Coalition’s fancy footwork on Gonski leaves policy underbelly exposed

The only long-term promise about funding his schools policy was this: “We will work co-operatively and constructively with all states and territories to negotiate a fair and sustainable national funding model.”

Apart from that, the Coalition said it would match Labor’s funding deals in 2014 and “match the Commonwealth funding for schools committed by Labor over the forward estimates”.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/coalitions-fancy-footwork-on-gonski-leaves-policy-underbelly-exposed

They actually had a vague school policy — that to go back to the chalk boards of 1956.

Christopher Pyne’s triple backflip, performed with a full sneer, signify an Education Minister who is not equal to his heavy responsibilities and a Government that’s floundering. Managing editorDavid Donovan comments.

WHAT A MANOEUVRE.

First, there was the abrupt backflip by the Abbott Opposition on its months of strident anti-Gonski rhetoric in the days before the Federal election, leading to a supposed “unity ticket” with Labor on Gonski reform. Then, last week came Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s agile backflip on this pre-election promise that all schools would keep their Gonski funding, along with the jaw-droppingdenial by Prime Minister Tony Abbottthat any such election promise had been made ‒ but that the Australian people were apparently suffering from some form of mass delusion. Then yesterday, seemingly because of the roasting being received on social media, came the third backflip, with the Government reverting back to committing to maintaining the Gonski funding after an agreement with the States.

Does anyone truly believe the word of Christopher Pyne ‒ a man who may argue black is white today, and then just a vigorously contend the exact opposite tomorrow ‒ or Tony Abbott (were yesterday’s remarks carefully scripted?) ‒ that the Gonski funding will be maintained? If I was the principal at a Government school, I wouldn’t be inking in my budget for the next few years — I’d be waiting for the now inevitable seeming fourth backflip, executed the moment the issue loses its electoral heat.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/pynes-triple-backflip-over-coalitions-credibility-gap,5949

The Abbott government’s overhaul of the national curriculum appears to be a “brainwashing and propaganda mission”, the Tasmanian education minister, Nick McKim, has argued in one of the most strongly worded attacks on the review.

The federal education minister Christopher Pyne announced on Friday that conservative education advocates Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire would complete their review by mid-year with a view to implementing changes in 2015. Pyne, who will require the support of states and territories to implement changes, said he was confident the review would a “very objective process” that led to fair and balanced outcomes.

Pyne said he wanted the curriculum to be a “robust and worthwhile document” that celebrated Australia and did not downplay the role of western civilisation or the Anzac story. Donnelly, a former chief of staff to the Liberal minister Kevin Andrews, recently attacked the curriculum for “uncritically promoting diversity” and undervaluing western civilisation and “the significance of Judeo-Christian values to our institutions and way of life”.

McKim, the Tasmanian Greens leader who serves as education minister in the minority Labor government, said Pyne had “ominously made his intentions very clear by appointing several fiercely conservative critics of the current curriculum to conduct the review”.

He branded Pyne’s review as “a thinly-veiled attempt to turn educational content into political propaganda” and argued that curriculum development should be left to teachers and educational experts.

“This has all the hallmarks of a brainwashing and propaganda mission to let Mr Pyne impose his extreme right-wing views on Australian students,” McKim said in a statement.

Pyne’s announcement also met with a strong response from Tom Alegounarias, president of the Board of Studies New South Wales. He said the existing national curriculum-based English and maths syllabuses this year were being implemented this year, while history would be introduced next year.

It had been drawn up following “an extensive consultation process” and schools were “reasonably not expecting any changes in the foreseeable future”.

“The curriculum has to go through the Board of Studies. We’ve just gone through an extensive consultation process; it included community input. The curriculum is supported by the community through the consultation, including parent representatives, and it’s about to begin implementation,” he told Guardian Australia.

“Schools are about to begin that process. They’re reasonably not expecting any changes in the foreseeable future to the curriculum they’re about to implement.”

Alegounarias said the NSW syllabuses placed a “lower order status” on the national curriculum’s general capabilities and cross curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures; Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia; and sustainability.

NSW replicated the subjects in the national curriculum but outlined a more comprehensive list of issues and people to be studied. The national curriculum’s examples were “illustrative”.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/christopher-pyne-is-on-brainwashing-and-propaganda-mission-critic-claims

Education minister Christopher Pyne has announced a sweeping review of Australia’s national curriculum to weed out a supposed “partisan bias” in what’s taught in Australia’s classrooms. Announcing the changes, Pyne said:

We don’t see the Australian Curriculum as a static document, but rather one that is gradually improved over time. All Australian students deserve access to a curriculum that encourages and fosters choice and diversity.

Last November, I speculated in a satirical fashion whether or not Pyne might appoint a national curriculum review panel that would include a team of such government-friendly luminaries as historian Geoffrey Blainey, Catholic cardinal George Pell and commentator Gerard Henderson.

Today, after much puffing and huffing from Pyne over the past two years, we hear that the much-anticipated panel will actually comprise two regular News Corp columnists, former teacher and education researcher Kevin Donnelly and University of Queensland academic Ken Wiltshire.

I wasn’t too far off in my November prediction then. My take is that nobody with serious professional credibility in the field could be recruited, so Pyne had to fall back on appointing hackneyed cultural warriors, neither of whom have recent experience in the classroom or in curriculum design. However, while they may not be the first team and probably aren’t even the A-team, they are in situ and they have a Pyne mandate to meddle with the curriculum.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/10/national-curriculum-christopher-pyne

see toon at top...

Why is Pyne so against Gonski?

It is because he understands that Gonski is more than a new approach to allocating recurrent funds to schools. It is a fundamental re-imagining of Australian education. It asks: ''What kind of country do we want Australia to be?'' And he does not like the answer to that question.

