Best and Worst Schools

8/2/2019 Best and Worst Schools

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YOUR JOB: SHOULD PARENTS

SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO THE

BEST SCHOOL?Best and Worst Schools

Tuesday, 18 Aug 09

Transcript

How do you work out whether a school is up to scratch, word of mouth, final year results orjust the way it feels when you talk to the principal or go on a tour. Soon you will be able togo online and find the core academic results of every school in Australia and you will be ableto compare them. So, it will make schools lift their game? What about teachers? How can lowperforming schools attract the best?

JENNY BROCKIE: Tonight we are joined by Deputy Prime Minister andEducation Minister Julia Gillard, Joel Klein, as well as parents, teachers andstudents. Thank you for joining us. I would like to start by talking to someparents and some teachers about this. Let me start with you, Mark, you have aboy in year 6. Do you want the sort of information that is about to go onlineabout how schools perform - as a parent? Do you want to know?MARK CORRIGAN: Well, we're particularly interested this year because we are having todecide on a high school for our son for next year. In making that choice, what I found wasthat there was a vacuum of information available. It was very difficult to make an intelligent -come to an intelligent conclusion.JENNY BROCKIE: So you want it, you want to be able to access it. Alison, youare a primary school teacher, do you think it's a good idea.

ALISON CRAWFORD, PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHER: No.

JENNY BROCKIE: Why?ALISON CRAWFORD: Because I feel that as much as the academic outcomes are important

and they do make a difference, those things will change over the 6 years that your child is ata secondary school. It will shift. I don't think that anything will tell you as much about theschool as much as walking through the school, seeing the classrooms, seeing the way theteachers teach and seeing the community that you are introducing your child to which is amuch greater influence on their success than anything out.

JENNY BROCKIE: Okay, Michelle Portlock what about you, you have two kids Ithink, one in a state primary school and one in a private high school do youwant this sort of information?MICHELLE PORTLOCK: I would, but it would have to be a very fine line on how it is doneproperly. It would have to be - like schools be compared with like schools, there wouldn't be

any point in having it listed alphabetically because there's no point in us comparing ourselves


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to say - the Northern Territory. You would have to have apples with apples in the samecart.

JENNY BROCKIE: We will talk about how it is going to be done in just asecond. I want to get a bit of a taste for the general idea. Judy King, whatabout you? You are the principal of a public girls high school in Sydney, whatdo you think about the idea of publishing test results?JUDY KING, PRINCIPAL, RIVERSIDE GIRLS HIGH SCHOOL: Well, I am in favour of testingand in favour of as much data as possible that we can share with parents. And in deed wehave done that in New South Wales very conscientiously for over 2 decades now. But I amtotally opposed to the data being available so that league tables can be constructed, not bythe government but by media outlets.

JENNY BROCKIE: Julia Gillard, thank you very much for joining us tonight.Explain to us how this will work because I think people are a bit confusedabout what it will mean and we have got Judy saying the information is therealready.JULIA GILLARD, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: How this is going to work, is that the start ofnext year, you will be able to go online. You will be able to look at an individual school, seeits national testing results, see its year 12 results, see the characteristics of the studentpopulation, the number of teachers, the qualifications of the teachers, the resources in theschool, school attendance rates, all of that kind of information. You will be able to click andcompare that school with schools in the local area. So if you were a parent making a choice,then you would be able to do that. You will then be able to click and compare that schoolwith schools serving similar student populations around the country. And to use theterminology that was used before, we in that regard, want to compare apples with apples.There's no point comparing an outback school serving mainly indigenous students with thewealthiest private school on Sydney's north shore. That comparison will not tell you anything.

But if you compare that outback indigenous schools with similar schools and you see onegoing streets ahead and one falling behind, you can study the best practice that means thatschool is in front and share it and you can bring new resources and new efforts to lift theschool that's falling behind including better paid teachers, excellent teachers being paid moreto go to that school, including more direct government resources to make a difference.

JENNY BROCKIE: I wonder what the students think about it Matthew, what doyou think about the idea of that information being out there?MATTHEW MEHARG: Yeah, I agree with Julia. Like, I know my school only goes up to yearten and next year I am going to have to make a choice of what high school I want to go to tofinish my schooling. I would really like this information to be available to me.

JENNY BROCKIE: What about some other students, Nathan, what do youthink?NATHAN JOHNSTON: I am a bit in two minds about it, yes, it's a good idea, let's try and getour education department accountable, let's try and lift other schools up. But, I don't thinkour schools are just educational institutions. They are there to help people - young adultsgrow into adults and I dont think you can measure that. You can't always measure the lifelessons they are going to learn. You can't measure the opportunities they are going to haveextra curriculum wise. I don't think you can measure everything you need to know about aschool.JENNY BROCKIE: Okay, one more student here, yeah!


