The Illusion of Schooling

The Treehorn Express

Treehorn story? http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

The Treehorn Express Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

 The Illusion of Schooling 

If one wanted to start an education system for a one-language, socially and financially stable, smallish country [Say 23 million inhabitants – about the same size as some world cities] what do you think should be the shape of its schooling system?  Before active learning centres called classrooms can be established, there is a number of organisational requirements to ensure that these classrooms operate with as little turbulence as possible….      right?  And…children need to develop their learning habits from birth as seamlessly as possible. Right? The natural  inquisitive joy of learning that very young children show, needs to be nurtured, fostered, expanded and developed for their entire school life and beyond. Right?

What happens in class each day is so crucial. Who, then,  would be better to arrange a  design for an efficient and effective schooling system  than ordinary, everyday classroom teachers?  Okay? Why not?

A wise government asks itself: Who are the most capable, most experienced, most needs-sensitive to design a world-class system of schooling?  Ordinary, practicing classroom teachers?  Practicing academics ? A group of any Ph.Ds who are smart? A group of elected and politically chosen Ministers of Education?  Officials with a background in public service and, maybe a bit of school experience? A group of politicians…Senators perhaps? Rich corporate business men [e.g. Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Koch Brothers]? Lawyers [e.g. Joel Klein, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd]? Bankers?

To date, countries, seemingly keen on impregnating classroom practices with mediocrity leading to backwardness, have tried all of the above groups….. except the first group… those in charge of our children’s future every day of every school year.  Their turn?  Not their unions; just worthwhile representatives. They’ll tell it as it is; and make sensible suggestions.

Starting Age The age to start ‘formal’ [as it is called] schooling needs to be consistent for every child. Of course. How to start the school-learning life of each individual is so important. Each child is different, but a common starting age makes administrative sense, and to have a small population start from a variety of ages is plain crazy. That’s if the rituals of ‘formal’ schooling have any meaning. Right?  Extremely silly. So some high-octane thinking about starting age is needed before any thing else gets off the ground. It would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it, to have a common curriculum with prescriptive overtones for schools before you knew their exact shape?

Contemporary and earlier research as well as school experience shows that the best age for a child to begin experiences that classrooms provide is at about age 7.  All educationally advanced countries start at this age. Starting earlier than this curbs childhood curiosity, problem-solving capacity, ability to play [non-work] and starting too early can have a life-time effect on confidence, curiosity, attitude to occupational interests,  social/ cultural competencies, general expectations and other serious developmental attitudes.

Many busy Mums don’t like the idea of helping, guiding, tolerating kids at home for a few more years, however.

Developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld suggests that four, five, six year olds are not ready to learn [as schools expect them to do] because the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that control feelings, is still under construction. ’It only gets wired at between five and seven years of age.”  http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=9814  He reckons that monkeys and elephants can be taught to perform if that’s what you think your child should do. Is that the reason for starting school earlier than necessary? It seems so.

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School-based child development, as an responsibility of the state, can [and should] be divided into three phases 1. Early Childhood [Ages 0-7]. 2. Middle Childhood [Ages 8-14]. 3. Late Childhood [Ages 14+]. Of course, the middle and late childhood ages are usually called Primary and Secondary schooling.  It’s the pupils of these legislated levels of schooling for which governments take most responsibility through law. Only a government that sponsors fairness, likes children, has faith in their potential and wants them to develop their learning potential, considers what it does with its children very, very seriously [e.g. Finland]. Other governments tinker. Australia has a variety of starting ages, most of them around the 4-5 years with different names for the first year…Prep., Kindergarten, Reception, Transition. Pure gimmickry. Surely. Can’t  the first year of ‘formal’ schooling be called Year 1 with a non-prescriptive curriculum to match?

The pre-school early ages [aka Early Childhood] in an advanced society concentrate on happiness, get-along-ability, developing curiosity and inquisitiveness, enjoying childhood for seven years under the control of parents. The first of these, happiness, deserves more consideration than it is given.   See http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html  Pre-school  agencies that offer help to Mums and Grand-mums would be as diverse as possible. Parents make the choices and decide the pattern of learning to best suit their little ones. Children can then move to ‘formal’ public schooling with confidence and a true sense of inquiry. A progressive country then ensures that a network of well supervised, experience-based public schools set a standard for all other kinds of schooling.

It’s at the real school level that parents learn to challenge their own beliefs. Do they continue to believe in schooling as a developmental agency where each child’s potential is warmly challenged to its highest degree, or a place for  each child is force-fed material and is regarded as a passive, obedient receptacle of information that someone else has decided each should know? Many governments and their agencies are incapable of lateral thinking, so they adhere to anachronistic forms of schooling that actually demonise the learning process from Year 1.

Wide scale blanket testing is a typical example. Parents and some teachers, even, believe that if one knows their tables and spelling and grammar then they are set for life; and that a school is a good school if its children do well collectively on certain performance categories. This New York based genius is now embedded in Australian political savvy and in some ‘educators’ belief systems. This act of worship has its genesis in a firm belief that we each have a fixed measure of intelligence. Americans have loved this notion since 1916 because they can number it, score it and grade it. Fixing firm scores is embedded in American thinking. Australia follows American ideas as faithfully as possible, and is now moving back with it to the original idea that the wheat should be sorted from the chaff and schooling arrangement be made to suit.

The father of IQ branding, Lewis Termin wrote the guidelines for how poor performers should be handled: “Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look after themselves. There is no possibility of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their prolific breeding.” [“The Measurement of Intelligence” pp91-92, 1916 – cited in ‘Eugenic Legacies Still Influence Education” [David B. Cohen]: http://accomplishedcaliforniateachers.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/eugenic-legacy/

It’s a dangerous legacy. It ignores the conscious integrity of learning in the teaching/learning [aka Learnacy] context of a school. It infers that testing can sponsor improvement in attitudes towards learning. Dangerous. It instinctively implies that a New York lawyer knows more about how to rear and encourage our children than we do. It implies that spending more school and private time on test preparation is preferable and more effective for child development than spending time on exploring the beauty of mathematics, the intrigue of our fascinating English language, the wonders of science.

Parents and teachers bow low to the near-sighted, narrow-minded, illogicality of totalitarian control. They tend to laud or approve by their silence,  the efforts of those governments which just throw money thoughtlessly at ‘education’; and make whimsical alterations to system structures without finding out what happens in the classroom and what the ones within the classroom feel about any change. Is a tight and demanding prescriptive curriculum with common core objectives in a strict age-grade, subject-centred organisational mode, the only way to school our children and does it help them with their general education? Should children at school be treated as students or as pupils?

There are so many important questions to be asked. Until we do, our learning-destructive Klein system remains; and our children pay the penalty.

Despite the irrefutable evidence that children progress faster and achieve higher when they are loved and unthreatened; and when teachers are highly regarded for what they do and respected for their opinions, we continue to approve of our Orwellian forms of control by our silence. Our culture of silence says that we salute authoritarianism at the expense of enlightenment. To our eternal shame, we allow demonising national blanket testing to exist.

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Read what Valerie Strauss, education journalist for The Washington Post has to say. Her column, by the way, always features a quote from Albert Einstein : “It’s a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

Valerie points out Seven Misconceptions about How Students Learn , suggesting that ‘many people – educators included – still cling to some of these misconceptions about learning because they think on their own  experiences in school, ignoring what 21st century science and experience are revealing.’

http://schoolleadership20.com/profiles/blogs/seven-misconceptions-about-how-students-learn-by-valerie-strauss

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If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. Meditate on the plight of today’s generation of Aussie kids.

