Archive for the 'Education' Category

Pssst! That’s our lecturer! In the Susso queue!

Published
by
Paul Norton
5 days, 21 hours ago
in Authoritarianism, Education, Government, Howardia, Indigenous, Policy, Politics, Poverty and Uncategorized
. 98 Comments

This morning’s media reports that the Opposition now intends to support the Federal Government’s intention to bring back the Susso for several categories of welfare recipient including those on Newstart Allowance.

The use of the term “Susso” is not mere hyperbole as the percentage of the recipient’s income which is quarantined will only be able to be accessed using a special smart card (which will, over time, become generally recognised as the quarantinee’s smart card) at designated retail outlets which have the necessary hardware to read the cards. Further, in some towns in the Northern Territory where the scheme is in place for indigenous people, stores are reportedly establishing special checkouts for holders of the card in order to minimise delays in the other checkout queues. Anyone spending their quarantined income is thus “outed” as a welfare recipient – and exposed to all the prejudices which many in our society hold towards such people – whenever they co shopping.

The mooted national extension of the income quarantining scheme could have some interesting but unpleasant consequences for university staff and the Australian university sector as a whole.
Continue reading ‘Pssst! That’s our lecturer! In the Susso queue!’

So, how about that hospitals plan?

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 4 days ago
in Education, Government, Health, Industrial Relations, Media, Policy, Politics and Polls
. 7 Comments

Tony Abbott’s performance in question time today, and the timing of his parental leave thought bubble more generally, suggest that his major imperative was to switch the topic of debate from health. That’s despite the Coalition running a very active scare campaign about hospital closures in the bush, but it’s probably because of the polling on Rudd’s initiative. I suspect also that it wouldn’t be going out too far on a limb to venture a modest prediction that that Labor might be headed for an uptick in the polls.

Some Coalition MPs have suggested that this plan came about so suddenly because Abbott had become privy to private party polling.

I strongly suspect that the Labor Party might have had a bit of a turnaround – perhaps related to the National Curriculum and health, and Abbott might be responding to that. It could also explain why he felt he had to release some ‘positive policy’. It could well be that his negativism has had an impact; I note that Labor Ministers have been reiterating the ‘Senate obstructionism’ line again this morning.

In short, on where the parties actually stand, one shouldn’t believe what one reads in The Australian.

Meanwhile, whether or not Abbott makes health a focus of his parliamentary attack, the Premiers continue to ponder the National Health and Hospitals Network. Kevin Rudd has wrought his own ambush, confident that there’s no political skin to be lost picking a fight with the states on this battleground. But that doesn’t mean that some of the Premiers haven’t been posing some good questions – interestingly, probably more from Kristina Kenneally than John Brumby.

And while the headline politics might have been the primary focus of media attention, some good work continues to be done on analysing the policy itself. I’ve posted some salient links over the fold. Continue reading ‘So, how about that hospitals plan?’

The reception and implementation of the National History Curriculum

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 4 days ago
in Culture, Education, History, Howardia and Politics
. 26 Comments

A while back, Kevin Rudd proclaimed the history wars over. He may have been right, at least insofar as the combatants left on the field are looking decidely ghostly; witness the non-event of the launch of Keith Windschuttle’s latest tome. Yesterday’s grapeshot over the history curriculum will, likely, not be followed up by another offensive – the Coalition, and the usual suspects, will move on to criticising the government’s health announcements.

Yet the influence of the Howard-era battles remains – and its most significant legacy might be the fact that history is embedded in the national curriculum at all. This is a major shift from its folding into SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) at P-10 levels in many states.

In an interesting piece for Crikey today, Tony Taylor looks at the reception and implementation of the history curriculum: Continue reading ‘The reception and implementation of the National History Curriculum’

Draft national curriculum

Published
by
Robert Merkel
2 weeks, 6 days ago
in Education, Policy and Politics
. 99 Comments

The education revolution rolls on, with the release of the draft national curriculum for public comment (a couple of earlier LP threads were here and here).

The website seems to show the influence of the Web 2.0 taskforce – you get rather slick, multi-dimensional views of the curriculum standards, and it’s dead easy to leave feedback on specific points – after you’ve registered, that is. What it does seem to lack, however, is convenient links to context which explain each element in the proposed curriculum. For instance, in the Year 10 science curriculum, we have the following item:

Evaluating evidence: Critique claims about scientific issues including consideration of methodology and use students’ own findings and secondary evidence to make informed decisions.

