In a League of Their Own

The last few weeks have seen further wrangling between politicians over the publication of league tables comparing schools. The NSW Opposition combined with the Greens and minor parties to push an amendment blocking newspapers from publishing tables comparing school performance data.

The Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and her NSW counterpart Verity Firth naturally took a swipe at the New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell, calling him hypocritical and accusing him of "political vandalism" and calling the move "a ploy that did nothing to benefit schools".

While this response was quite predictable, it does rather beg the question. Does the publication of such tables really benefit schools? A scan of some recent letters to the SMH reveals some interesting ideas "out there" such as this offering from one Lydia Sharpin:

This is what the real fear is behind league tables - they will lead to the migration of the brightest talents from schools. The better schools will get the better kids and the worst schools will be forced further down the ranking tables, which could then lead to the closure of schools and loss of teachers' jobs. But are we protecting the teachers and schools at the cost of our students' futures? [Link]

Personally, I find the suggestion that blocking league tables is about protecting teachers' jobs to be rather short-sighted. While there are students, there will be a need for teachers – exactly where those students and teachers end up may well be affected by the publication of league tables, but Ms Sharpin needs to think it through a bit more. If the "better" schools do get the "better" kids, (and I'm assuming that by better, she is referring to academic results), does that necessarily lead to school closures? If it does, where do the students and teachers go? (They have to go somewhere.) If it doesn't result in school closures, what is the impact on students and staff at those schools identified as underperforming?

O'Farrell's position doesn't exactly excite me either: "What we support are parents getting information about their child, about their child's school and their child's school's performance against the state average and against like schools." [Link] This really isn't very far from the Commonwealth's plan to publish results about 'similar' schools. Similar in what way? The likely measure here is socio-economic, but the current methods used by the Commonwealth for determining the socio-economic level of schools are badly flawed. And is socio-economic really the most appropriate measure?

However, the biggest problem (in my opinion, at least) lies in how the public understands the situation. Filtered through TV sound bites and jejune summations by newspaper columnists, the public ends up with a caricature instead of a proper understanding of what the issues really are, which in turn leads to these kinds of comments:

"For the record this is absolutely no logical reason why schools - as with any other public service - should not be benchmarked against each other to determine the poor performers. Anyone who argues otherwise has a vested interest." [Link]

Presumably this person would also expect that police, fire and ambulance stations should be benchmarked against each other and the results published so he can work out which suburbs he should avoid living in or visiting.

The politicians who are for league tables keep talking about transparency. But why should transparency necessitate the publishing of league tables? If the Commonwealth required that all schools make their results from various tests publicly available, wouldn't that be transparent enough? Schools would no doubt also put up a lot of other data about their school, filling out the picture of what their school is like, and isn't that a good thing? Won't parents be better informed by this, rather than simply looking at a table of figures comparing results on tests? Verity Firth keeps trotting out the same canard:

"Providing more information about schools' performance is not about naming and shaming schools, it is about helping and supporting schools ... Full transparency will enable us to channel resources to those schools that need them most." [Link]

Except that identifying where the needs are and channelling resources doesn't require publication of anything!

This entire exercise seems to be yet another example of politicians being seen to be doing something, in this case neatly wrapped up as 'giving parents more information'.

Maybe the teachers unions should fight fire with fire and propose the publication of league tables for politicians - number of divisions voted on, attendance rates, number of days actually spent in the electorate, whether or not the member actually lives in the electorate, number of overseas trips, etc. I'm sure we'd all appreciate such full transparency come next election.

Thank You, Dan Mesa

In response to an article on Net Tuts+, Dan Mesa coined this gem:

"IE doesn’t support the internet."

Best laugh I've had this week!

Puncture-ation

From the ABC News website:

Prosecutors were criticised by the presiding magistrate, for not formally notifying two of the men, that they were entitled to consular assistance. [Link]

What's with the commas? Surely the ABC can afford to have someone proof-read even a short article like this so that it doesn't appear to have been written by the work-experience kid.

Education in the Land of the Blind

Thanks to KRudd and Co., education here in Oz is very much in the public eye at the moment. Online news sites have embraced the blogging meme and provide their readers with the opportunity to comment on stories in a way that was never possible with newspaper columns. While in principle I think this a good thing, far too much of commentary on education stories is, sadly, drivel.

