The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. Dissecting Leftism is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other sites viewable in China: Political Correctness Watch, Dissecting Leftism, Greenie Watch and Gun Watch. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing). The archive for this mirror site is here.
****************************************************************************************



31 August, 2005

SCOTLAND CAN'T TRAIN ENOUGH DENTISTS -- BUT WHY?

Socialized education gone mad: Despite a shortage of dentists, they actually pay people NOT to study dentistry. Worthy of Ripley

Scotland's chief dental officer said that “constructive” talks had taken place at a university after it emerged that it was offering students bursaries to defer their studies. Ray Watkins met staff at Dundee University, which was paying prospective dental school students 2,000 pounds to postpone their studies after an unprecedented number took up offers of a place on the course, leaving it oversubscribed. The offer has attracted criticism from some politicians, who say that more places should be made available at at time when there is a shortage of NHS dentists in Scotland.

Speaking after a meeting with the dental school’s dean, Professor Bill Saunders, Mr Watkins said: “Last week the Deputy Health Minister highlighted the fact that our priority is not just on getting more students through our dental schools, but on making sure that we get more dentists committed to the NHS at the end of their training. Today I have had a very constructive meeting. I shall now feedback to ministers and they will respond fully in due course. ”

The school, one of only two in Scotland, has seen a 40 per cent rise in applications this year, with the number of acceptances increasing by more than 30 per cent. The shortage of NHS dentists has seen hundreds of people queuing outside surgeries to register with new practices when they open. The Executive responded to the crisis by announcing a 150 million pound funding package for dentists over three years.

The SNP’s Richard Lochhead called for the Executive to fund extra training places. “The hundreds of thousands of Scots who are not registered with a dentist will be wanting as many new dentists trained up as soon as possible,” he said. “The chief dental officer should go back to his political masters and demand resources to plug the funding gap that will allow our dental schools to take on more students.”

Source



Australian Secondary Teachers reject profit motive

And this is worthy of Ripley too: Teachers don't want education to be useful

The national teachers union has questioned whether schools should be teaching the skills needed to get jobs. In a submission to the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy, due to report within weeks, the Australian Education Union has questioned the value of knowledge becoming an "economic tool". The submission said teaching was now "the subject of intense debate by people who have little understanding of the process of education but great interest in the product. "(These are) people for whom the purpose of education is to enable nations and companies to profit within a knowledge society ... (though) such a purpose, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, within compassionate constraints," it stated.

The union argues against vocational teaching aimed solely at equipping students for the workplace, calling instead for a broad-based education. Federal president Pat Byrne said last night the submission aimed to show that "the purpose of education is not simply to prepare people for the workforce".

But federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson blasted the submission, saying "the union appears to think it is teaching students in a pre-industrial era". "It's seriously disturbing that the peak teachers' organisation in Australia can bemoan the fact it is educating young people for work," Dr Nelson said. "Of course, the moral, cultural, intellectual purpose of learning is important. But so too is preparing students for the world of work."

Ms Byrne said there was too much pressure on schools - from business, government and some parents - to produce students "who are prepared primarily for the workforce". "No one is saying that it shouldn't be the case but education serves a public good, beyond the benefit that it provides the individual. "It's not just: 'What does my child need so that my child benefits?"'

Ms Byrne came under fire earlier this week for criticising Australian voters for returning the Howard Government. In an address for a Queensland conference, Ms Byrne urged teachers to defend the "progressive" curriculum in schools and attack the rise in conservative values in education. "(The conservatives) certainly haven't won the curriculum debate, but they have made significant inroads into framing education to fit their version of the world," Ms Byrne wrote.

Her comments prompted Dr Nelson to say she was "not fit" to lead the union.

Dr Nelson announced the inquiry into literacy last May, after 26 leading academics questioned the teaching of literacy in Australia. The inquiry will study the effectiveness of both phonics and "whole learning" as learning tools.

The union's submission took a postmodernist stance on literacy, saying basic skills tests that only measure students' reading and writing ability "reinforce the one-dimensional view of literacy which is often seen in the press". The union argued against "accepting a narrow, cognitive-psychological approach to defining literacy at the expense of a broader socio-cultural definition". "Cognitive skills are a means to an end and must be situated within the broader context of the social and cultural purposes of literacy," the union said, adding that successful literacy programs "focus on the constructions of both masculinities and femininities" and that teachers must "avoid the 'competing victim' syndrome".

[Prime Minister] John Howard yesterday said more vocational training was needed to make up the skilled labour shortage. But Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations of NSW president Sharryn Brownlee warned: "There's a real danger ... that students will be told that school is only about getting a job."

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



30 August, 2005

Proving the Critics’ Case

By KC Johnson

Inside Higher Ed recently reported on four University of Pittsburgh professors critiquing the latest survey suggesting ideological one-sidedness in the academy. According to the Pitt quartet, self-selection accounts for findings that the faculty of elite disproportionately tilts to the Left. “Many conservatives,” the Pitt professors mused, “may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method.”

Imagine the appropriate outrage that would have occurred had the above critique referred to feminists, minorities, or Socialists. Yet the Pitt quartet’s line of reasoning — that faculty ideological imbalance reflects the academy functioning as it should — has appeared with regularity, and has been, unintentionally, most revealing. Indeed, the very defense offered by the academic Establishment, rather than the statistical surveys themselves, has gone a long way toward proving the case of critics who say that the academy lacks sufficient intellectual diversity.

In theory, ideology should have no bearing on how a professor teaches, say, physics. Even so, should responsible administrators worry that the overwhelming partisan disparity is worthy of further inquiry? And, in theory, parents who make their money in traditionally conservative professions such as investment banking or corporate law probably do not encourage their children to enter academe. Yet, as money-making fields have always been attractive to conservatives, why has the proportion of self-professed liberals or Leftists in the academy nearly doubled in the last generation?

Had members of the academic Establishment confined themselves to such arguments (or had they ignored the partisan-breakdown studies altogether), the intellectual diversity issue would have received little attention. Instead, the last two years have seen proud, often inflammatory, defenses of the professoriate’s ideological imbalance. These arguments, which have fallen into three categories, raise grave concerns about the academy’s overall direction.

1. The cultural left is, simply, more intelligent than anyone else

As SUNY-Albany’s Ron McClamrock reasoned, “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter.” The first recent survey came in early 2004, when the Duke Conservative Union disclosed that Duke’s humanities departments contained 142 registered Democrats and 8 registered Republicans. Philosophy Department chairman Robert Brandon considered the results unsurprising: “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.”

In a slightly different vein, UCLA professor John McCumber informed The New York Times that “a successful career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience,” qualities “antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.” In another Times article, Berkeley professor George Lakoff asserted that Leftists predominate in the academy because, “unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake.” Again, imagine the appropriate outcry if prominent academics employed such sweeping generalizations to dismiss statistical disparities suggesting underrepresentation of women, gays, or minorities.

These arguments become even more disturbing given the remarkably broad definition of “conservative” employed in many academic quarters. Take the case of Yeshiva University’s Ellen Schrecker, recently elected to a term on the AAUP’s general council. This past spring, Schrecker denounced Columbia students who wanted to broaden instruction about the Middle East for “trying to impose orthodoxy at this university.” The issue, she lamented, amounted to “right wing propaganda.”

The leaders of the Columbia student group, who ranged from registered Republicans to backers of Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential bid, were united only in their belief that matters relating to Israel should be treated objectively in the classroom. Probably 98 percent of the U.S. Congress and all of the nation’s governors would fit under such a definition of “right wing.”

Indeed, it seems as if the academic Establishment considers anyone who does not accept the primacy of a race/class/gender interpretation to be “conservative.” To most outside of the academy, such a definition would suggest that professors are using stereotypes to abuse the inherently subjective nature of the hiring process.

2. A left-leaning tilt in the faculty is a pedagogical necessity, because professors must expose gender, racial, and class bias while promoting peace, “diversity” and “cultural competence.”

According to Montclair State’s Grover Furr, “colleges and universities do not need a single additional ‘conservative’ .... What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists — all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.’”

Furr’s remarks echoed those of Connecticut College’s Rhonda Garelick, who decried student “disgruntlement” when she used her French class to discuss her opposition to the war in Iraq and teach “‘wakeful’ political literacy.” Rashid Khalidi, meanwhile, rationalized anti-Israel instruction as necessary to undo the false impressions held by all incoming Columbia students except for “Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true.”

To John Burness, Duke’s senior vice president for public affairs, such statements reflect a proper professorial role. The “creativity” in humanities and social science disciplines, he noted, addresses issues of race, class, and gender, leading to a “perfectly logical criticism of the current society” in the classroom.

At some universities, this mindset has even shaped curricular or personnel policies. Though its release generated widespread criticism and hints from administrators that it would not be adopted, a proposal to make “cultural competence” a key factor in all personnel decisions remains the working draft of the University of Oregon’s new diversity plan. Columbia recently set aside $15 million for hiring women and minorities — and white males who would “in some way promote the diversity goals of the university.” And the University of Arizona’s hiring blueprint includes requiring new faculty in some disciplines to “conduct research and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of valuing diversity.”

On the curricular front, my own institution’s provost, Roberta Matthews (who has written that “teaching is a political act") intends for the college’s new general education curriculum to produce “global citizens” — who, she commented, are those “sensitized to issues of race, class, and gender.”

Given such initiatives, it is worth remembering the traditional ideal of a university education: for faculty committed to free intellectual exchange in pursuit of the truth to expose undergraduates to the disciplines of the liberal arts canon, in the expectation that college graduates will possess the wide range of knowledge and skills necessary to function as democratic citizens.

3. A left-leaning professoriate is a structural necessity, because the liberal arts faculty must balance business school faculty and/or the general conservative political culture

University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, denouncing the “ridiculous and pernicious line” that major universities need greater intellectual diversity, complained about insufficient attention to the ideological breakdown of “Business Schools, Medical Schools, [and] Engineering schools.” UCLA’s Russell Jacoby wondered why ” conservatives seem unconcerned about the political orientation of the business professors.” Duke Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky more ambitiously claimed that “it’s hard to see this as a time of liberal dominance” given conservative control of the three branches of government.

Professional schools reflect the mindset of their professions: Socialists are about as common on business school faculty as are home-schooling advocates among education school professors. But, unlike business schools, liberal arts colleges and universities do not exist to train students for a single profession. Nor are they supposed to balance the existing political culture. If the Democrats reclaim the presidency and Congress in the 2008 elections, should the academy suddenly adopt an anti-liberal posture?

The intellectual diversity issue shows no signs of fading away. Ideological one-sidedness among the professoriate seems to be, if anything, expanding. And so, no doubt, will we see additional surveys suggesting a heavy ideological imbalance among the nation’s faculty — followed by new inflammatory statements from the academic Establishment that only reinforce the critics’ claims about bias in the personnel process.

In an ideal world, campus administrators would have rectified this problem long ago. A few have made small steps. Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, for instance, has expressed concern that the “chilling effect caused by the dominance of certain voices on the spectrum of moral and political thought” might negatively affect a quality education; her university’s Political Theory Project represents a model that other institutions could follow.

To my knowledge, however, no academic administration has made the creation of an intellectually and pedagogically diverse faculty its primary goal. This statement, it should be noted, applies equally as well to institutions frequently praised by conservatives, such as Hillsdale College. Such an initiative, of course, would encounter ferocious faculty resistance. But it would also, just as surely, excite parents, donors, and trustees. If successful, an institution that made intellectual diversity its hallmark would encourage imitation — if only because other colleges would face the free-market pressures of losing talented students and faculty. So, the question becomes, do we have an administration anywhere in the country willing to take up the cause?



A GOOD SATURDAY EDITORIAL FROM "THE AUSTRALIAN" -- AUSTRALIA'S NATIONAL DAILY

Educational idiocy: The teachers' union has ideas inimical to education

It seems the social engineers of the Australian Education Union could not care less what happens to individual kids in their members' care. In its submission to a national inquiry into the teaching of literacy the union warns against people "who see education only as an individual, economic benefit", as if acquiring the skills to earn a living should not be the paramount goal of schooling. Parents who want schools to teach their children functional literacy and numeracy generally also want them to receive the basics of a broad liberal education that gives them the confidence to think for, and express, themselves. A good schooling does all these things. But the AEU knows better than the rest of us and says education should "fulfil a nation-building role in which the tenets of democracy are promoted". Perhaps the union means the tenets education academic Wayne Sawyer invoked in February when he suggested teachers had failed in the teaching of "critical literacy", because the Howard Government was re-elected last year.

It appears as if the AEU is led by ideological warriors from another age. They are part of the army of activists who were trained to teach by academics in the 1960s, or their heirs, who abhor the free market, deny the core cultural values in the Western literary canon (too many dead white males) and believe teachers fail if kids leave school feeling inferior. They are the reason why Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has had to fight state ministers, who are always desperate not to annoy the powerful education unions, to introduce report cards that show how children compare against their peers. And why league tables that rank schools on objective performance measures are educational anathema. Perhaps this anti-competitive culture also explains why teacher education courses now attract academic low achievers, because starting teachers are not badly paid. Whatever the reason, parents should be less alarmed than terrified by the AEU attitude – that education is about acquiring the right sort of ideas as much as the skills to earn a living.

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



29 August, 2005

Perversity and Diversity at My Little University

By the inimitable Mike Adams

Most people don’t know it, but there is a war currently being waged within the UNC system. The administrations of each of the sixteen campuses are trying to outdo one another when it comes to funding unmitigated idiocy and perversion in the name of “diversity.” Recently, UNC-Asheville showed a porn movie to 200 students in order to take the lead. That has administrators at UNC-Wilmington fighting mad and fighting back.

In an effort to take the lead in this race (and become the most idiotic university in North Carolina), UNCW is helping to sponsor a showing of the film “Trans Generation.” In fact, the Office of Campus Diversity, the Office of the Dean of Students, and the UNCW Women’s Resource Center are all pitching in to help.

For those who don’t know, “Trans Generation” is an eight-part documentary series that charts the lives of four college students undergoing “gender transition.” It is produced by the same people who brought us the classics “Inside Deep Throat” and “Party Monster.” According to the flier, the film features “Gabbie, Lucas, Raci, and T.J.” who are “confronting the challenges of school, campus life, family… and changing their sex.” The film joins the four transitioning youths – two soon-to-be-ex-males and two soon-to-be-ex-females - as they “define who they are and take control of their gender identity.”

Although I don’t know whether to wear a dress or a suit, you can bet that I will be there on Wednesday, September 14th, at 7:30 p.m. in UNCW’s Cameron Hall Auditorium to experience this monumental event. Since it is free and open to the public, I plan to bring a lot of friends and ask a lot of questions. Some of them follow:

1. I noticed that the Women’s Resource Center is co-sponsoring this program. Is that because they are pleased that two of the students in the film wanted to have surgery in order to become women?

2. Is the Women’s Resource Center offended by the two women who wanted to become men? Will the two new men get their new hoo-hoo dillies from the two new women? How does that work, exactly?

3. When a woman has a hoo-hoo dilly surgically attached, does that not legitimize Freud’s sexist notion of penis envy? Is that something the Women’s Center really wants to touch - figuratively speaking?

4. Is it misogyny that causes a woman to have a sex-change?

5. Is it mister-ogyny that causes a man to have a sex change?

6. In the past, UNC has spent tax-dollars to address the problem of teen self-mutilation. Why is the system now spending tax dollars to encourage self-mutilation in the form of sex-changes? Are we, a) having trouble making up our minds or do we, b) enjoy going in complete circles at tax-payer expense?

7. Most people think of someone who wants to surgically remove his or her sex organs as mentally ill. How did the diversity movement arrive at the conclusion that this is not a sign of mental illness? And how did it become a cause for celebration as we “celebrate sexual diversity” with taxpayer-funded events?

8. The last time I saw a trans-gendered person at a UNCW diversity event, she (formerly he) said (when she was a he) that he was advised by his psychiatrist to move to a cabin in the mountains. The reason was that he (now a she) was so violent and dangerous that he (now she) might hurt someone. But when he became a she by cutting off his hoo-hoo dilly, she became less angry. Does the university support hoo-hoo dilly removal as a form of anger management?

9. Have you ever considered putting a fence around UNCW and hanging up a sign that says “Welcome to the North Carolina State Zoo?”

10. If your answer to number 9 was “yes,” I know some capitalists that could help you out. Together we could sell tickets and erase some of this wasteful government spending.



A HISTORIC END IN SIGHT FOR COMPULSORY UNIONISM IN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES

Unbelievable as it may sound, Australian university students have for decades been forced to join a union!

The Opposition education spokeswoman, Jenny Macklin, has defended Labor's position on voluntary student unionism, saying colleagues had been properly briefed every step of the way. Labor leader Kim Beazley recently abandoned his party's long-standing commitment to compulsory student union membership in a bid to safeguard a variety of welfare and support services on campuses. Under laws introduced into Parliament in March by the Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, university students will no longer have to join student unions and pay compulsory union fees. The changes would mean the introduction of user pays to subsidised services such as childcare, health care, food, entertainment, sporting clubs, accommodation advice, counselling and student support services.

Labor deliberately split the issues of student unionism and services in a bid to lure dissenting coalition members to vote for its amendment, which allows the collection of an amenities fee to run existing student support services. Ms Macklin today said the decision to commit the policy to the next election and beyond had been a difficult but pragmatic solution to try to secure the long term interests of students. "It's a solution we're putting forward to a very, very extreme piece of legislation," Ms Macklin told ABC television. What the Howard Government wants to do is get rid of the amenities fee, which will see the end of all of those services. We want to make sure that those services continue and that's what the amendment's about."

Ms Macklin, who was booed by some protesters at VSU rallies last week, said she thought most students understood Labor's position. "I do think that most students on our university campuses do understand why Labor is putting forward this solution," she said. "They know that if the Howard Government legislation gets through unamended, student services on our university campuses will just be decimated. There won't be the sporting facilities, there won't be the subsidised childcare, counselling services, the advocacy services, the drama facilities - all the things that students depend on at university."

But some in the Opposition are thought to be critical of the policy shift, due the unnecessarily alienation of students who would normally be expected to vote Labor. There is also confusion over whether shadow cabinet and caucus members were made aware the position on compulsory student union membership would become policy rather than a one-off tactical move.

But Ms Macklin today rejected that assertion. "What we did was take the amendment to both the shadow ministry and the caucus, it was very clear what the amendment was about," she said. This view was backed by Opposition finance spokesman Lindsay Tanner, who said he did not recall any serious dissent at the time the position was adopted. "We're happy to compromise on those matters, we're happy to ensure that there is a workable alternative here," Mr Tanner told the Ten Network.

With the Government now having the numbers in the Senate, Labor must gain the support of at least two coalition senators to see its amendment adopted. Liberal Senators Alan Eggleston and Russell Trood, in addition to Nationals Senators Barnaby Joyce and Fiona Nash, have said publicly they hold concerns over the legislation in its current form. But Dr Nelson has so far refused to budge from his position to force VSU on all Australian university campuses.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



28 August, 2005

Educational mobility

An Economist opinion editorial from July 14th (“The Missing Rung In The Ladder”) lamented the decrease in social mobility in the United States, and suggests that the solution is for the government to pour resources and legislative reforms into improving the public school system. This, the Economist argues, is the only chance for lower-income Americans to compete with wealthy children whose parents are willing to invest in fancy college degrees. The underlying assumption is that America’s growing class separation and decreasing social mobility are due to a market failure, to be compensated for by the government. But is that really the solution?

The greatest obstacle to social mobility is the gap between income growth rates among the various economic classes. The Economist author points out that over the last several decades “the real income of the poorest fifth of American households rose by 6.4%, while that of the top fifth rose by 70% (and of the top 1% by 184%).” The higher a person’s starting capital, the faster it will grow, enabling him or her to transition into higher-investment, higher-returns segments of the economy. In addition, the costs of entering a higher-grade business grow at a rate that follows income growth in the higher classes. Thus gaps in income growth rate generate bigger gaps in income growth rate--and the more difficult it is for those near the bottom of the ladder to catch up and move into the higher classes.

But although capitalism produces the income gaps that stifle social mobility, it also creates hope for those in the lower economic stratum. Financial capital is not the only way to produce more capital. The other way is entering--or creating--new industries, where competition is still low or non-existent. The diversification of industry constantly creates opportunities even for those who cannot grow their money fast.

Let us return momentarily to the issue of education. We often hear that, if only public schools were better and less corrupt, they would increase the earning potential, and hence the social mobility, of their students. However, the more qualified students come out of public schools, the more selective colleges become. For a quick example, as more students across the nation aspire to go to college, admissions rates at all the Ivy League universities keep dropping; they are significantly lower today than they were in the 1990s, and the trend is decidedly downward. Similarly, the more people go to college, the less rare, and hence less valuable, college degrees become, and the more employers discriminate based on the schools from which job applicants get their degrees.

This means that the market value of education is a function of its exclusivity more than its quality. A stint at Harvard or Yale brings credibility and connections to powerful alumni; but most importantly, it brings distinction. Such distinction is naturally costly, both in tuition payments and in the money and time that must be invested from early on to enable a student to compete for acceptance at a top school.

Thus the children of wealthy parents will always have an advantage in the competition for employment, correlated to the gap in income growth rates between economic classes. Free public education, which by its very nature is non-exclusive, will never bridge the gap between the poor and the increasingly rich--even assuming that inefficiency and corruption could be eliminated by a wave of the No Child Left Behind wand.

There is, however, a viable alternative to expensive education. In the same way that diversification of industry can open the door to social mobility for those with little starting capital, diversification of schools can help those who cannot afford to pay for educational prestige. But diversity in education is not merely analogous to diversity in employment options; it directly leads to it. Receiving a non-standard education can help one start a non-standard line of business, due to unique insights and experience gained.

In contrast to the public school system, with its relatively uniform educational methods and non-selective admission, private schools can expose students to a wide array of educational methods and resources. Lower-income students who attend private school will emerge better suited to seek out a unique economic niche, and thus to rise above their background.

Free public schools do not give value to education and do not allow the poor to adjust to a diverse economy; thus, even when functioning well, they cannot improve social mobility in the face of growing income gaps. At the same time, they force private schools to keep prices high by cornering the low-income student market, thus making diversity in education less available to those who need it the most. Instead of solving the problem of decreased mobility, as the Economist suggests, public education only exacerbates it.

If we are to live in a just and prosperous society where a hard-working person can carve out a better life than his or her parents, we must be freed from the yoke of the public education monopoly.

Source



Pork Barrel Education

The biggest mistake an economist can make when analyzing U.S. public education is to presume that expenditures have anything to do with the necessary costs of educating students. Economists instinctively presume that costs are developed by cost minimizing producers weighing the productivity of various inputs and choosing an optimal mix. Total expenditures are then built from the bottom up.

In the U.S. public education system, this assumption is dead wrong. There total expenditures are allocated from the top down to mop up available revenues. How much any public school spends depends not on how much it "needs" for efficient operation but on how much it can extract from taxpayers. These revenues are then dissipated among various squabbling constituencies to feed their continuous demand for public funds.

In the topsy-turvy world of public education, the incentive is for efficient, low-cost schools to imitate the less efficient, high-cost schools by spending more. The result is that U.S. public education is greatly over-funded. Public school per-pupil costs are roughly 40 to 45 percent higher than those of private schools. When we take into account the larger number of private elementary schools and further adjust for special ed, the difference narrows to about 36 percent. Put another way, a minimum of 36 percent of public school expenditures is wasted.

These results are consistent with education in OECD countries where education costs are about 35 to 30 percent lower than those in the U.S. The greater competition between public and private schools abroad makes all schools almost as efficient as private schools in the U.S. Thus, U.S. public education wastes around $141 billion annually -- about 1.4 percent of 2000 gross domestic product, or about $501 per capita. Add in remedial education and the total comes to at least $157.6 billion annually -- about 1.58 percent of gross domestic product, or about $560 per capita.

The education establishment attributes increased costs to the onerous mandates of state legislatures and federal acts such as No Child Left Behind. To the extent that these mandates raise the cost of public education (and not all do), they simply represent some of the more visible mechanisms by which the waste is generated and dispersed among special interests.

Similarly, the requirement that public schools must admit any student is often cited as a reason for higher costs. But slower students are increasingly shoved into special education, and this program explains only about 10 percent of the cost differential between public and private education. Further, a shocking 25–30 percent of all students are drop-outs. Once dropped out, it is hard to see how non-students can impose increased costs on the public school system. If the diverse student body created by an open admissions policy really produces public school inefficiency, it is an argument for reducing the monopoly enjoyed by the public school system and allowing for smaller, more specialized schools.

Most of the waste in public education is excessive labor costs. Over the period 1980–2000, national student enrollment grew by 15.5 percent, but total school employment grew by 37.4 percent, and teachers grew by 35.2 percent. Public schools now have about one employee for every 6.5 students, and teachers make up only 40 percent of school employees. Our public schools have become vast jobs programs, reminiscent of the Depression era WPA, rather than educational institutions.

On average, individual public school teachers' pay is well above that of both their private school counterparts and those in comparable occupations. Also, public schools employ a more expensive mix of teachers and unions make it virtually impossible to fire even the most incompetent employees.

Wherever competition with or among U.S. public schools is found, the evidence shows better and cheaper public school performance. Abroad, both direct competition and the presence of surrogate competition in the form of curriculum-based external exit exams produce better, cheaper education.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



27 August, 2005

ISN'T EQUALITY WONDERFUL?

Except that it is an officially-fostered illusion. Comments from Britain:

An abundance of top grades in this year's A-level and GCSE results shows that the exams are too easy and must be reformed, the deputy head of an independent school said yesterday. As almost 600,000 students receive their results today, Richard Cairns, of Magdalen College school in Oxford, said that all 83 pupils who sat English and maths GCSE had achieved an A* or A grade and that no grades fell below A for those who took German, Greek, Spanish, religious studies, chemistry and geography.

