Carfax: "If advocating choice for all families and better opportunities for all children, rich or poor, is a right wing rant then I am pleased to plead guilty as charged."

Watch your words. If you are really advocating that all parents should have equal access to the school of their choice, you must be implicitly proposing a massive change in the distribution of the nation's wealth towards that huge majority of parents who, at the moment, have a snowflake's chance in hell of being able to afford an elite school.

Another thing: You are dreaming if you think that the private schools would ever allow a situation in which parents of the children who are difficult, disadvantaged or dumb would ever able to knock on their door with their vouchers in their hands and demand that their children be taken in. The manifestation of their autonomy that elite schools value most is not the ability to adapt the curriculum to suit their own philosophy; it is the power it affords them to block undesirables from threatening their tone; and their NAPLAN scores.
I applaud your view that all parents should be able to choose whichever school they like; but don't assume that the right wing will. The last thing many of them want is for their children to come in contact with the children of social undesirables.

And yet another. I'll bet that the commentators who claim that the elite schools outperform government schools on value adding after allowing for disadvantage have assumed that the relationship between NAPLAN type scores and ICSEA type scores should be linear. They possibly also think that a 20ºC day is twice as hot as a 10ºC day when, to an American, those days would be 68ºF and 50º.

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/06/gps-special-re-airs-fixing-education/

I watched an interesting programme about education on CNNs GPS,
over the weekend.

It sounds like Bill Gates is throwing some huge money at the problem
of how do we land up with better teachers?

Its an interesting question, for boring teachers droning on and on
and on, they must have loved the sound of their own voices and
we were compelled to listen, was part of the major problem.

The Khan Academy approach, makes huge sense to me. I would have
learned a great deal more at school, had it been available in my time.

Hopefully some forward thinking Australians involved with education,
will do some trials with it, here in Aus.

Yabby,

Attracting good teachers is the key. There are many excellent teachers around but unfortunately as the status of teaching continues to decline, teachng will continue to struggle to attract the best quality recruits.

Teachers and universities have themselves to blame. So long as teachers and academics see education as a means for redistributing wealth rather than as a means of individual improvement than curriculum standards and the quality of personnel will continue to fall.

The most politically incorrect thing to say is that if teachers really want the status to improve they must attract more men. Women make fine teachers and there are many excellent female teachers, however the plain and unpalatable truth is that women often have babies and when they do their priorities change. Work is simply not as important for them anymore. They often reduce work to a few days a week. Men on the other hand often define themselves by their work. It assumes a central importance in their lives. They are also less likely to follow the latest teaching fad. Unfortunately (again) with all the hysteria about child abuse etc, teaching is just not attractive to many men. Why would you study for 4 years, acculumate a big debt and then have people look at you suspiciously because you are a teacher?

I taught in the UK recently. In many schools I went to the only men were foreign relief teachers like myself. It is just culturally unacceptable to be a male primary school teacher in the UK. What a shame for kids (esp. boys who are doing so poorly under the feminised teaching structures) and for society. I don't hold out any hope of things changing soon.

What about the transformation coming with effective mobile internet / GPS and light weight Tablets, UltraBooks (whatever)? Why spend a bucket on a school or Uni and often mediocre teachers when the best can record lessons, and the learners responses are reliably recorded for open and verifiable evaluation. Schools past Primary should no longer be an industrial process.