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Breaking
News: Week of 18 February 2008
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Saturday – Sunday, 23 – 24 February
- The Age
- To lift standards, lift teachers' pay
by Farrah Tomazin"Three months ago, as thousands of striking teachers marched to the steps of the Victorian Parliament in pursuit of higher wages, John Brumby was across town, announcing plans for the redevelopment of the Royal Children's Hospital.
"During a carefully staged-managed press conference, the focus eventually shifted to the contentious issue of teachers' salaries. Brumby - who spent three years as a teacher at Bendigo's Eaglehawk High School in the 1970s - was asked if he would be satisfied with his annual pay packet had he remained a teacher. The Premier's answer was that of a polished politician who knows all too well that, sometimes, the best way to answer a question is to not really answer it at all.
"I'd certainly be satisfied that the conditions in Victorian schools are the best in Australia," he replied. "If you look at our secondary schools, the staffing ratio . . . is the best anywhere in Australia . . . our class sizes, at the junior levels, are the very best in Australia . . . and we have the highest completion rates in Australia."
"But when it comes to the remuneration of Victorian teachers, the Premier was - and still is - less convincing.
"Brumby points out that new teachers start on a salary of about $46,000 a year (not bad when compared with other professions), while senior "leading teachers" can earn about $78,000 a year, which is comparable to other states.
"But what the Government often fails to mention is that leading teachers are not the same as classroom teachers, and that to earn more money they must take on extra responsibilities, such as being a curriculum co-ordinator.
"Victoria's classroom teachers - whose wage levels were the essential reason for last week's statewide strike - are paid a maximum of $65,414 a year at the top of the scale, making them the lowest paid in the country. (In NSW, a teacher at the top of the classroom scale earns $75,352 a year; in Western Australia they get more than $71,000.)
"When Brumby took over as Premier last year, he hung his hat on education being his "number one priority". But so far his actions on this front have failed to live up to the hype.
"The Government prides itself on record year 12 completion rates, that its students are performing at or above most national benchmarks in literacy and numeracy, and that it has revamped the school curriculum. Yet when it comes to properly paying teachers the workforce continues to get a raw deal.
"The Government can't have it both ways. The profession is hemorrhaging, and the consequences are grave. Secondary schools are already facing staff shortages as older teachers retire and new teachers leave the job within a few years of first entering a classroom.
"Rural schools near the border are losing teachers to NSW and South Australia, and others are watching their staff head to higher-paying independent schools or the corporate sector. Meanwhile, principals are being forced to resort to desperate measures, such as wining and dining job applicants or using unqualified "instructors" to fill the gaps.
"But there are broader implications. Teachers lay the groundwork for economic prosperity by playing a crucial role in developing the skills and intellectual capital needed to ensure society's future productivity. Not paying them enough places at risk Victoria's desire to be the so-called "smart state". It also undermines the state's ability to build a high-quality public education system that can attract and retain the best and brightest graduates. The Government is right to use enterprise bargaining talks with the union as an opportunity to push through a new wave of education reforms, such as pay bonuses for top teachers to work in struggling schools and tighter controls on pupil-free days and training days to ensure they are not being misused by teachers as extra "holiday" time.
"It is also correct to insist that a balance must be struck between teacher pay, and new school buildings, programs and technology.
"And the union - which wants an annual 10% wage rise - will eventually have to soften its claim and return to the bargaining table after stalling negotiations at the end of last year when both parties failed to give ground.
"But even if the union was to accept the Government's offer of a 3.25% pay rise, the starting salary for Victorian teachers would only rise to $47,626, and the top-of-the-scale salary would increase to $67,540. In other words, the state's teachers would still be starting, and finishing, on less money than they would receive if they crossed the border to NSW or South Australia.
"Politicians often talk about lifting standards in the classroom, boosting teacher quality and improving the lot of our children. If the Brumby Government is serious about education being a national priority, then it should put its money where its mouth is and pay Victorian teachers what they deserve."
Farrah Tomazin is education editor of The Age
From The Age at link
- Op Ed
Children's learning flourishes in the right atmosphere
In all the public debate about educational inequality, the truth about the many truly successful secondary schools that thrive in highly disadvantaged areas is ignored. Each is built on an unshakeable belief that these students deserve quality teachers and an equally firm belief that students must respect and obey these professionals — a calm environment of mutual respect.
Writing the wrongs of US system
by Elisabeth Tarica
Help comes from afar for New York's struggling students
"A Victorian teacher has developed an educational program that is helping hundreds of disadvantaged New York teenagers learn to read and write.
'Working in public schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Maggie Goodes was shocked by the number of students in the middle years of grades 6 to 8 with poor literacy. Some could not read or write, with many able only to recognise their names, familiar signs and logos.
"The former year 9 co-ordinator at Castlemaine Secondary College has since developed a two-year program, Supporting Adolescent Learners, to help teachers better understand and communicate with struggling students. By using her strategies, Ms Goodes says some teachers have been able to accelerate their students' literacy skills by up to three years in just six weeks.
"Ms Goodes moved to New York in 1999 to work as a literacy consultant, but by 2005 she had set up her own company offering the program. The program has since been implemented in 34 public schools. They are labelled "failing schools" because of their high number of students who have moved through the education system despite falling below desired literacy levels.
"There are lots of reasons why kids can struggle," she says. "Most have had their education disrupted by moving backwards and forwards to another country, while some are caught in two languages and are not proficient in either. But for every kid there's a different story.
"It is really disappointing when you come across kids in middle school who are struggling. Secondary school teachers are not trained to teach kids to read and write; there was an assumption that the kids would be able to read and write and our job would be to extend on that."
"Supporting Adolescent Learners works on similar principles to that of the popular reading recovery program, which identifies struggling readers in grade 1 and helps them catch up to their peers.
"Reading recovery is an intense system of one-on-one tutoring that was first used in New Zealand in 1983 and is common in Canada, Britain, Australia and the US, where it is estimated to have helped more than 1.6 million students. Yet some youngsters slip through the cracks.
"In grade one it is still possible for students to catch up," she says. "By the time you get a kid in the sixth or seventh grade, the gap has widened significantly as they might be reading at a third-grade level."
From The Age at link
- The Australian
- Pay children to go to school: academic
by Simon Kearney
"A proposal to pay indigenous children to go to school has been raised as a scheme to go before Kevin Rudd's "war cabinet" on indigenous affairs."The plan would involve paying school children for each day's attendance and is similar to a scheme in the US, where children are paid for good test results..."
Full story in The Australian at link
- E-books ready to open chapter one
After many false dawns, the electronic book may finally have arrived.
- The West Australian
- Letters to the Editor (page 22)
- In Short
"When our health and education systems are in danger of imploding due to poor management and poor pay, it is galling to see the State's wealth being spent on monuments. I am sure that the cold hard clarity that history's retrospect will bring will judge this period as one of greed and poor long-term vision.
"The issues regarding health and education aren't even about nurses' or teachers' pay. They are about the old lady who spends a day on a trolley in a hospital corridor and about the aspiring Year 12 student who has no maths teacher. Where are our priorities?"
Peter Bothe, Karratha
- "I read that the State Government is going to spend $300 million on "improvements" to the Perth city river frontage. That is a lot of money for what is really a cosmetic job, and I'll bet that the poor souls on hospital waiting lists, and those who are giving up teaching because they are tired of bashing their heads against brick walls, and all those who are living in fear of being attacked, robber or raped in their homes are cheering madly. I am convinced that this, along with the multi-million dollar sports stadium, will make a tremendous difference to the lives of every man, woman and child in WA. Who said the Government can't get its priorities right?"
Peter Baker, Binningup
- The West Australian
- Public servants want 23pc pay rise [Front Page Headline]
by Kim MacDonald
"The union that represents about 35,000 State public servants has told the Government it wants pay rises totalling 23 per cent over the next three years, double the amount it claims to have been offered."As the Federal Government urges unions and business to show wage restraint to help combat inflation, the Community and Public Sector Union claims the State Government has offered 11.5 per cent over three years.
"The CPSU has also demanded the Government life its superannuation contribution from 9 per cent to as much as 13 per cent, based on length of service.
"The union is running an unprecedented prime-time media campaign that warns poor wages are driving away public servants, making the service unable to properly monitor at-risk children and paroled criminals or provide other vital services..."
Full story in The West Australian
Recruiters get up to $10,000 fee for teachers (page 3)
by Bethany Hiatt
"Taxpayers are paying private recruiting agencies as much as $10,000 every time they find a teacher to help overcome the State's teaching crisis, on top of the billions spent running the Department of Education and training.
"The department began using specialist agencies Hays Recruitment and IPA Personnel early last year to attract more teachers to WA from other States. It has employed 57 teachers through recruitment agencies in that time - 16 this year and 41 last year."For each teacher the agency gets, the department pays 15 per cent of their gross annual salary package.
"Most teachers in WA State schools are paid between $50,000 and $70,000 a year, which means that the department could be paying between $7500 and $10,500 to recruiting agencies for each teacher they provide.
"Teachers also can earn up to $15,000 in allowances on top of their base wage for teaching in very remote areas, which could push up the finder's fee even further.
"Asked why the department needed to use external agencies to hire staff, a spokesman said it was another strategy to enhance the supply of teachers.
"These agencies have national and international databases of teachers and have the capacity to target specific areas of employment need, such as science and maths," he said. "It would be remiss if DET did not explore all ways to source teachers."
"More than $2.7 billion was allocated in this year's State Budget to "delivery of services" in the department.
"When you are seeing thousands of dollars going out as recruitment success fees, then you have to say… Could we do this better, more efficiently and more effectively from within," State School Teachers' Union president Anne Gisborne said. "You could accept that possibly as being an interim measure in the rush and the heat to get things going. But it may be that … it is actually appropriate for the department and Government to look at this type of arrangement being run in-house as opposed to providing a good boon for private enterprise."
"Shadow education minister Peter Collier said 15% of a teacher's annual salary seemed exorbitant. He questioned the department's efficiency, saying that using agencies to recruit teachers was an admission that it had failed its job of getting them.
"Hundreds of additional administrators have been employed by DET over the past seven years," he said. "Surely the department could find more deserving areas of need in education than recruitment agencies." [emphasis added]
"Education Minister Mark McGowan said he made no apologies for using every available method to ensure schools were staffed.
"Over the past 12 months the Government has initiated a range of recruitment strategies which has seen the vacancy level drop significantly," he said. "If Mr Collier does not think the staffing of classrooms is a deserving area of need, he needs to reassess his priorities."