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JULIAN BORREY: I think you need to be careful when you put things in tables. It seems tosend the wrong messages that we are really focussing on things like the academicperformances of schools and not really what schools might have in values and whether theyuphold those values. We need to be very careful when we are using tables and giving thatout to the general public.

JENNY BROCKIE: Brian Caldwell, youre a former dean of education atMelbourne uni, parents certainly seem to want this information and somestudents want it as well, why not give it to them. We measure things all thetime we measure students all the time.PROFESSOR BRIAN CALDWELL, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY: We do but the key issue is, arewe providing information to parents that is valid - to be perfectly frank with you, I have beenlooking at developments in this area for over 20 years in different countries, governments ofdifferent persuasions. The end result is of two kinds, one is the public information and to beperfectly frank, it's largely fraudulent. It is not telling parents rich information that is going toguide them in the selection of students.

JENNY BROCKIE: What information are parents getting now that - I mean, areyou saying we should leave things as they are? Is that the alternative?PROFESSOR BRIAN CALDWELL: We should certainly tap into the excellent practice that youwill find in several Australian states at the moment. I am in Victoria and every school andevery parent has the most extraordinary range of information available. Teachers areexcellent and so are principals in the way they analysis and use that data to improve schools,go to a limited extent in New South Wales, I have been looking at schools' web sites inQueensland recently and the annual report of the school is there. It provides all of the Napplan data.JENNY BROCKIE: Nap plan meaning the basic testing the basic skillstesting, literacy, numeracy, nationally.PROFESSOR BRIAN CALDWELL: In terms of parents to be actually valid about this, thedifference between classrooms within a particular school can be greater than the differencebetween schools. So parents are interested in the particular experience their children aregoing to get in this classroom, in a school that offers a much wider programme than what arebeing conveyed in the lead table of schools.

JENNY BROCKIE: Okay Brian, I am going to cut you off there you have hada good go. Barry McGaw, because you are implementing the publishing of thisinformation which is going to come out in December, I want you to answer thisand I want you to explain how it will work so that people fully understandwhat it is they will be getting.BARRY MCGAW, AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM AUTHORITY: Well the deputy Prime Ministerdescribed the broad outline of what information will be available. The crucial point is thatliteracy and numeracy skills aren't everything that schools are concerned with but they arereally foundational. If students don't develop strong basis in numeracy and literacy, a lot ofother learning won't have a foundation. It's important that we report to parents not just interms of the school itself, but that they can see that in a broader framework. So they will beable to go on to the web site and look up their school and then see how their schoolcompares with like schools.

JENNY BROCKIE: And they can't do that now?

BARRY MCGAW: No, they can't at all. They don't even know where the like schools are andthese will be like schools all around the country, not just in the local jurisdiction, and they will


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be public and private. Lots of the comparisons that schools have at the moment are justwithin their system.

JENNY BROCKIE: You can see on our website if you like, an example of howthis is going to work, yes?

BARRY MCGAW: No, you can't yet, because you've probably got a preliminary mock-up. Weare working on the design of this right now.

JENNY BROCKIE: Alright - you can see a preliminary mock-up of how thesystem is going to work, on our website.BARRY MCGAW: Ours will be a good deal better than that.

JENNY BROCKIE: Okay, Joel Klein I would like to bring you in at this point - inNew York, thank you for joining us. I know that you've influenced thisapproach somewhat. You have a system over there that's different to what isbeing proposed here but I think it's interesting to talk about. You give schoolsan A to F grading based on this sort of testing. Why? Tell us how it works.How your system works.JOEL KLEIN, NYC SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR: Fundamentally it goes back to what one of yourparents said. We compare apples to apples. If you compare schools in different communitiesbased on the socio-economics, you will get very different results and we all know that. Whatwe are trying to do, is to communicate among our schools and to our parents as muchinformation as we can give them. Sure, maths scores or reading scores or science scores arenot a complete picture. But I don't think there is a parent out there frankly who doesn't wantto make sure that his or her child isn't going to a school in which literacy and numeracy andscience, social studies and arts, all of this information, as much as they can get to know thatthe school is doing right by the child.

The reason we put a lot of grade on it is because far too many of our schools quite franklywere failing our children and we wanted to make sure that we created the political and thepress pressure to create a Rising Tide and also to say to schools wait a second - weunderstand that you have different challenges but here is another school that has the exactsame challenge as you have and they are moving their children forward by a significantamount each year and you are moving your children backwards. You know, this puts a lot ofpressure on a system and you want to put pressure to improve it so that you can create aRising Tide. You also want to say to other schools, look at what they are doing. It becomes atransfer of knowledge and information. Look at how they are performing - what particularthings are they doing that are getting the results that you are not getting.What I have found is our parents throughout the city, look at this information - they talkabout it with their school, with their principals and with their teachers and other schoolscheck out the schools that are comparable to them to learn from each other. I think it's avery powerful system. I would be the first to admit that you can't reduce everything to a setof numbers but don't kid yourself, numbers really matter.

