Auckland Mayoral Election

[canta_brian]

Coleman is likely being groomed by Crosby Textor. He has consistently blocked any sort of regulation of public health that conflicts with industry aims (e.g. coca cola, Catherine Rich, etc). Education and social services have been effectively handed over (we really should have seen that coming: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/artic ... d=10421543), and health is the next big thing to be "outsourced".

English is the worlds dullest accountant and Collins should probably be in prison.

Of the three Coleman must be keenest.

[morepork]

Gee, what a surprise

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news ... d=11762219

[morepork]

Are we starting to see who our politicians actually work for boys and girls?

[morepork]

Sing it loud Cas!!

[jared_7]

U.K. view on Key

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... p_Facebook

[morepork]

The rats are fleeing the ship...

[jared_7]

TPP was basically dead, now it appears it's proper dead. Bill English is still holding out hope though, like some sort of forlorn lover. Seriously, is this a hill worth dying on, Billybob?

Trump is like a stopped clock. He'll be right every now and again, through sheer luck mostly, and this is one of those occasions.

The problem of course is he will want to enter a new deal that more heavily favours the US, and our problem was it already too heavily favoured them. So we dodged a rodgering but now they're coming back, just without the lube this time, and I reckon Bill is dead keen.

[morepork]

TPP was basically dead, now it appears it's proper dead. Bill English is still holding out hope though, like some sort of forlorn lover. Seriously, is this a hill worth dying on, Billybob?

Trump is like a stopped clock. He'll be right every now and again, through sheer luck mostly, and this is one of those occasions.

The problem of course is he will want to enter a new deal that more heavily favours the US, and our problem was it already too heavily favoured them. So we dodged a rodgering but now they're coming back, just without the lube this time, and I reckon Bill is dead keen.

This is a big problem. Our village idiots are not looking out for us. Good call on the stopped clock. And the lube.

[scuzzaman]

TPP was basically dead, now it appears it's proper dead. Bill English is still holding out hope though, like some sort of forlorn lover. Seriously, is this a hill worth dying on, Billybob?

Trump is like a stopped clock. He'll be right every now and again, through sheer luck mostly, and this is one of those occasions.

The problem of course is he will want to enter a new deal that more heavily favours the US, and our problem was it already too heavily favoured them. So we dodged a rodgering but now they're coming back, just without the lube this time, and I reckon Bill is dead keen.

This is a big problem. Our village idiots are not looking out for us**. Good call on the stopped clock. And the lube.

**THIS.

This is why Trump won. It's almost the only reason. The political class running the western democracies were handed the sweetest political deal in all of human history and they fecked it up because they couldn't even bother to maintain the pretense of representing their own citizen's interests.

They seriously deserve Trump.

But he's going to roger a serious number of people who don't deserve it. OTOH, until NZrs wake up and overturn the idiocratic duopoly that has controlled NZ politics for at least 12 decades too long, they're going to keep getting the shaft.

[jared_7]

September 23rd, motherfuckers.

Cas - how is the TOP party education policy going down with teachers? I see he has just come out against performance related pay as well:

http://www.top.org.nz/performance_pay_f ... _territory

Not getting much press, as expected, but would be interested to hear whether its gaining traction in education circles.

[zer0]

I have no idea about performance based pay, but throwing an entire high school education into a few 7th form exams seems odd, to say the least.

[morepork]

The New Zealand Initiative has profound conflicts of interest here. They are pushing charter schools and privitisation like mad. They were heavily involved in setting up EDUCANZ. Dodgy.

[jared_7]

I have no idea about performance based pay, but throwing an entire high school education into a few 7th form exams seems odd, to say the least.

Know a couple of NZ teachers over here and they have basically said standardised testing is ridiculous and NZ is moving closer and closer to what they have in the US and UK whereby your entire year is set up around sitting tests. There are usually tests every month or so. The students don't learn, they just memorise stuff for testing. They are both pretty positive about the policy in general, especially the more heavy funding towards ECE as opposed to a later age.

As I understood it you would still earn NCEA credits throughout your school years, they just reduce the amount of standardised exams to one, at the end. EDIT: Also, seems there would still be testing at the end of each year, they would just not be "standardised" or used to rank performance.

Like I said, be interesting to see how Cas reads it.

