hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Teachers Unions
"Consider the union reaction to the Rudd Government's education revolution outlined last month by the Prime Minister and his deputy, Education Minister Julia Gillard. Reforms to make education more transparent by mandatory reporting of student results, allowing parents to compare school performance? Opposed by unions. Transparency and accountability reforms that will enable the most disadvantaged schools to be identified and receive extra funding of $500,000 for your average school so that they may improve? Opposed by unions. Moves to give greater autonomy and flexibility for principals to hire staff? Opposed by unions. Moves to introduce performance-based pay for teachers to encourage better teachers? Opposed by unions. Moves to introduce a national curriculum so that students moving between states and territories can access a seamless education system? Opposed by unions. Queensland Teachers Union boss Steve Ryan summed up the reforms as "beyond insulting".It's not news that teachers unions remain the single biggest hurdle to improving public education in Australia. They are wedded to an archaic public system that has long protected teachers, not promoted the interests of students. What is news is a federal Labor government is apparently willing to tackle the union influence that has long infected state and federal politics. The Howard government talked about reforming public education but achieved very little.
So it was powerful symbolism and pragmatic politics for Gillard, from Labor's left faction, to pose the killer question to union critics: "I cannot understand why public institutions such as schools should not be accountable to the community that funds their salaries and running costs." If any other group, drawing on the public purse, were exempt from disclosure and accountability, union activists would be the first to cry foul, demanding to know what was being hidden from the taxpaying public."
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Unions can act as vehicles allowing individual workers without much bargaining power to gather together and negotiate as a collective. This has both positive and negative effects. Employers finds it harder to exploit workers and society does not descent so easily into a two tier system comprised of a manipulating upper class on the one hand and a permanently exploited, animal like underclass on the other who's constituents never have a hope of affording the environmental factors, for example good education, which might allow some of them to realise their full potential and rise up out of the lower class.
However unions can also provide a platform for the type of herd instinct which protects mediocrity. If it is true that the teachers unions in Australia are the main barriers to improving public schools or at least maintaining public schools at a high standard, then they are one of the key causes of public schools increasingly loosing children to private schools and the associated shift in government focus towards private funding.
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