Kevin donnelly why our schools are failing

Find out more Donnelly, Kevin. Why our schools are failing. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video. You can view this on the NLA website.

Login Register. The superiority of market school systems has gone beyond immediate benefits to students, extending to communal effects such as increased social harmony and protection of minority rights.

As a result,. Tax Credits and private scholarship programs would be among the most promising elements of such a system. One is to set national benchmarks relating to things such as literacy and numeracy. The other very important goal is to facilitate choice by supporting the right of parents to decide where their children are going to be educated. While Government schools educate 68 per cent of our children, Government schools receive 76 per cent of total government funding.

In fact Howard has combined state and federal funding to achieve that figure. Read this excellent article in The Bulletin , if it is still available. This has proven only too true. In the promos they had a snippet where Fraser says the current leadership is deeply into attempting to stifle discussion, and I could not agree more. This is not a new concern. It is probably the most substantial thing I have ever written, and was the first extensive discussion of such issues as literary theory and semiotics in NSW English teaching circles.

I set out to defend the old ways and to reject the new, but found myself going in another direction altogether. Much of what I said then remains valid. As to my own political position, I find myself warming very much to John Button , former Minister in the Whitlam government — the one that the now quite admirable Malcolm Fraser killed off, as you might recall.

Dopey, almost. You seriously believe that. Yes indeed: as of December I still stand by that. Reject Kevin!?! How dare you! I will read all of this word for word when I get a mo, and can tell you I like your way of putting things. What exactly is KevDon trying to say about Critical Literacy, in a nutshell? Your imput would be most helpful, if not expedient…. Thank you in anticipaton of any comment you would like to give. Cheers from A ragged uni student and mother of a toddler! Kevin does not believe in critical literacy.

He thinks children should only be reading he classics. Strange man with some very strange thoughts, often uncited and rarely researched. People like KD have done so much lasting damage to our education system. Vale to you for speaking out. Susan Reibel Moore. Why is all this space given to Kevin Donnelly?

In Reading our focus was first on decoding and then, naturally, comprehension. I was NOT well paid, to put this mildly. One of the most internationally active people then and now, Mary Ruth Mendel, a Sydney speech pathologist, is still working in remote Aboriginal communities, helping adults and children to be fully literate. Mary Ruth was linked long ago with the international Spalding Foundation. In the 80s and early-to-mid 90s this foundation had the best research record on literacy gains in the English-speaking world.

His widow, Mary, now in her 80s, is still working on literacy for as many hours in the day as she can manage. Mary Ruth and I are well known to Mary North and others in diverse literacy milieus who have done their homework. I mean scholars and critics.

Helping influential educators to lift their game at every level of schooling, K and beyond, is a good idea. Goodness knows why my own outstanding record at Harvard, where I did my teacher training, means anything! WHO has heard of Harvard??!!! Since its mother has the same disorder as the Duchess of Cambridge, her pregnancy has not been easy. She and my son have a month old little girl.

They both left school early, since for good reason they detested it. They are largely self-educated. Mostly, however, they have profited from their environment, which emphatically includes the Net: educational sites, not mindless ones!!!

I agree. He is a total waste of space! But then the post, written quite a long time ago now, is about the book he published in , the stupidest book on education I had ever read, as I said at the time. Sadly the Australian government takes him seriously. Kevin Donnelly is still at it.

He continues to cherrypick and mislead. His recent article on Safe Schools is full of misinformation. Fortunately, intuitive, thinking teachers and students ignore his prescriptive, pre-historic curriculum ideas. Schools are about teaching students to think and grow as whole people. That frightens Kevin Donnelly.

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Donnelly cherry-picks the part that suits him, but since he regards environmental education along with just about everything else that has happened since as deplorable political correctness, he neglects to cherry-pick such things as this : Scott London: You point out that a widespread sense of urgency is tangible on many levels today, as if one historical era is coming to an end and another is about to begin.

My responses You may see what Bruce Wilson is on about in this conference handout from And yes, curriculum is always a compromise between competing interest groups. Here is a summary of the report [searching from that link may now be needed]: This report covers two topics: the ways in which academic life has changed in the last twenty years or so, and the impact on universities of an ageing academic workforce.

If you study the field, you can only laugh at almost everything Donnelly says about literacy. Before the mids, each of the State education departments issued clear syllabi for each subject, which detailed knowledge and skills that students were expected to attain at each year level. Teachers had to teach to the syllabus and students were examined on both their knowledge and skills. Inspectors were employed by the various departments to ensure that this process was observed.

Students who failed to meet the minimum required standard had to repeat the year level, and testing was used as a means of monitoring the effectiveness of instruction. This approach was abandoned for one in which the emphasis was on listing the competencies students should develop during certain blocks of years in their schooling e. The teacher is given a wide latitude in writing the syllabus. Accompanying this change was the introduction of a range of educational techniques such as open classrooms and whole-language approach to teaching English, many of which have since been discredited.

Unlike Australia, curriculum in such countries is discipline-based, measurable, incorporates high-stakes testing, relates to specific year levels and enforces system accountability with specific rewards and sanctions under-performing schools are identified and successful teachers are rewarded.

Bruce Wilson, head of Australia's Curriculum Corporation and the person partly responsible for Australia's adoption of outcomes-based education, now argues that the Australian approach represents: "an unsatisfactory political and intellectual compromise". The flaws in Australia's outcomes-based approach to curriculum are manifold.

As a result of adopting such fads as whole language, where students are taught to "look and guess", generations of students, especially boys, are placed at risk. As a result of fuzzy maths, where primary students are allowed to use calculators and where basic algorithms like long division are no longer taught, many students are unable to do mental arithmetic or to recite their times tables.

The very skills most needed if students are to master higher-order thinking. By dumbing down academic subjects to make them immediately attractive and accessible, the end result is that many students leave school culturally illiterate, unable to write a properly structured essay and with a misplaced sense of their own academic worth.