Dutch Teachers Say Schools Succumb to Violent Pupils
Schools are putting teachers under pressure to keep silent if they receive death threats from pupils. Teachers are advised against going to the police and sometimes even offered hush-money, according to TV programme EenVandaag.
A teacher recounted on EenVandaag how the school management instructed her to give a higher mark to an aggresive pupil for fear he would turn to violence if he did not receive this. This pupil had at that time already made death threats to six teachers.
There was reason to assume that the pupil was dangerous because he was a friend of the Turkish boy who shot a teacher through the head in a school in The Hague in 2008. But instead of informing the police, the school management tried to please him.
Another teacher recounted how schools sometimes dismiss teachers when they go to the police to make a report against a violent pupil. One teacher even had to promise as a condition for her severance pay that she would never discuss the threats made against her with anyone. Another teacher, whose exam questions were stolen by a pupil, was advised by the school management to buy the questions back from the thief.
One school allowed pupils to put up pornographic posters on which the faces of their teachers were used. These were only removed for the periodical parents evenings, when parents come to discuss the performance of their children with the teachers.
According to a poll by EenVandaag, 10 percent of the secondary school teachers say they have experienced physical violence in the past three years. Sometimes the perpetrator was a parent, but mostly a pupil. Some 24 percent say they receive threats of violence or death threats. The problems are worst in schools with many immigrant pupils, and at the lower educational levels.
Sanity Continues Losing Ground In America's School Culture Wars
Public schools continue to be a battleground in the culture war, as the education establishment – composed primarily of leftists bent on political correctness – gains more ground.
This strain treats Christianity and its holidays as a pariah, while embracing Muslim holidays.
The Hillsboro, Oregon school board just held a vote on what to call the time off school around Christmas and New Years. It had traditionally been called “Christmas Break.” But new calendars, produced by school staff, changed it to “Winter Break.” The school board voted 4-3 to call it “Christmas Break.” From OregonLive.com:
“[School board member] Janeen Sollman said winter break ‘respects everyone in the community. This isn't about religion, it boils down to respect.'
“Later, Hillsboro Education Association president Kathy Newman sided with Sollman and reminded the school board that equity is among its goals and ‘the district calendar should reflect that.’”
Further up the Pacific coast, a high school sophomore explained to a local radio station that the term “Easter eggs” could no longer be used because the administration preferred “spring spheres.”
Is this a joke? Is America being Punk’d?
No, the trend caught on elsewhere in Seattle. The parks department had several listings for “Spring Egg Hunts” all over the city. The word “Easter” has been wiped off the site.
But never fear: one religion, Islam, is being protected – and in fact gaining ground – in American public schools. The Boston Globe reports:
“But beginning next year, Cambridge public schools will attempt to make it easier for Muslim students to honor their highest holy days.
“In a move that school officials believe is the first of its kind in the state, Cambridge will close schools for one Muslim holiday each year beginning in the 2011-2012 school year.
“The school will either close for Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha, also known as the Festival of Sacrifice, depending on which holiday falls within the school year. If both fall within the school calendar, the district will close for only one of the days.
And if you’re wondering, the calendar does denote the existence of a “Winter Break.” This is little more than political correctness run wild.
Dearborn, Michigan has the largest population of Muslims outside of the Middle East but this writer could not find anything on the school district’s website indicating it celebrated Muslim holidays. School officials did not return calls seeking a definitive answer.
This isn’t just about holidays. The political correctness that has taken root in public schools has also provided a platform for radical ideology, namely Marxism. I’ll deal with that topic very soon.
British Coalition accused over £21m education consultants' bill
A huge education bureaucracy and they still need outsiders to do important tasks?
The Coalition has been accused of wasting at least £21m on education consultants, just as school budgets are cut in the downturn. Teachers’ leaders claimed the payments had been made to just five companies in the last year, despite a Government pledge to slash Whitehall waste.
In some cases, they received the money to oversee the setting up of the Coalition’s flagship academies and “free schools” – institutions run by parents’ groups, charities and private companies independent of local council control.
The National Union of Teachers has now written to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, condemning the payments, which it says has been made “at a time when school budgets are being squeezed to the limits”.
But the Department for Education hit back today, saying cash for consultants had been dramatically cut this year compared with fees paid under Labour.
The NUT analysed Government spending between April 2010 and February this year and found some £21.7m went on five companies, including EC Harris and Tribal Education.
But the union claimed that consultancy fees paid by the DfE and its associated quangos were likely to be much higher when other private companies are added.
The Government’s school buildings quango, Partnership for Schools, paid a further £5m to just three firms, it emerged, although most of this was for the purchase of land and buildings associated with the free schools policy.
The NUT also said 100 DfE staff were now employed to work on free schools – equivalent to around four per cent of junior civil servants in the department – at a cost of almost £4m.
In a speech to the union's annual conference in Harrogate on Tuesday, Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said the money was being spent as millions was slashed from the education budget, including a huge reduction in spending on school buildings and Sure Start children’s centres. She is calling on the Government to reveal how much of this cash has been spent specifically on fees to set up free schools.
David Cameron promised a huge purge on consultants and management fees which ballooned under Labour.
A spokesman for the DfE insisted that overall spending on consultants in the last year was likely to be significantly down on the year before. “Spend on consultants has been slashed under the Coalition Government,” he said.
“In 2009-10 it was over £74m but when final figures for the last financial year are published spend is expected to be significantly reduced. Even then, much of the spend will be leftover commitments from the last administration that are being wound up.”
"This has been done by introducing strict rules on spending ensuring value for money for the taxpayer. We are sure that Christine Blower will be pleased with this huge reduction.”
A homeless single mother who lives in her van pleaded not guilty yesterday to stealing nearly $16,000 worth of education for her son by enrolling the kindergartner in her baby sitter’s school district.
Tanya McDowell, 33, was arraigned in Norwalk, where she was arrested April 14 on felony charges of committing and attempting to commit first-degree larceny.
Prosecutors say McDowell used her baby sitter’s address to enroll her son in Norwalk schools in the fall but should have registered the boy in nearby Bridgeport, a significantly poorer urban district and the location of her last permanent address.
Officials call it the first known case of its type in Connecticut, although similar conflicts have played out elsewhere in the United States as districts try to ensure scarce local tax dollars are used for local students.
“He’s only 5 years old, and it’s hard like to explain to a 5-year-old kid, you know, ‘You got kicked out because we don’t have a steady address yet,’ ’’ said McDowell, an unemployed cook.
McDowell, who is black, has drawn the support of civil rights leaders and parents’ groups and is being represented by a lawyer provided by the Connecticut chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She faces up to 20 years in prison and up to $15,000 in fines if convicted of the felony larceny charge.
She said before yesterday’s arraignment that her bewildered son, A.J., repeatedly asks why he was kicked out of his school. The boy was removed from Norwalk’s Brookside Elementary School in January and now lives with relatives in Bridgeport, where he attends kindergarten. “He’s very curious in regards to it because he thinks I stole Brookside away from him,’’ said McDowell.
Connecticut students can only attend public schools in the municipality where their parents or guardians reside, unless they go to a magnet school, charter school, or another district under a desegregation plan.
McDowell’s case is not the nation’s first. Last year, a single mother from Ohio was convicted of a felony for using her father’s address to enroll her children in a suburban district rather than the larger, underperforming Akron district.
Gwen Samuel, one of McDowell’s supporters and founder of the Connecticut Parents Union, said she would do the same thing. “I would use the janitor’s address to get my kid a good education; that’s not even negotiable,’’ said Samuel, of Meriden.
McDowell would not comment on the specifics of her case yesterday, but she has said that she did not believe she was doing anything wrong when she enrolled her son in Norwalk.
Fewer British pupils in private schools as fees rise
Fewer children are being sent to independent schools after average fees climbed above £13,000 for the first time, it emerged today.
Figures show the number of pupils in private education dropped for the third year in a row as fee rises outstripped increases in earnings.
Data from the Independent Schools Council shows the average parent is being forced to pay £13,179 in annual fees this year – a 4.6 per cent increase in 12 months. More families also need help to cover the cost of private education.
The price hike could be fuelling a drop in overall enrolments among families already reeling from the recession and the Coalition’s austerity drive. Figures revealed a 0.5 per cent fall in British children this year, although the number of pupils from overseas jumped sharply.
Last night, school leaders insisted the figures – published as part of an annual census – represented a “good result” for the private sector in the face of a huge squeeze in family income.
They said fee rises were kept to their second lowest level in 17 years as they made “significant cutbacks” to building programmes to ease the financial blow for parents. It was also claimed that the overall drop in pupil numbers was not as severe as the fall witnessed during the last recession in the early 90s.
This suggests many parents are still reluctant to pull children out of private education in favour of state schools after 13 years of Labour.
David Lyscom, ISC chief executive, said: “ISC independent schools are showing remarkable resilience against a difficult economic background, reflecting the high quality of education that our schools offer to parents, and the value for money that this represents.”
The ISC said 1,228 schools completed its census in 2010 and 2011. Among these schools, like-for-like pupil numbers dropped by 0.2 per cent to 505,368, although the fall in British pupils was 0.5 per cent.
Overall, there were 506,500 children in 1,234 schools affiliated to the ISC. Figures also showed:
* Some 14 schools linked to the ISC closed in the last 12 months – double the number a year earlier;
* The number of pupils coming from abroad increased by 5.5 per cent, with 24,554 foreign children now in British independent schools;
* Foreign pupils make up almost 4.9 per cent of places, compared with 4.5 per cent a year earlier, with China, Hong Kong and Germany sending the most;
* The average annual fee increased from £12,558 to £13,179, while day fees rose from £10,713 to £11,208 and boarding costs increased from £24,009 to £25,152;
* In total, some 25 schools charged more than £30,000 in fees;
* A third of pupils are now eligible for fee assistance – a rise of 2.2 per cent – with schools spending £260m on means-tested bursaries.
Mr Lyscom said the rise in the number of poor pupils admitted to ISC schools suggested the Government’s university admissions policy – which appears to prioritise those from state schools – was misguided.
“The fact that over £250 million is now being paid by our schools to children who need financial support must make the Government think carefully about its approach to university admissions,” he said. “It would be very wrong to discriminate against these pupils when they apply to university just because they went to a particular type of school. Our schools help promote social mobility; our statistics show how socially diverse they may be.”
Behaviour "not good enough" at one in five secondaries
Even by Britain's low standards
More than 550 secondary schools in England are failing to ensure a good level of order in classrooms, amid concerns teachers do not have the power to control pupils.
In some areas behaviour fell below targets in 75 per cent of secondaries, according to the latest data compiled by Ofsted, the schools inspectorate.
Teachers have warned MPs that the level of discipline in schools is worse than official estimates because head teachers cheat inspectors by suspending unruly pupils or bringing in supply teachers during their visits.
A separate report to be published this week by the National Association of Head Teachers will say the conduct of pupils' families is little better, with one in ten head teachers having been assaulted by a parent or carer in the past five years.
The figures released by Ofsted showed that 82 per cent of secondaries across the country had good or outstanding behaviour – the top two levels of a four-point scale – a slight rise on last year's 79 per cent.
But the statistics showed there is a need for improvement in 18 per cent of secondaries, and that in areas such as Kingston-upon-Hull and Knowsley, Merseyside, discipline at just one in four schools was rated good or better.
Last week the NASUWT union accused heads of brushing low-level bad behaviour under the carpet instead of doling out punishments for fear of attracting greater scrutiny from parents, governors and local authorities.
Earlier this month staff at a school in Lancashire were reduced to a walkout over pupil indiscipline.
The government has pledged to hand teachers more authority by allowing them to search pupils for banned items, give teachers anonymity when facing allegations of misconduct and remove the need for schools to give 24 hours' notice of detentions.
There is also concern about the danger posed to heads by aggressive parents, often resulting when a pupil is excluded from school.
Later this week the National Association of Head Teachers will claim as many as ten per cent of heads have been attacked by parents, including cases of victims being hit with chairs and subjected to serious kicking attacks.
Nick Gibb, the schools minister said: "We remain concerned that nearly 1 in 5 secondary schools behaviour is judged as being no better than satisfactory ... We support teachers to tackle poor behaviour in our schools because until we deal with the persistent low level disruption prevalent in too many classrooms, we will not see the rise in academic standards demanded by parents."
A Department for Education spokesperson added that there was no excuse for aggressive behaviour towards school staff.
An Ofsted spokesperson said: "Schools receive no more than two days notice of an inspection. This means it is easier for inspectors to see schools as they really are. There is very little evidence that schools try to mislead Ofsted, and even for those that may wish to they do not have time to make arrangements which might mislead inspectors about standards of behaviour."
For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor’s degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the children.
Census figures released yesterday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record numbers of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.
Educational gains for women are giving them greater access to a wider range of jobs, contributing to a shift of traditional gender roles. Based on one demographer’s estimate, the number of stay-at-home fathers who are the primary caregivers for their children reached nearly 2 million last year, or one in 15. The official census tally was 154,000, based on a narrower definition that excludes those working part-time or looking for jobs.
“The gaps we’re seeing in bachelor’s and advanced degrees mean that women will be better protected against the next recession,’’ said Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint who is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
“Men now might be the ones more likely to be staying home, doing the more traditional child rearing,’’ he said.
Among adults 25 and older, 10.6 million US women have master’s degrees or higher, compared with 10.5 million men. Measured by shares, about 10.2 percent of women have advanced degrees compared with 10.9 percent of men — a gap steadily narrowed in recent years. Women still trail men in professional subcategories such as business, science, and engineering.
When it comes to finishing college, roughly 20.1 million women have bachelor’s degrees, compared with nearly 18.7 million men — a gap that has remained steady in recent years. Women passed men in bachelor’s degrees in 1996.
Some researchers including Perry have dubbed the current economic slump a “man-cession’’ because of the huge job losses in the male-dominated construction and manufacturing industries, which require less schooling. Measured by pay, women with full-time jobs now make 78.2 percent of what men receive, up from about 64 percent in 2000.
Unemployment for men currently stands at 9.3 percent, compared with 8.3 percent for women, who make up half the US work force. The number of stay-at-home mothers, meanwhile, dropped last year for a fourth year in a row to 5 million, or roughly one in four married-couple households. That was down from nearly half of such households in 1969.
British University campuses 'a hotbed of Muslim extremism', claims Parliamentary security group
Universities are failing to tackle the growing menace of Islamic extremism on campuses. Although they have been aware of the problem for many years, university authorities are reluctant to combat it because they fear a decline in the number of foreign students, from whom they make millions of pounds every year, it has been claimed.
A report by a Parliamentary homeland security group said the evidence against universities was 'damning' and that there was no sign of the risk of student radicalisation diminishing.
The review highlighted serious problems and claimed that 'some universities and colleges have become sites where extremist views and radicalisation can flourish beyond the sight of academics'. The report called on the institutions to tackle the issue with 'utmost urgency'.
Terror expert Professor Anthony Glees said the universities had failed to co-operate with the Government, making it much harder for them to tackle extremism. He said 'money-hungry' institutions are more worried about their coffers than keeping the country safe and insisted they must allow counter-terrorist police access to campuses and clamp down on extremist Islamic societies.
He added: 'We are dealing with people who hate this country and the way that it is governed. 'Taxpayers would be sickened by the idea that taxpayer-supported universities are giving people the space to develop plans that will result in some of us being blown up.
'The fundamental problem is that universities have refused to co-operate. 'It is not because they are fusty academics stuck in their ivory towers unaware of the scale of the issue. It is because they are now money making enterprises. 'They fear a hard line will lead to a decline in the number of lucrative foreign students coming to British universities.'
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Homeland Security was set up in the wake of the alleged attempt by student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow-up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam, carrying 280 passengers, as it made its final descent towards Detroit on December 25, 2009.
The Nigerian studied at University College London between 2005 and 2008, and was the Islamic Society president from 2006 to 2007.
The Parliamentary group said the Government's National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence and Security Review were 'deeply unsatisfactory'.
A previous inquiry found that UCL will remain at risk of radicalisation for as long as the institution retains its 'educational mission and character'.
Shortly after the foiled Christmas bomb attack, it was revealed that security services believed 39 universities were 'at risk of extremism'.
Foreign influx 'threatens uniquely British identity of public schools'
Private schools risk diluting their ‘uniquely British identity’ as pupils numbers are kept buoyant by an increase in overseas students. A national census of fee-paying schools shows the number of new overseas pupils in independent schools has reached unprecedented levels, increasing by a massive 44.4% on last year. More than a third of these youngsters, 37.8%, are from China and Hong Kong.
Meanwhile some 2,559 fewer British pupils were admitted in September 2010, compared with the previous year. Experts believe the drop in British pupils is due to high fees which spiralled out of control during Labour years and increased by an average of 4.5% in September 2010.
Average boarding fees for sixth formers are now £26,346-a-year and £16,290 for day pupils. Three schools now charge in excess of £30,150. The average annual fee for a private education is £13,179. That is an increase of 4.6 per cent on last year.
The fees are proving prohibitive for many recession-hit British parents. But wealthy parents from China and Kong Hong, who have a culture of paying for a good education, are happier to fork out. They believe a British private school education will help their child get into a top UK university. The revelation coincides with the phenomenon of the Tiger Mother who will relentlessly push their children to academic success.
Yesterday David Lyscom, chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, warned the trend risked diluting the nature of independent schools. He said: ‘Some schools specialise in teaching overseas students, to prepare them for entry to British universities. ‘So in the majority of private schools there are a handful of overseas pupils.
‘But one of the attractions of a British independent education is that it is uniquely British. ‘It is a brand that needs to be protected. It is all very well to have them [overseas students] but we need to make sure that it doesn’t go too far or we’ll lose our appeal.’
Data from Independent Schools Council (ISC) census which covers 1,234 schools, shows total of 13,944 of the 506,500 pupils in fee paying schools - 5% - are non-British with parents living overseas. This is an increase of 5.5% on last year. On average, each school has around 20 overseas pupils. The average independent school has 410 pupils.
Overall independent pupil numbers have dipped slightly, by 0.2%. It brings the numbers back to 2004 levels, after peaking in 2009, with some 506,500 pupils in the 1,234 fee paying schools.
Mr Lyscom added that although they had lost a few British pupils he was very encouraged because, despite the recession, few were fleeing the independent sector. This academic year there are some 5,859 pupils from Hong Kong and 3,428 and China in private schools. Of these 2,245 from Hong Kong and 1,684 from China were new to their school.
Self-proclaimed Tiger Mother Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, said Chinese parents fight far harder than Western parents to educate their children. She said they are prepared to ‘scrimp and save’ for a good education and ‘drill their children on academic task ten times more than Western parents’.
The next single country with a large share in pupils in fee-paying schools was Germany where 9.6% of all are foreign students.
Feminist whiner reluctant to allow due process. Wants instant "justice": "too much evidence is required"
The civil rights division of the US Department of Education is investigating Harvard Law School after a Boston lawyer filed a complaint with the agency alleging that school policies regarding response to sexual assault allegations violate Title IX rules against discrimination on campuses.
Wendy J. Murphy, a faculty member at the New England School of Law said yesterday in a telephone interview that she filed the complaint in September, after being hired by Harvard Law in the spring to work on a Title IX issue and finding that three policies ran afoul of federal regulations. She would not elaborate on why she was hired.
She said the most troubling violation is the school’s policy of waiting to address complaints on campus until police and prosecutors have finished investigating, a practice she called “running out the clock.’’ Murphy said criminal investigations can drag on until after victims graduate, leaving them vulnerable to retaliation from their attackers and others during the rest of their time in school.
A Harvard Law official with knowledge of the hearing process denied yesterday that administrators seek delays as a matter of policy. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the pending review, said campus hearings can be held before criminal investigations end, though he could not say how often that happens.
The official said the law school pays for an attorney chosen by each alleged victim to represent her or him during the disciplinary process.
But Murphy said too much evidence is required during a campus hearing to find a law student guilty of sexual assault, and that school officials do not provide alleged victims with a “clear and concise’’ timeframe for when cases will be resolved. She declined to say if she knew of any students who have been harmed by these policies.
In a statement yesterday, the school defended its record of handling allegations but did not comment on the specifics of Murphy’s complaint, citing the pending review.
“We have a responsibility to protect and maintain the safety and well-being of our students, and to offer complete support and assistance to any student who makes us aware of harm,’’ the statement said. “That responsibility includes effective processes for ensuring a safe community and for investigating any allegation of assault expeditiously and fairly, followed by appropriate disciplinary action.’’
The Department of Education’s civil rights division did not immediately return messages seeking comment yesterday.
Murphy said the division could issue its findings by June. She said that if a school refuses to comply with Title IX, the government could pull its federal funding, though she was unaware of any case being resolved in that manner.
Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.
Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets. County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket. Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.” (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different types and sizes are entitled to receive.)
Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.
Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset County, NJ – would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties. Indeed, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in determining people’s choices of neighborhoods in which to live.
Of course, thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would get no discount on their property-tax bills.
When the quality of supermarkets is recognized by nearly everyone to be dismal, the resulting calls for “supermarket choice” would be rejected by a coalition of greedy government-supermarket workers and ideologically benighted collectivists as attempts to cheat supermarket customers out of good supermarket service – indeed, as attempts to deny ordinary families the food that they need for their very survival. Such ‘choice,’ it would be alleged, will drain precious resources from the public supermarkets whose (admittedly) poor performance testifies to the fact that these supermarkets are underfunded.
And the small handful of people who call for total separation between supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at best, delusional and – it would be thought more realistically – more likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrition and starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket. (Some indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being ‘commercial.’)
Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services? To those of you who might think so, pardon me but you’re nuts.
To those of you who understand that such a system for supplying grocery-retailing services would be a catastrophe, why might you continue to count yourself in the ranks of those who believe that government schooling (especially the way it is currently funded and supplied) is the system that we should continue to use?
Middle class students will pay thousands more to subsidise poorer peers' university fees
Middle class students will pay at least £2,700 more in university tuition fees to subsidise those from low income families – even if they go on to earn much less in later life.
Under rules designed to help poorer youngsters into higher education, universities which wish to hike up their fees next year must put 30 to 35 per cent towards waiving costs for students on low incomes.
With virtually all universities defying the Government to more than treble fees, middle class pupils will, as a result, be required to pay an extra £2,700 to £3,150 a year towards the cost of subsidising their peers.
They will then be forced to pay back far higher loans, even if they are earning significantly less than a successful graduate originally from a poor background who goes on to enjoy a lucrative career.
The arrangement was drawn up by the Liberal Democrats, who were heavily criticised over their tuition fees about-turn, and is designed to counter criticism that higher fees will put poor students off applying to universities.
In an Opposition Day debate today, however, Labour will claim that as a result, youngsters from relatively modest backgrounds will end up subsidising those whose parents are only slightly worse off.
Under the “access agreements,” which universities wishing to charge more than £6,000 a year are required to draw up, fees must be cut for any student whose parents earn less than £25,000. So far, despite ministers’ claims that top fees would be levied only in “exceptional circumstances,” 70 per cent of universities which have set out their intentions have said they will charge the maximum £9,000, with many of the rest levying close to the upper ceiling.
That means that in most cases, a youngster with parents earning only £26,000 a year will be required to pay around £3,000 more in fees to pay for the education of a fellow student from a family on £24,000.
John Denham, the shadow business secretary, said: “The Government has lost control of fees, with £9,000 becoming the norm, not the exception. “On top of this incompetence, the Government is now trying to make students from middle income families pay to cut the fees of others.
“Progress … on social mobility must be maintained, but the Government has chosen to put the burden unfairly on the shoulders of hard working squeezed middle families. “Students do not pay until they graduate, but the Government is imposing a system where graduates with the same class of degree in the same subject from the same university doing the same job will owe very different debts.”
New research suggests that half of students will be turned off top universities by the imposition of £9,000 tuition fees. In a survey of current final year undergraduates, 51 per cent said they would not have enrolled if fees were almost three times higher than current prices.
Figures from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service show record numbers of students are applying for courses this year in order to beat the fee rise. Applications are expected to be up by around 14,000 in the summer as students scrap gap years to get into university this autumn.
More than 700,000 are expected to apply with almost a third missing out on places.
Indiana University students file complaint over Chick-fil-A discrimination
Students at Indiana University South Bend have filed a formal complaint against the university's Chancellor, alleging the presence of the fast food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A violated vendor policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
"Students impacted by the continued presence of Chick-fil-A on campus have come forward today to file formal discrimination complaints within the Judicial Affairs office of the university against the university's Chancellor, Una Mae Reck," Jason A. Moreno, a spokesperson for the students, said in a statement.
Chick-Fil-A, which has 1,550 locations in 39 states, is accused of having deep financial ties to nationwide organizations that oppose marriage equality and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights. According to an investigation by the progressive blog EqualityMatters, the restaurant chain's charitable division has provided more than $1.1 million to anti-LGBT organizations, including the Alliance Defense Fund and Family Research Council.
"Chancellor Reck has continued to proactively purchase goods from this vendor for the purpose of resale on campus despite all evidence proving the damage it causes the students she's charged to protect," Moreno added. "These purchases aren't automatic, but rather she's making the conscious decision to do this every week on her own authority and of her own volition, with full knowledge of the overwhelming evidence that shows she's participating in the promotion of discrimination."
A petition to remove Chick-fil-A from the Indiana University South Bend campus started by Moreno at Change.org has received over 8,000 signatures.
The president of Chick-fil-A has insisted that the company is not anti-gay, but is merely operating a business according to Biblical principles and supporting healthy families.
"We have no agenda against anyone," Dan Cathy, President and COO of the restaurant chain, said in a statement from January. "At the heart and soul of our company, we are a family business that serves and values all people regardless of their beliefs or opinions."
He added that Chick-fil-A had a long history of encouraging and strengthening marriages, but had decided not to "champion any political agendas on marriage and family."
"At the same time, we will continue to offer resources to strengthen marriages and families. To do anything different would be inconsistent with our purpose and belief in Biblical principles."
Six-figure pay deals given to 700 British head teachers
Hundreds of head teachers are being awarded inflated six-figure pay deals, it was disclosed yesterday. Figures were released showing that 700 heads or deputy heads in state schools earn more than £100,000, including 200 paid more than £110,000.
The NASUWT union called for individual heads’ salaries to be published to stop pay being “abused”, putting them under the same scrutiny as council chief executives and quango bosses.
The number of senior teachers on six-figure pay is likely to be much higher because hundreds of schools failed to disclose proper salary details.
Data released by the Department for Education showed that 500 senior teachers will earn between £100,000 and £109,999 in the current academic year, including 100 heads and deputies in academies. A further 200 heads earn more than £110,000.
The figures show teachers’ pay from last November. John Howson, of Education Data Surveys, a research firm, said the highest salaries were likely to have increased in the past 12 months. This was the first time that the figures have been published in this form.
The GMB union has claimed as many as 100 state school heads earn more than David Cameron’s salary of £147,000.
Last year, it was disclosed that Mark Elms, head of Tidemill Primary School in south east London, was given a remuneration package of £276,523 for 2009-10, which included fees for helping other schools. Another head, Jacqui Valin, from Southfields Community College in south-west London, received a £20,594 pay rise in 2009-10 to take her salary to £198,406.
The NASUWT said schools were by-passing rules on pay by rebranding senior staff as “executive heads” or letting them take jobs as consultants.
It also claimed that academies, which are free of council control, were awarding huge salaries because they were not bound by national pay deals.
At the NASUWT annual conference in Glasgow, Chris Keates, its general secretary, said: “We’ve heard of head teachers taking schools to academy conversion, calling themselves executive heads and saying they should get more pay,” she said. “There’s no rationale about it.”
A POPULAR myth about teaching is that if you increase salaries, you will get better teachers. This is an idea that gains traction with the teachers unions. It also resonates with those frustrated with poor school outcomes.
The pay and performance equation is disarmingly obvious. If you don't pay teachers enough, you can't attract the best. This view informs the position of Greg Craven, vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, who wrote on this page on April 13: "If you want brain surgeons and international lawyers to consider teaching as an option, then you are going to have to supplement altruism with cash."
And Ben Jensen, director of the school education program at the Grattan Institute, wrote on this page on April 18 that a "system of meaningful appraisal and feedback for teachers will increase their effectiveness by 20 to 30 per cent".
Jensen goes further and says of the institute's recent report on appraisal: "Our proposal concentrates on improving teaching, not sacking teachers." But how can teaching be improved by not getting rid of inferior teachers? Why is teaching sacrosanct?
There is no other profession, job or vocation that closes ranks on incompetence in the same way. When was the last time you heard a teaching union call for the sacking of incompetent teachers? Never. "It's OK to be a dud, we won't tell on you" is union-speak for membership.
This is why Australian Education Union president Angelo Gavrielatos says the union supports the idea of appraisal and is reported as saying on the release of the Grattan Institute report that it reinforces the union's view that the best professional development for teachers occurs when they are given time to work together.
But appraisal is a delaying tactic on palpably bad teachers. It can take years with minimal or no improvement. In the meantime, students are damaged. In a normal full-time teaching load of, say, five classes of 25 students each, this means 125 students. Multiply that by a three-year cycle of appraisal. That is 375 students who have not been well taught.
A survey by Britain's National Foundation for Educational Research shows only 21 per cent teachers think schools have enough freedom to sack incompetent colleagues. The Times Education Supplement reported on April 8 that a study of 2100 teachers found 73 per cent of school heads and 52 per cent of classroom teachers agreed there was not enough freedom for schools to dismiss poorly performing teachers. In response, Britain's National Union of Teachers general secretary Christine Blower said: "It is regrettable that colleagues agree it is not easy enough to dismiss teachers." There was no mention of appraisal being used to fix the problem.
Why the AEU does not ask its members similar questions is obvious. Many would support sacking teachers. Colleagues are aware of teachers who are failures. They all know who should go and why.
If appraisal and dollars held the key to better teachers, why hasn't performance-related pay been an unambiguous winner? In a report titled "The bonus myth" in New Scientist magazine this month, Alfie Kohn, a teacher turned writer, says: "Economists and workplace consultants regard it as almost unquestioned dogma that people are motivated by rewards, so they don't feel the need to test this." The magazine notes that, in many circumstances, paying for results can make people perform badly, and that the more you pay, the worse they perform.
It is obvious what will improve teacher performance. Australian schools, particularly state schools, must be given the autonomy to hire and fire. The growth in independent school enrolments is in part related to the view held by parents that state school education in some areas is in serious decline and teacher quality is a lottery. They pay independent school fees for not having to gamble on incompetence. The problem is also who gets into teaching. This is unpleasant to say but many teachers are simply not high-flyers, something that the federal government partly understands.
As of 2013 there will be tougher university entrance requirements for teaching. The pool of potential teachers will come from the top 30 per cent of Year 12 students, as well as others who meet the expectation of a high level of proficiency in literacy and numeracy.
