Recent Articles

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.

A Culture of Poverty? The Debate generated by the extraordinary reach of Ruby Payne

The original intent of this article was to gather together the debate and provide what might best be described as a select annotated bibliography on the topic of Ruby Payne and her amazing reach across schools across the US but also apparently in Australia. However just as I was consolidating all the articles I stumbled across a blog by Larry Ferlazzo posted on 6 February 2012 that obviously had the same idea. So I have started with his website but kept the extracts from some of the articles I have sourced that were not picked up by Ferlazzo.

The Revolution in the Classroom Debate

The Four Corners program on Monday, 6 February 2012, presented by Kerry O'Brien profiled three schools, one independent and two government, who are paying close attention to teacher quality by focussing on instructional practice. The program has led to quite a debate, and in this article I profile the commentary from teachers and others.

The Debate over Teacher Value-Add and Student Outcomes in Adulthood

Can the relationship between high performing teachers and students be observed and assessed at the individual level? On 15 January an article by Alicia Wood (Putting a dollar value on having top teachers, SMH) pronounced that good teachers can influence the earning power, teenage pregnancy rates and university enrolments of their students.

Call for wider debate on education accountability

The new national president of the Australian College of Educators (ACE), Professor Robert Lingard, has called for a wider public debate on accountability in education. In an interview in the latest edition of Professional Educator, Professor Lingard said ACE intends to play a leading role in debating Australia’s accountability push and national education agenda.

Australia Day Honours 2012

ACE congratulates Fellows and past winners of the Sir James Darling Medal on being named in the 2012 Australia Day Honours list.

Inner Sydney - Term 4 Newsletter

    INNER SYDNEY REGION TERM 4 NEWSLETTER 2011 overview