naughty, very naughty!

The protester:

We didn't get a chance to leave peacefully. The police just started pepper-spraying people, hitting them with batons and throwing them to the floor. It was absolutely shameful.

The Education Minister Julie Bishop:

So we did ring the police because they were actually inside the office chanting.

Imagine! They were actually chanting. Dangerous, chanting. Might lead to macrame or something.

no, i have not disappeared into my navel

And I will be posting again soon, not that I think anyone believes a word I say anymore, as far as promises to blog go. I have not been writing for a few reasons which I'll try and explain soon. I haven't been sketching either, but I have been cartooning myself into a frenzy, and I'll put up a couple soon, despite the danger that they're unintelligible to anyone but myself. (Tried one out on my folks today. First I had to explain it. Then my mum goes, "Ha, ha. So, which one is supposed to be Bush?". But they're being very encouraging, actually.)
On the subject of toons, I was amazed at the Leak/Herge controversy the other day. I would've thought if anything Bill Leak would be helping to market Tintin, by reminding his newspaper's audience of the classic character. Mightn't the publishers even enjoy a sales spike in Australia from this?
I also enjoyed David's post on the Big Donor. It's not the first time BB has achieved a social purpose, as I vaguely recall there was the UK asylum seeker case but I'll have to dig out the clipping as I've forgotten the details.
And Helen had a fantastic post at surfdom. My thoughts on education are that the Howard Government's tendency to view education simply as a commodity only further entrenches disadvantage, since socio-economically disadvantaged kids can only access poor resources. I don't believe public schools should be devalued to the point where they become a place of last resort, yet the only place for anyone who can't afford to pay a premium for decent schooling. (And Helen, the thing about the Superior Mums was funny. Just recently I had a woman who doesn't like me say, "What, your son still wears nappies sometimes and he's three? Well, my daughter was completely toilet-trained by the time she was two!". To which I didn't retort, "And does it not occur to you that every child is different and such comparisons are arbitrary, you silly twit?").
Well, if anyone's still reading me despite the extended and unexplained absences, I really appreciate it and I'll be back soon. In the immortal words of the PM, trust me...

masterclass, my ass

I was surprised to see The Australian declare the Budget a ‘masterclass’ the other day, because on the same front page several of its writers mentioned how Costello had ‘stolen’ and ‘pinched’ the idea from Rudd. It's a weird 'masterclass' that indulges cheating and doing homework the night before it's due, which is what this Howard Government's 'revolution' amounts to. (Saucy Julie Bishop was tightlipped this time, with no cracks of the wit about naughty boys and copycats.)
What is so revolutionary about the Howard Government‘s Budget? Paul Kelly, who endorses the Budget as a “tactical masterstroke”, claims it is revolutionary because the Liberals have finally decided to take education seriously. This “permanent change in Coalition priorities” is apparently evidence of a newly-contrived ability to engage in “long-range thinking”. So, in their eleventh year of rule, they have come to realise that education is important? Good on them. Do they want a medal or a chest to pin it on?
We expected them to lean on the states to enforce compliance and sure enough they are. What's scarier are the more insidious power grabs. The policy is vague on details like, how are they going to decide who's worthy. John Howard has a go at nutting it out, but even he doesn't sound sure:

Mr Howard said the $5 billion would go into a fund to be managed by a group called the Guardians of the Future Fund, chaired by former Commonwealth Bank head David Murray. He said it would invest the money and distribute proceeds on a competitive tender basis, possibly giving priority to universities proposing to match fund money with that from private sources, attracting tax deductibility.
“We will get a group of advisers on university matters, spiced with some financial experts to advise the education minister, who I imagine will discuss it with me and other senior ministers. The Government will make the final decision. “

And I imagine all these groups will be "spiced with" Conservatives. So, who’s electing the board of the Guardians of the Future Fund again? Who are the advisors gonna be ?(Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire, come on down!) Same with the Summer Schools. These sound a bit suss. Says Bishop, “Teachers will be selected by the federal government from a pool nominated by government and non-government schools...the programs would be run by top tertiary educators and would provide up-to-date training based on new research”. Wonder what the criteria are, and who these shadowy educators are again (Ken and Kevin, I'm watching you!).
Can we really expect the Howard Government to make ideologically-unbiased decisions about merit when it so closely controls the flow of funds? And it wants still more control over funds. Simon Marginson noted,

Another item slipped into the budget package indicates that the Government will ask the states to hand over their legislative powers over university finance. If they do not this voluntarily, says the minister, the Federal Government can seize control via its corporations power, which was confirmed last November by the High Court. This would allow the Government to decide entry into the university market and to dictate what public universities do - by shaping academic priorities, for example.

