Monday 16 March

Tuesday 17 March

Wednesday 18 March

Thursday 19 March

Friday 20 March

Saturday – Sunday, 21 – 22 March

Monday 16 March

• The Australian
  
  
  • Grammar gives the edge to primary school students
    by Justine Ferrari, Education writer
    
    "Students taught grammar in primary school out-perform their peers in national literacy tests, but their advantage is lost once formal teaching of the subject has ceased.
    
    "An analysis of national literacy test results shows that Year 3 students in NSW scored 13 points higher in the writing assessment than the national average. But by Year 9 this advantage had disappeared, with NSW students performing at the national average.
    
    "The NSW primary school syllabus is notable for specifying how grammar should be taught as part of teaching writing skills, but this requirement is not specified in secondary school syllabuses.
    
    "An expert in literacy education, retired University of NSW academic Peter Knapp, said NSW students scored 13 points above the national average in Year 3 in last year's national literacy tests but in Year 9 their scores were on par with the rest of the nation.
    
    "The effect was even more pronounced among the best students in the state, who actually fell behind their peers.
    
    "Among the top-performing students, almost 22 per cent of NSW Year 3 students scored in the top level in writing compared with 17 per cent nationally. But in Year 9, only 7.4per cent of NSW students scored at the highest level, below the national average of 8 per cent.
    
    "This clearly suggests that what NSW teachers are teaching in their early years is reflected in the writing ability of their students," Dr Knapp said.
    
    "But this edge disappears by their third year of secondary school."
    
    "As the former head of Educational Assessment Australia at UNSW, which runs literacy, numeracy and science assessments in schools internationally and across the country, Dr Knapp developed a national writing test assessing students across a common scale from Year 3 to Year 12.
    
    "Dr Knapp said the assertion by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English that teaching grammar in high schools did not improve the writing of students was extraordinary.
    
    "The national English curriculum framework says grammar should be taught to Year 12 and centre on improving students' writing. But the AATE submission to the National Curriculum Board argues that "once students reach high school, whole-class instruction on items of grammar does not improve students' written expression".
    
    "Dr Knapp said the AATE argument contained a "profound misconception" and that the demands on writing skills increased in high school.
    
    "From secondary school on, students require detailed instruction in the complexities of grammatical constructions and language abstractions in order to master the types of writing that are required for success in high school and beyond," Dr Knapp said.
    
    "To suggest that formal instruction in grammar should stop at the end of primary school is akin to saying that once students have mastered arithmetic in primary school, there's no need to teach them how to abstract numbers in algebra.
    
    "If students were to receive formal instruction in grammar at high school, then university lecturers would not need to teach their first-year students how to construct effective complex sentences or a coherent argument.
    
    "The NSW policy of not using formal grammar instruction in high school is clearly reflected in NSW's drop in the national literacy rankings." [emphasis added]
    
    From The Australian at link
    
    
    
  • Jobs plan to save lost generation as skilled migration slashed [Lead story]
    by Matthew Franklin, Chief political correspondent
    
    "Julia Gillard is planning a massive program of skills training and Year 12 retention, fearing that the global recession could create a lost generation of young people stuck on dole queues for so long that they become unemployable.
    
    "The Deputy Prime Minister plans in the next two years to target hundreds of thousands of young people unable to find their first job, with incentives to either stay at school and complete Year 12 or to undertake skills training.
    
    "And she will also aim assistance at people in their 40s who are made redundant to prevent them from spiralling into long-term unemployment and poverty.
    
    "Ms Gillard outlined her plans to The Australian yesterday as the Rudd Government moved to free up as many as 18,500 jobs for tradesmen by slashing the permanent skilled migrations intake this year by 14 per cent..."
    
    "Yesterday, Ms Gillard said the Government's next major policy package to respond to the crisis - labour market reform - would specifically target first-time job seekers and the middle-aged.
    
    "We don't want a situation where we have generations of people who are basically unemployable because they lose their jobs or can't find jobs," Ms Gillard said.
    
    "It has happened in past downturns and we have to move now to make sure it doesn't happen this time."
    
    "Ms Gillard refused to outline the details but said she would propose sweeping reform at the next meeting of the Council of Australian Governments, not yet scheduled but due within weeks.
    
    "COAG would consider "reform that will engage more young people in education and training for longer to help prevent them drifting into unemployment in the next two years", she said..."
    
    Full story in The Australian at link
    
    Related stories in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
    
    
    • Young hit by employment crisis
      
      
      
  • Unis to chase overseas research talent [late update: online only]
    
    Australia is formally entering the global talent wars, unveiling a plan to recruit the best and brightest university-age students from overseas.
    
    With Australia's research workforce facing intense skills shortages, Julia Gillard said Australia would upgrade its recruitment of overseas students to aid the country's research efforts. “In particular I would like to stress the economic and educational benefits that flow from increasing the proportion of international research students in the tertiary sector,” the Deputy Prime Minister told an education conference.
    
    
    
    
• The Age
  
  
  • Many teachers use job as career step
    by Farrah Tomazin
    
    "Many students are being taught by a new generation of so-called "switchers" - ambitious teachers who view their job merely as a stepping stone to bigger and better things.
    
    "As Australian schools grapple with staff shortages, a Monash University study suggests that more than one in four teachers enter the classroom without any intention of staying more than a few years.
    
    "But while state and federal governments are working on changes to keep teachers in the job longer, researchers argue that staff turnover is not always a bad thing.
    
    "I agree we need to be supporting and retaining teachers in the profession, but I do think we also need to consider the question of how long teachers should stay," said the study's co-author, Monash University associate professor Dr Helen Watt.
    
    "Is it really our hope and expectation that these people should have their entire working life as a teacher, or is it in fact renewing, re-energising and revitalising to have people in the system for however long, if they're making a good contribution for the time they are there?" ...
    
    "Their study has identified three types of teachers: "highly engaged persisters" (those who intend to spend their whole career teaching); "highly engaged switchers" (those who plan to use it as a stepping stone to other areas); and "lower-engaged desisters" (disillusioned teachers who did not want to stay in the profession).
    
    "The persisters made up the bulk of the group surveyed (45 per cent), while 27 per cent are switchers and 28 per cent are desisters.
    
    "Switchers tended to view their job as a pathway into longer-term careers in a range of other areas, from business and the arts to the police force or academia..."
    
    Full story in The Age at link
    
    
    
  • Principal standards bid
    by Farrah Tomazin
    
    "Labor is under pressure from some of its own MPs to force teachers who want to become principals to meet tough new entry standards.
    
    "A Labor-dominated parliamentary committee wants the State Government to create mandatory entry standards in a bid to lift the quality of leadership in schools and prevent principals from being under-prepared once in the top job.
    
    "The proposal is based on similar requirements overseas. In the Canadian province of Ontario, for instance, principals in public schools must have completed an undergraduate degree, have at least five years of teaching experience and undertake a 300-hour qualification program before they can take on the job.
    
    "If someone is to become a leader ... you'd want them to go through a pretty formal stage of professional learning before they are able to enter the principal (role)," said Ballarat Labor MP Geoff Howard, the chairman of State Parliament's education and training committee, which comprises four Labor MPs, three Liberals and one Nationals MP."
    
    From The Age at link
    
    
    
  • The Monday Education Section contains seven new articles [all dated 23 March !], including:
    
    
    • Kinder surprise
      
      Early childhood education is in the spotlight after years of neglect. But, with demand rising, where will the next generation of preschool teachers come from? Margaret Cook reports.
      
      
      
    • Finding the right words
      
      A quick course in [very basic] good English for the internet age
      
      
      
      
• The Washington Post
  
  
  • Putting Some Straight Talk Into Obama's Education Speech
    
    Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we've let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short and other nations outpace us. . . . What's at stake is nothing less than the American dream.
    
    With those words, President Obama last week rang this generation's alarm bell about the state of public education. Since the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" warned of economic peril because of troubles in education, each president has voiced concerns about the failings of schools. Yet advocates of public schools say that educators often haven't gotten the credit they deserve when the economy does well. And they note that speechwriters often oversimplify when they pluck a fact out of a long, nuanced study to help a politician make a rhetorical point. Here is a look at some things Obama said in his speech and the context behind the statements.
    

 

Tuesday 17 March

• The Australian
  
  
  • Curriculum 'beyond teachers' skills' says Australian Council of Deans of Science
    by Justine Ferrari, Education writer
    
    "The proposed national science curriculum risks sending science education backwards, with the nation's deans warning the course is beyond the skills of most teachers and fails to provide a grounding in "real science".
    
    "In a submission to the National Curriculum Board, the Australian Council of Deans of Science, representing almost all the nation's universities, says the curriculum needs to have the traditional disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics at its centre.
    
    "The national curriculum proposes teaching science through to Year 10 by focusing on big issues, such as climate change, in order to teach scientific thinking and processes and reveal the underlying disciplines. Separate subjects in physics, chemistry and biology would not appear until Years 11 and 12.
    
    "The council says the approach "requires far greater discipline expertise" than the current model, and "runs a very high risk of failure" given the shortage of science and maths teachers and the drafting of other teachers into these subjects.
    
    "The deans instead propose organising the science curriculum around the key phenomena in the universe. ACDS executive director John Rice said science was the exploration of a range of phenomena that occurred in our world.
    
    "Within the myriad phenomena that you see ... there are a few that give you insight in how to understand all the rest," Professor Rice said.
    
    "It might be good to get students to look at what are the basic phenomena of all science and how they work. That would be a good underlying, organising principle for the curriculum."
    
    "The ACDS submission says exploring issues such as climate change are important for engaging students but not sufficient in giving them a grounding in the traditional disciplines.
    
    "(They) may provide greater motivation towards science," it says. "However, the measure of a science education still remains the scope and depth of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, etc, that students have learned and are able to apply.
    
    "The science disciplines represent the distillation of human thought about particular natural phenomena and how best to understand them."
    
    "The national curriculum also proposes a significant shift in the way science is taught, away from the traditional "transmission" method where a teacher imparts knowledge. The new curriculum is centred on students, involving them in choosing the scientific concept or topic to be studied.
    
    "The teacher then provides activities to explore the ideas, and, using that experience as a basis, introduces the scientific terms and concepts that students can then apply to new situations.
    
    "The ACDS says this model for teaching "requires far greater discipline expertise than the transmission model".
    
    "In theory, such an approach to curriculum should deliver superior educational outcomes," it says.
    
    "In practice, in an education system not prepared for it, it may well deliver poorer outcomes, with real science, as embodied in physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology, downgraded."
    
    "Professor Rice said the deans supported the concept of taking a broader approach to the teaching of science, moving it away from learning formulas.
    
    "We don't want a return to the transmission model where you have a catechism that people can memorise and transmit to the student," he said. "But if that's all you have, at least that can be done. What this new curriculum is asking for is a genuine understanding of some scientific phenomena that requires a much more sophisticated understanding than a lot of teachers have."
    
    "He said teachers with such understanding were in the minority, particularly given so many science teachers had been drafted from other areas.

