Teachers claim they have been reprimanded by Ofsted inspectors for having pupils who are ‘too well behaved and polite’ and for marking work with ‘back to front’ left-handed ticks.
A list of bizarre complaints has been revealed, including one about a teacher who was eight months pregnant but told she was being downgraded because she ‘didn’t move around the room enough’.
The Times Educational Supplement yesterday reported that hundreds of teachers are flooding its online forum to share scathing accounts of the inspectors employed to judge them. Some inspectors are accused of falling asleep on the job.
One PE teacher was reportedly told that their lesson was ‘unsatisfactory’ as there were ‘children doing nothing at some points in the lesson’. The decision was overturned after it was pointed out that the pupils were fielding in a cricket match.
Another teacher described how a group of eight-year-olds were building models to demonstrate the Roman central heating system. The inspector declared it ‘the best design and technology lesson I’ve seen this year’.
One teacher was told: ‘That was a good lesson, but I’m going to mark it down as satisfactory because you talked too much.’
A food and technology teacher was told that the way to improve their lesson from ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’ was to ‘put all the pupils in chef’s whites instead of aprons’.
And one teacher said an inspector observed her lesson and complained: ‘Your children are rather too well behaved and polite.’
Ofsted’s desire to ensure that all minority groups achieve highly also led to confusion. One teacher was told that the 25 per cent ‘success rate’ for male Bengali sixth-formers was a ‘serious issue’ that could lead to a downgrading. In fact, out of only four such pupils, one was being treated for cancer, another had died in a road accident and a third was in a young offenders’ institution.
An Ofsted spokesman said: ‘It is difficult to respond to rumour and anecdote. 'It is worth keeping in mind that out of thousands of inspections each year, Ofsted receives complaints about less than 3 per cent.’
IF INSANITY is doing the same thing again and again but expecting a different outcome, then the federal government's strategy for keeping higher education affordable is crazier than Norman Bates.
For decades, American politicians have waxed passionate on the need to put college within every family's reach. To ensure that anyone who wants to go to college will be able to foot the bill, Washington has showered hundreds of billions of dollars into student aid of all kinds -- grants and loans, subsidized work-study jobs, tax credits and deductions. Today, that shower has become a monsoon. As Neal McCluskey points out in a Cato Institute white paper, government outlays intended to hold down the price of a college degree have ballooned, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $29.6 billion in 1985 to $139.7 billion in 2010: an increase of 372 percent since Ronald Reagan's day.
Most of that prodigious growth is very recent. The College Board, which tracks each type of financial assistance in a comprehensive annual report, shows total federal aid soaring by more than $100 billion in the space of a single decade -- from $64 billion in 2000 to $169 billion in 2010. (The College Board's data, unlike Cato's, includes higher-education tax credits and deductions.)
And what have we gotten for this vast investment in college affordability? Colleges that are more unaffordable than ever.
Year in, year out, Washington bestows tuition aid on students and their families. Year in, year out, the cost of tuition surges, galloping well ahead of inflation. And year in, year out, politicians vie to outdo each other in promising still more public subsidies that will keep higher education within reach of all. Does it never occur to them that there might be a cause-and-effect relationship between the skyrocketing aid and the skyrocketing price of a college education? That all those grants and loans and tax credits aren't containing the fire, but fanning it?
Apparently not. "We've got to make college more affordable for more young people," President Obama declaimed during campaign appearances at the universities of Iowa, North Carolina, and Colorado last week. "We can't price the middle class out of a college education." Like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, Obama argued for keeping the aid spigot open. He hit all the usual notes ("extend the tuition tax credit … cap student loan payments … make sure the Pell grants are there"), and for good measure used the federal student-loan interest rate -- which will double in July unless Congress acts -- to paint Republicans as clueless Grinches. Yet Mitt Romney also wants to extend the current rate. The myth that government can control the price of higher education by driving up the demand for it commands broad and bipartisan belief.
"It's not enough just to increase student aid. We've also got to stop subsidizing skyrocketing tuition," Obama said to applause in Iowa City. He might as well have declared that it's not enough to keep flooring the accelerator; we've also got to stop the car from going faster. Reality doesn't work that way. Rising government aid underwrites rising demand for higher education, and when demand is forced up, prices follow suit. (See under: Crisis, subprime mortgage.)
Federal financial aid is a major source of revenue for colleges and universities, and aid packages are generally based on the gap between what a family can afford to pay to send a student to a given college, and the tuition and fees charged by that college. That gives schools every incentive to keep their tuition unaffordable. Why would they reduce their sticker price to a level more families could afford, when doing so would mean kissing millions of government dollars goodbye?
Directly or indirectly, government loans and grants have led to massive tuition inflation. That has been a boon for colleges and universities, where budgets, payrolls, and amenities have grown amazingly lavish. And it has been a boon for politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, who are happy to exploit anxiety over tuition to win votes.
But for students and their families, let alone for taxpayers who don't go to college, it has been a disaster. The more government has done to make higher education affordable, the more unaffordable it has become. Doing more of the same won't yield a different outcome. By now, even Norman Bates would have figured that out.
Loneliness among university students: Is it worse in Australia?
I think Adele Horin has a point below. My undergraduate years were in the '60s and I had an exceptionally good time in campus politics at that time. Being one of the few outspoken conservatives on campus in the Vietnam era was immensely entertaining. But what I enjoyed most was my time in one of the university's army units. So I was the complete counterformist. Donning an army uniform when most of the campus was scared stiff of being drafted into the army was real defiance. And I could tell of other adventures ....
Rather to my regret, however, my own son in his undergraduate years was rather like those Adele Horin describes below: Sticking to his studies and his old school friends. Fortunately, however, he has now moved interstate to do his Ph.D. and he seems to be having there the sort of fun I would wish for him. In his undergraduate years I kept telling him that your time at university is a time for having fun so I am glad he has finally realized it
Having just read the latest American literary sensation, The Art of Fielding, about college baseball, I am struck once again at the deep emotional connection young Americans feel towards their university; for the American college student the years between 18 and 22 are seminal when new friendships are forged and campus experiences can be life-changing.
It could not be more different from the narrow, often lonely and alienating experience of going to university in Australia.
This week, new figures showed record numbers of students from migrant, indigenous and otherwise hard-up backgrounds are going to university.
But I could not help wonder how these students will fare without a pack - or a pair - of high school mates as a ballast against loneliness.
Some parents once feared university might corrupt their darlings by bringing them into contact with strange and subversive elements. But nowadays parents are more inclined to worry that university is not the broadening and enlivening experience it once was.
The old school tie is more important than ever. Many young people cling to their high school friends for dear life as they progress through the university years, barely making a new acquaintance.
So big and inhospitable are campuses, so large are the numbers in tutorials, so depleted are university clubs, and so pervasive are the changes in life outside the campus that the university experience has become less vital, interesting and social for many students.
A few years ago the mother of a gorgeous and vivacious young woman from Sydney's north shore - now a journalist - revealed how friendless her daughter found university. The only sources of welcome and cheer were the campus Christian clubs that unsurprisingly had gained a huge following. If this young woman with bountiful social skills found university a bit lonely what hope do the shy, awkward and socially disadvantaged have?
My assertions are based on observations over the past five years of a group of young people still making their way through university and backed by three research reports since 2005 charting the engagement - and disengagement - experience of thousands of students.
To give credit where it is due, the universities are keenly aware that student disengagement is a major issue that needs to be addressed. But a lot of the forces causing the alienation are outside the universities' control.
The First Year Experiences in Australian Universities report, which traced changes from 1994 to 2009, found only half the students in 2009 felt a sense of belonging to their university and one-quarter had not made a friend - a significant worsening from previous years. As well, there had been a significant decline in the proportion that felt confident that at least one teacher knew their name.
Decreasing proportions participated through university sports, clubs or societies, and, of course, students spent less time on campus than in the past, and the less time they spent, the less they felt they belonged.
The report also points to improvements in student satisfaction with the quality of teaching, and enjoyment of courses. Academically, life is better.
If university is a less exciting and social place than it used to be for many, it is partly because students are holding down jobs, on average 13 hours a week, and not just to pay for ski trips. Another report, "Studying and Working", which looked at student finances and engagement, found many were in financial hardship and 14 per cent sometimes could not afford to eat.
The decline in shared houses due to soaring rents is another reason for the diminution of university experience. Thinking back, it was the network of shared houses that linked students into a constant party in the long-ago 1970s that made the era so vivid. Living with mum and dad will not be so memorable.
And then there's Facebook. Stephen Marche, writing in The Atlantic, posed the question "Is Facebook making us lonely?" If you use it to make arrangements to meet friends it is an asset. But when Facebook - and online interactive games - become a substitute for meeting people then it robs students of the richness and complexity of real relationships.
That is what makes Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding so fascinating. It is a novel, at heart, about the deep and complex relationships forged at university, with the central character being a shy, awkward and socially disadvantaged young man.
The American system is entirely different from ours, propelling students across the continent to reside at college. It is enormously wasteful. Students and parents rack up huge debts to pay for tuition and board when often perfectly good institutions of higher learning are in their home town.
But it does have the advantage of expanding student horizons and friendship networks, and of imparting a thrilling edge to the university experience, and a deep attachment to the institution.
For the 40,203 students from low socio-economic postcodes who started university this year, the opportunity is priceless. Previous research shows such students have more clarity of purpose, study more consistently and skip fewer classes. But they are also less likely to make friends or like being a university student.
Young people are lucky in so many ways with a world of connection and information at their finger tips. But the university experience seems less special and more impersonal than it used to be, and that's a pity.
Political Spin in the Classroom- How it’s Hurting America
Benjamin Franklin once said “The good education of youth has been esteemed by wise men in all ages, as the surest foundation of the happiness both of private families and of common-wealths,”
He and the rest of the Founders recognized that the continuation of liberty is in the hands of an educated electorate. When the people are uninformed, they can be manipulated and enslaved- case in point- the feudalist system in the Middle Ages.
So, if the education of the public, and particularly young people, is crucial in a free society, the role of the teacher is perhaps one of the most important. They influence the individual at a crucial age- when they are discovering the world and learning to think for themselves. By opening the young mind to the wonders of society and humanity, a good professor can inspire passion in a student to succeed and change the world. And that is a truly beautiful thing.
But what happens when the teacher misuses their position? What happens when the teacher uses their position to push a private agenda, poisoning the student’s mind through malicious lies?
Given the trust and importance placed in public educators, is this duplicity not a betrayal of the free society they are supposed to be preserving?
I have spent many lectures fighting back tears of anger as my professors malign everything I believe in, mocking the conservative way of thinking, lying about the goals of an opposing party, snickering at anyone who has the guts to stand up and try to defend what they believe in. Can there be anything more despicable than a professor who uses their position to put down young people who are just learning to stand up for themselves? Yes, freedom of speech is crucial to public dialogue, and teachers have a right to their opinion, but do those opinions have a place in the classroom, especially when they are used it to be divisive and to bully?
And what about the lies? How many students take what their teachers say at face value, as they should be able to, and live in the manufactured reality of political spin? Shouldn’t we be able to place trust in our educators? Is it any wonder then, when the classroom is used as a propaganda platform, that the right wing is so unabashedly maligned in the public dialogue?
And perhaps the most crucial question, what does this mean for the future of our country? When students are lied to, taught not to think for themselves, and believe in the absolute evil of a certain way of thinking, how can a free society survive? This is where education becomes a national security issue. This is what the Founders warned about. The teacher has the power to shape the destiny of the next generation. And when they use their position to indoctrinate rather than promote critical thought, teach them to be guided by the opinions of others- that is when the next generation becomes slaves to the government, rather than the masters of it.
State pupils 'not being pushed for Oxbridge' prompting fears hundreds of youngsters are being held back
More than half of state school teachers are failing to encourage their brightest pupils to apply to Oxford and Cambridge, according to a survey out today.
They ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ advise their most gifted pupils to apply to the elite institutions, prompting fears that hundreds of youngsters are being held back.
The survey results suggest that many teachers perceive Oxbridge to be the preserve of wealthy private school pupils, even though 57 per cent of entrants are state-educated.
The Sutton Trust, the education charity that commissioned the study, called for action to ‘dispel myths’ surrounding Oxbridge. ‘It is deeply concerning that the majority of state school teachers are not encouraging their brightest children to apply to Oxford and Cambridge,’ said Sir Peter Lampl, the trust’s chairman.
‘It is also worrying that almost all state school teachers, even the most senior school leaders, think that Oxbridge is dominated by public schools.’
He added: ‘The sad consequence of these findings is that Oxford and Cambridge are missing out on talented students in state schools, who are already under-represented at these institutions based on their academic achievements.’
Institutions are coming under intense Government pressure to increase their intake of state school pupils despite fears such moves could introduce crude ‘social engineering’ into admissions.
Today’s survey suggests too few bright pupils are applying in the first place amid a failure by their teachers to encourage them.
The poll of 730 secondary state school teachers, by the National Foundation for Educational Research, showed nearly two thirds believed less than 30 per cent of Oxbridge pupils came from state schools. One in five said they would ‘never’ advise their brightest pupils to apply to Oxbridge, while 29 per cent would do so ‘rarely’. Only 16 per cent said they would ‘always’ advise applying, with 28 per cent saying ‘usually’ and 10 per cent saying they ‘didn’t know’.
Head teachers last night insisted that Oxbridge was ‘only one of many’ routes for bright students.
Brian Lightman, of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: ‘There are many good universities in the UK and other excellent employment-based routes into top careers, all of which are available to high calibre applicants from all backgrounds.
‘Social mobility is about far more than entry to Oxbridge.
‘If teachers and for that matter the general public are not aware of admissions trends to Oxbridge, surely those universities should be addressing the misconception in their own communication.
‘We agree that young people should be made aware of the opportunities available to them, which is why we have been so concerned about the removal of national funding for face-to-face careers guidance by a qualified adviser. This should be an entitlement for all students.’
Western Australia: Education Department Director General calls for calm over National Assessment fears
WA's education chief has urged parents to ignore the "fear campaign" surrounding national literacy and numeracy tests amid calls for parents to boycott the tests next month.
Education Department director-general Sharyn O'Neill called for calm as Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students across WA prepare to sit the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy tests from May 15 to 17.
Her comments followed a call from the Literacy Educators Coalition for parents to withdraw their children from the tests because they "create fear and stifle creativity".
“This kind of testing has been active in WA schools for the past 12 years, and the information we gather from NAPLAN is for teachers to better educate their students,” Ms O’Neill said.
“NAPLAN can be a call to parents to talk to their school and gather information about their child’s results, and we have an overwhelming response from parents who do just that.
Ms O’Neill also denied claims that the tests put undue pressure on students, likening the anxiety a child might feel ahead of the tests to that of a sports carnival or music performance.
“It is reasonable for teachers to do some preparation with students just like they would for a concert, for example,” Ms O’Neill said.
“However, if parents feel their child’s anxiety is caused by undue pressure from teachers, I encourage them to contact their school to discuss this.
“With these results a teacher can be at the forefront of diagnosing a problem, and parents have good information on the performance of their child.”
The USA Today reports graduating class of 2012 is in for a rude awakening as Half of new graduates are jobless or underemployed. A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade. "I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
About 1.5 million, or 53.6%, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41%, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year. Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less. In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.
Useless Degrees
The USA Today talks about the "underemployed". Is that really what's going on? Just what job does someone majoring in Political Science, English, History, Social Studies, Creative Writing, Art, etc., etc., etc., expect to get?
Arguably, graduates in those majors (and many more) should be thankful to get any job. Therefore, those who do land a job should therefore be considered fully employed, not underemployed. In turn, this means a college education now has a negative payback for most degrees.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.
There is nothing out there for many degrees which means that going to graduate school will do nothing but waste more money. Nurses are still in demand, but technology and engineering majors are crapshoots. If you can land a technology or engineering job it is likely to be high paying, but if not, the next step is retail sales.
Who Benefits From Student Aid?
Students get no benefit from "student aid". Rather, teachers, administrators, and corrupt for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix do.
Obama wants to throw more money at education, and that is exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, I propose stopping student aid programs and accrediting more online schools to lower the cost of education so that degrees do not have negative payback.
Sadly, there is a trillion dollar student loan bubble, and that debt overhang will negatively impact the economy for years to come. Let's not make the problem worse. It's time to kill the inappropriately named "student aid" program.
British Catholic schools face 'indoctrination' claims over gay marriage
The Roman Catholic Church contacted its secondary schools in England and Wales asking them to encourage pupils to back the campaign aganist gay marriage.
Church education chiefs last night defended theselves against allegations of “political indoctrination” insisting they were "proud" to promote traditional marriage.
The Catholic Education Service contacted 385 secondary schools asking them to circulate the recent letter read in parishes defending the traditional definition of marriage.
Schools were also invited to promote the petition organised by the Coalition For Marriage opposing the Government’s plans to allow homosexual couples to marry.
Last night almost 470,000 people had signed the petition, backed by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, the biggest active petition in Britain at present.
Last month a letter penned by the Archbishops of Westminster and Southwark, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols and the Most Reverend Peter Smith, was read at masses attended by around a million worshippers.
It defended marriage as a “natural institution” and said that redefining it would be a “profoundly radical” step.
Schools were invited to use the letter in assemblies or distribute copies to parents as well as highlighting the petition.
But a pupil at one London secondary school complained to the website PinkNews saying that they were “appalled” by the way the issue had been presented.
Secularist campaigners warned that schools which read the letter could be breaking equality laws as well as rules against promoting political causes in schools.
But Maeve McCormack, policy manger for the Catholic Education Service, said: “It was an explanation of marriage and a positive affirmation of marriage, celebrating the huge value that it brings to society – we are proud of the fact that these kinds of values are taught in our schools.”
She said that Catholic schools were free to put forward Church teaching in RE and assembly.
But Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, said: "This is a clear breach of the authority and privilege that the Catholic Education Service has been given in schools.”
Richy Thompson of the British Humanist Association, said: “the Coalition For Marriage petition is very deliberately a political document and for this reason we question whether the CES has broken the law.”
Britain's history lessons are 'worst in West': Failing curriculum needs overhaul, says academic
History teaching in England is among the worst in the western world, a Cambridge University don has warned in a devastating report.
Youngsters are taught a ‘mis-cellany of disconnected fragments’ and examined on barely anything before 1870, he claimed, missing out on vast swathes of British, European and world history.
Professor Robert Tombs, a history fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, said it was ‘difficult to name’ a European country that taught the subject so poorly.
In the report, released today, the professor demanded an overhaul of the subject, and published an alternative curriculum featuring 36 key events in British history that all secondary school pupils should study.
Very few current GCSE courses examine history before 1870, he said, with more attention often paid to skills such as evaluating sources rather than acquiring knowledge.
While coverage is broader at A-level, he said the late middle ages and most of the 18th century are hardly touched.
‘Over-specialisation on a few topics crowds out vast areas of history,’ he said. ‘Scant attention’ is paid to the British Empire, despite its far-reaching implications in global history.
By contrast, countries including France, Germany and Australia are already teaching, or moving towards, a broad chronological sweep of world and national history.
Professor Tombs also condemned ‘dismal’ marking, saying: ‘Many examiners seem to know little about the topics they mark.’
The report, published by the Politeia think-tank, comes as the Government considers major curriculum reforms. Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced a radical shake-up of all subjects. Proposals are being drawn up for introduction in September 2014.
In his report, Professor Tombs said history education in schools had ‘little in common with real historical study’.
Pupils typically study a random array of topics including Tudor England, the native peoples of America, the Industrial Revolution in England and the Nazis. Some study Hitler three times during their school career.
And rather than focusing on knowledge, examiners are more concerned with testing artificial historical ‘skills’ such as evaluating sources.
Pupils are also forced to study obscure topics in ‘absurdly arcane’ detail, he said. Pupils taking an Edexcel GCSE unit on international relations, for example, need to know about Hungary’s internal politics between 1953 and 1956, as well as ‘scores of other topics’.
‘It would be difficult to name a European country that teaches history in such a manner, one which can leave the majority of school-leavers in the dark about the unfolding story of their past,’ Professor Tombs said. ‘Our present compulsory curriculum lags behind other countries in its neglect of swathes of European history.’
It is not fashionable to say this but both political parties have suffered a lapse of logic and Economics 101 when it comes to student debt. Recently, Mitt Romney joined President Obama in calling for additional subsidies for student-loan borrowers.
I went to two critics of the current craze for federal subsidies and extension of student loans, Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation, and Hans Bader, senior attorney and counsel for special projects at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Why am I subsidizing student loans for Harvard kids?
BURKE: Exactly. The burden - and risk - is passed along to taxpayers, including the three-quarters of Americans who don't hold a college degree (and likely earn less than those who do hold a degree). Taxpayers will be on the hook for $6 billion if the rates are kept low.
BADER: I have no idea why. It never made sense to me even when I was at Harvard. Harvard has a huge endowment, and just hoards it. It's not mostly for the students. As the Dean of Harvard Law School publicly said then, students are merely "incidental."
Don't federal subsidies drive up the price of tuition?
BURKE: Keeping interest rates artificially low will fail to drive down college costs in the long run. Colleges will once again be able to increase costs, and students with easy access to low-interest loans will once again be able to pay. The Obama administration has significantly increased federal involvement in the student loan industry, effectively nationalizing student lending through language buried in Obamacare, by continuing to increase federal subsidies, and by "forgiving" student loans altogether after 20 years on the backs of taxpayers. But these policies only exacerbate the college cost crisis, continuing a vicious cycle whereby college costs rise in tandem with ever-increasing federal subsidies.
BADER: Yes, federal subsidies do drive up tuition. It's Econ 101: basic economics dictates that conclusion. Cato Institute education expert Neal McCluskey links to 4 studies so concluding at this link. Andrew Gillen persuasively argues that subsidies drive up tuition in a study available at this link. Gillen's study is discussed at this link. Government loan ceilings are higher for law students than for undergrads, and, surprise, surprise, law school tuition and student debt are much higher there. The more taxpayer-backed student loans available, the higher the tuition rises, and the more crippling students' debt upon graduation. Even the liberal law professor Brian Tamanaha was driven to observe that "This financial insanity will not stop until significant changes are made to the federal student loan program." As a story in the ABA Journal noted, "Law students . . . are treated generously as future professionals and able to borrow, with virtually no cap, significantly more money than undergrads. . . For several decades, most higher education loans were made by private lenders with the federal government providing guarantees against loss - and, in some cases, interest rate subsidies." Now, students routinely graduate from law school with well over $100,000 in debt - an average of $165,000 at John Marshall in Chicago.
Why are colleges allowed to keep tax-exempt status while sitting on mounds of endowment money?
BURKE: It's an interesting question, particularly when one considers the increase in non-instructional staff at universities over the years. The Goldwater Institute found that administrative positions at colleges increased 39 percent since 1993. But ever-increasing federal subsidies give colleges little incentive to cut costs. If the administration wanted to drive down college costs, they could consider reforms that would encourage savings-based - instead of debt-based - college financing, and ending the witch hunt against the for-profit higher education sector.
BADER: Logically, I can't explain why colleges are allowed to [keep] tax exempt status while sitting on mounds of endowment money. Private charities usually have to spend a certain percentage each year. Why not wealthy colleges? They are accumulating extravagant wealth due to preferential tax treatment in a way that reminds me of the Medieval Church, which ended up controlling much of the land due to its favored, tax-free status (which later kings - even some Catholic rulers - ended up confiscating in large part later in the Renaissance and Enlightenment). But if you tried to limit their tax-free hoard, they would send high-paid lobbyists to fight you, and claim you were stealing from the children and America's future.
Bader went on to explain: "Sometimes, financial aid increases lead directly to tuition increases. The federal government imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost for-profit educational institutions to raise their tuition to comply with a new federal regulation requiring them to charge enough over federal financial aid so that at least 10 percent of education costs don't come from financial aid. Corinthian College had diploma programs in health care and other fields that can be completed in a year or less. Until 2011, 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. The net result of the government's rule, as Corinthian College notes, 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.
In sum, Bader finds that President Obama has "harmed America's students, not only by perpetuating financial aid policies that drive up tuition" but also by encouraging students to seek degrees that don't make them employable "even though a credit rating agency, Moody's, is now warning student borrowers that college may not be worth the money for some majors. Meanwhile, he says, the administration is "seeking to cut back on useful vocational training needed for in-demand, high-paid blue collar jobs, such as the skilled workers who factories need before they can expand and hire more unskilled workers (among whom unemployment is very high)." His analysis on that topic is here.
Not unlike with health care, if someone else is paying the bill (in part), you're going to overspend. But more important, rather than searching for nonexistent illegal oil speculation, how about an investigation of tuition-gouging and a re-examination of guilty institutions' tax-exempt status? If Harvard is sitting atop an endowment of $32 billion, why is it charging students more than $50,000 a year?
Indoctrination 101: Chicago School Teaching Students How To Protest
Jones College Prep – a Chicago Public Schools “selective enrollment” school – recently held “Social Justice Week” in March, a collection of events geared towards turning students into activists.
According to a flyer on the school’s website: “Social Justice Week was created to promote community advancement through dialogue and community service based activism. Moreover, we hope to unify the voice of various JCP and community organizations in which to facilitate collaboration for the betterment of the community at large and promote a unified human rights advancement initiative.”
The school is, according to U.S. News & World Report, a Top 100 high school in the country. It’s one of the best of the best – the cream of the crop. Demographically, Jones College Prep is pretty balanced. Statistics from 2007-2008 show black enrollment is 23.4%, white enrollment is 29.5% and Hispanic enrollment is 33.7%.
Yet the school’s focus appears to be bent on radicalizing the students through political activities devised by adult employees, EAGnews.org reports exclusively.
On Wednesday of Social Justice Week, Black Star Project, a Chicago-based community organizing group, was brought into the school to teach students about “non-violent” protesting. Led by Phillip Jackson, former “Chief of Education” under former Mayor Richard Daley, the discussion was focused on students fighting back against gun crime.
Black Star Project, according to its website, is funded by Open Society Foundations (i.e. George Soros), Best Buy, ING and Toyota Motor Sales, among others.
But Jackson apparently had no interest in discussing the issue of gun ownership with students and allowing them to come to their own conclusions. When one student disagreed with Jackson’s premise on the topic, her opinion was dismissed. The agenda is not to teach students how to think, but rather what to think.
Jackson's co-presenter, Camille Williams of the Peace in the Hood movement, made several inflammatory statements about gun ownership and the National Rifle Association. She claimed the NRA is indifferent to gun violence. She also asserted she has received emails from the NRA and/or its members claiming she is "going to hell" for her advocacy and "these porch monkeys deserved to die," referring to the students.
EAGnews.org contacted Jackson regarding these emails, wishing to make them public. We received no response.
Students simply thinking about issues is obviously not enough for Jackson. He strongly encouraged them to develop forms of non-violent protesting. “I’m not telling you to do it, but if you were going to,” he said, leading the proverbial horse to the water.
"I'm just saying," he said on several occasions.
Jackson then offered the idea of creating a graveyard on the school lawn of headstones featuring the names of Chicago residents killed with guns.
It sounds as though Mr. Jackson was simply using the opportunity to recruit volunteers for his political mission. And that sounds more like indoctrination that education.
Do the parents of Jones College Prep students understand what’s going on? What about school leaders?
More pupils in Britain's private schools despite fees hike
Parents are being forced to pay almost £13,800-a-year to put children through private school following a rise in the cost of independent education, it emerged today.
Average fees increased by 4.5 per cent this year, figures show, adding another £600 to the bill for each pupil. The average price of boarding topped £26,000 for the first time, it emerged.
Over the last decade, the cost of independent schooling has now soared by more than 75 per cent – or £6,000 – far out-stripping the rise in earnings over the same period.
The disclosure – in data published by the Independent Schools Council – comes just days after the former headmaster of one of Britain’s top schools claimed that fee-paying education was increasingly becoming the preserve of the “super-rich”.
Martin Stephen, the ex-High Master of St Paul’s, said independent schools were now as “socially exclusive” as they were in the Victorian era.
But the ISC insisted that the latest figures showed continuing strong demand from parents.
According to organisation’s annual census, fee rises at schools this year were among the smallest levied since the early 90s, with schools spending record sums on means-tested bursaries for poor students.
The overall number of pupils in private education also increased for the first time in three years.
But a comparison of schools on a year-by-year basis shows a small drop in the number of British students, suggesting the overall increase in admissions is being driven by demand from foreign families. [China]
Barnaby Lenon, the ISC chairman and former headmaster of Harrow, insisted schools “should be very proud of the results”.
“At a time of recession, when very many parents are struggling financially, it is clear that finding fees for their children’s education remains a priority for very large numbers,” he said.
The ISC said that some 1,209 schools completed its annual census in both 2011 and 2012. Among these schools, the overall number of pupils increased by 0.1 per cent to 504,949.
But among British students alone, the number of pupils in like-for-like schools dropped by 0.1 per cent to 479,009 in 2012.
Figures also showed:
* Eleven schools belonging to the ISC shut in the last 12 months, following 14 closures a year earlier;
* The number of pupils coming from abroad increased by 5.8 per cent to 26,376;
* Hong Kong, China and Germany sent the most pupils, although the number of Russian students has more than doubled in five years;
* Fewer pupils were in boarding schools in 2012, with numbers falling by 0.2 per cent on a like-for-like basis to just under 68,000;
* Rising numbers of ISC students are choosing to take university degrees overseas, with 27 per cent of schools reporting a rise in pupils shunning British universities in favour of countries such as the US.
In a further disclosure, it emerged that the average annual fee increased from £13,179 to £13,788 this year, although the 4.5 per cent rise was the second lowest since the mid-90s.
Average annual costs stood at just £7,824 in 2002 – representing a 75 per cent increase in 10 years.
Day fees rose from £11,208 to £11,709 in the last 12 months and boarding fees increased from £25,152 to £26,340.