In the abstract, that sounds like a great thing for students to be able to do. But what level of sophistication is expected in such critiques?

Given the effort expended in making leaving feedback easy, perhaps some extra effort in providing context to allow that feedback to be informed might go a long way.

In other insta-reactions, the ACT’s Education Union has pointed out that teachers need to be trained in the new curriculum in a hell of a hurry, given that it’s to be rolled out next year, and I’m sure the wingnuts are thrilling over the headlines about grammar and phonics.

Elsewhere: Skepticlawyer has a post that expresses concerns about non-science (of the indigenous culture variety) working its way into the science curriculum, based on a report in the Oz. The concern seems to relate to some of the “science and culture” bits in the early primary school curriculum.

Elsewhere: [by Mark] Annabel Astbury, Executive Director of the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria, in New Matilda.

We learnz important lesuns in Victorian primary schulz

Published
by
Robert Merkel
3 weeks, 1 day ago
in Advertising, Education and Levity
. 4 Comments

They learn all the important stuff at Victorian government primary schools, as indicated by this propaganda from the Brumby government:

Continue reading ‘We learnz important lesuns in Victorian primary schulz’

Teach for Queensland

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 6 days ago
in Education, Politics, Queensland and USA
. 113 Comments

The Queensland government is pondering the introduction of the ‘Teach for Australia‘ model into state schools. The idea, trialled in Victoria and inspired by an American programme, is to fast track graduates with Bachelor’s degrees in any discipline into classrooms after six weeks’ training, with subsequent training delivered while they’re in the workforce.

I’ve been teaching at tertiary level for over a decade, I’ve taught Education students, and I’ve got family and friends who are or have been teachers. I don’t think I’d feel at all confident about going into a classroom after six weeks with a PhD as well as a few other degrees! – I’d be very well aware that I know little about child psychology and development, or classroom and behaviour management, let alone bearing the very weighty responsibilities for students’ well being and health and safety. I doubt all that could be taught in six weeks, and I doubt that you can learn it effectively through some sort of apprenticeship model, no matter how many ‘guides’ and ‘mentors’ you have.

University faculties, to my certain knowledge, already have great difficulty placing students on prac because of the additional workload on their classroom teachers, and stories about the difficulties involved are legion from teachers, academic supervisors and education students.

I believe there’s been no evaluation of the Victorian programme yet, and it’s not hard to see this as a simplistic twist on the movie fantasy of idealistic teacher saves poor kids’ lives script. The reality is that, no matter how idealistic, beginning graduate teachers have a high propensity to leave the profession in their initial years, because they’re already not adequately supported. Similarly, what disadvantaged schools need is stability, experience and professional skills in the workforce, and the fact that’s hard to secure is probably the real justification for Anna Bligh’s consideration of this policy.

How this all meshes in with Bligh’s overall goal of more rigorous teacher registration and qualifications is also a question still to be answered.

As well as insulting the professionalism of teachers, this also cynically cheapens the idealism of those who might be attracted to the programme in the cause of saving Bligh’s electoral skin. It’s particularly depressing because her earlier contribution to school education in Queensland, though susceptible to a range of legitimate criticisms, was the outstanding contribution she’d made as a Minister.

What’s up with Rudd?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Culture, Education, Politics and Sociology
. 55 Comments

Bernard Keane in today’s Crikey email: Continue reading ‘What’s up with Rudd?’

Year 13?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 month, 1 week ago
in Education
. 28 Comments

While this thread about “essential” knowledge was mostly tongue in cheek, I reckon there’s a serious point to be made – in that a lot of knowledge that isn’t particularly difficult to grasp, and generally useful, is only acquired by a relatively small subset of people who study a topic at a tertiary level (be that at a university or at TAFE).

In the USA, spreading this knowledge around is, to some extent, performed by their generalist undergraduate tertiary education system – though I also get the sense that at least some of the first year of college education is filling in the gaps left by their mediocre high schools. The Melbourne Model of generalist degrees followed by (fee-paying, in large part) professional Masters courses also heads in this direction. But that leaves a vast pool of young people who choose vocational education, or choose to head straight into the workforce, whose generalist education stopped at Year 10 (in Victoria, at least), and as such may well have missed out on the fundamentals of statistics, for instance.

