Posts Tagged ‘education poverty reform counter reform’

Teachers forced to equip schools at own expense as austerity bites West Bank

January 24, 2015

Teachers forced to equip schools at own expense as austerity bites West Bank.

Patrick O. Strickland
The Electronic Intifada
Ramallah
23 January 2015

Budgets are so tight that many Palestinian Authority schools cannot afford paper and pencils. Hard-pressed teachers must spend their own stagnating wages on supplies.

Ghadeer Rabi cannot remember a time during her five-year career as a high school teacher that her salary was enough to support her family. Without her husband’s income, the thirty-year-old says she would not be able to survive.

Rabi’s monthly paychecks are inconsistent, often coming as partial payments or none at all. The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority “keeps promising us a lot, like raises, but we haven’t seen anything,” she told The Electronic Intifada.

Rabi’s situation is not unique: the PA and public servants in the occupied West Bank have been at loggerheads for years.

These problems show no sign of letting up, especially since Israel began withholding taxes it is supposed to transfer to the PA as part of the Oslo accords.

Israel is withholding $127 million worth of tax funds and customs duties on goods that pass through present-day Israel before being exported, as reported by Al Jazeera English earlier this month. The Israeli move has been taken in retaliation for the PA’s decision to join the International Criminal Court.

Withholding Palestinian tax transfers, which Israel has done as a punitive measure many times in the past, intensifies the already difficult economic situation for public and civil servants, among them teachers. In response to Israel’s withholding of tax money, Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, said that “Western governments should refuse to follow suit [by imposing] their own sanctions” on the PA.

Wages stagnate

Living with her husband and infant daughter in Ramallah, Rabi teaches at the local Deir Jarir Girls High School and Mughtarabe Elementary School in the neighboring area of al-Bireh. The schools’ classrooms — which are overcrowded with upwards of forty students each period — lack heating, air-conditioning and most basic supplies.

Due to severe budgetary limitations, the twenty-eight teachers at Deir Jarir are often made to foot the bill for their own supplies, though more than 600 students attend the school. “We don’t even bother asking for additional supplies at this point,” said Rabi. “We know what the response will be.”

Aside from a one-time hourly wage increase of twenty shekels ($6) for the cost of living, “I have worked for five years and haven’t received a single raise,” Rabi said.

While the PA formally bans teachers from working a second job, Rabi said that most are forced to work elsewhere part-time.

Nidal Afafneh, a fourth-year English teacher at Anata Primary School in the West Bank, is one of those searching for a second job to supplement his income. “Some of my colleagues have even taken third jobs,” he told The Electronic Intifada. “This isn’t allowed, but they have to feed their kids.”

Afafneh, 26, said that teachers are demanding their basic rights, such as the school providing paper, pencils, and an annual salary increase to reflect the soaring cost of living, particularly in the Ramallah area. “Sometimes we don’t have electricity or water in our school for days at a time,” he added.

Israel’s harsh restrictions translate into stagnation for the Palestinian economy. In 2013, the World Bank estimated that Israeli control of the West Bank costs Palestinians some $3.4 billion each year. These restrictions have also created a dependency on foreign aid.

PA “dependent and fragile”

But critics also accuse the PA of rampant corruption. The lack of accountability within public institutions has led to widespread “embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, and exploitation of position for personal gain,” states a 2012 report by the Coalition for Integrity and Accountability, a Ramallah-based anti-corruption watchdog. “Those involved in these crimes were high-level employees, such as heads of government divisions, who were conspiring with lower and intermediate level employees.”

Alaa Tartir, program director of Al-Shabaka, a group that monitors Palestinian social and economic policies, explained that the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization “created an inherently dependent and fragile Palestinian ‘authority.’”

After years of building up its public sector, the PA today has around 150,000 public servants, Tartir told The Electronic Intifada. “When Israel decides to withhold Palestinian taxes or when the PA passes through a financial crisis — which is recurrent — those monthly salaries get majorly delayed or paid in installments over months,” he said.

“When Israel withholds taxes it does indeed commit another form of ‘collective punishment’ because it does not only punish the civil servants but also their families [and] we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people that are affected,” Tartir continued.

Yet, the PA’s neoliberal economic policies have only worsened the situation. A Western-backed agenda “entrenched the structural deficiencies in the Palestinian economy and created further distortion,” said Tartir. “It increased inequalities, poverty and unemployment. It created a status of individual wealth for some but national poverty for all.”

Harming the poor

The PA “created a capitalist class that are benefiting from the status quo and arguably from the mere existence of the occupation,” he noted, adding that “entrenching the neoliberal policies will only help Israel’s occupation directly and indirectly through adding another layer of repression that particularly harm the poor and [hinders] their process of liberation.”

As the costs of housing, food and utilities continue to increase, the Palestinian economy remains largely stagnant. According to a World Bank report published in September 2014, unemployment in the West Bank sat at 16 percent during the first quarter of that year.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, an estimated 23.1 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza worked in the public sector during 2013. Of those, 16.4 percent were in the West Bank.

In addition to the punitive measures taken by the Israeli authorities, the constant disputes between the PA and teachers have resulted in several strikes over the last five years. Most of the more than one million students across the West Bank are affected, creating a difficult learning environment.

Citing the fall 2013 semester as an example, Ghadeer Rabi, the teacher, explained that there were several strikes, “making the actual class time very thin.”

“Strikes have made it a very difficult learning environment. Teachers go through the lessons really fast to catch up with what they miss,” she said. “And students aren’t motivated to be in class.”

