Mediocre is the new black for schools!
Whist I normally write about the challenges facing practitioners in the vocational education space, I thought it wise to review the student experience before they reach us and the baggage they may bring from their school experience. I think there are implications for us, if we have a disaffected group graduating into our learning environments and feel the timing is right to discuss some of these issues here. I continue to be troubled by our school system that is high on pursuit of excellence rhetoric, but has internal systems which actively work against teachers who perform exceptionally. Whilst we all agree that there is no greater influence on student outcomes than the quality of the teacher, it seems that great teachers are leaving the profession on-mass and there is no real mechanism for retaining the talent.
Many of the problems are systemic. There are powerful unions who protect the lowest common denominator, using smoke and mirror techniques to demand higher wages without addressing the real issues that classroom teachers actually face. Wouldn’t the money be better spent in reducing class-sizes, having more specialist support, access to improved resources etc? Will increasing remuneration make them better teachers? The simple answer is no… it is more like guilt money paid to hush a broken system. And the system is broken. Unfortunately, the fate of education is a political hot potato and the reforms necessary will take more than a single term of government to bare fruit, even the low hanging ones. At the heart of the problem is a toxic culture of negativity which manifests itself within most schools and even if you attract the best and brightest to the vocation, it won’t take long before the poison takes effect. In such an environment there can be no individual excellence as it makes the others look bad. Further to this, there is no real outlet for Principals to move on poor performing teachers on as they are protected and as the Waiting for Superman documentary discusses, there is a kind of “lemon dance” that takes place where Principals swap their worst performers and hope to get something better than what they gave away. Even the latest federal government musings around performance-based bonuses for teachers values tenure as an indicator of the bonus size - with higher bonuses proposed for teachers with more experience. Surely, outcomes are outcomes and the bonus should be the same if the performance is the same.
We owe it to our children to be better than this. We have a profound responsibility in guiding these students’ futures and setting them up to be capable and confident learners as well as productive citizens. The influence of a bad teacher can have a life-time affect and we often meet these students in our adult learning contexts. These are the ones who have not been instilled with a love of learning and have been unsuccessful in schooling in a traditional sense and lack the confidence to take the kinds of risks required to be an effective learner.
What is necessary is a longer term view for teacher training. It shouldn’t end when they get the parchment. There should be an ongoing mentoring process to ease them from practicum to actual practice. This is something that the learning and development field does well but is absent from most school inductions. There is some light at a national level with Centres of Excellence programs being rolled out across the country. These provide the opportunity for genuine transition from pre-service teaching to full-time teaching and a safety net of advice and support via structured and tailor-fit mentoring activities. I wait with anticipation at the results of these pilot programs and hope they that enable a reversal of the skills vacuum and provide some sustained change in the quality of teachers. However, I fear that this initiative could be hamstrung without a robust examination of and action against the systemic issues raised earlier. I guess for the time being, mediocre is still the new black!
Marc Ratcliffe
CEO, MRWED Group
Follow Me on twitter: @MRWED_CEO