The Teachers Are Blowing Their Whistles!

But teachers who try to discuss the problems can be threatened with a punishment program (Managing Unsatisfactory Performance).

Nothing at all can be "beaten up" into a "confidential allegation concerning them" that will destroy their health and their career.

So Queensland teachers are forced to conform to systemic failure. 

Why are students who fail a majority of their subjects every year allowed to move up to the next grade?

Maybe there is a need to take a look at the way the whole Education System works.

Or, should I say, fails to work.

Jane Alley of Brisbane, Reader's Comment, Sort teaching wheat from chaff, Ross Guest, The Courier-Mail : 20 November 2009

The NAPLAN tests were a joke.

During my practicum last year in grade 7, we supervised the maths tests - the class teacher instructed us to review completed answer books of students who finished too early to look for 'any stupid mistakes' and hand them back to the student.

Any mistake ended up being reviewed and the child gently pointed in the direction of the correct answer.

This seems to be an amazing allegation.

But when I was working in one Queensland state school we were expected to do a huge amount of one-to-one maths testing.

It was an impossible amount of testing really.

Most teachers were testing children during their lunch hours and really "pulling out the stops" to get the testing completed.

I noticed that one particular teacher was very relaxed and did not appear to be doing very much testing.

I suspected that her results were being "fudged".

So it is possible that "fudging" test results is now part of the culture in Queensland.

Then again, how the children managed to complete the test at all was amazing in itself.

During normal weeks they must have spent 1 to 2 hours on maths in total.

And I bet that a lot of that time was spent "colouring in".

Twenty years ago it would have been 1 to 2 hours a day - and no calculators!

I've quit education altogether now, it's pointless.

I'm not dedicating the rest of my life to teaching the garbage curriculum set in this state.

• Posted by: Student Teacher of Brisbane, Readers' Comment 21, Academic ratings compared, Tanya Chilcott,  The Courier-Mail, May 22, 2009: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/comments/0,23836,25518707-3102,00.html

... As a secondary school maths teacher, I have had enough.

It is certainly child abuse when Year 9 students reach me at their age and still need to count up in threes on their fingers in order to tell me what four times three is.

I am amazed that they know how to add up in such groups to even work that out, considering they seem to have been taught virtually no maths facts in seven years of primary school.

I cannot teach them fractions or formulae, decimals or percentages, so necessary for everyday life (let alone for doing any science) until I spend months of revision drilling them on the times tables.

• Anita Bailey, Holland Park West, QLD, Letter to the Editor, Opinion, p. 14, The Weekend Australian, Saturday 21 March 2009.

"One of the main problems (at Queensland independent schools) seems to me to be the curriculum imposed on them, or at least the English curriculum ...

My son is in Year 11 at one of these schools. It's a well-known school. And it is subject to an English curriculum imposed by the state that forces school kids to do English assignments ... on things such as advertisments. These kids have to "deconstruct" the ad. ...

This awful discourse stuff has a few unintended consequences that are good ones. The main one is that it creates an awful lot of cynicism about this junk. The kids overwhelmingly think it is garbage.

And if you can talk to the English teachers away from his or her boss, then most of them will quietly tell you it's garbage too. How awful it must be to have to teach this nonsense when you actually know it's nonsense. ..."

• System is doing a good job of making students hate English, James Allan, Garrick Professor of law at The University of Queensland, page 29, The Courier-Mail.