Carnival

Today we made carnival masks in Italian with Lucy.

 

This weekend I'll be working on a Monster Calls unit and I'm reading What Katy Did and requainting myself with Little Women for a unit in term 3.

 

 

Today I had my last breakfast hot cross bun for the year! 

 

104000 views.....cheers!

Big swing back to state schools in the ACT.

Canberra's public schools are clawing back enrolments from the non-government sector at a rate almost three times the national average after years of fightback against private high schools who once boasted the majority share.

More than 60 per cent of all ACT students were enrolled in a government school in February this year with the remaining split almost evenly between the Catholic and independent systems.

In high schools, 51.7 per cent of students were in the public system and about 48 per cent in the non-government sector. Private schools educated more than half the ACT's secondary students between 2011 and 2014 but the public system won a slight majority in 2015.

The Association of Independent Schools of the ACT said minimal growth in non-government schools - 3.23 per cent since 2013 and .59 per cent between February 2016 and the same time this year - is evidence of schools nearing or reaching capacity.

Overall public school enrolments grew by 13.8 per cent in the past five years and 3.85 per cent since 2016.

University of Canberra education policy researcher Louise Watson said it was impossible to pinpoint why government schools were gaining ground on their non-government counterparts but noted it was indicative of a national trend.

The 2016 national data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed government schools had 65.4 per cent of the enrolment share, followed by Catholic schools (20.2 per cent) and independents (14.4 per cent).

Professor Watson listed the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, salaried wages being incompatible with high fees and transparent data about school outcomes on the My School website as potential reasons why parents were choosing the public system.

"The ACT rate of change is almost three times the national level," she said.

"Government school primary enrolments in the ACT have increased 23 per cent over the last five years, which is extraordinary.

"All schools have been operating in an environment of school choice for 10 or 20 years now and government schools are clearly attractive to parents."

Association of Independent Schools of the ACT executive director Andrew Wrigley said he did not believe the data meant parents were shifting from non-government schools. Canberra Christian School, for example, recorded a 42 per cent increase in enrolments.

"The data reflects a situation that has been emerging for the last few years: that is, while there are certainly some spaces available in some year groups in some schools, independent schools are generally running at close to capacity in terms of enrolments," he said.

"Anecdotally, waiting lists are healthy, and parents are keen to actively choose independent schools for their children for a wide variety of reasons."

Catholic Education Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn director Ross Fox said enrolments were largely driven by demographics and said he did not believe the Royal Commission had an impact on student numbers.

Fourteen out of 29 Catholic schools noted a decline in enrolments, including a drop of 14 per cent at Sts Peter and Paul Primary School, but the sector's newest ACT school, St John Paul II College, saw enrolments increase 34.6 per cent after introducing a Year 11 stream.

"The biggest issue for Catholic education and growth in enrolments in the ACT is accessing land for a school at Molonglo to service parents and families in growing areas of Canberra," Mr Fox said.

Gonski was funded by the Gillard Government

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Segregation

Even Birmingham is backing away from this one. The gaul of these schools who have left state school to carry the burden of providing quality schooling for ALL to now show an interest in a segregation style school for koorie kids is gobsmacking! Of course the money has nothing to do with it? What religion will they have pushed at them? Will they cherry-pick students like they do now?

