Getting the schools back to basics.

My message today is a simple one--the Howard government has got to got. Public education cannot afford another three years of this government. John Howard's attempts to unpick every skerrick of the Whitlam achievements and to reframe Australian culture into something of his own choosing continued unabated during 2006 and have reached a point which most of us would not have imagined possible ten years ago.

--Pat Byrne, Federal President, Australian Education Union, 2007

IF, AS THE APHORISM suggests, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then it is obvious that school education is a key policy area where the Howard government succeeded; why else would Kevin Rudd, when Opposition leader, spend much of the twelve months preceding the 2007 federal election copying the government's education agenda?

Unlike Mark Latham's politics of envy, with the hit-list of non-government schools he took to the 2004 election, Rudd and his education spokesman, Stephen Smith, spent much of 2007 staking the same territory as the conservatives. The ALP promised to maintain the Howard government's Socio-Economic Status formula to fund non-government schools, argued that schools and teachers needed to be held accountable for results and for a back-to-basics approach to curriculum, especially in relation to a more traditional approach to teaching history and literature. While the ALP promised to adopt a collaborative approach to working with the states and territories, unlike the Howard government that often enforced policy initiatives by tying them to Commonwealth funding, the ALP's education stance mirrored many of the Coalition government's initiatives.

That the Howard government set the agenda on issues like parents' right to choose between government and non-government schools, the need for a more academically focused approach to curriculum and the need to hold schools accountable and to monitor and raise standards, especially with literacy and numeracy, is beyond dispute. Unfortunately, it is also the case that in the final year or two of the Howard government, the then Opposition was allowed to take control of the education debate and to nullify education as an electoral disadvantage. For much of 2007, the Coalition government, except for the Prime Minister's occasional involvement, appeared to be missing in action when it came to education and those policies that were released failed to gain widespread support or community traction.

BENCHMARKS AND ACCOUNTABILITY

THE CONSTITUTION gives the states control over education and, as a result, the Commonwealth government does not employ any teachers or manage any schools. The various state education departments and boards of studies have a history of acting autonomously and, while initiatives like the "Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling for the Twenty-First Century" and national projects like the "Discovering Democracy Civics and Citizenship" program and "Statements of Learning", where states have to ensure that local curriculum documents embed nationally agreed curriculum outcome statements, seek to bring about national consistency, it is difficult for the Commonwealth government to determine what happens in the nation's classrooms. Attempts to challenge the status quo are made more difficult by the cultural Left's dominance in education, evidenced by its control over faculties of teacher education, professional associations and teacher unions like the Australian Education Union.