In the News, for week ending 7 March 2010

Our In the News feature provides an overview of news stories relating to education over the last week.  We focus particularly on news items referring to significant new developments or reports, issues affecting students with learning difficulties, and issues relating to education more generally.  We hope that this feature will help to keep our members and website visitors informed of current issues in education, and to generate debate and discussion of these issues.  To initiate debate and discussion on news stories listed, comments can be posted on the LDA Discussion Forum.

Schools should be free to teach what they want
Chris Berg, The Age, March 7, 2010
Most people seem to have missed the point about the national curriculum. The opposition certainly has. If the national curriculum is as bad as Nationals senator Ron Boswell says - it ''reads like a Marxist learner … to prepare our young for the anti-capitalist class struggle'' - in a way, that's the (decidedly not Marxist) Howard government's fault. Taking control of the curriculum out of the hands of the states and into the loving arms of the federal government didn't begin when Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election.

You can't fool the children of the school building revolution
RACHEL BROWNE, Sydney Morning Herald, March 7, 2010
FOUR schools have joined forces to protest their dissatisfaction at work undertaken on their grounds as part of the federal schools stimulus building program. The schools claim some of the costs for parts of the buildings were more than 10 times the standard market rates and some of the workmanship is unsatisfactory. Representatives from Mid North Coast public schools - at Willawarrin, Eungai, Stuarts Point and Scotts Head - met their local MP and Nationals Leader Andrew Stoner last week to discuss their concerns after being ''stonewalled'' by the NSW Department of Education.

Study secrets from Mr 100 per cent
DANIELLE TEUTSCH, Sydney Morning Herald, March 7, 2010
FOR parents desperate to get their children into one of the state's selective high schools, this man is Mr 100 per cent. Mr Ye, as he wishes to be known, runs a small coaching college in suburban Campsie where, he says, all his students are offered a highly coveted place in an elite school. Last year 48 of his students made it into year 7 at James Ruse Agricultural High School - NSW's top-ranked school for HSC results. The total year 7 intake at James Ruse last year was 120. The rest of his 129 students all made it into selective schools. Chinese-background Australians make up the majority of his students. More than 13,200 year 6 students will vie for 4127 selective high school places when they sit the selective school test on March 18. Mr Ye has a competitor. At Sydney's biggest coaching outfit, Pre-Uni New College, manager David Lee boasts that 67 of its students got into James Ruse last year. If the claims of both men are correct, it means the two colleges between them are responsible for coaching 95 per cent of James Ruse's annual intake.

Teachers vote with their feet on Cape York curriculum
Tony Koch, The Australian, March 6, 2010
THE two schools that have adopted a radical competency-based learning program in Cape York have encountered teething problems, with teachers leaving because they are unhappy. In the six weeks since school resumed, eight of the 20 teachers at Aurukun on western Cape York have left and one of the four in Coen has transferred to another school. The learning program is the brainchild of Aboriginal social reform advocate Noel Pearson, who lobbied government to introduce the US-based academy system in an effort to accelerate the learning levels of Aboriginal children, particularly those on remote communities. He pointed out, for instance, that very few children entering mainstream high school had a genuine competency level of even grade 4 or 5.

Literacy barriers hold back workers
Andrew Trounson, The Australian, March 6, 2010
POOR adult literacy and numeracy skills are impediments to raising workforce participation and productivity, with an additional $50 million needed for adult teaching programs by 2012, warns Skills Australia. Highlighting the extent of the problem, a yet to be released survey from the Australian Industry Group has found that 75 per cent of firms believe a lack of English language and mathematics skills hurt their productivity. Skills Australia yesterday proposed a new workforce strategy to boost skills and participation and arrest the projected decline in workforce as the population ages. It wants to boost funding for tertiary enrolments from $22 billion to $32bn by 2025 as part of a target to raise the participation rate to 69 per cent from 65 per cent. AI Group chief executive Heather Ridout said a big issue holding back participation was that 40 per cent of employed Australians and 60 per cent of the unemployed "don't have the literacy or numeracy levels to participate fully in a modern workforce".

School 'a longer race than before'
DANIEL HURST, Brisbane Times, March 5, 2010
Queensland's education minister says measuring the percentage of people who finish Year 12 studies at the normal age is as useless as picking a running race winner at the halfway point. Education Queensland said last week it was unable to provide recent figures on the senior school completion rate which could be compared with a target it set about 10 years ago.