OtherTreehorns ? :   Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Maintained by outstanding NZ educator, Allan Alach

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

The Classroom

The Treehorn Express

Treehorn story? http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

The Treehorn Express Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

 The Classroom

It’s where all the action takes place.  It’s where our country’s future resides. It’s the living learning laboratory where a child’s life will be shaped to a major degree. It’s where those who entered for the first time this month will emerge from in 2025 with growing talents to take on and shape the world. Each classroom is an amazing place where the kinds of interchanges, important for national survival and development, are so critical.

What do they look like? How many has the general public seen? Does a normal classroom really look like the ones portrayed in films and documentaries?  Kotter ?  Mr. Chips? Mark Thackery [‘To Sir With Love’]? John Keating [‘Dead Poets’ Society’]?Alex Jurel [‘Teachers’]?  They all ran classrooms, where their voices dominated their chosen activity. Very good role models, poor teachers. Very, very adult controlled. Have you ever seen a popular movie located in a classroom that did not show a teacher trying to direct activity from his place near a chalk-board? Didactic, ‘jug to mug’, chalk-talk techniques such as these seem to dominate film producers’ views of schooling; and the public often assumes that it is how classrooms are run.  A recent ABC ‘Four Corners’ program, indeed, portrayed a keen teacher trying to improve one of her adult-controlled teaching techniques by heeding advice from one who was experienced in this particular mode. Such portrayals of teacher-dominated didactic techniques are rampant. As a teaching technique, it is one of the hundreds of strategies learned [it is hoped] during teacher preparation or upgrade.

Didactic modes are useful for large group instruction and for force-feeding material. Every Sunday at Church my minister tries to instruct me in something that he has decided I ought to learn about. I can’t remember much from a lifetime of such instruction, although I know that I have sometimes listened to one who was a visitor or when my usual minister has tried something different. I pretend to be interested usually, but my thoughts are my own. That’s not much different from what happens in a classroom where such techniques prevail. They don’t have much going for them. Such techniques are thought to be useful for exam preparation and they certainly apply when a lot of writing has to be done. They are useful in such cases; and fear helps to maintain attention. There is not a great deal of the sort of individual personal interactions, that group and maieutic techniques promote.  Pupils, unfortunately,  are treated as students.

Now that NAPLAN controls Australian schooling, such impersonal techniques are becoming more common.

Encouragement of confining, didactic classroom cultures is official, indeed. An authority or school endorses them when it undertakes wide scale cheating by encouraging the use of practice tests, or allows classroom time for the kind of teaching that influences the  ‘foreign’ test results. They don’t seem to appreciate that they are crippling natural life-long learning that children deserve, even crave.

Classrooms need to sparkle with the joy of learning, with a zest for learning for its own sake, with a big yen for maximum achievement, with a yearning for thoughtful challenges and sheer happiness to be in such a classroom.  Do they… under test conditions?

It is foreseen that strict didactic modes of instruction will predominate more and more classrooms, the longer national blanket testing exists. It’s a simple technique and can be easily used to conduct the practice sessions required. One does not need to have a teaching degree to organise such classrooms. Remember the escapee from the mental institution in ‘Teachers’ and his history lessons?

Australia’s economic and social development is in jeopardy. There is little doubt.  If the U.S.A. provides us with any model [Yes. The power elite copied its NY version] it is one that, after ten years of a screwy belief in the power of blanket testing and a belief that schools should be testing factories, is heading downhill fast, on all counts. Just check the literature yourself.

When will ‘they’ ever learn?

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QUICK READS….

STANDARDIZED TESTING : THE MONSTER THAT ATE  AMERICAN EDUCATION

 http://bigthink.com/ideas/42087

From Allan Alach

Author Megan Erickson says, “In practice, test scores are not being used for diagnostic purposes but as a clumsy and myopic way to evaluate [and penalize] American schools, teachers and students.”

“The legislation was designed to address the growing achievement gap between rich and poor students in American schools. ‘The problem, ‘ as Diane Ravitch writes in The Life and Death of the Great American School System ‘was the misuse of testing for high-stakes purposes —and the idea that changes would inevitably produce better education.’”

“’If we think about what our needs are for the twenty-first century, and not just how do we compete in the world but how do we live in the world, how do we survive in the world, we need a generation of people who will succeed us who are thoughtful, who can reflect, who can think,’ says Ravitch. The question is, does testing really provide us with a measure of how well students utilize higher-order thinking skills? “

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ROTTEN TO THE (COMMON) CORE

http://dailycensored.com/2012/02/13/rotten-to-the-common-core

From Allan Alach.

Author Paul Thomas [13-02-2012] writes, “If insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results, then South Carolina is about to join much of the nation in education policy that can only be called insanity.”   It “jumped on the standard/testing bandwagon and has produced multiple versions of standards test to add to a yet-to-be-named increased form of testing associated with a Common Core.”

“ Plans for implementing Common Core standards include increased testing and implementing those tests by computers, insuring that this newest incarnation of the same solutions will be an even greater failure than the past three decades. Implementing new tests always produces lower scores in the first years of use, but more troubling is that high-poverty students tend to score even lower on computer-based testing than on the same paper tests….and….Teachers must be trained directly and spend time learning the standards while a tremendous amount of instructional time will be replaced by more teaching to the test and, with the new regime of testing, more testing days throughout the entire school year.”

“Weighing a pig doesn’t make it fatter. Neither does building a new scale every few years. Any farmer who weighed and kept weighing his livestock and failed to consider what he was feeding them, and then built a new scale to address the problem would be considered insane.”

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HOW A CRACKPOT THEORY OF EDUCATION REFORM BECAME NATIONAL POLICY

http://hnn.us/articles/how-crackpot-theory-education-reform-becamme-national-policy

This article by Mark Naison, History Professor at Fordham Uni, was referred by Ken & Suesie Woolford , former principal and  teacher, now Toowoomba home schoolers: Prof. Naison says that They “ …looked at the growing chasm between the rich  and poor, the huge size of the nation’s prison population, and the growing racial and socioeconomic gulf in education, and decided something had to be done to remedy these problems.”

“Corporate leaders, heads of major foundations, civil rights leaders, and politicians in both major parties have brought this explanation hook line and sinker, and so thus we have one of the strangest social movements in modern American history – the demonization of American teachers and the development of strategies to radically transform education by taking power away from them.”

“Through policies developed at the federal level, but implemented at state level so that they affect every school in the nation, scrutinizing teacher effectiveness has become a national mission with as much fanfare as was America’s efforts to put a rocket into space in the 1950s and 60s.”

“What you have, in short, is a prescription for making the nation’s schools places of fear and dread, ruled by a test protocol that deadens minds and stifles creative thinking. Make no mistake, there are people who stand to benefit handsomely from this insanity- especially the companies who make the tests and the consultants who administer them – but anyone who thinks this level of testing will make America’s schools more effective or reduce social inequality has a capacity for self-delusion that staggers the imagination. Only people with no options would chose to send their kids to schools run that way.””

“There are few examples in America where such a crackpot theory guided social policy this way. The most recent that springs to mind is Prohibition, which was based on the conviction that banning booze would somehow create social stability and save America from corruption.

Someday, test-based education reform will go the way of Prohibition, but not before incalculable damage is done to the nation’s children.

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SUMMARY 

The insanity of weighing achievements year by year at the sacrifice of higher-order thinking skills was a crack-pot idea in the first place. It is akin to creating a social policy based on Prohibition.

