Simon Templar makes some interesting claims. One that he'd just finished a radio interview on education funding (while cutting and pasting propoganda straight from a Liberal website).

Now he claims to be a teacher.

I think your claims ST are as fanciful as your name.

I've come across a couple of articles in recent times, published on 'Online', that just don't make the cut. This is one of them. It just gets a bit pathetic when you have any old Tom, Dick, or Ariel, claiming to have qualifications (relevant to the topic or not), and therefore their ignorant rhetoric supposedly has some credit.

I've said it before ... lift your game Online. Surely Online can follow usual professional etiquette that determines professionals write on their area of expertise, and not opine on topics that they are not qualified to speak on.

Sir Vivor and Liz

If you are going to 'play the man', get your facts right. I didn't write the article Sir Vivor, Johnathon Ariel did, and Liz I am not a teacher and have never claimed to be. It might be a touch of arrogance on your part to assume that if one works in education then one must be a teacher.
Focus on the issue.

I would claim, young Simon, that you intended to lead posters to believe you are a teacher with your comments 'I have worked in education for nearly 20 years'.

Now that I have called your bluff, you attempt to clarify your non-professional status in education.

Pointing out that the NSW premier “has a deputy who was a school teacher” and then adding “God help us” sounds like contempt for teachers themselves rather than the system, as does saying students “remain saddled with the current crop of teachers” with its implication that those teachers are useless.

Andrew Leigh will confirm the general decline in teacher pay at his website. The information on conditions in Victoria is readily found from the AEU and in EBAs.

When the IPA started talking about “outputs” rather than “inputs” in education, it led to a drop in inputs and the introduction of OBE to Victoria.

My argument is not that all teachers should be paid the same. They aren’t anyway. My argument is that performance pay will result in more favouritism and bullying in schools, which is my experience from several principals with the increase in power already granted to the local level.

Teachers in Victoria have been promised greater rewards for the best of them remaining in the classroom since the 1978 green paper. Every such promise has been a lie. If you can establish a system that rewards the best teachers more and ensures that they are spread among all schools, not concentrated in the eastern suburbs, I would support it. But it must be more broadly based than simply on test results and must not be open to abuse by principals. It also needs to provide proper salaried positions, not one-off bonuses. The idea is to have an elite of teachers who will speak up for education and their profession, not a collection of self-seeking intimidated toadies who follow fads and whims from the principals.

“Output” cannot easily be defined in teaching because there are many factors in education that cannot be reduced to numbers or data, and the individual teacher does not control all the variables. Even those who say the individual teacher is the major determinant of student success recognise other factors. I finished my time as a teacher in a dysfunctional school, where individual effort could make little difference against its overall modus operandi.

Liz, I have generally low expectations of teachers and you have lived up to all of them.

It is the pot calling the kettle black for a teacher to accuse anyone (based on no knowledge at all in this case) of being unprofessional!

Let's stop beating around the bush: The source of our national educational crisis is a massive failure of teachers to teach. Any educational reform program that does not include reductions in pay or wholesale firings for our failing teachers and school administrators as well as raises and bonuses for those who succeed will not work.

This is the simple (and unmentionable) fact: We produce functional illiterates and student dropouts because we employ large numbers of functional illiterates and irresponsible bureaucrats in our schools; adults who have no business overseeing our children's education.

Our public school systems are mini-versions of the socialist states that collapsed from the sheer weight of their economic backwardness in 1989 and 1990. Why do we think the same crackpot Marxist economics can work to educate our children? If teachers are not expected to work hard, if their incentives do not reward them for educating our children and punish them for failing at their jobs, how can we expect anything better than the mess we have

Simon Templar, how can teachers teach children who are malnourished, pumped up on junk food, put to bed at midnight or later, dropped at school by surly parents who have inculcated disrespect of learning and encourage their scion to violently bully the weak. I have seen teachers manage classrooms of children like this on a daily basis with every one getting home safely and quite frankly the classroom often offers the only island of safety in the child’s life.

Unfortunately Simon Templar / Graeden Horsell none of the metrics used to measure merit based pay would reward these teachers any better.

A school friend said she was sick of providing nourishing breakfasts, clean clothes and scrounging text books for children from disadvantaged homes so she preferred to teach in Brighton where the parents all earned more than teachers and generally respected what the teachers were doing and the advantages education brings.

The 18 year olds we rear are primarily influenced by their family status, their self belief, the aspirations of their peers and thirdly the quality of their education.

It’s a lot easier to teach a child who has been told from age of 5 that they will go to university than it is to engage a child who wants to drive dump trucks for the shire.