Should you be able to be beat your instructor?

Ron Amram explains Why You Should Beat Your Instructors Up.

I guess that if your instructor is good, and you can defeat him or her, then you have been taught well.

Tricks to remember what you read

In 9 tricks for remembering everything you read Shana Lebowitz collates some recommendations to improve our recollection of what we read.

Investing in preschools

In More preschool is a sure-fire budget fix, in the long run. But politicians don't have the guts Jacqueline Maley writes about the economic and social benefits of investing in preschool education for all children.

The evidence is clear that this near-magic initiative works to prevent poverty, illiteracy, social delinquency, welfare dependency, ill health, and even cardiovascular disease and obesity.

Becoming fluent in Maths

In How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math Barbara Oakley writes that developing an understanding on a topic isn't enough. You also need memorisation and repetition to retain that understanding and develop fluency. In other words for understanding to turn from ephemeral to permanent students need to practice.

Oakley explains how chunking is vital in developing skills (in language and maths):
This approach—which focused on fluency instead of simple understanding—put me at the top of the class. And I didn’t realize it then, but this approach to learning language had given me an intuitive understanding of a fundamental core of learning and the development of expertise—chunking.

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Time after time, professors in mathematics and the sciences have told me that building well-ingrained chunks of expertise through practice and repetition was absolutely vital to their success. Understanding doesn’t build fluency; instead, fluency builds understanding. In fact, I believe that true understanding of a complex subject comes only from fluency.

The pursuit of rank rather than knowledge drives univerities

In University status comes at a high price Ross Gittins highlights how universities are more interested in their status than their students needs.

Has it occurred to you that universities are fundamentally about the pursuit of status? Almost every aspect of their activities focuses on the acquisition of rank. And Christopher Pyne's proposed "reform" of universities is about harnessing the status drive to help balance the budget.

Ostensibly, unis exist to add to the store of human knowledge and to educate the brightest of the rising generation. All very virtuous.

When you think about it, however, you see that unis are about the pursuit of certification, standing, position and prestige. The main way they earn their revenue is by granting superior status to young people seeking to enter the workforce.

Ross Gittins continues on this theme with Students pay for status under uni fee rise.

Stiglitz compares Australia to the US

Joseph Stiglitz compares Australia to the US in Inequality: Why Australia must not follow the US.

The combination of unequal education opportunities and access to healthcare and inadequate systems of social protection translates into poor average performance of our children - well below the average of the advanced countries in standardised tests, in contrast to Australia, whose children perform well above average. Contrary to what some in Australia’s government have suggested, support for poor families is not only a moral imperative, it is an investment in the country’s future.

Two big lessons of economic research over the past 10 years are that inequality is not the result of inexorable laws of economics but rather of policy; and that countries that adopt policies that lead to high inequality pay a high price - inequality not only leads to a divided society and undermines democracy, but it weakens economic performance. Hopefully, as Australia debates its new government’s budget and economic “reforms,” it bears this in mind.

Stiglitz on Australia

In Tony Abbott's changes to universities and health 'a crime, absurd', says Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz Peter Martin writes:

Asked by Fairfax Media to nominate the two biggest mistakes the government could make that would take it down the American path of widening inequality and economic stagnation, Professor Stiglitz chose the budget changes to university fees and Medicare. Each would make Australia more like the US.

"Countries that imitate the American model are kidding themselves," he said. "It seems that some people here would like to emulate the American model. I don't fully understand the logic."

In the lead-up to the budget Education Minister Christopher Pyne said Australia had much to learn about universities from overseas, "not least … from our friends in the United States".

Professor Stiglitz said Australia had "a system that is really a model for the rest of the world", and deregulating fees would move the entire system in the wrong direction.

"Trying to pretend that universities are like private markets is absurd. The worst-functioning part of the US educational market at the tertiary level is the private for-profit system,'' he said. ''It is a disaster. It excels in one area, exploiting poor children.

"If you're rich your parents can pay the fees, but if you are poor you are going to worry about how much debt you're undertaking.

"It is a way of closing off opportunity and that's why the US doesn't have educational opportunity.

"While we in the US are trying to re-regulate universities, you are talking about deregulating them. It really is a crime."