    "It's like saying we want people who can fly the latest FA-18 and then saying we'll put in people who can fly Tiger Moths. There's bound to be a lot of crashes," he said. [emphasis added]

    From The Australian at link
    
    
    
  • Editorial
    Curriculum values
    
    Students must not be sold short on traditional disciplines
    
    "The value of grammar returning to the classroom from kindergarten to Year 12 under the national curriculum has been highlighted by an analysis of literacy test results for NSW students. The analysis shows that students taught grammar outperform their peers, but the advantage is lost once formal teaching of the subject has ceased. Year 3 students in NSW who learn grammar as part of their writing skills scored 13 points higher in the writing assessment than the national average. But by Year 9, when grammar is no longer explicitly taught, the advantage had evaporated.
    
    "This has wide repercussions. Students with a poor command of grammar struggle to express themselves in many senior and tertiary subjects, including science, economics and the humanities. They also encounter major problems at work, as frustrated employers attest.
    
    "Wisely, the National English Framing paper specifies that "spelling, punctuation, and grammar need to be taught throughout the school years". It advocates the process cover "structures and functions of word- and sentence-level grammar" and says teaching should extend to goals "such as clearer expression of thought, more convincing argumentation, more careful logic in reasoning, more coherence, precision and imagination in speaking and writing".
    
    "The challenge for education authorities and universities will be to prepare teachers for teaching grammar, given that most of those under 50 have grown up with minimal formal instruction in the discipline. Authorities must resist teachers' groups clinging to the furphy that "whole-class traditional grammar lessons appear to have no influence on either the accuracy or quality of written language development for five- to 16-year-olds".
    
    "Teacher expertise and adherence to traditional disciplines will also be crucial to the success of the national science curriculum. For this reason, the Rudd Government and the National Curriculum Board should address the concerns of Australia's deans of science. Correctly, the deans want physics, chemistry and biology to remain at the centre of the curriculum.
    
    "A more thematic approach, focusing on concepts such as climate change, carries a risk of teachers and students becoming bogged down in political and sociological issues and paying too little attention to scientific facts and formulas. As Justine Ferrari reports, Australia's shortage of science teachers would exacerbate the problem.
    
    "It is also a problem that the curriculum proposes a shift in the way science is taught, away from the traditional "transmission" method where a teacher imparts knowledge to a system in which students are more involved in selecting concepts to be studied. A similar approach in subjects such as history has seen too many students arguing complex ideological positions without having learned basic facts about major historical events. In all disciplines, there is no substitute for teaching the basics."
    
    From The Australian at link
    
    
    
  • Letters to the Editor
    
    
    • It’s the how, not the what
      
      "In Justine Ferrari’s piece on the teaching of grammar, Peter Knapp is quoted as stating the Australian Association for the Teaching of English believes formal instruction should stop at the end of primary school ("Case for further classes on grammar”, 16/3).
      
      "The AATE’s submission to the National Curriculum Board makes no such claim but, rather, states that the association’s response is not to be taken to mean that grammar should not be taught.
      
      "The AATE recommends that the board give closer consideration to different grammars and the efficacy of grammar-teaching in English.
      
      "A recent review on whether the formal teaching of sentence grammar helps five to 16-year-olds to write better concludes that such teaching appears to have no influence on either the accuracy or quality of written language development for five to 16-year-olds. At issue is how to best teach grammar."
      
      Mark Howie, President, Australian Association for the Teaching of English, Kensington Gardens, SA
      
      
      
    • "Having taught at-risk city students and in remote indigenous settings, I find much in the literacy debate that can be informed by W. E. H. Stanner’s reference to dispossession and the fact that, with the sightlessness of the dominant culture, we fail to see that our problem with them is less important than their problem with us ("Ending a shameful silence”, 14-15/3).
      
      "The notion that one system is better than another and that literacy teaching can be an either/or, one-size-fits-all program reduces it to an assimilatory process that asks the learning reader to un-be.
      
      "Good teaching is much more than the application of a program; rather, it is what occurs in the wonderful confluence between teacher, student, content and environment.
      
      "I disagree with Kerry Hempenstall’s statement that the methods cannot be integrated ("Different reading methods on trial”, 14-15/3).
      
      "When we teach we do not apply a program. We meet those before us in their full humanity. In such an instance the method becomes immaterial.
      
      "It would be a mark of progress to turn the debate around from one of applying the best method, to one of how best to listen and participate in the life of the other, instead of proclaiming that we know what’s best."
      
      Julie Beer, St Kilda, Vic
      
      
      
    • "In the ACT, a decline in students’ results in writing between Years 3 and 9 was accompanied by improved results for grammar. On the basis of Dr Knapp’s argument, this is evidence enough to claim that teaching grammar actually makes students’ writing worse."
      
      Emma Le Marquand, Castle Hill, NSW
      
      
      
• The Age
  
  
  • Drive to retain overseas pupils
    by Dan Harrison, Canberra
    
    "The Federal Government has launched a multimillion-dollar push to defend Australia's share of the international student market against the economic slowdown.
    
    "The Government will spend $3.5 million on the push in the next nine months, which will target Australia's best sources of students, including China, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
    
    "The push will include speeches by world-renowned Australian educators at major international events, greater strategic advice for Australian universities and colleges, better training for education agents and improved welfare and support services for international students in Australia.
    
    "Education Minister Julia Gillard told a gathering of international educators: "Our 2009 enrolments are holding up, but the challenge is maintaining our position in a tough financial climate."
    
    "Ms Gillard said that in an increasingly competitive international marketplace, more work was needed to improve students' experiences on and off campus.
    
    "International students tell us that word of mouth is one of the most common ways they make their study in Australia choice," she said.
    
    "Education is Australia's third-largest export after coal and iron ore, supporting about 80,000 Australian jobs and contributing $14.2 billion to the economy last financial year..." [emphasis added]
    
    Full story in The Age at link
    
    
    
    
• BBC News
  
  
  • Teacher filmed 'with integrity'
    
    "A teacher who secretly filmed appalling classroom behaviour "carried out a positive investigation" of the schools where she taught.
    
    "Alex Dolan, from Cambridge, who made the recordings for Channel 4, is appearing before a panel of the General Teaching Council (GTC) in Birmingham.
    
    "Schools in London and Leeds featured in the July 2005 documentary.
    
    "The programme's executive producer, Allen Jewhurst, told the misconduct hearing it was in the public interest..."
    
    "Mr Jewhurst said: "We were not setting out to humiliate children or teachers.
    
    "We wanted to show the public the real face of what was going on in some of our schools." ... [emphasis added]
    
    Full story at BBC News at link
    
    Similar story in The Guardian
    
    
    
    
  • Teachers 'lack skills awareness'
    
    A majority of teachers would rate their knowledge of apprenticeships as "poor" or "very poor", a survey suggests...
    
    Edge [Foundation] chief executive, Andy Powell, said there was a "deep-seated bias" towards academic qualifications within the education system. Teachers needed to know more about other forms of learning as they were the main source of careers advice, he said.
    
    
    
    
• The Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
  • Rise in private students
    
    Independent schools in NSW have reported an overall increase in enrolments this year, despite having bled some students to the public school system. The Association of Independent Schools of NSW said yesterday it had collected data in February from more than 340 private schools. It said there had been a 1.4 per cent increase in enrolments - almost 2000 students overall - since August.
    
    
    
  • Letters to the Editor
    
    
    • Fair tests for students
      
      "Kerry Goulston and Kim Oates raise important issues about entry criteria for medical degrees ("How to prescribe the best doctors", March 16). But the fact that Sydney University has established a new entry scheme for school leavers is perhaps less important than the broader inequities in the selection processes.
      
      "The privately operated undergraduate and graduate admissions tests have given rise to an industry of expensive training programs to coach students in these supposedly uncoachable exams, often charging thousands of dollars each.
      
      "Not only is there weak evidence for the longer term benefits of these tests, but they favour city students and those from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Academic excellence and thorough interviews should be fundamental to selecting students. But any additional testing barriers must be fair, transparent and proven to select better doctors."
      
      Chris Mulligan, Birchgrove
      
      
    • plus three more Letters on HEC "special provisions" (at above link)

 

Wednesday 18 March

• ABC News
  
  
  • TAFE teachers win big pay rise
    
    "Western Australia's TAFE lecturers have voted to accept a new pay offer, which will see them receive a pay rise of up to 15 per cent over the next two years.

    "That is on top of a recent six per cent wage increase.

    "The State School Teachers' Union had already given its in-principle support to the pay deal."
    
    From ABC News at link
    
    

  • Indigenous school retention rates bypass remote communities
    by Richard Lindell
    
    "Things may be starting to look up in Aboriginal education.
    
    "Official figures show that the number of Indigenous students completing high school has more than doubled in the past decade.
    
    "Indigenous education leaders say the improvement is due to a sustained focus on the issue from state and federal governments.
    
    "But the better retention rates are coming almost exclusively from the cities and towns.
    
    "There were 4,800 Indigenous students enrolled in year 12 last year, compared to just 2,200 in 1999. Moreover, the retention rate has jumped from 35 to 46 per cent over the same period..."
    
    Full story at ABC News at link
    
    

  • Uni staff complain about bullying
    
    The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) says dozens of Newcastle University staff members have come forward to complain about a culture of bullying within the organisation.
    
    
    

• The Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
  • From history wars to history snores: teachers go off course
    by Anna Patty, Education Editor
    
    "Teachers fear the advanced skills primary school pupils will be expected to learn in a new history course are too "ambitious".
    
    "In a submission to the National Curriculum Board, the History Teachers' Association of Australia broadly welcomed a proposal to teach a distinct history course in primary schools.
    
    "The association president, Paul Kiem, said teachers had also endorsed plans for a new senior high school course on Asia-Pacific history.
    
    "He said he was pleased that discussions about the curriculum were free of the "ideological battles" associated with the history agenda of the former prime minister John Howard. "It is very relieving to be focusing on classroom issues rather than nonsense about history wars."
    
    "But teachers were concerned about the long list of advanced skills that primary pupils would be expected to master.
    
    "There is a strong feeling that what is proposed for the primary years is far too ambitious in terms of both content to be covered and the conceptual capabilities assumed for students at this stage," the association submitted.
    
    "Mr Kiem said the skill level outlined was more appropriate for year 10 students.
    
    "A framing paper for the national history curriculum notes that primary pupils would, among other things, "be able to examine and critically assess the value of available primary and secondary sources, study human motivation, develop an understanding of viewpoints held by the people of the past and recognise causal relationships between events and draw conclusions about their historical investigations" as a result of the course.
    
    "Mr Kiem said there was no guarantee that 10 per cent of primary school teaching time would be dedicated to the stand-alone history subject outlined in the framing paper.
    
    "Primary teachers are concerned about a crowded curriculum. We are very concerned that there is far too much content being suggested for primary school students."
    
    "Some primary teachers were also concerned that they would be overly restricted to teaching Australian content.
    
    "Mr Kiem said there was wisdom in repeating such year 10 subjects as World War I and the Holocaust during senior years because it added depth to a student's understanding, but teachers were concerned that courses on the Australian gold rushes in primary and high schools could lead to boredom.
    