I love how they keep using that line: "Do this, or we'll make you. It's your choice."
Worst of all is the sheer trickery. As Simon Marginson detailed in the Herald yesterday, this Budget is words, words, words signifying nothing. Oh sure it hands over five billion bucks to unis!

HEEF is not a $5 billion investment in education. It is an investment in a capital fund. As the Treasurer, Peter Costello, said on budget night, the capital will not be spent. It remains part of the surplus, making future governments look good. What goes to the universities will be the earnings from the capital, an estimated $304 million a year. That's a 5 per cent increase on the $6 billion the Government spends each year on universities. Along with another $181 million in new funding in the budget, it will make a real difference. But it is no education revolution. All the Government has done is restore the cuts made to annual operating funds it made in the three years after it was first elected in 1996.

Truly, big deal.

Crossposted at Surfdom, where I also added this post today. (Oh, and I forgot to mention, a while ago, this one.)

bishop's pawns

Just now over Adele Horin, I choked on my toast.

The big problem is not whether we have too little narrative in history and too much critical analysis, or study too many movies in English and too little Shakespeare. It is not even that students moving states have to adapt to different curriculum demands, although that is tough. The big problem is the educational divide between the haves and have-nots. The Federal Government will not talk about it because its funding policy for private schools has exacerbated the divide. Labor won't talk about it - not after Mark Latham's "hit list" of elite schools went down so badly last time.

Course she's right, I realised. A national curriculum is essentially irrelevant when the achievement gap exists for socioeconomic reasons. So I've fallen right into the trap of engaging with the Liberal Party's strawman on education! Horin puts her finger on the real areas of crisis:

What is needed is a serious commitment to early intervention programs and to free preschool in disadvantaged areas, extra school funding and specialised teachers for low-achieviing students to help them meet state - or national - curriculum standards.

And I'd really like to see Bishop's truthful answer to this statistic from Horin:

Despite the impression the Federal Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, gives of poor national academic attainment, our students on average are high performers. Comparing results in 27 OECD countries, our 15-year-olds on average ranked second in literacy, sixth in mathematics, and fourth in problem-solving in international tests taken in 2000 and 2003.

Horin's right, it needs to be reframed. It's about the need to compensate for disadvantage.

The Coalition cannot get away with claiming curriculum is a national issue but funding schools to meet the challenge is a state matter. Labor must acknowledge many private schools are overfunded and many public schools are underfunded. It does not mean you need a "hit list". It does mean policies and resources should favour the long tail of underperformers, and start in poor communities from a child's birth.

Still, it's hard not to engage with the Government's ideological attacks on teaching. I feel they are based on absurd arguments that need to be challenged.
So back to my toast...

hey, minister, leave our kids alone!

Having watched the education debate on the 7:30 Report on Wednesday night, I agree with Anne Patty writing in today's Sydney Morning Herald that what is still very murky is the issue of content.
As you’d expect, both Bishop and Smith quoted supporting statistics and denied each other’s. Viewers were left confused about whether or not Federal funding of unis has in fact decreased, and whether unis are now more reliant on private funding than before. It seems that Labor’s stance on education is 'you have to spend money to make money if you want graduates who are globally competitive'. Whereas the Liberal Party’s credo seems more like, 'use money as a weapon to extract certain ideological outcomes in Oz'.
Most reasonable people can appreciate the arguments for a national curriculum and luckily it has bipartisan support. Who would really deny that to try to improve literacy and numeracy is a good thing? Who would disagree that lifting standards and improving quality are positives? Such vague appeals to common sense can't disguise the fact that the real game is about maintaining oppressive and punitive relations with the States for political and ideological reasons.
Bishop reiterates her threat,

"What I’m going to do is take a proposal to the Education Ministers’ meeting in April and if I cannot get cooperation on a national curriculum, I will tie it to funding."

