Posts by Russell Brown
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Quoted at the top of teacher Tim Kong’s excellent blog post on league tables and standards. It’s from a PISA report published by the OECD:
Most successful school systems grant greater autonomy to individual schools to design curricula and establish assessment policies, but these school systems do not necessarily allow schools to compete for enrolment.
• In countries where schools have greater autonomy over what is taught and how students are assessed, students tend to perform better.
• Within countries where schools are held to account for their results through posting achievement data publicly, schools that enjoy greater autonomy in resource allocation tend to do better than those with less autonomy. however, in countries where there are no such accountability arrangements, the reverse is true.
• Countries that create a more competitive environment in which many schools compete for students do not systematically produce better results.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Jolisa,
TKI has a very useful school-zone-and-info map, (according to which, Russell, you’d now only be in zone for the one very local public school, although with a nearby Catholic school as another option).
Well that settles it, then. We're not having any more kids.
Funny that the government wants to preempt all that with a single datum (ranking) which would eclipse all else. So much for doing it “by the numbers.”
Quite.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Some primary schools already exclude disabled children – there are ways around the laws – but this will just make it so much worse.
Yes, absolutely. It's hard enough anyway getting your disabled child the education to which they're entitled. The pressure of league tables would make it much, much worse. There's not even any question about it.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
Your experience is somewhat out of date now though, those schools you mention with the addition of Pt Chev to the list have enrolment zones with very, very few out of zone enrolments.
I stand corrected. Our old house would have been just out of the current zone for Westmere and Richmond Road.
Otoh, there are three primary schools within walking distance of where we are now in Pt Chev. (Not, I hasten to add, that we have any plans to use them.)
It isn't particularly unusual for parents to have a choice of local schools -- see Whoops' comment above about having a choice of five -- and indeed, that's the only reason we're having this debate.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Except most parents won’t be able to afford to do that. Sure if you can make that choice great, but it can’t be such a big difference that those that can’t afford the choice are penalized.
Not sure what you mean by "afford". For our oldest's primary school, we had the choice of at least three nearby schools. The nearest was Grey Lynn primary, which we didn't choose because it was still in flux after a governance crisis, but probably would have done two or three years later. But Westmere, where we had personal connections -- and most importantly, which didn't freak out about our newly-diagnosed ASD kid -- was only an additional couple of kilometres away.
On the other hand, had we been a bit posher and living in Herne Bay, we'd still have steered clear of Bayfield primary -- which had a rep for not being welcoming to special needs kids -- in favour of Westmere. These choices are really important for some of us.
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Hard News: Women and their representations, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Now that’s a discussion I’d like to see. How the MSM actively engages in feeding womens’ hate of, and disconnection from, their own bodies.
The thing is, of course, that most of that happens in the so-called "women's magazines", which are universally edited by women, almost always overseen by women publishers, and purchased in huge numbers by women.
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Hard News: Women and their representations, in reply to Graham Dunster,
Ummm… it’s 11, not 10 unless the Topp Twins have been recently co-joined.
Yes. They note that in the mag.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I was tempted to ask, but stopped for fear of being accused of Brown-bashing. I know a wall of undulating sequins after a hard day’s night can make one a tad queasy, but that’s only a crime against fashion. :)
I imagine he doesn't get to Family bar a lot. But in context, it did seem that it was the reporter that had the hangup, not the mayor.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Bart Janssen,
You shouldn’t have to make a choice about the school you send you children to, they should ALL be good.
They should -- but that doesn't mean parents shouldn't choose the school they think is best for their child. Different schools have different cultures and strengths.
That is, of course, the kind of thing you'll never find out by looking at a league table based on the dumbed-down measure of national standards.
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Hard News: Women and their representations, in reply to JacksonP,
I got to 8. And I haven’t even had lunch yet. (timezone trick)
You left out the greatest of them all: the amazing Shirley Maddock, who produced the first NZ TV documentaries --- and made the bloody tea.
Also: she's Jolisa's late mother-in-law. Jolisa will complete Shirley's unfinished memoir one day ...
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