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31 August, 2008

BANNING ACTIVE SCHOOLYARD GAMES

This sort of thing has been a subject of debate worldwide for some time and is now getting a good airing in Australia. Three articles below

School may backflip on cartwheel ban

An Australian school which recently banned its students from doing cartwheels, somersaults and other gymnastics during recess is reviewing the decision after parents and students got all bent out of shape.

The school, in the coastal town of Townsville in Queensland state, told students they could not perform any acrobatics such as handstands outside class because they were a safety hazard.

"The school is actually reviewing this," a spokesman for the Queensland state's education department said Wednesday. A statement by Education Queensland released Wednesday said the decision had been taken "in the interests of the safety of all students as well as in recognition of the school's physical environment."

But it added: "The school will work with its parents and citizens' committee and the school community to ensure an appropriate balance between student safety and their right to engage in gymnastic activities."

The school had classified gymnastic activities a "medium risk level 2" danger to children when performed in class. But Australian media said parents shocked by the ban also discovered that other popular sports such as cricket, tennis and soccer also had the same risk classification but were not banned.

Source

School sued over tiggy

CHILDREN are suing schools for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for injuries caused while playing games such as tiggy [tag]. Nearly 100 lawsuits were filed against the State of Queensland for injuries suffered by schoolchildren in the last financial year. One child is asking the court to award her $280,000 plus interest after she hurt herself playing tiggy (chase) in the schoolyard when she was six. Another launched a lawsuit last month claiming more than $136,000 for an injury she says she suffered while high jumping during a Sunshine Coast school carnival.

The revelation that schoolyards are becoming fertile ground for litigation follows public outcry over the banning of cartwheels, handstands and somersaults at a north Queensland school and admissions by Education Minister Rod Welford that fear of legal action was partly behind the decision.

The case involving tiggy centres around an incident at the Bribie Island State School in 2004. Documents filed in the District Court of Queensland say the now 10-year-old girl tripped on a metal bar "comprising part of the playground equipment" during her lunchbreak. It is alleged she suffered a shortening of her right leg, disuse osteoporosis and a deformity at the neck of the right femur as a result of the fall and then inadequate medical treatment by Queensland Health.

The girl claims through her legal representative that she was not supervised adequately and the playground equipment was not safe. A notice to defend filed by the State of Queensland denies many of the allegations.

A claim for more than $136,000 was filed in the District Court last month on behalf of a girl who was eight when she allegedly injured her lower left leg and ankle during an athletics carnival at the Kuluin State School on the Sunshine Coast. The girl's foot allegedly landed between two cushioning mats during the high jump, striking the ground. The claim states the now 12-year-old has an altered gait as a result of her injury and "has since undergone hospital, surgical, medical and para-medical treatment".

The State of Queensland filed a notice of intention to defend on August 11, denying that the consequences of the incident were caused by a breach of common law duty or negligence.

State schools are not the only ones subject to claims. The St Margaret's Anglican Girls School trust is being sued over an alleged injury suffered by a Year 8 student on July 20, 2005, while skipping on concrete during a physical education class. Kerin and Co Lawyers solicitor Stuart Wright said a settlement had already been reached in the case, filed in the District Court of Queensland last month. The amount was confidential. St Margaret's Anglican School deputy principal Cynthia May said it was compulsory for all staff to be trained in first aid and there was a full-time nurse on duty at the school. "We make every effort to minimise risk for the girls," she said yesterday.

Source

Lunchtime games ban turns children into wusses: experts



SOMETHING has crept under the skin of top child and adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg. An ambassador for the federal youth suicide prevention program MindMatters and a founding member of the National Centre Against Bullying, the Melbourne-based practitioner is generally unflappable despite his daily diet of teen angst and hurt. Yet a Townsville school's banning this week of a few allegedly unsafe gymnastic pleasures - handstands, cartwheels and somersaults - appears to have galled him.

"It's all part of this 'wussification' syndrome that we're seeing in contemporary Australia where schools have been forced to bow to the great god of occupational health and safety," Dr Carr-Gregg said. "We have schools in Victoria which have banned birthday cakes with candles on them because the children might burst into flames and where soccer has been banned during recess because the kids might be hit in the face by the ball. "Children are not accessories to dress up and keep behind glass. If we continue to cloak them in cotton wool and outsource their development to lawyers we will have a bunch of kids who are almost frightened of the world. This is very serious."

Deadly serious, according to Rob Pitt, director of the Queensland Injury Surveillance Unit. Like Dr Carr-Gregg, he believed adventurous play was a critical tool in teaching children how to appraise risk - with resulting injuries usually minor. "When you do something that's a little bit on the edge, the (lessons) are learnt before you get to an age when the toys you're playing with can potentially kill," he says. "If they haven't learnt appropriate risk-taking before they're in charge of a motor vehicle, the consequences are often fatal."

Not that Dr Pitt would class cartwheels among dicier high jinks. As well as running the QISU, he is director of the Mater Children's Hospital emergency department, which sees 42,000 patients a year. He said injuries from handstands and cartwheels "just don't turn up on our radar".

Townsville's Belgian Gardens State School principal Glenn Dickson continued to keep his public silence after mum Kylie Buschgens hit the headlines on Tuesday with claims that her daughter Cali, 10, was banned from performing cartwheels during breaks. But the cartwheels, handstands and somersaults ban will continue until at least October. The school's Parents and Citizens Association vice-president Jan Collins said about 40 to 50 parents and teachers attended their monthly meeting on Wednesday night and moved to set up a committee to discuss the ban.

Education Minister Rod Welford was slow to react, saying playground rules were a matter for individual schools. It is understood some Queensland public primary schools outlaw tree-climbing and contact games such as Red Rover. By the following day, Mr Welford had entered the wider debate, shifting blame to parents by contending it was their "mollycoddling" that had put schools on a defensive footing in case of lawsuits.

Education Queensland released figures showing that last financial year 93 compensation claims involving students allegedly injured at school or during school activities were brought against the State Government. They included a (now) 10-year-old girl who allegedly suffered a leg deformity and osteoporosis from tripping over play equipment in a game of tiggy at Bribie Island State School in 2004. The girl is seeking more than $280,000.

In reality, the paternalism stunting the liberties of modern children is all-pervasive: at once, cultural and institutional. It's there in the anxiety-ridden "helicopter parents". "Hovering over their children keeping the germs away and making sure that they're safe," explained Australian Council of State School Organisations president Jennifer Branch.

And it's underscored by skittish bureaucracy, the likes of which severed an incident-free, 57-year tradition by outlawing the Grand Carousel from this year's Ekka. A state workplace health and safety inspector speculated children could be crushed beneath sets of prancing timber hooves.

Dr Carr-Gregg was concerned all the fussing would usher in a generation of children who struggled to self-identify as adults "because we're pausing the DVD of their development". They would lack decision-making ability, independence and other life skills. Moreover, they would be low on that key survival ingredient - resilience. "If you extend this ludicrousness to its logical end, no child will ever learn to ride a bicycle because they might fall off," Dr Carr-Gregg said. "What's next? Are we going to ban the pencil because of the risk of RSI? "An essential part of growing up is exposure to the fact that life isn't always fair. "When things do go wrong, children can pick themselves up, start again and learn from the negative experience. "Because we're (sheltering) them from that, I'm seeing 12- and 13-year-old kids who are just normally sad because their dog's died or their parents have divorced. And they're running off to GPs looking for anti-depressants because they think they're depressed."

Educators like University of Queensland physical education professor Richard Tinning point out that scaling a tree or negotiating a climbing frame is a natural instinct and has benefits for honing motor co-ordination, building muscle and exploring boundaries. "But schools have increasingly sanitised the playing environment for kids, taking out a lot of the monkey bars in order to protect from litigation," Professor Tinning said. "As a result, if kids do any physical activity, it's usually not involving their upper body. Most kids today couldn't hang and support their weight."

Ironically, West Australian Ian Lillico, an internationally renowned expert on boys' education, strode into Townsville yesterday as part of a professional workshop tour for teachers and school administrators. He labels the cartwheel curb "rubbish" and says, especially for boys, broken limbs and various playground scrapes are often worn as a badge of honour.

Source





30 August, 2008

Harvard's "racist" police

Sounds like paranoia

Harvard University will launch an examination of the campus Police Department following long-running complaints that officers have unfairly treated black students and professors and, in an incident this month, a black high school student working at Harvard. President Drew Gilpin Faust announced yesterday that she has appointed an independent, six-member committee to review the diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts of Harvard police, the first review of its kind in more than a decade. In recent weeks, black student and faculty leaders have been pressing the university to address what they view as racial profiling by the predominantly white campus police force, which Harvard oversees.

Ralph Martin, former Suffolk district attorney and managing partner of the Boston office of the Bingham McCutchen law firm, will lead the committee, which will start work next week. "All of us share an interest in sustaining constructive relations between our campus police and the broader Harvard community, in order to provide a safe and welcoming environment for all faculty, students, staff, and visitors," Faust wrote in an e-mail to senior university administrators and faculty. ". . . I am confident that this group's efforts will help the university address this important set of issues in a constructive spirit and forthright manner."

Black faculty members praised Faust's initiative, saying it signaled that she will address the issue thoroughly and effectively. Some said the university should go further and establish a permanent police community board to ease tension on both sides.

Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree said black students arrive on campus aiming for academic success but instead find themselves under suspicion. "I've been hosting, moderating, and mediating meetings between Harvard's black students and university police for much of the last 20 years, and it always stems from an individual incident when African-Americans appear to be the subject of racial profiling by the police department," Ogletree said yesterday. "The problem is a persistent one, because there's still this unfortunate assumption that equates the color of a person's skin with involvement in criminality."

Harvard police officials would not respond to questions about specific incidents, but issued a statement yesterday saying they hope the review will help the private force better serve Harvard's diverse population. "We look forward to any recommendations generated by the process that will help ensure the HUPD remains as effective as possible," the statement said.

Faust was unavailable for comment yesterday. In her memo, she wrote that the review is being launched "partly in response to concerns expressed internally." Earlier this month, she noted, officers confronted a person using tools to remove a lock from a locked bicycle. The person, whom others familiar with the case have identified as a black Boston high school student working on the Harvard campus this summer, owned the bicycle, and was trying to cut the lock because the key had broken off in the lock. The two officers involved have been placed on administrative leave, pending a separate investigation into the matter, said a source familiar with the case.

Faculty and students say previous incidents have fanned tension with police. In spring 2007, officers interrupted a field day on the Radcliffe Quad sponsored by two black student groups. Police asked whether the young men and women were Harvard students and whether they had permission to be there, even though they had a permit. And in 2004, police stopped S. Allen Counter, a prominent neuroscience professor, as he was walking to his office across Harvard Yard because they mistook him for a black robbery suspect.

Earlier this month, in response to inquiries from the Globe, Police Chief Francis Riley said through a spokesman that the department has begun conversations with the black student organizations to address "bias incidents" but would not respond to a request for statistics on how often black students and faculty are stopped.

Alneada Biggers, president of the Association of Black Harvard Women, said the review shows Faust is aware of black students' concerns about police. "It's much needed," Biggers said. "If you talk to any student in the black community, they'll talk about being targeted." J. Lorand Matory - who co-chairs the Association of Black Faculty, Administrators and Fellows - called the police review a "thoughtful response." "I hope this committee will be able to initiate a thoughtful conversation that we have not been able to accomplish to date," said Matory, a professor of anthropology and African and African-American studies.

Martin said he hopes the committee will present its findings and recommendations by December. "Any great institution is never afraid to be introspective," Martin said. "This is really an effort to identify what the university police do well, as well as what the areas of improvement potentially are. We're going to go at it as objectively as possible."

In addition to Martin, members of the committee are William Lee, a former Harvard overseer; Mark Moore, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government; Nancy Rosenblum, Harvard professor of ethics in politics and government; Matthew Sundquist, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council; and David Wilkins, a Harvard law professor.

Source




University not always the path to good money

Young Australians are turning their backs on a university education to take advantage of the huge salaries flowing from the resources boom and skills shortage. Heading straight into the workforce and getting on-the-job training is an attractive proposition in boom towns where newcomers can walk into huge money. "Particularly in Queensland and Western Australia we're seeing many school leavers heading straight out to the mines and putting university and tertiary education on the back burner," says Peter Carey, National President of the Career Development Association of Australia.

Recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the average mining salary tops $100,000 a year - that's $1939 gross a week, or $800 a week more than the average worker. Trades are no different with the skills shortage meaning big bucks are available sooner rather than later. Construction workers' wages jumped almost 8 per cent last year to an average of $1140 a week. These pay rates compare to graduate earnings which range from as low as $35,000 for pharmacy graduates up to $51,887 for engineers.

Traineeships and "earn while you learn" apprenticeships is one way to get ahead. "With the way of the world today people need to work to survive and TAFE and traineeships often provide more work-ready skills than universities," Mr Carey said. "Student debt and poor workforce planning is influencing a move towards more practical learning," he said.

Eddie Dobosz from Apprenticeships Australia believes traineeships are no longer only an option for those who can't get into university. "A lot of people want to do training that gets them to the top quickly and furthering your skills later on in your career, via a degree is always an option," he said. The latest ABS data indicates enrolments in TAFE courses have increased by 4 per cent over recent years with practical learning undergoing a revival.

The average university graduate is $8500 in debt when they leave university. According to ABS data, over 1.2 million people pay for university via FEE-HELP or HECS with 6 per cent owing more than $20,000.

So where does a degree matter? If it's law, accounting or engineering you're looking into then you've got no choice but to hit the books, says Andrew Williams, general manager at LINK Recruitment. "However sales, commerce and business are professions more competitive driven than reliant upon an employee's tertiary education," he said Assessing what's important to you and where you want your career to go is the most important thing when it comes to choosing where to study, says Mr Williams. "Depending on where you want to be, a university degree may not be necessary," he said.

Source





29 August, 2008

Britain's education rat-race

Are you a pushy parent? Am I a pushy parent? Once upon a time we all knew what the term stood for. It was Violet Elizabeth Bott's father in a Roller demanding his spoilt darling got the best of everything. [Violet Elizabeth Bott is a character in the "Just William" stories]. In classic children's literature you can tell a good parent by their desire, above all else, that their offspring should not become "big-headed". It was all so deliciously unambiguous back then.

Cut to 2008 and being pushy is an arch crime in some quarters and a supreme virtue in others. Earlier this year, aggressively ambitious parents were blamed for the cancelling of Hickstead's junior show-jumping events. But few accusations come as loaded with bile as the suspected crime of shoving your angel to the top of the educational pile. Middle-class parents who "play the system" are so frequently blamed for the failings of the state system you'd think teachers and the Government played no part at all.

In 1996, a Labour politico called Andrew Adonis protested that, "securing places in popular church schools is an art form for the professional classes". What a difference a decade makes. On Sunday Lord Adonis, schools minister, said: "I want every parent to be a pushy parent. It is a jolly good thing." Is it, by Jove? Even if few things make you reach for an axe quicker than an acquaintance citing their child's IQ or violin grade?

My little boy starts school next month and I'm already daunted by the middle-class angst that surrounds all educational decisions. Most trips to the playground now involve a lengthy discussion - or justification - about our choice.

Some parents seem mystified that we chose our local state primary (good to average Ofsted report), others tell me with pinched expressions that our son is in the "better" reception class, with smarter parents "where fewer languages" are spoken. (How on earth do they know? Term hasn't even started.)

Lord Adonis now believes that parents who abandon deficient schools and fight to get their children into the best establishments boost the whole system. Yet this is nearly as fatuous an argument as the old one that blamed pushy parents for dismal state schooling. What has happened under this Government is that when ambitious parents have bolted for enclaves of academic excellence, children from less motivated backgrounds have been left ever further behind.

And for all the vote-winning exhortations to parents to enjoy a guilt-free sprint for the golden prizes, nobody's found a convincing rescue package for the illiterate stragglers in our educational ghettoes.

A good old-fashioned race is now, of course, an approved activity. Gordon Brown used the Olympics to admit that old Labour got things badly wrong when it waged a war on competitive school sports. With luck this means an end to the sports day cited by a friend that consisted of children in circles chucking beanbags through hoops. But Brown's new-found enthusiasm for hearty sporting competition raises a bigger question.

Will he admit that the loony Left did an even greater disservice when it tried to smother academic competition? Boys in particular have failed to thrive in an educational arena that stifles naturally combative tendencies. Of course, where there are winners there will also be losers; but can't we return to the days when dunces found compensation in sporting glory and weeds found consolation in A-grade Algebra?

As term starts, parents face an additional hurdle - how to keep children nit-free. Head-lice have become resistant to most chemicals, which at least means your children can evade the night-time ritual of a head coated in vile Prioderm. My cousin's wife, a mother of five, offers a top tip - she swears by Clairol hair dye. Choose the shade closest to your child's natural tone and this coats the hair shafts, which deters lice and prevents eggs sticking. Stylish, cool, and they won't stink of nit shampoo.

Source




Australian centre/Left government determined to push through school accountability

The agenda of the conservative Howard government lives on! Curriculum reform seems to have dropped off the agenda but we must be thankful for small mercies, I guess

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is preparing for an all-in brawl with the states and unions over his plan to test schools and sack underperforming teachers. Mr Rudd has outlined his policy to rank schools across the country to give parents the ability to compare the performance of different public schools. Under the scheme, schools continuing to underperform after an injection of funds would be expected to take radical steps to lift their game - such as sacking the principal and teachers, or merging with another school. "There may be a bit of argy bargy on the way through but I think it's time to do this," Mr Rudd told Fairfax radio today. "We're prepared to have an argument if that's necessary ... you can't simply allow our kids to be in schools which are consistently underperforming."

Education Minister Julia Gillard has defended the plan to sack underperforming principals and teachers, saying it would be worse to do nothing. Asked if it was a smart move to sack teachers when they were in such high demand, Ms Gillard told ABC radio: "What's not smart is having underperforming schools year after year, decade after decade, not even measuring it, not even recognising it's happening and not even doing anything about it." The Government wanted transparency in school performances and was prepared to bring new resources to make a difference to disadvantaged schools, she said.

Under the plan schools would only be compared with other schools with a similar student population and if there were differences in performance outcomes between comparable schools, then they could be addressed. "What you should measure is if you've got like student populations ... and you can see one school that's rocketing up the attainment level and the other school that's falling behind, then you can go into this school and say; `What's happening here? What are the teachers doing? What's the principal doing? What are the parents doing that's making a difference?," Ms Gillard said. "You can take that best practice to the school that's falling behind."

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson, a former education minister, said the laws minced legislation introduced by the Coalition government. The test for Mr Rudd was to use the laws to withhold funding from schools that did not provide information on student and school performance, he said. "The real challenge for Mr Rudd is ... will he now withhold funding from those state government and non-government schools that do not comply?" Dr Nelson said. "Mr Rudd has the power now to withhold money from states that have not complied with this, and the challenge for him is will he do so."

Source





28 August, 2008

Another Cohort of Kids Failed by Government Schools

Public schooling in too much of America has run down to mediocrity and worse. It's almost inevitable, and worse in some places than others.

At a Greenwich, Conn. elementary school recently the principal was suspended for a little juggle-ology with the school student handbook. Seems that he told a parent that birthday cupcakes needed to be left at the office. See, he said a little later, it's right here in the rules. Only it turned out that the principal had doctored the handbook, to provide, as Pooh-Bah, Lord High Everything Else, once said, a little "corroborative detail intended to provide artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

It's good that the schools in Greenwich are so good that parents only need to worry about the cupcake rules. In the rest of America things are not so good. Twelve to fourteen percent of adults rate "below basic" in literacy, and only 13 percent are rated "proficient" in the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

Now, it's in the nature of the beast that government programs gradually run down. They have a life cycle just like everything else. They start in a fury of indignation, a lust for change, and a millennial hope.

It was that over 200 years ago the Enlightenment philosophe Condorcet submitted a plan to the French Legislative Assembly that called for universal state education to educate the people out of their prejudice and superstition. Although a government program the system would, of course, be free of political control.

It was that over 160 years ago Horace Mann, the father of US public education, urged a rationalization and centralization of the disorganized schools in Massachusetts under a State Board of Education. Apart from anything else, he confidently predicted just before the crime wave of the 1840s, his program would cut the crime rate by 90 percent. Then he went off to Prussia to see its universal state education system for himself.

It was that over 80 years ago John Dewey, the father of progressive education, proposed a system to teach children problem solving and critical thinking skills rather than training and drilling in basic skills. Of course, there is nothing quite like entrusting a project of flexible, progressive education to a bureaucracy of state employees privileged with lifetime job tenure.

Today, 215 years after Condorcet, 160 years after Horace Mann, and 80 years after John Dewey the schools have run down. Today about half the students entering college are unprepared, according to the New York Times.

Yet 180 years ago when the economist J.S. Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, traveled around Britain making an anecdotal survey of education -- at a time when the government actively discouraged education for its revolutionary potential -- he found a rage for education:

"We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school."

You can see why those nineteenth century parents sacrificed so much for their children. It didn't take a rocket scientist back then to see that a basic education in literacy and numeracy was the best way to avoid sending a child "down the pit" or into the textile mill.

Of course, that was in the bad old days, before the age of universal government education. Yet even today, as James Tooley has written, there remain unmet needs in the education sector. How else could it be that unregulated private schools thrive in the slums of Hyderabad and outperform the government schools, and low-cost for-profit schools for the poor are growing in Lima, Peru?

Here in the United States you can't listen to the radio for an hour without hearing an ad for franchised educational tutoring from Sylvan Learning Center or Mathnasium. It's pretty odd, all things considered, that parents elect to pay for such extra tutoring when the governments at all levels in 2008 are expected to spend $837.7 billion, according to usgovernmentspending.com. Using the US Census 2000 number of 80 million Americans between 5 and 24, that's about $10,500 per young American.

It's good to know that the rich can get what they want out of the public schools in Greenwich. We wouldn't want them to go without. But the reason for government education is not to regulate the handling of birthday cupcakes. The purpose is to lift up the poor. And that is exactly what the current system too often fails to do in a nation with 14 percent of adults testing "below basic" in literacy.

As our children return to school this fall, most of them will do just fine. But many poor and inner-city children will not. Yet we know how to fix the inner-city schools. We have known for decades.

And now in Sweden, of all places, school choice is transforming the education system. Some day the American mothers are going to have the right that Swedish mothers enjoy. It is the right to wave farewell to the local government school and say: You just don't care about kids.

Source




Britain: Education in life skills missing

Two years ago I was driving home from work when I swerved to avoid a low-flying pigeon, veered into a hedge and punctured a tyre. Having pulled over, I jumped out and opened the boot with purpose, all the time trying to ignore the fact that I hadn't a clue how to change a car tyre. There I stood, jack pointlessly in hand, sporting a half-ironed shirt, poorly tied tie and shaving rash. To cap things off, a burly man in a four-wheel drive drove past and shook his head. My manliness wasn't just dented; it was battered with a sledgehammer.

I had no alternative but to call Dad, who came out and rescued me. I was a 24-year-old male damsel in distress. "You're useless," said Dad as he effortlessly manoeuvred my spare tyre into place, and I had to agree.

The experience got me thinking. I realised that it wasn't only practical, traditionally manly things like how to change a tyre (or tie a tie properly, iron my shirt and shave like a pro) that I didn't know how to do. I was clueless about pretty much every skill I perceived to be key to coming of age as a modern man. Sophisticated stuff, such as how to hold a baby, give a speech, speed-date successfully, end a relationship without being a git, or grapple with the idea of regular visits to the sexually-transmitted-diseases clinic.

While girls share magazines with dog-eared problem pages, men are offered the choice of perusing breasts or salivating over gadgetry even NASA doesn't need. Don't get me wrong, I love girls and gadgets, but such magazines don't show you how to put up shelves, let alone help you through a divorce. There's no manual, no instruction leaflet to modern manhood. I wasn't even sure what being a 21st-century man meant. So I decided to make my own manual, in the form of a website called 21st Century Boy.

But before I could start, I needed to find out what state 21st-century man was in. So I questioned my male friends and sent out emails asking people to send me lists of things they'd felt expected to know how to do, but had never been taught.

Times have changed a lot since my dad's generation was in its prime - but quite how much was something I'd never really considered. Dad's role was charted out for him: "Be the main breadwinner and leave the wife to look after the kids. Be strong and silent, with biceps the size of your girlfriend's beehive." Clear-cut. Simple. Then things got confusing. Men started growing their hair long and singing about flowers and San Francisco. Then we had "new men" reasserting their masculinity with phallic-shaped car-phones; ladettes chasing lads; and metrosexuals who moisturised more than their missus. Forty years on from my dad's youth, manhood is more confusing than ever. Despite his dismay at my tyre-changing ineptitude, my dad acknowledged that life was a maze for my generation.

My research began to highlight just some of the advanced life skills that today's young man is expected, but frequently ill-equipped, to navigate. A friend of mine trying to impress a new girl, for example, was doing his best to be neither patronising nor sexist by taking his date to see the horror film Hostel - and was surprised when it failed to work as an aphrodisiac.

Then there was the emailer keen to learn some massage skills for the bedroom, but clueless as to where or how to start. A university friend asked my mum how to fry an egg.

Along the way I discovered we're also meant to know how to hold our baby nephews when our sisters nip to the loo; be our mothers' iTunes, eBay and email advisers; sort out our dads' diets and training regimes because we're scared that if we don't, his ticker won't tick for much longer; be agony uncles to our female friends when their boyfriends dump them; book a restaurant but split the bill whenever we take our girlfriends out, not to mention cook them a gourmet meal every Saturday night; and last but not least, pop into the pub and down a pint in less than 30 seconds.

To help my fellow man via my website, I then had to get the inside track on how to do all this stuff. So I asked all the men in my family to share their old-fashioned man skills, I talked to my mum for the first time about girlfriends, talked to ex-girlfriends about how I could have been a better boyfriend, Googled late into the night and braved a clinic to find out what a sexual health check-up involved.

My uncle told me that shaving with cold water cured razor rash. After studying tie fan sites - yes, tie fan sites - I mastered the vicious "V" of the perfectly tied Windsor knot. I endured speed-dating, swiftly followed by internet dating, swiftly followed by a mini-breakdown after I went on a date with a woman old enough to be my mum.

My brother-in-law taught me that the secret of sturdy shelves is to use the right Rawlplugs.

I've succeeded in making testicular cancer a non-taboo topic, and now know how to control aggression in a relationship (tell your girlfriend when she's hurt you rather than bottling it up), as well as mastering mundane tasks such as ironing a shirt in a hurry (start while it's damp and hang it up while still warm) and cleaning a bathroom properly (it's all about the right tools). Along the way I learnt that, while it's not easy dealing with the things you don't necessarily want to deal with, you become more of a man by doing so.

And I'm pleased to say others have followed in my wake. The response to my two-month-old website has been brilliant. It has more than 70 tried-and-tested life skill tips posted so far. The "how to check for testicular cancer" video has resulted in at least two men finding a lump, and the forum has answered delicate questions on penis size and chat-up lines.

When I started this journey I set out to prove to myself that I could get to grips with a world that was passing me by. I took control of my life and I hope my website will encourage other young men to do the same - or at least change a tyre or two. www.21st-century-boy.co.uk

Source





27 August, 2008

The private sector could save British schools

I wouldn't want to frighten the horses this early in the day, or cause you to choke on your All-Bran, but I have to admit to always having had a sneaking regard for Lord Adonis, the education minister. This is partly based on my belief that he is not stupid, and is genuinely motivated to improve our schools system. Also, I have had surprisingly good reports of him from several headmasters at our leading public schools.

How my heart sank, therefore, when, in trying to divert attention from the fact that a large proportion of our youth leaves school without anything approaching a qualification in either maths or English, he came up with the traditional, and very unclever, PR line: that any criticism of the GCSE results was an insult to those students who had worked so hard to get "good grades". This mantra was designed some years ago - I first heard it when our would-be prime minister David Miliband was a schools minister - to stop people like me from being rude about these increasingly devalued qualifications. Sadly, we won't be stopped.

If a grade A at A-level these days is the same as a grade C 20 years ago, then heaven knows what a GCSE pass represents in terms of the old O-level. The ability to turn up and write your name without too many mistakes in it seems nearly enough in several subjects: this year's pass rate is an otherwise improbable 98.4 per cent.

I do not insult children who have just piled up GCSE passes, for they are the victims of the system. But it is important that they and their parents realise that having a clutch of A* results does not make the holder the next Einstein. And having a pile of less exalted passes means that, in the days when their parents were taking O levels, they probably wouldn't have passed any.

As I mentioned last week when writing about A-levels, the reasons for this - and for Lord Adonis's embarrassment - are clear. The pass rate is set so low because in many cases the teaching these children get, and the schools in which they attempt to learn, are awful. This is the Government's fault. It has devalued teaching systematically over the years with the result that only the most saintly and vocational of high-quality people now wish to enter it. Many that do find the experience of teaching in one of our comprehensive schools so demoralising that they soon clear off and do something else. Teachers are routinely assaulted and abused by pupils and by their parents.

Not only is there barely any discipline, there are not the means to enforce discipline. The children, meanwhile are left to the attentions of a series of supply teachers, with whom they can never form the relationship needed for successful learning, or to the products of our Marxist-inspired teacher training colleges. God help them, for no one else will.

When the whining starts about the "inequality" between private and state schools, it is not said often enough that it is hardly about money. It is about the quality of teachers in the private sector, many of whom have not been soiled by the state teacher training system, and who are given the means to do their jobs properly. It is also about supportive parents - supportive both of the child and of the teacher. Above all, it is about an attitude towards learning that seems not to exist in much of the public sector, where teachers are forced to be a combination of child minders and social workers.

If Lord Adonis wants to put this right, the route appears simple. He should ask the private schools to use their expertise to set up schools to replace those that are failing. He should pay them to run them and give them carte blanche to manage them.

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Algebra trouble in CA

Something is terribly wrong with California math education if 13-year-olds aren't ready to tackle Algebra I. Kids from Asia to Europe to Africa take algebra and geometry in the middle school years, and they do just fine. There's no reason why California kids can't match them. Since 1998, California has had the goal that all eighth-graders should take Algebra I. And the state has made progress. Of 491,000 eighth-graders, 248,000 (50.5 percent) take Algebra I. Another 38,000 (7.8 percent) take geometry or Algebra II.

But that leaves 205,000 eighth-graders who are spending their time repeating the same low-level arithmetic over and over. They're dumped into "general math," never moving beyond the fifth- or sixth-grade level. And the curriculum is deadly boring: Here's a type of problem; here's how you solve it; here is a set of problems to solve. Next topic. All sense of discovery, excitement and challenge is lost. And the learning is shallow. No wonder kids zone out.

