The below comment is solely the opinion of the author and is not reflective of or endorsed by the publishers of Larvatus Prodeo or related entities.
Today in a glorious wrap-around cover, the Sydney Morning Herald published an extensive league table of NSW schools as ranked by the MySchool website.
The newspaper explained that its actions breached NSW law at the risk of a potential $55,000 fine.
In a lengthy editorial, the newspaper took hundreds of words to express the following principles as a justification for publishing the league tables:
- That information about schools performance should be public, transparent and accountable.
- That the government has no business interfering with a free press.
- That members of the public are entitled to make their own decisions about whether and how they wish to use the information.
Now these are fine principles. You might even agree with all of them. But despite the ardour of the Editor’s insistence, these principles in no way justify publishing the league tables as they did.
It is specious to cite these principles as a justification for publishing MySchool data. A clue as to why it is specious is contained in the opening sentence of the editorial, which claimed that “for the first time” information is now available to the public that was formerly only available to bureaucrats and school executives.
At the stroke of its own pen, the Herald has trashed its justification: because it’s not the first time. The first time was yesterday, with the launch of the MySchool website. Nor is the Herald‘s geographic reach as extensive as the website. Nor does tomorrow’s fish ‘n chips wrapper have the longevity of the website. Nor can the dead tree edition reflect the national database or its interactive features. The Editor’s argument is a grandiose, verbose, purpled-prosed, multi-columned wrap-around non-sequitur.
Taxpayers have already paid, twice, for the MySchool information: once when they funded the education system, and again when they funded the MySchool website. Anybody who feels like paying for it a third time in an adulterated form by buying the Herald, is, I guess, entitled to throw their money away.
Since the Herald’s justifications are specious, we can only speculate about what their real reasons for publishing were. Perhaps they calculated that they would still be ahead on circulation and ad revenue even after paying a $55,000 fine. For all their talk of “adding value” to the MySchool data, one could be forgiven for believing the only value they are seeking to add is to their profit and loss statement.
Furthermore, without its flimsy fig-leaf justification, the Herald is now fully answerable for any damage caused to schools by its unnecessary, thoughtless and greed-inspired publication of league tables. Damage for school reputations trashed. Damage to teachers’ professional good names. Damage to students who cop the stigma of being in a “failing” school.
So even if you agree, as I do, with the three principles cited above, you can still express your disapproval of the Herald’s publication of the league tables, by taking any or all of the following actions:
- Cancel your Herald subscription, and tell them why.
- Tell your friends to do the same.
- Cease reading or linking to smh.com.au
- Write to the Principal and insist that your School’s limited budget is not spent purchasing advertising space in the Herald.
- Ask your (NSW) school to stop making the Herald available to students and to stop using Herald-produced materials in the classroom.
- Ask your P&C to write to the Herald and explain that their material is no longer welcome on School premises, and the reason why.
- Warn other newspaper proprietors that you will take similar actions against them if they publish school league tables.
The information you might wish to find is freely available at http://www.myschool.edu.au. Why let newspaper publishers get away with profiteering on what your taxes have already paid for, twice?
PS – Before anyone seeks to claim that I’m against accountability for schools and teachers, I can promise you that, unless you happen to be a Deputy or Principal of some years’ standing, I’ve fired more teachers than you have.
You could also vote Liberal. The Liberals are against these “league tables”. Its on the basis of their upper house votes that this legislation exists in NSW.
What’s the disclaimer for? I’ve seen some mightily silly things posted on this site, with the usual sprinkling of tapdancing-on-the-edge-of-defamation one sees on many blogs. Are you in negotiations with Fairfax and trying to suck up or something?
Welcome to the dark side.
(Rove – you’re an effing genius! How do you do it?)
Well Mercurious it is my view that if the Herald used better quality ink that didn’t come off so easily and leave smudges everywhere it could be used as loo paper but as things stand it is not even good for that. Tomorrow’s front page ought ought read “SMH editorialist wanks self to death and three colleagues die laughing”.
I thought the Herald league tables were great and I congratulate them for it.
(I suspect the disclaimer is there because threatening a secondary boycott is a flagrant breach of the Trade Practices Act.)
The SMH did publish something not available on the website. They published a ranking. Like it or not, many people wanted to know that. I spent a fun evening last night ranking my local schools, and comparing them. The SMH this morning made that much easier, and made it much easier (without waiting through numerous crashes of the site) to look at multiple schools quickly.
I tend to strongly disagree with their decision to ignore year 3 and year 7 data in their ranking (possibly because my boys’ school did much better in year 3 than 5) and the fact that there is no value add info available on the website. But you can’t say they didn’t add analysis.
Only grudgingly so. They only backed it to do-over the Labor party. A lot of them don’t support the ban at all. This could seriously unsettle the Libs, who have been putting on a very unified face in recent months, as internally they try to decide whether to push for the fine to be applied.
“(I suspect the disclaimer is there because threatening a secondary boycott is a flagrant breach of the Trade Practices Act.)”
I ain’t no fancy big-city lawyer or nuthin’ but the actions suggested in the post are unlikely to be caught by the TPA. Section 51 specifically exempts consumer boycotts and s45D, which is the non-union secondary boycott section doesn’t apply as there is no attempt to hinder or prevent two parties from transacting their business. It’s not like he’s suggested standing in front of the trucks trying to deliver the paper.
d
“Why let newspaper publishers get away with profiteering on what your taxes have already paid for, twice?”
Why aren’t newspapers free to interpret and publish publicly available data that’s been paid for by our taxes? If you don’t like their interpretation (and not a week goes by when I don’t scoff at some media outlet’s spin on data or stats) you’re free to make your own interpretation. The law is utterly absurd and Verity Firth has underscored the sheer stupidity of it by proclaiming her total lack of interest in spending a cent of the NSW education budget in pursuing a newspaper that is simply doing what newspapers tend to do. Good on her.
Gillard has shown her true clours by launching this website. She has no idea about education and has betrayed teachers and unions. I fully back union moves to ban the testing of kids this year. Gillard and Bligh who also backs Myschool have shown they view education as a factory. Perhaps Bligh and Gillard should visit my school and see what decades of severe underfunding in a low socia economic area does to a school. Perhaps they could see the decaying walls, holes in buildings, leaking rooves and meet some of the kids from disfunctional homes. They have no idea.
“Ask your (NSW) school to stop making the Herald available to students and to stop using Herald-produced materials in the classroom.”
Yes, only the Australian and Daily Telegraph should be made available to NSW students. They can educated on a diet of
Monday – Glenn Milne
Tuesday – Piers Ackerman
Wednesday – Janet Albrechtson
Thursday – Dennis Shanahan
Friday – Tim Blair.
List lovers unite.
I see James Ruse Agricultural High School topped the list. Surely they cheated.
I should boycott a newspaper for reporting statistics provided by the Government?
Proof that they shouldn’t have published is to be found in the availability of those statistics elsewhere?
Newspapers shouldn’t charge for content derived from Government sources?
Uh… whatever.
If you have a problem with Gillard’s website, fine. But to support the NSW Government banning newspapers reporting data provided by the Federal Government? That’s silly.
