SMH July 7 by Debra Hayes
There’s a crisis in Australian education but there is no solution to be found in the Teacher Education Expert Panel’s report, chaired by University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott….What we were delivered this week contains misrepresentation and an absurd overreach – a plan for the nation’s education ministers to mandate the content of initial teacher education programs. I only wish that any of our ministers in the states or territories could understand what it is that new teachers need. And why single out teacher education? Will there be a politically appointed panel sometime soon to tell us about what should be in medical or engineering degrees? This report is a politicisation of higher education…
…Transplanting practices shown to work elsewhere is not the solution. As assessment expert Professor Dylan Wiliam is wont to say, in education, everything works somewhere and nothing works everywhere. We need teachers with the kind of professional judgment to know what’s going to work for this group of students right here, right now – and to have the knowledge and skills to make it happen. There’s nothing in this report that prioritises this.
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