Dan Harrison & Heath Gilmore,
Sydney Morning Herald

Cathy Hooke letter to
Sydney Morning Herald

Prof Margaret Wu
Assessment Research Centre
University of Melbourne

Assoc Prof Steve Wilson

Letter to Editor
Sydney Morning Herald
13 Nov 09

Your story illustrates why many are so opposed to the publication of these results. You have lined up the results of three schools. You have not provided informed commentary or contextualised them, making one of the schools, Macarthur Girls High, look comparatively inferior. This is not the case.  ...

Macarthur Girls High School was recently confirmed as the first centre for excellence under National Partnerships funding for its outstanding record in building its students' achievement. My university is the academic partner for Macarthur Girls under this program. We are proud to be associated with a school that takes girls from many parts of western Sydney, many from families where English is not the primary language spoken in the home, and provides them with such a successful education.

If you are going to break the law by publishing school results in future, please consider how to do so fairly and responsibly.

Associate Professor Steve Wilson, Head, school of education, University of Western Sydney

Australian Education Union

Anna Patty
Education Editor
Sydney Morning Herald
17 Nov 09

Schools unite against rankings
Six peak national groups representing parents, teachers and principals from public and private schools have signed a letter to the Federal government asking it to prevent the publication of "misleading and damaging" league tables.

The letter says NAPLAN test results provide only a snapshot of academic achievement and provide a statistically unreliable basis for comparing schools.

The Daily Telegraph
28 Oct 09

National literacy and numeracy tests 'not reliable'

NAPLAN TEST RESULTS UNRELIABLE; CANNOT BE USED TO COMPARE SCHOOLS

The results from the national literacy and numeracy tests are unreliable and cannot accurately compare compare a school's performance from year to year or track the progress students make as they go through school.

With aberrant results, "it is difficult to have confidence in the overall NAPLAN 2009 results," says Prof Margaret Wu.

"...the government is going beyond the accuracy and the validity of the NAPLAN results. It basically means linking NAPLAN results based on student performance with teacher performance. That link is conjecture."

Professor Barry McGaw asked if it is fair for parents not to be told how badly a school is doing. As a statistician, I ask: ''Is it fair to accuse a school or a teacher of not doing their job when they are?''

NAPLAN results have large error margins. This can be shown statistically. But common sense will tell you that if we ever change the VCE to be based only on a couple of tests with 40 questions, there will be an outcry on the lack of reliability in the results. So how can NAPLAN results be used to assess school and teacher performance, when the performance of students is not measured well?

When schools are grouped into ''like'' groups, we need even more precision in the measures to detect differences between schools. It will be easy to demonstrate the difference between a high-profile private school and a low socio-economic government school, but it will be more difficult to determine significant differences between two high-profile private schools.

NAPLAN results just do not provide the precision to do that. Linking low student performance to school performance is at best a conjecture.

Talking 'bout their generation comes last
Remote students siply don't have the advantages of urban students, yet we expect the outcomes to be the same. (Some remote students have dirt-floored classrooms with no walls, and they hear English only when their teacher visits three days a week. National tests compare them unfairly.)

14 Nov 09

Miki Perkins
The Age

Victorian teachers take note:

Primary English test 'a waste'
Victorian teachers slammed a new English test undertaken by thousands of primary school children, saying it produced wildly inaccurate results and was a waste of time. Principals have reported Prep students shown as performing at Year 5 level -- "flattering but impossible."

Weapons maker funds school curriculum
An Adelaide public school has come under fire for reaching a deal with the world's largest manufacturerof guided missiles to fund a new curriculum.

Anna Patty
Education Editor
Sydney Morning Herald

Angelo Gavrielatos
Sydney Morning Herald

Jason Hill
Sydney Morning Herald

Justine Ferrari
Education writer
The Australian

Re-branding education as a career choice
The key to an "education revolution" is the attraction, development and retention of a new generation of quality teachers and educational leaders.

Students suffer in teacher shortage
A severe shortage of casual teachers means almost two-thirds of NSW schools cannot find one when they need one.

Alexandra Smith
Sydney Morning Herald

Stephen Lunn
Social affairs writer
The Australian

Justine Ferrari
Education Writer
The Australian

Anna Patty
Education Editor
Sydney Morning Herald

Rewards may split teachers
Performance pay for teachers could create disharmony between colleagues and damage teaching quality,a federal parliamentary committee says.