Patrick O. Strickland is an independent journalist and frequent contributor to The Electronic Intifada. His website is www.postrickland.com. Follow him on Twitter: @P_Strickland_.

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What are the aims and purposes of human life? Who am I to become as an early childhood professional?

January 5, 2015

Thinking about Life and education with a focus on early Childhood

“This is one view of the nature of education, based on a conception of human nature … According to this conception, the child has an intrinsic nature, and central to it is a creative impulse … the goal of education should be to provide the soil and the freedom required for growth of this creative impulse … a complex and challenging environment that the child can imaginatively explore and, in this way, quicken his intrinsic creative impulse and so enrich his life in ways that may be quite varied and unique … governed, as Russell said, by a spirit of reverence and humility: reverence for the precious, varied, individual, indeterminate growing principle of life; and humility with regard to the aims and with regard to the degree of insight and understanding of the practitioners.” Noam Chomsky reflecting on philosopher Bertrand Russell’s humanist conception of education. (Chomsky, Otero 2003)

As an educator it would seem inevitable, given that we engage in a practice, a vocation, that demands we adopt a position that places children first. To take an ethical position means that we have to affirm that we are doing all we can to provide the best environmental circumstances to allow wholistic sensory and cognitive growth.

This is affirmed by the OECD (2006) report Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education And Care proposing that the ‘social pedagogy tradition’ is one that best defines positively, a humanist approach within education systems,

“…The social approach is inherently holistic. The pedagogue sets out to address the whole child, the child with body, mind, emotions, creativity, history and social identity. This is not the child only of emotions – the psycho-therapeutical approach; nor only of the body – the medical or health approach; nor only of the mind – the traditional teaching approach. For the pedagogue, working with the whole child, learning, care and, more generally, upbringing … pedagogues seek to respect the natural learning strategies of young children, that is, learning through play, interaction, activity, and personal investigation. Co-operative project work is much employed to give children a taste for working together and to build up shared and more complex understandings of chosen themes. The belief is widespread that encouraging the initiatives and meaning-making of children strongly supports cognitive development.”

My Story

My journey toward early childhood education began with a significant personal event, the birth of my daughter – born in the month of December in 1990 – a decade which opened with the USA governments initiation of a new wave of invasion and war in Iraq. The latter decades and years of this century were marked by global shifts in power most significantly by the collapse of the all the former communist states. I did not know then just how profound the effect these events were to have on the struggle for social equality, and social welfare. After two decades one effect of collapsing Communist Parties is the significant absence of struggles for improved social wellbeing which has also boosted the neo-liberal, small government, market rule economists.

I remain an active socialist in the communist tradition and regard myself a Marxist. My ideas about class and socialism had found some purchase in my mind after a few years in the Royal Australian Navy. The hierarchical character of the armed forces was a rapid introduction to the larger issues of class and oppression that run through our societies. Decades latter a friend who was then an army intelligence officer, and an anarchist, articulated for me something I had understood but had not fully appreciated, the armed services in many ways is able to function because it relies on socialistic methods of organisation.

What has this to do with Early Childhood and education?

The collapse of communism and the influences of the Reagan and Thatcher era have been very disorientating politically as governments all over the globe sold-off our welfare to the corporations and so further concentrated ‘self-regulatory’ control and profits into fewer hands. As a labour movement activists I had to make sense of all this and seek new and different arguments and methods of organising. It was at this time that I came across the book ’Children First’ by Penelope Leach the British psychologist and child development and parenting expert. I vaguely knew of her, and was excited to see that someone who was a respected authority could write about the problems of capitalist society and its ill effects on children and human development generally.

“For our societies money is god, the market place is its temple and mass communications – from TV advertising to ‘motivational speakers’ – ensure that its creed is an inescapable driving force not just in corporate lives but in the lives of everyone of us.

With societies’ attention, energy and excitement focused on the marketplace, areas of human endeavour that cannot be directly bought with money and sold for profit tend to be regarded as peripheral. It may be thought worthy to work at personal relationships (as parents work to relate to their children and each other), but it will be usually considered more interesting to work at professional ones (as day care workers and marriage counsellors) – and get paid for it.”

“Children are a special case. Like the very old, the very young do not earn and therefore play little direct part in the marketplace. Indeed children are doubly unproductive because their maintenance and education cost money they cannot earn for themselves, and their care absorbs adult time that otherwise would be spent producing it. But because children are the producer-consumer units of tomorrow rather than yesterday, no economy can disregard them.” (Leach 1994)

Schooling and skills, is it education?

Preparing my daughter for school had a disturbing effect upon me that I had not expected. There were many good things about my school years but school itself was an indifferent experience. School had not built my confidence, if not undermining it, we sat in isolation while were encouraged not to speak unless spoken to, or asked a question, something to be avoided as it usually ended in humiliation. All said and done fertile ground for a sense of failure, as a teacher I vowed to improve on my experiences by not repeating them on the children in my care.

Studying and completing my degrees in Philosophy and Cinema Studies I then moved on into teaching. My semester in Philosophy with Children and the method of the community of inquiry, building out of Dewey’s conception of scientific inquiry, had given me fresh insights. This philosophical approach is a fine tool for facilitating children’s dialogue, engaging with each other in thinking about themselves and the world around them.

I have never had a desire to return to school, and this remains the case. I distinguish between schooling and education and I am sure I speak for many teachers who acknowledge their enjoyment of teaching as such, but find ‘the system’ vexing. Regulation enforcing minimum standards generally works to the detriment of improving and achieving best professional practice. Fenech, Sumsion, & Goodfellow (2006) used one educator’s description of regulation through the Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) as “a double edged sword” because “notions of professional decision-making and practical wisdom are not readily identifiable in either QIAS or the NSW Children’s Services Regulation.

