Who is going to defend the public system? Not the Federal government.

Oh, we got $24m for maths and science specialists in Primary – that’s less than half the amount the Vic government spent this year running the frigging Grand Prix.

The rest of this post was cancelled due to excessive swearing.

I’ve never been a swinging voter. From the time I was old enough to vote I was a rusted-on Labor voter. Rusted on. Here are just a few of the reasons I won’t be voting for them in the next State election and why I haven’t been able to do so for some time.

Because they won’t commit to a properly funded and resourced public education system and instead, they tinker around the edges instead of fixing the structural problems that our public system faces. This seems to be because they aren’t in their own system’s corner. Instead, they allocate an extra 40% of funding to private and Church schools – a huge slap in the face to the parents who are sending their kids to public schools. And while developers and real estate agents and “consultants” buy new BMWs, they treat our teachers like shit.

Because they have set city against country people by building a pipeline from the already overstressed Murray Darling Basin to Melbourne, which many city people don’t want and which is an environmental disaster from start to finish. Because they are building a huge white elephant in the form of a desalination plant which will be run at least in part on fossil fuels such as coal and gas. Because when the rains came recently, instead of keeping water restrictions, they eased them and then published a photo of John Brumby happily washing a car. Way to make country people hate us.

Because they have signed a memorandum of agreement allowing their police force to pass confidential details of protesters to the consortium building the desalination plant.

Because their “planning” minister, Justin Madden, gives a tick to any project which the consortiums and developers want, over the objections to any informed protest, destroying priceless environmental and architectural treasures as he goes. They plan for sham consultations and then add insult to injury by trying to paper over this by starting a “department of respect”, headed by…? Justin Madden!

Because they are so much in bed with the Roads lobby that they can’t see beyond the construction for roads, roads and more roads, especially freeways. Oh, god are they in love with freeways. As well as the social and environmental damage caused by poorly planned developments there’s the opportunity cost of all the money that isn’t spent on public transport.

Because, speaking of public transport, they spent $775-850 million on the MYKI project, which still isn’t working properly. Rolling stock and infrastructure, meanwhile, is run down and neglected and many Melbourne suburbs limp along with only unreliable and infrequent buses. Those of us lucky enough to live near public transport are still packed in like sardines and subject to train cancellations and random system malfunctions. Meanwhile, our taxes are pissed up against a wall with nearly $50 million spent on a car race.

Because all these bloated projects are carried out through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) which represent an orgy of profit for developers and unions with sufficient muscle to extract a fair share of that profit. Because they accept donations from the people who profit. Because this is a symptom of how your “party of the workers” has adopted neoliberal, corporatist, managerialist values. As the title of the linked article says, they’ve become a Labor party in name only. Because these are steps down the disastrous road of privatising our most basic needs, like tap water.

Because they encourage urban sprawl, ignoring boundaries set out by wiser governments and destroying the Green Wedges, urban boundaries and city parklands that made Melbourne livable.

Because they broke their 2006 election promise to protect the last remaining significant stands of old-growth forest in Victoria, gazetting acres of low-value vegetation for “protection” while continuing to chainsaw Victoria’s old-growth forest, like the cool temperate forest of Brown Mountain. They mouth platitudes about “sustainable” forestry while leaving areas a smoking ruin which a Supreme Court judge, Jack Forrest (heh) compared to the battlefield of the Somme.

Because although they got rid of Stephen Newnham, they have kept their dirt unit under the new guy, Nick Reece, doing stupid stuff like this. “Super Attack”? How old are their staffers, twelve?

Because “don’t criticise Labor because the Liberals might get in, and they’re worse,” doesn’t really inspire me, and that’s pretty much the best their supporters can come up with.

Now I’ve run out of time, but not out of reasons.

See you at the polling booth tomorrow.

“Drink Think” a play performed by a group of young women will be held at The Substation, Newport on Thursday October 14th at 7.00pm. This FREE, not for profit event has been organised by students from Victoria University’s Sport and Recreation course as part of their Event Management class.
The play focuses on the dangers of teenage binge drinking and is an educational yet entertaining play that is followed up with question time after it. On the night there will also be a special A-list guest speaker and free meals and beverages for everyone who attends.
We strongly encourage our Year 9, 10 and 11 students to attend this performance and welcome all parents and teachers along as well. It has been recommended however, that children of a young age do not attend as there is strong language in the play.