Tom Calma
Race Discrimination Commissioner

Adam Morton
The Age

Justine Ferrari
Education Writer
The Australian

Students must value dialogue about our past
The recently leaked draft curriculum framework is conservative and arguably overly prescriptive, emphasising events and dates rather than themes and issues, but nevertheless leaving teachers scope to incorporate themes, issues and investigations into their courses in appropriate conjunction with narratives and events. That Howard finds even this conservative document unacceptable is an indication of how extreme and limited his vision for history teaching is.

Anna Patty
Education Editor
Sydney Morning Herald

Dorothy Illing
Higher Education writer
The Australian

Phillip Coorey
Sydney Morning Herald

Hot stuff on little kids: Dr Mustard adds spice to the reading wars
Fraser Mustard, Adelaide's Thinking in Residence until March, reminds us about the vital importance of early childhood.

Prof Stuart Macintyre
(President, Academy of Social Sciences; former dean of arts at Melbourne University.)
The Age newspaper.

Maria Tumarkin
(The Age, Melbourne)

Telling Children a Dangerous Lie About Life
School reports do not tell children, or parents, how they are doing.

Fears for English Syllabus under national test plan
Published in Sydney Morning Herald 13 June 2006
It will be interesting to see Minister Bishop's response         
to the claims of "dumbing-down" in this article.

Mark Howie
President, English Teachers Assoc NSW

New assessment program can only fail students

Maureen Douglas (retired principal)
18 May 2009

Such testing has made neither Britain nor the US leaders in education.
I HAVE no doubt that politicians, policy makers, parents, carers and teachers all have a common goal for the students in our schools: they want the best, and that includes enabling them to develop those all-important literacy and numeracy skills.

But we are doing them a disservice if we think the Federal Government's impending testing program will improve performance in literacy and numeracy. Assessment is a highly complex process, yet we are being asked to believe that the National Assessment Program can be all things to all people, that it can, at once, tell parents how their is child performing, give teachers the information they need to plan programs to meet students' needs, and enable policy makers and politicians to judge the performance of schools and make meaningful comparisons between schools, states and systems.

It has become the single most important tool for judging achievement in literacy and numeracy and takes precedence over the ongoing assessment of teachers. Along the way, it risks taking the joy out of learning, and stifling our children's potential as dynamic and creative learners.

This year, the Education Department has held briefings for principals to stress the importance of the tests and to remind them to set time aside to prepare students. Emails have been sent to schools emphasising the importance of Victorian students performing well. Regions are issuing schools with lesson plans and hints to make sure students are "test ready". Clearly, schools are being asked to teach to the program, and therein lies a real danger for schools and, most importantly, our students.

Last year, I visited primary schools in two countries where high-stakes testing has dominated the education agenda for many years, the United States and Britain. I was struck by the effect of such testing on schools and students. Preparation for the tests dominates each day from the start of the year. This means students are streamed according to ability for the three core subjects: English, maths and science. Sadly, many students, particularly those for whom English is not their first language and those with learning difficulties, find themselves in the lowest-achieving group. This constant negative labelling leaves them despondent and many simply give up. And for the more capable students, there is little incentive or opportunity to use and extend their skills.

Arrogant Attack on Critical Literacy
Garry Collins (President, English Teachers Association of Queensland) 6 Dec 2008

In his piece, “Uncritical elevation of a loopy fad” (HES, 26/11), Luke Slattery asks: “Why, once the press had lifted the lid on critical literacy and exposed it to criticism, was it defended with such autocratic fervour by groups such as the English Teachers Association?” This prompts some questions in return.

Does Slattery arrogantly suppose that, just because he and a handful of other commentators (who don’t teach in schools) criticise an idea, thousands of English teachers across the country will obediently jettison what they consider to be a very useful element in their teaching repertoires? Does he assume that his pronouncements will automatically put a definitive end to debate on a professional issue about school English teaching, a profession in which he does not himself engage?

Some Thoughts on Grammar
Garry Collins (President, English Teachers Association
of Queensland)

One of the “rules” of traditional grammar that I had drummed into me when I attended primary school in the 1950s, that golden age when everything in education was apparently done so much better than today, was that it is not permissible to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as the word “and”. In today’s second editorial (“Silencing grammar, 13/6), this “incorrect” construction is to be found not just once, but twice.