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If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. Meditate on the plight of today’s Aussie kids.

OtherTreehorns ? :   Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Maintained by outstanding NZ educator, Allan Alach

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

NAPLAN or NAPALM?

The Treehorn Express

Treehorn story? http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

The Treehorn Express Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

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NAPLAN – SOME COMMENTS

It’s NAPALM, says Ken

For almost every Treehorn Express that I send,  I receive at least one comment or question, like : “When are they going to wake up to the damage that they are doing?”  ‘They’, of course, refers to the power elite [to use Kelvin Smythe’s term] consisting of  ‘politicians, bureaucrats, quantitative academics, newspaper editors’ and pro-NAPLANNERS ,who have ‘hermetically sealed’ the Australian schooling system; and taken little notice, deliberately, of the toxic problems that they have created and/or supported.

As Kelvin Smythe said in his honest-to-goodness treatise: “…while non-solutions to complex social issues are being slowly pursued to political advantage, actual solutions are being ignored, leading to the complex issues becoming more intractable and the ostensible beneficiaries of the non-solutions even more disadvantaged.”

That’s a powerful statement. So true….it’s the nature of western cultures, as demonstrated in schools since the arrival of managerialism’s carcinomatous testing pandemic.

Sadly, contemporary schooling is now being bullied by those, devoid of useful schooling experiences, who will not learn themselves and even seem proud of their destructive efforts – the ‘undead’, as Bruce H. calls them, deaden. One Treehorn reader, a former principal, spoke of a member of our Australian power-elite: “What he knows about schools can be written on the back of a used postage stamp in large font.”  That applies to all of them, I suspect, John.  It’s a truly sad state of affairs.

Another, Fred, a practising teacher, read of the plan to clear the deck of inept teachers.  “There goes the hierarchy and the test-focussed.” he said.

In another return comment, Ken, home-schooling parent, said, “ I note NAPALM has grammar etc. on it, when research [including York Uni.,2005] shows  no correlation between grammar knowledge and writing skills. NAPALM has no consideration for the humans burnt along with the buildings. I muse that if teachers had to take the equivalent of a Hippocratic oath, then most would now be forced to leave their jobs….The kids will survive NAPALM. Even at Auschwitz, as they were waiting to be gassed, children were observed playing in the dirt. I feel sorry for the adults [teachers and parents] whom I know are feeling more and more depowered. They are not asked their opinion. They are told what it will be. If ever the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes was appropriate.”  Yes, Ken. As resilient and play-some children are, the effects of our NAPLAN, our present-day mental gassing, will affect them for quite a while longer, of course.

Former principal Bruce said, “It  was on a visit to Virginia that I saw the destructive forces of computer generated testing take place. A dedicated computer lab room received a classroom of pupils every 45 minutes who filed in, logged on with their personal password and hammered like mad for thirty minutes. As they filed out the teacher pressed the print button and left with the full class results to improve upon till the next session. I think that’s when I saw no place for me in education. I’m glad we got through when we did, as the present rot has certainly caught up and kids will be the long term sufferers but they won’t know what they have missed and why.”

Avid reader Allan, school principal, provided the following articles, worthy of your reading time.

http://www.listener.co.nz/current-affairs/the-researched-child-in-early-education/

Author, Helen May, former dean of the University of Otago College of Education, worried about the passing of the era of progressive solutions, concludes the article : ‘If we can produce children who have a disposition to be learners, to take an interest, to become engaged, to take responsibility, to become good communicators, to become explorers – then we are setting a great foundation. It’s going to take a brave teacher to really challenge National Standards [aka NAPLAN in Australia], but if there is sufficient freedom and innovation, skilful teachers will make it happen. They always have.”

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/maths-reform/9060005/Teenagers-failing-to-study-maths-to-a-good-standard.html#disqus_tnread

Professor Sparks, chairman of the British Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education [ACME] is concerned about the growing disinterest in school Mathematics because “…few pupils take maths beyond the age of 16. They are being ‘put-off’ by test-driven lessons in primary and secondary school. Classes often focus on the dry ‘procedures’ behind sums to make sure children pass exams instead of passing on a well-rounded understanding of the subject. Currently, only one-in-eight teenagers study maths to a good standard in the sixth form – leaving Britain behind many other developed nations. It’s a problem of attitude – being no good at Maths is a badge of honour.”

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/education-departments-obsession-with-test-scores-deepens/2012/02/06/gIQAP7yuyQ_blog.html

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post journalist and editor of The Answer Sheet writes of the U.S. Federal “Education Department’s Obsession with test scores deepens”.  She writes of the screwball Departmental belief that the scores “…tell us something important about how well a teacher does his or her job. They don’t, assessment experts say [over and over], but why let facts get in the way?” She concludes her article : “ Here’s my comment.  Please stop wasting our time and money on nonsense.”

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To summarise :  If you  want our Aussie children to become keen learners  with a firm foundation of schooling, with love for the beauty and challenge of Mathematics; and you want our government to “stop wasting our time and money”, you will insist that the nonsensical, damaging blanket testing called NAPLAN ceases NOW.

If  you want the opposite, don’t take any notice.

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If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. Meditate on the plight of today’s Aussie kids.

OtherTreehorns ? :   Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

[ Sincerest thanks to the outstanding NZ educator, Allan Alach, for maintaining this widely-read site.]

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

A must-read posting – Kelvin Smythe

The Treehorn Express

 Treehorn story? http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

The Treehorn Express Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

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A MUST-READ POSTING

Kelvin Smythe, highly respected former Chief Inspector of Schools, New Zealand, has a blog site call networkonnet on which he posts comments about conditions affecting New Zealand schools. His latest statement is one that all should read.

http://www.networkonnet.co.nz/index.php?section=latest&id=381

 I have taken the liberty of extracting sections from this robust paper and tagged some pieces – albeit unsatisfactorily, because it is such an impressive treatise. It needs to be read in full and given serious consideration.  It confirms the attitudes of those who care for kids at school, I’m sure. [Phil Cullen]

The article is called:

 Bitter and Cynical Strategy on Poverty.

Kelvin Smythe  opens this posting with a comment on the Deputy-PM Bill English’s statement that poverty is not a big issue. Kelvin Smythe then moves to the principles underlying the PM’s notions as they apply to schooling problems, by saying…..

“When the power elite refers to ‘real results’ it is referring to immediate measureable results which, in relation to social issues, is a way of distorting and avoiding the inherent nature of such issues. Such issues are always complex, fundamental, and chronic – therefore not amenable to short term measures or measurement. [Consider, for instance, the  way national standards [Australians substitute NAPLAN for ‘national standards’] and league tables are proposed as a solution to education problems.]”

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“Contemporary Western society – driven as it is by individualism, managerialism, privatisation, accountability, and a deep distaste of the idea of public service – is running perilously short of trust, that vital ingredient for a truly healthy social democracy.

All the time , of course, while non-solutions to complex social issues are slowly being pursued to political advantage, actual solutions are being ignored, leading to the complex issues becoming more intractable and the ostensible beneficiaries of the non-solutions even more disadvantaged.

This posting’s main argument is that in the current political climate, any changes to education or other social policy, whether intended to help the poor or not, will result in making things worse. The power elite knows this, or goes out of its  way not to know it, which is the justification for calling the government’s policy on poverty, bitter and cynical.

Using the powerful tools of propaganda and persuasion at their disposal, the power elite, by playing on fear and insecurity, has been able to convince large sections of society to work against their own interests .”