From The West Australian
Vic teachers chase bigger pay rises
AAP
"Victorian school pupils and their families may face weeks of disruption as state and Catholic school teachers and state school principals all seek bigger pay rises."Teachers are seeking pay rises of 10 per cent a year for the next three years, but the government has offered its standard 3.25 per cent-a-year public service increase in return for productivity gains such as changes to holidays and pupil-free training days.
"The Age newspaper said Australian Principals Federation members will not comply with duties, including the writing of reports for the Education Department and attending government briefings and conferences, unless their wage deal is also sweetened.
"Thousands of teachers forced the closure of state schools because of industrial action last week.
"Teachers at schools in Premier John Brumby's Broadmeadows electorate plan to walk off the job for half a day on Tuesday next week, while teachers in the Bendigo area represented by cabinet ministers Jacinta Allan and Bob Cameron will strike for half a day the next day.
"These are the first of a series of rolling half-day stoppages planned by the Australian education Union, Fairfax newspapers said.
"Catholic teachers are planning to strike for a rally at Dallas Brooks Hall on March 7, followed by a march to state parliament.
"Opposition education spokesman Martin Dixon urged the government to restart wage talks to minimise disruption.
"The government now has to pick up that phone and negotiate in a realistic way with Victorian teachers and principals - and realistic is not 3.25 per cent. That's below the cost of living and an insult to the profession," Mr Dixon told The Age.
"A spokesman for Education Minister Bronwyn Pike, Matt Nurse, said the government wanted to pay its workforce more but needed enough money for school programs, computers and buildings."
From The West Australian at link
Graduates 'lack spelling and grammar'
AAP
"Mobile phone text messaging and gaming slang are being used by university graduates in job applications, prompting special lessons in grammar and appropriate language."We talk to a lot of people in the graduate recruitment industry and they all say the same thing," Australian Association of Graduate Employers spokesman Ben Reeves told Fairfax newspapers.
"The spelling is substandard, the grammar is not very good and at times the correspondence can be a bit familiar."
"In recent years there has seen an increase in student assignment-writing using leetspeak - gaming slang, using numbers to replace certain letters - University of Sydney deputy vice-chancellor Shirley Alexander told Fairfax.
"But there was no hard evidence grammatical skills were in decline, she said."
From The West Australian at link
Similar story in The Sydney Morning Herald
- The Australian
- Synthetic phonics a sound start to reading
by Justine Ferrari, Education writer
"Teacher Anna Matejka is perplexed by the fact that the literacy wars persist and that many of the academics who train teachers believe teaching phonics is not the necessary first step in learning toread."An assistant principal at Peakhurst South public school in Sydney's southwest, Ms Matejka has first-hand experience in teaching reading to children in the early years of school.
"For years, the school had taught reading by breaking words into their constituent sounds, an approach called analytic phonics. But two years ago, Ms Matejka introduced a program that taught the 42 sounds comprising the English language and how to blend them to make words, a method known as synthetic phonics.
"The results were immediate and dramatic. By June - only five months after they started school - the students were reading at the level of students the year above. Even more remarkably, every student in the class learned to read.
"I taught Year 1 (the second year of school in NSW) for seven years and was constantly frustrated that at the end of Year 1, there were always a handful of children, up to six or seven, who I knew really couldn't read," she said.
"I was terribly frustrated because I felt a failure."
"Her experience prompted her to seek an alternative method for teaching reading when she was handed a kindergarten class in 2005.
"The reading recovery teacher, who provides specialised one-on-one assistance to the bottom third of readers in Year 1, found the students taught using synthetic phonics had far less confusion between letters and sounds, and a very strong understanding of single sounds.
"Using standardised international reading assessment tool, the Burt Reading Test, which measures the number of words a child can read, the average score among the struggling readers at Peakhurst South in 2001 was 2.2.
"In 2005, the average score had risen to 7.4; by 2006, it was 13.3.
"The only change was synthetic phonics," Ms Matejka said.
"The program follows guidelines on teaching reading introduced in Britain last year, requiring phonics to be taught first and fast.
"The names of the letters are eschewed because of the confusion it causes among struggling readers, so only the sounds of the letters are taught.
"Students learn their first six sounds in the first six days, which are the most commonly used sounds in English: s, a, t, i, p and n. By their second week of school, they can read words such as sat, at, in, pant, tin.
"With more complex sounds, where two letters form one sound, the class might spend a couple of days to ensure the students have properly learnt it.
"All sounds are learnt by the middle of term two, whereas under analytic phonics it takes three years to get through all the sound-letter combinations.
"I don't think anyone who has ever really taught this could reject it," Ms Matejka said.
"One of the kindergarten teachers at the school, who is very experienced and has always taught analytic phonics, was quite sceptical but is converted now."
"Ms Matejka said opposition to phonics as the first step in teaching reading was an ideological stance.
"The trouble with academics is they don't have to teach children how to read," she said.
"You have to look at the evidence. There's no evidence to show the analytic approach works for all students. I'm not denying it works for some, but synthetic phonics is something that works for all."
From The Australian at link
- Editorial
And another thing
"Excellent teachers such as Anna Matejka, at Peakhurst South's public school in southwest Sydney, are treasures. As today's report in The Australian shows, Ms Matejka, who has taught every year level in a 30-year career, has helped her kindergarten class's literacy results soar with synthetic phonics. This means putting words together with sounds. She did so after researching solutions to help a handful of children in each group who were not learning to read. After the "whole language" fad of the 1960s and 70s, California re-endorsed phonics in 1996 and Britain in 1998. It beggars belief that Australia's education establishment, like ageing flower children in denial, still clings to "whole language" as its sole method of teaching reading."When will they ever learn?"
From The Australian at link
- Op Ed
Curriculum cordiality in the air
by Luke Slattery
"There's an unusual degree of cordiality in the air. And at the weekend, a Sydney University conference on the future of secondary English seemed to extend the cultural entente embracing black and white Australia to that most divisive of subjects: the school curriculum. The results were heartening.
"As a critic of some of the more radical trends in secondary school English I was encouraged by the interchange between academics and teachers, and the airing of a more subtle, nuanced and humanistic approach to English. A teacher wrote to me after her inspirational experience at the colloquium, suggesting that the dominance of critical literacy was old-hat. It seems as though the theoretical miasma that enveloped English for about a decade has been dispersed, and it's suddenly possible to talk about humanistic values and aesthetic pleasures without risking ideological sanction, charges of privileging the canon, or retrograde foggyish conservatism.
"Okay, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration, as there was always a place for tradition within the subject. But in order to gain a bit of perspective on the curriculum wars, I want to rewind the clock. In 2000, in their review of approaches to years 7-10 English for the NSW Board of Studies, academics Wayne Sawyer and Kate McFarlane, confessed that very little in the field was unproblematic.
"The teaching profession was grappling with an attempt to assimilate the traditional cultural heritage and personal growth models of English with the new approaches coming out of cultural studies, the resistant readings urged by enthusiasts for critical literacy (defined as a socio-cultural approach), and the efflorescence of multiliteracies. What a mess. This last neologism presupposes the need for many kinds of literacy in a globalised, networked, culturally diverse world, but what it does in my view is distract from the main game of reading, writing, and second language learning (the real way to become globalised).
"Critical literacy, Sawyer and McFarlane concede in their 2000 review, has been the dominant paradigm of the subject in terms of curriculum discussion; what's more, its advocates have levelled significant criticism at the more traditional approaches mentioned above. But what does critical literacy itself have to offer? Sawyer and McFarlane: Critical literacy advocates argue for English classrooms in which all language practices (including 'literature' ), are contextualised socially, and critiqued for their underlying ideology. The cultural studies school, for its part, proclaims the relationship between high, popular and sub-cultures to be fluid and unstable. These academics were fond of resistant readings, but they certainly weren't resistant to cliché.
"What's amusing about this document, in retrospect, is the way it highlights, in an intramural sort of way, many of the debates which later became the subject of media controversy. The profession's intellectual leadership screamed blue murder about media attacks on these curriculum trends; about concerns that English was becoming a form of pedagogical resistance; a brand of politics. And yet here, from within the profession, comes an acknowledgement that (A), the compulsory subject of English was dominated by the critical literacy school; (B) critical literacy's aim was critique of a text's underlying ideology; and (C) this school was in open conflict with the more traditional cultural heritage and personal growth models. There is a further, almost tacit acknowledgment: that the dominance of critical literacy in curriculum discussion is unique to Australia. This, I think, was a pretty crazy place for the profession to be, and quite inexplicable given that intellectual trends were loosening the grasp of theory in the academy at the moment it was tightening in the classroom.
"This is what makes the weekend's conference so cheering. Former NSW English chief examiner Jackie Manuel confessed she was troubled by the implications of critical literacy's idea of the resistant reader for ways of thinking, feeling, relating and knowing. She questioned the priority of resistance - suspicion of how a text is seeking to position, coerce or persuade us with its ideology - in classroom encounters with imaginative literature. Such an approach, she said, might short-circuit an authentic attempt to read and respond with receptivity to the new, the unfamiliar, the 'other'. This quality of receptiveness is, after all, an expression of the values we cherish in a compassionate, inclusive and just democratic society.
"In On Trust: Art and the Temptation of Suspicion, University of Sussex professor Gabriel Josipovici - one of Britain's leading public intellectuals - aims something similar at the school of thought that lies behind the older more Bolshie forms of critical literacy. Reading, he says, is always an act of trust. Of course this is not to advocate a return to the gushing enthusiasm of some Edwardian critics. But suspicion has to follow trust, not precede it; it is only by opening ourselves up to the literature of the past and the present that we can begin to see what works and authors are meaningful to us and why in some cases we feel that the trust we initially invested in them has been betrayed. To begin with suspicion is to condemn ourselves to solipsism."
From The Australian at link
- ABC News
- Taser used on boy during school assault
A 12-year-old boy will face the Rockingham Children's Court tomorrow after allegedly threatening a group of teachers with knives at a Perth high school. Police say the student threatened three staff members with two knives at Safety Bay High School earlier today.
- The Sydney Morning Herald
- Student laptops face the school of hard knocks
by Graeme Philipson
"... The promises about training teachers are rather vague, and there is no money set aside for the purpose. Many teachers are computer literate, but many are not, and the skills required to manage the hardware and software of a room full of laptops are in any case beyond those possessed by all but experienced IT professionals."And you know what teenagers are like (I have first-hand knowledge). They break things, they lose things, they leave them out in the weather. They do not look after their own possessions - we can hardly expect them to be kind to expensive bits of equipment for which they paid nothing and for which they are not accountable.
