When I started teaching the maximum salary of a classroom teacher was equivalent to that of a backbencher. Today a few principals of extremely complex schools attract such a salary.
Over the years I have seen the salaries stagnate but also the lack of support for teacher development and growth. Instead of maintaining an inspectorate that was designed to encourage best practice and remove under performing teachers we create a national system where the only ones being assessed are the students.
Periods of acute shortages meant that some poor teachers were either appointed or kept on. (When working in recruitment I was directed to appoint a person to a school because she was the only willing to go a particular remote area - so inspite of poor academic results and poor prac teaching reports she was appointed and after three years was given her preferred city location.)
There have always been outstanding teachers who can inspire and counteract negative influences.
Private tutoring? I have been involved with that industry ever since retiring - it is mainly the children from the elite private schools who attend.
We should be suspicious of league tables because I see it as yet another instance of governments introducing a measure that enables them to be seeing to do something about the poor state of our education system without actually doing anything substantive.
I too was taught in a class of sixty but I would like to think we have moved on and are able to do much better.

Another real issue to add to BAYGON's list is whether or not parents really care about their children's education. This can affect the performance of individual schools - the one at which I am employed draws a huge portion of its students from wealthy tradies who have done well out of the mining boom. Many have been very successful in life without ever having achieved success at school and, as a result, naturally place a low value on academic achievement. I can't really blame them for that, though - they earn a hell of a lot more than I can ever hope to. And good on them for that.

What this amounts to, though, is a group of parents who tolerate compulsory education but do not place a lot of value in it. A couple of weeks ago, we had a parent-teacher interview night. I requested 63 interviews - of those, 2 said they would come and 1 actually showed up. Last week, I contacted more than 20 parents about their students' non-submission of drafts for upcoming assessment. The following week, 3 drafts were handed in.

When the message from home is that academic achievement is unimportant, how are we as teachers meant to counter that? I have 200 minutes of access to each class in a week - that's not a lot of one-on-one time in which to convince kids that performance is important.

Well Oto, there should be no trouble caused by league tables, with all those people, should there?

None of those parents are likely to ever read them.

However parents like us, who have the ability to help our kids with their studdies, should not be denied access to test papers which can show where the kids are struggling. We should be swamped with information, if teachers care, in the hope that some kids will be helped.

This, along with school, & other kids results, are being hidden from parents, not to advantage kids, but to hide teacher inadequacies. All the mumbo jumbo is simply window dressing.

I personally have no problem with league tables. At the moment, access to information on Queensland school achievement is fragmented - you can access school-by-school reports on NAPLAN results for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9; you can also access a wide range of stats on the Year 12 cohorts - OP ranges, VET qualifications, QCE attainment and even the number of students who graduated with nothing. Unfortunately, you have to access a number of different reports to get the whole picture.

Take my school. Our NAPLAN results weren't that great (partly because of the demographics I discussed in my earlier post and, no doubt, partly because some of the students have been through 9 years of bad educational standards). Our Year 12 results, however, show that out of about 350 students, only 12 graduated with no qualifications. The rest either achieved OPs, most being offered university places, or completed VET qualifications. This suggests that we have worked with our students to identify their needs and aspirations. Those who wanted to go to uni were given the support they needed to achieve that goal; those who didn't were given opportunities to spend their senior schooling years working towards qualifications that were meaningful to them. NAPLAN suggests we are a bad school; the Year 12 results suggest that we aren't so bad after all. The trouble is, parents have a lot of sifting and interpreting to do to find that. Maybe well-structured league tables would help that.

As a final note, I'd like to remind you, Hasbeen, that the incompetent, inadequate and lazy teachers of today were educated by those wonderful teachers of yore. Perhaps they weren't so wonderful after all - or perhaps we aren't as incompetent as you would have us believe.

To get back to ‘league tables'.

Can we take the following as givens?

1. In OECD comparison, on internationally recognised testing in literacy, science and mathematics Australia is around fifth behind Scandinavian countries, Hong Kong and Singapore. The USA is in the middle of some forty countries.
2. However in the same comparisons we underperform in results from our disadvantaged students – if we could improve these our world ranking would increase and over the past ten years our achievements in the lower socio-economic ranges has actually got worse!
3. Our teachers, like any sub-set of the human population, vary from the highly intelligent professional to the fairly ordinary.
Will publicly ranking schools on performance improve this situation?

I would argue:
1. That ‘choice’ has played a part in this decline, because it has concentrated the majority of students have no effective choice and removed role models.
2. A public ranking will only accelerate this decline. There are not ‘failing schools’ but students who are being failed. Governments already have the data to do something about this but it is easier to blame others.

For those generally interested rather than just indulging in ‘teacher bashing’ I would strongly recommend the work of Trevor Cobbold in his well researched paper ‘League Tables increase Social Segregation and Inequity’
http://www.valuesineducation.org.au/pdf/cobbold0903.pdf

There are areas where I disagree with Trevor but this is one case where I think he is spot on.

The comments to this point contain much polemic and ranting that amounts to little more than the usual mindless bashing of teachers. Teaching has become more difficult, notwithstanding the reduction of class sizes since the mid-20th century. Teachers today must teach increasingly complex and wide ranging material to increasingly hard-to-motivate, rude, inattentive and disruptive students (the product of their parents and a consumption-mad society) while experiencing over time a continuing erosion of their pay, professional standing and community esteem. Furthermore, these factors have made teaching so undesirable an occupation that the academic standards required to enter training have dropped, and beginning teachers usually say they see themselves teaching for only a few years.

League tables have achieved nothing anywhere; they are merely a means for more teacher bashing and school closures. Finland is known to have the world's most successful education system; its teachers are highly educated, highly motivated, highly esteemed. It does not use league tables, it's private sector has shrunk to a mere rump, and it does not spend massively on education. I suggest that Hasbeen and co. read the Finnish Education dept. site:
http://www.edu.fi/english/SubPage.asp?path=500,4699
and then
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080502015.html
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2007/09/why-is-finlands-education-system-the-best-in-the-world.html

It's Finland we should be looking at, not the failed methods of the UK and the USA.