The quip has been doing the rounds since the Big Apple's education chief was invited to Australia. Having New York lecture us on how to run an education system was like Eric the Eel teaching Ian Thorpe to swim.
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Senior education bureaucrats in NSW and teacher unions were amazed at the way the Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, was so quick to embrace the New York City schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and his reforms.
Australia blitzes the US and Britain in international literacy and numeracy results, leaving many educationists wondering what they could possibly gain by following New York's example.
Gillard's backing of Klein has sealed the disappointment felt by many who are still waiting for any real sign of the much anticipated education revolution to materialise after more than a year of the Rudd Government.
This disappointment extends to Labor's adoption of the Howard government's policies on school reporting, private school funding and inadequate resourcing for public schools. Despite an analysis by the Federal Department of Education which showed $2.7 billion had been overpaid to more than half the country's independent schools, the Rudd Government continues to support the previous government's $42 billion private schools funding commitment for the next four years. A review has been promised by 2012.
The Government announced in November it would inject an extra $556 million into public education by 2011-12, the first funding increase for the sector in 10 years. But it falls short of the $1.4 billion a year needed for public schools to recover the share of total schools funding they have lost since 1996.
The Australian Education Union has released results of a survey of 1000 people last month which found 77 per cent agreed there would be no education revolution without a substantial investment in public schools.
The union's president, Angelo Gavrielatos, said: "The education community remains bitterly disappointed that with the Rudd Government having embraced for another four years the Howard government's discredited school funding policies as well as policies on school reporting which could lead to the creation of educationally unsound measures and league tables."
While Klein has top credentials as an anti-trust lawyer, he has no qualifications in education. What he lacks in expertise, he seems to have made up for with charm and political savvy.
The quality of New York test results are disputed, but the way they are publicly reported, ranking the performance of schools, is politically popular. Parents want clear information on their child's performance, the quality of teachers and how the school compares with others, as research for the Australian Government confirmed in November.
While the notion of transparency is politically appealing, critics of the New York model say it is confusing because it ranks top schools below poorer performers.
National testing, a national curriculum and school league tables are all part of the British education model which Peter Mortimore, a former director of the Institute of Education at the University of London, has criticised as a failure. As an example to follow, he points to Finland, which tops the world in literacy and numeracy without standardised testing.
A senior NSW bureaucrat shares that view, saying the US and British systems "test the shit out of students to no end".
Andrew Dowling, of the Australian Council of Research, released a paper last month advocating the Government's development of a national standardised testing regime.
Another supporter of standardised testing is Tom Bentley, a key policy adviser to Gillard and a former director of the British think tank Demos, which was active in the British school reform debate, promoting assessment to improve education standards. He also advised David Blunkett, the former British secretary of state for education and employment, on policy, including school curriculum reform. That he would spruik New York's system is no surprise. Britain has introduced a national curriculum, mandatory testing at ages seven, 11, 14 and 16 and school league tables.
The Australian Government is establishing a similar system with national standardised testing for years 3, 5, 7 and 9, a national curriculum and a reporting system that will probably allow the creation of school league tables.
The New York league table system appears to be a remarkable success story. But scratch below the surface. The grading system rewards schools that add value to student scores. A school whose average test scores increase from 20 to 30 might receive an A grade while a school whose average scores dropped from 90 to 87 might get a D. "Which school would you want your child to be in?" asks Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
"Parents and the public have a difficult time understanding the gradings," she told the Herald . "It is not really transparent at all … There are some excellent schools that are getting low grades."
The New York Times reported in November that 83 per cent of New York high schools had received an A or B grade, up from 65 per cent the year before.
Trevor Cobbold, an economist for the Australian Productivity Commission for more than 30 years and the convener of Save Our Schools, says the jump was mostly down to an unexplained reduction in cut-off scores. Had they not been changed, only 71 per cent of schools would have rated an A or B last year. Results from national tests by the US Department of Education show student achievement in New York has stagnated since 2003.
The NSW director-general, Michael Coutts-Trotter, advocated transparent reporting, but did not support the New York grading system, which in NSW would lead to the likes of Sydney Girls High being graded F. "We don't [want to] move to something that is so simplified that we break the relationship of trust with our teaching workforce," he said.
The NSW Minister for Education, Verity Firth, is a sceptic of the grading system and league tables, but agrees with the Federal Government on providing parents with transparent data on a child's performance. In NSW, parents already receive reports that include enrolment figures, attendance, class sizes, retention rates, staff qualifications, standardised test results and value-added performance.
Klein's critics say his system fails to improve education quality. The reputations and salary bonuses of teachers in the US depend increasingly on how well they prepare students for mostly multiple-choice style tests.
Ravitch has shown the New York test scores have been mainly flat or declining in national standardised tests. "Why anyone would want to copy this system is beyond me, particularly when Australia does better in all the international assessments and better than the US," she told the Herald . "Test taking and preparation for tests has become a substitute for education here."
The acting Education Minister, Brendan O'Connor, said Gillard had "never suggested that every policy decision should be determined by standardised test results. [But] without adequate assessments, there is no way of knowing which students need additional assistance."
Daniel Kurtz, professor of education at Harvard and an expert on standardised testing, says many policymakers often turned to testing regimes because they were cheap to implement, provide fast results and have an aura of objectivity.
"If, for example, you have kids who are highly transient, who don't speak English, who come from dysfunctional homes, it's hard imagining that a better test is really going to solve the problem," he says.
Christopher Pyne, the federal Opposition's education spokesman, accused Gillard of using "smoke and mirrors" with the education revolution. "They trumpet Joel Klein, saying they are doing the same thing, but they were opposed to our transparency agenda when it came to reporting on schools."
Labor may have abandoned full-fee-paying university places and replaced Howard's Australian technical colleges with trade schools. But many educationists are still waiting for greater signs of a break with the past.