"ICT managers know the problems of looking after end-users. Even professional white-collar workers are a nightmare to support. They download rubbish, run their own pet applications, they use the corporate laptops for all manner of personal activities. I, for one, would not want to be in charge of managing the laptop computers of 30 teenagers..."
Full story in The Sydney Morning Herald at link
- The Canning Examiner [Week of 15 February]
- Short term fix: union [Front page headline]
by Eoghan Barry and Ryan Eamer"The State Government's solution to teacher shortages is only a stopgap measure, according to the WA School Teachers' Union.
"Union president Anne Gisborne said 140 teachers had been redeployed from the district and head offices to teach in schools.
"They're mainly from curriculum support roles," she said.
"As an example, if an autistic child came into a class and the teacher had never dealt with an autistic child before, they would contact a curriculum support teacher for guidance and advice on how to teach them.
"So you're taking away the ongoing support for teachers in the system.
"As a short-term stopgap solution it may work, but as a long term method it's short-sighted."
"Ms Gisborne said some teachers were also being asked to teach out-of-area subjects.
"You have English teachers being asked to teach maths, for example," she said.
"Or science teachers teaching PE."
"Ms Gisborne said the impact of the teacher shortage had been minimised by spreading it across all schools, rather than a few.
"But it was important not to hide the fact there still was a problem.
"For individual schools, the situation appears to be better," she said.
"We don't seem to have schools that are 15 or 16 teachers down anymore.
"But we have literacy and numeracy and learning support programs that are being collapsed because the focus is on putting teachers in front of a class.
"The State Government needed to look at long-term strategies to attract new teachers and to keep them teaching longer.
"You need a good strong focus on salary to attract young people," she said.
"And current teachers have been subject to significant and radical changes in the education system.
"They need time to get used to change without more change being dropped in their lap." ... [Remainder of story is an interview with Willetton SHS principal Chris Booth.]
Full story in The Canning Examiner
- The Age
- The Monday Education Section contains 14 articles [two of which were included in yesterday's daily news coverage]
Full updates from eastern states' papers will be available this evening.
- Education Minister Mark McGowan Media Statements
- New course taps students into resources sector
Year 11 and 12 students will be able to learn about minerals, petroleum and hydrogeology while they study environmental science issues as part of a new course launched by the Education and Training Minister Mark McGowan today.Mr McGowan said the Earth and Environmental Science course could lead to further study in areas such as exploration, mining, petroleum, hydrogeology, environmental science, climate change science and marine science...
- Research partnership to improve teacher training
Training for tomorrow’s teachers has taken a giant leap forward with a landmark research facility to be built at the new Roseworth Primary School in Girrawheen.Education and Training Minister Mark McGowan said the Edith Cowan University Research Facility would give student teachers a fantastic opportunity to observe and research a wide range of teaching methods and behaviour management techniques, without disrupting the classroom...
- The West Australian
- Editorial
Education Department should seek out teachers (page 20)"It is galling for WA taxpayers to discover that the Department of Education and Training has handballed the task of finding more teachers to private agencies, with an inevitable extra cost.
"Surely the department, with all its taxpayer-funded resources, ought to be responsible for such a basic function.
"A department spokesman says that private agencies are able to target specific areas of employment, apparently something the department itself cannot manage.
"If the department lacks the ability to hunt out teachers itself as a way of reducing the shortages in WA schools, it ought to set about acquiring it, and with some urgency. [DET understands the meaning of "urgency"??? Web] After all, it costs as much as $10,000 per teacher if agencies are used.
"Education Minister Mark McGowan is right to say that all options should be used to find teachers, but using expensive agencies should be, at best, a short-term strategy."
From The West Australian
Metal detectors call after police Taser schoolboy (page 18)
by Ronan O'Connell"The teachers union and State Opposition say metal detectors may be needed in WA schools after a 12-year-old student allegedly threatened three teachers with knives at Safety Bay High School yesterday before police shot him with a Taser stun gun.
"Police will allege that the student entered the school's staff room about 9am and threatened the teachers while holding a knife in each hand.
"Police were called to the school and fired a Taser at the boy after he refused to put down the knives. It is understood he got the knives from the kitchen at the school.
"He was charged with making threats to injure, endanger or harm and will appear in the Rockingham Children's Court today. The student, who was uninjured, was released on bail, with conditions that he follow a curfew and does not attend school.
"The incident came just over a week after a teacher from Comet Bay College in Secret Harbour fought off a 15-year-old alleged knife attacker in front of hundreds of terrified students. Two boys were charged.
"State School Teachers Union president Anne Gisborne said the incidents highlighted the need for upgraded security.
"Ms. Gisborne, who stated recently the union would back the use of security guards if it made teachers feel safer in their workplace, said the introduction of metal detectors in schools which proved to be dangerous had to be considered.
"One is always reluctant to go down the path of this type of strategy but at the end of the day there is a need to examine security measures in particular schools," she said.
"It may well be that these types of strategies are the ones which are most appropriate for ensuring the safety of our teachers and students."
"Shadow education minister Peter Collier said such measures were almost inevitable given the growing culture of violence and intimidation in WA schools.
"It (metal detectors) is something that has to be looked at and it's just an unfortunate consequence of what is happening in our schools," he said.
"The fact is that these sorts of incidents are not rare anymore. Teachers are being threatened and intimidated by students on a daily basis in our schools so greater safety measures such as this have to be looked at."
"The teacher involved in the Comet Bay incident said schools were increasingly being targeted by intruding armed teenagers who were seeking fights with students over out-of-school disputes.
"Education Department schools deputy director-general Margery Evans said no students had seen yesterday's incident at Safety Bay and staff who had been in the area at the time had been offered counselling.
"She said security guards were occasionally deployed at schools when staff or students' safety was threatened.
"Education Minister Mark McGowan did not return calls yesterday."
From The West Australian
- Metal detectors in schools un-Australian: McGowan [late online update]
AAP
"An incident in which police fired a Taser gun at a 12-year-old Perth schoolboy was “disturbing“, Western Australia’s Education Minister Mark McGowan says."But, the minister said, he would not heed calls for metal detectors to be installed in WA schools because it was un-Australian.
"Police shot the Taser gun at the child at Safety Bay Senior High School, south of Perth, yesterday after the boy allegedly threatened three teachers with a knife he had picked up at the school.“He was told to drop the knife, but didn’t, and indicated that he was going to harm himself with the knife,” police said in a statement.
“Police deployed a Taser to prevent injury to any persons.”
"The Taser didn’t work because one of its probes missed the child and lodged in a chair.
"Two probes must come in contact with the skin to form a circuit.
"The boy dropped the knife and was apprehended by police.
“Police are confronted with difficult situations very often but it’s something you would do as a last resort,” Mr McGowan said.
“There’s been a lot of talk the last day or so about introducing metal detectors at schools.
“I don’t support that at all, and I don’t think it would have helped in this instance.
“The child, as I understand it, took a knife from the home economics room and a metal detector wouldn’t have helped.
“And metal detectors, when you’ve got schools with literally dozens of entry points just won’t work and it’s not an Australian way of doing things.”
"The boy is due to appear in the Rockingham Children’s Court today charged with threatening to injure, endanger or harm."
From The West Australian at link
Teachers with criminal past 'lost' in the system (page 42)
by Flip Prior and Bethany Hiatt"Hundreds of teachers with criminal convictions could be working in WA schools, but the Department of Education and Training cannot say how many or what they were convicted of because their records are destroyed after they are deemed fit to teach..."
"Shadow education minister Peter Collier condemned the lack of transparency, saying the department must be able to justify its decisions about why it allowed teachers with criminal convictions to enter the profession.
"If they can't, it's far too subjective and that subjectivity is entirely inappropriate," he said..."
Full story in The West Australian
WA education system given high marks (page 18)
by Bethany Hiatt"Taxpayers are getting good value from WA's education system compared with the rest of the nation and other countries, an independent report by Melbourne think tank the Institute of Public Affairs has found.
"Competition between private and public schools and between WA and other States has helped push up the performance of its students, according to the discussion paper by IPA researcher Matthew Ryan, to be released today.
"In terms of student performance compared to public dollars spent, WA's school system gets good value for money by comparison with the rest of Australia and the developed world," he said in the paper.
"The report, commissioned by WA's Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, is aimed at kick-starting public debate to help WA cope with the economic boom.
"Mr. Ryan, a former Commonwealth treasury senior official, warned against allowing education policy decisions to be dictated from Canberra.
"Competition is good and WA should maintain that level of independence in education systems because they're doing such a good job," he said.
"The huge drift of students away from public schools to the private sector in the past 20 years had also reduced pressure on taxpayers to provide public schooling in WA. Mr. Ryan estimated the total savings to taxpayers from private financing of non-government schools was more than $600 million each year.
"He said good teachers played a big role in improving student achievement and WA had to make its teachers' salaries nationally attractive to encourage people to move interstate.
"If, down the track, paying more for teachers threatens to blow the budget, WA could consider letting average class sizes grow as there appears to be good trade-off between raising teacher quality even at the expense of increasing class sizes," he said.
"Mr. Ryan said that despite its big number of disadvantaged indigenous students in very remote areas, WA students performed well academically.
"He cited the recently released Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2006 international test results, in WA students performed better than those in most other developed countries, and second only to the ACT within Australia.
"Tests of Year 3, 5 and 7 students within Australia do not show WA in such good light compared with other states, but Mr. Ryan said they were not as reliable.
"The typical WA student is often a lot younger than your typical Australian student elsewhere," he said."
From The West Australian
- ABC News
- TAFE lecturers step up industrial campaign
"Technical and Further Education lecturers are protesting in Perth today."Up to 16-hundred TAFE lecturers are concerned about their pay rates, staff retention levels and working conditions.
"In December last year TAFE lecturers began their industrial campaign by refusing to post student grades on the internet.
"The Senior Vice President of the State School Teachers Union, Pat Burke, says the protests will continue until the State and Federal Governments take notice.
"This is a start of a lot of action we are going to be taking, " she said.
"We'll be stepping up the action if we don't see some movement from the Government particularly around the areas of providing a retention packages for TAFE lecturers."
From ABC News at link
- Public servants plans industrial action over 23 per cent pay claim
"The state's public servants have voted to bring forward industrial action to next week as part of their campaign for a pay rise."More than 2,000 Community and Public Sector Union members held a stop work meeting at the Perth Convention Centre this morning.
"The union's Toni Walkington says her members want a pay rise of 23 per cent over three years.
"The State Government has offered 11 and a half per cent."
From ABC News at link
- Government: Teacher vacancies fall
"The teacher shortage across Western Australia has fallen to 42."There were 79 vacanies when the school year began a fortnight ago.
"The Education Minister Mark McGowan will fly to Queensland tomorrow to continue the government's interstate recruitment drive of teachers.
"Mr McGowan says he expects the number of vacancies to be fewer than 30 within weeks.
"Now that's at historically average levels of teacher shortages, so the measures we put in place over the last year or so have worked," he said.
"But we still have a long term problem which is why i'm not giving up on these sorts of interstate, international [advertising] and other mechanisms to get teachers in our classrooms."
From ABC News at link
- Teachers Union demands more action against violent students
"The State School Teachers Union (SSTU) says the West Australian Government needs to allocate more resources to programs that deal with badly behaved students."Police fired a Taser at a 12-year-old boy yesterday after he allegedly threatened teachers with two knives in a staff room at Safety Bay High School.
"The Education Department says it will not tolerate violence in schools and has set up three behaviour management centres to deal with the problem.
"The President of the SSTU, Anne Gisborne, says there needs to be more than three centres because violence in schools is escalating.
"Schools are a microcosm of the broader community," she said.
"I think we would all agree that the violence and aggression appears to be expanding and this is occurring in the student population as well as the general population."
"The Education Department's Marjory Evans says it is doing everything it can to protect teachers.
"We don't tolerate violence, safety is paramount," she said.
"We act strongly, we act swiftly and in the unusual circumstance where there is violence or threat of violence we will send in security guards."
From ABC News at link
- Boy pleads guilty to threatening teachers with knife
A 12-year-old boy has pleaded guilty to threatening three teachers with knives at a high school south of Perth.
- The Busselton - Dunsborough Mail
- McGowan stands up for high school's reputation
by Usman Azad
Claims of violence and abusive behaviour from a small group of students at Busselton Senior High School have been exaggerated, according to Education Minister Mark McGowan.
- The Australian
- Degree standards 'must be ranked'
by Milanda Rout
"Employers would be able to distinguish between university degrees from high- and low-quality institutions under a proposal by a leading Australian vice-chancellor for minimum degree standards."Australian National University vice-chancellor Ian Chubb has called on the Rudd Government to establish student performance standards to help assess the quality of degrees from different universities.
"He said a general "graduate exam" and comparisons of students' work across universities were just some of the options that could be used to measure academic performance.
"In a speech in Canberra last night, Professor Chubb said Australia had "danced around the questions of standards" of universities and their graduates for too long and the Government needed to confront reality.
"He said Australia was falling behind the world's top universities and urgently needed to "catch up" to stop further decline. "We persist with the notion of a parity of esteem of degrees even though we know there are sizeable differences in the entry scores of students, the capabilities of academic staff.
"There are differences, real differences, within the sector and those differences lead to consequences."
"Professor Chubb said the Government could consider comparing student work across universities or having graduate exams so the country could "safeguard the reputation" of Australian qualifications in the international marketplace.
"It is time to establish a minimum acceptable standard for a degree and to develop benchmarks for differences in performance standards achieved by graduates," he said in the speech, part of the Australian and New Zealand School of Government lecture series.
"He called for a "fresh" approach to policy and funding of higher education before it was too late. "Australia's capacity and performance slippage against the international leaders reflects an underlying deficit of national investment in research, research training and research infrastructure," he said.
"I hope ... ministers soon get to see the scale of investment in facilities and talent in the leading universities of China, Europe and elsewhere. Then they will understand just how far we have fallen behind, and how precarious is our future."
"Professor Chubb said that Australia's "catch-up" to the rest of the world cannot be done by "thinly spreading" funding to every university in the nation."
From The Australian at link
Related stories in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
- Maths funding just doesn't count
Cash-strapped university administrations diverted most of the millions of dollars meant to reverse the maths and statistics skills crisis to other purposes, confidential research has found. At least 50 per cent and as much as 80 per cent of new money allocated by the former Coalition government to the national priority disciplines appears to have been retained for administration, a draft report to the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute suggests.
- The Washington Post
- Parents Rise Up Against A New Approach to Math [19 February]
by Ian Shapira
"Greg Barlow, an Air Force officer in the defense secretary's office at the Pentagon, was helping his 8-year-old son, Christian, one recent night with a vexing problem: What is 674 plus 249?
"The Prince William County third-grader did not stack the numbers and carry digits from one column to the next, the way generations have learned. Applying lessons from his school's new math textbook, "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," Christian tried breaking the problem into easier-to-digest numbers."But after several seconds, he got stumped. He drew lines connecting digits, and his computation amounted to an upside-down pyramid with numbers at the bottom. His father, in a teacherly tone, nudged him toward the old-fashioned method. "How would you do that another way?" Barlow asked.
"In Prince William and elsewhere in the country, a math textbook series has fomented upheaval among some parents and teachers who say its methods are convoluted and fail to help children master basic math skills and facts. Educators who favor the series say it helps young students learn math in a deeper way as they prepare for the rigors of algebra.
"The debate over "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," a Pearson School series used in thousands of elementary classrooms, including some in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Howard counties, is one of the newer fronts in the math wars. Such battles over textbooks and teaching methods are fueled in part by the anxieties of parents who often feel powerless over their children's education, especially in subjects they know.
"The curriculum, introduced in the 1990s and updated in a second edition issued last fall, offers one answer to the nation's increasingly urgent quest for stronger elementary math education. The nonprofit organization TERC, based in Cambridge, Mass., developed "Investigations" with support from the National Science Foundation.
"Some experts and parents find it wanting. "There's very little substance. I read through all the kindergarten curriculum. It's wishy-washy," said Steve Santee, an engineer whose daughter Olivia is in first grade at Cedar Point Elementary School in Prince William. "My wife and I are very fortunate. She's a former math teacher, and we can teach her all the way up to calculus." ...
Full story in The Washington Post at link
- The Sunday Times Online / PerthNow
- Teachers strike to become nation's highest paid
by Andrea Hayward
"West Australian teachers will strike for half a day next week as part of a push to become the nation's highest paid teachers.
"The union has rejected a WA government offer of a 13 per cent pay rise over three years, pushing for a 20 per cent pay rise, which would make them the highest paid teachers in Australia."State School Teachers Union of WA President Anne Gisborne said teachers would gather in Perth's Supreme Court Gardens for a stop work meeting next Thursday morning, and she would not rule out further action such as rolling strikes and day strikes.
"Ms Gisborne said the strike was regrettable but Education Minister Mark McGowan and the WA government needed to respond rapidly and progress negotiations or risk further strike action.
"If we can get back and progress negotiations rapidly hopefully we won't need to consider further action '' Ms Gisborne said.
"Ms Gisborne said WA's attempts to attract teachers from interstate to fill critical teacher shortages were futile.
"A spokeswoman for Mr McGowan said the minister was on his way to Queensland, but Ms Gisborne said the trip was a waste of taxpayers' money if he was trying to attract teachers.
"I presume that the minister is out there trying to search for teachers in the east - if you can't offer improved salaries and conditions then I think his trip is probably a waste of taxpayers' money,'' Ms Gisborne said.
"WA Premier Alan Carpenter has urged the union to negotiate with the minister and the education department to bring an end to the stand-off as quickly as possible.
"Negotiations are always difficult. My hope is that commonsense will prevail and I would like to think that industrial action will not be necessary,'' Mr Carpenter told reporters in Adelaide.
"WA Department of Education and Training Director-General Sharyn O'Neill said she was disappointed by the union's decision to take industrial action.
"At the end of last year we put an offer to the members of the teachers' union, we think it was a good offer, a multi-million dollar offer, in fact it would have placed (WA) teachers among the best paid in Australia,'' Ms O'Neill said.
"We've been meeting weekly with the union and we intended to continue to meet.''
"Ms O'Neill said schools would remain open next Thursday and urged parents to send their children, who would be cared for and participate in school programs.
"Options including going to the Industrial Relations Commission would be considered, Ms O'Neill said.
"WA opposition education spokesman Peter Collier said he did not endorse industrial action but he had an appreciation of why teachers felt so aggrieved.
"Teachers generally feel undervalued, they lack morale, they feel cynical,'' Mr Collier said.
"They feel that the government is penny-pinching when really they should be rewarded for their efforts.''
From The Sunday Times Online / PerthNow at link [view / post readers' comments at that link]
- ABC News
- Teachers to stop work next week to push pay claim
"Public school teachers across the state have been directed by their union to stop work next week as part of their union's pay campaign."They have rejected a call by the Education Minister, Mark McGowan, not to take industrial action.
"Teachers are negotiating with the State Government for a pay rise but have rejected an offer of 13 per cent over 3 years, and the process has stalled.
"The State School Teachers Union has ordered a stop work meeting next Thursday morning to discuss the claim.
"Teachers will gather at Perth's Supreme Court Gardens, while regional staff will watch proceedings over the internet.
"The President of the union, Anne Gisborne, says the time for action has come.
"I think there is always the possibility that further industrial action will follow from this matter as our members are extremely angry and it is growing," she said.
"Ms Gisborne says teachers can not rule out further industrial action."
From ABC News at link
- Premier calls for common sense in teachers dispute
"The Premier Alan Carpenter says he hopes common sense will prevail and that teachers will call off their half day stop work meeting next Thursday."The State School Teachers Union has directed its members to attend the meeting next Thursday morning and return to the classrooms in the afternoon.
"The union is campaigning for a 20 per cent pay rise over three years.
"The Government has offered 13 per cent over the same period.
"Mr Carpenter says the Government's offer will make teachers the highest paid in the country and he's urged the union to call off the meeting.
"I don't believe the Teachers Union should be recommending to its members a course of action which would adversely affect students when they are being offered what would be the best pay deal any teachers in any state in Australia would be getting," he said.
Classes stay open
"The Education Department says schools will remain open next week despite the industrial action by teachers.
"The union is predicting up to 9,000 teachers will attend the meeting in Perth and thousands more will stop work in regional areas.
