Thanks for your post Mercurius as you raise important issues about Donnelly's credibility as an educator and policy maker.

Yes I would agree that many read the Journal of the Science Teachers of Western Australia except for Science teachers of Western Australia- the very people Donnelly’s accuses of being new-age lefties.

Read did them a service by defending their reputations and hard work and dedication to teaching.

Show me one instance of Donnelly praising the work of teachers?

The public are in my opinion being duped by Donnelly, a well paid ideological hired cowboy whose credibility as an educator can only be attributed to his rants about schooling and how they are apparently infested with radical lefties.

He never provides any tangible evidence to support this claim and people like yourself unfortunately take this on board as gospel. It is not.

The title of Read’s article was titled ‘Manufacturing a Crisis in Education” which beautifully illustrates Donnelly’s purpose in life down to a tee.

He’s paid to create moral panics and thus explain what causes it to people who otherwise have no understanding of teaching and learning theory or how school systems work, their history and evolution.

Demonising his more qualified peers is part of the game.

The Murdoch press regularly publish his raves as “opinion pieces”, other times they appear to be editorial commissions. Such access is not because he is a well revered educator and practitioner; it’s because of who he works for. Get it?

Ever thought of why they don’t publish rights of reply from White, Hannan, Connell, Ashden, Marginson and Luke? They do try!

So I totally agree with your call “Proponents of progress in education need to engage the public” But I believe “who controls the media controls the public debates”.

You can’t know what you don’t hear or read- but you should not think the media is ‘the world of balanced opinion”. It is not

From an insiders perspective Donnelly is seen as a third rate academic who has attached himself to an ideologically driven agenda – something ironically he accuses others of doing

Mercurius and others, See the article I refer to by Alan Reid, from Uni of SA here: http://newwace.curriculum.wa.edu.au/docs/Redi%20Article.pdf

Another revealing snippet for this article:

"Quality teaching and learning result from a range of factors. One of these might be the way in which the curriculum is described, but there are many others including the resources available, the quality of the relationships, class size and so on. Donnelly concedes this point at one stage in his report, but then ignores it and bases a raft of recommendations on a review of curriculum documentation done at his desk. It is difficult to understand how a report can
generalise about the whole curriculum on the basis of a review of the intended (written) curriculum in three subjects"

In other words Donnelly is not interested in undertaking deeper research, he is happy to develop conjecture and his own escape route of "plausible deniability", from the comfort of his own desk. This is hardly the academic rigor one expects in the field of education and schooling rsearch.

He's not the Messiah, he's just a naught little boy.(apologies to monty python)

Hi Rainier,

You say:

"He never provides any tangible evidence to support this claim and people like yourself unfortunately take this on board as gospel. It is not."

Evidence of the cultural left's control of the curriculum can be found in chapter 4 of the book 'Why Our Schools Failing', found at:

http://www.mrcltd.org.au/content.cfm?PageID=PubsMonographs

Best wishes,
Kevin

All teaching is a political act. I am happy to state that I use my position in the classroom to work toward the transformation of our society to one that more reflects the values of justice, peace and love. The religious order who run the school I work at state in one of their documents: "There is no such thing as neutral of value-free education. The process of education either legitimises the existing socio-economic system of seeks to transform it in the light of different values and beliefs. In the end, education is a profoundly political activity which seeks to influence the way people live their lives." I take this to heart - there is no such thing as neutral in education! This, I suppose, is where I differ from Kevin. He seems to believe there is a thing such as neutral education. And I thought he worked at a church-based school when he was working as a teacher. Surely they had a socially transformative mission Kevin? Didn't you want your students to go out into the world and to transform it in the light of Christian values? Hardly neutral. Or did you not take the school's Christian mission to heart?

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Hi bondi_tram,

You state:

"All teaching is a political act. I am happy to state that I use my position in the classroom to work toward the transformation of our society to one that more reflects the values of justice, peace and love."

If all teaching is a political act, how do you judge between different approaches and philosophies? Based on your assumption that all are able to use education as a tool to enforce their own particular ideology, how can you say that some are right and some are wrong? I favour a liberal/humanist view of education, one based on the disinterested pursuit of truth and cultivatiing the rational mind and discriminating spirit.

I feel I must correct the comment made early in this forum about Tasmania's curriculum change. The changes were first mooted by a group of principals here and strongly confirmed by the survey of almost 70% of teachers done by the state branch of the AEU. Both groups overwhelmingly showed that the ELs needed revision. It has not been "axed" or "scrapped" as the media delighted in putting it. It still remains standards/outcomes based education, but has had its 18 unmanageable, non-subject based outcomes reduced to five traditional learning areas and in response to teacher demand will have broad non-grade aligned scope and sequence documents written to match revised standards in those 5 learning areas. It will still have thinking skills embedded and explicitly taught, there will still be collegial assessment and it will still be assessed in levels. It was the union here which led this revision on behalf of members. The previous Minister would have continued to push the original "pure"/transformational OBE, but the new Minister recognised the unwieldy and unworkable giant it had grown into and applied some common sense to it. There are both avid supporters and avid detractors of this revised model amomg teachers here, but it is IMHO a fairly good compromise between the radical and the traditional.