“C” for (Australian) Curriculum

From the AGE today a top Victorian educational bureaucrat grades the draft Australian Curriculum as ‘C’ standard. Mind you, that would be totally acceptable by VIctorian VELS standards. Interestingly, David Howes’s main criticism was couched in terms of curriculum over-crowding and increasing expectations about what schools should have to teach. I liked the comment that [...]

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Bereft of big ideas?

From the ‘pretty much everyone agrees that National Curriculum is a good idea’ lovefest on the 7l30 Report last night I thought I must be the only living person in NY who still has big question marks about the ideas. So, I was pleased to see this piece in the AGE today from Libby Tudball, [...]

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Back to basics (continued)

Below, how the Herald-Sun described the Australian National Curriculum today. Interesting that Rudd argues that standards have slipped, yet the results of international testing don’t seem to indicate that. I’ve seen presentations on these tests that indicate Australian students sit very highly in international rankings (this government likes rankings), certainly higher than the USA curriculum [...]

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Back to basics

The long awaited draft detail of the National Curriculum wont be out until tomorrow but, as any long-time reader of this blog would know, I’ve got strong reservations about it. Those fears weren’t really soothed with the Prime Minister’s quote in the AGE today. Mr Rudd said the objective was, ”without apology, to get back [...]

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A New Era of Localism

I had made a solemn promise to my blogging self not to talk any more about the propects of national curriculum since we all apparently agree on what a great boon it will be for our nation, and those students who move interstate every year, for all Australian curriculum, including content and pedagogy, to come [...]

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Subsidiarity

I had almost decided to stop talking about my reservations with the National Curriculum and just go along with it like everyone else.  After all, there are bigger issues in the world just now, like the GBC (global economic crisis aka global economic meltdown).  But as Tom Petty famously sang, ‘I won’t back down’ (though [...]

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Lawyers, Guns and Money

Well there wasn’t a lot of actual guns thankfully, but a lot of implied threats, angst, legal wrangling and big money at stake this week in the Federal Parliament as school funding and national curriculum and political ambitions all got tangled up. There were threats, counter-threats, bluffs, bullying and bravado, and while education was front [...]

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States squabbling over test benchmarks

It had to happen of course; that the new spirit of national cooperation and cooperative revolution would get stickier and trickier when it got down to the details. Like the NAPLAN (National Asessment of  Literacy and Numeracy) benchmarks and where they might be placed. Last week the Herald-Sun gave some glimpse of that behind the scenes [...]

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21st Century Learning Discussion

With the annual Curriculum Corporation COnference circus in town last week, there was a lot of talk about national curriculum, at briefings I attended, and on the mainstream radio. Including this discussion on the Radio National program Life Matters. Australia has a ’21st century economy with a 19th century education system’, Rupert Murdoch’s damning assessment [...]

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Some US High Schools Return to Electives (gasp)

We hold these truths to be self evident: that giving students some choice in their own learning directions is likely to lead to them becoming more actively engaged in their own learning, and likely to help them find that ‘thing’ they love. So, I was pleased to read in the NY TImes today that some [...]

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