Education - Sydney Morning Herald Roundup

Articles from: Sydney Morning Herald Education News

Education still the key to a good job: ABS (August 7, 2007)

• Those students who fail to complete year 12 have 1 in 12 unemployment rate
• Students who finished at Year 12 have a 5.9% unemployment rate
• Students who a Bachelor Degree or above have an unemployment rate of 2.4%

Debate erupts over NSW school curricula - August 2, 2007

• NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell: "He also said the lack of emphasis on manners in public schools was among the reasons enrolments had dropped.""(Premier) Morris Iemma has to ensure that manners, civility (and) respect aren't add-ons in our public schools but continue to be an integral part of public education, to try and reverse the downward trend in enrolments," he said.

• NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca said Mr O'Farrell was "out of touch" and compared his schools approach to that of Prime Minister John Howard.
  "As part of the Personal Development Health and Physical Education lessons, students learn social skills and manners," a spokesman for Mr Della Bosca said.

School gap blamed for nation's stupidity - Anna Patty (Education Editor - July 10, 2007)

• Widening gap between the best and the worst performing students (Chris Bonner - Principal & NSW Secondary Principal's Council Head - see book, "The Stupid Country: How Australia is dismantling Public Education"
• Attacks on the curriculum are ideologically driven and they move attention from the increasing inequity between high-fee private schools and low-fee independent and public schools.
• "Social inequity and class differences are becoming entrenched in the growing divided between private and public schools" - Bonner & Caro (2007)
• Top students in Australia compare well with those in other developed countries but the poorest students are below those in similar countries
• Federal government plans to increase funding to private schools by 30% to $7.5 billion and to public schools only 10& to 3.4 billion

Comments:
How is this possibly fair? Michael Duffy writes in his article (see Article) that "Public high schools in NSW have 62.5 per cent of all pupils" - so they educate more than half of the students and they are getting less than half of the increase in funding...how is that right??? Surely more funding needs to go to those schools where there is a problem of retention, disadvantaged schools, schools catering to children with higher-level needs and so on....not less.