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The Cultural Capital of Families.

Kelvin Smythe discusses the degrees of cultural capital within families. A NZ HERALD (Wed. Jan.2. 2012) refers to a study that showed that “…competent, bright families transmit their skills to their children….being bred in a high income family provides children with role models and resources for both educational achievement and career success.”

But then, Smythe suggests that such reports don’t  “…really capture the half of it.”  “It is so easy to sit in an academic office or a political office and see things generally, acknowledging the problems, as this report does but, in my view, failing to grasp anywhere satisfactorily the disorderliness and fantastical limitations, the mind-numbing and overwhelming triviality of many children’s experiences, the violent haphazardness of events.

Compare the richness of conversational exchanges between adults and children in some houses and the shouted, impatient, at-wits-end verbal scatterings in others; compare the insubstantial, unhealthy food-preparation-on-the-run in these houses; the never being on you own and the constant clamour and disorder; the catch-as-can family sleeping arrangements; the broken nights from people returning from pubs, parties, and night shifts; the ugliness of backyards; the grinding effects of poverty; and the hopelessness of ever finding a way out.”

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Teacher Support

“The teachers know, of course, what some of these children from poorer families are going through. You see them comforting these children – violence at home, a father in jail, a family separation, all sorts of things…comforting at crisis moments…hugging them…reassuring them….providing a sense of stability….preparing special programs….giving special help….setting an appropriate pace for learning….providing sublime patience while they artfully build up children’s confidence, experiences, conceptual understandings, and learning skills.”

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But look where education is being pushed : a desiccated wasteland of learning. Teaching is becoming formalistic when it needs to be flexible and imaginative; narrow when it needs to be wide; standardised when it needs to be diverse; a soulless learning cram when it needs to be based on understanding; and leached of real world realities when it needs to be cognitively and affectively rich.

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Political Capital

Political parties of all persuasions have “used the concept of provider capture to work cruelly against improving the lot of children. What its use has done is to to move teacher knowledge from policy making, leaving the field open to politicians, bureaucrats, quantitative academics, newspaper editors, and that entity known as the public [whose voice is interpreted by these groups] – it also removes from a position of influence, the voice of parents with children at school. In this way, schooling becomes something of a generational thing, with the older generations holding almost complete sway over educational policy, free to vent their generational prejudices on today’s children and teachers.”

“Then there is the issue of accountability. In the last thirty years in Western countries, accountability has been largely used against schools for their ‘failure’ to achieve the utopian impossibility of having children from straitened circumstances achieve as well as children from privileged ones. The fantastical pressing for ever rising accountability is used to justify ever greater political and bureaucratic intervention, a breakdown in the trust in public schools, and the disparaging of public service as as a prime motivator for the actions of teachers.”

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Curriculum

“Beyond the school gate, is the twisting and turning of the power elite to avoid doing anything genuine about the growing gap beyond rich and poor. The return to the narrow version of the 3Rs should be seen as a cynical strategy put forward as an all-purpose cover for doing nothing of significance…..the power elite has successfully pulled the stunt of a narrow view of literacy and numeracy becoming a proxy for the curriculum…the idea that the 3Rs is somehow separated from the whole curriculum is a damaging fallacy…..The idea, openly acknowledged in present policies, and implicit in the idea of league tables, is that first get the 3Rs in place, and then attend to the wider curriculum.

No, no, no, no!

This idea of the 3Rs first…suggests a failure of imagination throughout the system.”

Audits?

“A great irony of national standards [aka NAPLAN] purported to keep parents and the government better informed, is that the reverse will occur. More information will be provided but, because of high stakes surrounding the production, it will become highly inaccurate – all the supervision, moderation, and computerisation won’t make a jot of difference.”

Government Control

“Also, any drop in learning and accomplishment, where and when it occurs, will be managed by the government – is being managed by the government – through its considerably increased command of the education system : the government already has almost complete control of university quantitative research through its contractual agreements; and control of qualitative reporting through its ideologically charged organisation of the bureaucracies – meaning the education system is already close to being hermetically sealed.

When test results become politically sensitive as they increasingly are through the extreme politicisation of education, the government is easily able to change the nature of the tests, the test processes, the marking procedures to improve or worsen the results as politically suits, and the interpretation and reporting of results.”

o0o

AND

  “Now is the time to have more faith in government requiring, though, better government to have more faith in.  Now is the time for trust and cohesiveness to assume priority in our policy making.

In respect to education, the first step is to implement policies with the potential to improve the education at all levels of society….To hang equity on a hook of school education, even if the specific school education policies are fair and sound, is to leave equity dangling.  Surely it must be obvious that, for whatever reasons, present policies in education are not working in the interests of equity : Western governments have been making much of managerialist education over the past two decades, yet, in that time, inequality has greatly increased. In the USA, national standards, league tables, formalistic teaching, business control of schools, increase in private schools, have been functioning for decades, yet, in that time, economic growth has plummeted.

If  business in New Zealand [and Australia] was achieving to the level of its schools, we would be in clover; and if government was, in turn, achieving to the level of its schools, then we would have ample employment, decent wages, strong social services, and a steep reduction in poverty- allowing schools to flourish even more.”

 ____________________________________________________________________________________

 Please share this with as many folk as you can. I reckon that the full paper should be read by every single teacher and parent in New Zealand and Australia. In particular it needs to be read by those politicians who like children and have the gumption to raise these serious issues at their party meetings – loud and clear.

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If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. Meditate on the plight of today’s Aussie kids.

OtherTreehorns ? :   Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

Important Readings

 The Treehorn Express 

Treehorn story?  http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

The Treehorn Express Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

The Treehorn Express is dedicated to the cessation of Kleinist NAPLAN blanket testing in Australia.  Our recently introduced Australian schooling system is based on one introduced to a New York school district by a lawyer, Joel Klein. in 2002 and copied by Australia’s Ms. Gillard in 2009, without consultation or examination. Now, the key-stone for Australian schooling is the administration of blanket testing of some measureable items for each child every second year, in May. Upon the results, teacher, principals and schools are judged and rated.

Mr Klein, the founder, now heads the Murdoch test-publishing company worth billions!  Australian test-freaks are amongst his disciples.

Why have it? Kleinism is a New York version of fear-driven schooling which separates ‘haves’ from ‘have nots’ and opens the door for mega-bank-rolling by known curriculum vandals for control of school-based learning.

That’s why it exists. It disrespects school pupils, devalues teachers’ professionalism, forces States to prescribe school texts and teaching strategies, threatens Australia’s future and rivals the Perth Mint as a money source for the top end of town.  Why does Australia support it? Why? Money.

You have seen the current advertisements on TV – buy test-practice books – approved cheating – making a mockery of what Australia could be : – a really advanced, educated society – where love of learning and achievement is happily pursued.

__Little Treehorn and his cobbers reckon that “Adults just don’t care about school kids.”  You don’t?__

SOME READINGS…..

NOTE VERY CAREFULLY THIS RECENT RELEASE:-

The Impacts of High Stakes Testing on School Students and their Families

http://www.whitlam.org/the_program/high_stakes_testing

The Whitlam Institute,along with its project partners, the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and the Foundation of Young Australians, is embarking on a significant,  long-term research project which examines the impacts of high stakes testing on school students and their families.

“Although much of the literature is focussed on the USA and the UK, the consistency of these finding raises legitimate questions and deep concern regarding the Australian experience.”

This review by Professor John Polesel, Ms Nicky Dulfer and Dr Malcolm Turnbull is compelling. Click above.

