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.”

More insanity from the US

North Carolina is planning controversial new laws that aim to ease gun restrictions in schools and allow teachers to carry weapons while on school grounds and even provide a financial incentive for educators to arm themselves.

The proposed laws – one in the state house and one in the state senate – were filed shortly after 2018 ended as the deadliest year for school shootings in the US since a US naval postgraduate school database began recording data. After last year’s school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people and spurred the March for Our Lives movement, public interest in creating more effective school security has grown.

HOORAY : 170000 views.

DeVos rebuked

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ruled that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos illegally delayed an Obama-era rule that required states to address racial disparities in special education programs.

In a decision on Thursday, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia called the Education Department’s delay of the special education rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The rule, drafted under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, would require states to identify districts with “significant disproportionality” in the number of minority students channeled into special education services, segregated in restrictive classroom settings or disciplined.

The rule, passed in the final weeks of the Obama administration, required districts to examine policies and practices that contributed to the disparities and fund remedies.

The judge’s ruling vacates Ms. DeVos’s decision to put off the regulation by two years. Instead it will take effect immediately. Leaders in the Education Department said last summer that they needed time to study the rule’s potential consequences because they were concerned that it could promote unconstitutional “racial quotas.”

Indigenous perspectives

Soon all Australian teachers will be able to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in their classes — across all learning areas. 

They'll have resources developed under a Federal Government-funded program called the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Curricula Project. 

The resources will come under three main themes — astronomy, fire and water.