Maybe its like their tax policy - where they are in the right ballpark but perhaps take it too far (tax on the family home), you can imagine in power it would be the extreme ends of the policy that would go.

[jared_7]

September 23rd, motherfuckers.

Cas - how is the TOP party education policy going down with teachers? I see he has just come out against performance related pay as well:

http://www.top.org.nz/performance_pay_f ... _territory

Not getting much press, as expected, but would be interested to hear whether its gaining traction in education circles.

With much contempt. The whole idea of "performance pay" in education is actually ridiculous, because it punishes teachers that have to work within conditions and with factors outside of their control.

A stark example are my Y9 classes - one is low ability, full of kids from rough households, and occasionally with drug issues (3 of them in my low ability Y9 class last year got smoking the reefer last year, and I half-expect the same to happen later this year. One of them has basically been expelled for assault a couple of weeks in, the fucking divot); the other is an extension class that I love to bits. I'd hug the lot of them, if I could. If I struggle with the low ability class, there will be a lot there that is caused by shit outside of my sphere of influence. With the extension kids, I know I'm going to go gangbusters with them. Does that mean I should earn a bonus for that? Fuck no. It's something I lucked into. If I deserve a performance bonus for anything, it's that I managed to drag a shitload of senior students - including ones I don't even teach - across the line at L1 and L2, including pushing them to get Merit and Excellence endorsements - and that only happened because I sacrificed most of the free time I had last year for them. Not that I expect nor feel entitled to a bonus or anything of the sort.

Basically, it's likely to punish teachers working in mid-to-low decile schools, who struggle to get much out of kids that end up shitty because they live shitty lives with shitty families.

Their policy is strongly against performance-related pay. In fact the article linked to highlights the exact things you just said - it will see all the teachers trying to move to better schools and increase the inequality of teaching standards.

I'm guessing its not carrying much weight then, if people don't get it?

[Mellsblue]

Sorry to butt in on your turf but a similar argument is/was being had in the UK over performance related pay (it seems to have gone away with Gove). The way it was trailed as working here was to base it on progression/improvement of a class and the kids within it rather than on pure exam grades. Last year's results were also used this way to rank schools, ie you were given a mark for how much your kids improved against their base test. Therefore, if you took a bunch of no hopers from (using UK grading from my years in school) F up to D you performed better than someone who took an average class from C up to B. There are some flaws in the system, as there always will be, but it seems a much fairer way of ranking schools and, if performance based pay is introduced, those teachers with the schools.
It also allows for smoothing/averaging over a career and if you get the odd class full of Lord Lucans you can prove they are an anomaly. It also allows for the incentive for teachers in poorer schools (standards not money) to earn a lot more as there is more scope to improve the students.

[jared_7]

Sorry to butt in on your turf but a similar argument is/was being had in the UK over performance related pay (it seems to have gone away with Gove). The way it was trailed as working here was to base it on progression/improvement of a class and the kids within it rather than on pure exam grades. Last year's results were also used this way to rank schools, ie you were given a mark for how much your kids improved against their base test. Therefore, if you took a bunch of no hopers from (using UK grading from my years in school) F up to D you performed better than someone who took an average class from C up to B. There are some flaws in the system, as there always will be, but it seems a much fairer way of ranking schools and, if performance based pay is introduced, those teachers with the schools.
It also allows for smoothing/averaging over a career and if you get the odd class full of Lord Lucans you can prove they are an anomaly. It also allows for the incentive for teachers in poorer schools (standards not money) to earn a lot more as there is more scope to improve the students.

It was an interesting step in the right direction, but from what I hear the issue is there is still a huge focus on standardised testing. My Kiwi mate who teaches in a secondary school in North East London said the amount of tests his kids had to sit (in History and Geography) went up - he said his curriculum was basically laid out in month-long cycles, whereby the students spend 3 weeks revising for a test, sit the test, then he gets one week of actual two-way, thoughtful dialogue before they have to start revising for the next test to "make sure they are on track".