What’s the problem? I’m not endorsing the SMH’s characteristically cheesy treatment, but it IS publicly available information and bound to get people talking (which it has and which is one of the measures of news value).
The biggest criticism of the SMH is why they didn’t get this information leaked to them BEFORE My Schools went live. Then they could have been justified beating their fearless journalistic chests.
@2 No Jacques, I just don’t want to inadvertently cause any trouble for the blog hosts, who graciously allow me to publish these thought-bubbles. You can call that “sucking up” if you like, I call it showing respect and good manners.
@6 I’m sorry for your children that this is the method you use to choose their school. It won’t help do anything other than make you feel better and give you a confirmation bias to avoid “buyer’s remorse”. But I hope it works out well for them all the same.
@9 I never said newspapers aren’t “free to publish”. I said the opposite: I affirmed the principle of a free press by stating my agreement with the principle. I even said people can waste their money on it if they like. Fortunately, we also are free not to buy or read rubbish, which is my recommendation as it pertains to the Herald. Try reading for understanding.
@13 I don’t support the Government ban on reporting data. I’m just suggesting to people that it might be a good idea not to buy warmed-over reheated rubbish, especially when it’s the intellectual equivalent of junk-food: a quick-fix, gives you a rush, but ultimately has no nutrition and makes you fat and lazy.
@14 The problem Mr Denmore is typified by Jennifer @6. People actually believe the rankings are telling them something meaningful. Are you not a little unnerved by the fact that still, today, in 2010, people will make major life decisions just ‘cos of what they read in the paper?
Behold, a list of vegetables, ranked in order of their frunginess, based on CSIRO data and seasonally-averaged blipblops:
#1 zucchini
#2 pumpkin
#3 artichoke
#4 celery
#5 eggplant
OK, now go shopping!
Apart from the grand-standing, how is this any different from the MySchools site in the first place, except that one can choose whether or not to pay for it?
So now that we have a league table, now what? What exactly will be the earth-shattering, educationally revolutionary consequences? I don’t need a league table to know that Palmerston High is shit and Darwin Middle school is full so if my kid was in high school he wouldn’t have a choice anyway. The only consequence of any note i can see is that the moniker Palmerslum will be used more often (gone out of fashion a bit recently).
Parents who care about their child’s education will continue to make informed choices , and parents who don’t won’t. And there seems to be an assumtion that if your child goes to a better school they will get better marks. Doesn’t matter of your kid goes to Geelong Grammar if he’s a dolt.
You find that surprising? Shit, there wouldn’t be much in the media if they took out all the stuff that might encourage people to make bad decisions. Caveat emptor, I would have thought.
I’ve been doing my own ranking as well, all the while keeping in mind the now well publicized criticisms of the stats. I don’t like the implication that the public can’t be trusted with information, can’t be trusted to draw their their own conclusions based upon that information and the commentary about its value.
At last, firm statistics to answer the real question: who to feed to the aliens.
@18, sure Mr Denmore, that’s quite true.
But here’s another take on the problem, rather neatly put in a cartoon in the local paper here:
A line of pupils marches into their classroom, test papers in hand. The leader admonishes the teacher as follows: “I just got my NAPLAN results, and boy do you need to lift your performance…”
I’m sorry I didn’t make myself clear. I wouldn’t dream of using data like this to choose my childrens’ school. I I know my kids a lot better than that, and I’ve spent a lot of time visiting potential high schools and talking to principals because my kids aren’t necessarily the easiest kids to educate.
But my point is that parents choosing a school want to know as much about it as they can. One of the things I did find very useful from the website (not the Herald) was that some of the high schools I’ve been considering have a clear bias towards maths over english. I’m not sure whether that is good or bad for my kids (both of whom are good at maths) but it is useful data.
Anyway, to my original point, this blogpost was criticising the Herald for having republished government data without having analysed it. They did analyse it, and that analysis had news value to a lot of people. For most of those people (like me), the news value was just like the last celebrity scandal – prurient interest in which nearby school had had a bad year (particularly if it happened to be a private school), but it is still news value.
The real problem with these league tables is that they imply strongly that it is OK that poor children get a worse education. But that’s a topic for a post on my own blog.
As a parent, Mecurius, I wish I had this data about seven years ago.
I’m going to respond with a personal account only and I don’t want to get into a debate on what could be negative outcomes from the publishing of this data.
Every parent at my daughter’s (now ex) local public primary school, knew very well that we had a swathe of teachers who just wouldn’t retire or had lost it years ago, and/or were disinterested or even incompetent.
Many parents whose kids were “in area” attended and then after two, three, four years etc gradually withdrew their kids. They loved the school community, but because of under-performance in the 3 R’s only, they would make the decision to leave – meaning that infants enrolments at this school now swamps esp. the upper primary enrolments – this should have been a huge clue for the regional office and the Dept.
Every other aspect of the school was really fantastic with a hugely involved parent community, but the school just didn’t ever put much emphasis into the academic side of things and some teachers even less…. It was the major parent talking point for the seven years my daughter attended, and I watched as some of the most dedicated families (President P&C etc) would move their kids to mostly private schools in the area, only because their bright children were falling behind in reading/writing and arithmetic.
I’ve just looked at the SMH’s online and it confirms everything we knew – that is, we were very poorly placed compared to every other public and private primary school in the local area, and even in comparison to schools in much poorer NESB parts of the larger area. Our socio-economic ranking and very waspy cohort meant we should have been in the top 100 at the very least, we were nowhere near it. The next closest public school, just walking distance away, was right up the in rankings equal to it’s nearly same socio-economic ranking. Many of the kids from this other school are friends at many after-school activities etc – ie. the exact same cohort of kids doing factors better.
A number of our last year’s Year 6′s should have made it into the the selective high school system based on their native intelligence – however only my daughter and another two boys were selected for a performing arts high school purely related to their out-of-school-activities. Not one of our kids were academically instructed well enough to make it into Sydney Boys or Sydney Girls unlike many other local schools. There was no socio-economic issues, no behavioural issues, no school resourcing issues – we had tons of money – it was all related to teaching issues and executive choices. A huge percentage of the kids have now moved into the private high school system, which they may have chosen to do irrespective.
It really wasn’t a good situation at all – as many underperforming teachers had been there for many, (many) years, however are parents supposed to move their kids from their local public school because the Dept won’t move on underperforming teachers – the answer we received for seven years was…..yes.
It was also really awful because these same teachers were all very kind, great people in fact, really nice to the kids and very capable in respect of “looking after” kids and they did lots of craft and art and sport and other fun stuff. The kids themselves were all having a great time and had many friends etc, but many years, their books would come home at the end of the year with ten pages filled in…. in a good year…
How this ‘ranking information’ will play out in terms of my daughter’s now old primary school will be very interesting – I still of course know many parents with kids still at the school. And the school always has a huge waiting list (maybe not after this data is more known). As I said, it was not an easy issue with all the human aspects involved. Actually, it was quite stressful knowing how much everyone loved the school and how we became very close to the very teachers we knew were not doing as much as they should have been etc.
I made the decision to leave my daughter, I never really consided moving her because she is pretty smart and would be able to catch up later, but I strongly requested for the first time (after two v. dud years), the one very well respected Yr 6 teacher, who then tried all year to “catch up’ the kids for high school. She herself retired last year.
