IT'S been a week of potent political juxtapositions. The Prime Minister has revealed himself as a political butterfly fast losing support in the community.

By tossing away inconvenient promises when the political winds change, Kevin Rudd has shown that his only genuine and steadfast conviction is grabbing and holding on to power.

His inflated language when making promises has only heightened the sense of duplicity voters now feel when he breaks them.

In contrast, the Deputy Prime Minister has put on the boxing gloves.

Despite weeks of violent union opposition and threats to boycott this month's school numeracy and literacy tests, Julia Gillard refused to budge from her pledge as federal Education Minister to introduce greater transparency and accountability into the nation's schools.

With NAPLAN tests proceeding this week, unions stand humiliated. No wonder Gillard's stocks are rising while Rudd's are in decline.

More important than the short-term politics is the long-term policy. This is only the warm-up in a long battle to improve student outcomes in our schools.

The real war will commence when the focus turns from student performance to the real target: teachers. And the battle to improve teacher quality will make the NAPLAN skirmish look like a genteel tea party.

The attempt by the Australian Education Union and state organisations to claim the moral high ground as conscientious objectors defending the interests of students did not succeed last week. And it won't work next time.

While she may be a creature of Labor's left-wing union faction, the Education Minister has made it clear she will not be backing down from delivering real education reform.

In an interview with The Australian last week, Gillard said she expects to see visible differences over the next two years from the National Partnership Agreement on Improving Teacher Quality. Agreed in 2008 between the commonwealth and the states, the agreement is still in the early roll-out phase.

There is much more to come. And that means another battle with the teachers' unions, whose lexicon of self-interest and status quo has not caught up with the new language around education reform.
Here's a taste of the new language.

Gillard's New Partnership Agreement proposes system-wide reforms to improve teacher quality and raise student performance, support innovation and reform, share best-practices through the creation of School Centres for Teacher Education Excellence, improve the quality and availability of teacher workforce data, establish new professional standards for teachers and provide recognition and reward for quality teaching.

Had this been one of Rudd's initiatives, there would be legitimate suspicion about an agreement so full of fine-sounding phrases, laudable aspirations and desirable outcomes. More Rudd-style hyperbole followed by bureaucratic hyperactivity followed by, well, nothing.

Under Gillard, things are happening. In NSW, the first 100 recognised "highly accomplished" teachers are being rewarded for excellence with an $8000 pay rise despite attempts by the NSW Teachers Federation to peg it lower, in line with their ideology for less, not more, pay dispersion.

In Victoria, school principals marked as educational leaders are being paid six-figure sums to turn around under-performing schools.

In Western Australia, principals are able to hire and fire their staff , just like in any other effectively run workplace.

All of these reforms are based on a single idea supported by clear evidence: quality teachers make an enormous difference to student outcomes. And one of the most exciting initiatives is the creation of new pathways for non-teaching graduates to enter the school system. This year, in conjunction with the National Partnership, the non-profit educational charity Teach for Australia placed its first 45 teaching associates into disadvantaged schools in Victoria.

Based on overseas models, Teach for Australia sets a deliberately high bar to identify high-achieving, motivated graduates from other fields eager to turn their proven success into success in the classroom.
Next year it hopes to double the number of associates moving into Australia's more disadvantaged schools.

As the Atlantic Monthly explored this year, through trial and error the US program Teach for America, an inspiration for the local program, has honed its selection criteria to identify those most likely to become great teachers. A track record of perseverance, being content with one's life, having achieved high grades and a record of leadership tend to produce teachers who perform best in the classroom.

Independent research by The Urban Institute has confirmed it: using longitudinal data, researchers found Teach for America teachers achieved higher results from their students than traditional teachers, even ones with more classroom experience, especially in the areas of maths and science.

In Australia, haughty bosses at teachers unions described the initiative as an "insult" to those teachers who have trained for years. Those at the coalface say otherwise.

Tony Simpson, principal at Copperfield College in Victoria, which has seven Teach for Australia associates across three campuses, describes the program as: "Mind-blowingly successful. The calibre of the associates is so high. I'm on the committee of management and from what I hear my experience is not unusual; it appears to be great across the state."

Gillard is rightly being held to account for cost blowouts and wasted expenditure in her $16.2 billion Building the Education Revolution school building construction package.

But an honest scorecard must also record credit where it's due. To date, Gillard has shown an unswerving commitment that goes beyond bricks and mortar to improving student performance and teacher quality.

She told The Australian the reforms are "on the runway, taking off, gathering height and speed." So far, it seems Gillard's promises are not the kind of disposable guarantees preferred by Rudd.

Accordingly, unions are on notice. And so is Rudd. Even if he wins the next election, it won't be long until Gillard moves into the Prime Ministerial office.
 
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This article was published by The Australian online on 12 May 2010.

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