Forewarned, Australia is ready for Joel Klein!

According to the Age, the Australian teachers union and parent advocates are already rising up in protest against the highly unreliable NYC school grading system, which Joel Klein intends to promote on a visit down under next month, after being invited by Julia Gillard, their Education Secretary:

The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the Australian Government should not be importing "flawed" approaches from the US, a nation that was consistently outperformed by countries such as Finland which did not publicly rank schools.

Canberra-based public education advocacy group Save Our Schools last week called on Ms Gillard to release the details of her performance reporting plan to ensure it did not reproduce the problems of the New York system, which it said had led to league tables and dissimilar schools being compared with each other.

See also the following postings from Save our Schools – which has studied the analyses of the NYC school grades by Diane Ravitch, Eduwonkette, and heard from the parents on our NYC education listserv about the numerous problems with the priorities of the Bloomberg/Klein administration.

The comments of NYC public school parent Ann Kjellberg are featured on Testimony From New York on Klein’s School Reforms:

Pretty much anyone in New York who has a kid in the system or who works in the system outside of “central office” hates these policies. It’s a triumph of public relations. There are so many things to get enraged about it’s hard to know where to begin.

See also: Gillard Should Come Clean on School Reports

Secrecy and avoidance of public debate are characteristic of how Klein has implemented change in New York’s schools. There too, teacher and parent organisations were excluded from the process.

Gillard Should Repudiate Klein’s Skulduggery

Gillard should know that Klein is widely derided by educationalists, teachers and parents in New York. She should also know that Klein’s response to their criticisms involves much skulduggery which she should repudiate.

School Accountability Discredited in New York

Conservative educationalist, Diane Ravitch, is at it again – highlighting the failures of the New York City school accountability model which Julia Gillard wants to emulate in Australia.

More Questions Raised About the New York School Reporting Model

More questions are being raised about the validity and reliability of the New York system of reporting school performance, which Julia Gillard wants to introduce in Australian schools.