Christopher Bantick, and a few thoughts on education, provided I get to sack everyone in the common room I don't like ...

(Above: Molesworth's thoughts on and insights into education, found here).

Talk about being offensively sackable and a sackable offence.

Surely Christopher Bantick should be sacked for the logic on display in Make poor teaching a sackable offence, but who will step up to the plate and sack him? The editor of The Australian, responsible for the worst coverage in the known universe of national broadband and climate change? Fat chance ...

Training? Instruction? Improvement? Remedial work? Help teachers mend their ways as you might in turn expect teachers to help students improve their understanding of the world?

Nah, sack 'em, it's all their fault, ne'er do wells, bludgers, no hopers, dingbat unionists, oh and by the way "let loose the hounds."

There's nothing wrong with the concept of failure, and just as a certain bunch of students must be turned into factory fodder, taught they are losers, wastrels, dummies and drop kicks, given to a lumpenproletariat life of crime and dole bludging, so we must extend the process to their failed, drop kick teachers.

What's the point of having an elite with everybody in it?

Of course Bantick makes it easy for himself by quoting Greg Craven at the start of his piece:

This view informs the position of Greg Craven, vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, who wrote on this page on April 13: "If you want brain surgeons and international lawyers to consider teaching as an option, then you are going to have to supplement altruism with cash."

Yes, yes, but only a doofus like Greg Craven could mount that simple-minded argument, as he did in You can't pay peanuts for good teachers.

What about the quality of the blithe argument in Bantick's own effort, which involves an injudicious amount of teacher and union bashing? Well it turns out if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you learn that Bantick is a senior English teacher at Trinity Grammar School in Victoria, and a complacent, smug, self-satisifed one at that...

I wonder, is smugness and certitude a sackable offence?

Those who are incompetent, who are inadequately trained or are allowed to consolidate poor performance under union sanction, secure that they will be appraised continuously rather than sacked, are the malady of Australian education.

The only way to tell a teacher they are hopeless is to remove them, as in the case of every other job I know.

Yep, it's a sack 'em, sack 'em all theory of life, the universe, education and schooling, as reasoned and rational as 42.

What about those who deliver the inadequate training that somehow allows inadequately trained teachers to worm their way into the education system? Why surely it must be sack 'em, sack 'em all.

Bottom line of course Bantick's piece is just another paean of praise to the private system:

It is obvious what will improve teacher performance. Australian schools, particularly state schools, must be given the autonomy to hire and fire. The growth in independent school enrolments is in part related to the view held by parents that state school education in some areas is in serious decline and teacher quality is a lottery. They pay independent school fees for not having to gamble on incompetence. The problem is also who gets into teaching. This is unpleasant to say but many teachers are simply not high-flyers, something that the federal government partly understands.

Uh huh. Well he would say that, wouldn't he, seeing as how he's such a high flyer, and understands things more clearly than the federal government, and so is a guaranteed way for worried parents to avoid gambling on incompetence (hmm, memo to self, ask Trinity student I know about Mr. Bantick).

But then I began to read the comments, and hang on, dammit if some of the commentary didn't make more sense than Bantick's piece, and that's when I began to worry. Chris of Orange got agitated:

There'll be plenty of others to fill the positions left by the thousands of retiring teachers over the next ten years--oh, that's right: there actually won't be plenty of others.

And so did rob of glen iris:

A poorly performing maths teacher might be better than no maths teacher at all. Where's the pool of unemployed teachers to pick and choose from? There isn't one of course, and it's only going to get worse as a significant proportion of the workforce reach retirement age, hang up their whiteboard markers and breathe a sigh of relief. Sacking teachers is the easy option, beloved of private schools. Don't make any attempt to try to improve the performance of the individual. Just replace them by offering an above award salary courtesy of high parental fees. The same goes for seriously disruptive students and the disabled. Shift the responsibility onto the state system and then take the high moral ground. I'm glad I wasn't taught by the likes of Mr Bantick.

Guys, guys, it's simple. If you want an ample supply of brain surgeons and international lawyers to replace all the inadequate, hopeless, sacked dingbat state teachers, you just have to pay them more. Ask Mr Bantick, and he'll surely agree, it's the way forward, and why private school teachers get paid so handsomely.

Who knows, in a previous life, perhaps Mr Bantick himself was a brain surgeon ...

As a result, once the losers currently teaching in the outer western suburbs of the big cities get the chop, there'll be a surge of brain surgeons rushing to do the job.

A few readers tried reasoned arguments, backed by research, and one noted the thoughts of John Hattie, University of Auckland, in Teachers Make a Difference, available here as a pdf, as he sought to identify what are the major sources of variance in a student's achievements might be.

Amazingly he proposed that it wasn't sackable teachers so much as students themselves in the first instance:

Students -- which account for about 50% of the variance of achievement. It is what students brings to the table that predicts achievement more than any other variable. The correlation between ability and achievement is high, so it is no surprise that bright students have steeper trajectories of learning than their less bright students. Our role in schools is to improve the trajectory of all these students ...

