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30 April, 2009

Excuses, Excuses

Persistent Racial Gap Seen in Students’ Test Scores but nothing will convince the Left-led politicians and bureaucrats that it is genetics that they are fighting

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s. That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap.”

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

The results no doubt will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other adjustments. “We still have a lot more work to do,” Mr. Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law’s accountability model itself.

Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of America’s 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970’s. This was due largely to a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.

The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, were up modestly in reading, and were considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were quite a bit higher than those of students of the same age a generation back. Still, the progress of younger students tapered off as they got older.

Some experts said the results proved that the No Child law had failed to make serious headway in lifting academic achievement. “ We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at Berkeley, “but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

But Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan’s predecessor under President Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law. “It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously,” Ms. Spellings said. “The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight — it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability type approach.” Whether anyone knows how to extend the results achieved with younger students through the turbulent high school years remains an open question.

The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trends, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released on Tuesday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.

The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation’s high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law, which requires states to administer annual tests in grades three to eight, but only once in high school.

The 2008 score gap between black and white 17-year-olds, 29 points in reading and 26 points in math, could be envisioned as the rough equivalent of between two and three school years’ worth of learning, said Peggy Carr, an associate commissioner for assessment at the Department of Education.

Freeman Hrabowski, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written about raising successful African-American children, said the persistence of the achievement gap should lead policymakers to seek new ways to increase low-performing students’ learning time.

“Where we see the gap narrowing, that’s because there’s been an emphasis on supplemental education, on after-school programs that encourage students to read more and do more math problems,” Dr. Hrabowski said. “Where there are programs that encourage that additional work, students of color do the work and their performance improves and the gap narrows.”

But he said that educators and parents pushing children to higher achievement often find themselves swimming against a tide of popular culture.

“Even middle-class students are unfortunately influenced by the culture that says it’s simply not cool for students to be smart,” he said. “And that is a factor here in these math and reading scores.”

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents more than 60 metropolitan school systems, said that much of the progress among the nation’s minority students has been the result of hard work by urban educators, not only since the No Child law took effect but for decades before.

“N.C.L.B. did not invent the concept of the achievement gap —much of the desegregation work in the 70’s and 80’s was in fact about giving poor, Hispanic and African-American kids access to better resources and curriculum,” Mr. Casserly said. “You do see from these results that in that period, the gains were steeper. It wasn’t being called an achievement gap, but that was what that was about.”

SOURCE




Liberal Student Infiltrates Liberty University to Write Exposé and Discovers Intolerance...From the Left

This is just too funny! A liberal Ivy League student decides to enroll at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Virgina and write a book exposé (The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University) supposedly showing the intolerance that must be there, or so he thought. The liberal student, however, was surprised to find little of the expected intolerance but is now finding plenty of it from the left because his book was not an outright condemnation of Liberty University nor of Jerry Falwell whom he met during his semester there. An AP story by Eric Tucker sets the scene:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Kevin Roose managed to blend in during his single semester at Liberty University, attending lectures on the myth of evolution and the sin of homosexuality, and joining fellow students on a mission trip to evangelize partyers on spring break.

Roose had transferred to the Virginia campus from Brown University in Providence, a famously liberal member of the Ivy League. His Liberty classmates knew about the switch, but he kept something more important hidden: He planned to write a book about his experience at the school founded by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell.

Roose explains the reason for his infiltration:

"As a responsible American citizen, I couldn't just ignore the fact that there are a lot of Christian college students out there," said Roose, 21, now a Brown senior. "If I wanted my education to be well-rounded, I had to branch out and include these people that I just really had no exposure to."

We have to give Roose credit here. Unlike most liberals, he actually opened himself up to contrary ideas. Something his parents found hard to understand:

Roose's parents, liberal Quakers who once worked for Ralph Nader, were nervous about their son being exposed to Falwell's views. Still, Roose transferred to Liberty for the spring 2007 semester.

He was determined to not mock the school, thinking it would be too easy _ and unfair. He aimed to immerse himself in the culture, examine what conservative Christians believe and see if he could find some common ground. He had less weighty questions too: How did they spend Friday nights? Did they use Facebook? Did they go on dates? Did they watch "Gossip Girl?"

Did they Twitter? Did they use electricity? Did they eat with utensils?

He lined up a publisher _ Grand Central Publishing _ and arrived at the Lynchburg campus prepared for "hostile ideologues who spent all their time plotting abortion clinic protests and sewing Hillary Clinton voodoo dolls." Instead, he found that "not only are they not that, but they're rigorously normal."

GASP! But how can that be? Haven't all good liberals been taught that Liberty University students are a bunch of ignorant hateful yahoos foaming at the mouth? Kevin Roose appeared to have strayed dangerously from the Party Line.

He met students who use Bible class to score dates, apply to top law schools and fret about their futures, and who enjoy gossip, hip-hop and R-rated movies _ albeit in a locked dorm room.

Stop! You're making the LU students sound too normal!

A roommate he depicts as aggressively anti-gay _ all names are changed in the book _ is an outcast on the hall, not a role model.

But...but where's all the hate?

Roose researched the school by joining as many activites as possible. He accompanied classmates on a spring break missionary trip to Daytona Beach. He visited a campus support group for chronic masturbators, where students were taught to curb impure thoughts. And he joined the choir at Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. Roose scored an interview with the preacher for the school newspaper, right before Falwell died in May of that year. Roose decided against confronting him over his views on liberals, gays and other hot-button topics, and instead learned about the man himself, discovering among other things that the pastor loved diet peach Snapple and the TV show "24."

You mean Falwell wasn't consumed with hate 24/7 as all good liberals "know" as absolute fact?And now something that will really disturb the "tolerant" liberals:

Once ambivalent about faith, Roose now prays to God regularly _ for his own well-being and on behalf of others. He said he owns several translations of the Bible and has recently been rereading meditations from the letters of John on using love and compassion to solve cultural conflicts. He's even considering joining a church.

This latter must be very upsetting to liberals including his own parents. Sonny Boy! Where did we go wrong? To see just how upset the liberals are over this book, just read a few examples of intolerace in the Huffington Post comments section:

Wow, that must be a pretty good brainwashing program they've got there. That or this guy is weak sauce. You wouldn't catch me praying to some magic sky daddy if I spent a THOUSAND years at Liberty "University".

He should have gone to a deprogrammer to complete the experience.I wish he'd done an MRI before and after. It appears he's been brainwashed. Long periods of time with cults will do that.

I'm a little worried about Kevin's soul now that he's been programmed. He seems strong and intelligent though, so there's still hope for him. I'll be praying for his salvation from the radical right.

I hope he's been debriefed and re-socialized into the real world. Never visit the darkside.

So it turns out that Kevin Roose did discover intolerance due to spending a semester at Liberty University and, as we can see from these comments, it is now coming from the left.Welcome to the Brave New World of ironic reality, Kevin.

SOURCE





29 April, 2009

Western Expansion

If there is a void in the conservative movement, a group of college students thinks it can be filled with culture warriors fighting for “Western Civilization.”

Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) debuted this year as a co-sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual political event commonly known as CPAC. Since that time, chapters have emerged on eight college campuses – not without controversy. With stated opposition to “radical multiculturalism, political correctness, racial preferences, mass immigration, and socialism,” the group has drawn early critics who view its members as intolerant at best, and linked to white supremacists at worst.

Adding fuel to the criticism is Youth For Western Civilization’s chosen “honorary chairman,” the former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo. Tancredo, a Colorado Republican known for his anti-immigration stance, was invited by YWC to speak last week on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Furious that he'd been invited to campus, protesters interrupted Tancredo's talk, drawing their own accusations of intolerance while decrying Tancredo and his hosts for intolerance at the same time.

“We’re still considered probably by most students to be sort of a rogue group right now,” said Riley Matheson, president of the Carolina chapter. “I think that that played a large part in creating the atmosphere of Tuesday night.”

If YWC has been relegated to “rogue” status, it’s no doubt in part due to the concerns expressed by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center recently published an article about YWC on its Hatewatch Web site, alleging links between the group and “white nationalists.” Matheson and other YWC members scoff at these claims, which they view as part of an ongoing effort to vilify “right wing” policy positions. “When they didn’t like the fact that we want to enforce immigration [laws], what did they say? They said we were haters; they said we were white supremacists,” Matheson said. “The culture of this university is such that left wing activism is OK, [but] right wing activism isn’t.”

Tancredo’s speech was abruptly cut short when protestors shouted him down and then proceeded to break a window. Carolina Chancellor Holden Thorp has apologized to Tancredo for the incident and promised an investigation that could lead to criminal charges or disciplinary action.

Group Aims to Groom Leaders

Youth for Western Civilization is the brainchild of Kevin DeAnna, a graduate student studying international relations at American University. DeAnna’s goals are significant. Far from merely launching a self-described “right wing” advocacy group, DeAnna wants to groom like-minded students for positions of power within the university. “You go to a typical campus, and in my opinion your college Republicans will be even better organized than the college Democrats,” DeAnna said. “It will all be very organized and everything else, but that’s not who controls the campus. Who controls the campus is this constellation of groups based on ethnic identity. … This is where you get the far left stuff that gets shoved down everyone’s throat.”

DeAnna aims to place his members in groups that allocate student funds, giving them a say in university priorities.

If anything gets DeAnna and his cohorts worked into frenzy, it’s the growth of groups on college campuses that cater to specific students based on race or culture. Think black, Asian and Latino student unions. Some of YWC’s harshest critics have emerged from these groups, and DeAnna says he sees some irony in that fact. “When they start advocating for the abolition of all these groups based on race … then I can take their charges seriously,” he said.

Frank Dobson, director of the Bishop Joseph Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University, has questioned the motives of the YWC chapter on his campus. Dobson said last week that he was worried the group may be using “coded language,” signaling intolerance without overtly expressing it. He went further in an interview with The Tennessean, saying he wondered if Youth for Western Civilization is “a euphemism for white civilization.” “I would love to be able to speak with them to get a sense of what really is in their heart and their head regarding starting the group on campus,” Dobson told Inside Higher Ed.

“I do think what we have to realize in a much larger sense … is that when we look at the political landscape, with an African American president, there are going to be instances of backlash towards what he represents, what his administration represents, and the types of changes that are going on on college campuses across the nation.”

YWC's Web site does not list its member chapters, but DeAnna says groups have formed or are organizing on eight campuses. The campuses include the University of Connecticut, Vanderbilt, American University, Elon University, Carolina, Providence College, Bentley University and the University of Rhode Island.

YWC’s stated mission is guided or at least informed by the views often espoused by David Horowitz, a conservative critic who claims professors routinely indoctrinate students with liberal ideology. The group also joins a longstanding chorus of critics who suggest quintessential American figures like George Washington get short shrift as colleges craft curriculums designed for multicultural inclusion. “Group identity pandering and things like that give way to history and things people should know if they’re living in a Western country,” said Devin Saucier, vice president and co-founder of Vanderbilt’s YWC chapter. Saucier cites Brown University’s recent decision to stop recognizing Columbus Day as an example of antagonism many institutions have toward the history of Western civilization.

College Republicans Not on Board

The YWC’s agenda has some overlap with the platform of the Republican Party, but the group has defined itself in some ways as an opposition movement. The Republican party dodged red meat issues like immigration during the 2008 campaign, and its losses were in part a consequence of that, Saucier said. The YWC seeks to highlight the very issues that Republican groups have decided to place on the back burner, he said. “The left has taken over the country,” Saucier said. “This is a very urgent thing. This not something where we can sit in a room in coats and ties like College Republicans and discuss how bad it’s going to suck.”

But the approach of YWC counters the “big tent” strategy that many argue Republicans will have to employ if they hope to return to power. To that end, some College Republicans have already started to distance themselves from the YWC. “In some ways the YWC could hurt the Republican party,” said Anthony Dent, treasurer of the College Republicans chapter at Carolina. “But at least on UNC’s campus, I don’t see that happening because the leadership structures are distinct, and I think we made it clear that College Republicans do not share the aims of YWC.”

While College Republicans may not be rushing to join forces with the YWC, the group has managed to garner financial backing from the Leadership Institute, an organization based in Arlington, Va. that bills itself as a “training ground” for conservative leaders. The institute funded Tancredo’s visit to Carolina, along with a speech by Bay Buchanan at Vanderbilt, DeAnna said. Buchanan, former U.S. treasurer and sister of conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, was met with protest when she spoke at the university about the need for immigrants to “assimilate.”

DeAnna is deputy field director for the Leadership Institute, but he says he does not play a role in deciding where the institute provides funding. The YWC chapters had to submit competitively reviewed applications for funding just as any other group would have, DeAnna said.

Founders' Connections Questioned

If there’s concern about Youth For Western Civilization, some of it stems from questions about its leadership. The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] raised particular concerns about the group’s connections to Marcus Epstein, a fundraiser for Tancredo as well as Pat and Bay Buchanan. Epstein, who says he was erroneously identified by the SPLC as a founder of Youth For Western Civilization, is a frequent contributor to VDARE.com, a Web site the SPLC has labeled a “hate group.” In one post, Epstein argued “Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don't mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.”

Epstein, whose mother is Korean, says his only connection to YWC is the fact that he was a classmate of DeAnna’s at the College William and Mary. While in college, the two wrote for the now defunct conservative newspaper, The Remnant, and they have remained friends. “If me being friends with the founder is the worst thing [about YWC] … then I think that says something about how silly these racism accusations are,” Epstein said.

The imagery and rhetoric employed by YWC have also contributed to concerns. The group’s Web site features a black and white crest with a hand gripping a hammer, which YWC members say is meant to symbolize Charles Martel, a Frankish ruler of the Middle Ages credited with halting Muslim expansion. [Martel was known as "The hammer"] The hammer may evoke different connotations for some. “People have compared it to the fasces, which is simply not the case,” Saucier said. [The Fasces are in fact a Leftist symbol. In ancient Rome they were a symbol of unity -- and unity has been a strong Leftist theme from Hegel to Obama]

DeAnna says he’s not surprised YWC is dodging allegations of racism, because that’s a common charge made against anyone that takes a hard-line position on issues like immigration or affirmative action. “They’re going to say that no matter what we do,” he said. “If we say there shouldn’t be in-state tuition for illegals, they’re going to say that’s Nazism.”

SOURCE




British children to be taught to speak properly amid growing 'word poverty'

Children will have lessons on how to speak proper English in formal settings, under an overhaul of the curriculum for 7 to 11-year-olds. The proposals, from Sir Jim Rose, a former head of Ofsted, place a strong emphasis on teaching children to “recognise when to use formal language, including standard spoken English”. They include how to moderate tone of voice and use appropriate hand gestures and eye contact.

The reforms come in response to concern that an increasing number of children suffer from “word poverty” and are unable to string together a coherent sentence by the time that they start school. A government-backed report by the Conservative MP John Bercow found last year that in some areas up to 50 per cent of the school-age population had speech and language difficulties.

There are also growing demands from employers for schools to emphasise skills in spoken English, amid evidence that some school-leavers lack confidence in basic tasks such as speaking confidently on the telephone to a stranger. A draft copy of the Rose reforms, seen by The Times, says that primary children should learn to “adjust what they say according to the formality of the context and the needs of their audience”.

Sir Jim has been appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary curriculum in response to concerns that it was overly prescriptive and “cluttered”. His review is expected to be published on Thursday. Yesterday he said that schools should pay serious attention to speaking and listening as subjects “in their own right”. This would help children from poor homes, who may start school already having to catch up because they do not have the right vocabulary. This in turn can have severe effects on their ability to learn and make friends.

“I will be making a very strong play on this. There’s more and more evidence coming from research and practice to establish the need for support for the children from certain backgrounds that don’t offer the right kind of development of speaking and listening. It needs to be put right,” he told The Times. He added that his recommendations will build on the £40 million Every Child a Talker programme launched last year to provide intensive language support for nursery-age children.

Anna Wright, director of Children’s Services at Reading Council, which has introduced intensive language support in its primary schools, said: “Children from poor homes have smaller vocabularies, which don’t contain many abstract ideas. “This makes it more difficult for them to make connections between words and to move to abstract concepts and to higher-order thinking about causes, effects and consequences.”

Other sections of the review will recommend that information technology classes are given as much prominence as literacy and numeracy. As well as classic fiction and poetry, children should study texts drawn from websites, film, newspapers, magazines, leaflets and advertisements, as well as “wikis and twitters”.

SOURCE





28 April, 2009

USA: Single sex schools better academically

Graduates of all-girls schools have higher SAT test scores and greater confidence in math and computer skills, concludes a new, large-scale study on single-sex learning. The 100-page paper, by the University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate School of Education, validates other research showing how single-sex education can dramatically broaden the educational horizons of graduates.

However, it won't resolve the heated debate over single-sex education, and whether it addresses inequities in education - or re-enforces gender stereotypes. This is partly because of the difficulty in disentangling the effects of other influences on educational outcomes, including students' socioeconomic background, school enrolment and course offerings.

While much of the recent polemic has focused on the "feminization" of the school curriculum and the generation of "lost boys," the report concludes that girls do benefit from being educated without boys. "There are significant differences between single-sex and co-educational alumnae, extending across multiple categories, including self-confidence, political and social activism, life goals and career orientation," says the report, commissioned by the National Coalition of Girls' Schools. "Future research will need to tell us whether such differences are sustained throughout college and beyond."

The study, released last month, compared 6,522 women graduates from 225 private single-sex high schools in the United States with 14,684 students from 1,169 co-educational private high schools.

Even when researchers controlled for the socioeconomic background of students and school characteristics, they still found that girls from single-sex private schools were more likely to desire engineering careers, have confidence in math and computing skills, and be more politically and academically engaged than their co-ed counterparts. The advantages were even more pronounced at Catholic schools, where many "Latinas" study.

While the study didn't examine all-boys schools, an expert in this area believes they too can profit from single-gender education.

Leonard Sax, a U.S. physician and author of the just released Boys Adrift, says girls and boys learn differently, and behave differently when they're in the same classroom. "Social construction of gender stereotypes can be broken down in single-sex classrooms," says Dr. Sax, who has a PhD in psychology. "The jocks and the geeks can become one and the same."

There is great interest in understanding the outcomes of single-sex education, as more schools in North America struggle to deal with the gender learning gap and boys' poor performance.

However, experts say it is notoriously difficult to evaluate, because graduates of single-sex schools often come from economically privileged families who place a premium on education. As well, there are no longitudinal studies tracking the graduates, notes Paula Bourne with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. "The verdict is still out," she said. "My concern is that as we look at ways to improve education for boys, we look at single-sex education, instead of at improving co-education. We're getting sidetracked."

In the U.S., there are now 540 single-sex public schools, compared with just 11 in 2002. In Canada, single-sex education is still largely the purview of private schools; however, there are a handful of pioneers in the public sector in Montreal, Calgary, Salmon Arm, B.C., and Prescott, Ont.

Public-school curriculum development over the last two decades has focused on the need to provide equity for girls, especially in learning materials and resources. However, research on literacy development shows boys will not read literature with main female characters, says Trevor Gambell, a University of Saskatchewan professor.

So when Cecil B. Stirling elementary school in Hamilton launched all-girls and all-boys Grade 7 and 8 classes six years ago, it addressed this discrepancy. Today, male students follow the experiences of a 13-year-old boy in the Canadian wilderness in the book Brian's Winter by Gary Paulsen. In a Grade 7 writing class, the boys document the results of their intramural ball hockey league. Male students are allowed to move around while they study. And yes, it's noisier.

"We've had boys practise on each other how to ask a girl to dance, and then how to accept rejection," says Doug Trimble, Stirling's principal. He introduced single-sex classes because he noticed how poorly boys were doing - although he believes they are of benefit to girls as well.

Boys have more behavioural issues, higher suicide and dropout rates, he says, and are less likely to attend university. Girls consistently outscore boys on Grade 3 and 6 assessments in Ontario.

"I got beaten up the first few years, especially by women, a lot of whom thought we were taking away resources from the girls in an attempt to put boys back on top," Mr. Trimble says. "But that's not the case at all. Girls are also doing really well."

In the all-girls classes, there is a greater focus on group learning and class presentations. They are reading Stargirl, a book by Jerry Spinelli about a non-conformist high-school student. Teachers also impart the importance of manners and conflict resolution - topics that wouldn't be taken as seriously in co-ed classes, where students vie to impress members of the opposite sex.

The "phenomenal" benefits of single-gender learning can be transferred to the public sector, says Jane Wightman, head of St. Mildred's-Lightbourn, a private, non-profit all-girls school in Oakville, Ont.

"Girls' learning styles are very collaborative," she says. "They compete in different ways than boys, and an all-girls' school allows for that ... and gives female students endless opportunities to participate."

SOURCE




UK: Why boys are held back by girls in English and should be taught separately

Children should be taught in single-sex classes for English because boys are being held back by the presence of girls, a study suggests. It found that many boys are left 'hiding in the background', and perform up to a 10th of a grade worse when they are placed in mixed lessons. And it claimed that the more girls there are, the worse boys do.

The researchers from Bristol University found that the trend was particularly marked in primary schools but may also apply in secondaries. The study, which is being presented this week at the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society, also found that in maths and science, primary school girls benefit from being taught in single-sex groups.

However, boys do better in those subjects with girls present, suggesting there is no way of organising classes to maximise exam results for both sexes. The report said: 'It is not possible to increase the proportion of girls for both boys and girls, implying that a mix of the genders is optimal in both maths and science.'

For the study, researcher Steven Proud analysed the exam results of boys and girls at every state school in England between 2002 and 2004. Most state primary schools are mixed-sex, although there are more single-sex ones in the independent sector.

Mr Proud found that, during English lessons, boys gained 'significantly' lower scores when there were girls present. However, it made no difference to girls whether they were taught with boys or not. 'These results suggest that it may be beneficial to teach boys in single-sex classrooms for English,' Mr Proud said.

One explanation is that boys may feel they can 'hide in the background' in English classes if there are large numbers of girls, he added. 'Alternatively, the class may appear to be performing at an acceptable level while the boys are left behind,' Mr Proud said. 'An alternative mechanism could be that, since girls and boys learn in different ways, if the majority of the pupils are female, then the teaching may be focused towards learning styles that benefit girls more than boys.'

Schools minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry has suggested boys and girls should be taught separately for key subjects after expressing concerns that boys 'hog the limelight'.

SOURCE




Crisis for new British High school exams

The Government’s new exams that will replace GCSEs and A-levels are in crisis.

A letter signed by every exam board in England and Wales has urged ministers “in the strongest terms” to delay their new academic diplomas, or face a potential disaster. The qualifications will be introduced in the next two years to thousands of secondary schools across the country and will signal the death knell for GCSEs and the gold standard A-level because they cover the same subjects. In an emphatic warning to the Government, the exam boards said that introducing the academic diplomas too quickly will destroy their “standards and quality” and leave them potentially valueless to universities and employers.

But despite the letter, sent on March 16 to Ed Balls, the Children’s secretary, the Government is pushing ahead with virtually all the diplomas in humanities, languages and science.

The academic diplomas come on top of 14 vocational diplomas which began to be phased in to schools last September. The unprecedented pace and extent of change in the exam regime is threatening a complete meltdown in the system, academics and head teachers have said.

The clash over academic diplomas is the latest crisis to rock England’s examinations system. On Wednesday, Ken Boston, the former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, accused ministers of “sexing up” evidence to the independent inquiry into last summer’s Sats fiasco so that ministers could not be blamed for their role in the crisis. Mr Boston said his warnings that the national tests taken by 1.8 million children were a “high-wire act” went unheeded. Now Mr Balls is accused of “steamrollering” through academic diplomas.

Michael Gove, the shadow children’s secretary, said: “Ed Balls is playing fast and loose with our exam and qualification system. He must think again before embarking on diploma plans that will threaten academic excellence.”

Mike Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “It is high time the Department listened to its professional bodies instead of pushing through a political timetable that will compromise the quality of these qualifications.”

The academic diplomas will initially be introduced alongside GCSE and A-levels in 2011 but ministers have repeatedly refused to guarantee a future for A-levels. The letter from the Joint Council for Qualifications, which represents Britain’s major exam boards, said: “The original timescale could only be achieved if we now compromise the quality of development in the areas of assessment and standards,” the letter said. “We urge you in the strongest terms to defer implementation.”

Despite the letter, the Department for Children, Schools and Families is pushing ahead with the “fourth phase” of diplomas. There will be nine in total, with courses below GCSE and at GCSE and A level-standard in humanities, languages and science. Only the advanced level science diploma will be held back for a year.

Graham Stuart, a Conservative MP on the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee, said: “If Mr Balls does ignore the advice, as he seems determined to do, I hope that on this occasion, ministers do not seek to smear the reputation of public servants so that they take the blame for what are ministerial decisions.”

Jim Knight, the schools minister, said: “I’ve always been clear that we cannot afford to rush the development of Diplomas – which is why I announced last week that we are phasing in the advanced science diploma. “Our recent consultation demonstrates strong backing from employers, experts and higher education for the current timetable. We have involved exam boards fully throughout the development of diplomas.”

SOURCE





27 April, 2009

University of Calif. admissions rule angers Asian-Americans

A new admissions policy set to take effect at the University of California system in three years is raising fears among Asian-Americans that it will reduce their numbers on campus, where they account for a remarkable 40% of all undergraduates. University officials say the new standards — the biggest change in UC admissions since 1960 — are intended to widen the pool of high school applicants and make the process more fair.

But Asian-American advocates, parents and lawmakers are angrily calling on the university to rescind the policy, which will apply at all nine of the system's undergraduate campuses.

They point to a UC projection that said the new standards would sharply reduce Asian-American admissions while resulting in little change for blacks and Hispanics, and a big gain for white students. "I like to call it affirmative action for whites," said Ling-chi Wang, a retired professor at UC Berkeley. "I think it's extremely unfair to Asian-Americans on the one hand and underrepresented minorities on the other."

Asian-Americans are the single largest ethnic group among UC's 173,000 undergraduates. In 2008, they accounted for 40% at UCLA and 43% at UC Berkeley — the two most selective campuses in the UC system — as well as 50% at UC San Diego and 54% at UC Irvine. Asian-Americans are about 12% of California's population and 4% of the U.S. population overall.

The new policy, approved unanimously by the UC Board of Regents in February, will greatly expand the applicant pool, eliminate the requirement that applicants take two SAT subject tests and reduce the number of students guaranteed admission based on grades and test scores alone. It takes effect for the freshman class of fall 2012.

Some Asian-Americans have charged that the university is trying to reduce Asian-American enrollment. Others say that may not be the intent, but it will be the result.

UC officials adamantly deny the intent is to increase racial diversity, and reject allegations the policy would violate a 1996 voter-approved ban on affirmative action. "The primary goal is fairness and eliminating barriers that seem unnecessary," UC President Mark Yudof said. "It means that if you're a parent out there, more of your sons' and daughters' files will be reviewed."

Yudof and other officials disputed the internal study that projected a drop of about 20% in Asian-American admissions, saying it is impossible to accurately predict the effects. "This is not Armageddon for Asian-American students," Yudoff said.

At San Francisco's Lowell High School, one of the top public schools in the country, about 70% of the students are of Asian descent and more than 40% attend UC after graduation. "If there are Asian-Americans who are qualified and don't get into UC because they're trying to increase diversity, then I think that's unfair," said 16-year-old junior Jessica Peng. "I think that UC is lowering its standards by doing that."

Doug Chan, who has a teenage son at Lowell, said: "Parents are very skeptical and suspicious that this is yet another attempt to move the goalposts or change the rules of the game for Asian college applicants."

One of the biggest changes is scrapping the requirement that applicants take two SAT subject tests. UC officials say the tests do little to predict who will succeed at UC, no other public university requires them, and many high-achieving students are disqualified because they do not take them.

The policy also widens the pool of candidates by allowing applications from all students who complete the required high school courses, take the main SAT or ACT exams and maintain a 3.0 grade-point average. Under the current policy, students have to rank in the top 12.5% of California high school graduates to be eligible.

Students still have to apply to individual campuses, where admissions officers are allowed to consider each applicants' grades, test scores, personal background, extracurricular activities and other factors but not race.

The policy is expected to increase competition for UC admission. This year the university turned away the largest number of students in years after it received a record number applications and cut freshman enrollment because of the state's budget crisis.

"I'm getting all sorts of e-mails from parents, alumni and donors who are quite upset by the action UC took," said state Assemblyman Ted Lieu, chairman of the Legislature's 11-member Asian-American caucus.

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Teach for (Some of) America

Too talented for public schools

Here's a quiz: Which of the following rejected more than 30,000 of the nation's top college seniors this month and put hundreds more on a waitlist? a) Harvard Law School; b) Goldman Sachs; or c) Teach for America.

If you've spent time on university campuses lately, you probably know the answer. Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. More than 11% of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35% of African-American seniors at Harvard. Teach for America has been gaining applicants since it was founded in 1990, but its popularity has exploded this year amid a tight job market.

So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly. Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year's applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of Teach for America teachers they will accept, typically between 10% and 30% of new hires. In the Washington area, that number is about 25% to 30%, but in Chicago, former home of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is an embarrassing 10%.

This is a tragic lost opportunity. Teach for America picks up the $20,000 tab for the recruitment and training of each teacher, which saves public money. More important, the program feeds high-energy, high-IQ talent into a teaching profession that desperately needs it. Unions claim the recent grads lack the proper experience and commitment to a teaching career. But the Urban Institute has studied the program and found that "TFA status more than offsets any experience effects. Disadvantaged secondary students would be better off with TFA teachers, especially in math and science, than with fully licensed in-field teachers with three or more years of experience."

It's true that only 10% of Teach for America applicants say they would have gone into education through another route, but two-thirds stay in the field after their two years. One program benefit is that its participants don't have to pass the dreadful "education" courses that have nothing to do with what they'll be teaching. Those courses are loved by unions as a credentialing barrier that makes it harder to get into teaching.

Some districts may be wising up. Mississippi's education superintendent has asked Teach for America to double the size of its 250-member corps in the poor Delta region and is encouraging local superintendents to raise hiring caps. Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has also sharply increased the percentage of corps members among its new teachers, to 250.

But why have any caps? Teach for America young people should be able to compete on equal terms with any other new teaching applicant. The fact that they can't is another example of how unions and the education establishment put tenure and power above student achievement.

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Rising fees and loans make British students ask whether higher education is worth it

Student debt is spiralling because of increasing tuition fees and the use of some commercial loans at very high rates, a report commissioned by the Government suggests.

More than half of the students questioned said that money worries had affected their academic performance. One in 12 full-time students had considered dropping out because of financial problems. Fewer students thought that higher education was worth the expense when their responses were compared with similar research conducted three years earlier.

Although the number who had jobs while taking their degree had decreased, it was still a popular choice. For many students it had a negative impact on their studies.

Researchers from the Institute of Employment Studies and the National Centre for Social Research interviewed more than 2,600 students about their finances for the Student Income and Expenditure Survey.

They said that the average debt in 2008 of students at the end of their first year was £3,500, compared with £2,400 three years earlier. The report said: “Some full-time students had borrowed from commercial or higher cost sources, such as commercial credit companies and via bank overdrafts. Where students had made use of these sources, the average amounts involved were substantial.”

The direct cost of going to university for first-year students had risen by almost 70 per cent between 2005 and 2008, the report found.

Students were deeper in debt than their predecessors, because they were less reliant on their families and more dependent on loans. This was particularly evident for students from working-class backgrounds.

Concerns about debt nearly stopped a quarter of full-time and almost a third of part-time students from going to university. The report said: “It is expected that students in their first or second year of study, under the new student finance system, will on average graduate with greater debt.

“One in three students said that the availability of funding and financial support affected their decisions about higher education.”

The researchers found that having a job was essential for many students to survive, but this came at a cost. They said: “Income from paid work was important for full-time students, representing 20 per cent of their total average income, and it was critical for part-time students. Half of part-time students and around one third of full-time students who worked during the academic year reported that this had affected their studies.”

Three quarters said that they had less time available to study and read, three fifths were more stressed and the same proportion said that the quality of their university work had suffered. Almost half were getting by on less sleep because of their paid work.

Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, said: “It is not acceptable that a third of students have to base their decisions about which university to attend or which course to study on the amount of financial support which will be available to them.

“We need a national bursary scheme, so that all financial support is based on how much a student needs it, not where they happen to be studying. We cannot leave this in the hands of individual institutions any longer.”

David Lammy, Minister for Higher Education, said: “Higher education remains one of the best pathways to a rewarding career, and it is good to see that students recognise it as a good investment for their future.

"We firmly believe that finance should never be a barrier to good education. This is why we continue to make generous loans and grants available to students.”

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26 April, 2009

It takes private schools to foster excellence in England

Prestigious private schools are vying to offer scholarships to Tom Daley, the Olympic diver, after his parents took him out of a state school where he was being bullied. Plymouth College, the alma mater of Dawn French and Michael Foot, and Brighton College, a leading independent, are competing to educate the 14-year-old, whose skills earned him a place in the Beijing Olympics.

Tom’s parents took him out of school before Easter because bullying had reached an “intolerable level”. Rob and Debbie Daley are now in discussions about a place at Plymouth College, which is home to an elite swimming club and charges up to £18,000 a year.

Mr Daley, 38, told The Times last night, “They understand the requirements of elite athletes. Academically, Tom’s doing well and we need to concentrate on his education.”

The college said Tom would be offered a “very significant scholarship” to enable him to attend. Dr Simon Wormleighton, headmaster, said he would fit in well at the school, which has experience of dealing with pupils who are high-level athletes.

Tom, who finished seventh in the men’s 10m platform event in Beijing, has also been offered a full scholarship to the £25,000-a-year Brighton College. “Tom is just the sort of young person we welcome here and I am confident he would fit in very well,” said Richard Cairns, the headmaster at Brighton.

But Mr Daley dismissed the generous offer. “Brighton is out of the question because it is too far away,” he said. Tom is aware of the discussions with Plymouth College and is very keen to leave Eggbuckland Community College, in Devon. Tom will go to Plymouth College when he returns from competing in Florida next month if the abuse does not stop. He has been plagued by bullies since the Olympics, who allegedly threatened to break his legs.

Mr Daley said: “Tom’s not big headed, he doesn’t even talk about it at school. But some kids don’t realise what the Olympics are, or the scale of what Tom’s doing.”

His parents complained to the school 11 times but removed Tom from classes because the abuse had become unbearable and was threatening to affect his diving.

Katrina Borowski, head of Eggbuckland Community College, said: “Tom’s extremely high profile has led to a minority of students acting in an immature way towards him. “It is difficult for Tom to have a ‘normal’ school life, but immediate action was taken to address concerns. We have a clear policy for dealing firmly with any incidents.” [A failed policy, unfortunately]

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SAT-optional: Will trend take off or sputter?

If you're one of those students afraid standardized test scores don't paint the full picture of your potential, your options are growing. More and more colleges don't require the SAT or ACT exams.

Wake Forest and Smith just admitted their first class of applicants who could decline to submit SAT or ACT scores, while Sewanee and Fairfield will do the same next year. But is the "test optional" movement gaining steam, or running out of it?

That was a big question hanging over a college admissions conference hosted by Wake Forest this past week. The answer could come in the next few weeks as colleges set their policies for next year's admissions cycle.

So far, several hundred colleges have gone test-optional for at least some students, including a small but growing number of more selective liberal arts schools. "I don't know if you can tell a tipping point until after it's happened, but it's very close," said Bob Schaeffer, the gadfly testing critic who heads the group FairTest. He said he's heard from at least a dozen very selective institutions reviewing their admissions policies and expects more to drop testing requirements this spring.

But the vast majority of colleges still use standardized tests in admissions. The College Board, which owns the SAT, says only 45 schools are truly test-optional for all. And the test-optional movement's "big fish" is still out there. If an elite college with the name recognition of a Harvard or Yale dropped testing requirements, it could be a game-changer.

Launched in 1926, the SAT was devised as a merit-based leveler to replace the old-boys pipeline from prep schools to top colleges. The idea was to let students show their natural ability even if they didn't come from the best schools. But many now view the SAT as the opposite — as an obstacle to opportunity. They point to scoring gaps between different racial and socio-economic groups, and concerns that the test is too coachable.

There's also a complex, long-running debate over just how well the exam (and its nearly equally popular cousin, the ACT) actually does what it promises: predict college success. Clearly, the SAT helps. But does it provide good enough guidance to justify the stress it causes students? More colleges are answering "no."

Some critics think test-optional is just a ploy for colleges to attract more minority students without having to report their on-average lower test scores to the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

But Provost Jill Tiefenthaler said Wake Forest went SAT-optional (along with other changes like interviewing more applicants) to send a signal it really wants a broader range of students. And it worked: Applications this year rose 16 percent — up 70 percent for blacks.

The new policy irked some Wake Forest alumni, who said the school was putting diversity ahead of standards. But Tiefenthaler said more diversity is was essential for building an educational community. "You've got to have different people from different backgrounds with different talents," she said. "The kind of students we want here are sometimes going to be great test-takers and sometimes not."

Wake Forest will re-examine the decision in five years. After a similar experiment in the 1990s, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania went back to requiring SAT scores. The change hadn't attracted the applicants it hoped for, and it concluded it needed SAT scores after all to predict student success.

The not-for-profit College Board said in an e-mailed statement the SAT has been validated in hundreds of studies and remains important because high school grade inflation makes it hard to compare students. The statement noted the organization has always advised colleges to use SAT scores in combination with other factors, especially grades.

Last fall, the National Association for College Admission Counseling encouraged colleges to consider dropping tests like the SAT in favor of others more closely tied to students' high school coursework.

But the report didn't go so far as to tell colleges not to use the SAT. Test scores "play a role in our process, and in some parts of our process I would have a hard time seeing what would be the replacement," said Jeffrey Brenzel, Yale's dean of admissions. Still, he said Yale constantly reviews how it uses tests.

Some critics doubt SAT scores often help disadvantaged students as intended — by revealing otherwise hidden potential, or persuading Yale to admit a riskier student without fear he or she will fail.

But Brenzel says that happens all the time. It happens "when you lack other information about a student that's reliable, where the teachers tend to write very short and unhelpful recommendations, where the course curriculum is suspect," Brenzel said. "The test is one of the few things where you might be able to identify a diamond in the rough," he said. "And we take kids like that every year."

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25 April, 2009

The Honoring of Ignorance

Hopefully most readers have had a chance to see comedian Jay Leno's occasional foray into the streets, where he interviews young people, many of whom are in college. He asks the simplest of questions, such as "Who is our nation's founding father?" or "Who is the vice president of the United States?" Often the interviewees stare into the camera and identify our nation's first president as "Abraham Lincoln," or the current vice president as "Clinton."

Increasingly -- disturbingly -- this kind of certifiable ignorance is worn as a badge of honor.

Now consider that it has been a longstanding tradition in America for conservatives, and in some cities liberals, to bemoan the content of their local newspapers. From the major "national papers," such as the New York Times and Washington Post, to the local community daily, newspapers have for generations been the focal point of allegations of bias in their reporting -- usually to the left of center.

Now the entire newspaper industry is holding on for dear life. A combination of increases in the cost of newsprint and the loss of reliable advertisers, such as car dealerships and real estate brokers, has left even the mightiest of papers in precarious shape. The New York Times had to borrow against its own building for operating capital. Many major papers across the nation have shut down, most have had major layoffs, and others are converting to new formats or moving toward creating only a digital online version.

For everyone who has hated his or her local newspaper -- for whatever reason -- there is cause to think twice about rooting for its demise. We are rapidly moving into a situation in which what has become "short-attention-span theater" becomes "no attention span" among many Americans. If your are reading this, then you, by definition, are in the distinct minority of those who still are interested in world events.

In the future, an increasing number of people, particularly young adults, might be exposed to even less of what is happening on the planet. After all, if they never pass a newspaper box with a headline, much less read a paper, how will they have the slightest clue about what's happening on the world stage?

"What about television news?" you might answer. Think again. There is a reason why every commercial that sponsors a network news broadcast is pushing some medicine to promote prostate health or prevent osteoporosis. The demographics for these programs skew older and older. The younger you are, the less likely you'll be to know who Charlie Gibson or Brian Williams is.

So, you might say, people get their news from radio and cable television talk shows. Some do, but as a percentage of the population, you could take everyone who watches programs on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, add in everyone who listens to talk radio stations, and it still doesn't come close to the numbers needed to have an informed population.

OK, it's the Internet, right? Well, yes, in the sense that younger Americans are increasingly likely to turn to their laptops or hand-held devices for information. But how do they know the source is reliable? And since they have endless choices of where to go on the web to be entertained and enlightened, will they choose hard news sites? The news organizations would have you think so, but in reality, many of the people going to news sites on the Internet are the same news junkies who watch network or cable news, and who read papers.

So who or what should be blamed for this mess? Technology? Our educational system? The breakdown of the family unit? Certainly all of this has contributed to what I believe will be a day not too many years down the line when the average citizen will have known so little about the issues of the day during their early years that they will be too darn dumb to understand or care once they are mature adults.

The truth is that America has come to honor ignorance. Increasingly, Americans would rather worship an American Idol or a Dancing Star than take the time to read a newspaper or watch a news program. Moreover, with instant messaging, TiVo, Twitter, Facebook, DVDs and so many highly segmented ways to find entertainment, the days of the structured "television broadcast" may be numbered -- and not by a matter of decades, but of years.

Those who want to dance a jig over the hard times that many a so-called "liberal rag" or conservative "tabloid" are encountering might think twice. A public that reads, listens and forms an opinion is a public that is our only protection from becoming the pawns of powerbrokers and potential dictators. A public that doesn't is simply ignorant. To those who would wish to destroy our nation -- be it through extremism to the left or right or some other wacky direction -- ignorance is bliss

SOURCE




British school indifferent to bullying

Government rules under which they operate leave them powerless to discipline anybody so all that they deploy is bulldust -- to no effect whatever

The parents of the Olympic diver Tom Daley have taken him out of school after he complained of being bullied. The 14-year-old athlete, who found himself in the public eye after representing Britain at the Beijing Olympics last year, said that he had been attacked by pupils in the playground of his school in Devon, south west England.

His parents said that the bullying began when he started Year 10 in September, after returning from China. The situation became untenable last week when an older boy allegedly cornered Tom and said: "How much are those legs worth? We're going to break your legs."

His father, Rob Daley, 38, said that he kept his son at home this week after staff at the Eggbuckland Community College in Plymouth refused to take action, despite complaints being lodged. Mr Daley said he was concerned that the bullying could affect his son's performance in a competition in Florida next month. He said that if the bullying did not stop he would move Tom to a new school. "The bullying is severe," he said. "He has been tackled to the floor walking through the school field and in class they throw pens and pencils at him. Some of them have even threatened to break his legs. That was the last straw. It has got to the point where enough is enough.

"The school has had plenty of opportunities to sort it out but it hasn't been done. It's gone way beyond mickey-taking - he has the whole school on his back and he knows that if he retaliates he will be all over the papers. It's just jealousy - it can't be anything else. I've been to see Tom's head of year and also the principal, because Tom has been so upset."

Mr Daley said that he had kept Tom away from school for two days before the Easter break because he felt that the bullying might affect his son's form at the Fina World Series competition in Sheffield.

Tom, who finished 7th in the men's 10m platform event in Beijing, said that he was being victimised by many pupils and had become a "hate" figure. "I ignored the `diver boy' or `Speedo boy' comments when I came back from Beijing last year, hoping they would get fed up and stop. The trouble is they haven't, and it's even the younger kids who are joining in," he said. "It's getting to the stage now where I think `oh, to hell with it. I don't want to go back to school'. "They've been taking the mick for ages, but they now spend most of their time throwing stuff at me. I thought it would calm down but it hasn't. Normally, I try not to go out during breaks if I can help it. I just stay in class. "It's sad and annoying that I can't have a normal school life. But I put up with it because I'm doing something I love. And I'm lucky I've got four good friends.

"If a teacher sees the kids doing it they'll tell them to stop, but I've got to the point that I really don't care. I'm away from school a lot anyway. I have fans outside school, but in school, it's the opposite - they all hate me." He is studying for nine GCSEs.

Katrina Borowski, the college principal, confirmed that Tom's "extremely high profile" had led to a number of "immature" students being disciplined. "Meetings have been held between college staff, parents and Tom's friends in which appropriate strategies were discussed. Certain students have been sanctioned. We take the wellbeing of students extremely seriously and have a very clear policy for dealing swiftly and firmly with any incidents of conflict that arise," she said.

Officials at British Swimming, the governing body for diving, said they would provide a psychologist and lifestyle coach for Tom, if he wants them on his return from the Florida event. "It is a shame but not a surprise in today's world," a spokesman for British Swimming said. "Tom's parents are handling things, but obviously we have a duty of care and are very concerned. We will give any help we can to a promising young athlete."

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24 April, 2009

Testing for 'Mismatch'

If members of some minority groups are admitted to elite colleges because of affirmative action -- and don't perform as well as they expected -- does this show a serious flaw in efforts to diversify student bodies?

Critics of affirmative action answer in the affirmative, and this is the basis of the controversial "mismatch" theory -- namely that affirmative action doesn't actually help its intended beneficiaries because they may struggle academically where admitted instead of enrolling at less competitive institutions where they might excel. Mismatch is heatedly debated -- in part because of the political potency of the argument. After all, it allows critics of affirmative action to say that they aren't just worried about white applicants, but about black and Latino students, too.

In a paper released Friday, four scholars at Duke University (three in economics and one in sociology) propose a new way to test for mismatch. They say that much more information is needed than has typically been available in the past. But because they were able to obtain this information for Duke, they argue that a mismatch test is possible. They propose a test in which applicants admitted to an elite university are asked to predict their first-year grades and are then told the average grades earned by members of similar ethnic and racial groups admitted under similar circumstances. In this situation, they argue, students admitted under affirmative action could make an informed judgment on whether they were being mismatched.

The data released by the scholars in explaining their idea could be quite controversial. Private colleges and universities historically release very little information, broken down by race and ethnicity, about the admissions qualifications and subsequent performance of students. Getting even SAT averages by race can be difficult. Duke provided the researchers not only with SAT averages, but with admissions officers' average rankings of admitted students on a five-point scale, by race, as well as the students' own projected first-year grades and actual grades.

Generally, the data show that Asian admitted students had better rankings and scores than all other groups, although their advantage over white students was modest. But Asian and white applicants are generally far above other applicants. And while all groups, on average, overestimated their academic performance in their first year at Duke, black and Latino students had the largest gaps between the performance they expected and what they achieved.

The study, "Does Affirmative Action Lead to Mismatch," is by Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban M. Aucejo, Hanming Fang and Kenneth I. Spenner, and was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. (An abstract is available here, as is information on how to download the study for $5.)

More here




Reforming Britain's schools — a self-correcting system

Plagued by persistent regulation, our system of state education is barred from reaching the level of quality that teachers not only aspire to, but are fully capable of achieving. Schools themselves are better placed than local government to decide where they should be allowed to set up and how they should function.

It takes only a small reform of our current system to allow the potential of our teachers and schools to be fulfilled - the creation of a system where schools of all kinds, whether they are state, private or charity-run, provide free and universal education, funded on a per-pupil basis by government, and given the freedom from burdensome regulation that the private sector enjoys. This is not an imposed reform, instead enabling schools to run themselves, opting in of their own accord, with government acting as the financier rather than the provider of free education.

The beauty of the reform is its self-correcting nature - the first of these free schools will appear where education is most in demand. As a school becomes popular, more parents will choose to send their children there and since it is paid per pupil, its income will increase. If a school is unpopular, then fewer and fewer pupils will be sent there until it either improves or fails. Schools will be able to innovate, directly rewarded for successful models of education through their popularity. Even if the amount paid per pupil is too low, then fewer schools will opt into the system until it can be increased.

However, this reform requires that all schools that have opted into the system be allowed to make a profit - something that the opposition party have shied away from, despite it being the principal reason for the system's success in Sweden. Without the entitlement to make a profit, not only will uptake of the system be slow, but successful schools will also be unable to expand and spread that success to other parts of the country for all pupils, parents and teachers to enjoy.

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The naked truth about strip searches in school

Ensuring school safety is important, but the Supreme Court must uphold students' rights

For many 13-year-old girls, being featured – even fleetingly – on a national news program might be exciting. Not for me. My image flickered across the screen only briefly on "Dateline NBC" – it was during one of my basketball games, and it showed all of my awkward teenage glory.

The context, however, made the whole thing more embarrassing than exhilarating: The program was all about how a group of my female classmates had been strip-searched after a gym class when several students reported some makeup, cash, and CDs missing. "Dateline" producers had filmed several of our team's games to use as B-roll while the anchor discussed the case.

Though I wasn't one of the girls in the class forced to remove their clothing to prove they weren't hiding the stolen items, I still look back at the episode – which for a time nearly ripped our community apart – with anger and a sense of betrayal.

Soon after the ordeal took place, I overheard my parents and grandparents discussing it, saying they didn't think the administrators and police officers who orchestrated the search were wrong. I fled the house in tears, aghast that my own family thought it would have been OK for me to have been made to undergo a humiliating act in front of a group of strange adults.

The incident at my school was not the first, nor the last in which young kids were made to strip as a result of school administrators bent on proving their "zero tolerance" for crime. The Supreme Court heard arguments in another such case tuesday – this one involving an 13-year-old Arizona honors student who was strip-searched in 2003 when school officials suspected she possessed ibuprofen. The search turned up nothing.

Defenders of such tactics insist that limiting schools' ability to carry out searches will invite more drugs and danger into classrooms. Certainly, the sentiment of protecting young people within school walls is right, but the method of protection must match that sentiment.

If students are going to be subjected to increasingly restrictive policies – no cellphones, iPods, painkillers, etc. – certainly administrators should have to operate under some limitations as well. And having rules in place to prevent kids from being forced to expose their bodies (something they'd be punished for if done by their own volition) might be a good place to start – particularly if all that's at stake is little more than some 99-cent bottles of Wet 'n' Wild nail polish and a copy of the "Grease" soundtrack.

In weighing potential threats, schools should take several factors into account: Does the suspected student pose an imminent threat? More important: Is the search itself reasonable? While that's open to interpretation, a good rule of thumb might be to get parental permission for anything other than simple tactics like making a student empty his or her pockets.

Savana Redding, the Arizona student whom the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with before the case landed before the high court, still recounts the incident as "the most humiliating experience" of her life. My closest friend shares that pain. Eleven years later, she says that being searched so intrusively left her with a deep emotional scar.

"In all the meetings and interviews afterward, the police and vice principal made it sound like they were just doing it to protect us," she recalls. "But they didn't care about protecting us in that locker room, when girls were crying and begging to call their parents."

A 2005 survey by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation revealed that high school students know shockingly little about some of their most basic constitutional rights – and it's no wonder when schools are trampling on them so blatantly.

In Tinker v. Des Moines, a 1969 case involving students who wore black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court famously noted that students do not "shed their constitutional rights ... at the schoolhouse gate." At the very least, that should include not having to shed their clothes.

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23 April, 2009

Strip searches at schools go to Supreme Court

In an Arizona case, administrators were worried about campus safety, while the student just felt humiliated.

When Savana Redding, now 19, talks of what happened to her in eighth grade, it is clear that the painful memories linger. She speaks of being embarrassed and fearful and of staying away from school for two months. And she recalls the "whispers" and "stares" from others in this small eastern Arizona mining town after she was strip-searched in the nurse's office because a vice principal suspected she might be hiding extra-strength ibuprofen in her underwear.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear her case. Its decision, the first to address the issue of strip-searches in schools, will set legal limits, if any, on the authority of school officials to search for drugs or weapons on campus. If limits on searches are imposed, the school district warns, its ability to keep all drugs out of its schools would be reduced.

In this case, said school district lawyer Matthew Wright, the vice principal was concerned because one student had gotten seriously ill from taking unidentified pills. "That was the driving force for him. If nothing had been done, and this happened to another kid, parents would have been outraged," Wright said.

In California and six other states, strip-searches of students are not permitted. Only once in the past has the high court ruled on a school-search case, and it sounds quaint now. It arose in 1980 when a New Jersey girl was caught smoking in the bathroom, and the principal searched her purse for cigarettes.

The justices upheld that search because the principal had a specific reason for looking in her purse. However, they did not say how far officials could go -- and how much of a student's privacy could be sacrificed -- to maintain safety at school. That's the issue in Safford Unified School District vs. Redding.

Savana was an honors student, shy and "nerdy" when the she began eighth grade at Safford Middle School, she says. She first learned she was in trouble when Vice Principal Kerry Wilson entered math class one morning and told her to come with him to the office. He was in search of white pills.

Wilson knew that a boy had gotten sick from pills he obtained at school. And that morning, another eighth-grader, Marissa Glines, was found with what turned out to be several 400-milligram ibuprofen pills tucked into a folded school planner. A few days before, Savana had lent Marissa the folder. The vice principal also found a small knife, a cigarette and a lighter in it. When asked where she got the pills, Marissa named Savana Redding.

These "could only be obtained with a prescription," Wilson reported. Commonly used for headaches or to relieve pain from menstrual cramps, ibuprofen is marketed under brand names including Advil and Motrin with recommend doses of 200 and 400 milligrams. "District policy J-3050 strictly prohibits the nonmedical use or possession of any drug on campus," Wilson explained later in a sworn statement.

Savana said she knew nothing of the pills in the folder. "He asked if he could search my backpack. I said, 'Sure,' " she recalled. When nothing was found, Wilson sent Savana to the nurse's office, where the nurse and an office assistant were told to "search her clothes" for the missing pills.

Savana said she kept her head down, embarrassed and afraid she would cry. After removing her pink T-shirt and black stretch pants, she was told to pull her underwear to the side and to shake so any pills there could be dislodged. It was "the most humiliating experience" of her young life, she said.

"We did not find any pills during our search of Savana," Wilson reported.

When her mother arrived at the school to pick her up, another student called out to her: "What are you going to do about them strip-searching Savana?" Upset and angry, April Redding said she marched to the principal's office, then to the superintendent's office nearby. Both denied at first knowing that a student had been strip-searched. "It was wrong. I didn't think anything like that could happen to my daughter at school," she said, wiping a tear. She later met with the principal but left, unsatisfied: "He said you should be happy we didn't find anything."

Contacted at the school recently, Wilson declined to discuss the case, as did other school officials.

When no one apologized, April Redding sued the school district for damages. Her lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union say the strip-search went far beyond the bounds of reasonableness, especially when there was no imminent danger. A strip-search can be deeply embarrassing and leave an emotional scar, they add.

So far, however, judges have been almost evenly divided over whether Savana's rights were violated. A federal magistrate in Tucson held that the search was reasonable because the vice principal was relying on the tip from another student. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Last year, however, the full 9th Circuit Court took up the case and ruled 6 to 5 for the Reddings.

Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw said the vice principal's action defied common sense as well the Constitution. "A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a 13-year-old girl to a traumatic search to 'protect' her from the danger of Advil," she wrote. "A school is not a prison. The students are not inmates," she added, noting that juvenile prisoners are given more rights than were given Savana.

Two of the dissenters agreed the search was unreasonable, but they said the officials should be shielded from suits because the law has been unclear. The three other dissenters, including Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, said the search was reasonable based on what Wilson knew at the time.

Last fall, the school district appealed to the Supreme Court, saying it "finds itself on the front lines of the decades-long war against drug abuse among students." The justices voted in January to hear the case, a good sign for the school district.

In recent years, national school officials say they have heard of only a few instances of strip-searches at schools. After the search, Savana refused to return to the middle school. She did not want to be in the presence of the nurse or the office assistant who she said humiliated her. She went to an alternative high school in Safford but dropped out before graduating. She is taking psychology classes at nearby Eastern Arizona College. She and her mother plan to travel to Washington to hear her case argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. For Savana, it will be her first trip on an airplane.

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I've seen how Britain's education system betrays children - it's enough to make you weep

A new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies is clear about who is to blame for the failure of bright children from poor families to get into universities. The reason is not, as Government ministers such as Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and John Denham claim, class bias on the part of universities. It is bad schools in deprived areas and the failure of this Government to get to grips with the issue.

The report tracked half a million children's education to give a devastating picture of a generation betrayed by Labour. Far from being a motor for social mobility, as it should be, the state school system is entrenching deprivation: youngsters from disadvantaged homes are five times more likely to fail to get five good A to C grades at GCSE than those from affluent backgrounds. As Christine Gilbert, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector for Schools, says, the relationship between poverty and poor results is 'stark' and poses an ' unacceptable' risk to the life chances of disadvantaged children. 'This cannot be right and we need to do more,' she says.

I have spent the past nine months interviewing youngsters all over the country, as well as visiting schools both here and in America. And my research has confirmed the utter failure of our education system to help those from deprived backgrounds. I have seen for myself that bright students are failed at every stage - at primary, secondary and at university levels.

The reason for this lamentable failure is a toxic mix of politically correct ideology on the part of the teaching unions, a feeble reluctance on the part of the Government to confront them, and a target culture for exam results which is designed to benefit politicians rather than pupils. The damage this has caused is incalculable.

The problem starts early on in primary school, where many pupils from poor backgrounds are no longer learning to read. For ideological reasons, teachers and educationists have shunned traditional phonetic teaching methods - which have a long track record of success - because they are considered a reactionary throwback. During my research, I found that the majority of children in this country learn to read however they are taught, because they have sufficient parental back-up. But at least 25 per cent - usually those from the most deprived backgrounds - do not.

And if their primary schools fail them between the ages of five and seven, when they should learn to read, they never catch up - because no one in those children's seven subsequent years of education (most drop out of school at around 14) addresses the problem. One result of this basic failure in teaching is that last year more than a third of 14-year-old boys in this country had a reading age of 11 or below. More than one in five of them had a reading age of nine. And almost 250,000 schoolchildren - a staggering 40 per cent - start GCSE studies without the ability in reading, writing and maths to cope with their courses.

One young man told me: 'For my first two years of secondary school, I was in the top sets for maths and science, but rubbish at everything else because of my lack of literacy. That kills you in every subject. Even in maths you need to read the question.' Instead of being at university, where he obviously belongs and where as a potential science graduate the economy needs him, this bright articulate 22-year-old lives on benefits in Hastings.

But it is not just teachers. The Government, faced with this increasingly illiterate generation of schoolchildren, refuses to confront reality. Instead, it skews the curriculum to make school exam results look more impressive than they really are - and to make its own achievements look better. Last month, Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, hailed the success of schools reaching a Government target one year early: 60 per cent of 15-year-olds gaining five higher level GCSEs.

But without wishing to take anything away from the pupils' efforts, I would suggest that this 'success' is comparatively worthless because neither maths nor English has to be included among these higher level GCSEs.

What price have young people themselves paid for Jim Knight's moment of glory? John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, is clear. The league tables have created perverse incentives. Schools are forced to skew the curriculum for 14 and 15-yearolds towards subjects 'in which it is easier to reach Grade C.'

A-levels create similar perversions. This might benefit schools and Jim Knight, but it has severe consequences for teenagers, especially those from a poor background. It's a crying shame that, in order to be sure of meeting Government targets, schools are deliberately pushing even able pupils away from studying difficult subjects such as science and languages. But it is these traditional subjects that top universities want. 'Soft' subjects - anything with the word 'studies' in it, as one headmaster remarked - do not win places at a good university. Geoff Parks, Cambridge's director of admissions, said: 'We know the school's bright students are on track to get As, but those As are in subjects that essentially rule them out.'

This has devastating consequences for disadvantaged teenagers. They are the most reliant on their schools for correct advice on universities and careers. They must trust that their schools have their best interests at heart. Too often this is not the case - as the educational charity Sutton Trust discovered. An online questionnaire of 3,000 students revealed that half believed there was no difference in earnings between graduates of different universities. Schools had also failed to warn them of the importance of their choice of subject. They had no idea that it would dictate not only which university would take them, but also their future salary.

According to the London Institute of Education, a decade after leaving university, nearly a fifth of graduates from leading universities earn more than £90,000 a year compared with just 5 per cent of those from the so-called new universities.

Of course, very few of the most disadvantaged pupils are lucky enough to get a university place. Government research has revealed that many state schools in disadvantaged areas are failing to bring on their brightest children 'for fear of being branded elitist'. One in seven pupils on a Government scheme to help the brightest children - defined as the top 10 per cent of the school population - even failed to get five good GCSEs.

But the state school student who does manage to get to university faces yet another piece of Government hocus pocus. More than one in five of the 230,000 full-time students entering university drop out. These are mainly working-class students. The Government has given universities almost 1 billion pounds to support these students. But universities are not penalised for recruiting students who do not graduate - provided they recruit even more to replace them and so fulfil the Government target of getting 50 per cent of youngsters into further education. Like everything in our smoke-and-mirrors education system, this fails to address the real problem - bad teaching in too many state schools.

While the Government trumpets its achievements in getting so many students into further education, MPs on the Public Accounts Committee last year discovered that university maths students, for example, say they are being forced to quit their courses because they lack basic numeracy skills and so do not understand assignments and lectures. Sir Richard Sykes, then rector of Imperial College London, put it bluntly: 'Yes, there may be thousands of kids out there who come from poorer backgrounds and are geniuses - but how can we take them at 18 if they've not been educated?'

Is it not time the Government stopped playing tricks and started examining why this is?

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22 April, 2009

The decay of discipline produced the Columbine massacre

William Dean Howells observed that at the theater Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending. But in life we are made of sterner stuff and demand from tragedy only this: a lesson.

That the mass killing at Columbine High School a decade ago -- it was on April 20, 1999, that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 13 and wounded 23 -- could offer us more than sorrow and outrage has been an article of faith since the nation first learned of the crime. The exact lesson, however, has proved elusive, and the search has seemed obdurately focused on the obscure or the strange: the trenchcoats; the question of social isolation; the possibility that jocks and cheerleaders might be so nasty to an outsider that they could render him into a sociopath.

Apparently, the thing to do was to look not at the largest questions posed by the incident but rather at its particulars and to adopt a "zero tolerance" policy toward any behavior that seemed to mimic them. The result was a longish, culturally embarrassing interlude when kindergartners could get tossed out of school for bringing a nail clipper in a backpack. We began to look like a nation of adults who were terrified of our smallest children.

The one aspect of Columbine that seemed unworthy of examination -- when it came to pondering the policy changes that might actually make American schools safer places -- was the fact that the two killers had a long track record of doing exactly what deeply disturbed teenage boys have been doing since time out of mind: getting in trouble -- lots of it -- with authority.

Ten months before their shooting spree, Harris and Klebold were charged and convicted of stealing tools from a parked van. They were sentenced to a "juvenile diversion" program, which was intended -- by dint of counseling, classes, and the coordinated efforts of school administrators, social workers and police officers -- to keep the boys out of the criminal-justice system. According to the records of that experience, Harris reported having homicidal feelings, obsessive thoughts and a temper. Both boys were placed in anger management, although -- strangely, given Klebold's history of alcohol use and his submission of a dilute urine sample to his minders -- they were excused from the substance-abuse class.

Back at school (which they attended throughout their enrollment in the juvenile-diversion program), they smoked cigarettes in the hollow behind campus, cut classes and blew off schoolwork. According to Dave Cullen's new book, "Columbine," when Klebold carved obscenities into a freshman's locker and was confronted by a dean, "Dylan went ballistic. He cussed him out, bounced off the walls, acted like a nutcase." Both boys also picked on younger children and got into fights.

All of this was in addition, of course, to the notorious AOL postings in which the boys laid their murderous plans bare. Those postings were the basis of the affidavit that the Jefferson County district attorney compiled for a search warrant of the boys' houses. Lacking enough evidence to present it to a judge, however, the affidavit was not acted upon, and the thugs moved closer and closer to their goal. There was a time when boys like these would have been labeled "juvenile delinquents" and removed from the society and company of good kids, whose rights were understood to supersede those of known offenders against the law. It was once believed that good kids should be neither endangered nor influenced by criminals-in-training.

At the turn of the last century, the U.S. -- a nation of laws, of course, and a nation with an ever-evolving sense of sympathy for children and teenagers -- decided that sending youthful offenders to adult prison was a grotesque form of punishment, and so were born the juvenile code and the juvenile court system. With these innovations came something that was still talked about in tones of dread and excitement when I was a girl in the 1960s and '70s. "He's going to end up in reform school," we would say of a bully or a fighter, some luckless child of a rotten drunk or a mean single mother. One way or another, it came to pass: Boys disappeared and were not missed.

Due process? Who knew, who cared? All we knew was that the funny-looking, heavy-set boy who used to smash kids' heads into the porcelain backsplash at the drinking fountain of Cragmont School was no more a menace in our lives.

Harsh fate that would send a boy away for no greater crime than the accident of his birth! Homeward the course of juvenile justice went, reinventing the system in yet another iteration, the one in which Harris and Klebold were allowed to stay put in their own houses and at Columbine, during the very time that they were not only committing petty thefts and cursing out their teachers but also communicating openly about their plans for mayhem.

Today only the most incorrigible young offenders are removed from their guardians' care and forced to live and study in correctional facilities. Furthermore, to expel a student in most public school districts is an arduous business. An expulsion hearing is required, and parents may choose to appeal the decision, a process that rains down a world of legal woe on whatever teachers and administrators have been involved in the action. Many expulsions, moreover, constitute a strange reinterpretation of the very word: They are time-limited and include within them plans for re-enrollment.

It is, of course, the responsibility of the state to provide some sort of education to all its children under the age of 18, and so for a host of legal, moral and economic reasons we end up with an ugly truth about our nation's schools: By design, they contain within them -- right alongside the good kids who are getting an education and running the yearbook and student government -- kids whose criminal rehabilitation is supposedly being conducted simultaneously with their academic instruction.

As someone who taught school for a decade and who has now been a mother for about as long, I can tell you that -- when it comes to children -- the rigid exercise of "due process" in matters of correction and discipline makes for high comedy at best and shared tragedy at worst. Someone needs to stand apart from children and decide what is best for them and for those around them. When it comes to matters of state-ordered punishment, someone needs to stand apart from their parents, too, and make the necessary decisions. It's a complete bummer; I will grant you that.

Who would possibly be willing to side not with the students of an institution -- those fun-loving creatures of the now -- but with the institution itself, a place ostensibly devoted, above all else, to the well-being of its population? I'll tell you who: adults. Remember them?

In my teaching days, no single document shaped my thinking as much as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders.

"And what if the student finds this is not to his taste?" O'Connor asked. "Well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."

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Britain. The working class children betrayed by Labour: Bad schools NOT class bias to blame for thousands missing university

Bright children from poor homes are failing to get into university because of under-performing state schools and not class bias. That is the finding of a major study, covering hundreds of thousands of children, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Pupils at struggling comprehensives are getting such low grades they are simply not equipped for degree-level studies, it revealed.

It was one of three studies published yesterday which together painted a picture of a 'lost generation' betrayed by Labour. Government figures showed the number of Neets - teenage dropouts who are not in employment, education or training - has soared to record levels.

Meanwhile, a report by York university found that British children are among the worst-off in Europe in terms of health, wealth and happiness. The study by the IFS - conducted jointly with another research body, the Institute of Education - blows apart ministers' claims that 'elitist' universities are snubbing youngsters from less privileged backgrounds. Gordon Brown and education ministers Ed Balls and John Denham have put universities under intense pressure to widen the class mix of students by reforming the admissions process and spending millions on 'outreach' work in schools.

In a recent speech, Mr Denham called on top universities to 'address fair access effectively, or their student population will remain skewed'. He has also accused them of 'social bias' and 'failing to attract' talent from across all sections of society.

However, the IFS research, which will be presented this week at the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society, throws the blame for the university class divide squarely on to ministers' failure to tackle poor-quality schooling. It will also fuel the belief that the abolition of most grammar schools since the 1960s has closed off an important route to university for bright children from poor homes.

The study, which involved tracking more than 500,000 state school students, revealed that the gulf between the university haves and have-nots has its roots in the school system. 'It comes about because poorer pupils do not achieve as highly in secondary school,' the research said. Grade for grade, pupils from low income backgrounds stand virtually the same chance of getting into university as their wealthier peers, according to the study. The problem was partly that poorer pupils were more likely to attend under-performing schools, it said.

The report added: 'At least part of the explanation for the relatively low achievement of disadvantaged children in secondary school is likely to be rooted in school quality.' The latest findings also undermine Mr Denham's claim that 'social bias' by universities plays a part in their selection process. Pupils from poorer backgrounds are just as likely to get into the most selective universities as middle-class peers, after taking into account their A-level grades, the study found.

The report said initiatives aimed at dispelling a 'university is not for people like us' attitude must begin much earlier, perhaps in primaries. Drives at sixth-form level - the focus of much taxpayer-funded activity - 'will not tackle the more major problem... namely, the underachievement of disadvantaged pupils in secondary schools'.

The findings were released as it emerged that 11 prestigious universities - including Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle - have launched a scheme to consider working-class school-leavers who would normally be rejected outright because of their predicted A-level grades. Critics have warned that the initiative could become a 'charter for bad schools'.

The Tories said the denial of opportunities to poor children was a ' scandal' and accused ministers of attacking universities instead of tackling failures in the school system. Admissions tutors said the research showed the real barrier to top universities was England's 'uneven' education system and the link between children's prospects and their social background.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'Over the past five years the attainment gap between those children eligible for free school meals and those who aren't has narrowed and the results for these children are rising faster than the average, but we know there is still more to do. 'That is why we have invested more than £21billion in child care and the early years since 1997, so that poor children get better chances in early life. We are also massively expanding one-to- one tuition for children falling behind in English and maths.'

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Anarchy in UNC

by Mike Adams

Last week, I was away speaking at Michigan State University. While I was gone, my inbox filled with requests that I write about the recent disruption of Tom Tancredo’s speech at UNC-Chapel Hill. I am pleased to do so. As a professor in the UNC system, I’m also pleased to explain why this embarrassing incident occurred.

If one is to understand the Tancredo incident one must be familiar with ten rules that apply to free speech and to other rights in the UNC system. One must also understand the origin of at least some of these ten rules. Once one is properly educated in these rules, it becomes obvious that Tom Tancredo is not a victim in any sense of the word. In fact, it is Tancredo, not the protestors, who should be embarrassed.

1. Groups, not individuals, possess rights. Many observers are confused into thinking that Tom Tancredo’s constitutional rights were violated last week in Chapel Hill. This is based on the antiquated notion that free speech is an individual right. Because our Founding Fathers owned slaves (read: violated individual rights) those rights have now been transferred from individuals to groups.

2. The rights of any given group are determined by the extent of historical oppression the group has suffered. Obviously, as a group, African-Americans now have rights because of slavery. Illegal aliens also have rights, as a group, because the conditions that caused them to become “illegal” were oppressive.

3. Oppression need not have occurred in this country to produce rights in this country. Some will note that the oppression that produced illegal immigration occurred in another country implying that this does not create any rights here in this country. This criticism assumes the legitimacy of the term “countries,” which like the term “laws” is suspect. It should also be noted that prior to any discussion of how to patrol our border, the term “border” is designated as oppressive. This helps us to think globally.

4. Jews are exempt from rule #3. Jews have suffered a lot throughout history. But most of that suffering occurred in other countries. Since the Jews now control so much of America and probably planned 911 there is no need to grant them unnecessary rights.

5. Rights do not compel responsibility. The notion of responsibility is antithetical to the notion of collectivism. Notions of responsibility help to advance capitalism, which help to advance oppression. In other words, it is irresponsible to advance responsibility because it is responsible for a lot of group oppression.

6. Whites may establish rights temporarily by acting as spokespersons for oppressed groups. The fact that most of the people protesting Tancredo were, like Tancredo, whites in the country legally, is irrelevant. They had free speech rights because they were speaking up for the oppressed. Tancredo did not because he was speaking out against the oppressed and, hence, advancing oppression.

7. Oppressed groups need not give consent to their spokespersons. White liberals always know what is best for minorities who do not always know what is best for them.

8. Vandalism is a permissible form of expression. Jonathan Curtis, a UNC administrator, aided and abetted the theft of the conservative Carolina Review in 1996. He went unpunished. Since then, the administration has been reluctant to suggest that lawlessness is illegal. Lawlessness can be a good way of showing how laws are oppressive. This includes pounding on windows and shattering glass while people are trying to speak.

9. An effect may precede its cause. The protestors claimed that the Tancredo incident was the fault of the police who sprayed pepper spray to disperse the crowd. It should not matter that the disruption happened first. These kids have taken sociology courses where they are taught that labeling someone “delinquent” causes delinquency. They have taken education courses where they are taught that labeling someone as “slow” causes bad grades. These assertions are not backed up by longitudinal studies that can separate cause and effect. That would constitute “evidence” and evidence is oppressive. In fact, the videotape of the protestors smashing a window is oppressive.

10. The law is an instrument of oppression and criminality is a form of expression. Tom Tancredo supports the enforcement of the law. He is an oppressor. The protestors were breaking the law as a form of expression. In the same way, illegal immigration is a form of expression protected by the First Amendment and unaffected by antiquated notions like “citizenship.” Citizenship is oppressive.

Now that you have heard the rules and know something of their origin you may decide to sympathize with the protestors. Or you may decide that I’ve been right about what I’ve been saying in this column for the last six years. And why I often feel like an alien in a strange land speaking a language no one understands.

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21 April, 2009

"Despite a doubling in the amount spent per primary and secondary pupil, attainment levels have remained flat"

Sound familiar? Detroit or DC? No. Scotland. The Leftist idea that money is the solution to everything constantly fails but they never lose faith in it. And they accuse business of being money-mad!

Analysis by Reform Scotland shows that despite a doubling in the amount spent per primary and secondary pupil, attainment levels have remained flat. “It is clear from the research that the extra spending is simply not delivering value for money,” Geoff Mawdsley, director of Reform Scotland, said. “Put another way, billions of pounds have been spent in the last decade to little or no effect.” While spending per pupil has risen from £2,092 to £4,638 at primary level and from £3,194 to £6,326 at secondary schools, the proportion of those gaining five good grades at the end of fourth year has fallen from 47 per cent to 46 per cent.

Reform Scotland also claimed that data it had obtained showed that pupils in England who had been lagging behind Scotland in 1998 are now ahead, with the number achieving equivalent grades rising from 36 per cent to 48 per cent. The Scottish education system has long been regarded as among the best in the world, but the report claims that this view is now a myth.

Mr Mawdsley called on the Scottish government to publish more information about pupils' performance. “Using the measure of the pupils attaining five good grades by S4, including maths and English, would be a good start,” he said.

Reform Scotland also urged ministers to look at best practice from other countries and said that the government should consider a report it published this year, in which it argued for parents to be given more power to choose which school to send their children to. The report said that parents from poor backgrounds should be given credits of up to £10,000 to allow them to send their children to independent schools.

Responding to the latest report, Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said: “This shows that the way devolution has been administered has not provided value for money for Scots. Politicians who only have the power to spend money without having to worry about where it comes from are never going to be as responsible as those who have to keep an eye on the income side of the ledger.”

The report provoked a furious response from a former Scottish minister in the previous Labour-Lib Dem Executive, who said: “Reform Scotland has produced a series of reports, none of which has contained any original research or thought. It is simply regurgitating right-wing ideas which have failed in Scotland in the past. To call them a think-tank is an abuse of the word ‘think'.”

A Scottish government spokeswoman said: “There is no doubt that Scotland can do better in education performance. That is why we are now embarking on the biggest reform in education for a generation.”

Reform Scotland's report comes as a former Labour economic adviser claimed that devolution has had an adverse effect on public services in Scotland. John McLaren, who worked for the late First Minister Donald Dewar, also said that the education system had been particularly affected, with performance lagging behind that in England. His report commissioned by The Sunday Times to mark the tenth anniversary of devolution said: “One can tentatively conclude that government being closer to the people has not led to improved relative performance in Scotland. In fact it may have had the opposite effect.”

Both reports' findings were dismissed by Ronnie Smith, general secretary of the teaching union Educational Institute of Scotland, who said: “Scotland continues to send a higher proportion of pupils on to higher education than England does, and if things were as bad as is being made out that wouldn't be happening.” [Would that be because there are substantial tuition fees in England but none in Scotland? Never trust a Leftist to give you the full facts]

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British Teenagers don't know how to write a letter, say education chiefs

Letter writing is becoming a lost art, according to education chiefs. They said teenagers are increasingly unlikely to be able to address a letter correctly, spell 'sincerely' or sign off with their name. Basic punctuation is being abandoned as emails, text messages and gossip magazine-style 'cliches' take over. It is feared that youngsters will be handicapped by their failings, particularly when applying for jobs.

The problems were highlighted by the country's largest exam board, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, in a series of reports on last summer's English GCSEs. In one question, candidates were found lacking when asked to address a letter to a Government minister about education.

'There were surprisingly few who: put an address, included a date, wrote an appropriate salutation, signed off appropriately and consistently with the salutation, included the name of the sender,' the report said.

Of another paper, which also called for the writing of a letter, the alliance said: 'The misuse or lack of capital letters were the commonest errors, an error often compounded by poor hand-writing and illegibility. Initial letters in sentences are frequently written in lower case; random capitals are used throughout the response, and the personal pronoun "I" is written in lower case. 'Inaccurate sentence structure where punctuation is almost entirely lacking, or where sentences are loose and lack accurate sentence breaks abounded.'

Meanwhile, examiners at Oxford and Cambridge have warned about the death of the apostrophe due to increased use of text messaging. They criticised pupils' limited vocabularies, which left them 'trapped firmly in the world of magazine-speak and dully predictable cliche; such as "you will love it".'

Examiners agreed that 'sentence construction, spelling and boundary punctuation were becoming less reliable'. Professor Alan Smithers, of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: 'Everyone from time to time needs to be able to write a formal letter. It is worrying if children aren't picking this up as it will essentially handicap them in future.'

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20 April, 2009

The Union War on Charter Schools

As New York shows, they want to kill any education choice

On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs. Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.

But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.

In New York, for example, the unions have backed a new budget that effectively cuts $51.5 million from charter-school funding, even as district-school spending can continue to increase thanks to local taxes and stimulus money that the charters lack. New York charters already receive less money per pupil than their district school counterparts; now they will receive even less.

Unions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. New York already has the "card check" unionization procedure for teachers that replaces secret ballots with public arm-twisting. And the teachers unions appear to have collected enough cards to unionize the teachers at two highly successful charter schools in New York City. If unions force charters to enter into collective bargaining, one can only imagine how those schools will be able to maintain the flexible work rules that allow them to succeed.

Matt Ladner, a researcher at Arizona's Goldwater Institute, envisioned what charters burdened with a lengthy union contract might look like on my blog: "Need to change a light bulb in your classroom? Page 844, paragraph five clearly states that you must call a union electrician. You kids sit quietly with your heads down in the dark until he arrives. It will be any day now."

Eva Moskowitz, former chair of the New York City Council education committee and now a charter school operator, has characterized this new push against charters as a "backlash" led by "a union-political-educational complex that is trying to halt progress and put the interests of adults above the interests of children." She is right. If the union-political-education complex succeeds in depriving charter schools of funding and burdening them with regulations, children really will be harmed.

The highest quality studies have consistently shown that students learn more in charter schools. In New York City, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby found that students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and were forced to return to district schools.

Florida State economist Tim Sass and colleagues found that middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than their peers who returned to district high schools because charter high schools were not available.

The most telling study is by Harvard economist Tom Kane about charter schools in Boston. It found that students accepted by lottery at independently operated charter schools significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery and returned to district schools. But students accepted by lottery at charters run by the school district with unionized teachers experienced no benefit.

When charter schools unionize, they become identical to traditional public schools in performance. Unions may say they support charter schools, but they only support charters after they have stripped them of everything that makes charters different from district schools.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have given speeches promoting charter schools. Despite their talk, charter spending constituted less than one-quarter of 1% of education spending in the stimulus package. And the Obama administration has done union bidding by killing the D.C. voucher program. They did this in the face of solid evidence of academic progress for the voucher students, and despite their stated commitment to do "what works for kids" regardless of ideology.

Vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire. But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble. It's time for reformers to increase pressure on politicians bending to the will of the unions and close the new education gap -- the one between what Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan say about education and what they do.

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Britain CAN turn back the clock and make the schools places of excellence. Here's how...

By Peter Hitchens

All the solutions to all our problems are obvious but shocking. They have also been ruled out in advance by the miserable pygmies and parasites who have taken over both sides of Parliament.

The breakdown of order in our State schools is a grave example of this political trap, in which everyone knows there is something wrong and nobody dares do anything effective about it. This is now a severe national crisis. Like the desperate state of our exam system, it is also a State secret, buried under a monstrous heap of official lies and twisted statistics.

A teacher who exposed it by filming undercover was not thanked, or invited to share her evidence with the authorities. She was disciplined more severely than another teacher convicted of smoking crack cocaine. I know of others who fear to speak out because they do not wish to damage their careers.

The teachers’ unions know perfectly well what is happening, though they are really interested only in getting more money for their members and gaining more recruits – since they are nowadays all in the hands of the Sixties Left.

But because they need to let off steam at their annual conferences, we get a yearly outbreak of stories about how schools are hiring bouncers to keep order – or even that teachers are going to work in body-armour. Of course there is some exaggeration for effect here. But nobody seriously doubts that many classrooms are now so chaotic that even the most determined pupil and the most dedicated teacher must fight to get any work done at all.

What is worse, many excellent teachers are more than weary of having to be policemen first, social workers second and teachers third. Some schools now actually have real police officers on the premises.

This is all completely ridiculous and unnecessary. It could be reversed in a matter of months and put right in a few years. Only a few things need to be done. Teachers need to be given back the power to use corporal punishment. We should leave the European Convention on Human Rights and other treaties which prevent the operation of commonsense British laws.

The school-leaving age should be reduced to 15. Secondary schools should be divided between the vocational and the academic, with selection on merit.

The law permitting ‘no-win, no-fee’ lawsuits should be repealed. So should the Children Act 1989 and the other social workers’ charters which have robbed sensible adults of authority for two decades.

Then we should embark on a Restoration Of The Married Family Act, which would end the many-headed attack on stable married families and restore the lost position of fathers in the home, one of the major causes of bad behaviour by boys. Divorce should be difficult. Every social institution, every law, tax-break and benefit, should discriminate clearly and unapologetically in favour of those parents committed to each other by the marriage bond.

None of these things is actually outrageous, though if a frontbench spokesman for any party dared embrace them, he would be met with cries of rage and fake expressions of shock and be quickly driven from his post.

There are plenty of people still living who can testify that when such rules operated, millions of British people lived free and happy lives, learned useful things in orderly schools, did not need to be under police surveillance, pass through metal detectors on their way to classes or be watched by CCTV cameras.

Yes, there were disadvantages and difficulties. Who denies it? Perfection isn’t possible. But they were nothing compared with the horrible mess we have made with our good intentions.

Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that a headmaster would be knifed to death at the gates of his school, thousands of children would be forced to take powerful drugs to make them behave and the only ‘powers’ available to besieged teachers would be either to keep their charges in for a few hours or force them to go away for a few weeks?

And who would have believed that people would say this was freedom and progress and that Conservative politicians would declare they were happy with this country as it is? The supposed freedom is a new slavery, enforced by social workers, lawyers, the BBC and PC police. The alleged progress is an accelerating slide back into the Dark Ages.

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19 April, 2009

Rising sons

What Japanese Schools are Doing Right

In March, I had the opportunity to visit a Japanese school. Kadena Elementary School is located on Okinawa Island in the town of Kadena, and is not to be confused with the school of the same name operated by the U.S. Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS). The purpose of my visit was to research successful aspects of the Japanese school system that could be used to improve the American school system. As an educational researcher, I believe that cultures should borrow the best practices from each other.

During my visit to Kadena Elementary, I observed several practices that worked well and could be adopted by American schools. First, Kadena Elementary has a social curriculum in addition to an academic curriculum. For example, the students clean the school every day by themselves; there is no janitor. They sign up for chores on the blackboard. The Japanese custom of removing street shoes at the front door of the school and replacing them with shoes that are only worn indoors makes cleaning somewhat easier.

Also, the students serve the school lunch to the teachers and themselves; there are no cafeteria workers. After lunch, the students clean up after themselves. The social curriculum helps students develop autonomy, responsibility, and a strong work ethic. It's an idea that could work well in American schools.

The second practice I observed that worked well is that the students eat a healthy diet. There are no soda vending machines at Kadena Elementary. The school lunch is planned by a dietician and prepared at a central location in the school's district. It is then delivered daily to every elementary school, middle school, and high school in the district. Japanese schools do not have cafeterias. Students eat lunch in the classroom with their homeroom teacher.

The school lunch I ate at Kadena Elementary consisted of rice, soup, broiled fish, and milk. By comparison, the American school lunch typically consists of processed foods that are higher in fat and sugar.

Third, the students stay active at Kadena Elementary. They have recess every day and participate in a rigorous physical exercise program. In contrast, American schools are cutting back or completely eliminating recess and physical education. Besides recess and physical education, the students also stay active in the classroom. I observed classrooms wherein students were not just passively sitting still listening to the teacher; they stood up and moved around while learning. They played educational games and learned by seeing, hearing, and doing.

Studies show that proper nutrition and increased physical activity lead to higher academic achievement. American schools can improve student learning by serving a healthier school lunch and giving students more opportunities to stay active during the school day.

Japan has outperformed the U.S. in math and science on several international assessments of educational achievement. For example, the average math achievement score for 15-year-old Japanese students was 523 on the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).American students only scored 474. In science, Japanese students outperformed American students 531 to 489.

The Japanese school system is teaching math and science to students more effectively than the American school system, and it still has enough resources left over to implement a social curriculum, offer healthy food, and allow students to stay physically active during the school day. These are all great practices that American schools should consider borrowing.

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Broken English immersion

BOSTON SUFFERS from a garbled approach to education for students with limited English - an approach that is widening achievement gaps at all grade levels and driving students to drop out. A change of course is needed to ensure opportunity for the 24,000 Boston students who aren't native speakers of English.

A report released this week by the Gastón Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Boston revealed the system's inability to adjust to changes in state law on how to teach students with limited English ability. The high school drop-out rates for so-called English language learners nearly doubled, to 12 percent, between 2003 and 2006, according to the report. The school district's family resource centers routinely fail to assess students' language skills. And fearing stigma, parents often make matters worse by withholding information about their native tongues.

It would be tempting to blame this entire mess on a 2002 ballot initiative mandating English immersion as the primary means of instruction. Previously, schools offered a broad array of classes for students in their native languages. But the authors of the UMass study wisely chose to focus on ways to improve the current system rather than on reigniting an old political debate. Immersion can work for many students. And for those who struggle with it, the law still offers various waivers and alternatives, including opportunities for students to attend classes in their native languages.

Boston has suffered from a lack of leadership within the school department on how to teach English language learners. The top post in the department has been empty for about a year. That changed yesterday when the school department tapped Eileen de los Reyes, a former education professor at Harvard. She'll have plenty to do, starting with the study's recommendation to hire staffers with enough knowledge and expertise to implement the immersion program.

Much smaller school systems, including Framingham, have managed to recruit on an international level for effective teachers of English learners, according to a 2007 Rennie Center report on best practices in the field. Brockton High School also has found ways to hasten the academic progress of non-native English speakers with the use of English language texts and teachers who use English and a foreign language interchangeably for instruction. Administrators in Boston should take some field trips to these and other smaller districts that do the job better.

There is also a dearth of statewide data on how school systems are progressing - or regressing - since the passage of the English immersion law. Boston is probably not alone in the beginners' category when it comes to teaching its bilingual students.

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UK: Unruly pupils to be removed from lessons

Too little too late

Pupils who misbehave should be sent to "sin-bin" support units until they calm down, a government inquiry will recommend this week. The report, by former headteacher Sir Alan Steer, will say that more use should be made of "withdrawal rooms" for disruptive pupils. The move is designed to tackle low-level misbehaviour which falls short of demanding that a pupil be excluded.

The Schools Secretary Ed Balls will unveil the measure on Wednesday when he addresses the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers conference.

Sir Alan's report will also stress the need for adults to set a better example. In a leaflet being sent to schools, heads are urged to get parents to sign contracts promoting good behaviour and to attend parenting classes if their children are disruptive. If they fail to attend, the school has the power to fine them up to £100 with the further threat of prosecution for non compliance.

The leaflet makes it clear that teachers have the right to search pupils for weapons, drugs or alcohol.

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18 April, 2009

To Slay a Hydra in Bridgeport: Teachers versus choice

“I perpetuate the creation of an underclass every day I open my classes up…” —Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch.

The monopoly on education held by public schools in Connecticut may be starting to crack. One brave mayor has decided to buck the hydra-like education establishment and advocate for school choice, risking his political skin on behalf of needy urban students. And if he succeeds, it may portend the beginning of the end of the union's stranglehold in the education community.

Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch believes that the Connecticut Supreme Court will rule that Connecticut's schools are separate and unequal, that they discriminate against blacks and Puerto Ricans—and that the solution for this is school choice.

The Mayor shocked the education and political establishment of the state with his statements in favor of what is usually too often portrayed as a conservative issue. “I think we need public school choice in the cities,” Finch said. “I wasn't planning on this being my coming-out party, but I believe, certainly, in public school choice for all the troubled cities. We have to strengthen and increase our charters. We have to work with the private schools.”

Flying in the face of NEA-union dogma, the Mayor pointed out that the urban students could attend private schools for a “fraction” of the cost of sending them to public schools. He noted that the public schools are overcrowded, that the private schools are not, and that both would benefit from an arrangement if students had a choice to attend private or parochial schools.

Needless to say, Finch won't have an easy row to hoe. In Connecticut, public education advocates have dominated the state legislature for decades. To them, deeply in thrall to the NEA, school choice is an anathema, routinely condemned as a threat to the public education establishment. And, in fact, it is. But that is because public education, dominated by union dictates, invariably skyrockets the cost of education, while protecting inferior teachers, and lowering academic standards.

Mr. Finch has evidently caught on to the deterioration of the system. But he has an uphill battle. And he will need aid. The public teachers unions, with a boot on the throats of state legislatures across the country, have guaranteed tenure and other benefits that have produced a culture of “clock-watchers” wholly unaccountable for failing students. Moreover, they are a potent political force in state and local elections, and Mr. Finch will undoubtedly find himself in the crosshairs of the Connecticut education establishment. He may also find himself subject to a political challenge when he next comes up for election.

And what of the students and parents, who presently cannot afford private schools? At present, law does not permit them to dedicate the money they pay in taxes to private or parochial schools, whether through vouchers or tax credits. They therefore have no choice but to continue sending their kids to the failing public schools.

Mr. Finch is adamant about helping the students. And he believes the out-of-control costs of public education are to blame. “We're going to have to figure out, all together, how to work to fund this problem… I perpetuate the creation of an underclass every day I open my classes up because I can't catch up. I can't get my kids to catch up.” It is this that the Bridgeport Mayor views as the injustice. As well he should. But to help the children he must first slay the multi-headed hydra that is the NEA-union establishment.

SOURCE




Routine violence in British schools

Teachers in fear of violence ‘are paying for body armour’, vaccinations

Teachers in some special schools have been forced to have vaccinations before going into the classroom and to wear the kind of armguards used by police-dog trainers — both of which they had to pay for themselves — it was claimed yesterday. They are being bitten, kicked and punched daily and left with debilitating injuries, the NASUWT teaching union conference in Bournemouth was told.

Special schools, struggling to cope with restricted budgets, are refusing to provide staff with the right equipment or training. Teachers are asking their doctors for preventive injections against tetanus and hepatitis B, which have cost some up to £80.

More than 20,000 teachers and 30,000 support staff work at schools for children with behavioural or learning difficulties or at pupil referral units for children repeatedly excluded from mainstream schools.

The union voted to challenge the view of some parents and heads that being assaulted and being the subject of complaints and allegations was part of the job. It will now conduct research into assaults and abuse. Suzanne Nantcurvis, who proposed the motion, said: “I sat in the staff room of a special school listening to teachers nonchalantly talking about the number of times they had been assaulted, their daily experience of being kicked and bitten and their visits to the hospital outpatients department.” The most common forms of assault are punching, kicking and biting. Our members question the method of restraint in use because of its effectiveness, especially with older, bigger and stronger pupils.

“Access to training is needed each year. The training is expensive and, where budgets are cut to the bone, the costs may prohibit all members of staff from attending. “I know of members buying their own arm guards. Due to the nature of the assaults they face, often teachers in special schools have to have vaccines such as tetanus and hepatitis B. For some colleagues this has come at a personal cost of around £80.”

Mark Perry, a teacher from Flintshire, told delegates he had been bitten so hard that blood was drawn through his shirt. A pupil had scratched his face, leaving marks on his eyelids. “I have been punched and kicked on numerous occasions and suffered a flying kick from behind . . . which did lots of damage to my back.” Mr Perry said that he had also been subjected to false allegations, which caused harm, torture and pain.

Geoff Branner, of the union’s executive, said that one teacher he knew had her arm broken by a teenager who punched and kicked her; another had a student jump on her back, push her to the floor, put her in a headlock and punch her in the face. The first teacher said that she wanted the pupil reported to the police, but was told that the head was shocked by her response and believed that it was part of her job.

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Louisiana State: A crooked university

LSU ouster of Ivor van Heerden removes most honest appraiser of city's levee failures

Ugly doesn't change, even when you see it coming. Neither does stupid. I'm talking about the decision by LSU to fire Ivor van Heerden, the head of the LSU Hurricane Center who earned world-wide renown for his work before and after Hurricane Katrina. This move had been rumored and threatened almost since van Heerden began his post-storm work, but it was no less repulsive for its inevitability.

As someone who covered that story, I always thought the state should be rewarding van Heerden, not chasing him away, because metro area residents -- indeed, citizens of any U.S. community currently relying on federal levees to keep them safe -- owe Van Heerden a huge debt.

Here's why. In the days immediately after Katrina, the world thought New Orleans had been ravaged by a huge storm simply too large for the high-tech flood protection system built at great cost by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And according to some members of Congress and many media commentators, that's just what we deserved for living here, below sea level. In fact, that was the official story being put out by the corps.

But about a week after the storm, as van Heerden and engineers on his staff began inspecting the deadly breaches in that system, the story began to change. They were expecting to see evidence of over-topping, signs Katrina was just too big for the system, the very scenario the center had predicted the day before the storm came ashore.

What they found was something else: Signs of catastrophic engineering failures. In other words, the floodwalls and levees failed not because they were too small, but because they had been either poorly designed, poorly built -- or both.

The world's media immediately gravitated to van Heerden not just because this was shocking news, but also because it came from a hurricane expert with a staff of geotechnical engineers qualified in the science of flood protection. And he was the only person from this area even talking about the issue.

Incredibly, the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans -- the two political entities most grievously damaged by the disaster -- showed no inclination to launch their own investigations. They were content to leave the examination of the tragedy to the same outfit that built the system in the first place: the Corps of Engineers.

Thankfully, van Heerden wouldn't let this happen. He put together a group of engineers and scientists from LSU and the private sector and convinced the state attorney general and the Department of Transportation and Development to give "Team Louisiana" official status.

You'd think the university would take pride in one of its own leading such important work. Just the opposite happened.

From the start, van Heerden was pressured by LSU administrators to go easy. At one point he was issued a gag order. It seemed the more problems Team Louisiana uncovered, the more intense the sniping from Baton Rouge.

Some of that was due to classic campus politics: jealousies, rivalries and professional disputes. Some of it was self-inflicted; even van Heerden's admirers admitted he could be difficult to work with, due to an often uncompromising style and a penchant for going public with results before final drafts were approved.

But van Heerden's real danger to LSU was his threat to funding. The federal government is the largest source of research funding for universities, and LSU was lining up tens of millions of dollars for coastal and wetlands work -- much of which might be partnered with the corps. Having one of its professors lobbing bombs at the feds made some at the university fear for the LSU pocketbook.

That's why members of Team Louisiana, as well as researchers from other universities, were warned to shut up or risk their careers. Fortunately for all of us they decided their ethics -- as professors, engineers and citizens -- compelled them to continue to work for the public good.

Anyone who thinks I'm overstating the case need only look at the Interagency Performance Review Task Force Report, the corps' official explanation of what happened during Katrina. After spending $20 million over eight months, the first page of the report states it found "no evidence of government or contractor negligence or malfeasance."

Please. How about ignoring information that the structures they were building were as much as two feet lower than claimed? Or skipping over alerts that its storm modeling was outdated? Or failing to inspect projects as required by law? Or a mandatory review process that was so sloppy, it missed obvious mistakes by subcontractors?

And how about this verdict: If the project has been built properly, some of the flooding would not have occurred, and much of the rest would have been reduced to the point of nuisance instead of disaster. That's just the start of a very long list.

Team Louisiana pointed the way to early exposure of these mistakes and many more. Van Heerden was the only Louisiana official to speak on the record, and loudly. If he hadn't persisted, who knows what the corps would have failed to find out, or how much more dangerous our lives would be today.

Now, rather than build on that very significant accomplishment, LSU has decided to clean out those who made it happens. That's ugly and stupid.

SOURCE

Update: Comment below received from a La resident:

This author just gets a lot of the levee issue just plain wrong:

1 No way Ven Heerden was original in his criticism. NOLA and other sources have been beating this drum for years - that there were serious design and maintenance issues.

2 Much of the "design flaws" were from many years ago, and local, state, and federal officials didn't fix the system for a number of reasons, including cost.

3 "Inside" sources tell me that Levee Board was much more guilty than th Corps - Federal money for maintainence was diverted to building roads and casinos.

4 Proposed project years ago for Category 4 protection was rejected because those with lakefront property didn't want their views obstructed by higher levees.

5 As I recall Van Heerden was a darling of the Press because he trashed the Corps - fitting in with the Left's trashing of everything Federal while Bush was President, and giving the mostly Democratic City and Governor a pass.

And this author is a part of the problem. Wanting to blame it all on the Corps.





17 April, 2009

"Educators" hate testing

Because it shows the ineffectiveness of their methods

One of Britain's leading experts on school testing and assessment delivers a scathing attack on national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds today. Professor Peter Tymms warns that they are having "a serious negative impact on the education system" and should be scrapped. They mislead parents as to the performance of their children's schools, he said.

Professor Tymms's intervention comes as the National Union of Teachers prepares to vote on balloting its members to boycott tests in English, maths and science to pressure ministers to drop the tests entirely. The vote will take place at the union's annual conference in Cardiff tomorrow.

"The main problem with key stage two [11-year-olds] tests is their publication in league tables. This is having a serious negative impact on the education system," said Professor Tymms, who is the director of the Curriculum and Evaluation Management Centre at Durham University. "Parents can judge schools based on the league tables which do not portray an accurate picture of the quality of the teaching or pupils' progress over time. Neither do they give a rounded picture of a school's success."

Secondary school heads have also argued that so much coaching goes on for the tests that the results do not give an accurate reflection of children's ability. Most schools re-test the pupils when they start secondary school.

Professor Tymms, who has written several books on assessment, suggests that a random sample of pupils should be tested every year to give an accurate guide to the Department for Children, Schools and Families as to how national standards are progressing. The system used to be in operation two decades ago and the pilot always mirrored the make-up of the population in the country. Over time, with a different selection of pupils, it also gave individual schools an idea of how they were achieving.

Professor Tymms said: "We do need assessment at a high level to monitor standards across the land and the best way to achieve that is by using a sampling approach. "Schools should monitor pupils' success with objective measures which do not have to be statutory tests."

Tomorrow's NUT vote will be followed by a similar vote for a boycott at the National Association of Head Teachers' annual conference in May – which would be the first time the heads have had a ballot on industrial action. The other two big teachers' unions, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, have cautioned against a boycott – arguing there should be continued dialogue with ministers over changes to the present system.

Speaking at the ATL conference in Liverpool yesterday, Michael Gove, the shadow Education Secretary, said: "It is not good enough to just say that the current system sucks. Some form of accountable testing which allows useful comparisons between schools to be drawn is necessary."

An expert group set up by the Government to look at testing and assessment in the wake of last summer's marking fiasco, when thousands of results were delivered late, is expected to report next month.

SOURCE




British justice: Teenager who shot teacher in the face is suspended for just 15 days

A teenager who shot a teacher in the face with a pellet gun has been given a 15-day suspension as punishment. The female English teacher was hit after she approached the 15-year-old in the school corridor. The local authority said the pellet gun was not fired maliciously and the teacher, named as Miss Atkins, was not seriously hurt by the pellet. But she is said to be so distressed she is leaving the school this summer.

The short-term suspension has caused uproar among parents at Beal High School in Ilford, Essex. Many are furious the pupil, understood to be the son of a teaching assistant, will be allowed to return after the Easter holidays.

The incident happened as the teacher approached a small group of pupils who had gathered in a corridor between lessons. A 14-year-old pupil who was in a classroom next to the shooting said: 'Someone came running into our lesson and said this teacher was shot. He said a group of pupils were playing with a toy gun, and were aiming for someone else, but it hit the teacher in the face. 'The teacher was very upset, she cried and cried.'

The Year 10 pupil will return to school after Easter. His classmates who helped conceal the pellet gun were given brief suspensions and have already returned to school.

Meanwhile Miss Atkins, who returned to work days later, is 'extremely upset' by the incident on March 17. She only started teaching at the comprehensive in September, but has told the school she will leave this summer and already has another job lined up.

One parent, who did not want to be named, said: 'It was very lucky the teacher was not badly hurt. The lad should have been expelled - not just suspended.' Iqbal Pnag, 44, who has two children at Beal High School, said: 'It is surprising that he is being allowed to return to school. To suspend him for three weeks is nothing. He shouldn't be allowed to come back.'

Last night John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said any children who use physical violence against teachers should be expelled. He said: 'There have to be very clear lines over which children must not tread. Violence on teachers should lead in the vast majority of cases to exclusion. 'That message is very important, not only to the child involved, but for other children at the school.'

Last night Redbridge Council defended the actions taken by the school over the 'isolated incident'. A spokesman said: 'This was not a malicious act, however the behaviour was wrong and potentially dangerous. 'The school took the matter extremely seriously and carried out a thorough investigation immediately which involved talking to a number of pupils involved and some parents. 'The pupils involved have since expressed remorse for their actions and apologised to the teacher concerned. All of the pupils involved have received or will be receiving fixed term exclusions and one pupil was excluded from the school for 15 days.'

The Met Police said they were aware of the incident, but did not attend the school when it happened.

SOURCE




Professor Defends terrorist Bill Ayers

Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor at the Northeastern University School of Journalism in Boston who writes for the British Guardian, has been caught spreading falsehoods about communist terrorist Bill Ayers. Yet, he refuses to correct the record, promising that he will one day "surprise" people with the truth about Bill Ayers and his connections to two Weather Underground members involved in the murder of a Boston police officer.

To borrow a phrase from Mark Thompson, a student parent who recently confronted Ayers at one of his propaganda sessions on the University of Illinois campus, Kennedy has revealed himself to be an "Ayer Head."

Specifically, Kennedy is defending Ayers against charges that members of his organization, Katherine Ann Power and Susan Edith Saxe, were convicted of involvement in a bank robbery and the murder of Boston Police Officer Walter A. Schroeder in 1970.

But a 1975 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee report and former top FBI official Oliver "Buck" Revell say that Power and Saxe were regarded by law enforcement authorities as members of the Weather Underground. An FBI document on the official FBI website explicitly identifies Power as a Weather Underground member.

Echoing Ayers, Kennedy claims that Ayers has been unfairly "demonized" and insists that, other than blowing up a bomb that killed three of their own members, the Weather Underground "radicals" never "killed nor injured anyone." This is a monstrous lie worse than his deceptions about Power and Saxe.

Murder Spree

Weather Underground members Power and Saxe were not only involved in the murder of Schroeder and served prison time for it but Ayers himself told an FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, that his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, had personally planted the bomb that killed San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970. This case is still open and evidence is being gathered and analyzed.

What's more, the Weather Underground spin-off, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), murdered black educator Marcus Foster and bank customer Myrna Opsahl during a robbery and also blew up police cars in an effort to kill police officers. SLA member Sara Jane Olson was recently released from prison.

Another Weather Underground off-shoot, the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, which included members of the Black Liberation Army, conducted the 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Dohrn spent 8 months in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury about what she knew about the case.

Ayers and Dohrn signed the notorious "Prairie Fire" manifesto praising the BLA and the SLA as "leading forces in the development of the armed struggle." This manifesto included a dedication to Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. A Weather Underground statement dated February 20, 1974, and signed by Dohrn had praised the SLA, which also kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, for raising "everyone's consciousness" about "the war between the rich and the poor."

Weather Underground members operated under a variety of names, including Red Guerrilla Resistance, Armed Resistance Unit, New World Liberation Front, and United Freedom Front.

It defies common sense and Journalism 101 for Kennedy to try to separate the Weather Underground and its leaders from their various cells or spin-offs.

Kennedy's bizarre comments have been thrust into the spotlight because Ayers had been scheduled to speak at Boston College. When Boston-based radio talk-show host (96.9 FM, WTKK) and Boston Herald columnist Michael Graham found out about it, he raised an outcry and sparked protests. Graham highlighted the fact that Katherine Ann Power, convicted in the 1970 bank robbery and murder of Officer Schroeder, was identified by the FBI as a member of the Weather Underground. As a result of the protests, Ayers' speech on campus was cancelled.

Considering the nature of the Schroeder murder, it's not surprising that Ayers and Dohrn and their followers would try to distance themselves from it. Schroeder, who was survived by a wife and nine children, was shot in the back three times.

No Facts

Kennedy, who also writes for the Boston Phoenix and is a regular panelist on "Beat the Press" on public television station WGBH, has been adamant on his Media Nation blog that "Katherine Ann Power had no connection to the Weather Underground" and that "I have searched far and wide on several occasions, and I can find no evidence that anyone has ever linked Power or Saxe to the Weather Underground?including the FBI." He based his conclusions on some Google and Amazon.com searches and a look at a heavily redacted FBI document on the Weather Underground posted on the Web.

Graham countered: "For the nitwits out there (including some moron who claims to teach at Northeastern University) who keep trying to argue that the murder of Officer Schroeder was unrelated to Ayers' Weather Underground, check out what the actual FBI has to say on the subject." This is a link to the FBI item about the Weather Underground that included a photo showing "Weather Underground members Bernardine Rae Dohrn and Katherine Ann Power."

Incredibly, Kennedy's response was that the FBI had erred. "Based on what I've found so far," he said, "I think someone in the FBI communications department made a mistake."

This is a classic response from someone who doesn't want to acknowledge that he is wrong. It is terrible for a journalist, let alone a journalism professor, to have such an attitude.

It turns out that the FBI listed Katherine Ann Power and Susan Edith Saxe as members of the Weather Underground for the basic reason that they were considered members of the group.

One authority on this matter is Oliver "Buck" Revell, who retired as FBI Agent in Charge (SAC) in Dallas, Texas, but had risen to the position of Associate Deputy Director in Charge of Investigations, with jurisdiction over all FBI operations. He was involved in the search for Power and Saxe after their involvement in the murder of Schroeder.

He told AIM that the FBI considered Power and Saxe to be members of the Weather Underground but involved in a "spin-off" that he called the United Freedom Front (UFF). "They had been associated with the Weather Underground," he said. "All the UFF members were essentially a cell associated with the Weather Underground." "We talked to a lot of people that had Weather Underground connections in trying to trace them [Power and Saxe] down and track them down," he added. "They generally hung around college campuses where the Weather Underground was active. They were connected."

Saxe was captured in 1975 and served seven years in prison, while Power surrendered to authorities in 1993, went to prison, and was released in 1999.

Ignorant of the Facts

In an interview with AIM, Kennedy admitted he was unfamiliar with a 1975 report on the Weather Underground from the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security which identified Power and Saxe as members of the Weather Underground who went on the FBI's "Most Wanted List." You can find the report (PDF) here and the reference on page 36. On Page 33 you can find a reference to Power and Saxe being members of the "Weatherman group." The Weatherman became the Weather Underground. Page 92 of the report noted that Power attended Brandeis University and was described by a confidential informant as a member of a "small Weatherman group" there. An October 5, 1970, report in Time magazine said Power was seen attending rallies of the SDS, the forerunner of the Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Saxe also attended Brandeis and roomed with Power.

Veteran Congressional investigator Herbert Romerstein, who just completed a major report on the Weather Underground, makes the basic point that the Weather Underground did not issue membership cards for obvious reasons. This was a secret communist organization, some of whose members were trained in Cuba, which operated in cells, spin-offs, sections, fronts, or "collectives."

The Weather Underground provided the leadership rather than establishing a membership organization, Romerstein points out. He explains, "They encouraged others to go out and commit acts of violence. People who committed these acts of violence on behalf of the Weather Underground were considered members of the Weather Underground." Such was the case with Power, Saxe and their gang....

The facts of the case are obvious to anybody who takes the time to do some basic research. But Kennedy is so determined to defend Ayers that he is willing to ignore essential facts about how the Weather Underground operated through cells and fronts. This is the mark of a left-wing ideologue determined to rehabilitate Ayers, not a journalist or journalism professor.

More here





16 April, 2009

The School that runs Britain: An old boy explains why Eton is suddenly cool

When the producers of the acclaimed TV cop show The Wire were looking for an actor to play tough, Irish-American detective Jimmy McNulty, they cast an Old Etonian, Dominic West. When Steven Spielberg, the man behind the classic World War II mini-series Band Of Brothers, was looking for a star to convey the strength, leadership and decency of Major Richard Wynters, a true-life U.S. hero, he chose an Old Etonian, Damian Lewis. And when the time came to find a man to play the grouchy, tortured but brilliant Dr Gregory House in the hit U.S. medical drama House, the role went to Hugh Laurie who is, I need hardly say, an Old Etonian.

They're everywhere these days, the products of Britain's most famous, most powerful public school. Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is one. Next year, we may well see the election of the 19th Old Etonian Prime Minister, as David Cameron follows in a line that includes Wellington, Gladstone and Macmillan. And, in due course, the nation will crown its first Etonian monarch as Prince William ascends to the throne.

For centuries, Etonians have wielded huge influence in high society. But, as the old Establishment collapsed in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, it seemed their influence was waning. The aristocracy lost their seats in the House of Lords. The Tory Party produced three successive state-educated PMs in Heath, Thatcher and Major. High finance exchanged the gentleman's club and the old school tie for international meritocracy. And for the past dozen years, the New Labour Government has been obsessed with modernity and anti-elitism.

Old Etonians should have become an irrelevance. Yet they're more powerful, more pervasive than ever. And their influence reaches into the most unlikely aspects of our lives. The country's biggest clubbing and dance-music business, Ministry Of Sound; one of our most successful fashion catalogues, Boden; the lastminute.com travel website; the White Cube gallery that nurtured Brit Art - all were founded by Old Etonians.

So what is the secret of the school's success? Well, one clue comes from the fact that we - for I am an OE myself - don't ever call it Eton. I was there from 1972 until 1976, and to us it has always been just 'school'. Even those of us who have decidedly mixed feelings about the place regard it as unique and, frankly, superior to anywhere else. So it's 'school' because, to Old Etonians, there is only one that counts. But it's also 'school' because you wouldn't necessarily want to say the word 'Eton' out loud. It's a name that has long carried connotations of grotesque privilege, chinless wonders and arrogant young men who deserve a good hiding.

This notion that Etonians are all idiotic twits is the first mistake the school's enemies make. In fact, Eton is a ruthlessly efficient machine for producing tough, super-confident, often arrogant young men who are geared for success and absolutely certain that they can get it.

It begins with the standard of teaching, and the level of expectation imposed on the 1,300 boys by their 135 teachers or 'beaks'. There is no nonsense at Eton about the need to make the little darlings feel good about themselves. Boys are tested weekly and examined every term. Results are public. Any drop in standards results in a summons to your housemaster.

In every sphere of the school's activities, competition is unrelenting. Outside the classroom, the opportunities are endless. If you want to act, the school has a fully equipped 400-seat theatre as good as many a provincial town, and better than most. If you want to row, it owns the 2,000m lake on which the 2012 Olympic rowing regatta will be held.

Above all, it instills the confidence that there is no aspiration so great that an Etonian cannot fulfil it.

I always wanted to be a writer. I soon discovered that James Bond was created by an Old Etonian. So was 1984 and Brave New World. I dreamed of following in the footsteps of Fleming, Orwell and Huxley. My contemporaries also had big ambitions - and most of them achieved them. Hugh Laurie, Conde Nast managing director Nicholas Coleridge, the writer and satirist Craig Brown, former Telegraph editor Charles Moore are but a few.

Eton is a very big, tough, demanding place. You have to learn to stand on your own two feet and hold your own in any circumstances. Try being 13 years old and walking through Windsor, the nearest town, wearing a tailcoat and stiff collar, while all the locals stare at you and the tourists frantically take photographs. After that, any other form of public appearance is a doddle. But why are those qualities coming to the fore again?

Well, for a start, 40 years of Labour's anti-grammar school bigotry have drastically reduced the competition. Fifty years ago, bright, working-class children could get something close to an Eton education for free. Now they're all, unforgivably, lost to bog-standard mediocrity and the field is that much clearer.

Plus, Etonians are adaptable. Look at all those actors hiding behind American accents on Hollywood TV shows. Look at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall playing the posh peasant down at River Cottage.

In my day, OEs were more stereotypical Hooray Henrys, much more likely to wear lurid cords and striped shirts, and speak with braying accents. Now they're much better camouflaged. The massive PR boost given by Charles and Diana's decision to send their sons to Eton also helped. So, too, did the prosperity, however bogus, of the past decade.

When people feel well-off, they are much less inclined to resent the wealth of others. But, above all, I think, Etonians owe a massive debt of gratitude to Tony Blair. His underlings may have been rabid egalitarians, but Blair was patently public school. Whatever one may think of his politics, Blair made it OK to be pleasantly posh; he was smart but not off-putting. That kind of easy-going, relaxed charm, however insincere, is right up an Old Etonian's street.

Now that times are hard, and Blair has been replaced by the dour, bitterly class-conscious Brown, you might think Old Etonians will have a tougher time again. But we still have the Cameron card to play. And even if Dave makes an utter hash at No.10, it won't make much difference in the long run. Old Etonians are like cockroaches. They will survive.

SOURCE




Revolving door' for British pupils who misbehave

The number of pupils suspended more than ten times a year has almost tripled in the past four years. Figures indicate that there is now a "revolving door" for the worst behaved, who bounce in and out of school instead of being expelled.

Last year at least 867 pupils were suspended more than ten times each, compared with 310 in 2003-04. The figures, obtained by the Tories under the Freedom of Information Act, from 125 out of 152 councils asked, suggest that up to 1,000 pupils were suspended more than ten times last year.

Ministers' attempts to lower the number of permanent exclusions have forced heads to keep pupils who would have been expelled. Between 1997 and 2007 expulsions fell from 12,300 to 8,600, but this decrease has been matched by an increase in the proportion being suspended numerous times.

Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, said: "Teachers want these pupils out of their classroom so other children can learn. Suspending a child over and over again does them no good at all."

Sir Alan Steer will today publish a report calling for traditional methods of discipline such as detentions and suspensions and for more use of parenting contracts for mothers and fathers failing to keep children in line.

SOURCE




The fundamental dishonesty of Arne Duncan

Why won't the Department of Education stand up for D.C. school vouchers?

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is "good for the kids." Well then, one wonders, why did his Department of Education bury a politically inconvenient study regarding education reform? And why, now that the evidence is public, does the administration continue to ignore it and allow reform to be killed?

When Congress effectively shut down the Washington, D.C., voucher program last month, snatching $7,500 Opportunity Scholarship vouchers from disadvantaged kids, it failed to conduct substantive debate (as is rapidly becoming tradition).

Then The Wall Street Journal's editorial board reported that the Department of Education had buried a study that illustrated unquestionable and pervasive improvement among kids who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn't. The Department of Education not only disregarded the report but also issued a gag order on any discussion about it. Is this what Duncan meant by following the evidence?

When I had the chance to ask Duncan -at a meeting of The Denver Post's editorial board Tuesday- whether he was alerted to this study before Congress eradicated the D.C. program, he offered an unequivocal "no." He then called the Journal editorial "fundamentally dishonest" and maintained that no one had even tried to contact him -despite the newspaper's contention that it did, repeatedly. When I called The Wall Street Journal, I discovered a different -that is, meticulously sourced and exceedingly convincing- story, including documented e-mail conversations between the author and higher-ups at his office.

The voucher study, which showed progress compounding yearly, had been around since November, and its existence is mandated by law. So at best, Duncan was willfully ignorant.

But the most "fundamentally dishonest" aspect of the affair was Duncan's feeble argument against the program. First, he strongly intimated that because only 1 percent of children were able to "escape" (and boy, that's some admission) from D.C. public schools through this program, it was not worth saving.

So, you may ask, why not allow the 1 percent to turn into 2 percent or 10 percent instead of scrapping the program? After all, only moments later, Duncan claimed that there was no magic reform bullet and that it would take a multitude of innovations to fix education.

Then Duncan, after trashing the scholarship program and study, emphasized that he was opposed to "pulling kids out of a program" in which they were "learning." Jeez. If they're learning in this program, why kill it? And if the program was insignificant, as Duncan claimed, why keep these kids in it? Are these students worse off? Or are they just inconveniencing the rich kids?

Duncan can't be honest, of course. Not when it's about politics and payback to unions who are about as interested in reforming education as teenagers are in calculus.

Politicians say a lot of things, but to glean any insight, we need only examine the decisions they make in their own lives. President Barack Obama sent his children to a private school in Chicago rather than entrust their education to then-CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan. He's not alone.

And this is just another example of how the Democrats who killed this scholarship program, specifically designed for disadvantaged kids, are so deeply hypocritical and dishonest. Ask the two kids who attend Sidwell Friends School, home to Obama's children, on vouchers. Their escape from failing schools is about to be cut off by a complicit administration.

"A lot of folks will give you a million reasons to why things can't change," claims the secretary of education. It's true. And one of the leading disseminators of pitiable excuses is Arne Duncan.

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15 April, 2009

British Nursery pupils' education 'damaged' by the 300 tick-box targets they have to reach by age of five

Children's development is being damaged by a 'nappy curriculum' which judges them against 300 tick-box targets by the age of five, teachers' leaders warned yesterday. The curriculum, which was introduced last September for all 25,000 private and state nurseries and 70,000 childminders, sets out hundreds of developmental milestones between birth and primary school. In one example, babies from birth to 11 months are marked if they have shown they have 'communicated' by crying, gurgling, babbling or squealing.

But the National Union of Teachers has warned that the requirement on nursery staff to complete detailed 'assessment grids' is tying up time they should be spending with children.

Members also claim that the curriculum is simply a box-ticking exercise with an over-emphasis on paperwork and assessment, and that it is too rigid and formal for many youngsters. Inbar Tamari, a nursery teacher from Hackney, East London, said: 'I soon discovered in the time I had there was no way I could tick all the boxes in the foundation stage profile with my play-based observations, and each time I had to resort to less than child-friendly, though quicker, methods. 'Not everything can be measured, not everything can be numbered. Measuring plants won't make them any taller.'

Speaking of one three-year-old child in her care, Jane Walton, a nursery teacher from Wakefield, in Yorkshire, said: 'I'm supposed to be observing her and all these little boxes I'm supposed to be ticking off, so I couldn't intervene with her play, I couldn't engage her or move her on because I was too busy ticking her. 'I want somebody to trust my professional judgment. It doesn't tell us any more about those children I am teaching.' And in a plea to Children's Secretary Ed Balls, she added: 'Perhaps we should set you a target when you were born and it would be "leave education alone" Mr Balls.'

Their complaints are the latest in a series of concerns levelled at the curriculum. Ministers have already ordered a review of standards in early writing targets amid fears they could be too stretching. One requires five-year-olds to begin writing sentences using punctuation.

NUT delegates yesterday passed a motion condemning 'the demands made on members to complete paper-based assessments in early years, including assessment grids including up to 300 tick boxes per child'. The motion added: 'High quality early education should not be limited to a narrow focus on academic standards and targets should be concerned with the education, in the broadest sense, of the whole child and, in particular, with active participation, experiential learning and play.'

EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE - EXTRACTS

? Birth to 11 months: Communicate in a variety of ways, including by crying, gurgling, babbling and squealing

? Eight to 20 months: Begin to make marks, for example with a rusk on a feeding tray

? 16 to 26 months: Say some counting words randomly

? 22 to 26 months: Understand the numbers one and two and use number language such as 'more' and 'a lot'

? 30 to 50 months: Sing a few simple, familiar songs, draw lines and circles

? 40 to 60 months: Write their own names and under things such as labels and captions and begin to form simple sentences sometimes using punctuation

SOURCE




Texas Christian University to Offer Separate Housing for homosexuals

This hardly conveys the Biblical message that homosexuality is abhorrent to God

Eight students have signed up for Texas Christian University's designated on-campus housing for gay students and their supporters, in what may be the only such college housing in North Texas. The DiversCity Q community will open in the fall in a section of the Tom Brown-Pete Wright apartments. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender students and allies — heterosexual classmates who support them — will have the chance to live together, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in a story posted Tuesday on its Web site. "It's a chance for students to be part of a unique experience," said David Cooper, TCU associate director for residential life.

TCU sophomore Shelly Newkirk, who is gay, applied to create the program. She said eight students have committed to live in the apartments. "Well I've been trying to create a safe space on campus for the queer community," Newkirk said Tuesday in an interview with Dallas-Fort Worth television station KDFW. "We're not creating just like a bubble for ourselves, but creating a space where we can have open dialogue and students can be comfortable."

TCU will also open two Christian-based living groups, another for fine arts and three other themed housing arrangements. It's all part of the university's living-learning communities, designed for students who want to live with others who are like-minded. Living-learning communities are common at universities in Denton and Tarrant counties, but none has an on-campus living program for gay students. A fraternity for gay and straight students opened in 1998 at the University of North Texas but had closed by 2001, University of North Texas spokeswoman Sarah Bahari said.

Neither Cooper nor Newkirk had received any criticism, they said. "Surprisingly, I found nothing but support," said Newkirk. She said she was prepared for criticism. "Sometimes those things can bring a community together," she said. "It doesn't have to tear us apart."

SOURCE




Sebastien Clerc's common sense crusade to improve French education

Sébastien Clerc left teacher training college with a good knowledge of 18th-century literature and 19th-century history, but he had almost no idea how to cope with the violent, rebellious teenagers he met in his first job. He was posted to a secondary school near Paris teetering on the edge of anarchy amid gangland battles and classroom insurrection. “I was on my knees” within a few weeks, he said.

Now the frail-looking 33-year-old is fighting back with a campaign to restore authority in the suburban lycees that are in the front line of social and economic breakdown in France. His recipe — be firm but fair, keep troublemakers apart, never let misdemeanours go unpunished — draws heavily on common sense. But it represents an historic U-turn for a nation that has traditionally taken a high-flown attitude to education. “In France, we like the theoretical approach because it seems more noble,” Mr Clerc told The Times. “But when it comes to getting a class to obey you, there is no one theory which holds sway — just a series of pragmatic steps you can take. As a result, it has been ignored altogether here.”

He wrote a book, Au Secours! Sauvons Notre Ecole (Help! Save Our School), in which he detailed the insults to which he was subjected and urged tougher discipline in response. The work proved so successful, and met with such an echo among his disgruntled colleagues, that officials have asked him to organise a course on classroom control for young teachers.

In teacher training college, for example, Mr Clerc was lauded for his dissertation on the history of the French education system and for his study of Le Barbier de Séville by Beaumarchais, the 18th-century playwright. But no one told him what to do when a fight broke out between two pupils in one of his first lessons at Jean Moulin lycée in Blanc-Mesnil, north of Paris. Mr Clerc tried to break it up, but found himself confronted with a bigger, heavier teenager. “He rushes at me,” he wrote. “I lift my knee to cushion the shock. He slams into me . . . As I am struggling with him, his classmates get up and help me to bring him under control. I feel worn out, emptied.”

Worse was to follow the next day when he was called in by the head teacher to explain why he had kneed the pupil in the chest. “It was as though I had been responsible for the altercation. The pupil had lied with great skill . . . and my colleague really suspected me.”

Violence is common in the school, where at least 50 per cent of pupils are brought up by single parents, where about 85 per cent are from immigrant families, where drugs are common and where 90 per cent of teachers put in a request for a transfer to another establishment every year. In September last year staff at Jean Moulin went on strike to protest at what they said were daily fights. Hardly had they returned to work than a gang burst into the lycée wielding baseball bats in an attack on a rival group.

Equally draining is the constant chatter — highlighted in The Class, Laurent Cantet’s award-winning film about education in urban France — and the indignation of lycéens asked to keep quiet. “Oh, there’s no need to shout at me,” said one adolescent girl when Mr Clerc requested silence. “It’s perfectly possible to learn while chattering,” answered a second.

For a teacher keen to interest teenagers in such great French authors as Proust and Flaubert, it can be dispiriting. When Mr Clerc asked his pupils to write about a contemporary figure who they found noteworthy, for example, Paris Hilton came out top. Angelina Jolie was second.

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14 April, 2009

CONGRESSIONAL DEMS AND OBAMA BOW TO TEACHERS UNIONS, DEAL SETBACK TO WASHINGTON DC SCHOOL CHILDREN

The Washington Post's editors describe how Congressional Democrats together with the Obama adminstration are destroying the District of Columbia's school voucher program which, according to a new study, has achieved good results for students in the program. I can't improve on the Post's account of this shameful development, so I will simply reprint it:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has decided not to admit any new students to the D.C. voucher program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. The abrupt decision -- made a week after 200 families had been told that their children were being awarded scholarships for the coming fall -- comes despite a new study showing some initial good results for students in the program and before the Senate has had a chance to hold promised hearings. For all the talk about putting children first, it's clear that the special interests that have long opposed vouchers are getting their way.

Officials who manage the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program sent letters this week to parents notifying them that the scholarships of up to $7,500, were being rescinded because of the decision by the Education Department. Citing the political uncertainty surrounding vouchers, a spokesperson for Mr. Duncan told us that it is not in the best interest of students and their parents to enroll them in a program that may end a year from now. Congress conditioned funding beyond the 2009-10 school year on reauthorization by Congress and approval by the D.C. Council. By presuming the program dead -- and make no mistake, that's the insidious effect of his bar on new enrollment -- Mr. Duncan makes it even more difficult for the program to get the fair hearing it deserves.

That's not to mention the impact of the last-minute decision on these families. Many of the public charter schools already have cut off enrollments for the upcoming school year; the deadline for out-of-boundary transfers for the public schools has passed. No doubt Mr. Duncan is right about possible disruption for new students if the program were to end. But scholarship officials have been upfront with parents about the risks, and the decision really should be theirs. Let them decide whether they want to chance at least one year in a high-quality private school versus the crapshoot of D.C. public schools.

That, after all, is what this program is about: giving poor families the choice that others, with higher salaries and more resources, take for granted. It's a choice President Obama made when he enrolled his two children in the elite Sidwell Friends School. It's a choice Mr. Duncan had when, after looking at the D.C. schools, he ended up buying a house in Arlington, where good schools are assumed. And it's a choice taken away this week from LaTasha Bennett, a single mother who had planned to start her daughter in the same private school that her son attends and where he is excelling. Her desperation is heartbreaking as she talks about her daughter not getting the same opportunities her son has and of the hardship of having to shuttle between two schools.

It's clear, though, from how the destruction of the program is being orchestrated, that issues such as parents' needs, student performance and program effectiveness don't matter next to the political demands of teachers' unions. Congressional Democrats who receive ample campaign contributions from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers laid the trap with budget language that placed the program on the block. And now comes Mr. Duncan with the sword.

SOURCE




Homosexual Day Of Silence

The Day of Silence, which is sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), fast approaches. This year it will take place in most public schools on April 17. On this day, thousands of public high schools and increasing numbers of middle schools will allow students to remain silent throughout an entire day-even during instructional time-to promote GLSEN's socio-political goals and its controversial, unproven, and destructive theories on the nature and morality of homosexuality.

Parents must actively oppose this hijacking of the classroom for political purposes. Please join the national effort to restore to public education a proper understanding of the role of government-subsidized schools. You can help de-politicize the learning environment by calling your child out of school if your child's school allows students to remain silent during instructional time on the Day of Silence.

Parents should no longer passively countenance the political usurpation of public school classrooms through student silence. If students will be permitted to remain silent, parents can express their opposition most effectively by calling their children out of school on the Day of Silence and sending letters of explanation to their administrators, their children’s teachers, and all school board members. One reason this is effective is that most school districts lose money for each student absence.

School administrators err when they allow the classroom to be disrupted and politicized by granting students permission to remain silent throughout an entire day.

SOURCE




Britain employing nightclub bouncers as teachers

Bouncers are being employed by schools to take classes when teachers are not available. One London school went to a doormen’s agency for “cover supervisors”, who watch over lessons when teachers are away, and gave jobs to two bouncers, one of whom is still at the school.

The National Union of Teachers conference in Cardiff heard that schools were advertising for cover supervisors with military or police experience. Andrew Baisley, a mathematics teacher at a secondary school in Camden, North London, told delegates that head teachers were hiring almost anyone provided they had been checked by the Criminal Records Bureau.

Cover supervisors hand out worksheets and make sure that children behave. They have no teacher training and work is normally set by a teacher who does not stay in the classroom. Mr Baisley said: “The idea is that it’s about crowd control and childminding. If they’re stern and loud, that’s what is necessary to do the job.” The wage, half that of supply teachers, was an incentive for supervisors to be used, he said.

In Birmingham an education recruitment agency posted an advert online saying: “Hard core cover supervisors needed now!” and offered £50 to £70 a day. It said: “Aspire People are on the hunt for dynamic, inspiring, hard core cover supervisors. You might be an ex-Marine, prison officer, bouncer, policeman, fireman, sportsman or actor. We need someone who thinks they can get involved in a school environment and control the kids in schools.”

Mr Baisley said: “I know of a school which went to an agency to employ bouncers. They were taken on as permanent members of staff. One ended up with a disciplinary issue within the first term. The bouncers were monitoring lessons. They were big guys who had no teaching experience.”

The school was a secondary in a “not particularly tough area”, he said. “Some adverts for cover supervisors ask for applicants with ex-military or police experience. I think there’s something questionable about thinking that is an appropriate skill for the classroom.”

Cover supervisors are paid up to £20,000 a year; experienced supply teachers earn twice as much. The NUT wants all classes to be taken by qualified teachers when the regular teacher is ill or away preparing for lessons. More cover supervisors are likely to be recruited after September, when rules barring schools from asking teachers to cover for colleagues other than in emergencies come into force.

One teacher discussing the issue on a web forum said that his former school had “full-time security on the corridors and on call for classroom and playground fights. These security were actually nightclub door staff, topping up their income with daytime hours — and believe me they were needed.”

Sarah McCarthy-Fry, the Schools Minister, said: “Heads should ensure that the people they employ have experience and training — and that checks are carried out. Cover supervision should only be a short-term solution. “Pupils should continue their learning through pre-prepared lessons and exercises supervised by support staff with appropriate skills and training. It is up to heads to determine systems for cover in their schools.”

The behaviour expert Sir Alan Steer, asked by the Government to examine behaviour in schools, is to report this week that disruptive children should be removed to “withdrawal rooms” and taught in isolation.

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13 April, 2009

Britain's ruling elite have put themselves in a class apart

They don't send their own kids to the sink schools they have created for "the masses"

It is easy to see why a cynical Tory leadership might have secretly wanted to destroy Britain's excellent grammar schools. Once selection by ability was abolished and replaced by comprehensives based on catchment areas, the best state schools would be in the wealthiest parts of town, and the Conservative-voting middle classes need no longer fear competition for scarce places from the bright children of poor homes. And so it has turned out, more or less.

But it is much harder to work out why Labour - supposedly the party of the working class --should have tried so hard and for so long to deprive the poor of good schools. If you can understand why this happened, then you can begin to grasp what has gone so wrong with British politics since the Second World War.

For the crisis in British state education is the direct result of the takeover of the Labour Party - once a working-class, Christian and socially conservative party - by dogmatic, well-off, middle-class cultural revolutionaries. They saw, and still see, education as the new nationalisation, their most effective weapon for levelling our society and forcing the rest of us - but not them - to be equal. It is their real Clause Four, the thing they will never give up. Those who have fooled themselves into thinking New Labour is really a conservative party should observe the dogged way that Labour never budges on this subject.

Modern British socialists - and modern British Tories - openly and actively support a school system that ensures the children of the rich and influential are privileged, while the offspring of the poor and weak are deprived. Why?

The evidence for all this is quite clear. The odd thing is that so few realise what it means. Since this is the system that we have, and since socialists do support it, and with some vigour, it is amazing that this question is not asked more often. All around us we see proof of it. We also have strong evidence that they know what they are doing. They pretend, when they must know they are fooling nobody, that they have not watered down the exam system to conceal the general drop in standards. And above all, they all try to avoid the schools they force on their voters. They usually do this through a variety of obvious fiddles. Sometimes they quite blatantly buy themselves out of the mess they have created. What they do not do is suffer the results of their own dogma.

This obvious, repeated hypocrisy is a reliable source of embarrassing scandals. But they are not like other scandals because, however many times they are exposed, the wrong is never put right. These events play for a little while in the Press, flare, flicker and die.

News is meant to shock, because it reveals a state of affairs that is plainly wrong. Normally, wrongdoing is in some way righted or at least expiated once it has been exposed. If it is the disclosure of a crime, the story usually ends with the trial and punishment of a culprit. If it is the revelation of an injustice, it generally ends in some sort of restitution. Fat cats are forced to ration their cream. Dirty hospitals are made to clean filthy lavatories and scrub bloodstained floors. Sordid broadcasters are forced off the air. The Monarchy, found to be privileged, is compelled to pay tax and to forgo much of its privilege and grandeur.

But if it is the exposure of socialist hypocrisy and privilege, there are no consequences. This hypocrisy is allowed.

Let us go through just some of the exposures of this kind. Back in the Sixties, prominent socialist politicians such as the Labour Lord and Minister C.P. Snow made no apologies about sending their children to Eton. Snow, himself a state-school product, said loftily that he 'didn't believe in cutting down the tall poppies'.

Nowadays it is slightly more complicated. Ruth Kelly, once in charge of forcing poor comprehensive schooling on others, while issuing massaged statistics to pretend it was good, was found to be sending one of her own children to a private school --on the grounds of 'special needs'. She tried tenaciously to prevent the news being published at all.

The Blairite Labour Cabinet Minister Paul Boateng got away with educating some of his children privately, perhaps because of his sparkling Left-wing credentials in other areas. Anthony Blair's friend Charles Falconer, forced to choose between educating his children privately and becoming a Labour MP, chose private education. But Mr Blair then made him a Lord, so allowing him to have a political career anyway.

Baroness Symons, another Labour Minister and former Leftwing trade unionist, quietly sent her son to an independent school. Diane Abbott, a militantly Leftist Labour backbencher, likewise sent her son to a private school. Astonishingly, she admitted that her action was 'indefensible' but went ahead with it anyway. Nothing has happened to her.

But for the more ambitious, other methods had to be used. It is simply impossible to find out how many Labour Ministers did as the Blairs did, and hired private tutors to coach their children through crucial exams. If nobody talks, the truth stays secret. But the general liberal elite method of obtaining a privileged and special education - while supporting egalitarian schooling for everyone else - appeared in many subtle and different ways.

Harriet Harman, a fierce upperclass radical married to Leftist union official Jack Dromey, managed to get one child (supposedly on the grounds of his religion) into the Oratory, a Roman Catholic secondary that is a grammar school in all but name. Soon afterwards, she got her second child into St Olave's, an openly selective grammar school (but not Catholic) far from her home. On this occasion, faith seemed to matter less.

Mr Blair himself, thanks to the Catholic faith of his wife, was able to escape bad local comprehensives and get his children into the Oratory, miles from his London home. This upset his Press secretary, Alastair Campbell. It also annoyed the pointedly unmarried mother of Mr Campbell's children, Fiona Millar. These fierce radicals were educated in selective grammar schools but are now passionate advocates of comprehensive schools. Miss Millar has publicly criticised Ms Harman over the St Olave's incident. Yet Mr Campbell and Miss Millar just so happen to live in the costly and very small catchment area of a group of London's most exceptional state schools, including two rare single-sex comprehensives. Others, too, just so happen to live in such desirable catchment areas.

To hope for a place at Camden School for Girls, you must dwell almost within sight of its gates. Local estate agents know to the yard where the catchment area begins and ends, and there is an agreeable gentrified square nearby, conveniently situated for middle-class buyers. It is not cheap to live there. Once again, it just so happens that, discontented with the state schooling available for their daughters elsewhere in London, the Blairite Pollster Philip Gould and his fashionable publisher wife Gail Rebuck moved to a property close to this excellent school - which is officially a nonselective comprehensive but has most of the features of an old-style girls' grammar school (with boys in the sixth form) and regularly gets plenty of pupils into Oxbridge. Nearby also live former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and her husband, the one-time communist, now a judge, Bill Birtles. Their daughter also attended Camden Girls.

Another prominent Labour MP, Jon Cruddas, was recently found to have used his parliamentary allowance to buy a second home in Notting Hill, which just so happens to be in the catchment area of the superb - and exceptional - Cardinal Vaughan Roman Catholic state school. I think we can be sure there are many others who happen to have made similar housing choices, but we have not heard about them yet.

Since David Cameron's Conservatives finally stopped pretending to defend grammar schools and accepted the egalitarian agenda of New Labour, Tory politicians have been going through similar contortions. Mr Cameron's wife Samantha has been working busily on the parish magazine of a fashionable West London church. So has Sarah Vine, the journalist wife of Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove. It just so happens that attached to this church is one of London's very best Anglican primary schools, and that a little Cameron and a little Gove just so happen to have won rare places there: three children apply for every one.

This sort of secret privilege is standard procedure in countries where socialism is in power, and the most blatant example of George Orwell's deadly accurate satirical comment in Animal Farm that all are equal but some are more equal than others.

In communist Moscow, those with Red Power - much more useful there than money - used it to get their young into the famous School Number One, a great deal less equal than most Moscow comprehensives, but officially just the same. The Lenin High School in Havana is for the sons and daughters of Fidel Castro's revolutionary elite. In Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School is at least as exclusive as Eton, though not perhaps in exactly the same way. The children of the communist Chinese leadership often turn out to be studying at major American universities. They did not get there through the normal Chinese state school system. Here the same process happens. It is not secret, but when it is found out, it does not stop. It is too important for that.

You might think that at some point someone had shown that comprehensive schools were better than what went before them. The opposite is true. Experts knew they would make things worse. The largely unknown father of the idea of comprehensive schools in Britain - who also invented the term - was a war veteran and onetime teacher at Eton called Graham Savage, later knighted. His 1928 study of high schools in the United States was the first shot in the campaign to go comprehensive.

But Savage admitted from the start that while comprehensive schools were more 'democratic', they would also hold back the brightest pupils. Before he died in 1981, he began to express regrets about the destruction of grammar schools. Too late. By this time Labour had been captured by militant levellers, especially the zealot Anthony Crosland, who in 1965 sent out the circular that set wrecking balls swinging against the walls of hundreds of grammar schools.

Crosland, it turns out, did not really know what he was doing. In his 1956 book, The Future Of Socialism, it is clear that he had no idea what comprehensive schools would be like. He, like Graham Savage, admits that American-style high schools 'would lead to a really serious levelling-down of standards'. He explicitly ruled out the mixed-ability classes that would in fact become common. He supported selection within schools, instead of between them. But he did not reckon with the revolutionary zeal of the teachers themselves, many of them products of the Sixties campus revolution. Too bad for the rest of us.

But the liberal elite would always find a way out of the educational hell it had made for everyone else. It is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with modern British politics, that this shameful hypocrisy, combined with grave damage to our educational system, goes unchallenged by any major party.

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That old School

By MARK STEYN

In his not–quite–State of the Union address the other week, President Obama said the following:

“I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina — a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She had been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says, ‘We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters.’ That’s what she said. ‘We are not quitters.’”

There was much applause, and this passage was cited approvingly even by some conservatives as an example of how President Obama was yoking his “ambitious vision” (i.e., record-breaking spending) to traditional appeals to American exceptionalism.

I think not. “We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen . . .” The doctors are on track to becoming yet another group of state employees; the lawyers sue the doctors for medical malpractice and, when they’ve made enough dough, like John Edwards, they get elected to Congress. Is there no one in Miss Bethea’s school who’d like to be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a salesman, a generator of wealth? Someone’s got to make the dough Obama’s already spent.

As for the train “barreling by their classroom,” my colleague John Derbyshire checked. The closest the railroad track comes to the school is about 240 yards, or over an eighth of a mile. The president was wrong: Trains are not barreling by any classroom six times a day. And, even if they were, I’ll bet that’s fewer barrelings per diem than when the school was built in 1912, or the new wing added in 1957. Incidentally, you may have read multiple articles referring to the “113-year-old building.” Actually, that’s the building behind the main school — the original structure from 1896, where the school district has its offices. But if, like so many people, you assume an edifice dating from 1896 or 1912 must ipso facto be uninhabitable, bear in mind that the central portion of the main building was entirely rebuilt in 1983. That’s to say, this rotting, decrepit, mildewed Dotheboys Hall of a Gothic mausoleum dates all the way back to the Cyndi Lauper era.

Needless to say, the salaried stenographers up in the press gallery were happy to take the hopeychanger-in-chief at his word on the facts of the case. But even more striking is how indifferent they were to the bigger question: If a schoolhouse has peeling paint and leaking ceilings, what’s the best way to fix it? Applying for federal funds and processing the building maintenance through a huge continental bureaucracy? Or doing what my neighbors did when the (older than Dillon) grade-school bell tower was collapsing? The carpenters and painters donated their time, and the materials were paid for through community dances and bean suppers. If that sounds sick-makingly Norman Rockwell, well, take it from me, small-town life is hell and having to interact with folksy-type folks in a “tightly knit community” certainly takes its toll, and the commemorative photo montage of gnarled old Yankees in plaid looking colorful doesn’t capture many of the disputes over the project. But forget the cloying small-town sentimentality: It’s the quickest and cheapest way to resolve the problem.

It always is: A friend of mine is on the select board of a neighboring town. In recent years, the state highway department has condemned two bridges. With the first bridge, they were advised to apply for funds under the 80/20 state/town formula: The bridge has yet to be constructed and in that time the cost — including their 20 percent — has almost doubled. When the second bridge was condemned, the town rebuilt it themselves, for less than half of the first bridge’s original 80/20 formula cost, and in a twentieth of the time. It’s called the can-do spirit, not the can-apply-for-funding spirit.

Dillon, S.C., is a town of about 6,000 people. Is there really no way they can organize acceptable accommodation for a two-grade junior high school without petitioning the Sovereign in Barackingham Palace? To be fair to the good burghers of Dillon, they seem to be wearying of playing the peasant extras in Barack the O-mighty’s crowd scenes. They were originally proposing a municipal bond to fund building improvements, and appear to have realized that being stuck in Stimulus Hell is a high price to pay for young Ty’Sheoma’s photo op with Michelle. But, even if the federal behemoth were capable of timely classroom repainting from D.C. to Hawaii, consider the scale of government and the size of bureaucracy that would be required. Once such an apparatus is in place it won’t content itself with paint jobs.

Tocqueville would weep. “It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides,” he wrote. “Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people. . . . Without municipal institutions, a nation is able to give itself a free government, but it lacks the spirit of liberty.”

The issue is not the decrepitude of the building but the decrepitude of liberty. Maybe the president can spend enough of our money to halt the degradation of infrastructure. The degradation of citizenship will prove harder to reverse.

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Cultural sensitivity directives 'bamboozle' Australian teachers of black kids

An education expert says teachers are being "bamboozled" by mysticism surrounding Aboriginal children and letting educational standards slip. Dr Chris Sarra, director of the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute in Queensland, was in Darwin this week addressing 200 principals and senior education department figures.

He says he told the conference teachers should demand high standards of Aboriginal children, instead of making allowances for cultural differences. "There is the potential and I believe this absolutely, that the Territory education system can move from one that is perhaps been guilty of creating an underclass to becoming a world class education system," he said.

Dr Sarra says he read a paper last year directing educators "not to look Aboriginal children in the eyes" because it might somehow damage their psyche. He says there is an impression that being culturally sensitive means accepting second rate outcomes from Aboriginal students, but that this approach does the students no favours. "It presented Aboriginal children as being so mystical and so culturally different and so exotic, to the extent that lots of teachers were overwhelmed by that sort of information and forgot these are actually just kids in schools who deserve an education as much as anybody," he said.

"We can't get to a point where we just cannot see the kids for the black faces. "We've got to take Aboriginal children as high-potential learners, high-calibre learners with tremendous potential."

Dr Sarra says he has completed a structural review of the Northern Territory Education Department which is currently with the Chief Minister. He was commissioned to conduct the review after the former head of the department, Margaret Banks, was sacked by the then education minister Marion Scrymgour in October last year.

Dr Sarra says it would be inappropriate for him to comment on whether his review recommends redundancies. "You'll have to wait for the Chief Minister to have a look at what's contained in the report," he said. "I don't believe it's fair that that education department employees up there should be hearing about any outcomes from me through this forum."

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12 April, 2009

British crack cocaine user keeps his teaching job... as he's an 'excellent role model'

A teacher caught with crack cocaine has been allowed to keep his job. Michael Swann was given a caution for possession of the Class A drug after being found with it in a nightclub.

The 27-year-old, who teaches at Maltby Comprehensive in Rotherham, could have been struck off, suspended or given an official reprimand. But at a disciplinary hearing, the General Teaching Council told the science teacher he would face no further sanctions. While his actions amounted to 'unacceptable professional misconduct' he remained an 'excellent' role model for children.

Drugs charities and teaching unions last night accused the GTC of being toothless. John Dunford, of the Association for School and College Leaders, said the decision sent out the wrong message. 'This represents an inadequate warning to others who might set a similarly bad example to children,' he added.

The decision was also described as being 'unhelpful' by drugs charity Hope UK, which works with young people. 'The examples that adults set have a powerful impact on children and young people, for good or ill,' said a spokesman. 'Parents and teachers are in a unique position to role model a healthy, drug-free lifestyle to the young people in their care - anything less is unhelpful, to say the least.'

Mr Swann was arrested by South Yorkshire Police in October 2007 outside Rotherham's Liqschooluid club. They released him with a caution, but were obliged to report the incident to the GTC. However, it chose not to take any further action after looking at Mr Swann's performance as a teacher. In its report, the GTC's professional conduct committee said it felt Mr Swann was 'a good teacher making a significant contribution to the and he had 'much to offer'. 'We believe you are genuinely sorry for what occurred,' it said. 'We think you have the potential to make a positive contribution to the profession.'

They said there was 'no direct effect' on his pupils and that the consequences of receiving a caution - which will be seen by future employers which carry out a Criminal Records Bureau check - was 'an adequate sanction'.

Mr Swann said last night that he planned to carry on teaching and he insisted that the cocaine did not belong to him. He told the Daily Mail: 'I went into the nightclub toilet and saw a small white polythene bag which had what I presumed was cocaine in it. 'I picked it up but as I did so a bouncer looked over the top of the cubicle, saw me with the bag and asked me to move out. 'He took me to the front of the club and said he was going to inform the police. I was subsequently arrested. I was tested for drugs and it came back clear.'

Mr Swann said his school had imposed an 18-month final written warning, which is due to expire at the end of this month.

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The Veteran: Penn State's gratuitous slur

By JAMES TARANTO

"What if it was 'Oh, the gay one,' or 'Oh, the Asian kid?' " asks Maggie Kwok, head of the Penn State Veterans Organization in an interview with the Daily Collegian, PSU's student newspaper. She is referring to a "training video," prepared by the university's Counseling and Psychological Services office, depicting "worrisome student behavior."

The office swiftly removed the video when it prompted a kerfuffle, but the PSU College Republicans preserved it on YouTube. It's a fascinating documentation of academic prejudice.

Just shy of five minutes, the video depicts a vignette in two scenes. As it opens, a timorous young female instructor is talking with an older man, perhaps the department chairman. We join the conversation as it is about to wrap up, before she brings up a new and worrisome subject:

Instructor: . . . So, I think that we should talk to everybody about that. Chairman: Good, let's bring it up at the staff meeting, OK? Instructor: Actually, I kinda wanted to talk to you about something else? Um, I'm still having problems with that student I mentioned? Chairman: The Veteran. Instructor: Yeah. He's having problems with his papers still. His grammar is really poor, and he veers off subject, and he's just not really seeming to understand the assignments.

Sound familiar? "You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

The video's salient stereotype, however, is not of veterans as thickheaded but as angry. The instructor reluctantly tells the chairman that the student's "tone is very confrontational, and I feel like he's always on the verge of losing his temper." The chairman asks if he has threatened her or if she is "worried about what he might do." She says no, but "he makes me really uneasy." He gives her some obvious advice, beginning: "If he ever threatens you, you call the police right away."

After this inconclusive chat, the story shifts to the classroom, where The Veteran confronts the instructor, demanding to know why he only got a C-plus on his paper even after rewriting it to her specifications. She says that while there was some improvement after the rewrite, she graded the paper on the merits. He thinks she has it in for him and says, "I don't see why you're doing this":

Instructor: I'm not doing anything, Matthew. This isn't a personal thing against you. The Veteran: I think it is! You've made it very clear in class how you feel about the war, and you're taking it out on me! Instructor: My personal beliefs have nothing to do with the way that I treat you. I think that you need to relax and we need to discuss this. Or I could give you the name of someone to talk to if you feel like you want to get some help. The Veteran: Help? Do you think I'm an idiot? You're the one who's being unreasonable! I just want the grade that I deserve. [Pauses.] You know what? You'll see, you'll be sorry. I'm gonna get you fired.

With this, The Veteran exits stage left. Fade to black as the instructor's jaw goes slack in an expression midway between terror and pensiveness.

"Penn State spokeswoman Lisa Powers said the university responded to the veterans' concerns as quickly as possible by removing the video," the Collegian reports:

"We heard them, we responded and there was certainly no intent to suggest that any particular student group was inclined toward worrisome behavior," Powers said. . . . "Obviously someone has taken our video and has posted it elsewhere," Powers said. "Since it has been posted on the Internet, we have received some e-mails from veterans and friends of veterans who have seen the video out of context."

We watched the other three videos in the series, and we must say we don't see how the "context" ameliorates the veterans' objections to the depiction of The Veteran.

All the videos in the series concern students behaving in ways that are creepy but not necessarily dangerous. In the first, a young woman tells her professor that a young man in her class has an unreciprocated romantic interest in her and has been making her feel uncomfortable. "It's not like he's stalking me or anything," she allows, but then she describes behavior that some may reckon crossed that line.

The second depicts a female student who is behaving erratically for reasons that are unspecified--perhaps trauma, mental illness or drug abuse.

The third shows a classroom discussion on news coverage of violent crime. When the conversation turns toward school shootings, a black-shirted male student in the back row remarks that such violence "doesn't make sense to me. Why shoot at the other students? Personally, I'd blow up Old Main or shoot up the administration. That's where the real problems are."

The video about The Veteran is similar to the others, in that all depict abnormal behavior by young people who probably are normal, but are immature or temporarily impaired. But the characters in the other videos are all completely generic, with no distinguishing characteristics other than their sex. Only The Veteran is fleshed out enough even to be a stereotype.

The obvious objection to the depiction of The Veteran is that there is no reason to think that veterans are more prone than anyone else to lash out angrily, blaming others for their own failings. If anything, one would think that the rigors of military training and deployment would leave them more mature, at least in this regard.

But The Veteran's status as a veteran is relevant to the video's story, inasmuch as he believes the instructor is treating him unfairly because he is a veteran. This lends another dimension to Maggie Kwok's speculation about the reaction if the character were depicted as a member of an ethnic or sexual minority.

What if the student in the video were black and accused the instructor of racial discrimination? Would this be depicted, as it is in this video, as if the charge was absurd on its face? Would the student's threat to have the (presumably untenured) instructor "fired" come across as an empty one, the way it does in the actual video? And if the department chairman in the opening exchange identified the student by asking, "Oh, the black guy?," would that not be seen--with some justification--as bolstering the charge of discrimination?

In the video, The Veteran behaves inappropriately--but he also accuses the instructor of inappropriately bringing her politics into the classroom at his expense. We are meant to think the accusation if preposterous. But at a university that produces such a video, is it hard to believe that such things actually go on?

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Australian country school rocked by student violence

Very different from the country schools of the "unenlightened" past

A COUNTRY Victorian school faces a growing culture of aggression and intimidation, a confidential report says. Several teachers have been assaulted and overwhelmed by unruly teens, the report commissioned by the Department of Education says. A former Benalla College teacher, who resigned last year, described the school as in crisis, but said the report into the violence had largely been ignored. "Staff are exasperated, they have nowhere else to turn . . . they expected the report to lead to changes," she said. "The Government has swept it under the carpet."

School sources said there had been at least five assault incidents against teachers in recent times, the latest last week.

The assessment report on trouble at the college, written by consultants ResolutionsRTK, says a mob of students was continuing to cause trouble. "There is a relatively small but growing cohort of students who are evidencing unacceptable behaviour," says the report filed last month. "There was also a perception that 'good' students are leaving the school at a higher rate . . . students swearing and being aggressive or threatening towards teaching staff was broadly reported."

Despite the reports, deputy principal John Brownstein said three recent incidents had been dealt with immediately and the students had apologised.

Concern over student conduct was raised last year when it was reported some parents were refusing to allow their children to return to the college. Police have attended the school several times in recent months and students had been asked to sign contracts regulating their behaviour.

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11 April, 2009

The Universal Pre-K Scam

by John Stossel

Did you go to preschool? When I was growing up, few kids did. But now there is a new movement that says every child in America should have a chance to start school before kindergarten -- at taxpayer expense. It's part of President Obama's massive spending plans. His "stimulus" bill includes an Early Learning Challenge Grant to encourage states to "Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs"

It's a popular idea. Sixty-seven percent of Americans favor universal pre-K funded by the government. But I doubt that most Americans have thought it through. Mia Levi has. She told me, "This whole thing is a scam." Levi runs six preschools. I thought she'd favor the program, since she'd collect easy money from the government. "I don't want to have to answer to the government," she said in my ABC special "Bailouts and Bull." "Our programs are so far superior."

Universal pre-K would create a single standard for preschools, but why is that a good thing? Why should we think there is one way to do preschool and that government experts know what it is? President Obama doesn't acknowledge what Nobel economist F. A. Hayek taught us: Competition is a discovery process.

Levi has to work hard to improve her schools because she knows that, unlike with government services, parents have options. "If we didn't do our job, families would go down the street to the next school. Public schools aren't doing their job, and they get to just keep opening their doors. To say that they are the ones to define ... quality is laughable."

As she says, the pre-K movement has the whiff of scam about it. Most American kids already attend preschool. Parents pay for it themselves, and those who can't afford it can get government subsidies or use free programs like Head Start. But under universal pre-K, taxpayers would pay for every child. "It's a flagrant waste of money," Levi said. "It's as if I went shopping for myself because I needed a dress for a party and I bought a dress for everybody else whether they needed it or not."

But we keep hearing that investment in pre-K will pay off later. Obama says, "For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health costs and less crime." Those glowing statistics come from tiny studies (58 children) of places like Michigan's Perry Preschool. But those low-income, low-IQ kids got much more than preschool, including after-school tutoring, and their moms and dads got parenting classes. Lisa Snell, education director of the Reason Foundation, says you can't expect similar results with middle- and higher income children.

In addition, lots of studies say the preschool effect fades. Head Start is revered for raising test scores, but studies show that by grades 3 or 4 those gains vanish. "They can't tell the difference between the kids that went to Head Start and the kids who didn't," Snell says. "When they compared them to the kids that are disadvantaged that didn't go to Head Start, they can't tell from their test scores which kids had the treatment of Head Start."

There's still another flaw in the program. Some studies have found that too much school may lead to disruptive and aggressive behavior. Libby Doggett, who leads one of the biggest pre-K advocacy groups, concedes that, but claims that "high-quality" government programs benefit children. She said Oklahoma and Georgia have them already. But those states, despite spending billions of tax dollars on preschool for the past 10 years, have not shown impressive results. Oklahoma's students lost ground to kids from other states.

Doggett replied: "We don't want to just focus on IQ scores. We want to look at how children are doing in their social and emotional, their non-cognitive development." Please. When the huge government program fails to raise scores, the central planners promise it will help the kids socially? Give me a break.

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Rigid British education bureaucracy produces crazy results

Boy, 4, refused place at village school where his family has been taught since his great-great-great grandfather built it

A boy of four has been has been told he cannot go to his village school - even though it was built by his great-great-great grandfather and has taught every generation of his family. When he starts school in September, Jamie Turner will not have a place in the primary just 150 yards from home but will have to attend another in a village two miles away. Priority goes to children who have siblings at the school - but Jamie's brother Joshua, 11, will be leaving when the new term starts.

Littledean C of E Primary was built in 1852 by their great-great-great grandfather, stonemason William Smith, and still carries a plaque bearing his name. Jamie currently attends the nursery which is housed in the school building.

His furious mother Leigh, 31, a care assistant, today attacked Gloucestershire County Council, which is giving places at the school to children from nearby Cinderford even though that village has three primaries of its own. She said: 'It's all wrong - the system has ruled that Jamie can't go to a school around the corner from his home yet they are bringing in children from outside the area. 'His great-great-great grandfather built the school and our family have always gone there, yet the majority of the children they've taken in are from Cinderford, not Littledean. They should give priority to local families.'

Joshua and elder sibling Ashleigh, 13, have both attended the school - as has every generation of their family since the 1800s. Mrs Turner added: 'The whole family is really upset. Jamie's quite shy and still cuddles my leg when I drop him off at nursery so he'd be lost if we tried to make him go to another school.' Father Gary, 30, a self-employed taxi driver, added: 'There has been a member of Jamie's family at that school since 1852 - so it baffles me that he has been rejected. 'If this is the system then the system needs to be changed - it's a total disgrace.' Jamie's grandfather David Annetts called it situation 'an outrage' and said: 'I have aunties and uncles in their 90s who went to that school.'

The Turners have appealed against the decision and headteacher Val Huggett has contacted Gloucestershire County Council to voice her support for the family. But Sam Budd, the council's senior access manager, said the authority had no choice but to refuse Jamie admission because it had received 19 first preferences for Littledean's 15 places - and 15 of them were from families with children already there.

'While we sympathise with Ms Turner, the county council has to abide by the school's admission criteria,' Mr Budd said. 'Jamie has been offered a place at Forest View Primary, which is the nearest school with free places.' The only option for children in Jamie's position is to go on a waiting list in case places became available after all, he added.

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10 April, 2009

Graduate School Admissions, Race, And The White Status Game

By Steve Sailer

Elite schools encourage black ambition by letting in poorly qualified black students -- and then fail heaps of them. Is that kind to blacks?

All across the country, applicants to graduate and professional schools have been receiving fat letters of acceptance or thin letters of rejection. They have a right to feel nervous. They’ve sweated through college and through rigorous standardized exams, which they hope will open the door to their chosen professions. But the prestigious postgrad programs are ruthless about selecting the best candidates (at least if they are white or Asian). So, applicants obsess over whether their 165 LSATK-12 education or 680 GMAT is good enough to get in.

But, paradoxically, the faculty of the top schools seldom preaches what they practice when it comes to K-12 education or immigration. They are fiercely selectionist about who they let in to their institutions. Yet they lecture American citizens about how we should be lax about whom we let in to our country.

There is much that can be learned from the study of average test scores from the major postgrad exams. The idiosyncratic scoring systems do make them seem impenetrable to outsiders, but fortunately, they are all graded on the bell curve, so I’ve come up with a handy table that makes them easy to understand.

I’ve accumulated recent data on the average scores by race for five exams: the GRE for grad school, the LSAT for law school, the MCAT for medical school, the GMAT for business school, and the DAT for dental school.

To make all the numbers comprehensible, I’ve converted them to show where the mean for each race would fall in percentile terms relative to the distribution of scores among non-Hispanic white Americans. Most of us have some sense of what the distribution of talent is among whites —political correctness doesn’t demand we avert our eyes when it comes to whites— so I’ll use whites as benchmarks:

Thus, for example, on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the gatekeeper for the M.B.A. degree, the mean score for whites falls, by definition, at the 50th percentile of the white distribution of scores. The mean score for black test-takers would rank at the 13th percentile among whites. Asians average a little better than the typical white, scoring at the 55th percentile.

Most of these tests break out separate nationalities among Hispanics. Thus, my table has columns both for “Total Hispanics” (27th percentile on the GMAT) and “Mexican-Americans” (24th percentile). In the 2000 Census, Mexicans made up 58 percent of the Total Hispanic population.

I listed the subtest scores for the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) because the sources didn’t aggregate them.

Note that language is a surprisingly small problem for Hispanics —they score no worse on the GRE Verbal subtest than on the GRE Quantitative, and only moderately worse on Verbal portion of the MCAT. Why? Because Hispanics who have problems with English generally don’t finish college, or even high school.

As you’ll note, the black average scores are consistently low across all five tests, plus the listed subtests. The scores for Asian Americans are generally good, but they bounce around depending upon the balance of verbal vs. quantitative / visual questions. The Total Hispanic and Mexican-American scores are dependably mediocre —better than blacks, worse than whites.

If we look at how many people of each group take the test, we can understand the variations in average score a little better.

Thus, for example, whites, who in 2007 made up 61.5 percent of the 20-24-year-old cohort, took 68.7 percent of the GMATs. Blacks took the GMAT at a per capita rate just under half (49 percent) of the white rate. Asians are more than twice (205 percent) as likely as whites to sit the GMAT. Mexicans are only a fifth (18 per cent) as likely.

(If you are wondering why America’s white elites aren’t more worried about their kids facing competition from the huge number of Mexican immigrants they’ve let in, this educational indolence is one answer—at the highest levels of American society, Mexican-Americans just aren’t much competition.)

We are often lectured about how our racist society crushes the fragile self-esteem of African Americans. But this combination of average score and sample size data suggests that blacks tend to have inflated ambitions, especially compared to the under-ambitious Mexican American population.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a poor black child interviewed on TV say “I want to be a doctor or a lawyer when I grow up” while the television personality nods encouragingly. But it’s many more times than I’ve heard a poor black child say, “I want to own my own carpet-cleaning business when I grow up”.

Consider the Law School Admission Test. Blacks made up a sizable 10.3 percent of LSAT-takers in 2006, while Mexican-Americans comprised only 1.6 percent, barely up from 1.1 percent way back in 1985. This large number of black law school hopefuls suffered from diminishing marginal returns: their mean score equated to just the 12th percentile among white test-takers.

In contrast, Mexican Americans scored at the semi-respectable 29th percentile among white. That was because only an elite few out of their ranks dared take the LSAT at all. If more Mexicans had tried it, their average would likely have been lower.

What nobody tells those black children is that even if you get into medical school or law school, you still have to pass a professional licensing exam when you get out.

Data gathered by Richard Sanders of the UCLA Law School shows that 53% of the black students who enter law school fail to qualify to become lawyers, versus 24% of white students. About 40 percent of black law school graduates (many of whom will have taken out crushing loans to pay three years of tuition) never pass the bar exam, compared to 15 percent of whites. Some will also waste additional years working dead-end day jobs while paying to take bar exam review courses at night, before finally giving up in despair.

In effect, the legal establishment is luring a sizable number of the black race's more promising young people (not the very best and brightest blacks, but well above average African Americans) into a career cul-de-sac. That warm and fuzzy feeling that liberals get from "diversity" comes with very real human costs.

You’ll notice that blacks take all five tests at relatively similar rates, while Asians specialize in the medical professions and tend to avoid grad school (probably because it prepares for generally lower paying careers). In a diverse society, it’s natural for racial groups to specialize in certain occupations the way Asians do. Yet, blacks don’t. One reason for that: blacks are counted as “diverse” for affirmative action purposes, while Asians generally aren’t. The grad schools’ institutional hunger for black students means that blacks aren’t allowed to develop ethnic specialties.

You might think, for instance, that blacks would be more inclined to take the DAT to try to get into dental school than the MCAT for medical school. After all— and this is not intended as an insult to dentists: the DAT User’s Manual testifies to the enormous effort the American Dental Association has put into making the DAT an extremely rigorous 4.5 hour-long test —studying one part of the body is surely less daunting than studying all of it.

But instead, blacks are relatively more likely to take the MCAT (where they do very badly: about the 11th percentile) than the DAT (where they face somewhat less competition and score at the 16th percentile).

Yet what would be the reaction of American Association of Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association if a healthy trend developed in which blacks focused more on dental than medical school?

A national crisis would be declared! The medical community would be instructed to mobilize its vast resources to fight off the challenge from dentists for precious diverse students! Bidding wars for blacks would get even more flagrant! And the Law School Admission Council is probably even crazier for diversity than the medical colleges.

In short, none of these powerful institutions will allow blacks to develop their own specialties. All of them compete against each other for scarce black talent. This is not because they care about blacks, because (as we’ve seen) many of blacks are burned out by being mis-selected.

Many blacks might be better off going to business school than to law or medical school because you don’t have to pass a licensing exam afterwards. You just get your diploma and put “M.B.A.” on your resume. (How much that’s worth is, however, another question altogether.)

It’s just another example of the intra-white status game. To adapt what I wrote some time ago: what white admissions officers in grad schools care about “is achieving social superiority over other whites by demonstrating their exquisite racial sensitivity and their aristocratic insouciance about any competitive threats posed by racial preferences.” Our culture doesn’t give practical advice to young blacks—because it would be “racist”.

SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




Now banned on campus: Bottled water

Originally published in The Union Leader There is a new “sin” industry on college campuses. It’s not beer, fast food or tobacco. It’s water! Universities around the nation have begun to deny students the option to drink bottled water, removing it from vending machines and campus stores.

Why? They are following the advice of environmental activist groups that say students should “drink responsibly” — which to them means tap water. Drinking bottled water is supposedly wasteful because you get basically the same thing from a tap. Yet their claims don’t hold water, and surely don’t warrant this silly prohibition.

At the extreme is Washington University in St. Louis, MO. As part of its “Tap It” campaign, the school took a symbolic step in promoting sustainability, according to student body representative, Kady McFadden. This “step” basically banned bottled water from campus stores and vending machines, except where sales must continue until bottled water contracts expire.

These actions ignore the important reasons why some people choose bottled water. Among them is predictable quality. Tap water, on the other hand, periodically experiences quality problems that cause governments issue health alerts.

In the spring of 2008, Penn State — a campus considering prohibitions on bottled water — declared a tap water health advisory, calling students to boil water or drink bottled water. Fortunately, it was eventually determined that the water was OK. Such incidents reveal that overreliance on tap water doesn’t make sense and why people appreciate other options.

Even places that claim to have exceptional tap water — such as New York City — experience problems. New York’s Columbia/New York Presbyterian Hospital has provided bottled water to its patients for drinking and brushing teeth since 2005 after two patients died from Legionnaire’s disease which transmitted via city tap water. Because tap water must travel through pipes, it can develop such quality problems along the way.

In addition to safety issues, piped water can suffer flavor defects from contaminants found in pipes, disinfectants, or from the water source. Some sources, such as the Potomac River next to Washington D.C., are home to species of algae that periodically impact tap water flavor.

This is not to suggest that most tap water isn’t generally pretty safe. The United States has some of the best quality tap water in the world. However, it is not correct for environmentalists to deny the unique challenges and quality differences that tap water possesses. Nor is it fair to deny students and other consumers the option to pick a product with fewer such issues or one they simply like better.

In fact, bottled water delivers consistent results. Seventy five percent of bottled water is drawn from non-municipal sources, such as springs and aquifers, which provide water on a sustainable long-term basis. Many of these sources have supplied quality water for decades. Other distributors purify municipal water, providing a higher quality product than simply opening the tap, and the packaging ensures the quality is maintained during delivery.

Still opponents of bottled water argue that plastic bottles have been the source of excessive waste. Yet the bottles contribute less than 0.3 percent of solid waste, which is managed safely via recycling and landfilling.

This debate over bottled water has taken calls for “dry” campuses to a whole new level! Many people desire their water will taste just as sweet or crisp as the last time they bought it. And why not? There is no good reason why anyone else should deprive them access to those products—on campus or anywhere else.

SOURCE




Failing Jewish school bounces back after emphasizing religious standards

AN Orthodox Jewish primary school has achieved some of the best results in the country despite living with the threat of closure after failing an Ofsted inspection.

Pardes House in Finchley ensured every boy who took national tests in English, maths and science last year achieved the Government's target Level 4 grade in all three subjects. Many scored better than expected, given their social backgrounds and academic records, placing the school top of the league for Barnet, and 13th out of 1,600 primaries in London. It was a remarkable change for the school, which had been under Ofsted's "special measures" since a failed report in October 2006.

Robert Leach, the 34-year-old head, said inspectors were critical of poor standards of behaviour and teachers "not doing their job".

"Classroom management was just totally inadequate. There was no respect," he said.

The school took a radical approach, changing 80 per cent of its staff and focusing on reinforcing its religious ethos and standards of behaviour in the belief everything else would follow.

SOURCE





9 April, 2009

Democrats and Poor Kids

Sitting on evidence of voucher success, and the battle of New York

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.

In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.

President Obama's stimulus is sending some $100 billion to the nation's school districts. What will he demand in return? The state budget passed by the New York legislature last week freezes funding for charters but increases it by more that $400 million for other public schools. Perhaps a visit to a charter school in Harlem would help Mr. Obama honor his reform pledge. "I'm looking at the data here in front of me," Mr. Duncan told the New York Post. "Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up. Teacher salaries are up. Social promotion was eliminated. Dramatically increasing parental choice. That's real progress."

Mr. Duncan's help in New York is in stark contrast to his department's decision to sit on a performance review of the D.C. voucher program while Congress debated its future in March. The latest annual evaluation was finally released Friday, and it shows measurable academic gains. The Opportunity Scholarship Program provides $7,500 vouchers to 1,700 low-income families in D.C. to send their children to private schools. Ninety-nine percent of the children are black or Hispanic, and there are more than four applicants for each scholarship.

The 2008 report demonstrated progress among certain subgroups of children but not everyone. This year's report shows statistically significant academic gains for the entire voucher-receiving population. Children attending private schools with the aid of the scholarships are reading nearly a half-grade ahead of their peers who did not receive vouchers. Voucher recipients are doing no better in math but they're doing no worse. Which means that no voucher participant is in worse academic shape than before, and many students are much better off.

"There are transition difficulties, a culture shock upon entering a school where you're expected to pay attention, learn, do homework," says Jay Greene, an education scholar at the Manhattan Institute. "But these results fit a pattern that we've seen in other evaluations of vouchers. Benefits compound over time."

It's bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.

Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they'd support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would "not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids." Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.

Mr. Duncan's office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You'd think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program. A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan's department didn't want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin's campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.

The decision to let 1,700 poor kids get tossed from private schools is a moral disgrace. It also exposes the ugly politics that lies beneath union and liberal efforts across the country to undermine mayoral control, charter schools, vouchers or any reform that threatens their monopoly over public education dollars and jobs. The Sheldon Silver-Dick Durbin Democrats aren't worried that school choice doesn't work. They're worried that it does, and if Messrs. Obama and Duncan want to succeed as reformers they need to say so consistently.

SOURCE




British teachers targeted in their own homes by pupils, say union delegates

More results from the destruction of discipline by Britain's Left

Teachers are being intimidated in their own homes by unruly pupils, a union has claimed. One teacher returned from work to find the word “bitch” painted across her garden wall. Another found that his car had been scratched with a key. A third had 17 windows smashed at her home, while a fourth received a series of late-night obscene calls.

These events are just a snapshot of a much bigger picture of intimidation and damage to property endured by teachers daily, members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers heard at their annual conference in Liverpool.

Even when they are on school premises, teachers cannot be sure that their property is safe. In the past year the union has received 146 claims about malicious damage to property and 69 claims of damage to vehicles.

Maxine Bradshaw, a teacher from North Wales, told the conference that pupils felt that they could get away with anything. “Parents and teachers feel powerless to discipline children for fear of repercussions or, worse still, prosecution,” she said.

Even when police did get involved with cases of vandalism, it was often a waste of time, she said.

When her car was damaged by pupils from another school she was offered restorative justice — in which perpetrators meet the victims to make amends. But the youngsters “appeared to feel no remorse” and offered an insincere apology, she said.

Ian Martin, from Bristol, said that he was aware of staff facing knife threats. On one occasion the knife had been made from copper in a workshop. In another incident a former student drove to a college and fired an airgun at pupils and staff, he said.

“A member of staff teaching 16 and 17-year-olds who had recently returned to work following a triple heart bypass was subjected to a student threatening to shoot him and students,” Mr Martin said.

Ms Bradshaw said that schools should follow the policy of many other public buildings with display notices indicating that they will operate a “zero tolerance” policy towards anyone who is violent or abusive to staff.

Although violence and abusive behaviour among pupils are commonplace in many schools, teachers are given very little training in how to respond.

Wendy Hardy, a teacher in Derby who works with excluded pupils and those at risk of exclusion, said that trainee teachers were offered just one hour and fifteen minutes’ training, during three or four years of study, on how to handle challenging behaviour.

A recent survey by the union found that challenging behaviour was one of the main reasons why one in five teachers leave the profession in the first five years of their careers.

But Irene Baker, a delegate from Sefton, Merseyside, said that schools were partly to blame. Pupils knew that they could get away with bad behaviour because the worst thing that they face is a talking-to. This would leave pupils little able to cope with the world once they left school and were forced to accept the consequences of their actions, she said.

Delegates warned of creeping state censorship over a clause in the guidance to the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill that would give ministers the legal power to control the content of exams. Teresa Dawes, an English teacher from Berkshire, said that the move was “chilling and frightening”. Last year a group of MPs put pressure on Britain’s biggest exam board to remove a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, Education for Leisure, from the GCSE syllabus because it refers to knife crime.

SOURCE





8 April, 2009

Revealing situation in NYC: 39,000 applicants for 8,500 charter spots

The teachers' unions must be grinding their teeth

Applications to the city's charter schools have surged to new heights -- more than doubling from 18,672 last year to 39,200. The interest has led at least one school, Democracy Preparatory Charter School in Harlem, to tout its acceptance rate of 100 middle-school students out of 1,500 applicants as more competitive than Harvard's.

"Whatever one may say about charter schools, the one fact that can't be denied is that parents are clearly voting with their feet," said James Merriman, CEO of the New York Center for Charter School Excellence, which released the figures.

The report comes as most charters begin holding lotteries for 8,500 open seats this week -- including the Super Tuesday of lotteries that will take place tomorrow, when 29 schools draw from their lists of applicants.

Among the parents vying for open charter-school seats are Cherida Nurse, of Crown Heights, whose daughter, Rebecca, has been attending traditional schools through fourth grade. "From what I'm hearing, the standards seem to be very, very high [at charter schools]. They expect a lot from the kids," said Nurse.

At least 99 charters will be operating this fall.

SOURCE




UK: 40% of teachers abused by parents, 25% attacked by students

The methodology of the survey behind this report was very slapdash so the figures below should not be taken as exact. That the picture is broadly accurate is however undoubted

Four in 10 teachers have faced verbal or physical aggression from a pupil's parent or guardian, according to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. And of the 1,000 teachers surveyed, a quarter said a pupil had attacked them. Over a third of teachers in primary schools said they had experienced physical aggression, compared with 20% in secondary schools.

The government says teachers have sufficient means at their disposal to punish disruptive pupils.

Almost 60% of those questioned for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' survey thought pupil behaviour had worsened during the past five years. The survey questioned over 1,000 teachers from primary and secondary schools. The responses appear to suggest that bad behaviour is not the preserve of secondary schools.

One teacher at a primary school in England said: "A six-year-old completely trashed the staff room, put a knife through a computer screen, attacked staff and we had to call the police. "Another six-year-old attacked staff and pupils with the teacher's scissors."

Another teacher said: "I and other members of staff were physically assaulted daily by a five-year-old (including head-butting, punching). "He was taken to the head to 'calm down' then brought back to apologise. "It became a vicious circle. I was off sick as a result. "People often underestimate that young children can be as violent and intimidating as the older ones."

Around one third of teachers surveyed said that they had lost confidence as a result of the behaviour they had faced. But most teachers (90%) reported that "disruptive behaviour" constituted talking in class.

"Persistent low-level rudeness and disruption seems to have become a fact of life in education today and no longer raises eyebrows or seems to merit special attention," said Dr Ian Lancaster, a secondary school teacher from Cheshire.

Teachers will discuss the problem at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' conference next week. Last year it emerged that more than 300 pupils a day were being temporarily, rather than permanently, excluded for violent conduct. A similar survey by ATL two years ago suggested half of teachers knew another who had been driven out of the profession by violent conduct.

ATL general secretary Dr Mary Bousted said it was "shocking that over a third of teaching staff have experienced aggression from students' parents or guardians". "ATL firmly believes no member of staff should be subjected to violent behaviour by either students or parents. "Parents should be acting as good role models by supporting staff and helping them create a more positive learning environment for their children."

The government said it was right that head teachers were using short, sharp shocks as a punishment.

SOURCE





7 April, 2009

Hispanics travel rough road to higher education

Ethnic group is the fastest growing, but the least likely to enroll in college

The future of Texas is sitting in room 318 at Austin High School, and right now, it could go either way. Students in the after-school program — Hispanic and from low-income families, the group least likely to enroll in college — are optimistic. But who knows?

“I hope to go,” says Neri Gamez, 17, a high school junior who dreams of being a doctor. Gamez has an advantage: She is in a program run by the Center for Mexican-American Studies at the University of Houston, designed to help Hispanic students enter college and, once there, earn a degree. Academic Achievers is among dozens of programs that address one of the state’s most intractable education problems.

But Hispanics, the state’s fastest-growing ethnic group, have fallen behind in some key areas, and efforts to change that remain piecemeal:

• Statewide, 68 percent of Hispanics graduate from high school within four years, 10 points below the overall rate.

• Just 42.5 percent of Hispanics who graduated from high school in 2007 enrolled in college or a technical training program the following fall, compared with 45.3 percent of black students and 57.5 percent of white students.

• Texas is “well below target” in raising the number of Hispanics in college, according to a 2008 report by the Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Enrollment of both white and black students was “somewhat above target.” And there are no consequences for schools that don’t raise Hispanic enrollment.

“The good news is, there’s a state goal,” said Paul Ruiz, co-founder and senior advisor to the Education Trust, a national group that advocates for at-risk students. “The bad news is, the institutions don’t get it. They set goals for Latino kids at about half the rate the state says we need.”

The issue is complicated by the rapid growth of the Hispanic population; about 36 percent of the Texas population is Hispanic. “We’ve made progress,” said Raymund Paredes, higher education commissioner for Texas. “Our challenge is, we started so far behind, and the Latino population is growing so fast.” Unless the numbers change, the state will be unable to field a well-educated work force. “The Hispanic community is key to the economic future of Texas,” Paredes said.

The state plan, known as Closing the Gaps, began in 2000 with the goal of increasing college enrollment to 5.7 percent of the population by 2015. That would raise college-going rates to the national average. Over the past eight years, overall enrollment has edged up to 5.3 percent from 5 percent. For Hispanics, it’s up to 3.9 percent from 3.7 percent.

More than 1.2 million Texans enrolled in a two- or four-year college or technical school last fall; state goals call for that to reach 1.6 million by 2015. The Coordinating Board’s own estimates suggest it will fall short by 300,000 students.

Gamez, a student at Austin High School, said she understands why so many of her peers don’t go on to college. “They may have to work,” she said. “And once they get a taste of the money, they may decide to skip college.” Often, no one in their family has attended college, so they don’t know the ropes...

The University of Texas system touts its diversity, noting that in 2008, Hispanic enrollment was about equal to that of white students, and several campuses have been designated as among the nation’s top in awarding degrees to Hispanics. But most Hispanic enrollment is concentrated at the system’s border schools, including UT-Pan American (86 percent), UT-Brownsville (91 percent) and UT-El Paso (75 percent). At UT-Austin, 16 percent of students are Hispanic; at UT-Dallas, it’s 9 percent.

About 20 percent of UH students are Hispanic, up only slightly over the last five years. (About 40 percent of Harris County residents are Hispanic.) But that was still enough to earn a place among the top 20 colleges and universities awarding degrees to Hispanic students, according to The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education magazine. The numbers are slightly higher at the University of Houston-Downtown, which has its own outreach programs. About 36 percent of students there are Hispanic.

SOURCE




UK: Three Rs courses late in life “ineffective”

Adult basic skills courses have been a waste of millions of pounds, an educationalist will tell a conference. Professor Anna Vignoles, from the Institute of Education, believes that good basic skills must be learned early to improve attainment later in life.

The government spent £995m between 2006-07 on one such programme in England, called Skills for Life. The government says it will not "write off" adults with poor basic skills, and that this is "money well spent".

Roughly five million adults still have the literacy levels which would be expected of an 11 year old, and the government has targeted its further education funding largely at extending the availability of literacy and numeracy courses. Colleges have in turn complained that training places in other areas are under serious threat.

But 2.8 million people have been through a Skills For Life programme. "It is well known that an individual's basic skills level affects how much they earn, but research shows that the three Rs are best acquired in childhood," Professor Vignoles will tell the Institute for Fiscal Studies conference. "Policies and qualifications to help adults develop them have proved largely ineffective."

Professor Vignoles will argue that there is a place for short training courses of up to 20 hours, as they can reach those who have not taken up any other opportunity to learn. And she acknowledges that adults who take basic skills courses may then go on to other courses. But she will say the "array of low-level courses available to adults has not boosted productivity and earnings". "Adult basic skills training might increase equality of opportunity, but unfortunately it won't boost economic competitiveness."

A spokesperson for the Department for Innovation and Skills said it was important for adults to develop these skills for a number of reasons, not just to try to increase their earnings. "Professor Vignoles may argue that good basic skills are best acquired in childhood but we have no intention of writing off the 12 million adults who struggle with literacy or numeracy," she said. "We will continue to invest so that even more adults can get a qualification, improve their self-confidence, get work, boost their earning power and help with their children's education.

"The £5bn we have spent since our Skills for Life strategy was launched in 2001 has enabled 5.7m people to go on 12m literacy, language and numeracy courses with over 2.8m achieving first qualifications. "This works out as £660 per achievement. "We consider it money well spent."

SOURCE




British parents get £10,000 State grant to teach their children at home... because they refuse to send them to failing school

Easier to pay off responsible parents than to fix a disastrous school, apparently. Too bad for the kids at the school concerned

Parents who refused to send their children to one of the country’s worst schools have been paid a £10,450 State grant to teach them at home. Essex County Council made the one-off payment to six families who kept the four boys and two girls away from Bishops Park College in Clacton-on-Sea and hired home tutors. It is believed to be the first time an education authority has provided funds to families who opt out of traditional school.

Under normal circumstances, parents who remove their children from schools are responsible for paying for their education. The payment was described by the council as ‘exceptional’, but it may encourage others in similar circumstances to apply for State funding.

The parents, who include a garden furniture manufacturer, a florist, a market trader and a former cafe owner, were offered places for their children at the failing secondary school despite refusing to name it on a list of preferred choices. For the past six months, they have been paying £100 a week in tutor fees and other expenses. The 11 and 12-year-olds are now doing so well their tutor is considering entering them for an English GCSE this summer, four years early.

The offer of financial help came after the parents had a meeting at the House of Lords with the council’s Conservative leader Lord Hanningfield. At a further meeting with director of education Terry Reynolds, they were told that if they looked into starting up their own school they could be given a cash payment. However, so far the parents have not done this. Under Government policy, town halls do not fund parents who educate their children at home but can provide money for groups who want to establish their own schools.

Holly O’Toole, who has kept her 12-year-old son Harry at home, said: ‘We were given no other option than to send our children to Bishops Park but it is chronically under-achieving. 'It is bottom of the tables and teachers from that school have even warned us not to send our children there. ‘The money is to help educate all the children. I was surprised when it happened because we had been told the money was not there. It is by no means enough and we have been told that there will be no further payments but at least it is a start.’

Another parent, Mark Hulstrom, said: ‘We were told that the funding was a very rare occurrence and that it was a one-off payment. I think they just wanted us off their backs and we didn’t have to fill out any forms.’

Earlier this year, Bishops Park slumped to the bottom of the GCSE ‘value added’ league table after axing traditional subjects for ‘themed’ lessons. Only eight per cent of pupils met Government targets. The school, housed in £15million state-of-the-art buildings opened by Tony Blair in 2005, has now reintroduced specialist teaching for science and maths.

The families learned this week that there are no further places at any of their other preferred schools next year either, and they will have to go on teaching the children at home.

Essex County Council said: ‘The payment followed an initial discussion around parents establishing their own school and we are pleased to be in a position to assist. 'We have always considered and will continue to consider any requests from parents for financial support on their merits.’

SOURCE





6 April, 2009

Study Supports School Vouchers

In District, Pupils Outperform Peers On Reading Tests

A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.

Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement that the Obama administration does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation. "Big picture, I don't see vouchers as being the answer," Duncan said in a recent meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters. "You can pull two kids out, you can pull three kids out, and you're leaving 97, 98 percent behind. You need to help all those kids. The way you help them is by challenging the status quo where it's not working and coming back with dramatically better schools and doing it systemically." [A very disappointing response from Duncan. That old "We are going to make ALL schools first-class" response has been around forever but it never happens and it certainly won't in DC]

Since it began, the voucher program has awarded scholarships to more than 3,000 students from low-income families, granting up to $7,500 a year for tuition and other fees at participating schools. This school year, about 1,715 students are participating. The Bush administration, and many Republicans, have championed the program as a "lifeline" for students in struggling schools.

Supporters hailed the congressionally mandated study as proof the program works. "With concrete evidence in hand that this program is a success, we look forward to reauthorizing it as quickly as possible," Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Calif.), the top Republican on the House education committee, said in a statement.

The study, conducted by the Education Department's research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, compared the performance and attitudes of students with scholarships with those of peers who were eligible but weren't chosen in a lottery. Parents of students in the program were more satisfied with their children's new schools and considered the schools safer, the report found. Students showed no difference in their level of satisfaction.

In a letter Thursday to Duncan, several GOP leaders urged him to continue awarding grants. "Under no circumstances should the funds be withheld by the U.S. Department of Education when so many children in the District need and deserve access to a quality school today," House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other lawmakers wrote.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), whose Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs has jurisdiction over the District, has said he plans to hold hearings on the program.

SOURCE




No school for 35,000 British High School students?

Tens of thousands of A-level students may be left without a college or sixth-form place this autumn because there is no state funding for them.

Frantic efforts were under way last night to plug a £60 million hole in funding for the education of students aged 16-19 in England.

Details of last-minute cuts to sixth-form funding were e-mailed to schools on Tuesday – the last day of the financial year – which meant that they had no opportunity to seek new money or to readjust annual budgets due to begin the following day.

The cuts, which could affect an estimated 35,000 students, contradict government plans to encourage more young people to remain in education until 18. Many schools and colleges say that they have insufficient cash to pay for their current students, let alone the significant increase in numbers predicted for 2009-10. Some have lost as much as £300,000 a year.

Shaun Fenton, co-chairman of the Grammar School Headteachers’ Association, said that jobs would be cut, leading to bigger classes and fewer courses. “It will not be popular media studies courses that will close,” he said. “It is more likely to be small science, maths, languages or computing courses that will face the axe.”

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that schools and colleges had responded magnificently to the Government’s policy to increase the number of 16-year-olds in education. “They have an even more critical part to play during the recession, when more young people are likely to stay in full-time education,” he said. He has written to Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, asking for more money.

Sixth-form and college funding is administered by the Learning and Skills Council, which was criticised this week for mishandling a rebuilding programme that left colleges millions of pounds out of pocket.

Ministers said that they were not aware that it had promised schools one sum of money on March 2 only to cut it on March 31.

SOURCE




British government meddling 'has de-skilled teachers'

Teachers should be allowed to use their judgment and be given greater freedom to teach beyond the strictures of the national curriculum, rather than being flooded with edicts, MPs say today in a highly critical report.

The Commons Children, Schools and Families Select Committee says that government meddling has de-skilled the teaching profession and turned it into a franchise operation.

The freedoms enjoyed by academies, which are semi-independent from local authority control, should be enshrined at all schools, the committee says.

MPs took evidence from government agencies, trade unions, academics, research organisations and associations representing different subjects.

The report says that MPs have heard how the level of central prescription and direction through the national curriculum and national strategies had “deskilled teachers”. “At times schooling has appeared more of a franchise operation, dependent on a recipe handed down by government, rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers,” it said.

The current regime of testing and school inspection had exacerbated matters, the report adds.

SOURCE





5 April, 2009

The Entitled

Every teaching assistant at a large state university has had the experience. At least I did as a TA in the University of Missouri's history department. Sometime during the semester you'd get a call from a junior assistant coach -- as new to the academic life as you were -- who just wanted to drop by and have a Coke.

How strange. I was mystified the first time it happened. What did he want, the pleasure of my company? Had he confused me with a football fan? Didn't he know that us intellectuals prefer baseball? Ah, the arrogance of youth. I kind of miss it.

After some puzzling small talk -- what do you think of this weather? where you from? -- my visitor got around to the point: He mentioned a student in a freshman survey course, a student whose name didn't register at once. Mainly because he just sat there without anything to say. His thoughts, if any, were clearly far away. Maybe on the football field? It seems that said student had failed a quiz or two, not surprisingly, and he would make an awfully fine guard or tackle or whatever if only his grades were better and he stayed eligible, and could I see my way clear to ... well, even I could see where this was heading, and the conversation was closed.

The young coach had carried out his assignment, I'd done my duty, no hard feelings. That's the way it worked. Every system has its little accepted corruptions that accumulate like sludge on the gears. I don't know if that kind of visit still happens. It shouldn't.

There's been one big change since my days behind the lectern. It's no longer the coaches who appeal, wheedle, growl, grovel, or whatever it takes to raise a student's letter grade. It's the students themselves.

Naturally enough, a team of academics has written a paper about this sad trend. ("Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting and Motivational Factors"). The syndrome now has a name (Academic Entitlement) and an abbreviation (AE) -- just like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Doubtless there will soon be federal grants and endowed chairs to study AE and a drug to treat it. And sure enough, it'll turn out to be more widespread than anyone ever suspected.

The four scholars who did this Pioneering Study trace the origins of AE to parental pressure, material rewards for good grades, competitiveness, and "achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation." They conclude that AE is "most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of entitlement and to narcissism."

At the risk of putting all that in plain English, these kids are spoiled brats with character problems. But how will they ever get over them if they're not allowed to fail -- and learn from their failures? If their mediocre performance is regularly rewarded with As and Bs, how will they learn the difference between excellent and run-of-the-mill?

The saddest aspect of these kids' condition is that they're unaware of it. They actually think they're pretty darned good, and deserve those good grades. More to be pitied than scorned, they may come out of school with no idea of what real accomplishment is, and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing something well.

They may never thrill at a formula elegantly devised, a mission truly accomplished, a sentence well written, a simple procedure done with care every time, an experiment perfected, a form that perfectly follows function.... Not for The Entitled the sense of awe that may be the first step toward God. If a teacher dropped one of these students off at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he the might emerge a few hours later with only one question: Is this going to be on the test?

But why should they be any different from what they are? Raised in an age when self-esteem is all, they're told how great they are from K to 12 and may graduate without the faintest idea of what greatness is, or demands.

Consider this newly named syndrome another argument for universal military service. Call it Greenberg's Theorem: There's nothing wrong with these kids that six weeks of basic training at an Army base in some barren clime wouldn't cure -- if they didn't manage to have mama or papa get them out of it.

But if they stuck it out, they'd soon learn that it's results that count, not influence or manipulation. Or even effort if it's misplaced, if it amounts to nothing more than the same mistakes endlessly, energetically repeated.

To quote a deluded young senior at the University of Maryland: "I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade. What else really is there than the effort that you put in?"

Well, for starters there is talent, insight, intention, humility, tolerance, an openness to criticism and a determination to learn from it. There is an appreciation for what is noble and contempt for what is base. And the love of knowledge for its own sake, not for the rewards it might bring, and . . . well, you get the point. Unless, of course, you think you're entitled.

SOURCE




Principals Australia calls for job preparation -- in pre-school!

Does the nonsense from "educators" ever stop? It's true that little kids do have career thoughts. Most little boys that I have known have wanted to be firemen or policemen when they grew up but I know none who grew up to be so. The Archbishop of Westminster wanted to be a truck driver when he was a boy.

THE head of Principals Australia believes toddlers in daycare should be given early career counselling to help them work out what they want to be when they grow up.

Kate Castine, who runs the Principals Australia career education project on behalf of the federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, is calling for "career development concepts" to be included in the new national curriculum, according to a report in The Australian. The call was immediately rejected as "crazy stuff" by a leading childcare operator, while the state and territory children's commissioners warned against pushing academic-based teaching on children still in nappies.

But Ms Castine said research showed students as young as six could identify what they wanted to do when they grew up. "The argument that children should be exposed to career development concepts at an early age has been endorsed by current worldwide research," she wrote in comments posted on the department's official online forum, seeking feedback on the latest draft of the "early-learning framework". "Reference to career development competencies needs to be explicit so teachers understand its importance."

Ms Castine said her concern was that little children rarely think beyond what their parents and relatives do for a living. "They identify very, very limited careers, usually associated with their family," she told The Weekend Australian. "That makes quite good sense but what needs to happen is that children who are very young need to identify there's a whole range of possible careers ... and not just what they see at home."

Queensland's biggest childcare chain, the community-based C&K, yesterday rejected the kids' careers counselling as "crazy stuff". "What about letting children be children?" said C&K's chief executive Barrie Elvish. "It's bad enough that kids in years 11 and 12 have to choose a career. How on earth can you get a four-year-old to think about what they'll be doing in 20 years' time?"

SOURCE




Indian students boost Australia's export economy

VASHA Vankadesh is the new face of Australia's export economy. As part of an exploding diaspora of young Indians now studying in Australia, she contributes more than $30,000 a year to the domestic economy as she ploughs her way through an engineering degree at the Australian National University in Canberra. But Vasha's investment in Australia is unlikely to end there.

The 18-year-old from Chennai, in India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, was one of the 96,739 Indian enrolments in Australian higher education and vocational training courses last year, a massive 54 per cent increase on the almost 63,000 Indian enrolments in 2007 and up from just 11,313 in 2002.

With India projected to be the fifth-largest consumer market by 2025, Australian-trained Indian graduates and skilled workers represent a future trade and investment bonanza as they return home to jobs in the business and government sector.

Australia's now well-established business links with Southeast Asia can be traced back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s when many students from that region studied in Australia.

"You're now seeing the beginnings of that sort of relationship between India and Australia," Australia's High Commissioner to India, John McCarthy, said yesterday.

Indian students now make up almost 18 per cent of Australia's total foreign student population, the second largest group after China, which represents 23.5 per cent of the total foreign student body. Foreign students are now Australia's third-largest export income earner, behind coal and iron ore, contributing $14.1 billion in direct income and an additional $12.6 billion in value-added goods and services, a new Access Economic report has found.

Vasha says she chose Australia over Britain and the US because it was closer to home and cheaper. "I was quite nervous, but since a large number of (Indian) students are now in Australia they're really helpful to new students," she said. She plans to return to India at the end of her four-year degree.

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4 April, 2009

British High School Physics exam is 'too easy and fails to prepare students'

Physics A-level has become so undemanding that it leaves British students the worst prepared in Europe to take degrees in the subject, an academic has claimed. Gareth Jones, a retired professor, said teenagers had been ‘short-changed’ by the removal of difficult maths topics such as calculus from A-level syllabuses. He also said shortages of specialist physics teachers were worse here than in other countries, leading to gaps in students’ knowledge.

Professor Jones is one of five academics who questioned staff at 120 universities in 21 European countries on the state of physics students’ knowledge. He said that in most countries, there was generally a ‘growing gap between what has traditionally been expected and assumed of new students by university physics departments and the preparation in physics and maths that they have received at school’.

But he said the drop in standards was particularly acute in England and Wales. ‘It seems that the shortage of specialist physics teachers with degrees in physics is greater in England and Wales than in other European countries,’ he said. ‘Also significant is that the physics school curriculum is less mathematical here than in other European countries.’

A-level physics courses, he said, were increasingly expecting pupils simply to regurgitate information, rather than getting them to use their understanding to reason their way through problems themselves. He said: ‘Students are more or less guided through the answer. Not very much careful reasoning is required.’

They no longer required the teaching of calculus in any depth, he said, and the level of maths needed for A-level physics was now ‘really quite low’. In drawing up the exams, boards could not assume that students were studying A-level maths.

The physicist and emeritus professor of Imperial College London, added: ‘If students are being taught little of this at school, then they are being shortchanged and receiving poorpreparation for careers in physics and engineering and for university courses in these subjects.’

His concerns were highlighted in a report on a seminar at Cambridge University on the teaching of mechanics in schools. The seminar heard that mechanics was the foundation for university physics study but up to 40 per cent of maths students were only given the chance to take one paper on it from the six they sit for A-level maths.

His findings follow the admission last week by Professor Alan Wilson, a former senior civil servant at the then Department for Education and Skills, that he was ‘astonished’ to learn that at least one major exam board no longer required calculus for A-level physics. Writing in the Times Higher Education supplement, Professor Wilson, now based at University College London, said there had been a ‘dumbing down’, even from the 17th century.

Also last week, the Government’s exams watchdog found the standard required to achieve A grades in A-level physics had fallen since 2001, while backing claims that GCSE science has been ‘dumbed down’.

SOURCE




Canadian Pro-Life Students Demand Public Apology from School

The acting president of the St. Mary's Students for Life, Joseph Westin, has asked that the university apologize for allowing a group of pro-abortion protesters to disrupt and finally stop a university-approved pro-life presentation last month. The presentation was given by Jose Ruba, a founding member of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

In February LifeSiteNews reported on the disruption of Ruba's presentation by a group of abortion supporters who, less than a minute into his talk, entered the room and began shouting down the presentation. Campus security did not stop or remove the protesters and when Halifax Regional Police arrived, a university official shut down the presentation.

Joseph Westin is demanding an apology from the school for violating freedom of speech rights and for giving a misleading account of the university official's actions in a press release posted on the University's website.

Westin said the press release gave the impression that university officials merely moved the presentation "on campus somewhere else." However that account is false, he stated in an Atlantic Catholic report.

The university statement reads that, "protesters were asked to stop disrupting the event, but after more than an hour and a half, the presentation was relocated to a nearby location ... Relocating the event, though regrettable, allowed the speaker to complete his presentation."

Westin explained that, "Really, they stopped the presentation, and we decided to leave and go to the church; if the church was not there we wouldn't have been able to continue." "They made no effort to provide another building or venue for us," he added. "They're claiming that they moved us to another building. But they didn't. They stopped our presentation."

Mr. Westin said that St. Mary's Students for Life pro-life group is looking for a retraction of the press release as well as a public apology from the school for the way they gave in to the group of protesters. "They're not dealing with it at all," Westin said. "They're pretty much sweeping it under the rug. They're trying to get rid of it. The people who were breaking the law should have been dealt with and stopped, not us."

The pro-life group is also calling for an investigation into the St. Mary's Women's Centre, which Westin claims organized the protest.

SOURCE




Don't spare the rod

Comment from Australia

Overwork, large classes and poor pay are issues that worry new teachers. But according to a recent Australian Education Union survey of teachers across Australia, the other issue at the forefront of their minds is classroom behaviour. The 2008 survey, which drew 1545 responses, ranks disruptive students second on a list of 11 issues - rating 66.1 per cent, compared with 68.5 per cent for concerns about workload, 62.9 per cent for pay and 62.6 per cent for class sizes. Of even more concern is that the figure on behaviour reflects a jump of more than 10 per cent compared with the 2007 survey. At the secondary level, the issue is ranked number one, with a rating of 71.4 per cent.

Victorian school leaders also see disruptive students as a serious issue. The president of the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals, Brian Burgess, recently criticised the Brumby Government for weakening the power of schools to deal with the problem.

Australian teachers and principals are not alone in expressing anxiety about the damaging effects of classroom misbehaviour. In Britain, a recent teacher survey found that 45.5 per cent of those interviewed said challenging behaviour was a daily event and nearly two-thirds agreed that student behaviour had grown worse since they had started teaching.

Disruptive behaviour does not just undermine learning; equally damaging is its effect on teacher morale and wellbeing. According to one newspaper report, cases of stress leave for Victorian teachers have risen from 125 in 2006 to 170 in 2008. Beyond the cost of WorkCover claims, many qualified and committed teachers leave the profession early because of the anxiety and stress caused by disruptive students. It needs to be noted, too, that many beginning teachers are also concerned about aggressive and demanding parents, with 86.5 per cent saying that their training had not adequately prepared them for dealing with what many teachers describe as the angry parent syndrome.

What's to be done? At a time when teachers are told that they must solve society's problems - from drug and alcohol abuse to sex education, self-esteem and wellness training, road safety, diet and, following Black Saturday, bushfire prevention - it's time to say enough is enough.

Parents are primarily responsible for raising their children and for instilling discipline and respect for others. It should be no surprise that children who are indulged, spoilt and turned into prima donnas at home cause disruption at school. So-called helicopter parents - the ones always hovering around, interfering and giving advice - should realise that they need to stand back, give children responsibility and allow teachers and schools to set and enforce their rules free from interference.

Based on the AEU beginning teachers' survey, it is clear that pre-service teacher education needs to be more effective in equipping teachers to cope with classroom realities. When asked whether their training had prepared them to deal with particular groups of challenging students, such as those from non-English speaking backgrounds, those with disabilities and those from dysfunctional backgrounds, nearly 70 per cent said "no".

Inquiries into teacher education have recommended that more time be given to practical classroom experience, with less emphasis on educational theory and more on what constitutes effective, research-based classroom practice.

Most baby boomer teachers my age will remember the '70s and '80s, when formal discipline went out the window - along with the strap and school inspectors - and classroom rules were negotiated, teachers were called by their first name and a student's rights had priority over those of the group.

One response to unruly behaviour, advocated by Britain's Office for Standards in Education, is a return to traditional discipline and a more authoritarian school environment. Comprehensive schools in disadvantaged areas have received positive reports after taking up such an approach. In drawing a clear line between life on the streets and what is accepted in the classroom, schools have banned hoodies and gang colours, introduced formal assemblies, clear rules that are enforced quickly and consistently, and strict uniform regulations. Many inner-city US schools have also turned behaviour around by enforcing strict rules and by promoting a school culture that rewards effort and success.

Compare such approaches with what takes place in many Australian schools, where discipline procedures are convoluted and bureaucratic. It's often assumed that teachers are at fault and parents are only too willing to take their children's side in any dispute. In one notable example of how difficult it is to enforce discipline, a Victorian teacher failed to intervene in a schoolyard fight between a group of girls, most likely because of what would have happened if he had manhandled one of them.

Research shows that, along with a rigorous, properly defined curriculum, teachers are the most important factor in successful learning. To be effective, teachers need to be well paid, well resourced and to be given the power to maintain discipline in the classroom.

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3 April, 2009

Charter School Teachers Attempt Ousting of Union

Implicit in the right to associate with a union is the right to disassociate from one and the later is the right that the teachers of KIPP Academy in New York are trying to employ by attempting to oust the United Federation of Teachers from their places of work.

Teachers at two KIPP charter schools in the Bronx and Manhattan, New York, took the action after the UFT tired to meddle in school affairs without contacting teachers and staff first.

Earlier this year, the teachers union filed a grievance against KIPP Academy’s “at-will” employment policies but the union did so without first meeting with teachers to see if they wanted this action. Teacher Matt Hureau told The New York Post that the union never talked to teachers first. “It was the union acting and notifying the teachers afterward,” Hureau said

This union action, KIPP teachers said, violated the trust that must exist between union, teachers and school administrators.

“The union was interested in a more active part of the way our school operates, and at KIPP Infinity we unanimously believe that what works for us best is 100 percent open communication lines between staff, administration, parents and students,” said Rachel Heuisler, 30, who has taught at the school for three years.

The union, for its part, suggested that the only reason the anti-union petitions were raised is because a KIPP school that isn’t unionized had recently sought to join the union. Typically the union did not respond to the charge deciding to deflect by offering theories on conspiracies against them instead. Tidings of good luck go out from us here to the KIPP teachers for their efforts to dump the union.

SOURCE




The “Overrepresentation” Of Immigrant Blacks

by John Rosenberg

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on a new study’s finding

that among high school graduates, “immigrant blacks” — defined as those who immigrated to the United States or their children — are significantly more likely than other black Americans to attend selective colleges. In fact, immigrant black Americans are more likely than white students to attend such colleges.

The study noted

that previous research has documented that a smaller proportion of black high school graduates than white high school graduates enroll in college. But when students of similar socioeconomic status are compared, the black high school graduates are more likely than their white counterparts to enroll. Given the debate about the immigrant factor in analyzing black enrollments, the authors set out to determine “whether this net black advantage is very African American.”

Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, Bennett and Lutz found that among high school graduates, 75.1 percent of immigrant blacks enrolled in college, a slightly higher percentage than that of whites (72.5 percent) and substantially larger than for native blacks (60.2 percent).

In terms of the college destinations of those who enrolled in college, the rates for immigrant blacks compared to other black students were similar for two-year colleges and non-selective four-year colleges that are not historically black. The biggest gap was at selective colleges, which enroll only 2.4 percent of native black high school graduates but 9.2 percent of immigrant blacks (and 7.3 percent of whites).

Think about this. I’ll have more to say about it later today.

Continued... O.K., I’m back. Playing tennis, this morning, was fun. Going to the dentist, this afternoon, wasn’t. But now that I’m back and have thought about this during the day, it turns out that I really don’t have anything to say about the “overrepresentation” of immigrant (or offspring of immigrant) blacks among the “underrepresented” blacks on American campuses. Or rather, I don’t have anything new to say, because I’ve already said a bunch in response to similar studies and earlier news here, here, and here.

From the first here, nearly five years ago:

According to a fascinating front page article in today’s New York Times, it has begun to dawn on Lani Guinier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and other preferentialists at Harvard and elsewhere that you’d better be very careful what you subsidize, for you’ll certainly get more of it ... and it may not be exactly what you had in mind.

One of the dirty little secrets of racial preferences, now beginning to leak out, is not only that most of the beneficiaries are middle class or actually rich -- that has been known if not advertised for a good while -- but that most are not even American, or if they are American they are of very recent origin. 8 percent of the undergraduates at Harvard are black (still “underrepresented,” says Guinier), but “the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.” Moreover,

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race. [Editorial Aside: Has the NYT lost its copy editors? The comma after “... Berkeley)” should not be there. If the Times were not as foolishly opposed to the serial comma as it is to President Bush, it should be after “Duke.”]

For many preferentialists, subsidizing dark foreigners is not at all what they had in mind....

Mary C. Waters, the chairman of the sociology department at Harvard, who has studied West Indian immigrants, says they are initially more successful than many African-Americans for a number of reasons. Since they come from majority-black countries, they are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race. In addition, many arrive with higher levels of education and professional experience. And at first, they encounter less discrimination.

So, there we have it. American blacks are so “psychologically handicapped” by the presumably internalized stigma of being black that they must be benevolently handed the crutch of racial preferences. I would like to think that if I had friends like this I would begin to rethink my friendship patterns.

“You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action,’’ Professor Waters continued. I would be tempted to ask where she has been, but then she’s been at Harvard. Has Harvard really not had such a discussion, or has she simply been unaware of it? In any event, here’s her dramatic philosophical contribution:

If it’s about getting black faces at Harvard, then you’re doing fine. If it’s about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you’re not doing well. And if it’s about having diversity that includes African-Americans from the South or from inner-city high schools, then you’re not doing well, either.

Well of course. If you give preferences to “black faces,” what you get is “black faces.” Why should anyone be surprised? I would say that’s Harvard for you, but that same surprising surprise seems to be prevalent across preferentialdom.

And from the third here, a year ago, which began by quoting from an article in the Washington Post:

The nation’s most elite colleges and universities are bolstering their black student populations by enrolling large numbers of immigrants from Africa, the West Indies and Latin America, according to a study published recently in the American Journal of Education. Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation’s college-age black population, account for more than a quarter of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study, produced by Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

.... The more elite the school, the more black immigrants are enrolled.....

Black American scholars such as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, two Harvard University professors, have said that white educators are skirting long-held missions to resolve historic wrongs against native black Americans by enrolling immigrants who look like them.

“Wait a minute,” I then continued.

Now I’m confused. Have Gates and Guinier finally rejected the “look like” test for preferential treatment? Have they, finally realizing that those “historic wrongs” consisted precisely of distributing burdens and benefits based on color, renounced racial preference and embraced the old civil rights standard of colorblind equal treatment?

If they reject color — the “look like” test — as a basis for preferential treatment, what test do they propose? If color is no longer an acceptable proxy for having suffered “historic wrongs” that preferential admissions are somehow supposed to redress, what is? Should actual harm have to be proven, and if so, how much, how recent? Should Southern blacks receive preferences over Northern blacks on the theory that they’ve suffered more discrimination?

It seems to me that it’s very difficult to defend a regime of racial preference while rejecting color as the basis of determining whom to prefer.

The widespread discomfort, sometimes hostility, expressed by the supporters of affirmative action for home-grown blacks to the large numbers of immigrant blacks who benefit from it confirms, I think, that they really don’t base their pro-preference views on a noble belief in “diversity,” no matter how often they mouth the word.

It could be argued, I suppose, that the advantage immigrant blacks have over both native blacks and native whites reflects the fact that college admissions officers really do believe the “diversity” mantra they all now repeat. But that argument would be persuasive only if, say, Asian immigrants were also given such favorable treatment, and, as numerous studies have shown, they aren’t. In fact, they are disproportionately victimized by the preferences given to other minorities.

SOURCE





2 April, 2009

Under a third of men at black colleges earn degree in 6 years

Enrolling kids who don't have what it takes to complete a course is pretty dumb -- and a rip-off from the kids concerned. An IQ test could predict who would succeed very readily

They're no longer the only option for African-American students, but the country's historically black colleges and universities brag that they provide a supportive environment where these students are more likely to succeed. That, though, is not necessarily true.

An Associated Press analysis of government data on the 83 federally designated four-year historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) shows just 37% of their black students finish a degree within six years. That's 4 percentage points lower than the national college graduation rate for black students.

A few HBCUs, like Howard and all-female Spelman, have much higher graduation rates, exceeding the national averages for both black and white students. But others are clustered among the worst-performing colleges in the country. At 38 HBCUs, fewer than one in four men who started in 2001 had completed a bachelor's degree by 2007, the data show. At Texas Southern, Voorhees, Edward Waters and Miles College, the figure was under 10%.

To be sure, women are outperforming men across education, and many non-HBCUs struggle with low graduation rates. And the rates don't account for students who transfer or take more than six years, which may be more common at HBCUs than at other schools.

Most importantly, HBCUs educate a hugely disproportionate share of low-income students. Compared to other colleges defined by the government as "low-income serving," HBCU graduation rates are just a few points lower. Factoring in obstacles like lower levels of academic preparation, some research suggests that HBCUs do as well with black students as do majority-white institutions.

Still, HBCUs' low completion rates, especially for men, have broad consequences, on and off campus. Women account for more than 61% of HBCU students, the AP found. They have unprecedented leadership opportunities, but also pay a price — in everything from one-sided classroom discussions to competition for dates.

HBCUs educate only one-quarter of black college students, but produce an outsized number of future black graduate students and leaders. That group is distinctly female; HBCUs award twice as many degrees to women as to men.

The good news is some HBCUs are working hard to boost graduation rates — and succeeding. Experts say that proves failure isn't inevitable — but also means it's fair to ask tough questions of schools that are not improving.

HBCUs receive more than half their revenue from government. There is growing frustration with the waste of money — for students and taxpayers — when students have nothing to show for their time in college. President Barack Obama wants to return the United States to the top rank of college attainment by 2020. That will never happen if the colleges that do the heavy lifting of educating disadvantaged groups don't perform better.

Even some within the tight-knit HBCU community say the schools bear some responsibility. They say too many HBCUs have grown content offering students a chance at college, but resisting the hard work to get them through. "I think HBCUs have gotten lazy," said Walter Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College in Little Rock. "That was our hallmark 40, 50 years ago. We still say 'nurturing, caring, the president knows you.' That's a lie on a lot of campuses. That's a flat-out lie."

Glancing around her classes at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis and in the stands at basketball games, sophomore Velma Maclin has noticed something odd. Most of the so-called "Big Men on Campus" are women. "The ladies pretty much run the yard," said Maclin. Several male friends recently got discouraged and dropped out. She has little sympathy. She works the overnight shift at FedEx Corp. and says if she can stay in school, they can, too.

Women have probably outnumbered men at HBCUs for most of their history, but the proportion has been gradually rising, the AP found — from 53% in 1976 to about 61% the last few years. On 17 HBCU campuses there are two women for every man. At a few, the ratio is three-to-one...

At Edward Waters, virtually every student takes developmental courses — essentially, to finish the high school education they never fully received. Only then can they start progressing toward a college degree.

To explain the particular struggles of men, educators point to a range of cultural factors that affect black men everywhere, but which are especially visible at HBCUs. Men have fewer role models, and also seem to think they have more opportunities without a degree. Educators also describe a constant battle against two poisonous ideas: that black men can't succeed, or that if they do they are somehow less than genuine.

More here




Quarter of British 11-year-olds fail English and maths

More than a quarter of 11-year-olds leave primary school without mastering the basics of English and maths, official league tables will show today. Around 150,000 pupils failed a performance measure the Government is introducing. It shows the proportion of pupils who took SATs for 11-year-olds last summer and achieved the Government's expected level in both English and maths.

As many as 28 per cent of pupils started secondary school in September without having met the benchmark, the tables are expected to show. However, the figure is expected to vary widely between primary schools, whose results are being published in school-by-school tables this morning.

Youngsters who missed the benchmark will need extra help to cope with the curriculum at secondary school because they failed to reach level four in the core subjects of English and maths.

Separate official figures showed yesterday that a fifth of bright children - those who exceed Government expectations at 11 - make no progress in key subjects in their first three years at secondary school. More than 20 per cent of pupils who gain level five in English and science are still at level five three years later after 'coasting' once entering secondary school. Opposition politicians said teaching should be better tailored to pupils' abilities.

The trends emerged as the Government faced fresh criticism over the decision to publish today's tables amid claims they are tainted by last summer's marking fiasco. A catalogue of blunders in the administration of the tests led to a sharp rise in the number of delayed, missing or incorrect results. An official report concluded earlier this month that while the reliability of results was no worse than in previous years, it was possible that up to half of awarded levels in any given year are wrong.

Today's tables, which are being published at 9.30am, are certain to trigger renewed calls by teachers' leaders for SATs for 11-year-olds to be scrapped. Ministers said performance had improved on last year following literacy and numeracy drives costing hundreds of millions of pounds. But Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb said: 'Too many children are leaving primary school without the basics they need to succeed later on. We simply cannot allow things to continue in this way.'

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove said: 'We need to ensure teaching is tailored to individual pupils. 'We would give heads much more power over budgets so they can better reward great teachers and attract specialists.'

Schools Minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry said: 'In 1997, almost half of children left primary school having failed to reach the expected level in both English and maths. 'We now see three quarters of children leaving primary school having reached the expected level in both subjects.'

SOURCE





1 April, 2009

Zero-tolerance policies wreak havoc on children’s education

There are children who matter so little that no government agency even bothers to count or keep statistical track of them. They are the children of prisoners. Nationally, the justice systems have no interest in how children or families are affected by an offending parent’s imprisonment. The state ensures that the sins of the father are visited upon the son.

The number-one predictor of a child going to prison is having had a parent in prison. The number-one drag on a child’s academic success is family chaos of any kind. And nothing is as chaotic as having a parent yanked out of their lives and branded as a convict.

Sen. Leo Blais, D-Coventry, has submitted Bill S0320 to the General Assembly, to reduce the penalty for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana to a fine of $100. Excellent. Hopefully this bill will pass. Hopefully it will start a trend of rethinking all of the state’s morally-righteous but destructive laws that don’t take families into account.

The 1990s surge of harsh zero-tolerance laws stuffed the U.S. prisons to the point where we lock up a higher percentage of our own people than any other country in the world. Some unlucky inmates got caught with an ounce or less of marijuana. In Rhode Island, 89 percent of the marijuana arrests are for possession. Is passing a joint among friends that much more pernicious than sharing a bottle of wine?

Well, some would say marijuana is the gateway to more serious drug use. Sol Roderiquez, director of the Family Life Center in South Providence, would say, “Incarceration itself leads to worse drugs, often worse crimes. And with a prison record, it’s so hard for an ex-offender to get a job, crime is one of the few options left.” And so the cycle continues. The Family Life Center helps ex-cons piece their shattered lives back together so they can live in the mainstream again.

According to the 2007 Pew prison report, Rhode Island spends $44,860 a year per inmate — the highest in the country. And that doesn’t include the court costs.

But neighboring Massachusetts passed a law similar to Blais’ that will save their taxpayers almost $30 million a year in arrests, bookings, and basic court costs alone. Eleven other states have also passed such laws. Vermont is considering one now. Blais’ bill is not legalization of marijuana, but decriminalization. The mom, dad, uncle, or sister caught with a joint won’t have a criminal conviction on their record that makes supporting a family with legitimate work nigh impossible.

According to a survey done by RI Kids Count, as of Sept. 30, 2007, roughly two-thirds of the 3,081 inmate responders had children — 4,520 children, to be exact. When the parent goes to jail, many children go into foster or residential care, or stay with relatives who resent the unasked-for burden and cost. Families split up. Children act out. The stress is intense.

Roderiquez says, “When the state imposes such a severe punishment, it should take the whole family into account. Prison has huge consequences for the whole family. But we’ve dehumanized this population. They don’t have feelings or respond emotionally. No one pays attention to the fact that we’re pushing the families into falling apart.”

Roderiquez and her colleague Nick Horton, policy researcher at the center, have seen it all, and rattled off story after story.

There was the family with three daughters. When the husband and breadwinner went to prison, the mother went on welfare. In time, the youngest child had to be treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, and the oldest became a classically enraged young adolescent, getting involved in serious escapist bad habits. All three girls’ grades at school have tanked. Roderiquez and Horton add that children’s grades always suffer. Always. “It’s the first thing to go,” said Roderiquez.

Then there was the single father responsible for two children. When he went to prison, one dropped out of school immediately, and the other ran away.

I’ll gladly stipulate that smoking dope could be an indicator of growing or potentially dangerous social behavior. But wouldn’t it be more effective in the long run, more healing for everyone, to send a family-services worker to the home to help those families who are in fact dangerously drug-involved? The City of Providence has a nationally recognized “go-team” of family-service workers whom the police call to crime scenes when children are present or a family is traumatized. Use them for marijuana busts. If you must punish the offender, revoke a bit of the family’s privacy by investigating whether a family has unhealthy stresses driving the drug use. If we’re serious about “corrections,” the only real way to correct misbehavior is to get to the root cause, which prison does not.

When the best solution to a social problem is treatment, provide treatment. It’s cheaper than courts and prisons, healthier, and more long-lasting. For my money, the state should look at all their laws with an eye to the collateral damage that harsh penalties cause to an offender’s extended community. Is the damage worth it? Sometimes prison is necessary, but often it’s just vindictive.

And for heaven’s sake, start collecting data on the inmates’ children. Bring those children to light. They are our responsibility.

SOURCE




How to Cure Your Daughter’s STD

by Mike S. Adams

Dear Steve:

Thanks for writing me with your concerns about your daughter’s recent visit home from college. I don’t have a daughter but I can understand the concern you have after seeing such dramatic changes in her after just six months at a public university. After all, you didn’t save money for eighteen long years in order to pay someone to teach her to despise the values you taught for, well, eighteen long years.

First of all, I want you to understand that many of the crazy ideas you hear your daughter espousing are commonplace on college campuses. Nonetheless, it must have been shocking for you to hear that she supported Barack Obama in the last election principally because of his ideas about “the redistribution of wealth.” I know you were also disappointed to hear of her sudden opposition to the War on Terror and her sudden embrace of the United Nations. Most of all, I know you are disappointed that she has stopped going to church altogether.

Now that your daughter is not going to church it will be easier to get her to accept other policies based on economic and cultural Marxism. Socialist professors like the fact that average church attendance drops dramatically after just one year of college. God and socialism are simply incompatible. One cannot worship both Jesus Christ and Karl Marx.

But there is good news, Steve. I think I can implement a program that will cure your daughter’s Socialist Teaching Disorder (STD) in just a few short days. In case you were wondering, I define STD as the sudden infatuation with socialism brought on by exposure to pro-socialist ideas without a corresponding exposure to anti-socialist ideas. Although not recognized by the APA, this emotional disorder is running rampant at American universities.

The solution to your daughter’s STD is to be found in your decision to award her a sum of $4000 if she returns from her freshman year with a 3.5 GPA or above. Previously, you explained to me that you decided to do this for two reasons: 1) Your daughter had earned a $4000 scholarship, which meant you had the extra money, and 2) Your only son had gone to college five years ago and flunked out after one year.

Now that your daughter has maintained a 3.6 GPA (so far) you are happy. But you are unhappy that you are about to reward her newfound love of socialism when you had only intended to reward her studiousness. I have a solution that involves three steps. If you follow these steps (in order) we’ll have this little problem cured in no time:

1. When your daughter returns from college in early May (presumably with a GPA over 3.5) I want you to tell her that you lied. Put simply, when she asks about her $4000 just tell her that you never really had any intention of delivering on your promises.

This revelation will, no doubt, cause significant consternation and outrage. But when she protests, simply point out that her choice for president, Barack Obama, also lied to her. Note that his lies about earmarks and line-by-line analysis of the budget will probably end up costing her more than $4000. She might say, “But you’re my father.” If she does, respond by saying “But I’m not your president.” If things get too uncomfortable, just tell her the $4000 promise was technically “last year’s business.”

2. When your daughter has cooled down somewhat from the realization that her father is a confessed liar I want you to strike again. Since your son, now 23, still lives at home it will be possible for you to implement step two in the presence of both children. This step will involve simply taking out your wallet and writing a $2000 check to your son.

This action will, no doubt, cause even more consternation and outrage for your daughter. She may well point out that her brother is unemployed. She may also point out that he has been in rehab twice and that he once punched you in the face while under the influence of drugs. But, when she protests, simply say that it was Barack Obama who taught you to reward failure.

She may well say “But that’s half of the money I was supposed to get.” If so, point out that it is Barack Obama who would like to take other people’s money – at least half, if not more – and use much of it to reward bad behavior. By this time, she will probably hate socialism and the lesson will have saved you a lot of money.

But, just in case the point is not yet made, there is a third step to my plan. And this is where I get actively involved.

3. I’m going to take your daughter and the remaining $2000 - in the form of one hundred $20 bills – to the “hood.” Specifically, I am going to take her to places where crack cocaine is sold here in Wilmington in the middle of the afternoon. This will include grocery stores and actual crack houses. Don’t worry about your daughter’s safety as I will be armed with a .357 magnum loaded with 145-grain silver tipped hollow point bullets. When I approach a crack head I will first ask whether he paid income taxes last year. If he says “no” I will hand him $20.

If your daughter asks me why I give money to people who don’t pay taxes I’ll remind her that this is what President Obama does. Then I’ll ask her if she still believes in “spreading the wealth” without regard to individual merit.

By the end of the afternoon, I can guarantee your daughter will be cured of her STD. Sorry if I sound overly optimistic, Steve. I got my optimism from the same place I got my love of capitalism. I learned it from Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama.

SOURCE