Julie Bishop and Stephen Smith debate education

I saw the “head to head” on The 7.30 Report and can’t blame the public for being confused. I’ll need to review the transcript when it appears later to see if anything substantial was actually said, because my feeling at the moment is very little was.

Much of the debate concerned matters of university financing. I am not competent to talk about that. I defer to Jim Belshaw on that one. It did strike me though that the picture Stephen Smith painted of the expansion of quality university education in China and India presents a far greater challenge than either politician conceded.

It would appear that whoever wins we get a national curriculum. Curiously, the USA does not have one and is unlikely ever to have one. Australia is already and always has been far more centralised in education at school level than either the USA or the UK. (If the USA did have a national curriculum the Creationist/Intelligent Design issue could be even more fascinating.) In recent years the USA has evolved a series of National Standards, and there is much controversy over how effective that has been. In Language Arts (or English) the National Council of Teachers of English (a professional body, not a union) has been a staunch defender of essential values in that area.

More on performance pay for teachers

Arthur has drawn attention to vcehistory.blog on this issue: “Devising a fair and equitable method … to identify good teachers seems like something of a pipe dream.”

Is it tonight Julie Bishop goes “head to head” on education with her Labor “shadow” Stephen Smith on The 7.30 Report? Don’t really know much about Stephen Smith.

Nice quote found…

I was just browsing what various bloggers have been saying about the implications of the Chinese stock crash/correction, a matter I don’t profess to understand. While reading Simply Left Behind (the non-rapturist’s guide to the galaxy) I spotted this under his masthead:

“Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things…every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.” — Matt Santos, “The West Wing”

Meanwhile, the ?Liberal? Party here in Australia is cracking down on dissent in its own ranks: PM berates Liberal critics.

Say something a bit more constructive than “Awk!”

I have just been browsing in an old collection of essays on the teaching of writing: Learning by Teaching: Selected Articles on Writing and Teaching (Boynton/Cook 1982) by Donald M Murray, and the title of this entry reflects one of those essays. I note that Don Murray (right) died last year after a distinguished career in teaching and journalism — he was a Boston Globe columnist. See Donald M. Murray Dies. See also this moving Guest book for Donald M Murray. I met his esteemed New Hampshire colleague Donald Graves on a number of occasions some years back. Visit the New England Writers’ Project. “Prof. Donald M. Murray (1924 – 2006) won a Pulitzer Prize, but will be best remembered for mentoring hundreds of writers. The only way to write well is write often, then revise, revise, revise.” Read the rest of that obituary by J. Dennis Robinson.

Lord Malcolm back home

He sounds tired, but he is back in Surry Hills.

If there isn’t a crisis, invent one…

The Donnelly referred to it, visibly salivating, and the Sydney Morning Herald trumpets this morning: Call to remedy poor teacher literacy:

SCHOOLCHILDREN are not the only ones in the classroom who need to work on their three Rs.

A parliamentary committee is worried that teachers may be graduating from university without sufficiently high literacy and numeracy skills. It wants people starting university education courses to sit special tests to work out whether they need remedial language and numeracy teaching.

In a report published yesterday the House of Representatives Education Committee said only four of 31 universities required entrants to teacher courses to have year 12 mathematics, another eight required year 11 mathematics, and the remaining 19 did not specify any level of mathematics for entry…

I just downloaded that report and so can you at Inquiry into Teacher Education. Such a shame that the preface to it states:

I’m watching “Difference of Opinion”…

…and I am learning very little, except that Kevin Donnelly is still cherry-pickings stats, and relying on anecdotal evidence if it suits him. Further, it appears he left public school teaching because he felt his particular brand of reactionary ideology was not sufficiently rewarded. He strikes me as a resentful man being avenged now “on the whole pack of you”. (I imagine he values Twelfth Night as much as I do and will get the allusion.) He is as lacking in real substance in 2007 as he was at the time I reviewed his great thoughts a few years back — see links on the right under “education”. He is on an ideological mission diligently finding “facts” to support his fetishes or to condemn his Aunt Sallies. He is very good at undermining public confidence in education and at preventing serious thought about where our culture, and education, may stand in this 21st century world, which he seems to reject, so far indeed as he actually comprehends it. As long as we can spell it doesn’t matter that we can’t think. (I believe in both by the way.)

Matthew Arnold he isn’t.

