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31 August, 2010

Allow private firms to run British State schools, says regulator

Private companies should be allowed to take over the running of state schools, the outgoing chairman of Ofsted has said. Zenna Atkins praised the Government's free schools policy, which allows parents and charities to run state schools, but urged ministers to go further by extending that right to profitmaking firms.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Miss Atkins, who has left her job to run the British arm of GEMS Education, an independent schools chain, said that state schools could also improve exam results and save money by learning new techniques from the private sector.

It came as figures from the Department for Education showed that academies, many of which have corporate sponsors, improved their performance at three times the national average in last week's GCSE results.

Academies, which the Coalition plan to expand greatly in number, reported a seven per cent increase in the number of pupils gaining five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths, compared with the national average of 2.5 per cent.

Miss Atkins said: "At the moment the constraining factor is the fact that academies, free schools and schools that are state funded need to be run by charitable trusts or by the state itself and I think there is an opportunity to expand and look at the role that the private sector can play.

"Currently the private sector, if you're running a school, has to set up a charitable vehicle to do that and that seems to be an unnecessary level of bureaucracy. "A lot of countries are trying to open up the market so that increasing numbers of schools operators can get involved in the delivery of schools.

"At the moment in the UK that is being opened up with quite a progressive policy by Michael Gove (the Education Secretary) and his team but I think that doesn't necessarily need to stop with the charitable sector."

Miss Atkins said the Coalition's free schools, which will be free from local authority control, would benefit from the help of private companies. "It's a daunting thing for a group of parents and they will need support and assistance in doing that," she said.

"The Government can offer a lot of practical guidance and support going through the process. They don't offer the practical guidance and support in how you actually run the school. "I think parents are looking for a greater degree of support in that."

She added: "Schools tend not to be run in a businesslike fashion. And that is everything from the management information to basic systems, processes, back office."

Using better systems could help more children pass exams with improved grades, she said, and finances in the education sector could also benefit from corporate expertise.

She insisted that new school premises could be constructed from existing funds despite Mr Gove's decision to scrap 715 projects in the building programme which was known as Building Schools for the Future. "I think it's perfectly possible within existing funding formulas to run schools more efficiently. Therefore, you can afford to service capital and you can afford the school that you aspired to get while Building Schools for the Future existed," she said.

Miss Atkins also insisted she was unaware of the phenomenon of parents who opportunistically begin attending church in order to win places for their children at oversubscribed church-run schools. The practice has even led the Church of England to introduce a system to evaluate how often parents worship, to help prioritise admissions.

Asked if she had a view on the trend, Miss Atkins said: "As far as I'm aware Ofsted haven't got any subject matter that shows that has happened. "You are probably better qualified about it than I am."

Her remarks come despite evidence from different denominations about parents joining congregations in a bid to secure school places.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the then Archbishop of Westminster and leader of the 4.5 million Catholics in England and Wales, told this newspaper in 2008 that he did not condemn parents who misrepresented their religion. "I wouldn't want to judge parents who pretend to have a faith to get their children into school," he said. "They'd do anything for the good of their children."

In 2007, the numbers of families doing so led the Church of England to set out three tiers which describe a prospective parent's relationship with the sponsoring church.

Families who worshipped twice a month would be regarded as "at the heart of the church" and therefore their children may be more likely to be awarded priority places. Less frequent worship would lead to an applicant being regarded as "attached to the church" or "known to the church", the guidance said.

SOURCE





34 Ways a Teacher CAN Get Fired

The LA Times recently published a detailed expose of how ridiculously difficult it is to fire a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The article documents countless horrifying offenses that won’t get a tenured teacher booted. I couldn’t help but wonder what will leave a public school teacher unemployed.

Since, there have been so few examples in LA (less than 1 in 1,000 tenured teachers get the axe in LAUSD), I had to broaden my search to the nation, so here’s a less-than-comprehensive list of things that will leave your local indoctrinator polishing his or her resume.

