Stephen

As good as your article is, I'm not sure that it addresses the core issue.

You and your co-authors suggest that part of the 'problem' is that by being a predominantly female industrial sector, teaching has endured unnecessary scrutiny about performance.

I would whole-heartedly agree that teachers are a scapegoat that politicians love to flog. But, I wouldn't make the link that this is because of the predominance of women employees in the sector.

I think your argument fails when you suggest nursing is also predominantly female, but nurses are not subjected to the constancy of political debate over 'quality assurance'. I might add that pharmacy is also another sector with a predominantly female participation rate.

You write...

"Concern about teacher competence has been around for several decades. Recently, there has been a concerted push by state and federal governments to enact policies to improve “teacher quality”."

You conclude with...

"Our societal obsession with the inadequacy of the teaching force and the repetitive nature of the remedies proposed to fix this unproven deficit are accepted as right and necessary."

I do believe that a cause for the constancy of political debate over 'quality assurance' lies more with the fact that politicians score well in the electorate when they find populist subjects that also have strong emotional ties.

Political comments about educating the family progeny will always find favour with the electorate if the politician can show a link between process and outcome.

We parents will always be able to provide an example as to how our little Johnny or Mary was poorly treated by teacher Anne.

So, when a politician asserts that if we enhance teacher quality, we tend to swallow that by associating it with our own baggage.

As an aside, I've never been able to understand how one can provide assessable criteria to measure 'teacher quality'. The term 'quality' being subjective and not quantifiably measurable against standardised criteria. Hence, 'teaching quality' is evaluative and thus subject to all sorts of rorts.

I would have liked to see your article dwell on the assumed inadequacies of process (ie teacher qualities) being articulated in the 'debate' and related that with outcome (ie actual increase in student skills, etc.).

From where I sit, the linkage between process qualities and outcome has yet to be adequately shown by those advocating same.

That said, part of the 'problem' may also lie with those leading the teaching industry responses to politicians.

Maybe it's time for the industry leaders to call the politicians' bluff and seek them to explain where the supposed shortfall lies.

Cheers

Bruce.

You missed the point about nursing, which is that nurses are not regarded an issue because they work in hierarchies and under control.

I think you kind of proved the point when your teacher in your evidential anecdote is both female and has the rather infantilie name of 'Annie'. What about Ms So-and-So instead? Nope, she is chidlish and lacks proper adult status and respect. She's a GIRL!

And yes everyone has had experiences with teachers but this also applies to doctors.The marked tendency to blame teachers for educational outcomes does not extend to anywhere near the same extent to blaming doctors when patient outcomes are poor. People, on the other hand, are encouraged to pay out on teachers and their stigmatised status makes this acceptable.

Re pharmacists, I bet if you asked someone to invent a name for a fictitious pharmacist they'd say Mr So-and-So. The stereotype does not match the reality.

If this article was correct, then we would also deem child care workers to be unskilled and in need of improvement - so why are parents are constantly going on about how impressed they are with the workers at the child care centre they use?

Stephen, you appear to have missed the underlying cause of falling academic standards for the teaching profession. Private schools have received government funding for 50 years to make them "equivalent" to state schools. The Howard government extended this middle class charity for political vote-buying reasons.

Had all these funds gone into state schools, including teacher salaries, then today experienced classroom teachers would be paid about the same as state politicians (about $160K) ... as they were when I started teaching.

The relative decline in teacher's expendable income since the mid-80s has meant that good academic students look to better paid careers with less stress & higher social acceptability.

Fat cat education bureaucrats bleat that teaching is "a vocation". But try to tell that to the bank when your mortgage payment is overdue & the kids are screaming for dinner when the refrigerator is empty.

There are two axioms of education;
1. If you think education is expensive consider the cost of ignorance: and
2. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Teaching is unique among most professions in that a graduate can enter a classroom after three or four years of study, and then receive little or no formal supervision, particularly in-classroom supervision. The same does not go for doctors, plumbers, nurses, pharmacists, accountants, or any other profession you could care to think about.

Teachers are also unique in that they have the potential to impact a person for their entire life. I could think of a handful of my own teachers that fall within that category. Teachers have my utmost respect.

That said, as a parent, I entrust my children, the most important thing in my life, to a school, to teachers. Obviously, *obviously* I want the best for my child. I don't want good teachers, I want *the best* teachers. Nothing less is good enough for my children. Forgive me if that means I am interested in the quality of teaching, the education standards of teachers, the (lack of) pay and recognition that they receive.

For what it's worth, I couldn't care less if the teacher is male or female, I just want them to help me give my children the best grounding for their future lives.

Yes, I am more inclined myself to focus on this persistent inquisition of the professions, bad enough overall because in the minds of too many people representing authority, except it is no boy's club but entrenched mother's clubs. The issue is especially telling among teachers for that reason, who I do not think are entirely blameless.

Schools even today are the primary sites of political indoctrination, of forced acquiescence to the status quo. You can tell Labor people especially, the way they think, merely by knowing which Labor-sponsored government school they attended.

Beyond your "several decades", since corporal punishment was phased out and this new 'child protection' racket emerged, most schools were unjustly harsh environments. Many, many people still today, men especially, older now than your "several decades", carry unconscionably bitter memories of school. They rarely drive past a school, still today, without recalling the thrashings.

There is no accident that still today men are vastly over-represented in all the statistics on suicide, drug abuse, violence and incarceration. Women predominate in such institutions because they more readily acquiesce to control, even more so today as they close ranks with this 'child protection' racket doing the rounds.

Ask young female undergraduates why they hang around with the boys not girls, is it 'sexual liberation', or what? It's a fair question, and generally they will answer fairly that they don't fool around especially with study pressure, but prefer male company because girls when they get together become incredibly bitchy. The boys likewise.

Children in Australia are not at all 'vulnerable', but like women remarkably safe. The substantiated child abuse rate in Australia remains at around 3-4 in 10,000, not at all evenly but clearly clustered among certain demographic sectors and in certain communities. For children generally, the actual risk is more like 3-4 in 100,000.

Yet even recently women pushing their protection agenda have been found in schools telling even the smallest children that one in four of them is being sexually abused, causing the kiddies to gaze about in wonder at who it was. We have that on public record, with photos and known associates including their political sponsors.

Men tend not teach in primary schools because they run far too high a risk of being accused of molesting the children, partly arising from the fact that in the corporal punishment days it was they who had to administer the cane, as in too many households it is the father obliged to discipline the children on a complaint of the mother's, who stands back manipulating the situation, and partly on a grossly distorted feminist projection arguing that 98% of child abuse is inflicted by men, therefore 98% of men are guilty.

Which brings me to the further fact that women are not only vastly over-represented among teaching staff and in administration, but on P&C committees. Anything happens to their little darlings, and watch the feathers fly. Watch them arriving morning and afternoon in their four-wheel drives, bull bars front and back, to safely drop off and pick up 'their children', when in all respects it is quite as safe and certainly more fun for children to walk the few blocks to school.

If you happen to be a sole father, forget it. Far easier and far more effective to simply make up the difference at home, to have your children actually receive an education under decent supervision despite the school they happen to attend, hoping for the occasional professional among the teaching staff willing to work with you in core remedial areas mostly, like reading and doing their sums, or in the final resort home-school them.

There appears to be a sustained effort lately, hence this and other articles, to renovate the face of schools, to have them appear user friendly, to shed their harsh institutional image and resolve the bitter memories, to employ psychologists to do the brainwashing more gently and unobtrusively in place of the cane, yet at the end of the day a coercive system is still a coercive system.

At the end of the day an entrenched system so open to manipulation and interference, so prone to protection racket corruption setting women and children up as perpetual victims, as state-run 'education', is not going to go any way whatsoever toward improved 'teaching standards'. The contradictions and with them pressures are simply far too great.

Far better, as here in Western Australia, for governments to allow the schools they own their independence, to allow autonomy to administer the school itself and to establish what to teach, to pursue the excellence that particular school is positioned to deliver compared with other schools.

The churches have long been doing that very highly successfully with their schools, and other independent and private schools like Montesori are very, very clear about their philosophies and methods, brooking no nonsense from anybody.

I dare suggest that by doing that first, by allowing trained professionals to simply get on with their job in a supportive and professional environment, the rest will simply fall into place. Good teachers - I really don't care one iota whether male or female - will spontaneously take their place while the rest of them will rightly fall by the wayside.

In short, everybody else just get out of the way finally.

Just to add a littl eevidence to the claim that teachers are thought to be second best because they are mostly WOMEN, how about this

"Allowing the profession to remain female-dominated means that the majority of our teachers will be below average, compared to the distribution we'd have if men were better-represented."

From here:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_performance/2012/08/go_teach_young_man.html