So to get the state to the next level, the State Board of Education, following a recommendation by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has changed the Algebra I goal to a mandate. All of today's fifth-graders will have to take Algebra I in eighth grade. That puts the focus in the right place: Fifth, sixth and seventh grade. If kids get the right thinking and reasoning skills in the earlier grades, they'll do just fine in eighth grade.

Algebra, contrary to popular belief, is not a set of rules for solving equations. It's about discovering patterns, and that is its power in teaching thinking skills that go far beyond mathematics. To see the difference, here's one elementary example:

289 + 847 = ___ + 848. The arithmetic way of solving this would be to add 289 and 847, getting a total of 1,136. You can then get the answer by subtracting 848 from 1,136. But another way is to look for patterns, "algebrafying" the problem. On one side, 848 is one more than 847 on the other side. So the answer has to be one less than 289.

The state needs to do a better job of integrating algebraic reasoning long before eighth grade. Let's do what it takes, starting with fifth grade, to retool what's happening in math classes. That means working with teachers to build new confidence and competence in math.

To be sure, the state also will have to increase the pool of teachers qualified to teach Algebra I. Many who are teaching eighth-grade general math will have to return to school and take a certain number of units to get their math single-subject credential. (Alternatively, they can get a supplemental credential by passing either the foundational or advanced math California Subject Examination for Teachers.)

And the state will certainly have to find new ways to draw more young people to math teaching. It will also have to make it easier for midcareer professionals and retirees to get a math teaching credential.

The new Algebra I mandate is getting conversations going on all those topics. Schools and districts are crafting solutions. The University of California and California State University systems have teams working on the issue. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell has put out his recommendations. Schwarzenegger is about to release his ideas. This isn't just about eighth grade. It's about increasing the richness of the experience in the fifth, sixth and seventh grades, where math education is standing still for far too many kids.

Source




Don't blame parents for `cotton-wool kids'

Comment from Britain

Today is Playday, a celebration of children's `right to play' - and an ideal time to have a kickabout with the culture of fear that imprisons our kids

An ICM survey commissioned by Play England for Playday - the annual celebration of children's right to play, which takes place today, 6 August - reportedly shows that over-cautious parents are `spoiling' children's playtime. `Children are being denied adventurous play because their parents are nervous about exposing them to risk', warns BBC News (1).

The Playday poll shows that half of children aged 7 to 12 years (51 per cent) are not allowed to climb a tree without adult supervision, and 42 per cent are not allowed to play in their local park without an adult present.

`Constantly wrapping children in cotton wool can leave them ill-equipped to deal with stressful or challenging situations they might encounter later in life', said Adrian Voce, director of Play England, a charity that promotes `free play opportunities'. `Adventurous play both challenges and excites children and helps instil critical life skills,' he said.

According to Play England, this year's Playday theme - `Give us a go!' - highlights children's need to `experience risky and challenging play' in order to ensure they are able to `manage risk in their daily lives' (2). Playday is supported by Persil, the washing powder manufacturer, whose website says the aim is `to shake off the "cotton wool" culture that can limit children's play' (3).

These are commendable aims. There is a real danger that by cocooning, over-protecting and over-supervising children, society might be denying the next generation the opportunity to grow up and become capable, confident adults. This is one of the reasons I decided to write Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, which will be published early next year in the UK and the US (4). I feel strongly that children are losing out on many childhood experiences that my generation took for granted.

Children need space away from adults' watchful eyes - in order to play, experiment, take risks (within a sensible framework provided by adults), test boundaries, have arguments, fight, and learn how to resolve conflicts. Today, they are increasingly denied these opportunities.

But I also feel that in pinning the blame on individual parents and their `over-cautious' anxieties, as Play England is doing today, those who decry the decline of outdoor play are being unfair - and naive. The cause of the cotton-wool kids phenomenon is a broader cultural obsession with risk, which has had a major impact upon policymakers, public institutions and media debate, as well as upon teachers and parents. And in challenging this culture, it is important to be clear about where the real problem lies, and to resist pat explanations for its cause.

In his book Paranoid Parenting, spiked writer and sociologist Professor Frank Furedi described the culture of fear that has led parents to restrict their children's freedom to roam. He showed that parental fears must be understood in the context of a generalised sense of anxiety and risk-aversion, which is particularly strong when it comes to the lives and futures of children.

The fact is that parents are continually told to be `better safe than sorry', and it is far from easy for parents to go against the grain and give their children more freedom than society currently deems acceptable. In April 2008, the New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy wrote an article entitled `Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride The Subway Alone'. She gave her son a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, `just in case he had to make a call', waved him goodbye, and told him she'd see him at home.

She wrote: `I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn't do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, "Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I'll abduct this adorable child instead."' (5)

Skenazy later described how she suddenly became `a lightning rod in the parenting wars': `Mention my story and millions of people not only know about it, they have a very strong opinion about it, and me, and my parenting skills - or utter, shameful lack thereof.' In an interview with spiked in April, she described how she became branded `America's worst mom' simply for allowing her child to do what most people her age had done routinely when they were young.

But there were also many parents who applauded her decision to let her son travel alone. In her spiked interview, Skenazy stressed that many people reacted positively to her column. She has now set up a blog - Free Range Kids - which is filled with stories from parents who give their children the freedom to do things on their own, and with the concerns of parents who would like to give their kids more freedom, but don't (see `I've been labelled the world's worst mom', by Nancy McDermott).

The root of the problem is not parental fears but the fact that parents are continually discouraged from entrusting their children to other adults. In the UK, it is a crime to work with children without first being vetted by the authorities. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, which was passed into law in England and Wales in 2006, requires that millions of adults whose work involves coming into contact with children must undergo Criminal Records Bureau checks. The message this gives to parents and children is to be suspicious of any adult who comes into contact with young people.

Also, it is almost impossible in Britain today to take photos of one's children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews in public places if they are surrounded by other children. The rules governing the use of cameras and camera-phones in swimming pools, parks, at children's parties, pantomimes, school sports days and any other place where children might be present are ubiquitous, and strictly enforced. The kind of photos that have traditionally appeared in many a family album are now treated as being akin to potential child pornography.

In this climate of institutionalised fear and suspicion, it is little wonder that parents do not feel confident about letting their children play unsupervised in the streets or in local parks - especially when it is assumed by many that any parent who does let their child run around is a Bad Parent, and possibly the `worst mom in the world'.

Ultimately parents will only give children the independence they need if they have sufficient trust in other adults - trust in them not to harm their children, but to look out for them. When we grew up our parents assumed that if we got into trouble, other adults - often strangers - would help out. Today that trust does not exist - or, at least, it has been seriously damaged by government policy, media debate and a rising culture of suspicion towards adults' motives.

Only by challenging the safety-obsessed culture that depicts every adult as a potential threat can we start to build a better future - and present - for our children and ourselves. Today's Playday should involve a lot of fun and freedom for children, which is great; let us now build on it by standing up to the paralysing climate of fear and make every day a Playday for youngsters.

Source





26 August, 2008

Most U.S. private schools aren't elitist, just independent

Four years ago, my wife and I toured W.W. King Academy near Batesburg. As we walked the hall with the headmaster, an oddity caught my eye. "Honey," I said, "do you notice something different?" She was stumped. "There aren't any locks on the lockers," I told her. "We don't need them," the headmaster said. That sold me.

I can't remember any of the sales pitch we got - just the lockers. Two of my sons and my daughter now attend this unique school, and we couldn't be happier. Like many independent schools in South Carolina, W.W. King Academy does things a little differently.

Sadly, independent schools are often lumped into one big group by the media and politicians. They call them "private" schools. "Private" as in elitist. "Private" as in doctors and lawyers only. "Private" as in if you aren't just like us, don't apply.

The reality of the typical independent school experience is far different. Most of the schools in the S.C. Independent Schools Association have a K-12 enrollment of less than 300 students. The families of middle-class working folks far outnumber the rich folks. King Academy has a current enrollment of 250 students and could comfortably handle 300. This hardly presents a threat to replace even the smallest public school. So why are independent schools pummeled in the press during the big debate on school choice?

Parents of independent school children choose these venues to educate their children for a variety of reasons. Many parents who have enrolled their children in independent schools make significant financial sacrifices to make this experience possible. For many families, an independent school education means choosing between a vacation and an education. Is it worth the sacrifice to know that your children will start the day with a group devotion led by a caring member of the staff? How about smaller classrooms with curriculums free from bureaucratic restraints? Is it comforting to know that practically every adult at a school can call your child by name? How about giving your child the opportunity to be a part of whatever sports team he or she wants to try?

Is it reassuring to know that the possibility of exposure to drugs and alcohol is greatly diminished? Is it nice to have all of your children on one campus? Is it inspiring to know that your child is surrounded by other children who have been sent to the same place with the same goals? I spoke with a teacher at our school last year who had just joined the staff after working at a public school. She said the behavior of the students was so different she felt like she was on a vacation. Doesn't everyone desire this kind of environment for his or her child? The problem is that in many cases, the government can no longer provide the alternative that parents seek.

The current tussle over vouchers will play out eventually. Independent schools will continue to grow and prosper regardless, because they provide something that people want and need. Would it help independent schools if parents were given control of their tax dollars and empowered to choose a school that can fit their goals for their children's education? Sure it would. The failures of public schools, especially in disadvantaged areas, are well documented. Clearly, given the opportunity, parents would choose another option.

As for the argument that public money shouldn't be given to independent schools because the government could not monitor their progress - that's just laughable. Quite simply, independent schools have to perform. If they don't, their customers leave. Independent schools could do twice the job with half the money. They are already doing it.

My oldest son graduated from a terrific public high school, Lexington High School. It's really like a small college. Frankly, I think some small colleges would be jealous. We drive right past Lexington High School these days, though. It's too big for us. We drive by to join the other 170 families who comprise our independent school family. It is a journey rooted in faith, commitment and teamwork. Funds are always tight.

If we need to build something, we raise the money and likely do the work ourselves. If it breaks, we fix it. If the students need something, we find a way. It's hard work sometimes. Independent school families take full ownership and provide all of the time and money to make our schools successful. So spare us the elitist tag. It's a labor of love to send a child to an independent school. Lots of labor, and lots of love, but it's worth it. I wish more people who don't currently have the money could have the opportunity. One good thing so far though: We haven't had to buy any locks.

Source




The British government is too embarrassed to admit its own absurd preschool rules

Ministers are producing misleading "propaganda" which skirts around new targets for the under-5s in an attempt to head off a revolt by parents of nursery children, campaigners claim today. Under the new Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework which comes into force next week, all preschool children in private, voluntary or state childcare in England will be expected to meet 69 literacy, numeracy and problem-solving targets based on, and even using, computers and other technology.

But a booklet for parents on the framework contains no mention of any of the statutory literacy or numeracy targets, emphasising only that children will be expected to "learn through play" and "develop at their own pace".

Two of the most contentious targets are that children should "write their own names . . . and begin to form simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation" and "use phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words". The booklet states: "It's not about introducing a curriculum for young children. Or making them read or write before they're ready. Quite the reverse." This is despite the guidance for nurseries and childcarers referring to the targets as "learning and development requirements that all early years providers must by law deliver".

The guidance also refers to "the early learning goals which young children should have acquired by the end of the academic year in which they reach five" and "the matters, skills and processes which are required to be taught to young children".

Kim Simpson of the Open Eye campaign which has been set up with the backing of child-development experts, parents and leading children's authors to campaign for improvement to the EYFS, claims that the booklet is misleading. "It makes a point of mentioning the welfare requirements but the statutory learning requirements, which have caused so much disagreement and dissent, are noticeable by their absence," she told The Times. Ms Simpson, who has run a Montessori centre for preschool children in Richmond, West London, for more than 30 years, added that the booklet would confuse parents.

In July the Government bowed to pressure from critics and said that nurseries would be able to opt out of the two most contentious literacy targets if parents agreed to it. Ms Simpson said that anyone reading the booklet would not see anything in it that would justify a nursery seeking an exemption. "There is plenty in the statutory framework that both parents and practitioners have taken strong and principled issue with because of its developmental inappropriateness," she said. "But, in stark contrast, there is pretty much nothing that any parent or practitioner would take issue with in this parents' booklet. "[The booklet] seems to amount to little more than a propaganda exercise specially launched by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and designed to head off any `parents' revolt' about the EYFS," she said.

Leading authors and child development experts have criticised some of the statutory targets in the EYFS, claiming that they are unrealistic and risk harming preschool children by setting back their development. They also accuse Beverley Hughes, the Children's Minister, of ignoring her advisers and shelving research commissioned by her department that found that tutoring children to read using basic phonics and simple sentences does not improve their success once they start school.

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The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling

When World War II ended, Congress authorized a tax cut to take effect January 1, 1946. Young America, a publication distributed through public schools, ran an article in its December 13, 1945, issue discussing the measure and presenting a brief history of American taxation. The article concluded with a section titled "Then & Now: Taxes Serve Us." "One hundred years ago," the writer stated, "our government helped the citizens by maintaining order. It did little else. Its expenses were low, and so taxes were low." He then quoted Benjamin Franklin's observation in Poor Richard's Almanack in 1758: "It would be a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their income." The Young America writer continued, "In 1940, our Federal, State and local governments taxed us one-fifth of our incomes. But Franklin could not have guessed the tremendous growth of this country."

The writer then offered justification for such high taxes: "As students, our young citizens are given school buildings. Our government does hundreds of things for us in our everyday life." He finished with a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: "I like to pay taxes. It is purchasing civilization." The article vividly illustrates the overriding intent of public schooling, which has always been indoctrination of the young.

Indoctrination itself is not illegitimate. In fact, it is an intrinsic part of child rearing. Out of love and concern, parents explicitly or implicitly formulate desired outcomes for the young lives they have created. Parents generally hope their children will adhere to their own traditions and belief systems, which they attempt to inculcate.

The question parents must face is, "Who will do the indoctrinating?" Schooling is an adjunct to child rearing. The schooling options available force parents to make decisions regarding the level of autonomy they wish to exercise. They retain the greatest control over their children's developing beliefs by schooling them at home. An alternative is to enroll their children in an institution where they are certain the indoctrination conforms to their own values, such as a religious school.

When parents send a child to a tax-funded school, they sacrifice their autonomy to alien interests. The state has goals of its own that are distinct from those of parents. Parents are able to economize by availing themselves of a "free" school, but the bargain is Faustian. The child is subjected to indoctrination outside parental control. The price of tax-funded schooling is that parents give up their children to become instruments of the state. Under totalitarian regimes, the subjugation of parental belief systems to those of the state is blatant. Schoolchildren are propagandized into the doctrines of the leadership, their thoughts molded to the state's purposes.

But even under a "democratic" regime the state operates manipulatively for its own ends. Those who govern generally like to continue governing. Their governance is more easily maintained when the governed are passive and docile. The state propaganda machine must convince the citizenry of government's benevolence. Schoolchildren are taught, as in the Young America article, that government "gives" them things and "does" things for them.

Government schools inevitably become battlegrounds for control by ideological adversaries. The nature of the indoctrination changes as advocates of particular ideologies wax and wane in their power to influence curricula. The constant is that parents have relinquished direct control over what their children are taught to believe. This battle has been going on ever since the modern public school emerged in the first half of the 1800s. Education historian Joel Spring stated, "In the Western world of the nineteenth century, various political and economic groups believed that government-operated schools could be a mechanism for assuring the distribution of their particular ideology to the population. In this sense, public schools were the first mass medium designed to reach an entire generation."[1]

Indoctrination through compulsory schooling originated early in the nation's history. Massachusetts Bay Colony was organized unabashedly as a theocratic government that required citizens to adhere to stipulated religious beliefs. In 1642 the Massachusetts General Court passed an act requiring compulsory education of children and giving town selectmen the authority to maintain orthodox teaching and punish recalcitrant parents. The civil government was in charge of the schools, which were supported by taxes. R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin wrote, "Here was the principle that government had authority to control schools, and it was well enunciated in the New England colonies early in their histories. It was a principle of great importance, for it set a precedent in American life establishing the authority of the state to promote education as a public and civil matter."[2]

However, private schoolmasters were in business in Boston by the mid-1660s, according to records examined by Robert Francis Seybolt. The number of private teachers gradually enlarged to the end of the seventeenth century, partly in response to market demand. He wrote, "The two public schools [in Boston] . . . admitted only boys who were at least seven years of age and had learned to read. Girls as well as boys were welcome, at any age, in the private schools."[3] In the 1700s in New England, Butts and Cremin noted, private schools flourished as "colonial legislatures showed a slackening of effort to require compulsory education and gave greater freedom to private groups to educate children in schools of their own preference."[4]

A wide variety of curricula was offered in eighteenth-century Boston private schools, Seybolt found. "Unhampered by the control of the town meeting, and little influenced by traditional modes of procedure, these institutions were free to grow with the town. This they did as conditions suggested it. The result was a remarkably comprehensive program of instruction which appears to have met every contemporary educational need."[5]

Seybolt articulated the benefits of private-sector schooling. "The private schools were free to originate, and to adapt their courses of instruction to the interests of the students. The masters sought always to keep strictly abreast of the time, for their livelihood depended on the success with which they met these needs. No such freedom or incentive was offered the masters of the public schools."[6]

This principle was overwhelmed by the swelling tide of nationalism of the early 1800s. Proponents of common schools, or tax-funded elementary schools requiring compulsory attendance, viewed them as crucial vehicles for indoctrinating young people in Americanism. The movement intensified as immigration increased from continental European cultures that lacked democratic traditions. Benjamin Labaree, president of Middlebury College in Vermont, expressed popular fears in an 1849 lecture before the American Institute of Instruction. He asked, "Shall these adopted citizens become a part of the body politic, and firm supporters of liberal institutions, or will they prove to our republic what the Goths and Huns were to the Roman Empire?"[7]

Wartime Indoctrination

Chauvinistic indoctrination becomes a useful tool of the state in wartime, as when President Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to build support for American participation in World War I and to blunt opposition by constituencies with European roots. The nation's high schools were prime propaganda targets and received hundreds of thousands of copies of a CPI-produced pamphlet designed to stir anti-German sentiment. "Germany does not really wage war," the pamphlet stated.

"She assassinates, massacres, poisons, tortures, intrigues; she commits every crime in the calendar, such as arson, pillage, murder, and rape."[8] Joel Spring commented, "From the standpoint of the public schools, [the CPI] was the first major attempt to bring the goals of locally controlled schools into line with the policy objectives of the federal government."[9]

An influential CPI official was William Bagley, who "believed that local control of educational policy was a major hindrance in adapting the public schools to the needs of the United States as a world leader. . . . The combination of the war and the new national spirit opened the door for the federal government to exercise leadership in a national educational policy. Included in Bagley's proposals was a call for federal financing of the public school system."[10]

During the 1920s, local schools suffered for being dominated by the wrong kinds of people on their boards, according to public-school champion George S. Counts. His research showed that "for the most part, [board members] are drawn from the more favored economic and social classes. They are also persons who have enjoyed unusual educational advantages. . . . No longer is the ordinary American community homogeneous as regards interests, philosophy, and ideals. Hence the need of guarding the integrity of the various minority groups."[11] The laboring classes were expressing "lack of confidence in the public school on the ground that it is under the control of the great capitalistic and employing interests."[12] As the high school of that era evolved and expanded in curricula, he noted, "the institution offers itself as a powerful agency of propaganda to any group able to secure dominion over it."[13]

Since then the dominion of the federal government over schooling has grown to a scope of which Bagley would approve. Its power, abetted by the activism that the collectivist Counts advocated for teacher organizations, enables it to be the leading propagandist in educational policy.

But the nationalist Bagley would be disappointed in the ideology that has accompanied the federal growth. The current pre-eminent public-school propaganda indoctrinates students in an anti-nationalistic collectivist environmentalism. Meanwhile, Counts's "capitalistic and employing interests" attempt to re-establish influence because so many products of public schools need remediation before they can become employable.

Proponents of public schooling argue against the complete privatization of schooling on the grounds that the poor would not be able to afford tuition and that some parents would not provide schooling for their children, leaving them "uneducated." However, the rampant levels of ignorance, subliteracy, and hostility to learning that characterize tax-funded schools argue that the present system is itself not serving the best interests of students.

Instead it is clear whose interests are being advanced. Fifty-four years ago the writer in Young America was moved to emphasize in italics that era's apparently high tax rates. Since then the average tax burden has doubled. Yet, as one of my acquaintances has commented, "Americans today are in a stupor." In other words, the tax-supported school system has triumphed. Americans are behaving exactly the way those who govern desire them to behave.

Children who are turned over to the state become molded by the state. Most parents cannot conceive of a totally privatized alternative because they themselves have been indoctrinated by public schooling to believe in its alleged necessity. However, it is fallacious for parents to think that children can escape government schooling without having their traditions and beliefs subverted. "Free" schooling is seductively attractive in the short run, but it has long-term costs. The dismantling of tax-funded schooling will not be accomplished until more and more parents say, "My child does not belong to the state."

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25 August, 2008

Congress flunks in higher education act

Colleges that take taxpayer money must be held accountable for how much students actually learn

It's fair to say that the latest college rankings from U.S. News and World Report, due out Aug. 22, will be more widely read than the Higher Education Act signed last week by President Bush. There's a good reason for that, and it's not because the act is 1,158 pages long and a foot high. College-bound students often use the magazine's annual rankings to find the best schools to apply to. As imperfect as these comparisons are, the rankings have shaken up higher education.

Unfortunately, the rankings mainly measure prestige and inputs - such as SAT scores - and fail to satisfy a demand to know which schools deliver on the quality of education achieved by graduates. As Congress sought to renew the Higher Education Act - first passed in 1965 - the Bush administration and some in Congress wanted government to hold colleges accountable for such "learning outcomes."

Billions of taxpayer dollars are spent on these institutions or are given in student loans, and yet taxpayers know next to nothing about their return on this investment.

The university lobby, however, rose up against the idea of providing an objective measure for consumers on educational quality. Professors joined in this effort, claiming government cannot withhold money from schools by using the same measuring stick for all schools. That would infringe on academic freedom, they insist.

They're right in that scholarship must be free of federal interference. But given the billions in federal aid, professors should be measured on the results of their core mission, education.

In the end, lawmakers succumbed to this lobby. They not only ditched the idea of providing data on quality, they barred the Education Department from doing so on its own. So this act is notable more for what it lacks - or prevents - than for what it does.

Fortunately, many schools are willing to be measured by private groups, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment or the National Survey of Student Engagement. Such surveys serve as the industry's answer to the US News rankings. But it is up to each school whether to release their own survey data, so rankings are difficult. Most colleges still resist knowing how well they compare in learning outcomes.

In passing this act, Congress did not balk at one consumer demand: reining in tuition hikes. Colleges with the highest and lowest tuitions will now be ranked, while the top 5 percent with the biggest tuition increases will need to justify their increases and reveal plans to control them. And in another step to rein in tuition rises, states will be penalized if they do not maintain steady spending for state schools.

But Congress rejected two good ideas: requiring schools to reveal "merit" aid for students from wealthy families and to provide incoming freshmen with a four-year schedule of expected tuitions. This act does make an effort to improve the access and affordability of higher education but fails in delivering on the most important aspect: accountability for quality. Without that, it may be difficult to ensure America's colleges and universities remain the best in the world. Perhaps Congress won't wait years to fix this lapse.

Source




German authorities: Children may 'visit' parents

Youth Welfare Office relents with homeschooling family

Authorities in one of Germany's regional Jugendamt, or Youth Welfare Offices, without explanation have relented and given five sisters permission to "visit" their parents, from whom they were taken by government officers earlier this year over the family's homeschooling. According to a report from the Home School Legal Defense Association, which has been involved in defending a number of homeschooling families under attack in Germany, authorities this week confirmed the Gorber sisters could return to their home to visit their parents "temporarily." The girls have been detained in "youth homes" for the last eight months with only minimal visitation with their family because of court concerns over the family's homeschooling.

The HSLDA said the permission to visit their home extends "until the beginning of September," but no word was available on what would be required of the family at that point.

Lawyers for the family have argued there is no valid reason for the government to retain custody of the girls. Even so, a court decision earlier this month ordered the five to remain in state custody. The children were taken into custody by the government in January - in a SWAT-style raid on the family home while the parents made a trip to a hospital. A recent court ruling released a 3-year-old back into his parents' custody but ordered the five sisters to be kept in state custody. The ruling also included an order for the parents to be evaluated by a psychologist.

A family friend reported to HSLDA that the "children have held up well under the circumstances and have not been susceptible to manipulation by the Jugendamt or other children in the homes. This is a real testimony of the strength of the family and the parents."

The Gorbers have homeschooled because of their religious convictions, HSLDA said. In Germany, the sexualization of school curriculum is advanced, and Christian perspectives are repressed, critics have said. The parents have promised to fight until they regain permanent custody of all their children.

A similar raid happened in 2007 when the police seized Melissa Busekros, then 15, from her home in Erlangen and kept her in foster homes for months with severe restrictions on family visits. When she turned 16 and was subject to different national laws concerning her education, she escaped from her foster home and now is back at home, pressing her case against the government for violating her civil rights.

The HSLDA said there are concerns attacks will increase, since German President Horst Kohler signed a law recently that actually makes it easier for the Jugendamt to take children from their families. The new law allows removal if authorities consider the children "endangered." The term "endangered," however, not defined in the law and courts already have ruled homeschooling is "an abuse of parental rights."

Another homeschooling family, Juergen and Rosemarie Dudek, were sentenced in July to 90 days in jail each for homeschooling, and they are appealing their case.

Other families simply have fled Germany, seeking refuge in England, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and even Iran, the HSLDA said.

Michael Donnelly, a staff attorney for the homeschool organization, said Germany simply is "out of step" by choosing to clamp down on concerned parents who follow their conscience in educating their own children. "This kind of behavior by the Federal Republic of Germany is very disturbing," he said. Germany's policies are in conflict with most of the rest of the European Union, and even the U.N. has criticized its attacks on parental rights.

HSLDA officials estimate there are some 400 homeschool families in Germany, virtually all of them either forced into hiding or facing court actions.

Source




Clash with university over beliefs strands student

Seeking resolution of master's degree work at Temple

A university student who challenged his school's "speech code" and won a ruling in federal court that it was vague, overbroad and stifled student speech, including his Christian views, is continuing his battle with Temple University because the school has - three years after he completed it - declined to provide a grade on his master's thesis, thus effectively denying him his degree.

The Alliance Defense Fund recently announced that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed the district court victory by Christian DeJohn, who is a sergeant in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. The ADF handled DeJohn's successful request in the courts for a permanent injunction against Temple University's speech code, and after a district judge sided with DeJohn, the appeals court confirmed "speech cannot be prohibited in the absence of a tenable threat of disruption. Furthermore, the policy's use of 'hostile,' 'offensive,' and 'gender-motivated' is, on its face, sufficiently broad and subjective that they 'could conceivably be applied to cover any speech' of a 'gender-motivated' nature 'the content of which offends someone.'"

Continued the appeals court ruling, "This could include 'core' political and religious speech, such as gender politics and sexual morality. The policy provides no shelter for core protected speech."

DeJohn's career, however, is not advancing as he planned. He told WND the judge's order did not include instructions for Temple to grade his thesis, so more than three years after he completed it under school supervision, it still sits. DeJohn now is serving at Fort Meade in Maryland, and told WND how the problems developed. He said he was enrolled at Temple in Philadelphia, but left about seven months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because he was deployed to Bosnia. While he was in Bosnia, he started getting anti-war e-mails, called "teach-ins" from Richard Immerman, chairman of Temple's history department. DeJohn responded with a request that the e-mails be stopped.

Then when he returned from active duty and tried to re-enroll in Temple as a graduate student, he was told he had been expelled because he had not asked permission to leave the university. DeJohn produced copies of his written request, with copies of his orders to deploy, and officials then attributed the situation to "computer error." He eventually was allowed back into school and worked on his master's degree in American and Military History.

However, two professors whose classes he took, Gregory Urwin's "Comparative History of Modern Warfare" and Immerman's "American Diplomatic History," included diatribes against President Bush, the military and the war, he said. During the course of those lectures, DeJohn expressed his opinion. He also finished his thesis, "The Sherman Tank in World War II: For Want of a Gun," in 2005 following payments for "thesis guidance" to the school, but he claims because of the dispute, the school simply declined to address his project.

However, Ray Betzner, a Temple spokesman, told WND the court simply did not rule in DeJohn's favor on the issues regarding the thesis. "In short, his academic performance just wasn't good enough," Temple attorney Joe H. Tucker, Jr. said. "It had nothing to do with his First Amendment rights and everything to do with Temple professor's academic freedom to grade a student's poorly written, poorly constructed . thesis."

However, the primary reader of his thesis, Dr. Jay Lockenour, was ready to sign off on it but when DeJohn needed a secondary reader, Urwin refused to approve it, DeJohn said. He said Lockenour apparently believed it would be resolved, and advised him to register to graduate in May 2005, but it didn't happen. Despite those circumstances, DeJohn said Temple reported to his student loan companies that he had obtained a diploma, causing his loans in the amount of $50,000 to default, damaging his credit.

DeJohn said he believed Temple had initiated a campaign against him, punishing him for openly discussing his opinions while he was a student. He even wrote to Temple's president, David Adamany, seeking his help regarding the obstacles he was facing. Subsequently, when asked under oath if he was aware of DeJohn's dilemma, Adamany denied being aware of allegations about violations of academic freedoms. DeJohn, also under oath, produced copies of their communication. Shortly thereafter, in a front page story in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Jan. 20, 2006, Adamany announced his resignation. Betzner insists that he "retired."

DeJohn eventually sought help from Accuracy in Academia and a Pennsylvania state representative, and later followed the discrimination complaint filed by the Alliance Defense Fund. But even today, DeJohn's academic status remains in limbo because his status of his thesis hasn't been resolved. And the campaign apparently even has gone beyond that. DeJohn reported when he applied for a job as historian at The Army Military History Institute at The Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, Urwin apparently e-mailed one of his former students who worked there, saying that he understood that DeJohn had applied for the job. He stated that all veterans are mentally imbalanced because they have been trained to kill by the Army.

DeJohn said he never even was interviewed for the post, but under a Freedom of Information Act request, he obtained documents showing that he was rated No. 1 out of 62 candidates for that position.

Source





24 August, 2008

McCain Is the Pro-Choice Candidate -- in education

Obama would do the bidding of the teachers unions, and children would pay the price.