    "The History Teachers' Association said extra training would be essential to prepare teachers for delivering any new national history curriculum.
    
    "We are proposing to have history taught from primary through to the end of high school in a fairly sophisticated manner," Mr Kiem said. "We need teachers to have at least an undergraduate degree with a major in history and some teaching method."
    
    From The Sydney Morning Herald at link
    
    
    
  • Elite degree won't earn you more cash
    
    Graduates from prestigious Australian universities earn no more than those from other universities, new research has revealed.
    
    
    
  • Letters to the Editor
    
    
    • Extra tuition of no benefit
      
      "Chris Mulligan (Letters, March 17) raises the concern of many who fear that students who can afford coaching for undergraduate and graduate admissions tests to medicine will have an advantage. There is no evidence that coaching confers an advantage in these tests.
      
      "The University of Western Sydney has recently shown coaching did not assist student performance in multiple mini-interviews for undergraduate entry. Our own survey of first-year students in the postgraduate medical degree at the University of Sydney found no significant difference in scores for the graduate admission test and multiple mini-interviews between those who received coaching and those who did not."
      
      Kerry Goulston and Kim Oates, Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney
      
      
      
    • Education sale ignores home ground disadvantage
      
      "Since when has it become acceptable that Australian tertiary education be openly "spruiked" as an internationally marketable commodity ("Campaign dangles study lures to overseas students", March 17)? Young Australians are already losing university places to wealthy international students - something of a paradox given that the Bradley report prescribes a radical increase in the proportion of higher-educated Australians."
      
      Oliver Lindholm, South Coogee
      
      
      
      
• The West Australian
  
  
  • Opposition fails in bid to widen bash laws [late update: online only]
    
    "Nurses have been let down by WA’s lawmakers and their safety is not valued as much as other public officers, according to the nursing union.
    
    "Australian Nurses Federation boss Mark Olson said he was “bitterly disappointed” that nurses were not covered by mandatory sentencing laws that are expected to pass through the Lower House this afternoon without amendment.
    
    "Nurses, firemen and teachers will not be covered by controversial mandatory sentencing laws after the Opposition failed to have the legislation extended to cover other workers during a marathon parliamentary session overnight..." [emphasis added]
    
    "The Premier said while he was aware other professions faced the risk of assault in their occupation he believed police, ambulance officers, prison officers and public rail officers deserved extra protection for being required to intervene in dangerous situations."
    
    Full story in The West Australian at link
    
    
    • ABC News update: Mandatory Sentencing Legislation delayed
      
      
      
      
  • WA ‘second in shift to private education’
    by Kate Campbell
    
    "WA recorded the second biggest shift towards private schools in Australia over the past decade, new figures reveal.
      
    "Australian Bureau of Statistics figures examining school, student, teacher, participation and retention figures from 1998 to 2008, showed WA non-government schools increased their share of the student market by more than 6 percentage points since 1998 to 34 per cent.
      
    "The ACT recorded the biggest increase.
      
    "The number of WA private school students soared by more than 35 per cent over the decade to 118,710 pupils last year. Only Queensland had a bigger rise. There were 3733 more private school students last year than in 2007, while the number of students enrolled in WA government schools — 230,947 in 2008 — has remained fairly consistent since 1998.
      
    "WA is well above the national trend of a 22 per cent increase in the number of private school students over the past 10 years.
      
    "Association of Independent Schools WA deputy director Ron Gorman said the drift towards private schooling was a result of parents having more choice of where to send their children.
      
    "The ABS figures showed there were 25 more independent schools and eight more Catholic schools in WA last year compared with 1998.
      
    "Mr Gorman said he had not noticed a reduction in independent school enrolments this year because of parents tightening their budgets.
      
    “If there is going to be an impact I think we’ll probably see it towards the end of this year and into the 2010 school year,” he said.
      
    "However, a preliminary Australian Secondary Principals Association survey released last month revealed a swing towards the public education system, with 45 per cent of government high schools across the nation reporting a rise in enrolments at the start of this year.
      
    "The survey found that 56 per cent of former private students switching to the public system came from low-fee independent schools, 32 per cent from Catholic schools and 6 per cent from more expensive independent schools."
    
    From The West Australian at link
    
    
    
    • Parents put to the test in picking the right school
      by Bethany Hiatt
      
      "For many parents the choice between public and private education can be agonising as they weigh up facilities, programs available and the financial effects on the family.
      
      "The West Australian interviewed two families from similar backgrounds about how or why they chose the school they did..."
      
      [One chose Hale School, the other chose Churchlands SHS.]
      
      Full story in The West Australian
      
      
      
      
• The Brisbane Courier Mail
  
  
  • Teachers say testing program is hurting students
    by Tanya Chilcott
    
    "National literacy and numeracy tests are widely referred to as "napalm" by Queensland teachers who say it "kills everything in the classroom".
    
    "Teachers, their associations and even Education Minister Rod Welford have raised concerns about the effect of the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy testing regime on classrooms.
    
    "The Queensland Teachers Union warns practice tests are placing undue pressure on teachers, disengaging children and taking over subjects.
    
    "Teachers have been asked to practise 2008 NAPLAN exams with Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 after the state came second-last overall last year..."
    
    "Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said there had been an "hysterical over-reaction" by some Education Queensland staff, who were placing enormous pressure on teachers to lift students' results by practising for the NAPLAN tests.
    
    "Teachers are being told that if the results don't improve, their own employment positions will be reviewed," he said..."
    
    "Mr Ryan confirmed teachers had widely referred to the tests as "napalm" but said it was not a word the union supported..." [emphasis added]
    
    Full story in The Brisbane Courier Mail at link
  
  
  
  
• The Age
  
  
  • Male teachers shifting schools
    by Farrah Tomazin
    
    "First it was the students who began drifting from public to private schools. Now, it seems, male teachers are following suit, with many abandoning public education to work in the Catholic or independent system.
    
    "New Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show the number of male teachers in government schools has fallen by more than 2100 during the past 10 years, while those working in non-government schools has increased by more than 6500 during the same period.
    
    "Yet the trend has not extended to female teachers, who are increasingly opting to work across all schools - public and private - and make up about two-thirds of the teaching profession.
    
    "Educators were perplexed about the the drift of male teachers to non-government schools yesterday. Although some observers speculate it could be because individual schools may have previously adopted policies to entice more men into private schools, Independent Schools Council executive director Bill Daniels told The Age: "It's not a concerted effort by us and I can't imagine why the figures would be that way."
    
    "Australian Education Union president Angelo Gavrielatos was equally puzzled. Asked if more male teachers were needed in public education, he replied: "Schools are a microcosm of society and should reflect the broader society. But having said that, what we need is to ensure that there is a qualified teacher in every classroom - and there are some classrooms in Australia that don't have that."
    
    "The ABS Schools Australia 2008 report, released yesterday, presents a snapshot of the nation's schools, students and staff. According to the report:
    
    
    • Almost 40 per cent of 17-year-olds are not attending school, and year 12 retention rates have only marginally improved over the past year - from 74.3 per cent in 2007 to 74.5 per cent last year.
      
      
    • The so-called "drift" is continuing, with private school enrolments growing by 22 per cent during the past 10 years compared with 1 per cent growth for public schools.
      
      
    • The number of indigenous students enrolled in year 12 has doubled in the past 10 years - from 2206 in 1999 to 4779 last year - but retention rates for Aborigines are still well behind that of non-indigenous students.

  "The figures are likely to present a challenge for the Government as it seeks to boost teaching quality, tackle disadvantage, and lift year 12 retention rates to 90 per cent by 2020.
  
  "Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard yesterday said the report showed the Government had made "positive progress" in its bid to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous students. But she admitted that the proportion of indigenous students who stayed to year 12 - 46.5 per cent last year - was still "unacceptably low" compared with the non-indigenous retention rate of 75.6 per cent."
  
  From The Age at link
  
  
  

• The Australian

Higher Education

• Equity goals need outreach programs
  by Gavin Moody
  
  "How might Australian higher education meet the federal Government's goal of increasing the participation of students from a low socio-economic status background in undergraduate programs to 20 per cent by 2020?" ...
  
  "As Education Minister Julia Gillard said in a series of three speeches over the last week, it will be important for equity as well as for educational and economic reasons to improve the co-ordination of school, vocational and higher education.
  
  "She could do so by increasing the funding and scope of the early outreach programs that support universities working with groups of pupils and their parents and teachers from upper primary school throughout their secondary schooling, until their transition to tertiary education.
  
  "This program should be broadened and expanded to include joint participation by schools, vocational and higher education, thus further following the design of the Clinton administration's GEAR UP program. The program should require partially matching grants and thus commitment from state and territory governments, schools, TAFE colleges and universities, as required under GEAR UP.
  
  "Geography matters in equity. Universities based in more advantaged areas need to actively recruit students from beyond their immediate locale..."
  
  Full story in The Australian at link
  
  
  
• Campuses to chase unmet student demand
  
  Universities will have access to a growing pool of students on which to base expansion plans in the newly deregulated student market because there will be rising unmet demand as the economy stalls.
  
  
  
• From games to global crisis as recklessness increases
  
  The economic crisis could be a brain problem in part and an early warning that computer games and online social networking sites are making people more reckless and self-obsessed, a leading British brain scientist warns.
  
  
  
• Funding strands inventions
  
  Potentially lucrative Australian technological inventions are sitting in university laboratories, stalled by the liquidity crisis, one of the country's leading research commercialisers has warned.
  
  
  
  
• The Guardian
  
  
  • Girls do better without boys, study finds
    
    Girls are far more likely to thrive, get GCSEs and stay in education if they go to a single-sex school, according to new research, which reveals pupils who are struggling academically when they start secondary school reap the biggest rewards of girls-only schooling. The analysis of the GCSE scores of more than 700,000 girls taught in the state sector concludes that those at girls' schools consistently made more progress than those in co-ed secondaries.

 

Thursday 19 March

• The Australian
  
  
  • Teachers in 'subliminal' bid to bar phonics
    by Justine Ferrari, Education writer
    

    "Literacy teachers are planning a subliminal campaign to undermine phonics as an approach to teaching reading by subconsciously linking it with the idea of failure.
    
    "The target of their campaign is NSW Education Minister Verity Firth, who last week announced the nation's first direct comparison of phonics-based reading methods with other techniques.
    
    "In a group email sent to a network of literacy educators, associate professor in education at Wollongong University Brian Cambourne proposes flooding Ms Firth's office with emails that associate phonics based approaches with failure "at an almost subconscious level".
    
    "Professor Cambourne suggests messages, including linking phonics to "readicide", which he defines as a noun meaning "the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools". [emphasis added]
    
    "He points to "evolution theory" and non-Western forms of writing such as Chinese and hieroglyphic scripts as evidence that decoding sounds in the written word is not a prerequisite for being able to read alphabetically based scripts.
    
    "The campaign is prompted by the decision of the NSW Government, reported in The Weekend Australian last Saturday, to conduct a trial using a reading program called MULTILIT (Making Up Lost Time In Literacy), which was designed for struggling readers by researchers at Macquarie University and teaches letter-sound relationships.
    
