NSW public school principals to control teacher appointments at last

I thought it would never happen. Actually, I thought at some point it must, but you know what I mean...

The Herald today has the story that the NSW government has ended the bureaucracy's central role in allocating teachers to public schools, effecting mid-2010. Principals will be able to advertise jobs and interview teachers and choose the best one for the job. Given that the quality and commitment of staff must be the most significant factor in a school's success, it's about time.

Secondary Principals Council president, Jim McAlpine: "Principals for years have been saying they would like a greater say in the staffing of their schools."

Education minister John Della Bosca: "Modernising these arrangements will help us retain our best and brightest teachers."

But, of course, that's not the way the union (NSW Teachers Federation, or NTF) sees it. Senior vice-president Gary Zadkovich: "The best means by which we can attract and keep teachers in the harder-to-staff parts of the state is through a statewide transfer system." What he's referring to is that teachers who permit themselves to be allocated to remote or "difficult" schools can jump the queue for more desirable schools. That's right, folks, the union boss wants would-be professional teachers to be hampsters in a wheel. Should staff at hard-to-staff schools be there for the carrot that's dangled in front of them? Or should they be there because they're committed individuals with particular skills in dealing with difficult situations? Oops, I used the word "individual", which is something the NTF is not familiar with. Their support for centralised staffing arrangements and their dogged industrial support for capital-B bad teachers shows they consider all teachers to be interchangeable.

(By the way, I do believe staff in such schools should be paid more, and given more power and more assistance to sort out problems.)

Of course, the Herald simplifies its reporting to make it easier for readers to digest: "Principals have embraced the opportunity for greater freedom in hiring, but teachers will fight the move, ..." The union leaders fight the move, either because it threatens to erode their power, or because of their communist ideology (sorry, but I'm not exaggerating; central planning and viewing workers as interchangable are seriously communist ideas), or both. But what about actual teachers? The Herald could do us all a service by conducting a rigorous survey of teachers on this point. Personally, I've not met a single non-union-official teacher who supports the status quo, and have heard plenty of bile from teachers whose livelihoods have been affected by having to work with lazy or incompetent people, but I might be mixing in the wrong crowds.

As a private school teacher, I had to apply for my job and impress the head teacher and the principal. (I had an advantage as it was near year-end so they were in a hurry.) In doing so, I had a chance to suss out the school a bit. When I was offered the job, the school was making a professional commitment to me that they considered me suitable and would support me in my treacherous initial years of teaching. When I accepted the job, I made a professional commitment to the school that I would make every effort to advance the quality of education on offer there. Two years later, it's a commitment that guides me still. Such a basic and advantageous tenet of working life is bypassed when workers simply list the geographical areas in which they are willing to work and then wait to be called up.

Gary Zadkovich might like to know that I used to be dedicated to the idea of teaching in a public school. As I found out about the rotten recruitment procedure, though, my interest waned entirely. I applied for and got a job almost immediately upon finishing university, whereas friends of mine waited months to hear from the bureaucracy. Gary is defending an absolute lemon.

(By the way, I think public school teachers and private school teachers are probably, on average, equally good, discounting the extra time-serving lemons in public schools. But a school needs more than fundamentally good staff; it needs a workplace environment based on professionalism. That's the crux of this argument, not on teacher quality per se.)