Via Marcus and the SMH.
I like journalists whose three word sentences do not hide their contempt for bean counters. Even if the comparison with mining flies in the face of the actual convergence of schools and industry, still…:
For a start, schools are complex environments. They are full of people. They aren’t mines. This might be seen to be stating the bleeding obvious but you can’t measure schools and the people in them in the same way you measure iron ore. The human variable affects everything that happens in a school. Good teaching is impossible to measure. Examination results might be easy to measure. They tell us that students at well-resourced schools will do better in examinations than students at poorly resourced schools. Isn’t that incredible? Examination results will also suggest that students from comfortable middle-class backgrounds will get better marks than students from less privileged backgrounds. Another earth shattering fact.
