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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On Anzac Day, let’s remember the stupidity and futility of war

Ever since I won the negative in a debate at school on the topic “that Anzac Day was the birth of modern Australia” by taking the then trendy anti-war view of Anzac Day, I’ve struggled to decide what I think of Anzac Day. But this year, the nuances of my thinking have got more complicated. [...]

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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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Merry Christmas!

This Christmas greeting from the atheist penguin household comes to you courtesy of Hungry Boy, Chatterboy, and Grandma Penguin, who assisted with the architecture.

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Fertility rates update

The annual fertility statistics were released last month. There wasn’t as much of the traditional story about how Peter Costello had single handedly forced up the fertility rate by introducing the baby bonus (here’s a story here – reasonably staid), which was so prevalent a few years ago, but I thought was worth updating a  fertility post [...]

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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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