    "As part of the national partnership with the commonwealth on literacy and numeracy, NSW will assess the progress of MULTILIT students with students taught by methods that place less emphasis on phonics and more on "whole language" techniques, such as pictures and sentence structure.
    
    "Ms Firth said the purpose of the trial was to provide evidence of what methods worked best, and to "stop arguing about what we believe, and start talking about what we know".
    
    "Professor Cambourne denied he was proposing a campaign and said he was "just using my right as a member of the community and my friends to inform the minister of things we think she should know" to counter bias propagated by MULTILIT and supporters of phonics.
    
    "Asked why he had to resort to a subliminal campaign instead of relying on evidence, Professor Cambourne first said: "You don't really believe we can influence the minister's subconscious?"
    
    "When the email was quoted back to him, Professor Cambourne said he and his colleagues had to rely on cognitive science's "framing theory". "It's a way of making ideas change based on new theories rather than just denying or trying to argue with people you can't argue with," Professor Cambourne said.
    
    "When you rely on evidence, it's twisted. We can also present evidence but we never get a fair hearing. We rely on the cognitive science framing theory, to frame things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true - framing things that you're passionate about in ways that reveal your passion."
    
    "Professor Cambourne said the best example of the use of framing theory was former US president Richard Nixon, who was "framed a crook by newspapers ... It didn't matter how many times Richard Nixon said 'I'm not a crook' ... every time he denied it, he reinforced the connection between himself and being a crook," he said. "It didn't do him any good.
    
    "It doesn't matter how many times we say all the evidence that's been presented about whole language. Because of the way whole language has been framed by people like MULTILIT, we don't get anywhere. We have to use the same kind of tactics that have been used to demean and demonise whole language."
    
    "Professor Cambourne then said that, if The Australian reported his comments: "I will deny I ever said this." [emphasis added]
    
    "In the email, Professor Cambourne suggests using framing theory to link "Multi-link" (sic) to "failed theory, practice, programs and metaphors/analogies which can be linked to 'failure' in the minister's mind, at an almost subconscious level".
    
    "A series of short email messages sent to the minister's office which makes these links but from different perspectives of reading and literacy is what I have in mind," he says.
    
    "As evidence that sounding out words is not the necessary first step in learning to read, Professor Cambourne cites evolution theory, deaf kids and the case of the deaf and blind Helen Keller, who learned to speak."
    
    From The Australian at link
    
    

  • Editorial
    Time to spell it out
    
    Denying pupils the right to read is a form of child abuse
    
    "Dogmatists never let the evidence get in the way of ideology, and they don't come much more dogmatic than critics of NSW Education Minister Verity Firth. Ms Firth has ordered tests to compare the efficiency of different techniques used to teach children to read. The program will compare phonics, where students are taught to read through the relationship between letters and sounds, and what education academics call a "balanced approach". This relies on the whole-language technique, where children are expected to work out words by looking at pictures or understanding their context in a sentence. It is a debate that has raged for decades. The Australian has pointed to the way the whole-language approach fails students, especially those from homes where there are no books or parents who are regular readers, since the 1980s. So good for Ms Firth in trying to find out what works.
    
    "But outraged activists don't agree. As Justine Ferrari reports in The Australian today, they intend to bombard the minister with messages opposing the study. The academic orthodoxy in teacher-training has long emphasised self-expression and the rights of dispossessed minorities over old-fashioned irrelevancies, such as teaching children to read, to love literature and understand arithmetic in primary school. In secondary school, students are taught to sceptically assess texts for signs of patriarchy and prejudice, even at the expense of higher order maths and literacy. The idea that education is about acquiring competencies, sometimes best learned by rote, is rejected by education experts who believe schooling must be a force for social change. But until children have the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, they are ill-equipped to participate in society, let alone analyse power structures. And while education theorists hate phonics because it drills skills into children rather than encourages creativity, the fact that just about everybody over 50 knows how to read demonstrates it works. The real risk for school students today is not that they will never learn to spot sexism when they study TV advertisements in English, but that they will not acquire the ability to write grammatically or work out interest on a bank loan, skills their grandparents were taught by tested, traditional methods.
    
    "The importance of the problem extends beyond the obsessions of ideologues. Neuroscientists now know the human brain is capable of acquiring, and losing, skills. British brain physiologist Susan Greenfield suggests computer use can change not just what we think about, but also the way we do our thinking. Children who grow up online may be good at processing information, but much worse than previous generations at acquiring knowledge. This makes a strong case for teaching techniques that drill universally applicable skills in maths, reading and writing into students. None of this will impress people whose idea of debate is to harass Ms Firth's office, people who say this newspaper has old-fashioned ideas about education. So be it. When it comes to pushing for techniques that teach people to read and write, to multiply and divide, The Australian is guilty as charged. And proudly so. Because any sort of education that leaves young people innumerate and illiterate is a form of child abuse."
    
    From The Australian at link
    
    
    
  • Overseas student intake up 21 per cent
    
    The recruitment of overseas students to Australia continues to defy the global downturn, with the latest statistics recording growth of 21.4 per cent over the same time last year.
    
    Similar story in The Sydney Morning Herald
    
    
    
  • Letter to the Editor
    
    
    • Teach grammar
      
      "Julie Beer (Letters, 17/3) presents a cultural-relativist argument in objecting to the standardised teaching of English grammar. It’s just this philosophically baseless sort of thinking that has exacerbated the plight of “at-risk city students” and those “in remote indigenous settings”, who, in my experience, respond well to the teaching of grammar.
      
      "The issue is not about ideological imposition, as those who regard education exclusively as a political tool would have us believe; it is rather about the necessity of grammar for clear communication and how it can best be taught, to the benefit of all its users."
      
      John Kelly, Tranmere, SA
      
      
      
    • GP not his patient’s keeper
      
      "To make doctors responsible for the actions of their patients is yet another move away from the idea of individual responsibility. It is as unjust as making teachers responsible for the achievement levels of students who refuse to do their homework."
      
      Chris Curtis, Hurstbridge, Vic
      
      
      
      
• ABC News
  
  
  • State schools need $160 million for repairs
    
    "The West Australian Government says more than $160 million is needed to bring the state's public schools up to scratch.
    
    "The Education Minister, Liz Constable, says a building assessment of 770 state schools has identified the backlog in maintenance work.
    
    "She says the backlog is a product of the former government's neglect.
    
    "Doctor Constable says she is looking at ways to clear the backlog, but has not specified how this will be done."
    
    From ABC News at link
    
    More detailed story from The Sunday Times online / PerthNow
    
    Liz Constable's Media Statement
    
    
    
    
• The West Australian
  
  
  • TAFE lecturers endorse pay deal at twice the inflation rate
    by Kim MacDonald
    
    "The public purse has been put under more pressure as TAFE lecturers yesterday endorsed a generous pay deal for up to 26.5 per cent more pay over three years, or more than twice the national inflation rate.
    
    "The $186 million package for 3200 lecturers ends nearly two years of heated negotiations but comes as the State Government prepares to axe up to 500 public service jobs.
    
    "The Community and Public Sector Union was angry yesterday that its own members were getting redundancies while other government workers were getting big pay rises.
    
    “On one habd we have the Treasurer talking about a blow-out in the public sector, and on the other they are reaching agreements for unprecedented pay rises for other public sector workers,” secretary Toni Walkington said.
    
    "Training Minister Peter Collier said the deal made them among the best paid in Australia. A spokesmen for Mr Collier defended the big rises, claiming it was negotiated last December, before much of the economic crisis took hold, and was necessary to attract and retain staff.
    
    "Lecturers would get pay increases of 18.4 to 20.5 per cent over three years, and would be offered an extra 5 per cent for flexible working hours.
    
    "The State School Teachers Union’s Pat Burke said a significant number would not have to change the way they taught classes in order to qualify for the extra 5 per cent top-up because they already put in long hours at a range of venues.
    
    "Ms Burke said the lecturers could be eligible if they agreed to teach regularly outside of the classroom at say, a mine site or an automotive workshop, depending on the subject.
    
    "The new pay deal also comes with the introduction of new allowances for rural lecturers of between $931 to $6076, on top of their district bonus. Remote area teachers get improved allowances of $14,000 to $19,000."
    
    From The West Australian
    
    SSTUWA Media Statement
    
    
    
    
  • Lynwood students fly flags of harmony
    by Dawn Gibson
    
    "Being surrounded by a sea of faces from all around the world is an everyday experience for students at Lynwood Senior High School.
    
    "The southern suburbs school has a veritable United Nations among its student body, with 53 cultural groups represented within the 1000-strong population.
    
    "Teenagers whose families fled war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq sit side by side with migrants from Russia, Turkey and beyond.
    
    "The school will celebrate its diversity this morning with a special assembly to mark Harmony Week, followed by a dinky-di Aussie barbecue with a twist – halal sausages to cater for Muslim students.
    
    “One of the best things about working here is that there is a such a cultural mix,” deputy principal Rosemary Cunningham said. “Given the diversity, the kids get along extremely well.”
    
    From The West Australian
    
    
    
    
• The Independent
  
  
  • Teachers becoming the worst cheaters in school exams
    
    Teachers are coaching their 11-year-old pupils inside the exam hall to give the right answer during tests.

 

Friday 20 March

• The West Australian
  
  
  • Our neglected schools need $166m to fix, says Minister
    by Yasmine Phillips
    
    "The State Government claims it has found a $166 million backlog in outstanding maintenance within WA’s public schools.
    
    "Education Minister Liz Constable told Parliament yesterday that the average age of the State’s 779 schools was 52. She said the backlog in school maintenance was a “legacy of prolonged neglect” by the former Labor government.
    
    "But shadow education minister Michelle Roberts said the claims were a “crass political diversion” because Labor had instigated the maintenance review that gave the Government the details. Mrs Roberts said it had been due to be finished last October.
    
    “The Labor party in 2001 did inherit a large backlog of maintenance in our schools — we spent over $450 million on school maintenance in our time in government,” she said. “In the forward estimates, there is significantly more than the $166 million that she’s now talking of . . . Labor’s commitment was to spend another $310 million over the next four years.”
    
    "Among the schools with the greatest need for maintenance were Esperance Senior High School ($2.3 million), Derby District High School ($1.7 million), Perth Modern School ($1.2 million), Collie Senior High School ($1.2 million) and Eastern Hills Senior High School ($1.1 million).
    
    "WA Council of State School Organisations president Rob Fry said successive governments had failed to give school maintenance the priority it deserved. It was not a new issue and had been a concern for 15 to 20 years. “Let’s get out of the blame game because it doesn’t matter who has been in government, no one has been able to keep up with the demand of building maintenance,” he said.
    
    "Dr Constable said annual funding for preventative maintenance had plummeted from $18.7 million in 1996-97 to zero in the Carpenter government’s last year. The blowout had grown steadily from $60 million in 2001.
    
    "Mt Lawley Primary School principal Don Barba said the school’s buildings, almost 100 years old, needed new carpets and paint. The school needed to spend about $200,000 on overdue work."
    
