The paradox of choice in schools
Further to this weeks rant about choice in schools.
There are plenty of moans and complaints around, without a great lot of proposed solutions, or even reasoned assessments of the problem.
Perhaps the market for places at the good schools should attract money and resources to that school. Applications from parents should come along with ‘vouchers’ to help that school expand, regardless of whether or not the application is successful. Attracting applications should be a goal for the school. The schools that don’t get as many applications should eventually close as there is no market for them, and they have in fact failed. All factors surrounding that failed school should be looked at, including location, systematic issues and teaching quality. Teachers should be assessed and if necessary asked to leave the profession and find another job which they may be better at. Teaching should never been seen as a ’safe’ job, they should be on 3-5 year contracts and have to apply all over again and prove to the school board why they should be allowed the privilege of teaching the community’s children. Schools are about children not teachers’ jobs.
Private enterprise should be allowed to set up schools as a profit-making venture. The quality of the school and teaching would be what attracts parent’s applications and therefore funding. Market forces would drive the desired output of roundly educated children (in a way that attracts applications from more parents). Government grants and offsets could be used to attract private investment in more underprivileged or difficult areas.
but whatta i know
So what did you do in the Great Recession?
So daddy, what did you do during the great recession of 2009? did you have to roam the streets in search of manual labour and menial work, arriving back late at night with a stolen loaf of bread and some soup from a charity to feed your emaciated and sickly family for just one more day? Did you struggle each month to raise enough money to pay the landlord so your family had a roof over its head, albeit in a rat infested slum?
No son, I just kept my job like the overwhelming number of people did. Some businesses like Woolworths and MFI had to shut up shop, but most people were amazed at how such a dodgy bloated inefficient business had lasted this long! There were some media stories about the possibility of mass unemployment but in reality unemployment remained at a historical healthy 7%. As you know son in the medieval 1983 it was at 13%, when even the most ardent lefties talked about full/cyclical employment meaning around 5% looking for work. For those that did lose their job, hardly any of them had to beg on the streets for bread, although some did have to cancel Sky Sports and cancel the foreign holiday and only vote once on x-factor.
Then again, all the old people died of swine flu, which wasn’t so nice, and the ones that didn’t had great trouble with the digital switch-over, meaning they couldn’t always receive E4+1.
The illusion of parental choice in England’s primary schools
In England when your child is three years old, parents must ‘choose’ a primary school. They send a form to the council with their choices, marked in preference order, one to three. The family across the street from me have just done this, applying to the three schools with in one or two miles. They had hoped to get into the school which they can literally see from their back garden.
It was however over subscribed, as were the other two schools, so their child has been assigned a place in a school three miles away, in an area of town heavily populated with Somalis, a large percentage of the children in the school don’t have English as a first language, it has understandably bad reputation in terms of test results (no fault of the Somalis i might add). The promised parental choice was a bit of a cruel joke, it’s really the option to express a preference. So what do they do now? are they rich enough to move to an area with better schools? is that fair that they can do that if they can afford to? So the poor and disadvantaged end up at the same school and spiral downwards?
No easy answers. When you actually have kids and are making this decisions for real it becomes more than political theory. I’m broadly in favor of comprehensive education … as long as it doesn’t have a determent to my own children. hmmmm! It will be interesting to see what happens in Brighton when they experiment with a lottery for school places.
Sometimes you just have to reboot
Sometimes you just have to reboot
Clear out all the trash you’ve accumulated on purpose or by stealth
Get your system back to its pure intended state
Hand the processing power and memory back to the core and vital system functions
Dam that Pope, stop being right, in an annoying way
Fair to say that my knee jerk reaction to anything the Pope says is , well, less than positive lets say.
Which was my enraged reaction to his ’outburst’ last week regarding the proposed equality legislation, forcing religious organisation to employ people who don’t , shall we say, share their values.
Annoyingly though, on further thought/reading. the big hatted one has a decent point. I hate when that happens.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/01/pope-condemns-british-equality-bill
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7012842.ece
A lie by any other name
Is willfully misleading the same as lying?
yeah
Spin or be spun
It’s paradoxical that a government so known for spin is at the same time ruthlessly self-analytical and public. It’s amazing how many of the negative news stories that surround them are only in the public eye because (new) Labour legislated that it be allowed. Freedom-of-information requests hector government departments, they commission surveys into equality a few months before an election which turns out to say that UK is more unequal than at any time since 1945! They set up a public enquiry into the Iraq war, their defining failure, THREE MONTHS before the election. The list goes on, and paradoxically the fact that the feral media have so much meat to chew on means that the government spin machine has to work harder just to keep above water. Any government that doesn’t have world class media management and presentation is no government at all, the naive bleat about insincerity and ‘airbrushing’, when in truth good political campaigning is a sign of good management and persuasion skills.