By PETE DU PONT

America's first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992. Sixteen years later, there are 4,128 charter schools educating 1.24 million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia. Another 300 to 400 are expected to open in the coming school year.

Charter schools are public schools, but they are very different. The Center for Education Reform's 2008 Annual Survey reports that responding charter schools are one-third smaller than conventional public schools, with about 348 students, compared with 521. They spend less-about $7,625 per student, compared with $9,138 in public schools-and they receive only about 61% of the per pupil government funding that other public schools receive. They nevertheless offer longer school days, longer school years, often performance-based pay for teachers and more innovative curricula than conventional public schools. The majority of charter school students are classified as minority (52%), at risk (50%) or low income (54%).

Most important, charter school students often outperform other public school students. The Center for Education Reform reports that last year in Colorado, 73.3% of third- through eight-grade charter school students "performed at or above proficiency in reading, as opposed to 67.7% of conventional public school students." In California charter middle school's median Academic Performance Index was 767, compared with 726 in traditional middle schools.

Access to better schools can be aided by the availability of vouchers. Four years ago President Bush signed into law the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program, which made federally financed school choice available to disadvantaged children of low-income families in the capital. They can receive vouchers worth up to $7,500 a year to attend private schools of their choice. Some 1,900 students, from families with an average income of $23,000 a year, are now participating in the voucher program. They are attending better schools, they are doing better educationally (after just a few years), and their parents are more satisfied. So popular is the program that there are about four applicants for every school choice opening, meaning that 7,000 Washington families would like to have their children attend better schools of their choice. Even those families that do not benefit from the limited voucher scholarship program can benefit from attending charter schools. Some 25,000 Washington students are expected to do so this fall.

The contrast between the Washington public and charter schools is dramatic. The District of Columbia spends $13,400 per public school student, the third highest in the nation. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the district ranked last in math scores and next to last in reading scores among all urban public school systems in the U.S. The Center for Education Reform found that students in charter elemtary schools were more proficient in math than conventional students by nine percentage points, 38% to 29%, and in reading by five percentage points, 43% to 38%.

Washington is the best example of three important educational conclusions: School choice (charter schools and vouchers) is improving the education of students; it is wildly popular among parents with children in public schools; and it provokes vigorous opposition from by teachers unions and the liberal political establishment. And it is an issue that deeply divides the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, which means the November election may well determine its future.

School vouchers do not drain money from the district's public schools, for they are funded by federal government appropriations (and in any case represent only about 1.5% of its education spending). But congressional Democrats vigorously oppose the Opportunity Scholarship Program and are working to end it. The program expires at the end of the 2009-10 school year, and if it is not renewed, the 1,900 students who have been given an opportunity to get out of failed public schools would be sent back to schools that are doing much worse than the charters they attend. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's nonvoting House delegate is strongly opposed to vouchers--"I can tell you that the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this [the Opportunity Scholarship] program"--and all but four Democrats voted against the voucher bill when in 2003 it passed the House on a 205-203 vote.

Teachers unions are also opposed. The National Education Association says "there is no need to set up new threats to schools for not performing" (they have that backwards); that "vouchers were not designed to help low-income children" (but they do); and "despite desperate efforts to make the voucher debate about school choice and improving opportunities for low-income students, vouchers remain an elitist strategy." But of course there is nothing elitist about helping low-income children leave failed public schools.

Barack Obama's thinking matches the NEA's. In February he said, "If there was any argument for vouchers, it was, 'Let's see if the experiment works.' And if it does, whatever my preconception, you do what is best for the kids." But when that drew public attention, his campaign reminded us "that throughout his career he has voted against voucher proposals" and his education plan "does not include vouchers, in any shape or form." Earlier this summer he spoke of his opposition to vouchers and the "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice"--very similar to the language the NEA president used in criticizing John McCain for embracing "the tired old rhetoric on vouchers."

Mr. Obama's 15-page education plan does not mention vouchers or charter schools, yet he, like 45% of other senators, has chosen to send his daughters to a private school. The Obamas may receive a voucher of sorts: The University of Chicago, where Michelle Obama works, offers discounts to employees who send their children to the university's Lab School.

Sen. McCain is of the opposite judgment; he is strongly for school choice. His Web site says, "Public education should be defined as one in which our public support for a child's education follows that child into the school the parent chooses," and "school choice for all who want it, and expansion of Opportunity Scholarships . . . will all be a part of a serious agenda of education reform."

School choice and charter schools are today the most important example we have of how to create better schools and improve children's education. That charter schools are less expensive and academically superior to public schools is what we need to understand about our education system.

Source




Britain's top universities 'favouring the poor'

Leading universities have been accused of discriminating against middle class pupils by favouring less-qualified students from poorer backgrounds. An investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals five out of 20 elite institutions in the UK make lower grade offers to sixth-formers from poor-performing schools and deprived homes. The London School of Economics, Bristol, Nottingham, Newcastle, and Edinburgh all allow staff to choose students with worse grades. Overall, almost two-thirds of the elite Russell Group - which represents research-intensive universities - attach weighting to candidates' schools, home postcodes and whether family members also attended university as a tiebreaker during the application process.

The findings will fuel allegations of "social engineering" at the most sought-after universities. It comes just days after Oxford was criticised for using postcodes to identify students from less well-off areas when interviewing candidates. Under Government rules, all higher education institutions have a duty to encourage more students from non-traditional backgrounds to apply.

But Martin Stephen, high master of St Paul's, a fee-paying school in west London, branded the move "immensely dangerous and hugely unfair". "One is in very close danger of punishing a child for coming from a good home or going to a good school," he said. Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: "There would be uproar if we tried to take into account this data when selecting our Olympic team. We don't seem to be able to recognise talent and develop talent as we do in the sporting arena."

At present just a fifth of students at Russell Group universities come from deprived backgrounds, compared to almost a third at other institutions. Three-quarters are from state schools, even though they account for 93 per cent of children educated in the UK. The Telegraph analysed admissions policies at all 20 universities.

Documents reveal that students from poor homes can receive vastly differing advantages depending on where they apply. Twelve universities instructed tutors to use some form of routinely gathered data about students' socio-economic or educational background as a standard part of the admissions procedure. An admissions policy drawn up by the LSE says: "The lower the average performance of the school, the more weight may be given to the candidate whose past examination performance significantly exceeds their school's average performance." Five universities also allow staff to use flexible grade offers to take applicants' backgrounds into consideration.

Newcastle University says: "Admissions tutors have discretion to make conditional offers which differ from the typical entry requirement, if in their judgement the typical entry requirement would not be appropriate because of the particular circumstances of an applicant." A spokesman for Bristol laid out a scenario in which two candidates apply for the same place, "one of whom is predicted to achieve AAB at A-level while the other is heading for AAA".

"The first attends a school that is dealing with many educational challenges and where AAB is exceptional," he said. "The second attends a school where AAA is not unusual. He or she has an uninspiring reference and a lacklustre personal statement. We think that offering a place to the first candidate rather than the second is both fair and in tune with our desire to recruit the students with the strongest academic qualities."

All of the universities who make use of personal information defended their decision, claiming that it allows them to operate a fair policy by identifying potential and not just prior achievement. But eight Russell Group universities - including Birmingham, Cardiff, Imperial, Queen's University Belfast and Southampton - consider the use of such information to be unfair. Some also said it breached their equal opportunities policies and could trigger a decline in academic standards.

An Imperial College London spokesman said: "Admission is based on academic merit... the College will not lower its admission standards as a means of widening access."

Source




Australia: School choice is 'guesswork' says Federal education boss

Julia Gillard says parents have no guarantee their child's school meets a minimum standard of education, acknowledging that choosing the best school is little more than guesswork. In an interview with The Weekend Australian, the Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister said parents choosing a school for their child were forced to rely on rumour and prejudice, rather than being able to make a decision based on facts. "A lot of guessing goes into the decision and there should be more objective information," she said. "Giving full information to people would mean that they can actually know what's going on and, rather than judging individual schools or school systems on the basis of myths, rumour, prejudice or perception, people would have the facts,"

Ms Gillard called on the states and territories to agree to greater transparency of school results and features. Inspired by the changes made in New York City by the education chancellor Joel Klein, Ms Gillard is proposing schools make public as much information as they can, from the qualifications of their teachers to comparing their students' performance and improvement against groups of similar schools.

One of the features of the New York system is that schools consistently failing to meet benchmarks are closed, giving parents confidence that their child's school is meeting expected standards. Asked whether parents could have the same confidence in Australian schools, Ms Gillard agreed they could not. "I'm not sure that is the case at the moment. Perhaps as worrying as that statement is, from the point of view of being the federal Education Minister, I couldn't tell because the amount of information that's available doesn't enable me to make that judgment in a meaningful way," she said. "So I think the more information that's available to parents, the better. "People will still make choices for a wide variety of reasons."

Speaking at his Manhattan office yesterday, Mr Klein said he and Ms Gillard spoke at length about the need for federal governments to set clear national standards in education. "There should be very strong national standards and national assessments so we can say what it actually means to graduate from a high school, rather than letting each state set its own benchmark," he said. "Australian children are going to have to compete with kids all over the world, so the opportunity to set really strong standards and make the information about them transparent to parents, to educators, to everybody, seems to me to be a very intelligent central government function."

He conceded that letter grading of schools, while important, was not fundamental to the transparency process. "Put it this way, if she (Ms Gillard) were to make everything transparent, showing progress, tying it to meaningful national assessments but without putting a letter grade on schools, she would have accomplished a great deal," he said. "I think the power of letter grades is that they focus the mind. But data and information will also focus the mind, and you never want the best to be the enemy of the good."

Ms Gillard envisages a system in which schools report their students' achievements and the progress they are making, which would be compared with a group of peer schools with a similar student population. She said school reports should also include the staffing numbers and qualifications, welfare indicators about the students and how it defines its mission. The Government is still determining how to report student and school achievement, whether as performance bands or levels of proficiency as in New York.

"Peer grouping methodologies are very important to enable genuine comparisons of like with like," she said. "We know that kids across the nation go to schools with a set of abilities and challenges and we know that schools that cater for disadvantaged communities tend to be working with more students who need extra assistance."

Ms Gillard said the purpose was not to shame schools and students, but to identify those in need of extra assistance, and share the methods used by the most successful schools. "What's got a negative reaction from many around the place is the sense that was pushed very strongly by the Howard government that all of this was going to be about raw scores," she said. "School leaders and schoolteachers I think would respond well to feeling there is going to be an objective measurement and understanding of the nature of the particular task they face."

The New York system is underpinned by giving schools resources, giving the principals the autonomy to spend them, and then hold the principals accountable for meeting their own goals. Schools must set goals each year and are expected to show an improvement in their students every year, so that even the top-performing schools will not receive the highest rating if their students show no improvement. Schools failing to meet benchmarks year on year are restructured or closed while those that perform well receive financial rewards.

Ms Gillard ruled out a system of rewards and penalties in Australia and said the Government was looking to direct extra resources to the areas of most need. "We're looking at a model about supplementing resources to make a difference for disadvantaged schools rather than a rewards-based model," she said. "One would be in a better position to work out which schools need extra assistance, a better position to then measure the difference that the extra assistance and implemented programs make. That evaluation would enable us to identify and spread best practice."

Ms Gillard said bringing greater transparency to school performance and characteristics would confer greater accountability in the system, and motivate schools to improve each year. "I do think transparency of information in and of itself will spur people to do better and they will all want to be seen to be doing better," she said.

Source





23 August, 2008

Protect Our Kids from Preschool

Barack Obama says he believes in universal preschool and if he's elected president he'll pump "billions of dollars into early childhood education." Universal preschool is now second only to universal health care on the liberal policy wish list. Democratic governors across the country -- including in Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts and Virginia -- have made a major push to fund universal preschool in their states. But is strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool good for them? Not according to available evidence.

"Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes," says James Heckman, a University of Chicago Noble laureate in economics whose work Mr. Obama and preschool activists routinely cite. "But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations."

Mr. Obama asserted in the Las Vegas debate on Jan. 15 that every dollar spent on preschool will produce a 10-fold return by improving academic performance, which will supposedly lower juvenile delinquency and welfare use -- and raise wages and tax contributions. Such claims are wildly exaggerated at best.

In the last half-century, U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16%. But fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- the nation's report card -- have remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s.

Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now -- two major organizations pushing universal preschool -- refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia -- both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago -- paint an equally dismal picture.

A 2006 analysis by Education Week found that Oklahoma and Georgia were among the 10 states that had made the least progress on NAEP. Oklahoma, in fact, lost ground after it embraced universal preschool: In 1992 its fourth and eighth graders tested one point above the national average in math. Now they are several points below. Ditto for reading. Georgia's universal preschool program has made virtually no difference to its fourth-grade reading scores. And a study of Tennessee's preschool program released just this week by the nonpartisan Strategic Research Group found no statistical difference in the performance of preschool versus nonpreschool kids on any subject after the first grade.

What about Head Start, the 40-year-old, federal preschool program for low-income kids? Studies by the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly found that although Head Start kids post initial gains on IQ and other cognitive measures, in later years they become indistinguishable from non-Head Start kids.

Why don't preschool gains stick? Possibly because the K-12 system is too dysfunctional to maintain them. More likely, because early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don't begin formal education until they are 7. Subsidized preschool is available for parents who opt for it, but only when their kids turn 6.

If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada's C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

The only preschool programs that seem to do more good than harm are very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids. A 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., a 1970s program in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a 1980s program in Chicago, Ill., all report a net positive effect on adult crime, earnings, wealth and welfare dependence for participants. But the kids in the Michigan program had low IQs and all came from very poor families, often with parents who were drug addicts and neglectful.

Even so, the economic gains of these programs are grossly exaggerated. For instance, Prof. Heckman calculated that the Michigan program produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent -- not even remotely close to the $10 return that Mr. Obama and his fellow advocates bandy about.

Our understanding of the effects of preschool is still very much in its infancy. But one inescapable conclusion from the existing research is that it is not for everyone. Kids with loving and attentive parents -- the vast majority -- might well be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize a premature separation between toddlers and parents.

Yet that is precisely what Mr. Obama would do. His "Zero-to-Five" plan would increase federal outlays for early education by $10 billion -- about 50% of total government spending on preschool -- and hand block grants to states to implement universal preschool. This will make the government the dominant source of funding in the early education marketplace, vastly outpacing private spending.

If Mr. Obama is serious about helping children, he should begin by fixing what is clearly broken: the K-12 system. The best way of doing that is by building on programs with a proven record of success. Many of these involve giving parents control over their own education dollars so that they have options other than dysfunctional public schools. The Obamas send their daughters to a private school whose annual fee in middle school runs around $20,000. Other parents deserve such choices too -- not promises of subsidized preschool that they may not want and that may be bad for their kids.

Source




Study finds minorities more likely to be paddled in school

Since they misbehave more, it would be racism if they were NOT paddled more

Paddlings, swats, licks. A quarter of a million schoolchildren got them last year - and blacks, American Indians and kids with disabilities got a disproportionate share of the punishment, according to a study by a human rights group. Even little kids can be paddled. Heather Porter, who lives in Crockett, Texas, was startled to hear her little boy, then 3, say he'd been spanked at school. Porter was never told, despite a policy at the public preschool that parents be notified. "We were pretty ticked off, to say the least. The reason he got paddled was because he was untying his shoes and playing with the air conditioner thermostat," Porter said. "He was being a 3-year-old."

For the study, which was being released Wednesday, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union used Education Department data to show that, while paddling has been declining, racial disparity persists. Researchers also interviewed students, parents and school personnel in Texas and Mississippi, states that account for 40 percent of the 223,190 kids who were paddled at least once in the 2006-2007 school year.

Porter could have filled out a form telling the school not to paddle her son, if only she had realized he might be paddled. Yet many parents find that such forms are ignored, the study said.

Widespread paddling can make it unlikely that forms will be checked. A teacher interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Tiffany Bartlett, said that when she taught in the Mississippi Delta, the policy was to lock the classroom doors when the bell rang, leaving stragglers to be paddled by an administrator patrolling the hallways. Bartlett now is a school teacher in Austin, Texas. And even if schools make a mistake, they are unlikely to face lawsuits. In places where corporal punishment is allowed, teachers and principals generally have legal immunity from assault laws, the study said.

"One of the things we've seen over and over again is that parents have difficulty getting redress, if a child is paddled and severely injured, or paddled in violation of parents' wishes," said Alice Farmer, the study's author. A majority of states have outlawed it, but corporal punishment remains widespread across the South. Behind Texas and Mississippi were Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida and Missouri.

African American students are more than twice as likely to be paddled. The disparity persists even in places with large black populations, the study found. Similarly, Native Americans were more than twice as likely to be paddled, the study found. The study also found:

_In states where paddling is most common, black girls were paddled more than twice as often as white girls.

_Boys are three times as likely to be paddled as girls.

_Special education kids were more likely to be paddled.

More than 100 countries worldwide have banned paddling in schools, including all of Europe, Farmer said. "International human rights law puts a pretty strong prohibition on corporal punishment," she said.

In rural Drew, Miss., Nickolaus Luckett still remembers the paddlings he got in fifth and seventh grades. One happened when he called a teacher by her first name, the other when a classmate said, wrongly, that he threw a spitball. "I didn't get any bruises, but they still hurt, and from that point on, I told myself and my parents I wasn't going to take any more paddlings," said Luckett, who is about to be a sophomore at the University of Mississippi.

It's not an easy choice. In many schools, kids can avoid a paddling if they accept suspension or detention, or for younger kids, if they skip recess. But often, a child opts for the short-term sting of the paddle. And sometimes teachers don't have the option of after-school detention, because there are no buses to take kids home later.

During the three years Evan Couzo taught in the Mississippi Delta, he refused to paddle kids, offering detention instead. But others - teachers, parents, even kids - were accustomed to paddling. "Just about everyone at the beginning of the year said, `If he or she gives you any trouble, you can paddle them. You can send them home, and I'll paddle them. Or you can have me come out to the school, and we can both paddle them.' "It's really just a part of the culture of the school environment there," Couzo said.

There is scant research on whether paddling is effective in the classroom. But many studies have shown it doesn't work at home, said Elizabeth Gershoff, a University of Michigan assistant professor of social work. "The use of corporal punishment is associated almost overwhelmingly with negative effects, and that it increases children's problem behavior over time," Gershoff said. Children may learn to solve problems using aggression, and a sense of resentment might make them act out more, Gershoff said.

The practice is banned in 29 states, most recently in Delaware and Pennsylvania. While some education groups haven't taken a position on the issue, the national PTA believes paddling should be banned everywhere. "We teach our children that violence is wrong, yet corporal punishment teaches children that violence is a way to solve problems," said Jan Harp Domene, the group's president. "It perpetuates a cycle of child abuse. It teaches children to hit someone smaller and weaker when angry."

Source





22 August, 2008

Hispanic-dominated L.A. school grapples with worst dropout rate and gang problems

Amid the verdant lawn and leafy trees of the tidy Jefferson Senior High School campus, a police officer patrols the grounds and a sign warns that guns are illegal. Students in this inner-city school say gang members frequently disrupt class, and teachers spend much of their time dealing with troublemakers.

The biggest problem here, however, may be what you don't see - all the dropouts. With a 58 percent dropout rate, Jefferson has the worst dropout record in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest. "It's horrendous," said Debra Duardo, director of the dropout prevention and recovery program at the district, which averages 33.6 percent dropouts. While half the students typically quit inner-city schools nationwide, Jefferson is at the lower end of the spectrum of so-called "dropout factories" because of a concentration of factors that are rarely all present at schools in other cities.

Located in South Los Angeles, where new immigrants mostly from Mexico and Central America settle, the area has a large minority population and high poverty. Of its 1,977 students last school year, 45 percent qualified as English learners. More than 90 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. The newcomer population means families shift quickly, following jobs or fleeing immigration raids. The school has a 57 percent transience rate, compared to a 38 percent average across district high schools. "There's a lack of well-paying jobs in the area," said social studies teacher Nicolle Sefferman. "When folks have a chance to move on, they move on."

A vast number of students are raised by single parents who struggle to support their families, financially and emotionally. Principal Juan Flecha noted that many students do not live with their parents, who work in other cities or even in other countries.

A shift in demographics has spurred racial divisions that peaked three years ago when blacks and Latinos clashed in several bloody melees. A quarter-century ago, Latino students totaled 31 percent of the student body; now they account for almost 90 percent. Blacks comprise about 10 percent and a sliver are Asian or white.

While ninth-graders spend a week learning conflict resolution and peer mediation, violence, particularly gang-related, frames students' lives. Gang rivalries are minimal in school because one group - the 38th Street gang - dominates school turf, but the undercurrent is ever-present. Flecha recently had to deal with a freshman who got shot in the leg on his way home from school.

Students say the gang problems divert teachers from teaching. "Teachers pay more attention to people messing around than people who want to learn," said Jeanette Garcia, 14. Such factors mean that academic failure starts long before high school. Kids arrive in the ninth grade woefully unprepared and manage to cling on until they're old enough to get a job.

"There's a psychological effect of failure," says Russell Rumberger, director of University of California at Santa Barbara's California Dropout Research Project. "Kids who experience failure start to give up."

For Sefferman, the biggest challenge is re-engaging those students. She believes Jefferson is on the right track with a new model that lets students choose a focus among creative arts, global leadership, business, and teacher preparation. There's also the academically rigorous New Tech Academy, where students wear business attire one day a week, and do assignments by computer.

Some students professed a sense of hopelessness at the lack of opportunity. "The only way to make money is selling dope on the corner," said Kahyla Love, 15.

Last year, the district launched a $200,000 marketing campaign to convince kids school is worthwhile. Promos on hip-hop radio, cell phone text messages, a MySpace Web site and You Tube videos hammered home that graduates earn an average of $175 more weekly than dropouts followed by the message: "Get your diploma." Administrators are evaluating if the ads were successful, but the campaign sparked interest across the country, inspiring a similar program in New York City public schools.

One of the most effective ways of keeping kids in school is simple - home visits, which the district has been doing for years. The visits are now conducted by "diploma project advisers," guidance counselors who work with dropout-risk students. "It gives a really powerful message that if you're not in school, we're going to your home," Duardo said. "Most of the time, we find dropouts not working and not happy with life."

There are signs of turnaround. This year Jefferson qualified for $1.9 million in state funds for disadvantaged schools and plans to hire 10 teachers to reduce class sizes, a psychiatric social worker, and more security. The campus is getting a new athletic field and cafeteria. Academically, there are glimmers of improvement. Three years ago, 50 percent of 12th-graders passed the graduation exam, LAUSD's lowest rate. Last year, 73 percent passed.

It's a far cry from a half-century ago when Jefferson was renowned as an athletic powerhouse and graduated notables such as actress Dorothy Dandridge, jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche. But for Flecha, who grew up in South Los Angeles the son of a housecleaner, it's a start. "Education is truly an equalizer. I want our youngsters to have that opportunity," he said. "But it's one day at a time."

Source




Britain: Parents applying to university on children's behalf

Pushy parents are being allowed to apply to university on their children's behalf, it has been revealed. Students starting higher education next month will be the first to be able to leave the admissions process to mothers and fathers. Some universities are even allowing parents to sit in on vital interviews. Critics said the move risked turning universities into "schools for biologically mature children". It is also feared that it will benefit middle-class teenagers, with some students from poor homes unable to call upon articulate parents.

In the past, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) had to deal directly with students themselves. But officials insisted a rise in the number of calls from parents had prompted a rule change, with applicants now able to nominate parents, guardians or teachers to act as "agents" on their behalf. Ucas said the service - which affects almost all students applying to university - was also intended to benefit those on gap years. Around one in 10 this year are estimated to have nominated parents to make calls on their behalf this year.

Experts said it underlined the influence of so-called "helicopter parents" - mothers and fathers who hover over their children at school, putting too much pressure on them at a young age. Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, said over-protective parents were "destroying the distinction between school and higher education". "All universities now have to take the parent factor into account," he told BBC Online. "On university open days you can see more parents attending than children. "There is a powerful sense of infantilism, where parents can't let go."

He told how some parents arrived at university expecting to attend their son or daughter's interview. Some academics even accepted that it would be "a family discussion", and allowed parents to take part.

Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University Management School, said parents wanted to control the "psychological and financial investment in their children". "These parents are paying more, so they think they can demand more," he said.

A Ucas spokesman said: "This is usually because the parent feels they haven't got all the information they need from their son or daughter and so phone back to double check and clarify points."

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21 August, 2008

Ohio: Cleveland Schools on Academic Watch

(Cleveland, Ohio) Public education continues to endure troubling times in the city of Cleveland.

After a year of celebrating gains in achievement, the Cleveland schools are braced to drop in state rankings to academic watch, the equivalent of a D grade.

On a positive note, and somehow it's considered good news, the graduation rate jumped seven percentage points to 61.9 percent. I'd call it mixed news. Although the rate increased by seven percent, it still is dismally low.

Furthermore, it's reported that the graduation rate is the highest ever for Cleveland public schools. That is hard to believe. Even if one has to go back to the early 20th Century, I have to believe that the public school system in Cleveland had, at some point, a higher graduation rate.




Congress Recognizes Importance of Free Speech, Due Process in Higher Education

President Bush signed the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act into law yesterday. Referred to by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as a bipartisan effort, the new law recognizes the importance of free speech and due process rights for college students across the nation. Congress amended the law to include provisions stating that it was the sense of the Congress that "an institution of higher education should facilitate the free and open exchange of ideas" and that "students should not be intimidated, harassed, discouraged from speaking out, or discriminated against." In defense of due process, Congress added that college "students should be treated equally and fairly" and any sanctions of students should be imposed "objectively and fairly."

While "sense of Congress" resolutions are not legally binding, the author of these provisions, Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) explained why the amendment is important:

Colleges and universities across the country play a key role in preparing our students to be the nation's next leaders. As such, it is the duty of these institutions to promote and facilitate the free and open exchange of ideas among students, and not prohibit students from speaking out with ideas that are politically or culturally different. During a time where it seems natural to take political sides, my provision protects free speech in an environment where it is most important that this freedom be preserved-the college classroom.

The bipartisan support for this law demonstrates the American public's strong commitment to its universities operating as a free marketplace of ideas. The fact that Congress felt a need to add this language to the Higher Education Act illustrates that while the public is devoted to these core principles, the academy has too often strayed from them (as FIRE is well aware), and needed to be reminded of their importance.

Congress' strong words add to those of the federal judiciary in urging universities to live up to their unique and important role in society. Hopefully, universities will listen, and re-commit themselves to fostering open campuses where ideas can be exchanged freely without threat or sanction.

Source




Merit pay for teachers catches on.

IN A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN dominated by foreign affairs and the economy, both candidates have made a point of endorsing one controversial education proposal: teacher merit pay. Barack Obama even braved the boos of a core Democratic constituency, the National Education Association (NEA), with his exhortation "to reward those who teach in underserved areas, learn new skills that serve their students better, [and] consistently excel in the classroom."

Merit pay is an idea that just won't die. On the school reform agenda for over 30 years, it has been defeated outright or negotiated past recognition in most school districts where it's been tried--yet, in 2008, the candidates for president apparently believe it has voter appeal. More important, it is still being pushed at the local level, where control of schools actually resides--notably in the president's backyard, Washington, D.C.

Washington's dynamic new schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is currently leading the District's public schools in contract negotiations with the Washington Teachers' Union. Rhee was given unprecedented autonomy as Mayor Adrian Fenty's appointee after Fenty assumed control of the school district in 2007. She's young, and her only previous experience inside a school system was a three-year stint as a Teach for America elementary instructor in Baltimore. However, she has been engaged since then with the New Teacher Project, a "social capitalist" organization that works with school districts to streamline their hiring procedures in order to attract and retain high-quality teachers.

As D.C. schools chancellor, Rhee has proposed offering teachers dramatically higher salaries and plentiful bonuses, rocketing their pay to six figures, if they sacrifice tenure and seniority. While negotiations are underway, details are meant to be confidential; however, leaks have been abundant. According to the Washington Post, under a two-tiered system current teachers could choose to remain on the traditional union salary schedule (the "red" tier) or switch to the higher-salaried scale and defend their jobs yearly in an individual evaluation and assessment of their effectiveness in raising student test scores (the "green" tier). All new teachers would be admitted on the green tier.

It isn't the first time merit pay has been suggested in Washington. The District has seen six superintendents of schools in the last decade, and more than one has advocated merit pay, with indifferent results. A behemoth central bureaucracy and vicious local politics hobbled superintendents' power to effect sweeping reforms. The District has long been infamous for combining one of the country's highest per-pupil spending rates with some of its lowest student performance. In 1998 General Julius Becton, a veteran of three wars and wounded in Korea, resigned after less than two years as D.C. schools superintendent, calling it "the toughest job" he'd ever had.

Actual corruption was part of the problem, in both the union and the city government. In 2003, the president of the Washington Teachers' Union, Barbara Bullock, pleaded guilty to stealing $5 million from the organization she had been elected to lead. She had been respected in some quarters for holding a hard line for teachers' rights--the kind of hard line that dragged out their contract negotiations for half a decade while teachers went without a raise.

In the wake of that scandal, the American Federation of Teachers assumed control of the Washington union, but in 2005 it handed the reins back to a local president, George Parker. The preamble to the union's 2006 contract, which Parker helped to negotiate, called for a more trusting and collaborative relationship between the union and the D.C. public schools administration. Both the contract and the union's website proclaim the organization "The New Washington Teachers' Union." Parker recently organized a series of informational meetings for teachers while negotiations are still in progress, allowing union members a 10-minute question and answer session with Rhee herself.

"Merit pay" has long been associated, by opponents, with fears of favoritism and inequality. Sometimes called "performance pay" or "incentive pay," it has usually been so watered-down by the end of negotiations that the eventual bonuses or raises are inconsequentially small. Some plans dole out only a trivially higher reward for "exceeding expectations" than the bonus a teacher is entitled to for simply "meeting" them. In many districts, firing incompetent teachers is so difficult, time-consuming, and expensive that principals choose to transfer them to different schools instead. The only merit-based pay reform teachers' unions have consistently supported is "skills and knowledge" pay--raises based on graduate degrees or National Board Certification, measures not conclusively proven to enhance their students' performance.

The American Federation of Teachers is the smaller of the two major national teachers' unions, but more open to reform. The NEA strenuously opposes nearly any kind of merit pay; they're the crowd that booed Obama. The union has overwhelmingly supported a Democrat in every presidential election since it began issuing endorsements; however, it endorsed Obama by the weakest vote since 1980: slightly less than 80 percent. In 1996, Bill Clinton won the NEA endorsement with 91 percent.

