Leonard Colquhoun

Local Education Minister D Bartlett’s recent claims to be shoving the bureaucrats out of EdCentral into the empty spaces in the State’s under-utilised school buildings should be encouraged and applauded. ( Back to school for bureaucrats ). Three points stand out: one, AEU state president J Walker’s support for the move, saying that it would put bureaucrats “more in touch” — and that surely has to be a Good Thing; second, Bartlett’s claim that the proposal will return the bureaucrats’ focus to the student — hooray for that small advance; and third, the pathetic lament that “some bureaucrats would find it difficult to get to work at Mt Nelson and isolated suburbs where transport and other services were limited” — hey, it’s not Baghdad’s Green Zone, or even Bagdad 7030, that they’re being told to find their way to, and a nice healthy cut lunch can replace one of the “other services” they’ll miss …

PERFORMANCE PAY for teachers is much in the airwaves, on screen and in print.

On the right, J Bishop MHR (Curtin, WA) has been widely reported as being in favour, and about to try to coax, meaning coerce, the relevant authorities into putting it into practice by 2009. Should she succeed in this (and you like to see how many zeroes there are in any bookies’ odds) she is the obvious person to put in charge of the nation’s water supplies, ports, railways and hospitals with a 2010 “Do-it-by” date in mind.

On the other side of politics, prominent ALP figures are falling over themselves to give the impression they’re in favour of it, but … Teacher union officials loudly reject it, sometimes on grounds so dodgy — how does “Every teacher is a good teacher” sound ? — that it immediately gains another thousand supporters.

It’s one of those ‘simplisticisms’, to coin a new word for the situation, that look good until looked into. For starters, exactly what kind of performance is / performances are to be paid at differential rates ? A fellow Tasmanian put this into a realistic perspective in this letter in The Australian:

Beyond a teacher’s control

Performance pay for teachers … is akin to performance pay being introduced for doctors and nurses, who would be paid according to how many of their patients survive. Teachers, like medical professionals, are faced with individuals whose circumstances are beyond a teacher’s control.

I’m sure many teachers wouldn’t mind having their pay adjusted to include an increment based on the time-consuming roles they have been forced into, such as social worker, mother, father, nurse, babysitter, ethical mentor, breakfast club cook, security guard, and sadly in some cases, the only trustworthy adult in a child’s life. Also, an added bonus for the verbal and physical abuse many teachers are confronted with would also make them finally feel respected.

C Connors
Launceston, Tasmania
(Slightly abbreviated)

What ‘performances’ are a teacher’s core business ?

Far over and above everything else, classroom performance, how well teachers teach, and that should not simply mean ‘facilitating’ as a “guide on the side”1 — it should involve active, informed, effective instruction, as can only be delivered by a well-prepared “sage on the stage”1. Therefore every decision about schooling and teaching — note the intentional avoidance of the term ‘education’ — should be assessed on whether it will either help or hinder better teaching performance in the nation’s classrooms. Will paying different rates for different performances improve classroom work overall, or will it simply separate a chosen few for a token bonus, and leave the rest feeling even more undervalued ? Would the money, time and effort which would need to be expended to do this even half well — and that’s very unlikely — be better spent on other moves ?

Putting it precisely, can it be done, and even so, ought it be done ?

Local Education Minister D Bartlett’s recent claims to be shoving the bureaucrats out of EdCentral into the empty spaces in the State’s under-utilised school buildings should be encouraged and applauded. ( Back to school for bureaucrats ) Three points stand out: one, AEU state president J Walker’s support for the move, saying that it would put bureaucrats “more in touch” — and that surely has to be a Good Thing; second, Bartlett’s claim that the proposal will return the bureaucrats’ focus to the student — hooray for that small advance; and third, the pathetic lament that “some bureaucrats would find it difficult to get to work at Mt Nelson and isolated suburbs where transport and other services were limited” — hey, it’s not Baghdad’s Green Zone, or even Bagdad 7030, that they’re being told to find their way to, and a nice healthy cut lunch can replace one of the “other services” they’ll miss; what’s even better, TASMAP has just published its lovely new Edition 7 of the very helpful Tasmanian Towns Street Atlas, which, unlike mainland ones such as Melbourne’s much admired Melways, shows every goddam building in every goddam street — how “difficult” can it be ? If even a merely physical move such as this one means schools and students, and, indirectly, their parents, are saved from some future top-down nonsense like ELs, then it is already justified, and Mr Bartlett need apologise to no-one.

