COMMUNITY IS OWED AN EXPLANATION
Those parents, community members, students and teachers who attended the public meeting at Wade HS several years ago when the Griffith Director of Public Schools NSW, David Lamb was challenged to provide the research that proved that a big high school in Griffith would solve the issue of poor student performance compared to other similar schools across NSW might remember him holding up a document and waving it in the air triumphantly.
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It reminded you of Chamberlain waving his "peace in our time" document that was supposed to bring peace to the World.
Mr Lamb claimed the document was the research that supported Adrian Piccoli's merger of the two public high schools in the town.
When he was asked to provide copies to the public Mr Lamb declined to do so claiming the document was a Departmental document and had not been released by the Minister, Mr Piccoli.
I phoned the Education Department's Centre for Educational Statistics and Evaluation. Nobody knew of the paper. How could that be?
Someone must have written it, probably recently, because Mr Lamb knew about it and had a copy. Nope! No such paper existed.
A copy of the "document-that-didn't-exist" was finally released to the public about two weeks later, but not by CESE.
Whoever cobbled this piece of research together should be ashamed of themselves.
For example, it's very first statements include: "the issue of the school size that most effectively maximises student outcomes is extremely controversial. Reliable studies with rigorous methodologies are uncommon. (Slate & Jones 2005) and much of the literature on the subject is characterised by ideological argument, rather than a careful analysis of the evidence (Scheerens, Hendriks & Luyten 2014)."
And, weirdly, Mr Lamb told the Griffith community in October 2016 in The Area News that he had research that showed that there was "no correlation between school sizes and student outcomes".
If that's the case, why has the Griffith community been put through this debacle? Because that was what it was supposed to be about, student outcomes!
2019 and chaos reigns. I finally decide to track down where the 'research' document had really come from. No luck at the CESE until I mentioned the name 'ICAC'.
Well, they found the document in a flash! And yes, it's still as flawed and lacking in professional rigour as ever.
The Griffith community is owed an explanation.
The parents and kids of the public schools of Griffith deserve an apology for this disaster and financial compensation for their unwarranted costs.
And the Griffith public high schools should be immediately de-merged without loss of any of the promised funding
Kevin Farrell, Beelbangera
CHECK THE DEFINITION OF INTEGRITY
The whole argument is not about religion.
It's about a person who pledged not to make certain statements and turns around and does the opposite.
There is probably a section in the book he carries that says integrity is a very important part of any religion.
But then again being Israel Folau its possible he could change that to please himself.
As a fundamental of life as most were taught a person is only as good as their word. But again this is Israel Folau, who knows, is he exempt.
Check integrity in the dictionary.
Barry Kemp, Griffith
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