PPTA

Campbell Live ran a story last week "Who wants to run charter schools?"

The hopefuls included:

Nga kakano - they want state money, they haven't been able to get state funding, and they want to get bigger.

C Me mentoring - want more state money .... they want to get bigger.

Mt Hobson and Alwyn Poole - want state money - want to get bigger.

So these are existing programmes, they're not new, they are working within the existing system, they don't need the charter school model.

EXCEPT they want money from the state ... and they won't have to answer to the protections in the existing system for any of it.

New Zealand state schools would like more money too ... for buildings that don't leak,

for working heating systems,

for computers,

for sports equipment,

for libraries,

for teacher/teacher aide support for struggling students,

for enough teachers for more personalised learning,

for more counsellors,

for school nurses,

for music rooms,

for classrooms that are bright, warm, friendly and well equipped,

for schools that can safely welcome the school community with resources that can cater to the education needs of all, ....

Comment (0) Read More...

So the billionaire worshippers at Forbes Magazine * have got their eyes on the massive opportunities for profit promised by the privatisation of public education.

Naveen Jain’s article is so full of absurd assertions, greed- masquerading as idealism and fundamental misunderstandings that it is hard to know where to begin.

Comment (2) Read More...

PPTA Pasifika at Select Cmmttee on Fri - We don't appreciate your touting Maori & Pacifika underachievement as a reason for charter schools

— Teachers@ PPTA (@PPTAWeb) February 22, 2013

The people who want our children to have charter schools had a little get together in the weekend. They are called the ACT party - not polling very well - but the current government seem to quite like some of their ideas.

Comment (0) Read More...

Horror stories, especially those that bring ghouls back from the shadows of the underworld, are popular with some people. Others prefer to rob a grave or three and dig up the skeletons of bad ideas.

The 'Bulk funding' spectre is one bad idea recently dug up by Ministry of Education wonks - and hinted at by lurking Treasury boffins - as a solution to 'teachers'.

Some of ACTs shades have even suggested taking the spectre of Novopay that one step further to the full chaos of bulk funding.

Comment (0) Read More...

Reading the start of Hard Times in the library last weekend, I had to stop myself accosting the nearest person with how strikingly relevant it is to the educational debate today.

In a miserable class room in a northern English industrial town a school inspector and a new teacher drill a class of youngsters with facts in the modern, 1850s, method.  Exaggerated as they are in Dickens’ inimitable style, Misters Gradgrind and M’Choakumchild are recognisable still as archetypes of the ‘filling a bucket’ style of educator.  Dickens describes the teacher “…looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another… from thy boiling store that shalt fill each jar brim full [and] kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within…” and so on.

So, what’s so exciting about this?

First, it’s that, even in 1854, this style of education was quite obviously mocked and criticised by Dickens, and presumably other people too. There’s  this mythologising that goes on, from educational consultants and people on TED talks in particular, that the twentieth century industrial model of education was about pumping kids through schools and filling their heads in a regimented manner and rhythm, and that we have to change this because of the ‘new economy’ or ‘new forms of knowledge’ or whatever. What nonsense. The tension between education as a personal, holistic, creative endeavour versus the acquisition of knowledge, at least reaches back to the mid nineteenth century, and I suspect much earlier indeed.

And the relation of this to charter schools is simply that Mr Gradgrind sounds like a perfect candidate to run a KIPP school.  “A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations… With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket... ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature…” this sounds like a man ideally fitted for the ‘no excuses’ extreme-accountability regime of the (commonly known as) Kids in Prison Programme.

Comment (0) Read More...