And so we have a narrative, or at least the start of one.
The Prime Minister isn’t mucking round when he talks of being at the reforming centre of Australian politics. With the truancy-welfare bill and yesterday’s education announcements, Rudd has adopted some decidedly Howardesque policy positions.
The Opposition is working hard to claim credit for Rudd’s proposals to link education funding to greater school accountability and performance pay, even if their own efforts fell foul of the Labor states. But the proposals strongly complement a key emerging theme of the Rudd Government — consumer empowerment.
This is the idea behind making it easier to transfer between banks — however clunky the new arrangements, behind Fuelwatch, behind the drive to improve hospital performance indicators, behind the Grocerychoice website and unit pricing, and now behind the way Rudd and Gillard want to enable parents to work out how their school is performing.
The approach is easily mocked, and of course has been. Providing information looks wimpy, and bureaucratic. Any benefits that arise are long-term, rather than the immediate fix everyone demands. But better informed markets operate more efficiently. Better informed consumers can exploit competition better and obtain lower prices and better deals. It’s not Government intervention, price-fixing or regulation — which is presumably what critics of such proposals would prefer — and all the better for it.
In each case, there are vested interests that prefer to operate in, if not secrecy, then with consumers acting with less than full information. Oil companies. Big retail. The banks. And education and health bureaucracies.
One of the most telling reactions to the Rudd plan was contained in Justine Ferrari’s item in The Oz:
Some states believe publishing information about the ethnic make-up of a school and the socio-economic status of parents would be counter-productive.
That’s code — an unsubtle code — for “parents are bigots who don’t know as much as we do about what’s best for their kids.”
Some parents will undoubtedly make biased and unjustified educational decisions based on the additional information the Commonwealth wants to see them getting. But that’s their right as parents and as consumers. That’s why Rudd yesterday was so keen to declare that if parents used performance information to vote with their feet, well, that was partly the point of the exercise.
Rudd and Gillard will probably also be delighted if teachers’ unions react with fury to the proposals. Parents like their kid’s teachers, but hate their unions. The more union leaders condemn the proposals, the more it will position the Government nicely at the political centre, where it wants to be seen. The notion of a Government run by the unions — or out to get private schools — never looked so absurd.
Getting a front page run on newspapers as diverse as The Daily Telegraph, The Oz, The AFR, The Age and SMH won’t hurt politically either.
Driving this reform through COAG might also be easier than previous attempts at “cooperative Federalism” like the Murray-Darling Basin. With water, doing nothing was not an acceptable option for Rudd, so all the negotiating power lay with recalcitrants like Victoria.
Here, doing nothing means the States miss out on funding, so all the power is with the Commonwealth. The States have already agreed to more benchmarking of hospital performance. But the States are the ones that will have to drive the shift to performance assessment and develop the performance data — and deal with striking teachers.
Meantime, the Rudd-Gillard narrative starts to take shape. It might lack the drama of the big reforms of the Hawke Government, but it should yield significant long-term benefits, especially when applied to public services that for too long have kept their users in the dark.
I was so happy when the Rudd government won the election last year and believed we were about to see the beginning of a new style of governing. Being an adult educator I have looked forward to when the ‘education revolution’ would begin.
It concerns me that the education revolution has begun with what appears to me as bureaucratic rules. It maybe true that some teachers are underperforming and I beleive fully in performance measurement. What I have seen so far appears to be a very simplistic response to a ‘problem’ that has been being created for along time, that problem being bureaucracy. If a teacher is underperforming, the reason(s) may not be simple but instead be a complex tapestry of frustration with the system they work in, large class sizes and lack of resources to name but a few.
Simply putting a performance measurement system in place may win in the populist stakes but will not solve systemic problems. Private schools have a greater opportunity to turn out better educated kids as they do not operate under the weight of inefficient government bureaucracies that treat their members with nothing other then disrespect – I know I work for one!
