One third of Australian children can't read properly as teaching methods cause 'preventable tragedy', Grattan Institute says

The failed "whole word" method of teaching beloved by Leftist teachers goes back to some work by Wilhelm Wundt in the late 19th century. And they call themselves "progressive"! "destructive" would be more like it

One third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new report.

The Grattan Institute's Reading Guarantee report calls this a "preventable tragedy" caused by persisting with teaching styles popular at universities, but "contrary to science" and discredited by inquiries in all major English-speaking countries.

"In a typical Australian school classroom of 24 students, eight can't read well," said report lead author and Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter. "Australia is failing these children."

The estimated cost of this "failure" was profound both personally and economy-wide, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even jailed later in life, the report concluded.

Dr Hunter said the "conservative" financial estimate amounted to a "really significant cost" that did not include productivity benefits from increased reading.

Students left to 'guess' meaning of words

The Grattan Institute attributed the major cause of its findings to the rise of a teaching style called "whole language", which became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s.

It is underpinned by a philosophy that learning to read is a natural, unconscious process that students can master by being exposed to good literature.

Proponents say it empowers young people by giving them autonomy.

However Grattan said it left students to "guess" the meaning of words and was saddling parents with expensive tuition costs to help their children catch up.

What are the reading wars?

Phonics, or sounding out words, is part of the "structured literacy" approach, which says reading should be broken down and the elements taught explicitly

After decades of the so-called reading wars, "whole language" has incorporated elements of other approaches such as phonics, but Grattan said it remained "light touch" and "contrary to scientific recommendations".

"What we need to do is set our expectations higher. We need to stop accepting failure," Dr Hunter said. "It's not good enough that one in three students are not where they need to be in reading."

The Grattan Institute said evidence showed a much greater number of students learned to read successfully using the alternative "structured literacy" approach, and at least 90 per cent of students would be proficient using this model.

"Structured literacy" includes phonics, but also teacher-led "explicit instruction" backed by the latest science on how children's brains learn new concepts.

"The quality of teaching is the thing that will shift the dial for our young people," Dr Hunter said. "We need to make the most of every single minute we have with our young people."

Why are some schools still not using phonics?

Despite major inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States settling the argument that structured literacy teaching is superior, that hasn't flowed to all classrooms, the Grattan Institute said.

It said where school systems have embraced it, students have reaped the rewards.

Australia's 10,000 schools have a high degree of autonomy, and even in states where education departments advocate for the structured literacy approach, the report said there needed to be more support for teachers to re-train and be provided with ready-made lessons.

"The real issue here is, are governments doing enough to set teachers up for success?'" Dr Hunter said. "The challenge is making sure best practice is common practice in every single classroom."

Western Sydney University's Katina Zammit, president of the Australian Literary Educators Association, said the whole language method should not end up in history's trash can.

She said that in school systems that moved to the teaching methods championed by the Grattan Institute, some teachers found it too prescriptive.

"The teachers that I have had contact with, some of the children who are being taught this way, have either lost interest in reading because it's a whole class approach or they are not retaining the instruction," Dr Zammit said.

Dr Zammit agreed whole learning did not work for all students but said it could still be useful in the classroom. "One size doesn't fit all students," she said. "Yes, the majority it might, but we do have to look at engagement and motivation as well."

However in a statement to the ABC, Education Minister Jason Clare said the science on teaching reading had been settled. He also foreshadowed mandating teaching styles in the upcoming school funding agreement.

"The reading wars are over. We know what works. The current National School Reform Agreement doesn't include the sort of targets or reforms to move the needle here," he said.

"The new Agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work. The sort of things that will help children keep up, catch up and finish school."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/grattan-institute-reading-report/103446606

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Cross-party MPs back Jewish community push to outlaw doxxing

A cross-party group of federal MPs is backing a push from the Jewish community to criminalise doxxing – the publication of people’s identifying information to shame, harass or intimidate them – in response to the mass outing of Jewish writers, artists and academics who belonged to a private chat group.

