Julie Bishop’s reference group may be a joke…

… but so is NSW Minister for Education John Della Bosca’s response to it. See Expert barred from history panel.

A NSW bureaucrat has been barred from helping recommend what year 9 and 10 school students should be taught about Australian history.

Jennifer Lawless, a Board of Studies inspector who has taught history for 20 years, was named by the federal Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, yesterday as one of several experts who would help overhaul the history curriculum.

John Howard: bullying expert extraordinaire…

[WARNING: some adult content appears in the second half of this post.]

If you thought last night’s rant was over the top, check me out on the subject in 2004 here (ex-Diary-X stored on the Big Archive). Julie Bishop’s performance last night is transcribed here.

…TONY JONES: You’re not suggesting that good retention rates or higher retention rates are a bad thing, are you? Still, you haven’t explained what this means – ‘a soulless and narrow form of national economic service’. National economic service, what does that mean?

JULIE BISHOP: The focus of Labor has been very much on the numbers only and not on the individuals. I mean, we’re talking about providing choice in schooling. The Labor Party had a policy about no new non-government schools, taking away choice from parents. They were focused on a very narrow definition of education that was strictly public education and strictly on numbers. We’re looking at choice and opportunity and that’s what the Prime Minister was discussing tonight. My point about retention rates was this: you don’t set a target, you pluck a target out of the air and say, ‘That must apply across the board’, you look at what’s best for individual students. Now some students would rather leave school at 16 and then come back to education later. The point is that they ought to have the basic skills when they leave school so that they can come back to education. It’s the quality of the education they receive, not whether they were forced to stay to complete Year 12, for example.

TONY JONES: Let’s be absolutely clear on this. Does the Government think it’s a bad idea to link education to national prosperity and productivity?

JULIE BISHOP: Not at all. Of course it’s fundamental. But the point is we’re not constrained by just a narrow focus on targets and numbers. We’re looking at the individual. We’re looking at choice and opportunity for students…

What the PM actually said last night is not at this stage on his web site, but it is in The Australian.

Hollow desperation: John Howard on education — TV review bonus

That’s my first impression of Howard’s attempt just tonight to undo Kevin Rudd’s progress on the schools front. I only have the news report to go on at this stage. I will follow it up later. Still following Kevin (the D-word one) down the yellow brick road, it appears.

Rudd comes back on education policy

Again I will confine myself to schools, leaving the whole argument about tertiary policy to others. Kevin Rudd said:

Education Revolution

Every country in the world knows the more you invest in the education, skills and training of your people, the more productive your economy becomes. The problem we have in Australia is that against so many of our competitor economies, we are falling behind.

It is time to put a stop to this by investing in a real Education Revolution – not just increasing investment but also raising the standards. For Labor, we actually believe in education. It’s not something we’ve cooked up over night. It’s one of our core values – and has been so for more than a century.

Julie Bishop embraces destructive policy…

How to poison relationships in a school? How to stress out Principals even more? Just ask Julie Bishop. She knows, and for reasons only God knows that is precisely what she plans to do. See Plan for principals to set teacher pay. Not surprisingly, Principals don’t want it. Nor does the ACER.

The recommendation to give principals discretion to determine pay rises contradicts the views of Lawrence Ingvarson, from the Australian Council for Educational Research, commissioned by the Federal Government to conduct a study on performance pay for teachers.

A case study in extremis of educational philosophies

Atlantic Monthly never fails to please me with its intelligence and civility, even if some very conservative people sometimes write there: Mark Steyn for example. In the January-February 2007 issue, just now available in Surry Hills, there are a number of good articles, but the one that has most attracted me is Amy Waldman, “Reading, Writing, Resurrection”. For the moment you may read it all online, but against the time it closes from non-subscribers, here is a taste. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed one of America’s worst school systems and made New Orleans the nation’s laboratory for educational reform. But can determined educators and entrepreneurs transcend the damage of the flood — and of history?” Read it as you contemplate our education debate here in Australia. Particularly note the graphic on the right!