"The Director General of Education, Sharyn O'Neill, has conceded the move will be disruptive for students but has urged parents to still send their children to school.
"If necessary, we'll get additional teachers in through teacher relief or other resources like district officers," she said.
"But what I'd say to parents is that we expect your children to be at school. They'll be cared for and programs will run."
Parity needed
"The Opposition's Education Spokesman, Peter Collier, says teachers deserve a pay rise but he does not support next Thursday's industrial action.
"What we have to do is look at where we are going in terms of the salary increase," he said.
"New South Wales teachers are about 16 to 18 per cent above Western Australian teachers and what we have to do is provide a one off salary increase for teachers and then keep them on parity with their New South Wales counterparts."
From ABC News at link
- Teachers to stop work over pay claim
"Public school teachers will stop work next week to discuss their ongoing pay claim."Teachers are seeking more pay but negotiations with the State Government have stalled after the Union rejected an offer of 14 per cent over 4 years.
"The President of the State School Teachers' Union, Anne Gisborne, says the half day stop work meeting will be held next Thursday at Perth's Supreme Court Gardens.
"Ms Gisborne says she can not rule out further industrial action.
"What the stop work will provide us with is the opportunity to update our members on the current statuts of negotiations and then they will be considering further progress and response to further negotiations," she said.
"I think there is always the possibility that further industrial action will follow from this matter, our members are extremely angry and it is growing."
Rolling stoppages
"Meanwhile, the Community and Public Sector Union is warning its members will take part in rolling stoppages if the State Government does not improve its pay offer to them by next Tuesday.
"The CPSU is seeking a 23 per cent pay rise over three years and superannuation contributions of up to 13 per cent, depending on length of service.
"The Government is offering 11.5 per cent over three years.
"The Chamber of Commerce and Industry says those pay rises could place more pressure on the economy and raise costs for the government ahead of the State Budget in May."
From ABC News at link
- Stopwork meeting will not close classes: Education Department
"The Education Department says schools will remain open next week despite industrial action by teachers."The State School Teachers Union has directed its members to attend a half day stop work meeting next Thursday morning in pursuit of its wage claim of 20 per cent over three years.
"The Government has offered teachers a 13 per cent increase.
"The union is predicting up to 9,000 teachers will attend the meeting in Perth and thousands more will stop work in regional areas.
"The Director General of Education, Sharyn O'Neill, has conceded the move will be disruptive for students but has urged parents to still send their children to school.
"If necessary, we'll get additional teachers in through teacher relief or other resources like district officers," she said.
"But what I'd say to parents is that we expect your children to be at school. They'll be cared for and programs will run."
From ABC News at link
- The West Australian
- Big ad campaign for teachers nets just seven (page 19)
by Bethany Hiatt"Just seven interstate teachers have applied for jobs in WA State schools in response to expensive advertising campaigns, new official figures show.
"On the eve of his trip to Brisbane to recruit more high school teachers from Queensland, Education Minister Mark McGowan admitted that so far the advertising campaign to attract staff from interstate had netted seven teachers from Victoria and Tasmania.
"But the Department of Education and Training had received 580 expressions of interest from those States and New Zealand.
"It's very difficult to determine out how many teachers we've actually secured from that because a lot just come and apply for a job and arrive and we don't actually realise or know that they responded to the advertising campaign," Mr. McGowan said.
"The formal applications from those campaigns that we actually can verify came from those States at the moment amount to seven but we can expect there'll be more over time. Now 580 expressions of interest means that there are probably a lot more than seven that have come from those States but it's very difficult to actually work out the exact figure.
"Mr. McGowan claimed the Government had largely solved the teacher shortage problem for this year, but it still remained a problem for future years.
"State schools began the year with a shortfall of 79 teachers.
"By yesterday that had dropped to just 42.
"Thirteen of those places were already under offer and were expected to be filled within a week.
"So the measure we've put in place over the past year or so have worked, but we still have a long-term problem which is why I'm not giving up on these sorts of interstate, international and other mechanisms to get teachers into our classrooms," he said.
"Mr. McGowan hoped the $45,000 press campaign would help fill vacancies, which were in specialist secondary areas such as design and technology and music.
"He said WA could offer Queensland teachers significantly higher wages and "a different life."
"The West Australian revealed this week that the State Government was paying private recruiting agencies as much as $10,000 for every teacher they provided. It had employed 57 privately recruited teaches in the past 12 months.
"Shadow education minister Peter Collier said that while he applauded the Government's efforts in attempting to resolve the teacher shortage, the combined result of all of its strategies had resulted in only a handful of additional teachers.
"If we are to overcome the current shortage and prevent the situation from deteriorating, it is absolutely imperative that the Government address the most fundamental issue concerning teachers - and that is salary," he said.
"The fact that we are three weeks into the 2008 academic year and the Minister has still not reached agreement with the State School Teachers Union on the enterprise bargaining agreement is disgraceful."
From The West Australian
- Boy admits knife threat at school (page 15)
"A 12-year-old boy has pleaded guilty to threatening three teachers at Safety Bay High School with two knives on Tuesday.
"The boy, who was fired at by police with a Taser gun during the incident, appeared in Rockingham Children's Court yesterday. He pleaded guilty to one count of making a threat to injure, endanger or harm.
"Prosecutor Sgt. Steve Thompson asked Magistrate Timothy Schwass for a remand because he said other charges might be laid. The boy was released on bail to appear on March 5.
"The teachers' union and the Opposition have urged the Government to consider installing metal detectors in WA schools to prevent students from carrying dangerous weapons.
"Education Minister Mark McGowan said yesterday installing metal detectors was a "preposterous idea."
From The West Australian
- The Australian
- Professor keeps it simple for teachers
by Patricia Karvelas, Political correspondent
"The new national curriculum for preschool to Year 12 will provide guidelines for teachers that are "light" and not cumbersome, according to the man heading the review."The newly announced head of the National Curriculum Board, Barry McGaw, told The Australian he had collected examples from leading countries to see how their curriculums were better.
"Professor McGaw said the national curriculum had been misunderstood as being highly prescriptive when in reality it was about a broader framework.
"We don't want documents of thousands of pages; these have to be accessible to teachers and they've got to give guidance about what students should be able to do and what content teachers should cover," he said.
"My notion is that we ought to invite the various curriculum agencies that already exist around Australia to give us some examples of what they think are their best current documents.
"We will get documents from other high-performing countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Korea, and challenge ourselves by looking at what other countries are expecting of their students.
"We've got a long history of producing major curriculum reforms that have no impact in schools; people assume they do, but teachers just ignore them because the documents are not accessible or the time demands of understanding them and using them are so great they end up continuing what they are doing," he said.
"Professor McGaw, director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne and architect of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's international student tests, said nominations for the new board were due by Friday, and they hoped to have their first meeting before Easter. Education Minister Julia Gillard has written to state ministers and non-government school organisations for nominations."
From The Australian at link
- Othello becomes a tragedy of the system
by Justine Ferrari, Education writer
"Literature, the soul of the English language, has been marginalised by ideology and social theory in its study in schools and universities."Reader in English at the Australian National University Simon Haines said the literature part of the subject English had been squashed and marginalised during the past 30 years, pushed aside to teach theories from other disciplines.
"Literature is the heart of English and if we're not doing that, then the subject loses its soul," he said after addressing the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney yesterday.
"Dr Haines said university academics in English and literature over the past two generations had "colonised" other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and linguistics.
"As a result, it had become the attitude in English schools to question the primacy of the text in the belief that the text should be used to illustrate theories from the other disciplines.
"And so Othello has become a tragedy of race rather than a tragedy of jealousy," he said. "It hasn't always been; up until the 1960s, it was a tragedy of jealousy.
"It's not the teachers' fault - they're just reflecting what they've heard for two generations in universities, which is that literature as core of the subject English is in the end dispensable and theoretical."
"Dr Haines is the director for the ANU of the International Centre for Human Values, a joint venture with the Chinese University in Hong Kong.
"He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and is a former diplomat and analyst with the Office of National Assessments, and was chairman for three years of the OECD budget committee before pursuing a career in academia.
"Dr Haines said the English syllabus in schools had become much more crowded over the past three or four decades.
"It's all the more reason not to dilute English with other disciplinary or ideological approaches. There just isn't time," he said. "The best you can hope to have is an understanding of the context of the play, so you don't want to narrow it down into one ideological approach. What you get then is a teacher who doesn't understand Marxism and feminist theory as thoroughly as a university academic trying to give students a half-baked version at the same time as teaching Othello. Students end up with a mishmash.
"By all means study Marxist theory when you're at university, where you can study it thoroughly, but don't try to do it in a half-baked way at school."
"Dr Haines said in this way, Othello had become a tragedy of race not jealousy, which makes the play narrower, more polemical and ideological than Shakespeare intended."
From The Australian at link
- Schools PC funding on track: Gillard
The federal Government's bid to slash public spending will have no impact on Kevin Rudd's pre-election promise to equip all year 9 to 12 students with computers.
- Schools free to allot new computers
Schools will be able to decide where to put computers and how they are used under the Rudd Government's $1 billion promise of a computer for every senior student.
- Macquarie taps YouTube to deliver lectures
Welcome to YouTube university, where there's no need to physically attend lectures: with a few mouse clicks, the lessons come to you.
Note: There was a similar article about The University of NSW doing this in The Sydney Morning Herald on 7 November 2007.
- ABC News
- IRC hearing fails to avert teachers' industrial action
"The State Schools Teachers Union in Western Australia has vowed to push ahead with planned industrial action next week."The union was asked to appear at the Industrial Relations Commission this afternoon as the State Government tries to avert the action.
"The union's members plan to attend a half day stop work meeting next Thursday morning in pursuit of a wage claim of 20 per cent over three years.
"The Government has offered 13 per cent over the same period.
"No date has been set for another hearing in the IRC.
"The Education Minister Mark McGowan says the union's demands are unreasonable and will cost about $1.2 billion.
"The salary component they're after is $984 million, but when you add in smaller class sizes and less teaching time, plus the allowances, it goes up to about $1.2 billion," he said.
"What we offered last year was $685 million."
From ABC News at link
- Government seeks urgent IRC hearing on teachers dispute
"The Education Minister Mark McGowan will request an urgent hearing in the Industrial Relations Commission to try to end threatened industrial action by teachers."The State School Teachers Union has directed its members to attend a half day stop work meeting next Thursday morning, in pursuit of its wage claim of 20 per cent over 3 years.