Another of the “rules” that I was taught was that a sentence must contain a verb. At the end of a paragraph in the second column of the editorial we find, between the capital letter and full stop indicating sentence boundaries, the single word “Pathetic”. This word is an adjective, not a verb. Are we then to deduce that a leader writer for a major daily newspaper is unable to consistently write in complete sentences? The “split infinitive” in the previous sentence was quite deliberate since it serves to highlight another of the so-called “rules” of traditional grammar that is of no practical use.

It is interesting that what is condemned out of hand by the use of the comment “Pathetic” is the suggestion that students should apply grammatical concepts to material like TV guides that they might voluntarily choose to read in their spare time. I suppose the idea here is that grammar can only be character-building when it is confined to boring work-book exercises conducted outside of any meaningful context. That, after all, is how it was routinely done in the good old days.

In expressing outrage about some errors in the ETAQ journal, the editorial claims that a pair (both words in italics) is “a noun”. This is clearly incorrect. The second word is certainly a noun but the first is an indefinite article or what some authorities would classify as a determiner. The old adage about people who live in glass houses comes to mind. In addition, the fact that the word “a” is classified by some as an article and by others as a determiner indicates that some grammatical terminology is not as fixed and clear-cut as the editorial would suggest.

Yet another of the traditional grammar gems that I learnt in primary school was that it is incorrect to end a

sentence with a preposition. Winston Churchill’s comment on this dictum was that it was the sort of arrant pedantry up with which he would not put. No doubt Churchill would be chided by The Australian for his poor use of the English language. As quoted on the front page, even the erudite Emeritus Professor Rodney Huddleston commits this grammatical sin when he talks about “the worst published material . . . that I have come across.” Any dictionary will confirm that “across” is a preposition.

Traditional grammar, as it used to be taught in schools, includes a number of Latin-based notions that do not accurately describe how the English language actually works. Perhaps those who advocate a complete return to it should have the good grace to practise what they preach in their own writing.

When Kevin Donnelly asserts that, in functional grammar, nouns become participants and verbs become processes (“Class-based waffle”), he indicates that, while he may have heard some functional grammar terms, he does not really understand them. His ignorance is coupled with rather astonishing arrogance when he goes on to describe as “dense and arcane” some simple and very useful concepts solely because he has not bothered to understand them properly. To be consistent, he would have to deny the value of most human knowledge simply because he is not familiar with it.

Incidentally, I have taught secondary school English for twice as long as Kevin Donnelly ever did. It might also be worth remembering that, as far as I am aware, Professor Huddleston, for all his acknowledged erudition, never taught a single day at primary or secondary school level and never produced any materials that were useful in teaching grammar to school students.

In conclusion, I would like to thank The Australian for providing my 15 minutes of fame. To be the subject of attack in the pages of this newspaper is confirmation that ETAQ is making a valuable contribution to English teaching.

You don't dictate what we debate, Ms Gillard

Julia Gillard (Opinion, May 29) ignores a fundamental point about schools and learning. Learning does not simply take place in the classroom, but in the playground, in the school "community". By all means dispense with the divisive public/private, religious/non-religious, selective/non-selective debates, but do not ignore the wider issue.

The real issue is inclusive-versus-exclusive. Schools that are segregated along economic, religious or academic lines teach appalling lessons. Why can't all of our children just go to school together? Why do we have to corral them into educational ghettoes? Each and every school needs diversity within its walls.

Ms Gillard, you may be the minister in charge, you may even be the Deputy Prime Minister, but you don't get to dictate what should or should not be debated. Education is about so much more than service delivery, and the Julia Gillard we put into power knows it.

Lee Borkman Menangle

Letter from Brian Cambourne to Julia Gillard re phonics failure in the US

Why Has The Australian Media Ignored This Story ?

In her column of May 19, 2008, The Australian's education reporter (Justine Ferrari) implies there is clear scientific evidence that children need intensive phonics instruction before they can become effective comprehenders of what they read. Why has she ignored a study which casts serious doubt on such evidence? The results of this study were released by the US Department of Education about two weeks ago, and were reported in most USA newspapers well before she would have penned this piece, Why hasn't The Australian (or indeed any other Australian news media) picked up these results?