This old stick was really shocked in the first few weeks of last year, at the amount of stuff her new Yr 6 class just didn’t know, when I having a gasbag with her. When I pointed out that they’d missed out X teacher and X teacher (due to some teacher/year changes in the previous years) and that their year had unfortunately got all the dud teachers who I named, in a row, and missed all the good ones – she held her tongue, but her expression said it all. She knew, I knew, that she couldn’t say anything to a parent, and that she’d just have to do her best to catch them up herself, which she did as much as she could.
I also have an issue with some people’s opinions that parents will have wildly different expectations of their school and will by “shocked” by the published results. Disappointed, vindicated, and pleasantly surprised – would be the 3 top parent responses, imo. Most parents are pretty savvy about every school in their local area and the type of pupil cohorts in different schools and the expectations based on that etc. It’s one of the reasons why parents enrol their kids in certain schools in the first place, if they have the choice.
This information will no doubt provide parents with tangible evidence to push for change within their schools. I am concerned about the ramifications of how this information could and maybe used, I’m not so sorry that some principals and teachers may have pull up their socks or even be moved out of the system, but after seeing really smart children not receiving the fundamentals, being moved to other schools, and many others having to attend after-school coaching in basic skills, has completely changed my mind about this issue.
And I’m a parent who isn’t into hours of homework (any?) nor pumping children with facts and rote learning from morning till night, and I like lots of arts & crafts and other activities, but a little bit of balance and accountability would have solved much of the angst in this one school’s case and also given some children the opportunity of gaining a place at the local selective public high schools which it must be said, none were given.
I’ve just re-read my comment and just to reiterate this is a personal account of a school in a very privileged area and where the children will most likely all do well blah, blah in the long term – it does however provide an account of the sort of issues which effect many schools and children beyond the lack of resources etc for public education generally.
I agree with su’s point how this just confirms expectations etc.
I suppose my real disappointment is that the various State Dept of Education’s have not used this information which could be drilled down internally to identify issues with poor teaching and poor school leadership in their own public schools, based on known student cohorts and deal with the issue of underperforming teachers and principals themselves (!!) and not have the Federal Govt “name and shame” all schools to attempt via parents, to do the same.
Jo. I am a parent and a teacher. I work in one of the toughest schools in Brisbane which I won’t name. You won’t get too much lower than us in the NAPLAN tests though. I have not looked at My School but imagine we are very, very low. Over half of all students in some grades in some areas are below benchmark. Looking at this school one may think the teachers are not “performing” (I hate that word – so clinical). Anyway, if one knew the reality of the school one would know that an absolute majority of these kids come from either broken families, disfunctional familes, are refugees or do not speak English. Many kids do not have lunch so they get fed at school. Add one of the highest unemployment rates in Queensland, second generation unemployment and high crime rates.
Given that many of our kids come to school speaking little or no English the fact that within a year or so many are happily playing with other kids and conversing and reading and writing in some English is a HUGE achievement. Other kids have been moved around foster homes and the fact that they have it together enough to be in class laughing is a success in itself. NAPLAN tests? They will still fail. So you could say that the teachers are “underperforming. In my opinion the teachers in some of these schools are among the most creative and persistant around. If you put some of the teachers from your white middle class schools that do so well on the disgusting My School site they simply would not survive. They would not cope.
Other issues in my school – high numbers of kids in foster care, high numbers of single parent families, high numbers of refugees from traumatised backgrounds who have seen people violently attacked, kids who hide under desks because they are asked to write in their books. Then factor in that the government has underfunded this school so badly that there are holes in walls, leaking rooves and a general decay of buildings.
I asked to work in this school. I know that getting a traumatised kid back on track and being able to be a source of stability to a fatherless child is success for many teachers. I have no desire to work with white middle class kids who will make it because of the family they were born into. My choice to work at the bottom end of a system is because I believe this is where I can do most good.
I would not send my child to this school because of the extreme social issues. However I do not not believe that the teachers at her private school school would have any idea of how tough a school like this is. I do not blame them for this but to argue they work harder or are better teachers is simply rubbish. My School is a disgusting and revolting corruption of what education should be. It caters to the horrible competitiveness in some parents which sees their kids as vehicles of success rather than children. I am a unionist but the ALP will be last on my ballot paper over this issue alone.
“PS – Before anyone seeks to claim that I’m against accountability for schools and teachers, I can promise you that, unless you happen to be a Deputy or Principal of some years’ standing, I’ve fired more teachers than you have.”
Well that speaks to your commitment to the accountability of teachers. However, on the evidence of your comments here and elsewhere I am more inclined to be worried about the accountability of deputies and principals than of teachers or schools more generally. Let us shine a bright light on the bastard bosses!
BBB
Well said, Spana.
The opinion expressed is just a tad strident. It’s only education for pities sake. It’s of no consequence and it will wear off. The education debate is almost as mind numbingly dull as the environmental debate. Frankly, I cannot wait for everyone to die just so I can get a little peace. On and on and on they go. The ever ready bunnies of nothingness braying endlessly about sod all. “I have an opinion” they say. Well cop this, ” I have another” they retort and on it goes till your ears start to bleed. Poor old human beings. They never learn because they haven’t a clue how to get along. Fear, suspicion, greed and envy dog them all day every day and then they wonder why everything turns out so bad. It’s grand comedy and epic tragedy all at once and no-one knows whether to laugh or cry.
Spana, I have no idea what your point is in regards to my comment.
I realise that the myschool demographic rankings are all over the place but it’s pretty obvious to people who live in a particular area ‘who’ is going to what schools and what schools draw what from areas, and will, like I did, compare my daughter’s school only to the local schools where I know exactly who the cohort is.
Therefore the results are pertinent in respect of school outcomes, only when you know who is attending what schools, and in my case I know many, many of the kids who attend a range of locals schools – it’s very much comparing apples to apples in my case only.
As to your situation – you can likewise view results of similar schools in that one area which have very similar student cohorts who are facing the same issues and if other like-schools are doing factors better or worse in this one aspect – ie NAPLAN, then it says something is being done differently. What is it – well, you’d have to know the situation in much greater detail, and this is where this information is useless as an innocent bystander/spectator.
In my case, this information just confirmed what most parents already knew; a number of underperforming teachers and school executive choices.
If some people want to compare Sydney Grammar School with your school based on this information and for whatever purpose that could be, then that says more about them, than it does about this ‘very blunt instrument’ type of data.
As I said, the Dept of Education have a duty of care to their public school students and considering that they have had access to this type of information year after year – they should have always been dealing with these issues it raises internally and I was most disappointed as a parent years ago now to find that it wasn’t.
As to the issue of selective public schools, that is unfortunately what parents in NSW have to deal with as both Federal and State Govt decisions from both sides of the fence, have created a situation where many public high schools have had a flight of middle class parents to private schools or progressively upping the academic stakes to gain a place in a public selective high school over many decades and therefore the choice of public high schools in some areas is negligible unless you make a decision to send your child to the one big local public comprehensive which may not be a choice some parents will make because of chronic underfunding and the overall student cohort etc. and rarely due to teacher issues.
