This blog is really just a way of me getting this article on www, as I wish to share it with a specific friend, but please feel free to read and think about it.
Original article in Viewpoint section of the Brisbane Courier Mail 1/03/2011 by Shane Budden
In an estate in Brisbane’s industrial south, in the crawl space beneath a decades old housing comission home suspended on 1m stumps cowers a child.
In the daylight, that space is an adventure playground - the jungles of Africa, the spy-strewn streets of Russia, even the surface of another planet.
At night, it is a labyrinth of horrors, hiding not only the rats and snakes that are surely there but also every demon the young boy’s mind can conjure.
Above him, in the relatively warm and well-lit rooms of his home, sounds of merriment filter down as his mother entertains (again) the local football team. The sounds seem inviting, but he knows he is not welcome there - and that in any event the joy will be short-lived. As the effects of drug and alcohol-focussed indulgence wear off, tempers will grow thin and violence will explode. As terrifying as it is, the young boy’s refuge is safer than the world inside his house.
Eventually, overcome with fatigue, the young boy will sleep fitfully, grabbing only fleeting fragments of the his young body needs.
The next morning he’ll awake and creep warily into his own house, mindful not to wake any guests who were too drunk to depart the night before.
If he is lucky, his mother will have remembered to buy food that week and whatever wasn’t consumed by the drunken horde the previous night will be his breakfast.
Then he will find his least-soiled clothes and head t school.
Not far away, a girl of the about the boy’s age will wake in a garden shed, which she shares with her parents and younger brother. By some curious arrangement of which she knows nothing, her family is allowed to sleep in a shed belonging to another family.
She might get some form of breakfast, but will still have to face the humiliation of going up to the “real” house and asking to use their toilet. A shower would, of course, be too much.
She, too, will head to school that morning.
When these two hapless children get to school, some poor teacher will try to control a boy who has barely slept or eaten and a girl who is also hungry and unclean.
The teacher will be stressed from having several children with similar - or worse - problems in his or her class.
Less than 20km away, a very different scene will play out.
In Brisbane’s leafy west, a boy and a girl of similar age to the ones we have already met sit down to meals with their parents.
They have to eat their vegetables, like it or not, and their professionally employed parents check their homework.
The children are then monitored as they brush their teeth and dress for bed and both parents take turns at reading bedtime stories as the kids drop peacefully into slumber.
In the morning, these children will eat a nutritious breakfast and be dropped off at school, attentive mothers watching as the kids enter the safety of the well-provisioned schoolyard and join peers who also had the privilege of being properly fed and rested the night before.
As part of the Federal Government’s Education Revolution, at some point next year bureaucrats will begin assessing the teachers at these two schools.
They will look at the results of the children who sleep under houses or in sheds and compare them with the results of the kids who have never known hunger and have only ever slept in soft beds.
And the bureaucrats will determine which of these schools has the better teachers. Any bets on who will come out on top?
I have spoken with many teachers over the yeras and the stories above are taken from these conversations.
Despite what people say, I have yet to meet a teacher who would not embrace being paid for performance - the issue remains how would that performance be assessed?
Some teachers have to toilet-train nine-year old children. If they succeed, is that less of an acheivement than the son of doctor to spell?
It makes sense to assess teachers based on performance, but that assessment must take into account all relevant factors, not just literacy and numeracy scores.
Before we dock a teacher’s pay because some of their students can’t spell, let’s devise a system which takes into account all of the relevant circumstances.
Steve Budden is a Brisbane lawyer and father of two children; he has a particular interest in education issues.