"The Government has offered 13 per cent over 3 years.
"Teachers are also refusing to take on activities outside of school hours.
"Mr McGowan says he'll be asking the Commission to intervene.
"We'll be going to the Industrial Relations Commission to try to get the bans lifted and get the union back to the negotiating table."
"Mr McGowan says demands by the teachers union amount to about $1.2 billion.
"He says the union is being unreasonable.
"The salary component they're after is $984 million, but when you add in smaller class sizes and less teaching time, plus the allowances, it goes up to about $1.2 million," he said.
"What we offered last year was $685 million."
From ABC News at link
- The West Australian
- Teachers to strike for half a day (page 3)
by Bethany Hiatt"Parents have been warned to keep their children at home on Thursday as thousands of State schoolteachers across WA walk off the job for half a day as part of a campaign for higher pay.
"The State Scholl Teachers' Union has directed members to attend stop-work meetings in Supreme Court Gardens and in country centres to show support for a 20 per cent salary increase over three years. About 9000 teachers are expected to attend the city rally.
"Our advice is don't send your kids to school if you're not sure that there are going to be teachers there," SSTU general secretary David Kelly said yesterday.
"Department of Education and Training director-general Sharyn O'Neill conceded the strike would disrupt student learning but she guaranteed that all schools would remain open. District office staff or relief teachers would be used to cover classes if schools were short-staffed.
"I am disappointed that parents are being asked to be involved or support that sort of action," she said. "Schools are open next Thursday, like any other day, programmes will run, students will be cared for in the normal way."
"Ms O'Neill said the department was considering taking the union to the WA Industrial Relations Commission.
"Teachers overwhelmingly rejected a pay increase of 13 percent over three years last December. Experienced teachers and those working in difficult or remote schools would have received up to 19 per cent.
"The union wants teachers at the top of the pay scale for automatic increments, who are now paid $69,132 after 7 years, to get more than those at the top of the NSW scale, who receive $75,352 after nine years.
"The West Australian understands that it would cost the Government $984 million over the life of the agreement - before taking into account bonuses for working in tough schools.
"SSTU president Anne Gisborne said the department and the Government had underestimated the level of anger among teachers.
"I think our members have had enough, they are angry, they believe that enough water has gone under the bridge since the significant refection of the second offer in early December," she said. "We would also appeal to the parents in the community to support the action that teachers are taking."
"The union already has a ban on teachers doing voluntary work outside normal hours.
"Ms Gisborne would not rule out further action if the Government did no agree to meet teachers' demands for hight pay, smaller classes and more time for duties other than teaching.
"It may include further stop-work meetings, we might look at rolling strikes, we might look at day strikes, we might look at identifying further activities that occur in schools that would impact upon the department and the Government's capacity to say that schools are running smoothly," she said.
"School dentists, licensing centre workers and parole officers are also "champing at the bit" to take industrial action, according to the Community and Public Sector Union.
"A union spokesman said these three occupations had complained of a serious drop in services because of a chronic labour shortage and had stood out as vocal supporters of rolling stoppages due to start on February 26, if the State Government did not improve its pay offer."
From The West Australian
- Letters to the Editor (page 22)
- It's time society valued teachers
"I am in my 50s and have been a teacher for more than half my life. I have always had a sense of pride in my chosen profession and my ability to do a good job. I feel that I have been a positive influence in the lives of the many children I have taught.
"I still enjoy the craft of teaching but now I find myself feeling that I would like to pull the pin on my career. I am unable to do this because of my personal circumstances; in fact, I will need to continue working for a significant number of years. I will continue to do my utmost to do the best job that I am capable of. The is too important to do otherwise.
"I now find myself heading into the last phase of my career feeling undervalued, overworked, frustrated and depressed. Sadly, I suspect that I may be voicing the feelings of many of my mature-age peers.
"The nature of the job has changed almost beyond recognition over the years, although the core business of teaching children to be literate, numerate and to have some idea of how our world and society functions, together with understanding their place within it, has stayed the same.
"The workload has more than doubled in the course of my career, actual teaching seeming to have become secondary to the continually increasing demands on teachers to produce data, evidence and assessment facts and figures. These massive and growing demands for documentation, although having a place, rob teachers of time which could be better spent devising effective, interesting and even innovative ways by which they could be optimising the learning opportunities of the children in their classrooms.
"Those who know and live with teachers bemoan widely-held negative attitudes about our "short" working days, long holidays and "high" salaries; they are often our only advocates.
"It is time for the society we serve to start to value us and the job we do. It is time for the governments and agencies which employ us to start treating us reasonably, and respectfully, giving us the validation and support that we so badly need and deserve."
P McGowan, Thornlie
Please explain
"The good thing about being a history teacher is that I can remember the past. I can remember Alan Carpenter as opposition education spokesman, preaching that teachers needed a "significant" pay rise.
"I then remember the same man as education minister claiming that budgetary constraints prevented such a pay rise. I remember this same person dumping WACOT, OBE and other curriculum changes, and then telling us he was "not a fan" of giving teachers time to plan and implement these changes, (or even time to talk to parents about their children's education)
"I then remember Mr Carpenter grabbing the chance to be Premier. Surely, as Premier, he would be able to deliver on his earlier promises?
"Today I watch as my rent increases by 25 per cent, my health insurance, food and fuel prices have also gone through the roof. I watch an Education Minister who regularly flies off to the Eastern States to scrounge for more teachers (even though their education systems are in similar crises).
"I watch the minister beg retirees to return to the workforce. I am still waiting for the minister to do something to keep the current workforce working.
"I watch as two-thirds of the graduate teachers that I worked with last year left the profession after only one year because of the workload and better opportunities elsewhere.
"I watch as our Government builds new trains, hospitals, sports stadiums and swan-shaped islands while sitting on a record Budget surplus.
"However, I do not see a sign of this "significant" pay rise anywhere. Mr Carpenter, where do you expect to find these workers for your future vision of WA if students are not being taught by qualified teachers? Keep watching, Mr Premier, as your schools empty."
Geoff Clayton, Maylands
A right to safety
"In relation to the issue of teacher safety, I am having trouble containing my feelings about the number of incidents where teachers are being harassed and children are arrested at schools.
"What did people think would happen once a parent's right to discipline their child was taken away? Teachers are forced to deal with kids who have absolutely no right be mainstream educated due to behavioural problems and then when the child is dealt with by police, they are criticised for their methods. What a load of codswallop.
"Who on Earth in their ivory tower decided that taking away corporal punishment at school was in the best interests of kids? Who decided that removing a parent's right to give their kid a smack when they have done wrong was the right course of action? Look what you have created: a society where teachers are afraid of their pupils because they are coming to schools and terrorising fellow pupils and staff. Congratulations "social engineers", or whatever you call yourselves.
"Teachers don't need the same stress that police officers face - constant danger, threats of violence and the possibility that all it takes is one wrong move to provoke an incident. At least the police have means to defend themselves, not just a harsh word. But then, teachers can't even say that now, can they?
"Talk of there being a Columbine-type incident in our schools should not be discounted. And when your child is searched by a security guard with a hand held scanner to make sure they really are weapon-free, don't cry about how your kid has rights, because the life it saves might just be theirs. All of us have the right to be safe at work."
Simon Allen, Noranda
- Shadow Education Minister Peter Collier Media Release
- Minister sits on another secret report
In 2007, the Department of Education and Training appeared to spend more time evaluating itself than trying to implement education philosophy and policy.However, the government keeps these reports secret and won't make them public.
Earlier this week Shadow Education Minister Peter Collier sought the release of one of these reports - a comprehensive review of the Department of Education and Training by the Public Sector Management Office through the Department of the Premier and Cabinet - through a parliamentary question to the Premier - but was rebuffed.
"I asked the Premier whether he would table the report. He said no, offering no legitimate explanation," Mr Collier said.
"This continues an alarming trend in the education sector - a distinct lack of transparency. Until this attitude changes confidence will not return to the teaching fraternity."
Mr Collier said when Mark McGowan was appointed Education Minister a year ago, he approached the role with enthusiasm and gusto but by mid-year had retreated to a stance of blocking and delaying tactics when confronted by Opposition questions.
From that point, 17 questions - many requiring simple yes or no answers - were deflected to be 'put on notice' - a delaying tactic used by the government.
Last December Minister McGowan refused to release the report of the Twomey taskforce, which was charged to identify the areas of need with regard to the teacher shortage.
"Even though I did not see any need for the Twomey taskforce because blind Freddy could see the teaching fraternity's problems, most notably a much-needed salary increase, this report has still not been made public," Mr Collier said.
"Why is this government so determined to hide the findings of these reports.
"Cynics may say it is because they expose basic flaws with the Department of Education and Training and expose the Premier to criticism because he was the Education Minister in the Gallop Government..
"Cynicism within the education sector would dissipate if the Twomey Report was released.
"Cynicism within the education sector would dissipate if the Public Sector Management Report was released.
"The Public Sector Management report website says:'All submissions made may be subject to a Freedom of Information application under the Freedom of Information Act 1992'
"This may be my reluctant and yet inevitable course of action - I would prefer the Minister and the Premier to be more transparent."
Media Contact: Peter Collier - 0414 595 572
- Review of the Department of Education and Training
A review of the Department of Education and Training (DET) was conducted during 2007 in accordance with section 10 of the Public Sector Management Act 1994.The Review was conducted by Ms Prudence Ford, a former senior State and Commonwealth public servant.
As part of the Review, consultation was undertaken with key stakeholders.
The Review specifically considered:
- The appropriateness of DET's functions and activities relative to Government policies and priorities;
- DET's financial management performance, including internal resource allocation processes;
- The impact of the non-government sector's provision of educational services in Western Australia upon the Department's current and future operations;
- The effectiveness of the organisational structure and reporting arrangements of DET, in supporting efficient and effective service delivery;
- The effectiveness of the current portfolio structure and its impact on collaboration and coordination between DET and other agencies within the Education and Training portfolio such as the Department of Education Services, the Curriculum Council and the Technical and Further Education colleges;
- The appropriateness of accountability and governance arrangements between all agencies in the portfolio;
- The adequacy of all planning undertaken within the Department with a focus on data collection systems and the quality and value of data collected in existing systems;
- As a priority within the review, the Department's procurement planning and decision making processes with a focus on capital works items;
- The development of appropriate performance targets that would assist Government in measuring Departmental performance into the future; and
- Other reports and reviews that have considered organisational matters related to the Department.