They clearly show that intensive "phonics first" approaches have failed.

The "Reading First Impact Study", presents a scientific analysis of Reading First, the federal program authorised by the No Child Left Behind Act to teach US children to read. The instructional model underpinning Reading First is based on the recommendations of a group of US academics appointed by the Bush administration as a National Reading Panel. This group argued that a heavy " phonics first" emphasis would raise reading achievement, especially among low-income students.

The Reading First Impact Study clearly shows that a after six years of intensive phonics-first instruction at a cost of $US6 billion, children enrolled in Reading First scored no better on tests of reading than children in comparison schools. Furthermore after six years of implementation Reading First has failed to produce gains in state or national reading tests.

The UK study Ms Ferrari cites to support her claims is equally as suspect. It is based on the results of a single study done in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. A careful reading ofthe study shows that children taught with synthetic phonics were not

“three years ahead of their peers in reading,” as is claimed in the reports in the UK media. They were ahead only on a test that asked them to pronounce words presented in a list. On a test of reading comprehension, which required understanding the text, they were only three months ahead of national norms when tested six years after their phonics experience. This is an insignificant advantage.The Clackmannanshire study confirms thatlearning to pronounce words through phonics instruction does not contribute much to the ability to actually read with understanding,

I am not anti-phonics. Explicit phonics instruction is absolutely necessary if children are going to learn to spell and write with power and fluency.

I am one who has spent the last forty years sitting in classrooms observing and documenting how teachers teach literacy I am concerned by a shift to the mindless, lock step teaching of phonics at the expense of exposure to, and enjoyment of good children's literature.

Sincerely,

Brian Cambourne

Associate Professor Brian Cambourne,
Principal Fellow, Faculty of Education
University of Wollongong


Member International Reading Association's Reading Hall of Fame
Life Member USA National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Language Arts Educator of the Year 2001
Winner Australian Literacy Education Association's (ALEA) Inaugural Garth Boomer Award for Services to Literacy Education.

Letter from Mem Fox to Crikey.com re Julia Gillard's comments on phonics

So Julia Gillard has been kissed by the phonics fairy. This is bad news for literacy teaching and worse news for Australia’s economic future.

The last important political figure to be kissed by the phonics fairy was George W. Bush who knew as much about the way children learn to read as he did about helping survivors of Hurricane Katrina. He’d been lobbied successfully by those who stood to make billions out of a reading scheme based on phonics which they claimed was the most successful ‘evidence-based’ method of teaching reading. George Bush is not known for his skills in interpreting the evidence of research. He never discovered that the evidence in a huge piece of research had been either ignored or skewed, for financial reasons, in favour of the phonics method.

The result today is such a horrifying ten-year slide in literacy standards in the USA that the state of New York now employs hundreds of our best primary teachers to teach reading properly and successfully, and to teach teachers how to do it our way.

Our way is to teach phonics also—surprisingly!—and to teach phonics well. It’s the way we do it that’s different and it’s made all the difference to literacy learning in Australia. Our literacy levels are among the four highest in the world consistently, which feeds into our economic well-being—there’s nothing like a well-educated workforce to boost the country’s economy.

But to throw out what we’ve been doing so well and thereby sink to the current levels of literacy in the USA based on ‘evidence-based’ research is more than this particular fairy can stand. It must not happen. I couldn’t bear the divine Julia to turn into an education frog.

And by the way, there wouldn’t be anyone in this country who’d be able to make a mint out of a universal phonics program would there? Just asking.

Mem Fox

History is more than just recitative
Guy Rundle (Crikey.com  5-7-2007)

News that PM John Howard has been micro-managing the drafting of the new history curriculum (Crikey, yesterday) should come as no surprise.

For a long time many people were fooled into the belief that John Howard worked from a set of political values befitting a conservative. As his sudden reversal on a lifetime’s support of states’ rights – once Labor had the whole set – showed, this is bollocks.

Howard is a cynical professional politician and the polls would seem to indicate that most people now share this belief. Part of Howard’s problem is that public dislike of him is now categorical – if he donated blood folks’d say he did it to get the free biscuit.

But like all cynics, Howard is not bereft of sentimental attachments to concrete objects in place of values. The Don, the flag … and those old High School Readers that taught generations of students a unitary narrative history and a particular interpretation of it.