So do State education ministers just have to give in-principle go ahead to the basic idea of a consistent national curriculum or do they have to sign on the dotted line endorsing the Howard Government’s favored model there and then? Imposing sanctions may well punish recalcitrant State governments but perhaps it's the students who pay the price in the end.
The big meeting takes place next month, well before the comparative data is released next year. Pre-empting the research, Bishop promises the data will show significant qualitative differences between the States. Well, let's wait and see before rushing out and reforming ourselves stupid. Surely it makes more sense to await the results of the national comparative data next year and for everyone to get to take a really good look at it to determine which models and which content works best? Why the rush job?
Inexplicably, the Liberals seem to frown on competition between States, and differences are seen as something that must be artificially ironed out. This is in contrast to Labor's support for consistency for what appear to be more practical reasons (eg. labour force mobility).
The critical question for me is about curriculum content and this Bishop neatly skates over without providing any detail. Kerry O'Brien raised as an example the teaching of Australian history. Here Bishop replied, "It [her curriculum] is much broader than just the narrative". Are we really supposed to believe they are going to allow the teaching of critical thinking to continue? For me, anyway, that's the little red flag right there, the philosophical crux of the question of content. In talking about the narrative, Bishop betrays her Government's denial of postmodern pluralism, and its desire to see the simplistic teaching of a single approved narrative.
As 'proof' of a crisis in education, Bishop claims high schools are failing kids but later she seeks credit for the fact that more kids are attending uni than ever. How can that be, if there is such a decline in literacy and numeracy standards?
Anyway, it will be interesting to get a detailed look at the Government's proposed curriculum models, that's for sure. And until then, it's just politics.

arguments that don't hold water

"Merde," Morris Iemma might've thought to himself on reading Ken's post at Surfdom after the televised debate on Friday night (which I didn't get to watch). It's curious that Iemma might lose Labor votes because of his water policy, but on the other hand the conservative Miranda Devine comes out swinging at Debnam.
While I can see Ken's point, I'll still vote for Iemma. A win for Debnam would be ecstatically claimed by Howard as a defacto win for WorkChoices, in the same way that conservative journalist Imre Salusinszky interpreted a potential Iemma win as a defacto loss for WorkChoices. So I hope the water issue doesn't lose too many 'lefties'.
The only comforting thing about the possibility of a 'Premier Debnam' is that if the checks and balances/counterbalance theory works, then if NSW voters switched to Debnam, you'd expect them to be more likely to dump Howard.(Maybe this is why Howard has seemed so lukewarm about Debnam lately, despite early indications that he would be invading state politics to help liberate voters from Labor.) I guess if a vote for Debnam ultimately translates to a vote for Rudd, that's okay with me...
Contrary to the counterbalance theory though, voters might actually find it a relief to see the states able to work co-operatively with federal government, rather than be competitive adversaries as the Liberals have characterised the relationship between the states and Canberra. So it's not inconceivable that Rudd could get in despite the supposed liability of there being so many Labor-run states. Or rather, because of it.
The Liberal Party probably doesn't even care if it wins state elections anymore--far easier for Canberra to just appropriate state powers instead. Peter Costello was interviewed in The Weekend Australian ("Public wants us in charge: Costello"; story is not available online). He claimed that "The public sees the commonwealth as a more competent administrator than the states...People take the view that because the commonwealth is more competent, it should involve itself in more areas, and you can understand that." He offers not a skerrick of evidence in support of there being such a 'public view'. Cynical voters might even suspect the federal Liberals would not be quite so desperate to wrest power from the states if the state premiers happened to be Liberal. Truth is, the Liberal Party does care about the states, but it can't show it, and so it has no choice but to press on with Plan B (the power pushes).
Costello's argument is that the states should be demoted to having only a role of "service delivery" rather than any executive role. The Australian describes this as the Liberals' "twin federalism push" (water and health) but we all know of at least one more push that's looming large: education. The paper's editorial even laments that Howard is not more aggressive on that one. But Howard's just biding his time, lining up all his ducks.
Ultimately, it's one thing to want to make federalism work more efficiently (Rudd's pitch), but the fact remains that if voters really wanted Liberals holding state powers then they wouldn't have repeatedly elected Labor premiers.