Liberal MP Julian Leeser and independent Allegra Spender, who have previously condemned the targeting of Jewish people and businesses since Hamas’ October 7 atrocities and Israel’s war in Gaza, gave their support to the idea of anti-doxxing laws, while Labor MP Josh Burns declared social media the “new frontier” for antisemitism.

The support came as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned last week’s co-ordinated doxxing of 600 members of the J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and academics WhatsApp group by pro-Palestinian activists.

“The targeting of people because they happen to be Jewish is just completely unacceptable,” Albanese said. “It has got to stop. It must stop.”

The push for anti-doxxing law reform is being led by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Anti-Defamation Commission. Under a proposal from the council, a provision explicitly prohibiting the practice would be added to the section of the federal Criminal Code which covers telecommunication offences.

Leeser, a Liberal MP who relinquished his position on the opposition frontbench to campaign for an Indigenous voice to parliament, urged Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to move quickly to ban doxxing.

“Whilst this attack is aimed at Jewish Australians, the tactic of doxxing can hurt anyone perceived to be involved in Australian public life, from the home addresses of public servants and police to local branch members of a political party, or the details of family members of a public official,” he said.

Spender, whose Sydney electorate of Wentworth takes in one of Australia’s largest Jewish populations, said she supported an ongoing Victoria Police investigation into last week’s doxxing and consideration of whether further legal protections were necessary.

“We are all deeply concerned by the tragic and horrifying events in Israel and Gaza, but recklessly publishing details of fellow Australians to provoke division will not have any positive impact on peace in the Middle East,” she said. “It simply tears at our social fabric and brings enormous distress to fellow Australians.”

Burns, whose electorate of Macnamara includes the Melbourne suburbs of Balaclava, Caulfield and Elsternwick, which have large Jewish communities, said the doxxing of Jews had led to death threats and vilification and, in extreme cases, forced people into hiding.

“Social media is the new frontier for antisemitism and attacking Jewish people,” he said.

“I completely understand that people are distressed about the conflict in the Middle East, but this is no excuse to target Jewish Australians at home. This activism is misdirected and dangerous.”

There is already a provision within the Criminal Code which makes it a criminal offence, with penalties of up to five years’ jail, for someone who uses a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.

The proposed anti-doxxing provision would take the law one step further and make it possible to prosecute not just those who harass people online, but those who facilitate and encourage the harassment by disseminating the names, workplaces, contact details and social media accounts of those being targeted.

Doxxing emerged in the 1990s as a form of online attack by computer hackers, where documents or “docs” containing people’s private information were uploaded and disseminated. It became a potent weapon within the anti-fascist movement, which has used doxxing to expose the identities of neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.

‘The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.’

In the US, the state of Washington last year passed an anti-doxxing law with bipartisan support. However, that law makes it a civil offence, rather than a criminal one. Washington is the most recent of a dozen US states to prohibit doxxing to varying degrees, but there are no federal laws in place.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, KC, said that since Israel’s war against Hamas began, Jewish people living in Australia have felt unprecedented levels of fear and anxiety about their physical safety and livelihoods.

“In the last few days this has been caused by the publication of lists containing the names, faces and other personal information of hundreds of individuals, whose only common trait is that they are Jewish,” Aghion said.

“This has been done with co-ordination and with malice, in many cases resulting in harassment, death threats directed to named individuals and their children, professional and financial loss, vandalism of premises, and extensive psychological harm.”

Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich said pro-Palestinian activists had declared “open season on our community” in publishing a “hit list” identifying all members of the WhatsApp group. “We know that people are often inspired to do crazy things when they are radicalised online and this doxxing is dangerous and will have real-world consequences,” he said.

“The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.”

Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni said that rather than worry about doxxing, the Australian government should respond to the escalating crisis in Rafah, in southern Gaza, where the Israeli government has issued its latest evacuation order.

“We implore the Australian government to immediately end its ‘friendship’ with genocidal Israel, cut ties with the regime and to do all it can to stop the slaughter,” Mashni said.