All submissions made may be subject to a Freedom of Information application under the Freedom of Information Act 1992. Furthermore, submissions may be used publicly by the Review, and quoted in the Review's report, unless the author chose to make a confidential submission.
Submissions to the Review closed on Friday 28 September 2007.
For more information about DET, please visit the Department's website at http://www.det.wa.edu.au. Information about the Department can also be found in its Annual Report and Budget Papers.
From http://www.dpc.wa.gov.au/psmd/pubs/psrd/agencyreview/revdet.html
- The Sydney Morning Herald
- Catholics dig in over school funds formula
Private school lobby groups are divided over whether the Federal Government should continue its controversial funding arrangements for half the nation's Catholic and independent schools.A secret review by the federal Department of Education, obtained by the Herald, shows Anglican schools are opposed to continued funding of schools above their entitlements under the formula. However, the powerful Catholic system - in which one in five students in Australia are taught - wants to retain the "funding-maintained" category, which entrenches higher payments to its schools.
- The Australian
- Private-sector school plan to grow
by Rick Wallace, Victorian political reporter
"A contentious plan for the private sector to own, build and operate schools is poised to be greatly expanded by the Brumby Government."Documents reveal the Government, which has flagged using the private sector to build only 11 schools, could extend the public-private partnership model to fixing many existing schools.
"The prospect of the expansion was revealed in tender documents released after businesses interested in building the new schools were briefed at Melbourne's Park Hyatt hotel.
"Successful delivery of this project will create a precedent for future PPP schools projects in Victoria with broader scopes, including brownfield sites, regenerations and more complex community partnerships," the tender document says. Brownfield sites are existing schools.
"Australian Education Union state president Mary Bluett accused the Government of a lack of consultation. "It's not an issue that's been canvassed with us," she said. "Clearly there are sensitivities with PPPs in education, and I will raise the issue with the Government."
"She said while the union supported PPPs for new schools, experiences in Britain had shown the model was unsuitable for refurbishment and had produced schools with defects such as windows that failed to open.
"Exactly how PPPs would be applied for refurbishment of Victoria's state schools is not spelt out in the tender documents, but in the case of new schools it involves firms bidding to build, own, operate and maintain schools for several decades in exchange for a periodic payment."
From The Australian at link
Similar story in The Age
- Quality of higher education a priority
by Michael Costello
"Ian Chubb has been the Australian National University's vice-chancellor for seven years. He has been mightily effective in the job, with the ANU, according to the latest Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, being the top-rated Australian university in the world. So it was pity the speech he gave this week on the future of our universities was a bit swamped by the political warfare and various public and sporting scandals of the week.
"The future of our universities may well be the single most important factor for the medium and long-term standing of Australia in the world. Yet it barely rated a mention in the last election campaign. This was not for lack of policy, because there was good policy on Labor's side, but because it's hard to make university education politically sexy, unlike global warming, industrial relations, petrol prices or interest rates.
"So Chubb was doing the nation a service. Australia has been dropping behind rapidly for more than 10 years in this key area, and every moment we fail to take action compounds the time it will take to catch up. Chubb's key point is that the Dawkins reforms of the 1980s had gone too far, with too much stress on a single unified national universities' model. Rightly or wrongly, this approach led to a strategy of implicit equalisation, levelling down in a time of scarce resources. This has been exacerbated by a one-size-fits-all approach in which all universities wanted to offer all the disciplines, or at least as many of them as they could. Coupled with the equalisation strategy and reduced funding, this was a recipe for equalised mediocrity.
"Chubb argues that we need many different types of universities. Some would focus on primarily teaching undergraduates, emphasising equitable access. Others would focus primarily on research. He argues that if Australia's national ambitions are to be realised, we have to invest the substantial funds necessary to sustain a small number of globally networked research universities and institutions of the highest international standards."
Full story in The Australian at link
Saturday – Sunday, 23 – 24 February
- The Sunday Times
- Threat to stop teacher talks (page 7)
by Paul Lampathakis"WA Education Minister Mark McGowan has threatened to immediately freeze pay negotiations with the teachers' union ahead of a planned half-day strike on Thursday.
"Mr. McGowan said if the Industrial Relations Commission ruling, due by tomorrow, said the teachers should not stop work, but the State School Teachers' Union decided to do so anyway, a negotiation meeting scheduled for Wednesday would be "reconsidered".
"He urged teachers not to strike, saying it would impact on students.
"He asked employers to be understanding of parents who might need time off to deal with the strike if it proceeded.
"Mr. McGowan also revealed that he had not ruled out offering more money to teachers.
"The union wants a 20 per cent pay rise over three years. Mr. McGowan said the Government's last offer, which had been withdrawn, was nearly 14 per cent, which increased as allowances and other factors were added.
"That (more pay) is something we have to negotiate with them," he said. "I am not ruling anything out, I'm just saying that we have to negotiate in good faith between them and us, not through the newspapers."
"He indicated that teachers' demands for more out-of-class administration and preparation time were unlikely to be met, because this would exacerbate teacher shortages.
"When they try to make the teacher shortage problem worse, I have a responsibility to students not to do that," he said.
"Teachers' Union president Anne Gisborne would not say yesterday if the union might back down on its directive to strike.
"She said it would be unfortunate if the Government stopped negotiations because the union wanted them to proceed." [emphasis added]
From The Sunday Times
- The West Australian
- Teachers vow to stop work despite IRC talks (page 19)
by Bethany Hiatt"The teachers union has vowed to push ahead with its half-day strike on Thursday despite being called before the WA Industrial Relations Commission yesterday.
"State School Teachers Union president Anne Gisborne and Department of Education and Training director-general Sharyn O'Neill were called into the commission for "informal discussions."
"Neither would comment on what took place but Ms. Gisborne said the stopwork meeting would go ahead as planned."The directive still continues and our teachers will be out on the grass on Thursday morning," she said.
"(They) will be demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the current status of negotiations."
"However, Ms. O'Neill said negotiations with the union were continuing.
"Even though the department had been preparing to ask the commission to stop teachers from walking off the job on Thursday, it had not yet made a formal application.
"The commissioner was just talking to us informally about the progress of negotiations," Ms. O'Neill said. [emphasis added]
"Teachers want a 20 per cent pay rise over three years. Late last year they rejected the Government's offer of 13 per cent over three years.
"More than 9000 teachers are expected at the city rally, which has been moved from the Supreme Court Gardens to Langley Park. Thousands more are expected at country centres.
"While the Education Department is guaranteeing that school programmes will run as usual on Thursday, the union is urging parents to keep their children at home during the strike.
"We are certainly encouraging parents to show their support for teachers and administrators in their schools."
From The West Australian
State sits on education and training report (page 53)
by Bethany Hiatt"The State Government is keeping secret a taxpayer-funded review into the Department of Education and Training which was completed late last year.
"The review focuses on 10 key areas, including internal financial management, the impact of private education providers, whether the department has adequate planning in place and the development of performance targets.
"The refusal to release the review into a department that has battled staff shortages, the continued loss of students to private schools, plummeting teacher morale caused by abusive students and heavy workloads stemming from the implementation of outcomes-based education, comes after Government stalling on a separate report into getting and keeping teachers.
"Education Minister Mark McGowan has so far also refused to release the report by teacher shortage task force chairman Lance Twomey which was completed two months ago.
"Mr. McGowan has promised that he will release the Twomey report after it has been considered by the Cabinet, but a spokeswoman for the Department of Premier and Cabinet said it was not standard practice to release functional reviews of departments: "They are internal Government documents that require Cabinet consideration."
"The teachers' union said the department review carried out by former senior public servant Prudence Ford, should be released publicly because many people made submissions as part of the consultation process.
"You would think that in the context of a teacher shortage, the Gerard Daniels report (into teacher recruitment) and investment by the Government into running a functional review…that it would likely be beneficial for those documents to become available," State School Teachers Union president Anne Gisborne said.
"WA Primary Principals Association president Stephen Breen said school leaders were keenly awaiting any recommendations stemming from the review.
"There was a lot of discussion last year with the Twomey task force and the functional review and I think the department, has in their wisdom, developed these reviews, and schools are awaiting the decisions from them," he said.
"Shadow education minister Peter Collier said the decision to keep the report hidden was "unbelievable."
"Every single time there is anything that is remotely going to reveal the true operational capacity of the department, it's made unavailable," he said.
"You can bet your bottom dollar if it was very complimentary of the operations of DET, it would have been released the next day amid a great fanfare." [emphasis added]
From The West Australian
- Quote of the Month
Queensland education minister's summation of Mark McGowan's desperate bid to recruit Queensland teachers:
Why would you want to leave the Sunshine State to go and teach in the desert?
[from ABC News, 22 February 2008]
- The Weekend Australian
- Ideology be damned, just surrender to beauty
by Luke Slattery
"The humanities may be reeling the world over, as budget cuts and vocational education roll back resources for liberal studies, but many Australian schoolteachers and academics are rediscovering the values of beauty, wonder and admiration in the senior English curriculum. They are the new romantics."At a University of Sydney colloquium on the English curriculum last weekend, held with the aim of engaging teachers and curriculum powerbrokers with the latest academic trends, a senior lecturer in secondary English education told the audience that the practice of critical literacy, narrowly applied, had "tended to denude English of some of its distinctiveness, some of its magic".
"For more than a decade the study of English has been dominated by critical literacy, a uniquely Australian pedagogy, self-consciously political, that defines itself as a critique of all "language practices" including literature, aimed at revealing their "underlying ideology", in particular the residues in the text of race, class and gender.
"A 2000 review of secondary English in NSW noted that critical literacy was the "dominant paradigm of the subject in terms of curriculum discussion". It is embedded in the English curriculum of most states and territories, and also informs the primary school curriculum.
"In a 2003 book addressed to primary school teachers, instructions were given on how to teach the methods of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida, through the picture book Tusk Tusk by David McKee. After Derrida's death, London newspaper The Times described him as the "mad axeman of Western philosophy".
"In this theoretical handbook, teachers were told of the need to unpack the text's ideologies and make its ambiguities apparent. "Perhaps in Tusk Tusk McKee presents readers with both an example of indeterminancy, the impossibility of arriving at a determinable, fixed meaning of any text, and an undoing of the hierarchical presuppositions of racial and political differences. This may provide an opportunity for teachers to introduce young readers to some of the concepts of deconstructive theory, particularly the concept that there can only be a multiplicity of meanings."
