It's hard to disagree with Malcolm but the problem is not confined to the AEU, sadly out of touch as it is. State education bureaucracies across the land are awash with educzational fads and fantasies. Teachers are bombarded with this rubbish on a daily basis.

Wellness education; emotional intelligence; innovation education and many other 'initiatives' serve very little purpose other than keeping education bureaucrats in work and adding more confusion and stress to teachers' daily lives.

Root and branch reform is necessary but Julia, Kevin et al will need every weapon at their disposal if they are to win the battle to give all children a chance at a decent education.

Good comment. It's a strange dance that the Ruddster will have to perform to convince the states that the initial running on school reform must come from Canberra. It's a test for his 'new Federalism' - whatever that it.

I would have liked to see a joint review of both higher education (as done recently by the former VC of Uni SA) AND the secondary school sector. More focus on the student rather than the politics.

I sometimes am concerned about King's Toryism but he's on safe ground with the AEU. They're holding back educational reform in Australia. They're part of the problem abd instead of focusing on curriculum and bleating about wages, they should have a bloody good hard look at themselves.

The author never quite clearly spells out his position here other than that he doesn't like the AEU (or presumably any other union).

I assume he is advocating that teachers pay and conditions be determined by a performance-based structure, the nature of which will be unilaterally determined by the employer.

I have have worked at the coalface of the state education system for 13 years (though I am not a teacher) and can assure him that not too many teachers, regardless of their age group do "just enough to get by". Indeed many, if not most of them do large amounts of unpaid overtime - in fact, it is expected of them - so I have no problem with any pay rises they may win.

I strongly doubt that performance-based pay would have any significant positive effect on overall outcomes. I think that some people simply do not understand the amount of dedication to the job it is necessary to possess in order to do what can be a very frustrating and emotionally taxing occupation - anyone with the nous to earn a degree in education would not stay in the proffession if they were not dedicated to educating children. The teachers unions say that it would unfairly disadvantage some teachers, especially those working in low socio-economic districts, while unfairly advantaging others and I agree. The author appears to think that such a system will draw super-talented people who will come up with a magic formula for turning sow ears into silk purses (please excuse the political incorrectness). I can assure him that this is largely a pipe dream.

So Malcom, what do you do when your writing business recieves a load of dodgy printing ink or sub-standard paper? That's right - you send it back, don't you?

Spare a thought for those who do not have that option.

Well Malcom, I started back at work today.

It is two weeks before school starts and there were several teachers there already, organizing, doing paperwork.

Unpaid.

Malcolm King’s article seems to wander around several different issues. The plethora of assertions could be seen as coming down to accountability through revelations of performance (?league tables) will reward better teachers and teachers going on strike only alienate parents. And schools and the bureaucracy need reform. Some of this is correct, that is supported by evidence.

It is an astonishing thing that assertions continue to be made on basically ideological grounds as if we have no evidence on which to base our strategies for reform. The statements of Rupert Murdoch and New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein in November last are just two examples.

One, Australian students are known from international test such as PISA and TIMSS to be not performing at the highest level: students from Finland, Korea and some other countries top the tests. But the performance is not a certainly not a disaster: the substantial variation is related to socio-economic status of the students’ family and remoteness from city centres.

Two, whatever one would like, league tables and other measures which attempt to relate performance in tests to teachers’ input, are nearly useless because statistically one can only distinguish the worst 10 per cent or so from the best 10 per cent. There is no statistically significant different between the rest of them. Countries like Finland don't use league tables. Kenneth J. Rowe from the Australian Council for Educational Research said a few years ago, “Australian politicians and senior bureaucrats currently advocating the publication … of ‘league tables’ are naively, and in typical fashion, stomping around in an uninformed epistemopathological fog”.

The single most important issue in the whole debate, for schools and excluding the possibly even more important issue of early childhood intervention, is the quality of the teachers. If teachers have to strike every time they want a pay rise the immediate conclusion to be drawn is that teachers are not valued. Arguing about the AEU is irrelevant.

Let’s focus on these and other issues which are very well informed indeed by well conducted research and stop this argument based on little or evidence.