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After a decade of attacks, public schools in Australia are looking battered and bruised. A Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), which seeks to subject public schools to the logic of the market, is taking root worldwide, and Australia is no exception. In Australia, as elsewhere, schools are in crisis. They have become subject to questionable metrics for assessing “performance” in order to secure funding. Demands for productivity increases have seen teachers’ workloads skyrocket, as hours are now wasted on data collection and bureaucratic reporting. The spread in temporary contracts is undermining job security. As well as teachers’ work conditions, the quality of education and school facilities is deteriorating. This is the context that the New South Wales’ Teachers Federation (NSWTF) — representing around 60,000 teachers, one of the largest education unions in the world — finds itself in during its bargaining period, negotiating terms for their industrial award and staffing agreement. As NSWTF weigh their contract negotiation strategies, we should look to the example set by teachers in the United States, who have repeatedly shown — most recently with another successful strike by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) last month — that teachers are strategically placed to lead their communities in a fight against austerity and the commercialization of public services. The CTU has demonstrated that if teachers stand firm in their demands — not just for pay raises, but for demands that benefit the entire working class — and are willing to engage in industrial action, up to and including strikes, they can push back against neoliberal attacks.

Standing United Against Divide-and-Rule Tactics In NSW, there are two pressing threats to teacher solidarity that must be reckoned with. First, pay anomalies have been inflicted upon thousands of younger teachers, threatening to pit them against their colleagues. Emerging from a transition to a new pay scale in 2016, these anomalies mean that some teachers employed in 2014 or 2015 are paid lower salaries than those employed after January 1, 2016. The potential for division here is self-evident. The second threat is the continued expansion of casualization, a phenomenon buried under the bureaucratic jargon of “Temporary Teacher Engagements.” Many teachers are now effectively employed on temporary contracts, for a period that can range from four weeks to three years. Worse still, a 2018 review raises proposals that will result in a further increase to the number of temporary teachers in NSW schools. Casualized teaching often amounts to heightened exploitation, which simultaneously works to undermine solidarity. Temporary teachers understandably resent the amount of work they are forced to do, and under such fragmented conditions, it is extremely difficult to assert workplace rights. The spread of casualization, of course, also harms students by removing their most reliable source of academic and social support: namely, permanently employed teachers. Resolving unfair pay anomalies and halting the spread of casualization are crucial to building union power among younger and precariously employed teachers. These measures can ward off bitterness, promoting trust and confidence between colleagues and with the union. A generation of teachers could be recruited as fighters for public education.

Time for Teaching We are fortunate that the American trends towards closing public schools, expanding charter schools, and introducing performance-based pay — usually tied to standardized test results — have not yet hit NSW. However, since 2012, teachers have been increasingly under the pump to collect and analyze evidence related to their work activities and student progress, which is often measured by mass testing. Forced compliance with these bureaucratic measures is a hallmark of the “growth” — focused, private sector logic of the GERM model. In addition to being a precursor to the full-blown attacks common in the United STates, this helps create an unmanageable workload for teachers, which in turn takes time away from teaching students. Teachers also lack meaningful professional autonomy. We are forced to spend ever-increasing hours on “tick-a-box” administrative work, which most teachers feel impinges on the quality of teaching and learning. This is a manifestation of “continuous improvement” ideology, which comes from corporate management playbook by government bureaucrats. This teacher exploitation is concealed in the jargon of “effect size,” “PLAN2,” “outcomes,” “expected growth,” “Schools Excellence Framework,” “registration,” “live document,” and “external review.” Now a new state government policy has been announced which explicitly calls for year-on-year “improvements” which will set “stretch targets” based on NAPLAN, a standardized test that has been criticized by education experts. A system obsessed with corporate-style accountability and “compliance” is bound to result in meaningless data-collection practices of little to no educational value. In the same year that the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike inaugurated a new era of teacher unionism, the “Local Schools, Local Decisions” (LSLD) policy subjected NSW schools to atomization. This policy significantly devolved responsibilities for budgeting and management onto individual schools and their principals. LSLD is the NSW equivalent of the US charter school model: it works teachers harder than ever before, undermining our union and staff solidarity by creating a competitive culture over funding and promotions. It’s a policy that lumbers teachers with the blame for systematic under-resourcing. For example, funds for resources and specialist staff for students with disabilities are partially contingent on teachers’ ability to produce voluminous documentation on how we are supporting these students. All of this means that our work-life balance is collapsing. Teachers in NSW work an average of fifty-five hours per week. This leaves little time to plan for or even think about teaching. A study commissioned by the NSWTF found that over 60 percent of teachers report unacceptable levels of occupational stress. One teacher reported working over eighty hours per week during term, and fifty during “holidays,” noting that this “left me physically exhausted and mentally drained”; a “total burn out.” Another teacher described the workload as “simply not possible to sustain … If I do my job to the standard required, my family suffer[s], if I focus more on my family life, I fall behind in my employment requirements … Every other week, term, year the job description just gets added to time and time again.”

Fight on All Fronts How do we combat this culture of overwork? A “Time for Teaching” campaign could begin to challenge ubiquitous measurement and monitoring. This has the potential to build wide solidarity, both between teachers and with the community, because workload increases detract from lesson preparation time and teaching quality. We should call for the abolition of LSLD and demand the creation of permanent jobs as a way to take back control of the curriculum and our work hours, so we can devote more time to teaching and lesson preparation. In communications to its members, the NSWTF has indicated that it has the right priorities. It is committed to resolving the pay anomalies and has promised to fight for permanent jobs in order to both achieve reductions in face-to-face teaching hours and improve working conditions. Yet, the problems facing teachers are not discrete issues but components of a neoliberal whole that must be fought as part of a single campaign. Without a comprehensive campaign, advances on one front may mean losses on another. An increase in permanent staffing, for example, does not necessarily amount to more time for lesson preparation. Employers can always counter by demanding increased “productivity” or by setting new performance targets. It’s for this reason that we must follow the CTU by demanding clearly defined guarantees embedded in legally enforceable industrial agreements, especially around workload and working conditions. Under no circumstances should we accept a continuation of the unfair pay anomalies. This risks seriously undermining solidarity within our union and the success of this and future campaigns. Just as West Virginia teachers fought alongside school service staff in 2018 , any attempt to divide staff must be unequivocally resisted.