The Washington union's current contract negotiations have been underway since December 2007, before the presidential candidates' recent spate of education rhetoric, and they could last much longer. Denver took six years to hash out a similar plan, enacted in 2004, which offered teachers raises and bonuses ranging from several hundred dollars up to about $3,000 for meeting various performance and professional qualification criteria. Denver's contract is due to be renegotiated this year, and tensions are high: "a recent [union] newsletter called on teachers to prepare for a strike if negotiations fall through," Education Week reported.

Denver's plan is new enough that even as negotiations are scheduled to reopen it's difficult to judge its success and make plans for improvement. Mike Antonucci, an education expert based in California, believes that school districts suffer from a lack of information concerning other merit pay programs across the country and their results. If Barack Obama and John McCain really do favor merit pay, they could draw attention to these unfolding stories, especially the ambitious proposal in the nation's capital.

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20 August, 2008

Academics Against Israel and the Jews

One of the greatest myths in Middle East studies departments across North America is that if one has an Israeli faculty member, one has a balanced department. In fact, many Israeli academics have built their reputation on scholarship that is critical of Israel and Israel's existence. And these academics are also given center stage by the Association for Jewish Studies, Middle East scholars, and Middle East studies centers, which frequently host them and provide visiting appointments. This gives Israeli scholars the visibility they seek while allowing their hosts to claim balance in presenting an "Israeli viewpoint."

In his book Fabricating Israeli History, Middle East historian Efraim Karsh observes that in the field of Middle East studies, propaganda has become the accepted norm, more so than in any other discipline. If this had happened in any other field it would have created a serious issue of credibility. As Karsh notes, "not so in contemporary Middle East Studies. For such is the politicization of this field that the New Historiography's partisanship has been its entry ticket to the Arabist club and its attendant access to academic journals, respected publishing houses, and the mass media."[1]

Israel as Stand-In for "the Jews"

In Academics against Israel and the Jews, Manfred Gerstenfeld, chairman of the Board of Fellows at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, presents a collection of essays on the latest surge of anti-Israeli/Western sentiment on college campuses in the United States and Europe. The phenomenon itself is not blatantly anti-Semitic but rather appears only critical of "Zionist policies." This well-worn distinction has enabled the anti-Israeli camp to pose as legitimate critics. But what has actually emerged is a new form of anti-Semitism whereby the state of Israel acts as a proxy for Jews at large. The situation has become increasingly inimical to the pro-Israeli community as it becomes harder to make a case for Israel on campus.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy[2] presents yet another challenge as it focuses on the U.S.-Israeli partnership. The authors contend that there are no genuine motives for America's support for Israel, which they refer to as a "strategic burden." They argue further that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked by the pro-Israeli camp to the detriment of America's own interests. Mearsheimer and Walt indeed claim that the war in Iraq resulted from AIPAC's pressure.

In turn, an integral part of this trend is the adaptation of Holocaust rhetoric to the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic, such as equating the Palestinian Naqba (catastrophe) with the Holocaust. This has engendered statements that, for example, Israelis are doing to Palestinians what was done to them during World War II and the security fence is Israel's method of ghettoizing the Palestinians. This poses yet another hurdle to the pro-Israeli community, which has to counter demands to recognize a nonexistent Palestinian Holocaust. The task becomes increasingly difficult as the media consistently promotes the Palestinian angle.

Several of the contributors to Academics against Israel and the Jews note that 9/11 fostered yet another element of the formula, namely, the apologetic tendency among American Jews with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In particular, rabbis and Jewish educators, whether on the Left or Right of Israeli politics, feel the need to apologize for defending Israel. This, along with the need to be politically correct, is one of the prime sources of confusion among students.

For example, the Palestinian "right of return" has always been a topic of debate when discussing prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace. The issue, however, is almost always framed in terms of "Israeli oppression," which is assumed to be solely responsible for the plight of Palestinians wherever they may be. In contrast, the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is among those also never raised by Arabs or by liberal American Jews.

"Academic Freedom" as Pretense

College campuses have become podiums for those who denigrate Israel, such as the various human rights, antiglobalization, and anti-imperialism groups that have adopted the Palestinian cause. In academic circles, individual scholars' views are often, as Daniel Pipes and Norvell B. De Atkine note,

turned into a political litmus test. For example, Fouad Ajami, the articulate interpreter of Arab culture and politics who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, has been subject to scathing attacks from Arab critics. In a review of his book The Vanished Imam, Asad Abu Khalil verbally assaulted Ajami, calling him a "neo-orientalist," an insult in Middle East studies circles. Ostensibly, Arab critics find Ajami's scholarship faulty. In reality, they see him as too soft on Israel and, worse, as selling out to the enemy. He endured much abuse, for example, for attending a Jewish function.

Pipes and De Atkine also note that "this factional infighting becomes particularly bitter in the context of the Arab-Israeli issue. Halim Barakat of Georgetown University simply dismisses as `Zionist scholarship' anyone who dares dispute his dubious vision of the Arab world as `a single overarching society.'"[3]

This type of anti-Israeli advocacy is highlighted in Academics against Israel and the Jews. Contributors emphasize the need to provide students with a broad understanding of Israel before they leave high school for the college campus. Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is by no means black and white, the Palestinian cause has, primarily under the impact of the late Palestinian apologist Edward Said, become the flagship of many Middle East studies departments across North America. Said's Orientalism posited the Palestinians as the icon of alleged Western prejudice against the Arab world and Islam in general. Thus, in the post-1967 era the Arab-Israeli conflict was portrayed in this light, and Israel as the latest outpost of Western oppression of non-Europeans.

Said's thesis adds another element to the political correctness that already dominates American society. It must be recognized that there is no acceptable use of terrorism, nor any acceptable notion of eliminating a living and breathing state like Israel. Those who advocate such "causes" are the ones who should be on the defensive. An open climate for discussion of Israeli society and Israel's quest for peace will enable calm reflections on what Israel means to American Jews.

Furthermore, academic freedom has been used as a shield and a "get-out-of-jail-free card" when speakers are dismissed as conservative. The modern notions of free speech and academic freedom stem from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Mill argued that free speech originates in society's desire to discover the truth. By vetoing a right opinion, society loses the opportunity to exchange an error for truth. But banning a false opinion, Mill maintained, means losing something almost as precious-a clearer perception of truth that is produced by its clash with error. If no foes are available to put one's ideas to the test, Mill urges inventing arguments against one's own beliefs.

Today whatever is said in a classroom, whether or not it is academic, is deemed protected by "academic freedom." Only sexual harassment appears exempt from this blanket protection. Gradually the entire campus has become an "academic freedom" zone where protests and other activities now qualify as academic "speech." The freedom to critique is, predictably, directed mostly at the two Satans, Israel and America, while efforts to curtail speech that academics find uncongenial have long taken the form of "speech codes" and restrictions on "hate speech." Clearly, academic freedom is a one-way street; only those having the correct opinions may claim it.

Academics against Israel and the Jews presents testimony of the clear lack of balance in academia, especially in Middle East studies departments where so-called scholarship consistently fails to examine, much less condemn, terrorism or jihadism. Such an atmosphere enables intolerable ideas to become accepted as the norm. This situation needs to be challenged by all those concerned about the health of academia, as well as the continued wellbeing of Israel. It is to be hoped that the essays in this book will serve as a wakeup call for the Jewish community at large and engender proactive steps on these critical issues.

Source




Lots of antisemitism in British universities

A massive rise in anti-semitic incidents involving students and campus life has contributed towards a overall increase in cases of hate against Jews, according to new statistics released today. The Community Security Trust recorded a total of 266 incidents during the first half of 2008, representing a nine percent hike on the same period last year and including many more incidents of abusive behaviour and mass-produced anti-semitic literature. One of the few positives seemed to be the fall in violent assaults by 24 percent.

However, "particular concern" was expressed over the fact there were almost double the number of incidents reported to the CST involving Jewish students, student bodies or academics, 49 compared with 26. Among them were 41 classified under the category of abusive behaviour', 27 of which involved anti-semitic verbal abuse, while there were also 12 cases of anti-semitic graffiti on property belonging to universities or non-Jewish students including graffiti saying Kill the Jews at leeds University. There were also two minor assaults off campus.

"We will work with the Union of Jewish Students, university authorities and the government to tackle what is clearly a growing problem," said CST spokesman Mark Gardner. UJS, for its part, challenged "all relevant organisations to take a firmer stance against anti-semitism, which affects students either on or off campus", but claimed the increased numbers reflect the attitude of students not to accept anti-semitism.

"One of the main campus related recommendations of the All Party Inquiry into Antisemitism was that UJS and CST "set up reporting facilities that allow unchallengeable, evidences examples of abusive behaviour" associated with university life. These latest figures show that the recommendation has been, and continues to be, implemented. The next step is for the sector to work with UJS to find effective and creative methods to tackle the problem."

Nevertheless, the union's Campaigns Director Yair Zivan insisted "really good progress" was being made with government and higher education sector "in our strategy to confront the problem. Last year UJS and Jewish students had a fantastic year with key political victories across the country. We are confident that these will play a vital role in firmly tackling anti-semitic incidents over the next year. "At the National Union of Students conference this year we set the precedent of how we expect anti-semitism to be dealt with when an organisation handing out antisemitic material was removed and banned. The stance taken by the NUS should be an example to the rest of the higher education sector."

The CST's report - which represents the first time the organisation has supplemented its annual incidents report by also publishing figures for the first six months of a year - showed schools, synagogues and individuals all fell victim. One of the worst incidents came when a visibly Jewish man was walking down the street when a gang of youths on bicycles surrounded him, called him a "f***ing Jew" and kicked and punched him.

While the number of incidents in London and Manchester were almost identical to the period between January and June last year, the overall rise was attributed largely to a significant increase in incidents reported from elsewhere - 98 in 38 towns and cities compared to 70 in 25 separate places. This was put partly down to the orgaisation's efforts to improve contact with less populous Jewish areas.

The final figures do not include a further 158 incidents reported to the CST that on investigation did not appear to be anti-semitic.

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19 August, 2008

Judge Rules California University Has Right to Reject Christian Courses for Admission Requirements

A federal judge ruled Friday that the University of California is permitted to reject certain Christian curricula as inadequate for meeting admission requirements. The University of California (UC) system has decided that high school students who use certain Christian textbooks will not be considered to have taken the requisite courses necessary for admission to the University.

However, the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), as well as Calvary Chapel Christian School and five Calvary students, argued that the University's decision was not based on a rational assessment of the texts' educational value, and reveals a bias against Christian beliefs. This, they alleged, violates their Constitutional rights, including freedom of speech and the freedom of religion.

The dispute concerned certain textbooks - including physics, American literature, and biology texts from such publishers as Bob Jones University (BJU) Press and A Beka books - which utilize a Christian perspective. While the UC argued that these texts were deemed inadequate purely on an objective assessment of their educational content, ACSI contends that the inclusion of Christian material in no way compromised the curriculum.

According to court documents, in order to prove that their rights were violated, ACSI and Calvary School "would have to show that Defendants rejected the challenged courses to punish religious viewpoints rather than out of rational concern about the academic merit of those religious viewpoints."

Many of the plaintiff's motions were dismissed for procedural reasons. The remaining complaints attempted to convince the Court that UC's admission policy was unduly subjective. Wyatt R. Hume, UC provost and executive vice president for academic and health affairs, however, claimed that the textbooks were evaluated from an objective academic perspective: "The question the university addresses in reviewing courses is not whether they have religious content, but whether they provide adequate instruction in the subject matter. "We also evaluate whether or not they promote the analytical and critical thinking skills necessary to succeed at the University. Our decisions are made based on the academic merits of the course."

However, an ACSI document reported that, by the University's own admission, the decision to reject the textbooks was based, not upon the quality of objective material, but upon the perception that they "prioritize religion over science." According to the report, UC officials had also said in the case of the BJU physics book, there was no objection to the factual information presented. Instead it was indicated that "if the Scripture verses that begin each chapter were removed the textbook would likely be approved."

Yet the court ultimately rejected the claim that the UC system showed ill will toward the Christian faith, and stated that the University had legitimate reasons to reject the texts, including the omission of important subject material and inadequate emphasis on developing critical thinking skills. According to the decision summary, the Court "agreed with the analyses of experts who found [the textbooks] academically inadequate."

To Ian Slatter, representing the Home School Legal Defense Association, the UC system's victory came as little surprise. He declined to comment as to whether the new court ruling could pose a significant threat to the homeschooling agenda.

Jennifer Monk, the plaintiff's lawyer, condemned the decision as a threat to the religious freedom of Christian education. "It appears that UC is attempting to secularize private religious schools," she said. "Science courses from a religious perspective are not approved . . . if it comes from certain publishers or from a religious perspective, UC simply denies them."

This ruling does not mean that students who have taken courses using the unapproved texts cannot still be accepted to UC. Most students qualify for admission to UC by taking an approved set of college preparatory classes; students whose courses lack UC approval can still remain eligible by scoring well in those subjects on the Scholastic Assessment Test.

Judge Otero's ruling has been appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and if upheld, could reach the Supreme Court, considering its potential ramifications for future cases concerning freedom of religion in schools.

Source




British universities pay women to study science

Affirmative action madness: Cash awards, often unrelated to merit, are being used to filll places on undersubscribed university courses

Women can win cash payments of $2,000 a year to study science as universities struggle to fill places on undersubscribed courses, an investigation has found. An undercover reporter was told by Leicester University physics department that she was a strong candidate for the money partly because women were "underrepresented" on the course.

The policy, which critics argue is the result of "social engineering", is evidence of the booming market in cash awards to fill some courses. Other offers made to reporters posing as applicants last week included an institution paying up to $2,000 cash to all comers, regardless of their income. Another was offered $1,000 a year for choosing a less popular course.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of Buckingham University's centre for education research, said using gender as a justification for offering money was "really quite alarming". "It's all about the social engineering from government. The universities have to respond," he said.

The inquiries about degree places were made during clearing, the method by which institutions scramble to allocate unfilled degree places after A-level results are released. The process began last week following the publication of record A-level grades, which showed nearly 26% of exams resulting in an A and a further 25% scoring a B; 11% of teenagers scored at least three As.

The market in awards is unrelated to income and operates outside the usual hardship assistance given to students from poor families. They are often described as scholarships and linked to grades, although these are often not high. Leicester is a well-respected university - ranked 19th equal in The Sunday Times University Guide - but physics courses nationally are hard to fill because there has been a near-halving of A-level pupils studying the subject in the past 25 years.

The department told the reporter that she had a strong case for $2,000 a year partly because she was from an "underrepresented" group as well as being a good candidate. About 30% of Leicester's physics intake are women and, although this is above the national average, she was told: "You tick that box because you are female."

Almost every undergraduate course in England costs students the maximum $6,290 tuition fee. Institutions have been reluctant to appear cheap, and they market the cash awards as scholarships, paying them directly into students' bank accounts rather than reducing fee bills.

Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne offered a reporter $2,000 a year simply to take up a place - the cash is not means-tested and is open to any British or EU student. The reporter told the staff member: "It's a pretty good offer. It's basically just cutting the tuition fees, isn't it?", to which the staff member replied: "Yes". Westminster University told a reporter he was highly likely to receive a "silver scholarship" worth $4,000 a year - if he had applied earlier, his three As would have won him twice as much money.

Hull told a reporter that grades of ABB were enough for a 50% fee reduction to study economics - worth $9,000 over the four-year degree because the university wanted to "encourage good students to come, people with grades like yours, we need more of them". Bangor offered $1,000 a year to a reporter to study subjects including chemistry, languages and law. "There is no condition," said a staff member. "It's to assist in recruitment of the sciences."

Smithers said the boom in cash awards was because universities were "trying to lift themselves through the league tables and they are like a football team paying to attract new talent". Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: "The shift towards a market in higher education is inevitably bringing about a consumer culture."

All the universities contacted last week said financial incentives were a sensible way to attract talented applicants and that they had generous additional bursaries to help low-income candidates. [So you get money if you are smart and money if you are poor and money if you are female. How come mainstream men need no help? Sounds like gross bigotry against mainstream men to me] "It's part of the reality for a competitive marketplace," said Matthew Andrews, academic registrar at Oxford Brookes University. Applicants to highly ranked institutions, by contrast, can expect no payment as thousands of applicants with three As are being turned away.

Independent and grammar pupils have dramatically widened their lead over comprehensives, with four or more As now commonplace. Some of the strongest performances are at girls' schools. Minette Monteith, 18, from Perthshire, left Cheltenham Ladies College in Gloucester-shire with five As.

Monteith, who has been talent-spotted as a potential rower for the 2012 Olympics, was turned down by Cambridge, Imperial College London, Ddinburgh and St Andrews. She won a place at Edinburgh to study medicine through clearing only last week. "I'm very happy with the course I've got now, but I didn't really see what more I could have done," said Monteith.

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18 August, 2008

Monopoly unionism is inimical to academic standards and enterprise

The faculty at Montana State University in Bozeman will soon vote on whether to unionize. If a majority vote yes, the school will gradually descend into academic mediocrity or worse.

The vast majority of unionized faculty in higher education are employed in government colleges and universities. This is because in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, ruled that faculties in private higher education are "managers" and hence are exempted from the mandatory recognition and bargaining provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Private-sector college and university administrations may choose to recognize and bargain with faculty unions, but they are not compelled to do so even if a majority of faculty members want them to. By contrast, unionization in government colleges and universities (as well as K-12 education) is controlled by individual state laws. Most states have enacted statutes, modeled on the NLRA, that force administrations in government higher education to recognize and bargain with faculty unions if a majority of faculty members vote to unionize.

Consider the worst feature of NLRA-style unionism: exclusive representation. If 50 percent plus one of the members of a faculty vote to have, say, the local National Education Association (NEA) be their representative in bargaining with their university over the terms and conditions of employment, all faculty members who were eligible to vote must accept the union's representation whether they want it or not. Faculty who prefer another union or some non-union organization to represent them are out of luck. They are even forbidden to represent themselves. The winner of the election becomes the monopoly representative of the faculty, and there are no regularly scheduled reelections. As individuals, professors lose voice. All professors are treated exactly like all other professors. Excellence is not rewarded and often disparaged; poor performance is protected; individual autonomy vanishes; and strife replaces collegiality.

Unionists justify exclusive bargaining on the grounds that it is merely workplace democracy. Most faculty accept the legitimacy of majority rule in governmental matters. So, unionists argue, to be consistent, faculty must accept its legitimacy in the workplace. This is a silly, inapt analogy. There are three branches of American government- executive, legislative, and judicial. There is no fourth branch of government called unions. Democracy, forcing a numerical minority to submit to the will of a numerical majority, is appropriate in governmental matters but not in private matters. The sale and purchase of one's labor is a private matter.

On legitimately governmental matters individuals cannot be allowed to go their own way. Government makes decisions that must apply to all its citizens uniformly. But on private matters individuals must be allowed to go their own way subject only to the rule that no one can infringe on the equal rights of others to do the same. In the private sphere of human interactions, mutual consent, not majority rule, is the proper decision. Individuals may choose to associate with others who are willing to associate with them to pursue some common goal, but no one should be forced into any association by any means, including majority rule. If asked, most professors would agree that coerced associations are anathema to the academy. Too many professors fail to apply this admirable principle to faculty unionism. Logical consistency and academic freedom demand that they do so.

From the time of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, academic freedom and scholarly creativity have been highly prized academic values. Ideally, successes and failures of individual academics are based on the values that other academics (and students) place on their work. Performance, not politics, is what counts. Of course all academic institutions fall short of the ideal. Even at the best schools, campus politics intrudes into decision-making. But when it does, most academics struggle to minimize its impact. As soon as faculty unionism intrudes, politics displaces excellence. Professors come to be treated, by their unions as well as their administrations, like assembly-line workers whose responsibility is limited to playing the roles assigned to them in so-called collective-bargaining agreements. All degrees of freedom in decision-making are swallowed by slavish adherence to "the contract."

The union that has monopoly representation privileges over the California State University faculty is the California Faculty Association (CFA). My experience with it is a cautionary tale. When CFA campaigned to become the monopoly faculty representative, it promised it would never try to compel payment of forced dues. Soon after becoming certified as the monopoly representative, it undertook a long campaign to do precisely that. It finally succeeded in 1999 by giving sufficient electoral support to Gray Davis in the 1998 gubernatorial election to bribe him into signing such legislation-a fine example of politics as exchange.

What else hath the CFA wrought? For one thing, it established de facto tenure for many adjunct faculty even though most of them never publish anything. For another, it quashed merit pay for faculty who demonstrate outstanding professional contributions. It asserted that all faculty contributions are equally meritorious. CFA also imposed a faculty staffing rule that says in the event of any downsizing, faculty must be let go in reverse order of seniority. Expertise and the needs of students and the integrity of the academic enterprise do not matter at all.

The CFA significantly impeded the 2005-2007 effort of the College of Business and Economics (CBE) at California State University, East Bay, to maintain its accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). In 2005 the administration hired a new dean and charged him to get the CBE ready for its reaccreditation review. It had been almost ten years since the previous review, and academic standards at the College had been allowed to decay in favor of keeping nonproducing faculty happy and quiet (that is, not filing complaints with the CFA) and boosting student enrollment. The new dean set out to remedy this decay as quickly as possible. Among other things, he tried to implement a set of incentives to get faculty to increase their research and publication activities. For example, he proposed to give faculty who published in reputable academic journals a reduced teaching load, and he proposed to give faculty who produced good research proposals financial bonuses and summer research grants to help them with their work.

The CFA, at the behest of some faculty who figured they could not compete on these grounds, intervened to impede these incentives on the grounds that they created invidious distinctions between members of the faculty. Five-year, post-tenure reviews of faculty have long been required in the California State University system. In practice they had become little more than pro forma endorsement of everyone under review. The dean attempted to strengthen these reviews as a way of reminding faculty of their academic responsibilities, particularly in research and publication. The CFA again intervened stating that "the contract" limited the post-tenure reviews to teaching performance. Notwithstanding "the contract," AACSB considers research and publication important criteria for accreditation.

In the end, CBE was not reaccredited, but was given three years to remedy its deficiencies. Failing that, CBE accreditation will be withdrawn. In a unionized environment it is doubtful that three years will be enough time for CBE to restore its academic legitimacy.

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British government tries to civilize its Leftist academics

British academics will be encouraged to conduct research with their Israeli peers in an attempt to heal fractured relations between UK and Israeli universities. Gordon Brown has signed up to a $1,480,000 academic exchange scheme during his trip to Israel today. The government has been keen to promote links between the two countries to play down attempts by British academics to boycott Israeli academics over the treatment of Palestinians.

In May, members of the University and College Union voted to consider the moral and political implications of education links with Israeli institutions. But the UK government's contribution of $40,000 to the scheme which is mainly funded by charities was described as an insult by a leading Anglo-Jewish historian. Geoffrey Alderman, visiting professor of theology and education at York St John University, said: "Compared to the money that the government is giving to the Palestinian Authority, this is an insult. I would throw this back in their faces. If the government was seriously interested in a programme to foster academic cooperation, it would think in terms of millions."

The higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said the new scheme would help foster academic cooperation through joint research programmes and academic exchange trips between the UK and Israel.

The Britain-Israel research and academic exchange partnership (BIRAX) will award scientific research grants to junior academics - from postdoctoral students to mid-career researchers and lecturers - who tend to have far fewer international opportunities. The British Council will manage the scheme, which is funded by the Pears Foundation, the United Jewish Israel Appeal, with smaller contributions from the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Israel's Ministry of Science.

The academic who led the call for the boycott, Tom Hickey, a politics and philosophy lecturer from the University of Brighton, said academics should consider whether it was "morally acceptable to continue links with Israeli institutions where there was evidence that they were complicit in the occupation".

The government will give the same amount to improve links between British researchers and their peers in Palestine. Rammell said this would be "in the near future".

The scheme will last for five years in the first instance, although it is anticipated that it will develop over time into a longer-term partnership.

The British Council is also working on proposals to support academic links between Britain and Palestine, which the government will offer equal funding to support. Rammell said: "There is a long history of cooperation between Israel and the UK and BIRAX will help further cement this relationship and create new partnerships. It will help strengthen academic links between individual researchers and between universities in both countries. "There have been calls in the past for a boycott of Israeli academics but I strongly believe that we have much to learn from each other and our researchers have much to gain from working together. Education should be a bridge between nations not a barrier."

Trevor Pears, the executive chair of the Pears Foundation, said: "The new scheme increases academic collaboration in science and technology with potentially lasting benefits for Britain, Israel and, hopefully, the world."

The chairman of UJIA, Mick Davis, said the scheme would strengthen "the living bridge that draws on the great history of academic cooperation that has benefited Israel and the UK so greatly over the years".

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Administrators versus faculty in academe

C.P. Snow wrote of the "two cultures" of the sciences and humanities and of the divisions between them. In higher education today, many feel an ever-increasing culture gap between administrators and faculty members. Professors - at least those with tenure - sometimes share their views of the deans and presidents who lead institutions. But what of administrators? Forget the platitudes of Faculty Senate meetings. What do they really think of the faculty role in running campuses?

A national survey of administrators reveals a mixed picture. A majority (60 percent) believe that faculty members should play a bigger role in running campuses, with most of the rest happy with the status quo and only a few believing that professors should play less of a role. But while seeking more of a faculty role, the administrators share a highly critical view of faculty knowledge and perspective when it comes to campus decision making, with a broad consensus finding professors focused far too much on their own issues or departmental issues, and lacking either the knowledge or perspective to think about institutions as a whole and to promote change.

The study was prepared by a team of sociologists: Debra Guckenheimer, Sarah Fensternmaker and John Mohr from the University of California at Santa Barbara and Joseph Castro from the University of California at San Francisco. They surveyed 200 academic administrators (dean level or higher) at nine four-year colleges and universities. The institutions were a mix of sizes, were located in different parts of the United States, and included public and private, unionized faculty and non-unionized faculty. The results were presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

The paper - presented by Fensternmaker - notes that whether collaborations between professors and administrators are "easy or awkward" can have a major impact on many campus policies and initiatives. At the same time, she noted that there is relatively little research done on administrators' attitudes about professors. She noted the apparent contradiction between administrators generally saying that they want faculty members more involved while overwhelmingly agreeing with factors that limit the ability of professors to be effective players in faculty governance.

Using quotes from the interviews with survey participants, the paper outlines four common complaints about professors with regard to governance: ignorance, inability to see the big picture, a self-serving approach and a lack of appreciation for the role of administrators.

One administrator was quoted saying: "Faculty usually underestimate the complexity and difficulty of making a university operate well. They think it will just happen by itself if administrators would get out of the way. This is an ignorant opinion." Another said: "I think that sometimes faculty have tunnel vision and do not understand the full picture of what it means to effectively operate and manage a college." Repeatedly, administrators said that professors didn't understand financial matters related to their institutions or issues outside of their own disciplines.

Asked about their greatest disappointment as administrators, a frequent response was "faculty resistance to change," the paper says. "Administrators varied in how they responded to this issue - some saw faculty members as a group resistant to change, while others saw it as a problem of only some of the faculty." The perspective stays with administrators even if they return to the faculty, the paper says.

One other commonality found in the study is that administrators believe that faculty fail to exercise the power that they have. Many reported that they feel that their initiatives ultimately succeed or fail when professors either embrace or ignore them. One typical response: "Faculty think we administrators have more power than we actually do and have more money than we actually do. Faculty do not understand or are aware of the great power they have. Faculty hold the key to change and institutional transformations but most are not aware of that."

The paper notes all of the ironies in the fact that administrators and faculty members both view the other side as having the power, and that administrators simultaneously want more faculty involvement and fault faculty members for lacking knowledge.

So does this leave administrators on Mars and professors on Venus? Some in the audience when the paper was presented said that the research suggests the need to focus on specific qualities that may encourage behaviors that keep the two sides apart. For instance, one professor said that he believes too many chairs "play up the us vs. them divide rather than taking a more responsible academic leadership role." So instead of explaining the rationale behind administrative proposals, this professor said, chairs are telling their departments: "You won't believe what academic affairs is proposing now."

Kristin G. Esterberg, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, who is also studying administrative attitudes about faculty, said it was important for administrators to consider realities facing professors. She noted, for example, that it's not surprising that professors focus on their departments when "faculty-reward structures focus on the disciplines." Further, because administrators can move in or out of their positions on their campuses - or switch campuses - they are "mobile in ways that faculty are not."

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17 August, 2008

DESPITE SAUDI PROMISES, TEXTBOOKS FILLED WITH HATE

Two years after protracted American-Saudi negotiations persuaded the State Department that the Saudis would remove religious intolerance from their national textbooks, a new study finds the books still portray non-Sunni Muslims as the enemies of true believers.

The report from the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute finds that the Saudi textbooks are filled with the austere supremacism of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, despite promises from the Kingdom in 2006 to alter them. For example, a textbook for 10th graders on Islamic jurisprudence not only says it is permissible in Islam to murder a homosexual, but recommends the methods for doing so: burning alive, stoning, or throwing oneoff a high building.

Jews, Christians, and non-Wahhabi Sunni Muslims are described in many of the textbooks as enemies of the true faith and infidels. What's more, examples from Muhammad's teachings that focus on tolerance of other faiths are often ignored.

The report coincides with a conference the Saudi monarch is sponsoring in Madrid, at which he appeared to want reconciliation between the clerics of the Muslim world and their counterparts among Christians and Jews.

Saudi textbooks are not only a human rights issue, but also increasingly a national security matter, as the House of Saud underwrites Islamic education across the world, including a school in northern Virginia that has come under scrutiny for using the Saudi official textbooks.

The director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, said yesterday that the State Department should consider sanctions against Saudi Arabia. "The government of Saudi Arabia may have told the State Department it would thoroughly revise its textbooks in order to diffuse criticism two years ago. But it's two years later and now is the time for reckoning. The State Department must now demonstrate it was not an unwitting accomplice to a public relations ploy. They must intensely scrutinize these textbooks and work with them to remove it, or impose sanctions," she said.

Nearly two years ago, the State Department waived a series of sanctions suggested under the International Religious Freedom Act after America and Saudi Arabia came to an arrangement whereby Riyadh promised to excise the intolerance of their textbooks by the start of the fall 2008 school year.

The report says: "This analysis documents that thorough textbook reform has not yet occurred. It is in American interests that the U.S. Government, in this administration and the next, hold Saudi Arabia to its obligations."

