four to eleven periods each week taking classes in art, music, cooking, carpentry, metalwork, and textiles. These classes provide natural venues for learning math and science, nurture critical cooperative skills, and implicitly cultivate respect for people who make their living working with their hands.
This is a great article outlining the success of the Finnish education system. They don't standardise test, they don't track or target teach, they have smaller class sizes, train, educate and pay their teachers better. Dah!! That's why they top the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results. What's happening in Australia???
For years, almost no-one wanted to talk about education policy. Suddenly everyone is.
Of course, just because you can invoke the name of "Gonski" doesn't mean you've read the Sydney businessman's talismanic report on schools funding reform, much less understood it.
Schools funding is a complex topic. There's an alphabet soup of abstract acronyms (SES, AGSRC) and a spaghetti diagram of administrative structures. Funding for a particular school could include money from parents, from a major church, from a state or territory, and from Canberra. The formula is set with a bewildering array of equations, fed by the demographic chance of Census data.