On Pearson's "Teach for Australia"

The newsletter of the Noel Person Fan Club (aka the Australian), front pages a proposal for a scheme designed by Pearson to attract teachers to schools in Aboriginal communities.

Pearson proposes something called Teach for Australia, to be modeled on similar schemes in the US and Britain.

Under the scheme, existing teachers will be given tax-free incentives to spend four years in Aboriginal communities where they will mentor “associate teachers”. The latter are university graduates who are selected because they are outstanding academically and have leadership skills - but not teaching qualifications.

Both Teaching for America and Teaching First in Britain are flawed models.

They take predominantly white and bright yuppies (see British Teach First appointees - right) and place them in schools that are poor, black, Hispanic - generally hard to staff.

With no qualifications to teach, and relying on raw idealistic enthusiasm alone, they are expected to teach for two years - and complete basic teacher certification and/or business management courses.

Why the business management courses?

Because the funding for the two schemes comes largely from the private sector - both corporate financiers and private foundations.

Those who do not get burnt out in the whiteboard jungle (and the burn out rate is as high as 30%), are then fast-tracked into employment with the corporate sponsors.


The Teach First website explains: “Teach First supporters consistently identify communication skills as being the greatest weakness of the graduates they hire. As a result of a rigorous recruitment process and their time in the classroom, Teach First participants demonstrate strong communication skills, as well as planning, organisation and creativity. In addition, they have all excelled academically. The results show that they are making an (sic!) significant impact in England schools. What could they achieve in your business?”


Or as Wessex Scene Online puts it: “Teach First hopes to demonstrate to applicants how the skills they gain while teaching will enhance their careers in the long-term, as well as offering fast-track recruitment from the sponsors of the project.”

As they now operate (Teach for America has been going for 17 years), selection for the scheme is both a matter of selection (academic achievement) and self-selection (desire to be fast-tracked into employment with Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Deloitte etc). The altruism of empathy with the poor and the marginalised has been replaced with a commitment to self and the profit margin. Just what we want in remote Aboriginal schools!

But can’t these “teachers” improve things during their two-year stint in the ghetto?

The Australian repeats claims of “evidence from the Britain and the US…that the associate teachers produced comparable results or slightly better in reading and maths.”

But the study that produced evidence for this was flawed since many teachers in hard to staff schools are not credentialed (registered in our terms) anyway. Matched against properly credentialed professional teachers, they were shown not to do as well.

And then there is the specifically Australian problem of cross-cultural understandings. The Little Children Are Sacred Report was quite clear that non-Aboriginal teachers should have thorough induction in Aboriginal cultural studies and should develop cultural sensitivities in respect of Aboriginal children that they teach.

Indeed, many of the children in Aboriginal communities use English as a second language and require education that is bilingual and bicultural.

Just parachuting a future stockbroker into a remote Aboriginal school armed with an Accelerated Literacy (ie English literacy for urban residents) program is doing these students a grave disservice.

The merit of Pearson’s proposal is that it indicates quite clearly a level of financial remuneration that is appropriate for teachers making a commitment to work in remote communities for a specified period of time.

Indeed, that level of remuneration should be sufficient to ensure that teachers would be willing to learn about, and develop a basic fluency in, an Aboriginal language specific to a community into which they would be placed, and that they would be prepared to seek accreditation in Aboriginal cultural awareness as well.

Such properly qualified and accredited, experienced teachers – and not “associates” of the Teach First, or Teach for America, type – can be properly regarded as part of the answer.

The answer however, will remain fundamentally incomplete so long as Aboriginal people themselves are denied opportunities to achieve teacher qualifications and are kept (“kept” because of issues of structural inequality and remoteness) at the bottom rung of the education employment ladder as clerical staff and community workers.



As it stands, Pearson's importing of the Teach for America and British Teach First models is a recipe for the privatisation of social responsibility for poverty and disadvantage - a bit like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.