Federal School Education Minister Peter Garrett said on the announcement of the new teaching entry expectations earlier this month: "We want the very best people coming into the teaching profession. The Australian community wants to see high-quality teaching in schools."
The problem with poor outcomes in schools is not a matter of funding, class sizes, difficult children or any other excuse. The problem is teachers.
Those who are incompetent, who are inadequately trained or are allowed to consolidate poor performance under union sanction, secure that they will be appraised continuously rather than sacked, are the malady of Australian education.
The only way to tell a teacher they are hopeless is to remove them, as in the case of every other job I know.
The performance screams indoctrination to an agenda when 1st-graders are using terms like "boycott" and "petition." Sick.
Sadly, most parents let the school system get away with it.
Beyond the education bubble
Peter Thiel’s contrarian approach to higher education, as you might expect, has provoked considerable squealing from the usual suspects. Thiel believes higher education has become a speculative bubble, and that the price of a college education is vastly overvalued compared to its lifetime payoff. There are more college graduates than there are jobs that call for their qualifications, which means that for many unemployed or underemployed graduates a student loan is the equivalent of an underwater mortgage.
The education bubble, like the finance bubble, is fueled by excess money looking for an outlet and unscrupulous promoters looking for suckers. Just as shady bankers lured people into mortgages that were beyond their means, the higher education industrial complex — through its affiliated high school counselors — lures kids into obtaining what seems to be easy money through Sallie Mae with the promise of higher lifetime incomes. Meanwhile, the availability of this third-party money fuels an educational culture based on high-overhead and cost-plus markup — the same culture that gave us the Pentagon’s $600 toilet seats — and tuition increasing at more than four times the rate of inflation.
To challenge the college mystique, Thiel is in the process of selecting the twenty most promising candidates under age 20 to drop out, in return for $100,000 over two years to start a business. Hence the above-mentioned squeals of outrage.
Of course the idea that the educational panacea is overrated isn’t a new one. The late Joe Bageant pointed out that the “economic growth by sending everyone to college” meme was a fallacy of composition. The Empire, he said, only needed about 25% of its population in administrative-technical positions. Sending more than that to college just resulted in burger-flippers and floor-moppers with bachelor’s degrees.
There are some serious difficulties with Thiel’s position, in an economy organized on the kind of hyper-capitalist corporate model he seems to assume. In such an economy, as plenty of critics have pointed out, higher education — even if overpriced — will be indispensible to people seeking certain kinds of professional employment. It will continue to perform a signaling function, simply because HR departments will naturally desire some bureaucratic S.O.P. for processing human raw material without having to deal with a lot of special cases on an ad hoc basis. And I’ve seen more than one person argue that Thiel probably hires college educated people; if American higher education implodes, he’ll just hire cheaper credentialed Chinese tech workers.
John Robb, of Global Guerrillas blog, wants to go further than Thiel and challenge the existing state capitalist model of how employment itself generates demand for credentials (“The Education Bubble,” April 13).
The idea is not to eliminate higher education, but to eliminate the mass-production model by which it is organized: Transporting people to a central location with expensive physical plant and a bloated administrative bureaucracy in order to process them into human resources. Network technology, with its ability to move information cheaply rather than moving people, offers the potential of an alternative that “creates its own educational modules if needed (from scratch using modern tools and techniques).”
We’ve seen the first hints of this with MIT’s Open Courseware project, which puts its entire catalog of course syllabi and lectures online. And there are corporate capitalist challengers, like the University of Phoenix, offering a cheaper education in competition with the legacy colleges. But what happens when you combine the two? What happens when you combine online syllabi, video lectures, online conferencing and virtual classrooms into a single package on the U. Phoenix model — but the lectures and other content are provided on an open-source basis without the state’s copyright monopolies?
Education may provide an essential signaling function, given the conventional model of employment. But the conventional model of employment by a large bureaucratic corporation — with a conveyor belt running from schools to the HR department which sorts out the “resources” which are manufactured to spec — is itself becoming obsolete.
Industrial supply and distribution chains are radically shortening, and tools are becoming radically cheaper, which means that business enterprise will become much smaller and relocalized, with business models driven by those who actually own the tools and the skills.
So the organization and selection of educational options will be driven much more by producers’ own assessments of what they need to learn to be able to produce effectively, instead of a curriculum set to the specs of HR at GlobalEvilMegaCorp LLC. Curricula will be set on a much more decentralized, bottom-up and ad hoc basis, with the student — not the corporate employer — as the real customer.
Higher education, as conventionally understood, is a legacy of the 20th century model in which giant interlocking bureaucratic institutions — large oligopoly corporations, centralized government agencies, bloated bureaucratic universities — dominate society.
University Administrators Refuse to Allow Christians to Speak Their Peace
It’s hard to understand what, exactly, public university officials across the country have against the Christians on their campus.
Christian students don’t often lead riots. Those who are serious and sincere about their faith don’t cheat on their exams, traffic in drugs, get drunk and disorderly, indulge in sexual hijinks in the dorm, or otherwise undermine the general campus esprit de corps.
Christian students put a particular premium on learning truth (a time-honored practice in academic realms). They value life and the worth of every individual and have deeper incentives than most of their peers for treating those around them – even those with whom they disagree most fervently – with dignity, compassion, and respect.
Many are driven by the nature of their beliefs to share their faith with others, but most do so in appropriate and respectful ways. And proselytizing is not exactly a rarity on college campuses, where the urge is to make converts runs at least as strong among political theorists, sexual hedonists, and vegans as it does among Christians.
So, what’s not to like? Or, more to the point…what’s to despise, so aggressively?
Something, apparently – for the antipathy is intensifying, as more and more public universities coast to coast are creating and enforcing regulations clearly designed to silence, humiliate, and dispel Christian students. In recent years, the Alliance Defense Fund alone has taken on 70 colleges and universities across the country where administrators have bullied, marginalized, and in many cases, violated the most basic constitutionally protected rights of students who openly profess faith or identify themselves with Christian beliefs.
ADF has won the 61 of those cases decided – a most recent one being against the University of Wisconsin, a perennial base for anti-Christian sentiment and one that’s spurred several lawsuits in the last decade. Just last month, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear UW’s appeal of an appellate court ruling in favor of a student ministry at the university’s Madison campus.
The case, Badger Catholic v. Walsh, stemmed from the refusal of UW officials to allow the ministry the same kinds of student activity fee funding that the university makes available to other registered student groups on campus. Their reason for withholding the money: the Badger Catholics’ events include prayer, worship, and sharing their faith.
The university’s policy marked such a blatant attack on the students’ rights as protected by the First Amendment that a string of courts – culminating in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit – ruled flatly against them. And this is only the latest in a slew of clear-cut, ADF-backed cases dating back to 1995, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia that a school couldn’t provide funding for every campus student publication except the Christian one.
But the universities’ bigotry isn’t limited to mere budgetary considerations.
At Missouri State University, Emily Brooker was threatened with expulsion for declining to violate her Christian principles by completing a class assignment that required her to write a letter to the state legislature endorsing adoption for same-sex couples.
At California’s Yuba College, Ryan Dozier stood just off a campus walkway, holding an evangelical sign and politely offering Gospel tracts to students who asked for them. A security officer charged him with conducting an unauthorized “assembly” (of one). Later, administrators informed him that free speech was only permitted at Yuba on Tuesdays and Thursdays between noon and 1.
The Commissioned II Love club at Savannah State University was banned from campus when officials characterized a student re-enactment of Jesus humbly washing His disciples’ feet as “hazing.”
At Georgia Tech, Ruth Malhotra objected to speech codes that severely curtailed any student conversation, publications, events, or activities administrators deemed “intolerant.” She drew the full fury of those campus officials, who cut off funds for organizations involved in religious activities, banished free speech in all but the most remote areas of campus, and even instituted a program to demonize anyone who considered homosexual behavior immoral. When Ruth’s public stand brought threats of rape and murder, the university offered no protection or support.
Full disclosure: ADF represented the plaintiffs in each of these cases, which all have two more things in common: (1) the schools involved lost their case – expensively – in court. (Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, how do you suppose they made back the money?) And (2), they are all the tip of the iceberg in an academic Cold War against Christians.
Across America, an estimated 274 public universities currently have speech codes that can be used to shut down points of view that a student, professor, or administrator might find “offensive.” (At Penn State, officials even went so far as to say that “intolerance will not be tolerated.”) And nothing offends the academic Left faster than a Bible, a prayer, or a Christian with a conscience.
Of course, ultimately, it’s not the people of faith that the Left objects to – it’s the faith itself. Their hatred is really aimed at a Truth that galls them to the deep, deep places of their souls…in the place where sins, and the need for a God bigger than themselves, can’t be denied.
They won’t go there. They can’t shut Him up. So they’re bent on removing some of the best students and most thoughtful professors they have. If that means destroying not just good people, but the holiest freedoms endowed by that Creator and ever cherished by mankind – well, surely that’s not too high a price to pay, for delusion?
Is teaching racist? No more than Oxford University or 'Mastermind'
We are too quick to throw around accusations of racial discrimination, argues Alasdair Palmer
There was consternation in schools last week when The Guardian – the teachers' favourite newspaper – reported accusations that the profession was "institutionally racist". The evidence for the charge was that while those of black Caribbean or black African origin make up 2 per cent of the population, they provide only 0.7 per cent of our head teachers.
That might sound like a standard Guardian whine. But it is actually a very common complaint, and one which is treated with the utmost seriousness. From a statistic showing that the proportion of a particular ethnic group in a particular position does not mirror that group's share of the population as a whole, the conclusion is drawn that the only explanation can be racism. This is visible everywhere, from the insistence that the police are institutionally racist to last week's claim that Mastermind must be guilty of the same fault, since it hasn't had enough contestants from ethnic minorities. Even David Cameron was at it a couple of weeks ago, lamenting that Oxford's admissions system was "disgraceful" – code for "racist" – because it admitted only one black student last year (actually, it was only one black Caribbean student).
Yet the inference, although widespread, is invalid. It's a way of not thinking about whatever problems there are with ethnic or other "minority" representation. (Minority has to be in quotes, because women are frequently described as a minority, even though they are actually the majority.) Racism can be the explanation for the fact that a group is under-represented, but it does not have to be, and frequently is definitely not.
If you look at Britain's Olympic sprinting team, you will not find the white middle classes represented. Indeed, you may not find anyone white at all. Is this the result of racism? Er, no. It is simply the consequence of the fact that the fastest runners, at least over short distances, do not happen to be white and bourgeois. No one complains, for the obvious reason that there is nothing sinister going on.
Again, almost all of the workmen who built skyscrapers in New York and other big cities on America's East Coast were, until recently, Mohawk Indians: there were very few Italians, Jews or Wasps. This was not down to racial prejudice on the part of the contractors: it was merely that Mohawks were better at the job. For reasons no one fully understands, they had less fear of heights and were better able to weld rivets 20 storeys up.
If Mr Cameron's reasoning were valid, the over-representation of Mohawks in high-rise construction, and of blacks in sprinting, should automatically be labelled a "disgrace" – as should the fact that Jews and Chinese, for instance, do better at getting places at top universities and firms than the ethnically Anglo-Saxon. Which merely shows the silliness of that form of inference.
The real explanation for the failure of some groups to do as well as others is not that admissions tutors, the Civil Service, and other employers are closet racists who conspire to ensure that incompetent whites are appointed to top jobs, in preference to more able individuals from ethnic minorities. Educational attainment is determined by many factors, particularly the sorts of things a child is exposed to before the age of seven. The gaps within the ability range have opened up considerably by then, and get wider during the school years.
By the time a child is old enough to go to university, there is not much that government can do to close them – other than ordering institutions not to admit or appoint on merit, but on some other characteristic, such as ethnic or class background. That, of course, is precisely what this government is trying to do, and it really is a disgrace. Dispensing with merit as the only criterion for entry to our top institutions is the fastest way to destroy them. But then again, perhaps that is the idea.
As state governments continue to grapple with labor and legacy costs, we’ve seen government employee unions respond with massive rallies and publicity stunts. Some union bigs have even threatenedto turn their job into a “weapon.”
Case in point, of course, is Madison, Wisconsin. Thousands of union protesters from around the country converged on the state capitol in an effort to intimidate and stop Gov. Scott Walker and his allies from passing a bill that would not only balance the state budget, but allow schools and municipalities to dramatically cut labor costs.
Unionized teachers have been at the head of the line to complain loudly that the public is “ungrateful” for their work. They speak of being “demoralized” and “undervalued.” Poor souls. If the private sector has it so good, go join it and see for yourself.
But we’ve heard very little from police officers and firefighters – large groups of very important public servants.
I have the utmost respect for these individuals. Unlike unionized public school teachers, they risk their lives every day in order to protect society from thugs and danger and don’t bellyache about it.
According to PoliceOfficerSalary.com, cops make an average of $51,410 annually. In Michigan, a fairly typical, if not depressed state, teachers make an average of $52,300. Cops work year-round. Teachers are contracted to work typically about 185 days a year. So cops make less, work more, and risk their lives every day. Where are their complaints?
Teachers unions lately have been employing publicity stunts, such as grading papers in mall food courts. This has been reported in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey and a few other states. Like misbehaving puppies, we have to have our noses rubbed in what teachers are doing.
Why don’t we hear of cops pulling similar stunts? I bet if they decided to clean their guns in the mall food court, media would descend from far and wide to tell the cops’ story. But they don’t do that. No, they go about their business, risking their lives, just grateful to have jobs.
We hear of stories where teachers, apparently satisfied with the pathetic state of public education, are passing resolutionsin support of cop killers, namely Mumia Abu-Jamal. In that situation, the police officers’ group fired back, asking American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to distance herself from the ridiculous California resolution. Weingarten hasn’t gotten around to doing that.
Teachers need to get real and understand the reason the public is fed up is because our schools are leaving taxpayers broke and far too many students illiterate and unprepared for life.
And a little gratitude towards taxpayers wouldn’t hurt either.
I frequently speak about the never-ending information war in which we are engaged with the Islamic world. One of the Islamists’ tactics is to pit other non-Muslim Americans against us, and they know just who to target: America's impressionable youth. Let's examine a perfect example of this practice. This is from an article in the University Daily Kansan, by Allison Bond:
"Educate yourself on Islamic faith to help stop Muslim prejudices. Since September 11, 2001, Muslims in America have constantly been targets to religious intolerance. One would think after 10 years the hype of Muslim terrorists would be over. I thought that today people were more educated about the Islamic faith and put aside their prejudices. I hoped Americans no longer took seriously the minority of people who burn Qurans and solicit hate speech toward Muslims. However, I have been sadly proven wrong once again."
According to Bond, all the Islamic terrorist attacks that have taken place across the world post 911 are just "hype". Don't believe the "hype!" Besides that, people are more educated about Islam today, and that is exactly why they are speaking out against it.
On March 10, a congressional hearing took place to discuss Islamic terrorism within America in association with radical Muslims living in the U.S. The New York Times wrote that some people at the hearing portrayed Muslims to be a “community ignoring radicalization among its own.” Witnesses testified saying things like, “Our children are in danger” and “Americans are sitting around doing nothing about radical extremists.”
Our children are in danger. The danger comes from the Sharia movement that is taking place across America. Do you want your children to be subjugated under Sharia?
But what are Muslims here in America supposed to do about this issue? Aren’t there radical beliefs in every religion that could lead to radical acts? It is disappointing that we have decided to single out Islamic radicals and Muslim communities once again. While it seems that Congress was split on the issue, the fact still remains that Islamic intolerance is still an issue in America.
Christians and Jews are not on a worldwide mission to impose a barbaric set of religious laws on all.
This intolerance is spreading all over the world and has recently landed in France as well. On April 11, France officially banned the wearing of “full faced veils” in public. Muslim women, who wear the niqab for religious purposes, are outraged that they are being limited in expressing their faith. Once again, the Islamic faith is being targeted for Muslim radicalism that now threatens the French Republic.
I had to reread that last sentence twice. YES, Muslim "radicalism" does threaten the French Republic. Muslim "radicalism" is still Islam. This is as simple as 1 + 1 = 2.
This intolerance toward the Islamic faith needs to be stopped here in America and abroad. It starts with us here at KU. The Muslim Student Association on campus works to educate the student body about Muslim identity. It is our job to learn all we can about what the Islamic religion is truly about and not base our opinions and thoughts on what the world is trying to tell us about a select group of radical Muslims.
Is there one valid reason why we should tolerate Sharia? The MSA is part of the Islamic propaganda machine. From their Kansas University website:
"Once this is realized, it should be clear that Islam has the most continuous and universal message of any religion, because all prophets and messengers were “Muslims”, i.e. those who submitted to God’s will, and they preached “Islam”, i.e. submission to the will of Almighty God."
Mohammad sanctioned rape, and called for perpetual war against all infidels! Jesus neither raped nor killed. Slight difference there.
Was Mohammad part of this "select group of radical Muslims"?
Bukhari Hadith Volume 1, Book 2, Number 25: Narrated Ibn 'Umar:
Allah's Apostle said: "I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is Allah's Apostle, and offer the prayers perfectly and give the obligatory charity, so if they perform that, then they save their lives and property from me except for Islamic laws and then their reckoning (accounts) will be done by Allah."
Back to Bond:
Education can start with attending prayer at the Islamic Center of Lawrence mosque on Fridays at 1:30 p.m., attend events during the MSA Islam Awareness Week, take an Islam course through the department of religion or research on your own. Religious intolerance will not stop until prejudices can be put aside and individually we can start to move forward in our education of others. Perhaps eventually then, America and the world will become a place where freedom of religion is truly present.
— Bond is a junior in religious studies and journalism from Andover.
Would that be a course that Bond took? If so, it was a complete waste of her time! She is obviously unaware of the intolerance of Islam.
Muslim Hadith Book 041, Number 6985: "Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews."
Allison Bond is also oblivious to the lack of religious freedom under Islam. Koran verse 009.029:
"YUSUFALI: Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
Journalists are supposed to do their homework, so Ms. Bond gets an "F" from me.
'Are there any Christians left in the CofE?' Wave of anger after senior British Bishop calls for faith schools to limit number of Anglican pupils
Religious leaders yesterday poured scorn on Church of England proposals to limit the number of practising Anglicans admitted to faith schools. The Bishop of Oxford has called for a major shake-up of admissions rules, saying policies which favour religious children should be changed even if this affects a school’s exam results.
The Right Reverend John Pritchard, who is also chairman of the CofE’s board of education, urged heads to reserve no more than 10 per cent of places for practising Anglicans.
But his plans stirred anger among other denominations and faiths, who described them as ‘nonsense’ and ‘depressing politically-correct drivel’ and pledged to ‘robustly fight’ their right to admit members of their own faith. They said the Church was being led by a ‘secularist agenda’ on the issue, with Conservative MP Stewart Jackson asking ‘are there any Christians left in the CofE?’ [Simple answer: No]
The Bishop’s suggestion even sparked a row within his own flock, with one vicar saying he was ‘incandescent’ with the ‘level of incompetence displayed by senior Church members’.
Bishop Pritchard told the Times Educational Supplement this week: ‘Every school will have a policy that has a proportion of places for church youngsters... what I would be saying is that number ought to be minimised because our primary function and our privilege is to serve the wider community.’
There are about 2,500 CofE ‘voluntary aided’ primary and secondary schools in England. They each act as their own admissions authority and, when oversubscribed, can admit by faith.
There are also around 2,300 Roman Catholic schools, where 78 per cent of pupils are baptised Catholics. Several of these schools routinely dominate league tables.
Dr Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service, defended their right to educate children of their own faith and insisted their share of pupils on free school meals is in line with the national average.
She described the Bishop of Oxford’s comments as ‘nonsense’, and ‘emphatically’ denied that Catholic schools were academically selective. She said Catholic schools are often successful because children flourish in an environment with a strong moral and spiritual ethos.
And she added: ‘It is the entitlement of Catholic parents to send their children to Catholic schools. Unfortunately in some areas, such as London, we cannot satisfy the demand. If a school is oversubscribed we need a criteria by which to select. And we do this through faith.’
Ibrahim Hewitt, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Schools, said: ‘The Church of England should be setting a lead, not bending to what is very much a secularist agenda to try to get rid of faith schools.’
A spokesman for Education Secretary Michael Gove said: ‘Our aim is to end the rationing of good schools by making schools accountable to parents instead of politicians and therefore raise standards across the country. As we make progress the issue of admissions policy will become less important.’
But Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, welcomed the Bishop’s comments and said faith schools should be for the whole community.
The Bishop’s announcement is due to be issued to CofE schools as guidance in the summer. The move is likely to spark outrage among middle-class parents who fight to get their children into a top faith school.
Education Department Financial Aid Rules Backfire, Harming Students
The Education Department tried to restrict the use of financial aid by for-profit colleges by barring them from getting more than 90 percent of their funding from federal financial-aid programs.
How did they respond? By raising tuition, so that at least 10 percent of their students’ education would not be paid for by federal loans and grants. Thus, financial aid actually encouraged them to increase tuition, radically increasing their students’ future indebtedness.
The net result was to “create a perverse, no-win ‘Catch-22’ that could prevent low-income students from attending college,” by encouraging such colleges to raise tuition to outstrip rising financial aid by more than ten percent.
Over the past three years, the federal government has increased student aid by more than 40 percent. As a result, students are entitled to as much as $15,000 in grants and loans during their first year of study. The result has been to drive up tuition at some colleges by even higher percentages.
For example, Corinthian College has diploma programs in health care and other fields that can be completed in a year or less. Until earlier this year, many of those programs had a total cost of about $15,000, which meant that federal grants and loans could cover nearly 100 percent of their cost. In response to the Education Department’s rule, the college raised tuition to comply with the 90/10 rule.
As a result of increasing federal financial aid, colleges have been able to increase tuition faster than inflation, year after year, secure in the knowledge that they can rake in ever-rising government subsidies and skyrocketing tuition. College students are learning less and less even as higher education spending explodes.
Students have little choice but to pay inflated tuition bills into the education industrial-complex, as they vie with each other for scarce entry-level jobs by acquiring ever more degrees that show their ability to jump through hoops and master difficult (but largely useless) skills. The net result is an educational arms race in which people compete to see who can acquire the most paper credentials. There are now 8,000 waiters and 5,057 janitors with PhD’s or other advanced degrees, and millions of Americans have useless college degrees.
The Education Department recently made college officials’ lives more difficult by trying to alter the burden of proof long used by many colleges in sexual harassment cases (despite the lack of any legal basis for doing so), and by seeking to discourage procedures such as cross-examination that safeguard accuracy and due process in campus disciplinary proceedings.
Another recent Education Department rule that is likely to backfire on students is discussed here (the so-called “gainful employment rule”).
Massachusetts Pro-Life Group Riled by State-Funded Sex Education Website
A state-funded sex education website that claims getting an abortion is "much easier than it sounds" has angered a Bay State pro-life organization that says the site glorifies the controversial procedure.
Linda Thayer, a former Boston teacher and vice president of educational affairs for the Massachusetts Citizens for Life, told Fox News that the website, MariaTalks.com is a misuse of state funds and claimed it downplayed the medical procedure. She also claimed the website provided a "road map" for teenagers to get an abortion without informing their parents.
"Any minor girl who reads this website, whether she's pregnant or not, basically gets a road map on how to get an abortion without telling her parents," Thayer said on Wednesday. "They're really setting these girls up if they follow through with an abortion."
MariaTalks.com also downplays the potential physical complications associated with abortions, claiming that the website's characterization of abortions as "safe and effective" to be a "deceptive sleight of hand," Thayer said.
On the site, Maria informs readers that she was "overwhelmed" by different birth control options when she and her boyfriend began having sex.
"I did some Internet research, but I got overwhelmed with all the different birth control options (the ring? the cap? the patch?.. what’s the difference?!)," the site reads. "I decided to talk to my aunt – she’s a doctor and knows a lot about this stuff – and she helped me figure out what was best for me."
Abortion, meanwhile, is characterized as a "pretty hot topic" that some believe is wrong while others believe it can be a "good and responsible" choice.
"While everyone is entitled to their opinion, it can sometimes be hard to get truthful information because some people may try to get you to think the same way they do," the website reads. "What’s important is how you feel about it. One of my friends who had an abortion told me that it was a difficult decision to make, but she felt that it was the best choice she could make for herself, her boyfriend, her family, and her future."
The website also claims that abortions are "more common than you might think," with roughly 4 out of every 10 U.S. women having at least one abortion by the time they reach age 40.
"My Aunt Lucia says that abortions are safe and effective, though some people may experience temporary discomfort," Maria says on the website. "She also says that early abortions have less risk than those done later in the pregnancy."
The website has been produced since 2008 by the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts with $100,000 in annual grants from the state Department of Public Health. Those funds also cover a sex-crisis hotline and other outreach efforts, according to the Boston Herald.
Calls by FoxNews.com to the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts were not immediately returned on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Haag, chief of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, defended the website in a statement issued to the Boston Herald. “We feel strongly that the issues that are addressed through the Maria Talks Web site are essential in safeguarding the general, sexual health of youth by informing them of their risk for unintended pregnancies, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections," Haag's statement read.
The Massachusetts Department of Health also released a statement defending the site. "The website strives to provide accurate, complete, and non-judgmental information about all aspects of sexual health, including sex, abstinence, birth control, pregnancy, pregnancy options, sexually transmitted infections, sexual violence, and information for gay, lesbian, and questioning youth," the statement read. "The website is intended to be accessible to teens through the site's narrator, 18-year old Maria, who provides accurate information in a youth-friendly way."
The black headmistress who saw lynch mob in a British parent's poster and called police
For a poster advertising a primary school parents’ meeting, it is certainly unusual. Using models, it depicts scientist Charles Darwin surrounded by an angry mob wielding flaming torches and makeshift weapons. According to the school governor who created it, City executive David Moyle, it is a satirical joke about pushy middle-class parents demanding higher standards.
Yet when black headmistress Shirley Patterson saw it, she believed it represented her surrounded by white parents. She reportedly compared it to a scene from Mississippi Burning, a film about the Ku Klux Klan’s racist lynchings, saying it left her ‘fearing for her and her family’s safety’.
She called the police, claiming harassment. Then a council inquiry spent weeks determining the race of the Charles Darwin figure. Now Mr Moyle has been suspended from the governing body of Goodrich primary school in fashionable East Dulwich, south-east London, and is considering withdrawing his two younger children.
Although the police realised Darwin was white, and said no crime had been committed, Southwark council insisted it had ‘appropriately’ investigated the ‘deeply disturbing’ poster. The Labour authority refused to reveal details of its inquiry – which involved half a dozen officers at a time when 500 jobs are set to be cut.
And it will not discuss how a model of a white, bearded, Victorian scientist could be confused with a black 21st century headmistress.
But a friend of Mr Moyle said: ‘Southwark council summoned David for a meeting and told him the posters amounted to harassment. ‘A two-week investigation was carried out into the toy Charles Darwin’s ethnicity, before it was ruled “indeterminable”.
‘But the council inquiry, carried out by a whole team of officers including the assistant director of access, inclusion and education, Pauline Armour, ruled the poster was “an image of violence and intimidation”, and “deeply disturbing and damaging to children”.’
Last night Mr Moyle, who is also a volunteer cricket coach at the school, said: ‘The poster and subsequent events have taken up way too much of my time this year. I was very surprised and disappointed that the school executive tried to criminalise me over it, especially in light of the amount of time my wife and I have given to Goodrich over the last eight years.
‘If there was a perceived problem with the image I would have thought they could have spoken directly to me about it. ‘And as an ardent supporter of local government, I was taken aback by the reaction of the council, who not only fully endorsed the disproportionate reaction of the school management, but also contrived additional charges about the poster that had no relation at all to the original complaint.
‘The only people involved who have applied common sense to this incident are the police and the parents of the school, and to them I am grateful.’
The friend added: ‘David is really angry. He feels he can’t have his children in a school where the headmistress tried to have him arrested. The posters were supposed to be poking fun at parents, representing them as a peasants’ revolt. ‘And the parents, teachers and police saw nothing racist about it. But once the council got involved it escalated.’
Mrs Patterson, 53, replaced a popular long-term headmaster of Goodrich school when he retired in 2007. Ofsted inspectors rated the school, which has around 700 pupils aged three to 11, a lowly ‘satisfactory’ in 2008.
In January, newly-elected parent governor Mr Moyle, who lives nearby in a £650,000 Victorian house with wife Lisa, a former treasurer of the parents’ association, and their sons aged 12 and ten and daughter of eight, was asked to advertise a meeting. He found the image on a website mocking ‘creationists’ angered by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and stuck posters around the school.
The next week he was told Mrs Patterson had complained to the National Union of Teachers.
The friend said: ‘Mrs Patterson was previously at a school where lots of children come from migrant families and English is not their first language. ‘But East Dulwich is quite gentrified, and a lot of middle-class parents here want schools that rival prep schools. ‘They want academic excellence.
‘She feels everyone is against her and has over-reacted to a poster she thought symbolised her.’
Mrs Patterson, who lives with her daughter in a £250,000 flat in Camberwell two miles from the school, refused to comment.
There is a lot of talk from many people about bullying in school. The problem is that it is all talk. There is no sign that anybody is going to do anything that is likely to reduce bullying.
When politicians want to do nothing, and yet look like they are doing something, they appoint a blue ribbon committee or go to the U.N. or assign some Cabinet member to look into the problem and report back to the President -- hoping that the issue will be forgotten by the time he reports back.
When educators are going to do nothing, they express great concern and make pious public pronouncements. They may even hold conferences, write op-ed pieces or declare a "no tolerance" policy. But they are still not going to do anything that is likely to stop bullying.
In some rough schools, they can't even stop the bullying of teachers by the hooligans in their classes, much less stop the bullying of students.
Not all of this is the educators' fault. The courts have created a legal climate where any swift and decisive action against bullies can lead to lawsuits. The net results are indecision, half-hearted gestures and pious public pronouncements by school officials, none of which is going to stop bullies.
When judges create new "rights" for bullies out of thin air, just as they do for criminals, and prescribe "due process" for school discipline, just as if schools were little courtrooms, then nothing is likely to happen promptly or decisively.
If there is anything worse than doing nothing, it is doing nothing spiced with empty rhetoric about what behavior is "unacceptable" -- while in fact accepting it.
Might educators abuse their power, if the courts did not step in? Of course they could. Any power exercised by human beings can be abused. But, without the ability to exercise power, there is anarchy.
When responsible officials are prevented from exercising power, then bullies exercise power.
President Barack Obama has joined the chorus of those deploring bullying. But his own administration is pushing the notion that a disproportionate number of suspensions or other punishments for members of particular racial or ethnic groups is discriminatory.
In other words, if a school suspends more black males than Asian females, that is taken as a sign of discrimination. No one in his right mind really believes that, but it is part of the grand make-believe that pervades our politics and even our courts.
