Goss kept his promise to the teachers & they got a huge pay rise.
Hasbeen,
And look what we ended up with ? We have to deal with young adults who have no idea what responsibility means & their kids who can't read & teachers whose main ambition is to maximise their Super.

Did I misread the title of this forum? Is it actually meant to be "Bashing teachers based on stereotypes"?

Senior Victorian - I'm going to assume you were having a senior's moment when you wrote your post. I love and nurture my children but I don't assume I know more than the doctor who treats them, the coach who trains them for their chosen sports, etc. Heck, I wouldn't even trust myself to cut their hair - I get the trained hairdresser to do that.

I think you will find that qualified teachers are in a better position to deal with your child's educational needs than you are. And that doesn't detract from the fact that you do know your child better and any teacher I have worked with keenly seeks to meet with you and share that knowledge.

I have sat with too many parents whose sole focus is what's best for their child and their child alone. I have heard way too many parents actually say the words, "Well I don't care about the other children!" Hardly a model for deciding what works for the whole school.

I insist all of my staff either meet with, call or, as last resort, email all of the parents of children in their class by mid term one at the latest so they can tap into the knowledge and background the parents have, so we can work together to educate their child. I also encourage all staff to invite parents into their classes on a regular basis to contribute. That is the appropriate model for parent involvement in schools.

rational-debate,

While I think most teachers are dedicated to their calling, I'm in favour of children being self-motivated in their learning. My son is going along swimmingly in a stress-free non-competitive learning environment at home and in the community. The idea that someone should shape your learning in the same way that a hairdresser shapes your hair says it all.

Well done rational-debate. Always better to go for the cheap jibe and the glib analogy than engage in the debate around the trend throughout the Western world towards parent involvement in and control of schools. You might want to start by looking at Sweden and the Netherlands.

Hey SV, I'm not the one who called people faddish and silly... It was an attempt at humour which failed. I apologise.

I think you will find I was promoting parent involvement at schools. The more the merrier I say but within limits as to what the involvement actually is. Obviously I am aware of what happens in Scandinavian countries but there is more to consider before adopting that wholesale here. As I mentioned earlier, many of the parents I deal with are very focussed on their child only and how things work OS would not work here. What works OS relies on parents seeing a much bigger picture that many do here. I would love to trial it but don't see it working at the moment. However, read a bit more. I certainly wouldn't be citing The Netherlands as an example...

Poirot - Please do not put words on my mouth, especially when you are doing so disingenuously. You know full well that I was not drawing ANY sort of analogy between how one has their hair cut and how one teaches. I take it your children are home schooled? If so, that's a whole different discussion.

The qualitative measures of 'good teachers' being used by various academic and institutional policies is often at odds with a clearer understanding of the environment that teachers find themselves in.

These teaching and learning environments range from schools that attempt to cater to a wide range education of low socio economic and social capital interests.

Clearly new teachers will thrive in schools that reflect their own experience of school and the modelling of teaching they were exposed to, but many do not.

There is an ongoing mismatch between how schooling systems recruit teachers with the professional and personal qualities that will have both a short and long term impact on the academic and personal growth of the students in the schools care.

The radical shift to standardization (eg. NAPLAN) of educational practices has the potential to flatten out of cultural and linguistic, intellectual and educational diversity, with potentially deleterious effects on residual and emergent pedagogic, curriculum and educational traditions.

Teachers are finding it difficult to jungle official policies of standardisation and thus teaching practice to meet mostly externally driven school learning objectives as well as find ways to accurate calibrate and measure where 'their students are at".

This leaves no room for experienced teachers or (newly inducted teachers) to strategically plan for 'what is possible' within their classrooms.

One only needs to examine the standard deviation and often very different results that exists between 'like schools' on the myschools website to understand that schools cannot operate through policy and practice that adheres to production line (Fordist) notions of education delivery and thus academic achievement. School's need to have the internal democracy to be able to honestly declare both the capacity of its teaching staff and what it thinks are achievable goals semester by semester, year by year. What would be interesting if this were allowed would not be those indicators of educational (academic) achievement, but those goals that are informed by cultural, social, even philosophical endeavours, indeed many of the things we never discuss or think 'school enviroments' are