Public education ‘crisis’ refuted

By Kerri Carr

Public education "crisis constructions" and Howard Government education policy were challenged by Riverside Girls High School principal Judy King on the ABC's Difference of Opinion "Putting Education to the Test" episode on February 26.

Ms King is also NSW secondary principal representative on the Australian Education Union's National Principals Committee.

She said she looked at appearing on the program as an opportunity to refute the "crisis constructions" that fellow program panellist, one-time chief of staff to ex-Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrew (and author of Why Our Schools are Failing and Dumbing Down) Kevin Donnelly had been making.

"Quite often assertions like his go unchallenged...I wanted to offer an alternative view," she told Education.

On the program, Ms King gave her thoughts on aspects of the Howard Government's education agenda.

"We now have a federal government that uses economic funding via blackmail, bludgeoning the states into submission on assessment regimes, on national curriculum, on merit pay tied to grades and so on. Is this really the new centralism of John Howard where you blackmail governments into submission and threaten to withhold the funding of 70 per cent of Australia's young people? It's absolutely unacceptable, so we need to very seriously re-think if we're going to move towards national curriculum and how we might get there," she said.

"I think politicians really fear post-modernism...they certainly reject pluralism. I think John Howard would love it if we had one grand narrative -- the whiter, Anglo-Saxon, male Protestant view of history -- the 1950s version," she added.

Ms King said graduates that return to her school are thankful they've done Extension History and English because at university they really know how to deconstruct, and mount solid argument based on research and evidence.

"That's what we're teaching students and if that means in history they have to have a plural sense of many stories -- the story of the dispossessed, the story of recent arrivals and migrants, the story of women, that white Australia has a black history. If the politicians can't cope with students that are equipped to deconstruct the spin-doctors and deconstruct crisis construction then too bloody bad," she said.

Ms King rejected Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop's performance pay proposals.

"I really do reject Julie Bishop's assertion that you can pay cash for grades. That's essentially what performance pay means," Ms King said.

She asserted performance pay has a detrimental effect on collegiality and had not worked in Houston when it was tried there.

"Some of the students in some of the wealthier areas of Sydney are coached after school in just about every subject. Should the teacher share their bonus with the private coaches?" she asked.

Ms King said she would really welcome the Federal Government's $20,000 grant [for its chaplains for schools program] if she could have much freer guidelines and tie it to a secular based counselling service.

The chaplains debate also touched on values.

"Values aren't necessarily only faith based -- this is the narrow Christian view of the world. I'm sorry, but Christians don't have a monopoly on social justice and humanity," she said.

Ms King told Education that had she been given the opportunity to sum up, she would have said Australians can't have it both ways with well-funded public and private schools.

She said "an over-funded, bloated public-funded private schools" meant an "under-funded residual public system".

"They have to make up their minds...I'm concerned they have not looked at the consequences [of an under-funded public system].

"It's almost too late and if Howard wins it will be too late."

Difference of Opinion was hosted by Jeff McMullen. Other panellists were former state Liberal shadow education spokesperson and Christian Schools Australia chief executive officer Stephen O'Doherty and Sydney University Faculty of Education and Social Work Associate Professor Robyn Ewing.

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March 2007 contents