    From The West Australian
    
    
     
  • Top State school reject non-local enrolments
    by Yasmine Phillips
    
    "Some of WA's top State high schools have been forced to turn away students who do not live within their catchment areas and others report cases of families lying about their address to secure their children's places.
    
    "In a sign that competition is heating up for a place in WA's best secondary schools, some schools, including Rossmoyne, Churchlands and Willetton, are dealing with constant requests from families who do not live locally.
    
    "Many schools have reported a marked increase in the number of students who have transferred from private schools and a greater interest from families who do not live within the school's designated boundaries.
    
    "Churchlands Senior High School principal Neil Hunt said 18 applications from families living outside the local area were rejected this year but “many more interested parents” did not apply once they realised the school's policy. About 32 students from outside the school's boundaries were accepted into the Year 8 gifted and talented program.
    
    "While other schools cited instances where families had lied about their home addresses to be accepted in the past, Mr Hunt said three families were refused entry to the school on that basis this year.
    
    “We had a greater number that that who indicated that they resided within our boundaries, however once they collected our enrolment pack they did not return for enrolment,” he said. “One can only assume that they could not provide the level of proof required.”
    
    "Willetton Senior High School principal Jim O'Neill said his school was forced to turn away some children from outside the local area due to increasing student numbers.
    
    "Some families bough or rented locally to secure their place.
    
    “Many people are interested in having their children come here and we enjoy fantastic local support,” he said. “However, we cannot keep accepting all cross-boundaries when we get to a certain point. People in the local area prefer to sent their children here and not to the private system.”
    
    "Rossmoyne Senior High School principal Terry Sanbrook said there appeared to be more interest this year from non-government schools, with 12 new enrolments from that sector.
    
    "Mr O'Neil said some students from outside the school's local area were accepted because they had siblings already at the school.
    
    "A report by the Australian Secondary Principals Association revealed recently that parents were pulling their children out of private schools and sending them to State schools in the global economic downturn."
    
    From The West Australian
    
    
    
    
• ABC News
  
  
  • McMaths: McDonald's moves into education
    
    "McDonald's will bankroll free online maths tuition for Australian children, in a move that has won Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard's applause but has divided education groups.
    
    "The fast-food giant and its restaurant licensees are fully funding the Maths Online tutoring program, which used to cost $40 a month but will now be accessible to all schools and students for free.
    
    "The site, developed over 10 years by a team led by Sydney teacher Patrick Murray, features hundreds of animated lessons and thousands of exam-style questions based on the state curricula for years seven to 12.
    
    "The home page features a McDonald's logo and the words, "Proudly provided by your local McDonald's restaurant," but there are no further signs of the sponsorship deal within the website.
    
    "The move has been commended by the Federal Government, the Australian Secondary Principals Association and the Catholic Principals Association.
    
    "[I] encourage secondary schools and students across the country to utilise this resource," federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said in a statement.
    
    "But New South Wales Parents and Citizens Federation president Dianne Giblin has accused McDonald's of "subliminal advertising in the greatest form".
    
    "Ms Giblin says the program is not in line with the NSW Government's Healthy Canteen Strategy.
    
    "If this is the mantra of Mcdonald's, then we would ask they remove any form of advertising off the site," she told 702 ABC Sydney Local Radio.
    
    "The State Opposition's education spokesman, Adrian Piccoli, agrees it is inappropriate for corporate interests to be involved in education.
    
    "Mcdonald's need to stick to making hamburgers and the NSW Government stick to educating our children," he said.
    
    "McDonald's Australia managing director Catriona Noble says the advertising on the site is minimal.
    
    "There's no reference to promoting anything, talking about food. It's as simple as that," she said.
    
    "We think, along with our licensees, it's about giving back to the community like we do with Ronald McDonald House charities or little athletics."
    
    "Ms Noble says McDonald's decided to bankroll the website after an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to its decision to fund the program for its restaurant staff from late 2007.
    
    "We're certainly not trying to do the job of educators. We're not experts in that area and that's why this is independently developed and run," she said.
    
    "We do firmly believe that we have wonderful teachers out there but this is a great support to teachers, to students, to parents and that's the feedback we're getting.
    
    "We're really proud to be supporting that and we do think it's every corporate's responsibility to give back."
    
    "The NSW Education Minister's office has refused to comment because it has a policy of not endorsing commercial products."
    
    From ABC News at link
    
    Similar story at The Sunday Times online / PerthNow
    
    
    
  • Gillard defends 'McMaths' program
    
    "Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard is being accused of supporting "insidious" advertising by a fast food company.
    
    "Nutritionists and parents' groups say Ms Gillard should not endorse a free maths education website sponsored by McDonald's, which credits the company's restaurants.
    
    "The launch of the website was publicised this morning with an endorsement in the McDonald's press release from the Education Minister.
    
    "I commend McDonald's for taking this step, and encourage secondary schools and students across the country to utilise this resource," Ms Gillard's endorsement read.
    
    "Ms Gillard has made a point of encouraging the private sector to support the education system. She says the Maths Online website is a good example of that and the branding does not go too far.
    
    "Clearly, we believe the engagement of corporate Australia with schools has to be on the basis of making a genuine difference, not on the basis of product promotion," she said.
    
    "But this Maths Online resource, put forward by McDonald's, is a responsible way of making a difference."
    
    "Ms Gillard says she believes McDonald's should be able to put its name on the website as a sponsor.
    
    "McDonald's, as a company that is subsidising the free availability of Maths Online, would obviously put its name on the site; we obviously wouldn't want to see a site like this used for advertising or food products promotion," she said.
    
    "But I do believe that corporate Australia can play a role in supporting our schools ... in providing school communities with some of the skills that they may lack, particularly in financial management and other areas where corporate Australia has expertise, and through initiatives like this one."
    
    'Insidious' advertising
    
    "But not everyone is convinced the fast food giant has charity as its number one priority.
    
    "Sharon Johnson from the Parents and Citizens Federation of NSW says the Federal Government's endorsement lends the McDonald's initiative credibility, and that could be open to abuse.
    
    "We definitely don't want our children being soft targets of what would be a really successful marketing campaign," she said.
    
    "The Happy Meal and the Quarter-Pounder Meal add up to a really great opportunity for McDonald's to get some exposure online by saying that they're offering students an educational experience."
    
    "Nutritionist Rosemary Stanton sees the McDonald's branding of the website as a form of backdoor advertising.
    
    "If this didn't work to encourage children to have more of the product, I think that ... it's a fair bet that the company wouldn't be doing it," she said.
    
    "The food industry realises that sooner or later junk food advertising to children is going to stop, so they're looking at other ways to make sure that their name is constantly before the children's' eyes and ears, and this is a very insidious way of getting to them."
    
    "Dr Stanton says she is disappointed by Ms Gillard's endorsement of the website because she says it sends mixed messages about acceptable advertising.
    
    "It absolutely muddies the water, because people always trying to curry favour with the Federal Government. Why wouldn't you?" she said.
    
    "I mean, they're going to supply money for lots of things, so that when they endorse something, people then are a bit more reluctant to criticise whatever it is that's being endorsed.
    
    "I would have expected much more from this Government and it's very disappointing."
    
    'Community service'
    
    "The Maths Online homepage is laid out in blue, red and grey. Down the bottom of the page is a large yellow 'M' underneath a sentence which reads, 'This has been made possible by McDonald's Australia and its hundreds of franchisees who have covered the costs of the program'.
    
    "Below the Maths Online logo is this information: 'Proudly provided by your local McDonald's restaurant.'
    
    "McDonald's says the tutoring program, which used to cost $40 a month, has been developed by maths experts over a decade and will now be available to Australia's 1.46 million high school students free of charge.
    
    "The managing director of McDonald's Australia, Catriona Noble, says the program is about community service.
    
    "There's no reference to promoting anything, talking about food, it's as simple as that," she said.
    
    "We think that along with our licensees - most of our McDonald's stores are owned by small business men and women - it's about giving back to the community.
    
    "We're certainly not trying to do the job of educators. We're not experts in that area and that's why this is independently developed and run."

    -Based on a report by Simon Lauder for The World Today.
    
    From ABC News at link
    
    
    

  • Indigenous teacher training program launched
    
    A new program aimed at reducing the high turnover of teachers in remote Indigenous areas in the Northern Territory has been formally launched.
    
    
    
    
  • 24 teacher sex cases in NSW in two years
    
    Twenty-four public school teachers were sacked for sex matters across New South Wales over two years, the state's top education bureaucrat has confirmed.
    
    
    
    
• The Australian
  
• Letters to the Editor
  
  
  • First Byte
    
    "Education experts seem a bag of mixed nuts, without the bag ("Teachers in subliminal bid to bar phonics”, 19/3)."
    
    John Blahusiak, Maylands, WA
    
    
    
  • Ideology-pushers stunt children’s literacy growth
    
    "Those critics of NSW Education Minister Verity Firth’s trial of phonics-based instruction of reading need to get a life.
    
    "Indeed, they should go out to Sydney’s Exodus Foundation and have a look at young lives being saved—literally.
    
    "Behind the Ashfield church, its Loaves and Fishes restaurant and queues of those whose destitution is too often rooted in illiteracy, is a miracle on Earth.
    
    "There, MULTILIT (Making Up Lost Time In Literature) is administered by professionals and volunteers under the supervision of Macquarie University.
    
    "In the space of six months, it takes kids who have spent five years in this nation’s education system from not being able to read a word to being able to write and read a piece of poetry.
    
    "Educationally impoverished families, a lack of performance measures in schools, poorly trained teachers, belief-based teaching practices and dogma protected by anachronistic unions compound the disadvantage many kids bring with them to school.
    
    "For too long we have had to endure these educated, self-appointed drivers of the social justice truck condemning young Australians to a life of underachievement.
    
    "They deny kids a solid reading foundation and then bemoan under-representation of the poor in the (substandard) universities from which this pontification comes.
    
    "In affluent, educated, book-rich families, kids will learn to read irrespective of teaching practices. Not so in the real world.
    
    "Ambitions to fill the nation’s universities with more students from a low-income background will be achieved only by lifting literacy levels in the first three years of education. It’s not money that keeps kids out of uni, it’s a lousy Year 12 result."
    
    Brendan Nelson MP, Federal Education, Science and Training minister, 2001-2006, Lindfield, NSW
    
    
    
  • "The Australian is right to report on Professor Brian Cambourne and his email campaign to derail Ms Firth’s MULTILIT program.
    
    "His argument to discredit the teaching of phonics lacks conviction: learning pictograms and other symbols in other languages is surely similar in process and intention to associating sound and symbol in the phonics of English.
    
    "We are all aware of the irregularities in structure in relationship to sounds in much of the vocabulary of English because of its origins in other languages.
    
    "For this reason, phonics alone is not the key to literacy. It is, however, the premise on which word recognition is based.
    
    "If a child does not know the range of sounds and the symbols they represent, there is no starting point for word recognition.
    
    "The key to setting anyone, child or adult, on the path to literacy is firstly recognising the relationship between sound and symbol.
    
    "Then combine other approaches: whole-word recognition and contextual clues."
    