JENNY BROCKIE: OK, what happens if you are an F if your school is an F -what happens to schools that don't perform?JOEL KLEIN: If you are an F or D and you remain that, we can change the principal of theschool. We have done that. We have also shutdown several schools for non-performance andit's interesting to note the secretary of education - President Obama's secretary - is nowtalking about creating a federal mandate to close-down non-performing schools and frankly,sometimes a school just doesn't deliver the goods and we don't want to make pretendbecause our kids don't have forever. When we find that a school isn't making the changes

after we have interceded and tried to help them and we find that the culture is just notworking, that the kids are moving in the wrong direction, we will close the school down and


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open up new schools. We have done that several times over the last 7 years here in NorthYork city.

JENNY BROCKIE: Julia Gillard, is that what you plan to do? Is that the aim ofthe exercise to eventually shutdown low performing schools?JULIA GILLARD: The aim of the exercise is to change low performing schools, obviously inthis country using these new measures, if we find schools that are failing behind, we will bethere with our new national partnership for disadvantaged schools, with new resources, wewill be there our new teacher quality initiatives which are about bringing the best teachersand paying them more to go to disadvantaged schools and we will be bringing thoseingredients and our new literacy and numeracy money to make a difference. But I wouldendorse what Joel has said to this extent.. We can't wait year after year while schools failkids. Kids only get one go at education. So managing for change matters and you would beneeding to be doing that as quickly as you could.

Yes, could that imply in some schools, in some school systems that people will look at theprincipal and say, maybe we need a new principal. That's possible. But that should happen ina circumstance where we are failing children. Every question should be on the table, should

be asked and answered if we are failing children so that we can do better.JENNY BROCKIE: And do you think we are failing children?JULIA GILLARD: Undoubtedly, our international testing tells us when we compare our kidsfrom kids around the rest of the world what that testing shows us, is in this country,disadvantage, being from a poor household is strongly correlated with getting a pooreducation. It doesn't have to be like that. Other countries prove to us it doesn't have to belike that. We are choosing to organise our education system like that and we shouldn't. Weshould say to ourselves, doesn't matter how difficult a child's background, they can succeedin education if we get education right. We owe that to every Australian child that they get agood education in a great school and we particularly owe it to the children who come from

the households where education has to do more for them to make a difference.

JENNY BROCKIE: OK, Mary-Ellen I would like to bring you in at this pointbecause you are now deputy principal of a Sydney prime school, but I know afew years ago, you were a literary consultant in New York, yes. I just wonder,having seen that system at work, how you felt about it - having seen both theAustralian system and what is going on in New York.MARY-ELLEN BETTS, AUBURN WEST PRIMARY SCHOOL: There is nothing about classroomsin New York that I would like to replicate in Australian schools. The impact of high stakestesting which is what it becomes when you are threatening to close schools, means that thecurriculum narrows. Children are forced into more and more repeats of the same thing. Sothat if your school is failing and if you've got a group of failing students, you bring them in forbreakfast programs. You keep them after school for after school programs. So that childrenas young as 6 are at school from 7.30 till 4.30 - they are still failing.Now as a literacy consultant, I worked in classrooms in the Bronx and my challenge, most ofthe time, was to get teachers to look at the standards, what the curriculum was, and notwhat the tests were going to ask. The teachers were driven by the tests and there was somuch pressure, collegiality fell apart because every one felt that the pressure was on onegroup of teachers to provide the results. So if you were on a testing grade, it was your job toget the kids up so collegiality collapsed.JENNY BROCKIE: I would like to get a response from Joel Klein to this. Joel,you have heard this -what is your answer to that? Are teachers in New Yorkteaching to the test, I guess is the question?


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JOEL KLEIN: If you mean by that are they teaching my children to read, and my children todo mathematics, these are absolutely essential skills that our kids are going to need in the21th century, for the longest time, we pretended in schools in the Bronx, where they had anabysmal high school graduation rate, most of my kids in the Bronx grow up in verychallenged circumstances. I went to high schools my father grew up in the Bronx I grewup in the inner city. I went to high schools in the Bronx when I took this job and lots and lots

of kids simply could not read. How did we allow a school system to move them through andlet them get to high school and be incapable of reading? Many of them failed out and wentnowhere. To me, making sure that children master fundamental skills that they can read, thatthey can comprehend, that they understand algebra, that they understand mathematics, thatthey know history, and the way that you know if that is happening, is you assess and yes,you test children. That's the way it was when I went to public school in New York. That's theway it's always been in education. We need to know if our kids are mastering the skills and acollegiality built on a failing school system to me - is not a collegiality at all. Too often weput the needs of adults ahead of the needs of children in public education and we pay anenormous price for that.JENNY BROCKIE: I would like to hear from the Minister in response to whatyou heard.JULIA GILLARD: In our system we are not going to have the curriculum here and the testover here, so teaching the curriculum and teaching the test are somehow two differentthings. We test kids in schools every day. We test them for teachers, to do diagnostics andthen once a year - kids in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9 are asked to do national tests. I understandthat some kids find tests stressful but the reality of our education system is, they are going tobe tested. Even if we didn't do the national tests, and didn't have these transparencymeasures, they are going to be tested. I am saying, let's use the national test to drive changeand improvement in our education system the best teachers in the schools that need themthe most, new resources to make a difference, otherwise what do you do? You don't test andyou never know? You never know whether the school is up to the task?