Mr Cairns, who becomes the headmaster of Brighton College next term, also accused the Government of failing the top 5 per cent of students and called for a return of state-funded scholarships for poorer, gifted pupils to attend private schools. The exceptional results come a week after 51 of the 73 boys taking A levels at the school achieved at least three As. Mr Cairns said: "GCSEs and A levels are just too easy." The results demonstrated that the exams no longer stretch the most able students. "Pupils are thinking they need to do more and more in order to differentiate themselves from others so they are piling on more subjects rather than trying to stretch themselves by doing something different and challenging. It's like building 15 roads rather than building a bridge. They are not being stretched intellectually."

The proportion of pupils getting five good GCSE passes has risen by 8.6 percentage points since Labour came to power in 1997, from 45.1 to 53.7 last year. That figure is also expected to rise for GCSEs results released today. Mr Cairns said that the Government was neglecting the top 5 per cent and suggested that independent schools were better able than those in the state sector to provide further academic challenges to able students.

Magdalen's performance at GCSE and A level was "obviously very pleasing" for the boys, he said. "But it also demonstrates why we can no longer depend on GCSE or A-level examiners to stretch and challenge our most able students." It was now up to individual schools to provide that extra intellectual stimulation that bright teenagers need. "Some very clever boys and girls from academically deprived backgrounds are doubtless missing out, their talent squandered," he said. "There is, in my view, a stronger case than ever for the State to support scholars at leading independent schools, selected on the basis of academic ability and genuine financial need."

Mr Cairns's call came as Lord May of Oxford, President of the Royal Society, said that studying science at GCSE was more an exercise in memory than understanding. "The sciences are truly dynamic and exciting subjects," he said. "However, the experience of studying science for many GCSE students is one of rote-learning for exams and memorising a few standardised experiments. Consequently we see that many students drop science like a hot potato as soon as they have the opportunity."

Source



MORE ON A MEANINGLESS BRITISH EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATION

GCSE results showed the highest increase in top grades in 13 years yesterday as head teachers’ leaders admitted that schools were increasingly “playing the system” to boost their standing in examination league tables. The proportion of exams awarded at least a C grade rose by two percentage points to 61.2 per cent this year, the biggest increase since 1992. The number of top A* and A grades also rose by 1 percentage point to 18.4 per cent of entries. Overall, students passed 97.8 per cent of the 5.73 million papers this year, an increase of a fifth of a percentage point on last year....

The results showed that less able pupils were being entered for vocational subjects instead of GCSEs in languages and sciences. Mr Hart said that many schools were focusing on vocational qualifications to boost standings in the league tables. He called on ministers to review the practice that permitted a vocational GNVQ to be considered equivalent to four GCSEs in the tables. New applied GCSEs in subjects such as construction and “learning for life and work” were also worth two GCSE grades. “The demands of league tables are driving the system and that is not in the interests of students or of UK plc,” he said. “Students are understandably playing the system and studying their stronger subjects.”

Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, said that many more less able students had been “switched out” of “harder” academic GCSEs into less challenging vocational courses. “The league tables need to be reviewed in the light of the evidence of their impact on schools’ behaviour,” he said. ...

Sir Digby Jones, Director-General of the CBI, said that the education system still left too many teenagers with inadequate levels of literacy and numeracy. Nearly half of students failed to get a grade C or better in maths and almost 40 per cent in English. “Every student deserves praise for their achievements and I wish every one of them a prosperous future, but there is clearly a systemic failure in the education system as yet again almost half of GCSE entrants have failed to reach the basic levels of competency in the three Rs,” Sir Digby said. "Being taught how to read, write and add up was regarded as fundamental right for all in the 20th century, so why in the 21st century is the education system of the world’s fourth richest economy seemingly unable to deliver?”

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



26 August, 2005

BOEHNER REPLIES TO PHI DELTA KAPPA ABOUT NCLB

U.S. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), chairman of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, today criticized the methods used to produce the latest Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) annual survey, which claims to independently assess Americans' views on K-12 public education. "The PDK survey is released annually, and has annually drawn criticism from education reform supporters for its `softball' questions that protect the interests of education establishment lobbyists. This year's survey, released this morning, carries on this dubious tradition," said Boehner.

"The United States spends more than $500 billion a year on K-12 education - more than we spend on national defense - yet our students lag behind those of other nations in key subjects, and millions of disadvantaged children do not have the same educational opportunities as their more fortunate peers," Boehner said. "The Phi Delta Kappa survey relies on a number of loaded questions carefully phrased by education reform opponents to make it appear the American public isn't bothered by these facts. The result once again is a confusing tangle of survey information that is frequently contradictory and of questionable value to the education reform dialogue in our country."

Boehner listed a number of ways in which the PDK survey presents a distorted picture of public opinion on President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education reforms and efforts to expand parental choice in education:

* Special education students can learn. The PDK report implicitly contends Americans do not believe public schools should be held accountable if special education students do not make academic progress - but the survey avoids asking that question directly. The poll presents no evidence to suggest Americans do not believe public schools should be accountable for ensuring all of their students, including students with special needs, make academic progress.

* Minority children do not yet have equal educational opportunities. Asked "do black children and other minority children in your community have the same educational opportunities as white children?" - the PDK report suggests most Americans answer by saying "yes, the same." What the survey is careful not to ask is whether respondents believe black and other minority children in general have the same opportunities as white children. The poll presents no evidence to suggest Americans believe black and other minority children overall have the same opportunities as white children in America , and even contradicts itself by showing an overwhelming majority of Americans believe closing the achievement gap between minority students and white students is a very important goal.

* Americans are far more concerned about children not learning to read than they are about "too much testing." The PDK poll suggests the number of Americans saying there is "too much testing" has increased, but fails to note polls consistently show Americans are far more concerned about children passing through public schools without learning to read than they are about children being tested too much. Asked which is the bigger problem - children passing through U.S. schools without learning to read, or children being forced to take too many tests - Americans overwhelmingly (77%) believe the more important problem in education is that children are passing through schools without learning to read, according to a 2004 poll of 1,000 Americans conducted for Americans for Better Education (ABE) by The Winston Group, a top national polling firm.

* Loaded school choice questions. The PDK report contends public support for giving low-income families the right to send their children to the school of their choice (private or public) - an option PDK refers to only by the codeword "vouchers" - is decreasing. The PDK poll presents no evidence to suggest Americans believe low-income parents should not be allowed to transfer their children to better performing private schools if their public schools are chronically underachieving or dangerous. President Bush fought successfully for legislation giving this option to more than 1,000 low-income children and families in the District of Columbia .

* "Single test" myth. The questions in the PDK survey repeatedly suggest - incorrectly - that schools are judged under NCLB based on the performance of their students on a "single test." But NCLB simply requires states, in exchange for billions in federal education funds, to use tests that generate results that can be compared from one year to the next in key subjects such as reading and math. Nothing prohibits states from taking performance in other subjects into account as well for their own purposes in addition to reading and math. NCLB not only explicitly bans anything resembling a national test taken by all students, but allows states to design and implement their own tests, and makes clear that no two states are required to adopt the same test.

* "Narrow curriculum" myth. The questions in the PDK survey suggest - incorrectly - that an increased focus on basics such as reading and math forces states and schools to teach students less in other areas, such as art, music, and history. But across the nation, thousands of schools are reporting improved results in the core subjects under NCLB without having abandoned their efforts to teach these other subjects.

Source. Note: The poll itself is here



CALIFORNIA FUDGES THE FIGURES

By ignoring dropouts

UCLA researchers say the state is overestimating the number of students passing the California High School Exit Exam. But state officials say it depends on how you do the math. And they prefer their method. This year's incoming seniors make up the first class that must pass the exam to receive a diploma. The Department of Education reported last week that 88 percent of students in the class of 2006 have passed the English language arts part of the test and 88 percent have passed the math.

But at a meeting at National Hispanic University here, researchers on Tuesday presented a study showing lower numbers - an 81 percent passage rate in language arts for students in the class of 2006 and 80 percent passage rate in math. Students must pass both portions of the test to receive a diploma. The reason for the difference: UCLA's calculations include class of 2006 students who dropped out in 10th and 11th grade or didn't take the test for some other reason. The California Department of Education includes only students still enrolled and trying to pass the test by the end of 11th grade. "This difference is highly consequential," said UCLA professor John Rogers, one of the study's authors. Rogers was among 200 educators and civil rights advocates gathered at a conference partly sponsored by Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, an organization that researches social justice issues in education. "The state has forgotten about 40,000 students in each section," Rogers said.

Where the state Department of Education says about 54,000 students have not yet passed each section of the two-part test, Rogers says the number is closer to 90,000 for the English part and 100,000 for the math.

Department of Education officials said their measurement is more accurate. "We're measuring how many kids that are taking the (exit exam) are passing it," said Rick Miller, spokesman for Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of schools. "That seems like the information we ought to want to know." Miller said the state's dropout rate is a significant problem. But information on graduation and dropout rates should be examined separately from the exit exam data, he said. "What we're trying to talk about is not how many are graduating, but how many are passing the (exit exam)," Miller said.

For exit exam opponents, the two pieces of information are related. Students who don't graduate from high school - either because they fail an exit exam or because they drop out - will likely have a hard time earning a living. Russell Rumberger, an education professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who spoke at Tuesday's event, estimated that high school graduates earn about $7,000 more a year than those who don't have a diploma, a difference in lifetime earnings of around $270,000.

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



25 August, 2005

THE INCOHERENT CONNECTICUT CHALLENGE TO NCLB

They say that they do plenty of testing already and then say NCLB testing is a bad idea and would take up too many resources

Calling the federal No Child Left Behind law a cruel hoax, Connecticut officials sued U.S. Education secretary Margaret Spellings on Monday in Hartford federal court, making the state the first to legally challenge the mandates of President Bush's signature education policy. The lawsuit follows repeated attempts by the state this year to ease the requirements of the federal law that at its core requires schools to meet academic goals measured in annual test scores meant to ensure that all groups of children are achieving. Connecticut's efforts earlier led Spellings to criticize the state's campaign as "unAmerican."

In announcing the lawsuit Monday, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and other state officials repeatedly lauded the goals of No Child Left Behind, which attempts to close the achievement gap between white students and their minority counterparts, but said the federal government had failed to live up to its promise to not shift the law's costs to them. "We in Connecticut do a lot of testing already, far more than most other states," said Gov. M. Jodi Rell. "Our taxpayers are sagging under the crushing costs of local education. What we don't need is a new laundry list of things to do -- with no new money to do them."

Blumenthal summed up the lawsuit, assigned to federal judge Mark Kravitz, with a pithy comment modeled after a popular 1990s movie. "Give up the unfunded mandates or give us the money," Blumenthal said.

Federal education officials strongly criticized Connecticut for going ahead with the lawsuit and said it detracted from the real issue at hand: the gap between how its white students and their minority counterparts perform on standardized tests. "Unfortunately, today's action doesn't bring the state any closer to closing its achievement gap, which is among the largest in the nation," said Susan Aspey, a federal Education Department spokeswoman. "From the day she walked in the door, Secretary Spellings has worked diligently to listen and respond to states' needs and concerns, and she has kept her word to help states implement No Child Left Behind in a workable, common-sense way."

According to a state Department of Education estimate, it will cost Connecticut $41.6 million through 2008 to comply with the federal law, which would require Connecticut to start testing students in grades three, five and seven in addition to the schoolchildren it already tests in grades four, six and eight. Despite Monday's lawsuit, state officials conceded that $3.8 million was already in this year's state budget to proceed with the federal testing schedule.

Blumenthal first threatened to file suit five months but waited to give other states a chance to join. That hasn't happened, but still could, Blumenthal said Monday. States have been reluctant because of "fear of retaliation from the federal government," he said last week. Some in Connecticut have been reluctant, too. Even the state school board declined to support the lawsuit earlier this year, saying it wanted to allow more time to reach a compromise. Now, though, its chairman publicly supports it and other members are reconsidering. "A lawsuit certainly would not have been my preference," said state board member Lynne Farrell of Shelton, who added she will support Blumenthal, Rell and Sternberg in the lawsuit. "Who am I to say they shouldn't have filed a lawsuit? These are top-notch people and I support them."

Connecticut's 29-page lawsuit comes amid a growing restiveness among states and educational organizations that have begun to openly oppose the federal law. Proponents of No Child Left Behind argue that the law has helped to improve student performance, decreased the achievement gap between whites and minorities and that frequent testing aids teachers in identifying problems early. "If states were closing achievement gaps on their own, the federal government would not have needed to intervene," said William Taylor, chairman of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, who called Monday's suit ill advised. In eighth grade math, only 17 percent of Connecticut's white students scored in the lowest category of achievement compared to more than half of black and Latino students, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Despite the brewing controversy, many states are taking aim at the federal law. According to a recent report, every state except Alabama, Delaware and New York is fighting the law in some way. Utah has taken perhaps the most bold stance, authorizing its schools to ignore provisions of the federal law that conflict with its education program, even though it could cost the state $76 million in federal aid. Nine school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont, meanwhile, joined a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the National Education Association, which is arguing against the law's unfunded mandates. But Connecticut's lawsuit represents the first time a state has gone to court to challenge the law. "If there's a bully on the playground, it often takes one brave soul to step forward," said Rep. Andrew Fleischmann, D-West Hartford, and a co-chairman of the legislature's Education committee. "We're stepping forward." ....

The suit, in many respects, boils down to the issue of who must fund the implementation of the education law, the state or federal government, and whether the law's sweeping mandates work the same in every state. Critics call it a cookie-cutter approach. If there were research that showed testing every year was helpful, "I'd be the first in line to advocate for the tests," said Connecticut Education Commissioner Betty J. Sternberg. "But the tests have questionable merits."

Federal officials did tell the state it could save money by converting the state's existing mastery tests to a multiple-choice format. Current Connecticut tests require a written portion for students. No Child Left Behind requires testing in math, reading and a third subject selected by states. Writing is more expensive to score because it can't be done by computers. State educational officials balked. "We're not going to dumb down our tests," added Allan Taylor, who as chairman of the Connecticut State Board of Education stood with Blumenthal and other officials Monday when the lawsuit was announced.

Sen. Thomas Gaffey, D-Meriden, a longtime opponent of the federal education law, said the fallout requiring student testing in every grade from third to eighth merely heightens the stress for students. "It sucks the creativity out of the classroom," Gaffey said. Farrell, a retired elementary principal in West Hartford, agreed. "I was never an advocate for a lot of testing. I found that I could test best by going around the room quickly and asking questions and looking at the expressions on the students' faces. You could find out how much they knew through active discussion," she said. "Testing turns off kids and I worry about that."

Besides, she said, it wastes time. "You have to prepare for it, then finally do the testing and accumulate all the tests and then test all the students that were absent. It takes up an awful lot of time that could have been devoted to teaching students," she said. Mary Bucaccio of Torrington, agrees. She is a fourth-grade teacher in Farmington and the parent of two students at Torrington High School. Tests help measure progress, but once every two years is enough, she said.

Education leaders such as Waterbury Superintendent David Snead agree. "These tests require huge amounts of resources to tell us what we already know: that the kids trying to overcome poverty aren't doing as well as kids who are wealthier," he said.

No Child Left Behind requires schools to test every year starting this spring. Blumenthal's suit "is a step in the right direction," Bucaccio said. The state should not concern itself over federal intimidation because of the federal lawsuit, Blumenthal said. "The first glimmer of intimidation, we will be in court seeking immediate injunction against the secretary of education," the attorney general said. She has directed her senior staff to be on the lookout for such behavior, Sternberg added.

Source. See also here



GIFTED CHILDREN: MORE GOOD SENSE FROM AUSTRALIA'S FEDS

Treasurer Peter Costello has urged the states to embrace selective schools for academically gifted students, warning that talented children are being left behind.

Blaming the decline of selective schools as a factor in the exodus of children from the public sector, the federal Treasurer said parents wanted more choice over state-run schools. "I believe there is a place for selective schools, most definitely," he told The Australian yesterday. "Particularly, in my own state, Victoria, where we only have a couple of selective schools, I think that is a real problem. "Many parents as a consequence are taking them to private schools, because they don't have the option of a government selective school. The talents of some of these kids could be stretched much greater than they are in comprehensive schools."

A spokesman for Victorian Education Minister Lyn Kosky said the Government had "no plans" to introduce more selective schools. "Our position is every student in every school should have every possible opportunity to succeed to their full potential," he said.

The balance of selective to non-selective schools is not uniform nationally, and Mr Costello praised NSW for its approach. The state, which has the country's biggest school system, has been criticised by others for creating too many selective schools, bleeding ordinary public schools of the best students.

Mr Costello, a privately educated son of a schoolteacher, backed performance pay for teachers and a greater push to attract and retain talented teachers. "I know education is important for Australia's economic future and I believe that, while we spread education well in the Australian population, we are going to have to continue to focus on excellence in education. "We have got to value good school teachers: these are very important people for our children and our future."

He backed Education Minister Brendan Nelson's push to ensure plain language in school report cards. "I reckon Brendan is doing a good job, in tying commonwealth funding to standards, to our values education. As a parent myself, I've tried to read some of these reports and they are very difficult to understand. I think we want our students to have an understanding of their common values and Australia's values. It's what I call a common culture."

John Howard sparked a controversy last year by warning that "politically correct" public schools were prompting parents to switch to private schools.

Yesterday, Mr Costello stepped up his warnings over left-wing teachers contributing to anti-Americanism. Labor has accused Mr Costello of sparking the debate to improve his chances at the Liberal leadership.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



24 August, 2005

PROSECUTING A PARENT WHO JUST WANTED INFORMATION

David Parker of Lexington, Mass., is scheduled to go on trial on Sept. 21 for asking his son's public school to provide parental notification before discussing homosexuality with the 6-year old. The actual charge is criminal trespassing. But the real issue is whether parents or schools will control the teaching of values to children. The conflict began on Jan. 17, when Parker's then-5-year-old son brought home a Diversity Bookbag from kindergarten. Included was Robert Skutch's "Who's In a Family?" that depicts families headed by same-sex couples. Parker had wanted to decide for himself the timing and manner in which his son was introduced to the subject of homosexuality. (The Bookbag is supposed to be a voluntary program but the Parkers knew nothing about it in advance.)

Parker immediately e-mailed the Estabrook school principal, Joni Jay. Parker expressed his belief that gay parents did not constitute "a spiritually healthy family"; he did not wish his son to be taught that a gay family is "a morally equal alternative to other family constructs." Parker acknowledged the equal rights of gays but objected to "the 'out of the closet' and into the kindergarten classroom mentality." In essence, Parker highlighted the difference between tolerance, which acknowledges someone's right to make a choice, and acceptance, which is the personal validation of that choice.

The conflict moved quickly from the Diversity Bookbag to the more general issue of parental notification. The Parkers wanted to know if sexuality was scheduled to be discussed in class so they could remove their son. They also wanted their son removed from any "spontaneous conversations" about sexuality that involved an adult.

By law, Massachusetts requires schools to notify parents when sexuality is scheduled for discussion. Lexington School Committee chairman Thomas B. Griffiths explained, "We don't view telling a child that there is a family out there with two mommies as teaching about homosexuality." In an e-mail, the Estabrook school principal stated, "I have confirmed ... that discussion of differing families, including gay-headed families, is not included in the parental notification policy."

At an April 27 meeting at the school, Parker refused to leave without an assurance that he would receive parental notification. Arrested for criminal trespass, he spent the night in jail. When asked why he insisted on staying, Parker replied, "I wanted to see how far they [school authorities] would go for [my] asking something simple."

The state now wishes to impose probation upon Parker, along with other restrictions -- such as banning him from Lexington school properties without prior written permission from the superintendent of schools. This means he is barred from places to vote, as well as school committee and parent-teacher meetings. Parker is contesting the charge. Why? After his arraignment, he stated, "I'm just trying to be a good dad." During a May 11 appearance on the FOX News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," Parker expanded on this statement, saying that he wanted his son "to play on the swing set and make mud pies. I don't want him thinking about same-sex unions in kindergarten." Parker's attorney, Jeffrey Denner, points to a larger issue -- "the role of family and what kind of encroachments government can make into children's and people's lives."

Otherwise stated, schools are usurping the parental role of teaching personal values to children. They are not acting as educators but as guardians, "in loco parentis" (in the place of a parent). Some schools clearly consider this function to be their right, even over parental objections. Thus, Estabrook defends its "right" to teach Parker's son to accept same-sex marriages. Denner hopes to resolve the conflict before trial but he also intends to file a civil suit in federal court against the town of Lexington, the school system and its officials.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a campaign to discredit Parker. The Lexington School Board has reportedly accused Parker of wanting to be arrested to grab "headlines." If true, it is strange that he wasted months on e-mails, faxes and school meetings before making his move. Parker's actions sound more like those of a father with no options left. The school also claims that Parker's demands would prevent other children from discussing their families or drawing pictures of them.

But this is far from what's been officially requested. According to Neil Tassel, Parker's co-counsel, "the Parkers' proposal was simple: notify them in advance if there is a planned discussion about same-sex issues, and, if an adult becomes involved in a discussion spontaneously begun by a child, then remove their child from the discussion."

School authorities quite reasonably responded that they could not be held responsible for monitoring spontaneous conversations or remarks made in the class. Moreover, they contend that children with gay parents have a right to talk about their families and have their families represented. At some point in the dialogue, however, reason broke down; police were called. The attacks on Parker have been so intense that Tassel recently found it necessary to write a defense in the local paper denying that his client is a shill for or member of Article 8, a controversial organization opposed to same-sex marriage. He pointed to Parker's Ph.D. to deflect criticism of his client as an ignorant book burner. To counter the charge that Parker hates gays, Tassel described him as "an exceptionally kind hearted man" whose best friend was gay.

Perhaps Estabrook authorities are trying to divert attention from the real question: Is Parker simply demanding parental notification or not? I think he is. David Parker cares so deeply that he is willing to go to jail and endure a lengthy court process for the right to be a parent. In a world where a myriad of social problems can be traced back to parental abuse or indifference, it is incredible that Parker is being treated as a criminal and not as the hero he is.

Source



AUSTRALIAN POLICE WIMP OUT BEFORE LEFTIST THUGGERY

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott says NSW Police are allowing "thugs" to threaten freedom of speech by urging him not to attend a university debate because of the threat of violence. Mr Abbott today said he had withdrawn from a planned debate about voluntary student unionism (VSU) at Sydney University after NSW Police advised him not to attend because they could not guarantee his safety. He had been scheduled to debate Labor opponent Julia Gillard today about the Government's plans to abolish compulsory student fees.

Student groups oppose the Government's VSU legislation and have staged major rallies across Australia, including a protest at the University of Sydney on August 10, in which three police officers were injured.

Mr Abbott said he did not like the idea that intimidation was stifling free speech. The minister said he called on police to consider the ramifications of allowing "thugs" to intimidate people. "I've asked them to ponder the implications of their actions," he said. "If baddies can threaten goodies with violence and the police then tell the goodies that they can't do what they're lawfully entitled to do, what does that say about the smooth functioning of society? "It says that intimidation works; it says that, forced to adjudicate between normal people and thugs, instead of keeping the thugs in line the police will tell the normal people not to do whatever it is they're trying to do, [and] that's a real worry."

Mr Abbott said he was prepared for a verbal stoush with student groups but was disappointed police were unable to ensure law and order would prevail. "I'm disappointed that the NSW Police didn't feel able to ensure that [the debate] went ahead in comparative safety at Sydney University," he said. "No one expects a university debate to be conducted in an atmosphere more reminiscent of a church service - everyone thinks that a university debate would be a lively and maybe even a rowdy occasion and I've been in plenty of them. "But I am disappointed that the police first thought that there was potentially violent disruption planned and second weren't sufficiently able to stop it to allow it to go ahead."

Mr Abbott admitted being "quite tempted" to ignore the police warnings and attend the debate. "[But] had anything gone wrong and had people been hurt, I would have been blamed and I didn't want to be in that position," he said.

The University of Sydney Union said it was saddened Mr Abbott had decided to pull out of today's debate because of fears for his safety. The debate has since been cancelled. "I'm very disappointed," union spokesman George Livery said. "Mr Abbott is always welcome back to this campus. He's an old boy and he's always been fun to have here, he's never shied away from a debate on campus." Mr Livery would not criticise police for urging Mr Abbott to withdraw from the event but said he had thought police were satisfied with security arrangements for the debate at the university's Manning Bar. "I thought that we had provided the kind of assistance [to police] that alleviated a majority of concerns," he said. "In fact indications from the [police] area command were that they were quite satisfied with what we had done." The union could not control the actions of people outside the university campus but it had not received any indications students were planning violence, Mr Livery said. "From all of our conversations with clubs and societies ... all they were looking forward to was a good, fun day and a great debate," he said.

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



23 August, 2005

ANTI-AMERICANISM TAUGHT IN AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS

GROWING anti-American attitudes have been generated in part by left-wing teachers in Australian schools, according to Treasurer Peter Costello. Mr Costello last night delivered a speech to the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue dinner, warning of the dangers of anti-Americanism taking hold in Australia. He says allowing anti-American sentiment to fester could incite terrorism. "There's no doubt in my mind that anti-Americanism can easily morph into anti-Westernism, particularly we've seen that with terrorists," Mr Costello said today. "They don't really draw distinctions between Americans or Britons or Australians, they just like to hit anybody who they consider to be a part of the West. "And that's why I think we've all got an interest in working to explain the aims and objectives of our policies."

Mr Costello said he was aware of anti-American attitudes among students while he was at university in the 1970s. Some of these students had become teachers carrying with them "ideological baggage" which he said was now filtering through to their students in schools. "I think in the schools, if your teacher's carrying that bias it tends to get passed on," he said. "And I think in the schools, the other side of the story ought to be taught.