* Let students go joyriding in your car.
* Put on The Laramie Project.
* Give your students a suggestive, but actually clean, four-letter word quiz. It doesn’t matter if you’re teacher of the year.
* Work weekends in a bikini, on a fishing boat.
* Explain what bad words mean to your ESL students.
* Use MySpace…er, to talk about “getting any” with your students.
* Call your students “filthy animals who belonged in a f***ing zoo.” Nice.
* Randomly try to beat the crap out of a student.
* Have your third grade students give you massages.
* Be a wizard. Oh wait, make that, perform a thirty second magic trick with a toothpick. Yeah, that’s right.
* Duct tape your student’s mouth shut. Oh, did I mention she was a special needs student. Classy.
* Maintain academic standards and fail the damn students that are failing.
* Have the wrong views about homosexuality.
* Be in an x-rated movie. More than a decade ago.
* Add “nonviolently” to a state-mandated loyalty oath. You might call this the “be a believing Quaker” case.
* Take your students to an art museum, without ensuring that all the fig leaves have been reattached.
* Demand your student pull down her pants and reveal her menses.
* Be married to a really ugly man. Oh, and go on the Howard Stern Show, mostly nekkid.
* Pose for Playboy (you had to see this one coming).
* Take your students to a gay strip bar. Why exactly a female teacher would take four female students to a male strip bar is…unclear.
* Prevent a cop from roughing up one of your students.
* Tie your student to a chair with a bed sheet. Your TWO-YEAR-OLD student.
* Protest your government’s actions. In Russia, anyway.
* Refuse to remove your bible from class. Those allegations about burning crosses into students’ arms are totally false. Totally.
* Watch porn at school. No, flimsy excuses won’t save you: “I wanted to make sure the kids couldn’t see it!”
* Question the administration’s gaming of the public funding system.
* Be a woman. [Note: this isn't a public school, but it's too ludicrous not to mention.]
* Teach about magical penis theft.
* Give your student a graphic novel that’s, well, too graphic. Particularly if you’re a man, and she’s a 14-year old girl.
* Be an obnoxious vegan.
* Be a painter…who just so happens to paint using his naked buttocks. Ah, modern art.
* Tell your students to “give into their boyfriends’ requests for sex.” Female empowerment!
* Throw eggs with your students, and promote drag racing.
* And, of course, have a 17 yeard old lover…who was kinda one of your students.

I’m sure there are many more but this sampling should reveal that it’s not completely impossible for a teacher to be fired.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





History wars set to break out again in Australia

THE new national school curriculum could be delayed under a Coalition government, which would review it and address ideological concerns it has about some history topics.

The Coalition's education policy broadly supports Labor's moves towards a nationally consistent curriculum, due to be introduced next year, but it accuses Labor of politicising the draft curriculum in history.

The policy is critical of the absence of references to the Magna Carta and the Westminster parliamentary system, which underpin Australia's legal and political systems. It is critical of students being taught about the "day-to-day activities of trade unions and the history of the Australian Labor Party".

School teachers have complained that the history and English curriculums have been politicised by governments.

The Howard government commissioned a Monash University historian, Tony Taylor, to draft a new Australian history curriculum, but sidelined its recommendations. The conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey and the political commentator Gerard Henderson were later appointed to rewrite the curriculum.

Associate Professor Taylor acted as a consultant in the drafting of the new history curriculum introduced under the current Labor government, and said a "huge amount of work" had gone into it. "In the history area, the sequence of drafts have been devoid of ideological overtone," he said. "From a professional point of view, it would be inexplicable if any new government decided to go back to square one."

NSW English and maths teacher organisations are unhappy with the draft national curriculum, saying they favour the existing NSW Board of Studies curriculum. Eva Gold, a spokeswoman for the NSW English Teachers Association, said teachers would be relieved if the national curriculum was scrapped.

"Teachers in NSW would be greatly relieved to teach the NSW curriculum rather than the national curriculum," she said. "Our members are not happy at all with the K to 10 [kindergarten to year 10] curriculum."

SOURCE



30 August, 2010

British teacher fired for imposing discipline wins employment tribunal

A schoolgirl simulated a sex act in class – and the teacher who disciplined her was fired by a bitchy headmistress. Now he has been vindicated.

It must rate as one of the more vulgar and indecorous moments of misconduct witnessed in a British classroom. During a science lesson with a class of bottom-set 13-year-olds at Collegiate High School in Blackpool, one girl, a known troublemaker, threw herself into the lap of a startled girl sitting nearby and began simulating a lewd sex act.

Her teacher, David Roy, was horrified. When the youngster finally stood up, she wandered around the classroom, disrupting the lesson. Eventually she slumped down upon a table, turning her back on her teacher.

Mr Roy was not prepared to talk to the girl’s back. Nor was he willing to let her disrupt the class. “So I moved the table, which was big and heavy, and in a dramatic gesture — what I would call an exaggerated fashion — she fell off,” he explains.

To Mr Roy’s frustration the lesson was ruined. “I felt sorry for the other pupils who just wanted to learn,” he says wearily. “She was a troublemaker, I knew that.”

Just how much of a troublemaker she was, Mr Roy — a mild-mannered and measured man who says he would never countenance physically abusing a pupil — would find out in the year ahead.

Though the teaching assistant who witnessed the girl’s antics later described the incident as “the worst classroom behaviour” she had ever seen, the girl lodged a complaint. Police and social services became involved and both concluded there was nothing to investigate.

When the school’s deputy head looked into the episode, which happened in September 2008, he exonerated Mr Roy of any wrongdoing. And there the matter may have rested. Instead, it would become the first salvo in campaign that ultimately cost the science master his job.

To Mr Roy’s disbelief, after two more alleged incidents, involving his disciplining of unruly pupils, he was dismissed. In spite of the fact that it was deemed he had no case to answer over the original girl’s complaint, school staff used it as a reason to sack him.

As part of the head’s investigation she did not ask the former Army officer for his version of the later incidents, but relied mainly on the word of the students involved.