None of this stuff is revelatory to anyone who has children at Australian schools -90% of what parents talk about, as you probably know, revolves around these very issues.
Anybody who thinks that these statistics have even the remotest connection to education is either stupid or having themselves on.
So your argument is that media organisations (or indeed anyone else on the tubes) should not be allowed to suck up government data, undertake their own numerical/statistical analysis, and present their findings to the public? Jaysus, we could only wish that MORE journalism was like this, rather than cut-and-paste press-release churnalism!
Maybe they’re in breach of govt copyright, in which case I would question that the government should be copyrighting the data in the first place — a CC licence would be much more appropriate.
Gov 2.0 should be facilitating open, creative and unanticipated uses of govt datasets, not regulating against them. Would be very interested to hear Nicholas Gruen’s views on this.
@ 31:
If publishing the league tables was such a self-evidently great idea, it would require little or no explanation…so why did the SMH Editor need a multi-columned, rambling editorial to write their justification?
They write shorter editorials when declaring their support for one party or the other in Federal elections!
The lady doth protest too much…
God forbid that a newspaper publish data, how can we stop this unnerving trend?
“People actually believe the rankings are telling them something meaningful. Are you not a little unnerved by the fact that still, today, in 2010, people will make major life decisions just ‘cos of what they read in the paper.”
I see little difference with the newspapers same provision of ‘life changing’ info regarding the safety or otherwise of genetically modified food, the global warming debate, the War on Terror and the war in Iraq, taking ecstasy drugs at parties and so on. The quoted passage by Mercurius above makes my head spin. Likewise, I’m sure the Herald’s geographic reach won’t be as extensive in theory as the MySchool website, but in practice I suspect it might fare slightly better with providing that same information to the members of the population who don’t currently have internet access, the latter of whom are probably also taxpayers.
“Taxpayers have already paid, twice, for the MySchool information: once when they funded the education system, and again when they funded the MySchool website. Anybody who feels like paying for it a third time in an adulterated form by buying the Herald, is, I guess, entitled to throw their money away.”
I’m sure however that if any of those (internet ready) taxpayers wanted a hard copy version of that information they paid for, to read away from the computer, , you’d support them cutting-and-pasting it into a Word document and printing it out for themselves? There’s no mention anywhere in the above article that the information printed by the Herald-Sun is factually incorrect, just that seeing it in bold print might ‘damage’ the reputation of various teachers and schools in the eyes of parents, and that newspapers should be ashamed of themselves for reprinting government data of any sort, all of which would have been ‘funded by taxpayers’ at one point or another. (Mercurius, if you ever get your wish, be sure to grant us the occasional waiver for things like Royal Commissions). Good luck anyhow with the campaign to stop newspapers from profiteering. Last time I checked, a growing number of of educational facilities in this country weren’t particularly shy about subscribing to the same profiteering ethos.
The article by Mercurius boils down to an attack on a newspaper printing data about the education system, written by someone who apparently works in the education system, with the notion that taxpayers should be offended when a newspaper ‘profiteers’ from printing public data. (Should I be retrospectively angry for all the years local newspapers reported information first broadcast on the public-funded ABC, or data from the CSIRO?) I doubt that any person who reaches into their wallet to hand over the dollar or so for a newspaper will be stunned at the revelation that newspapers seek money to continue printing, as do the growing number of news and commentary websites wrestling with the notion of installing a paywall. Maybe we’d all be better off if the gradual death of print journalism led to information like this being accessible on Government websites only – with the occasional generous critical insight provided by the odd lone, evening blogger writing for free – but I kind of doubt it.
A paper should be prevented from publishing public data; I don’t think so.
Hey, I’m all for the SMH publishing meaningful information it is just that the heroic breast beating editorialising that went with it suggests that the spark of liberty burns deep within their chests and no bully government is going to prevent them from spreading ‘da troof’ to the masses in dire need of oh blah blah blah. What a load of shite.
The information isn’t meaningful. It is barely comprehensible, poorly thought out and doesn’t represent the reality of why certain schools perform worse than others. In some cases there may be an underperforming cohort of superannuation watchers dragging standardised test results down as Jo notes. In others, as Spana so clearly and comprehensively outlines, the social circumstances of the children are beyond the imagination of most people and they act as a severe handicap on learning capacity against which numerous deeply (democratically) committed teachers struggle. The tables don’t show this distinction. They can’t.
Good journalism and investigative reporting might be able to draw out the sorts of issues that spana and Jo raise but I haven’t seen any of that at the SNH for a long time.
On a broader note: Gillard is no social democrat. We need to neologise: Social Technocrat? Any labor leader who cannot take the representative union with them on a policy area such as this is a failure from the get go. I’d support teacher’s unions actions against this becuase social democracy begins with the genuine engagement of citizens in their workplaces. If they reject the policy it is for good reason. No policy wonk from head office or anywhere else knows better what the issues on the ground are than the people who actually deliver the service.
Geoff Honnor @9: so Verity Firth (NSW) has an opinion? WGaF? NSW ALP is dead and rotting and the only thing that people note about it is the quality of the stench of corruption coming off its corpse.
“Hey, I’m all for the SMH publishing meaningful information”
Providing the AEU has sole pre-publication determining rights on ‘meaningful’ it seems. I’m all for readers of the SMH making up their own minds about ‘meaningful.’
No Goeff, the SMH should publish away. They’ve no track record of cred on the issue at all. I also make up my own mind, which I did after visiting the Fed’s website and then imagining how an NESB parent would comprehend the information. It is crap: crap front end and crap assumptions in the making. Besides, in NSW at least, people don’t have a choice about what public schools their children attend because school enrolments are based on catchment areas. Sure, you can decide to sell up and buy (more likely rent if you are lucky)another house in Sydney based on school performance but anyone who thinks that any but a minority of people are in a position to do that is out of any touch with reality.
The entire affair has more to do with the ALP positioning itself as a Blairite ‘third way’ social technocrat party than anything else. This way they pander to a sense of outraged middle class entitlement about those under performing public servants (teachers) while totally ignoring the wider realuity that old fashioned soc dem solutions like targetted spending on low performing schools in low soc/en postcodes would fix the specific problems.
Generation ‘cannot find my arsehole without NAVman’ has just been given another toy with buttons to push.
@ 34 it would help if you read what I actually said. There is a mile of difference between what I wrote and your strawman suggestion that the paper should be “prevented” from printing.
NSW has already substantially instituted a system that enables teacher pay to be tied to demonstrated performance and competence in the classroom. Teachers who meet the standards of the NSW Institute of Teachers have a much faster road towards higher salary grades and promotions. Under the newer schemes being progressively introduced, a 2nd or 3rd year teacher who demonstrates competence against standards can earn as much as what an 8-year teacher could earn under seniority-based schemes.
This is a sensible approach to providing individual reward and recognition for teachers with a proven track record of classroom excellence.
But anyone who has bothered to make more than a cursory study of attempts to link teacher pay to
performancestudents’ exam results knows that there is no “there”, there.I note that none of the detractors here have even attempted to offer any solution to what is to be done about this “unintended consequence” of league tables:
I guess this is all just Somebody Else’s Problem. I recall a time when “Stuff you Jack, I’m alright” wasn’t an ‘Australian value’.