The chief concern I believe is the problem of regulations impinging on, or driving our pedagogical practice that is detrimental to children and is therefore not best practice. Pedagogues should begin with the question, who educates the educator? Any dialogue concerning the needs of children should begin here; what are the social, community and public needs of children generally, and the children with whom I work directly?

Love and learning

What can I do to develop their ‘Love of Learning’ that I believe that they initially come to me with? The mantras of ‘Life long learning’ and ‘learning readiness’ – within our formal institutions –suggests a view of learning that is knowledge transmitted down from the teacher, in contrast to the view that we have an innate predisposition to learn. How can we overcome or transcend the economic reductionism of the Corporate State that narrows the definition, purpose and possibilities of education?

To begin by asking, what do I have to do to be accountable to The State, is to unwittingly enforce the status quo and consequently the interests of the ruling class and the nation-market-state? Considering my position as an early childhood educator is one that needs to be regarded in terms of the real politic of education played out in each school under the auspice of education departments. As Bruer (1999) observes, politicians use ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ to spin their gloss-over of practices detrimental to wholistic conceptions of early childhood education.

“Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education, Workplace Relations and Social Inclusion, discussed ‘new’ knowledge…The new thinking that I’m talking about…is the new scientific research about the way children’s brains develop. …Gillard’s statement demonstrates how politicians can play a key role in framing and/or determining policy content and outcomes… Crucially, the quality of formal ECEC provisions for children also rests, to a considerable extent, on the policy decisions of politicians.

The problem is not so much one of science or developmental models opposing post modernist and humanist conceptions of education, but rather a crudely defined ‘medical model’ imposed on teachers and enforced through their practice. My experience of some school administrators is that they use counter reforming government demands, the use of regulations, and public service acts to enforce the medical model of testing, teaching to predetermined outcomes, and collecting quantifiable data as ‘evidence’ of ‘value adding’ to children.

Questions, questions, and more questions

The questions we should ask, how do educators defend best practice and research while they maybe dealing with draconian methods imposed by hierarchies, and unreasonable authoritarian methods at the departmental and school level? Who and what are educating the educator while they are being disciplined and undermined by those in authority? How do humanistic approaches that rely on qualitative means to measure personal achievements and growth flourish in this current period of reactionary politics?

Progressive approaches understand young children as ‘already human beings, with desires and powers of their own, and not as units of production and consumption, to be improved – potentially – for the benefit of the corporate profit-and-war machine. Part of the answer lies within ourselves as professional educators, by organising power into our collegiate and collective hands, so to build our profession and thereby serve the best qualities of all human kind.

References

Bruer, J.T. (1999) In Search of … Brain-Based Education, Phi Delta Kappan, 80(9), pp. 648-657, quoted in Brown, K., Sumsion, J., Press, F., Influences on Politicians’ Decision Making for Early Childhood Education and Care Policy: what do we know? What don’t we know?

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Volume 10 Number 3 2009, http://www.words.co.uk/CIEC

Chomsky, N. & Otero C. (2003) Chomsky on Democracy and Education Routledge pp. 163-4

Fenech, M., Sumison, J., Goodfellow, J., (2006) The Regulatory Environment in Long Day Care: A ‘double edged sword’ for early childhood professional practice, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, Vol. 31, No.3 September 2006.

Leach, P. (1994) People, Profits and Parenting, Children First: What society must do – and is not dong – for children today, Penguin, pp. 4-6

OECD (2006) A unified approach to learning: The social pedagogy tradition, Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education And Care, p59

Words 17

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An end to the Queensland Acts

January 5, 2015

Minister Katter said the legislation, intended to protect sacred sites and other places of significance, was ‘socially divisive’, ‘simplistic’, would ‘freeze development’ and gave too much power to the Commonwealth. Detailed responses from each government department were shown to support this view. A submission to repeal the Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act was withdrawn in October (Dec. 44456).

Workers BushTelegraph's avatarWorkers BushTelegraph

[PN: A little over a year after the Commonwealth Games Protests of 1982 the Qld Government made extensive changes to what was known as the Queensland Acts which had kept a kind of apartheid in place in Queensland since the 1890s – here is a report of those changes using newly released Cabinet Minutes as their source]

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs

Grants totalling $1.5m for religious organisations running Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities were approved by Cabinet members, with $1m allocated to the Lutheran Church (for Hopevale and Wujal Wujal) and $115,000 for the Brethren Church at Doomadgee (Dec. 42170, Dec. 42302, Dec. 44383). New community services legislation, to provide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, was approved (Dec. 42644, Dec. 42821, Dec. 44013). Provisions for liquor sales and other administrative functions were included.

Members considered the issue of award wages for Aboriginal and Torres Strait…

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Brains are bodies: Brain research and understanding brain function and the brain itself.

January 2, 2015

There can be no doubting the importance of brain research and the understanding we have of brain function and the nature of the brain itself. What is worth noting though is that the research support what many have argued for years and decades about the importance of social equity and distribution of wealth and services to human happiness and its correlation to wellbeing. What is most disconcerting is the refusal by successive governments to seriously address the issues with policies that acknowledge the research. Far from it in fact the emphasis on relying on market forces to address concerns of equity have been proven to be failing.

