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来看看今天SMH的新闻
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Rudd sets tough rules for school funding
Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font Phillip Coorey and Anna Patty
August 28, 2008
KEVIN RUDD has threatened the states and education unions by declaring future federal education funding will be conditional on information about the performance of individual schools being made available to parents.
Announcing a new plank of what he has called an education revolution, Mr Rudd demanded yesterday that the states agree to a new national system of school transparency by December so it could be in place for the next school year.
As flagged by the Herald, their agreement would be a non-negotiable condition of the four-year Commonwealth-state education funding agreement to come into effect on January 1.
"We don't intend to shirk from this," he said, adding he expected "significant argy-bargy" from the unions and the states.
The information would make it easier for parents to decide where to send their children. It would also allow them to "vote with their feet" and send their children elsewhere if the school they were using was found to be underperforming.
The Prime Minister also outlined incentives to improve the calibre of teaching by introducing performance pay and luring talented graduates to the profession and placing them where they were most needed.
He also promised $500,000 to each underperforming school to help them raise standards. If they still failed to do so, they should close or merge, he said.
"Kids out there going to average schools deserve every opportunity that kids at flash schools have," he said.
The acting NSW Minister for Education, John Hatzistergos, welcomed the new funding for disadvantaged schools but did not endorse Mr Rudd's proposal to tie funding to reporting of performance. He would request further detail "to see if it is fair and workable".
Mr Hatzistergos said NSW was already comparing test results between similar schools and setting higher accreditation standards for teachers. "Like-school reporting is already a feature of our system," he said.
But Mr Rudd wants a uniform national system. "I cannot understand why public institutions such as schools should not be accountable to the community that funds their salaries and their running costs," he said.
The president of the Aust- ralian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, condemned the proposals as "more about slogans than substance" and said Mr Rudd was no better than the Howard government.
"We've had FuelWatch, we've had Grocery Watch, and now we've got school watch," he said.
He said Mr Rudd should concentrate on funding and pointed to a report by the union, released yesterday, which said 1000 teaching jobs would disappear by 2012 under funding projections in the federal budget.
Mr Rudd dismissed the report as an "intellectually dishonest document" because funding for the next four years had yet to be finalised and the forward estimates in the budget were not "concrete figures".
The Federal Opposition complained that Mr Rudd pinched its idea. The Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, who was the minister for education when the Howard government tried to introduce a similar measure, in 2004, welcomed Mr Rudd "now following our agenda" but said yesterday's announcement was aimed at distracting from the slowing economy.
The president of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, Jim McAlpine, said tied funding was a good idea only if fair comparisons were made between schools. |
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更新：跳槽。在家十年，重回职场。 (2021-8-18) zhangxiaoli 
楼主:风玲
发表于 2008-8-28 11:23