The other side of the story, he said, was when Australia was dealing with Japanese attack and when Darwin was being bombed in February of 1942. "The American allies together with Australian troops, began to turn the tide in the Pacific, through the islands and back up to Japan," he said. This is a side of the story that young people in Australia need to know. "In our greatest security threat ... our allies came and helped defend Australia with us."

Mr Costello said the US itself should do more to counter growing anti-Americanism, for the benefit of all Western countries including Australia. "I think that's in the general interest of the whole West," he said. "Because anti-Americanism can easily morph into anti-Westernism which picks up and encapsulates Australia and threatens our interests as well."

Anti-American sentiment was generally based on a fear of US power, Mr Costello said. "And the point I was making last night was that US power is much more likely to come to the aid of Australia and its values than to threaten Australia and its values," he said. "There's no solid reason for Australia to fear the emergence of US power." "But I also made the point last night, that just as the United States has become the pre-eminent world power, it's still important that it act in concert with other people."

Source



Horrors! Information!: "Colleges are accustomed to being ranked on the basis of everything from the quality of their libraries to the vibrancy of campus party scenes. But a proposal to have the federal government compare schools by how much they increase tuition has administrators and higher-education groups objecting. Such a ranking, proposed as part of legislation to renew higher-education programs, would require public and private colleges to report their tuition and fees annually to the US Department of Education. The federal agency would then assign each school a 'college affordability index' based on the rate of increase, and make the information public."

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



22 August, 2005

Less is Good, Nothing is Better: How the State Can Improve British Education

By Sean Gabb

Even before Mike Tomlinson reported on examination reform, everyone agreed, and competed at agreeing, that British state education was a mess. Schools all over the country are turning out generations of innumerate, semi-literate proles. They have become places notable for bullying, truancy in its various shades, drugs, unwise sex, the occasional murder, and a pervasive contempt for achievement. Yes, there are those whose job it is to disagree with this proposition. Naturally enough, there are the teachers and educational bureaucrats; and there are the relevant Ministers, who every summer put their names on news releases lauding the latest set of examination results. But everyone knows they are talking nonsense. If examination results were an indicator of excellence, we should be living in a nation of Shakespeares and Newtons. In fact, grade inflation and a continuous debasement of the whole examinations system have made the results largely worthless. We can no more make people educated by giving them pretty certificates than we can make them rich by giving them bags of forged banknotes. State education is a mess.

The standard response is to whine or boast about levels of funding. But this is a manifestly threadbare response. In 2002, the authorities spent £49.354 billion of our money on schooling and further education. Given a total of 10.094 million children and young people in the maintained sector, we have spending per head of around £4,900. Many independent schools charge less than that - and get better results. Indeed, there are schools in black Africa that do better. These are places without school books, without roofs over the classrooms, where the teachers are dying of aids, and where bandits every so often turn up and conscript the more promising children to fight in what are pretentiously called civil wars - and they still turn out children with a better English prose style than the average inmate of an English comprehensive.

There is no one explanation for why things are so bad. But this does not mean the problem is intractably complex. Though there are others, there are three main explanations.

In the first place, there is the emphasis on vocational learning that we owe to the vulgar economic liberalism of the Thatcher and Major Governments. The belief here is that the main or even sole purpose of education is to promote economic development. Accordingly, any subject from which no tangible return could be imagined was either removed from the curriculum or fragmented or simplified into nothingness. History and Classics were the most obvious victims - and, in lesser degree, Music. Much of the time thereby freed was filled with the almost obsessive teaching of Information Technology.

Now, there is a case for teaching children how to type: left to themselves, most people develop typing habits that reduce their general efficiency. There may also be a case for teaching the basics of the Microsoft Office suite. But these are things to be learnt over a few weeks. All else specified in the Information Technology syllabus is useless or would be picked up anyway by the children themselves. No one has yet developed a course in Mobile Telephone Studies. This has not visibly left any of my students at a disadvantage. In my experience, much of the time given to Information Technology is used to play games or look up trivia on the Internet. The time would be better given to teaching German or a musical instrument.

In the second place, there is the fact that the main purpose of state education has always been to legitimise the wealth and status of the ruling class. We can see this was so in the past. Without all the drilling in the playground, and all the team sports, and all the hours given to nationalist propaganda, would those ten million young men have marched even semi-willingly to die in the killing grounds of the Great War? Nothing fundamental has changed since then. All that has changed is the personnel of the ruling class and the nature of its legitimation ideology.

Because it is suited to our present assumptions, we cannot see this ideology so clearly as we now see those it replaced. It is there, even so. It is that axis of anti-liberal, anti-western, anti-science, anti-Enlightenment and pro-collectivist values and coercive social engineering that we call political correctness. With the decline of traditional socialism, this has gained a growing and hegemonic role in most developed societies. As an ideology, it manifestly promotes the power and privileges of our new ruling class - this being a coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, lawyers, media people and associated business interests who derive wealth and status from an enlarged and activist state. The ideology is used to stigmatise and demonise any dissenting opinion, and to censor and silence it; and information is socially constructed in order to balkanise society into alleged "victim groups" who provide tribalistic bases for the exercise of political power and the extraction of economic profit by the ruling class. As ever, education is the chief mechanism by which this legitimation ideology is transmitted from one generation to the next.

As illustration, take the way in which GCSE English Literature is taught. Some years ago, while short of cash, I acted as an assistant examiner. Two of the most commonly examined books - both American - were To Kill a Mocking Bird and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Doubtless, these are worthy enough texts in their own right. But they are nothing much compared with the great classics of English literature produced in these islands. Judging by the several thousand pages of answers I must have read, however, they had been preferred because they allowed English lessons to be made into sermons of racial hatred that passed unrebuked only because the objects of hatred were white.

In the third place, there is the centralised, authoritarian control that both of the above require for complete enforcement. We have the National Curriculum and we have endless testing to see that arbitrary and often incomprehensible targets are being reached.

The combined result is a demoralised teaching profession, bored and apathetic children, and a collapse of standards as these were once universally defined. The system was not very good before the 1980s. Since then, it has rotted away to the point where just about everyone with money either avoids it altogether, choosing the independent sector, or rigs it by moving into middle class catchment areas.

The politicians promise reform. But all reforms so far discussed can only make things worse. Labour promises more money and a restructuring of management - not only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but also replacing the canvas with silk. The Conservatives promise "choice" - though always supervised by the same philistine and politically correct bureaucracy that messed up the present system. The more adventurous Conservatives even talk about a voucher scheme. This has its merits. But conservatives of all people ought to know that any scheme of improvement takes its whole tone from the circumstances in which it is introduced. Any voucher scheme introduced now would give our ruling class a perfect excuse to spread the corruption deep into the independent sector. It would do this by setting criteria for the reception of vouchers, and would enforce these criteria through the usual agencies of inspection and control.

The only answer is to get the state entirely out of education. The education budget should not be expanded, or its administration reformed. It should simply be abolished. That £49 billion - now, I believe, £63 billion - should be handed back to the people in tax cuts; and these should be directed at the poorest taxpayers. The schools should be sold off or given away, and the bureaucrats be made redundant. The people should then be left to arrange by themselves for the education of their children.

The argument that parents would not or could not do this falls flat on any inspection of the third world, where parents make often heavy sacrifices and choose often highly effective schemes of education. There is also the experience of our own past. A generation ago, E.G. West showed how growing numbers of working class people in the 19th century paid for and supervised the education of their children. The beginning of state education in 1870 should be seen as ruling class coup against an independent sector that looked set to marginalise its legitimation ideology. And that reaction was promoted on the basis of fraudulent statistics.

Left to themselves, it is inconceivable that parents would not do substantially better than those presently in charge of state education. How they might do this is for them to decide. Some would pay for a conventional independent education. Some would send their children to schools run by their ministers of religion, or by charitable bodies. Some would educate their children at home. Many do this already, by the way; and Paula Rothermel of Durham University caused a stir in 2002, when she looked at a sample of children educated at home and found they performed consistently better in standard tests than schoolchildren - indeed, she found that the children of people like bus drivers and shop assistants were receiving a better education than those committed to the care of state-certified teachers. Parents could hardly do worse than the present arrangements manage. They could easily do better.

This is not a "left" or a "right" wing cause. It is about allowing children to get an education which is not directed to moulding them to believe as suits the convenience of their betters, and which really will enable them to make the best of their own lives.

Source



A CALIFORNIA COVERUP

They want as little as possible to be known about their appalling results

By the end of this school year, the state could deny diplomas to tens of thousands of high school seniors who didn't pass the California High School Exit Exam. But don't ask state officials exactly how many or who they are or what schools they attend. There won't be an exact count until the spring of 2007 - nine months after failing students are denied their diplomas and successful ones will have tossed their graduation caps. Until then, a precise count is only available from individual school districts, which vary greatly in their ability to produce the information on request. "We're struggling with what's the best kind of information to give (to the public) without going too far into estimates," said Deb Sigman, director of testing for the state Department of Education.

The situation flies in the face of the state's move toward greater public accountability. And it frustrates parents curious about how the pass rate at their child's school stacks up against other schools, as well as civil rights advocates concerned about pass rates of African American and Latino teens. "You can't make head nor tails of how many kids actually failed, or dropped out in lieu of taking the test," said Kelly O'Hagan, president of the Sacramento Council of Parent Teacher Associations. "If the state's using it (to determine graduation) they need to know which schools are performing well." The class of 2006 is the first required to pass the exit exam to receive a diploma, though the testing program has been in development since 1999.

Sigman expects to have a good idea of how many seniors have passed by the end of this school year. But the final number won't be known until 2007, she said, because some districts allow students to take the test for the last time after their senior year.

Incomplete reporting can have political consequences, said Patty Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy, in Washington, D.C. Her organization studies exit exams in the 25 states that have them or are developing them. Sullivan said states that report the information well tend to have greater public support for the exams, while states that report only limited information suffer battles that threaten the exams' staying power. "Arizona has people so confused about what's going on and the result is that kids are not taking the test seriously," she said. Other states, including Massachusetts, are able to report the percentage of each class in each district and school that have passed the exit exam - after each administration of the test. "Our attitude is: The numbers are the numbers, and they speak for themselves," said Heidi Perlman of the Massachusetts Department of Education.

In California, public school students in the class of 2006 first took the test as sophomores. Those who didn't pass got two more chances as juniors. If they still haven't passed, they can try three more times as seniors. School districts are supposed to keep track of which students pass the exam each time it is given - but they don't report that information to the state. "We can't (require) that without a law," Sigman said. So even though the state reported Monday that an estimated 88 percent of California's incoming seniors have passed the math section of the test and 88 percent have passed the English section, officials are unable to report the same information for each school and each district. "That's a total redesign of the system," Sigman said. "That's not to say it isn't a good idea, but it wouldn't happen overnight."

Yet it's information Debra Durazo would like to see about her son's school. She knows that her son passed the exam as a sophomore. He's now beginning his senior year at Sacramento New Technology High School. "I'm curious (about the pass rate) because it's a new school," Durazo said. She said she'd like to see how the senior class at New Tech compares with other schools.

The state's reporting system also frustrates researchers and advocates who want to know how many students passed both the math and English sections of the test, as required for graduation. State education officials say they can't report that figure because they don't have identification numbers that would allow them to match students' English scores with their math scores. A system is in development, said Keric Ashley, the Education Department's director of data management, but won't be complete until at least 2008.

Jeannie Oakes, an education professor at UCLA, said the lack of information portends a crisis. "Because we don't know the combined test results for any one student, we simply don't know ... if there are 49,000 students at risk (of not graduating) or 96,000 students at risk, or somewhere in between," she said. "It really seems terrible that we have to make guesses about something that important." Oakes is calculating exit exam pass rates using a formula different from the state's. She said if students who drop out after 10th-grade are included, the pass rate is 8 to 20 percentage points lower than the state reports. And her analysis shows that students who fail the exit exam tend to be clustered in the same schools.

Ashley, the education department's data manager, said he expects the state's reporting method to improve . "We're probably going to have to work out some way to do this better," he said.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



21 August, 2005

SOROS ON CAMPUS

News media reports from meetings organized by billionaire George Soros say he and some rich allies are now funding groups intended to counter the efforts on college campuses of the Leadership Institute and other conservative educational organizations. Although Soros and his allies hope through their spending to increase the effectiveness of the left on campus, I do not fear that activities they bankroll will significantly increase the left's campus influence. Nor can Soros stop the growth of campus conservative activities.

My Leadership Institute's Campus Leadership Program, for example, grew its number of active, independent, conservative campus groups from 216 in September 2004 to 437 groups in May 2005. And Institute graduates have created 32 new conservative student publications already in 2005. The Institute will send 27 field staff out to visit all 50 states this fall, and I expect them to increase the number of active conservative student groups by at least 300.

George Soros and his wealthy friends cannot write checks big enough to increase significantly the resources the left already spends on American college campuses. Not all college professors and administrators are leftists, but the great majority of the politically active ones are, as Dan Flynn's "Deep Blue Campuses" proved. Take all the money which pays the salaries of leftist professors and administrators. Add the money spent on the leftist, official student newspapers. Add the college funds and the compulsory student fee money spent to bring off-campus leftists to speak during the school year and at graduation ceremonies. Then add in all the compulsory student activity fees money poured into leftist student organizations. And the support national left-wing organizations pour into support of the vast array of campus leftist groups. The total has to be many billions every year.

George Soros, billionaire though he is, can't write checks of that magnitude. Neither can his wealthy allies. They can spend a lot, especially if compared to what LI and other conservative foundations spend on campus. But their spending won't have much more effect than pouring a bucket of water into Lake Michigan.

If you study how Soros affected the political situation in other countries, you will see that in every case he supported political insurgents against repressive regimes. In all those cases, he found it easy to identify and fund dissidents morally indignant against the abuses of those in power.

American college campuses certainly are now a fertile field for the kinds of activities which proved successful for Soros in the past. But now he's on the wrong side, and conservatives are on the right side. On U.S. campuses, those with the power are almost everywhere abusive leftists. Those who chafe under the bias and persecution on campus have a big moral edge, particularly when trained and organized conservative students shine spotlights on the abuses. Students appreciate cleverness, but they react negatively to unfairness when it is skillfully called to their attention. Conservatives have moral indignation on our side regarding the leftist abuses on campus. Moral indignation is highly contagious, so powerful that it tends to sweep aside everything else. That is why, in almost every case, a three-pronged strategy of public relations, political heat, and legal responses wins against leftist abuses on campus.

George Soros achieved spectacular results when he funded highly motivated political insurgents against all the massive resources of repressive, socialist regimes. American campuses today are dominated by repressive, socialist regimes. Leftists believe that any conservative presence on campus is too much, even though the resources of time, talent, and money available for campus conservative activity are still minuscule compared to those of the left.

Yet conservatives are making great progress. Once again it's David vs. Goliath. Conservatives have achieved a lot on campus, but barely begun to fight. We shall achieve a lot more as our resources continue to grow. Soros funded David against the Soviet empire. That worked. Now he's funding Goliath on campus. That won't work.

Source



Leftist ideologues in Australian schools

Imagine the outcry if a conservative think tank, such as the H.R. Nicholls Society, set up an internet site for schools and offered students a $200 prize for the best essay extolling the virtues of the free market. Imagine the outrage if a teachers' organisation then promoted the website and the essay competition to schools, lauding it as something that teachers should incorporate in their lessons.

The response would be one of concern about special-interest groups pushing their agenda on unsuspecting students. Recall the outrage of the Carr Labor Government in NSW in 2003 when federal Employment Advocate Jonathan Hamberger wrote to school principals asking them to inform students about Australian Workplace Agreements. According to then state education minister Andrew Refshauge, the attempt to inform students about employment contracts was "completely inappropriate". The federal Office of the Employment Advocate was told to butt out. One wonders whether the Iemma Government and NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt will respond in the same way to the ACTU [Australia's version of the AFL-CIO] and Australian Education Union's attempts to enter schools?

The AEU sent an email to teachers across Australia headed "ACTU National Competition for Students -- Win $200". Some weeks ago, the winners of the competition were announced and their essays are posted on the ACTU website, www.worksite. actu.asn.au. The email described the competition as follows: "To enter, students must tell us in 300 words or less what makes a job fair and fun for them and why, as well as their ideas to amke [sic] jobs fairer and more fun." The AEU extolled the virtues of the ACTU website, saying: "Worksite for Schools continues to be a valuable resource for younger people about the world of work. Worksite is a terrifice [sic] source of information about the workforce, providing statistics, encouraging debate, creativity and analysis."

Welcome to the double standards of political correctness. It is outrageous for the OEA to inform schools about the increasing reality of the Australian workforce: individual contracts. But it's perfectly fine for the ACTU and the AEU to publicise their one-sided (and increasingly outdated) view of industrial relations. Take a look at the ACTU-sponsored website. Under the section Personality Profiles, students are introduced to trade union and ALP worthies such as Bob Hawke, Sharan Burrow and Greg Combet. That the list is biased towards trade union and Labor stalwarts is to be expected. Yet there is no attempt to balance the list by including other notable figures, such as leading economic dries Bert Kelly, Hugh Morgan and Peter Costello, who represent an alternative view.

Similarly, on examining Fact Sheets, students are again presented with a jaundiced view. On reading about the Ansett collapse in 2001, the impression is that the union movement guaranteed worker entitlements; there are no details about the federal Government's Special Employees Entitlement Scheme. Given the Howard Government's planned changes to the industrial relations system, it is obvious the subject is highly contentious and politically sensitive.

It should be no surprise, given that the ACTU is funding the website, that students are told that the present system works well and that the federal Government has no reason to change the system whatsoever. The website quotes ACTU secretary Combet: "There is no need to change this system. It works well and strikes a balance between reasonable increases for workers and economic factors." Never mind any counterarguments.

In the aftermath of last October's federal election, Wayne Sawyer, an editor of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English journal English in Australia, lamented that, because the Howard Government was re-elected, English teachers had clearly failed to teach critical literacy. According to Sawyer, the teacher's role, instead of being disinterested, is to teach students about the failures of a Coalition government in an effort to ensure that students, as future voters, do not vote conservative. Alas, this most recent example of PC bias involving the ACTU and the AEU proves that the ideological stance taken by Sawyer is not isolated. Such incidents also demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Left: while the OEA is attacked for approaching schools, the ACTU and the AEU are given free rein.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



20 August, 2005

BRITAIN'S MAJOR HIGH SCHOOL QUALIFICATION IS NOW MEANINGLESS

The cartoon that goes with this story is pretty apt. Excerpts from "The Times" below:

A-Level pass rates will record their lowest rise for more than two decades when the results are released this morning, The Times has learnt. The pass rate in the examinations, taken by more than 265,000 students, will reach 96.2 per cent, up just 0.2 of a percentage point from 2004. Sources close to the Joint Council for Qualifications, the umbrella group representing exam boards, told The Times that the proportion of A grades had risen more sharply, by 0.4 of a percentage point to just under 22.8 per cent of entries - the lowest since 2000.

But ministers and exam boards will maintain that the academic "gold standard" is being maintained in the face of allegations of "dumbing down".... Lord Adonis of Camden Town, the Schools Minister, made a strong defence of A levels yesterday, insisting that better results were the product of improved teaching and increased government investment in education. He dismissed the "bogus argument" that exams were getting easier and said that students could have full confidence that standards were being maintained. "Continued progress in exam performance is real - it is not the result of dumbing down of standards - and the roots of this success lie in a fundamental shift in the quality of teaching in our schools," he said in a speech at a summer school for gifted children in Canterbury...

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "I am absolutely certain that an increase in A grades and in the overall pass rate is a tremendous tribute to the work of students and their teachers. But at some stage - sooner rather than later - the Government has got to face the fact that the current system is creaking. "Universities and employers are finding it more and more difficult to make sense of the grades for university entrance and employment purposes."

Independent schools said that the A level was in "terminal decline" and hinted at establishing their own alternative qualification. Geoff Lucas, general secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of 314 leading schools, said: "It is not just that A level no longer discriminates between candidates. It no longer prepares them properly in key subjects because it has become such a mechanical exam."

The Institute of Directors said that there was little evidence that A-level standards had fallen. Miles Templeman, its Director-General, said that employers were more worried about low levels of literacy and numeracy among school-leavers. "There is no case for replacing GCSEs and A levels with a diploma. A revolution in the examination system would not in itself deliver the improvements that are so desperately needed," he said.

More here



NO TENURE UNLESS YOU ARE A LOCKSTEP LEFTIST

This spring Professor William Bradford received a poor vote from the law faculty at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis both on a straw vote for his eventual tenure, and even on a vote simply to retain him as an untenured associate professor for the next three years. This occurred despite the fact that he has an outstanding teaching record (including a teaching award from the law students), an excellent record of service, and a stunning record of publication, including a book, a forthcoming book, and 21 articles in law reviews or in books-enough ordinarily to assure someone at Indy-Law not merely of tenure but of a full professorship. Indeed, one of his colleagues with a similar record of publication, a person who came to IU-Indy School of Law in the same semester as Bradford, has just received promotion not merely to tenure but to full professor. Bradford believes that he was denied tenure because he refused to sign a petition circulated in the law school this spring which supported Ward Churchill, the Professor of Ethnic Studies at Colorado who described the victims of 9/11 as "little Eichmanns" deserving what they got. The petition was circulated by Florence Roisman, who is a full professor holding a prestigious Chair in Law at the school. Bradford's position was that as far as he was concerned, someone who couldn't distinguish between commercial office workers and Nazis who engineered the Holocaust did not deserve to teach.

What makes the story even more interesting is that while Ward Churchill falsely claims to be an Indian, William Bradford really IS an Indian. He is a Chiricahua Apache. He is also a veteran, who served for 10 years in the armed forces, including at the Pentagon. He says Roisman's response to his refusal to sign the Ward Churchill petition was to say to him: "What kind of Native American ARE you?" Bradford sees this as an expectation that as an Indian, he is expected by leftist colleagues such as Florence Roisman to support any other Indian or even someone who just CLAIMS to be an Indian. Bradford calls such expectations racist.

When he refused to conform to Roisman's view of what an Indian's opinions should be, she engineered a vote in the law school in which one-third of the faculty voted against retaining Bradford for future tenure, and one-third voted against retaining him for three more years untenured. This is a bad sign concerning his eventual tenure; university administrations only rarely grant tenure to someone against whom one-third of the department has voted. The vote on Bradford HAD to be political in origin, because on the merits (teaching, service, publication) Bradford should obviously already be tenured. Indeed, he should probably be a full professor.

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



19 August, 2005

U.S. HIGH SCHOOLS FAIL TO PREPARE KIDS FOR COLLEGE

The poor b****s cannot even read properly -- and we're not talking about dropouts here. Leftists destroy anything they get control over and American education sure is a prime example of that

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests. The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science. "It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday.

ACT sets its college-readiness benchmarks - including the reading comprehension benchmark, which is new this year - by correlating earlier students' ACT scores with grades they actually received as college freshmen. Based on that data, the benchmarks indicate the skill level at which a student has a 70 percent likelihood of earning a C or better, and a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better. Among those who took the 2005 test, only 51 percent achieved the benchmark in reading, 26 percent in science, and 41 percent in math; the figure for English was 68 percent. Results from the new optional ACT writing test, which was not widely taken this year, were not included in the report.

About 40 percent of the nation's 2005 high school graduates took the ACT, and the average overall score, 20.9 of a possible 36, was unchanged from the year before. But Dr. Ferguson found it heartening that scores were holding even, given that the pool of test takers had become so much larger and more diverse, in part because both Illinois and Colorado now use the ACT to test all students, even those who do not see themselves as college-bound.

Minority students now make up 27 percent of all ACT test takers, up from 24 percent in the class of 2001. The number of Hispanic test takers has grown 40 percent in that period, and the number of African-American test takers 23 percent. Caucasians taking the test have increased by only 2 percent. "It's wonderful that more and more students who might not have considered college several years ago are now making plans for education beyond high school," Dr. Ferguson said.

But it is a source of concern, he said, that too many students are not taking the kind of rigorous high school courses that will prepare them for college. In fact, only 56 percent of this year's graduates who took the ACT had completed the recommended core curriculum for college-bound students: four years of English and three years each of social studies, science and math at the level of algebra or higher. Those who do complete the core curriculum are far more likely to meet college readiness standards, Dr. Ferguson said, but the percentage who complete that core has been falling. "The message doesn't seem to be getting though," he said.

The ACT report highlighted other worrisome trends as well, including a continuing decline in the percentage of students planning to major in engineering, computer science and education. And at a time when more women than men go to college, Dr. Ferguson said, it is also a matter of concern that 56 percent of this year's graduates who took the ACT were female, and only 44 percent male. As in previous years, men had higher average math and science scores, and women higher averages scores in English and reading.

Source



MATH TEACHERS WHO CAN'T DO MATH

This story is from Australia but is certainly not unique to Australia

It's the moment all new teachers dread - standing in front of 30 bright-eyed students eager for a maths lesson, knowing they are only just ahead of the youngsters after swotting up on the textbook the night before. Up to 40 per cent of high school maths classes are taught by teachers with no training in the subject and, according to academics, many of them cannot add five one-digit numbers without a calculator.

That is hardly surprising as teachers spend little time at university actually learning maths. Instead, trainee teachers are being instructed - in the words of universities - in how to teach "the social, cultural and political contexts" of mathematics or to think mathematically "from socially inclusive and critical perspectives". This "psychobabble" has been highlighted as a problem for primary school teachers, who need a wide range of skills to cover the extensive curriculum and cater for the range of students' academic ability. The director of the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, Garth Gaudry, says the average four-year primary bachelor of education degree devotes just 7 per cent of study time to "anything remotely to do with mathematics".

