Corporate Takeover Part 2



Julia Gillard, the o so empowered female Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, wants more performance checks for schools. "I think we need to understand in a much more sophisticated way what's going on in schools. And I think the more information that enables people to understand it in a sophisticated way, the better."

Performance checks have become the latest craze in corporate madness, yet not every interaction is quantifyable. Basic literacy and numeracy skills, subject to Julia's desire to measure more, should not take 10 years to teach. However, measuring performance of a poorly designed system does not yield any valuable information. The results can either confirm the bad state of the system (if students manage to leave school illiterate, it proves major deficiences) or even worse, they can show "that it's all not that bad".

Did we know more by counting dead birds after the Exxon Valdez accident? The low official body count in the Iraq war does not change the fact of an illegal invasion. Measuring does not always help to gather useful data, to the contrary. Scales for grown, yet undesigned system like the education system, can only be arbitrary. As long as the goals for education lack an agreed and reasonable definition, performance checks provide nothing.

The implementation of this splendid plan requires plenty of consulting and administration, another project to redistribute tax money in friend's pockets. How many education units does an average teacher successfully to her/his students? Can the students still be herded in bigger classes? How much mandatory donation can parents contribute?

Meanwhile, kids leave school that cannot read.