Getting started

I have started writing up my summaries for the interviews and am doing it through a mixture of writing from my written notes and then listening to the recorded interviews and writing direct quotes that can be used. It is a rather long process and took me about 5 hours yesterday (with some diversions to find yet more articles!) but am now integrating these quotes and comments into the first draft of my essay.
I have been reading some really interesting articles and found one particularly interesting debate about the issue of class in Australia from the Radio National Big Ideas programme titled Australia Forums: Class in Contemporary Australia
It discusses the issue of class in general but does talk about class in regard to education. I liked one quote in particular - very telling I think about the nature of power in Australia...and indeed elsewhere...

"And there’s a lovely moment in one of those, where one of the very rich guys, who are the most influential group in Australia, explains why people like him don’t give very much attention to questions of education. Because however good an education you get, the best it’s going to do for you in terms of economic advantage is get you into a high-paid profession. But even doctors and lawyers are only going to get paid while they are themselves working. But to make any real money, any serious money, and this is what the capitalists themselves are telling us, you have to get other people working for you. And it’s when you get other people working for you that you get accumulation of serious wealth." Bob Connell

Well, must get on...lunch and then more reading and writing. Thank goodness we do not have the excavator noise next door today. I had to retreat to work to get some quiet - on the first day of my holidays!

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.

State Schools vs Private Schools

State Schools slowly waking from nightmare by Michael Duffy (SMH)

I read this article this morning whilst eating marmalade on toast, slowly but painfully recovering from a cold. I had heard about the book, The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education" (Bonner & Caro, 2007) , to which Duffy refers on EdPod (education roundup on Radio National) and was surprised to hear that people are not leaving the public schools in droves to go to Private schools. Some of the issues mentioned:

Three points I thought interesting:

1. Movement from Private to Public based on the pursuit of socioeconomic, behavioural, racial and intellectual sorting.
e.g. movement to catholic schools not based on religion but based on class & in rural areas the occurrence of black and white schools, sorting by race.

2. State schools have a higher incidence of discipline problems - they tolerate more than private schools. The book asserts that the government has spent money so that now principals have increased powers to suspend students and there have been special schools set up to help deal with unruly students. Also there has been more movement on dealing with less competent teachers.

3. From EdPod - the numbers in private schools is stagnating in some areas and state school enrolments are steady or increasing. This is dependent upon the state, area, and city of course (e.g. Western Australia has seen a big increase in Private school enrollments. "Rise in Private Schooling no surprise"

It is a very interesting point that state schools have to be much more transparent in communicating information about the schools than private schools (even though private schools receive between 42 and 82 % of annual costs from the government (Dufy, 2007).


AiW