Red Rag

The results of the 2004 Australian Blog Awards are now official, and prove that preferences flow in mysterious ways.

Closest to home, I was beaten for Best Western Australian Blog by the deserving Sam Ward (and his sidekick ChrisV). This may have been because my vote was split — some people voted for my old site, Mentalspace. Strangely, those people preferenced the Yobbo ahead of this blog. I knew I should have distributed how-to-vote cards… ;-)

Elsewhere, Tim Blair was leading on the primary vote in the Overall, NSW and Political categories. After preferences he was pipped by Loobylu in the first and She Sells Sanctuary in the second; he picked up the prize for Best Political Blog, but probably only because his two nearest competitors finished up with exactly the same number of votes and their preferences were not distributed.

Also of note was that the Queensland category saw fewer preferences distributed than the rest. Vlado speculates that “the fact that they’re used to the ‘optional’ element of the preferential voting system and they exercise their right to take [the] quick and easy way out” might explain it.

The fact that so many of these contests came down to preferences shows that the competition was fierce. There are obviously a lot of good Aussie blogs out there. For that reason, I’d suggest you wade through the list of nominees, rather than heading for the most popular.

Thanks to Vlado for throwing this shindig and for battling with the intricacies of Australia’s zany electoral rules.

John Howard thinks Labor’s proposed school funding system would be “the thin end of the wedge”. In other words, Labor is secretly plotting to remove all the funding from private schools. Nobody really believes that — least of all the schools themselves, who are overwhelmingly opposed to Howard’s model.

The public schools obviously oppose it. The Catholic schools, all 1700 of them, are “opposed to the model and [are] expected to support Labor’s approach.” The same goes for Christian Schools Australia, which represents a great many of the low-fee Christian schools the government claims its policy benefits:

The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O’Doherty, said he had proposed a moderated form of the Government’s socio-economic model to the federal Education Minister, Dr Brendan Nelson. It would take into account school fees and expenditure, and act as an incentive for schools to maintain “affordable fees”. “I’m glad Labor’s given the issue some traction,” he said.

That’s a polite way of saying, “We prefer Labor’s plan, but we want a new policy before the next election.”

Really the only schools that support Howard’s funding model are the ultra-wealthy schools like King’s School and Trinity Grammar. As many commentators, like Andrew Bolt, have noted, “Most [parents] don’t send their children to a place with flash facilities either, but to a low-fee Christian school” — the same ones that have criticised the government and leapt on board with Labor.

And of course, that means the parents at those schools will probably support Labor too. For all this waffle about “values” and the (vastly overstated) influence of the AEU, the single most tangible aspect of schools policy is funding. Most people vote according to their hip pockets, and that’s especially true of the “aspirationals” who will decide the next election. Labor will spend more money on more of their children than the Coalition, and will pick up more votes as a result.

I suspect that Brendan Nelson’s recent commitment not to alter the current arrangements might soon turn out to be a “non-core promise”.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from New Hampshire:

The best story of the night? The one that should unite us all? From the Republican primary results:

Bush 57,670
Kerry 835
Dean 633
Clark 545
Edwards 541

That’s over 2,500 registered Republicans who wrote in a Democrat in their ballot.

I have no idea what its significance is, if any. I just thought it was weird.

S Whiplash pointed out that my post on values education misrepresented a government-commissioned study. The Values Education Study was about how to improve values education, rather than an analysis of values education as it stands today. Participating schools were given a grant to engage in a values education project, and report on their progress. However, that doesn’t mean the study is of no use.

The report makes it clear that most of the schools — including the government schools — already had values education programs in place. Harristown State School is one particularly striking example (p113):

Having pursued values education for five years, Harristown State was able to collect a degree of quantitative data over the whole period, rather than just the project time, using the Education Queensland opinion surveys. This has revealed a very positive view of the school amongst teachers, parents and students, and especially of the quality of relationships which the school seeks to foster…

Many of the schools used the grant to analyse programs that were already running, and made explicit the values that underpin them; for example:

The attempt by Corio Bay Senior College [a state school] to identify the core values underpinning its Advocacy Programme which has been running successfully for four years, surfaced a set of ‘constituent values’ comprising ‘an ethic of care (the values underlying personal relationships…), acceptance (nonjudgmentalism), fairness, and informality’. Beyond this, it was clear that all groups in the school ‘placed some value on structural rather than personal values: goal setting, organisational skills and course and career guidance’; pointing again to the close link many schools and clusters sought to establish between values education and programmes designed to build students’ resilience, responsibility, independence, connectedness to school, engagement and feelings of self-confidence and self-esteem. (p130)

In fact, the report remarks that “[a]n effort to articulate the values that drive the school, so they are explicit rather than implicit, was arguably one of the most common focuses of schools and clusters involved in the Values Education Study.”

Mr Whiplash complained that the list I provided of ten values taught in public and private schools were just suggestions for the future. It is true that the report suggests that the list “be considered as a ‘discussion starter’ in Australian schools, when working with their school communities on values education”, but it also indicated that the list was merely a succinct statement of the values currently being taught — it states that the list “emerged from Australian school communities.” In other words, the “broadly representative” schools that participated in the study already shared these ten values, which they recommend other schools use as a basis for analysing their own values.

The report also states that the various public education authorities are committed to values education. Apart from the fact that “[v]alues statements abound in policy documents, curriculum programmes, and reports”, a recent national agreement on values education was noted:

All key stakeholders In the Australian education context have a strong commitment to values education. This is most notably reflected in the National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century, the Adelaide Declaration by all education ministers in 1999.

(That the federal government would use rhetoric about school values as a divisive election issue is quite disturbing when it has already begun to collaborate with the states in developing a national approach.)

The study may not touch precisely on the topic at hand, but it certainly gives us a pretty good indication that the values schools consider important are pretty much the same all over the country, in the public and private sectors. Its literature review also concurs with my assessment (and that of Professor Teese, referred to in my earlier post) that it is the schools’ success in teaching that accounts for any difference.

Significantly, no attempt has been made by John Howard, Tony Abott or indeed Mr Whiplash to provide empirical evidence to back up their claims. Neither has John Anderson, but the Values Education Study’s survey indicates that teachers consider conservation values to be more important than do parents or teachers. There’s nothing to suggest that is limited to public schools, though. S Whiplash has offered some anecdotal evidence that classroom behaviour is affecting public schools, but as I’ve said before, I reckon that is an issue of discipline more than values.

Dave Ricardo offers a pretty good formulation:

Private schools teach the same values, by and large, as state schools, perhaps apart from the very small number of private schools that take religion seriously. They teach the same curriculum. The only substantial difference is that private schools can more easily get rid of badly behaved students and poorly performing teachers, and of course they are usually much better resourced.

Aside: It seems that public schools are taking a keen interest in the debate. My local highschool, Greenwood High, has a sign out the front that announces upcoming events — exam periods, concerts, etc. This is how it looks at the moment:

Jason Soon on Tim Blair: “Is it any surprise that he appears in Google under the category of ‘Impersonators’ — impersonating a Journalist, perhaps?”

In other news, Tim Blair says choosing between Howard Dean and Lyndon Larouche is “like choosing between cancer and leukemia.” It might not break a black-letter interpretation of Godwin’s Law, but I prefer judicial activists anyway.

Well, that was a pretty good weekend.

After Brisita’s twenty-first on Saturday evening, I spent Sunday afternoon at a Hottest 100 garden party. It was a bit peculiar listening to it before the 26th, but the shade was warm and the beer was cold, and that’s really what it’s all about.

I spent a pleasant afternoon on the South Perth foreshore yesterday, topped off by a spectacular fireworks display. (There’s a slight chance I’ll be seen on the news belting out the national anthem.) Unfortunately, the day was soured by the racist stickers Jack van Tongeren’s gang of boneheads had plastered around the place. A fucking disgrace, but not surprising — such is the product of jingoistic nationalism.

(I don’t know what this fuss is all about, though — there was plenty of drinking going on around us, and I didn’t see a copper say a harsh word to anybody.)

Manas will be heading off to Sydney for the ALP National Conference this morning. If I can convince her to give us a brief report on the fringe events, you can read them here. She has suggested she might reignite her blog in the near future, too. Something to look forward to.

