Riddler,

You say “You’re(sic) 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” (4.54:04pm, 26/2). We have had a system under which some teachers are paid more than others for all the years since I began teaching. Senior Teachers were paid more after demonstrating extra ability. Then Advanced Skills Teachers 1, 2 and 3 - brought in at the union’s advocacy - were paid more for demonstrating extra ability. Now Leading Teachers are paid more for demonstrating extra ability. I even advocated such a system myself in my submission to the 1980 Green Paper on Strategies and Structures for Education in Victoria, which you may be able to get under FoI. More recently, I wrote:
“If we want to identify the best teachers, we need a simple and competitive process which really does select the best, say, five per cent. We need to pay them as much as leading teachers receive for moving to administrative duties but we need to insist that they keep a full teaching load.”
(“Keeping the best teachers in the classroom”, The Australian, 17/7/2006)

“The Australian Education Union has commissioned an independent company to survey its members and develop a set of standards as a basis for assessing teachers and paying more to those who excel.” (Justine Ferrari, “Teachers warm to merit pay”, The Australian, 17/1/2008). So there is no lie. Such a system is “fine” – my words – and is not opposed by the AEU. The dispute is over the criteria and means, not the paying more.

You say “The AEU… don’t even allow parents to choose where their kids go.” The AEU has no say in where parents choose to send their kids. The parents make the choice.

It looks like you want me to stay with my first priority (8.03:14am, 2/3).

When you say that I “can’t read”, you are just continuing your habit of making things up, whether as a deliberate debating technique or because you just can’t help yourself I do not know. I can read very well. What I read was your claim that they had “eliminated” grammar from most schools (later, “killed off”). I replied that they had not and gave the fact that it was taught in all the schools, not just one school, I had taught in. You later asked if it had been decreased. I agreed. You then claimed I had changed my point. I pointed out that I had not because to say something is “killed off” is not the same as saying it has decreased. You ought to know the difference between “decreased” and “killed off”.

My “new point about Catholic schools” is not “that they achieve better results with less money” (9.44:33am, 2/3). This is another of your inventions. Nowhere do I say this. Nowhere have I said that they achieve better results. I did not say that “private schools are working even harder”. I did not say that “private schools deserve more money”. I have not expressed an opinion one way or the other on how much money should go to private schools.

Yes, I do know something about economics. You can extrapolate revenue from expenditure for public schools because they cannot spend what they do not earn. If the average expenditure per government school student is $12,639, their average revenue will not be $12,000. It will be around $12,639 per student. I say “around” because there are funds carried forward from one year to a next, money put aside for building programs, etc. I have not argued that “public schools “are putting out such a bad product in comparison that they can't give it away”. Obviously, they can give it away because most parents still send their children to government schools.

Your claim that Catholic schools have more revenue than government schools, which you now say is “unimportant” was not unimportant when you first made it.

You say I am dishonest when I give the actual figures on Catholic school revenue because you weren’t talking about primary schools, which you say was “clear”. It wasn’t clear at all. The idea that primary schools are suddenly not relevant to the subject under discussion is absurd.

When teacher registration was re-introduced to Victoria, it applied to existing teachers, whether public or private. NSW is the only jurisdiction whose website clearly indicates that registration is not required of private school teachers already employed at the commencement of the professional registration system. Even in NSW, as new teachers are employed in private schools, they will be required to have teacher training. It beggars belief that the overwhelming majority of teachers in private schools, Catholic or otherwise, do not already have teacher training qualifications. There may be a few exceptions from a past era, but the original point holds.

Your summary of my argument on teacher pay is wrong. I did not say that “the time period of 1975 is the appropriate one to begin at”. I could have started with 1974 or 1976 or any of a number of years. The point is the long-term change. I could even have started with the 1960s and the argument on relative earnings would hold.

I did not say that “teacher performance justifies an indexed salary”. Nowhere have I argued for an indexed salary. I haven’t even said what a teacher’s salary should be or how a teacher’s career path should be structured.

I did not say that any teachers are “being overpaid”.

I did not say some of the other things either, though it is a reasonable inference that I think more should be spent on education

Still replying to old posts, how pedantic.

1. The point of putting $11,400 into the 1983 inflation calculator is to point out that you can’t use the figures from 1975, and then a study from 1983, as though the 2 things are interchangeable, when the inflationary difference is huge. However, you are finally making an attempt to clear the hurdles of establishing the first of the 6 points I just outlined. While the figure you give suggests a (very small) prima facie cut from 1983-2003, there are numerous problems with such analysis (before we even get to points 2 or 3). Firstly, factoring in tax for 84-85 (the furthest back I found on the ATO site here: http://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/content.asp?doc=/content/73969.htm) the amount leftover for the 1983 salary of 24,199 (you’ve mistyped it, so I assumed this was the correct #) is $17,566.5, equivalent to $39,246 in 2003 money. Even the 7 year amount you choose of $49,820 comes out at $38,494 after tax, so the drop in real terms after tax is basically nominal.