Well, how could that possibly end up as “”Hey, “Girls”, think before you drink because you’re the one responsible for not being raped!” Yes, happy to be proved wrong.

We’ve all been talking quite a lot about victim-blaming and slut-shaming failure in the way we talk to our girls and boys about sex and safety. Just look at the comments thread on any article on the topic of s8xual assault and r8pe in bloke culture: if a woman is dressed counter to current standards of virginal modesty or present in a vulnerable situation after hours, they assume men have the right of access to her. The same people, on another thread somewhere, will be condemning immigrant societies for their medieval attitudes to womens’ dress and freedom of movement (you know, because of our superior Western Civ and all, in which women are completely equal). Excuse me while my head meets the desk.

I’m sure the subject of drinking and driving will be addressed as well, which is good, as long as the young ones listen.

I’m just wondering whether, as a study of binge drinking, this play is going to reflect the new call for male responsibility (and refusal to treat men/boys as animals who can’t control their primal urges), or whether it’ll be just more of the same exhortations to women not to get themselves raped.

Anyway, if any Melbourne femmobloggers and allies are reading this and are not too busy on Thursday night, I encourage you to get along to the Substation in Newport (if you like cool architecture, and Melbourne’s old substations are Victorian classics, that’s another reason to go), and participate in the Question time. I have a feeling that if it’s another “ThinkUknow”, this bunfight might be needing a feminist voice.

You never know – my low expectations might be totally unfounded. I’ll report back!
 
 
 
Update: OK… Debrief!

It was a student play. “Drink Think” was the name of the group. The play itself was called “West Side: My Story”. There were six or seven young women acting and only one man, who was played as a dead-set sweetie. It passed the Bechdel test. It did not slutshame. Because the only male role was kind-of modelling ideal behaviour, well, there’s that, but they bypassed the toxic dynamic we’ve been talking about by not addressing it at all. In a way, perhaps, that allowed them to present binge drinking as something that damages everyone (car accidents, death, losing sight of important life goals), and get the male actor to demonstrate being a good human being rather than the predator. I’m not sure how many hardcore entitled douchebags it would really convert, but they’re taking it around the secondary schools and apparently it’s shutting year 10s up stone cold on their lunchtimes, and that’s got to mean something.

It was supported by the Victorian Womens’ trust, which does some wonderful things. I didn’t offer any questions at question time because the slut-shaming and “personal responsibility! For girls only!” stuff really wasn’t apparent, and to introduce a big new (sub)topic didn’t seem appropriate.

Kudos to the Victoria University students who put the event on and gave us free sandwiches, choccies and coffee!

A senior lecturer in psychology at Charles Darwin University, Dr Peter Forster, says there is no truth to the argument that testosterone levels make men more aggressive.
He says social factors such as the rise of feminism in the last few decades could be behind the rise in violence amongst women.

I’m happy to give him points for biology not being destiny – a refreshing change from most antifeminists I’ve read – but what actual evidence does he have that the “rise of feminism” has kicked off a rise in violence among women? Has he demonstrated that there is a rise in female violence?
Has he told us what the increase(s) are and from what bases they’ve increased? No. Has he teased out increases in actual violence from increases in arrests and charges? Nope. Has he looked at whether violence overall is rising or static, and if so, is male violence rising as well (See also previous point)? No.

Has he mentioned that if you look at historical sources of milieux such as Victorian London and accounts of colonial Australia, the idea of women as gentle and delicate creatures who never threw a punch was somewhat class-based? No.

I went off in search of more information, because I thought that if the ABC had seen fit to publish an article about Dr Forster pronouncing on women and violence, it must be that Dr Forster and/or his department had come up with some ground breaking research, perhaps resulting in a report or peer-reviewed paper which we could read.

Apparently not. In fact, my usually effective google-fu hasn’t unearthed any publications or reports put out by Dr Forster on women, violence, or women-and-violence at all. So what’s he got?

…(P)eople were now looking at other contributing factors, particularly at social and cultural factors such as the effects of several decades of feminism which have largely removed the expectation that women would behave differently to men, and, more recently, the binge-drinking culture among young people, for the rapid rise in female violence.

“Studies have shown that at the age of 14, girls were just as likely as boys to be involved in fights, threats and stealing,” he said.

“This is supported by studies at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, where they have found similar rates of binge drinking by men and women, and women are also catching up in the use of illicit drugs, and these behaviours are linked with aggression.

