Dress code for......parents

A Houston high school has implemented a dress code -- for parents.

 No “leggings, sagging pants, low-rider shorts, short dresses & low-cut tops... No pajamas or revealing clothing... Women can't wear a satin cap, hair curlers, shower cap or bonnet”

Big money for private schools

Millions of dollars from a federal government program for capital projects at under-resourced schools have been directed to facilities at “elite” private institutions, prompting claims from the public school teachers’ union about unfair funding levels in the education system.

The Australian Education Union criticised the newly revealed grants for the construction of drama, art and sport facilities at a series of schools that are well-funded and serve relatively well-off communities. The union used the examples to hit out at a 2017 decision by the Coalition government to exclude public schools from federal funding for capital works.

Under the capital grants program, $3.6 million went to construction of art, music and drama facilities and further refurbishments at St Scholastica’s College in Sydney’s Glebe. The school enjoys educational advantage significantly above average with a majority of students in the top cohort. The capital grant is in addition to the school’s annual income of $19.6 million.

Just over $800,000 went to the refurbishment of a library and education centre at Alphington Grammar School in Melbourne. The school ranks highly on educational advantage, with 53 per cent of students in the top cohort. The capital funding is on top of $11.7 million in recurrent income, or $22,000 per student.

Marist Catholic College Penshurst in Sydney received $3.5 million for learning facilities, a fitness hall and covered outdoor learning area. The funding is on top of a $5.9 million grant in 2015 for music spaces and other facilities. Combined with other capital spending, the school has spent more than $30 million on building works over recent years.

Public schools educate just over two-thirds of students and Ms Haythorpe said they were “groaning under the weight” of new enrolments. The sector has absorbed 76 per cent of a recent boom in student numbers. Independent schools have also grown while enrolments at Catholic schools have dropped.

As of 2017, the government stopped capital funding for public schools. The decision saw all federal funding for the sector go into meeting the federal government’s 20 per cent share of the Schooling Resource Standard, the needs-based education funding benchmark introduced under the Gonski reforms. The rest of the SRS funding is provided by state and territory governments.

Education Minister Dan Tehan said the government was providing record funding for all school sectors, with money for non-government schools ensuring choice for parents.

Tehran is a waste of space.

Teachers struggle in the UK

Schools are “haemorrhaging” staff with two in five teachers planning to quit the profession within the next five years because of their unbearable workloads, a major union has warned.

Despite government efforts to tackle the issue, the majority of teachers (56 per cent) say their work-life balance has worsened over the past year, a survey for the National Education Union (NEU) has found.

Teachers said that funding cuts had led to increased hours and greater responsibilities. One said he no longer has time for autistic pupils in his class after 21 members of support staff were cut.

Some principals I know!!!!

Manipulative, bad bosses use many different communication strategies, but the intent behind a lot of their tactics is the same: to get you to prioritize the company above your own best interest. 

You may be receiving these messages from your boss, who is trying to get you to keep your head down and work longer and harder than is healthy for you. Don’t be fooled. 

1. “Work is your family.” 

Using the intimate language of family is one common message bad employers say to ensure commitment to their cause. If your boss is like your loving family, then you are less likely to speak up against any unethical business practices or bad decisions the company makes.  

This is the personal message that Billy McFarland, co-founder of the infamous Fyre Festival, gave his employees when he tried to keep them working after his fraudulent practices were exposed, according to the Netflix documentary about his downfall.

As one of his employees said while recounting the conversation, “We’re not a family. You won’t even tell me anything! You’ve completely violated all the trust that we had in the product, in the company, in the brand and in you.”

In a good family, your membership and rights are not conditional, but in a business, they can be.  

2. “I need you to be available at any time.”

Advances in technology mean that we can work from anywhere, but the downside of this is that some bosses think you can always be working. A 2017 study from the Academy of Management found that workers spent on average eight extra hours a week handling work emails after hours. 

You have the right to spend free time away from the reach of your employer.  France has formalized this belief into legislation. Under their “right to disconnect” law, companies with more than 50 employees have to ensure hours when staff can ignore business emails. 

Being on call 24/7 is not good for your health. One study of 315 employees found that those who had to use technology to work at home around nighttime had worse sleep quantity, quality and consistency. 

