Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Taking a very big gamble, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s hard to see how this isn’t both a disgrace and a debacle.
It's pretty astonishing.
Wtf?
I second that. WTFF? This one should be all over the news.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to bmk,
This is kind of what I mean by conceding the argument to the right.
That sounds like the Perfect being the enemy of the Good. Yes, it would be great if we lived in a paradise where governmental services can detect and correct all injustices to children. But we don't and therefore measures that can make a difference should not be dismissed on account of their imperfection.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
And even if you don’t want to buy into the whole “children are hungry because their parents are neglectful”, or “parents don’t feed their children because they spend the money on alcohol, cigarettes, lotto and Sky subscriptions” thing
I don't know if it's the major cause, but if it's a cause at all, for anyone, then it's something that breakfast provided by someone other than the parents gets around. Which raising benefits can't help with.
And yes, it takes away that horrible choice of rent or eat, at least with respect to breakfast.
Either that more money won’t help the kids and if they have that neglectful parents what about lunch, what about dinner?
Lunch isn't exactly a bad idea. Dinner, not so much, since by then, the kids aren't actually at school.
I used to get a school lunch, at primary school. It was organized by the PTA, by volunteer parents, rather than by the school, but I do remember there being some real advantages to it. It fizzled out in the end, though, as voluntary charitable things often do, when sufficient contributors got tired of doing it. It was a source of interesting variety, as the responsibility for planning it shifted. I doubt I would have ever discovered the vegemite and chicken chips sandwich otherwise. Nor would I have learned a distaste for pea soup :-)
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to bmk,
IE if the problem is hunger use the existing welfare system to solve it rather than the education system.
That's the usual argument, to which the counter is that kids not getting breakfast might not be because breakfast was totally unaffordable, but that the parents preferred to use the money another way, or even were too lazy/drunk/stoned/disorganized/dopey to make it. So school breakfast can get around at least one bad outcome of having neglectful parents.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Matthew Poole,
children who go to school healthy, not hungry, and dressed properly, will learn better
Quite. I think decent ECE access is under-emphasized, too. It's an area where lot of policy initiatives are possible.
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Hard News: What Hekia Parata actually said, in reply to JonathanM,
Even if all this could be done, is the best pay scheme to use to begin with?
Indeed. That all sounds like good data to collect, but you could make much more informed decisions about more things than just pay. You might use it to identify which teachers need more resourcing to perform which tasks - in other words to flip that whole idea on its head, and to treat "no child left behind" as strongly correlated to "no teacher left behind". Perhaps you fix the long tail by identifying teacher needs, as much as pupil needs, rather than just presuming that mucking with their pay is going to help.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to bmk,
But I think they are better to propose one or two strong policies and principles rather than a broad suite of policies. The latter approach will just lose public interest.
I'm not so sure about that. Individuals are typically interested in a small number of things, but there are many individuals to appeal to here. I think people tend to just ignore what they're not interested in, so if you only have 2 strong policies, you're losing everyone who isn't interested in them. Education policy, for instance, is of considerably less interest to people who don't have children in education. Minimum wage policy interests people at or near the minimum wage, and their employers, but others don't care so much.
I certainly think there should be broad focus on core overall areas of strength, and that Jolisa is right to see education as a crucial battleground in this election, especially if Parata is unwittingly giving us insight into the true intentions of her party. Even if the election is lost, it's an important duty of the Opposition to make sure the public is aware of what the government wants to do, and is able signal their preferences.
But within education, I think there are much more photogenic policy opportunities that can be hammered than the true but boring point that mostly trained and professional teachers actually know what to do and shouldn't be interfered with so much by bureaucrats. If the biggest problem in our schooling is identified as the long tail, then focusing on child poverty and how it can be alleviated at school can stand up as a far more practical solution than the ideologically driven idea that therefore teachers need a selective whipping.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Sacha,
I'm kind of regretting the war analogy. My aim was to get people to talk specific policy points they would most like to see improved to counter the inevitable angle that Baxter raised, that National is "doing something". To argue only that what Parata's apparent plans are wrong is to kind of suggest that the alternative is stasis, and that the battle lines have been drawn and this trench war (which teachers have been steadily losing, due to the sheer weight of government forces) is how it's going to be. To me that looks like a hiding to nowhere. I didn't intend a philosophical discussion on the art of war, just an acknowledgement that there even is such an "art", that multiple strategies are possible. And it was those that I wanted to hear about.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to bmk,
I think we are on the same page just seeing different answers.
Pretty much. The head on war I was referring to is this entrenched ideology vs ideology one that moves backwards and forwards with the same pace as you'd expect from trench warfare.
They have to find a highly important policy where they have an advantage and concentrate on that.
My suggestion was that the advantage should be formed into very clear, specific objectives, with a strong thrust for each, rather than a general objective of "push back the Right". And there should be many of these attacks, forcing each one to require specific answers. It's not enough that this kind of education policy is wrong, it has to be countered, rather than just blocked.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to bmk,
Heh, this is the same Clausewitz so roundly ridiculed by Tolstoy in War and Peace? Wherein the Russians beat Napoleon doing much what I said. Napoleon captured Moscow, after all, when he pushed the Russians from the field at Borodino, when the inferior Russian army attempted to fight head on. But just by being surrounded, harried and engaged in small skirmishes from then on, his magnificent army was completely routed in one of the most notorious and costly defeats in military history.
ETA: I don't think there are any really certain tactics in warfare. However, when you've got the numerical disadvantage, I think that if you really wish to win, then you have to do something other than the most obvious concentrated head on clash. Odds are, just by the fact that three terms is the median and mode number for an NZ government, that National has the advantage, and the polls are reflecting that currently. In 3 years, head on might be a workable strategy, but if Labour wants an upset, they have to be tricky.
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