“People” are looking at contributing factors. “Studies” have shown. I’ve seen undergraduate essays, let alone blogs, with more demonstrated evidence – and active verbs – than that. Well, there is a citation of sorts, the AIHW, which does exist, although would it kill him to point to the studies themselves? And there doesn’t appear to be anything to do with women and violence, but women and “behaviours (which) are linked with aggression.” Right! Men binge drink and set women on fire and king-hit other men on King street, while women binge drink and “get themselves” raped. See, equal!

The only actual piece of work done within the walls of Charles Darwin University that he seems to be able to point to is a study of road rage by his colleague Mary Morris.

“The research by Dr Morris has clearly shown that, in such aspects of road rage as aggressive gestures, sounding their horn at another driver and verbal abuse, there is no significant difference between male and female drivers. There used to be differences, but not any more,” Dr Forster said.

Road rage covers a continuum up to and including stabbing, shooting, thumping and running over people, so I don’t see that an increase in female horn-sounding and verbal abuse is very useful evidence of an epidemic of violent femmes. I haven’t been able to find Dr Morris’s study either, but I’ll take his word that it exists, so that’s one more on the topic than I’ve been able to find for Forster. It’s ironic that given that the subject is the evil power of feminism, he took her work and ran with it as “Expert Warns”.

Dr Forster hasn’t even begun to demonstrate any link between feminism and violence.

I have no idea why this should have been put out as a media release by CDU and why it should have been news, but unfortunately it’s one more brick in the wall of the bullshit “Feminism gone wrong” story that the media is hellbent on giving us, no matter how dodgy the source might be.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ada Lovelace, please check this out. OK, maybe I’ve chosen that because I love it so much, rather than its hundred percent historical accuracy. Wikipedia has an interesting page on her (and more about that some other time).

I work in the IT department of a nonprofit, as they call them in the US, in a sometimes uncomfortable limbo between the developers, who build the system, and the people who use it.

Most of what I know I learnt from my workmate. She had done a degree, or diploma, or something in IT after working in another place which went through a systems upgrade, and said she got the urge to, as she put it, “see what was behind it all”. And she certainly did. I think she’s probably forgotten more than I know by now. She taught me so much, but she believed in nutting things out for yourself, too, and would take me only so far down a certain path and would then leave me to work the rest out. When I see a discrepancy in some query result or process, and I’m tempted to write it off as some kind of meaningless one-off fail, I hear her saying “there’s always a reason”.

She could be hard work. This woman was full of ‘tude. And she had to be, working in a male-dominated department where she often had to go toe to toe with volatile and entitled developers. She used to bottle it up quite a bit, and sometimes it made her hard to live with. That’s the sort of thing which, in that setting, will attract the inevitable judgement of oh, women, so emotional. But holy Mary McKillop on my breakfast crumpet, you should see the men sometimes. The hissy fits they chuck. Women emotional and feeling, men unemotional and rational – a load of dingoes’ kidneys m’lud, I rest my case.

As a techie, she was ahead of everyone in the building who wasn’t actually conversant with a programming language, and in some respects she was even ahead of those people. What that woman couldn’t do with about twenty-five intricately linked database tables and a fearsomely complex reporting tool, isn’t worth knowing about. She built our website after a two-day training session in web design and HTML (and teaching herself about javascript). Thousands of people use her javascript pages to this day to do stuff online and make payments. She was awesome. And I, a thirtysomething jack-of-all-trades and refugee from the music industry, was always a little in awe of her.

And when I was working with her, although I never dared to ask, she was in her sixties, if she was a day.

Ah, the smashing of age and gender stereotypes: what a lovely sound.

Does anyone else have stories to tell for Ada Lovelace day about their favourite female techs?

Murphy's law states that if you post a scornful article bagging someone else's web site, there will be a great big dog's balls of a HTML error just below the byline.

OK, now my heart is thoroughly broken and trampled on. I’ve become the voter who cannot love. The infamous My School database/website has been released today (and very buggy it is, too), and what do we see as the very first headline on the dead-tree Herald Sun? OUR SCHOOLS SHAME. The banner on the online version? HOW DID YOUR SCHOOL RATE? So predictable. Don’t ask me how the Boy’s school rates (The Girl has just left the public system with an excellent VCE score and as yet no crack habit – the Boy starts year 7 on Monday. Serial only children, I haz them.) The website hasn’t worked successfully for me yet. And yes, I am aware of most internet traditions and able to work most simple interfaces, so I don’t think it’s me.