"A senior lecturer in English education at Sydney University, Jacqueline Manuel, agrees that critical literacy has its place, but she is concerned about what is lost from a curriculum focused on this approach and about the attitudes toward aesthetic experience it imparts to students. She is concerned about the cultivation under critical literacy of the "resistant reader" who interrogates the text and holds it suspiciously at arms-length. "Central to our job as teachers is the fostering of capacities for informed critique and active interrogation of language and ideas," she told the curriculum conference.
"But beginning the encounter with language, and particularly imaginative literature, with resistance - with suspicion of how a text is seeking to 'position, coerce or persuade us with its ideology' - seems to me to short-circuit an authentic attempt to read and respond with receptivity to the new, the unfamiliar, the 'other'.
"This quality of receptiveness is, after all, an expression of the values we cherish in a compassionate, inclusive and just democratic society.
"Resistance potentially blunts the capacity to engage with the aesthetic dimensions of a text. This is evident when we see how poetry as an experience in English now lingers on the margins as irrelevant and opaque. Why? Because poetry simply will not yield to some of the pedagogy of a critical model, especially to the assumption that all texts are ideological documents first and works of art second."
"Conference organiser Will Christie noted optimism about the future of English studies at the secondary level, together with "a shared, arguably romantic conviction that literature and its study genuinely mattered".
"There is recognition of the need to keep the thinking, feeling school student at the centre of the pedagogical process; the need to shift the responsibility for critical discrimination back on to the student, and make the classroom and not a prescriptive syllabus the centre of critical and creative activity," Christie said. "The opportunity for creative activity was stressed by a number of the teachers present.
"With regard to the cultural wars fought in classrooms and in the media over the 1999 stage six HSC syllabus, there was a prevailing distrust of the kind of reading that reduced creative literature to a covert set of ideological positions or propositions.
"Most of the speakers and participants urged different kinds of rhetorical and ethical approach that saw the excitement of a child's contact with imaginative literature as necessary to his or her intellectual and emotional, and indeed social, development."
"Manuel, a former chief examiner for HSC English and member of a new Arts, English and Literacy Education Research Network, invoked the "monumental artistry and genius" of Paolo Veronese's The Wedding Feast at Cana, the "beauty and majesty" of the sculpture of Winged Victory, or Nike of Samothrace, in the Louvre, the "transporting power" of Beethoven's Emperor concerto or the almost "beyond human achievement" of Michelangelo's statue of David.
"Try to stand before these works of art and resist. Why would we want to?"
"Other speakers at the conference included Don Carter, inspector for the NSW Board of Studies in English, and academics Simon Haines, Wendy Morgan, Wayne Sawyer and Sarah Golsby-Smith. As the Australian National University's head of humanities, Haines has warned against politicising literature too early in the classroom. In a speech to the Lowy Institute for International Policy this week, he said it was "misguided to read Shakespeare through the grid of some ideological interpretation or other. That's just so against the grain with him. It's exactly what his own practice should warn us against."
"A teacher who attended the conference, Maree Horne of Sydney's Tangara School for Girls, said English "continued to be the study of values and meaning, and when studying literature and other texts students can learn about humanity, and thus learn compassion. Much of the criticism about the teaching of English of late has been about the study of alternative and resistant readings of texts. Critical readings and the study of others perspectives will always have a place in the study of English.
"Such perspectives are useful to help a student's ability to evaluate and think critically, but this is not always the best starting point. A teaching approach should not inhibit a student's engagement with the text. English teachers choose their career because they love literature. It follows that they want to share their experiences with students."
From The Weekend Australian at link
- The Sunday Age
- Schools to scale 2020 summit
by Jason Koutsoukis
"Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard has invited all schools to participate in the proposed 2020 summit involving 1000 of Australia's best and brightest minds in April."The forum, to foster and develop ideas about Australia's future over the next decade, will be held in Canberra over a single weekend.
"In a bid to tap into the minds of Australia's best and brightest students, Ms Gillard said she wanted all primary and secondary schools to host their own ideas summits.
"She said the schools summits would offer a unique opportunity for students throughout the country to make sure their views are heard on the 10 key themes of Australia 2020.
"Today's school students are the adults of 2020, and it's vital that we harness their energy, ideas and vision in any discussion about this nation's future," Ms Gillard said.
"They will be the parents, the business owners, the farmers, the educators and the leaders of 2020, and it's crucial that we hear their views about the kind of Australia they want to live in."
"She said the schools summits would be an excellent opportunity for young people from Bundaberg to Karratha, from Gove to Launceston, to say what they thought about the big issues facing the country.
"The ideas, issues and questions raised through the schools summit will be taken forward to the youth summit announced last week, and from there to Australia 2020," Ms Gillard said.
"From Monday, schools will be invited to register at www.australia2020.gov.au to host a schools summit.
"Each school will be able to hold their summit at a convenient time over a three-week period beginning March 17, with every school being encouraged to participate.
"Feedback from the schools summits will be collected and consolidated by the Federal Government, and will provide material for discussion at the youth summit, to be held on April 12 and 13."
From The Sunday Age at link
- Letters to the Editor
- Bring on the revolution
"Parents are entitled to choose a school they think is best for their child," (Editorial, 17/2). Are they really? I do not think that parents "own" their children. They are our future and the responsibility of society as a whole. The level of education should be determined by a child's predisposition and talent alone, and the quality of all schools should be identical, so that there is no choice to be made."In some parts of the world, there are no private schools because that would lead to inequity. A real "education revolution" is needed, which must start at the misguided parental ownership and choice concept."
Ralph M Bohmer, St Kilda West
Close the gap
"The Association of Independent Schools continues to bleat its line that "opponents of funding for independent schools … ignore funding provided by state governments" while they themselves manage to ignore the huge surpluses made by some private schools."Here's the only worthwhile comparison: it costs under $10,000 per annum, from all funding sources, to educate a child at a state high school. It costs well over $20,000 per annum, from all funding sources, to educate a child at expensive private schools.
"If both are receiving an equally high-quality education, then the private school student is being badly ripped off. If not, then the state school student is being drastically under-funded. As the latter is most likely the case, an obvious solution is to direct Federal Government money away from rich private schools (which seem to be quite capable of looking after themselves) and into the government system.
"But I won't hold my breath. As Monty Python once said, "Blessed are those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo".
Keith Fletcher, Alexandra
New model needed
"Your article $50m elite schools piggybank" (17/2) is to be commended as it enlightens taxpayers how this outrageous scam has been operating courtesy of the Howard government since 1999. Australia is the only country in the Western world that hands out money to private schools with no accountability. Other countries make it conditional when funding these schools that a cap is put on fees and, if they do not conform, funding is withdrawn."The Rudd Government needs to act urgently in reforming the existing flawed model and a good starting point would be to ditch the socioeconomic model of the former government. It is obvious that the underlying aim of the Howard government was to privatise the entire education system and, by undermining the public education system, this would eventually come about."
Jean Hart, Maryborough
Doesn't add up
"Xavier has not yet worked out its federally funded budget surplus that Scotch and the other elite private schools have owned up to. Perhaps the bursar could use their new electronic scoreboard to do so."Peter McCarthy, Mentone
Keeping score
"So Xavier College oval has an electronic scoreboard with video replay capability? Say it ain't so!"Remember The Vicar of Dibley episode where a benefactor donated the funds needed for a replacement stained glass window? And Geraldine installed plain glass and gave the money to help the poor overseas?
"How much could aid agencies in Timor Leste use funds to assist the thousands of refugee families? Weigh that up against the need to Xavier sports teams and spectators to have video replays. Pretty easy decision for a well-heeled Christian school, apparently."
Ian Sharp, Alice Springs
You'll need it, Tim
"Initially, I assumed that Tim Steel was yet another spineless cur cashing in on a celebrity romance (17/2). However, given the enormous profit Melbourne's private schools are making out of our dim-witted government, I see clearly why he needed the $50,000 to "put my (his) boys through private school". Unfortunately Tim, that amount will only get them to about year 2."Andrew Banks, Mildura
- The Guardian
- Report on exams reveals the 'dumbed down' subjects
A report published by the government's exams watchdog today attempts to settle the row over qualifications by conceding that not all A-levels and GCSEs are equal... Top universities have drawn up lists of subjects they consider not academically rigorous enough. Cambridge University says its applicants must do at least two "traditional" subjects to have a chance of a place and has published lists of A-levels which provide "less effective" preparation for a degree. They include media, sport and business studies.
- The Times
- Hi mum, this lesson’s rubbish
by Alexandra Frean, Education Editor
"Teachers struggling to control the use of mobile phones, cameras and iPods in class now have a new irritation to contend with: pupils who phone their parents from lessons to complain about the teacher."It is not just that the youngsters are complaining about them that is getting to the teachers, it is the way they do it, according to a string of messages posted on a popular teachers’ chat room.
“These kids don’t do it private,” one outraged teacher fumes.
“No they do it in front of all their friends, and you, and make pointed comments such as, ‘Yes I hate HER too and I think SHE is a crap teacher’, while staring directly at you so you get the message that ‘mum supports me totally so you can’t do anything coz my mum will sort you out!’”
"Another visitor to the staffroom on-line web community, run by The Times Educational Supplement, described an incident when a child called her mother in the middle of an exam. The mother turned up at the school and started screaming at the deputy head.
“The deputy head got up and walked out the office. Mother had no idea what to do. She stayed, eventually the deputy came back and told the mother to take her kid away and bring her back when she had taught the daughter some manners, if that were possible,” the person posting said." [emphasis added]
From The Times at link
- The Canberra Times
- Gillard fails to do her homework
The "education revolution" Kevin Rudd promised voters last year was one of Labor's election coups. The slogan pithily conveyed the ALP's commitment to end a decade of underfunding in the education sector and to position Australia as a leading knowledge-based economy. But while the education policy was long on initiatives for preschoolers and primary and secondary students (a $450 million plan to give all four-year-olds an entitlement to 15 hours of preschool or early learning each week, and the promise of computer access for every senior high school student), the higher education promises were more modest: 1000 fellowships to prevent Australia's brightest researchers from being lured overseas, grants of $50,000 to research institutions to be used toward the purchase of infrastructure and equipment, and the phasing out of full-fee paying undergraduate places from 2009 (for which universities would be fully compensated).
All Alston cartoons are © The West Australian Newspaper
All media quotations, photographs and cartoons © their respective publishers
This page last updated 11 August, 2008 11:46 PM