But figures show a third of pupils gained some form of assistance with fees in 2012, with a record £284.7m spent on means-tested bursaries – up by 9.4 per cent in a year.
Kenneth Durham, chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents 250 leading schools, said: “Even in deep recession, parents recognise excellence in education. Despite increasing financial pressure, families are determined to find the best and broadest opportunities for their children in the independent sector.”
To Pay Off Loans, Grads Put Off Marriage, Children
Between the ages of 18 and 22, Jodi Romine took out $74,000 in student loans to help finance her business-management degree at Kent State University in Ohio. What seemed like a good investment will delay her career, her marriage and decision to have children.
Ms. Romine's $900-a-month loan payments eat up 60% of the paycheck she earns as a bank teller in Beaufort, S.C., the best job she could get after graduating in 2008. Her fianc‚ Dean Hawkins, 31, spends 40% of his paycheck on student loans. They each work more than 60 hours a week. He teaches as well as coaches high-school baseball and football teams, studies in a full-time master's degree program, and moonlights weekends as a server at a restaurant. Ms. Romine, now 26, also works a second job, as a waitress. She is making all her loan payments on time.
They can't buy a house, visit their families in Ohio as often as they would like or spend money on dates. Plans to marry or have children are on hold, says Ms. Romine. "I'm just looking for some way to manage my finances."
High school's Class of 2012 is getting ready for college, with students in their late teens and early 20s facing one of the biggest financial decisions they will ever make.
Total U.S. student-loan debt outstanding topped $1 trillion last year, according to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it continues to rise as current students borrow more and past students fall behind on payments. Moody's Investors Service says borrowers with private student loans are defaulting or falling behind on payments at twice prerecession rates.
Most students get little help from colleges in choosing loans or calculating payments. Most pre-loan counseling for government loans is done online, and many students pay only fleeting attention to documents from private lenders. Many borrowers "are very confused, and don't have a good sense of what they've taken on," says Deanne Loonin, an attorney for the National Consumer Law Center in Boston and head of its Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project.
Danielle Jokela will have paid $211,000 for $79,000 in student loans by the time the debt is paid off in 25 years.
More than half of student borrowers fail to max out government loans before taking out riskier private loans, according to research by the nonprofit Project on Student Debt. In 2006, Barnard College, in New York, started one-on-one counseling for students applying for private loans. Students borrowing from private lenders dropped 74% the next year, says Nanette DiLauro, director of financial aid. In 2007, Mount Holyoke College started a similar program, and half the students who received counseling changed their borrowing plans, says Gail W. Holt, a financial-services official at the Massachusetts school. San Diego State University started counseling and tracking student borrowers in 2010 and has seen private loans decline.
The implications last a lifetime. A recent survey by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys says members are seeing a big increase in people whose student loans are forcing them to delay major purchases or starting families.
Looking back, Ms. Romine wishes she had taken only "a bare minimum" of student loans. She paid some of her costs during college by working part time as a waitress. Now, she wishes she had worked even more. Given a second chance, "I would never have touched a private loan-ever," she says.
Ms. Romine hopes to solve the problem by advancing her career. At the bank where she works, a former supervisor says she is a hard working, highly capable employee. "Jodi is doing the best she can," says Michael Matthews, a Beaufort, S.C., bankruptcy attorney who is familiar with Ms. Romine's situation. "But she will be behind the eight-ball for years."
Private student loans often carry uncapped, variable interest rates and aren't required to include flexible repayment options. In contrast, government loans offer fixed interest rates and flexible options, such as income-based repayment and deferral for hardship or public service.
Steep increases in college costs are to blame for the student-loan debt burden, and most student loans are now made by the government, says Richard Hunt, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, a private lenders' industry group.
Many private lenders encourage students to plan ahead on how to finance college, so "your eyes are open on what it's going to cost you and how you will manage that," says a spokeswoman for Sallie Mae, a Reston, Va., student-loan concern. Federal rules implemented in 2009 require lenders to make a series of disclosures to borrowers, so that "you are made aware multiple times before the loan is disbursed" of various lending options, the spokeswoman says.
Both private and government loans, however, lack "the most fundamental protections we take for granted with every other type of loan," says Alan Collinge, founder of StudentLoanJustice.org, an advocacy group. When borrowers default, collection agencies can hound them for life, because unlike other kinds of debt, there is no statute of limitations on collections. And while other kinds of debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, student loans must still be paid barring "undue hardship," a legal test that most courts have interpreted very narrowly.
Deferring payments to avoid default is costly, too. Danielle Jokela of Chicago earned a two-year degree and worked for a while to build savings before deciding to pursue a dream by enrolling at age 25 at a private, for-profit college in Chicago to study interior design. The college's staff helped her fill out applications for $79,000 in government and private loans. "I had no clue" about likely future earnings or the size of future payments, which ballooned by her 2008 graduation to more than $100,000 after interest and fees.
She couldn't find a job as an interior designer and twice had to ask lenders to defer payments for a few months. After interest plus forbearance fees that were added to the loans, she still owes $98,000, even after making payments for most of five years, says Ms. Jokela, 32, who is working as an independent contractor doing administrative tasks for a construction company.
By the time she pays off the loans 25 years from now, she will have paid $211,000. In an attempt to build savings, she and her husband, Mike, 32, a customer-service specialist, are selling their condo. Renting an apartment will save $600 a month. Ms. Jokela has given up on her hopes of getting an M.B.A., starting her own interior-design firm or having children. "How could I consider having children if I can barely support myself?" she says.
The Delaware education civil war ... complete with victims
There are too many "sides" in Delaware public education.
Part of the reason is that there is no consensus surrounding exactly what the mission of public education in Delaware was, is, or will be. Are we creating entry-level employees for our corporations? Prepared college freshmen? Better American citizens? Literate individuals? Are we using the schools to lift up an entire generation of the downtrodden children and their families. There is no consensus, and all too many people willing to say, "Yes. All of the above."
Part of the reason is that we have tied ourselves in knots for two decades trying to figure out how to measure our success in doing . . . whatever it is we are doing (if we only agreed). Performance Assessment. Authentic Assessment. Assessment drives instruction. High-stakes testing. DSTP. NAEP. DCAS. DPAS. DPAS 2. NCLB. RTTT. Teacher work samples. Data coaches. Teachers drive instruction. Data drives instruction. The General Assembly wants to mandate CPR and the History of Labor Unions. Charter schools. Magnet Schools. School choice. Neighborhood schools. Vo-Tech schools. Rodel. Vision 2012 2015. Delaware PTA. Chamber of Commerce. DSEA and associated PACs. NEA. Bloggers. The News Journal. University of Delaware. School board elections. State School Board.
I feel like I am doing some awful reprise of Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire."
You will notice that somewhere in there how we measure our success got mixed up with "who is in charge" and "who pays."
But that's not as bad as the other distinction we have drawn between us: the idea that people on the wrong "side" [whatever that is] are enemies of children, God, and chocolate desserts, rather than people who want to do what's right for education as they define it.
Thus we engage in naming, shaming hyperbole, coarsened dialogue, and ludicrous allegations. [I should know: as a blogger I have done all of the above.]
Yet what has gotten completely ridiculous is the emphasis on the "sides"
On the one side, I'm told, we have the "ed reformists." who want nothing less than to make corporate profits from public education, who want to impose assessments on students and teachers, and to undermine local control in favor of some cabal run by the Federal Department of Education, Wireless Generation, Goldman Sachs, Arne Duncan, and Josef Stalin. This group includes the Vision 2015 Network, Rodel, the DE PTA, the Delaware Department of Education, the Federal Department of Education, Governor Jack Markell, and a bucket of crabs (which will be used to resegregate the schools). Oh, and this group sometimes includes the NEA and DSEA when the mood strikes them, there are deals to be struck, and there are rewards for the compliant.
On the other side, I've been lead to believe, are "the teachers" and "the bloggers" and the great silent majority of parents who haven't been asked for their very valuable opinion since 1972 when Richard Nixon bugged their phones to hear what was on their collective mind. These folks want local control, teacher control, union control, Federal intervention (when they don't agree with something the various "other" locals did), research-based solutions, a monopoly on the support of candidates for school board or General Assembly [everybody else's money is tainted and should be sent back], and the right to sit seriously at the table with the people they have called racists and lampooned as wearing knee-pads to give blowjobs to their supposed Federal and corporate masters. Oh, and this group sometimes includes the very politicians who are supposed to be kneeling for perverted sex acts, people who have actually attended Vision 2015 meetings, and PTA members/officers if they bring the proper notes to get in.
What these two groups have in common is money and organization.
The "ed reformists" have money to throw at charter schools, money to gain from offering data coaches, money to spend in political campaigns, and access to some really nice meeting rooms at UD that come equipped with sound systems and chilled, bottled water.
The "teacher/blogger/silent majority types" also have money, principally union money (DSEA, NEA, AFL-CIO, and others) that they throw into election campaigns by the hundreds of thousands of dollars every year through an interlocking network of nearly unaccountable and untraceable PACS, while screaming at the top of their chiefly blogger-inflated lungs that "the other side" is trying to buy the election.
Both sides claim to be advocating for children, which is intriguing, because the kids have no money (many of their parents don't either, right now) and fewer voices, and seem to be floundering no matter what we try.
The truly crazy part about this fratricidal education war in Delaware is just talking to people on "the other side" makes you suspect, and allowing somebody from "the other side" to support a political campaign, or visit a school, or show up at the General Assembly appears tantamount to becoming a terrorist who molest children before he blows up their schools.
Yet neither side actually knows (a) what works or (b) what we're all trying to do.
They just know the other side is wrong. Deeply, dangerously wrong.
There have been too many arrows launched, too many attacks made, and two many apparently unforgiveable sins committed for everybody to sit down again at the table and start fresh.
And besides, the war is too much fun. Who gives a rat's ass if fighting it is killing public education and too many children's chances?
The choice is not Wall Street vs the teacher's union, it's our children v our colossal crusading egos.
Parents, teachers, and children--even some educational administrators, corporate types, and union leaders--are getting pretty damn sick of it.
Unfortunately, those non-aligned parents and teachers are the ones without the money to throw into the fray, and without the time to devote to backbiting and mudslinging.
They're just trying to raise and educate kids, whether they know quite why or not, and whether the research supports them or not.
Because many of the people on both "sides" have forgotten them, and have forgotten the idea that we are (or should be) a small enough state for everybody to sit at the table.
Good teaching `stops pupils going off rails': British government minister praises power of traditional subjects
Teaching children traditional subjects makes them less likely to indulge in `risky behaviour', Michael Gove declared yesterday.
The Education Secretary claimed that a good grounding in core academic disciplines was more effective than teaching life skills `in minutiae'.
His comments to MPs came amid growing controversy over lurid sex education materials used in some schools. They include a film for nine-year-olds produced by BBC Active that features computer-generated images of genitalia and a couple having sex. Sex education is typically covered in personal, social and health education (PSHE) lessons, which remain optional.
Labour tried to make PSHE compulsory from September last year, which would have required all schools to provide sex education to pupils as young as five.
The Coalition ditched these plans and instead launched a review of PSHE.
It also began ranking schools according to how many pupils achieved the English Baccalaureate - good grades in traditional subjects including maths, English, science and a language.
Giving evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee, Mr Gove said he wanted to make a `deliberately controversial point'.
`I am all in favour of good sex and relationships education, and our investigation into PSHE is an attempt to find which schools do it best because we want to learn from them,' he said.
`However, if you look at the way in which we can encourage students not to indulge in risky behaviour, one of the best ways we can do that is by educating them so well in a particular range of subjects that they have hope in the future. `There is a direct correlation between how well students are doing overall academically and their propensity to fall into risky behaviour.'
Instilling character, resilience and intelligence in pupils was more important than `for example, teaching someone in minutiae how to wash their hands,' he said.
Last year, the Daily Mail highlighted a disturbing dossier containing a wide range of graphic resources recommended for use in primary schools, which include explicit images. Yesterday Damian Hinds, MP for East Hampshire, highlighted concerns over some of the material making its way into schools. `Some of the BBC stuff and Channel 4 stuff is quite startling,' he said.
This should be a fad that has run its course but I don't suppose it will ever go away. There has been a lot of research showing that assertiveness training doesn't do much good, if any
Oxford University has introduced assertiveness classes for female students in a bid to get them to compete for jobs in the City and aspire to the boardroom.
They may be young and gifted but research at the elite institution has found that female undergraduates are shying away from applying to jobs in banking, finance, management consultancy, engineering and resource management.
Partly as a result, starting salaries for women when they graduate are on average £2,000 to £3,000 lower than their male counterparts.
“Women are earning less on leaving Oxford. On the face of it, this is ridiculous,” said Jonathan Black, the careers service director at the university. “We have high quality, high achieving students of both genders. “From the research it appears that women are selecting lower paid jobs. They perceive more prejudice in certain industries and are saying 'I won’t strive for that really high paid job’.
"We are not trying to push loads of women in to the City but we are trying to say, you should feel able to apply for these sorts of jobs.”
The four day programme at Oxford which starts this week will help 45 female undergraduates improve their self-confidence and decision making, think positively and build on their strengths.
Assertiveness training will teach them how to deal with opposition and thrive in challenging situations.
“What we find is that women can be pretty assertive in some parts of their lives but not in others,” said Jenny Daisley, the chief executive of the Springboard Consultancy which will run the programme along with staff at the university.
“The undergraduate sitting quiet as a mouse in supervision, giving the impression that they have not got anything to say, may have lots to say but needs positive advice so that they are not invisible.”
Successful female employees from RBS and BP, which are sponsoring the course, will talk about their lives and careers. A small number of sought-after internships at the two companies will be made available to the Oxford course participants.
RBS’s involvement follows a commitment by the bank to target female recruits, increasing its national proportion of female graduate applications from 35 per cent to 50 per cent by 2014.
Sophie Kelley, 20, studying law at Corpus Christi College, is hoping the course will make her more confident in tutorials and interviews.
“I am applying to London law firms for vacation schemes and it is so competitive,” she said. “The rejection letters don’t give any real feedback so I’m hoping the Springboard programme might give me an insight and advice.”
Anna Broadley, 19, a first year history student at Brasenose College, who is also taking part said: “Boys seem to have a more self conviction and see the bigger picture generally, even when their self-belief is not necessarily based on any greater academic merit.
"While the girls are freaking out about whether they have done enough work for a tutorial, the boys are more likely to say 'I’ll just blag it’.
“I’m really interested in the elements of the course on being assertive and taking the initiative - turning that uncertainty that women may have in to a positive thing.”
Poppy Waskett, 22, a first year experimental psychology student from Harris Manchester College, said she was tempted by management consultancy but hoped to gain inspiration from the career women giving presentations.
The Springboard programme was developed in the 1980s for the BBC and is now a social enterprise company. Its programmes, tailored to specific groups, have been delivered to hundreds of thousands of women worldwide.
Women currently make up just 15 per cent of FTSE 100 directors. A study last year revealed that of the 200 most senior bankers at a sample of 20 investment banks and investment banking divisions, just 17 were women.
David Cameron has said that business leaders have not made sufficient progress in ensuring women get top jobs.
In February, he attended a summit in Stockholm to learn from countries such as Norway and Iceland, which have so called “golden skirt quotas” to increase the number of women in boardrooms.
So far, the Government has called for firms to voluntarily increase the number of senior female executives to 25 per cent of the total by 2015.
Daniel Pinkwater on Pineapple Exam: ‘Nonsense on Top of Nonsense’
Eighth-graders who thought a passage about a pineapple and a hare on New York state tests this week made no sense, take heart: The author thinks it’s absurd too.
“It’s hilarious on the face of it that anybody creating a test would use a passage of mine, because I’m an advocate of nonsense,” Daniel Pinkwater, the renowned children’s author and accidental exam writer, said in an interview. “I believe that things mean things, but they don’t have assigned meanings.”
Pinkwater, who wrote the original story on which the test question was based, has been deluged with comments from puzzled students — and not for the first time. The passage seems to have been recycled from English tests in other states, bringing him new batches of befuddled students each time it’s used.
The original story, which Pinkwater calls a “fractured fable,” was about a race between a rabbit and an eggplant. By the time it got onto standardized tests, however, it had doubled in length and become a race between a hare and a talking pineapple, with various other animals involved. In the end, the animals eat the pineapple.
The tests can be used to determine whether a student is promoted to the next grade. Once new teacher evaluations are put in place, the tests will also affect teachers’ careers.
Pearson PLC, which created the test as part of a five-year, $32 million state contract, referred questions to the New York State Education Department. The department hasn’t returned requests for comment since Wednesday.
Pinkwater, 70 years old, took a moment to speak with Metropolis while having his tea, after he walked the bluffs along the Hudson River with his dogs in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Metropolis: The pineapple thing…
So you’re calling because– Oh the pineapple thing! I thought you were calling because I’m this great author.
That’s why I originally wanted to call, and then this came up. Once again you’re dealing with this sort of absurd passage on a state test.
There was never all this attention before. Occasionally there would be some mention, every couple of years, that that quote has been appearing on those stupid tests — and you can quote me, stupid tests. There’s big to-do about it now since it ran in New York this past week. I’ve gotten a ton of emails from kids. One kid phoned me up. They had many comments ranging from, “What are you, crazy?” to “That was the funniest thing I ever saw on a test” to “These tests are stupid, aren’t they, Mr. Pinkwater.”
How did the passage become part of the test?
You’re an author, and one of the side benefits — and it’s not a very big one — is that people will pay to use excerpts. You know they’re useless, but on the other hand, I’m not John Grisham, I could use the extra couple of bucks. They used to ask for it gratis. You’d ask, “Are you going to pay me anything?” And they’d go, “Oh, well, we’re educational.”
Can you tell me a little bit about the passage in context of the original novel?
The novel is called “Borgel.” It’s in a collection called “4 Fantastic Novels.”
Quite the modest title.
Well, yeah, I didn’t want to go over the top.
It’s a nuclear little family, a mother, father and three kids. An old man shows up at the door and says, “Hello, I’m your relative, I’m 111 years old.”
“You’re our relative how?”
He said, “I’m not quite clear about that. I know we’re related. I’m moving in.” And he brings in all his valises and moves into the back room. He becomes great friends with his great-great-great nephew.
In this particular passage, they’re on a bus, and Borgel, the old man, is telling him one of these fractured fables after another. And much better things happen. They go on a time-space adventure, and they meet God, who happens to be an orange popsicle. I think this may the only work of fiction in which it’s revealed that God can take the form of an orange popsicle, which I believe he can.
What is the moral of the eggplant story?
In the book, the moral is never bet on an eggplant. The old man is gradually giving the nephew reason to believe that he is senile or crazy by the things he says or does, so that the nephew will be alarmed but not surprised when the old man appears to be stealing a car. They take off on a road trip in it. But as far as I am able to ascertain from my own work, there isn’t necessarily a specifically assigned meaning in anything.
That really is why it’s hilarious on the face of it that anybody creating a test would use a passage of mine, because I’m an advocate of nonsense. I believe that things mean things but they don’t have assigned meanings.
I’m on this earth to put up a feeble fight against the horrible tendency people have to think that there’s a formula. “If I do the following things, I’ll get elected president.” No you won’t. “If I do the following things, my work of art will be good.” Not necessarily. “If I follow this recipe, the dish will come out very delicious.” Maybe. Trust me, there is no formula for most things that are not math.
When kids are confronted with questions about the modified version of your passage, there seems to be no particular answer. Yet all answers can be correct. Does that actually fit your message?
That’s exactly right — and I must interject that I admire the job they did, because it makes even less sense than mine. If the test company, when you get around to them, can gather their wits together sufficiently to make a case for, “We don’t count that against the kid’s grade, we put that there as a sort of brain teaser to show them that not everything is quantifiable, and to let them have a little fun,” then I’ll retract all my aspersions about how they’re money-grubbing b——- and overcharge for this stuff and sell it over and over again and underpay the poor authors they buy it off of.
They’re referring all questions to the New York State Education Department, which also hasn’t responded to my questions.
It is pretty funny that anybody — anybody — is taking any of this seriously
You say it’s funny people are taking it seriously, but these tests nowadays determine whether kids move on to the next grade, and they also will determine, in part, whether teachers keep their jobs.
I might have said, “They’re making a dishonest living doing these tests, but they’re doing no harm.” But maybe now they are. And certainly they’re sucking up a lot of money that could be put to better uses in education, and I think the whole thing is shameful.
Australia: Compensation claim fears cramp students after classmate sues girl over tennis mishap
COMPENSATION claims against schools for playground and sporting field accidents are creating a "nanny state" harmful to children's health, a childhood obesity expert says.
Professor Geoff Cleghorn said a growing number of compensation claims by students and parents could lead to more schools banning or restricting sports and outdoor activities.
His concerns follow revelations in The Courier-Mail that Julia Wright-Smith, 13, a student at prestigious Somerset College, was served with legal papers by lawyers acting for architect Paul Burns, whose daughter Finley was allegedly accidentally hit in the eye with a tennis ball by Julia, her classmate.
Other Queensland schools have also moved to ban activities including tiggy, red rover and cartwheels because of injury fears and a flood of compensation claims.
Prof Cleghorn, from the University of Queensland, said accidents happened in the playground and risks could be eliminated only if all sports and outdoor games were banned. "If you try to legislate against every element of chance, you're not going to have them (activities)," he said. "In the drive to provide a caring and nurturing environment, you could be creating a nanny state. I feel strongly that kids should be out exercising."
An investigation by The Courier-Mail in 2010 found Queensland state schools had been successfully sued for thousands of dollars for playground and sporting field accidents. They included lawsuits by children injured while doing handstands, running on the school oval and being thrown in a judo demonstration.
But compensation law expert Mark O'Connor, of Brisbane firm Bennett and Philp lawyers, said most school sport injuries lawsuits were thrown out.
"Sports injuries rarely succeed in the courts because the courts expect people doing physical sports to be aware of any possible risks involved," Mr O'Connor said.
But the Burns' lawyer, Mark Frampton, said there was "nothing malicious" in the case and Finley had to serve legal papers on Julia in case she suffered long-term eye damage and needed to mount a compensation claim "down the track". Mr Frampton said the Burns family was required to give notice of a potential claim.
Tennessee’s elementary and middle school teachers could face more pressure not to talk about homosexuality with their students next year after the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill cleared a House education committee Tuesday.
Some Republican leaders have questioned the need for House Bill 229, which prevents the teaching of alternative lifestyles, noting that it is already illegal under state law to teach sex education in grades K-8.
House Education Chairman Richard Montgomery, R-Sevierville, voted against the measure, but it passed on an 8-7 vote and goes to the calendar committee before a floor vote.
Bill sponsor Rep. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, and others argued that outside groups and some teachers slip those conversations in, and the bill serves as an accountability reminder.
“I have two children — in the third- and fourth-grade — and don’t want them to be exposed to things I don’t agree with,” Hensley said. “... Even though the state board disallows this now, I’m afraid it does happen, and sex education is talked about in a way that it is acceptable.”
Rep. Joe Carr, R-Lascassas, who voted for the bill, said he’s seen documentation that outside groups are entering classrooms at the invitation of principals and teachers and not staying within the curriculum guidelines.
“And they should,” he said after the vote.
Schools caught in violation of the state’s sex education policies can have state money withheld, and teachers face a $50 fine and up to 30 days in jail, according to state law. The bill passed the Senate last year.
British PM praises children who rise when adults enter the room
Children should stand up when their parents or teachers walk into the room, David Cameron has suggested. The Prime Minister made the remarks in a speech praising the return of “real discipline” to British schools.
He said reforms to the education system would lead to “fantastic outcomes” like children who observe the old-fashioned practice of rising in the presence of an adult.
Mr Cameron also applauded schools where children are allowed to be competitive and learn about failure.
"Give headteachers and their staff the freedom to teach and run their schools; give parents greater choice and transparency about schools and their results and you can see fantastic outcomes,” he said.
“Children who stand up when their parents or teacher walks in the room. Real discipline, rigorous standards, hard subjects. Sports where children can learn about success and, yes, sometimes failure too.”
The Prime Minister was speaking in Dumfries as part of the Conservatives' local election campaign. He told Scottish party members they must be the “insurgent force” campaigning for greater freedom in public services and the right for citizens to run their own local areas.
The Prime Minister also gave his support to towns and villages across Britain fighting the spread of wind farms. “We shouldn’t be plonking wind farms all over communities that don’t want them,” he said.
The Tories are only the fourth most powerful party of local government in Scotland, as the Scottish National Party, Labour and the Liberal Democrats all have more councillors.
In a light-hearted introduction, Mr Cameron joked about his relationship with Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister, saying they are “like any couple”.
Amid signs of strain in the Coalition over recent weeks, the Prime Minister admitted there had been ups and downs to their relationship.
“I love coming to Dumfries,” he said. “I pass, as you do, Gretna Green on the way, and I'm reminded of my own shotgun wedding.
"It feels like years ago. Like any marriage there's good times, there's bad times. We - that's Nick and I - we have to work at it like any couple.
"I didn't expect to end up with a Liberal Democrat, but there we are. You have to make it work - and we do make it work for the good of our country."
Some top Australian private schools to face reduction in Federal subsidies -- maybe
Prime Ministers Howard, Rudd and Gillard knew better than to cut any private school funding. Private schooling is sacrosanct to a big proportion of Australians. 39% of Australian teenagers go to private schools. Former Leftist leader Latham wanted to attack private school funding but lost the election, in part because of that threat
LORETO Kirribilli is among the independent schools in NSW with the most to lose - estimated at up to $3.9 million a year - in the proposed Gonski reforms of schools funding, a preliminary analysis shows.
Other schools at risk of having their federal funding reduced are Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College at North Sydney, St Aloysius' College at Milsons Point and Oakhill College at Castle Hill.
They are among the 17 per cent of independent schools in NSW that have had their funding maintained and indexed at the levels they were at before the Howard government changed the system in 2001.
The Commonwealth formula uses census data to allocate funding on the basis of need according to the socio-economic status of parents.
Since the introduction of the so-called SES funding formula, the wealth profile of many schools has increased, entitling them to less funding under the formula.
But the Howard government introduced a "no losers" policy, which was continued under the Rudd and Gillard governments, which meant annual funding for schools would not decrease.
Analysis by the Association of Independent Schools using 2009 data from the federal Department of Education suggests 86 NSW independent schools would lose between $65,000 and $3.9 million each year under the Gonski system.
The NSW Greens MP, John Kaye, said government figures showed Loreto Kirribilli would have received $32 million less than it has since 2001 if the SES formula had been applied strictly. This year it will receive an estimated $3.6 million above its strict SES entitlement of about $1.7 million.
"Losing some of that money would be more than fair and reasonable, especially if it ends up back in public schools," Dr Kaye said.
Geoff Newcombe, the executive director of the Association of Independent Schools NSW, said an examination of the proposed Gonski model using 2009 data showed a number of schools to have had their funding maintained and indexed would receive more funding, casting doubt on claims that these schools were "overfunded and rorting the system. Other schools, however, will have their funding reduced by amounts ranging from relatively low levels to up to $4 million," he said.
He said all education sectors were awaiting 2010 data to allow the Gonski model's indexation rate to be calculated.
If it was below 6 per cent, the "feasibility of the Gonski model will be struck a severe blow".
It would need to reflect "the real increases in the annual cost of education which has averaged around 6.5 per cent to 8 per cent per annum". A spokeswoman for the Education Minister, Peter Garrett, said the Gillard government had said repeatedly that no school would lose a dollar per student as a result of the funding review.
"Mr Gonski and the review panel have made clear that there is still a lot of work to do to test and refine the various elements of their proposed funding model.
"This includes testing the proposed funding amount per student, and examining whether the loadings for disadvantage are set at the right levels."
A closed- door encounter between two college acquaintances. Both have been drinking. One says she was raped; the other insists it was consensual. There are no other witnesses.
It’s a common scenario in college sexual assault cases, and a potential nightmare to resolve. But under the 40-year-old federal gender equity law Title IX — and guidance handed down last year by the Obama administration on how to apply it — colleges can’t just turn such cases over to criminal prosecutors, who often won’t touch them anyway. Instead, they must investigate, and in campus proceedings do their best to balance the accused’s due process rights with the civil right of the victim to a safe education.
Lately, though, the legal ramifications of such cases are spilling off campus, with schools caught in the middle.
Colleges that do too little about sexual assault could lose federal funds. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is currently investigating a dozen colleges and universities over their response to sexual violence (documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show schools that have recently agreed to take steps to resolve OCR complaints over Title IX policies include universities such as Notre Dame, Northwestern and George Washington).
Meanwhile, judgments in Title IX lawsuits against colleges, usually brought by accusers, are soaring. Compounding the fear: In some such cases, college administrators may be found personally liable.
But when colleges do take action against accused students, those students are increasingly lawyering up themselves, suing for breach of contract and negligence. And in at least two recent cases, in Tennessee and Massachusetts, male students have tread novel legal ground by alleging violations of their own Title IX protections against gender discrimination, arguing a college’s sexual assault policies or procedures were unfairly stacked against men.
Whether or not such Title IX arguments hold up, they underscore a new fact of life: For better or for worse, the days when colleges could count on handling such matters quietly behind closed doors are over.
A 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision established potential liability under Title IX for schools that fail to address sexual harassment and, in its extreme form, sexual assault.
Now, Title IX cases represent “the most expensive lawsuits in history’’ against colleges, said Brett Sokolow, managing partner of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management.
Why Federal Education Department may be safe for now, even though it's a GOP target
The US Department of Education is probably safe, for now. No matter who wins in November.
It's been a favored target of the GOP presidential hopefuls, with candidates from Ron Paul to Rick Perry promising it would be one of the first government agencies to face the chopping block.
But – at least according to remarks overheard by reporters Sunday night, during a fundraising event – Mitt Romney would keep it. Although reduce its budget.