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British kids can get a GCSE (Middle school) mathematics pass by reading a thermometer

Teenagers were required to read a simple thermometer and measure a straight line with a ruler to pass a GCSE maths exam, The Daily Telegraph has learned. Just days before results for 600,000 pupils will be released, it emerged 16-year-olds could gain a C grade in the test - officially a good pass - by answering two-thirds of the "simple" questions correctly. The disclosure prompted fresh claims that tests were being "dumbed down", with the Conservatives insisting they were "suitable for an eight-year-old".

It comes as results published next week are expected to show fewer than half of pupils leave school with five good GCSEs including English and maths - the standard expected of all 16-year-olds. Just over 55 per cent of pupils gained at least a C grade in maths last year. It follows fears that many young people are being turned off the subject because of a lack of rigour in the curriculum.

A report by the think-tank Reform said GCSEs were "considerably" easier than 50 years ago as questions had been simplified to make them more relevant to modern teenagers. The Telegraph obtained a foundation tier GCSE paper set by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, Britain's biggest exam board. In one question, pupils are asked to read a diagram of a thermometer. One arrow points to 13C and another to -4C, with students required write down the temperatures for two marks. Another question presents pupils with seven numbers - 24, 26, 29, 34, 40, 47 and 55 - and asks to write down the multiples of five and eight.

Pupils are also shown a short line and asked to measure it - giving their answer in millimetres. They are then required to measure 4cm along the line and mark it on the exam script.

In another question pupils are asked to write down the most suitable metric unit to measure the distance from London to Edinburgh. And one more asks students, who cannot use a calculator, to multiply 350 by two.

Pupils sitting the foundation tier test can score C to G grades. They need to get around two-thirds of questions correct to gain a C in the exam element of the GCSE.

Last night, AQA said questions were easier at the beginning of the exam but became more challenging, including those testing circle area, formulation and solution of equations, algebraic simplification and angle geometry. The exam was just one element of the GCSE, the board said, and pupils must also complete two pieces of coursework, a statistics module, a number module and a second test paper - some four hours and 40 minutes worth of assessment.

"The skills tested by the questions in the paper referred to are all part of the specified content for GCSE which has been unchanged for five years so such questions will have appeared on foundation papers in the past," said a spokesman. "AQA is confident that sufficient evidence is therefore present to ensure that candidates awarded a grade C on this tier will have shown comparable performance to candidates awarded grade C on the higher tier this year."

Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister, said: "This is primary level maths suitable for an eight or nine-year-old. It is clear evidence that GCSEs have been dumbed down."

Source




Australian kid, 10, banned from school for bikini pic

A happy snap of a bikini-clad woman taken on a family day out has landed a Grade 4 Cairns schoolboy a seven-day suspension from class. The 10-year-old boy's father, who asked not to be named fearing reprisal for his children, yesterday told The Weekend Post he was ropeable about the way Bentley Park College had disciplined his son, saying pictures in store catalogues were more risque.

"I remember the picture being taken and there was nothing rude about it," the father said. "It was taken from a moving car." The dad said he had to visit the school before the principal admitted that no teachers had seen the picture and it could not be found on the boy's laptop computer. His son had shown the picture to his classmates, he said.

"Because they (five kids) said it was rude, (the teachers) believed them even though they hadn't seen it," he said. "They have punished him for a crime when they haven't even seen the evidence. "I am all for punishing him if he's done something wrong or taken something rude to school, but this was taken on a family day out," the dad said. The boy's parents were told about the suspension in a phone call from the school.

The photograph was taken from the window of a rental car, during a family trip to the northern beaches to celebrate the parents' wedding anniversary. The photo showed the back of a woman who was wearing a Brazilian-style swimming costume.

Opposition education spokesman John-Paul Langbroek called on the Government to investigate why a boy so young would cop a suspension over what appeared to be a "minor infraction". An Education Queensland spokesman confirmed the Year 4 student had been suspended for taking an inappropriate photograph to school and using it to harass ["Harass?? Entertain, more likely] other kids. "The student was suspended under the college's Responsible Behaviour Plan for breaching guidelines covering safety and respect for others," the spokesman said. [What sickening cant!]

Mulgrave MP Warren Pitt told The Weekend Post he was stunned about the suspension, but wanted to find out the full circumstances before criticising the decision. He urged the boy's father to contact him so he could investigate the claim. Late on Friday after The Weekend Post contacted the Education Department, the boy's father said he was phoned by the school principal to arrange a meeting on Monday to discuss his son immediately returning to school.

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16 August, 2008

Meaningless British High School qualifications

97% of students get a High School diploma

Increasing numbers of teenagers believe that three good A levels are no longer a passport to a university degree and are opting to take four or more subjects in an attempt to stand out from the growing crowd getting three A grades. A-level results published yesterday showed that more than 11 per cent of teenagers now get three A grades, increasing parental and school pressure on the most able students to go the extra mile with an extra A level to impress university admissions officers. This year's record crop of A-level results showed that the pass rate has exceeded 97 per cent for the first time, with the percentage of pupils achieving A grades up to nearly 26 per cent.

The results, published yesterday by the Joint Council for Qualifications, representing exam boards, also show that while the number of A-level candidates this year remains stable at around 317,000, the number of A levels taken has risen by more than 22,000. The number of candidates studying further mathematics, usually taken as a fourth A level to accompany maths, rose by 15.5 per cent with more than 9,000 entries.

Howard Loh, a pupil at Abingdon School, Oxfordshire, yesterday celebrated seven A grades. Similar tales abounded throughout the country. Tom Morley and Clarence Frank, pupils at City of London School, got six grade As each, as did Jenny Crowhurst, a pupil at Sutton High School in southwest London.

University admissions officials said last night that they were seeing a steady increase in the number of candidates with four or more A levels, excluding general studies. But many questioned the wisdom of such a move. Wendy Piatt, director-general of the elite Russell Group of research- intensive universities, said: "In many cases all candidates have three As - and increasingly four As."

Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, said that taking four subjects was a growing trend, given that three As was now virtually a minimum requirement. "Some talented pupils do more than three A levels because they enjoy the work and the challenge. But you can see how some pupils might think that doing more might make them stand out from those with three As. "In fact they might be disadvantaging themselves by taking the edge off their overall performance by doing so much," he said. Dr Parks said that he hoped the introduction of the new top A* grade from 2010 would reverse the trend and persuade more students to take three because the key discriminator will be quality rather than quantity.

Angela Milln, head of admissions at Bristol, said that growing numbers of pupils with four A levels were applying to the university, which attracts a record 12 applications per place (rising to 40 for drama places). "Some do it just to stretch themselves," she said. "But I'm sure there are those who think that offering something extra will give them extra credit with universities. It won't."

Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, said: "Increasingly pupils have opted for four or five as a way of distinguishing themselves from other candidates. Sixty per cent of our pupils do four A levels for this reason. "My own feeling is that pupils should not be encouraged to do too many A levels because it eats into time that should be devoted to all those other important aspects of an education such as sport, public speaking and the performing arts." He agreed that the A*, to be introduced next month for testing in 2010 as part of a package of reforms to make A levels harder, would ease the pressure on students.

Yesterday's record results meant that more pupils than ever met their university offers, but this also led to renewed concerns that the exams were getting easier. For the first time the exam board released a regional breakdown, examining pass rates and the proportion of students getting A grades in various areas of the country. It showed that the greatest improvements in the past six years have been in the South East, and the North East appears to be lagging behind. Between 2002 and 2008, the number of A grades in the South East rose 6.1 per cent, while in the North East there was an improvement of 2.1 per cent. Mike Cresswell, director-general of the AQA exam board, said that the figures suggested a worrying "long-standing historical pattern" with causes beyond what went on in school.

The results showed signs of a revival in traditional subjects, such as sciences and languages. The number of maths candidates rose from 60,093 last year to 64,593 this year. There are more candidates doing mathematics than at any time in the past. Entries rose by 2.7 per cent in biology, 3.5 per cent in chemistry and by 2.3per cent in physics, although numbers are still down on what they were in the early 2000s.

Fears that languages would undergo a slump in popularity proved unfounded as the number of candidates taking A levels in French rose to its highest level since 1993. Spanish entries were the highest they had ever been at 7,055.

Source




Slump Squeezes Enrollment at U.S. Private Schools

Private schools across the Washington region have begun to feel the effects of the nation's economic slumber, as some families seek more financial aid to help with staggering tuition bills and others simply opt out of paying for an education.

Independent and parochial schools in the seven Maryland counties closest to Washington lost almost 8,000 students between 2005 and 2007, a 7 percent drop, in a trend that is expected to continue this fall. The Newport School, an esteemed Montgomery County campus, is shutting down for lack of students after 78 years in operation.

The Archdiocese of Washington will offer an unprecedented $2 million in need-based aid this year, including a $400,000 "opportunity fund" targeted at nine struggling schools. The goal is to lure back families that can no longer pay the tuition and attract families that could never afford it. It's a strategy borrowed from commercial airlines: Better a paying customer than an empty seat. "This economic downturn is affecting everyone, absolutely everyone," said Patricia Weitzel-O'Neill, superintendent of schools in the archdiocese.

Enrollment has been declining in some of the area's public schools as well, chiefly because of a slowing birth rate, but not to the same extent. Public school enrollment in the Maryland suburban region slid by 1 percent over the past two years. Public school enrollment is rising in Northern Virginia, while private enrollment is essentially flat. Public enrollment in the District is falling, but enrollment in District archdiocese schools is falling faster.

Private school leaders say their community has seldom faced such a daunting combination of economic and socioeconomic woes. Tuition is rising faster than inflation, partly to meet a spiraling demand for aid. The birth rate is flat, thinning the ranks of prospective students. And consumers are reluctant to spend, unnerved by rising gas costs and falling stock prices.

The LaCourse family of Kensington decided this year that a five-figure annual investment in private education was starting to look more like luxury than necessity. So the LaCourse girls will enter kindergarten and third grade this fall at Kensington Parkwood Elementary, a well-regarded public school. By the time the two are grown, the private school where each began her education will be a distant memory. "It would have been more than $30,000 for the academic year, and that doesn't count summer, right?" said Lisa LaCourse.

The Washington region is served by a continuum of private schools, their tuition ranging from less than $10,000 a year to more than $30,000. Some are parochial schools that mirror public campuses in structure; others are nationally known independent schools that offer small classes and universal college acceptance.

An informal survey of officials at dozens of schools suggests that the region's most prestigious independent campuses may be least affected by the downturn. Such schools generally have many more applicants than spaces and a sufficient number who can afford the tuition. "But there's a big caveat here, and that's that we've never experienced the perfect storm before: rising tuitions well beyond inflation in a recessionary climate with a shrinking school-age population," said Patrick Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools.

Even the most prestigious schools are dispensing more need-based aid to a greater number, Bassett said, and working harder to sell families on the virtues of a private education. Funds spent on need-based financial aid have almost doubled since 2001 among independent schools, said Betsy Downes, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington. Tuition has risen 37 percent in that span; enrollment, 6 percent.

More here




Foreign enrollment soars in CA colleges

Colleges across the Southland are expecting a surge in international students this year, part of a nationwide trend that many experts attribute to a weak dollar. At the University of Southern California, applications for international students grew by 10 percent this fall. Loyola Marymount saw a 33 percent spurt and University of California, Los Angeles, reports a 25 percent increase. Nationwide, the government issued 10 percent more student visas this year, and colleges across the country are reporting increases in international student applications.

For students like Jean Foo, the decision to enroll in a U.S. college boiled down to simple math. A practicing lawyer in her native Singapore, Foo said an increase in American investors there made the idea of an American law degree more of a necessity than a luxury. But last July Foo would have paid 1.8 Singapore dollars for every $1 U.S. That would have left her paying 76,000 Singapore dollars in tuition and fees at UCLA. This summer however, the exchange rate is 1.3 Singapore dollars to every $1 U.S. The savings for Foo: 21,000 Singapore dollars. "Who knows if it will ever be this low again?" Foo said.

As a result, students worldwide are taking advantage and snatching up seats at American colleges. But international education advocates think the increase is about more than just dollars and cents. "We expect to see this trend continue," said Allan Goodman, president of the New York-based Institute for International Education. "But this is not just about money. It's the country's reputation for quality, lack of corruption and huge range of choice that attracts students."

Goodman said the number to focus on is not the ratio between the dollar and the euro, yen or peso. "The number is 4,000 - the number of accredited colleges and universities in the U.S - about a third of the higher education capacity in the whole world," Goodman said. "No other country has that many."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks the country saw a nationwide dip in international students because restrictions on visas both in and out of the country were tightened. Horror stories of the mistreatment of international students as they attempted to get into the U.S. coupled with other tales of years-long wait lists for student visas discouraged many students from even applying to schools in the states. International student enrollment bottomed out during the 2003-04 school year when nationwide enrollment among these students dropped by 2.4 percent - the first time the country had seen a decline in at least five decades. But in 2007 the U.S. State Department gave out a record 600,000 new student-and-exchange visas.

Bob Ericksen, director of the Dashew Center for International Students at UCLA, said many students, unfortunately, still feel like they are harshly scrutinized when they are trying to come into the U.S. "Our students did a research project last spring about students' experiences acquiring visas and entering the country, and there was no shortage of unpleasant experiences shared," Ericksen said. "From applying for visas and dealing with uncooperative officials to dealing with officials at port of entry, many feel like they are being treated as criminals. They don't understand why they are receiving so much attention as potential criminals or terrorists when they are trying to come and contribute to society."

But despite some of the hurdles, once international students begin their studies in the United States, Ericksen said most agree the sacrifices were worth it. "Students report high levels of satisfaction... they report that it's a welcoming environment," Ericksen said.

Part of the reason why many students see American colleges as welcoming environments is because these institutions are, in fact, competing on a local, national and international level with each other for these students from abroad. "Many universities are trying to do more to globalize their campuses and provide students with a global education because this helps prepare students for the world out there that is increasingly small," said Csilla Samay, director of international outreach at Loyola Marymount.

Samay's department exclusively looks at ways to attract more students from abroad. The goal is to have international students make up 5 percent of the entire student body by 2010, up from the current 2 percent. Samay said the focus isn't on the financial contributions these students make - Loyola is a private institution so tuition for out-of-state students is the same as for California residents.

But at public universities international students pay top dollar for their American degrees and these students' economic contributions don't stop at the classroom. From buying textbooks, renting homes, and buying groceries, international students spent more than $2 billion in California alone in 2006, according to statistics from the International Institute of Education. Nationwide their contributions topped at $14.5 billion.

Still, Justine Su, director of the China Institute at California State University, Northridge, said the benefits of international programs are about the dual enrichment they provides students. CSUN's institute has created a "2 plus 2" program that allows American and Chinese students to complete their undergraduate degrees in China and the U.S. Su said the result has been that American and Chinese students are equipped with a global view that will then influence the work they do. "When we send students abroad they become our best ambassadors," she said. "They absorb new ideas and help people speak differently about the American people."

As for Foo, weeks before she starts her first semester in an American college she is nervous. She has no friends or family in the city and even a simple task like getting a driver's license is cause for anxiety. And despite the savings, Foo is still going to end up shelling out about $100,000 in U.S. dollars for tuition, books, food and other living expenses. Still, Foo believes some things are worth more than money. "Everybody has that American Dream, you know? You aspire to someday work or live in the U.S. ... to experience the American life," she said. "This experience is beyond monetary value."

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15 August, 2008

For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place. Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses. The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough -- four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you're a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.

The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work, public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for almost two-thirds of the bachelor's degrees conferred in 2005. For that matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines. Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or economics -- and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after studying in the local public library?

Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.

Certification tests will not get rid of the problems associated with differences in intellectual ability: People with high intellectual ability will still have an edge. Graduates of prestigious colleges will still, on average, have higher certification scores than people who have taken online courses -- just because prestigious colleges attract intellectually talented applicants.

But that's irrelevant to the larger issue. Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.

The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test -- as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.

Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.

But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.

An educational world based on certification tests would be a better place in many ways, but the overarching benefit is that the line between college and noncollege competencies would be blurred. Hardly any jobs would still have the BA as a requirement for a shot at being hired. Opportunities would be wider and fairer, and the stigma of not having a BA would diminish.

Most important in an increasingly class-riven America: The demonstration of competency in business administration or European history would, appropriately, take on similarities to the demonstration of competency in cooking or welding. Our obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.

Here's the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders. Getting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence -- treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone -- is one way to help us to recognize that common bond.

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Reading standards drop in Britain

Reading standards among 14-year-olds have fallen in the past year, national curriculum test results revealed yesterday. The Schools minister, Jim Knight, called on parents to encourage their children to read after results showed a drop of two percentage points in the number of students who had attained the required reading standard. The results of the tests, taken by 14-year-olds, showed 73 per cent of students were up to par in English (down one percentage point), 77 per cent in maths (up one point) and 71 per cent in science (down two). The drop in English was based on the reading tests, where the number of up-to-standard students fell from 71 per cent to 69 per cent. Writing, however, went up from 74 to 77 per cent.

The results were published despite calls from education professionals to delay their issue, because so many papers were missing or unmarked. Only 84 per cent of English scripts and 94 per cent of maths and science ones had been marked when the figures were compiled. Leaders of the National Association of Head Teachers said the results should not have been published. Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, claimed the tests were an "irrelevance" and should be scrapped.

Nearly 250,000 students failed to reach standards in writing, reading and maths. Only 60 per cent were up to par, the same as last year and well short of a target of 85 per cent set by ministers. Boys lagged behind girls in reading and writing. Only 62 per cent of boys reached the reading standard, compared with 76 per cent of girls, and 70 per cent attained the writing standard, compared with 83 per cent of girls. Mr Knight said boys should read more fiction instead of stories about football teams and asked parents to read the same books as their children, so they could discuss them.

The results show that writing weaknesses identified in 11-year-olds appear to have been addressed by the time children reach the age of 14, but reading and science standards fall away.

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Some Australian universities highly rated

I have a large and ornate document issued to me by the University of Sydney

Australia now has three universities in the top 100 as measured by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with the University of Sydney joining the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. However, the number of Australian universities in the top 500 dropped from 17 to 15.

ANU dropped slightly, from 57 to 59, in the world university rankings, while Melbourne continued its relentless climb, jumping six places to 73 in the otherwise fairly stable top 100. Sydney University leapt into the top 100 for the first time, at 97. Vice-chancellor Michael Spence said it was "very pleasing" that three Australian universities were ranked in the Jiao Tong top 100. "It is an indication of the strength and quality of Australian higher education that we perform so well in world class competition," he said.

Down the ranks, which were not specified outside the top 100, the University of Adelaide dropped from the second to the third 100, while James Cook, Tasmania and Wollongong universities moved up from the fifth 100 to the fourth 100, according to an analysis by the country's leading commentator on Jiao Tong, Melbourne University professor of higher education Simon Marginson. The University of New England and Murdoch University fell just below the cut-off line for the last 100 this year, while Griffith University also fell not far below the cut-off line.

While criticism of the Jiao Tong methodology is common, it attracts attention and cachet simply because it meets the need for a global performance measure. The US retained its stranglehold on the rankings, with four of the top five universities: Harvard, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are first, second, third and fifth respectively. Britain's University of Cambridge was in fourth place.

According to Professor Marginson, Jiao Tong placements increasingly are seen as an important measure of a nation's economic health and competitiveness. He told the HES that while he would like to see an Australian university in the top 50, having three in the top 100 - and six in the top 200 - compared well with European countries of similar population and wealth, such as The Netherlands. However, Australia was well behind Britain and our top universities lagged behind those of European countries such as Switzerland, whose best was at equal 24, France (42), Denmark (45), The Netherlands (47), Sweden (51) and Germany (equal 55).

Australia also was significantly behind Canada, whose best universities - the University of Toronto at equal 24 and the University of British Columbia at 35 - were stronger. The most striking improvement was shown by China: the number of Chinese universities in the top 500 increased from 25 to 30 last year.

"In (the) future we can expect to see Chinese universities bulking larger in the top 200 and then the top 100, as the hyper-investments in (research and development) of the past 10 years begin to bear fruit in stellar research performance," Professor Marginson said. On the present trajectory, China was on course to become the world's second largest knowledge economy.

In contrast, Australian universities operated in what Professor Marginson described as a hyper-scarce funding environment, where the top institutions sustained research performance by squeezing teaching resources and other facilities, which was a highly undesirable trade-off. "Full funding of research, currently under discussion, is very important because it means research no longer has to be subsidised from resources generated by local and international students," he said.

Professor Marginson noted that in the US, Canada and Britain, full funding of research sustained significantly stronger performance. The US comfortably retained its position as the country with the largest number of universities in the top 500, although the total fell from 166 to 159, according to analysis by Melbourne University's Centre for the Study of Higher Education. Next came Britain, with 42 universities in the top 500, followed by Germany with 40 (down from 41), Japan 31 (down from 33) and China 30 (up from 25).

The Australian Technology Network recently proposed that the performance of Australian universities in world rankings should be a part of formal performance benchmarks.

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14 August, 2008

Exams for British High School diplomas 'now two grades easier than 20 years ago'

A-level exams are now two grades easier than they were 20 years ago, academics claimed last night. Sixth-formers of the same ability awarded C grades in the late 1980s can now expect to gain As, they said.

Researchers found that average results improved by more than two grades in most subjects, even though students were no brighter. In mathematics, scores jumped by three-and-a-half grades. Academics said the trend was likely to be influenced by a number of factors, including a fall in the rigour of exams combined with an increased focus on test preparation in schools and colleges, reigniting the debate over A-level standards.

The findings - in a study by Durham University - come as almost 250,000 students prepare to receive results of A-levels on Thursday. Experts are already predicting a rise in the number of passes and A grades. Last year, 25.3 per cent of papers were awarded the top mark - more than double the number in 1990.

Ministers have long claimed that the rise is down to improved teaching. But the latest study - published yesterday(MON) as part of a wide-ranging review of A-levels by the Institute of Directors - said it was "hard to see how the claim could be convincingly substantiated". The claims fail to explain why results improve quicker some years than others, or why improvements at A-level have been much quicker than GCSEs.

"A-level and GCSE grades achieved in 2007 certainly do correspond to a lower level of general academic ability than the same grades would have done in previous years," said the report. "Whether or not they are better taught makes no difference to this interpretation; the same grade corresponds to a lower level of general ability."

Robert Coe and Peter Tymms, from Durham's Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre, analysed standards achieved in A-levels between 1988 and 2007. They then compared them with the outcome of aptitude tests over the last two decades, which measure pupils' skills in a range of subjects without testing curriculum knowledge. They found that students with similar results in the independently-administered exam went on to score much better A-levels in 2007 than in 1988.

In the study group, the average student was awarded an E in biology in 1988, but similar sixth-formers gained a comfortable C last summer. In French, students of the same ability saw results rise from a low D grade to a B. In maths, marks were inflated by 3.5 grades. Average students in the 1988 sample gained a U (ungraded) but saw results rise to a low B by 2007. Academics said rises in GCSE results were more modest, increasing by less than a grade in science, English, history, French and maths between 1996 and last summer. "The quality of work presented for examination may well be equal to or better than that of candidates in previous years," said the study. "However, given identical conditions, today's candidates might nevertheless be unable to match the performance of their predecessors."

The IoD report also warned that university admissions tutors have seen no rise in the quality of new undergraduates, despite steadily improving A-level results in the past decade. Seven in 10 tutors believe standards either stayed the same or deteriorated in recent years.

The conclusions come as Ofqual, England's new exams regulator, said it would launch a major review of standards in the Autumn. The study will cover setting, marking and long term standards in A-levels, GCSEs, Sats and other school examinations.

Nick Gibb, Tory shadow schools minister, said A-levels lacked "rigour and relevance". "The Government has been undermining A-levels for the last few years," he said. "We are determined to restore public confidence in the A-level as the gold standard of British education."

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said syllabuses and examinations were "appropriate and reliable". "We've commented on Durham University's research time and time again," she said. "Their work is quite different to GCSE or A-level as it uses aptitude tests which are not directly comparable to performance at GCSE and A level."

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Tell-all report cards to rate Australian schools

Surprising sense from a Leftist

The Rudd Government is on a collision course with Morris Iemma and teachers' unions who say its push for transparent report cards that identify test results, class sizes, teacher qualifications and even the wealth of students' families will lead to unfair school league tables. The federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard - having met the chancellor of schools in New York, Joel Klein - says Australia can learn from his methodology of "comparing like schools with like schools to measure differences in school results". A former lawyer criticised for his lack of education credentials, Mr Klein has stirred the ire of New York teachers with his focus on standardised testing and links between student results and teacher performance.

Ms Gillard has distanced herself from criticism from the NSW Government and teaching unions who warn her approach will name and shame disadvantaged schools. Rather, Ms Gillard said yesterday, teaching excellence should be identified and rewarded and high standards expected of all students, rich or poor. "We're not talking about anything as simplistic and silly as league tables," she said at the Australian Council for Educational Research annual conference. "But we are talking about parents and the community understanding what kinds of students are in schools, their socio-economic status, the number of indigenous students, the number of students with disabilities, because that obviously means the schools have special needs."

Researchers have linked low performance at school to social disadvantage, with less able richer children overtaking more able poorer children by the age of six. Apart from investing in early learning and rewarding quality teaching, Ms Gillard said a spotlight was needed on schools needing extra help. "The aim should be to robustly ascertain what mix of capacities and needs children are bringing to their school," she said. "We need this information in order to understand what schools, in turn, should offer to these students, and how governments and communities working together can support schools to do so.

"As a nation, we should then be tracking attainment, knowing that we are in the powerful position of comparing like schools with like schools. If two schools have comparable school populations but widely varying results, we would be able to ask the question why and ascertain the answer. "We should be able to identify best practice and innovation, and work systematically to ensure that they are spread more widely. We should be able to especially assist those schools that need it. Specifically we should be identifying excellent teaching and excellent school leadership. We must expect high standards of every child."

However, a spokesman for the acting NSW Minister for Education, John Hatzistergos, said enough information was already available to help identify struggling students in need of help. "There is considerable concern with proposals to excessively 'tag' students and schools with various labels for little purpose," he said. "NSW is responsible for the welfare and education of its students and is committed to the constructive application of the outcomes of assessment in all its forms."

The Premier, Morris Iemma, said it would be difficult to rank schools around Australia. "It's like hospitals; it's the rules around that [ranking], because if you're going to stand in a hospital - and it's a similar example with schools - like Westmead and compare it, for example, with a small district hospital, like Canterbury, and then attempt in some way from the straight statistics that appear on that list to rank those two hospitals, you would not be comparing like with like."

The president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the learning priorities of students would not be addressed by a "divisive sideshow on league tables". "Raising overall student performance and addressing underachievement requires investment," he said. "Teachers know it and parents know it. "Public schools nationwide require an immediate $1.4 billion per annum to raise retention rates to 90 per cent and a further $1.3 billion per annum to ensure that all primary school-age children reach the minimum benchmark scores for literacy and numeracy."

The principal of SCEGGS Darlinghurst, Jenny Allum, said students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 had completed the first round of national literacy and numeracy tests in May, but no results had yet been made available to help schools diagnose any learning difficulties in students.

The federal Opposition's education spokesman, Tony Smith, said: "Already Julia Gillard has failed the first test in refusing to release the individual results of the national literacy and numeracy tests until the end of this year. The whole reason the Coalition government introduced these tests was to provide parents and schools with information in a timely fashion so parents could get help straightaway."

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13 August, 2008

Better Grades Through Bling-Bling

With alarming failure rates at our nation's inner city schools, one wants to celebrate any attempt to motivate success. Still, sincere efforts must be examined not according to their intentions but to their likely or demonstrated results. One new concept that is gaining attention gives kids immediate cash or gifts for completing normal academic tasks, such as homework. While such programs are well intentioned, hustling minority kids with "bling-bling" is sure to cultivate materialism and deteriorate family relationships.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer developed the Sparks Incentive program in an effort to raise achievement scores for America's black children. In the pay-to-learn scheme, children are redirected from finding intrinsic meaning in their work, and are instead seduced to pursue the vanity of money. The power of learning the value of delayed gratification, one of the most important principles of long-term success in anything, is totally incapacitated.

Last year, the New York City schools, desperate for solutions, hired Fryer as its Chief Equality Officer. His job was to figure out how to narrow the racial gap in achievement in the city's schools. Today, over 5,000 students in the New York City public school system are participating in this privately funded program. In one Brooklyn elementary school, students can earn up to $250 a year. School districts in at least twelve states have similar incentive programs, including the cities of Atlanta, Dallas, and Baltimore.

One misguided school even offers free cell phones as an incentive. Fryer defends this rueful practice saying, "[with] cell phones, [as] financial rewards for kids, we're meeting kids where they are and giving them rewards to do the things that we want them to do." What's next? Free sagging pants? Coupons for weaves, rims, designer jeans, gold chains, and gold-teeth grills?

This type of disregard for the practical effects produced by striving for good ends via dubious means reduces the humanity of entire families. Black kids are more than simply a variable in a complex economic algorithm applied to education philosophy. Black kids are human beings with inherent dignity who must be formed into virtuous adults destined to make a positive contribution to the world within the context of family and community.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege, reports that research shows that giving kids cash for grades is one of the most psychologically damaging approaches to education. Manipulating behavior in this way profoundly sabotages the internal mechanisms needed to form the character and integrity required for adulthood.

Hustling performance with cash can never substitute, Levine argues, "for parental interest, presence, and guidance." It leads to a lessening of parental influence and cultivates greed. One would think that America's public school system would not wish to cultivate "bling, bling" ideology.

Children have a nascent ability to desire and appreciate parental approval. Once upon a time, children were challenged to perform well--or else parents would be involved. Children knowing, early on, that they are accountable to their parents--and that other adults cooperate in that accountability--creates conditions for healthy family life in general.

The late Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University railed against the deification of material goods as incentives for living well at the univeristy's commencement ceremony on May 18, 2008. Pausch encouraged graduates to pursue meaningful vocations that stirred their spirits. "You will not find that passion in things," he warned, "and you will not find that passion in money."

When asked if giving cash for performance might send a message to children that learning is not its own reward, Fryer responded, "Those are not my concerns. My biggest concern is [that] we don't do anything." Why is cultivating self-centered materialism and breaking down parent/child relationships the only alternative to doing nothing? Herein lies the problem of hiring an economist who may not have the wherewithal to connect economics to the formation of children with character and integrity.

While economics teaches helpful things about the role of incentives, the dignity of children and the integrity of family life cannot be subverted for algorithmic results. Ignoring the character process will give us a generation of children who can perform on exams but have little humanity.

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When Will School Choice Come to the 'Land of the Free'?