And working longer does not even produce better work for companies. If you find yourself working longer than 50 hours a week to meet the demands of your boss, this overtime is probably not going to produce better work. In his five-year survey of 5,000 managers and employees, management professor Morten Hansen found that performance starts to plateau at 50 hours and sharply falls after 65 hours a week. 

3. “Everything is fine.” 

One of the worst bosses is the boss who is not there. They may be physically present, but they are psychologically absent from their duties as a leader. They offer vague praise, but no tangible feedback for you to learn from. They say the company is doing fine, even when layoffs, “pivots” and budgets in the red say the opposite. 

The researchers behind one 2010 study said a laissez-faire leader “may avoid decision making, show little concern for goal attainment and seldom involve themselves with their subordinates, even when this is necessary.” In their analysis, it was the most common type of incompetent leadership employees experience. 

This hands-off leadership becomes manipulative when you need feedback and guidance about your future at the company. Instead, you’re given the unsatisfying answer of “everything is fine” to keep you working even though you have questions that need to be addressed. 

4. “That’s not my problem.”

“That’s not my problem” is a demoralizing phrase to hear because it tells you that your boss does not care about helping you, said Randy Conley, a vice president of client services and trust practice leader at the Ken Blanchard Companies.

“This behavior silences the employee and discourages them from bringing further problems or issues to the boss’ attention, which results in a drag in performance and efficiency because problems chronically remain unsolved,” he said. “It also discourages employees from engaging in whistleblower behavior, which opens the door to unethical and illegal behavior in the organization.”

5. “This is how we’ve always done it.”

This language comes from a boss who only enforces the rules, and does not have the power or desire to shape them. When your boss says this, they are signaling they are going to mindlessly follow the status quo. 

Thinking that the old way of doing things is the right way to keep doing things is a trap that even well-intentioned leaders make when assuming new roles. In the onboarding book The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins, which aims to help leaders in career transitions, Watkins said that these bosses “fail to see that success in the new role requires you to stop doing some things and to embrace new competencies.” 

When your boss tells you that this is how things usually go, they are signaling that they are not open to new ideas and that they do not want you to offer a challenging response. Conley said that leaders “often resort to this response as a way to subtly manipulate employees to go with the flow and not make waves.”

6. “Don’t you agree?”

“Don’t you agree?” is a phrase that leaders can tack on to the end of a remark to seemingly invite discussion, while actually ensuring discussion does not happen.  

“By virtue of their position and title, leaders have more power in the boss/employee relationship,” Conley said. “Saying ‘Don’t you agree?’ automatically puts the employee in an uncomfortable position of either choosing to agree with the boss even if they don’t, or confronting the boss in disagreement.”

It is possible for a boss to request feedback without signaling personal alliances. Conley suggests that a nonmanipulative way to do it is to ask, “What do you think?”

“That opens the door to the employee sharing their true thoughts and feelings in a safe and open environment,” Conley said. 

The long-term impact of a manipulative boss

A manipulative boss can get you to adopt their mindset and stay at a bad job far longer than you should.

To get away from your boss’ influence, you can raise the issue to human resources, you can offset their bad behavior by remembering your values, or you can do what half of 7,272 Americans did in a Gallup study to escape their manager: They quit. 

From Huffington Post.

Labor response

"If you vote Labor, we will guarantee universal access to preschool or kinder for every 3 and 4 year old in Australia - 15 hours a week, 40 weeks a year, 2 years of preschool is global best practice and it's only just good enough for our kids." - 

"Investing in the future always begins with education...Labor is backing public TAFE all the way" - 100k TAFE places w no up-front fees; 150k new apprenticeships.

“Labor’s commitments to put public education first is welcome news to teachers and parents ... after six years of a Coalition government whose main priority has to been private schools and for cuts to state schools’

Budget failure

This week's federal budget, not surprisingly, has been a great disappointment. While many will focus on the tax cuts and pork barrels being desperately rolled out in advance of a federal election, there's no avoiding the black hole at the centre of Scott Morrison's first budget as Prime Minister. Where is the missing $14 billion owed to public schools? Where is the fair funding?