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Asked what Australia had done right that the US had not, he said: "unions".

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The elite, the top one per cent are not too concerned. When you have so much inequality those at the top say: I don't need public transportation, I have a helicopter, I don't need public schools, I don't need all these other public services and so the result of that is - you look at America today we have some of the best universities, but our average education performance is mediocre.”

The spin of earn and learn

Greg Jericho writes in Hang on, youths already earn and learn that youth unemployment mirrors overall unemployment.

When it comes to either earning or learning the 15-19-year-olds are doing that in record numbers. In May about 92 per cent of youth aged 15 to 19 years of age were either working or learning. This includes about 44 per cent who were employed, 5.7 per cent who were unemployed but doing full-time education and 42 per cent who were not in the labour force but were attending full-time education.

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There has always been a strong link between the percentage of 20-24-year-olds out of work and not attending education and the total unemployment rate.

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Earning or learning sounds great, but not when the number of jobs is declining, and you have reached a point where you have already done a fair amount of learning. Do you do another TAFE course? Another degree?

And the problem is it's not like you can just pick your job. The jobs market is tough - and has become tougher in the past two years.

Don Russell on Canberra, the public service, innovation, etc.

In Reflections on my time in Canberra Dr Don Russell makes some interesting observations about the public service, universities, industry, innovation, the economy and the role of ministers, the Prime Minister and departmental secretaries.

Inequality leading to falling education standards

In Tide of inequity to blame for falling education results David Gillespie explains why the increasing market share of private schools is not a good thing.

But we are on the fast train to inequity again. And, as the studies have predicted, the more the tide of equity sinks, the worse our education results as a nation become.

Running away from the public system is not the solution to Australia's education woes. It simply drives wedges into cracks in Australian society and replays the disaster movie our education system has seen once before. Any government that encourages that as a solution is looking after its bottom line, not your child's future.

An argument for the abolition of private schools

Elizabeth Farrelly argues in Why private schools add little to education mix that all schools should be made public:

Private schools, on the other hand, add little. They build enclaves of privilege for those who need it least. They suck public funding, with three-quarters of non-government schools getting most of their funding from government sources. This is bizarre and unprecedented. And, as theologian Marion Maddox notes in her book Taking God to School, they guise all this as neo-liberal "choice".

More compelling still, as corporate lawyer and father of six David Gillespie argues in his new book Free Schools, private schools offer no guarantee of a better educational outcome. You can fork out $150,000 for a child's schooling and essentially get nothing for it.

Private schools may perform decently in league tables but only because they use the fee-hurdle to select for socio-economic status, by far the best predictor of academic success. They further skew their results by giving scholarships to select gifted children who will up their average.

In other words, says Gillespie, once you correct for socio-economic advantage, our education system adds no value to what children bring from home. Losing such schools therefore has no net negative. In fact, by flooding middle class energy into the public system, it would bring massive gains.

Gillespie points out that the best measure of how much value an education system adds overall is "resilience", that is, the chance a socially disadvantaged child has of performing to his or her full capacity as a human.

The world's best education systems - Japan, Finland, Korea - all have a resilience measure over 50 per cent. In Australia it's 30 per cent, and falling.

This is bad for us all. Your private school may sit near the top of our league table, but as Gillespie notes, "we are riding a sinking tide, and a sinking tide lowers all boats".

Latham on education

In The real education revolution Labor needs Crikey has an extract from Mark Latham's contribution to Quarterly Essay 49, Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-Left Future.

What we need to do to support teachers

Jane Caro in Hey politicians, leave those teachers alone argues that we need to make teaching desirable again if we want to attract the best and brightest:

If we really want to help our teachers, both new and experienced, to do their jobs to the best of their ability, we need to do some fairly obvious things. First, give the teachers in the toughest schools the support they need. Larger class sizes may be fine in nice middle-class schools, but in schools dealing with the really tough social and behavioural problems that generational poverty and marginalisation can cause, they will make everything worse. The really tough schools may need teachers aides, social workers and behavioural psychologists on staff to free teachers up to do their job.

We need to lower the workload on teachers, particularly for young teachers and those in tough schools, so that they can de-stress and get the support they need to survive. We certainly don't need to add to their stress with more testing or hoops to jump through.

