{"id":643,"date":"2012-09-13T21:38:07","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T11:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/?p=643"},"modified":"2012-09-14T08:00:40","modified_gmt":"2012-09-13T22:00:40","slug":"death-by-1-7-billion-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/death-by-1-7-billion-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"Death by 1.7 billion cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a scene in an early episode<\/a> of Sex and the City<\/em> that\u2019s always been a favourite of mine. The girls are talking over a meal about\u2014what else\u2014men, and Charlotte says, in utter exasperation…<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been dating since I was 15 years old, I\u2019m exhausted, where is he?<\/em><\/p>\n

I know how she feels. Only it\u2019s not dating that exhausts me (chance\u2019d be a fine thing!)\u2014it\u2019s education. It\u2019s schools and teachers and kids and politicians and what seems like a lifetime of fighting one way or another for public education and the rights of kids and teachers to the very best that they are entitled to.<\/p>\n

And after more than a quarter of a century, like Charlotte, I\u2019m exhausted.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t intend to become a teacher. All I wanted to do was go to university and study literature. I\u2019d spent my last 2 years of high school in a senior college in Canberra where I was able to study as many English units as I wanted to. A double major, they called it. I did subjects like Women in Shakespeare and The Short Story, Irish Literature and many more now that I can\u2019t name even though I remember the teachers and the books and the fact that I was essentially, a pig in mud. And I wanted to keep studying literature at university, but I didn\u2019t know\u2014I honestly didn\u2019t know\u2014what else to do with an English degree except to become an English teacher.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been accepted into ANU, USyd and Macquarie, and I wasn\u2019t sure where I should go. I knew I didn\u2019t want to stay in Canberra for the rest of my life, and I figured if I was going to be a teacher\u2014because what else did you so with an English Lit degree\u2014then I should train in NSW so I was qualified for the NSW school system. So I went to my careers advisor for advice, and instead of guiding me through the range of career options open to a kid who loved English, she simply said, well, if you\u2019re going to be a teacher, then I suggest you go to Macquarie Uni, because Macquarie has the best teacher training program<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And she was right, and I don\u2019t blame her for not giving me advice I didn\u2019t ask for, and I duly went off to Macquarie and had what may have been the best 4 years of my life and came out the other end utterly committed to being the best public school high teacher I could be. And I\u2019ve never regretted it.<\/p>\n

But before I\u2019d even graduated, I started to get a taste of life as a teacher. In my final year of university, I attended the wedding of a school friend, and because I was single and a nice girl, I was sat on the table with the extended family of the groom instead of my school and church friends. And I got stuck next to the annoying, overly-opinionated brother-in-law who took it upon himself, when he found out I was soon to finish my teaching degree, to inform me of everything that was wrong with the state of the teaching of English in Australia and what a cushy life teachers had.<\/p>\n

This was essentially a precursor for the public discourse that dominated my short teaching career.<\/p>\n

I graduated in 1986, and was appointed that year to a selective high school in Sydney\u2019s south-west. It turns out it wasn\u2019t a happy appointment, for a variety of reasons that are not the subject of this post, and I have often said over the years that if I\u2019d had a happier first year out, then maybe I\u2019d still be a teacher. Or have stayed in teaching for longer.<\/p>\n

But really, it wasn\u2019t the fault of that difficult first year, because subsequent to that I had wonderful experiences in fabulous schools with incredibly supportive fellow teachers and head teachers and principals (one in particular) who went out of their way to mentor and support me and give me opportunities well beyond my tender years. I taught 3 Unit English in my 5th, and final, year of teaching, thanks to a head teacher who was unfailingly encouraging and who saw in me a real need to challenge myself intellectually as well as creatively and professionally.<\/p>\n

And I loved the kids. I loved the funny farm boys I taught in that first year at that selective high school, when I was only 22 years old\u2014at 16 or so, they towered over me like gum trees. (I\u2019m Facebook friends with a lot of those lads, and one of them moved me to tears a few years ago when he told me he became an English teacher because of me. Remember, I was 22 and what did I know? Except I loved teaching and I loved those boys and I loved my subject and I guess somehow that all came together.)<\/p>\n

I loved the rough as guts working class kids I taught at my next school. The young woman who tried to teach me to break dance by saying ‘Go on, Miss, it\u2019s just like yer making love!’; and the strapping Islander girl who with just a few well-chosen words pricked the inflated ego of her male classmate who liked to talk about his \u201cmorning glories\u201d at the top of his voice, trying to make the now (if I might say so) cute 23 year old teacher blush.<\/p>\n

