While I’m sure the PM’s press secretary would be thrilled with the New York Post‘s extensive three-column coverage of Rudd’s visit to New York on page 17 (bottom, centre) last Sunday, they may be a little startled at the caption writer’s none-too-subtle moniker:
Was this a flamboyant gesture to balance the gender ledger of Rudd’s New York nightlife - an attempt to settle old Scores perhaps?
No, sadly, the Rainbow Room isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds, but is of course the stalwart dining institution atop the Rockefeller Centre.
At the weekend it was the scene of the 60th anniversary dinner of the American Australian Association which, the Murdoch-owned paper was quick to remind us, was founded in part by old pa Keith. (The Post is the local Terrorgraph equivalent, also owned by Rupert.)
A rather fascinating confluence of media, history and international politics, if you could look past the shrimp and lamb that graced the dinner tables.
But I much prefer the caption writer’s take on the night - don’t you?
Education metrics geeks would be well aware that Finland routinely comes at or near the top of international test batteries such as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) as well as in annual OECD reports.
So it’s worth noting this summary list of features of the Finnish education system which appeared in The Providence Journal, written by former UCLA researcher and 28-year high school English teacher Walter Gardner.
Who said the following are incompatible with a world-beating education system?:
- Education seen as an end in itself, not as a pathway to employment
- Total spending is $5000 US dollars spent per student per year
- Average class sizes of 25-30
- School starts at age 7
- National curriculum
- Teachers design their own lesson plans (compatible with the national curriculum), instead of delivering centrally-planned scripted lessons
- Before the equivalent of year 10, there is standardised national testing of only a 10% representative sample of each age group to check basic skills
- No published school league tables or rankings
- No ‘gifted and talented’ classes
- Strong teacher union
- Teacher pay is no more than that of neighbouring countries
Continue reading ‘Finnishing first’
…then it probably isn’t true, right?
I don’t know what else could explain this monograph which appears alongside Greg Sheridan’s columns at The Oz:
Greg Sheridan is the most influential foreign affairs commentator in Australia.
Technically this is true. I suppose the marketing people jazzed it up from the first draft - ‘Greg Sheridan is the only foreign affairs commentator in Australia.’
But that shouldn’t deter us from pondering Mr Sheridan’s influence behind Australia’s signing of Kyoto, the dismantling of the Pacific Solution, the impending Iraq withdrawal and our recognition of Kosovo.
Perhaps Mr Sheridan’s influence can best be seen at work in the timing and venue of the former foreign minister’s luncheon appointments.
Nevertheless, the future looks bleak for Mr Sheridan’s influence. As I depart for San Francisco in two days’ time, he stands to lose fully 20% of his readership.
In the months to come, I hope to bring LP readers some up-close views of US education policies. So, until my next missive from across the Pacific, may I bid you farewell from the nicest, gentlest, most sweet-tempered education commentator in the Southern Hemisphere.
As a proud soon to be ex-Sydneysider, this is the hardest column I will ever write.
Queensland is now officially ahead of NSW, specifically when it comes to transport, specifically when it comes to ticketing. Like some surly middle child, we are now reduced to accepting Queensland’s hand-me-downs.
NSW is now running out of:
- Buses
- Ferries
- Trains
- Water
- Electricity
- Hospital Beds
- Did I miss anything? Continue reading ‘NSW curls up its toesies and dies’
Republished with permission from Online Opinion
“Revolution, revolution … there has already been one.�
Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah Q, 1921-22. (trans.)
The great Chinese satirist and social critic Lu Xun knew a thing or two about revolutions.
Lu Xun wrote that line when the newly-awakened nation of China had thrown off the dynastic Emperors barely a decade before. As his characters smashed clay tablets proclaiming “Long Live the Emperor�, Lu Xun offered a darkly prescient vision of the cataclysmic revolutionary violence that would again convulse his nation a generation hence.
That is why this quote, delivered by a weeping nun sheltering from the rampage, is in my view the lynch-pin of Lu Xun’s legacy to us. His warning is stark - that revolutions have a tendency to roll you back round to where you started, and that things get broken along the way.