Cum laude for the curriculum
The Australian, March 5, 2010
Julia Gillard has prevailed where others failed for 25 years
THE Hawke, Keating and Howard governments had a proud record of reform in many areas but, when it comes to the school curriculum, Julia Gillard has achieved more in two years than her predecessors managed in a quarter of a century. The draft national curriculum released this week for kindergarten-to-Year 10 is a major achievement setting out a path for improved teaching of English, history, mathematics and science. Parents of children who have left school might wonder why previous governments did not act instead of talking and dithering.
The Rudd government is promoting the curriculum as "back to basics" and for once the spin has a solid basis. The English program sets out a good foundation in phonics, sentence and paragraph construction and grammar. And while the draft does not nominate set books or poems, it values literature in all years. Thankfully there is no sign of the nonsense pushed by English teachers' associations, branding literature study "inherently political" and advocating "other models of English such as personal growth".

Curriculum no return to 'golden age'
ANNA PATTY, The Age, March 5, 2010
The leading adviser for the new national English curriculum has dismissed assumptions that the back-to-basics approach to grammar is a return to a so-called golden era of education. Peter Freebody, who wrote the English curriculum ''shape'' paper, on which the draft national curriculum was based, said literacy standards were poorer two generations ago, when grammar was taught more intensively in schools. He said the back-to-basics approach to grammar was not about returning to ''a golden age where everyone was literate''.

Creationism could slip into science classes
ANNA PATTY, Sydney Morning Herald, March 4, 2010
The draft national curriculum does not prohibit the teaching of creationism in schools, raising questions about whether this will open the door to its promotion as a science in classrooms. The NSW Board of Studies has explicitly ruled out the teaching of creation theory from the Bible as a science, however it allows the teaching of spiritual perspectives on creation in science classes, as long as they are not dressed up as scientific or used to substitute any curriculum content, such as the teaching of evolution.

Making history in the classroom
Justine Ferrari, The Australian, March 4, 2010
The newly unveiled national curriculum takes a back-to-basics approach
"THEY didn't teach it like that in my day." For years, that was the lament of parents worried that an out-of-touch school system was failing to equip their children with the basic skills needed for life and work. Well, their day is back. At least that is how the federal government is selling its new "back-to-basics" national curriculum, with the release on Monday of the first four subjects of English, history, maths and science. The national curriculum is not intended to provide an exhaustive list of everything a student will learn but to set out the essential knowledge and skills children across the nation need to know.

Glen Waverley students to test new curriculum
FARRAH TOMAZIN, The Age, March 3, 2010
KYLIE Price has a tough task ahead. Over the next three months, the year 8 English teacher will be one of the first in the country to test-run the new national curriculum. After so much hype about the new system - which promises to strip English ''back to basics'', scale back maths so students have more time to learn, and reinvigorate history and science - Ms Price is keen to finally discover what works and what doesn't. The new system dictates that all students must be taught grammar and language conventions - fundamental skills the 29-year-old head of English at Glen Waverley Secondary College admits she didn't spend much time learning when she was at school.

On the path to higher standards
Andrew Trouson, The Australian, March 3, 2010
OVERSEEING the development of new academic standards is the first step in what could be a continuing role for the Australian Learning and Teaching Council in keeping them updated and relevant, new council chief Carol Nicoll says. Nicoll, a former senior federal education bureaucrat who last month succeeded Richard Johnstone as chief executive, believes the ALTC can be the "honest broker" in leading the development of standards and presenting them to the new Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. She says the standards should be viewed as "living documents" that will need revising as curriculum priorities and graduate needs change and evolve. "We have been given the leadership [role] to work with the academic community and other stakeholders on developing a preliminary set of academic standards in some discipline areas, and I hope it is a role that we can continue," Nicoll tells the HES.

Christian schools angry over ban on teaching creationism
MALCOLM BROWN, Sydney Morning Herald, March 3, 2010
Australian Christian schools will campaign against what they see as the thin end of the wedge - a decision by the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board to effectively ban the teaching of creationism. Under policies published in December, the board said it required ''teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis''.

Bradley endorses My Uni website
Andrew Trounson, The Australian, March 3, 2010
DENISE Bradley has backed federal Education Minister Julia Gillard's plans for a My University website, arguing it is in line with the new "student demand-driven" system being rolled out. There are concerns that complex information on a university's performance, such as the varied academic background of commencing students, could be taken out of context and lead to simplistic judgments. But Professor Bradley said this was not an excuse for not putting out comparative information. "I think it is an important principle," said Professor Bradley, who in 2008 chaired the government's review of higher education. "In a more open system with more choice and competition, people need better public information, not PR information." In a speech at the Universities Australia conference in Canberra today, Ms Gillard will announce plans to launch a My University website by 2012 that will complement the My School site launched in January.

