Education Revolution

President Obama’s attack on high-stakes, standardised tests, like Australia’s National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), proves once again that Australian policy makers and educrats are championing failed educational experiments at the very time they are being ditched overseas.

It’s no secret that Australia’s national literacy and numeracy tests at years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and the policy of making individual school results public on the My School website, are copied from the US and, to a lesser extent, England.

Such is Julia Gillard’s infatuation with the US model of testing and accountability that she invited the New York Education Chancellor, Joel Klein, to Australia and justified NAPLAN and My School on the success of the New York model.

Continue reading "Gillard’s best mate Obama is no rap for NAPLAN" »

Only a few days after doing an Olympic standard quadruple backflip on its asylum seeker policy, the Rudd Government now has announced that it will establish a taskforce to investigate gouging and waste on the $16.2 billion school stimulus package.

A po-faced deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard made the announcement in Canberra this afternoon despite previously claiming that problems with the scheme were largely a confected fantasy of the Opposition and an overly zealous Australian Newspaper (although was careful not to criticise the paper on the record). 

Well now it seems there is a problem worth investigating, worth hiring former chief executive and chairman of UBS Investment Bank Brad Orgill and worth spending $14 million on setting up a taskforce to do it.

Continue reading "What a difference an election year makes" »

Hidden away in most capital cities around Australia there are troubled suburbs which suffer the afflictions of social and economic breakdown.

These communities are often populated by a majority of good hearted battlers living alongside a minority of ratbags. These hidden communities are often absent from our national debate partly because the communities lack advocacy skills and partly because the problems seem so intractable.

Often the only time these troubled suburbs are noticed is when the harsh glare of the media descends upon them in response to some criminal incident or to catalogue their social dysfunction.

Continue reading "Twin revolutions to help troubled suburbs" »

Drifiting off during Question Time yesterday it was tempting to wonder what Evesham State School looked like and what its one student might do with a $250,000 library all to herself.

What if the one student at this school is some kind of genius who needs to read 35 books each afternoon Good Will Hunting style?

Well, after contacting Evesham State School in remote central Queensland it turns out it hasn’t received a cent of the fabled $250,000 and, according to its principal and teacher, it won’t receive any of it.

Continue reading "The one-pupil school isn’t getting any money after all" »

Yesterday saw a pretty poor parliamentary performance from the person widely regarded as the best performer in the Government.

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was tickled up by the opposition on a range of Government pressure points - importantly the question of misdirected stimulus spending, whether the signage at schools benefiting from the plan amounts to advertising and its promise that nobody would be worse off under new IR awards.

Of course the star performer isn’t just deputy Prime Minister, she’s Education Minister, Minister for Employment Workplace Relations minister and Social Inclusion Minister. And this is the point: Education and IR and the two portfolios that are right at the pointy end of policy and politics and the moment and it’s fair to ask whether the pressure of this super-portfolio is starting to get to Gillard.

Continue reading "Is Gillard starting to buckle under the pressure?" »