The Victorian State Readers announced in their foreword that they were telling the "story of our Race and its role in history" (paraphrasing from memory). It wasn’t necessarily a pernicious triumphalist version – after WW1 it spoke of the role "our race" had to play in ensuring peace.

Howard seems to want a curriculum pretty much of that form, even if the R word is removed. But it’s a fantasy, a memory of schooling suited to an earlier era, when the majority of students left school at 14 or 15, in an era when sources of media and information were far more limited. Your family, your neighbours, your church, a handful of newspapers, ABC radio, a dog-eared copy of Esquire left in the barber's … that was about it, all within a pretty much monocultural society, with international travel a dream for most.

Education has changed because childhood has changed, not because sinister lefties have been developing curriculum bombs in basements.

From the age of three or four one of the main tasks of growing up is synthesising a world-view from an oversupply of information. Kids asks questions because they’re engaged with a world in which a multiplicity of contradictory info comes at them constantly, and because they’re constantly engaging with that world.

So curriculum design includes questions because kids ask them anyway, and any history course that doesn’t include such will bore them rigid. You can try and nail down "the story of WW1" as a given if you’re fool enough – but if your class includes anglo, Turkish, Greek and Arab-descended kids you’ve got at least four perspectives before you’ve even started. They will compare it to Iraq anyway, ask questions about the nature of war, invasion, etc etc. Any teacher worth their salt will encourage that, and any feasible curriculum has to be designed on that basis.

You’re also educating kids for a world not of stable and unchanging trades and professions but for a world in which the world, work, etc changes rapidly, constantly, unceasingly. Education is about teaching kids how to keep revising their world view, not giving them a fixed stock of "true" info.

Having looked at the leaked framework, it seems to me that it’s got more of a narrative spine than older versions – a good thing – but that the method – questions, issues, themes – is virtually unchanged. As it cannot but be.

Should Hendo and Blainey try and nail down a recitative as curriculum, teachers simply won’t teach it. The whole thing is shaping up as another Howard fiasco.

Indigenous education demands community learning circles

Neil Hooley (Lecturer, Education, Victoria University)

If we have learnt anything about Indigenous education in Australia, it surely concerns the total participation of local communities in school life. This is a democratic process, an acceptance that there is an Indigenous frame of reference or state of being that is not the same as European understanding.

For non-Indigenous educators, this different way of viewing the world may be impossible to access. How islander people navigate across the seas, or how desert people are never lost seems a mysterious process. Indeed, as one example, the concept of wilderness may be entirely metropolitan.

These are matters of essence and culture involving how humans perceive their place in the universe. Indigenous viewpoints see everything connected with everything else and a literal connection of the living with the land. When these environmental connections are broken, life itself is in peril.

Australian schools as elsewhere have found it extremely difficult to respect these cultural relationships, let alone construct curricula that embody such principles every day. There is an argument however that Indigenous ways of knowing are good education appropriate for all children.

As a first step to cultural inclusiveness, schools need to develop structures that enable Indigenous families, children and Elders to participate as respected equals in the learning process. Wherever we live, there will be Indigenous co-ops, health centres, education houses and local identities through which contact can be made.

To see formal education as a community partnership involving all stakeholders is surely not a radical idea. In Sweden for instance, a system of study circles has existed for over one hundred years. This is seen as a form of liberal education and a means of strengthening democracy for the entire country.

Swedish study circles have over two million participants each year and arrange about 200 000 cultural events annually. They follow the same tradition of the folk high school established in 1868, where programs are decided by the people according to current interests and needs.

In general terms, study circles can be envisaged as a systematic process for public dialogue and community change. They usually comprise small groups who meet together over a period of time, who set their own procedures and who may engage a facilitator to assist the discussion. They often begin with personal stories and accounts from which themes, ideas and ways of proceeding emerge.

It is not intended that one view will dominate the outcomes of a study circle. Rather, the circle reaches out to all participants so that knowledge and experience is shared and a range of possible pathways can be explored. The study circle seeks to reach consensus and a heightened respect and does not impose a particular will.

