My Blog on My School

For those stuck between numerous rocks and hard places, the My School website is a central database of the NAPLAN test results, designed in such a way as for people to compare school results between schools in their area and/or to compare schools from similar socio-economic areas. More detailed information can be found in the resources section of the site. As blogger Mac says, the results are already meant to be published on each school’s website but this doesn’t always happen, certainly not in a complete or ideal way. In this sense I feel that the My School website is a good resource even to just provide all these results in one location in a consistent manner.

The main reactions in the media to the site have come from the teachers’ union and from individuals that in some way lay claim to represent the interests of parents. The line from teachers, and a line that is well represented at a Larvatus Prodeo thread on the topic, is that this site is a bad thing because the media will make up league tables of the best and worst schools and that the notion of what makes a good school will be simplified into a question of their performance in the most recent NAPLAN test. Some also see this as turning schools into businesses that compete for consumers’ business. While I agree that these things are not good, that schools shouldn’t be made into businesses and that there is much more to schooling than NAPLAN results, I think most of these arguments are rather silly and hyperbolic.

When people argue that this is bad information to give out because people will relinquish their critical capacity to one set of test results, I find that to be quite patronising. If a parent can be bothered to look up information about possible schools on a website I’m going to guess that they’re also going to go to the school and talk to the principal and make much more of an effort than to just look at a few numbers. They’re also probably going to be aware of the many factors that can contribute to the quality of a school beyond how well that school performs in standardised tests. To assume, as many of the comments at the LP thread do, that the vast majority of people won’t be able to comprehend this smacks of a paternalistic attitude that’s quite ridiculous.

Even if people fail to use this information in the best way possible, it’s not as if people haven’t made bad decisions like that in the past. It’s just that now people who are disengaged will make disengaged decisions based on a different set of arbitrary measurements. In short, I really don’t think you can argue it’s better to give people less of a chance to make a good decision in the pursuit of saving silly people from themselves. That’s a futile goal.

A more credible attack on the My School website for mine is that many in the media will act irresponsibly and publish misleading comparisons that aren’t warranted. Indeed, there is much ammunition for that argument because that’s pretty much what the media did immediately. Indeed there are times when I think the Sydney Morning Herald just wants to go out of business. I acknowledge that a screaming headline about a school that is a failure could be quite harmful to that school’s community but the answer to this isn’t to restrict information and to censor. The proper response is to open up information and educate people about the information.

To my mind, the most reasonable critiques of the site are not that the information shouldn’t be published, just that the information is or will prove to be not as good as it could be. On another thread at LP there is a reasonable discussion of the limitations of the data presented. The main obstacles in the present are that the site does a poor job of comparing “like with like” schools and that the marks presented do not sufficiently indicate how well students improve at various schools. There are also long term issues with using standardised testing from an educational stand point, mainly that teachers will start teaching to the test thus rendering the test invalid. To put that another way, the test will no longer test what it is designed to test: the general skills and knowledge acquired by students during their ordinary schooling.

The solutions to these problems are not to restrict access to this information but to improve the quality of the information. I agree with the suggestion at LP, via the Grattan Institute, that the inclusion of “value added scores” would be a significant improvement to the data provided. The process whereby the site adjudicates what are like schools should also be improved, there are clear deficiencies in this process at present. The NAPLAN test procedure would also need to be regularly reviewed by governments to ensure it stays effective. This would be the case whether the results were published online or not. Overall, if these issues are addressed, I believe the My School website will become a valuable tool for parents when deciding on what school to send their children to.

I do not think this site is the bogey man that many on the left seem to think it is. If anything, I think it’s more likely to be a valuable tool for those that want a review of the funding arrangements for schools, whether they be public, private, metropolitan, rural or whatever. As far as I know, the federal government has every intention of including on the site, information about how much funding each school receives; not just from governments, but including donations and fees. For those that argue that the top private schools get more than enough funding from non-governmental sources this should provide a clear set of figures for that campaign to be based on. Likewise for anyone concerned about the level of funding their school receives compared to what level of funding they think their school should receive.

Hashtag-a-go-go

CAUTION: This post has a NERD ALERT WARNING

OK, so, for those of you not on twitter, hashtags are a device used on twitter so that people can search for all tweets on a certain topic. They are made by typing the hash symbol (#) and then a word or combination of characters directly afterwards with no spaces. Popular hashtags in Australia include #qanda, for the ABC TV show Q and A, and #spill, the hashtag that developed around the Leadership trouble in the federal Liberal party at the end of 2009. Although there are websites and services that attempt to organise hashtags in some ways, anyone can start or use any hashtag because the only action involved is typing characters into a tweet.

Sometimes a hashtag is prescribed to an event, Q and A being a good example of this; they mention the hashtag at the start of the show each episode. At other times a hashtag will evolve by itself; in the case of the #spill the hashtag came from continued speculation early on that there would be a spill for the leadership positions. Because twitter updates are limited to 140 characters, brevity is at a premium. This is all the more important with hashtags given that a hashtag will often be added on to the end of a tweet rather than worked into tweet itself. It is also useful for a hashtag to be clearly related to what is being discussed, although I would argue that this isn’t an essential ingredient in a useful hashtag.

And now to the topic at hand: the ideal hashtag for the Australian federal election most likely to be held sometime this year. The issue was raised by the ABC Elections account because the tag #election2010 was being swamped by tweets about the UK and US elections also due this year. Also this afternoon Ben Raue set up a poll to get a vibe of what people would prefer and so here I am, writing this blog post on the topic.

