Letter from PLATO to all education spokespersons [12 August 2008]
DearWe are members of PLATO W.A., a concerned group of teachers, parents, students and university academics. Our website http://www.platowa.com is visited by 5000 people each week.
The problems we perceive with education are: discipline, salaries, curriculum, large attrition rate and teachers being seconded to teaching outside their areas of expertise.
We encourage you to respond to the following three questions either by directly contributing to the PLATO website forum or by responding to this email, in which case we will post your response for you.
This email has been sent to all education representatives for all political parties. You response will be posted immediately to ensure readers can respond and provide some useful feedback for you.
1. The EBA2 was accepted by the union executive yet rejected by 90% of teachers. EBA3 is not greatly different for the vast majority of teachers and is expected to be similarly rejected, leading to possible industrial action. What is your party’s proposed solution to this impasse?
2. Each day teachers in some schools face physical assaults and ongoing problems dealing with disruptive and abusive students. This is a significant factor in teacher attrition. What are your strategies for dealing with this issue?
3. Outcomes Based Education is a failed, imported pedagogy. Yet the remnants still remain in our own education system. Will you remove assessments based on levels in all years? Does your party intend to remove the outcome based Curriculum Framework from legislation, and thereby acknowledge the failure of the OBE experiment?
Yours Sincerely,
Marko Vojkovic,
on behalf of the PLATO W.A. committee