Editorial.

Editorial. Welcome to the final issue of the Australian Journal of Educationfor 2008. As I look over the range of content covered in this volume, Icannot help but ponder the extent to which the content of the journalreflects the issues of most concern to educators, policy-makers and thegeneral public today. Teacher quality is clearly high on the public agenda--how can webecome smarter at recognising and rewarding it, and what policies areneeded to enhance it? Ingvarson and Rowe set the agenda in Issue 1, andthe momentum has grown through the year, with a consensus emerging thathigh-quality teaching needs to be rewarded much more than it is at thistime. The difficult issue, of course, is how this can best be achieved.Tackling this issue is one of the key challenges for 2009. The improvement of teacher quality will not occur simply because webecome better at recognising it. It requires decisions to be made aboutthe allocation of resources to schools. Dowling's article on schoolfunding (Issue 2) makes it clear that the systems in place to determinethe allocation of funds to schools are less than optimal, and some mightsay they are bordering on dysfunctional. Improving teacher quality isnot just a matter of incentives, and Ohi (in Issue 1), Prosser (in Issue2) and Ferfolja (in this issue) report on projects aimed at improvingteacher effectiveness, through pre-service preparation and throughcontinuing professional development. School curriculum has had its share of attention, with Berlach andO'Neill examining the controversy over outcomes-based education inWestern Australia (Issue 1).With the work of the National CurriculumBoard to continue through 2009, we can expect national curriculum to bethe source of further lively debate. There has been a substantial focus on tertiary education, includingthe enduring dilemmas associated with selection (Edwards, in thisissue), research quality (Watson; Issue 2) and assessment ofhigher-degree work (Holbrook, Bourke, Lovat and Fairbairn; Issue1).There has been a tendency to assume that Australian tertiaryinstitutions can avert the threat of reduced federal funding by dippinginto the bottomless pit of overseas students' fee income, either bybringing the students to Australia, or by taking the courses overseas tothe students. Yang, in this issue, reviews the vast 'market'that is China, and provides some timely warnings for those who mightthink that tapping that 'market' will be easy. But what of those to whom all of this effort and concern isdirected--the students? A significant portion of this volume has beendevoted to furthering our understanding of the forces that drive themand the hurdles that they strive to overcome. McLeod, Heriot and Hunt,in Issue 2, documented the difficulties faced by school students withgeographically mobile parents, and identified skills that can assistthem to achieve adequate progress as they move from school to school. Inthis issue, Kabir paints a vivid portrait of the life of Muslim studentsin Australian schools as they accommodate new pressures and new values.Pearce, Down and Moore portray the difficulties experienced byuniversity students from low socioeconomic backgrounds as they enter aworld that is often quite foreign to their experience and to that oftheir parents and peers. Issue 2 presented contrasting approaches to the achievement ofindigenous students. Marie, Fergusson and Boden, in New Zealand, foundthat achievement differences between Maori and non-Maori children are nogreater than would be expected, given the socio-economic disadvantagethat these children experience. Gray and Beresford, in WesternAustralia, saw socio-economic disadvantage as one of many factors thatneed to be dealt with if the achievement gap between Indigenous andnon-Indigenous children is to be reduced. Issues of gender are ever-present, and Fergusson and his colleaguesGibb and Horwood have continued to make excellent use of data from theChristchurch Health and Development Study. Their work has yieldedinteresting findings on the impact of classroom behaviour (Issue 1) andsingle-sex schooling (Issue 3) on male-female differences inachievement. They found evidence to suggest that male underachievementmight be reduced by encouraging better classroom behaviour among boys,and that the gender gap almost disappeared when students attendedsingle-sex schools. Sokal and Katz, in Issue 1, noted the argument thatboys' underachievement in reading could be reduced by using maleteachers and a 'boy-friendly' pedagogy, but their research,conducted in Canada, found no evidence to support this claim. So where does this leave us? Achievement differences, whetherbetween genders, or among students from different ethnic groups orsocio-economic backgrounds, are remarkably persistent. But the problemis not the achievement difference, it is underachievement, wherever andhowever it occurs. If only we were better at identifying and dealingwith the causes of underachievement, these differences would concern usless. So we face 2009. What will be the issues that dominate our concernsin the coming year? Will the need to assess and reward teacher qualityremain at the forefront? Will the move toward a national curriculum takecentre stage? What new issues will emerge to capture the attention ofeducators and policy-makers? It is not for me to determine what these issues will be. It is you,the readers of and potential contributors to this journal, who willdecide. As readers, you can note the important issues raised in thejournal, and you can draw them to the attention of your colleagues andthose who shape policy. You can cite them in your writing. And,importantly, you can keep those contributions flowing in to the AJE, andwrite about the issues that matter most in education. By doing so, youcan help to shape the future of this journal, and, less directly, thehealth of our education system and the futures of the young people whodepend on it. Glenn Rowley Australian Council for Educational Research