@ 33
Ah yes, the ad hom, thanks Bogan. Clearly any discussion of the education system by people who actually work in the education system is automatically suspect. Only people who aren’t teachers are qualified to comment about teachers.
I wonder: it’s suggested by George Brandis and others that people who don’t have children aren’t entitled to put arguments or propositions about children, since they “know nothing” about them.
Why doesn’t this ‘common sense’ notion apply also here? Oh that’s right, because noisy authoritarians wish to suggest that they, and only they, have a legitimate right to speak on any subject. Everyone else: women, the child-free, teachers, the unemployed, etc. should simply STFU…
Merc: @ above – look, it is common knowledge that most of these kids cannot read anyway so their loser self esteem won’t be further damaged by league tables showing they went to loser schools. Nor their employability. Not effin much it won’t.
Spot on, Adrian and Anthony Nolan.
Like GroceryWatch and FuelWatch, now we have SchoolWatch.
The MySchool website and data is the Rudd Government’s version of Howard’s anti-terrorism fridge magnets. Something for scared middle class voters to clutch and mouth propitious utterings to keep the Scary Stuff away. And the scariest thing of all in the middle class mind is the thought that they might have Paid Too Much or that someone, somewhere, might be Getting Something I’m Not.
Ah Mercurious you made me LOL again with “And the scariest thing of all in the middle class mind is the thought that they might have Paid Too Much or that someone, somewhere, might be Getting Something I’m Not.”
Jo: I’m hearing you re: the frustration of having your kid stuck with a string of dud teachers.
Two words spring to mind: Teachers Union.
Here in Qld our current premier was education minister from 01-04, long enough to rejig the state school education system, and there’s been time enough for the effects of what she did to show through and Welford didn’t do anything much, so these Qld Grade Nine NAPLAN results can be raesonably said to be Anna Bligh’s legacy.
One of the things tried was the Career Change program, where “Teachers with more than 10 years’ service could volunteer for payouts of up to $50,000 to move into other fields. To be eligible, teachers were required to meet criteria, such as demonstrating a “shortage of contemporary teaching skills” …. at least 1700 were able to fill in the forms, take the money and run.
Did any really competent people think “hello, $50,000 to get out of this system, go somewhere else, including qld private schools, whatever I like? What’s the catch?” Were there any wastes of space that didn’t even understand the question? Does skippy have ticks?
Have a look at your school, see who did and didn’t take up the offer, you might find an explanation there.
It was such a bad idea they rolled it again in ’07, and Victoria has adopted similar,
You didn’t think education policy was about what’s best for kids or something like that did you?’
Correction of detail: Anna was even longer at the helm of the good ship Mary Street, 01-05.
Danny: I’d be interested to know what the average after tax income of a 20+ yr teacher in Qld is? Poor pay = lower entry requirements for tertiary training of teachers as the Unis try to fulfill their quotas for replacement grads each year. Similar to nurses. Lower UAI for entry = lower quality teachers (I know some real duds) but that is how the structure works. It is also gendered: poor pay = feminisation of the labour force. I was fortunate to have numerous primary and secondary teachers who took advantage of the retraining offer made to WWII vets. Excellent teachers, excellent men.
at this point I’m really looking for evidence that the Fed ALP has not swallowed the neolib fundamentals despite Rudd’s essays. That evidence would take the form of significantly increased support for the provision of state services and an intention to get the unions on board in policy formation and delivery.
This principle of accountability could be extended.
What about financial advisers?
A a web-based, annually updated league table of:
a. FAs’ aggregated returns on their clients’ investments
b. FAs’ front-end commission rates as a percentage of the capital they have placed on behalf of their clients
c. FAs’ trailing commission rates as a percentage of the capital they have placed on behalf of their clients
could easily be constructed from their accounts and required as a condition for their licensing as financial advisers.
“Ah yes, the ad hom, thanks Bogan. Clearly any discussion of the education system by people who actually work in the education system is automatically suspect. Only people who aren’t teachers are qualified to comment about teachers.”
Yeah. “Clearly”, indeed. Mercurius, tell me where I noted, anywhere, that teachers weren’t qualified to discuss the education system, or that such discussions should be restricted to non-teachers in general. (You’ve hinted, without offering further details in your final “PS”, that you work in the education sytem somewhere, somehow, in a higher than usual capacity, so it’s a bit rich to take offence at my characterisation of you as “someone who apparently works in the education system” – given your lack of further detail, I could surmise little else). I’d expect teachers to be full of insights regarding the education system that mightn’t be obvious to the rest of us. That’s all fine, except I note just one paragraph (“Furthermore”) where you run through a laundry list of possible victims working in the system, four whole sentences – three of them not exactly generous at elaboration – in the midst of your entire article, noting the possible effect of the Herald-Sun’s piece on teachers. The vast majority of your piece isn’t discussing the “education system”, or providing much “comment about teachers” from the position of an insider at all, however. Instead, you give us a logic-defying argument on how the “fine principles” noted by the newspaper that justify printing public data are countered by the fact that the same information is available to those with the time and capability of accessing the internet – I wonder how many nurses, taxi drivers and brickies labourers get the chance to crack open their Macbooks each morning – and that the Herald-Sun is suspect for hoping to sell some copies of their paper, as if they’ve ever printed anything, on any topic, without openly having the same goals. That goofball position shakily established – and others here have noted the issues with it that I share – you then write “So even if you agree, as I do, with the three principles cited above, you can still express your disapproval of the Herald’s publication…”. I’d be more inclined to hold “disapproval” of their article if you’d extended greater effort at clarifying how the hypothetical damages noted in your quick “Furthermore” paragraph affecting a small segment of the population were, or weren’t, offset by the commonly understood benefits of having such data available, as noted by posters such as Jo, above. You’ve provided little insight into that side of the issue, and extended much greater, fruitless effort into justifying your dislike of their article by pleading for us to be outraged at the paper’s use of public data for profit. (Be sure to show your piece to the teachers working under you so they can cheer at the great pains you took to offer “comment about teachers” in comparison to the greater efforts you took to convince us that a newspaper printing “taxpayer funded” data is an outrage.) If I need to allude to the fact that you – again, apparently – are a professional in the education system attacking a journalistic process that might (or might not) be against that system’s interests, it’s because you’ve evidently taken pains to move that fact away from the spotlight, rather than obviously using it as a clear-cut source of insider knowledge and wisdom in your article. You must have decided at one point or another that the insightful, “qualified” comments backed up by personal experience that an education professional could offer weren’t worth the bother over the the other arguments you’ve dwelt on, arguments that I’d suspect most professionals in your field would be embarassed to hold, as the bulk of your piece seems dumb enough to have been written by anyone. I don’t see any “ad hom” in my reply, but as far as the “thanks” goes, you’re very welcome.
Bogan, these league tables will harm a lot of families in a lot of struggling schools.
Of course, this needn’t concern the editors of the Herald or Fairfax shareholders. Because the families that are going to be most harmed by these league tables don’t read the Herald much, and their children don’t offer much competition for university places against the children of families who do subscribe to the Herald.
So that’s alright, then.
