According to the Australian paper the Age, looks like the Australian teachers union and education advocates are not buying the unreliable NYC school grading system that Joel Klein is pitching to them down under. To be forewarned is to be forearmed!
The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the Australian Government should not be importing "flawed" approaches from the US, a nation that was consistently outperformed by countries such as Finland which did not publicly rank schools.
Canberra-based public education advocacy group Save Our Schools last week called on Ms Gillard to release the details of her performance reporting plan to ensure it did not reproduce the problems of the New York system, which it said had led to league tables and dissimilar schools being compared with each other.
A New York state of mind
October 13, 2008
http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/a-new-york-state-of-mind-20081012-4yyk.html?page=-1
Julia Gillard tells Dan Harrison of her plan to introduce report cards on schools.
EDUCATION Minister Julia Gillard has sought to allay fears of a wholesale adoption of the controversial "New York model" of schooling as its creator prepares to visit Australia next month.
The chancellor of the New York City department of education, Joel Klein, is due to discuss his radical methods, which include grading schools from A to F, closing schools that consistently fail to meet performance criteria and rating individual teachers based on the performance of their students in standardised tests.
Ms Gillard met Mr Klein in New York in July and was impressed by his transformation of the city's school system, which is credited with lifting graduation rates and levels of student achievement in maths and reading.
But the effectiveness of his changes is contested. A survey commissioned by Newsweek magazine in May found that no New York high school was in the nation's top 200.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd angered teachers' unions in August when he flagged the adoption of many of Mr Klein's ideas in a speech to the National Press Club. He also said the information to be collected and published on schools would go beyond "simplistic league tables".
The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the Australian Government should not be importing "flawed" approaches from the US, a nation that was consistently outperformed by countries such as Finland which did not publicly rank schools.
"Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd have said repeatedly that they don't want to reduce school accountability to simplistic league tables," Mr Gavrielatos said. "The question for the Deputy Prime Minister is, how will she stop it?"
In an interview with The Age, Ms Gillard said her system would compare like-with-like schools.
"What they do in New York goes beyond that," she said. "We've made it clear that we're not talking about importing any one model, whether it be the New York model or any other. We are interested in designing the model that would work best for this country but I think, at its core, it does need to have that comparison of similar schools." She would not provide details of her system, citing negotiations. She said Mr Klein's visit was intended to enrich the public discussion on the issue.
"I heard from him directly and came to a range of conclusions about things we would want to do here and things we wouldn't want to do here.
"But I think it's great to have him so that people can access him directly and I think that will help people sharpen their thinking and sharpen the community discussion around this whole question of school transparency and what can be achieved from it."
Canberra-based public education advocacy group Save Our Schools last week called on Ms Gillard to release the details of her performance reporting plan to ensure it did not reproduce the problems of the New York system, which it said had led to league tables and dissimilar schools being compared with each other.
"Let us have an informed debate while Klein is here and not just a one-sided presentation to bolster Gillard's secret negotiations with state and territory governments," SOS spokesman Trevor Cobbold said. "It seems it is all being decided behind closed doors with the axe of Commonwealth funding held over the heads of state and territory governments to ensure compliance."
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