It is all-out war between the Australian Federal Government and the Australian Education Union (AEU). Up until this month, the conflict has played out in the media as a war of words, centred on the publication of results from the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) through the MySchool website.
The stage is now set for an industrial action showdown, with the 180,000-member AEU maintaining its ban on teacher supervision of NAPLAN, despite an investigation by the Fair Work Ombudsman. Any order against unprotected industrial action will cover Victoria, Northern Territory and the ACT. In other states, education ministers have pursued such an order to prevent a teacher boycott.
There would have been a few die-hards who hoped until the last minute that Education Minister Julia Gillard could be brought to the table to negotiate terms.
She has not, however, truly engaged with concerns from teachers, principals, academics and — yes — parents, regarding the flaws in determining groupings of 'like' schools, the use of MySchool figures by the media to create simplistic rankings of local schools, the promotion of a professional culture that teaches to a test, and the creation of an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers.
What intensifies the conflict is that both sides actually agree on a core point — that NAPLAN provides valuable information. In fact, Gillard and teacher unions present a similar argument that the national tests are not to be taken lightly. The divergence of opinion over the use of test results is thus made sharp by the fact that both parties are righteous in roughly the same spirit.
Yet the Federal Government has carefully crafted its communication so that it would seem teachers do not share its goals nor the values of parents. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has stated, 'The Australian Government is on the side of parents and we're on the side of MySchool because we want to lift the standards of all Australian schools.'
The rhetoric echoes Gillard's proposal that parents be recruited as replacements should the teacher boycott go ahead. It is a kind of brinkmanship that discomfits even her state counterparts, Geoff Wilson (Queensland) and Jay Weatherill (South Australia), who oppose this move. Weatherill went as far as saying that 'a number of the suggestions [made by the union] about improving the quality of information on the MySchool website seem sensible to me.'
Indeed, the use of data is the area in which