JENNY BROCKIE: We are talking about how to work out whether our schoolsare up to scratch. Before the break we were talking about information beingmade available online. I know that Tasmania, Western Australia andQueensland do already put information online about some school performance.Now, Garry Bailey, you are the editor of the Mercury newspaper in Hobart.What have you done with that information that was made available inTasmania?GARRY BAILEY, EDITOR, THE HOBART MERCURY: The government this year did publish ona website the detail of various performances in schools. We decided on the basis of that as itwas publicly available, that we would look at the material and see what sort of story it told.The story it told was perhaps a typical one. There were large gaps in the performancebetween schools, although, there was some intriguing variations. Some of the schools, forexample, had very good attendance despite the fact they didn't perform as well on otherstandards. There were questions there, why are they doing this? So it comes down to thefact that this sort of information, if we can ask those sorts of questions, so can parents.JENNY BROCKIE: Which school came out on the bottom of that table you puttogether, Garry?GARRY BAILEY: Bridgewater High.

JENNY BROCKIE: Bridgewater High.GARRY BAILEY: Wynyard High was top.


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JENNY BROCKIE: Bridgewater High came out with 30% absenteeism, is thatright?GARRY BAILEY: That's correct.

JENNY BROCKIE: And low literacy and numeracy, compared to other schools?GARRY BAILEY: That's right.

JENNY BROCKIE: Rosanne, you are the new principal at Bridgewater, I thinkyou've only been there for about 9 weeks now.ROSANNE MCDADE, PRINCIPAL, BRIDGEWATER HIGH SCHOOL: Yes.JENNY BROCKIE: How did you feel about this being made public and why doyou think a third of the students at the school just aren't turning up?

ROSANNE MCDADE: I feel that it is a very bad representation of what happens at the school.I am the new principal there. At the moment, we are looking very closely into why studentsare not attending the school. We do have a 30% absentee rate and there are a whole rangeof reasons for that.

JENNY BROCKIE: What are the reasons though?ROSANNE MCDADE: I am looking into that at the moment. There is long-term illness, thereare students who are disengaged. We are in a low socio - economic area - one of probablythe lowest socio economic areas in Australia. There is a link between low socio - economicbackgrounds and non-attendance. But, I think the picture of the school hasn't really beenclearly articulated because Bridgewater High at the end of 2007 was burnt down. The school

- the students were sent to two different schools for 6 months to try and get them backtogether again in a new school. They have been put back into a school which is an exprimary school and the actual situation of the school is - it's not a high school. There areterrific resources there that have been put in place by the education department over thepast 12 months or so, but all of this has had a very very strong impact on the students of theschool.

JENNY BROCKIE: So, a negative impact?ROSANNE MCDADE: A strong negative impact in that the school was a . Bridgewater Highbefore it was burnt down in 2007 was a very very strong heart of the community and whenthat school burnt down, some of the heart of the community was - went with it.JENNY BROCKIE: No one has been charged with the burning down of theschool so we don't know who is responsible.ROSANNE MCDADE: No idea.JENNY BROCKIE: I wonder how some of the parents felt about some of thatinformation being made public. Once the information is out there and themedia picks it up, what is the impact on the school. Wendy, what do you thinkabout the information being made public as a parent?WENDY BRODERICK: A lot of parents don't get involved. They don't read news letters. They

just don't have an insight into their own school and I think it's a good idea.

JENNY BROCKIE: You think it was good that was made public?


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WENDY BRODERICK: Yes, I do.

JENNY BROCKIE: What good do you think it's done?WENDY BRODERICK: It will bring out the community and try and get them together to find

out why is Bridgewater High School at the bottom of the list.JENNY BROCKIE: Fatima, you are a teacher at a disadvantaged school inMelbourne. How would it stack up do you think in this sort of system?FATIMA MEASHAM, HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER: It wouldn't stack up very well at all I don'tthink. Just based on what I know of how our students did with Naplan, it wasn't as bad aswe thought. But it was still - a lot more that could be done there obviously and our school isalready looking at ways to improve. We have got literacy and numeracy coachers, to helpteachers. We have got families in financial distress, you know, in the area that we are in,there is a lot of transitional or crisis accommodation so students do come in with a lot ofbaggage. I suppose this is the challenge I want to put in terms of the idea of parents' right to

know I think of the families that our students are raised in, sure these parents would love forthe kids to be fantastic, really, really posh schools but I think a league table would bemeaningless to them. They wouldn't be able to afford to move their children to grammarschool.

