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30 April, 2005

THE HARASSMENT OF PROF. JONATHAN BEAN

Striving for balance is now a vice rather than a virtue in academe

Bean's History 110: 20th Century America class, an SIUC core curriculum course of roughly 270 students, studied the usual litany of readings by Rosa Parks, Malcom X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for its section on the Civil Rights era at the beginning of April. Bean also distributed what he said were additional, optional reading handouts through his three graduate assistants assigned to the course. Among those papers was an abridged article from James Lubinskas of FrontPageMagazine.com titled, "Remembering the Zebra Killings," which recounted a series of 71 murders perpetrated by a group of black men against white civilians in San Francisco between 1972 and 1974. FrontPageMagazine.com also hosts writer David Horowitz, who visited SIUC last year on the subject of academic freedom at universities. Bean had pulled the article from the FrontPageMagazine.com Web site and thought it would be material students could possibly go over in the course discussion sections.

At that point, Bean said, the wheels began to turn. "It sparked what I called "handout hysteria," he said. "I handed it out on Tuesday. On Friday afternoon I'm called into the department chair's office, with a hysterical department chair waving the handout at me." Bean said at that point he wasn't sure what had caused the problem. "What I took away from it, the concern was about sensitivity," he said. History Department Chair Marjorie Morgan declined to make any on-record comments about the exchange and said she might issue a written statement later on the situation. Morgan is leaving SIUC at the end of the semester. College of Liberal Arts Dean Shirley Clay Scott, who oversees the History Department, said two of Bean's three History 110 graduate assistants, both of whom are black, complained the Lubinskas article alluded to racist material. Scott said she reassigned the two black graduate students to other courses, because they felt uncomfortable continuing with Bean......

Bean said he sent an e-mail apology, by request, to the department chair, the dean, history faculty and graduate students immediately after learning the article created a controversy. He also e-mailed his students, telling them to disregard the Lubinskas article. That weekend, April 9 and 10, Bean received the university's Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award for his department and was honored with a plaque.

When he returned to work the next Monday, however, Bean was notified the dean had dropped two of his teaching assistants and that eight fellow history professors had written a letter to be published in the campus newspaper trying to distance themselves from what they said was a practice of distributing racist propaganda to students. Bean said he began to suspect something bigger was afoot. Then, he began to examine where exactly he stood in the picture of the history department at SIUC. "I am a lone libertarian-conservative on a campus that lacks ideological diversity," Bean said he concluded. Bean contends 90 percent of all liberal arts faculty are Democrats by past primary election voting records. He is traditionally known to be more conservative, although he admits he did not vote Republican in the last two presidential elections.

Bean said he suspects he is an ideological underdog in a department rife with liberal viewpoints, and he now suspects the incident surrounding the Lubinskas article is a cover for a new practice of departmental McCarthyism by some history professors. "McCarthyism is keeping the victim in the dark, forcing apologies based on hysterics, and then not accepting the apology," Bean said. Bean said he was never given a clear explanation as to what needed an apology. Even though he agreed to cancel the Lubinskas handout, he said several faculty members still publicly chided his perceived practices. The letter the eight faculty members wrote didn't specifically name Bean as the subject.

Tenured history professor Robbie Lieberman was one of the faculty members to issue the letter. She said Bean has been combative with colleagues on the subject of the handout from the beginning and has made what she said are unfounded claims of a witch hunt and McCarthyism against those who criticized him. "I know what McCarthyism is," Lieberman said. "I teach McCarthyism. It's absurd; there are no elements of it in this." Lieberman said no one is attacking Bean's views or even his right to discuss controversial topics in class. The main problem, she said, with Bean's handout is it came from an Internet source that had questionable ties......

Jane Adams, an anthropology professor and personal witness to the effects of the Zebra killings mentioned in the Lubinskas article, said the matter goes beyond Bean's academic freedom as a professor to discuss controversial material. "He didn't get due process," Adams said. She said the university has channels through which these kinds of questions flow. They were not used in this case, she said, and it should disturb all campus professors who could find themselves in a similar case. "I don't think there is any one of us who haven't been accused of something at one time or another," Adams said. Adams said in her 18 years on campus, however, she has never seen almost a whole department turn on one of its own faculty members, as she said is being done in the case with Bean. "I think this is a really serious breach of collegiality," Adams said. "One of the things I am appalled by is his (Bean's) reputation has been publicly smeared. That is all we have as professors."

More here

Front Page has fuller background on the whole affair -- including details about Prof. Bean's chief accuser. A small excerpt:

"Bean's chief prosecutor, professor Robbie Lieberman has portrayed her own efforts to defame Bean's reputation as a struggle for campus decency-"Everybody should bring up controversial topics. But you have to do it in a responsible way," she said without getting too explicit about what would qualify as "responsible" in an article in the student newspaper.

Robbie Lieberman is a Marxist ideologue, who has taught courses in the "Cold War United States," and "American Radicalism," and has written a tract called My Song Is My Weapon: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950, which liberal historian Theodore Draper described as part of the "curious academic campaign for the rehabilitation of American Communism."

The daughter of Communist folksingers, Lieberman has had a long affinity for Marxism, Communism and folk music; when singer, songwriter, and Communist Party hack Pete Seeger visited the SIUC campus four days before 9/11, Lieberman remarked, "Seeger should be regarded as an important figure in American history, not just as a prolific songwriter, but as a social critic." Lieberman has also written such books as The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anti-Communism and the American Peace Movement, 1945-1963, and Prairie Power: Voices of 1960s Midwestern Student Protest. So overt is her political preaching that conservative students at SIUC routinely refer to her as "Robbie the Red.""



SOCIALIST SCHOOLS NOT THE ANSWER

From Nancy Salvato

I don't often find myself so angry about an opinion expressed in a piece of writing that I have to respond. It does happen every once in awhile, though, and so today I must write a rebuttal to Kathleen Loftus's piece, Leaving Kids Behind in Illinois (http://www.educationnews.org/leaving-kids-behind-in-illinois.htm). Let me begin by saying that I vehemently disagree with the views expressed in her Op Ed, so much so that I might propose Illinois consider legislation that would actually make it a law NOT to implement Robin Hood dispersal of education funds.

Ms. Loftus actually had the audacity to call Illinois Representative Tom Cross a "whiner" because he criticized Randy Dunn's (acting State Superintendent of ISBE) decision to divert more federal funds to less affluent schools. How dare she impose a Socialist agenda in this Capitalist country of ours!

I live in a good school district and my tax dollars should go to keeping it that way. I work very hard, sometimes 16 hours a day to try to get ahead. I CHOSE to purchase a previously neglected smaller house, with a yard that hadn't been maintained in a decade, a carpet that needs replacing, a garage door that's warped, trees that need to be cut down, windows that leak, and an assorted list of things that need attention because this is a good neighborhood with good schools. I don't have the wealth of most of my neighbors. I do however live in a community which has a lot to offer. I've accepted that tradeoff. What, then, gives the Illinois Board of Education the right to disperse more federal funds to school districts with less local tax dollars? Why do I have any less right to that money than anyone else? Do I deserve less because I work hard and sacrifice in many areas of my life to have what I have? I think not.

As a matter of fact, I would like to earmark exactly where my tax dollars go. Many states have referendums allowing people to vote regarding tax increases for public education. I'd like the right to choose where I want a percentage of education funding to be spent. I am not suggesting that I can decide the uses for 100% of the money. But I want to decide where part of the money should be dispersed.....

Allowing tax payers to ear mark a percentage of their education dollars to go to private schools would significantly cut down the cost of accessing education alternatives. What was once out of the reach of many people would now be obtainable. Competition for tax dollars would reform public schools and force them to meet the needs of the students they serve.

It's been said time and time again that pumping more money into failing schools does not reform the problems. There is more at work in a school that functions well than the amount of money available to the district. It is an insult to good teachers and parents who are involved in their children's lives to credit student performance solely to education dollars.

Funds should be distributed based on the number of pupils and the number of "special services" needed by individual students. Just because one school has more local tax dollars doesn't mean that school isn't entitled to their fair share of the pie. If everyone adopted the Socialist Robin Hood philosophy then there would be no reason for those in our society to excel…the benefits would all be the same. Oh, that's right, utilizing the lowest common denominator is the cornerstone of the liberal agenda.



California: Governator proposes teacher "combat pay": "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that he will propose paying bonuses to teachers who agree to work in the state's toughest schools, providing a potential compromise with Democrats on one aspect of his policy agenda. Schwarzenegger said he will spell out his proposal for what he describes as 'combat pay' in a budget revision he will release next month that he said will include money to enact the idea. The governor's new proposal comes as he, lawmakers and an army of political consultants and interest groups face a deadline next week to gather enough signatures to qualify ballot initiatives for a potential special election in November."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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29 April, 2005

SOME RICHLY DESERVED SARCASM

Dear Superintendent of Schools,

I've been meaning for some considerable time now, to write to various individuals in your line of work and thank them—sincerely and profusely—for taking yet another bold step in the direction of saving the children of this country from the vile scourge of public education. I refer, of course, to the sinister case of the little girl you punished—and rightly so—because she gave her best friend a gift, a little bag of dirt and leaves she collected surreptitiously from the school playground. This sort of dangerous behavior simply can't be tolerated. How many lives do you suppose you've saved through your actions?

It's been so long now, I can't recall how this noble crusade began. Was it, perhaps, with the little boy who kissed a female classmate on the cheek and got punished as if he'd committed rape? You certainly knocked him off the crooked path to anything resembling heterosexuality. I say, let that be a lesson to him.

Or maybe it was the little girl whom you treated like a drug pusher, because she offered an aspirin to a friend who needed it? Or the one who brought a deadly butter knife to school to eat her lunch with? I just don't remember, there have been so many monumental achievements over the past nine or ten years in the name of "Zero Tolerance".

I recall some young miscreant you dealt with as if he'd been one of the shooters at Columbine High School, because he had one of the minuscule plastic machineguns in his pocket that came with his G.I. Joe. Also, I seem to remember half a dozen kids—mostly boys, of course—who drew pictures of guns or knives and were severely punished for it. And another who chewed his sandwich into the shape of a gun and "shot" his playmate with it. You have even taken measures against kids who simply pointed their right index finger and said, "Bang!"

Naturally, it's important to take action against atrocities like these. Confiscate these deadly fingers and turn those nasty boys into little girls as quickly and thoroughly as possible. If administrative punishment won't do the job, and involuntarily drugging the children fails, as well, then perhaps it's time to look seriously at corrective surgery. Have there been any studies on the effects of castration, versus the simple, straightforward prefrontal lobotomies so popular a century ago? This is an era in which cost-effectiveness is all important, lest we run out of money to bomb all those widows and orphans in the Third World.

Not that you haven't built on a firm foundation provided by your predecessors. American parents, survivors of public school themselves, have been rendered so ignorant and stupid by the experience—twelve years of relentless brainwashing—that they willingly voted for two of the worst presidential candidates ever shamelessly foisted on the electorate, and still believe there's a meaningful difference between them. I'm sure that even greater things await this generation. While it's undeniably true that you can't teach children responsibility by denying them every opportunity to exercise it, who wants responsible individuals in the welfare-warfare nanny state being built around them?

But forgive me, I have digressed. What I really wanted to thank you for was bringing us that much closer—through your policy of Zero Tolerance for freedom, dignity, independence, and common sense—to the day when children everywhere will refuse to be dragged off to the day-prisons that you run, and parents refuse to make them. Shortly afterward, the public school system will be abolished, its buildings razed to the ground so that not one stone is left standing on another, and salt is sown on the ruins.

Meanwhile, you and your hundreds of thousands (or is it millions) of colleagues will be free at last to fulfill yourselves in the vocation that suits you best, in security, groping people at the airport. It is something to look forward to, and you are helping to make it happen. I can only stand in admiration and say, "More power to you and yours!"

Source



WHO NEEDS AUDITORS? TRUST US!

Even though it is about the most spendthrift (and least effective) education system in the country

The D.C. public school system has left vacant many key positions in the 13-employee internal watchdog office that scrutinizes how it spends and manages an annual budget of more than $1 billion, financial records show. The school system's office of compliance last year received funding for 10 auditor jobs. But pay records show that at one point the system had left nine of the auditor positions unfilled, but employed two directors and a management analyst.

John M. Cashmon, director for the compliance office, said hiring has soared since last year. As of last week, he said, only two of the office's auditor positions remained unfilled. "It has not been a quick process," he said, citing a lag in budget approvals and personnel descriptions last year. Although several auditors have been hired since last fall, Mr. Cashmon said, the compliance office has had trouble finding candidates to scrutinize city school system financial records. "There is a definite shortage of auditors," he said. "We're also fairly picky when we're selecting our staff. We're looking for good, qualified staff."

School system pay records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the system's compliance office has been depleted over the past year. The school system's Schedule A pay records compiled in January show six auditor vacancies out of nine funded positions in the compliance office. In April 2004, the school system listed as vacant nine out of the 10 auditor positions. The Schedule A document, which is hundreds of pages long, includes a detailed list of all funded positions, compensation levels and vacancies. It is given to the Board of Education and to the D.C. Council.

Mr. Cashmon called the document "a snapshot in time." "That is put together at a point in time, and we've advanced long past that point in time," he said. "We're progressing."

The D.C. inspector general and the office of the D.C. auditor have made numerous inquiries into the school system's contracting practices and finances. D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey recently told the D.C. Council Committee on Education, Libraries and Recreation that the ongoing inquiries have put a strain on administrators trying to comply with auditor's demands for documents...

Mr. Cashmon said budget issues have kept his office from becoming fully staffed over the past year. He said full staffing had to wait while school system officials obtained budget authority and hiring approval. "We went through some growing pains a year ago ... but I'm happy we're just about completely there," he said. The compliance office is an internal audit division under the school system's office of the chief operating officer. The office of the D.C. auditor and the office of the inspector general are independent...

In recent years, the compliance office has investigated the misuse of credit cards by school employees and the misspending of school activity funds by administrators.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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28 April, 2005

HOMESCHOOLING PAST AND PRESENT

Homeschooling has been around for a generation now. As the positive reports continue to roll in it is good news for those who took the plunge ten or twenty years ago and decided to educate their children themselves. Numerous studies and reports have shown homeschooled children handily outperforming their publicly schooled peers at every level, and by most measures.

Still, the parents who first embarked on the untested waters of homeschooling had no information of that kind available to encourage them. And certainly the school boards did nothing to help. In fact, in many jurisdictions public school officials went out of their way to make homeschooling difficult for parents, invoking truancy laws against them or demanding to have the right to approve all curriculum or even to conduct intrusive inspections in the homes of those so presumptuous as to think they could educate their children. Friends, neighbours, even family of the first homeschoolers were not very encouraging either. Most were aghast because they thought that kitchen table education would surely be inferior to what was offered at the shiny local school. In the early days homeschoolers were regarded as nuts and cranks. That was then.

It is true that homeschooling is much more economical than public schooling. So if you don't know much about it you might believe financial saving to have been its attraction. It involves about one tenth the cost of its public counterpart. But that amazing saving was no help to the first homeschoolers. Nor does it help in most jurisdictions even today. Parents have to pay that 10% on top of their school taxes. In other words, homeschoolers look after their children's needs at their own expense only after they have already paid 100% of the costs of the wasteful public system.

In the early days there was no Home School Legal Defence Association to help protect the interests of home educators. That organization was founded in the U.S. by Michael Farris and Michael Smith in 1983, but did not come to Canada until 1991. And it took patient years of information sessions and lectures at homeschooling conferences across the continent before enough families joined to build up the focused and potent organization it represents today.

So why would anyone have begun way back then, when homeschooling was dangerous, expensive and socially unaccepted? Studies have consistently shown that there were and are two main motivations: religion and morality. Everyone who is part of the homeschooling movement will have known that already, though it may come as a surprise to those who send their children to public schools. Parents with decided views on religion or morality find it intolerable to see those views treated as they are in the public schools: namely as something between silly quirks that polite people don't discuss and nasty perversions that have to be rooted out.

It is true that negative attitudes toward traditional religion and morality are not peculiar to the school but reflect social realities. Those who homeschool are not alone in having witnessed the successive takeovers of the public sphere by secularism, multiculturalism, the cultural left, and the long, sorry chain-gang of victims still trudging through it. The transformation of their country has been a sickening one for all conservatives, but it has also been judicially imposed and therefore accepted, however reluctantly, by most.

But not by all. A large proportion of homeschoolers could be described as people who have given up paying attention to whatever is being shouted through the public bullhorn, and begun to cultivate their own practices and communities on a scale they can still understand and in a manner of which they approve. Their spontaneous reaction to their situation has a historical parallel memorably drawn by Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue. Recalling the period in which the Roman Empire collapsed and the so-called "dark ages" began, he reminds us how: "a crucial turning point occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness."

So began the monastic tradition of the early middle ages - the institution that saved civilization. It may be the privilege of homeschoolers to bear that bright torch in their own time. Our children have become healthy, well-adjusted and successful, in spite of all the efforts of public institutions to thwart them.

The above article is reproduced from here but probably the most interesting part of the article is the many thoughtful comments that follow it



ACADEMIC SPEECH CODES

One of the symptoms of overbearing political correctness has been campus speech codes that ban offensive speech, especially that directed at women and minorities. The interpretation of what constitutes offensive speech was often left to the alleged victims. In the notorious water-buffalo remark at the University of Pennsylvania case, this led to misguided accusations of racism because the targets of the remark were unfamiliar with the speaker's culture. Invariable, it is the speaker who required to be "more sensitive" in these cases.

Several court cases have struck down overly broad speech codes. The U.S. Supreme Court (R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 1992) found speech codes that ban viewpoint discrimination to be unconstitutional, even when "hate speech" was the nominal target of the codes. Other cases have similarly supported free speech on campus, including Doe v. University of Michigan, 1989 (invalidated speech code for being facially vague and overbroad), the UWM Post, Inc. v. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 1991 (code struck down as unconstitutional), Silva v. University of New Hampshire 1994 (".the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom."), Corry v. Stanford 1995 (found that the Stanford code applied to speech that could cause emotional distress but would not incite an immediate breach of peace nor other clear and present danger). Even if speech is insulting and hurtful, as many found the recent remarks of Ward Churchill on this campus, it is not necessarily unlawful.

Despite the court victories, speech codes are still prevalent on America's college campuses. This is partly because they have not been challenged in court and partly because they have been restructured so as to be constitutional. Some of the codes are ambiguous at best. For example, the U.H. Student Conduct Code states that "A student may not behave towards another member of the University community, even in the name of conviction or under a claim of academic freedom, in a manner that denies or interferes with that individual's expression of conviction, academic freedom or performance of legitimate duties and functions."

The resilience of speech codes is thought to be related to a broader politicization of the college experience that derives from a concentration of faculty members on the ideological left. Indeed political college faculties do not exhibit diversity in political affiliation. A 2003 survey of six major professional associations of in the Social Sciences and Humanities found that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least 3 to 1 (Economics) and as much as 30 to 1 (Anthropology). Studies of voter registration roles uncovered the following ratios of Democrats to Republicans: Cornell, 24:1; Brown University, 18:1; University of Colorado, 23:1; UCLA, 16:1; University of Maryland, 6:1; Syracuse University, 25:1 (Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise, Jan/Feb, 2005). A more comprehensive study was done by matching the faculty lists of Stanford and UC-Berkeley with voter registration roles in surrounding counties (www.NAS.org). Berkeley came in at 445 to 45 (10:1) Democrats to Republicans with Stanford at 276 to 36 (8:1). Among assistant and associate professors, Republicans are outnumbered 31:1.....

The curriculum of higher education is alleged to be politicized and guilty of substituting indoctrination for the disciplined pursuit of knowledge. General education requirements have exploded to the point where the core is unrecognizable. Following the lead of Stanford ("Ho Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go") and other mainland institutions, UH replaced its requirement of Western and Eastern Civilization with "Global and Multicultural Perspectives," which aims to provide students with "a sense of human development . through the consideration of narratives and artifacts."

The cost of political correctness is not so much that students become ideologically warped or anti-American for life. Indeed college graduates are marginally more likely to be Republican than Democrat and significantly more likely to be independent. Rather it is the opportunity lost for learning through the disciplined application of reason and evidence. Instead students often focus on gaming the system. Douthat (2005) describes his own experience at Harvard. One of his illustrations concerned the requirement to write a 10-page paper on pair of artifacts from the early American West without doing any research on the cultures represented. Douthat had a dilemma. "How could I eke out ten pages when I knew nothing about the provenance of the weapons or the significance of their markings? The paper was pathetically easy to write - not despite the dearth of information but because of it. Knowing nothing meant I could write anything. I didn't need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all. [He craftily sprinkled his essay with references to capitalism, violence and male domination.] .the paper got an A."

At the very least, the climate of political correctness has a chilling effect on academic inquiry. Without political diversity, how can there be diversity of thought? Can we really afford to designate some issues, such as differences by race and gender and Hawaiian sovereignty, as too inflammatory for investigation?

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughley indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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27 April, 2005

A GOOD REVIEW OF HOME-SCHOOLING FROM A MAINSTREAM NEWSPAPER:

Excerpts

Home schooling, best known in modern America as a movement of the left in the 1960s and a conservative Christian trend in the 1980s, is now becoming a mainstream education revolution, increasing from 7 to 10 percent annually across the nation. In 2003, an estimated 1.1 million students are home-schooled in the United States, an increase from 850,000 in 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In Minnesota, 17,533 students were home-schooled in 2003-04, an increase of 7.4 percent from the previous school year.

There is no one reason parents choose home schooling. Some want to nurture a gifted child or a child with learning disabilities or health problems. Some cite reasons of faith or remote physical locations. Others are concerned about the school environment, from negative peer pressure to school violence to large class sizes to budget cutbacks. Often, it's a combination of reasons. But at the heart of home schooling's renaissance is the growing acceptance that it is simply one more viable option — along with private, public, charter and online schools — from which parents can choose. "Home schooling is a real possibility now for many people who wouldn't have considered it 10 years ago," says Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute. "And that's because resources are everywhere. Home-school organizations are everywhere, support groups are everywhere. It's in the news, it's on Web sites, it's everywhere."

Home-schooling parents used to be afraid to let their children play outside during the school day, worried that neighbors would report the kids as truants. In the early 1980s, home schooling was expressly legal in only four states, says JoAnn Vender, a Penn State graduate student in geography who is studying home schooling. That changed when fundamentalist Christians and other religious groups adopted the practice with vigor, pushing states to legalize the practice in the 1980s and 1990s, she says. For many conservative Christians in that era, home schooling was a way to protest the increasing separation of church and state.

Minnesota adopted a law in 1987 that clearly established the legality of home education. In 1985-86, an estimated 654 Minnesota children were home-schooled. This year, that number is 18,000. Today, Minnesota has some of the stricter laws overseeing home schooling.

Lorin Velikonja, who recently wrapped up her tenure as president of the Minnesota Homeschoolers' Alliance, has had a unique vantage point from which to gauge society's changing attitudes. "MHA has had a booth at the State Fair in the Education Building for about 10 years, and when I first worked shifts there, you'd get people who would walk by and give you the eyeball and say, 'You people are crazy,' " Velikonja says. "But over the past few years, it's changed dramatically. Now, people stop by just to say, 'Oh, my grandchildren are being home-schooled! They're wonderful!' Or, 'We're getting married in June, and we're already thinking about home schooling.' "You still get a few people who challenge you," she says. "The big question is, 'What makes you think that you're trained, that you have the credentials to teach your child?' "Overall, I think people are just more positive about it now.".....

Home-schoolers must excuse Tom Keating, Minnesota's 2004 Teacher of the Year, if he favors a public-school education. That's not to say he doesn't believe there isn't a place for home schooling. He just wants parents considering it to think it over carefully. "The question for parents is, 'Why do we want to do this?' It's a serious gut and heart check," says Keating, who teaches at Turning Point alternative school in Monticello. "Because, if we're running from something, that would be a little scary. If we're raising a generation of kids in cocoons, we're in trouble." Keating says some of the home-schooled students he has met make the transition into public school at the high-school level when the subject matters become more challenging. They adapt nicely, he says, after sometimes struggling to learn to work in a group dynamic.....

Home-schooled students learn to be passionate about what they're studying, too. Many show a thoughtful maturity. One recent morning, for instance, seven home-schooled teens and pre-teens settled into the sitting area of a Minneapolis bookstore for their weekly Philosophy Club discussion. One of their mothers served as moderator. Arlo Sherbitz, 12, curled up in a wicker chair, shoes off, and opened the session with the first question: "Is there such a thing as a just war?" "No," said his brother, Dylan, 14. "That's a good question," said Nora Cox, 16. "I think war is part of human nature." Across the metro, every day, home-schooled students gather together like this to learn. Some meet through formal home-school "co-ops," founded by parents who hire teachers to give instruction on biology, music or art. There are regular sessions, field trips and waiting lists — similar to school but more flexible and on the parents' terms. Others are more free form, offering classes taught by parents who have expertise in a subject like science or math.

For many years, Northwestern College, a Christian liberal arts school in St. Paul, has actively recruited home-schoolers, who make up 10 percent of its student body. It was a unique strategy — until now. "Until recently, a number of colleges and universities were very skeptical of home-schoolers; they just didn't know how to approach or deal with them," says Ken Faffler, Northwestern admissions director. "That was fine with me; we wanted all of them we could get," Faffler says. "We could see, on average, they're above average … on SAT and ACT exams. And they also seem to have a slightly higher level of maturity — all this worry about socialization is something we knew we didn't have to consider."

Now, Ivy League schools, businesses like Apple Computer, PBS and many others are reaching out to the home-schooler. In the case of PBS, the network has been focusing in the past five years on alerting home-schooling parents about "TeacherSource," which provides free lesson plans and activities tied to PBS programming and correlated with local and national curriculum standards.

Statistics show today's typical American home-schooling family is white, middle class and conservative Protestant with more than two children, and the mother is primarily responsible for the children's schooling, says home-schooling researcher Vender. But home-schooling demographics are changing. "The most rapidly growing segment is the non-Christian group," Vender says.....

Danielle Reedy, 17˝, is a home-schooler who has dabbled in public education, and she sees the upside and downside of both options. She is the oldest of four children of Donna and Tim Reedy of Hudson, Wis., who began home-schooling Danielle in kindergarten, mostly for religious reasons. Since starting high school, Danielle has begun taking a few classes at the public school as allowed by the district. Last year, her sophomore year, she attended school full time because the family budget couldn't stretch to purchase curriculum after Tim lost his job, but now she's back to home schooling. "At home, I've liked reading all the books," Danielle says. "She soaks up literature," Donna says. "I like just learning and not being exposed to all the garbage at school, swearing and drinking and cliques and middle school," Danielle says. "At home, you don't have that pressure." Danielle will return to high school for her senior year. When asked why, she says, "For the fun. And there are so many classes I want to take, like more art classes and a law class, which is an area I'm interested in. "I like the structured classes at school, where there are teachers there every day when you need them and they are experts in that area," she says. "And I like having all my friends at the school and being able to talk to people and meet new people. Whereas if you're home-schooling, you're home all the time. I'm a people person, so I like lots of people around me, not just my family. "But there are things I definitely don't miss about school, like the bomb threats," she says."



"FUNDING" CLAPTRAP A MASK FOR LETHARGIC TEACHING

Lawsuits with union backing and demanding more tax dollars to provide for an adequate public school education are becoming more common place. However, according to Doug French in his piece about Nevada's K-12 education, "High per-pupil spending in America often correlates with pathetic educational results-witness New York City, Washington, D.C., and many other union-dominated jurisdictions. On the other hand, low per-pupil spending is often linked with relatively high educational success-as with our neighbor Utah, and with private and parochial schools."5 He warns us that, "The best defense is often a good offense. And so, a constant drumbeat about supposedly inadequate per-pupil taxpayer subsidies has proven an effective way to shift the blame, maintain the political initiative and, perhaps most importantly, keep the money flowing."

People who are not educated on both sides of an issue and continually subjected to only one ideology or viewpoint make it easier for those with power and influence to have a greater effect on their opinion. For so many children an abridged education starts early in life because labels, like "politically incorrect" censor fairy tales like The Boy Who Cried Wolf; deemed no longer appropriate to teach morals such as to be wary of false accusations. Parents hand their children over to public education institutions earlier and earlier. The result, special interest groups like the NEA are able to maintain a lot of power and influence, even having long outlived their usefulness.

Going back to Doug French's piece, he writes, "The quality of the individual teacher is by far the most important factor in student success." He continues, "Vast millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted each year by school district administrators and union bosses through the [salary] grids. They could move to measuring teacher quality by tracking individual students' improvements year by year. But it's so much less threatening to the union to just look at longevity and trivial teacher college degrees-neither of which, research has shown, significantly helps student achievement."

Doug French gives the very reason why NCLB is so important to reforming the public school system. The law requires districts to implement what does work. As French puts it, "It is this-Nevada's chronic spending to purchase what is known to not work-instead of what does work-that is this state's fundamental education problem. And it has persisted for decades because it grows directly out of the debased role of the modern state as the servant of well-organized special interests."

State courts legislating from the bench order legislatures to provide, what the NEA considers "adequate funding" to the public schools. In New York, Robin Rapaport, the President of the NEA reminded the Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means Committees that, 'Our state's constitution mandates that "the Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated."'

She was critical that the Governor slashed funding for BOCES (vocational) funding cuts and for creating charter schools. She asked that education retirees continue to receive the same health insurance benefits as active educators and to re-enact the section of the law which would phase out with a sunset provision. She suggested state leaders find new revenue from the wealthiest private and corporate citizens.

In response, the legislature restored the Governor's cuts, and passed a budget, "that will provide over $848 million more in funding to public schools than last year - approximately $354 million more than the governor proposed." It is because of testimony such as Rapaport's that Kansas, Montana, and New York are, "currently under orders from their highest courts to fix their school finance systems." In New York, the state is planning to appeal the trial judge's order to provide $5.6 billion in operating increases over four years to fix the New York City schools.

The idea that the court can tell politicians to appropriate more taxes to assuage special interest groups is quite frankly, frightening. This is judicial activism at its worst. It has not been proven that greater funding will solve the problems inherent in the public schools. Certainly the court can determine the legality of an action but to determine how our tax dollars are spent seems out of its jurisdiction. "Whether the court has the authority to require us to appropriate money is a major constitutional question. The answer will be keenly anticipated by many. The prevailing view is that the court lacks the ability to do that."

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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26 April, 2005

Demise of U.K. grammar schools leaves the poor facing an uphill struggle

And these researchers actually gave some consideration to race as a factor! Background: The "elitist" British Grammar School system of the past took in students essentially on the basis of high IQ -- regardless of family background -- and prepared them for university-level study. The British Left always hated the system because it violated their "all men are equal" creed.

Children from poorer families have far less chance of improving their lives in Britain than those in many other wealthy countries, according to research published yesterday. The study of eight countries, carried out by the London School of Economics, said that social mobility in Britain was lower than anywhere except the United States. The abolition of grammar schools was said to have reduced opportunity in a country where parental wealth and good education are strongly linked. Uniquely among the countries studied, the life chances of poorer children in Britain had become worse over time. In America the figure was lower, but stable.

The study found that an increasing link between family wealth and educational achievement was partly responsible for the marked decline in Britain. Poorer children born in 1970 had much less opportunity to improve their social and economic status as adults than those born in 1958. Educational opportunities improved for those born in the early 1980s, but social inequalities widened because children from wealthier families benefited overwhelmingly from the increase in places at university.

Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, an educational charity that sponsored the study, said that the findings were "truly shocking": "The results show that those from less privileged backgrounds are more likely to continue facing disadvantage into adulthood, and the affluent continue to benefit disproportionately from educational opportunities."

The report examined social mobility in Britain, the US, Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. It compared the extent to which a person's childhood circumstances influenced their later economic success as adults. The four Scandinavian countries performed best, with social mobility being greatest in Norway. Canada was also found to be a highly mobile society. Germany was placed close to the middle while Britain and America trailed well behind.

In Britain, 38 per cent of sons born in 1970 to the poorest quarter of families were themselves in the bottom quarter of earners at the age of 30. Only 11 per cent had reached the richest quarter. By contrast, 42 per cent of those born to the wealthiest quarter remained among the top earners at 30 and 16 per cent were in the bottom quarter. There was greater movement among those born in 1958. Of those from the poorest families, 31 per cent were still poor in their thirties, while 17 per cent had reached the top income group. Among those born to wealthy families, 35 per cent remained in the top quarter while 17 per cent had sunk to the bottom group.

The study said that race was an important factor in explaining America's low social mobility, but in Britain the key was the strong link between parental wealth and educational opportunity.

The study concluded: "The strength of the relationship between educational attainment and family income, especially for access to higher education, is at the heart of Britain's low mobility culture."

Stephen Machin, part of the research team, said: "The grammar school system was seen at the time as being very elitist. But it is ironic that probably that system got more people through from the bottom end than the system we have today." Professor Machin added: "We have 20 per cent of the population who are functionally illiterate. They have been let down by the school system. In Germany and Scandinavia they don't have anybody down there. They are at least getting everybody up to the same basic level."

Educational inequalities at 16 in Britain narrowed in the 1990s as staying-on rates among poorer youngsters rose. This was partly because of improved examination results after the introduction of the GCSE. But far more youngsters from wealthier homes went on to university, even with the huge expansion of higher education, leading to an increase in social immobility between children of different backgrounds.

From The Times



Amusing: EU rules will force British schools to protect teachers from noisy pupils

Discipline has been declared incorrect and that creates the noise so we have another regulatiion to stop the noise -- one regulation to fix the problem caused by another. And no doubt the new regulation will create new problems requiring yet more regulations

Every nursery school, primary school and day-care centre in Britain will have to conduct a "noise risk assessment" in case the din of children is damaging teachers' hearing, Europe's health and safety official said yesterday. If noise levels are found to be above 80 decibels - a level recorded in many classrooms during one recent Danish study - head teachers will be obliged to take action to reduce noise "to a minimum", said Hans-Horst Konkolewsky, director of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. If the noise levels rise above a new maximum of 87 dB, heads, or creche owners, who fail to take action could face criminal prosecution. Actions required could involve fitting acoustic tiles on classroom ceilings, giving staff longer breaks or reducing class sizes, said Mr Konkolewsky.

Traditional noise-prevention laws have focused on shipyards, steel mills and other obviously loud workplaces. But the education sector is a hidden source of risk, said Mr Konkolewsky, especially where today's more raucous pupils are housed in hard-floored, echoing Victorian classrooms, built for the days when children sat silently, copying from a blackboard.

A European Union Noise Directive will come into force next February, replacing and substantially toughening up existing EU noise rules. The directive, which was approved by the British and other EU governments in 2003, imposes a new obligation on all employers where noise is a potential hazard to conduct a scientific analysis of their workplace. The directive includes new, much lower levels of noise that trigger mandatory action.

Vladimir Spidla, the European Commissioner for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities, yesterday launched a Europe-wide "Stop That Noise" campaign. The initiative is aimed, he said, "at people in industry, but in primary schools as well". Mr Konkolewsky said: "A Danish study has shown that over half of schoolteachers and day-care workers have to raise their voices to communicate with colleagues, much more than in many industrial trades."

But he offered assurances that the EU would be "reasonable" in assessing what was possible in schools. Head teachers had to work with health and safety experts to find the right balance. The new directive allows the entertainment sector an extra three years, until 2009, to find ways to reduce noise levels in venues that are hard to keep quiet, such as discos, bars and concert halls.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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25 April, 2005

PRIVATE SCHOOLS BETTER FOR BLACKS

A recent analysis of national test score data suggests private schools do a better job than public schools of closing the achievement gap between black and white students as they progress from fourth to 12th grades.... Closing the achievement gap between black and white students has been one of our nation's overarching goals for half a century. However, there remains a gulf of more than 200 points between the SAT scores of white students and black students, and black children trail their white peers by significant margins on every subject tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

One aspect of the very familiar achievement gap, however, is almost universally unknown: how it differs between public and private schools. This disparity can be documented by using a U.S. Department of Education database to compute the average NAEP test score differences between black students and white students in both public and private schools.... there is a sizeable achievement gap between black and white fourth-graders in both public and private schools. It is also clear the private-sector achievement gap is narrower in the 12th grade than the fourth grade for all of the core NAEP subjects. Public schools, by contrast, see a larger gap in both writing and mathematics at the 12th-grade level than at the fourth. Averaged across subjects, the public school racial achievement gap is virtually unchanged between fourth and 12th grades. By contrast, the gap in private schools is an average of 27.5 percentage points smaller in the 12th grade than the fourth.

The achievement gap closes faster in private schools not because white private school students lose ground with respect to white public school students as they move to higher grades, but because black private school students learn at a substantially higher rate than black public school students.....

Economist Derek Neal has found that black students attending urban private schools are far more likely to complete high school, gain admission to college, and complete college than similar students in urban public schools.

Similarly, in a study comparing graduation rates of all Milwaukee public school students (of all income levels) with those of the low-income participants in the city's private school voucher program, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jay Greene found the voucher students were more than one-and-a-half-times as likely to graduate as public school students. More remarkable still, Greene found this to be true even when he compared the voucher students with those attending Milwaukee's elite group of academically selective public schools.

More here



PRIVATE TUTORING TAKES OFF IN BRITAIN

(Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog)

New research by the London Institute of Education suggests that more than one pupil in four receives private tuition at some stage in his or her career, reports John Clare, Education Editor of the Telegraph.

When Tony and Cherie Blair sent their state-educated sons to be privately tutored, they were not so much setting a trend as climbing on a rapidly accelerating bandwagon.

Despite the availability of free state education, people are spending 50 million pounds a year on private tuition, and the market is growing. The reason is not only a natural desire of parents to give their children a good start. It is, according to some, a move born out of despair. Bill Fleming, founder of Top Tutors, puts it succinctly:

"Poor teaching, high staff turnover, too many temporary teachers, disruption in class - there are loads of reasons why state school parents come to us," he says. "Their children can't keep up, the curriculum has not been covered and so on."

Many parents must be grateful that there is a remedy to hand for the deficiencies of state education. But a possible reason for the success of private tuition is that it barely registers. When Labour politicians send their children to a private school there is the usual outcry; but private tutors don't count. They can be hired discreetly, without the P-word being mentioned.

Parents in general might wish that state schools did the job anyway, but they have seen years of campaigning and oceans of cash leave standards still far below acceptable levels. Private tuition gives them a solution. It cuts through the Gordian knot and gives them a way of raising the achievement level of their own children. It's a pity the state school system leads them no other recourse, but they prefer their children better educated than it seems able to manage.



TESTING WITHOUT CHOICE IS LARGELY POINTLESS

Although most reformers and education experts agree there is reason to be concerned about the quality of U.S. secondary education, there are a variety of opinions about whether rigorous high school testing is the right solution. Some groups, such as the Gates Foundation, advocate making schools smaller. Others recommend making the high school experience more relevant and individualized. Efforts to make it easier for high school students to enroll in college courses while still in high school also have been suggested. Advocates of school choice, however, argue that unless a reform program creates real market competition among private and public schools, no amount of testing or remediation will do much to improve low-quality public schools.

Moreover, they say, choice allows competing solutions like those mentioned above to be tested in the education marketplace, with parents choosing the solution they think is best for their child. As John Merrifield, author of School Choice Wars, has pointed out, "school choice would raise productivity by exploiting educators' comparative advantages, by paving the way for smaller schools, and by creating better matches between students and educators."

During his first term, Bush sought to incorporate parental choice into the NCLB bill. Although most of the choice provisions were stripped out before the bill was passed, Bush was vocal about his support for school choice. The president also pushed hard for a pilot voucher program for children in the District of Columbia, which successfully passed Congress last year as part of the 2004 appropriations bill.....

Education researchers disagree about how effective NCLB has been in improving the nation's elementary and middle schools. Each state designs and administers its own achievement tests; hence, it is easy for states to report results showing a high number of students as proficient. Only 30 percent of America's fourth-graders scored at or above the "proficient" level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, yet all but eight states claimed "proficiency" levels above 50 percent for fourth-graders on their own achievement tests. The width of that gap casts doubt on the validity of states' reports about proficiency.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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24 April, 2005

SEATING IN ROWS WORKS BEST

This article is another blast from the past that should not be forgotten

Pupils work harder and are less disruptive if they sit in rows rather than in groups around tables, according to researchers at the University of Birmingham. A team led by Dr Kevin Wheldall, of the university's department of educational psychology, found children spent up to twice as long concentrating on their work when seated in rows and teachers found it easier to praise them and to refrain from disapproval.

In fourth-year junior classes in two urban schools Dr Wheldall and his colleagues observed the extent to which children remained "on task" when seated normally around tables in groups and then when desks were rearranged in rows for a week or so. "On task" was defined as doing what the teacher instructed; looking at and (apparently) listening to her when she was talking to them, looking at their books or work cards when required to do work and only being out of their seats with the teacher's permission. Calling out, interrupting and talking to neighbours were regarded as "off task" though some teachers might regard talking as a legitimate classroom activity.

On task behaviour as defined rose by 15 per cent when pupils were seated in rows in both classes and dropped by the same amount when put back into groups. A few children also complained at the return to tables as they preferred rows. A similar study in a special school for children with behavioural difficulties found that on task time doubled in rows and disruptions were reduced to a third of their former frequency.

Dr Wheldall says: "I must emphasise that I am not advocating a return to rows for all work - only for academic work which requires the child to concentrate on the specific academic task in hand without disruption. Rows would be totally inappropriate for small group discussions." Dr Wheldall is now looking into the horseshoe arrangement of desks. He says that in some cases groups around tables might prove more effective, but he criticises the complete abandonment of rows. "Seating around tables has become the norm apparently because it was believed that this facilitated learning by discovery and project work. To my knowledge no empirical evidence was produced to justify this change, but then education is like this; strong on theory and speculation, weak on evidence and objective data."

Article originally from the "Times Educational Supplement", reprinted in the "Sydney Morning Herald", Feb. 16th., 1982 p. 12.



CALIFORNIA'S UNIVERSITIES NOW TEACH GRADE-SCHOOL STUFF

Even to the top one third of High School graduates! It's like something out of "Alice in Wonderland" but it is no wonderland

"The students are among the tens of thousands of California State University freshmen who required courses in remedial English, math or both when they arrived at one of the system's 23 campuses last fall. Placement exams showed they hadn't mastered a range of skills, from solving quadratic equations and using the Pythagorean theorem to having a command of vocabulary, grammar and techniques to write essays and papers. It's a troubling and expensive trend for the nation's largest public university system, which draws most of its freshmen from the top one-third of high school seniors in California.

Now, after years of focusing almost exclusively on helping students catch up once they get to college, CSU has pledged to drive down the demand for remediation before the freshmen ever get to their campuses. In partnership with California's public high schools, officials are testing juniors, creating courses for college-bound 12th-graders who need to improve their English and math and training teachers to better prepare students for the demands of CSU.

They are motivated in large part by expense: In the 2003-04 school year, remedial courses in math and English cost CSU nearly $30 million. Last year, 47 percent of the 39,000 freshmen at CSU campuses needed remedial English; 37 percent required basic math. At CSUS, more than 1,600 freshmen (out of 2,345) enrolled in remedial courses in English, math or both. "We are talking about students who come to us from high school with a 3.2 (grade point average)," said Betsy Kean, an education professor at CSUS who is working with high schools in the region to stem the need for remedial courses. "These are students who have reasonable grades, but for a variety of reasons did not master the mathematics and English they need once they get to college."

University officials and faculty have been working for nearly a decade to reduce the numbers of freshmen who aren't prepared for college-level work, a move that began in 1996 when the CSU Board of Trustees learned that the university was spending $10 million a year on remedial education. The trustees cracked down on lagging students, adopting a policy to dismiss those who hadn't reached proficiency in English and math within the first 15 months of entering CSU. But in the years since, the numbers improved little. CSU officials realized the problem was rooted more in a mismatch between what students were learning in high school and what they needed to function at college.

So this month and next, thousands of high school juniors will take a short exam designed by CSU faculty and high school faculty -- called the Early Assessment Program -- to gauge their college-level English and math skills. The test, introduced last spring, consists of 15 English questions and 15 math questions and is offered to juniors when they take the mandatory California Standards Test. The EAP exam is voluntary, but participation last year exceeded CSU's expectations: 150,000 juniors took the English portion and 115,000 opted to answer the math questions. Questions on the EAP are similar to those on the English and math placement exams that incoming CSU freshmen must take, said Roberta J. Ching, director of the Learning Skills Center, CSUS' remediation program.

For juniors who score poorly and demonstrate a need for more English and math skills, CSU officials and high school faculty members are designing courses to help them catch up in their senior year. CSU campuses also are beginning to offer courses to high school English teachers to train them to teach students how to write in an explanatory or expository style".

More here



CORRUPT PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS IN NEW YORK

Charges filed yesterday against a math teacher in Brooklyn were the latest in a string of five cases said to have involved criminal or inappropriate behavior by school employees that have stunned parents and school officials. The teacher, Joanna Hernandez, 27, surrendered to face misdemeanor charges of kissing one of her students, a 15-year-old boy, in an empty classroom at Intermediate School 55 in Brownsville during school hours, the police said.

Ms. Hernandez's arrest came a day after Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein issued an extraordinary warning to principals throughout the city. "I will use all means at my disposal to see that sex offenders are removed from our school system and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Mr. Klein said in an e-mail message. He warned faculty members to be on the lookout for school employees who make lewd or inappropriate remarks, and those who have sexual or romantic relations with students. Mr. Klein also called for a tightening of state laws that he said now make firing sexual offenders "far too cumbersome and protracted."

A spokesman for the Department of Education, Keith Kalb, said last night that Ms. Hernandez, a teacher in the city school system since 2001, had been reassigned to administrative duties away from students. He said each of the other school employees facing charges of sexual activities, including two other women in their 20's, had either resigned or been reassigned away from classroom duties. Pending formal disciplinary proceedings, he said, "We will move to fire every one of them."

The succession of charges, brought by the New York Police Department and Richard Condon, the special schools investigator, began last week. The police said another teacher came upon Ms. Hernandez and her student kissing on April 12. The identity of that boy, like those of the other students involved in the cases, have not been made public. Mr. Kalb said the principal of I.S. 55 was immediately informed, and Ms. Hernandez was reassigned last week to a regional operations center in Queens. The police said she surrendered yesterday to face charges of sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a minor, both misdemeanors.

Two female faculty members at the High School for Health Professions and Human Services in Manhattan were also removed from contact with students last week after investigations by Mr. Condon's office. Mr. Kalb said that one of the women, Rhianna Ellis, 25, had given birth to a son whose father was an 18-year-old in her social studies class. The other case at the same high school involved Samantha Solomon, a 29-year-old guidance counselor, who had sex with a 17-year-old student, school officials said. Mr. Kalb said last night that Ms. Ellis had indicated that she planned to resign, and that disciplinary proceedings against Ms. Solomon were pending. Neither of the women was charged with criminal activity. Both liaisons were with students over 16, which state law deems the age of consent, and both students had described their relations as consensual.

Two other cases last week involved male school employees. Mr. Condon charged that Jermaine Reid, 27, a high school English teacher, had engaged in sexual relations with two female students, 16 and 18, over a period of many months at two schools in Queens. He had become involved with the younger girl while teaching at August Martin High School, and the 18-year-old at Richmond Hill High School, where he had been transferred, Mr. Kalb said. Mr. Reid has not reported for work since he was confronted last week with the charges against him, and it was not clear yesterday whether he intended to resign before facing disciplinary proceedings. Mr. Kalb said his case has been referred to the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, but it was not known whether criminal charges would be brought.

Last Friday, Joseph Morales, 28, a teacher at I.S. 24 on Staten Island, was charged with public lewdness and endangering the welfare of minors after witnesses told the police he exposed himself to many people, including teenage girls, at several places since February. In his remarks to principals on Tuesday, Chancellor Klein reiterated his call for lawmakers in Albany to make it a criminal offense for any school employee to have sex with a student, even if the student has reached the age of consent. State Senator Carl Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat, introduced such a bill in January.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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23 April, 2005

ACADEMIC QUALITY IS STILL POSSIBLE

A message from a devout Catholic writer about a group of Protestants:

Today I received a request to write a short article on Pope Benedict XVI from a club called the De Tocqueville Society, in a small college in Northern Virginia. That such a request came was no surprise. Its provenance is, and cheeringly so. For this De Tocqueville Society is made up of a group of students at the new Patrick Henry College, founded by Mike Farris, the President of the Home School Legal Defense Association. More than ninety percent of the college's students were homeschooled. If there's a Roman Catholic in the bunch, I've yet to hear about it, and I've been to that campus twice to give lectures.

More on that in a moment. I could spend all evening singing the praises of PHC (as the students fondly call it), but let me share one discovery I made that should gratify Touchstone readers. The first time I spoke there, two years ago, I was stunned to meet young men and women who-who were young men and women. I am not stretching the truth; go to Purcellville and see it for yourselves if you doubt it; I believe my wife took a couple of pictures, just to quiet the naysayers. The young men stand tall and look you in the eye-they don't skulk, they don't scowl and squirm uncomfortably in the back chairs as they listen to yet another analysis of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or one of the healthier poems of Sylvia Plath. They're frank and generous and respectful, but they hold their own in an argument, and they are eager to engage you in those. They are comfortable in their skins; they wear their manhood easily. And the young ladies are beautiful. They don't wither away in class, far from it; but they wear skirts, they are modest in their voices and their smiles, they clearly admire the young men and are esteemed in turn; they are like creatures from a faraway planet, one sweeter and saner than ours.

Two years ago I spoke to them about medieval Catholic drama. They are evangelicals, half of them majors in Government, the rest, majors in Liberal Arts. They kept me and my wife in that room for nearly three hours after the talk was over. "Doctor Esolen, what you say about the habits of everyday life-to what extent is it like what Jean Pierre de Coussade calls `the sacrament of the present moment'?" "Doctor Esolen, do you see any connections between the bodiliness of this drama and the theology of Aleksandr Schmemann?" "Doctor Esolen, you have spoken a great deal about our recovery of a sense of beauty, but don't you think that artists can also use the grotesque as a means of bringing people to the truth?" "You've suggested to us that Christians need to reclaim the Renaissance as our heritage, yet we are told that that was an age of the worship of man for his own sake. To what extent is the art of that period ours to reclaim?" And on and on, until nearly midnight.

The questions were superior to any that I have ever heard from a gathering of professors-and alas, I've been to many of those. I mean not only superior in their enthusiasm and their insistence, but in their penetrating to the heart of the problem, their willingness to make connections apparently far afield but really quite apropos, and their sheer beauty-I can think of no better word for it.

A few weeks ago I was in town for another talk, on the resurrection of the body. The Holy Father had passed away. At supper, ten or fifteen of the students packed our table, to ask questions before the talk. They were reverent and extraordinarily well informed; most especially they were interested in the Theology of the Body. The questions on that topic continued after the lecture, and I had the same experience I'd had before, but now without the surprise.

And these are the young people who are devoting an entire issue of their journal to the thought of Cardinal Ratzinger, now the new head of the Roman Catholic Church. They are hungry to know about him; in the next week or two they will do what our slatternly tarts and knaves, I mean our journalists, have never done and will not trouble themselves to do, and that is to read what Benedict XVI has said, read it with due appreciation for their differences with him, and due deference to a holy and humble man called by Christ to be a light not only to Roman Catholics but to all the nations.

These students don't know it, but in their devotion to their new school (they are themselves the guards, the groundskeepers, the janitors; they `own' the school in a way that is hard to explain to outsiders), they live the community life extolled by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum; in their steadfastness to the truth they are stalwart participators in the quest set out by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio; in their welcoming of me and, God bless them, of the good Benedict XVI, they live in the true spirit of Lumen Gentium, that greathearted document of the council so often invoked for the lame tolerance of every betrayal of the ancient faith.

Source



A GOOD COMMENT FROM C.S. LEWIS

In my view there is a sense in which education ought to be democratic and another sense in which it ought not. It ought to be democratic in the sense of being available, without distinction of sex, colour, class, race, or religion, to all who can-and will-diligently accept it. But once the young people are inside the school there must be no attempt to establish a factitious egalitarianism between the idlers and dunces on the one hand and the clever and industrious on the other. A modern nation needs a very large class of genuinely educated people and it is the primary function of schools and universities to supply them. To lower standards or disguise inequalities is fatal.

If this sounds harsh, I would observe that the opposite policy is really devised to soothe the inferiority complex not of the idlers and dunces but of their parents. Do not be in the least afraid that those who live out their school-days-which should be brief-on the back bench of the lowest class will suffer any trauma when they see promotion and honours and official ap-proval going to the diligent minority. They are stronger than it. They can punch its head and kick its stern. All the distinctions they really care about-the popularity and the success in games-go not to it but to them. They enjoy their school-days very much. Our real problem is to see that they impede as little as possible the purposes for which school really exists.

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ANOTHER GOVERNMENT SCHOOL ATTEMPT AT A COVERUP

An administrator at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School faces discipline for failing to contact police about an alleged sexual assault on campus, district sources said Wednesday. All the district would say officially was that "corrective action" had been taken against the administrator, whom police have identified as the dean of students at the Bayview District school. However, sources familiar with the case say the dean has been counseled and still faces unspecified disciplinary action.

Police say they have launched a criminal investigation into why the dean didn't call them immediately when a distraught 14-year-old girl told him April 6 about an incident in a school bathroom involving a 14-year-old boy. Although upset, she told the dean that nothing had happened, said district sources who spoke on condition they not be identified. The dean called a parent and sent the girl home on a bus.

Instead, she went to the Taraval police station and reported that she had been forced to perform oral sex on the boy. The boy has since been charged in juvenile court with sexual assault and faces an expulsion hearing. The Marshall dean told police that he had been conducting his own investigation of the girl's accusations, police said. The dean has told investigators he intended to report the matter but wanted to do more fact- finding. State law requires that school officials notify police promptly when they suspect a crime has been committed on campus.....

Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman is out of town and could not be reached for comment. The senior member of the school board said he wanted a full accounting of how the Marshall assault allegation had been handled. "The district needs to get to the bottom of it," said board member Dan Kelly. "The district needs to be sure that every principal, every administrator needs to report sexual assault in a proper way. "If this report is correct, it's a very serious failure of the staff of Thurgood Marshall school," Kelly said. "No question about it."

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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22 April, 2005

PUBLIC SCHOOLS DON'T EVEN PROTECT CHILDREN

And nobody cares -- unless their negligence is publicized, of course

The horror that happened at Mifflin High School in Columbus, Ohio, is happening in public schools everywhere. While the names and ages of the young victims vary, one thing is constant across the country: spineless education bureaucrats more concerned about covering their hides than protecting innocent children from harm.

On March 9, according to press reports, a developmentally disabled girl told Mifflin school officials that four boys dragged her into the school auditorium, punched her in the head and face, pushed her to her knees, and forced her to have oral sex with two of them. A crowd of students watched, and one student videotaped the incident. The 16-year-old girl's lip was bloodied in the alleged gang attack; dazed and crying, her face swollen, she reported the assault immediately to her special education teacher, Lisa Upshaw-Haider.

One monstrosity was piled upon another. When the girl's father, who had been summoned to the school by the teacher, insisted on calling police, an assistant principal twice urged him not to call 911, according to Upshaw-Haider. Assistant Principal Rick Watson implored the girl's father to call the non-emergency police line instead of 911, a violation of Ohio state law, because "a news channel might tape his daughter and cause her further mental trauma," according to his statement to school investigators.

Meanwhile, according to witnesses, the school's principal, Regina Crenshaw, shuttered herself in a meeting about bell schedules and curriculum for a half-hour while underlings scrambled to perform damage control. Cover your ears, cower in a classroom, and pray that the media stay out of it. It's all about the children, right?

Witness statements revealed that none of the administrators bothered to call a nurse to assist the girl. Only after the girl's father called police himself did law enforcement come to the scene. By the time the cops arrived, all of the administrators had gone home for the day.

The principal is now in the process of being fired. The animals accused of assaulting the victim were suspended and may face criminal charges. But two of three assistant principals, including alleged cover-up man Rick Watson, are protesting their measly suspensions over the incident as "unwarranted." Worried as ever about his own hide, Watson said through a lawyer that he hoped to be "spared the public ordeal of a full hearing."

What about the girl's ordeal? As is frequently the case in these situations, this was probably not the first time the disabled student was attacked. Police are investigating claims that she had been previously assaulted on a school bus, and that boys had tried to disrobe her at school.

Public-school Pollyannas will dismiss the Mifflin High School horror story as an isolated case. Open your eyes. Smell the stench. It's in your neighborhood. The New York Post reported recently that assaulted or sexually abused students and staff members collected $6.9 million in negligence claims against the New York City school system in fiscal 2004, an 18 percent increase in payouts over the previous fiscal year. The largest settlement, $1 million, was awarded to a Bronx high school student whose classmates stabbed him in the head with a screwdriver. The school had refused his mother's request for a safety transfer before the assault.

In my home county, Montgomery County, Md., a local government report revealed that nearly 12,000 children ages 12 to 17 are bullied, abused or robbed by peers and others. Of that number, more than 1,000 are victims of sexual assaults. The school system, which is not required to inform police of these crimes, has been bombarded with complaints by parents that school officials ignored the victims or downplayed sexual assaults, including a number of incidents involving young girls attacked on local school buses.

These are heart-stopping nightmares every parent fears. You send your children to school to learn, not to be assaulted by classmates and abused by the negligent overseers of Public School Classrooms Gone Wild. If these assaults occurred in private schools, the institutions would be shut down. Instead, the government dance of the lemons continues, as abominable administrators skip away with "sensitivity training," "reassignment," and eternal protection from accountability.

From Michelle Malkin



OPPONENTS OF CHOICE ARE THE ENEMIES OF BLACKS

Parental choice has become a hot issue in this state. Unfortunately, it is generating the heat of controversy rather than the light of reason. Opponents of reform, including certain media, are now pulling out the race card and arguing that school choice will "re-segregate" public schools. That charge is not just false, it is hypocritical.

For all the anti-reformers talk and alleged concern, the fact is, today's public schools are disgracefully segregated. According to Harvard Professor Paul Peterson in his article School Choice: A Civil Rights Issue, "Despite the efforts of the civil rights movement, public schools today remain just as segregated as they were in the 1950s." There is ample evidence out there to support Mr. Peterson's contention. According to a published analysis of Department of Education data, 55% of public school 12th graders nationwide are in racially segregated classrooms (where more than 90% of students are of the same background) compared to 41% of private school 12th graders.

Anyone who wants local proof does not have to look far. South Carolina's record on race, justice, and equity is deplorable. Just look at a school district like Clarendon One. It is hard to imagine a school district more segregated (well over 90% Black) and one where the schools have failed the students so badly (95% of 8th graders cannot read and write at proficient level). Allendale County schools are almost 95% Black. Thanks to poor education, only 3% of Allendale students can qualify for the state's LIFE scholarship due to low SAT scores and GPAs. Jasper County's schools are 86% Black. Again, because of low achievement, less than 1% of students qualified for LIFE scholarships. Not a single one was Black. One shudders to think of the many lost opportunities for our children due to poor education that this system has provided them.

It is a shame and it is unjust that Blacks are stuck in this situation. But what is worse is that our so- called "champions of education" are working to keep Blacks in this system. Ultimately we must ask ourselves, "What sort of reform will bring about the change we need to expand opportunity?" In a word, we need choice and the power that goes with it. That is why I and other pastors across the state have formed a new association called Clergy for Educational Options (CEO). We believe school choice is a tool that will empower Black parents to the maximum extent possible and will give us the leverage necessary to secure an adequate education for all children.

Unfortunately, opponents of reform who are desperate and frightened about losing control over our children are playing the race card - saying that "school choice" is code for "re-segregation." This is a cynical, malicious attempt to kill a proposal that will finally give Blacks equal choice in education. Haven't we had enough racial hatemongering in this state's history?

Thankfully, Blacks across the state aren't buying this argument. To combat this bleak picture of lost opportunity and grinding poverty, Blacks are establishing their own schools with high academic standards, tight discipline, and absolutely first-class academic outcomes. Anyone who is skeptical should take a day trip to John's Island to see Capers Christian Academy, or visit Russellville to see Theresa Middleton's alternative school, just to name a few. Throughout the state, independent, Black-run schools are thriving, in spite of the segregation "warnings" of the education establishment. In fact, a new association comprised of black independent schools in the state (49 have been identified thus far), has been formally organized so that Black schools and parents will have an even greater voice.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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21 April, 2005

REVOLT OVER CLASS-SIZE THEORY

This report is from a long while back but I don't think it should be forgotten

A recently released report challenges the commonly held belief that students perform better when class sizes are reduced. This is one of the hottest issues in the current education debate and is the basis on which teachers' unions across Australia argue for increased staffing levels. The report, written by academic John Keeves and Victorian teacher Anthony Larkin was published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.

Its release will be like a red rag to a bull. Already there are indications that teachers will take industrial action on the staffing issue as soon as the school year begins.

Apart from questioning whether reducing class sizes automatically improves the quality of education, the report even suggests that students often achieve more when class sizes are increased. The authors found:

* That classroom practices do not vary greatly with class size and that the teacher's own individual style appears to be the main factor determining classroom activities:
* That more able students are placed in larger classes because remedial classes are traditionally small and year co-ordinators are more prepared to tolerate class sizes creeping up if they know the class contains more able students:
* That classroom practices that change with size have little influence upon achievement outcomes;
* That larger classes have enhanced occupational and educational aspirations, possibly because students responded to greater competition:
* That larger classes achieve more.

The report did find, however, that increased class sizes have a detrimental effect upon student attitudes towards science.

The report has been warmly received by the NSW Education Department but with misgivings by the NSW Teachers Federation.

"The report doesn't solve all the questions but it adds a new dimension to the debate about classroom sizes" says NSW deputy director of education, Mr Bob Winder.

Says Federation president, Mr Ivan Pagett: "I don't dispute the findings of the report - there is a body of research which shows there is no clear correlation between class sizes and achievement. However I am worried that the report will be misused to justify a cost-cutting exercise by the Education Department"

From p. 11 of the Sydney "SUNDAY TELEGRAPH", JANUARY 27, 1985



A BROKEN SYSTEM

According to a study recently released last month by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, high-school graduation rates in California are almost 20 percent less than those officially reported by the California Department of Education. While the state data show 87 percent of high-school students graduating in 2002, the Harvard study says the graduation rate was 71 percent. More shocking is the snapshot the study provides of minority graduation rates. Statewide, 57 percent of blacks and 60 percent of Latinos graduate from high school. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of blacks graduate....

Given that education is the principal predictor of future earning power, we are looking here at a classic cycle of poverty. This means that poor kids in L.A. are incapable of taking advantage of the single resource available to them - education - that can change their lives. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 1999, the earnings of full-time workers without a high-school degree were 77 percent the earnings of those with high-school degrees and 45 percent of those with bachelor's degrees. The gap between education and earnings widens over time. Back in 1975, those without high-school degrees earned 90 percent of those with high-school degrees and 58 percent of those with bachelor's degrees. Not only are inner-city high schools factories of hopelessness, but as society becomes more complex, with increasing demands for an educated work force, the hole just gets deeper for kids, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, who are not getting educated....

The frameworks for standards, reform and sanctions defined by No Child Left Behind are important reforms for our public school system. But the problem is our public school system itself. How do you fix a business that has no competition and for which government itself limitsthe possibilities for reform? Poor kids are simply trapped in a government school monopoly where the manner in which education is defined and administered and the values that are conveyed are by and large pre- scripted by a politically correct establishment..... Businesses that face competition deliver more and more for less and less. Monopolies deliver less and less for more and more. What else can we expect from the NEA and the government school monopoly than claims that spending is the answer for everything?...

We can educate these kids. But we need to open the education marketplace, take it out of the hands of the unions and monopolists, and let people who really want to help these families and their children have a chance with them.

More here



NCLB IS AN OPEN INVITATION TO FRAUD

According to the RAND Corporation, Texas boasted an 88 percent pass rate on its eighth grade reading test last year while South Carolina turned in a miserable 21 percent pass rate. Texas children read far better than South Carolinians, one might conclude. One would be wrong, though. On the standard National Assessment of Educational Progress, scores from these two states are nearly identical: South Carolina has a 24 percent "proficiency" rate compared with only 26 percent among Texans.

Different state exams were useful in a pre-NCLB world. Then, states set standards with an eye toward cleaning their own houses. Now they tailor tests and statistical methods to obscure reality, compromising the integrity of state systems to keep the federal government flying blind. Last year the state of Michigan reduced the number of "failing" schools under its care from 1,500 to 216. But this remarkable achievement was merely a statistical sleight of hand. Michigan lowered the minimum passing score on the state's assessment from 75 percent to a mere 42 percent, the Heartland Institute reports. Other states lower standards by manipulating their methods for reporting results. North Carolina increased the percentage of its schools reporting adequate progress from 47 percent to 70 percent last year. The increase is largely due to a technical change in the way the data are reported. Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee have made similar adjustments.

But state bureaucrats aren't the only ones with reason to dissemble. The Bush administration touted NCLB as a seminal domestic policy achievement. It wants the Act to appear successful, and it seems prepared to tolerate fuzzy math. The Department of Education has been complicit in these state shenanigans and others, approving technical obfuscations and plans that backload required progress to a time when both state and federal executive branches are sure to be in different hands. Just this week, the Department reversed a prior decision to agree with North Dakota that a teacher can be "highly qualified" by no other standard than having spent years in a public school classroom.

NCLB has states and feds smiling thinly across a mountain of paperwork like two cheating spouses in front of the children. Federal micromanagement of state testing regimens just wasn't a very good idea. The foregoing facts have inspired demands that Congress dump state tests in favor of national assessments, or empower federal bureaucrats with more minute control over schooling. But it is no solution to demand that the federal government toughen up. NCLB has already caused some homogenization of school curricula, a disturbing trend that may thwart fruitful experimentation by states and localities.

The No Child Left Behind Act should be ended, not mended. If the law were repealed, Congress could unearth some good proposals, like the House measure that would grant massive regulatory relief to "charter states" experimenting with real reform. Better yet, lawmakers could revisit an older idea: a plan to phase out the federal department entirely.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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20 April, 2005

BIBLE BANISHED AT A SCOTTISH UNIVERSITY

I guess it's mainly a game for the kids concerned but it is intolerant nonetheless

A students' association has called for the Bible to be removed from more than 2,000 university rooms because it could offend non-Christians. Stirling University Students' Association (SUSA) wants the Gideons Bibles taken out of all student rooms. Students said providing the Bible in all university accommodation was "presumptuous" and offensive to different religions on the campus. The university would not comment until SUSA submits its request next month.

A motion to have the Bibles removed was passed by 15-1 at a recent student council meeting. Seven members abstained. The council said representing one faith was not in the spirit of equality and cited the Scottish Executive's One Scotland Many Cultures campaign. SUSA president Al Wilson said: "The one thing that students have brought up is the fact that they do have Gideon's Bibles in their rooms. "They felt that this was not really fair on those students who practice other faiths. And it was promoting one faith over others. So we are trying to encourage the university to still retain the Bibles within the buildings themselves but not necessarily in the rooms." SUSA wants other faith texts provided to create a campus of "great diversity".

A former chaplain at the university said it was wrong to remove a book from a bedroom in a place of learning. The Reverend John Munro, of Kinross Parish Church, said: "I think there is an agenda here, seemingly politically correct. There is actually a hostility towards faith by those who have none. "This is repeating the worst of our errors, where the Christian faith used to have an intolerant attitude towards people of no faith."

Source



THE BASIC PROBLEMS OF TAX-FUNDED SCHOOLS

The nonmarket organization of education has a serious but unappreciated implication for the financing of schools: people do not know what they pay. As Myron Lieberman writes, “None of us knows the costs of public education, from our own pockets or the government’s. These costs are extremely diffuse and intermingled with others beyond identification. Even with the help of a supercomputer, it is impossible to ascertain what any individual is paying for education.”

Generally, it is easy to tell what we pay for the various goods and services we buy. But when every level of government, taxing us in a variety of ways, puts money into the schools, how can anyone know precisely what he has been forced to contribute?

That lack of knowledge has further consequences. Most people will not undergo the arduous effort to find out how much they pay. Many people will shrug and think, “What’s the point? I won’t be able to do anything about it anyway?” That understandable ignorance and weakening of responsibility suit the authorities just fine. They would prefer not to have the taxpayers looking over their shoulders, closely watching their decisions. It gives them substantial rein to spend money and to experiment with any fad in education theory that catches their fancy. The system’s inherent lack of accountability insulates the administrators from those who foot the bill and suffer the educational results. It also enables them to form close alliances with education professionals, who are seen as the experts who understand the “science” of education and child development, although there are excellent reasons for believing that those are bogus disciplines.

That mystification of financing creates fertile ground for bureaucratic irresponsibility. As noted in the Appendix, the financing of public schools has skyrocketed in recent years. It is unlikely that the taxpayers have even been aware of that fact. The system has been arranged to keep taxpayers in the dark. No, they are not prohibited from acquiring the information. But such acquisition is made so difficult that most people, busy as they are raising their families and making a living, will not have the time to navigate the backwaters of the bureaucracy. The division of labor, normally a blessing, is perverted so as to discourage people from exercising self-responsibility.

A related problem is that tax financing precludes market prices for educational services. Market prices do not only let buyers know what they are paying. They are the fruit of a complex communications process that encapsulates information about the relative scarcity of resources and conveys it to all participants in the marketplace. That information is crucial to intelligent planning by buyers and producers of services. It is at the very heart of market competition, which Nobel-laureate F.A. Hayek properly called a “discovery procedure.”

We live in a world of uncertainty, an open-ended world in which perfect knowledge is denied to us. Discovery of new things and methods is always possible. But discovery is fueled by incentives. As economist Israel M. Kirzner points out, in the marketplace, the lure of profit creates incentives for entrepreneurs to find unsatisfied needs and to devise ways of satisfying them. Those incentives do not exist in government schools.

In the market, entrepreneurs are accountable to consumers; they face the constant threat of financial loss. The alleged accountability of officeholders to voters is a mirage. It bears not real resemblance to the accountability of the marketplace. If the shoe-store operator misrepresents his product, there is recourse in the civil courts. Offended customers can take their business elsewhere without notice. They do not have to persuade over 50 percent of the other consumers to join in the boycott. That power held by the individual consumer in the marketplace—sometimes called consumer sovereignty—is lacking in the democratic administration of services such as education.

The inherent insulation of school boards (and other democratic bodies) from real accountability aggravates a phenomenon known as the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The law says that in almost any group endeavor, a small elite will emerge as the most active in determining the activities of the group. Even in a neighborhood bridge club, two or three people will show the most interest in running the group — finding a place to play, determining the game night, and so forth. The Iron Law asserts itself because people tend to have busy lives, and few will find the activity of such importance that they wish to invest an extraordinary amount of time. Of course, in a bridge club the Iron Law is benign. But that is not true with things such as school boards. Even if people might like to spend lots of times studying every aspect of the school system, attending board meetings, and the like, most simply cannot do it. Besides, as mentioned above, the return on the effort will seem too small. Those who can invest such time usually have a special interest in doing so—members of the teachers’ union, for example. In the end, school policy will be inordinately influenced by a small group of activists, not by the mass of taxpayers or parents….

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DC: Schools advocates to protest at ballpark opener "A coalition of advocacy groups, teachers and students upset about the disrepair of D.C. public schools plans to rally outside RFK Stadium Thursday, when tens of thousands of fans head to the Washington Nationals' home opener. 'It's not a negative action against baseball, but it is a statement about the city's priorities,' said Roger Newell, an organizer for the coalition, known as D.C. Public Schools Full Funding Campaign. 'It's a statement to say that if the city had the same enthusiasm for making repairs in the city schools as it did to get RFK Stadium ready for baseball, then 65,000 students would be in a lot better shape,' Newell said [Sunday]. Marc Borbely, another organizer, said the widespread public attention focused on Major League Baseball's return to the District is one reason the groups decided to hold the rally before and during part of the Nationals' first home game." They already get comparatively huge funding so the dissatisfaction shows that a total rethink is needed rather than more funding

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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19 April, 2005

CATHOLIC TEACHINGS WRONG AT A CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY?

Why go to a Catholic university if you don't like Catholic teachings? Is diversity among universities not allowed? Or must all universities conform to Leftist ideas?

Refusal to allow formation of a gay student organization at Duquesne University is fanning an extraordinary debate on the Catholic campus, where 119 faculty and staff are publicly urging the administration to reconsider. What is being framed by some as a struggle pitting diversity against school mission surrounds sophomore Matthew Pratter. He penned an opinion piece in the student newspaper, The Duquesne Duke, recounting his failed bid to gain approval for a gay-straight alliance on the 10,000-student campus. Pratter argued that at schools where they exist, such groups promote dialogue and discourage harassment. "It is crucial to combat the 'better dead than gay' lesson that so many young people are taught," Pratter wrote. "This outreach does not mean an official endorsement of homosexuality, but rather a desire to provide support for people who may need to be supported, and a voice for those who need to be heard."

Pratter, an education major, said he was told by campus authorities whom he did not identify that such a proposal was in conflict with the school's mission. "When I inquired further, I was informed there were no homosexuals that attended Duquesne University," he wrote. Pratter's piece, in which he described himself as gay, brought a flood of letters to The Duke for and against his position after it was published on March 3. The matter escalated this week with the surfacing of a petition addressed to Duquesne President Charles Dougherty that by yesterday had garnered 119 signers campus-wide, most of whom teach in disciplines from theology to business to pharmacy.

Dougherty was traveling and unavailable late yesterday. Spokeswoman Bridget Fare said the matter is under review even though Pratter apparently did not go through proper channels in making his request. "The president and the administration recognize that it's an issue of concern and reflection, not only for Duquesne, but for campuses across the country," Fare said. "[School leaders] are taking it under consideration. They're discussing it. Any decision will be made in light of the school's mission."

Pratter, 21, of Bryn Mawr, said in an interview yesterday that he's heartened by the response including other gay students who wrote to The Duke. "I'm not alone. There clearly are other students in my position as a gay student on a Catholic campus," he said. The petition was drafted by several professors involved in social justice issues and conveyed electronically across campus. Fred Evans, a philosophy professor who helped circulate it, said there are moral and educational issues involved beyond one's thinking on whether a group supportive of gays is any different from one that represents international students or African-American students.

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ANOTHER NUTTY PROFESSOR -- AT UCLA

Dr. James Barnard, a professor of Physiological Science at UCLA, is no one’s idea of a bon-a-fide professor. To the conservative, he is politically outrageous and intolerant. To the liberal, he is embarrassing and discomforting. To the apathetic, he is dreary and dull. Professor Barnard taught in the fall of 2004 the first half of Physiological Sciences 5, Diet and Exercise. (The second half was taught by Professor Roberts, a much better and apolitical teacher.) There are several features that became apparent to us from Barnard’s introductory lecture.....

It is also obvious from the get-go that Dr. Barnard is a pessimist. His very attitude and tone suggest a deeply-rooted negativity. Even in the most benign of things, Barnard finds an omen to global pandemonium. This observation is well documented on Bruinwalk.com, our professor ratings service. One student writes, “You are going to die. This is the message I got from the 2 and a half weeks of cardiovascular physiology I took from him…. The man has some sorta ultra-pessimistic outlook on life and is intent on convincing his students that a slow, painful death is at hand.”

The two biggest causes of concern are pesticides and cigarettes. Pesticides, of course, are the cause of infections, ailments, and even death. Meanwhile, cigarettes are deadly and wicked. Therefore, those that use pesticides and those that smoke cigarettes are bad, bad people. What makes Barnard an inductee to our Academian Nut series is not, however, his pessimism or his crippled logic. It’s what he holds to be the cause of his pessimism: capitalism and corporate America. In the first week of class, Barnard was already on his soapbox. “The greatest problem that we all face is corporate greed,” he announced. Corporations, he continued, are guilty in the production of destructive commodities and in the cover-up of their damaging effects on human life. And he wouldn’t stop. For a whole half hour, Barnard opined and pontificated.

As if this was not enough, he proceeded to show the class a one-sided documentary that slurred corporations that produce pesticides. The documentary, which interviewed “victims of corporate negligence” and representatives of various left-wing environmental groups gave legitimacy to Barnard’s claims. And to the interested students, Barnard was kind enough to recommend the book Crimes Against Nature by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The book is a ferocious hatchet-job on the Bush administration.

The opening lecture was so horrifyingly political, so biased, that nobody could dismiss the unfairness. A liberal student next to me said, “I agree with him and I can even admit that this is guy is a political hack. All he wants to do is shove his views on his students.”

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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18 April, 2005

VOODOO IN UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS

Every year about this time, high school students get letters of admission — or rejection — from colleges around the country. The saddest part of this process is not their rejections but the assumption by some students that they were rejected because they just didn't measure up to the high standards of Ivy U. or their flagship state university. The cold fact is that objective admissions standards are seldom decisive at most colleges. The admissions process is so shot through with fads and unsubstantiated assumptions that it is more like voodoo than anything else.

A student who did not get admitted to Ivy U. may be a better student than some — or even most — of those who did. Admissions officials love to believe that they can spot all sorts of intangibles that outweigh test scores and grade-point averages. Such notions are hardly surprising in people who pay no price for being wrong. All sorts of self-indulgences are possible when people are unaccountable, whether they be college admissions officials, parole boards, planning commissions or copy-editors.

What is amazing is that nobody puts the notions and fetishes of college admissions offices to a test. Nothing would be easier than to admit half of a college's entering class on the basis of objective standards, such as test scores, and the other half according to the voodoo of the admissions office. Then, four years later, you could compare how the two halves of the class did. But apparently this would not be politic.

Among the many reasons given for rejecting objective admissions standards is that they are "unfair." Much is made of the fact that high test scores are correlated with high family income. Very little is made of the statistical principle that correlation is not causation. Practically nothing is made of the fact that, however a student got to where he is academically, that is in fact where he is — and that is usually a better predictor of where he is going to go than is the psychobabble of admissions committees.

The denigration of objective standards allows admissions committees to play little tin gods, who think that their job is to reward students who are deserving, sociologically speaking, rather than to select students who can produce the most bang for the buck from the money contributed by donors and taxpayers for the purpose of turning out the best quality graduates possible. Typical of the mindset that rejects the selection of students in the order of objective performances was a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which said that colleges should "select randomly" from a pool of applicants who are "good enough." Nowhere in the real world, where people must face the consequences of their decisions, would such a principle be taken seriously.

Lots of pitchers are "good enough" to be in the major leagues but would you just as soon send one of those pitchers to the mound to pitch the deciding game of the World Series as you would send Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens out there with the world championship on the line? Lots of military officers were considered to be "good enough" to be generals in World War II but troops who served under General Douglas MacArthur or General George Patton had more victories and fewer casualties. How many more lives would you be prepared to sacrifice as the price of selecting randomly among generals considered to be "good enough"?

If you or your child had to have a major operation for a life-threatening condition, would you be just as content to have the surgery done by anyone who was "good enough" to be a surgeon, as compared to someone who was a top surgeon in the relevant specialty?

The difference between first-rate and second-rate people is enormous in many fields. In a college classroom, marginally qualified students can affect the whole atmosphere and hold back the whole class. In some professions, a large part of the time of first-rate people is spent countering the half-baked ideas of second-rate people and trying to salvage something from the wreckage of the disasters they create. "Good enough" is seldom good enough.

Source



COLUMBIA'S ROTC BIGOTRY

Columbia University, only a few miles north of Ground Zero, treats young people who are training to defend this nation as second-class citizens. You might think that, at a university where virtually every student and faculty member was directly affected by 9/11, there'd be respect and gratitude for ROTC. Reserve Officer Training Corps students, after all, seek to serve and protect their country and their community. Instead, President Lee Bollinger (who's also under fire over alleged anti-Semitism in his Mideast Studies Department) has said he allows ROTC recruiters at the Law School only "with regret," and ROTC itself is banned on the Columbia campus.....

At other schools, ROTC students receive regular course credit for their ROTC classes and conduct their other ROTC activities on campus. At Columbia, ROTC is barred; students who wish to add these activities to already demanding schedules may do so - but elsewhere, please. Columbia banned ROTC in 1969, a few months after the height of the famous campus demonstrations against the Vietnam war and all things military. Yet that knee-jerk anti-military attitude doesn't apply to today's Columbia students: Two years ago, a student referendum to bring ROTC back to campus passed with 65 percent of the vote.

The faculty is another matter. It took a year after the referendum before the faculty-dominated University Senate would even form a task force to study the isssue. After a year of town halls, email exchanges and committee meetings, the committee is deadlocked, 5 to 5, over whether to change the existing policy. The full Senate is set to decide on May 6.

ROTC opponents claim that they're not anti-military - that their opposition is solely related to the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. That's supposedly the one issue that has the committee deadlocked, because the policy doesn't match with Columbia's own non-discrimination policy. One can only wonder: If (God forbid) terrorists launched an attack at Columbia, would these critics block the gates of 116th and Broadway to prevent the military from entering the campus because "Don't ask, don't tell" violates Columbia's anti-discrimination policy?

Keep in mind that ROTC students have their tuition partially paid by Uncle Sam; checks are sent directly to Columbia from the "Don't ask, don't tell" U.S. Army. Columbia has yet to send any of those checks back. But the hypocrisy gets worse.

An official Columbia group, the Columbia Law School Center for the Study of Law and Culture, recently hosted a "teach-in" on this subject. Professor Michael Adler, who supports the return of ROTC, hoped the center would allow for a debate on the issue. In an email (provided to me by an ROTC supporter) to Professor Kendall Thomas, the center's co-director, Adler noted: "The fact is that most of us who support the return of ROTC to Columbia would be willing to make common cause with the law students" on certain aspects of the "Don't ask, don't tell" issue.

Professor Thomas replied, "A teach-in is being planned, which I believe will be a more productive use of the law school's resources, and its members' time." Thomas failed to explain how three hours of one-sided military-bashing would be "more productive" use of resources at a center of higher education. Debate is apparently inappropriate for the education of future lawyers......

More here



Tennessee: Teachers resist incentives: "The long-standing, contentious issue of incentive pay for Metro teachers is at a stalemate after the teachers union again opposed the idea last week. All nine Metro school board members say it's a good idea, especially for enticing teachers to schools with many low-income students. Those schools have grappled for years with low academic achievement by students and high turnover among teachers. While they haven't set a definite dollar amount, school board members want to offer a salary bonus to lure the best teachers to those schools. But salaries and all other teachers pay must be negotiated with the teachers union, which has declined further discussion. Among the objections: Teachers who don't get the bonus would feel slighted. 'We just think there's a better way to tackle the problem, that incentive pay is a political Band-aid that sounds good,' said Ralph Smith, Metro Nashville Education Association president."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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17 April, 2005

SCHOOLS DANGEROUSLY OUT OF CONTROL

The flying chair that knocked out a Cleveland high school administrator on Mon day should send alarms throughout the city. When going to class means risking a hospital visit, education stands no chance. And when adults look at chaos and call it order, they undermine the school district's credibility and put more students in jeopardy.

Monday's fracas at South High School that sent an administrator and a student to emergency rooms is only the latest example of uproar in local buildings. As Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett reported on Sunday, Glenville High School suffered an incident of its own last week that bloodied students and teachers and led to the arrests of two teens. Journalists' visits to Collinwood High School, meanwhile, have revealed an institution where students are completely comfortable loitering in hallways when they should be in class.

Disruptive students themselves bear first responsibility for this culture of unrest. Teenagers are old enough to know how they should act; those who choose to do otherwise ought to face discipline, up to and including expulsion. The parents of such youths also should be accountable. They are their children's first teachers, and at the least should impart respect for authority. At South High, however, police say a parent pitched in to injure a student, underlining the desperate need for church and community leaders to play a vocal and visible role in establishing basic standards for behavior.

But no matter how spectacularly those outside school walls may fail in their obligation to guide young people, education officials must do what is necessary to guarantee safety within their buildings. That means beefing up security, an area that took large hits in last year's budget cuts and now faces more reductions. Meanwhile, alternative schools - where the district assigns its most troublesome youths - also face closure. That's a recipe for more chaos and less learning.

Of course school officials want to devote the bulk of their shrinking resources to instruction, but reality dictates that security must command a hefty share of the budget. No one - much less a teenager - concentrates well in a state of constant fear. It is regrettable that meeting the demands of safety means spending less on other valuable programs, but district officials have no choice. They must stop declaring order and actually restore it.

Source



WHAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS NEED TO DO TO MAINTAIN ORDER

My home-schooled granddaughter and I went to have lunch with my public schooled granddaughter at her school recently. She wanted us to come have lunch with her. It cost $2.50 for me and $1.50 for granddaughter.

It sure wasn't like when we went to school. None of the kids were allowed to talk at all to each other during their lunch hour. After they finished eating, they had to read a book that they brought with them. There were monitors with eyes roving to and fro. If they order milk, they are forced to drink it all. It seemed to me more like I was in a prison cafeteria.

They had to get in no-talking lines to arrive and to leave, all in the same uniforms, and no talking of course, even in the rest rooms. If they talk in lines, they have to go to the principal's office. I sure didn't see much socialization going on there. My home-schooled granddaughter and I were glad to get out of there, and step back into freedom.

This report now seems to have gone offline but originally appeared in "The Ledger", Lakeland, Polk County, Florida, here on 14th April, 2005



Students apathetic, unknowledgeable about 1st Amendment : "Most high school students in the United States do not understand or are apathetic toward the First Amendment [guaranteeing free speech etc.], according to a survey released in January by the University of Connecticut. The survey suggests media studies classes and student journalism give students a greater appreciation and understanding of First Amendment rights than they would have without that background. For the project, 'The Future of the First Amendment,' commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, more than 100,000 students, almost 8,000 teachers, and more than 500 administrators and principals at public and private high schools were surveyed. 'These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous,' said Knight Foundation President and CEO Hodding Carter III in the Knight news release."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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16 April, 2005

Forget preferences — educate

Latino and African American professionals can get pretty worked up defending affirmative action. I know this firsthand. Whenever I mention to a group of them that I oppose racial preferences in college and university admissions, I get a tongue-lashing.

Not that I buy the argument that giving minority students a boost in admissions amounts to reverse discrimination against whites, especially white males. I don't. But I am convinced that preferences hurt intended beneficiaries by lowering academic standards and masking deficiencies in the education given to Latinos and African-Americans at the K-12 level.

I usually have trouble selling that line of reasoning to well-educated and well-off affirmative action beneficiaries, many of whom are so loyal to the program and so grateful for all it has done for them personally that they defend it with everything they've got because they're convinced they wouldn't have gotten anywhere without it.

But defending affirmative action is the wrong fight. Latino and African Americans should worry less about the admissions policies of college X or university Y and more about the everyday practices at elementary and secondary schools in this country. What should concern them is that so many public schools fail so dismally at educating minority students that relatively few will ever be in a position to benefit from affirmative action in the first place.

Just look at the depressing situation in California where, a recent Harvard study concluded, many of the schools that service primarily black and Latino students have become little more than "dropout factories." Some of those schools are in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduated with their class in 2002. That is compared to 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians. Statewide, according to the report, just 57 percent of African Americans and 60 percent of Latinos graduated on time, compared with 78 percent of whites and 84 percent of Asians......

We have this all backward. It is astounding and troubling that at the very moment when society demands more from those who come through our educational system, the trend among educators and public officials alike seems to be to demand less from students. And the way public education works, the less you ask for, the less you get. Now that's an argument that should resonate with Latinos and African Americans. Who knows? It might even convince them that the time has come to shift their concern away from defending affirmative action and toward fighting a battle that's really worth fighting — one to improve the entire educational system.

More here



ANOTHER FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT EDUCATION

The academic growth that students experience in a given school year has apparently slowed since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the education law that was intended to achieve just the opposite, a new study has found. In both reading and math, the study determined, test scores have gone up somewhat, as each class of students outdoes its predecessors. But within grades, students have made less academic progress during the school year than they did before No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002, the researchers said.

That finding casts doubt on whether schools can meet the law's mandate that all students be academically proficient by 2014. In fact, to realize the goal of universal proficiency, the study said, students will have to make as much as three times the progress they are currently making.

The study was conducted by the Northwest Evaluation Association, which develops tests for about 1,500 school districts in 43 states. To complete it, the group drew upon its test data for more than 320,000 students in 23 states, a sample that it calls "broad but not nationally representative," in part because the biggest cities, not being Northwest clients, were not included. One of the more ominous findings, the researchers said, is that the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students could soon widen. Closing the gap is one of the driving principles of the law, and so far states say they have made strides toward shrinking it. But minority students with the same test scores as their white counterparts at the beginning of the school year ended up falling behind by the end of it, the study found. Both groups made academic progress, but the minority students did not make as much, it concluded, an outcome suggesting that the gaps in achievement will worsen. "Right now it's kind of a hidden effect that we would expect to see expressed in the next couple of years," said Gage Kingsbury, Northwest's director of research. "At that point, I think people will be disappointed with what N.C.L.B. has done."

The findings diverge from those of other recent studies, including a survey last month by the Center on Education Policy, a research group. It found that a significant majority of state education officials reported widespread academic progress and a narrowing of the achievement gap. "This new study should give everybody pause before they run off and say, 'We're marching to victory,' " said Jack Jennings, the center's president. "Maybe we're not." ....

Still, the Northwest study tracked student performance at a level that others did not, a factor that may help explain why some of its findings appear unorthodox. Rather than relying on test scores at just one point in the year, the Northwest study looked at how students fared in the fall and then again in the spring, in an effort to see how much they had learned during the year. With this approach, Northwest found that test scores on its exams did, in fact, go up from one year to the next under No Child Left Behind, typically by less than a point. The reason successive classes appear to do a little better than those before them may stem from the fact that younger students have grown up during a time of more regular testing than their immediate predecessors, the researchers said, and are therefore higher achievers.

But rising test scores tend to mask how much progress individual students make as they travel through school, the researchers found. Since No Child Left Behind, that individual growth has slowed, possibly because teachers feel compelled to spend the bulk of their time making sure students who are near proficiency make it over the hurdle. The practice may leave teachers with less time to focus on students who are either far below or far above the proficiency mark, the researchers said, making it less likely for the whole class to move forward as rapidly as before No Child Left Behind set the agenda

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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15 April, 2005

FOUL LANGUAGE PERSISTS BECAUSE SCHOOLS TOLERATE IT

Dan Horwich's English class is a bastion of clean language, where students read the classics and have weighty discussions free of invective and profanity. But when the bell rings and they walk out his door, the hallway vibrates with talk of a different sort.

"The kids swear almost incessantly," said Horwich, who teaches at Guildford High School in Rockford, Ill. "They are so used to swearing and hearing it at home, and in the movies, and on TV, and in the music they listen to that they have become desensitized to it."

In classrooms and hallways and on the playground, young people are using inappropriate language more frequently than ever, teachers and principals say. Not only is it coarsening the school climate and social discourse, they say, it is evidence of a decline in language skills. Popular culture has made ugly language acceptable and hip, and many teachers say they only expect things to get uglier.

Horwich said he won't tolerate vulgarity in his classroom, and he tells students on the first day of school what he expects. But the 31-year-old teacher said he feels as though he is waging a losing battle -- and he isn't alone. Many teachers say that even if they can control their own rooms, only schoolwide efforts can make a real difference.

Teachers say their principals often don't give them support on the issue, and principals say they can't because administrators are worried about "bigger" problems. Many parents are no help, cursing themselves or excusing their children's outbursts, teachers say. And though many school systems ban profanity, not much happens to most offenders. Many teachers say they no longer bother reporting it.

More here



HAVE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES PASSED THEIR PEAK?

Here are a few snapshots of what's been happening on campuses in the last six months that has many parents I know up in arms: Duke University found itself in a crossfire after voluntarily hosting an anti-Israel group's annual national conference. The president of Columbia University had to appoint a commission to look into student charges that certain professors, with whose views on the Middle East conflict the students disagreed, were attempting to indoctrinate and intimidate them. Hamilton College issued a speaking invitation to a University of Colorado professor who had written an essay arguing that the 9/11 attacks were a justified reaction to U.S. policies abroad. And locally, a ruckus broke out at George Mason University after it invited filmmaker Michael Moore to campus -- and then disinvited him after receiving political pressure from Virginia lawmakers to cancel the speech.

Colleges have long been hotbeds of political agitation, of course. But where it was once students who did the acting out, as they spread their intellectual and philosophical wings, now the professors and administrators are more likely to be playing politics -- and more and more Americans with college-age kids are getting fed up with it. In 18 years of in-the-trenches experience counseling kids on their college choices, I've never seen the unhappiness as widespread as it is today. If colleges don't tone down the politics, and figure out how to control ballooning costs, they run the risk of turning off enough American consumers that many campuses could marginalize themselves right out of existence.....

As a consultant, I feel the need to advise my clients to cover all their political bases. Recently, I was advising an Eagle Scout who was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and wanted to highlight it on his college applications. But I worried that the national Boy Scouts' stand against homosexuals as scout leaders might somehow count against him in the admissions process at some schools. So I suggested that he get involved in an AIDS hotline to show his sensitivity to an issue often linked to the gay community. The need for this kind of double-thinking is good for my consulting practice, but I find it troubling. Yet trying to anticipate potential concerns about my students' backgrounds or qualifications is something I increasingly feel I have to do.

When I started counseling in the 1980s, many of my students told me that nothing but an Ivy League school would do for them. Now, many aren't sure that the Ivies -- where the political battles on campus are fiercest -- are worth the money. Last year, one of my students chose Lehigh over Columbia. It wasn't just that Lehigh offered him a full scholarship; he also thought the craziness of campus politics and the divisiveness at Columbia would distract the faculty and administration and hinder him in his goal of getting a solid education.

This year, the mother of one of my students reacted so negatively to the controversy at Columbia that she encouraged her daughter to apply early decision to the University of Virginia. She told me she felt that if the university was brushing intimidation by professors under the rug, then they must also lie about the crime rate on campus. A couple of weeks ago, a father called reacting to the fallout from the anti-Israel conference at Duke. He asked me outright whether Duke was anti-Semitic. I jokingly assured him that the school wasn't being run by the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, he decided that if his son really wanted to go there, the boy could find a way to pay the $30,720-a-year tuition himself.

A large part of the alienation I'm seeing stems from the widening economic disparity between the middle class and the universities. While the median income for a family of four is just a little over $62,000, middle-class families are regularly expected to come up with nearly $200,000 per child for four years of college. And tuition rates keep soaring. Brown University's yearly tuition, which was an already-hefty $14,375 in 1989, reached $30,672 last year. Loans are now 70 percent of financial aid packages, making college an increasingly sour deal for students, who are saddled with debt once they graduate. Meanwhile, 321 colleges and universities are sitting on endowments of $100 million or more, and scores of university presidents earn in excess of $400,000 a year.

But the sheer number of outlandish political controversies at universities across the country, coupled with escalating fees, is alienating parents from the very institutions they have been supporting through tax and tuition dollars. I'm not arguing that universities should teach only engineering, business and computer science. Liberal arts courses, taught in the context of free speech, have always helped open young minds to the excitement of the marketplace of ideas and to the value of even unpopular opinions. But that tradition seems to have been stood on its head. There is a world of difference between challenging students to think more broadly and trying to shoehorn them into a more narrow spectrum of thought, which many parents feel is happening.

To many consumers of higher education, colleges have lost their way and have strayed outside the mainstream. And the backlash is upon us. State governments, strapped for cash, see higher education as one place to cut costs; the U.S. House of Representatives considered legislation to rein in tuition in 2003; and there is now an advocacy group in Washington, College Parents of America, that lobbies for the increased involvement of parents in university communities. Even loyal alumni are pushing back -- in part, I believe, because of recent professor-led campus political battles. The national percentage of alumni donating to their alma maters has declined for three years in a row and is now below 13 percent....

Maybe we can learn from recent campus incidents. Maybe we can ask ourselves what we would like our universities to actually do. Maybe university communities can engage in real soul-searching to figure out how they can benefit both their students and the country in ways that the broader public can support. If they don't at least try, the university as an institution may have seen the heyday of its influence.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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14 April, 2005

THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE NEA

"Parents must not abdicate their parental responsibilities to their child's public school," says Finn Laursen. Laursen is executive director of Christian Educators Association International (CEAI). He is himself a product of public schools and worked 32 years in public schools.

Founded in 1953, CEAI became the first national organization of professional Christian educators working in public, private and charter schools. From the beginning, the group has served the education community by encouraging, equipping and empowering Christian educators in public and private education.

For many, CEAI is the perfect alternative to the National Education Association, a teachers union that has been leaning hard to the political left for decades. Like NEA, CEAI provides many benefits for its members, such as professional liability insurance. It also views teaching as a God-given calling and ministry and promotes the Judeo-Christian ethic in public schools.

CEAI does not become involved in local school debates. However, when moral concerns or parental rights are at stake, CEAI is eager to see parent-friendly results. For example, in Lawton, Oklahoma, CEAI regional director David Williams learned in January that the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) was attempting to form an affiliate at his son's high school. Lawton is a city of 81,000 in southwest Oklahoma.

Williams, who teaches in another school district, went into action. First he sought prayer from believers in the area. The local paper published his letter to the editor, and he enlisted the help of KVRS radio station manager Dan Allen. KVRS is the local American Family Radio station. Next came a local TV story addressing equal access and parental involvement. Local church members distributed materials by former homosexuals to students at the high school. Hundreds of e-mails went to local politicians, school board members, teachers and parents.

"To make a long story short," says Williams, "the club was voted down by the student government. What was intended to quietly appear without parent notification was thwarted." One result of the project was a practical 10-step plan of action that Williams will furnish to others who face the homosexual agenda in local public schools. (Williams can be contacted at davidw@ceai.org)

As a former public school counselor and administrator, Laursen agrees that teachers legally function in the role of parents when they supervise and teach children during the school day. However, he says schools should always respect the parent-child relationship.

As an example Laursen recently commended the school board in Roseville, California, for its decision regarding students leaving campus for medical procedures, including abortion. The school board was expected to amend district policy to allow students to secure such procedures without parental knowledge. However, when parents learned of the proposed change, they packed the January 4 board meeting and found the board responsive to their concerns and rights.

School spokesman Larry Brubaker told AFA Journal that, while this issue is certainly divisive in many school systems, the Roseville board stood with their parents. "The school will not release students for medical reasons without parental permission," he said. The city of 45,000 is near Sacramento and has 8,000 students in its school district.

More here



FROM AN INSTRUCTOR AT THE VIRGINA MILITARY INSTITUTE:

A great stimulus for Leftist bigotry

"So what's it like to teach in a uniform?" asked the Post-Colonialist as he turned ever so slightly, revealing UC-Whatever on his nametag.

"Gee, I guess I've never thought about it. You first; what's it like to teach in jeans and Birkenstocks?"

Silence (and no more Camembert on the plate); he has no answer simply because there could be no answer to such an inane question. Obviously the Post-Colonialist links his professional persona to his teaching and his research, not to his wardrobe. Who among us does not?

But the professional activity of academics that teach at a military school always comes second - if at all - to curiosity about the institutional aspects of our positions, especially in juxtaposition with the accepted archetype of the American professor, molded by the political activity of the sixties and cultivated by the visibility of the left-wing power structure within higher education.

"I think it would be far too stressful for me to teach children of Republicans," the Multiculturalist commented over cappuccino in Padua, after expounding on profiling as a bigoted, narrow-minded policy of Eurocentrists.

I was tempted to ask if children of Republicans, indeed, young Republicans themselves or - God forbid - conservative professors were forced to stay in a closet of their own at her college, whose mission statement, after all, stipulates diversity in regards to race, gender and religion, but makes no mention of political affiliation. Would she have them wear a bright red R lest they enroll in her classes or sit next to her in the faculty lounge?

I shuddered to think how any of us would react to a colleague making the same statement, substituting party preference with an ethnic, gender or religious denomination: "It would be far to stressful for me to teach children of a gay couple . to teach children of Arab immigrants . to teach children of "fill-in-the- blank" (then run for cover). Yet no one else at our table seemed to view her statement as bigoted or even the slightest bit outrageous, as the comment encompassed a group considered marginal but not conceded full minority privileges; no hyphen, no prefix, no slashes or parentheses.

"So," remarked the Feminist, cutting her breakfast sausage into tiny little morsels with both purpose and vengeance, "you lived in Spain during the Franco years and now you're back to fascism." The effortlessness with which she had established her analogy between a totalitarian regime imposed through a military coup and the academic environment in which some of her colleagues and their students have freely chosen, far surpassed arrogance to border frighteningly on ignorance. I imagined her at countless rallies, proudly marching behind her sign "Keep Your Laws Off My Body," and wondered how many times she had become infuriated with the small-mindedness of those who do not respect the right of each individual to do with her life as she chooses.....

Ours is the honor of teaching young men and women who have vowed, like generations before them, to uphold and defend those liberties all Americans hold so dear but too often take for granted. Many of them may be asked to pay the ultimate sacrifice so that the Queer Theorist can continue to speculate over wine and cheese; so that the Post-Colonialist may never have to wear a uniform, unless it be of his own choosing; so that the Multiculturalist may continue to enjoy a cappuccino in Padua, some Bordeaux in Paris, or a mate in Patagonia; and to ensure that no one ever deny the Feminist her First Amendment right to label them "fascists".

But the differences between college students and cadets, mainstream teaching assignments and ours, extend beyond the temporal and spatial characteristics of our respective professional environments and are best represented by the ethical code and personal sacrifices that intrinsically define the four-year cadetship. Cadets live by an Honor Code, which they themselves enforce. They answer questions truthfully, even if it means personal embarrassment or disciplinary consequences, because they have vowed not to lie as part of their Honor Code, and they leave a twenty-dollar bill laying on the street if it is has not fallen from their pockets, lest they violate their pledge not to steal. Having sworn to choose "integrity over personal gain," cadets do not copy, plagiarize, or cheat in any other way, and the few that do face the shame of dismissal. Professors at VMI do not take attendance, inflate grades or even proctor exams.

The cadets' rigid schedule requires a strong mind, body, and spirit, and the discipline needed to meet expectations permeates the classroom atmosphere as much as the parade ground or the obstacle course. Cadets thrive on inquiry and debate, exuberantly entering the open forum of intellectual exchange where their opinions, contributions, and inquest are not only accepted, but welcomed. They realize that understanding another language, other cultures, and respect for different value systems and ideologies will be as vital to their success, maybe even survival, as the firing of a weapon or the flying of a plane....

It is not the uniformity of the ranks, but the individual commitment and selflessness of each cadet there that inspires the profound respect and admiration I hold for them. This nation owes so much of its greatness to a series of Others - there have been many. Our cadets are this century's campus Radicals; I revel in their Otherness and they teach me to cherish my own.

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Direct loan taxpayer ripoff: "This year marks the 40th anniversary of the guaranteed student loan program for college students. The program, created by Lyndon Johnson as part of the Great Society, has made college affordable for thousands of students. But it also has had a scandal-plagued past, with billions of dollars of unpaid loans and massive taxpayer losses and has contributed to the runaway inflation in college tuitions. In theory at least, student loans are supposed to be paid over time once the students graduate and start working. Through the 1970s and '80s, the student loan default and delinquency rates were scandalously high. Tens of thousands of financially successful professionals walked away from their loans with relative impunity. Stories of highly paid doctors, engineers and lawyers defaulting on loans were commonplace. ... Taxpayers got socked with a multibillion-dollar tab."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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13 April, 2005

NO DIVERSITY OF THINKING OR FREE SPEECH ALLOWED AT DE PAUL UNIVERSITY

During his 14 years at DePaul University, Thomas Klocek dwelled in adjunct-professor purgatory, quietly coming and going times a week from his Loop classroom and his home on the city's Southwest Side. His evalutions from students in the university's School of New Learning were consistently positive-and that, apparently, was enough for his bosses because nary a supervisor visited his classroom. Klocek's invisibility ran out, however, one day in September when he got caught up in a heated debate at a student activities fair on the school's downtown campus. He stopped at a table where two student groups-Students for Justice in Palestine and United Muslims Moving Ahead-were distributing literature likening the Israelis' current treatment of Palestinians to Hitler's treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

Klocek recalls telling the eight students present that "technically speaking, there is no such country as Palestine." An impassioned exchanged followed, culminating in Klocek scoffing at the students' literature and thumbing his chin in a way they interpreted as an offensive hand gesture. "I said that the term `Palestinian' was a fairly newer phrase that came into vogue in the 1970s, with Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization," whereas people from that part of the Middle East previously identified themselves as Arabs, he says.

The students complained to the university, and within 24 hours Kloceck was called into the office of his dean, Susanne Dumbleton, and asked to withdraw from his fall class with pay. Kloceck, who has been working on his PhD at the University of Chicago while teaching, felt his free speech had been violated and sought out a lawyer, John Mauck, who specializes in First Amendment and free-speech issues. Since then, the matter has received attention nationally on conservative talk radio and the New York Post, but not much in the local news.

Mauck said he decided to take the case after reading an October 8 letter from Dumbleton printed in the school's newspaper, The DePaulia, after Dumbleton advised Klocek not to speak to the press. Mauck took particular umbrage at a passage that focused on the content of Klocek's speech rather than his conduct toward the students: "No students anywhere should ever have to be concerned they will be verbally attacked for their religious belief or their ethnicity," Dumbleton wrote. "No one should ever use the role of teacher to demean the ideas of others or insist on the absoluteness of an opinion, much less press erroneous assertions."

Says Mauck, "That's what got me going," he said. "This was about content, not conduct."

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POOR BRAINWASHED SODS

It's getting hot in here - on the planet, that is. And anyone who doesn't believe global warming is a serious problem might just as well argue that Earth ends at the horizon line. That's the message from a group of students at Vermont's Middlebury College, who set up the first annual Flat Earth Award during their recent winter-term class on climate change and activism. Visitors to the website (www.flatearthaward.org) can vote to give the mock award to one of three nominees targeted as global-warming naysayers: radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, scientist Fred Singer, and novelist Michael Crichton. The "winner" will be announced April 18 by the Green House Network in Oregon, the nonprofit group that oversaw the student project.

In this month leading up to Earth Day on April 22, students on campuses across the country are getting in touch with their inner activist - whether it's by "ticketing" SUVs or starting a dialogue with local auto dealers about the need for fuel efficiency.

Middlebury's class tapped into students' intensifying concerns about the environment and was one response to a paper presented last year by two environmentalists - one a pollster and the other the head of a progressive organization - raising the provocative idea that environmentalism is dead. Through hands-on projects, students were challenged to help broaden the movement by reaching out to people who might not consider themselves activists or environmentalists.....

Setting up the award was a refreshing counterpoint to her typical academic work in sociology, Ms. Brown says. "You always talk about Marx's ideas of social movements or kind of abstract ideas ... [but in this class] you actually see people getting involved and getting really excited about changing things."

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THE RACE WARRIORS AT BERKELEY HATE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

UC Berkeley's new chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, sounded the opening priority for his administration Thursday by issuing a call to action on a student diversity crisis at the highly ranked university. Citing the drop in under-represented minorities on campus, especially African Americans, Birgeneau called for research into refining admissions standards and finding the best ways to create a more multicultural campus. "Part of what I'm trying to accomplish as a new chancellor here is to say this really is a crisis," Birgeneau said in outlining his agenda to reporters at a campus faculty club. Birgeneau's diversity campaign -- including an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times on March 27 -- represents his first major public initiative since becoming chancellor in September. The former University of Toronto president will have his formal inauguration ceremony on April 15. "We're not meeting our obligation as a public institution because we're underserving in an extreme way a significant and increasingly important part of the population, which actually is going to be the majority population," he said.

Birgeneau blamed the drop in numbers on Proposition 209, the 1996 voter- approved initiative that banned affirmative action based on race and gender for state and local agencies, including the university. The number of African Americans in Cal's 1996-97 freshman class, before Prop. 209 took effect, was 260, while the 2004-05 class has only 108, with fewer than 40 males, he said. "Out of 3,600 freshman students, that's just a shocking number," he said. Even more striking, he said, is that there is not even one African American among the approximately 800 entering students in engineering, whose faculty was ranked best in the world [coincidence, of course] in a recent survey by The Times of London newspaper. He said enrollment numbers for Latino and Native American students were similarly deplorable.

Former UC regent Ward Connerly, who headed the Prop. 209 campaign, sharply criticized Birgeneau in a recent newspaper column. Noting that the initiative won 55 percent to 45 percent, Connerly wrote, "In the private world, Birgeneau would either be fired or taken behind the woodshed for revealing such disregard for the people who pay the bills."

He said he had no intention of flaunting [flouting?] the law but said he wanted to explore whether more could be done under the current "comprehensive review" admissions process, which considers a variety of factors besides test scores.

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12 April, 2005

ALL KIDS ARE NOT EQUAL: HOW DISTRESSING!

Reality has got too much to ignore in England

A secondary school in Hampshire is to become the first state school in England to allocate all children to lessons by ability rather than age. From September, pupils at Bridgemary School, in Gosport, will be taught in mixed-age classes in a radical initiative aimed at stretching the most able and helping pupils who have fallen behind. The experiment abandons the decades-old convention of teaching in age groups and is being closely watched by the local authority, the Office for Standards in Education and other schools.

Under the plan, which signals that streaming by ability is back in favour with head teachers, bright 12-year-olds will be encouraged to begin GCSE or even A-level courses with older pupils. Conversely, 14- or 15-year-olds with literacy or numeracy problems will share classes with pupils who have just transferred from primary school.

Cheryl Heron, the head teacher, said the radical departure was necessary to raise standards because most pupils at the school fail to gain five good GCSEs. "This is a challenging school in a deprived area," she said. "We need to do something about raising standards and to do that, we need to try something different. About a quarter of children are getting five A* to C GCSEs but that is not good enough. We need to offer these children individual curriculums in smaller groups. We have children here who are capable of doing A-level work but we also have pupils who still struggle with the basics. Their ability is not necessarily age-related. Some are bored because they are not being challenged in classes with their own age group, while others are turning off school because their lessons are too difficult for them. The normal way of doing things is not getting the most out of children."

Pupils who are currently in year groups will be allocated to one of five levels, depending on their ability in each subject. All pupils will take accredited academic or vocational qualifications, whatever their level. Ability is assessed by results in national tests taken at age 11, teacher judgments and children's performance in tests which the school carries out when they join. Termly assessments of the classes, which will have 20 pupils each rather than the current average of 28, will be carried out to gauge whether children should be moved up or down in various subjects.

Mrs Heron said the school, which has 1,100 pupils, had tested the plan when it transformed traditional tutor groups into mixed age "learning groups". "We found there were no problems with having older and younger children together. In fact, we were surprised about how well they bonded and learnt together," said the head, who was described by Ofsted as an "excellent leader who was driving the school forward".

The school's plan takes streaming to a new level and is part of the resurgence in support for differentiating by ability, once condemned as anti-comprehensive. Many schools had moved to mixed-ability classes because it was claimed they would help less able pupils by removing the stigma of being in the lowest set and encourage them to aim for the standards achieved by more able classmates. As schools at the bottom of the league tables have struggled to raise standards, however, a number have returned to streaming in some or all classes. It is estimated that 60 per cent of secondaries now employ some form of streaming.

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WHO CARES WHAT SORT OF BUILDINGS A GOVERNMENT SCHOOL USES?

The Leftist government of the Australian State of New South Wales certainly doesn't care at all. No wonder 40% of Australian teenaged students go to private schools

Almost 16 months after their school was ravaged by fire, students from a Sydney primary school are still having lessons in makeshift classrooms while they wait for repair work to start. Parents are outraged at what they say is an unacceptable delay in rebuilding Carlingford Public School, gutted after an arson attack in December 2003. The fire was one of 77 blazes in NSW schools in 2003-04, causing more than $26 million in damage. The cost of repairing Carlingford Public has been estimated at $2.5 million, a small fraction of the capital works backlog in NSW schools.

While the NSW auditor-general revealed in November a maintenance backlog of more than $115 million in the state's public schools, the Department of Education does not keep figures for capital works projects that have not been approved or submitted.

Opposition education spokesman Jillian Skinner said anecdotal evidence suggested the backlog of capital works projects was "hideously severe", adding that buildings were "falling down and need to be replaced".

The 310 students at Carlingford are housed in demountable classrooms, and temporary rooms have been set up for the library, hall, canteen, staff room and administration. Adding insult to injury, 17 of the school's new computers, bought to replace those damaged in the fire, were stolen two weeks ago from one of the demountable classrooms which was inadequately secured.

Carlingford Public's Parents and Citizens Association president James Vianellos said the temporary classrooms had created a security issue at the school, and the appearance of the blackened building had damaged enrolment numbers. "The building is quite an eyesore," he said. "We had people last year who pulled their kids out of the school because they believed it couldn't function and wasn't going to be an adequate educational institution for their children."

A spokesman for Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said tenders for the rebuilding of Carlingford Public would be put out next month, and he expected work to begin in early July.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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11 April, 2005

TERRORIST PROFESSOR AT NORTHWESTERN

By a student

"On its official Web site, Northwestern offers an impressive biography of Law Prof. Bernardine Dohrn, detailing her work in children's law, her educational background, her academic appointments and other notable accomplishments. The university's profile curiously omits one of her most significant leadership positions: She was a principal organizer of the Weathermen, a radical cabal, during the late 60s and early 70s.

Among its many criminal exploits, the group claimed responsibility for no fewer than 12 bombings between 1970 and 1974, and Dohrn spent a decade hiding from federal authorities to avoid prosecution for assaulting a police officer.

A basic Internet search turns up additional details regarding Dohrn's checkered past, including a New York Times article which, ironically, hit newsstands on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The story featured Dohrn and her husband, Bill Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, about their days as domestic terrorists. In one of several outrageous statements, Ayers said he "did not regret setting bombs," concluding the Weathermen "did not do enough" in the way of violence. A search also turns up Dohrn's mug shot from when she was on the FBI's list of 10 most wanted fugitives in 1970.

Offended by Dohrn's statements and actions, and concerned that my tuition may help to pay the salary of an unrepentant former terrorist, I tried to contact her to set up an interview. I hoped Dohrn would be willing to condemn some of her crimes and strike a note of reconciliation. Dohrn would not even speak to me, however, and her assistant informed me that she only discusses her radical days with "certain magazines." ......

Dohrn's presence at NU can hardly be classified as breaking news. However, the fact that NU employs someone with Dohrn's past is astounding, and her stonewalling has not assuaged my concerns."

More here



THE DESTRUCTIVE NEA

Our educational institutions at all levels are under the wing of the National Education Association, which controls teacher certification, resists higher standards and has great influence on curriculum at all levels Our Boards of Education, across the country, are as putty when acting as balance wheels to the onslaught of the teachers union. As Mark Twain Wrote, " In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards." They have become as irrelevant to being productive administrative forces in school systems as a Volkswagon is to moving forward while an 18 wheeler sits on top of it.

Boards are comprised of nice people in a community who want to do good, are generous with their time, are civic minded and love children but are usually untrained for the task assigned. They generally are no match for the hard core union pros and the end result has been over 50 years of allowing outsiders with secular and socialist intentions to develop the minds and the thinking of the nation's children. In terms of meeting the needs of students for having the tools to compete in the outside world we have as impotent a force in trying to educate as we have in a United Nations pretending to meet human needs around the globe.

There was a time when the schools were considered standard bearing agencies of American culture, ethics, mores and values along with such institutions as churches and charities but not anymore. When parents allowed political correctness, multiculturism, secularism and collectivism to permeate the hallowed halls of learning it thus allowed education to become a godless pop culture with a faddish regimen rather than a viable and intellectual spiritual force to aid in productive learning.

The whole object of education allegedly is to develop the mind but in too many schools across the country they are leaving the buildings which we call schools quite unprepared for the variances of life.

We cannot escape the past nor can we foresee the future. In molding the minds of children you determine the fate of a nation. Political correctness is and has been a disease with both stultifying and repressive pressures. The proof is in the present results of an educative discipline which is organized chaos but has definitive political goals.

We have found that teachers, whether they be hard core socialists, groupies who are robotic followers, the meek who can't be bothered or the solid ones who only wish to teach and be left alone are and have been supporting a Union which has spent millions upon millions of dollars to support and abet a Bill Clinton in the nineties and a John Kerry in the recent past. Now these are not just run of the mill aspirants in politics. These are people who openly and effectively worked solidly against their country in whatever way they could in order to gain personal and political power.

At a time when his country was at war Clinton fled to England and then to Russia where he groveled at the feet of the communists. He was said to be in England as a Rhodes Scholar but he didn't stay long enough for his second cup of tea. It is not known whether he ever attended a class since the posse was on its way. During the Iraq war he actually toured Europe and spoke against his own country. Kerry is of the same breed. He encouraged the Vietnamese during that war and helped to subvert the military while joining hands with Jane Fonda against his own country. After losing the presidential election in November of 2003 and while we are still at war in Iraq this man has had the gall to visit and speak to our troops against our country. Both of these men emboldened the enemy in time of war thus causing overtly and surreptitiously more deaths of our own soldiers.

Both of these men have been energetically supported by the teachers Union. What does that tell you? What kind of faith can you possibly keep relative to those who are teaching your children. Where is the focus on the learning process. . Is it no wonder that students today are graduating with deficiencies in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history and all the basics for which they are being sent to school?

You might find, especially in the blue states, pockets of schools where they have fine management, dedicated teachers and competent Boards of Education but their location, at times, are like seeking the page numbers in the Reader's Digest. As William Lowe Bryan once reported, "Education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get." The whole object of education allegedly is to develop the mind but in too many schools across the country youth is fleeing the buildings, which we call schools, quite unprepared for the variances of life.

Across the country there has been no set pattern but there has been an underlying ideology aimed at creating values foreign to our culture and to our way of life. The examples are too numerous for these pages but there may be room for a few. There are schools which have eliminated the Valedictorians and the Salutatorians at graduation since their ability to excel would most assuredly destroy the self-esteem of their peers. Classrooms have indicated that a child has given the correct answer if responding that 2 + 2 equals 5. Thus self- esteem is protected. Prayer in school had to be abolished whether in a group or individually since others should not be subjected to such a mundane act. A number of schools across the country quit using red ink on papers because red is too shocking and traumatic for children. The school district in Fairfax, Virginia (of all places) strictly prohibits reciting the Lord's Prayer but during the Islamic holy month the students were exposed and indoctrinated in that religion's customs, practices and prayers. In other schools students could be sent home for wearing a necklace with a cross. There are schools which no longer display the American flag nor pledge allegiance. There are schools which have taken down the picture of George Washington. There are schools which teach a secular and socialist revision of American History and where the space for Marilyn Monroe is in excess of the limited pages for Washington or Lincoln. In Ypsilanti, Michigan a wrestling coach had to stop leading his team in prayers or the ACLU would sue. In other schools the Declaration of Independence cannot be exposed since the word God is in it. It has been an ongoing credo in a huge number of public schools that students be promoted whether they passed the grade or not. A high school graduate with a second grade education thus is sent out to fight the battle for his livelihood quite unprepared.

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What's wrong with politics in the United States? "It is commonly argued that education is too important to leave to market forces. However, I take the position that education is so important that it must be left to market forces. Education cannot markedly improve without diversity. Without consumer demand to set the price structure it cannot be known which teaching methodologies are the most effective. Without diversity and consumer choice in education any reform is a shot in the dark. Throw in teacher union lobbying and other politicizing that we see today and the result can only be increasing costs for decreasing quality. The children lose most of all."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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10 April, 2005

CHANGE AFOOT IN BRITAIN?

Parents would be given more control over their children's education, with the "ultimate sanction" of ousting the management of failing state schools, under plans being unveiled next week in Labour's election manifesto. The proposal is designed to correspond with similar measures for expanding the private and voluntary sector's role in the NHS, as well as giving people more say in the operation of police and local authority services. Tony Blair believes the radical nature of such third-term reforms will show that the scale of new Labour's ambition remains undimmed after eight years in government.

The manifesto is understood to have been agreed with Gordon Brown in unexpectedly trouble-free negotiations over recent days. This reflects an apparent rapprochement between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. Friends deny there is any formal succession deal, but Mr Blair is privately acknowledging Mr Brown as his heir apparent.

Although most of the policy platform has been announced previously, the "parent power" plan goes further than last summer's five-year education plan. This had proposed allowing the private or voluntary sector to take over management of failing schools put into "special measures" by Ofsted inspectors. In February David Bell, the Chief Inspector of England's schools, said that 332 - 1.5 per cent of the total - were in "special measures". This figure is almost double that for last year. Labour's manifesto will now promise that "parental satisfaction surveys" should also be one of the key determinants of judging whether a school is failing.

Groups of parents will be given the chance to apply to run the school and appoint a new head teacher. Teaching unions and local council leaders have expressed reservations about these "independent specialist schools". The policy is based on a similar system in Sweden where parents have set up schools and taken over responsibility for running others. Ministers say that closure of a school or the replacement of its management should be only the last resort. Instead, they want parents to be more closely involved in their children's education by giving them e-mail addresses for teachers and more places on school governing bodies.

Labour will guarantee that there will be no extension of academic selection in state schools and that equal access to NHS care will remain free at the point of delivery. John Reid, the Health Secretary, has already assured unions that he does not foresee the proportion of NHS operations being performed by the private sector rising above 15 per cent.

Source



EDUCATION: THAT GOOD OLD MONEY TROUGH FOR LEFTISTS -- MUSLIMS NOW WELCOMED IN TOO

The wife of an influential Muslim cleric was sentenced to house arrest and probation Monday in a corruption investigation that became public when an FBI bug was discovered in the mayor's office. Faridah Ali was convicted in October on charges she conspired to defraud a city community college of about $224,000 by setting up an adult-education program involving ghost students and nonexistent classes. She was sentenced to five years' probation, one year of which she must serve under house arrest. She also must pay $30,000 in restitution and a $2,300 fine. [Why only $30,000?]

The case was based partly on financial records, and partly on FBI wiretaps that recorded Ali discussing the scheme on the telephone. It was related to a broader federal corruption probe that became public when a listening device was found in the office of Mayor John F. Street. Street has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing, but the city's former treasurer and several others are now on trial over how they negotiated government contracts.

Ali is married to Shamsud-din Ali, a Muslim leader known for his close ties to city Democrats. Both Alis are awaiting trial on racketeering charges more closely related to the corruption probe.

Source



Why equal education funding isn't as easy as apple pie: "When a judge in February ordered New York State to spend an extra $5.6 billion to bring New York City school funding up to the level of surrounding counties, he left a question unanswered: How much difference will all those billions make for children in failing schools? Unfortunately, based on studies of spending patterns in New York and other big-city school systems, the answer is 'not much.' That's because of the dark secret that our research has uncovered: Some big-city schools get plenty of money. We have studied actual spending on every school in six big urban districts. Knowing that districts' official budgets ignore many factors that drive spending -- for example, differences in the salaries paid teachers in one school versus another, or differences in the services particular schools get from the central office -- we followed every dollar."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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9 April, 2005

SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

The color red has become an issue for school officials across the country. Some schools have now put red on the blacklist for marking students' work. At Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, Conn., teachers are no longer grading papers in red ink. Parents complained that students get stressed out by red ink. Blue and other colors are now being used. Red has become so symbolic of negativity that some principals and teachers across the country are not touching it.

Joseph Foriska, the principal of Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pa., has instructed his teachers to grade with colors with more "pleasant-feeling tones" so that their instructional messages do not come across as derogatory or demeaning.

Top pen and marker manufacturers -- including Bic, Pilot Pen and Sanford, which produces Papermate and Sharpieare -- are making more purple pens in response to rising rising demand. The companies say principals and teachers are largely driving that demand.

The disillusionment with red is part of broader shift in grading, said Vanessa Powell, a fifth-grade teacher at Snowshoe Elementary School in Wasilla, Alaska. "It's taken a turn from 'Here's what you need to improve on' to 'Here's what you've done right,"' Powell said. "It's not that we're not pointing out mistakes, it's just that the method in which it's delivered is more positive." Her students, she said, probably would tune out red because they are so used to it. So she grades with whatever color -- turquoise blue, hot pink, lime green -- appeals to them.

Source



THE DRUG WAR IS EVERYWHERE

As random police checks are introduced to the Scottish Highlands, there are fears that Britain's drug culture has taken root even in the remotest areas

For the 1,700 inhabitants of Kingussie, there is normally little to gossip about other than the latest new neighbours from England, attendance levels at the local line-dancing classes and the next bingo tea for the village shinty club. This week the tiny community, on the banks of the River Spey and between the Cairngorm and Monadhliath mountains, is being forced to confront a topic that is threatening to tarnish its image as a remote Highland idyll: drugs. The 393 pupils at Kingussie High School are to be subjected to random drug checks by police sniffer dogs.

Two other nearby schools are likely to follow suit after the Northern Constabulary gave warning that, even in one of Europe's last great wildernesses, the area used to film the television drama Monarch of the Glen, the smoking of cannabis "is replacing a cigarette behind the bike shed".

Although the use of police sniffer dogs has already been trialled in inner-city schools in England, the decision to replicate this in the Highlands has sent shockwaves across Scotland, where Kingussie High is the first school to introduce the practice.

An English resident, who asked not to be named but who has been living in Kingussie since 1998, said: "It may not look like the kind of place where there would be drugs, but it's going on here, just like everywhere else. You hear all sorts of stories."

Although Kingussie High School does not have a history of drug problems, there have been rumours that cannabis is being smoked in the grounds and some pupils have started to experiment with hard drugs. One community worker told The Times that several local youths were being treated for drug misuse, while there had been an increasing number of seizures in the area.

More here

When will people realize that prohibition never works?

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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8 April, 2005

ANOTHER ACADEMIC FRUITCAKE

For example, there is Jane Christensen who teaches at North Carolina Wesleyan College. One look at her webpage makes me proud to be a Methodist. It isn't really the picture of Jane holding an M-16 with a black hood over her head that bothers me...... Her webpage links to some interesting articles, which say some interesting things. An example follows:

"America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under Zionist control...Jews rule America (and most of the world) by proxy. They trick us into fighting and dying for THEM. Politicians of the 'free world' are too cowardly to oppose Zionism."

Another link presents the theory that Ariel Sharon is preparing to launch attacks in America:

"Israel is embarking upon a more aggressive approach to the war on terror that will include staging targeted killings in the United States and other friendly countries..."

Another link says that Israel is preparing to launch a nuclear attack on Iran:

"a team of U.S. computer specialists flew to Diego Garcia to fit the latest version of the software known as 'over the horizon.' This would allow a Harpoon (equipped with a nuclear warhead) to hit Iran's nuclear establishments with pinpoint accuracy."

The first reader comment on that article is posted under the name "Killing Jews is Good." Nothing more need be said.

Given these "recommended readings," I know most of you will be shocked at the first two questions on Christensen's final exam for a class called "The American Presidency":

"1. How has the war on terrorism contributed to the powers of the Bush presidency? (Discuss at least 4 ways).

2. Discuss the sweeping attack on democratic rights under the Bush administration and what this means for the future of democratic government in America."

No leading questions, here!

More from Mike Adams here



BRITISH GOVERNMENT STUPIDITY

The anti-phonics religion marches on despite all the evidence of how bad it is for kids

An immediate review of how children are taught to read was demanded yesterday after MPs cast doubt on one of Tony Blair's key reforms. The one in five children who cannot read properly at the age of 11 is "unacceptably high" eight years after the National Literacy Strategy was introduced in primary schools, the Education and Skills Select Committee said.

The Labour-dominated committee cast doubt on Mr Blair's claims that primary school standards have improved under Labour and was sceptical about improvements in the results of the national curriculum English test at 11. It contrasted the failing of English schools with Scotland where the restoration of the more traditional phonics approach has recorded some remarkable improvements.

The MPs said that a large-scale inquiry was necessary to establish the best ways to teach children to read. It concluded: "It may be that some methods of teaching (such as phonics) are more effective for children in danger of being left behind." It disputed claims by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) that the literacy strategy was based on the best available research.

In Clackmannanshire, 300 children received intensive instruction in a method known as synthetic phonics, learning the sounds of the alphabet and combinations of letters for 16 weeks as soon as they started school. By the age of 11, they were more than three years ahead of their peers.

There was no difference between girls and boys, unlike their counterparts in England, and children from poor backgrounds performed as well as those from better-off homes.

The committee urged the DfES to commission an independent evaluation of trends in reading standards to make clear "the scale and nature of the problem". "Even if government figures are taken at face value, at age 11 around 20 per cent of children still do not achieve the success in reading (and writing) expected of their age. This figure is unacceptably high," it said. "Furthermore, there is a wide variation of results achieved by schools with apparently similar intakes. This . . . suggests that problems do exist, either in the implementation of the Government's strategies or inherently in the methodologies it promotes."

The dispute centres on whether existing methods work as effectively as synthetic phonics. The committee said that the literacy strategy had been a compromise between competing approaches. It included a form of phonics but also encouraged pupils to work out the meaning of words using context, grammatical understanding and pictures. The idea was that if one failed, others would help children to decode words. But some argue that the strategy takes too long, leaves many children confused and encourages them to guess. Some children come to believe that they are not good at reading and never learn.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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7 April, 2005

HORRORS! NO REGULATION! PARENTS OF COURSE CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO SEEK VALUE FOR THEIR KIDS

And of course regulation wouldn't do more harm than good. Look at the wonderful job the regulation of drugs does!

"Propelled by the No Child Left Behind law, the federally financed tutoring industry has doubled in size in each of the last two years, with the potential to become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise, market analysts say.

Tutors are paid as much as $1,997 per child, and companies eager to get a piece of the lucrative business have offered parents computers and gift certificates as inducements to sign up, provided tutors that in some cases are still in high school, and at times made promises they cannot deliver. This new brand of tutoring is offered to parents by private companies and other groups at no charge if their children attend a failing school. But it is virtually without regulation or oversight, causing concern among school districts, elected officials and some industry executives. Some in Congress are calling for regulations or quality standards to ensure that tutors are qualified and that the companies provide services that meet students' needs. "The potential here is unbelievable, and it's not being regulated by the states or the Education Department," said Patty Sullivan, the director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research group that released a study in late March examining the tutoring programs. "We're pouring a lot of money into it, and we're not sure it works. To the extent that it is going to grow, we've got to get a handle on it."

Critics are particularly concerned about aggressive marketing tactics, like the offers of computers, gift certificates and basketball tickets, though they acknowledge that such practices do not violate the law. Students are not required to enroll in a tutoring program. The option is merely offered at poor schools that have been deemed "failing" for two years in a row. But because families can choose from a list of state-approved providers, some tutoring groups have reacted by engaging in aggressive solicitations.

School officials in Clark County, Nev., the district that includes Las Vegas, had to call security to remove tutoring providers from a school where they were soliciting families too aggressively, the Center on Education Policy found in its report. The parents, many of whom did not speak English, said they felt that they were being pressured to sign things against their will, according to the official who called the school police. In New York City, where more than 81,700 students are being tutored, complaints about inappropriate incentives led officials to start an inquiry into all the providers about six months ago. It is expected to be completed by the summer.

The law's silence on such issues is not an oversight. "We want as little regulation as possible so the market can be as vibrant as possible," Michael Petrilli, an official with the federal Education Department, told tutoring company officials at a recent business meeting organized by the education industry. In fact, hundreds of new companies and community groups have been established to take advantage of the law, joining more established names in test preparation and tutoring like the Princeton Review, Kaplan and the Huntington Learning Center. Across the country, there are more than 1,800 "supplemental educational services providers," as they are called in the law."

More here



California HS Purges Non-Resident Students

(Post lifted from Interested Participant)

(Fremont, California) Today, the 9,500-student Fremont Union High School District will order approximately 300 students to immediately pack their bags and leave if they are unable to prove residency in the district. Parents were informed of the action weeks ago by telephone and mail.

"We're taking a gentle course," said Polly Bove, deputy superintendent. "We'll call them in between classes and call home to let parents know what's going on."

[ ... ]

Still, she said, "We expect to hear from people who will say they didn't think we meant it."

The Cupertino-based school district administration is making the change to cut costs.

Well, my, my, my! In California, no less! They are not going to spend money on kids that don't live in their district. Holy moly! Is this a grassroots message with momentum?

Can we expect the school district to next require that a student be a legal resident?

Let's hope.



AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT

It sounds like "Summerhill" all over again to me -- dependent on one charismatic and hard-working leader. Let's see what happens to his ideas when lazy NEA members get their fangs into it. I myself once taught in a "progressive" school and the founder there worked very hard in his own way

Three decades ago school teacher Dennis Littky took himself off to a cabin in the forests of New Hampshire in the US north-east. There, he chopped wood and pondered his great passion: the future of education. As far as Littky was concerned, secondary education was in a state of meltdown. High schools were outmoded sausage factories turning out generation after generation of bored, disaffected students who failed to reach anything like their true potential. The big question, of course, was what could be done about it? Littky had some ideas about this, and the more he pondered, the stranger his ideas became. When he emerged from the woods two years later, he became headmaster of a run-down high school in a nearby town and set about putting his theories into practice.

The school he'd taken over had a terrible academic record and a history of disciplinary problems. Littky cut class sizes, abandoned the syllabus, threw away textbooks and asked the students to write their set of rules. Parents and the community were appalled, and banded together to try to get him fired. Littky, however, hung on to his job - and a year later his critics were confronted by some unforeseen results. The drop-out rate at his high school had fallen from 10 per cent to 1 per cent. The number of students applying for university had shot from 10 per cent to 55 per cent. Littky, universally known as "Doc", was voted School Principal of the Year. This, though, was only the start.

Ten years ago, Littky was approached to become the director of a new state-funded school for 14- to 18-year-olds in Rhode Island. The school was to be built in a rough, mixed-race, inner-city neighbourhood. Littky agreed to take on the job - on certain conditions. There would be no classrooms, no formal lessons, no bells, no grades, no uniforms, no detentions - and no teachers, at least not in the accepted sense of the word.

The students who enrolled at the Met School had sunk to the bottom of the pile; on average, they were three years behind the norm in literacy skills. However, according to last year's figures, all of the Met School students were accepted into university, with 75 per cent of them being the first in their families to go on to higher education.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was so impressed that he donated $US40 million ($52 million) to help set up 70 more Met Schools across the US by the end of 2007. Gates says: "America's high schools are obsolete. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year."

The first thing you notice about the Met School is how clean it is. There's no graffiti or rubbish, none of the casual detritus that defiles most school premises. The students are pretty spotless, too. They are friendly, courteous and apparently at ease with themselves and with each other. They also look fit and healthy - the result of a nutritious, junk-food-free diet, which they help to cook.

The sceptical visitor may conclude the reason everyone looks so happy is because they're barely doing any work. But as one of the students, 18-year-old Chayanna Santana, says: "I came here from a school that had eight classes a day and 30 students in each class. To be honest, I didn't learn anything; mainly because I was bored. Here, though, they make it really fun to learn, as well as challenging. My friends at home can't get over that I actually like coming to school."

At the Met, students are divided into groups of 15, each of which is supervised by an "adviser". The adviser acts as a teacher, tutor and mentor, first identifying what each child is interested in, then using that as the basis of his or her studies. Instead of formal lessons, students sit at an oval table, discussing such subjects of general interest as ethics or current affairs. Then, two days a week, they all do work experience; the idea being that practical learning is far more useful than studying textbooks. "Textbooks!" snorts Littky contemptuously. "I think textbooks are the most boring things in the world. I would much rather my students read a historical novel than some dreary list of facts and figures. "Or better still, went out and discovered things for themselves." If he had his way Littky would get rid of all exams. "I just don't think they show much. By the same token, I also think grades are meaningless. "But when you say you want to get rid of grades, some people think you want to get rid of standards altogether. In fact, it's the exact opposite."

At the Met every child is evaluated at the end of each term by a two-page "narrative" written by his or her adviser. These narratives aren't used to rank students. They're simply to help a student understand how to meet his or her goals.

The school costs the same amount to run as any other high school in the area, a result of cutting administration costs and employing dedicated teachers prepared to teach more subjects, and take on far more tasks, than they would be called upon to do elsewhere. "I honestly believe that we could take any high school in the United States and get the same ratio of staff to pupils for the same amount of money," Chris Hempel, Littky's second-in-command, says.

What, however, remains to be seen is whether the Met Schools can succeed without the charismatic figure of Littky to supervise them. Twenty-six of the proposed 70 are running, and although they seem to be working well there's always the danger that by franchising the format, they'll end up like any other school - albeit producing different-shaped sausages.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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6 April, 2005

A SENSITIVE AND CARING BRITISH "COMPREHENSIVE" SCHOOL

Bullying a fatty to death sounds OK to them. For non-British readers, "Comprehensive" schools are the usual form of government schooling in Britain. They are definitely safer than Los Angeles public schools but there is not much more that you could say for them.

The parents of a girl who killed herself after being bullied may sue her school after learning that a member of staff said that their daughter "must accept the blame" for being victimised. Mike and Yvonne Rhodes have consulted lawyers about legal action after being handed school records showing that staff held their daughter, Laura, 13, responsible for being bullied. The couple said that they were astonished and angered at the response of the school, Cefn Saeson, in South Wales, to their daughter's death. Social workers have also expressed outrage at the insensitivity of some staff and their failure to tackle persistent bullying.

Laura Rhodes, of Neath, died last year in a suicide pact with Rebecca Ling, 14, a friend she had met through an internet chat room. Rebecca, from Birmingham, survived after telling Mrs Rhodes that the two of them had taken an overdose of prescription pills. Laura died in hospital a few hours later. Since the death of their daughter, Mr and Mrs Rhodes have been trying to find out to what extent the school authorities accept that they were responsible for failing to prevent her from being bullied. In papers obtained by the family and seen by The Times, Laura's progress at Cefn Saeson and comments about the bullying are charted in detail. They reveal that Laura was regarded as being the author of her own misfortune and that the school authorities felt that the bullying allegations were best dealt with by exiling her to a pupil referral unit. Her parents said they were furious at the way she was treated and a "blame the victim" attitude from authorities that sent out the wrong message to bullies.

When Laura left primary school she was a happy child who thrived in class but by the end of her first day at Cefn Saeson secondary school in Cimla, Neath, she was already complaining of being bullied. Instead of taking every measure to stamp out the bullying, her parents said, the school had within three weeks decided that the problem lay with her and had requested a psychiatric assessment. During the first term she befriended another girl and sent her affectionate messages. They were interpreted wrongly, Laura said later, as declarations of lesbian love and she was branded the "school dyke".

After this Laura was held responsible for further outbreaks of abuse. Helen Langford, the education welfare officer, wrote: "Name calling will take a while to stop because of Laura's verbal indiscretion. Laura fully realises and appreciates she must accept the blame for the current situation." By the end of the first year Laura was told to attend the Bryncoch pupil-referral unit instead of Cefn Saeson. The head of Cefn Saeson, Alun Griffiths, later suggested that Laura was merely the subject of schoolgirl "squabbling", yet a written record of a meeting to discuss her background states: "Mrs Langford outlined the difficulties Laura had to face at school. She explained that she had suffered some very nasty forms of verbal bullying

Mr Rhodes said that his daughter was happier at the referral unit because she could go there knowing that she would not be bullied. Angered by the school attaching blame to Laura, Mr Rhodes said: "It's the injustice of it. How can they get away with doing this to children? How many more children will die because of schools not dealing with bullying?" Mr Griffiths maintains that his staff did all they could to help Laura, often in the face of her refusal to report bullying immediately or to name the protagonists. ....

Delwyn Tattum, director of the Countering Bullying Unit at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff, said that the family was right to be concerned about Laura's treatment. After seeing the documents, he said of the school blaming Laura for being bullied: "It's most unacceptable. It's blaming the victim for the bullies' behaviour."

The school refused to comment in detail about the bullying claims until after the inquest next month but was praised last year by school inspectors for "outstanding" standards of pupil welfare, including bullying.

More here



THE CALIFORNIA DISASTER (1)

California's public schools, once among the best in the nation, now lag behind almost every other state in student achievement, funding, teacher quality and facilities. The state's urban high schools have become "dropout factories," saddled with some of the lowest graduation rates in the United States. And the pay disparity among California teachers means that the best-paid teachers in 42 of the 50 largest districts work in schools that serve the fewest number of black and Hispanic students. Those are just a few of the findings outlined in several recent reports which together paint a grim picture of the sorry state of California schools. The conclusions by organizations including the Rand Corporation, Education Trust-West and the Harvard University Civil Rights Project suggest that a combination of factors - from budget cuts to rapidly changing demographics to lack of political will - have contributed to an alarming degradation of the state's schools over time. The problems have disproportionately affected low-income and minority students, who make up a majority of the state's public school students.

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger travels the state to promote several initiatives to reform state government, only one - a proposal to pay teachers according to merit, rather than seniority - even touches on the state's exploding education crisis. Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger's engaged in a pitched battle with teachers who are still steamed over his decision to withhold about $2 billion they say is owed to them under Proposition 98, a voter-approved initiative that guarantees a funding formula for public schools.

As lawmakers and advocates argue over the value of the merit-pay proposal, even some Schwarzenegger advisers say it only scratches the surface of the problem. Both sides agree that dealing with the state's most intractable challenges, such as its burgeoning population of non-native English speakers, will require new ways of thinking about an education system that has remained stubbornly resistant to change.

"We need merit pay, and it's a great step in the right direction. But it's only a step," said Richard Riordan, Schwarzenegger's education secretary. "The major piece is doing some very, very systematic changes in the way schools are governed." Among other things, Riordan supports the work of Eli Broad, the southern California philanthropist whose Broad Foundation helps to fund innovative programs in public school systems around the country. Broad has advocated improving local management in education and reducing the control of unions. He also believes big city mayors should wrest control of urban school districts from seemingly unaccountable school boards.

More here



THE CALIFORNIA DISASTER (2)

When teacher Bonnie Taylor swung open the gym doors of El Cerrito High School last week, she expected to take the stage at an assembly -- not take one on the chin. The 56-year-old came home bruised, bandaged and outraged after a 17-year-old girl punched her in the face and jabbed a pencil at her hand. The student faces suspension and possible expulsion. That doesn't make Taylor, a teacher of 33 years, feel any better about returning to work. "Physically, I'm fine. Mentally, I'm still upset and angry," she said.

Student assaults are becoming more frequent in California, statistics from the state Department of Education show. Growing concerns in the West Contra Costa school district have prompted new demands from the United Teachers of Richmond to more strongly discipline unruly students and to protect teachers. "They don't mind giving their life for education, but it should be a figurative thing, not a physical thing," said union President Gail Mendes.

According to a 2004 report, an estimated 90,000 violent crimes were committed against teachers on campuses nationwide from 1998 to 2002. About 4 percent of teachers surveyed nationally in 1999-2000 said they had been attacked by students, according to the 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety report. Male teachers, city teachers and those at middle or high schools were more likely to be targets. The magnitude of the problem is difficult to track. Like many states, California's data includes all school employees without separate statistics for teachers.

Recommended expulsions stemming from student assaults or batteries on school employees has grown steadily from 668 in 2000-01 to 1,053 last school year, according to the state Department of Education. However, those figures count students punished for violence against employees, not the attacks themselves. "Who knows how many didn't get reported," said Chuck Nichols, a safety consultant for the state Department of Education.

In the 33,000-student West Contra Costa school district, the union recently added new safety proposals during contract negotiations. The teachers want the district to pursue legal action if a student injures a teacher or damages property. The district would also reimburse teachers for injuries or repairs caused by campus assault or vandalism. The union, which represents about 2,000 teachers, also wants stiffer punishment for students who break the rules. Teachers can banish students from their classroom the day of an offense and the next day. The union wants to expand classroom suspensions for up to five days to prevent what Mendes calls "the revolving door." When students violate a rule, such as using profanity, teachers send them to the principal's office from where they often return during the same period. "All the kids around them see that and they think, 'Gee, if you can get away with it, I can too,'" Mendes said.

Swearing does not amount to homicide. But lax punishment for minor infractions encourages more aggressive acts, Mendes said. "It starts with children being verbally disrespectful to teachers. It moves into using foul language. And it escalates" to physical attacks, she said.

The district has rejected the safety proposals. Lengthening classroom suspensions might violate student legal rights, said Laurie Juengert, lawyer and member of the district bargaining team. "The district believes that proper disciplinary action should be taken against students who injure teachers," Juengert said. "However, we have to follow the due process requirement for state and federal law."....

To meet federal reporting requirements, California schools report expulsions related to Education Code violations that include disrupting school events, carrying a weapon and assaulting or battering a school employee. But few want to admit their schools are violent, and chalking up more expulsions offers little reward for a principal looking for approval from higher-ups. "They see that as a bad thing," Mendes said. "Well, it is a bad thing that the children are out of school and aren't learning. But it's a good thing for other students who are in the classroom and are learning."

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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5 April, 2005

MORE MONEY FOR A FAILED SYSTEM IS DUMB

Some alternative ideas

"Absent some extraordinary about-face, Nashville will soon be debating a tax-increase proposal to fund public education. Everywhere you turn these days, city leaders are enumerating the needs of our schools. Likewise, all involved are pointing to the anemic revenue side of the Metro ledger, where money is scarce. Because education is the single most important endeavor of an organized society and because our school funding is so topsy-turvy, it's hard to resist the urge just to give in. If the schools need more money, then why not give it to them? Isn't this the right, decent thing to do? That's how the question has been framed thus far. But I would pose an additional question: If we put more money into this particular educational model, will the children be better educated?