The History Wars
1915 and all that: History in a holding pattern
Guy Rundle (Crikey.com.au)  28 June 2007

So, after a lot of sound and fury, a one-day conference, a lot of tut-tutting about hysterical accusations, the development of the new high school history curriculum turned out to be a fix after all. After Professor Tony Taylor, a specialist in history education, presented his draft curriculum developed after a heavily right-slanted one-day conference on the issue, the Government has called in Geoffrey Blainey and Gerard Henderson to rewrite it.

I suspect they were always going to. It seemed clear at the time that Minister Julie Bishop, who had set up the process, hadn’t really understood what was required of it and of her – to deliver a socially conservative curriculum so tight that it would leave a minimum of room for history teachers to raise questions about the interpretation.

Thus, say, Gallipoli would be presented as ‘the making of a nation’ and though some old bearded leftie in Wooropna High might be able to suggest that it was a chaotic imperial adventure that shows you should never trust what governments say about war, there’d be less scope to suggest that the real making of Australia was the Harvester judgement that set our social, political and economic form for a century to come – because it wouldn’t be on the exam.

But Bishop stuffed up – deliberately or otherwise – and Taylor has allegedly delivered a curriculum much like the previous ones, with (according to Greg Melleuish one of the right-wing placemen) a variety of different modules and a focus on the way social movements have shaped the contemporary political environment.

I say allegedly because the Government won’t release the draft before Blainey and Hendo get their hands on it. Clearly, Howard realised that this had all gone pear-shaped, and the intervention was planned at a pretty early stage.

It’s hard to know how much difference this sort of blatant political fixing would really make. Curriculum design turns on a lot more issues than content – it has to be designed so that it keeps students interested, develops their research skills, connects with worlds they know etc. It’s a specialist art and just being a historian (Blainey) or a hack who thinks he’s a historian (Henderson) ain’t enough. You can never really tell which Blainey you’re going to get – the conscientious historian or the shameless booster of books like Windschuttle’s farrago on Tasmania And if Henderson’s contribution is as boring as his columns on Doc Evatt, students will just do what the editor of The Age did.

Most likely the final result will be a dog’s breakfast, unteachable, and have to be thrown out anyway. And it’s deckchairs on the proverbial in any case if Rudd gets in, coz he’d never let stand such a blatantly conservative cultural fix, would he?

Would he … ?

Disadvantaged students need dedicated and gifted teachers, but how are they to compete on such a criterion? How do you comparatively measure the merit of a variety of great gifts that teachers possess in conveying knowledge, confidence and encouragement to students? What price do you put on the teacher who will go the extra yard and put in that extra time?

I spent years measuring merit for promotion of a great range of skilled and professional classifications and found that careful examination of the views and observations of supervisors was a valuable measure. But here again differing outlooks and, in particular, likes and dislikes can complicate evaluation.

My son is the assistant principal at an international school in Bangkok where merit bonuses have been paid for some years. Untold friction resulted, with the eventual result that a standard bonus of 5 per cent is now paid to all teachers. Teachers there are, however,

on contracts of two or three years' duration because of local conditions and the view is taken that if a teacher's contract is renewed, he or she is deserving of the bonus; this is an easy way out of a thorny problem.

Best of luck, minister.

Brian McGee, Balgowlah

Merit-based pay for teachers? Why is anyone suggesting this? How does one assess a teacher's performance? Who does the assessing? At a time when we have enough difficulty getting people into the profession are we now going to create another disincentive?

If we extend this idea, how about merit-based pay for politicians? Can we have a full accounting of their use of funds allowed to them as members of parliament? An assessment of how well they have represented their electorate, which is what they are elected to do?

Any party that wants to introduce such a measure will not get my vote. That is the only method of assessment of politicians allowed to me.

David Ashton, Orange

It's the Mao propaganda.

Not once have I had a teacher or lecturer who has advocated the autonomy of the Hunan Province, the expunging of non-Marxists from the military or the execution of the intelligentsia.

Yet, according to federal Education Minister Julie Bishop, perniciously pinko pedagogues have been busily ramming Maoist dogma down the unquestioning gullet of every other pupil across the nation.

I feel so left out.

Embarrassingly enough, my public high school education means I can still spell diarrhoea sans dictionary, perform long division sans calculator and recite - trippingly on the tongue - Shakespeare sans script. Sceptics may doubt the usefulness of such skills given the wide availability of spellcheckers, calculating devices and people who think Hamlet quoters are complete and utter wankers, but on the whole I've always felt relatively well-rounded.