This masthead last week reported that pro-Palestinian activists had published links to a spreadsheet containing the names, occupations and social media accounts of hundreds of members of the J.E.W.I.S.H WhatsApp group and separate documents containing their images and a leaked transcript of their group chat.

The transcript revealed that some members of the WhatsApp group wrote letters to broadcasters, media companies and publishing houses raising concerns about pro-Palestinian writers, journalists and presenters.

One of the presenters targeted by the group, Antoinette Lattouf, was stood down by the ABC for breaching the broadcaster’s social media policy after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on the Gaza conflict. She is suing the national broadcaster for unlawful dismissal.

Victoria Police confirmed it was examining whether charges could be brought against people who had doxxed Jewish people and businesses in Melbourne.

“Police are investigating following reports that a number of people who belong to a private social media chat group appear to have been released online,” a spokesperson said.

The mass doxxing prompted Liberal senator David Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, to write to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus urging him to request a federal police investigation.

“We would not accept such silencing or intimidation of any other group of Australians, and nor should we accept or condone it for Jewish Australians, no matter how strongly people may differ in their political opinions over this conflict,” Sharma wrote in his letter.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last week called for greater leadership from the federal government to tackle antisemitism and said he would support any changes needed to “beef up” the current laws.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cross-party-mps-back-jewish-community-push-to-outlaw-doxxing-20240211-p5f3za.html

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Property Investors Won’t Lose Tax Deductions: Treasurer

And his word is his bond, no doubt

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has ruled out changes to negative gearing and capital gains.

Property investors are under the spotlight as the tax reform debate shifts to wealthier Australians.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton are both under mounting pressure to revisit tax breaks on investment properties.

The Greens are proposing limiting negative gearing rules to a single investment property.

But Mr. Chalmers says any changes are off the table.

“That’s not something that we’re proposing, not something that we are considering, not something that we are working up,” he told Sky News on Sunday.

Negative gearing allows investors to claim deductions on losses, while the capital gains tax discount halves the amount of excise paid by people who sell assets that have been owned for 12 months or more.

Asked if he had ever sought advice on changing the tax breaks, Mr. Chalmers said he had discussed all aspects of the tax system with the treasury department.

He agreed a person earning $160,000 a year was in “middle Australia.” “I think of middle Australia as the people who get up and work hard to provide for their loved ones and get ahead,” Mr. Chalmers said.

Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has called for negative gearing reforms to be considered as part of a wider debate about how tax changes could address housing affordability.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/property-investors-wont-lose-tax-deductions-treasurer-5584776

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Ethnicity and crime

The internet is currently awash with the video of four youths of Somali/Sudanese appearance leaving a car. Police want to talk to them in connection with the alleged murder of a 71-year-old woman in Brisbane. At the time of writing, three of the group have been arrested. While the police and the ABC are making no comment on the ethnicity of the group, keyboard warriors are certain that the four youths should be ‘sent back’ to East Africa. How the police and the press discuss the ethnic identity of criminals is fraught with Woke obstacles.

In London six years ago, a car ploughed into a group of people outside a museum. One journalist, Katie Hopkins, leapt to the conclusion that the attack was Jihadi terrorism and published a statement to that effect. The police refused to release the name of the driver of the car, and initially declined to provide an opinion as to whether or not it was a terrorist incident. The driver of the car was arrested and subsequently released as the police did not believe the incident was terror-related. The left-wing British press jumped on Ms Hopkins, accusing her of racism.

With characteristic delicacy, Rod Liddle weighed into the controversy, noting that the police had not released the name of the driver. If, Rod argued, the name of the driver ‘turns out to be John Christian Whitechap’ one can accept the police’s interpretation of the cause of the crash. However, if the name of the driver ‘was something more like Muhammed al Kafarkilla’ then Rod would be inclined to accept Ms Hopkins’ interpretation of the incident. He also noted that if the driver does have an Arabic name, and, if the BBC reports the story, ‘they will almost certainly describe the man as “Norwegian” because he spent a few months in Bergen’. Rod argued that ‘the BBC and the filth do not quite tell us the truth and instead feed us soma’. (Blame the grownups for the safe-space tribe.)