She did seek the views of teachers who witnessed parts of the confrontations, but so “abused” the statements that the teachers willingly appeared as witnesses for Mr Roy when he took the school to an employment tribunal, claiming unfair dismissal. One, Allyson England, said she had been “primed” by the head teacher and a human resources officer from Blackpool council to answer questions to support their argument.

Nine days ago, a very different conclusion was reached by an employment tribunal in Manchester. Mr Roy, described as a “model teacher” by colleagues, was awarded £63,000 after winning his case. To his relief he walked out of the tribunal without a blemish on his professional reputation.

Mr Roy’s case was extreme. His supporters say that his dismissal was a moral outrage and that he was the victim of appalling injustice. But it is also the tip of the iceberg.

According to critics, today’s teachers are so bound by the rule books that there are few disciplinary methods left available to them other than to suspend pupils. Government figures show that some of the country’s most unruly children have missed the equivalent of a school term after being suspended more than 20 times in the same year. Incredibly, 1,430 pupils were sent home for bad behaviour at least 10 times in an academic year — and many 20 times.

As Nick Seaton, the chairman for the Campaign for Real Education points out, suspension is the only tool teachers still possess. “In lots of schools it is the only effective punishment left. Instead of teachers being the authority, the pupils have control. Teachers have gradually lost their authority so their only option is exclusion.”

The current situation, the critics say, is a legacy of Labour’s insistence that teaching should be “child-centred”, that pupils should dictate the pace of learning and that their voices should be listened to above all others. The result has been a spate of dismissals of talented teachers. In many cases the teacher under investigation is not even consulted.

More HERE






British children's grasp of the 3Rs at its worst in a decade: One in five struggling to spell at age seven

Children’s grasp of the three Rs after two years of school is at its worst for a decade, official figures suggested yesterday. One in five seven-year-olds - nearly 105,000 pupils - failed to reach the writing standards expected of their age this spring, struggling to use capital letters and spell single-syllable words.

One in six, or about 84,000, failed to reach expected standards in reading and nearly one in ten - 58,700 - failed to make the grade in maths.

Boys trailed girls in every tested subject, while performance by bright pupils dipped on last year.

Despite record investment in early education by the Labour government, pupils’ average scores in reading, writing and maths combined has fallen from 15.5 points in 2000 to 15.3 this year.

The Coalition responded by pledging a stronger focus on traditional teaching methods, including the back-to-basics ‘synthetic phonics’ approach to reading.

Ministers are planning a new reading test for six-year-olds to identify struggling pupils earlier. Schools Minister Nick Gibb said: ‘In spite of the hard work of teachers and pupils, there are still too many seven-year-olds not reaching the expected level.

‘We need to make sure that government gives schools the support they need to get the basics right. A solid foundation in reading, writing, maths and science in the early years of education is crucial to a child’s success in later life.’

Yesterday’s results are based on ‘key stage one’ assessments of 553,000 seven-year-olds by teachers in English primary schools after formal SATs were scrapped. A sample of the assessments is cross-checked to ensure consistency across the country. They cover speaking and listening, reading, writing, maths and science.

Some 15 per cent of children failed to meet the expected national curriculum ‘level two’ in reading. It means they struggle to read simple passages or express opinions about stories.

Meanwhile 19 per cent fell short of ‘level two’ in writing. This level requires youngsters to be able to use past and present tenses, vary their sentence structures, spell common words correctly and use full stops and capital letters.

Some 11 per cent failed to make the grade in maths, meaning they struggle to count to 100, and a similar proportion in science.

Mr Gibb highlighted an ‘unacceptable’ gap in attainment between rich and poorer areas. He promised extra funds for teaching deprived pupils.

GCSEs taken by hundreds of thousands of pupils this summer were too easy, according to the qualifications watchdog. Isabel Nisbet, chief executive of Ofqual, told the Times Educational Supplement that the general GCSE science and additional science exams represented a ‘collective falling short of the standards that young people and teachers have a right to expect’.

Teenagers passed 60.9 per cent of science GCSEs and 64.7 per cent of additional science papers at grade C or above this summer.

SOURCE






The Power of Choice

Newsweek ran a good article on “New Orleans’ Charter-School Revolution” yesterday, and it shows the possibilities of a very open charter school system:

In most public school systems in America, students attend the school for which their neighborhood is zoned. But in the five years since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has created a school system unlike any other in the country. “We used Katrina as an opportunity to build—not rebuild, but build—a new school system,” says Paul Vallas, the outgoing superintendent of the Recovery School District, which, authorized by the state to turn around failing schools, took over most of New Orleans’s schools after the storm. Last year more than 60 percent of the city’s students attended charter schools; this year nine additional schools switched to a charter model, so that number will be higher. Vallas calls this new paradigm an “overwhelmingly publicly funded, predominantly privately run school system.”

In 2005 Orleans Parish was the second-worst-performing school district in the state, and in some schools 30 percent of seniors dropped out over the course of the year. In 2003 one high-school valedictorian failed the math portion of the state exit exam five times and could not graduate. Things were different at the charters: at New Orleans Charter Middle School, which in 1998 became the city’s first charter school, parents would put their head in their hands and cry if their child’s name didn’t come up in the admissions lottery.