That is why I fervently hope that the latest revolutionary, our Prime Minister Lu Kewen, has read Lu Xun. If so, then perhaps he coined the term “education revolutionâ€? as an ironic homage to Lu Xun’s prophetic warning. If not, then I fear we are in for a bumpy ride. Continue reading ‘The True Story of the education revolution’
Gentle readers, I beseech you to consider the following five seemingly unrelated phenomena:
- The Ishmael Beah alleged sort-of hoax (or is it?)
- The fourth estate’s duty to be skeptical and seek the truth
- Margaret Mead’s 1920s anthropological research in the South Pacific
- The ‘sexual revolution’ of the Baby Boomers
- The conservative moral imperative to bring pregnant women back to the kitchen, which is their rightful place in the natural order of the universe where they belong, which is true, and which everybody knows and secretly believes to be true if only they would search their hearts and admit it. We also secretly know that homosexuality is unnatural, that sex is dirty and shameful and wrong and should only be between a man and woman for the purpose of procreation and you know you’d all be much happier if you just did it with the lights off in the missionary position.
If you think these things have nothing to do with each other, well, you’d be right.
But that didn’t stop Simon Caterson from making an heroic effort to draw them all together in this marvellous piece of post-facto sophistry that has earnt him the first nomination in LP’s inaugural Agincourt Awards for the Longest Bow in Journalism.
Continue reading ‘Announcing the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow’
Rejoice! Although this SMH headline is worded more politely, it harks back to a gentler, nylon-clad era, when suburban newspapers would shriek at the iniquity of Winnie Reds rising to over 75 cents a pack.
So dear readers, here is your false-dichotomy debating topic of the day:
So-called ’sin taxes’ on certain legal substances are an appropriate way of recovering the cost of preventable diseases and other social costs associated with these substances. In fact, they’re such a good idea, we should extend them to carbon, jet travel, coffee-drinking, meat, tofu, breathing and anything else that isn’t nailed down. And nails too.
-or-
‘Sin-taxes’ are an unacceptable form of nanny-state coercion and in effect a regressive tax upon low income earners who are subjected to middle-class morality everytime they pay more for the only simple pleasures they can afford, while the law-makers enjoy tax-privileged junkets and resort holidays…
Discuss.
(Name-calling will be subjected to a non-deductible swear-jar levy.)
Well, I knew the axe-grinders at The Australian couldn’t go long without kicking around the merit-pay for teachers can.
But readers deserve better than the selective reporting of Justine Ferrari in today’s article which claims “overwhelming support” amongst teachers for merit-based pay.
For a start, a survey of 13,000 teachers is nowhere near the author’s claimed one-third of the profession, which numbered almost 250,000 in 2005 according to the Bureau of Statistics. This alone invalidates the article’s central premise of “overwhelming support” for merit pay.
It is disappointing that The Australian’s specialist education reporter seems blithely unaware of elementary facts such as the size of the profession she’s been writing about for years, but then I suppose it’s hard to keep up with current statistics when one’s time is spent sharpening axes instead. Continue reading ‘Kick that can: Revenge of the Son of Merit-pay redux, The Sequel (again)’
On my holiday, I discovered a fascinating dimension of the Australian government’s war on boat people. I wonder whether all those voters who salivated at the prospect of enhanced customs and immigration powers to keep out terrrsts realise what their taxes are actually paying for?
Let me begin by saying that I admire the resolve and determination of the Australian Customs Service to ensure that every single boat arrival to Australia is duly authorised.
In fact, so dedicated are they to this cause that they are prepared to endure 4 hellish days on luxury cruise liners like the above, just to check all the passengers’ arrival cards.
Continue reading ‘War on boat people (no job too large!)’
Republished with permission from Online Opinion
As Australian citizens, voters and taxpayers, we should dare to hope that our government exists to serve us, and not the other way around.
We should dare to hope that a Federal government which accounts for 22 per cent of GDP and state governments which account for around another 11 per cent, between them should be able to provide the essential human services we all rely upon: healthcare, education, infrastructure, defence and a social security system that assists people to become independent where it is feasible for them to do so.