Now, however, I realise I'm a freak: possibly the only Australian to escape school without having to spend my uniform allowance on a Mao cap, Mao suit and Red Army shoulder bag for carrying my textbooks, all of which would have been copies of Mao's Little Blue Book. Or was it puce?

Once again I must confess my shocking ignorance and critical need for a crash course in chairmanisms.

University has been no better. I'm about to finish a masters degree and it is my grave responsibility to report that Mao has been mentioned only twice.

The first time was in a lecture about the implications of the rise of China on competing Asia-Pacific and East Asia regional organisations, and was part of a brief overview of Chinese economic history.

During this class, there was a lot of chitchat about China's global economic ranking based on GDP (gross domestic product) as opposed to PPP (purchasing

Probably not a concept Mao would have been comfortable with in a little book of any hue.

Marxism also made a brief appearance in one of those notorious gender studies classes, but even here, an area where radical indoctrination is supposed to reign supreme, it was only a brief mention in an incredibly dense reading comparing different economic views on the idiosyncratic circulation of commodities. Maybe this particular piece had a left-wing bias. Maybe it didn't. Unfortunately, it was the first industrial-strength academic text I ever encountered at university and I had absolutely no freaking idea what its author was on about.

Perhaps ignorance was my ideological salvation. All I know is that, once again, the academics who taught this course didn't ever turn up wearing Che Guevara singlets or suggest that the great proletarian class violently overthrow the foul running dogs of capitalism.

Apart from anything else, these lecturers didn't have time for a class struggle. They were too busy wrestling with the massive class sizes and massive enrolments of under-Englished foreign students, both of which are commonplace now that Australian universities have been starved of public funds and are obliged to run themselves as enterprises. Not that Bishop or the rest of the Coalition would see these developments as the result of enforcing ideology on education.

As Australian educationalists Jane Caro and Lyndsay Connors pointed out this week, it's depressingly common for people to brand others' opinions as insidious ideologies while insisting their own views are values. Actual evidence to back up such positions is usually seen as an optional extra.

Well, far be it for a lowly, brainwashed student to suggest that Australian politicians lack intellectual rigour, but I reckon a little more research is required before the cold warriors of education do any more screaming about all these alleged reds under the texts.

Emma Tom
11 October 2006

The most constantly recurring issue in our field, maybe since early Greco-Roman history, has been the lament of the aged and the conservative about the ‘decline in literacy standards’ in the young being perpetrated by dreadful, ‘soft, touchy, feely’ contemporary teacher ‘revolutionaries’ accused of lacking the intellectual rigour of their predecessors.
 
To say this is not to deny the absolute legitimacy, indeed the utter imperative, of the ever-recurring concerns throughout history for maintaining and increasing the literacy skills of young people within a world of ever rapidly changing and demanding contexts for textual, oral/aural, visual and what might broadly be called technological, literacies.
 
Our students need to be able to write grammatically, to spell correctly, to read fluently, flexibly and critically, as well as being able to use language imaginatively, creatively and purposefully in a wide variety of contexts.
 
And one does not learn to read merely by osmosis. It demands the informed, skilled and explicit intervention of good teaching - whether this be undertaken by parents, school teachers, or others such as volunteer aid workers in Africa, or those children in Nicaragua who taught their own illiterate parents how to read in Paulo Freire’s famous literacy program.

But it does not matter where you dip into the history of education, you will find thunderous roars of utter conviction that standards are ‘now’ palpably worse than they were a generation ago. The 1990s Jeremiahs hearken back to the 1950s.  It is necessary, however, to apply an informed historical perspective to untrammelled cries of gloom and doom. For example,  if you go back to the newspapers of the so-called ‘good old days’ of the 1950s you will find identical lamentations for contemporary disasters, and calls for a return to the presumed halcyon days of the 1930s.
 
So, let us go back nearly 50 years to those ‘good old days’ and listen to the comments of the Chief Examiner in English for the 1948 Leaving Certificate examination, Professor Waldock, thundering about the students sitting for the Leaving Certificate in 1946: “It is disappointing to find that students imagine they can pass a Leaving Certificate Examination without being able to write a sentence”[i].