In New Orleans today, students and educators have unprecedented leeway to mold educational experiences. Students can apply to and, if accepted, choose to attend any of the [...] 46 charter schools or 23 “traditional” schools. The vast majority of schools have open-enrollment policies that allow any student to attend, regardless of past academic success. (Schools with more applicants than spots hold lotteries.) The prevalence of charters means that in most of the city’s schools, educators can choose how their schools are run. Even in traditional schools, principals have unusual autonomy over the hiring—and firing—of teachers, since the city’s teachers’ union lost its collective-bargaining rights.

So far, the experiment appears to be working. Before Katrina, two thirds of students were attending schools deemed failing by state standards, notes Leslie Jacobs, a New Orleans education-reform advocate; in the 2010–11 academic year, she says, it will be less than one third. “The fact that we haven’t gotten everything right yet shouldn’t take away from the fact that we’re getting a whole lot more right,” she says. New Orleans schools are still performing below the state average on achievement tests, but according to Jacobs’s analysis of state data, the gap between New Orleans and the rest of the state has basically been cut in half.

Obviously, that’s far from perfect, but it’s more improvement than the city saw under the old regime. I also think that the teacher union’s loss of collective bargaining rights is a big reason that charters schools have the chance to succeed in New Orleans. Public school teacher unions typically act as a special interest groups hell-bent on stopping any kind of competition to the public school model, so they lobby for laws restricting options like vouchers, education tax credits, and charter schools. Missouri, for instance, has fairly strict rules on charters requiring them to have an academic sponsor and restricting their operations to the cities of Saint Louis and Kansas City.

Still, students in Missouri’s charter schools can be expected to outperform their public school counterparts over time, according to a study by Standford University’s Center for Research on Education, which my colleague Josh Smith blogged about last year. If Missouri offered an even more welcoming environment to charter schools — by, say, letting them operate anywhere in the state — we might be able to come closer to matching the impressive gains of the New Orleans’ schools. At the very least, the research shows that charter schools can replicate the academic accomplishments of public schools at a much lower cost, which is still a net benefit over the status quo.

Again, the evidence shows that schools are like most other institutions in that they perform best when their stakeholders have alternatives and choose which establishment to patronize.

SOURCE



29 August, 2010

The Myth of Equality

Pat Buchanan

In 21st century America, institutional racism and sexism remain great twin evils to be eradicated on our long journey to the wonderful world where, at last, all are equal.

What are we to make, then, of a profession that rewards workers with fame and fortune, yet discriminates ruthlessly against women; an institution where Hispanics and Asians, 20 percent of the U.S. population, are neither sought after nor widely seen.

In this profession, white males, a third of the population, retain a third of the jobs. But black males, 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, have 67 percent of the coveted positions -- 10 times their fair share.

We are talking of the NFL.

In figures reported by columnist Walter Williams, not only are black males 77 percent of the National Basketball Association, they are 67 percent of the players in the NFL.

Yet no one objects that women are not permitted to compete in the NFL. Nor do many object to the paucity of Asian and Mexicans, or the over-representation of blacks, even as white males dominate the National Hockey League and the PGA.

When it comes to sports -- high school, collegiate or professional -- Americans are intolerant of lectures about diversity and inclusiveness. They want the best -- the best in the NFL, the best in the NBA, the best at Augusta, the best at Wimbledon, the best in the Olympics, the best in the All-Star Game, the World Series, the Super Bowl.

When it comes to artistic ability, musical ability, acting ability, athletic ability, Americans accept the reality of inequality. We are not all born equal, other than in our God-given and constitutional rights.

We are not all equally gifted. There are prodigies like pianist Van Cliburn, chess wizard Bobby Fischer, actress Shirley Temple. Every kid halfway through first grade knows who can spell and sing and who cannot, and who is bright and talented and athletic, and who is not.

What most Americans seek is a level playing field on which all compete equally, for what we ultimately seek is excellence, not equality.

Why, then, cannot our elites accept that, be it by nature, nurture, attitude or aptitude, we are not all equal in academic ability?

What raises this issue is the anguish evident in New York over the latest state test scores of public school students, which reveal that the ballyhooed progress in closing the racial achievement gap never happened.

That gap approached closure only by lowering the pass-fail score and by using similar tests, year-after-year, so teachers could prepare the kids to take them.

After a new, tougher state test was used in 2010, where 51 correct answers, not 37, meant achieving the desired grade, the old gaps between Hispanics, blacks, whites and Asians reappeared as wide as they were when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city schools chief Joel Klein set out to close them.

"We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever," blared Bloomberg in 2009, in the euphoria of what The New York Times now calls "the test score bubble."

"Among the students in the city's third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 83 recent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent of whites and Asians."

Appalling, when one considers New York City usually ranks first or second in the nation in per-pupil expenditures.

Nor has George W. Bush's vaunted No Child Left Behind program fared better. Results of national tests conducted in 2009 make New York students look like the Whiz Kids.