Dr Mustard and Professor Stanley argue the importance of “investing in early childhood development if we want to encourage a healthier, fitter population, and provide opportunities for children to achieve their potential”. As with Cuba’s example, the central aspect for improving outcomes is caring, responsive communities; only then can we provide safety, quality care, and schools that genuinely support families. Professor Stanley speaks of “causal pathways” which are a set of factors that interact over time to create an outcome. If we wish to see responsible communities and “resilient” adults then we need to provide the circumstances that allow for the development of responsible, thoughtful and resilient children.

 Dr Fiona Stanley in 2003 outlined some key critical issues that policy makers have yet to seriously address. As she has stated in other interviews one has to wonder what the point of research is if we fail to act on it.

The questions she asked seven years ago are these;

  • Are outcomes for children and youth improving in Australia? As so many outcomes are related to social disadvantage, surely as economic prosperity and living conditions improved, so have the health, educational, behavioural and general status of our children?
  • Is there any evidence more recently of a levelling of social gradients, that is fewer differences between the ‘haves’ and the ‘haves not’?       Are all in society winners from the dramatic economic and social changes in our society?
  • What has been the impact of services? (Mostly focussed on treatments not preventions).
  • Why have so many of the problems in children and youth not improved? Are there some common explanations?
  • What do we know about the causes and possible prevention of them?
  • What should Australia do?

Professor Stanley argues that a multidisciplinary approach is required if we are to address in any systematic way these pressing social issues. We know that the problems that will impact negatively on children, family and society begin in the womb; in reality they begin before then if we consider the circumstances of the women and men who will become parents.

An outstanding and obvious example is the issue of insufficient and inadequate housing and related homelessness. We know that instability and relocation is extremely stressful on children especially, and of course for the adults. We know about stress response and that the detrimental effects can be overcome when there is stability and consistency within caring environments which in turn improve children’s learning and wellbeing. We can easily assume that this issue alone will have to be resolved before serious in roads can be made to addressing the concerns raised by Professor Stanley.

The current debate on Health Reform is a case in point, so little of what is being proposed has to do with prevention of illness and providing social solutions. The head of the Queanbeyan Hospital suggested to PM Rudd that he should look to Cuba’s example for solutions, as did Dr Mustard who lived and worked in South Australia as Thinker in Residence in 2006 and 2007. He asked the question, why is Cuba leading the world in Early Childhood development?

As much as it may upset some people on ideological grounds, an important part of the answer is that Cuba leads the world in the practice of socialised medicine and care. Health and wellbeing are community concerns; they are not commodities to be used for the social advancement of a few. There are many other examples but another is bound up with the question of diet. Cuba went through an oil shock and import crisis when the former Soviet Union collapsed. Since the 1970s Australian permaculturalists have been assisting in improving food production and the Cuban diet which has been high in meat and carbohydrates and low in fibres. Today up to 70% of Cuba’s domestic food production occurs in urban areas. That a society was able to respond to a crisis of this proportion is due to the way fundamental social values and needs were redefined after the social and economic revolution of 1959. Cuba for this reason has been regarded as the Jewel of Central America in relation to social wellbeing ad literacy.

Thinking about what is necessary here today in this country and what should and needs to be done makes all the rhetoric of an education revolution ring very hollow. We should remind ourselves that governments do little to change anything fundamentally. Profound and lasting changes in the early childhood and education have been the consequence of the combined forces of thorough research and enlightened practitioners and educators.

As educators and practitioners we must pay attention to the current research about brain development. One aspect that does concern me is that we could be in danger of losing site of the person. While it is important to appreciate brain development and pedagogy that enhances this development, especially so for those who are living in conditions that mitigate against providing an enriched learning environment whether it be informal or formal. As we strive for informed data as evidence it would be an error to end up where we have in the compulsory sector. Schools in the public system are narrowing the curriculum, losing sight of the whole child. I have heard it said even, that we need big schools so that the data is reliable!

Dr Mustard and Professor Stanley argue the importance of “investing in early childhood development if we want to encourage a healthier, fitter population, and provide opportunities for children to achieve their potential”. As with Cuba’s example, the central aspect for improving outcomes is caring, responsive communities; only then can we provide safety, quality care, and schools that genuinely support families. Professor Stanley speaks of “causal pathways” which are a set of factors that interact over time to create an outcome. If we wish to see responsible communities and “resilient” adults then we need to provide the circumstances that allow for the development of responsible, thoughtful and resilient children.

(Fiona Stanley AC

  • Founding Director and Patron
  • Distinguished Research Professor, The University of Western Australia
  • Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, and Director – 2013 Festival of Ideas, The University of Melbourne
  • Australian of the Year 2003
  • Established the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth in 2002
  • UNICEF Australia Ambassador for Early Childhood Development
  • The Fiona Stanley Hospital named in her honour)

(Dr Mustard is involved with governments in Canada and Australia, with the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, UNICEF and the Aga Khan University In Pakistan.  He also leads The Founders Network, a virtual research organisation that proposes practical solutions to the complex problems facing society and seeks to put research findings and ideas into action in communities worldwide. Dr Mustard has received numerous awards for his work including the Companion of the Order of Canada. Most recently he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

See more at: http://www.thinkers.sa.gov.au/thinkers/mustard/who.aspx#sthash.0kg36rd3.dpuf)

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It shouldn’t be difficult to find more money for less privileged schools by Denise Ryan

January 2, 2015

This article outlines the myriad concerns of thousands of teachers and school leaders when it comes to funding schools and programs. We know the bulk of money and resources go to the wealthiest schools and families: Inequality looms large and we are far to tolerant. Many of us are only to well aware of the complete disregard the most privileged in our society have for those most in need. 