Why don’t newspapers print the formula for making TNT, or C4 explosive? The recipes are widely available. It’s just information, data, some of it government owned, so why shouldn’t they run it? Oh yes, ‘cos somebody could get hurt.
Now do you get it?
@ 48 Why stop there, Katz?
Professional accountability and transparency are loudly supported by all sorts of white-collar types. So let’s have at it:
Law firms: Percentage of cases lost with costs awarded against the client.
Accounting forms: Percentage of clients who are penalised by the ATO for incorrect or late filing.
Surgeons: Percentage of patient deaths in the operating theatre.
Architects and builders: Percentage of projects that run over-time and over-budget, and the margin by which they are over.
Wheee! This is fun!
But wait, what’s that, I hear you cry? Those are all metrics subject to many factors beyond the control of the service provider, and may not be a fair or accurate reflection of the competence and diligence of the professionals involved? No, really? You don’t say…
Correct, except remarkably, in the case of financial advisors in regard to the metrics I listed.
Indeed Katz. Another metric directly in the control of the practitioners would be a performance measure for newspapers: the percentage of articles where editorialising replaces straight reporting. not looking at anyone in particular *cough* SMH *cough*.
Yeah, I’m in:
* Percentage or registerd league and union players fatally injured or turned into quads and paras every year;
* same for percentage of juniors;
* annual percentage of tourists/visitors killed or seriously injured in NZ;
* subset of same – those who were engaged in ‘adventure activities’ every at the tome;
* road fatalities by year and make of motor vehicle over annual and 10 year periods.
Let’s see there gotta be more real life-choice-informative date we need out there.
Oh yeah, the big one:
* annual micro-breakdown of occupational health and data statistics on morbidity and mortality. Lets just start with an accurate count of how many die at work each year through accident which is not currently available and hasn’t been for years. That would really influence me on what I encourage my children to study with a view to them not being employed in high risk areas. What’s out? Farming, fishery, forestry. It seems an obvious but people would be amazed at the other high risk occupations. If they could read about it.
Good grief. Apologies to any one trying to make sense of what I’ve written above. No, I am not drinking but it sure reads like it.
“But wait, what’s that, I hear you cry?”
I was thinking that that information should indeed be available. It is unsatisfactory to have to rely upon word of mouth. There is one medical professional in town here that most people avoid, most GP’s won’t refer to. This is because he is an utter utter pig. Only the new people in town and those seeing GP’s who don’t care have the misfortune to be given into his care.
Mercurius states that “Damage for school reputations trashed. Damage to teachers’ professional good names. Damage to students who cop the stigma of being in a “failing” school.”
Mercurius, don’t you think that the students and parents at schools decribed by Spana are already aware that their community is disadvantaged or struggling, or that the rest of the town or city doesn’t know which are the areas to avoid? I can’t see the NAPLAN results being a surprise to anyone, so can’t see how the publication on MySchool will “damage” them. The “damage” to reputations (often on unfair grounds) is done as soon as they say they attend X school.
Or even publication in the SMH which was the point of your post.
Spana is quite correct to point out the incredible impact that teachers can have in turning lives around from illiteracy and a career in petty crime (or much worse). These teachers over a lifetime save taxpayers literally millions of dollars in jail-days not paid, and in helping to turn out citizens who contribute to the community.
How can they be adequately rewarded? What acturial calculation can adequately address the value these teachers add to the community? Those are rhetorical questions only, because they are beside the point. That’s not what drives teachers’ work, for the most part. So you can take your league tables and stick ‘em.
Marlin’s response basically exposes the moral bankruptcy that drives the “demand” for league tables.
Marlin there’s any number of people who have been shrieking in the meeja for years that parents don’t know where to send their kids because they have literally no information about how different schools are performing (they can’t have been looking very hard). Many politicians have been eager to stoke parents’ doubts and concerns about the ‘educrats’ running the show in secret, apparently denying parents any insight into the operation or quality of schools in their neighbourhood (again, they can’t have been trying very hard to find out).
You’re basically saying that, in fact, parents have known all along and just want to know ‘the areas to avoid’. Let the hoi polloi rot in their ghettoes, as long as we have ‘transparent and accountable’ information to tell us where they are.
Shorter Marlin: “Stuff you Jack, I’m alright”.
I thought the SMH published NSW schools league tables only proved just how unwise it was of the Rudd Government to create the My School website, based as it was on comparative lists of high school and primary school performance calculated via the results of a very simple (but not totally objective) assessement of pupils’ basic literacy & numeracy skills.
The entire site is riddled with error and a bit of a laugh for everyone but the pupils in schools with lots of red and pink bands across the page and, rural/regional parents who can now tell that their public schools are obviously not always getting the degree of government support that metropolitan schools appear to receive.
Gee, I think you’re being a bit tough on me Mercurius. What I said was that your comments on the damage caused by publication of the NAPLAN results are irrelevant because the damage has already occured through the already established reputations of certain schools and areas. I even said “The “damage” to reputations is(often on unfair grounds)” to show that I thought the reputations were in many cases inaccurate.
To say that publication of results is the cause of any damage to reputations etc. is to ignore the damage of already widespread beliefs about certain schools.
Sorry Marlin, but I’ve been hearing the same arguments, in different forms, for years. Patience wears thin. I’m only human.
To save time, here’s a summary of the points to avoid…
http://thisteachinglife.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-be-education-expert-and-warrior.html
Katz and Mercurius I’d pay good money to have reliable data about doctors’ and hospitals’ performance. Things like comparative post-operative infection rates and average consultations per hour would be great to know (when my GP coughs and suggests I DON’T have the op at XYZ private hospital if I want to avoid a high risk of infection, does he really know what he is talking about?). Much more meaningful than the schools nonsense.
Since I suspect many doctors and their wives are all in favour of releasing information about schools, I’m sure they will have no objection to the SMH publishing health league tables.
There is a nice league table of private schools in the Weekend AFR.
As a teacher I know there are some teachers who are not good at the job. Every profession has these people. However, to hear Gillard ranting about how teachers in schools with poor results need to life their game shows her absolute ignorance. There are a few problems with teaching that will be solved far more quickly than the bullying Gillard is doing through this website.
1. Teaching is underpaid. It is a four year degree with high social responsibility. Teachers should be being paid tens of thousands more than they currently are. They do far more than most people in the corporate world but earn far less.
2. Too many women with low OPs are entering teaching. This is fact. Check the intakes. Boys in schools need more men desperatley. We need to cap uni entry to say OP ten and above and we need to offer incentives to get males into primary schools. Some primaries are lucky to have more than two or three male teachers.
3. Schools need to be given the power to refer problem children to behaviour centres which the Bligh government currently underfunds – therefore the violent desk thrower remains sitting next to your child because Bligh will not fund assistance for him.
4. Class sizes need to be cut drastically. It is insane to think that kids learn in a class of 28 with one teacher. Cap class sizes at 15.
If these four issues are addressed Queensland would see school achievement skyrocket. But wait, Bligh and Gillard are really only concerned with money and they would rather give tax breaks to big business or increase money to the military or fund stuoid websites. Teachers know that it is not about kids. Never has been. It is about getting as many through for the least amount of money. Gillard and Bligh have a corrupted and impoverished view of education and care little fro the conditions that will assist schools and kids in the long run.
