Frank wrote on Oct 21^st, 2023 at 10:31am:



you missed out on concrete, canoli, duckie, peas and paki, just to name a few

Dnarever wrote on Nov 8^th, 2023 at 6:48pm:

Not at all, posturing empty headed ducky. Not at all.

You, like the others, are the manifestation the uniquely Australian version of the useful idiots Lenin was talking about. Or was it Stalin?

You are deferential to every enemy of your own culture and seize every oportunity to cringe and a debase yourself to show just how universalist and inclusive you are. Laughable, fake, stupid.


You know **** all about other cultures and even less about your own. All you know is how to make yourself a subordinate duck wit.

If it wasn't so sad it would be hilarious.  Frank, the idiot who still thinks Trump's election was stolen,  is lecturing others on 'useful idiots'. 

If you look up useful idiot in the dictionary it will have franks photo.

Frank wrote on Nov 8^th, 2023 at 9:08pm:


Everyone is 1000% against what Hamas have done and believe those responsible should be caught and punished but killing 10,000 innocent people does nothing to achieve this.

It didn't start with the Hamas attack as awful as that was, This was likely a response to decades of occupation expansion and murders. Israel continue to take more and more and more land for their settlements.

There are two pivotal problems in education – politics and evidence-based research. The politics of education is about pacifying the many institutional stakeholders – these are professional groups, with the teacher unions top of the list. State education ministers, bureaucrats and organisations such as ACARA function to manage stakeholders, offering concessions here and there, to minimise political trouble. Politics not performance is the priority.

There is no political accountability for school performance. None. There is no measure of overall school performance advanced at state elections. The decline continues, always masked, yet doing immense damage. Political leverage for improvement is almost non-existent.

Governments keep announcing pledges to improve Australia’s STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) skills but seem unable to confront the demise that Jensen’s report documents at school. The decline in senior students taking science is known. How many more reports are needed before somebody in charge breaks the glass?

The absence of evidence-based research is pervasive. What Jensen’s report shows is that ACARA doesn’t have a good analysis of what’s being taught in classrooms. If it doesn’t know, what hope have the rest of us got?

The resistance to evidence-based research is notorious. It took decades for phonics to be accepted as the method for teaching kids how to read. Most schools still operate in defiance of evidence that direct, explicit instruction is the superior method of teaching. Most universities refuse outright to run evidence-based teacher training courses.
...
Jensen’s 44-page report shows by the time Australian students finish year 8, they will have covered less than half as much science content as the average of every other system compared.

Australia is a curriculum outlier. Experts often analyse curriculum as a trade-off between breadth and depth. But the Australian curriculum, unfortunately, lacks “both breadth and depth”.

The real significance of the Jensen project is that the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, the independent statutory authority, has not done its job during and after the development of the Australian curriculum during the Rudd-Gillard era.

In criticising ACARA, Jensen told this paper neither the research on quality curriculum nor the benchmarking against other systems had been done to deliver a world-class Australian curriculum.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/curriculum-crisis-a-tale-of-politics...


https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/27/australian-education-in-l...

ProudKangaroo wrote on Dec 1^st, 2023 at 11:48am:




A local council in inner Melbourne plans to replace the Australian flag with the flags of minority groups multiple times per year as part of a “ridiculous” new policy.

Under their updated flag policy, the City of Yarra will fly 20 different flags across its Richmond, Collingwood and Fitzroy town halls as well as Clifton Hill depot.

While each site will fly the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island flags every day of the year, the Australian flag will be rotated with several other flags – including the aromantic flag (for people who feel no romantic attraction) and the flag of a west African state that doesn’t officially exist.

The updated flag policy states that the Australian flag will be removed and both indigenous flags flown at half mast three times per year – Australia Day, April 15 (to mark the release of the Aboriginal deaths in custody report) and on May 26 (Sorry Day).

The updated flag policy was hidden away in the City of Yarra’s governance report, which the Greens and Socialist-dominated council passed unanimously in August.