From the Sydney Morning Herald
Private schools would be able to create "satellite" Indigenous-only campuses that would reap hundreds of thousands in extra taxpayer funding under reforms presented to the Turnbull government.
As entirely Aboriginal campuses, the satellite schools would be eligible for maximum government subsidies, worth tens of thousands a year per student - regardless of the wealth of the parent school.
The idea is being pushed by the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia, whose chief executive Beth Blackwood played down concerns about segregation of Aboriginal students.
"It's not an isolationist approach. They do have opportunities to integrate with the wider school community," she told Fairfax Media, citing extra-curricular programs like sport and music.
"At the end of the day, if you're working in partnership with the Indigenous communities and it's something they want for their youth … then it can work."
In its pre-budget submission to the Turnbull government, AHISA pointed to schemes run by St Andrew's Cathedral School and Barker College - both in Sydney - that had achieved "exceptional results".
Education experts welcomed the interest independent schools were showing in closing the education gap, but said it was vital the plan be executed fairly.
Pete Goss, the director of the Grattan Institute's school education program, warned it could "create more segregation" if schools cherry-picked bright Indigenous students rather than opening a lottery.
"They have an obligation to take any Indigenous student who is needy," he said.
Mr Goss also argued schools should be prepared to cop a reduction in funding at their main campuses if they segregated the most disadvantaged students to a satellite campus.
"If you're going to ringfence, you ringfence on both sides," he said. "I don't think they would expect to have their cake and eat it too."

Tony Abbott has been in the news a lot recently as he continues to undermine Turnbull. Now might be a good chance to remember what a liar he is. remember this......

 

Start of a new term

Just started term 2. the kids got back into it as if they'd never been away. We have our Secret garden and Sinbad units to finish this week and then we can start new units: Howls Moving Castle for grade 4 and Hercules for grade 3. Im also working on a What Katy Did /Little Women unit and possibly something for A Monster Calls.

Some photos from the last few days.

 

   

Autumn down Humffray St.

It's starting in Arizona

From the Atlantic

Buoyed by Donald Trump’s championing of a voucher system—and cheered on by his education secretary Betsy DeVos—Arizona just passed one of the country's most thoroughgoing policies in favor of so-called “school of choice.” The legislation signed by Governor Doug Ducey allows students who withdraw from the public system to use their share of state funding for private school, homeschooling, or online education.

Making educational funding “portable” is part of a much wider political movement that began in the 1970s—known to scholars as neoliberalism—which views the creation of markets as necessary for the existence of individual liberty. In the neoliberal view, if your public institutions and spaces don’t resemble markets, with a range of consumer options, then you aren’t really free. The goal of neoliberalism is thereby to rollback the state, privatize public services, or (as in the case of vouchers) engineer forms of consumer choice and market discipline in the public sector.

DeVos is a fervent believer in neoliberalizing education—spending millions of dollars on and devoting herself to political activism for the spread of voucher-system schooling. In a speech on educational reform from 2015, DeVos expressed her long-held view that the public-school system needs to be reengineered by the government to mimic a market. The failure to do so, she warned, would be the stagnation of an education system run monopolistically by the government:

We are the beneficiaries of start-ups, ventures, and innovation in every other area of life, but we don’t have that in education because it’s a closed system, a closed industry, a closed market. It’s a monopoly, a dead end. And the best and brightest innovators and risk-takers steer way clear of it. As long as education remains a closed system, we will never see the education equivalents of Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Wikipedia, or Uber. We won’t see any real innovation that benefits more than a handful of students.

Many Americans now find DeVos’s neoliberal way of thinking commonsensical. After all, people have the daily experience of being able to choose competing consumer products on a market. Likewise, many Americans rightly admire entrepreneurial pluck. Shouldn’t the intelligence and creativity of Silicon Valley’s markets be allowed to cascade down over public education, washing the system clean of its encrusted bureaucracy?

What much fewer people realize is that the argument over “school of choice” is only the latest chapter in a decades-long political struggle between two models of freedom—one based on market choice and the other based on democratic participation. Neoliberals like DeVos often assume that organizing public spaces like a market must lead to beneficial outcomes. But in doing so, advocates of school of choice ignore the political ramifications of the marketization of shared goods like the educational system.

The first point to consider when weighing whether or not to marketize the public school system is that markets always have winners and losers. In the private sector, the role of competition is often positive. For example, Friendster, the early reigning king of social networks, failed to create a format that people found as useful and attractive as Facebook. The result was that it eventually vanished.

When businesses like Friendster fail, no significant public damage is done. Indeed, it is arguably a salutary form of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” which is a feature of market innovation. But should all goods in a society be subjected to the forces of creative destruction? What happens to a community when its public schools are defunded or closed because they could not “compete” in a marketized environment?

