Australia's approach to testing students and holding schools and teachers accountable has been copied from New York. The head of schools there, Joel Klein, has just announced his resignation, and an evaluation of the success or otherwise of the New York experience suggests we may be copying his mistakes.

Julia Gillard, when she was education minister, touted New York's system of teacher and school accountability as the world's best. She used the US example to justify Australia-wide testing in literacy and numeracy at years 3, 5, 7 and 9 and making school results public on the My School website.

In 2008 Gillard met Klein in New York and was so impressed with his policies that she invited him to Australia to show his approach of publicly ranking schools and penalising the underperformers.

Klein argues that his reforms have turned around failing schools