Only four of 31 Australian universities require trainee teachers to have studied mathematics to year 12 level. More than half do not require any senior school mathematics. "An extremely high proportion of the very small number of courses containing the words 'mathematics' or 'mathematics education' . don't delve into mathematics at all," Gaudry says. "They're about sociological theory, or pop psychology about theories of learning and the child as a learner."

Saddled with teachers with only a minimal grasp of mathematics, students were turning off the subject and often entered high school ill-prepared for secondary studies, he says. "The degree requirements in education faculties in universities are often cast so low . that the poor trainees are going out into primary schools utterly unprepared for the task of teaching mathematics," Gaudry says. His federally funded centre was set up this year to improve mathematics education, from kindergarten to postgraduate students.

The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, with 5000 members, said in a recent submission to a Federal Government inquiry that there was "strong anecdotal evidence" that mathematics instruction in teaching degrees "has been curtailed in many institutions". In high schools, the shortage of specialist teachers is being felt. A 2003 survey by the association found that two in five secondary classes were taught by teachers with no training in mathematics, with country schools most affected.

The teaching of maths has been changing. In modern mathematics, students are taught to add, subtract, multiply or estimate using mental computation. In other words, a return to mental arithmetic. The catchcry is "Do it in your head". Students are encouraged to understand concepts before they practise their number sense, perhaps by playing a card game. Then they memorise the basic facts - a variation on their parents' "drill and kill" chanting of times tables.

Ed Lewis, a mathematics education lecturer at the Australian Catholic University, says the emphasis on mental and oral work reflected "the prime mode of calculation used in society". "People do things in their heads; if they can't they will pick up a calculator," he says. "The research tells us that students need to understand the concepts first . Once they have a good handle on the concepts, then they can memorise."

The NSW primary syllabus was modernised in 2002 to reflect these changes, and introduced a new strand called "working mathematically". It underpins what primary school students do in patterns and algebra; data; measurement; space and geometry; and numbers, by stressing the skills of questioning, reasoning, applying strategies, reflecting and communicating. Lewis and colleague Jim Grant were consultants on the mathematics syllabus shake-up, the first since 1989. The syllabus now promotes mental computation, problem-solving, mathematics in a real-life context and more on technology. Grant says the changes were influenced by feedback from teachers that students could cope with more challenging problems. "Children were finding a lot of the syllabus too easy," he says.

There is greater precision in measurement, such as working out a swimming race time down to the parts of a second. Whole numbers, which previously only went up to 1 million, now soar into the trillions. But calculators, which have been available for 35 years and can be used from kindergarten, are still resisted by some teachers due to a fear they will "interfere with learning", Lewis says. "If teachers aren't using calculators they are missing the boat because kids are using them at home anyway."

Like many other subjects, maths is often linked to real-world examples but exactly what grabs students' attention is a $64,000 question. Steve Thornton, a lecturer in mathematics education at Canberra University, says a lesson for senior students on buying a house and getting a mortgage "doesn't interest kids at that age". "As teachers we try to find examples that we think will interest students but quite often what we think will motivate them actually doesn't," he says. Often a "purely mathematical" conundrum was the most exciting way to teach students.

And for the teachers, Lewis says the challenge is for universities to develop "better mathematicians" through teacher education courses. Gaudry believes universities need to set the bar as high for school teachers as it should be for the students they will teach. Standards all round must be improved before too much more damage is done. "Many of the people pressed into teaching [mathematics] in the junior years come from other subject areas and, therefore, have an inadequate training and mastery of mathematics," he says. "This is a very serious problem and it must be addressed. Time is rapidly running out."

Source



Indian socialism at work: "Students of a school in India locked up their teachers for the day as punishment for not turning up egularly. Police officers led by a local magistrate rescued 12 teachers from a classroom at the Jambura high school, near Agartala. Magistrate Basir Ali told The Statesman: 'The students have genuine reasons to be angry, as some teachers invariably come late or never attend classes at all. There were charges of some teachers coming to the school drunk and some of them smoking inside classes.' The school authorities have now been asked to submit a report on the students' allegations."

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



18 August, 2005

BRITAIN: MEANINGLESS PUBLIC EXAMINATION RESULTS JUST CREATE THE NEED FOR NEW EXAMINATIONS

Universities are coming under mounting pressure to adopt admissions tests to distinguish between the best candidates as record numbers of A-level students are forecast to gain top grades this week. With almost a quarter of girls predicted to achieve A grades, it has emerged that the Government is preparing to back nationwide trials of a generic university entrance test, as early as next month. The move indicates that Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, has understood universities' concerns that the examinations are no longer a sufficiently reliable gauge of pupils' intelligence.

Over the past 22 years, the percentage of pupils achieving grade As at A level has risen from 8.9 per cent in 2002 to 22.4 per cent last year. At the same time, the pass rate has gone up from 68.2 per cent to 96 per cent. Alan Smithers, director of the University of Buckingham's Centre for Education and Employment Research, said yesterday: "The number of universities setting their own entrance exams is bound to increase. It looks like a quarter of girls will get A grades this year, so unless national exams have tougher questions, universities are going to have to introduce tests to discriminate fairly."

Since 2003, Oxford, Cambridge and other leading universities claim that they have been forced to set additional entrance exams for subjects such as medicine and law, history, because A levels alone no longer help them to identify the very best. Last year, Cambridge was forced to turn away 5,325 applicants who went on to achieve straight As.

The Government has ruled out any changes to A levels until 2008, but yesterday Tessa Stone, director of the Sutton Trust education charity, confirmed that preparations were under way for a national trial of the US-style admissions test, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, with 50,000 A-level students later in the year. She told The Times: "We're hoping the tests will come off in the autumn . . . Teams of researchers will approach schools this September, as soon as we get the government go-ahead."

The trial, which will cover a representative sample of A-level students around the country, will be conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). It will track students from the time that they sit the test, through university and afterwards, to measure the examination's effectiveness. Dr Stone added: "We think it's very important for widening participation in particular, and that admissions tutors have something alongside A levels to make an admission decision."

Last year, Steven Schwartz, the vice-chancellor of Brunel University, who chaired a task force on fairer university admissions, came out in support of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is widely used by American universities. Professor Schwartz cited research by the Sutton Trust charity which indicated that, of 30 British students achieving 1,200 points, enough to be considered by Harvard in a US-style test, only one had achieved three A grades at A level.

Critics claim that the test can be coached and that it does not measure a student's aptitude for an individual subject. Professor Smithers said that a previous trial in Britain in the 1960s was suspended because it did not add to the sum of knowledge provided by A levels.

However, at Oxford University, a spokeswoman said that admissions tutors might consider more selective tests if numbers increased for other popular subjects. She said: "Nothing can be ruled out . . . but one thing admissions tutors have felt is that subject-specific tests are a better way of finding an aptitude for a subject, than a general test."

As more than 260,000 students prepare to receive their A-level results on Thursday, an ICM poll revealed yesterday that almost half of Britain's adults believe that A levels have become easier. Ms Kelly was criticised this year when she rejected radical plans to replace A levels, GCSEs and vocational qualifications with a four-level diploma.

Yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said that A levels were "here to stay" and it was premature to theorise about exam results before they had been published. She added, however, that the Qualifications Curriculum Authority, the examinations watchdog, was examining A levels to see how "we can increase the stretch of our brightest students by introducing tougher questions and the introduction of an extended project. We will provide more details on these proposals later in the year."

Source



The teaching of reading goes back to phonics in Australian schools

The "whole language" fallacy goes back around a century but destructive know-all "educationists" seem to be themselves incapable of learning

Children are set to learn reading in the same way their parents did as part of a Federal Government push for back-to-basics teaching in classrooms. The head of a national literacy inquiry, Ken Rowe, said nearly one in three children were not learning to read properly because they lacked the building blocks provided by phonics, the system of sounding out letters and syllables. "There does seem to be a tail of underachievement, and the major concern is boys," Dr Rowe said. "You'll find roughly 30 per cent of year 9 students have functional literacy problems. The only way we can really address this is with a nationwide solution."

His report is due within weeks. The federal Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, says he will withhold funding from states that resist the recommendations. In phonics teaching, emphasis is on the relationship between letters, or syllables, and their sounds. They are sounded one at a time (such as c-a-t) through repetitive exercises that begin with easy words and move on to more difficult ones. It was generally replaced in classrooms in the 1980s by the whole language method of immersing children in print and allowing them to absorb words. In recent years schools have adopted a blend of the two. But Dr Rowe, a research director with the Australian Council for Educational Research, said whole language teaching had acquired "too great an emphasis in some schools". He is expected to recommend a national scheme for the systematic teaching of phonics.

Dr Nelson, who commissioned the inquiry, said: "I suspect there's a lot of teachers who simply do not know how to teach phonics, or they're working in educational bureaucracies that frown on the use of phonics." He said he would "mandate" to ensure the states implemented Dr Rowe's proposals. And he would withhold funding if they resisted. "If they don't [agree], that then leaves us with the only language they seem to understand, and that's money."

Dr Rowe said: "The constructivist way [of whole language teaching], for 70 per cent of kids that may be appropriate, but then you have to take into account the 30 per cent for whom it doesn't work. They need direct instruction, or what you might call systematic phonics. "But there is no dichotomy . all evidence-based research shows both ways of teaching are valuable depending on the development learning needs of the child. We just need to be sure that one isn't downplayed."

The most recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development literacy review found 15-year-old students in NSW performed second only to those from Finland. Dr Rowe said Australia was among the top countries such as Finland, New Zealand and Canada, and performed better than Britain and the US. But the latest national literacy results show about one in 10 year 5 and year 7 students cannot meet their reading benchmarks.

Maureen Walsh, an education lecturer at the Australian Catholic University, said phonics was taught in schools among "a rich blend of principles". "It's silly to say we need more phonics," she said. "We give all our teaching students at ACU a lot of phonics instruction. And anyway, we moved on from the phonics and whole language debate 10 years ago - we now have a model that draws from both and also takes in social context and new technology."

Dr Rowe and his committee of academics, teachers and parents have read 400 submissions since October. And they have examined the findings of a British parliamentary committee that completed a similar inquiry into literacy four months ago. Its report noted the success of early phonics programs in some British schools and recommended a review of British teaching strategy, which treats phonics as just one of many learning tools. Dr Walsh suggested the push for "the explicit teaching of phonics is not a bad thing in itself but it would be very damaging if it is at the expense of losing many newer, excellent approaches".

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



17 August, 2005

AMAZING LEFTIST ARROGANCE IN BRITAIN

You couldn't make this stuff up

A growing number of Labour councils are taking parents to court to try to prevent them from sending their children to the school of their choice. Alfie Sidford, 4, won the right to attend his popular local school in Haringey, North London, from an independent appeal panel. But the Labour local authority is spending thousands of pounds to take his parents to the High Court to send him to a more distant primary.

In Reading, Berkshire, a group of parents have spent 2,000 pounds each to hire a barrister to uphold an independent appeal decision to send their children to the popular local school. Labour-controlled Reading council is fighting them in court because there are empty desks to fill elsewhere in the borough. Both cases fly in the face of Tony Blair's commitment to parental choice and are driving the Government's urgent quest to make the expansion of popular schools a reality.

Anthony Sidford, Alfie's father, said that his son wanted to go to nearby Weston Park primary school to join his friends and still did not know that the council was battling to stop him. Mr Sidford, who is representing himself in the High Court case, added: "I never thought that making an application to go to the local primary school would end up in the High Court. When Labour came to power in 1997, one of the mantras was `education, education, education'. We are fighting for the right for our child to be provided with a good local convenient education and the independent appeal panel agreed with us. But it does not seem as if the local Labour council is actually giving substance to the rhetoric. "It seems strange that Haringey council can find money for lawyers but is apparently unable to provide enough places."

The council said that it regretted the distress to the Sidfords but it had a duty to all parents to treat every case consistently in line with the law. Reading council is battling 12 sets of parents in the High Court who won the right for their children to attend Caversham primary school at an independent appeal panel. Some even have siblings at the oversubscribed school.

Clare Cummings, who wants her daughter Chloe, 4, to attend the school next month along with her older sister, Gemma, said: "We won our appeal and then we were taken to the High Court and had our appeals quashed. We are going back to a second appeal later this month. Parental choice has just not worked for us. We have had a terrible time. "The parents hired a barrister and a lawyer and we have all got to pay around 2,000 pounds."

Reading council said that to admit the children would affect education at the school and cost 200,000 pounds for one extra teacher over six years.

Source



Blair demands more school choice

Tony Blair has ordered officials to make it easier and quicker for popular schools to expand after the failure of measures to improve parent power in education. An Education White Paper this autumn will rewrite the rulebook on school choice after a 37 million pound school expansion programme that was begun in 2003 resulted in just seven popular schools adding extra classes.

Parents will be given new rights to demand sixth-form provision and schools may lose the ability to block the expansion of a successful neighbour even if it threatens their own viability, The Times understands.

A range of other measures is being considered including more direct financial incentives for popular schools and the reform of School Organisation Committees, the local bodies responsible for planning school places. Successful head teachers will be offered even greater incentives to "expand" their school by taking over a failing school nearby.

Mr Blair is said to be deeply frustrated that his continued pledges of a revolution in parental choice to enable hundreds more pupils to go to their first preference school have come to little. Speaking at the Labour Party conference in 2002, the Prime Minister said: "Why shouldn't there be a range of schools for parents to choose from . . . Why shouldn't good schools expand or take over failing schools or form federations?"

But figures from the Department for Education show that it has so far received just 20 applications for the popular schools expansion programme which came into force two summers ago. Seven have been approved, five rejected and eight are still being considered.

The White Paper expected in October will focus on Labour's manifesto promise to tailor schooling to the individual needs of every child. But Downing Street has been embarrassed by the actions of Labour councils taking parents to the High Court to stop them sending their children to the school of their choice. One source said: "School expansion is something we are looking at as we develop the White Paper proposals. "It is certainly the case that there has been a poor level of expansion over the past two years. "We need to do more to create the right incentives for a popular school to want to expand as well as making it easier or quicker."

Good schools will also be encouraged to expand using funding from Labour's 15-year Building Schools for the Future programme, which aims to refurbish every school. The ambitious proposals to expand popular schools hit problems not least because many head teachers do not want their schools to get bigger. They fear that this will change one of the qualities of the school that made it popular and successful in the first place.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said: "Schools see the next phase of development as getting better not getting larger because getting larger can put at risk the progress that you have already made. One of the major tensions in the Government education programme is the greater freedom for individual schools on the one hand and the thrust towards greater collaboration on the other. That will not be made easier by loosening restrictions on expansion

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



16 August, 2005

School Choice Knows No Color Lines

In the shadow of an old, prestigious, white-columned building, filled mostly with old, prestigious, white-collar politicians, stand thousands of black and Hispanic children who can only dream about growing up to pursue similar endeavors. These kids, our kids, are forced into some of the worst schools in the nation--where only 10 percent of students are proficient in reading and math and the idea of going to college is a joke. Or it was. The preceding scenario describes Washington, DC just over a year ago, when the city was on the verge of dramatic education reform that (sans more state meddling) will forever change the climate of learning in the nation’s capital.

The 2004-2005 school year saw the first disbursements of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. For the first time ever, many families inside the Beltway had the chance to direct some of their own tax dollars by sending a student to a school of choice. The District’s mayor, Anthony Williams, realized that after years of toil, several failed superintendents, and millions of dollars and rhetoric, the best opportunity for minority children to receive a quality education lay outside the halls of D.C. public schools.

Private schools answered the call and showed that fundamental skills like math and science know no color barriers. These independent and religious schools are truly examples of non-discrimination as they (unlike the District’s conventional public schools) refuse to use race or income as an excuse for low achievement. Of course, the icing on the cake is that each Opportunity Scholarship is $3,000 less than the per-pupil expenditure in the public schools, an important fact that rarely makes the headlines.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship is just one example of how infusing sound market practices into the public education monopoly benefits kids. Nationally, more than 60,000 students receive similar scholarships to attend the elementary, middle, or high school of their parents’ choice. There are many, however, who would choke the life out of this all-important movement. Like everything else in D.C., the battle over education policy has become partisan. Many have lined up in support of school choice (in the form of vouchers, tax credits, and charter schools) ... and just as many have voiced support for the status quo.

Defenders of the conventional public school system, with its rigid school districts based largely on socio-economic status, apparently discount the ability of everyday Americans to make sound decisions about their children’s education. So many have bought into the teacher unions’ lie: “Let us, the education experts, decide where your kids should go to school.” That might not sound too ridiculous at first. But can you imagine what would happen if the United Auto Workers of America started mandating precisely what type of car you were allowed to drive? You can believe even the most anti-voucher member of Congress would cry foul if he were told what to drive to work. Why, then, won’t state and federal legislators extend the same courtesy to every family in the country with respect to education?

Perhaps the solution is one of semantics. Whereas many Red-state-ers love the word “voucher,” the term doesn’t resonate with the people who need them most. I doubt many working-class Latin American families think of “vouchers” when searching for ways out of persistently poor-performing schools. For that reason, calling “vouchers” opportunity “scholarships” makes far more sense. Anyone who has ever contemplated paying for college understands the value of a scholarship. That is an important concept for school choice-minded leaders of black and Hispanic communities to consider. Once we can raise enough support for publicly funded scholarships (and scholarships generally), ever-responsive, vote-seeking politicians will have to listen. Representatives of minority communities across the country must themselves be taught that school choice is neither Red nor Blue. Most of all, it has the potential to help those who are shades of black and brown.

Complicated tax credit schemes and notions of non-compulsory education all miss an important point. While these plans are nice to chat about over dinner with economists and libertarians, the vast majority of minority families believe in the value of publicly funded education, and many remember the fight to get into schools in the first place. The best service to them is to ensure publicly funded entrance into the schools that are best for them. It is a dream a long time coming, and one that should be embraced on both sides of the political aisle.

At a reception in the spring I heard Rod Paige, former secretary of education, say the following: “The Declaration of Independence says that ‘all men are created equal.’ Well, without a proper education he won’t stay that way for long.” Dr. Paige is right. The fight for meaningful education options is a fight as important as any that has been waged. Then, we fought against proponents of the status quo who wanted to keep people “separate but equal.” Now, we fight against a system that seeks to keep people equally ignorant.

Source



Australian Prime Minister warns Islamic schools to stick to official curricula

John Howard has warned private Islamic colleges not to stray too far from government-approved curriculums, saying there "could be cause for concern" about what they teach their students. The Prime Minister said Muslim colleges, like all schools, should be required to teach Australian values such as democracy, and warned that those that failed to do so faced having their government funding cut. "We have become too apologetic about our identity," Mr Howard said. "I'm in the process of satisfying myself as to whether there are any things that are being taught that shouldn't be."

Kim Beazley [Opposition leader] urged Mr Howard to put education on the agenda at a planned summit with Muslim leaders. "If we are serious about fighting terrorism in Australia, we must use education as part of a strategy to combat extremism," the Opposition Leader said. "We know that the mainstream Australian Muslim community does not support extremist teachings in schools or condone terrorist activities in any form," Mr Beazley said. "But we also must ensure that individual classrooms do not deviate from the mainstream and present opportunities for extremism."

But the comments perplexed Silma Ihram, principal of one of Australia's oldest Muslim colleges, Noor Al Houda, at Strathfield in Sydney's inner west, who said most Islamic colleges were committed to fighting extremism. Two years ago, Ms Ihram helped develop the Muslim Schools Charter, which has been signed by 18 of Australia's 23 Islamic colleges. It condemns all forms of terrorism, including in the name of Islam. "We acknowledge there are some people outside this school who might feel some sympathy for extremists," Ms Ihram said. "But I can say for certain that at this school we are teaching that terrorism is wrong. We are making sure our students know it is wrong."

Mohammad Hassan, a founding member of the Australian Council of Islamic Education and director of the Minaret College at Springvale, in Melbourne's outer east, said his school proudly flew the Australian flag every day. "Our students know very well they are Australian," he said. "We share the same values as other Australians."

President of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils Ameer Ali said: "Why pick on Muslim schools? Of course it's appropriate that all children mix with each other and learn these values, but why target only Muslims?"

Islamic colleges are growing faster - both in size and number - than any other schools in Australia. Most have been established in poor areas, meaning they qualify for millions of dollars in federal funding. In total, the schools get about $40million from the commonwealth, and a smaller amount from state governments.

Geoff Newcombe, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools in NSW, said all independent schools taught Australian values. "All schools are accountable to government for what they teach and how they teach it," Dr Newcombe said.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



15 August, 2005

CONGRESS HITTING AT BIAS

Congress is taking the first steps toward pressuring colleges to maintain ideological balance in the classroom, a move that supporters insist is needed to protect conservative students from being graded down by liberal professors. A resolution attached to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which has passed the House Education and the Workforce Committee and is expected to be taken up by the full House in September, tells colleges to grade students on the basis of their mastery of subject matter rather than on their political views.

The provision makes no mention of specific political leanings, but represents a victory for conservative student groups who have been arguing for years that American universities are bastions of liberalism seeking to impose their liberal orthodoxy on dissenters.

The measure is not binding, but some higher education analysts caution that it is not to be taken lightly. Colleges and universities, they say, should consider this a warning shot from a Republican-controlled Congress fed up with the liberal academy. ''If the universities don't move, all that's going to happen is this will build," said David Horowitz, a conservative author and a driving force in the free speech movement that inspired the resolution. ''They're sitting on a tinderbox. Now we have resolutions. I guarantee you, if they thumb their noses at this, there will be statutory legislation."

The resolution, which also tells institutions not to take political orientation into account when allocating money for programs and declares that campus speakers should reflect a range of viewpoints, was made following several recent controversies involving politics in the academy.

Last year, Columbia University launched an investigation of its Middle East studies department after a student documentary accused professors of intimidating Jewish students when they tried to express views supporting Israel. Earlier this year, Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., reneged on a speaking invitation to University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill because he had published an article blaming America for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and comparing the victims to Nazis. The University of Colorado fired Churchill for his comments.

The resolution does not specify how colleges and universities should achieve political balance, only that schools should encourage expression of diverse views. But many college administrators fear that it could lead to congressional interference if students seek to explain low grades by saying they disagreed with their professor's political views. Also, the provision's biggest backers in Congress make no secret of their intent to make colleges more welcoming to conservative students

More here



PROGRESS TOWARDS OPENNESS IN AUSTRALIA

It could teach a lot of American schools a thing or two

The school gates once marked a clear division of responsibility: on one side parents ruled and on the other teachers taught. Not any more. Conditioned to a highly competitive world, parents are challenging teachers to justify the trust that has always been extended to them - teachers can get with the program or get out of the way. "When your child goes to school you've got no idea what they're supposed to be learning and how they are being taught," says company manager Piers Morgan. "Parents often get mixed messages about what's happening in the school."

But at Cammeray Public School, where Hamish Morgan is in year 2, the lines of communication are clear. The classrooms are open to parental scrutiny, and mothers and fathers attend evening mathematics seminars to learn about syllabus developments. Teachers answer emails about homework from parents who have signed an agreement with the school about how the lessons will be taught. Each child has a "personalised learning" plan to fit the curriculum to individual needs. Hamish is a whiz with numbers so he does maths at year 3 level. "Parents want to know things like how much homework their kids are doing, is it too much, what should they be reading, and at what level," says Morgan, the president of the school council. The school's principal, Christine Taylor, says the team approach makes parents feel confident about what their children are learning and enables them to help more at home.

But for many other parents, what children are being taught at school is of paramount concern. Educated in the 1970s and '80s, when grammar went the way of the dodo, parents are demanding back-to-basics school lessons for their children. They want times tables drilled and poetry memorised stanza by stanza. At dinner parties, there is hand-wringing that children can't spell, do fractions, conjugate a verb and don't read "real" literature.

Social researcher Hugh Mackay says it's part of "a broader picture of parental concern about the well-being of their kids" and is heavily influenced by Australia's falling birth rate, now down to 1.7 babies per woman. With fewer children, parents are more protective and aspirational, and they want "the best education" for their brood.

On most indicators, school education in the 21st century is better than in the 20th century. Students score highly on international tests, are taking harder subjects for the HSC and 75 per cent finish year 12, compared with 35 per cent in the 1980s. But there are flashpoints in almost every subject - from alleged postmodernism in senior English to how maths is being taught in primary schools. In the past decade, subjects have been increasingly linked to the "real world" to be relevant to students. At the same time, conservative politicians and parents have called for a return to the three Rs, and there is evidence that education authorities are responding.

Parents are placing more value on their children's education "as seen in the growth of private education and demands for greater accountability", says Peter Knapp, the director of Educational Assessment Australia, a centre at the University of NSW. They are pushing for "more testing and rigorously teaching fundamentals like grammar early on. You can see that with the way grammar was brought back into the K-6 [kindergarten to year 6] syllabus," he says. This year about 200,000 students will sign up for his centre's tests. These academic inquisitions are on top of the 10 statewide exams they sit at school, starting with the Basic Skills Test in year 3 and finishing with the HSC in year 12. "Teachers are saying, 'We've got too many tests for kids' ... but parents are saying, 'There aren't enough tests, we want more'," Knapp says. "We now give our tests to one-third of all NSW schoolchildren, between about year 3 and year 10, in English, writing, computer skills, science and mathematics." He explains the return to fundamentals as a parental "backlash" against the education fads of the 1980s and '90s. "You got kids leaving school who couldn't write. Parents have become much more hard-nosed. They're paying for their kids' education and they want results. You see it in the trend away from state schools," he says.