Spana @25: the most interesting contribution on this thread notwithstanding Mercurially acute commentary. I commend the authenticity of what you’ve written and couldn’t fault your intentions and resolve. This is the stuff of social democracy. It appears to me that many people really have no idea at all of the dire social conditions of many children – somewhere between a Dickens text and a Hogarth print. Any education against that sort of background is an absolute achievement.
I am curious Mercurius as to why the vitriol is directed toward the SMH, rather than the MySchools site/concept? As clarencegirl says @ 60 it was more about showing how such a thing can be used and abused for other “unintended” prurposes.
As we should all know this is nothing to with “providing parents with information”. It is about creating a spectacle that makes it look like something is happening. The federal government knows that this won’t help schools, whether rich or poor. It is not about that. It is about making people talk, getting them on the website( a bit like Andrew Bolt- 9 million hits in the first day alone!), blame (or praise) teachers and generally get into all sorts of uninformed opining about what it all means. It is a nakedly political strategy that has nothing to do with education (as adrian presciently and efficiently pointed out).
Therefore why all the concern about the SMH (even given the OTT editorial)? I just don’t get it…
@67 with all the points you’ve made, you’ve answered your own question.
Spana@65:’We need to cap uni entry to say OP ten and above”
What’s happening now? Could you, or someone, take a stab at what an ‘OP of ten’ means in terms of “top x%”?. Taa.
Merc @ 68. you might think I’ve answered my own question but I am not sure you have? But as I alluded the first time maybe I’m missing something (was there an earlier blog post?)
If the MySchool data is all the terrible things you say it is ESD (and I agree with your comments), then the paper publishing it only inflames things and makes it worse. Hence the vitriol. I’m not going to go out of my way to praise a masthead that pours petrol on a fire.
The SMH didn’t feel inspired to publish a wrap-around league table using data from GroceryWatch or FuelWatch. Well, SchoolWatch deserves to die the same death-by-obscurity as its predecessors.
That’s not what clarencegirl meant, at all. You misunderstood her comment. The SMH’s purpose was not nearly so constructive as you suggest. Clarencegirl was saying that the SMH’s conduct was an example, not a warning, of how the MySchool data can be misused.
That is quite another thing from suggesting, as you did, that the SMH was wisely providing intructional guidance to the public about how such data can be misused. If that were the case, their editorial would have said something like “we are publishing this data as a warning to the public about how nonsensical it is, and how damaging it would be to assemble it into a league table.” No, they did not say that. They attempted to run a specious argument that they were serving some high-minded principles of a free press, transparancy and accountability, for the benefit of a discerning public.
By publishing league tables, the SMH are complicit in the misuse of data for purposes that it simply isn’t suited to, and therefore they are culpable for the consequences of publishing those tables.
I can’t put it any more plainly than that. If you’re not satisfied with the explanation, that’s your problem, not mine.
Hi Mercurius, thanks for that. As it turns out I agree with you. Yes the SMH were pouring something on a fire (maybe half a bottle of metho rather than petrol). The problem for me is not so much the SMH with their metho but the ones who collected all the wood, told us all how great the fire would be invited us all to come and lit it. That is why I wonder why the SMH is presented as the real evil in this.
Just to clarify I wasn’t actually saying that the SMH were trying to create the MySchools league table to show how it could be abused (and insodoing were bringing things to the publics attention), but that it was clever enough to know that it would be a good way to misuse the Myschools information to do exactly what everyone had been talking about what they thought Myschools was all about. So it was cynical, but it was also “aware” enough to know what it was doing (for which you are taking them to task) We differ in that I think the SMH in this case is more like the the messenger (though one cynically acting in its own interest), though your statement of their editorial as being specious is perfectly on the money (not that you need me to tell you).
The bigger point is that it would not be at all surprising if this is exactly what the government wants. They create the site, tell all sorts of bullshit stories about what it is for and then hope that it takes off (in a way that grocery watch etc did not). The government would be as pleased as punch that the SMH did what they did. They can say it is an abuse of the stats (or whatever) while sitting back and smiling as the plebs (of which I am one) work themselves into a lather about it. Gillard to herself- has the Myschools website done its job? You bet! And it ain’t got nothing to do with education!
I’m an infrequent contributor on these pages but afraid I can’t agree at all with the original poster.
Some of his/her taunts are exactly why I support the policy.
1. The ALP must finish the destruction of the union base it started under Whitlam and nearly completed under Hawke and Keating. Unions are an anachronism and centre left parties now have the ability to directly control the economy rather than through pseudo-grass-roots proxies. Unions are only a loose destraction.
2. There can never be too much information public. Too much insider trading goes on in this society – not just in the share market, but in the jobs market, the housing market, the health market and so it goes. If only 2 parents in a class of 30 didn’t know the school’s poor reputation, then this exercise is worthwhile
3. The poster’s aversion to ‘social-technocracy’ is why I adore Rudd and Gillard. I favour technocratic governments and would rather democracy worked Singapore style. At best, an election enables a dissatisfied electorate to flush a bad party down the toilet (the NSWALP being the ‘floater’). Elections and campaigning are no place for the development of policy. That is best done by experts and bureaucrats. Keeping bureaucrats in line is best done by full publication, hence the website.
4. Poverty will be with us always, as Jesus said, and the campaign against the website is shooting the messenger. The SMH could have just as easily said what is common knowledge – Schools A B and C are good, Schools X Y and Z are bad. They used a different source of information, but the fact that these schools are bad predates the website.
5. Kids need to learn the world is tough as early as possible. Learning that you go to a bad school helps the child to make the necessary adjustments to their strategies and coping skills to get through life. I went to school with some kids who came off boats from Vietnam and are now doctors, but saw other kids with everything amount to nothing. We are not helping kids by lying to them (directly or by fudging the issue).
6. How can we not improve without the discipline of competition. NE Asian countries are eating us for breakfast. We must recommand the lead in subjects such as maths by pushing the children hard. More examinations and scores will help.
Ricardo @73: OMG! Your historical namesake had decent values compared to those you espouse. Singapore as a model democracy? See wiki for a compilation on their death penalty (please) just for starters before you hold that dysfunctional prison state up as a desirable state:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapore
Best of all:
“Kids need to learn the world is tough as early as possible. Learning that you go to a bad school helps the child to make the necessary adjustments to their strategies and coping skills to get through life. I went to school with some kids who came off boats from Vietnam and are now doctors, but saw other kids with everything amount to nothing. We are not helping kids by lying to them (directly or by fudging the issue).”
Right. Trauma is good for kids because it helps them adjust to an unfair world. Shit physical resources and school conditions toughen kids up? They did at my old public dump where at least a third of the senior school had ongoing contact with juvies as a warm up to the real deal when they graduated to Long Bay. You didn’t perchance run a British poorhouse in previous life did you? Those tough little fuckers the Vietnamese succeed where our over priveleged bourgeois precieuses flounder because they had it too good. But I thought that all that private school bullying and buggary and christian kiddie school flogging was about teaching them how to inhabit the real world. Of well. Must have got that bit wrong then.
Trauma and poverty are never any good for anyone. Ask someone who has experienced it, they’ll set you straight.
