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Australian: Real ed reform is happening in Florida

As I commented last week, sometimes people on the outside looking in make the best observations.  Take this from Australia, for example (yes, it’s a long quote, but it’s a long and important column): 

For too long, the social engineers in charge of teaching used the classroom as a leveller, where no one failed and no one excelled. Or, if a student was failing or excelling, you wouldn’t know it from the school report dropped on the kitchen bench. In the weird world of educrats, the focus on outcomes-based education is code for hiding the real outcomes of students.

That information under-load promoted mediocrity for students and teachers alike.

Protecting their own backsides from a caning for poor performance, that is just the way the teachers’ unions want it. Greg Combet may daydream about unions one day running the country again, but in our schools unions still rule. Indeed, nowhere is the power of unions more pernicious than in our schools.

Unions have been dragged kicking and screaming to the table on the issue of transparency and accountability in our schools. Last year, when former federal education minister Brendan Nelson suggested that schools start delivering meaningful information to parents, unions and their supporters defaulted into hysteria.

NSW (New South Wales) Teachers Federation president Maree O’Halloran started waving around the teachers’ industrial award that prevents the public release of comparative data on school performance. This information would lead to school leagues tables and we – meaning union members – don’t want that, she groaned. Other teachers’ unions also preferred the report that doesn’t report.

With unions as their paymasters, state Labor governments also resisted even these modest reforms. As Nelson said at the time: "Money is the only thing that brings them to the table."

Just how meek those reforms are becomes obvious when you look at what’s happening in some American states. In the US a few weeks ago for the American Australian Leadership Dialogue organised by businessman Phil Scanlan, I learned about real education reform. And it’s all happening in Florida.

With textbooks such as Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by Numbers – which includes chapters on Multicultural Math – the US is home to the same sort of politically correct gimcrackery that infects our schools.

In 1999, Florida decided to see how its students were doing. Governor Jeb Bush introduced the nation’s most far-reaching and controversial reforms premised on three ideas: testing, transparency and accountability.

For a quick comparison of where we’re at compared with Florida, click on the state’s Department of Education website (www.fldoe. com). The wealth of information you’ll find there puts the information void on our own state education websites to shame.

Bush’s A+ program involves so-called high-stakes testing of all students from grades three to 10. It’s high stakes because consequences flow from the results. Schools are graded between A to F depending on the performance of their students and, hold on to your seats, in those schools that attract two F-grades in any four-year period, students are given vouchers to attend private schools. As one pundit wrote, it was "the first money-back guarantee in the history of public education".

That the brother of George W. Bush is driving these education reforms will have left-wing union folk frothing about right-wing conspiracies. But the results prove that sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant. In a nutshell, once Florida started testing their students and making schools accountable for the results, student achievement levels kept rising.

Thanks to the Florida Supreme Court’s recent legal contortions having partially undone one of Bush’s main reforms–namely, school choice–it remains to be seen whether Florida will be able to hang on to its gains in education.  But it’s somehow reassuring to know that we aren’t the only nation having to lock horns with the teachers’ unions.  Read the whole thing.  And to better appreciate the columnist’s criticism of "Rethinking Mathematics", see Moebius Stripper’s thoughts here (warning: language).