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WHAT'S IN A NAME?

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What a strange world we live in at times. Yes, that’s a generalisation but it can be bloody accurate and no more so than when dealing with punters inhabiting the departure lounge a.k.a. we baby boomers. A couple of weeks ago Grandparents’ Day was celebrated in New South Wales. The state government produced a precis for the event stating that it ‘…is about celebrating the role of grandparents and older people in our lives.’ Further, ‘Grandparents, grand friends, kin, and those who take on the role of a grandparent in their family or community are recognised for their contribution.’ Well-intentioned, targeted, and affirming are all descriptors of this summary……… or so you would think. Apparently not. A state primary school in south-western Sydney supported the oldster focus by organising a Grand Friends’ Day where the punters could visit the school, see a few student presentations and down a complimentary cup of Joe. But someone was pissed off that ‘Grandparents’ had been altered t...
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WRITING REVISITED

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  The skills of being able to write have again hit the headlines here in Sin City. Jordan Baker’s article, Writing wrongs: ‘Our society is about to hit a literacy crisis’ (The Sydney Morning Herald; 19 September 2020), attempts to highlight the ever-increasing chasm between the spoken and the written word and that this ‘disconnect’ is most evident in our school and university students and aspiring teachers. It seems that writing is heading towards Hades in terms of accuracy, readability and quality. To make matters even worse, Dr Russell Daylight, an English lecturer at Charles Sturt University, asserts that business people, bureaucrats and journalists form part of the cohort struggling with the skills of coherent writing. One can only assume that COVID-19’s tentacles have reached victims’ grey matter or, at least, the magical Language Acquisition Devices in their temporal lobes. ‘Shit for brains’ has now taken on one new meaning/ application and the world of communication is th...
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OPERATION DUNDERHEAD

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  I’m all for more opinions and opinion-givers. There’s a dearth of both in today’s media and I reckon we’d be better off if lots of voices and ideas were heard. While divergent views may not be extinct, anything that lies outside of the ‘tame lane’ on the information superhighway is endangered. However, the line has to be drawn somewhere when encouraging ‘out there’ thinking as opposed to just plain idiocy and I think I’ve found an example that lies on the latter’s turf. I refer to an article entitled ‘Our brightest kids are being left to fend for themselves’ by Cynthia Fenton which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 8 May 2018. In her article, Ms Fenton aligns herself strongly with the NAPLAN testing regime and cites students’ waning performances across the board as an area for concern. But she offers us all some hope with this bottler………. If we were serious about our education, Australian kids would be NAPLAN-ing four times a year. How do you start to mak...
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EDUCATION'S HALF-YEARLY REPORT

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Funding for Australian schools has for over a decade assumed the shape of a football to be kicked purposefully around by state and national teams until it is barely recognisable. There’s nothing new in this but Trevor Cobbald’s recent study (dated 2.6.2018) highlights a current state of play that no-one should cheer about. The rationale behind the Gonski funding model in the first place was that schools (and their students) should be financed equitably. It wouldn’t matter where the school was, who the students were or what ‘system’ the school was a party to. Every school would be funded to a minimum resource benchmark. The logistics of this funding model are complex but, at the dummy levels of understanding that I employ, it meant that both the federal and state governments would contribute to achieve the shared goal which, you guessed it, was one of financial resource equity. It’s really as simple as that. The federal government has come under some deserve...
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THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION

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I’m not so sure about Adrian Piccoli’s take on cultural differences within our schools as an explanation for those students who are excelling and those who aren’t. Mr Piccoli reckons that NAPLAN results and international PISA rankings indicate that Oz students from non-English speaking backgrounds are outperforming WASP-like scholars. He ‘value-adds’ to this observation by suggesting that Asian- and S.E. Asian-background citizens place huge importance on academic achievement while the thong and T-shirt brigades worship more around sports’ arenas than anywhere near a 21st century classroom. The latter’s profile, Piccoli continues, has been underwritten by two decades of unfettered economic growth which, in turn, has led to a corresponding ‘cultural complacency’. The higher than average representation of non-English speaking background (NESB) students in the upper bands of NAPLAN literacy and numeracy attainments is nothing new. In the three decades of Basic Skills and NAPL...
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BIRMINGHAM'S BATHSHEBA

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    Barnaby Joyce is not the only politician who is a victim of his own desires. Federal education minister Simon Birmingham this week announced a bold new initiative to add to the impressive ‘suite’ of recruitment strategies for the great nation’s teaching ranks. Tradies are now being targeted as potential new whiteboard warriors in our quest for world domination…or, at least, some improvement in our international PISA ratings. Minister Birmingham has again displayed a long held affection for securing the right stuff when talking about new teachers entering the game. Further, he seems to be intoxicated by- and obsessed with- solving all of our schools’ woes by loitering around the pointy end of teacher education and induction. If teacher education was to be personified as something of a temptress, young Simon would be first in line as a suitor. To be fair to the minister, the federal government’s powers regarding school education are relatively limited. But w...
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2015 NAPLAN DEBRIEFING

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The 'furore' surrounding the release of the 2015 NAPLAN results last week and the accompanying explanations by various dons and pollies certainly made for a gripping read. 'No significant progress made by students in both literacy and numeracy since NAPLAN testing was introduced in 2008' emanated as a common cry from these educational hangers-on.   Now you have to wonder. Why has it taken seven years to be in a position to make this fearless 'call'? There is a political perspective to this timing which I'll address a tad later. More importantly, is it an accurate 'call' and why has it been made now?   Let's start with the second question first. Has there been no significant progress made by students in literacy and numeracy since NAPLAN testing was introduced? Well, that's a really difficult question to answer given the state of play in school education at a national level. If students' attainments were pegged from a common ...
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