This appeared among the comments to a journo-blog entry on the Daily Telegraph website:

In many public HS, we have teachers who don’t know much more than their top students. These students actually learn from books and self research (and some do it with help from private tutors). Those who are not top students move on and cramp [sic] for the HSC. And again, some of these average kids are the most likely to follow education training to become new teachers. By the time they get to University 2nd year, they forgot most of the stuff they bolted down in a short period without true understanding. So we have a vicious circle that need to be broken by offering high pay to teachers to attract top candidates. I could see that Universities are doing the right thing at this moment to offer combined educational degrees to make sure that new teachers will have at least one solid specialisation. But we need the government to get serious and offer high pay for good teachers and encourage the rest to go back to University to learn specialisation to lift their performance and consequently, better pay.

There are a number of fallacies implied in this comment:

• that teachers don't really understand what they are teaching;
• that those who go into teaching are not the 'top candidates' but only average students;
• there is a vicious cycle (!) of poor teachers leading to more poor teachers;
  
• a 'solid specialisation' (whatever 'solid' is supposed to mean) should be part of teacher training (hmm, now what 'solid' specialisation should a K-2 teacher have?);
• that 'specialisation' would lift 'performance' (naturally without any explanation of how 'performance is to be measured or how a 'specialisation' would change it).

I keep seeing this dreck again and again in comments on websites to educational stories. The Federal Government has added fuel to the fire by teasing the media with hints about performance pay (though they've carefully dodged using that exact expression) and teacher accreditation and accountability.

Like our politicians, it seems there are many members of the public who believe they are knowledgeable about education, apparently on the basis that they had one.

And it appears to have become fashionable to rubbish our education systems in this country. It's no surprise that the KRudd government is gung-ho about changing education in Oz - fiddling around with education and then claiming to have achieved something is de rigueur for Labor governments (and almost as much so for Coalition ones). But we are now seeing the likes of Rupert Murdoch dumping on Australian education (though why anyone would think that Murdoch would know anything about it eludes me) and no one standing up and saying "hang on a minute, is any of that criticism actually valid? Is it based on anything substantial, or is it just hot air?" The same goes for the media - witness the negative spin put on the TIMSS results reported by ACER a couple of weeks ago. Anyone would think that our Year 8 students couldn't add up, the way it was reported in the media. In reality, the gap between Australia's results, and those of the USA or Britain was very small, and only Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan can claim to be clearly ahead of everyone else.

Is there room for improvement in our education systems? Of course there is. Are we failing our students and delivering them a substandard education? Of course not.

Geek vs. Tool

I've started playing with GeekTool. I'd seen it some time back, but hadn't bothered with it until I stumbled one of those "Top 10 thingies" lists and saw some nice screenshots of GeekTool in action.

Getting my CPU usage stats up on my desktop was straight-forward enough, so I thought about what else I'd like displayed. Then I saw a forum post where someone was using curl and sed to pull out a list of items from SlashDot.

The script was this:

curl http://slashdot.org/index.rss | grep <title | sed -e ’s/<title>Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>Search Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/</title>//g’

Now, I wasn't interested in SlashDot, but getting the headlines from the ABC news website appealed, so I started playing with the above script, using the same idea to strip out the parts of the xml feed I didn't want.

At which point I learned something important about sed on Mac OS X - it won't wipe out blank lines. This instruction - sed -e '/^*/d' - should delete all blank lines; at least, that's what every sed tutorial tells me. But it just doesn't work on OS X. I even made sure that I had the GNU version installed rather than the POSIX one, but to no avail. So my output contained multiple blank lines between titles. Blech!

After scouring the web for hours trying to find an answer to this problem, it seemed that GeekTool had left me feeling rather un-geek-like, but certainly a bit of a tool.

I finally found part of the solution, in another forum - use perl instead of sed:

perl -pe 's/\r\n/ /'

This did the job of removing the newlines, but left me with a long chain of sed and perl calls piped together, at which point I began thinking again and asked the obvious question: can I do this more simply with a single call to perl? A little more searching, and...

curl http://www.abc.net.au/news/indexes/justin/rss.xml | perl -nle 'print for m:<title>(.*)</title>:'

Done.