    Enid Duncan, The Gap, Qld
    
    
    
  • "Whole language can work wonderfully well as a teaching method that accelerates learning to read and promotes a love of reading. But only for some children.
    
    "They tend to be kids with an aptitude for language who like school and come from literate homes where they are read to and where books are valued and discussed.
    
    "That makes it perfect for the offspring of literacy academics, authors of picture books about possums and since I’m a novelist, my own daughters, too.
    
    "For many kids without these literacy advantages, it doesn’t work at all.
    
    "Whole language deserves its place, but only as one among many."
    
    James Moloney, Coorparoo, Qld
    
    
    
  • "I recently ordered coffee at a cafe chain in Melbourne, where the young shop assistant was required to tap my order and first name into the computer, before I took a seat.
    
    "So I said my first name—slowly. He looked at me completely blankly; unable to enter even the first letter, and asked me to spell it out slowly, one letter at a time.
    
    "If he had learnt phonics in primary school as I did, this wouldn’t have happened."
    
    Elizabeth Matuschka, Ballarat, Vic
    
    
    
  • "Surely it is not a matter of either or.
    
    "Phonics should be just one tool in the word-attack toolkit every child deserves.
    
    "Denying phonics to some kids will deny them the capacity to reach their reading potential."
    
    John Clapton, Greenwood, WA
    
    
    
  • "Literacy involves the integration of reading, writing, talking and listening, of which learning to read is but one part.
    
    "Your editorial ("Time to spell it out”, 19/3) describes the whole-language technique as one “where children are expected to work out words by looking at pictures or understanding their context in a sentence”.
    
    "This is only part of the process.
    
    "Using cues other than phonic decoding—sounding out—is encouraged for working out an unknown word.
    
    "Students will look at the initial sound or sound cluster, then consider all the information to hand to arrive at the correct word.
    
    "When a student hesitates over a word that can be sounded out, then the teacher will say first, “try to sound that out”.
    
    "Teaching a program that is based on phonics alone offers no skills for working out the many words, such as “plough” and “enough” that don’t follow the rules."
    
    Alayna Sutcliffe, Empire Bay, NSW
    
    
    
• Internet filter list of porn exposed
  

  The Rudd Government's plans for a nationwide internet filter are in jeopardy after its top-secret blacklist of banned web pages was leaked. The list, published on the internet, reads like a White Pages of porn and its release has provided a handy guide for young people to access the very material the Government wishes to banish from their eyes.
  

  • Similar story in The Sydney Morning Herald:
    
    The communications regulator's secret blacklist of banned websites has been leaked onto the web and includes such innocent sites as a dentist and tuckshop consultant.

  
  Cathy Wilcox © The Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
  

• The Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
  • A crush to get into [NSW] selective schools
    
    More than 13,000 students sat the selective high schools entry test yesterday for the 4152 year 7 places available next year - 630 more than this year.
    
    
    
  • Letters to the Editor
    
    
    • Two more Letters on "coaching" for medical graduate admission tests
      
      
      
      
• The Montreal Gazette
  
  
  • Spared, education officials heave sigh of relief
    by Brenda Branswell
    
    "For all the disparate reactions in Quebec's education sector to yesterday's budget, there was a common theme - appreciation that in tough economic times the system was spared the knife.
    
    "The government increased the education budget by 3.5 per cent - $490 million - to $14.5 billion.
    
    "You have to recognize that the government made significant efforts under the circumstances to support education and training," said Gaëtan Boucher, head of the Fédération des cégeps, which viewed the budget in a positive light.
    
    "Some of the extra money will go toward trying to keep children from dropping out of school.
    
    "Smaller class sizes in elementary schools are also on the horizon.
    
    "As of next fall, class sizes will drop by 20 per cent in Grades 3 and 4 in disadvantaged areas and by 10 per cent in Grade 3 everywhere else..."
    
    Full story in The Montreal Gazette at link
    
    
    
    
• Associated Press / Yahoo News
  
  
  • Obama says education money, reform go together
    Associated Press
    
    Los Angeles – "President Barack Obama says those demanding more money for education should be willing to embrace reform, too.

    "Speaking at a town-hall event in Los Angeles on Thursday, Obama said: "You can't have something for nothing.
    
    "Obama says his administration is pushing to spend more on education. But he noted that state and local governments spend the most on schools and will keep doing so.
    
    "He says schools pleading for more money must be willing to consider better testing of kids. He also says schools should endorse training teachers or getting rid of the ones who are not doing the job."
    
    From Yahoo News / Associated Press at link
    
    
    
    

• The Independent
  
  
  • Head forced to quit by stress wins £400,000 payout
    by Richard Garner, Education Editor
    
    "A primary school headteacher was awarded more than £400,000 in damages yesterday after suffering a nervous breakdown which forced her to give up her job.
    
    "Erica Connor, aged 57, was awarded the compensation against Surrey County Council for negligence in protecting her, following a campaign against her by governors during which she was accused of racism and Islamophobia. The payout is thought to be one of the biggest ever awarded to a headteacher.
    
    "Deputy High Court Judge John Leighton ruled she had been given insufficient support by the council after it became clear that she was suffering mental health problems..."
    
    Full story in The Independent at link
    
    
    
    
• The New York Times
  
  
  • Report Says Principal Put Students in Cage to Fight
    
    Dallas — A high school principal and his security staff shut feuding students in a steel cage to settle disputes with bare-knuckle fistfights, according to an internal report by the Dallas Independent School District.

 

Saturday – Sunday, 21 – 22 March

• The Weekend Australian
  
  
  • Science curriculum 'an insult'
    by Justine Ferrari, Education writer
    
    "Primary school principals have condemned the national science curriculum for failing to focus on scientific knowledge and skills, describing its low expectations of primary teachers and students as insulting.
    
    "In a scathing submission to the National Curriculum Board, the Australian Primary Principals Association says the science curriculum is overly concerned with teaching methods and too little with scientific content.
    
    "The aims are unbalanced in being too focused on active citizenship and the social outcomes of science at the expense of scientific knowledge and skills," the submission says.
    
    "The focus is on the uses of science and on matters which cluster around science, such as values, attitudes, approaches, rather than on science itself."
    
    "The association, which represents principals in government, Catholic and independent schools, says the curriculum largely ignores how little science is taught in primary schools, and particularly the lack of teachers with specialist science training and the resulting reluctance to teach science.
    
    "The national curriculum is a chance to address this shortfall, but the proposed framework fails to take the opportunity, the submission says.
    
    "When the curriculum does address primary students, the APPA says it "seriously underestimates" the ability of children in the early years of school to work with real science content, and that it fails to outline a science program.
    
    "The suggestion that topics and major concepts could include 'block play and structures' and movement, as if these were substantially scientific in nature, is insulting to primary teachers," the submission says. "The suggestion that the world may well seem complex and complicated to children at this stage is likewise insulting."
    
    "On the English curriculum, the association welcomes the proposal to teach grammar and spelling explicitly and strongly supports the focus on teaching the basics, such as phonics, in reading and writing.
    
    "While the principals agree that non-print texts should be studied in the English course, they say print literature should be the main medium studied -- putting the APPA at odds with the professional association representing English teachers. [emphasis added]
    
    "The Australian Association for the Teaching of English says in its submission to the board that the amount of traditional literature taught will have to be reduced to allow room for the study of other forms of texts.
    
    "However, the APPA criticises the jargonistic language used in the English curriculum, arguing that the terms are in "unnecessarily complex and specialised language".
    
    "Language such as 'oriented to colonial agenda' (which seems to mean about Australia's past), 'authoritative teaching' (which seems to mean explicit teaching), 'disciplinarity' (which may mean the practice of English teaching) and 'modalities' (ways of communicating) seem to be either neologisms or terms drawn from academic discourse," it says.
    
    "The principals would prefer the curriculum to be written in language familiar to primary teachers and others "not engaged in the academic study of subject English". [emphasis added]
    
    "APPA president Leonie Trimper said the principals' overriding concern was that each subject was making an ambit claim for lesson time and risked further overcrowding the primary school timetable."
    
    From The Weekend Australian at link
    
    
    
  • Hidden ideologues control our teaching
    by Justine Ferrari
    
    "Brian Cambourne is not a household name, but he has had an enormous influence on our children's education.
    
    "An associate professor in education at Wollongong University, Cambourne was the author of an email proposing a subliminal campaign against NSW Education Minister Verity Firth, to undermine her trial comparing phonics with whole language methods of teaching reading.
    
    "As reported in The Australian on Thursday, Cambourne proposed to his network of literacy colleagues that they should flood the minister's office with emails that would subconsciously link the idea of phonics -- teaching letter-sound connections -- with failure in the minister's mind.
    
    "While it may have been the first time many people had heard his name, in education circles Cambourne casts a long shadow.
    
    "He is the father of whole language theory in Australia, has trained generations of teachers, and more than anyone else has shaped perceptions on reading and literacy.
    
    "Similarly in other subjects, influential education academics have reshaped what is taught in schools and how.
    
    "As a result, English has become less about the study of literature and more about cultural studies. History and geography in all states except NSW became wrapped into one social studies course with economics and legal studies.
    
    "The focus of education shifted from acquiring knowledge to socially engineering citizens.
    
    "These changes occurred with little, if any, public discussion.
    
    "Parents were not asked if their children should study text messages alongside Shakespearean soliloquies, and the community was not consulted over what sort of citizens the schools should produce.
    
    "Curriculums until now have been written behind closed doors, with only internal professional consultation, and then introduced into schools with no reference to the community. [emphasis added]
    
    "But with the focus created by the national curriculum, the fads and ideologies that have held sway over schools are being forced into the daylight.
    
    "The development of the national curriculum involves the community for the first time in deciding what should be taught in schools, and how.
    
    "From the outset, the man charged with steering the national curriculum, education professor Barry McGaw, has demanded that it be written in simple language and easy to understand.
    
    "McGaw has said the audience for the curriculum is not only teachers, but also "interested and intelligent observers". The curriculum is more than a technical document for teachers, and its measure is the public good.
    
    "As a result, community expectations will help shape the national curriculum, tempered appropriately by the expertise of the teachers.
    
    "The process is pushing ideological education debates into the public arena. Beliefs that children don't need to learn grammar, for example, or that sounding out words is not a prerequisite for reading, have been accepted wisdom -- but must now withstand public scrutiny."
    
    From The Weekend Australian at link
    
    
    
  • Feature
    Discipline overthrown by the new-found tyranny of niceness
    by Kenneth Minogue
    
    "Why have the British (and to some extent other Anglophones) allowed family and school life to collapse so extensively?
    
    "The collapse has not happened on all levels of society but it is widespread enough to affect everyone. The statistics, for what they are worth, are remarkable. According to Dispatches, a program aired on British television in January, a poll conducted for the National Union of Schoolmasters-Union of Women Teachers suggested that 97 per cent of teachers had disruptive children in their classes. Almost three-quarters (74.4 per cent) claimed to have problems with physically aggressive children, while almost half (45.5 per cent) noted the disruptive behaviour of a minority was a daily occurrence.
    