Back to Julia, who on assuming the Deputy PMship announced that she would bring on an Education Revolution. Well, since “revolution” can mean doing a complete 360 and ending up facing the same way as when you started, then OK, technically correct, Julia.

Trevor Cobbold in his article, The Free market and the Social divide in Education (PDF), points out that the My School website is a continuation of the commodification of education which features the establishment of “quasi-markets” in schools.

The publication of the results of each school is seen as a central component of quasi-markets because it is supposed to inform parent choice…
The Rudd government has maintained and extended the focus on markets and competition in education… It has not reversed any of the key measures of the Howard government.
…It is paradoxical that a government which calls itself progressive is implementing the policies of its erstwhile conservative predecessor.

Progressive? They’re starting to make the previous government look more progressive:

…(A)s far as education policy is concerned, the Rudd Government has given John Howard and David Kemp another term in office…(The PM) says that schools that fail to improve will be subject to “tough action”, including firing principals and senior staff and closing schools. This is something that Kemp could only dream of.

And a Labor government that can actually introduce policies that aren’t the previous government’s leftovers plus spin from a personable pollie – that’s something that I can only dream of.

Robert Merkel at LP has more on the nuts and bolts behind the My School website.

So, I’m sitting around the table with the people I volunteer with at Scarysuburb High, and the conversation turns to the people who are pushing for a new high school closer to where I live. I said that I hadn’t joined the group except as an email listee, because I’ve chosen to put my limited effort into Daughter’s school and there are only so many hours in the day, but I admired them for their support of the bigger picture and of public education.

Well, said one of the other mums, have a look at this then. And when I saw the article in the local newspaper she had brought with her, I realised what she meant. The group supports public education – just not the public education that the rest of us are using. Because the real public education is too scary!

What the parents appear to dislike the most is that their children actually have to leave their immediate area to attend school. Scarysuburb High, where my daughter goes, is a twenty minute bus ride – about 5 K – one way. For kids down the other end of the suburb, they can go to Poshsuburb High, about 5 K the other way. People like the sound of Poshsuburb High better, but as I wrote in part 1 – Like Sandra Tsing Loh – once I got past the brutalist bunker, Scarysuburb High turned out to be pretty good. Impressive, even.

Here’s one of the parents quoted in the local paper:

Ms I said A was already “quite anxious” about which school he would go to and where his classmates would end up.

Yeah, not surprised, with the parents hyperventilating the way they are. Read on..

We don’t want to dissipate [friendships] by sending our children all over Melbourne.”
Ms I would prefer to send her son – and later, her six-year-old daughter B – to a local, co-educational state school.
“There were children walking around the streets in Y at 7.15am the other morning. For my children that would never be an option, when they could be at home living their lives instead of having to be stressed about catching two trains and a bus or what ever the combination is (to get to school).

Two trains and a bus? or tram? That sounds like you’re aiming for Selective High over in the city – but that’s only from year nine. And I agree about the travelling time. So, what about Scarysuburb High? a five-K bus ride!

“We’ve looked closely at two schools so far. One of them ticked all the boxes, but the likelihood of us getting into that school is pretty slim because the zoning boundaries change from year to year.

So that’d be Poshsuburb High. Yeah, they are very strict about their zoning boundaries. But the educational experience at Poshsuburb is little different from that at Scarysuburb.

“The other school would be a reluctant option. At this point we wouldn’t be confident with that decision…. There’s nothing a simple and safe bike ride away for our children.”

Wait, WUT? The reluctant option? Yes, that’d be Scarysuburb High. Where our FRIGHTENING CRACK DEALING TAGGERS GO. Ahem.

I, and others, wrote back to the local paper, with stuff like this:

Of course, the school’s physical surroundings don’t come up to scratch according to the standards set in the private schools’ glossy brochures, and many parents don’t even bother to check it out, as they see a school which is inclusive of many recent immigrants, refugees and the financially disadvantaged, and panic. This creates the equivalent of “white flight” in the US …

And the parents responded with stuff like: How dare you, we support public education. But then one of them said (no link to letter in local paper for this one): there are no schools of excellence in the West.

So that’s what it boils down to: one, that they consider the schools that exist incapable of excellence – which is demonstrably false – and they are expecting some kind of special deal with a new school, something different and better, while abandoning the other schools in the area as “safety nets” and no-go areas; and two, that they’re getting their helicopter-parent rotors in a spin at the idea of their children taking a short trip on public transport.