I'm now thinking that it would be nice to be able to put somewhere on my desktop a list showing the subjects and senders of my most recent unread emails. If I can work out where and how Thunderbird keeps this info, it should be easy (note the unwarranted optimism), but it could also mean that I need to learn perl (properly). Now if only some kind person would comment on this post and provide me with a solution. (There's that unwarranted optimism again.¹)

1. With apologies to Dilbert

Drongo #3

Playing with StumbleUpon, I came upon a list of websites that work only with IE. I still occasionally come across websites that only look good in IE, but I was surprised that there are still websites out there that use javascript to check the user agent and spit back unhelpful messages if you are not using IE.

When I noticed an Australian site, I decided to have a look. Sure enough, this site for an electronics firm in northern Queensland checks your browser and unless you are using IE on a Windows machine, you get "Your are not currently supported" (whatever that's supposed to mean), and the (poorly designed) drop-down menu doesn't appear.

When I looked further at this site (after changing my browser to bypass the javascript), it became apparent that there is absolutely nothing in the site that requires IE as the browser or Windows as the platform. The javascript to block non-Windows non-IE browsers appears to have no rationale except to ensure that people who use other platforms or other browsers cannot navigate through this website, i.e. to turn away potential customers.

Pathetic.

The Purpose of Education?

I've been catching up on reading the edublogs in my newsreader, which has led to an interesting juxtaposition of articles for me.

The first is Wolin, Democracy and The Math Wars by Michael Paul Goldenberg. I found the following quote Michael gives from Wolin's book resonates very strongly with me:

"The new education is severely functional, proto-professional, and priority-conscious in an economic sense. It is also notable for the conspicuous place given to achieving social discipline through education.
It is as though social planners, both public and private, had suddenly realized that education forms a system in which persons of an impressionable age are “stuff” that can be molded to the desired social form..."

While Wolin is talking about the US in particular, this is consistent with what is also an emerging trend here in Australia, where governments readily tout education as an economic mechanism, but discussion of education as a means for personal discovery and development is thin on the ground.

Craig Emerson, the Federal Minister for Small Business , has made his view very clear:
"Market democrats harness the power of the market for the public good," he said. "They dedicate themselves to remedying social disadvantage out of prosperity by giving every child the opportunity of a quality education through excellence in teaching and high-quality school facilities." [as quoted by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald]

I agree with Gittins' response: "the primary cause of inequality of opportunity isn't education, it's inheritance - of brains, social status, social skills and money." [link]

Hard on the heels of reading Goldenberg's article, I came upon this offering from Tom Hoffman.

After reading through William Deresiewicz's article and then visiting the Teach For America website, I found myself wondering if I was missing something, if perhaps I had failed to fully appreciate the full extent of the socio-economic impact of education.

But after re-reading all of the articles again, and taking some time to reflect on them, my response to all of it is as follows:

• My own view of education, while it allows for the idea that improved levels of education may lead to opportunities for students to improve their socio-economic status, is grounded in the idea that the student be given the opportunity for self-actualisation. Consequently, I object to views of education that seek to reduce education to little more than a social or economic mechanism. This sort of utilitarianism devalues education as a whole - it dismisses as unimportant subjects like Visual Arts and Music in the first instance, but ultimately devalues all subjects by narrowing the curriculum to fit the desires of business and industry.

• William Deresiewicz's "holes" are not in his education - or more specifically, not in his schooling. His attitudes, his self-professed inability to talk to people not like him and false self-worth are the products of the social environment he grew up in, not his education. (What does the fact that he now wants to point the blame at his schooling rather than his social upbringing say?)

• Programs like TFA are actually doing good things, but there is a real risk that governments, bent on driving their particular socio-economic (read myopic) views of education, may hijack their agendas.

But that's only my view things, which no doubt someone will regard as the by-product of my 1970s/80s education and Gen-X mindset. Or possibly my working-class upbringing or maybe the fact that I now teach in a non-denominational non-government school.

Whatever. I just wish there was a way to keep politicians at arm's length from education.