‘Other people’s children also deserve an education’ February 9, 2010, Denise Ryan is an senior education writer for The Age a daily newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Teacher Brendan Murray made a public plea last November for someone to donate a portable classroom so that he could help high school drop-outs wanting to study at an alternative school program he and a small team of teachers and social workers have been running in Heidelberg West. Asked last week if any school had responded to his request to help teenagers in one of the most disadvantaged areas of Melbourne, he looked downcast. ”No,” he replied.

That seems extraordinary. Schools have never had it so good. Millions of dollars are flowing to state and independent primary and secondary schools. Yet not one school offered to help or to donate one of its old portables. No doubt they will end up in a paddock in Kyneton or one of the other graveyards for old school buildings. Murray has run the Pavilion school program for three years from rundown changing rooms in the former Olympic village. More than 80 young people who were previously not working or studying turn up on a rotational basis to a venue that can only comfortably cater for 12. The teenagers share toilets with cricket players who use the adjacent room.

The Education Department saw fit to award Murray its outstanding secondary teacher award for 2009, yet it failed to find his program suitable premises for three years. The federal government also knew about the program, awarding it a Closing the Gap award for its work with indigenous students. Following recent publicity about the Pavilion’s plight, the Education Department offered it rooms in the former Preston East Primary School. This is a wonderful outcome. But it is only a start. Another program for disadvantaged teenagers that urgently needs help is ‘Hands On Learning’. High schools have to run this program outside their budget, and this year schools such as Mornington Secondary College and Monterey Secondary College can’t afford it.

Mornington Secondary principal Sarah Burns says her most challenging students are devastated that this ”absolutely brilliant” program, where tradesmen and specialist teachers worked with them on practical building projects, can no longer run. She is not sure how she can prevent them from dropping out of school this year. More alternative school programs are needed to offer education to the 13 per cent of people aged 15 to 20 who are not studying or working. In its 2008 report, the Foundation for Young Australians calculated that 200,000 people fit this category. It’s not hard to find them. These are the young people you see hanging around Melbourne’s shopping centres and stations, bored and often getting into trouble.

There seems to be a disconnect, where the link between these disaffected young people and crime is not recognised. Sure, more police might help, but what about dealing with the underlying problem of hundreds of young people who would love a chance to rebuild their lives and learn, even if their literacy levels are low and they may first have to deal with problems such as substance abuse? At a time when the education system is flush with money, it seems timely to suggest that parent groups and staff in every school that received funding should sit down and work out how to help less fortunate schools.

A friend told me recently about the reaction when she suggested at a Parent Teacher Association meeting at her child’s state primary school that it might use some of the $90,000 raised in the school fete to help a disadvantaged school – she was met with an uncomfortable silence. When she raised it again at the next meeting, she was firmly asked to drop the issue. I hear that school has just bought a baby grand piano. Those who work with troubled teenagers see it so clearly: To have a safe society, everyone must look out for the most needy. You can’t protect your own children when there are other children on the street desperate for help.

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A critical discussion about the current concerns in the public education system

January 1, 2015

The purpose of this document is to encourage a critical discussion about the current concerns that teachers are dealing with in the public education system. I am a practicing primary school teacher in a state system so consequently the emphasis is on early childhood and primary education; however I am sure that many of the issues raised have implications for the middle years of compulsory education – Grade 5 to year 9. While the concerns outlined below are mainly those of teachers I also encourage anyone who has an interest in public education and pedagogy to participate with their comments.

Any discussion about education and attempting to define its meaning and purpose for our children and society proposes the need to provide an analysis of our society. That we live in an age of mass production should be a given but what then are the implications for our educations within a mass-culture? Presumably we must also talk about education generally as mass-education for the masses. I have an idea that an educator’s aim is to encourage each other to be autodidacts. Where we are able to learn for ourselves and learn from each other. Who educates the educator?

Finally, before you proceed a point needs to be emphasised.

The following article is informed by the following assumptions.

  • That the primary objective of public education is to promote and foster wholistic human development of the individual while understanding that human beings are fundamentally social animals.
  • That there should be a constant focus on understanding how we learn. How we learn is a question we should always keep asking and attempting to define. In this regard we need to ask who is asking and for whom? We know something about human cognition from a scientific point of view but there is increased interest in a holistic understanding of learning and teaching, and consequently that good personal relationships make a significant contribution to effective teaching and learning.
  • That ‘life long learning’ is an essential characteristic of human beings’ development. That education should be directed toward developing our capacities to educate each other and ourselves in the manner of the autodidact. It should not be seen in the negative sense of constant retraining to meet the changing demands of the corporate economic and political system.
  • The role of the teacher is then not to reproduce the next generation of ‘wage slaves’ ready to provide their labour power for the benefit of capitalists and their ‘enterprises’. We need to be able to critically appraise the prevailing industrial model and the corresponding transference of its ‘values’ into the public education system.
  • Standardisation through systemetised testing; terms such as value adding; line managers; classroom management are contrary to the previously stated aims of education in that they are management tools which have little to contribute to teachers’ pedagogical concerns or the social and emotional development of children and adolescents in the positive sense. overtly about building cooperative caring teams are an – language such as communities – communities of inquirers
  • That Citizenship – benign and abstracted from contemporary circumstances- for what a parliamentary democracy a participatory democracy? – what does empowerment, taking action, making a difference mean? Service charity etc
  • The Victorian Governments Blueprints for Victorian Government Schools, The Victorian Essential Learning Standards and the Principles of Learning and Teaching provide the framework for effective teachers, and teaching and learning. The Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority supports integrated and inquiry approaches that supports this holistic understanding of learning, education, and our purpose as teachers.
  • In addition to the Victorian Essential Learning Standards and the Principles of Teaching and Learning the approach provided within the series Primary Connections produced in collaboration with the Academy of Science: Linking Science with Literacy using the ‘5Es’ teaching and learning model; Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate, supports the understanding that we learn best when we are allowed to work out explanations for ourselves over time, through a variety of learning experiences structured by both learners and the teacher. Making sense and meaning of our experiences and connections between new information and our prior knowledge in relation to the natural and cultural worlds is the intention of this content framework.

