News & Views item - July 2007

 

 

Are We Really Heading Down the Path of Becoming "The Stupid Country"? (July 10, 2007)

    Later this month the University of New South Wales Press will publish The Stupid Country: How Australia is dismantling public education by Chris Bonnor and Jane Caro.

 

Chris Bonnor, until last year represented 466 principals as the head of the NSW Secondary Principals' Council while his co-author, Jane Caro is a Sydney writer with particular interests in women, families and education. She is the convenor of Priority Public.

 

According to the publisher:

This book warns of a future where the hardest schools for Australian parents to get their kids into will be public ones. With insight, passion and a great sense of urgency Chris Bonnor and Jane Caro show how government, anxious parents, the church and ideology are combining to undermine public schools. The Stupid Country is not a one-sided defence of public education. But it challenges us to consider whether we really want to continue stumbling blindly down our current path, risking the health of our public schools and everything they have created – our prosperity, unity, stability –even, perhaps, our democracy.

Anna Patty in The Sydney Morning Herald writes that Bonner and Caro say: "populist education policies are diverting attention from government neglect of schools, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Mr Bonnor says the Federal Government's focus on issues such as performance pay for teachers indirectly blames schools and teachers for problems in student performance, and the authors say that, the Government suggests there must be something wrong with schools, creating "an easy and populist agenda for politicians. What passes for educational policy degenerates into competing plans for more testing, accountability, standards and anything else that addresses community anxiety, real or otherwise. It all sits easily with calls for more police, longer jail terms … [and diverts attention from] problems that can't be boiled down into simple policies or blamed on teachers."

 

And they take to task the Government's and bureaucracy's tendency to point to "lighthouse schools that register substantial achievement against the odds, as some form of proof that the solution lies entirely within schools and that the broader context doesn't matter".

 

According to Ms Patty's report: "Australia's top students perform well compared with those from other developed countries, but the poorest students are behind their equivalents in similar countries. Mr Bonnor said this gap was set to worsen because of the growing inequity between economically disadvantaged and well-resourced schools. The Federal Government will increase its funding to private schools by 30 per cent over the next five years to $7.5 billion and by 10 per cent to $3.4 billion for public schools."

 

And in a repost the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop said policies such as performance pay, greater principal autonomy and national consistency in curriculum were aimed at improving academic standards "so that students across the nation have access to a high-quality education from a high-quality teacher in a high-quality environment".

 

To paraphrase Anna Russell: "We're not making this up you know."