Updated:- After hearing about John Howard today announcing more funds for schools maintenance, I have to think that he is likely to shelve any attempt at big ideological reforms in education until after the election. If he wins, he will argue he is mandated to implement the grander (and more disturbing) reforms at any time of his choosing, because he has already staked out his position during the campaign the Liberals and the conservative media have been running these past few years. But this year, well, he has more than enough Grand Ideas to defend already.
Obviously Howard has been listening to his focus groups and has belatedly realised that parents do care about education, but that they have more pressing, practical concerns than obsessing about whether or not teachers are Communists.

catching up with Julie

Allow me to give you the shorter Julie Bishop:

The ALP is playing catch-up with Tony Blair who is playing catch-up with the Liberals who are playing catch-up with Tony Blair who is playing catch-up with the ALP.
Look how Tony Blair copied the ALP in bringing in a form of HECS, then he copied the Liberals by trying to make unis more commercial. If Rudd thinks he can come out and try to make unis more commercial somehow, well, we got there first and so did Tony Blair.
Tony Blair owns education reform. The Liberals own education reform, too. The ALP wants it badly but can’t have it. Can’t touch it.
Can’t even look at it.

Convincing stuff.

slow pokes

Is that the best Julie Bishop can do in response to Kevin Rudd's release of the first tranche of Labor's "education revolution" plans?

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said Labor was playing "catch-up". "The Australian Government has already focused on early childhood as a priority," Ms Bishop said. "We have put the issue of early childhood on the Council of Australian Government's agenda, so Labor is playing catch-up on the early childhood issue."

How nice that after ten years the Australian Government has now put the issue of early childhood on an agenda, coincidentally as there's an election approaching.
Who's really "playing catch-up" around here? Apparently Ms Bishop has forgotten how Kevin Rudd started talking about water last week and, a couple of days later, John Howard started talking about water. Or how about how the Liberals are playing catch-up with David Hicks. Let's face it, after ten years standing around admiring the view, it's the Liberals who have got a lot of catching-up to do.

not sticking to the scripture

"Offer non-believers ethics, schools told" says the headline in the weekend Herald*.

"Ethics should be taught in public schools for students who do not attend scripture lessons to save them wasting time "colouring in", the state parents' group says.
Scripture has been part of secular public education for more than a century, but in many schools non-believers go to the library or playground, or watch videos during the weekly classes."

Well, there's much to be said for coloring in, so we shouldn't sniff at that in any case. But listen, here's an idea. Since we're talking about secular schools in the first place, how about we teach 'em all something like, say, "Comparative religion and ethics"? Why are we having Bible study as part of a secular curriculum anyway?
My parents were staunch atheists and didn't want me to attend, but due to the particular charisma of our scripture teacher, a ninety year old called Mrs Nixon, I used to sneak out of the library to attend Scripture classes. I was quite mesmerised by her. I think I got quite brainwashed in the end and had even built a little altar in my room before my parents got wind of it all and had me taken out of the class again. Phew.
But my point is this: why don't they all just learn ethics?

(*Humph. As much as you can trust what the Herald says these days, anyway.)

the full halfwit nelson

They think they can just do what they want now, the Liberals, don't they? You look away for half a second and there they are, dismantling our higher education system even further. And what schadenfreude from the Education Minister:

"The good news for the Labor Party and student activists is that they will continue to be able to pay their student union fees," Dr Nelson told ABC radio. "There is no law preventing people from paying student union fees."

Yeah, and people are going to pay their taxes if you make it optional, too.
Then you have Mr Nelson saying he's justified in introducing this legislation because he's had a few complaints:

Brendan Nelson says...the Government has received complaints from students about having to pay for things they do not want. Dr Nelson quoted the views of one young man:
"He said some of the things that my money has been spent on in the past year are 'a bus to Woomera for a protest, a sausage sizzle and balloons to protest the Tampa incident, and bail for those arrested at the aforementioned Woomera protest'," [Mr Nelson] said.
"In modern society, student protest and student dissent is an important part of a vibrant democracy but no student should be forced to join and support political activism unless they choose to do so."

I'd like to know exactly how many complaints he's received. A handful, compared to the majority of students who are content paying for services and therefore don't write in to whinge about it?
And watch how Nelson skews it into ridicule of protestors, as if that's the only thing student union fees go towards, when anyone who's ever been to uni knows that's a lie; viz:

John Mullarvey from the Vice Chancellor's Committee says the changes will mean many student services simply will not exist.
"There are a myriad of services provided to students and paid for by this compulsory fee, services such as support services, health services, food outlets etc, all of those services will go unless students want to pay for it voluntarily," he said.

And what Bob Brown said:

Wealthy students could afford services and facilities off-campus, but poorer ones would struggle.
"The opt out is so that wealthier students who've got other options can not pay their dues," [Senator Brown] said.
"We're an egalitarian country and we all should pay our taxes and I think we all should pay our union dues when we go to university."

But who needs unis anyway? We don't want more (snigger) intellectuals after all.