In Detroit (where DeVos played a big role in introducing school choice) two decades of this marketization has led to extreme defunding and closing of public schools; the funneling of taxpayer money toward for-profit charter ventures; economically disadvantaged parents with worse options than when the neoliberal social experiment began; and finally, no significant increase in student performance. Indeed, some zones of Detroit are now educational deserts where parents and children have to travel exorbitant miles and hours for their children to attend school.

On the whole, neoliberalization is hardest on the poor. Market choice does, however, favor those who already have the education, wealth, and wherewithal to plan, coordinate, and execute moving their children to the optimal educational setting. This means the big beneficiaries of school of choice are often the rich. For instance, when Nevada recently passed an aggressive school-of-choice system the result was that the vast majority of those able to take advantage of it came from the richest areas of Reno and Las Vegas. As money is pulled from failing schools and funneled into succeeding ones, wealth can actually be redistributed by the state up the socioeconomic ladder.

Education is not simply another commodity to buy and sell on a market.

Market competition in the context of schools thus opens the possibility for a vicious cycle in which weak and low-performing communities are punished for their failings and wealthy communities receive greater and greater funding advantages. Americans should ask themselves a basic question of justice when it comes to the education system: Should it be organized around a model in which the more you win the more you get, and the more you lose the less you are given? Markets are by their nature non-egalitarian. For this reason, neoliberalization has been one of the biggest factors contributing to the growing inequalities and diminishment of the middle and lower classes.

A common neoliberal response to this is simply to say that economic inequality is the cost paid for individual liberty and personal responsibility. But the problem is that this discourse of individualism followed to its logical conclusion eliminates any public goods whatsoever. For example, if student funds are portable based on consumption choices, why shouldn’t the growing number of childless taxpayers be able to move their funding outside the education system entirely toward goods they actually consume, like dog parks or public golf courses?

This is the logical conclusion of Margaret Thatcher’s famous neoliberal pronouncement that “there is no such thing as society” but only “individual men and women.” The problem with this way of thinking is that education is not simply another commodity to buy and sell on a market. It is a shared good. Free societies need educated members to intelligently and critically deliberate over public life, select representatives, and help guide policy decisions. Market freedom is thus in tension with the freedom of democratic participation.

Many people recognize this fact and for that reason favor coordinating action and sharing costs through the government when it comes to goods like education, defense, public parks, transportation, public health, and the environment. Yet forming a shared collective action through government or a labor organization is the one kind of individual freedom that neoliberal philosophy does not tolerate. As the preeminent historian of neoliberalism, David Harvey, puts it, “neoliberals have to put strong limits on democratic governance … while individuals are supposedly free to choose, they are not supposed to choose to construct strong collective institutions.

It's starting in Arizona

Safe Schools political football and Abbott's continued hypocrisy.

The former prime minister Tony Abbott has welcomed New South Wales’ announcement the Safe Schools program will be replaced by a new anti-bullying strategy in the state’s schools after the federal government refused to fund it beyond mid-year.

Abbott stressed that, even though the strategy was implemented under his government in 2014, it was a Labor policy.

“Good that NSW is scrapping so called Safe Schools, a social engineering programme dressed up as anti-bullying,” Abbott posted on Twitter on Sunday.

The NSW education minister, Rob Stokes, said in a statement on Sunday the government was working on a replacement strategy, which would be available to teachers by term three.

“The Australian government, who fund and oversee the Safe Schools program, have advised that they will no longer be providing funding for the program by mid-year,” Stokes said.

The Safe Schools program with many conservative MPs criticising the program since its inception. But Stokes said it would be replaced with a program which still supported children who struggle at school.

“Bullying will never be accepted in NSW public schools – whether it be because someone is overweight, gay, based on the colour of their skin or for any other reason,” he said.

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said the program had been used as a “political football by conservative critics” but his party was interested in seeing the new proposal.

