Recent Articles

Don't Panic! A hitch-hiker's guide to teaching the digital native

An extended version of the article published in the May 2012 edition of Professional Educator including reference list.

Budget Wrap: No pain, but no gain either

Tuesday night's budget was all about finding savings to meet the surplus. Fortunately education was one of the least affected areas with overall spending remaining stable in dollar terms (just shy of $30 billion), but incurring a small loss in real terms. The best news overall has been the announcement of a $54m investment into science and mathematics teaching, to be shared between universities training teachers and schools needing resources. This has been an area of crucial need in education, and we look forward to seeing how the programs are implemented.

2011 Annual Report

The 2011 Annual Report from the Australian College of Educators.

ACE Victoria Newsletter March 2012

News from ACE Victoria in Term 1, 2012 including the President's report, profiles of new committee members, a report on the recent Gippsland Awards and lecture by international guest speaker Ben Levin.

2011 Financial Statements

Please see attached Financial Statement June, 2011.   Thank you, ACE National Office

National Certification: Let’s make sure we get it right

Late last year, the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, Peter Garrett, announced a modified version of the Rewards Payments for Great Teachers initiative. Although funding for the period to 2015 has been reduced, the slowdown provides a valuable opportunity to make sure we get the assessment methods right before going to scale.

Income Contingent Loans for the VET Sector - the experts respond

There were a number of articles responding to the to the Prime Minister's announcement that the Commonwealth will negotiate with states and territories to set up an income-contingent loans scheme for vocational education and training students, similar to that offered to university students. It is likely to cover diplomas and advanced diplomas in engineering, computing and IT, architecture, building, community services, social sciences and health. This briefing brings together the key responses across the sector picked up by the Australian press.

The New Stupid

Today's enthusiastic embrace of data has waltzed us directly from a petulant resistance to performance measures to a reflexive and unsophisticated reliance on a few simple metrics--namely, graduation rates, expenditures, and the reading and math test scores of students in grades 3 through 8. The result has been a nifty pirouette from one troubling mind-set to another; with nary a misstep, we have pivoted from the "old stupid" to the "new stupid."

The Secret Research Report

The important research by Richard Teese makes it clear that, under current funding regimes, the exercise of choice by some parents erodes quality for others. The concentration of advantage in some schools concentrates disadvantage in others. Funds for equity fight funds for choice. Choice should be managed so as to ensure that segregation does not occur and that public schools are fully supported as regards their viability and their vitality as community assets.

Avoiding Institutional Dementia: reinvigorating the study of the History of Education, Education policy, Education reform,

Dr Brian Croke has suggested that the Australian College of Educators take up reinvigorating the study of the history of education as a special agenda for future years. Even finding, documenting and publishing the deliberations, debates and decisions of national meetings of Ministers of Education, in the various forms they have occurred over the last 50 years would be enlightening for those engaged in similar meetings today.The issues are not new. Our engagement with those issues however, is the engagement of dementia sufferers and will look thus to any future generation that can find, or stumbles across, the source documents.