JENNY BROCKIE: Roseanne, I have a question for you though, because we cantalk about disadvantage and disadvantage will continue to exist in numbers ofcommunities. I want to ask you whether you think that Bridgewater has failedthe students by delivering these low rates of literacy and numeracy, by notbeing able to get the kids to come to school - is that a failure of the school?ROSANNE MCDADE: When you look at the data, 7 out of ten of our students are at or above

the national levels of literacy and numeracy, 7 out of ten of our students, are actuallyattending school regularly. Putting them at the bottom of the league table and saying theyare the worst performers in Tasmania, does nothing at all, it just stigmatises the school.

JENNY BROCKIE: Garry, a response for you, as the person who took thisinformation and put this in the newspaper. What do you say to that?GARRY BAILEY: I disagree with it. The argument about stigmatising schools is alwayswheeled out. Yet, that area where Bridgewater serves has just been described as a low socio- economic area. The point of this information is so people are galvanised to action, to dosomething about their schools, I am not just talking about the schools themselves but thecommunities. It's not quite name and shame but I think....

JENNY BROCKIE: How isn't it name and shame?. How isn't it name and shamethough - there is an element of shame at being at the bottom of the list isntthere?GARRY BAILEY: Something should be done about it.JENNY BROCKIE: Julia Gillard, naming and shaming, I mean, you are hearingarguments about people saying its stigmatising the school, its putting theschool in a position where the kids are embarrassed about it, that it is aboutbigger issue than how the teachers are performing or how the school itself isperforming, your response to that?

JULIA GILLARD: The information we are going to put out is not the kind of table that youhave just seen displayed that was done by The Hobart Mercury, we are not doing that.


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JENNY BROCKIE: But the media will.JULIA GILLARD: The media can name and shame schools today if they want to of poorquality information. The media can make those choices. What I'm saying is I think the bestpossible public debate including in the media, will be had when we have got comprehensive

information, not in a list, but actually comparing similar schools. And seeing what thedifference is.

JENNY BROCKIE: How do you deal with this question of disadvantage, I mean,if your in a school in an area of serious disadvantage, and Bridgewater is in anarea of very high unemployment - numbers of problems associate with thatarea that clearly feed into the school population to some degree. I mean, canyou by publishing information about a school's test results counter that? Imean, what is the role of the school in that environment and how can itcounter that?JULIA GILLARD: It's much more than just publishing the information. Yes, we are going to

publish the information comparing like schools. That's important because it will drive a set ofreforms to make a difference. If all we were doing was saying, that's it. The information hasgone into the big wide world, we now walk away and do nothing, then I would agree withsome of these criticisms. But what we are going to do is when we see incomparable schools,one falling behind, we are going to be there to share the best practice from a similar school,we are going to be there with new resources, $1.5 billion of new resources and we are goingto be there with new programs backed with real resources to get our leading and bestteachers into those schools. Now, that is there to make a difference. We need to know wherewe can make the most difference by having this information.Whilst I understand that people are anxious about it, and I can share that anxiety, I canshare that anxiety because it's going to put pressure on me and education minister's rightaround the country as part of this transparency is going to be transparency about the

resources going into a school. So, if a school is under resourced and that is explaining poorperformance, then that's going to end up on my desk and the desk of education ministersaround the country and so it should. We do need to remind ourselves, this is for all schools,not just state schools, independent schools and Catholic schools will also be in this system.JENNY BROCKIE: All right, I am going to try and get to some people wehaven't heard from yet, yes?ISAAC CARROLL: Disagreeing with the fact that it's transparent, a school is not just aboutacademic results. When someone goes out into the world, they want to have people skills,they want leaderships. They want to have ways to communicate with people, and publishinga table online, that won't show that. The only way you are going to find that is by going tothe school and talking to people about it.

JENNY BROCKIE: A response.JULIA GILLARD: I absolutely agree with that. There's no piece of paper on the planet thatcan tell you absolutely everything about a school and there never will be. So, I would echo infact, what Joel Klein said. We can't purport to measure everything. I would - parents will stillwalk into schools and look at schools. They will still talk to their neighbour down at the localcoffee shop, how is your child going in school? How are you finding the school, is that a goodteacher. I mean, all of those conversations will still occur. But for those things that we canmeasure, this is a system that enables the comparison of them. So, education is about morethan academic results but it is academic results are not irrelevant to end up with great peopleskills, being a leader, you know, all of those things, reading and writing, all those things come

into play. We can measure that and we should measure that. Are schools bigger than that?