Today marks the arrival of the second group of boat people to arrive in Australia. They stole land from the first, and now they lock up the newest boat people (who have no such heinous intent).

Update: Darren’s post pretty much sums up my attitude to the day.

Bernard Slattery:

Christopher Pearson, in a well-researched piece in The Australian today, reveals how lying, elitist greens and bureaucrats have condemned millions of third worlders to death.

John Quiggin:

This piece by Christopher Pearson in today’s Oz, denouncing green opposition to DDT, encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Australia’s right-wing commentariat. Not only is almost everything in the article either false or grossly misleading, but it’s a fourth-hand recycling of points that have been flogged to death in the blogosphere.

[...]

[S]houldn’t journalistic and magazine ethics be extended to include some kind of Google rule, prohibiting the publication of articles that can be replicated by less than an hour’s Googling, or at least the payment of more than an hour’s casual rates for such pieces.

Unlike Slattery, Quiggin backs up his claims with actual arguments.

John Howard’s comments on public/private schooling were designed to muddy the waters, and they have. I’m going to separate my thoughts into four areas for clarity: funding, values, discipline and sundry. Here is the second instalment.

Values

This week, John Howard criticised the state school system for being both “too politically correct” and “too values neutral”. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the two points are contradictory, and that Howard is really upset that students are not being indoctrinated in Liberal dogma. Tony Abbott said that tolerance “is a good value, but sometimes I think that in modern Australia we end up tolerating the intolerable.” Like Howard, he refused to give specific examples. Dog-whistle politics again.

Tim Blair joined in by criticising a government-commissioned report that found state school values were not as bad as Howard would like us to think:

“Tolerance and understanding, social justice and respect” sound like exactly the sort of vague, valueless PC values [sic] the Prime Minister is complaining about. This report doesn’t contradict him; it supports him.

Needless to say, Blair hadn’t actually read the study (pdf: report, summary), just a one-line summary in a newspaper article. If he had done some research, he would know that the values espoused by both state and private schools go far beyond tolerance (summary, pp16-17):

1. Tolerance and understanding (Accepting other people’s differences and being aware of others).

2. Respect (Treating others with consideration and regard).

3. Responsibility — personal, social, civic and environmental (Being
   accountable for and in charge of a course of action — responsibility for one’s own actions, including the exercise of self-discipline; responsibility for the way in which one interacts and cooperates with others especially for resolving differences in constructive, non-violent and peaceful ways; responsibility for one’s role in and contribution to society; and responsibility for one’s own role in the maintenance and preservation of the environment).

4. Social justice (Being committed to the pursuit and protection of the common good where all persons are entitled to legal, social and economic fair treatment).

5. Excellence (Seeking to accomplish something noteworthy and admirable individually and collectively, and performing at one’s best).

6. Care (Caring for self and showing interest in, concern for and caring for others).

7. Inclusion and trust (Being included and including others, listening to one another’s thoughts and feelings actively and creating a climate of mutual confidence).

8. Honesty (Being truthful and sincere, committed to finding and expressing the truth, requiring truth from others, and ensuring consistency between words and deeds).

9. Freedom (Enjoying all the rights and privileges of citizenship free from unnecessary interference or control, and standing up for the rights of others; ensuring a balance between rights and responsibilities).

10. Being ethical (Acting in accordance with generally agreed rules and/or standards for right [moral] conduct or practice).

What’s more, allegations from John Howard, Tim Blair and other bloggers that teachers’ values are out of step with the community are not borne out by actual research. The Values Education Study surveyed students, teachers and parents from primary, secondary, government, Catholic and independent schools, and asked them various questions about values education. The most striking feature of the results is the broad consensus on which values are most important (parents and staff are almost entirely in agreement, students are only slightly different). Using the table of results on p220 of the report, I produced a graph to show how similar the groups were:

Some interesting features to note:

• Parents and teachers share the same top five values: responsibility, respect, honesty, tolerance and equality.

• Staff are far more likely to want parental involvement in values education than the parents themselves.

• “Peace” was ranked seventh by students, eleventh by staff, and tenth by parents.

