David de Carvalho, Annotated, Again

Two years ago, we annotated parts of a speech that ACARA CEO, David de Carvalho, gave at The Age Schools Summit. De Carvalho’s stage-setting for ACARA’s soon-to-be-released draft curriculum was nonsense throughout, and included a cunning reference to the “Joint Maths Statement” from “five of the leading maths and science organisations” supposedly supporting the then […]

David de Carvalho and the Annoying Taco Kids

Last week we wrote about the mushy Australian puff piece on PISA clown, Andreas Schleicher. Readers may recall that Schleicher was critical of “Australia’s shallow Curriculum”. Schleicher says nothing of substance, simply advocating, ad nauseam, “teaching fewer things at greater depth”. The Australian piece also briefly quoted Ben Jensen and Mailie Ross, from some consultancy group […]

De Carvalho Hawks the New Curriculum

We still haven’t gotten to ACARA’s sparkly new curriculum. We do have David de Carvalho, however, to tell us all about its wonderfulness, and the wonderfulness of ACARA’s processes. A couple weeks ago, De Carvalho was interviewed by Geraldine Doogue on Radio National’s Saturday Extra. Of course, Doogue asked De Carvalho all the tough questions. […]

WitCH 78: Seeing Through De Carvalho’s Prism

Happy April Fools’ Day everyone. Guess which gang of fools is gonna get fooled, and guess which gang of fools is gonna do the fooling. There’s not a whole lot of point to this any more, but it’s niggling. So we’ll post again on ACARA‘s thoughtful and classy CEO, David de Carvalho.

David de Carvalho Wrecks the Joint

Recently, we decided to look a little at the writings of ACARA’s CEO, David de Carvalho. There’s not a lot to see. De Carvalho’s writings exhibit the calm smugness typical of a Catholic intellectual lightweight, and without any proper consideration of how the ideas expounded might play out in practice. There is some discussion of […]

David de Carvalho Inquires into the Australian Curriculum

One of the notable aspects of the Curriculum farce has been ACARA’s silence in the face of contempt. There has been no serious attempt, by ACARA or anyone, to publicly rebut the many pointed and strong criticisms of their draft curriculum. Evidently, ACARA has seen no need to pretend that “public consultation” has any meaningful […]

De Carvalho, AMSI and that Other Singapore

Sigh. So much crap …   This one is even more brazen than Chico. It’s more like Who are you gonna believe, me, or your own eyes and me from two minutes ago? Rebecca Urban, The Australian‘s education reporter, is notable for her poor stenography skills. Urban has this peculiar habit of not simply buying […]

New Cur 14: Moving the Decimal Point, and Other Sins

The Year 6 Number stream of the new mathematics Curriculum contains a notable content descriptor: multiply and divide decimals by multiples of powers of 10 without a calculator, applying knowledge of place value and proficiency with multiplication facts; using estimation and rounding to check the reasonableness of answers (AC9M6N06)  Yep, we’re just like Singapore.