//Australia has a major problem. UNIFEC rates Australia's Literacy standards as 39th in the world out of 41 countries.//

If you're the one supposed to have all the answers on literacy and you think that's how UNICEF is spelt, it would seem that we have a quite a problem indeed.

"Why do teacher unions oppose diagnostic testing?"

Possibly because they fear misdirected accountability where someone outside the classroom, no outside the school, can look at a set of figures taken well out of context, and impose a change in the published curriculum.

BoB, why is that a problem once the higher authority has listened to the teacher/school?

Brian of Buderim, how about a few facts in your posts.

You must know, if you taught until recently, just how far the standard of scholarship of teachers has slipped in your time. We can blame Whitlam for opening up university education to people of even below average scholarship. Teachers courses get the left overs, rather than the cream.

From my matriculation class in 1957, 3 of us got open company scholarships to do BSc courses. 3 more got some form of teachers scholarship to do a BSc.

5 more got teachers scholarships to do arts.

2 went into the family business, & one back to the farm.

All the rest got 2 year teachers collage scholarships.

Almost the entire cream of that years crop became teachers. Little wonder our teachers were great.

As the founder, with my wife of the P&C school textbook hire system in our local 1600 student high school, I had a fair bit to do with the teachers, & particularly the subject masters, for 12 years.

With that scheme we saved parents about half the cost of books & materials, while putting between $100,0000 & $170,000 into the school funds each year. The hardest thing to do in that scheme was to get some subject masters to put a few hours effort into telling us what books would be required for next years courses. A few hundred hours of volunteer work was required after the books were bought.

About 30% of those subject masters were simply going through the motions, with no interest in the kids. Even worse, about 20% of the teachers, particularly in senior math & physics could not have passed an exam in the subject they were supposed to be teaching.

Continued.

Continued.
The reason teachers are so against tests is, as we are seeing, it shows up those teachers who fail to teach any kids anything over many years. In an education system, run for the kids, they would be long gone. However our system, controlled by the union, is run for anyone but the kids.

When one biology teacher was told to teach senior math C he told the subject master & head master that he couldn't even do it, let alone teach it. When told to "muddle through" he resigned. He should have stayed for the kids sake. The Indian woman given the job, would have failed a junior math B exam

Hasbeen, we have been down this path at least once before. It is to your credit that you have done all the things you have done for the good of one school.It is very difficult for you to validly extrapolate your volunteer experience of one school across a number of others. The school you supported may have been the average of all the schools in one state, it may have been an outlier either better or worse. When it comes down to it, it is just one school.

Luciferase, the problem with top-down syllabus reconstruction is that teachers are very rarely asked for any input particularly when a top-level bureaucrat or a fast-ascending politician wants to build a reputation for "getting things done".

Cynical? I've seen it happen too many times. What looks perfect from cloud-cuckoo land by the time is has drifted down to the chalk-face is frequently unworkable.