"I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I'm probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are to go," Mr. Romney told donors, according to reporters standing on the sidewalk who overheard his remarks. Although he went on to say that Housing and Urban Development (HUD) might be eliminated, he said he had different plans for education. "The Department of Education I will either consolidate with another agency or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller. I'm not going to get rid of it entirely."
He also addressed teachers unions in his overheard remarks, promising his donors that he'd stand up to them. "The unions will put in hundreds of millions of dollars" to support President Obama's campaign, Romney said. "There's nothing like it on our side."
The smallest cabinet-level department, Education is also one of the most recent. It was established under President Carter and started operating in 1980.
And it's long been a whipping boy of many Republicans, who argue that the federal government has no business being involved in education.
Abolition of the department has been part of the official GOP platform at various times since it was established (and Ronald Reagan tried, and failed, to eliminate it). George W. Bush, however, increased the federal government's role in education with the creation of No Child Left Behind.
These days, Mr. Obama's policies on education – in which he's greatly increased the department's power and used it to push for state laws favoring accountability – are more in accord with some conservatives' views than with, say, the teachers unions'. Indeed, there are rifts within both the Democratic and Republican parties about how the federal government should approach education.
It's not a topic Romney has elaborated on much so far. But in 1994, when he ran for a US Senate seat against Edward Kennedy, he did favor eliminating the department. It was a stance that hurt him at the time and that he brought up in a recent interview to illustrate why he's vague on some positions.
“One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” Romney told The Weekly Standard.
Between now and November, Romney will probably need to get more specific on some of his proposals – including his views on education. He almost certainly favors less of a federal role, and less federal money, in education than Obama or Mr. Bush do. But if his remarks to donors can be believed, the department is likely to stick around awhile longer.
British private school to create chain of 'happy academies' (charters)
Sounds absurd -- like California around 1990
A new chain of “happy schools” is being launched by a leading public school and a former aide to the Prime Minister.
The network of state-funded academies will have “well being” at the heart of the curriculum, with lessons in positive psychology for all pupils based on classes pioneered at Wellington College in Berkshire, where fees for boarders are £30,000 a year.
Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington, has appointed James O’Shaughnessy, who until October was David Cameron’s head of policy, to run the scheme.
Mr O’Shaughnessy, a Wellington old boy, is a proponent of the Prime Minister’s controversial “happiness index”, a measure of the nation’s well-being levels to be published this summer.
He said the private school’s brand of education could benefit thousands of children in up to a dozen new academies in the next five years.
“I was initially very sceptical about the happiness and wellbeing stuff,” said Mr O’Shaughnessy. “But at Number 10 we did a lot of work on it and I came to believe that there was a science to it and that it wasn’t just airy-fairy wishful thinking.
“The field of positive psychology has demonstrable, scientifically tested benefits to people’s mental health. It helps people to lead better lives. It doesn’t mean that money or jobs or other traditional things don’t matter but we all have a sense that there is more to life than that. We want to encapsulate that in an education context.”
Mr Seldon, the biographer of Tony Blair, is in the vanguard of the “happiness agenda”, having introduced it in Wellington in 2006.
The lessons, designed by Professor Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, are aimed at developing pupils’ mindfulness, optimism, emotional resilience and self-confidence.
They are also taught at the new Wellington Academy, in Tidworth, Wiltshire, a state-funded boarding school, sponsored by the independent college with a £2 million donation from Goldman Sachs. It opened in 2009, replacing a failing school.
Mr Seldon is in a minority of independent school head masters who has answered David Cameron’s call for the private sector to play its part in the academies programme by sponsoring nearby state schools.
His new chain, for which he is seeking £5 million private funding, will include a mixture of failing schools, new schools and good schools which want to convert to academy status under the Government’s expansion plan.
They will join the 1,641 secondary schools in England, out of a total of 3,261, that are now academies or have applied to be one.
The Wellington chain curriculum will be built around the aim of developing pupils’ character.
For instance, English lessons could involve looking at the strengths and weaknesses of characters in classic English literature to encourage pupils to consider their own.
“There is a false dichotomy in British education – that it is about learning facts or producing happy people,” said Mr O’Shaughnessy. “The truth is, it is about both.
“If you think about what those really good public schools do so well, develop the personality traits of optimism and ambition, altruism, service, character and grit, these things are not advertised in the glossy brochures but they are implicit in the kind of education parents pay good money for.
“They have developed over decades of tradition and they are in every brick. That is what we want to transfer. We don’t just want a good group of schools, but a tangible 'Wellington group’ of schools.”
The former adviser said the approach, based on the positive psychology pioneered by Martin Seligman, an American psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, had a scientific basis.
As a result, it differed from the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme, which the Labour government spend millions of pounds on to little discernible effect, he claimed.
“It is not the same thing,” said Mr O’Shaughnessy. “It is very far from the 'Are you all right, are you happy?’ approach that turns into fluff at one end of the spectrum. The resilience programme developed by Pennsylvania University has been adopted by the US Army for over a million soldiers, it is a tough approach.”
Academies are schools which are funded directly from Whitehall and independent of local authority control. They employ their own staff and set their own pay, conditions and curriculum.
Many successful academies are members of chains run by charities and not-for-profit companies such as Oasis Community Learning, the United Learning Trust, Harris Federation, E-ACT and ARK.
The Government argues that academies produce better results. Opponents point to statistics which show that the schools exclude three times more pupils than the national average.
The Office for National Statistics is due to deliver the first official “happiness index” in July.
Florida students and their teachers are held to account based the scores on the high-stakes FCAT tests. School funding is partially contingent on test performance. Robert Krampf, a Florida science educator, has been reviewing the test-prep materials given to teachers in order to refine his own curriculum and prepare his students.
However, the test-prep materials were very poor. They consist of multiple-choice questions with more than one correct answer. For example: "This sample question offers the following observations, and asks which is scientifically testable: 1 The petals of red roses are softer than the petals of yellow roses; 2 The song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal; 3 Orange blossoms give off a sweeter smell than gardenia flowers; 4 Sunflowers with larger petals attract more bees than sunflowers with smaller petals."
The curriculum guide says that the correct answer is 4, but 1 and 3 are also correct. Krampf asked FLDOE's Test Development Center for clarification, and the Center told him that although the question had three answers, only one was "correct" in the context of the curriculum -- that is, students would only have learned about testing 1, and not about the chemistry needed to test 3, or the observational methodologies to test 4. This is just dumb. It means that the test doesn't distinguish between students who misunderstand the curriculum, students who are making guesses, and students who have progressed beyond the curriculum. In other words, the test can't tell you anything useful about the students' understanding or the teachers' methodology.
The question about isn't an isolated example, apparently. Krampf reports finding many examples like this from all parts of the test, some of which weren't just bad test-design, but factually incorrect; for example, the test defines a "predator" as "An organism that obtains nutrients from other organisms." As Krampf points out, "By that definition, cows are predators because they obtain nutrients from plants. The plants are predators too, since they obtain nutrients from decaying remains of other organisms."
I wonder how many students got "wrong" answers on the FCAT because their teachers taught them too much. How many "F" schools would have higher grades if those scientifically correct "wrong" answers were counted as correct answers. How many "B" schools would get the extra funding that "A" schools get, if those scientifically correct "wrong" answers were counted as correct answers?
We may never know the answers to those questions. The Test Item Specifications are the guidelines that are used to write the test questions. If the Science FCAT test is reviewed by the same Content Advisory Committee that reviewed the Test Item Specifications, then it probably has similar errors. But as much as I would LOVE to check the accuracy of the questions from the actual Science FCAT, I can't. Teachers, scientists, and the general public are not allowed to see actual test questions, even after the tests have been graded and the penalties for those grades have been imposed.
Standardized testing is usually a mess. High-stakes standardized testing is usually a bigger mess. But even by those standards, the FCAT science tests are a disaster, and the lack of transparency and accountability in them means that they're doomed to fail Florida's students for a long time to come.
A southern California school science teacher who once appeared in a porn film has been fired by her school district over concerns the issue could pose a distraction to students, officials said on Thursday.
The five-person Oxnard school board voted unanimously on Wednesday night in favour of the dismissal of Stacie Halas, who had been a teacher at the Richard B. Haydock Intermediate School for almost three years.
Superintendent Jeff Chancer said that, as a result of Halas' role as a porn actress, the district found she had displayed immoral conduct, dishonesty and evident unfitness for service.
"To have Ms Halas back at school would cause continued distraction and disruption, and it would be difficult for the students to concentrate," Chancer said. "I don't know Ms Halas, but I feel badly for her."
Halas, whose school in Oxnard is about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles, has been on leave from teaching for nearly two months amid allegations she had performed in pornography.
Chancer said she will have 30 days to appeal the decision.
Video snippets of the porn film in question were shown on the website of Los Angeles news station KTLA. The movie showed a woman welcoming a pizza delivery man into her house. Halas' precise role in the film was not clear.
Chancer said he believed Halas performed in the porn film prior to starting her career teaching in Oxnard, but he added that he could not verify that.
Diane Duke, the executive director of pornography trade group the Free Speech Coalition, defended Halas and complained the school district was discriminating against her.
"Many adult performers work to put themselves through school, especially now when support for education has hit an all-time low," Duke said. "Ms Halas worked in a legal industry in order to supplement her income, allowing her to go to college and better her life."
Halas could not be reached for comment.
In Florida, a teacher was fired last year when it was revealed he was in gay porn films, but a school commission later reinstated him because he technically did not violate any rules.
British private schools 'risk extinction over fees' - former top headmaster warns
Private schools are risking extinction because they are pricing themselves beyond the pockets of ‘normal’ parents,
They are losing the confidence of the public because they are increasingly the preserve of the super-rich, according to Dr Martin Stephen, who was High Master of St Paul’s School.
Parents earning more than £50,000 a year would struggle to afford many day schools, let alone boarding, he said.
In an outspoken critique, Dr Stephen warned that schools were increasingly reliant on the ‘fool’s gold’ of fees from overseas students, while ‘sucking out’ the best pupils from state schools.
It was now unlikely they would win the support of most voters if asked whether they wanted to keep them, he claimed.
‘The result is that the independent sector is becoming socially exclusive in a way not seen since Victorian times,’ he said.
‘Independent schools, like any other species, must evolve or face extinction.’
Parents with children at fee-paying schools have endured annual inflation-busting fee rises. Average boarding fees for schools in the Independent Schools Council were £25,152, while average day fees were £11,208. St Paul’s School, in Barnes, West London, charges boarders £29,466 a year and day pupils £19,674.
Dr Stephen stepped down in January 2011. Writing in the Times Educational Supplement, he said: ‘Of course, the “great” schools will survive. Apart from anything else, they thrive in a recession through the rush to quality ... But for most independents, it is time for a radical rethink.’
Claims that private schools are thriving because they are turning pupils away are ‘fool’s gold’, he added. ‘The sector has become too dependent on overseas parents and is profiting from a state sector in some turmoil as a result of radical change.’
Dr Stephen said Education Secretary Michael Gove’s reforms would massively improve state education, which would ‘present independents with the same sort of challenge they last faced from grammar schools’.
Dr Stephen, the new director of education at GEMS, an international private schools group which aims to make private education ‘affordable’ for many, went on to criticise Government plans for independents to sponsor state academy schools.
‘Independents have little experience of dealing with children who don’t want to go to school and parents who don’t care if they do,’ he said.
And he criticised schemes to lure top state school students with lucrative bursaries. ‘Independent schools educate only seven per cent of children in the UK, yet they back too many schemes that “support” state schools by seeking to suck out their best pupils: a brilliant idea for independent schools, but lethal to the health of the state sector,’ he said.
'I Had an Abortion’ Shirt Sales Stir Controversy at University of North Carolina Wilmington
Not a nice place to send your kid however you look at it
While the right to privacy may have been the key to securing abortion rights in Roe v. Wade, some advocates of the controversial procedure today want to walk around with a sign, t-shirt to be exact, broadcasting their reproductive decisions.
In 2004, abortion advocate and author Jennifer Baumgardner launched the “I Had an Abortion” project to encourage women and men to “come out” about their procedures. The campaign featured shirts that read “I Had an Abortion,” a book, photo exhibit, and documentary film featuring 10 women – including feminist Gloria Steinem – describe their abortion experiences spanning seven decades.
In preparation of an upcoming panel discussion and book signing featuring Baumgardner at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, controversy ensued when “I Had an Abortion” shirts began to pop up around campus. WWAY reports that the panel was held Monday by the Women’s Studies Department and LGBTQIA Resource Office, where the controversial shirts were sold for $15 each at the event.
WECT reports that the shirts caused a protest and other students rallied with their own shirts, saying things like “I haven’t killed a baby.”
“It’s still a very controversial issue,” Jimmy Eastman, a spokesman for several students that held a silent protest outside the panel room, told WWAY. ”It’s not about the abortion or pro-choice. It‘s about ending a human life and that’s the real issue here. That‘s what we’re trying to get at.”
Supporters of the shirts told WWAY that they are simply trying to de-stigmatize the word abortion. Critics said the abortion shirts are out of line and embarrassing to the UNCW student body.
Proceeds from t-shirt sales went to Soapbox Inc., the feminist non-profit group formed by Baumgardner and fellow author activist Amy Richards.
Who is not being "inclusive" here? Are traditional families an obscenity that may not be mentioned?
A student's artwork is at the center of a controversy at Pilgrim High School in Warwick.
Seventeen year old Liz Bierenday designed the mural, which shows a man's evolution from a child into adulthood.
She said she was given the go ahead from the school's vice principal after showing him the sketch. However, the last portion of the mural, which depicts the grown man married with a wife and child, was later painted over.
"Some members of the Pilgrim High School Community suggested that the depiction of a young man's development... as displayed may not represent the life experiences of many students at Pilgrim High School," Supt. Peter Horoschak said in a news release.
Bierenday says she thinks its her depiction of wedding rings that has stirred the controversy, and that some may feel the mural has religious undertones. She told Eyewitness News she is upset with the changes made to her design, but is willing to work with the school.
Supt. Horoschak suggested the student artist's ideas be respected and that she be allowed to finish the mural as she had originally visualized it.
The sheer number of immigrants has made it harder than ever for British parents to secure a place at a good primary school
For just over half a million parents this week is Terror Week, when the nation’s four-year-olds are allocated a place at primary school. In most countries, this is a dull formality. In Britain, it is anything but: gaming the system has become nothing short of a national obsession. Some atheist mothers will have spent years in the pews with their offspring, praying for nothing more than a school place. Others will have rented a second home near the catchment area, calculating that this is cheaper than going private. Many parents who refused to play this game will lose none the less. A handful will be told there is – at present – no place for their child at all.
This year the problem is worse than ever, with one in seven parents in England likely to be denied their first choice. Every child will eventually find a place but it may well be in a portable building in the playground. All the indicators suggest an even bigger pile-up in the next few years, so the nation’s supply of angry mothers will grow exponentially. If David Cameron thinks he has trouble with women voters now, then he should wait until the May 2015 election, by which time hundreds of thousands will have been refused their first choice of school by his Government.
All of this raises a basic question: where are Michael Gove’s new schools when you need them? The Education Secretary’s success story, so far, has been mainly about state secondaries being granted “academy” status. A great liberation to their teachers, no doubt, but it hardly broadens the choice available to pupils. When it comes to actual new “free schools”, set up from scratch, the story is less impressive. There were just two dozen of them last year and 70 more have been approved to open in September, half of which haven’t even found a building yet. Of these, just 21 are primaries. All of this is welcome, but England needs 410 new primaries a year, for the next four years, just to keep up with pupil numbers.
The size of Britain’s schools problem is rapidly outgrowing the size of Michael Gove’s solution. The Education Secretary has made much progress, and in less than two years has granted quasi-independent academy status to half of England’s secondaries. Yet he has failed in several critical areas. In opposition, Mr Gove spoke about bold new powers that would grant planning approval to any new school, sweeping aside council objections. Such powers have not emerged. Anyone wishing to set up a new school now needs permission from the very people intent on strangling the experiment at birth.
The Tories originally wanted the best academies to use their freedom to expand. Some attract six applicants for every place, so they could open a new wing, or even sponsor a new school. Or they could become chains, like the extraordinarily successful Harris Federation in London. But the schools have been denied the basic requirement for anyone who wants to expand anything: to be able to borrow money. They are told to wait until they secure a large cheque from a philanthropist (such as Lord Harris of Peckham) or to negotiate a large transfer of government funding. If businesses cannot borrow to expand, the economy does not grow. The same is true for schools.
Mr Gove has prevailed in his battle with the teachers’ unions. His real struggle lies in persuading the rest of Mr Cameron’s Government to help. The Treasury hates the idea of schools borrowing money to enlarge their capacity. The Communities Department lets councils blackball new schools simply on the grounds that parents would clog up the morning traffic. The Cabinet Office has failed to deliver the empty government buildings that Francis Maude once offered. And No 10 is failing to bang these heads together, or accept that the problem will be much worse for the class of 2015.
At the heart of this lies denial about the ongoing surge in immigration. The concerns, so widely felt throughout the country, were never driven by racism or xenophobia. It was more about the supply of GP clinics, houses or school places. Under the last government, a refusal to talk frankly about immigration mutated into a failure to consider its implications. Of the children who enrol in primary school this September, one in four will have a foreign-born mother (including, I should add, my eldest son). The implications of our multilingual baby boom were known about for years, yet preparations were not made.
The government machine has spent so long managing a decline in education that it cannot handle its expansion. The Labour years meant the closure of, on average, 110 schools each year, with teenagers being shoehorned into Grange Hill-style secondaries for bureaucratic convenience. Even today, the Department for Education arranges its statistics in a way that suggests there is no problem because there is, overall, a surplus of places. Under-filled schools vastly outnumber the popular ones. This, of course, is precisely the problem – bureaucrats hate opening new schools if there are places to fill in bad ones. But in the real world, parents want the best schools, and many will do anything, even fake a religion or a divorce, to secure a place.
This is not middle-class paranoia. A quick look at the CVs of Cabinet members shows that schooling still matters very much in Britain. England’s state schools may rank a lowly 18th in world league tables but our private schools are second. This staggering quality gap, the largest in the world except for Uruguay and Brazil, is reflected in the difference between state schools. The top tenth of England’s state schools do every bit as well as fee-paying schools, so a house in the right area is worth the extra money (typically £90,000) for those who can afford it. The infamy of the bottom tenth, the sink schools, requires no elaboration. This is why so many parents play the school places game: the stakes are terrifying high.
Once, Mr Gove hoped to usher in a new era where pupils would inform schools by text message if they had been selected, not vice versa. With so few new schools being set up, this power flip now looks impossible unless changes are made. This would involve a single school licensing authority, saying “yes” unless there is an extraordinarily good reason not to. It means putting pupils before ideology, so Liberal Democrat objections to profit-making schools are overruled. It means No 10 starting to function properly, and grasping the urgency of the situation. And it means making the Coalition’s most radical policy bolder still.
Mother Outraged After Kindergartner Forced to Sit in Class With Poopy Pants
Sounds like a teacher who hates little kids. Perhaps she should get a job in a bar
A Missouri mother is seeking school policy reform after her kindergartner had an accident in class and was humiliatingly forced to sit in her own waste for an extended duration of time.
The 6-year-old daughter of Lisa Skidmore from Washburn was in class where the teacher had given students an opportunity to use the restroom before a testing period during which they would not be able to leave the room. While the test was in session, the little girl said she had to go but teacher said no. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hold it long enough and pooped her pants.
Skidmore said when she picked up her daughter, she still was covered in diarrhea. Skidmore said the teacher didn’t excused her daughter from the class nor did she clean her up. The little girl was forced to wait out the testing period and for her mother to come get her. In some act of benevolence, the teacher did provide the child with a plastic trash bag to wrap around herself.
“You don’t even treat a dog that way,” Skidmore said disgusted with how the situation was handeled. Mo. Kindergartner Forced to Sit in Poop After Having an Accident in Class, Teacher Refused to Let Her Go
The girl’s father said, “If any parent sent their kid to school with crappy pants, those parents would be facing with criminal charges. I believe that with all my heart.”
Although the family is not pressing charges, they are seeking some reform on the school’s part for when a child expresses an emergency bathroom situation. The superintendent of the school told KY3 that he disagreed with how the situation was handled and has expressed to teachers how incidents such as this should be taken care of — or prevented — in the future.
The news anchor explained the school was in the process of taking a state standardized test when the incident occurred. Although the testing did not apply to children at this level, the kindergarten teacher was holding to the strict testing guidelines to prepare the children for what they would be met with in the future.
New Online Library Program in Tampa Bay Elementary Schools Includes Gruesome Content
While many Americans love TV shows depicting the gruesome ins-and-outs of crime fighting, such as “Law and Order” or “Dexter,” there seems to be one overriding consensus about the content features on those shows – it’s not for kids. So imagine the shock of some Tampa Bay parents when their children came home spouting details about murder, and with ready access to autopsy photos.
According to Tampa Bay Online, the culprit for this mass epidemic of children being exposed to highly adult material is a website called myOn, which purports to offer a “virtual library” experience in lieu of a visit to a physical library. Along with offering books or information, myOn includes navigational tools that students can use to browse by interest. So far, so harmless, but the absence of a filtering mechanism which can keep kids away from age-inappropriate material has some parents crying foul.
After all, one wouldn’t want a seven-year-old who just wanted to look up technology learning instead about autopsy procedure, and being privy to grisly photos involved in the subject. As one parent put it, “Are we teaching our children to be medical examiners in elementary school? I don’t think so.”
The response of school district officials has been, understandably, somewhat mixed. Some teachers cite concerns about intellectual freedom, and point out that some children want to dissect a frog at early ages, so dissecting a human corpse might not be that far off. Others defend myOn for offering the same information that would be available in your standard order public library, just with fewer of the natural barriers to entry involved in such places. Still others admit that the content is inappropriate for children, but are uneasy about how to go about the process of censoring the material:
“I don’t want this to outweigh the positive information here,” one teacher said. “And that’s that 2,200 titles are in the homes of Hillsborough County school kids. These include houses that don’t have many books now.”
Tampa Bay Online also quotes myOn officials, who defend the product by pointing out that much of the material does come with grade level guidelines.
British government Minister: admit students on 'potential' rather than grades
This is a perfectly reasonable proposition --- DEPENDING on how "potential" is assessed. High scores on an IQ test or something like the American SAT would be an excellent way of detecting potential
Bright students from poor-performing schools should be admitted to university with worse A-level results than other pupils, a minister claimed today. Academics should look beyond raw A-level grades to select pupils by their “potential” to succeed in higher education, said David Willetts, the Universities Minister.
He also suggested that rising numbers of poorly-qualified students should be given a “foundation year” – before the start of their full degree course – to enable them to catch up.
In a speech, Mr Willetts denied charges of “social engineering” but insisted a “serious sorting exercise” was needed to ensure the university admissions system was based on “genuine meritocracy”.
The comments came as the Government announced that a record total of around £900m would be spent in 2012/13 on reforms designed to boost access to university – up by £100m in just three years.
Last month, figures showed the majority of universities belonging to the elite Russell Group admitted fewer pupils from state schools and the most deprived backgrounds in 2010/11.
Amid unprecedented demand for university places, academics insisted that many bright students failed to apply or fell short of tough entry requirements.
In a speech in London, Mr Willetts called for a “renewed push to ensure that universities are broadening participation and improving access” as a pay-off for allowing institutions to charge up to £9,000 in tuition fees this year.
“What we all want to see is not social engineering – and certainly not quotas – but quite simply genuine meritocracy," he said. "Because entry to our universities is a competitive process, with more applicants than there are places, there has to be a serious sorting exercise."
Mr Willetts added that admissions “can be based on more than just A-level results, by looking at all the information that indicates the potential of an individual to succeed”. “The aim is that those who can perform best at any given university are selected for it,” he said.
“We now spend a lot of money trying to overcome the barriers which might stop those who are perhaps at weaker schools or in low participation neighbourhoods going to university.”
A study last year found that almost 23 per cent of universities were planning to make “lower offers” to candidates from poor backgrounds starting in 2012 – up from 18 per cent in 2011.
Addressing the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Mr Willetts said that central Government and individual universities were preparing to spend £900m in 2012/13 on programmes designed to widen access. He said a “systematic assessment” of these programmes would be carried out to discover “what works and what is less effective”.
Speaking afterwards, he backed programmes run by many Russell Group universities in which academics mentor bright pupils from poor-performing schools throughout their A-levels.
He also praised a scheme run by King’s College London that gives bright students with poor A-levels a “foundation year” to prepare them for the demands of a full-time medicine degree course.
“We know, at the end of the day, that their chances of getting a good medical degree are as good as those who turn up with three As,” he said.
Once again police have to be called because of lack of disciplinary powers in the schools
Police in Georgia handcuffed a [black] kindergartner with her arms behind her back after she threw a tantrum at school, and the police chief defended the action as a safety measure.
“She might have misbehaved, but I don’t think she misbehaved to the point where she should have been handcuffed and taken downtown to the police department,” the girl’s aunt said.
Her father remarked: “A six-year-old in kindergarten. They don’t have no business calling the police and handcuffing my child.” Police Handcuff 6 Year Old Salecia Johnson After Temper Tantrum in Georgia School
While it’s unusual to see a young child handcuffed in school, it’s not unheard of. School officials around the nation have wrestled with the issue of when it’s appropriate to call police on a student.
“Our policy is that any detainee unreported to our station in a patrol vehicle is to be handcuffed in the back…There is no age discrimination on that rule,” the city’s Chief of Police explained.
Salecia Johnson, 6, was accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing books and toys in an outburst Friday at Creekside Elementary School in Milledgeville, according to a police report.
Specifically, they say the child threw a small shelf which struck the principal on the leg, and also jumped on a paper shredder and tried to break a glass frame.
So, the school called the police. When an officer tried to calm the child in the principal’s office, she allegedly resisted. The police report says she was then “restrained by placing her hands behind her back and handcuffed.” A juvenile complaint was filed, accusing the girl of simple battery and damage to property.
The girl’s aunt and mother say the 6-year old waited in a holding cell until they picked her up, and was “so shaken up.”
However, police chief says the girl was taken to the police department’s squad room, not a holding cell, and officers there tried to calm her and gave her a Coke.
Officials at Creekside Elementary did not immediately return calls Tuesday.
Salecia Johnson has been suspended and can’t return to school until August, according to her mother.
“We would not like to see this happen to another child, because it’s horrifying. It’s devastating,” her aunt told The Associated Press.
Elsewhere in the U.S., incidents involving students, police and handcuffs have raised difficult questions for educators, parents and policymakers.
In Florida, the use of police in schools came up several years ago when officers arrested a kindergartner who threw a tantrum during a jelly bean-counting contest. Since then, the overall number of student arrests in Florida has declined, but those for minor offenses have increased on a percentage basis.
"Teaching as a Subversive Activity": The Theory of Political Indoctrination
Last weekend I visited the U.C. Berkeley campus and on a whim attended a lecture with the provocative title "Teaching as a Subversive Activity — Revisited."
Because this was a presentation aimed at education insiders only, the lecturer, retired professor H. Douglas Brown from S.F. State, seemed perfectly willing to let the cat out of the bag about political indoctrination on college campuses. Fortunately, I had my trusty camera with me, so I was able not only to snap a few pictures but also record several key portions of his speech, which I found so eye-opening that I felt the general public deserved to hear it as well.
The timing couldn't have been better: A devastating new report issued by the National Association of Scholars had just been issued a few days beforehand, which documented with exquisite and irrefutable detail the extreme liberal bias at the University of California. However, the main problem with the NAS report (which you can download in full here if you're interested) is that it's too overwhelming and too technical to deliver the kind of emotional impact needed to sway public opinion. To drive home the point in a more personal way, the NAS report needed an introductory companion anecdote of a professor frankly confessing the rationale behind what is essentially the "theory of indoctrination." As if on cue, Professor Brown stepped into that role, unwitting though he may have been.
Let it be noted that Professor H. Douglas Brown is no wild-eyed extremist; in fact, he's rather bland and respectable and not the most thrilling of speakers, as you will soon hear. But that's what made his presentation so disturbing: radical and self-admittedly "subversive" attitudes that affect the future of society are discussed with matter-of-fact nonchalance. The main drawback of Professor Brown's verbal style (at least from my point of view) is that he often resorts to the academics' tried-and-true escape hatch, which is to rephrase statements as questions, so as to have plausible deniability if later confronted. Thus, for example, instead of just flatly saying something like "We should indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies," he asks "Should we indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies?" and only after five minutes of talking in circles eventually concludes "Yes."
The title of Brown's lecture is taken from an influential and groundbreaking book published in 1969. Written by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, the manifesto Teaching as a Subversive Activity did not actually advocate political indoctrination in the classroom, but rather it was one of the first books to completely deconstruct the concept of education itself, and the "subversion" it advocated was much deeper and more structural: Get rid of tests, the notions of "the right answer" and "the wrong answer," the memorization of facts, the ascendency of teachers, and so forth; instead, make education an ungraded process of learning how to think and how to criticize, respecting the opinions and ideas of the students themselves. Of course, this being 1969, it was presumed that the establishment status quo with its facts and rules was rigid and conservative, while the students were radical and transgressive, so all one had to do to foment a revolution was simply to put the kids in charge of their own education, and they'll naturally overthrow society without even being specifically instructed to do so. (If you're curious, the entire text of Teaching as a Subversive Activity is now available for free online as a PDF document.)
In the decades since, many of the recommendations in Teaching as a Subversive Activity and similar books were in fact implemented to various degrees, but things didn't quite work out as the authors envisioned. Without some structure, students often flounder aimlessly. Furthermore, the "authority figures" controlling academia are no longer uptight conservatives, but are instead now liberals, progressives and radicals themselves, so when students are encouraged to ignore those in charge, then they may very well ignore the progressive messages as well.