For years, there have been stories in New York and Philadelphia newspapers about black kids beating up Asian classmates. But do not expect anybody to do anything that is likely to put a stop to it.
If these were white kids beating up Hispanic kids, cries of outrage would ring out across the land from the media, the politicians, the churches and civic groups. But it is not politically correct to make a fuss when black kids beat up Asian kids.
None of this is unique to the United States, by the way. The same mushy-minded attitudes have been carried even further in Britain, both as regards criminals and as regards bullies in the schools.
Britain was once one of the most law-abiding nations on earth. But the reluctance of the left to put some serious punishment on criminals has been carried so far there that only 7 percent of convicted criminals actually spend any time behind bars. Britain has now overtaken the United States in various crime rates.
Years ago, there was a book published in Britain titled "Murder in The Playground." The boy who ended up killing a fellow student on the school playground had previously committed crimes ranging from motorcycle theft to arson that created more than $50,000 worth of damage in school. For the latter, he was given 24 hours' detention.
People who say that we should learn from other countries almost always mean that we should imitate what other countries do. But one of the most important things we can learn from other countries is to avoid the mistakes they have made.
The irresistible force of school reform meets the immovable object of teachers unions
"When Oprah starts talking about it, we're almost there," says Julio Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options. School choice is "definitely a mainstream topic right now," Fuentes crows at National School Choice Week festivities in Washington, D.C., in January. "Five or six years ago, when I got into this movement, we were viewed as the crazy voucher folks in Florida running around trying to pass legislation. Now Oprah is talking about it, so we're no longer crazy. We're making sense. We're making progress."
Oprah isn't alone in her late-breaking interest in education reform. Documentaries about school choice are popping up like pimples on a middle school boy, first among them the wildly successful, Sundance-winning Waiting for "Superman," by director David Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth fame. President Barack Obama spent 1,000 words of his 7,000-word State of the Union address this year on schools, referring to public education as "a system that's not working." Secretary of Education Arne Duncan kicked off the new year by writing in The Washington Post that "few areas are more suited for bipartisan action than education reform." Old Democratic mayors are saying nice things about reform, and new Republican governors are saying mean things about the status quo. And then there's Oprah, who devoted one of her final episodes to school reform. Her guests included Guggenheim, education technology champion Bill Gates, and the controversial former chancellor of the District of Columbia's public schools, Michelle Rhee.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act—rechristened No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001—is overdue for congressional reauthorization. On the state level, tight budgets and partisan rivalries are driving a reevaluation of how education money is spent. Policy makers are taking a fresh look at the way teachers are compensated, considering drastic reductions in administrative overhead, and reconsidering the role of technology in schooling. Independent charter schools and publicly funded vouchers are on the rise.
None of these ideas are new, but implementing them has taken on a new urgency. Is 2011 finally the year for serious education reform?
Irresistible Force
There is no denying that U.S. schools are ripe for reform. Per-pupil education spending has doubled in the last three decades, while test scores have remained stubbornly flat. American kids squat solidly in the middle of the pack in international testing, with 15-year-olds ranking about average in math and reading, slightly below average in science. Dropout rates in major cities are approaching 50 percent.
But schools have been this bad for a long time. Why the sudden surge of interest?
While reform remains primarily a Republican hobbyhorse, the conversion of some prominent Democrats has brought energy and life to the pool of exhausted political players. Michelle Rhee, the best-known of the eponymous Supermen in Guggenheim's documentary, identifies as a Democrat and worked for Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty (who lost the 2010 Democratic primary to a candidate backed by the teachers union). The Obama education team, led by Duncan, has been more open to talking about education reform than any Democratic administration in recent memory. Recently departed New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is a Democrat as well; he first made his name prosecuting Microsoft for antitrust violations in the Clinton Justice Department. Democratic campaign strategist Joe Trippi actively supports school choice. Even the rabble-rousing minister and lefty activist Al Sharpton has joined a new, Gates-funded lobbying group called Democrats for Education Reform.
Newark, New Jersey, boasts the reform dream team of zippy young Democratic Mayor Cory Booker plus fat and happy Republican Gov. Chris Christie. The two politicians are planning a massive education overhaul, which may include big cuts in the city's morbidly obese education bureaucracy, more support for charters and vouchers, and performance pay for teachers, all fueled by a $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The media have been friendly toward their bipartisan effort—Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg appeared on Oprah together as well—making reformers giddy. "When the most liberal paper [the Newark Star-Ledger] in the state endorses a voucher bill," says Derrell Bradford, executive director of New Jersey's Excellent Education for Everyone, "the only thing stopping you is you."
But if all obstacles had indeed been removed, parents would have widespread education choice, and public schools would be noticeably on the mend. Neither is yet close to being true.
In urban school districts, where schools have been disaster zones for at least a generation, despair is breeding robust cooperation. But areas of bipartisan reform agreement are smaller on Capitol Hill and in statehouses around the country. More radical school choice proposals, such as vouchers for private school tuition, are mostly off the table. Usually when the two parties join hands it's not to change the status quo but to protect it. When Republicans talk about fixing schools, they often mean simply giving kids and parents ways to bail out of the worst of the worst. When Democrats talk about reform, they tend to prefer spending more to patch things up and build on top of the existing system. Both sides wind up voting for increased spending in the short and long run.
The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which controls the flow of federal K–12 funds to the states, is typically revisited every five to seven years. Duncan and others are hopeful they can get some form of education reauthorization to the president's desk for a signature this year despite the Republican takeover of the House. As Teach for America vice president (and former husband of Michelle Rhee) Kevin Huffman points out in U.S. News and World Report, "the relevant committee chairs and ranking members (Tom Harkin and Michael Enzi in the Senate, John Kline and George Miller in the House) are experienced pros"—and known moderates, the sort of people more likely to keep the spigot open than push radical reform.
In this regard they are in step with the president, who despite a reformist reputation has a mostly status quo record. Obama's main boast about K–12 education reform in the State of the Union address was that "instead of just pouring money into a system that's not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top." It would have been more accurate to say, "In addition to pouring money into a system that's not working, we launched a relatively insignificant competition called Race to the Top."
At $4.4 billion, Race to the Top spending accounted for just a small share of the $500 billion spent on education at the federal, state, and local level. That said, by refusing to give states the money until after they implemented reforms such as publicizing information on teacher quality and lifting caps on charter schools, the administration did manage to elicit a decent-sized bang for its buck. As Obama correctly noted, "For less than 1 percent of what we spend on education each year, it has led over 40 states to raise their standards for teaching and learning."
In education policy, Washington has tended to be the worst kind of backseat driver. The real power to set curriculum and allocate resources rests with the states, meaning the federal government can only bribe, cajole, and reprimand from a distance. But the bribes keep getting bigger and bigger, which means state policy is increasingly subject to the whims of the feds; many reformers would like to use that influence to advance school choice. In the case of Race to the Top, the piles of cash were big enough (a couple hundred million dollars per state in most cases) and the rules specific enough that they gave state legislators, governors, and education bureaucracies sufficient incentive to risk ticking off teachers unions a little.
Let the market decide what British universities charge
The Coalition's university funding policy is turning into an entirely predictable shambles. It was right to raise the level of tuition fees, both to shift the cost of university education from the taxpayer to the students who will reap the economic benefit, and to encourage a genuinely competitive market in higher education. However, by imposing a cap of £9,000, that market has been badly distorted.
Initially, ministers were insistent that universities would charge the maximum only in "exceptional circumstances". To no one's great surprise – other, it seems, than the minister responsible, Vince Cable – the overwhelming majority are charging the maximum fee.
This is already being described as the Stella Artois route: even our less illustrious academic establishments want to be seen as "reassuringly expensive". Indeed, Graham Henderson, vice-chancellor of Teesside University in Middlesbrough, made no bones about it in this newspaper yesterday, when explaining why his institution wanted to charge £8,500 a year, almost as much as Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial College: "Our students are checking that we are not charging the bottom of the spectrum, because they don't want to be seen as second-rate."
The result is not just sky-high fees all round, but a significant shortfall in the higher education budget. The Government will have to advance more money than expected in the form of student loans, leaving less to fund university places: it is estimated that up to 36,000 will be lost as a consequence.
While this newspaper has long argued that too many youngsters are being shoved through the university system, the rationing of places should be based squarely on academic ability, not on a cash shortage caused by an ill-designed funding mechanism. Once again, a sensible Tory policy has been fatally compromised by the necessity to pander to the Liberal Democrats – a common theme in so many of the Coalition's reforms.
What can be done? One solution would be to remove the £9,000 cap, and allow a true market to develop. Our best universities – which are world-beaters – would be able to charge significantly more, channelling much of the surplus into bursaries for poorer students, while the less distinguished would have to charge significantly less, or fail to fill their places.
The more innovative could also start to market two-year courses – as the [private] University of Buckingham already does – that would offer an attractive lower-cost option.
Mr Cable seems to spend much of his time these days perfecting his role as the Coalition's licensed dissident. It is a pity that he does not spend longer ensuring that the policies for which he is responsible are fit for purpose.
The College Republicans at the University of California-Merced ask fellow students, who support raising taxes on the rich, if they would be willing to redistribute their GPAs. They don’t think it’s a good idea because they earned their grades.
The average American, as parent, student and taxpayer, has little idea of the academic rot at so many of our colleges. Save for a tiny handful of the nation's colleges, what distinguishes one college from another is the magnitude of that rot.
One of the best sources of information about our colleges is the New York City-based Manhattan Institute's quarterly Web magazine, Minding the Campus, edited by John Leo, former columnist for U.S. News & World Report.
The magazine's Winter 2010 edition contains an article by Dr. Candace de Russy, former member of the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY), titled "Hate-America Sociology." De Russy's colleague sent her a copy of a student's exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at an East Coast public college. The professor had given it a perfect score of 100. Here are some of the questions asked and the student's written response:
"Question: How does the United States 'steal' the resources of other (third world) countries?
"Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor that cannot be turned down.
"Question: Why is the U.S. on shaky moral ground when it comes to preventing illegal immigration?
"Answer: Some say that it is wrong of the United States to prevent illegal immigration because the same people we are denying entry to, we have exploited for the purpose of keeping the American wheel spinning." ...
"Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?
"Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. (F)or example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female's expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.
"Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.
"Answer: The belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished."
Out of retaliation fears, de Russy withheld the name and university of her colleague who sent the exam. Teaching students hate-America indoctrination is widespread, as I've documented in the past.
A few years ago, according to UCLA's Bruin Standard, Mary Corey, UCLA history professor, instructed her class, "Capitalism isn't a lie on purpose. It's just a lie." She continued, "(Capitalists) are swine. ... They're bastard people."
Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, "The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world."
Professor Andrew Hewitt, chairman of UCLA's Department of Germanic Languages, told his class, "Bush is a moron, a simpleton and an idiot." The professor's opinion of the rest of us: "American consumerism is a very unique thing; I don't think anyone else lusts after money in such a greedy fashion."
An English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey tells his students, "Conservatism champions racism, exploitation and imperialist war."
University officials are aware of this kind of academic rot, but not university trustees who bear the ultimate responsibility for the university's welfare. Trustees are mostly yes-men for the president. Legislators and charitable foundations that pour billions into colleges are unaware as well. Most tragically, parents who cough up thousands in tuition to send their youngsters off to be educated, rather than indoctrinated, are unaware of the academic rot as well.
You say, "Williams, what can be done?" Students should record classroom professorial propaganda and give it wide distribution over the Internet. I've taught for more than 40 years and have routinely invited students to record my lectures so they don't have to be stenographers during class. I have no idea of where those recordings have wound up, but if you find them, you'll hear zero proselytization or discussion of my political and other personal preferences. To do otherwise, I consider to be academic dishonesty.
Scandal of Britain's untrained teachers: Thousands don't have degrees in the subjects they teach
More than a quarter of teachers in many subjects do not have any qualification beyond an A-level in the course they teach, official figures reveal. Almost a million children are taught maths by ‘inadequately qualified’ teachers, and English doesn’t fare much better.
Government statistics on nearly 140,000 secondary school teachers – collected for the first time – show a shocking proportion of teachers do not have a degree in their subject. Education experts warn that this ‘alarming’ lack of qualifications will result in schools becoming trapped in a spiral of slipping standards.
A quarter of maths teachers in secondary schools – 26.6 per cent or 8,745 – do not have a degree in their subject, and nor do 28.7 per cent of geography teachers, 31.4 per cent of physics teachers and 55 per cent teaching religious education. Worse still, 63 per cent of business and economics teachers and 82 per cent in media studies do not have a degree in their chosen field.
Of the ‘core’ subjects included in Education Secretary Michael Gove’s new performance measure, the EBacc, biology is the only subject to have a high proportion of teachers, 92 per cent, who are subject specialists. A total of 7,560 of 36,600 secondary school English teachers – 21 per cent – do not have an English degree.
Professor Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, said: ‘The lack of qualifications held by teachers is alarming and will have consequences. ‘It is little wonder that in comparison with the rest of the developed world, our standards are slipping. It takes more than a good degree to make a good teacher. But sound subject knowledge, gained from a degree, is absolutely key. ‘How can teachers passionately communicate their subject if they do not have a good level of understanding about it?’
He said the Government urgently needs to break the cycle of inadequate training because it results in less qualified students and, as a result, a smaller pool from which to find the teachers of the future.
Yesterday’s figures, from the Department for Education, were collected as part of the 2010 school workforce census. In previous years the Government has used a sample of staff to gauge the level of teachers holding degrees. This year they sought to gather information on all 200,000 qualified teachers, and 140,000 responded.
The figures follow Mr Gove’s pledge to attract more graduates with first-class honours into teaching to raise the status of the profession. However, the Coalition has also cut the number of training places and axed ‘golden hellos’ for all but maths and science teachers. Graduates with less than a 2:2 degree will no longer be eligible for teacher training funding.
Schools Minister Nick Gibb said: ‘We are trying to increase the number of graduates in subjects coming into teacher training.’
A Department for Education spokesman added: ‘It’s clear that the leading systems are built on teachers with expert, specialist subject knowledge. ‘We’ve struggled to attract enough graduates in shortage subjects like physics, chemistry and maths for a long time. That’s why we’re taking radical steps to toughen up recruitment and training. ‘We are going to overhaul professional development so existing teachers keep their skills and knowledge up to scratch.’
New York Health Officials Back Off Proposal to 'Legislate Fun'
New York health officials pulled back a proposal that would have placed new regulations on classic kid games like tag and Wiffle Ball that officials deemed unsafe.
Just in time for summer camp season, the list was delivered to towns, villages and camp operators, and in a surprise to many, games like kickball were placed in the category of “significant risk of injury.”
In turn, public outcry called for the state to stay off their handball courts. Some had called it an attempt to "legislate fun," as the proposal faced increasing criticism from lawmakers and recreational sports businesses.
Dave Mullany, president of Wiffle Ball Inc., based in Shelton, Conn., told FoxNews.com that he was shocked to hear that lawmakers in Albany recently identified the activity as "poses a significant risk of injury" along with other iconic childhood pastimes, like dodgeball.
"It's crazy," Mullany said on Tuesday. "Amid all this talk of us becoming a nation of overweight kids, we really need to promote activity and kids having fun. Should these kids go to summer camp and sit quietly with their hands folded? It's a little disconcerting to see fun being legislated."
The New York Health Department maintains these lists make sure camps have the proper medical equipment to treat any injury that may result from any particular activity. The games range in danger from archery to kickball.
“A lot can be misread,” Claudia Hutton, a department spokeswoman told FoxNews.com. “For example, Arts and Crafts sounds like it’s glue and paint, but in some cases they use power tools.”
Leaders at the department are also relatively new and are working with legislation that was authored during the previous administration. Hutton said the department is open to suggestions from residents before it implements any new guidance and the decision is likely to be made on May 16.
The department created the list of risky recreational activities in response to a state law passed in 2009. The law has yet to be implemented.
"People talk about how we're less and less active and that we're concerned about the increasing waistlines, so to kind of limit what kids do for activity and recreation is somewhat ludicrous," Mullany continued. Mullany also noted that Wiffle Ball is the only activity identified by brand name. "It catches you off-guard when you see something like this, and especially as the only brand name mentioned," he said. "I'm sure I'll be hearing from friends who are parents."
The games are not banned at camps, but they come at a play-at-your-own-risk cost. Camps that want campers to play the games will be required to pay a $200 registration fee and have medical staff on hand.
There are roughly 2,300 regulated summer camps in New York that are required to be under permit and be inspected twice a year by the state's Department of Health.
The state claims that this has resulted in markedly low levels of serious incidents. State statistics claim that of more than 640,000 children who attend camps, less than two-tenths of one percent are injured in any manner. Games/activities on the warning list:
Education programs, systems and methods in America today are ancient and obsolete. The university concept of colleges and degrees, for example, is a medieval invention. University graduates still wear the same cap and gown costumes of many centuries ago.
But graduation doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore. Almost everyone graduates now. We see kindergartners today wearing the traditional cap and gown for “graduation” up to the first grade. They “graduate” with cap and gown from elementary school too; but most of them still can’t read.
Compulsory primary and secondary public school systems in America took hold in the late 19th century. What began as a method to provide all children with a basic education in reading, writing, and figuring, has become a grand thirteen year daycare program to “socialize” children into the American collective. There’s more emphasis now on teaching kids what to think than how to think.
By most accounts, compulsory education isn’t working. Arne Duncan, Secretary of the US Dept of Education, admitted recently that this year, up to 82 percent of public schools could "fail" the government's "No Child Left Behind" standards. "No Child Left Behind” is broken and we need to fix it now," he declared. "This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed," "We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk."
According to Secretary Duncan then, President Bush’s law creating achievement standards for schools is responsible for the schools’ failure to meet the standards. He thinks that if we stop labeling schools as failures, they’ll no longer be failures. If the law were only fair, he imagines, the kids would do so much better. The obvious truth, however, is that 80% of compulsory American public schools can’t even meet basic academic achievement standards.
Meanwhile, in the land of perpetual fruits and nuts, The California Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful Education Act law is pending. It would require school textbooks and teachers to incorporate information on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans into their curriculum.
I can’t imagine exactly what information they want to teach about that beyond the fact that lots of normal people, both gay and straight, like to tickle each other’s private parts now and then. Admitted, that’s an interesting subject, but surely not for a compulsory public school classroom. Public schools have no business instructing children on cultural values and preferences. Those are purely private matters.
School officials from a small district in the state of Maine have decided to purchase at taxpayer expense $200,000 worth of Apple's brand new iPad 2 tablet computers, one for each new kindergartner in the district, now and every year in the foreseeable future. I’m sure the little five-year-old Einstein’s will have a wonderful time with them before the majority of the delicate machines are kaput within a week or two.
Give a responsible toddler a $500 computer; he’ll likely use it as a hammer.
So I don’t think any of these crackpot ideas are going to work, but if they do, maybe they can pass similar laws requiring expensive equipment and information on how to read.
A 2009 study by Toronto-Dominion Bank found the total cost for a four-year degree, including academic fees plus living expenses, was $77,000. If you stayed at home, it went down to $52,000.
Fast forward 18 years from 2009, enough of a time span for a child to be off to university, and the costs more than double. The costs of a four-year degree will go up to $137,000 if your child goes away and will be $101,000 even if he or she stays at home.
“Can you realistically ask a child to take on that type of financial burden?” asks Craig Alexander, chief economist with the bank. “The answer I would reach is no, and this is why parents are having to save for children’s education expenses.”
Saving for your children’s education has become a necessity unless you want them to face a lifetime of debt, even if that savings comes at the expense of money that might have been earmarked for retirement.
The federal government has helped nudge us along this education path by offering parents valuable incentives if they save for their child’s education. Since 1998, Ottawa has topped up all registered education savings plans by 20% to a maximum of $500 per year and $7,200 lifetime.
The results have altered the landscape for RESP plans. Total assets in RESPs before 1998 were $4-billion — a time when none of the major banks even offered the program. Today, there are more than 70 financial institutions that offer RESPs, and as of 2009, assets had climbed to $26-billlion.
Mr. Alexander says all you have to do is look at tuition rates over the last four years and you get an idea of how difficult it has become for children to make it on their own.
“The average rate of increase of tuition rates is running at 4% annually. It’s not astronomically high, but with inflation running at 2%, it means tuition is rising at twice the rate of consumer prices,” the economist says, noting in the past four years alone the average annual tuition rate has risen from $4,500 to $5,000.
Yet, it’s all worth it based on a purely financial decision. “The rate of return on education is the highest of any investment you make. It’s better than cash, bonds or equities. The real issue is how do you finance that education,” Mr. Alexander says.
Peter Lewis is vice-president, regulatory and corporate, with Canadian Scholarship Trust Foundation, which at 51 years old is the oldest education savings plan in the country. He says parents used to make monthly payments on an education plan to shelter income and profits from tax, but it didn’t reach a critical mass of popularity until Ottawa started paying people to make contributions.
“I think part of what has also happened is an increasing understanding of the need for education,” says Mr. Lewis, adding 70% of all jobs today now require some form of post-secondary education. “If you as a parent want your child to have success, a post-secondary education becomes important.”
The real challenge when it comes to getting parents to save is convincing low income families to put money away for an RESP. The latest statistics from 2009 show only 19% of Canadian low-income families applied for the Canada Learning Bond, which pays out as much as $2,000 per child without having to put any money in at all. “The participation rate drops as you go lower down on socioeconomic ladder,” Mr. Lewis says.
David Sharone, product manager of registered plans with Bank of Montreal, says the message just has not gotten through to those eligible for the free money.
“We’ve got to figure ways to increase that number. We’re meeting with government to try to solve it. There are lot reasons why — low-income people might not go to the bank as often, there might be financial literacy issues — but it’s free money if they just open the plan. There should be enough incentives out there for everybody to open an RESP.”
Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel may have dodged an early fight with the teacher's unions.
Illinois is on track to pass a major set of education reforms -- without much of the drama that has dogged the effort in other jurisdictions like Washington D.C. -- and Wisconsin.
“The changes to Illinois’ education system agreed to by all parties will make Illinois a national model, and set a standard for other states to follow,” said Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for Children.
The bill under consideration is the result of negotiations between education groups Advance Illinois and Stand for Children, teachers' unions, and school administrators and it reforms tenure, establishes performance as a hiring standard and limits seniority and the right to strike. The Chicago Teachers Union, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Illinois Education Association have all backed the measure.
On the campaign trail, Emanuel backed an early version of the bill that the unions originally opposed, using harsh rhetoric against the teachers unions.
"Chicago kids are being cheated out of four years' worth of education," Emanuel said in February signaling he backed reforms to tenure and curtailing the right to strike. Teachers, he said "are working very hard in adverse conditions in many places but they are not underpaid."
An unguarded comment by the new president of Britain's National Union of Students shows how denigrated university education has become
From Britain’s government officials right through to anti-cuts protesters, it seems everyone agrees about one thing in relation to Higher Education: universities should be engines of social mobility. They should give a boost to students from poorer backgrounds and help them to make their way up the career and social ladders.
The newly elected president of the National Union of Students (NUS), Liam Burns, spelt this out very clearly. Speaking to the Scottish Herald before his election, he said we should put aside the archaic idea that universities should encourage the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of truth, and welcome the fact that unis are now training grounds for youngsters who want to have brighter career prospects.
‘I think we should be honest about our priorities’, he said. ‘At the end of the day, the point of the university has changed. If you look at when only five per cent of the population went, that was about knowledge, discovery, pushing boundaries, people talked about the crème de la crème. [Now], it is about social mobility and people changing their lives. The reality is you need that bit of paper [a degree] to get into better jobs with greater earning potential and influence. So we want as many people to get one as possible, at the expense of quality if necessary.’
‘At the expense of quality…’ It is a remarkably naked assertion of the denigration of education from being about quality (knowledge, reflection, truth) to being about quantity (getting as many young people through as possible in order to improve their ‘earning potential’).
This outlook has been widespread on recent student demonstrations against the Lib-Con government’s plans to cut HE funding and enforce student fees. If young people don’t get that ‘bit of paper’ that acts as a passport to a better job, the protesters have argued, then it’s all over, we’re doomed. Student commentators described the government’s plans as a ‘breathtaking attack on social mobility’ while protesters waved banners pleading ‘Don’t cut our futures’, ‘My dream for a better future will be over’ and ‘No degree = no hope’.
When students and their representatives see the primary role of Higher Education as providing a path towards ‘greater earning potential’, then it is clear that they have bought into the idea of themselves as consumers. Apparently they are simply the consumers of a product (education), whose time at uni is really just an investment that should eventually pay off in terms of increased social mobility. Indeed, many students have even started to demand refunds for ‘poor teaching’, when universities fail to deliver and provide those measurable outcomes that students expect as a return on their investment.
If the student movement has bought into the idea of Higher Education as a kind of investment, that begs a serious question: why shouldn’t students have to pay for this service? If HE really is just about improving prospects and lifestyles, then perhaps there should be fees, much like when adults take night classes because they want to move higher up in their firm of field of work? In this sense, it is not surprising that Liam Burns, who explicitly elevates ‘earning potential’ over ‘knowledge, discovery, pushing boundaries’, reportedly believes that the idea of a free education is now ‘untenable’ outside of Scotland, and that a graduate tax, imposed upon graduates who earn above a certain threshold, is the way forward. (Burns played a key role in keeping Scotland itself fees-free.)
Once a university education is no longer treated as something that has an intrinsic value, regardless of the outcomes upon graduation, then the arguments for keeping it free, the idea of keeping it shielded from market forces, become increasingly spurious. In buying into the language of social mobility, anti-fees student campaigners are shooting themselves in the foot.
In fact, in arguing that ‘knowledge, discovery and pushing boundaries’ should be deprioritised in favour of boosting social mobility, student representatives undermine the very basis on which degrees were once seen as valuable. Degrees were traditionally a mark of academic excellence; having one made you stand out from the crowd. If, as Burns now seems to be suggesting, the quality of degrees should be compromised so that ‘the crowd’ can all be awarded one, then degrees will cease to have the cachet they once had. And organisations will have to find other ways of selecting the best employees.
Ironically, they might have to do that by falling back on older, quite problematic methods: the school-tie approach, perhaps, or the question of whether your degree is from a ‘good university’ or a ‘bad university’. The hollowing out of degrees, the elevation of quantity over quality, not only robs young people of the chance to stretch their minds and seek knowledge - it also implicitly invites organisations and institutions to develop various ways to separate people into ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ categories.
With their talk of social mobility, especially for poorer students, student representatives may think they are being radical. But in truth, they are buying into the very marketisation of HE that the coalition government itself is encouraging. Furthermore, in failing to defend the traditional role of a university, these new student consumers will find that their ‘investment’ is less likely to yield either a decent education or a passport to a brighter, more brilliant future.
One in six British schools bans conkers over "elf 'n' safety" fears - and leapfrog and marbles are also under threat
Traditional school games such as conkers and leapfrog are dying out because over-protective teachers have irrational fears about health and safety, a survey suggests.
Researchers found that conkers have been banned from nearly one sixth of playgrounds for fear that they could cause injury or trigger a nut allergy, even though they are not nuts.
British bulldog contests have been banned from more than a quarter of playgrounds and even innocuous games such as leapfrog and marbles are going the same way.
Of 653 heads, teachers and support staff questioned, 29 per cent said British bulldog has been banned in their school, 14 per cent said pupils are forbidden from playing conkers and 9 per cent said leapfrog had been banned. Some 5 per cent said children were prevented from playing marbles and the same percentage said chasing games, such as tag, had been stopped.
The trend has been blamed on the rise in bureaucracy and red tape in schools and an increase in the number of parents who sue. Education experts have accused ‘over-zealous’ teachers of ruining childhoods.
Tim Gill, former director of the Children’s Play Council at the National Children’s Bureau, said schools have ‘forgotten how to give children a good childhood’. He added: ‘Bumps and scrapes and dealing with life’s trials are part and parcel of growing into a confident and resilient person. ‘You can only learn through experience.’
He said teachers who insist they are hampered by red tape are ‘confused’ because ‘bureaucracy barriers are not as great as they think they are’.
The reluctance of teachers to let children play has been revealed by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.
Its research has also shown that pupils are being taken on fewer school trips due to too much form filling, a lack of time and funding, and safety fears. One primary school teacher told researchers: ‘Apparently the main problem with conkers is that nut allergy sufferers are increasingly allergic to them.’ 'Right, Perkins, I'm just going to check your pockets for any conkers'
A secondary school teacher said: ‘Bulldog is banned because of the number of broken bones it generates.’
In total, 15 per cent of those questioned said fewer playground games and sports are played at their school now than three years ago. More than half, 55 per cent, cited concerns over pupil safety as the reason. And 42 per cent said there was a fear of being sued if a child was hurt during a game. In total, 57 per cent of those questioned said there was a growing trend of ‘risk aversion’ in schools.
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: ‘Risk in any school trip or activity should be recognised, assessed and managed, rather than avoided. ‘Young people are often less safe when there is an adult saying “be careful” – they then don’t trust their own instincts.’
Peter Cornall of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said increasing numbers of children are allergic to conkers, which are the seed of the horse chestnut tree. This is not because the conker has known allergens, but because fewer children play outside and build immunity to germs that may be on conkers. But he added: ‘Teachers are taking matters too far.’
Food is vital for survival, yet less than 2 percent of America's population works in agriculture. That's a big change from 100 years ago, when over 40 percent of the workforce was toiling away on the farm. If I had been born at the start of the 20th century in Kansas, rather than at the end of the 1950s, no doubt my life would have been spent on the farm.
Agriculture was labor-intensive then, requiring plenty of strong backs, human and animal alike. In addition to nearly half the human workforce, 22 million animals worked the fields. Now 5 million tractors and a dazzling array of farm implements do the work of thousands. Farms have become more productive and specialized. And the number of farms has plunged, while the average-sized farm has quadrupled.
According to the USDA's website, in 1945 it took 14 labor hours to produce 100 bushels of corn on two acres. By 1987, it only took 3 labor hours and one acre to produce the same amount. Now, it takes less than an acre.
We have a wider array of food available to us than ever before. Created by fewer people. The division of labor continues to work wonders. Thank goodness we're not all stuck on the farm. According to the occupational employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 419,200 were employed in the farming, fishing, and forestry occupations in May of 2009.
The same May 2009 report listed 8,488,740 people employed in education, training, and library occupations. So more than 20 times more people are needed to educate a small portion of the population than to grow food for everyone. But what about serving the food? Yes, food-preparation and food-serving occupations totaled 11,218,260 employees, serving the entire population of over 308 million.
Meanwhile, it takes more than 8 million to educate the 81.5 million that are enrolled in school. History and technology would say this surely can't last. A proud father recently told me of quizzing his kids about scurvy. And while his young daughter gamely took a wild guess, his crafty teenage son ducked into the next room to google it, quickly emerging to give the correct answer that the disease that killed so many centuries ago is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C.