Public need a clear policy on education: editorial
The Courier-Mail , March 2, 2010
THE draft national curriculum unveiled this week drew some passionate criticism but also praise for its attempt to give structure to the hodge-podge of state-based curriculums Australian teachers and children are labouring under now. Not before time, Australia will have a school curriculum that acknowledges the increased mobility of its residents, while making it clear that the classroom is no place for fad theories on how to help children realise their potential. Those who see the value in a return to less casual forms of school education will welcome a curriculum which ensures that history, phonics and grammar are granted more formal places in every student's learning. Although it is important to make sure children are not force-fed political dogma at their desks, we should avoid spending too much time worrying about whether and how the curriculum allows for some ideologically sound form of Australian history to be taught. Those who produced this draft curriculum appear to have made a serious effort to eschew the notion of either a black armband view or a white blindfold approach to teaching children about Australia's past.

What the nation learns, the nation will become
Sydney Morning Herald, March 2, 2010
AUSTRALIA'S history teachers are worried that the draft national curriculum for their subject, released yesterday, might fail if it is placed in the hands of the bored or the ill-trained. That seems a sensible and mundane concern to have, and the fact that history teachers have that sort of worry about the curriculum is cause for rejoicing. It is one sign that the ideological battles of the so-called history wars are over, allowing the focus to return to what actually happens in classrooms. There will be no black armbands, or white ones either, for students will be expected to study history from more than one perspective.

'Black armband' view risks national curriculum
DAN HARRISON, The Age, March 2, 2010
THE Coalition has threatened to scrap Australia's first national curriculum, saying it places too much emphasis on indigenous and Asian perspectives at the expense of the nation's British and European heritage. The curriculum, the product of more than 30 years of agitation by education experts and two years of negotiations by federal, state and territory governments and Catholic and independent school sectors, could be binned before it reaches classrooms if Labor is defeated at the election expected in the second half of this year. Speaking to The Age soon after launching the draft curriculum yesterday, Education Minister Julia Gillard said she took the threat seriously.

Back to basics on national education
Sue Dunlevy and Bruce McDougall, The Daily Telegraph, March 2, 2010
TEACHERS will be forced back to school to learn how to deliver the Federal Government's new national curriculum. Experts who have designed the back-to-basics curriculum, which has heavy emphasis on grammar and phonics, said yesterday many teachers would have to be re-educated before they were competent to teach it from next year. It is expected that primary school teachers will need training in basic grammar. High school teachers for the first time will be required to teach literacy basics such as grammar and text types to children who may not have fully understood the concepts in primary school.

A sound beginning
FARRAH TOMAZIN AND MIKI PERKINS, The Age, March 2, 2010
When Elisabeth Lenders went to school, she was part of a generation that wasn't taught grammar but rather the ''whole-language'' approach, which emphasised meaning rather than deconstruction. Decades later, Lenders (pictured above), now an English teacher and deputy principal of Carey Baptist Grammar School, admits that grammar lessons are still the ones she has to prep for, ''like most teachers under 50''. From next year, she will be one of thousands charged with rolling out Australia's new national curriculum - a curriculum in which English teaching will be stripped ''back to basics''; maths will be scaled back, but taught more comprehensively; science and history will be revamped to encourage more students to take on the subjects; and Aboriginal and Asian ways of seeing the world will be placed into almost every learning stream.

Give Britain its due or we'll can it: opposition
DAN HARRISON, ANNA PATTY, HEATH GILMORE AND AMY CORDEROY, Sydney Morning Herald, March 2, 2010
THE federal Coalition has threatened to scrap the new national curriculum, saying it places too much emphasis on indigenous and Asian perspectives at the expense of British and European culture. Its education spokesman, Christopher Pyne, said the curriculum was ''unbalanced''. ''While there are 118 references in the document to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people and culture, there is one reference to Parliament, none to 'Westminster' and none to the Magna Carta,'' he said.

History curriculum 'could fail'
DAN HARRISON, The Age, March 1, 2010
HISTORY teachers are warning that the national history curriculum could be a failure if the subject is placed in the hands of bored or ill-trained teachers.
Before the release of the curriculum today, History Teachers' Association of Australia president Paul Kiem, a member of the advisory panel for the history curriculum, also suggested the document might be too ambitious in the amount of content it expected teachers to cover. The draft national curriculum expects year 9 and 10 students to cover world history, including Australian history, from 1750 to the present day.

Draft national curriculum unveiled
By Samantha Hawley and David Mark, ABC, 1 March 2010
Grammar and phonics will be central planks in a new draft national curriculum teachers across Australia will be expected to teach next year. The curriculum - covering English, maths, science and history - will go up on the web this morning for a public consultation period before all state and territory standards are abolished. Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard will unveil the draft curriculum, which covers students from kindergarten to year 10. "As a nation we have to be able to reassure ourselves that we have got a high-quality curriculum being taught to every child in every school," she said. "There are around 80,000 students who move interstate each year and it is obviously easier for them if they are in a new school and they are doing the same curriculum." Grammar and phonics are significant inclusions in the new curriculum.