When the federal Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, launched his crusade last year for "plain language" student report cards, he was armed with the results of a $60,000 survey of 3000 parents. "Parents want to be told in plain language exactly how their kids are performing," he says. "They want to know how they are performing in relation to the rest of the class and they want to know how they're going against the rest of the country." From next year, 10,000 schools will be forced - through Government legislation - to give students an A, B, C, D or E grade and rank them into performance quartiles within the class. "The only people that I've had opposing our agenda for publishing school performance ... are teachers, principals and educational bureaucrats ... It's like having a dialogue with the deaf," Nelson says.

Mathematician Garth Gaudry, head of the federally funded International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, is a harsh critic of the lack of rigour in the curriculum. "If you ask the average parent they would say 'there are two subjects I really want my kid to master: English and mathematics'," he says. "They're absolutely right for the simple reason that if you know those two subjects you can learn lots of other things by yourself. They are foundation subjects."

The NSW Board of Studies is about to set guidelines on how much time should be allocated to each subject. Literacy and numeracy - which can be taught across subjects other than English and maths - should comprise 45 per cent to 55 per cent of the school week. It will be the first time in a generation that these "indicative" times have been used in schools, and they will be combined with a streamlined list of what is "mandatory" subject matter. There are only 24 teaching hours in a primary school week, yet the curriculum has grown like topsy, jamming in non-essential studies like road safety and recycling. The president of the Board of Studies, Professor Gordon Stanley, says the 316 "mandatory outcomes" that teachers have to teach will be replaced by new statements that spell out what students should be able to do at each stage of their schooling. These statements will list "the essential learning that we expect all schools to be delivering as part of the minimum curriculum". "From a parents' perspective I think the stage statements are more intelligible than some of the detail we have currently," he says.

The board's inspector of primary education, Margaret Malone, said the guidelines would cover 80 per cent of the school day and include times for English, maths, science, technology, creative arts, history, geography and personal development. The remaining 20 per cent of time gives schools flexibility to teach extra reading, religious instruction or use it for school sport.

Ironically, it is the "overcrowded curriculum" that has sent parents fleeing to coaching colleges for more tuition for their children. Mohan Dhall, public officer for the Australian Tutoring Association, said many parents feared that "the basic skills will be overlooked" because there was so much to cover in the curriculum. At Sydney's prestigious Ascham school, a mother this week told the Herald that "everybody I know has coaches, many have three". So what makes these parents, who are paying $18,000 a year in fees, seek more help? "We have coaching because we feel she is missing some of the basics," the mother said. Her daughter, doing her HSC, needs a high mark to get a place in her preferred university course.

Parents nostalgic for the "good old days" - when they were made to chant times tables until they were blue in the face - need a reality check, long-serving education bureaucrat Paul Brock politely suggests. "You would never, ever have done King Lear for the Leaving Certificate. You didn't even have to study poetry ... You could opt out of it. I have read chief examiners' reports in the '40s complaining bitterly that their students couldn't write or spell properly," says Brock, the director of learning and development research in the NSW Department of Education and Training. "The good old days? The HSC English curriculum now is immeasurably more challenging than the old Leaving Certificate English curriculum." In nearly two decades on the English syllabus committee, from the late 1960s into the 1980s, Brock watched the course content become more difficult. He is adamant that HSC English is now harder than ever before. "And despite all the fuss, the vast majority of texts on the syllabus are still classics by any definition of the word."

Poet Les Murray shudders when he recalls his school days in the 1950s. Poetry, which was seen as "an effeminate thing for girls", was rarely taught to boys and it was only by accident that he discovered the joy of verse. "I had one teacher, luckily, who showed me how exciting it was," he says. "Education in schools has always been pretty crap. I can't imagine it would be much worse now."

The results of two international assessments, released late last year, summed up the curriculum conflict for governments, educators, parents and employers. Our students know enough to get by in everyday life but they don't always do it by the book. The 12,500 Australian 15-year-olds tested for the OECD Program for International Student Assessment rated in the world's elite for how they could apply reading, mathematical and scientific skills to real-life problems. They had the mathematical skills to perform currency conversions and to read graphs in newspapers. But a quarter - and more boys than girls - were at or below the lowest international reading benchmark.

Geoff Masters, the chief executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research, says the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study - which examined 10,000 Australian year 4 and year 8 students - painted "a less positive picture" of how much they absorbed from maths and science textbooks. This test showed a disturbing 35 per cent of Australian year 8 students were at or under the lowest international maths benchmark. Both tests are run in more than 40 countries every three or four years, so it is possible to track each country's improvement, or lack thereof. The study has rung alarm bells because Australian students in the nine years to 2003 did not improve at the same rate as students from other countries and were significantly outperformed by England, Belgium, The Netherlands, Estonia and Hungary. This gave the appearance that "Australia has been standing still while other countries have been moving forward", Masters wrote last month in his centre's journal, Research Developments. "If Australia is to lift its performance in mathematics and science over the next decade, then greater attention will need to be given to the teaching of basic factual and procedural knowledge."

Anne Baker jokes that she and her husband, Chris, have laboured over enough homework to qualify for honorary Dip Eds. The couple send their son Simon, in year 11, and daughter Kim, in year 9, to the "parent-controlled" Covenant Christian School in Belrose. An association of parents at the school meets to determine the way the curriculum is taught, and runs the selection process for new teachers. Parents sit in on classes as helpers, organise reading groups for younger students, volunteer in the library and supervise exams. One conundrum the parents faced was whether to allow students to read the popular Harry Potter books when "they don't really reflect the Christian message". "Some parents didn't mind their kids reading it, but other parents did," says Baker. "We allowed the first two books to stay in the primary school, and the other books were only allowed in the senior school." At home she proofreads assignment drafts and tracks the children's workload. When Kim struggled, as a younger student, her mother spent "a year doing extra work with her at home". "Now that they're a bit older, it's not quite so hands-on," says Baker. "It's mainly making sure they're on schedule with their work, that they're sticking to a timetable. I help them break work down into chunks and time-manage. "I suppose we're like the new teachers, but outside school," she says.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



14 August, 2005

LOCAL CONTROL FADING

There was a time when your locally elected school board members had the last word on what and how your child was taught, how the district's money was spent, who graduated from high school, how teachers were trained, and who was hired or fired. Not any more.

Arizona built its education system on "local control." Once powerful and independent governing boards firmly directed each of the state's more than 220 districts and were answerable mainly to district voters. But new federal and state laws swept in a massive reform movement and swept away much of that power and independence. It has left district school board members feeling the pressure of dividing up limited money, while caught between new mandates to push basic reading and math skills and their voters, many of whom are upset about changes board members are powerless to stop. The result: parents are further from the decisions makers for their neighborhood schools, classroom lesson plans are becoming more uniform, and fewer people will become school board members. "Do I feel local control is being stepped on? In lots of ways I think I do," said Vicki Johnson, Glendale Union High School district board president. "There are times we're feeling helpless and the pressure put on us. Can I say that we like it? No."

Like it or not, this education reform movement is rolling on without, and sometimes over, locally elected school boards with unhappy results for some members. Take, for example, the drama in Phoenix's Kyrene Elementary District. Right now, some parents are collecting signatures to recall Kyrene board president Rae Waters. They are upset over what they view as Waters' vote against daily arts and music classes in favor of more reading, writing and math classes so all students will excel on state tests and district schools can continue to be ranked as top performers. "With stakes that high, school boards are put in a position of making difficult decisions," Waters said. "It's taken our choices away and in many ways, our ability to respond to community desires." Waters added: "It drives me crazy."

Newly elected Kyrene board member Mitzi Epstein already said board members and teachers tell her the district must focus on state test scores, while parents tell her they want more foreign language, art and music. "But the law said we're going to look at math, English and, soon, science and that's all," Epstein said. "Here I am stuck in the middle."

Things began to change for education in the mid 1990s when Arizona voters, as well as those across the country, appeared to lose faith in public schools and politicians began to use those doubts to gain votes. These new politicians joined state lawmakers and state business leaders in backing a reform movement. The state received the go-ahead to create grade-by-grade learning goals, known as Arizona Academic Standards, and a statewide testing system to ensure those standards were being taught in every classroom from Yuma to Chinle.

Schools where too many children fail Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards tests are shamed by being publicly ranked as "underperforming" or "failing" and face a state takeover. The state can replace a failing school's principal, take charge of its budget, reconfigure the grades on its campus; even turn over the school's management to a private company. Starting this year, students not passing the high school AIMS test will not get a diploma. "It restricts what is taught," Glendale Union board president Johnson said. "We've been accused of teaching to the test. What do you expect us to do? Kids will pay if we don't keep up. We are boxed in. I do feel boxed in as far as the mandates coming down, yes I do. It is so confining."

The state's reform movement could have been yet another of Arizona's political whims, but then the Bush Administration and Congress enacted a similar national reform program, called the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Now, federal education money is tied to every state's willingness to follow a similar path to reform. "Accountability" became an education buzzword, micromanaging schools became a national and state obsession, and Arizona school districts had few options but to conform. As federal and state laws strip away the power of locally elected district boards, some board members said parents and kids lose.

* Classroom curriculum becomes more uniform.

* Power is concentrated at the state capital and removed from the neighborhood, making it more difficult for parents to influence changes.

* The state could be forced to pay board members, as fewer and fewer people are willing to run for what has become a 30-hour-a-week volunteer job.

* There is no sign state or federal education officials will pull back on their mandates. Just the opposite, they continue to make proposals that would weaken the power of local school boards.

New federal and state mandates show no signs of softening. This year alone, some Arizona lawmakers tried to create a uniform set of text books to be used in all state schools and others wanted to require school districts to put 65 percent of their budgets into classroom spending and less into administration.

Maricopa County Schools Superintendent Sandra Dowling is responsible for replacing board members who quit and encouraging candidates to run. It's getting tougher and tougher and Dowling is convinced the state or districts will have to offer some sort of pay to entice qualified people to sit on local school boards. To make matters worse, state law requires districts with several schools ranked "failing" two years in a row to print that information on the election ballot. "Nobody understands how the pendulum has shifted toward state and federal control," Dowling said. "When you say 'accountability' that means turning in just the opposite direction of 'local control'."

Source



Home Schoolers Are Challenging the Education Monopoly

The fact that so many parents feel obliged to homeschool is in fact a crashing indictment of the government system. When something is so bad that people won't even have it for free, what does that tell you?

It is a fundamental tenet of capitalism that free market competition is good for the people and the country. That's why Congress wisely enacted anti-trust legislation a century or so ago - to prevent big, powerful monopolies from eliminating their competition by stifling the little guy.

But today Americans are threatened by a government-sponsored and taxpayer-funded monopoly, one that is potentially more powerful and dangerous than the old Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel operations. Like a giant octopus with long, deadly tentacles, the socialistic "Official Public Education Trust" has established a virtual stranglehold on the impressionable minds of our nation's youth.

The Public Education Establishment in America is controlled by the Federal government through the unconstitutional Department of Education and is supported by the Left-leaning teachers' union, the National Education Association. These power-hungry academic oligarchs desperately want their 3-Rs racket to become the only game in town. Compulsory attendance requirements and anti-truancy regulations allow the long enforcement arm of the law to stretch into homes and classrooms all over America.

The problem for these frustrated educrats, though, is the fact their failed system doesn't work as well as the competition. The private sector has always been able to out-produce the government system. Rich folks with enough money could always buy their children a top-notch education in the pricier private schools, and that's still true today.

But the real threat to the public school monopoly comes from the rapidly growing Home School movement in America. Why? Because the numbers prove that average Moms and Dads who take the time to teach their children themselves are able to get much better results for a fraction of the cost. The statistics compiled by both the Department of Education's own Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC) and private researchers bear witness to this truth.

On nationally normed standardized achievement tests, the average score for all public school students is 50 in all areas. For all home schooled students taking the same tests, the average score for the complete battery of tests was 87, a whopping difference of 37 percentile points. For example: Total Reading, 87; Total Math, 82; Social Studies, 85. In every category, the home-schooled kids out-performed their public school peers.

According to Bryan D. Ray, Ph.D., president of the National Home Education Research Institute, the number of home-schoolers has been growing for the past two decades at a rate of between 7 and 15 percent per year, making this the fastest growing form of education. Close to two million American children in grades K-12 were being educated at home in the 2002-2003 school year, with similar overall success.

The education monopoly can't dispute these figures, let alone duplicate them, although they spend approximately ten times as much per student only to get dismal results. So they try to discredit home schooling in other ways. One way is to set up a straw man called (aptly enough) "Socialization," and then knock it down.

"The isolation implicit in home teaching is anathema to socialization and citizenship. It is a rejection of community and makes the home-schooler the captive of the orthodoxies of the parents," charges Dr. Dennis Evans, who directs the doctoral programs in education leadership at the University of California, Irvine.

"Schools, particularly public schools, are the one place where 'all of the children of all of the people come together,'" explained Dr. Evans in his 2003 "USA Today" op-ed piece entitled "Home is no place for school." Kids taught by parents and inculcated with their values might miss out on "an openness to diversity and new ideas," he warned.

Yes, and they might also miss out on dangerous drugs, gang violence, sacrilegious and degrading music, peer pressure to try sex before marriage, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, to mention just a few of the more prominent aspects of "socialization" being democratically spread through the public school system daily.

Some parents might actually prefer that their children would continue to address them respectfully as "sir" and "ma'am" rather than "dude." Or that they might spend their free time doing something more constructive than swapping pills at Pharming parties.

Frankly, the whole socialization argument is bogus, too. Fully 98 percent of home-schooled kids are involved in two or more extracurricular activities with other kids outside the home. These just happen to be of a more wholesome type, like field trips (84 percent), Sunday School classes (77 percent), group sports (48 percent), music classes (47 percent), and volunteer work (33 percent). (To read some of the many inspiring home school success stories, visit http://nche.hslda.org/docs/brightspots/default.asp or, for academic statistics, see www.hslda.org/docs/study/rudner1999/default.asp.)

Some states tightly regulate home schools to make sure that they toe the curricular line. Others do little or nothing to monitor home-schoolers. Either way, the academic results are statistically the same. Home-schooled kids excel across the board, whether they are scrutinized or ignored by the State.

In my own state of North Carolina, an abortive effort to bring home-schoolers under the control of the Department of Public Education was derailed by the protests of outraged parents last Spring. I was glad to see that happen because I know that parents - and not bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., or Raleigh, NC - should make the final decisions about their children's education. Elected officials should actively fight for the rights of home school parents and their children to live free from intrusive government regulations.

If liberals truly believe in tolerance then give home-schooling families a tax credit. Our children are our greatest natural resource. If parents are willing to invest the time and effort to train their children to be critical thinkers, law-abiding citizens and productive adults, then I think that we as a nation need to invest in them, too.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



13 August, 2005

KANSAS: THE DUMBING DOWN YOU HAVE WHEN YOU ARE NOT HAVING DUMBING DOWN

The state should change its accreditation standards for public schools so that all students do not have to be grade-level proficient in math and reading by 2014, Senate Vice President John Vratil and Attorney General Phill Kline said Tuesday. Vratil and Kline told the 10-member State Board of Education, which sets academic standards, that the mandate for 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2014 was unrealistic and could be costly to the state. They said the courts could force the state to increase funding to public schools so they can meet the standard. "There's probably not enough money in the state of Kansas to attain 100 percent proficiency," said Vratil, R-Leawood.

The State Board of Education adopted the proficiency mandate as part of its accreditation requirements following the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind law in 2001. Schools are required to make progress each year toward the goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and math or face sanctions. Vratil insisted he was not trying to "dumb down" education. Rather, he said, he wants the board to be realistic and set goals and standards the state can hope to achieve, including closing the achievement gap between whites and minorities and rich and poor students. "If we're unrealistic, all we do is breed disrespect for the standard," he said. "We're setting ourselves up for failure."

Board Chairman Steve Abrams, of Arkansas City, said it was unclear if the board would act but that members have expressed concerns about the federal mandates. "I've said before that No Child Left Behind is a problem, a disaster waiting to happen," he said.

However, Board member Bill Wagnon, of Topeka, said the state shouldn't weaken the requirements. He said he could provide Vratil and Kline with the names of the state's 450,000 students and they could "identify which ones you want me to leave behind."

Kline expressed concern about what the courts might do if the standards aren't changed. He said that if the proficiency requirement remains intact, courts could end up ruling that the Legislature must spend as much money as is required for schools to reach the goal. Kline said that could mean other needs in education aren't met, and the courts could end up deciding how much the state spends on education and where the money is spent. "The issue is who maintains the authority to set policy and set priorities," he said.

Source



ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE LEFT TRYING TO GET VIA LAWSUITS WHAT THEY CANNOT GET THROUGH DEMOCRACY

And, judging by places with high per capita spending on public education, this grab will only destroy Califonia education even further if it succeeds

California's largest teachers union and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell announced Tuesday that they have sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to seek $3 billion more for public schools. The California Teachers Association and O'Connell, a Democrat elected statewide to his nonpartisan post, say the Republican governor broke his word and violated state law by failing to give K-14 schools (K-12 schools and community colleges) more in his 2005-06 budget. Some California parents also joined as plaintiffs in the lawsuit. "We've exhausted all of our other remedies, and the judicial option is our last remaining option to adequately fund public education," O'Connell said.

Schwarzenegger's budget aides said Tuesday they are confident the lawsuit will not hold up in court and that the governor's budget was approved legally by the state Legislature and sufficiently funds schools. The lawsuit comes after a months-long battle between Schwarzenegger and education advocates over a deal they struck in January 2004. Facing a massive budget shortfall, the new governor persuaded a powerful and vocal education coalition to accept a $2 billion cut to K-12 schools and the suspension of Proposition 98's minimum funding guarantees. In exchange, it was announced, the cut and any resulting lost money from the suspension would be restored in future years when the state's fiscal picture brightened. "Just one year later, however, the governor changed his mind about the funding agreement," states the lawsuit filed late Monday in Sacramento Superior Court.

Schwarzenegger in January announced his second budget would not repay the $2 billion, despite growing revenues, because he said the state needed the money for other priorities such as transportation. The governor's top finance officials at first acknowledged that he was breaking his word to school officials, saying that the state's fiscal situation simply would not allow him to keep it. Schwarzenegger later changed his defense of the matter slightly, however, saying only that he had promised eventually to repay the $2 billion and that he did not think he had broken a commitment. He defends his 2005-06 budget as one that boosts per-pupil spending over last year. His budget also used billions in new revenues to repay a loan to local governments early, fully fund the state's Proposition 42 transportation funding and avoid any significant new borrowing.

But schools advocates say some of that additional revenue should have gone to classrooms under the governor's deal and under state law. They said they are owed more - about $3 billion for the last and current fiscal year - based on a state statute that was passed after the budget deal was made with the governor. The statute, signed as part of the 2004-05 budget, says that schools should receive just $2 billion below the amount that Proposition 98 guaranteed them if it hadn't been suspended. But because revenues were better than expected, the lawsuit argues that schools should have been guaranteed $1.8 billion more for the 2004-05 fiscal year and $1.1 billion this year. Proposition 98 establishes a minimum, or floor, for school spending that is decided by revenue pictures and one of three formulas each year, depending on economic conditions. The Legislature and the governor can agree to suspend Proposition 98.

Dean Vogel, CTA's secretary treasurer, said the organization sought to persuade Schwarzenegger to include the $3 billion in the budget he signed. But when that didn't happen, the group decided to sue.

H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance, said budget officials "don't believe that the suit will stand up in court." He pointed to an analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office last fall that called Schwarzenegger's approach sensible. And he said that Democrats - who control the Legislature - and Republicans voted to send a budget to the governor that contained about the same levels of education spending that he recommended in January. "We believe that the courts will recognize that two branches of state government came to the same conclusion, that this was legal and appropriate," he said.

O'Connell countered that he believes the law is clear. "There's a formula, and the formula needs to be adhered to," he said. "This isn't just the governor's word and the education coalition's word. This is about the law."

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



12 August, 2005

ARE AMERICAN STUDENTS UNEDUCATED OR LAZY?

The article below argues that international comparisons of educational achievement are invalid because American students may be less motivated in doing their tests than overseas students are in a similar situation. That is undoubtedly a fair point. But since motivation is arguably even more important in life than is "book learning", it seems cold comfort. One hopes that the lack of motivation extends only to the obviously uninvolving stuff American kids are taught at school. Of greatest concern, of course, are the large disparities WITHIN America. When a California High School graduate may well be unable to read properly, international comparisons are the last thing that matters

The fact that 8-year-olds and 17-year-olds have different attitudes toward low-pressure exams isn't going to come as a surprise to anyone who has raised a teenager—or has been one. The NAEP is used to judge school systems and overall student performance, but the test doesn't matter at all to individual kids. In 2002 nearly half of the 17-year-olds tapped to take the national NAEP exam didn't bother to show up. Students who did show up left more essay questions than multiple-choice questions blank, an indication that they weren't going to be bothered to venture an answer if it required effort.

The "who cares?" phenomenon probably plagues older students' performance on international exams, too. Granted, kids in Japan and the United Kingdom don't pay a personal price for how they do on global tests, either. But cultural pressures can be very different in other countries. Korean schools have staged rallies to rev their children up before they take international assessments. And Germany created a national "PISA Day" to mark the date when 15-year-olds take the exam that will rank them against students in other countries. The U.S. Department of Education, meanwhile, has a hard time convincing principals to administer voluntary international tests at all.

The dubiousness of these test results becomes clear when you compare them to the results of tests that actually do matter for teenagers: high-school exit exams and college boards. Nineteen states now require their students to pass assessments before they can don a cap and gown; seven others are testing students but not yet withholding diplomas. When states begin imposing penalties for failure, it makes a difference—sometimes a big one. Look at Texas: In 2004, results counted toward graduation for the first time, and pass rates on both the math and English portions of the test leapt almost 20 points. According to Julie Jary, who oversees student assessment for the state, no substantive alterations were made to the test. What changed was students' motivation: When their diplomas were hanging in the balance, they managed to give more correct answers.

More here



MORE EROSION ON STANDARDS IN NEW YORK

Obviously budget-driven rather than education-driven

Several foreign-born students at Brighton High are confident that they handily passed a state exam measuring their grasp of the English language. But instead of rejoicing, they've written letters to the state Education Department, demanding to know why the test wasn't more challenging. A couple of their comments:

"How can you give us this easy test? Do you think I'm stupid or something?"

"Please change this test. Make it fair and honest to help us."

State officials rolled out the New York state English as a Second Language Achievement Test in 2003 to assess reading, writing, speaking and listening skills for an increasing number of foreign students in prekindergarten through 12th grade. Once students reach proficiency on the test, they no longer are eligible for translation dictionaries and extra time on exams. Even more importantly, they are moved into mainstream classrooms and no longer work regularly with teachers trained to help them learn in an unfamiliar language. So, if the proficiency test is too easy, many students could lose their special instructional help too soon.

The concern is acute at the high school level, where students must pass the rigorous English Regents exam to graduate. Some argue that students who are relatively new to the United States are put at a disadvantage as they try to score as well on the Regents exam as their peers born and educated in this country. "There shouldn't be that much of a gap," said Annalisa Allegro, coordinator of the Bilingual/ESL Technical Assistance Center in Spencerport, which helps area districts educate students learning English. She has fielded concerns about the test from more than half of Monroe County's 18 districts. "The current test is very weak," Allegro said. "It's insulting, it's demeaning and it's not what we expect of our New York state students."

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



11 August, 2005

The irony of charter school innovation

Post lifted from Katie Newmark

Feeling pressure from charter schools, one Arizona school district is starting a new "traditional school"

The Cartwright Elementary School District was once considered one of the fastest-growing areas in west Phoenix.

But the district seems to have peaked at about 20,000. The challenge now, administrators say, is to retain that enrollment number despite competition from charter, parochial or other public schools outfitted with special magnet or traditional programs....

"Traditional-school models is part of our strategy of different ways to attract more families," Garcia [the president of the district's governing board] said. "We have over 1,200 students that are in the charter schools; many of those students are former Cartwright students. I believe that we are offering so much more now than before that we can attract some of those students we lost."

This example is good anecdotal evidence that charter schools are inspiring improvements in the regular public schools, as charter advocates promise, but it's sad and ironic that the great innovation sparked by the charter schools is a "traditional school [that] ... will focus on the basic instructions of reading, writing, and math". Ironic that traditionalism is now innovative; sad that regular public schools needed the pressure of school choice to realize that teaching the basics is a good approach to education.

Link via EducationNews.org



GENOCIDE TEACHING EXPANDED

At least it might give some relief from seeing America as the source of all evil

Illinois public schools are now required to teach about genocides around the world, under a bill signed Friday by Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The measure expands the previous requirement that elementary and high school students learn about the Holocaust to include lessons on genocides in Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan and Ukraine. School districts have the entire academic year to meet the requirement, State Board of Education spokeswoman Becky Watts said. "As we teach our kids the important lessons of history, we have to be sure that they understand that racial, national, ethnic and religious hatred can lead to horrible tragedies," Blagojevich said in a statement.

Glenn "Max" McGee, superintendent of schools in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette and a former state schools superintendent, said learning about genocide and other tragedies should be part of the curriculum. "I think it is important for boys and girls to learn about these tragic events so that maybe they can make contributions that will truly change the course of history in the future," he said. But McGee worried that the requirement could become an unfunded mandate from the state. "I hope and trust that the State Board of Education will provide resources and some training in teaching these and it won't fall in the district's lap to develop units," McGee said.

The law says the State Board of Education may give instructional materials to districts to help them develop classes. Local school districts will set specifics on the classes for each grade level. Richard Hirschhaut, project and executive director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, praised the law. "The new law affirms the continuing relevance of applying the universal lessons of the Holocaust to the tragedies of genocide in our world today," he said in a statement.

Source



One consequence of now meaningless High School diplomas: "These days, even perfect grades may not be good enough to get students into the best colleges and they certainly aren't enough to win scholarships. Ivy League schools reject hundreds of valedictorians every year in search of students who have not only good grades but packed resumes to boot. The eight-page application to the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University now asks as many questions about activities and community service as it does about grades and test scores. 'Everyone is a 4.0 (grade-point average) or above,' says Mark Jacobs, the college's dean. 'It stops being a meaningful way to judge.'"