Note: Australia has for many years had a system where the Federal government pays a substantial share of the costs of private schools, thus greatly reducing the burden on parents who seek private education for their children. As a result, around 40% of high school students in Australia are privately educated

While presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama was on his world tour, the world came to Newark, New Jersey and demonstrated how parental choice has become an engine of education reform around the globe. For the first time in its 30-year existence, the International Standing Conference for the History of Education held its annual conference in the United States--in Newark, July 23-26, with the city and Rutgers University as co-sponsors.

It did not go without notice among the conferees that the school choice available through broad consensus in many nations still confronts stiff education-establishment resistance in the United States. Newark may have landed the conference partly because its mayor, Cory Booker (D), is a strong advocate of empowering families in this way. "America, the land of freedom and choice, except when it comes to your schools," The Star-Ledger of New Jersey quoted Prof. Sjaak Braster of Utrecht University in the Netherlands as quipping.

In Holland, one of the featured nations in a discussion of access and excellence, it has been a right of parents for almost 100 years to send their children to schools they choose, using a government grant. Two-thirds now choose private or religious schools. If schools fail, they can be de-funded.

While the conference was underway, the Associated Press distributed a dispatch, run by many U.S. papers, telling how Sweden had defied its own welfarist ways and allowed parents to choose between state-run and independent schools. The independents are government-funded but may make their own decisions on staffing, teaching methods, and buildings. They may not charge tuition. Before the advent of choice in 1992, only 1.7 percent of Sweden's high school students attended private schools. Now, 17 percent do. In another deviation from democratic socialism, Sweden allows managers of independent schools to turn a profit if they can deliver quality cost-effectively.

Sweden is not the most out-of-character fan of school choice. In 2003 the People's Republic of China gave private schools equal standing with government schools and began assisting them with tax credits and loans in an attempt to boost their growth. As China Daily explained at the time: "Although local governments have put a lot of cash into education, government-run schools can't meet the needs of the public due to the large population of China."

Choice is a force in many other lands. In Canada, the degree of school choice varies considerably among the provinces. Alberta, which has the most education freedom, also has the highest level of academic achievement, while spending the least per-pupil.

So what about using the bully pulpit of the U.S. presidency to help bring more parental choice to American K-12 schools? Will that be a high-profile issue this fall? Until recently, education has not received much attention from the two major-party candidates. But that may have changed as of the mid-July NAACP convention in Cincinnati. Speaking there July 16, the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, made choice a central focus of his education program, endorsing the Washington, DC school voucher program for low-income families, an alternative to monopolistic teacher certification, new approaches to charter school funding that would empower principals, and creation of new charter schools offering online instruction.

Sen. Obama, the expected Democratic nominee, put the onus on parents in his July 14 NAACP talk, stressing the need for them to provide their children more guidance. He criticized McCain for supporting vouchers. While endorsing public charter schools, Obama has taken a harder line against vouchers since first telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board in February that he might favor them if research proved they helped students succeed.

Ultimately, it will be up to the voters to decide whether the U.S. has something to learn from the international community about choice in school reform--and, if so, which candidate is for true reform.

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Australian education unions oppose choice

Like the little Stalinists they are

The Australian Education Union has reacted angrily to plans to move towards a voucher-like scheme, which would give students the power to choose between private training providers and public ones such as TAFEs. AEU federal president Angelo Gavrielatos warned yesterday the union would launch a community campaign to head off any such changes, accusing federal Labor of continuing the "failed policies" of its Coalition predecessor. "Vouchers represent an attempt to commodify education and an abrogation on the part ofgovernment for ensuring planned provision of education," he said.

The Weekend Australian revealed on Saturday that the Rudd Government could use its reform of federalism to encourage its state Labor counterparts to introduce competition into vocational education. Victoria has already released plans to make public and private training bodies bid for students, prompting the AEU to declare the shift "the biggest threat to TAFE" in the state's history.

Education Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday the Government was in intensive discussions with the states and territories on the best ways to deliver vocational education and training. But she said training providers should not be the ones to decide what should be available. "Rather, the structure and funding of VET has to give students and industry the power to get providers to respond to their needs," Ms Gillard said.

She said future reforms would, however, not be modelled on the previous government's voucher system, since cut by Labor, which offered young Australians up to $3000 for vocational training. "There are a number of ways of achieving this reform, but an ill-thought-through, badly implemented voucher program like the Howard government's Work Skills vouchers isn't one of them," Ms Gillard said.

Martin Riordon, chief executive officer of TAFE Directors Australia, which represents TAFE and technology institutes, said vouchers were one of the financing options being discussed by governments. While he was yet to see the details of the proposal, he said it was important any reform was accompanied by a funding boost. "The last voucher system was trialled but it really was both poorly targeted and inadequately funded," Mr Riordon said.

"We are just keen to see that, in the next commonwealth and state agreement that comes in force in July next year, whatever funding agreement is ultimately agreed that there's a lift in training funding." Ms Gillard is also negotiating with the states and territories on school funding and yesterday told ABC's Insiders program she was "very assertively" challenging them to open up their schools to public scrutiny.

In a speech to the Australian Council for Educational Research conference in Brisbane today, she will call for school-by-school data on student populations, their socio-economic mix and development status to be made available nationally. "If two schools have comparable school populations but widely varying results, we would then be able to ask the question why and ascertain the answer," Ms Gillard said.

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12 August, 2008

Four-Year-Old Expelled for Acting Like a Child

What kind of society have we become when a four-year-old is expelled for saying he is going to shoot his friends?

Kyle reached his limit about the time his pillow was taken away. Unable to sleep during nap time, and made to step into the hallway until he could stop crying, the cranky 4-year-old lashed out in a classroom at The Family Development Center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

"I am going to go shoot all my friends!" he said, according to a written account that the day care center provided the boy's parents after the July 22 tantrum.

What came next - after a day care worker talked to Kyle about appropriate language, eliciting an apology - was an investigation that sent university police to question Kyle's parents and ended with the boy's dismissal from the day care center he had attended for the past three years.

Even if I had not given away the plot of this tragic farce in the first paragraph, you would have already guessed where this was going before they got to the University Police investigation part. This is the result of political correctness run amok.

Officers questioned Kyle's parents, asking if they had any guns. His mother said they don't. She said she doesn't allow her son to watch TV or play with toy guns. The investigation ended with Kyle dismissal from the day care center he had attended for the past three years. His mother believes the whole thing was handled unreasonably.

The fact that this situation was handled unreasonably is beyond dispute. The article mentions that Kyle has had numerous reports filed about his behavior over the last three years that he attended the day care center, most for behavioral issues such as not staying still during nap time and running instead of walking - flogging offenses I'm sure.

Perhaps the authorities were fooled by young Kyle's size or the timbre of his voice, but they seem to have forgotten one tiny detail about him: HE'S FOUR YEARS OLD!

I have an 8-year-old son, and even with daily admonishments, he still runs around when he shouldn't (in the store, in the house, in the barn - one shouldn't run around horses). I believe it's perfectly normal for a four year old to run instead of walk sometimes.

This is the single stupidest story I have seen in memory. The road we are heading down, where children are expected to act like little adults, is one we will regret when we have a generation that is completely off their rockers simply because they were never allowed to really BE children.

Also, with all the debate about our children becoming more and more obese and getting less and less exercise, one would think that a child running around would be looked upon favorably. Chalk up yet another cognitive disconnect for the adherents of political correctness, eh?

What I fear even worse is that someone will soon approach Kyle's mom, who works in a mental health clinic, and explain to her that poor little Kyle can't concentrate and is fidgety and needs medication. Children are not being allowed to be children anymore, to the detriment of everyone save overburdened day care workers, and it's a sad sign of our times when that happens.

Add in the fact of many schools banning tag and dodge ball and even running at recess, and what we have here is a movement so insane it defies definition. When I was a kid, we rode our bikes without helmets and our skateboards without kneepads, and climbed trees and fell out of them in our neighbor's yard. Nothing was said other than "Oh, are you OK?" We got angry with each other and made silly threats ("I'm gonna hit you so hard your grandkids are gonna cry"), and had fights, many times where one of us or - more usually - both of us ended up with bloody noses, scrapes, and bruises. But the next day, sometimes in the next ten minutes, we were back to being friends. Nobody got sued, nobody went to jail, and we grew up into perfectly fine adults capable of taking care of ourselves and treating our fellow humans in a decent manner.

We are creating a generation of fearful drones who, once they are thrust into real life after they graduate from school, will be unable to handle reality, think for themselves, and speak freely, as they will never have been taught how to do so. They are simply being taught what not to say, how not to act, and what not to think. And I, for one, think that stinks.

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Swedish Left indoctrinating schoolkids

Two new publishing houses for children's books have sparked debate in gender-equal Sweden over their professed aim of instilling the country's open-minded social values in the next generation. "Our goal is for all people, regardless of gender, sexuality, ethnicity or other such things, to have the freedom to create their own identity and be respected for their personal qualities," said Karin Salmson, the co-founder of the new Vilda publishing house.

But several critics are outraged, saying they are simply pushing propaganda disguised as literature. Vilda and another small publisher, Olika, both opened their doors last year with the express aim of making children's books that promote liberal values and challenge traditional views on gender, race and sexual orientation. "Many parents feel forced to change he to she or she to he and other details as they read stories for their children, because so many details in children's books are so very traditional," Salmson said.

Vilda has therefore introduced a so-called "hug label", guaranteeing that its books have been "scrutinised from a democracy, equality and diversity perspective" and contain no details "based on prejudice or traditional gender roles that rein in individual freedom". The publisher for instance makes sure girls are not always dressed in pink and boys in blue, that dad is not necessarily the one rushing off to work while mom stays home whipping up dinner and that same-sex parents are portrayed as a natural part of life.

Olika's co-founder Marie Tomicic also says her publishing house aims to "break down traditional gender roles and offer children broader role models, allowing them to be all they can be." Together the two small publishers have so far only released about a dozen titles, including a book about a boy who wears pink sandals, and a story about a girl who likes to make farting sounds using her armpits, who just happens to have two dads.

The publishers' philosophies are largely in line with ruling attitudes in this Scandinavian country, which is widely considered a world leader in gender equality and minority rights. But critics have challenged their methods.

"For both Vilda and Olika, their values are the top priority ... and I think that is simply the wrong approach when you want to make good children's books," says Lotta Olsson, a literary critic at Sweden's paper of reference Dagens Nyheter. If the whole aim of a story is to promote an idea and alter children's behaviour and attitudes, the artistic and literary side of the book tends to suffer she insists. "You cannot write a book simply because you want it to be gender equal. You can however write a good book that is gender equal, but as soon as you can see the thought behind the book, I think the artistic side has failed," she tells AFP.

Both Tomicic and Salmson, however, dismiss the criticism as "cultural elitism," pointing out that they have received an overwhelmingly positive response from parents. "It is perfectly possible to make good literature that takes these issues into consideration," Tomicic says, pointing out that "we have good authors and illustrators and we insist there is a good story. That is absolutely the most important thing."

One of Olika's illustrators, Per Gustavsson, has publicly criticised the publisher's request to change the colour of a girl's T-shirt from its original pink in one book, while questions have been raised about the interest of portraying homosexual parents in another book when the fact is not important to the story line. "We are trying to break a pattern," Tomicic responds, insisting that it is important to show children that there are many natural alternatives to traditional ways of describing gender roles, including the colours girls and boys wear, and family structures.

Salmson agrees. "Portraying a gay family in a story that is not simply about gay families shows that these families exist too and are just as normal as other types of families." "I really can't see how that can affect the quality of the story itself," she says, adding however that "I guess there are people who really feel very threatened when you try to open up perceptions on sexuality and gender identity."

Olsson rejects that notion, maintaining that the problem with the new publishing houses is their "prerequisite that they only take in authors with the same perspective. That affects their access to books in a way that just isn't good." "I don't think it works either," she insists. "Children do as we do, not as we tell them to do. If you look around and see women being treated worse than men, it makes no difference that you've read a children's book in which the mother goes to work and the father stays home with the kids."

Source




British education spending spree has 'failed pupils'

The literacy and numeracy of new employees have tumbled over the past decade despite Labour's œ28 billion increase in annual education spending, according to research by a leading employers' organisation. The Institute of Directors (IoD) found that 71% of its members believe the writing abilities of new employees had worsened, while 60% believed numeracy had also declined; 52% reported a worsening of the basic ability to communicate.

With the exam results season under way, more than 60% of company directors now think GCSEs and A-levels are less demanding than a decade ago. Overall, only 27% believe schools have got better under Labour. A-level results to be released this Thursday are expected to show the number of passes going above 97% and the proportion of A grades rising slightly from last year's 25.3%, the 11th successive annual rise. One exam board chief said the results will show continued decline in the numbers taking languages but rises in some science subjects, reversing the trend of recent years.

According to the IoD report, to be published this week, the results of Labour's education policies fall far short of what might be expected given the surge in school spending since the party came to power. In 1997-8, $96 billion was devoted to education, rising to $152.6 billion in the current year, an increase of nearly 60% when adjusted for inflation. "Despite the impressive political energy and resources focused on education, our members believe the government has generally performed poorly in this critical area," said Miles Templeman, the IoD's director-general. "There is a substantial credibility gap between what official statistics show and what employers feel on the front line."

Exam grades improve almost every year, leading to arguments between ministers who claim they show a real improvement and critics who argue that standards are becoming more lax.

The research also includes a review by Durham University academics of evidence on whether the rigour of GCSEs, A-levels and primary education has been maintained. They find that, at best, standards have remained the same or improved marginally. In basic scientific knowledge - such as knowing what density means - they report a "dramatic" fall, particularly for boys.

The Durham academics, Robert Coe and Peter Tymms, found strong evidence of "grade inflation" in their analysis of GCSE and A-level results over the past three decades. They also report that the understanding of basic scientific concepts such as volume and weight among 11 and 12-year-olds has deteriorated since 1976. The proportion of boys giving the right answer to an elementary question on the displacement of water fell from 54% to 17% over the period. "The fact schools are not teaching this is a real problem," Coe said. "The scale of the drop is just huge: it is dramatic. Many people would argue that you cannot do science without these fundamentals."

Jim Knight, the schools minister, said: "English and maths standards have risen over the last decade and quality has been rigorously scrutinised. "Business concerns about school-leavers reflect the reality of the changing economy with historic low unemployment and the virtual elimination of low-skill jobs. Employers rightly have far higher expectations of workers' skills than ever. "We are tackling employers' concerns head-on with the biggest education reforms for generations such as tougher A-levels and GCSEs; improved skills training across the board; and raising the participation age to 18."

- More teenagers are not in education, employment or training (Neet) than studying for A-levels in three of Britain's poorest boroughs, according to new research by the Conservatives. Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, argues that the figures for Rochdale in Greater Manchester, Sandwell in the West Midlands, and Knowsley, Merseyside, are evidence of "shocking" polarisation between rich and poor areas.

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11 August, 2008

Homeschooling OK - even in California

Reversed: Ruling that parents had no right to teach children

An appeals court in California has ruled that state law does permit homeschooling "as a species of private school education" but that statutory permission for parents to teach their own children could be "overridden in order to protect the safety of a child who has been declared dependent." The long-awaited case resolves many of the questions that had developed in homeschooling circles across the nation when the same court earlier found that parents had no such rights - statutorily or constitutionally - in California.

The ruling released this morning by the 2nd Appellate District in Los Angeles said the dispute came out of juvenile court proceedings in which court-appointed lawyers for two children demanded "an order that they be sent to private or public school, rather than educated at home by their mother."

The dependency court did not agree, "primarily based on its view that parents have an absolute constitutional right to homeschool their children," the appeals court said. The lawyers then advanced their case to the appeals level, which earlier granted the order. "We filed our original opinion on Feb. 28, 2008, granting the petition on the bases that: (1) California statutory law does not permit homeschooling; and (2) this prohibition does not violate the U.S. Constitution," the opinion said.

But the judges granted a request for rehearing "in order to provide an opportunity for further argument on the multiple complex issues involved in this case, including, but not limited to: (1) additional California statutes that might bear upon the issue; and (2) potentially applicable provisions of the California Constitution."

"This is a great victory for homeschool freedom," said Micheal Farris, who is chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association and was one of the attorneys who had argued the case. "I have never seen such an impressive array of people and organizations coming to the defense of homeschooling." "Tens of thousands of California parents teaching over 166,000 homeschooled children are now breathing easier," he said. The opinion said the judges were not deciding whether homeschool should be allowed. "That job is for the Legislature," they said.

"Homeschooling was initially expressly permitted in California, when the compulsory education law was enacted in 1903," the court said. "In 1929, however, homeschool was amended out of the law, and children who were not educated in public or private schools could be taught privately only by a credentialed tutor."

However, since then, "subsequent developments in the law call this conclusion into question. Although the Legislature did not amend the statutory scheme so as to expressly permit homeschooling, more recent enactments demonstrate an apparent acceptance by the Legislature of the proposition that homeschooling is taking place in California, with homeschools allowed as private schools," the court ruling said. "Recent statutes indicate that the Legislature is aware that some parents in California homeschool their children by declaring their homes to be private schools. Moreover, several statutory enactments indicate a legislative approval of homeschooling, by exempting homeschools from requirements otherwise applicable to private schools."

The court said, "it is our view that the proper course of action is to interpret the earlier statutes in light of the later ones, and to recognize, as controlling, the Legislature's apparent acceptance of the proposition that homeschools are permissible in California when conducted as a private school." The opinion was authored by H. Walter Croskey, who had written the earlier opinion as well. He was joined by Joan Klein and Patti Kitching....

The court found multiple specific provisions in state law, including one that exempts "a parent or guardian working exclusively with his or her children" from fingerprinting requirements, that support the legitimacy of homeschooling. "We therefore conclude that home schools may constitute private schools," the opinion said.

In the specific case that prompted the questions, however, the court said state law permits a dependency court "to issue any reasonable orders for the care of a dependent child, including orders limiting the right of the parents to make educational decisions for the child." "Because the United States Supreme Court has held that parents possess a constitutional right to direct the education of their children, it is argued that any restriction on homeschooling is a violation of this constitutional right. We disagree. We conclude that an order requiring a dependent child to attend school outside the home in order to protect that child's safety is not an unconstitutional violation of the parents' right to direct the education of their children," the judges wrote. "Parents possess a constitutional liberty interest in directing the education of their children, but the right must yield to state interests in certain circumstances," the court said.

"In this case, the restriction on homeschooling would arise in a proceeding in which the children have already been found dependent due to abuse and neglect of a sibling," the court said. "Should a dependency court conclude, in the proper exercise of its discretion, that due to the history of abuse and neglect in the family, requiring a dependent child to have regular contact with mandated reporters is necessary to guarantee the child's safety, that order would satisfy strict scrutiny. There can be no dispute that the child's safety is a compelling governmental interest. Restricting homeschooling also appears to be narrowly tailored to achieving that goal. Without contact with mandated reporters, it may well be that the child's safety cannot be guaranteed without removing the child from the parents' custody. As such, the restriction on homeschooling would be the least restrictive means of achieving the goal of protecting the children; they would be permitted to continue to live at home with their parents, but their educators would change in order to provide them an extra layer of protection."

The judges' earlier opinion had ruled in the case the family failed to demonstrate "that mother has a teaching credential such that the children can be said to be receiving an education from a credentialed tutor," and that their involvement and supervision by Sunland Christian School's independent study programs was of no value. Nor did the family's religious beliefs matter to the court. Their "sincerely held religious beliefs" are "not the quality of evidence that permits us to say that application of California's compulsory public school education law to them violates their First Amendment rights." "Such sparse representations are too easily asserted by any parent who wishes to homeschool his or her child," the court concluded.

The parents of the children talked with WND as the case developed about the situation over the education being provided to two of their eight children. The father said the family objects to public school because of the pro-homosexual, pro-bisexual, pro-transgender agenda of California's public schools, on which WND previously has reported. Just yesterday, California lawmakers decided to mandate a day of celebration and honor for Harvey Milk, the late San Francisco supervisor who was an activist for homosexuality. "We just don't want them teaching our children," he told WND. "They teach things that are totally contrary to what we believe. They put questions in our children's minds we don't feel they're ready for. "When they are much more mature, they can deal with these issues, alternative lifestyles, and such, or whether they came from primordial slop. At the present time it's my job to teach them the correct way of thinking," he said.

That was the court opinion, however, that was vacated by the appeals court prior to the newest ruling. And while today's decision was pending, a judge ended the juvenile court case that had established jurisdiction over the two children, opening the door for the demand for public school enrollment. The Home School Legal Defense Association said, "the juvenile court judge terminated jurisdiction over the two young L. children in a hearing held on July 10, 2008."

An estimated 166,000 children are being homeschooled in California, and their parents and advocates had expressed concern that the court's original ruling would leave parents who educate their children at home open to criminal truancy charges and civil charges for child neglect. A number of groups already have assembled in California under the Rescue Your Child slogan to encourage parents to withdraw their children from the state's public school system. The Discover Christian Schools website reports getting thousands of hits daily from parents and others seeking information about alternatives to California's public schools. WND reported leaders of the campaign called California Exodus say they hope to encourage parents of 600,000 children to withdraw them from the public districts.

Source




British universities discriminating against private school students

Under big pressure from the government -- in the name of "equality"

Top universities are at the centre of a new social engineering row over plans to reject the new A* grade at A-level, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. An investigation by this newspaper has uncovered plans by several leading universities to ignore the new award because it will mean offering more places to independent school pupils.

The A* grade was introduced by ministers because universities were finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between top candidates in an era when 25 per cent of sixth formers gain an A grade at A-level. That proportion is expected to rise when exam results are released next week. Internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that admission committees at a number of Britain's universities are reluctant to sanction the new A* because they fear that state school pupils will not achieve the grade in sufficient numbers. Oxford University said it is "highly unlikely" that it will utilise the A* in offers until "there is a sense of the probable grade distribution".

Exeter and Bath Universities cite concerns that if the top grade is used in offers, it is likely to "disadvantage state schools" and "have a detrimental effect on widening participation efforts". Bristol has also expressed reservations about the A* because "some schools will be able to provide intensive preparation for their pupils and others will not" which could "exacerbate existing inequalities in education provision".

Critics last night accused the universities of trying to "fix" their admissions. "It is quite disgraceful if universities are saying 'we are not going to use this measure because we are afraid of what it is going to show'," said Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University. "It is a terrible situation to get in to that higher education is avoiding the best qualified candidates because of where they were educated in a bid to comply with state school benchmarks set by its paymasters. "We will have good institutions, that should be recruiting the brightest talent, trying to fix admissions by ignoring a new grade."

Independent schools accused universities of being "lilly-livered" in their approach to the A*. "If there are reservations, they should be about potential differences between subjects and exam boards in the awarding of A*, not how different schools will perform," said Geoff Lucas, the secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. "This is woolly, lilly-livered thinking and not very honest. It shows the extent to which universities are cowered by Government pressure to widen participation. They should be giving credit to pupils who are best equipped to do well in the subject they are applying for."

Pupils starting out on their courses in September will have the chance of gaining the grade when they complete their exams in 2010. It was assumed that universities would use the grade when making offers in that year. However, internal documents reveal many institutions have yet to decide and could delay using it in case it increases the dominance of independent school pupils. Admission tutors' concerns are based on research which suggests that private school pupils will do better in A* than comprehensive pupils. Almost a quarter of those at fee-paying schools are expected to gain at least one A*, compared to just nine per cent at comprehensives, according to an analysis by exam board AQA.

Bath University admissions committee, which will consult with tutors on the issue in the autumn, fears that independent schools will gain too many of the top grades. "It was noted that the A* grade was intended to be awarded only to the highest scoring percentage of students, who would largely be in attendance at independent schools," said minutes of a meeting earlier this year. "There are some concerns that selection on the basis of A* might have adverse effects on widening participation."

Extracts from the minutes of Exeter's admissions working group said: "Other institutions are not including the A* in their offers as they feel that this is likely to disadvantage state schools." It added: "The admissions group felt they required a more informed debate on the issue and have asked for an indicator from the 1994 Group of universities (of which it is a member)."

Bristol University said despite reservations, it would accept the A* but take in to account the school context in which candidates have studied. Only one university said it had made the decision to include the A* in some offers. At University College London, departments such as history, English and economics, which currently demand three grade As, will be permitted to ask for a maximum of one A* from 2010.

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The irrelevance of sociology

At one large public university, more than 600 undergraduates are currently classified as sociology majors. Students pick among five concentrations, and one - criminal justice - attracts more than half of the majors. Yet of the 30 faculty members, only 3 specialize in criminology. The department is "trying to bring the criminology majors in the fold of sociology" but finding that many of the students interested in criminal justice aren't necessarily interested, said a professor in the department. "They want hard core probation or forensics courses," not sociology, said the professor, who like many in this article asked that her institution not be identified.

The professor spoke on Sunday at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting, at a briefing by a special task force.the association created to study its relationship to criminology and criminal justice. Another professor described a department of seven faculty members where they "view it as a badge of honor to dismiss criminology" and to deal with increasing student interest by hiring adjuncts for the courses.

The tensions described by these professors were seen by task force members as typical of many campuses, where interest in criminal justice is taking off. At an increasing number of colleges, criminal justice has broken off from sociology into separate departments. But at many campuses where that has not happened, departments are facing what Steven E. Barkan, a professor at the University of Maine, called "structural tensions" of the sort he noted that sociologists realize have the potential to be unhealthy.

Many departments have reported to the task force, of which Barkan is a member, that two-thirds of their enrollments are now in criminal justice while one-third of faculty slots are there. Elite universities appear to be less affected by the trend, but elsewhere it is increasingly visible. Between 2001 and 2006, criminal justice overtook sociology in the number of bachelor's degrees completed. Sociology increased by 14.5 percent during that period, to 31,406. Criminology increased by 35.7 percent, to 34,209. During the same period of time, sociology master's degrees declined by 15 percent while criminology degrees (of which there aren't as many) increased by 135.5 percent, and criminal justice master's degrees were up 56.5 percent.

For sociology, the debates over what to do about these numbers aren't easy. Many in the discipline believe that such fields as gerontology and communications studies should be more fully integrated with sociology - and partisans of the various approaches debate whether sociology pushed them out on their own or whether professors in those areas wanted to be seen as independent from sociology. In an era of tight budgets, when enrollments are more crucial than ever to liberal arts departments, some sociologists want to be sure criminal justice stays within the discipline, while others fear its presence will dilute standards.

For sociology, there are actually two discussions going on. One is about criminology - which is seen as closer to sociology's roots and has a shared research and theoretical base, but focuses on a subset of issues. The other is about criminal justice, a more practical field in many cases designed to prepare students for careers in law enforcement or the judicial system. Many sociology departments are changing their names to "sociology and criminal justice" or just becoming the major for students interested in criminal justice, even though there isn't as much shared intellectual vision between the fields.

A survey of colleges by the ASA's task force found that 49 percent of institutions offered a sociology major only, 28 percent have separate departments of sociology and criminal justice with each offering a major, 19 percent have criminal justice and sociology majors offered by the sociology department, and the remainder offer only the criminal justice major.

According to results that task force members stressed were "very preliminary," many sociology chairs are reporting that they are being pressured to add criminal justice programs or to expand concentrations into full-fledged majors. The pressure, according to the chairs, comes from admissions offices, who report that criminal justice majors are hot, and will attract more applicants. Adding to the tension, the survey found, many chairs believe that their professors, especially older ones, hold their criminal justice colleagues in "low esteem."

If so, departments may be in for a rude awakening, according to data collected by the sociology task force. In the five years studied, the number of sociology Ph.D.'s increased by 3.1 percent, to 558. Doctorates in criminology and criminal justice, while still fewer in number, are increasing at much faster rates. The number of criminology doctorates awarded was up 19.0 percent, to 25, while criminal justice doctorates were up 88.1 percent, to 79. The increase is significant because many criminal justice programs have historically been led by sociologists, but with a critical mass of criminal justice Ph.D.'s being produced, that may change.

Some sociologists at the meeting Sunday talked about concerns over a "cop shop" mentality in criminal justice programs. In some programs, sociologists said, retired police officers are hired to "tell war stories," and the result is a loss of focus on the kinds of issues sociologists care about: the impact of poverty, race, gender and inequity on society. One sociologist said that he has been urged by his local police force to insist on the discipline's relevance in criminal justice programs. He quoted one police officer as saying: "We don't want you to teach them to shoot. We'll teach them to shoot."

But stressing traditional sociology knowledge may be easier said than done. Dennis W. MacDonald, chair of sociology at Saint Anselm College and chair of the task force, said that "even our sociology majors don't like theory." Several said that the attraction of criminal justice is pragmatic - with either students or their parents seeing that a criminal justice degree leads to many jobs. Even as sociology professors boast about how their bachelor's students can package their degrees for a variety of careers, they acknowledge that there is a huge demand for criminal justice graduates - no packaging needed.

That pragmatism upsets some sociologists, who view their field proudly within the liberal arts and sciences - not as job training. "We've gone from a culture that values higher education for the civilizing influence it has produced. And it should civilize and temper the worst impulses of humanity," said one professor. "Now we have a vocationalizing influence. Our students are not coming to be better citizens, but to be employable."

The degree of frustration at individual colleges seems to vary widely. Several described respectful and even friendly relationships between sociology and criminal justice professors, but at the other extreme, one person described one mixed department as "a war zone." Even some of those who described cordial relations, however, said that tended to change if departmental reorganizations were proposed. Beyond issues of philosophy, professors noted practical reasons some may want separate departments. One criminologist who is in a sociology department, but whose university has a separate criminal justice department, said that the criminologists in sociology have realized that their criminal justice colleagues in their own department are being paid more, and that's led them to discuss whether they want to move there.

The sociology task force appeared torn on just how much to push sociology's values. Barkan said that one proposal the committee is considering would be to set up a minimum list of sociology course topics - theory, research methods, statistics, inequalities - that should be part of any criminal justice degree. One member of the audience said that would be a great idea because it would allow sociologists to point to a national standard to be sure criminal justice programs have enough intellectual heft. But another audience member said such a list of requirements might have the opposite of the intended effect. It could easily prompt more criminal justice programs to sever ties to sociology and just do their own thing, he said.

An audience member who teaches criminology in a sociology program asked the task force to specifically address part of its report to non-criminology sociologists, and to stress that "criminal justice does belong." MacDonald said he thought it was important that criminal justice and criminology stay connected to sociology and that "it would be suicide" for the discipline to be seen as kicking the field out.

W. Wesley Johnson, president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and director of the doctoral program in criminal justice at the University of Southern Mississippi, was not at the sociology meeting, but in a phone interview, he said he was not surprised by the discussion. Johnson said that when he started studying criminal justice, all programs were led by sociologists, and that's no longer the case. Currently, he said, there are three faculty jobs available for every new Ph.D. in criminal justice.

