My new role teaching politicians

Governments' devolution agenda, which ultimately will make principals vulnerable, is bad policy that must be exposed.

After 34 years as a teacher including the last ten as a high school principal, I have experienced a very different start to this school year. My term of office as President started on the day most teachers returned after the summer vacation.

I certainly missed greeting and reassuring the new students at their first assembly. There’s nothing quite as crisp as a brand new tunic, just as there’s nothing as spiky as the gelled hair of a young boy on his first day at school. And as teachers, when we look out at the young faces at our welcoming assembly, we are reminded of the enormous trust parents and caregivers place in the adults who work each day in our public schools.

Yet, despite the nation-building work we do as public educators in our schools and colleges, public education is facing an uncertain future. If public education is one generation’s promise to the next, there are forces that have spent decades developing policies that would deny the notion of a public provision of services and would have us renege on that promise.

These policies are as coherent as they are vicious. Theories around testing, management, privatisation, choice, competition, devolution and accountability now dominate the policies of both major political parties.

And they certainly dominate the thinking of the DEC. Never before in our history have we had such a convergence of thinking. Never before has there been such a concerted attempt to stifle any debate. Any critique or differences of opinion from teachers and their unions are met with bullying accusations that the critics “are against reform”, “living in the past” or “out of step with 21st century thinking”.

In NSW, we see these theories morphed into a range of policies around salary caps, “school autonomy”, reduced special education funding, school closures and a deregulated TAFE system.

Salaries

It is now clear that the DEC never had any intention of negotiating in good faith during the seven negotiation meetings held over the summer break. No serious attempt was made to provide the NSW Teachers Federation negotiating team with any information that related to employeerelated savings for schools or TAFE. (See page 1 for a full report on the salaries campaign.)

Principals: more vulnerable than ever?

Let’s be clear: “local schools, local decisions” is a marketing slogan, an attempt to sell a profoundly dangerous set of ideas.

Australia is at a critical juncture. At both federal and state levels, politicians are enraptured by theories such as “local autonomy” because they see this as an opportunity to divest in public education by fragmenting the system into thousands of standalone schools competing with each other for resources and staff, and struggling with an ever diminishing share of government funding.

The deceit is the attempt to beguile the community into believing it is genuine reform by cloaking the real intent with weasel words like “local”, “autonomy” or “self-managing”.

The theories behind this agenda did not originate in education faculties, but in the conservative economic think tanks that are scornful of the work of public servants and, in particular, teachers. These same think tanks, heavily funded by corporations, have for decades argued for governments to become “small” — code for cutting or privatising public services.

Having just returned from a study tour of both the US and UK, I am now more alarmed than ever by where Australia is heading. Both countries perform poorly on international tests. Both countries have highly devolved school systems. Teachers and principals in both countries told me repeatedly that morale has plummeted and that the profession is exhausted.

What we can learn from these countries is that when the system is broken up and devolved into “autonomous” institutions, stricter “command and control” measures are introduced. In the world of devolution then, perhaps the most vulnerable people are, ironically, principals.

The newly appointed Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools in England and head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, is targeting principals in devolved schools: “As more and more secondary schools gain independence...it will be difficult for the Department of Education to focus on improving schools” (The Telegraph, December 28, 2011). He argued, therefore, that there was a need for more principals to be sacked. In his most recent statements this month, he has claimed that over 5000 British principals are underperforming and should be held solely responsible for their school’s poor performance. In other words, the principal may well pay with their career for their “local decisions”.

Is it just a coincidence that prior to the release of Local Schools, Local Decisions, the DEC unilaterally changed the Principal Assessment and Review Schedule (PARS)?

In this light, it is not surprising that the recently released “Staff in Australia’s Schools” survey conducted by ACER showed that twothirds of principals did not want more authority to recruit teachers or determine their school’s staffing profile or dismiss teachers. But in a masterstroke of dissembling, the Federal Minister’s media release triumphed this as one-third of principals welcoming “autonomy”.

Two tests of any policy proposal in education should always be: a) Can it withstand the scrutiny of informed debate? and b) Is it in the best interests of the children we teach? But when was the last time the DEC provided a keynote speaker with an alternative point of view or published a paper that opposed local autonomy at any of its principal conferences? A policy that will shift schools into a deregulated environment without guarantees around resourcing, staffing and curriculum cannot be good for our students.

For over 34 years I have been proud to say to people that I am a teacher. I bring that sense of pride to my new role as President of the NSW Teachers Federation. I have a strong belief that there is no career in our community that is more important than teaching. And I will always be a teacher. My new teaching job is to convince our political leaders that the nations that are the most economically successful and socially cohesive are the ones that continually strive to enhance the status of the teaching profession and which invest heavily in public education.

Our students deserve a better deal. This is what drove me each and every working day as a teacher and principal. It will continue to drive me in my new role. I look forward to meeting you in the weeks and months ahead as I travel the state. All the best for 2012.