Professor Brown's talk focuses specifically on this problem: His basic thesis is that it is no longer sufficient to simply tell students to think for themselves, because then we lose the ability to influence them, and there's no guarantee that the students will then develop progressive worldviews. The "Revisited" part of the lecture's title means that these days, we must be more blunt and to the point: Since the good guys are now in charge, let's just dispense with all the experimentation and instead directly indoctrinate the students in leftist thought and ideals.
Now, I'm sure Professor Brown, were he to ever read this essay, would take exception to my characterization of his lecture; but listen to the excerpts below and judge for yourself. Although he (and his legions of fellow educational theorists) seems partly aware of his biases, and frankly admits them, he also seems to be blithely oblivious to the depth of his political prejudices, which you'll encounter below.
I'm not presenting this lecture in and of itself as a significant political watershed, nor as a shocking behind-the-scenes glimpse at academic bias. Rather, it's just another random day at a random university; stuff like this goes on all the time. And it's this normalcy of radicalism that makes it so alarming; people in the academic hothouse chat about the most disturbing ideas as if they were discussing the weather. The banality of subversion, as it were.
Below you will find six audio clips from his April 6 lecture, followed by six exact transcriptions. The sound quality of the audio is, admittedly, rather poor, so read the transcriptions as your main resource and only refer to the mp3s as proof that the transcriptions are true and accurate. The lecture was nearly two hours long in full, far too long to present in a short essay like this, plus I was only able to record segments of it, so what you see here are only excerpts; but they're a fair representation of the overall lecture. (Portions of the transcriptions [in brackets] indicate words that are not clearly audible; Ellipses [...] indicate passages skipped because they were inaudible or were asides.)
Following each clip are brief comments and analyses by me.
Also scattered throughout the essay are photos I took of various slides in Brown's PowerPoint presentation; if you want to see the whole thing as a PDF document, the Berkeley Language Center (which sponsored the lecture) has made it available here.
Ever wonder how "progressive" educators justify their one-sidedness? Behold:
Nutty British bishop wants to keep Anglicans out of Anglican schools
On Monday in the House of Commons, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said that he was keen to work with John Pritchard, the Bishop of Oxford, on extending the role of the Church of England in schools. His words have been taken to mean that the Government will support the creation of a new generation of state-funded Anglican academies.
In theory, that should please anyone who is concerned about two recent social trends. The first has been a steady decline in the country’s position in international educational league tables. The second has been our drift during the same period towards an all-consuming secularity.
For all who favour high standards, and who also believe that moderate religious affiliation benefits children and those involved in their education, the Secretary of State’s support for the expansion of publicly funded Anglican schools can only seem a cause of celebration.
But I’m not so sure. There’s a risk that educational standards, and even Anglicanism itself, might be endangered by the expansion of church schools. My fear is that Anglican schools may be forced, for the sake of becoming more inclusive, to dilute their distinctively religious character, and even to turn away applicants from genuine Anglican backgrounds, to accommodate those who are not.
Last year, the Church put John Pritchard in charge of developing its policy on schooling. He soon disclosed – much to the horror of many Anglicans – that he favoured his Church’s schools reserving no more than 10 per cent of places for children from Anglican backgrounds, an unprecedented level of “inclusiveness”. The bishop justified this, saying, “Our commitment [is] to serve the whole community, including those of other faiths and no faith. We are not a club that exists only for its members.”
He must realise, however, that church schools will only continue to achieve good academic results, and hence remain popular, so long as they preserve enough of their religious character. It’s what drives their success.
The question that should be exercising Bishop Pritchard and Mr Gove in the coming months is whether all or any new Anglican schools should be encouraged, or made, as a condition of extra state funding, to become so socially inclusive that the vast majority of their pupils cease to be from Anglican or Christian backgrounds.
Would it be wise to have admissions policies at Church of England schools that force them to turn away applicants from Anglican or other Christian backgrounds to accommodate those who are not? Surely not. Charity begins at home, after all.
Opponents of faith schools often claim that these schools only achieve better academic results because skewed admissions policies enable them to cream off middle-class children, who are easier to educate. They also claim that savvy, well-off parents know that an educational premium is attached to their children when they’re being taught with children from similar backgrounds.
Such concentrations of middle-class children at faith schools are said to be unfair to children from poor backgrounds, because these disadvantaged children become concentrated in community schools, often adversely affecting the performance of each other.
In support of their claims, critics of faith schools cite dodgy statistics that seem to bear them out. One is that nearly two thirds of Church of England primary schools have fewer pupils on free school meals than is the average for non-religious schools in their neighbourhoods. The same applies to nearly half of the Church’s secondary schools.
But such charges against faith schools are wrong because these statistics are misleading. There is no guarantee that distributing middle-class children evenly across all schools would improve the academic performance of children from poorer backgrounds. More likely, it would so widely diffuse their presence in the classroom as to spoil any potentially beneficial effect from it. The appropriate solution to the over-concentration of children who are difficult to teach in some schools is not to dilute the ethos of faith schools. It is, rather, to continue what the present Government has already started: to attach a pupil premium in the form of extra funding to schools for every child they admit from a socially disadvantaged background.
More important, pupils of faith schools often perform better on average academically than their counterparts at community schools, even when their levels of social deprivation, as measured by eligibility for free school meals, are similar.
Several studies suggest that children at faith schools do better than children at more secular schools because of the religious outlooks they share with each other, their parents and teachers. If so, the Department for Education and the Church of England would do well to tread cautiously when expanding the number of Anglican schools. The price of expansion may be too high if, to accomplish it, they are forced to water down their distinctive religious ethos and character for the sake of government funding.
The Church of England should be the last body to need reminding that it was for the sake of a mere mess of pottage that Esau lost his birthright.
Author’s Note: I’ll be speaking at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio on April 19. The event will start in Harrison Hall, room 111, at 6 p.m. The speech is called “Three Liberal Assaults on Free Speech (and Three Conservative Solutions)."Because it is about free speech in public forums, the speech is free and open to the public
Tyranny is never more than a generation away. Those who wish to impose tyranny prey upon the ignorance of those they wish to subjugate. Knowing that it is easier to deprive people of their rights if they are unaware of their rights, academic elites often forsake their responsibilities in order to further their own political goals. In other words, they seek to preserve ignorance, rather than advance knowledge.
Against this backdrop, last spring I decided to dedicate an entire course to teaching the First Amendment. I’m writing this column to show one way it can be done and to show how it has been received by students. I hope other professors follow a similar path. Our students need to know what they risk losing if they remain indifferent to their God-given rights.
I originally intended (pun originally intended) to call my course “The First Amendment and Original Intent.” I also intended to use David Barton’s book Original Intent as a text. Additionally, I planned on covering 53 U.S. Supreme Court decisions. You can imagine how well that proposal went over. There was a predictable administrative “suggestion” that I change the title of the course. This was followed by a “suggestion” that I use a couple of texts written by avowed Marxists.
I successfully fought both the effort to change the course title and to “suggest” Marxist texts. In the wake of that success, I am left wondering whether a Marxist professor has ever had a capitalist administrator “suggest” that he teach using Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell. These administrators are very predictable. Dripping with hypocritical condescension, they see academic freedom as a one way street.
But I prevailed – at least until a crisis emerged. An error in scheduling resulted in a request for me to cancel the First Amendment class and teach one of our senior seminars, which is required for graduation. The crux of the problem was that only one 25-student seminar was being offered - although there were fifty seniors graduating from our department. (Author’s note: I am not certain why we choose to call a class of 25 a “seminar” but that is beside the point).
The “First Amendment and Original Intent” course could not be used as a senior seminar for criminology graduates because it simply was not sufficiently crime-related. So I created a course called “The First Amendment and Crime” and did so in just a couple of months. That meant spending hours every day reading and re-reading a new set of Supreme Court cases and developing special oral and written requirements for graduating seniors.
The result has been highly satisfactory. It is not difficult to fill an entire semester calendar with courses relating the First Amendment to the issue of crime. Consider the following:
*Our first important free speech cases – Abrams, Whitney, and Gitlow (just to name a few) – began a long struggle to determine the appropriate limitations on the right to advocate illegal conduct, including violent revolution. This struggle would last for fifty years before the Court finally settled on the Brandenberg test.
*Defining obscenity has proved to be a difficult task for the Court. Between the Roth and Miller cases, the Court would battle for 16 years before deciding on one test for defining obscenity. During this struggle, Potter Stewart would famously quip that he could not define hard-core pornography but that he knows it when he sees it! The court has also dealt with zoning issues relating to adult theaters. This is all tied in with the secondary effects (crime) that often flow from the presence of adult books stores and topless bars.
*In recent years, cases like Mitchell v. Wisconsin have tested state penalty enhancement statutes that consider race bias at sentencing hearings following criminal trials. The implication of these laws for hate speech legislation cannot be lost upon even the most casual observer of Supreme jurisprudence.
In addition to teaching those crime-related First Amendment cases, I have also taken the time to teach students about Rosenberger v. Rector, Wisconsin v. Southworth, and NAACP v. Alabama – and other cases dealing directly or indirectly with student rights. Against this backdrop, I also assign the students to a semester-end project dealing with the erosion of free speech rights in America. This is where things have become very interesting.
On the first day of class, students were asked to respond to the same question, which is “Who is responsible for censorship in America and who is being censored?” This question is asked in order for them to contemplate a hypothesis for their semester project. It has produced varied hypotheses, such as the following:
*The religious right is responsible for a disproportionate amount of censorship in America. That censorship is primarily directed towards atheists.
*Atheists are the most censorious people in America. Their censorship is generally directed towards Christians.
*Public universities restrict expression to a greater degree than private universities. First Amendment violations at public universities are usually directed towards religious rather than secular speech and organizations.
*Conservative Catholics are less tolerant of free speech than politically liberal Catholics.
After students form a hypothesis in Part I of their paper, they must get down to business. In Part II, they must turn to scholarly sources in order to explain (theoretically) their proposed hypothesis. In Part III, they must examine empirical evidence in support of (or opposition to) their hypothesis.
Since many of my students have decided to study campus free speech issues, they will soon have to evaluate and critique academic studies of campus censorship. When they do, they will find that the topic has been ignored by scholars at our institutions of higher learning. Imagine that: universities rarely speak about the issue of free speech at universities. (However, they do talk about free speech problems occurring elsewhere).
I’ve gotten the ball rolling by teaching specifically about First Amendment issues. But what we need now is an entire course explaining why censorship is so much worse among academic elites than among normal Americans. We could call it “The Sociology of Censorship.” But that will never happen. The censors of sociology would never allow it.
Tyler wants to use my little signaling model to predict the future of online education. At risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, I'm afraid a much richer model is required to address Tyler's question.
In the interest of parsimony, my model assumes that education is purely a signal of IQ; Tyler also considers a variant where education signals conscientiousness instead. So far, so good. But as I've said several times, in the real world education is also a signal of conformity. One of the main things a stack of degrees says about you is, "I uncomplainingly submit to social expectations."
This makes educational innovation inherently difficult. Why? Because the first people to sign up for innovative alternatives to traditional education are usually people who have a beef with the powers that be. As I've told Arnold before:
[E]ducation doesn't just signal intelligence and conscientiousness; it's also signals another character trait employers pragmatically cherish: conformity. This leaves us in a catch-22, because experimenting with new ways to signal conformity is a strong signal of... non-conformity!
You could of course reply, "All that's going to change. The future is coming." I'll bet against it. In fact, I already have. It's easy to imagine a society where traditional educational credentials could collapse at a moment's notice. But that society is not ours.
Take out your sociological goggles and look around. In our society, smart, hard-working, conformist kids go to old-fashioned brick-and-mortar colleges. Their elders expect them to do so. Their peers expect them to do so. They feel like losers in their own eyes if they don't go.
The normativity of conventional education isn't a passing phase. College attendance is a central tenet of our society's secular religion. A student who scoffs at all these expectations probably has a serious problem with authority. Would-be employers treat him accordingly.
There may well be a niche for online education. Maybe it will attract the best students who currently don't go to college and the worst students who currently do: the top of the bottom plus the bottom of the top. But until we sharply reduce subsidies for traditional education, traditional education will continue to dominate, warts and all. Middle class jobs will no longer require college only after middle class kids can no longer afford college. Hail austerity!
British education boss urges church to extend role in education
The Church of England has been urged to establish a new generation of academies [charter schools] after Michael Gove said he wanted to 'extend' its role in educating children.
Mr Gove said he “cherished” the education currently provided by the Church to more than a million children.
His remarks in the Commons yesterday have been interpreted as backing for the Church to set up a new generation of faith schools. There had been concerns that Mr Gove’s support for faith schools was wavering, but yesterday’s comments are expected to be welcomed by bishops who are currently considering the future role of the Church.
The Education Secretary backed an increased role after a review by the Bishop of Oxford which looked at the potential for new academies.
Mr Gove said: “We praise and cherish the role of the Church of England in making sure children have an outstanding and inclusive education. “I welcome the report and look forward to working with Bishop John Pritchard to extend the role of the Church in the provision of schools.” He also praised the Church for “driving in the first instance” the provision of education.
The Church of England is still the biggest single provider of education in Britain, teaching one million pupils in 4,800 schools. It is involved in 154 academies in England. The Church’s review came after a reduction in local authority provision of education, which gives potential for a new generation of faith schools.
There had been some concerns over Mr Gove’s commitment to faith in the schools after allegations that the importance of religious education has been downgraded. He has also supported attempts by some faith schools to keep more than half their places for religious families.
David Cameron has previously been a vocal backer of faith schools and his daughter was educated at a Church of England school.
He has called for an increased role for religion in public life and Baroness Warsi, the Cabinet Office minister, has warned of the dangers of “aggressive secularism”.
Italian university switches to English for teaching
One of Italy's top universities has sent shockwaves through the country's higher education system by announcing that from 2014 its courses will be taught exclusively in English.
The radical move by Milan's Politecnico university will, according to its rector, Giovanni Azzone, "contribute to the growth of the country". He said the strategy would attract brain power and yield the high-quality personnel that would "respond to the needs of businesses".
But the announcement has sparked a furious debate among academics and public officials. The higher education minister, Francesco Profumo, told La Stampa newspaper that he hoped other leading institutions would follow suit.
Others expressed alarm at the move. Luca Serianni, an eminent linguist at Rome's La Sapienza university, said the move was "excessive and not only in the ideological sense".
Despite having some of the oldest universities in the world in cities such as Bologna, not one Italian college appears among the world's top 200. Nepotism and closed-shop recruitment of staff have largely been blamed.
It’s beyond belief to teach witchcraft in British schools
Teaching Druidry and paganism in schools is just another example of our liberal fear of religious values, says Cristina Odone
Saint Morwenna, who in the 6th century built a church on a cliff with her bare hands, must be turning in her grave. Her beloved Cornwall, the last redoubt of Celtic Christians, is to teach witchcraft and Druidry as part of RE. The county council regards her religion (and that of other Cornish saints such as Piran and Petroc) as no better than paganism.
It makes perfect sense. Fear of being judgmental is so ingrained today that no one dares distinguish between occult and Christian values, the tarot and the Torah, the animist and the imam. Right and wrong present a problem for liberals who spy covert imperialism or racism in every moral judgment. Saying someone has sinned is “disrespecting” them, as Catherine Tate’s Lauren Cooper might say. Speaking of religious values is as dangerous as playing with the pin on a hand-grenade: it could end up with too many Britons blown out of their complacency. No one should dare proclaim that adultery is wrong; greed, bad; or self-sacrifice, good. In doing so, they’d be trampling the rights of those who don’t hold such values.
This mentality is not confined to Cornwall. When the BBC’s The Big Questions asked me to join its panel of religious commentators two years ago, I was taken aback to find it included a Druid. Emma Restall Orr rabbited on inoffensively about mother nature, but I was shocked that her platitudes were given the status of religious belief by the programme makers. Ms Restall Orr exults in her website that the media has stopped seeing Druidism “as a game” and now invites her on serious faith and ethics programmes from ITV’s Ultimate Questions to Radio 4’s The Moral Maze and Sunday Programme.
God, Gaia, whatever: school children are already as familiar with the solstice as with the sacraments. In pockets of Cornwall, children will point out a nun in her habit: “Look, a Druid!” Their parents will merely shrug — one set of belief is as good as another. How long before the end of term is marked by a Black Mass, with only Health and Safety preventing a human sacrifice?
This is just a shot across the bows. Labor learned under Latham that attacks on private schools are a big loser. With 39% of Australian teenagers going to private High Schools you can see why
SOME schools could lose up to $3.9 million a year under a proposed national funding system, forcing them to increase school fees, the NSW Association of Independent Schools has warned. Some might be forced to close.
The association's executive director, Geoff Newcombe, said he was concerned preliminary data suggested "serious flaws" with the new funding model proposed under a review led by the businessman David Gonski.
"We are very happy to work with the government," Dr Newcombe said. "But we are very concerned about how much independent schools could lose under the new model. This would be likely to put pressure on schools to increase fees and in extreme circumstances could cause a small school to close."
Dr Newcombe said 2009 data provided by the federal Department of Education to demonstrate how the new funding system would work suggested significant reductions in funding to many independent schools.
The association's analysis of the data showed that 86 independent schools in NSW would lose funding under the proposed model - a quarter serving communities with low socio-economic status. According to the analysis, 50 of the 86 schools would lose more than $250,000 a year.
Dr Newcombe said a small, low-fee school in outer Sydney would lose more than $65,000 a year, requiring an extra $280 per student to be found, based on the 2009 figures. A school with a low to medium socio-economic status in metropolitan Sydney would lose more than $960,000 a year, leaving the school to raise an additional $1300 per student. Some schools stood to lose as much as $3.9 million
"At this stage the independent schools sector in NSW is not withdrawing its support for funding reform as it does not believe this result was the intent of the review or of the government," Dr Newcombe said.
"However, the sector … is calling on the Australian government to give certainty to parents and independent schools by stating that funding to schools will not be reduced in real terms."
Brian Croke, the executive director of the Catholic Eduction Commission, said it was too early to tell whether individual Catholic schools would be better or worse off.
He said there were technical issues that needed to be resolved, but the concept of having a base level of funding for each student, topped up with additional loadings for disadvantage, was a good one.
Stephen O'Doherty, the chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, said he was "very positive" about the directions of the Gonski report, particularly because it promised to provide additional funding to schools serving needy communities.
The federal secretary of the Independent Education Union of Australia, Chris Watt, warned against rushing to adopt the current Gonski model. "It won't just be high-fee schools that would lose out in this, it's potentially every school in every sort of community," he said.
The federal Education Minister, Peter Garrett, said the government has said repeatedly no school will lose a dollar per student as a result of the review.
"All the work now being undertaken is predicated on that commitment," he said. "Mr Gonski and the review panel have made clear, there is still a lot of work to do to test and refine the various elements."
Progressive Teacher Pustule: Pay Your School Taxes and Shut Up
EAGnews.org and I continuously poke the belly of the education beast to see what kinds of pustules pop, and it never ceases to amaze us the types of low-lifes involved in our education system.
There are many great teachers – we work with a lot of them every day. But there are also a lot of people who don’t deserve the honor of teaching our children.
Whether it’s union-defended “pervy” teachers getting a slap on the wrist for very serious offenses, teachers doctoring student test scores for their own gain, or teachers union officials involved in spending scams, some people don’t belong in education.
Some simply have contempt for parents and taxpayers. School employees and education bureaucrats know best. Parents are the silly rubes who can’t figure out the very complex education system because they’ve never been in the classroom. They don’t know children (irony?).
Consider an exchange with one such pustule that was poked. Posting as “The Frustrated Teacher,” the anonymous self-described teacher explained to me on Twitter, “Teachers often combat the nonsense parents instill in their kids. That surely bothers U cuz misinforming yr kids is impt 2 U.”
Uh huh – teachers know better than parents. Got it. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah. Sadly, he wasn’t done after the audacity of his statement was pointed out.
“Why? Because a teacher actually said parents intentionally, sometimes, screw with their kids and teachers have [to] unscrew them?”
But it’s worse than that. It’s not just that there is the belief that teachers need to “reeducate” students from what their parents teach them, but that any questioning of the system by a non-educator is not only unacceptable, but offensive.
“You have NO standing to discuss education anyway. You’re a nobody who knows little about schools, education, children or policy.”
You can just feel the love these so-called “public servants” have for taxpayers. But he wasn’t done, especially when I reminded him that taxpayers fund the system (not to mention his pay and benefits) and we will have a say.
“Pay & mind ur business. Once U understand education, then U cn make it ur business. I C no evdnce u have.”
When I broached the idea of opting out of the system and taking my tax dollars with me (which would negate the need for my criticism), that didn’t go over well.
“If you don’t like American schools, take your kids out and put them in private schools and STFU.”
I presume he means “shut the f*ck up,” which, sadly for him, won’t happen. We as parents and taxpayers fund the government education system and many of us are dismayed by the waste, abuse, corruption and misguided focus on the desires of adult employees, rather than the needs of students.
We constantly hear from the education establishment that parents aren’t involved and that’s leading to the decline of student achievement. What parent would want to be involved in their child’s education when they encounter the type of attitude that this teacher, and so many others, convey
And with tenure, even if parents are outraged by this type of attitude, there’s little or no leverage to do anything about it.
This example is just one of many that illustrate the myriad problems facing our education system. And if it requires getting a little dirty and gross to expose the problems, so be it. But we as a country cannot afford to have such destructive people teaching and influencing our children.
Georgia Professors Bribe Students to Lobby Legislators
Why would GALEO (Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials), which lobbies against enforcement of immigration laws, thank “students” and “educators” (among others) for defeating Georgia bills restricting illegal aliens? Their April 9 newsletter joyfully announces in a headline “ZERO anti-immigrant [sic] legislation from GA passed.”
Well, it’s because educators, public school teachers, and professors at Georgia public colleges and universities used their positions to influence students and engaged in lobbying efforts. At the Georgia State University College of Education, during a February 4 “Teach-In,” ostensibly to discuss curricula banned in Arizona, one of those professors pledged to give her students “extra points” for bringing in letters to legislators opposing bills that would enforce immigration laws—therefore bribing students with grades.
You can see the video of Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Education at Georgia State University, making this pledge on my website Dissident Prof here.
On March 19, I testified about this at a House committee hearing on SB 458, a bill that “would have streamlined the process by which public benefits are administered and ended the official acceptance of undocumented foreign passports from illegal aliens as useable ID in Georgia,” according to D.A. King, president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, a group that advocates for enforcement of immigration laws. At the hearing, one of the many members of the illegal alien lobby present yelled out that she had been at the Teach-In and that I was lying. Chairman Rich Golick replied to her, “We’re not engaging in a dialogue here. . . . We’re not shouting out. That’s not the way the system works here.” It happens towards the end of the eight-minute testimony here.
You can also hear Golick call this information an “extremely disturbing reality” and promise to “explore that on a different track.”
GALEO focused on education benefits and cast SB 458, as “Georgia's Anti-DREAM Act,” because it “would have placed Georgia in the extreme position of being one of three states in the nation that deny access to higher education to undocumented students.” That’s the way the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported it too.
Sponsor Barry Loudermilk’s explanation—made with exceeding logic and patience during debate—however, was all but ignored. The bill was really about public benefits for illegal aliens and the type of documentation needed. PUBLIC education—at public universities—is a public benefit; under the bill, Georgia would enforce federal law and deny illegal aliens access to public universities. One of the points Loudermilk kept repeating, as opponent after opponent played the “children just wanting education” pity card, was that SB 458 did not prohibit access to PRIVATE colleges. But for GALEO higher education is synonymous with public higher education, one that they believe illegal aliens have a right to enjoy.
By the fortieth and last day of the session the by then toxic provision about higher education benefits would have been struck out had the bill been allowed to go to the House floor.
The Speaker of the House, David Ralston, however, did not call the bill up for a vote. There was a “skyrocket high majority” of votes in both houses to pass the bill, according to King. In his latest newsletter, King blames Governor Nathan Deal as the “root cause” for defeat.
But the negative cast on the bill, as affecting innocent children, was promoted by employees of the University System of Georgia, in the classroom and at the “Teach-In,” where the dean of the College of Education opened the day’s events with remarks in Spanish. D.A. King is used to seeing students and educators pack hearing rooms and dominate testimony. He calls most American universities “de facto training camps for future anti-enforcement radicals.”
The Board of Regents has been on the side of admitting illegal aliens to Georgia public universities. Chancellor Hank Huckaby testified AGAINST SB 458 on March 19, 2012. But in 2011, before he was appointed to the position by Governor Nathan Deal--when he was REPRESENTATIVE Huckaby--he voted FOR a similar bill, HB 59. One of the activists at the Teach-In bragged that legislators had “listened” to the many students and educators and tabled HB 59. According to King, at that earlier hearing opponents of HB 59 were allowed to take up far more than their allotted three minutes to speak; the chair, Carl Rogers, would not allow a vote, when it was clear that the bill had the votes to pass out of committee.
Why SB 458 failed in the GOP-controlled Georgia Capitol is somewhat of a mystery, although King said he has some theories about why the bill was refused a House vote.
What is not a mystery is that professors and administrators are using public facilities and using students for their own political lobbying purposes.
In addition to revisiting this immigration bill during the next session, legislators need to examine the corruption in education. The balance of power needs to be restored, back to the people who pay for the public institutions.
Observing the contrasting school experiences of the panellists on last week’s episode of Insight, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Australian ideal of a ‘fair go’ for all was all self-deception and no self-realisation.
While non-selective public schools are apparently under-resourced and blighted by underachievement, private schools and selective public schools seem to provide supportive and aspirational educational environments conducive to academic excellence.
Perceptions aside, Australia actually remains one of the most socially mobile countries in the developed world, according to a 2010 OECD report. This is consistent with a 2011 Smith Family study, which found that 29% of Australians whose father had stayed at school until Year 10 or less obtained a university degree.
Despite the relatively high level of social mobility, Australian children often go on to reproduce the socio-economic environments into which they are born. The same Smith Family report also found that 53.7% of the children with fathers who were managers and professionals become managers and professionals themselves, compared with only 27.9% of those whose fathers were operators, drivers and labourers.
However, a degree of social immobility is not necessarily cause for concern about economic opportunity. This is because social mobility is never exclusively a function of the opportunities offered by society; the values and aspirations of individuals are also crucial.
Assuming that the same material opportunities existed, a society of tiger mothers of the Amy Chau variety (‘Study hard, do well and do not date or drink’) would produce very different socio-economic outcomes from a society of Alfred Doolittles (Eliza Doolittle’s feckless father in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion).
Unsurprisingly, social capital often trumps economic capital when it comes to producing a healthy, meritocratic society. As the testimony of the students on Insight made clear, academic achievement is in large part the result of the values and aspirations of fellow students, parents and teachers, and not simply a product of the number of dollars spent on schooling.
While an austere regime of constant study and no play might seem all too onerous for children and parents alike, an emphasis on self-realisation and responsibility is arguably the best way of speeding up our social escalator.
The economy remains slow, recovering from the recession at an unusually low rate, partly due to economically-harmful Obama administration policies. “U.S. stocks fell, dragging the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lower . . . after employers added fewer jobs than forecast in March,” reports Bloomberg News. As one columnist notes, “Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be well over 11%.”
Under the Obama administration, the Education Department has poured increasing amounts of financial aid into law schools, while seeking to cut vocational education needed to train certain kinds of skilled factory workers who are in short supply, impeding the expansion of factory operations that would also provide jobs to many unskilled workers. As the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal notes, “Law students . . . are treated generously as future professionals and able to borrow, with virtually no cap, significantly more money than undergrads. . . For several decades, most higher education loans were made by private lenders with the federal government providing guarantees against loss—and, in some cases, interest rate subsidies.”
The leftist law professors who dominate many law schools openly teach law students a contempt for property rights, the rule of law, and the free-market system, telling them that a lawyer’s role is to be “either a social engineer or a parasite on society.” Many law schools are more like incubators of evil than centers of learning.
Based on my experience as a graduate of Harvard Law School, much of what law schools teach their students is useless drivel, as some law professors themselves have conceded. Imagine how much more economic growth there could be if taxpayers no longer subsidized law schools and their indoctrination of students in left-wing group-think. (Since many law schools fail to teach much in the way of practical skills, there is also no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam, a requirement that merely enables law schools to jack up tuition.) The lawsuits and social engineering promoted by left-wing law professors harm economic growth.
Cutting subsidies to law schools would allow the government to either reduce the skyrocketing budget deficit, or redirect the money thereby saved to more productive uses, like vocational education. As The Washington Post has noted, as senior skilled factory workers are retiring, no one is taking their place, since “many of the younger workers who might have taken their place have avoided the manufacturing sector because of the . . . stigma of factory work.” Our government’s prejudice against manufacturing and in favor of white-collar college degrees is causing serious harm to our economy. As the Post observes, “A recent report by Deloitte for the Manufacturing Institute, based on a survey of manufacturers, found that as many as 600,000 jobs are going unfilled.” Meanwhile, millions of people are unemployed, many of them people with economically useless college degrees in politically correct majors that teach few useful skills.
Yet the Obama administration wants to slash useful vocational education that leads to high-paying blue-collar jobs, even as it seeks to increase wasteful education spending that has fueled massive administrative bloat and enormous college bureaucracies. As The New York Times notes, President Obama “aims to shrink the small amount of federal spending for vocational training in public high schools and community colleges. . .The administration has proposed a 20 percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budget for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent.”
Meanwhile, universities continue to expand their bureaucracies to include more duplicative jobs for campus administrators and left-wing apparatchiki. There are now “more administrators than teachers” at many colleges. One university that claims to have cut spending “to the bone” is expanding its huge bureaucracy even further, creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.”
As Heather Mac Donald notes, that position augments the university’s “already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.”
