Jean Walker

Could anyone lead me to where I could find some examples of UK private school fees. Probably not Eton or Harrow, but your regular "posh" county private school?? Want to do some reasonable comparisons with here in Oz.

Can you give me a quick summary of what you see as the problems ahead for NUT under their new leader - as a "foreigner" I'm interested to know something about his policies.

Came across this and thought it was interesting Technology for community-building in America Just back from a workshop at MIT on technology for community-building in America. The focus turned out to be poor communities. Apparently the middle class don't need community because they can enjoy their suburban comforts. I reflected that technology has so far mostly harmed the poor in the U.S. In the old days when telecommunications and transportation were expensive there was a real need in our economy for the labor of the lowest economic class. Maybe they'd work in a factory or do some kind of clerical job. In 2004, however, our businesses can get all of the unskilled labor that they want in China or India. Fear of crime was once a motivator for trying to improve poor neighborhoods. But improved management techniques, universal cell phones for calling 911, innovations like the gated community and security cameras everywhere, and pure technology such as the fancy alarm system have lessened this fear. The elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about was education. The non-profit world likes to think about affordable housing, leadership development, better health care, specialized training, etc. If everyone in a poor neighborhood were educated to the standard of the average Harvard graduate all of the other problems would be solved. Someone who is really well educated probably has a good job and makes a lot of money and can afford whatever housing is out there. Someone who is really well educated may find that others naturally want to follow him or her so leadership development isn't that important. Someone who is really well educated will probably have better habits and won't need as much health care (it is the college grads who wear seat belts). Someone who is really well educated can read a For Dummies book and learn how to use a computer application. Schools for poor people are government schools. Everyone who works there is either a bureaucrat or a union member. None of these people incurs any kind of pay loss or risk of firing if the kids remain totally ignorant. All attempts at reform over the past 40 years have failed. So people give up. One community organizing expert sitting next to me responded to my observation that if everyone had a first class education the other stuff would fix itself with "that's just not realistic". Working from the assumption that most people in a poor community are doomed to a third-rate education, what can we do for them with technology? It turns out that the answer is "not much". Foundations fund thousands of small groups nationwide and they spend $billions on IT (i.e., indirectly the foundations are spending $billions every year on IT). None, however, has a large enough budget to do more than buy packaged software or write some half-working half-documented custom software. All the groups complain that there is no packaged software that actually serves their needs and that they can't afford to develop full custom apps. Although their IT needs are fairly similar none of them have a large enough budget to attract commercial software companies except for fundraising management software. You'd think that the open source revolution would have attracted some notice. Programmers who weren't paid a dime generated a tremendous amount of social benefits worldwide. What more effective use of grant money than to pay some programmers to develop open-source software products and toolkits for common non-profit organization requirements? Yet nobody at the conference had ever heard of a foundation funding an open-source software project. One bright spot... a handful of folks had set up free wireless Internet access blankets over struggling neighborhoods in various parts of the country. All of the academic papers written about the "Digital Divide" turned out to be nonsense. As soon as a poor person had an opportunity to get broadband without being reamed out for $50/month by the local telco or cable monopoly the poor person was able to leap right over the exotic language and cultural barriers that sociologists had posited. I.e., it turned out that these folks were poor, not stupid. # Posted by Philip Greenspun on 6/12/04; 8:12:40 PM - Comments [20] Trackback [5]

It may well be true that generals ate the same food as soldiers, but their pay was still a hell of a lot better. I have done the hard yards for 30 years in the classroom, and therefore know what it's like - but I don't see why I should be then paid the same salary for doing a much harder and more responsible job.

We're aiming to be a Republic here in Oz but, by God, he's absolutely right about educational fads, change fatigue and teacher workload.

Sorry, my intro somehow got cut off. This comes from "Brian's Education Blog". What do you think?