About the walking to school thing. Yes, it’d be great, but you know, little Lachlan and Sophie are not going to be in grade four when they go to high school. They’re going to be (dun dun dun!) Teenagers! Taking public transport, even if it’s just the twenty-minute hop necessary for Scarysuburb or Poshsuburb, is a part of growing up. They might actually find it a sociable experience. They might even – try to get your heads around this- make friends that are not from that immediate area, who haven’t been vetted by Mum and Dad! Wooooo! Scary, I know! But they’re going to be learning some actual life skills.

So, if this new school eventuates, how will it overcome the same problems of public funding and community perceptions? Part of the impression I get is that they’re looking to use their “pushy, type A parent” mojo to drive up the value of their school, as Sandra Tsing Loh described in part 1. Good on’em. That’s what we, the Friends of Scarysuburb High, try to do. And it’ll be dominated by their group – not as diverse, not so many people that aren’t like them. That I find less admirable.

The group uses demographic studies to argue that by 2012, there will be an upsurge of Year Sevens with nowhere to put them. But the demographics, or enrolment figures rather, go the other way. Enrolments in public schools, are still declining because of the flight to the private and Catholic systems. We need the higher socioeconomic groups to stop abandoning the public system. Creating another school will simply dilute any such return.

One of the virtues of Scarysuburb High is its breadth of subjects; if enrolments decline, a school loses subjects. The new high school would start from a low, very low enrolment base. How many languages could it offer, if any? (Scary High offers several.) What specialist subjects?

I don’t want to be completely captured by an argument of low expectations. I would love nothing more than the Victorian government to announce, tomorrow, that they are going to put up the money for a new school in our suburb tomorrow, fully funded for a diverse range of subject choices, plus plenty of funding for Scarysuburb High so that it can offer all its subjects, too. Really. I just think the pushy type-As could get that bang for their buck and grow the system by moving back into existing schools, and allowing their kids to grow up and away a little.

Community ginger group, I identify with and approve of your determination to get a good public education for your kids. Just don’t keep on telling us how awful we are, while calling it supporting public education.

In my area, we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to Primary schools. When we moved here, we had three nearly equidistant public schools to choose from, all bright, well resourced and with high morale. We ended up choosing the one just across a park from our house, which the kids could walk to once they were old enough. I even discovered that I had some distant relatives in the area and one, about my age, had taught at that school under the existing principal. How nice is that?

In the matter of high schools, we are not so spoiled. We did have a local high school, which fell victim to the Kennett government school-closing orgy. We do have a local school which is only five kilometres away, and is easily accessible by a bus service which goes right by the school doors.

It happens that this is the school which the daughter attends and at which she’s relentlessly pursuing a highly academic programme, with plenty of input from some impressive and motivated teachers. This school excels in a broad range of areas, with special emphasis on music and the arts, including film and TV, and they excel in maths, science and technology as well.

Here’s the thing: It bears the Scarysuburb name. And it appears that since my area became gentrified, and the Audis and SUVs and two-storey extensions covered the land, the incoming population have the opportunity to send their children there. But the parents who “support public education” don’t want to send their children to Scarysuburb High, because they see it as dangerous, or beyond help, or whatever, because it is part of the existing system. And as everyone knows, the existing public system is scary and failing. They fail to see that it’s the flight of the middle classes to the private and Catholic systems that is leaving the public system underfunded and in danger of becoming a “safety net”.

They want something better, somehow, built for them, so that their kids won’t have to mix with the presumed dangerous paint-sniffers and ice dealers at Scarysuburb High and they will not have to go on a terrifying, twenty-minute bus ride to (gasp) an adjoining suburb.

Anyway, I have some sympathy – not a lot, at times, but some – because of course I had to thrash this one out in my own mind when Girlchild was in grades 5-6, before I’d really checked the place out. If it was true that the public system was impossibly run down, then I shouldn’t use her as a sacrificial lamb to express my support of the public system. I think this is the thought pattern that most parents go through. Unlike many parents here, though, I went to have a real look at Scarysuburb High and talked to a senior teacher or two. Now I’m on a parents’ group which raises funds and advocates for the school, so that’s where I’m coming from.

I’m going to quote an article I found by the artist and education activist Sandra Tsing Loh, because it almost channels many of my observations as a new public school parent, the issues are very similar, and it’s very, very funny.