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Education Deform as Farce

http://theassailedteacher.com/2012/01/19/education-deform-as-farce/

introduction to this article features an illustration of the hand of Uncle Sam over a John Doe’s mouth with large-type demands : QUIET!    KNOW YOUR PLACE.    SHUT YOUR FACE!

But; “Defenders of public education cannot be compromisers.” says the author.

O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0

Why the United States is Destroying Its Education System

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/why_the_united_states_is_destroying_her_education_system_20110410/

This paper by Chris Hodges, posted on April 11, 2011, was hailed for its frankness; e.g. “I cannot say for certain –not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing – but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self respect. In less than a decade we have been stripped of autonomy and increasingly micromanaged.”

________________________________________________________

You know you have the time to absorb these three articles. Never, ever trust a professional person who says that they ‘don’t have the time’ to read their profession’s literature as much as they can. They can’t organise their time. They are useless….probably spending their time trying to a arrange a queue of two people. You know that it is only busy people who find time to do more. Share important time with other professionals.

______________________________________________________________________________

Come on folks. Get off the fence. Say something to somebody who might be able to help our kids.

Parents can stop the malignant practice by telling their school that they don’t want their children to contest NAPLAN.

Politicians can stop it if a few fair-dinkum Aussie ones stand up for Aussie kids in their Parliamentary Party Room.

Principals can stop it by refusing to have their professional ethics battered any more.

Teachers can stop it by saying ‘enough is enough’. We like our kids.

o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0

 If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. Meditate. Calm your anger. Enjoy. For their sake, just say NO to NAPLAN.

OtherTreehorns ? :   Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

News Ltd. does it.

  The Treehorn Express 

Treehorn story?  http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

The Treehorn Express Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

The Treehorn Express is dedicated to the cessation of Kleinist NAPLAN blanket testing in Australia.  Our recently introduced Australian schooling system is based on one introduced to a New York school district by a lawyer, Joel Klein. in 2002 and copied by Australia’s Ms. Gillard in 2009, without consultation or examination. Now, the key-stone for Australian schooling is the administration of blanket testing of some measureable items for each child every second year, in May. Upon the results, teacher, principals and schools are judged and rated.

Mr Klein, the founder, now heads the Murdoch test-publishing company worth billions!  Australian test-freaks are amongst his disciples.

Why have it? Kleinism is a New York version of fear-driven schooling which separates ‘haves’ from ‘have nots’ and opens the door for mega-bank-rolling by known curriculum vandals for control of school-based learning. That’s why it exists.

It disrespects school pupils, devalues teachers’ professionalism, forces States to prescribe school texts and teaching strategies, threatens Australia’s future and rivals the Perth Mint as a money source for the top end of town. 

Why does Australia support it? Why? Money. 

____Little Treehorn and his cobbers reckon that “Adults just don’t care about school kids.”  You don’t?___ 

NEWS LTD. DOES IT

Rupert Murdoch will be pleased. One of his colonial possessions has taken the initiative and is about to expose the dreadful state of schools in the the state of Queensland, Australia. It makes his own task so much easier. While school authorities in the USA are pleading: ”Release our schools from the control of  Rupert Murdoch.”, the Courier Mail [Friday, 27 Jan.] headlines “Good and bad of our education revealed”.

Go Rupert and Joel. Your troops are loyal.

The article forewarns: “Individual school-by-school marks will be revealed after a six-month battle by this paper for the results” in tomorrow’s issue. It says that the State Government has carried out ‘audits benchmarking all of its schools’ and supplied the material to the newspaper. That should earn the government’s  candidates thousands of more votes from the teaching/parent fraternity at the coming elections!

“Revealing school marks” will be about as useful as revealing how many school children carry a hanky… but some people will make judgements about the worth of schools and praise the Naplan blanket testing system for revealing such profound information. Families will be packing to head for Wonga Beach [as Kevin Rudd advised parents to ‘walk to another school’], north of Cairns because the marks reveal that it was “one of three to achieve an outstanding rating for the ‘effective teaching categories’ practices category. The four-page lift-out in tomorrow’s C.M will cause a massive increase in daily circulation….and migration.

Comments from child-protecting agencies such as the Q’ld Council of P&Cs, the Q’ld Assocation of State School Principals, the Queensland Teachers Union, and all Independent School organisations will proffer their professional opinions  in subsequent papers; and they will be measured by the metre. Treehorn will be thrilled. He is being noticed.

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However..

Learning is different from such gathering of marks of a few school items. Their relationship is fragile.  Learning is an individual and personal matter. It is immoral for anyone beyond my child’s learning experiences to make judgements about the outcomes of his exchanges with me or his teacher. The evaluation of his efforts at school and at home is his business. I am very interested and so is his teacher, with whom I share his progress. IT IS NO ONE ELSE’S BUSINESS. I did not give permission to any group or politicians or measurers to mention my child’s effort within his class or school context. Leave him out of the numerals that are used to judge the learning experiences of his collectivity.  So there.

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At the same time…

In the independent US press, Marion Brady, a frequent contributor to the Washington Post [not owned by Rupert] authored an article on Thursday, 26 January, the opening and closing paragraphs of which are repeated below. The full article is available on http://truth-out.org/education-reform-order-magnitude-improvement/1327433628

It’s certainly worth reading.

“Education Reform: An Order-of-Magnitude Improvement.

Imagine the present corporately promoted education reform effort as a truck, its tyres flat from the weight of the many unexamined assumptions it carries.

On board: An assumption that…

• punishment and rewards effectively motivate;
• learning is hard, unpleasant work;
• what the young need to know is some agreed-upon, standard body of knowledge;
• doing more rigorously what we’ve always done will raise test scores;
• teacher talk and textbook text can teach complex ideas;

Well you get the idea.

Misdiagnosing the Main Problem

Right now, the biggest, heaviest assumption on the reform truck has it that, when Common Core State Standards Initiative is complete – when someone has decided exactly what every kid is supposed to know in every school subject at every grade level – the education reform truck will take off like gangbusters.

It won’t. If all the reformers’ flawed assumptions are corrected, but the traditional math-science-language-arts-social-studies “core curriculum” remains the main organiser of knowledge, the truck may creep forward a few inches, but it won’t take the young where they need to go if they care about societal survival. The mess from this generation’s political paralysis and refusal to address looming problems can’t be cleaned up using the same education that helped create it.

What’s wrong with “the core”?

For its content to be processed, stored in memory, retrieved and combined in novel ways to create new knowledge, it would have to be well organised and integrated, It isn’t. It’s a confusing, random. overwhelming, intellectually unmanageable assortment of facts, specialised vocabularies, disconnected conceptual frameworks, and abstractions – the whole too far removed from life as the young live it for them to care about it.

So they don’t. They’re being blasted with information at fire-hose velocity. The diligent and the fearful store as much as they can in short-term memory, and when testing is over, their brains delete what’s considered clutter because it’s not immediately useful. The non-diligent and the cynical guess and/or cheat the answer sheets. The rest [and their numbers, understandingly, are steadily increasing] opt out of the trivia game, or are opted out by thought, caring parents.

CONCLUSION : On the Other Hand

When the CEOs and the politicians they’ve bought finish the simplistic “reform” they’ve started, when the claim that an order-of-magnitude improvement in learner intellectual performance has been dismissed as hyperbole, when all states have been pressured to adopt the Common Core Standards [aka National Curriculum] locking the knowledge-fragmenting subject-matter tests that can’t measure the quantities and quality of thought have been nationalised, and when the Standards and Testing Police are fully deployed and looking over every teacher’s shoulder, it’ll all be over. America and the nations that follow its lead in education [That’s us ] will face a dynamic world equipped with a static curriculum.