Thanks Anthony for your response.
If the Left wants to succeed as a political force it needs to toughen up and forget the fluffies.
The rich get rich because what they do works. The poor know that but the middle class often delude themselves otherwise.
Despite what you might characterise my views as, I would regard myself as a Marxist. Social classes are real and can’t be fluffed away. Power is real. Real people wield real power. The left blinds itself when it doesn’t see these realities – but clouds its own judgement with fluffy rhetoric. Marx knew this.
The resources you seek to fix broken tables and cracked windows will not come to public schools from the fluffiness – but from tough decisions that benefit the national interest.
Rudd and Gillard also know that Australia will not get out of its malaise through fluffies. Tough decisions to be taken, sacred cattle to be slaughtered. Did not Labor heroes, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating conclude as much?
I could put on my best Yorkshire accent and tell you I also did it tough when i was young- but that would be unfair to the vast population of humanity who did it much tougher – and didn’t have time for fluffies.
Singapore is much more a model democracy than Australia – took 3 million odd people from the brink of poverty and dictatorship of foreign powers, to prosperity in 50 years. What has Australia done in the same time? Tread water? Australia was at the top of the economic league tables 50 years ago, where is it now?
I don’t agree with the death penalty myself – but according to David Chalke’s longitudinal survey Australia Scan, a consistent majority of the population do support it. Stands to reason, it stays off the agenda because of an undemocratic agreement of the major parties to keep it off.
That said, most of the proponents of the death penalty in the political arena also favour banning abortion, which David Chalke found is not supported by the population, and if both issues were paired it would sink them.
Singapore only retains the death penalty that Britain bequeathed to it. Time to work on Australian prosperity first, worry about the fluffies later.
Why does the Labor tradition need to be defended to the so-called Left? Read The Hawke Government – Bob himself writes of his impatience with the idiotic end of the Left who can’t see what Australia’s predicament was, and is, and how he had to fight people to the Left as much as he had to fight the formal enemy on the Right.
Australia is trying to do the impossible – feed a first world population using a third-world economic structure. It tried to institute a Scandinavian style tripartite social accord for most of the C20th, without the economic development to pay for it (and in a federated rather than unitary government, for an added complication). By the 1980s, it was falling apart and was threatening to turn Australia into Chile or Argentina, with the army on the streets. This was the reality Hawke and Keating faced – and they faced it down.
Rudd too has the clarity that someone of his stature can enjoy – he stands above domestic politics. Gillard enjoys the cut and thrust and is no doubt loving every minute of it. A similar pair to Hawke and Keating.
Why do the Left spend so much energy having right wing figures cut down, to elect Labor figures to do the heavy lifting that the right will never do – but then hassle them throughout their term?
Ricardo @ 76 amd then @ 76:
“The resources you seek to fix broken tables and cracked windows will not come to public schools from the fluffiness – but from tough decisions that benefit the national interest.”
Quite right too which is why the league table is a waste of time and money, a diversion from the real task of the ALP in office which is to get rid of the disgraceful funding formula that feather beds the very aspirant lower middle classes, puffed up tradies and old school privileged classes who think that they are owed something towards their kids’ education from the public purse. The social technocrats who dominate the ALP are too piss weak to take on these groups and lack sufficient labour consciousness to imagine how to do it. The result is no policy spin such as Gillard has delivered.
“Singapore is much more a model democracy than Australia – took 3 million odd people from the brink of poverty and dictatorship of foreign powers, to prosperity in 50 years.”
Bollocks. There is more to democracy than prosperity. Your approach is to create a bigger cake so that the sans bloody culottes at the bottom of the neoliberal shit heap that Howard bequeathed us can get a few more crumbs rather than address issues of distribution. Moreover, it might be useful to look at who actually pays taxes in this country because it isn’t the sort of perople who deliver their whelps to private schools in bloody great 4WD’s every day. if you tie greater democracy to greater prosperity we are, as Keanes noted, all dead in the long run so I’m not prepared to wait.
On the subject of waiting – I waited for the Accords Marks 1 to whatever to deliver the social wage. Remember that little escapade? That was the deal whereby unions gave over the right to defend and extend wages and conditions in return for govt generalised social investment. hah. wht a jokke. So when you ask why does the left have a tendency to stick it to the ALP when in office it is because we have historical memory of previous failures. And that is putting it politely.
Re: popular support in Australia for the death penalty and any apparent ethical inconsistencies around abortion. Not my problem. I don’t give a ratz what majorities think on any issue. Majorities dan’t make an action in violation of the democratic rights of an individual ethically correct. That pathway leads to Bourke’s correct criticism that democracy misapplied as a numerical majority leads to the tyranny of the majority. Unborn children don’t have rights prior to viability. If they did it would be recognised by the law. If you want to argue that one I guess I’ll see you out the front of the clinic some Saturday morning.
Fianlly:
“Why does the Labor tradition need to be defended to the so-called Left? Read The Hawke Government – Bob himself writes of his impatience with the idiotic end of the Left who can’t see what Australia’s predicament was, and is, and how he had to fight people to the Left as much as he had to fight the formal enemy on the Right.”
The left is bigger than the ALP although not as big as Hawke’s ego and let’s not even mention the bloody undertaker from Bankstown for ego. They don’t like having the left scrutinise their actions and demand better from them. Specially Hawke whose favourite post retirement project (possibly abandoned, I know not) was to open the equivalent of a TAB in Burma which was at the time run by the wonderously named military dictatorship SLORC. Stuff him and his whining about the left. what about a decent whinge about the class enemy for a change? does he mean that the left was more of a problem that the HR Nicholls Society of packer and Murdoch? What a bloody wanker.
Riccardo and Anthony Nolan, it’s a diverting discussion, but you’re waaaay off the reservation. If you must attempt to redesign society from the ground up on a blog, can I please request you *try* to restrict your comments to the area of education, apropos of the thread?
Like, for example…
The only place outdoing the NE Asian countries for schools performance are the Scandinavian and Nordic states. But they would be too “fluffy” for Riccardo’s taste, so they fall off his radar.
I don’t think Riccardo’s theory about national “toughness” correlating to educational success, and “fluffiness” correlating to educational failure, is true in, you know, reality. But it’s certainly true in the “I’m a hairy-chested realist, hear me ROAAAAR” sense!
Donald Horne identified decades ago why Australia was treading water then, and would continue to do so for some time. The relative merits toughness and fluffiness were not among them.
Here’s the Riccardoan post-Marxist cycle of toughfluffiness:
Adversity breeds Toughness.
Toughness breeds Determination.
Determination breeds Prosperity.
Prosperity breeds Fluffiness.
Fluffiness breeds Weakness.
Weakness breeds Adversity.
Rinse and repeat…
…And it all starts at school. Therefore, we, the wise (but not fluffy!) leftist rulers must do our best to restrain the population from prosperity, lest they fall into fluffiness, weakness and adversity! Let us keep the prosperity to ourselves, the tough wise rulers who can handle it properly, and thus guarantee our population will remain tough and prosperous long into the shining future!
Sounds good to me! Where do I sign up as a benign tough-leftist ruler?
Fair enough. Shall exercise uncommon restraint.