A letter to our education minister

Start of a new school year and an exciting year ahead with our 1 to 1 roll out mid year and our staff moving along on our computer journey.  Mind you, I hate calling it the “computer journey” – rather it be referred to as our learning journey – but hey you can’t win them all.

So first blog of the year….  Not sure if you have heard, but here in Australia we have recently had our elected representation (Federal government) launch their brand new fancy education website www.myschool.edu.au It was the brain child of our deputy Prime Minister and Education minister Ms Julia Gillard.  This site is worth a look – it basically gives everybody access to the standardised testing scores of each school in the country, allowing anyone to compare schools.  Our Government believes this will help parents make the right choice of school for their children and will help schools compare themselves to similar schools and learn from them.

So to start the year I thought I would post a letter I would like to send to our Deputy leader and receive some feedback before sending it.  I would like to thank some twitter friends for their thoughts on this topic.  Please read my draft letter and comment.  I will send this off in the coming weeks.

Dear Ms Gillard,

I would like to thank you and your Government for the recent launch of the MySchool website.  This resource has helped me as an educator and a parent realise that I live in a nation that thankfully has access to important statistics that can help me make educated decisions about where I work and where my child should go to school.  Your efforts to provide us with information of this nature will surely help citizens of our nation make one of the most important decisions parents everywhere will face.

The genius that has been displayed with this concept must NOT stop here Ms Gillard.  I would like to suggest that the Government continue moving forward with this concept while they are on such a great run.  Please consider my proposal for the MyMP.gov.au website.  Think about it Ms Gillard, you could provide a resource that helps me as a concerned citizen and voter understand my local member of parliament and so many other politicians in our nation.  I would like to have access to you and your colleagues academic transcripts, your attendance in parliament, your average number of bad hair days, fashion disasters and most importantly the number of babies kissed in shopping malls during the most recent campaign.

I believe this level of in depth analysis of our members of parliament will provide as valuable criteria for making a decision of representation as the myschool site does for choice of school.  Just like the myschool site, the myMP site would help citizens make decisions by looking for the schools that had more green than pink in the key.  You see I don’t want to be represented in the parliament by just anybody.  Voting is quite a tough decision and it would make life so much easier if we just had a resource that was so nicely colour coded to help make this decision.

Your commitment to providing such an in depth analysis should continue.  All of life’s decisions should be able to be made by simply looking at a colour coded chart of such in-depth statistics.  In fact why don’t we select two days every year where every citizen sits a test that measures their understanding of what their local MP is doing to improve our society.  Furthermore, just like the suggestion from the creators of MySchool, if any MP’s are shown to be performing poorly through these tests they could “learn” from other MP’s that are doing better even if they were opposite sides of politics.  Just because you are seen as opposition doesn’t mean you won’t help each other learn?!?!

Ms Gillard you must continue providing information like this to our nation.  I look forward to hearing you and your colleagues thoughts on this proposal.

Regards,

Concerned Citizen

So why not give me a few thoughts to add to the letter after taking some time to look over the myschool.edu.au website.  Oh and for those who don’t know our genius of a deputy and education minister….  Why not have a look at this clip I found of her.