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Yes, they are but our measurements will be there showing these comparisons so we canmake a difference.JENNY BROCKIE: Nathan, a comment from you?NATHAN JOHNSTON: I am hearing a lot of schools, parents, principals Im sorry - where

do the kids fit in with this? All I've heard is, who loses, name and shame game but who losesin the end are the kids, Bridgewater High School got published in a paper as being the worseschool how is that going to affect their employment in the future. Mount Druitt High Schoolis a perfect example - published under the headline the school the class we failed. How isthat going to affect them?

JENNY BROCKIE: I guess, I guess that's the concern that is coming out here,is the use of this information, Julia Gillard, a response from you about that.JULIA GILLARD: Firstly we are not publishing league tables.

JENNY BROCKIE: Can we please let the Minister speak.JULIA GILLARD: Can we just remind ourselves that's Mount Druitt, and I agree with you - tohave concerns about that, absolutely. That Mount Druitt headline was published several yearsago, not in the context of any of the information I'm talking about. So if a newspaper wantedto publish a headline like that again tomorrow, there is nothing stopping them doing that.What we are talking about, being in the public domain is this comprehensive informationcomparing like schools. What it will be is a call to action for change and I think that is in theinterests of kids. I understand that you know, this is a process that puts pressures on people.But we do need to ask ourselves don't we have to be up to bearing those pressures if it'sgoing to drive change and make a difference to schools that are struggling? If the alternativeis just to pretend that there's no problem, not publish anything, not re act, and let kids endup in schools where we know they are not going to get a great education and that's going to

count against them for the rest of their lives, that's a very bad outcome. So we have to findthe right levers for making a difference to these schools, knowing whether the problems are,where we can make a difference, identifying best practice in similar schools, sharing that bestpractice, new resources.

JENNY BROCKIE: I want to talk a little bit more about teachers and how toattract good teachers to schools which obviously is a key to schoolperformance and also whether publishing test results will improve educationfor our kids what about those other benefits that can't be measured. Tonightwe are looking at the accountability of schools and the Federal Government'splans to publish school results. Whether that will l ift standards, I want to talkabout teaching right now and how to attract the best teachers to a schoolbecause I think that's very much what this discussion is about as well. Butbefore we go there, Barry McGaw, I know you wanted to make a point aboutsome of the critiquing of the idea about publishing results. Can you just sharethat with us?BARRY MCGAW: In some of the discussion there has been a counsel of disappear really thatsocioeconomic disadvantage, confers a disadvantage educationally about which nothing canbe done and if you are in a community like that, that's the best a school can do. What we willhave is the possibility of seeing whether other schools in similar communities are doingbetter, and if that is the case, to do something about it where poorer performance exists.I am committed to our publishing distribution of performance in schools - what proportion ofstudents are doing very well, what proportion of students are doing badly, not just a single

number that summarises where the middle of the distribution is.


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JENNY BROCKIE: Let's talk about teachers and how you attract the bestteachers. Joel Klein how do you think you attract the best teachers?JOEL KLEIN: I think in a variety of ways. One, teachers want to be part of a system thatsucceeds. Teachers are like everyone else, they want to a feel they are making progress withtheir students. So when New York City won the award last year as the best urban school in

America - that was a bonus to our teachers. The second thing you want to do is compensatethem properly. Teaching is a tough job, make no mistake about it. Teaching kids from socio-economically disadvantaged and communities is an especially tough job and we shouldcompensate them well. We should actually I believe, have an element of paying teachers forperformance so that we incentivise excellence so that those teachers who are gettingoutstanding results are rewarded for that.We study how our teachers affect student performance. I do think that there is this myth thatkids who grow up in high poverty neighbourhoods were doing about as well as we could withthem. I now know that from analysis that we have done in New York, that the same kids indifferent schools in different classrooms get entirely different outcomes. So the power ofteaching to transform lives is critical.

JENNY BROCKIE: OK, Joel Klein can I just cut across you briefly there. Youclose poor performing schools. What do you do about poor performingteachers?JOEL KLEIN: Poor performing teachers, we work to improve their performance. But if youdon't know who your strong performers are and your weaker performers are, you won't beable to figure out how to improve them. So what do we do, we provide professionaldevelopment; we take our strongest performers and they model and we let the otherteachers observe them. We create what we call a lead teacher in New York, pay two teachersto go together to teach as well as to coach and to support. We give them an extra $10,000 ayear to go to our most challenging schools, just the kind of thing the deputy Prime Minister issaying, let's get great teachers where there's great needs and let's compensate them. Let's

be candid with each other. If I pay you exactly the same to teach in a highly motivatedmiddle class community as I do in my most challenged schools, I won't get the distribution Iwant.

JENNY BROCKIE: Judy King, you looked very worried - sorry Joel but we arerunning out of time. I just want to get a reaction. When you mentioned cashbonuses a bit of a groan went up from some of the teachers. Why, Judy King?JUDY KING: Teachers want investment in the profession as a whole. If an English teachersand a mathematics teachers are going to be paid a bonus because they produce higherNaplan results, but the music teacher and the phys ed teacher and remedial reading teacherand all of the other teachers are not, it's not collegial and its not professional, it's reallydevisive. So much of teaching is about teamwork and collegiality. It's not a corporate model.The Prime Minister has written two 6,000 word essays recently on debunking deregulation,debunking corporatisation, debunking the market forces and yet here we have market forcesat work with league tables that the deputy Prime Minister, with all due respect, can not say Iam not creating any. And of course she is right -she is not. But she is facilitating theircreation by announcing and releasing all of that data.

JENNY BROCKIE: Phil Dye, you have had your hand up for a while, I knowyoure a casual teacher and a parent. What do you think about teaching andhow to attract good teachers? Do we need to be doing more?PHIL DYE, CASUAL TEACHER: Absolutely I think one of the crucial points is that we'reevaluating students with this system of course, but we are also assessing teachers and

teachers hate to be assessed. Teachers don't like other teachers going into their classrooms.This is how it is.


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JENNY BROCKIE: OK. Hear him out.PHIL DYE: Teachers are very resist to being assessed.

WOMAN: They are not.

PHIL DYE: My experiences show that there are many dead wood teachers in the system.Most teachers are great and they try their hardest under difficult conditions.

WOMAN: That's nonsense.

PHIL DYE: There are dead wood teachers hanging out for their superannuation payment. Ihave seen them. There are teachers who have been in the same classroom for 25 years andif that creates a broad world experience to give to the students, then you know, I think that'sa problem.

JENNY BROCKIE: OK. Tim Hawks, you are from an elite private school inSydney, you have been listening to this debate, what do you think?DR TIM HAWKES, HEADMASTER, KINGS SCHOOL: Well, I think teachers are absolute grade Agold dust and the sort of picture that has just been painted is shocking. I have to say that ifthe one thing that teachers love to do gasp, shock, horror - is to teach. So whatever youcan do in a school which allows them to teach rather than control unruly, deal with disciplineissues, deal with a welter of red tape and procedures and so on which comes out ofcentralised education bureaucracies which essentially now are becoming a real impediment tothe central educational process, we need to try and make teachers freer to actually teach andto teach well and to resource them and to honour them. We are - I would love to see thingslike them after five years being given a term off, paid so that they engage in a refreshingprogramme and this be part and parcel of the whole package for teachers.

PHIL DYE: So you agree teachers need refreshment.DR TIM HAWKES: Absolutely, the best teachers need refreshment as well as the worst. Ithink we need to be honouring our teachers rather more than we currently are incontemporary Australian society in terms of the conditions in which they work.JENNY BROCKIE: OK. Julia Gillard, accountability. Do you think teachers needto be made more accountable than they are at the moment?JULIA GILLARD: Can I just agree with the last contribution. I think we have got greatteachers in great schools. We have got many great schools in this country, we have gotfantastic teachers in this country. But, we also need to recognise if we look right across thesystem, that there are schools and kids falling behind and we need ways to make sure thatgreat teachers go to the schools where they can make the greatest difference for the kidswho need them the most. We are certainly not talking about teaching pay somehow beingassociated with Naplan. That was an idea floated by the former government and I absolutelyreject it. We are talking about great teachers being able to be recognised through national

accreditation standards as leading and accomplished teachers and then being paid more toteach in the schools that need them the most, the disadvantaged schools, and we will knowwhere those schools are as a result of these transparency measures.

You can be a great music teacher the way you can be a great English teacher. We need all ofthem making a difference for the kids that are crying out with the biggest needs. So that isthe sort of system we're looking at. Everybody in education, from the education minister, toschool principals, to teachers, to parents, and indeed students, everybody needs to be

accountable for what is going on in schools. We test students to hold them accountable. Ithink these transparency measures will put more pressure on everyone in the system to do


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better particularly to do better for the kids that need it the most. It will put more pressure onme and I welcome that pressure, every education minister from now, until the end of time,should feel that pressure publicly because it means our politics will respond and make moredifference for those schools.

JENNY BROCKIE: Clearly one of the concerns that's coming out here is howyou measure the things that are almost immeasurable. How do you measurethe things about a school that make it a great school that might not bereflected in those basic results. How are you going to do that?JULIA GILLARD: Well, you can't - the nature of being a human being, is you can't measureeverything. We measure lots of things. We measure for example, when you go for adiagnostic test, you might go for a Mammogram, some mammograms throw up falsepositives and some miss things they should have picked up. It doesn't mean that it's a badthing to go for a mammogram - it just means every measurement has ever been invented byhuman beings has some limits. That shouldn't be used as an excuse for not measuringanything. We can't measure everything but the things that we can measure we shouldunderstand in their proper context. That's why the things we can measure in our system will

be in this like school context and schools will still of course be able to tell their own storyabout what they are doing. If we come back to the Bridgewater example, the specialcircumstances of the fire, how they are building the new educational pathways, we areworking with that with the trades training centre investment so all of that information can stillbe there from schools and we will have this measurable information in this context of likeschools.

