Education links
An animated scenario that any teacher can empathise with.
Having fun with a blog on awful library books.
Czech schools may be giving up teaching handwriting and just teach handprinting instead.
Geoffrey Blainey on doing history.
Review of a documentary critiquing public education in the US.
Judge grants German family refugee status because they want to homeschool their children, which is illegal in Germany. A US government education resources site targeted to (among other people) homeschoolers.
The war between lecturers and laptops.
Suggesting educating girls might be a good way of undermining terrorism.
In defence of “elitism”.
New York City intends to stop paying teachers to do nothing.
Students suspended from a Californian high school for wearing American flag t-shirts on the “wrong” day (Mexican heritage day).
Study of lunchrooms finds that private schools are better integrated than public schools in the US.
Noting the success with charter schools in the US is mixed.
Conservatives win a curriculum battle in Texas. But a creationist member of the Education Board narrowly lost his Repulican primary. Suggesting that there is a cycle within the Republican Party on this.
Controversy over when a former head of the Chicago school system (now US Education Secretary) had a list for getting the children of favoured people into better schools. More. Further. And more. His successor as head of the Chicago system apparently committed suicide. Chicago politics: don’t you just love it?
Very useful discussion of vouchers. President Obama happily killed the (very popular) Washington DC voucher program. Illinois unions have killed a voucher proposal to help disadvantaged kids. About why the pressure for vouchers for disadvantaged kids in Chicago. Study finds charter schools do better than government schools in Chicago. Experience elsewhere is more mixed. About the experience of working in one of Chicago’s (disastrous) public schools. An expression of turmoil within the teacher’s union.
Noting that, since Reagan, Harvard and Yale have monopolised not only the Presidency, but serious contenders for the Presidency as well as the Supreme Court.
The new UK Parliament is more of a product of elite schooling than the previous one. About how Labour is to blame for this:
Or - and this is the explanation I favour - isn't their reappearance the final proof of a self-defeating contradiction at the heart of socialism itself? After 13 years of Labour, and many more years of grievously misguided tampering, not only with grammar schools but with the very principles of a humane education, relativising knowledge for fear of privileging truth, denying children an education in the name of not imposing one on them, have we not simply left the field open for Clegg and Cameron's return? They are not in power because they are monsters of deviance - the attacks on Clegg for acting politically this past week have been as absurd as anything in Beckett - nor are they in power because they are throwbacks for whom we entertain a sentimental hierarchical regard; they are in power because we have not come up with a sufficient number of people educationally equipped to seize it from them.
Social mobility through education is a wonderful ideal, but first we have to provide the education.
The irony is that the Tories, with or without the Social Democrats, are far more likely to facilitate this mobility through education than Labour in any of its guises. …
Make of Clegg and Cameron what you will, but they persist against the odds because they are in possession of a culture which is no more theirs than ours, but which, thanks to a wicked ideology of principled self-disinheritance, we have ceded to them. Whoever would empower the disadvantaged must give them back the "best".
About the culture wars and the debate over schooling in Oz:
Donnelly points to the (considerable) evidence that outcomes in schooling do not flow directly from expenditure (Pp128-9). It is a fairly childish form of analysis to think that it does or would, but it is, of course, the perennial claim of defenders of government schooling that the problem is “lack of funding”. Bad incentives create waste and ineffectiveness that ends up looking like inadequate funding but is actually something quite different-something that will neither be changed nor fixed merely by more money. On the contrary, studies suggest that increased spending is largely soaked up in waste and ineffectiveness, with increases in spending going with declines in school productivity (pdf). ...
In his Conclusion, Donnelly draws together his threads to warn of the dangers of increasing “centralised, top down, one-size fits all” approaches, against a utilitarian “improve productivity” notion of education, for a tempered approach to testing to improve accountability an awareness of what happens in schools matters that continuity matters as well as change, that Australia is a highly successful society with a rich cultural heritage that we have an obligation to pass onto our children. That learning has value for its own sake and educational outcomes are improved by empowering parental choice, by allowing diverse students to be taught in diverse ways so that the system itself continues to learn.
