Curios of the week #33

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Last weekend, I was up in Queensland at a 50th birthday party when the results of Australia’s Voice referendum came in. The consensus view among the knowledge workers present was that Australia is a country of stupid racists and this accounted for the No result.

I was a supporter of the Voice but I saw early on that we were heading for a car crash. I was not particularly insightful, coherent or informed when I warned where we were going in June last year. The parallels with Brexit, when voters rebelled against what the establishment said was good for them, and the difficulty of passing referendums in Australia were there for all to see.

The truth is that is was not racism and misinformation swaying the votes of those with limited intelligence that lost the Voice referendum, it was a series of mistakes right from the start of the Yes campaign. The result is that we have raised false hope among the First Nations peoples of Australia and we have left them wondering what this all means. Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, is responsible for that.

There is much to be sombre about this week but the world of education doesn’t stop, even if we sometimes want to get off. So, this week’s Curios include a diktat, a curate’s egg, a paper on paper and much more.

Diktat of the week

In the circle of educational life, we keep returning to policies that seek to bear down by diktat on school suspensions and expulsions. These attempts take on different flavours in different nations and states but amount to the same thing.

Here’s how it goes: Suspending or expelling kids from school is determined to be a bad thing — the victims of school violence and disruption are not considered. Perhaps the correlation between students who are expelled and those who go on to become criminals is mentioned, as if the former causes the latter rather than a tendency towards disturbing behaviour causing both. Perhaps some disparity between the numbers expelled from different demographic groups is cited. So, a policy is implemented to limit the powers of principals to suspend or expel. After some time, behaviour in schools deteriorates as a direct result of this policy before, finally, there is a policy reversal.

The latest round involves California. Governor Gavin Newsome has banned suspensions for ‘willful defiance.’ This may seem a petty reason for a suspension to those who don’t work in schools. Teachers are often characterised as tinpot dictators who want to suspend students who damage their pride. However, imagine the safety issues a school faces with students who refuse to follow reasonable direction.

According to campaigners, the problem is the discretion this category of suspension gives schools:

“Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said California’s decision to ban defiance suspensions is an acknowledgement that the criteria for these kinds of suspensions is overly broad. The more discretion educators have, she added, the more likely implicit and explicit bias will influence how they punish students, leading to disparate treatment of Black and Latino kids.”

I doubt many schools are suspending students for trivial reasons but maybe they are. And I suspect there are wider and deeper causes or disparities than teachers’ implicit bias. Let’s see how this one goes in the years to come.