June 22, 2004 "All academic subjects are now deliverable by computer …" This looks really interesting. Note how public sector failure seems automatically to have attracted the interest of the private sector. The private sector had to solve the problem, and then it decided to go into the business in an even bigger way. Clowes: How did you become involved in education reform? Brennan: When we began automating our manufacturing plants in the early 1980s, we discovered our employees were insufficiently educated to do the necessary transactions on the factory floor, so our company went into the education business. Every single employee, depending upon level of education and achievement, was in our classroom for one or two hours a week, using computer-aided instruction. We had great success with that program – which still continues in our factories – and I recognized that technology has a major place in education reform. But when I tried to carry this message back to the public schools, they weren't interested. It didn't fit their pre-conception of how education should be carried out. Then I recognized that the problem we had in public education was a total inability to effect innovation. That only comes in a market economy, where there are choices. Computer-aided instruction is the teaching of mathematics, reading skills, language arts, history, social sciences, and so on, by computer. All academic subjects are now deliverable by computer. It's a segment of our education world where a number of companies are aggressively pursuing the continued development of more sophisticated computer-delivered curriculum. Our education company now has a fully supported homeschooling network with high school curriculum delivered over the Internet. We have a very large center of master teachers serving a student population of about 2,500 here in Ohio and we're opening in Pennsylvania. Sooner or later, computer aided basic education that really works is going to be available free to everyone on the Internet, and everyone is going to know that it is there. There is some way to go before this happens, but when it does, and it will, it will be a different world, my readers, a different world. Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 11:27 PM

I discovered Teachit a few years ago when I was teaching and found it wonderfully useful and especially for those times when you're running out of ideas or want individual stuff while working with others. Their Shakespeare stuff is partricularly great as we don't have as much emphasis on it here for younger students and I found their things terrific for older but less able kids. I have passed it on to many Australian teachers as we have nothing as good here - at least I haven't found it if we have. Pleased to hear that they are upgrading. I will put that into our union journal IT notes.

That sounds like a good compromise if you have the necessary resources to do it. Our trouble here is lack of money for sufficient support and particularly TAs for seriously disabled students. One TA tells me of a girl in Yr 12 who has no language, few motor skills, wheelchair bound who is taken to lessons simply to sit there and be "included". Waht is the purpose of that except that bureaucrats can say they've done their job. We are going to start a union campaign here shortly for more special units on school campus and the reopening of some of the special schools. The wheel, I think, has turned too far for everyone's good.

I have just had one demonstrated to me in a newly built Canberra school and I was greatly impressed and I am not an IT buff. The school currently had one between each two rooms - they are pretty expensive here as yet, but no doubt prices will come down. It was a kindergarten and the applications seemed endles and highly productive. They are predicting they will be in every Australian classroom in the next decade. I could see many creatuive ways of using them from Kinder through tertiary. Yes, I was an immediately converted fan! We are experimenting with a few here in Tasmania but money will be the difficulty.

Because we are a small state (about the size of Ireland) and only 400,000 population, I guess it's a very different situation, but she really does have an open door policy. I, along with one or two other of our union officers, have regular organised monthly meetings with her, and also meet more informally with her advisers. Her approach is, we won't agree on everything, but at least let's see where we can agree and how we can sort out differences. She has publicly promised to send her 2 small children to state schools as she herseld did and her previously Ed Minister father, also did. Yes, what a pity they can't all be so reasonable. She doesn't get us all the money and resources we'd like but she does try. I recently met the Canberra Minister for Education - 35, widowed, with a 7 year old son. Everyone says she's great, so perhaps that's what you need - young mothers!!!

I agree. We have just done a teacher workload study here and the findings are very similar. I presented it to our Minister this morning and she was quite shocked at some of what it revealed. She is Labor and friendly to us which is a help, but she had not known of some of the things reported by teachers because her minders and bureaucrats do their best to keep them from her. Our curriculum gurus have come up with a new report format which is totally user unfriendly and jargon filled, and is stressing our teachers and this fact came out in the survey. I took her a copy, which she actually hadn't seen. She has two young children, she took one look at it, and was appalled - as a result one top bureaucrat tomorrow is in for a bit of a talking to. So, surveys can achieve things - sometimes!!