I loved the Italian Catholic boys at yet another school who argued that Rita (from Educating Rita<\/a><\/em>) was in the wrong for hiding her contraceptive pills from her husband, even as they asked me questions like, It was the Catholics who killed Jesus, right?<\/em> (I kid you not\u2014we were \u2018doing\u2019 Bruce Dawe<\/a>\u2019s poem ‘And A Good Friday was Had by All’<\/a>.) I loved the Year 9 boy who carefully placed a framed photo of his girlfriend on his desk at the start of every lesson, and the Year 10 girls whose gelled fringes shot half a foot into the air. (Come on, it was the 80s. They were gorgeous.) I loved the kids I worked with on Rock Eisteddfod and the refugee kids who didn\u2019t know how old they were and the Laotian kids with their warm gentleness and the Slavic kids who said they didn\u2019t care whether their friends were Serbs or Croats because the cost of caring about that was why their parents left eastern Europe on the first place.<\/p>\n

I loved the boy who made Year 7 English merry hell during that Friday afternoon double period, but whose poetry showed me what hell he was enduring at home. I loved another Year 7 boy who gleefully chopped me to pieces in a ceiling fan in one of his stories. I just loved them, even the ones I didn\u2019t like (OK, maybe I didn\u2019t love them), and I loved being their teacher.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t love everything about teaching, though. I didn\u2019t like the fact that I ALWAYS had work that needed to be done\u2014marking or programming or something, there was always something hanging over your head that needed to be done. I didn\u2019t like that you never felt as if you finished the job\u2014the kids would move on and you never really knew how they went after they\u2019d left your class. And I was a bit frustrated, like many teachers who chose to work in less privileged schools are, that I didn\u2019t often get the chance to engage with my subject area at the intellectual level I\u2019d have preferred.<\/p>\n

But what I really didn\u2019t like was a growing societal and political atmosphere of outright antagonism towards my profession.<\/p>\n

That conversation as the wedding was very much a portent of what I experienced as a teacher in the 1980s, and a lot of it was driven by a conservative state government hell bent on imposing their ideological position on teachers in schools that they fundamentally didn\u2019t care about, have any personal or political investment in, and frankly, it seemed to me then (and now) they resented having to support.<\/p>\n

This was a time when slandering teachers was a blood sport indulged in across the board. Letters to the newspapers were full of complaints about slack teachers who only worked for 6 hours a day and got 12 weeks of holidays a year. We were lazy, stupid, and responsible for (rather than victims of) everything from poor behaviour and discipline in young people to falling educational standards.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not exaggerating when I say it was relentless. At least, it felt that way.<\/p>\n

And it made it all too easy for the then government to come in and slash and burn not just teacher\u2019s rights and conditions, but funding and resources to public schools.<\/p>\n

If you were around then, you may remember the notorious education minister, Terry Metherill. So hated was he that banners at industrial meetings proclaimed \u201cCome back Rodney, all is forgiven\u201d, referring to the previous Labor education minister, Rodney Cavalier, who until then was the most reviled name in public education in NSW.<\/p>\n

And there were lots of those industrial meetings. We were on strike a lot, and at that time it went right against the public mood. These days, things have changed a lot, and it\u2019s comforting to hear Jo Public frequently comment that s\/he supports teachers in industrial action even if strikes and stop work meetings are inconvenient.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t like that in the Metherill era. People openly loathed teachers and were deeply critical of strikes. They seemed to think it was only about money and conditions\u2014which it was, in part, but what was not appreciated then in a way that I think is better understood now, is that when teachers conditions are attacked, so are the learning conditions of students.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all a long time ago now, and I don\u2019t pretend to remember all the detail of Metherill\u2019s notorious white paper, apart from the huge staff cuts in public schools (2500 teaching positions were cut), but I do remember the atmosphere of anger and hostility on both sides of the school gate. I remember so clearly saying to my then partner, I\u2019m tired of being angry all the time. I\u2019m not an angry person by nature, but I\u2019m angry all the time.<\/em><\/p>\n

I had friends in the staff room who never told people they met at parties or the like what they did for a living. Back in those days, calling yourself a \u2018public servant\u2019 was less reviled than being a teacher, and it wasn\u2019t exactly a lie, either. But tell people you were a teacher, and you\u2019d cop a barrage of opinion on your professional standards and how everything that was wrong with the world and with kids today was your fault.<\/p>\n

I was sick and tired, every day, of defending my profession.<\/p>\n

I was sick and tired of working in a system that in so many ways was geared to make so many of the kids I was teaching fail, and through no fault of their own.<\/p>\n

I was sick of being angry.<\/p>\n

And so I left.<\/p>\n

Curiously, though, it wasn\u2019t long before I was back working for the department, but this time in the curriculum directorate, where over the next decade and a bit I would spend around 8 years in different stints, and then another 15 months in at Head Office. And in those jobs\u2014as an editor at The<\/em> School Magazine<\/em><\/a> and as a journalist on the staff newspaper (Side by Side<\/em>), I got to see the other side of the bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

