Gadget, after reading your latest post in response to mine, I think I now understand the standards for what you had in mind when you called Donnelly’s article “a proper and well balanced article, nice and scholarly”. You have been paying attention in Mr Donnelly's classes!

Criterion 1: ignore any oppositional arguments; the substance of their ideas isn't important;
Criterion 2: abuse the opposition with personal insults;
Criterion 3: accuse the opposition of being an academic;
Criterion 5: do this in illogical stages:
- (a) make a guess that the person is an academic
- (b) assert that if the person is an academic he/she must have plagiarised their ideas from ‘some rabid, anti-political Leftoid’
- (c) finally, assert he/she is an academic and, hey presto, absolve yourself from the need for any rebuttal of the ideas put forward.

Just for the record, Gadget, I am not an academic; but if I were, it would be an honour.

And if I were an academic, where in your contribution do you think I would look for what you call ‘balance’ and ‘scholarship’?

Dear HRM,
A quick Google search found the following PR, pertinent to our Australian schooling of boys:
http://www.successforboys.edu.au/boys/
Julie Bishop writes:
“I am pleased to introduce the Australian Government’s $19.4 million Success for Boys initiative.”

”The Australian Government has taken a leadership role in raising boys’ achievement, and we have shown our commitment to improving boys’ educational and social outcomes by allocating around $27 million over 2003-2008.

”We know that many boys enjoy school and are successful in their studies. However, it is also clear that many others are underachieving against a range of key educational areas and broader social indicators. We know that boys are underperforming in literacy, are less engaged with school, and in some schools boys account for eight out of every ten suspensions and exclusions.”

”Through this initiative the Australian Government is seeking to address areas of concern that impact on boys.”

”The successful Boys’ Education Lighthouse Schools programme, which has been operating over 2003-2005, has supported over 550 schools nationally to develop effective teaching practices and strategies that work with boys.”
(snip)
”In the first round of Success for Boys funding, successful schools received grants of around $10,000 to implement professional learning modules in 2006 to help them meet boys’ learning needs”.

The Hon Julie Bishop MP
Minister for Education, Science and Training

And the program report for the year 2003 is available at:

http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/856C589F-F8AD-4481-BADA-9D7B63CB8BEE/2657/meeting_the_challenge.pdf

I looked through the outcomes, which were interesting and encouraging, although anecdotal. Have a look for yourself - there may be something your school P&C can use, can possibly adapt to the requirements of the $90 millions -(three-and-a-third times $27m)- available as chaplaincy grants.

I would not rule out the involvement of any stakeholders in your school P&C - Many teachers are parents, too.

Sir Vivor
I have previously seen the data and the federal government grants that you refer to. The surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) thing is that many P&C associations were not even informed by their schools that federal government grant money was being made available.

As well as that, many P&C associations are presently not getting sufficient information from their schools to enable them to develop effective student performance monitoring systems, so any time or money being spent by P&C associations could very well be time or money that is being misspent or wasted.

What the P&C associations have to do is establish effective monitoring systems to identify students at risk. I believe many teachers in many schools are not doing this very well at all, so it is left to P&C associations to do it for them.

Chaplains can be potentially useful to P&C associations to help identify students at risk, and if there are students at risk in a school, then the P&C associations have to establish projects to reduce the number of students at risk in their school.

The teachers in many schools have had 30 years to do this, but have failed to do it, or failed to do it properly.

Dear HRS,

I am satisfied that chaplains in schools will wield a positive influence, in most instances. My reservations have to do with the extent of their influence.

I would prefer to see $90 million available for boys literacy and retention projects, and $27 million for chaplaincy projects, over the same period; but perhaps a pair of granting programs with equal funding rates of $45 million per year would put them at the same starting gate.

After prior careful selection of the programs and subsequent careful evaluation of the outcomes, we might be in a position to compare their relative results and adjust the fundings accordingly.

Perhaps you can put that case to your Federal MP, if it interests you.

Kevin Donnelly attacks the Left for faults in education that were introduced by the Right. He tends to point out that certain features appeared while we had a federal Labor Government but neglects to mention that the various state governments - even the Liberal ones - were in fact responsible for education.

It was the Victorian Liberal Government which made history and geography disappear in favour of the mess of Studies of Society and the Environment. It was the current Labor Government which dumped SOSE and restored history and geography as traditional disciplines within the humanities. It was the Victorian Liberal Government which introduced the jargon of 'beginning', 'consolidating' and 'established' on reports. It was the current Labor Government which replaced them with a reporting system which tells parents the year level at which their children are achieving even when it is not they one they are in. It was the Victorian Liberal Government which officially introduced outcomes-based education as a cover story for cutting the inputs that had underpinned Victoria's long-term educational success; i.e., reasonably decent staffing of schools which allowed smaller classes and manageable teaching loads. It was the current Labor Government which restored teacher numbers in primary schools and which, we can only hope, will eventually get around to restoring them in secondary schools.

The picture of postmodernist 'anything goes' that Dr Donnelly keeps on painting in issue after issue of The Australian is not an accurate description of any school I have taught in or heard of. My experience is that schools do attempt to teach a sense of right and wrong to students. They do teach values. They do teach facts. The do teach traditional subjects. They do teach children that they can fail. They do teach traditional literature. I have taught works such as Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations, Hard Times (which has been reborn in e-comic fashionalist Australia), Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, Nineteen eighty-four and Medea.

The constant exaggeration of the difficulties in the government school system simply crowds out any discussion of the real problems it has.

Sir Vivor,
I would think most people should become very interested in the education of our young people. Australia cannot afford to have many young people failing out of the education system. Australia now faces considerable competition from nearby countries with very large population, but those countries are rapidly educating and skilling those populations, and Australia will have to compete with those countries for trade and industry.

The Federal government has already given many millions of dollars towards improving the teaching methods being used by teachers, but whether the teachers will actually use those methods is a different matter. So there also needs to be people on the inside who act as a catalyst to ensure the teachers are actually carrying out quality teaching, and chaplains may be one of those people.

Recently a relative got 15 out of 25 for a science test in grade 9, and received a B+.

Most of the students in that grade failed, but each class size is not much more than 20 students. The teachers have plenty of teacher aids that have been purchased by the P&C association, and the teachers have numerous student free days throughout the year.

But with marks like that I cannot believe quality teaching was being carried out.