Below you will find the sort of rage-filled rant that comes from academics who have not shown academic excellence. The "publish or perish" rule is a demanding one (though I never found it so) but a more objective way of assessing intellectual excellence has yet to be found. And if a university is not about intellectual excellence, what is it about?
The claim below that intellectual productivity is "philistine" shows by itself what a confused thinker the author is. He sounds like one of the "Theorists" who tend to infest English Departments these days.
It is certainly true that some good teachers are inactive in research but they should not be in a research-intensive institution. You can be good at both research and teaching and a university is right to demand that
How to assess academic productivity? At Sydney University, the question couldn't be more relevant: in November, management announced that it had made a serious budgetary mistake and would slash underperforming staff in order to pursue IT and building improvements. Although officially, research is only 40 per cent of academics' responsibilities, management retrospectively introduced a new performance test, just to purge staff. Anyone who hadn't published at least four articles in less than three years was threatened. This basic violation of natural justice was astonishing, particularly from managers who continually profess their commitment to high-minded, progressive values.
Like other workplaces, universities have performance management processes. These, not redundancy, are the answer to underperformance. But how to respond to a failure of management?
The cuts have provoked an outcry. With its simplistic measures, how will Sydney maintain research quality, when the finest researchers couldn't possibly teach and publish consistently at the rate administrators demand? How can management sack staff with classrooms already so crowded?
Sydney's administrators have not been so different from their counterparts elsewhere. Administrators everywhere are trying to shrink their already overstretched academic workforces. Universities, apparently, just don't need academics.
Talk of values such as productivity serves to justify managers' failure to promote the conditions necessary for universities to function. Local managerialism is the polar opposite of world's best practice - such as in the US Ivy League - and shows parallels with the disastrous financialisation of the global economy.
University technocrats are the equivalent of the regulators whose negligence caused the GFC. Just as markets favoured complex financial instruments far removed from commodities, so too universities have been alienated from their basic rationale by an ascendancy of executives hostile to the principles that should govern academic communities: respect for students and staff; research unfettered by philistine "productivity" requirements; security of academic tenure; uncasualised labour; low student-staff ratios. These are the ways to guarantee academic "productivity", rather than its bureaucratic substitutes.
It is the managers who are unproductive. Systemic managerial failures are compromising quality.
MUSIC in schools is being sacrificed in the push to improve literacy and numeracy, but a major study shows its importance in improving students' results and attendance.
The Song Room, which funds music programs for schoolchildren, said students were falling behind despite a bigger focus on literacy and numeracy.
And a leading Hobart music teacher said fewer schools were investing in music, despite long-term knowledge that primary schoolchildren in particular benefited from specialised music teaching.
The Song Room report said children who had done its programs had higher academic grades, gained the equivalent of one year in literacy and reading results in NAPLAN scores, and had better relationships with teachers.
"The results show students taking part attend school more often, become more engaged with their studies and schooling and become happier, more well-rounded students," said co-author Professor Brian Caldwell.
Sandy Bay music teacher Annette Stilwell said music was offered less and less as part of school studies.
"The very sad thing is that they don't spend the money in the primary schools," she said. "It's especially important in the little ones. We know it helps their concentration, memory and time management skills.
"Everybody benefits but in particular in primary school, and it should be specialised music teaching."
Ms Stilwell said singing was cheap to teach but also had benefits.
"People talk about the high results in Asian students, and they neglect to mention they have intensive music classes in all their primary classes," she said.
The Song Room offers programs mainly to children who would not otherwise have the opportunity, with the possibility of some this year in Tasmania.
Chief executive Caroline Aebersold said the study showed music and art helped bridge the huge disparities in educational achievement for students from low socio-economic, indigenous or non-English-speaking backgrounds.
National report finds too few in state prepared to meet greater expectations
Kindergarten used to be considered a place kids learned how to learn, with simple lessons on how to sit still and recognize shapes and colors.
Today, by age 5, they’re expected to count to 100, know whether shapes are two- or three-dimensional, and read most pronouns, according to state standards. In Tennessee, too many are showing up without those skills, causing alarm for early education officials as the state moves its curriculum forward in leaps.
A report released today by the National Institute for Early Education Research says state-funded pre-kindergarten does well at instilling those skills, but only 21 percent of Tennessee’s 4-year-olds are enrolled. In Florida and Oklahoma, the figure is more than 73 percent.
For Tennessee children who can get in, those classes are among the best in the nation, the curriculum hitting nine of 10 nationally accepted benchmarks. The problem is the number of children who don’t qualify — and don’t get the prerequisites in private programs or at home.
The institute estimates a third of children nationwide arrive at kindergarten unprepared, although the number can be tough to measure. It’s a figure U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called “staggering.”
“The goal for the country is to get that down to zero absolutely as fast as we can,” Duncan told The Tennessean last week.
Some state changes are under way, such as evaluating teachers in early grades, adding depth to the curriculum and making sure those who work with children ages birth to 5 have more rigorous standards based on that new curriculum. The Early Childhood Advisory Council is working on a more encompassing definition of kindergarten readiness and hopes that, as the state rebounds financially, lawmakers will pump more funds into pre-K programs.
Lindsay Ferrier, a blogger for cafemom.com, noticed when her daughter Gigi entered Harpeth Valley Elementary in Bellevue two years ago that some children were ahead of the pack.
She realized they had a common factor: They had gone through preschool and learned to write their name, knew the alphabet and could read a little.
So as her son Jack, 4, prepares to enter kindergarten at the same school this fall, she hasn’t home-schooled him as she did Gigi, but enrolled him in preschool part time. She and Jack do workbooks and skill-building activities at home, too. That way, he will be both socially and academically ready, she said.
“Sitting in a class for seven hours is a challenge when you are away from your loved ones … and then you throw in these new standards,” she said. “It’s tough if your child doesn’t have those basics down.”
No uniform testing
It’s difficult to measure kindergarten readiness because the state has no formal definition of what that is and because school districts use different ways to test 5-year-olds’ skills. The tests even vary from school to school within districts.
In Metro Nashville, the number of kindergarten students who are behind could be more than 35 percent, officials say. Depending on the school, students entering kindergarten are either simply screened for delays or given a fuller assessment to see whether they know shapes and patterns, are able to share toys or can recite the alphabet.
Metro’s leadership and learning department is interested in moving to a common kindergarten test.
“It has been several years since we were using the Brigance Screens (readiness test) districtwide,” said Paul Changas, Metro’s executive director of research, assessment and evaluation. “Our numbers were around 33 percent to 35 percent of students being flagged at risk in terms of kindergarten readiness at that time, and I would expect it to be a little higher now with the higher numbers of economically disadvantaged and non-English background we serve.”
Some Middle Tennessee parents elsewhere say they’ve already observed a change in the pace of kindergarten.
Stewarts Creek Elementary kindergarten parent Yasmine Mukahal of Smyrna said she didn’t realize that kindergarten had advanced so much until she enrolled her daughter, Zeina, this school year. Zeina is required to cut out words from her mother’s Us Weekly and Redbook magazines to form sentences and distinguish whether a book is based on real events or the creative mind.
“You think kindergarten is coloring and fun, but no, this is hard-core work,” Yasmine Mukahal said. “She comes home with homework every night except on Fridays.”
New standards
Much of the push comes from the new Common Core Standards being adopted by 48 states. It will cost Tennessee at least $2.95 million in federal grant money to implement the curriculum, throwing out state content that is no longer vital for college readiness to focus more heavily on lessons that are.
Soon, Tennessee will be tested on the same standards as much of the nation — tests that require students to think critically and apply what they’ve learned to real-life situations.
Some schools already voluntarily adopted Common Core in their K-2 classrooms, and spring Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program tests for students in grades 3-8 will include sample questions based on the new standards that let education leaders know how far behind students are.
The math curriculum starts being phased in next school year. All grades will use the curriculum for math and reading by 2013-14, with new standardized tests by 2014-15.
Under the new Common Core kindergarten standards, children are asked to count to 100 by ones and tens; identify the front cover and title page of a book; and use a combination of drawing, verbal cues and writing to narrate an event in sequence and give a reaction to what happened.
It would be easier to get all kids doing that with better access to pre-K programs.
Decreased funding
Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, an advocacy group for better and more widely available pre-K programs, said 22 states, including Tennessee, increased enrollment in the past decade.
The institute’s report out today, The State of Pre-School 2011, looked at access, funding and quality of state pre-K programs as well as 10-year trends.
Although enrollment increased, state funds collectively decreased by almost $60 million in 2010-11, and per-child spending declined $145 from the previous year.
“Our key finding is that preschool expansion over the past decade garnered great attention, but something else happened that got less notice: Funding slipped,” Barnett said. “That means we’ve taken a giant step backward as a nation.”
Tennessee spends, on average, $4,620 per child per year compared with $4,151 on average nationally and served 21 percent of the 4-year-old population, up from 2 percent a decade ago when state-funded pre-K was piloted. The national average is 28 percent.
Bobbi Lussier, the state Department of Education’s assistant commissioner of special populations, says funding has stayed steady. Tennessee pays for pre-K for only its low-income 4-year-olds to close achievement gaps. A few states have pre-K for all 4-year-olds, while 11 states have no funded programs.
“I think the feeling is, once our state recovers economically, that we need to really look at expanding the programs to serve more children,” Lussier said.
Robertson, Polk and Bedford counties have 60-70 students each who qualify but can’t get in because there are no empty seats, she said.
Local school districts fund some of their own pre-K programs, and there are federally funded Head Start programs plus church-run and private schools offering pre-K curriculum. It’s up to parents to be sure the schools aren’t providing only day care but also the proper academic preparation.
An impact at home
Lussier and Linda DePriest, Metro’s assistant superintendent for instructional support, said parents can make a huge learning impact at home in their children’s early years, even if they can’t get them into a pre-K program.
Parents can ensure their children have rich experiences simply by taking a walk and counting things such as leaves on a tree or buds on a flower. Reading to children daily and then asking them questions about a story and characters and just talking to children also can be powerful.
“It’s exposing them to print and developing their listening skills, which tie in well when they go to school,” DePriest said. “It helps them listen and develop vocabulary.”
NJ Middle School Principal Who Banned Hugging Resigns
Last month, The Blaze reported about Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School Principal Tyler Blackmore’s decision that his school would become a “no hugging” zone. As you may recall, the reasoning behind the ban on student embraces was centered upon the allegation that there were some “incidents of unsuitable physical interactions.”
Now, it seems the principal is moving on — literally. On April 5, Blackmore filed his resignation from Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School, where he had worked since July 2010. In an interview with the Asbury Park Press, School Board President Charles Kenny said that the resignation was a personnel matter and the reasons behind it were confidential. The Press recaps last month’s events:
"On March 22, Blackmore told students at the middle school that they were in a “no-hugging school.” District officials came to Blackmore’s support at the time, with Superintendent David M. Healy releasing a statement that night saying the announcement was intended to address incidents of “unsuitable physical interactions between students.”
“There is no policy specific to hugging, and we have not, nor will we be, suspending students for hugging,” Healy said in the statement, adding that the Board of Education does have policies in place to address bullying, inappropriate relationships and inappropriate conduct.
At a Board of Education meeting on March 26, Kenny explained the principal’s controversial “no hugging policy” and maintained that it was “not at all intended to prohibit a passing embrace.”
“Some students had prolonged, overly physical contact that (Blackmore) considered inappropriate for the middle school,” Kenny said at the time.
There is no indication that the hugging controversy was at the center of his decision to leave the school.
This week’s outrageous claims have revealed just how reactionary and self-serving the unions are.
It was when the union spokesman justified long school holidays on the grounds that teaching is the “most stressful profession in the country” that the presenter Evan Davis’s eyebrows hit the roof. I was sitting in the Today studio, having been invited on to defend the pioneering head teachers who have shortened their summer holiday to combat their pupils’ loss of learning between July and September. Kevin Courtney, the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, started by arguing that there was no academic evidence for the idea, which was rubbish but at least sounded reasonable. But he lost all sympathy when he argued that teachers needed long holidays for “essential relaxation”.
Evan Davis has an economist’s suspicion of humbug. He asked, in exasperation: “Are you ever, at the NUT, really welcoming of any kind of experimentation, change, something ambitious and different, thinking outside the box when it comes to teaching?” I simply added that the unions are wrong to describe the notion of shorter summer holidays as a government conspiracy against teachers. In fact, teachers themselves have come up with this new thinking. Ministers have latterly (and rightly) given them support. It is the NUT that wants to impose its thinking on schools, in this case by a blanket veto on change.
In truth the teaching unions have done us a great service at their recent conferences by revealing just how reactionary and self-serving their agenda is. We don’t need to dwell on the fact that the NUT conference is heavily attended by the Socialist Workers Party, which speaks for a tiny handful of voters on the extreme Left who want to change the government via a workers’ revolution rather than a democratic election. We can pass over the fact that NUT delegates once forced David Blunkett, then Labour education secretary, to take refuge in a room for 30 minutes after he committed the heinous crime (in their eyes) of condemning teachers’ strikes and promising to sack bad teachers and shut failing schools. These things scarcely matter, when compared to their actual demands in regard to education and their own privileges.
Two unions have now called strike action over the Government’s freeze of teachers’ pay and the requirement for teachers to pay higher contributions towards their pensions. Both of these changes are entirely reasonable. On one estimate, a private sector worker needs to build up a pension pot of £300,000 in order to obtain the average teachers’ pension. It used to be said that public sector workers’ higher retirement benefits were a compensation for lower pay, but nowadays public sector pay has more than caught up with the private sector, as Lord Hutton’s review found. A teacher on the average salary will now have to pay a mere £10 a month more towards their pension. Most private sector workers will be amazed that teachers will strike over such a slight change to what are very generous terms and conditions.
They will also be surprised by the NUT’s vehement opposition to the basic idea that schools should measure the performance of their teachers and expect improvement. For the union this is (again) a cause of “stress” which “leaves teachers feeling overwhelmed by the constant pressure”, as one of this year’s conference motions put it. Inspectors sometimes dropped in on classrooms “unannounced”, complained a motion, when clearly this is the best way that inspections can capture the true performance of the teacher. This is not all. As Damian Hinds MP pointed out yesterday, the teaching unions argue against the testing of children, at all ages, just as much as they do against the testing of teachers.
In fact, staff at the best schools – both state and private – understand that teaching is a skill that can be learnt and developed. Schools such as David Young Community Academy in Leeds have even drawn up their own training framework, grounded in a practical understanding of what works in teaching day-to-day and based on a passionate commitment to improvement. This vision of good education seems to be the polar opposite of that of the NUT.
The question for the Government is how to respond to the unions’ demands. So far it has sought compromise. For example, most schools still operate under national terms and conditions (and the regional pay-setting proposed by the Chancellor is not a fantastic improvement) and a national curriculum, which the Department of Education is refreshing this year. These ideas are entirely consistent with the NUT’s worldview – nationalised, top-down, one-size-fits-all. That should give ministers pause for thought. There is still time in this parliament to do something radical. One idea would be to go beyond regional pay, and implement local pay-setting in every school, as if every school were an academy. It would not be supported by the unions – but that should hardly be ministers’ first concern.
The NUT’s formal motion in favour of long summer holidays ended as follows: there is a “misconception that more teaching automatically leads to more learning”. It has come to something when a teaching union questions the value of teaching itself. The unions’ ideas on education are dangerous, damaging and unrepresentative of the good practice in many state schools. When they sit down with the unions in future, ministers can afford to be a little tougher in their negotiations.
Staggering law school debts will lead to exploding debt disaster for graduates and taxpayers
Federal financial aid policies have encouraged law students to borrow increasing amounts to attend law school, despite the glut of lawyers (oddly, government policies encourage more people to go to law school, driving up law school tuition, even as the Obama administration seeks to cut back on vocational education aimed at training the skilled blue-collar workers who are in desperately short supply in much of the country). The result, says law professor Brian Tamanaha, is a “Quickly Exploding Law Graduate Debt Disaster” in which most recent graduates of many law schools will never be able to pay off their staggering student loan debt. At the liberal Balkinization blog, Tamanaha notes that the average student has over $100,000 in debt just from law school at many schools:
This year 17 law schools are above $135,000. Last year the highest average debt among graduates was $145,621 (Cal. Western); this year the highest average debt is $165,178 (John Marshall). Below are the 20 schools with the highest average law school debt among graduates (these figures do not include undergraduate debt).
John Marshall Chicago $165,178 California Western $153,145 Thomas Jefferson $153,006 American $151,318 New York Law School $146,230 Phoenix $145,357 Southwestern $142,606 Catholic (DC) $142,222 Northwestern $139,101 Pace University $139,007 Whittier $138,961 Atlanta’s John Marshall $138,819 Pacific (McGeorge) $138,267 St. Thomas (FL) $137,721 Univ. San Francisco $137,234 Vermont Law School $136,089 Golden Gate $135,645 Florida Coastal $134,355 Stetson $133,082 Syracuse $132,993
What’s remarkable is that the majority of graduates from these law schools–with the exception of Northwestern–do not obtain jobs with salaries sufficient to make the monthly loan payments due on the average debt. At some of these schools 90% or more of graduates with debt do not earn enough to make the loan payments on this level of debt (not all indebted students will carry the average debt). . .
Thousands of 2011 law graduates across the country will not earn enough to manage the debt they incurred to obtain their law degree. . .
This financial insanity will not stop until significant changes are made to the federal student loan program.
As one commenter noted earlier, federal financial aid and student loans have driven up law school tuition and student loan debt: “education loans . . . often have implicit government guarantees,” even those not explicitly backed by the government. As a result, “like the GSE’s, the supply of credit for education loans has continued to expand. So in a way colleges and universities, public and private have been in a bubble akin to the housing bubble. The benefits to the institutions are irresistible and so there is no way they will try to reign in costs and thus tuition. Not as long as students are willing and able to borrow.”
When the bubble pops, taxpayers will be on the hook for countless billions of dollars (many graduates already are not repaying their student loans). “Why is college so expensive? A new study points to a disconcerting culprit: financial aid,” notes Paul Kix on page K1 of the March 25 Boston Globe. I and professors and education experts commented earlier on that study at Minding the Campus. Other studies also have concluded that increased federal financial aid, such as student loans, drives up college tuition, and you can find links to some of them here.
As the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal notes, “Law students . . . are treated generously as future professionals and able to borrow, with virtually no cap, significantly more money than undergrads. . . For several decades, most higher education loans were made by private lenders with the federal government providing guarantees against loss—and, in some cases, interest rate subsidies.” As I explained earlier, cutting law school subsidies would help the economy. Links to additional commentary about the high cost of law school can be found here.
When law school graduates are unable to pay off their student loans, lenders will come after their elderly parents who co-signed for the loans. As the Washington Post notes, “Americans 60 and older still owe about $36 billion in student loans . . . Many have co-signed for loans with their children or grandchildren to help them afford ballooning tuition.”
Portland State University Offering ‘Revolutionary Marxism’ Course — And Wait Until You See the Syllabus
Portland State University is offering a number of controversial courses this semester, the likes of which include “Revolutionary Marxism: Theory and Practice,“ and ”Art Within Activism”
The “Revolutionary Marxism” course is introduced in what appears to be the syllabus:
"The onset of the Arab Spring, revolts in European capitals against austerity, and the emergence of Occupy Wall Street here in the US have made the need for understanding revolutionary political theories [more] urgent than ever.
This course is designed to introduce students to the basic concepts of Marxist thought with an emphasis on the practical applications of Marxist Theory in local political struggle. We will focus on four major areas throughout the semester, including the Fundamentals of Marxist Theory, Marxism and Oppression, Revolutionary Practice, and The Future of Socialism. In exploring these four areas of focus, the course will compare and contrast revolutionary Marxism to Stalinism, reformist socialism, leading academic interpretations of Marxism, as well as other radical leftist ideologies."
The course’s instructors, Grant Booth and Wael Elasady, are both admitted socialists. They define the course’s goals as:
1. Students will learn the fundamentals of Marxist theory
2. Students will apply a Marxist analysis to current events
3. Students will apply Marxist theory to local political and community organizing
Moreover, students will seemingly be required to forge a “community connection” with a local community/political organization from a specified list. Some of the “approved” organizations include: Occupy PSU, Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights, Occupy Portland, Portland Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions Coalition (BDS), Jobs with Justice, and the May Day Coalition.
Similarly, the “Art Within Activism” course is described:
"Rediscover your radical imagination! This course will focus on creating art within Portland-based activist initiatives, such as marches, actions, and causes different grassroots community groups are working on, like the Occupy and Decolonize movements. We will experiment with applying diverse mediums—graphic design, social practice, printmaking, and sculpture—to actions seeking to resolve diverse problems—hegemony, biodiversity loss, immigrant detention, animal exploitation, debt, insufficient healthcare, etc."
The controversial courses are part of the Chiron Studies program, where qualified students can “propose and instruct official, for credit classes” with the university.
The Blaze attempted to contact numerous officials in charge of approving the courses, in addition to Wael Elasady (who teaches the “Revolutionary Marxism” course), in order to confirm the course details, but we did not hear back.
That leaves a lot of unanswered questions, such as: Why is the taxpayer helping pay for these courses at a public university? With socialist professors and mandated participation with leftist groups, is the other side being presented at all?
Moreover, would Portland State University allow a “Limited Government: Theory and Practice“ course where students were forced to make a ”connection” with Tea Partiers and the NRA?
UPDATE: Wael Elasady, one of the professors of “Revolutionary Marxism: Theory and Practice,“ returned our call and wanted to clarify that students are free to ”apply a Marxist perspective” to any local community/political organization; the list of organizations on the syllabus are simply pre-approved.
London Metropolitan University mulls alcohol ban for 'conservative Muslim students'
A London University may become the first in the country to ban alcohol from part of its campus to attract more Muslim students, its Vice Chancellor has said.
London Metropolitan University is considering banning the sale of alcohol from some parts of the campus because a "high percentage" of students consider drinking "immoral," Prof Malcolm Gillies said.
One-fifth of the University's students are Muslim, and of those the majority are women. It is an issue of "cultural sensitivity" to provide drink-free areas, Prof Gillies told a conference, adding he was "not a great fan of alchol on campus".
Do you think London Met should ban alcohol at sites around campus? No - It is wrong to pander to an extreme viewNo - It would discriminate against those who do drink alcoholYes - It is right to make Muslim students feel comfortableYes - Students drink far too much and this might encourage them to drink less
"It's a negative experience - in fact an immoral experience - for a high percentage of our students," he said.
He went on: "Many of our students do come from backgrounds where they actually look on [drinking] as a negative. And given that around our campuses you have at least half a dozen pubs within 200m, I can't see there is such a pressing reason to be cross-subsidising a student activity which is essentially the selling of alcohol."
"Because there's no majority ethnic group, I think it [selling alcohol] is playing to particular parts of our society much more [than to others]".
Professor Gillies said the University was "much more cautious" about the portrayal of sex on campus than universities had been 30 or 40 years ago, the Times Higher Education reported.
Many of its female Muslim students "can only really go to university within four miles of home and have to be delivered and picked up by a close male relative", he said.
"Now we've got a younger generation that are often exceedingly conservative, and we need to be much more cautious about [sex] too.
"Their student experience is going to be different from someone gorging out in the Chocoholics Society or someone who is there to have a...libidinous time."
London Metropolitan University was founded in 2002. It has 30,000 students from 190 countries.
The common assumption among policymakers is that, in order to maintain its higher living standards against emerging markets competition, the United States must invest more in higher education. To achieve this, the government has instituted a massive student loan guarantee program, with over $1 trillion outstanding and an average of $25,000 in debt for every graduating student with debt. Yet millions of students continue to graduate with degrees that have no obvious real-world benefits. There’s a disconnect here, and it is beginning to appear that the current U.S. obsession with higher education is misguided.
The traditional idea of higher education was to train the literate for the Church, whether Catholic, Episcopalian or other Protestant. However a hundred years ago, for the elite on both sides of the Atlantic, a very different approach had been devised. This was best illustrated in Evelyn Waugh’s immortal “Brideshead Revisited” in which the protagonist Lord Sebastian Flyte wanders round Oxford with a teddy bear, drinking champagne, eating quail’s eggs and occasionally throwing up onto other students’ carpets. Americans will scoff at this depiction, but really the Harvard of Theodore Roosevelt was not very different, except in that it involved the occasional life-threatening game of football.
Flyte’s Oxford was not intended to train him for real life, it was intended as a highly enjoyable 3- or 4- year holiday before real life intruded. For the middle classes whose fathers were not Marquesses – a majority at Oxford even in Flyte’s time; there are only 34 Marquesses – the system applied a gloss of social polish and connections that was useful in later life, but did not impart more than a modicum of knowledge. Certainly the education provided was not expected to involve a huge amount of work, or to be useful in a subsequent career.
This changed after 1945 in the United States and from around 1960 in Britain, as a higher percentage of the population experienced a college education (in the U.S. often financed by the post-World War II “G.I. Bill” and in Britain essentially free, with only a modest means-tested contribution, under the 1944 Education Act.) The increased access of the masses to college education produced a greater competitiveness at the top colleges, so that when I went to Cambridge in 1968-71 access was more competitive and more work was expected from students than had been the case thirty years earlier.
Even then however access to top colleges was less competitive than it is today. While I was expected to have a reasonable mastery of Latin in the entrance examination there were no probing “essays” in the application, and my interview at Trinity College consisted of a most enjoyable discussion about the career of the cricketer Jack Hobbs. (I aced it by remembering that he amassed 197 first-class centuries not 198, with the two scored on the unofficial India tour of 1925-26 not counting. Presumably as I was to study Mathematics such statistical precision was thought valuable!)
Currently, not only are almost all students expected to get a college degree, but those of superior abilities are expected to carry on for a Masters’ degree, a PhD, or two Masters’ degrees, with the second being in business, law or journalism, according to the student’s future activity. The excessive credentialism of the U.S. system was exemplified at a medical conference I attended recently, where the attendees were surprised how many Chinese doctors were prepared to engage in primary medicine, but then explained patronizingly that many Chinese doctors had only an undergraduate degree. It occurred to me at that point that U.S. medical costs could be sharply reduced and quality improved if primary physicians, the principal point of contact with most patients, could be qualified in four years instead of ten.
Similarly from the 1890s, the American Bar Association began to press states to require that lawyers have attended not only an undergraduate program but a three-year law school in order to pass the state bar exam; currently all states but California, Vermont, Virginia and Washington require this. As with doctors, the cost of legal services could be drastically reduced by eliminating this requirement of no less than seven years of college study to enter what is in most cases a fairly intellectually undemanding profession.
The rising tide of credentialism may however have peaked, for two reasons: the excessive cost of college education and its diminishing quality. First, there is considerable evidence that finance availability is pushing up college costs. As college funding has become more readily available, it has reduced the financial pressure on colleges, since few of their students are today paying their way from part-time jobs and parent cash flow. Huge endowments in the Ivy League, which allow those elite colleges to provide full scholarships for students, focus the competition between colleges ever more closely on league table “prestige” rather than costs.
Within the colleges themselves the ranks of college administrators have exploded (as is also the case in the medical profession, equally insulated from market forces). So have their earnings – according to the New York Times, in the decade between the 1999-2000 and 2009-10 college years, the average college president’s pay at the 50 wealthiest universities increased by 75%, to $876,792, while their average professorial pay increased by only 14%, to $179,970. (Average college tuition costs increased by 65% and consumer prices by 31% during that decade.) That’s precisely the opposite of what you’d want to happen, if you were concerned about college productivity and cost.
For the very brightest students, or those from really good schools, the appeal of the Ivy League may remain overwhelming. The knowledge that only four years’ moderate attention to politically correct drivel will get you a piece of paper that more or less guarantees you a six-figure salary thereafter is for most rational kids a very good reason to attend an Ivy League college and major in one of the softer arts or social sciences subjects.
For those of a mathematical, scientific or technological bent, however, the Ivy League is much less attractive; you will have to work much harder, and when you graduate you will be subjected to competition from innumerable Third World students on H1B visas, making the average salary for even Ivy League science graduates far below those available in law or medicine. What’s more most undergraduate courses in science are now so far from the technological cutting edge that the student will have to waste several more years in a Masters program before arriving at a point where he is actually useful to potential employers.
For these science-oriented students, or for others of high intelligence with an independent bent, the Internet has opened a new opportunity. Many college courses are now available online, either for free or for a small fraction of the $5,000 they would cost as part of private college major. For example, I recently came across the 24 video lectures comprising the Yale course on Game Theory, a relatively new area of economics that I wish I understood properly.
For students with initiative this brings the possibility of obtaining a college education through Internet courses, perhaps at a higher level than that of second-tier colleges and certainly at a far lower cost. This would enable them to avoid the rigidity of many college degree programs, which include requirements for all kinds of irrelevant basic level courses taught by teaching assistants in classes of 300. Students who don’t like to waste their time will thus welcome the opportunity to obtain an education consisting only of courses that are directly useful, plus some sidelines that are intellectually fascinating or culturally enriching.
As has been well advertized, the Internet billionaire Peter Thiel has been encouraging this trend, providing $100,000 fellowships to students who drop out of college and start a small business. That doesn’t necessarily provide the students concerned with an education, and it raises the question of what they will do for a living if their start-ups don’t work, as inevitably many won’t if recession intervenes. However the website uncollege.org, run by Thiel Fellow Dale Stephens, provides resources to those wishing to educate themselves, without necessarily becoming tech entrepreneurs. Of course many such educations will be incomplete, leaving the students concerned culturally deprived, but a conventional degree in computer science or sociology isn’t what our parents would have called a proper education, either!
Students who self-educate will find it difficult to get jobs in large companies or the federal government, which will remain wedded to possession of the right pieces of paper. For many students with low self-confidence, this may be a decisive factor; even if they cannot get into Yale, the degree from a second-tier college will give them much greater job security than if they had self-educated. However students with high levels of ability and self-confidence will take their chances; there are enough small companies and entrepreneurial opportunities around that securing a steady desk job with GE or the federal government may not seem all that attractive.
The current credentialism model faces another problem: the credentials go out of date. With longer lifespans and inadequate social security systems, this is an increasingly serious defect. For liberal arts majors, the need to re-train may not be extreme. However for majors in any technical subject, including many of the social sciences and business, educations obtained 30 or even 40 years ago may have become utterly useless. Moreover even large companies have considerably shorter lifespans than in past generations and their demise generates involuntary workforce churn. Thus many will find themselves needing to retrain at the age of 45 or 50 in order to enter a different field, or simply in order to make themselves competitive again in their own field. 4-year degrees or even 2-year Masters programs will be impossibly expensive for such people, who generally will have families and mortgages to support. Again, the availability of self-education over the Internet will offer them new possibilities, far more convenient than overpriced executive education programs.
From the above, the market share of conventional four year colleges is likely to go into sharp decline in the years ahead. Provided policymakers have the sense to stop subsidizing student loans with state guarantees and special provisions to survive bankruptcy, the banks will become much less willing to encourage the young and feckless to over-extend themselves in this way. Students will once again exert pressure on colleges to reduce their fees, and will choose cheaper state schools and programs that allow them to work their way through college.
They are government funded but under control by community groups rather than local authorities
Twenty-two of the 24 Free Schools which opened last September responded to a Department for Education (DfE) survey, with 19 reporting being over-subscribed for the coming school year starting this September.
On average, primary Free Schools attracted more than twice as many applications for the number of places available.
The secondary, or all-through, Free Schools, on average received well over three times as many applications for the places available.
Free Schools are being set up by teachers, parents and charities where there is parental demand and, in the main, in areas of deprivation.
Schools Minister Lord Hill said the figures underlined the popularity of Free Schools with parents. "These figures show how keen parents are to send their children to Free Schools," he said.
"They provide the answer to the naysayers who said that Free Schools weren't wanted or needed - or that no one would be bothered to set them up. "They are also providing a spur to other local schools to do the best they can."
Tania Sidney-Roberts, principal of Free School Norwich, said: "The Free School Norwich is three-and-a-half times over-subscribed again for this September and we are currently operating waiting lists of at least 18 children in all year groups across the school. "This demonstrates just how desperately needed the service our school provides is.
"A recent parent feedback survey carried out by the school also indicates that 100% of our parents are very happy with the service and that their children love coming to the school and are making excellent progress.
"I am obviously delighted to have confirmed in this way what we always knew was the case - that the freedom given to Free Schools to be innovative and to meet the needs and preferences of parents was long overdue and it works."
Dr Brinder Singh Mahon, chairman of the Nishkam School Trust, in Birmingham, added: "We have been very disappointed to turn away over 50 families who could not be accommodated in the school."
On April 4th, after months of hard work, FreedomWorks activists celebrated as the Louisiana State Senate finally passed HB976 and HB974, two bills that mark a historic overhaul of the state’s education system.
The HB976 legislation creates a market-based school choice system, creating vouchers for children to escape failing schools and allowing an easier pathway to creation of charter schools with a “parent trigger” program. The HB974 legislation completely overhauls the teacher tenure system in Louisiana, rewarding only effective educators and provides financial incentives for those performing above expectation. HB974 also eliminates “automatic” teacher tenure for new teachers entering the school service.
These reforms eliminate two untouchable sacred cows of union power—voucher control and tenure.
What the victory in Louisiana shows is that real education reform is supported by an overwhelming number of people who are no longer willing to accept the status quo. Louisiana has set historic precedent this week, demonstrating to the rest of the nation that it is possible to get complete overhaul of a system, something deemed impossible up until now.
School choice advocates have been advancing small reforms incrementally over time, taking small bites at the apple, rather than one big chunk. With the passage of HB974 and HB976 and the likely passage of the four other pieces of proposed legislation, Governor Jindal has made history doing what many considered impossible.
Looking ahead to other states and other school choice battles, reform advocates should be inspired to reach for larger, more aggressive reforms. Once considered unbeatable, education union bosses are slowly being broken down. Each time a new school choice bill becomes law, the union’s stranglehold on the system is loosed just a little. Other governors should take notice, especially those with bills being fought by legislators who are lost in the fog of special interests.
Governors like Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. These governors sit idly by as their legislators work on reform bills. In South Carolina, HB4894 recently passed the House for the first time in the state’s history, and a long fight is expected in the Senate.
Reflecting on the victory in Louisiana, these two governors should follow Governor Jindal’s display of committed leadership and be bold. Governors: Push your legislators to act, do not allow failure. If you fail to lead, your constituents will take notice and replace you with someone else who will.
As for us, we must not rest on this one victory. We must continue pushing forward, keeping the momentum from Louisiana and building off of it. There are many lessons to be learned from our grassroots efforts this time around, what worked, what didn’t. This movement is spreading, and cannot be stopped. The match has been struck, the spark is now a fire, and it’s us who must not let it go out…
Pupils are recruited to spy on us during our lessons and schools are being 'run like totalitarian regimes', say British teachers
"Teachers must not be assessed" is the holy gospel of teachers everywhere
Pupils are being ‘actively recruited’ by schools to spy on their teachers in the classroom, a union has warned. They are being used as ‘management tools’ to carry out covert – and even open – surveillance of members of staff, it was claimed.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, condemned the practice as a ‘form of abuse’ of children. She told the union’s annual conference in Birmingham on Saturday that ‘debilitating’ monitoring ‘erodes teachers’ self-esteem and gnaws away at their professional confidence’.
She said: ‘Children and teachers are diminished and abused by the use of pupils as management tools to carry out surveillance on their teachers.
‘Schools are being run like totalitarian regimes where children are being actively recruited to spy and report on adults.’
Afterwards, Mrs Keates said she had been horrified to discover that secondary schools in some areas have been taking pupils out of lessons to put them through a form of ‘formalised Ofsted training’.
Pupils are trained in the methods used by real inspectors to assess whether teachers are good at their job. Ofsted is not involved in the practice, which has also been adopted by some academy chains.
The NASUWT union said that heads now have ‘breathtaking autonomy’ and are undermining teachers by forcing them to mark work on school premises until as late as 7pm.
General secretary Chris Keates said: ‘Roman Emperors were more accountable than head teachers in our schools.’
Mrs Keates revealed that some pupils are given forms to rate teachers as part of Student Voice – a movement which involves giving pupils a greater say in the running of their schools. These forms tell students to list the ‘strengths’ of members of staff.
Other schools use questionnaires, which ask pupils to consider whether they are ‘treated fairly and equally’ by teachers. They can tick boxes including ‘always’, ‘usually’, ‘occasionally’, ‘never’ and ‘not sure’ and complete ‘one star and a wish’. This involves awarding a teacher ‘one star for something they are doing well’ and ‘one wish for something you would like them to do even better’.
Mrs Keates added: ‘We’ve had practices ranging from children sitting at the back of classrooms, watching teachers with check lists, to unacceptable covert practices where children have been identified before a lesson starts by management.
‘They’ve been given a form to fill in, with no consultation with the teacher at all that the practice is going on, and in fact it’s only being discovered when the teacher asks the child why they’re not concentrating on the work in hand.’
'Make them pay': Pupils who make false claims against their teachers should be dealt with by police, says British union
Pupils who make malicious allegations against teachers should face criminal charges, a union said today. The NASUWT said false claims remain 'an enduring problem', blighting the lives and careers of accused teachers, and called for urgent action to make sure that those responsible face punishment.
The union published figures showing that 103 of its members faced criminal allegations last year.
Of these, only four resulted in court action, 39 cases are yet to be concluded and the rest (60 in total) were not taken forward.
NASUWT, or the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, passed a resolution at its annual conference in Birmingham which said it believes 'the most effective way to protect teachers from malicious allegations is to make such an allegation a criminal offence'. It called on the union's executive to 'take action to bring about the necessary legislative change'.
Phil Dunn, a physics teacher from Walsall, told delegates: 'Malicious allegations eat away at the very fabric of our professional standards. 'The NASUWT has successfully highlighted the blight on the accused teachers' lives and their families, with often lengthy suspensions. Many teachers are simply unwilling to return to teaching following such allegations.
'Strong clear legislation would make the consequences of such allegations plain and clear to pupils and families. 'I will not defend any teacher who has betrayed the basic tenets of our profession. Child protection remains one of the basic foundations of our profession. 'But, colleagues, malicious allegations threaten to undermine that very basis.'
NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said: 'These figures demonstrate that the issue of false, malicious and unsubstantiated allegations against teachers continues to be an enduring problem.
'Teachers' fear of having allegations made against them is very real, yet four out of five did not feel that current protections for teachers are adequate.
'The coalition Government has made bold promises of handing power back to teachers, but the new powers to search and restrain pupils, which teachers did not want, will leave them even more vulnerable to allegations and litigation.
'The fear of having an allegation made against them is compounded by the fact that, even if they are exonerated, their career will be permanently blighted by the fact that the allegation will remain on record. 'Urgent action is needed to bring in statutory provisions to cover the recording and reporting of allegations on a teacher's file.'
According to research commissioned by the Department for Education, nearly half of allegations made against teachers are malicious, unsubstantiated or unfounded.
The survey, which examined the number and nature of allegations of abuse referred to 116 English councils between April 1 2009 and March 31 2010 found that of 12,086 allegations referred, 2,827 (23%) were against school teachers while a further 1,709 allegations of abuse were made against non-teaching staff in schools.
A DfE spokesman said: 'Schools should have absolutely no tolerance of malicious allegations against teachers. We've made crystal clear that heads can suspend or expel pupils who make false claims - and should report them to the police if they believe a criminal offence has been committed.
'All investigations must be quick and thorough, with unfounded allegations stripped out of individual teachers' personnel records.
'We've legislated so teachers have a legal right to anonymity before they are charged with an offence, to prevent their names being dragged through the mud.'
Iowa Republicans blast law school over refusal to hire conservative professor as faculty
Iowa Republicans are taking aim at the state's top law school for denying a faculty position to a conservative law professor, who an assistant dean once said embraces politics the rest of the faculty "despises."
Teresa Wagner, who works as an associate director of writing at the University of Iowa College of Law, is suing former dean Carolyn Jones for employment discrimination, claiming she was not hired for a professor position because Jones and other law faculty disapproved of her conservative views and activism.
To hold a law faculty position at the publicly funded university is viewed as a "sacred cow," Wagner said in an interview, and "Republicans need not apply."
The case, which goes to trial this October, has become a chief concern for Republicans in Johnson County, who on Monday passed a resolution calling on the Iowa House of Representatives' oversight committee to investigate hiring practices involved in Wagner's case and others like it.
"We think the hiring policies need to be such where there are certainly non-discriminatory practices which relate to political philosophy, as well as to race and gender and other issues," said Bob Anderson, chairman of the Johnson County Republican Party. He claims students are deprived of "diversity of political thought" when conservative thinkers, like Wagner, are rejected based on their politics.
"We have a very active, conservative Republican community within the University of Iowa, which has not been met with an appropriate sense of respect for their ideas," he told FoxNews.com. "We see generally the climate as unfavorable."
Wagner, who graduated with honors from the law school in 1993, has taught at the George Mason University School of Law. She has also worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion, and the conservative Family Research Council.
In 2006, Wagner applied for a full-time instructor position with the law school and was denied. She was also rejected for an adjunct or full-time position in four subsequent attempts, according to her attorney, Stephen T. Fieweger.
"For the first time in years, there are more registered Republicans in the state of Iowa than there are Democrats, which is obviously not reflected at the University of Iowa," Fieweger told FoxNews.com.
Fieweger said Wagner's candidacy was dismissed because of her conservative views, and he cited a 2007 email from Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson to Jones in which Carlson wrote: "Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it)."
Associate Dean Eric Andersen was not immediately available for comment when contacted Thursday. Tom Moore, a spokesman for the university, told the Iowa City Press Citizen last week that the school is "committed to equal opportunity, diversity and to following fair hiring practices."
Wagner's case was initially dismissed in a lower court that ruled the dean could hire whomever she wishes. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, reinstated it in December. A trial is set for Oct. 15.
Fieweger said the law school and academic institutions in general have been so "entrenched" in discriminating against conservative-minded faculty over the years that "they don't recognize they're doing it."
At the time Wagner filed her complaint, Fieweger said, the number of registered Republicans on the law faculty stood at one.
Fieweger said the school argues Wagner was rejected because she "stunningly flunked the interview" in refusing to teach analysis -- a claim he said "just doesn't make sense and the jury is going to see that."
‘America Is Better Than Glenn Beck’: College Textbook Includes Anti-Beck Writings
“Today’s Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.”
“[Glenn] Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure.”
If those sentences sound to you like they’re straight out of the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, you’d be right. But they can also be found in a college textbook assigned to students at a community college in Texas.
America Is Better Than Glenn Beck: Anti Beck Writings in College Textbook“Read, Reason, Write: An Argument Text and Reader” is a critical reading and analysis book assigned to freshmen at Lone Star College-University Park in Houston. Its 10th edition features a collection of readings excoriating Beck and the Tea Party, while providing only the barest counter point of view.
The two sentences above came from op-ed pieces in the Post and Times that were reprinted in the book’s 23rd chapter: “America: Embracing the Future — or Divided by Conflict?” The line about the Tea Party is from Post columnist Colbert I. King’s March 2010 piece, “In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history”, while the line about Beck comes from the Times‘ Bob Herbert’s “America Is Better Than This,” published in August 2010.
King compares the Tea Party to the protesters who stood to block the Little Rock Nine in 1957 and those who cheered ex-Klansman David Duke at a rally in 1991. He describes Tea Party members picketing on Capitol Hill during the health care debate and says they’re the legacy of George Wallace, the former Alabama governor who famously declared: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”:
They see the world through the eyes of the anti-civil rights alumni. “Washington, D.C.” now, as then, is regarded as the Great Satan. This is the place that created the civil rights laws that were shoved down their throats. This is the birthplace of their much-feared “Big Government” and the playground of the “elite national news media.”
In “America Is Better Than This” — published on the eve of Beck’s Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C. — Herbert says there is “no road too low for [Beck] to slither upon.”
He is an integral part of the vicious effort by the Tea Party and other elements of the right wing to portray Mr. Obama as somehow alien, a strange figure who is separate and apart from — outside of — ordinary American life.
The book, first brought to The Blaze’s attention by a professor at the college, does feature an article by Arthur C. Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Brooks’ 2010 piece, “America’s new culture war: Free enterprise vs. government control,” is the only reading in the chapter that can be said to offer any real counterpoint, and it’s limited to one paragraph:
“And while some have tried to dismiss the ‘Tea Party’ demonstrations and the town hall protests of last summer as the work of extremists, ignorant backwoodsmen or agents of the health care industry, these movements reveal much about the culture war that is underway.”
Vicki Cassidy, a spokeswoman for the Lone Star College System, told The Blaze two faculty members at University Park use the book, but said the chapter in question is not assigned and the readings — part of a supplementary section — are not part of the syllabus. Other chapters in the supplementary section deal with the environment (Chapter 17: “How Do We Cope With Climate Change”) and marriage (Chapter 19: “Marriage and Gender Issues: The Debates Continue”)
Cassidy said the book was first adopted in 2006 before it contained the readings in question. Textbooks are selected by a faculty committee that does not typically re-examine subsequent editions of previously adopted material.
She confirmed the book’s current edition was not re-examined before it was assigned to students. The committee may opt to revisit its material this summer, she said.
Of the two faculty members who teach out of the book, Cassidy did not immediately know how many classes it has been assigned to. She also did not immediately know whether the book is assigned at other colleges within the Lone Star College system.
'This is the worst time to stop teaching religion': Archbishop of Canterbury warns of dangers of axeing RE lessons in British schools
The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday warned about the dangers of ‘downgrading’ religious education in secondary schools.
In his Easter Sermon, Dr Rowan Williams said it was the ‘worst possible moment’ to undermine the teaching of religion to teenagers. He told the congregation at Canterbury Cathedral that apparent hostility towards faith among the young had been exaggerated and that many took the issue of religion seriously.
Dr Williams, who will resign as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the year, said pupils appreciated the role it plays in shaping human existence and are keen to learn about it.
He said: ‘There is plenty to suggest that younger people, while still statistically deeply unlikely to be churchgoers, don’t have the hostility to faith that one might expect, but at least share some sense that there is something here to take seriously – when they have a chance to learn about it. 'It is about the worst possible moment to downgrade the status and professional excellence of religious education in secondary schools, but that’s another sermon.’
Under current guidelines all five to 16-year-olds must study RE at school and all 14 to 16-year-olds must take at least half a GCSE in religious studies.
But research published last year showed that one in four comprehensive and academy schools do not teach religious studies at GCSE and nearly a third of grammars are now also shirking the obligation.
The study came after RE was left out of the subjects counting towards the English Baccalaureate. This is given to teenagers who score at least a C at GCSE in English, maths, science, a foreign language and a humanities subject, which is limited to history and geography.
Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: ‘Most parents will think the Archbishop of Canterbury is absolutely right. Let’s hope education ministers take note and restore religious education to its proper status in schools after it has been allowed to decline for the last 20 years.
‘Even if people are not religious themselves, it is very important to get a good grounding in religious education because so much of our culture and society is based on religion.’
You wouldn’t like a restaurant run like schools are
California's public schools continue to lay off teachers, in a process that is as convoluted and illogical as one would expect in a bureaucratic system in which the needs of the students falls fairly low on the list of priorities. That's my takeaway from a new report by the state's Legislative Analyst's Office detailing the teacher layoff process as districts struggle with declining revenue in the face of shrinking budgets.
The big issue, however, isn't the arcane process for shedding teachers, but what the process says about the inefficient way that most Americans have decided to educate their kids. As the LAO reports, decisions about who stays and who goes are based on which teachers have showed up to work for the most years – i.e., seniority – rather than which ones are most effective and energetic. The hearing and appeals process, by which every laid-off teacher gets an automatic hearing, adds enormous costs to a system that always claims to lack enough resources.
The LAO report only looked at one small, technical aspect of the public-school behemoth, and it was meant to offer a little advice for tweaking the layoff process. It wasn't meant to provide a thorough analysis of school systems. But in some ways, that's what is so frightening about the report. Americans don't think twice about the way schools are designed. Few things are more important than educating children, yet we accept this current system the way Soviet citizens accepted long bread lines. No doubt, auditors in that system issued reports discussing ways to shorten the lines.
Don't include me in the chorus of those who claim that the schools are somehow "underfunded," even as K-14 education consumes more than 40 percent of California's general-fund budget – not to mention all the local bond measures and federal funding. School-district budget "cuts" usually refer to a reduced rate of spending growth, not actual cuts.
One of the nation's worst-performing systems, Los Angeles Unified School District, yearly spends more than $29,000 per student, when all funding sources are included, according to a Cato Institute report. Its graduation rate of 40 percent is appalling.
LAUSD is particularly bad, but it isn't run that differently than your average suburban district.
Consider the LAO's chart of a declining teacher workforce over the past few years against this report in the Los Angeles Daily News from 2008: "[A] Daily News review of salaries and staffing shows LAUSD's bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent. The district has approximately 4,000 administrators, managers and other nonschool-based employees – not including clerks and office workers – whose average annual salary is about $95,000."
Now consider this tidbit in June from the Sacramento Bee: "The number of educators receiving $100,000-plus annual pensions jumped 650 percent from 2005-11, going from 700 to 5,400, according to a Bee review of data from the California State Teachers' Retirement System."
Here's a Los Angeles Times headline from October: "California teachers lack the resources and time to teach science."
Is this an issue of money or spending priorities?
Instead of focusing on the little things, Californians ought to be thinking big thoughts about education. We can start by asking: Is the public education system one that best serves the students? The answer, even for people whose kids attend decent schools is, "Obviously not."
There's an endless call for reform. Some ideas are useful. For instance, tuition vouchers – which let people take a portion of their school tax dollars and spend them at the school of their choice – or charter schools, which are government-controlled schools freed from some of the government-imposed red tape, offer some hope because they provide some level of competition.
I'm not calling for specific reforms here but arguing, instead, for readers to conduct a thought experiment.
If we were tasked with providing an important service, how would we provide it? If, say, we were asked to create the best-possible chain of restaurants to serve hungry customers, would we buy a huge building, hire scores of extremely well-paid administrators and then impose a tax on local residents to fund the chain? Would we let a board of directors, elected from the community, choose the décor, the menu and the locations?
Would we empower a union to make hiring decisions and allow it to grant tenure to waiters and kitchen help, so that we could not fire them even if they were lazy and incompetent? Would we pay the most money to people who worked there the longest rather than to those who were the best workers?
When customers complained that we served too much meat and not enough pizza, would we shrug and ask them to elect board members who preferred pepperoni to cheeseburgers?
Would we pass laws mandating that people who live in neighborhoods near our restaurants eat only there – allowing them to eat elsewhere only if they spend additional money or move to the neighborhood where the restaurant more closely meets their taste? Would we ignore the pleas of people who live near filthy restaurants that serve lousy food just because we live near one that at least keeps a clean kitchen and offers adequate meal choices?
Other observers have made similar analogies, and school officials always claim that schooling somehow is different. But it isn't.
Instead of tinkering around the edges and endlessly fighting for reforms that offer little hope of transforming the system, we need to redesign it from the ground up. Perhaps we should, in the words of the late reformer Marshall Fritz, "separate school and state" and allow the market to provide schools just as we allow it to provide food and other vital services.
Baa Baa Little Sheep: How British private school abandoned nursery rhyme's lyrics for Easter show sparking political correctness accusations
Quite what the little boy who lives down the lane would make of it is open to conjecture.
But parents at one school made their feelings plain when they heard their children reciting ‘Baa Baa Little Sheep’.
They accused the £2,700-a-term Park Hill primary school of changing the words from ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ for the sake of political correctness.
The school, in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, insists this was not the reason, and that the change was merely a way of teaching children to read by adding different words. Adults who attended its Easter concert, however, were unconvinced.
Andrea Craig, a councillor whose son sang in the show, tweeted: ‘At my son’s Easter concert I saw a song called Baa Baa Little Sheep which I assumed was new. Not so – not allowed black. Really?’
She said most parents in the audience were concerned about the change of wording.
‘It’s good they want children to think about what different words mean. But this is one nursery rhyme I personally don’t think should be used because it could be so easily misconstrued as political correctness gone mad. They have got to be a bit smarter about it.’
The school uses the phonic learning system to teach children aged three to seven word meanings through well-known songs and rhymes. Its marketing manager Holly Christie said Baa Baa Black Sheep had been changed ‘because it fitted in with the theme of what we were doing. It was about baby sheep.
‘We have always had adjustments to Baa Baa Black Sheep just because the children like to sing different variations of that. It’s a way of teaching phonics so that children understand these words that they are using and then reading.’
This is far from the first time the rhyme has been amended. In 2006, children at two nurseries in Oxfordshire were taught ‘Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep’ to promote ‘equal opportunities’. Some children in London have been taught ‘Baa Baa Green Sheep’.
And in 1999, Birmingham City Council said the rhyme should not be taught at all because it was racially negative.
Australia: Parents feel the pinch as childcare squeezed by new federal laws
But it's "for their own good", of course. One size fits all, don't you know?
This will just lead to more informal childcare -- e.g. where some lady looks after a few neighbourhood kids in her own home -- with none of the safeguards of the formal sector
That happened in Britain so they passed draconian laws about informal childcare -- but they had to back down because it criminalized friends looking after another friend's kids
PARENTS face a tougher fight for childcare places - and a bigger bill when they find a centre - as tough new federal laws squeeze 8400 places from the system. The cost of child care will rise by up to $13 a day per child as rules requiring an increased staff-to-child ratio are enforced.
Federal Government figures show a quarter of Queensland children are in childcare, with more than 155,000 children from 120,000 families in long day care at childcare centres.
Childcare Queensland says centres across Queensland will close as increased staff ratios, soaring power bills and fears of a massive 30 per cent wage claim force an already stressed sector close to the brink.
Childcare Queensland says the new regulations alone, the first phase of which started in January, will cost the state 8400 places.
President Peter Price said the average price of long day care in Queensland was between $60 and $80 a day, but that would go up under the new laws that require more staff to children and university degrees for some positions. [How absurd! Will you have to have a degree to become a mother soon?]
While changes to ratios that were causing massive spikes in fees down south would not affect Queensland for another two years, he said centres were already having to put on extra staff to cover paperwork and training.
Mr Price said the industry had no problem with raising standards but said the contradiction with existing minimum room sizes and the required floor space per child means fewer places will be available in existing centres.
Industry research tips childcare costs will rise by $13 a child per day, which will create an exodus of families from already struggling centres in areas like the Sunshine and Gold coasts, as well as in Brisbane's eastern suburbs.
Mr Price said a survey of centres shows those around Caboolture, Wide Bay and Cairns are already at risk of falling through the 70 per cent occupancy level, which is break-even, and could dip in to the red under any other stress.
He said some centres on the Sunshine Coast were already half empty and parents would soon start feeling the pinch as more tried to organise their childcare after the school holidays. "It's happening now but there's still a lot more to come," Mr Price said of the cost increases. "For the average parent looking for a place, there are going to be less places available."
But C&K chief executive officer Barrie Elvish, whose community group operates centres across the state, said he did not expect any massive price rise. He said C&K centres had raised prices by $4 or $5 a day at the beginning of the year to cover rising bills but the ratio changes would not affect them.
Federal Child Care Minister Kate Ellis said children deserved the best start in life. "All of the research shows us that the first five years of a child's life are critical to shaping future outcomes and will play a major role in their long-term health, education and development," she said.
"With record numbers of families using childcare in Queensland and across the country, it is essential that we ensure that children in care are getting the quality early educational opportunities that they need.
"That is why the rest of the world is acting and it is why the Commonwealth and every state and territory government, of all political persuasions, have agreed that the National Quality Framework is the best way forward for Australian families.
"These reforms are being introduced gradually, over a number of years so that the sector has time to adjust. "The only changes that have come into effect in 2012 are a ratio requirement of one staff member for every four children aged under two as is already the case in Queensland and a harmonisation of national regulations....
Tewantin Early Learning Centre owner John Keast said private operators were under pressure from rising utilities and red tape.
He said he would like to be able to provide healthy fruit as a snack to his kids, but he can't without complicated and expensive licensing. "We can't supply fruit to our children, but if they bring it in, we can cut it up and serve it to them," he said. "It's ridiculous."
He said his two Sunshine Coast centres turned a profit but there were plenty of others that were badly stretched and at risk of folding.
A new report on the UC system documents the plague of politicized classrooms. The problem is national in scope
By PETER BERKOWITZ
The politicization of higher education by activist professors and compliant university administrators deprives students of the opportunity to acquire knowledge and refine their minds. It also erodes the nation's civic cohesion and its ability to preserve the institutions that undergird democracy in America.
So argues "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," a new report by the California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The report is addressed to the Regents of the University of California, which has ultimate responsibility for governing the UC system, but the pathologies it diagnoses prevail throughout the country.
The analysis begins from a nonpolitical fact: Numerous studies of both the UC system and of higher education nationwide demonstrate that students who graduate from college are increasingly ignorant of history and literature. They are unfamiliar with the principles of American constitutional government. And they are bereft of the skills necessary to comprehend serious books and effectively marshal evidence and argument in written work.
This decline in the quality of education coincides with a profound transformation of the college curriculum. None of the nine general campuses in the UC system requires students to study the history and institutions of the United States. None requires students to study Western civilization, and on seven of the nine UC campuses, including Berkeley, a survey course in Western civilization is not even offered. In several English departments one can graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. In many political science departments majors need not take a course in American politics.
Moreover, the evidence suggests that the hollowing of the curriculum stems from too many professors' preference for promoting a partisan political agenda.
National studies by Stanley Rothman in 1999, and by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in 2007, have shown that universities' leftward tilt has become severe. And a 2005 study by Daniel Klein and Andrew Western in Academic Questions (a NAS publication) shows this is certainly true in California. For example, Democrats outnumbered Republicans four to one on University of California, Berkeley, professional school faculties; in the social sciences the ratio was approximately 21 to one.
The same 2005 study revealed that the Berkeley sociology department faculty was home to 17 Democrats and no Republicans. The political science department included 28 Democrats and two Republicans. The English department had 29 Democrats and one Republican; and the history department had 31 Democrats and one Republican.
While political affiliation alone need not carry classroom implications, the overwhelmingly left-leaning faculty openly declare the inculcation of progressive political ideas their pedagogical priority. As "A Crisis of Competence" notes, "a recent study by UCLA's prestigious Higher Education Research Institute found that more faculty now believe that they should teach their students to be agents of social change than believe that it is important to teach them the classics of Western civilization."
Some university programs tout their political presuppositions and objectives openly. The mission statements of the Women's Studies program at UCLA prejudges the issues by declaring that it proceeds from "the perspectives of those whose participation has been traditionally distorted, omitted, neglected, or denied." And the Critical Race Studies program at the UCLA School of law announces that its aim is to "transform racial justice advocacy."
Even the august American Association of University Professors—which in 1915 and 1940 published classic statements explaining that the aim of academic freedom was not to indoctrinate but to equip students to think for themselves—has sided with the politicized professoriate.
In 1915, the AAUP affirmed that in teaching controversial subjects a professor should "set forth justly without suppression or innuendo the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue."
However, in recent statements on academic freedom in 2007 and 2011, the AAUP has undermined its almost century-old strictures against proselytizing. Its new position is that restricting professors to the use of relevant materials and obliging them to provide a reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject represent unworkable requirements because relevance and comprehensiveness can themselves be controversial.
