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30 April, 2010

Obama pushes 'second-chance' training

Plan to teach illiterate blacks "critical thinking"? Good luck with that!

With as many as 6 million youth under age 24 having failed to finish high school, the Obama administration wants to see its many "second-chance" work-training programs have a stronger impact on the lives of those youth, officials told a Washington briefing yesterday.

One major change is to have work-training programs stress critical thinking and other skills — like being versatile and nimble — that are essential in today's workplace, said Cecilia Rouse, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, to a Brookings Institution panel Tuesday morning.

The days of high-paying, routine-focused jobs like car assembly lines or steel-mill work are "not gone, but they're going," Ms. Rouse said. The strongest job growth is happening in professions in which employees have to "think on your feet" and "problem-solve on the job."

Work-training programs also need firmer exit goals, said Jane Oates, assistant secretary of the Employment and Training Administration at the Department of Labor.

Youth should leave a program with at least some community college credits, for instance, or have a certification as a union-ready pre-apprentice in a trade, or have a clear path into a chosen career field.

Nobody wants a bridge "from Jobs Corp to nowhere," Ms. Oates said. "We have to have a destination and commitment from both ends."

However, the problem of remediating disadvantaged and disaffected youth will likely vex the Obama administration as thoroughly as previous ones.

Jobs Corps has been around more than 40 years, and there are more than 100 federal programs — most of them with work and training components — aimed at at-risk and delinquent youth, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Unfortunately, the impact of those work-training programs has only been "mixed," said Dan Bloom, who oversees projects at the research firm MDRC, at the Brookings event.

Mixed results means that in the short term, a program might help its students get General Equivalency Degrees (GEDs) or achieve some other work-preparation goal, but none was associated with lasting improvements in students' living standards, he said.

Minority youth are particularly at risk for not finishing school — the dropout rates are 20 percent for Hispanics, 12 percent for blacks and 6 percent for whites, federal data show.

There also are mixed expectations about education in some Hispanic communities, said Juan Rangel, chief executive of United Neighborhood Organization, a major community group in Chicago.

Graduations are celebrated, even lavishly, he said. But "culturally, there's no shame in work — it is revered" and seen as equal to a high school diploma, he said. Getting a job at 16 is "just as good."

The U.S. dropout problem is one of the costliest in the nation, said a 2009 study from Northwestern University. Youth without high school diplomas are more likely to be incarcerated, be jobless or have poverty-level earnings (less than $9,000 a year) compared to peers who get college degrees, the study found.

The National Urban League, National Council of La Raza and Youth Build are among the groups calling for a new national re-enrollment program to help dropouts finish high school.

SOURCE





British Teacher who attacked pupil with dumbbell should never have been put on trial, says judge

A teacher who bludgeoned a disruptive pupil with a dumbbell walked free yesterday when a 'common sense' jury acquitted him in minutes. Peter Harvey was cleared of trying to kill a 14-year-old boy who told him to '**** off'.

His trial heard how he was targeted by teenagers who knew he had been off work with depression and stress.

The 'fundamentally decent' man snapped when the science class set out to upset him, with a girl - described as the pupils' ringleader - using a camcorder to film the incident so she could distribute it round the school.

Mr Harvey dragged the boy - a persistent troublemaker - into a cupboard and hit him about the head with a 3kg dumbbell shouting 'die, die, die'. The attack fractured the teenager's skull.

But yesterday a jury swiftly acquitted him of attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

Judge Michael Stokes QC told the court 'common sense had prevailed'.

Mr Harvey, 50, had already admitted the lesser count of grievous bodily harm but the judge said he would not be sent to prison.

It was revealed that the judge had already said that the trial should never have been brought because of the teacher's 'previous good character' and his state of mind when he attacked the boy.

Astonishingly, the father-of-two had spent eight months on remand before the trial - despite his own mental state, his wife suffering severe depression and their daughter having Asperger's syndrome.

The judge told him at Nottingham Crown Court: 'You have already effectively served a sentence that is more than the appropriate sentence. 'I am already looking to a community order with a view to assisting you, in view of your recent problems.'

At a press conference called by his union, the teacher sat in silence alongside his wife Samantha, 44, as his solicitor Paula Porter read a statement on his behalf, saying the verdict was not 'received with any sense of joy or triumph'.

Mr Harvey said in the statement: 'I acknowledge, as I have from the outset, that my actions have caused damage and pain. For that reason, I again extend my deepest and sincere apologies and regret for that.'

The trial had heard how the veteran science master had gone from a 'great teacher' admired by all at All Saints' Roman Catholic School in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, into someone who was snappy and irritable when he returned to work after having four months off with stress and depression.

A group of disruptive pupils set out to 'wind up' the teacher and used mobile phones to circulate evidence of their misbehaviour. The court heard pupils had noticed Harvey muttering to himself when he became stressed in the three months since he returned to work.

Chris Keates, general secretary of teachers' union NASUWT, said Mr Harvey had been the victim of an 'explosive combination' of a teacher in fragile health and a group of pupils hell-bent on exploiting it - and that questions had to be asked about how
he had been allowed to come back to work by his employers.

'Any teacher who has had to deal with challenging and disruptive pupils will recognise that given the combination of factors that applied in this case how such a situation can easily spiral out of control,' she said.

More here





Australia's new national curriculum looking fairly promising at this stage

The history part is predictably one-sided but Rudd comes out in favour of phonics and grammar. But what the teachers actually do could be another story. That phonics and grammar are evil is almost a religion to some of them

ENGLISH and maths classes will return to basics, history will explore Sorry Day alongside Anzac Day and science will be made more interesting.

The changes form the backbone of a radical overhaul of teaching in Australia that will bring all states and territories under a single curriculum.

An eight-page liftout inside The Courier-Mail print edition today provides a comprehensive guide to the drafts of the first four subjects that span Prep to Year 10 and will be taught in classrooms from next year.

Under the changes, Prep students will be taught to count to 20, learn what a scientist is, write in upper and lower case letters and talk about how families share their history.

Within three years children will learn to tell the time on analogue and digital clocks and research a famous astronomer and by the time they finish primary school, students will be using paragraphs to write well structured English texts.

When they reach Year 10, students will be working with trigonometric ratios and discussing the major economic and political debates in Australia during the 20th century, including workplace reforms.

Parents will be able to follow the curriculum online to get an unprecedented look at their child's learning at every stage of schooling.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the new national approach would end the "pretty patchy standards" in many classrooms and give parents confidence that their children will learn the essentials wherever they live.

"When it comes to teaching the basics, let me be very frank – what we need to make sure is our kids know how to sound out letters, that they know grammar, that they know punctuation, that they know adding up, taking away, counting. These essential elements must be part of the basic knowledge in the school education of all Australian kids," he said.

Queensland has consistently trailed the nation in literacy and numeracy and the curriculum is a centrepiece of the Government's election promise to deliver an "education revolution". Premier Anna Bligh said a national curriculum would ensure Queensland students would not be disadvantaged.

The draft reveals Prep students will be expected to learn more and play less while Queensland's Year 7 students will face greater demands.

Queensland Association of State School Principals president Norm Hart said the Year 7 and Prep curriculums would be a challenge, with "a significant jump" required from both students and teachers. Queensland is one of three states to currently have Year 7 in primary and not high school.

Mr Hart said the Year 7 science and history curriculum was closer to what was currently being taught in Year 8. "It's clear in the science curriculum that there is a significant jump in the expected achievement levels," he said.

Early Childhood Teachers Association president Kim Walters said it was a sad day for Queensland's play-based Prep. "Outdoor play will suffer because of this, I am very disappointed," she said.

The Opposition yesterday slammed the history and science components of the curriculum, saying it was left-wing and contained too much focus on indigenous Australians.

"If we get elected this year, we'll entirely review the national curriculum and if it doesn't measure up to what we expect then, the Coalition will scrap it and start again," education spokesman Christopher Pyne said.

Teachers in 155 schools will trial the subjects for the next three months.

Senior curriculum will be released next month for consultation and draft curriculum for geography, arts, and languages will follow next year.

SOURCE



29 April, 2010

Quality of British school books hit by changes

Constant tweaking of math syllabus mean textbooks are 'less coherent' than in Asia. Far be it from me to defend ANYTHING about British government schools but IQ tests do show greater mathematical aptitude among East Asians so not all the fault for British pupils falling behind can be placed at the door of their schools. The Asian advantage is inborn.

Pupils of East Asian origin do extraordinarily well in Australian schools too. Some Asian first graders have more literacy in English than do some American High School graduates. That is a bold statement to make but I have seen it with my own eyes

Constant changes to the national curriculum have left school textbooks floundering in their wake, according to a major international study of maths performance published today.

The authors of the report single out a deterioration in the quality of textbooks as the key factor for England lagging behind the top performers in international league tables.

"Countries that perform consistently well in maths use carefully constructed textbooks as the primary means of teaching," says the study by academics at King's College London.

"By comparison, use of textbooks in English schools is relatively low and English textbooks use routine examples and are less mathematically coherent than those in other countries. Pupils in high-performing countries (such as China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore) are also more likely to use textbooks at home than their English counterparts."

The authors, Professor Mike Askew and Dr Jeremy Hogden, argue: "Over the past 20 years the educational system in England has been subject to frequent reform and review. One consequence of this has been to limit the time available for the development and trialling of textbooks with publishers competing to produce textbooks quickly. This has led to a reduction in the quality of textbooks." In a separate study of books used in English, French and German schools, the English textbooks were found to be "less coherent".

The report also comes to the conclusion that children do not have to enjoy maths to do well at it."There is no link between achievement and enjoyment in maths education," it says. "High-performing countries are as concerned over pupils' dislike of mathematics as we are in England." One factor in the success of eastern countries could be the fact that in China, for instance, parents have to buy their children's textbooks. "That may influence expectations," the report's authors argue. "Colleagues in China have expressed surprise that in England textbooks are provided by the state and the lack of expectation that pupils would do extra work from textbooks at home."

One of the most respected international studies into maths standards, known as Timms, places England seventh in the world in the tests for 14-year-olds. In the other respected international maths standards study, Pisa, 18 countries outperformed England.

It explains the Asian pupils' success in maths by concluding: "Pupils in these countries may be less interested in the mathematics itself and more in the status afforded by exam success. Success within such exam-oriented systems requires effort and any pleasure is as a result of the success attained rather than derived through the processes of learning per se."

SOURCE




British grade inflation as Cambridge rejects record 5,800 straight-A pupils

Fears over A-level grade inflation were revived last night after Cambridge revealed it rejected a record 5,817 straight-A applicants last year. The university said the figure was up 323 from 5,494 in the previous year.

The figures highlight the difficulties faced by admissions tutors in sorting between well-qualified applicants. Cambridge is introducing an A* grade to conditional offers this year but most other universities will shun the new grade for the first years of its operation.

Pupils from independent and grammar schools were significantly more likely to be accepted by the elite university last year, despite a multi-million pound drive to recruit talented comprehensive pupils.

Cambridge said that in 2008, state school pupils had claimed their biggest share of places since 1981 - a sign their efforts were paying off. But 2009 figures show that state school numbers slipped back, falling 5 per cent to 1,675.

At the same time, the numbers admitted from private schools rose 3 per cent. It meant that 58 per cent of British students accepted were from state schools, compared with 42 per cent from the independent sector. This compares with a 59/41 split the year before.

Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, said the fact nearly three quarters of rejects went on to achieve three As - once regarded as an elite achievement and a likely passport to a top university place - reflected the 'highly competitive' nature of Cambridge admissions.

But critics say grade inflation is to blame. In 2009, one in eight students gained a hat-trick of As. Cambridge has set conditional offers of one A* and two As for many students this year, and some for two A*s.

Mr Parks said: 'We hope that will seem to be a fairer system because students who get into Cambridge will by and large have higher grades than those who don't.' He said ministers had been 'bending his ear' over the decision.

There are fears that the proportion of state school pupils will fall further if A* grades are used to discriminate, amid claims independent schools will be better geared to prepare candidates for questions linked to the new grade.

Mr Parks said the university was hopeful of progress in widening access to state school students. He said: 'The proportion of home students from state schools admitted in the 08/09 admissions cycle is 58 per cent. 'While this represents a small decrease, minor fluctuations in the figures are common, and a one percentage point change is not statistically significant.

'Cambridge is pleased that the gains made in this area last year, when we reported an increase of four percentage points, have to a large extent been retained.

'While the figures remain reasonably stable, we are also very conscious of the need to keep reinforcing the message that Cambridge is a welcoming and inclusive place.'

SOURCE




British Fee-paying schools hit by recession as pupil numbers drop

Independent schools have had their first fall in pupil numbers for five years as the recession hits admissions.

The overall figure in Britain fell by 2,645 to 511,886 at the start of this year, down 0.6 per cent. Were it not for a big rise in admissions of overseas students it would have been greater — the number of British children fell by 1 per cent.

Fees rose to an average of £12,558 a year, up by 4 per cent, although this increase was limited by schools deferring building projects.

The independent sector said that given the recession, the drop in pupil numbers had been modest.

In the recession of 1990-91, admissions to independent schools held up — but they fell for the next three years and were flat for a further year before recovering from 1996. Pupil numbers have risen continuously since, bar a fall in 2005 that heads attribute to demographics, and reached a peak last year.

Independent schools continued to be increasingly popular with parents from across the world. Numbers of overseas pupils from non-British families rose by 7.4 per cent to 23,307.

Hong Kong sent the largest number of children to British schools, 5,308, followed by the rest of China, with 3,109. Between them they accounted for more than a third of non-British overseas pupils. There were 2,265 German children, the next largest group, 1,197 Russians and 1,006 Americans.

Schools reported demand to be growing most strongly in Europe and Asia — with the exception of Japan where there had been a significant drop.

More than one in three children at British boarding schools are from abroad, compared with fewer than a quarter six years ago.

Having competed by offering ever-improving facilities during their boom years, independent schools slashed spending on new buildings last year by £42.6 million, or 11.3 per cent, as they sought to keep fee increases down, although in some cases tougher bank lending played a part.

The proportion of children who received help with their fees dropped slightly from 33.1 per cent last year to 32.5 per cent. Of those, only 7.2 per cent were children from families on modest or low incomes on means-tested bursaries. The largest proportion of subsidies was for pupils with siblings at the school or parents on the staff, in the Armed Forces or the clergy, followed by merit-based scholarships.

SOURCE





28 April, 2010

Groundbreaking School Choice Movement in Illinois

School choice is on the march in Illinois. And if the Rev. Senator James Meeks (D-15) has his way, 22,000 children stand to gain a lifeline out of failing public schools in the Prairie State. Senator Meeks introduced the school choice bill, which passed out of the Senate in March. Last Thursday, the Illinois House Executive Committee approved the measure, and the legislation now awaits action any day in the full House. A press release from the Illinois Policy Institute lauded the school choice bill:

“‘The highest-quality research is clear on two points’, said Collin Hitt, Director of Education Policy for the Illinois Policy Institute. ‘School vouchers improve education for students who use them, and the resulting competition improves the performance of surrounding public schools. This is bold policy, but it can change the course of education in Chicago. If the Illinois House passes this legislation, families will have a better choice of schools, public schools will compete for students and improve. This can all be accomplished at no additional cost to taxpayers or public education’.”

The Chicago Sun-Times also came out in favor of the bi-partisan measure.

“Studies in Milwaukee, Charlotte, New York and Washington, D.C., documented gains for voucher students. Reading and math scores improved for African-American pupils on vouchers in New York, Washington and Dayton, research showed.

”What’s more, competition produced by voucher programs prompts improvement in public schools, according to research on programs in Florida, Milwaukee and San Antonio… Meeks’ bill is a modest one. It would offer a lifeboat to 22,000 kids drowning in Chicago’s lowest-performing elementary schools, 37 of them under state or federal sanctions for at least nine years. If government can’t provide good schools for these kids, politicians, unions and educrats shouldn’t block the private school door offering them hope of a better life.”

In cities where voucher programs have been in operation, children have benefited significantly. Students in the now embattled D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (D.C. OSP) have made statistically significant gains in reading achievement equivalent to 3.7 months in additional learning. Extrapolate that out over the lifetime of a child’s educational career, and that’s nearly two full years in additional reading achievement. And while children are making tremendous academic gains, they are also safer and their parents are happier.

Ironically perhaps, Illinois’ landmark school choice language is making its way through the state represented in the U.S. Senate by Richard Durbin (D-IL), author of language now in law that could spell the end the successful D.C. OSP. While Senator Durbin may have been able to thwart the chance for a promising educational future for low-income District children for the time being, the horizon has the potential to get much brighter for children in his home state.

We know what works in education: empowering parents with the ability to choose the best school for their child. School choice puts families in the driver’s seat and holds schools accountable to parents. For 22,000 low-income families in Illinois, they could soon hold the key to their children’s educational future.

SOURCE




Elite colleges thawing on ROTC

Administrators at Harvard, Brown, and other elite universities are softening their resistance to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps more than four decades after the military scholarship programs were driven from campus in the face of fierce antiwar sentiment.

Many professors, students, and administrators say the more welcoming climate is a result of growing support for the military since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But they contend it has become pronounced since February, when Pentagon leaders for the first time advocated overturning the law that bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the ranks.

Some college administrators consider the ban on gays in the military discriminatory and have cited it as a reason to keep full ROTC programs off campus long after the Vietnam War ignited the controversy.

“The declaration of military leaders regarding abolition of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy means the fig leaf that university administrators and professors have been hiding behind is about to be withdrawn,’’ said Army National Guard Captain Marc Lindemann, a Harvard Law School graduate who completed an analysis of the issue for the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

Harvard, which has not fully recognized ROTC since the antiwar protests of the early 1970s, now allows the small number of its students who participate in the program at nearby MIT to be commissioned as officers in Harvard Yard upon graduation. And in a highly symbolic show of support, the president of the university, Drew Faust, has attended the ceremonies the past two years and is expected to attend again next month. Harvard also now allows cadets to include their ROTC affiliation in yearbooks.

“They have been far more receptive,’’ said retired Navy Captain Paul E. Mawn, a 1966 Navy ROTC graduate who runs the group Advocates for Harvard

ROTC, which he said has 2,300 members. Last year, he said, Harvard “even invited General David Petraeus,’’ the top US commander in the Middle East, to the commissioning ceremony.

At Brown University in Providence, where Army ROTC students must commute to Providence College for drills and military science classes, a top dean has pledged to do more to support students in ROTC, including finding ways to award them academic credit for their military courses.

Last month, the Faculty Senate at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., established a committee to study whether to overturn its ban.

And in another sign of a thaw, the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, predicted after an April 10 meeting with Admiral Mike Mullen, the nation’s top military officer, that “the campus will be much more receptive — this and other universities, if not almost all of them — to rebuilding that relationship.’’

“I think the policy has been anachronistic for a long time,’’ said David Kennedy, a history professor at Stanford who, along with William J. Perry, the former secretary of defense, proposed the university’s committee that’s studying the issue. “We are developing a separate military caste that the [nation’s] founders never intended.’’Continued...

The policy reviews come at an opportune time; ROTC scholarship applications nationwide are increasing between 12 and 15 percent each year, according to officials.

The ROTC program dates to 1862, when the federal government established land-grant colleges and required them to offer military instruction as part of their curriculum. In recent decades, it has provided cadets college tuition in return for a commitment to serve at least four years as an officer in the Army, Navy, or Air Force.

ROTC cadets first studied at Norwich University in Vermont, and the program had deep roots in the Ivy League until the turmoil of the Vietnam War, when the cadets were the most visible sign of the military on campus.

The Army ROTC unit at Harvard abandoned the campus in 1970, followed a year later by the Air Force and Navy units. Other universities did not renew their contracts with the Department of Defense.

While the number of ROTC units rebounded around the country in subsequent years, the program remained exiled from some of the nation’s most selective universities, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Brown, and the University of Chicago.

In the 1990s, these universities maintained that the military’s stance on gays conflicted with their own antidiscrimination policies, justifying a continued refusal to recognize ROTC.

Some universities, including Harvard, also took steps to bar military recruiters from campus, but a 1996 law and a 2006 Supreme Court ruling stipulated they must provide access to recruiters and allow their students to participate in ROTC programs. Still, for ROTC students at universities that do not fully recognize the program, this means not only commuting to another school for military instruction — which is commonplace for other universities that have consolidated ROTC programs — but also not receiving credit for their military science courses.

This year, Harvard has 20 undergraduates enrolled in ROTC at MIT. But it does not credit their ROTC courses or share program costs. Instead, private funds from Harvard graduates cover the estimated $400,000 to provide the students with classroom space, instructor salaries, and other support, according to Mawn.

“We want to get official recognition and create a long Crimson line of ROTC graduates,’’ he said.

Other influential alumni voices say a policy change is long overdue, especially now that the military leadership has changed its view of the “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy on gays and lesbians serving in the military.

“The emperor has no clothes,’’ said Theodore Roosevelt IV, a Navy ROTC graduate of Harvard who served two tours in Vietnam. “If the Harvard faculty thinks it’s inappropriate [to embrace ROTC], then they are being intellectually dishonest. Harvard has a long, distinguished history of creating future leaders, including military leaders.’’

A Harvard spokesman, John Longbrake, said there are no plans to significantly change its stance on ROTC, but indicated that the Pentagon’s ongoing review of the policy on gay military service could change that. The university administration, he said, will “follow any federal policy changes with interest.’’

Other schools are doing more. At Brown, which has only one student enrolled in the ROTC program at Providence College, a new student group called Students for ROTC at Brown is circulating a petition calling for Navy or Air Force ROTC departments to be reinstated and urging the university to award credit for Army ROTC cadets at Providence College.

“Our main goal is to reinvigorate the program and increase the population,’’ said Keith DellaGrotta, a senior who started the group but is not in the ROTC.

The university administration, for its part, says it is highly receptive. “We have had some very good conversations about how we can better support students in the program,’’ said Katherine Bergeron, the undergraduate dean of the university. “We are looking forward to, or anticipating, a day when more students are interested in participating.’’

While she said the issue of awarding credit would have to be voted on by the faculty, “I think it would be a very worthwhile thing to do.’’ But she acknowledged there are practical challenges. For example, official recognition might require Brown to have its own department of military science, staffed by members of the Brown faculty.

As for the military, leaders are eager to see the program fully embraced.

After his meeting with Columbia’s president this month, Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he sees a “transformative moment’’ for the ROTC debate. “I think representation . . . in particular [at] universities in the Northeast would be of great benefit to both the universities as well as the military, as well as the country,’’ Mullen said.

SOURCE




Shakespeare vanishing from British classrooms

On the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and death, Anthony Seldon asks why we are allowing the world's foremost playwright and England's cultural figurehead to disappear from the classroom

Forget the election, the Clegg bounces and the Brown gyrations. Blank out Icelandic volcanoes and flight disruptions. For today is the happy conjunction of St George's Day and Shakespeare's possible birthday, his 446th no less, as well as the day he died. It is as good a day as any to be celebrating all that is English, and the world's greatest playwright.

Whichever party wins on May 6 must champion a renaissance of Shakespeare in our schools and restore him to his rightful place across the nation. Shakespeare should make us proud to be British.

Familiarity with Shakespeare must begin early, because it is there that the roots are laid for the rest of life. Yet the Bard has been on the retreat in schools. The dropping in October 2008 of tests for all pupils at 14 may have had much to recommend it in our exam-drunk country, but it has damaged the study of Shakespeare, as his plays were a compulsory element. The numbers of pupils in this 11-to-14 age group who have seen one of his plays in the theatre has halved since then.

The new English Language and Literature GCSEs, beginning this autumn, downgrade the importance of studying Shakespeare through live performance in favour of Shakespeare on film. Schools increasingly are turning to "International" GCSEs, which are more rigorous than traditional GCSEs, but do not require pupils to focus on Shakespeare.

He remains central to English Literature at A-level, but a declining percentage of students are now opting for the subject, while media and film studies are growing apace. Increasingly, there are teachers joining the profession who hardly studied Shakespeare at school, and lack the same passion of older colleagues who were reared on him.

Why does this matter? If our aim is to turn out, not civilised and sensitive young men and women, but unthinking automatons, then the dwindling of Shakespeare does not matter. But few Telegraph readers will agree with the new philistinism.

On St George's Day, thanks to Shakespeare, we can feel proud of our English heritage. No writer has contributed more to our national identity. In times of crisis, we turn to him. Churchill's government did so during the Second World War, funding Laurence Olivier's Henry V as morale-boosting propaganda. How many of today's young can quote Hal's Saint Crispin's Day speech: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother"? Most who revelled in the television miniseries Band of Brothers would never have known the origin of the phrase.

Shakespeare has given us so many of them – "more in sorrow than in anger"; "in my mind's eye"; "old men forget"; "a sea change"; "all that glisters is not gold"; "all the world's a stage"; "as dead as a doornail"; "vanished into thin air"; "fight fire with fire"; "wild goose chase"; "foul play"; "good riddance"; "in a pickle"; "more fool you", "mum's the word", "my journey's end", "sent him packing", "the game is up"; "the truth will out". Studying Shakespeare opens the young to a world of language that will enrich their lives for ever.

His plays give unparalleled insights into human nature. He is the greatest psychologist of all time. I have just returned from directing my sixth formers in Othello in the Far East. In Beijing and Ho Chi Minh City, many in the young audience did not understand a word uttered; but they were engrossed. No spinmaster in this, or any other, election has ever approached the manipulative subtlety of Iago.

As with the Greek playwrights, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, the dramas move deeply into the human psyche. They portray all the seven archetypal plots described by Christopher Booker: Henry V thus typifies "the quest"; The Tempest "voyage and return"; Richard III "killing the monster"; Twelfth Night "rags to riches"; As You Like It "comedy"; The Winter's Tale "rebirth and redemption", while Hamlet gives us true "tragedy", with the perceptive young recognising the same story as The Lion King.

Shakespeare is the best representative of the English renaissance, the age of our greatest artistic and intellectual flowering. Our young need to know about it so that they can gain a better understanding of how English culture – their culture – has developed, with Shakespeare its finest example.

The British obsession with exams is a principal factor in the decline. The imperative of drilling students to learn the dross that examiners expect risks killing our best literature. Instead of being a delight to the imagination and spirit, classes can become a dull drudge of learning "correct" quotations and answers.

Teachers increasingly find that they lack the time to bring Shakespeare to life by allowing the students to read the whole play and act out scenes. Instead they do extracts. "I'd like to be more creative, but playing with the text will not attain the school's academic targets," said one teacher, responding to a survey commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Unsurprisingly, less than one fifth of the students agreed with the proposition that "Shakespeare is fun".

Seeing Shakespeare in the theatre is much profounder for students even than watching wonderful films such as Franco Zeffirelli's (1968) or Baz Luhrmann's (1996) Romeo and Juliet, or Kenneth Branagh's (1993) Much Ado. But many professional productions are too long and worthy, even for adults. It is little fun for the students, their teachers or parents, when the coach arrives back at the school gates at 1am.

The RSC, with its special abridged school versions, has it right, and its productions for schools are proving justly popular. You do not need much more than two hours to appreciate a Shakespeare production. The excellent 2007 production of Othello at the Globe Theatre on London's South Bank was marred by its length; the first Act lasted nearly 40 minutes. It could have been cut to 20.

None of the political parties has produced a manifesto on Shakespeare. Let me propose one. All children at primary level should know the stories and see simplified forms of all the major Shakespeare plays. They should learn passages from Shakespeare. At eight, I had to learn "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more" from Henry V, and have always been grateful for that (memorising poetry is the entitlement of every child).

Those in their first two years of secondary school should be offered opportunities to act in a Shakespeare, and should study "easier" plays such as Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thirteen to 16-year-olds should all study a tragedy – Hamlet or Macbeth would be ideal, a comedy such as Twelfth Night, and a history, perhaps Richard III. Lessons should involve acting key scenes, because that helps to create a deeper understanding, and brings character and plot to life. The RSC and other bodies should hold annual conferences and festivals to encourage a love for Shakespeare, and implant passion lost.

On St George's Day, let us remind ourselves that England is a "precious jewel set in a silver sea". Readers will recognise this line from Richard II. How many of our young will continue to do so unless we act now?

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27 April, 2010

A Model School Flops

And yet it was so "progressive"! How to understand that? "Progressive" assumptions wouldn't be wrong would they? If your theory is wrong, you certainly won't get the results you expect

It sounded like a great idea: Stanford education professors would create a model school to show how to educate low-income Hispanic and black students. Or, as it’s turned out, how not to.

In March, Stanford New Schools (aka East Palo Alto Academy) — a charter high school started in 2001 and elementary grades added in 2006 – made California’s list of schools in the lowest-achieving five percent in the state.

This month, the Ravenswood school board denied a new five-year charter. The elementary school — now with K-4 and eighth grade — will close in June. Another year or two wouldn’t be enough to improve poor student performance and weak behavior management, Superintendent Maria De La Vega told the board.

The high school will get two years to find a new sponsor: the local high school district has said “no,” but there are other options.

How did it happen? Stanford New Schools, run by the university’s school of education, seems to stress social and emotional support over academics.

Stanford New Schools hires well-trained teachers who use state-of-the-art progressive teaching methods; Stanford’s student teachers provide extra help. With an extra $3,000 per student raised privately, students enjoy small classes, mentoring, counseling and tutoring, technology access, field trips, summer enrichment, health van visits, community college classes on campus, and community service opportunities. The goal is to send graduates to college as critical thinkers, lifelong learners, and “global citizens.”

The school provides students a web of support, reports the New York Times: "High school students have one teacher/adviser who checks that homework is done, and when it is not, the teacher calls home. Teachers know students’ families and help with issues as varied as buying a bagel before an exam to helping an evicted family find a home. Teachers stay late and work weekends, and tend to burn out quickly — causing a high rate of turnover."

EPA Academy enrolls very disadvantaged students: Most are the children of poor and poorly educated Spanish-speaking immigrant families; the rest are black or Pacific Islanders. Their English skills are poor. Those who come in ninth grade are years behind in reading and math.

In comments on the news stories that have run, I see a common refrain: It’s impossible to teach these kids. Not even Stanford can do it. But other schools with demographically identical students are doing much better. The top-scoring school in the district is East Palo Alto Charter School (EPAC), a K-8 run by Aspire Public Schools, Stanford’s original partner. An all-minority school, EPAC outperforms the state average.

Rather than send EPAC graduates to Stanford’s high school, Aspire started its own high school, Phoenix, which outperforms the state average for all high schools. All students in the first 12th grade class have applied to four-year colleges.

Aspire co-founded East Palo Alto Academy High with Stanford, but bowed out five years ago. There was a culture clash, Aspire’s founder, Don Shalvey told the New York Times. Aspire focused “primarily and almost exclusively on academics,” while Stanford focused on academics and students’ emotional and social lives, he said.

Deborah Stipek, Stanford’s dean of education, says the elementary school is too new — in its fourth year, but with only two years of scores — to be judged. Stanford considers the high school a success.

In an email to Alexander Russo, Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who helped create the high school, defended the high school’s “strong, highly personalized college-going program.” The graduation rate of 86 percent exceeds the state average. “In addition, 96 percent of graduates are admitted to college (including 53 percent to four-year colleges) — twice the rate of African American and Latino students in the state as a whole.” Half the students enroll in Early College classes on campus.

More here




Achieve educational freedom, excellence and harmony: Eliminate the public schools

As resistance to ever-bigger government increases, with a commensurate greater appreciation for individual liberty, state constitutions will be re-examined, perhaps even amended. What follows is not a prediction, only an exploration which in turn may lead to better ideas. Finally, readers should bear in mind that eliminating public schooling is not the elimination of education, but rather the expansion of both freedom and education.

Freedom for Taxpayers. Property taxpayers would no longer support a system which even its supporters readily admit must be “structurally improved” [Statist-ese for, “Give us more money”]. Anything in constant need of major improvements, not just routine adjustment, which produces uneducated “graduates” year after year (JayWalking anyone?), for decades on end, is irredeemable, netting very poor investment returns for taxpayers despite huge outlays. Since a sizable percentage of local municipal budgets (usually well over 50%, typically with supplemental “help” from state capitols) is dedicated to school funding, the elimination of this line item will give meaningful property tax relief.

Freedom for Municipalities. In the view of some – though at this point in time not nearly enough – all education is intrinsically coupled with morality, religion, and the reason of life itself. Necessarily it cannot then lawfully be a proper function of government if we’re to be serious about individual liberty and separating church and state. Governmental involvement in matters with religious overtones and nuances including differing worldviews conflicts with the Establishment Clause and state constitutional counterparts. Freed of school budgets, cities and towns will confine themselves to matters within their appropriate purview, generally subjects associated with public safety.

Freedom for Parents. Parents, relieved of a portion of their property tax burden, will have greater disposable income with which they may choose a private school appropriate for their child. Including a home school. Today, families wanting alternative schooling for their child/ren pay two tuitions, one to the chosen school directly, another to the municipality to support the public schools.

Freedom for Students. Relief to students who simply do not want to spend time in school for whatever reason (e.g., attitude, disinterest, safety concerns). Relief from One-Size-Fits-All-ism. How these now-emancipated students will choose to spend their newly-acquired time and freedom will be left to them and their parents. For the student willing to learn there will be choices galore as a thousand points of light evolve following the demise of the public schools. Throughout their history Americans have shown themselves to be both generous and ingenious. From scholarships and tuition assistance (remember, property tax relief will enable all citizens to spend their property tax relief as they see fit, not as government sees fit) to an array of different school types, all manner of ideas will come forth on “what to do with all those children.” To believe otherwise is to concede that we have lost our way as well as our senses of freedom and personal responsibility, and that only overseeing superintendent-esque nannies can save us.

Repealing the truancy and compulsory attendance laws frees students enabling but also requiring them to become personally responsible for usefully filling their time, simultaneously serving as a sobering means of correcting immature attitudes via a dose of reality. Students and parents will of necessity become discerning consumers of those educational services which they desire. Consider this example. A parent/s believes that comprehensive sex education, including awareness of all different perspectives of human sexuality, is an important educational value and that such information should be taught, at all grade levels, to his/her/their child. These parents will choose, through free association and without compulsion, schools accommodating their expressed wishes. While acknowledging the rights of those parents to choose as they may, other parents might avoid those choices, preferring instead other educational values which for them may include emphasis on math & science, fine arts, building trades, mechanics, religious instruction, and so forth. They too will decide through free association and without compulsion. Open choice aka freedom aka liberty will enable each educational consumer to receive the specific educational values which he/she/they seek/s without the application of governmental force upon others who do not share or want those educational choices.

Freedom for Teachers. To those who tsk-tsk the viable idea of doing away with the public schools, they should know that eliminating the public schools will not be the end of education. To the contrary it will encourage genuine learning. In an atmosphere of non-compulsion students who want to learn a chosen curriculum will present themselves before teachers who want to teach. The discipline problems of which teachers complain, including bullying, will largely disappear. Teaching to willing students is a joy unto itself. Having been a teacher in several venues – as seminar instructor on tax law matters to other accounting, tax & legal professionals; as host of numerous client seminars; as a homeschooling parent – I am keenly aware of how fulfilling it is to teach receptive students.

Freedom from Incompetence or Indifference. Every large public school system has its “rubber rooms” (search, “rubber rooms Stossel”) to which incompetent, insubordinate, or dangerous teachers are assigned, at full pay, while their cases for dismissal wend their way through a labyrinth of union contract provisions. Why such rooms? Because in the perverse world of public schools it is next to impossible to get rid of bad teachers. Despite the overriding concern, stated endlessly by politicians, bureaucrats and unions, of how much they all want to “educate the children,” the game is really about protecting government and its employees. Big government types, invariably “led” by Democrats and lapdog teachers’ unions, are the biggest offenders. Bureaucrats and union members have little concern whether children learn or not; their principal worry is their own paycheck. And please, let’s not hear about the many fine, dedicated teachers, blah, blah, blah. Even if true, these teachers are like students and parents: trapped in the grip of the union–big government vise. The fine intentions of these teachers will never loosen this grip; only an adherence to limited government and a commitment to personal responsibility will do that.

Freedom for the Uninvolved. Elimination corrects an inequity visited upon those who have no current direct stake in the educational system. Why should those who have no school-aged children be burdened with the schooling costs of those who do? If you choose to raise children, your obligations include clothing, sustenance, housing, and education. Before setting out, the cost is to be counted. The decision to start a family was yours, not that of your elderly, childless, or empty-nest neighbors. It doesn’t take a village to raise a family: it takes a responsible mom and a responsible dad. As matters now stand your neighbors, not exercising any influence in your family-raising decision, are sent the bill for educating your children. All sorts of rationales are given for continuing this unfairness. They reduce to one: We benefit when all citizens are educated, or in bumper sticker language, If you think public education is expensive, try ignorance. This slogan’s encapsulated arrogance assumes that people are incapable of acting in their own best interests and would forever remain inert until the Nanny State intercedes and affects a rescue, all for their own good you must understand. Who else but leftists sell people for such short money? If those who are inadequately prepared understand that the principal difference between themselves and others who have better prospects, employment, or social standing, is education, common sense says that the former will know what to do.

Freedom to Choose. Each of us has different driving wants and needs; we choose cars accordingly, based on factors which include cost, safety, options, color, type (sedans, wagons, SUVs, minivans, pickups, light & heavy duty trucks, et alia). Yet the choice of schooling, also subject to a variety of factors, is far more determinative of an individual’s life direction than the choice of a car whose life span is a matter of mere years. Freedom prevails when parents and students, acting as consumers, make thoughtful choices for their purposes among competing alternatives with funds that would otherwise have been taken from them and wasted on a scheme that has failed for decades. Even leftists endorse educational choice, but only for themselves. When given the chance, leftists never choose the public option. Obama's daughters go to private schools, as did Chelsea Clinton, as did Ted Kennedy's kids. If this is leadership by example, then the people too should be able to choose. “Do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do.”

What is more, genuine educational choice (without a public option) will defuse, at least in the school setting, many of society's divisive issues, issues brought into the public schools through raw political power imposed on students, a captive, generally powerless audience. Without forced public schooling there would be no more of the seemingly endless battles on church-state separation and courses on human sexuality. Gone and unmissed will be battles over religious songs and symbols, whether religious days special to a particular faith should be recognized as school holidays, refusals to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, prayers at games or graduations. Mandatory sex education and associated hot-button topics such as abortion counseling, creationism, evolution, environ-ism, and countless other subjects which at best are only marginally tangential to core academic subjects, will be dealt with in a manner agreeable to students and parents since they as consumers will be freely choosing schools compatible with their wishes and expectations in these areas.

Tuition will be reasonable as schools will no longer be forced by law to deal with the selfish demands of public employee unions. Rather than serving the interests of their employees and administrators, schools will compete as every other successful consumer service competes, by placing the customer, here parents and students, not employees, as Priority #1. Sometime in the 1980s I heard Lane Kirkland, a then important union leader, speak at an American Federation of Teachers function. After his prepared remarks he took some questions one of which touched on the declining academic achievements of students. His blunt and forceful answer remains with me to this day. Paraphrased, “When children become union members paying union dues, then I'll care about children's education.”

Ending educational compulsion will bring freedom and freedom will bring responsibility and accountability. Schools in the post–public school era will be burdened to please their customers, parents and students, if they wish to succeed. Today, failing public schools are neither punished nor eliminated; rather, in the eccentric world that defines the “public domain,” they're rewarded by being allowed to continue, often with increased funding, in order to “self-correct.” Bailouts may be new to Wall Street & Detroit carmakers, but bailouts have long been a part of failed public school systems.

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Social mobility in England 'lags behind other countries'

And useless schools are a big part of the reason

Parental background has a bigger impact on children’s education achievement in England than in many other developed nations, according to a major report.

Pupils with poorly educated mothers and fathers were more likely to fail at school in England than in countries such as Australia, Germany and the United States, the study suggested.

Researchers also found that the link between pupils and their parents was almost as strong now as it was in previous generations, despite billions of pounds spent by Labour to boost standards among the poorest children.

The study – commissioned by the Sutton Trust – suggested that pupils born into families with a history of underachievement were still much more likely to be resigned to low-paid jobs when they grew up.

Sir Peter Lampl, the charity’s chairman, said failure to improve social mobility risked pushing the UK to the “bottom of the class in education’s world order”. "Education mobility points the way to the level of future social mobility in this country,” he said.

“While there are some signs of progress, we are still not serving the needs of the current crop of school pupils as well as we should and parental background remains a much more significant determiner of children's life chances in the UK than elsewhere.”

The findings suggested that the divisions were down to the fact that well educated parents were more likely to play the system to get sons and daughters into the best secondary schools.

“The achievement gap widens during the teenage years, almost entirely because children with degree educated parents are far more likely to attend higher performing secondary schools, benefiting from a combination of better resources, teaching, advice and positive peer effects,” the report said.

“A major obstacle to education, and consequently social mobility, is therefore the high levels of social segregation in English secondary schools.”

Researchers at Essex University analysed the test scores of thousands of children born in 1989/90 – and educated almost entirely under Labour – and compared them with results of equivalent exams by children born at a similar time in other nations.

The findings show that in England, 56 per cent of children of degree educated parents were in the top quarter of test results at the age of 14, compared with just nine per cent of youngsters whose parents left school without any O-levels – a gap of 47 percentage points.

This was twice the equivalent gap seen in Australia – 23 percentage points – and bigger than the 37 point gap in Germany and 43 point gap in the US.

Researchers also looked at a separate measure – the number of books a child has access to in the home – which is seen as another indicator of parental education.

The study found that in England, children with access to more than 100 books were 4.7 times more likely to be among the top performers in maths at the age of 13 compared with pupils who had access to less than 100 books.

In Australia, children were three times more likely to do well, in the Netherlands they were 3.1 times more likely, while in Ontario, Canada, teenagers with access to a large numbers of books were 2.9 times more likely to succeed.

The gap was also bigger than in countries including Turkey, the Slovak Republic, Korea, Italy and Belgium.

In a further analysis, researchers looked at GCSE and test results in England and compared them with previous generations.

The findings show that in 2006, the odds of obtaining at least five good GCSEs were four times higher for children with degree educated parents than those whose mothers and fathers did not go to university.

This was only slightly better than for previous generations of children, the study said. For children born in 1970, the odds of obtaining good O-level results were 4.6 times higher if their parents were degree educated, while for those born in 1958 the odds were 6.5 times higher.

The report said that the gulf had closed slightly over time but "stark achievement gaps between children of degree educated parents and those of uneducated parents remain".

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26 April, 2010

American Federation of Teachers Funded ACORN After Video Scandals Hit

Union officers who are "shocked and angered" over proposed budget cuts in N.J. that will supposedly harm young students have thus far failed to find their voice where the spending habits of their respective national organizations are concerned.

A good starting point would be with the $352,510 The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) funneled to ACORN in 2009 just as the organization's employees were caught on videotape describing to uncover investigators how they can arrange for legal loans, set up brothels, advance child prostitution and human trafficking.

"It looks like the AFT essentially outsourced ACORN to do the union organizing work," Nathan Mehrens, a counsel to Americans for Limited Government (ALG). "This is incredibly ironic given that many unions consider outsourcing evil and almost criminal. It might also be worth asking a rhetorical question of why does the union need to outsource work to shady operatives? If the union's services were so desirable then the teachers would be beating a path to their door and not the other way around."

The AFT, which is part of the AFL-CIO, is not alone here in its support for ACORN.

In fact, U.S. Labor Department financial disclosure forms show that the teachers unions as whole have contributed over $1.3 million to ACORN and its affiliates for political activities and representational activities, since 2005. Some of the larger donations include $100,000 from the National Education Association in 2008 and $200,000 in 2007 for political activities. The Teachers AFL-CIO Local Union 2 contributed $406,730 in 2008, $457,778 in 2007, and $346,300 in 2006 for representational activities.

The mission statements and public pronouncement of the AFT and NEA are instructive here in that both organizations posture as strong advocates for school children, teenagers and their families.

“Since its beginning, the National Education Association (NEA) has been ahead of its time, crusading for the rights of all educators and children,” the union declares on its web site. Not to be outdone in children caring department, the AFT’s vision for community betterment transcends national boundaries.

“The mission of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, is to improve the lives of our members and their families; to give voice to their legitimate professional, economic and social aspirations; to strengthen the institutions in which we work; to improve the quality of the services we provide; to bring together all members to assist and support one another; and to promote democracy, human rights and freedom in our union, in our nation and throughout the world.”

As it turns out, ACORN has its own international vision.

ACORN staffers in Baltimore were caught on video instructing James O’Keefe, the undercover filmmaker, and his partner Hannah Giles how they could falsify documents and obtain benefits for 13 “very young girls” from El Salvador.

Former ACORN insiders who have formed their own alternative whistleblower group in response to financial scandals claim that funds are misappropriated and that there is no guarantee a particular donation will actually be used for its stated purpose.

Corporations and foundations that have funded ACORN in the past have said that they are longer supporting the organization as a result of the on-going scandals. House and Senate members also moved to cut off funding albeit temporarily.

Up until 2009, it was plausible for supporters and financial backers to claim that they were unaware of criminal activities. But the 2009 LM-2 form available through the Department of Labor shows that the AFT’s support for ACORN continued even as the videotapes were being released.

Meanwhile the teachers unions have turned their ire on N.J. Gov. Chris Christie for imposing spending restraints they claim are “irresponsible” and damaging to the future of education. Here is a statement from Barbara Keshishian, president of the NEA’s N.J. affiliate:

“We are shocked and angered that Gov. Christie has taken his attack on public schools to an irresponsible new low,” she said. “After cutting $1.5 billion from education in the first three months of his administration, he is now calling on local residents to make his cuts even deeper and more harmful to students by voting down their local school budgets.”

“Gov. Christie apparently has no qualms about robbing New Jersey's 1.4 million students of their chance at a quality public education,” she continued. “But to do so while insisting on a significant tax cut to New Jersey residents who earn over $400,000 per year is an inexplicable and unconscionable position to take.”

Whatever the merits or defects of Gov. Christie’s budget proposal, union officials who are genuinely concerned about the young people they claim to champion should re-evaluate their own internal financial transactions.

Although ACORN announced that it has officially dissolved as of April 1, an internal memo from Bertha Lewis, the CEO and Chief Organizer, made it clear the organization and its national apparatus still exists under new names and are soliciting continued support. Moreover, Brooklyn prosecutors have also cleared ACORN of any wrongdoing after a four month investigation that has come under criticism. But it’s evident the organization has thus far managed to sidestep serious investigations.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a previous ruling that said it was unconstitutional for Congress to cut off funding for ACORN. But even allowing for this setback, the renamed affiliates remain well positioned to receive continued support from foundations, corporations and individual donors. In fact, public funding is only a small percentage of its financial base.

The lead ACORN organization registered in Arkansas and New Orleans has received $3 million from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, $821,000 from the Robin Hood Foundation, $595,000 from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and $65,000 from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, according to the Capital Research Center (CRC). That’s not an exhaustive list.

Apparently, the organization formerly known as ACORN could remain a potent force through the 2010 elections and beyond. But should self-described child advocates be part of this coalition?

Unfortunately, the disclosure requirements that have made it possible to connect ACORN with its labor benefactors are being rolled back under President Obama; a byproduct of lobbying efforts by union bosses.

Even if the teachers unions publicly distance themselves from ACORN, verification could be problematic. Why not call for greater transparency, openness and accountable “for the children” so concerned citizens can keep taps on the financial support for organizations that wink and nod in the direction of criminal enterprises?

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More than 7,000 British parents hit by truancy convictions as courts punish soaring levels of school absenteeism

More than 7,000 parents a year are being convicted over their children’s truancy, figures show. The Government’s own statistics have revealed absenteeism is reaching record levels. They show the number of parents prosecuted and sentenced for their children skipping school has soared fivefold in just seven years.

But critics have accused Labour of failing to get a grip on the underlying causes of truancy, including low levels of academic achievement and poor behaviour.

Since tough truancy sanctions were introduced in 2001, more than 32,500 parents have been convicted, with nearly 100 jailed for up to three months. Yet figures show that truancy is still rising, with it hitting a record high during the last school year when 67,000 children skipped lessons every day – an increase of nearly 2,000 on 2007-08.

The most recent figures, released by the Ministry of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal 9,506 parents were taken to court in 2008 for failing to ensure their children go to school. Of these, 7,291 were found guilty. The most common penalty was a fine of up to £2,500. A total of 391 were made to undertake community service, while 11 were immediately imprisoned. This compares with 2001, when just 1,961 were prosecuted and 1,595 found guilty.

Between 2001 and 2008, a total of 32,567 parents have been convicted. Figures for 2009, available in the autumn, are expected to show a continuation of the rising trend.

Figures released earlier this year by the Department for Children, Schools and Families show that in 2008-09, the truancy rate – the percentage of school registration sessions missed without permission from parents – rose to 1.05 per cent. This was up 4 per cent from 1.01 per cent in 2007/08.

It marks a 44 per cent rise since 1996-97, when the truancy rate was 0.73 per cent. Nick Gibb, Tory schools spokesman, said: ‘We need to address underlying causes of truancy – the fact that so many children still struggle with reading and poor discipline in schools fuels bullying.’

Ming Zhang, an education welfare officer from Kingston Council in Surrey, said: ‘What seems to be happening is councils are setting targets for the number of children they prosecute,’ he said. ‘I think this is dangerous. Performance should be based on the number of children in school and not the number of parents in court.’

Schools minister Vernon Coaker said a tougher approach had brought about the ‘slight rise’ in those punished for unauthorised absences.

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Australia: One Victorian State high school enforces standards

NOT many people would figure that as school girls' skirts rise, education standards fall. Last week Ms Wade made headline news when it was revealed her state high school regularly checks the length of its girls' skirts.

Yes, that's right, headline news. This "back to basics" stuff sure did cause a fuss. This was a revolt against the slackness of the post-'60s decades and so was news.

And I was relieved to hear it. Until I checked what else the school is doing to warrant such gasps of shock. In fact, Bentleigh shows that our social pendulum may still have a long way to go before it's swung back to anywhere near where it was.

The school won praise for also insisting students line up in an orderly fashion before class and sign good behaviour contracts in the senior years. What's more, they risk failing subjects if they wag school too often. Talk about revolutionary. Or, as Ms Wade put it more demurely: "We are raising expectations".

I so don't have a problem with any of this. It's all the little things - the skirt lengths, the nose rings, the coloured beanies, the hooded jackets - that give a school an identity, or, rather, an oh-dear reputation.

Sometimes such fashion statements can be refreshing - or surly - assertions of individuality outside school. But in a school they can be signs the school is failing to teach the kids that individuality often has to be balanced with a sense of community if we're all going to get on with each other and thrive.

Such sloppiness also signals that the school doesn't dare to impose any expectations on children, who signal back that they owe the school no duty.

Same story with lining up, which is a basic acknowledgment that life can't be a me-first free-for-all if we want a civil, well-run school or any other form of society. Cracking down on wagging and bad behaviour is also basic stuff in socialising children, teaching them that some kinds of discipline are actually going to make their lives better, not worse.

I most certainly am not hankering for a shut-up-or-smack kind of teaching, but the fact that Ms Wade's very modest changes have made such news makes you realise many other schools must have given up insisting on anything at all.

No wonder there's been such a drift away from state schools to private schools, which for some years have insisted on the kind of things that in a state school seem so brave.

But I'm still worried, and not just because Bentleigh's new rules are not so much back to basics as plain basic, yet are seen as so new. Why do Bentleigh's students now need to sign "contracts" to behave well, when it should be a school's unchallenged right to insist they must?

Why are students under this "tough" policy allowed as many as seven unexcused absences a semester before they fail a subject? Why does the school make a boast of having just two assemblies a term at which the national anthem is played?

When all this is hailed as "tough rules", I'm reminded again how soft the rest must be.

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25 April, 2010

California Dumbs Down Tests

When it comes to education trends, as California goes, so goes the nation. Which is all the more reason to be concerned about the latest effort in California to dumb down standards. The University of California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) has launched another salvo in its long-running war against the SAT, the test used by many colleges and universities to assess academic achievement among high school seniors. This is only the latest in a series of moves by BOARS against the SAT, but this one may be a stalking horse to eliminate standardized tests in general, especially if they conflict with the goal of promoting racial and ethnic diversity.

BOARS has already eliminated a requirement that University of California applicants take at least two subject-matter tests in addition to the SAT Reasoning Test. Now BOARS is taking aim at the SAT directly. What makes the action more suspicious is that BOARS' own report notes that the SAT-R was developed specifically in response to testing principles it promulgated and that the new test "adds significant gains in predictive power of first year grades at UC." Nonetheless, BOARS is now recommending that students forgo the SAT in favor of the less-popular ACT.

Both tests have been accepted for more than 30 years and do a good job of predicting first-year grades. So why is BOARS now signaling preference for one test over another? After reading the report, it's hard to come away without feeling that the real target is standardized testing in general.

As numerous studies and the raw data on test scores have shown, performance on standardized tests varies not just between individuals but also between different racial and ethnic groups. In general, black and Latino students perform less well as a group than do white and Asian students. Since BOARS is committed to boosting the number of black and Latino students admitted to the UC system, standardized tests that do not produce politically correct results are a problem. It's not too far-fetched to wonder whether BOARS' effort to discourage students from taking the SAT may be the first step in getting rid of standardized tests altogether.

But getting rid of standardized tests is not the way to solve the problem of underperforming black and Latino students. Standardized tests, whether they be the SAT or state tests taken to assess elementary and secondary school performance required by the No Child Left Behind Act, merely document the skills gap that exists between whites and Asians on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. The answer isn't fixing the tests to produce more even results between racial groups but improving the skills of those students who lag behind.

In 1996, voters in California did away with racial preferences in college admissions to state schools by enacting Proposition 209. Since then, many administrators in the UC system have tried to figure out a backdoor way to boost admissions of blacks and Latinos to the university's flagship schools, UC Berkley and UCLA. What they've failed to notice is that black and Latino enrollment system-wide is up over the levels when racial preferences were common. The students now enrolled under more race-neutral standards are doing just fine, graduating in higher percentages than they were when racial preferences admitted many students to campuses where they couldn't compete with their peers because their grades and test scores were substantially lower.

Eliminating standardized tests or dumbing down their contents doesn't help anyone. It simply sweeps evidence of academic disparities under the rug, where they can't be dealt with. If California really wants to improve education for all its students, it will work to keep high standards in place and encourage students to test what they have learned. California students prefer the SAT to other standardized tests, judging by the numbers who take this test now. BOARS' job should be to encourage students to make their own choices about which test they prefer, not to pick one test over another -- but most of all not to discourage the use of standardized tests altogether in the hopes of promoting greater diversity.

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Texas corrects Leftist bias in history textbooks

Textbook publishers long ago learned that publishing textbooks for Texas was an opportunity to hit a gusher, like Jett Rink's gusher of oil in the movie "Giant." With more than 4.7 million students and a school board that adopts textbooks for the whole state, Texas attracts publishers from all over to make pilgrimages to Texas to get drafts of their books approved according to Texas standards. It follows that this one-size-fits-all cuts the cost of textbooks for schools in the rest of the nation.

This year, the Texas Board of Education landed itself in the middle of the culture wars when it rewrote the social studies curriculum, inviting a debate that mirrors the values conflict between traditionalists and multiculturalists. With partisans on the right and on the left, it's the 21st century's "battle of the books." The argument is tilted a bit to the right, with 10 Republicans and five Democrats deciding on changes in the books.

"We are adding balance," Dr. Don McLeroy, the conservative leader on the board, told The New York Times. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left. "

Counters Mary Beth Berlanga, a longtime Texas board member and Hispanic activist, "They are rewriting history." She complains that conservatives ignore Hispanics and want to portray a white America. She and her liberal friends accuse the board of "racist ideology" and spreading "capitalism propaganda."

Calmer observers suggest the changes are a necessary correction of liberal bias. Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the New York-based American Textbook Council, an independent research organization that reviews history and social studies textbooks used in the nation's schools, argues that "for two decades, multiculturalists have tried to supplant the older view of Americans as religious dissenters, pioneers and immigrants intent on making a freer and better life, a force for good in the world, a nation that regulated reform and advanced civil rights to all."

He describes American parents as shocked and dismayed to discover their children are reading history as "a setting for power struggles between groups, or as an unjust and patriarchal society whose rapacity -- from Jamestown to Vietnam -- needs exposure and explication." Columbus isn't a discoverer and explorer, he's an invader and exploiter. Harriet Tubman is a saint. Thomas Jefferson is a sinner.

Although the more than 100 changes recently adopted by the selection board tilt rightward, they are mostly only mildly corrective. The American experience of moving westward is to be described as "expansionism," not "imperialism." The "free enterprise system" replaces the negative connotations that have come to adhere to the word "capitalism" (as in "capitalist pig"). The goals of the Great Society will be broadened to include discussions of its "unintended consequences."

Students will actually learn about "the conservative resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s," including the way Phyllis Schlafly led the successful fight against the Equal Rights Amendment and Newt Gingrich succeeded with the Contract With America and the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994.

These textbook controversies may soon become moot, as more schools rely on electronic books. Students would do a lot better to read different works of actual historians than the rehashed, reinterpreted history often written by hacks. Herodotus and Thucydides such hacks are not.

History, as the cliche goes, is always written by the victors, but a strange thing has happened to American education since the 1960s. Our triumphs have been trivialized and twisted, demonizing America with no celebration of what America stands for in the hearts and minds of the millions across the world.

Instead of emphasizing the abolition of slavery, the educationists encourage our children to wallow in the horrors of that "moral, social and political evil" before Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves, along with an enormous expenditure of blood in the Civil War. Instead of focusing on the courage of our ancestors, educationists obsess on what went wrong. They indulge the mindset that sneers at the tea parties as "rabble and racist," ignoring the growing aspiration to return to the smaller government as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Lord Byron scoffed that history was the "devil's Scripture." Arnold Toynbee defined history as "a vision of God's creation on the move." The textbook wars will continue, because they're too big even for Texas.

SOURCE




Australia: Too-hot topics out of secular ethics course

THE state government made a last-minute decision to remove a hypothetical scenario involving designer babies from secular ethics classes being trialled in public schools as an alternative to scripture classes.

A hypothetical terrorist hijacking has also been removed from ethical scenarios put to students.

The baby scenario was removed some time between late last week and early this week after the Herald reported the Anglican and Catholic churches had lobbied the Keneally government over the ethics trial as a threat to the future of religious education.

Phil Cam, an associate professor of history and philosophy at the University of NSW, who developed the ethics curriculum, confirmed the two scenarios had been omitted, saying they were considered "age inappropriate".

The Catholic Bishop of Wollongong, Peter Ingham, the spokesman for the NSW and ACT bishops on the ethics trial, said he was not aware that the designer baby and terrorist scenarios had been part of the original draft and their inclusion was not something the Catholic church had lobbied against.

A spokesman for the Anglican church also said the Anglican church had not been aware of these topics in the curriculum.

A spokesman for the NSW Education Minister, Verity Firth, confirmed that the controversial topics had been removed.

The NSW Greens MP and spokesman on education, John Kaye, said: 'There are no reasons why these issues should not be discussed in primary school classrooms as students are exposed to them through news reports and television."

Bishop Ingham said he did not oppose the teaching of ethics in schools but did not want children enrolled in scripture classes to be excluded from them. He said he would call on parishioners of the Catholic diocese to sign petitions asserting the importance of scripture classes.

SOURCE





24 April, 2010

SOME BROMIDES ARE ACTUALLY WORTH REPEATING

The one below is an example. It is an academic journal article that comes to some very unsurprising conclusions -- but its first sentence is still one that would be denied by evidence-ignoring Leftists

Teacher Quality Moderates the Genetic Effects on Early Reading

By J. Taylor et al.

Children’s reading achievement is influenced by genetics as well as by family and school environments. The importance of teacher quality as a specific school environmental influence on reading achievement is unknown. We studied first- and second-grade students in Florida from schools representing diverse environments. Comparison of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, differentiating genetic similarities of 100% and 50%, provided an estimate of genetic variance in reading achievement. Teacher quality was measured by how much reading gain the non-twin classmates achieved. The magnitude of genetic variance associated with twins’ oral reading fluency increased as the quality of their teacher increased. In circumstances where the teachers are all excellent, the variability in student reading achievement may appear to be largely due to genetics. However, poor teaching impedes the ability of children to reach their potential.

Science 23 April 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5977, pp. 512 - 514




Muslims, Christians challenge content of Canadian sex ed curriculum

Christians and Muslims in Ontario are united in their objections to the province’s new sex education curriculum.

Mentions of homosexuality as early as Grade 3 have raised objections from diverse groups and the participants in a school boycott on May 10 – aimed at putting pressure on Premier Dalton McGuinty to pull the new curriculum – will likely represent a cultural cross-section of the city.

“There’s a big reaction in Muslim community,” said Suad Aimad, president of Somali Parents for Education. “We believe basically that sex education may be taught by the parents to their children. It’s not public, it’s a private matter and that’s why I don’t think [sex] should be part of education, especially at such a young age.”

The new curriculum, outlined in 208 pages that were quietly posted on the Ministry of Education's website in January, will for the first time teach Grade 3 pupils about such topics as sexual identity and orientation, and introduce terms like “anal intercourse” and “vaginal lubrication” to children in Grades 6 and 7. The new curriculum begins in Grade 1 with lessons about the proper names of body parts.

The changes are part of a regular review of Ontario’s physical education and health curriculum, which hasn’t been updated since 1998. They went nearly unnoticed until a Christian group, led by evangelist Charles McVety, threatened to pull its children from school.

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak plans to use the new sex education curriculum as an opportunity to attract advocates for family values, party insiders say.

The Tories began staking out their position Wednesday, arguing that it is the responsibility of parents to teach children in Grade 1 about body parts.

“A six-year-old should be learning how to tie their shoes and playing with Barbies,” said Lisa MacLeod, a Tory MPP and mother of a five-year-old daughter.

The Tories already have the support of conservative and religious groups. But Mr. Hudak also has an opportunity to characterize himself as a moderate, and Premier McGuinty as a leader who has gone too far, said David Docherty, a political scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont.

This will involve walking a political tightrope, Prof. Docherty said, where Mr. Hudak and his caucus colleagues will have to stick to their message that children in Grade 1 are too young to be taught such words as penis and vagina.

“It’s going to allow Tim Hudak to talk about family values,” he said. “If he goes any further, it does risk becoming a faith-based education argument where he risks losing ground.”

A party insider said the Tories plan to seize on the new curriculum, because it is such a sensitive issue that speaks to many families’ values and beliefs. Mr. Hudak echoed Ms. MacLeod on Wednesday, saying children in Grade 1 are too young to learn about genitalia.

“The notion of teaching sex ed to kids as young as six years of age just doesn’t sit right,” Mr. Hudak told reporters. “I don’t think it sits right with the vast majority of moms and dads in our province.”

Murielle Boudreau, of the Greater Toronto Catholic Parent Network, said Catholic parents aren’t happy that Mr. McGuinty is condoning such an explicit approach to sex education and she expected many would keep their children at home in protest.

“I don’t understand how the business of sensual behaviour between consenting adults has anything to do with Grade 3,” she said. “Grade 6? Getting them ready for masturbation and vaginal lubrication? Give me a break. They’re going to traumatize these children – they’re going to be doing everything out in the schoolyard.”

SOURCE




Australia: Small classes for schools a 'costly mistake'

Nice to hear the occasional voice of sanity on this

THE head of the Productivity Commission has attacked the emphasis on reducing class sizes in schools as "the most costly mistake" in education policy in recent years, stealing scarce resources from investment in teaching.

Productivity Commission chairman Gary Banks also pointed to the waste of money in highly bureaucratic state school systems, with NSW spending more money than Victoria per student to achieve similar results.

Mr Banks said the "performance of teachers appears not to have been a priority of education policy" and "if anything, attention to it seems to have been weakened over the years, at least until recently".

"Arguably the most costly mistake has been to spend scarce budgetary resources on smaller class sizes instead of better teachers, notwithstanding steadily accumulating evidence that smaller classes, in the ranges contemplated, were unlikely to achieve improved learning outcomes," Mr Banks said.

"While there are many more teachers in Australia than ever before. . .the average teacher who joined years ago seems to have effectively paid for this with a lower salary today."

Mr Banks's comments come as the federal government this week asked the Productivity Commission to look at the education and training workforce, including school teachers.

In a speech on the government's human capital agenda, delivered last week but released yesterday, Mr Banks said opposition to reform in the school sectors seemed "particularly strong and wrong-headed" but future policy needed to rest on the evidence of what worked.

Mr Banks said the debate over teachers' pay had to look not only at improving the overall rate of pay compared to other professions, but also paying more to certain types of teachers, such as maths and science teachers, who are in short supply.

"Currently, one finds little recognition in remuneration structures for experience or skill levels, let alone for scarcity, or the contentious matter of differential performance on the job," he said.

Mr Banks noted the $500 million partnership on teacher quality between the federal and state governments, which is trialling schemes to pay more to highly qualified teachers or those in remote or disadvantaged schools.

"The main constraint on their success -- or the scope to extend them -- may be resistance by teacher associations, rather than the budget," he said, pointing to objections by the NSW Teachers Federation to the introduction of a highly-paid teaching position for "highly accomplished teachers" in disadvantaged schools.

Mr Banks also championed autonomy for school principals, saying most had little or no say in hiring, firing or promoting staff. This ran counter to the trend internationally, with Australia being among the most centralised systems in the OECD.

"There is little between Victoria and NSW currently in relation to literacy and numeracy outcomes. What does seem clear is that Victoria's devolved system achieves comparable outcomes at a significantly lower cost per student than NSW's more highly centralised and bureaucratised one," he said.

"Or, to put it another way, NSW has achieved similar results to Victoria with additional resourcing."

SOURCE





23 April, 2010

FL: Crist signs school voucher legislation

With the stroke of a pen and solid bipartisan support, Gov. Charlie Crist on Thursday ushered in the most sweeping expansion of private-school vouchers in Florida history. Crist signed Senate Bill 2126, which significantly increases the value of a ``tax-credit voucher,'' offers more incentives to corporations to fund the program and essentially removes a cap on how much they can collectively give.

``This is the largest expansion of a voucher program in the country,'' said Rep. Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, who sponsored the House version of the bill. ``It's a good day for parents, good for students.''

``It's gone too far,'' countered Pinellas school board member Linda Lerner, who was among the plaintiffs in a successful effort to overturn another voucher program in 2006. ``It's time to get legal opinion about a legal challenge.''

Tax-credit vouchers are available to low-income students and funded by corporations that get dollar-for-dollar tax credits in return for contributing to them. Currently, 27,700 students - including 2,500 in the Tampa Bay area - use the vouchers, which are valued at $3,950 each.

But under SB 2126, the value of a voucher would grow over several years until it reached 80 percent of the state's per-pupil funding figure. At the current per-pupil rate of $6,866, the voucher amount would grow to $5,492, putting the cost of private school in reach for even more low-income families.

"Our sense is, the demand is there," said Jon East, spokesman for Step Up for Students, the Tampa-based outfit that provides the scholarships.

With little marketing, the program has grown an average of 22 percent a year for five years, East said. At that pace, it will have 70,000 students by 2015.

Vouchers have been controversial and divisive since former Gov. Jeb Bush led the fight for them in 1999. Supporters consider them a lifeline for high-poverty students and a competitive lever that forces public schools to improve. Critics see a drain on public school funding and, because so many private schools are faith-based, a dangerous blurring of church-state lines.

SOURCE




Pupil behaviour 'poor in fifth of British schools'

Behaviour is still not good enough in more than a fifth of secondary schools, according to figures. At least 700 state secondaries in England are failing to keep order to a high standard, it was revealed, despite hundreds of millions of pounds spent by Labour to crackdown on unruly pupils.

In some [minority] areas, behaviour was poor in more than half of comprehensives, figures suggested.

The disclosure comes just weeks after Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, told headteachers to take parents of the worst offenders to court for failing to control their children.

He said behaviour had improved dramatically under Labour but mothers and fathers had to play their part to make sure all pupils followed school rules.

According to figures, the number of schools with good or outstanding behaviour – the two top rankings on a four-point scale operated by Ofsted – has increased year-on-year since 2006.

But it suggests behaviour is still not good enough in more than 21 per cent of secondaries.

The conclusions follow a survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers last month that found a quarter of teachers had been forced to deal with violent pupils in the current academic year.

The Conservatives accused Labour of “undermining adult authority in schools”. Michael Gove, the Conservative shadow schools spokesman, said: “Over the last ten years teachers have been denied the power to keep order in the classroom and stop violent incidents. Unless there is good discipline pupils can't learn and teachers can't teach and the children who suffer most are the poorest.”

Mr Balls said: "It's encouraging that the number of schools judged good or outstanding for behaviour continues to increase and there are fewer schools with poor behaviour standards, even under the new inspection framework. "But I know there is more to do to make sure every school is an orderly place with strong discipline so no child's learning is disrupted by the bad behaviour of a minority."

Figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families show that 78.6 per cent of secondaries had good or outstanding behaviour in December 2009. The figures – based on an official breakdown of judgments made by Ofsted – show that standards have steadily improved since 2006. Four years ago, some 73.7 per cent of schools imposed order to a high standard, rising to 74.5 per cent a year later and 76.1 per cent in 2008.

But the latest statistics reveal stark differences between areas. In Bradford, Hull, Brighton and Stockport more than half of schools were rated merely satisfactory or inadequate for behaviour – the watchdog’s bottom two rankings.

Last month, the Government suggested schools could crackdown on the worst pupils by targeting parents. Under plans, headteachers can apply for parenting orders, forcing mothers and fathers to attend counselling sessions and parenting classes, as well as setting out strict rules on how they should bring up sons and daughters.

This includes making sure children do not stay up late, ensuring they cannot get access to alcohol at home, getting them to school on time and making sure uniform rules are followed.

New powers for teachers to use force and search pupils without consent for alcohol, drugs, stolen property or weapons have also been introduced

SOURCE




British High School exams HAVE got easier, says Cambridge exams chief

GCSEs and A-levels really have got easier, an exams chief has admitted. Tim Oates, a key figure in Cambridge University's exams board, admitted his warning over 'grade inflation' could amount to a 'Ratner moment'.

In a paper designed to provoke debate about exam standards, he drew a comparison with jeweller Gerald Ratner, who in 1991 sent the value of his stores plummeting by admitting they sold 'crap'.

Mr Oates admitted exam boards had bowed to political pressure to make exams more 'accessible'. Pupils and teachers are also helped by guidance on how tests are marked. At the same time, A-levels, and increasingly GCSEs, had changed in structure to become 'modular', with pupils examined on their courses in bite-size chunks.

The measures had, over the years, led to 'subtle drift', Mr Oates admitted. It is thought to be the first time such a senior figure in the exams world has publicly acknowledged the possibility of the tests getting easier.

Mr Oates is head of research at Cambridge Assessment, the parent company of the OCR exam board, one of four offering GCSEs and A-levels in England and Wales. The company is a department of Cambridge University, and a non-profit agency.

His paper was published ahead of a conference on exam standards to be staged by Cambridge Assessment next week.

The controversial remarks emerged as another speaker at the conference - testing expert Professor Roger Murphy - warned that trusting GCSE and A-level results was 'dangerous' because grades were only 'approximations' of pupils' ability.

The men's comments are part of a drive to shine a light on the shadowy world of exam grading.

The proportion of typical A-level students gaining three A-levels has risen to 17 per cent from 7 per cent in the mid-1990s.

Mr Oates said: 'Giving the benefit of the doubt to pupils - consistent with the general moral sense of "access" and "best chance" which was foremost in the political agenda - can result in subtle grade inflation.'

He went on: 'Increasing access, updating content, switching to modular/unit provision - and being as transparent as possible over mark schemes, grade criteria and guidance - have all been fervent pre-occupations of policy makers and the education establishment. Awarding bodies delivered on that agenda. 'To investigate possible grade inflation, to publicly acknowledge that there may have been subtle drift, and that a reorientation of standards might be required, sounds like a "Ratner moment" for awarding bodies.' But he said boards must not shy away from self-criticism.

But Professor Murphy, of Nottingham University, said it was wrong to try to turn grading into an 'exact science'. He said: 'Most examinations require the person taking them to undertake a sample of tasks and do not attempt to provide a comprehensive examination of the area under assessment.

'Give the candidate a different sample of tasks and almost certainly they will produce a different performance. 'Give them the tasks on a different day and their performance may vary again. 'Give their responses to a range of different examiners to mark and again you will probably get different judgments.'

SOURCE





22 April, 2010

The virtual university

This article is from a Leftist source so is a bit starry-eyed but there are some good points in it

Young people worldwide are caught between the spiraling cost of college and an apparently bottomless hunger for it. According to a 2009 report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), today 150 million students are enrolled in some kind of education beyond high school, a 53 percent increase in less than one decade. With such numbers, there is no foreseeable way enough traditional universities could be physically built in the next two decades to match the demand.

Meanwhile, here in America, the birthplace of mass higher education, we are stalling in our educational attainment while the rest of the world is roaring ahead. In the U.S., about 30 percent of high school students drop out, and just 56 percent of college freshmen complete their bachelor's degree after six years, 150 percent of the time allotted. Only a little more than a third of Americans end up with any kind of college degree. For more than a century, arguably the world's most educated nation, we've now fallen behind nine others. Unlike citizens of every other rich country except Germany, Americans in their late teens and early 20s are no more educated than older generations.

President Barack Obama clearly understands the problem. In his first address to Congress, he promised, "We will provide the support necessary for all [young Americans] to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."

Obama has appointed some wonderful advocates for students to the Department of Education. His administration has backed great proposals, like increasing the Pell grant's maximum amount, cutting corporate subsidies out of the student-loan program, simplifying the federal student-aid application process, and raising funding for community colleges. But nothing on the table addresses the underlying issues that make tuition rise or the capacity problems and leaks in the system.

College tuition has been outpacing inflation for decades. Between 1990 and 2008, tuition and fees rose 248 percent in real dollars, more than any other major component of the consumer price index. Raising the Pell grant's maximum doesn't address this underlying problem. Constant transfusions of public money help keep the patient alive but do not stop the bleeding.

What's to be done about dropout rates and outstanding student-loan debt that currently totals over $730 billion, or $23,200 per graduating senior in 2008? At first, I stood with progressives who say the federal government should increase grants and rein in the parasitic student-loan business. But while the student-loan industry has been part of the problem, and more grants are part of the solution, there is more to this story.

The higher-education system has a lot in common with another great challenge our country is confronting: health care. Colleges, like hospitals, have little incentive to conserve resources or compete on price. They can actually gain prestige by raising tuition. They shift costs to students to make up for gaps in state funding and then hand out grant money to the applicants they want the most, not the ones who need the most help. Community colleges dedicated to serving the poorest get a fraction of the public money that goes to flagship state universities.

The fact is, as aspirations toward, and for, higher learning grow, the model of inexorably growing bureaucratic institutions of formal education is under extreme pressure. "Our learning institutions, for the most part, are acting as if the world has not suddenly, irrevocably, cataclysmically, epistemically changed -- and changed precisely in the area of learning," Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg write in their 2009 book The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. Universities may be on the brink of a phase change from something monolithic to something more fluid: a sea of smaller, more specialized and diverse institutions offering a greater variety of learning opportunities, a cloud of ideas, texts, and conversations. More than one in five of the nation's 19 million college students took at least one online class by the fall of 2006, according to a study by the Sloan Consortium, but technology hasn't yet changed the prevailing model or brought down costs in higher education as it has for so many other industries.

Princeton economists William Bowen and William Baumol argued in their 1966 book, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, that modernization, mechanization, and efficiency just plain escape certain areas of human endeavor. If you want a proper Beethoven string quartet, you can't cut the cellist, and you can't squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. Just as there is no substitute for the concert hall experience, the writers argue, there is no substitute for being in the classroom with a professor. Higher education and health care, as well as the arts, are subject to a "cost disease."

Today, live performance is still vibrant and without rival. However, the music aficionado has opportunities that go far beyond what could have been imagined when Beethoven was composing or even when Baumol and Bowen were writing. My husband's grandparents go to a New York City movie theater to watch a live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's Tosca. If I search YouTube for "Beethoven," I can watch 80,800 videos, like of the late Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan conducting the full "Seventh Symphony in A Major." Contemporary composers can record entire symphonies from their bedrooms. Musicians from around the world can collaborate and perform for an audience of millions without ever meeting each other. The marginal cost of distributing a copy of a musical recording around the world has dropped to pretty much zero.

The same is happening in education. Since 2001, a growing movement -- from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, and hundreds of other universities worldwide to insurgent bloggers and entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves -- is looking to social media to transform higher education. They're releasing educational content for free to the world and enlisting computers as tutors. Google has scanned and digitized 7 million books. Wikipedia users have created the world's largest encyclopedia. YouTube Edu and iTunes U have made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free.

The face-to-face learning experience, like the live concert experience, remains inimitable. Research shows that, at its best, hybrid learning beats both online-only and classroom-only approaches. Learners can take in and retain more content faster and more easily, form strong mentoring and teamwork relationships, grow into self-directed, creative problem solvers, and publish portfolios of meaningful work that help jobs find them. These innovations hold out the tantalizing possibility of beating the cost disease while meeting the world's demand for higher education.

As exhilarating as this future sounds for students, there is plenty of anxiety about the transition. "Thinking Big in a Crisis" was the title of a summer 2009 higher-education policy summit in Washington, D.C., featuring representatives from the worlds of journalism and architecture sharing war stories about the scary impact of the Web on existing business models. Later that summer, I attended an Open Education conference in Vancouver titled "Crossing the Chasm." The pace of transformation is uneven. Existing institutions don't want to give up their authority, nor faculty their jobs. Even among early adopters, there's a divide over basic issues: Some see an economic opportunity, while others are eager to spread free education; some want the university to absorb the new information technologies, while others see the digital age absorbing the university.

As a print journalist, I'm all too aware that a cardinal way the Internet has disrupted traditional knowledge industries is through disaggregation or unbundling of services. In the case of a daily newspaper, for example, Craigslist replaced the classifieds, Yahoo! Finance the stock listings, ESPN.com the sports scores, bloggers the op-eds. Newspapers are making shaky attempts to profit from their remaining unique strengths in local and investigative reporting.

Higher education is not just an industry. Still, from students' point of view, colleges do provide a bundle of services. You crack a book or go to lecture and learn about the world. You go to labs or write papers and build a skill set. You form relationships with classmates and teachers and learn about yourself. You get a diploma, and the world can learn about you. Content, skills, socialization, and accreditation.

The Web and allied technologies can make each of these services better, cheaper, more accessible, and even free to the student. Content, whether text, video, audio, or game-based, has progressed the furthest along that path. Interactive teaching algorithms can adapt to your learning style on the fly, allowing you to grasp concepts intuitively and at your own pace. And the Internet hasn't just changed the way we consume information. It has altered the way we interact. Social media can help students and teachers form learning communities. Reputation, assessment, and certification are held jealously as a monopoly by existing institutions, but new tools and models are knocking on that door, too.

"If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written on his blog, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

Open content -- also known as open courseware, or open educational resources (OER) -- can mean any use of the Web to share the fruits of faculty time, from curricula to lesson plans to texts to original research. As Wikipedia is to a conventional encyclopedia, open content is to a conventional textbook or lecture hall. Both open-source software and Creative Commons, a nonprofit set up in 2001 to create the intellectual and legal framework to share or remix creative work found online, share intellectual DNA with OER. For example, you can search the photo Web site Flickr for CC-licensed images and use them like stock photos, for free, to illustrate a blog post, so long as you live up to the requirements of the CC license, such as crediting the creator or linking back to the original photo on Flickr.

More than a technical innovation, CC has spread to millions of works in all media and become the focus of what thinkers like Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, author of the book Remix, term the "copyleft" movement. "What happened was unexpected," says Ahrash Bissell, former director of CCLearn, the educational division of Creative Commons. "We tapped into this social dimension of people who are hungry to be able to stand up and say, 'Yes, I am part of this new and exciting universe of possibility around distributed collaboration and adaptation.'"

Those values -- distributed collaboration and adaptation -- are central to open education. The ball got rolling in 2001 with the OpenCourseWare project at MIT, funded by the Hewlett and Andrew W. Mellon foundations. If you go to MIT's Web site today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every one of the 1,900 courses MIT offers, from physics to art history. By the end of 2009, some 65 million current students, aspiring students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world had checked them out.

"Education has a long, long history of a gift economy around knowledge," says Steve Carson, a director of MIT's project, explaining why the university devotes up to $15,000 per course in development costs from its own budget to put each course online to everyone for free. "That ethos underpins both open-source software and educational sharing." Over 200 institutions in over 30 countries have posted courses online at the OpenCourseWare Consortium under CC licensing. Countries from Kenya to the Netherlands have started their own open courseware repositories. China's Ministry of Education has been funding the release of university courses since 2003; over 10,000 courses are now available for free online, many including video.

These materials have been accumulating for several years now, but most colleges have yet to fully take advantage of them. Students spend an average of $1,000 a year on textbooks, and faculty spend countless hours preparing and updating course materials, which prompts the question: What will it take for colleges to realize the power of free and open resources and use them to cut educational costs?

SOURCE




Britain: Conservative vision for education 'will change schools for the better'

The writer below sees no need for radical change but that probably reflects today's wishy-washy British Conservative thinking

When the Liberal MP WE Forster masterminded the successful passage of the Education Act, 1870, the main opposition to the legislation came from within his own party. He did in fact rely on Conservative support for his measure to become law.

No one would deny that Forster’s eventual Act, introducing primary schooling for most children, was a big step forward. One hundred and 40 years on and as the electoral campaign begins to heat up, the Conservative Party is determined to welcome in a new vision for educational change and to stamp home its message should they be able to gain enough seats in the House of Commons after the next general election.

But what do the Tories stand for in education? What policies are they unveiling for schools and for the teaching profession? In this article, I will put forward some of the keynote school and teacher policies currently supported by the Conservative Party.

An important starting point for a new Conservative government would be the schools. The Conservative Party would legislate at the outset to open more academies, and radically reform Ofsted, the body in charge of inspecting standards in schools.

Much effort will go towards using the best schools to help the ones that are struggling.

Michael Gove MP, Shadow Secretary for Children, Schools and Families, would promote a Bill, to become law by the end of July 2010, leading to the creation of new academies.

The Tories would be able to build on the record of the Labour Government, and they would seemingly enhance the status of the academy and the attractions of combining the best of the public with the best of private provision in the school system.

In a similar vein Kunskapsskolan (translates into English as the ‘knowledge school’), Sweden’s largest supplier of independent schools, provides an important model for change. This scheme envisages that greater choice will be made available to parents, regardless of their income.

Teachers would be given far more freedom to develop innovative practices in the way they teach children and it is evident that vital lessons can be learnt from Sweden and many of the schools in that country.

Cameron and his team believe that schools thrive when they are allowed the freedom to innovate. Academies and schools based on the Kunskapsskolan blueprint could benefit from other freedoms such as the right to shape the curriculum, to exclude disruptive pupils, and to choose the best elements in the private and public sectors. And to enforce their own discipline.

I can’t see much wrong with this kind of approach, but an emphasis must, on this policy, in my view, be placed on the importance of compassion and care and on not forgetting that the poor and deprived deserve more than just lip service and are more often than not in need of special help and consideration.

Cameron himself has been touched by the sad loss of his disabled son, Ivan, who passed at the age of six. Conservative policies designed for disabled children open the door for children in need either to attend mainstream schools or go to special schools. This will avoid the sort of blanket solution that many previous governments have mistakenly pursued.

The Conservatives also aim to replace the leadership of those schools with persistent serious problems. Where Ofsted judges that schools are failing to teach the basics properly, where discipline is absent and where the leadership has failed, they will install leadership teams with a track record of success.

As far as inspection is concerned outstanding schools will too be free from Ofsted inspection. Improvements in discipline are, moreover, a key tenet behind the Tory programme.

Quangos, those organisations or agencies that are financed by a government but that act independently of it, that are wasteful will meet with the full force of Tory venom and I would expect where savings can be made the money would be best spent on helping directly to finance projects in schools that really give a boost to realise as the full potential of school children.

However, root and branch reforms are not always the best way ahead.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, the regulatory body for public examinations and publicly funded qualifications such as GCSEs and A-levels, is, for instance, one quango ready for the chop, and a degree of understanding might be advised. The QCDA, for instance, has done much work in the area of disability awareness, and success in this area, particularly for the deaf and visually impaired, should not be overlooked.

Yet the QCDA might be stripped of its control to meddle with A-levels, and instead they would be given back to the universities and exam boards. This would reverse decline in the A-level's reputation globally and help bring back the former prestige and status attached to the delivery of the nation’s examinations.

Cameron has been inspired by the passion for their subject shown by teachers across many disciplines and in many different schools and colleges he would like to build the National Curriculum around a basic entitlement to study scientific disciplines in a more rigorous manner: each of the three basic sciences would be given greater depth and detail than at present.

Turning to the teachers – those heroes without whom everything would collapse – what do the Tories have in store for them? Professional status is one dominant value and it definitely appears that the Conservatives are keen to improve the lot of the classroom teacher.

Economic stringency might limit the rewards going into their pockets and it might be hard to give in too liberally to teachers in their demands for substantial pay increases when there are so many additional deserving cases contributing to society and the economy.

Teachers’ academic credentials will no doubt be greater and those with the basic pass degree might find that their options to take up teaching would be limited.

Speaking with Nick Gibb MP, the Shadow Minister for Schools since July 2009, I learnt that he is very sympathetic to causes which help teachers. A Royal College of Teachers established along the lines of the royal colleges in the medical profession sounds an intriguing plan, and is supported in the House of Lords by Baroness Pauline Perry.

For such a reform the Conservatives would be wise to get teachers support first and to continue to consider the role of bodies such as the existing College of Teachers, the world’s oldest surviving teachers’ society, incorporated by Royal Charters in 1849 and 1998.

On the other hand, Cameron has less passion for the General Teaching Council for England, the watchdog of the teaching profession, brought in by New Labour, and similar to the GMC in the medical profession.

I doubt whether Cameron would abolish it but a revised role for this body, might well be in the interests of teachers who are generally reluctant to have their annual fee for membership forcefully extracted from their salary, as has been the case since 2000.

The GTC for England clearly needs to focus on primarily being in charge of teachers’ discipline though with perhaps less stress on naming and shaming those found guilty of misconduct...

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21 April, 2010

The bubble in for-profit schooling

In the midst of economic depression, the for-profit trade-school industry is booming. Enrollment has grown 20% annually over the past two years, and some experts predict that revenue may increase as much as eightfold over the next decade. Entrepreneurs and economists alike would usually commend such a herculean performance and credit the basic laws of supply and demand at work; however, this growth has not been earned by free-market means such as innovation, efficiency, and accurate forecasting.

Instead, the giants of for-profit education have grown fat on a steady diet of government credit by cleverly maneuvering their way through a vast field of regulatory landmines to take advantage of federal-aid programs aimed at helping those they ultimately hurt — students. As expected, many have ignorantly aimed their weaponry at the profit motive, instead of unleashing their fury on the root cause: government interference in the market.

For-profit trade schools have long been marred by controversy stemming from questionable business practices and accusations of sub-par education. For example, only 16% of University of Phoenix students without prior college experience graduate within six years, compared to nearly 50% at traditional schools; moreover, Corinthian Colleges Inc., which owns Everest College, agreed to pay $6.5 million in 2007 to settle a lawsuit that claimed they engaged in false advertising by overstating starting-salary information. Unimpressive outcomes and multimillion dollar lawsuits have become synonymous with the for-profit trade school industry.

Under market conditions, such dismal performance would unquestionably have a substantive impact on a company's bottom line; after all, if an airline agreed to bring its passengers to Maui but instead brought them to Midland, a rational observer would expect the business to founder soon after. In essence, this is precisely what for-profit trade schools are doing — promising paradise in the form of high-paying jobs and delivering destitution in the form of unimpressive career prospects and heavy government-sponsored debt burdens. In fact, the average debt for students graduating from proprietary schools in 2008 was an astounding $33,050 — a substandard return on investment, considering many struggle to achieve hourly wages above $12 in the workforce.

Unlike the fate of our incompetent airliner, however, trade schools continue to fill their seats. In 2009, the publicly traded giant Career Education Corporation (CEC), which owns Le Cordon Bleu and American Intercontinental University, reported revenue of $1.84 billion, a 10.6% increase over 2008. Similarly, Apollo Group, which owns University of Phoenix, has seen enrollment nearly double since 2004. Federal loans and grants accounted for 80% and 86% of their revenues, respectively while this figure jumps to 88% industrywide. To understand how unsatisfactory student outcomes can be accompanied by increased profits, one need not look further than the effects of federal financial aid (FFA) on the industry's pricing system.

"In essence, FFA allows for-profit schools to increase their prices significantly above what they would be in a true market."

In a free market, the ability to satisfy an obligation is a basic consideration of almost any transaction; with a reputation for not satisfactorily settling his debts, one is hard-pressed to find a willing creditor. However, creditors might be keen on accepting a high degree of risk in exchange for a larger return; this risk is directly reflected in the form of higher relative interest rates.

In essence, a market has natural mechanisms for punishing credit abusers, mechanisms that decrease the likelihood that these individuals will be the beneficiaries of credit in future transactions.

Unfortunately, much to the dismay of the American taxpayer, such mechanisms are not intrinsic in FFA, where everyone enjoys equal status regardless of their ability to satisfy debt-related obligations. Only in rare instances, such as prior default on student loans, will government restrict access to this ubiquitous program. While some may champion FFA by arguing the merits of readily accessible education, they fail to heed the lessons taught to us by Henry Hazlitt in his masterpiece Economics in One Lesson. In particular, advocates conveniently overlook the unintended consequences of systematically extending credit to undeserving debtors: higher prices and default.

When government offers virtually unfettered access to student loans, it artificially increases the threshold of what students can afford. Many would presume this to be a highly desirable outcome and precisely the reason FFA exists. However, this reasoning fails to account for the causal relationship between FFA and prices: tuition rates are not only based on factors such as the costs of delivering education, the industry's competitive landscape, and the economy as a whole, but also on demand, which encompasses the ability of students to pay for the education they consume.

In essence, FFA allows for-profit schools to increase their prices significantly above what they would be in a true market. If FFA were eliminated or significantly scaled back, schools would be forced to decrease their prices to the point of market efficiency or face a catastrophic decrease in enrollment industrywide. Only then would students receive a market-based return on investment in their education.

Moreover, it's commonsensical that systematically extending credit to high-risk borrowers has dire consequences for creditors and debtors alike. Unqualified borrowing, in addition to paltry completion rates and low admission standards, has caused for-profit education to become a breeding ground for student-loan default. A US Government Accountability Office analysis of the 2004 federal student loans cohort default rate has shown that 23.3% of proprietary students default on loans within four years. In a private transaction, this would generally be of little or no consequence to the average citizen; however, because these losses are socialized, one can reasonably conclude that the financial success of for-profit schools is being bankrolled by American taxpayers.

Many schools have begun offering their own institutional loans to stay in compliance with federal regulations such as the "90/10" rule, which stipulates that no less than 10% of a school's revenue must come from nongovernmental sources; failure to adhere to this guideline could result in FFA funds being frozen, a cataclysmic result for any of the major trade schools.

To prevent the well from drying up, CEC planned on giving approximately $50 million in institutional loans in 2009, which helped them maintain a sufficient gap between public and private student funding. Interestingly, some schools are setting aside as much as 50% of these reserves as losses, clearly indicating that they have relatively little faith in the ability of their students to honor debt obligations. One cannot help but wonder how taxpayers can reasonably expect to collect their dues when for-profit schools can't collect such debts themselves. There is something terribly awry with this system.

Conclusion

Government interference in the marketplace has allowed for-profit schools to realize immense profits at the expense of American taxpayers. By offering virtually unfettered access to FFA, these institutions are able to increase prices significantly beyond true market value to students who pose a high risk for default. Privatized profits and socialized losses are the result of such a system.

Profits, per se, are not to be demonized; rather, the role of government-backed loans in private transactions must be called into question. For-profit schools can play a significant role in educating a traditionally underserved market; however, for their thousands of students to be the beneficiaries of such education, the market must be freed of governmental involvement.

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SCOTUS to consider religious discrimination allegations vs. law school

At the oldest law school in the West, law is being made this semester, not just taught.

In a case that carries great implications for how public universities and schools must accommodate religious groups, the University of California's Hastings College of the Law is defending its anti-discrimination policy against charges that it denies religious freedom.

The college, which requires officially recognized student groups to admit any Hastings student who wants to join, may be well-meaning, says the student outpost of the Christian Legal Society. But the group contends that requiring it to allow gay students and nonbelievers into its leadership would be a renunciation of its core beliefs, and that the policy violates the Constitution's guarantee of free speech, association with like-minded individuals and exercise of religion.

"Hastings' policy is a threat to every group that seeks to form and define its own voice," the group told the court in a brief. The case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, will be argued in the Supreme Court Monday morning.

Hastings counters that the CLS, a national organization that seeks to "proclaim, love and serve Jesus Christ through the study and practice of law," is demanding special treatment. It wants the college's official stamp of approval and the access to benefits and student activity fees that come with it, but it will not commit to following the nondiscrimination policy that every other student group follows.

The CLS is not being forced to do anything, Hastings contends. "A group may abide by the school's viewpoint-neutral open-membership policy and obtain the modest funding and benefits that go along with school recognition, or forgo recognition and do as it wishes," it said in its brief.

The case poses a quandary for a court that has recognized both the ability of public universities and schools to control the use of their facilities and funds and the right of religious groups to select members based on their beliefs. It comes as religious groups have become more active and litigious in demanding a place in the public forum of free speech.

Christian groups have brought suits against similar policies across the country, from the University of Florida to Boise State University. "In every case . . . either the courts have ruled for the religious student group or the university has settled or mooted the case by revoking its unconstitutional policy," the CLS brief asserts.

The controversy also raises questions about who needs protection. CLS lawyer Michael W. McConnell, a former federal judge and director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, likens the underdog status of Christian groups at liberal law schools such as Hastings to the way gay rights groups might have felt on a Southern campus years ago.

"One of the things I find kind of pleasantly ironic about the briefing in this case is we find ourselves relying on about a dozen cases that involve gay rights groups in universities," said McConnell, who was appointed as an appellate judge by President George W. Bush. The other side, he said, relies on decisions and legislative acts that helped Bible clubs.

Hastings has also brought in high-powered help. It is represented by Gregory G. Garre, a solicitor general under Bush who is now in private practice. The National Center for Lesbian Rights, which represented a campus gay rights group called Hastings Outlaw that is a party to the case, has made way at the high court for Washington lawyer Paul M. Smith. He successfully argued Lawrence v. Texas, in which the court struck down a state law making homosexual conduct illegal.

They are joined by 37 organizations and states who have filed amicus briefs. Notably missing is the Obama administration, which chose not to get involved.

More here




British bishop fears loss of faith schools

A senior Roman Catholic bishop criticised the Liberal Democrats yesterday for an election pledge that could result in the abolition of religious schools. The Lib Dem manifesto commits the party to stopping Catholic, Anglican and Jewish schools from selecting pupils on grounds of faith.

Critics say the policy will effectively spell the abolition of schools that have succeeded in delivering high quality education over generations.

The Catholic bishops have refused on principle to be drawn into party politics during the general election campaign. But the Rt Rev Malcolm McMahon, the Bishop of Nottingham, broke ranks to accuse the Lib Dems of seeking to destroy the partnership between the state and the churches in the provision of education.

“Catholics should give it very serious consideration before they vote Liberal Democrat,” said Bishop McMahon, the chairman of the Department for Education of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. “Our position is that every person should have the right to bring up their children according to their consciences.”

The policy is contained in a section of the Lib Dem election manifesto entitled Freeing Schools for Excellence. “We will ensure that all faith schools develop an inclusive admissions policy and end unfair discrimination on grounds of faith,” the policy states.

Critics said that if the policy was implemented 4,470 Church of England, 2,300 Catholic and 85 Jewish schools would lose control of the admissions process.

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20 April, 2010

An open letter to high school science students

Always be inquisitive about science. As Will Rogers said, “Everyone is ignorant; just on different subjects.” Even an individual with a Ph.D. in science does not know everything in science.

The reason why you need to be curious and questioning about science is that there is a lot of false science being generated because of politics. This false science is backed by billions of dollars in special interests. Unfortunately, this false science is being spread by television, newspapers and magazines. It is also spread by those who benefit financially from the false science. Sadly, many Americans do not question science as to whether it is true or false, thereby making it much easier for false science to control lives and cause the loss of individual freedoms.

Here are some examples of scientific things about which you should be curious. For a thousand years, scientists have used what is called “the Scientific Method” to solve scientific problems. The four steps to the scientific method are (1) observe and describe a phenomenon; (2) formulate a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon; (3) use the hypothesis to predict; and (4) perform experimental tests of predictions to obtain reproducible test results.

Question why so-called experts in global warming cannot get to Step (4) which is to obtain reproducible test results. There simply are no reproducible test results. Ask others why scientists who advocate anthropogenic (man-made) climate change cannot obtain reproducible test results.

Here is another scientific thing to be curious about. Energy is measured in British Thermal Units, BTUs. A gallon of biofuel contains only 61% of the energy in a gallon of gasoline. Therefore, it takes 1.64 gallons of biofuel to do the same amount of work as one gallon of gasoline. Burning that amount of biofuel emits about a pound more of carbon dioxide into the air than burning a gallon of gasoline. Therefore, using so-called “clean” renewable biofuel instead of a gallon of gasoline will emit about a pound more carbon dioxide into the air. Be curious. Ask others why anyone would want to use biofuel instead of a gallon of gasoline since it emits about a pound more of carbon dioxide into the air.

This brings up another scientific thing to be curious about. Since using biofuel emits more carbon dioxide into the air than using gasoline, and since our climate policy is to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide into the air, our energy policy to switch to biofuels conflicts with our climate policy to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Ask others why we have this conflict in scientific policies.

Here is something else to be curious about. I have asked famous global warming scientists this simple question, and they have been unable to provide a scientific answer. Why is it that carbon dioxide from carbonated beverages, pets, cattle, farm animals, humans, yeast, dry ice, fireplaces, charcoal grills, campfires, wildfires, alcohol and ethanol is good, and carbon dioxide from fossil fuel is bad? Ask others to explain why carbon dioxide from fossil fuel is bad.

Here is yet another thing to be curious about. The United States does not have enough crop land to grow crops for enough biofuel to replace our current oil demand of 15.1 million barrels per day. In fact, using our entire corn crop land, we can only produce enough ethanol, after 12 more years of increasing ethanol production, to provide 15% of our current oil demand. Using the size of New Mexico, our 5th largest state, as a measurement, switchgrass would require crop land—which we do not have—2.6 times the size of New Mexico, sugar cane 3.8 times the size of New Mexico, and palm oil 4.6 times the size of New Mexico. Algae would require a controlled chemical tank 1.5 times the size of New Mexico. Ask others how renewable biofuel can replace oil when the US simply does not have the crop land to replace more than 15% of current oil demand.

Be curious about science as it relates to increasing taxes, particularly taxes on oil. All oil wells decline in production. Each oil well has an economic limit that is the producing rate below which the well will start losing money. The equation for calculating the economic limit of an oil well contains four parameters, taxes, operating costs, royalty and oil price. Raising taxes destroys proven oil reserves by raising the economic limit, thereby shortening the life of the well. Ask others to explain why they would want to increase taxes on oil since doing so would destroy proven oil reserves.

If you get a reasonable and understandable scientific answer to any of the above six scientific questions relating to climate change and “cap and trade,” please let me know immediately. The public needs to know the answers to all six questions before any decision is made.

Inquire! From inquiry comes knowledge. Question anything I have said which you do not fully understand. I will be glad to explain in much more detail.

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The possibilities and limitations of educational alternatives

Last week, I wrote that we needed many more options in education than the traditional public school. In his latest column, Steve Chapman echoes that sentiment but cautions that no single alternative is likely to bring revolutionary change. For instance, Chapman looks at the lackluster results from the voucher program in Milwaukee:

In 1990, in one of the most innovative developments in modern American education, the Milwaukee public schools created a parental choice system. Some low-income parents got vouchers that could be used to send their children to private schools.

It was a richly promising idea. The new option would let disadvantaged kids escape wretched public schools. Competition would force public schools to improve or close. Students would learn more.

Twenty years have passed. Last week, researchers at the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas published their latest assessment of the results.

What did they find? Something unexpected: Kids in the program do no better than everyone else. “At this point,” said professor Patrick J. Wolf, “the voucher students are showing average rates of achievement gain similar to their public school peers.”

Although I agree with Chapman’s main point, I think he is too critical here. Voucher students score basically the same as public school students, but the graduation rate for students receiving vouchers is 77% to 65% for students without the voucher, which is hardly insignificant. Even more striking, especially in such a lean fiscal year, voucher students attain the same level of education as their public school peers for less than half the cost — $6,400 a year for voucher students against $14,000 for public school students. In other words, the private schools are doing the same job with half the resources. Cutting costs without substantially improving educational outcomes is not worthy of a standing ovation, but it at least deserves mild applause. The same point can be made about charter schools.

That said, Chapman’s conclusion is incredibly wise:

What should we learn from these experiences? Not that nothing works, but that few if any remedies work consistently in different places with different populations. We shouldn’t expect that broad, one-size-fits-all changes imposed by the federal government—such as those offered by the Obama administration—will pay off in student performance.

From the local school district to the federal Department of Education, humility, caution, and open-mindedness are in order. Because right now, the main thing we know about improving schools is that we don’t know very much.

This is why changes in the educational system should come from the bottom up. Students, parents, and individual schools and districts should be encouraged to experiment and imitate those experiments that work. Grandiose nationwide (and even statewide) plans, on the other hand, have a tendency to ignore local and individual particulars. Ignoring those particulars all too often leads to general failure.

SOURCE




Class size not important in education say German researchers

One of many such findings

Smaller school classes, long the holy grail of politicians, parents and educationalists aiming to improve performance, do not actually have any affect on children’s achievements, according to a new study.

And the researchers showed that a child’s social background was a very important factor when it came to whether he or she would be sent to a university track school, or Gymnasium.

Scientists who examined data from recent international primary school test results concluded the most important thing was for the teaching to be good, and for additional support lessons to be provided to children who were struggling.

“An effect from class size is not demonstrable,” the researchers write in their analysis of the 2006 data, reported in Der Spiegel on Saturday.

Working under the Dortmund educational researcher Wilfried Bos, the group examined a number of different factors including the social status of parents, and the recommendation of a school of whether a child should go to Gymnasium.

They confirmed the results of other studies which suggested that children from higher social classes had clearly better educational chances than those from worker families.

The chances of a child from a higher social class going to Gymnasium are around four times those of a child from a working class family, they said.

Even when the children have matching scores in reading and other capabilities, those from a higher social background are on average still three times as likely to get into a Gymnasium than those from a lower social class, they concluded.

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19 April, 2010

PA: School district snapped thousands of student images

The suburban Philadelphia school district accused of spying on students using school-issued laptops snapped thousands of images of teenagers in their homes, including shots of a boy asleep in his bed, documents filed in a lawsuit claimed Thursday.

In a motion filed April 15 by Michael and Holly Robbins, and their teenage son Blake, the family's attorney said Lower Merion School District personnel remotely activated Blake's MacBook over 400 times in a 15-day stretch last fall, taking photos using the notebook's camera and snapping images of the computer's screen.

"There were numerous webcam pictures of Blake and other members of his family, including pictures of Blake partially undressed and of Blake sleeping," alleged the motion. Screenshots of Blake's conversations with friends using instant messaging were also taken, said his lawyer.

The motion claimed that the LANRev software Lower Merion used to track stolen, lost or missing MacBooks took "thousands of webcam and screen shots ... of numerous other students in their homes, many of which never reported their laptops lost of missing." Among the photographs were some of a student who had a name similar to another student's who had reported a missing notebook.

Lower Merion, of Ardmore, Pa., was first sued by the Robbins family in mid-February, when they alleged that the district spied on Blake Robbins using his laptop. Later, Robbins said, a Harriton High School assistant principal accused him of selling drugs and taking pills, and used a snapshot taken by the computer as evidence. Robbins claimed the pictures showed him eating candy.

The motion filed on Thursday asked U.S. District Court Judge Jan DuBois to grant the Robbins' attorney access to the home of Carol Cafiero, information systems coordinator for the district, to seize any computers found in her home. Cafiero is one of two district employees who were put on paid administrative leave by Lower Merion in late February pending the ongoing investigation. According to her attorney, Cafiero only triggered the remote monitoring feature on school officials' orders.

Cafiero's computers' hard drives will be imaged, and the machines returned to her within 48 hours, the motion said. "There is reason to believe that evidence may be found on her personal home computer of the downloading of the pictures obtained from the LANRev 'peeping tom' technology," the Robbins' attorney argued.

The motion noted that Cafiero cited her right under the Fifth Amendment to not answer questions during a recent deposition, which she had earlier contested. "Unlike any of the witnesses asked to testify, [Cafiero] invokes the Fifth Amendment to every question asked of her, including a question asked as to whether she had ever downloading [sic] pictures to her personal computer, including pictures of students who were naked while in their home."

SOURCE




“The Federal Takeover of Higher Education Financing: Why Obama’s Boost Could Bust Taxpayers”

America’s colleges and universities might not qualify as bailout material, but the nation should get ready for what amounts to a federal takeover of higher education financing. Legislation signed March 30 by President Barack Obama practically seals the deal. And despite the administration’s claims to the contrary, taxpayers may find the transition exceedingly expensive.

The measure, tacked onto the massive health care overhaul, requires that campuses using the prevailing system – federally-guaranteed private-sector lending – must move to federal direct lending. The latter program has been in place for more than 15 years. President Obama wants to make it the only game in town. Banks, credit unions and other private lenders would still be allowed to operate, but without backing from Washington. With an Obama-style ‘let’s-get-it-done’ clap of the hands, the law mandates that all colleges and universities switch by July 1. The legislation also relaxes loan repayment terms; provides massive funding for Pell Grants; and boosts aid to historically black institutions.

The president is trumpeting the switch to direct lending as a victory for the American people and a blow to avaricious lenders and servicing firms. “For almost two decades,” Obama announced at the signing ceremony on the Alexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College (where Vice-President Joe Biden’s wife, Jill, teaches English), “we’ve been trying to fix a sweetheart deal in federal law that essentially gave billions of dollars to banks. Those were billions of dollars that could have been spent helping more of our students attend and complete college.” Those “unnecessary middlemen,” as Obama described them, now would be virtually obsolete.

The White House estimates elimination of government fees payable to private-sector intermediaries would save taxpayers $68 billion through 2020, a savings that presumably will pay for other programs. Yet experience suggests that the savings will not materialize and that more taxes will be needed.

Before casting doubt on the new system, it’s essential to understand what it replaces. That would be the Federal Family Education Loan Program, or FFELP. Created by Congress in 1965 as part of the Higher Education Act, FFELP is an elaborate public-private partnership in which participating for-profit, nonprofit and state lenders underwrite and/or service loans to borrowers with a limited income or credit history.

The program now serves in excess of six million participants, underwriting more than $55 billion a year in new loans, or more than 75 percent of the federal total. FFELP consists primarily of Stafford and PLUS components. Stafford loans, which run from 10 to 30 years, can be interest-subsidized or unsubsidized based on financial necessity. PLUS loans are available to parents of dependent undergraduate and graduate students, and cover the full cost of attendance minus outside aid.(The means-tested Perkins loan program may be part of either FFELP or direct lending).

Fueling much of the FFELP’s rapid growth over the last couple decades has been SLM Corp., better known as ‘Sallie Mae.’ Chartered by Congress in 1972 as a Government-Sponsored Enterprise, Student Loan Marketing Association, the Reston, Va.-based Fortune 500 company has an active loan portfolio of nearly $190 billion covering some 10 million students and parents. Having phased in a full privatization plan during 1997-2004, Sallie Mae engages in a wide range of lending, servicing and counseling activities.

It soon will scale them back. Sallie Mae, unlike the residential mortgage industry’s roughly equivalent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which thus far have received a combined more than $125 billion in federal bailout money), can be seen as the inverse of “too big to fail.” Call it “too big to succeed.” That is, Obama administration officials and allied Democrats in Congress, seeing a huge, solvent and privatized company, recognized an obstacle to a full conversion to direct lending, and decided to crowd it out.

During the signing ceremony, the president singled out Sallie Mae as the prime culprit in an “army of lobbyists.” That the company had been named one of America’s “100 Best Corporate Citizens” at least five times by Corporate Responsibility Officer scored no points. And its contribution of the $250,000 legal maximum to George W. Bush’s second inauguration no doubt cost it a few.

Now that its services suddenly have become dispensable, Sallie Mae is figuring out how to downsize. Almost as soon as Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, corporate management announced plans to lay off 2,500 employees from its 8,600-person work force at dozens of offices across the nation. This likely isn’t the only college loan-related employer who will distribute pink slips. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who served as Education Secretary nearly 20 years ago under President George H. W. Bush, estimates 31,000 private-sector employees will lose their jobs. “The Obama administration’s motto is turning out to be: ‘If we can find it in the Yellow Pages, the government ought to try to do it,’” he said.

Supporters of direct lending argue that it is more efficient than the public-private partnership model, since it eliminates unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. Now there’s little question that the FFELP has had its share of problems. In 1991, U.S. Senate investigators concluded that the program is “plagued with fraud and abuse at every level.” Accusing the Department of Education of “gross mismanagement, ineptitude and neglect,” the Senate put cumulative losses during 1983-90 at $13 billion. In 1994, the Education Department (ED) admitted that waste, fraud and defaults in its higher education loan and grant programs amounted to at least $3 billion annually.

And in May 2005, ED Inspector General John Higgins told a House committee that “the department’s student loan programs are large, complex and inherently risky…the loan programs rely upon over 6,000 postsecondary institutions [and] more than 3,000 lenders.”

Direct lending offers pretty much the same terms, benefits, interest rates and loan ceilings as its FFELP counterpart. And a sizable number of schools, such as Penn State University, already have made a transition to direct lending on their own. But would mandatory full conversion be an improvement? The evidence suggests not.

In 1993, Congress enacted and President Clinton signed into law the first-ever direct loan program. The main argument, then as now, was that cutting out middlemen would deliver more education for the dollar. Then-Education Secretary Richard Riley remarked:

So, who opposes direct lending? The financial middlemen who benefit from the old loan program, earning billions each year while assuming virtually no financial risk. That’s because the guaranteed loan system gives them a federal guarantee to replace their money if a borrower defaults, as well as hefty federal subsidies for participating in the guaranteed loan program. The bottom line is that the special interests’ profits are threatened, and their lobbyists have made clear to Congress that they expect to be protected. They do not want competition from a new system that works better.

Those words could have come straight from President Obama. Yet evidence indicates that direct lending, formally known as the William D. Ford Direct Loan Program, isn’t the bargain it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, the projected $68 billion in long-term savings is an exaggeration. Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf estimates the true figure at $40 billion. Writing in his blog this past March 15, he explained:

CBO estimates that replacing new guarantees of student loans with direct lending would yield savings in mandatory spending of about $68 billion over the 11 years through 2020. That figure represents the estimated savings in mandatory costs that would be shown in a CBO cost estimate for legislation under consideration by Congress. However, adjusting for the projected increase in annual discretionary administrative costs in the direct program, the net reduction in federal costs from the proposal would be about $62 billion. On a fair value basis, incorporating administrative costs and the cost of risk, CBO estimates that replacing new guarantees of student loans with direct lending would yield savings of about $40 billion over the 2010-2020 period. The primary reason for that $22 billion difference is that payments from the government to lenders are risky – they terminate when a borrower defaults on or prepays a loan.

On top of this, when the federal government becomes the bank, it is unlikely to assess risk as thoroughly as banks and other private lenders. A paper prepared by Deborah Lucas (Northwestern University) and Damien Moore (Congressional Budget Office) for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that as of January 2006, the direct loan portfolio had incurred a composite 11 percent default rate, whereas the rate for guaranteed loans was only 8 percent. And the Government Accountability Office several years ago found that the direct lending program spent more than it collected in interest and fees in each year since 1997.

Additionally, direct lending severely diminishes consumer choice. The federal government, not the student or his family, chooses the lender with whom to do business. Bill Spiers, director financial aid at Tallahassee Community College explains: “One of the great benefits of the FFELP is the ability of the student, and where it is appropriate, their parent(s) to decide with whom they want to do business. Students in direct lending are not given this choice.”

Perhaps the most onerous consequence of a full conversion to direct lending is the possibility of financial aid used as political leverage. We all know the old saying about the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Well, it applies here. Nominally, these are ‘student loans.’ But in fact the federal government disburses them to institutions. When a student takes out a loan, he effectively is promising to his respective college or university to pay back all debt with interest following completion of studies. Without recourse to switch back to the FFELP system, campus administrators may be at the mercy of the federal government. Peter Wood, president of the Princeton, N.J.-based National Association of Scholars, recently outlined the dilemma:

The federally subsidized student loan system surely stands in need of reform. But “Direct Lending” may well be a cure that is worse than the disease. The main problem is not financial but political. It will make American higher education extraordinarily vulnerable to political interference. Will Congress, presidential administrations, and the Department of Education resist the temptation to misuse their new power? Direct Lending will give the federal government decisive if not quite total control of higher education finance.

Then there is a paradox common to direct and indirect lending: tuition ‘cost-push.’ An individual loan defrays a student’s tuition, but loans a whole raise it because participating institutions have fewer incentives to constrain costs. Taxpayers, after all, are liable for losses. “More and more Americans have sought a college education,” wrote Neal McCluskey and Chris Edwards in a Cato Institute paper last year, “which has pushed prices higher. Ordinarily, such upward pressure would be restrained by consumers’ willingness and ability to pay, but as government subsidies have helped absorb tuition increases, the public’s budget constraint has been lifted.”

The new legislation exacerbates this problem by loosening repayment requirements on direct loans. Students who meet income and other eligibility requirements and who borrow after July 1, 2014 would be allowed to cap their repayments at 10 percent above basic living requirements rather than the current 15 percent. Moreover, if borrowers remain on schedule in their payments, any debt remaining after 20 (instead of 25) years would be forgiven. Loan forgiveness would kick in after only 10 years if the student finds employment in a designated public service such as teaching, nursing or the military. It’s a backdoor way to expand government and raise tuition in one movement.

The switch to direct lending has major implications for a planned expansion of the Pell Grant program, the main source of federal aid to postsecondary students from low- and moderate-income families. Enacted in 1972 and named after its prime sponsor, Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., the program serves more than 10 percent of all college students, costing $16.3 billion in fiscal year 2009. That figure may seem quaint in the near future. Under the new law, the federal government would provide about $36 billion worth of new financing for Pell Grants over the next decade. The maximum annual grant would rise from $5,350 to $5,975 by 2017. If anything, these figures undershoot the mark. The CBO projects annual outlays to rise by $27 billion during fiscal years 2010-19 – in other words, to exceed $40 billion – thanks to Consumer Price Index indexing and increased participation. The Department of Education likewise projects Pell Grant spending to increase to $35.4 billion during fiscal 2009-13. Other beneficiaries of the new law are the more than 100 ‘Historically Black Colleges and Universities’ (HBCUs) and their students.

The new legislation provides $2.55 billion to black four-year institutions (e.g., Howard, Florida A&M) and another $2 billion to black two-year community colleges. That’s a hefty sum to maintain and promote racial separatism. That students at HBCUs typically exhibit high default rates makes this giveaway all the more inexcusable. President Obama puts it differently: “We’re not only doing this because these schools are a gateway to a better future to African-Americans; we’re doing it because their success is vital to a better future for all Americans.” Got that? We’re all better off.

Americans are overextended to their creditors, and the new legislation will push the situation further into the danger zone. During 2000-09, total outstanding federal student loans more than quadrupled from $149 billion to $630 billion. President Obama says he wants to double higher education enrollment from 18 million to 36 million by the year 2020. If this comes to pass, can anyone deny the possibility that debt will explode even faster? There are practical ways of getting around the high cost of a four-year college: attend a community college for the first two years; live at home and attend a commuter four-year school; choose an in-state public institution; apply for a partial or full scholarship; contribute to a ‘529’ state-sponsored prepaid tuition plan; contribute up to $2,000 annually to a tax-free Coverdell Education Savings Account; and enroll in college after accumulating full-time work force experience (or take evening courses during such experience). Yet the ultimate cost-reduction strategy is to avail ourselves of the notion that college is a basic right.

It’s understandable why an entitlement view is taking root. A special Census Bureau study early last decade, for example, concluded that adults with a four-year college degree receive around 75 percent higher lifetime earnings than adults with only a high school diploma. Yet the blunt truth is this: College is not for everyone. The very term ‘higher education’ assumes a mastery of basic reading, math, history, science and other skills. It’s not ‘elitist’ to say that colleges and universities shouldn’t be providing remedial high school education. Yet so long as the line of applicants gets longer and the pot of federal aid gets larger, more institutions may find themselves filling that role. Taxpayers, less than cheerfully, will provide support.

SOURCE




When experts lack expertise

Jeffrey Tucker, discussing the decline of apprenticeships last week, noted the modern state-controlled schooling system is based on “the completely la-la-land view, emerging sometime after World War II, that a student can sit at a desk listening for 16 to 20 years and thereby be prepared to call down immediately a substantial salary from a firm by virtue of the great value he or she provides.” This view is preposterous, Tucker said, as businesses are often flooded with college graduates who have little practical knowledge. Of course, that’s only a problem for the private sector; when it comes to the government sector, schooling credentials have always been more valuable then practical ability.

Bureaucracy is a credential-based system. A PhD or Juris Doctor is the modern equivalent of an earldom or a knighthood. Mere possession of a credential is sufficient to establish one’s credibility on a subject — even if the subject isn’t directly related to the credential.

Educational credentials are generally a stepping-stone towards government commissions; these pieces of paper confer authority upon the possessor, which in the eyes of the state and its supporters equal expertise. Some government commissions are election-based: the president, members of Congress, etc.; the overwhelming majority of commissions are beholden to the bureaucracy itself, technically originating from the president in communion with the Senate, but in practice arising from self-selected interest groups. These groups function much like medieval guilds in that they are effectively mini-states that rely on credentialism to restrict competition or challenges to their so-called expertise over a given trade.

Let’s consider my favorite agency, the Federal Trade Commission. Although the FTC is billed as a “consumer protection agency,” in reality it is simply the research-and-development arm of the antitrust guild. The law specifies no particular qualifications for FTC members — unlike, say, the solicitor general, who must be a lawyer — but in modern practice virtually all commissioners are antitrust professionals.* It’s a closed system, and the FTC’s primary job is to ensure it remains closed to “unqualified” outsiders.

Consider the words of former FTC member Thomas B. Leary. In a 2005 interview, Leary bemoaned the fact that so many physician groups had run afoul of the FTC’s “guidelines” about how medical providers were expected to organize and conduct their businesses. Leary said he was sympathetic to the physicians themselves; he blamed a lack of competent antitrust advice:

The Guidelines are very helpful to practitioners who are willing to pay attention to them and deal with them. I think they’re very fulsome. It may be, quite frankly, that collectively they’re too big a mouthful for outside-the-beltway practitioners. And I am not saying that in a patronizing way.

I get the impression there are an awful lot of lawyers giving antitrust advice on the Health Care Guidelines who are not really antitrust lawyers, and I think that it might be desirable to consider amplifying on those Guidelines through speeches and things of that kind to make them more focused for the edification of outsiders. As you know we’ve got a case under consideration right now involving possible application of the Guidelines. When that opinion comes out, it may provide some guidance for people — regardless of the outcome. (Italics added)

It’s important to understand that Leary is not talking about the law — that is, a statute enacted by Congress — but merely the opinions of unelected antitrust lawyers at the FTC and Department of Justice. The “guidelines” exist solely in their minds; even if a physician group followed the guidelines to the letter, the FTC can turn around and say, “Oh, that’s not what we meant.” Indeed, that’s exactly what’s happened in the majority of FTC cases (about three dozen since 2001) against physician groups.

Now, Leary is no healthcare expert. He’s never run a medical practice or a hospital. His knowledge of healthcare management is no greater than mine. He is, however, an antitrust lawyer with “50 years of experience” in that field, according to Hogan & Hartson, the law firm he was a partner at before and after his six-year FTC tenure. And that’s what’s important. He’s master of a field with no real market value, but thanks to the state’s antitrust patent, he’s instantly a valuable commodity for firms — such as physician groups — looking for “expertise” in dealing with the FTC.

The damage such false expertise can reek on the market is incredible. The man who succeeded Leary as a commissioner, John Thomas Rosch, proved as much. Like Leary, Rosch spent his career as an antitrust litigator for a prominent law firm. When he was invested with the powers of the FTC, Rosch suddenly became an expert in hospital management, which he put to use in a handful of cases involving hospital mergers. One of his victims was a small nonprofit hospital that nearly suffered financial ruin at Rosch’s hand.

Prince William Hospital in Manassas, Virginia, spent over a year seeking a larger nonprofit partner to provide badly needed capital. PWH was a one-hospital operation, and many of its facilities had not been upgraded since the 1960s. After a lengthy review, the hospital’s board chose to merge with Inova Hospital System, a larger group also based in northern Virginia. Inova promised approximately $250 million in new investment. PWH physicians and local politicians seemed agreeable to the deal; it was a win-win for everyone.

Everyone except Commissioner Rosch. The FTC was in the midst of a losing streak when it came to stopping hospital mergers. Rosch, a Republican, joined the FTC during the Bush years and quickly asserted control over the agency’s litigation bureaucracy. Rosch needed a hospital merger he could torpedo as a show-of-strength. PWH and Inova presented themselves as victims of opportunity.

What ensued was one of the longest merger “reviews” in antitrust history — nearly two years of FTC demands for documents about every aspect of PWH and Inova’s operations. The review wasn’t limited to “competitive” issues. During one meeting with over two dozen FTC lawyers, the staff questioned PWH’s architectural decisions regarding future construction plans; one lawyer scoffed at the hospital’s plans to include only private rooms in a new patient wing, as opposed to semi-private rooms. On another occasion, FTC lawyers demanded PWH’s confidential personnel files, a move the hospital balked at.

All of this took place at Rosch’s command. In December 2007, he issued a ten-page memorandum to the FTC’s chief litigator. The FTC refused to release the contents of this memorandum, but an FTC official later confirmed to me that “[Rosch] was very active in the investigation.” This same official said that at that time, “Rosch views the litigation strategy of the staff as his unique domain among the Commissioners given his litigation experience.” [This may no longer be the case since Democrat Jon Leibowitz became chairman; Rosch publicly chided the staff for its actions in a recent physician case.]

After two years, over $15 million in legal bills, and a downgrading of PWH’s credit rating, the hospitals’ merger collapsed. The final straw came when the FTC finally announced it would challenge the deal under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. The FTC Act requires complaints be tried before an administrative law judge. The FTC, however, bypassed their two sitting judges — neither of whom was hearing a case at the time — and appointed Rosch himself to serve as judge! The hospitals saw the writing on the wall.

The FTC’s only stated reason for its unprecedented decision to name a sitting commissioner as trial judge was Rosch’s “40 years of experience as a trial lawyer, predominantly in the context of complex competition cases, making him the best available candidate to sit as the trier of fact in this case.” This doesn’t pass the smell test. Experience as a litigator is not equivalent to experience as a judge. More importantly, the FTC’s two administrative law judges at the time both had substantial experience both as judges and as triers of “complex competition cases.” Indeed, then-Chief Administrative Law Judge Stephen J. McGuire had just presided over the most complex antitrust case in FTC history, the Commission’s seven-year pursuit of Rambus Incorporated (more on that in a moment).

The real reason that Rosch orchestrated his own appointment as trial judge – and an FTC official told me, “I’m sure the idea came out of his office, not at anybody else’s request” — was that McGuire and his fellow judge had ruled against the FTC staff in four major antitrust cases. Rosch wanted to avoid any independent review of the antitrust investigation that he had directly supervised.

Shortly after PWH and Inova abandoned their merger, Rosch spoke to an antitrust industry audience, where he again emphasized his “expertise” as the primary justification for his appointment as trial judge:

I haven’t discussed the specific reasons for the assignment with my colleagues. But I hope the assignment helped address concerns about both the antitrust expertise of the judges conducting plenary trials at the Commission and the time it takes to prepare for and conduct such a trial.

Rosch’s outright lie about not speaking to his colleagues aside, it’s not clear who had “concerns” about the “antitrust expertise of judges” — aside from Rosch and his fellow commissioners, that is. In two cases where the FTC disagreed with its administrative law judge about the disposition of an antitrust case, the appellate courts broke the deadlock in favor of the judges. (Of course, Rosch has also chastised the appellate courts for lacking sufficient antitrust expertise.)

Rosch’s claim that judges lack sufficient “antitrust expertise” mirrors Thomas Leary’s statement about lawyers “who are not really antitrust lawyers” advising physicians. Both place enormous weight on their own credentials as antitrust lawyers; which, in reality, means they have law degrees and chose to network with other people who call themselves antitrust lawyers, nothing more. Whether they possess relevant knowledge and experience is, apparently, irrelevant.

Such thinking permeates the FTC’s trial of cases. In the Rambus litigation, Judge McGuire rejected the Commission’s two principal “expert” witnesses as unreliable. The Rambus case arose from the FTC’s belief — heavily influenced by industry lobbyists — that the computer memory industry had adopted the “wrong” technical standards, because they included inventions that were under patent to Rambus. (Please, spare me the anti-IP comments here; this isn’t the forum.) The FTC paid over $1.1 million to expert witnesses to help prove this theory.

One expert, Dr. Bruce Jacob of the University of Maryland, received $208,900 to testify about alternative technologies the memory industry — specifically manufacturers of DRAM — should have adopted in the 1990s instead of the Rambus designs. Judge McGuire said Jacob was “not persuasive,” because he, um, lacked expertise in memory design:

Professor Jacob had never done DRAM circuit design. Indeed, Professor Jacob had never designed any circuits for computer chips (even apart from DRAMs) that were to be fabricated prior to 2002. Aside from reviewing some DRAM data sheets, Professor Jacob, who was a student at the time, had no particular DRAM-related experience in the mid-1990s. Professor Jacob did not obtain his graduate degree and begin to teach electrical engineering until 1997

A second expert, economist R. Preston McAfee, received $573,000 to detail the alternate universe that would have existed if the DRAM industry had adopted non-Rambus technologies. Like most “expert” economics testimony, McAfee was compelled to work backwards from the FTC’s conclusions. As with Dr. Jacob, Judge McGuire found McAfee’s testimony “not persuasive.” Among the problems was Dr. McAfee’s conclusion that there were “equal or superior technologies” that the DRAM industry should have adopted; Judge McGuire said this analysis was “flawed,” because Dr. McAfee “did not quantify” any cost, performance, or future flexibility differences between Rambus and non-Rambus technologies.

Overall, the FTC’s attempt to retroactively create an alternate DRAM universe demonstrated an appalling mix of arrogance and ignorance. Judge McGuire issued his initial decision dismissing the case in February 2004. The FTC then took three years to review, reverse, and rewrite the decision in favor of the Commission’s position; this was followed by another two years of review by the federal appellate courts, which ultimately reversed the Commission and reinstated McGuire’s original decision. The FTC, however, never wavered from its view that it knew best, even after conceding defeat in the courts.

You can condemn the FTC’s petulance, but it’s more important to understand where it comes from. These people sat at their desks for 20 years, obtained that all-important schooling credential, “worked” as lawyers (or academics) in a field where they could fabricate any theory they wanted without any regard for economics or empirical data, and ultimately found themselves rewarded with a government title, salary, benefits, and staff. What do you think the consequences of such a system are?

*The current five commissioners include two career government attorneys, two career antitrust litigators, and a law professor who consulted foreign governments on antitrust policy.

SOURCE





18 April, 2010

Forget the PhD and become a mechanic

Overqualified and underworked? Then try working with your hands

Matthew Crawford, who has a PhD in political philosophy, gave up his job as executive director of a Washington think tank to start his own business as a mechanic of vintage motorcycles

What does a good job look like these days: smart suit and BlackBerry in the palm or overalls and dirt under the fingernails? The question isn’t as counterintuitive as it sounds. We’ve never been more qualified for white-collar work, but with a 44% increase in graduate unemployment in the UK, according to recent figures, it’s time to reconsider some long-held assumptions.

I started working as an electrician’s helper in America when I was nearly 14. What I learnt then gave me something to fall back on when I couldn’t get a job, despite having a degree, further down the line. And that position — highly educated but potentially unemployable — is one that’s increasingly common. Having a practical trade meant I could always earn money when my career plans weren’t in full flight. But it offered something more as well: regular moments of accomplishment. I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch: “And there was light!”

The imperative of the past 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the office cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. Now, as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

Further, the globalised economy has sprung a cruel surprise on many who invested in a university education. Some programmers and accountants and radiologists, for example, find their jobs outsourced to distant countries. Plumbers, electricians and mechanics do not.

The Princeton economist Alan Blinder foresees a massive disruption that has only just begun. He argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labour market is not the conventional one between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

Yet despite the fact they have become one of the few reliable paths to a secure living — and are now at the heart of building a greener economy — the trades suffer from low prestige. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience.

I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Virginia, which I started in 2002. I work on mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

After finishing a PhD in political philosophy at the University of Chicago 10 years ago, having already done a degree and an MA, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak.

In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift basement workshop where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it was a balm.

Stumped by a starter motor that seemed fine in every way but wouldn’t work, I sought help from an independent mechanic named Fred Cousins. He checked the electrical resistance through the windings to confirm there was no short circuit or broken wire. He spun the shaft that ran through the centre of the motor, as I had. No problem: it spun freely. Then he hooked it up to a battery. It moved slightly but wouldn’t spin.

He grasped the shaft delicately and tried to wiggle it from side to side. “Too much free play,” he said. He suggested that the problem was with the bushing (a thick-walled sleeve of metal) that captured the end of the shaft in the end of the cylindrical motor housing. It was worn, so it wasn’t locating the shaft precisely enough. The shaft was free to move too much side to side (perhaps a couple of hundredths of an inch), causing the outer circumference of the rotor to bind on the inner circumference of the motor housing when a current was applied.

Fred scrounged around his shop for a Honda motor. He found one with the same bushing, then used a “blind hole bearing puller” to extract it, as well as the one in my motor. Then he gently tapped the new, or rather newer, one into place. The motor worked! Here was a scholar.

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. Then in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organisation in Washington. This felt like a coup.

But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backwards, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. This was demoralising.

Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. I had landed the job because I had a prestigious education in the liberal arts, but the job itself felt illiberal.

As I sat dejectedly in my office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image of liberality that I kept coming back to. Here was someone who really knew what he was doing, losing himself in work that was genuinely useful and had a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having fun.

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to go into business fixing bikes. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational. And it frequently requires intellectual rigour — a sort that may not be obvious to an uninformed bystander, but which I have found to be more demanding than the kind you exercise in work that deals only in abstractions.

There is always, for example, a risk of introducing new complications when working on old motorcycles, and this enters the diagnostic logic.

Imagine you’re trying to work out why a bike won’t start. The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips-head, and they are almost always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch if each of eight screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments have to be taken into account. The attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand. The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms.

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and these causes may be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around for a while. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules.

For me, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think tank. Put differently, mechanical work has forced me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition”, which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. To be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken.

This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because a good mechanic internalises the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. Why else does he experience such elation when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

More here

This story has many resonances for me -- not the least is that I had some involvement in fixing up old motorbikes in my youth myself and that my admirable brother has made it his life's work -- and has prospered doing so. I don't think he even did an apprenticeship, let alone go to university. He simply started playing around with small motors as a kid and has never stopped.

Another resonance is that I have twin stepdaughters, one of whom got a degree and one who went straight into the workforce. The latter is now very highly paid, the other not so much

A third resonance is that I have often employed tradesmen in connection with my business activities and I have always admired the creativity, ingenuity, insight and skills that they bring to their work. They are the salt of the earth and I treat them accordingly

Another very small resonance is that I was once a champion seller of diehead chasers, though I doubt that anybody reading this will know what they are. So not all my talents are academic -- JR




Edinburgh University’s Scottish bias may break race laws

THE admissions policy of a leading university might breach race relations laws because it favours Scottish applicants over those from England, according to one of the country’s most senior education lawyers.

Edinburgh University gives “additional weighting” to applicants for some courses depending on where they live, and favours those who come from the area around the Scottish capital.

In a formal legal opinion obtained by The Sunday Times, Oliver Hyams, a barrister at Devereux chambers in London, writes that the policy “might, depending on the facts, be directly discriminatory and therefore contrary to section 17 of the Race Relations Act 1976”. The opinion could open the way for candidates to take legal action if they believe they have been turned down because they are English, Welsh or Northern Irish.

Hyams, chairman of the Education Law Association, argues that Edinburgh’s criteria “put persons who are not of Scottish national origins at a particular disadvantage”.

The policy at Edinburgh, where 41% of the intake is English, was introduced in 2004 to give local applicants a greater chance of winning places.

In contrast with the Edinburgh admissions policy, Hyams believes Scottish universities are acting within the law by discriminating against English students in the level of fees charged.

Under Scottish law, British undergraduates from outside Scotland are charged £1,820 a year, while Scots and those from other European Union countries have fees paid by Holyrood. Although the British courts have ruled that the Race Relations Act applies to discrimination between the UK’s nations, these nations are not recognised by EU law.

Universities such as Birmingham, King’s College London and Glasgow run schemes that favour pupils from comprehensive schools in their region. However, schools in deprived areas are singled out, a policy that Hyams said could be justified. Edinburgh, by contrast, bases part of its decision purely on where an applicant lives. “I suspect that the area [favoured by Edinburgh] as a whole could not reasonably be called socially deprived,” writes Hyams.

Dennis Harding, former vice-principal and professor of archeology at Edinburgh, said: “I’d very much regret it if Edinburgh had a reputation for not accepting good students from English schools as I’d like to think of it as a top British university, not a parochial Scottish one.”

Edinburgh’s weighting applies to candidates for some humanities and social science courses from the area close to the university and in a second tier of regions including the rest of Scotland, Cumbria, Tyne and Wear and other parts of northern England.

Hyams believes a court could see Edinburgh’s inclusion of a few English regions as “a thinly disguised cloak for discrimination in favour of persons resident in Scotland”.

Edinburgh, ranked 15th in the Sunday Times University Guide, said the impact of the policy was only “minimal”, adding: “Without some way of acknowledging local applicants in selection, we would risk running some degree courses with barely any local, or Scottish, students on them.”

It said: “Previous consideration has given us no reason to think this approach falls foul of any anti-discriminatory legislation, but we will give further consideration to this question in the light of the comments made by Mr Hyams.”

The university’s policy has angered English head teachers. Richard Cairns, of Brighton college, East Sussex, said one of his pupils, Jo Saxby, had been rejected by Edinburgh without an interview despite being predicted to achieve three A*s and an A in his A-levels. He has been offered a place at Oxford.

Cairns, who this weekend is making a formal complaint about Edinburgh to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the university was “pandering to nationalist sentiment”.

Andrew Halls, of King’s college school in Wimbledon, southwest London, called the university’s policy “perverse, xenophobic and anti-English”. He added that only six out of 42 of his pupils who applied there had been offered places, a far lower success rate than at Bristol, Durham or Imperial College London.

Halls said: “It just so happens that all the boys offered places have Scottish surnames or ones that are very obviously foreign and not English. I’m sure it’s a coincidence.”

SOURCE




Australia: Report on bungled school funding could punish the Labor Party in the forthcoming election

THE last time the Auditor-General released a report during a federal election campaign the results were explosive. With one week to go in the 2007 campaign the independent investigator found the Coalition government had used a controversial grants program to funnel millions of dollars into projects in marginal seats, against departmental advice.

This year it is the Labor government's turn to wonder when the Auditor-General will drop a potentially damaging report into its Building the Education Revolution. The $16.2 billion program was announced as part of the government's efforts to keep Australia from falling over a cliff into recession.

As well as helping to upgrade school facilities the project was designed to quickly inject cash into the building sector, with the idea of keeping jobs going at a time when the government was expecting unemployment to eclipse 8 per cent.

For the past six months reports of overspending on projects have been filtering out, as have principals' and parents' complaints about their lack of input into the projects.

The temptation is to see parallels between the building program and that other federal economic stimulus program – the home insulation program. But the home insulation program was actually administered by the federal government. The state bureaucracies are the ones managing the education building funds and projects.

The federal opposition is making the most of the link, saying the school program is yet another example of the government's inability to manage programs and taxpayers' money.

Once it realised the extent of the problems of the insulation program – both practical and political – the federal government axed it. Ministers are no longer visiting homeowners talking about the benefits of ceiling insulation. But not so the schools building program.

Julia Gillard visited at least one school construction site every day last week, hard hat and reflective safety vest on.

Gillard is not backing away from the program and continues to point out the benefits of spending money to improve educational facilities. She is also taking every opportunity to ask the opposition if it would guarantee the program's future.

Tony Abbott has indicated the opposition would axe it, although this is at odds with what his education spokesman Christopher Pyne has reportedly been telling school principals. Nevertheless the opposition is not letting this get in the way of its attacks on the program.

Last week Gillard commissioned her own investigation into the billions of dollars of spending. This is in addition to the Auditor-General's report, which was originally expected last week but has been delayed. There are now nine official state and federal examinations of the scheme.

Although it is likely the reports will conclude that only a relatively small number of the 24,000 projects were problematic, the opposition will still pounce on any evidence that the government is a poor economic manager.

That is why it is in the government's interest for all the reports to come out as soon as possible. The sooner they are released the further away from the election they are.

SOURCE





17 April, 2010

Teacher Who Sought to 'Demolish' Tea Party Placed on Leave From School

An Oregon teacher who announced his intention to "dismantle and demolish the Tea Party" has been placed on administrative leave until his school district finishes its investigation into whether his political activity crossed the line.

The state's Teacher Standards & Practices Commission is also conducting an investigation into Jason Levin, a media teacher at Conestoga Middle School in Beaverton.

"Jason is on paid administrative leave," Maureen Wheeler, the school district's spokeswoman, told FoxNews.com. She described the suspension as "standard practice during an internal investigation."

Levin has come under fire for saying he'd do anything short of throwing rocks to bring down the Tea Party. In the last two days, the Beaverton School District has received thousands of e-mails and phone calls from people across the country who said they were outraged at his behavior.

The school district is defending Levin's right to free speech, but it's investigating whether he used district computers to spread his political message or worked on his "Crash the Tea Party" Web site during school hours.

Levin has said he would seek to embarrass Tea Partiers by attending their rallies dressed as Adolf Hitler, carrying signs bearing racist, sexist and anti-gay epithets and acting as offensively as possible -- anything short of throwing punches.

A source within the district said parents at Conestoga did not initially appear upset at Levin's anti-Tea Party activism -- but that changed in recent days as controversial statements continued to emerge.

Now, the source said, parents have become outraged by the severity of his political activism, and many have told the school board members that it has no place in a public school system.

Parents supported teachers who wore Obama buttons during the 2008 presidential election, the source said. But they say Levin has crossed the line.

Levin's Web site has since been changed, and the calls to infiltrate the Tea Party have been removed. The home page now simply reads: "Want to Show your support for Jason Levin? BUY A TEA-SHIRT."

In a recent interview with Talking Points Memo, Levin said of his plans, "Our goal is that whenever a Tea Partier says 'Barack Obama was not born in America,' we're going be right there next to them saying, 'Yeah, in fact he wasn't born on Earth! He's an alien!'"

In a now deleted post on his "Crash the Tea Party" Web site, he called on his supporters to collect the Social Security numbers -- among other personal identifying information -- about as many Tea Party supporters as possible at the numerous rallies that took place on Thursday, Tax Day.

"Some other thoughts are to ask people at the rally to sign a petition renouncing socialism. See just how much info you can get from these folks (name address, DOB, Social Security #). The more data we can mine from the Tea Partiers, the more mayhem we can cause with it!!!!" he wrote.

The state agency is investigating whether this is a hint at identity theft, and whether it is appropriate behavior for a public school teacher. It also will investigate charges that Levin used school computers during school hours to work on his Web site. Levin teaches 6th, 7th and 8th graders about computers and technology.

According to the school district laws regulating teacher conduct, which are posted online: "The Beavertown School District rules involving teacher use of the district's electronic system clearly state: The district's electronic communications system shall be used for educational purposes consistent with the district's mission, priorities and beliefs. Educational purposes do not include commercial use, use for personal financial gain or political advocacy."

The investigation will be assigned to a case agent who will compile a preliminary report that will be presented before the commission. The commission members will then decide whether to charge Levin with misconduct or dismiss the case due to insufficient evidence, said Melody Hanson, the director of professional practices.

More here




Must not tell the truth about a sink school

A New York principal told the mother of a teen that she could not guarantee her daughter's safety after the girl exposed the failing high school as blighted by violence, drugs and sex, the New York Post reported Thursday.

Sophomore Alisha Strawder was barred Monday from going to her classes at Paul Robeson High School, a day after the Post quoted her blasting the majority of the school's staffers and security guards as lazy and inept, her mom Kasyra Strawder said.

"You're telling me she can't get into the building because your staff members want to attack her because she told the truth?" a dumbfounded Strawder said she asked school officials.

Last week, Alisha slammed the school as a dump where kids have sex and smoke weed in the stairwells, and where fights and pregnancies are the norm. "The boys pressure you," she said. "A lot of girls will do anything and everything in the staircase ... " "If I could burn down this school and get away with it, I would."

But instead of tightening the reins on the out-of-control school, officials put the 15-year-old in an office when she showed up Monday and called her father to take her home, her mother said.

When the mother finally spoke with interim acting principal Simone Grey, she was allegedly told Alisha could come in only if she were put in isolation with a staffer -- and away from students and adults who might retaliate. "Everyone has taken this personally. We cannot ensure her safety," Strawder said Grey told her.

The distraught mom said she also received a phone call from a district official advising her that Alisha will be granted a safety transfer to attend school elsewhere.

Department of Education spokeswoman Margie Feinberg said officials were investigating the mother's claims, but she disputed her account, saying Grey never said Alisha would not be protected. "She said the child is not barred from the school and the child is welcome," Feinberg said.

SOURCE



Man hanged himself as lazy British police failed to inform him case was dropped

Even a simple phone call was too much bother for these politicized goons, apparently

A man who was falsely accused of sexual assault hanged himself after police failed to tell him they had dropped the case, an inquest heard.

John Keogh, 23, was "very upset and angry" after a woman claimed he had indecently assaulted her. An investigation was launched but police decided to drop the case and withdraw all charges after interviewing him.

However, they did not plan to tell Mr Keogh until four days later - and he hanged himself with a pair of shoelaces before they broke the good news. His family believe he would not have killed himself if police had told him that he was no longer a suspect.

A jury inquest held into his death in Trowbridge, Wilts., returned a narrative verdict in which the chair juror described the delay as a "contributing factor". He said: "He took his life by hanging, however, we feel that a failure to recognise the risk of this happening to him, particularly subsequent to the police interview may have been a contributing factor."

Speaking after the inquest John's brother Christopher, 34, from Trowbridge, Wilts., said the police had been "negligent".

He said: "There was a lot of crying down the phone about what had been allegedly done. He was crying that he didn't do anything. He was very angry. "There should have been more communication between the police and mental health partnership. "The system just failed him. They were negligent. If John had been told the allegations had been dropped I don't think we would be here today. "I feel there was a total lack of communication. I hope some recommendations come along so that this type of thing doesn't happen again. "

Mr Keogh was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia aged 18 but lived alone in a flat in Trowbridge, Wilts., and had ambitions to become a landscape gardener. However, he was moved to Fountain Way Mental Health Hospital in Salisbury, Wilts., in late June 2008 after being accused of sexual assault.

He allegedly assaulted a female patient at Green Lane Hospital in Devizes, Wilts., on June 9 2008 but the attack was not reported until June 16. Wiltshire Police interviewed John on July 1 and decided to drop the case against him on July 4. Officers immediately informed the complainant but did not plan to tell Mr Keogh until July 7.

However, he was found hanged at 3.40am on July 7 in the en-suite bathroom of his bedroom at the Fountain Way Mental Health Hospital.

Former Wiltshire Police investigator Christopher Bazire, who dealt with the case, told the inquest he would have informed Mr Keogh sooner had he known about the extent of his fragile mental state.

Wiltshire Coroner David Ridley told the inquest he will be writing a report criticising the lack of communication between police and hospital workers.

A spokesman for Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership (AWP) said they will "consider and reflect" upon his concerns. He said: "While disappointed at the inquest's findings, we will reflect upon the coroner's letter on receipt and will respond to him accordingly. "We will continue to support John's mother. We offer his family and friends our sincere condolences."

Under the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime victims have the right to be told when a case is dropped but there is no such legislation for informing suspects.

Detective Superintendent Sarah Bodell, head of Wiltshire Police's public protection department, pledged to review this system. She said: "We recognise that there is no national policy about informing suspects but there is for keeping victims up to date. This is something we have already chosen to review."

SOURCE

British schoolboy dislikes what the Labour Party has done to British education

Joel Weiner, 17, asked Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg whether it was not the case that school pupils were now "over-examined and undertaught", during the ITV leaders' debate.

Speaking before going into lessons, Joel said on Friday: "I would not vote for Labour, because of a series of failures over the last 13 years. "It is a tired government and there needs to be change – it has run out of ideas."

The teenager, from Kenton in north London, added: "All my school life has been under a Labour government – I'm a child of Blair." But constant testing of pupils – brought in under Tony Blair – meant teachers could not teach as they wanted, he argued.

"It is such a waste of an opportunity," he said. "It means, without a doubt, that teachers can't teach to their full potential. "I've got some very good teachers. I'm sure they've got much more to teach me, but they are restricted by the system."

For example, he said teachers felt pressurised to enter A-level pupils for January exams, as that meant they could retake in June if they performed poorly.

"The result is that we don't learn it properly the first time, because we have to cram," said the schoolboy, who is studying English, Politics and History. "I'd much rather learn it in depth and take the exam in June."

Joel, who attends the 2,000-pupil Jews' Free School in Kenton, a state-funded religious co-ed described by Ofsted as "outstanding", did not think any of the leaders fully answered his question. "They were wanting to give lines from their manifestos," he said.

He conceded Mr Clegg was "good at putting his point across" about reducing class sizes, but dismissed Mr Cameron's response as "disappointing" and said Mr Brown merely "managed to avoid the question".

Like many pundits, he thought Mr Cameron was "not entirely impressive". "Maybe if he were to give a bit more of a heartfelt response next time, then he would be able to galvanise the public," he advised. "He was trying to be slick but he didn't really do what he does best, which is talking from the heart."

Last October Joel confronted Nick Griffin on BBC One's Question Time over comments the British National Party has made in the past casting doubt on the Holocaust. Attacking the BNP's appropriation of Churchill as a symbol, he said: "Winston Churchill put everything on the line so that my ancestors wouldn’t get slaughtered in the concentration camps. "But here sits a man who says that that’s a myth, just like the flat world was a myth. How could you say that?"

Joel said two of his great-grandparents were believed killed at Auschwitz, while his grandmother and grandfather both escaped from Nazi Germany.

Questions have been raised about how come the schoolboy managed to appear on both programmes. Joel said he simply applied for each, firstly for Question Time, a year before Nick Griffin was invited on air; and secondly for the leaders' debate via ITV's website.

SOURCE





16 April, 2010

Should teachers have tenure?

That has been a hot topic in Florida this past week, because the Florida legislature passed a bill that would remove job protection from tenure for teachers, prohibit teachers from being paid more for holding advanced degrees, or for being paid more for number of years on the job, and require merit pay based on the performance of their students.

Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the bill today.

Despite the rhetoric on both sides of doing what’s best for Florida’s schools, there were some politics involved on both sides. Teachers’ unions lean strongly Democratic, and Florida’s Republican legislature was, at the very least, not concerned about passing legislation the teachers’ unions opposed. Democrats, of course, supported the union line on this and opposed the bill.

A host of Republican heavyweights in Florida came out in support of the bill, including former Governor Jeb Bush and two former Speakers of the Florida House of Representatives. There was a clear partisan divide on this bill: Republicans in favor; Democrats against.

The veto by Republican Governor Charlie Crist is interesting in the context of the upcoming election, as Governor Crist has decided not to run for a second term as governor, but to run for an open U.S. Senate seat instead. He is being challenged (on the Republican side) by former Speaker of the Florida House Marco Rubio, who now leads Governor Crist in the polls.

It appears that Crist’s veto will cost him even more Republican support, making it more likely he will lose the Republican primary. Meanwhile, a poll indicates that if Crist did lose the primary and ran as an independent in November, he would win a three-way race.

Despite rumors that Crist might run as an independent, he has said he is a Republican and will be running as a Republican for the Senate. But his veto of this legislation with strong Republican support suggests he’s setting himself up to win a three-way race in November, should Rubio win the Republican primary.

Setting aside all the political maneuvering, it’s also worth considering whether it’s a good idea to pay teachers based on the performance of their students rather than on years on the job, with a pay premium to advanced degree holders, and whether job protection for tenured teachers is a good policy.

SOURCE




Now prosecute my accuser, says teacher at top British boys' school cleared of seducing 6th-former

A teacher accused of seducing a sixth-form boy while working at a leading public school was acquitted yesterday - and then demanded that he be prosecuted. Oxford graduate Hannah McIntyre, 25, said she never wanted to be in the company of another school pupil as long as she lived.

A jury took only an hour-and-a-quarter to clear her of having sex with the 16-year-old.

He had claimed the public school-educated classics teacher had 'passionately' kissed him for a dare after letting him and his friends into her flat and plying them with cider before taking him up to bed.

She was charged with unlawful sexual activity with a child while in a position of trust, an offence which carries up to five years in prison, and sacked from her job at £8,000-a-year Merchant Taylors' Boys' School, in Crosby, Merseyside.

But her trial this week heard that her accuser, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, had previously been suspended for being rude to female teachers. The defence suggested he had made up the sexual liaison to ensure he was allowed to finish his A-levels so he could go to university.

The case will reinforce fears that teachers' careers are being ruined by bogus allegations by pupils.

After she was cleared yesterday, Miss McIntyre called for her teenage accuser - whose anonymity continues to be protected by law - to be prosecuted himself. 'Anger is not first among my thoughts right now,' she said. 'But he has, with no accountability, made an accusation and I would like to see him have to realise the effect he has had on me.'

Miss McIntyre, who had denied the charge, said she was 'ecstatic' at the verdict. 'I now need to go and have a large drink and sleep for a week,' she added.

After a celebratory kiss with her boyfriend, who gave his name only as Pete, she was asked about her future career. She said she had 'a few things in mind', and that she had found the legal process 'incredibly interesting'. But she added: 'Right now I don't think I would ever want to be in the company of another school pupil in my entire life.'

Miss McIntyre went to the leading Scottish public school Fettes College - which Tony Blair attended - before studying classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Without taking a teacher training course, she went straight to Merchant Taylors' - whose ex-pupils include former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie and rugby World Cup winner Ben Kay - to teach Latin, Greek and classical civilisation.

But Miss McIntyre, who was described as 'painfully shy', soon found herself incapable of controlling the disruptive behaviour of some boys in her classes, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

The young teacher, who stands only 5ft tall, said they nicknamed her 'the Jock Dwarf' and would lock her in cupboards, put her mobile phone on top of lockers where she couldn't reach it and use it to send text messages without her knowledge.

On January 21, 2008, the 16-year-old - who sometimes 'sat in' on her classes - and two friends decided to call at Miss McIntyre's flat in the Waterloo district of Crosby for 'a laugh'. They found her drinking wine in her pyjamas.

The boys - all over 6ft - had been drinking. According to Miss McIntyre, they barged inside in an intimidating fashion, rummaging through her possessions and grabbing her pet lizard.

She told the court she agreed to accompany them to an off-licence and buy them bottles of cider in the hope that they would leave her alone, but they followed her back.

According to the teenagers, after a £20 'dare' that one of them should kiss her wasn't acted upon, one of the boys 'dared' Miss McIntyre to kiss his 16-year-old friend which he claimed she did, 'passionately'.

But she described their account as 'rubbish', saying he kissed her without warning, leaving her feeling 'repulsed' and so panicky that she had to go up to her bed, on a mezzanine level above the living area.

But he followed her simulating 'moans of ecstasy' to amuse his friends, she said. She began hyperventilating and played the game Tetris on her mobile phone to calm down. Eventually, she fell asleep, and when she awoke they had gone. She informed the school's head the next day that the boys had spent the evening at her flat, but both she and they denied anything improper had taken place.

It wasn't until almost a year later that the teenager - now a 19-year-old whose ambition of going to university has been fulfilled - told his mother they'd had sex, and Miss McIntyre was arrested.

The boy - who was a virgin at the time - said he got into bed beside her and that they had sex, but he admitted his recollection of how it had happened was 'far from clear'. Under cross-examination, he said he hadn't enjoyed the kiss as she had been 'chain-smoking', adding: 'I did not think she was all that attractive.'

She was sacked by the school after being charged, and although an appeal has been lodged she does not intend to return to teaching.

Miss McIntyre's mother Irene, herself a teacher in their home town of Falkirk, said after the verdict that malicious allegations were now a sad reality in the profession. 'It's become a more obvious hazard,' she said, adding that she was 'overwhelmed and delirious' at her daughter's acquittal.

Last month Teresa McKenzie, deputy headmistress of a school in Cheshire, appeared in court accused of seducing a 16-year-old boy and having sex with him at the British Library and in a hotel after sending him steamy love notes. But she was cleared after the boy was exposed as a serial liar with a history of making sexual advances to teachers and social workers.

In 2007 Andrew Riley, a PE teacher and head of sixth form, at a school in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, was left with his marriage and career in tatters despite being acquitted of having cocaine-fuelled sex with a promiscuous 17-year-old girl pupil.

In 2008 Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said consensual liaisons between teachers and pupils aged over 16 should be considered disciplinary matters, not criminal ones.

SOURCE




Australian Labor Party aiming to cut private school funding?

Private schools in Australia receive Federal grants to cover part of their costs. It's likely the Leftist Feds will freeze funds going to private schools while increasing funding elsewhere. Roughly one in three pupils in Australia is now privately educated at some stage so it would take a bold government to attack private education head on. The campaign by former Labor leader Mark Latham to do so was undoubtedly a major reason for his resounding election defeat

TONY Abbott has questioned the point of the education funding review flagged by Julia Gillard and claimed the government would cut funding for private schools if re-elected.

The Australian reported this morning that the Education Minister told the Sydney Institute she would launch a review into education funding at the end of the month. She also guaranteed schools would maintain their funding until 2012 and said there was no suggestion that non-government schools would lose funding.

But Mr Abbott has today questioned the purpose of the review if it simply recommended more money for schools. “What's the point of having an inquiry if it's just more money for everyone?” Mr Abbott asked on the Today program on the Nine network. “Where's the fiscal responsibility in that?”

Mr Abbott pointed to the Rudd government's broken promise not to means test the private health insurance rebate before the 2007 election as evidence it would seek to strip funding from private schools. “You just can't trust these people,” he said.

“They don't like private education. They will, after the election, if they're re-elected as sure as night follows day, they will try to cut private schools funding.”

But Ms Gillard said she was prepared to go to fight the next election on the issue of trust on school funding. “I'm happy to fight the next election on the issue of trust,” she said. “School funding, we have almost doubled the amount of money going into schools.”

In a speech to the Sydney Institute last night Ms Gillard said her plan was to use information gathered through the My School website to ensure all schools were adequately funded. There is widespread criticism the existing model favours elite schools over public schools.

“We have given a funding maintenance guarantee. I gave it last night. This is not about taking money of schools,” Ms Gillard said this morning. “The school funding review that I opened up last night is about all schools. We currently have a system where we don't look across at all schools and say `how are they being funded?' I want to do that, I want to get it right for every child and every school.”

The government has promised to review schools funding before 2013 when the current Howard government model expires.

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15 April, 2010

Gay Day of Silence a Waste of Tax Dollars, Critics Say

Thousands of public schools nationwide will allow students affiliated with a gay and lesbian advocacy group to sponsor an anti-bullying "Day of Silence" on Friday, a demonstration some socially conservative family organizations say is a disruptive waste of taxpayer dollars and a reason to keep kids out of school.

GLSEN — the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network — is organizing the 15th annual Day of Silence for April 16, encouraging students to remain mute during classes to call attention to verbal and physical abuse of gay students.

GLSEN says students at more than 5,000 middle and high schools are expected to participate, and over 30,000 people have joined a Facebook group promoting the effort. Many sport T-shirts or hand out literature promoting alliances between gay and straight students.

But family advocacy groups warn that GLSEN is using the day to try to indoctrinate kids and force a pro-gay agenda into schools — something they want kept out of class entirely.

"I think that we shouldn't be exploiting public education for this," said Laurie Higgins, director of school advocacy for the Illinois Family Institute. "There are better ways to use taxpayer money. We send our kids there to learn the subject matter, not ... to be unwillingly exposed to political protest during instructional time."

Critics say the anti-bullying message could have been spread after hours and off-campus, but GLSEN's choice of venue shows the group's intent for the schools.

"Obviously this is intended to make an impact on the educational environment — otherwise they wouldn't be doing it at school," said Bryan Fischer, director of issues analysis at the American Family Institute. "The only impact it could possibly have would be to interfere with class."

Higgins and Fischer are calling on parents to withdraw their children from classes that participate in the Day of Silence, a move Higgins compared to "civil disobedience" after years of being ignored by school officials.

"This is definitely a last-resort option," she told FoxNews.com, "but school administrators have not listened to parents and teachers. Teachers who object to this are afraid to say anything, afraid of personal and professional repercussions."

But GLSEN says feedback from schools has been positive and that teachers are still in command of their classrooms, no matter how many students choose to take part.

GLSEN distributes materials online outlining what students may do during class to support the Day of Silence, and it urges them to contact teachers and administrators before Friday to avoid running afoul of speech laws.

Lunch period is one thing, but during actual classes students "do not have the right to refuse to speak — instructional time is instructional time," said Eliza Byard, GLSEN's executive director. Supreme Court decisions have denied free speech to students inside classrooms — and that precludes any right to silence.

Byard said the Day of Silence has resonated with so many students over the years because it is a peaceful and non-disruptive way for them to make a difference.

The day began as the creation of a college student at the University of Virginia and has spread to thousands of institutions since 1996. GLSEN, which took over organizing the event in 2001, provides organizing instructions to students — even teaching how to create press conferences promoting the Day of Silence.

But GLSEN says urgent action is still needed to address the dangers gay and lesbian students face on a daily basis. A survey conducted by the group in 2007 found that 86 percent of homosexual students reported being harassed at school, and that more than 60 percent felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation.

"The national picture still doesn't look good and the national numbers still remain unacceptably high," Byard told FoxNews.com.

Byard, who expects this year to be "one of the biggest Day of Silence celebrations yet," said the event is far less disruptive than the backlash against it.

"Participants in Day of Silence go to school, go to class and answer when called upon," she said. "For a family to decide to take their child out of class, it would disrupt that child's learning and that would be a shame."

The boycott of classes is a new tactic being urged by conservative groups to hit school officials where they think it will hurt the most: in the wallet.

"Most schools get reimbursed on the basis of average daily attendance. In other words, they don't get taxpayer dollars for teaching students anything — they get taxpayer dollars for having fannies in the seats," said Fischer, of the American Family Association. "So if you have fewer fannies in the seats that's less dollars for school administrators and that's an incentive for them to do the right thing here."

The family groups also worry that GLSEN's reach into the classroom will continue after the Day of Silence is over. While Higgins agrees that bullying is a problem, she said it would "open a can of worms" to give the group free rein and allow public schools — and public funds — to "transform the moral beliefs of other people's children," she said.

"No decent people want any children to be bullied ... and I think they exploit that sentiment," she said.

SOURCE




"Anti elitist" British school system in fact entrenches elitism

The hated "Grammar" schools at least selected on ability alone. Not so the present system

Top comprehensives are more “socially exclusive” than grammar schools as parents play the system to make sure children get a place, according to research. The most affluent families still have “wriggle room” to get sons and daughters into leading schools, despite the introduction of beefed up admissions rules by Labour, it was claimed.

Academics called for the most popular schools to allocate places by lottery to give all children an equal chance of gaining a place, irrespective of their background.

The recommendations – in a study commissioned by the Sutton Trust charity – come just weeks after almost 100,000 children were rejected from their first choice school.

Some one-in-six 11-year-olds failed to get into the state secondary of their choice for September amid intense competition for the most sought-after places.

Sir Peter Lampl, the trust’s chairman, said a wave of new schools being proposed by the Conservatives should all adopt random “ballots” to stop them being dominated by children from middle-class families.

“Deployed alongside other select criteria, ballots are the fairest way of deciding school places in over-subscribed schools,” he said. “There has to be some way of choosing which pupils are admitted and ballots offer the same chances to all children irrespective of their background.”

In the latest study, academics from Buckingham University analysed the proportion of deprived pupils at each school – and compared numbers to the social make-up of the local community.

Prof Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson found that the most popular comprehensives, which are not supposed to select pupils, were "more socially exclusive" than England's remaining academically selective grammar schools.

The 164 most exclusive comprehensives took only 9.2 per cent of pupils from poor backgrounds, even though around 20 per cent of children living in their surrounding area were “income deprived”. By comparison, some 13.5 per cent of children from 164 grammar schools were from poor homes.

The study suggested that grammars – which select pupils on the basis of the 11-plus entrance exam – were more transparent as they identified pupils “with talent, irrespective of their backgrounds”.

Comprehensives, which normally admit children by distance to the school gates, give parents more chance to play the system by moving "close to the desired school”.

Faith-based comprehensives, which select on the basis of religious observance, can also be more easily manipulated by parents who “can take pains to demonstrate they are active members of a particular faith”, the study suggested.

Labour has attempted to close loopholes by repeatedly updating its admissions rules. But the report – Worlds Apart: Social Variation Among Schools – said there was “still wriggle room for schools that want to ensure a favourable intake to enable them to show up well in league tables”.

“Our view is that the principal means [of admission] should be by ballot,” it said. “It would be fair and lead to a more equitable education system. “It could be used in conjunction with other criteria, for example ability, faith or location.”

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14 April, 2010

Education Race to Top hits bottom

You've probably been in an argument and, not very confident about your point, resorted to rhetorically blitzing your opponent by just insisting you were irrefutably right. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been employing a similar tactic with the "Race to the Top," a competition pitting states against each other in a grab for $4 billion in "stimulus" dough. Duncan has been flatly declaring RTTT a triumph.

"The Race to the Top has been an extraordinary success," Duncan trumpeted in last week's announcement that Tennessee and Delaware had won the Race's first round. "This historic program has been a catalyst for education reform across this country."

Examining the first-round winners reveals why Duncan is going right to declaring victory.

The first thing one notices is that RTTT isn't about bold change. Indeed, as Duncan conceded when he announced the victors, what put Delaware and Tennessee in the winners' circle wasn't embracing cutting-edge reforms, but getting all districts and teachers' unions to endorse their applications.

"Perhaps most importantly, every one of the districts in Delaware and Tennessee is committed to implementing the reforms in Race to the Top, and they have the support of the state leaders as well as their unions," Duncan said.

Now, if you want a revolution you don't bolster the regime in power. But that's exactly what demanding union buy-in does. After all, it's teachers' unions that have most effectively fought real accountability because it is largely their members who would be held to account.

Maybe, though, Delaware and Tennessee have risen above union self-interest and come up with real reforms that unions also love.

On the other hand: maybe not.

Consider Delaware's teacher-assessment proposal. Currently, student achievement is included in teacher evaluations, but the achievement measures are about as useful as a scale that ignores any unwanted pounds. A teacher starts the year by setting her own student-achievement goals, and she can use numerous assessments — including her own tests and writing assignments — to measure success.

So what does Delaware's RTTT application say the state will do about this nonsensical system? "After consulting with stakeholders, including the teachers' union, the Delaware Secretary of Education will define a rigorous and comparable measure of student growth to be used in educator evaluations starting in the 2011-2012 school year."

Promises, promises.

How about Tennessee? It made a big deal in its application about lifting its charter-school cap and "having one of the oldest and most robust databases for tracking 'student growth.'"

Those things sound nice, but they hardly mean real change is a-comin'. The pro-charter Center for Education Reform has graded Tennessee's charter law a D, but not primarily because of its cap. No, it's because Tennessee charters have very little autonomy and can only be located in a few districts — super-restrictions that make caps largely irrelevant.

On teacher quality, Tennessee offers the same IOU as Delaware. Sure, Tennessee has a great data system, but it won't apply the data until the 2011-2012 school year, and then only after a "teacher evaluation advisory committee" has recommended how to do it.

Ultimately, RTTT is all promises, no production. States must say how they would improve lots of things, but they actually have to do very little. It is decades of public schooling — from the Great Society to No Child Left Behind — in a nutshell.

Stagnant scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tell the tale. In 1973, the average mathematics score for 17-year-olds — our schools' "final products" — was 304 (out of 500). By 2008 it was just 306. In 1971, the reading average was 285. Twenty-seven years later, it had skyrocketed to…286.

The good news is that many states appear to be souring on RTTT, though not because they object to a contest that rewards mere promises. No, it's that the first-round outcome has shown it impossible to know what's ultimately needed to win.

As Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, who says his state will not apply for RTTT Round 2, explained after it appeared establishment buy-in was more important than reform: "It was like the Olympic Games, and we were an American skater with a Soviet judge from the 1980s."

That might be overstating things a bit. But it is a far more reasonable assessment than just declaring Race to the Top "an extraordinary success."

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The Truth About Diversity

by Mike Adams

In the past, I have been critical of radical leftist university president Rosemary DePaolo. I’ve directed specific criticism towards her for valuing diversity over competence. Thankfully, she has finally seen the light. In a letter written to the entire UNC-Wilmington community on Wednesday, April 8, 2010, she admitted that much of what I’ve said about diversity (for at least seven years' worth of columns!) is true. I am taking the time today to thank Rosemary for her honesty and humility. For those who are interested, I have reprinted her entire letter below:

Dear Colleagues,

While the core mission of UNCW focuses on academics and providing the most powerful learning experience for our students, athletics also plays an important part in the lives not only of our students but of the entire, broad university community, as well. I know that the search for a new head coach for men’s basketball is on the minds of many people, and I would like to take this opportunity to provide you a brief update.

Since the end of the basketball season, the search committee has been identifying and reviewing potential candidates. We believed we had a firm commitment, but yesterday we learned that was not the case. To be certain, searches are complicated and complex processes, especially where contracts are involved. You might recall in the early 1990s that head basketball coach Bobby Cremins left Georgia Tech where he was extremely successful to go to the University of South Carolina. Three days later, he returned to Georgia Tech after indicating that he had a change of heart. Similarly, Greg Marshall, head coach at Winthrop, was recruited to go to the College of Charleston. He even held a press conference to announce that move, only to return the next day as coach at Winthrop. Ironically, the person who replaced him at College of Charleston was Bobby Cremins.

Why am I telling you this? We all may know of numerous other situations where an individual was recruited by multiple institutions, only to take the one with the best financial package or change decisions for personal reasons. I am providing these examples to remind all of us that, despite rumors and speculation to the contrary, people routinely change their minds during negotiations for a variety of reasons. As disappointing as that may be at times, I have been in this business long enough to know that such situations are common; I also know that in the end, we will be successful.

I am working closely with our athletic director Kelly Mehrtens and our search committee to continue the process of identifying the right coach. I am forced to do so because it has become apparent that Kelly Mehrtens is over her head in this position. That is because her selection for this position was not made on the basis of qualifications. She was selected on the basis of her status as a black female.

Some have made much of the argument that Kelly Mehrtens is incompetent. As evidence, they have cited the following: 1) Her decision to fire our last basketball coach during homecoming week. 2) Her decision to give the last coach a two-year contract extension after only one year of coaching his predecessor’s recruits. 3) Waiting six weeks to form a committee to look for a new coach. 4) The drastic reduction in donations to support the athletic department, etc, etc, etc.

But these criticisms miss the truth about diversity, which I have highlighted in bold letters so all of you can understand: An institution’s commitment to diversity is inversely related to its commitment to competence. Those who are calling for the firing of Kelly Mehrtens miss this fundamental point.

Put simply, if Kelly Mehrtens was hired by considering race (and gender) over competence then it makes no sense to fire her – in effect, saying her incompetence is suddenly more important than her race. After all, she is still black. And there is no evidence that she plans to change her gender.

I know it hurts to lose basketball games. And I know it hurts to see an entire athletic program in shambles. But diversity feels good. And it reminds us we are all really good people at heart.

For those not Swift enough to understand, you have just read a social satire on affirmative action and diversity. Rosemary DePaolo has never told the truth about diversity, nor taken much of an interest in the truth on any given issue. Despite her incompetence, she remains as UNC-Wilmington chancellor because she is a woman. And Kelly Mehrtens remains as her athletic director because she is black.

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University corruption

A former Brown University student alleges in a lawsuit unsealed Monday that he was removed from campus more than three years ago after being falsely accused of rape by the daughter of a major donor and fundraiser for the Ivy League school.

William McCormick III and his parents say university administrators gave him a one-way ticket home to Wisconsin after he was accused of rape in the fall of 2006. McCormick alleges the school never told the police about the rape allegations and accepted them as true without doing an investigation.

The lawsuit says the father of the accusing student is a Brown alumnus who has "donated and raised very substantial sums of money," was in regular contact about the allegations with school administrators and contacted university president Ruth Simmons directly.

Brown, which has asked for the case to be dismissed, said in a statement late Monday that university administrators acted appropriately but declined to comment further, citing student confidentiality.

The university's lawyer, Steven Richard, told a judge Monday that the lawsuit didn't show any wrongdoing and that it merely made vague and unsubstantiated claims against various administrators.

"My difficulty is responding to the broad net cast on everyone," Richard said.

A university administrator told McCormick his removal from campus was to be on an interim basis, according to a letter submitted in court. But McCormick wound up withdrawing from Brown later that fall under an agreement with the accuser's family he says he was coerced into signing.

The lawsuit names 15 people affiliated with Brown, including Simmons, as well as the female student and her father. It was filed last fall, just before the three year-statute of limitations for bringing such claims was to have expired. A federal judge unsealed it Monday.

The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they were sexually assaulted, and is not naming the father to avoid identifying the woman here. The woman maintains that she was raped and that the sexual assault allegations are true, said her lawyer Joseph Cavanagh.

The lawsuit says McCormick, a nationally ranked wrestler in high school who obtained a scholarship to go to Brown, was accused of rape in September 2006 by a fellow freshman who lived in his dorm.

The student initially accused him of stalking and harassing her, at which point a no-contact order was issued against McCormick by the university, lawyers say.

The following week, the student _ encouraged and pressured by friends, according to the lawsuit _ reported that she had been raped by McCormick to the resident adviser, who urged her to repeat her allegations to deans at the school.

Administrators told McCormick he was being accused of sexual misconduct but never gave him a written copy of the allegations or a chance to defend himself, according to the lawsuit, which says he was also ordered to leave campus, driven to the airport and put on a flight back to Wisconsin.

The lawsuit says no sexual contact occurred and no charges were ever filed.

U.S. District Judge William Smith heard arguments Monday on whether to dismiss the lawsuit, but did not immediately rule.

He told J. Scott Kilpatrick, a lawyer for the McCormick family, that the complaint was a "mess" and that some of its claims so far appear unsubstantiated. He said the lawsuit was not detailed enough in specifying what each staff member and administrator is alleged to have done wrong.

But he also said he was troubled the university never alerted the police about a rape allegation it considered credible. "The thought that with all the people involved in this matter at different levels, a determination is made to not tell law enforcement, even the Brown Police Department _ I'm having trouble getting that," Smith said.

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13 April, 2010

American academic crooks get away with it

More evidence of the decay of academic standards. The Left destroy anything they touch

The paper trail of plagiarism turned up in a university faculty member's Ph.D. dissertation, then in a job application and, eventually, in a proposal for taxpayer-funded research sent to the National Science Foundation.

Yet like several other researchers caught stealing information on government-funded foundation projects or proposals, the faculty member managed to avoid the embarrassment of public exposure.

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) office of inspector general, which closed the case last year, is withholding the researcher's name from public scrutiny, citing privacy interests.

In another recent case, a researcher plagiarized in at least three funding proposals and, once caught, claimed as an excuse the fact that "his non-native command of English made paraphrasing difficult," case records show. His name, too, remains private.

Unlike the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), another federal agency that investigates scientific misconduct, the NSF inspector general withholds many of the identities of the researchers it catches engaging in misconduct, according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The policy reflects a stark but little-known difference in the scientific community and in the federal government on the question of whether, and when, to name names in the wake of misconduct investigations.

"My position is that these are public agencies and public funding is involved, so there should be disclosure," said Mark S. Frankel, director of the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He said researchers found to have committed misconduct could do so again if the misdeeds go unnoticed by future employers. In their new jobs, these same researchers someday could be placed in positions of trust, such as supervising the work of graduate students, he said.

But others say the disparity between the two agencies' policies might be a reflection of the sorts of cases they typically investigate. The NSF inspector general often uncovers plagiarism, while many of the ORI integrity cases involve fabrication or falsification of data, analysts say.

"It may have to do with the types of findings," said Debra Parrish, a lawyer who has published scholarly articles on research misconduct. "Most NSF findings are premised on plagiarism. … [P]erhaps plagiarism, although not desirable, is not as worthy of public hanging."

More here




How Eton inspired British Conservatives' 'national service' plan

A plan with good precedents

David Cameron spoke of his own community service at Eton College as he launched plans for a National Citizenship Service for young people. The Tory leader told how he volunteered to visit elderly and vulnerable people, as well as joining the school’s cadet force.

Community service has long been seen as a key element of life at independent schools – particularly boarding schools – as a life-enhancing supplement to the rigours of academic study.

At Eton, the school’s social service programme forms part of the extra-curricular timetable for most sixth-formers. Each boy at the £29,000-a-year school in Windsor is expected to take part in voluntary activities up to twice a week.

This includes reading and playing sport with children at state primary schools, visiting the elderly at home, helping at day centres, working in charity shops and taking food and clothing to homeless people in Slough. Some boys have also tended to the grave of a soldier from Eton Wick killed during the Second World War.

Other independent schools expect pupils to take part in similar programmes – usually for one afternoon every week.

At Wellington College, Berkshire, community service projects - a 150-year-old school tradition - include volunteering at a local centre for the mentally handicapped, tutoring students at local schools and reading to the elderly. Students also traditionally volunteer with the National Trust and the college’s own estate team.

The Combined Cadet Force (CCF) is also a hugely prominent part of life in independent schools. There are currently around 200 cadet force units in the private sector, compared with just 50 in state schools.

Asked at a news conference whether he had done voluntary service, Mr Cameron said: "Yes, I did. At the school I went to there was a choice: you could either join the cadet force or you could do social services.

"Being a community-spirited sort of person I decided to do both. "I was in the cadet force and I also did visits to elderly, vulnerable people in Windsor, visiting them in their homes and doing their shopping and things like that, which I hugely enjoyed."

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Australia: How to hijack a child’s education

Teachers abhor evaluation of their work

The union inspired threat by state school teachers to boycott next month’s literacy and numeracy tests for Queensland children ought to be seen for what it is, wildcat industrial action aimed at sabotaging a policy for which the Rudd Government gained a mandate at the last election.

Queensland Teacher Union president Steve Ryan’s performance on radio this morning justifying this boycott was an example of the sophistry and arrogance that afflicts union officials who believe schools are there for the benefit of teachers rather than for students and their parents.

According to Ryan, the NAPLAN tests “only’’ measure literacy and numeracy, not the whole child. Good to see that the union sees the ability to read, write and count is such a minor part of a child’s school education.

And while this boycott might seem a lot like industrial action to the rest of us, it is nothing of the sort, according to Ryan. It is a “moratorium’’ on supervising the tests.

This action is all about the union’s distaste for a nationally consistent measure of school performance. It has precious little to do with the welfare of Queensland children. It’s unlikely that the union will be able to get away with such nonsense for long, but it would help put a quick end to this ridiculousness if the Bligh Government gained some backbone and opposed this union’s constant efforts to hijack a policy that has the legitimate political endorsement of the Australian electorate.

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12 April, 2010

Behind the NJ school problems: Bloat

Gov. Chris Christie is trying to solve New Jersey's chronic budget problems by cutting spending, including state aid to local schools. But the state's powerful teacher unions and many school boards are balking -- claiming that this will either drive up local property taxes or result in devastating cuts to school services.

In fact, there's plenty of fat to cut. For proof, just take a close look at the recent hiring and spending patterns of Jersey's school districts: Both hiring and spending have risen far faster than can be justified by the mild growth in enrollment. Thus, most should have plenty of room to cut spending without major impact.

Given the state's chronic budget woes, the schools' hiring spree defies logic. Since 2001, just as budget problems began in earnest, public-school enrollment in Jersey has risen by less than 3 percent, or slightly more than 36,000 students. But total school hiring (full-time employees and equivalents) has jumped by 14 percent, or nearly 28,000 employees, according to federal Census statistics.

That's right: Jersey's schools have added three-quarters of an employee for every new student -- during a period of deep fiscal pain for the state. Most of the new hires were teachers -- which is more than one new instructional worker for every two new students.

The hiring spree, along with rich benefit increases, has fueled payrolls. Wage costs alone have increased 43 percent since 2001 -- well ahead of the inflation rate plus enrollment growth.

But the real budget-buster has been health and pension costs. Between 2001 and 2006 (the latest year data are available), total benefit costs rose by a whopping 115 percent, adding several billion dollars to school costs.

After this runup, outlays are now a whopping $16,000 per student, nearly 60 percent above the national average. Jersey already was a leader in this spending category back in 2001; the spending spree has widened the gap, at great taxpayer cost.

Jersey now has the highest combined state and local tax burden in the country -- yet has been in an almost perpetual budget crisis since 2001.

But the tax hikes didn't solve the budget crisis. The key reason: As the above data suggest, the spending hasn't slowed.

If anything, the numbers suggest that Christie's approach, which is to finally start weaning local schools off continual increases in state aid, is the only way to bring spending in line.

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British school inspection shambles

Emphasis on bureaucratic trivia rather than looking at how the school is doing in facing its challenges

Three schools judged to be "inadequate" by Ofsted were later told that they were actually "outstanding", in a move which has raised concerns over the quality of inspections.

A total of nine schools inspected by Ofsted last term were initially given wrong judgements, it can be revealed. In three of the cases cases, schools told by inspectors that they faced a "notice to improve" – the category just above a failed inspection – were reassessed and then given the very best official rating.

Critics said the U-turns cast serious doubt on the accuracy and fairness of Ofsted's new inspection regime, introduce at the start of this academic year. The regime has already been accused by the state and independent sectors of focusing on the wrong things.

Head teachers said they were appalled that schools could be misjudged to such a degree and that primaries and secondaries were facing ruin on the basis of "arbitrary" rulings. A poor inspection report can sound the death knell for a school, as rolls dwindle and staff leave.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "How can you possibly have a judgement of inadequate and in the next breath, rate the school as outstanding? "It totally undermines the validity of the inspection and raises serious questions about the quality of inspections. "There is mounting pressure for a review of this system and this revelation adds to it."

Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "Whether the judgement of inspectors is at fault or schools are being initially failed on trivial matters, both are very serious flaws. "This calls in to question the whole Ofsted regime."

Every time a school is judged "inadequate" during an inspection, the finding is subjected to a "moderation process" in which Ofsted reviews the reasons for the provisional rating. Among six schools inspected last term and initially rated "inadequate", three - one primary and two secondaries, all in the south of England - had their rating raised after moderation to the top category of "outstanding". Another had its rating improved to "good", while two became "satisfactory".

Three further schools which were facing "special measures", the category that schools are put in to when they fail their inspection, had that rating scrapped and were instead found after moderation to be merely "inadequate".

Head teachers said many more schools may have been given the wrong judgement but the mistakes would never be remedied because only initial verdicts of "inadequate" or "special measures" were put through the moderation process.

From September to December last year, Ofsted received 110 complaints relating to the 2,140 inspections carried out, but no ratings were changed as a result of the complaints. Ofsted refused to name the nine schools whose judgements had been overturned at moderation.

It said: "Schools may be moderated out of a provisional category. Moderation is a routine, rigorous and robust process. It is an integral part of our work to ensure consistency and high quality in our inspections and demonstrates that Ofsted is fair and transparent in its work."

As The Sunday Telegraph has revealed, schools in the state and independent sectors have fallen foul of stringent new rules on child safety and the early years curriculum which came in to force in September.

Transgressions which have resulted in schools being marked down during inspections have included failing to supervise a car park that did not belong to the school, and not giving child protection training to cooks. Other schools have been marked down over the wording of their school policies or how they store information.

Ofsted claimed that no school would fail an inspection for minor breaches, but the widely-differing judgements applied to some schools after the moderation process support claims that inspectors' judgements are overzealous or suspect.

Earlier this month, more than 80 MPs told Parliament they were "seriously concerned" about reports of Ofsted making "arbitrary" judgments leading to schools being marked down. Miles Coverdale Primary, in Shepherd's Bush, west London, was initially given a "notice to improve" after inspectors who carried out a two-day visit in January said it was "inadequate".

Tara Baig, the head teacher, was stunned – three years earlier Ofsted had rated the school as "good with outstanding features". Staff and governors became convinced they had been subjected to a flawed inspection process.

The school was marked down for failing to recycle its food waste, for not linking with a "leafy, suburban white" school to promote "community cohesion", even for the content of some pupils' packed lunches. A faulty electrical gate was deemed a risk to children's safety, even though the school was waiting for local authority contractors to fix it and it was kept locked at all times.

A recent improvement in attendance figures was not taken in to account and the verdict on teaching was only "satisfactory" despite a "good" rating for three-quarters of the lessons observed.

Evidence of an upward trend in results generally across all ages, including a massive jump in maths results for 11 year olds from 49 per cent to 90 per cent, was given much less weight than a dip in writing results, which the school had identified and was addressing.

Days after the school lodged a complaint with Ofsted, it was told that the moderation process had removed the notice to improve and raised the outcome to "satisfactory". But Mrs Baig still refuses to accept the rating and said the reputation of the school had been undermined by an "unjust" process. "The staff here work relentlessly and are highly committed. For them to be told that they were on the bottom rung was an absolute outrage," she said. "We are a good school and we have the evidence to prove it."

Inspectors visited St Thomas More Catholic Primary, in Coventry, after it was forced to move buildings because of structural defects discovered at the school. Rather than praise the school for coping in extreme circumstances over which it had no control, inspectors graded it as "satisfactory", in part because of shortcomings with the emergency accommodation.

Although some pupils were moved into the old junior school building, others were taught in six temporary classrooms which inspectors said lacked space, led to overcrowding and offered limited accessibility to outside areas.

Mary Wilson, the head teacher, said: "I expected officers to come here pleased with what we've been able to achieve considering what we were faced with. We are still in an emergency situation and I felt the report was unfair." Although Ofsted amended the wording of the published report after the school complained, the grading remained the same.

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Australian teachers' union wants censorship of school information

THE Australian Education Union is preparing its position against next month's National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy tests.

There is a distinct possibility of a national boycott. Such a move will be a direct challenge to Education Minister Julia Gillard's resolve. She must hold the line on NAPLAN and the availability of data on the MySchool website.

At the centre of the mooted boycott of the NAPLAN tests, scheduled to roll out across the country from May 11 to 13, is one pressing issue. This is how data collected by the government can be used in league tables. Next Wednesday in Hobart, the Tasmanian branch of the AEU will ask members for a decision on the boycott. It is expected to pass. This will give momentum to the national AEU push for a boycott.

Already, the industrial journals of the AEU are using combative language. In last month's issue of Public Education Voice, the official journal of the AEU's ACT branch, the following call to arms summarises the union position:

"As our union has been called upon in the past, we are once more called upon to stand proudly for the principles of our profession against the political expediency and indeed stupidity of our political representatives . . ."

But besides the battle cry of the AEU, Gillard is coming under increasing pressure to change the MySchool website. Last month, talks were undertaken between the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, which developed the MySchool website, and the AEU to see how they could placate teachers threatening to boycott.

As a measure of the AEU angst towards the accountability of school performance the MySchool website enables, Jo Earp, editor of Australian Teacher Magazine, had this to say in an editorial headed "Rank smell of unwanted website" in the March edition: "It is hard to gauge how Gillard would deal with a teacher boycott of NAPLAN testing, as she remains tight-lipped on the legal options open to her, but it seems highly unlikely that the stalemate will be broken."

At the centre of the AEU opposition to the My School website is the issue of alleged misuse of the data and league tables. According to AEU Victorian president Mary Bluett, "All that's being sought is a protection of the data and that it not be, in our view, misused to generate unfair league tables."

This position presents what amounts to a direct attack on the availability of information to parents and the media. Data protection must be resisted. It is a form of censorship that denies parents data they should be able to access.

It is, however, seemingly acceptable to make school comparison information available to the AEU but not elsewhere. Why else would AEU Tasmanian president Leanne Wright say last month of the NAPLAN results, "To a point they can be useful for teachers because they give an overall indication of how things are going"?

Being useful to teachers does not include being useful to parents, it seems.

It is not just the AEU that is against providing the specifics to parents. Responding to the MySchool website, Viewpoint, the March newsletter of the Victorian Independent Education Union, asked that "reporting of students' average scores be replaced with a graphical representation of relative performance or an alternative proxy such as percentage achievement above minimum benchmarks". This is nothing more than data protection by stealth.

But beyond the persistent claims by the AEU and its federal president Angelo Gavrielatos that the MySchool website data is "invalid", it is curious that parents are overwhelmingly in favour of not less data being available but more.

In a survey before the launch of the website, more than 90 per cent of polled parents believed they had a right to know how their school compared with others.

Still, calls for legally binding conditions pertaining to use of the MySchool data are reason for concern. While it is arguable that organisations should be prevented from collating the MySchool data and selling it to parents, as one organisation did on the website's launch, the media should not be prevented from making information available in whatever form it chooses.

To restrict this is tantamount to a union, at best an unrepresentative body in community terms, choosing what the public should and should not be able to access.

What the AEU persists in doing is trafficking in false information, generating an unreasonable fear about whether league tables will show some schools to be better than others and that sinking schools will be exposed.

If this logic is taken further, it is acceptable for poorly performing schools to continue to fail their students as long as people do not know. This is data protection.

What Gillard must resist, on all counts, are calls for legislation restricting the free availability of comprehensive data generated from the NAPLAN test results and posted on the MySchool website. She must also hold the line against the kind of criticism made by Waleed Aly in the April edition of The Monthly.

In a comment piece on the new national curriculum, Aly, not known as an educationalist but as a lecturer in politics at Monash University, takes aim at Gillard's "meat and potatoes curriculum", which he says is distinguished by "common sense" and "practicality" that amounts to "a very conservative revolution indeed. [John] Howard with a smile."

It may be conservative to measure children, tell parents how their schools are going in comparison with others and offer a curriculum that gives children the kinds of content that it is utilitarian rather than ideological.

But it is the kind of conservatism we need. This is why the Education Minister must stare down her opponents, protect the school performance principles that parents broadly share and provide accessible data on schools for all.

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11 April, 2010

Teachers between a rock and a hard place in NJ

When the Hackettstown School District presented its $28.5 million 2010-11 budget April 1, the document lacked 18 full-time positions -- seven of them classroom teachers -- who are working this year.

The district is hardly alone in making staff cuts to cope with aid cuts and rising costs. However, Superintendent Robert Gratz told the audience that at least the teaching positions could be restored, if the teachers agreed to a wage freeze advocated by Gov. Chris Christie.

The district teachers union was unable to provide an answer that night, and representatives could not be reached for an update on their discussions this week. "They missed a great opportunity," Gratz said, acknowledging a concession also could help convince voters to approve the budget April 20.

The prospect of a wage freeze has New Jersey educators in a difficult position. Unions that consent could save teachers' jobs. The alternative is to resist the pressure from the governor and lose not only colleagues, but possibly standing in public opinion, experts say.

Since taking office in January, Christie has come out strongly against teachers unions, particularly the largest: the New Jersey Education Association. In his budget address last month, when he proposed reduced total aid to schools by $819 million, he referred to an "arrogant" teachers union that used "intimidation tactics, political bullying and smears" to maintain its "empire."

Before that, he reduced the current year's school aid by $415 million, forcing districts to tap surpluses. Late last month, he offered to restore some state aid to districts where teachers took a wage freeze.

"Certainly the governor is trying to run a public opinion campaign" against teachers, NJEA spokesman Steve Baker said.

The state-level union is not guiding local unions to a decision, he said, because it must be done on a case-by-case basis. However, there will be "massive cuts" around the state no matter what direction they go.

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Leftists want to "protect" unpaid internships out of existence

Thus closing off a valuable opportunity for otherwise useless graduates to learn something practical

As the recession rolls on and workers continue to scramble for employment, there's one group of people who haven't seen any diminishment of their employment prospects: those who are willing to work for free. Unpaid internships are booming. At Stanford, employers listed 643 of them on the college's job board this year.

That's more than triple the number they posted two years ago. Experts estimate that somewhere between one-fourth and one-half of all internships are now unpaid. This isn't a trivial number when you consider that internships are increasingly becoming a crucial resume-builder, even for college graduates: A national 2006 study showed that 84 percent of college students at four-year institutions had completed at least one internship before graduation.

In an increasingly competitive job market, internships have become crucial for graduating students or people looking to change careers. In some professions (especially the arts and the world of nonprofits), the unpaid internship is nothing new. But as unpaid internships mushroom in the for-profit world of business, government officials need to step in and ensure that interns aren't being exploited.

Some of these unpaid internships violate federal workplace laws: They displace regular employees, fail to pay interns who should be paid, and don't provide "educational benefits" for those who are legally allowed to work for free.

To put it bluntly: For some employers, the internship has become about taking advantage of free labor rather than a mutually beneficial exchange of work and training for employers and students.

Federal officials are concerned, and they're starting to pay attention. Nancy Leppink, who's the acting director of the Department of Labor's wage and hour division, has said that there aren't many circumstances where for-profit employers can refuse to pay interns.

And yet, as any college student can attest, there's no shortage of for-profit employers who are seeking to hire free interns. Part of the problem is that the six federal legal criteria for unpaid internships were written in a different era (1947), for a time when most internships were more like apprenticeships for production and manufacturing jobs that have vanished.

The criteria need to be updated. And Congress needs to step in, too, with new legislation - unpaid interns should be eligible for the same workplace protections against harassment and discrimination that regular employees enjoy.

Informally, the Department of Labor has already started to update the criteria. It's offered opinion letters about unpaid internships that offer college credit, for example - such internships must provide "educational experiences unobtainable in a classroom setting" and there must be a burden on the employer in terms of training and supervision. But opinion letters are only designed to represent a single specific case. What would be best for both students and employers would be a specific set of standards that apply to all for-profit employers.

Unpaid interns also need protection against workplace harassment and discrimination. There have been court cases where such suits were dismissed since, under current law, only employees receive such protection. That's unfair, and Congress needs to write and pass legislation to set it right.

The Labor Department is right to focus its attention on this issue: In tough times, for-profit companies shouldn't be taking advantage of the loose rules around internships to get people to work for free. There are wide societal implications for the rampant growth of unpaid internships - for one thing, they disadvantage lower-income students, who can't afford to work for free. So at the very least, employers need to follow the current laws that do exist around unpaid interns (e.g. train them and don't use them to displace regular employees). And both the Labor Department and Congress need to fix the laws so that they reflect the contemporary issues these interns are facing.

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1930s books revived in the hope of teaching pupils traditional British history

Not much hope of government schools using them

History books first published in the 1930s have been revived in a bid to tackle schoolchildren's ignorance of Britain's past. Acccording to the publishers, the 1930s books are needed to address a 'crisis' in the teaching of the traditional narrative of British history

The series, called A History of Britain, was first published in 1937 and was widely used in schools for decades. It has now been updated and relaunched for a modern audience amid growing concerns that schools are failing to give children a good grasp of history.

It comes as a group of leading history experts called for reform to the school curriculum so secondary schoolchildren are taught a single chronological history course, stretching from the Norman conquest to the 20th century.

Currently, pupils study topics such as the Nazis, Soviet Russia, slavery or the Victorians, often taught in isolation and repeated in different years.

According to the publishers, the 1930s books are needed to address a "crisis" in the teaching of the traditional narrative of British history. "For more than half a century most intelligent youngsters in Britain have grown up to live in the half-darkness of historical ignorance," said Tom Stacey, chairman of Stacey International.

"I have seen this ignorance creeping up on three generations. I count their loss as incalculable deprivation. There has been a parallel discarding of the fabric of biblical history and the Christian narrative."

He said that traditional history had "all but vanished" in schools, replaced by a diet of "projects on slavery, Victorian slums, the labour movement or, again and again, the Second World War".

The 1930s series was written by E H Carter, who was chief inspector of schools, and R A F Mears, a history teacher. Subsequent volumes covered British history up to the 1950s. The updated books are edited by David Evans, an historian and former head of history at Eton College. The first two books to be re-released cover the Tudors and the Stuarts. Eight more will follow, beginning with the Roman invasion.

The last two books, From Churchill to Thatcher; 1951 – 1990, and Into the 21st Century, are new but will be in the same style as the original series.

Concerns that schools are failing to instil a good understanding of the timeline of British history have been raised by a long list of commentators, including academics David Starkey and Niall Ferguson, Andrew Marr, the BBC presenter and author of A History of Modern Britain, and the Prince of Wales.

"There can be no justification for the excessive focus on the history of the Third Reich," said Professor Ferguson, "What we urgently need is a campaign for real history in schools."

A group of experts, lead by Sean Lang, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, have just published a report, Better History, calling for a single chronological history course for 11 to 16 year olds. It should be compulsory and have historical knowledge at its heart, the group say.

Mr Lang said: "The current situation whereby students study one set of topics in the early years of secondary school and then embark on a quite separate set of topics in later years has gone unquestioned for too long. "The building up of an extensive body of historical knowledge should be a central aim of the history curriculum."

Fears about current history teaching are backed by a damning Ofsted report which found that although the National Curriculum demands that children develop a "chronological framework", in practice pupils' knowledge was "often very patchy and specific" and that children were "unable to sufficiently link discrete historical events to answer big questions".

The Conservatives have pledged to give children a "clear sense of how British history developed", if the party wins the general election, and the Anglia Ruskin group hopes to influence a Tory rewrite of the National Curriculum.

The group, which includes Martin Roberts, a member of the academic steering committee of Prince Charles's Teaching Institute, and Nicolas Kinlock, a former school head of history, author and former deputy of the Historical Association, will hold a seminar in the summer to sort out details of the new proposed course of study.

Alan Hodkinson, principal lecturer in educational research at Liverpool John Moores University, whose three year study showed that even young children can grasp chronology, said: "Historical time is vital to the study of history. "Without a comprehensive grasp of such, children will fail to understand how to sequence events, periods and people chronologically.

"My research suggests that rather than being de-emphasised, dates appear vital to historical study and should be employed consistently. "It is time that the people responsible for the curriculum stopped underestimating what our children are capable of."

A report published last year by the Historical Association found that thousands of pupils get only two years of teaching in the subject at secondary level, instead of three.

Official figures show that fewer than a third of students sat GCSE history in 2008, raising concerns that the subject is becoming the preserve of independent and grammar schools.

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10 April, 2010

Give every child a school-choice option

School choice has been proven to empower parents, help children excel, narrow the achievement gap among poor and minority students, and save taxpayers money. Yet teacher unions, education bureaucrats, and their patrons from the White House on down oppose any reform they cannot stifle with red tape and regulation.

But they cannot kill school choice. Against the odds, choice keeps coming back, in the unlikeliest of places.

A voucher program is one step closer to reality in President Barack Obama’s adopted home state of Illinois, despite fierce opposition from the powerful Illinois Education Association and Illinois Federation of Teachers.

Senate Bill 2494 by Rev. James Meeks, a Baptist minister and independent Democrat representing Chicago’s South Side, passed the state Senate on March 25 with broad bipartisan support. The bill now awaits action from the Illinois House of Representatives. Meeks’s modest but important legislation would create a pilot school voucher program for students in failing Chicago public schools.

Meeks wanted to provide every Illinois student with a $6,000 voucher to attend the school of his or her parents’ choice. Instead, qualified elementary school students in Chicago would be eligible for a voucher. It’s a start.

When legislators object that voucher programs divert money from public education, Meeks says: “If the public schools are not doing their job, why do you want to continue to reward them with money?” Plus, a $6,000 voucher is much, much less than the average per-student outlay in the state. A statewide version of Meeks’s plan would be a huge money-saver.

Of course, that’s why the entrenched powers don’t like it—teacher unions are big donors to Democratic politicians.

Choice works where it is tried. Milwaukee’s voucher program, one of the oldest in the nation (outside of New England), has delivered impressive results over its 20-year lifespan, despite heavy regulatory burdens imposed by hostile Badger State politicians. Against the odds, Milwaukee’s voucher program has improved student performance and promoted racial desegregation. A study published in February by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren found voucher program students had a lower high school dropout rate than their public school counterparts.

And the voucher program, which serves about 21,000 students, saved taxpayers more than $30 million in fiscal year 2008, according to the School Choice Demonstration Project.

Despite such proven successes, opponents of school choice impose an impossible standard on voucher programs. Are vouchers a panacea? No. Do they immediately help every single student succeed? No. Then do away with them, critics say. Just imagine if we held all government agencies and programs to a similar standard.

As Illinois discusses a limited voucher plan, an innovative school choice program is struggling to survive in Washington, DC, thanks to the machinations of the Obama administration. The Senate on March 16 defeated, by a 55-42 vote, a bipartisan measure by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) to reauthorize the $18 million District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program.

President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan were keen on killing the DC voucher plan from day one. Never mind that the program gives thousands of poor children—almost all black or Latino—a shot at a first-class education at a cost of only $7,500 a year. DC’s abysmal public schools spend upwards of $28,000 per student to foster mediocrity, illiteracy, and failure.

When Duncan was chief executive of Chicago’s public schools, he was all too happy to entertain requests to place the children of politicians and well-connected businessmen in the city’s most-exclusive public schools, segregated for the rich and influential and paid for with taxpayer dollars. Parents without such powerful connections were left out.

The political class has supported a broad system of “school-choice-for-me-but-not-for-thee” for decades. Kids shouldn’t be disadvantaged simply because their parents don’t have a direct line to the superintendent of schools. Meeks has a remedy for Illinois, and Lieberman is fighting nobly for kids in Washington, DC. Every American child deserves the same options.

SOURCE




Parents Beware: Activists in the Classroom

Parents must be extra vigilant these days in paying attention to the political movements invading today's school classrooms. On April 16, students from across the country will participate in a "Day of Silence," sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Next Friday, "hundreds of thousands" of public school students are being encouraged to take a vow of silence for the entire school day--even during instructional time.

GLSEN claims this student movement is meant to draw attention to "anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools." Of course bullying is wrong, but if students can't get together on school grounds for voluntary prayer groups, how is it acceptable for groups like GLSEN to carry out their own socio-political goals and freely spread its views of the nature and morality of homosexuality?

In response, family groups are encouraging parents to take action in helping to "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."

In addition, Carrie Lukas from the Independent Women's Forum wrote this week about the politics of Earth Day and the various activities schools will force students take part in to mark the April 22 holiday. Lukas warns: "Schools will take a break from normal instruction to discuss the importance of preserving the environment. That may sound like a harmless activity, but too often Earth Day becomes a platform for pushing an ideological brand of environmentalism. Parents need to pay attention and ask their children's teachers what's their plans are for Earth Day."

Just because it's Earth Day, Lukas rightly notes, schools shouldn't abandon their mission to educate students, provide facts, and encourage them to draw their own conclusions. Al Gore's doomsday prophecies shouldn't be kids' only source of information when it comes to how best to protect the environment.

Find out what your kids' schools are planning for Earth Day celebrations and encourage their teachers to give students the balanced education they deserve.

SOURCE




An Australian State makes a well-timed move -- enticing British students

Many bright British students are being denied university admission this year because of preferences given to students from poor backgrounds and from overseas. See here

And the climate and general environment in South Australia do undoubtedly leave Britain for dead. Australian academic standards are also high. Australian academics fare well in the number of papers that they get published in academic journals

The Government of South Australia will focus on the poor job prospects of graduates in Britain – combined with the gloomy weather – as part of a marketing drive to tempt students to universities Down Under.

It will take a roadshow around five cities in England in a bid to increase the number of students taking up degree courses at four universities in the state. This includes Adelaide, South Australia, Flinders and the soon-to-open Adelaide campus of University College London.

There are already more than 5,000 British students in Australia and the number of foreign students as a whole has soared five-fold in a decade.

It is thought that students could be tempted Down Under if existing tuition fees in Britain - up to £3,200-a-year - are significantly increased next year. An independent review is currently being carried out into fees and is widely expected to result in a dramatic hike.

Undergraduate fees in Australia vary but the majority of courses are priced at between £6,000 and £10,000 a year.

The latest move came just 24 hours it was revealed that more than a third of graduates claimed jobseekers' allowance [i.e. were unemployed] in the last year because of tough economic conditions.

Bill Muirhead, South Australia’s London-based agent general, said: “It’s survival of the fittest and with the state’s economic strength and amazing lifestyle we’re picking off the talent ourselves. “Adelaide is in a state of economic boom and to support that growth, we need to draw in the highest skill sets from across the world.

“Brits have a similar educational structure, but we have the added extras to make a degree a life changing opportunity; amazing weather, many more job opportunities and a quality of life you won’t get anywhere else in the world.”

A roadshow will target Birmingham, Bristol, London, Manchester and York next month. An advertising campaign will tell teenagers that South Australia boasts more than 300 days of sunshine a year and 3,148 miles of coastline.

Students will also be told that there is far more chance of finding employment after graduation amid claims the state “survived the global financial crisis better than the rest of Australia”. [And Australia as a whole did well, with much lower unemployment than either Britain or the USA]

SOURCE





9 April, 2010

Last chance for school reform

D.C. schools are the worst in the nation, but they may also be ripe for big changes

American public school teachers don’t get fired. They just don’t. In New York City, hundreds of teachers spend all day in “rubber rooms” because they’re deemed too dangerous or stupid to supervise children but can’t be booted because they have union-protected tenure. In crisis-ridden California, the mildest of threats from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to cut back on teaching staffs led to an immediate rebuke from the White House.

So when 266 teachers were unceremoniously canned in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2009, the educators of America collectively slid their glasses down their noses and glared at the District of Columbia. Although 266 firings might not seem like a lot in a country that has lost 8.4 million jobs since December 2007, they could turn out to be more important to the nation’s long-term health than the $150 billion “jobs bill” legislators were debating on Capitol Hill.

D.C. is a divided town. In the heart of the capital, the federal government hums along, churning out paperwork and disillusioned interns at a steady clip. But the rest of the city is in pretty miserable shape. The District of Columbia Public Schools rank below all 50 states in national math and reading tests, squatting at the bottom of the list for years at a time. More than 40 percent of D.C. students drop out altogether. Only 9 percent of the District’s high schoolers will finish college within five years of graduation. And all this failure doesn’t come cheap: The city spends $14,699 per pupil, more than all but two states and about $5,000 more than the national average. Yet as unlikely as it seems, D.C. may prove to be the last best hope for school reform in the United States.

The District’s school system is sitting at the center of a remarkable convergence. A driven, reform-minded chancellor, endowed with extraordinary powers by the city council and mayor, arrived on the scene in 2007 just as the teachers union’s contract was about to be renegotiated. Charter schools are blossoming, with nearly a third of the city’s public school students now enrolled in nontraditional institutions. And a new presidential administration, which has been retrograde in other policy areas ripe for reform, has flirted with some of the more advanced ideas on the education front. Add an education secretary who has respectable reform credentials and a president who has two school-age children, and it’s hard to imagine a sweeter set-up.

One further advantage, paradoxically, is the city’s utter hopelessness. “D.C. schools have long been the poster child for paralyzing education dysfunction,” says Neal McCluskey, an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “It seems like they have a complete inability to educate anyone. Educationally, if you could save this patient, you could save anyone.”

But there’s a flip side to all these advantages: If D.C. can’t fix its schools in this context, probably no one can. And the first indications from the Obama administration have been ominous: As part of an omnibus spending bill in March 2009, union-backed Democratic legislators gratuitously killed a promising pilot program for school vouchers in the District. Meanwhile, the fate of reform hangs in the balance of a long, increasingly tense standoff between superintendent Michelle Rhee and the all-powerful teachers unions over the fundamental question of hiring and firing instructors. Depending on which side blinks first, education reform in America could be a long-lost dream come true or simply a lost cause.

‘You Don’t Want Me for This Job’

Michelle Rhee was an unlikely candidate to take over the D.C. school system, let alone wind up on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. “I was like the least obvious choice,” says Rhee, whose verbal mannerisms are those of a recent college grad. The person who suggested Rhee to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty did so with a few caveats: “She’s 37 years old, she’s Korean, and she’s never run a school district.”

In fact, Rhee’s only in-school experience was two years in Baltimore as a recruit for Teach for America, a nonprofit that places new college grads in troubled inner-city and rural schools for two-year teaching stints. In 1997 she founded The New Teacher Project, another nonprofit, which brings highly qualified teachers—people who are credentialed in the subjects they teach—to public schools. She was busy running that project when Fenty called.

Rhee immediately told the D.C. mayor, “You don’t want me for this job.” With a bluntness for which she would later become famous, she explained, “If I were to take over the school district, the kinds of things that I would have to do to transform the district”—closing schools, firing teachers—“would just cause you headaches, political headaches. And that’s not what politicians want. Politicians don’t want the dirt to get kicked up. They want everyone to be happy.” Fenty swore indifference to the political ruckus, and, much to Rhee’s surprise, he has so far remained true to his word. Rhee enjoys near dictatorial powers within the system, thanks to the absence of a school board, and she has used them to the fullest possible extent. “The man has not blinked once,” she says.

Rhee has become the Great Korean Hope for school reform advocates around the nation and a lightning rod for criticism locally. D.C. publications follow her every move. Blogs are devoted exclusively to hating everything from her policy proposals to her hairstyle. Almost every move she makes draws headlines. And no wonder: Rhee’s approach goes right to the heart of a decades-long political debate about what schools really need, more money or fewer lousy teachers. On that question her position is clear: No real change is possible unless good teachers are hired and bad teachers fired.

Within months of taking office, Rhee foreshadowed the bloodbath that lay ahead by firing 30 percent of the school’s central bureaucracy. She commissioned an outside audit of school records. (Her staff is still finding rooms filled with unmarked file boxes and cabinets with no keys.) As her first year ticked away, Rhee staffed the human resources department with her own people, installed modern payroll systems, and generally tidied up the back office. Before her first school year started, she found 68 people on the books with no discernible duties, 55 teachers, three aides, and 10 assistant principals, costing a total of $5.4 million a year. She closed 25 underperforming schools (in a district that has 129) and replaced half of the system’s principals with candidates hand-selected by her personal staff and interviewed by Rhee herself.

In July 2008, Rhee revealed her opening gambit with the teachers union: She offered the teachers a whole lot of money. Under her proposal, educators would have two choices. With the first option, teachers would get a $10,000 bonus—a bribe, really—and a 20 percent raise. Nothing else would change. Benefits, rights, and privileges would remain as they were. Under the second option, teachers would receive a $10,000 bonus, a 45 percent increase in base salary, and the possibility of total earnings up to $131,000 a year through bonuses tied to student performance. In exchange, they would have to forfeit their tenure protections. To make good on her financial promises, Rhee lined up money from private donors; she has been close-mouthed about their identities, but The Washington Post has reported that likely contributors include Bill and Melinda Gates and Michael and Susan Dell.

Says Rhee: “I thought, this is brilliant. Everybody talks about how teachers don’t get paid enough; I’m going to pay teachers six-figure salaries! I’m going to pay the best teachers twice as much as they are currently making. Who could not be in favor of that? But people went ballistic.” Getting incentive pay required giving up near-absolute job security. “That,” she says, “is when the crap hit the fan.”

If Rhee has a model, it is Chicago, one of the only places in America where bad teachers can (eventually) get the heave-ho. In the Second City, failing schools can be dissolved and reconstituted. Teachers who worked at those institutions must reapply for their jobs, without seniority rights. Those who fail to get their old posts back are free to apply elsewhere in the city. If they haven’t found a placement in a year, they’re off the books. Just plain old laid off. There’s even a small merit pay program. The man who instituted this plan is Arne Duncan, who is now Obama’s secretary of education.

More here




WI: Sex ed could mean charges for teachers

A Wisconsin prosecutor is warning sex education teachers they could face charges if they follow a new state law that allows them to instruct students about proper contraceptive use.

A letter sent to five school districts by Juneau County District Attorney Scott Southworth said the instruction could amount to contributing to the delinquency of a minor if teachers know students are sexually active. He said the districts should drop sex education until the law is repealed.

Southworth also argued that teaching contraceptive use encourages sexual behavior among children, which equates to sexual assault because minors can't legally have sex in Wisconsin. "Depending on the specific facts of a case ... this encouragement and advocacy could lead to criminal charges," Southworth, a Republican, wrote to districts in his county.

The law's chief author, state Rep. Tamara Grigsby, D-Milwaukee, dismissed the March 24 letter as a scare tactic. "It's beyond ridiculous," Grigsby said Tuesday. "It's irresponsible to portray this act in the way he is."

Southworth said in a Tuesday e-mail to The Associated Press that he "merely provided a legal opinion to my school districts about the impact of the new mandate." "It was the Legislature that acted irresponsibly," he wrote.

Wisconsin school districts aren't required to teach sex education. But the new law, which took effect March 11, lays out requirements for those that do, including teaching the benefits of abstinence, criminal penalties for having underage sex and the benefits and proper use of contraceptives.

Supporters, including groups representing nurses, health departments and the state teacher's union, maintain the law will help reduce teen pregnancies. Conservative opponents counter schools should focus on abstinence.

Southworth's letter said law would convert sex education classes "into a radical program that sexualizes our children as early as kindergarten. This, in turn, will lead to more child sexual assaults."

Southworth complained that language prohibiting biased instruction makes it impossible to teach that sexual promiscuity is wrong. He also said a clause allowing volunteer health care providers to teach sex education could open the door to Planned Parenthood employees marketing sexually oriented products to students.

Planned Parenthood doesn't go into schools unless a school asks, said Chris Taylor, public policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Taylor said the law is designed to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies. "The real issue here is you have a district attorney who says teachers will be prosecuted," she said.

Southworth's letter is "a friendly warning," said Matt Sande, legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, which registered to lobby against the law. "He's simply doing his duty as district attorney," Sande said.

New Lisbon Superintendent Tom Andres said his district, which was among those that received Southworth's letter, is seeking legal advice about the law. While the school board will make the ultimate decision, Andres said he believes his schools should teach according to the law if parents approve.

"We're in a moral dilemma," Andres said. "We know our kids need correct, right information. We have to know what that is and teach it in such a manner that doesn't promote sexual assault or bullying."

SOURCE




A political test for British teachers?

It might be defensible if members of extreme Leftist groups were banned too -- and there are plenty of those among British teachers

Members of the British National Party should be banned from the classroom, a teaching union heard today. The BNP is already barred from working as prison officers and the same should be the case for teaching, it was claimed.

Activists from the National Union of Teachers said that membership of the BNP and far right organisations posed a threat to community relations. [And preaching class-hatred does not??]

The comments follow the publication of a Government review that said there was no justification for banning teachers from joining extremist organisations. Maurice Smith, the former chief inspector of schools, said banning BNP members from teaching would be using a "very large sledgehammer to crack a very small nut".

But addressing the NUT annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, some activists called for an all-out ban.

Jason Hill, a teacher from Stoke-on-Trent said: “In prisons, prison officers are not allowed to be members of the BNP, in schools there in no bar on teachers being members of the BNP, there is no bar on school governors, there is no bar on councillors involved in education.

He added: “What we are arguing for in this amendment is that we in the education service be brought into the same position as the prison service and that members of the BNP, that we argue to government, that members of the BNP should be barred from this position.”

Jean Roberts, a delegate from Hammersmith and Fulham in west London, said she was opposed to the views of the BNP, and insisted that any teacher who promoted racist views in the classroom should be barred from the profession.

But she added: “I don’t believe the NUT should call on the state to bar teachers from joining a presently legal political party. “They would rapidly move on to others who are more of a threat to them.

“To remove such a basic civil right, the right of association, something trade unionists find especially precious, is in my view a grossly disproportionate response, but more importantly it gives the BNP a credibility it does not deserve.”

A motion to the conference called for united action to oppose the BNP and other groups such as the English Defence League, while an amendment to the resolution demanded an all-out ban. The union failed to vote on either after running out of time.

Paul Golding, BNP communications officer said: “It’s a dangerous road to go down, once you start banning based on political beliefs where does it end? Isn’t that the sort of thing always lambasted by democratic politicians, banning people based on political beliefs?”

SOURCE





8 April, 2010

Traditional schools aren’t working — let’s move learning online

We already work online, play online, and shop online. Why isn't school online?

Deep within America's collective consciousness, there is a little red schoolhouse. Inside, obedient children sit in rows, eagerly absorbing lessons as a kind, wise teacher writes on the blackboard. Shiny apples are offered as tokens of respect and gratitude.

The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States—and they're right to, as test results confirm again and again.

But just as most Americans disapprove of congressional shenanigans while harboring some affection for their own representative, parents tend to say that their child's teacher is pretty good. Most people have mixed feelings about their own school days, but our national romance with teachers is deep and long-standing. Which is why the idea of kids staring at computers instead of teachers makes parents and politicians extremely nervous.

However, it's time to take online education seriously—because we've tried everything else. Education Secretary Arne Duncan debuted his Blueprint for Reform this month to mixed reviews, joining at least 30 years' worth of government officials who have promised that this time, honest, they're going to fix education. Even the reforms promoted by the much-ballyhooed federal Race to the Top funds, which are supposed to encourage innovative educational practices, offer mostly marginal changes to the status quo. In an early March speech on technology in education, Duncan touted $500 million in new federal spending over 10 years to develop post-secondary online courses—an area of online education already thriving without federal assistance—thus arriving at the dance 15 years late and an awful lot more than a dollar short.

Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn't taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions—which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members—are aligned against it.

So children continue to learn from blackboards and books—the kind made of dead trees! no hyperlinks!—rather than getting lessons the way they consume virtually all other information: online. Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it's like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of "Avatar" in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center's ArtsEdge site.

In the 2010 annual letter from his foundation—the biggest in the United States, with a $33 billion endowment—Bill Gates listed online education as one of his top priorities and rattled his pocket change in the direction of reform. He wrote: "Online learning can be more than lectures. Another element involves presenting information in an interactive form, which can be used to find out what a student knows and doesn't know."

Right now, other than the venerable pop quiz, teachers have very few tools to gauge just how many students are grasping a concept in real time and reshape the curriculum to meet their needs.

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses—39 percent of whom are minority students—score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students.

In his book on online education, "Disrupting Class," Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen estimates that half of all high school courses in the United States will be consumed over the Internet by 2019. But we have a long way to go to reach 50 percent. Seventeen percent of high school students nationwide took an online course for school last year; another 12 percent took a class for self-study. Many of these students, along with younger kids taking online classes, might be considered homeschooled, though that very concept is changing as they sign up with virtual schools connected to state systems.

Few people have a clear picture of what online education really looks like, which is one reason so many people are reluctant to consider what it has to offer. Learning online won't turn America into a nation of home-schooled nerds, sitting in their basements, keyboards clacking. And it doesn't mean handing your kids over to Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons" for the day.

Moving lesson planning and delivery online can provide students with more supervision, not less, says Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of "Disrupting Class." It would free teachers, Horn says, "to do hand-holding and mentoring, something which is pretty much impossible in the current model." After all, where is it written that the babysitter, disciplinarian, lecturer and evaluator must all be the same person? Or even that they all have to be in the same building?

Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls. The Virtual Virginia program focuses on offering Advanced Placement classes to every student in the state, bringing college-level courses to rural districts and inner-city Richmond, where high-level instruction is difficult to get. Rocketship Education, in San Jose, Calif., brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, cheap, modular space along with a small staff and hands their studies over to online curriculum for part of each day.

Online education has already become a boon for kids with special needs, the students least served by the traditional system. Education entrepreneur Tom Vander Ark launched Internet Academy, the first online K-12 establishment, in 1995 in part to serve kids with unorthodox education requirements, from serious athletes to children with health problems or learning disabilities.

One of the most successful areas of online education so far is helping kids who have fallen off the educational grid. Companies such as AdvancePath Academics scoop up students classified as unrecoverable by traditional schools and help them complete their education. Some dropout-recovery programs can be found in shopping malls and gyms.

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British teaching unions need to calm down and wise up

High dress standards improve behaviour — as good schools know

It’s that time of year again. Stony-faced belligerence, implausible allegations, wild sabre rattling, howls of pent-up anguish, cries of defiance searching for a target; yes, it’s the teaching unions’ conference season.

I like and admire teachers. I encourage my children to respect them. Granted, they have a tendency to grumble, to talk shop. Some can be prone to unworldliness, lacking insight into the world beyond the classroom.

But none of us is perfect. I think teaching a truly noble calling, among society’s most important. My parents, now retired, were schoolteachers. This is why I lament the public relations disaster inflicted annually on the profession — and state education — by the teaching unions’ conferences.

News bulletins are full of strike threats on any pretext, intemperate attacks on politicians, inspectors, examiners, bullying heads. Teachers come across as government-baiting, parent-hating, child-fearing lunatics spoiling for a fight, gathered only to agree how and when.

I know they come to let off steam, that they get carried away with conference rhetoric. Yet they don’t seem to grasp that the world is watching, and is aghast at what it sees.

This unmitigated folly must stop. Teachers I meet are not remotely like the tub-thumping conference militants. They must rescue the reputation of their profession from this annual charade. Here are five ways to do it.

• Move the conferences: the end of term is ridiculous — teachers are exhausted, snappy and at their worst. They should be in bed, certainly nowhere near a podium. Why not meet at the end of a holiday, when they have rested and calmed down?

• Merge the unions: having three is crazy, producing silly competitive behaviour and weakening teachers’ influence as ministers divide and rule. A single union would dilute the influence of the Trotskyites.

• Debate things of interest to parents: why wall-to-wall motions on workload, discrimination, pay? Why not discuss pedagogy, supported by research, expert speakers and classroom insights?

• Smarten up: jeans and Cuba Solidarity T-shirts won’t do, nor will sweatshirts, fleeces and rumpled woolies. High standards of dress improve behaviour — as we often hear from successful schools.

• Cheer up: teaching is a great job, with 71 per cent satisfied with their work, according to a YouGov survey for the National Union of Teachers, the bolshiest of the lot. So why is its conference a rage-fest? Where’s the joy, the pride, the professionalism?

All this would transform perceptions of teaching and rescue Easter from classroom militancy. Any takers?

SOURCE




British Conservatives kill off compulsory child sex education law

Plans for compulsory sex education in schools have been dropped in the pre-election “wash up” after being blocked by the Tories. The controversial measure would have ensured every 15-year-old had at least one year of sex education lessons. It was part of Ed Balls’ Children, Schools and Families Bill, but was shelved today in the last-minute rush to get legislation through before the election.

Mr Balls, the Schools Secretary, described the move as a “significant setback” which would deny many young people a balanced education.

But the Conservatives claimed it as a victory for the freedom of parents to withdraw their children from such lessons. They also blocked new rules that would have provided greater protection for children educated at home. At the moment Britain has among the most liberal laws in the developed world and does not require parents to register or be inspected.

Khyra Ishaq, the seven-year-old girl who starved to death at the hands of her mother and stepfather in Birmingham, was supposedly being home educated by them.

A report commissioned by the Government, which recommended a compulsory national registration scheme for home educating families, caused uproar among the vocal home-schooling lobby last year as an infringement of their rights. They won Tory support. Michael Gove, Mr Balls’ counterpart, said today the plans were “draconian”, and has ensured they are left out of the Bill.

In a letter to Mr Gove, Mr Balls said the Tories were putting the wellbeing of young people at risk, and voiced “deep regret” that key measures of the Bill were not supported.

“It is our very clear intention to ensure that all the measures you have rejected are included in a new bill in the first session of the new Parliament,” he said. “I am especially disappointed that, despite our conversation, you could not agree to make personal, social and health education statutory in all state-funded schools.

“There is widespread agreement that this is essential to prepare young people for adult life, and our reforms would ensure that all children receive at least one year of compulsory sex and relationship education.”

More HERE





7 April, 2010

Banning prayer in schools hurts public morality

I got the most pleasant of surprises at a funeral. The service had reached the point where an Old Testament passage had to be read. The one selected was the 23rd Psalm. As the woman reading it pronounced each word, I found myself following along. I didn't remember each and every sentence, but I remembered most of it.

I said along with the woman as she read, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

As the reading concluded, I sat in the pew and asked myself, "How did I remember that after all these years?"

My first memory of the 23rd Psalm is not from hearing it in a church, but in school. I distinctly remember hearing a Miss Pemberton in my kindergarten class. The year must have been 1956, maybe 1957. The 23rd Psalm was the Scripture reading of choice for most days; somehow, the repeated readings must have been ingrained in me.

Sitting in that pew earlier this year, I marveled at how I was able to remember the passage, and I pondered this question:

What harm did the reading of all those passages of the 23rd Psalm do to me? The answer is none at all. But one day past Easter in the year 2010, all of us -- even the ones who don't consider ourselves very religious -- might ask ourselves what harm has come from the 1962 Supreme Court decision that banned prayer and Scripture reading from the nation's public schools.

Now before you dismiss me as some born-again nut job on a religious rant, some clarification is in order. I'm a Roman Catholic, but not a very good one. I haven't been to confession in years and I attend Mass only sparingly. But I've listened to black senior citizens for years who swear that America went to hell in a handbasket once God or any mention of God was kicked out of public schools, with condoms being let in a short time later.

Ordinarily I would dismiss such talk as typical "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after the fact, therefore because of the fact) reasoning. This line of thinking is often flawed, but I believe the elders may be onto something this time.

They're not the only ones who've noticed. In late 2007, a group of black men traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia to hear the lame-duck mayor and police commissioner of that city talk. Both cities were trying to solve frighteningly high homicide numbers, with the victims mainly being young black men.

Both the then-mayor and then-police commissioner told the group that they'd been hearing from black Philadelphians that maybe the time had come to allow prayer and Scripture reading back in public schools. And these were two Democrats speaking, mind you. It's amazing what a high body count will do.

Those elderly black folks remember what America's black communities were like back in the days when we had school prayer. Yes, there was segregation. But there was also some kind of moral center.

Never would there have been a situation where a young mother could murder her 1-month-old son, bury him in a park, and some members of the community threaten the father for reporting the mother to police. That's exactly what happened to the father of the late Rajahnthon Haynie in Baltimore last month. There were actually people out to get the father for "snitching" on the mother.

It doesn't quite sound like a generation inculcated with values of "goodness and mercy," does it?

SOURCE




The Wall of Hate

by Mike Adams

This week, April 5th through 8th, my university is doing something really neat. A bunch of organizations – including the NAACP, PRIDE, and the Black Student Union – are sponsoring a “Breaking Down Hate” week. Since the planned events only run Monday through Thursday it isn’t really a “week”. Despite the preponderance of white people on our campus there doesn’t seem to be enough hate to keep the anti-hate people busy all the way through Friday.

The printed flier for the “Breaking Down Hate” almost-week talks about a thing called the “Wall of Hate,” which has been a part of our campus diversity movement for three years. The flier invites students to “share insensitive, intolerant, and hateful words that (they) feel should no longer be accepted in (the campus) community with the WALL OF HATE.” After students write down the words, they spray paint over them as a symbol of the eradication of hate.

I’ve made fun of the wall of hate in the past. But I’m not making fun of it anymore. That’s just hateful. This year, I’m going to the “wall of hate” all four days of “Breaking Down Hate” almost-week. In fact, I’m going twice each day to write down a hateful word. My “Great Eight Words of Hate” are listed below. Each is followed by the reason why I chose to write each word before covering it with spray paint:

Colored. Few people realize that the “C” in “NAACP” stands for “colored.” Where I come from, the term “colored” is racially insensitive and hateful. Therefore, I think anyone who uses that term is a hater. In fact, I think the NAACP is potentially a hate group in need of a close second look by the IRS. I’m even considering writing the Southern Poverty Law Center to put them on notice of another potential hate group.

PRIDE. I read somewhere that pride cometh before a fall. And this group – People Recognizing Individual Differences Exist (PRIDE) – is a very proud bunch. They think it’s a great idea that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) declassified homosexuality as a mental illness (many years ago). But they celebrated the victory by coining the term “homophobia.” This was meant to say that everyone who disagrees with them on the issue of homosexuality has a phobia, or irrational fear. Could it be that PRIDE has an irrational fear of intellectual diversity? Why can’t they just recognize that individual differences of opinion about homosexuality exist?

Black. I really don’t like the term “black.” It’s so antiquated. Someday it will be considered as hateful as “colored.” I prefer the term “African American.” And I think the Black Student Union should change its name to something not only more sensitive but more accurate. Personally, I prefer the Union of African Students for Segregation (U-ASS). In my view, if you need to segregate yourself on the basic of race U are an ASS. And you are probably a racist.

Hate. I really hate the word “hate.” Whenever I hear that word it is coming from someone who is full of hate. For example, I was greeted by a thirty-foot sign last year at UMass (The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which is not to be confused with U-ASS). When I asked who made the sign – which spelled my name with a “Z” – I was told it was the “Coalition Against Hate.” I rest my case. And I propose a coalition of un-bathed communists who are so stoned they can’t spell “Adams.”

Gay. Let’s just use the term “sodomite.” They are way too angry to be called “gay.” Plus, I’d like to be able to once again use the term “gay” without having people think about sodomy. For example, “Writing down a word and then immediately spray-painting over it? That’s gay!”

Choice. When I hear the word “choice” I know some feminist is about to kill a baby so she can increase her sex partners without decreasing her income. So I choose not to hear that word anymore.

Communism. The communists killed over 100,000,000 people in the 20th Century. That’s a big number. In fact, it’s 1/15,000 as big as this year’s federal budget deficit measured in dollars. So let’s replace this word with something else like “Social Justice.”

Tenure. Tenure is a really ugly word. After professors get it they aren’t as nice and spend most of their time sitting around and thinking of things to do, which are not related to the reason they were hired in the first place. Like writing down “hateful” words, spray painting over them, and calling it “progress.”

SOURCE




Pre-election turnaround by the Leftist government: British teachers 'should use force to control violent pupils'

Teachers should use force to break up fights, stop pupils wrecking classrooms and prevent children disrupting sporting events, according to the Government. Guidance issued to schools in England warns them against having “no contact” policies, despite fears staff can be sued for restraining children.

It said the use of physical force was vital to keep order in lessons and stop the most unruly pupils running amok.

The document said that schools did not need parents’ permission before employing force or searching pupils for banned items such as weapons, alcohol, illegal drugs and stolen property.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, presented the guidelines at the NASUWT annual conference in Birmingham on Monday. It will be seen as an attempt to present Labour as the guardians of traditional discipline in schools. The move follows recommendations last week that headteachers should take parents of unruly pupils to court if they repreatedly fail to keep children in line.

But the Conservatives insisted the Government had eroded teachers’ powers to enforce good behaviour since 1997, suggesting as many as half of schools now had some form of “no contact” policy.

Mr Balls said: "Teachers have the powers they need to manage bad behaviour but I am aware that many fear retribution if they were to forcibly remove an unruly pupil. This guidance aims to stop teachers being afraid of using the powers they have when necessary.

"Myths that schools should have 'no contact policies', that teachers shouldn't be able to protect and defend themselves and others, will be dispelled by this new guidance which makes clear that in some situations, teachers have the powers and protection to use force."

The guidance provides teachers with a list of situations where physical force may be necessary. This includes when pupils are:

* *Attacking a teacher or classmate

* *Fighting and causing risk of injury to themselves or others

* *Committing – or on the verge of committing – deliberate damage to property

* *At risk of injury through “rough play” or misusing dangerous materials

* *Attempting to leave class or school at unauthorised times

* *Persistently misbehaving in a way that disrupts sporting events, school trips or lessons.

Teachers are told to first “engage the pupil in a calm and measured tone”, making it clear that behaviour is unacceptable.

It said “reasonable” physical force should be used as a last resort to control escalating bad behaviour.

Teachers should be trained in retraining techniques and adapt them to individual situations, the guidance said.

But it warned schools against employing certain moves that presented an “unacceptable risk” of injury, including the “nose distraction technique”, which involves a sharp jab under the nose, and the “double basket hold”, where pupils' arms are held across their chest.

Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, said; ““Ed Balls is wrong to say we don’t have a discipline problem in our schools – over 1,000 pupils a day are being excluded for assault and abuse.

“A key reason for this is teachers are afraid to tackle violence and disruption in the classroom – one study found that over half of schools now have some form of ‘no touch’ policy that prevents teachers from restraining troublemakers.

“Republishing existing guidance is not going to solve this problem.”

SOURCE





6 April, 2010

Post Racial "affirmative action"?

Perhaps it was unfair to expect that the election of Barack Obama would “bend the curve” on hundreds of years of racial attitudes and the politics that developed around those attitudes. Then again, for a man that entered office with a promise to calm the seas and heal the sick doing “post racial” should have been a piece of cake.

Moreover, with all the talk of “hope and change” it was not outrageous to imagine that there might be some positive change in the tone surrounding discussions of race. Certainly it was not unreasonable to imagine that at the very least this President- who was going to win back the worlds respect -- would not stoke the fires of racial enmity here at home. Well, as my mother used to say: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Instead of bringing Americans together, this President is proving to be the most divisive and racially polarizing president in recent memory. And France still isn’t all that crazy about us....

Now comes news that the Obama Justice department has filed an amicus brief supporting a return to the use of racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin.

Following the 1996 decision in Hopwood v Texas the University of Texas was forced to find race-neutral means to increase the enrollment of minority students on its campus. The school began granting automatic admissions for students graduating in the top 10% of their high school senior class.

In 2003 the Supreme Court in Grutter v Bollinger held that some use of race is permissible only if race neutral methods fail and then they must be narrowly tailored. The University of Texas chose to hold onto the top 10% program and return to the use of race preferences for students falling outside that percentage.

In 2008 Abigail Fisher, the lead plaintiff in Fisher v University of Texas, graduated in the top 12% of her high school class and was denied admission to the university. Her lawyers argue that the race-neutral 10% plan has been successful and therefore any use of race preferences oversteps the dictates prescribed by the Supreme Court and is unlawful.

What is of particular interest is that the administration has gone beyond simply filing a brief in support of existing law. The President has extended the argument beyond what The University of Texas applies and the Supreme Court envisioned in Grutter and endorses the use of racial preferences in all "educational institutions"---K-12, undergraduate, and graduate. As Roger Clegg, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity points out, “The Supreme Court has never found there to be a compelling interest in the former instance---nor, for example, in post-doctorates for chemistry---and it is aggressive and wrong to argue that, because the Court found there to be compelling educational benefits in diversity at the University of Michigan law school, therefore any educational institution can make that claim.”

In the battle against discrimination Obama seeks to take us backward. This administration does not envision an America moving away from preferences, but a nation of increased preferences based on race! Just as unfounded cries of racism lead to an increase in racial enmity, racial preferences create racial hostility.

SOURCE




British teachers threaten industrial action (walkout) to keep troublemakers out of class

Long overdue

School teachers have threatened industrial action to keep dozens of “unteachable” children out of the classroom, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. Staff across England and Wales have refused to teach troublemakers after they were allowed to remain in school despite brandishing knives, attacking staff and disrupting lessons.

In most cases, teachers threaten to take legal action after attempts to expel yobs were overturned by governors or independent appeals panels. Dossiers published by the two biggest classroom unions show staff refused to teach pupils on 37 occasions over a 12 month period.

In one case, a 12-year-old boy was permanently barred from a school in Essex for carrying a knife, but was allowed back into lessons by an appeals panel. Members of the National Union of Teachers balloted for industrial action – refusing to teach – and he was eventually moved to another school.

A seven-year-old in East Sussex was expelled for assaulting a member of staff – the latest in a string of “violent and dangerous behaviour” reported by teachers – but governors refused to ratify the decision.

Staff at a Gloucestershire school threatened to walk out after an 11-year-old accused of “intimidating” pupils with a butter knife was allowed to remain in school by the governing body.

The NASUWT union refused to teach a 14-year-old boy after he sexually assaulted a classroom assistant and attacked a teacher. Governors overturned the head’s attempt to expel the pupil.

Union leaders said the cases constituted a “deeply worrying” assault on teachers’ authority.

It comes as Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, prepares to outline new rules on Monday giving teachers more power to physically restrain violent pupils.

Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said: “If a child has really crossed the line, it is very difficult to accommodate them back in school as it is seen as a challenge to the whole institution. “This is a serious problem because it undermines the authority of a school and potentially harms the education of other children.”

Chris Keates, NASUWT general secretary, said: “Governors seem to be taking the line of least resistance to placate the minority of parents rather than to protect the majority of pupils and their staff. “If governors do not back headteachers' professional judgment in these matters then staff and school leaders cannot manage behaviour with confidence.”

The issue represents the latest in a series of concerns over teachers being undermined. At the weekend, unions warned that pupils were regularly being allowed to rate their own teachers in the classroom and interview staff applying for jobs.

In one case, it was claimed children at a school in Kent had been handed iPhones to enable them to pass instant judgments on teachers' performance to senior staff.

A head's decision to expel pupils is reviewed by governors at each school. If the decision is upheld, children and parents can also appeal to an independent panel formed by the local council. The Conservatives have promised to scrap appeals panels which they claim undermine the authority of schools.

The NUT’s latest annual report – published at its annual conference in Liverpool – show that members refused to teach children on 28 occasions in 2008.

Attempts to expel children were overturned by governors 10 times and by an independent panel on nine occasions. In other cases, the union suggested that headteachers themselves failed to take a firm line against troublemakers. The situation was usually resolved without taking formal action, normally with a “managed move” to another school.

Figures published by the NASUWT show nine children were the subject of a ballot for industrial action in 12 months. Five were expelled by heads only to be reinstated by governing bodies.

On one occasion, the NASUWT said a five-year-old boy threatened to stab a member of staff with a pair of scissors and threw chairs in his reception class.

Incidents reported by the NUT included a 10-year-old expelled from a school in Manchester for a “serious assault” on another pupil, only to be reinstated by an appeals panel.

In another case, teachers at a Cardiff comprehensive threatened to walk out after a 15-year-old was expelled for making false allegations against a colleague, but was allowed back into school following an independent appeal.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “We are absolutely clear that heads should not hesitate to permanently exclude the worst-behaved pupil, when other sanctions have failed. "The vast majority of exclusions don't even go to appeal and where they do, it's clear independent panels are backing heads taking tough action.

"It's difficult to argue that schools are being undermined when just 60 out of over 8,000 pupils permanently excluded in 2007/08 were reinstated to their original schools following appeal - with the proportion halving in the last six years.

"No appeal will make a substantial difference where heads have gone through the proper process. No exclusions should be overturned purely on technicalities and we've told panels that no pupil expelled for violence should ever win an appeal, without very robust reasons.

"We make no apology for having independent appeals panels. Heads associations and our chief behaviour expert, Sir Alan Steer, are clear that heads would end up being dragged through the courts, if parents weren't given a fair right of appeal."

SOURCE




A tribute to many years of "look and see" literacy education in Australia

Phonics was abandoned decades ago -- in a typical act of Leftist destructiveness -- but very recently seems to have staged a partial comeback

An astonishing four million Australian workers [Note: the total Australian population is around 22 million, of whom roughly half would be workers -- so the percentage involved here is enormous] have poor language, literacy and numeracy skills and cannot understand the meaning of some everyday words.

And their inability to following basic instructions and warnings is causing a safety and productivity nightmare. Most are in labour-intensive and low-level service jobs.

Among the terms that are too difficult for some workers are "hearing protection" and "personal protective equipment is required", according to a report by Skills Australia for the Rudd Government.

The words that many do not understand include: immediately, authorised, procedure, deliberate, isolation, mandatory, recommended, experience, required and optional.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout told the Herald Sun 46 per cent of workers had substandard literacy skills and 53 per cent had numeracy below the expected benchmark.

"It's really worrying when people can't read or write," Ms Ridout said. "It contributes to workplace safety problems. You've got to have a lot of pictures to promote safety and it contributes to inefficient practices and mistakes. That means time is wasted and work has to be repeated."

Ms Ridout, a board member of Skills Australia, said some workers could not read and understand standard operating procedures, which led to incorrect use of machinery. They could not read drawings and were drilling the wrong-sized holes or cutting steel incorrectly.

"These people are not able to function successfully in a modern workforce," she said. "But it is not just the workers. One company found a supervisor couldn't read or write properly and got a big shock," she said.

Ms Ridout called on the Government to introduce a national adult literacy and numeracy scheme in next month's Budget to provide resources and teaching support. "This problem is caused by bad education," she said. "These people haven't been picked up when they've fallen."

Other terms that were too difficult for some workers included sheeted material, company policies, gross misconduct and disciplinary action.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has nominated improving productivity as a crucial plank towards coping with the pressures of an ageing population. Ms Ridout said poor workplace literacy and numeracy was a roadblock to that goal.

The Government recently provided $50 million to create more training places for businesses to increase skills that are in high demand.

But Ms Ridout said it did not help workers who had trouble with the basics. "We can't lift skills if some workers don't have the basic skills to build on," she said. "All these people should be given a chance to participate but if they can't read and write and add up, it's going to be very tough for them."

SOURCE





5 April, 2010

Vouchers Do Not Harm Public Schools

Opponents of school choice worry that public schools will suffer when competition is introduced. They cite the diversion of money away from public schools and the “creaming” of the best students into private schools, leaving the neediest children even worse off than before. But how realistic is this scenario?

A new report from the National Center for Policy Analysis marshals powerful evidence that school voucher programs do not hurt students who remain in public schools, and they may even help.

From 1998 to 2008, the Edgewood Voucher Program (EVP) offered private school tuition support to all families in the Edgewood school district, which is located in a low-income section of San Antonio, Texas. Since EVP was privately funded, no government money was diverted from public schools. However, large numbers of students did leave the public schools for private ones. EVP serves as a case study, therefore, on whether public school students suffer when some of their peers transfer away.

The answer is a firm “no.” Test scores and graduation rates went up in the Edgewood school district during the course of EVP. Whether these gains were directly caused by EVP is difficult to ascertain, since vouchers were open to all comers rather than subject to a randomized lottery that would have provided the “gold standard” experiment.

Nonetheless, the empirical debate is over whether EVP’s effect on public schools was zero or positive. When the progress of Edgewood public schools is compared to similar districts that had no voucher program, the data do not plausibly support any negative effect of EVP.

With school choice increasingly looking like a “no lose” proposition for private and public school students alike, will the Obama administration take notice?

SOURCE




Britain: Children running the schools?

Pupil 'spies' are attempting to rid schools of strict teachers by sabotaging their promotions and snitching on their lessons, it has been claimed. They are being allowed to rate members of staff through observing their teaching, filling in anonymous questionnaires and even sitting on interview panels.

The Government has put greater emphasis on schools allowing the 'voice' of youngsters to be heard in recent years. In Ofsted forms, school heads need to illustrate how the views of pupils are taken into account. From September, headteachers will have a legal duty to consult pupils on major changes to school policy.

Now teachers say that increased pupil power means youngsters 'seem to be running schools' and feel no guilt about 'putting the boot in'.

Some pupils are complaining about strict teachers and ruining their chances of internal promotion by sitting on interview panels. They are also using their positions on these panels to humiliate staff by asking silly questions such as: 'If you could be on Britain's Got Talent, what would your talent be?' Headteachers stress that pupils only make recommendations on interview panels and their views are useful.

But the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers has warned of widespread abuse following a survey of more than 200 members. At its annual conference in Birmingham today, teachers will call for ballots of industrial action to stop 'inappropriate use' of the 'student voice'.

One teacher told how he was 'culled' from the interview process for a new job because the pupils on the panel thought he was 'too strict'. The teacher said: 'I felt upset that two out of three of the adults liked me enough but that the pupils had that much sway.'

Another claimed: 'Before you know it, students are choosing to keep "easy-going" teachers who let them do as they like and getting rid of the more strict ones.'

Other teachers complained about the unprofessional questions that pupils ask on the interview panel. They included: Can you sing your favourite song? What fancy dress character would you dress up in to go to school and why? What rewards/trips would you provide for pupils?

The survey also found some bizarre reasons why pupils voted against teachers on interview panels. One teacher took a snowboard along to impress a group of five to seven-year-olds as part of the interview but failed to get the job. The youngsters preferred two other applicants who brought in balloons and a didgeridoo. Another teacher lost out for supposedly looking like 'Humpty Dumpty'; another because he didn't allow the pupils to email him at home.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: 'Children are not small adults. They are in schools to learn, not to teach or manage the school.'

SOURCE




Student arrested over desk doodle to sue

No school discipline so police have to be used -- in a gross misuse of authority and resources

A 12-year-old New York schoolgirl who was arrested and handcuffed for doodling on her classroom desk is suing police for US$1 million, the New York Daily News reported. Lawyers for Alexa Gonzalez claim police used excessive force and violated her rights in the February incident at Junior High School 190 in the Queens neighbourhood.

Alexa's mother, Moraima Camacho, told the newspaper the schoolgirl scribbled "I love my friends Abby and Faith" - in washable green ink when teachers pounced on her and dragged her to the dean's office.

Police were called and officers cuffed and arrested the girl. At the police station she was handcuffed to a pole for more than two hours, according to the lawsuit against the police and education departments.

Miss Gonzalez said she broke down as she was led out of the school in handcuffs. "I started crying, like, a lot," Gonzalez told the New York Daily News. "I made two little doodles... It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary."

New York City officials have agreed better judgement should have been used by the arresting officers but could not be reached immediately for comment.

"The whole situation has been a nightmare," Camacho said.

Alexa was also was suspended from the school when an offending item - Wite-Out - was found in her pockets, but the suspension was later lifted.

SOURCE





4 April, 2010

Opposition to tough education reforms in Florida

Teachers who don't get results will be fired -- as employees in any other field would be

Sweeping education changes including a plan to end tenure for teachers and enact merit pay may have won approval in the Florida Senate, but it hasn't won lead sponsor Sen. John Thrasher points with educators and school advocates in his home county. The word "frustrating" comes up a lot when talking to people about the education changes.

Two weeks ago Senate Bill 6 whipped through the Senate. This week a similar House bill is set for debate on Monday and passage is expected.

However, Thrasher didn't campaign on the school issue, hold town meetings or talk with St. Johns County school board officials, teacher unions or education advocate groups to get input on the issue and that's left many feeling blind sided. It's also a surprise for a county whose schools are ranked first in the state and whose school leader was named superintendent of the year.

Thrasher has said anyone who wanted to have input got the chance. Others disagree. "This was never discussed with the superintendent, the staff or anyone on the school board," said St. Johns County School Board chair Bill Mignon, who sees the bill as one that will "pit teachers against the school board."

Like others Mignon finds the bill "political" and worries what it will mean for public education and local control. "I think the biggest frustration I and others educators face is that we weren't part of the plan; we were never asked to provide any input. It's almost like we didn't have the ability to make rational decisions," he said. "But we're the ones in the trenches, the people who have to make this work."

St. Johns County School Superintendent Joe Joyner said Thrasher never contacted him. "I think there is some room for discussion about merit-based pay, but I'm more talking in terms of enhancement as opposed to making it 50 percent of a teacher's pay," he said. Like others he has a number of questions about the bill and what the long term costs and effects including fairness and assessments will be.

District 1 school board member Bev Slough, former head of the state school board association, echoes those concerns. Thrasher, she said, "talked to nobody locally." Among the problems is that the bill "effectively does away with collective bargaining" and "really strips local control."

While she doesn't like the bill or what it will do, she will be "real surprised" if it doesn't clear the House because "there is so much pressure from House leadership to pass it."

But, Slough said, grassroots efforts have made a difference in the past. Teachers statewide turned out for rallies on Friday, waving protest signs and seeking to increase public awareness. The Florida Education Association is rallying efforts statewide to take the fight to Tallahassee for hearings on Monday.

Debby Etheredge, president of the St. Johns Education Association, wasn't consulted about the bills, but she's hearing plenty from local teachers who are concerned about what the evaluations and tests will mean. "It's not really based on what the teacher is doing, it's based on what the children are doing," she said.

The plan means more tests and more pressure, she said. "(Some students) have enough on them, they're about to explode," she said.

Teachers argue time in school is just part of what is involved in children learning. There is also the home life. Broken homes, family arguments and financial pressures all can contribute to potential learning problems. There's also the question of whether a family considers education important and how supportive it is.

Leadership in the Florida Legislature has made the bills a priority. In an interview last month, Thrasher said the issue didn't just come out of nowhere as many have said. It was brought up in last year's session, but didn't get anywhere. In October of last year, it was among the items Florida legislative leaders decided they wanted passed, he said.

More here




British politicians warn over ‘shocking decline’ of school trips

Pupils have increasingly been denied the chance to visit museums, galleries, theatres and the countryside in recent years, it was claimed. In a damning report, the Commons schools select committee warned that the likelihood of children enjoying any green space at all had “halved in a generation”. One expert told MPs that the drop – combined with parental fears over child safety – meant many young people were becoming “entombed” in the home instead of being allowed out to play.

The conclusions were made despite a Government drive to increase the number of school trips. Recently, ministers have issued new guidance to teachers attempting to cut health and safety red tape as well as launching a kite mark to accredit organisations hosting school parties.

But MPs insisted that the measures had failed to increase the take-up – suggesting that a sharp drop reported five years ago had continued. In a document published on Thursday, they said that each pupil should have an entitlement to at least one school trip every term.

Barry Sheerman, the committee’s Labour chairman, said: "The steep decline in the amount of time children are spending outside is shocking. “Research has shown that the likelihood of a child visiting any green space has halved in a generation. "It is vital for the Government to make a commitment to a serious funding increase to ensure that all children have opportunities to visit the wealth of museums and galleries, and the natural environment of the English countryside, which are at our disposal. “

MPs quoted a recent survey by the Countryside Alliance that showed only around half of six- to 15-year-olds go on a trip to the countryside with their school. This has been coupled with a more general decline in the amount of time that children spend outside, the committee said.

Other research by Natural England has found that the likelihood of a child visiting any green space at all has halved in a generation. Almost two-thirds of children played indoors at home more often than any other place, it found.

MPs cited a number of reasons for the decline in school trips. The report said that that funding to support education outside the classroom had been “derisory”. Since 2005, just £4.5 million has been allocated, including £2.5m on a single residential initiative, it was claimed. By comparison, MPs found that £40m has been spent on one scheme to boost the amount of singing in schools.

The report also said that teachers' fears over “health and safety litigation, making them reluctant to offer trips and visits, have not been effectively addressed”.

In a further conclusion, the study said that teacher training continued to pay “scant attention” to giving new staff members the skills and confidence to lead outings.

MPs also blamed rules that effectively barred heads from asking teachers to cover for absent staff. Schools are supposed to pay for supply teachers instead of ordering existing staff members to step in when colleagues are leading trips. The move was introduced in September to ease teachers’ workloads.

But the select committee was told that many schools are simply cancelling outings altogether instead of raiding stretched budgets to pay for supply staff.

Attractions and study centres reported a “significant reduction” in the number of bookings following changes to teachers’ contracts imposed last year.

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3 April, 2010

Teachers Unions: Don't Work Too Hard!

Jaime Escalante -- the math teacher who became famous for teaching even the poorest kids calculus in a failing Los Angeles school -- died this week at age 78. His story shows not just what can be accomplished by great teachers, but also what damage unions can do.

Escalante got national attention when 14 out of 15 of his students at a low-ranking Los Angeles school passed the Advanced Placement Calculus exam. By 1987, 73 students from the school passed the AP calculus exam -- more than all but six other schools in the country. After a movie about his success, called "Stand and Deliver", was released in 1988, Escalante became an icon for showing that even the most disadvantaged kids could learn complex subjects if given the right instruction.

I would think that any reasonable education system would reward Mr. Escalante. But this is a unionized public school we're talking about. As Reason Magazine reported several years ago:

One assistant principal threatened to have him dismissed, on the grounds that he was coming in too early (a janitor had complained), keeping students too late, and raising funds without permission.

Can you imagine if a private school operated like that? Sadly, the story gets worse.

After Stand and Deliver was released, Escalante became an overnight celebrity... This attention aroused feelings of jealousy. In his last few years at Garfield, Escalante even received threats and hate mail. In 1990 he lost the math department chairmanship, the position that had enabled him to [teach students from 9th grade on, so that they would have adequate preparation once they got to his calculus class.]

But Escalante kept teaching, sometimes with classes of 50 students or more.

Calculus grew so popular at Garfield that classes grew beyond the 35-student limit set by the union contract. Some had more than 50 students. Escalante would have preferred to keep the classes below the limit had he been able to do so without either denying calculus to willing students or using teachers who were not up to his high standards. Neither was possible, and the teachers union complained about Garfield's class sizes. Rather than compromise, Escalante moved on.

School officials were unapologetic. One official said: "We were doing fine before Mr. Escalante left, and we're doing fine after." The result? Over the next five years, the number of students at the school passing AP calculus tests plummeted from 85 a year to just 11.

It is impossible to record all the innovations that unions have destroyed. But unions are clearly one reason that even though America spends more money on education than other countries, American students score near the bottom on international tests.

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British children in crowded classes

This is just the usual teacher nonsense. Good teachers can easily handle much larger classes than what teacher unions push for. There is a case for small classes among the very young but not otherwise

Children are still being taught in “hideously overcrowded” classrooms after 13 years of Labour, according to teachers. Some pupils are being asked to share classes with 35 other children in a move that threatens to undermine education standards, it was claimed. The National Union of Teachers said “reducing class sizes” should be the number one priority for any incoming Government.

In 1997, ministers pledged to cut classes for five- to seven-year-olds. Under current legislation, schools are banned from teaching infants – Key Stage 1 pupils – in lessons of more than 30.

Speaking at the union’s annual conference, Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said it was hoped that cuts to classes for the very youngest pupils would filter through to older year groups. But she said many children were stuck in lessons of “34, 35, or 36”.

“There are still classes that are hideously overcrowded,” she said. “We cannot say [ministers] have not fulfilled their pledge on Key Stage 1 classes, but that was never enough and the aspiration that this would simply roll on through has not happened.”

Almost six in 10 NUT members responding to a union survey said that reducing class sizes should be the top priority for the Government – irrespective of the outcome of the general election. Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary, said that cuts to school budgets in some areas meant primary school classes were being merged.

He cited one school in Gloucestershire that had been forced to put children in a lesson of 36. “Pupil numbers have been falling so they have had to combine two smaller classes into a class of 36 because they have not got the money,” he said. “Clearly that damages the education of those children.”

The union has already launched a campaign demanding that the average class size is cut to 20 by the end of the decade.

Figures last month showed at least 210 state primary school teachers were regularly leading lessons of at least 41 children last year. In addition, around one-in-eight pupils in England were in classes of more than 30, it was revealed.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "Over the last 10 years we have massively increased the number of adults teaching children. “Over 98 per cent of infant classes are under the statutory limit and the average size is 26.2.

“We expect local authorities and schools to take their legal responsibility to limit class sizes very seriously. There can be no excuses for any infant class that is unlawfully over the legal limit.”

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Helicopter parents not doing enough to let children fail

Comment from Australia

THE belief that regular praise will improve the self-esteem of students has backfired, with educators urging over-anxious parents to let their children fail so they can learn from their mistakes.

Parents were also doing too much for their children who were becoming less resilient and unable to cope with failure. Some were even too scared to put up their hand in class and risk giving the wrong answer.

As new research shows that members of Generation Y are entering the workforce with an inflated sense of their abilities, principals are warning "helicopter parents" against putting too much pressure on children to be successful, which could discourage them from risking failure.

Rod Kefford, the headmaster of Barker College, has warned: "We are creating a generation of very fearful learners and the quality of our intellectual life will suffer as a result."

Today's students are let down lightly by teachers and wrapped in cotton wool by some parents. But in the 1960s, it was not uncommon for teachers to tell students bluntly that they had given a wrong answer. "Then someone invented the concept of self-esteem," Dr Kefford said. "In some ways it has been the most damaging educational concept that has ever been conceived.

"We couldn't do anything that would upset or harm the self-esteem of students, which was very fragile, we were led to believe … That is when we stopped our proper work in the character formation in young people. If we are serious about building resilience, we have to let them fail. It is only through our failings in the learning process that we learn anything." He said schools needed to give children the confidence to risk failure to encourage more creative thinking.

"[Through] this fear we have of ever allowing them to fail, we are selling them short as human beings and as future adults," he said. One of the first empirical studies on generational differences in work values shows Generation Y or the "millennials" (born between 1982 and 1999) are entering the workforce overconfident and with a sense of entitlement. The research, led by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University and published in the Journal of Management, shows this generation wants money and the status of a prestigious job without putting in long hours. When they do not get the marks they expect at university or rise quickly enough in their jobs, they turn into quitters.

"More and more students are reaching university not knowing how to do things for themselves. Parents think they are helping young people by doing things for them but they are actually making them less independent," Professor Twenge said.

"It is now common for parents and teachers to tell children, 'you are special' and 'you can be anything you want to be'." While such comments are meant to encourage students and raise their self-esteem, experts say they can inflate students' egos.

"Feeling special often means the expectation of special treatment," she said. "Your parents might think you're special but the rest of the world might not. This can be a difficult adjustment."

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2 April, 2010

Is our children learning?

Excerpt from a very pessimistic REVIEW of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education" by Diane Ravitch. Review by Peter Wood. The reviewer seems to ignore that kids DID once learn more than they do today.

I graduated in the late '50s from a small and undistinguished Australian country school with a knowledge of Latin grammar, German Lieder and a nodding acquaintance with poets from Homer through Chaucer, through Tennyson to G.M. Hopkins. I also learnt enough physics to see how transparently false Al Gore's global warming scare was. My son graduated from a good private school recently knowing virtually nothing of that. But he is now working on his Ph.D. in mathematics so it is not a shortage of ability that left him so uneducated.

Most children take education seriously when they see that it has some urgency in the larger culture. In America today, no one feels particularly abashed by not knowing stuff. “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” asks the popular Fox TV show. “So what if I’m not?” is the implied answer. It is OK for adults not to know the difference between the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Battle of the Bulge. We know that’s just “book knowledge” and could Google it if we really needed to find out.

Mark Bauerlein struck this chord in The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2008), but he may have been too generous to generations past. America has a long tradition of adult dumbness, or at least numbness to the kinds of knowledge that don’t bear directly on earning a buck. “History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford told the Chicago Tribune in 1916.

Our whole land-grant university system is laid on the foundations of a Civil War congressman, Justin Morrill of Vermont, who saw no need to teach the liberal arts. America’s most distinctive contribution to philosophy is the get-to-the-bottom-line school called pragmatism. Huck Finn was not alone when he reflected on the prospect of being “sivilized” by Aunt Sally and chose instead to “light out for the territory.”

If we chose to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into schooling, America might well do a much better job of it—but that is a highly unlikely choice for Americans to make. As a people, we are just not that interested in the tedious work of learning or teaching things that don’t appear to have direct application. We expect from schools more in the way of affirmation of popular conceits than the slow building up of knowledge.

A great many Americans actually want schools that promote faddish ideologies, though, of course, dressed up as cutting-edge insights. Right now, one of the most popular teaching videos in the country is a crudely anti-capitalist, pro-sustainability video, The Story of Stuff. We want schools that promote equality, which has come to mean mingling as much as possible the talented with the untalented and the enthusiastic with the bored. We want diversity. We want creativity. But we have never been of a single mind whether we actually want education.

Ravitch offers some terrific chapters on school-reform efforts in New York City and San Diego. These alone make the book worth reading, for they dispel forever the idea that well-meaning businessmen with all the institutional freedom and funding they could dream of can actually make much of a dent in America’s educational lassitude.

Ravitch’s critique of NCLB mostly hits home, too. President George W. Bush won support for his signature program by decoupling “standards” from content. States were required to test students frequently and report their progress, but individual states were free to establish their own standards. This became an invitation to aim low: you can’t miss when you are shooting at the ground. Schools also quickly figured out that the way to deal with a regime of testing was to establish their own counter-regime of “teach to the test.”

Hence, as Ravitch and many before her have pointed out, schools across the country sacrificed a balanced curriculum and thoughtful pedagogy to concentrate on teaching students how to score well on multiple-choice exams in reading and math. Ravitch is especially deadly on the rank impossibility that NCLB supporters had to profess: that by 2014 all students in all schools will be “proficient in reading and mathematics.” Or else what?

Ravitch remains, as she has always been, a good advocate of her ideas. She is least convincing, however, in her newfound defense of teachers’ unions and her turnabout on charter schools, which she now sees as draining away the more talented and motivated students from public schools. They may well do that. But I don’t see a compelling case that the students should sacrifice their only opportunity to get a halfway decent education just to advance the cause of classroom equality with kids who don’t care, kids who lack ability, and kids who haven’t been able to surmount the disorganized homes and culturally impoverished backgrounds that life has dealt them. We do indeed need to help these kids, but a one-size-fits-all public-school system hardly seems the answer.

“Accountability” has been the watchword of a reform movement centered on the not implausible idea that at the root of school ineptitude are many teachers, principals, and other administrators who do poor work year in and year out without ever facing significant professional consequences. They are protected by unions, by bureaucratic inertia, and by a school culture that fosters intellectual laziness.

The accountability movement attempts to rescue schools from this miasma by rewarding teachers whose students excel and punishing those whose students don’t. Ravitch’s most dramatic reversal is her change of heart on accountability, which she now sees as essentially a business concept misapplied to schooling. Students are not products to be quality-controlled, and teaching cannot be stuffed into accountability formulas without destroying the fabric of education.

There is certainly something to this. The widget-factory approach of some accountability-inspired reformers is deeply unappealing. Moreover, schooling really is a distinctive human activity with its own logic. Conflating it with other institutions inevitably leads to confusion. But the accountability mavens with whom Ravitch now parts company do have some powerful points of their own.

Our schools are chockfull of teachers who, as graduates of ed schools, possess thin knowledge of the subjects they teach, are hostile to the civilization they are supposed to transmit, and are steeped in the nonsense of progressive pedagogy. It was bad enough when this meant teachers earnestly believed children are natural-born dynamos of intellectual inquiry. These days it means something even worse: that teachers should be eagerly promoting race and gender politics and the claptrap of leftist “social justice.” If accountability is a deadening doctrine in one sense, it is in the eyes of many Americans a way to constrain teachers from doing still worse. Ravitch is silent on this score.

Ravitch at several points smiles on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as the one great exception in an era of educational incompetence. In the 1990s, Massachusetts developed and implemented school curriculum frameworks that were far and away the most rigorous in the country and that vaulted the state to the top of national standards.

I’ll immodestly own that I played a small part in writing those frameworks. But it is more to my point that Massachusetts now has a governor elected with the support of the teachers’ unions who is doing everything he can to compromise and eliminate that reform. At some level, Americans just can’t stand to have excellent schools; when we get too close to having them, we come up with an excuse for undoing them. As Kipling reminds us, “The burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire.”

It is not that we want to relax into a state of complete natural ignorance. We just value some things more than we value schooling. The reformers are to be honored for wanting to change the equation in favor of more people knowing more important stuff. Many of the reformers, as Ravitch shows, have blind spots. All of them underestimate the difficulty. Ravitch herself, I suspect, still does. But she has made a useful reality-based contribution to the conversation.

My own view is that America will never be as good at schooling as some other nations that are more profoundly attached to learning for its own sake and have the benefit of being proud rather than ashamed of their cultural inheritance. We would do better for ourselves if we chose to emphasize a little more the thrill of outstanding intellectual ability and a little less the solace of multiculturalism and leveling equality.

We do breed a certain kind of exceptional student in our public schools—usually one who is ill at ease with the school itself and has by an early age diverged into lonely or geeky individualism. Our future scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and culture creators typically shape themselves against what the schools have to offer. I suspect we could do better by them—but then, we might have to give up some of that utopian dream in which all students can be proficient, and everybody gets to dance.

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The profit motive has a place in the classroom

If businesses can help more children to learn we should let them make money – and hire and fire teachers

During a particularly fractious debate about schools reform, a Gordon person once said to a Tony person: “Delivering an education isn’t like delivering a pizza, you know.” “Ah no, it’s not,” replied the Tony person, sagely, “but it might be rather like making one.”

Actually, education isn’t remotely like either making or delivering a pizza. You could go so far as to say that education has got nothing to do with pizzas at all. The exchange does, all the same, contain two insights into education policy, one about the past, the other about the future.

What a tragedy that two intelligent people could have such a stupid conversation in public. This is the standard of argument you get when the two principals, for whom the pizza warriors were agents, are having an altogether more fundamental fight — a fight for control.

I was thinking of the pizzas during Tony Blair’s deft critique of the Tories at Trimdon Labour Club. It was a clever speech; whoever writes his stuff these days is a lot better than the last guy. But to hear Mr Blair heap praise on Gordon Brown was deeply frustrating for anyone who wishes their party well. As Mr Blair left the stage in Sedgefield, it was impossible not to recall the moment he shared an ice cream with Mr Brown during the 2005 campaign and wonder how much more might have been done, if only the pair of them had managed to make their extraordinary, and complementary, talents point in the same direction.

They might have averted the charge that their progress was bought at too great a price. They might have had a leaner State that bought more services and ran fewer. They might have built a system in which improvement was organic and therefore much more recession-proofed. The three sorriest examples are education, education, education.

There might, by now, have been many different types of school, catering for pupils with different aptitudes. The lines between public, private and voluntary sector would mean less. Private money and expertise would be common in state schools. Federations and school chains would be the norm. New schools would have sprung up, established and run by entrepreunerial teachers. Schools would all be independent entities, with the right to hire, fire and vary pay. They would use data to track their progress, like the pioneering Michelle Rhee in Washington DC.

There is some evidence of all of these things. The Prime Minister endorsed most of them in a speech on education two weeks ago. But it is far, far too late. It is the 59th minute of the 11th hour of a day in which your protaganists have been disrupting a conference saying that reforming schools is the equivalent of setting up a pizza parlour.

What the long scream between Brown and Blair has left undone, it will fall to the Conseratives to complete. Schools reform may yet become this generation’s utilities privatisation. Opposed all the way by the Labour party, selling the utilities — transport apart — worked. Nobody now wants to go back in time. Parties sometimes need to be taught a lesson by their opponents. If the Tories manage a revolution in schools, this attempt to change their party brand would be the tribute that Tory vice has paid to Labour virtue.

There is a serious risk that it might not happen, for the reason contained in the pizza row. We are unconcerned when wicked pen-pushers make a dirty profit from supplying our children with writing implements. But woe betide any company that offers to teach kids to read while turning a profit. I know, I know. Pens are not books and being able to write is not the same as learning to read. But we already permit companies such as EdisonLearning to manage schools. VT Group makes a living training school staff. Serco makes a healthy return managing the facilities. All of this is profit that comes out of the public grant.

And yet, if a company wins a contract in which it promises, on pain of no payment, to teach children to read, the politicians — Tory as well as Labour — think that a principle of scholarly detachment is being breached. But is there really any vital violation if, in return for the gift of literacy, a company gains a capped profit, just like a utility? Electricity companies keep the lights on, partly because keeping the lights on is what they do and partly because a regulator is checking up on them. As long as the standards demanded are clear and rigorously policed, the existence of profit is not the difference between good and evil.

It might, though, be the difference between present and absent. There is not an infinite supply of public-spirited parents, teacher buyouts and philanthropic capital. Charities that run schools cannot be expected to stump up the capital, and it is obvious that the supply of public money has dried up. It is only if a firm can expect a profit that it can be told to provide the start-up capital itself.

Even if enough providers can be found, there could be serious trouble ahead with the workforce. If you don’t do Easter or if you decide to cancel it, try to catch the proceedings of the teacher union conferences, which may be playing on an obscure cable channel. Some of the leaders are ready to add their weight to the industrial militancy of Unite and the RMT. The cocktail of cuts to existing budgets and encouragement of competition could easily lead to a serious breakdown of communication between a Conservative government and the teaching unions.

There will be a lot at stake for the Labour party in these circumstances. The quality of education at the bottom of the pile needs new schools, new teachers, new ways of working, underpinned by strong government — audit, inspection and a tough failure regime. The paradox of market reforms to the public sector is that they create a new, but extensive, role for the State. It is to be hoped that the Conservatives don’t think the Big Society (answers on a postcard) can step in here.

If the Conservatives do fail, the cause of public service reform on the Left will dwindle. It is hard for people with a partisan leaning to wish success on their oppponents. It’s harder still when you know you ought to have done this yourself. It’s yet harder again to know you might have finished by now if you’d only been capable of avoiding those silly arguments about delivering pizzas, which you knew, even then, were a surrogate for a much bigger dispute that would go on and on and on, until both of them were gone.

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"Nothing can be done" about sexual abuse in British grade school

An education authority took two years to investigate claims that a six-year-old girl had been sexually abused by classmates, it was alleged yesterday.

The girl, who claimed that she was being stripped and abused on a daily basis by up to 23 tormentors aged between 6 and 10, has since been moved to another school. No action has been taken against the other children involved.

Keith Towler, the children's commissioner for Wales, described the delay as a "shocking failure" and said: "The bottom line is the family will never know what happened to their child."

The claims were made by the girl’s mother, who told BBC Wales that she found out that her daughter was being abused from the mother of another child who was also being bullied. She said: "I said. 'It's OK, you can tell mammy' and then it all started to come out. Her eyes were like marbles of fire.

"She was telling me things I think every mother dreads to hear from their daughter. It was horrendous what she'd gone through. Every day she was being stripped. She was being physically and sexually abused every day and every day she cried out for help and nobody ever came."

The mother said that the school was sympathetic but claimed that the bullies' ages and a lack of evidence meant that no action could be taken. The mother added: "They said the children couldn't be suspended. Because they had sexually abused my daughter and they were only six years old, they were victims themselves and wouldn't be suspended."

No details of the school or the education authority have been revealed to protect the girl's identity, however it is understood to be in South Wales.

It was only when the girl was moved to another school and her mother began legal action against the local education authority, which cannot be named, that the serious case review was ordered. The review claimed that it was "very difficult to establish the extent, degree and involvement of specific children" and that they were all "under the age of criminal responsibility". The inquiry recommended changes to anti-bullying policies and the way incidents were recorded.

Mr Towler said: "Clearly there are issues with the serious case review system and there is consensus the current serious case review arrangements are not working effectively. "The Welsh government has heard those calls for change and is responding." He said that the Assembly had set up two bodies to improve procedures.

Mr Towler added: "The establishment of the Welsh Safeguarding Forum aims to ensure that safeguarding is achieved at a national, regional and local level. "This forum’s work is critical in ensuring the system is strengthened and that joint working is improved to safeguard our children. "This forum and the advisory group must address the ineffective system which will result in change in practice.

"We cannot find ourselves in the same position again where the system is failing some of our most vulnerable children. "Clearly there are issues with the serious case review system and there is consensus that the current serious case review arrangements are not working effectively.

"The Welsh government has heard those calls for change and is responding. I will not yet be undertaking a review but instead will be working with practitioners and other relevant officials on two groups which the deputy minister for social services has convened.

Neelam Bhardwaja, president of the Association of Directors for Social Services in Wales, said: "If there are these number of children involved, it begs the question where did that behaviour arise from? Why are these children behaving in this way and are they from abusive situations themselves, which they need protecting from?"

A Welsh Assembly government spokesman said that it took "its roles and responsibilities around the safeguarding of children very seriously". [Utter bulldust!]

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1 April, 2010

Academic says Scotland's schools are producing a generation of illiterate scientists

Scottish secondary schools are producing a generation of illiterate scientists unable to write clearly and accurately about their subject, according to a senior academic at the University of Glasgow. In an article for the journal of the Queen’s English Society – which champions the proper use of the English language – Emeritus Professor of Marine Biology Geoff Moore said both undergraduate and postgraduate papers were strewn with inaccurate punctuation, grammatical errors, and fundamental confusion between terms such as ‘proscribe’ and ‘prescribe’, and ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.

After marking papers at the University of Glasgow and London University for 36 years, Professor Moore said the problem lay in secondary schools – and he expects the poor standards to get worse. He wrote: “We must anticipate that more and more British secondary-school teachers – the contemporaries of those graduates we have encountered – will not have acquired a sufficient grounding in the English language in order to teach proper grammar, spelling and punctuation to their pupils effectively.”

Speaking to the Sunday Herald, Professor Moore said that some students’ written English made him “throw my hands up in horror”. He traced this back to the move away from writing essays in the teaching of science in schools.

“A lot of assessment is done by multiple choice, ticking boxes, one-word answers, and students don’t get the experience of writing essays as they did in the old days,” he said. “Coupled with the fact that they don’t get things corrected accurately by their teachers. You sometimes wonder if they even read a book any more.”

In science accurate English is an essential, but a dying art, Professor Moore believes. “It is a question of precision,” he said. “You have to be able to express yourself exactly. If you’re using the wrong word in the wrong context – there is a great deal of difference between a prescribed and a proscribed drug. It’s important that people learn to express themselves correctly.”

In response to Professor Moore’s criticisms, the biggest teaching union for secondary teachers in Scotland, the SSTA and the national body for science teachers, the Association for Science Education, agreed with many points.

SSTA general secretary Ann Ballinger said while she did not expect pupils or teachers to use the Queen’s English perfectly she admitted that multiple choice examinations had affected the standard of written English. “It does cause difficulties,” she said. “It is less easy to use language if you are not using it regularly. There certainly is an issue here. It reduces the amount of time and effort spent on the language. Clearly that is a problem.”

Steuart Cuthbert, ASE’s Scottish field officer, said that in his classroom experience, science teachers were discouraged from correcting the grammar and English of pupils. “Although I firmly believe that every teacher should be maintaining standards across the board, there was a thought in the mind of many people that my job was to teach chemistry or physics and have nothing to do with how that was expressed,” he said.

Mr Cuthbert offered hope for Professor Moore, however. The incoming shake-up of the schools – the Curriculum for Excellence – will make literacy and numeracy the responsibility of every teacher, regardless of subject. Mr Cuthbert said: “There is a sea change in attitude. We are now teachers of children rather than teachers of subject ... Because of the current developments this sort of criticism should be minimised in future.”

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Take parents of unruly pupils to court, British schools told

The latest ruse to dodge responsibility for discipline

Schools are being told to take parents to court for failing to control their children as part of a new crackdown on bad behaviour.

Headteachers should make greater use of “parenting orders” to force mothers and fathers of the worst offenders to take more responsibility for their children, the Government said.

The civil court order requires them to attend counselling sessions and parenting classes – and can also set out strict rules on how families should deal with sons and daughters. This includes making sure children do not stay up late, ensuring they cannot get access to alcohol at home, getting them to school on time and making sure uniform rules are followed. Breach of the order can lead to prosecution and a £1,000 fine.

A report by Sir Alan Steer, former headteacher and the Government’s top advisor on behaviour, warned of a “lack of understanding” about the orders in schools. New guidance issued to heads will say that parents failing to play their part in keeping children under control “need to know that the issuing of a parenting order is a possible action by the school”.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said: “For heads to have the power to take court action against parents whose children continue to behave badly, disrupt lessons and impact on other pupils is a vital step in the right direction.”

Parents are already being asked to sign Home School Agreements – non-legal contracts setting out minimum standards of behaviour, attendance, uniform and homework – before the start of term. They are expected to sign them every 12 months. Most schools already have agreements but under new legislation it will be a legal requirement on every state primary and secondariy to issue them. Sir Alan’s report suggested that schools should apply for parenting orders when families repeatedly fail to abide by rules set out on the agreements.

Speaking at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers annual conference on Wednesday, Mr Balls said: “I want to see more schools using parenting orders when Home School Agreements fail. It is time for parents to be held accountable for their child’s behaviour.”

Parenting orders have been available to schools and local councils for six years, but only 2,000 have been issued for truancy and none have been handed out for behaviour. Mr Balls said heads had “not felt sufficiently confident legally that the courts would support them if they were apply for a parenting order for behaviour”, but insisted that new guidance handed to schools would improve their awareness of the process.

The comments come after research by the ATL found that a quarter of teachers had been forced to deal with a violent pupil in the current academic year. Many teachers blamed parents for failing to act as good “role models” for their children. More than a third of staff also said they had faced abuse from mothers and fathers themselves, often after attempting to discipline their child.

One teacher from a state primary in Essex said: “I have had a threat to my life from a parent because I told a child to complete their homework during part of their ‘golden time’. “It was threatened that they and their family would kill me when I came to or from school.”

A female secondary school teacher said: “I have been trapped in an office by a father and older brother of a student who were angry that he'd had his gold trainers confiscated until the end of the day.”

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Lunatic Leftism in Australian schools

Any intelligent teacher tries to get the kids on side but discipline is needed too

TEACHERS trying to restore order in their classrooms are being asked to ditch tough disciplinary measures for such tactics as standing on a green spot or pointing to a message on a wall.

Traditional methods for dealing with disruptive children, such as detention and loud reprimands, are being cast aside in favour of merely "hinting" at bad behaviour. The techniques are part of an Education Department program being tested at more than 100 state schools in disadvantaged areas.

Some of the methods, criticised by a family group as "pie in the sky", urge teachers to give up "power" and become "agents" of their students.

Strategies to improve class behaviour include involving students in deciding rules and discussing with them the impact of their misbehaviour.

But Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey, a part-time teacher, said the program sounded like a throwback to the 1970s. "A lot of this is pie in the sky stuff," he said. "If you don't have a tight ship being run at school, and some backup from home, it is very hard to achieve discipline."

Liberal education spokesman Martin Dixon said improving academic standards shouldn't mean turning classroom practice on its head.

But the scheme's facilitator, La Trobe University's Prof Ramon Lewis, said it was all about using gentle hints rather than being aggressive with unruly students. "You identify ways of letting kids know that someone's rights are being ignored without necessarily forcing them to do anything about it," he said. "So, basically, it's a skill of hinting. That can be a sign on the wall you can point to. "One teacher has got a green dot on the floor on which he actually stands to indicate that right now someone is not doing the right thing."

Prof Lewis, who has been researching classroom management for decades and has written several books, said discipline still had a place.

Some of his techniques are being used at north suburban schools, under an Education Department initiative called Achievement Improvement Zones, in a bid to lift literacy and numeracy levels and improve teachers' practices.

Acting Education Minister Maxine Morand said trials did not replace traditional classroom discipline. "Principals and teachers at Victorian government schools already have the power and autonomy to deal with students behaving inappropriately," she said.

An Education Department spokesman said Prof Lewis had more than 20 years' experience in training teachers in how to use positive reinforcement techniques to encourage good behaviour.

Broadmeadows Valley Primary School principal Andy Jones said Prof Lewis's program had been well received and had good results. "A lot of what he does is quite out there," he said. Prof Lewis's methods were also backed by youth psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg and Parents Victoria, which said fresh ideas were needed to deal with difficult children.

SOURCE







Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.


TERMINOLOGY: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.


The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed


Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.


Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor


I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.


Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".


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


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


A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.


Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.


Comments above by John Ray