Posts by Tom Semmens
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The webcaster model has flaws, that being that one pretty much needs to exclude people without computers or broadband
This government has basically adandoned bothering even to pretend it provides a decent face-to-face service for its citizens anymore. Bill English himself is on the record as considering the move to putting all interactions online or via under-staffed call centres an "efficiency gain" (for whom and by what measure one has to ask).
Given that, I am amazed no one in Labour (well, not so amazed when I consider the not very intelligent Clare Curren is Labour's spokesperson) or the Greens has raised the issue of whether or not a free broadband connection is now a basic requirement and right for all New Zealanders. After all, the government is about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers money on a fibre network. Shouldn't we use that opportunity to get all citizens online?
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Talk radio is deluged with ads for stupid magnetic mattresses and bee products
Sports talk radio appears to think it's target demographic profile is a rather sad man in his fifties who sneaks off to to strip clubs and there discovers he can no longer crack a chubby without magical chemical help, so I suppose on the balance a future of magnetic mattresses and bee pollen isn't quite as depressing to contemplate.
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Ironically, science programming eventually became a stellar part of the lineup
Anyone who has followed the success of Mythbusters or of Brian Cox would know the public enthusiasm for popular science is undimmed by the efforts of the barbarians who guard the commercial broadcasting gates.
And I have taken to recording Graham Norton on a Friday night for in-bed Saturday viewing, such is the quality of his chat show, which is yet another extinct format in this country, presumably deemed to boring and/or expensive and/or SOOOO yesterday by the half wits who run our broadcasting system.
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Actually, it’s 68th to the USA’s 1st.
Cripes, those small ex-British Caribbean countries like to lock 'em up and throw away the key don't they? They make up half of the top twenty!
The general public has been treated to five decades of unrelenting, absolutist prohibitionist anti-drug propaganda from their public and law enforcement agencies. The threat from drugs is frequently treated as synonymous with the threat from terrorism when conflating them is considered expedient.
The fearful public generally believes what it is told by those in authority who they have been indoctrinated to trust. For those authorities to suddenly turn around and say it was all a terrible misunderstanding and all that stuff from Reefer Madness on was just alarmist nonsense would be to risk a massive psychological backlash.
Politicians and enforcement officials have made drug use the biggest, baddest tiger in the room and now they've got that beast firmly by the tail. Good luck finding a politician that is keen on letting go! -
Is it just me, or is it spookily coincidental that that other "compassionate conservative" and currently deeply in the
electoral doo-doo David Cameron deployed distraction by way of previously unannounced wild, unobtainable welfare reform "targets" just a few days before John Key declared his wild, unobtainable targets by way of distraction? -
This report is a fascinating insight into the effects of privilege in the British Parliament, and by extension what National's class based education policies will produce here. To summarise:
-35% of UK MPs elected in the 2010 General Election attended private schools, which educate just 7% of the school population.
-Less than half (43%) of MPs were educated in comprehensive state schools, with the remainder having attended state grammar schools (22%).
-54% of Conservative MPs attended fee paying schools, compared with 40% of Liberal Democrat MPs, and 15% of Labour MPs.
-There are 20 Etonians in the 2010 UK Parliament - 5 more than those who served in the 2005 Parliament. Overall 13 schools (12 of which are fee-charging) produce a tenth of all MPs in the new Parliament.
- 35% of newly elected MPs for the 2010 Parliament attended independent schools, the same proportion as MPs who were re-elected.
- 90% of MPs in 2010 attended university Parliament to date. This includes just under 30% who were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge universities. Oxford has produced 102 MPs serving in the 2010 Parliament.
- 38% of Conservative MPs were educated at Oxford or Cambridge compared with 20% of Labour MPs and 28% of Liberal Democrat MPs.
- Newly elected MPs were even more likely to be graduates – with 94% attending a university, including 69% who had attended a leading research university, and 28% who had attended Oxbridge.
An unrepresentative parliament made up overwhelmingly of middle class, university educated MPs with a massive over-representation of the favoured schools and universities of the elite establishment. When you read that, National's education policy starts to make sense. -
Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
We’re currently in the London commuter belt, and the angst over schooling is insane.
Yet it is almost certainly all in vain. Ninety percent of children in the UK attend publicly funded state secondary schools. But just five private schools send more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge than the next 2000 schools combined, and nowadays almost the entire British
political elite is narrowly drawn from those who matriculated at the Oxbridge universities.For a century British educationalists and intellectuals were pointing to this self-selecting, excessively narrow class as responsible for presiding over Britain’s precipitous decline as a world power, yet here we are well into the 21st century and (if the Royal wedding/Jubilee is any guide) the remorseless self-sustaining class privilege it creates and preserves is if anything stronger than ever.
Despite all that, all the international reviews and reports that ridicule and highlight the poor performance of the British system I would bet my last dollar (given the number of class riddled British “experts” our acutely class conscious National government likes to employ) that National wants to re-create the British system here and consign Clarence Beeby’s philosophy of “every person regardless of background or ability had a right to an education of a type for which they were best suited” to history. On the one hand, the public education system has been under continual attack, with more and more ideologically imposed process driven learning coupled with constant budget cutbacks and attacks on independent centres of educational thought like the teachers unions. On the other hand, a well funded parallel education system is created to perpetuate and reinforce the privilege of a narrow elite.
This is the context in which it is worth bearing mind that John Key sends his kids to Kings College – days fees $22,536 per kid per annum, boarding $13,000 extra – which is more money in day fees alone for one child than the household income a quarter of a million New Zealand children have to live on per year.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is class war.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Scott Chris,
Grammar is not a political institution
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The Americans tried compulsory bussing years ago to de-segregate the public school system, and ultimately failed after wealthier parents switched to the private system. Is there anything that can be done without being accused of PC gone mad?
That’s easy, simply stop subsidising private schools with taxpayer dollars and see how many can afford the resulting astronomical fees.
But the whole thing could more easily be dealt with by using the Tory’s weapons against them. Decile funding was supposedly introduced to help funding. Simply change the funding formula to be dependent on how accurately your school reflects the demographic, gender, social and economic make up of (for example in Auckland) a 8km catchment area. The more accurately you reflect your catchment, the more money you get.
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According to the last census, 21.5% of the population were under 15 years of age. Based on a population of slightly above 4,400,000 that implies around 950,000 children, around 63,000 in each age cohort. We know about one quarter of New Zealand children live near, on or below the poverty line - something which equates quite accurately with the much touted "one in five" children "failing" at school. According to my back of the envelope calculations*, providing a decent $2.50 breakfast** to the around 144,000 children who fall into this category would cost a paltry sixty million a year. To feed hungry children to get them to school, and help them learn.
So here is my question. Instead of the government squandering millions of dollars over bitter fighting about national standards and all the antagonism over league tables and class sizes, why don't the government get some money (we are paying twenty million Euro or so for each new NH-90 helicopter, surely we could put one off for a few years) use it trial a school lunch program and see if that makes a material difference? Why?
*let's be generous and say that is 18,000 kids near, on or in poverty in each age cohort. If we were to introduce a school breakfast program for these kids aged 5-12 that would be 144,000 kids getting a solid meal at school, assuming it cost $2.50 per kid per 162 school days.**$2.50 is a bit of a guess, based only on the costs mentioned on the indomitable and utterly charming blog of nine year old Martha Payne. Fonterra is already saying it going to start providing free school milk. Sanitarium and others (Harraways are still NZ owned and operated, I am sure they'd love a big government contract) would surely come to the party with food at cost.