Here’s my criteria in May: Shares my values; Intelligent; Visionary; Compassionate, Driven to succeed; Skillful political operator
Scrap TV Licence, not the BBC
TV Licence is an unfair flat tax, which is too easily avoided and costs too much to administer. When it was introduced TV was a luxury item so it was unfair for those that don’t use it to pay for it, but now it’s so ubiquitous that it should be paid for by income tax revenue. Therefore making it a progressive taxation and fairer on those who can least afford it.
Just do it! there’s no good argument against, is there?
The fun subject of Alzheimer’s
There are times in life when mortality is to the fore and you finds yourself having discussions along the lines of ’so do you want to be buried or cremated?’. Weirdly i find myself thinking that i need to leave a list of passwords and on-line account information somewhere my Mrs could get them, gap in the market? I’ve had one of these mortality chats recently, initiated by Life Insurance applications and family members’ health scares.
So, organ donation? yeah fine whatta i care if i’m dead and gone, and by showing willing while alive it encourages others, which may help me or my family. Buried or cremated? don’t care. Maybe if i die young-ish it might be helpful for my kids to have a plot to visit to realise my one-time existence.
I don’t fear death, because i won’t be here/there to feel/care. I do though want to live a long time because I enjoy life and i would rather be than not be. I care about my loved ones, and how my death would affect them, hence the life insurance.
What i don’t want is to have Alzhimer’s or be physically incapable of looking after myself. My grandmother had it for 5-10 years and lived in a home for most of that time, not recognising anyone, she was no longer the person I knew, she was perhaps, no longer a person, she held no real memories or moral thoughts or future aspirations. That’s something i don’t want for myself or my family. Why can’t i hold a card in my wallet which expresses my wish to be euthanised if I develop Alzheimer’s? ‘I’ am not my body, ‘I’ am my ability to act as a human, relate to those around me and have memory.
Afgan Schoolgirls
2000 in Afganistan, there were no girls in school
2010 there are around 2 million
On a gloomy news day there are chinks
A comic vignette
Whilst watching Avatar I wrote a sit com sketch in my head. I’m not sure what this says about the movie.
Our protagonist goes to see a 3D movie for the first time, and starts to imagine that the entire movie theatre is part of the show. He’s amazed as he looks around, imagining that he could almost touch the person sitting beside him, it seems so real. Hilarity ensues!!
I’m not saying there’s an entire half hours material, but there we have it.
Just to make ya feel a bit safer
I can’t help feeling that if bombers are willing to wear underpant bombs on planes detonate backpacks on the tube, then there’s not much we can do about it with out seriously infringing on our own liberty and way of life. It doesn’t mater how many scanners and searches we put in place we’re not going to have 100% security. But what percentage is would we settle for?
Its really a psychological battle. We want to be made to feel a bit safer, and maybe extra layers of security do that, whether they are effective or not is only one part of the jigsaw. If by making every one walk though an Early Learning Centre pretend scanner that makes a pleasing beep, every one calms down a bit about terrorism, then money well spent.
Doing something is better than nothing
Well, I’m not so sure any more. U2 and Jay-Z and Rihanna are putting together a song and a concert for Haiti, George Clooney is doing a two hour benefit show on MTV to raise money and awareness, etc etc……etc
Hard to criticise it as I go about my daily business as normal and these people are actually doing ’something’. The problem is that what they are doing is next to useless, it has no effect. I can’t help thinking that its more about us and how we feel about ourselves than practical help for others in need. Haiti doesn’t need a million dollars here or there, or to have our awareness raised for a couple of hours and neither does Africa or ‘the rainforests’ or [insert other].
Every little bit helps, well ok yes. But not as much as a lot helps and if by giving and thinking a little we allow ourselves not to do a lot then screw the “every little bit”.
Don’t get me started on all the faux emotion and finely synthesised empathy… as long as I don’t miss Glee on E4 tonight!
Where is the UN in Haiti
OK, I know that their mission was devistated, and head of mission died, but…
I can’t help but wonder if its right that the USA can have thousands of troops, tens of aircraft and a logistical plan up and running in a week when the UN can really only muster talk and resolutions.
Couldn’t there be some sort of standing UN army of 5-10 thousand relief workers, equipment and transport that can be sent at a moments notice so the world doesn’t have to rely on the charity and good will of the American tax payer.
Pie in the sky, I know
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