Johnson said that he believes that sociology professors and criminal justice professors have more in common than they sometimes realize. The roots of criminal justice and criminology are all in sociology research, he said. "We are both grounded in communities and environments."

Another way that sociology and criminal justice are similar, he said, is that neither approach has a monopoly on academic excellence. "This is a new degree and it is evolving, and some programs are more rigorous than others" he said, "but that's true of sociology as well."

Johnson declined to endorse either joint sociology-criminal justice departments or separate programs. But he said that as long as enrollments boom in criminal justice, there will be more pressure to hire professors in the field and to be sure that the discipline's interests are addressed. "Administrators are going to allocate resources to units that are producing the most credit hours," he said. "Whoever hold the checkbook gets to call the shots."

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10 August, 2008

Britain: Correct spelling under attack

Just because students can't spell `their' and `truly' doesn't mean we should accept variations that break all our useful rules

So English spelling is in the dock once again. This time it's students who write "thier", "ignor" and "arguement" (and obviously don't know how to use a spell checker). The solution? According to Ken Smith, an academic at Bucks New University, we should now tolerate variant spellings. Students are now incapable of learning the spellings of "their" and "truly" that countless millions have mastered over the centuries. So let's change our attitudes to spelling to help this deserving minority.

Two important things are left out of this argument. One is that English spelling does have a system. The silent "e" in "tone" shows that the preceding "o" is long; the lack of "e" in "ton" show the "o" is short.

And so on with all the other vowels: "Dane/Dan", "pin/pine" etc. (The exception is TV commercials for Danone that pronounce the name to rhyme with "salmon" in breach of the silent "e" rule.) If we allowed odd variants like "ignor/ignore", this would obscure the silent "e" system in English. Better to teach people the real rules of English spelling, not folk myths about "i" before "e", which at best affects 11 common words.

The real advantage of a sound-based system like English is indeed that anything can be read aloud - as newsreaders demonstrate with foreign names, such as Solzhenitsyn and Pervez Musharraf in the past couple of days. As the system has been around for centuries, it has stuck with various anomalies, like the 11 ways of saying "a" - "age", "bad", "bath", "about", "beat", "many", "aisle", "coat", "ball", "beauty" and "cauliflower". The only languages that don't have such problems are those with "shallow" spelling systems that were standardised comparatively recently, such as Finnish.

English is called a "deep" spelling system because of rules like silent "e" and because it treats words as wholes. When we're reading silently, we don't read words like "the" and "of" letter by letter; we recognise them as wholes, just as we recognise a Nike swoosh or McDonald's golden arches. We go straight from the whole word to its meaning without passing through the sounds. We recognise the two hundred or so most frequent words of English as shapes - and we couldn't read silently at speed if we didn't. But reading whole words also applies to the famous oddities like "lieutenant" and "yacht": we store them as one-offs and don't work out their pronunciation letter by letter.

If we made the spelling of "they're", "there" and "their" interchangeable, we would be ignoring all the aspects of English writing other than sounds. The three forms fit into sentences in very different ways; the difference in spelling helps us to see the structure of the sentence. Spelling makes distinctions that are impossible in speech, such as "whole" versus "hole" or "beech" versus "beach". Reducing writing to a pale shadow of speech is impoverishing the English language.

There's nothing very unusual about using whole words: it's how Chinese works. Speakers of the different Chinese dialects can understand each other in writing even if they have different words for the same character. An educated Chinese speaker knows about 5,000 characters; a dictionary has 40,000. Surely we can manage a few hundred unique words in English? Memorising the spelling of the hundred most common words of English would mean that you spelt at least 45 per cent of the words correctly in any piece of typical writing, quite a useful start.

The panel (above right) shows some of the words that English-speakers are most likely to get wrong, the variants that people produce and the percentage of web pages that get them wrong. Would accepting all these variants make life easier?

One type of variation is between styles of spelling. Look up "judgment" or "minuscule" and the preferred spelling varies between North American and British dictionaries and from publisher to publisher. It's a matter of identity; use "color" and you're American, use "colour" and you're British.

The most common type concerns the consonant doubling rules of English - "embarrass", "accommodate", "desiccate". "Supersede" and "definitely" are probably examples of one-offs where you have to remember the word as a unique whole.

Before adopting greater tolerance to spelling, we need to take many factors into consideration, not just how letters go with sounds. And we need to take far more people into consideration than UK students.

The majority of people using English in the world are not native speakers and live outside English-speaking countries. Any change will have to take their needs into account, in particular the need for a consistent spelling system with constant word forms rather than something based on native speakers' pronunciation and characteristic spelling mistakes.

Source




Florida school-voucher plan allowed on the ballot

It's a disgrace that people have to fight to give voters a say. But the antidemocratic education groups are fighting tooth and nail to prevent that

A Leon County circuit judge ruled Monday that two constitutional reforms designed to expand taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools can go before voters statewide in November. Opponents promised to appeal. Judge John C. Cooper rejected arguments by attorneys for the Florida Education Association, school superintendents and other education groups that the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission had overstepped its authority by putting Amendments 7 and 9 on the Nov. 4 ballot.

The two amendments were crafted to eliminate constitutional language cited by the 1st District Court of Appeal in 2004 and Florida Supreme Court in 2006 in decisions that scrapped former Gov. Jeb Bush's statewide voucher program called "Opportunity Scholarships."

Cooper, however, did not consider the legal merit of vouchers, which was not at issue in the Monday morning hearing. Instead, he ruled that the tax and budget commission -- empaneled every 20 years to review the state's finances -- has the authority to put the measures before voters. The state constitution's language empowering the panel to propose "state budgetary process" reforms allowed it "to propose revisions to any portion of the constitution touching upon the state budgetary process generally," Cooper wrote in a 14-page decision.

Amendment 7 would scrap state constitutional language prohibiting state aid to religious or "sectarian" institutions. Amendment 9 combines two issues -- spelling out that school districts must spend 65 percent of their budgets on classroom education, and also mandating that the state isn't "exclusively" required to fund education through a free public-school system.

If the two amendments are approved by voters, the Legislature could reinstate and even broaden Bush's voucher program to subsidize enrollment at religiously affiliated and other private schools.

More here




Surprise! Free college boosts enrolment

Tulsa County, Okla., is attracting the attention of educators across the country with a new scholarship program that has dramatically boosted college attendance by guaranteeing free tuition to all high school graduates. Tulsa Achieves is among a growing number of programs nationwide that seek to boost economic growth by expanding the skilled labor force though improved access to higher education.

The Tulsa program has proved a boon for Cassidy Mays, 19, who had planned to take a year off after graduating from Union High School in Tulsa to earn money for college. "I didn't really have money just to fork out, so it would have been a good time to take a break," said Mr. Mays, who is pursuing a pre-med associate degree. "There's no telling if I would have ever gone back." He is not alone. Tulsa Community College has doubled its enrollment of county applicants in the past two years, from 972 in 2006 to more than 1,800 this year, said Lauren F. Brookey, the college's vice president of external affairs.

Miss Brookey said the Tulsa Achieves scholarships will provide up to 100 percent of any county high school graduate's tuition at the college. The program requires applicants to complete up to 63 credits in three years. Tuition costs $2,100 for full-time enrollment, which is 30 credits a year.

No new taxes were levied to pay for the program, said William Stuart Price, owner of a Tulsa energy company and vice chairman of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Instead, the college reallocated 1 percent of its general operating budget to fund the program last year, and this year will spend just less than 2 percent of the operating budget, Miss Brookey said, adding that private donations offset the reallocated funds.

The budget comprises revenue from state and county taxes, and programs like the federal Pell Grants and the state Oklahoma's Promise, which gives free tuition to children from families earning less than $50,000 annually. "Our goal was to get more people into the college pipeline so that they would go on to get higher degrees and increase the number of college graduates in the area," Miss Brookey said. "All social indicators are tied to your level of education."

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9 August, 2008

Australia: EDUCATION, EDUCATION

The Howard government made a big issue of declining educational standards but lost power before it could do much. Education problems remain, however, with the vested interests of Left-dominated government teachers entrenched against any reforms. Three recent articles below

Second-ranking government universities fear private competition

Lobby group Innovative Research Universities warns against allowing increased competition from private providers, and demands protection for existing public sector institutions in its in its submission to the Bradley higher education review. "We argue against applying a pure market model to universities - they are critically important to this country. We don't want to see the risk of market failure, as happened in the case of ABC childcare, effecting universities'' IRU executive director Lenore Cooper told HES.

IRU consists of six predominantly suburban and regional institutions, Flinders, Griffith, James Cook, La Trobe, Murdoch and Newcastle. Macquarie University vice chancellor and outspoken reform advocate Steven Schwartz took his institution out of IRU in June. IRU cautions against competition from private providers, arguing that further deregulation would "drive greater homogenisation" in higher education as all providers focused on low cost courses in high consumer demand and that student fees would rise.

Endorsing a 2006 Labor Party policy document the lobby argues that the "special role of public universities'' should be preserved and that "pure market-base forces are not the solution to current funding shortfalls''. "The opening up of Commonwealth supported places to private providers, which are driven by the need to maximise profits for owners and shareholders will inevitably result in those providers moving into the most profitable market niches,'' the submission states.

IRU also rejects further deregulation of student fees suggesting that study costs would either rise or if the market was price sensitive that "regional and outer metropolitan universities'' would lose income due to community pressure to offer a full range of courses at low fees. This would be "a recipe for lowered quality and financial decline''.

And the organisation also opposes research concentration, suggesting that it would be anti-competitive, and that its long term impact would be to "lock institutions into their existing profiles, stifle innovation in research and to deprive many Australian regions of the research support that is required to stimulate regional development''.

However the lobby also suggests that institutions undertaking insufficient research could lose their university status. "IRU's view is that a university must be able to demonstrate research strength in a number of areas. If an institution did not do enough research - it could elect not to be a university and thus not to compete for research funds. This would depend on how much research government specified was necessary for an institution to qualify as a university," Cooper said.

IRU proposes fine tuning the system to reduce the number of discipline clusters used by Canberra to allocate student funding and an end to what IRU says is the unfair subsidy of private providers which allows their students access to publicly supported loans while public universities are barred from offering full fee places to domestic undergraduates. The lobby also called for specific funding to increase university access for disadvantaged Australians in its submission. "There has been enormous change in the last decade and there will continue to be plenty of change but we don't want dramatic change,'' Cooper said.

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Call for standards in testing Year 12 of school

One of the nation's leading education researchers has called for national minimum standards in fundamental skills that all students must meet before qualifying for their Year 12 certificate. Australian Council for Educational Research chief executive Geoff Masters said Year 12 certificates should come with a guarantee that students had achieved minimum standards in some basic skills.

At an ACER research conference next week, Professor Masters will propose minimum levels be set for fundamental skills including reading, writing, numeracy, science, civics and citizenship, and information technology. "Most students can complete 13 years of school and be awarded a senior certificate without having to demonstrate minimally acceptable levels of proficiency across a range of fundamental areas," he said yesterday. "Some things are so fundamental we should expect all students to achieve at least a minimum standard by the time they leave school."

Professor Masters said the available evidence suggested that many students leave high school without possessing these fundamental skills. He said the results from international tests run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that 13 per cent of Australian 15-year-olds perform at a minimum baseline, below which students are considered atrisk of not having the basic skills to work or participate in thecommunity. While there is no data on how many Year 12 students graduate without those basic skills, Professor Masters said there was no evidence suggesting that proportion would decrease between Year 9 and Year 12.

In fact, it was unlikely struggling students of that age had received the assistance they required to meet such benchmarks. Professor Masters said a national debate was required about the level at which the standards should be set and how the assessment should be conducted. He envisaged a system under which students could demonstrate they had reached the minimum standards earlier than Year 12 if they felt ready. The assessment could take the form of a national or state-based external exam or an online exam or use teachers' regular assessments where appropriate.

Professor Masters said the current certificates were based on assessing students' knowledge in subjects. "If someone is doing maths in Years 11 and 12, then you can be pretty confident they're going to pass a numeracy test," he said. "But not all students study maths or science, for example, in those years and there's no way of knowing what they understand."

Professor Masters said the standards should be set as part of a national consultation, but outline a minimum level of skill required in everyday life, such as reading and filling out job applications. The system should also report a range of proficiencies in the basic skills to give employers and others a sense of what students could achieve. "We should set the standard at the level we hope everyone should reach by the time they finish school," he said. "There's always a risk that standards are set too low and that the focus is then just on achieving low standards so there needs to be levels beyond a minimally acceptable standard."

Other skills that could be considered were employability skills nominated by employers, such as planning, organisation and teamwork. But Professor Masters said assessing these skills was more complicated than the straightforward tests used in literacy and numeracy.

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Postmodern path to student failure

POSTMODERNISM is hobbling Australia's best and brightest university students by locking them into narrow, prescriptive and politically correct ways of thinking and using language. The domination of postmodern theory, especially in humanities courses, is setting up a generation of students for educational failure, University of NSW professor Gavin Kitching argues in a book to be published this week. Based on an analysis of all honours dissertations written by politics students at the university over 23 years, Professor Kitching concludes that the students had abused their intelligence in writing their theses.

In the book, The Trouble With Theory, he says even the best students produce radically incoherent ideas and embrace the "extraordinary proposition" that language uses people rather than being a tool manipulated by people. Professor Kitching, who describes himself as being politically left-wing, said postmodernism had become identified with being left-wing.

"It's postmodernism as intellectual radicalism - if you're on the Left politically you have to believe in all of this," he said. "There are other traditions of being left-wing which respect the facts, which don't believe the world is simply what we believe it to be, that think if you're going to make political arguments, you have to have evidence to support them. I want to reinstate that kind of rigorous, realistic Left liberalism."

Professor Kitching, a professor of politics and fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, argues that postmodernism locks students into inflexible and emotionally manipulative definitions of words in a way that ignores the nuanced nature of language and often defies common sense. This means that terms like terrorist, asylum seeker and gay are used to create stereotypes and not simply to refer to a group of people or to challenge the stereotype. He argues that postmodernist theory does "active intellectual damage" to able students and clouds their thinking. "Postmodernism is addling the brain and wasting the time of some our brightest young people," he says.

In an interview with The Australian, Professor Kitching said the book was not a critique of postmodernism but looked at the educational cost of theory in teaching. "This book is about what a group of intelligent students think postmodernism is," he said. "You could say they don't have it right, they don't understand it, they haven't grasped it. But if this is what they think postmodernism is, if it has led them to argue in these ways, then it's educationally damaging irrespective of whether they have it right or not." Professor Kitching analysed theses that achieved a distinction or high distinction. While they were only those in the school of politics, he said his experience as an external examiner and discussions with colleagues showed the problems ran through history and sociology.

From his analysis of the theses, Professor Kitching said students were captive to a form of linguistic determinism that held that language forces people to think in certain ways. Students equate the way language is used with the meaning of words, so that the word "terrorist" always means a person using extreme violence for political ends, and anyone called a terrorist is actually a terrorist. But he said such thinking excluded sentences such as: "Calling these people terrorists distracts attention from the justice of their cause. "They have a very narrow idea of how we use words.

"(They believe) words have given meanings, and these meanings have certain biases or prejudices. If you use words, you have to accept the biases or prejudices - you're stuck with them. That you can use words ironically is not something they can take seriously. "Clearly that's not true. We use words to refer to things, but we can refer to them ironically, we can refer to them sarcastically, doubtingly, aggressively."

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8 August, 2008

The Harvard kindergarten

A BOOK REVIEW of "Back to School, Turning Crimson" By Philip Delves Broughton. Review by ANDREW FERGUSON

As Paris bureau chief for the London Daily Telegraph, Philip Delves Broughton had one of the most desirable jobs in newspapering -- indeed, one of the last remaining desirable jobs in newspapering -- and he did it well enough to earn the admiration of boss and colleague alike. He shared an apartment on the Left Bank with a charming and beautiful wife and a burbling baby boy. He dined with heads of state and traveled widely on his employer's dime. Despite the volatility of the journalism business, his professional future seemed exceedingly bright. So he quit and went back to school to study accounting.

Of course, these weren't just any old accounting classes. As he tells us in "Ahead of the Curve," his horrifying and very funny memoir, he entered Harvard Business School, joining 900 other strivers as a member of the Class of 2006. At 33, he was older than most of his classmates and wiser to the ways of the world but much less handy when it came to regression analysis.

Half-Burmese and Oxford-educated, Mr. Delves Broughton knew of Harvard -- and particularly of HBS, as it is known in our acronym-crazed era -- mostly as a brand, and he emerged with an ambivalence toward the brand that most Americans will understand. Like our common language, like our love for baseball and bleached flour, our resentful mistrust of Harvard is one of the things that have traditionally bound Americans to one another, from the snootiest Yale graduate to the lowliest stevedore. Meanwhile, everybody is trying to get in.

It is hard to account for the odd position that Harvard holds in the American imagination, and Mr. Delves Broughton's excellent book only deepens the puzzle. Some of what he found won't be surprising, particularly the sense of entitlement for which its students and faculty are famous. The self-regard must get handed out with the matriculation packets. Most graduate business schools, you might have noticed, award MBAs. HBS, according to the dean, specializes in "transformational experiences." Asked to account for a Wall Street Journal poll of corporate recruiters that ranked HBS 13th among business schools, the dean shrugged off the poor showing as sour grapes. What did you expect? HBS grads reject so many routine job offers that of course recruiters are going to resent the school.

Mr. Delves Broughton was prepared for the number-crunching nerdiness, the intense competitiveness and the unrealistically high levels of self-esteem. But there was much more. "HBS," he writes, "had two modes: deadly serious and frat boy, with little in between." The future titans of American industry celebrated the end of their first week of classes with a party at which everyone was expected to dress as his favorite hip-hop star. The central attraction was a "booze luge," an ingenious and super-efficient means of chugging vodka. At midsemester came the Priscilla ball. "The men were to dress as women and the women as sluts. . . . One man looked like Virginia Woolf in a white boa and black wig . . . while another wore a skimpy Heidi outfit and women's underwear, which failed to contain his errant . . . " -- well, you get the idea. And it cost only $120 to attend.

If Mr. Delves Broughton was surprised at the frat-boy excess, it is the other mode, the serious, non-frat-boy one, that the reader may find more disconcerting. The jargon-choked faddishness and fatuous therapeutics of pop business books and the modern workplace have seeped into HBS too. Or maybe it's the other way around. In any case, no serious student, even a serious Harvard student, should have to suffer through New Age group bonding games, as Mr. Delves Broughton and his classmates are forced to do. Another required "personal development exercise" is called "My Reflected Best Self." He quotes the instructions: "The Reflected Best-Self Feedback Exercise differs from other performance mechanisms in its explicit focus on understanding how key constituents experience individuals when they leverage their strength constructively."

Mr. Delves Broughton remains appropriately appalled at this, but as the semesters wear on and he unspools his story, he shows signs of succumbing to a version of Stockholm Syndrome -- a hostage identifying, if not with his captors, then at least with his professors, even those who pretend to teach "leadership skills." His prose, usually breezy and ironic, begins to sprout words like "team-focused." By the end of his two years in Cambridge, Mass., he writes, "I was happy I went." He knows how to do a regression analysis, and he has learned how to make an Excel spreadsheet do everything but play canasta.

He hasn't found a suitable job yet, though, and readers will be happy to see that he retains a hint of skepticism about the whole HBS enterprise -- enough, at least, to include this wonderful bit of data from a study by a banking analyst who tried to track the American equity markets in relation to the number of HBS graduates who chose to go to work in finance each year. If the figure was less than 10%, the market went up not long after. More than 30% and the market was headed for a crash. In 2006, Mr. Delves Broughton reports, 42% of the HBS grads went to work in finance. Right on schedule.

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It's time for education reform

By John McCain

Campaigning at town halls across America, I am often asked about my plans to reform our public schools. And the answer begins with two points on which most everyone agrees: Every public school child deserves a first-rate education. And too many of our schools are producing second-rate results. Beyond that, the education debate divides quickly into two camps. Some say all that's needed is more taxpayer money, along with more prekindergarten and after-school programs. Others believe that the basic structure of the education system is flawed, and that fundamental reform is needed. You can put me squarely on the side of major reform.

These days, the cause of education reform crosses all boundaries of party, race and financial means. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have taken up the cause of reform, as have many others, including the Rev. Al Sharpton. These men are strong supporters of the Education Equality Project, a group dedicated to finally changing the status quo in our education system.

This group of leaders is no longer willing to accept a public school system in which many students never even graduate or learn the basics of math, science and English. As Chancellor Klein puts it, "In large urban areas the culture of public education is broken. If you don't fix this culture, then you are not going to be able to make the kind of changes that are needed."

The chancellor speaks for many, and especially for parents who cannot afford a private school. Consider the example of the Opportunity Scholarship program in Washington, D.C., which serves more than 1,900 children from families with an average income of $23,000 a year. More than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all share is the desire to get their kids into a better school.

Yet Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, Sen. Obama, oppose this program. Not long ago, addressing the American Federation of Teachers, he dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." That went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave children who are stuck in failing schools?

Parents ask only for safe schools, competent teachers and diplomas that open doors of opportunity. When a public school fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children. No entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity.

If I am elected President, school choice for all who want it, an expansion of Opportunity Scholarships and alternative certification for teachers will all be part of a serious agenda of education reform. We will pay bonuses to teachers working in our most troubled schools because we need their fine minds and good hearts to help turn those schools around.

We will award bonuses as well to our highest-achieving teachers. And instead of measuring teacher achievement by conformity to process, we will measure it by the success of their students. Moreover, the funds for these bonuses will not be controlled by faraway officials. Under my reforms, we will put the money and the responsibilities where they belong - in the office of the school principal. One reason charter schools are so successful is that principals have spending discretion.

I am proud to add my name to the growing list of those who support the Education Equality Project. But one name is still missing: Barack Obama. My opponent talks a great deal about hope and change, and education is an important test of his seriousness. The Education Equality Project is a practical plan for delivering change and restoring hope for children and parents who need a lot of both. And if Sen. Obama continues to defer to the teachers unions, instead of committing to real reform, then he should start looking for new slogans.

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7 August, 2008

British grade-school exams a mess

From coloured graphs manipulated by statisticians to children bewildered by their grades, education is in turmoil

So who is going to carry the buck for this failure? Late results, unmarked papers, baffled teachers, confused children. "We don't want to see excuses about poor performance, what we want to see is clear plans to raise standards." Thus spake Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, in June, of the 638 schools he deemed to be "failing". He gave them 50 days to turn around or face closure or merger. (Their 50 days was up, incidentally, last Wednesday - funny that we haven't heard anything more about it. Or did they all file their reports late as well?)

Who will give Mr Balls his notice to improve? Yesterday, as his department published the results of Key Stage 2 SATs results for 11-year-olds, Mr Balls was nowhere to be heard. These are the results that headteachers have cautioned are seriously flawed: markers received the papers late; the new online system introduced by ETS, the American company to whom the marking had been contracted out, was too complex and slow. Some pupils did not exist, schools had the wrong papers returned to them, or were sent papers that hadn't even been marked; about a third of secondary school pupils did not get their results by the end of term, and legal action is now under way against ETS.

Meanwhile, many experienced markers have abandoned ship having got fed up with the chaos and ETS's unanswered premium-rate telephone lines - a child's education ransomed to profiteering on essential phone calls. It is already getting too late for another company to take over marking for the 2009 tests. This saga is nowhere near ended.

These are real children, with real futures, who have worked hard, and who are utterly confused. It is bad enough to be reduced to a set of numbers in the first place, without all the authorities behind that set of numbers failing even to produce them for you. But instead of coming out fighting for what was left of the results yesterday, Mr Balls has taken to hiding behind his statisticians.

Last week, the Schools Secretary wrote to a House of Commons committee that publication of the results was a matter for his department's "head of statistics", who had advised that they should come out on August 5 despite headteachers' widespread concerns about missing results and marking quality.

An education minister hiding behind his statisticians is like a chancellor cowering behind his economists: it is drivel and deserves to be treated with derision. Yet the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) was at it again yesterday, a spokesman now using the statisticians to deride as not "statistically robust" a well-timed report from the think-tank Civitas.

Civitas found the overwhelming majority of secondary schools that it spoke to had their own doubts on the validity of official SATs results. Nine out of ten of Year 7 teachers who replied to a random survey by Civitas believe the Key Stage 2 SATs tests exaggerate a child's abilities, with around a third of pupils getting higher scores than they deserve. Most secondary schools have to test the children again in their first weeks to determine which level they are really at, as specific coaching at primary school has enabled pupils to skim higher marks in the SATs than they really merit.

And why the coaching? Because the scores feed into the league tables, thence into the furrowed brow of a local parent obsessing over the numbers for her child's potential school. Testing and league tables have their place in our education system, but not at the expense of clarity and honesty; the numbers should elucidate, not confuse.

You choose your statistician and your statistics to suit your case. I was reading an article in the Royal Statistical Society journal a few months ago which argued that school league tables themselves are statistically meaningless as a measure of educational quality. Funny the DCSF doesn't have any departmental statisticians telling it that. And this year's tables will be more unreliable than ever because of the added uncertainty over the accuracy of ETS's SATs results.

No ministers will ever admit to the imperfection of their charts because, in the face of scepticism about the achievements of their Government, these multicoloured graphs have become the only measure by which they can trumpet their success. This explains the obsession with testing: it has become not a tool of policy, but policy itself. By their test results shall you praise or damn them. Imagination and good leadership have shrunk to lines on a graph.

As the date of publication of the SATs results approached, what were education ministers doing? Sending out multicoloured charts to the media to demonstrate their latest anti-obesity drive in primary schools. Hey, your kid may not be able to read, but at least he knows he's fat.

This row over SATs is not just about exam results, it is about a style of government that reduces people to blobs on graphs, to data entered in a system and then manipulated by the statisticians. It is government gone wrong: contracted-out responsibility, lack of accountability, and a ministry that can send out 3,840 pages of instructions to head teachers in a single year, but cannot get exam papers marked on time.

It is a tale of children being failed by a system that turns them into numbers on a chart; which treats their individuality as a problem, problems as targets, and then contracts pupils out to the lowest bidder with a premium-rate phone line to tout.

Great expectations fallen on hard times: it is a tale, ultimately, of the four in ten children, born in the year Labour came to power promising "education, education, education", and leaving primary school today still without real competence in literacy, numeracy and science. Funny that those statisticians cannot come up with a chart illustrating that.

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Education politics in the USA

Teachers' unions are expert at presenting the interests of their members and of public school students as one and the same. Which is why it's always illuminating to see how the nation's largest teachers' union, the National Education Association, spends its political money.

Each year, NEA members pay into a "Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund" that allows the union to spend tens of millions of dollars on all manner of state and national political issues. Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, a longtime union watchdog, has tracked this fund's spending. In the 2007-08 fiscal year, not surprisingly, the NEA spent $2.3 million -- on top of $1 million spent the previous fiscal year -- fighting a school voucher referendum in Utah.

But other expenditures reveal this national NEA cash -- which is separate from PAC contributions that must adhere to federal campaign-finance laws -- as a fund for various and sundry left-wing political causes. Mr. Antonucci reports that during the current fiscal year the NEA sent the Hawaii State Teachers Association $20,000 to conduct polling on a state constitutional convention. It sent the Massachusetts Teachers Association $60,000 to oppose a state income-tax repeal. And it sent the Florida Education Association $200,000 to oppose property-tax cuts in the Sunshine State.

Expect more of the same going forward in a state near you. "Unlike most previous years," writes Mr. Antonucci, "NEA finished 2007-08 with a surplus of nearly $5.9 million, which means the union will enter the 2008-09 school year with almost $20 million available to spend." It's a shame the NEA doesn't spend as much money and effort trying to improve lousy schools as it does trying to keep taxes high.

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6 August, 2008

Don't worry, kid, you don't need to know that

By Vin Suprynowicz

The Review-Journal editorialized, back on July 25:

"To understand and explain American exceptionalism, like it or not, it may be necessary to at least understand why aeroplanes were not used in the Civil War, why the British couldn't use the train to get back and forth between New York and Philadelphia in 1788, and why the Jackson Democrats kept making such a fuss about the National Bank.

"Nevada's Council to Establish Academic Standards was scheduled to meet July 21 to adopt new public-school history standards. When some attention was drawn to what they're up to, they promptly postponed their meeting for 'lack of a quorum.'

"Behind all the double-talk about replacing fact-driven, chronological history with a more 'thematic approach,' the unmistakable goal is to dumb down our history classes still further. The draft proposal under consideration is 'gobbledy-gook,' says Carson City School Board member (and former history teacher) Joe Enge. The stated goals are 'so broad I could drive a truck through them,' Mr. Enge says.

"Extrapolating 'themes' from history is great. But a young person cannot possibly judge -- let alone generate -- a useful interpretation of any facet of American history if he or she cannot locate the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Bunker Hill, Guadalcanal, Normandy, and Yorktown on a globe ... place them in their proper chronological order ... and name a commanding officer from at least three. "Go ahead, ask them."

In response, one Cheryl Grames Hoffman of Las Vegas writes in:

"Kind sir, I can assure you that no job or law school application has asked any questions about the names and places of American battles of any century. More importantly ... such a view obstructs a constructive conversation about how best to teach history to kids.

"I taught American history at UNLV for three semesters, and I really, really did not want my students simply to spew facts at me. Instead, I wanted them to learn the relevance and meaning of some key facts, and then to show me they could convey that relevance and meaning in a clear and convincing way. Sure, it would be cool for young people today to know the facts of the Great Depression. Even cooler would be for them to be able to speak and write about it well. Employers, I think, place value on that ability -- not on knowledge of important battles in our past.

"Studying history is a means to an end: it can provide an opportunity for kids to master a much-needed set of skills. Let us focus on providing them a means for learning how to think critically, to synthesize data, and to present it for others to scrutinize. The end, however, is not that young people become more patriotic and less apathetic about all that has transpired before they arrived on this planet. The end is that our youngest citizens are ready to join us upon graduation as productive members of society, equipped with valuable, transferable skills. "Isn't that really what most folks would like our educational system to accomplish?"

Well, no, Ms. Hoffman. If all we wanted was to teach the process of "synthesizing data" we could cancel the history courses and have the young people write papers analyzing the philosophy of Batman.

You cannot process and interpret data until you've got some. English class is for learning how to craft a paper -- to improve their diction and delivery the young folk can join the Debate Club. In history class we expect them to actually commit some stuff to memory.

