Posts by mpledger
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Things like school trips to Japan are funded by parents and fundraising - not school funds. It's cheaper for a kid to go with the school than for a family to go and usually the teacher doing it has all sorts of educational contacts to set up a good trip for the kids so it's actually a good deal - if the families can afford it.
It's the overseas school sporting trips that I don't see any merit in. They are only trivially educational and, for most cases, it would be better for the kids to travel internally, especially Aucklanders.
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@Matthew Hooton
If parents, teachers and just about everyone have reacted badly to Hekia Parata’s online learning policy then she has only herself to blame. If she made the announcement with so little information than people are going to look elsewhere to see what she means.
And if she used terminology that comes straight out of American educational policy around Online Charter schools then people are going to take it that she means to replicate American educational policy.
American online schools has been terrible for the vast majority of students who enrol in them – IIRC only about 33% graduate from online schools compared to 80% across all schools. Huge number of kids enroll but never logon or only logon once.
Parents Across America, a parent advocacy group, recently came out with these concerns about education by computer…
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PAA’s specific concerns about EdTech’s:
- harmful effects on children’s mental and emotional development,
- negative impact on student intellectual and academic growth,
- damaging physical effects,
- depersonalization and other ways of undermining the educational process,
- questionable value and effectiveness,
- continuous testing of students, often without obtaining consent from or even informing students or parents,
- threats to student data privacy, and
- hugely lucrative benefits for private companies.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If people are "hysterical" as DPF claims than it's Hekia Parata's fault because it's her communication skills that have caused people to become "hysterical".
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The thing about online learning is that online testing goes with it. And with online testing it's very easy to build a database of information about a child and that database is valuable. Especially when joined up with enrollment info - religion, parent's jobs, home addresses etc.
It's harder in school with pen and paper tests because someone has to sit down and enter the data, in the right format and add it to the right database. That's get really hard with lots of kids over many years.
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Polity: Hekia's waynebrave, in reply to Russell Brown,
RB said:
It does make me think that had there been a suitable COOL available to us at the time, we'd certainly have tried it.Private hospitals send their difficult cases (i.e. expensive cases) to the public health system. I don't think COOLs will be any different - there is no profit in it.
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We all know who the "nutters" are "running the place on political polling".
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Too many industries think the govt should be importing immigrants to meed their labour needs rather than training their staff too.
Hair dressing as a skilled immigrant class is depressing.
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The Maori Parties position bugs me because IMO it's the best position for them to take that serves their petty self-interests rather than being about who is the best candidate for the top job to run an agency that covers the world.
IMO Helen Clark runs her own agency too well for the powers that be to want to elevate her to a higher position.
Nowadays, only the incompetent get promoted. The incompetent have to depend so much more on others to get the job done and they get to grab swathes of the power while being beyond view.
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Moz said
This is where proportional systems win, hands down. MMP where you tick two boxes, party and MP, the end.
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The worst thing about MMP is that the parties select their party list. (I am assuming that) in Australia if I dislike A and like B from the same party I can rank B high and A low but with NZ's party list it's either vote neither or both via the party vote.And some pretty awful people get put high on the list...
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The other thing to realise is that peoples tax and benefits change over time. That the people paying the most tax now and getting the least benefit are most likely 55 year old business managers with independent children. It fails to take into account that 30 years ago they were in a family getting lots of benefits through the education system and the health system for their children and that 10 years earlier they themselves were paying little or no tax but having massive benefits through the education system.
Making the most taxed/least benefited people think they are being hard done by is really an attack of the old on the young.
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@Rob
Don't get to invested in PISA.We're going down the rankings but a lot of that is because new countries are being introduced that live on standardised testing, where the kids are consigned to the scrap heap if they don't pass the standardised test for university. Whereas in NZ, NCEA tests for a lot of non-exam skills through internal assessments. It's understandable that kids who work solely for exam-type assessments are going to better at exam-type assessment than kids who do work for many different types of assessment.
Although Shanghai is "top" in the ranking this is what wikipedia has to say -
"Critics of PISA counter that in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, most children of migrant workers can only attend city schools up to the ninth grade, and must return to their parents' hometowns for high school due to hukou restrictions, thus skewing the composition of the city's high school students in favor of wealthier local families. According to Schleicher, 27% of Shanghai's 15-year-olds are excluded from its school system (and hence from testing). "NZ would improve a lot if the 27% of the lowest deciles schools weren't included. Given the different enrollments in high decile versus low decile schools that would be like only testing in deciles 4 and up (actually that's a guess but I don't think it's far from the truth).
And it's become like the Olympics, there is prestige in a country doing well so there is a huge incentive to cheat. But to the kids taking the tests, it doesn't matter and, from the stories I have heard, treat it as bit of a laugh.
The real problem with education is not that we are going down in the PISA rankings but that the govt is trying to change the education system in order to not go down the PISA rankings. But it's the easiest to acquire skills that are tested by PISA - drill and kill skills. Not deep and creative thinking that we really need to improve our economy and give citizens a way to understand and improve their lives.