I have complained about our new curriculum approach here before, but this one absolutely floored me. I have had a concerned parent ring me. Her daughter has started high school and the school decided last year to allow all students to choose the "type" of English they do - English with a Media Focus/English with an Everyday Focus/English with a Literature Focus. She has discovered that her daughter is the only Yr 7 student out of 120 who chose (or perhaps was encouraged to choose - parents are librarian/journalist) the Literature Focus. She has had to be put in with a Yr 10 class of eight other students - the only ones who chose it last year when it began. Undoubtedly, the proportions will remain the same and by 2006 there should be a maximum of 20 students out of 500 doing that particular "focus". What does that say about children's attitude to reading, and the school's? This is considered cutting edge curriculum reform. I sometimes absolutely despair of what is happening to education.

Oh, dear! I've never heard that one about ties before - I am going to have trouble looking a man straight in the tie from now on.

I've been on leave for a week (visiting my son on the beautiful and balmy Sunshine Coast in Qld) and have just been catching up. Wonderful philosophical discussion above, but have just read in the local paper the REAL answer to it all by our state P&F President - children are obese because teachers no longer spend after school and weekend hours coaching sport teams. "In his day......." So, that's all right then, we know whose fault everything is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, Anders. I've bookmarked the site and will follow the journey.

Interestingly, we have just had a Workload Study commissioned here in Tasmania and I've seen the preliminary report, and guess what?? It says exactly the same things - biggest causes of teacher stress: behaviour, inclusion, bureaucracy and constant change. While I agree with the above posters that there were always badly behaved students, I do not accept that things are not worse. Unless you have been teaching in a consistently similar school constantly over the last twenty years, I don't believe you are qualified to make that judgement. There was an excellent article in one of our national papers recently pointing out the treatment that is nowadays dished out to doctors, nurses, bus drivers, waiters etc - they are being attacked and assaulted on a daily basis, and making the point that younger people particularly are much more concerend about their own rights than their responsibilities. We made the mistake of OVER emphasising that in the 80s, then we brought in Inclusion, then we made parents more aware of THEIR rights - the right to defend their offspring beyond all common sense, the right to defy authority, the right to believe that everything is someone else's fault and not theirs. I cannot believe that any of you can be reading the daily newspapers, walking up and down your city streets, and not acceopting that social behaviour has deteriorated. If you read the TES staffroom chatline over any length of time, you will certainly find out how teachers are treated nowadays, not just by children but by parents as well. It's the same here - we have an alarmingly increasing incidence of young children, Kinder upwards, who are physically attacking teachers - biting, scratching, punching, spitting, throwing objects - some of them are like little wild feral animals. No, they're not ALL like that, but a disturbing, and increasing, number are. Do little children get to be like that by chance? I don't think so. The question is: how do you change society? Yes, we can put school programs in place. Yes, we can have parent training sessins. We can spend heaps on "behaviour management" PD, but it can't be done by teachers alone, yet they invariably get the blame when things go wrong.

Thank you for the pictures of Gothenburg, I really enjoyed them as the city has sentimental memories for me. (I might as well tell you that some years ago, after a nasty divorce, I was travelling in Sweden and ended up having a memorable relationship with an interesting Gothenburger) The places are all familiar and I have been inside the college and seen its wonderful interiors as he was teaching there. I also made some women friends from the local Zonta club, one of whom I still visit and so have had the chance to return several times. Last January we went to see the reconstruction of the porcelain carrying clipper which was almost complete and went to see A Chorus Line (in Swedish) at the new Opera House. A wonderful town!! You obviously all had a great time!! better keep that photo to show your grandchildren, although it might confuse them about your age!!

We've gone one further here - we're being told exactly how to teach in terms of pedagogy, methodology and school structure, but with no mandated curriculum whatsoever. Kids may very well be doing Egyptian mummies and/or dolphins in every grade from Kinder to Yr 10. But they will "be able to think" and "know how to learn"!!! So, that's all right, then!!

