Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

wonder if this will keep the blairites quiet for the summer or not

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-finkelstein/american-jewish-scholar-behind-labour-s-antisemitism-scanda

Is this fair about Shah and Livingstone?

It's Norman Finkelstein. Enough said?

Linked that on the anti-semitism thread - mostly otm.

Because I have nothing better to do I looked at the Euro 2016 fixture list and it appears that England will have two opportunities to get themselves knocked out of the tournament before the Brexit referendum. If they win their group they could exit the tournament the day before the referendum itself.

Considering that, Glastonbury, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of students could be between constituencies at the time, it feels like the very worst date to have chosen if you were hoping to secure an In vote.

England getting knocked out means people are more likely to vote Brexit, I suppose? Friend of mine prefers the more accurate Ukexit btw.

I suspect most people will have made up their mind by then, but England getting knocked out in controversial circumstances would be a gift to the Out campaign. Maybe there are enough morons out there to make a difference - on the other hand most of those people would probably end up voting Out anyway.

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/stop-after-test-parties-nicky-morgan-tells-primaries

she is such a traet

I'm obvs no fan of her but can absolutely guarantee that had she taken the opposite position you'd be seeing headlines along the lines of 'childhood-snatcher tells schools to bribe kids with parties to accept tests that are destroying their education' or 'Morgan admits tests are so traumatic children need parties to recover'.

lol :/

there's some sense in what she says but part of being a politician is figuring out how to say stuff without sounding like a cartoon villain

That story is from last November.

haha lol. when you read the URL instead of the article.

building 'breaking-news' into the url seems a little short-sighted

lol, well, it's always going to be breaking news to somebody.

I did read the article but missed that, which is worrying.

My interest in the article wasn't so much in Morgan (Morrigan? Morgana le Fey?) as a wicked witch ... more that as a non-parent, non-teacher, I had no idea they were testing so much at KS1, and no idea that such things as after test parties for kids that young existed

I didn't know test parties existed full stop.

I wasn't aware and tbh they sound stupid - I think there are schools and teachers who have at least made the testing situation worse than it need be thru their own overhyping

Y6 sats finished yesterday (not sure about the KS1 sats) so I'm guessing this is getting reshared today because of that - our lad's school isn't having a party exactly, but they all got to watch harry potter instead of having lessons this morning.

NV otm

The NUT and AFT have set their stall quite firmly against having national testing of any description and their most effective way of combating it at the moment seems to be playing on parental fears in the hope that they'll either withdraw kids ahead of the test in protest or put enough pressure on the government to stop it. Inevitably, hyping it as a terrifying experience is going to add extra stress to the children.

It's a shame that there can't be a more measured discussion of whether assessment is required and what kind of testing is appropriate without it being polarised between the Telegraph's 'it'll toughed the little bastards up' and Guardian / Washington Post pandering to the anti-assessment factions.

The NUT and AFT have set their stall quite firmly against having national testing of any description

And quite right too.

The main problem seems to be that these tests aren't really an assessment of the kids, but of the schools. So the right approach would be to just drop it in as a no-big-deal thing to do one afternoon, except the schools are (perhaps understandably) too jumpy about them to do that, and instead spend months prepping the kids for them. And then when the time comes, they push out a lot of "hey, don't worry about these, it's nothing serious, just do your best" stuff. So the kids get a heavily mixed message and don't know what to make of it.

I'm sure there are some better schools who do the second part of that without the first (and some worse who do the first without the second) but then you're talking about better/worse in terms of what's good for the pupils, and no doubt the better/worse axis in terms of league tables or whatever ends up being the exact inverse of that.

And yes just dropping them altogether would be the best solution all round.

And quite right too.

That's one perspective, though not shared by the NCAAP in the US, for example. Having benchmark tests to measure achievement and progress are fine as long as the metrics are appropriate and the data isn't decontextualised and used as a stick to beat teachers with.

There's also an argument that low-stakes testing early in life reduces stress levels when kids take more serious exams later on. If the first time you take a formal exam is your GCSEs, idk if that is helpful.

