OPERATION DUNDERHEAD

 

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 make any sort of response to such big picture thinking? But the bounty doesn’t end with just the beatification of NAPLAN.

Fenton quickly turns her attention to gifted and talented students and asserts… Gonski 1.0 brought increased support for learners at risk needing specialised classroom support. But there remains little funding for classrooms that are unprepared for talented kids at the other end of the bell curve. To be precise, Gonski funding focussed on neither. The Gonski plan, put most simply, seeks to bring all schools up to an equitable resource-based level. The actual targeting of money towards sub-groups of students is NOT a part of the Gonski brief and it’s never been a strategy. Fenton is just wrong when she suggests that it is or that it should be.

Cynthia, undeterred, presses on……… Fortunately for the teacher, bright kids can often work with little approval or guidance. In reality they are left to cruise along and fend for themselves. It is a disgrace that those who are academically gifted or even just talented and hardworking are disparaged for their success. What? We’ve jumped, in Fenton’s view of the current world order, from a funding realignment to burning bright kiddies at the stake! I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed but how does anyone connect Lego blocks to come up with that? I wonder what all those fortunate teachers’ responses might be regarding the drifting sub-cultures in their classrooms. She has to be kidding.

Hold on, it gets even better. In the space of one paragraph, Fenton’s gifted and talented student profiling morphs from one of needing little professional guidance to being one of total disengagement. …… their boredom quickly turns to disruptive behaviour. These children’s anger is palpable. They don’t understand why they are left to educate themselves by a teacher who is supposedly the expert in the field. I’m tempted to ‘value-add’ to these authoritative statements by suggesting that Fenton, herself, doesn’t understand what goes on in classrooms around the country by teachers who are intimately aware of the challenges that bright students present. Teachers, by and large, adjust their programs and methodologies to accommodate all students’ learning needs.

Cynthia Fenton is billed as a high school teacher but one can only guess at what she’s been doing over the years when she comes out with a nugget like this- This is an argument for academic selective schooling to begin at the primary school level. Has Ms Fenton not heard of opportunity classes in New South Wales’ schools? These classes, which exist in all districts and regions of the great state and have done so for decades, cater for high achieving Year 5 and Year 6 academically gifted students…………. the very tackers that she claims are left rudderless in the elementary years of schooling. You’d think a teacher- any teacher- would know that. Not this article’s author.

Cynthia Fenton’s arguments infer that drooping students’ performances in literacy and numeracy can be halted with the insertion of a gilded Gonski suppository up gifted and talented education’s arse. She offers no convincing evidence or rationale for this other than inaccurate generalisations and crude stereotyping of gifted students, high learning needs students, teachers and schools. Her article adds nothing to the current educational scene here in Oz.

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