Teaching is most rewarding when there are opportunities to provide for, and participate in learning experiences with students. Younger children particularly enjoy time in the garden when they are digging, collecting and sharing their observations with their peers and teachers. Older students can be more difficult to engage when they have not had the opportunity of these early playful foundational experiences.

My observations and experiences with children in such learning environments convince me that when we allow possibilities for exploration, experiment, observation and questions students generally become, and are, actively engaged in learning. A young third grade boy, unsettled and made anxious by his first two years of ‘schooling’ elsewhere, remarked to his mother, “It doesn’t feel like work because it is fun”. Described as experiential learning, this approach provides the means for serious but ‘playful’ engagement in the learning process and the childrens’ self-development and self-understanding as active learners with an emphasis on the social context. Emergent and integrated inquiry learning and teaching relies on an ongoing, evolving dialogue, a narrative constructed over time by the collective, or community of students and their teachers.

Accepting that knowledge is socially constructed means that purposeful, and meaningful engagement with ideas and concepts is only possible when they connected to, and are built out of our own experiences. If we accept that learning is the struggle for knowledge then we need to then accept that teachers need to provide a learning environment and situations that provide students’ with the possibilities, and the means, to construct knowledge for themselves. Because knowledge is socially produced childrens’ ideas become particularly meaningful when they are shared with others and have arisen out of common events and shared experiences.

Because knowledge is socially constructed and reconstructed the way we learn, and gain knowledge of the world does not change fundamentally as we progress from infant to adult. What does change is the degree of sophistication of our understanding of elements, processes, and the complexity of our conceptual descriptions. Our subjective commonsense, everyday beliefs and opinions are invalidated or validated as we seek to discriminate by finding evidence for objective judgments.

This is also the case for teachers’ professional development. Leading the evolution of a program that provided for students’ participation in a kitchen garden, and developed their appreciation and involvement in the surrounding natural environment, was key to fruitful and meaningful engagement with these learning process precisely because they were central and common experiences for both students and teachers.

Understanding teaching practice as an imagined continuum, as an evolving project, benefits from being alert to opportunities provided by the It has been through of an inquiry approach for the evolution of a student-centred, emergent, and integrated curriculum that evolved Given the many demands of classroom teachers’ time and other issues around ‘covering the curriculum’, careful attention must be given to building connections between concepts and activity in all these areas by demonstrating how they can be developed in an integrated way and arts program

An example of this was the evolution of my students’ mould project. During one of our forays into the garden we had plucked from it a very large squash. The children were amazed by its size and we set to weighing, measuring, drawing and writing about it. We had also noticed that the skin had been punctured. Over the following weeks we observed that mould had begun to grow over the puncture mark. The children continued to observe and record the changes that were taking place over time. Many weeks later our large squash had been reduced to a small, hard, and unrecognisable disc about the size of a fifty-cent piece. These observations provided no end of discussion and speculation. Questions and hypotheses abounded as we struggled for plausible explanations. This all lead to further mould experiments and back into the garden of course to discover even more about life within a compost bin.

For teachers’ creating interest in the mundane, everyday world, could at first appear uninteresting. However this story alerts us to what it actually means to ‘localise’ the curriculum, and as well provide meaningful learning that connects to, and builds on childrens’ experiences. The complexity of any curriculum framework can be made manageable by uncovering the interrelationship of knowledge and skills across the three strands and sixteen domains in regard to VELS. It is critical to appreciate that the development of any program that involves cultural change within a community takes time. It requires bringing everyone involved on the journey with you.

Understanding the intention of any curriculum framework as defined by education departments is an absolute given, but the significant challenge is the interpretation of that ‘abstract’ framework into one that is localised and gives meaning to the term authentic learning and teaching for both students and teachers.

A ‘localised curriculum’ must meet both the education department’s and the school community’s expectations. It is necessary to continually remind ourselves that the purpose of the teacher, and teaching, is primarily to provide opportunities for meaningful experiences, and carefully introduce and develop substantive content in an engaging way for students. It is difficult to improve teaching practice personally and generally when it is compromised by misinformed parental expectations, and demands to satisfy political and commercial agendas that have little to do with the welfare and education of students.

Negotiating the daily demands of creating a productive and engaging classroom program with the students’ involvement provides the educator with rich learning experiences too. My ongoing participation in subject associations, the Teacher Environment Network and the Victorian Association for Philosophy in Schools have all reinforced for me the evolving nature of the educational process for both students and educators, and the importance of collegiate teams and peer-to-peer learning in this regard.

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How have political events shaped education policy and the production of regulatory and quality frameworks in Australia?

December 30, 2014

How have political events shaped education policy and the production of regulatory and quality frameworks in Australia? What effects may this have on how and who you can ‘become’ as an early childhood professional?

