News Flash: Incompetent Teachers Teach Badly -- Brendan Nelson. (August 26, 2004)

    It's still winter but the silly season seems to have come early this year. At a Sydney press conference yesterday the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson told the media, "I laid out, more than a year ago, our National Agenda for Standards and Values in Schools, everything from the quality of teaching, reporting results to parents, and making sure that we have a common starting age right across Australia...

And according to The Australian he observed, " 'While all of the talk might be about school resourcing, the most dangerous thing we have in Australia are children being taught by incompetent teachers.'

    "Incompetent teachers were the biggest danger in Australian schools, Education Minister Brendan Nelson said yesterday after the nation's first large-scale survey into class sizes showed smaller classes did not necessarily improve student results.
    "Dr Nelson said the results of the study, by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vindicated the Howard Government's initiatives on teaching and education standards."

And here we are eight years into the rein of the Coalition government with an acknowledged (and increasing?) worrying percentage of teachers in our secondary public schools who are inadequately trained (in some cases untrained) to teach mathematics or science subjects. Why? Just where is the buck going to stop. The study "vindicated the Howard Government's initiatives on teaching and education standards." Did they indeed?

Dr Nelson brings to mind an exasperated response by Jean Kerr to one of her young offspring in her 1957 family portrait, Please Don't Eat the Daises:

  Why should I take you to a psychiatrist, I don't need to take you to a psychiatrist to tell me you're impossible, I know you're impossible.

Just maybe if demoralised under resourced university science staffs were given the tools and incentives they need, perhaps that would be a good start in training and motivating potential properly training teachers. Would it be sufficient? Certainly not. Is it necessary? Well, yes. Are the federal and state governments adequately addressing the matter? Don't really think so. Unless you accept the usual pre-election spin political parties thrust at the public.

A timely example comes from Dr Nelson's address today to the "Make Schools Better" conference at the University of Melbourne. Below is what he had to say regarding science and mathematics:

The October 2003 report of the Government’s independent Review of Teaching and Teacher Education (Australia's Teachers: Australia's Future - Advancing Innovation, Science, Technology and Mathematics) identified strategies to help attract and retain talented teachers especially in the fields of science, technology and mathematics, and to build a culture of innovation at all levels of schooling in Australia. In response to the Review, the Australian Government has announced new funding through the Boosting Innovation, Science, Technology and Mathematics Teaching Programme of $39 million to improve science, technology and mathematics education and foster innovation in Australian schools, as well as a capacity for innovation in students. This is in addition to the initial $10 million applied to establish the National Institute.

 

...we will be introducing national tests in year 6 and year 10 in the key subject areas of English, Mathematics, Science, and Civics and Citizenship. Children should be at the same educational standard and learn similar skills regardless of the state in which they reside. These national tests will provide authoritative measures of the standard of achievement of children against national measures.
 

Complementing these national tests is the work occurring to ensure that there is greater national consistency in curriculum outcomes. Education systems are developing Statements of Learning in English, mathematics, science, and civics and citizenship and we are requiring that these be implemented by the end of 2007. The Statements will describe the key knowledge, understandings and capacities that all students should acquire in these subject areas, irrespective of where they attend school.

With support like that the void in teaching mathematics and the sciences in the secondary public school system is in little danger of being vanquished.