(Disclaimer – Tsing Loh’s language, when talking about ethnic mixes, can get a bit misty-eyed about “whiteness” as a desirable trait. She gives herself a free pass to say stuff like this because of being half Chinese. Just a warning that I don’t necessarily endorse that aspect of her writing.)

Beating up on public schools is not just our nation’s favorite blood sport, but also a favorite conversational entertainment of the well-off—like debating the most recent toothsome plot twists of Big Love—who, of course, have no dog in the fight. And who adore a tragic ending. In my Los Angeles, everyone agrees that public education is a bombed-out shell, nonnegotiable, impoverished, unaccountable, run in Spanish. … I myself am no freedom fighter. If I could have afforded either a $1.3 million house in La Cañada or $40,000 a year to send my two girls to a private school… I wouldn’t waste two minutes on social justice. Let them spell cake! (Which is to say, let them spell it “kake.”) …we seem to have fallen out of the middle class, because today my daughters attend public school with the urban poor.

…

After a fair amount of heartache, I have to admit I have given up on trying to charm white people, at least a certain NPR-listening, Bobo, chattering class of white people, back into public school. For these shrinking families, the aesthetics alone of public schools are horrifying—the chain-link fence, putty-colored bungalows, fluorescent lighting. Confessed one writer dad to me, about his son’s corner elementary (which he did not have the heart to step inside): “Even the grass made me sad.” Another white mom rejected my daughters’ school because our kindergarten wall art looked “rote.” Asians, on the other hand, tend to overlook the occasional snarl of graffiti (in our city, a way of life). What they see at Van Nuys High, for instance, with penetrating laser vision, are the math and medical magnets embedded within. Indeed, I’ve gradually become aware—via frequent newsletters—that behind those high brown walls flourishes a buzzing hive of Korean Magnet Parents. They are busily committee-meeting, Teacher Appreciation–lunching, and catapulting their children from Van Nuys High School directly into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley! Why should they spend $25,000 for each year of high school to make the Ivy League? These immigrants know how to find value!

…

Back in fall 2005, when my older daughter enrolled at our drab LAUSD school, I was pleasantly surprised—almost shocked…to discover that it was not a blasted wasteland. While aesthetically uninspiring on the outside, inside it was a plethora of books, computers, LeapFrog pads, and the like. Title I schools, such as ours (those with a substantial portion of low-income students), are eligible for hundreds of thousands of federal dollars that affluent schools are not. Our library was stocked, litter was picked up, graffiti erased. As far as I could see, no dusty panes of glass were in danger of shattering at our feet.

Other myths circulating among my chary middle-class cohort turned out to be false. I have yet, for instance, to trip over a crack-addicted parent in the parking lot. The children arrive relatively on time and mostly having breakfasted. True, the climate is probably helped by our wide mix of ethnicities—no one group overwhelms the school, so no minority feels disenfranchised…

Upon dropping off my daughter one morning, I heard a virtuosic tuba player warming up in the amphitheater; a brass quintet sent by the L.A. Music Center was giving a 90-minute morning assembly. I snuck in, and it was extraordinary—they played Copland and Mozart and Rossini. Excitedly smelling if not blood in the water, then chardonnay, I soon accumulated more information about all the free stuff the Los Angeles Unified School District has—the music teacher who comes with 65 free instruments, the arts money, and so on. In time I would learn to see the LAUSD as a giant Costco—overcrowded parking, gray lighting, mini-skyscrapers of cat litter—but replete with buried treasure. Free upright pianos in every school, for instance, serviced by LAUSD tuners. No one in my circle knew anything about this, because no one had actually had a child in a public school in years [My emphasis].

Read the whole thing.

It might come as a surprise that the US seems to do better at resourcing schools, considering how they think the sky is going to fall in if they adopt public health care, but there you go. In Australia, we don’t do this as well – too many public resources go to private and religious schools – but Scarysuburb High is still well resourced, constantly renovated and restocked, capable of providing my daughter with the stimulating, academic experience she wants. She also has a kind, creative, savvy circle of friends there, none of whom are ice dealers (as far as I know).

Girlchild is brainy, upfront and ambitious. She was offered the opportunity to change to a selective school in year 9. If Scarysuburb wasn’t meeting her needs, she’d be out of there.

