Economy
The miseducation of Julia Gillard
Julia Gillard is trying to shift attention to education and training as the theme of this year’s federal budget. That’s far firmer ground for Labor than the two more obvious themes – how it will balance the books with not enough revenue coming in; and the bewildering lack of accounting for the carbon and minerals taxes due to commence operation in 2012.
So the ‘education budget’ it shall be.
On Monday Julia Gillard named the amounts the nation’s best teachers could expect to see in the budget as performance bonuses. Depending on their individual level of remuneration, teachers will get between $5,000 and $8,000 for being in the top 10 per cent of teachers. The scheme will cost $425 million over the next four years, and the first cheques will change hands (during smiling photo-ops) in 2014.
This is in addition to funding announced with the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook (MYEFO) of $164.8 million over four years to provide “reward grants to government and non-government schools that have shown the most improved performance over twelve months”. That plan was created as part of a deal struck with independent Rob Oakeshott during negotiations to form a minority government last September.
Both schemes have been criticised for relying on simplistic measures of achievement. The US-inspired national literacy and numeracy tests, or NAPLAN tests, which allow comparison between schools and teachers, don’t measure some of the more important attributes that students will later need at university or in the workforce, such as critical thinking and creative approaches to problem solving.
Those criticisms are valid enough, but some kind of benchmark against which to incentivise schools and teachers is surely better than nothing. Labor aims to continue expanding the university system – it wants 40 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds holding a degree by 2020 – and so needs to keep working at a federal level to find ways to improve the skills of secondary school leavers feeding into that system.
Bonuses and achievement-based grants are “divisive” according to critics, but that is a cultural attitude many business people would find alien – there’s nothing more ‘divisive’ than comparing the salaries and bonuses of junior managers and CEOs, but such disparity is also the incentive for junior staff to excel in their work and climb the salary scale.
In recent years I have met and interviewed many educators within the tertiary system who privately lament that overcrowded and under-resourced universities turn out graduates with competencies that should be achievable at a good secondary school. Likewise, alumni of the best private schools have told me that they consider their expensive secondary education to be “as good as a degree”.