Similar to NerdyGirl, I agree that there's a vicious negative spiral in the Education system.
1. There are fewer people doing Sciences and hence less science/maths teachers.
2. Since there are less science/maths teachers, the BOS (real one lol) has to compensate by lowering the standards, and even hiring overseas teachers. Some of these teachers are excellent, whereas the majority have poor English skills and fail to inspire students.
3. Due to the lowered standard for teachers, we have more and more teachers who just think of their job as a way of making money, and have no intention of interesting to their students or inspiring them to take Science into tertiary education.
4. As a result of #4, students have a poor opinion of the sciences and think "wtf this is crap, I'm not going to become a teacher"
5. Students graduate and do other subjects apart from sciences. Very few go into Education.
6. Back to step #1.
This cycle is also facilitated by the fact that teachers make fairly low salaries compared to other industries. In other countries with excellent Education systems like Switzerland, teachers are very well respected and their salaries are higher (although they pay much higher taxes than in Australia).
If more money were put into teachers salaries, then perhaps it would attract more people, and hence reverse this cycle. If there were some way to make the Education system competitive, and salaries are dependent on teaching abilities, then this would most certainly reverse the cycle. However, this also raises the issue of Education in schools such as Birrong Boys vs James Ruse and how grading the teachers in both schools cannot be done equally etc.
Every time there is a potential solution, there is always a big problem that arises from it.
tl;dr Increase teacher salaries, attract more people to do education, we get good teachers, good teachers make good students, good students go back into education and science, rinse and repeat infinitely.
