Figures released last month indicated that the number of breaches by teachers, school staff and principals in administering the 2011 National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests almost doubled from 2010. The results point to the immense pressure on schools and teachers to achieve high scores under the Gillard government’s My School testing regime.
In 2010, as part of its “education revolution,” the Labor government launched the My School website to rank schools nationally based on their performance in NAPLAN tests. Labor’s aim was not to identify students needing additional support—such indicators were already available—but to pit schools and teachers against each other, driven by the threat of falling enrolments, cuts to funding and eventual closure.
The Australian Labor government passed a bill last month to allow universities to charge all students an annual fee of up to $263 for basic student services, but expressly excluded any funding for political activities. As well as imposing an additional financial burden on students, the legislation reflects concerns in ruling circles about a developing political radicalisation among young people.
Student services had for decades been managed by student unions that received their funding from compulsory student union dues paid by all students on enrollment. However, since the rollout of Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU) by the previous Liberal-National Coalition government in 2007, services have either collapsed as many students elected not to pay the union fees or were taken over by university administrations.
Just one day after a new enterprise agreement was pushed through by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at Sydney’s Macquarie University last week, the management announced redundancies. No sooner had the university’s academic staff members voted in an online ballot on the three-year agreement, than the management declared it was seeking 70 “voluntary separations”—3 percent of the workforce—and other unspecified cuts to staffing levels to achieve further “salary savings”.
The timing of the job cuts underlines the direct connection between the enterprise agreements that the NTEU has helped impose on staff at individual universities across Australia during the past 18 months, and the Gillard government’s “education revolution”—which is turning the entire university sector into a market-driven system.
The following statement is being circulated by Socialist Equality Party supporters at Macquarie University in Sydney, where the National Tertiary Education Union is seeking to push through a new enterprise agreement that will further the federal Labor government’s “education revolution.” Similar agreements have been imposed at individual universities across Australia over the past 18 months, with the union isolating its members at each campus in order to prevent a unified struggle against the introduction of a free market regime that will undercut the conditions of staff and students nationally, as part of a broader assault on public services.
Events in the Australian state of Tasmania over the past few weeks have shone a revealing spotlight on the role of the Greens in spearheading austerity measures. In what the Murdoch-owned Hobart Mercury described as a “stunning backdown”, the Labor-Green state government was forced by public outrage to postpone plans to shut down 20 schools by the end of the year.
Closely supported by national Greens leader Bob Brown, the party’s state leader Nick McKim had been assigned the task—as education minister—of implementing the closures, a substantial attack on the public education system in a state with just over half a million people.
Over the next three days, students in years 3, 5 ,7 and 9 across Australia will sit the NAPLAN (National Assessment Program―Literacy and Numeracy) test in order to provide data for the Gillard Labor government’s MySchool website. MySchool assesses a school’s performance based on the test results and is being openly used by the media to publish de-facto league tables, or performance rankings, of schools throughout the country.
On the eve of last year’s NAPLAN tests, momentum was building among teachers for a nation-wide boycott of the regime. Performance ranking has operated in the United States for a decade and even longer in Britain. It has been exposed by education experts as destructive to the all-rounded intellectual and social development of young people.
Staff at Sydney’s Macquarie University, involved in rolling industrial action for the past six months against budget cuts and a sharp increase in the use of short-term and casual appointments, are facing the imposition of a trade union deal prepared behind their backs.
Members of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) are due to meet today, a fortnight after a March 16 meeting that was supposedly called to inform them about the progress of enterprise bargaining negotiations. The real purpose of that meeting was to prepare them for a sell-out that will enforce the measures demanded by Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz.
A secret report commissioned by the New South Wales Labor government, published by the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend, indicates the scale of the cuts to be made to public education and all areas of social spending, regardless of which party takes office in the state election on March 26.
The report, marked “cabinet-in-confidence,” exposes the federal Gillard government’s NAPLAN (National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy) testing regime and its My School web site as vehicles for shutting down schools and slashing education spending.
The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) report, delivered to the state Labor government early last year, proposes closing more than 100 government schools, axing 7,500 teaching jobs, as well as those of 1,500 school support staff, selling off “surplus” school land and cutting back programs to disadvantaged students.
The mark 2.0 version of the My School web site, launched on March 4, is yet another step in the Gillard Labor government’s assault on public education. Endorsed by the New South Wales Labor government and all the other state governments, the new site ranks schools using data obtained from NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy)—the high stakes literacy and numeracy tests administered to students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
Socialist Equality Party member Carolyn Kennett spoke of the need for a political struggle against the Gillard Labor government and for a socialist perspective to defend education at a stop work rally at Macquarie University on January 5. Her address to fellow-academics appears in full below.
Against the efforts of other speakers to cover up the role of the Labor government, Kennett explained that the crisis facing staff at all universities was a direct result of Labor’s pro-market agenda for higher education—its “education revolution”, which subordinates every aspect of the education system to the demands of the corporate elite.
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