Catastrophe will be inevitable.”

___________________________________________________________________________________

  Come on folks. Get off the fence. Say something to somebody who might be able to help our kids.

Parents can stop the malignant practice by telling their school that they don’t want their children to contest NAPLAN.

Politicians can stop it if a few fair-dinkum Aussie ones stand up for Aussie kids in their Parliamentary Party Room.

Principals can stop it by refusing to have their professional ethics battered any more.

Teachers can stop it by saying ‘enough is enough’. We like our kids.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     OtherTreehorns ? :   Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

The Undead

CELEBRATE  AUSTRALIA DAY   -    BE FAIR-DINKUM   –   STOP NEW YORK-STYLE TESTING   –   SAY NO TO NAPLAN

 The Treehorn Express 

 Treehorn story?  http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

The Treehorn Express is dedicated to the cessation of Kleinist NAPLAN blanket testing in Australia.  Our recently introduced Australian schooling system is based on one introduced to a New York school district by a lawyer, Joel Klein. in 2002 and copied by Australia’s Ms. Gillard in 2009, without consultation or examination. Now, the key-stone for Australian schooling is the administration of blanket testing of some measureable items for each child every second year, in May. Upon the results, teacher, principals and schools are judged and rated.

Mr Klein, the founder, now heads the Murdoch test-publishing company worth billions!  Australian test-freaks are amongst his disciples.

Why have it? Kleinism is a New York version of fear-driven schooling which separates ‘haves’ from ‘have nots’ and opens the door for mega-bank-rolling by known curriculum vandals for control of school-based learning. That’s why it exists.

It disrespects school pupils, devalues teachers’ professionalism, forces States to prescribe school texts and teaching strategies, threatens Australia’s future and rivals the Perth Mint as a money source for the top end of town.  Why does Australia support it? Why? Money.

You have seen the current advertisements on TV – buy test-practice books – approved cheating on a large scale – making a mockery of what Australia could be – a really advanced, educated society – where love of learning and achievement is happily pursued.

Come on folks. Get off the fence. Say something to somebody who might be able to help our kids.

Parents can stop the malignant practice by telling their school that they don’t want their children to contest NAPLAN.

Politicians can stop it if a few fair-dinkum Aussie ones stand up for Aussie kids in their Parliamentary Party Room.

Principals can stop it by refusing to have their professional ethics battered any more.

Teachers can stop it by saying ‘enough is enough’. We like our kids.

____Little Treehorn and his cobbers reckon that “Adults just don’t care about school kids.”  You don’t?______

The Undead

A well-known contemporary author, school consultant and commentator, Bruce Hammonds refers to  people, who remain embedded within a professional occupation, but ignore its raison d’etre as well as the effects of changes to their profession’s operations; and who maintain an unhelpful silence when their clients are badly treated, as undead. They haven’t been interred and still possess movement of a kind….sorta dead but they won’t lie down. They cannot or will not speak up and thoughtlessly assist superordinates in flagitious operations that impact seriously on the welfare of clients.

The term is a most suitable one to describe those who just go with the flow and find it easy to ignore professional ethics.  That’s why it’s a Treehorn topic.

Those who claim membership of the teaching profession, but don’t work at its raison d’etre, nor read much about it, nor share opinions about it on a professional level, nor worry about it, nor have any great view on how to care for kids are conspicuous amongst the ranks of the undead. The profession can do without them. Some run our schools….public, systemic and private.

Classroom teachers in a public school system can openly claim to be amongst the highest of professionals if they are conscious of and proud of what they are, and what they are expected to do.  As a rule, members of a public school system know what teaching and learning is all about [there’s the rub] and they care greatly about the demotic children who turn up on the school’s doorstep. If you have been in a school, you know that they do their tasks with great love and determination. True blue professionals. There is no picking and choosing of clients, no specially chosen school in which to serve.  The description is real.

If the superordinates are from beyond the profession or are of limited experience in the school classroom, yet exert controls over the operation of the work-place, teaching time and syllabus modus operandi that infringe on an operator’s professional standards, there is tension of many kinds. What happens in the normal classroom and its place as the learning centre for the school curriculum cannot be absorbed into the psyche of such superodinate controllers through texts or by casual observation. It’s an intricate and complicated operation. To pester the learning atmosphere with foreign blanket tests or aim a national curriculum at the said tests is aperient.  If the tests are their own and concocted without respect for the learning climate, the complications are prodigious. A senior officer of a state education department told ABC Radio recently [Monday,23 Jan.] that the new national curriculum was so good that the Year One children would do ever so much better at NAPLAN tests when they get to Year 3 than others have ever done.  Unbelievable. I’ve been waiting for an outcry from professional representatives in the press, haven’t you? This is the purpose of the new curriculum?

Classrooms are special places where the action for a country’s progress and greatness takes place; and primary school classrooms are different from secondary ones.  The problems caused by mixed non-classroom-relevant ideals are manifold and if allowed to persist, will become ‘manifolder’. While true classroom teacher-professionals of all kinds want to take each client to the very limits of their abilities, most sciolist superordinates [and the politicians who push them] don’t.  They don’t seem to like children and  their aim, patently, is “…not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is the aim of the U.S. [and of Australia using the Klein model], whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other mountebanks… Their purposes, in brief, are to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking as possible.” [Mencken]

The compliance of Australia’s undead is legendary. Despite their collective knowledge of the dangers of blanket testing, for instance, they succumb….too easily. They not only jump to commands, but they join the spoilers to improve the presentation of the deadly tests. The rights of the child are abused by such undead operators. UNESCO, by the way, has a lot to say about the rights of children. These rights are ignored and untested.

Governments love the undead. In an article called “Education Deform as a Farce”  http://theassailedteacher.com/2012/01/19/education-deform-as-farce/ the USA  author speaks of the power of propaganda. During war time, conspicuous people and the media were paid to support the war through silence and ‘proper’ comment. Remember that few Australians knew that Darwin had been bombed as often as it was, hidden by silence;  and a later PM assured us that there were WMDs in Iraq when he sent our soldiers there. “The tactic is so powerful that it has the ability to make lies true”, says the author.

“Now those drums are beating in the current war against teachers.” he continues. Wealthy philanthropist Bill Gates, together with Australia’s patron saint, Joel Klein, and the big USA union boss, Michael Mulgrew ‘’…all work with the same lexicon: ‘effectiveness’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘value added’.  They cannot speak of love of learning or achievement happiness. It is beyond them. Low in experience, high in pretence, they become government appointees to important decision-making committees. Friends of kids find it hard to get anywhere near such important decision-making….as the compliant undead march to the music of conformity with North Korean precision. “

Bill Gates especially, but Eli Broad, the Waltons and the Koch Brothers as well, give the marching orders.”

The article suggests that educational deform will never be overcome unless more  defenders of public schooling [like the parents, pro-pupil politicians  principals, teachers suggested above] do something. [Before May, for Australia’s sake.] 

The author concludes “Anyone short of being a radical defender of public school children and the teaching profession is a shill [aka an undead ‘stooge’]. Anyone who assumes the presence of the Big Lie of education ‘reform’ is having their strings pulled.”

[Come on Aussies, come on..true blue child-oriented ones.

Undo the strings. Get off the fence. Say NO to NAPLAN]

o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. Meditate. Calm your anger. Enjoy. For their sake, just say NO to NAPLAN.

