Here's a relatively simple question:
If Dorothy leaves Sydney to read Miranda the Devine at 7.30 am, and arrives home, having driven like a bat out of hell, by 12.30 pm, and the amount of information absorbed relative to the amount of disinformation, disingenuous distortion, and outright humbuggery, can be expressed as an average, please tell me if Dorothy spent two hours reading Miranda the Devine at an average speed of 60 kilometres an hour, while her partner drove the rest of the way averaging 90 kilometres an hour, what is the speed at which the brain dissolves: (a) 67 km/h; (b) 75 km/h (c) 78 km/h; (d) 84 km/h; (e) none of the above, the brain dissolved instantly once it was decided it should spend some time in the mugwump swamp mush of Miranda the Devine thinking.
Got it wrong? What this town needs is a monorail - oh wait, we've got one already - and what you need is more time in a NSW public school.
The Devine is of course off on a union bashing exercise and celebrating the national NAPLAN tests as a way of subverting their fiendish cabalish ways, what with the bully boy tactics and the yadda yadda this and the yadda yadda that. You can find it here under the gentle header Bureaucrats catch the bully bug from anti-test teachers, a pious plea for reasoned, balanced debate and discussion, and an example of courteous behaviour worthy of an Oxford debate.
Yep, let's not mince words, sabotage and saboteurs are at work in a brand new educatioal environment, and Bob Carr is a hero for defending the curriculum from the worst educational fads.
Bob Carr? You there Smithers, stop chortling and get back on your chair.
We can learn from some of the surprise successes, such as Macquarie Fields High School in the oft-maligned south-west suburb, which ranked in the top 100 schools in the country in numeracy.
Hang on a nervous tic, as Herbert Lom said to the Pink Panther.
At this point, perhaps it's time to revert to some of the Devine's readers comments, to see what this really means:
Macquarie Fields High School is a semi-selective High School so its results naturally are more positive than fully comprehensive schools in impoverished areas. Your misinterpretation of this school's result, is exactly the reason why teachers don't want this data published ...
Macquarie Fields High School's ranking in the top 100 was not a "surprise success". It is a half selective, half community school, which means 50% of the enrolment intake is made up of selective students ...
Macquarie Fields is an excellent high school, but it is a semi-selective school, which allows it to attract many bright students who would otherwise attend neighbouring schools.
Details such as this are just too difficult for the simplistic reporting of people like Miranda Devine. This is exactly the kind of unfair comparisons that are causing the dispute over the use of NAPLAN tests.
Talk about a selective selection of selective responses to a selective point!
There were other marking downs of the Devine's talking points:
Miranda loses marks for the English section of her test when she writes "...students who sat the first test in 2008..." People sit FOR tests, they don't SIT them. How annolying can you be to an old teacher!!
Oops, pity about that stray l. Let he whose without typos cast the first ston.
And way too cruel David Morrison. If we applied literacy standards to journalists, we'd have nothing to read. Worse still, this vexatious pedant then has the cheek to go on to defend the teachers' union as not being particularly militant or left wing, and basing its current position on good educational principles.
No wonder then for the rest of the column, the Devine shifts tack, and embarks on a campaign of support for a site that provides NAPLAN tests for paying customers. Oh hang on, she's still banging on about Macquarie Fields, and what it all means for power crazed militant ideologues:
The only logical explanation for this madness is the unions are frightened of information. They don't want Macquarie Fields to be hailed a success or become a model for other schools in impoverished areas. They want to hide failures and condemn another generation of young Australians to illiteracy.
Logic and the Devine? That's the only time you'll see those words linked in a coherent sentence. Hang on, if it's a coherent sentence, where's the verb? And how about an adjective? Logic and the delinquent Devine?
It turns out that the NAPLAN tests which seemed to have the enthusiastic support of the Devine are in fact deeply flawed, or so the Devine asserts:
An IT expert married to a schoolteacher, Johnson, 43, came up with the idea for the website after his eldest son sat the first NAPLAN tests in 2008 and he saw the flaws. ''It was all paper-based, expensive and controlled by big bureaucracy.''
Hmm, could the teachers have a point? Is NAPLAN fatally flawed?
Warning inconsistent logic problem, kernel panic attack, motherboard under stress, hit restart button, plunge into the nether world of the terminal, throw machine out with garbage.
No, no, you silly goose, it's all very easily resolved. The whole education system needs to be turned into a private playground for benefit of Catholics and Anglicans (and to hell with those silly ethics classes).
BTW, how has the sorry saga of the IT revolution ended?
As Johnson says: ''If our site disappears, someone somewhere will build another site to replace it.'' But he is running out of money and is now thinking of giving up and taking an IT job overseas. He has shown how private enterprise can solve problems more efficiently than bureaucracies. But his travails show how innovation is crushed when those bureaucracies run out of control.
You see, it wasn't the viciously ideological teachers after all, but the power-crazed out of control Bambi-crushing bureaucrats, some still in power from the time Bob Carr sat on his bum for a decade.
Well, that's it. Out with the bureaucrats, out with the teachers, and in with the private sector. In no time at all, we can manage to have as dumbed down and useless an education sector as is on offer to the wretched poor in the United States.
Still it confirmed that once again the Devine managed to publish the controversy without shedding much useful light on the actual issues to hand, a remarkable skill, even if as a result I remain in educational oblivion, while fully informed about her own whacky views. And thanking the absent lord I'm not a teacher having to deal with all this nonsense and a classroom full of fractious unruly children, inspired to revolt by reading the Devine.
But I do so love the idea that if you sit for a school test and do well, you're on the way to a tremendously successful qualification, certified on ways to best deal with the world. I've always though multiple answer tests are tremendous, and as useful as sending a rat through a maze to score a tasty treat.
It must be a constant regret for all the dropkicks and ne'er do wells who dropped out of school and went on to make billions that they failed to see the tremendous benefit in being able to calculate an average travel time which fails to produce an understanding of the average logic on display in a Miranda the Devine column ...
Now when teachers can sort out that kind of opaque muddied thinking, the easy generalisations, the political attitudinising, the sloppy misuse and abuse of facts, and the willingness to resort to simple minded calumnies and stereotypes (bolshie teachers, power mad bureaucrats), we might truly be in the middle of an educational revolution ...
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