JENNY BROCKIE: In terms of attracting teachers which you are talking about abit at the moment. When will we see more detail of what that will mean indollars and cents and how it will work with the states?JULIA GILLARD: Here in New South Wales, the government responding to our additional

resources, more than half a billion doll arts to make a difference for teachers and teachingquality. The government here in New South Wales has already announced a system to payaround $100,000 to leading teachers who are prepared to go to disadvantaged schools. Thefirst measure already announced and in implementation and we want to roll measures likethat right around the country and we have got the resources to back it up and we are puttingthe resources in because that's the education revolution we promised Australians.JENNY BROCKIE: I would like to just finish up by asking some of the criticshere, what your proposals are to actually lift standards in areas with problemswith literacy and numeracy, if you don't want the testing Judy King, how areyou going to.JUDY KING: I am really sorry Jenny but it's not a testing thing that we are on about. I am notopposed to tests. I am not afraid of data. It's not testing. You see, we are really got twoarguments here.JENNY BROCKIE: But if that information is available, it's going to be madepublic?JUDY KING: No, no, it's already available. I fully agree with the deputy Prime Minister, let'suse that data that we have got now, without publishing it so that league tables can be usedby media outlets, obviously the deputy Prime Minister doesn't want to scewer underperforming schools in difficulf areas with high unemployment, of course she doesn't. There isplenty of people who are socially disadvantaged in her own electorate.


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JENNY BROCKIE: I guess my question to you is what would you do indisadvantaged schools?

JUDY KING: Use the data that we have got now to target improvement and if it means classsizes of ten in some schools, in primary and secondary, instead of 25 or 30, then let's do itand let's do it with enthusiasm and let's be accountable without league tables.

JENNY BROCKIE: Parents, let's hear from some parents. Cathy, do you wantthe information? Do you want to know what these test results are?CATHY SCHMATLOCH: I mean, would like to know the information for having the choice ofschools for later on. But I don't know necessarily whether it would be a good thing todisadvantage some of the schools. One thing with a lot of the teachers, I think they are all abit nervous about looking bad but in business, people get fired if they are not performing sothat's one of my concerns is that teachers can sort of slip through.JENNY BROCKIE: OK, Natalie. you wanted to make a comment too.NATALIE: My concern actually was looking at this issue in terms of disadvantage from just

an education point of view, that injecting resources into the whole community as a way ofunderstanding the issue in context. That was my concern.JENNY BROCKIE: A comment over here.MIRANDA KORZY: I just think you have to get realist about teachers' wages - $100,000 for atop graduate is not going to attract them, if that is the top of the teaching profession. Imean, ordinary graduates, plenty of ordinary graduates these days, earn that well beforethey are at the top of their career. That money, I mean that's the bottom line, if you want toget your top people in there teaching, you need to be paying them and by publishing a

league table shaming a whole school is not going to improve teachers' moral.

JENNY BROCKIE: We need to clarify this, that the publishing of the leaguetable is what happened in the media.MIRANDA KORZY: OK, making available information that enables that to happen. The pointis as well, you take any profession, you were talking about measuring the medical profession,but we don't rank our GPs in the state. We place our lives in their hands but we leaveprofessional standards up to the medical profession. We don't go so why do we have to dothat with teachers? Why can't we trust them to measure their own - have their ownprofessional standards.

JENNY BROCKIE: Final comment from you, Julia Gillard?JULIA GILLARD: I would clearly see more transparency in medicine and the government hascommitted to that as well. I think as someone who needs to go to the doctor, I should beable to go online and compare doctor performances and have that information. But I alsothink when we are talking about the use of information, let's remember who needs to use it.Principals and teachers do. Policy makers do. But at the centre of this are parents andfamilies with kids in school who are making choices and I believe they should have this kindof information. I believe that's important to individual families, to work through and that'swhere we started with all of this conversation. But it's also important to the nation for us tohave a public debate about education, how much we are prepared to devote to it, how muchwe are prepared to pay teachers. Really understanding what is happening out there. Wedon't have that now and we should.


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JENNY BROCKIE: OK, we have just had a bit of it. I know you all want to keepit going. Thank you to the deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, thank you verymuch, Barry McGaw for joining us and Brian Caldwell. If you are on theeastern states, just pop on that website. You can also find an example of whatthe new system will look like in draft forms on our website. There will be moreinformation on Joel Klein's reforms of the New York City education system onour website too.

Best and Worst Schools

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