Sitting on my friend Peg's lounge, watching the news last night, I gained new insights about this whole "Education Revolution".
It's my first week as Blogger-in-Chief and I'm on the hunt for fellow bloggers. Having known Peg for years, I'm well aware of her disdain for the sort of arrogant know-it-alls who like to make themselves feel important by offering their opinion uninvited every chance they get.
So, despite knowing I had Buckley's I asked anyway, "don't wanna write a blog about this for Open Forum do ya"? Her reply, "write your own blog", (in italics because I have no other way to express the way she spat the word out through pursed lips).
Peg is teacher with more than 40yrs experience. Not merely an experienced teacher, she epitomises the sort of "excellence" that proposed reforms claim to seek to encourage and reward.
The government is talking a lot about teachers needing to meet performance benchmarks. How her students are doing is, and always has been Peg's benchmark. The archetypal strict teacher you think is a grump at first but a term in is your favourite: Peg doesn't make it easy. But she does care; decades before it was trendy she was espousing the need to look after the wider welfare of students.
Many adults are now benefiting from her belief that, as children, they deserved her to deliver and expect the best from them. Her dedication has achieved that rarest of career accomplishments: maintaining the same level of enthusiasm for the job that she had in the beginning.
Sadly, this is particularly rare in teaching; and it's not surprising. I'm struggling to think of another graduate career in which, after being an excellent performer for decades one could not reasonably expect markedly better pay and conditions. As a result many get fed up and move on, never mind the difficulty attracting them in the first place.
In short, if you want to advance your career (in the traditional sense, ie $$$) as a teacher - then you stop teaching. Peg has had plenty of opportunities, but she never wanted an administrative position, or a role in the department, and more money is never going to lure her away from the public system.
Career advancement would hinder her professional fulfillment because she is an educator who is passionate about education.
This isn't intended to be a piece of prose in praise of Peg: her story is representative of many outstanding teachers. But we're not hearing from them in this debate because, probably because they're too busy teaching.
Theirs are exactly the sort of opinions that need to be getting in The Prime Minister's ear on this issue.
I hate to say it Peg, but Kevin can't hear your policy advice from where you're sitting: that's why you should blog.
Open Forum is a place where the community can engage with political, business and social leaders on issues that are important to the future of policy development in Australia. This is forum where anyone is free to have their say, and actually be heard not just by like-minded people, but by those difficult to access people who probably need to hear it most.
That's the theory. But I've seen the statistics and there are thousands more of you reading than there are writing. Please, make our vision of e-Democracy a reality, just take the plunge and tell us what you think.
(If you'd like to know more about Peg's views on education reform, then bad luck; she said to tell you to write your own "web-log").