Read Jim Belshaw on “Problems with Performance Pay”

My gut is against the idea, as you may already know, and I further am amazed that an educational practice discredited in the nineteenth century — or something very like it — is suddenly the latest “best practice” according to the vapid (and possibly historically illiterate) Julie Bishop. See Payment by Results: An Example of Assessment in Elementary Education from Nineteenth Century Britain by Brendan A. Rapple in EDUCATION POLICY ANALYSIS ARCHIVES Volume 2 Number 1 January 5, 1994.

Young Daniel Radcliffe, and young Dave

Well, the resemblance to a young Ninglun is quite remarkable, I feel…

Now there is an assertion you can’t check.

John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (2003)

It took me a while to get around to finishing this book, even though it isn’t very long. It is however very provocative and sometimes almost elliptical in style, though not hard to read; I guess the problem is that it can pack so much content and allusion into a very small space, often with throwaway remarks that make you say “Hang on, run that by me again!” It really doesn’t say all that much about Al Qaeda either, aside from arguing that rather than “medieval” Al Qaeda (in the book a shorthand for Islamist extremism) is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. A review in The Observer rightly questions Gray’s depth of understanding here, though I still think Gray has a point. I do agree with The Observer reviewer on this though:

Our next Prime Minister

Please, God…

Please.

Value-adding, performance pay, and similar 21st century superstitions

Like invading Iraq in 2003 or like building a cross-city tunnel, Julie Bishop’s “idea whose time has come at last” slouches towards Canberra to be born, and like those other great moments of politics you can be sure the result will be a nightmare at worst or a waste of time and money at best.

Come on, given that teaching is quintessentially a human transaction, a human relationship, why not apply this contemporary Fordism to marriage or parenting? Why not? Now I am no expert on marriage or parenting, or indeed on Iraq or cross-city tunnels, but I have been a teacher and/or tutor for more than forty years, and I am here to tell you loudly and often that the current philosophy (if that is not an abuse of the term) embraced by the Howard government in general and Julie Bishop in particular is barking up quite a few wrong trees.

The econometricians, statisticians and various other shamans who have been dreaming all this up should be put back on medication as soon as possible and then ignored, except when they care to tell the truth as has Lawrence Ingvarson, a research fellow at the Australian Council of Educational Research, who was commissioned by the Federal Government to research performance pay for teachers.

Setback for Lord Malcolm

Unfortunately he is back in hospital.

The Kamikaze Mind

The what? The Kamikaze Mind

… is the story of an astronaut who launched himself into a black hole. The recovered fragments of his mind have been organized alphabetically into a witty, whimsical, surprisingly touching and laugh-out-loud funny dictionary of a floating mind.

Richard Allen and Karen Perlman have sent these details:

This coming Monday February 26, Richard James Allen will be in Adelaide as part of: WRITING the STORY of the FUTURE, a one-day seminar on the author in the digital age organised by The Australia Council for the Arts. Richard will develop the notion of being a “shapeshifting” artist, that is inherently cross-platform in approach to creating work, by drawing on ideas in his recent UTS Chancellor’s Award-winning doctoral thesis and his cross-platform literary work for pages, performance, and phones, The Kamikaze Mind.

There were four eulogies yesterday…

At Phil Day’s Anglo-Catholic Requiem Eucharist four people spoke of him: one who had known him all his life, one who had known him from university, a colleague from Sydney High (Con Barris) and Subdeacon Graeme Bailey who spoke of Phil as a churchman. The first two had us laughing. Con’s speech was heartfelt and very moving. Graeme Bailey told me more of this side of Phil than I had known before, as Phil was someone who, as Subdeacon Bailey said, did not shout his faith from the mountain top though neither did he hide it under a bushel. I felt these were a right and proper part of a thanksgiving service.

Such a shame then to read Cardinal Pell today, not that he has anything directly to do with St James Church yet. See Bell tolls on saucy detail in eulogies.

Celebration of an amazing man

I arrived at St James Church an hour before Phil Day’s funeral only to find the church already filling up. What an amazing talent the man had for sustaining circles of friendship over decades, and how deeply was he appreciated by generations of students! St James seats 1,000 or more and it was packed, with hundreds standing in the side aisles. Australian of the Year Tim Flannery read the Old Testament Lesson (Ecclesiastes 3: 1-9). The readings and hymns had been chosen by Phil himself, I was told. I saw so many young men who used to be kids I (and Phil) taught… Young men of many ethnicities and faiths whose lives he had touched. Many bore witness to that, such as that anonymous reviewer on RateMyTeachers.com: “5 5 5 Best teacher. Ever.”

Today was a total reminder of what some teachers are and what they give. It is not often one sees this so spectacularly demonstrated as it was today.

Phil was a person of faith too and St James was his church.