Jenanne:
In a nutshell I agree that teacher wages need to increase – but the quid pro quo will be some form of measurement (better to try than say it is all too hard) – every organisation can find ways to improve.
Alternative won’t fly – very difficult for govt. to go to an election saying they are throwing money at teachers with no strings attached (where do I sign-up) !
This is unbelievable slight of hand!
Who is responsible for education! Who is accountable for education? THE GOVERNMENT!
This is buck passing rubbish!
If a public school is underresourced, if the teachers are demoralised and underpaid, if the kids aren’t learning their ABCs, where does the buck stop, WITH THE GOVERNMENT!
Oh, and if the public figures out that young Johnny or Janine is going to a demoralised underesourced school, what are they going to do? Jump in their 4 Wheel drive, use up more fuel and energy and resources to drive their progeny miles away to a new school they perceive as better, only to a. Find it is full up 2. Starting to perform badly as it is overfilled. 3. They have no alternative but to pay out big bucks for a private school as a final straw playing into the government’s hands to actually CLOSE public schools! ( Thereby saving their budget blow out on the missing computers they promised…)
Oh, and if one teacher is “perceived” by a class to be better than another, who’s going to want to be in the other class? What are you going to do? Sack the inferior teachers, and therefore you remain back at a group of teachers who are even stevens, or are you going to let kids run riot in Mr C Grade teacher’s class because that is what kids will do! This is UNWORKABLE!
They don’t want to pay teachers the $90,000 they really deserve, and so some GOOD teachers are going to miss out in a politicised workplace and have a stigma to deal with as well.
I mean, come on! Wake up. This is bureaucratic obfuscation at its most magnificent or pathetic, depending on your angle! Humphrey would have been impressed. This guy Rudd was the one who bottlenecked the Qld Pubic Service to end up costing Goss his government. They’re the ones that forgot to build dams, roads, schools and look after our public health and they’re still bungling it!
Ba ba ba! Up here for woolly thinking and down there for dancing with shifty feet.
Jenanne – I can see logic to your arguement re paying good teachers better salaries – ie pay for play.
Thing is – in most merit-based workplaces pay for play is measured in a transparent way. If you perform, you get paid, if you outperform, you get paid more, if you underperform you get a warning to lift – then three strikes and off you go to something else.
So teachers do need their performance measured in a transparent way. That is why I can’t understand the broad resistance to measurement (eg basic reading, writing and arithmetic competency testing).
I think most people on the outside looking in on public school teaching (and I assume your interest is outward looking) would say that the Government IS ultimately responsible – for the measurement of teacher performance ! So the challenge to lift standards rests with teachers – after all I don’t think Kevin & Julia will be teaching Chemistry classes anytime soon.
BTW are you seriously arguing that increased transparency will lead to public school teachers having to work in a politicised workplace with stigma (or should that be stigmata) attaching ? Goodness – how much more politicised could teachers become (come on down Chariman Mao) ?
Well identified Bernard.
I agree there should be more competition in the education sector and Universities especially, for example there is massive wastage on out of date or simply low-quality courses. I don’t like the provision of racial and socio-economic data of schools however.
The devil is always in the implementation of course and the regulation and cost of information-gathering would seem to be least suited to day-to-day petrol and grocery prices (though improving home loan transferability is probably worthwhile). I am all for greater information, but especially on most economic issues it is window dressing.
How about greater tax reform – reducing its complexity, and actually raising the money to eliminate inefficient taxes like stamp duties? The job of raising revenue should be left to income taxes, company income tax, resources royalties and the GST. There are so many taxes outside of these that do not serve any social purpose but are simply to raise revenue outside of the most politically visible areas. The problem with this is that they discriminate against certain transactions and activities – which makes them inefficient. They are like the reliance of the Australian colonies on tariffs for revenue.
Speaking of tariffs, there should be an end to the permanent subsidies/tariffs for industries like car manufacturing and agriculture. Following from that, the government should create a national economic strategy which identifies what areas we can be most competitive in and how we should foster them.