Income raising is a labour-intensive process that is re-imagining the role of school staff and parents. Raising money relies on entrepreneurial principals, savvy PR staff, engaged parents and parent committees, as well as the work of intermediary organisations like Schools Plus. This is a problem, especially when it comes to public schools.
Research from the United States and United Kingdom cautions that an over-reliance on private income could lead to governments shirking some responsibility for resourcing and supporting schools.
Tag: Equity
In China, many rural students lack the connections or hardware to learn remotely. More nations will confront the same reality as the outbreak spreads.
Australia’s education system was once ranked among the world’s best, but its falling reputation has nothing to do with teacher quality and curriculum. The problem is growing inequality, writes Pasi Sahlberg.
I have accepted many scholarships and awards and I still wonder why people see the ATAR as a measure of merit.
It seems more of a flimsy contrast to justify the myth of meritocracy in an inequitable society. ATAR results measure socialisation or lack thereof, sorting young people by privilege or underprivilege.
Putting a 5G tower next to your house will only help you if the 5G tower is connected to a fast internet pipe. Basically, 5G is fiber to the curb with wireless distribution over the final few yards, the very thing that America’s telcoms sector is pathologically allergic to, and incapable of delivering on.
Equity Unbound is an emergent, collaborative curriculum which aims to create equity-focused, open, connected, intercultural learning experiences across classes, countries and contexts. Equity Unbound was initiated by Maha Bali @bali_maha (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Catherine Cronin @catherinecronin (National University of Ireland, Galway), and Mia Zamora @MiaZamoraPhD (Kean University, NJ, USA) for use in their courses this term (September-December 2018), but it is open to all.
Equity Unbound is for learners and/or educators at all levels (e.g. undergraduate, postgraduate, professional development) who are interested in exploring digital literacies with an equity and intercultural learning focus, in an open and connected learning environment. Our motto is:
“The only way to make borders meaningless is to keep insisting on crossing them.” (Lina Mounzer)
Participants will collaborate in a series of open online activities including: collaborative annotation using open-source Hypothes.is, social network conversations and live studio visits, a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, blogging, collaborative multimedia making, and creating their own new learning activities (inspired by the DS106 assignment bank). Activities will seek to develop critical digital literacies and intercultural collaboration while encouraging questions of equity issues such as equity in web representation, digital colonialism, safety and security risks on the web, and how these differ across contexts.
Feels like a continuation of the Engagement in a Time of Polarisation MOOC earlier this year. Interested, but will have to see.
As Aral keeps saying to me (and I reluctantly agree), we have to do these things the hard way so we can work out how to make them easier. It is the essence of what we’re trying to achieve at Ind.ie.
I am not being defeatist when I say that these tasks are often beyond my means. Beyond my means in financial cost, ability, time, and confidence.
So look at the power of the tools you have at your disposal. Look at what you can do with a camera. With a computer. With your voice and your connections. Look at whose voices are missing in your classroom. Look at who your students need to meet so that they can change their ideas of others.
We say we teach all children, but do we teach all stories? Do we teach the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or just the sanitized version that will not ruffle any feathers? I can choose to bring others into our classrooms so that their stories are told by them. I can choose to model what it means to question my own assumptions and correct my own wrongs.
I really like Ripp’s point that we need to consider how we use technology, it just makes me wonder what play technology can play in silencing voices? Whether it be the labeling of gorillas or the normalisation of whiteness by camera flashes and filters, it feels that speaking ones voice is easier for some than others for a range of reasons.
I have written about gender equity in the past. It is such an interesting issue with no clear solutions.
… winning not by being better, but by rigging the competition in your favour. Erecting economic barriers to employment via the high cost of taking an internship is just one more way to reserve the highest-status jobs for the elite.
If we’re serious about making schools better, then we can’t concede the topics of equity and social justice to the neoconservatives while re-shaping schooling to make it even more congenial to the structures that make people increasingly precarious. Makers and entrepreneurs aren’t the answer to the questions we have about equity. We’re not all pawns in some power struggle between the neoconservative and neoliberal movements, between the Champions and Pirates, as if there has only been one game in town, a match to which we must all buy tickets and watch.
Benjamin Doxtdator takes a look at Teach Like a Champion and Teach Like a Pirate. He questions the place of equity within all of this. In a second post, Doxtdator focuses on empowerment and its history. He continues his look at the work of Couros, Juliani and Spencer.
The concept of empowerment has more radical roots. In The Will to Empower (1999), Barbara Cruikshank argues that we can distinguish two different uses of ‘empowerment’: “the left uses empowerment to generate political resistance; the right, to produce rational economic and entrepreneurial actors.” I think the educators that I just surveyed complicate this left/right division since Robinson, Ferriter, and Richardson definitely occupy an identifiable strand of progressivism. Nonetheless, it’s a progressivism divorced from a call for political resistance
Ian O’Byrne also provides a useful breakdown of ’empowerment’ theory.
We just don’t trust human beings. In our self-centered reality, most humans are out to get us, take what we have, or at the very least, let us down. We’ve been sold a pull ourselves up by our bootstrap form of individualism that creates an extremely rich environment for technology to take root. We are so alone, that digital signals seem soothing. Technology and the Internet has become an amazing tool for delivering within our belief system making us more than willing to ignore the damage it does in the world we do not see, and refuse to see. Sure, technology won’t bring clean water to Flint Michigan, or help poor people actually navigate the educational system, but it will allow us to dream big, get rich, and feel good in our isolated bubbles.
Is a private high school education really worth the cost?
This is an important debate. I am unsure much is gained, especially when the private sector argue that they are working on equity more than the select entry public schools. It would be fair to say that this is not what Gonski was talking about in his original review.