Reviewing what he had seen in the 1948 LC Examination he lamented:
 
Examiners again stress the weakness is spelling.  Here are some of the words that seem to confound large numbers of students (nearly 80 words followed including those such as “tragic”, practical”, “clever”, “hungry”, “persuade”, “believe”, “enemies” and “sensitive”).....It was felt too that errors in grammar and syntax are still too common.  It seems that many pupils are conversant with the correct theory of good usage, but from lack of practice or attention continue to commit the old mistakes. ...The examiners...feel that candidates are still very weak in fundamentals - that far too many, for example, do not know what a noun is, let alone an abstract noun[ii].

Professor Waldock’s successor, Professor Alec Mitchell, declared in 1950 that he agreed with the withering criticisms made in the Norwood Report of 1941 on “the serious failure of the British secondary schools to produce literate students” and declared that, without a doubt, the same situation existed in NSW in 1950[iii].
 
Let us not forget that these Leaving Certificate students were the creme de la creme.  In the 1940s and early 1950s, of every 100 students commencing 6th class only fewer than 20 or so completed their Leaving Certificate five years later.  For example, of the 50,000 who enrolled in first year government high schools in 1948, only 16.1% survived to commence their LC year in 1952[iv].  The comparable figure today, of course,

is around 70%, and almost certainly about to climb following the Commonwealth’s latest edict on abolishing dole payments for 16 to 18 year olds.
 
Ah, but how the right wing media pontificators and so many talk-back radio disc jockeys love to hark back to the mythical ‘good old days’ when, they assume, everything was wonderful.
 
This process of lamentation for the present and exhortation for a return to some mythical halcyon past era can be traced continuously back into the 19th century and beyond.  George Elliott, President of prestigious Harvard College, lamented in 1871
 
that bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation and almost entire want of familiarity with English literature, are far from rare among young men of eighteen otherwise well prepared for college[v].
 
One of the many modern scholars who have the ‘declining standards’ myth the American Andrew Sledd, has observed that:
 
The discussion of this (declining standards myth) is not timely - it is timeless; for although Newsweek certified our crisis a mere decade ago .... no fewer than five consecutive generations have been condemned for writing worse than their predecessors.  By now our students should hardly put processor to paper; it’s a wonder they can write at all[vi].
 
Another American historian of literacy practices, Harvey Daniels traces this pattern back as far as George Puttenham’s despair about the declining standards of literacy amongst the young of his day in 1586!  Daniels sums up in this way:
 
To conclude: literacy has been declining since it was invented; one of the first ancient Sumerian tablets deciphered by modern scholars immortalised a teacher fretting over the recent drop in (standards of) students’ writing.  It is Sledd’s cryptic conclusion that ‘there will always be a literacy crisis, if for no other reason than because the old never wholly like the young[vii].
 
Academics like myself who have undertaken research into the history of the English curriculum and the social, political, and cultural contexts within which public debate and controversy have been waged - such as Margaret Mathieson, David Shayer, Stephen Ball in the UK and Ken Watson, Alan Luke and David Homer in Australia - all have good stories to tell about literacy policies and practices.

[i] Waldock, A.J, “Leaving Certificate Examination, Examiner’s Report, English - Pass Paper 1946”, The Education Gazette, 1st April, 1947, p. 129.
 
[ii] Waldock, A.J, “Leaving Certificate Examination, Examiner’s Report, English - Pass Paper, 1948, unpaginated,  Private Papers of D.B. Bowra stored in the library of the then Sydney Teachers’ College, later known as Sydney College of Advanced Education - Institute of Education, and now incorporated within the Faculty of Education, University of Sydney.
 
[iii] Board of Secondary School Studies, “Minutes of Meeting”, 28 June, 1951, p. 295.
 
[iv] Wyndham, Harold S., (Chairman), Report of the Committee Appointed to Survey Secondary Education in New South Wales, Government Printer, Sydney, 1957, p. 88.
 
[v] Cited in Daniels, H. Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered, Southern Illinios UP Carbonale, 1983, p. 51.
 
[vi] Sledd, A., “Essay Readin’ not Riotin’: The Politics of Literacy”, College English, 50, 5, 1988, p. 496.
 
[vii] loc. cit.

How pleasing to find teachers questioning the Federal Government's push for teachers to report to parents using an A to E scale (The Age, 26/5).

Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop have argued that parents have a right to know in plain English how their child is progressing.  No argument there from teachers.