I know I live in a much smaller place, but I am amazed that a Union candidate visiting schools is looked upon as innovative and wonderful. If I HADN'T visited schools and listened to teachers during my campaign for the Presidency of our Union it would have been considered a definite reason not to vote. Now, as President, I get out into schools as often as I can. Right round the country, Australian Education Union Presidents or Gen-Secs (the title varies from state to state) earn about the same as a Principal of a fairly large school, plus a car. I think that's absolutely reasonable as we are the responsible officer for the organisation, working with top bureaucrats and politicians, and the public media spokesperson. I would not want to be doing all that on an unpromoted teachers' pay.

Our Prime Minister has a sure fire solution - as all PMs do - leave it to the schools and introduce compulsory sport and PE daily. Then if that doesn't work it won't be the parents (read: voters') fault, just the teachers' who don't matter because they vote Labor anyway!!

This may be of interest: The non-profit Kindersite Project needs your associations help. Our mission is to understand how, or even if, computers and technology should be introduced as a tool of education for young children. An academic research will be based around the existing, child-safe, Kindersite website at http://www.kindersite.org The Kindersite is a free resource for parents and teachers with 1,000s of links to graded content suitable for 2 to 6 year olds. The site is already being used as a resource by educationalists in about 95 countries, 167 participating schools in 28 countries are listed on the site. You can help this important project by: 1. Permitting a mention or article to be included in your regular journal, magazine or newsletter. I would be happy to write a piece for you, please let me know how long and if you want about the subject of 'Introducing computers to children' or about the Kindersite itself. 2. Bringing the site to the attention of your membership in additional ways 3. Testing the site yourself – I ask users to register (its free) as this will enable us to carry out the research methodologically 4. Adding a link to your website (if appropriate) – I have logos for your use at http://www.kindersite.org/links.htm The Kindersite has gained the endorsement of many educationalists for two reasons: 1. It's mission to try to understand if computers are 'good' for small children or not by using a large scale global research 2. For a free resource that helps small children, with their caregivers or educators, to use Internet content safely and easily There is a lot of information on the website about the project, some of which is in 6 languages, but if this does not cover all your questions please feel free to ask me anything. With many grateful thanks for any help you can give to the project. Joel Josephson – Founder and Executive Director Web : http://www.kindersite.org Email : joel_Josephson@kindersite.org Where Children Play and Teachers Learn

One of the young teacher members of my union has recently created a new website called "Australian Teachers". I think she's done a wonderful job and would like to encourage people to look at it and perhaps recommend it to other teachers, particularly younger ones looking for help from other teachers. If she feels it's supported, I'm sure she will develop it and feel it was worth the initial effort. http://www.austeachers.net/

Fully agree with all of the above about corporal punishment, but what, if anything, can we do about the fast growing number of parents who have no common sense about bringing up children? I was talking yesterday to our Deputy Director of Education who has responsibility for student management etc and she was saying that they are fast coming to the conclusion that the money being poured into student behaviour management is almost useless because so many parents do not back the schools' advice or help. Twenty years ago parents supported the sanctions teachers put in place, now they don't just go to the Head to complain of the unfair treatment of their unmanageable offspring, they go to the Secretary, the Minister, the Opposition, the anti-discrimination board or whoever will listen to them saying that their child isn't understood, isn't listened to, isn't given their "rights" - may be a "little difficult" but is a angel at heart, even though he's just kicked the teacher in the groin. Last week one of our teachers was punched in the breast by a Grade 1, whose mother said he just needed more love. Where do we go from here with these kids?

I agree with you about Sweden. I lived in Gothenberg for a few months in 92 (one block down from the library) and since then have been back 4 times, last visit last January to stay with friends. He is retired but was the national manager for a large well-known medical drug company. He knew Sweden at its height and has kept us informed about what he sees as its deterioration, but I keep telling him they are still so much better off socially than the rest of us. I spent some time in schools and colleges in and around Gothenberg and have friends who are teachers there. It is like being on another planet compared with either here or the UK. The schools are physically attractive, beautifully decorated and equipped, well-resourced compared with ours. The Montessori approach in early childhood seemed to help to instil values, appreciation of aesthetics and a social awareness. I know things are less perfect than they used to be but we could still learn a lot from them. Apart from the weather, I would prefer life there anyday.