Political events will always shape our society and culture generally. Politics is the activity of organising people and society to achieve purposeful collective outcomes. What these outcomes may be, and how they will be achieved, and who for, is defined as ideology. Politics per se should not be defined primarily by political parties and parliamentary participation; organised people, community members, trade unions, involved in extra-parliamentary activity have and can also significantly shaped early childhood policy and regulatory outcomes.

The State (the rule of law, parliaments and local government, the military and paramilitary) mediates the expressed interests of the contending parties. The State is the product of the means to achieving said social organisation which is partly defined by policy and regulations

Policy as quality and regulation while expressed through the transactions of The State machinery is shaped by the relative power of contending forces that work under and within its mandates. While the current federal government works to protect the market and the needs of corporate business and power it must, as an emperor sans culottes, must attempt to disguise prevarication and counter reforms as an ‘Education Revolution’.

Current ALP policy is a reminder that policy rhetoric and actual practice need to be interrogated if we are to make sense of the political landscape; what political and departmental representatives say they mean and what they do should never be taken at face value.

‘Productivity’, the business person’s and politician’s euphemism for ‘corporate profits’, informs the direction of ALP policy for children and education. The former deputy prime minister in addressing corporate business groups says it as it really is;

‘In today’s world’, she told a gathering of the Australian Industry Group, ‘the areas covered by my portfolios – early childhood education and childcare, schooling, training, universities, social inclusion, employment participation and workplace cooperation – are all ultimately about the same thing: productivity’. …. Further to the point ‘I’m going to be ignoring the old battles between unions and employers, public and private schools (taxpayer-funded-non-government-schools), the trades and universities and welfare and work’ … ‘Instead, I’m going to be measuring policies against the all-important criteria of how effectively they increase national productivity.’ (Dusevic 2009)

The question now is what should be done and by whom? For advocates and activists the real questions are; what are Australian governments hiding; where are the support and resources for; children who are having social, emotional or academic difficulties; school libraries and librarians; science and art rooms; maintaining and cleaning schools and care for gardens; to incorporate the creative arts, music, and dance? Why are essentially human activities regarded as distinct to literacy and numeracy, and good learning generally? These questions tell us quite a deal about what quality may mean. Is there a connection between the absences and regulation?

The view of education implied by the likes of PM Gillard is a default setting for a second-rate, standardised mass education for the mass of the people, the working class. Are Australian governments (COAG) the best advocates for school improvement? Do they assists to raise the sights and standards of teacher moral and professional learning. How does the Ministerial Council’s (MCEETYA) ‘Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians’ compare to the past two declarations?

How do we argue for, and provide a choice between an education worthy us of us all, as creative citizens, rather than a mass education suitable only for entraining teachers, students and the masses for the needs of corporations? For these choices to be made there needs to be a voice alerting our communities to other possibilities. This is the role of the early childhood teacher who regards themselves as an activist and advocate.

Dusevic, T. 2009, The Great Gillard Experiment, The Best Australian Political Writing 2009, MUP.

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Can teachers be held for responsible for social and economic collapse?

August 27, 2011

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Dodgeball – Education reformers aren’t tackling the root problems that lead to bad schools Sarah Garland | August 17, 2011
On an unseasonably warm evening last November, Glendalys Delgado lowered herself into a child-sized chair in the classroom of her youngest son, Juan, a second-grader at Thomas Dudley Elementary School in Camden, New Jersey. Juan’s teacher, Shakira Wyche, sat next to her looking serious.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
“You’re going to be a little upset,” Wyche told Delgado as she held up Juan’s report card. A line of Fs trailed down the page. Juan is “very intelligent,” perhaps the smartest in the class, the teacher said, but he refuses to work in class or do his homework. “I can’t just give him straight-A’s because I like him,” Wyche said.
Delgado nodded. “I tell him he’s going to be left behind if he doesn’t do his work,” she replied in halting English, giving the teacher a wan smile as she backed out of the room. “No more excuses.”
Delgado, a 32-year-old mother of three, works as a home health aide for the elderly. She moved to Camden at age 18 from Puerto Rico and lived alone with an infant daughter after the child’s father was sent to prison for his role in a murder. Delgado stayed in Camden and had two sons.
By any measure, there are few worse places in this country to raise a family than here. Camden, a small city across the river from Philadelphia, competes with Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, for the nation’s worst poverty and crime rates. Infant mortality in Camden is 16 percent, significantly more than the 6 percent nationally. This year, Camden’s unemployment rate rose while it stabilized in the rest of the country. The city laid off 168 officers, half of its police force, until the state sent money that allowed it to rehire 50 of them. Last year, the city’s population shrank, like it has every year since the 1950s as people with enough means flee to the suburbs.
Only 16 percent of Camden’s elementary school students pass literacy tests. The graduation rate at the two main high schools averages just 50 percent. Violence is common. Juan, who is 7, describes his first-grade experience as “rough” because of the numerous fights on the playground and in the halls. The district has a notorious history of corruption, cheating, and neglect by the grown-ups in the system.
Many education reformers have become convinced that fixing failing public schools is the best, perhaps only, way to revive places like Camden. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie has proposed a series of reforms meant to resuscitate failing schools and, with them, failing communities. “If we get this right, most of our other problems will fix themselves,” Christie has said. “And if we get this wrong, we can’t fix any of our long-term systemic problems.”
Christie rolled out a slate of proposals for statewide school reforms including merit pay for teachers, stricter tenure rules, and more efficient means of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. In Camden this June, he announced another initiative that would hand the management of failing schools over to private organizations. (Legislation is pending before the state legislature.) At the heart of Christie’s philosophy, shared by reformers that include former school chancellors Joel Klein in New York and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., is the conviction that poverty has been used as an excuse by teachers’ unions and school districts to avoid the hard work of school reform.
But in Camden, even great teachers face obstacles that are difficult to overcome. Increasingly, educators and experts are questioning the reformers’ tactics and asking whether the single-minded focus on schools has become an excuse to avoid the hard work of addressing poverty.
For the past seven years, Delgado has lived with her three children in the Ablett Village housing project. Surrounded by vacant lots, the community sits on a spit of land known as Cramer Hill that’s cut off from the rest of the city by a sludgy brown tributary of the Delaware River and a rail yard. The project is a few square blocks of two-story bunker-style buildings with a reputation for crime and drug dealing. Living there is a trade-off. Although Ablett may be grimy and dangerous, the apartments are at least occupied; about one in seven homes in Camden is abandoned, and at least one rotting, boarded-up house sits on most blocks.
Delgado’s hope is that her children will escape poverty someday, and she has put her faith in the schools to help them do so. “I want them to go to college. I want them to be police or doctors, so that they do something in the morning. I want them to have careers,” she says. This year, her faith in the power of schools was deeply shaken. She moved her children to new schools, asked for better teachers, and has meanwhile watched the district experiment with reforms like charter schools. These changes, though, seemed to have little effect on her children’s academic performance. Were her children’s failures the sole fault of their schools and teachers, or was there something more pervasive at work?
During a parent-teacher conference last fall, Delgado listened to her son Carlos’s sixth-grade special-education teacher spend a half hour complaining about her students: “They do not shut up. They’re all talking while I’m trying to teach.” The woman confided to Delgado that “math was never one of my favorites.” The teacher then explained that she’d started the year with a fifth-grade math book but that the students didn’t understand her lessons. So she switched to a third-grade book.
In Juan’s case, it was more difficult to blame an indifferent teacher for his troubles. Wyche, who has two years of experience, works late most days. One of her lowest-performing students often stays after school to finish his homework because his mother works long hours. Wyche, who spent much of her childhood in Camden and “knows what goes on outside of these walls,” was sent several hard cases last year because her principal thought she was best equipped to handle them. Even after the parent-teacher conference, Juan still refused to do his schoolwork and was suspended twice for fighting. Wyche blames a combination of things: his past teachers, a lack of discipline at home, his environment, his own stubbornness. “I don’t write them off,” she says. “But there has to be effort from everybody.”
It’s hard for schools to hold the line against a city that has crumbled into rubble and violence around them. The first time I visited the high school that Delgado’s 16-year-old daughter, Ninoshka, attends, a brawl involving dozens of students broke out on the lawn. The second time, as I chatted with Principal Tyrone Richards, a school secretary swept him away to deal with an emergency. Gang members had threatened a ninth-grader after killing one of the boy’s friends, and the ninth-grader had attempted suicide. “Learning is our first priority,” Richards said later. “But sometimes it can be hard to focus on academics.”
A recent study by John Fantuzzo, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that even for kids like the Delgados who don’t suffer from problems like homelessness or abuse, being surrounded by kids who do can hurt their achievement.
Delgado has sought out charter schools after hearing good things from other desperate parents about the schools’ “no excuses” motto. She applied to four, but her children were waitlisted at each. Even if they had gotten in, it’s not certain that they would have excelled.
Camden’s half-dozen charter schools have yet to prove that schools alone can conquer poor academic performance in high-poverty areas. Two-thirds of elementary students in Camden’s charters fail state literacy tests, and more than half of middle-school students in charters fail, according to a report by the Christie administration.
The focus on schools as the saviors of communities like Camden have largely quashed discussions about more large-scale anti-poverty policies as a piece of the solution. Two universities in Camden are trying to replicate the whole-neighborhood approach pioneered by the Harlem Children’s Zone of improving parenting skills, health, and other outside-school factors; both projects had hoped for more funding from an Obama administration initiative known as Promise Neighborhoods, but Congress scaled back the budget for the program this year.
Expecting schools to make up for all of society’s problems is shortsighted, argues Fantuzzo. “Success in education is more than the education system,” Fantuzzo says. If schools were to start coordinating with hospitals and doctors, government agencies that deal with homelessness and child abuse, and nongovernmental groups that provide counseling, after-school programs, and other services–all of the “many hands that touch the little hand,” as Fantuzzo puts it–government might be better able to craft more comprehensive, and ultimately more effective, interventions.
On a recent afternoon at her apartment in the Ablett Village, Delgado sat at the kitchen table in hot-pink scrubs after work, thinking back on the school year that she once had high hopes for and recounting her children’s latest academic crises.
She lobbied to have Carlos moved into a regular education class for part of the day, where he was enjoying the more challenging work. But the principal told her that because his teacher continued to report behavior problems, he might have to move to a new school this year, which is known for gang violence. She caught Ninoshka cutting a free tutoring program she had found for her. And she was still at a loss about how to make Juan work harder.
“I’m giving everything for my kids. I told them I want them to have a better life than I did. I don’t know what’s wrong,” Delgado said, adding in Spanish: “I get so stressed and anxious about it. It’s like I’m swimming and swimming upstream, and I don’t get anywhere.”
The same might be said of Camden as a whole. Governor Christie and his fellow reformers hope that teachers will have more success in improving beleaguered places like Camden, where every previous effort seems to have failed. But, as Fantuzzo and his colleagues and many others are increasingly arguing, their job would be easier if poverty and failing schools were attacked together.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.

Sarah Garland is a staff writer at The Hechinger Report, an education-news outlet at the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

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