Q&A with Randi Weingarten: Is Australia’s conservative government doing more about school equity than the Obama administration?
President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten has traveled the globe, to places like Argentina, Finland and Singapore, to bring lessons back from foreign education systems to the United States. She spent three days in Australia in April, visiting schools and talking to union officials from across the country.
Australia, like the United States, is a diverse country with a significant percentage of students living in poverty. Both countries perform below the world’s best on international assessments and are trying similar things, like expanding school choice and adopting new standards, to improve their position.
In February, I took my own trip down under to learn about Australia’s policies for tackling truancyand elevating the teaching profession. A conservative government had assumed control about five months prior, and educators talked to me about their concerns that the “Gonski Report,” a 2011 report that recommended ways to improve education funding and address inequities, would no longer be honored. It disappeared from all government websites in late 2013, but resurfaced in January.
Australian students in their final year of high school take a break during a conference about what to do after graduation. The country is trying to boost its high school completion rates to 90 percent. (Photo: Sarah Butrymowicz)
Teachers are still concerned, Weingarten said, when we talked to compare notes. Here are some of her other impressions from the trip:
Question: What were some of your initial reactions from your time in Australia?
Answer: The thing that was great was going to the schools. The elementary school where dozens of languages were spoken at home. There was a school near a detention center. We saw a performance by the students in an intensive English program and we’re still singing the song ‘I’m proud to be a refugee.’ The second chance school that we saw. One of the students said that the teachers there saved her life. We met a couple of students who had suffered breakdowns or severe anxiety brought on by the stress of national standardized tests.
What I was really, really struck by was the potential of Gonski. You had business support, you had the government support, where they talked about over $15 billion in new funds. There was a majority of members associated with Catholic education unanimously agreed that school funding had to be overhauled. There’s a huge, huge, huge set of resources for public schools and schools serving large numbers of disadvantaged students. Where you see that there was this huge push by [the] union to Q&A with Randi Weingarten: Is Australia’s conservative government doing more about school equity than the Obama administration? | Hechinger Report: