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30 April, 2006

AMERICAN EDUCATION FROM A to Z

Article by Tina Blue, who teaches English at a large Midwestern university. It sounds like I would be failing 100% of my students if I were teaching there

I have been teaching freshman and sophomore English at a state university since 1972. For part of that time (18 years), I also ran a home day care center; and, I also worked as a substitute teacher in the local elementary schools for a year while continuing to teach at the university.

One of the reasons I closed my day care center in 1999 was that the children who attended were so unsocialized that it became not just difficult but often unpleasant to deal with them for many hours each day. I quit working as a substitute after just one year for a similar reason. The students in the grade schools were so unsocialized that it was difficult to maintain enough control to get through the lessons that I was supposed to teach.

In addition to being poorly behaved and difficult to control, most of the children had also learned that no one was ever supposed to criticize them or to say anything to them other than how wonderful and special they were. Their self-esteem had been bolstered not by their having acquired any knowledge, not by learning to manage their own impulses or to develop any skills or accomplish anything, but rather by indiscriminate praise and a total absence of constructive criticism or honest evaluation of their performance at any task.

During those last few years of daycare, and during that one year as a substitute teacher, I often thought to myself (with more than a little dread) that these children were in the pipeline and we would be getting them in our college classes soon.

I met in my office yesterday with a student who has been coming for conferences a twice a week for the past two and a half weeks. He didn't start coming in for help with his writing until then, just three and a half weeks before the end of the semester. But he wants a good grade (i.e., better than a C, and preferably an A), and he finally realized that it just wasn't happening for him, so now he is coming to see me.

Or at least he was coming to see me. I doubt he will be in my office again this semester. Five minutes into our conference yesterday he snatched the draft of his paper out of my hand, stuffed it into his backpack, and stomped out of my office in disgust. He sent me an email last night saying that the reason he cut our conference short in such a rude way was that no matter how hard he tries I keep criticizing his writing.

I have to admit I have contributed to grade inflation, not willingly, but because of overwhelming pressure from all sides. I don't hand out As and Bs like candy, the way so many teachers do these days, but I do tend to pull my punches at the lower end of the grade scale. I don't give as many Ds and Fs as I used to. In fact, I often put a C- on a paper that would have earned a D from me twenty years ago. Giving a student less than a C- on any sort of writing that is not absolutely illiterate has become virtually impossible, no matter what the flaws in the writing are -- especially since even our best college students now make errors of the sort that would have earned a grade school student an F at one time.

This boy actually got a D+ on his first paper. Let me be honest here: twenty years ago I would have given that paper an F, without any hesitation at all, and I believe that most or all of my colleagues would have done the same. But even putting a D+ on it was difficult in the current atmosphere, and he was obviously upset by having gotten such a grade. (Not upset enough to come in for a conference, of course.)

His second paper was equally weak, but this time he had taken advantage of the opportunity I offer students to turn in a draft before the paper is due, in order to get feedback on it before turning it in for a grade. After seeing the corrections and comments on the draft, he finally decided to come in to see me for help.

During our first few conferences, I went over each sentence to explain in more detail his grammar and usage errors and his stylistic missteps. I also showed him where paragraphs were not developed or where coherence was not maintained within a paragraph or between paragraphs. You know, all the things we are supposed to be teaching students in a composition and literature class. Each time he came in, he would bring another draft of the paper, and each draft would show some improvement over the preceding draft. In other words, our conferences were helping. He was improving his writing.

By improvement I mean that he was writing papers that would get grades within the C range. Remember, his papers were originally bad enough that they would have gotten Fs 20 years ago, and his first paper had gotten a D+ even now, with grade inflation in full effect. But he wasn't happy to hear that he was working in the C range now. He doesn't want a C in the course.

Unfortunately, he also doesn't think he deserves Cs on his papers. He believes he deserves As, and since he has never gotten below an A in any English course or on any English paper, including those he wrote for English 101 and English 102 here at the university where I teach, it seems obvious to him that he is in fact an "A writer," and I am just an unreasonable, hypercritical harpy.

I know why this young man has always gotten As in his English classes. He is very cute and very charming -- that is, as long as you don't cross him. Cross him and he gets pretty nasty.

I have another attractive, charming student in the same class who is also getting Ds on papers, though he has now begun to come in for conferences, and we are making very good progress with his writing. It is late in the semester, so I don't know if he will manage to get better than a C in the course. Frankly, I doubt it, though there are still two essays and the final to write, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that he could pull through with a very low B, especially since I do give credit for obvious improvement, and I do count later work a bit more heavily than early work.

But this boy also tells me that he got an A in English 102 and a B in English 101. His writing did not suddenly become terrible between English 102 and English 210 (my class). It always was terrible. But he was still getting mostly As in English courses, with the occasional B.

How can we teach these kids if they believe, first of all, that we have no right to criticize them, and second of all, that they really deserve all those As they have been getting despite their decidedly substandard work?

And then there is the expectation that we are never supposed to even say anything slightly negative to them about their work (e.g., "I'm sorry, but this paper has too many grammar and usage errors to deserve an above average grade"), but they feel they have the right to treat us rudely, snatching their papers from our hands, stomping out of our offices in a rage, if they are not delighted with the grades we give them or the fact that we actually require them to do their work.

Think about his complaint, "You criticize my writing no mater how hard I try."

How else am I supposed to show him what is wrong with a paper or what isn't working, so that he will be able to fix it or improve it in his next draft? Of course I criticize his work when it is not good enough. That's what teachers do.

Source



PUBLIC SCHOOLS VS. PARENTS' VALUES

Of the five candidates running to succeed Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts, all but one have chosen to send their children to private schools. Nothing wrong with that -- millions of parents would move their kids out of public schools tomorrow if they thought they could afford something better. For millions more, government schooling isn't an option in the first place: They would no sooner let the state decide what their children should learn than they would let it to decide whom they should marry.

Earlier this month, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, the only Republican in the governor's race, explained in an interview why she and her husband picked a private school for their son and daughter. "I want my kids to be in an environment where they can talk about values," she said -- talk about values, that is, "in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting."

It's hard to see anything objectionable in Healey's words, but they triggered a broadside from Attorney General Thomas Reilly, a Democrat and the only gubernatorial candidate whose children all attended public schools. Healey is "completely out of touch with the lives of regular people," he snapped. "Somehow the perception is that the kids in public schools are not learning the values that they should be learning. . . . Public schools reinforced the values of our home. . . . It was a wonderful experience." Those quotes appeared in The Boston Globe on April 17. Now consider a story that appeared three days later.

On April 20, in a story headlined "Parents rip school over gay storybook," the Globe reported on the latest controversy in Lexington, where school officials committed to normalizing same-sex marriage have clashed with residents who don't want homosexual themes introduced in class without advance parental notice. Last year, a Lexington father named David Parker complained to officials at the Joseph Estabrook Elementary School about the "diversity" curriculum in his son's kindergarten class, which included pictures of families headed by gay and lesbian couples. When he refused to leave the school grounds without being assured that he would be alerted before similar lessons were taught in the future, Parker was arrested for trespassing.

The latest incident, also at the Estabrook School, was triggered when a second-grade teacher presented to her class a storybook celebration of homosexual romance and marriage.

There is nothing subtle about "King & King," the book that Heather Kramer read to her young students. It tells the story of Prince Bertie, whose mother the queen nags him to get married ("When I was your age, I'd been married twice already," she says), and parades before him a bevy of princesses to choose from. But Bertie, who says he's "never cared much for princesses," rejects them all. Then "Princess Madeleine and her brother, Prince Lee," show up, and Bertie falls in love at first sight -- with the brother. Soon, the princes are married. "The wedding was very special," reads the text. "The queen even shed a tear or two." Bertie and Lee are elevated from princes to kings, and the last page shows them exchanging a passionate kiss.

Dismayed by such blatant propagandizing, the parents of one student made an appointment to discuss their concerns with school officials. "This is a highly charged social issue," Robin and Robert Wirthlin told them. "Why are you introducing it in second grade?" Kramer said she had selected the book in order to teach a unit on weddings. When the Wirthlins checked the Lexington Public Library, they found 59 children's titles dealing with weddings, but "King & King" wasn't among them. The library's search engine listed it instead under "Homosexuality -- Juvenile fiction."

Massachusetts law requires schools to notify parents before "human sexuality issues" are taught in class and gives parents the right to exempt a child from that portion of the curriculum. But the Wirthlins' request to be given a heads-up before something as contentious and sensitive as same-sex marriage comes up in their child's class again was rejected out of hand. "We couldn't run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed," Lexington's superintendent of schools, Paul Ash, told the Globe. "Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal."

Reviewing "King & King" for the web site Lesbian Life, Kathy Belge -- who describes herself as a longtime lesbian activist and the director of a queer youth program -- writes that it is "sure to capture a child's imagination" and praises it in particular for its nonjudgmental embrace of homosexuality: "The same-sex attraction is normalized. There's no proselytizing, no big lesson. It just is."

But homosexuality and gay marriage are not like arithmetic or geography; they cannot be separated from questions of morality, justice, and decency. No matter how a school chooses to deal with sexual issues, it promotes certain values -- values that some parents will fervently welcome and that others will just as fervently reject. And what is true of human sexuality is true of other issues that touch on deeply felt religious, political, or ideological values.

When it comes to the education of children, there is always an agenda -- and those who don't share that agenda may find themselves belittled, marginalized, or ignored. Perhaps it was true, as Thomas Reilly says, that the public schools his children attended "reinforced the values of our home." But as the Parkers and Wirthlins in Lexington can testify, other families have a very different experience. When Kerry Healey says she wants her children "to be in an environment where they can talk about values . . . in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting," many public-school parents will understand exactly what she means.

(From Jeff Jacoby)

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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. My home page is here

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29 April, 2006

Educating From the Bench: Judges order legislators to spend more on schools, and taxpayers see less in return

Spending on public schools nationwide has skyrocketed to $536 billion as of the 2004 school year, or more than $10,000 per pupil. That's more than double per pupil what we spent three decades ago, adjusted for inflation--and more than we currently spend on national defense ($494 billion as of 2005). But the argument behind lawsuits in 45 states is that we don't spend nearly enough on schools. Spending is so low, these litigants claim, that it is in violation of state constitutional provisions requiring an "adequate" education. And in almost half the states, the courts have agreed.

Arkansas is one such state, and its "adequacy" problem neatly illustrates the way courts have driven spending up and evidence out. In 2001 the state Supreme Court declared the amount of money spent at that time--more than $7,000 per pupil--in violation of the state constitutional requirement to provide a "general, suitable and efficient" system of public education. Like courts in other states, Arkansas's court ordered that outside consultants be hired to determine how much extra funding would be required for an adequate education.

A firm led by two education professors, Lawrence Picus and Allan Odden, was paid $350,000 to put a price tag on what would be considered adequate. In September 2003 Messrs. Picus and Odden completed their report, concluding that Arkansas needed to add $847.3 million to existing school budgets. They also recommended policy changes, but the only thing that really mattered, at least as far as the court was concerned, was the bottom line--bringing the total to $4 billion, or $9,000 per pupil.

One might think that relying on court-ordered experts would be more rational and responsible than leaving spending decisions to politicians. The exact opposite is the case. For all of their defects, legislators can be held responsible for wasting taxpayer dollars, while courts and the consultants they mandate generally cannot. This gives courts and consultants license to use pseudoscience to drive education spending higher, where legislators might be more skeptical and frugal.

The Picus and Odden report is a perfect example. To determine adequate spending they rely on what they immodestly call the "evidence-based" approach. This involves selectively embracing educational practices that some research finds beneficial and costing those policies out. Their method does not address whether their favored reforms would really result in an adequate education or are in fact the most cost-effective. This approach is about as "evidence-based" as the one employed by the diet-crazy person who comes across a study that says olive oil is healthy and decides to sprinkle it on everything he eats. There is some evidence to support it, but is it really the most sensible and effective way to assure "adequate" health?

But the most obvious sign the Picus and Odden report is not really evidence-based is its neglect of empirical examination of the overall relationship between school spending and student achievement. If spending more is the answer to inadequate education, it should be the case that schools that spend more per pupil, all else being equal, have higher student achievement.

As it turns out, they don't. The vast majority of social science studies find no relationship between spending and student achievement. My own analysis of schools in Arkansas finds that schools with more money perform no better than schools with less once student and community background characteristics are controlled. And the fact that per pupil spending has doubled over the past three decades while student achievement has remained stagnant ought to give us a clue that simply spending more won't fix schools. The shortcomings of schools are not generally attributable to the lack of resources, but to a lack of incentives to use resources effectively.

By declaring that spending had to increase, the court foreclosed consideration of this relevant evidence. And by requiring the Legislature to base the size of the increase on the recommendations of consultants, the court privileged the spending level preferred by the consultants over those that other experts might recommend or that legislators might want. If legislators did not increase spending by roughly what Messrs. Picus and Odden asserted, they would be held in violation of the court order.

Yet even this wasn't enough. After the total amount provided to Arkansas schools increased by 25% in one year, the legislature slowed the pace of spending. For the 2005 school year, money was added to the teacher health plan and school construction funds, but the minimum amount that school districts would receive for operating expenses (excluding capital and categorical money) was left unchanged at $5,400. The plaintiff attorneys argued before the state high court that spending had to at least match inflation.

The court agreed and ordered the governor to call the Legislature in special session to remedy the situation. Legislators met in early April and in less than a week increased spending again. They were so eager to placate the court that they gave schools more for the current school year, even though it could hardly do any good with only a month remaining. They also increased spending without knowing how the last round of additional money was being used or whether it had any effect. Messrs. Picus and Odden were retained for another $450,000 to provide this information, but their report is not expected until August.

One legislative leader attempted to justify their haste by declaring, "Lack of information does not justify legislative procrastination." Doesn't it? What information we do have suggests that schools haven't been able to digest the new influx very well. Unspent reserves as of October 2005 were $1.1 billion, more than 25% of the total budget. That is, schools can't even spend the additional money fast enough as the court orders more.

In Arkansas, as in too many other states, elected leaders have ceded control over the size of education budgets to unaccountable courts. Judges and the consultants they require are not easily held responsible for misusing evidence or wasting taxpayer dollars. As long as this continues, expect to spend more on education and see less in return.

Source



BREASTBEATING IN LOS ANGELES OVER LOW HIGH SCHOOL SUCCESS-RATE

Undoubtedly a deplorable record of failure but with huge numbers of Hispanics who barely speak English and lots of blacks, what can you expect? The graduation rate of whites is respectable -- as well it should be, given the rockbottom standards

A new study found that barely half of Los Angeles Unified School District students receive their high school diplomas, mirroring a Harvard University study a year ago that alarmed city officials and fueled debate over the district's effectiveness. The LAUSD ranks 86th out of the nation's 100 largest school districts in its graduation rate - lower than districts in Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas - according to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

And the results were even bleaker for the district's minority students. Blacks had a 55 percent graduation rate and Latinos, 44 percent, compared with 77 percent among whites and 80 percent among Asians. The district's Latino males had the lowest graduation rates at 39 percent, followed by black males at 49 percent.

"It's pretty bad. Large districts in general are doing less well and Los Angeles is toward the bottom of that list," said Jay Greene, co-author of the study and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The national average is a 70 percent graduation rate. The study looked at how many students entered high school in 1999 and how many regular diplomas were awarded in 2003.

Greene said the region's challenging demographic profile can't be blamed for the problem. "We can see that demography is not destiny looking at some of the districts who have managed to produce success with minority students," he said. The California Department of Education puts the LAUSD's graduation rate at 65.7 percent for 2003 - a number district officials expect to increase by as much as 10 percentage points by next year. "All these rates ... are all estimates. Depending on how you use the formula, you come up with a different number," said Esther Wong, assistant superintendent of planning, assessment and research at the district. "I think educators should use it as a guide until a better system is in place."

In a bid to boost graduation rates, the district is developing Diploma Project, which would lower class size, assign counselors to follow up on students not coming to school, and create a more personalized middle and high school experience, Wong said.

The Harvard study, which concluded that more than half of the LAUSD's students failed to finish high school in a recent four-year period, became the source of much debate in the city. Political leaders, including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, seized on the figures to push agendas for reform ranging from mayoral takeover of the district to its breakup. "The Los Angeles school district can no longer dispute the fact that we have a dropout crisis in our public schools," the mayor's spokeswoman, Janelle Erickson, said. "This new study ... supports Mayor Villaraigosa's belief that we need new leadership at every level 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.

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. My home page is here

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28 April, 2006

THE INCORRECTNESS OF COCA COLA

Student self-display matters a lot more than the facts at UCLA

In order to ride a high horse for any considerable length of time without getting sore, you need a fancy saddle. A group of righteous high horse hobbyists on campus has chosen the accusation of murder as theirs. The student group Coke-Free Campus wants to ban Coca-Cola products from UCLA because some of the casualties of the ongoing civil war in Colombia have allegedly included union leaders and Coca-Cola factory workers.

Economically, Coke has no incentive to have employees murdered by guerrillas. No workers, no Coke: no-brainer. Legally, they have been acquitted of any responsibility by two judicial inquiries. So why the persecution? I tried to find out on Friday. While Associated Students UCLA heard arguments for and against the charges, a stampede of high horses gathered to whinny in protest outside Kerckhoff. I found two answers before my cover was blown: "Our campus" and "students' power." These were in reply to the questions of "Whose campus?" and "Whose power?" This was the Q&A portion of the protest, but I couldn't decipher what it had to do with Coke's supposed guilt.

One student began the rally by announcing the group's intent to silence Coke's representatives. He told everyone that when the time came for the representatives to speak in their defense at the meeting inside, he would signal for all to scream and holler. "You can't speak here," he yelled. "It's our school and we'll tell you when to speak." The bullhorn then went to the hands of Karume James, chairman of the African Student Union. He proceeded to compare what Coke hasn't done to "apartheid, Vietnam, the genocide of black people in the Sudan region." "It's all for profit," he continued, revealing in one fell swoop the breadth of economic, historical, legal and political knowledge stocked by Coke-Free Campus.

I asked James, between his many speeches, why he's mad at Coke and what evidence he has of its guilt. "Direct your conversation to one of the organizers," he said. "I'm just here in support." Minutes later he was leading the chant, "Coca-Cola stop your lying! Because of you people are dying!"

The bullhorn made its way to Claire Douglas, who spoke of "the urgency of this issue." After her speech, she admitted to not being able to say why Coke was guilty. My search went on. Finally I was directed to Emily Villagrana, of Conciencia Libre and Raza Womyn. Villagrana admitted "(Coke isn't) the one doing the killing. ... The paramilitary in Colombia is the one causing all these deaths, massacres and tortures." Two minutes later, she was chanting: "Cherry, diet or vanilla: Coca-Cola is a killa." She admitted Coke was giving Colombians jobs they otherwise would not have. Two minutes later, she was chanting: "We support workers, we don't support Coke."

After these admissions, all that remained was the complaint that Coke hasn't provided enough protection for its workers. Any sensible person dreams of a world in which corporations have armed battalions guarding their factories from government intrusion. Sadly, we have yet to achieve that ideal. For now, private corporations are subject to the political realities of whatever government they operate under. How are they expected to provide protection in a war-ravaged country such as Colombia? "As far as I know, they haven't tried anything," Villagrana said.

I suggested that her knowledge might be augmented by listening to Coca-Cola's defenders at the meeting, rather than attempting to physically silence their free speech. "You're entitled to believe that," she said.

Her fellow riders who actually attended the meeting were jolted off their horses when a young Colombian refugee emotionally testified to the heroism of the Coca-Cola Company in her native land. She begged Coke to stay and hold its own, as the thousands of jobs it and other corporations provide help those who would otherwise probably end up joining the paramilitaries.

Colombian Professor Miguel Ceballos, of Foundation for Education, Colombia, said that no Colombian lacks a friend or family member - union or nonunion, Coke worker or non-Coke worker - who's been killed in the violence. He bashed the protestors for knowing nothing about the violent context in Colombia, where Coke is a rare force for saving lives.

Ed Potter, the Coke representative, added that Coke has more union employees than any other Colombian company, and that it provides a hotline for its workers to call to get a safety escort to work. Such are the condition-enhancing incentives of the profit motive, wherever it is allowed to motivate. Not that the riders really care about Colombian workers or the real effects of profit motive. They're there for the ride, fairgrounds be darned.

The anti-Coke protesters can only hope to be taken as ridiculously as they sound. If taken seriously, they'd have to be placed in the same category as Salem witch-hunters and Southern lynch mobs - so strong is their willingness to disregard free speech, pursuit of truth and presumption of innocence for the sake of a righteous crusade. Those tenets are among the core principles of a free society. If our university has any responsibility, it is to discourage the type of moral inflation that devalues those principles.

Source



Minnesota panic: Fire drills give way to lockdown exercises

Even though fire is a much more dangerous threat

Melissa Galarneault's fourth-grade class at Indian Mounds Elementary had just started a math quiz when the alert came over the loudspeaker: "Attention staff, this is a lockdown." The 20 children instantly dropped their pencils, sprang from their desks, scrambled to the front of the classroom and sat silently on the floor. Galarneault rushed to the doorway, dimmed the lights, scanned the hall for stragglers and pulled the locked door shut. She checked to make sure the blinds were drawn, and then joined the huddled youngsters until a coded, all-clear message was sounded over the intercom. The entire episode lasted four minutes. This time, it was only a drill.

Across the country, many schools hold lockdown drills because of terrorism fears and school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 that left 15 people dead. But Minnesota could apparently become the first state to require such exercises. A proposal before the Minnesota Legislature would mandate at least five lockdown drills a year. To free up time, the number of required fire drills would be reduced from nine to five. "There haven't been any kids killed in school fires in Minnesota because we've done a good job with fire safety equipment, with fire drills and so on," said Democratic state Senator John Marty, a sponsor of the bill. "Unfortunately, times have changed in such a way that we have lots of other threats." Last month offered a fresh reminder of the danger, with the first anniversary of a rampage at Red Lake High School in Minnesota that left a teacher, a security guard and six students dead, including the teenage gunman.

Lockdown drills are this generation's version of the duck-and-cover exercises held during the Cold War 1950s and '60s. Some states, including Arkansas and Connecticut, have laws encouraging -- but not requiring -- drills in case of a terrorist attack or other threat. Backers of the Minnesota bill and groups that track education trends say they are not aware of any state laws that require lockdown drills. Legislatures in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and South Dakota are among those weighing laws that would require schools to update safety plans periodically and practice them regularly. Kenneth Trump, president of the Ohio-based National School Safety and Security Services, said he wishes all schools would be nearly as conscientious about mock lockdowns as they are about fire drills. He said the exercises teach students and staff to respond instinctively to emergencies without panicking, and they allow the staff to identify weaknesses in the preparations. "The bottom line is that a plan that's sitting on a shelf in a fancy notebook collecting dust is worth little more than the paper it's printed on if it's not practiced," Trump said.

Deadly violence in the nation's schools is actually less prevalent now than in the 1990s, according to a 2005 government report. In the 1990s, the number of homicides per year was two dozen to three dozen; from 2000 to 2002, the number has been in the low to middle teens. The Minnesota legislation has advanced through committees without protest. While observing the Red Lake anniversary, Governor Tim Pawlenty threw his support behind it. The state fire marshal is neutral despite the reduction in fire drills.

In Michigan, fire agencies have come out against a lockdown drill plan because it allows schools to cut back on fire drills. The state's Association of Secondary School Principals has concerns of its own. "You are actually teaching the robbers how to rob the bank," said executive director Jim Ballard. "Most violent crime within schools has been student against student. If you're teaching those students what you are going to do in your lockdown procedures, they basically know what's going to happen."

Minnesota state Republican Representative Dean Urdahl said there are not many secrets to give away: "The plan is to lock the rooms." Child development experts are split over whether the lockdown exercises subject children unnecessarily to stress and fear. Ted Feinberg, assistant executive director of the National Association of School Psychologists, said he is not convinced the drills are harmful. But he said teachers and parents should discuss with children why they are done. "We have to empower our children to not feel frightened about life but be prepared for it," Feinberg said.

In Bloomington, school leaders rehearse the plan monthly. The elementary school called a real lockdown last year when teachers heard gunfire outside. The commotion turned out to be a military ceremony at a senior center.

Source



Some Education Quotes

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. John Ciardi (1916 - 1986)

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week. - Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology. - Clive James

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving. - Russell Green

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. Pete Seeger

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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. My home page is here

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27 April, 2006

UNSACKABLE TEACHERS IN NEW YORK

Report lifted from a comment thread on Tongue Tied

My mother taught remedial reading at a school in Hamburg,NY which is a suburb of Buffalo. (Not Hamburg HS, by the way, but a rival HS). I remember her talking about the inability of the school to terminate some of her colleagues for behavior which would have gotten them fired from other jobs. I graduated from the same system, and had firsthand experience with some of these bozos. Some shining examples:

#1) A male music teacher who was a convicted sex offender. He was "encouraged" not to live in the district, and actually lived just across the Canadian border. Frequently smelled of booze, and was verbally and physically abusive. But, he had tenure.

#2) A male chemistry teacher who frequently spent entire class sessions discussing not chemistry, but rather on the best way to rob a bank. One afternoon in the early '70s.....he robbed a bank. He was also apprehended immediately. Guess he should have asked the regular students instead of the honors class. Naturally, this relieved the school system from having to deal with that tenure issue.

#3) A male Spanish teacher who drank in the classroom in full view of the students (including me) and who was verbally and physically abusive. He got nasty with me...once. He didn't do it again. (No, I didn't go crying to Mom. I.....dealt with it. Myself.) The year after I graduated, he hit a bridge while driving drunk at high speed. Once again, the system didn't have to deal with that sticky tenure problem.

#4) Another male chemistry teacher whose stepson dated my older sister for a while. He used to follow them around and harass them. Also very verbally abusive to students. I remember him telling one girl in my class that she was,"so ugly, you could make a maggot jump off a gut-wagon". Hell of a nice guy, huh? But...he had tenure. Couldn't touch him.

#5) A female Health teacher who dressed very provocatively, and used to lean waaayyyy down over the male students' desks to answer questions.

I never had a problem with her......just couldn't understand what the issue was. Or why I couldn't take her course again........ :)

I graduated in 1975 (I'm 48). Back then, the teachers were allowed to hit the students with wooden paddles for failing marks on exams, being late, or just because they felt like it.

Guess it's a whole different ballgame now with all the PC b.s. ...... but there are still stupid people teaching our children...... and it's still next to impossible to get rid of them.



MORE MONEY! MORE MONEY!

Comment from Hawaii

I have received dozens of letters from students at Kaiser High School using the familiar rhetoric of the Department of Education. "Why does the government want to take away our creative outlets? Why don't you put more effort into getting money for education?" It seems the weighted student formula spending scheme is shortchanging schools like my alma mater, Kaiser High.

Ironically teachers and administrators from the DOE were the primary drivers for Act 51 which devised the spending formula. Now they have driven their students to do the political dirty work, demanding to know why I want to get rid of school librarians. It is laughable that a decision that is wholly the Department's is being used to draw unsuspecting students into the DOE's favorite past time, chanting "mo money, mo money!"

Education was the hot issue 2 years ago in the legislature. Scores were low, teachers were frustrated and parents were irritated. The DOE had been saying for decades that they needed more money, but where does the money go? Records show that the number of non-teachers employed by the DOE has increased over the past 30 years from about 7,000 in the early '70s to 23,790 in 2003. Sadly only 6,362 were teachers. In other words, only 1 in 4 employees of the education system is a teacher. Look more closely and you'll find that while DOE staff increased 236 percent, student enrollment increased only by 3 percent (178K to 183K).

Per pupil spending was close to $11,000. In 2003, a study entitled "Financial Analysis of Hawaii Public Schools," showed that Hawaii was in the top fourteen of all states in per-student spending on educational operations. The same study went on to report that only 49 cents of every dollar makes it to the classroom.

The political battle of 2004 was between the Republican effort to decentralize the system into locally elected school boards for greater accountability. The DOE/Democrat effort was to "reinvent education" with new layers of complicated bureaucracy which could pass for accountability. They won. The weighted student formula that emerged seemed promising, but I was skeptical knowing it would reward lower performing schools at the expense of those with higher performing students. For instance, Kaiser High School budget has been cut by $813,000. And where have school officials decided to cut? The Library and Fine Arts.

In an historic move Democrats called for the Superintendent of Education to speak in the Legislature. In her bicameral speech, Pat Hamamoto said, "Give us both the money and the authority and.hold me accountable." (http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Jan/28/ br/br06p.html ).

If my child was being politically manipulated to do DOE dirty work and to shift the responsibility, I would be livid. This is one reason my wife and I homeschool our children. Why are teachers misleading students into a political debate? Shouldn't they be teaching them? Maybe this is part of the problem.

Source



Australia: School assessment goes full circle in Queensland

Back to the old ways

The report cards of almost all Queensland students will use an A to E grading system from the end of this year. An overhaul of the school reporting system will give parents of all students in Years 1 to 10 twice-yearly assessments in plain English and access to two parent/teacher interviews a year. Education Minister Rod Welford said the changes meant that all students from Years 1 to 10, but not Prep, would be graded from A to E in each subject, with clear explanations of what each grade meant. Year 11 and 12 students are already assessed on a five-tier rating system (Very High Achievement ranging to Very Low Achievement) as part of the Overall Position (OP) process. The measures will apply to state, Catholic and independent schools and take effect at the end of this year in many schools and in all by the start of 2008.

"We want clarity and consistency so parents can understand their child's progress," Mr Welford said. "The reports will be more understandable." The Minister said reports had become too confusing with wide variations in styles. Some schools grade students by numbers such as 1 to 7 or 1 to 5, others use measures such as VHA (very high achievement) or SA (satisfactory achievement), while others use codes such as AV (achieving well) or ED (experiencing difficulties). Some schools assess students according to three different grades, others four and some five. And while some schools offer two parent/teacher interviews a year, many offer only one.

Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Association spokeswoman Wanda Lambert said it was vital that gradings were consistent between schools. "We need to feel confident that . . . an A in Cape York is worth the same as an A for someone of the same age in Burpengary," she said. Queensland Teachers Union President Steve Ryan said teachers had no problem using the A to E grading system in most year levels. But he said the union did have problems with its use in early primary years. "We believe it could be categorising children very early," Mr Ryan said.

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.

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. My home page is here

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26 April, 2006

Teaching versus Preaching

By Tibor Machan

After having taught college for nearly forty years, I can report that a great many teachers use their class rooms to preach, not to teach. (The same is reportedly the case in secondary schooling but I am not qualified to speak to that.)

In the tradition of liberal education, which is what is supposed to guide the profession of teaching, when professors enter the classroom, they are supposed to present to their students facts about the subject matter and, where appropriate, the variety of viewpoints that have gained prominence concerning it. The former approach is mainly associated with the natural sciences, the latter with the humanities and social sciences. Of course, facts are involved in both and even where there are different viewpoints afoot, it doesn’t mean they are all equally sound. But because they have all gained respectability, the professor is not supposed to take sides. He or she is supposed to familiarize students with these prominent perspectives and leave it to the students to decide which position is the most reasonable.

Of course, total nonpartisanship is unlikely, even if possible. And students usually do not expect it—nor do they need it since they are, after all, capable of careful thinking. But they do deserve a respectful representation of all those positions the professor may not find convincing. After all, another professor with just those views could be teaching the very same course and they all took an oath, as it were, to teach, not preach.

The frequent partisanship of professors is, of course, offset by the fact that students take quite a few courses and most are taught by different teachers, so they do often receive representation of different viewpoints even if their teachers are out and out partisan. Yet even with partisan teaching, contrary viewpoints aren’t supposed to be ridiculed—if they are worth teaching, they are worth rendering at their strongest, instead of being belittled, spoofed.

Sadly this tradition of liberal education is not being faithfully followed by many professors. I do not only have my own experience—with my own nine years of college and graduate education, with my colleagues, and with reports from students—on which to base my assessment. I also have my three children with their experiences in college. They, too, have had all too many professors who engage in blatant malpractice. They often make no attempt to represent ideas at their strongest with which they disagree and quite often outright rant and rave against these, as well as at thinkers who hold them. Back when I was a graduate student, one famous Oxford educated professor of mine dismissed all philosophers prior to Bertrand Russell as nothing but ideologues—which is to say, as apologists for some ruling class. And he gave no argument for this at all.

The abuse of class room power is nothing new but it is my impression that it used to be held in very low esteem and prevailed only because some who received tenure took advantage of the policy of academic freedom. It seems, however, that these days the abuse is the norm, although it is difficult to track the matter since the classroom tends to be the fiefdom of the professor so that no one can come in without his or her permission. And deans do not breach this practice, even though they are perhaps the only ones who have the authority to do so.

All this is disconcerting although the effort to take advantage of one’s captive audience in a classroom is not likely to get far in a relatively free society. There are many other sources of information, educated opinion, and competent renditions of different viewpoints, so even if some professors try to indoctrinate their students with just their take on a subject and denounce everyone else’s as silly, they are likely to be found out.

The one clear liability of professorial malpractice can be serious, however. This is the student’s grade who dares oppose a very partisan teacher. To such students, who do not want to become wallflowers as they face such destructive professors, ones who would penalize them for failing to toe the line, I have a suggestion. Raise your objections, your questions, in the third person—for example, "I wonder what you would say to a critic who says this or that to the idea you just championed?" Or "Are there not some who have proposed this objection to your position and how would you respond to them?" This approach could help one dodge the mean-minded grading of professors who want full compliance from their students and will punish them for refusing to provide it. But sadly even this tactic cannot stop those teachers who will refuse to hear anything contrary to their views from doing damage to their students.

Source



Rigid Victorian "sex offender" policy partially circumvented at last

An Orbost teacher who lost his job under controversial "zero-tolerance" laws for sexual offences has reached a financial settlement with the State government. The Age believes the confidential settlement is worth about $100,000 and will involve the teacher dropping legal action against the Department of Education and Training and Victoria's teacher registration body. Former Orbost Secondary College teacher Andrew Phillips was forced to resign in February last year after a compulsory police check revealed a prior sexual offence with a minor. As a 20-year-old, Mr Phillips pleaded guilty to the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl, in 1992. No conviction was recorded and he received a good behaviour bond. The incident was consensual and the complaint was made by a third party. Under the laws, teachers convicted or found guilty of a sex offence involving a minor face mandatory dismissal.

Mr Phillips' case sparked fierce debate, with many in the community - including state and federal Labor and conservative politicians and teacher unions - calling for the laws to include ministerial discretion or an appeals process. But Premier Steve Bracks and Education Minister Lynne Kosky have maintained their zero-tolerance approach to offenders. The stance is supported by Parents Victoria and the State Opposition. Yesterday, Ms Kosky said the matters involved complex legal action and the decision took into account "the most appropriate use of taxpayers' funds" - meaning it is cheaper to settle than defend cases.

The Government stands by its legislation and policy for teachers and staff found guilty or convicted of child sex offences, she said. "The Government has acted and will continue to act in the best interests of children and places the protection of students in schools as its highest priority," Ms Kosky said. As part of the settlement, Mr Phillips, 35, will drop court action against the Government, Education Department and the Victorian Institute of Teaching as well an unfair-dismissal claim in the Industrial Relations Commission.

In his first public comment on the controversy, Mr Phillips thanked the community for their support. "I will not be returning to teaching, but the resolution of my case enables me and my family to move forward with greater confidence and security," he said in a statement to The Age.

Orbost Secondary College principal John Brazier said the settlement brought closure to what he called the worst miscarriage of justice in his 35 years of teaching. "Retrospective legislation supporting 'double jeopardy' and leading to the dismissal of outstanding teachers is not what I would expect of governments in the 21st century," he said.

The Australian Education Union, which represents Mr Phillips, said the education system had lost a good and passionate teacher because of the laws. "The union will continue to press for discretion to be included in the legislation so that more good teachers are not needlessly lost to Victorian schools," AEU president Mary Bluett said.

But Opposition education spokesman Martin Dixon said the decision to pay Mr Phillips out sent a mixed message to the community. He reiterated his opposition to discretion. "On the one hand, this sort of case involving a teacher was black-and-white and teachers with these convictions shouldn't be allowed in our schools," he said. "Yet when the community reads of the Government giving him a payout it's almost a watering down of that strong line."

Victorian Principals Association Fred Ackerman repeated calls for an appeals process in such cases. "Any process of natural justice must have an appeals process," he said.

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.

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. My home page is here

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25 April, 2006

Meet Arlene Ackerman, the woman who shook up San Francisco's schools

No person deserves more credit for introducing a robust school choice system to San Francisco than Arlene Ackerman, 59, the district's superintendent since 2000. The city had experimented with open enrollment since the '70s, but it was Ackerman who made the size of a school's budget dependent on the number of students who attended the institution, thus introducing a market-like feedback mechanism; it was Ackerman who gave schools the autonomy to use those budgets as they saw fit; and it was Ackerman who made parental preferences the first criterion for school assignment.

Her relationship with the Board of Education has been frequently stormy, in part because of ideological differences and in part because of her management style, which critics consider autocratic. Indeed, she will be leaving the district at the end of the school year, invoking an "incompatibility" clause in her contract that allows her to resign with severance pay. But while in office, she was able to introduce some radical changes to the ways the city educates its children, and student achievement improved immensely as a result.

Despite her departure, Ackerman is optimistic about the future of the reforms she put into place. She is now bound for Columbia University Teachers College, where she will run a leadership program for aspiring superintendents. Lisa Snell spoke with her in January 2006.

Reason: How did the weighted student formula get put into practice in San Francisco?

Arlene Ackerman: We started with a year-long pilot program. We took a cross-section of about 27 schools-schools that had a lot of parent involvement and schools that didn't have a lot of parent involvement. That gave us an opportunity to look at what kind of resources we needed at the district level and what kinds of support the schools would need regardless of the conditions on their individual campuses. We paid them $200 per student to participate. We went full-scale the second year.

Reason: What has been the impact of the new system?

Ackerman: Five consecutive years of academic improvement for all groups of students at every level. I mean all groups-even special ed. When I first came to the district, the African-American students' achievement was going backwards. We reversed that. The last two years we have been the highest-performing large urban school district in California. This last year we were up for the Broad Prize as one of the five top urban school systems in the country. I'd say that's pretty good. I'd link our success not only to the weighted student formula but to the fact that the formula is linked to an academic planning process that's based on trend data and performance targets that every school has to meet.

Reason: What's the role of school choice?

Ackerman: As a school's academic performance index gets better, the school becomes more desirable to parents. We had schools that were 8s [in their academic performance index rating] that are now 10s and schools that were 3s that are now 6s and 7s. When I arrived six years ago, those were not schools that parents were choosing. Now they are, because their academic performance has increased and they are much more desirable.

A new union president came in about three years ago who wanted to get rid of the weighted student formula. There was a resounding no from the majority of the schools because they like making the decisions. For example, we've had to make deep cuts for the last three years. In the past those decisions were made in the central office. Many of the schools felt that was inappropriate because the central office is too far away from the needs of the students. Even when it's been difficult to make hard choices, I've heard parents and principals and teachers say that they'd rather make those choices than someone else.

Reason: What do you think is the future of school choice and the weighted student formula in San Francisco?

Ackerman: I'm not really worried about the weighted student formula and the academic planning process because I think people in the schools really appreciate it. As for the student assignment process, we just have to wait and see. The board is very split on whether or not race should be used as one of the guidelines for choice. I think they are going to adjust the diversity index [part of the formula for determining who can attend popular schools], and one of the new factors might be race. I'm proud of the work I've done in San Francisco. This is a great city, and I leave a legacy that I know is going to continue after I am gone.

Source



CAMPUS HETEROPHOBIA

Does anybody really think homosexual activists aren't trying to push their lifestyle on America -- as opposed to merely striving to avoid discrimination? A few recent news items shed some light on the subject.

Scott Savage, a librarian at Ohio State University at Mansfield, got a quick lesson in "tolerance" while serving on a committee responsible for selecting books for incoming OSU students to read as part of their "First Year Reading Experience." Savage, a devout Quaker, recommended that a number of conservative-oriented books be added to the list, to balance other books on the list, many of which reportedly had a liberal slant. Savage recommended four books, "The Marketing of Evil," by David Kupelian, "The Professors," by David Horowitz, "Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis," by Bat Ye'or, and "It Takes a Family," by Sen. Rick Santorum. How dare he? Won't he ever learn the proper lessons of selective censorship? The school had earlier investigated him for recommending other forbidden conservative books to freshmen students.

But I guess the request to place these dread screeds on a formal school list was just way too rebellious for anyone employed by an institution of higher learning priding itself in maintaining an environment of academic freedom and open inquiry. Three professors strenuously objected to Savage's suggestions, describing the Kupelian book as "hate literature," and "homophobic tripe." The professors, two of whom are homosexual, said the inclusion of these books on the list made them feel threatened and unsafe on campus.

Now get this -- if you haven't already heard: The faculty voted to support the professors' claims and the school began an investigation against Savage for sexual harassment. Sexual harassment? We are talking about book recommendations here, not words or action against specific individuals. This complaint, on its face, was offensively absurd. You can't have sexual harassment without a victim -- without some form of mistreatment of specific individuals. The homosexual community is the first to cry intolerance at the slightest perceived indignity, yet these professors refused to tolerate the innocuous recommendation of a few books whose message they apparently don't agree with. They not only sought to suppress opposing ideas, but conspired to punish a man trying to present those ideas.

You have to be a semantic contortionist not to realize that any intolerance or hate speech involved in this episode emanated from the professors and their supporting faculty. Then again, conservative thought is obviously not entitled to the same degree of protection, if any, and anti-conservative propaganda is promoted in much of liberal academia. We can only imagine what goes on in these professors' classrooms that we don't hear about. What these professors, then the faculty and school, did to Mr. Savage comes much closer to harassment than what he did to the professors, which was absolutely nothing. Apparently someone at the school finally figured that out because the malicious and frivolous charges against Savage were dropped.

But Savage's attorney, David French, said that merely dropping the complaint doesn't repair the damage to his client's reputation and career. He is considering litigation. I think he should seriously consider going forward with litigation against the people and institutions involved. Radical homosexual groups routinely characterize the utterance of opposing opinions -- just as in this incident -- as hate speech and seek to ban it. They frequently seek to have the expression of opinions running counter to their dogma, branded as harassment or bullying, to make it easier to stigmatize those daring to disagree. Well, in this case -- if the allegations are true -- the professors appear to be guilty of that which they were accusing Savage: harassment.

You have to be naive not to recognize that the radical homosexual lobby is pushing its lifestyle on American society and using intimidation tactics, such as we see here, to compel society's acceptance of homosexual behavior as mainstream or normal. They say they just want to live and let live, but many of them want far more than that. They want to live free of harassment themselves, which I'm all for, but it doesn't appear they want to accord similar respect to those not sharing their views.

If anyone doubts the aggressive intentions of the radical homosexual lobby, he should read the recent news report about a second-grade school teacher in Massachusetts reading to her class a fantasy book about two princes getting married. Objecting parents can't even opt out their children from these experiences because same-sex marriage has been decreed legal by the high priests of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Here we see what radical homosexual activism fueled by radical judicial activism has wrought. It's difficult to understand how there can be so much apathy as we witness such ongoing assaults on our culture.

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.

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. My home page is here

***************************



24 April, 2006

SCIENCE EDUCATION IN THE USA

Post lifted from Civil Commotion

The National Science Board has issued its 2006 report (statistics, narrative) on the state of science and engineering in the United States — and the news is not good.

Nearly a quarter century ago, the National Science Board's Commission on Precollege Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology assessed the state of U.S. precollege education in the subject fields and found it wanting. In the intervening years, we have failed to raise the achievement of U.S. students commensurate with the goal articulated by that Commission-that U.S. precollege achievement should be "best in the world by 1995"-and many other countries have surpassed us. Not only are they not first, but by the time they reach their senior year, even the most advanced U.S. students perform at or near the bottom on international assessments. [emphasis mine]

Here are some sobering numbers:

Percentage of 4th-graders not meeting specified math competence: 68
Rank of American 15-year olds in math, out of 30 industrialized countries: 21
Rank of American 15-year olds in science, out of 29 industrialized countries: 19

You don't have to be Mr. Wizard to see that America's technology leadership, and its wealth, cannot be sustained if numbers like this persist much longer. Indeed, it's not irresponsible to speculate that the nation may already have passed the tipping point. Certainly, we shall have to undo a lot of nonsense if we are to keep up.

It has always been the case, and it is the case today more than ever, that the creation of wealth arises from the application of intelligence and reason to physical problems. It is human intelligence, sifting through observations, abstracting principles, and projecting those principles into the future, that made it possible for man to learn to harvest seed, store it — and feed himself the next year. It is that same human intelligence that brings clean water to the tap today, which designs and constructs safe highways, which designs and constructs the nuclear furnaces that heat hundreds of thousands of home, which has decrypted the genetic code and made possible therapies for congenital illnesses, which fuels the communications revolution ... on and on. And we will need more of that intelligence, not less, in the future. From the moment we arise in the morning to the time we go to sleep in the evening, there is scarcely an instant of the day that is unaffected by the work of an immense and mostly anonymous army of scientists and engineers.

Meantime, thanks to the inane conceit that America can remain an island of high-salaries, stupendous benefits and ignorant citizens in an ocean of cheap labor — good engineering jobs are steadily trickling to other countries.

What is more, foreign countries are poaching our best talent. Singapore, of all places, is luring some our best scientists with big salaries and well-equipped laboratories, determined to stake a claim in the miracle business of bioengineering.

In this country ... fundamentalist yahoos subject kindergarten-aged children — more than 2000 at a time — to lectures by Ken Ham, who instructs them that science is a satanic conspiracy against God, and equally insane Lefties teach children that the really, really important thing is to feel good about themselves and never mind worrying about being an ignoramus.

This is nuts; it's national suicide. Reality always gets the last word, and we need desperately to face reality, confront the fact that American education is a ruinous disaster, and start turning-out engineers and scientists. If there still is time, that is.



THREE RECENT INSTALLMENTS IN THE BIG AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION DEBATE:

Far-Left education bureaucrats are finally being called to account

The muffled canon

Kevin Donnelly deplores the way literature is being swamped by an 'it's all good' attitude in our high schools

What do the works of Shakespeare and the television talent quest Australian Idol have in common? For most, especially Prime Minister John Howard, who argued this week that teaching of great literature is being destroyed by postmodernism and outcomes-based education, the answer is: nothing.

Shakespeare's works, as Harold Bloom argues in The Western Canon, represent literature at its most sublime and suggest something profound and moving about what it means to be human. Australian Idol, by comparison, deals with human nature in a superficial and predictable way and, although entertaining to some, lacks the enduring and universal quality of great literature.

Not so according to Paul Sommer, president of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. In defending the idea that in English classrooms across Australia everything from graffiti and SMS messages to weblogs and computer games is a worthwhile "text" for study, Sommer says: "We want them [students] to be confident with a range of computer literacies and we want them to understand that texts from Shakespeare to Australian Idol are profoundly shaped by contexts and open to a range of understandings." Two teacher-academics, in a paper delivered at a 2005 national English teachers conference, also argue that Australian Idol should be included in the classroom and provide a lesson plan showing students how to analyse a judge's comments that one of the singers was overweight.

Welcome to the brave new world of "critical literacy". The Tasmanian Education Department defines critical literacy as "the analysis and critique of the relationships among texts, language, power, social groups and social practices. It shows us ways of looking at texts to question and challenge the attitudes, values and beliefs that lie beneath the surface."

The president of the ACT Association for the Teaching of English, Rita van Haren, describes teaching critical literacy as getting students to ask the following questions: "Who is in the text? Who is missing? Whose voices are represented? Whose voices are marginalised or discounted? What are the intentions of the author/speaker? What does the author/speaker want the audience to think? What would an alternative text say? How can the audience use this information to promote equity?" The task is no longer to read with sensitivity and discrimination what is written and to value what a literary work tells us about what D.H. Lawrence terms "the relation between man and his circumambient universe at the living moment".

The result? Whereas the Western canon, defined as works that best exemplify our creative urge to give shape and meaning to experience through the use of imaginative language, once held centre stage in the English classroom, the sad fact is that literature is no longer privileged. Not only are great works such as Hamlet reduced to being one cultural artefact among many, along with The Terminator and Australian Idol, but the moral and aesthetic value of literature is ignored as students are taught to analyse texts as examples of how dominant groups in society oppress and marginalise others.

As borne out by the example of SCEGGS in Sydney, where Year11 students are taught to deconstruct Othello from a Marxist, a feminist and a racial perspective, the joy of reading is reduced to a sterile and formulaic exercise in political correctness. Further evidence that the culture warriors of the Left have won the day is the way Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is taught in NSW senior English classes. In notes given to Year 12 students, they are asked to analyse Winton's book in terms of each of the following perspectives: gender (feminist), socio-political (Marxist), cultural, post-colonial, spiritual and psychological.

Across Australia, the reality is that critical literacy reigns supreme. The South Australian curriculum asks teachers to develop in students "the capability to critically analyse texts in relation to personal experiences, the experiences of local and global communities and the social constructs of advantage/disadvantage in order to imagine more just futures". In Western Australia, the new Texts, Traditions and Cultures program for Year 12 argues there is nothing universal or profound about the literary canon, as "the concept of the literary is socially and historically constructed, rather than objective or self-evident". Teachers are told they must teach that reading is ideological on the basis that "texts and reading practices enact particular ideologies, playing an important role in the production and maintenance of social identities and reinforcing or contesting dominant ideological understandings".

In opposition to critical literacy, it is possible to argue a case for the pre-eminent position of literature. One of the defining characteristics of literature is that it deals with those existential and moral dilemmas that define what it is to be human. Literature, unlike a computer manual, also uses language in a unique way. Reading involves what Coleridge termed a "willing suspension of disbelief" as the reader enters an imaginative world that has the power to shock, to awe and speak to one's inner self. Emotions such as love, despair, ambition, grief and joy are universal and, as suggested by Jung, there are symbols and archetypes that recur across cultures and across time. One only needs to read Greek tragedies such as Medea and Oedipus to realise that, notwithstanding all the cliches about millennial change, human nature is constant.

No amount of cant about readers as "meaning makers", texts as "socio-cultural constructions" and the purpose of reading being to "deconstruct texts in terms of dominant ideologies that disempower the marginalised and dispossessed" can disguise the fact that most of us read for more mundane reasons. As S.L. Goldberg said, "People are more likely than not to go on being interested in people, as much as they are in abstract theories and ideologies, or impersonal forces, or structural systems, or historical information, or even the play of signifiers. "So it is more likely than not, I'd say, that people will go on valuing those writings that they judge best help them to realise what the world is and what people are, and to live with both as realistically and as fully as they can."

Source



Noted playwright backs PM's attack on current teaching



The celebrated playwright David Williamson, a fierce critic of John Howard, has joined the Prime Minister's attack on English literature study based on postmodern ideology. The left-leaning Williamson, whose plays are studied by Year 12 students, said that despite Mr Howard's criticism of English teaching this week there was nothing wrong with "pointing out to students that literature has an ideological content". "But to treat our best literature as being nothing more than ideology would seem to be abandoning our greatest repository of human wisdom," he said.

On Thursday, Mr Howard labelled the postmodern approach to literature in schools as "rubbish" and lashed out at Western Australia's outcomes-based education system, dismissing it as "gobbledegook". His attack follows reports that top Sydney school SCEGGS Darlinghurst had asked students to interpret Shakespeare's Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives.

Williamson, who has defended the arts against perceived attacks from Mr Howard's Government, dismissed as "nonsense" the postmodernist principle that people are merely creatures of their immediate society and its ideologies. "We have a universal set of human emotions that vary little between cultures and which drive us to universally exhibit egocentricity, tribal affiliation, susceptibility to charisma, nepotism, sensitivity to social pressure, altruism, excessive fear of threat, pair bonding and other deep-rooted tendencies that literature has identified as 'human nature' for thousands of years," he wrote on the Crikey website. "What great writing does is identify the enduring truths about human nature that cross time and culture."

Writing in The Weekend Australian today, education expert Kevin Donnelly says forcing high school students to "regurgitate" English literature through the prism of often left-leaning critical perspectives leaves them with little interest in the discipline at university level. Mr Donnelly is executive director of the Education Strategies consulting group. He says that in recent years Cloudstreet, a novel by Australia's Tim Winton, has been taught to Year 12 NSW students, who have had to analyse it through gender, socio-political, post-colonial and spiritual perspectives. He said the limitation inhibited the students' understanding of the text. "Students tell me they dropped literature after Year 12 because it's such a boring exercise," he said. "They really had to jump through hoops in terms of regurgitating the critical response required, whether that is feminist, Marxist and so on."

Despite his criticisms, Mr Howard was reluctant yesterday to tie federal school funding to English programs that he thought were appropriate. "I'd be reluctant to do that because I do believe that if the states are to have sensible functions on their own, setting the syllabus and so forth for the teaching of English ought to be one of them," he said.

Source



Education: Trendy "isms" are incompatible with lasting knowledge

Below is an editorial from "The Australian" newspaper -- Australia's national daily

What is the best way to introduce young people to literature? Is it to reveal to them the joy of reading great writing, and how themes and plots developed even centuries ago can be an anchor for their lives in the modern world? Or is it to treat every work as a "text" no better than any other, dissect them all ruthlessly and examine the entrails for political, sexual and racial bias? This debate has flared up again this week, sparked both by John Howard's comments on the "gobbledegook" taught in Australian English classrooms, and the defence of postmodernism mounted by the likes of the principal of exclusive Sydney girls school SCEGGS Darlinghurst, Jenny Allum, whose Year 11 students have their first encounter with Shakespeare's Othello when they are thrown into the postmodern deep end and told to analyse the play through the prisms of racism, sexism, and feminism. While many arguments can be made against this postmodern approach, the strongest one is that it does not belong in a high school classroom. If a graduate student who is well-versed in the Western canon and understands 5000 years of social and political thought from Plato and Aristotle through to John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau wants to deconstruct an author through a philosophical prism, then fine. But forcing dull formulas of race, sex and class on unsuspecting Year 11 students is unfair - not so much because it dumbs down the curriculum, but because it introduces the concept at the wrong time. Neither high school students nor their teachers are equipped with the base knowledge of literature, history and politics to do justice to such an enterprise. No wonder educationalists are tossing out Beowulf for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and claiming that students are bored by the classics.

The Australian strongly believes there is much more to life than race, sex and class, and that literature is a great way to understand the transcendant themes of human existence. Love, hate, war, jealousy, greed, charity, faith, hope, despair: these are the universals of human experience, and great and ancient literature speaks to us about these themes from across the years. Sadly, a small-mindedness has infected Australia's education system, producing an obsession with politics and power relationships that has infected the nation's classrooms like a mould. Those who defend current teaching methods by setting up a straw-man argument - "all we're trying to do is teach students that there are different points of view" - are being disingenuous. For, in forcing students to accept dull interpretations of "texts" in which everything becomes political, the postmodernists exhibit the worst sort of narrow-mindedness. The first job of teachers introducing students to the works of any great writer should be to instill a love of literature and learning. And English teachers everywhere must focus more on basics such as spelling, punctuation and grammar, all of which lose out to trendy theories like critical literacy and outcomes-based education. Those who are so inclined can always study the gobbledegook later.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the controversy is the postmodern fixation on Karl Marx as an appropriate filter through which to examine literature. For one thing, he was an economist, not a literary critic. For another, his writings inspired the deaths of perhaps 100 million people around the world, and this tragedy is better learned about in history classroom. And teaching high school students to interpret literature through ephemeral "isms" is, by definition, a way to produce students with dated knowledge. While the likes of Ms Allum may hopefully believe they are teaching students to "understand what (great authors) said in the context of their day and what it is they say to us today", it is tragically obvious what this obsession with Marx leads to - namely, students with poor skills who have had the love of books beaten out of them.

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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. My home page is here

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23 April, 2006

Vive la Revolution: After 25 years, conservative papers have stirred campus debate

In the summer of 1980, a clutch of students at a small college in New Hampshire, disaffected by campus liberalism and incensed by the unfair treatment of an insurgent candidate for the board of trustees, founded a conservative newspaper. That might have been the end of it, but the Dartmouth Review promptly scandalized the campus with its heterodox opinions and brash style, and hostilities escalated.

In the years since, the Dartmouth administration has gone to great measures to stop the presses, including frivolous lawsuits against the paper and kangaroo suspensions of its editors. Mission hardly accomplished: As the Review tonight celebrates its 25th anniversary with a black-tie gala in Manhattan, we'd like to raise a glass to conservative student papers across the country. What was once a lonely voice challenging campus orthodoxy is now a boisterous chorus.

By 1984 the University of Chicago Counterpoint, the Harvard Salient, the Princeton Tory and the Virginia Advocate had joined the fight. As more and more such publications cropped up, they were brought under the patronage of the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), which was funded, in part, by the John M. Olin Foundation. According to James Piereson, Olin's former director, the goal was to invest in "conservative knowledge production."

And it wasn't a passive form of knowledge. Articles from the 1980s and '90s--in conservative student papers around the country--focused on the decline of academic standards, the excesses of militant feminism, the hypocrisy of racial preferences and the reign of political correctness.

Their audience included alumni. In 1994, Yale alumnus Lee Bass learned from the campus conservative journal Light and Truth that his $20 million donation to the school, aimed at establishing a program in Western civilization, was not being used for its intended purpose. The university, it turned out, had refused to launch the program because of faculty hostility. In the ensuing controversy, Yale was forced to return the gift--with interest.

Such victories have not come easily. In addition to being denounced as "fascist" by administrators and faculty members, conservative papers have been subject to theft and vandalism by students. In 1997, a mob stole a press run of the Cornell Review and burned it in front of an audience that included several administrators, including the dean of students. The school did nothing and later defended the protesters' "freedom of expression."

Today the Collegiate Network, the successor to the IEA, supports about 95 right-leaning campus papers. Their writers and editors help to promulgate and legitimate conservative ideas that are rarely encountered in the lecture hall. Their iconoclastic tone appeals to students who are open to new ideas but skeptical of settled "truths."

The papers are even contributing to a gradual shift in the culture of universities. Conservative student journalists have helped to overturn speech codes at Stanford, George Mason and the University of Wisconsin. As civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate notes: "It is now difficult or virtually impossible for a college administration to justify or rationalize censorship when it is brought to the attention of the free world."

Which won't stop college officials from trying. But the American campus is no longer a liberal mausoleum. A lively debate has started, and we have intrepid young journalists to thank.

Source



LOUISIANA: FAITH IN COERCION

If a child's parents habitually fail to show up when asked to come to parent-teacher conferences, the school principal would be empowered to withhold the child's report card, under a bill approved narrowly by the state Senate on Wednesday. The bill is aimed at forcing parents to become more involved in their child's education, said its sponsor, Sen. Julie Quinn, R-Metairie. Her Senate Bill 564 requires teachers to notify the principal when parents or legal guardians fail to attend or respond when asked to attend a parent-teacher conference. The principal, after deciding the failure is habitual, must send a written notification to the parents and demand a response. The principal then must withhold the next report card "until the issue has been addressed to the satisfaction of the principal."

The 20-13 Senate floor vote sends the bill to the House Education Committee. Opponents said while they agreed with Quinn's intentions of getting parents more involved, they disagreed with punishing the child. Sen. Don Cravins, D-Opelousas, said he would prefer making it a criminal offense for a parent to fail to respond to a request for a parent-teacher conference, with some kind of community service as a penalty. "To put the stress on the kid is inappropriate," Cravins said. "You can't legislate common sense." The bill got the minimum 20 votes -- a majority of the Senate's 39 elected members -- required for final passage.

Source

The child would be embarrassed, and unconcerned parents would be unconcerned about not getting a report card



Top Marx for Australia's educators

John Howard is absolutely correct in seeing post-modernist influence behind the dumbing-down of the English syllabus and in the growing disrespect shown for significant literature. But does he - or most parents - appreciate fully the extent to which Marxist ideology hides behind the mask of postmodernism?

Communism has never achieved even 2 per cent of the total vote in Australian federal elections. In the sphere of public education, however, the grip of ideas that have their origin in Marxist theory has never been greater. Children are now regularly indoctrinated in Australia's public schools with political ideology that is the opposite of that supported by their parents. Add to this an accelerating decline in quantifiable standards of learning and achievement and you see why a sizeable migration to private education has been taking place for years.

If parents were offered a totally depoliticised system of public education - even one approximating to a classical model from 50 years ago, which emphasises the acquisition of skills rather than of attitudes - I have no doubt that many would embrace it with enthusiasm. In terms of measurable academic standards, hopes for worthwhile future employment, ability to cope with tertiary courses and the development of genuinely independent, educationally informed minds, such an alternative could not help being an improvement on the present, covertly politicised and academically disastrous model. Such an alternative would, of course, be resisted to the death by those who now dictate educational policy. Such educationalists invariably claim - in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary - to know best what is most beneficial and desirable for those in their power.

Does such a claim to omniscience sound familiar? It certainly should to anyone who has ever lived for any length of time under a communist regime. Under such regimes even abject failure was always represented as triumph or impending triumph. Regular observers of our educational scene should have realised by now that wherever radical educational initiatives - generally of postmodernist and thus Marxist origins - appear to create chaos or failure such shortcomings find themselves twisted through 180 degrees to re-emerge as triumphant vindications of doctrine: "Our children may not be able to read, spell, punctuate, add or subtract or show even the slightest grasp of the pleasures and purposes of significant literature but what they have been forced to recognise are the power structures concealed in educated discourse. Access to the mysteries of such recognition will make them the true world citizens of the future." What I am referring to here obliquely is the brave new world of what is termed critical literacy.

It may be instructive for parents who remain understandably in the dark about any supposed need to analyse language largely or solely in terms of power relationships to understand why their children should be obliged to view the written word in this one-eyed fashion. The originator of these ideas was a French Marxist historian/philosopher who died 22 years ago and whose entire life was consumed by a corrosive hatred of the kind of conventional, middle-class, "bourgeois" values that tend to obtain in modern Western democracies such as Australia. The man in question was Michel Foucault. Was this paragon truly the possessor of an exceptional, visionary and supremely balanced mind whose theories of life and society should be accepted by the rest of us - including parents of hundreds of thousands of children now attending Australian schools - without question?

When not exercising his supposedly superior vision of the true nature of bourgeois Western societies, Foucault was a promiscuous masochist whose areas of interest were in torture, drug-use and totally anonymous sex. His spiritual hero was the Marquis de Sade. As well as seeking the destruction of conventional Western capitalist societies, the admired philosopher had a parallel penchant for destroying himself, attempting suicide a number of times and finally succeeding in dying prematurely at the age of 57 from a sexually transmitted disease.

Whether any of these acknowledged facts fitted him supremely to be a posthumous arbiter in the way our children and university students are taught is not for me to say. These personal details of Foucault's life are, incidentally, freely available, being discussed in disturbing detail in a biography written by James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Simon & Schuster 1993).

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.

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. My home page is here

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22 April, 2006

Professor Who Trashed Abortion Display Advises evading the police

Post lifted from Alain's newsletter

Highland Heights, KY -- A university professor who was forced to resign after leading a group of pro-abortion students in vandalizing a pro-life display has attacked pro-life advocates in a private email to the students involved. The email also encourages the students to "make it hard"; for police investigating the vandalism to find them. News of the email is surfacing just hours after Northern Kentucky University professor Dr. Sally Jacobson issued an apology for her actions.



Jacobson apologized Tuesday evening in an interview with a local television station, but told the NKU student newspaper she will no longer grant interviews on the advice of her attorney.

Meanwhile, Jacobson emailed the pro-abortion students involved in the vandalism and urged them to obtain attorneys and to resist being charged by police in the matter. She worries and charges will aid the pro-life movement.

"If you are named, my advice is to get your attorney to plead you down to a misdemeanor", she wrote, according to The Northerner student paper. "The well-funded Right to Life groups that are pushing for this need felony convictions, I believe, in order to file civil suits for damages"

Jacobson also told the students about the current investigation the NKU police department is conducting, even encouraging the pro-abortion students to make it difficult for police to locate them: "In the meantime, the campus police continue their investigation", she said. "If you have not yet been interrogated, you do not have to talk to them without an attorney. You can make it hard to find you. Again, I am so sorry."



Jacobson and the students involved could face as much as a Class D felony for their actions. Charges have not yet been filed against those involved in the destruction of the pro-life display but NKU Officer Rob Yelton told the student paper they are forthcoming. "The [pro-life] group has indicated that they are willing to press charges", he said.

However, The Northerner reported that the bulk of the charges will be directed at Jacobson. "At this time, we don't anticipate the students being charged", Lt. Col. Jeffrey Martin said. "They were intimidated by an authority figure into believing that this was not a criminal act".

Commonwealth Attorney Jack Porter, the local prosecutor, will make the final decision on the charges, and the officers indicated they thought he would grant the students immunity but charge Jacobson for her part in the vandalism. Jacobson clearly hopes this is the case, according to the paper, as she wrote the students that she wants to help them avoid prosecution: "I want to do everything I can to keep any of you from being specifically named", she said. "And I am very sorry I got you involved in this".

Jacobson, whose classes have been given to other professors to complete for the semester, also warned the pro-abortion students to stay away from her office on campus.



AMERICA HATRED: OBSERVATIONS FROM A FORMER STUDENT AT THE ELITE BROWN UNIVERSITY

Excerpts from an interview with Travis Rowley, author of "Out of Ivy"

I was a junior by the time I finally decided to criticize particular segments of the campus. Again, I was a football player, and that took up a lot of my time. So rather than immediately join some leftist student-group, I was forced to be a spectator of campus activism at first. There was always a lot of controversy on Brown's campus, and I spent a lot of time observing the behavior of my classmates. I had an immediate repulsion to them for a lot of reasons. It wasn't that I was pro-life, and they were pro-choice. Or that I was against affirmative action, and they were in favor of it. Those weren't even opinions that I had formed or cared about. My objection to liberal activism was more about my classmates' zealotry, and the fact that I knew I was forbidden to disagree or disapprove of them. In other words, I had a negative reaction to the ethic and demeanor of liberals before I even disagreed with liberal thought. I found Brown's leading liberal forces to be deviant, oppressive, and improper before I reached any other conclusions. Ironically, they were viciously labeling everyone but themselves as mean, dumb, and racist. But I saw it in reverse. In fact, Out of Ivy documents the campus left's hypocrisy, and their readiness to lie, smear, stereotype, and discriminate --all accompanied by their assertion that they were the fluffy-hearted champions of tolerance and understanding.

The incident that triggered my involvement in campus controversies was the 2000 presidential election. Some Brown students, including members of the Brown Democrats and the International Socialist Organization, traveled down to President Bush's Inauguration to protest his controversial victory. When they returned to Providence they were bragging about giving President Bush the middle finger as he walked by them. The entire campus seemed to think of them as heroes returning from some sort of glorious charge against evil. But again, I saw it in reverse. So I wrote an opinion piece for the Brown Daily Herald that condemned the protest, and very simply observed the indecency of flicking off the President of the United States. The reaction to my column was unbelievable. I received harassing phone calls, and was repeatedly called a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe-for saying that you shouldn't give the President the finger!

As it turned out, this over-reaction to what I saw as an opinion grounded in decency and common sense was typical liberal temperament. Brown's campus left wasn't much different from many other leftist groups. They made it a habit to smear anyone who disagreed with them on any issue. And from that point on, I considered myself engaged in a battle with campus liberals. I continued to criticize them, and tried to discover the roots of their behavior and beliefs. And because I suddenly found myself in the middle of campus controversies, I was also forced to quickly define my own values in order to argue effectively against them. Here is where readers are able to follow the political development of a politically na‹ve student, armed only with gut feelings and his own personal sense of right and wrong.

Interviewer: What would you say are the key ingredients of leftist ideology?

Rowley: The immediate ones that come to mind are Hypocrisy, the belief that there are one set of rules for leftists, and another set for everyone else. And Elitism, a sense that they are not only smarter than everyone else, but are inherently more caring than the populace, and that they are the only ones who feel passionate about their beliefs. But I truly believe that the underlying driving force behind leftist philosophy is a disdain for America. In fact, the entire book leads up to this one conclusion. The book is peppered with entertaining stories about my clashes with various components of the campus left, but that's merely the setting I have used to deliver the more important message concerning the intentions of hard-core liberalism. Brown's campus left wasn't made up of mild American liberals. This is the Far Left we're talking about. They are much more devious than the person who simply believes in taxing the wealthy a little more than we tax the poor. I didn't know it at the time, but I was arguing with Communists, Marxists, anti-Christians, and anti-Americans. Hatred for America was a very difficult scheme to decipher for a politically ignorant student, but I eventually found the campus left to be operating off of the intellectual premise that American liberty, Christianity, capitalism, and the United States were the root causes of all world tragedies.

To prove this, the campus left made a tireless and incessant effort to undermine America by constantly reminding everyone of certain people's claim to victim-hood, oppression caused by the American system. Homosexuals were victims. Minorities were victims. Women were victims. Muslims were victims. Indians were victims. Anyone who dared to question this premise-that certain people were injured by America's past and present-was doomed for what liberals saw as the appropriate social consequences. Their problem was, that once they marked particular people as victims, they were forced to point out the perpetrators who had inflicted such harm. If you listened closely, you would hear them saying that it was straight, white, and patriotic Christians who were to blame-the American mainstream. 9/11 couldn't have more perfectly demonstrated the reason why liberals fought so hard to maintain an image of victim-hood for certain types of people.

They desired to create a natural impulse for everyone that would prompt them to blame their own country at any turn of tragedy. I was a senior when the World Trade Center was bombed, and no other event could have exposed leftist intentions better than an incident that prompted America to defend itself. Only a few days after the terrorist attacks Brown professors and students, fearing our military retaliation, began to assert our role in causing the attacks. They were unashamedly screaming that we deserved what happened to us, that America was also a terrorist state, and that America causes pain and suffering throughout the world.

Interviewer: Tell us your thoughts on David Horowitz's fight for academic freedom. What do you think about the academic bill of rights and the whole battle overall to bring intellectual diversity to the campus?

Rowley: I've always kept an eye on Mr. Horowitz and his skirmishes with campus radicals. Actually, Mr. Horowitz's clash with Brown's campus left in 2001-concerning reparations for slavery-was one of the events that inspired me to pay more attention to my alma mater's political climate. No other event could have more perfectly exposed the type of dishonest political games Brown students are taught to play, and just how far the University is willing to go to enslave the minds of its students.

That's why I chronicle the Horowitz controversy -- as it's called at Brown -- in Out of Ivy. When Mr. Horowitz was finally allowed to speak at my alma mater in 2003 he told the audience that you can't get a good education when your school is only telling you one half of the story. That statement made so much sense to me. Most of all, it seemed to be a statement of humility, asserting that nobody has a monopoly over truth. I found this to be the exact opposite attitude of Brown's liberals. Up until that point, anyone who disagreed with them on any issue was deemed stupid or racist -- no questions asked. Mr. Horowitz's lecture was a deep breath of fresh air to Brown conservatives, despite the fact that the campus had to be dragged through one of the most venomous debates ever seen on Providence's College Hill. It actually prompted a handful of recent alumni to form the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity, an organization dedicated to continuing the fight for intellectual tolerance on Brown's campus.

Because I've seen the problems Mr. Horowitz speaks of first hand, I find it difficult to disagree with him on these issues. He seems to have a firm grasp on the history and evolution of higher education. What I have attempted to do with Out of Ivy is take readers through the halls of one elite university, with the hope that it will be a testament to what Mr. Horowitz has been saying all along about the sad state of the academy. His academic bill of rights is hardly an extreme proposition. It may be revolutionary, but not extreme. It's a principled stance that merely reminds campus citizens that colleges are not supposed to be political parties. Students should not be coerced into thinking a certain way by professors who constantly demonize particular political figures, and mock certain political ideals. Professors aren't paid to dismiss their students into political rallies that conflict with class time. Tuition payments have never been paid to ensure that students can go to class to learn what a horrible nation they live in. Aside from the importance of the call for intellectual diversity that would counter leftist philosophy, Mr. Horowitz has also been pointing out that a college classroom has a unique and specific purpose, one that doesn't include political indoctrination. Yet, Mr. Horowitz encounters such fierce opposition on nearly every college campus precisely because universities are exactly what he accuses them of being. The intellectual dominion leftists have on these campuses is crucial to the survival of their agendas. The last thing they need is honest and open debate, and for leftist professors to be restricted from corrupting the education of their students.



Australian Prime Minister condemns 'rubbish' postmodern teaching

John Howard believes the postmodern approach to literature being taught in schools is "rubbish" and is considering tying education funding to ending the "gobbledegook" taught in some states. The Prime Minister made the threat after accusing the state education authorities of "dumbing down" the English syllabus and succumbing to political correctness. "I feel very, very strongly about the criticism that many people are making that we are dumbing down the English syllabus," Mr Howard said.

Australia's most distinguished literary scholar, Leonie Kramer, yesterday agreed with the Prime Minister's criticism of how English is taught in high schools. Dame Leonie, professor emeritus in Australian literature at the University of Sydney, said what worried her was "the notion that you have to read, let us say Shakespeare, in relation to contemporary preoccupations such as race and class".

Education Minister Julie Bishop has raised concerns over Western Australia's outcomes-based education system, claiming it is "inevitable" that standards will fall. When asked about the "outcomes-based" program, Mr Howard replied: "That is gobbledegook - what does that mean?" Ms Bishop is expected to drive the reform push at the next meeting with state education ministers, scheduled for either June or July. The minister, who is overseas at present, is keen to push for greater national consistency on English curriculums, amid concerns that senior high school students are not being sufficiently challenged on traditional texts.

Mr Howard may also seek to have education standards placed on the agenda for the next Council of Australian Governments, also scheduled to be held in June. But senior government sources yesterday played down suggestions that Canberra would seek to "stand over" the states in the public debate over education standards. Mr Howard said: "I share the views of many people about the so-called postmodernism ... I just wish that independent education authority didn't succumb on occasions to the political correctness it appears to succumb to."

The criticism of teaching standards followed revelations in The Weekend Australian that a prestigious Sydney school, SCEGGS Darlinghurst, had asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives. "I think there's evidence of that (dumbing down) in different parts of the country ... when the, what I might call the traditional texts, are treated no differently from pop cultural commentary, as appears to be the case in some syllabuses," Mr Howard told the ABC.

Western Australia's introduction of a Year 12 English exam that fails to penalise students for poor spelling or grammar and asks students to compare two film posters but not read a book has also been blasted by Canberra. Rather than dictating what students should know by a specified time and then grading them, outcomes-based education focuses on what students are able to do.

Mr Howard's intervention drew a stinging response from the states and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley. "Instead of telling everyone what they should read, John Howard should make his ministers read cables about the bribes to Saddam Hussein," Mr Beazley said. Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford also accused the Prime Minister of trying to divert attention away from the AWB kickbacks scandal. Mr Welford said Mr Howard's blanket denigration of school curriculums was an attempt to divert attention from "other pressing issues, such as the appalling unethical dealings by AWB, over which he has presided". "The fact is, in Queensland we do value the traditional literature as well as more popular media," Mr Welford said.

NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt indicated her state's syllabus was more likely to comply with Mr Howard's view because it had a strong base in classical English literature "NSW has compulsory Shakespeare in Years 9 to 10 and for the Year 12 advanced English courses," she told The Australian yesterday. "Other authors on the HSC reading list include Chaucer, Yeats, Wordsworth and Jane Austen. The more modern classics include George Orwell, David Williamson, David Malouf and Michael Ondaatje."

Victoria's Education Minister Lynn Kosky accused Mr Howard of being "ill-informed" on the issue. "The Prime Minister is out of touch with what is going on in Victorian schools and what students are reading," Ms Kosky said.

Mr Howard's statement was embraced by anti-OBE campaigners yesterday, who said their views had been vindicated. PLATO WA co-founder Greg Williams said Mr Howard's comments were an accurate description of the controversial system that is currently being implemented in Western Australia. "It is not gobbledegook to everyone but it is gobbledegook to the teachers, it's gobbledegook to the students and it's gobbledegook to the parents. These three groups are the only ones that matter when it comes to outcomes-based education."

Teacher of literature at the University of Western Australia Peter Morgan said many teachers were just as confused and disappointed as their students at the shift from teaching English literature to focusing on literary theory and its sub-branches. Associate Professor Morgan said the English literature syllabus in Western Australia was being replaced by a course called "Texts, traditions and cultures", which had led to a large degree of dissatisfaction and low morale among teachers. "Literary theory covers a broad range of cultural and social theory from Marxism to post-structuralism, feminism and queer theory," he said. "It's very obscure. It encourages students to use buzzwords and jargon to cover up that they have no idea what they're talking about. "Teachers are disappointed they are not teaching literature any more. They feel the subject has been hijacked by those who want to teach about race, gender and Marxism, rather than about literature. "I read what the students write, and hear what the teachers have to say, and there is a lot of confusion."

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.

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. My home page is here

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21 April, 2006

RECOGNITION OF ACADEMIC FRAUD IN BRITAIN

A new watchdog to promote research integrity was launched this week with a scathing attack on the "good chaps" network and general complacency in universities that has allowed fraud and misconduct to gain a foothold in the UK academic sector. Sir Ian Kennedy, the chairman of the board of the new UK Panel for Research Integrity, said he had found that many universities' procedures for dealing with allegations of misconduct were "completely unequal to the task", "not fit for purpose" and often "pitiful".

At this week's launch, Michael Farthing, who will chair the panel's planning group, held up a copy of last week's Times Higher, and cited a report on the suspension of a whistleblower at Sheffield University as evidence that universities were not taking the issues seriously enough. He added that whistleblowers were failing to find an ear in their own institutions. The panel - which is funded by a number of sources, including the UK higher education funding councils, research councils, government departments and, more controversially, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry - will initially cover research in the health and biomedical sciences only.

But Professor Farthing, who is principal of St George's Hospital Medical School, said he hoped it would soon cover misconduct in all fields. The panel, which has been ten years in the making, will have a permanent office and will be supported by a 24-strong board. It will not have regulatory or policing powers, but will focus on providing support and advice to whistleblowers, developing a code of good practice and maintaining a register of advisers to help institutions improve procedures and ensure that cases are handled effectively.

Sir Ian, who chairs the Healthcare Commission, said a priority would be to support universities. He said: "We looked at universities' procedures and many would not have survived attacks from anybody legally represented. They were not fit for purpose. "The issue has not been taken seriously enough," he said. "There has been a theory that researchers are generally good chaps who couldn't possibly do anything improper and a sense that all is well. But that degree of complacency fails to take into account the pressures of academic life, where the rewards for making breakthroughs and getting published bring real pressures."

Professor Farthing said that the case of Aubrey Blumsohn, the Sheffield researcher suspended after turning to The Times Higher with concerns about the conduct of a drug study at his university, highlighted the need for a panel dedicated to research integrity. "There are some sophisticated and highly concerned whistleblowers who cannot find an ear," he said. "Dr Blumsohn had been talking to the authorities at Sheffield for two years, but instead of taking his concerns seriously - and I don't know if they are right or wrong as I have not seen any evidence - they suspended him for the misdemeanour of talking to the press."

He said the panel would encourage whistleblowers to contact them and would seek to have their concerns investigated. But he acknowledged criticism that its funding sources, its base at the headquarters of Universities UK and its lack of investigatory powers could deter some.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, said: "It needs to be, and must be seen to be, completely independent. Providing support for whistleblowers is important, but if the panel is relying on funding from bodies that people may wish to blow the whistle on, there is a clear conflict of interest."

Peter Wilmshurst, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, who has exposed a number of research fraud cases, said: "My concern is that this is set up under the auspices of UUK. If you look at the record of the universities, they have consistently concealed research fraud and protected the crooks." Sir Ian said the independence of the panel was secured by his personal integrity and the diverse sources of funding secured.

Source



CUT-PRICE DEGREES COMING IN BRITAIN

Students will be able to gain an honours degree in only two years as part of a “study anytime” revolution for higher education. Long summer holidays will end for undergraduates on “compressed” degrees as they complete their studies a year early so that they can get on with their careers with reduced levels of debt. Others will take courses entirely at work and through online study in an effort to raise the proportion of adults with degree qualifications. They will be given credit towards their degrees for skills learnt on training courses. A common system of American-style credit accumulation will also allow students to take study breaks and complete degrees later, possibly at different institutions.

Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, said that the proposals would change the face of higher education provision. He told The Times yesterday that radical reform was crucial if Britain was to compete with the rising economic power of China and India. China overtook Britain as the world’s fourth-largest economy this month. Half of new British jobs would require a graduate qualification by 2012, he said. But, while the numbers at university continued to rise, the proportion of people entering higher education had stalled below the Government’s target of 50 per cent. “We have to be more flexible and innovative. Getting more people into higher education is both a social and economic imperative as the international competition looms large.

Higher education had to become “less supplier driven” and take more account of the needs of different customers. Traditional degrees had been organised for the convenience of academics rather than students. “The assumption was that studies would be taken over a fixed period of time, punctuated by a holiday pattern driven by university rather than student needs,” Mr Rammell said. “For many young people the traditional three-year degree allowed for a range of experience of immense personal value. But just because a model fits some people well doesn’t mean it fits all — and increasingly we live in a world where people expect that service providers will have scope to offer flexibility, not uniformity. “A model of full-time provision that dictates that an honours degree must last three years rather than a much more intensive but shorter period of time is, ultimately, supplier driven.”

More flexible courses would allow people “to learn when, where, and in ways that meet their learning needs, preferences and abilities best”. The Government was “very interested” in giving the option of two-year compressed honours degrees. “We would need to ensure the competencies and skills acquired by a student undertaking a compressed degree were the same as a student undertaking a traditional three-year course. However, I believe that two-year degree courses would offer a great opportunity to many students and would encourage those who would not usually feel able to take three years out of their lives to study to see that a degree may be possible for them.” The Higher Education Funding Council for England will begin pilot programmes for compressed degrees at five universities in September, covering a range of subjects.

Mr Rammell said that a common credit framework for universities, now under development, would help students “to complete their education at their own pace, in different modes of study, and in different locations”. The Government also wanted a greater “diversity of provider” in higher education. More degrees would be taught in further education colleges in partnerships with universities. Some students would find it easier to take degrees in the “more supportive atmosphere” of FE colleges, where they may have studied on vocational courses since the age of 14. Pilot schemes providing degrees at work will begin in September. Further education colleges and universities will offer employers “customised provision” to train staff in skills related to businesses. Mr Rammell told university chiefs last week that more degrees should be “partly or wholly designed, funded or provided by employers”.

Source



Racism phobia can muzzle the truth

The Australian academic world can seem, at least to outsiders, a cosy place where anyone who ventures a dissenting opinion on a sensitive topic gets stomped on very quickly. Let's update the saga of Associate Professor Andrew Fraser, which took an unexpected twist this week. Fraser, you might recall, wrote to the Parramatta Sun last year about the settlement of Sudanese immigrants in the area, with the provocative claim that "experience practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems". Fraser believes that, on average, black people have lower IQs than whites, while Asians have higher IQs.

Macquarie University banned him from teaching because of the letter, and Deakin University in Victoria subsequently directed its law journal not to publish an article by Fraser that it had had refereed and accepted. A Sudanese man complained about Fraser's views to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which announced two weeks ago that the professor had breached the Racial Discrimination Act. Unless he apologises in a form acceptable to the complainant, he could face prosecution in the Federal Court. It's a landmark decision in the history of Australian free speech.

On Wednesday, The Australian newspaper published a letter from six American and European professors, and two other scholars, protesting against the commission's decision. They said: "Fraser has done no more than restate hypotheses offered for more than half a century by eminent psychologists and anthropologists at leading universities." (That's outside Australia, of course.) Indeed, "There is an important and legitimate academic debate going on about race, intelligence and genetics." (Not in Australia, mind you.) Moreover, "It is a sad day when governments and universities once rooted in the traditions of British liberty muzzle academics and public figures from engaging in open discussion."

I don't have an opinion on Fraser's views. Last year, when I interviewed him, he told me it was "hard to spot a white face" in Macquarie University's library, or at Westfield Parramatta. My visits to both places suggest that the professor can't count. There are lots of academics with a flawed sense of proportion whose views I disagree with, yet I wouldn't dream of suggesting the law be used to silence them. So what's happening to Fraser is quite disturbing. Sure it's rare, but maybe that's only because these days it's rare to hear an unusual view on a delicate subject coming from an academic

The other great dissenter of the last few years has been Keith Windschuttle who, in his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, challenged the widely held view that genocide had been practised by white people against the blacks in Tasmania. The abuse that Windschuttle has received from academics has been extraordinary. In the latest issue of Quadrant magazine, Windschuttle has listed some of the personal attacks on him. An historian at Sydney University, Dirk Moses, wondered in 2001 if Windschuttle and two other dissenting writers "experience castration anxiety. That is, a fantasised danger to their genitals symbolised by the [traditional white] national ideal that makes them feel powerful and good about themselves". This statement was published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Aboriginal History. Moses has claimed elsewhere that Windschuttle was once a "fanatical communist", while Professor Robert Manne, of Melbourne's La Trobe University, has several times said he was a Pol Pot enthusiast. According to Windschuttle, both smears were invented.

Some critics have attacked the core of Windschuttle's book by claiming that academic historians never described what happened to the indigenous Tasmanians as genocide. For instance, in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, published last year, Associate Professor Bain Attwood, of Monash University, wrote that Windschuttle's "imputation that academic historians have compared the British colonisation of this country to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews . is a figment of his imagination". This is the same Attwood who, in the 2000 collection Reconciliation, wrote: "The severe historical impact the various dimensions of colonisation have had upon Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders . can and should be called a holocaust."

In 2003 in The Australian, Moses wrote: "No Australian historian contends there was an Australian holocaust." Windschuttle points out that one of those who did actually contend this was Moses himself who, in 2000, in the Journal of Genocide Research, wrote: "Australia has had many genocides, perhaps more than any other country."

Windschuttle and Fraser don't have much in common except that they're probably the two most prominent intellectuals to have challenged conventional wisdom in recent years. The attacks on them make you wonder how widespread low-level reprisals are for less prominent rebels, and whether others stay quiet from fear of suffering the same fate.

I don't know if what Fraser says is true, yet its truth surely affects whether it is racist. But none of his critics seem to care. Macquarie University made no effort to argue the facts with him, nor did Deakin University. A statement by Fraser's union speaks of racism, not the facts. In its letter to Fraser, the human rights commission doesn't raise the issue of truth: what matters is that someone was offended. We need less moralising, more facts.

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.

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. My home page is here

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20 April, 2006

FEMINIST DESTRUCTION OF EDUCATION SPREADING

Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights Stephanie Monroe has announced that the administration of President George W. Bush is investigating universities that have fewer women in science and math programs than feminists would like. We are more than five years into the Bush presidency, but it appears that former President Bill Clinton's feminist policies are still in force. Is Bush a feminist, or is he just a gentleman who is intimidated by feminists and unable to cope with their unreasonable demands, tantrums and rudeness? When it comes to public policy and personnel appointments, the result is the same.

The gender police have already ruined college sports for many men, forcing the senseless elimination of 171 wrestling teams to reduce the overall proportion of men to women on college athletic teams. Fresh from that attack on masculinity, the new target is math and science departments.

Universities know all too well how this game is played and have every reason to fear the worst. Just one feminist lawsuit can have a devastating effect on most universities, both financially and in adverse publicity. An internal Title IX regulation invented by feminists in the administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Clinton established the "proportionality" of men and women enrolled in a college as the bean-counting goal for the proportion of men and women on sports teams. If the percentage of men on sports teams is too high, then the college can expect to be sued for alleged gender discrimination, even though men are far more interested in sports than women. If the college loses the lawsuit, it must pay the attorney's fees of the feminist lawyers. This encourages lawsuits and has resulted in million-dollar paydays at the expense of schools that rely on donations to stay afloat.

The Bush administration is now getting ready to apply this same mindless mentality to math and science departments, which are predominately male because men are more interested in those fields than women and score significantly higher on math and science aptitude tests. The National Science Foundation has an ADVANCE program that is already spending $75 million over five years to lure more women into science and engineering. Math and science departments have traditionally been based on merit and have produced code-breakers and technology essential to winning wars and preserving our freedoms. Why should we accept anything less than the best in our classrooms or on our athletic fields?

The National Science Foundation confirms that it is starting "a joint effort" with the Education Department "to do Title IX compliance reviews," which spells the end of picking the best and the brightest. Apparently that effort was initiated when Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., demanded that the Government Accountability Office review gender issues.

There isn't a shred of evidence that women are discriminated against in math and science; there are no separate tracks for men's math and women's math. There simply is a higher proportion of men than women who voluntarily choose math and engineering just as more men choose competitive sports. The feminists want a quota-imposed unisex society regardless of the facts of life, voluntary choice, human nature, common sense, or documented merit. And they use the power of government to achieve their goal.

One agitator for compliance reviews, Debra Rolison of the Naval Research Laboratory, reveals that compliance reviews are focusing on the way women students are "experiencing a different climate" in engineering and computer science departments. Boohoo. Bring on Massachusetts Institute of Technology feminist Nancy Hopkins to stage another tantrum and demand preferential funding for women to let them feel cozy in technical subjects.

Feminists expect that their whining and outbursts about alleged discrimination will intimidate men into giving them preferential treatment. Feminists want to rig the system so they will not have to compete with men, but will compete only with other women for a quota of scholarship slots, resources and professorships.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration ignores the gender disparity that is having very hurtful consequences: the precipitous decline in male schoolteachers. The number of male public school teachers has fallen to only 20 percent, and at the elementary school level fewer than 10 percent of teachers are men, giving boys the distinct impression that school is not for them. This nationwide trend is getting worse. Public school unions are dominated by feminists who have weighted teacher compensation in a way that is more attractive to women than men, i.e., toward generous retirement packages rather than better salaries based on merit, especially for teaching the more difficult subjects.

Nor do we hear anything about spending taxpayer funds to force universities to attract more men into the soft liberal arts subjects that now have a big majority of women students.

Source



Church vilified in Australian classrooms

The Australian Multicultural Foundation recently launched a series of books for primary schools titled Harmony and Understanding. The rationale for the series is to "foster a better understanding and respect for cultures and traditions of Australian society". One hopes that the editors of Jacaranda Press's Year 7 and 8 textbook SOSE Alive 2 will study the Harmony and Understanding material, because they are in urgent need of guidance about what constitutes religious intolerance.

In its teachings about medieval life, the Jacaranda book presents the Catholic Church in a negative light, portraying its teachings as based on fear and its monks as indolent and selfish. As if that's not bad enough, the accompanying CD vilifies icons central to the church's faith. One of the scenes shows a medieval village where a heretic is about to be burned. Close by is a religious figure holding a cross incorporating the figure of Jesus; after clicking on the cross it changes into what appears to be a witch's broom. Whether intended or not, the implication is that Catholicism equates with witchcraft and superstition. In the same scene, several religious figures are shown looking at the figure tied to the stake. On clicking on the head-piece of what appears to be a senior member of the church, it changes into a dunce's cap.

That students are expected to see the church as the villain is confirmed when they click on the word "heretic" inscribed above the victim's head. It changes to "heroine" and there is no doubt where the allegiance lies of those responsible for the material.

The most unsettling thing about the Jacaranda book's treatment of Christianity is that it illustrates, once again, how left-wing thought police have succeeded in their long march through the education system. Forget Woodstock, Vietnam moratoriums and flower power; the cultural revolution of the '70s and '80s was also about the way education was identified as a critical instrument to overturn the status quo. Former Victorian education minister and premier Joan Kirner told the Fabian society in 1983: "If we are egalitarian in our intention we have to reshape education so that it is part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change rather than an instrument of the capitalist system."

Instead of acknowledging Australia's success in providing prosperity, stability and peace, leftist teacher academics argue that society is, in the words of one textbook set in teacher training courses during the '80s, "disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression, and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction".

In teacher training, as noted by Monash educationalist Georgina Tsolidis, teachers were told "to instil in our students feelings of self-worth premised on the value of what these students already knew and the value of what they wanted to learn, rather than the intrinsic worth of what we wanted to teach. Our job was to produce young adults who would challenge the status quo through skills of critical inquiry."

While education has always been concerned with the search for the truth, it is obvious that "critical inquiry" means something different. Since the release of the Keating government's national curriculum during the early '90s, history has been transformed into studies of society and the environment with a politically correct stance on multiculturalism, feminism and environmentalism.

Early European settlement is described as an "invasion", instead of celebrating what we have achieved as a nation, students are taught "black armband" history and Australia's Anglo/Celtic culture is presented as simply one culture among many.

In English, everything from Shakespeare to tissue boxes to Australian Idol is considered a worthwhile text for study as students are taught to deconstruct texts in terms of how those more privileged in society are able to dominate and marginalise others.

Even science teaching has fallen victim to cultural relativism. Instead of recognising the primacy of western science, the South Australian curriculum argues that different versions of science are simply socio-cultural constructs.

The consequences of the long march are clear to see. Students leave school culturally illiterate, with a fragmented view of the world. Worse still, given the politics of envy and the spiritual emptiness of postmodernism, many students also leave school ethically challenged and morally adrift.

Source



Choice is not a dirty word

An Australian perspective on school choice

The issue of government funding to non-government schools has returned to centre stage. The ALP has decided to get rid of its hit list of so-called wealthy private schools, finally realising that all parents pay taxes, regardless of where their children go to school. At the same time, the federal Government has announced a review of the formulas used to decide how much support non-government schools receive. For many Australian parents, especially those demanding flexibility and choice in their children's education and who are financially penalised for doing so, it is a review we have to have.

One way forward would be to introduce school vouchers, an idea that is not as radical as opponents make out, given that Australia already has a de facto voucher system. All students attending non-government schools, both Catholic and independent, attract some degree of state and federal funding.

Instead of education being centrally managed and funded and the state having monopoly control over the school system, vouchers allow the money to follow the child and, in turn, give parents the freedom to choose between government and non-government schools. Based on figures compiled by the Productivity Commission, the average recurrent cost to state and federal governments of educating a student in a government school is $10,003 a year. The equivalent figure for a non-government student is $5595. Under a full voucher system, all parents would be entitled to the same amount of money, possibly means-tested, to spend on the education of their children and the freedom to choose their children's school. Australian parents want choice in education. The percentage of students enrolled in non-government schools grew from 23 per cent in 1980 to 33 per cent last year. Forty per cent of students attend non-government senior secondary schools.

The benefits of vouchers are many. Empowering parents and giving them increased responsibility and control over educational decision-making is not only good in theory; the closer power resides with people the better. Experience in the US shows it also helps to strengthen community ties and community engagement represented by social capital.

At the moment, school choice for Australian parents is restricted to those wealthy enough to buy into those areas where there are successful government schools or to pay costly fees. Why not give parents on low incomes the same type of choice by providing vouchers? Such is the situation in Milwaukee in the US. And in underdeveloped places such as Puerto Rico and Colombia, voucher systems are targeted at disadvantaged communities on the basis that education represents a ladder of opportunity.

If, as a result of vouchers, more students attend non-government schools, this is also a good thing. In the independent schools sector, excluding Catholic schools, it is estimated that governments save $2.2 billion a year as a result of fewer students going to government schools, money that can be spent on health and other services.

As argued by Canberra-based education writer Mark Harrison in Education Matters: Government, Markets and New Zealand Schools, vouchers also provide increased competition and help break down monopoly control represented by the state system. "The market-based approach relies on choice and competition," Harrison writes. "It relies on increased incentives to perform, improve and change - the incentives of the market - such as the need to attract students and pressure from competitors. Competition provides strong incentives; it punishes mistakes and rewards success and provides continual pressure for improvement."

As so graphically illustrated during Victoria's gas crisis in 1998, when an industrial accident led to Esso-BHP closing down the plant, monopoly control means all are made to suffer when something goes wrong. Think of the damage that whole language and fuzzy maths teaching approaches are causing. Non-government schools are in a stronger position to resist destructive experiments such as outcomes-based education, where students no longer fail and academic studies are a thing of the past. American academics such as Milton Friedman and Terry M. Moe also argue that parental choice represented by vouchers frees schools from provider-capture, where schools are managed more for the benefit of education bureaucrats and teacher unions than for those at the local level.

One of the greatest dangers facing education in Australia is the need to attract and keep highly qualified, motivated and committed teachers. Surveys show that many become dispirited and leave the profession because of over-regulated and time-consuming curriculum and accountability measures imposed from on high. The way teachers are rewarded also promotes mediocrity, with little financial or professional incentive for more able teachers. Vouchers provide a solution in that opening the system to market forces leads to a stronger incentive to raise standards by innovation and rewarding better teachers.

Notwithstanding the arguments in favour of vouchers, there are caveats. First, non-government schools are able to succeed because they have the autonomy to respond to the needs of their communities and to manage their own affairs. In his new book, Vital Signs, Vibrant Society: Securing Australia's Economic and Social Wellbeing, federal Labor MP Craig Emerson argues that the funding distinction between government and non-government schools should be abandoned. But if the price of increased government funding to non-government schools is that they have to succumb to the same type of over-regulation and interference faced by government schools, then that freedom is lost.

Giving parents more power to choose and freeing up the education system will also fail to be effective if all schools, government and non-government, are made to follow the same centrally mandated and controlled state-designed curriculum. While there is an argument that all schools have to abide by a minimum set of regulations and accountability measures, and there may be a common curriculum in areas such as literacy and numeracy, it is also essential that schools are not forced to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach.

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.

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. My home page is here

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19 April, 2006

BLACKS LEARN LEAST IN TOP SCHOOLS

All very puzzling to the commentators but just what those who acknowledge the importance of IQ would expect. Blacks CAN usually be properly educated but, as Thomas Sowell and the Thernstroms have often pointed out, blacks as a group learn well only in high-discipline schools. Treating them as "equal" makes it too hard for them. It's the degree of discipline that will determine whether blacks learn well or not. They have to be MADE to learn, sadly. And in schools predominantly populated by high socioeconomic-status white students who learn easily and well, discipline will be low -- just what is bad for black students.

Black students in Fairfax County are consistently scoring lower on state standardized tests than African American children in Richmond, Norfolk and other comparatively poor Virginia districts, surprising Fairfax educators and forcing one of the nation's wealthiest school systems to acknowledge shortcomings that have been masked by its overall success. Even within Fairfax schools, black elementary school students are outperformed on reading and math tests by whites and some other students, including Hispanics, poor children and immigrants learning English.

The statewide disparity occurs among all age groups except the middle-school grades, but it is most pronounced at the elementary level, according to Virginia Department of Education data analyzed by The Washington Post. Black third-graders in Fairfax ranked 91st among more than 125 Virginia districts in reading and 69th in math in tests taken last year. Fifth-graders ranked 40th in reading and 71st in math. "Something is broken with the way we teach a segment of the population," said John Johnson, education chairman for the Fairfax County NAACP and the father of two students in county schools. "Despite all the things we have at our disposal, our children are being outperformed by people like us -- or people with fewer resources."

The Fairfax County schools are among the most respected in the country, and their quality has long been a draw for families. Nearly 90 percent of public school graduates go on to college or other schools. The district's SAT scores were the best in the county's history last year and 8.4 percent above the national average.

In a district so accustomed to being on top, Fairfax leaders hadn't noticed that many black students were not making the grade. "We had a perception that our performance is higher than the data would indicate, in part because of the accolades our schools get," said Superintendent Jack D. Dale. "Until you peel back the onion a little bit, you may not see areas where you are not as successful."

The standardized tests taken by Virginia students are used to measure performance under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires school systems to present overall performance data as well as the scores of racial groups, poor children and disabled students. In Fairfax, 59 percent of black third-graders passed last year's state reading test. By comparison, 74 percent of black third-graders in Richmond passed the test and about 71 percent in Norfolk. Statewide, the passing rate for black children was 67 percent. About 79 percent of all Fairfax students passed.

Fairfax's black third-graders did better in math, with a 75 percent pass rate. But 86 percent of their peers in Richmond and 80 percent in Norfolk passed. Fairfax did not do well against other Northern Virginia districts, either. In Prince William and Loudoun counties, 84 percent of black students passed and in Arlington, 81 percent.

A look at Maryland test scores required under the federal law reveals no similar pattern of African Americans in well-heeled suburbs lagging behind peers in lower-income urban districts. Black students in Montgomery County, a district that in many ways mirrors Fairfax, are well ahead of black students in urban Baltimore in standardized reading and math tests.

More here



IF YOUR "EQUALITY" IDEOLOGY PREVENTS YOU FROM EDUCATING BLACKS EFFECTIVELY, WHAT DO YOU DO?

In good Stalinist fashion, you hide the failures

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress. With the federal government's permission, schools deliberately aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found. Minorities - who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing - make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising. "I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't counted to judge her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school's performance by race.

Under the law championed by President Bush, all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, although only children above second grade are required to be tested. Schools receiving federal poverty aid also must demonstrate annually that students in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and teachers. The U.S. Education Department said it didn't know the breadth of schools' undercounting until seeing AP's findings. "Is it too many? You bet," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in an interview. "Are there things we need to do to look at that, batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system? You bet."

Students whose tests aren't being counted in required categories include Hispanics in California who don't speak English well, blacks in the Chicago suburbs, American Indians in the Northwest and special education students in Virginia, AP found. Bush's home state of Texas - once cited as a model for the federal law - excludes scores for two entire groups. No test scores from Texas' 65,000 Asian students or from several thousand American Indian students are broken out by race. The same is true in Arkansas. One consequence is that educators are creating a false picture of academic progress. "The states aren't hiding the fact that they're gaming the system," said Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, a group that supports No Child Left Behind. "When you do the math ... you see that far from this law being too burdensome and too onerous, there are all sorts of loopholes."

The law signed by Bush in 2002 requires public schools to test more than 25 million students periodically in reading and math. No scores can be excluded from the overall measure. But the schools also must report scores by categories, such as race, poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. Failure in any category means the whole school fails. States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant. Suppose, for example, that a school has 2,000 white students and nine Hispanics. In nearly every state, the Hispanic scores wouldn't be counted because there aren't enough to provide meaningful information and because officials want to protect students' privacy.

State educators decide when a group is too small to count. And they've been asking the government for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories. Nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the government for such changes in the past two years. As a result, schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even 50 students of a given race in the testing population......

Toia Jones, a black teacher whose daughters attend school in a mostly white Chicago suburb, said the loophole is enabling states and schools to avoid taking concrete measures to eliminate an "achievement gap" between white and minority students. "With this loophole, it's almost like giving someone a trick bag to get out of a hole," she said. "Now people, instead of figuring out how do we really solve it, some districts, in order to save face or in order to not be faced with the sanctions, they're doing what they can to manipulate the data."....

Some students feel left behind, too. "It's terrible," said Michael Oshinaya, a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City who was among a group of black students whose scores weren't broken out as a racial category. "We're part of America. We make up America, too. We should be counted as part of America."

More here



NKU Does the Right Thing on pro-abortionist vandalism

Statement by NKU President James C. Votruba below. Good to see that there remains SOME committment to free speech on an American university campus

I am writing to comment on the recent destruction of an approved campus display created by the Northern Kentucky Right to Life student organization.

One of the important roles that a university must play is to be a forum for debate and analysis concerning the important issues of the day. Often these issues are surrounded by strident rhetoric and strong emotions which makes it even more incumbent on the university to create and nurture an intellectual environment in which reason and evidence prevail and where all points of view can be heard.

Northern Kentucky University has a distinguished record of addressing important public issues in a balanced way. We are proud that, as a campus, we are not the captive of one ideology or point of view. At their best, universities are not places of comfortable conformity. They are places where ideas collide as students and faculty search for deeper understandings and perspectives.

While the University supports the right to free speech and vigorous debate on public issues, we cannot condone infringement of the rights of others to express themselves in an orderly manner. By leading her students in the destruction of an approved student organization display, Professor Sally Jacobsen's actions were inconsistent with Northern Kentucky University's commitment to free and open debate and the opportunity for all sides to be heard without threat of censorship or reprisal.

It has been heartening that student and faculty groups that do not necessarily support the position of Northern Kentucky Right to Life have come out strongly in support of the organization's right to be heard through their display. This reflects a commitment to the importance of free speech and inquiry as a hallmark of our University.

Professor Jacobsen has been removed from her remaining classes and placed on leave from the University. She will retire from the University at the end of this semester. The Faculty Senate, representing more than 1,000 NKU faculty members, has taken strong action today that affirms the importance of free expression as a defining quality of the University. Our campus has spoken with a strong and unified voice. Further action may occur once a full investigation has been completed.

The action taken by the University should be considered in the context of Professor Jacobsen's entire 27 year career at NKU. Nevertheless, her recent lapse of judgment was severe and, for a period of time, has caused some in our community and beyond to question whether Northern Kentucky University upholds freedom of expression. My answer to this question is an unequivocal yes. NKU lives its commitment to free expression and responds when that commitment has been compromised.

America is, today, debating a variety of polarizing issues around which people feel great passion. It is not surprising that these strong sentiments find their way onto college campuses. However, our role is to add light to these debates, not more heat. If we don't serve this role, who will?

Source. Another article discussing the issues involved can be found 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. My home page is here

***************************



18 April, 2006

UNIONIZED GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS GIVE INFERIOR EDUCATION EVERYWHERE

Poor countries show the way

"Education is for children, not for profits," proclaims the National Union of Teachers. "It's privatisation!", chimes in Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT).

The teaching unions are upset about the Government's flagship programme for 200 new Academies, supposedly "independent" state schools, and the new "trust schools". To listen to the unions, you'd think nothing was in need of reform. Their complacency is staggering. To take one statistic at random, more than 80 per cent of children on free school meals fail to gain five decent GCSE grades. That's failure on a grand scale.

Anyway, the reforms are hardly radical. To allow a few businessmen to donate a couple of million quid [pounds sterling] to gain a modicum of influence over a school's ethos, that's not privatisation. Real privatisation, however, is taking place elsewhere in the world with salutary lessons for us. And contrary to the unions' moralising that privatisation must be bad for the poor, it's happening because some of the poorest people on this planet are fed up with the failures of state education. In slums and villages that I have visited in Africa and India, parents are appalled that teachers often don't turn up and, if they do, often don't teach. Their children tell them of sleeping teachers and parents see that exercise books are rarely marked.

But these parents don't sit by, waiting for their politicians to do something. Instead, they put their children into the burgeoning private schools. My recent research has shown that between 65 and 75 per cent of children in the poorest slums in Africa and India are now in private schools. These schools charge low fees, perhaps a couple of pounds per month. They are run by proprietors who are not heartless businessmen, but who provide free places to orphans and those with widowed mothers. When they tested large random samples of children, my teams found that these schools outperform the government alternative. And they do it with teachers paid a fraction of the unionised rates.

Unions here would be up in arms about this. Touchingly, the first concern of many delegates at the conferences is that private enterprise would cut teachers' pay or make them work longer hours. But if in the free market, schools can find dedicated champions of children's learning willing to work longer hours, or be flexible on their pay and conditions, then what is wrong with that, if it benefits children? In Africa and India the market has set its own pay and conditions. Even though teachers in private schools are paid less than their government counterparts, and work longer hours, they have higher standards because they know they are accountable to parents. Poor performance could lose them their jobs; in state schools, the unions make sure that nobody can be sacked.

Last week I was in a deprived fishing village in Ghana that boasts six flourishing private schools only yards from the state school. A fisherman with an understanding of economics that would put union officials to shame, who had moved his daughter from state to private school, told me that the private school proprietor needed to satisfy parents like him, otherwise he would go out of business. "That's why the teachers turn up and teach," he told me, "because they are closely supervised." His wife, busy smoking fish for sale in the market, concurred. "In the state school, our daughter learnt nothing. Now she's back on track."

These parents understand what apparently baffles those in the unions, so used to the dependency culture of the West - that what is handed out for free is likely to be low quality. One father, living in the Kenyan slum of Kibera, summarised it like this: "If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, you know they'll be rotten. If you want fresh produce, you have to pay for it."

Real privatisation occurs only if the customers of education are empowered, if the educational providers are made accountable to them. We have found a very effective way of doing that over the millennia - it's called the price mechanism. Only when people pay for something can they be in real control. Poor parents in the developing world recognise this with crystal clarity.

Importantly, in these poor countries, and in China too, the markets are now consolidating, with entrepreneurs creating chains of schools. These chains are starting to offer parents a brand name that they know they can trust. That's real privatisation, too, when business men and women grasp the incentive of the profit motive to improve and innovate. When businesses are free to win customers from other competitors, to expand their markets, to find ways of making the system more effective, then we will see the shake-up the education system needs.

The unions are scaremongering. The present reforms are only toying with privatisation. To bring profit and fees into that system - now, that would be progress. What could it look like here? Gazing into my crystal ball, I see chains of learning centres carrying the distinctive bright orange logo of "easyLearn", competing with those sporting the red "V" of "VirginOpportunity". Competition between these players would make good schooling affordable to all, accelerate the pace of learning innovation, and end the system mired in complacency and under-performance. I guess the unions would be right to be worried then. But parents and children could rest easy, and grasp the new opportunities offered.

Source



BRITISH TEACHERS BLAME ADVERTISERS FOR COMMON BLACK BEHAVIOUR

Many British inner city schools are predominantly black these days -- but we don't mention THAT of course

A "culture of cool" is damaging children by placing them under relentless commercial pressure to buy trendy clothes and other goods, members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) said yesterday. Discipline in schools was suffering as children became caught up in the desire to own the latest expensive training shoes rather than concentrate on their education. The annual conference of the NUT in Torquay called for parenting classes to teach families about "an all-pervasive culture of cool that is hugely undermining to positive pupil attitudes both in and out of school". Marketing campaigns aimed at children had left parents facing "challenges that as little as 30 years ago barely existed".

Nigel Baker, a teacher from Birmingham, told the conference: "Children's toys have never been so gender specific, clothing choices have never been so multiplied, children's food has never been so adulterated. They are victims of corporate strategists and rampant commercialisation. We must help parents to build resilience in themselves and their children. A resilience that says we don't need to buy Nike trainers for 90 pounds, because we can get the same quality for 25 pounds. A resilience that says we don't need to buy fatty, salty rubbish from McDonald's because we can cook better at home. "Teenagers are a billion-pound market, the relentless exploitation of which leaves parents in debt and satisfaction never met. Let's get real to the new mode of social control."

Max Hyde, a member of the national executive of the NUT, supported parenting classes but acknowledged concerns "that the Government will teach parents to say `yah', to hold a dinner party and to drive a Chelsea tractor". "We will make clear that any attempt by government to impose wishy-washy, objectionable classes will be opposed by the NUT," she said. "Parents are part of the solution, not the problem ."

However, Jan Neilsen, from Wandsworth, southwest London, told delegates: "When I hear the term `parenting classes', I want to reach for my gun. In the present climate, teenagers are demonised and so are reckless and feckless parents. It is a class question. This motion demonises youth culture. It is not the fact that they listen to rap music or wear hoodies or have their trousers below their Y-fronts that is the problem. What parents really need is a shorter working week, more wages, more holidays and better facilities."

The conference voted to campaign for "parenting skills programmes and parental support networks". Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the NUT, said: "We want to create a culture among young people that what is right or cool is coming into school prepared to work and prepared to learn."

Source



Teachers spied on in classrooms: "Teachers are preparing to protest against surveillance cameras and microphones that are being installed in classrooms across the UK. Surveillance firm Classwatch has installed more than 50 CCTV systems with microphones across the UK, said the Times Educational Supplement on Friday. Draconian headteachers, who have had teachers watched through two-way mirrors as well, grade teachers according to their performance under observation. Occasional observation is necessary to ensure lessons meet quality targets set centrally by the Department for Education and Skills. But the TES reported on Friday that teachers were being 'observed to death,' that surveillance was being used as a punishment, that schools were installing CCTV cameras with microphones into classrooms, and that teachers were wilting under the all-seeing Great Eye of Sauron."

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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. My home page is here

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17 April, 2006

SEGREGATION IS GOOD FOR BLACKS -- APPARENTLY

Ernie Chambers is Nebraska's only African-American state senator, a man who has fought for causes including the abolition of capital punishment and the end of apartheid in South Africa. A magazine writer once described him as the "angriest black man in Nebraska." Ernie Chambers, the only African-American in the Nebraska Legislature, was a major force behind a law enacted this week that calls for dividing the Omaha school district into three districts defined largely by race. He was also a driving force behind a measure passed by the Legislature on Thursday and signed into law by the governor that calls for dividing the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, one largely black, one white and one mostly Hispanic.

The law, which opponents are calling state-sponsored segregation, has thrown Nebraska into an uproar, prompting fierce debate about the value of integration versus what Mr. Chambers calls a desire by blacks to control a school district in which their children are a majority. Civil rights scholars call the legislation the most blatant recent effort in the nation to create segregated school systems or, as in Omaha, to resegregate districts that had been integrated by court order. Omaha ran a mandatory busing program from 1976 to 1999. "These efforts to resegregate schools by race keep popping up in various parts of the country," said Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, adding that such programs skate near or across the line of what is constitutionally permissible. "I hear about something like this every few months, but usually when districts hear the legal realities from civil rights lawyers, they tend to back off their plans."

Nebraska's attorney general, Jon Bruning, said in a letter to a state senator that preliminary scrutiny had led him to believe that the law could violate the federal Constitution's equal protection clause, and that he expected legal challenges.

The debate here began when the Omaha district, which educates most of the state's minority students, moved last June to absorb a string of largely white schools that were within the Omaha city limits but were controlled by suburban or independent districts. "Multiple school districts in Omaha stratify our community," John J. Mackiel, the Omaha schools superintendent, said last year. "They create inequity, and they compromise the opportunity for a genuine sense of community."

Omaha school authorities and business leaders marketed the expansion under the slogan, "One City, One School District." The plan, the district said, would create a more equitable tax base and foster integration through magnet programs to be set up in largely white schools on Omaha's western edge that would attract minority students. The district had no plans to renew busing, but some suburban parents feared that it might. The suburban districts rebelled, and the unicameral Legislature drew up a measure to blunt the district's expansion. The bill contained provisions creating a "learning community" to include 11 school districts in the Omaha area operating with a common tax levy while maintaining current borders. It required districts to work together to promote voluntary integration.

But the legislation changed radically with a two-page amendment by Mr. Chambers that carved the Omaha schools into racially identifiable districts, a move he told his colleagues would allow black educators to control schools in black areas. Nebraska's 49-member, nonpartisan Legislature approved the measure by a vote of 31 to 16, with Mr. Chambers's support and with the votes of 30 conservative lawmakers from affluent white suburbs and ranching counties with a visceral dislike of the Omaha school bureaucracy. Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican facing a tough primary fight, said he did not consider the measure segregationist and immediately signed it.

Dr. Mackiel, the Omaha superintendent, said the school board was "committed to protecting young people's constitutional rights." "If that includes litigation, then that certainly is a consideration," Dr. Mackiel said. Some of Nebraska's richest and most powerful residents have also questioned the legislation, including the billionaire investor Warren Buffett as well as David Sokol, the chief executive of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, which employs thousands in Nebraska and Iowa. "This is going to make our state a laughingstock, and it's going to increase racial tensions and segregation," Mr. Sokol said in an interview.

The Omaha district has 46,700 students, 44 percent of them white, 32 percent black, 21 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian or Native American. The suburban systems that surround it range in size from the Millard Public School District, with about 20,000 students, 9 percent of whom are members of minorities, to the Bennington district, with 704 students, 4 percent of whom are members of minorities.

More here



U.K.: Students to get marks not worked for

Keele University has privately admitted that scores of students could graduate this summer with degree classifications that they do not deserve under plans to beat the assessment boycott, writes Phil Baty. In a set of contingency plans designed to counter the assessment boycott by the Association of University Teachers, Keele's senate last week agreed to allow final-year students to graduate as long as they had completed about two thirds of their final year.

The senate will invoke an obscure part of the constitution that allows students to graduate under exceptional circumstances if they have obtained at least 75 of the 120 final-year credits they would normally be expected to achieve. This is the equivalent of obtaining a degree despite dropping up to three final-year exam papers.

If the dispute allows for final exams to take place, and if marks are returned after a student has graduated, subsequent reclassification of a degree "will only be done to the advantage of the student", in other words, the classification cannot be lowered.

Keele insists that its emergency measures will not lower standards. But a document detailing the plans states: "Out of a cohort of 1,400 students to graduate this year, 5 per cent - 70 students - might attain a higher classification of degree than they would have been awarded had they been assessed on the full 120 credits."

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the AUT, said: "Universities would be better off talking to us to resolve the assessment boycott rather than trying to devise half-baked ideas that may make our universities a laughing stock." A Keele spokesman said: "Senate has recognised that the AUT action could disadvantage students and voted heavily in favour of using existing regulations."

Source



Continuing Sagas in Seminar Socialism

Post lifted from Promethean Antagonist

In my last post I had noted a recent clerical project of the Communist party of China - a sort of banal attempt at reinvigorating fervor and allegiance for the socialist cause in that country. In degrees and styles, such nonsense occurs regularly in America as well. Most colleges today matriculate new students with religious-like sermons on "multiculturalism" and other politically correct chastisements. Certain students are assumed guilty for their backgrounds or the degree of success their parents have attained. Others are glamorized for their victim-hood. Of course the student's actual circumstance is not an issue since the very act of being at a university is hardly the status of one who is "oppressed."

Group categorizations are the standard of good and bad in left-land. So it is that race, skin shade, gender, and even who one directs amorous thoughts toward are measures of who's naughty or nice and who should be rewarded or punished by fiat.

In keeping with the typical mindset of the bureau-socialist, a host of gimmicks, exercises, and "activities" are regularly used in colleges and public education. The comical nature of such wastes of time holds a family likeness to the criticism and "self-criticism" sessions held by communist parties in history when they had managed to seize power over entire countries. So far, the average leftist college professor has little real power over a free society (the main reason they harbor such resentment toward America, business, and the choices made by private citizens in a free market). If they were to attain power there is no doubt in my mind that they would exercise it as leftists have always done once successful in eliminating opposition and freedom of choice. Some relatively benign professors of "Woman's Studies," "Education," "Critical Studies," or even, "Literature" would become tyrants over society at large as they have sought to be among their captive audiences in America's stockades of political correctness (its universities and public schools).

I've pasted below a typical "education exercise" that one may find in some school or university classrooms - it's in the classic Marxist style. I had read of this particular exercise before. It's one that's often used in the new "White Studies" classes that have sprung up on some college campuses recently (often under the guidance and promotion of - ironically - privileged, and often white, academics). The particular example below is taken from the "diversity" website of Melissa Bailey at Michigan State University but can be found at a host of websites (do a search for, "White Privilege Exercise").

The whole "exercise" is a classic example of the bureau-left's phony world view and their guile-laden attempts to con young minds into believing that the real world is a place where "classes" and "races" battle their lives out using such contrived fantasies as "privilege." To this mindset, any fortune or misfortune in circumstance can only be due to one's membership among a host of "privileged" or "oppressed" people. In this worldview, no one simply makes right or wrong choices that advance or diminish their circumstance - no one is an individual freely choosing sound conduct or passive victim hood. No one rises above their birth condition or falls from fortune. They are all cogs in the Marxist fantasy image of free society, a society that must be "transformed" or overcome by "revolution" (e.g. professors, "artists," and authoritarian leftist / statists must be put in a position to "plan" society - for its own good).

When closely evaluating the statements in the "exercise" one finds them to be quite arbitrary. They actually gauge nothing but are stated as if they are some sort of scientific method of finding true guilt or innocence - whether one is a victim worthy of sympathy and praise or a privileged person who has attained too high a degree of comfort or satisfaction from life ("unfairly").

I've added my own responses to this stupid exercise's statements in the hope of addressing their blatant absurdity. Humor and sarcasm are intended since such nonsense is most worthy of ridicule.

The leftist clowns who develop such "learning projects" take this stuff very seriously. No doubt some will automatically assume "racism" as my motive for daring challenge this typically ridiculous con game in the halls of "Education." Sorry to disappoint, but my motivation is something more benign and astute - anti-Leftism. Those who continually seek to promote, indoctrinate, and impose the leftist vision are the true culture of privilege.

The "exercise" and my responses are below

["] Privilege Exercise ["]


Purpose: To provide participants with an opportunity to understand the intricacies of privilege.
Time: 1 « hours
Materials: none needed
Facilitator Notes:
This is a powerful exercise and should be thoroughly processed. [typical neo-Comm-speak]

1. Participants should be led to the exercise site silently, hand in
hand, in a line. [Note the usual almost religious wording used in such nonsensical projects]

2. At the site, participants, can release their hands, but should be
Instructed to stand shoulder to shoulder in a straight line without
speaking. ["speaking" would no doubt upset the holy nature of this exercise in spiritual understanding]

3. Participants should be instructed to listen carefully to each sentence,
and take the step required if the sentence applies to them. They
should be told there is a prize at the front of the site that everyone is
competing for. [remember, success in life is, "a prize."]


Sentences:

If your ["] ancestors ["] were forced to come to the USA not by choice [200 or 300 years ago], take one step back.

What if your "ancestors" were slaves of the Aztecs, Arabs, or Sudanese?


If your primary ethnic identity is American, take one step forward.

Guilty of good fortune - to the rice fields for reeducation.


If you were ever called names because of your race, class, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, take one
step back.

.Why? How about if you were called names like, "fascist" for believing in free and open society, Christianity, or self-interest?


If there were people of color who worked in your household as servants, gardeners, etc., take one step forward.

If these paid employees were white, don't step forward?


If you were ever ashamed or embarrassed of your clothes, house, car, etc. take one step back.

I hated that used car my dad drove with the broken muffler -- but then again, a lot of people had used cars and bad mufflers in our neighborhood. I was obviously very "oppressed." Give me some money and free stuff.


If your parents were professionals: doctors, lawyers, etc. take one step forward.

God forbid your parents were successful. Do you get to step back a half step if they worked themselves through college or, as doctors, saved human lives?


If you were raised in an area where there was prostitution, drug activity, etc., take one stop back.

How about alcoholism or spouse-swapping?


If you ever tried to change your appearance, mannerisms, or behavior to avoid being judged or ridiculed, take one step back.

.No, no one's ever done that.


If you studied the culture of your ancestors in elementary school, take one step forward.

There's that bogus obsession with folks from long ago who you never met. Also, why should an American grade school teach Lebanese culture when they barely teach math, reading, and writing?


If you went to school speaking a language other than English, take one step back.

What if it was German, Swedish, or French?

Give me twenty pushups lowly class enemy!


If there were more than 50 books in your house when you grew up, take one step forward.

If they were porn - OOH-HOO! (If your parents didn't like to read, you can't be part of the world socialist club!).


If you ever had to skip a meal or were hungry because there was not enough money to buy food when you were growing up, take one step back.

...then step forward again if there were churches, private organizations, or local, state, and federal government agencies to give you handouts.


If you were taken to art galleries or plays by your parents, take one step forward.

If your family liked sports and camping, you're oppressed and should get more free stuff from the omnipotent state and its taxpayers.


If one of your parents was unemployed or laid off, not by choice, take one step back.

If it was for longer than a year, chastise your parents for being incompetent and not applying to the millions of jobs available each year.


If you attended private school or summer camp, take one step forward.

If you went to a public school, sorry you can't read this.


If your family ever had to move because they could not afford the rent, take one step back.

If they were living beyond their means and had to move back to something they could afford, make a circle, touch your nose, and sing an old Beatle's song.


If you were told that you were beautiful, smart and capable by your parents, take one step forward.

Step back if they were lying.


If you were ever discouraged from academics or jobs because of race, class, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, take one step back.

Step back further if you couldn't get a class or job because you were light skinned or male.


If you were encouraged to attend college by your parents, take one step forward.

If you were a "victim" of everything your parents said or didn't say to you, you're an idiot - get a life.


If you were raised in a single parent household, take one step back.

If that parent was rich and a member of a chosen minority group, just stand there and look confused. There will be no parents when the revolution comes. It "takes a village" and a totalitarian communal state to raise the lumpen proletariat.


If your family owned the house where you grew up, take one step forward.

If they rented a townhouse in Paris or New York laugh at the meaningless nature of this statement.


If you saw members of your race, ethnic group, gender or sexual orientation portrayed on television in degrading roles, take one step back.

If they were depicted as evil, ignorant, greedy, or fascist ask the "facilitator" why its okay to depict that phony image.


If you were ever offered a good job because of your association with a friend or family member, take one step forward.

If you were from another planet where this never happens, become a sociologist and take a college lit course then, move two spaces and collect trust fund check from rich socialist parents.


If you were ever denied employment because of your race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, take one step back.

And ask yourself why you didn't' complain to the million and one government offices or lawyers who would have sued the employer and showered you with cash (disregard question if your ethnicity or gender is white or male)


If you were paid less, treated unfairly because of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, take one step back.

See last response.


If you were ever accused of cheating or lying because of your race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, take one step back.

If you were ever accused of cheating or lying because you cheated or lied, look puzzled and continue to protest the conditions of life on planet Earth.

If you ever inherited money or property, take one step forward.

If the government took huge sums of your money through coercion to finance social programs and college classes in Marxist Studies, just shut up and keep on paying.


If you had to rely primarily on public transportation, take one step back.

Especially if it was an airplane in first class.


If you were ever stopped or questioned by the police because of your race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, take one step back.

If you happend to be speeding, stealing, or murdering at the time, call a Woman's Studies professor, Gay rights advocate, or Al Sharpton for one free pass.


If you were ever afraid of violence because of your race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, take one step back.

If you were actually a victim of violence merely because someone wanted to harm you or take your property, no big deal. (Remember, this project is only designed to direct concern for skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and how much money people are paid for working...or not working).


If you were generally able to avoid places that were dangerous, take one step forward.

.off the edge of a bridge into a flaming pit of molten lead.


If you were ever uncomfortable about a joke related to your race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation but felt unsafe to confront the situation, take one step back.

Also, try to forget about the jokes you told or laughed about involving other people or groups. (If you're black, and sing rap lyrics advocating the death of homosexuals -- one free pass. If you're Muslim and behead infidels -- two free passes and immediately go to the front of the classroom).


If you were ever the victim of violence related to your race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, take one step back.

If it was because you were light skinned or non Middle-Eastern, too bad.


If your parents did not grow up in the United States, take one step back.

If they grew up in a French Chateau - cool. If your parents were Asian and worked hard and made sacrifices to put you through school, cringe in self-loathing. If you don't want to live in the U.S. at all - leave. (There are lots of countries that are already fully socialist or half way there. You should be with them).


If your parents told you that you could be anything you wanted to be, take one step forward.

If they told you that you'd have to settle for what you're actually capable of, cry because they were realistic.


Processing: [there's a great word familiar to anyone who has encountered a leftist bureau-minded control freak]

Ask participants to remain in their positions and to look at their position at the site and the positions of the other participants.

Ask participants to consider who among them would probably win the prize.
Suggested questions for processing are:

1) What happened? [I had a divine revelation. I will now save the rainforest, give more money to the state, lick the shoes of middle-class college instructors, and give away my bourgeoisie CD collection.]

2) How did this exercise make you feel? [Classic Socialist Ed School Bureau-lesson question -- but, for the record, the "exercise" made me sick.]

3) What were your thoughts as you did this exercise? [Like.wow! Like, this is sooo stupid]

4) What have you learned from this experience? [Answer; Not what you could have learned in a real class.]

5) What can you do with this information in the future? [Whine more about injustice and ask for more free stuff].


****************************************


Remember, decades ago the time taken to "perform" this pathetic soap-box ritual would have been used to actually learn something academic

When a teacher or professor can be paid -- often with taxpayer money -- to use such "lessons" to promote their personal radical political ideology, the question as to who in society is "privileged' becomes clearer.

Remember; If you're ugly and diseased, have lost a loved one, if someone close to you has committed suicide, or you have retarded children.and you're light skinned, male, or financially well -off, you're "privileged." If you're relatively happy, have good relationships and a decent job and home but are a "minority," you're oppressed and can get free stuff and sympathy from middle class white kinds majoring in "critical studies."

Poor, ugly, unemployed, divorced, paraplegic white men with cancer "have all the power."

...it's been a privilege.

(see my "glossary of Ed-euphemisms" for further insights into the bizarre worldview of Ed-world)

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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. My home page is here

***************************



16 April, 2006

ONLINE CHARTER SCHOOLS

The California Virtual Academies, a network of online public charter schools serving 35 counties statewide, is coming to the region in September with a digital-age alternative to the little red schoolhouse. CAVA offers a K-through-9 curriculum that students complete at home. The organization, based in Simi Valley, provides a loaner computer to every student along with a hefty bundle of books sent by mail. Students log in Monday through Friday and usually spend four or five hours every day completing their lessons with help from parents. Students use a back-to-basics curriculum designed by K12, a Virginia-based company that operates virtual academies in 10 states.

The program, said CAVA administrator Lisa Gillis, has been a hit with students for whom traditional school doesn't work - from young actors who are often on the road to students who have illnesses that keep them at home. "Parents are looking for options other than a brick-and-mortar school," she said.

The "virtual school" concept has grown tremendously in recent years. CAVA enrolls 3,500 students statewide, up from 750 when it opened in 2002. Its main competitor in California, Connections Academy, serves about 400 students in five counties near Los Angeles. The idea is similar to the now-familiar home-schooling concept, with a few crucial differences. Every CAVA student is assigned to a credentialed public school teacher who stays in touch via phone or e-mail. The teacher pays an in-person visit at least once every 50 days. And CAVA helps organize social outings and field trips for students. CAVA's six sites post relatively high scores on the state's Academic Performance Index, and the schools have met federal performance targets every year.

The increasing popularity of Web-based schooling should come as no surprise, said Eric Premack of the Sacramento-based Charter Schools Development Center. "I get my DVDs online, and I haven't stepped foot in a bank in I don't know how long," he said. "When you see how much of what kids do online and you take a step back, it's odd that we do so little educating online."

CAVA did serve Sacramento-region students in the 2002-2003 school year, then closed down its programs in the region. Gillis could not immediately say why the program closed down, but she said it's returning because of requests from parents. The Sacramento-region branch of CAVA will serve K-through-8 students in Sacramento, Sutter, Butte, Colusa, Placer, Yolo and Yuba counties. The Nuestro Elementary School District in Sutter County granted the organization a local charter.

The program has won over at least one family locally. Four years ago, Kelly Krug of Fair Oaks grew frustrated with the private school her son Ben attended. He had plenty of work to do, but none of it was challenging enough. The Krugs looked around for an alternative, but all the public schools they liked were full. So they turned to CAVA in 2002, intending to transfer Ben elsewhere the following year. But Ben flourished, and the family stuck with the K-12 curriculum even when CAVA shut down locally. Now Ben's little brother Sam, 8, is enrolled in the program too. Kelly Krug quit her job to stay home and supervise their education.

The boys log on in the morning, take a 90-minute break at midday for lunch and PE (perhaps a bike ride or a session on the trampoline), and then return to their studies. The kitchen table serves as the lab where the family dissects frogs together. Ben, his mother said, loves the program. "We have to tell him to stop reading, to slow down and have dinner and go to bed. Where education was a chore before, he now looks at it as a sport. That never happened with homework before."

Source



Stifling of Dissent at Northern Kentucky University

Post lifted from Blogger News



"Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it."

So says the literature professor who apparently led nine female students in tearing down a university-sanctioned display put up by a campus pro-life activist group. She continued "Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged." Outraged? That other people dared to have a pro-life viewpoint? And that they further dared to actually express it?

Apparently, the free speech rights of other people don't count for anything, if they make you feel angry or outraged. (Note the contradiction, as well - the display is "silly" when its importance to other people is being deprecated to minimize the offense, but it's an "outrage" when it comes to her feelings.)

This is classic. MY feelings are so important that they trump other people's rights. YOUR feelings are so insignificant that I can ignore you. This is the moral calculus possessed by a five-year old.

The symbolism of crosses - each of which represented an aborted fetus - being thrown into the garbage can by female students speaks for itself.



Elite girls' school 'kills the study of literature'

One of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare's work, Harold Bloom, and the nation's pre-eminent poet, Les Murray, have declared literary study in Australia dead after learning that a prestigious Sydney school asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives. "I find the question sublimely stupid," Professor Bloom, an internationally renowned literary critic, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, said yesterday. "It is another indication that literary study has died in Australia."

The question was an assessment task in March set for advanced English students in Year 11 at SCEGGS Darlinghurst, an independent Anglican girls' school in inner Sydney. Considered one of the nation's leading schools, it charges almost $20,000 a year in fees for senior students. The assessment task asked students to write an essay explaining how Othello supported different readings. "In your answer, refer closely to the prescribed text and explain how dramatic techniques might be used to communicate each reading. You must consider two of the following readings: Marxist, feminist, race," the question says.

Bloom is a renowned defender of the Romantic poets and a critic of Marxist and post-modern approaches to literary criticism, among others. His 1994 work, The Western Canon, attacked the rise of ideologically based criticism. Murray, who has just published his latest volume of poetry, The Biplane Houses, described the question as horrifying and said Australian literary study was "worse than dead". He said literature should be removed from school curriculums, which, in the words of US poet Billy Collins, teach students to strap poetry to a chair and beat meaning out of it with a hose. "Students are being taught to translate (poetry and literature) into some kind of dreary, rebarbative, reductive prose for the purpose of getting high marks," Murray said. "They're being taught to overcome it, not to appreciate it, not to value it, not to be changed or challenged by it but to get mastery over it."

But SCEGGS head Jenny Allum defended the question, arguing that it asked students to show their understanding of Othello's themes. "It's phrased in a slightly different way ... but it's about the role of women, the role of black men in that society, the role of the worker, which I think are clear themes of Othello," she said. Ms Allum, also chairwoman of the academic committee of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia in NSW, said it was a legitimate way of interpreting Shakespeare's themes using a modern-day understanding of feminism, race relations or Marxism. "There's always been different ways of looking at a play and drawing different meanings," she said.

SCEGGS head of English, Jennifer Levitus, said terms such as Marxism and feminism were modern labels used to help simplify the universal themes found in Shakespeare. The president of the English Teachers Association of NSW, Mark Howie, said the assessment question was in keeping with the syllabus - that students develop a personal understanding of the text and can relate to the notion that it can be interpreted differently in different contexts

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.

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. My home page is here

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15 April, 2006

ANOTHER CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY SURRENDERS TO SECULARISM

The lesson of Gideon is obviously lost on them. But they would probably think that Gideon is the guy who puts Bibles in hotel rooms

At Notre Dame, the Lenten liturgical calendar is still observed. On Ash Wednesday, many foreheads are gray with ashes, no meat is served on Fridays in the dining halls and now, during Holy Week, hundreds of students drag an enormous cross around campus while observing the Stations of the Cross.

Yet Notre Dame's Lenten season has taken on a different character during the past several years, since "The Vagina Monologues" and the Queer Film Festival have been added to the extracurricular calendar. Not surprisingly, many find these performances inappropriate at Notre Dame, given their explicit attacks on central Catholic teachings.

The previous president of Notre Dame, the Rev. Edward "Monk" Malloy, refused to interfere in these events. But Notre Dame's new president, the Rev. John Jenkins, expressed uneasiness with them after he took office last year. He did not ban them outright, though, saying that he would render his final decision after sufficient discussion had taken place. He convened campuswide meetings for that purpose.

Most campus observers assumed that, given his stated concerns, Father Jenkins would place some restrictions on the play and the film festival. Both Providence College and the Catholic University of America had earlier this year banned "The Vagina Monologues." Father Jenkins's superior in the Holy Cross religious order, to which he belongs, had banned performances of the play at the University of Portland. Bishop John D'Arcy, much respected in the South Bend, Ind., community and much loved by Notre Dame students, had also spoken out against both the play and the festival.

Thus there was a great deal of surprise when, in the days before Holy Week, Father Jenkins announced: "I see no reason to prohibit performances of 'The Vagina Monologues' on campus, and do not intend to do so." As for the film festival, that too will be allowed to continue. Those faculty members who, the week before, had been plotting Father Jenkins's removal from office for even discussing possible restrictions now congratulated him, and his former student critics praised him as a champion of personal freedom.

Although Father Jenkins called his announcement the "Closing Statement," the debate is unlikely to go away. More is at stake than the fairly standard, indeed humdrum, questions about "censorship" and "free speech" on campus. To some of us--and I speak as a Notre Dame professor--Father Jenkins's decision is one more step in a long process of secularization: It has already radically changed the major Protestant universities in this country; it is now proceeding apace at the Catholic ones.

At Notre Dame, this secularization is most evident in the composition of the faculty. While roughly 85% of Notre Dame students are Catholic, the percentage of Catholic faculty has dropped precipitously in the past few decades, reaching its current number of barely 50%, and there is no sign that this trend will be reversed. More important, the debate initiated by Father Jenkins exposed a great deal of hostility among faculty members toward traditional Catholic teachings as well as a confusion about the nature of Catholic higher education itself.

The Rev. Bill Miscamble, a distinguished historian and former rector of the campus seminary, expressed the disappointment that many of us feel at Father Jenkins's decision. He suggested that it had "brought most joy to those who care least about Notre Dame's Catholic mission." He criticized Father Jenkins in an open letter to him: "You were called to be courageous and you settled for being popular."

Such commotion comes 15 years after the promulgation of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II's encyclical aimed at ensuring the orthodoxy of Catholic theology departments. It is not evident that the encyclical has been properly followed. Very few administrators at Catholic colleges and universities are willing publicly to discuss their conformity with its requirements.

Father Jenkins's retreat on "The Vagina Monologues" and the Queer Film Festival raises questions about whether Notre Dame has the will to retain its Catholic distinctiveness in the face of a hostile culture and whether it can do so with a faculty that seems largely out of sympathy with Catholic tradition. It is a good time to contemplate such questions, the holiest week of the calendar, when Christians celebrate ultimate victory emerging from apparent defeat.

Source



"DISABILITY" SCAM

When Ali Hellberg, 19, was in prep school, she said several of her classmates obtained notes from psychologists diagnosing them with learning disabilities, even though they didn't have any learning problems. They faked learning disabilities to get extra time to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, in the hopes of getting a higher score, she said. "I had a friend who is a good math student but is no math brain, and she got extended time and got a perfect score on her math SAT," Hellberg said. That friend now attends an Ivy League school.

Some call this scheme the rich-kids loophole. With intense competition to get into Ivy League and other elite colleges, students say they need nearly perfect SAT scores, as well as great grades and impressive extra-curricular activities. A rising chorus of critics say high school students from wealthy ZIP codes and elite schools obtain questionable diagnoses of learning disabilities to secure extra time to take the SATs and beef up their scores.

Hellberg believes that to get into Harvard or Princeton, she'd need to score at least a 1500. The highest SAT score is 1600. "I got below 1400 and I knew I didn't have a shot getting into an Ivy despite my grades and extra-curriculars," she said.

Approximately 300,000 students will take the three-hour-and-forty-five-minute SAT this Saturday; about 30,000 taking the test this year will be given special accommodations, including extra time. For decades, the College Board, which administers the SAT, has allowed up to twice as much time to accommodate students who have legitimate learning disabilities, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But with college admissions more competitive than ever, guidance counselors and other educators say privileged kids have gamed the system.

At the elite Wayland High school outside Boston, the number of students receiving special accommodations is more than 12 percent, more than six times the estimated national average of high school students with learning disabilities.

Source



BORING LESSONS GOOD

Boring classes help children to grow up and prepare for life in a world that is not always "a Disney ride", teachers said yesterday. Learning multiplication tables or long division might seem tedious, they said, but were vital for developing a child's knowledge. Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in Gateshead, Michael Boakes, an English teacher, said that children had to accept that boredom was a fact of life. "It's a necessary part of development to realise that life's not going to be a Disney ride 100 per cent of the time. We're not going to be all-singing, all-dancing all of the time and you'll find that's real life," he said. He called for the review of school inspectors' assessment criteria. Teachers were failed if some children became bored in a class, he said, which was "grossly unfair".

Barry Williams, a teacher at Hertford Regional College, said that he produced lessons to prepare children for life, including watching party political broadcasts, but that some inspectors did not always recognise this. He said: "My lessons are not boring. They are sometimes not wonderful for everybody, sometimes for me. But they are not boring. I am, in fact, producing adults who will be able to watch party political broadcasts."

Zoe Fail, a maths teacher from Kent, added: "Being bored encourages thinking skills and imaginative play. I remember being bored, but I'm not bored now because I know how to deal with it."

Source

***************************

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. My home page is here

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14 April, 2006

MORE POLITICAL INTERFERENCE WITH BRITISH SCHOOLS

As if political interference has not done enough to destroy them already. Note that British local councils are often very Leftist

Thousands of apparently successful schools will face the threat of being taken over by their local authorities under powers unveiled by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, today. Schools that are "coasting" or failing to stretch pupils to their potential will be given just 15 days to make improvements spelt out in "warning notices" issued by councils. Failure to respond will trigger intervention by town hall hit squads with powers to take control of a school's budget and appoint new governors.

As many as one in four of England's 24,000 schools could be caught by the rules, which a headteachers' leader described last night as "very worrying". Local authorities will have powers to compel a school to join a federation so that it can be run by a more successful neighbour. They will be able to seek Ms Kelly's permission to sack the entire governing body and replace it with a hand-picked board.

The powers effectively overturn years of policy from both Conservative and Labour governments, which have successively cut the powers of local authorities to intervene in the running of schools. It also casts doubt on Tony Blair's stated goal in the Education and Inspections Bill of creating a new generation of "trust" schools free of town hall interference. Mr Blair has said that the Bill will establish a system of "independent state schools" with heads and governors in control.

Critics will see the latest plans, set out in draft guidance from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), as an attempt to appease backbench Labour MPs angered by Mr Blair's desire to cut out the role of local authorities in schools. The 71-page document on dealing with "schools causing concern" makes clear that the Bill will strengthen dramatically the powers of local authorities to take charge of thousands of schools. They can only intervene at present when standards are "unacceptably low", the safety of pupils is at risk, or there has been "serious breakdown in management".

Ms Kelly intends to rewrite the definition of what constitutes poor performance to include thousands of "coasting" schools, where data suggests that children should be doing better even if their exam results are good in comparison with other local schools. Ofsted has declared that one in four schools is "coasting". "A school where the absolute level of attainment is apparently satisfactory may nonetheless be caught by the definition if pupil performance is persistently below levels expected when pupils' prior attainment and the school's context is taken into account," the guidance says. "This provision is specifically designed so authorities can tackle underperforming schools, as well as those with outright low standards."

Councils will judge performance using data which compares schools' results in GCSE exams and national curriculum tests with prior standards achieved by their pupils. It also takes account of levels of family poverty in a school.

Schools will only be able to appeal to Ofsted if they disagree with the council's assessment. The guidance states that an appeal may trigger an inspection to determine whether the council's action is appropriate. The DfES guidance states that the new powers will target schools in the bottom quarter nationally on "one or more key performance indicators", including exams, attendance and expulsion rates. Schools will also be vulnerable to a council takeover where they are "persistently and unacceptably letting down sizeable groups of pupils".

Local authorities will issue warning notices for schools to address underperformance within 15 days. Local authorities will be free to intervene just one day after the deadline if the head and governors do not respond to their demands or fail to appeal.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, called the guidance "very worrying". "This is very far from the Prime Minister's vision of schools being more independent from local authorities."

Source



British schools 'covering up' attacks on staff

Record compensation payments have been made to teachers this year, but schools have been accused of covering up attacks on staff to avoid negative publicity. Violence and poor behaviour are cited as the most common reasons for teachers leaving the profession. However, far from being supported, most said that they were under pressure to keep quiet about incidents.

"On a good day, some of us are verbally assaulted on an almost hourly basis in our work," Jovan Trkulja told the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) annual conference in Gateshead. Mr Trkulja, 37, a modern languages supply teacher in Tottenham, North London, told delegates that he had been hit several times in his job, once with a brick to the back of his head, and last year he was knocked down "by a braying mob of Year 9s". He said that when he raised the issue with his employers, they refused to treat the assault as crime. "When someone suffers a violent incident, the school seems to 'deal with it' internally," he said. "Schools don't want to be seen as places where violence occurs, especially not by parents on teachers or, more frequently, pupils on teachers."

In January the ATL recorded 39 cases in the previous year of members suffering attacks from pupils and parents that had resulted in serious injuries meriting compensation. Lesley Ward, a teacher at Intake Primary School in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, said children frequently "pushed the boundaries" with their behaviour, seeing what they could get away with. "Occasionally the end result is another adult can't physically or mentally cope because they are beaten literally and not protected, and we lose another good teacher."

Assaults on teachers had contributed to 7.6 million pounds in compensation paid to members of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers last year. The NASUWT published the figures at its annual conference in Birmingham, showing that compensation payments for personal injury and employment disputes were 850,000 pounds higher in 2005 than in 2004.

A teacher in Preston, Lancashire, received 129,600 pounds after a child at a neighbouring school threw a brick at her head. Linda Curtis, a design and technology teacher at a school in Bristol, suffered severe shoulder injuries after she was thrown against a radiator while attempting to break up a fight 13 years ago. She received 10,000 pounds compensation this year from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

Jim Quigley, the NASUWT's legal officer, said that bad behaviour by pupils was increasing dramatically. Cases that produced compensation payments were the tip of the iceberg. "It is a growing problem, but it is very hard to bring such cases to a successful outcome," he said. "An employer's defence generally is that it was not foreseeable that a child would have assaulted a teacher in these circumstances. "There are lots of cases where teachers are assaulted and they will not report it. They will be dissuaded from reporting it by the school because it doesn't look good."

Jacqui Smith, the Schools Minister, said that, according to Ofsted, classroom behaviour was now "satisfactory or better" in 94 per cent of secondary and 99 per cent of primary schools. However, she added that the Education and Inspections Bill would deliver "a new legal right to discipline" children and send a strong message that a culture of disrespect would not be tolerated. [Just empty huffing and puffing and everybody knows it]

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.

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. My home page is here

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13 April, 2006

A FAILURE TO EDUCATE IN U.S. SCHOOLS

There's no question that high school students have a penchant for spending money - and often the faster the better. But unfortunately many have little - if any - knowledge of how to navigate the financial marketplace. In fact, a national survey released last week by the Federal Reserve found that only 52.4 percent of U.S. high school seniors could correctly answer a series of questions about personal finance and economics. These are the very same students who are just weeks away from entering the work force or moving onto college and living on their own.

That's scary to a lot of financial experts who say that financial education is the responsibility not only of schools, but also of parents and personal-finance professionals. In short, it takes a village to eliminate financial illiteracy among young people. In looking for answers, I asked three financial experts for their suggestions on how to increase financial literacy among our nation's teens. Here's what they had to say:

Sacramento financial planner Bob Dreizler, a former teacher, believes there's plenty to learn in school beyond math and English. "It's always been a pet peeve of mine that so many kids come out of school not knowing much about personal finance," he says. "I've always felt that the world would be a lot better off if people learned to manage their money." In a perfect world, the certified financial planner says, schools would beef up their course offerings to include personal finance. "But when you see (schools) having to cut back on music, art and even driver's ed, I just don't think that's going to happen."

Dreizler says the challenge is to teach money management and keep it interesting. "Until you have something that appeals to (students), you're not going to hit the mark," he says. "They won't realize how much they need to know until they get out into the real world and run up $10,000 in credit card debt and wonder what to do next," he notes. The Sacramento financial adviser says that schools can't be expected to handle the full load of financial education. "They have to work in tandem with parents, who have to be involved," Dreizler says.

When his own children were in high school, he took the unusual step of having them get a credit card that was tied to their bank account. "I thought it was better that they learned how to use their credit card while they were at home and had someone to help them learn about saving and spending," he says. Dreizler advises parents to sit down with their teens before they go off to college and run the risk of getting into financial trouble. "Parents have to find some way of connecting with their kids on learning about money," he adds.......

Crosta's concern is that students graduating from high school or college enter the work force with no knowledge about 401(k) programs or using a credit union, for example. She also says schools can enlist help from professional financial experts who could assist classroom teachers in running programs.

More here



U.K.: TEACHERS WHO CAN'T TEACH ENVY THOSE WHO DISRUPT THEIR COSY MONOPOLY

They ignore that it is their own mass failure to educate in their government schools that has led to the British government encouraging alternative schools

Teachers called yesterday for a ban on government funding of any further faith schools, amid fears of a rise in fundamentalism in the state system. Delegates of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers yesterday voted to cut off taxpayers’ money to the schools by 2020 and promote integration, as scientists also gave warning of the dangers of teaching creationism in biology lessons. The call reflects a growing concern among teachers about the influence of some religious fundamentalists and in particular their ability to sponsor city academies and trust schools under the Government’s latest reform proposals.

In spite of rejecting calls for laws to ban the teaching of creationism, the conference, led by Hank Roberts, a teacher at Copland Community School in Brent, northwest London, made clear its disapproval of plans to give religious groups a bigger say in education. With a third of all academy schools sponsored by Christian backers, Mr Roberts cited Sir Peter Vardy, the founder of the Emmanuel Schools Foundation in the North East, who has come under fire for allowing the teaching of creationism alongside evolution theories. “No government action has been taken to prevent Sir Peter Vardy, who runs two academies and a CTC [city technology college], from teaching creationism in his schools [actually ours — we pay for them]. Instead of government action to stop this . . . what’s happening? Vardy is putting up a further £2 million to gain control of yet another school,” Mr Roberts said. “The academies programme, now without the 200 limit, means yet more ‘independent’ state-funded schools. The proposed trust schools further open the bag for religious organisations and individuals to take control of state-funded education.”

The Rev Chris Wilson, a minister with the Unitarian and Free Christian Church, agreed. Admitting that his youngest son was “happily settled” in a Church of England primary school, the further education lecturer from Cambridgeshire said that while existing faith schools should remain, serious concerns were being raised about the growth of “single-faith schools”, which were in danger of undermining society as they promoted “one dominant tradition over another”. Mr Wilson, 42, said that established faith schools understood the need to “develop partnerships which celebrate equality and diversity of beliefs”, but that increasingly some faith communities had “agendas which are at odds with the Enlightenment, and with reason and progress and the interests of science”.

Thirty-six of the existing 100 academies are sponsored by Christian groups. The United Learning Trust, an Anglican charity chaired by Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is among the biggest academy sponsors, with 12 open or planned academies. There are 7,000 faith schools in England, of which 600 are secondary.

Source

***************************

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. My home page is here

***************************



12 April, 2006

PRIVATE PAYERS LEARN FASTER

Educational experimenters rejoiced when multibillionaire Bill Gates' foundation bankrolled some of their favorite education schemes, but these private sector philanthropists quickly learned what public officials are loathe to admit: social planning will not yield literacy. "At the Gates Foundation, early grants went to utopian and communitarian movements but we moved away from that because it does not work," foundation spokesman David Ferrero said late last month. Ferrero spoke at a conference on high school reform sponsored by the Center for Education at the National Academies of Science.

The conference was cosponsored by the Education Sector and the National Education Knowledge Industry Association. In a paper presented at the conference, Craig Jerald, of Break the Curve Consulting, laid out the Gates Foundation's record.

"The findings were mixed," Jerald writes of studies of Gates foundation grantees. "On the positive side, English teachers in new high schools gave students assignments that were much more demanding and more relevant than assignments given by their peers in traditional high schools." "But math teachers in new schools were no more likely than those in conventional schools to assign intellectually demanding class work. Indeed, fully half of the math assignments collected from both types of schools exhibited `little or no' rigor."

Jerald formerly worked as a senior editor at Education Week. The Gates Foundation invested $1 billion in 1,500 "small learning communities" of fewer than 400 students each. "I visited 100 grant schools and made the observation that they were all small, autonomous, and assumed that was the path to school improvement," Tom Vander Ark, of the Gates Foundation says. "It turns out giving a failing school autonomy is a bad idea."

Vander Ark is executive director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's education initiatives. In that position, he got to experience the education bureaucracy at its most inert. "With many of our early grants, I encouraged people to fix the architecture," Vander Ark says. "Several years later, many of those same folks are stuck in architectural arguments and never got to the heart of the issue-teaching and learning."

"Overall the evaluators concluded that `the quality of student work in all of the schools we studied is alarmingly low'," Jerald reports. "It's not surprising, then, that except for a slightly more positive trend in reading scores, test-results in most Gates-funded schools generally are no better than in traditional schools, at least so far." "The early structural changes in the foundation-sponsored schools were supposed to lay the groundwork for changes in teaching and learning, but that hasn't happened in many places."

Source



TOUGH INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAM GETTING PRAISE IN CALIFORNIA

There's lots of politically correct bits in it, of course, or it would not even be considered in Californian public schools

The I.B. program, one of about 1,800 worldwide, is an intense, two-year curriculum that's known for taxing even the most dedicated students. The I.B. Diploma is based on courses in six core disciplines, culminates in a stiff set of exit exams, and counts for course credit at hundreds of American colleges.

Because of its reputation for rigor and adherence to a consistent international standard - it was originally intended for the children of diplomats - I.B. is gaining ground locally. In San Juan Unified School District, Mira Loma's 17-year-old program draws students from five counties. Luther Burbank High in Sacramento started an I.B. program recently targeting neighborhood students, and two high schools in Roseville Joint Union High School District are considering adopting the program as well, in part to bring back district students who attend Mira Loma.

Because of the kind of serious student it attracts, Mira Loma's I.B. program has racked up a long list of academic achievements, especially in science competitions. Next month, the school, along with Arden Middle School, will send teams to the national Science Olympiad - a 23-event science and engineering competition. The high school also will have a team at the national Science Bowl, a Jeopardy-style contest later this month in Washington, D.C. And Mira Loma had two semifinalists, including Griffiths, in this year's prestigious Intel Science Talent Search.

Ask student Joe Antognini why he signed up for the Science Olympiad team, and you'll get a perplexing answer. "It was a chance to take a really hard astronomy and physics test," the 17-year-old said, bouncing a little in his seat. That response, along with Antognini's T-shirt displaying the Milky Way galaxy, might cost him his lunch money at some schools. But not at Mira Loma High.

Doing extremely well in school isn't exactly a social plus, students say, but it's not a liability either. "There's a little less of the geek-nerd label, and there's a little more prestige," said senior Brian Page, another member of the Science Olympiad team. Page will tell you proudly that he helped build a trebuchet - a kind of catapult - for the statewide earlier this month.

In part because of that social climate, students commute startling distances to attend the San Juan district school. While many students from Churchill Middle School's I.B. program continue to Mira Loma, about 250 of the high school's 1,800 students come from outside the district, according to program coordinator Dave Mathews.

Kathy Beasley, a single mother, drives her two daughters all the way from the Little Pocket area of Sacramento every morning - a trip of about 40 minutes. "It's been god-awful," said Beasley, who has memorized the date her older daughter could receive a driver's license. "I don't have time to read the magazines and books I used to read. I get up at 5 a.m. so I can get my exercise in. I tried dating a couple of times, and it's just very difficult to fit any personal life in." Even so, Beasley said, the quality of the training that I.B. teachers must undergo has made it worthwhile. "The quality of the curriculum and the quality of the teachers - you can't beat it, not even if you pay for private school," she said.

Despite the program's upsides, many critics nationwide have questioned whether I.B.'s hefty price tag - from $50,000 to $150,000 per year for each school, depending on the scope - is worth it. Exceptionally capable students may benefit at the expense of those who are average or struggling, critics say. The staff at Mira Loma is well aware of such criticism, and some members, even I.B.'s most die-hard supporters, say it contains some truth. "Having a range of kids at all different ability levels is really the lifeblood of this school," said Principal Chris Hoffman. "If it's too focused on one program, it's not a comprehensive high school anymore."

That's why the staff has taken some innovative steps since the program's inception to bring in new revenue, spread the benefits of I.B. to all students and make sure the fast-growing program doesn't hijack the school's social identity. About eight years ago, troubled by the notion that students outside the I.B. program were slipping through the cracks, the staff designed a humanities curriculum called International Scholars, intended for motivated students who "don't test off the charts," said Hoffman. And just three years ago, they introduced another program called International Passport for at-risk youth who want extra tutoring and mentoring. Today, all but 70 Mira Loma students belong to one of these programs.

About 80 percent of the $140,000 the school spends each year on the I.B. program comes from grants and parents' fundraising efforts. The school has tough entrance requirements for eighth-graders who want to enter the I.B. Middle Years Program - a kind of prep track for the Diploma. But I.B. courses are open to anyone who wants to take them. And all teachers who have I.B. training teach a wide range of students, not just the highest-performing ones.

The remarkable result, students say, is a socially accepting campus where a wide range of students take I.B courses; high-performing students aren't ostracized as nerds; and lower-performing students say they're valued. The staff "appreciates everyone the same," said Will Perez, a sophomore in the school's International Passport program. "One of my best friends is in the I.B. program," said Anthony Borquez, a freshman who's also in the Passport program. "I hang out with them every lunch." Some I.B. students say the school's structure has given them the chance to make friends beyond the program. But the tension between good grades and good times remains. "It's definitely easier if you give up your social life to get good grades," said Kara Stuart, 16, who plans to enter the I.B. program next year. "I have more of a social life now than I did last year, and my grades aren't as good, but it's worth it."

More here



THIS GUY MUST BE A REAL "RINO"

After the California Teachers Association railed against Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's special election agenda last year, it was a shock when the group last week endorsed a Republican, Bruce McPherson, for secretary of state. CTA President Barbara Kerr said it was the first time she could recall CTA endorsing a Republican for statewide office. McPherson took over the secretary of state's office last year after being nominated by Schwarzenegger once the embattled Kevin Shelley resigned from the post.

The CTA passed on state Sens. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, and Debra Bowen, D-Marina del Rey. Bowen did receive the backing of the California Federation of Teachers. Kerr said McPherson did well enough in a CTA interview to receive more than 60 percent support. The group has backed him in past legislative races and considered his performance in office. "We looked at the November election, which was about education, and he ran that well," Kerr said. "He was the bipartisan (official) he was supposed to be."

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.

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. My home page is here

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11 April, 2006

WELCOME TO A NEW EDUBLOGGER

DIANE PHILIPSON has started a new blog here and has a lot of interesting posts up already. Here is what Miranda Devine recently had to say about Diane:

"Diane Philipson is a former primary school teacher who spends her days at home in Newcastle coaching children who are struggling to read. This week she had phone calls from two desperate mothers who say their sons, one aged 12 and one aged eight, feel life isn't worth living. "The eight-year-old told his mother he'd rather be dead than have to struggle so much with reading," Philipson said yesterday. Philipson is one of a number of backyard operators across Australia to whom anxious parents have turned to teach their children to read when school has failed. They invariably use a method that involves direct, explicit, systematic phonics. This is the inexplicably politicised way of teaching children that letters in our alphabet are associated with sounds."



The Echo Chamber on Liberal Campuses

Professors are stereotyped as pinko, tree-hugging, world-order globalists intrigued by same-sex marriage, obsessed with the environment and besotted with anything non-Western. Admittedly, I overstate the public image somewhat. Still, when consensus does occur among colleagues at my faculty "lunch table," it generally falls left-of-center, so perhaps there is some validity here.

One study, by a team that included GMU communications professor Robert Lichter, provides more tenable evidence of a liberal inclination among today's professors. Survey responses from faculty members at 183 American colleges and universities show that "liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins" and that liberals generally teach at the so-called better institutions.

There is some variation by academic discipline. English literature professors, for example, turn out to be 88 percent liberal and 3 percent conservative, whereas business professors are 49 percent liberal and 39 percent conservative. Overall, however, 72 percent of professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent as conservative. That's almost a 5-1 ratio.

Another interesting point: The percentage of faculty members who are liberal increases with the academic ranking of the school. The study postulates that anti-conservative discrimination in hiring and advancement may push conservative professors out of elite schools. So, if you are looking for a conservative academic, try the business department at an institution not considered top-tier. You will need some luck, however, because the odds are still against finding one. Okay, academic faculties are generally liberal. So? What's a liberal faculty anyway? Well, according to the study, faculty members agree with these statements in the percentages shown:

* Homosexual and heterosexual lifestyles are equally acceptable (67 percent).

* Women have a right to an abortion (84 percent).

* Extramarital cohabitation is acceptable (75 percent).

* Government should guarantee employment (66 percent).

* Government should reduce the income gap (72 percent).

* The environment should be protected even with higher prices and fewer jobs (88 percent).

But I think there's more to this. I would argue that there is an implicit mainstream campus credo. Dissent is heresy, so stay in the mainstream unless you are tenured. Here are the principal tenets.

* Diversity, particularly linguistic and theological diversity, binds and unites a culture.

* Proportionate representation of races within a student body justifies corrective discrimination by race.

* All cultures are morally equivalent.

* Social justice may require unequal application of equal protection laws.

* The dearth of women in science screams gender bias; the dearth of men in nursing does not.

* Diversity promotes classroom learning -- except in English composition, for which foreign-born students must have their own section.

* Hate speech (racial, sexual and religious slurs) has no place on college campuses. Some words should never be spoken.

* No one should ever have to pay for health care -- or condoms.

The American professoriate is sexually tolerant, culturally sensitive, environmentally conscious and socially collectivistic. It leans hard to the left, but that is not the important thing. What is important is that many perspectives on every issue should be presented and examined. Right now, liberal bias is so extreme as to threaten the only campus diversity that matters, the diversity of ideas.

Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell worries that students may be exposed to just one side of issues and that they may graduate with neither skill nor competence in intellectual argumentation. "These 'educated' people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues . . . learning only how to label, dismiss and demonize ideas that differ from what they have been led to believe," he wrote. I worry, too, but at least a study has identified the problem and quantified the challenge. Now if we could just hire and retain a few conservative professors, we might expand classroom debates, teach students to evaluate conflicting arguments -- and just maybe tilt my lunch table back toward the center.

Source



Ignorant Australian teachers still holding out against phonics

Reactions to the report of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Teaching Reading, published in December last year) have been mixed. Many teachers and parents have welcomed the report's emphasis on the central role of phonics in the initial teaching of reading, but many educators have either questioned the importance of phonics or are of the view that teachers already employ sufficient phonics instruction within a "balanced" approach to literacy teaching. In Britain, the Rose report, released last month, also strongly favoured phonics, first and fast, for early readers.

Those least convinced by the findings of the two reports are those traditional educators favouring the well-entrenched "whole language" approach to the teaching of reading. "Whole language" advocates believe that reading is acquired naturally, in much the same way as we learn to talk, and that little or no phonics instruction is necessary, and may even be harmful.

Those who support phonics are perceived as uncool at best and reactionary at worst. Whole language exponents, on the other hand, are portrayed as children's champions in the fight for liberty and equality. Yet phonics instruction, rather than subjecting (if not subjugating) students to mindless, robotic drill, is actually powerfully liberating for children.

Those who advocate phonics share the views of whole language supporters on the importance of phonemic awareness, vocabulary and comprehension, and the fact that students need to be able to read fluently and easily, not laboriously. Together with phonics, to which even some whole language advocates pay lip-service in a minor role, these elements have been identified as the five critical components of any effective reading program by the National Reading Panel in the US and reiterated subsequently by the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in Australia. No one, to my knowledge, believes that phonics is the only answer.

So, advocates of phonics and whole language actually agree on far more than they disagree on. The point of departure lies solely in the importance the two camps attach to explicit and systematic instruction in how to decode words. The whole language side says children will discover this for themselves by being exposed to a rich literacy environment (and some children do), while those associated with phonics instruction argue that, to ensure the majority of children learn to read easily and quickly, systematic, explicit instruction in phonic decoding is essential. This is especially important for those experiencing difficulties.

A second misconception is that phonics advocates seriously suggest that once we have learned to read phonically, we continue to read that way. Not so. Phonics instruction provides a self-teaching mechanism by which children can teach themselves an increasing number of new words, initially by sounding them out. With sufficient repetition, and this varies for each child, these words are learned as sight words; they do not subsequently have to be sounded out each time they are encountered in text. Self-teaching is truly liberating because it allows children to learn new words without a teacher or parent even being present.

A focus on reading for meaning alongside systematic, explicit phonics instruction means the self-teaching mechanism also gives children an in-built check on the accuracy of their decoding. This is not to deny for a moment the vital significance of reading for meaning for its own sake.

It is not just educators advocating a whole language approach who want children to read critically. We all do. We all want children to be able to differentiate fact from opinion, and the ironic from the literal, for example. But to do this, students need to be able to read fluently first. If a child cannot read the actual words on the page, there is no possibility of being critical.

So the main point of departure is essentially one of priorities. To become a critically literate member of society, you need first to be able to read fluently and with understanding. To attempt to teach critical literacy before children have learned to read fluently is to put the cart before the horse. In the early years of schooling, the main emphasis should be on teaching accurate, fluent decoding with the aim of the vast majority of students being able to read well by year 3.

Explicit, systematic instruction in phonics is the best way to achieve this so that students can then read by themselves a variety of texts and hence have access to a variety of opinions, views and perspectives: phonics for freedom, in fact.

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.

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. My home page is here

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10 April, 2006

FURTHER TO MY TOP POST YESTERDAY:

An email from a reader below. To reinforce his points, I might note that I myself did the last two years of High School in one year -- AS AN EVENING STUDENT -- mainly by teaching myself. I had tuition for only one subject

I was for ten years a teacher in one of the worst school systems in the US, the Hawaii Department of Education. Interruptions from on high, as described in the story you cite, did not intrude as often as the writer observed in his encounter with US schools. The conduct of an ordinary class is bad enough, though, with bathroom passes to write, students to shush, points to repeat for the slow kids while the quick ones fidget and wait or wander into dreamland.

Some years ago a Professor of Library Science came to the University of Hawaii for a sabbatical semester. She brought her 15 year old daughter. She had been warned about Hawaii's wretched State schools. She was not about to jump through the hoops necessary to get her daughter admitted for one semester to a decent independent or parochial school. She requested a semester's worth of assignments from her daughter's private East Coast school, hired a Biochem grad to tutor Math and Science three hours per week and a History grad to tutor History and English two hours per week, gave her daughter a set of keys to her office, and gave her dayghter the run of the campus.

At first they had doubts, but by the end of the semester the daughter did not want to return to her plush private school. She oconcluded that school is a waste of time; that she could get her academic work completed between 0800 and 1100, and then had time to read independently or take craft classes at the student center (she was pretty good at pottery).

The author of Evolution's Captain, a biography of Robert FitzRoy, wrote that FitzRoy entered the Admiralty school at age 12 and completed the customary 36 month course in 20 months. This curriculum included Classical and Modern Languages, History, Math through Calculus, navigation, ship handling, gunnery, fencing, and dancing. This implies: 1) FitzRoy was brilliant, and 2) the Admiralty curriculum was self-paced.



Study finds preschool initiative would benefit few

An initiative to pay for universal preschool in California would help some low-income children and English-learners who could benefit the most but also would subsidize thousands of parents who already pay to send their children to preschool, according to a study released Wednesday.

Proposition 82, the "Preschool for All" initiative led by director Rob Reiner, would provide what supporters call high-quality preschool for all 4-year-olds by raising income taxes by 1.7 percent for individuals who earn at least $400,000 a year, or couples earning $800,000. It would raise an estimated $2.4 billion a year.

A review of the measure by the Policy Analysis for California Education, a joint research project at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, concludes that the extra funding would boost preschool enrollment by just 10 percent to 15 percent. That means as much as $1.3 billion of the funding would go to parents who already are paying for preschool. "The bulk of benefits really would go to better-off families," UC Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller said in a conference call Tuesday. "Is this initiative about providing income relief for these families or is it about expanding access to preschool?"

Several studies have found that children from poor families and students who are learning English reap the most from intensive preschool programs. Among the findings in the Stanford and Berkeley study:

- About 64 percent of California's 533,000 4-year-olds attend preschool, about 40 percent of them in subsidized programs for low-income families. Results from other states suggest the percentage of students who would enroll in the voluntary program is likely to increase to about 75 percent.

- There's no proof of better outcomes for programs in which all teachers have bachelor's degrees, as the initiative would require. Fuller said benefits have been shown from the two-year training programs Proposition 82 would require for preschool aides.

- Existing community and nonprofit preschools could be squeezed out by school district-operated preschools that would have access to greater resources and training, while preschools that serve disabled students would not qualify for funding because of a legal loophole.

The report's release shows how heated the battle over universal preschool has become. Several Proposition 82 supporters interrupted Fuller's conference call with reporters Tuesday to challenge his findings. They said it was misleading to say two-thirds of California's 4-year-olds are enrolled in preschool, saying that figure includes thousands of children who attend day care or low-quality preschool programs. "There are very few programs that are comparable in terms of the quality aspirations of Proposition 82," said Karen Hill-Scott, a consultant for the Los Angeles First 5 coalition and an initiative supporter who called into Fuller's press conference. "The vast majority of low-income families do not benefit from the subsidized system."

Fuller acknowledged that the estimated 26,000 additional low-income children who could enroll in preschool under the initiative would likely see benefits. Reiner resigned his position as head of the statewide First 5 coalition last week amid a controversy over the commission's funding of television commercials that touted the benefits of preschool

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.

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. My home page is here

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9 April, 2006

The kids learned their lesson well

American non-education as seen by an outsider

It has been years since I've seen the inside of an American school. But I was invited to give a lecture on economics to a suburban high school. I didn't know what to expect. Perhaps that was best. The teacher had warned me that students simply never paid attention. I was a bit taken back by that. The first thing I noticed at the school was two armed security guards. Considering that I last lived in New Zealand, where not even the police are armed, this was a bit unnerving.

I went to the office and told them that I was to speak to a specific class. The individual working the main information desk said he would call the teacher. While he was doing that I used the toilet. But when I came out he had still done nothing. I stood there for a few minutes and he finally called the classroom. I was told a student would come for me. A few minutes later a young women came to escort me to the classroom. On the way there she told me not to expect much as the students don't care. Adding her warning to the teacher's had me wondering how bad it could be.

As I started I could immediately see that about half the students were in a walking coma. They could walk, they could talk but they were oblivious to the classroom itself. As I started speaking, trying to get their attention as much as possible, I was surprised to see that now and then a student would simply get up and walk out. Maybe ten minutes later they would come back. Some went out and then came back and then went out again. They didn't have to ask permission or apparently have any real reason for leaving. They came and went as they liked.

I used my best tactics to get some attention from the students. And with a great deal of effort I finally had half of them paying attention. But it was a real chore. And here is what shocked me the most. At least five times the school interrupted the class with announcements over the loudspeaker. If they wanted one student, from one class, to come to the office they interrupted every student in every class . None of these announcements had anything to do with a student in the class to which I was speaking The interruptions made it difficult for me to concentrate and they interrupted the students. Each time they loud speaker went off I had to get the attention of students all over again.

Toward the end of my talk I made it very clear that I would try to answer any question on any topic related to political economy. I told the students that if they only learned what I thought they should learn they would remember nothing. But if we discussed the topics that interested them they would remember. And with a little prodding the questions started coming. And some of them were good questions. One girl, pierced nose, semi-punk look, who had been drifting for the first half had finally become interested. She wanted to know what are the differences between classical liberals and modern liberals. It was a good question.

Things were finally moving along and then the damn loudspeaker went off again. I had tried to speak over it the previous times. But it still created problems each time. And I thought I would do the same thing this time. But the announcement went on and on and on. Some man in the office was making announcements about which class won which game. And he literally meant games. He droned on about a "stick race" and dragged the announcement out. He announced which class came in fourth place. Then he would go "yaaa" and applaud over the loudspeaker. Then he went into third place, cheered again and applauded again. And then second and did it all over again. And then first and did it all over again. Now if you think it was tedious reading what he did you should have heard it live! And he had at least four such game results to announce and each time he cheered and each time he applauded. The students did learn who came in fourth, third, second and first in the all important "nacho macho" contest but what they were not learning was anything about economics.

I was quite angry with the school. I could see in that one period that with some effort one could get through to a fair number of the students. But at least five times I was interrupted for unimportant, inconsequential announcements. All I could think was: "No wonder the kids don't take learning seriously." Why should they? The school itself didn't take learning seriously.

In just that one period. the main school office sent the message to students that a "nacho macho" contest was more important than learning. They got the point across loud and clear that a "stick race" was more important than learning. Two other games, the absurdity of which I do not even remember, were both more important than learning. At least four other times the students were told that having one student come to the office was sufficient reason to stop the teaching of every single student on campus.

And that was only one period. Is it like this throughout the day? I don't know. I hope not. But I suspect that these interruptions are common. So the students have learned what the school went out of its way to teach them: class time is not important and learning is not important. For a good number of these kids that is the one lesson they really got from the administration.

Source



CROOKED VOTER REGISTRAR IN CALIFORNIA STOPS EDUCATIONAL REFORM

He serves the Democrat establishment, not the people

Capo for Better Representation (C4BR), a group of parents who initiated a recall of their school board for what they say is financial mismanagement, formally filed a Writ of Mandate in Orange County Superior Court today, Friday, April 7th, in an attempt to get their recall campaign certified.

C4BR filed papers in April, 2005 to recall all seven trustees of the Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD) in April, 2005. The group, led by recall organizer Kevin Murphy, a financial executive and CUSD father of four whose wife served as a PTA president in the district, collected the 20,000+ signatures needed for each trustee to place the recall on the ballot. Several hundred volunteers successfully gathered signatures at grocery stores, coffee shops, movie theaters and in neighborhoods throughout the district.

In early November, the group delivered to (acting) Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley over 177,000 signatures; 25,000+ signatures per trustee. In a surprising move, the registrar informed Kevin Murphy at 5 pm on Friday, December 23rd that the group did not turn in enough "valid" signatures to certify an election. This despite the fact that they delivered over 25,000 per trustee, when only 20,000 were required. The registrar had invalidated an unprecedented 35% of the signatures.

Recall volunteers went to work inspecting the signatures to find out what went wrong. What they found was disturbing. As many as 3,650 signatures per trustee were invalidated because the petition circulators wrote in the address for some of the signers when asked for assistance in doing so. Even though OC Registrar Neal Kelly's office told the petitioners on eight different occasions this was allowed, Mr. Kelley apparently reconsidered at the eleventh hour and decided to disallow these signatures.

In addition, volunteers who reviewed the signatures found that the registrar made errors on roughly 30% of the invalidated signatures. The registrar invalidated voters' signatures because he claimed they were not registered when in fact the recall volunteers discovered that they were indeed registered in the district. Other examples of errors include invalidation of signatures because the "signature does not match" the voter rolls. Many of the signers had registered decades before, so their signature would indeed appear different today. In addition, voters were asked to sign seven times, once for each trustee. By the time they got to the seventh signature page, their signature often varied widely. These voters' signatures were summarily disallowed however. It appears that the benefit of the doubt clearly was not given to the voter in these instances. Murphy also pointed out that the temporary staff hired by the registrar to review the signatures were not trained handwriting analysis professionals.

The registrar appears to have been overzealous in invalidating signatures and in fact, appears to have gone out of his way to invalidate, rather than validate, signatures. This raises the issue of whether the will and intent of the voter was truly respected.

The recall campaign was initiated after several poor decisions made by the trustees. The board voted 7-0 to spend $52 million for a 126,000 sf luxury administration building for only 134 administrative employees, while about half of CUSD's students languish in portable classrooms, many of them 10 to 20+ years old. Local Mello-Roos and redevelopment dollars that should have been spent for classrooms and older campuses are now being used to build the largest, most expensive administration building in Orange County.

The trustees also voted unanimously to spend $130+ million (and climbing) on building the new San Juan Hills High School, which is currently the second most expensive high school ever built in California, after the Belmont Learning Center in LA. According to Murphy, the new high school is being built on 85 to 130 feet of fill on the site of an ancient landslide, next to a dump that services several counties, virtually under high voltage transmission lines, on a road not meant for public use that has 600 daily trips from trash trucks on a steep grade, across the street from a green waste facility. For this, the district paid nearly $1 million dollars per acre. Worse Murphy says, the district (i.e; taxpayers) paid the developer who sold them the property to grade exactly the number of acres the developer needed for his residential development, and used that dirt to fill in the canyons for the school site.

Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that CUSD Superintendent James Fleming is paid close to $300,000 a year; the highest paid Superintendent in the state. Fleming, the recall group says, regularly turns a deaf ear to parents' and kids' needs, cutting basic programs and services in the district due to "budget cuts" while moving forward with hugely expensive and unnecessary projects. Murphy says Fleming and the trustees had many parents fooled into believing that the district didn't have enough money, until construction began on the beautiful new administration building. When parents complained that their kids were in old portables while the trustees and Fleming got a $52 million building, Board President Marlene Draper's response was "kids can learn in anything". That pretty much sums up the board and Superintendents' attitudes towards the parents and children in CUSD, says Murphy.

The group is asking the court to either validate the signatures based on the errors uncovered by the recall volunteers, or for a recount of those petitions invalidated due to registrar error. They will ask that signatures be allowed where the circulators completed addresses at the signers' request, as the group relied on the registrar's advice regarding the completion of addresses by circulators. C4BR's lawyer anticipates a judicial review will not take more than 30 days.

Source



Minding our manners: "My parents had conflicting views about the nature and origin of good manners. My father took the Romantic view that they were the expression of man's natural goodness of heart and that they therefore emerged spontaneously -- that is, if they emerged at all. If they didn't, it was because of the social injustice that inhibited or destroyed natural goodness. My mother took the classical view that good manners were a matter of discipline, training, and habit and that goodness of heart would, at least to an extent, follow in their wake. The older I grow, the more decisively I take my mother's side."

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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. My home page is here

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8 April, 2006

Education Committee Chair Highlights NCLB Report, Expresses Concern about Lack of Participation in School Choice, Supplemental Services Options

Press release from here

U.S. House Education & the Workforce Committee Chairman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA) today highlighted a report - released this morning by the U.S. Department of Education - on the progress made under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The report, which is required by Congress to track the law's Title I implementation, focuses on key provisions related to state assessments, accountability measures, trends in student achievement, teacher quality, school choice, and supplemental educational services.

Among the report's major findings is that states are not notifying those schools which did not achieve adequate yearly progress (AYP) in a timely enough manner. For example, regarding the 2004-05 academic year, only 15 states provided final AYP results to schools by September 2005. Moreover, despite the fact that NCLB requires parents to be informed of a school's AYP status prior to the beginning of the next school year, almost half of all school districts notified parents an average of five weeks after school had started.

"As we approach next year's reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, this report provides Congress, schools, and parents valuable information about the progress being made in implementing NCLB's chief reforms," said McKeon. "While the report details generally strong progress toward meeting the law's key goals, I'm particularly concerned that parents are not being informed quickly enough if their child's school is not making adequate yearly progress. In fact, this late notification seems to be impacting a parent's ability to take advantage of school choice and supplemental educational services options under the law."

The report supports McKeon's concern, finding that in the 2003-04 school year less than one percent of students eligible to attend a different public or charter school through NCLB's school choice provisions had actually taken advantage of the option. "Access to school choice and supplemental services options is vital to the ultimate success of NCLB," McKeon continued. "Parents whose children are eligible to take advantage of them should be notified in a timely manner so they can make the fully-informed decisions about their children's academic future. Other key findings of the report include:

* National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in both reading and math have improved for 4th grade students, with Hispanic and African American students seeing more dramatic gains;

* The number of Title I schools that have been identified for improvement is roughly the same as it was before NCLB, disputing claims by education reform opponents that NCLB is too punitive;

* Only 14% of schools did not achieve AYP solely because of the performance on assessments by disabled students, while just four percent missed solely because of the assessment performance of limited English proficiency (LEP) students, disputing the claims of some that the performance of LEP and disabled students on assessments is the only reason schools are not achieving AYP; and

* Based on state reported data from the 2003-04 academic year, 86% of classes were taught by highly qualified teachers.

"As we continue a national discussion - from the classrooms in our schools to the kitchen tables in our homes - about what we need to do to ensure every child has access to a high-quality education, this report has uncovered valuable facts about both our successes in NLCB implementation and the areas in which we still need to work in closing the achievement gap in our nation's schools," concluded McKeon.



A BAPTIST UNIVERSITY THAT PERSECUTES BELIEF IN CREATION??

Baylor University is the Baptist-affiliated school in Waco, Texas, best known perhaps for its football team. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in Texas and, with some 14,000 students, the largest Baptist university in the world. Of late, however, the school has distinguished itself mainly by its evident disdain for the academic freedom of an eminent scholar and its concomitant promotion of a radical polemicist.

Baylor recently decided to deny tenure to Francis Beckwith, a leading bio-ethicist and one of the most accomplished scholars at Baylor. Beckwith had been associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies and associate professor of church-state studies. The vote to deny him tenure was little more than an act of political censorship directed against his conservative political and religious views. It has also turned into a media nightmare for Baylor's administration. Rod Dreher at the Dallas Morning News wrote this about Baylorgate: "The fact that a Baptist university cannot bring itself to award tenure to a scholar of Dr. Beckwith's stature is scandalous -- and will cause shock waves beyond Waco."

Beckwith's sin seems to be his belief in Christianity and his defense of the teaching of "intelligent design," the doctrine holding that it is possible to see evidence of an intelligent plan in the patterns of evolution and that advanced life forms could not have simply evolved via random interactions of chemicals. "Intelligent Design" has become the bogeyman of radical secularists, who want to make sure that no high school biology teacher in the country dare mention it as an alternative view of how biological processes took place.

The ACLU and similar outfits consider "intelligent design" to be the backdoor introduction of religious indoctrination into the schoolhouse. More troublingly, as they see it, it is at variance with their preferred political causes -- such as homosexual marriage, racial quotas, global warming and other left-wing doctrines -- which they adhere to with a near-theological fervor and which they have long promoted under the guise of education.

Beckwith's supporters are understandably outraged. One of Baylor's graduate students described the firing of Beckwith in The American Spectator as a case of petty revenge. But the circumstances of of Beckwith's case are unusual and controversial, and have attracted attention and comment from First Things magazine, a prominent religious journal published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life (led by Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus). Its editor Joseph Bottum wrote on March 27:

"Baylor has apparently decided to sink back into its diminished role as a not terribly distinguished regional school. President Sloan is gone, the new high-profile faculty are demoralized and sniffing around for positions at better-known schools, energetic programs like the Intelligent Design institute have been chased away, and the bright young professors are having their academic careers ruined by a school that lured them to campus with the promises of the 2012 plan and now is simply embarrassed by them."

Beckwith had been hired by Robert Sloan, Baylor's former president, whose aim it was to turn Baylor into something more than the home of a football team and to build Christian academic excellence and achieve for Baylor true research university status. Sloan's recruitment program was known as "Vision 2012." After being forced out of his office, Sloan was replaced by John Mark Lilley. Moving to fire Beckwith for the crime of political incorrectness was among Lilley's first major decisions. The thinking among the heads of Baylor, whose brains no doubt are composed of random combinations of chemicals, is that Baylor can't have any views on biology that have word associations with religion.

Source



Stupid education policy from Australia's mainstream Left

They object to students paying their way through university! Only the taxpayer is allowed to pay for people's education, apparently. It is of course envy-driven -- envy of those who can pay

University chiefs have warned that Kim Beazley's pledge to ban full-fee university degrees costing up to $200,000 is "unsustainable" and must be dumped in the lead-up to next year's federal election. As senior ALP frontbenchers conceded yesterday it would prove far too expensive to compensate universities for the reduced revenue, vice-chancellors urged Mr Beazley to end his opposition to full-fee degrees.

During the 2004 election, contested by Mark Latham, universities said they could be left $1.2billion-a-year worse off under the ALP's plan to ban full-fee degrees and wind back the cost of HECS increases. That cost will now be substantially higher as a result of the FEE-HELP loans scheme which is supporting an explosion in demand for full-fee degrees and an increase in the cap on the number of places offered to students who miss out because of marks.

The push to encourage Mr Beazley to dump his opposition to full-fee degrees is supported by Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis and Australian National University Vice-Chancellor Ian Chubb, who are regarded as having strong ALP links. Queensland University Vice-Chancellor John Hay told The Australian last night the existing policy was "unsustainable". "I don't think their present policy is realistic," he said. "In the first place, the current level of funding is seriously inadequate. Many universities now, in a sense, depend on additional funding to make their activities viable. Either they are going to massively increase the level of commonwealth funding ... or it is unsustainable."

However, deputy leader Jenny Macklin said she was not walking away from the policy pledge. "Labor opposes full-fee degrees for Australian undergraduates at public universities," she said. Ms Macklin was recently mired in controversy over an internal row over Queensland Premier Peter Beattie's push to support full-fee degrees for medicine students to tackle the skills shortage. The degrees can cost up to $200,000 for students who miss out on a HECS place on marks. The ALP subsequently moved in parliament to oppose a measure to increase the cap on the number of full-fee medicine degrees that can be offered in a course. The measures also increased the FEE-HELP loan available to students.

At the last election, former education minister Brendan Nelson warned that a string of universities would be worse off under the ALP. They included the University of Queensland, which calculated it could lose $40 million a year; La Trobe, which could lose $18million; and Monash, which could lose $216 million over four years.

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.

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. My home page is here

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7 April, 2006

BLACK AND HISPANIC FAILURE

A generally sensible article excerpted below -- but one with stupid conclusions. What does it suggest if blacks and Hispanics try just as often as whites to get challenging degrees but fail a lot more? Nobody who knew the respective IQ averages would be the least bit surprised at the finding but IQ is not mentioned below, of course

Among the many concerns that policy makers, politicians and others have expressed about the current state of American science and math education has been the comparatively low rate at which black and Hispanic students - the country's fastest growing populations - enter and thrive in high-demand science and technology fields. And foremost among the presumed causes of those low rates has been the idea that those students, because of lack of academic preparation, are failing early in their college careers to get through courses that are designed to weed out less qualified students from those majors.

A study released Monday by the American Council on Education suggests that a relative lack of academic preparation in high school does indeed diminish Hispanic and African-American students' chances of completing degrees in science, math and technology fields. But the report, "Increasing the Success of Minority Students in Science and Technology," finds that the problem comes significantly later in students careers.

Black students who enrolled in college in 1995-6 were just as likely as their white peers to major in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, while Hispanic students were more likely than both of those groups and second only to Asian-American students...

And by the spring of 1998, when those students are three years into their college careers, members of the various racial and ethnic groups who began majoring in science and technology fields are still enrolled and majoring in those fields at strikingly similar rates...

But by spring 2001, the pipeline has sprung a leak. By that six-year mark, 62.5 percent of the African-American and Hispanic students majoring in STEM fields had earned bachelor's degrees, compared to 86.7 percent of white students and 94.8 percent of Asian-American students. Most of the rest of the black and Hispanic students - 28.8 percent - were still enrolled at four-year institutions, so it's not as if they had necessarily failed. But, the study finds, they clearly had taken an "unexpected detour" in their careers that put them behind their peers.

To offer some insight as to why, the report next compares the characteristics (regardless of race) of those science and technology majors who had completed their degrees and those who had not. Those who had finished their programs of study were significantly likelier than the "non-completers" to have taken a "rigorous" high school curriculum (42 percent vs. 18 percent of the "non-completers"); to have at least one parent with a college degree (64.4 percent vs. 38 percent of non-completers); and to be from families in the highest third of the national population in average income (47 percent vs. 28.1 percent).

Those who earned their degree were also more likely to be enrolled full time (75 percent vs. 49.3 percent) and less likely to work at least 15 hours a week (27.1 percent vs. 42.6 percent of non-completers). The students who did not finish their degrees were far less likely to have received financial aid grants worth at least $5,000 in their first year of study, by a margin of 7.6 percent vs. 38.5 percent).

While inadequate academic preparation is a major factor in the failure of black and Hispanic students to earn degrees in science and technology fields, the report of the study concludes, "the biggest challenge for institutions seeking to improve student persistence in encouraging students to work less and attend full time consistently. "This is a major challenge because these are two areas that institutions can do little to control," the report adds. "[I]nstitutions should provide academic advising and financial aid options that encourage students to enroll full time and reduce their need to work more than 14 hours a week."

More here



No Child Left Behind? Ask the Gifted

Despite all the talk about America losing its edge in the global market, programs for the gifted and talented are threatened on several fronts. There are fewer classes for gifted elementary and middle school children today than there were a decade ago, said Jane Clarenbach, public relations director of the National Association for Gifted Children. In 1998, 25 states reported that 80 to 100 percent of their local school districts provided services to gifted students; last year, there were 22 states reporting that level of services. Ms. Clarenbach said the federal No Child Left Behind law was "eroding support for gifted services." Passed in 2002, the law rates schools on how students perform on reading and math tests, pressuring districts to focus resources on students struggling to attain proficiency. Schools that score too low can be taken over. "It's important to help the kids who are struggling," Ms. Clarenbach said, "but it's important to challenge the kids on the other end, too."

She said that while the extra $90 million President Bush has budgeted this year for Advanced Placement math and science programs was good news, "we need to do more K to 8 so more kids will be in a position to take the A.P. tests in high school." Each year, President Bush has eliminated the $9 million Javits Act, the only federal financing for elementary and middle school gifted programs. And each year, a bipartisan Congressional coalition has saved it, this year led by Senators Charles E. Grassley and Christopher J. Dodd. In New Jersey, Gov. John S. Corzine recently cut financing for the Governor's School of New Jersey, a 22-year-old, $1.9 million summer program that sent 600 top high school juniors to college campuses to study science, engineering and international relations.

A new study by the Center on Education Policy found that the federal law put so much emphasis on reading and math, there has been a reduction in teaching history, science and the arts. And that appears to have affected field trips. Peter O'Connell, who runs the educational program at the national park in Lowell, Mass., just completed a survey of school visits to 10 history museums in New England, including Old Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation. He found a 20 percent decline in student visits in the last few years. "Schools aren't devoting as much time to history, especially urban districts," Dr. O'Connell said.

More here



Australian Left ends class war against private schools



Labor is preparing to dump Mark Latham's controversial policy of a private schools "hit list" by guaranteeing the funding of all non-government schools.

In a rejection of the politics of envy which sought to strip funding from 67 private schools, Labor has abandoned its philosophical objections to funding wealthy schools by promising they will not to be disadvantaged under the ALP. The infamous schools "hit list", the Tasmanian forest policy and the Medicare Gold policy, later deemed a "turkey" by the then president of the ALP, Barry Jones, are considered to be the most damaging policies Labor took to the last election.

After running an old-fashioned class war at the poll, Labor's new policy will guarantee no school will face a reduction in funding. Kim Beazley has decided to act on the policy and wipe out the image of a Latham-led Labor Party picking off the richest schools, such as The King's School in Sydney with its rifle ranges and swimming pools, and threatening hundreds of other schools, including poorer Catholic schools, with losing funding over time.

The new school-funding policy has not yet been discussed in detail within the ALP's strategy group nor presented to the Labor front bench. But senior Labor sources confirmed to The Australian last night that the hit list was going, and said the Opposition Leader and his deputy and education spokeswoman, Jenny Macklin, were working on a new way forward for schools.

Mr Beazley and Ms Macklin are working on a "bedrock" Labor policy that is directed towards shifting government funds to schools where they are most needed, government or non-government. "The emphasis in the new policy is need," a senior Labor source said last night. Ms Macklin refused to comment on the review and said the policy, like all 2004 election policies, was under review. But Ms Macklin's shift in direction from the policy she crafted for the last election under the leadership of Mr Latham will be welcomed joyously by most federal Labor MPs.

While aspects of the policy appealed to some Labor supporters at the last election, fears among poorer non-government schools of a flow-on effect as indexation cut funding from more and more private schools were widespread. There are also political concerns within the front bench and on the ALP back bench that the politics of envy did not work for Labor and made the party under Mr Latham appear threatening and mean-spirited on education.

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. My home page is here

***************************



6 April, 2006

UC Administrators trying to get rid of financial controls

The very first thing I learned about the desire of the business and law schools at the University of California to wriggle out from under the dead hands of UC headquarters and the state Legislature is this: None dare call it "privatization." The term "confuses more than illuminates," Christopher Edley, the dean of Berkeley's law school, Boalt Hall, wrote in an op-ed in these pages last year.

The issue, unsurprisingly, is money. Public university administrators all over the country are getting fed up with declining support from their state and local governments, which measured as dollars per enrolled student hit a 25-year-low in 2005, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I don't think any public institution can fund to fullest extent what it takes to be one of greatest business schools in the world," Judy Olian, dean of UCLA's Anderson School of Management, told me this week.

Along with Boalt, Berkeley's Haas School of Business and UCLA's School of Law, Anderson has been waging a very delicate campaign to win more autonomy from the UC Regents in setting its tuition and faculty pay scales. The issue is delicate because the schools' relationship with the UC system is intimately bound with their public mission, which includes educating the most qualified Californians regardless of their financial resources. There's also some concern that, as the law and business schools go, so will the UC system. Eventually that leads to the question: What does it mean to have a state university?

The impulse toward self-sufficiency is a rational response to an off-campus phenomenon - the decline in the state's budgetary support of UC has been picking up steam. Things have reached the point where administrators and faculty have lost all confidence in the state government as a reliable funding partner.

The record suggests that traditional levels of state support of 60%-80% are relics of the distant past, given competing demands on budget dollars and the Legislature's refusal to raise taxes to meet them. At Anderson and Haas, the state's share of the budget is now only 20%. At UCLA law school it has fallen to 38% from 59% in just the last two years.

The law and business schools at UCLA and Berkeley feel the crunch because they compete with wealthy private institutions for the most-qualified students and most-heavily recruited professors. The system's other law and business schools also are strapped, but don't compete in the same market; the system's medical schools have access to other outside resources, including clinical fees and research grants and contracts.

There aren't many ways to take up the slack. One option is to solicit more private donations, a course that all the institutions have embraced - Boalt this year launched a $125-million fund-raising campaign, for example - and raising tuition and fees. Increasing tuition and fees for Anderson's 660 full-time MBA students by say, $7,000 a year, would bring the rate for out-of-state students about even with the average market rate of $40,000. And it would leave a sizable discount for California residents, while yielding $4.6 million for the school - a healthy chunk of its $60-million budget.

But the UC Regents have always been uneasy with the idea that the professional schools should charge market rates and spend the additional income on faculty salaries and student fellowships. The board acknowledged the principle in 1994 when it established a so-called professional degree fee differential as a mechanism for the schools of law, business, medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine to reach parity with their private competitors - with the understanding that California residents would still get a discount.

Still, the regents retained the authority to set the differential every year, and they've never exploited it to the max. Although tuition at all four schools has roughly doubled in the last few years, it still greatly lags the market and the regents haven't set a timeline for catching up.

Things are almost as bad on the spending side: Olian says Anderson must get formal approval from UC headquarters to pay any professor more than $189,000, and other deans complain that bureaucratic obstacles to various forms of noncash compensation abound.

One important question is whether increased autonomy for the law and business schools presages an entirely new relationship between UC and the state government. Supporters of this notion point to the University of Michigan, which responded to draconian state budget cuts in the 1970s and 1980s by remaking itself as a private university in all but name. The university retained a commitment to educating qualified state residents through a substantial in-state discount. But it embarked on a program of aggressive private fund-raising and recruitment of out-of-state students willing to pay full fare. The state now contributes less than 10% of the university's budget.

"That's the broad outline of where UC has to go," argues Daniel J.B. Mitchell, a professor of management at Anderson. He argues that granting autonomy to the law and business schools is only a starting point. "It's more politically acceptable to ask why the California taxpayer should be subsidizing MBA education. But at the end of the day, the system [in Sacramento] is dysfunctional and we should get the university as much disengaged from that as we can."

And what of the system's public mission? The four schools all say that even with more freedom to increase tuition they'll devote large portions of their resources to financial aid and to serving the community. "We are committed to training the leaders of the state in the government and nonprofit sectors," says UCLA Law Dean Michael Schill; the school understands that students leaving law school with crushing tuition debt can't afford to launch careers in public service.

But the administrators argue that they can better serve their public missions if they're free to raise money where they can and deploy it themselves. If they get their way, they'll be embarking on a great experiment. Will the rest of UC follow?

Source



Yale hates the ROTC, loves the Taliban -- someone should be embarrassed

A bad day at Yale University, one of the jewels of the Ivy League. Rahmatullah Hashemi is still ensconced at Yale University, and his words of marvel at how great America really is continue to ring true. I could be in Guantanamo Bay, he said, but instead I'm at Yale.

Hashemi has been afforded special status admission to Yale precisely because he was at one time the spokesman for the Taliban. And Thursday is the day that fact becomes an unavoidably profound embarrassment for Yale University, which has so far avoided much more than a slightly reddened face.

Hashemi's Taliban abused women, violated international law, hosted Usama bin Laden, joined with him in his enmity for America, imposed a reign of 10th century Islamic terror on Afghanistan. But Hashemi gets a choice spot at Yale because he's a rock star of the "let's poke George Bush in the eye" wing of academia.

Thursday the big embarrassment for Yale is that it's decision day: who gets into Yale and who gets left out. Over 19,000 young men and women will be rejected. But the Taliban man is in solid. John Fund has been writing about the Hashemi case in The Wall Street Journal and I recommend you look over John's columns.

Hashemi still has an application pending to join Yale's sophomore class in the fall. So far he's just a special student. Bear in mind, as John Fund reported, some of the 19,000 young people just rejected were turned down for as little as an inebriated prom evening or a shoplifting case in grade school. And yet a guy from the organization which is still killing our soldiers has doors thrown open for him. Yale should declare the experiment in cross-cultural pollination over and let Mr. Taliban go home. He's had a bit of time at Yale, and Yale shouldn't make it worse by letting him continue toward an actual degree.

Source



US civil rights group: Campus anti-Semitism a serious problem

Anti-Semitism on campuses is a "serious problem" that merits a campaign to inform Jewish students of their rights, the US Commission on Civil Rights said. The commission came to its decision Monday after considering testimony last year from the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and other groups. The commission cited anti-Israeli propaganda appearing on campuses that exploits ancient stereotypes. It recommended that the Education Department run a campaign to inform Jewish students of their right to be free of harassment and that it should collect data on anti-Semitic and other hate crimes at universities. The commission also concluded that there is "substantial evidence" that some university departments of Middle East studies "may repress legitimate debate concerning Israel

Source

***************************

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. My home page is here

***************************



5 April, 2006

School Revolution May Be on Horizon

Talk is cheap in the Florida House, where would-be orators struggle to be heard over the constant buzz of chatter from their colleagues. But the din noticeably quiets when Rep. Marco Rubio speaks. Rather than reciting trite talking points polished dull from years of use, the West Miami Republican's fiery sermons are seen by many as the future of the Republican Party in Florida, his words ringing with an unmistakable tone of revolution. His speech earlier this month calling for a complete "transformation" of Florida's public schools has special significance. Rubio will have the power to put ideas into action as he prepares for a two-year term as Florida House speaker, one of the most powerful positions in the state with virtual veto power over legislation and spending.

Defending Gov. Jeb Bush's proposal to require high school students to declare majors and minors in preparation for the work force, Rubio said the state's best schools fail to meet the standards of most schools in other developed countries. "In Florida, we aspire for our third-graders to read," Rubio said. "In China, they speak three languages." Rubio said sixth-graders in America are getting "stars and happy faces" for their work while students in other countries work on advanced math and science. "Public education will not improve by reformation, it will only improve by transformation," Rubio said, "when you say our system no longer works."

The details of such transformation are still vague as he and others gather data and ideas, Rubio said last week in an interview. But the clear goal is to make school matter to students adrift in courses they find meaningless. "We're all born with natural talents for something. Trying to match up those natural talents with their dreams, that's the general theme," said Rubio. "Kids go to school and they do school work, but no one tells them why it matters." He talks of adults in the mid-to late 20s going to vocational schools for career training, wondering why they couldn't have been steered toward that path when they were teenagers. He also laments a culture in which "scientists are looked at as geeks and nerds. The cool guys are the basketball players, the drug dealers and the pimps. We need to turn that around."

A solution, Rubio said, may be making high school relevant again, with more diverse offerings for careers ranging from paralegals to poets. This "tracking" of students into career paths is common in other parts of the world, said Dr. Joseph Beckham, the Allan Tucker Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Florida State University. He applauds the concept of more specialized offerings for high school students, but said tracking can force students into paths before they're ready for such a decision. "For a 12- or a 13-year-old, they may have no idea what they want to do and some tracking programs would have pejorative effects that would limit their options at a later point," Beckham said. "Some tracking programs work against the idea of giving people every reasonable opportunity to determine their talents."

Rubio has also questioned the cookie-cutter aspects of education accepted as givens in Florida. "The idea that we have to have a system that is uniform everywhere all schools look alike, the same desk, the same light, all the same over and over," Rubio said. "Maybe 12 years is too short or too long. Maybe it should be year-round. Maybe it should be longer days. I don't know, all I'm trying to do is start that debate." Beckham said studies are pretty firm in showing the lack of continuous education, interrupted by the summer break, hinders student learning.

Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Board Association, said longer school years have long been a goal of the state's districts. He said parents may buy into the idea of 220-day school years compared with the 180 now required, but the Legislature has balked at the anticipated cost of nearly $80 million for each day added to the school year. "I think we could sell it very easily to the parents of Florida," he said. "It's just always been the situation that the state has been unwilling to bite the bullet."

Rubio has succeeded, thus far, in garnering support from Democrats willing to revolutionize the state's schools. Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, said Rubio's speech to lawmakers is "one I could have given" as a Democrat said to lead his party in the House. But he wondered about Rubio's ability to sell such a revolution to Republican lawmakers who have strictly and uniformly tied performance on the FCAT test to everything from teacher bonuses to the availability of vouchers. "I think at some point the rubber has to hit the road and we'll have to see what those ideas area and how they compare with this party's record," said Gelber, citing the state's dismal rankings in teacher pay and high school graduation. "It's one thing to talk about wanting to do things and it's another to actually do them."

Rubio acknowledges the difficulty of long-term visions in a legislative process that rewards immediate gain. "If you transform education, you're not going to see the results for 10 to 12 years," Rubio said. "We are not in a system that rewards 10-year outlooks, we're in a system that rewards how the papers tomorrow write about things. We're willing to allow history to be the judge of our work."

For now, Republicans say Rubio is the right man for creating a broader vision that will lead to specific ideas. "A major shift in the education model is going to take a Marco Rubio to cast that vision," said. Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, chairman of the House Education Council. "He is going to assemble the platform for the Republican Party for the next 10 years." Rubio is less grandiose in assessing his mission, comparing it to his father's absolute reluctance to sell a 1971 Chevrolet Impala. Despite clear evidence that the car's usefulness had passed, his father kept changing tires and repainting the vehicle to extend its life. "In Florida, we're still committed to an Impala model," Rubio said. "And the model itself is broken."

Source



Taking on the teachers unions

IT IS RARE -- and risky -- for a governor and national political aspirant to put the interests of children above those of a constituency that has as much electoral clout as the teachers unions. Yet Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has done just that with the education reform package he proposed last September and is touting nationwide.

The governor's bill seeks to upend the status quo in teacher pay and evaluation that has been written into collective bargaining agreements across the Commonwealth. Specifically, it would offer annual bonuses for teachers with a math or science degree who pass the teacher test in their subject, forgo tenure, and receive a satisfactory year-end evaluation. It would also make teachers in all subjects eligible for a bonus upon receiving an exemplary evaluation and empower superintendents to reward teachers who work in low-performing schools. Crucially, the bill would remove teacher evaluation from the collective bargaining process and establish statewide criteria for assessing each teacher's ''contribution to student learning."

While several states and districts nationwide are experimenting with differential pay for teachers, Romney's proposals are noteworthy for their breadth and the size of the proposed bonuses. All told, an effective math or science teacher could receive up to $15,000 a year in three bonuses. Catherine Boudreau, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, predictably criticized Romney's proposals as ''inequitable, divisive, and ineffective." The MTA denounced the proposal as ''uniquely designed to destroy collegiality in a school," ignoring the fact that performance pay is routine in such other professions as medicine, law, and engineering, not to mention in the Commonwealth's first-rate universities, including those that are unionized by the MTA.

The governor can expect a similarly abrupt reception nationwide -- a fact he should consider as he eyes a presidential run. Teachers unions control enormous political resources, including a network of readily mobilized voters. Moreover, the public likes to think that the interests of teachers and kids are always aligned, a line tirelessly advanced by the unions. The National Education Association's political action committee even bills itself as the ''Fund for Children and Public Education."

However, what the unions want may not always be good for students. Teacher pay is exhibit one. While unions have fought to boost salaries, they have resisted efforts to ensure that this money recruits, rewards, and retains the most essential or effective teachers. Current pay scales reward teachers only for experience and graduate credits, neither of which is a meaningful predictor of quality. The result is that districts reward long-serving veterans while failing to recognize those teachers who improve student achievement, possess high-demand skills, or take on more challenging assignments.

Proposals to revamp collective bargaining by tackling teacher pay are only a start. Teacher collective bargaining agreements extend far beyond bread and butter matters, frequently privileging the interests of employees over those of students. Across the nation, contracts include clauses that prohibit principals from factoring student achievement into teacher evaluation, that allow senior teachers to claim the most desirable school and classroom assignments, and that engage in a dazzling array of minutiae, such as when teachers are allowed to wear an NEA membership pin. As a result, schools are organized and managed more like mid-20th century factories than professional 21st century centers of learning. None of this serves students, valuable teachers, or communities.

Improving teacher collective bargaining is not only a question of knowing what to do, but of persuading school boards and the public to tackle the issue. State policymakers must change the environment in which negotiations take place by maintaining pressure on local officials to raise student achievement. Local newspapers must shine light on contract provisions that serve adults rather than children. School boards and superintendents need to push for fundamental changes in contract language and fully exploit ambiguous language where it exists. Civic leaders and citizens must support management measures that may entail, at least initially, disgruntled unions and increased labor unrest.

Since 1993, education reform in Massachusetts has been a bipartisan triumph, accomplishing both a dramatic leveling of the financial playing field between wealthy and poor school districts and the creation of a nationally recognized accountability system. Building on that start is no short journey, but overhauling teacher collective bargaining is the crucial next step. It would be something if Romney did not have to take it on alone.

Source



Two new public schools for gifted teens in Queensland, Australia

Inequality recognized! Leftists will be grinding their teeth about such "elitism"

Two new "super state schools" for gifted Year 10, 11 and 12 students will open next year. Education Minister Rod Welford and Premier Peter Beattie yesterday announced the Academy of Creative Industries would be developed in partnership with the Queensland University of Technology and located in the Kelvin Grove Urban Village. The Academy of Maths, Science and Technology will be built at Toowong.

Mr Welford said both schools would be "melting pots of genius and creativity with superb interaction between highly motivated teachers and students ideally suited to accelerated learning". "Watch out Grammar. These academies will be unashamedly elitist and yes, I expect they would achieve 95 per cent or so of students with OPs 1-15," Mr Welford said. This would challenge the supremacy - in terms of academic achievement - of the top-ranking Brisbane Girls Grammar school.

But Girls Grammar principal Amanda Bell welcomed the news. "I think any improvement to education that lifts the quality of learning through innovative programs and offers parents a wider choice is good," she said.

Although state schools, the new academies will charge each student about $1000 a year to cover curriculum materials. Up to 10 per cent of places will go to overseas, full fee-paying students. The academies will open with 300 Year 10 and Year 11 students next year, to be selected through a screening system that considers academic ability, leadership potential and high-level skills in either maths/science or creative industries. With Year 12 added the following year, there will be 450 students in each school. "An OP statistic is too simplistic a measure for parents to use to chose a school for their child," he said.

Executive director of Catholic Education in the Archdiocese of Brisbane, David Hutton, said the data was "useful", but urged parents not to reduce schools to limited performance measures. "These issues are only part of a big picture when assessing the total contribution of a school community to the overall development of students," he said.

Headmaster of Somerset College, Dr Barry Arnison, said parents "had a right to know" the information, but academic performance was only one aspect of a school community. Kenmore State High School principal Wade Haynes said he was happy for "people to see the data as it is". "It's a transparent process," he said. "The academic data and the range of data presented is very important, but it's only one factor. It's a complex thing to choose a school for your child."

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.

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. My home page is here

***************************



4 April, 2006

WHAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS USUALLY LACK

From Jeff Jacoby -- addressing his young son:

There was an awful story in the paper a few days ago: "A 16-year-old Brighton High School student," it began, "has been charged with slashing a 14-year-old girl's face with a razor blade in a Dorchester park, leaving a gash that required more than 100 stitches to close." The story was on the front page of the metro section, along with a large photograph of the 14-year-old. Her face is now disfigured by an angry red scar stretching from her forehead to her lip. She said that she and some of her friends had been challenged to a fight by another group of girls, and had been told that if they didn't show up, the other girls would find them and beat them on the street.

I made a point of showing you that story so we could talk about it. I asked you to imagine what it must be like to attend the schools these girls go to, or to have to worry about the things that must constantly be on their minds. The story quoted the 14-year-old as saying she "believes girls in the city these days must assemble a cadre of friends at a young age to back them up or risk getting more seriously injured or even killed. And she fears being labeled a snitch for identifying the girl who slashed her face."

Such violence and intimidation are far removed from anything you've ever experienced, Caleb. But you are no longer too young to know that many other children are not so fortunate -- including some in your own backyard. When we talked about that news story, I told you that safety is one of the reasons Mama and I send you to the Hebrew Academy -- a religious day school -- instead of public school. You've never seen a fistfight, never mind a gang brawl with razor blades. When you first read the story, you weren't even sure what a razor blade *was.*

But it isn't metal detectors or security guards that makes your school safe. It isn't a zero-tolerance policy on weapons, or penalties for fighting. It's an emphasis on values and character that began on the first day of school, and that your teachers and parents treat as no less important than academics. As a 3-year-old, you would come home from nursery singing songs based on the Bible stories you were learning -- Abraham's hospitality, Rebecca's kindness to strangers. Now as a 9-year-old, you come home with monthly "midos sheets" meant to reinforce good character -- midos (or midot) is Hebrew for character traits -- by having one of your parents initial the page each time you demonstrate the particular virtue being emphasized that month: cheerfulness, gratitude, kindness to others.

Does emphasizing character in this way ensure that you'll never be involved in violent or criminal deeds? Will it guarantee that you never treat another person with cruelty or malice? Can your teachers or your parents know for a fact that *you'll* never slash anyone's face with a razor? Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. How you turn out will depend, ultimately, on how you choose to live. The most your parents and teachers can do is equip you to make the right choice.

So we work at it, always keeping an eye out for ways to reinforce the better angels of your nature. When you brought home your report card in December, I wasn't thrilled with the grades you had gotten in behavior, self-control, and respect for teachers and peers. Which is why I offered you an incentive: If on your next report card all your behavior marks went up, you would be rewarded with one of the I Spy books you like so much. Three weeks ago your second report card came home, and what do you know? Your conduct and character had improved across the board. Way to go!

Of course Mama and I care about your progress in English and science and religious studies, too. Sure, we want you to grow up to be good at math. But it's even more important that you grow up to be a mensch.

It's a message I try to reinforce whenever I can. After every meal, I tell you constantly, make sure to thank the person who prepared it -- and that includes the "kitchen ladies" at school. When you play with your brother, you're not allowed to torment him -- kindness and courtesy aren't only for outsiders. "Make us proud of you," I say each morning when I drop you off at school -- a daily reminder that while your parents' love is automatic, their admiration is something you must earn.

At 9, you're off to a great start, Caleb -- bright, energetic, inquisitive, articulate. Who knows what great things await you? Just remember: Whatever else you grow up to be, make sure to be a mensch.



AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY SCHOOLS BEAT CITY SCHOOLS

But the teachers don't want the public to know

Education Minister Rod Welford has released details of last year's OP scores in Queensland schools, giving parents a snapshot of school performances for the first time in 12 years. The list of percentages of eligible students who received OP scores of 1 to 15 in every Queensland secondary school contains some surprises, including:

* Small rural state schools outshone city state schools.

* Private schools dominated the top 50 places.

* Non-government all-girls and co-educational schools scored highly while Catholic schools generally performed well.

Brisbane Girls Grammar School topped the list with 96 per cent of last year's 215 Year 12 students scoring OP1 to 15, followed by Boys Grammar with 93 per cent. Somerville House (92 per cent) was matched by Barcaldine State School's 12 eligible students scoring between 1 and 15. The Southport School, the most expensive school in the state with fees of between $12,276 and $12,924 a year, recorded 72 per cent. That was matched by Mackay North, Dalby and Mansfield state high schools. This means that more than one in four TSS eligible graduates left with OPs of 16 to 25. TSS principal Greg Wain did not return The Courier-Mail's call.

Nudgee College, with fees of about $7200 a year plus a "voluntary" $1000 building fund donation, had 70 per cent in the OP1 to 15 range, on a par with Clermont and Wellington Point state high schools. Principal Daryl Hanly said Nudgee had enjoyed an excellent result with 98 per cent of QTAC applicants receiving offers and 185 students receiving a VET (vocational and educational training qualification) and others completing school-based apprenticeships. "It's a challenge and we continue to work at it," he said.

Mr Welford said the "admirable transparency" of the figures showed "the wonderful diversity of educational opportunities in Queensland". He promised annual publication of the results, which had been "a really valuable exercise." "The data shows that the performance of schools is unrelated to whether they are public or private and what fees are charged," he said. "These school profiles should reassure parents in regional and rural areas that country and smaller schools are delivering great opportunities to students." He said the strong outcomes of country schools would help attract and retain good teachers, who appreciated enthusiastic students.

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said the statistics were "pretty meaningless" as they only measured a student's ability to enter universities. "We are opposed to the public release of this information," he said. "If any parent chooses a school based on that data it is bordering on irresponsible." Mr Ryan said the scores belonged to students not schools and only reflected one aspect of what students achieved.

OPs or Overall Positions, provide a statewide rank order of students (on a 1 to 25 scale, with 1 the highest) based on achievement in Queensland Studies Authority subjects and the Core Skills Test. They are used by universities for selecting students for courses. Somerset College Mudgeeraba and St Rita's College Clayfield performed well with 90 per cent. In general, state schools outside the Brisbane metropolitan area performed strongly. In Brisbane, the leading state schools were Brisbane and Kenmore state high schools where 80 per cent of students had OPs of 1 to 15. Indooroopilly and The Gap state high schools achieved 78 per cent.

The tables also show a small group of remote schools, with only a few students, had all eligible students receive an OP15 or better. The "100 per cent club" included Charters Towers School of Distance Education, Cloncurry, Cunnamulla, Glenden, and Winton state schools, Collinsville State High and the School of Total Education, Warwick. It was the first year since 1995 that information to compare school outcomes has been released.

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.

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. My home page is here

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3 April, 2006

Technically Foolish: Why technology has made our public schools less efficient

Michigan education officials are championing a new regulation that would require every high school student's education to include a substantial "online experience" of some kind, with the assumption being that most would complete an online class. To fulfill this vague new mandate, district technology officials in Detroit and elsewhere argue that extensive, unspecified expenditures will be necessary. This proposal is drawing national attention as visionary, though it is more remarkable for the manner in which it neatly illustrates the problems with how we think about technology and schooling.

Absent in Michigan, and often elsewhere, is serious thought about how technology might help cut costs or modernize educational delivery. The Michigan department of education's chief academic officer explains the idea's genesis in the same vague manner that a sophomore might describe a class project: "We thought of this as a skill that people would need to have to continue to be lifelong learners." The Michigan proposal finds a way to turn the sensible adoption of new technology into a boondoggle that promises to expand bureaucracy, increase costs, and turn a blind eye to pursuing new efficiencies. Even as public schools have made ever-larger investments in new technologies, they have steadily added to the ranks of teachers and staff. Spending on technology in public schools increased from essentially zero in 1970 to over $100 per student in 2004, according to Education Week.

In the past five years alone, the nation has spent more than $20 billion linking schools and classrooms to the Internet through the federal E-rate program. Between 1997 and 2004, the federal government appropriated more than $4 billion to help states purchase educational technology. Meanwhile, these huge new investments in technology were coupled with a massive increase in the teacher workforce that drove the student-teacher ratio from 22 students per teacher in 1970 to 16 per teacher in 2001. There is no reputable analysis suggesting that the billions invested in technology have enhanced the productivity or performance of America's schools.

This state of affairs contrasts sharply with how technology is used by enterprises that face meaningful competition from alternative manufacturers and service providers. For these businesses, technology is not an end--it is a tool for self-improvement. New technologies are adopted when they enable workers to tackle new problems or do the same things cheaper and more efficiently.

Even the oft-maligned Postal Service understands this. It found ways to trim its workforce by more than 40,000 in the past four years--when sufficiently squeezed by competitors such as UPS and Federal Express. The USPS substituted technology as it identified routine tasks where automation was cheaper and more efficient than human labor.

Why do inviolable laws about the productive benefits of technology seem to stop at the schoolhouse door? Organizations like the Postal Service make effective use of technology because they must keep up with the competition. Knowing their competitors are constantly seeking ways to boost productivity, hold down costs, and develop new products, for-profit enterprises are always on the lookout for similar advantages. It's not that any executive likes painful measures such as downsizing; they take these steps because survival requires it.

Insulated from such pressures, school boards and superintendents have little incentive to view technology as a tool for trimming jobs or rethinking educational delivery--especially given union hostility and public skepticism. Meanwhile, existing collective-bargaining agreements between school districts and employees have made using technology to displace workers or reinvent processes extraordinarily difficult.

If anything, there is a bias in education against ideas deemed too "businesslike." Indeed, the very words "efficiency" and "cost-effectiveness" can set the teeth of parents and educators on edge. Proposals to use technology to downsize the workforce, alter instructional delivery, or improve managerial efficiency are inevitably attacked by education authorities like the wildly influential Henry Giroux, a professor at Canada's McMaster University, as part of an effort to, "Transform public education . . . [in order] to expand the profits of investors, educate students as consumers, and train young people for the low-paying jobs of the new global marketplace."

Ultimately, if leaders lack the incentives to pursue new efficiencies, they won't. So long as technology serves as an easy applause line and an excuse to demand ever more school spending, rather than an opportunity to reengineer educational delivery, America's schools will remain ill-equipped for the rigors of the 21st century. Michigan's bad idea is evidence of that.

Source



A DISCREETLY CONSERVATIVE UNIVERSITY SHOWS THE "ELITES" A THING OR THREE

"You've got to be kidding." That was the reaction of CBS sportscaster Billy Packer when George Mason University was invited to play in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament. Mason has since defeated Michigan State, the University of North Carolina, Wichita State and the top-seeded University of Connecticut to advance to the Final Four this weekend. The Patriots basketball team is finding out what the rest of the university has long known. George Mason is the Rodney Dangerfield of universities--it just can't get any respect. The school has attracted Nobel economists, developed a top-notch law school and, through the writings of its scholars, affected public policy in major ways. But it is continually dismissed as a no-name state school--a mere convenience for commuters from northern Virginia.

Allow me to take offense. When I enrolled at Mason in 1993, a condescending friend described the school to me as a "glorified community college with pretensions of being an elite university." At that point, young and naive, I worried he might be right. By the time I graduated I knew better. With some 28,000 students, GMU resembles many large state schools in that it provides an affordable education to a broad range of people. For state residents, tuition is about $3,000 a semester; for those out of state, $8,500. (These amounts roughly correspond to a few weeks of classroom time at nearby Georgetown.) The education it offers is intellectually rigorous--I can attest to the rigor, having suffered through plenty of annoyingly demanding tests, paper-writing assignments and required courses. But George Mason has no intentions of being an "elite" institution, and a good thing too.

Mason began as an extension of the University of Virginia in 1957 and became independent 15 years later. Such relative youth is a clear advantage. The school came into its own after the 1960s generation passed through the halls of higher education. Student protest, and the effort to appease it, never became part of its culture. George W. Johnson, GMU's president from 1978 to 1996, exploited this advantage. He grounded the school in technology, computer science and economics, leaving to elite institutions the competition for hot (read: postmodern) humanities scholars. He also exploited the school's proximity to Washington, using it as a selling point to bring professors to the area and also pulling into the professorial ranks various policy analysts, intellectuals and former government officials.

The recruited professors included James Buchanan, who joined the university in 1983 and soon after won a Nobel Prize in economics for his groundbreaking research, with Gordon Tullock, on what drives government bureaucracies to make seemingly irrational decisions. The economists showed that government, no less than private enterprise, responds to economic incentives (e.g., bigger budgets) more than high-minded legislative goals. This idea--known as "Public Choice Theory"--became part of the intellectual framework of the Reagan Revolution.

Mr. Johnson also brought to George Mason the Institute for Humane Studies, a constellation of scholars devoted to teaching undergrads (both at GMU and elsewhere) classical economics. Soon after Mr. Johnson stepped down, the economist Vernon Smith and six colleagues migrated to Mason from the University of Arizona. Mr. Smith won a Nobel Prize for developing standards to "lab test" economic theories with small groups, often using real money.

Mason's law school isn't even three decades old, but it has already climbed into the first tier of the U.S. News & World Report rankings and is a leader in the field of intellectual property. It is also home to the National Center for Technology and Law, which studies how existing laws--e.g., patents and copyrights--will need to adapt to the information economy. Even the law school's legal-aid program has a novel slant. As John Miller has noted in National Review, George Mason's law students, rather than suing police departments or petitioning for access to government programs, volunteer their time to help, among others, members of the military and their families.

Even the school's name cuts against the grain of conventional pieties. George Mason is the Founding Father most Americans have never heard of. He was a key architect of the Constitution (he had written the influential Virginia Bill of Rights more than a decade before) but doomed himself to obscurity by becoming one of the three delegates to the Constitutional Convention who refused to sign the final document. It bothered him that it lacked a bill of rights. Whether or not George Mason University wins on the basketball court this weekend, it is still a great school. And no, Mr. Packer, I'm not kidding.

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.

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. My home page is here

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2 April, 2006

House Backs Bill to Expand College Access, Enhance American Competitiveness

The U.S. House of Representatives today approved the College Access & Opportunity Act (H.R. 609), legislation to expand college access by strengthening the Pell Grant program, providing parents and students with more information about spikes in college costs, and bolstering math and science education to enhance American competitiveness. The legislation - which would complete reauthorization of the Higher Education Act - was authored by Education & the Workforce Committee Chairman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), along with former committee chair and current House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH). "The new realities of an increasingly competitive global economy have made a college education more necessary than ever before," said McKeon (R-CA). "Unfortunately, even with historic levels of federal funding for higher education, the dream of getting a college education continues to elude many low- and middle-income Americans. This bill takes a huge step toward making that dream a reality."

The College Access & Opportunity Act improves the Pell Grant program - funded at an all-time high, with a 101% increase in funding since Republicans gained the majority in Congress in 1994 - by allowing students to receive Pell aid year-round and repealing the federal rule that needlessly limits the amount of Pell Grant aid a student attending a very low-cost school may receive. "This legislation strengthens the Pell Grant program and increases access to college for millions of worthy young students," said Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL), chairman of the 21st Century Competitiveness Subcommittee and chairman of the Congressional Pell Grant Caucus. "On the heels of record funding for Pell Grants, the improvements we're making to the program will make a difference for even more students seeking to attend college."

The legislation also takes steps to improve math, science, and critical foreign language education, including an amendment - offered by Education & the Workforce Committee member Rep. Cathy McMorris (R-WA) - to incorporate components of the President's American Competitiveness Initiative into the framework of current law. "Congress recognizes the need to enhance American competitiveness, and that effort must start within our education system," said McMorris. "This bill follows up on the President's State of the Union proposal to enhance America's leadership in science and technology. By placing well-qualified teachers in the classroom and creating incentives for pursuing degrees in math, science, and foreign languages, we will create a 21st Century workforce that is prepared to be competitive in the global marketplace."

Also included in the College Access & Opportunity Act are innovative measures to increase transparency in higher education programs and provide parents and students with more information about college costs and colleges themselves. For example, the bill creates a College Affordability Index would take existing information and present it to students and families in a new format that can be useful as they make decisions about attending college. This index provides an "apples to apples" comparison of tuition growth - similar to the Consumer Price Index. "Expanding college access remains a fundamental goal for this nation and this Congress," concluded McKeon. "Part of this effort is adding more sunlight into the discussion about higher education - and the rising costs of a college education in particular. This bill adds that necessary sunlight, and it will make a difference for countless students."

Source



THE STUDENT LOAN DISGRACE CONTINUES

Comment by Senator Harris McDowell (D) Delaware

No Democrat would be stupid enough to kill competition for student loans for two reasons. 1) It is a dumb idea. 2) Republicans would kill us for it. And rightly so. Yet, that is what happened to the U.S. Congress just a few months ago; and Republicans controlling the House are right in the middle of it.

As a Democrat, I admit it: Sometimes I wonder about Republicans. But let's give Republicans some grudging credit for all they have done to convince people that they are the guardians of the free market system. When people are watching and the cameras are rolling, they talk a good game about protecting consumers with competition and free markets. But a few days before Christmas, at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, with nary a reporter in sight, Republicans in Congress took the most anti-competitive law in America, and made it worse.

They outlawed competition for the 40 million people with hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans who can no longer shop for a better deal or even change lenders if they so choose. Lots of people heard that Congress raised rates on student loans. But much worse, and what got much less attention, was that Congress also changed the way people pay them back. Starting July 1, students and parents will no longer be able to lock in low rates for longer terms. Big lenders convinced Congress that competition for their student loan portfolio would be bad.

Just as they convinced Congress to remove a provision that would have outlawed the most anti-competitive law in America: the Single Holder Rule. Under this law, students and parents whose loans are owned by only one lender cannot change lenders if they find a better deal for rates or terms of service. And they are only allowed to refinance one time. That is it. No more.

As a result of this unprecedented protection from the marketplace, America's largest student loan lender is also one of America's most profitable companies. Not because they are better, smarter or faster, but just because they have better friends on Capitol Hill to protect them from competition.

Imagine if a Congressman tried that kind of law with your home loan, car loan, boat loan or any kind of loan. He would be laughed out of office. Yet, Republicans meet in the dead of the night to outlaw competition for student loans, and they are the ones who are laughing because few even noticed.

Some did. Columnist Dick Morris called the anti-refinancing move an "obnoxious...student loan rip-off." The New York Times called it "robbing Joe College to pay Sallie Mae." The Chronicle of Higher Education said legislation was meant to make refinancing less appealing to borrowers, and "force the consolidation companies out of the market." It is working with a vengeance.

Today, because of crushing debt from credit cards and student loans, the average age of a person filing for bankruptcy is less than 30 years old. By outlawing refinancing, this new legislation is removing a student's most valuable tool to manage that debt.

We don't have to wait until July to know the results; more graduates with even less ability to repay their loans, more defaults, higher cost to the federal government, and a whole bunch of Republicans in Congress hoping students and parents never find out how a few big companies have turned a federal student loan program into a cash cow at their expense.

The previous chair of the committee overseeing student loans, John Boehner, did such a good job that his colleagues kicked him upstairs to become House Majority Leader. The committee has a new chair, and a new chance to set this crazy law right. One of the first questions they will have to answer is why can't we refinance student loans wherever and how often we like, just like other loans? Let's hope that they answer that question during school hours and not at 3 a.m. Because if Republicans aren't good for free markets and competition, what good are they?

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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. My home page is here

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1 April, 2006

MORE EVIDENCE OF THE FEMALE ORIENTATION IN MODERN EDUCATION

Note that the sex gap starts in kindergarten! Boys are alienated from the outset by values uncongenial to them

This spring, when Maine high schools release their lists of the 10 seniors with the highest academic rankings, girls are likely to outnumber boys by a ratio of nearly 2-to-1. Boys score lower on standardized reading and writing tests, men earn only 38 percent of the bachelor's degrees from Maine's public universities and boys are twice as likely as girls to receive special education services. Various measures of academic performance show that in Maine, as elsewhere in America, boys are trailing girls, and no one seems to know why. "It's absolutely a concern," Jeanne Crocker, principal at South Portland High School, told the Maine Sunday Telegram. "It's a tough problem, and I don't think there are answers yet. Is it that school, as we know it, is not working as well for guys as it is for girls? If so, what are we going to do with it?"

The economic impact of the gender gap could be particularly severe in Maine because of its loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs that have long been a source of support for men who lack a college degree. The trend knows no geographic or social boundaries. It is found in poorer northern Maine and the richer south, affecting educated families as well as those in which neither parent is college-educated. The poor performance of male students is a turnabout from decades ago. In 1972, men made up 55 percent of the nearly 24,000 students enrolled in the University of Maine System. This fall, 38 percent of the more than 34,000 students were men.

Whereas girls used to lag in educational achievement, today the reverse is true. "Everything has flip-flopped," said Maryjane Stafford, a math teacher at Winslow Middle School. "Now these little boys are endangered." The problem appears to begin early on. A study of 52 state-funded pre-kindergarten systems in 40 states found that in Maine, boys are 4 1/2 times more likely to be expelled than girls. "The gender gap starts very early," said Professor Walter Gilliam of Yale University, who conducted the study.

A task force formed by Maine's Department of Education to study boys' poor academic performances is expected to issue a report in the coming weeks. Students say the achievement gap is obvious. When asked why boys don't measure up academically, boys themselves cite laziness, disinterest and the fear of being branded a nerd. "I think girls work harder than boys. Maybe not doing your work is a sign of being cool," said Jack Niveson, a 14-year-old student at Winslow Middle School. At Bonny Eagle High School, Liz Waters said girls are more competitive within the class rank. "In English, it's girls that dominate. I'm in (Advanced Placement) English and there's only five boys in a class of 14."

Various theories have been offered, ranging from differences in boys' and girls' brains to a failure of schools to address the needs of boys. Some point to gender stereotypes that depict tough guys as heroes and smart kids as wimps. Or to the preponderance of female teachers in elementary and middle schools that leaves boys with a lack of male role models.

There is also an economic theory offered by those who find a better job market for 18-year-old boys than girls, which encourages more girls to go to college. A strong construction industry enables many boys to earn decent money at age 18, which may explain why some boys see higher education as unnecessary. But U.S. Census figures show that over the course of the average man's working life, a bachelor's degree is worth more than $1 million more than a high school diploma. "Want that new car?" said Lynne Miller, an education professor at the University of Southern Maine, mimicking a concerned parent. "You're not going to make it, you know, if you don't go to college."

Source=email_to_a_friend



Make A-level harder for all, says U.K. exams chief

A rare move in a world of ever sagging standards. Perhaps standards have sagged too far even for Britains's Leftist education bureaucrats

A-levels [K 12 final exams] will be made harder for every pupil under a new blueprint devised by the Government's exams watchdog. Ken Boston, the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, will make it clear in a speech today that all candidates face tougher questions under his recommended option for improving A-levels. He will also signal the introduction of a new A* grade at A-level for the brightest candidates.

Ministers had planned to introduce either an optional harder paper for high-flyers or an optional set of questions to be answered by them at the end of the main exam. Universities have complained that they cannot select the best candidates because so many pupils get A-grade passes. More than 20 per cent of scripts are awarded an A-grade pass.

Research for the QCA shows that both teachers and pupils now have greater faith in A-levels and GCSEs, although there are concerns that coursework allows pupils to cheat.

Source



U.K.: ZERO DISCIPLINE

The Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, has ordered a primary school to take in a seven-year-old boy accused of violent behaviour, against the wishes of its headteacher and governors. Her intervention angered the school which claims it flies in the face of her view that there should be "zero tolerance" of bad behaviour.

Some parents at the school, Cummersdale in Carlisle, Cumbria, have warned they will keep their children at home if the boy starts at the school after the Easter break on 19 April.

The boy was excluded from Great Orton primary school last year following claims that he assaulted the headteacher three times, a teaching assistant twice and injured several pupils - although his exclusion was rescinded on appeal. His mother now wants him to go to Cummersdale.

Sarah Mason, the acting head, said her school was full and was not geared up to cope with a disruptive pupil. "We have no male staff as a role model and we have an awful lot of special needs kids anyway," she said. It is understood that the boy has already been turned down by several other schools in the area.

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.

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. My home page is here

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