But it will help this state of affairs to continue, and improve, if the middle class stops its exodus from these schools. Here’s Tsing Loh again, starting from the point of the increasing unaffordability of housing in the “desirable” school areas:

The good news, if my experience is any indication, is that this could drive middle-class white children back into local poor brown schools, and they would come with parents armed with higher educations, the Internet, fiercely lofty expectations… What happens to poor public schools when, God forbid, pushy middle-class, Type A, do-it-yourself PTA mothers become involved and agitate to lift up the boats, not just of their own children but, perforce, of their children’s disadvantaged classmates as well?

That’s why I think a big shakeout in personal debt and housing could be the ill wind that blows people some good.

Where did those home equity loans and lines of credit go? Irvine Renter points out that the situation went really toxic when people realised that they could take out money, not just for renovations – which would then increase the house’s value – but for consumer spending. Boats, cars, holidays, that kind of thing. But I can see that many people who would balk at spending on these kinds of things might consider using their home equity for something they consider more important, more reasonable, more of an investment.

Back in the Australian context, I’m wondering how many households have been mining their home equity for education.

Under the previous government, a culture was built up whereby private education has been valorised at the expense of public, and (because of poorly designed funding systems) rewarded disproportionately. At the same time, the public school system has been starved of resources to the point where even parents who would rather choose a properly constituted public system feel compelled to go over to the private system simply because the local high school is too run down.

The peak body of the “independent” (private) schools has relentlessly pushed the line that private schools aren’t just for the super-rich, and that many parents of modest means are “making huge sacrifices” to send their children to private schools. We used to have the apocryphal taxi driver trotted out: “We have taxi drivers’ children at our school!” It’s difficult to prove or disprove the industry’s claims that our elite schools are filled with the happy offspring of taxi drivers and process workers, whose parents are forgoing the second and third car and the annual holiday to Tuscany in order to fund their childrens’ education.

I think you can see the holes in this argument. I have been looking around in vain for the second and third Mercedes which I can hock, and the Tuscan holidays, and the beach house which I can sell, but sadly, they are not there.

The marketing spin skirts around the unspoken ideas “if you really love your children, you’d go private” and “education is a competition, and private education will give your kids an edge”. And of course there was the idea, enthusiastically kicked along by the last Federal government, that private schools espouse values whereas public schools don’t. It puts a great deal of psychological pressure on parents. I’m thinking that many parents – and this is conjecture only, mind you, and this is a blog, not the Fin Review, so… many parents may have been doing the equity mining thing to put their kids through private school.

Recently articles like this and this have begun to appear about school fee defaults and home reposessions. Note that the second article describes a mother who contemplated suicide when she was forced to consider taking her kid out of private school. Moral panic can be a dangerous thing. Note also that the Christian Values of the private system, the superiority of which has been rammed home to us by marketers and the Howard government, seems quite a flimsy facade when they start behaving like the businesses they are.

The articles cite job loss, loss of bonuses and the effects of declining interest rates on grandparents as the reason for the defaults. The writers don’t mention the effects of the credit crunch and the end of the home ATM bonanza. They are talking about people losing houses. It’s just my guess that housing credit is contributing to the situation.

The outcome, of course, is rising enrolments in the previously despised public system. You’d think I’d be pleased, because surely it’s possible that a genuine crisis in the private system might lead the Labor government and State governments to re-think the current neglect of the public school system and decide to fund a system which will educate all comers, whether they’re headed for the boardroom or the coolroom. Well, it’s possible. But it’s very probable that before any such desirable policy change takes hold, I’ll see the same effects on the public system as I saw on the public transport system after the rise in petrol prices: severe overcrowding and overstrain on the system without any commensurate action by State governments to respond to the increased demand. All just as Exploding Boy is beginning his secondary school career. Lucky us.

It’s a long day. After the sale is over we sit and enter the details into the database, and then write a billion cheques together. Daughter helps out. I get a lot of pleasure from events like these; we work together, have a good time, and get to know the teachers and other students better than we would otherwise. And I’ve been committed to it all year. But!

Why, why, why, why, why in the name of all that’s inconvenient did they have to schedule it for the day of the Melbourne blog meet? Why must they torture me so? After I went to all that trouble to pick the venue from Ralph’s list of top 10 Melbourne pubs. (That must be true, I read it at FX’s place.)

Have a drink for me, all of you. I might be able to sneak in later to see if any diehard drinkers are still there. Have a wonderful time!