DPM intolerable
The Federal Minister of Education is intolerable.
Peter Curtis AEU Vic Councillor Primary Sector Personal capacity
The bullying of public school teachers by the federal Minister of Education is intolerable.
Minister Gillard is dividing parents, teachers and principals.
Refusal to discuss our concerns over the uses of NAPLAN, and school data on the ‘My School’ website are causing stress, confusion, and personal turmoil for teachers. Her disregard undermines healthy collegiate relationships and is damaging the quality of learning and teaching.
Gillard and her government’s beliefs about the practice, purpose, and future of schools and ‘education’ have not been explicitly stated to parents, but they can be measured by a standardised test.
Addressing a gathering of the Australian Industry Group the Minister stated,
‘In today’s world, the areas covered by my portfolios – early childhood education … (and) schooling… are all ultimately about the same thing: productivity… I’m going to be measuring policies against the all-important criteria of how effectively they increase national productivity.’
Parents naturally care about their precious children and they should be assisting them by involving themselves in their children’s school.
But can we possibly accept children as young as three and four being reduced to ‘units of production’, a mere ‘widget’ to which we ‘add value’, only to serve and benefit the interests of the commercial, corporate market?
Why should all our best expectations and high ideals for children be boiled down to producing results for dubious standardised test data?
The only purpose of these unreliable and misleading tests is to produce data for school comparisons, and to give the corporate media the means to publish detrimentally competitive league tables.
NAPLAN data does not provide for better teaching practice, nor does it provide useful information for understanding the learning needs of children.
Our children’s best interests are not served by NAPLAN tests.
These tests undermining good learning and teaching and distract our attention away from our best efforts to assist children’s learning.
It is intolerable that the federal minister believes that she alone is the most able person to decide what is best for our children.
While the minister claims to make her decisions based on evidence she has not provided us with any apart from her concocted sound-bites.
She claims ‘education’ is important but her belligerent attitude toward teachers and parents tells us otherwise.
Her glib responses demonstrate her ignorance about teaching and learning and what good education should be,
“I am not negotiating about what is on the My School website… I think that (the Australian Education Union Moratorium) is a foolish course that would be bad for students, bad for schools, bad for parents, bad for the nation’s education system.”
Many reputable educators, academics and researchers are explaining why high stakes standardised testing is counter-productive for children’s wellbeing and learning.
We are ignored because we challenge Gillard’s opinion, and her government’s view that it is the economic needs of the commercial markets that matter most.
The people who brought upon us the global economic crisis, are informing Gillard and her government of what our civic and educational obligations to children should be.
It is intolerable that we are being asked to ignore the evidence that overwhelming contradicts the government’s education policies.
It is intolerable that Gillard expects us to accept being bullied into withholding judgement and passively accepting her attempts to silence our voice and stop us acting on our professional and ethical concerns.
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