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



10 August, 2005

NEA focuses too much on political activism unrelated to education

(To put it mildly)

When one considers the local teachers union, one should remember that in many cases it is part of a statewide organization which is, in turn, part of the national organization. One such organization that should be fairly well known to most readers is the National Education Association, better known as the NEA. The NEA's Web site (www.nea.org) tells us: "The National Education Association (NEA) is the nation's largest professional employee organization and is committed to advancing the cause of public education. NEA's 2.7 million members work at every level of education, from pre-school to university graduate programs. NEA has affiliate organizations in every state, as well as in more than 14,000 local communities across the United States."

In all likelihood, your child's teachers pay dues to belong to this particular union. These dues come out of the teachers' paychecks, which are comprised of moneys that come from the taxpayers' checkbooks (you and me). So, what are we getting for "our" money that finds its way into the NEA's coffers? Just how does the NEA plan to "advance the cause of public education"? A good place to look for the answers is at the aforementioned Web site. Having just wrapped up its annual meeting, the NEA adopted several rather eye-opening resolutions that might surprise the average citizen.

Did you know that the NEA has joined leftists, anti-capitalists and various union groups in designating Wal-Mart as the latest whipping-boy? That's right. Regardless of the fact that Wal-Mart is consistently involved with the local community through its fundraising programs and donations - many education related, such as their "Teacher of the Year" award - the NEA now has them locked in the crosshairs. In a press release titled, Wal-Mart: Always High Costs. Always, the NEA reports, "The NEA Executive Committee has endorsed a national effort called 'Wake-Up Wal-Mart' that educates the public about the impact of Wal-Mart on its employees, their communities and our schools. As back to school approaches, there's a campaign to encourage shoppers to buy school supplies from other stores in their communities."

Can you believe this? How will your child's education improve with the act of boycotting Wal-Mart? Says the NEA: "Think you just got a bargain on those rolled back prices? Think again. You may have just helped break unions and dismantle public schools."

Meanwhile, kids get promoted from one grade to the next unable to read! Who do you think is more responsible for the state of public education today - Wal-Mart or the teachers? I'll bet you are as surprised as I was to learn that by shopping at Wal-Mart you were "dismantling" the government schools. Shame on you!

Among the other measures passed at the annual meeting under "new business items" (NBI's) was a measure "Committing NEA to develop a strategy to counter new attacks on curricula and practices that support gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students and staff in public schools." If anybody knows how this "advances the cause of public education," please let me know.

What about NBI 61? This calls for President Bush and Congress to "support our troops by creating an exit strategy to end the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and bring our troops home." (Sounds to me like the same chanting one might hear at a local rally of balding/graying anti-war peaceniks.)

And finally, think how much smarter our children will be when the NEA is finished with NBI 32, calling for a study on "the feasibility of initiating a boycott of Gallo wine."

And you thought the government schools were failing simply because we weren't coughing up enough in higher taxes. Now you know that it's not as simple as that.

Source



AUSTRALIAN PARENTS REJECTING FEMINIZED SCHOOLS FOR THEIR SONS

More parents are moving their boys into private schools earlier, leaving boys heavily outnumbered by girls in public and parish primary school classrooms. The increase in boys being enrolled in private schools is happening in kindergarten and years 3 and 5. Non-government primary school enrolments have increased steadily in the past decade, with more boys than girls, Australian Bureau of Statistics data show. St Mary's Primary School in North Sydney loses large numbers of boys in year 3 and particularly year 5 to Catholic private schools St Ignatius College, Riverview and St Aloysius College, Milsons Point.

St Mary's year 5 class has 19 girls and nine boys while the year 6 class has six boys to 13 girls. Principal Rosemary De Bono said boys who leave their primary class early miss out on leadership opportunities, such as being a peer support leader or school captain. Those who remain can benefit from their small numbers. "The boys that stay have a greater opportunity to take up leadership roles than if they go to a new school with a large population," she said.

The pressure from relatives or a long-standing tradition for males in a family to attend a particular school can force parents to pull their boys out even though they are happy where they are. "A number of parents say they don't want their child to go but there is uncertainty if their boy will get a place in year 7," Ms De Bono said. She said the boys did not seem to feel marginalised. "Working with girls as well as boys builds their development of relationships."

Brother Kelvin Canavan, from the Sydney Catholic Education Office, said the issue typically affected schools in the lower North Shore and eastern suburbs. He said congregational schools in these areas had offered boys primary education for many years. "The downside for the parish schools is their year 5 and 6 classes are predominantly girls," he said.

NSW Primary Principals Association president Roger Pryor said teachers should be able to adjust their teaching styles to cater for an imbalance of sexes in their classrooms. He said boys were unlikely to miss out on traditionally male team sports such as soccer and cricket because the Primary Schools Sports Association had many mixed teams playing in state-wide competitions.

Trinity Grammar School, in Sydney's inner west, set up an additional junior school for years 3 to 6 five years ago to cater for the growing demand from parents of boys for independent education in primary years. The school's spokesman, John Edwards, said children had a far better chance of securing a place in year 7 if they began in year 3. Entering the school earlier gave boys more time to settle into the school's culture, he said.

In 2004, 9.7 per cent of kindergarten to year 6 students went to independent schools, up from 6.2 per cent in 1993. Catholic school enrolments remained stable and government school numbers dropped over the same period.

Bill Daniels, executive director of the Independent Schools Council of Australia, said parents whose children were on a long waiting list for a secondary place would opt to enrol them in a primary grade if this guaranteed entry. He said schools were responding to this demand by expanding their junior levels. "Some independent schools that previously offered only secondary level schooling have established classes down to year 5 in response to this trend," he said. "Schools are also growing outwards, offering additional classes at each year level." Mr Daniels said more than half of independent schools combined primary and secondary levels, and some were introducing early learning childhood centres. Parents used to paying for child care were comfortable spending large sums on primary schools.

St Ignatius has phased in middle schooling for students in years 5 to 8 over the past six years. Students are gradually introduced to the structures of high schools, such as multiple teachers for different subjects. Father Robert Davoren, St Ignatius's director of middle schooling, said schools such as his could better cater for the needs of 10- to 15-year-olds. "It relates to them growing up . . . becoming more mature earlier," he said.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



9 August, 2005

INDIANAPOLIS: NOT MANY KEEN TEACHERS THESE DAYS

With minimal discipline among the kids, it's hardly surprising

Rebecca Green spent much of seventh grade wondering "why they didn't get someone who was educated" to teach her classes. For two months, a substitute taught her English class. She says students were often told to sit down when they asked questions. In all, five substitutes rotated in and out of the class because the regular teacher was "out most of the time." Sometimes, she says, the "substitutes didn't even show up."

For students of Indianapolis Public Schools, Green's experience is all too common. The district's heavy reliance on substitutes means students often are taught by less-qualified, ill-prepared educators. Learning decreases. Discipline problems increase. And the risk rises that many of IPS' hardest-to-reach students will eventually drop out. On any given day last school year, at least 14 percent of IPS' 39,000 students attended classes without a regular teacher. Substitutes filled 275 classrooms on an average day. At least 5,500 students a day -- based on the lower end of IPS' student-to-teacher ratio -- were without regular teachers.

An average of 8.5 percent of IPS teachers were absent from class each day last school year, according to a Star Editorial Board analysis of school district data. That's higher than the average teacher absentee rates for school systems in Seattle, St. Paul, Omaha and Minneapolis -- all of which have slightly larger student populations. Private sector firms experience a 2.4 percent average absentee rate.

IPS' average of 11 days absent per teacher is higher than all the districts surveyed except for Minneapolis. The absenteeism is especially astounding considering the built-in time off that comes with teaching. IPS also relies heavily on substitutes to fill open positions. With the start of a new school year only 11 days away, IPS still has 29 teaching positions vacant, nearly all in hard-to-fill areas of math, science and special education, according to Jane Hart-Ajabu, the district's interim human resources chief. She thinks most of those spots will be filled. But a rash of abrupt departures often occurs in September. Sixty-six teachers resigned or retired in the opening weeks of last school year.

IPS' pool of substitute teachers has grown by a third, to 1,100, in the past five years. The job requirements are low -- just 60 college credits and the ability to pass a criminal background check. Few substitutes meet the standard of "highly qualified teachers" called for in the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Longtime IPS substitute Stephanie Patterson says subs often aren't told if they're simply filling in for a regular teacher or are joining a revolving door of replacements. If lesson plans haven't been laid out, Patterson says, "you go in and do the best you can."

For some students, having a substitute may be seen as a chance to relax and watch movies. But many understand they're missing out on the opportunity to learn. "They're quite concerned and rightly so," says Patterson, because "they like the accountability and the discipline."

As Education Trust Director of Policy Research Kevin Carey, a former adviser to the late Gov. Frank O'Bannon, points out, teachers have to know and understand their students to improve their academic performance. Absenteeism short-circuits academic success. A study by state education officials in Massachusetts showed a correlation between teacher absenteeism and low test scores. UCLA Professor James Bruno found the same thing three years ago. Two decades earlier, a team led by Cornell education researcher Ronald Ehrenberg linked high teacher absenteeism to high levels of skipping school by students -- a harbinger of a student becoming a dropout.

The consensus among education scholars and reformers is that for the poorest and lowest-performing students, a high-quality teacher can make the difference between graduating and dropping out.

Absenteeism and teacher shortages are by no means limited to IPS. Students in high-poverty urban districts, according to the Education Trust, are 77 percent more likely than those in more affluent school systems to end up with teachers leading courses in subjects for which they were neither trained nor certified.

Why are teachers absent so often? As with any employees, illness, jury duty and family leave account for some days. As does training, which in IPS often takes place during the school day. Generous leave policies also are a factor. IPS teachers receive between 11 and 13 sick and personal leave days each school year. Unlike in many private businesses, IPS teachers are allowed to accumulate unused sick days year after year. School principals also can grant teachers an unlimited number of days for personal development.

Poor working conditions in the district's antiquated buildings -- and the lack of air conditioning -- mean teachers are more apt to take sick days or quit altogether. Peggy Hattiex-Penn, president of the Indianapolis local of the Indiana State Teachers Association, complains that, "You're swatting flies. You're swatting bees. You know, these aren't the best conditions."

IPS and other urban districts also must battle a mind-set that they're merely gateways into teaching. A rookie, according to the Education Trust's Carey, can "make their mistakes on IPS students, they learn from their mistakes and take those lessons" to suburban schools.

What can be done to keep teachers in class? Offering higher salaries for hard-to-find math and science teachers could help alleviate shortages. But it's a move teachers unions have fought vigorously. New IPS Superintendent Eugene White has committed to move training sessions from school days to keep more full-time teachers in class. Capital improvements, paid for with last year's $200 million bond issue, should help IPS improve teacher morale.

Yet, more must be done, including better tracking of how much time is spent on professional development and ending the ability to roll over sick days. Incentive pay for teachers willing to accept the challenge of instructing at-risk students also is critical.

Most IPS students have the ability to learn. But they won't if full-time teachers aren't in classrooms more often. Reducing the high teacher absentee rate is one more essential step in closing the wide achievement gap and lowering the dropout rate.

More here



HAWAIIANS WANT RACIAL SEGREGATION

But they have not got a hope. If they were to win, it would provide a legal basis for re-segregating Southern schools

Blowing conch shells and chanting Hawaiian prayers, some 15,000 people marched through downtown Honolulu Saturday to protest a federal court ruling striking down Kamehameha Schools' Hawaiians-only admissions policy as unlawful. "We are outraged," said Lilikala Kameeleihiwa, a professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii. "This is a great setback for our people. Here we are on our own homeland and we can't educate our children." The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the private school's policy of admitting only native Hawaiians amounted to "unlawful race discrimination" even though the school receives no federal funding.

The decision shocked school officials and devastated the Native Hawaiian community. The school has defended the exclusive policy as a remedy to socio-economic and educational disadvantages Hawaiians' have suffered since the 1893 U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Protests against the ruling were planned throughout the islands Saturday. "Our hearts have bled in these past four days," Michael Chun, headmaster at the school's main Kapalama campus on Oahu, told the massive crowd blanketing the courtyard surrounding Iolani Palace - the former residence of the Hawaiian Kingdom's last two monarchs. "We must stand together to focus and right this wrong," Chun said. "March tall, march proud, march strong."

The Kamehameha Schools were established under the 1883 will of a Hawaiian princess. About 5,100 Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian students from kindergarten through 12th grade attend the three campuses, which are partly funded by a trust now worth $6.2 billion. Admission is highly prized in Hawaii because of the quality of education and the relatively low cost. Non-Hawaiians may be admitted if there are openings after Hawaiians who meet the criteria have been offered admission.

The lawsuit was brought by an unidentified non-Hawaiian student who was turned down in 2003. The appeals court wrote that the school's admission policies are illegal because they operate "as an absolute bar to admission of those of the non-preferred race." Kamehameha Schools has said it will appeal. An injunction asking the court to order the school to accept the teenager for the fall term is pending.

At the Honololu rally, Gov. Linda Lingle, introducing herself as a "haole" and "a non-Hawaiian," said the court's decision was "not just." "The Hawaiian people have been tested many, many times," Lingle said. "This is just one more test that you will show you will overcome." Amber Marquez, 17, a senior at the school's Kapalama campus, said Kamehameha has given her a future. "We are just trying to preserve what little we have left because everything is being taken away," she said. "We just deserve this; we feel blessed."

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



8 August, 2005

CRACKDOWN ON AUSTRALIAN ISLAMIC SCHOOLS

Independent schools - including Victoria's seven Islamic colleges - will be required to teach a curriculum consistent with Australian democratic values under State Government reforms. The Government, which is to establish a new regulatory authority, has warned it will crack down on non-government schools where there is inappropriate teaching or antisocial behaviour. Acting Education Minister Jacinta Allan told The Sunday Age: "All schools in Victoria must conform with all Victorian and Australian laws relating to equal opportunity and racial vilification. "Any school breaking the law will be prosecuted in the same way as any other institution or individual," she said. Ms Allan said it was a fundamental tenet of society that there be equality between the sexes in schools at all levels and equal access to facilities and opportunities. Supervising standards in non-government schools would be handed over to a new regulatory body called the Victorian Qualifications Authority with improved powers to investigate breaches and monitor standards. It will replace the Registered Schools Board.

Ms Allan, who is Minister for Education Services, also warned that the Government funded only non-profit schools and that all public funding must be used to support operational costs for delivering education to students. Any attempt to divert the money into other ventures would invoke legal penalties. The Sunday Age revealed last week that Werribee Islamic College was using funds to build a college in Jakarta and an orphanage school in Banda Aceh as part of an international expansion program. The report also contained claims by former staff that a visiting imam to the college had vilified Jews and that management had discriminated against female teachers and female students.

Omar Hallak, a Palestinian-born principal who along with other relatives is believed to control the college through a community trust, accused The Sunday Age of mounting a "demonising" attack on Muslims and rejected claims by former staff that a visiting imam had vilified Jews as "horribly incorrect". The statement confirmed that the college, which has more than 600 students, was establishing a college in Jakarta, but claimed money for the school and orphanage in Aceh had come from donations.

In a statement, the college said it practised equal opportunity between male and female teachers but confirmed that male and female staff were separated to "prevent sexual harassment" and for religious reasons. Non-Muslim women teachers were also required to wear Islamic clothing. "Like any other schools in Victoria we do have our own dress code. In our case, this involves that female staff must wear a hijab (headscarf) and abaya (long dress jacket) once they enter the premises."

Ms Allan said it was the state's responsibility to monitor activities and standards in non-government schools, but said there was need for information to be better shared between the Federal Government and the states and between the relevant "monitoring bodies". She said the State Government was reviewing the whole issue of standards as part of reforms to the Education Act with a view to tightening them. "In the meantime, the current regulatory requirements for non-government schools make it clear that schools are to demonstrate that they are teaching a curriculum which reflects the approved Victorian curriculum and to prepare students for contemporary society," Ms Allan said.

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils has warned that young Muslims were prey to visiting imams and religious scholars. Council president Ameer Ali said extremists posed a problem for vulnerable and impressionable youth.

Source



AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF HARVARD REDUCING ITSELF TO ABSURDITY

1989 is rightly regarded as the year of death for the Left, but the cause of death was neither the fall of the Berlin Wall nor the decline of the Soviet Empire that that symbolized. The fatal last straw was a little-publicized event halfway across the globe.

A clique of Critical Legal Studies professors at Harvard Law proposed that the professoriate and the custodial staff switch positions every six months. And? Well, nothing -- the proposal went nowhere. Absent its own Berlin Wall, Harvard could not stop the flight of professors to other schools; absent control of all media, it could not prevent the news from getting out and its reputation from suffering. The "scholarly eminence per person at Harvard," observed Dean Robert Clark, "is seriously below that at several competing law schools."

Credit where it's due: Here were Marxists who understood the implications of ideology as it related, not to the masses of the Third World, but to their own lives. The division of labor had always been assailed by Leftists as the very root of "class" and all inequality. Why, then, not abolish it within their own domain?

And yet, they would not translate this egalitarian theory into practice. What colorless "radical feminist" was really going to leave her lectern for a cart and allow the black cleaning woman to decide what should constitute "Women and the Law 101"? Would not and could not: What elderly Old Leftist was actually going to do heavy lifting? And exactly how is a Spanish-speaking nineteen-year-old janitor going to teach "The History of the Common Law"? Here, as everywhere else, the beloruchki did not leave the ranks of the ruling class for those of the working class -- even temporarily.

The Left's only alternative to absurdity was hypocrisy -- about as damning a circumstance as reality could impose. But this one struck at its heart in a way even the atrocity of Communist practice or the obscenity of Western apologetics couldn't. Now the question was raised: If the theorists of absolute equality could not practice what they preach even within their own world of theory, who would ever practice it anywhere?

More Here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



7 August, 2005

WARNING: DUMMIES AT WORK

Read the following advertisement and feel sorry for the kids of the parents concerned. They think that all Texas public schools need is more money. Surely somebody has told them that the school districts where the biggest money is spent (like Washington D.C.) are the ones with the WORST results?

Texas Parent PAC is a newly formed political action committee for parents, grandparents, parents-to-be, and anyone who loves children and supports high-quality public education. The future of Texas rests in the children of today, and our public schools are the best opportunity we have to ensure the state’s future is bright and prosperous. Unfortunately, state legislators continue to shortchange students by refusing to adequately fund neighborhood public schools. There are no good excuses for failure by the Legislature to meet the needs of 4.4 million students enrolled in Texas public schools!

Parents are fed up with the inability of state lawmakers to support Texas children in the manner they deserve and our constitution requires. That’s why Texas Parent PAC is bringing together parents from all over the state to take action.

Our PAC-with-heart will stand up for children by making contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates who are committed to strengthening Texas public schools. Endorsements will be based on key record votes and positions on issues such as the school start date, public school finance, opposition to private school vouchers and excessive testing, local control, and government mandates.

Source



Truth Has Nothing to Do With It

Is Theory going out of fashion in American universities?

A half-century ago theorists in departments of literature debated such topics as the relation of scientific truth to the sort of truth made available by great literature. Now that topic is no longer raised, not because answers have been found but because the reigning consensus holds that "truth" is an empty concept, that there is no such thing as "literature," let alone "great literature," and that the meaning of any piece of writing--or "text"--is unstable at best.

Of course today's academic theorists do not limit themselves to deconstructing, say, Jane Austen. They practice a broader sort of "theory" or, better, Theory. (One needs a capital letter to do justice to the ambition of the project.) Under the rubric of "cultural studies," theorists claim to possess the key to understanding all sorts of human activity, from crime to colonialism. The Frenchmen who started it all, figures like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, are now in disfavor in their native country and, worse, out of fashion. But they still have a grip on American humanistic scholarship.

But for how much longer? A sign that things may be changing is "Theory's Empire," edited by Daphne Patai and Will Corral. Its 47 contributors patiently dissect all aspects of Theory, from its putative grounding in the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) to the practical effects--say, in India--of the postcolonial ("poco") branch of Theory, which does so much to denigrate logic and reason.

Valentine Cunningham, Raymond Tallis and other contributors show how much theorists distort Saussure's insights. Contrary to what the theorists claim, the arbitrary aspects of language as a system (langue) in no way imply that individual speech acts (parole) must be likewise arbitrary and thus incapable of communicating truths. "The confusion between the system and its use," notes Mr. Tallis--e.g., between the arbitrary rules of syntax and the particular meaning of a sentence--is "especially unforgivable in writers who claim to be familiar with Saussure, as it was one of the latter's great achievements to distinguish these things."

Theory has tried to deconstruct science in a similarly misleading way. The philosopher Thomas Nagel observes that theorists invoke quantum theory and relativity "to show that today even science has had to abandon the idea of an objective, mind-independent reality." But, he curtly remarks, "neither theory has this significance." Another philosopher, Susan Haack, draws attention to Theory's use of what she calls "the Passes-for Fallacy": What "passes for truth" is equated with "what is truth." Such an elision, she notes, allows theorists to make a bogus claim: They observe (rightly) that some things once thought to be true are now considered false; then they discard (wrongly) the very concept of truth.

If challenged, theorists often vilify their opponents as right-wingers or worse. Kwame Anthony Appiah observes that when Susan Gubar, a leading academic feminist, raised questions about the state of feminist theory she "found herself condemned, astonishingly, as a troglodyte, perhaps even a racist." Ironically, Theory may harm the very politics it purports to defend. Noam Chomsky finds it "remarkable" that leftist intellectuals, with their attacks on rationality, "should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of Enlightenment." Meera Nanda laments that when postcolonialists repudiate the "objectivity" and "universalism" of science, they give "aid and comfort to Hindu chauvinists who display many symptoms of fascism."

For most people outside the academy what is most striking--and most puzzling--about Theory is the prose in which it is couched. To take an example offered by contributor D.G. Myers: Homi Bhaba, a major theorist, refers to "the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality." (Whatever that may mean.) The theorist Luce Irigaray asks more clearly, though not more cogently: "Is E=MCý a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its use by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest."

It all makes one wonder how anyone could ever have taken such pronouncements seriously. "Theory's Empire," by its very existence, suggests that even professors need not feel obliged to do so any longer. And where will their newfound wisdom end? Mr. Appiah reports that "more and more literary critics" have actually decided to "devote themselves to . . . literature."

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



6 August, 2005

READING SKILLS NOT IMPROVING -- AND NO WONDER

Kids get textbooks designed to bore rather than real literature that can excite

In July, the results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated standardized test, showed the reading skills of high school students haven't improved since 1999. And last week, the Pew Research Center's Internet Project reported that for today's teenagers, "the Internet and cell phones have become a central force that fuels the rhythm of daily life." Eighty-seven percent of America's kids ages 12 to 17 spend time online. E-mail is no longer fast enough for most teens who are using instant messenger and text messaging to keep up with their friends.

Faced with declining literacy and the ever-growing distractions of the electronic media, faced with the fact that - Harry Potter fans aside - so few kids curl up with a book and read for pleasure anymore, what do we teachers do? We saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader.

Just before the school year ended in June, my colleagues in the English department at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and central office administrators discussed which textbook to adopt for the 9th- and 10th-grade World Literature course for next year. Of the four texts that the state approved, the choices came down to two: the Elements of Literature: World Literature from Holt, Rinehart and Winston and The Language of Literature: World Literature from McDougal Littell. The problems with these two tomes are similar to the problems with high school textbooks in most subjects.

First, there's the well-documented weight problem. The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons has said that an increase in back injuries among children might be attributed to the enormous textbooks they lug around in their backpacks. Injuries aside, what kid is going to sit in a chair and relax with a heavy hardcover, 9-inch-by-11-inch compendium? Worse is the fact that for all their bulk, the textbooks are feather-weight intellectually......

Take the McDougal Littell text that we finally adopted for 9th- and 10th-graders. It starts off with a unit titled "Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature," followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes "Persian and Arabic Literature" and "West African Oral Literature" - and that's only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it's the same drill - short excerpts from long works - a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare's plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. The other includes the following (which is sure to turn teens on to the Bard):

"Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare's plays are treasures of the English language."

Both books are full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the readings. Both also "are not reader-friendly. There is no narrative coherence that a student can follow and get excited about. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that," says T.C. Williams reading specialist Chris Gutierrez, who teaches a course in reading strategies at Shenandoah University in Virginia. For kids who get books and reading opportunities only at school, these types of textbooks will drive them away from reading - perhaps for life.

Such texts bastardize literature and history, reducing authors and their works to historical facts to be memorized - what Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve, calls "the bunch o' facts" theory of learning. Students are jerked from one excerpt of literature to another, given no chance for the kind of sustained reading that stimulates the imagination.

One of the most popular books I teach is Night, Elie Wiesel's powerful remembrance about Nazi concentration camps. Even the most reluctant readers are enthralled by the 109-page narrative. The Holt, Rinehart and Winston World Literature text throws in seven pages of Night, cheating students out of the experience of reading the whole work and giving them the illusion that they know the book.

With my subject, English, special problems exist - any literature that has a whiff of controversy is kept out of texts to appease the moralists on the right, while second-rate "multicultural" literature is put in to appease the politically correct on the left. Quality is 'secondary'

As researcher Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police, wrote in the summer 2003 issue of American Educator, "Literary quality became secondary to representational issues." You will never see John Updike's A&P or Toni Cade Bambara's The Lesson - great short stories that kids can easily relate to - in these tomes because they might offend groups on either side of the political spectrum.

No matter how highly esteemed poet Denise Levertov is in academia, The Mutes- her poem that evokes intense discussion about sexual harassment - will never make its way into the bland 1,000-plus pages of a high school textbook. The McDougal Littell text proudly lists its 10-member "Multicultural Advisory Board" in its introduction.

A similar problem exists with math and science books. A study of textbooks by the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded: "Today's textbooks cover too many topics without developing any of them well. Central concepts are not covered in enough depth to give students a chance to truly understand them."

'Teacher-proofing': Teachers who didn't major in science tend to "use textbooks - lean on them - more than better-qualified teachers do," Arthur Eisenkraft, former president of the National Science Teachers Association, told Science News in 2001. The desire of school officials to make courses teacher-proof - to put more faith in bland compendiums than in the skill of teachers - is only getting stronger with the spread of high-stakes state exams. Textbook companies now get state approval by boasting that their wares cover every possible skill demanded on state tests. The safe thing for school systems to do is to limit themselves to the state-approved books; if a school district adopts its own materials and its test scores go down, administrators could take the fall.

The fact is that for all the anxiety schools have about state exams, with the exception of science and math, those exams have turned into nothing more than minimum competency tests that any average student can pass with little preparation. And no decent teacher needs a 1,500-page text to prepare below-average students for these dumbed-down tests. It's time for states and school districts to kick the mega-textbook habit that four or five big corporations control and start spending money on the kind of books that will make kids want to do sustained reading, to get lost in the written word. For English classes, that's paperback novels (whole novels) and collections of short stories (complete short stories) and poetry.

More here



Censoring A Conservative School Paper

No Conservatives Allowed by the champions of "diversity"

By Tyler Whitney

America's culture war is fought everyday with the country's most vulnerable soldiers -- conservative high school students. Conservative students such as me are ridiculed everyday as we fight to save America from the ongoing leftist assault. Unfortunately, spreading right-wing ideas is difficult when administrators muzzle conservative speech and indoctrinate students with liberal propaganda. Stalinism is alive and well at East Lansing High School.

On Tuesday March 19th, several conservative students distributed "The Right Way" -- a conservative paper independently organized and published. Instead of receiving accolades for extracurricular involvement, we were reprimanded for distributing our publication before the school approved it.

Frustrated yet cooperative, I visited the board office where Superintendent Dave Chapin banned our paper. Although his reasoning is unclear, he did mention that the John Birch Society is too extreme for East Lansing High School. Apparently, Dr. Chapin felt his superintendent status granted him authority to rate the extremity of content.

That night I immediately fired off press releases to every major media outlet. I wanted to make East Lansing High School regret their unconstitutional actions. Thankfully, I wasn't the only person who believed that ELHS was in the wrong. East Lansing High School received numerous phone calls from angry conservatives nationwide about the censorship of our paper.

Due to the awkward nature of the situation, I managed to completely avoid speaking to administrators while media coverage continued to pile up. Eventually, Principal Paula Steele granted our paper the status of a Non School Organization, meaning we had the same rights as groups that meet in the building after school.

Despite previous gratification, I was later informed that any content that can be traced to East Lansing High School must be removed. Principal Steele wanted me to remove an ad for my Teenage Republicans club as well as several other insignificant things.

Feeling rebellious, I distributed my paper with the banned content. As expected, I was caught and reprimanded. Unfortunately, my punishment was quite severe. Not only was I suspended, over 200 copies of "The Right Way" were trashed by school authorities.

After weeks of fighting, I have decided to give in to East Lansing High School's Stalinist policies. I can't call my battle completely pointless because I've created awareness about the cultural bolshevism prevalent in America's high schools.

As a dedicated conservative activist, I will continue to publish more issues and inform our nation about America's biggest threat: Liberal indoctrinators that create minions with their biased multicultural education and anti-male curriculum. If conservatives rise up, we can create a cultural backlash against the tide of liberalism corrupting America's youth.

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



5 August, 2005

HOMESCHOOLING: Hitler's Ghost Haunts German Parents

In Germany, the State owns the children, not the parents. Sound familiar?

Of all religious groups Baptists were among the most fiercely persecuted in the Soviet Union. They were not just Christians but they also distrusted the state, preaching an institutional secession from state-run institutions. Many Baptists belonged to the German-speaking minority in Southern Russia and Kazakhstan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they emigrated to Germany, the land where their forefathers had originally come from. Today, these Baptist immigrants from Russia, as well as the Low-German Mennonites, are being prosecuted in Germany because they are unhappy with what their children are learning in the German public schools, which they consider too secular. Children are not allowed to opt out of classes or school activities and homeschooling is illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938.

Last week, a court in Paderborn in the German state of Westphalia ruled that two Baptist couples lose their parental authority over their own children in educational matters. The court said it was interfering "in order to protect the children from further harm." It stated that the parents had shown "a stubborn contempt both for the state's educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school." The court appointed the local Paderborn social service as guardian over the children to ensure that they attend public school.

The two couples belong to a group of seven families with a total of fifteen children of elementary school age who do not attend school. The parents were brought to court by the local education board of the county whose director, Heinz Kohler, argued that homeschooling cannot be allowed because it is "a right of the child not to be kept away from the outside world. The parents' right to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society." Kohler was backed by the Westphalian minister of Education, the Socialist politician Ute Sch„fer, who stated that the obligation to attend a government approved school follows from the "right of a child to free education and maturation."

Last January, a court in the Westphalian county of Guetersloh sentenced a couple to imprisonent, six days for the mother followed by six days for the father, because the parents had refused to let their children attend a Christmas school play after Grimm's fairytale "K”nig Drosselbart" (King Thrushbeard), which they considered blasphemous. The prison sentences were demanded by Sven-Georg Adenauer, the Christian-Democrat Landrat (governor) of Guetersloh county, because the parents refused to pay the fine of 150 euros which they had received for not sending their children to the school play.

Upon the conviction Hermann Hartfeld, a Baptist preacher from Cologne who is also an immigrant from Russia, wrote to Adenauer: "These parents did not give in to the intimidations of the Communists. Do you really believe that they will give in to you?" However, Germany's Christian-Democrats, who are likely to win the coming general elections in September, are as opposed to homeschooling as are the ruling Socialists. The German mentality, even among its so-called conservatives, is very statist. Parents are considered to be incapable of schooling their own children. In this respect the German mentality does not seem to have changed much since the days of Adolf Hitler, when the Germans were expected to look upon the state as a caring parent. Ironically, Sven-Georg Adenauer is the grandson of Konrad Adenauer, the first post-Nazi Chancellor of Germany.

The initiative of the Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the authorities, who argued that such a school is but a cover for homeschooling and that "the living room is not a class room." The Baptist families received the support of Hermann Stuecher, a 68-year old Christian pedagogue who from 1980 to 1997 homeschooled all his seven children, despite a government prohibition. Stuecher runs the Philadelphia School in Siegen, another Westphalian town. The Philadelphia School, which is not recognised by the German authorities, was established to assist homeschooling families. Stuecher called upon all Christian parents in Germany to withdraw their children from the public schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of "neomarxist activists propagating atheist humanism, hedonism, pluralism and materialism." Manfred Mueller, the Christian-Democrat Landrat of Paderborn county, has threatened to take Stuecher to court on charges of "Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities) - a charge which the Nazis also used against their opponents. Mueller considers homeschooling to be high treason because "die Schulpflicht sei eine staatsbuergerliche Pflicht, ueber die nicht verhandelt werden k”nne" (the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with).....

What is one to make of modern-day Germany, a country which happily appoints a former marxist fanatic and condoner of terrorism to the post of minister of foreign affairs but accuses ordinary citizens of treason when they voice concern about what the schools are teaching their children? Clearly they have learned nothing from their experiences with state totalitarianism in the last century.

Source



AMAZING: A TEACHERS' UNION THAT TALKS SENSE

Merit-based schooling advocated

The comprehensive school system should be scrapped and replaced with academic selection for all pupils from the age of 11, a teachers' union said yesterday. Delegates at the annual conference of the Professional Association of Teachers said generations of pupils had been failed by the "one-size-fits-all" approach, and called for grammar schools to be reintroduced across England and Wales. Peter Morris, from Bishop Gore comprehensive school in Swansea, told the conference that grammar schools had been "the most successful type of school Britain has ever seen".

Following the 1964 general election, the Labour government instructed all local authorities to draw up plans to introduce a comprehensive school system. However, there are still 164 grammar schools spread over 36 local authorities. They only represent 5% of secondary school education, but they account for more than 40% of the best 100 schools in terms of progress made by pupils between the ages of 11 and 16.

But last night, Judie Harrington from the Campaign for State Education, said that reintroducing selection at 11 would be bad news for pupils. She said that although grammar schools' results were higher than the national average, the majority of children in those areas went to other schools, where they were "failed" by the system. Ms Harrington said international research had shown that a comprehensive education system that included children of all abilities and backgrounds offered the best results, and she called on the government to limit the opportunities for pupils to "opt out" into private, church or grammar schools.

But Mr Morris said the government should reintroduce grammar schools as soon as possible. "Social inclusion is wonderful in theory, but does not produce the results anticipated prior to its introduction." He said most 16-year-olds today would not be able to get good grades in the old O-levels, which were replaced 20 years ago with GCSEs.

Tony Reynolds, a primary school teacher from Cambridge, said that the comprehensive system had let down the brightest pupils. "I have taught many pupils who have had to hide their academic brilliance to survive in comprehensive schools," he said. "If grammar schools allow them to show their true worth, I am all in favour of their reintroduction."

Yesterday the government reiterated its opposition to grammar schools. "The government does not support academic selection at 11 and does not wish to see it extended," said a spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills. "Where selection exists, the government believes in local decision making as to whether it should continue, and has put in place mechanisms to allow this to happen."

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



4 August, 2005

PARENTS BEING PUSHED OUT OF EDUCATION

The usual Leftist "all men are equal" religion taking over

This fall in Palm Beach County, letter grades will no longer be included on report cards for kindergarten through fifth grade. The report cards will read as follows for various subjects: Child is performing on or above grade level; child is less than one year below grade level; or child is struggling.

In essence, information is being withheld from parents and students that indicates a child is doing well. "On or above grade level" tells parents nothing. There is no distinction between average work and work that is better than average. What message are we sending our children when the best they can be is "on or above grade level"? This change cuts to the root of our value system in America.

Art Johnson, the Palm Beach County school superintendent, was quoted as saying that "our challenge has been, and is, the education of the masses." It is offensive that Mr. Johnson views our children as the "masses" and not the beautiful individuals that they are. This change is being forced on the parents and students of Palm Beach County without us having much say in the matter. Most parents were not informed by our principals, but read about it in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in March. It is interesting, however, that although we were not notified, the School Board provided principals with an information sheet to "provide assistance when dealing with questions." As if they wanted to control the principals' responses, or didn't trust they would answer the questions appropriately. They anticipated parents having questions about incentives or awards the children could receive without letter grades.

The School Board's canned response was that the new report cards could provide awards for attendance and conduct. Are you kidding? Forget about the honor roll. Let's replace our bumper stickers "Proud Parent of an Honor Student" to "Proud Parent of a Student Who Showed Up." A group of parents attended the School Board meeting in May and the issue of report cards was raised. There were board members who were opposed to, and surprised by, the change being made and stated that grades would be reviewed at their next retreat and revisited. On June 29 we attended the meeting; three board members vocally opposed the change. It finally was discussed at the July 21 meeting and scheduled for a workshop meeting this Wednesday. The public can attend, but not speak.

Source



Why does Washington State University pay campus hecklers?

(Because it's just another form of censorhip)

Washington State University's web site calls the school "an ideal place to live and learn" and promises prospective students that instead of "smog or traffic jams," they will find "an easy-going pace and eclectic college-town atmosphere." Here's something else WSU students don't find much of on the Pullman campus - freedom of speech. Hecklers who shout down speakers at WSU sometimes do so on tax dollars. Hitler used Nazi thugs called "Brown Shirts" to silence opponents as he sought power in pre-war Germany. Today at WSU, the people paying the hecklers are called "administrators."

Here are the basic facts of this incredible event: Black student playwright Chris Lee staged his intentionally provocative production of "Passion of the Musical" at WSU April 21. He warned potential ticket buyers beforehand the play was likely to offend everybody because, as he later said, "the whole point of the play was to show people that we're not that different, that we all have issues that can be made fun of."

Sure enough, a group of Mormon students peacefully protested the production outside the theatre, but inside the First Amendment took a beating as 40 mostly Black protestors repeatedly shouted "I am offended" and threatened audience members and the cast. Guess who paid for the protestors' tickets? WSU's Office of Campus Involvement (OCI).

At one point, Lee took a microphone and asked campus security to remove the protestors. The officials declined to do so and suggested instead that Lee change the lyrics to one of the play's songs that especially drew the ire of the hecklers.

WSU President V. Lane Rollins later defended the hecklers, telling the campus student newspaper they "exercised their right of free speech in a very responsible manner by letting the writer and players know exactly how they felt." Then Raul Sanchez, OCI's Director, investigated the incident but concluded no action was needed to discipline the hecklers because "the mere fact that such an outrageous play was produced, though lawful, was a provocation." Sanchez also suggested Lee was himself responsible for the hecklers' conduct because he "spared few social groups from the play's abundance of slurs, swear words, epithets and derogatory language," then tried to evade "all responsibility for intended and unintended impacts on the audience and the WSU community."

As a result, not only do WSU students now know campus administrators will not protect their freedom of speech, those same officials are encouraging more such violations. As David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is aiding Lee, observed: "Washington State's defense of this vigilante censorship will encourage students to unlawfully silence others whenever they feel offended."

As disturbing as is the fact WSU bought tickets for the hecklers knowing in advance that they were likely to disrupt the controversial play, and as difficult to believe as it is that WSU's president and another high-profile administrator absolved the hecklers of blame, what is truly dangerous about this incident is the role of campus security and WSU's favored method of avoiding future such controversies. It's bad enough campus security refused to enforce the First Amendment. They also took the next very large step of invoking police power in an attempt to censor the play, even as it was being presented! The next even larger step after that, of course, is using the police power to enforce pre-production censorship, AKA "prior restraint." Oh, but that could never happen here in America, you say?

Tell Sanchez, who has already put the student playwright on notice. Sanchez doesn't dare call it censorship. In fact, he almost appeared obsequious about it, telling Lee three months ago: "If you decide to stage a similar performance in the future, this office strongly encourages you to think long and hard about the possible reactions of your audience and the entire community .No one should seek to censor you but it is not unreasonable to expect you to act more responsibly in anticipating public reactions to your theatrical productions. This office stands ready to help you do that."

And just to make sure there was no doubt in Lee's mind about his orders, Sanchez added this instructive suggestion: "If you put on any more plays, please seek us out well ahead of time, so we may help you develop a constructive framework for anticipating and responding to public reactions to your work."

Those, my friends, are the words of a nascent American Stalinism.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



3 August, 2005

At Law School, Unstrict Scrutiny

An inside look at identity politics in law schools

Dan Subotnik once went to his dean and asked to teach a course on race and the law, a subject to which he had devoted a great deal of his own scholarly effort. Teaching a course about something you know is a time-honored method of refining your ideas and, not least, of educating the young. But the dean turned him down. Why? He claimed that Mr. Subotnik's message would be unduly dismissive of racism, amounting to, as the dean put it, "get over it."

While the dean's decision may have been unfortunate for Touro Law School, where Mr. Subotnik is a professor, it was an excellent one for the rest of us because it prompted "Toxic Diversity" (New York University Press, 335 pages, $45), a thoughtful critique of identity politics in the nation's law schools. These days "critical race studies" and feminist jurisprudence are a routine part of law-school scholarship, and much of it is devoted to discovering in the law those white, male power structures that have become an obsession throughout our universities.

Mr. Subotnik argues that critical race theorists and feminists often publish dubious articles and books that ignore the relevant facts in an effort to deliver an unrelenting message of victimization. He wants to hold these scholars to the same standards by which other legal scholars are judged. That they are sometimes not speaks volumes about the double standards that plague all institutions--not only universities--when ethnic identity and gender become in themselves a criterion of judgment, even an axis upon which the institution turns.

Double standards are deeply embedded in the scholarship, too, according to Mr. Subotnik. Racist speech by whites, for instance, is treated as evidence of racism in whites, while racist speech by minorities is evidence of racism . . . in whites: It is either "justified" or part of the warped sensibility that the governing power structures have imposed on persons of color. Meanwhile, the facts that normally support arguments are treated loosely. One of the first African-American law professors recently lamented that his "colony" was at "risk" because law schools showed "little interest" in replacing black professors when they retired. But in the decade before he wrote those words African-Americans had risen to 7.8% of the legal professoriate, up from 4.8%, casting doubt on his central claim.

And then there is the neglect of social statistics. Many critical race theorists, for example, view efforts to discourage illegitimate children as an assault on the African-American community, where illegitimacy has recently run to more than 60% of newborns. But the theorists refuse even to acknowledge the data showing illegitimacy to be a major cause of crime, poverty and disorder there. By contrast, distinguished scholars outside the legal academy, like Harvard's Orlando Patterson, have written eloquently about the blighted lives that result from families without fathers. Mr. Subotnik sees such law-school myopia as typical of the way that critical race scholarship tends to celebrate any conduct that violates middle-class values, never mind the costs.

Mr. Subotnik's critique of feminist scholarship is less sweeping but no less shrewd. He focuses on claims that paradoxically impugn the fortitude and resilience of women. There are more than a few feminists who argue, for instance, that law schools need to change their ways because certain practices, such as the Socratic method of aggressive classroom interrogation, make female law students uncomfortable and cause them to lose their identity. Mr. Subotnik believes that feminists who make such arguments are reviving the stereotype by which the 19th-century Illinois Supreme Court dismissed women as unfit to engage in the "hot strifes of the bar."

Some of the same feminist scholars also call for the elimination of testing for admissions and hiring because tests do not take into account, among other things, "emotional intelligence." As Mr. Subotnik wryly wonders: Why should we pay attention to such soft academic speculations and not take seriously the comments of Bill Gates, who says that winning in business is all about I.Q.?

Mr. Subotnik's book is not without its debatable aspects. He believes that the Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold affirmative action may lead to less use of standardized tests in admissions. But actually the decision allows universities to keep using such tests--as a device to help pick the best students within each ethnic group while often ignoring the differences between students of different ethnic groups.

More generally, Mr. Subotnik's writing style is somewhat diffuse, full of jokes and asides, with the result that his line of analysis is sometimes opaque. And he would make his case more compelling were he to contrast the scholarship that he criticizes with the fine new empirical writing on race and sex, such as that of Rick Brooks of Yale about minority perceptions of the judicial system.

Most disappointing is Mr. Subotnik's decision to approve of the narrative as a sound form of scholarship and, in fact, to indulge in a few personal stories of his own--e.g., his bitter reaction to being mugged. The problem with narratives in scholarly writing--whatever their virtues elsewhere--is that they are difficult to verify, hard to place in context and generally impossible to evaluate. The big question always is: How representative are they?

It is a strength of the academy--in law and many other disciplines--that professors have diverse, sometimes even radical, views. But to advance our knowledge such views need to be supported by rigorous analytical reasoning and the dispassionate gathering of cases and data. It is the great merit of Mr. Subotnik's work that he moves us toward a single standard for judging scholarship and thus helps create the conditions for the common enterprise of explaining our social world--and even, if we are lucky, improving it.

Source



L.A. STUCK WITH DUMB TEACHERS

Too bad about the students

Principal Faye Banton can walk through the classrooms of Edison Middle School in South Los Angeles and quickly identify her weakest teachers. But Banton knows she can't dismiss them without a drawn-out fight. "It takes much too long to get rid of them," she said. "There is a real need for change." Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger believes he has the solution: a voter initiative that would extend the probationary period for new teachers and change the rules for firing veterans who perform poorly.

But critics, including the state's association of school boards, say the governor has missed the mark. The initiative would not achieve his popular goal and might, in fact, make removing problem teachers harder, they say. Schwarzenegger, whose initiative will appear on the state ballot in a Nov. 8 special election, says the issue is simple. "If you have someone who does not perform well in any job . you are able to get rid of that person. And we cannot do that" with teachers, he said.

Large numbers of government employees and workers in many unionized businesses share job protections similar to those of teachers. Unlike college and university professors, public school teachers do not receive lifetime tenure. But the idea of reducing teachers' job protections is popular with many principals and parents concerned about the difficulty of removing poor-performing instructors. A Field Poll last month found broad support for the teacher measure among registered voters, with 59% supporting it and 35% opposed.

Under state law, school districts can dismiss teachers during their first two years on the job without providing any reason. After two years in the classroom, teachers earn the more protective "permanent status." Before dismissing a permanent-status teacher, district officials must meticulously document poor performance over time, formally declare the intention to dismiss the teacher and then give the instructor 90 days to improve.

Schwarzenegger's measure - known as the Put the Kids First Act - would authorize school districts to dismiss teachers summarily during the first five years. The initiative also would simplify the process for dismissing teachers with permanent status, allowing district officials to fire a teacher after two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations without declaring their intentions in advance or waiting 90 days. Dismissed teachers would still be entitled to a hearing before an administrative judge and two credentialed teachers from outside their district. State law empowers such panels to uphold or overturn teacher dismissals.

The struggle to remove underperforming teachers is a familiar frustration in California school systems. Schools often provide extra training and mentoring for teachers who receive unsatisfactory evaluations in an effort to help them improve and stay on the job. But rather than hassle with dismissing a teacher, which can consume hundreds of hours, some administrators shuffle problem instructors from school to school in a practice known to school officials as the "dance of the lemons."

The Los Angeles Unified School District has attempted to dismiss just 112 permanent teachers - or about one-quarter of 1% of the district's 43,000 instructors - over the last decade. Some were fired, but most resigned or retired. "It takes two to three years to effectively remove someone who is not helpful to children in the classroom," Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer said. "That's too long."

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



2 August, 2005

"EBONICS" IS FOR LOSERS

"Academics sometimes are too book smart for their own good. Overintellectualizing anything is not necessarily a good thing, and Ebonics proves it. It is beyond me how anyone can take poor English skills and attribute that to another language. I don't think poor English skills should be an goal to be aspired to, much less, attained. I have to agree with those that say that possessing these skills will not help gain a professional career, let alone just a regular job.

Twenty years or so ago, I had an African American woman work for me in a telemarketing firm where I was office manager. One of the requirements there was that English had to be spoken clearly and concisely. It was essential that good English speaking skills were utilized, or customers on the phone couldn't understand what was being said, which was, of course, detrimental to our business.

I remember her telling me that she was having problems with her teenage daughter, who insisted on speaking this so-called "Black English". My co-worker went on to say that she was the daughter of a college professor who insisted that she learn to speak "the King's English", as that was basic to being able to get and hold a decent job.

Her daughter's friends, on the other hand, were saying that speaking "the King's English" meant that she was pretending to be "white". My co-worker was having a tough time convincing her daughter that speaking proper English had nothing to do with what race you were, and had everything to do with your success in life. I often wonder if she prevailed in getting this across to her daughter.

As office manager, I was in charge of hiring. I was turned in to the labor board on at least two occasions for refusing to hire an African American who couldn't speak good English. I was accused of discrimination. Each time, I won the suit because I employed other African Americans who COULD and DID speak proper English.

Even today, I cringe when I hear this "street English". I'm sick of going to a fast food restaurant, where so many young African Americans work, and can't understand a word they're saying, and they apparently can't understand me either, since "iced tea" is constantly interpreted as "Hi C", a totally different beverage.

My personal understanding of this "Black English" is that it is an attempt to differentiate Blacks from Whites. As such, it is a racist undertaking, at the very least. "Black English" is just street language, and most of the people that I've met that speak it are, indeed, undereducated and underachievers. I live in a very racially balanced neighborhood, in a mostly poor area of my city. Believe me when I say that most of the people who speak this "language" are basically illiterate. And I'm not kidding.

That's sad. It's also unnecessary. There are other ways to respect and honor the African American culture other than the dumbing down of its people. Because in the end, that's what "Ebonics" is - a nod to the dumbing down of a people that need that like they need more discrimination and poverty.

Giving credence to this language does a great disservice to Black Americans. I applaud the efforts of any and all Black leaders who dissuade their people from adopting this "street English", which will do nothing but KEEP THEM DOWN. And if you think about it, it's just another form of slavery, because as long as people speak it, they will be denied access to the kinds of jobs and careers that will make them successful. Not everyone can be a Rap Star."

Source



SUBJECTIVITY RULES AT UC ADMISSIONS

By the same logic a medical student who is a great guy but who fails all his medical exams should be graduated

As students ponder their selection or rejection by University of California campuses, Patrick Hayashi is one of the people they could praise or blame. The Oakland resident is among a handful of people who have been instrumental in changing how the UC system reviews students. Even in retirement, he remains a potent force. Concerns he raised about the fairness of the prestigious National Merit Scholarship Program led to an announcement this month that UC campus chancellors are pulling university funding from the test-based program in 2006. ``Had he given up, this matter would not have received UC attention, perhaps ever,'' said UC-Santa Barbara education professor Michael T. Brown, who headed a faculty committee that also found problems with the program.

Hayashi has been a driving force behind the idea that each UC applicant should be evaluated as an individual. The post-affirmative action strategies he helped devise moved UC campuses away from selecting students based on grade-and-test-score formulas toward a broader, individualized review like those at elite private universities. ``He has had an extraordinary influence on how people get measured,'' said Tom Goldstein, a UC-Berkeley professor who has known Hayashi for 20 years. He did it, Goldstein said, by ``questioning the orthodoxies that went unquestioned for decades.''

Hayashi, 61, is a skilled political strategist. As the UC system's associate president, he worked with former UC President Richard Atkinson, a noted expert in testing and cognition, on a high-profile campaign that forced major revisions in the SAT I college entrance exam. ``It was a cooperative effort between us,'' Atkinson said. ``We laid out a plan for changes being implemented, but Pat really engineered this.''