Secondly, the number you choose, as you admit, is not the number we should be comparing here, since the actual top position is listed at you as being $54,202 (worth $41,058). The fact that the time it takes to get the top teacher’s salary is longer doesn’t make it a bad point of comparison, especially if it was AEU policy. On this latter number, they actually attained a raise, despite losing students, and having poor performance. An the tax rates introduced shortly after 2003 are even more favourable still, so any 1975-2010 comparison will end far worse for you.

Thirdly, the study you cited which uses the period of 1983-2003 isn’t even helpful to your point, as they don’t argue for an actual drop in entry scores for teaching, and certainly not the drop you claimed, the study makes a wholly different argument.

Fourthly, I’m dubious of any study you present, because you’ve consistently provided bad date, or misinterpreted the data presented. I’ll assume the figures for the sake of argument, but it took me 2 minutes on

Google to search for teacher salaries, and find that NSW salaries in 2003 for the top teacher scale were over $58K (http://www.educationworld.net/salaries_aus.html), which is higher even if we ignore tax. Did teacher performance in NSW increase then, in light of their higher salary? And if so, why did we instead see a steady exodus from public schools, and crap marks?

Lastly, I query what Leigh actually says (I haven’t read the study) when he says teacher salaries fell “elative to other occupational groups”. Is this relative to lawyers and doctors, or to some meaningful benchmark?

Your findings on this point are simply specious. So it’s dubious if you’ve even shown a salary drop, let alone explained why a salary drop isn’t merited, or why 1975 (or 1983 for that matter) are somehow correct starting figures.

2. The AEU. You persist in pointing to outliers in Victoria rather than honestly confronting the way the system works, and this makes your argument weak. It would be akin to me arguing that Labor has a talented group of MP’s, because they have Andrew Leigh (“he’s an economist!”), while ignoring everything else. Most teacher salaries are not determined by the niche collection of exempted leader teachers in Victoria (salaries here for anyone curious
http://www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/edulibrary/public/hr/empconditions/Teacher_salary_rates.pdf)
Rather we determine AEU policy by their standard practise, which is a tenured based system. Victoria has a small number of teachers who aren’t judged by tenure… because they recognise discretion is important… now let’s continue with discretion and implement it fully everywhere. Your quote from the AEU is not the helpful refutation you think it is (much like your BCA quote was unhelpful). The AEU does not oppose EXTRA payment for really good teachers, but not at the expense of bad teachers, which if you read down to the level of my actual words is what I’ve been advocating since my first 4 posts on here.

The AEU does not control where children go, I did not say they did, but they support the policy of their quasi-lobby in the education department, which is that parents do not have

a real choice. This point has been covered. Repeatedly. It’s nice some parents have some choice, but most don’t, and I want to change this. Your continual references to outliers is unhelpful at best, and dishonest at worst.

3. Whether or not you can read
I said grammar and classics had been eliminated in MOST schools, and generally killed off. You interpreted that to mean X, I told you it didn’t mean X. Whether it was initially a product of your failure to read my sentences I don’t know, but at this stage it clearly is. I don’t care what you interpreted my words to mean, I know what I meant by them, and have been very clear in explaining exactly what they meant for some time now. Your call for me to defend an imagined position I never held is tired to say the least. For the tenth time I will ask you (for curiosity, not because it’s an important argument here), “did your school teach grammar as a subject, or a sub-part of English?” You’ve already conceded however that grammar and classics have dropped generally, there’s really little to say about this anymore.

“My ‘new point about Catholic schools’ is not ‘that they achieve better results with less money’ (9.44:33am, 2/3). This is another of your inventions.”
I realise you’re immune to sarcasm, but even you should have picked up on this one. You argue that catholic schools pay their teachers the same, according to your study they have a worse PTR & spend less per student, yet public schools (with a free product) can’t compete with them, and have been losing students to them in flocks and droves (yet they receive less public money). I don’t think the myschools scores (or general performance) does them poorly either, but I don’t want to get you distracted from your own argument just yet. All this seems to suggest that Catholic schools should get more money, not public schools. Yet the dialogue of the AEU is quite different. But doubtless you’ll reply (again) with a vague statement like