Values are dealt with in pretty much the same way by parents and teachers, state and private schools. So what’s the difference?

As Professor Richard Teese argues, the difference is in the relative success of the schools:

What distinguishes young people in terms of their moral development – how well they relate to themselves and to others in an ethical sense – is not the type of school they attend. It is how well they do at school, whatever its type. The higher the level of student achievement, the stronger their self-esteem, the greater their caring attitude to others, and the firmer their sense of community responsibility.

This difference is, I think, largely driven by discpline problems in state schools, which I will address in my next schools post.

Tom Tomorrow suggests Dean can use his professional wrestler impersonation to advantage:

Just my two cents…

…but if I were in the Dean camp right now, I’d be trying to pull a little ju jitsu–turn that “yeaarrggh” thing around, make it a joke, embrace it. Open campaign rallies with that remix that’s floating around the ‘net. Hand out t-shirts to volunteers which just say “YEEAAARRRGGH” across the front. Maybe have Dean open speeches with some mildly self-deprecating joke: “I’ve taken a lot of kidding for my speech in Iowa–but if you think *I* was hollering then, wait till *you* get the bill for Bush’s spending spree!”

You can’t make it go away, but you can turn it around.

It looks like that’s the Dean plan, and even the Blog for Bush can see that it might work:

Of course, the last person you expected to poke fun at Howard Dean was Howard Dean himself. Last night Dean had a taped appearance on Late Night with David Letterman and delivered the The Top Ten List, titled, “Ways, I, Howard Dean, Can Turn Things Around.”

Reproduced on Blogs For Bush for your amusement, here is the list, as delivered by Howard Dean, called “Ways, I, Howard Dean, Can Turn Things Around.”:

10. Switch to decaf.

9. Unveil new slogan, “Vote for Dean and get one dollar off your next purchase at Blimpie.”

8. Marry Rachel on the final episode of “Friends.”

7. Don’t change a thing, it’s going great.

6. Show a little more skin.

5. Go on “American Idol” and give them a taste of those pipes.

4. Start working out and speaking with an Austrian accent.

3. I can’t give specifics yet, but it involves Ted Danson.

2. Fire the staffer who suggested I do this lousy Top 10 List instead of actually campaigning.

1. Oh, I don’t know — maybe fewer, crazy, red-faced rants.

This may not have been a bad thing for him to do. Perhaps now he can say we’re not laughing at him, but we’re laughing with him.

I actually thought the howl/scream was humanising — the guy just lost a ballot, he should be entitled to blow off a little steam.

I don’t know whether I’m a Dean supporter yet, though. I have only paid a superficial interest to the race, and according to the Presidential Match quiz, Kucinich is the man for me.

John Howard’s comments on public/private schooling were designed to muddy the waters, and they have. I’m going to separate my thoughts into four areas for clarity: funding, values, discipline and sundry. Here is the first instalment.

Funding

If people want to spend money on their child’s education, that’s a good thing. I suspect that one reason parents choose private schools is that they feel like they’re doing something for their child’s education. They might not be able to help with the physics homework, but at least they can pay for a decent school. To the extent that it demonstrates a commitment to the kid’s future, this is a very good thing. It should be encouraged.

There has been a tendency in the blogosphere to see the debate about school funding in black-and-white terms: you either support government funding for the wealthiest schools, or you think private schools are evil and should be abolished. The truth is, hardly anybody supports either of the two extremes. The real debate is not even about how much government money goes to private schools — it’s about which private schools.

Christopher Sheil argues that a more reasonable (and historical) schools division is between the state and Catholic schools on the one hand, and the ultra-wealthy elite private schools on the other. (These days, there are many non-Catholic low-fee private schools that should be included in the former camp.) The reason that this division makes more sense is that the most important consideration here is parental choice. I don’t mean the false, rhetorical choice that the Liberals preach while pumping cash into Australia’s wealthiest schools, I mean real choice for “middle Australia”. The government can best protect choice by subsidising state and low-cost private schools.

If a parent is currently paying $15,000 per year for their child’s private education, their range of school choices includes every school in Australia. If the Government removed its funding from such a school, the school might think twice before ordering new pillars for its grand entrance statement, but that won’t alter its standards. Alternatively, it might raise its fees to $16,000 or $17,000. Most of its students would stay where they were, and a very few would move to another private school in another leafy suburb.

On the other hand, if we took that elite school’s government contribution and gave it to a low-fee school, the school might be able to buy air conditioning for its classrooms, or new bunsen burners in the chemistry labs — or it might reduce its fees by a couple of hundred bucks. Either way, the result would be more realistic choice for Australian families.

The Coalition is right to complain that recent dicussion about school funding has been misleading by considering federal funding in isolation — but its version doesn’t tell the whole truth either:

A spokesman for Education Minister Brendan Nelson said state governments had the main constitutional responsibility to fund and manage state schools, and the commonwealth was a supplementary funder.

But the federal government was the majority funder of independent schools.

He’s ignoring the defining feature of private schools: fees. Private citizens have the main responsibility to fund private schools — the commonwealth’s real role is as a supplementary funder of both sectors.

The fact that the Coalition ignores a school’s fees and other resources is the most disgraceful element of their funding model. The average government (state and federal) funding for a public school is $10,000 per student. Some private schools charge more than that in fees alone — not to mention building fund contributions, donations from old chums and the like. Surely the Commonwealth’s cash would be better spent elsewhere?

In a nutshell, I think our schools should be funded according to their needs, taking all income sources into account. That would be the most effective way to increase parental choice.

Note: An important exception to this general rule is government support for scholarships. If a school provides scholarships, they should receive funding equal to the amount the government would have contributed had they attended their local state school.

Update: Having bookmarked it earlier in the week, I have just read John Hirst’s excellent contribution to the school funding debate. He describes a system I would wholeheartedly support:

All schools receive government support and no schools are totally supported by the government. Parents raise funds and pay levies to so-called government schools and the amount they contribute may be as much as the fees charged by a local Catholic school.

[...]

To encourage a diverse social composition in schools, the Government will favour low-fee schools over high-fee schools.

The local Catholic and the new Christian and community schools that charge low fees contain the same range of social class as in a government school. Schools charging low fees would receive from the government for each student 95 per cent of what the government spends in support of each student in its own schools. (In New Zealand it is 100 per cent.) This would give them more government support than they are currently receiving.

[...]

Schools charging middle-order fees would receive government support, but less than the low-fee schools. These places are not out of reach of the children of ordinary working people who can, with some effort, meet the cost of their fees.

High-fee schools would receive no government support. When fees are $15,000, a third of average yearly earnings, they are creating a school that is an exclusive club, not a mirror of the wider society.

The money saved here would be redirected to government and low-fee schools. The high-fee schools could regain some government support on one condition: if they used scholarships to recruit the children of working people and welfare recipients and demonstrated that they were teaching a wide range of students.

I suspect that if a party were to run on this platform, they would win widespread support from the community. And that appears to be exactly what Labor is planning.

Is anybody else concerned that of the 97 Australian soldiers who peed in cups at Robertson Army Barracks, 47 “tested positive for one or more of cannabis, amphetamines and opiates”? Or that guns are going missing from the same Northern Territory facility? Don’t worry, though — we’re pretty sure they didn’t swap the guns for drugs.

(The full story is here.)

20 January 2004:

Paul Krugman:

Al Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean was a momentous event.

Reality:

The entrance poll in Iowa found that less than one percent of voters cared about endorsements.

21 January 2004:

“I’m very proud and honoured to endorse Howard Dean to be the next president of the United States of America,” said former V-P Al Gore last month. This was “a momentous event”, according to New York Times columnist and reliable reverse indicator Paul Krugman. It sure was…

My emphasis, his backflip. The guy can’t even keep his punchlines consistent.

Excellent news: my entire last year’s work has been validated.

I am writing to congratulate you on your academic work as part of the Honours year within the College of Arts. After an exhaustive period of finding external markers, gathering reports and convening our own Honours Academic Committee to formalise results, Dr Robert Imre, the Honours Coordinator, has passed the recommended grades on to me. While these grades are not “official” until they have been confirmed by a specially convened Board of Examiners, we are happy to inform you that you successfully completed Bachelor of Arts (Honours) (First Class). This is a significant and laudable achievement. … [O]n behalf od the College of Arts and especially Dr Robert Imre, I would again like to congratulate you on your academic achievement and wish you every success in the future.

Yours truly,

Assoc Prof Simon Adams
Dean of Arts

So all those hours hunched over the microfilm in the Battye Library paid off! I’ve decided that I’m going to revise the thesis based on the feedback I receive from the markers, in order to tidy up the rough sections (the section on the woodcutters, for instance, and aspects of the conclusion). I’m also planning to create a stand-alone article based on a large section that was excised during the editing process, about “a Trades Hall red-ragger” with a “foreign-sounding name” and a “head full of flatulence and Karl Marx.”

But first and foremost I’m glad to have finished!
Read the rest of this entry…

Howard’s tirade against public schools was nothing more than a distraction. Most people agree that private schools should receive government funding, but a policy that doesn’t even consider a school’s fees or resources is simply ridiculous. Nobody thinks that a $12000/year school needs another $3000+ of public funds; that’s why Howard’s trying to frame the debate in terms of “values”.

In one breath, the Prime Minister declared that public schools are both “too politically correct and too values neutral”. As Tim Dunlop points out, that’s just not possible — but then, “PC” and “values-neutral” are just code-words for “left wing”. In case the dog whistle was pitched too low, Howard threw in a reference to the insidious Communists in the teachers’ unions. That’s as far as he would go, though: he “declined to expand on the values he most prized and felt lacking in state schools.” Smart move — for every value he specifically mentioned, a dozen state school principles would have come forward explaining how they handle it.

In order to support his leader’s claims, the Acting Education Minister marshalled just two (nonspecific) examples — a school that worried about holding a nativity play, and another that wasn’t sure about its Anzac Day service. We have to ask, though — are those two vague claims enough to condemn an entire system? Those two schools are surely outweighed by the thousands of others that force their students to sit through Christian and nationalist ceremonies each year — indeed, the WA Government enforces Anzac Day ceremonies at every state school.

Of course, the corollary of Howard’s claim is that private schools are “non-PC”. I don’t think that claim can be backed up. I went to a low-fee Catholic school, where I learned all kinds of PC things — for example, that Indigenous Australians suffered (and continue to suffer) systemic racism, that we should give a helping hand to those less fortunate, and that multiculturalism is a worthwhile project. Hell, the school library’s Refugees and Asylum Seekers page links to my old weblog!

Has the school suffered an exodus of students as parents pull their sprogs out of this “politically correct, values neutral” institution? No. A rough count of the roll call in the back of my 1995 year book includes 940 boys from years four to twelve; a similar count of the 1999 annual finds over a thousand. I have no reason to believe that the trend suddenly reversed after I finished school; indeed my brother (who has just graduated) thinks its expansion accelerated as the capital works plan continued.

So if it’s not a fear of “PC” curriculum that is driving Australians to private schools, what is it? Here’s one suggestion:

Melbourne University professor of post-education and training Richard Teese said studies showed parents did not make schools choices based on values, but on the basis of academic expectations.

He said the shift away from government schools had been evident since early last century but had acclerated in recent years as the Federal Government gave “bigger and bigger subsidies” to private schools, he said.

The difference between Howard’s outburst and Professor Teese’s argument is that the latter is based on evidence. All Howard’s got is ideology, concealed behind the usual anti-elite, culture-war, Hansonite rhetoric.

The public chooses its children’s schools based on academic results, but they weight their decision against the cost. Education is going to be an election issue, so the list of ultra-exclusive, elitist schools receiving fat (and growing) wads of taxpayers’ cash will be well publicised this year. Will Mr and Mrs Aspirational believe the guff about upper-class welfare improving their available educational choices? Probably not. I reckon they’d rather see the cash spent on their local state and low-fee private schools — and that’s what Labor’s promising.

(See also Graham Freeman, David Tiley, Gummo Trotsky.)

Update: I’ve just remembered an incident that occurred earlier this year, involving the young girls and boys of some of Perth’s most elite private schools, a video camera, and some illegal sexual activity. It’s certainly un-PC, but is it really what Howard wants?