There seem to be a few words/chunks that could be put together in a few different ways including
What it is: Election/Vote
When it is: 2010/10
Where it is: Aus/Oz/Fed

Clearly an important consideration here is to what extent the content of the hashtag needs to make clear the subject at hand. If it was something like #Aus10 it would be nice and short but it doesn’t say anything about an election. While a phrase such as “in the red corner is tony abbot and in the blue corner is kevin rudd federal election 2010” (sic) condensed into one hashtag would be ridiculous. In my opinion, hashtags are primarily of use to people already somewhat engaged in the conversation, or who would be familiar with the background to the issue, and therefore it is not necessary to make clear, within a hashtag, exactly what the issue is. Further to that, a hashtag doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it will inevitably be surrounded but other text or a link that will provide a context.

On that basis, I personally believe that including the word Election or Vote in the hashtag for the Australian federal election is not necessary. This has the added benefit of taking out two of the longest chunks that could’ve been included. I also advocate for the abbreviation of the date to just ‘10’ to keep the tag short and to choose Aus over oz and fed; over fed because Aus is specific to Australia and over the shorter oz because i (and a few others) were told off this morning. So ultimately, my preferred hashtag for the next Australian federal election would be #Aus10. Also, as I observed earlier today, this hashtag can be easily modified for the other elections in 2010 e.g. SA10.

However, I’m not dogmatic about this. I’m open to debate and indeed I really think there is no absolute right or wrong answer here, just guiding principals. The one last point I’d make is that, one way or another, I really don’t think there needs to be one chunk out of each of the three categories highlighted before. You could include Vote and the year, or Vote an an indication of the country, but I don’t think you need to specify that it’s an election, in the year 2010 and in Australia, all in the hashtag.

Now over to you, what do you think makes a good hashtag? What would be the best hashtag for the federal election? Or if you want to get all meta on me, is it too nerdy to write a post about a hashtag in the first place?

AVATAR! It’s um, a movie.

SPOILER ALERTS (minor, if you’ve seen a trailer or ad for the movie you probably won’t have it ruined for you here)

I don’t think a review, critique or discussion of Avatar would be appropriate without beginning by mentioning how good the graphics and special effects were. Admittedly, I don’t go to see many movies and I’m no expert on these things, but visually the movie was really fantastic. In this context I like Skepticlawyer’s line that while the plot was very predictable it was probably really just there to make the money to pay for the graphics.

That said, when analysing the plot and issues covered, I tend to side with the general vibe of the open Hoyden thread that, for a movie that I believe is criticising the destruction of indigenous cultures and peoples by explorers, colonising governments and corporations, it doesn’t really challenge many norms of society and even reinforces (to varying degrees) existing biases. I’m sure the film makers would say that makes the story easier to understand but personally I think it’s really a failure by people who probably have privilege growing out of their ears (as I do myself) to question those assumptions.

As a few examples, why do the indigenous people have to be so generic and clichéd, why is there only one person with a disability in the whole film, why does his disability then have to have a significant role in the film rather than just being seen as unremarkable or unusual, and why does the resolution to the tension have to come through violence and conflict? Surely a film that seeks to criticise the destructive and horrible practice of explorers, colonists and corporations would want to challenge the notion that violent conflict is the natural and only way for clashing cultures to resolve their differences over values and/or property rights.

The movie could’ve easily ended in a few other ways. Either the Na’vi and the humans could’ve negotiated a settlement over the land, the humans could’ve understood the fundamental injustice of their actions and left or there could’ve been a violent end with a twist. The twist for me would’ve been to have the Na’vi’s Mother Earth equivalent concept, by having some connection with the other animals, plants and creatures on Pandora, place the humans at a disadvantage that would be beyond their anticipation or comprehension. In my mind, the advantage of this ending would be to challenge the primacy of the values and beliefs of the explorers/colonists/corporations over other cultures’ understanding of the world around us. I know there was some attempt at this but I don’t think it was as effective as it could’ve been.

More importantly than that I think the aspect most in need of attention in the context of the “non challenging enough privileges” critique is the racist/racially privileged nature of Avatar. This has been described in other places but to summarise; why does the Na’vi have to be lead by a non-Na’vi to win the final battle? Why is it necessary for a member of the dominant group to swap sides when they realise the error of their ways? To me this is more important than the movie’s questionable treatment of disability, sexuality and gender as the movie is primarily about racism and the clash of cultures. I understand that not every movie can or should be perfectly politically correct, but surely when a central theme of a movie is the challenging of historical assumptions about race and indigenous cultures it’s important to treat these issues in an appropriate fashion.

To finish, a few quick thoughts. Firstly, I know this critique is coming from a pretty standard leftie perspective so I thought I’d share this review/interpretation of the film that was linked to by Skepticlawyer. I think it provides a much better contrast for a right wing take on Avatar than the trollumn written by Miranda “Trollumnist” Devine, also I agree with the thrust of the argument.

Also why oh why does the lead scientist have to smoke? I say this specifically because she’s the ONLY PERSON in the whole movie who smokes and both times she’s shot smoking it’s always really obvious. I’d be willing to put serious money down that says that part of Avatar’s financial backing came from Tobacco companies. I personally am against tobacco advertising especially when it’s done like this but even if I wasn’t I would like to think that I’d still be pissed off at how tokenistic it is. To me it serves no purpose what so ever and should’ve been cut.

So overall i think i’d give Avatar 3.5 stars out of 5, to conform to western movie reviewer privilege. The graphics were great and while the plot and deeper meaning wasn’t as good as i think it could’ve been, i was entertained and held throughout. Given its large audience, i think it can be cut some slack for it’s failings in the eye of a concerned leftist.