Other Treehorns ? :   Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

We Catch More Flies With Sugar

The Treehorn Express

Treehorn story?  http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697

Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

The Treehorn Express is dedicated to the cessation of Kleinist NAPLAN testing in Australia.  Our recently introduced Australian schooling system is based on one introduced to a New York school district by a lawyer, Joel Klein. in 2002 and copied by Australia’s Ms. Gillard in 2009, without consultation or examination. Mr Klein now heads the Murdoch test-publishing company worth billions. Australian test-freaks are amongst his disciples. Kleinism is a New York version of fear-driven schooling which separates ‘haves’ from ‘have nots’ and opens the door for mega-bank-rolling by known curriculum vandals for control of school-based learning. That’s why it exists.

It disrespects school pupils, devalues teachers’ professionalism, forces States to prescribe school texts and teaching strategies, threatens Australia’s future and rivals the Perth Mint as a money source for the top end of town. Why does Australia support it? Weird.

Come on folks. Get off the fence.Say something to somebody who might be able to help our kids.

Parents can stop the malignant practice by telling their school that they don’t want their children to contest NAPLAN.

Politicians can stop it if a few fair-dinkum Aussie ones stand up for Aussie kids in their Parliamentary Party Room.

Principals can stop it by refusing to have their professional ethics battered any more.

Teachers can stop it by saying ‘enough is enough’. We like our kids.

________But…Little Treehorn and his cobbers reckon that “Adults just don’t care about school kids.” ________

When Treehorn first started to shrink, he went to the doctor, quite agitated. He shouted at  the doctor, “Doctor, I’m shrinking.”

The doctor calmly responded, “Now, settle down, Treehorn. You just have to be a little patient.”

__________________________________________________________________________

We Catch More Flies with Sugar

Derek Hedgcock

Attached is an outstanding paper from an outstanding practitioner,known to many for his successful, innovative practices. It is eight pages long, hard to read on the fly [so to speak]. Dare I recommend that you print it out and, when you have the time, read it very carefully? It is quite outstanding, full of common sense.

It’s about the best child-supportive comment on NAPLAN that I have read. It signals some very important warnings as to the destiny of those unfortunate pupils who have to endure NAPLAN. They are our Australian kids, and Derek’s comments are telling.

Indeed, it presents some serious points of view that few of us have considered.

Click here to download the attachment.  We Catch More Flies with Sugar

_____________________________________________________________________________________

This n’That

NAPLAN for Politicians

The search for a name for the acronym NAPLAN 2013.. which refers to.the biggest schooling test ever for politicians, prior to the next federal elections, continues… with this response:-

“Because I believe there are two types of political force/farce behind the NAPLAN disaster…

Firstly, those who are naive and misled either through ignorance or apathy and I hear you ask what is the difference.

Secondly, those who are scheming and evil in their manipulative intent.

Therefore, I suggest two acronyms for NAPLAN that match these two categories respectively…

National Assessment of Politicians’ Lightsome Naivety.

National Assessment of Politicians’ Licentious Naziism.”

There is also..

National Assessment of Politicians’ Lassitude and Neglect.

National Assessment of Politicians’ Laziness and Nonchalance.

National Assessment of Politicians’ Liabilities and Negligence.

This means that we will, as a measure of accountability for our children’s happy and purposeful school learning, be assessing and sharing, with fellow voters, our local member’s [and all political parties’] neglect and laziness [ Do they say anything enlightening about the issues in their speeches and statements?], when it comes to getting rid of national blanket testing? Do they know the alternatives for effective evaluation of pupil progress. Are they so non-caring? Do they agree with totalitarian [Nazi-like] methods to ensure school compliance and teacher silence? OR What do they think of having an Australian child-loving, achievement oriented [sky’s the limit], love-learning, cooperative and equitable system? Can we learn from Finland and improve on its ideals ? Will our local member tell us about what’s so wrong with promoting respect for teachers; with training them and paying them well? Will they vote in their party meetings and in parliament for NAPLAN to be banned? OR Will they take the coward’s way and vote for its modification?

Will my member stand up for kids at the party meetings?

We can all look forward to the next 20 months of interesting teaching/learning dialogue. Right?

Any more suggestions? Did I miss some?

o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

Derek Hedgcock [“We Catch More Flies with Sugar!” P.8] says : “NAPLAN is simply a compliance based, bullying approach to schooling.  As is universally the case with every instance of bullying, it reveals more about the fears of those who design, promote and support it [whether by direct action, sycophancy or by timid compliance] than it contributes to any form of worthy education, such as all our children deserve and need.

If we are to emerge into the unknown challenges of the future, we need, as best we can, to apply a combination of ancient wisdom with the emerging sciences of learning.

NAPLAN  does neither.”

________________________________________________________________

If you have another 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. It’s quick meditation. Calm your anger. Enjoy.

Other Treehorns ? Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

The NAPLAN Farce

The Treehorn Express

Treehorn story?  http://primaryschooling.net?page_id=1924

Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

The Treehorn Express is dedicated to the cessation of Kleinist NAPLAN testing in Australia.  Our recently introduced Australian schooling system is based on one introduced to a New York school district by a lawyer, Joel Klein. in 2002 and copied by Australia’s Ms. Gillard in 2009, without consultation or examination. Mr Klein now heads the Murdoch test-publishing company worth billions. Australian test-freaks are amongst his disciples. Kleinism is a New York version of fear-driven schooling which separates ‘haves’ from ‘have nots’ and opens the door for mega-bank-rolling by known curriculum vandals for control of school-based learning. That’s why it exists.

It disrespects school pupils, devalues teachers’ professionalism, forces States to prescribe school texts and teaching strategies, threatens Australia’s future and rivals the Perth Mint as a money source for the top end of town. Why does Australia support it? Weird.

Come on folks. Get off the fence.Say something to somebody who might be able to rescue our kids.

Parents can stop the malignant practice by telling their school that they don’t want their children to contest NAPLAN.

Politicians can stop it if a few fair-dinkum Aussie ones stand up for Aussie kids in their Parliamentary Party Room.

Principals can stop it by refusing to have their professional ethics battered any more.

Teachers can stop it by saying ‘enough is enough’. We like our kids.

We should not have to wait for the next election when un-Australian supporters of NAPLAN will be turfed out.

________But…Little Treehorn and his cobbers reckon that “Adults just don’t care about school kids.” ________

________TRUE?  HARD TO BELIEVE.   WHY IS IT SO?________

The NAPLAN Farce

Today’s Courier Mail [18 Jan.,2012]  unkindly headlines State Tops Cheats on Naplan.

“Queensland recorded half of the nation’s cheating incidents on the 2010 NAPLAN tests and nearly one-third of the total breaches, an ACARA report shows.”

God bless Queensland.

ACARA the governing body for the administration of NAPLAN, and now clearly in charge of the Australian schooling system as designed by Joel Klein [see above] , has recently released its report on incidents attached to the 2011 NAPLAN tests. It’s a riot.

It defines that “…cheating occurs when there is intent to gain an unfair advantage or improperly influence test results .”

You will find the report when you open the  http://www.saveourschools.com.au article “Several Schools Found to be cheating in NAPLAN Tests”; and click on the access in Para 5. Thirty-one un-named naughty incidents at schools are listed as “Incidents Investigated and Substantiated” [as at 15 December, 2011]. Please stop laughing until you have read it.