What schooling is for many is a 12- or 16-year sentence wherein young people are penned up, talked at, cajoled, quizzed, and tested, for the most part on facts and figures that can now be retrieved in seconds with a handheld device.
The budget for education in the United States was $972 billion in 2007, according to the 2009 Statistical Abstract of the United States — all of this money and all of these people for the promise that a life of employment success follows. Just as buying a house was the surest of investments, investing in an education is thought to be a sure bet. But the housing bubble has popped, and the education bubble is afloat, looking for a needle, according to PayPal founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel.
"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed," says Thiel. "Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus."
In an article for TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy accentuates Thiel's point, writing, "Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe."
As home buyers leveraged up to buy McMansions in the housing boom, parents and students are borrowing thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands, for degrees from big- (and small-) name universities, with the idea that when they come out the other side, with diploma in hand, the employment world is their oyster.
Other than the connections one makes at the Ivy League school, or Stanford, or Whatever State U, what's the point? Years of lost productivity, mountains of debt, and a piece of paper that likely has nothing to do with the job skills needed for this century.
Community-college English instructor Professor X is haunted by the similarities between the housing and education bubbles. In his book, entitled In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic, X writes, "I, who fell victim to the original pyramid scheme of real estate … have used the educational pyramid scheme, the redefining of who college students are, for my own salvation."
Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek have decided to pluck 20 talented teens out of the college quicksand and pay them $100,000 each over two years to start companies rather than sit through lectures, go to football games, and pile up student-loan debt. Thiel calls it "stopping out of school."
Great things will come from these "20 under 20." But for the rest of the millions left on campus — and in grade and high schools — few are learning to think and write, while all are gaining the highest self-esteem in the world.
This is the information age, yet the ability to communicate is not being taught, or not sinking in. College English instructor Kara Miller wrote on Boston.com that few of her students had received writing instruction in high school, and that correcting student papers was so time consuming that the task was virtually overwhelming. She quotes Vartan Gregorian, the former president of Brown University, who rightly understands that "the ability to read, comprehend, and write — in other words, to organize information into knowledge — must be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill."
In a piece questioning the need for colleges offering majors in business, David Glenn writes that employers are looking for "22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they're perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors."
Yes, the facts and figures are a click away. The ability to use, understand, and communicate those facts is what must be taught and currently is not. And it doesn't take an army of 8 million and a budget of 1 trillion dollars and counting to do it.
British middle-class children disadvantaged by University admission reforms
Middle-class schoolchildren could be denied university places in favour of students with lower grades from poorly-performing schools under reforms to the application process.
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) will include statistics about each applicant’s school on all forms from 2012. Each application for entry will show the average GCSE and A-level performance of the candidate’s school and the proportion of pupils in their neighbourhood who go on to higher education.
This way universities will be able to see how well a pupil is performing compared to other students from the same school and local area.
The proposals have been put forward by vice-chancellors who face being penalised if they fail to hit government targets for the proportions of students admitted from deprived families. It will enable elite institutions to make lower offers to students from poorly-performing schools who they believe have academic potential.
Universities must hit government targets in order to be able to raise fees to the maximum level of £9,000 from 2012.
However, critics have warned that it will penalise children who are educated privately. Helen Wright, headmistress of St Mary’s Calne, Wiltshire, and president of the Girls’ School Association, described the system as “morally wrong”. She told the Sunday Times: “This is too much of a broad brush approach and is not sensible. “In the end decisions will be based on guesswork based on stereotypes.” She said schools that had high grades were likely to be “teaching its pupils well”.
The proposals have been backed by Universities UK, the vice-chancellor’s association.
However, Graham Stuart, Conservative chairman of the education select committee, said that “hard-working youngsters” could have their results disregards “because of nakedly political interference”.
Tim Hands, master of Magdaean College school, Oxford warned that such statistics could not take into account factors such as private tuition and described the measurements as “crude”.
In a recent newsletter Ucas said: “For the 2012 application cycle, Ucas will be able to provide additional contextual data from publicly available data sets to those institutions who wish to use it. This is one of a number of shared services being developed by Ucas for the benefit of the Higher Education sector, and comes in response to a number of requests from institutions to provide such information.”
Data from the Complete University Guide reveals a drop in students landing graduate jobs or places on more advanced postgraduate courses after finishing their degree. At most universities, some 64 per cent of students found decent jobs or further study, compared with 68.5 per cent two years earlier.
Graduate prospects were particularly hit at many former polytechnics and new universities amid rising competition for sought-after positions during the economic downturn.
Figures show just 45 per cent of students who left Bolton University in 2009 – the latest available data – secured graduate jobs or places on further courses, such as PhDs. It means more than half were either unemployed or found low-skilled jobs that were not linked to their degrees, such as shelf-stacking and working behind a bar.
According to figures, 53 per cent of students who left De Montfort in Leicester gained decent jobs or places on other courses, compared with 69 per cent a year earlier. Graduate prospects dropped from 71 per cent to 61 per cent at Bournemouth University, 67 per cent to 55.5 per cent at Leeds Metropolitan and 58.5 per cent to 49 per cent at London South Bank.
But other universities ensured more students found graduate jobs, often after offering courses in employability skills or better careers guidance.
This included Plymouth, Huddersfield and the University for the Creative Arts in London.
More students from Buckingham – a private university – graduated with a good job or place on another course, strengthening the Coalition’s claim that more students should consider studying with private providers.
CA Senate Passes Bill Mandating Homosexual History in Public Schools
The state Senate has approved legislation that would require California’s public schools to include gay history in social studies lessons.
Supporters say the move is needed to counter anti-gay stereotypes and beliefs that make gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children vulnerable to bullying and suicide.
Opponents said it would burden an already crowded curriculum and expose students to a subject that some parents find objectionable.
The bill, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco, passed Thursday on a 23-14 vote. The measure now goes to the Assembly.
It leaves it up to local school districts to decide what to include in the lessons and at what grade students would receive them.
Indiana is on the verge of taking its most important strides forward on education in decades.
The final, and most important, piece fell into place Friday when Gov. Mitch Daniels announced that he would ask the General Assembly to expand full-day kindergarten to every school district in the state. That unexpected announcement, which dropped late in the legislative process, was made possible by a much better than expected revenue forecast.
Mitch Daniels made all-day kindergarten a key piece of his first campaign for governor in 2004. And he was able to greatly expand the option early in his tenure as governor; about 75 percent of districts in Indiana now offer all-day kindergarten. Friday's announcement, if approved by the General Assembly, would finally complete the task.
Beyond that critical milestone, the General Assembly also is poised to significantly expand the number of charter schools, increase pay for high-performing teachers, create a sensible voucher program that would improve educational options for low- and middle-income families, strengthen the accountability system for schools, and revamp work rules that hinder the state's best teachers while protecting those who underperform.
The drive to adopt such reforms hasn't been easy. Defenders of the status quo have made wild assertions that Daniels and his supporters are trying to "destroy'' public schools and "punish'' teachers. While the proposed reforms certainly deserve thoughtful critique, the over-the-top rhetoric coming from opponents, including some in the General Assembly, has been counterproductive.
The true goal of each of the reforms isn't a mystery. It's to significantly improve student achievement in a state that has an undereducated workforce, a reality that hinders economic growth in an increasingly competitive global economy.
Will all-day kindergarten eventually help make Indiana more competitive? Research indicates that it should.
So too should giving families more choices in educating their children. Recent studies have shown, for instance, that students in Indianapolis charter schools fare better than peers in their old schools. Early results from a University of Chicago study have uncovered similar results from Florida's voucher program.
None of these reforms, including all-day kindergarten, is a panacea. But taken in total they provide Indiana with a momentum on education that it has not had for many years.
A legislative session all but derailed by an ill-conceived and lengthy walkout is on the verge of ending on a very high note. But it won't be the lawmakers who are the true victors. It will be the children of Indiana.
The student union at Westminster University in central London has elected to its top leadership posts two people linked to a radical Islamist group with an anti-Semitic history.
The two have ties to Hizb ut- Tahrir, a group calling for an Islamic state or caliphate. The group has been barred from organizing and speaking on campuses under the National Union of Students (NUS) policy of “no platform” for racist or fascist views.
“Our rules state individuals or members of organizations or groups identified as holding racist or fascist views are not allowed to stand for election or go to, speak at or take part in conferences, meetings or any other events,” said NUS president Aaron Porter.
Tarik Mahri, 23, was elected president of the Westminster student union in polling on April 1. He is a member of the “Global Ideas” society, which was banned last year by the university after inviting senior Hizb ut- Tahrir member Jamal Harwood to address students.
In his election manifesto, Mahri called for the creation of “segregated sports activities” for women, and his Twitter feed and Facebook profile are littered with calls for Shari'a law and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.
Jamal Achchi, 26, was elected vice-president. He has been accused of circulating Hizb ut- Tahrir documents that call on Muslims to overthrow democratic regimes and establish the Khilafah, a worldwide Islamic theocracy run by mullahs.
Hizb ut-Tahrir was once led by Omar Bakri Mohammed, who was expelled from the UK in 2006. Residing today in Lebanon, the radical cleric has recently been charged with fundraising for al-Qaida.
Since the 7/7 terrorist attack on London in 2005, the government keeps Hizb ut-Tahrir “under continuous review,” but has not yet banned the group despite regular calls by the Conservative party to do so.
The group, which has been outlawed in a number of countries, including Germany and Egypt, calls for “the dismantling” of the “illegal entity” of Israel. In 2001, part of a statement removed from its Web site said: “In origin, no one likes the Jews except the Jews. Even they themselves rarely like each other.”
Islamist radicalization on campuses is a huge concern in the UK. A review of extremism by Universities UK, the organization of vice-chancellors in Britain, was launched last year after it was discovered that the failed 2009 Detroit airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a former president of the Islamic Society at University College London.
“Hizb ut-Tahrir despises democracy and believes Shari'a law must be imposed over the whole world, by force if necessary,” said Shiraz Maher, a former member of the group and now a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalism at King’s College London. “I think unless we challenge this we are sleepwalking into a very dangerous future.”
Raheem Kassam, director of Student Rights, an organization that tackles radicalism on campus, and himself a former Westminster student, said there has been a “grassroots Islamist movement” there for many years and that he had “experienced” it himself.
“What’s disgraceful is that the Student Union refuses to subscribe to the NUS’s no-platform policy for extremists and that the university allows this to continue,” Kassam said.
Political Correctness roundup: Liberal school officials attack Easter, Thanksgiving, and 'white privilege'
The National Review notes that one Minnesota school district is “laying off 94 teachers” even while “sending a delegation” of teachers to an annual “White Privilege Conference” with Marxist speakers, “which starts today and ends April 16.”
"This will cost the district $160 a day for each teacher plus $125 a day for the substitutes who will handle their classes while they are away, learning ‘how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life.’ Other cash-strapped districts will also be sending delegations. The keynote speaker will be Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,” who was “part of the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba. . .Last year’s speaker recommended looking to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela for ‘exciting progressive developments.’ The sponsors of this educational event include the University of Minnesota,” “Hamline University, Gustavus Adolphus College,” and “Augsburg College, among others.”
The Seattle schools, a past participant in the White Privilege Conference, recently insisted that Easter eggs be referred to as “spring spheres” so as not to offend non-Christians. In 2007, the Seattle Schools illegally used federal funds to send students to the White Privilege Conference. (One of the Conference speakers says that Christianity has far too much influence in our society.)
“Past speakers at White Privilege Conferences include Obama’s Department of Education appointee, Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network.” In a move trumpeted by Jennings, the Education Department recently reinterpreted federal harassment regulations under Title IX to reach constitutionally-protected speech even outside of schools (as well as bullying and homophobia that, however personally or morally objectionable, are not covered by existing federal civil-rights statutes).
The Seattle School District also said that celebrating Thanksgiving is racially insensitive. The Seattle Schools told parents that Thanksgiving is a “time of mourning” and a “reminder of 500 years of betrayal” of Native Americans. This is the same school district that claimed for several years that “individualism” is a form of “cultural racism,” that only whites can be racist, and that planning ahead is a white characteristic that is racist to expect minorities to exhibit. (Those claims were criticized in Supreme Court opinions in the 5-to-4 decision striking down racial quotas in Seattle’s schools.)
Glenn Singleton, the Seattle Schools’ “diversity” consultant, was later hired by California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell (D), as well as several school districts, such as Arlington, Virginia, and Greenwich, Connecticut. So this politically-correct nonsense may soon be coming to your own child’s school. Maybe the celebrated author Mark Twain was right when he questioned the wisdom of school boards. (Singleton, by the way, claims that Mark Twain was a racist).
Diversity training often backfires, resulting in animosity among employees of different races, and even lawsuits. In Fitzgerald v. Mountain States Tel & Tel. Co. (1995), where employee reactions to diversity training gave rise to a lawsuit, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that “diversity training sessions generate conflict and emotion” and that "diversity training is perhaps a tyranny of virtue."
Does your 5 year old need an iPad? School officials in Maine certainly think so, where the Auburn Schools Committee voted unanimously to provide all kindergartners with a brand new iPad 2 next year -- with the process repeated for each new incoming class.
It's a move that will ultimately cost the school system about $200,000 next year, including Apple's $25 discount from the designer tablet's regular retail price. While the thought of a bunch of grubby kindergartners running around with $500 equipment may seem ridiculous, school superintendent Tom Morrill is a staunch believer in what he considers "a game changer."
"This is truly redefining how we're going to teach and learn," said Morrill, speaking to the school committee. "We're talking about a new tool, the iPad 2. You begin to watch how young people jump on, jump in and figure this out. It has great potential for leveling the playing field for all students."
Steve Jobs has long touted the educational potential of his latest shiny toy. But for local parent Nicole Fortin, the whole thing is just too much, especially when the district is looking for a 5 percent budget increase.
"It's crazy," Fortin told Maine newspaper The Sun Journal. "I look at all of the budgetary restraints we have. Our school system loses money every year to certain things. This is a lot to put in the hands of a 5-year-old."
Morrill hopes to find the money in the school budget and from grants from now through June, when he retires.
The Unteachables: The violent pupils who have sexually assaulted teachers - yet are being let back into Britain's classrooms
Pupils who have sexually assaulted teachers, threatened other children with knives and attacked police officers have been allowed back into the classroom, a shocking dossier reveals. In most cases, exclusion orders were lifted by their head teachers, school governing bodies or independent appeals panels. In a handful of schools, the child was not even removed in the first place.
The dossier on the 16 ‘unteachable’ youngsters was compiled by teachers who warned that their authority is being undermined by allowing such children to return to school.
In all the cases, ballots for industrial action were launched last year by members of the NASUWT and the National Union of Teachers in an effort to force schools to protect staff from troublemakers. They threatened to refuse to teach the child involved, and in most instances the boycotting tactic resulted in the pupil being transferred to a different school. Dozens more discipline cases were resolved without the need for industrial action.
The NASUWT report, unveiled before its annual conference in Glasgow, features a horrifying catalogue of violence by classroom hooligans including the sexual assault of a female learning support assistant and an attack on a police officer.
The union’s general secretary, Chris Keates, said: ‘We are seeing a trend whereby in over 50 per cent of our cases, it’s either head teachers not taking strong action or governing bodies overturning the professional judgments of heads and teachers.
‘All that pupils see is that someone either assaulted a teacher verbally or physically, or caused a major incident of disruption. They leave the school for a short time, then come back and it looks as though that behaviour’s OK because all they get is a few days off school. It’s completely the wrong signal that’s sent. That’s why teachers are very keen there is zero tolerance.’
Mrs Keates said that early intervention to combat low level disruption was vital. ‘It’s important schools take a very strong stand at the outset and make sure that not just the pupil concerned, but other pupils have an example of what the consequences are for unacceptable behaviour,’ she said. ‘However, teachers feel that their head teachers are often divorced from the daily realities of the classroom.’ She added: ‘Teachers shouldn’t have to resort to taking action to have their professional judgment about behaviour taken seriously.’
Mrs Keates said that heads should continue to have some classroom experience to help keep them in touch.
Shane Johnschwager, of NASUWT in Brent, north-west London, claims that head teachers’ reluctance to discipline pupils has left some schools ‘ghettoised’ and abandoned by the middle classes. He is putting forward a motion at his union conference claiming that lessons are being ‘ruined for the majority by a minority of poorly behaved pupils’. He told the Times Educational Supplement: ‘Middle class parents are more likely to hold schools to account over issues such as behaviour; the loss of involvement means behaviour in the school might get worse.’
Christine Blower, general secretary of the NUT, said the majority of schools had good behaviour and discipline procedures in place. She added: ‘Where there is inconsistency in the application of such policies the union will take action.’
Last October, Education Secretary Michael Gove unveiled wide-ranging plans designed to restore discipline to schools. Head teachers will be granted the right to expel pupils without fear of independent appeals panels reinstating the child. However, they face fines of thousands of pounds if they make the decision unfairly.
Schools will have a duty to make alternative provision for the expelled pupil, for example by ‘buying’ provision for the child at a special centre.
Other measures aimed at boosting class discipline include powers to frisk pupils for pornography, tobacco and fireworks. Children could also be checked for mobile phones and cameras if teachers fear they will be used to harm others or break a law.
Too many heads are wasting money by attending junkets in expensive hotels while their schools face cuts, staff claim.
Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so.
While many economists say student debt should be seen in a more favorable light, the rising loan bills nevertheless mean that many graduates will be paying them for a longer time.
“In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.
Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.
The mountain of debt is likely to grow more quickly with the coming round of budget-slashing. Pell grants for low-income students are expected to be cut and tuition at public universities will probably increase as states with pinched budgets cut back on the money they give to colleges.
Some education policy experts say the mounting debt has broad implications for the current generation of students.
“If you have a lot of people finishing or leaving school with a lot of debt, their choices may be very different than the generation before them,” said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for Student Access and Success. “Things like buying a home, starting a family, starting a business, saving for their own kids’ education may not be options for people who are paying off a lot of student debt.”
In some circles, student debt is known as the anti-dowry. As the transition from adolescence to adulthood is being delayed, with young people taking longer to marry, buy a home and have children, large student loans can slow the process further.
“There’s much more awareness about student borrowing than there was 10 years ago,” Ms. Asher said. “People either are in debt or know someone in debt.”
To be sure, many economists and policy experts see student debt as a healthy investment — unlike high-interest credit card debt, which is simply a burden on consumers’ budgets and has been declining in recent years. As recently as 2000, student debt, at less than $200 billion, barely registered as a factor in overall household debt. But now, Mr. Kantrowitz said, student loans are going from a microeconomic factor to a macroeconomic factor.
Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan, said student debt could generally be seen as a sensible investment in a lifetime of higher earnings. “When you think about what’s good debt and what’s bad debt, student loans fall into the realm of good debt, like mortgages,” Professor Dynarski said. “It’s an investment that pays off over the whole life cycle.”
According to a College Board report issued last fall, median earnings of bachelor’s degree recipients working full time year-round in 2008 were $55,700, or $21,900 more than the median earnings of high school graduates. And their unemployment rate was far lower.
So Sandy Baum, a higher education policy analyst and senior fellow at George Washington University, a co-author of the report, said she was not concerned, from a broader perspective, that student debt was growing so fast.
Indeed, some economists worry that all the news about unemployed 20-somethings mired in $100,000 of college debt might discourage some young people from attending college.
A decade ago, student debt did not loom so large on the national agenda. Barack and Michelle Obama helped raise awareness when they spoke in the presidential campaign about how their loan payments after graduating from Harvard Law School were more than their mortgage payments.
“We left school with a mountain of debt,” Mr. Obama said in 2008. “Michelle I know had at least $60,000. I had at least $60,000. So when we got together we had a lot of loans to pay. In fact, we did not finish paying them off until probably we’d been married for at least eight years, maybe nine.”
Even then, Mrs. Obama said, it took the royalties from her husband’s best-selling books to help pay off their loans.
In 2009, the Obama administration made it easier for low-earning student borrowers to get out of debt, with income-based repayment that forgives remaining federal student debt for those who pay 15 percent of their income for 25 years — or 10 years, if they work in public service.
But if the Obamas’ experience highlights the long payback periods for student debt, their careers also underscore the benefits of a top-flight education.
“College is still a really good deal,” said Cecilia Rouse, of Princeton, who served on Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Even if you don’t land a plum job, you’re still going to earn more over your lifetime, and the vast majority of graduates can expect to cover their debts.”
Even believers in student debt like Ms. Rouse, though, concede that hefty college loans carry extra risks in the current economy.
“I am worried about this cohort of young people, because their unemployment rates are much higher and early job changing is how you get those increases over their lifetime,” Ms. Rouse said. “In this economy, it’s a lot harder to go from job to job. We know that there’s some scarring to cohorts who graduate in bad economies, and this is the mother of bad economies.”
And there is widespread concern about those who borrow heavily for college, then drop out, or take extra years to graduate.
Deanne Loonin, a lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center, said education debt was not good debt for the low-income borrowers she works with, most of whom are in default.
Unlike most other debt, student loans generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the government can garnish wages or take tax refunds or Social Security payments to recover the money owed.
Students who borrow to attend for-profit colleges are especially likely to default. They make up about 12 percent of those enrolled in higher education, but almost half of those defaulting on student loans. According to the Department of Education, about a quarter of students at for-profit institutions defaulted on their student loans within three years of starting to repay them.
“About two-thirds of the people I see attended for-profits; most did not complete their program; and no one I have worked with has ever gotten a job in the field they were supposedly trained for,” Ms. Loonin said.
“For them, the negative mark on their credit report is the No. 1 barrier to moving ahead in their lives,” she added. “It doesn’t just delay their ability to buy a house, it gets in the way of their employment prospects, their finding an apartment, almost anything they try to do.”
The emergency manager appointed to put Detroit's troubled public school system on a firmer financial footing said on Thursday he was sending lay-off notices to all of the US district's 5466 unionised employees.
In a statement posted on the website of Detroit Public Schools, Robert Bobb, the district's temporary head, said notices were being sent to every member of the Detroit Federation of Teachers "in anticipation of a workforce reduction to match the district's declining student enrolment".
Mr Bobb said nearly 250 administrators were receiving the notices, too.
The district is unlikely to eliminate all the teachers. Last year, it sent out 2000 notices and only a fraction of employees were actually laid off. But the notices are required by the union's current contract with the district. Any lay-offs under this latest action won't take effect until late July.
In the meantime, Mr Bobb said that he planned to exercise his power as emergency manager to unilaterally modify the district's collective bargaining agreement with the Federation of Teachers starting on May 17, 2011.
Under a law known as Public Act 4, passed by the Michigan legislature and signed by the state's new Republican governor in March, emergency managers such as Mr Bobb have sweeping powers. They can tear up existing union contracts, and even fire some elected officials, if they believe it will help solve a financial emergency. "I fully intend to use the authority that was granted under Public Act 4," Mr Bobb said in the statement.
He was appointed emergency financial manager for Detroit's schools two years ago by then-governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, to close chronic budget deficits brought on by declining enrolment in the city. Over just the past year, Detroit's population has dropped 25 per cent, according to census data.
Mr Bobb has closed schools, laid off workers and taken other steps to cut spending but the district still faces a $US327 million ($311 million) budget deficit.
Poor children arrive at British schools feeling 'tired and hungry'
Because their parents spend the money on beer, cigarettes, drugs and gambling? From my experience with them, those are the poor who have problems. Most of the poor DON'T send their kids to school hungry
Growing numbers of children are turning up at school unfit to learn because of crippling poverty, according to research published today. Teachers are reporting a rise in pupils entering the classroom feeling tired, hungry and dressed in worn-out clothes.
A study by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers found almost eight-in-10 staff had pupils living below the poverty line and a quarter believed numbers had increased since the start of the recession.
One teacher from Nottingham told of a sixth-former who had not eaten for three days as her “mother had no money at all until pay day”.
A teaching assistant from a West Midlands comprehensive told researchers that some pupils had “infected toes due to feet squashed into shoes way too small”, while another member from Halifax reported a boy who was ridiculed in the PE changing room because his family could not afford to buy him any underpants.
Some teachers told how pupils were consistently late for lessons as parents could not cover the bus fare to school. Other children from middle to lower income families have been forced to cut out school trips because money is so tight, it was claimed.
The disclosure follows the publication of figures showing a rise in the number of pupils eligible for free school meals as families struggle to stay above the breadline in the recession. Almost 1.2 million five- to 16-year-olds claimed free lunches last year – a rise of more than 83,000 in just 12 months.
Mary Bousted, ATL general secretary, claimed that problems would escalate further because of Government funding cuts – putting the Coalition’s social mobility drive in jeopardy.
“It is appalling that in 2011 so many children in the UK are severely disadvantaged by their circumstances and fail to achieve their potential,” she said. “What message does this government think it is sending young people when it is cutting funding for Sure Start centres, cutting the Education Maintenance Allowance, raising tuition fees and making it harder for local authorities to provide health and social services.
“The Government should forget empty rhetoric about social mobility and concentrate on tackling the causes of deprivation and barriers to attainment that lock so many young people into a cycle of poverty.”
The ATL, which represents 160,000 school staff, surveyed members ahead of its annual conference in Liverpool next week. Some 86 per cent said poverty was having a negative impact on pupils’ ability to learn. Eight-in-10 said pupils from the very poorest families came to school tired, three-quarters claimed they arrived hungry and some 72 per cent suggested they were unable to complete homework.
Four-in-10 said poverty levels had increased over the last three years. The comments follow claims from Lesley Ward, former ATL president, that poverty levels in some parts of Britain now mirror "the times of Dickens".
Craig Macartney, a secondary school teacher from Suffolk, said: “More children from middle to lower income families are not going on school trips and these families find it difficult to meet the basic cost of living. “A family with two or three teenage children who have one earner who loses hours, or their job, will struggle to reach the minimum income to pay for basics. “This will get worse as the impact of the cuts affects families. The number of young people with mental health problems has been on the increase in the last three years.”
Anne Pegum, a further education college teacher from Herfordshire said: “We have students who miss classes because they cannot afford the bus fare or cost of other transport to get to college. “We have students who miss out on meals because they do not have money to pay for them and in some cases then feel unwell and have to be helped by our first-aiders.”
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “We’re overhauling the welfare and schools systems precisely to tackle entrenched worklessness, family breakdown, low educational achievement and financial insecurity. “We’re targeting investment directly at the poorest families. The most disadvantaged two year olds will get 15 hours free child care.
“We’re focusing Sure Start at the poorest families, with 4200 extra health visitors. We’re opening academies in areas failed educationally for generations and bringing in the Pupil Premium to target an extra £2.5billion a year directly at students that need the most support”.
Among a number of other bits of good news lately, there has been a favorable Supreme Court ruling regarding school choice.
A closely-divided Court decided (5–4, in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v.Winn) to uphold an Arizona law meant to facilitate school choice. The law allows people who donate to organizations that support religious schools to write off all their school payments on their state income taxes.
Opponents of the law — including, naturally, teachers’ unions and public school administrations — argued that the tax credit amounted to establishment of religion, and was thus unconstitutional. They pointed to the fact that many of the schools supported by the tax credit required students to be of a particular faith. The opponents were trying to get around the landmark 2002 Supreme Court ruling Zelman v.Simmons-Harris, which held that voucher programs comply with the establishment clause, even when the vouchers are used to send kids to religious schools.
The opponents’ suit was based on a 1968 Supreme Court ruling that allows people who are not harmed by a religious subsidy to have standing to sue, because otherwise enforcement of the establishment clause would be difficult. But the majority of the current Court held that the exemption was meant only to apply to actual government payments to support religion, and a tax credit is not a government payment; it is just funds never collected to begin with.
This ruling will permit more states to allow tax breaks enabling parents whose children are being cheated out of a decent education by the state monopolistic school systems to send their kids to religious schools instead (or private secular schools, for that matter). Robert Enlow, head of the estimable Foundation for Educational Choice, hailed the verdict, saying, “Every state that is considering a tax-credit program can rest easy.” As a religious agnostic, I also hail the ruling. If you want to send your kids to a religious school, it seems obvious that you should have that right — it doesn’t harm me in the least.
Predictably, educrat Francisco Negron, head lawyer for thee National School Boards Association, the major organization representing state public school systems, condemned the ruling, rightly viewing it as another blow to the public school monopoly. Indeed, yes sir, it is a blow — to those disgusting swamps of governmental failure, which deserve all the efforts we can make to drain them, since they are destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, every year. Negron’s specific complaint, that allowing tax deductions for private schools lowers the resources available for public schools, is specious. Yes, allowing tax credits reduces funds available to the public schools, but it also reduces the number of their students, hence their costs.
Those who find little difference between the political parities should note that all of Bush’s Court appointees voted for the ruling, and all of Obama’s and Clinton’s voted against it. The Obama administration supported the law officially, but the people whom Obama put on the Court voted against it. Justice Kagan — Obama’s most recent pick for the court — wrote the dissenting opinion. This is a classic progressive liberal trick: feign support for popular initiatives, but pack the courts with judges who will rule them unconstitutional.
Understanding the Adults' Insatiable Thirst for School Spending
We continue to hear from teachers unions and the rest of the education establishment that if public schools aren’t up to par, it’s because they’re “underfunded.”
That’s natural response from the adults – 80% of every education dollar goes to benefit them, so of course they would be fighting for more spending.
As we’ve seen in Madison, Trenton, Columbus and Lansing, the unions are making good use of their First Amendment rights “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
But the unions have no right to conscript students to help fight their battles.
In Wisconsin, the union was exposed for busing kids to the Capitol protest without having the faintest idea of why they were there. One student interviewed on camera couldn’t even name the governor – he called him “some guy.” How’s that for government-school civics?
Now, the geniuses of Michigan Big Education aren’t even hiding their idea to use kids for their protests. As a “revenue enhancement” is to a “tax increase,” Grand Rapids teachers union president Paul Helder is calling for a day off from school so kids can take “educational civics field trips to Lansing to teach our students about the importance of having a voice in government." You must listen to the audio clip to fully appreciate his arrogance and gasbaggery.
The union’s idea of “a voice” in government consists of shouting out well-phrased slogans at the Capitol dome and carrying signs comparing the governor to Hitler and Mussolini.
But they already have some politicians on their side. FoxNews.com reports that President Obama’s 2012 budget increases federal funding of education by an astounding 21%. Talk about good money chasing after bad. What will it be used for? Most likely, keeping the teachers’ cushy health care plans and pensions whole. After all, 80% of the spending ends up in the adults’ pockets.
For example, Michigan school districts are now currently paying a staggering 24% of their payroll towards employee retirement. Does that improve student learning?
The reality is public schools – like the rest of government – are not underfunded. Their priorities are screwed up. And they want taxpayers to bail them out.
But they, unlike the federal government, must live within their means. So they should start now. And while they’re at it, they should make every effort to see to it that students are not used as pawns in the unions’ political game of protecting the interests of adults.
A leading peer and former College principal has criticised David Cameron for his attack on Oxford, claiming that "in no other country would a politician be allowed to speak like this about a top university". Cross-bencher Baroness Deech described the Prime Minister's claims that only one black undergraduate was admitted by Oxford last year as "damaging and ill-informed".
The peer was the latest person to hit back at the Prime Minister after the university accused Mr Cameron of using "highly misleading" figures.
Mr Cameron caused outrage when he told an audience in Harrogate, North Yorkshire on Monday: "I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. "I think that is disgraceful, we have got to do better than that."
Aides to the Prime Minister later accepted that Mr Cameron should have said "one black Caribbean undergraduate" after the university challenged him over the figures, but insisted Oxford was "missing the point" because the total number of black undergraduates admitted was just 27.
Lady Deech, principal of St Anne's College, Oxford until 2004 and independent adjudicator for higher education between 2004 and 2008, used her blog to condemn Mr Cameron's comments.
She wrote: "I deplore the ill-informed and damaging comments made ... by the Prime Minister about his own university, giving the impression that either it discriminates against black candidates or that it is not doing enough to attract them. "In no other country would a senior politician speak like this about a top national university, thereby undermining its reputation and all the efforts made to open up access."
Lady Deech, formerly chair of the committee in charge of Oxford's admissions policy, added that the university had spent millions on reaching out to students from all backgrounds. She added: "The result is, according to the latest figures, that there are about 17,000 potential students applying for 3,000 vacancies ... success in attracting candidates inevitably brings with it disappointment for many more."
Comparing the Prime Minister's remarks to those made by then chancellor Gordon Brown about Laura Spence, a medical student from a state school who failed to gain a place at Oxford despite an impeccable academic record. She wrote: "Gordon Brown got it wrong about Oxford in 2000 when he criticised it for not accepting Laura Spence ... Surely David Cameron does not want to be another Gordon Brown?"
A "disproportionate" number of black and minority ethnic candidates applied for oversubscribed courses such as medicine and maths, Lady Deech added. "Chances would be better if the BME applicants considered other sciences and humanities in greater numbers," she said.
Oxford University said the figure quoted by the Prime Minister referred to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin starting courses in 2009/10. There were an additional 26 students who said they were of black origin, and another 14 of mixed black descent.
Food Fight: Chicago School Bans Students From Bringing Own Lunches
Who would have ever thought that the youth would revolt over bringing their own lunches to school? But while young communists march against austerity in Britain, young people at one Chicago school are fighting their administrators for the opportunity to pack their own meals. All because the school wants to promote healthy choices.
“Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?” the Chicago Tribune recently observed seventh-grader Fernando Dominguez shouting to his lunch mates in Spanish and English at Little Village Academy. It‘s a public school on Chicago’s West Side.
As numerous hands reached for the ceiling, Dominguez led a chant: “We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!”
At the school, students are only allowed to bring their own lunch if they have a medical excuse. Why? You guessed it: the school wants to protect children from food that’s unhealthy.
“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,”Principal Elsa Carmona told the Tribune. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”
Carmona said she instituted the policy six years ago when she got tired of seeing kids bringing chips and soda. According to her, it’s a common practice in Chicago. And according to a district spokesperson, that’s okay.
“While there is no formal policy, principals use common sense judgment based on their individual school environments,” Monique Bond wrote in an email. “In this case, this principal is encouraging the healthier choices and attempting to make an impact that extends beyond the classroom.”
The ban has had two effects. First, more government money funneled to the school lunch provider. And second, ironically, less students eating the meals. The Tribune explains the not-so-shocking details:
Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.
At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. During a recent visit to the school, dozens of students took the lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. Though CPS has improved the nutritional quality of its meals this year, it also has seen a drop-off in meal participation among students, many of whom say the food tastes bad.
“Some of the kids don’t like the food they give at our school for lunch or breakfast,” Little Village parent Erica Martinez told the Tribune. “So it would be a good idea if they could bring their lunch so they could at least eat something.”
“This is such a fundamental infringement on parental responsibility,” J. Justin Wilson, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom, told the Tribune. (The center is partially funded by the food industry, the news outlet reports.)
“Would the school balk if the parent wanted to prepare a healthier meal?” he added. “This is the perfect illustration of how the government’s one-size-fits-all mandate on nutrition fails time and time again. Some parents may want to pack a gluten-free meal for a child, and others may have no problem with a child enjoying soda.”
Don't blame Oxford. The real racists are the hand-wringing liberals who expect black pupils to fail
By Lindsay Johns
Filled with self-righteous indignation, the Prime Minister has launched a scathing attack on the apparent racism of Oxford's admissions policy. Claiming that just one black British student was given an undergraduate place for 2009, David Cameron described the university's approach as 'disgraceful' and said it 'had to do better'.
This idea of Oxford as a hotbed of racial bigotry has become part of the fashionable consensus in political circles, with such sentiments common in all three major parties.
Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who has taken to posing as the champion of social mobility, expressed his full support for the Prime Minister, saying this verbal assault had been 'absolutely right'.
Cameron's speech also echoed the views of the black former Labour Education Minister David Lammy, who last December wrote of Oxford's 'shocking' reluctance to admit more black students. The dons, Lammy argued, 'should be ashamed' for 'entrenching inequality' in modern Britain. According to the fulminations of the politicians, the city of dreaming spires has become the place of broken dreams for successive generations of young British black students.
As a black Oxford graduate of part-African heritage, I might be expected to welcome this condemnation of supposed prejudice within the cloisters of the ancient university.
Certainly, I loathe any form of exclusion based on narrow-minded racism. And I am passionate about the need to help black pupils realise their full academic potential, including, for the brightest, gaining admission to one of the world's great seats of learning.
But the theory, propounded by the likes of Cameron, Clegg and Lammy, that the small number of black students at Oxford is entirely the result of crude racial discrimination is absurd. The real fault lies not with the admissions tutors of the university, but with the gross inadequacy of our modern school system — which has dumbed down standards and imposed a culture of low expectations.
The true culprit is the disastrous poverty of aspiration which brands young black people as good for nothing except rap and sport.
Indeed, as a mentor of black teenagers in inner London, I think this slew of recent attacks on Oxford has been grossly irresponsible. Such outbursts might play well in the trendy liberal salons of the metropolitan elite, whose members love to see themselves as the heroic guardians of the oppressed.
But in the real world, this over-blown rhetoric will do nothing to achieve genuine equality. For a start, the figures quoted by Cameron and Lammy are misleading. Yes, only one applicant of Caribbean origin was admitted last year, but this ignores the fact that 40 other black students, of African or mixed heritage, were given places. And in total, almost 20 per cent of Oxford's student population is from ethnic minorities — hardly an indicator of rampant prejudice.
Moreover, black pupils tend to apply in the most over-subscribed three subjects: medicine, law and English literature, where there is ferocious competition for places. Last year, 44 per cent of black applicants tried for these three subjects — compared with 17 per cent of white applicants. It is therefore inevitable that, proportionately, more of them will be disappointed.
In addition, the denunciations from the Prime Minister ignore all the outreach work — such as open days and school visits — that Oxford undertakes to increase the number of black applicants.
Ultimately, however, admissions tutors are not miracle workers. They cannot give out places to those who do not apply, and the truth is that far too many young black pupils, who are just as intelligent as any white ones, are not encouraged to think of Oxbridge because of the anti-elitist, self-defeating mindset that prevails in too many state schools, especially in our inner cities.
This brings us to the most worrying aspect of Cameron's speech. Far from advancing a greater racial balance at Oxford, his remarks could prove counter-productive because they send out a negative message that might put black pupils off from even applying in the first place. Such comments feed into the depressing cliche of black victimhood, whereby teenagers are urged to believe that racism in Britain is so endemic that they will never be able to break free from their backgrounds. The shrill emphasis on alleged prejudice means that black failure can become a self-fulfilling prophecy — and an excuse for low standards.
Oxford is not a nest of racial hostility — as David Cameron should well know from his own days as an undergraduate. Indeed, I found my time as a student at Lincoln College in the mid-Nineties both intellectually stimulating and personally liberating.
I was in the heart of a wonderful city dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. It was a bastion of learning, not discrimination. The lecturers were driven by intellectual inquiry, so they wanted to work with the best students. Race did not come into it.
My devotion to the university meant that, while I was an undergraduate, I served as a volunteer in an access scheme to encourage more applications from ethnic minorities and, ever since, I have strived to give others the chance of enjoying the same enriching experience I had.
One of the ways I do that is through a mentoring scheme in the deprived district of Peckham in South London for 14 to 18-year-olds, a few miles from the private school in Croydon I was lucky enough to attend. Unlike so many inner-city schools which tolerate the shallow, hip-hop culture in the name of 'anti-racism', this programme is based on rigorous discipline, tough intellectual challenges and a refusal to accept ghetto stereotypes.
Outside school hours, we teach Shakespeare, hold a weekly vocabulary seminar and demand proper grammar rather than street vernacular. Neither do we allow the wearing of hoods and baseball caps. And contrary to the message of despair that Cameron conveys, we have had many successes.
Two of our former pupils have won places at fine universities — Warwick and Sussex — to read politics, while one girl has just been awarded a scholarship for a sixth-form place at the renowned independent school of Westminster.
What I have learnt, in my mentoring role, is that the greatest obstacle to advancement is the outlook of our state schools, which fail to challenge black pupils or instil in them an enthusiasm for learning. Instead they indulge in a form of intellectual sabotage. Everything has to be made 'relevant' to the lives of young black students.
So English literature is ignored and proper grammar avoided. Real narrative history is replaced by politically correct topic work. The tolerance of failure I've witnessed amounts to an immense betrayal of successive generations of black pupils, who are denied the chance of a brilliant education through inadequate schooling
Teachers terrified of undermining pupils' self-esteem ignore mistakes in their work that would never be accepted at a good university, poor behaviour goes unpunished and praise is lavished indiscriminately.
Remorseless grade inflation in public exams has assisted in the destructive process, too, both by creating the illusion of progress to mask declining standards and by making it impossible for universities to pick out the truly bright pupils.
When so many university applicants get top grades, it is often the private school-educated children who are able to offer so much more than just academic excellence.
The tolerance of failure I've witnessed amounts to an immense betrayal of successive generations of black pupils, who are denied the chance of a brilliant tertiary education through inadequate schooling.
Racism is far less a problem in Britain than it was 30 years ago. But this doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to education — not in the way David Cameron thinks, though.
The real racists are often those hand-wringing liberals who pander to stereotypes — and judge people by the colour of the skin rather than their characters or their minds.
The problem isn't Oxford, and the university should not be used as an instrument of social engineering to satisfy political whims. A genuine meritocracy in Britain will be built only when we radically reform our schools.
Nick Clegg stepped up the Government’s attacks on elite universities tonight accusing Oxford and Cambridge of being biased against poor students.
The Deputy Prime Minister brushed off a furious response from academics over David Cameron’s claim this week that Oxford has a ‘disgraceful’ record on admitting black youngsters. Instead, Mr Clegg upped the ante, condemning both Oxford and Cambridge, where he was a student, for failing to accept significant numbers of students from the poorest homes.
The Cambridge educated Deputy Prime Minister said only 40 students from families which qualify for free school meals, meaning their income is around £16,000 or less, qualified for Oxbridge last year. He told universities they would have to do ‘a lot more’ to admit students from poorer and minority backgrounds if they wanted to charge tuition fees of £9,000 a year.
‘I think the wider point that the Prime Minister was making is absolutely right,’ Mr Clegg said. ‘One of the objectives behind our controversial reforms in the funding of universities is we’re saying to universities, “look, if you want to charge graduates more money for having the benefit of going to university, you’re going to have to do a lot, lot more to get under-represented youngsters from poor backgrounds, from black, minority ethnic backgrounds into your university”.
‘And here’s a fact: last year, only 40 – four zero – children who had been on free school meals – in other words from the more disadvantaged families in this country – got into either Oxford or Cambridge, and that was a lower number than the year before.
‘So we do need to make real efforts to say to universities, if you want to continue to get support from the taxpayer to educate our young people, you’ve got to make sure that British society is better reflected in the people you take into the university in the first place.’
Mr Clegg’s remarks risk further inflaming the Government’s row with Oxford over admissions following Mr Cameron’s intervention on Monday.
The president of Trinity College, Oxford, launched a counter-attack on the Oxford-educated Prime Minister, warning that his ‘ill-informed’ comments could deter black students from applying to Oxford in future. Sir Ivor Roberts said: ‘I thought it was an extraordinarily misguided comment. ‘It seems to be based on zero understanding of what’s actually happening in the real world. ‘It’s unhelpful to have inaccurate, misleading information out in the public domain because I think it does act as a depressant and discourager for just the sort of people we are trying to attract.
‘If you are told by a public official like the Prime Minister that your chances of getting in are zero or virtually zero, you would be rather put off applying. ‘It makes our job harder in terms of encouraging people from ethnic minority backgrounds and I think ill-informed comments like those smack of trying to force a political agenda when a little more careful thought and attention to the facts and the context would be wiser.’
Sir Ivor said he agreed with those who argue that the problem rests not with university admissions policies, but with state schools not providing a good enough education for pupils. He said: ‘That seems to be exactly right. The education in our schools is where we let people down. ‘You can’t socially engineer places for people. I think there’s an element of teachers in schools discouraging people from minority backgrounds (from applying) and that compounds the whole problem.
‘Of course it’s highly competitive, but if you want to get to the best university you have to be prepared to throw your hat into the ring.’
Tony Spence, president of Magdalen College when Gordon Brown publicly attacked dons for rejecting Laura Spence, a would-be medical student from a Tyneside comprehensive school, expressed dismay that Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg had followed suit. ‘The criticism of Oxbridge admission used to come exclusively from the left, but now, as we see, it comes from the right and the centre too,’ he said.
‘National educational policy for the last 40 years has dug an ever wider ditch through the level playing field of university admissions, across which the underprivileged have to try ever harder to jump.’
Thomas Cole, 18, a first year history undergraduate at University College, Oxford, who is of mixed white/Afro-Caribbean race, agreed Mr Cameron’s comments were ‘fairly unhelpful’. He said: ‘Even though there aren’t that many ethnic minority students, I don’t think it’s because the university is discriminatory. I would rather have a university that picks on merit rather than race.
‘His comments give a negative perception of Oxford and from everything I’ve seen they’re doing a lot of access work to get students from ethnic minorities in.’
But Labour MP David Lammy, one of Britain’s first black ministers, said: ‘Of course it’s a disgrace that there are over 400 young black children in the country getting straight As and they’re not making their way to Oxford, but this isn’t just about race. ‘There are whole cities in Britain - Barnsley, Middlesbrough, Rochdale, Stoke, Hartlepool - where there are not young people making their way to this university.
‘All of us pay our taxes, and Oxford and Cambridge receive around £560 million worth of British taxpayers’ money and yet there are more young people from the London borough of Richmond going than the entire city of Birmingham.
‘Why is it that Oxford is doing outreach events at Eton, nine outreach events in Eton last year? Why is it that they are doing 12 at Marlborough College? That’s why these young people from working class backgrounds, often black backgrounds and in terms of geography particularly from the North of England are not making their way to this university. The Prime Minister is right.’
The University of California's Antisemitism Problem Deepens
America's most renowned public university system is sinking deeper into a scandal over its treatment of antisemitism and even terror groups.
The Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) at the University of California Irvine (UCI) is a fig leaf, a token gesture, used by the UC administration to cover up the shame of the existence of antisemitism at UCI and the administration's lack of resolve in identifying, condemning, and combatting it. But now the cover is blown. A letter, dated 10/08/2009, obtained recently under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals the moral confusion of the OTI ideology and its staff. The letter indicates that the OTI is part of the problem of antisemitism at UCI and not the esteemed solution as proclaimed by the UCI administration.
Chancellor Michael V. Drake has been silent for years as his campus has been the scene of physical and verbal harassment of Jewish students, inversion of Holocaust imagery, in which Jews are the new Nazis, sponsorship of public speakers who accuse Jews of not being able to exist equally with other human beings, as well as accusations that Jews deliberately kill non-Jewish children for nefarious purposes. He was even silent when more than 60 UCI faculty issued a public statement, May 2010, stating that they "are deeply disturbed about activities on campus that foment hatred against Jews and Israelis. Some community members, students, and faculty indeed feel intimidated and at times even unsafe."
Instead of addressing the problem, Mark Yudof, President of the University of California, and Chancellor Drake have promoted the Olive Tree Initiative(OTI) at UCI as a sterling example of their efforts to combat bigotry. President Yudof in May 2010 gave the first-ever President's Award for Outstanding Leadership to the OTI student leaders, and Chancellor Drake awarded its founders as "Living Our Values." Moreover, on March 24, 2010, when asked to speak at a special meeting of the Regents of the University of California called specifically in response to an outbreak of bigotry at various University of California campuses, including UCI where the Muslim Student Union had disrupted an invited lecture from Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Chancellor Drake touted the OTI as evidence that students on his campus "live and practice tolerance."
The Olive Tree Initiative, begun by a group of UCI students of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds, has as its mission to promote dialogue and discussion about the Israeli Arab conflict. The OTI is now an official part of the UCI Center for Citizen Peacebuilding and International Studies Program with salaried faculty, director, and staff. Three trips by students to Israel and the West Bank have been organized as part of the program, as well as more than 70 lectures off and on campus. There are efforts on other UC campuses to replicate the program.
Yet, the moral bankruptcy of the OTI as a solution for antisemitism in academia is revealed by the letter. Addressed to Michael V. Drake, Chancellor of UCI, written by the Jewish Federation of Orange County, the letter divulges that UCI faculty and staff under OTI auspices, during the second trip to Israel in the fall of 2009, secretly arranged for students to meet with Hamas leader Aziz Duwaik. Hamas is virulently anti-Semitic; it is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.; its charter calls for the destruction of Israel (Article 15) and the murder of Jews (article 7). It is responsible for suicide terror attacks that murder Israeli civilians, and the firing of thousands of missiles into Israeli territory.
Combatting bigotry and promoting peacebuilding by meeting with Hamas is Orwellian. Would the University of California take students to meet and dialogue with the head of the Ku Klux Klan as a way to combat murderous racism? It would not.
Even the OTI faculty and staff realized that something was amiss in their plan. As exposed by the letter, Daniel Brunstetter, the faculty advisor, and Daniel Wehrenfennig , Ph.D candidate, who were the organizers on the ground, told students to conceal the fact of the meeting in order to thwart Israeli authorities, the Jewish Federation of Orange County, the chief funding organization, and the UCI administration itself.
How high up did their cover-up go? Once he was notified by the Jewish Federation of Orange County in October, 2009, it clearly included Chancellor Drake. He made no public statement about the event, nor any public condemnation of Brunstetter or Wehrenfennig. Brunstetter is still Assistant Professor of Political Science. Wehrenfennig now directs OTI as well as a new undergraduate certificate program in conflict analysis and resolution. Rather than rebuke or punishment, Chancellor Drake colluded in awarding Wehrefennig a precious staff position.
Equally reprehensible, given that Chancellor Drake knew in the fall of 2009 about the infamous incident and its cover up, he glowingly advertised it six months later as the way in which he was combating antisemitismand protecting Jewish students on his campus.
Did the cover-up go further than Chancellor Drake? Is it possible that President Yudof was informed, but 6 months later, he gave a first-ever commendation to OTI, implicating himself in the cover-up? Or is it possible that Chancellor Drake did not notify President Yudof that UCI had involved students with a U.S. designated terrorist group, an incident that would at best deeply embarrass UC? Now that President Yudof has been apprised, what actions is he taking in regard to Chancellor Drake and the OTI?
After years of trying to get the University of California administration to take action, Jews have had to turn to federal law to combat antisemitism at UC. Jessica Felber, in a suit against President Yudof and the Regents of UC, charges that as a student at UC Berkeley she was physically assaulted by a member of the student group, Students for Justice in Palestine, an assault for which UC officials are partly responsible for ignoring the mounting evidence of anti-Jewish animus at their campus.
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, has filed a Title VI complaint against UC Santa Cruz, presently being investigated by the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. The complaint charges that "professors, academic departments and residential colleges at UC Santa Cruz promote and encourage anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish views and behavior" creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.
Although the OCR previously denied a complaint of the Zionist Organization of America against UCI, claiming that Jews were not a protected group under Title VI, that position is now changed. Jewish students, under federal law, must now receive the same civil rights protection in higher education as do other protected ethnic groups.
The legal suit and Title VI complaints charge that the University of California administration discriminates against Jewish students by allowing a hostile, antisemitic environment. President Yudof and Chancellor Drake can no longer hide under a fig leaf. That fig leaf, itself tainted, does not provide cover for such an abuse of decency and of the law.
Caution: This Column Now Protected by the First Amendment
Mike Adams
Some told us we should just give up. Others told us we should simply accept the federal judge’s decision and resign ourselves to the fact that the First Amendment is now dead on our college campuses. But the Alliance Defense Fund took my case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in January. And, last week, they issued a landmark defense of First Amendment rights for faculty at public colleges and universities. For the first time in years, I’m getting love mail from liberals.
In my original complaint filed against the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2007, my attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund alleged that my application for promotion had been denied in part due to the conservative political viewpoints expressed through my work as a columnist. In a ruling issued in March of 2010, the federal district court rejected our claims. With respect to my First Amendment retaliation charge, the district court found that because I had included the conservative columns in my application for promotion, the content of the columns became speech "made pursuant to (my) official duties"—and thus not protected by the First Amendment.
In support of the holding, the district court cited the Supreme Court's ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U. S. 410 (2006), in which the Court ruled that public employees do not enjoy First Amendment protections when engaging in speech pursuant to their official duties. Under Garcetti, the district court determined that the columns could not be cited as grounds for retaliation in violation of the First Amendment.
The district court's reliance on Garcetti was particularly disturbing because it was not an isolated event. It was just the latest in a series of Garcetti-based rulings for public university faculty members. The problem with Garcetti is that in lessening First Amendment protections for public employees generally it has a far greater impact on faculty members.
Put simply, faculty members are required to speak regularly on a broad range of issues in order to fulfill service and research requirements. It should go without saying that our duties differ greatly from those of police officers, fire fighters, and employees for the Department of Motor Vehicles. That is probably why Justice Anthony Kennedy inserted a crucial caveat into the majority opinion he penned in Garcetti, writing:
There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court's customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.
Before my case, Justice Kennedy's warning had been largely disregarded by courts. So my old friends at The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) joined with The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression to file a brief urging the Fourth Circuit to reverse the lower court's decision to throw out my case. And the panel of three judges did just that.
The landmark ruling from the Fourth Circuit was welcome news for conservatives, liberals, and non-partisan supporters of the First Amendment alike. In reversing the district court's First Amendment holding, the Fourth Circuit panel made several key points.
First, the Fourth Circuit pointed out that the district court hadn't even acknowledged Justice Kennedy's carve-out for public faculty speech.
Second, the Fourth Circuit pointed out that just because I had included my columns in my application for promotion, that act alone did not transform them into speech made pursuant to my duties as a government employee. The court observed that "[n]othing about listing the speech on Adams' promotion application changed Adams' status when he spoke or the content of the speech when made."
Third, the court noted that while Garcetti may apply to public university faculty when their duties include "a specific role in declaring or administering university policy, as opposed to scholarship or teaching," the facts presented by my case don't merit such an application. Indeed, the court found that my case involved speech that was "intended for and directed at a national or international audience on issues of public importance” unrelated to any of my assigned teaching duties at UNCW or any other terms of my employment.
Fourth, the court noted that even though the speech was "unrelated to any of Adams' assigned teaching duties" and "was clearly that of a citizen speaking on a matter of public concern," it nevertheless implicated my right to academic freedom simply because it is understood that professors will provide such commentary as a function of their role as academics. The court addressed the intent of Garcetti in very clear language:
Applying Garcetti to the academic work of a public university faculty member under the facts of this case could place beyond the reach of First Amendment protection many forms of public speech or service a professor engaged in during his employment. That would not appear to be what Garcetti intended, nor is it consistent with our long-standing recognition that no individual loses his ability to speak as a private citizen by virtue of public employment.
Fifth, and perhaps most surprising to me, the Fourth Circuit commented on the district court's denial of the defense of qualified immunity to the university administrators named as defendants in my case. In that portion of the opinion, the judges rejected the argument that the impact of Garcetti was to so fundamentally alter the law that reasonable university administrators can't possibly know that faculty members continue to enjoy a First Amendment right to speak out about matters of public concern:
(T)he underlying right Adams asserts the Defendants violated - that of a public employee to speak as a citizen on matters of public concern - is clearly established and something a reasonable person in the Defendants' position should have known was protected.
This all means that soon my lawyers with the ADF will go back to court to argue for a trial on the facts of my First Amendment retaliation claim. But thousands of professors in the Fourth Circuit – most of whom do not share my views - have already won a major victory. Their free speech rights once again belong to them as individuals – and not to the state that employs them.
British PM locks horns with Oxford U over racism, as dons demand he withdraw 'one black student' claim
David Cameron was locked in a bitter row with Oxford University last night after accusing it of racism. The Prime Minister – who studied at Oxford – denounced the institution as ‘disgraceful’ for admitting only one black student in an academic year.
But the university accused Mr Cameron of failing to get his facts straight, pointing out that 41 students from black and ethnic minority backgrounds were admitted that year.
Mr Cameron spoke out during a local election campaign visit to Harrogate, North Yorkshire. He said: ‘I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful, we have got to do better than that.’
The Prime Minister, who read philosophy, politics and economics at Brasenose College after attending Eton, also said the top universities had a ‘terrible’ record when it came to admitting students from state schools. He said the numbers had gone down in the last 20 years.
The Coalition has pledged to avoid meddling in university admissions. And although it has told universities to improve support for poorer pupils if they wish to charge the new £9,000 annual maximum for tuition fees, it has made no provision for raising the number of ethnic minority applicants.
In 2009 – the year Mr Cameron was referring to – 27 black British students gained undergraduate places at Oxford, as well as 14 students of mixed race. Of the 27 black students, one was of black Caribbean origin, 23 were black African and three were listed as black ‘other’.
An Oxford University spokesman said: ‘The figure quoted by the Prime Minister is incorrect and highly misleading – it only refers to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin for a single year of entry, when in fact that year Oxford admitted 41 UK undergraduates with black backgrounds. ‘In that year a full 22 per cent of Oxford’s total student population came from ethnic minority background.’
That figure is double the rate in Britain as a whole – but many of these students are from overseas. And Oxford has just 99 black undergraduates from all over the world in all years, out of a student population of more than 11,000. With postgraduate students included, this figure rises to 245.
The spokesman pointed out that in 2009, 26,000 white students got the three A grades at A-level necessary to be considered by Oxford, but just 542 black pupils managed to do so. Of those straight-A students, 8.9 per cent of white pupils got places at Oxford compared with 7.5 per cent of black students.
Oxford also pointed out that black students apply in disproportionately high numbers for the most heavily oversubscribed courses, such as medicine, making it less likely that they will win places.
Last night Downing Street refused to back down, saying Mr Cameron was making a valid point about the failure to help some ethnic minority pupils. A spokesman said: ‘The wider point he was making was that it was not acceptable for universities such as Oxford to have so few students coming from black and ethnic minority groups.’
Aides expressed incredulity that Oxford was defending the admission of just 41 black students in a year. One said: ‘People will be pretty shocked by that figure. It’s nothing to write home about.’
But Mr Cameron’s intervention fuelled concerns among some Tories that he is under-briefed and overly-keen to let his mouth run away with him. Former Cabinet minister Lord Tebbit yesterday criticised the failure of the Downing Street machine to get the correct facts into his hands. He said: ‘What worries me is that the Prime Minister’s briefings for these sort of occasions seem to be so poor. This sort of thing is happening much too often.’
Shadow education secretary Andy Burnham accused Mr Cameron of being ‘cavalier’ with the facts. And shadow business secretary John Denham warned that huge rises in tuition fees would make it harder for black students to go to Oxford. He said: ‘The Tory-led Government’s plan to triple fees will make this situation worse, not better.
‘The Government keeps making false promises on university access and social mobility. ‘The Office of Fair Access cannot impose quotas on social access, determine individual university admissions policies or set fees levels, regardless of what ministers claim they can do. ‘With their plans for universities becoming yet another embarrassing shambles, David Cameron needs to get a grip.’
British School leavers unfit for work: 'Firms forced to spend billions on remedial training for victims of education failure'
Firms are spending billions on remedial training for school leavers who are not capable of work, a business leader said yesterday. In a scathing attack on Labour’s legacy, he said the youngsters are the victims of an ‘education failure’, and called for the urgent return of grammar schools.
The comments by David Frost, the outgoing director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, came on the day teachers at one secondary school went on strike in protest over their uncontrollable pupils. At another, a headmistress exasperated with slovenly standards of behaviour and continual fiddling with electronic gadgets, handed out more than 700 detentions in four days. Both cases highlight a crisis in discipline which many believe has contributed to a drop in attainment by many children.
Mr Frost, who speaks for more than 100,000 British businesses, told the BCC annual conference in London: ‘Despite the billions that have been spent over the last decade, business relentlessly bemoans the lack of skills available. ‘What they are really describing is a failure of the education system. ‘A system where half of all kids fail to get five decent GCSEs simply means that five years later we spend billions offering them remedial training to make them work-ready.’
Mr Frost made an unashamed call for the return of grammars to improve social mobility by giving youngsters from poorer backgrounds greater opportunities. Earlier this week, ministers led by Nick Clegg published their strategy to close the gap between rich and poor, but there was no mention of expanding selective education.
Mr Frost suggested this was a mistake, although he backed the Government’s creation of more technical schools. He said: ‘If we really want to focus on social mobility rather than just internships why not re-introduce grammar schools? ‘They provided the escape route for bright working class children. I appear to be a lone voice on this subject, and find little support. ‘But high quality state academic education coupled with high quality vocational education would, I believe, make a major contribution to the future economic performance of the UK.’
Mr Frost joins the growing ranks of business leaders to attack Labour’s record on education. Former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy described school standards as ‘woeful’ in 2009. His comments were echoed in the same year by former Marks & Spencer chief Sir Stuart Rose, who said many school leavers were not ‘fit for work’.
Despite a doubling of spending on education since 2000, from £35.8billion to £71billion, Britain has plummeted down world rankings, according to the respected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
During this period the UK slipped from eighth to 28th in maths, from seventh to 25th in reading and from fourth to 16th in science. It is now behind relatively poor nations such as Estonia, Poland and Slovakia. Disturbingly, the study found that a fifth of 15-year-olds are ‘functionally illiterate’.
Under Labour there was a 3,800 per cent increase in uptake of non-academic GCSE-equivalent courses. In 2005 15,000 were taken. This soared to 575,000 last year.