Throw in a 5-10% variance for the effects of the home, 5-10% variance for schools (with Hattie including principals in the school effect), and 5-10% variance for peer effects, and then you have teachers jogging along, and accounting for about 30% of variance.

So teachers can play a significant role, but whenever you get complacent senior English teachers, and resentful public school teachers, you can get this kind of comment:

Chris, you teach at Trinity Grammar. The students and you are at the school for the same reason - to learn the subject you are teaching. Easy to criticize from that perspective. Try slogging it out for more than a decade with kids from homes who can't read and don't give a toss about anything except binge drinking for a good time. Yeah it'll be the teacher's fault that they can't turn those 125 students who he/she has contact with for less than 3% of the year (do the maths). Oh and then you need to divide that 3% by the 25 students to get the proportionate amount of time with each individual student. Chris, get a grip. You're not really in the real world, but keep writing for the Australian to get that journalism job you are chasing.

Indeed. The schools of western Sydney are standing by, waiting for Mr Bantick to descend and fix everything with a decent round of sackings ...

Meanwhile, it turns out that Mr Bantick is a regular scribbler for The Australian, and he has a reliably dullard and predictable mind, which runs along a very narrow path. The headers alone are enough to give the game away: What unions really fear about teaching to the test blazoned forth in February 2010, and then boldly strutting forth in March 2011 came My School mute on bad teachers (same song and lyrics as the current piece), and then there were a bold set of homilies set forth in Good teachers put students first.

Which concluded with this little vituperative outburst:

We don't need to wait until next year's World Teachers Day to celebrate professional teachers who put children first. Nor to expose the freeloaders, phonies, self-centred strikers and white-collar wannabes with blue-collar values who are not fit to be in a classroom.

Oh dear. Blue collar values. Quick, someone phone up Mr Howard's battlers so they won't get offended by this naked inner urban elitism ...

And so on and so forth. If you have hours to waste googling, you might find Mr Bantick disparaging preachers and interminable sermons in Hope and pray for a joke from the pulpit, or musing about memento and memorabilia in Tying the knot with the royal tea towel.

But perhaps the most astonishing news, at least for an English teacher, is that Mr Bantick is a vandal of the lowest kind, as revealed in When the pen is mightier than the type:

I have added my voice to books in marginalia where an author has caused me to be incandescent with bibliophilic rage. I noted in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in a moment of undergraduate bile: "Does anything ever happen?" Later still, I scrawled in Peter Temple's The Broken Shore: "Overworked and indulgent tosh." Yes, I was cross, but felt liberated and secretively thrilled that I had vandalised a book and indulged my annoyance.

Nothing happens in Jane Austen, and most of all in Pride and Prejudice, and you sir an English teacher? Incandescent with bibliophilic rage at being forced to read Austen in your undergraduate days?

Wash out your mouth with a particularly vile soap, and stand in the corner for the rest of the class ...

But then it turns out that Mr Bantick values books for their decorative, coffee table, homely effect, as well as a certain cluttered mustiness, as you can discover in Books battle for their slice of real estate.

Which brings us back to his latest piece of teacher bashing and another comment:

Is there any other group, other than teachers, who are being constantly blamed for the ills of society? Who'd want to do such a low paying, long hours of work and be constantly vilified in the press?

Indeed. In a just and proper world, someone would help Mr Bantick move from the sheltered world of teaching at Trinity to scribbling for a living, and thereby save him from the ignominy of appraisals, or perhaps save his colleagues from an ominous lynch mob mentality:

Colleagues are aware of teachers who are failures. They all know who should go and why.

Yes, we have a little list, we've got a little list, and none of them will be missed.

We all know teachers who are self-satisfied, smug and foolish, but what's amazing is that some of them even head into the media to advertise the fact.

There is, however, a flickering of light today in the news with the story that David Gonski seems to be doing his work with enthusiasm, the wretched Peter Garrett is listening, and so Axe to fall on school funds deal.

It seems the biased regime that favours private schools in funding might finally be changed, and here's hoping it causes Mr. Bantick a little heartburn.

That's until you get to the line:

Both Ms Gillard and Mr Garrett have pledged that no school will lose a dollar under any changes they make.

So scientology and Exclusive Brethren and Catholic and Mr Bantick's beloved Trinity schools are safe, and everything will change so that nothing will change ...

No doubt we can look forward to a piece by Mr Bantick in The Australian explaining why this is so, just and proper, and everything actually is the fault of teachers, and if we just sacked pack of time wasters malingering in the state education system, everything will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Thank the dear absent lord I stopped being a teacher a long time ago ...

There's the silly scribbles of Murdoch hacks,

I've got them on the list
English teachers who hate Jane Austen,
they never would be missed
they never would be missed

I have more empty spaces left but what is one to do?
the task of filling up the list I'd rather leave to you
But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list
for they'll none of them be missed!
They'll none of them be missed!

Chorus: You may put 'em on the list (You may)
You may put 'em on the list (Go ahead)
And they'll none of them be missed
They'll none of them be missed!
Little list!

(Below: more xkcd here).