Tag: Inequality

Bookmarked Australian curriculum review: strengthened but still a long way from an amazing curriculum for all Australian students (aare.edu.au)

A greater emphasis on the basics in the curriculum might produce a small bump in test results, but the effects of an impoverished curriculum will be much longer lasting, especially for those students who are most marginalised and disadvantaged.

As such, we need to shift the debate away from one that engages in endless cultural and ideological dispute, or one which focuses on the lowest denominators of basic literacy and numeracy, to one that asks how we can meaningfully ensure that all young people, but especially those least advantaged, have access to an engaging, high-quality and rich curriculum.

Stewart Riddle discusses the push for dumbing down the curriculum and explains that the biggest consequence is in regards to inequality. Riddle also discusses this on the TER Podcast.
Liked I thought life was back to normal. Then a text message from a listener shut me up (abc.net.au)

“Not everyone can afford to go out to eat. I now have to manage my kids’ disappointment when they want take away or to eat out and we can’t afford it.

Declining offers to go out to eat by making excuses because I’m embarrassed. I enjoyed ISO. It made me feel ok about not having money to spend.”

Liked

Liked For the first time in a long time, we’re setting up a generation to be worse off than the one before it (The Conversation)

Most Australians want to leave the world a better place for those that come after them.

It’s time to make sure we do it.

Lots of older Australians are doing their best, individually, supporting their children via the “Bank of Mum and Dad”, caring for grandchildren, and scrimping through retirement to leave their kids a good inheritance.

These private transfers help a lucky few, but they don’t solve the broader problem. In fact, inheritances exacerbate inequality because they largely go to the already wealthy.

We need policy changes.

Reducing or eliminating tax breaks for “comfortably off” older Australians would be a start.

Liked The History of the Future of High School by Audrey Watters,Kitron Neuschatz,Lia Kantrowitz (Vice)

Masking the real history of high school in America also helps the DeVoses of the world obscure legitimate problems the education system has always faced—problems that have been deliberately created and maintained. Funding inequality and racial segregation are rarely the focus of these sorts of stories about an ever-unchanging educational system. The dominant narrative instead tends to point to teachers or curricula, or even bells and early start times, as the reason schools are “broken” and that students aren’t being adequately prepared for the future.