Public education

NAPLAN and the War on Your Local Public School – Adrian Skerritt

This talk was presented on 17 September 2018 at a Brisbane community forum on NAPLAN, hosted by the Queensland Greens and The Cloudland Collective. The forum was chaired by Michael Berkman MP, Greens member for Maiwar.  The other panelists were parent and teacher Janine Rees, and Dr Katie Weir, an education expert from Griffith University. The event marked the launch of the Scrap NAPLAN community group and its website, https://scrapnaplan.weebly.com/.   Many defenders … Read more

American Teacher Union Insurgency and the Creation of a New Militant Minority: a Report on the 2018 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago – Adrian Skerritt

In May this year there were teachers’ strikes North Carolina. In Arizona recently, 70,000 teachers marched in the capital Phoenix. Similar scenes in Oklahoma, Puerto Rico and of course West Virginia. It is possible to speak now about a teacher insurgency in the US. Many of the activists who have played leading roles in these historic strikes met in Chicago in April at the Labor Notes conference, the most important gathering of trade … Read more

‘Uniting the Breakout: from Gonski to Permanency’ – The Activist Teachers Network

One uncanny characteristic about an octopus is its innate ability to escape from a box. In 2012, the Activist Teachers Network (ATN) published a pamphlet titled ‘Resisting Austerity – From NY to Your School’. It featured a cartoon of an octopus delivered in a box, representing the New York neo-liberal model of education, that the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard was determined to impose in Australia. Gillard was then the doyen of schools funding, … Read more