It's no secret that, like the US singer Billy Joel, Minister for Education Julia Gillard is in a New York state of mind. After a trip earlier this year, Gillard has waxed lyrical about the success of the Big Apple's education system.
So impressed is the federal Education Minister that she has invited the head of the New York Department of Education, Joel Klein, to Australia next month to convince state and territory authorities that they should also start singing from Klein's songbook.
In New York, school results in statewide tests are made public and schools are ranked by performance. Teachers are also monitored, and rewarded if their students improve or punished if they do not.
On the surface it looks good. For too long, parents have been kept in the dark about whether Australian schools are up to scratch, and under-performing teachers have been able to keep their jobs.
At the level of rhetoric, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's call to make school data public, like academic results, teacher morale and student behaviour, also deserves a tick.
As the PM said, if parents find out their school is no good they can vote with their feet and move to the next one.
Reality check: unfortunately matters are not so simple. For all the extra millions spent on New York education rising from $US12.5 billion in 2002 to a projected $US22 billion this year, and all the Joel Klein initiatives to make schools and teachers accountable, the system is no better.
While students' results, measured by state tests, have strengthened on Klein's watch, according to the more credible and objective National Assessment of Educational Progress students' scores have flatlined.
As argued by Sol Stern, a New York-based educationalist, the reason state-controlled results have improved is that the bar has been lowered each year so more children succeed.
Someone should also tell Minister Gillard that, in every major international test since the 1970s, America has failed to perform in the top category. Why should Australia follow New York's example while world's-best performers such as Singapore, Japan, Finland and the Netherlands are ignored?
The way New York schools are ranked is also open to criticism. Schools are not rewarded according to the best results but ranked according to how much their performance improves.
US academic Diane Ravitch argues, ''There is so much emphasis on progress that schools that consistently have high scores may be graded F because they did not improve while schools with abysmal scores that went up a few points would get an A.''
If the New York system were adopted by the AFL, based on the 2007-08 home and away results, Geelong (at the top of the table both years) would get an F because there was no improvement. The Western Bulldogs, on the other hand, would be rewarded with an A as the team moved from 13th on the ladder to third.
The result? As noted by New York education activist Leonie Haimson, under this faulty ranking system the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice can be cited by US News and World Report as one of the nation's leading high schools despite receiving an F.
The system that is used to evaluate teachers is also open to criticism. Not only are teachers rewarded or punished largely on the basis of one criterion student performance in standardised tests but the margin of error, according to the New York Department of Education's own research, is 15 per cent to 20 per cent.
Under the New York system, one that Minister Gillard now wants to mimic, it's impossible to know whether a teacher's ranking signifies him or her as being below average, average or above average.
Unlike Gillard, parents strike a discordant note when talking about New York's education system. In a 2008 survey carried out by a group called Class Size Matters, most parents argued there was too much emphasis on testing.
More important for parents were reducing class sizes and spending more on school maintenance.
Over the past 10 months, Gillard has argued that gone are the days of guesswork and unproven fads. Rudd's education revolution, she argues, is based on sound research about what works and what doesn't.
It's a pity, when singing the praises of New York and Joel Klein, that the minister fails to follow her own advice.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is director of Melbourne-based consultancy Education Strategies
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