"Forty-nine percent of white students and 17 percent of black students showed proficiency on the fourth-grade English test, up from 45 percent of white students and 14 percent of black students in 2003."

One in six African-American fourth-grade kids is making the grade.

How many scores of billions did this pathetic gain cost us?

Since 1965, America has invested trillions in education with a primary goal of equalizing test scores among the races and genders. Measured by U.S. test scores, it has been a waste -- an immense transfer of wealth from private citizens to an education industry that has grown bloated while failing us again and again.

Perhaps it is time to abandon the goal of educational equality as utopian -- i.e., unattainable -- and to focus, as we do in sports and art, on excellence.

Teach all kids to the limit of their ability, while recognizing that all are not equal in their ability to read, write, learn, compute or debate, any more than they are equally able to play in a band or excel on a ball field. For an indeterminate future, Mexican kids are not going to match Asian kids in math.

The beginning of wisdom is to recognize this world as it is, not as what we would wish it to be.

SOURCE






British High School exama are 'so boring' says top school's head who wants a tougher exam for her students

A school where pupils passed 51 per cent of A-levels with A* grades may abandon the 'methodical' exam in favour of a rival qualification. Cynthia Hall, head of £29,250-a-year all-girls boarding school Wycombe Abbey, warned that pupils risk being penalised for showing originality and intelligence in their A-levels.

She said her school - which tops the national league tables for A* grades - was 'keeping an eye' on the rival Cambridge Pre-U exam, brought in two years ago to encourage more in-depth studies.

Earlier this week Gary Lineker blamed the Pre-U for the failure of his son George, a pupil at Charterhouse, to get into university. The TV presenter said it 'seemed to have been marked much harder' than A-level papers.

But Mrs Hall said her school was considering the Pre-U to stretch her high-achieving pupils. 'We are interested in something that provides stimulus and challenge,' she added. She said reforms to A-levels ten years ago, which broke up courses into bite-size chunks, meant pupils faced exams after just two terms of sixth-form study.

The Pre-U, in contrast, involves all exams being taken at the end of a two-year course. 'One of the things it gives is the opportunity to restore to the lower-sixth that opportunity to research,' she said. 'We're going to keep an eye on the Pre-U. We want to see what teething troubles there are,' she added.

Mrs Hall said A-levels offered limited opportunities for pupils to show 'originality and creativity'. She also claimed some of the marking was 'inadequate'. Mrs Hall added: 'You have got some markers who are not really subject specialists and are not able to recognise more individual work.

'From time to time, you look at an answer which is clearly very intelligent but the specialist knowledge of the marker is not adequate to understand.' Pupils were advised not to 'take risks' in the exam room, she added.

Her remarks came as the head of Charterhouse, the Reverend John Witheridge, made an outspoken attack on A-levels. In what was seen as a riposte to Mr Lineker, he defended his switch to the Pre-U.

'Here are syllabuses that engage and stretch sixth-formers. They require deep delving, rigorous research and wider reading,' he said, writing in the Spectator. 'Pupils are encouraged to take intellectual risks by developing their own ideas and arguments, and are rewarded for academic flair. 'All this will ring bells with those us who sat A-levels 30 or 40 years ago, but not with those who sat today's A-levels, with their "accessible", prescriptive and frankly boring curricula.'

The results for more than 400 independent schools, published today, show that fee-paying pupils passed 18.17 per cent of A-levels at A* this year - more than double the national average of 8.1 per cent. Some 2,108 pupils gained at least three A* grades. Boys were slightly more likely than girls to achieve a hat-trick of A*s.

Some 1,485 pupils at 43 schools took the International Baccalaureate, while 552 pupils at 23 schools took the Pre-U in at least one subject.

More than 80 schools including Eton refused to allow their results to be used in league tables, claiming the lists damage education.

Magdalen College School, in Oxford, topped the Mail's table after gaining the most top A*, A and B grades overall - 99.38 per cent. Its head, Dr Tim Hands, insisted most schools still favoured A-levels but said there had been 'change after change' and now a period of 'consolidation' was needed.

SOURCE





Politically correct British politicians lose sight of what makes a "good" school

It's heavily influenced by the quality of the kids attending it. If you let in a lot of dumb and unruly kids, educational standards go down to cope with them and the school soon ceases to be a "good" one. "Banding" will just degrade ALL schools

Middle-class parents would be unable to guarantee their children places at the best state schools by buying houses nearby under admissions rules backed by the Schools Secretary.

The Coalition is planning to allow hundreds of secondary schools to control their own entry policies and Michael Gove warmly praised the system, which allocates places according to academic ability and reserves many places for children with the weakest performance.

“Fair-banding” admissions schemes are often seen as a way of breaking the middle-class dominance in the best-performing state secondaries since they prevent affluent parents from monopolising places by paying a premium to live in their catchment areas.

Banding generally means that 11 year-olds applying for school places sit an IQ-based “attainment test” and are then divided into seven or nine ability groups. The same number of children from each ability group are then given places at the school.

Advocates say that reserving some places for children with the lowest scores ensures that children from poorer homes are more likely to get places at the best schools. Critics say it unfairly discriminates against children with the best results.