Education Secretary Michael Gove has signalled that he will scrap the most pointless vocational courses and is encouraging schools to concentrate on the teaching of core subjects including English, maths, science, modern languages, history and geography.
British headmistress who gave out 717 detentions in four days invokes fury of parents who say 'it's not a prison'
A headmistress who introduced a ‘zero-tolerance policy’ to improve standards in her school has handed out 717 detentions in four days. Catherine Jenkinson-Dix has won the support of many parents after deciding to punish misdemeanours including smoking, chewing gum, eating between lessons, carrying mobile phones, applying excessive make-up and insubordination.
A strict uniform policy was also announced under which individualistic touches such as odd socks or wearing hoodies in class would be banned. Anyone breaking the rules would be sent immediately to the school hall for five hours where they would have to read a booklet about good behaviour.
On Monday, the first day of the policy, 236 children – a fifth of pupils at City of Ely Community College in Cambridgeshire – were punished. On Tuesday the figure was 186, on Wednesday it was 180 and yesterday it was 115.
Supporters of the regime say the diminishing figures prove it is working. But the crackdown has divided parents, with some calling it draconian and others saying that old-fashioned discipline will be reflected in academic achievement.
Sophie Martin, 38, backed the school despite her son Jack, 14, being given a detention on Monday for talking when he was meant to be reading a book. She said: ‘He learned not to do it again and he hasn’t been back since. ‘The number of children in the hall has been going down every day so it proves it is working. ‘Teenagers need guidelines and they always push the boundaries. If they know what the guidelines are they behave themselves.’
A parent of a 15-year-old boy said: ‘There are plenty who agree with what the school is doing. ‘Yes, the children that get detentions miss classes, but my son said that after several hours bored out of their skulls with nothing to do most of them actually want to be back in class. I think it’s a stroke of genius.’
However, florist Amanda King, 34, took her children, Ben, 12, and Shannon, 14, out of classes on Wednesday and is now looking for a new school. She said her son had been given a detention for arriving late to a French lesson. ‘I’m absolutely appalled. They are wrecking pupils’ education and turning it into a prison,’ she said. ‘Staff are nit-picking over everything – for behaviour, for what they wear.’
Ruth Hanslip, 47, has stopped sending her daughter Karris, 13, to the school after she was punished on three consecutive days for laughing, wearing a bracelet and carrying a mobile phone. She said: ‘We’d both had enough. They don’t give them any work to do and my daughter is now missing out on her school work.’ Karris said: ‘They gave me a little book to read but the rest of the time I was just sat staring at the wall.’
A letter to parents announcing the 14-point zero-tolerance policy said that any pupil who misbehaved would have to sit in the hall and read a booklet called Right To Teach, Right To Learn, which lists the rules. Those who played up in detention would be moved to an ‘isolation unit’, a room away from other children. The rules were drafted after a ‘minority’ of pupils failed to meet ‘basic expectations’.
Mrs Jenkinson-Dix, who was appointed in 2009, said: ‘Low-level issues, such as using mobile phones, affect staff’s ability to teach pupils and also affect those pupils who are trying to learn. If we can eradicate these, all students will be able to receive the best possible education. I am pleased to say I have the support of the majority of parents. ‘Any pupil who is removed from class is removed for a good reason and this is fundamental in preparing pupils for their future careers.’
Governor Ben Gibbs said: ‘Teachers are saying they are getting through their lesson plans quicker and we have feedback from students effectively saying how much better the lessons are.’
The California Legislature could soon pass a bill that would require school textbooks and teachers to incorporate information on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans into their curriculum.
The Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful Education Act, or SB48, which mimics a bill previously vetoed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, made it one step closer to becoming law Tuesday after being approved by the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee.
The bill, introduced by state Sen. Mark Leno, could have a nationwide impact if passed because California is such a big buyer of textbooks that publishers often incorporate the state’s standards into books distributed to other states.
Supporters say that’s a good thing because it will help prevent gay students from being harassed or bullied by their classmates.
But critics say SB48 is just an attempt to brainwash students into becoming pro-gay political activists and ensure that government, not parents, has the final word on teaching kids about moral values.
“Most textbooks don’t include any historical information about the LGBT movement, which has great significance to both California and U.S. history,” Leno said in a statement. “Our collective silence on this issue perpetuates negative stereotypes of LGBT people and leads to increased bullying of young people.”
Leno told FoxNews.com that California school districts that have included the historical contributions of LGBT people and the LGBT movement in their curriculum have seen reduced rates of bullying and violence among students.
He said the bill aspires to achieve the same results statewide by adding LGBT to the existing list of underrepresented cultural and ethnic groups, which are covered by current law related to inclusion in textbooks and other instructional materials in schools.
“Furthermore, SB 48 will reduce bullying by ensuring that discriminatory bias and negative stereotypes based on sexual orientation are prohibited in school activities, instruction and classroom materials,” Carolyn Laub, executive director of Gay-Straight Alliance Network, which helped draft the bill, said in a statement.
Critics object to the bill on several accounts, saying it undermines parental authority, promotes gender confusion and experimentation, inappropriately classifies LGBT as a cultural ethnic group, and aims to brainwash children into adopting the LGBT community’s political agenda.
“This is teaching children from kindergarten on up that the homosexual, bisexual, transsexual lifestyle is something to admire and consider for themselves,” Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com, a group advocating against the bill, told FoxNews.com.
Thomasson said teachers should teach about homosexuals’ historical accomplishments but should not be forced to mention their sexual orientation. “Teach them about the good behavior, the noble things that people have done, but you don’t have to go into what they do sexually… True history focuses on the accomplishments of people; it doesn’t talk about what they did in the bedroom.”
Thomasson also complained that the bill does not allow for teachers to discuss the opposition to the LGBT movement or warn against “the negative consequences, that male homosexuality is the largest transmitter of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.” “So this isn’t even about history, this is about, ‘Hey, join the movement now. We need more children to become soldiers in the fight against religious freedom, parental rights, marriage for a man and a woman, the boy scouts, you name it.’”
Jim Carroll, President of Equality California, which also helped draft the bill, denied that it aims to recruit students into the LGBT movement. “And I don’t believe that by teaching about the black panthers for instance, that any school teacher could be accused of recruiting for that radical organization,” Carroll told FoxNews.com.
Carroll admitted that teachers would not be allowed to say things like “some believe homosexuality is an unhealthy lifestyle, the same way that you couldn’t talk about the civil rights movement but then say something discriminatory about African Americans.” But he said that people’s sexual orientation would be used only as a way of identifying them.
“It would be difficult to teach about the women’s movement without mentioning that Susan B. Anthony was a woman, it would be difficult to teach about the black civil rights movement without talking about Martin Luther King Jr. being black, it would be impossible to talk about the LGBT movement without saying Harvey Milk was gay or Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were lesbians,” Carroll said. “… We’re not asking people to talk about what they did in the bedroom, but their sexuality is relevant in terms of why you would discuss them in an educational environment.”
Leno added that the State Department would work with local school districts and the public to determine what changes should be made “and then, only at the next printing of the textbook, will this change, along with probably many others, be incorporated into the textbook, so no additional cost to the state.”
Opposing groups like SaveCalifornia.com and Concerned Parents United have launched letter-writing campaigns, asking critics to garner more opposition from their neighbors, religious leaders, local PTAs and lawmakers in hopes of persuading the governor and other lawmakers to oppose the bill.
Leno said the SB48 “will get to the floor of the Senate by late May; we hope that it will make its way to the assembly for similar review and to the governor’s desk by late summer.”
Idaho's governor on Friday signed into law the final piece of a controversial Republican overhaul of education in the state, as teachers and their allies mobilized to fight the measures.
The bill signed by Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter, a Republican, forces districts to equip high schools with mobile computing devices and potentially shifts funds from teacher pay to technology.
It also could lead to the layoffs of some teachers and certain positions going unfilled, officials said.
"By spending what we currently have differently, we will reform our public education system to invest in Idaho's great teachers, create the 21st century classroom and put our students first," Tom Luna, the state's schools chief, who crafted the sweeping education overhaul, said in a statement.
The measure was the last of three Republican-backed education bills that Otter has signed into law in recent weeks.
The other two bills ended tenure for new teachers, instituted merit pay and removed discussions of workload and class size from contract negotiations for the 12,000 teachers represented by the Idaho Education Association.
Idaho is one of several U.S. states in which public sector workers are currently battling with Republican leaders over their drive to curb public employee unions.
Attention has focused on a high-profile battle in Wisconsin over a law limiting public sector unions. Proposals to limit collective bargaining are also advancing in New Hampshire and Oklahoma, and bills targeting teachers unions are under consideration in Indiana and Tennessee.
"These are troubling times; all across the nation, political leaders have decided teachers are the enemies," said Sherri Wood, president of the Idaho Education Association.
Opponents of the state's education measures are seeking to get the laws overturned. They filed their latest petition on Friday in a bid to get opposition to the latest bill as a referendum before voters.
The group has less than two months to gather more than 47,000 registered Idaho voters' signatures, in order to get the measure on the ballots for the 2012 general election.
Teachers and others opposed to the bills have led protest rallies and student walkouts across the state, and have also launched a drive to recall Luna, who in November won 60 percent of the vote to claim a second term as superintendent of public instruction.
Yesterday felt like a parody of politics in this country. A much-vaunted government “strategy” for social mobility was launched which, in policy terms, amounted to essentially nothing.
Unfortunately, asking businesses and government departments to be more socially conscious when hiring interns will do little to improve the chances of people born to poor families. But Labour's reaction – attacking Nick Clegg for “hypocrisy” in talking about the need for more social mobility, since he was born into a rich family – was absurd. As Nick Thornsby asked, if Clegg had announced that he was going to ignore social mobility would Harriet Harman say, “Quite right too, given his background”?
The focus on internships is beside the point. People who have managed to graduate from a decent university with the skills that would make them potential hires for good jobs are not the ones we should be concerned about. Many, and maybe most, children born into poor families will receive a terrible education in a bad comprehensive school. The state schools system destroys poor childrens’ opportunities, thanks to plummeting quality and standards. The fact that many university graduates in this country cannot write to a basic standard of English should say enough about the quality of English lessons in many schools in Britain.
The Sutton Trust, an educational charity, has looked into the rates of entry to Oxbridge by children with good A-Levels across the socioeconomic spectrum. The results show that, irrespective of family income levels, students who receive excellent A-Levels have roughly the same rate of entry to Oxbridge.
The problem is that students from relatively poor families are far less likely to get those A-Levels than those from relatively well-off families. Students on Free School Meals perform disproportionately badly across the board in A-Level results. Focusing on the school-leaving point (as opponents of tuition fees do) is too late to do anything to help mobility. Likewise with a focus on making internship access more equitable – the people for whom an internship might lead to a good job are not the people most in need of help.
Fifty years of school comprehensivization (an ugly word for an ugly policy) has done enormous damage to the prospects of children from poor families. As Tom wrote this morning, rigid state bureaucracies in healthcare create bad outcomes for patients.
Education is no different. What can we do to reverse this? Some propose a return to grammar schools, which may improve mobility but would do little to help those who fail their 11-plus. Competition and choice in schooling drives up standards – allowing profit-making companies to set up free schools would be a start, but a school voucher system like the one Milton Friedman proposed is the probably best option.
Any discussion of social mobility that doesn’t focus on the failure of the state school system is fundamentally unserious. We need to get real, and get radical.
BUDDHIST community leader Dr Sue Best has complained of the "Christian bias" in religious education in Victoria, saying if her group had access to government funding, they too could expand to hundreds of schools. And social commentator and Muslim Waleed Aly said it was a "logical necessity" to "get proselytisation out of the classroom".
Public debate on the issue was sparked by a Sunday Age revelation that the Education Department was forcing schools to host Christian religious education whether they wanted to or not. It took a new turn last week when state Education Minister Martin Dixon granted $200,000 in extra funding to Christian religious education provider Access Ministries to improve its training. Mr Dixon, a Catholic, said that despite the controversy he had no intention of reviewing the system.
The move sparked anger yesterday from groups representing other religions, who said Mr Dixon had not consulted them. "We were requesting a meeting with the minister and have not even received a reply," said Anna Halaffof of the Religion, Ethics and Education Network Australia, which promotes religious tolerance and respect. "Instead he made a decision to support Access without doing any community consultation."
Access is the only religious instruction provider that receives government funding, and only Christian religious education is given to children as a default if their parents forget to opt out.
The leaders of Access Ministries say their syllabus gives children an introduction to spirituality and values, and they insist that they do not proselytise.
Mr Aly asked whether "the providers of Christian education feel equally comfortable if the religious education spot were handed over instead to Jewish teachers, or Buddhist teachers or, shock horror, Muslim teachers? "If they're not comfortable in that, then it's clear that there's a bias in the teaching that they would wish to preserve." He said children in state schools should be taught about all religions.
Dr Best said Buddhist education was offered in 14 Victorian schools, but did not have the advantages enjoyed by the Christians, who teach 96 per cent of all religious education. "There is definitely a funding bias . Ours is funded by volunteers and donations," she said. She said half the children attending Buddhist classes came from other religious traditions, but their parents were keen for them to experience their world view. If they had the resources, "I am confident that we could be in hundreds of schools".
Scott Hedges, a parent involved with the "Fairness in Religions in School" grassroots campaign, said that the Christianity taught in his daughter's Hawthorn school was missionary in nature. "The only difference between my daughter's class and an African village to these people is that we have cleaner water and shoes."
Education Department 'Dear Colleague' Letter Shreds Presumption of Innocence in Harassment Cases, Ignoring Supreme Court
By Hans Bader (An attorney who once worked at the federal Education Department)
To promote due process, some college disciplinary systems recognize a strong presumption of innocence, requiring clear-and-convincing evidence of guilt for discipline. That practice is now called into question by a recent Education Department letter that ignores a Supreme Court decision and federal appeals court rulings to the contrary.
In an April 4 “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) claims that schools cannot use a clear-and-convincing standard of proof typical in school disciplinary procedures for sexual harassment cases: “A school’s grievance procedures must use the preponderance of the evidence standard to resolve complaints of sex discrimination.” See Dear Colleague Letter: Sexual Violence Background, Summary and Fast Facts. “Preponderance of the evidence” means that if a school thinks there is as little as a 50.001% chance that the accused is guilty, the accused must be disciplined.
To satisfy this OCR requirement, schools that have long used a clear-and-convincing standard in disciplinary cases would have to suddenly create a special exception for sexual harassment and discrimination cases, giving people accused of such offenses less due process than they would otherwise receive. This would be a major departure from existing practice for schools, like Harvard Law School. Harvard’s “Policy and Guidelines Related to Sexual Harassment,” adopted by faculty vote in April 1995, contains the following provision: “Burden of proof: Formal disciplinary sanctions shall be imposed only upon clear and convincing evidence.” The Education Department’s rule also conflicts with faculty collective bargaining agreements mandating a clear-and-convincing standard.
The Education Department’s claim that complainants have a right to demand discipline whenever the evidence ever-so-slightly favors them is at odds with the Supreme Court’s Davis decision, which spelled out when sexual harassment in the schools violates the federal civil rights statutes that OCR is charged with enforcing. (See Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629 (1999).)
In its Davis decision, the Supreme Court specifically rejected the argument that complainants have a right to demand particular disciplinary sanctions, much less automatically require a school to “suspend or expel” someone accused of sexual harassment, saying that there is no violation of Title IX unless school officials behave in a way that is “clearly unreasonable”:
“We stress that our conclusion here — that recipients may be liable for their deliberate indifference to known acts of peer sexual harassment — does not mean that recipients can avoid liability only by purging their schools of actionable peer harassment or that administrators must engage in particular disciplinary action. . . the dissent erroneously imagines that victims of peer harassment now have a Title IX right to make particular remedial demands . . .courts should refrain from second guessing the disciplinary decisions made by school administrators,” who “must merely respond to known peer harassment in a manner that is not clearly unreasonable.”
The Supreme Court further emphasized that to successfully sue a school district for damages, a complainant alleging sexual harassment must show that school officials were “deliberately indifferent to sexual harassment, of which they have actual knowledge.”
Applying this “deliberate indifference” standard, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that where a school district is unable to conclusively determine that harassment has occurred, it is not liable even where that conclusion was “flawed,” and led to future harassment. (See Doe v. Dallas Independent School District, 220 F.3d 380 (5th Cir. 2000).)
The Davis decision also said that a school does not have to discipline people in ways that would give rise to “statutory or constitutional” claims against it: “it would be entirely reasonable for a school to refrain from a form of disciplinary action that would expose it to constitutional or statutory claims.”
For a school to discipline people based on a mere “preponderance of the evidence” standard, as the Education Department now demands, might well violate state law if it conflicted with collective bargaining agreements or other provisions mandating a “clear-and-convincing evidence” standard.
Even in the workplace, where employers are stringently liable for mere “negligence” — not just for “deliberate indifference” — they are not automatically liable for giving the accused a clear presumption of innocence, as federal appeals courts have made clear. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia held that an employer was not liable for sexual harassment, where it refused to discipline the accused because the evidence did not convincingly prove the existence of harassment, citing the absence of a corroborating witness. (See Knabe v. Boury Corporation, 114 F.3d 407 (3rd Cir. 1997).) That employer escaped liability despite requiring more than a close case for discipline, as a preponderance of evidence would mandate, since its refusal to impose discipline in the face of uncertainty was reasonable as a matter of law.
Another federal appeals court, the Fourth Circuit, has also rejected the idea that discipline is required if it is unclear whether the accused is guilty. It emphasized, “the legal standard of ‘prompt and adequate remedial action’ in no way requires an employer to dispense with fair procedures for those accused or to discharge every alleged harasser. . . ‘[A]n employer, in order to avoid liability for the discriminatory conduct of an employee, does not have to necessarily discipline or terminate the offending employee as long as the employer takes corrective action reasonably likely to prevent the offending conduct from reoccurring.’. . . And a good faith investigation of alleged harassment may satisfy the ‘prompt and adequate’ response standard, even if the investigation turns up no evidence of harassment. . . . Such an employer may avoid liability even if a jury later concludes that in fact harassment occurred.” (See Harris v. L & L Wings, 132 F.3d 978, 984 (4th Cir. 1998).)
Similarly, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an attempt to hold an employer (Wal-Mart) liable for harassment because it failed to discipline a harasser where it was genuinely unclear at the time it refused to discipline him whether he was guilty: “It would be unreasonable, and callous toward [the accused harasser’s] rights, for the law to require Wal-Mart to discipline [him] for events he denies, of which Wal-Mart could not find evidence.” (See Adler v. Wal-Mart, 144 F.3d 664, 678 (10th Cir. 1998).)
Thus, even in the workplace, there is no rule that the “preponderance of the evidence” standard (discipline upon a mere 50.0001% chance of guilt) is the one that always has to be applied to avoid harassment liability; indeed, it may be unreasonable to discipline a someone with no previous history of harassment where it is unclear whether he is in fact guilty.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has elsewhere sought to evade the requirements of the Supreme Court’s Davis decision by suggesting that its “deliberate indifference” standard for liability applies only to lawsuits against schools, not OCR investigations. But even if true, that is no help to OCR.
Even if the Davis standard for collecting damages in a lawsuit is somehow different than the standard for whether a violation of Title IX is established (for administrative purposes), the Education Department would still have to show a statutory violation happened in the first place, and recognizing a presumption of innocence is not a violation, as workplace cases reveal.
In the workplace, deliberate indifference need not be shown for a violation, and the question of damages liability and the existence of a violation are one and the same. That’s because the workplace antidiscrimination statute, Title VII, is not a spending-clause statute like Title IX, but instead automatically imposes damages liability for all but certain disparate-impact claims. Nevertheless, the courts have held that the mere existence of harassment in the workplace does not lead to liability on the part of the institution in which the harassment took place: for a violation to have even occurred in the first place, the institution must have failed to take reasonable steps in response to the harassment, and giving the accused the benefit of the doubt is not unreasonable and thus is not a violation to begin with. Thus, “a good faith investigation of alleged harassment may satisfy the “prompt and adequate” response standard, even if the investigation turns up no evidence of harassment.. . .Such an employer may avoid liability even if a jury later concludes that in fact harassment occurred,” (See Harris v. L & L Wings, 132 F.3d 978, 984 (4th Cir. 1998)), and “an employer, in order to avoid liability for the discriminatory conduct of an employee, does not have to necessarily discipline or terminate the offending employee.” (See Knabe v. Boury Corp., 114 F.3d 407, 414 (3d Cir.1997).)
OCR’s own 1997 interpretive rules regarding sexual harassment in the Federal Register explicitly borrowed from Title VII workplace precedents in laying down OCR’s test for whether a Title IX violation has occurred to begin with, thus incorporating those workplace limits on what is a violation of laws against sexual harassment. (See, e.g., 62 FR 12034 (1997)).
Even if OCR’s position were not at odds with Supreme Court precedent (and thus void), which it certainly is, OCR’s new mandate is procedurally improper and not a valid administrative rule.
If OCR wishes to impose a new rule overriding college disciplinary codes and collective bargaining agreements as to the burden of proof (as it is effectively doing), it has to do so in a formal rule, after notice and comment, and explain how to justify its departure from federal appellate court rulings about what a violation of the antidiscrimination laws is, and how to reconcile its new mandate with the Davis decision. Its unexplained departure from its past rules mimicking the standard workplace test for liability renders this new legal mandate invalid under the D.C. Circuit’s Paralyzed Veterans rule, which says that longstanding agency rules cannot be changed without notice-and-comment, even when the agency is merely amending an interpretive rule, unless that rule is being amended to comply with a superseding court decision. See Paralyzed Veterans of Am. v. D.C. Arena L.P., 117 F.3d 579, 586 (D.C. Cir. 1997). (The only arguably superseding court decisions since OCR issued its harassment guidance have been those that narrowed the definition of harassment: like Davis, which made clear that harassment must be both severe and pervasive, not severe “or” pervasive as OCR claims; and the 1998 Gebser decision, which dismissed a lawsuit for failure to show “deliberate indifference”).
Remember, it’s not the harassing student or professor who is being sued under Title IX, since Title IX liability is on the part of the school, not the harassing student or professor. (See, e.g., Smith v. Metropolitan Sch. Dist., 128 F.3d 1014, 1018-19 (7th Cir.1997).) So it’s the school, and its action in response to the harassment, that has to be culpable in order to violate the statute, not just the harasser’s own conduct.
And it’s not in any way culpable for a school to give someone a presumption of innocence.
Rudyard Kipling... doesn't he make cakes? How a third of British children have an exceedingly poor knowledge of literature
More than a third of children think Rudyard Kipling makes cakes, according to damning research. The study, carried out among eight to 12-year-olds, also found that one in five thinks Phileas Fogg, the principal character in the 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World In Eighty Days, is just the name of a snack brand.
The poll of 217 children nationwide found just 15 per cent had heard of Arthur Conan Doyle, 17 per cent knew J.M. Barrie, 19 per cent Robert Louis Stevenson and 31 per cent Lewis Carroll.
Ignorance about Kipling – the novelist and poet behind the Jungle Book, Kim and stories of imperial India – and other books, confirms fears that many children don’t count reading as their leisure activity of choice. If a new book came out, 31 per cent would read the book, but 69 per cent would prefer to see the film.
And when asked what their favoured after-school activities are, 78 per cent chose TV and 69 per cent went for games consoles. Fewer than a third of boys – 31 per cent – were likely to read a book for pleasure.
The implications of a lack of enthusiasm for reading could be devastating. A study by the OECD suggested that the UK had plummeted down international tables measuring reading, maths and science ability.
And a recent report by ChildWise found that children in Britain sit in front of a TV or computer screen for four-and-a-half hours a day. It found that children now spend an average of one hour and 50 minutes online and two hours 40 minutes in front of the television every day.
The reading research was carried out to support an initiative to print extracts from children’s books and poems on breakfast cereal boxes. The Roald Dahl Foundation has signed up to it, along with Puffin books and Asda, which commissioned the study of children’s reading.
Extracts from four of Roald Dahl's children's books, combined with interesting facts about the author and details of a creativity competition for youngsters will appear on Asda shelves nationally from today.
Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Children's Books, said: 'We're delighted to be supporting this imaginative campaign to inspire kids to read and fire their imaginations.
'We've selected the extracts very carefully and we're hopeful that by doing so many thousands more children will soon be hooked on books. Roald Dahl is the world's favourite children's author and the perfect choice to launch this important campaign.'
Children’s author Tamsyn Murray said: ‘There are far more tugs on kids’ time today than ever before and that means that we need to find new ways of getting kids hooked on reading and awakening their imaginations.’
Australia: An ideology-driven educational systen victimizes teachers as well as students
Teachers often not free to teach
CHRISTOPHER Bantick (Viewpoint, April 1) did a great job summarising and supporting all the false analyses and "solutions" for fixing our dreadful state of education.
He, like others on this particular bandwagon, starts with the explicit premise that the quality of the teacher determines the quality of education and doing something about "poor" teachers will therefore fix the problem.
The implied premise is that principals, parents, students, administrators, bureaucrats, theorists, lecturers, education ministers and everybody else who has any bearing on schools are blameless and helpless victims of teachers and their unions and that all would be well if a way could be found to "fix the teachers". Anybody who has ever worked in a school knows that teachers are at the mercy of just about anyone and everything. The "best" teachers can do next to nothing in a class of unco-operative students and much less when the students don't even attend.
Our failed system has for decades been propped up by spending billions of dollars that should not need spending, by endless propaganda, by bullying and belittling members of the public who question its approaches and results, by denying anything's wrong, by intimidating teachers, by government slogans and by dumping every fad, pointless innovation or ill-fated attempt to deal with system-caused problems on to teachers. The same system has for decades persecuted teachers who tried to resist mindless dictates they knew to be wrong and harmful to children's education.
If the teaching unions were anywhere near as powerful as the Davis Guggenheim thesis in the film Waiting for Superman, as cited by Bantick, makes out, they would be in a position to stop many of the things that turn capable, dedicated teachers into "failures" unrealistic, unnecessary and uncompensated-for workloads constantly being added to an already unmanageable job, lack of support (often outright hostility) from parents and employing authorities, lack of authority commensurate with their responsibilities, insolent children and stress levels that in any other field would have been the subject of a judicial inquiry years ago.
But they aren't. They cannot even protect their members from suffering the worst rates of attrition and early death of any profession.
The true causes of our problems lie in the system itself. Along with the indiscipline of vast numbers of children, its foundational ideologies have given rise to an overcrowded curriculum and a mountain of peripheral activities, an emphasis on process and method over content and achievement, the shunning of the critical fundamentals of learning and the substitution of essential drilling of basics with creativity and fun, all of which have led to an increasing dependence on time-wasting PR to make it seem the school is doing a good job.
Many brighter children have survived this type of schooling, but many more have not. For many who needed remediation, it hasn't worked and the system has never asked itself why.
Teachers can be blamed for this only to the extent that they participate in this regime of system-mandated idiocy.
This is not to deny there are under-performing teachers, or to argue that they should be protected. It is to emphasise that the problem is the system, not the teachers, and that nobody in any job can be said to be below standard if there are no standards, or if they are denied the opportunity to perform to the best of their ability.
Teaching, more than any other profession, suffers this denial of opportunity.
The most glaring flaw in Bantick's argument is that he delimits education to just teachers. But surely any attempt to remove teachers on the basis of quality must apply equally to parents, students and administrators, especially those who undermine the rightful authority of the one who has to teach.
We must never forget that the ideologies responsible for all of this also laid the foundation for the abolition of teacher authority, a social calamity that the bad-teacher thesis bypasses in its entirety.
Would-be reformers need to go back to the 1960s and look at the philosophies and ideologies that, without any consultation or mandate, were injected into our education systems and labelled "progress".
Top quality free education is already easily available. It's just the credentialling that needs sorting out. Maybe diploma mills might come into their own! If you know your stuff, it's unlikely that people will look closely at your credentials -- JR
How much should a college education cost? According to the College Board, the average cost of earning a degree at a private, 4-year university is now more than $100,000. If tuition prices continue to rise as quickly as they did during the past decade, a college degree will cost more than $200,000 by the time today’s third-graders are applying. That price tag is enough to cause most parents to break into a sweat.
Is a college degree really worth this cost? Some bright minds think Americans are paying way too much. In fact, Bill Gates--one of the country's most famous college dropouts--thinks it should be closer to zero. He told an audience last summer: “Five years from now, on the web, for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”
One could argue that the bright future Gates described is already here. The Massachusetts Institute for Technology has already put all of its instructional materials, including lectures, online and made it available for free. Other schools, including many elite universities, are following suit. For example, using iTunes University, you can already download free lectures from Stanford, Yale, and dozens of other colleges.
The trend of a free and open higher education system will revolutionize higher education, and fundamentally change the way that the world learns. As Gates argues, someday soon, anyone—anywhere in the world—with internet access will be able to learn from the best professors and teachers.
Of course, access to instruction isn't the only, or even primary, reason why most American students go to college. A big part of what today’s students are purchasing for that $100,000 is the degree itself—the credential that signals to employers and society in general that one is able to learn and can survive four years of classes and exams.
But alternative credentialing systems, like AP tests and CLEP exams, are already in place. And the realization of Bill Gates's vision of free online higher education will surely be followed by new credentialing systems that allow people who learn online to prove their accomplishments and signal their value to employers.
Forward thinking elected officials now have the opportunity to expedite the arrival of the free college era, and—in the process—solve a major problem for American families while providing big relief for taxpayers and federal and state budgets.
For too long, efforts to solve the college access and affordability problem have focused on increasing subsidies—grants, loans, and scholarships—for students to attend college. Increased student aid subsidies have contributed to today’s high tuition prices. The College Board reports that total federal support for all forms of college student aid programs was $146 billion in 2010—an increase of 136 percent over just a decade ago.
Instead of this continuing this failed approach—an approach we simply can no longer afford—elected officials should focus on dramatically lowering the costs associated with earning a college education. For example, Governor Rick Perry recently called on the Texas higher education system to develop a new program through which students can earn a college degree for only $10,000. Presumably, this initiative will take advantage of the exciting efficiencies that are happening thanks to online learning.
Leaders in Washington and in state capitals around the country should follow Governor Perry’s lead. Governors and state legislatures should require state-funded universities to follow schools like MIT—putting lectures and course content online for free. Like Texas, state higher education systems should create new credentialing systems to allow people who learn online to demonstrate their mastery and work towards a degree.
Congress and the administration have a responsibility to taxpayers to support reforms that will lower the $150 billion annual burden of student aid programs. For example, Congress could require a college that receives a certain level of direct federal subsidies place a percentage of its instructional content online for free. This initiative would follow the tradition of the Library of Congress—creating a national library of college lectures that all citizens can use. President Obama could use his bully pulpit to challenge universities across the country to do their part to solve a critical national problem.
Very few of our country’s many, big problems have simple and inexpensive solutions. We can’t afford to pass this one up.
Britain's Labour Party government put mediocrity ahead of bright children
Labour institutionalised mediocrity in schools by encouraging teachers to neglect capable pupils, according to an analysis of GCSE results. Teachers focused their attention on bumping-up pupils from a grade D to a C in order to improve their ranking in school league tables.
Meanwhile those youngsters who were considered bright enough to get a grade B or higher at GCSE have been neglected. And those at the bottom of the pile – who would take too much work to get to grade C – have been consigned to the scrap heap, according to research by the think tank Policy Exchange.
The analysis of GCSE grades from 2000 to 2009 shows the proportion of pupils getting A*, A and B grades has remained static while the number achieving a C grade has soared by 25 per cent. This is the first time the practice, which has become so ingrained that it is even incorporated in teachers’ manuals, has been illustrated in an authoritative study of GCSE results.
One manual reminds maths teachers: ‘Students who achieve a GCSE grade C or above in mathematics help to boost the school’s statistics and so show the school in a better light for Ofsted and for league tables.’ As a result schools have failed to help hundreds of thousands of bright pupils better their chances in life, the report suggests.
Professor Deborah Eyre, author of the study, said: ‘Children who try harder do better. But because of a fear of appearing “elitist”, pupils are not being encouraged to put in the effort which will bring about excellence. ‘We need an approach which will recognise and nurture signs of high performance in every subject – both academic and vocational. ‘There are many more pupils capable of high performance than we currently recognise.’
Schools watchdog Ofsted has found that some 46 per cent of students do not feel they are intellectually challenged at school.
James Groves, of Policy Exchange, added: ‘Schools need a focus on high achievement. If we are to produce enough skilled adults who will be able to compete in a vastly tougher global economy, then we cannot afford to waste any potential at all. ‘Just being able to master basic skills is no longer enough. We need a workforce that can take on anyone in the world and beat them.’
In my home State of Queensland, one third of students overall go private and an even higher proportion are in private High schools. Anyone who can afford to wants out of government schools, particularly in the teenage years of their kids. British parents must be envious. Only 7% get private schooling there -- JR
ENROLMENTS in state high schools have dropped as parents look increasingly to the private sector to educate their teenagers.
Figures released yesterday, taken on Day 8 of the academic year, show overall enrolments in Queensland state schools increased less than 1 per cent between 2010 and 2011.
But all of that growth was in primary schools. State high school enrolments dropped slightly from 174,721 on Day 8, 2010, to 174,685 in 2011.
Similar figures provided by the Queensland Catholic Education Commission show their enrolments in high schools went up about 3 per cent, while the state's population has been growing at about 2 per cent a year.
Enrolment figures for state primary schools were much brighter. They increased their Day 8 numbers from 307,147 students in 2010 to 310,104 this year. Prep enrolments grew by almost 5 per cent from 40,974 to 42,912 this year.
Queensland Secondary Principals Association president Norm Fuller said he was unsure of why enrolment in high schools went down by less than 40 students.
He said principals had anecdotally reported that some parents had moved their children from the private sector to their state schools after looking at data on the My School website.
But Shadow Education Minister Bruce Flegg said the figures were "a continuation of a very long-term trend" of parents voting with their feet because there was a perception of more opportunities and better discipline in the private sector.
The figures were released yesterday, only a day after The Courier-Mail applied for the data through the Right to Information process.
While the figures are normally released in the weeks after Day 8, Education Queensland initially delayed them this year because of the floods. The numbers are expected to go online today with a statement that overall, enrolments grew by 1.1 per cent between 2009 and 2011.
Independent Schools Queensland said they had not yet received their enrolment figures.
It is the third year in a row that Queensland state school Day 8 enrolments have grown less than one per cent overall, while the Catholic sector has been growing at about 3 per cent.
But Education Minister Cameron Dick said Queensland parents knew state schools offered quality education and the enrolment figures proved it. "Sixty-seven per cent of all Queensland students attend state schools, the third highest proportion in Australia and higher than the national average," he said.
The Day 8 figures, and those supplied by the QCEC, are initial data collections at schools with an official census carried out for the Australian Bureau of Statistics later in the year.
BOOK REVIEW of The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For
Parents and taxpayers shouldn't get overheated about faculty salaries: tenure is where they should concentrate their anger. The jobs-for-life entitlement that comes with an ivory tower position is at the heart of so many problems with higher education today. Veteran journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, an alumna of one of the country's most expensive and best-endowed schools, explores how tenure has promoted a class system in higher education, leaving contingent faculty who are barely making minimum wage and have no time for students to teach large swaths of the under- graduate population. She shows how the institution of tenure forces junior professors to keep their mouths shut for a decade or more if they disagree with senior faculty about anything from politics to research methods. And she examines how the institution of tenure – with the job security, mediocre salaries and low levels of accountability it entails – may be attracting the least innovative and interesting members of our society into teaching.
As staff walk out at a school plagued by violent pupils, teachers who dared to confront thugs in classrooms across Britain reveal how THEY were the ones to be punished
Staff at a struggling secondary school who are today staging a walk-out in protest of an escalating wave of verbal and physical abuse from pupils have won support from a teacher who made a similarly strong stand against classroom indiscipline.
Beleaguered teachers at the Darwen Vale High School in Blackburn, Lancs, overwhelmingly voted to go on strike in protest at what they see as the lack of support from senior management in dealing with pupils’ challenging behaviour. The children had been pushing, shoving and constantly swearing, leaving hard-pressed staff at the end of their tether.
Last month, a disciplinary hearing decreed that Michael Becker, 63, a teacher with an ‘exemplary’ record, should be allowed to return to the profession he loves despite an earlier conviction for assaulting a pupil. Mr Becker, 63, of Stutton, Suffolk, who reacted firmly to an unruly pupil, said: ‘I have enormous sympathy for these teachers who daily run the gauntlet of rowdy and aggressive children. I applaud their action.’
Two years ago, Mr Becker was fined £1,500 and ordered to pay £1,875 costs by Suffolk magistrates who believed the account of a disruptive 13-year-old who was in his class. The boy said the teacher had used unreasonable force to eject him from a lesson. Mr Becker has always contested that he had merely grabbed the boy by his belt and sweatshirt and removed him to a nearby storeroom when he refused — after repeated warnings — to stop telling particularly offensive and inflammatory racist jokes and leave the classroom.
When, last month, the General Teaching Council ruled that he could return to the classroom, Mr Becker said: ‘I’m delighted. I feel I’ve been vindicated. I just cannot describe the relief. I believe common sense has, at last, prevailed.’
And so, it would seem, do his many supporters. Roland Gooding, the former headteacher at the special school where Mr Becker gave ‘exemplary’ service for more than three decades, told the tribunal he ‘would not hesitate’ to employ Mr Becker again — adding public interest would not be served if he was forbidden from teaching.
At a time when schools are experiencing shortages of science and maths teachers, it would indeed seem a folly to ban Mr Becker from teaching, as he is a specialist in both.
His other passion is music: the school band, which he set up and ran, made ten albums — the proceeds of which went to charity — and appeared on television. In recognition of this laudable work, Mr Becker and his wife Ilona, 62, a retired secretary — who are parents to a grown-up son and daughter, and grandparents — attended a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
However, Mr Becker acknowledges that he did ‘overstep the mark’. He has also expressed genuine apologies and regret. But he would like to see the law clarified so other teachers fully understand what constitutes ‘reasonable’ force in removing disruptive pupils from lessons.
For his experience is not a one-off. It is replicated on a daily basis in classrooms throughout Britain, where teachers are expected to exercise almost saintly forbearance when confronted with pupils’ insolence, foul language and rowdyness.
‘All the power is with the children now,’ says Mr Becker. ‘Indiscipline is rampant and it seems to be a mark of honour to bring down a teacher.’ Mr Becker believes his experience is an extension of the barmy extremes of political correctness that currently hamstring every aspect of school life: the ludicrous health-and-safety zealotry that dictates pupils can’t make collages out of old eggboxes or loo roll holders any more for fear of contracting salmonella or ingesting germs; the nannying that forbids conker fights; and the absurd ‘risk assessment’ exercises that precede every trip outside the school gates.
Moreover, today’s discipline strategies are short-changing the diligent — an inequity not lost on Mr Becker. ‘Pupils stroll round classrooms as if teachers don’t exist,’ he says. ‘The boy I reprimanded was using his mobile and telling racist jokes. He was being unbearably insolent. It infuriated me that he was denying the other pupils their entitlement to learn without disruption, so I removed him.’ He adds: ‘Teachers should be allowed to teach. It’s a scandal that the system has forsaken those who want to learn.
‘My colleagues are constantly struggling with disrespectful and sometimes violent pupils. I know of one teacher, in a middle school, who is told to ‘f*** off’ 20 times a day. While other countries — many in Asia — are ascending the educational league tables, we are sliding down them.’
While parents would once support teachers’ efforts to discipline their children, now they are more likely to collude with their unruly offspring against their teachers.
Rita Burgess (not her current name), 55, teaches at a primary school in a deprived area of Liverpool. Her experience proves just how skewed in favour of children’s ‘rights’ the system has become. A year ago, two of her nine-year-old pupils were brawling in the classroom. She intervened to separate them. One of the children then ccused Mrs Burgess of assault, claiming she had strangled him.
The entire incident had been witnessed by the school’s assistant head, who testified that Mrs Burgess had merely broken up the fight. Had common sense prevailed the incident would have ended there, with a stiff reprimand and sanctions for the pupils.
But it didn’t. Preposterous though it seems, it was Mrs Burgess — a teacher with an unblemished record and 23 years experience — who was put through the wringer.
‘The headteacher said he could not take my word, which was corroborated by the assistant head, about what had happened,’ says Mrs Burgess. ‘He said if he did so, the parents would assume I’d colluded with my colleague to take sides against the children.’
What happened next is the stuff of nightmare. Mrs Burgess was suspended from her post for six weeks while the head carried out his investigation. In the time it took to accrue evidence — which exonerated Mrs Burgess unequivocally — she began to suffer from depression. ‘It was terribly stressful. I thought I was going to lose my job,’ she says. ‘Worst of all was the sense of utter betrayal.
Presumably the headteacher was obeying “procedures”, but we’ve now reached the point where heads are so frightened of litigation they give more credence to the word of children than to the testimony of two responsible adults.
There have been many instances of older pupils who’ve conspired against teachers and told lies just to get rid of them.’
Mrs Burgess’ experience is commonplace. It is replicated in schools all over Britain and it indicates how the ‘human rights’ of unruly pupils are trampling over the far more compelling right of the well-behaved to be educated.....
Mrs Burgess’ comments strike a chord with Basil Howard, a former head of religious education at a Midlands comprehensive. Mr Howard, dismayed by the daily verbal assaults on him by pupils, left the profession suffering from stress to become a social worker. He says: ‘I took my job seriously. I was a good, imaginative teacher. Even so, unruliness in the classroom was routine.
‘Pupils would wander aimlessly around, the more disruptive of them swinging Tarzan-like from the curtains. ‘“Mr Howard is a ****” was engraved indelibly by penknife and ink into desks. And I was expected to suffer this in silence. “You are a useless w***** and RE is pathetic,” was a typical torment.’
Like Mrs Burgess, Mr Howard notes that today even the most unruly pupils are indulged because they have ‘conditions’ that warrant quasi-scientific labels. ‘I believe the rot set in when teachers’ obligation to maintain discipline was undermined by pupils’ rights,’ he says.
‘Kids who are simply too idle to work are now excused because they have “learning difficulties”. My years as a social worker have taught me that children genuinely afflicted are, in fact, a tiny minority.
‘Moreover, teachers have become afraid to damage the fragile sensibilities of their pupils and school reports are so cloaked by euphemism that they are meaningless. What happened to the short, sharp shock of the one-liner? “Must do better” and, “An awful performance” leave no room for doubt or misinterpretation. ‘The pendulum has swung too far in favour of tolerance and acceptance.’
Small wonder, then, that so many pupils, denied boundaries and discipline at home, have no sense of the meaning of such out-moded values as respect, diligence, reliability and courtesy.
Nearly two-thirds of Australian teachers want to quit - survey
NEARLY two-thirds of Australian teachers are considering quitting their jobs for a new career.
The Centre for Marketing Schools was commissioned to survey staff satisfaction levels of 850 teachers in government and non-government schools in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.
Centre for Marketing Schools director Dr Linda Vining said the survey confirmed the "deeper issues" of concern to teachers.
They included a lack of communication between staff and principals, and feeling undervalued and not being consulted.
"Teachers are feeling steamrollered . . . they are feeling that things are happening too quickly," Dr Vining said. "Through my research comes a sense they feel they are not valued members of the team - they are simply there to work and for many of them that's not fulfilling."
The survey also found:
SIXTY per cent of teachers said the school's direction was not clearly communicated.
FIFTY-ONE per cent did not feel part of a close-knit school community.
FIFTY-FOUR per cent said communication between staff and management was poor.
TWENTY-SEVEN per cent said the school principal was not approachable.
Education Minister Jay Weatherill said he had been "concerned about the morale of the workforce" when he was put in charge of the portfolio.
He said he had since announced a range of new policies aimed at improving communication between the central office and teachers.
"Many of the Supporting our Teachers initiatives are directly aimed at addressing teacher morale - such as the Public Teaching Awards, a major conference about teaching in the 21st century, a new outstanding teacher classification, a new recruitment policy and the Teacher Renewal Program," he said.
Association of Independent Schools of SA executive director Garry Le Duff said a more strategic approach to teacher retention was vital. "It seems unusually high that such a high proportion of people in teaching would be looking for alternative careers," he said. "But we certainly have to accept that people are more mobile in their occupations than a few years ago . . . and be more strategic in what sort of career pathways we're offering teachers."
The US Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by taxpayers in Arizona challenging a state tax credit program that primarily benefits parochial schools. In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said the taxpayers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their lawsuit.
The action sweeps away a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that had struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.
The majority justices did not directly address the larger constitutional issue. Instead, the 19-page decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focuses on whether the complaining taxpayers had suffered a direct and personal injury from Arizona’s religious school tax credit program.
Justice Kennedy drew a sharp distinction between government expenditures from the general treasury that directly benefit religion versus tax credits that provide individual citizens an opportunity to decide for themselves whether to direct the credited funds to a religious school.
“When Arizona taxpayers choose to contribute [to the tax credit program], they spend their own money, not money the state has collected from respondents or from other taxpayers,” Kennedy wrote. “Arizona’s [tax credit law] does not extract and spend a conscientious dissenter’s funds in service of an establishment [of religion],” he said. “On the contrary,” Kennedy said, “respondents and other Arizona taxpayers remain free to pay their own tax bills, without contributing to [the religious school tax credit program].”
The decision is important because it signals the intention of five members of the court to enforce a narrow interpretation of when taxpayers may be permitted to file lawsuits seeking to prove the government is engaged in unconstitutional support for or entanglement with religion.
In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the decision will make it harder for ordinary citizens to challenge government actions that they feel violate the First Amendment principle of government neutrality concerning religion. “Today’s decision devastates taxpayer standing in establishment clause cases,” Justice Kagan wrote in a 24-page dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. “Appropriations and tax subsidies are readily interchangeable,” Kagan wrote. “What is a cash grant today can be a tax break tomorrow.”
She added: “The court’s opinion thus offers a road map … to any government that wishes to insulate its financing of religious activity from legal challenge.”
Supporters of the tax credit program praised the ruling. “Today’s decision marks the fifth time in recent years that the Supreme Court has rebuffed efforts by school choice opponents to use the courts to halt programs that empower families to choose a private school education,” said Tim Keller, executive director of the Arizona Chapter of the Institute for Justice.
A bold — for the U.S., anyway — experiment is taking place in Detroit, which recently announced plans to convert nearly a third of its public schools into charter schools as soon as this fall.
Detroit already has a larger percentage of schoolchildren in charter schools than any other city except New Orleans and Washington, D.C. The Big Easy's transition to charters was driven by the disaster of Hurricane Katrina; the District's, by the disaster of the D.C. school system itself. Detroit is moving to charters largely out of fiscal necessity.
Teachers' unions and other usual suspects often object to charter schools on the grounds that they drain money from the public schools — a complaint that overlooks one salient fact: Charter schools are public schools. (Many, however, are not unionized, which does a lot to explain the union objection.) In fact, some school-reform advocates believe they will be the salvation of the public-school system, staving off the voucher campaign and saving public schools from wholesale abandonment.
It's telling that the charter movement has taken off in major urban areas saddled with terrible schools, rather than places — such as Virginia — where the mostly suburban systems meet parents' expectations. A principal reason people flock to the suburbs, of course, is to move to a better school district. If the charter movement can restore big-city school systems to some semblance of health, then they might also bring about what stadium and convention-center projects have not: an urban renaissance.
British school on the verge of a breakdown: Teachers set to walk out over pupil misbehaviour
Teachers at a struggling secondary school will stage a walk-out tomorrow in protest at a wave of verbal and physical assaults from pupils. Staff at Darwen Vale High School voted overwhelmingly to go on strike in protest at the lack of support they say they have received from senior management.
The threat came the day after Education Secretary Michael Gove announced a ‘back to basics’ crackdown on bad behaviour which he said was rife in too many schools.
Yesterday parents told how children at Darwen Vale in Blackburn, Lancashire, had been staging a low-level rebellion, challenging teachers to fights, pushing and shoving them and constantly swearing.
Problems are thought to have begun after the school moved to temporary premises during a £22million rebuild under Labour’s now discredited Building Schools for the Future programme.
Some teachers have allegedly been the subject of malicious allegations by pupils trying to get them suspended, while teenagers have been filming lessons on their mobile phones and threatening to post the footage on the internet.
As a result, lessons are expected to be cancelled tomorrow for all 1,150 pupils as staff form a picket line outside the school’s temporary premises. In a ballot, 95 per cent of the school’s 31 National Union of Teachers members voted in favour of the strike. Two thirds of the 29 members of the National Association of Schoolteachers/Union of Women Teachers also voted to walk out.
Parents said teachers had been complaining of a dramatic deterioration in behaviour and lack of respect since the school moved to near a former council estate. One father said: ‘It’s not the best school and there are a lot of badly behaved pupils. I’m not surprised the teachers are striking – I wouldn’t want their job.’
NAS/UWT Lancashire representative John Girdley said: ‘We sincerely hope that changes can be implemented as a matter of urgency in order to allow the staff of the school to continue to deliver the high standard of education which our pupils deserve.’
But Darwen Vale head teacher Hilary Torpey said the problem had been vastly exaggerated. In a letter to parents, she wrote: ‘It is unfortunate that matters that were being dealt with by the school about appropriate behaviour and ways of managing it have been made public in this way and blown out of all proportion.’
She said the school, which had a ‘good’ pupil behaviour rating following an Ofsted inspection in June, had been revisited by auditors following the claims and they had again been ‘highly complimentary’.
The behaviour at Darwen Vale has a long way to go before it reaches the depths of violence and anarchy that blighted what was dubbed Britain’s worst school.
The Ridings in Halifax gained notoriety in the 1990s amid shocking accounts including a 14-year-old boy fondling a French teacher’s breasts in front of a class. In 1996, teachers voted to strike unless 61 pupils were expelled. Two ‘superheads’ were appointed and they mollified staff by expelling 12 students and suspending 21. By 1998, Ofsted inspectors reported a ‘remarkable transformation’, but the school slipped back into chaos and was closed in 2007.
College Professor Arrested for Closing Student’s Laptop in Class
Professor Frank J. Rybicki teaches Mass Media at Valdosta State University. The other day, he was arrested for assaulting a student in his class and is now facing battery charges.
Did he punch the student? No. Did he throw his chair across the room at the student? Definitely not. Did he inappropriately get a bit too intimate with a student? Not even close.
He was arrested for shutting a student’s laptop in class. The student, the professor claims, was web-browsing on sites not related to the course, instead of taking notes. After he closed her laptop, an argument ensued between the professor and the 22-year-old girl. Then, soon after the argument, the professor dismissed class early because he was so upset.
That was Friday. The following Monday, when the students came to class, instead of being greeted by their professor, they were greeted by officers. Inside Higher Ed has the story:
Frank J. Rybicki, assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, did the equivalent last week when he shut the laptop of a student who was allegedly web surfing as opposed to taking notes. She filed a complaint (reportedly about a finger or fingers that were hurt when he shut the laptop) and the university’s police arrested him on a charge of battery. The Georgia institution suspended his teaching duties there, although not his pay.
The professor–and the students in the class–were asked by the University to not answer any questions relating to the incident. Still, Professor Rybicki did have a few words to say about this fiasco:
While he declined to discuss the incident specifically, Rybicki did answer a few questions. Asked if students shouldn’t look at non-class websites while in class, he said that was “pretty obvious.” Asked if he had ever caused physical harm to any student, he said “absolutely not, never.”
Many students have come to the defense of the professor. One said that his arrest was not justified “because he is a great teacher and she [the student with the laptop] was on Facebook, when we know not to be on other sites while the teacher is teaching.”
I’m getting to be a crabby old man and I’m not even fifty. But working at a liberal university for eighteen years has taught me never to accept responsibility for my actions or my disposition. Instead I blame my most recent bad mood (the one I’m in right now) on a student who just asked me a question about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Leon, (1984). Wanting to know the holding, he asked if it meant “that the police can rely upon a search warrant they don’t reasonably no is invalid.” I almost told the student there was know way he was going to pass my course if he didn’t no the difference between “know” and “no.” But I just new I would get in trouble if I did.
Of course, when criticizing the low quality of students in higher education it’s important that we not pick on males only (that would be sexist). No discussion of the declining quality of student communication skills would be complete without talking about the role (or was that roll?) of female students. After all, they make up more than 50% of the student body on the average college campus. You are (like totally) aware of their presence when you hear a conversation like the following, which occurred last Tuesday right outside my opened office door:
“I’m just like not real sure what I want to do when I graduate? I like thought I would like major in business but there’s a lot of like math and stuff? Plus, the classes in sociology are like easier and like way more interesting? I just seriously like need to focus on like what I want to do when I get out and stuff?”
None of the young woman’s sentences were actually questions. But the inflections at the end of each sentence (along with the general lack of confidence in anything she said) made them sound like questions. I mean, it made them like sound like questions? I’m sure that that woman has a Facebook account with a “like like” button. So she can like seriously like. And stuff.
Of course, it is racist of me to have just given two examples of declining student quality using white students. Let’s (like totally) fix that by recounting a conversation I heard just this morning as I was walking up the stairwell in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building, which is sure to be re-named Mike Adams Hall after I retire.
“You did dat. I did not do dat. Yo. Dats right. It’s yo fault. My situation? What about yo situation? I do dat. I do dat. But dats because you done did dat. Dats what I’m sayin’. Dat’s what I be sayin’.”
I have no idea what that young Hyphenated-American student was saying to his cell phone. All I know is that I have the song “Zip-a-dee-do-dat” stuck in my head. Thanks to the Diversity Office it’s the new “Song of the South”!
As much as I enjoy broaching these topics with humor the results aren’t funny when these students get out into the real world to compete in a full-time job applicant pool. So there has to be a serious discussion of how this problem became so pronounced and what can be done about it.
It would be tempting to blame these kinds of problems on the university English departments. After all, they rarely teach students English these days – opting instead to indoctrinate them into post-modern philosophy and radical feminist politics.
It would also be tempting to blame the Schools of Education that pay wacky professors like Maurice Martinez to teach “black English” to white students. Instead of asking the minority to conform to the majority they do the exact opposite – probably because it is more difficult and, hence, would require greater government intervention (read: greater federal grant opportunities).
But the problem is much broader than that. It is a problem stemming from our basic educational mission of promoting multiculturalism and diversity. In this age of diversity we are reticent to correct students for speaking in a “wrong” way or to reward them for speaking in a “right” way. To do either one of these things is to admit that there is a right or wrong way of doing things in any given cultural or social context. Professors who are unwilling to agree that English is the “right” language to speak in this country are hardly willing to assert that there is a right or wrong way to speak it.
President George W. Bush was considered an idiot by most college professors simply because he was inarticulate. One of my colleagues even circulated an email saying that Bush was responsible for the fact that most college students are inarticulate. But Bush is no longer in office and the problem keeps getting worse. Multiculturalism has come up short in our efforts to promote linguistic skill and social competency. It’s time for a new strategery. I think you gnome sayings. Gnome sayin’?
British schools have been hiding true extent of pupil bad behaviour for years, claims Education boss
Bad behaviour is rife in schools – and heads have been hiding the problem for years, the Education Secretary has warned. Michael Gove said yesterday that schools were suffering from a ‘real behaviour problem’.
And headmasters have conspired to hide the true nature of yobbish behaviour in the classroom by concealing naughty pupils and incompetent teachers from Ofsted inspectors, he added. As a result, thousands of teachers – trained at the taxpayers’ expense – have fled the profession, citing bad classroom behaviour as the reason. And with 1,000 children being suspended every school day for abuse and assault, their disruptive behaviour is interfering with the education and life chances of tens of thousands of pupils.
Mr Gove’s comments will enrage teachers’ unions, who insist behaviour in schools is good and that any attempt to paint a bad picture is ‘scaremongering’.
Mr Gove announced his ‘back to basics’ plans as he published guidance for schools on dealing with bad behaviour. Under the updated guidance, which has been reduced from 600 pages to 50, school heads will be able to press criminal charges against pupils who make false allegations about teachers in England. They will also be able to confiscate mobile phones without fear of being accused of infringing pupils’ rights.
Launching the guidance, Mr Gove said he was told by teachers that ‘weak teachers are invited to stay at home, we make sure disruptive pupils don’t come in, and the best teachers are on corridor duty. We put on our best face for inspections’.
He added: ‘We rely on Ofsted to let us know how behaviour is in many schools. It is certainly the case that in some schools the behaviour problem is critical. ‘We do know from recent evidence that the single biggest reason [for teachers leaving the profession] is because of poor behaviour.
PRIMARY SCHOOLS CRISIS
Tens of thousands of children face being turned away from primary schools because a migrant baby boom has led to a severe shortage of places.
London alone faces a shortage of some 70,000 primary places in the next four years, according to a report, and Berkshire, Bedfordshire, Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield and Hove, are under enormous strain.
Parents in the worst-hit areas will have to separate their siblings and send their four-year-olds on 30 minute bus rides across their borough to get them into a school. The rapid increase in numbers, which will cost £1.7billion, is being attributed to a baby boom fuelled in part by rising net migration – which more than doubled under Labour.
Many migrants were young and have since started families. It has been predicted 500,000 more primary places will be needed by 2018.
A sluggish housing market has compounded the crisis because parents are effectively trapped in areas with too few school places.
Others have found they lack the cash to send their offspring to private schools.
‘The biggest barrier to entry is the fear of not being safe in the classroom. These are both indicators of a real behaviour problem.’ Two-thirds of teachers believe bad behaviour is driving staff out of the classroom, according to the Department for Education.
Mr Gove’s behaviour tsar, Charlie Taylor, said the guidance should encompass rules on school uniform and advice on recruiting educational psychologists. He said a school uniform, with top buttons done up and a nicely tied tie, can ‘set the tone for a school’.
Mr Taylor added: ‘You need to have the high expectations; you need to have the rules in place and the boundaries. ‘But in any school, and in particular in a deprived area...you need to do a bit extra with them.’
Pimlico Academy in Central London, where Mr Gove launched his guidance, has a full-time education psychologist and four part-time psychotherapists to work with children with the most serious problems.
Concerns that schools are hiding badly behaved pupils from Ofsted were raised at a Commons select committee hearing last year. Tom Trust, a former member of the General Teaching Council for England, told the committee: ‘Getting evidence from head teachers is not always reliable because they have got a lot to lose. Ofsted’s views on behaviour are not worth the paper they are written on.’
Florida Education Reforms Succeed, Spread to Other States
Florida is widely recognized as the state leader in education reform. Students in the Sunshine State have made the strongest academic achievement gains in the nation since 2003, and they are one of the only states that have been able to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority students. Yesterday, the Washington Post highlighted the Florida model, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s role in its creation:
“The president who turned No Child Left Behind from slogan into statute is gone from Washington, and the influence of his signature education law is fading. But another brand of Bush school reform is on the rise.
“The salesman is not the 43rd president, George W. Bush, but the 43rd governor of Florida, his brother Jeb.
“At the core of the Jeb Bush agenda are ideas drawn from his Florida playbook: Give every public school a grade from A to F. Offer students vouchers to help pay for private school. Don’t let them move into fourth grade unless they know how to read.”
State leaders seem to know a good reform strategy when they see it, and many across the country are beginning to embrace the Florida reform model.
Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Governor Gary Herbert of Utah just signed the Florida-style A-F grading system into law in their respective states. The scale grades schools and school districts on a straightforward, transparent scale designed to inform parents and taxpayers about achievement results. The move will arm parents with more information about school performance – a necessary step to improving education. State leaders in Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana also recently implemented the A-F grading scale.
While transparency about school performance is essential to results-based education reform, providing parents with opportunities to act on that information is crucial. Many states are now working to enact that most important piece of the Florida reform model – school choice.
In Indiana, a school choice bill – what could become the largest in the country – is under consideration that would provide significant new education options for families. According to the Foundation for Educational Choice, the House bill under consideration would create a new voucher program that would allow children to attend a private school of their choice. Scholarship amounts will be determined on a sliding scale based on income, and after three years, the cap on the number of eligible students would be lifted.
Moves to embrace the Florida reform model – in whole or in part – illustrate the great capacity of state leaders to look toward what works in education and modify it to meet the needs of local communities.
By contrast, Washington has been trying for nearly a half century to push education reform from the top down, despite being far from the students and schools their policies impact.
The Washington Post goes on to say that “[Jeb] Bush left office in 2007, and his legacy is much debated.” While some may like to debate which of the reform elements of his plan were most effective, there’s little room to debate the results.
Florida students have demonstrated the strongest gains on the NAEP in the nation since 2003, when all 50 states began taking NAEP exams. Moreover, between 1998 and 2008, the average score for black students increased by 12 points in reading from 192 to 204. In Florida, it increased by 25 points—twice the gains of the national average. If African American students nationwide had made the same amount of progress as African American students in Florida, the fourth-grade reading gap between black and white would be approximately half the size it is today.
If federal policymakers truly wanted to help education reform flourish, they would relieve states of the bureaucratic red tape and heavy handed mandates, and allow state leaders to have more control over how education dollars are spent. As the recent replications of the highly successful Florida reform model show, state leaders are eager to do what works and what’s in the best interest of students.
Pupils could face police action as British government announces surprise raids on schools to tackle bad behaviour
Britain's worst schools will face surprise raids by inspectors and heads will be able to press charges against pupils under moves to stamp out discipline problems in the classroom.
