Australian Education Issues

The World Socialist Web Site interviewed school teachers over the past week about the Rudd government’s newly-launched My School web site, which publicly ranks government and private schools across the country for the first time, using standardised literacy and numeracy tests called NAPLAN.

As the federal Labor government intended, My School’s data was immediately turned into media league tables of “winning” and “losing” schools designed to stigmatise those schools at the bottom and stampede parents into enrolling their children at private or higher-scoring schools.

Labor’s web site is designed to accelerate the privatisation of education, narrow the curricula to serve the interests of employers, and blame teachers for poor test results, diverting attention from the chronic under-funding of public education.

The Rudd government’s launch of its My School web site on January 29, publicly ranking government and private schools across the country according to standardised tests, marks an enormous acceleration of the shift toward a market-based, fee-paying model of education.

The measure, opposed by virtually the entire teaching profession and many parents, and which the former Howard government proved unable to introduce, is now being carried out by a Labor government, with the enthusiastic backing of business and the media, and the assistance of the teachers’ unions.

Exactly as intended, My School’s data was immediately turned into media league tables of “winning” and “losing” schools. This process is designed to stigmatise those schools at the bottom and create an inevitable stampede of parents seeking to enrol their children at higher-scoring schools.

Technical and Further Education (TAFE) teachers in the state of New South Wales (NSW) walked off the job last month to protest the biggest assault on their working conditions in decades, an agenda being driven by the federal Labor government’s misnamed “education revolution” and being enforced by the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF). Further stoppages are scheduled next week.

The immediate trigger for the walkout was a ruling handed down on October 15 by the NSW Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) which directed that TAFE work-loads be increased by 20 percent in return for an average 1.5 percent annual salary “increase”.

In settlement of the 2008-2011 TAFE award, the IRC ruled that the NSW Department of Education (DET) could direct teachers to:

Members of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at 16 universities stopped work yesterday to fight increased workloads, a blow-out in class sizes, casualisation and other attacks on jobs and conditions, which are being driven by the Rudd Labor government’s misnamed “Education Revolution”.

Nationally, thousands of academics and general staff joined the “day of action” protesting the gutting and ongoing commercialisation of tertiary education. But the NTEU is blocking any struggle by university staff against the Rudd government’s agenda. It is seeking separate industrial agreements on a university-by-university basis whose central aim is to enforce Labor’s pro-market assault on public education.