In your excellent editorial (''Backlash likely on school report cards'', June 29, p8) you rightly stress the right of parents to accurate information on scholastic achievement in choosing a school for their children.
Teachers' unions oppose the publication of data which will allow the formation of crude ''league tables''. But we must never forget that many parents, not to mention the brighter students, already form their own ''league tables''. If they take an interest in educational issues they soon know very well whether their children are learning to read and write and calculate numbers fluently, and whether the teachers are really helping them, or just providing riot control or child minding.
Parents who care about education should turn off the TV at dinner and talk to their children about what happened at school, listen to what they say, and discuss it with other parents.
The results in national literacy and numeracy tests will only confirm what parents already discover for themselves, if they are really interested.
Robert Willson, Deakin
Your editorial (June 29, p8) noted that teacher unions support a parental-ignorance-is-bliss approach to school testing because different schools receive different sorts of kids.
In effect, dud kids produce dud results, and ranking results will only embarrass them. Better to leave them in under-educated peace. Differing learning capabilities can be accommodated in many statistical ways.
For example, we could assess children both on entering and leaving the school, then rank schools by the percentage value they add to knowledge and skills. Or we could classify schools into socioeconomic or performance strata, based on, say, catchment post codes or school-entry tests, then compare like-with-like in final-year testing.
What teacher unions are really saying, by pointing at the kids, is that there is no such thing as a dud teacher. And even if there were, they sure don't want those paid-up union members being embarrassed.
Tom Waring, Ainslie
Thank you, David Stephens (Letters, June 24) for so clearly and comprehensively listing the many, activities that University of Canberra teachers, in effect, contribute voluntarily in the course of their employment.
Teachers in the schools sector could add much more to this list behaviour management, pastoral care, parent-teacher interviews, overnight excursions, an endless schedule of endless meetings, and so on.
Where school teachers differ significantly from his experience is in the hourly rate $95.70 an hour is something we could only dream about. Twenty in a class is another dream.
While the ACT Government continually refuses to address the abject wages and conditions under which its teachers work, one is reminded of the likelihood that we could open a wonderful new school building, but find that there are no teachers all having accepted better offers.
Philip Rasmus, Australian Education Union
Bridge defence
May I respond to just a few of the critics who have lined up to bag my view on the Immigration Bridge?
John Holland (Letters, June 18) says the bridge would ''endanger the lives of sailors''. This is nonsense. How can he say that when he doesn't even know the design? Why will Immigration Bridge be a killer when Commonwealth Avenua and Kings Avenue bridges aren't?
He goes on the say that there is no need for a pedestrian bridge. Perhaps, but is there a ''need'' for any monuments? We don't ''need'' public artworks but they can provide any city great enrichment. He adds that Walter Burley Griffin didn't ''envisage a pedestrian bridge being built to compete with'' Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. Since when do footbridges ''compete'' with road bridges?
The National Trust's Peter Dowling (''Bridge assertion disputed'', June 17, p2) suggests the Griffin vision for the lake crossing was so different to the present proposal that the Griffins would have repudiated the latter. The fact remains that the Griffin design contemplated a crossing of the lake from what is now the Acton Peninsula to the southern shore of the lake, at about this point.
But Dowling's assertion is sophistry. Is he seriously implying that a bridge in exactly the form Griffin proposed it would be acceptable to the National Trust, or any of the other array of critics? Hardly.
John Hosking (Letters, June 22) claims ''substantial public funding will be required to implement this proposal''. Not so. The proponents of the bridge plan a community-funded monument, a refreshing change to the approach adopted for all our other memorials.
Finally, Lynne Bentley (Letters, June 22) suggests the only way to give the bridge a ''fair go'' is to build it and then knock it down if it doesn't make the grade. There is an easier way: wait till the bridge has actually been designed, then pass judgment.
In making her suggestion, she joins the all-too-numerous ranks of naysayers our city produces, ready to strike down ideas for change almost as soon as they appear in our midst.
My point is this: we have laws which afford protection and fair process to those who want to put up new ideas for Canberra.
Let's allow those laws and processes to take their course.
Gary Humphries, Senator for the ACT
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