Times and public opinion changed over the years, and somehow Jo Public came to a better understanding of the challenges and responsibilities facing teachers, and a much-welcomed greater level of general public support for the profession grew. At the same time, though, the term \u2018public servant\u2018 started to be a dirty word. Phrase. You know what I mean.<\/p>\n

My boss at The School Magazine<\/em>, Jonathan Shaw<\/a>, one of the best men I\u2019ve known, and a terrific boss, used to talk about this a lot. I always remember how he would sadly note that where once upon a time, it was a good and noble thing to be a servant of the public, now it was a term of derision and contempt. And he was right.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s chicken or egg, but as the term \u2018public servant\u2019 became so vilified, it became that much easier for politicians to slash into departments and services\u2014clearly for as much ideological reasons as economic ones\u2014by emphasising that it was only public service<\/em> positions that were going. That it was back room services<\/em>, not frontline positions. As if all of those public servants, those back room workers were doing nothing all day long but drinking coffee and playing Tetris or, these days, fooling around on Facebook. When in fact, they were, are, providing administrative support for professional units whose staff\u2014public servants too\u2014in turn provided support for teachers by way of developing resources and programs and professional development that meant better teaching and therefore better learning.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not stupid or naive or mendacious enough to say there\u2019s never been a lazy public servant, just as I\u2019d never say that every teacher I worked with was a sainted genius (in fact, I could tell you stories make your hair stand on end, as any teacher could. As any worker in any field could). I\u2019m not going to deny that there\u2019s never been good reasons to reorganise and restructure, to streamline services or to assess need and the best use of resources, and that sometimes that means people lose jobs and that\u2019s the way things go in the adult working world.<\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t help but think of my old teaching colleague and sparring partner, Cheryl, who would regularly sail into the staff room waving her hands and crying \u201cNew rules! New rules!\u201d, and her (and our) frustration at some stupid and unnecessary new procedure or rule that one of the exec staff had dreamed up when the rest of us were still marking illegible essays at 2 am.<\/p>\n

And having lived through a few of them, I can tell you that many of those departmental restructures felt exactly like that\u2014new ways of doing things just for the sake of it.<\/p>\n

Sections would be restructured and positions would disappear, only to find that somewhere not too far down the track, the powers that be would realise that that person actually had a job to do, and now they weren\u2019t there any more, that job wasn\u2019t being done. And so a new position would be created, with all the costs and inefficiencies that go with firing and hiring people<\/p>\n

Sometimes those restructures were little more than deckchair shifting\u2014a new Minister would come in and, like my cats when they\u2019re let out into the garden in the morning, he or she would feel the need to sniff around and leave her own mark where the last guy had been.<\/p>\n

Things, though, have been pretty good, comparatively, in public schools in NSW for a long time. I haven\u2019t been as intimately involved as many other people have since I last left DET in 2008, but certainly things have been much quieter on the industrial front, compared to the late 80s and early 90s when there was a real danger that teachers would stage an indefinite walk out. (Threatened, but they never do, because fundamentally teachers are about the kids and shutting down schools for the duration is bad for kids and so teachers, who are essentially conservative creatures, no matter what politicians or the Daily Tabloid would have you believe, will actually never take that kind of extreme action.<\/p>\n

I know, for example, a cousin something removed of mine, who is a now retired primary school principal, disagrees with me on that last point (the one about things having been pretty good in public education for a while\u2014arguably, under the last Labor state government). From Ed\u2019s point of view, there have been plenty of cuts and attacks on conditions, but it\u2019s been done by stealth, death by a thousand cuts<\/em>. But I think even Ed would agree that what has happened this week is about as bad, if not worse, as it\u2019s ever been.<\/p>\n

So, you probably know, if you care about this issue long enough to have got this far in this post, that the NSW State coalition government has just announced 1.7 billion dollars worth of cuts to the education budget. Some of these \u2018savings\u2019 will come from freezing funding to Catholic and so-called \u2018independent\u2019 schools\u2014not the actual real cuts that were mooted last week, before the back benchers revolted and the minister and premier backed down. (Apparently those back benchers don\u2019t have any public school teachers or parents in their constituencies. Curious.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not getting into the public versus private funding debate here, though\u2014this isn\u2019t about that, and anyway, my views on this are well known to my friends and colleagues and the rest of you can probably guess.<\/p>\n

What I want to talk about is what this is going to mean for public schools<\/p>\n