If I'm reading this right, what we have here is a history teacher (albeit "former") saying it's silly -- that it "obstructs a constructive conversation about how best to teach history to kids" -- to expect college history students to be able to tell us whether Gettysburg or Yorktown came first (We said "place in chronological order," not "give specific dates") and to name a couple of the commanding generals. Because the question never comes up on job applications.

I don't remember ever being asked to do long division on a job application, either, or how many electrons there are in a helium atom. (We would want our students to be able to "spew some facts" about what happened at Lakehurst in May of 1937 before they substituted hydrogen in their balloons with helium, wouldn't we?)

What prospective employers and institutions of higher learning do ask is whether you've got an eighth grade education, or a high school diploma, or maybe spent four or five years at a day school best known for its semi-pro basketball team and being closed on weekends.

As recently as 1965 an affirmative answer to the "eighth grade" question meant you could do long division, algebra and at least stumble through "Madame Bovary" and/or the "Commentarii de Bello Gallico." The "high school diploma" question used to mean no one had to re-check to make sure you knew "1781; west shore of the Chesapeake; Cornwallis surrenders to Washington" with extra points if you knew what the Comte de Grasse was up to, that week.

Apparently nowadays asking about the diplomas will no longer suffice; thanks to "educators" such as Ms. Hoffman we're going to have to actually start checking this stuff.

How do you discuss the "relevance and meaning" of Continental logistics problems or the Treaty of Paris or the 1789 debate over the need for a stronger central state if you think Yorktown was fought after Gettsyburg and you believe the American commander in 1781 was Meade or Eisenhower or maybe Robert E. Lee or you just don't care because you're convinced none of that matters, it's all just "spewing facts," that studying history is a "means to an end" -- an undisclosed "end" that apparently has more to do with moaning about the lack of advancement opportunities for 18th century women than requiring anyone to retain any "facts" or be able to explain what happened at Pearl Harbor or Bunker Hill or the beaches of Normandy ... or even who was in charge?

How do you "think critically" about whatever theories and "trends" the government-school teacher wants to spoon-feed you if you don't know enough "boring facts" to say, "Wait a minute; that doesn't fit"?

Should we wonder now why so few of our public servants seek to emulate Washington -- how would they even know how? -- if they have no idea what he did on Dec. 23, 1783, and then on March 4, 1797, arguably the two most important acts taken by any single man in delivering us our freedom ("If this is true," said no less a figure than George III, "then he is the greatest man of the age") ... exceeding even what "the indispensable man" did on Christmas night, 1776, a date any American should be ashamed at having to look up?

I wipe away tears of pride. Ms. Hoffman sneers that we're "just spewing facts."

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Education as a Civil Rights Issue

Civil rights groups have begun a welcome attack on a House bill that would temporarily exempt the states from the all-important accountability requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002. The attack, led by powerful groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, was unexpected, given that the nation's two big teachers' unions actually hold seats on the conference's executive committee. Recent events suggest that the civil rights establishment generally is ready to break with the teachers' unions and take an independent stand on education reform.

Despite innocuous packaging, the House bill looks very much like a stealth attempt to gut the national school accountability effort. Introduced by Representatives Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, and Timothy Walz, a Democrat from Minnesota who is a former teacher, it is supported by the National Education Association, the influential teachers' union that has been trying to kill off No Child Left Behind for years.

The bill, which is unlikely to pass, would permit the states to ignore the parts of the law that require them to pursue corrective actions at failing schools. That would encourage lassitude in states and districts that have already dragged their feet for too long. It would sap the energy of states that have shown clear progress since the law was passed and are eager to move forward. Once stopped, the reform effort could take years to get moving again.

The support of civil rights groups for the No Child Left Behind Act has been muted in the years since the law was first passed. But with the reauthorization process under way, the groups are making it clear that they view education reform as a civil rights issue. They want changes in No Child Left Behind - but only changes that strengthen the law - and they are fully prepared to fight the unions for those changes if necessary.

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5 August, 2008

A new British "university of life"

It is not so much a school for scoundrels as an academy to turn hooray Henrys into smart Alecs. A new "university of life" will teach its students how to talk at the dinner table, what books to read and how to sneer at British holidaymakers. A group of philosophers, actors, wits and businessmen has been assembled to offer courses on everything from sparkling table talk to French philosophy.

The School of Life, whose faculty includes Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, and Luke Johnson, chairman of Channel 4, may appear to critics to be an attempt to bolt intellectual pretentiousness onto old-fashioned snobbery. Its backers, however, insist it will help clients who have been too busy in the pursuit of money to develop their social skills and intellectual depth. De Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, will offer students an insight into ways to revive a relationship, choose a good doctor, enjoy a holiday, make friends and respond to an insult.

Those who would be welcome to attend evening and weekend classes include Katie Price, the model and bestselling author also known as Jordan. Price said she was barred from part of the Cartier polo tournament at Windsor last weekend out of "pure snobbery".

The school, which opens in Bloomsbury in central London next month, was founded by Sophie Howarth, 33, a former curator at Tate Modern. "It is not a finishing school. Nor is it conventional evening classes," Howarth said. "We are going to be teaching essential stuff to bright people and acting as a travel agent for the mind. We are pitching at bright, busy people who want to make the most of their careers and lifestyles and limited time off. The etiquette lessons will not be about which spoon to use or how to fold a napkin but more a menu to good conversation."

Lessons in politics will examine the theories of philosophers from Plato to Karl Marx but will also look into whether it would be more politically effective to become a billionaire than prime minister.

Learning courses - which include lessons in love, work, family and play - will cost $400 a term, starting in September. Meals will cost $90 for three courses. There is also the opportunity for a "one-to-one" with an expert for $100 an hour and a chance to listen to a "sermon" from a guest speaker or go on specialised holidays with a guest lecturer. The "sermons" are not religious but will discuss modern ethics.

Experts such as Susan Elderkin, author of Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, will give students a spot of "biblio-therapy" with tailored reading lists. Students will also be invited on field trips. De Botton will teach them the meaning of travel at Heathrow airport for two days for $600 a head; and Martin Parr, a photographer, will lead an expedition to the Isle of Wight to observe "the vulgarity, nostalgia and brashness of British holidaymaking in its full glory".

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Australia: Teachers union has proposed a national system of performance pay

Unusual for a teachers' union. "All teachers are equal" is their usual mantra

The teachers union has proposed a national system of performance pay that would restructure the profession to pay the best teachers more money to stay in the classroom. The Australian Education Union is calling on the Rudd Government to fund a national system of accomplished teachers that would assess teachers against a published set of standards and pay them at least $100,000 a year. The system would be voluntary and insert a new salary band for classroom teachers above the existing wage scale, which most teachers top in their first eight or nine years.

Federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said a new career structure was required to move away from the current system under which teachers are forced to leave the classroom and undertake administrative positions to achieve further pay rises. "This is a two-step process in giving professional pay for teachers," he said. "First we need to ensure as a country that we have a competitive professional salary to attract teachers in the numbers required to ensure a qualified teacher in front of every single classroom, no matter where it is in the country. "Beyond that, I restate our preparedness to negotiate a framework that further recognises and rewards demonstrated teaching skills, knowledge and practice."

Primary school teacher Anthony Atkinson welcomed the plan to recognise the profession's best performers and to give new teachers a guide to what is expected of them. Mr Atkinson, who is in his second year of teaching at Merri Creek Primary School in Melbourne's inner suburbs, said the system would focus attention on the professionalism of teachers. "I like the idea of having a set of standards that are a way of recognising things when still in the classroom," he said. "Anything that gives you a roadmap for your professional development ... is definitely going to be helpful."

The union proposal is based on a report commissioned from Educational Assessment Australia at the University of NSW, which developed a set of standards for assessing teachers as accomplished performers. The report looked at professional standards developed by the teacher registration bodies in each state and territory to compile a set of about 100 indicators for measuring the quality of teaching practice.

The majority of questions dealt with standards of teaching and practice, curriculum and programming, lesson planning and content, assessment and reporting, implementation of teaching practice, professional development, and participation in the school community. The EAA study sought to indicate the proportion of teachers who met the accomplished teaching standard, and found half the 1833 surveyed teachers met 57 per cent of the criteria.

Education Minister Julia Gillard said the AEU report was timely and would add to the work being done by governments to improve rewards, incentives and career structures for teachers. "Better ways to reward quality teaching certainly need to be developed and any reward system needs to be based on transparent standards for assessing teachers," she said. "We need to find ways of valuing teachers who are teachers of excellence because we want to keep the best teachers in front of classrooms."

Opposition education spokesman Tony Smith also welcomed the union's turnaround on performance pay, saying the AEU had "come out of the Stone Age" to discuss the issue.

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4 August, 2008

Eminent British educationist says that centralization of education is the evil and school choice is the answer

Chris Woodhead was a champion of the Tory education reforms but now admits they have failed. Here he explains why

Twenty years ago last week the educational landscape changed. Kenneth Baker's Education Reform Act, the most comprehensive and controversial piece of education legislation since the second world war, became law. I did not know it at the time but my life was about to move on, too.

Naturally, most teachers were deeply suspicious. They dismissed the idea of a national curriculum to be defined by politicians as an intrusion into their professional domain. They hated the introduction of national curriculum tests to be taken by children at seven, 11 and 14, and they hated the prospect of inspections every six years, with more published reports .

The idea that heads should take greater financial responsibility for their schools was more welcome, and entrepreneurial head teachers could see that the introduction of a new category of grant-main-tained schools could free them from the clutches of local authority bureaucrats. Most, though, were nervous of this new independence. They may not have liked their local education authority, but they liked the idea of standing on their own two feet even less.

My reaction was more positive. The basic logic seemed right to me. Why shouldn't parliament set out what it expected the nation's children to be taught? Given that broad specification, why not devolve as much responsibility as possible to the individual school to take financial and educational decisions that made sense in its particular circum-stance? And why not hold schools accountable, through tests and inspections, for the quality of those decisions and the standards achieved by their pupils?

The devil, as always, would be in the detail, but there was nothing here that was not good management practice. Tell people what you want them to do, give them the resources and space to get on with it and hold them accountable. I hoped, too, that a national curriculum would mean a national entitlement to study a broad range of subjects, ending what can only be called the eccentricity of local provision in many schools.

I thought it would raise expectations in those schools that did not demand enough of their pupils. Likewise the prospect of real accountability and, yes, the danger of public humiliation might focus a few minds that needed focusing. And, working as I was in a local authority, I was only too aware of both bureaucratic waste and the eccentricity of some local politicians.

A couple of years later I found myself in charge of the national curriculum. Then in 1992, when responsibilities for the curriculum were merged with testing, I headed up the new School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Later I took over Ofsted, the inspectorate. That is what I mean when I say my life changed. I became responsible at different times for most of the key aspects of the act.

I have therefore to ask myself a difficult question. How much am I to blame for the failure of a series of educational reforms that in principle I continue to believe make basic sense, but which in practice I now consider to have done more harm than good?

If David Cameron and his Conservatives were to ask me what to do about it all, I would tell them to abolish both the national curriculum and Ofsted. The tests at 11 and perhaps at seven should be kept but are in need of radical reform, as is the so-called autonomy of schools. The idea behind the act was that they should be autonomous institutions, free from local authority and central government control, but the tentacles of bureaucratic control are as strong now as they were in 1988 - stronger perhaps.

Baker and subsequent Conservative politicians saw the national curriculum as a challenge to progressive, child-centred educational theories. So the English curriculum insisted on the teaching of spelling and grammar and listed the classics of English literature that should be taught to pupils as they moved through school. The history programme of study sought to ensure that children learnt something at least of the nation's story - and geography, in a similar fashion, focused on a fair number of geographical facts.

My own view was that these were much-needed developments but, as the years have gone by, the original knowledge-based core of the curriculum has come under ever greater attack. With hindsight, what has happened is utterly predictable. The national curriculum now enshrines the very educational beliefs it was originally intended to confront. Hence my belief that it has become part of the problem and should be abolished.

Inspections made a contribution when they focused in a rigorously objective way on what matters most in a school: the quality of leadership and teaching. Now they are based on the school's own self-evaluation, teachers are rarely observed and the evidence from inspection seems more often than not to be used to buttress ministerial claims that everything is progressing wonderfully. Once again a good idea has been rendered impotent, if not downright dangerous.

The tests, in particular those sat by 11-year-olds, matter because they give parents some sense of how successful the school their child attends, or might attend, is in teaching basic skills of English and mathematics. But at the moment, as we all know from news reports, the testing system is in chaos, so even here it is hard to say the reform act initiated a change that has survived the years.

I tried in the different jobs I did to insist on what I thought mattered. Many people of course disagreed with what I wanted to achieve, but not many have accused me of failing to fight my corner. I fought and perhaps I should have fought harder. But in the end, whatever I did or anybody else tries to do in the future, my conclusion is that any attempt to reform the nation's 24,000 schools from the centre is doomed to failure.

Our current government is never going to deviate from its centralist path. Cameron could. He could develop a truly Conservative approach to state education that finds ways to empower parents as consumers and relies on the wisdom of their choices. That is the prize. The history of the past 20 years shows there is no alternative.

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Detroit crookedness again

The FBI is investigating Detroit Public Schools for possible misuse of at least $500,000 in funds connected to a program aimed at retaining and attracting students in the beleaguered district, according to board members and a confidential memo Superintendent Connie Calloway sent to board members Monday. In the memo, obtained by The Detroit News on Monday, Calloway told board members "the FBI has picked up two boxes of files in connection with the Detroit Public Schools' Retain and Gain Initiative." The program was launched February 2007, months before Calloway started with the district. Calloway ended the initiative.

Calloway said she was contacted by the FBI about the program in July 2007, shortly after she became superintendent. "Since then I have had several discussions with the FBI related to Retain and Gain," the memo said. "DPS has also moved forward with an internal investigation." The Retain and Gain Initiative probe involves allegations of undocumented employees and undocumented work hours, among other allegations and could involve up to $1 million more in missing funds, according to one board member. The district has lost nearly 61,000 students since the 1999-2000 school year.

An FBI spokeswoman in Detroit had no comment on the memo. "We cannot confirm or deny the existence of an investigation," Sandra Berchtold said. School board members Monday night confirmed the investigation. Board member Marie Thornton said the probeis another black eye for the district. "The FBI needs to do their job and someone needs to go to jail," Thornton said. "Peoples' heads need to roll."

Former Detroit Public Schools Board President Dr. Jimmy Womack said he doesn't believe the FBI will find any wrongdoing. "Based on the information that was shared with me before Dr. Calloway got here and since she's been here it is not likely they are not going to find something," Womack said. But Womack added he's skeptical the FBI approached Calloway. "The FBI doesn't just come to you," he said. "They have to have a reason to come to you."

William F. Coleman III was removed as superintendent of the trouble district in March 2007. Lamont Satchel was interim superintendent until Calloway's appointment.

Lekan Oguntoyinbo, a former district spokesman who was a member of the team involved with the initiative, said he had brought concerns to Calloway regarding another employee. He said the funds originally promised for the initiative, $1.5 million, were not available. "Given some of the concerns I had ... I'm not surprised" about the investigation, he said Monday.

The Retain and Gain probe joins another FBI investigation into the district's Risk Management Office. That office oversees the district's insurance and assesses its financial liability and cost. The probe involves allegations of millions of dollars in improper wire transfers. It is the latest in a series of money problems that have struck the district recently.

According to a federal audit of funds from 2004-06, DPS misused $53.6 million in federal funds designated for low-income children and should return that amount to the U.S. Department of Education or provide documents that the money was used properly.

The district is trying to eliminate a $408 million deficit and pay past-due vendor bills. The district must make $522 million in cuts over two years; it also received $38 million in emergency payments from the state this month.

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3 August, 2008

Final grade school exams in Britain expected to show quarter of pupils without grasp of basics

Fewer children are expected to start secondary school in September with a decent grasp of the basics, according to official forecasts

The number of 11-year-olds reaching national standards in English, mathematics and science will drop across the board, it is predicted. Sats results published next week are expected to show a quarter of pupils failed to reach the level expected of their age in maths. At least one-in-five is predicted to fail in English.

It follows new rules introduced for the first time this year - preventing schools "inflating" scores for thousands of borderline pupils. In the past, children just missing national standards had exam papers automatically reviewed - resulting in some many papers being upgraded. The loophole has now been closed.

Government statisticians said they expected results to drop by up to two percentage points when they are published on Tuesday, putting standards back at levels achieved in 2004. But there are fears that results could also be affected by the chaos surrounding the marking of this year's Sats papers. Results for 6,000 primary pupils had still not been delivered to schools earlier this week following errors by the company handling the process. Thousands more results for 14-year-olds were also outstanding.

Ofqual, the exams watchdog, said the delays would not affect marking, insisting "there was no evidence of widespread problems with the quality" of scripts. But some teachers have complained of irregularities, including papers being returned with no marks at all.

Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: "The Government would have been better advised to hold them back so we could be assured that we were looking at authentic results. "So many doubts have been expressed that there has to be question marks against whatever results are published next week. If we are going to compare them properly against previous years, and use them as an accurate reflection of the performance of the system, we need to know that the results are as accurate as they could be."

The National Association of Head Teachers said the decision to publish national figures "beggars belief". It said it received 300 complaints from members about inaccuracies, which may only represent the "tip of the iceberg".

Some 600,000 children took Sats tests in their final year of primary school. In 2007, 80 per cent of pupils gained the level expected of their age in English, 77 per cent in maths and 88 per cent in science. The Department for Children, Schools and Families said it expected results to fall following the removal of so-called borderlining. In a statement, officials said it was likely to cause "a fall in the proportion of pupils achieving the expected level by up to two percentage points". It is believed English results will be worst hit.

Since the mid-90s, pupils with results two or three points below the pass mark in tests had papers automatically reviewed. But results for those who only just scraped over the borderline were never re-checked. It means thousands were marked up - but no-one was downgraded. Since 1999, average results have been boosted by 1.2 percentage points in English, 0.2 points in maths and 0.6 points in science, according to the Government's National Assessment Agency.

Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister, said: "If these are more accurate figures, it just shows that the small rises in results we have seen in the last few years have been completely bogus. It will just reiterate the fact that standards of reading, writing and maths have plateaued over the last six or seven years. We should be getting all children to the required standard."

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Inside the new U.S. education bill

On Tuesday night, a congressional conference committee passed legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA) that if enacted - and it seems it will be - will drive up both the price of college and your tax bill. But don't bother trying to nitpick it; the legislation is 1,158 pages long and is expected to be voted on by the full House and Senate today. It is doubtful many members of Congress will read even a little of the bill before it's given a final yea or nay.

And what's the significance of 452 billion, you ask? In dollars, it's the newly projected size of the federal deficit, a huge shortfall to which the new HEA will only be adding digits. Consider just some of the broad lowlights, which is all that are available given the bill's sheer, mountainous size, and the time constraints under which it's being rammed through Congress.

First and foremost, the new HEA would increase the Pell Grant maximum from $5,800 to $9,000, a 55 percent leap. If the same number of Pell recipients as we had in 2008 - almost 5.6 million - were to receive maximum benefits under the new bill, it would cost more than $50 billion. The chances of that happening aren't huge - most Pell recipients don't qualify for maximum awards, and Congress rarely appropriates full authorized amounts - but Pell outlays will almost certainly rise, and their potential is fiscally frightening.

Still in the direct-costs-to-taxpayers column, the bill would simplify the process for students to get federal aid, easing the way to government money for students who are so unmotivated they won't even go through the current process to get college dough. There's also a new loan fund for colleges damaged by natural disasters, and added cash for graduate programs serving large minority populations.

Next, we have new rules and regulations. Colleges will have to report a lot more information about what supposedly drives their costs and prices. The U.S. Department of Education will get new authority to regulate private loans, which use no taxpayer money and are, as a result, the only truly fair student aid because both lender and borrower voluntarily agree to terms. There's even a requirement that colleges come up with plans to enable students to legally download music and movies.

And then there's the real kicker: This bill would do nothing to rein in rampant tuition inflation, by far the biggest problem in higher education. Indeed, by giving students yet more taxpayer-furnished aid, it will just keep exacerbating the problem, heaping more cheap money on kids so that they can demand bigger hot tubs, more famous professors, and fancier dining-hall food.

Just look at the numbers: It's no coincidence that while the inflation-adjusted price of college has gone up roughly 70 percent over the last two decades, aid per-student rose almost 140 percent. The more money students get from others, the more they're willing to pay and the more universities are happy to charge.

Unfortunately, this all seems inconsequential in Washington. The conference committee passed its HEA monstrosity 40-4. The bill is expected to breeze through the House and Senate - if it can physically be squeezed through the doors - on its way to a presidential signature. It's just another sign that numbers like 1,158 and $452 billion mean nothing in D.C. Vote counts are the only numbers that really matter.

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2 August, 2008

House, Senate Pass Overhaul Of Higher-Education Programs

Congress yesterday passed a major overhaul of federal higher-education programs aimed at expanding financial aid and bringing greater clarity and disclosure to the student loan process. By overwhelming bipartisan votes, the House and Senate approved a five-year reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. It will nearly double the maximum amount of Pell Grants by 2014 and will require the Education Department to collect and publish better data on soaring tuition costs at universities and colleges. "This legislation will create a higher-education system that is more affordable, fairer and easier to navigate for students and families," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and an architect of the legislation.

The House's vote was 380 to 49; the Senate's was 83 to 8. President Bush has said he will sign the bill into law. Some Republicans opposed the measure because they think it imposes too many regulations on universities and the private lenders that finance higher education for millions of students. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former secretary of education, piled five cartons into a stack almost five feet high on the Senate floor to illustrate the quantity of existing regulations governing higher education. He said the new legislation would double the pile. "The greatest threat to higher education isn't underfunding -- it's over-regulation," he said.

But others said the legislation, which took five years to write after the previous act expired in 2003, would start providing benefits to students in time for the coming school year. "It needs to be done before the kids go back to school this fall," Sen. Mike Enzi (Wyo.), ranking Republican on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, told reporters. Enzi negotiated the final details of the bill with Sen. Barbara Mikulski (Md.). She has been the lead Democrat on education matters while the chairman, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), recuperates from surgery for a brain tumor and undergoes chemotherapy and radiation treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Mikulski said Kennedy continued to play a key role in the negotiations over the bill through regular phone calls and memos from his home. "I talk to Senator Kennedy once a week to give him a report on who's been naughty and who's been nice," she told reporters. Kennedy plans to return to the Senate and his chairmanship in September after the five-week recess for the national party conventions and a district work period, aides and senators said.

In addition to increasing Pell Grants, the legislation seeks to clarify the application process. One provision, written by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), simplifies a financial aid form by reducing the number of questions asked and mandating it contain more easily understood language. Emanuel said yesterday he has drafted a letter to the Education Department, asking its officials to implement the language as he had intended it. "Do not let the bureaucracy kill this," he said.

The legislation also imposes new regulations on financial institutions that make private loans to students not in the federal student loan program. It requires those lenders to disclose 27 pieces of information, such as mandating lenders to reveal three times in the application process all potential finance charges, late fees, penalties and adjustments to the loan. It also gives student borrowers up to 30 days to terminate a loan after an application is approved.

The April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, during which campus officials did not alert students to the first shooting incident, inspired another provision. It mandates that universities immediately notify students of emergency situations.

The Higher Education Act follows the passage of a $20 billion bill last year that provided increased funds for expanded Pell Grants and cut interest rates on federally backed tuition loans.

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School prayer

This is a statement that was read over the PA system at the football game at Roane County High School , Kingston , Tennessee, by school Principal, Jody McLeod

It has always been the custom at Roane County High School football games,to say a prayer and play the National Anthem,to honor God and Country. Due to a recent ruling by the Supreme Court,I am told that saying a Prayer is a violation of Federal Case Law. As I understand the law at this time,I can use this public facility to approve of sexual perversion and call it 'an alternate lifestyle,' and if someone is offended, that's OK.

I can use it to condone sexual promiscuity,by dispensing condoms and calling it, 'safe sex.' If someone is offended, that's OK.

I can even use this public facility to present the merits of killing an unborn baby as a 'viable! means of birth control.' If someone is offended,no problem...

I can designate a school day as 'Earth Day' and involve students in activities to worship religiously and praise the goddess 'Mother Earth' and call it 'ecology.'

I can use literature, videos and presentations in the classroom that depicts people with strong,traditional Christian convictions as 'simple minded' and 'ignorant' and call it 'en lightenment.'

However,if anyone uses this facility to honor GOD and to ask HIM to Bless this event with safety and good sportsmanship,then Federal Case Law is violated.

This appears to be inconsistent at best,and at worst, diabolical Apparently, we are to be tolerant of everything and anyone, except GOD and HIS Commandments.

Nevertheless, as a school principal, I frequently ask staff and students to abide by rules with which they do not necessarily agree. For me to do otherwise would be inconsistent at best, and at worst, hypocritical... I suffer from that affliction enough unintentionally. I certainly do not need to add an intentional transgression.

For this reason, I shall 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and refrain from praying at this time. However, if you feel inspired to honor, praise and thank GOD and ask HIM in the name of JESUS, to Bless this event, please feel free to do so As far as I know, that's not against the law ----yet.

One by one, the people in the stands bowed their heads, held hands with one another and began to pray.

They prayed in the stands. They prayed in the team huddles. They prayed at the concession stand and they prayed in the Announcer's Box!

The only place they didn't pray was in the Supreme Court of the United States of America- the Seat of 'Justice' in the one nation, under GOD.'

Somehow, Kingston , Tennessee Remembered what so many have forgotten. We are given the Freedom OF Religion, not the Freedom FROM Religion. Praise GOD that HIS remnant remains!

JESUS said, 'If you are ashamed of ME before men, then I will be ashamed of you before MY FATHER.'

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1 August, 2008

Britain: Smaller private schools at risk of closure because of credit crisis

Independent schools are at the risk of closure because parents can no longer afford the fees, education experts have warned

It came after two schools were forced to close, becoming the first high-profile victims of the credit crisis. One school shut altogether while a second has been forced to call in receivers, who are attempting to sell it to a new buyer. Both were members of the prestigious Girls' Schools Association, the group representing Britain's top single-sex schools. Wispers School in Haslemere, Surrey, will not reopen after the summer holidays, blaming financial pressures and a drop in demand for all-girls' education. And Wentworth College, Bournemouth, will shut next week, citing the "current economic climate, linked with a short term fall in pupil numbers".

Last night, experts said the schools' closures were likely to be the "first of many" as the independent sector is squeezed by the financial downturn. All bar one of England's top 20 private schools raised fees above inflation this year, according to one report, prompting claims that some schools were "underestimating parents' sensitivities to fee increases".

Sue Fieldman, regional editor of the Good Schools Guide, said: "These are the first ones to close for a while but I think we may see a string of them. Girls' schools are particularly vulnerable. "Of course, the top schools remain very strong, but the middle-ranking and very small schools may suffer. "Some of these only need to lose two or three pupils a year and it is going to start being very difficult to stay afloat, particularly in the present climate."

Wispers, an all-girl boarding school, announced it was closing at the end of the summer term after 60 years. The school, for 11 to 18-year-olds, charged up to $42$42,000 for boarders and $26,500 for day pupils - with 72 students registered last year. It was known as a strong academic school, sending all pupils to top universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. In a statement, John Parker, president of trustees, said: "We are saddened that the difficulties facing small schools in budgeting for ever increasing costs has resulted in this decision to close. "Wispers' small size has been one of its strengths but its size also makes it vulnerable when single-sex girls' schools are under increasing pressure from the trend towards co-education and when the demand for boarding is in decline." The school will use the sale of its assets - thought to be worth $8m - to create an educational trust, providing bursaries for girls from deprived backgrounds to attend other fee-paying schools.

Wentworth College, for 144 pupils, founded in 1871, was placed in the hands of receivers Grant Thornton this week and will be officially closed on August 4. The girls' school, which charged $32,350 for boarders and $20,850 for day pupils, had been due to admit boys for the first time from September to boast numbers. In a statement, Grant Thornton said it was hoped it would reopen if a new owner was found. "The cost base of the school has risen and management sought to address this by expanding pupil numbers," the firm said. "However, given the current economic climate, linked with a short term fall in pupil numbers and limited availability of funding, the board of governors took the decision to place [the school] into administration." Parents have been advised to find alternative schools for September.

Between 2001 and 2006, average school fees across the country rose by 39 per cent - compared with an 18 per cent rise in average earnings. The Independent Schools Council said the rises were due to staffing costs. Vicky Tuck, principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College and president of the Girls' Schools Association, insisted these were "isolated" cases. "My conversations with fellow heads in GSA indicate that recruitment is going very well," she said. "We have all got parents who are taking all sorts of contingency measures to pay for education. "They want independent education and many recognise they have to go without certain things as a result. "

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School choice doing well in welfarist Sweden

Schools run by private enterprise? Free iPods and laptop computers to attract students? It may sound out of place in Sweden, that paragon of taxpayer-funded cradle-to-grave welfare. But a sweeping reform of the school system has survived the critics and 16 years later is spreading and attracting interest abroad. "I think most people, parents and children, appreciate the choice," said Bertil Ostberg, from the Ministry of Education. "You can decide what school you want to attend and that appeals to people."

Since the change was introduced in 1992 by a center-right government that briefly replaced the long-governing Social Democrats, the numbers have shot up. In 1992, 1.7 percent of high schoolers and 1 percent of elementary schoolchildren were privately educated. Now the figures are 17 percent and 9 percent.

In some ways the trend mirrors the rise of the voucher system in the U.S., with all its pros and cons. But while the percentage of children in U.S. private schools has dropped slightly in recent years, signs are that the trend in Sweden is growing. Before the reform, most families depended on state-run schools following a uniform national curriculum. Now they can turn to the "friskolor," or "independent schools," which choose their own teaching methods and staff, and manage their own buildings.

They remain completely government-financed and are not allowed to charge tuition fees. The difference is that their government funding goes to private companies which then try to run the schools more cost-effectively and keep whatever taxpayer money they save.

Bure Equity, listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, is the largest private school operator in Sweden and is expanding rapidly. In the first quarter of this year, net profit for its education portfolio rose 33 percent to $3 million. Such profit-making troubles Swedes who don't think taxpayers should be enriching corporations.

The Social Democrats strongly opposed the change as anti-egalitarian, but when they were re-elected to power in 1994, they found it was so popular that they left it in place, though they imposed a lid on fees.

Barbro Lillkaas, a 40-year-old accountant, is considering putting her child in a private school, and has no problem with the profit motive. "If you run a good operation then you make a profit. But you won't get any students if you are bad," she said. "You have to do a good job to get money; that is even more important for a private school."

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