Posts by Jolisa
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An interesting comparison is between Pt Chev and Te Atatu Peninsula: they're roughly the same size and population, but Te Atatu has three primary schools (and one intermediate, and one high school).
I find the current staged trade-off between the primary and the kindergarten really sad and frustrating. Yes, the school could certainly do with a little extra breathing space. But if anyone needs those two spaces to be in close proximity, its parents who - for a few years - have children in both kindy and the first years of primary. The logistics of dropping off and picking up wee kids from different institutions at the same time is hard enough as is, without adding separate locations into the mix.
(Which would also encourage car use over bikes/scooters/ walking, which would only add to the traffic woes when you've got a huge concentration of small kids in one area a couple of times a day).
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Meanwhile, here's a brilliant, informed rant about what's wrong with standardised testing - funny and quotable, and very, very useful for clarifying things when talking with anyone who just, y'know, "can't quite see the problem with testing kids and using those tests as measures of progress, because what's wrong with a few little quizzes here and there?"
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Anyone out there still doubting that the story I told about our experience in the US could ever truly happen here, READ THIS, about one NZ 5-year-old being kept in at lunchtime to "complete his writing."
Yep, it's one little story. But that's exactly how it happens: one kid at a time, one story at a time, one school at a time, one "hey, this ain't right" feeling at a time - until we join the dots.
And here's another bit of anecdotal evidence, from a teacher who's been talking to her colleagues who are thinking about school choices for their own children:
More recently, the teacher/parents I have spoken to have all categorically stated that if they could they would choose to home-school their child. That they felt their child's emotional and mental well-being was at-risk in some schools because of the pressure schools are now under to conform to the government's policies.
You know it must be bad if teachers, given half the chance, would choose to home-school their own kids.
Sounding familiar??
And if that's not got you exercised enough for a Monday morning: here's a rolling list of what the current government has managed to do to our schools in two terms. It's quite some reading.
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Hard News: What Hekia Parata actually said, in reply to Ross Mason,
"what difference I have made in my teaching and learning in this 6 month period"
LOUDLY: Testing every 6 months.
Exactly.
Because, if you're linking school funding and teacher salary - the big bucks - to this notion of progress, are you really going to just take a teacher's word for it that the kids are doing well? Nup; you're going to prefer a magically "neutral" instrument like a test.
Except those tests aren't neutral.
If they're anything like the ones we saw in the US, they'll be buggy, stupid, repetitive, and -- in order to be efficiently administered and graded - they'll reduce the curriculum to a series of tricks to be learned. All ambiguity and creativity goes by the board.
Kids will be trained not just to take the tests, but the language and grammar of the tests will leak out into every other aspect of the classroom, as detailed in my original post "Testing, testing".
Meanwhile, the businesses of test-design and test-preparation will boom. As will tutoring - both for kids struggling with the testable curriculum, and for parents who can afford to supplement their children with extra-curricular fun outside of school hours.
Schools whose children can't be drilled or cheated into passing the tests at the acceptable rate will - as in the US and the UK - be branded as "failures" and passed into the eager hands of charter chains, who can swing into action (as we've seen) at weeks' notice, especially now that legislation has smoothed the way.
Remember, these partnership schools are not subject to OIA or Ombudsman oversight; nor are they required to have any parental or community representation in their governance. Guess why.
Money -- taxpayer money, community money, our patrimony and our collective fund for the future of our population, as well as money spent by individual parents -- thus spills out of the classroom and into the hands of whoever is connected -- sorry, prescient -- enough to be standing there with a massive bucket.
Over in the other thread, we've gotten to talking about "trickle-down economics" vs "rising tides." If we're doing hydrological metaphors, I reckon it's time to focus on the FUCKING ENORMOUS FUNNELS.
As Thomas Frank points out in this piece on Salon, increasing "inequality" is no accident. It's a direct, deliberate, cynical, self-serving result of policy designed to transfer money out of the hands of those most in need.
And small, persuasive-at-first-glance policies like "testing for added value in the classroom" are just another part of that giant machine.
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Yup.
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Hard News: The Cycle Frolic, in reply to Bart Janssen,
As my wise sister was saying just last night over Waitangi Day cocktails (and just the other day on Twitter): Political leadership. Political leadership. Political leadership.
We can bubble and foment and brainstorm all we like from the tarmac-level, but only when someone at the top says "Let's do it, and let's do it now" will it actually happen.
Which is 50/50 wildly frustrating and oddly hopeful. Because, when it happens with political will behind it, it happens overnight - see what New York did. NEW YORK CITY!
Maybe the latest research from the University of Auckland will help tip the minds at the top of our bicycling bucket fountain? Cycling infrastructure investment is about the cheapest transportation thing you can do for the biggest return, in this case "more than $20 in benefit to society for every dollar spent over the next 40 years."
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The Rock to Rock annual community bike ride across New Haven always had a shuttle vehicle to return people and their bikes to the start of the ride if they were unable to go the distance themselves. Something like this would do the trick.
Or I suppose we could all leave our own bikes at home and queue for a go on one of these... of which there are ten.
Anyone know at what point bike racks will be added to Auckland buses?
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The rail network closure thing is wildly frustrating: I'd just worked out how my whole family could make it to Ciclovia with our bikes: we can bike to the Mt Albert station and then emerge at Britomart straight into open-street-paradise. And then home again at the end of the day.
(Sure, the fittest/biggest of us could bike all the way into town and home again, but it's a huge ask for kids, and there's no route I'd be entirely comfortable taking an 8 year old on.)
A more forward-thinking city apparatus would have seen the conflict coming, and arranged a fleet of buses with bike trailers setting off from train stations and town centres around the city at designated times, and returning again at the end of the day...
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So many thoughts, so tongue-tied right now, so grateful for the eloquence of others.
I've been thinking and thinking and thinking about the quotation that gives this post its title. It's such a clear-eyed statement of theoretical open-mindedness. Unobjectionable. Agreeable, even. A useful injunction; a workable bottom line for intelligent debate of the sort we generally enjoy in this forum.
Oddly enough, it's also what rape culture tells those to whom something has actually happened. Out loud. In your own head. In the moment. Down at the station. Over the teacups. In the factory. At the party. The morning after. In the newspaper, on the telly (see the PDF that Lilith linked to earlier, and which I wish everyone would read before commenting further). The insidious whisper of structural dominance asserting itself: "Think it possible that you may be mistaken."
I don't know what to do with this horrible paradox but maybe it helps explain the parallel lines along which this discussion is running. One person's handy theoretical credo is another's all-too-familiar dismissal of lived experience.
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And if a car went over 40kph, it got this message instead:
