School funding Inquiry

Back in April 2010, when she was Education Minister, Julia Gillard commissioned an enquiry into School Funding in Australia. They are asking for submissions by 31 March, and my friend JV  has suggested that I join her in making a submission. I thought I’d post some of my initial thoughts here, to see if my [...]

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Banning Christmas

Helen at Cast Iron Balcony has a post up noting the seasonal reappearance of the usual story of politicians taking back Christmas from the perils of political correctness. Sadly, our school was part of this annual beat up this year. Chatterboy’s teacher was in charge of the Year 5 end of year concert this year. [...]

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More on schools

The myschools website is a small step towards the US No Child Left Behind Model, in which school funding depends on testing results for individual schools. So via Laura at 11d, it was fascinating to see a complete turnaround from a Dianne Ravitch, someone Laura describes as one of “the handful of people who really [...]

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The my schools website

The SMH has published a league table of all schools in NSW, derived from the myschool site, ranking them by their Year 5 and Year 9 average results. They’ve called it an “alphabetized list” (because league tables are illegal), which is rubbish, because each school has a ranking (calculated on the average year 5 and [...]

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My School

Well, give me some statistics about something I care about, and I can’t help myself. I’ve just spent an enjoyable hour and a half getting statistics about all our local primary schools, plus the high schools we’re thinking of sending Chatterboy and Hungry Boy to.* Robert at Larvatus Prodeo points out some of the problems [...]

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Coaching our school students

As Chatterboy gets closer to high school, our conversations and angst about high school seem to intensify. I’ve blogged about this before – the choices we have for our boys are: two very exclusive private boys schools within walking distance a selective boys school within a long (2km) walking distance a very exclusive coed school [...]

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IQ Testing

I found an interesting old post and conversation a while ago about a sad article in the New Yorker. The New Yorker article was about a young gifted child who committed suicide. The brief facts are that a young 14 year old boy committed suicide with the gun at his parents’ farm. He had been homeschooled [...]

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Nurturing a misogynist culture

The story this morning on the front page of the SMH about the students at an all male college of Sydney University and their proud “pro-rape”culture was horrifying.  But it was also not altogether surprising. The colleges at Sydney University seem to be mostly continuations of the elite private schools – students from the city [...]

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School Acceleration

We’ve recently been having a bit of an acceleration dilemma. When we first went through this process, I remember how thirsty I was for real stories, so I’m going to share mine here. Chatterboy was born in September. He learned to read pretty much on his own, and around the time he turned four, he [...]

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Helicopter parenting?

The boys’ school has a real emphasis on public speaking. From the last term of Kindergarten up, they have to do a two minute speech each term (on a defined topic). The top two from each class get chosen to go to the speak offs with their fellow winners from the classes, and there are [...]

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