[Mellsblue]

Sorry to butt in on your turf but a similar argument is/was being had in the UK over performance related pay (it seems to have gone away with Gove). The way it was trailed as working here was to base it on progression/improvement of a class and the kids within it rather than on pure exam grades. Last year's results were also used this way to rank schools, ie you were given a mark for how much your kids improved against their base test. Therefore, if you took a bunch of no hopers from (using UK grading from my years in school) F up to D you performed better than someone who took an average class from C up to B. There are some flaws in the system, as there always will be, but it seems a much fairer way of ranking schools and, if performance based pay is introduced, those teachers with the schools.
It also allows for smoothing/averaging over a career and if you get the odd class full of Lord Lucans you can prove they are an anomaly. It also allows for the incentive for teachers in poorer schools (standards not money) to earn a lot more as there is more scope to improve the students.

It was an interesting step in the right direction, but from what I hear the issue is there is still a huge focus on standardised testing. My Kiwi mate who teaches in a secondary school in North East London said the amount of tests his kids had to sit (in History and Geography) went up - he said his curriculum was basically laid out in month-long cycles, whereby the students spend 3 weeks revising for a test, sit the test, then he gets one week of actual two-way, thoughtful dialogue before they have to start revising for the next test to "make sure they are on track".

Yeah, the amounting of testing/exams has gone through the roof. Gove had a hard on for them. I think the system, with literally no professional basis on which to comment, has become too slack but Gove was obsessed with learning by rote and old fashioned academic rigour. He, and his top SPAD, was far too dogmatic and tried to push things too far too quickly - I think a lot can be blamed on his SPAD - and he paid the price. There were some good ideas in there - ranking by improvements rather than grades being one of them - but he just lost the plot.

[KaikoheMan]

Yeah - a whole 29% of the electorate voted in the Mt.Albert election - 71% could not be arsed - landslide indeed ...
Ardern will go far - not sure where though

[Lizard]

I voted in Mt Albert, mostly so I can complain later.

What was dumb was the only candidates with any realistic chance were already MPs. What we were voting on was really a choice between the two no-names next on the Lab and Green Party lists.

I also don't get all this gushing over Ardern's looks. First, it's fucking irrelevant and frankly shameful in this day and age. Secondly, she might look ok next to other MPs but in reality she looks like Hugo Weaving in a wig.

[canta_brian]

I voted in Mt Albert, mostly so I can complain later.

What was dumb was the only candidates with any realistic chance were already MPs. What we were voting on was really a choice between the two no-names next on the Lab and Green Party lists.

I also don't get all this gushing over Ardern's looks. First, it's fucking irrelevant and frankly shameful in this day and age. Secondly, she might look ok next to other MPs but in reality she looks like Hugo Weaving in a wig.

Yeah, but would you?

[Lizard]

I voted in Mt Albert, mostly so I can complain later.

What was dumb was the only candidates with any realistic chance were already MPs. What we were voting on was really a choice between the two no-names next on the Lab and Green Party lists.

I also don't get all this gushing over Ardern's looks. First, it's fucking irrelevant and frankly shameful in this day and age. Secondly, she might look ok next to other MPs but in reality she looks like Hugo Weaving in a wig.

Yeah, but would you?

I wouldn't let someone with teeth like that anywhere me.

The nearest I've got to getting my member into a Member was at uni when I had a brief tryst with the daughter of a then-now-former MP.

[bruce]

She could eat an apple through a letter box, but I'd have a go.

[morepork]

He was put there to promote the privatization of public assets and intellectual property via the TPP. As soon as that dog of a "deal" was dead, he bailed, and not one journalist seems to have questioned that association. Now we have a crumbling infrastructure, education from preschool through to tertiary that exists only to feed a quick buck to a select few. Some of the for-profit institutes charging for hotel management type qualifications are a fucking disgrace. Science and engineering discovery are practically dead as the government vultures everything at the earliest possible point without investing in development. Given we have absolutely no protection for any industry and all industry seems geared for export, what is the next magic free market salve? The shit Key has got away with beggars belief (GCSB anyone?) but hey, your house is still worth heaps. If you have one.

[morepork]

I saw that. What chance this also is not swept under the rug?

[scuzzaman]

Even the most lefty Labour governments have said that the SAS are a weapon that needs to be kept sharp. They have justified NZ involvement in all sorts of imperial lunacy, with that metaphor.

I have no truck with Key or the National party - they're not any tiniest bit preferable to Labour. But they're not any worse, either. Just bad in (marginally) different ways.

Quite how the weapon is kept sharp by using it to slaughter villagers is not something I've seen any politician of any stripe attempt to answer. As a younger man I had a Bowie knife, but I never used it to butter my toast.