The Conservatives have not previously spoken out in favour of the practice, but Mr Gove told the BBC that fair banding had “a role to play” and could make schools “truly socially comprehensive”. It prevented better-off parents boosting their children’s chances by buying homes near better schools.

“You can make sure that if your school is located in an area which may well be relatively privileged, by dint of house prices and background and so on, that you are spreading the load academically,” he said.

There is no official record of how many schools use fair banding, but a Daily Telegraph survey last year identified at least 22 local authority areas where the rules were in place.

The Schools Department estimates that only around 100 local authority-controlled secondary schools in England admit students on a fair-banding basis.

But almost half the 200 academies currently operating, which set their own admissions policies, are estimated to use some sort of fair-banding policy.

Mr Gove has claimed that hundreds of schools are considering opting out of council control under his plan to allow all schools to become academies. If that prediction is accurate, there could be a dramatic expansion in the use of banding policies.

Mr Gove praised schools including Dunraven School and Mossbourne Academy, in south and east London respectively, as high-performing schools that use banding.

Dunraven school in the south London borough of Lambeth introduced fair banding in 1992. It puts children in five different bands and gives priority to those children who are in care or in foster care.

David Boyle, the school principal, said results had improved dramatically since the system was introduced. The number of GCSEs at grade C or above had increased from 30 per cent in 1992 to 82 per cent this year.

He said that Dunraven was now more aspirational. “Our mission is to try to ensure a service for the whole community,” he added.

A source close to Mr Gove said: “We are not telling any school to use fair banding nor are we telling them not to. We want all parents to be able to send their children to a good school. That’s why we are expanding the number of academies.”

Some experts say the schools with the greatest incentive to adopt banding are those in the poorest areas, because they often struggle to attract brighter children.

But supporters of the policy say all schools can benefit from becoming more socially and academically inclusive.

The charity Barnardo’s this week called for the widespread use of fair banding. But David Green, the director of the think tank Civitas, described it as “a kind of social engineering based on animosity to middle-class parents.”

Prof Stephen Gorard from Birmingham University warned that Mr Gove’s voluntary approach to admissions had risks. “If banding is implemented partially and voluntarily, it sounds like the outcome will be all pain and no gain.”

John Bangs of the National Union of Teachers said banding was right in principle, but should be implemented uniformly. “Banding only works if you do it in a geographical area,” he added. “If every school has its own admissions policy and sets its own banding system, you’re going to get real unevenness.”

Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, attacked fair banding as an unfair policy that denied places to the brightest. He added: “I’m not saying we shouldn’t help the worse-off, but it I don’t think the best way to do that is to disadvantage the better-off.”

SOURCE



28 August, 2010

One in four British lap dancers has a university degree

Mainly humanities (Arts) graduates, of course. What else are their degrees good for?



They are traditionally viewed as uneducated young women who are coerced into the lap dancing industry. But the first academic study on the subject has found that one in four lap dancers has a university degree and works in strip joints to boost their income.

Strippers take home an average of £232 per shift - or £48,000 a year - after paying commission and fees to the club where they work. Many are aspiring actresses, models and artists who hope to use exotic dancing as a lucrative platform for breaking into their desired industry. Unemployed new graduates – mainly with arts degrees – are also dancing because they cannot find graduate jobs.

They decided to work as strippers because it pays much better than bar work and the hours means they can still attend interviews, training days or further education courses during the day.

The research, conducted by Dr Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy from the University of Leeds, found the vast majority of women claimed to have high levels of job satisfaction. It concluded that career and economic choices were the key reasons for dancing rather than drug use or coercion. There was no evidence of trafficking in the industry, researchers found.

However, the academics claimed dancers' welfare was often disregarded because women could be in danger when alone with customers in private booths. They called for better regulations to improve dancers' safety, including the banning of private booths in clubs. Dancers are also open to financial exploitation by clubs who could impose charges and fines, the study showed.

One dancer told researchers: 'There's not enough security. I know of girls who have been raped and abused at work. 'You cannot go to the police as you are a stripper, so there's no legal standing.'

The findings come after a change in the law saw lap dancing clubs reclassified as entertainment venues, giving local authorities more power to limit the number of clubs in their area.

Dr Sanders said she had been surprised at the 'endless supply of women' wanting to be lap dancers. 'These women are incredibly body confident,' she said. 'I think there is something of a generational cultural difference.

'These young women do not buy the line that they are being exploited, because they are the ones making the money out of a three-minute dance and a bit of a chat.

'You have got to have a certain way about you to do it. They say 80 per cent of the job is talking. These women do work hard for their money – you don't just turn up and wiggle your bum.

'But there is an issue about whether these women become trapped in the job because of the money. I think people often stay longer than they want.'

All the 300 women interviewed during the year-long study had finished school and gained some qualifications. Almost 90per cent had completed a further education course, while a quarter had undergraduate degrees. Just over one in three dancers were currently in some form of education, with 14 per cent using dancing to help fund an undergraduate degree.