Not one mention was made of those schools that deliberately practised for the tests nor of those that used test-practice books in school time. Big-time ‘cheating’ of this magnitude seems to have been ignored. Intense practice is done only to influence results, and those who practise better or longer get a greater advantage. Those who teach the full curriculum until May are clearly in the purest condition for serious wide-scale testing; but they are at a disadvantage as far as test results are concerned. And those who are in a multiple grade situation, such as a small school, won’t be able to have their practice sessions supervised as diligently as a single-class group. There is a clear advantage to a school that has single-grade units with lots of help, lots of time and lots of money. Those of them who do the most practice, cheat the most. Some schools have been reported in the press as concentrating on NAPLAN practice in Years 1 and 2. No mention of this in the incidents report. Next year’s report, maybe, if NAPLAN lasts that long. Confusing and farcical, isn’t it?

Is there mention of what happens in large schools that believe in the effectiveness of multi-aged learning? Must they succumb to less effective forms of single-aged instruction because blanket testing almost demands it? Since practice seems to be the approved norm for Australian school systems, shouldn’t multi-aged schools of all kinds be given a choice of contesting NAPLAN or not?

Is our system of learning for children at school becoming shambled or not….for the sake of some distant measurer’s score…or a special politician’s self-aggrandisement?

It is clear that that no reliable or valid statement about mental capacity, learning ability or teaching expertise can be made about any person, school, suburb or town, based on any form of blanket testing. Such comparisons are grossly frivolous.

Most of the incidents are really funny – both “funny ha-ha” and ”funny peculiar”; and even the administration of ‘six-cuts’ to some miscreants is passed off to some-one else beyond or below ACARA. Poor State Department. The boss-principal had to do the dirty work in our day.

There is a serious side. One wonders if any ACARIAN or NAPLAN supporter or fence-sitting politician has ever been in a classroom where test-induced tension prevails. It can be like water-torture at its most efficient.  Nervousness and agitation pervade the atmosphere. It’s thick with created tension. Wonder at what the test might contain and worry. worry, worry is in the air. It’s in the faces and the gestures and the antics. As the test gets going and the teacher empathizes with the obvious tension, the temptation to help their young friends…somehow… must be great. They can’t. Those who do…maybe a few minutes extra..maybe pointing at an obvious error…maybe a grunt or ‘uh-uh’ at a mistake about to be made…can get mentioned in the SUMMARY OF REPORTED INCIDENTS and the future of a loving teacher is in jeopardy. As a teacher-supervisor or invigilator, you wonder what masochist dreamed up this idea. Why can’t these little people enjoy learning?

The Save Our Schools article started with “Several teachers were found to have helped children…” and “Several schools were also found to have encouraged some parents to withdraw their children from the tests’.” As friend Fred would say, “That’s their bloody duty, mate…to tell it as it is! We need more spunky, information-sharing schools with independent points-of-view.”  Spunkiness is the only way to contest this malicious, threatening and degenerative regime of fear. We want to know what our principal, unthreatened, thinks of national blanket testing. It’s our kids’ future on the line. We want our [thinking] principal to tell us as it is.

One incident was described as follows : “Principal reported in media interviews that he would not allow students to sit the tests and subsequently that parents would be encouraged to withdraw students. Relevant to: Years 3,5,7,9.’’ No prizes for guessing the school. Kimberley College, a private school,  is one of the best in Australia, with spunky, heavy curriculum-based, achievement-oriented leadership. It doesn’t need unreliable, curriculum-wrecking external blanket-testing to ruin its esprit. What did ACARA record in its ‘Action taken and outcome’ column in its report?  “Matter was substantiated. No further action taken.”   Well done, KC.    LOL

It is now reported that one State wants to limit the time spent on practising for the test. Ye Gods. Did one ever think they would witness such a thing in 2012? It knows that wide-scale cheating is going-on and tries to organise/supervise it!  One hope that it doesn’t say that it approves of a child-oriented, learning-based curriculum at the same time as it suggests such a thing.

Even the shambles are becoming shambled.

CLEARLY…..this NAPLAN testing is the centre-point of Australian schooling. It defines us as educators…all of us.

Fair go.

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If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. It’s quick meditation. Calm your anger. Enjoy.

Other Treehorns ? There are 70 others! 

Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

  Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net

Sites to Behold

The Treehorn Express 

Treehorn story?  http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=11697  

Theme song: ‘Care for Kids’

The Treehorn Express is dedicated to the cessation of Kleinist NAPLAN testing in Australia. 

Our recently introduced Australian schooling system is based on one introduced to a New York school district by a lawyer, Joel Klein. in 2002 and copied by Australia’s Ms. Gillard in 2009, without consultation or examination. Mr Klein now heads the Murdoch test-publishing company worth billions. Australian test-freaks are amongst his disciples.

Kleinism is a New York version of fear-driven schooling which separates ‘haves’ from ‘have nots’ and opens the door for mega-bank-rolling by known curriculum vandals for control of school-based learning. That’s why it exists.

It disrespects school pupils, devalues teachers’ professionalism, forces States to prescribe school texts and teaching strategies, threatens Australia’s future and rivals the Perth Mint as a money source for the top end of town. Why does Australia support it? Weird.

Come on folks. Get off the fence.

Say something to somebody who might be able to rescue our kids. ___________________________________________________________________________________________

“Looking forward to teaching in 2012 ?” I asked

“Gosh. The first few months at our school it’s just NAPLAN, NAPLAN, HAPLAN. What do you think?”  she replied.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Sites to Behold

These are arranged in alphabetical order. You probably have most of them. They are favourites. Each is alive, unique and very enlightening. I know that you will want to preserve contact with all of them. Check them every now and then.

BOWER, Joe [Canada] :  http://www.joebower.org

BRADY, Marion [Washington] : http://www.marionbrady.com

DEMOCRACY EDUCATION :  http://democracyeducationjournal.org

GURR, Tony [Melbourne] : http://allthingslearning.wordpress.com

HAMMONDS, Bruce [N.Z.] : http://www.leading-learning.co.nz

HORNSBY, David [Melbourne] :  http://literacyeducators.com.au

KOHN, Alfie [USA] : http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.php

OHANIAN, Susan [USA]: http://susanohanian.org

OPT OUT [USA] : http://unitedoptout.com

SAVE OUR SCHOOLS : http://www.saveourschools.com.au

SMYTHE, Kelvin [N.Z.] : http://www.networkonnet.co.nz

STRAUSS, Valerie [USA] : http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet

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STAND ALONE SITES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U    Sir Ken Robinson talks about the changing paradigm, with illustrations. [Dec.2010]

http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html  Sir Ken…[May 2010]

http://ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html  Sir Ken [June, 2006]

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4409  An hour-long video. Four outstanding US educators discuss how the media mangled the debate about pubic education.

http://www.alternet.org/education/152516/what_does_rupert_murdoch_want_with_america’s_schools

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/03/20/obama-s-war-on-schools.html   Diane Ravitch comments.

http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/eet.ctte/naplan/submissions.htm  Submissions to Australian Senate Inquiry.  Refer:  Nos.20 [Phil Cullen]; 208 [Prof. Margaret Wu]; 228 {APPA]

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If you have 4 minutes 17 seconds to spare from your busy schedule, click on the theme song “Care for Kids” above, relax and ‘take in’ the words. It’s quick meditation. Enjoy.

Other Treehorns ? There are 69 of these on this site. 

Check Recent Posts and Archives in the sidebar.

Phil Cullen

41 Cominan Avenue

Banora Point

Australia 2486

07 5524 6443

cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://primaryschooling.net