So how should this be remedied? Teach more in the earlier years of high school? I’m not sure students are sufficiently mature at that point; perhaps the teachers who read LP can comment, but from what I can recall the middle years of high school involve a fair bit of treading water. And cramming more into the final year curriculum of high school isn’t likely to achieve much either; increasing breadth of the year 12 curriculum would only seem possible at the cost of making the individual subjects even shallower.

Continue reading ‘Year 13?’

The Australian Education Union writes to Federal Labor MPs about MySchool

Published
by
Paul Norton
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Education, Policy, Politics and The Web
. 29 Comments

…and here’s the text of the letter.

Continue reading ‘The Australian Education Union writes to Federal Labor MPs about MySchool’

The Women’s Weekly and politicians

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Education, Federal Elections, Feminism, Media, Politics and Sexuality
. 83 Comments

Over at Gatewatching, Jason Wilson references Andrew Elder’s very good question about the Australian Women’s Weekly being a graveyard for politicians, and asks another good one – given the magazine’s truly huge readership, were Tony Abbott’s comments ill advised?

The Weekly is a colossus, that really does reach an incredibly wide sweep of Australian voters. Looking bad in it means looking bad to a lot of people. For a man who is struggling with women voters, Tony Abbott has at the very least taken a huge risk with his comments. If they really were off the cuff, and really do hurt him, he will come to regret going unprepared to an encounter with the Weekly, one of Australia’s most important political publications.

To reiterate Mr Elder’s question – one that of course many feminists asked before either of us did – why aren’t magazines like the Weekly taken more seriously, more often, by more journos, scholars and political junkies, as both public sphere institutions, and as places where politics happens?

As summer holidays end, and Parliament prepares to resume, we’ve seen two stories this last week which have had lots of normally not so engaged voters talking; Abbott’s remarks about young women’s sexuality (quickly spun away as ‘private advice’ to his daughters when their potential for embedding a negative perception of his persona became clear) and Julia Gillard’s launch of the Myschool website.

Despite my own reservations about the latter, I have no doubt whatsoever it’s been a big political plus for the Government as the election year begins in earnest. Can the same be said for Tony’s thoughts about sexuality?

Hit ‘em where it hurts

Published
by
Mercurius
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Education
. 79 Comments

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:

  1. That information about schools performance should be public, transparent and accountable.
  2. That the government has no business interfering with a free press.
  3. 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.

Continue reading ‘Hit ‘em where it hurts’

So what are NAPLAN tests, anyway?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Education
. 25 Comments

There have been a few comments on the threads on Myschool asking about the other part of the equation – what’s in the NAPLAN tests from which the achievement scores are calculated. Well, if you’re curious, here’s NAPLAN’s website, from which, amongst other things, you can download the actual tests given in the past two years.

I had a quick poke around in the Year 9 tests. As broad-brush assessments of certain aspects of student achievement, in my completely inexpert opinion, they didn’t seem too terrible. The numeracy test was particularly interesting to me – I’d echo some of the comments about the test design made in this analysis of the results in one school – most of the questions the calculator-based test were not made any easier by the use of a calculator.

But what I noticed most strongly – and something that was pointed out in the linked commentary – was the relative lack of emphasis given to data analysis, or in other words the rudiments of statistics. Perhaps it’s just because I’m interested in the area, but it seems to me that lack of statistical literacy is a particular blight on public discourse in Australia. Is it that this test has less emphasis on “data” than actually occurs in Year 9 mathematics classes? Is it just that at year nine level, the other basic mathematical tools haven’t developed to a point where it’s worth starting to teach much statistics? Or is this reflective of the relative emphases in school curricula – and would I be right in perceiving this as a problem?

Links to other analyses of the NAPLAN tests most appreciated!

Education Revolution: A complete 360

Published
by
Helen
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Education, Media, Policy and Politics
. 114 Comments

Even in those heady piñata-bashing weeks of November 2007, I don’t think any of us were expecting the Rudd/Gillard government to be some kind of paragon of progressivism. By then, I was already low expectations R Us. Simply not being Howard, Abbott, Nelson and Bishop were the key to gaining my vote. It turns out that even this was asking a bit too much.

Murphy's law states that if you post a scornful article bagging someone else's web site, there will be a great big dog's balls of a HTML error just below the byline.

Murphy's law states that if you post a scornful article bagging someone else's web site, there will be a great big dog's balls of a HTML error just below the byline.


At first, I was a fan of Julia Gillard, a funny, combative ranga who could reduce the baying saurians in the Liberal seats to a humiliated near-silence (assuming they’re capable of understanding and feeling humiliation, that is). She’s fun to listen to in question time, but she broke my heart with the part she played in the 2004 election. OK, so she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near environmental policy, but surely she’d come good on the social justice issues…?

OK, now my heart is thoroughly broken and trampled on. I’ve become the voter who cannot love. The infamous My School database/website has been released today (and very buggy it is, too), and what do we see as the very first headline on the dead-tree Herald Sun? OUR SCHOOLS SHAME. The banner on the online version? HOW DID YOUR SCHOOL RATE? So predictable. Don’t ask me how the Boy’s school rates (The Girl has just left the public system with an excellent VCE score and as yet no crack habit – the Boy starts year 7 on Monday. Serial only children, I haz them.) The website hasn’t worked successfully for me yet. And yes, I am aware of most internet traditions and able to work most simple interfaces, so I don’t think it’s me.

Back to Julia, who on assuming the Deputy PMship announced that she would bring on an Education Revolution. Well, since “revolution” can mean doing a complete 360 and ending up facing the same way as when you started, then OK, technically correct, Julia.

Trevor Cobbold in his article, The Free market and the Social divide in Education (PDF), points out that the My School website is a continuation of the commodification of education which features the establishment of “quasi-markets” in schools.

The publication of the results of each school is seen as a central component of quasi-markets because it is supposed to inform parent choice…
The Rudd government has maintained and extended the focus on markets and competition in education… It has not reversed any of the key measures of the Howard government.
…It is paradoxical that a government which calls itself progressive is implementing the policies of its erstwhile conservative predecessor.

Progressive? They’re starting to make the previous government look more progressive:

…(A)s far as education policy is concerned, the Rudd Government has given John Howard and David Kemp another term in office…(The PM) says that schools that fail to improve will be subject to “tough action”, including firing principals and senior staff and closing schools. This is something that Kemp could only dream of.

And a Labor government that can actually introduce policies that aren’t the previous government’s leftovers plus spin from a personable pollie – that’s something that I can only dream of.

Myschool demography FAIL

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Education and Parenting
. 123 Comments

According to Julia’s press release, the MySchool website is supposed to tell whether your local school is working well:

My School contains important information about each of Australia’s 10 000 schools including the number of students at the school, the number of teachers at the school and how the school is performing in national literacy and numeracy testing.

Parents and school communities are also able to compare their school’s results with neighbouring schools and up to 60 statistically similar schools.

By comparing statistically similar schools, it will be clear which schools are doing well and which schools need an extra hand. By comparing statistically similar schools, it will be clear which schools are doing well and which schools need an extra hand.

The very idea of making this kind of information public is of course controversial. If it is to be done, however, you’d hope that it’s done in a rigorous way, so that schools are indeed compared against appropriate benchmarks.
Continue reading ‘Myschool demography FAIL’

The Last Tirade: A Ballad about NUS National Conference

Published
by
Paul Norton
2 months ago
in Activism, Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Education, Elections, Levity, Music, Politics and Terrorism
. 11 Comments

If you have been a student at any time in the past 23 years you will probably have been a member of the National Union of Students. If you are the kind of person who regularly reads this blog, you are more likely than most people to have been a participant in at least one NUS National Conference. I myself have been a participant in two. If you have been to an NUS National Conference, you will know that the following ballad, written by myself with apologies to Banjo Paterson and to Wallis & Matilda, is solidly grounded in fact. Those of you who have been mercifully spared the experience will just have to take my word for it.

NB: A “runner” in NUS parlance is an alternative term for a whip.

In beer-stained faction t-shirts
With stickers on bags displayed
The last of the young campaigners
Filed in for the last tirade

Continue reading ‘The Last Tirade: A Ballad about NUS National Conference’