The researchers found arts degree graduates were most likely to turn to dancing after being unable to find other work. Others used dancing to provide a more steady and reliable income when working in more unstable arts jobs.

One dancer had been doing a law degree which included a work placement during her third year. While working, she got used to earning a good wage, decided she would struggle when she returned to university without an income, and began dancing as soon as she went back to finish her degree.

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Separation of school and state

Today my wife and I met with our son’s kindergarten teacher. We are sending him to a pricey private school, but we think it is worth it. It’s not a status thing; this school really offers an environment we think will be great for our son.

It later occurred to me that sending a child to school is one of the most personal and serious decisions a family can make. For all the reasons that Americans strongly believe in separation of Church and State, they should also endorse separation of school and State.

On spiritual matters, the basic civil bargain runs like this: I promise not to use the force of law to make you (pretend to) believe in my religion, so long as you promise not to do the same to me. My freedom of conscience is very important to me, and I would never want to risk losing that in a society where the majority can enforce its religious views on the minority. I say this, even if my religious views are currently in the majority.

The same ought to hold for schooling. Even though I am a born again Christian, it would offend me if the government passed a law saying every child had to read the Bible, and go to church. But by the same token, it offends me that politicians dare to pass laws saying which biology and mathematics textbooks my child must read, and that he must go to school for a large portion of his life.

Whatever argument the modern American liberal could use to defend government intervention in schooling, could also be used to defend government intervention in religious matters. Of course it would be awful if the vast majority of parents were fools and didn’t educate their kids. But by the same token, it would be awful (in my mind) if the vast majority of parents raised their kids to believe there was no God, and that all of the universe in its majesty is really just a big coincidence.

It would be one thing if the government did a good job in the area of schooling. But of course, it fails miserably here too. That is why so many parents have embraced the homeschool movement, because it is the only way to protect their children from State-engineered propaganda.

For a superb analysis of the free market versus the government in matters of education–and note that education is different from schooling–see Murray Rothbard’s “Education: Free and Compulsory.”

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"Insensitive" Australian school

An Australian primary school apologised after a student was awarded first prize at a costume party for dressing as Adolf Hitler. The school sent a letter of apology yesterday to parents after several complained about the child's Nazi-inspired getup, which included a swastika emblem, The West Australian newspaper reported.

The school's principal denied allegations that classmates had roared approval with chants of "Hitler, Hitler" explaining that youngsters had simply been calling out the name of the character they thought should win, Sky News Australia reported today..

Parents at the Catholic school also objected to several more "nasty" costumes, including a vampire outfit and a student dressed as the Grim Reaper, the newspaper said. The school, in Perth, Western Australia, has not been identified.

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27 August, 2010

Why Britons should study foreign languages at school

The article below is an eloquent statement of the case for study of foreign languages. As it happens, languages are an enthusiasm of mine but I nonetheless doubt that the case for studying them is strong. I have some formal (but very minor) qualifications in Latin, Italian and German and I feel that the knowledge I have gained of all three has opened many gates for me. But I have a slight "gift" for languages and most people don't -- so I see no reason why most people should study them. I think that the study of foreign languages among English speakers should only be treated as an enthusiasm -- not a virtue

I suppose it's not entirely logical but I see the fate of a recent Prime Minister of Australia as instructive. Kevin Rudd's major subject of study at university was Mandarin Chinese. He basically knew nothing else. And he acquired a fluency that enabled him to speak mainly Chinese on his first state visit to China -- and having a blue-eyed blond person speak good Chinese to them certainly impressed the Chinese leadership. And any Westerner who acquires fluency in Chinese is certainly exceptional and to be admired.

Yet Australia's relationship with China did not prosper under Rudd's leadership and he was eventually booted out of office over matters in which his knowledge of Chinese did not help one bit. Had he studied Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk he would have done much better

I have corrected all the spelling mistakes below. I can understand an enthusiast for foreign languages being shaky in her own language but how did so many mistakes get past the DT copy editors?

by Cassandra Jardine

During the past week, I have felt like a dinosaur. One daughter has just achieved the A-levels that will allow her to study French and Italian at Oxford. Another is about to start A-level Spanish. The third is eager to do two languages when she enters the sixth form. Meanwhile, my 11-year-old has been at a language school in Touraine to learn some French. (Having glanced at his primary school exercise book where Au Revoir was spelled “Ovwa”, I felt he needed a spot of immersion.)

But it seems that I am one of a dwindling number of parents who think that it’s important to have even a smattering of a foreign language. The latest figures for GCSEs and A-levels show such a steep decline that German is all but kaput, and even French is heading for la merde - For the first time it has been booted from the top ten most popular subjects (replaced by Religious Studies). The number of students taking these languages at GCSE has nearly halved since 2002.

The decline in language A-levels is equally steep. Only 13,850 students took A-level French this year, a drop of more than 3 per cent in just 12 months. German has dwindled to just 5,548 candidates.

“Exotics” like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Polish are creeping up at all levels but the overall trend is down and many university departments have closed in recent years, due to lack of demand, leaving largely the Russell Group to keep the study of modern languages alive. Just 28,500 of nearly 2 million undergraduates at British universities are studying languages. Three quarters of them are women.