And yet, Australians seem in recent years to have given up this hope. Many of us have accepted the blandishments of successive Federal and State governments that have somehow managed to convince us we’re better off paying our own health insurance, school fees and road tolls – and yet still hand over one-third of our national income in tax.
So let me introduce you to a fictional political party that does observe the maxim of serving the Australian people instead of serving itself.
Continue reading ‘Who dares hope for progress?’
One remarkable feature of this week’s eulogies for “crazy� John Mustafa Ilhan is that two columnists at opposite ideological poles have both loaded his body into their respective barrows and taken it for a victory lap around the graveyard.
Irfan Yusuf celebrates the life of Mustafa Ilhan as a ‘mozzie’ who represents the true, harmonious, forward-looking face of Islam.
Meanwhile, Janet Albrechtsen celebrates the life of Crazy John as the hero-capitalist who epitomised the best of entrepreneurial spirit and derring-do, and lest we forget, to whom we owe our society’s prosperity, which falls upon us like spring rain from the lofty twin peaks of self-interest and the pursuit of profit.
One death, two very different lives, apparently.
Continue reading ‘Hey, this barrow has a corpse in it!’
Supporters of the union movement and supporters of the Howard government at last have something in common: when pondering the reasons for their current diminution relative to past glories, both groups can deploy the soporific explanation that they are “victims of their own success”.
Thus we may hear from union supporters that the victories of decades past such as eight-hour days, sick leave, holiday pay, improved workplace safety and the like have lulled employees into believing that collective representation is no longer required, like an appendix or vestigial tail.
We may also hear from Howard supporters (now pay attention, Tony) that the relatively benign economic conditions of the last 11 years have inured voters to the strife of tough times, and thus they no longer consider a Coalition government to be an essential prerequisite for a strong economy (perish the thought!)
Continue reading ‘Victims of their own success’
…it wants democracy back.
Would you like to leave a message?
Most of us would be familiar with George Orwell’s 1984 invention of the memory-hole, that infamous censorship device that Big Brother used to make things that had happened, un-happen.
We try to use memory-holes all the time. Many of our social interactions depend upon them. When we ring our friends the day after the night before and apologise for what we said after the second bottle of merlot, that’s a memory-hole. When we pass on gossip, “you didn’t hear it from me, but…”, that’s a memory-hole.
Continue reading ‘I wish I hadn’t said that…’
Reprinted with permission from Online Opinion
If we are fortunate, Malcolm Turnbull will be the next Liberal Prime Minister of Australia.
Fear not, dear reader. I shall not subject you to some vomitous hagiography in the style of courtiers such as a David Flint or Alan Jones. In any case, since the Honourable Member for Wentworth has thus far declined to “friend” me on Facebook, such blandishments seem doomed to go unrequited.
I come not to praise Caesar but to examine him, and to consider what lessons we can draw from a life lived so publicly. These lessons I think will explain why Australia would benefit from a turn with Turnbull, PM.
Continue reading ‘All hail Malcolm the Second’
Recent comments
Fine, Mark, Paul Burns, David Rubie, Mark, Brian [...]
Mark, Ambigulous, Adrien, Katz, Paul Burns, Kingsley [...]
Mark, Adrien, Legal Eagle, Michael Sutcliffe, Mark, Tyro Rex [...]
Fine, Ambigulous, dylwah, murph the surf, wizofaus, David Rubie [...]
Adrien, Ambigulous, Adrien, Liam, Mark, Liam [...]
David Rubie, Paul Burns, Brian, David Irving (no relation), kymbos, kymbos [...]
jrbarch, Mindy, Mark, Mark, Leon, Derek [...]
Mindy, Admin!!! HELP!!!, FDB, David Rubie, FDB, David Rubie [...]
Ambigulous, suz, Colin, un ami des beaux arts, adrian, suz [...]
Bilko, Paul Burns, Dave Bath, Bilko, Nabakov, Adrien [...]
RobWindt, Pappinbarra Fox, Ai! Que Dolor!, Patrick B, peter jones, Paul Burns [...]
Mark, Adrien, Adrien, Kim, Adrien, smiley [...]