Hayashi's family came to California in the 1880s. He was born in 1944 in Utah's Topaz internment camp and lived there a year. ``I remember nothing, but it affected my entire life,'' he said. The experience made him aware of racial issues and injustice, and their effect on whole generations. There were few early clues that Hayashi would become an activist. He played tennis at Hayward High School, and for a year at San Jose State College. Academically, he ranked dead center in his high school class. After graduating from UC-Berkeley in 1966 with an English degree, he worked at a variety of campus jobs while pursuing graduate education. He helped establish Berkeley's Asian-American studies program, but wasn't among the militant student strikers who called for an independent ethnic-studies college in the late '60s.

When Asian-American admissions to Berkeley dropped suddenly in 1984 after a period of rapid growth, some suspected the university of setting quotas. Hayashi was tapped to manage the public-relations crisis, which lasted several years during state and federal investigations. UC was never sanctioned. His skill dealing with the controversy ``saved my butt,'' said campus chancellor, I. Michael Heyman. ``I just didn't realize the intensity of the feeling.'' First as Heyman's executive assistant, then as associate vice chancellor of admissions, Hayashi lived on the front lines of UC-Berkeley's admissions wars of the 1980s and 1990s, attacked from all sides. He believed in ``throwing the net wide,'' Heyman said. He wanted ``admission standards that would bring in kids from non-traditional backgrounds who had a good chance of doing well, but had never had that opportunity.''

In 1996 Californians passed Proposition 209, which banned race as a factor in admissions. Hayashi introduced the concept of ``comprehensive review'' at Berkeley: reading each applicant's file, doing away with rigid scoring formulas and considering multiple factors in assessing potential. Its subjectivity, he said, is what made it good. ``Some students, you look at their history and put it all together and they're greater than the sum of their individual factors,'' he said. ``They're great kids. They've done great things with their lives by 17, and you know they will do great things after.''

Hayashi has a complex view of affirmative action as ``more than a numbers game,'' said UC-Berkeley professor Jack Citrin, who supported Proposition 209. He wanted to increase underrepresented minority students, ``but he also wanted Berkeley to remain an elite place from a conventional way of looking at things,'' Citrin said.

Hayashi retired last year but continues to battle the National Merit program, a symbol of academic achievement for almost 50 years. His main objection is what he calls ``a fake definition of merit'' based on its use of the PSAT as a gateway exam. The program uses cutoff scores that vary from state to state to eliminate about 99 percent of the test takers. ``You shouldn't make momentous decisions on insignificant differences in score,'' Hayashi said. ``Whites and Asians suffer most from the program,'' he explained. ``Millions of high-achieving students of all races, but especially whites and Asians, take the hardest courses their schools offer, concurrently enroll in community college and do extraordinarily well as president of the student body or mistress of the local youth symphony. But they just didn't get above a certain PSAT cutoff, so they are judged without merit.'' Hayashi hopes UC's decision will inspire other universities. If nothing else, he said, the debate demonstrates ``that traditional notions of merit have to be examined.''

Source



Teachers Need High Expectations Too!

But at the moment they only have to be dummies. Post lifted from Mz Smlph

Wow...I'm really on an education-rant roll lately. A few days ago, I posted about what makes a teacher "qualified" or not. While I didn't focus on teacher education, I do believe that a teacher needs some sort of training before becoming certified, whether it be a formal four-year program or an alternative licensure kind of deal. The state in which I currently teach agrees with me (smart) and graciously offers financial assistance to those who come into teaching from another field and are seeking licensure.

I am happy to say that, as of last Monday, I am done with all my licensure courses and will start teaching in the fall with a complete Lateral Entry license. You might think that it was difficult for me to reach this point, and part of me wishes that it had been. I might be a better teacher if I had actually been challenged in this process.

Coming into teaching, I wasn't required to take many classes, thanks to the similarities between the Psychology and Education curricula at my university. Then, as I demonstrated "success" in the classroom, licensure requirements such as "Classroom Management" were fulfilled, further reducing the number of actual courses I needed to take. Passing the Praxis, which was frighteningly easy, meant that literature and grammar courses were also waived. By the time all these waivers were taken into account, I needed only two courses to be granted licensure.

The first course I took, during my initial semester as a teacher, was called "Technologies in Education." I took it as an on-line course since the actual university, if you can call it that, was 1.5 hours from my home. I knew right away that I was in for an interesting experience when my instructor sent out her "Curriculum Vitae." In my primary perusal of this document, I noted no fewer than 5 fairly glaring errors. As if this were not reason enough to doubt her professionalism, I then started reading the announcements she sent to our class via the university's Internet distance learning system (Blackboard). She was extremely critical and harsh, reprimanding the entire class for "not reading the syllabus" whenever one person asked a question. She never taught directly and never contributed to the discussion board conversations we were required to have. While we did have a textbook (a $75.00 paperback), we didn't really have to read it. Weekly quizzes came from the textbook's website, and my classmates and I quickly figured out that, by using the browser's back button, one could get answers for and resubmit the quizzes endlessly without losing points. To the teacher's credit, there was a final project: a portfolio that consisted of various projects we were supposed to complete over the course of the semester. I did my entire portfolio on Thanksgiving Day. I think I had to design a web page, create a spreadsheet, and make a PowerPoint. It was rough, grueling almost, but boy, did it make me a better teacher!! (*clears throat*)

When it came time for me to start my second and last certification-required course, Reading in the Content Areas, there was only one "university" offering the class. This "university" is one that I have long suspected to be a REALLY CRAPPY school. (Unfortunately, several of the teachers I mentioned in that last post got their degrees there.) From the day my colleague and I drove to the campus for orientation, I knew my suspicions had been confirmed and not in any sort of self-fulfilling prophecy kinda' way.

The instructor of this course, which was also on-line, was a kindergarten teacher who had never taught the course before. She used the same assignments as the teacher before her, sometimes not even bothering to change the dates from the previous semester. Unlike the instructor from my first course, she wasn't rude to us, but this was probably because she almost NEVER communicated with us at all. We had weekly assignments, due on Fridays, that consisted of regurgitating information from the textbook. The on-line grade-book we could access showed that, week after week, the class average on these assignments was 100%. Clearly, if the instructor was reading our responses at all, she was not holding us to very high standards.

I was out of town when the short answer, open-book midterm was posted and freaked out when I realized I had left my book at home. Over the phone, THE GREATEST ROOMMATE EVER kindly gave me some key points from the text. I put in about 30 minutes of work and scored a, you guessed it, 100%.

Going into the final, I still had 100% in the class. When I heard that, like the midterm, this exam would be open-book, I was confident that I could do fairly well. When the instructor told us it would consist of 25 multiple choice questions (this was the FINAL, people!), I became even more sure of myself. Then...I saw the test. Many of the questions contained obvious typos. Some of the questions had vaguely tricky answers, like this one:

Why should teachers allow students time to think?

a. Being given more time makes students think.
b. being given more time enables students to answer questions better.
c. It is the polite thing to do.
d. It ensures quick answers.

I was a little torn between a and b. Eventually, I chose b because nothing, not wait-time, not a miracle can MAKE anyone do anything. Tricky questions like these aren't the type of trick questions that I can respect. Rather, they're the type that requires the test-taker to attempt to guess what the test-writer might have been thinking. Of course, I will never understand what my instructor was thinking with this next question:

What educational practices contribute to the students diversity in secondary classrooms?

a.More students entering school from poverty-level homes
b.Immigration
c.Cultural change
d. All of the above

Since when are immigration, cultural change, and poverty EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES????? I chose d because a,b, and c all contribute to diversity, but I hated myself for even having to answer it.

So, I did my best to answer 25 questions like these. I was quite chagrined when, upon submitting my answers, I learned that I missed 5, scoring only an 80%. How depressing!! I was only slightly comforted by the fact that the class average on the exam was only 72%.

The fact that this class was required for certification bothers me for a couple reasons. First of all, the state must think it's an important class if you can't get a teaching certificate without taking it. I feel I was cheated out of a class that was supposed to have taught me something I need to know. I can honestly say that I learned nothing from that class. Is this partially my fault? Sure, I could have taken the initiative to read the text book on my own, create challenging assignments for myself, and regularly assess my own progress by means of varied and authentic assessments, but who are we kidding here? It's summer. Would I have done these things if they were a requirement for the class? Of course I would have. It's all about high expectations. Teachers need them as much as students do.

The other thing that really gets my goat about this class is that, clearly, the instructor had NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS DOING!!! Immigration is not an educational practice, dam*it! I have always been of the opinion that, if someone is going to be my instructor, get up in front of me and lecture - or "teach" me over the Internet - that instructor SHOULD KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT SHE'S TEACHING!!! Does this woman have a single shred of a conscience? Did she not feel bad that she was collecting a paycheck for teaching us nothing? (Sounds a lot like some teachers at my school.)

Granted, I paid only $58.00 for the course (+ $90.00 for the crappy book), but the State of ** footed the rest of the bill. I know, I should be happy that the course was so easy, that I can now start teaching in a few weeks with a fully cleared license. But something inside me continues to rage against this kind of non-education. It's insulting, and I don't like being the victim of it.



THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Whenever he can, President Bush touts the huge spending increases necessary to promote his No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But it's not just NCLB funding that has increased: the entire education budget has ballooned during the president's time in office. The Department of Education's budget has grown by 82.5 percent in real terms from $34.9 billion in FY2001 to $63.7 billion in FY2005. This is the largest increase of any president since Lyndon Johnson. And President Bush's 2006 budget asks for more of the same. Every state sees an increase in grant money, nearly 5 percent on average. The average state receives a level of grant funding that is more than 50 percent higher than when President Bush took office; no state has an increase less than 35 percent.

In spite of the GOP's extravagance, Democrats constantly criticize the Administration for not spending enough. During the presidential campaign, Kerry told voters that the President was not serious about education and promised that, if elected, he would spend an additional $27 billion. Special interest groups are also dissatisfied with the amount of money going to education. In April, the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers union, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education charging that the federal government hasn't provided enough money for states to comply with the NCLB. This is bad news for fiscal conservatives: the Bush administration may use this opportunity to brag about how much they have increased federal education spending and may be required to spend even more....

This is unfortunate. The only real measure of success is not how much we are spending but whether we are getting the most bang for our bucks. American schools are already very well-funded. Moreover, there is little evidence that additional funding would much improve the quality of education. In international comparisons of per-pupil expenditures, the U.S. ranks near the top of the list. According to OECD figures, the U.S. spends 78 percent more per primary school student than Germany, 58 percent more than France, 31 percent more than Japan, and 71 percent more than the U.K. But despite these large spending differentials, American students perform no better than average on international comparisons of math and reading skills.

Comparisons over time reveal a similar story. From 1960 to 2000, inflation-adjusted spending on education in the U.S. nearly tripled, yet test scores show little improvement, dropout rates are high, and a large racial achievement gap persists.

Education economist Caroline Hoxby explains that public schools today are doing less with more: school productivity -- achievement per dollar spent -- declined by 55 to 73 percent from 1971 to 1999. Meanwhile, private and charter schools are boosting student achievement with lower expenditures per pupil than public schools. In other words, there is no consistent, systematic relationship between education spending and student outcomes.

Trumpeting huge increases in education spending may lower the level of complaining from the NEA and other critics of President Bush's education policies, but "historic" new federal spending is nothing for a fiscal conservative to brag about. And given the weak effectiveness of money to improve education, it's nothing for an education reformer to boast about either. The Bush administration has taken the GOP from advocating no federal spending on education to spending like drunken sailors. It's high time for the party to sober up and remember its core principles.

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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



1 August, 2005

MILWAUKEE: A BLACK HIGH-SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT SPEAKS UP

Jude also says the world of his parents offered things that the world of today's parents of MPS students lacks - strong parenting setting good standards for kids, to name one. And he now believes, at age 58, something he never would have expected when he started as a math teacher in 1973: Things have gotten worse during his career. A few of Jude's thoughts as he departs:

* "Did my parents give me basic tools (for succeeding in school)? No, because they didn't have them themselves. But what they did have was respect, discipline and courtesy."

* Show up and show up on time. Both in his years in the MPS central office and in its high schools, Jude made a priority of fighting truancy and - something he considered just as serious - tardiness. He says parents and MPS don't do enough in dealing with these. "There are two major things that businesses are complaining about (related to the high school graduates). Tardiness and attendance. They go together into attitude and relationships. (Business executives say) if a kid comes in here punctually and they have a pleasant attitude, we can train them. But I can't train them if they're not on time or they're arguing with every supervisor and co-worker they come into contact with. . . . "Once a student is punctual and in school, a lot of other problems begin to disappear." Jude said MPS policy since the late 1980s has barred principals from taking strong stands against tardiness.

* Working in an MPS high school, 2005 vs. 1973: "First of all, there's far less respect in high schools now, meaning the adults in high schools in 2005 are not the same as the adults of 1973. The adults in 2005 are not taking charge for all kinds of reasons, staff members as well as non-staff members. The red tape that is not only established locally but statewide or nationally . . . causes some restraint, especially for those of us who don't have the courage to step out there and do things because it's the best for kids or right for kids. " . . . The other difference has to do with the expectations of schools these days, whether it's in curriculum, whether it's in discipline, whether it's in other areas. " . . . The adults are no longer the real authority. The authority now is shared by many and sometimes the authority that is the closest to the problem is the one that is second-guessed the most."

* The 80-20 rule - there's only so much schools can do to offset what happens in kids' lives outside of school. "Too many expect the schools to solve the problems when we only have the kids a maximum of 15, 16 percent of the time. . . . Even with extracurricular activities thrown in, few kids spend more than 20 percent of their time in school. That percent will destroy the 20. The 20 cannot carry the 80 unless something productive is happening in that 80 percent. " . . . You show me a youngster who is being successful in school, I'll show you a household where someone is spending time with that youngster."

* The state of MPS as a whole: "The elementary schools are moving in the right direction, and they're making progress. I'm not sure we'll be able to sustain it unless we focus in on the group between grade 3 and 8. . . . We begin to lose as they go forward because we're not paying close enough attention to the building blocks that need to be developed further - vocabulary, math skills, to really home in on them. "Oftentimes, high schools are blamed for not preparing youngsters. But right now, even as late as this past year, we know that in many of our high schools we have kids come in reading at Grade 6. Well, our high school curriculum is designed for Grade 9, so we have a gap there. So we try to figure out, how do we fill that gap and at the same time keep the kid on the high school curriculum that is to prepare him to compete with others when he leaves high school? That becomes a real challenge. " . . . What happens in the first 14 years - or what does not happen - cannot be made up in the (next) four years."

* You can do a good paint job that makes a poorly performing car look good, but it's still a poorly performing car. That's true too often of MPS diplomas. For kids to get to graduation, they sometimes take courses that aren't as demanding as what should be expected. Graduation comes, "but it's at the expense of content." The student goes to college and finds other kids are way ahead. Jude's response: "You were doing the A section of the book while they were doing the B and C sections. You covered a lot of material but it was very shallow. They covered a lot of material but it was in depth."

More here



WITHOUT MERIT PAY, TEACHERS ARE GETTING DUMBER

Student test scores rose in New York City this year-and in some classrooms and schools, kids made truly significant gains. Consider Region Five, a poor district of eastern Brooklyn and Queens. As Julia Levy reported in the New York Sun, the district was an "educational wasteland for decades," with two-thirds of students failing at everything. But this year, the district's elementary- and middle-school students pulled off testing gains of 17 percentage points in English and ten percentage points in math, outpacing the city's average gains in both areas. At P.S. and I.S. 41 in the district, 48 percent of fifth-graders met reading standards this year, up from 32 percent last year, while 37 percent of the seventh-graders did okay or well this year, more than double last year's figure. It's no mystery why scores are going up: a gifted, determined manager who motivated teachers to succeed. The district's leader, Kathleen Cashin, established clear expectations for principals and teachers, and pushed the schools in the district to meet them. P.S./I.S. 41 principal Myron Rock enthuses that his teachers worked evenings, Saturdays, and vacations to push students....

But without the introduction of merit-based pay, new money won't do much to build upon this year's rising scores, as a recent study, conducted by Harvard economics prof Caroline Hoxby and Andrew Leigh of the National Bureau of Economic Research, makes clear. The study examined worker aptitude (native smarts, basically) as it related to worker pay. In most professions, the best workers usually get the top pay-a situation that once held in teaching, before the unions arrived on the scene and began to mandate lockstep salaries. Hoxby and Leigh found that smart women (the study looked only at females), frustrated by the absence of reward for ability in the public schools, have looked elsewhere for more rewarding career paths, as you'd expect.

Forty years ago, as unions were just gaining control in public schools, Hoxby and Leigh report, 16 percent of American female teachers were of low aptitude in relation to other college grads (determined by mean SAT scores at their respective universities). By 2000, 36 percent of women teachers were of low aptitude. In 1963, 5 percent of women teachers came from the highest-aptitude group; by 2000, that figure had plummeted to 1 percent. The main reason for this startling decline in teacher quality, Hoxby and Leigh conclude, is the elimination of financial rewards for talent. Back in 1963, the smartest teachers earned more than average teachers, while the lowest-aptitude teachers earned less; by 2000, all teachers earned about the same for the same level of experience, regardless of talent.

If New York wants to attract and keep the best teachers, then, the solution isn't to increase teacher pay across the board. That might draw more people to teaching, but not necessarily smarter or harder-working people. Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein should instead seek to structure financial incentives to reward teachers like those who did so well at P.S. 41....

More here



Don’t Fund College Follies

It is easy to give money foolishly to colleges and very hard to give it wisely. But at a handful of schools, enlightened alumni not only have learned how to avoid misguided benevolence but are also figuring out how to re-introduce serious scholarship to their campuses. Their initiatives are doing what presidents and trustees have failed to do: break the Left’s illiberal stranglehold on their institutions’ intellectual life and restore true academic freedom to campus....

Though at first glance, the prospects that trustees and alumni donors can recall the universities from their descent into narcissistic know-nothingism look grim, donors nevertheless have two possible levers for change. One is as yet unused, but the other is already exerting effective pressure.

Unused is the power that trustees could wield—if they had the courage to do so. All boards have academic committees, meant to advise the president on academic matters, and university bylaws usually vest final say over hiring in the trustees. Nothing prevents trustees from actually reading the course catalog; doing so would be eye-opening. While no trustee today would dare to challenge an appointment, there is no reason that boards can’t start conversations with provosts about why, for example, their colleges no longer offer courses in American revolutionary history. They might also ask why their colleges require each student to take a “diversity” offering rather than an overview of European and American history, or why English departments offer far more courses in theory and “underrepresented” voices than in the greats of English literature. Asking questions is no violation of academic freedom, though professors and administrators will doubtless complain that it is.

Trustees could also hire presidents who understand the value of a liberal education and are committed to improving the curriculum. Unlike the Harvard Corporation, they should then back up their choices unequivocally. Liberal education, they should explain, has nothing to do with the party affiliations of professors. Rather, it means a willingness to engage the legacy of the past with seriousness, rather than condescension, and to understand the achievements of Western civilization—science, prosperity, freedom, and artistic marvels—rather than only moan over its failings. Will the faculty howl? Sure, but that does not mean that their “academic freedom” has been violated.

For now, though, the alumni are the most likely agents for change. A few savvy alumni entrepreneurs are already creating a blueprint for breaking the monopoly of the academic Left and bringing traditional scholarship and intellectual diversity back to campus. The model is as follows: find a tenured professor committed to classical learning. Give him resources to expand his jurisdiction by bringing in new faculty or offering new courses. A tenured prof, it turns out, often has leeway to recruit faculty on a temporary basis and to set them to teaching—as long as the prof is highly respected and has his own pot of money independent of the university budget, and as long as he, not the donor, is the actual and the perceived force behind the new program.

The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton is the flagship of all such cartel busters, a conservative version of the left-wing research institutes, like the Radcliffe Institute, that have proliferated on campuses in recent years. Directed by the charismatic Robert George and funded entirely by foundation and alumni money, the program focuses on constitutional law and political thought. George selects six fellows a year to come from other campuses to pursue research in such topics as the nature of free institutions, to offer public lectures, and to supervise student writing projects. Sometimes a fellow may teach a preexisting undergraduate course that has lain fallow in the catalog for years, or he may devise a new course and offer it on a one-time basis, subject to the approval of the chairman of the politics department, where the Madison Program is housed.

The program, which has attracted an enthusiastic student following, has altered the political debate on campus. No longer can a speaker at a conference assume that everyone in the audience shares the view that America is the world’s prime source of evil; some of George’s fellows may be there and will ask uncomfortable questions. Students interested in American ideals now have a body of thinkers they can draw on to expand their knowledge and encourage them, and they have a mutually reinforcing peer group sharing their generally conservative worldview.

In a similar vein is the Political Theory Project at Brown, also under the complete control of an energetic professor and backed by a strong-minded alumnus. Political theory professor John Tomasi, a free-market libertarian, had watched in frustration as the political assumptions on campus and in the curriculum narrowed and ossified. He had his own scars from that close-minded culture. When he had dared to question Brown’s minorities-only freshman-orientation program, a powerful tool for indoctrinating students into the reigning anti-white, anti-capitalist orthodoxies, Brown’s diversity police launched a hate campaign against him, he recounts. His colleagues wrote letters to the campus newspapers denouncing his “insensitivity”; anonymous diversity commissars made harassing late-night calls to his family; “anti-hate” activists hung his picture, with the label “racist,” throughout campus; and vandals smeared slurs on his car.

Alumnus Curtin Winsor, President Reagan’s ambassador to Costa Rica, had seen the results of Brown’s doctrinaire left-wing culture up close. His daughters, in collecting their Brown degrees, had also picked up a set of political assumptions that he found “distressing.” “I’m still trying to detox them,” he says. “They look at the world from a socialist perspective, which is alien to their upbringing.”

Tomasi’s and Winsor’s benevolent revenge? Introducing free-market thinking to Brown freshmen. With financing from Winsor, Tomasi created the Political Theory Project, an umbrella for courses and student discussion groups in liberty and democratic values. The project brings in five ideologically diverse postdoctoral fel-lows from other universities to teach freshman seminars—a task that most of Brown’s own faculty regard as beneath them. The fellows, who stay at Brown for two years, create their own courses, based on their scholarly interests. The result: ten new courses a year in perspectives that Brown would otherwise lack.

Tomasi plays to the typical Brown student’s desire for the avant-garde. “I tell freshmen that if they want radical funky ideas, here are some new courses, such as in de Tocqueville, Locke, or the philosophical ideas of the American Founding. Students are not getting these books anywhere; they just get critiques of free-market politics and the canon. The classics are so untaught that they become trendy.” Tomasi wants to create undergraduates who’ve read different books from the faculty. “After a whole semester of Hayek, it’s hard to shake them off that perspective over the next four years,” he says slyly.....

The secrecy in which reformers are working is the clearest proof of how desperately academe needs change. At one Ivy League school, a government professor hoping to replicate Princeton’s Madison Program begged me to keep his college’s identity blank, “as this is something the feminists will try to quash as soon as they hear of it.” Alumni and a professor at another Ivy League college want to create an institute for researching the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. The institute will be a home for people who want to do non-political scholarship without being subject to discrimination, a donor explained. He might as well have been trying to set up a center for making anthrax. “We are reaching a crucial stage,” he said, in requesting anonymity, “and it will be extremely important that nothing be done that would mobilize the campus left in opposition.”

The challenges to re-introducing liberal scholarship are considerable. If the key to creating a Madison-type program is to find a tenured scholar in place who can run it, few are the colleges that still have such traditional thinkers—and fewer still that have anyone with the star power and organizing skills of a Robert George. A philanthropist looked into starting an Alexander Hamilton institute at what was once the premier American history faculty in the country, for example, and quickly concluded that there was no one left in the department who would champion such a program.

Yet the prospects for change have never been more auspicious. Activist David Horowitz’s nationwide academic-freedom campaign, complete with an Academic Bill of Rights, has provided the perfect entree for alumni who seek to better their colleges’ education (see “On Campus, Conservatives Talk Back,” Winter 2005). Presidents are starting to get nervous that their campuses may be the next to be blasted by Horowitz’s bullhorn. The Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate University, established in 2003 by political scientist Robert Kraynak and funded by Colgate alumni, announces boldly on its website that it “seeks to challenge the prevailing [campus] conformity by presenting a ‘conservative voice’ and a genuine exchange of ideas.” Why this unusual honesty? Colgate president and feminist theologian Rebecca Chopp asked the center to designate itself as “conservative” to demonstrate Colgate’s intellectual diversity, according to the NAS’s Stephen Balch, writing in the June Philanthropy.

The Ward Churchill affair at the University of Colorado at Boulder has also started administrators worrying about whether their own campus radicals may blow up and expose their left-wing ravings to all the world. Desperately trying to recover after the press unearthed Professor Churchill’s comparison of the 9/11 victims to “little Eichmanns,” Boulder can look to its new Center for Western Civilization as a needed counterweight. (The center was also a beneficiary of Horowitz’s agitation.)

Would-be alumni entrepreneurs should seize the moment. The model for starting a revolution has already been forged: fund professors already in place. If you can’t find anyone committed to liberal education at your own university, send your money instead to places that are more open to traditional scholarship. The National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni have databases of worthy candidates. If your alma mater sees that it is losing philanthropic dollars to institutions that support the traditional liberal arts, it may figure out a way to win back your donations. (Even universities with billion-dollar endowments hate to forgo significant alumni grants: in the 1980s, Harvard Law School alumni, angry over the Critical Legal Studies faction’s lock on tenure decisions, stopped giving money. The left-wing tyranny ended within a year.) Never give to a college’s general-support budget; it is money down the drain.

More here

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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