Having fun with a blog on awful library books.
Czech schools may be giving up teaching handwriting and just teach handprinting instead.
Geoffrey Blainey on doing history.
Review of a documentary critiquing public education in the US.
Judge grants German family refugee status because they want to homeschool their children, which is illegal in Germany. A US government education resources site targeted to (among other people) homeschoolers.
The war between lecturers and laptops.
Suggesting educating girls might be a good way of undermining terrorism.
In defence of “elitism”.
New York City intends to stop paying teachers to do nothing.
Students suspended from a Californian high school for wearing American flag t-shirts on the “wrong” day (Mexican heritage day).
Study of lunchrooms finds that private schools are better integrated than public schools in the US.
Noting the success with charter schools in the US is mixed.
Conservatives win a curriculum battle in Texas. But a creationist member of the Education Board narrowly lost his Repulican primary. Suggesting that there is a cycle within the Republican Party on this.
Controversy over when a former head of the Chicago school system (now US Education Secretary) had a list for getting the children of favoured people into better schools. More. Further. And more. His successor as head of the Chicago system apparently committed suicide. Chicago politics: don’t you just love it?
Very useful discussion of vouchers. President Obama happily killed the (very popular) Washington DC voucher program. Illinois unions have killed a voucher proposal to help disadvantaged kids. About why the pressure for vouchers for disadvantaged kids in Chicago. Study finds charter schools do better than government schools in Chicago. Experience elsewhere is more mixed. About the experience of working in one of Chicago’s (disastrous) public schools. An expression of turmoil within the teacher’s union.
Noting that, since Reagan, Harvard and Yale have monopolised not only the Presidency, but serious contenders for the Presidency as well as the Supreme Court.
The new UK Parliament is more of a product of elite schooling than the previous one. About how Labour is to blame for this:
Or - and this is the explanation I favour - isn't their reappearance the final proof of a self-defeating contradiction at the heart of socialism itself? After 13 years of Labour, and many more years of grievously misguided tampering, not only with grammar schools but with the very principles of a humane education, relativising knowledge for fear of privileging truth, denying children an education in the name of not imposing one on them, have we not simply left the field open for Clegg and Cameron's return? They are not in power because they are monsters of deviance - the attacks on Clegg for acting politically this past week have been as absurd as anything in Beckett - nor are they in power because they are throwbacks for whom we entertain a sentimental hierarchical regard; they are in power because we have not come up with a sufficient number of people educationally equipped to seize it from them.
Social mobility through education is a wonderful ideal, but first we have to provide the education.
The irony is that the Tories, with or without the Social Democrats, are far more likely to facilitate this mobility through education than Labour in any of its guises. …
Make of Clegg and Cameron what you will, but they persist against the odds because they are in possession of a culture which is no more theirs than ours, but which, thanks to a wicked ideology of principled self-disinheritance, we have ceded to them. Whoever would empower the disadvantaged must give them back the "best".
About the culture wars and the debate over schooling in Oz:
Donnelly points to the (considerable) evidence that outcomes in schooling do not flow directly from expenditure (Pp128-9). It is a fairly childish form of analysis to think that it does or would, but it is, of course, the perennial claim of defenders of government schooling that the problem is “lack of funding”. Bad incentives create waste and ineffectiveness that ends up looking like inadequate funding but is actually something quite different-something that will neither be changed nor fixed merely by more money. On the contrary, studies suggest that increased spending is largely soaked up in waste and ineffectiveness, with increases in spending going with declines in school productivity (pdf). ...
In his Conclusion, Donnelly draws together his threads to warn of the dangers of increasing “centralised, top down, one-size fits all” approaches, against a utilitarian “improve productivity” notion of education, for a tempered approach to testing to improve accountability an awareness of what happens in schools matters that continuity matters as well as change, that Australia is a highly successful society with a rich cultural heritage that we have an obligation to pass onto our children. That learning has value for its own sake and educational outcomes are improved by empowering parental choice, by allowing diverse students to be taught in diverse ways so that the system itself continues to learn.