More recently Lionel Shriver made a similar claim when discussing the recent riots in Dublin following the refusal of the Garda to release the name and nationality of a man who had stabbed a woman and three children. ‘The Garda Siochana’s refusal to release the nationality of the man who triggered the unrest … has been worse than coy: try contemptuous. Were the culprit a native-born Irishman, his nationality would have been released in a heartbeat.’ (Fatalism is a bad way to run immigration policy.)

The same strange cosy alliance between the Police, ABC, and the left-wing press exists in Australia. Recently the Sydney ‘Snoring’ Herald published an article about human trafficking in Australia by Clare Sibthorpe and Perry Duffin (Human Trafficking on Rise and ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.)

Clare and Perry claimed that, ‘Child trafficking, sexual servitude, forced labour, and exit trafficking – when a person is forced to leave Australia against their will – all marked significant increases in reporting since 2018-19. Forced marriage is consistently the most common type of human trafficking, making up 90 of the 340 reports of 2022-23.’

They told the story of ‘Ayra’ who ‘was one of an unknown number of mostly young women taken from Australia by their own family to be married off against their will’. We were not told where Ayra was taken nor the ethnicity of her parents. I wrote to the authors to ask why, in an article trying to educate the public about human trafficking, sexual slavery, and forced marriages, they could not mention the details of which countries are involved in this activity. There was no reply.

Apparently an ‘increase in public awareness’ cannot extend to identifying the countries involved in human trafficking and forced marriage. Thus the public has no way of knowing whether we should be watching out for concupiscent Scandinavians trying to abduct innocent Aussie sheilas, or peace-loving Islamic fathers trying to ensure that their daughters don’t marry infidels.

We see the same tendency towards obfuscation when the authorities release data discussing social problems within Aboriginal communities. Recently the ABC published a story stating that ‘Alcohol-related instances of family violence were 49.8 times higher outside metropolitan areas in Western Australia and there were 18.8 times as many calls for police assistance’. (Derby Wiluna top list of WA towns where police want hard-line liquor restrictions to fight alcohol-fuelled violence.) It failed to mention that the violence was mainly in Wiluna’s Aboriginal community.

Wiluna sits on the edge of the Western Deserts which were the home of the Martu people who, in the 1960s, who were among the last Aboriginal groups living a traditional way of life and had never seen a white person. In 1964, travelling in ‘rocks that moved’, white patrol officers began contacting the remnants of Martu people and moving them to settlements in places like Wiluna. The inevitable result was complete societal collapse from which the Martu culture, like all other Aboriginal cultures, will never recover. With the best will in the world Aboriginal social structures, cultural traditions, and beliefs, the initiation ceremonies, and above all, traditional law, cannot survive in the face of the fatal impact of Western Civilisation.

A similar reserve is evident in the ABC’s coverage of criminal activities among the young in rural areas of Queensland and the Northern Territory. We are told there is an epidemic of break and enter, car theft, and vandalism but when reporting these daily events we are never told the ethnicity of the criminals. They are simply referred to as ‘youths’. Should an Aboriginal be a victim of a crime or an assault we can be sure that the headline will be ‘Aboriginal boy/man/girl assaulted/robbed’.

We know that there are massive problems within Aboriginal communities due to the complete destruction of traditional culture. I happen to believe that there are no solutions at the present time. For the foreseeable future drunken Aboriginal men will continue to beat up their wives and put them in hospital. Aboriginal kids will continue to steal cars and anything else they can get their hands on. Above all, alcohol will continue to create chaos and ensure the continuance of poverty within Aboriginal communities.

And, also for the foreseeable future, the ABC will continue to present a hopelessly shallow, dishonest account of the causes and consequences of the destruction of Aboriginal culture. Presenting such inadequate accounts of problems in minority communities helps no one.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/ethnicity-and-crime

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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