On the boundaries, they can be—like anything else. However, it is wrong to dismiss professors' duty to avoid introducing into classroom discussion opinions extraneous to the subject and to provide a well-rounded treatment of the matter under consideration. That opens the classroom to whatever professors wish to talk about. And in all too many cases what they wish to talk about in the classroom is the need to transform America in a progressive direction. Last year the leadership of AAUP officially endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Excluding from the curriculum those ideas that depart from the progressive agenda implicitly teaches students that conservative ideas are contemptible and unworthy of discussion. This exclusion, the California report points out, also harms progressives for the reason John Stuart Mill elaborated in his famous 1859 essay, "On Liberty": "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."
The removal of partisan advocacy from the classroom would have long-term political benefits. Liberal education equips students with intellectual skills valued by the marketplace. It prepares citizens to discharge civic responsibilities in an informed and deliberate manner. It fosters a common culture by revealing that much serious disagreement between progressives and conservatives revolves around differing interpretations of how to fulfill America's promise of individual freedom and equality.
It is certainly true that not all progressive professors intrude their politics into the classroom, but a culture of politicization has developed on campus in which department chairs and deans treat its occurrence as routine. "UC administrators," the California report sadly concludes, "far from performing their role as the university's quality control mechanism, now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards."
In California, this is more than a failure of their duty as educators. It is also a violation of the law. Article IX, Section 9, of the California state constitution provides that "The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom."
It is incumbent upon the UC Board of Regents, not to mention the governing bodies of other institutions of higher education across the country, to begin the long and arduous work of depoliticizing our universities and renewing liberal education.
British School taken over by street gangs: Staff warn over safety threats after pupil arrests
The headteacher of a secondary school has admitted that his staff fear for their safety following a series of student arrests last month.
Pupils at Copland Community School in Wembley, North London are troubling the 100-strong staff after youngsters were reported to the police for actual bodily harm, harassment and possession of a weapon.
That has led to urgent appeals from the teachers, who have written to the Board of Governors complaining over a 'hard-core (group) in each year who are forming what amount to in-school gangs'.
The letter reads: 'We as staff have long-standing concerns regarding pupil behaviour the safety of pupils and staff is being compromised. 'A significant proportion of the student body (40 per cent) share these concerns and do not feel safe at school. 'Serious incidents occur daily and examples of violence, aggression, defiance, bullying and non-compliance are far too common.
Plunked echoed those sentiments adding: 'There are problems with ganfs and things like this all over the place; it is not something that is specific to this school.
'There have been a lot of improvements at the school, we are a fairly new team. 'We are all working together to improve the school. The school does face significant challenges, but it will be a journey of improvement.'
On March 3 a 15-year-old boy appeared at Brent Youth Court on April 2 charged with possession of an article with a blade on the premises of Copland School. He admitted the charge at an earlier hearing and was given a youth rehabilitation order.
Ten days later on March 13 a report was made to police of ABH (actual bodily harm), and the following day a report of harassment was lodged. Finally on March 22 a case of disorderly conduct was reported and a 17-year-old boy was charged with disorderly conduct in connection with the incident.
Australia: Children of the rich do better at school, study of NAPLAN test results finds
And so it always will be. But some galoot says low funding for schools is behind it. In fact of course, being smart tends to help you get rich and IQ is mainly genetically transmitted. And IQ is the single best predictor of school achievement. Some of the worst schools in America have the highest funding -- but it doesn't help. If your theory is wrong you won't get the results you expect.
CHILDREN from higher socioeconomic areas are performing better at school than those in poorer areas, according to an analysis of school figures.
A study of the national literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) test results by The Weekend Australian has revealed the country's top 100 primary and secondary schools have a roll-call of students from well-to-do suburbs.
Director of the Centre for Research on Education Systems at Melbourne University, Richard Teese, says the analysis highlights a geographical concentration of advantage.
"It's not an even playing field in which talent can blossom from whatever location - it's people excelling through social advantage," he told The Weekend Australian. He said schools in poorer postcodes were under-resourced and found it difficult to attract experienced and specialised teachers.
"We are now at a point where there are no new commonwealth funds available to correct the funding imbalance that has operated for decades..." he said. "Our potential is not being harvested. "Public schools educate two-thirds of our kids; they are our nurseries and we are starving them."
The study also found selective schools ranked highest among the country's secondary and primary schools, with government selective schools in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia out-performing many other high schools.
The study highlighted that while independent schools performed highest outside of selective schools, students from the best performing non-selective government schools were also from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
It also found a correlation between students' performances and their family's level of education. "The large reserves of talent in less well educated families are being denied the support needed to be turned into the large band of high achievers representing all backgrounds that Australia should have," Professor Teese said.
The Weekend Australian performed the analysis by comparing NAPLAN results, based on national testing of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students, with the Index of Community Socio-Education Advantage, which measures income and education level's of student's families.
It comes after education ministers from across the country met in Sydney on Thursday to discuss major reforms to the national schooling system.
School removes God from the song "God bless the USA"
Parents at a Massachusetts elementary school are furious after educators first removed the word ‘God’ from the popular Lee Greenwood song, “God Bless the U.S.A.” and then pulled the song all together from an upcoming concert.
Fox 25 in Boston is reporting that children at Stall Brook Elementary School in Bellingham were told to sing, “We love the U.S.A.” instead of “God Bless the U.S.A.”
After parents started complaining, school officials removed the song from the school assembly concert. The school’s principal released a statement to Fox 25 stating they hope to ”maintain the focus on the original objective of sharing students’ knowledge of the U.S. States, and because of logistics, will not include any songs.”
Greenwood [song author] released a statement to Fox News condemning the school’s actions: “The most important word in the whole piece of music is the word God, which is also in the title ‘God Bless The USA,” Greenwood said. “Maybe the school should have asked the parents their thoughts before changing the lyrics to the song. They could have even asked the writer of the song, which I of course, would have said you can’t change the lyrics at all or any part of the song.”
Greenwood said the phrase “God Bless the USA” has a “very important meaning for those in the military and their families, as well as new citizens coming into our country.” He said it’s also played at every naturalization ceremony behind the national anthem.
“If the song is good enough to be played and performed in its original setting under those circumstances, it surely should be good enough for our children,” Greenwood said.
An online poll taken by the television station indicated more than 80 percent of viewers were outraged by removing God from the song.
“I don’t have a problem with the song if somebody else does I guess it’s their business,” resident Patrick Grudier said. “I mean It’s on our currency (God).”
But not everyone agreed – including parent Matthew Cote. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with changing the song,” he told the television. “It’s a public school. If you want to have the word God in the song, go to a private school.”
Reaction on Facebook has been overwhelmingly in favor of the traditional patriotic song. “Here we go again, more war on Christianity,” wrote one Facebook user. “You can remove God all you want, but the good news — there is still a loving God and He lives.”
Another Facebook user called it sad and disgusting. “I’d like to say unbelievable — but it is so totally believable.”
Michigan Teacher's Aide Said She Was Disciplined for Not Giving Boss Facebook Access
When Kimberly Hester of Cass County, Mich. posted with permission a photo a coworker sent her on Facebook, she didn't think it would offend the public school where she taught, or lead the superintendent to demand access to her Facebook page. But a photo of her coworker with her pants down did just that.
Hester, 27, was a full-time peer professional, or teacher's aide, at Frank Squires Elementary in Cassapolis, Mich. for about two years. A year ago, in April 2011, a coworker texted a photo showing herself with her pants around her ankles, with the message "thinking of you" as a joke.
"She's actually quite funny. It was spur of the moment," adding that there was nothing pornographic about the picture, which only showed the pants, part of her legs, and the tips of her shoes.
"I couldn't stop laughing so I asked for her permission to post it [on Facebook]," she said. The coworker agreed. Hester said all this took place on their own time, not at or during work.
Hester said a parent (not of one of her students) showed the photo to the superintendent, calling it unprofessional and offensive. Hester said the photo could only be viewed by her Facebook friends. The parent happened to be a family friend.
In a few days, the superintendent of Lewis Cass Intermediate School District, Robert Colby, asked Hester to come to his office.
"Instead of asking to take the photo down and viewing it from my friend's point of view, they called me into the office without my union," she said. Hester is a member of the Michigan Education Association, which represents more than 157,000 teachers, faculty and support staff in the state, according to its website.
The superintendent asked that she show her Facebook profile page.
"I asked for my union several times, and they refused. They wanted me to do it right then and there," Hester said.
Colby did not immediately return a request for comment.
A letter from the Lewis Cass Intermediate School District said, "…in the absence of you voluntarily granting Lewis Cass ISD administration access to you[r] Facebook page, we will assume the worst and act accordingly."
Hester's story echoes reports of employers asking job applicants for access to their Facebook pages.
Robert McCormick, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law, said normally in the private sector and in a non-union setting there is nothing to prevent an employer from asking for access to a Facebook page. But in a private sector setting, if an employee is summoned to a disciplinary meeting with the employer and requests union representation at that meeting, it is an unfair labor practice to refuse that representation.
"I would be surprised if Michigan law did not follow the same standards," he said.
Louis Chism, the school district's special education director, wrote in an email to ABC News, "At this time it would be inappropriate for me to comment on any aspect of this situation."
Ban on the cane in British schools 'left schools unable to impose discipline and led to deterioration in children's behaviour'
The scrapping of the cane has led to a deterioration in children’s behaviour at school, according to teachers.
Sanctions available to schools since corporal punishment was abolished 25 years ago are ‘totally inadequate’ at reasserting authority in the classroom and lack the same deterrent effect, they said yesterday.
While rejecting a return to the cane, members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers condemned existing sanctions such as detention and suspension.
‘Novel’ punishments are needed to allow teachers to reassert their authority in the classroom, they said.
Delegates at the association’s annual conference voted unanimously for research into ‘effective’ disciplinary methods.
‘When corporal punishment was abolished nothing was put in its place that had equivalent deterrent powers,’ said Julian Perfect, a teacher from London.
Laws forbidding state schools from using the cane or slipper to discipline pupils were introduced in 1987, and a decade later in independent schools.
But Mr Perfect pointed out that subsequent governments had failed to give teachers sufficient sanctions.
He added that while teachers have statutory authority to discipline pupils whose behaviour is unacceptable, governments have failed to suggest methods for making authority ‘meaningful’.
Suspensions and expulsions were now handed out all too rarely amid pressure on schools to reduce the number of pupils who are excluded from school, the conference also heard.
Research by the teachers’ association suggested pupil behaviour had declined further in recent years.
Responding to one of its surveys, a teacher said: ‘The children know that our hands are tied and play up frequently. ‘In the past two years, we have only successfully permanently excluded one pupil. It is the good students whose education is being wrecked that I feel for.’
Another said: ‘Persistent low-level rudeness and disruption seems to have become a fact of life in education today and no longer raises eyebrows or seems to merit special attention.’
A third reported: ‘I had a female student threaten to kick the smile off my face, in front of a whole class.’
The association’s general secretary Dr Mary Bousted said: ‘Sanctions do have to be something students don’t want to have to endure. ‘We’re not saying at all that children should fear teachers but they should respect them. ‘If they go beyond the bounds of respecting a teacher there should be sanctions. ‘And those sanctions should be something children would rather not face.’
Proposing a motion aimed at tackling poor behaviour in the classroom, Mr Perfect said: ‘This does not seek the reinstatement of corporal punishment but rather the identification of additional forms of sanction.’
Jean Roberts, who teaches at Old Oak Primary, London told the conference: ‘We need more research into behaviour management particularly sanctions that work, are equitable and can be used widely in schools supported by governments and parents. ‘We have to ensure more of our classes are not disrupted but are places of real learning for all.’
School removes God from the song "God bless the USA"
Parents at a Massachusetts elementary school are furious after educators first removed the word ‘God’ from the popular Lee Greenwood song, “God Bless the U.S.A.” and then pulled the song all together from an upcoming concert.
Fox 25 in Boston is reporting that children at Stall Brook Elementary School in Bellingham were told to sing, “We love the U.S.A.” instead of “God Bless the U.S.A.”
After parents started complaining, school officials removed the song from the school assembly concert. The school’s principal released a statement to Fox 25 stating they hope to ”maintain the focus on the original objective of sharing students’ knowledge of the U.S. States, and because of logistics, will not include any songs.”
Greenwood [song author] released a statement to Fox News condemning the school’s actions: “The most important word in the whole piece of music is the word God, which is also in the title ‘God Bless The USA,” Greenwood said. “Maybe the school should have asked the parents their thoughts before changing the lyrics to the song. They could have even asked the writer of the song, which I of course, would have said you can’t change the lyrics at all or any part of the song.”
Greenwood said the phrase “God Bless the USA” has a “very important meaning for those in the military and their families, as well as new citizens coming into our country.” He said it’s also played at every naturalization ceremony behind the national anthem.
“If the song is good enough to be played and performed in its original setting under those circumstances, it surely should be good enough for our children,” Greenwood said.
An online poll taken by the television station indicated more than 80 percent of viewers were outraged by removing God from the song.
“I don’t have a problem with the song if somebody else does I guess it’s their business,” resident Patrick Grudier said. “I mean It’s on our currency (God).”
But not everyone agreed – including parent Matthew Cote. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with changing the song,” he told the television. “It’s a public school. If you want to have the word God in the song, go to a private school.”
Reaction on Facebook has been overwhelmingly in favor of the traditional patriotic song. “Here we go again, more war on Christianity,” wrote one Facebook user. “You can remove God all you want, but the good news — there is still a loving God and He lives.”
Another Facebook user called it sad and disgusting. “I’d like to say unbelievable — but it is so totally believable.”
Michigan Teacher's Aide Said She Was Disciplined for Not Giving Boss Facebook Access
When Kimberly Hester of Cass County, Mich. posted with permission a photo a coworker sent her on Facebook, she didn't think it would offend the public school where she taught, or lead the superintendent to demand access to her Facebook page. But a photo of her coworker with her pants down did just that.
Hester, 27, was a full-time peer professional, or teacher's aide, at Frank Squires Elementary in Cassapolis, Mich. for about two years. A year ago, in April 2011, a coworker texted a photo showing herself with her pants around her ankles, with the message "thinking of you" as a joke.
"She's actually quite funny. It was spur of the moment," adding that there was nothing pornographic about the picture, which only showed the pants, part of her legs, and the tips of her shoes.
"I couldn't stop laughing so I asked for her permission to post it [on Facebook]," she said. The coworker agreed. Hester said all this took place on their own time, not at or during work.
Hester said a parent (not of one of her students) showed the photo to the superintendent, calling it unprofessional and offensive. Hester said the photo could only be viewed by her Facebook friends. The parent happened to be a family friend.
In a few days, the superintendent of Lewis Cass Intermediate School District, Robert Colby, asked Hester to come to his office.
"Instead of asking to take the photo down and viewing it from my friend's point of view, they called me into the office without my union," she said. Hester is a member of the Michigan Education Association, which represents more than 157,000 teachers, faculty and support staff in the state, according to its website.
The superintendent asked that she show her Facebook profile page.
"I asked for my union several times, and they refused. They wanted me to do it right then and there," Hester said.
Colby did not immediately return a request for comment.
A letter from the Lewis Cass Intermediate School District said, "…in the absence of you voluntarily granting Lewis Cass ISD administration access to you[r] Facebook page, we will assume the worst and act accordingly."
Hester's story echoes reports of employers asking job applicants for access to their Facebook pages.
Robert McCormick, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law, said normally in the private sector and in a non-union setting there is nothing to prevent an employer from asking for access to a Facebook page. But in a private sector setting, if an employee is summoned to a disciplinary meeting with the employer and requests union representation at that meeting, it is an unfair labor practice to refuse that representation.
"I would be surprised if Michigan law did not follow the same standards," he said.
Louis Chism, the school district's special education director, wrote in an email to ABC News, "At this time it would be inappropriate for me to comment on any aspect of this situation."
Ban on the cane in British schools 'left schools unable to impose discipline and led to deterioration in children's behaviour'
The scrapping of the cane has led to a deterioration in children’s behaviour at school, according to teachers.
Sanctions available to schools since corporal punishment was abolished 25 years ago are ‘totally inadequate’ at reasserting authority in the classroom and lack the same deterrent effect, they said yesterday.
While rejecting a return to the cane, members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers condemned existing sanctions such as detention and suspension.
‘Novel’ punishments are needed to allow teachers to reassert their authority in the classroom, they said.
Delegates at the association’s annual conference voted unanimously for research into ‘effective’ disciplinary methods.
‘When corporal punishment was abolished nothing was put in its place that had equivalent deterrent powers,’ said Julian Perfect, a teacher from London.
Laws forbidding state schools from using the cane or slipper to discipline pupils were introduced in 1987, and a decade later in independent schools.
But Mr Perfect pointed out that subsequent governments had failed to give teachers sufficient sanctions.
He added that while teachers have statutory authority to discipline pupils whose behaviour is unacceptable, governments have failed to suggest methods for making authority ‘meaningful’.
Suspensions and expulsions were now handed out all too rarely amid pressure on schools to reduce the number of pupils who are excluded from school, the conference also heard.
Research by the teachers’ association suggested pupil behaviour had declined further in recent years.
Responding to one of its surveys, a teacher said: ‘The children know that our hands are tied and play up frequently. ‘In the past two years, we have only successfully permanently excluded one pupil. It is the good students whose education is being wrecked that I feel for.’
Another said: ‘Persistent low-level rudeness and disruption seems to have become a fact of life in education today and no longer raises eyebrows or seems to merit special attention.’
A third reported: ‘I had a female student threaten to kick the smile off my face, in front of a whole class.’
The association’s general secretary Dr Mary Bousted said: ‘Sanctions do have to be something students don’t want to have to endure. ‘We’re not saying at all that children should fear teachers but they should respect them. ‘If they go beyond the bounds of respecting a teacher there should be sanctions. ‘And those sanctions should be something children would rather not face.’
Proposing a motion aimed at tackling poor behaviour in the classroom, Mr Perfect said: ‘This does not seek the reinstatement of corporal punishment but rather the identification of additional forms of sanction.’
Jean Roberts, who teaches at Old Oak Primary, London told the conference: ‘We need more research into behaviour management particularly sanctions that work, are equitable and can be used widely in schools supported by governments and parents. ‘We have to ensure more of our classes are not disrupted but are places of real learning for all.’
CA: School board to parents — “screw the law, we do what we want”
ADELANTO, California - A group of activist parents in this impoverished community were thwarted again in their bid to become the first in the nation to seize control of a public school under a controversial "parent trigger" law designed to shake up chronically failing schools.
Capping an emotional four-hour meeting, the board of the Adelanto School District in California's Mojave Desert voted 5-0 on Wednesday night to reject a petition invoking a 2010 state law that permits parents to effectively seize control of low-performing schools.
But supporters of the petition vowed to challenge the board's action in court.
The trigger effort, backed by a well-funded activist group, Parent Revolution, but opposed by the teacher's union, has been closely watched as a key battleground in an intensifying fight over the nation's $500 billion-a-year investment in public education.
The Florida legislature narrowly defeated a parent trigger bill earlier this month, after a fierce debate, and several other states, including New York, Michigan and Louisiana, may consider similar bills this year.
"The nation is watching this evening. California is watching," said former California state Senator Gloria Romero, who co-sponsored the legislation.
The outcome of Wednesday's meeting marked the second time the Adelanto board has denied a petition submitted by families seeking a takeover, finding they fell short in collecting valid signatures from parents representing at least half of the 642 students at Desert Trails Elementary.
The petition drive has been fraught with acrimony as the two sides accused each other of fraud and forgery in trying to meet the 50-percent threshold or in presenting rescission affidavits from parents who claimed they were misled into initially giving their support.
"I could care less if I don't get elected to office again, but today I stand for all of Adelanto in saying we will not be duped by anybody," school board member Jermaine Wright said in explaining her vote against the petition.
Even after a second rejection, it appeared the debate in Adelanto, a community of about 31,000 people made up predominantly of low-income minorities, was far from over.
Patrick DeTemple, the organizing director of Parent Revolution, said the group planned to challenge the board in court, insisting supporters had collected valid signatures from "a solid 70 percent of the parents."
At its core, the dispute has pitted parents ready to take drastic action to reshape management of their school against parents concerned that sweeping, untested changes promised under the "trigger" measure would worsen the situation.
"Our children are much too precious to turn them over to groups that have no track record of proven success," said Lanita Dominque, a teacher and president of the Adelanto District Teachers Association.
Petition supporters cited years of chronically poor academic performance at the school, where more than half of the students fail standardized state tests in math or reading.
Takeover advocates have called for converting Desert Trails into a charter school in the fall, allowing them to hire non-union teachers or renegotiate the union contract. They have said they would like the charter to be run by a coalition of parents, teachers and district administrators, rather than by a private charter school management company
‘Hijacking Holocaust Remembrance’: Video Slams ‘Anti-Israel Radicals’ at Northeastern University
Americans for Peace and Tolerance/On Campus (APT), an organization that claims to “expose radical ideologies that threaten the academic integrity and knowledge seeking mission of America’s college campuses,” has released a disturbing new video. The group, which deals with issues impacting Jewish students who support Israel, is accusing Northeastern University faculty of “abusing Holocaust Remembrance events for political purposes.”
APT claims the video exposes professors and guest lecturers comparing Israelis to Nazis, disparaging Jews and issuing other unfavorable statements in recordings and e-mails. The nearly 17-minute video does, indeed, raise some questions.
“Northeastern is a popular and respected school, but there does exist a problem — mostly confined to a few anti-Israel radicals among the professoriate and the administration,” said APT President Charles Jacobs in a media release. “These individuals have used a chair donated for the purpose of teaching students about the genocide of European Jews to demonize and delegitimize the state of Israel and its supporters.”
Jacobs went on to call these actions “unscholarly, insensitive and hurtful.” Additionally, he said that it is troubling that certain Jewish faculty members are not speaking out about these issues. It is “academic freedom,” Jacobs believes, that is used to protect those who he believes are willing to defame the Jewish community.
In a press release, the APT laid out three, specific actions that it is calling for in reaction to the video coverage that has been released:
1. The University should apologize and launch an independent investigation into how such demonization of Israel and the Jewish community could have occurred on campus.
2. The University should form a new Holocaust Awareness Committee composed of faculty sympathetic to Jewish peoplehood.
3. Professors who claim that Jews act like Nazis are engaging in hateful bigotry. To prevent such bigotry in the future, the University should extend its existing minority sensitivity training programs to include the Jewish people.
Below, watch the video that provides evidence, APT says, of anti-Israeli bigotry among Northeastern University faculty members:
British universities to get control of High School courses
A-levels will be designed by universities under reforms aimed at ending years of political meddling in the exam system. The biggest shake-up for 30 years will see leading academics deciding the content and format of A-level courses as Whitehall’s influence is stripped away.
Education Secretary Michael Gove has written to the exams watchdog, detailing the reforms to courses starting in 2014. It is hoped that the overhaul will restore rigour to exams, following years of tinkering that have dented public faith in A-levels.
His intervention comes as a study by Cambridge Assessment, which runs the OCR exam board, found that 72 per cent of 633 lecturers questioned – mainly from the Russell and 1994 university groups – have had to adapt their teaching because first-year students are not suitably prepared.
Under the plans, elite universities will publicly endorse A- levels they have been involved in developing and lead post-exam reviews to ensure that standards are maintained. Exam boards will be required to demonstrate that they have consulted academics extensively about subject content, syllabus and the style of questions.
The Department for Education would have no role in deciding the structure and content of A-levels under Mr Gove’s plans, which could also see the end of bite-size modules and the AS-level, introduced by Labour as a stepping stone to full A-level.
In addition, GCSEs may get tougher to prepare students for the revamped exams that follow them.
In his letter to Ofqual, seen by the Daily Mail, Mr Gove said: ‘Leading university academics tell me that A-levels do not prepare students well enough for the demands of an undergraduate degree..... I would therefore like to see universities having far greater involvement in the design and development of A-level qualifications than they do at present.’
He said there should be a ‘particular emphasis on our best, research-intensive universities such as those represented by the Russell Group’, adding: ‘This means that government must take a step back in order to allow universities to take a leading role.
‘In future, I do not envisage the Department for Education having a role in the development of A-level qualifications. ‘It is more important that universities are satisfied that A-levels enable young people to start their undergraduate degrees having gained the right knowledge and skills, than that ministers are able to influence content or methods of assessment.’
The changes will affect A-levels in key subjects including English, maths, the sciences and history from September 2014, with final exams taken in the summer of 2016.
Confidence in A-levels has been damaged with repeated reforms, such as the scrapping of final exams in favour of modular courses and multiple resits.
Mr Gove said he was concerned that A-level courses split into several modules – which students can keep resitting to bump up their final grade – were hampering children’s ‘deep understanding’. He also questioned the division of A-levels into AS- and A2-levels.
The reforms were disclosed as Cambridge Assessment revealed the results of an 18-month study. It found that 60 per cent of universities run remedial classes for first-year students to fill glaring gaps in their subject knowledge and boost essay-writing skills, including basic grammar.
Mark Dawe, OCR’s chief executive, said: ‘The design and content of qualifications has increasingly become the domain of government-funded bodies. One effect of this has been to disenfranchise university lecturers, tutors, and admissions staff.’
The lecturers questioned by Cambridge Assessment called for school exams to contain more advanced material and open-ended essay-style questions to stretch the brightest students.
Census Data Shows Inequality Linked to Education, Not Taxes
Much of President Obama's rhetoric and proposed policies have focused on eliminating what leftwing analysts have labeled a burgeoning income gap. However, the researchers and analysts that inform this stance and advocate its resulting policies often fail to account for the causes of that inequality, says Scott A. Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation.
Specifically, the role of education in increasing incomes for the more-educated and lowering incomes for the less-educated is substantial.
* Just 8 percent of those at the lowest income level have a college degree while 78 percent of those earning $250,000 or more have a college degree or advanced degree.
* At the other end of the income scale, 69 percent of low-income people have a high school degree or less, while just 9 percent of those earning over $250,000 have just a high school degree.
This data informs a conclusion that most are already familiar with: those with more education tend to make more money. Yet, this conclusion also explains much of the ostensibly runaway income gap. Americans are increasingly enrolling in higher levels of education, and this is raising their earning potential while they become wealthier than those who did not seek higher education.
* Last year, Census data showed that for the first time ever that more than 30 percent of U.S. adults age 25 and older had at least a bachelor's degree.
* As recently as 1998, fewer than 25 percent of people this age had this level of education.
* In 2010, there were 5.6 million more Americans with bachelor's degrees than in 1998 and nearly 3.5 million more with master's degrees.
This increased prevalence of education explains a large portion of the growing income gap.
* Census data shows that in 2010, income for high school degree holders averaged $50,561.
* A person with a bachelor's degree, meanwhile, made an average of $94,207 -- 86 percent more.
* Someone with a master's degree made an average of $111,149 -- roughly 120 percent more.
Tax policies that seek to tax the rich in order to level the playing field fail to recognize that income inequality is the natural result of government policies that send more people to college.
Source: Scott A. Hodge, "Census Data Shows Inequality Linked to Education, Not Taxes," Tax Foundation, March 16, 2012.
Political correctness has a double standard when it comes to teaching about religion in public schools. Drop Christianity down the memory hole but give extensive and mostly favorable coverage to Islam.
Even the mainstream media have provided extensive coverage of the steady stream of court cases and threatening letters from the American Civil Liberties Union aimed at removing all signs of Judeo-Christianity from public schools. Not only must prayer be prohibited, a cross and the Ten Commandments removed or covered up, a valedictorian banned from thanking God for his help, a football coach prohibited from bowing his head during a student-led pre-game prayer, singing of Christmas carols banned, and school calendars required to recognize winter holiday instead of Christmas, but there is also the complete omission of the history of the Founding Fathers' public recognition of Christianity.
An organization called ACT for America conducted an analysis of 38 textbooks used in the sixth- through 12th-grades in public schools, and found that since the 1990s, discussions of Islam are taking up more and more pages, while the space devoted to Judaism and Christianity has simultaneously decreased. In 2011, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that American 12th graders scored lower in history than in any other subject, even lower than in science, math and economics.
Most of these students are too young to remember 9/11, so current textbook descriptions about 9/11 is all they will learn. In one textbook example of pro-Islamic revisionism, 9/11 is portrayed as "a horrible act of terrorism, or violence to further a cause," without any mention that the attackers were Muslims or that the "cause" was Islamic jihad.
The textbooks generally give a false description of women's rights under Islam. The books don't reveal that women are subject to polygamy, a husband's legal right to beat her, genital mutilation, and the scandalous practice misnamed "honor killings," which allows a man to murder a daughter who dares to date a Christian.
Slavery is usually a favorite topic for the liberals, but historical revisionism is particularly evident in the failure to mention the Islamic slave trade. It began nearly eight centuries before the European-operated Atlantic slave trade and continues in some Muslim areas even today.
Other examples of historical revisionism in currently used textbooks include the omission of the doctrine of jihad or failure to accurately define it. Discussions of Muhammad's life and character are often contrary to accepted historical facts.
Muslim conquests and imperialism are usually omitted or downplayed, and a completely false narrative about the Crusades is given. The books often falsely claim that Islam is tolerant of Jews and Christians.
Another technique is to describe Christian and Jewish religious traditions as mere stories attributable to some human source, whereas Islamic traditions are presented as indisputable historic facts. In one textbook, you can read that Moses "claimed" to receive the Ten Commandments from God but that Muhammad simply "received" the Koran from God.
ACT for America is sending its report to all U.S. school board members nationwide. We hope they read it and tell the publishers the schools won't buy books that contain such errors and biases because that may be parents' only remedy for this indoctrination.
In the year of 9/11, a big controversy erupted at Excelsior public school in Byron, Calif., where seventh graders were being taught a three-week course about the Islamic religion. This course required the kids to learn 25 Islamic terms, 20 proverbs, Islam's Five Pillars of Faith, 10 key Islamic prophets and disciples, recite from the Koran, wear a robe during class, adopt a Muslim name, and stage their own "holy war" in a dice game.
Excelsior was using one of the textbooks that omit information about Islam's wars, massacres, and cruelties against Christians and Jews. Christianity was mentioned only briefly and negatively, linked to the Inquisition and to Salem witch hunts.
The students were given Muslim names and told to recite Muslim prayers in class. They were required to give up things for a day to recognize the Islamic practice of Ramadan, and the teacher gave extra credit for fasting at lunch.
For the final exam, the students had to write an essay about Islamic culture. The essay assignment warned students in these words: "Be careful here; if you do not have something positive to say, don't say anything!!!"
Parents naively thought they could appeal to the courts to uphold their right to reject this class for their children, which was really not education but behavior modification. They didn't realize that federal court decisions have ruled consistently against parents' rights and in favor of the authority of public schools to teach whatever they want.
The parents lost in court. And on Oct. 2, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider the parents' appeal from the lower court decision against them.
'Please Sir, we'd like some more': Teachers claim pupils are served 'very small' dinners by cost cutting British schools
Children are going hungry at school as cost-cutting canteens serve up tiny portions despite the price of meals rising, teachers have warned.
In echoes of the era of Dickens' Oliver Twist, portions in some schools are 'very small' and staple dishes run out quickly, a survey of staff revealed.
Yet the cost of school meals is rising, with parents likely to be paying an extra £95 this year compared with 2010/11.
Teachers surveyed by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers complained that youngsters are too often given limited choice and unhealthy, carb-heavy meals of chips, pasta or rice.
Some canteens are skimping on portion sizes, prompting suspicions that firms providing school meals are putting profits before children's nutritional needs.
More than a third of staff surveyed believed school meals offered poor value for money, while nearly a fifth said the meals were not healthy.
The revelation came as figures showed how the number of children eligible to receive school meals free-of-charge is rising due to the recession.
The number of children who qualify for free meals edged up from 1,012,000 in 2009/10 and 1,055,00 last year as growing numbers of parents are made redundant.
Discussing the survey findings, Dr Mary Bousted, ATL's general secretary, said: 'It's absolutely the case that children are going in hungry in school and we all know what hunger does to your ability to learn.
'Teachers do raise issues about the quantity of food that children get, and about choice. 'Some teachers are saying that children don't get enough food. 'Some parents say their children may be eating food that is against their religion because the choice has gone, the other option has run out.
'In an age of austerity, in rising child poverty... free school meals become increasingly important as a major source of nutrition for children and young people.
More than two-fifths of primary school children and a third of secondary school pupils are now opting for school meals, according to the latest official figures.
Take-up has been growing since the school meals revolution was kick-started six years ago.
'If they are rising in importance in that way, we need to make sure they are nutritional, they are adequate in terms of quality and there is choice so children can exercise choice in what they want to eat.'
The survey of school dinners, covering 500 teachers and classroom assistants in primaries and secondaries, found that 62 per cent of respondents said the price of meals had gone up in their school this year.
Most said the price had risen by up to 50p per day, leading to an additional cost to parents of £95 a year. But 34 per cent said meals failed to represent good value for money and 19 per cent said meals were not healthy.
A primary school teacher said: 'The food provided for our school varies in quality. Some meals are delicious, others are far from it.
'The portions served to the children are very poor, and there seems to be no regular inspection of the food, kitchens or portion size by the local authority provider.'
Another primary teacher said: 'There are times that meals are good but others when they are most unappetising. There are occasions when the portion size is very small and there have been times when portions have run out.'
A third added: 'The young children often get very small portions and very limited choice. Children who come with packed lunches eat a lot more at lunchtime.'
Meanwhile, a reception class teacher said: 'The younger children pay the same price but get much less than the older ones. Also they do not get the choice as this is saved for the older ones.'
Overall, staff felt meals were healthy but one secondary teacher said: 'There seems to be a lot of carbohydrates on offer each day. 'There are usually chips, pasta and rice available, while vegetables and salad don't seem to be on offer.
'As the meals are cooked in-house, the choice is limited to what our cook is able to make in large quantities.'
Commenting on the findings, Dr Bousted added: 'One respondent said we could do with more inspection of the standard of the meals.
'If it's not inspected, then there is a danger that private market forces can just take over and you're getting as much profit as you can out of feeding the nation's children.
'If, as is usual they have been provided by an outsourced company, by a private company, the size of the portion and the quality of the food will impact directly on the extent of the profits.'
The findings were published as ATL members debated a motion on free school meals at their annual conference in Manchester.
Delegates passed a resolution recognising that a rise in child poverty will further increase the importance of school dinners and cooking skills for the health of children and young people.
It calls on the Government to introduce a universal credit system to make sure that qualifying for free school meals becomes the accurate indicator of child poverty.
Clare Kellett, a teacher at West Somerset Community College, said some pupils came to school having had no breakfast, while some also failed to eat lunch.
'They don't really need to read Pope and Dickens, they don't really need to read Dickens and write essays about it to find out about child poverty, neglect, hunger,' she told delegates. 'They don't need to read it because they live it, in 2012.'
A School Food Trust spokesman said: 'Every child's appetite is different so portion sizes aren't set nationally - but cooks do get to know their pupils, and should make sure they are getting a portion that's appropriate for them.
'If parents or teachers are ever concerned that children aren't getting enough to eat, we always advise that they talk to their cooks in the first instance.'
She added: 'School meals need to be affordable for families. Our research proves that school food is particularly sensitive to changes in price and in these tough financial times, access to decent food at school for children has never been so important.
'Schools need support to build their market, run their catering efficiently and to deal with rising costs
But also a very sad story because the last sentence rings so true
Although we all know that death is inevitable, we are still seldom fully prepared for the death of someone who has been important in our lives. So it was with the recent death of Dr. Marie D. Gadsden, at the age of 92.
Mrs. Gadsden's only official connection with me was that she taught me freshman English at Howard University, more than half a century ago. But she and Professor Sterling Brown were my two idols when I was a student there -- and both remained so for the rest of my life.
Mrs. G, as I came to call her in later years, was not only a good teacher, and a demanding teacher, but also one with kindness toward her students. I can still remember one very rainy night when a young lady from her class and I were walking up the street together from Howard University, when a car suddenly pulled over to the curb, a door was flung open and we were invited to get in. It was Mrs. Gadsden.
When I decided that I wanted to transfer to Harvard, both Mrs. G and Sterling Brown wrote strong letters of recommendation for me -- letters that may have had more to do with my getting admitted than my mediocre grades, as a night student who was carrying too many courses for someone who worked full time during the day.
Mrs. G put me in touch with a lady she knew in Cambridge, who rented me a room, and also put me in touch with a lovely young woman who was a student at Radcliffe. Mr. Gadsden, her husband whom I had come to know by this time, said to me: "Oh, Tom, now she is picking out your women for you!" He had a great sense of humor.
In the decades that followed, Mrs. Gadsden and I remained in touch, usually by mail, even after we were both long gone from Howard University. Since she had many sojourns overseas, her letters often came from exotic places, principally in Africa.
She was my most important confidante, and her wise words helped me through many tough times in my personal life, as well as in my professional career. She encouraged my work, celebrated my advancement and, where necessary, criticized my shortcomings. All of it helped me.
At one point, I returned to Howard University to teach for a year. Among my students was a young African woman who had studied under Mrs. Gadsden in Guinea. This young lady, just recently arrived in the United States, seemed almost frightened by it -- and by my economics class, which met two hours every night during the six weeks of summer school.
The class was moving ahead at a rapid pace and, when this young African woman fell behind, I knew it would be very hard for her to catch up. She failed the first two weekly tests and, when I spoke with her about it after class, she was thoroughly embarrassed and quietly began to cry.
I then went to see Mrs. Gadsden, who was back in Washington at this time, and who knew this girl and her family back in Guinea.
"So you think she's going to fail the course?" Mrs. G asked.
"Well, she's not going to learn the material. Whether I can bring myself to give her an F is something else. That's really hitting somebody who's down."
"You're thinking of passing her, even if she does not do passing work?" Mrs. G said sharply. She reminded me that I had long criticized paternalistic white teachers who passed black students who should have been failed -- and she let me have it.
"I'm ashamed of you, Tom. You know better!"
Now it seemed as if I could neither pass nor fail this young African woman. In desperation, I began to meet with her in the office for an hour before every class to try to bring her up to speed. At first, it didn't look like these private lessons were doing any good, but one night she finally began to grasp what economics was all about, and she even smiled, for the first time.
The young woman from Guinea did B work from there on out -- and I was tempted to give her a B. But her earlier failing grades could not be ignored, and averaging them in made her grade a C.
When I saw Mrs. Gadsden later, she said, "Our friend was overjoyed at getting a C in your course! She was proud because she knew she earned every bit of it."
That was the Mrs. G I knew. And I never expect to see anyone like her again.
Three-quarters of British universities 'to cut student places'
Growing numbers of bright students face missing out on their first choice university, academics warned today, as figures showed three-quarters of institutions are being forced to slash places.
Almost 100 out of 130 universities in England could be forced to take fewer undergraduates this year numbers following the introduction of Coalition reforms designed to drive down tuition fees, it emerged.
Many members of the elite Russell Group are among those facing reductions, with Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Southampton being particularly hit.
Data from the Government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England suggests some newer universities such as Bedfordshire and East London are expecting to lose around one-in-eight places.
The cuts are being imposed following the introduction of new rules that effectively penalise universities charging more than £7,500 in student fees from this autumn.
It means large numbers of places are being shifted towards cheap further education colleges.
Ministers are also lifting controls on the number of bright students gaining at least two A grades and a B at A-level that universities can recruit – leading to an inevitable scramble towards a small number of top institutions.
Sir Alan Langlands, the funding council’s chief executive, denied the loss of student places would tip any institution into "significant financial trouble".
But Prof Michael Farthing, vice-chancellor of Sussex University and chairman of the 1994 Group, which represents many small research institutions, said the figures show that “many excellent students will be denied places at their first choice universities.”
“The number of students universities are allowed to recruit has been cut across the sector, with 20,000 places auctioned off to institutions with lower than average fees,” he said.
“Far from giving the best universities freedom to take on more students this represents a push to a cut-price education."
Today, HEFCE announced funding and estimated student places for universities and colleges in 2012/13. It emerged that teaching funds had been cut by £1.1 billion – to £3.2bn – while cash for research has been frozen at £1.6bn.
Under Coalition reforms, funding gaps are expected to be plugged by a rise in annual student tuition fees – from £3,290 to £9,000.
But to keep the student loans bill down, some 20,000 places are being taken from all institutions and redistributed to universities and colleges charging less than £7,500.
At the same time, 10,000 places – offered in previous years to cope with a sudden surge in applications – are not being made available in 2012.
In a report published today, the funding council outlined how places would be distributed this year. Some 98 out of 129 universities – 76 per cent – are estimated to see some drop in their student numbers. A quarter could see cuts of at least 10 per cent.
Fourteen out of 20 English members of the Russell Group also face cuts, with Liverpool losing as many as 6.4 per cent of places and Leeds 5.1 per cent.
All 12 English members of the 1994 Group are also facing reductions, including 11 per cent at Essex and 10.5 per cent at Goldsmith’s College, London.
But newer universities are being hit hardest, figures suggest. Cuts of at least 12 per cent will be seen at Bedfordshire, East London, Liverpool Hope, Middlesex and Northampton.
The funding council insist figures are estimates based on recruitment in previous years and final allocations could be higher as universities compete against each other to recruit students gaining two As and a B at A-level. This is likely to benefit the top universities the most.
But the biggest year-on-year rises in student numbers are likely to be seen at further education colleges, which can often run degree courses at a fraction of the price of universities. Kingston College in West London is seeing a 1,115 per cent rise in places – from 20 to 223 students.
David Willetts, the Universities Minister, said: “We want a student-focused higher education sector, more choice over where to study and a renewed focus on the quality of the student experience.
“That’s why we’re freeing up centralised number controls, improving information for prospective students and driving a new focus on the academic experience.”
But Libby Hackett, director of University Alliance, said: “Despite continued demand for university places we are seeing significant drops in student places across the sector with some institutions subject to cuts of 12 per cent in just one year.
“The places which are being taken out of the system in 2012-13, or transferring to further education, means that there will be 20,000 fewer young people able to go to university compared to last year.”
British teachers bend rules to boost exam scores: Survey finds test marks are fiddled and pupils bribed
Just like Georgia
Teachers are bribing pupils with pizza nights and fiddling test results to help their schools secure exam success, a survey has found. Almost 40 per cent admitted the ‘overwhelming pressure’ to ensure that pupils achieve good grades ‘could compromise their professionalism’.
The poll, by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, reveals the lengths that schools are prepared to go to in order to climb league tables. A quarter of respondents said they gave pupils ‘rewards and incentives’ to work harder. One teacher cited organising ‘pizza nights’.
In addition, 28 per cent said they felt obliged to attend controversial exam board seminars.
The admission follows an undercover newspaper investigation that found some teachers paid up to £230 a day to attend seminars with chief examiners, during which they were advised on exam questions and even the wording pupils should use to get higher marks.
One state secondary school teacher told ATL: ‘I know of an exam meeting where it was strongly hinted which topics would come up in the exam. I was glad my school was there but I felt sorry for those that were not.’
Another said: ‘We don’t go to many exam seminars because we can’t afford it. We probably lose out to those who can.’
The union surveyed 512 teachers, lecturers and headteachers working in state-funded and independent primary and secondary schools, academies and colleges in England ahead of its annual conference, which begins in Manchester today.
Some admitted fiddling exam scores. A primary school teacher said: ‘I have been forced to manipulate results so that levels of progress stay up.’ A secondary school teacher added: ‘The school I work at definitely pushes the boundaries of exam integrity. Maintaining their “gold-plated” status takes precedence over developing the abilities of the pupils. ‘Controlled assessments and aspects of coursework are problem areas for cheating, with senior leadership driving the agenda.’
A grammar school teacher said: ‘In some cases I end up virtually re-writing my students’ homework to match the marking criteria, rather than teach them my subject, French. I do this because there is simply not time to do both.’
Eighty-eight per cent of those polled said the pressure to get pupils through exams prevented the teaching of a broad and balanced curriculum, while 73 per cent claimed it had a detrimental effect on the quality of teaching. Seventy-one per cent said it affected the standard of learning.
In addition, one teacher warned that pupils are ‘close to breakdown’ with the demands being put on them during out-of-school hours and the Easter holidays.
Dr Mary Bousted, ATL’s general secretary, said: ‘With the Government’s persistent focus on tests, exam results and league tables, many teachers and lecturers also feel under enormous pressure – often to the detriment of high-quality teaching, learning and development of pupils.
‘School league tables, school banding and Ofsted inspections undermine the curriculum and do nothing to support pupils and their hard-working teachers, lecturers and leaders.’
Two Alabama teachers caught taunting disabled boy, 10, as 'gross' and 'disgusting' after his mother bugged his wheelchair with recording device
Teachers can be surprisingly unprofessional. My son is physically robust and very bright but his female teacher in Grade 4 was contemptuous of him because he sat quietly rather than running around like the other kids. I spoke to the Principal about it and he promised action but I sent my son to another school for grade 5, where he was found to be two years ahead of his classmates in reading age. When my son got a First in Mathematics at university years later, I emailed the Head teacher and pointed out that one of his alumni had distinguished himself but with no credit to the school
Two Alabama teachers were caught cruelly taunting and abusing a 10-year-old boy who has celebral palsy after the boy’s mother attached an audio recorder to his wheelchair.
The shocking recording captures two voices chiding Jose Salinas for his ‘disgusting’ drooling and reveals he was left alone with no instruction for long periods of time.
The teachers accused, Drew Faircloth and Alicia Brown, have been put on administrative leave from Wicksburg High School, Alabama, where Jose is in the fourth grade.
Melisha Salinas knew her son was not happy at school and he often came home sick but Jose always said he had a ‘good day’ when asked about it. In despair Salinas, a nursing student, took her son to a psychologist who told her the problem could be stress or anxiety but could not determine the cause.
An explanation came when one of Jose’s classmates told Salinas that the teacher’s aide had been mean to Jose three times that day.
Determined to be sure of what was happening herself she attached a bugging device to Jose’s wheelchair and left it recording over three days. The recording revealed that her son was being cruelly taunted about his disability and ignored for the majority of the day with no-one giving him instruction.
'You drooled on the paper,' a male's voice, allegedly that of teacher's aide Drew Faircloth, can be heard saying. 'That's disgusting.' 'Keep your mouth closed and don't drool on my paper,' a woman's voice identified as Alicia Brown is heard saying.'I do not want to touch your drool. Do you understand that? Obviously, you don't.'
After listening to the tapes. which she said 'broke her heart', Salinas immediately pulled her son out of the school. 'I could not believe someone would treat a child that way, much less a special needs child,' Melisha Salinas told ABCNews.com.
'The anger in his voices ... and the thing he was getting angry about, [Jose] just can't help.'
She played the tapes to the school board and the teachers were placed on administrative leave.
And Jose, who is known as Little Joe to his family and friends, was able to return to school.
But within days the teachers were returned to their positions so Salinas and other parents took their children out of the school in protest.
Feeling that ‘nobody was listening’ Salinas took the recordings to her local newspaper and the teachers were placed on leave once again.
'There were some very disturbing things on the tape,' Superintendent Tim Pitchford told The Dothan Eagle. 'Employees were not very compassionate to the needs of the child and the symptoms of his disability. It did not appear on the tapes that there was much teaching going on.'
The recordings have shocked YouTube viewers and a Facebook page called 'We Got Your Back Little Joe!!!' has nearly 5,000 supporters.
The school board are meeting on April 9 to decide what action to take against the teachers.
UC's Leftist Echo Chamber Drowns Out Diverse Voices
Political activism has drawn the University of California into an academic death spiral. Too many professors believe their job is to "advance social justice" rather than teach the subject they were hired to teach. Groupthink has replaced lively debate. Institutions that were designed to stir intellectual curiosity aren't challenging young minds. They're churning out "ignorance." So argues a new report, "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," from the conservative California Association of Scholars.
The report cites a number of studies that document academia's political imbalance. In 2004, for example, researchers examined the voter registration of University of California, Berkeley faculty. They found a ratio of 8 Democrats for each Republican. While the ratio was 4-to-1 in the professional schools, in more political disciplines, the ratio rose to 17-to-1 in the humanities and 21-to-1 in social sciences.
Over the past few decades, the imbalance has grown. The report noted, "The most plausible explanation for this clear and consistent pattern is surely that it is the result of discrimination in the hiring process."
UC Berkeley political science professor Wendy Brown rejected that argument. (Yes, she hails from the left, she said, but she doesn't teach left.) The reason behind the unbalance, she told me, is that conservatives don't go to grad school to study political science. When conservatives go to graduate school, she added, they tend to study business or law.
"If the argument is that what is going on is some kind of systematic exclusion," then critics have to target "where the discouragement happens."
OK. Freshmen sign up for courses that push an agenda of "social justice." Most professors may try to expose students to views other than their own, but others don't even try. The message could not be clearer: In the universe where politics and academia converge, conservatives are freaks.
That's how ideologues self-replicate.
The fallout isn't simply political. The association scolds argue, "This hiring pattern has occurred just as the quality of a college education has sharply declined."
Campus reading lists require trendy books instead of challenging authors, such as William Shakespeare, who can draw students deeper into the English language. Teach-ins are notoriously one-sided. College graduates today are less proficient as readers than past graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could read and explain a complex book. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours per week on homework; today's students study for 14 hours per week.
At the same time, grades have risen. "Students often report that all they must do to get a good grade is regurgitate what their activist professors believe," quoth the report.
Though she had not read the report, Brown didn't dispute that today's students have trouble writing a "deep, thoughtful essay" about a passage from Thomas Hobbes or Milton Friedman.
"If Shakespeare were required, I would be thrilled," Brown stressed. But: "Don't pick on liberals for this." Universities have cut back on core requirements because students, parents and alumni revolt.
That may be, but in ideologically lopsided academia, there aren't enough voices to stand up for educating students about, say, the U.S. Constitution. Besides -- this is me, not the report -- in pushing protests, faculty members essentially have assured students that they already know enough to occupy Sacramento. Only a third of them can read and explain complex material, but students already know better than lawmakers and voters how best to pay for education. Why study?
The proof is in academia's acceptance of this imbalance. The old, discredited excuse about why women didn't work in management that I heard when I was young -- because they didn't want to -- now somehow works for the left when it comes to conservatives and academia.
As for UC administrators, "A Crisis of Competence" concludes, "far from performing their role as the university's quality control mechanism, (they) now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards."
Like those in so many other ailing institutions, they don't know how to change to save themselves.
Parents will have legal right to choose the best school for their children, says British PM
People will have a legal "right to choose" which schools and hospitals they use under new laws overhauling public services, David Cameron says today.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the Prime Minister sets out his vision for ending “once-and-for-all the closed, state monopoly” of public services.
Under the changes, the Government will give people the power to lodge a complaint if they are forced to send their children to a certain school.
Patients will also be able to go to a tribunal or ombudsman if they are not offered a choice of hospitals for medical appointments.
“We are publishing draft legislation that could enshrine in law the right to choice,” Mr Cameron says. “This means if your mother needs hospital treatment, or your child is about to start school, you will get a choice over where they go.
“And if that choice doesn’t exist, or you’re not happy with it, you will have a way to get your complaint properly and fairly listened to – and resolved.
“So if as an outpatient you are unfairly denied the choice of appointment, you will be able to have that unfair and anti-competitive decision over-ruled.”
Last year, Mr Cameron said that private companies, voluntary groups and charities will be given the right to run schools, hospitals and vast swaths of council services under ambitious plans to end the “state’s monopoly” over public sector work.
New draft laws published today will build on this idea by allowing private companies and charities to challenge local councils or hospitals if they feel they are being squeezed out of the market.
“If you are a new service provider who believes you can offer a better service - you will have a way to break through the state monopoly and allow the service user, not the bureaucrat, to be your judge and jury,” the Prime Minister says.
Mr Cameron also wants to see more “neighbourhood councils”, where small groups of residents can force local authorities to fix problems like broken street lights and potholes. These groups would be like town or parish councils, but potentially covering just four or five streets.
“Some local authorities have been guilty of the same kind of top-down bureaucracy that has for so long been the Achilles heel of central government,” Mr Cameron says.
“I want us to challenge this kind of institutional behaviour, and really turn the tables so local people have a genuine opportunity to come together and take responsibility for the services in their neighbourhoods.”
Cabinet Office ministers have expanded and updated last year's White Paper as they seek to make more progress on ending “clumsy and inefficient” bureaucracy in the civil service.
“Nearly two years on from coming into office, brick by brick, edifice by edifice, we are slowly dismantling the big state structures we inherited from the last government,” the Prime Minister says.
The Government will also conduct an independent review to make sure “the most disadvantaged in our society” have equal access to choice in public services.
Australia: Government schools struggle to attract male teachers as non-government sector scores more men
Because there are fewer of them, they have more choice and many choose schools where they are free to teach, instead of having to spend half their time just trying to get the kids to sit down. I was pleased to see the number of male teachers in my son's private High School. It was because of them that he became enthused about mathematics -- and he now has a B.Sc. with a First in Mathematics
Australian High Schools are heavily sorted. With 39% of the kids going to private schools, all the problem kids are in the State sector. So those who most need discipline and strong role models are least likely to get that. If the State schools had reasonable disciplinary policies, the chaos would vanish and a career there for those who really want to teach would be more atttractive
AUSTRALIA'S public schools are in the grip of a man drought. But it's raining men in the non-government sector, where the number of male teachers has grown 25 per cent since 2001.
At the same time, the number of male teachers has dropped 2 per cent at the nation's public schools, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal.
Schools have struggled to attract male teachers to the female-dominated profession.
Teachers can earn more money in the non-government sector but there can also be more demands outside school hours, such as Saturday sport.
The New South Wales Department of Education and Communities said the national trend was reflected at the state's schools but they also had a very low resignation rate.
Last year there were 15,274 male teachers at public schools, representing about 27 per cent of teaching staff.
In 2001, male teachers made up about 31 per cent. There were 9734 male teachers in the non-government sector - about 30 per cent of the teaching workforce. In 2001, male teachers represented 23 per cent.
A department spokesman said strategies were in place to recruit more male teachers but quality was more important than gender.
One man happy to be working in the public system is 29-year-old Mark Platt, who teaches Year 6 students at Kellyville Ridge Public School.
The school has almost 800 students from the boom suburbs in Sydney's northwest and nine male teachers - a rarity in the public primary system.
Mr Platt said the pay rate was probably the reason men were attracted to the non-government sector but he enjoyed the challenges of a public school.
"I'm happy where I am and couldn't see myself at another school," he said.
The school's assistant principal, Luke Hogan, said he chose to teach at a public school because he believed in its values.
He said male teachers could provide a positive role model to boys who may not have a man in the family home.
"Every child deserves to have access to an education, whether their families can afford it or not," he said.
James Galea, 24, is the only male teacher in his nine-person faculty at Mitchell High School in Blacktown, which he said reflected the perception that teaching was not an attractive career path for men.
The English and drama teacher said his wife taught in the non-government sector and earned more money than him but the main difference between the two sectors was facilities.
British High School calls in primary teacher to solve its reading crisis as pupils have abilities of a FIVE-year-old
An inner-city secondary school has had to recruit a primary school teacher because so many pupils have the reading and writing skills of a five or six-year-old.
Shocking standards of English among children aged 11 to 13 at the Sirius Academy in Hull led to the pioneering back-to-basics literacy scheme. It is believed to be the first such scheme in the country in a state-funded mainstream school.
Teacher Liz Atwood is using picture books usually aimed at youngsters barely out of nursery school, working on basic spelling and joining up letters to improve terrible handwriting.
The rise of Facebook and texting are said to be significant factors behind appalling standards of English at some schools. Teachers say they have encouraged a lazy approach to spelling and grammar as well as the use of abbreviations.
Miss Atwood, 24, is working with 38 children in Year Seven and 24 from Year Eight – around 10 per cent of the pupils in those age groups.
She sees the children in small groups four times a week for 100-minute sessions. ‘Some have a reading age of five years and the reading age is the same age as the writing age,’ she said.
Other schools facing similar problems are said to be monitoring the scheme’s progress with interest.
The teacher was recruited from a local primary school to take up the ‘transitional’ teaching post when the academy opened two-and-a-half years ago. In that time standards are said to have improved dramatically, with the group’s average reading age increasing by nine months a year.
Some of her students now in Year Eight have advanced three years in reading age since September 2010. Miss Atwood identified ‘routine and repetition’ as the key to improving literacy standards from the previous crisis level.
The bookshelves in her class reflect the primary school level study and include favourites such as Beware Of The Story Book Wolves (recommended for ages four and over), Sam’s Sunflower and several Dr Seuss classics.
The school library also has Don’t You Dare Dragon!, a pop-up style book intended for four-year-olds, and other simple-to-read picture books such as Alfie the Sea Dog.
English teacher Gemma Jackson, 27, said ‘social media’ had a negative impact on school work, with abbreviations such as ‘B4’ frequently being used.
‘When they are reading things on Facebook they do copy the language, so we get a lot of text talk and it can be so difficult to get children to write properly,’ she said.
Commenting on the learning programme, she added: ‘It has made a huge difference and you now see children walking around with books, which you never used to.’
Charlotte Hobbs, 12, has flourished with the extra help and is seen as a success of the system, though her reading level is still seven years and five months. She said: ‘It has made a big difference to my life. 'I enjoy school so much I do not want to take a day off.’
Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, praised the initiative at the academy school – which has 1,200 pupils – but criticised standards at primary level.
He said: ‘Children should be learning stuff like this when they are five or six, not 11 and 12. They may say parents need to do more but they have to call the primary schools to account.'
Orthodox Jewish school wants its students off Facebook
Given the safety concerns that Jews reasonably have, this seems an understandable precaution but it surely it should be up to the families to decide
Students at the Orthodox Beth Rivkah High School in Brooklyn, New York, have reportedly been given an ultimatum: Delete individual Facebook profiles and pay a $100 fine or face expulsion.
Considering the negative elements that hold the potential to come as a result of using the social network, the school has apparently decided that the risks outweigh the benefits. This is specifically true when it comes to the potential for the girls to violate the Orthodox code of modesty.
Now, the all-girls school is doubling down on its stance against Facebook and its potential evils.
“Girls are getting killed on the Internet — that’s the reason for it,” explained school administrator Rabbi Benzion Stock in an interview with The New York Post. “The Internet is a good way to ruin marriages and families. We don’t want them there, period.”
The New York Daily News quotes Stock as saying, “We have an eternal ban. A ban from whenever it started.”
Stock went on to claim that the social media platform is “the wrong place for a Jewish girl to be” and that it isn’t a modest tool for the girls to be utilizing.
The Daily News provides more on the latest developments in “Facebookgate”:
"Administrators cracked down further last week after receiving word that girls were still updating their statuses and sharing photos. And the renegades were easy enough to find with a search of Facebook, said Stock. All 33 girls agreed to delete their accounts, Stock said, and paid a $100 fine that will be returned at the end of the school year. The students didn’t “like” complying, one of the offenders said."
The Post reports that the crackdown initially appeared on CrownHeights.info, a web site devoted to local news. School officials have countered the news of the ban, which has broken nationally, by claiming that the policy has always been on the books. In fact, the students allegedly sign a contract saying they won’t use social media.
At least one former student has spoken out about the ridiculousness she sees in the crackdown. After being kicked out for using Facebook and dressing without modesty, 17-year-old Chaya Tatik claims that the policy is “not right” and that Facebook helps her communicate with her cousins in Israel. “Everyone uses Facebook. It’s a way to communicate,” she said.
Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.
TERMINOLOGY: The English "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.