    "In some British primary schools, each class is equipped with women who function as behaviour support assistants. They take over the disruptive children and thus allow the tranquillity needed for a little actual teaching. A difficult child, reported Dispatches, might be asked to choose -- choose! -- whether he was prepared to go back into class and behave, otherwise he would be shepherded into a "quiet room" without distractions to cool down. These children are 10 or younger, and the pathos of their being asked to make choices when they have never acquired the integrated mentality needed for that sophisticated act is piteous to behold.
    
    "Think back before the watershed 1960s and the contrast is instructive. Then, children had defined places in a classroom and learned rapidly the decorum necessary for school life. There was no question of choosing whether or not to behave because there was an order of conduct enforced by the teacher and it applied to everyone. The teacher was an authority figure and, like all authority figures, inspired a certain amount of fear, part of which depended on the possibility of physical punishment. Such punishment was seldom used, but it was part of an understood world. As a supply teacher in a variety of primary and secondary modern schools across Brixton, south London, for 18 months in those days, I only once had occasion to call for the cane, which was sent (with the caning record book) straight up from the headmaster's office. As I raised the cane over the offender's hand, a chorus came from the class: "Mustn't raise the cane above your shoulder, Sir, LCC (London County Council) regulation." These were children who had not yet been accorded the absurdity of rights, but they understood very well that they lived under a rule of law.
    
    "The insistent question is this: How is it that so many schools have moved from the orderly world of that time to the violent distraction and educational failure of today? It is a complicated story in which the causal links can only be speculative. We must recognise, of course, that we are a different society from that of two generations ago, better no doubt in some ways, worse in others, and the causal links we detect are only part of the story.
    
    "To lose one's grip on the centrality of punishment in our civilisation is to destroy the crucial balance between punishment and reward. Without the balancing severities of punishment and criticism, praise and reward take on the aspect of bribes, which demeans those who give and those who receive. But themanagers of our world increasingly resort to inducements.
    
    "Seventeen and 18-year-olds from poor families in Britain have been given educational maintenance allowances to induce them to stay on at schools after the age of 16. Schools reported that most of the beneficiaries exploited the system, turning up to the classroom only to qualify for the grant.
    
    "The idea that people should be paid to perform their duties is a pure case of the corruption that has doomed underdeveloped countries to poverty. The destruction of the punishment-reward balance is importing the same moral collapse here.
    
    "The niceness movement, then, is a central part of the answer to the question: How have we moved from the disciplined and largely successful schools we had before 1960 to the disorderly educational failure common, though obviously not universal, today? Much that happens in schools depends on family life, of course, and some of the most radical changes clearly have little to do with politicised compassion.
    
    "From television to the mobile phone, the enclosed character of family life has been opened to outside influences, of which the most powerful is probably the peer group. The peer group locks individuals into the much narrower experiences of contemporaries rather than the intergenerational wisdom of the family.
    
    "Nevertheless, the niceness movement has powerfully changed family life. Sixties' liberation detested the frustrating conventions by which (to put it crudely) sex had to be traded for commitment. Commitment is painful, especially to individuals with little talent for controlling impulse. Many restrictive conventions were abandoned so that the young should be free to follow wherever their impulses might lead.
    
    "Divorce became easier, yet the number of couples getting married dramatically declined. This left many of the resulting children in an unstable world, especially if they belonged to what was euphemistically called a single-parent family. Single parenthood often resulted from misfortune and could work well, but public concern has focused lately on one cohort of such abbreviated families: that of teenage pregnancy. In the past, the pregnant teenager faced painful options: the shotgun marriage, adoption or the backstreet abortionist. The state responded compassionately by providing accommodation and financial support to these young people.
    
    "But many of the children of such relationships grew up to be no less feckless and impulsive than their mothers. In the 1990s, the British government made a late start in trying to identify the fathers of these children, partly to pay for child support and partly to involve men as well as women in these problems. They have not had much success. The children of such unions have been prominent in the annals of gangland and delinquency. This is a classic case of compassion in one generation leading to misery in the next.
    
    "My argument is, then, that the collapse of family and school discipline largely results from a dominant moral sentiment that we may call "the niceness movement". Niceness as a political sentiment has many departments -- political correctness is one, for example -- but I am concerned largely with its sentimental undermining of authority in family and classroom. The selling point of this niceness was, as it were, that pupils would become a nicer, gentler generation, but in fact the disorderly tendencies that teachers soon lost the power to check have spilled over into the playground, where bullying has long been increasing, and from the playground this disorder has spread into the streets. Thus can politicised compassion lead to misery. [emphasis added]
    
    "Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues. Niceness presents itself as benevolence but is often merely an evasion of hard decisions that the realities of human nature require. And it has spread throughout our societies because it is often popular with voters. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and so is a good deal of democratic politics.
    
    "One last point about this moral corruption: it is in important ways irreversible. I have emphasised that the campaign against physical chastisement in schools and families is an important element in the collapse of discipline. But one cannot have discipline back merely by changing the rules because it would need a platoon of soldiers to deal with the riots likely to follow any revival of the cane. Nor could one withdraw the rights to sustenance that dependent mothers have acquired in the 20th century.
    
    "This does not mean that there will not be a backlash against politicised decency as its nastier consequences become intolerable. That backlash is likely to make the well-judged pains of past practice look merciful indeed. But that is what happens when moral structures collapse."
    
    Standpoint
    
    Kenneth Minogue is emeritus professor of political science at the London School of Economics. His publications include The Liberal Mind, Nationalism, The Concept of a University, and Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology.
    
    www.standpointmag.co.uk
    
    From The Weekend Australian at link
    
    
    
  • Letters to the Editor
    
    
    • Screen children at four to find, and help, the strugglers
      
      "Thank goodness NSW Education Minister Verity Firth is at least comparing methods of reading instruction instead of sticking her head in the sand and pretending there is not a problem in our schools ("Teachers in subliminal bid to bar phonics”, 19/3).
      
      "Evidence already published supports and recommends that systematic quality instruction is definitely the best way to teach reading.
      
      "In the teaching of phonological awareness, phonics, the rules of spelling and writing and comprehension are required.
      
      "It would be great if we could screen children as young as four to determine their level of risk for reading difficulties, which would be better than tutoring students who fall below benchmark on the Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 tests.
      
      "Research-based and evidence-based explicit reading programs should be incorporated into the preschool and early years curriculum."
      
      Teresa Pickford, Southport, Qld
      
      
      
    • "Thank you so much for getting to the point ("Time to spell it out”, 19/3). As a secondary school maths teacher, I have had enough.
      
      "It is certainly child abuse when Year 9 students reach me at their age and still need to count up in threes on their fingers in order to tell me what four times three is.
      
      "I am amazed that they know to add up in such groups to even work that out, considering they seem to have been taught virtually no maths facts in seven years of primary school.
      
      "I cannot teach them fractions or formulae, decimals or percentages, so necessary for everyday life (let alone for doing any science) until I spend months of revision drilling them on the times tables."
      
      Anita Bailey, Holland Park West, Qld
      
      
      
    • "The intervention of Brendan Nelson in the debate about teaching reading is compelling (Letters, 20/3).
      
      "However, despite the accusations being made against certain teaching strategies and those who advocate them, we must acknowledge the evidence.
      
      "First, 95 per cent of Year 3 students in NSW, where the trial of an intensive phonics program is to take place, meet national reading benchmarks.
      
      "Most NSW students learn to read because of the state’s balanced approach.
      
      "Such an approach was endorsed by the national inquiry into the teaching of reading, initiated by Dr Nelson in 2005.
      
      "The report for this inquiry stated: “Since reading essentially involves two basic and complementary processes: learning how to decipher print and understanding what the print means, an integrated approach to reading instruction is mandatory.”
      
      Mark Howie, President, NSW English Teachers Association, Leichhardt, NSW
      
      
      
    • "During more than 25 years of specialist teaching of slow learners, I learned some important, if simplistic, truths about the teaching of reading.
      
      "There are three pathways that we all use in learning anything: the visual pathway, in which we learn by looking; the auditory pathway, in which we learn by listening; and the kinesthetic pathway, in which we learn by doing.
      
      "English is not a phonic language but a knowledge of sound symbol relationships is crucial.
      
      "Because there is also a core of frequently used, mostly short, non-phonic words, we learn to recognise these visually, as taught through a whole-language approach.
      
      "So much for the basic decoding.
      
      "But if we are to understand the levels of meaning in any text, we have to do more than merely “bark” correctly at the words.
      
      "So we have to think about the context of the words.
      
      "This is not just guessing, but applying reason and using the logic needed, as is also taught as part of a whole-language approach."
      
      Heather Myers, Maroochydore, Qld
      
      
      
    • "It truly is an important project that is being undertaken by the NSW Education Minister, and we all trust that there is no bias, or framing, in both the implementation and data collection and analysis stages.
      
      "If there is then, yes, your editorial would be correct but it would be more than child abuse, it would be generation abuse, that can be compared only to the time when all children were forced to write with their right hand.
      
      "As we all now know, forcing children to write with their non-preferred hand condemns them to additional reading hurdles."
      
      Rob Sasse, Balywn, Vic
      
      
      
    • "A few years ago I asked my 16-year-old son, an avid reader, how he had learned to read.
      
      "He said “Oh Mum, in infants they tried the whole-word recognition thing on the class but sometimes I didn’t get it, so I just sounded out the words, like you told me to.”
      
      "Knowing no English when I started school I first learned to read in English by sounding out the words and then I learned to speak it.
      
      "My love of reading and the English language has given me great joy. I would hate to think that stubborn adherence to ideology would rob children of that joy."
      
      Maria Luisa Rigo, Canada Bay, NSW
      
      
      
    • "Phonics can be tricky for young children.
      
      "A six-year-old approached me in the playground one day and told me in a worried voice that so and so had used the “R” word.
      
      "After some questioning he whispered the offending word in my ear: “a...hole.”
      
      Judi Cox, Springfield, Qld
      
      
      
      
• The West Australian
  
  
  • Op Ed
    Lessons from the bush fall on stony ground
    by Zoltan Kovacs
    
    "When former school principal Brian Clarke read in this newspaper that the Education Department found it hard to fill teaching positions in remote schools, he decided to step out of retirement and go back to teaching in some of the most testing conditions. He spent the last school term of 2007 at Warburton in the Great Victoria Desert.
    
    "He says he was told in March last year of the death of the newly appointed principal in a four-wheel-drive rollover between Menzies and Kalgoorlie and offered his services again. He became the relief teacher for the 10 desert schools in the area known locally as the “Lands” and was based at the small community of Jameson, 130km east of Warburton.
    
    "Mr Clarke took to the region the wealth of a working lifetime of experience in schools. He left with serious concerns about chronically low school attendances and academic performances of students and the conditions teachers are expected to endure.
    
    "When he learnt that Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said in January she was “gutted” by the results of Aboriginal students in the 2008 literacy and numeracy tests, he decided to tell her about his experiences in the “Lands”.
    
    "He sent her a letter on January 14, with a copy addressed to WA Education Minister Liz Constable. Ms Gillard doesn't have direct responsibility for running schools; Dr Constable does.
    
