untrue things you have said in response to me. This will take some time. My second priority is to deal with your claims about teacher salaries, that being one of the issues on which I first tackled you. My third priority is to discuss the issue of public and private education, a matter that I had no intention of discussing beyond my original pointing out what the OECD research says about student performance in the different systems.

My own practice when faced with the “he said…no I didn’t” exchanges that develop on some forums is to skip them, so I expect most others still looking at this thread will do the same. But I will not allow you to get away with the false claims that you make pots after post.

You say, in regard to grammar and classics, that I am “now, in a very shady and backwards way, accepting my initial point was correct” (2.14:06pm, 25/2). There is nothing “shady or backwards” about what I said initially or later. I have quoted it. You say it makes me look “stupid”. Nothing has ever done that. You used terms like “killed off”, “eliminated…from most schools”, “almost totally phased out”. So when I say that they have decreased I am not accepting what you said initially or changing what I said about their still being taught.

Catholic schools do not have “more revenue to pay teachers with” (4.17:29pm, 25/2)

According to the 2008 National Report on Schooling in Australia, the average per capita revenue available to Catholic schools was $10,745 (compared to $15,062 for private schools)

http://cms.curriculum.edu.au/anr2008/pdfs/anr2008_Statistics_16-8-10.pdf

No separate figure is given for revenue per student in government schools, though it is reasonable to think the expenditure would be close to the revenue. In 2007-08, per capita expenditure, not revenue, in Catholic schools was $10,826 (compared to $15,576 for private schools and $12,639 for government schools). The official figures say Catholic schools spend $1,813 less per student than government schools.

I did not base my claim that relative teacher pay had fallen at the same time as teacher training entry scores had fallen “entirely” on the Leigh study (4.51:49pm, 26/2). I gave the Leigh study as one example (3.48:32pm, 15/2) because I had it handy. The information contained in it is not controversial or new. It is well known. I did not and do not “concede that the study is useless”. It demonstrates my point clearly.

I was not “completely wrong”. Entry scores for teacher training have fallen. The Leigh study uses percentile ranks of ability. If the percentile ranks of those who enter teacher training have fallen, so must the entry scores have fallen, as the entry scores are based on academic ability.

You say that I “don’t know what causation is”. Of course I do. I have argued the causation between failing relative pay and falling entry scores more than once. You may not agree that there is any relationship, but it would be strange if pay had no effect at all on people’s choice to take on particular jobs.