Ah. sweet music to my ears.

I have three sons ploughing through the Qld 'edumacation' system.

Two have passed out the other end, one still battles daily with mindless Ed Qld silliness dressed up as 'in pursuit of excellence'.

It is not, it is low grade, badly managed, gormless, nit-picking, dull, empty and largely a waste of time.

Ed Qld resent parents who ask why the English reading books are 30 yaers old, why the maths books are poorly written with wrong answers, questions and examples, why the science books, highlighted by an ex-principal, are useless...all falls on deaf ears at the school, district, region, DGs door, and finally at the feet of the Minister.

No one cares, but most of all, none of them have any desire to self examine, listen, or read the results.

What was Welliegogs answer to 'the tests'?

Our underperfoming teaching staff will now drop all and start to 'teach the tests'.

As they do already with the QCS test, with 12 months of cramming to lift the results.

And of course, the amount of time Ed Qld spends promoting 'chaplains' and RI instead of maths, science (where despite Ed Qld denials Intelligent Design is allowed to be taught across Qld) real English and whatever else, is just shocking.

It's not so much the fact that our state schools are now defacto evangelical recruiting grounds, so much as the lack of intelligence on the part of the school principals who mistake all this as being a benefit.

The Ed Qld teachers job description requires teachers to attend to all levels of students. They do not. They cater to the poorest students first, who consume time, and are neither supported by worthwhile PD, nor sufficient materials, nor support staff, nor intelligent leadership, nor any hint of imagination.

All this is endorsed by aquiescent P&Cs, an EQ compliant QCPCA, and a totally silent QTU, topped off by parents who want nothing to do with the schools because they know there is no point in questioning anything.... coupled with their memories of their own time in school.

As economic refugees from Melbourne to Queensland in 1996 my primary children were amazed that they were repeating work, but that was compensated by the progress in Maths which made a huge difference to my daughters' confidence.
When it came to choosing high school I was dismayed that the State school could not offer my daughter, Maths B and science subjects to lead to University entrance scores to progress to a Science degree(is she so desired).
The reason? There wasn't enough students in the low socio-economic/rural town to teach it. Their apirations were not likely to be for University. Even the lack of non-Asian languages being taught was mystifying.
I had to appeal to local Anglican Independent school that offered all of the above for a bursary so I could assure my daughters of choices in their education. This was a distressing time for me ideologically too.
When I told middle-class ALP leaning aquaintenances I was sending my girls to a private school they said, but state schools need parents like you!
As an ALP member this lack of sophisticated standards in educatation is distressing, and all I can do is petition within the party for improvements, so I applaude the authors petition for a parliamentary inquiry.
Queensland has had a long term culture of neglect by the rural National Party over decades. They feared educating the populace, hence the lack of specialist arts/science rooms, and censorship which has meant teachers have very little confidence in teaching these subjects.
My oldest daughter went to Qld Uni as a Science student with friends but they only did one year as their lecturers were boring. She went to a much more dynamic Nursing degree course at QUT, and is now working in Neurology with options for further professional courses.
My younger daughter is nearing the end of primary teaching degree, and as we near the struggle of financial stress due to supporting them through unpaid fulltime practicals of 6-8weeks we hope the State will appreciate their work.
We do what we can!

Dear Mr Reid

Hi. To what extent does the fault lie, if at all, with the brain drain from mathematics, across to investment banking for instance? Syd Morning Herald journo Lisa Pryor describes such a drain in her book "The Pin-Striped Prison" (2008), claiming that an Australian Academy of Science study found that "in the past decade, mathematical science depts in Aust's leading universities lost almost a third of their permanent academic staff...teachers without adequate maths training are teaching maths classes".

Hi John,

Kevin Donnelly here - another great article and on the money. As I outlined in Dumbing Down, those responsible for curriculum across Australia, especially Queensland, have a lot to answer for. The only problem is that most are still there and many are writing the new national curriculum! Outcomes based education might be a no go zone, but just wait for the next round of education fads and dumbed down experiments.

That's a worry, when Kev Donnelly agrees.

Kev's ideal of education seems to be the chalkntalk variety, again.

With a John Howard view of history where students learn 'facts' by rote and glorify the nation, where English is studying Chaucer only, and students get back into the world language, Latin.

No evaluation of the current school principals or 'edumacation' management teams is required, according to Kev, only 'back to the 1950s' when schools were so much 'better'.

Oh, and yet more power to principals to hire and fire... but who says the current principals have got a clue about what is required, apart from Kevin, Howard and probably Gillard, who wouldn't be too up-to-date with the power machinations within a school, not having any children in one to see how dysfunctional most schools really are.

Look, the text books publishers publish are rubbish, all too often.

I took issue with a Maths C Qld book and the publisher told me it was wrong because they had no editors who could do Maths C to edit it, but they put it out anyway because they had a 'suite' of maths books from Y8-12, and they needed to 'fill the market place'.

I contacted the Maths teachers assoc', they used the book in Brisbane but 'hadn't done anything about it'.

The junior science books from this publisher are all nonsense but all the schools here still use them, and across the state.

The QSA don't care, because they only look after the curriculum-not our problem. Ed Qld doesn't care because they don't publish books- it's up to the schools to get suitable materials, the QCPCA isn't interested, P&Cs only want to raise funds and evangelise with unqualified 'chaplains' and teachers shrug their shoulders because no one listens to what they say, including the QTU who do very little to promote education here.

I hope I am not too late with this post.

I notice John Ridd that in your numerous interesting articles you place great reliance on TIMSS. But I don't think you deal with PISA. I also note that you focus a great deal on mathematics. I have to say I have only read your articles quickly so I may have missed something.

I don't think you mention the important study, "the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study". I wonder why. What has happened to that study? I can find no recent reference to it on the web anyway.