    "On February 1, Mr Clarke wrote again to Ms Gillard to say that “...surely it is not too much to ask that you at least give me the courtesy of a reply”. Finally he got a response dated February 25 and signed by a department officer who apologised for the delay and went into some detail about Aboriginal education developments.
    
    "Meanwhile, Dr Constable's office sent him a two-sentence acknowledgement signed by an officer and dated February 10. He responded to this on February 12 with another letter to Dr Constable saying, among other things, that surely the points he had raised after a year in the “lands” deserved much better consideration than such a trite response”.
    
    "Nearly two month after Mr Clarke sent his first letter, The West asked Dr Constable's office whether it would confirm the exchange of letters. It did so and commented that a copy of a letter addressed to someone else was regarded as “information only”.
    
    "A spokesman for Dr Constable said that once she received a letter “directly” from Mr Clarke she sought advice and would respond “shortly”. Make of that what you will.
    
    "However, it is hard to ignore the bureaucratic signals that suggest that the views of a veteran teacher with contemporary experience in Aboriginal education attracted little interest or attention at the upper levels of education administration, despite the continuing deplorably low overall levels of achievement among Aboriginal students in remote areas.
    
    "One of the points Mr Clarke sought to make to the ministers is that students perform to the level of their school attendance. He wrote: “If a child misses one day a week from school, their year is 80 per cent of a normal school year. This does not happen. During my year in the 'Lands', absenteeism was far worse that just one day a week.” Warburton school, the biggest in the region with an enrolment of 120, would rarely have half that number attend.
    
    "Mr Clarke wrote that Aboriginal parents should be held responsible and he supported tying Centrelink payments to attendance at all schools. He also argued that some of the schools in the “Lands” desperately needed refurbishment and security needed upgrading, that teachers had to live in substandard accommodation and that the Education Department appeared unable to select the right teachers for these schools.
    
    "Last year, Warburton school, with six teaching areas, had 15 new teachers appointed, four principals and three registrars. The Years 5, 6 and 7 class had eight teachers in the year. Jameson school had seven principals in two years.
    
    "He has recommended significant improvements in conditions for teachers and drastic action to increase school attendances. However, he seems to be up against an unwillingness among education bosses to take notice of people who do the job of teaching and arrive at their conclusions through experience, not social theorising.
    
    zoltan.kovacs@wanews.com.au
    
    From The West Australian
    
    
    
  • Kindy door shuts on disabled children
    by Amanda Saunders
    
    "The State Government's failure to recruit special education teachers has left 14 disabled children without places at a specialist kindergarten, according to a support group.
    
    "Parents were distraught when they were told their children, who have physical disabilities and are aged under four, had lost their place in a unique kindergarten in East Victoria Park which specialised in teaching them basic movement and communication skills.
    
    "An Education Department spokesman said that one of the two specialist teachers at the Carson Street Primary School Conductive Education Centre went on maternity leave this year and despite "searching extensively" the department could not find a replacement..."
    
    Full story in The West Australian
    
    
    
    
• The Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
  • Op Ed
    The crazy politics of learning to read
    by Miranda Devine
    
    "Ideological promoters of the discredited "whole language", or osmosis method, of teaching children to read have been unmasked this week. The whole language lobby's devious and irrational opposition to evidence was exemplified in a bid to derail the State Government's trial of MULTILIT, a successful remedial reading program based on explicit phonics teaching.
    
    "In an email stream last week from Associate Professor Brian Cambourne, of Wollongong University, to literacy educators who subscribe to a university mailing list, unscrupulous strategies for winning the "reading wars" were laid bare. Cambourne, regarded as the "godfather" of whole language in Australia, urges his network to "flood Verity's [the Education Minister, Verity Firth's] office" with messages designed to denigrate MULTILIT and undermine the trial "at an almost subconscious level". He also suggests linking the program to "readicide", which he defines as "the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools".
    
    "Confronted this week by The Australian's education writer, Justine Ferrari, Cambourne came up with this extraordinary quote: "When you rely on evidence, it's twisted … We rely on the cognitive science framing theory, to frame things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true."
    
    "That sounds like a postmodern justification for lying.

  
  Simon Bosch © The Sydney Morning Herald

  "To their great credit, it appears that both Firth and the federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, are more interested in results than ideology. Gillard has tied literacy and numeracy funding to programs proven effective by evidence-based research. "This is about finding out what works," Gillard said in a press release last May. Similarly, Firth has said she is not interested in "internecine debates". She urged educators to "stop arguing about what we believe and start talking about what we know".
  
  "In other words, reading programs should be based on evidence of what works. Paying lip service to phonics under the rebadging of whole-word theory as "balanced" instruction isn't enough. Both Firth and Gillard are lawyers who understand the value of evidence. Interestingly, both are also members of the Labor Left, which will insulate them from the ideological ad hominem attacks usually employed by the leftists of the whole-language lobby, and may help to unhook the teaching of reading from its historic left-right baggage.
  
  "It has never made sense that the whole-word doctrine has been a hobbyhorse of left-wingers, when its results work particularly to the detriment of the working class. Underprivileged children have suffered most from the marginalisation of phonics in schools, as their homes are generally not rich learning environments. The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (of which I was a member) found as many as 30 per cent of year 5 students had literacy problems preventing them from "effectively participating" in further schooling. The National Curriculum Board reportedly puts the figure for struggling readers at between 20 per cent and 40 per cent. [emphasis added]
  
  "How can anyone dismiss the miracles that go on every day in classrooms in Uniting Church centres in Ashfield and Redfern and in a Noel Pearson-led trial in Cape York, where the reading age of indigenous students is three to four years behind the national average.
  
  "You just have to see for yourself the joy in the faces of children as they learn the sounds of the alphabet and how to put them together in words, and they suddenly realise what the "black stuff" on the page means.
  
  "In the program trial in Coen, on Cape York, some children started learning so quickly a special accelerated program had to be devised for them. After two terms there were average gains of almost two years in reading accuracy.
  
  "How can anyone ignore Melbourne's Bellfield Primary, one of the most disadvantaged schools in Australia, which transformed itself by rejecting whole language theory and instituting a program of explicit phonics instruction. The results were stunning, with 91 per cent of grade 2 students reading with 100 per cent accuracy compared to the previous 31 per cent. How can anyone reject results of the seven-year study of underprivileged children in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, who were taught to read using an intensive form of phonics, and wound up more than three years ahead of their peers.
  
  "In his email stream, Cambourne gives a clue to the origins of his ideological blinkers when he dismisses the evidence on which the MULTILIT trial rests as a "neo-liberal" concern.
  
  "I believe that the neoliberal views of 'evidence-based research' … can be shown to be just as flawed as their economic theories". How the science of teaching children to read became an ideological battleground is a mystery to Professor Kevin Wheldall, the inspirational creator of MULTILIT. But there is no doubt it has been a tragedy, as the whole language movement has held sway for 40 years, with its Rousseauian notion that children learn to read naturally just by being exposed to books. When it became clear this was not the case for as many as two-thirds of children, whole-language proponents did not question their beliefs but turned to social justice for justification. Teacher education courses became infected with the revolutionary idea that only by eradicating poverty and underprivilege (by overthrowing the patriarchal, authoritarian, elitist capitalist system, of course) could students progress.
  
  "This has been as futile and damaging as the notion that we cannot prevent catastrophic bushfires unless we stop climate change. It is using the tragedy of illiterate children as the means to achieve an ideological end."
  
  From The Sydney Morning Herald at link
  
  

• Get 97 in HSC and we'll give you $3000: school [Sunday: online only]
  
  A private school in Sydney is rewarding students with cash bonuses for performing well in the Higher School Certificate.
  
  
  
  
• The Sunday Times
  
  
  • Op Ed
    Respect the good old days
    by Joe Spagnolo
    
    "... Labor Collie MP Mick Murray recalled when it was OK for a kid to get a boot up the backside by a copper for playing up.
    
    "He remembered when parents stood behind our law enforcers, instead of taking them to court for trying to teach children the difference between right and wrong.
    
    "I remember the days when we got a boot up the backside and were sent home," Murray said in parliament. "If that happened now, people would go to court and say that their son had been assaulted.
    
    "I know of cases in which sons or daughters have been taken to their front door, drunk and unable to defend themselves, let alone anyone else, and the parents have attacked the police officer for bringing those children home."
    
    "Liberal Morley MLA Ian Britza told parliament: "Parents are afraid to discipline their children in the very early years. "If someone scowls or even looks at a little child, there is recrimination.
    
    "Therefore, we are stopped from correcting our children properly and there is a right way to do that.
    
    "We have taken authority away from teachers in the classroom. Teachers do not know what to do.
    
    "They have been given no authority or protection in the correction of children in the schoolroom..."
    
    Full story in The Sunday Times at link
    
    
    
  • Op Ed
    Good news for schools
    by Phil Haberland
    
    "Being a hands-on sort of guy, I willingly sit on the council at my children's primary school.
    
    "Last week I was in complete shock when the school principal handed me a document titled Building the Education Revolution. Primary Schools for the 21st Century.
    
    "The council was told that we had to decide quickly whether we wanted a) A new library; b) a new covered assembly area; c) a new multipurpose building incorporating music and art classrooms; d) permanent classrooms to replace the dreaded demountables; or e) refurbishment of existing learning facilities.
    
    "All we as a school council had to do was literally tick a box and $850,000 was ours!
    
    "This financial largesse is part of the Federal Government's "Building the Education Revolution" (BER). It's a shame some Canberra bureaucrat didn't call it "Building the Effective Education Revolution", or BEER.
    
    "The funding is happening with a ruthless time line attached. Building starts in May 2009. Principals are being told to "Use it or lose it!".
    
    "Unbelievably, politicians appear to be following up their election promises.
    
    "BER is providing $14.7 billion over three years for new facilities and refurbishments in Australian schools.
    
    "WA's cut for primary schools is about $1 billion.
    
    "Also, as part of the National School Pride Program, WA public schools will receive $98 million to fund maintenance and minor capital works projects in all schools.
    
    "These are the sort of figures that make a jaded school councillor want to ask the principal if there is any champagne in the teachers' staff room fridge.
    
    "No matter which political party initiated this educational infrastructure revolution, it should be applauded.
    
    "Now all we need to hope for is that the WA building industry isn't flooded with dodgy contractors hoping to suck up all this new-found cash – just as those shoddy pink-batt installers have been reported springing up all over the country to capitalise on the Rudd Government's $3.9 billion insulation scheme."
    
    From The Sunday Times at link
    
    
    
    
• The Guardian
  

• Pressing snooze on the school day
  
  Why force teenagers to get out of bed early? One school has changed its hours to accomodate their need to lie-in
  
  
  
  
• The Age
  
  
  • Letters to the Editor [Sunday]
    
    
    • Four Letters on the public – private school debate
      
      
      
  • Quality in journalism [Saturday]
    
    The complete transcript of John B. Fairfax's address to last night's Melbourne Press Club annual awards dinner.

All Alston cartoons are © The West Australian Newspaper
All media quotations, photographs and cartoons © their respective publishers

This page last updated 23 March, 2009 11:46 PM