A quite interesting story on education reform in The Australian. The Prime Minister sort of picked up the idea in 2008, when she “returned from a trip to New York City fired up by the vision of then schools chancellor Joel Klein and his radical overhaul of the city’s schools.” See if you can pick up the salient difference between the Klein model and the Prime Minister’s. The bolding is mine:

Klein graded schools every year on a scale from A to F on the improvement recorded in students’ results, and schools that failed to improve were closed down.

In Australia, transparency is used to identify struggling schools and support them with additional resources – financial, or targeted teaching programs.

In New York they rewarded success and penalised failure. Here we are to reward failure and penalise success. For those who can’t spot the difference – the PM for example – there is a very too-the-point accompanying article by Kevin Donnelly.

According to a government information sheet the additional millions can be spent on “more teachers and better resources”, introducing “personalised learning plans”, “more teachers, teacher aides, support staff”, “better resources and equipment, like SMART Boards, computers, iPads and tablets” and “new and better ways of teaching”.

The flaws in such an approach are manifest. The assumption that simply by giving schools more resources and more staff disadvantage will be overcome and standards will improve is incorrect.

As Donnelly concludes:

No matter how much cultural-left groups such as the Australian Education Union want to believe, low SES is not the principal cause of underperformance. Working-class kids, with effort, ability, application and effective teachers and a rigorous curriculum, can do well. Such students are not destined to failure because of postcode.

It doesn’t take a cultural-left view to recognise that the main reason Australia’s standing in international tests has flatlined or gone backwards is because we have fewer high-ability students performing at the top of the table.

If the Prime Minister is serious about getting Australian students to be among the top five performing countries in literacy and numeracy tests by 2025, then one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways is to better support gifted students.

Promoting competition and meritocracy in education represents an alternative to Gillard’s cultural-left, Fabian-inspired approach.

To a leveller, such a thought is beyond comprehension. They know only how to pull down, never how to build up.