I mean from what I read the impression I get is basically, Nicky Morgan likes tests because it 'holds schools to account', in other words our old friend the taxpayer is financing these schools, so they'd better get used to jumping up and down for any fivers that might be held over them, constant testing of the kids will demonstrate 'value for money' for the taxpayer

Which I think is prob the missing link in the testing debate - people who care about kids and education could probably come up with two good systems, one with and one without testing, but there's a political reason why Morgan wants it to be testing testing testing

at the risk of mutual backslapping Shari is right: testing can be a perfectly valid element of an educational program. definitely a valid element in the kind of educational programs we run in this country. I'm pretty sure that the teachers' unions aren't advocating for an education system tailored to individual self-exploration so this "never test" line looks like dogmatic cobblers tbh

I guess it's no surprise but at age 10 I really made a hash of my sats, just thr most basic exam practice totally eluded all of us. I did quite well in maths (i think, who remembers sats results?) which was straightforward enough, but otherwise we all ran out of time, impulsively tried different things, realised our efforts were unrepresentative and looked on our results with a mixture of bemusement and indifference

you could do anonymous tests if you just wanted to test the school and be honest about it being of no benefit to pupils

xxp fighting for the best education for children isn't happening on either side, or only when it suits. the political disagreements between NUT and HM Gov are not really philosophical disputes about pedagogy

I'm old enough not to have had to sat any exams (that I remember) until I was about 12. Also, Scottish, so different system.

I'm younger than you - I don't remember any exams before I was 14 or so

bigger deal than exams/tests - when I was at primary school age, play and other self-expressive activities were still a big part of the curriculum up to probably 8 or 9. that's long gone, and the results have been hugely damaging to children's early attitudes to education imo.

Yeah there are tons of ways to asses learning needs and testing is one, a valid one, but national testing isn't the same thing at all. Testing a child should be "ok, which bits of the stuff we've covered does he/she need more help with", not "how are we doing as a school compared to other schools" or (especially) "how well is this child doing compared to every other child in the country".

otm x10000000

Knowing how a cohort of students does against their peers can be hugely important. We track comparable achievement of middle class kids vs poor kids, white kids vs kids from minorities, boys vs girls, kids from grammar schools vs kids from comprehensive schools, etc, etc at GCSE level. Testing early gives a baseline so you can see how much closer together or further apart they get over the course of their education and, potentially, helps as a diagnostic tool for good practice in some cases.

To give an extreme example again, the NCAAP in the US has always been in favour of standardised tests because they demonstrate that there's not much of a racial disparity at a young age but that grows over the course of an educational career in a lot of school districts as the effects of poverty and disparities in investment between schools kicks in. Failing to understand and document that means failing to hold political authorities who make decisions about funding, and are responsible for oversight, accountable.

The reason teachers are (arguably understandably) dead against testing is because the data is frequently used as a blunt instrument with the government only looking at % pass rates and not at the underlying circumstances in which children are being taught. There are pedagogical arguments in favour and against but they're largely secondary. That is a problem with the government and not with the concept of assessment though.

I can see that. But if the way that diagnostic testing is administered ends up being detrimental to the learning and the wellbeing of *all* kids then surely there's an argument that the cure is worse than the disease?

Absolutely but the case for it being harmful is not clear and is primarily being made by people with a separate non-pedagogical reason.

There are no wrong or right answers but you have to show your working.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/15/therell-always-be-an-england-tristram-hunt-labour-patriotism

But more than that, what these tales from the 2015 campaign expose is Labour’s need to shed its metropolitan squeamishness about England. It needs to express its admiration and love for the people and culture of this great country.

depressing that people were talking this oaf up as a potential Labour leader a few months ago. Dan Jarvis seems to gesture towards this reheated Blue Labour stuff a lot of the time, I guess this us likely to form a significant part in the eventual coup attempt when it comes?

can't imagine voters seeing all this waffling about how much Labour loves England as anything other than a patronizing con, and when he gets into stuff like how Labour needs to respect voters' legitimate "cultural concerns about changes in language, dress and social norms" due to immigration - what is he actually proposing that Labour do to tackle these perceived problems aside from affirming that they are 'legitimate'? surely Labour tried doing this pandering to immigration hostility for most of the last decade or more and it just left voters cynical, as well as being indefensible anyway?

A failure to appreciate the value of Englishness played an important role in our 2015 defeat and nothing Corbyn has done as leader has changed this. Indeed, his cosmopolitan views on immigration, benefits, the monarchy and armed forces are likely to have exacerbated the disconnect.

like, is he proposing to curb immigration, or just to badmouth and stigmatise it while letting it carry on as before in the hope that will be enough to appease bigots?

also, the implication in that quote that anything other than support for hacking away at benefits is not only unpopular, but somehow antithetical to "Englishness", I mean really

Does Boris J fall foul of Godwin's Law, or is that 'only the internet'?

Hitler themed lols from ILX lurker Boris

Fuck's sake

Like, the most 'metropolitan' thing anyone could do is this kind of mouthing along with down to earth bigots to try and show you're one of them

If I were an aspiring PM who was virtually guaranteed to win the next election provided I could secure the nomination I might be inclined to be a bit more circumspect about a massive supranational entity that I would need to deal with regardless once in power.

and, Matt DC, is why you are not lol a legernd

He so is.