“If the NSW government wants to run anti-bullying programs in one way and not another, we’ll have a look at what that means,” Shorten said. “It is important that children go to school and are not bullied on the basis of their sexuality.”

Shelley Argent, the national spokeswoman for PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), said: “As far as social engineering goes, I think that was the last thing that [Safe Schools] is doing.”

“It’s not coercion. You cannot encourage a child to be gay. So by having this program in the schools, its benefiting those children by providing support and education to those who aren’t to be more supportive of their schoolmates.”

It should be noted that it was the Abbott government that implemented this program. It was announced and introduced to state education systems by Abbott government ministers. Government backbenches have claimed that Abbott when PM did nothing to curtail the program when it was rolled out. It should also be noted that it was Howard and Abbott who were responsible for putting the clergy into government schools in welfare roles. This is still fully funded by the commonwealth. 

Reading aloud to students

From the We Are Teachers blog

No one doubts the benefits of reading aloud to students. Walk into any elementary classroom, and you will find teachers reading to their kids.

By high school, however, this has usually stopped. Teenagers are expected to be responsible and take their learning into their own hands. This is, after all, ultimately the goal. We want to send out responsible, self-sufficient adults into the world.

I’m all for independence, but I still take the time to read aloud to my high school English classes. Here’s why.

1. It’s fun.

When you listen to great literature, you experience and absorb the book in a different way. This is why audiobooks and apps like Audible are so popular. I love reading the old-fashioned way of ink on paper, but I also enjoy a good audiobook on my commute to work or when working around the house. So if adults enjoy being read to, why shouldn’t students?

2. It allows students to truly hear the story.

When I’m reading to my students, they hear things like word pronunciation, dialect, and pacing. This is a good thing. As a child, I read constantly. I mispronounced words or names because I only heard them in my head. Then you have those light bulb moments later when you realize you’d read it or learned it wrong. For instance, how you pronounce the name Hermione from Harry Potter.

Dialect can also come out when you’re being read to, like when someone is reading Shakespeare or Huckleberry Finn. When reading Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, I read every section out loud to my students because I pause when Wiesel writes a sentence fragment that has underlying, often tragic meaning. I slow down my pace and give the words the attention they deserve. This forces students to slow down and think about the words. The other day after I finished the section where Elie’s father passes away, one student told me that the way I read made the scene even sadder.

3. I know that students are engaging with the material.

I work in a school where my students are often more worried about what they’re going to eat that night or if they’re going to have a place to sleep. For many kids, homework is the last thing on their mind when they leave school. When I read out loud, I know that my students are actually “reading” the material. They aren’t just finding a summary or looking up answers online.

4. Not all parents read to their kids.

This could be for a variety of reasons, like maybe they had to work or perhaps they can’t read themselves. Either way, children might have missed out on that valuable time. It may sound silly, but I have no doubt in my mind that my reading aloud to students can help them feel safe and loved. We teachers often have to take on more than just the educator role when it comes to our students, and this is one way we can do that.

5. It helps me be a better teacher.

When we read the book together, I am able to pause them all in the same spot at the same time to discuss some aspect of the book. Sometimes I might discuss vocabulary and we use context clues to figure out the meaning of the word. Other times I might pause them to infer what an author means, or why the author set up the story like they did.

By doing this, I am able to meet multiple Common Core ELA standards in one class period. I do still have them work on critical thinking questions on their own, and some students choose to do this while I am reading and others wait until we are done. Either way, I am able to have them work as a class and independently simultaneously.

For my students in a tiny, rural, high-poverty school, reading aloud works. Not only are kids reading outside of the classroom more, but they are also learning more from the books we read in class.

When my sophomores find out my freshmen are starting To Kill a Mockingbird, they talk about how much they liked the book. They don’t just tell me this, but they tell each other as well. Reading has changed from a negative experience to a positive one for my students, and, for me, that is how I measure success.

The most popular books. 

I've read them all except One Hundred Years of Solitude and Crime and Punishment.

 

Post Trump book!