If recent history is any guide, the answer is no, and I have a sneaking suspicion why. Between 2000 and 2004, the annual operating budget of Metro schools increased from $407 million to $503 million. Another $230 million was spent on bricks and mortar. We haven't just been dropping nickels and dimes into the system. We've shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars into it. What do we have to show for it? Answer: Student performance has nearly flatlined. What makes the situation troublesome, if not utterly confounding, is that in addition to the money piece, a number of other parts of the puzzle are quite good. The schools chief is nationally respected, the elected board is at last a good one, parental involvement has increased, and principals have been spit-shined, polished and returned to the front lines.

Then there's the teachers' union. Let's say you are a new principal at a school. You know some of your teachers are not up to snuff, and you want to replace them. What you really want is your own team - nothing but top-notch teachers, all working together, all pulling the oars at the same time. Can you do this? Not really. A principal in Nashville has fairly restricted personnel authority. In fact, once a teacher works for three years in a Metro school, he can only be fired with difficulty. It's tenure. Thank the union. In the real world of accountability where most people live, it's normal to report to an employer who sets performance goals. You do well, and you advance. You do poorly, and you are fired. In this city's public schools, a badly performing teacher often doesn't leave. Instead, he lingers. Or, if a principal is lucky, the bad teacher is transferred to another school, then he's somebody else's headache. In the private sector, how would a manager be expected to perform if he were handicapped in hiring and firing and putting together his own team? Basically, he'd go out of business.

The point is not to blame a teacher. But do feel free to blame the union, and do by all means blame your political leaders who have countenanced the union. And do realize that pouring money into this system is akin to loading cargo onto a ship filled with holes. The tragedy is that our schools really do need the cargo. But until the holes are patched and until we allow principals to act with autonomy and freedom, only then can the system move with speed and determination and efficiency.

So, what to do with our public schools? Here's a plan. It involves raising money without raising taxes, and it is predicated on dealing the union a new hand.

1. Ask businesswoman Martha Ingram to chair a campaign to raise a $1 billion public schools endowment that would exist outside of Metro government. All private educational institutions rely on endowments. It's time public schools took the hint. Ingram raised tens of millions for a new symphony hall. Wouldn't the broader appeal of public education raise even more? Wouldn't the act of giving be preferable to the act of being taxed? The goal is ambitious, but doable.

2. Add to that $1 billion by selling two Metro-owned utilities - Nashville Electrical Service and Metro Water and Sewer Department to private buyers. Given the option of being in the business of flushing toilets or educating minds, shouldn't a 21st century city focus on educating minds? My rough guess is the sale of these two entities might bring in another half billion.

3. This $1.5 billion would spin off $75 million a year. With this money, Metro could offer a massive pay increase to school teachers. But to get this pay increase, the teachers would have to give up tenure. In other words, teacher pay would go up by a magnitude large enough for them to agree to work at will. The point is that our leaders are now focused on traditional remedies to a hogtied system that will likely result in sustained mediocrity. Only with citizen pressure and gobs of money to back it up can any long-lasting good result. I will be against a tax increase because I hate to see good money go after bad. But at the first spark of meaningful revolution, understand this: I'll happily pay."

Source



Public high school grads unprepared for college, work: "Whether they went right to work or into college, large percentages of recent public high school graduates do not believe they were adequately prepared for the challenges they faced after graduation, according to a new report from Achieve, Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan group created by the nation's governors and corporate leaders to help states prepare young people for post-secondary education, work, and citizenship. Employers and professors agree with that assessment, according to the study, published as Rising to the Challenge: Are High School Grdauates Prepared for College and Work? in February 2005."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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4 April, 2005

SPARED ROD SPOILS A GENERATION

From the Premier down, many are calling for stricter discipline in the family. Sandra McLean reports from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia:

Ir was Edward VIII who famously commented on American parenthood, telling a British magazine: ''The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.' Who knows if he was trying to be funny, but decades later his offhand comment would certainly raise a knowing frown among parents not only in America but also in Australia. Both countries, perhaps because we are joined at the hip culturally, sharing similar interests in movies, fashion, TV and music, are wrestling with the notion that we may have lost our way with parenting simply because we've been too keen to be nice to our kids.

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie may have shocked many when he said recently that parents needed to give their kids "some bloody discipline". The Premier made his statement at an Ipswich community meeting in response to criticism over rising juvenile crime rates. Beattie revealed that he had smacked his own children and said it was about time other parents took some responsibility for disciplining their own children and keeping them home at night. "If parents played a greater role and actually gave some bloody discipline at home we wouldn't have some of these problems," Beattie told the meeting. "I am sick of people abrogating their responsibilities as parents who think that at the end of the day it should be someone else's problem."

Strong stuff from the Premier. but his views have the support of experts who feel that society has become too lax over the disciplining of children and young adults. It is an issue that has spawned many books for parents dealing with wayward children. as well as a television show. The University of Queensland's Triple P Positive Parenting Program has made a TV program with Britain's ITV called "Driving Mum and Dad Mad", about showing parents how to control their badly behaved children.

But the loss of discipline is not only of concern among parents of four-year-olds who won't eat porridge for breakfast. It has wider ramifications to do with the breakdown of an individual's ability to know how to function in society, not to flout laws and to respect the rights of others. These concerns underscored the intense debate that flowed after the Macquarie Fields riots in far western Sydney in March. The riots on a public housing estate were sparked by the death of two young men in a police car chase and resulted in five nights of violence, leading to more than 60 arrests.

When the shock of the violence wore off, people were left asking: why? Suggested causes ranged from poverty, unemployment, alcohol, frustration, anger and general disillusionment with a society that too often forgets those who fall through the cracks. A constant in the ensuing debate was the issue of responsibility - who is responsible for the behaviour of these youths and who will find a way to avert history repeating itself? Boni Robertson, director of the Murri Centre at Griffith University, told The Courier-Mail that all parties - parents, youths, indigenous, Anglo and government - needed to take responsibility for youth violence.

If asked. Beattie might have suggested discipline. although everyone knows the youths at Macquarie Fields are past a good smack. So what's the answer? Brisbane clinical psychologist Brad Johnston agrees with Beattie that it is the parent's responsibility to bring discipline into the lives of young people. This way children learn how to function in a demanding world - discipline leads to self-discipline, which can be a valuable asset in today's busy, stressful society. Johnston says the problem is not so much a lack of discipline as a slackening off of discipline too soon in a child's life. "Parents feel the pressure to relax the discipline at an earlier age now," he says. "They feel the pressure to allow their child to discover the world and learn how to cope with situations but, in many cases, parents assume the child has more ability than they really do have at that age. This can be the case for children as young as two."

Johnston deals with parents who approach him because of disciplinary problems with their children, ranging from those who are unhappy with their children taking drugs or engaging in sex to toddlers who won't go to bed on time. "The major cost to society is that people find it very difficult to to cope with the pressures of the world," he says. "This is because they haven't developed this sense of self-discipline that helps them manage the pressures of living in a world such as holding down a job, being a spouse or having children.

Dr Karen Brooks, a parent and senior lecturer in popular culture at the University of the Sunshine Coast, says she agrees with Beattie's tough stand on discipline and parental responsibility. There is a real truth in this issue about the abrogation of responsibility," she says. "This is not necessarily parents' fault because we have seen a real change in society where there is too much emphasis on teachers' roles and how they should be more than educators. But they are also now having to teach sex education and social education - this sort of thing belongs in the home."

The problem, Brooks says, is that too many parents in the 21st century are too time-poor to embrace the basic tenets of parenthood. It is also because they don't have much time with their children that they want to avoid that time being made uncomfortable by battles over bedtime and eating habits. As a result, discipline goes out the window.

Brooks says it also is about too many parents wanting to be friends with their children, a misapprehension she says which has been spoon-fed to consumers of popular culture, particularly American and Australian dramas such as "The O.C." and "Home and Away". These programs romanticise the notion of family, emphasising the role of the parent as being buddy and adviser, while any hint of a disciplinarian is frowned upon. "Too many parents try to be friends to their kids and try to strike bargains with their children," Brooks says. "I just don't think they understand their role any more. It is great to have a good relationship with your children but you can do this without being the best mate. They get friends from their own age group. Parents are meant to set boundaries."

Brooks, who describes herself as a strict parent. says it isn't too late for some so-called tough love, so that children can learn to respect household and social rules. Generations of decent people have proved that tough love works, she says. It doesn't mean belting your kids either - it just means being solid, reliable and true."

(The above article appeared in the Brisbane "Courier Mail" on March 31, 2005, p.15. Note that the Premier (roughly equivalent to an American State Governor) referred to above is a leader in the Australian Labor Party, a moderate Leftist party)



TEACHING IGNORANCE

(Excerpts from Thomas Sowell)

"The notion of a trickle-down theory is debunked on pages 388-389 of my book "Basic Economics" (2nd edition). But most of those who went ballistic over my denial of a trickle-down theory were not seeking further information.

As far as they were concerned, they already had the absolute truth and only needed to vent their anger over my having dared to say otherwise. That is a sign of a much more general and much more dangerous trend in our society today that goes far beyond a handful of true believers foaming at the mouth against one columnist.

If education provides anything, it should be an ability to think -- that is, to weigh one idea against an opposing idea, and to use evidence and logic to try to determine what is true and what is false. That is precisely what our schools and colleges are failing to teach today. It is worse than that. Too many teachers, from the elementary schools to the graduate schools, see their role as indoctrinating students with what these teachers regard as the right beliefs and opinions. Usually that means the left's beliefs and opinions.

The merits or demerits of those ideas is far less important than whether or not students learn to analyze and weigh those merits and demerits. Educators used to say, "We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think." Today, students can spend years in educational institutions, discussing all sorts of issues, without ever having heard a coherent statement of the other side of those issues that differ from what their politically correct teachers say.

There are students in our most prestigious law schools who have never heard arguments for the social importance of property rights -- not just for those fortunate enough to own property, but for those who don't own a square inch of real estate or a single share of stock. How they would view the issues if they did is a moot point because they have heard only one side of the issue.

People who go through life never having heard the other side of issues ranging from environmentalism to minimum wage laws are nevertheless emboldened to lash out in ignorance at anyone who disturbs their vision of the world. The self-confident moral preening of ignoramuses is perhaps an inevitable product of the promotion of "self-esteem" in our schools."

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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2 April, 2005

A VERY MINOR MILESTONE

This site averaged 100 hits per day in March. Still a very tiny corner of the blogosphere but not bad for a blog only 6 months old.



Dewey's socialism is alive and well in America today

America's crippled educational system

I never envisioned what I would find when I embarked on the research about our educational system. The people that are involved and how each of their lives crossed one another. These people, in ways that you could not imagine, have touched our lives. The deceit and lies under the guise of education and patriotism with the final goal Socialism. We are in trouble and the future of our children has to be our first and foremost priority. We need to save America before they turn this wonderful country into Amerika. What I write today is but the tip of the iceberg.

Initially, I researched a man by the name of John Dewey. He is known as the "Father of Modern Education." I documented, chronologically, the principal events of education in regard to this man. What I found was that he was a socialist bent on destroying the minds of the American child. Dewey's belief goes back as far as 1887 with a book he wrote called, "Looking Backward." He was a totalitarian socialist who wanted government to take over all education via government schools. He wanted the government to create an "industrial army" of totalitarian socialism......

Langdell and Dewey mocked and drove out of the teaching profession any teacher than held on to the belief of absolute values. They discarded Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law, which taught that there were certain rights and wrongs that did not change related to human behavior. Blackstone also believed that law came from God.

Dewey assisted the AFT's founder Clara Goldwater in the formation of this organization. Initially the NEA was first called the Teachers Union Auxiliary then became the Teachers Guild. Later it became known as the American Federation of Teachers. Presently the AFT is in partnership with the NEA. The NEA had John Dewey serve on the legislative commission in 1917 when it was formed.....

In 1940 the California Senate Committee investigated various foundations in regard to controlling the training of teachers and promoting specific philosophies. One of the foundations that were investigated was the Rockefeller Foundation. What they found was that this foundation spent millions of dollars in creating new history books. They also found that the new history books undermined the free enterprise system and patriotism. Here is an excerpt from their findings.

It is difficult to believe that the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Education Association could have supported these textbooks. But the fact is that the Rockefellers financed them and the NEA promoted them very widely.

The 1970's heralded the communist and socialist oriented anti-Vietnam war activities, the emergence of the modern NEA openly advocating the use of public education for social change, and the rise of the United States Supreme Court's unconstitutional contradiction in terms called 'substantive due process.'

In 1995, Clinton's unqualified support for the NEA in their use of public education for social change. It was accompanied by the current Supreme Court's "lifestyle socialism." We had the emergence of the "international rule of judges" which was the means of achieving social and economic change under mandate by the United Nations. During this time Goals 2000 was signed into law by President Clinton.

This is the feel good society, the humanist society. It is because of this our educational system has changed to the way it is today. The people changing our laws to reflect conformity and one worldness are the results of this Dewey education system. Laws are being changed to accommodate anyone without regard for what is right or wrong. Changes are being made to how much government is involved in our lives. Changes, changes and more changes until we are no longer a free society but a socialist one. This is why multi-culturalism is the buzzword. It is to prepare us for the one world system.

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LOW STANDARDS FOR STUDENT TEACHERS

In my home State of Queensland, Australia. If you saw the years of juvenile crap student-teachers have to put up with to get a teaching certificate you would understand why only dummies can hack it most of the time

Last week, Education Minister Anna Bligh signalled the opportunity for another 500 unmotivated or dissatisfied teachers to take a $50,000 payment and leave the state school system to make room for some of the hundreds of new graduates unable to secure a permanent position. They will join 1046 of their colleagues who have opted for the career change bonuses since they were first offered in 2002 in the name of topping up classroom enthusiasm.

Now we are faced with the reality that a side effect of increasing student teacher places in the state's universities this year has been a drop in cut-off scores for primary and secondary teaching courses to as low as OP16 and 17 – the bottom third of students. The risk, and likelihood, is that Year 12 students unable to gain entry to courses in their preferred field will apply for teaching as a consolation prize.

This is not acceptable in an era already focused nationally on appalling standards of literacy and numeracy. What profession is as vital to the formative years of rising generations as teaching? A good comparison is that the cut-off level for primary teachers at the Australian Catholic University in Brisbane is OP9. Ms Bligh says no score, however high, will help students become good teachers if they don't like children and enjoy working with them. She is right. But taking the gamble that students with lower scores will mature, improve their academic skills and blossom as teachers is not the answer. Part of the solution may be to adapt the teacher training process to mandate better ongoing assessments, including aptitude tests.

Part may be based on University of Queensland vice-chancellor John Hay's urging. Ideally, he says, secondary teachers should undertake a degree in the disciplines they hope to teach, followed by professional training in education. But the warning signal – the amber light is flashing, says Queensland University of Technology's Professor Erica McWilliam – must not be ignored. Universities may have to consider imposing cut-offs higher than those enforced by demand. Students in the bottom third have clearly had problems in some subjects and their experience must not be allowed to snowball.

In 1997, medical courses at Australian universities including UQ followed the example of leading overseas institutions and switched from a six-year undergraduate degree, catering largely to school-leavers with an OP1, to a four-year postgraduate course. This was in response to public demand for doctors with greater skills in dealing with patients. The change has ensured a broader intake in both age range and primary degree, with selection depending on aptitude as well as academic performance. The principle is similar to that suggested by Professor Hay for teachers.

It is not prudent for Queensland to wait to see whether cut-offs for teaching remain at risky levels, or fall even further, before deciding remedial action is needed. The time to act is now.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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2 April, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO CHINESE FIGHT BUSING

They value education too much to put up with such nonsense

Chinese American families upset over their children's assignments to San Francisco public schools are again holding contentious meetings with school board members, staging protests and considering keeping their kids out of classes when the new school year begins in August. It's a swelling of anger not seen since two years ago, when some families stormed Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's office and police were called. About 25 families kept their children out of school for six weeks in protest then. At issue is the school district's court-ordered desegregation system, scheduled to expire in December, which is intended to give all students a shot at the best schools, regardless of where they live. The process of matching students to schools takes into account a student's top seven choices and the student's socio-economic status. The way it works out is that some students are sent away from their neighborhoods. A third of the district's 57,000 students are Chinese American. Many of them live on the city's west side, home to several of the highest- performing schools, and expect that their addresses will make them a shoo-in to attend those schools.

On Wednesday afternoon, a few dozen parents and children staged a demonstration in front of the school district headquarters on Franklin Street. One of the protesters, Patrick Yu, 48 -- who lives with his wife and 10- year-old son, Hiram, and another family in a home in the Outer Sunset -- wanted his son to attend middle school at A.P. Giannini, Hoover or Presidio. But Hiram was assigned to Aptos near St. Francis Wood -- which would require his taking two Muni buses, Yu said. The families are calling for more seats to be made available at certain schools and a review of the student-placement program to see if it unfairly impacts them.

The day before Wednesday's demonstration, there was a contentious, four- hour meeting between 200 angry parents and Board of Education president Eric Mar. The group is considering a one-week walkout when school starts. The complaints have been heard before, but this year is the perfect time to fight for change, said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Committee. The desegregation system expires and the school board will determine what sort of assignment process it will adopt for the 2006-07 school year. In addition, the school board is now led by President Mar and Vice President Norman Yee, both Chinese Americans. "This year is key year -- a pivotal year -- for the Chinese community, particularly Chinese activists who are interested in this issue, to mobilize, " Lee said.

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MOVEMENT IN MAINE?

College-age Republicans told lawmakers Wednesday that Maine needs a law to make sure divergent political viewpoints are welcome on the campuses of the state's colleges and universities. Supporters of the bill - An Act to Create an Academic Bill of Rights - said such a document would free students and faculty at state-funded schools to express their political or philosophical views without fear of retaliation. The legislation, which is being considered by the Legislature's Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, reflects a belief among political and social conservatives around the country that their views are neglected in classroom and campus discussions. Similar legislation has been proposed in other states in recent years. "I am here today with my fellow College Republicans because I feel you must be made aware of a scary trend occurring on all Maine campuses," said Mia Dow, a member of the College Republicans at the University of Maine, Orono. "I have been taunted, sworn at and humiliated beyond the realm of imagination, and I am sick of this treatment," she said. Testimony continued late into the evening as legislators, professors and other young Republicans from campuses around the state spoke in favor of the bill. The committee is expected to discuss the bill in a workshop before voting on it.

Opponents said such a bill could stifle discussion on controversial topics. Allen Berger, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at the University of Maine at Farmington, said requiring faculty to abide by "definitions imposed by outsiders and possibly measured by political standards that diverge from academic criteria would be to severely constrain their academic freedom."

But Jon Reisman, professor at the University of Maine at Machias, supported the bill. Colleges around the state have made strides in the last decade to combat discrimination in areas of gender and ethnicity, he said, but intellectual diversity is now at risk. "We don't have intellectual pluralism on our campuses today and the research shows it," he said. Students feel they face the possibility of bad grades if their political or religious views differ with that of a teacher, said Melissa Simones, a junior at Bates College in Lewiston.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bowen, R-Rockport, said the goal of any university is to expose students to a variety of experiences and ideas. The bill of rights would require universities to establish procedures for hearing complaints of discrimination based on a person's political and social beliefs. It also would prohibit colleges from considering such beliefs in hiring or firing of faculty. One committee member, Rep. Connie Goldman, D-Cape Elizabeth, said hiring and firing decisions are not always that clear-cut. "How much of this is plain out bad teaching and how much is a personal bias," she said.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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1 April, 2005

ANTI-CHRISTIAN SCHOOL DISTRICT LOSES A ROUND

A federal grand jury punished a public school superintendent for rejecting a vice-principal applicant because she refused to remove her children from a private Christian school. The jury unanimously said the constitutional rights of Karen Jo Barrow were violated and ordered former Greenville, Texas, Independent School District Superintendent Herman Smith to pay back wages of $15,000 and $20,000 in punitive damages. "This is truly a victory for every teacher and administrator in America," said Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute. "The jury sent a strong message that this type of behavior is not permitted within school districts."

Barrow claimed she was denied the opportunity to interview for the job because Smith insisted she remove her children from Greenville Christian School.

The teacher said she would use the awarded money to fund college scholarships for Greenville ISD and Greenville Christian School graduates who pursue education degrees.

Shackelford argued "American children are not children of the state. They're the children of the parents." "One of the most fundamental rights every parent has is the right to decide how to bring up and educate their children and whether they want to put them in a Christian school, public school or whatever school they feel is best for their own children," he said.

Source



Florida: Bush outlines expanded voucher proposal : "Gov. Jeb Bush advocated a dramatic expansion of school vouchers Wednesday that could affect thousands of students, calling the proposal for struggling readers 'as American as apple pie.' Bush estimated that the reading vouchers, if approved by state lawmakers, would be used by only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of eligible students. ... Bush put the proposal to state lawmakers even with the constitutionality of his groundbreaking voucher law still unsettled. When Bush became governor six years ago, that voucher law was a centerpiece of his first legislative agenda. The day after he signed the bill into law in 1999, opponents went to court to challenge the measure."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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