1800 jobs are going, around 800 of them from TAFE. (And that\u2019s a whole other issue, the relentless downgrading of TAFE over many years. It\u2019s just as well this country doesn\u2019t have a skills shortage problem. Oh wait.) 600 of those job losses will be from state and regional offices. But that\u2019s OK, because they\u2019re not teachers. They\u2019re not \u2018front line\u2019.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re only public servants.<\/p>\n

So let me tell you a little bit about job cuts to the public service of the NSW Department of Education and Communities.<\/p>\n

The curriculum directorate has already, before this latest round of cuts were announced, lost around 200 staff. Most of these were, technically, public servants. However, they were also highly skilled and experienced classroom teachers who had moved into the directorate in order to develop and deliver resources and programs and professional development for\u2014you guessed it. Teachers. Front-line staff.<\/p>\n

And kids.<\/p>\n

So, for example, the English\/Literacy unit has been slashed down to just one or two staff members to serve the entire state of teachers and students, K-12. Two people, tops, to support the teaching of English and the support of literacy programs. For the entire state. Kindergarten to HSC.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just English, although obviously that\u2019s the subject I care and know most about\u2014it\u2019s across all curriculum areas. Just as well there\u2019s not a new national curriculum looming on the horizon that teachers will need support in delivering.<\/p>\n

And just as well we haven\u2019t all been talking about the best way to implement a review into school funding<\/a> that would bring genuine reform to education on this country by creating a more equitable funding and resourcing model to ensure that every child has access to the very best education available.<\/p>\n

Oh wait.<\/p>\n

And beyond the basics of compulsory curriculum, there\u2019s all those extra programs that enrich the educational experiences and opportunities for kids across the state.<\/p>\n

Teams that created fantastically innovative programs such as Murder under the Microscope, which engage kids hands on with science, will be gone.<\/p>\n

The Arts Unit<\/a> will be dismantled.<\/p>\n

The Priority Schools funding program is already gone, and I heard on the radio yesterday that the Best Start<\/a> kindergarten early literacy and numeracy assessment program is also gone.<\/p>\n

And this new round of staff cuts will come from regional offices.<\/p>\n

So let me tell you about the staff in regional offices.<\/p>\n

Many of them are subject\/curriculum specialist consultants. They are teachers with recent classroom experience who work within a given region (eg South Western Sydney, the Riverina) to directly support teachers in their region with their particular professional needs. They work one-on-one with schools to develop programs to address specific needs. So if there\u2019s a school with, for example, low reading engagement with Year 9 and 10 students, the regional consultant will work directly with staff to develop strategies to engage those students (who may\/will have particular demographic profiles, so a strategy that will work well with refugee kids may not work with Aboriginal kids, just for instance).<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve lost 200 curriculum specialists and now we\u2019re going to lose regional consultants.<\/p>\n

But all of that\u2019s OK, because the people who delivered these programs and resources are only public servants. And no-one cares about public servants.<\/p>\n

Fat cats.<\/p>\n

Bureaucrats.<\/p>\n

Stationery orderers.<\/p>\n

It won\u2019t have any impact on teachers. Or kids.<\/p>\n

And money doesn\u2019t fix everything, apparently.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019ve all got to tighten our belts, so why should education be exempt?<\/p>\n

And if you keep saying this stuff\u2014like you keep saying \u2018public servant\u2019 with that flared nostril as if you\u2019ve smelt something nasty\u2014then it becomes truth and people stop caring and start getting irritated with those of us who keep trying to cut through the linguistic dissonance to talk about the actual detail of what this all means.<\/p>\n

And you can bet your life that soon enough, it will turn around and be directed back at teachers. And for the same reasons I only lasted 5 years as a fulltime classroom teacher, I predict a mass exodus from the profession in the next, say, 5 years. Because being a teacher under these conditions is just. too. hard.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a teacher any more, and I\u2019m not an education department bureaucrat any more either. But I spend a lot of time in schools and with teachers and I know what this is going to mean for them, and for kids, especially kids in the already under-resourced and desperately underprivileged public schools in regional Sydney and NSW.<\/p>\n

And you never really stop being a teacher. And you never stop caring about education and those kids, those kids, who deserve every chance they can get to be bright and safe and happy and educated and to look forward to not just the best start, but the best life we can offer them.<\/p>\n

For all our sakes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been caring about this, angry about this, exasperated and frustrated and, like Charlotte, exhausted, for longer than I can bear.<\/p>\n

Please, won\u2019t someone make it stop?<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s a scene in an early episode of Sex and the City that\u2019s always been a favourite of mine. The girls are talking over a meal about\u2014what else\u2014men, and Charlotte says, in utter exasperation… I\u2019ve been dating since I was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":644,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[11,14,13,12],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-education-2","tag-politics","tag-schools","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}