seems like a few people on this thread have great opinions but not so great an understanding of education - from the current state of it in Australia to the latest research in policy making globally. lets clarify a few things from my perspective as an administrator in the international education system teaching International Baccalaureatte courses. 1. Content is about as useful as yesterday's newspapers. Content changes so regularly that to examine educational success on the basis of how well a student remembers facts is pointless. Content education was particularly useful in times when accessing content was extremely difficult - a set of encyclopedias in the library type of thing. The problem today is not finding content but successfully appraising and critically evaluating it. Hence the shift away from content to functional approaches to learning (ATL's) so that students actually have learning skills that are useful and relevant to their future working environment. There's very little to no value in remembering the capital city of any country in the world when you can find it instantly. Being able to judge good from bad info is waaaaaayyyyy more important.
2. Hence, if you use wikipedia to justify anything ever in your entire life you are a fool and have no idea about critically evaluating information.
3. I had 12 years in the elite system in Australia, WA and VIC before moving internationally. The thing that holds private schools back is the flawed, time consuming(and almost pointless to top level private schools) national curriculum. They would achieve far more without that structure or if they were allowed to run with an established curriculum model like IB from the primary years to Grade 12. Passing grade 12 in the IB is equivalent to 6 months credit at many top universities around the world.
4. School funding is a problem - not private school funding - public school funding per student has not kept up with inflation or the needs of technology etc over the past 20 years.
5. the largest problem is a non-bipartisan approach to education. Finland is a classic example of prioritising education as a national goal regardless of the government. hence why the education budget is protected and the Finnish education is the best in the world.
6. I have a majority Korean,Chinese and south east asian student body and the reason they kick the s#!+ out of australian students comes down to work ethic. Not only do the vast majority do regular school, play musical instruments, compete in sports but they also mostly fulfill a full other curriculum in their native tongue, or do tutoring for 3 -4 hours a night. Show me an underachieving or even middle of the road Australian student who does any where near this amount of work one day a week, let alone 6 days a week.
7. Blaming teachers for poor performance is like blaming garbage people for loose rubbish blowing along the street. They can only clean up the things that there to be cleaned up and can only do their job effectively if people put the rubbish in the right place in the bins provided. teachers and administrators with tiny budgets, poor facilities and almost no powers to properly manage, moderate or in some cases remove students from the school, working in a poorly devised and even more poorly run system can really only do so much. as an example, at my last elite school in australia, the budget for my department each year was in excess of $1.5 million. this was on top of the 10 million capital budget for building redevelopment over 5 years. In some cases that is many times greater than the budget for entire public schools.
those who blame teachers have absolutely no idea.
Unfortunately education is an industry like any other.
Yes, some teachers are better than others and Yes, the best schools want the best teachers, and Yes, they pay up to 60k a year MORE than public schools for the same job in australia, and they usually have much better facilities, resources and so forth, and YES, the best teachers really like working with the most motivated students.... it is just like any other industry.
If I offer you double the money, a better job environment, and better opportunities for career development with more motivated students, what do you do? be a martyr? as an example in lest 12 months my school has sent me to singapore for week, hong kong for 8 days, Istanbul for a week, and a week with students along the silk road. do teachers in the public system in australia get that.
so - I apologize for the long post but apportion blame where it is and by and large it is with the faulty system, poor support available for schools, administrators and teachers and the continuous stream of incompetent and under informed governments.