The correlation between poor student performance and aggregated social disadvantage is much stronger in Australia than in any other comparable western nation; indeed, stronger than the average for all 34 OECD countries. By consigning our disadvantaged children to the bin of under-achievement, we are failing to maximise our potential stock of human capital. It is primarily this, rather than any differences in curriculum and pedagogy, which puts us behind our international competitors. So long as aggregated social disadvantage continues to have such a significant impact on educational performance, our national decline will continue.

The essential thrust of Gonski is to target strategically our investment in schooling, from both commonwealth and state sources, in order to reduce the impact of aggregated social disadvantage on educational outcomes. As has been shown in NSW with the application of the Resource Allocation Model in government schools, the strategic targeting of resources on a school-by-school basis according to need is readily achievable, and cannot reasonably be opposed on the grounds that it is too complex to implement.

Pyne is shrewd enough to understand that strategic targeting of resources according to need will do much more than reduce the impact of disadvantage on educational outcomes. He knows that it will also reduce the impact of advantage and privilege. If school performance is neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by parental income, ethnic background, religion, school size and location, or whether a student attends an independent, Catholic or public school, success at school will be determined essentially by the student's ability, application and hard work.

In other words, Gonski will create a genuine meritocracy.

Jones again attempted to restore order but he was clearly unable to hear instructions from the program's producer.

As the protest continued unabated, producers cut to a clip of a previous episode, in which Katie Noonan sang a cover version of Gotye's Heart's a Mess.

One or two minutes later, Jones welcomed the studio and TV audience back, saying "we had a little musical interlude there while we got democracy back on track".

"Apologies to the Minister, apologies to everyone on the panel, apologies to the wider audience watching," Jones said.

"That is not what we want to happen on this program. That is not what democracy is all about and those students should understand that."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-05/q-and-a-protesters-target-pyne/5432200

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Hey! Tony Jones! Stop trying to become like Alan Jones...

You would have to know that Christopher Pyne is the geezer who does not understand "de-mo-cra-cy"... He lied with his mate Tony Detritus about their views on education funding. As soon as Pyne became minister of educashun, Pyne reneged on the promises made before the elections. Pyne is a disgrace of a regime that has no anchor in proper democracy, but has been elected by deceit, lies and porkies.

Jones was disappointing and out of line for talking of "democracy" in this Q&A game show — where the liars like Pyne are invited time and time again to sell their rotten wares and see who's buying...

We need more student revolutions... and less of ponderously antagonistic Q&A.

...

Former prime ministerial daughter Jessica Rudd seemed to think not, tweeting "what a sad own goal that was in such an important discussion".

And yet for all the huffing here, the sum total of what we had was some rhymes, a sign and a few bonus minutes of Katie Noonan.

It is nothing compared to the long tradition of student protest, prankery and in some recent cases, violence.

And nothing compared to a previous Q&A protest, when that guy threw his shoes at John Howard.

And besides, Jones is wrong. Expressing your opinion and expressing it where other people don't want to hear it, is exactly what democracy is about.

The fact that the students weren't thrown in jail or sent to a gulag - and were allowed to go and gloat about their actions on Facebook - is also what democracy's about.

It may be annoying (to some), but people with dissenting opinions do tend to be so.

What was disrupted on Monday night was a highly produced television show that has a well-worn formula. 

And as for helping the cause?

Well, it would be fair to say that most Australian news watchers are now fully aware that university students are piping angry about proposals that would see local universities head the way of the US system, and that would see students pay more for their degrees.

I'm not sure where the message failure is here.  

Democracy - as least where these kids are concerned - is all right. 

 ...just to ensure that nothing exciting ever happens on Q&A again, the ABC is now “reviewing our procedures to make sure we reduce that risk [of disruption] and the program does what it should do”. And if you’re unsure what that is, it’s to “provide an opportunity for citizens to ask tough questions and get answers from our politicians”. Only not too tough. The ABC also maintained that “Illegible banners and chants aren’t a substitute for intelligent debate.”

I’m sure Q&A is not suggesting we keep our banners legible and our chants in key. Rather, our national broadcaster seems to be aiming to make Q&A the most dully conformist TV it can be, led by a white middle-aged man protecting the white middle-aged man’s idea of what does, and what does not, constitute “intelligent debate”.

The truth is that Q&A for the most part has become nothing more than politically inane conversation with a much more compelling sideshow, that is Twitter. That’s not the moderated feed that makes it on to the screens during the liveshow, but the unsanitised stream that is #qanda.

Of course the ABC can’t make it a free-for-all, declaring that it will “set the bar at civil”, but for those of us following at home, the best way to watch Q&A these days is to not watch it and to follow the Twitter stream. It’s certainly a lot less dull. You can get the cheap thrill of political derision, without the frustration of watching a middle-aged man try to stifle it.

So what can be done to improve things?

Answering the odd question from the Twitterverse (yes, that would mean that panellists were expected to have spontaneous answers!) might go a long way to spicing things up a little. With about 21,000 tweets an episode, there’s bound to be one question that is “acceptable”.

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/australia-culture-blog/2014/may/12/what-qa-needs-to-do-to-improve

Gus: there is nothing salvageable from Q&A... I always quip that Q&A cannot rise above the riffraff of antagonistic pugilism. Facts cannot permeate the thick skin of the conjurors. The worst one where facts were muddled was this "debate" between a young girl and Minchin, the politician... Imagine Minchin being a professional turf and porkies geezer with convictions of someone who does not want to know, while the young woman was not able to slice through the hide of the mule-spirited man, with any science. So the result was 50/50 of a blancmanged arguments that went nowhere, despite the science of global warming being 99 per cent correct... Idiotic? Yes... And the Q&A show carried on downhill with acceleration from there... Never recovered. Totally ridiculous.