Efforts to select some teachers for bigger elephant stamps, and a few extra quid, don’t seem to have a good record. There seems to be no unambiguous study that can say that, as a result of this, teacher and student performance in the classrooms of this or that state, county, system or region have improved. Australian efforts since the early 1990s seem to end up giving everyone a pay rise, and you’d have to have buggered the bursar2 on Open Day to miss out. A lot seem to deliberately avoided looking too closely into the classrooms themselves, kidding any and everyone that assessing whether someone can ‘perform’ in a classroom comprises lots of dot points, criteria, matrixes, cluster group pow-wows, tick-a-box surveys, not forgetting the bells ‘n’ whistles of the obligatory PowerPoint presentation3. People employed as teachers whose classroom control is only one step from abetting full-scale rioting get their “Advanced Skills” accreditations. Real teachers, who know their stuff, run focused and enthusiastic classes, and are efficient in the data-management and other bumph-bumping that now steals lesson preparation time, are quietly appalled, but are resigned that this’ll likely be as good as it gets.

No, ‘performance pay’ as currently understood, is a non-starter, because it is starting from the wrong end.

What teachers and those who understand and value their ‘performances’ should be pushing for consists of the following:

(i) better teacher-education, where their university courses give them an education in the depth and breadth of their subjects, and an end to nonsense like “Wimmyns Perspectives on the Fifth Law of Thermodynamics”, “Marxist Critiques of the Binomial Theorem” and “Hermaphrocontextuality of Tasmanian txting as a Meta-cultural Construct”; graduates should feel absolutely confident that they can front their classes knowing that they know far more than their students, are proud of and appreciated for that, and want to use this knowledge to reduce ignorance, superstition and prejudice in the upcoming generation, and that interesting and stimulating lessons and other naturally ensuing activities will follow;

(ii) better teacher-training, where they are immersed in real classrooms, mentored by live teachers who are great ‘performers’ in the craft — and note carefully the “who are”, as distinct from who were, or might have been — who have all the specific skills that proficiency in the craft uses, and who can devote time to this task, with the knowledge that its remuneration is commensurate with its importance, and that time, which is indeed of the essence here, is freely available for these periods of induction.

In other words, let’s have ‘performance pay’ at the start of a teacher’s career, and ensure that these two factors operate: that the money is there directly to pay this profession fully in line with its societal and cultural responsibllities, and that those who have the wonderful task of preparing each new cohort to start their, hopefully, lifetime ‘performances’ are also paid what they’re worth; and that their ‘performances’ have been so well prepared that it would take an act of deliberate self-destructive stupidity to not deserve this ‘performance pay’.

And, in the interim, ensure that the deadwood is chopped out — it’s already given the profession a very bad name, and their sub-standard ‘performances’ don’t deserve being paid.

1 I am indebted to Dr Athena Vongalis-Macrow, of La Trobe University’s (Victoria) School of Educational Studies for these pithily apt expressions, which she used in a Letter to the Editor in The Australian, Tues 29 Aug 06, contributing to that day’s ‘Most talked about’ forum, ‘Quality of teaching’, with the sub-heading ‘Schools need teacher-scholars who are deeply educated’. She pointed out that the “nature of teaching has changed over the past 20 years. The sage on the stage has been replaced with the guide on the side. Thanks to a succession of policies which have systematically eroded the teaching role, what students now get is someone with plenty of good intentions, with some working knowledge of their subject area, heaps of administrative tasks to ensure that they have a record of every decision, and flexibility to change their educational thinking and practice every couple of years. It has led to confusion about the profession of teaching and its status.”

2 Readers of a certain age and sense of humour will recognise this allusion to British playwright Willy Russell’s ‘Educating Rita’, the film version of which, featuring two great actors in Michael Caine and Julie Walters, was an enjoyably teachable HSC English text, for both its message and the medium employed. It was in that blessed time before po-mo freaks theorised worthwhile novels, drama and poetry off the syllabuses, and enjoyment out of the ‘performance’.

3 A newspaper article passed in front of my eyes last week claiming that the old overhead projector was far more audience-friendly than the new-fangled PowerPoint, what with the propensity of the latter to be used as a son et lumiere show signifying nothing, or, at best, very little. Older teachers will recall wildly exaggerated claims for 16mm projectors, language labs, epidiascopes, et bloody cetera.

PS: Readers who’ve managed to get this far, and reckon some of the above needs a fuller treatment, can consider opening a previous TT contribution –

http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php/weblog/comments/len/

Leonard Colquhoun 7248

For www.oldtt.pixelkey.biz
April 2007