We need to give them time to do specialist professional development and experienced mentors to coax them out of the fetal position and give them strategies to cope. (By the way, the current mentoring program is being scaled back.) Just as you can only help children develop effectively by supporting their mothers, so you only help children learn effectively by supporting their teachers.

If we simply raise the ATAR and the hurdles that must be jumped over before you can do a teaching degree, but continue to throw young teachers to the lions unsupported, all we will do is have an even higher churn. The brighter the teacher, the more choices they have, so if this is all we do, expect teacher retention problems to get even greater.

But if we support, nurture and respect our teachers, and acknowledge and reward the degree of difficulty they face in their extremely demanding jobs, we won't have to artificially fiddle about with ATARs and interviews. If we make teaching a desirable job again, the ATARs will rise all on their own.

The future on journalism and outsourced education

Robert W. McChesney has written a rather bleak article on the future of journalism in Mainstream media meltdown! Basically he says that there's not enough money to support quality online journalism.

However, it's the summary that I want to highlight:

There is probably no better evidence that journalism is a public good than the fact that none of America’s financial geniuses can figure out how to make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When manag­ers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative public service, not a business. Corporatized schools throw underachieving, hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard stu­dents with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the main impediment to “success.” No one has ever made profits doing qual­ity education—for-profit education companies seize public funds and make their money by not teaching. In digital news, the same dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to the same conclusion.

Unfortunately there's nothing in the body of the article discussing corporatised education. Judging by the one paragraph above I think it's a topic probably worth an article in itself.

Why Christopher Pyne is wrong to claim the current education funding model works

In Why Christopher Pyne should go back to school Bernard Keane applies the blowtorch to Opposition Education Spokesman Christopher Pyne's claims that the current funding model works.

Finnish education: teachers are important

John Hattie has written Finnish education guru Pasi Sahlberg: treat primary school teachers like doctors

The economic benefits of education

Jessica Irvine, in her new digs at News, has written If the mining boom busts, education could step in. Jessica looks at the economic benefits to the individual and the country from higher levels of education.

Some interesting posts on private vs public funding of education

Dave O'Neil accuse Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott of giving up on fairness in I see rich people.

Ross Gittins criticises the announcement of more funding for all schools in Productivity the loser in Gonski fight. He suggests that we could improve worker productivity by directing the extra funding to those who need it most.

David Gonski and his committee proposed increased funding of $5 billion a year for schools - government or non-government - according to their numbers of low-income, indigenous, disabled, non-English speaking or remote-area students.

According to the calculations of Trevor Cobbold, of the public-school Save Our Schools lobby group, Gillard's promise of extra funding for independent schools regardless of educational need could cost a further $1.5 billion a year.

See what happened? Successful lobbying by the independent schools ensured that, however much extra ends up being spent on federal grants to schools, more will go to privileged students who don't need it and less to underprivileged students who do.

Should Tony Abbott win the federal election, it's likely little or nothing extra will be spent on increasing resources for the education of the underprivileged. And that will be a lost opportunity to improve the future productivity of Australia's workforce.

Education outcomes and family

In Family matters for education outcomes – and we have to accept and celebrate this Stephen King has a look at The Australian's headline story on wealth being the key to the success of schools:

The story is behind a paywall. But it notes something that anyone involved in the education system knows: Family background (including parental education), family income (probably because it is correlated with parental education) and family attitude matter a lot for the educational outcomes of children. Children are not equal before they arrive at their first day of school. Children from families that value education cluster in selective government schools and the more expensive private schools. And they are more successful at school.

Unfortunately the accompanying story – The evidence is in, not all children are equal – does not address this difference but focuses on money.

He argues that:

Undoubtedly, funding for students is part of the answer. But if family background and attitudes are a source of difference in education outcomes, throwing money at schools cannot be the whole solution. And the approach of focussing just on school funding can lead to attempts to bring the high achievers ‘back to the pack’.

So – a simple prediction. Even if ‘all schooling were equal’, so that children from families that value education highly and children from families that value education less highly, received identical schooling, my prediction is that the children from families that value education would still outperform the others in terms of education achievement.