Teachers will also be given powers to confiscate pupils’ mobile phones in a package of measures designed to end years of politically correct official guidance that gave disruptive children the upper hand.
Education Secretary Michael Gove, who will unveil the plans today, is determined to reverse the collapse in classroom discipline that has resulted in 1,000 children a day being suspended from school for abuse and assault.
As well as confiscating mobiles, which are banned in many classrooms, teachers will be allowed to search the phones for evidence of cyber-bullying and inappropriate material.
And they will be allowed to break up fights and manhandle unruly pupils out of the classroom. They will also automatically be given the benefit of the doubt when facing malicious allegations from children or parents – and given anonymity while the claims are investigated.
Under the new rules they will then be allowed to launch criminal action against their own pupils who have made false allegations about them. The youngsters will also face expulsion over the claims.
Teachers will also be allowed to hand out automatic detentions to misbehaving students, without having to give parents 24 hours’ notice.
The 50-page document replaces more than 600 pages of complex guidance on discipline.
Mr Gove will also press the schools inspection body, Ofsted, to carry out more unannounced raids at the worst schools. At present most schools receive many months’ notice before an Ofsted inspection – giving them time to cover up the worst problems. New powers to carry out so-called ‘no-notice inspections’ have been used only five times in 18 months.
A government source said Mr Gove expected the powers to be used more widely, adding: ‘In the small number of schools with very bad behaviour problems we need more no-notice inspections. It must become unacceptable for schools to tolerate persistent serious problems.’
Mr Gove said the new measures would hand power in the classroom back to teachers. He added: ‘Improving discipline is a big priority. Teachers can’t teach effectively and pupils can’t learn if schools can’t keep order.
The new regime will remove the controversial ‘no touch’ rules, which banned teachers from any physical contact with pupils.
The guidance also gives teachers far greater protection against malicious complaints from pupils and their parents. One in four teachers has faced false allegations from a pupil, while one in six has had unfounded allegations made by parents.
Chris Yeates, the leader of teachers’ union NASUWT, yesterday criticised the ‘disproportionate’ powers allowing teachers to search for mobile phones – despite having previously branded mobiles ‘offensive weapons’ used by bullies.
Charlie Taylor, head of a tough inner-city school for excluded pupils, has been appointed as a school discipline tsar to drive through the reforms. He said: ‘For far too long, teachers have been buried under guidance and reports on how to tackle bad behaviour. I am determined to make sure I help schools put policy into practice.’
Millions of Australians behind on basic skills; threatens Australia's international competitiveness
Not as bad as the USA but getting there
AUSTRALIA'S international competitiveness is under threat because up to eight million Australian workers don't have the reading, writing or numeracy skills to undertake training for trade or professional jobs.
The nation's 11 Industry Skills Councils will today call for a new campaign to tackle endemic numbers of workers with poor reading and writing skills, launching a report detailing the problems being faced by industry training bodies.
The bodies say they are confronting inadequately prepared school leavers, an ageing workforce struggling to cope with technological advances and overseas-born workers with English as a second language.
The report, No More Excuses, calls for the Council of Australian Governments to develop a national "overarching blueprint for action on language, literacy and numeracy".
The report will reignite the skills debate at a time when industry is warning of the re-emergence of shortages of trained workers and Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have thrust workforce participation and getting the long-term unemployed into work to the front of the political debate.
The report says "the situation looks as if it could be getting worse, not better" in terms of the language, literature and numeracy skills of workers.
"International studies have shown that over the past two decades, Australia's literacy and numeracy skill levels have stagnated while those of other countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, have improved.
"By continuing to accept the current levels, we are limiting the future success of individuals, businesses and our economy," the Industry Skills Councils say in a joint statement to be released today.
The report calls for industry training programs to be provided with specific funding to tackle language, literacy and numeracy gaps faced by students and overseas-born workers with English as a second language.
It also calls for recruits to be given better advice about the language and maths requirements of training courses.
Forest Works chief executive Michael Hartman, who runs training programs for the forest, wood, paper and timber products industry, said literacy and numeracy were the "foundation of productivity".
A failure to improve skills among both school leavers and experienced workers would see Australian businesses fall behind international competitors.
Electrocomms and Energy Utilities Industry Skills Council chief executive Bob Taylor told The Australian a decade of calls for skill-ready school leavers had failed to achieve any tangible improvements.
And the resources and infrastructure industry skills council, SkillsDMC, writes in the report that some indigenous recruits on resources projects have learning levels as low as primary school grade four.
This means that providing them with literacy and numeracy skills "is costly and time-consuming, and often results in the employee spending more time at training than at work".
Mr Taylor said industry had been complaining about the poor quality of literacy and numeracy among school leavers looking to enter the trades for more than 10 years and there had been no improvement.
He said the report was aimed at ending the "blame game" and incorporating basic reading, writing and numeracy skills into preliminary training courses.
He said lack of skills in this area was a "real issue" in terms of drop-out rates of apprentices and schools needed to become more focused on providing the relevant skills to the 70 per cent of students who would not attend university and seek work in a trade.
Mr Taylor said preliminary training courses to allow regional workers access to jobs on the National Broadband Network included facets of basic literacy and numeracy training.
He said it was "quite frustrating" that basic maths and physics of the 15- to 16-year-olds seeking trades in the 1960s was superior to today's 18-year-olds seeking trades.
Mr Hartman said his industry was confronting literacy and numeracy problems among older workers who had been long-term employees in industries that were suddenly facing technological change.
He said under current training arrangements, there was not a lot of money available to enable trainers to help students struggling with basic literacy and numeracy skills and this needed to be addressed: "It is a major problem in our society; unless we tackle it, we'll fall further behind in terms of international competitiveness and the skills of our people."
Virginia Tech will have to pay the maximum $55,000 fine for violating federal law by waiting too long to notify students during the 2007 shooting rampage but will not lose any federal student aid, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.
Department officials wrote in a letter to the school that the sanction should have been greater for the school's slow response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, when student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 students and faculty, then himself.
The $55,000 fine was the most the department could levy for Tech's two violations of the federal Clery Act, which requires timely reporting of crimes on campus.
"While Virginia Tech's violations warrant a fine far in excess of what is currently permissible under the statute, the Department's fine authority is limited," wrote Mary Gust, director of a department panel that dictated what punishment the school would receive for the violation.
The university avoided the potentially devastating punishment of losing some or all of its $98 million in federal student aid. While that's possible for a Clery Act violation, the department has never taken that step and a department official said Tuesday it was never considered for Tech.
University officials have always maintained their innocence and said they would appeal the fine, even though it's a relatively small sum for a school of more than 30,000 full-time students and an annual budget of $1.1 billion. The amount would cover tuition and fees for one Virginia undergraduate student for four years, or two years for an out-of-state undergrad.
"We believe that Virginia Tech administrators acted appropriately in their response to the tragic events of April 16, 2007, based on the best information then available to them at the time," spokesman Larry Hincker said in a statement.
The Clery Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal student financial aid to report crimes and security policies and provide warning of campus threats. It is named after Jeanne Ann Clery, a 19-year-old university freshman who was raped and murdered in her dormitory in 1986. Her parents later learned that dozens of violent crimes had been committed on the campus in the three years before her death.
The Education department issued its final report in December, finding that Virginia Tech failed to issue a timely warning to the Blacksburg campus after Cho shot and killed two students in a dormitory early that morning in 2007. The university sent out an e-mail to the campus more than two hours later, about the time Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty, then himself.
That e-mail was too vague, the department said, because it referred only to a "shooting incident" but did not mention anyone had died. By the time a second, more explicit warning was sent, Cho was near the end of his shooting spree. "Had an appropriate timely warning been sent earlier to the campus community, more individuals could have acted on the information and made decisions about their own safety," the department said in its letter.
A state commission that investigated the shootings also found that the university erred by failing to notify the campus sooner. The state reached an $11 million settlement with many of the victims' families. Two families have sued and are seeking $10 million in damages from university officials. That case is set for trial this fall.
Virginia Tech argues that, relying on campus police, it first thought the shootings were domestic and that a suspect had been identified so there was no threat to campus. The university argued that the Department of Education didn't define "timely" until 2009, when it added regulations because of the Tech shootings.
Hincker, the university spokesman, outlined six other serious incidents at other college campuses before and after the Tech shootings in which notifications were not given for hours, or in some instances the next day, and the schools were not punished.
"The only reason we want to appeal this is that it gives us the process to explain how a notice given on one campus can be OK if it's this long, and a notice given on another campus is not OK if it's this short a time period," he said. "As best we can tell, it's whatever DOE decides after the fact." The education department rebuffed that argument, saying officials should have treated it as a threat because the shooter was on the loose.
Through its appeal, Hincker said the university hopes to find out how the department came to its conclusion. School officials were never interviewed, he said, and the department refused to share materials or respond to Freedom of Information requests sent by the school. If the school loses the appeal, it could fight the fine in court.
Several victims' family members maligned Tech for saying it would appeal. "This is in black and white," said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured in the shootings. "They're going to spend more money appealing it than just paying the fine, because they do not want to admit they did anything wrong."
Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was shot but survived, said she was not surprised by the maximum fine. "I feel like it's par for the course, if you will, for what they are allowed to do," she said. "I think it is a woefully, woefully, woefully sad amount of money for the staggering loss of life."
Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin also was injured, said even a smaller fine would have accomplished a purpose. "The bottom line is just having a monetary amount points out what they did was wrong," he said. "There's really no way you can replace 32 people, or even seek to equate that with money. I'm not too worried about the amount. Even if they charged them a dollar, it would have done the same thing."
Only about 40 schools have come under review for Clery violations in the 20 years that the law has been in place. The largest fine to be levied was $350,000 against Eastern Michigan University for failing to report the rape and murder of a student in a dormitory in 2006.
S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security On Campus, a nonprofit organization that monitors the Clery Act, said it's "a shame" the department had only really began fining schools for noncompliance in 2005. "If the Department of Education had sent a stronger message about having to follow the law and that something faster would be expected sooner, the shootings at Virginia Tech may have never happened," Carter said.
In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its "shining stars."
Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes' students scored "proficient" or "advanced" in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.
Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes' staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.
A closer look at Noyes, however, raises questions about its test scores from 2006 to 2010. Its proficiency rates rose at a much faster rate than the average for D.C. schools. Then, in 2010, when scores dipped for most of the district's elementary schools, Noyes' proficiency rates fell further than average.
A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
This is a series of documents obtained by USA TODAY through public-records requests. It details a back-and-forth between two District of Columbia agencies on test-score investigations. Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools.
Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.
In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.
On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.
"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.
A trio of academicians consulted by USA TODAY — Haladyna, George Shambaugh of Georgetown University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University — say the erasure rates found at Noyes and at other D.C. public schools are so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.
USA TODAY examined testing irregularities in the District of Columbia's public schools because, under Rhee, the system became a national symbol of what high expectations and effective teaching could accomplish. Federal money also was at play: Last year, D.C. won an extra $75 million for public and charter schools in the U.S. government's Race to the Top competition. Test scores were a factor.
USA TODAY initially looked at Noyes only because of its high erasure rates. Later, the newspaper found that Wayne Ryan, the principal from 2001 to 2010, and the school had been touted as models by district officials. They were the centerpiece of the school system's recruitment ads in 2008 and 2009, including at least two placed in Principal magazine.
"Noyes is one of the shining stars of DCPS," one ad said. It praised Ryan for his "unapologetic focus on instruction" and asked would-be job applicants, "Are you the next Wayne Ryan?"
In response to questions from USA TODAY, Kaya Henderson, who became acting chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools after Rhee resigned in October, said last week that "a high erasure rate alone is not evidence of impropriety."
D.C. "has investigated all allegations of testing impropriety," Henderson said. "In those situations in which evidence of impropriety has been found, we have enforced clear consequences for the staff members involved, without hesitation."
Henderson, who was Rhee's deputy, said the system would identify only schools where violations of security protocol were found. "For the majority of schools" investigated, there was "no evidence of wrongdoing," she said. Out of fairness to staff members, she said, she declined to identify all the schools that were investigated.
There can be innocent reasons for multiple erasures. A student can lose his place on the answer sheet, fill in answers on the wrong rows, then change them when he realizes his mistake. And, as McGraw-Hill said in a March 2009 report to D.C. officials, studies also show that test-takers change answers more often when they are encouraged to review their work. The same report emphasizes that educators "should not draw conclusions about cheating behavior" from the data alone.
Haladyna notes, however, that when entire classrooms at schools with statistically rare erasures show fast-rising test scores, that suggests someone might have "tampered with the answer sheets," perhaps after the tests were collected from students. Although not proof of cheating, such a case underscores the need for an investigation, he says.
Lefties, not Etonians, are closing British libraries
Zadie Smith is wrong about libraries – and the BBC were wrong to let her broadcast her attack on the 'cuts', writes Simon Heffer
Just as some of us believe in Father Christmas or the Lone Ranger, I have long believed there is no institutional political bias in the BBC. I have made many programmes for the corporation over the past 20 or so years and have never encountered any blatant example of it. I know some senior BBC executives who I think might even vote Conservative – not that that signifies a freedom from Leftism these days. However, one contribution to the Today programme this week made me think I might be wrong.
It was the piece-to-microphone by Zadie Smith, a novelist, about the closure of libraries. For five minutes she was allowed to broadcast an attack on the “cuts”, and the effect they were having on these institutions. She did so with her assertions, prejudices and misinformation going unchallenged.
Miss Smith happens to be a woman, a Leftist and a member of an ethnic minority. I fear there are some people in the BBC for whom that formula signals the need to suspend disbelief. No man of the Right from the ethnic majority would ever be given such a platform to make such assertions. The editor responsible should be the subject of the most rigorous inquiry, to say the least.
Miss Smith and I would agree that libraries are good. We would disagree about why they are closing. She says it is because the Cabinet is full of people from “Eton and Harrow” who simply don’t care. Not a single member of the Cabinet went to Harrow. Only one, the Prime Minister, went to Eton. Two other OEs, Sir George Young and Oliver Letwin, attend Cabinet but are not members of it. The BBC seems not to mind that she says these dishonest and unpleasant things. Had someone spoken in the same way about homosexuals, Muslims or even Jews, the world would have ended.
Libraries are closing not because of “cuts”, or because of a callous, privately educated clique whose bookshelves are so capacious and well-stocked that they have no need of public provision – they are closing because mischievous Leftist councils of the sort supported by Miss Smith choose to close them rather than make savings elsewhere.
If you sack diversity officers or lesbian outreach workers, that merely makes sense, since the productivity and social value of such jobs are minimal. If you close a library, you harm children, the elderly and the intellectually curious poor who are already betrayed by our dismal education system. The political point made is therefore far more satisfying. (Miss Smith seemed to think another purpose of libraries was to be somewhere from which her mother could steal books, but let that pass.)
The BBC is making “cuts”, because the Government feels the revenue from generous licence-fee settlements past has been squandered or badly deployed. The BBC should not have diversified into the guide books business nor given an £18 million contract to one rather ordinary presenter. There long ago ceased to be a link between funding and quality in the BBC: look at the job of informing, educating and entertaining that Radio 3 does on very little money.
So the BBC is touchy about “cuts”, and Miss Smith was a suitably high-profile voice to articulate this anger. But she was also wrong. There is another side to the coin, and in the interests of impartiality I trust we shan’t need to wait too long before seeing or hearing it.
I don’t get angry very often but this morning I got so mad I nearly dropped my assault rifle. I was writing another column in my camouflaged pajamas (no one saw me) when I got an email from a critic of one of my recent columns on campus diversity. The reader corrected my reference to the campus “LGBTQIA Resource Center” noting that it was only an “LGBTQIA Resource Office,” not an actual center. Since getting that email I haven’t slept a wink.
It appears that, at least on our campus, the African Americans get a “Cultural Center,” the Woman Americans get a “Resource Center” and the Hispanic Americans (although some of them aren’t actually Americans “yet”) get a “Centro.” But the LGBTQIA Americans only get a “Resource Office.” This is the kind of inequality that makes our institution look bad. So I think it’s time to call for a Queer Resource Center on campus that will help foster a sense of true equality.
In addition to giving an appearance of equality, re-naming the LGBTQIA Office will help to unite the Ls with the Gs. In recent years, there has been increasing tension concerning which one should go first in the alphabet soup of diversity. To date, they have been falling back on the antiquated notion that the ladies should go first. Calling them all Queers (as some schools already do) will have a unifying effect -unless, of course, they decide to break into a spontaneous game of dodge ball. In the name of tolerance, “smear the queer” will not be tolerated.
Note that my proposal says a “Queer Resource Center on campus … will help foster a sense of true equality.” I did not say it would actually achieve true equality. In order to have true equality we will have to do something about the funding discrepancies between all the different victim groups on campus. In recent years, the African American Cultural Center has been the beneficiary of the most victim-related funding. (Note: Women come in second place with Hispanics, Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, Qs, Is, and As trailing far behind).
So I propose a new way of allocating the money to our various centers of hyphenation and victimhood. Under my plan, we will simply dump all of the money into one fund and divide by four. This will give each of the major victim groups an equal allocation of the money. But I would caution against doing this before we officially open the new Queer Resource Center. Otherwise, there may be an effort to divide the present “Office” into separate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Inter-sexed, and Allied Offices. It may sound Machiavellian but queerer things have happened.
Under my plan, the African American Center will lose a good bit of funding. But our African victims will stand to gain with another component of my new “homogenized diversity” plan. Under my new (Ok, it’s actually really old) plan we will have separate “colored” and “white” bathrooms. The term “people of color” is making a comeback on our college campuses and it’s time to make it part of a new and comprehensive bathroom expansion plan.
Under the current oppressive regime of diversity, women are the only victims who get their own bathrooms. That needs to change and it will when we start providing separate restrooms – not just for African Americans – but for Hispanic Americans and Queer Americans, too.
Some may think my new plan is too expensive. But that is a simplistic view that fails to take account of certain long-term benefits. For example, we presently spend a great deal of money filling “glory holes” in our campus men’s restrooms. These holes are drilled (into the walls separating bathroom stalls) by gay men looking for casual sexual encounters in between classes. We have to fix them every time a heterosexist complaint is leveled by a straight man who prefers to (go #2) in privacy – as opposed to having sex with a complete stranger. But once we have Queer Restrooms those glory holes will be inoffensive (and useful) to those who encounter them.
At first glance, giving separate bathrooms to those who call for inclusion is like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to someone who bombs third world nations with regularity. But overt actions should never be taken as a sign of hypocrisy. The feelings behind them are the only thing that matters.
Classic literature risks dying out in schools as hundreds of thousands of pupils are allowed to complete GCSEs without studying a single book written before the 20th century, Michael Gove warns today. Fewer than one in 100 teenagers who sat the most popular English literature exam last year based their answers on novels published prior to 1900, says the Education Secretary.
Only 1,236 out of 300,000 students read Pride and Prejudice, 285 studied Far From the Madding Crowd and just 187 completed Wuthering Heights as part of the test, he claims. At the same time, more than 90 per cent of answers were based on the same three books – Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Gove says the disclosure underlines the extent to which England’s “constricted and unreformed exam system” fails to encourage children to read.
He says Britain also has some of the best modern children’s writers in the world, including Philip Pullman, JK Rowling, Michael Morpurgo and Anthony Horowitz, but many young people are “growing up in ignorance of their work”.
It follows the publication of a major international study in December showing that reading standards among British teenagers had slumped from 7th to 25th in a decade.
“We’re not picking up enough new books, not getting through the classics, not widening our horizons. In short, we’re just not reading enough,” he says.
Mr Gove’s comments were made after a tour of independent “charter schools” in American last month. He claims that a love of reading is promoted in many schools opened in tough inner-city areas, praising one that issued children with a challenge to read 50 books in a year.
But in a dig at the teaching establishment in England, Mr Gove says many children in this country are held back by an “anti-knowledge” culture that prevents them from reaching their potential. “The children I met were smart and lively. But they were also, overwhelmingly, from the most disadvantaged homes,” he says.
“That didn’t mean their teachers lowered the bar. Quite the opposite. They wanted to give those children a chance to enjoy the glittering prizes – so they set expectations high.
“I want the same culture here. I want to take on the lowest-common-denominator ethos, the 'let’s not be too demanding', 'all this smacks of targets', 'the poor dears can’t manage it', 'the idea of a canon is outmoded', 'it’s all on the internet anyway' culture which is anti-knowledge, anti-aspiration and antithetical to human flourishing.
“Instead, I want a culture in which the more you read, the more you are celebrated. "That’s why I have said we should set our own 50 Book Challenge. And that’s also why I want to develop a stronger and more durable culture of reading for pleasure.”
Australian Catholic school bans gay 'cure' seminar
Some ideas may not be expressed -- even ones that the Holy Father would endorse!
A CATHOLIC school has kiboshed a "curing homosexuality seminar" set to be held at their Caboolture college.
The meeting sparked outrage on Facebook, with a protest page set up against it.
But the group holding the meeting has accused Catholic Education of discrimination over the decision.
A statement released by Brisbane Catholic Education says St Columban's College at Caboolture "immediately" withdrew permission for its hall to be used as a venue by the Miracle Christian Center when they realised what the meeting was about.
"Permission was given by the school, on the basis that the nature of the meeting would need to be in line with the college's Catholic Christian values," the statement said.
Principal Ann Rebgetz said the group had deliberately withheld from the school the real nature of the event.
But Miracle Christian Center president Dorian Ballard denied the accusation, saying when they hired halls they didn't advise what they would be preaching about.
He denied the group was homophobic. He said they had been discriminated against and the case was now with their lawyers.
"We are not homophobic, many of us have come out of the homosexual lifestyle," he said.
"We are not afraid of homosexuals; we love them, we've ministered to them for years.
"This topic is always up for debate. It's great to hear a lot of different views in the broad spectrum and we have been silenced, we have been discriminated against."
Former student and Facebook "Protest against the curing homosexuality seminar" page organiser Lexi Ryan said the school had done the right thing and she had cancelled the protest, which had 353 people who had replied they would be attending.
Obama’s Union-Friendly, Feel-Good Approach to Education
The Obama administration, principally the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are now routinely making public statements which are leading to one conclusion: instead of fixing American education, we should dumb down the standards.
According to the Associated Press, President Obama “is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools” and wants “a test that ‘everybody agrees makes sense’ and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.”
The article goes on to say that Obama wants to move away from proficiency goals in math, science and reading, in favor of the ambiguous and amorphous goals of student readiness for college and career.
Obama’s new focus comes on the heels of a New York Times report that 80% of American public schools could be labeled as failing under the standards of No Child Left Behind.
Put another way: the standards under NCLB have revealed that the American public education system is full of cancer. Instead of treating the cancer, Obama wants to change the test, as if ignoring the MRI somehow makes the cancer go away.
So instead of implementing sweeping policies to correct the illness, Obama is suggesting that we just stop testing to pretend it doesn’t exist.
If Obama were serious about curing the disease, one of the best things he could do is to ensure that there is a quality teacher in every classroom in America. Of course, that would mean getting rid teacher tenure and scrapping seniority rules that favor burned-out teachers over ambitious and innovative young teachers.
That means standing up to the teacher unions. For a while, it looked like Obama would get tough with the unions, but not anymore. With a shaky economy and three wars, it looks like Obama’s re-election is in serious jeopardy. He needs all hands on deck – thus the new union-friendly education message.
Obama’s new direction will certainly make the unionized adults happy. They’ve hated NCLB from the get-go.
And the unions will love Obama’s talk about using criteria other than standardized testing in evaluating schools.
He doesn’t get specific, of course, but I bet I can fill in the gaps. If testing is too harsh, perhaps we can judge students and schools based on how hard they try or who can come up with the most heart-wrenching excuse for failure or how big the dog was that ate their homework.
This makes sense in America’s continual slouch toward mediocrity. But hand-holding and effort awards didn’t produce the light bulb or the automobile or the MRI.
Hard work, accountability and the real possibility of failure – those are the things that made America great. Some kids and parents need to receive the cold hard reality that they’re not up to snuff. The Obama administration should not dumb things down so fewer people feel bad.
Because then those same people will complain when the cancer is incurable.
I went to Princeton in 1969, where they taught me that government could solve the world's problems. Put the smartest people in a room, give them enough taxpayer money, and they will fix most everything. During those years, I heard nothing about an alternative. How things have changed!
I recently spent time with several hundred college-aged people at a Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Here were hundreds of students who actually understand that government creates many of the problems, and freedom -- personal and economic liberty -- makes things better.
I appeared at the conference along with David Boaz of the Cato Institute. Here are some highlights.
Karina Zannat, a student at American University in Washington, D.C., said, "A lot of my professors seem to think that even when politicians spend money in seemingly wasteful ways, we should be OK with it because every dollar spent is one dollar that goes toward income for an American citizen."
This is a common canard known as the "broken window" fallacy. The 19th-century French free-market writer Frederic Bastiat exposed it with the story of a boy who breaks a shop window, prompting some townspeople to look at the bright side: fixing the window will stimulate economic activity in the town. The fallacy, of course, is that had the window not been broken, the shopkeeper would have spent the money in more productive ways.
People often commit this fallacy -- have a look at what's being written in the wake of Japan's tsunami.
Meg Patrick of George Mason University asked about the Austrian business cycle theory. How delightful to meet a student interested in that! This is Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek's argument that when government inflates the money supply and holds down interest rates to create an economic boom, a bust, or recession, must follow because the prosperity is built on an artificial foundation.
Meg wanted to know if "the injection of fiscal stimulus into the economy (after the bust) disrupts the signals necessary to fix the current problem."
To which I replied: Sure does. The market is signaling that certain changes are needed, but stimulus spending interferes with those signals. If businesses are not allowed to fail, we don't get the market feedback we need.
David Boaz added: "If you get drunk, you have a hangover. I'm sure some of you have tried the theory: just keep drinking. But you can't keep drinking forever."
Ian Downie from the University of Virginia had a good question about spending: "Our congressional representatives have huge incentives to steal the wealth from the vast majority of the country and funnel it down to their constituents. What kind of systematic changes can we make to stop this perverse incentive machine?"
"The special interests are always there," Boaz said. "The challenge is to get the public interest -- the taxpayers -- to stick around after the election, to keep putting pressure on. And that is very difficult."
He went on to say we need constitutional limits on what government can do. We tried that, of course, but too many insiders have an incentive to interpret the limits so broadly that they are hardly limits at all. So government grows.
Grant Babcock, from the University of Pittsburgh, raised a good point: "If government grows in response to crises, what do we do? It seems like there is always another crisis on the horizon. It used to be international communism. Nowadays ... it's the threat of Islamist fundamentalism. ... Are we trapped?"
The media do keep inventing new crises. The global-warming crisis, the swine flu crisis, the pesticide crisis. "The running-out-of-oil crisis," Boaz added. Crisis is a friend of the state.
As Boaz pointed out, however, "sometimes there are crises that cause countries to go ... toward less government. New Zealand hit a crisis like that, and they actually reformed their economy. So there's at least the hope that the next crisis in the United States or Europe will cause people to say: 'This hasn't been working. We have to cut back.'"
After spending time with those students, I feel better about the future of America.
Robberies and other crime at Berkeley High School are common, prosecutor says
A horror story that is normal for some
Adults at Berkeley High School are obstructing prosecution of students arrested on suspicion of armed robberies on a campus where robbery, beatings and drug dealing are common, an Alameda County district attorney told a crowd at the school Monday night. In two cases, witnesses were persuaded not to testify against suspects, one of them accused in a brutal beating and robbery on campus, Matt Golde said. In the other case, a football coach persuaded a witness not to testify, he said.
"I'm just trying to give you the reality of the danger in school here because some people don't appreciate the reality of the situation," Golde said. "We have so many armed robberies at this school it's unbelievable. We have a culture here where people are putting up with stuff that they shouldn't."
Golde, a supervisor in the county's juvenile division, made the comments during a parent forum designed to find solutions to the school's gun problem. More than 400 parents attended the meeting at the Berkeley Community Theater.
One of the students apprehended earlier this year already had a warrant for his arrest in connection with a "brutal beat-down" robbery on campus and "certain people at this school persuaded others not to testify against him," Golde said. Berkeley High students also are committing home burglaries, selling drugs on campus and across the street at Civic Center Park, he said.
Pasquale Scuderi, principal at Berkeley High, said that Golde's assertions are not the rule. "It is atypical that a staff member would say 'don't press charges,'" Scuderi told parents. "We have some pretty firm protocols for these types of incidents."
Since the beginning of the year, three gun incidents have been reported at the high school in which students were arrested on suspicion of gun possession, and one incident was reported at the smaller secondary Berkeley Technology Academy. Ashot was fired inside a bathroom at Berkeley High on March 21, but no one was injured.
Bill Huyett, superintendent of Berkeley schools, said all options are on the table for increasing security at the school and reducing the number of guns coming on campus. That includes installing metal detectors at school entrances, although Huyett said those may be troublesome because it will be difficult to get 3,400 students through them in the morning and after lunch.
Other options include searches of students and their lockers, bringing reformed criminals onto campus to work as mentors to troubled teens, and beefing up security in and around the campus. The school already has added two security guards, bringing the number to 14. On Wednesday, Berkeley police will meet with Huyett to offer recommendations on how to reduce student gun possession.
In a survey of 539 11th-graders at the school last year, 9 percent, or 48 students, said they brought a gun to school. Seven percent of 687 ninth-graders, also 48 students, said they brought a gun to school.
While Golde contended that students are bringing guns to school to commit armed robbery, school officials say the two most common reasons they hear are a belief that guns increase status and power and that they bring them for protection.
One student at the forum, 18-year-old Danielle Armstrong, said students are bringing guns to school because they fear gang members from other towns are waiting outside the school to shoot them. She said in one of her classes, two female gang members who didn't even attend Berkeley High were sitting in her class when a substitute teacher filled in.
"First, we need to make students feel safe to come here," Armstrong said. "That way they don't have to bring weapons to school."
Huyett said he thought parent comments during the two-hour meeting were divided between imposing stricter security measures and closing the campus or educating and mentoring kids about the dangers of carrying guns.
"We have a problem, and we need to address it now," Huyett told parents. "Metal detectors and searching lockers are deterrents. We're trying to get a feel for the community on whether we should do things that preserve personal freedoms or go for more intrusive actions to physically control guns or both."
Parent Gina Morning said she wants action now. "These three incidents are nothing new, it's just that things are now getting out in the open," she said. "We really need to lock these kids down. We've been fortunate so far that someone has not brought a gun on campus and started shooting us."
Scott Blake, however, said that Berkeley probably would not tolerate intrusive searches. "I'm concerned about being locked down and having metal detectors," he said. "In the history of race relations in this town, I wonder how you would implement a search-and-seizure policy and who would be the ones who implement it. I would imagine you could be violating people's rights by the way they look and this district could enter into litigation if you search and seize the wrong person."
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.