This is a Santa Claus budget, frantically throwing presents at the electorate in the hope that voters will believe the Morrison government is going to do something, when their track record is one of cuts to schools, preschools and TAFE. But this smoke and mirrors approach won’t distract from the fact that public education is a key issue for Australians. And this budget makes clear Morrison's contempt for public education.

By every measure, this budget fails Australian public education:

• no restoration of the $14 billion in public school funding cuts.
• no capital works funding for public schools.
• no guarantee of ongoing permanent funding for 15 hours of preschool for four-year-old children and no funding for three-year-olds.
• no reversal of the $3 billion they have cut from vocational education and TAFE since elected. There is not a single mention of TAFE in the Budget papers.

Funding truth

The Coalition record on schools is a record of public school cuts. The cuts started with Tony Abbott’s $30 billion cut to schools in the 2014 Budget. Those cuts have never been fully reversed. 

Mental illness

School children as young as five are self-harming, exhibiting significant behavioral issues and suffering anxiety and primary school principals say they are struggling to respond.

“Children as young as prep and grade one are having such significant behavioural issues that whole classes of students are having to be removed because they are destroying the classroom,” says  Anne-Maree Kliman, president of the Victorian Principals Association.

“I have had students as young as grade two telling me they wanted to die.”

As the royal commission into Victoria’s mental health system begins community consultation sessions this week, Ms Kliman met with Education Minister James Merlino and urged him to dispatch mental health workers to primary schools and increase access to primary welfare officers.

Speechless

QUEENSLAND’S top private school principals are being paid more than the state’s Premier, newly released annual reports have revealed.

The financial reports of eight Queensland private schools have been tabled in State Parliament, revealing the annual incomes of school leaders – half of which were more than $500,000 – with the schools pulling in tens of millions of dollars in school fees.

Toowoomba Grammar School Headmaster Peter Hauser had a total remuneration package of $537,000 in 2018 including a base salary of $462,000, surpassing Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s last reported salary of $399,955 and just slightly behind Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s salary of approximately $538,000.

Lambing is an idiot

Public hearings for the Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training’s Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession have wrapped up and a report is expected to be delivered to the Morrison Government by mid-April, ahead of the federal election.

The report is expected to address teachers’ hours and the status of the profession, among other issues.

Liberal MP Andrew Laming, chair of the Standing Committee, told EducationHQ that there is a need for more collaboration between states and territories.

“What was clearest to us is that there are slightly different approaches in each jurisdiction or each state and territory, and that each of these locations are doing really interesting work around the challenge of the standing of teaching as a profession, [but] a lot of those great ideas aren't necessarily being shared,” he said.

Among the issues most often raised by educators and education stakeholders were the administrative burden of data collection, the role of research in education and after-hours work, Laming said.

“There were some quite divergent views on this issue of take-home work, and there was also very limited data.

“The researchers told us the total number of hours that teachers assessed that they work and we know that there's lots of bias in self-reporting to start with, but what we couldn't work out is what teachers are doing with those hours,” Laming said, echoing controversial comments he made last year.

“There's actually very little data on that and there's very little data around of all this extra work, how much of it is authorised by the principal, how much of it is known of by the department and exactly what that work is, and without that information it's very hard to make a constructive recommendation...

“So there's an absolute lack of data beyond self-reporting by teachers of how many hours they do.”

Labor MP and deputy chair Susan Lamb told EducationHQ that similar issues were raised at each of the public hearings.

“It didn't matter where we went, I think there were probably three things that were discussed at every single hearing,” she said.

“One was workforce; both the management of the workforce, whether we're talking about support and mentoring, career pathways that exist or don't exist in the workforce, looking at the size of the workforce, the future of the workforce and where it will be needed. We had a lot of conversation around the workforce.

“There was a lot of conversation around the responsibilities of teaching staff, so their expectations versus reality and what they are prepared for and what they know they're getting into.

“There was also a lot of conversation about society's value of education, and in particular the importance of early childhood education in establishing the value of education.”

Lamb said that the impact of funding cuts on education was often discussed.

The committee hopes to produce a final report in the coming weeks.

“If we can get something out [by mid-April] that would certainly be warp speed for an inquiry of this size to have something in the public domain, but that's my goal..." Laming said.

“If you think about how long it takes to get NAPLAN results for your school, that's a pretty good achievement.”