The British attitude to languages is polarised. On the pushy side we have parents enrolling their two-year-olds for lessons in Mandarin. Elsewhere, languages are seen as a pointless chore and little wonder. As far as children can tell from their diet of films, music and television everyone can speak English. On this island, we rarely come across the 93 per cent of the world population that doesn’t share our language. Nor are we aware that 80 per cent of internet content comes in other languages. So what’s the point of struggling with irregular verbs, and speaking in a funny accent?

According to the Annual Language Trends Survey for 2009, just 41 per cent of comprehensive school pupils took a modern language at GCSE. It is selective and private schools that are keeping languages alive. At A-level, the 7.7 per cent of children in private schools are now so over-represented, that only 11 of 31 Cambridge colleges have a majority of language students from state schools.

The rot started long before a foreign language ceased to be compulsory at GCSE in 2004 - and has spread. Like fish stocks, levels are now so low that Mike Kelly, Professor of French at Southampton University and Director of the UK Support Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Study, says: “If the clock is ticking, we are getting close to midnight. We had hoped that the decline in modern languages had bottomed out, but it’s not getting better.

“Free choice has meant that languages are often set against subjects like art or drama, and are pushed further down the list of preferences. Languages are a long term business: you don’t get quick rewards. It takes three or four years to get to a decent level, whereas in other subjects you can have fun without long-term preparation.”

Language teaching can, indeed, be deadly boring. Pupils at state primary schools must be offered a language option, though they don’t have to take it. More than 90 per cent now do, but the teaching, in my experience, is desultory: hence my 11-year-old being parcelled off to France for a two-week confidence-boosting session before joining a private school. “I won’t be able to communicate with anyone except my one English friend,” he wailed on arrival - and this after being 'taught’ French over several years.

Even at secondary school, the approach can be stultifying. In the interests of relevance, weary teenagers practice talking about their holidays, families and hobbies year after year. For GCSE they learn fifty such answers by heart to parrot in the oral exam. A child with a good memory could pass without understanding a word of what he or she is saying.

French came alive for me when I was sent on what I tell my children was a “proper” exchange holiday. Landed in a family where no English was spoken, I had to up my game. Nowadays, for fear of causing alarm, the standard language study trip involves spending all day sightseeing with English classmates, and has almost no observable impact except on the wallet.

And yet if we continue to let modern languages decline, employers say, we would be making a grave mistake. “In today’s world English graduates without languages are at a real disadvantage.” says Anny King, French-born director of the Centre for Languages at Cambridge University. “The English think: 'I’m all right Jack, because everyone speaks English,’ but there are a lot of countries where you are lost if you only speak English.”

The EU and the UN are trawling for British people with command of foreign languages, and the jobs aren’t all in interpretation, translation and teaching. Languages are essential for research. Olympic hurdler Sally Gunnell recently bemoaned that she hadn’t a language to help her promote the 2012. “It’s also an excellent way into banking,” says David Shacklock, director of Euro London Appointments. “There’s a huge demand for German, French, and Chinese, but there are jobs out there for computer games testers in all languages. First and foremost you need a skill, but an A-level language will improve your job prospects.”

The booming third sector also needs linguists. “If languages continue to decline, it will be difficult for us to find the right people, especially if the Government cracks down on the number of non-EU people we employ,” says Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, where 80 staff speak 25 tongues. She finds that languages are not just useful in themselves, they are good for the brain. “Young people with languages have a greater mental agility - as well as a broader appreciation of the world.”

Mike Kelly (who speaks seven European languages and a smattering of Japanese) agrees. He wants to increase the range of language choices in primary schools, but isn’t fussed about which. “Once you’ve learnt one language, other than your mother tongue, it is much easier to learn another because it activates a different part of the brain. One is enough to get you over the surprise that people from other countries see the world in different ways. It’s not just about language but a sense of time and etiquette. In English we get to the point early in a conversation; in China, you build up to it. If you final words are, 'You must come to dinner,’ the Chinese think that’s the point, not a polite flourish. Monolingualism locks you into a single way of being.”

The Coalition government is committed to a curriculum reivew. The time has come for a return to compulsory language teaching at GCSE, Anny King believes, and a more “ambitious” approach involving literature. Kelly wants a voluntary - but more extensive - system of teaching and testing, making more use of the Languages Ladder system of stepped tests, like music grades. It will, he hopes, encourage those who speak languages other than English at home to realise their assets. “If we don’t,” he says, “we are dead meat on the world job market.”

Students (and parents) with Oxbridge ambitions might also note that they are missing a trick. One in two applicants for modern languages is offered a place at Oxford, while the success rate for Politics, Philosophy and Economics is just 7.6 per cent. A friend has watched three children sail into Oxford on modern languages - and on to good jobs in industry, the civil service and the arts.

Tough love, maybe, but sending a child off to learn languages seems like a good idea. When I greeted my 11-year-old off Eurostar, I asked him if he had learnt any French. “I suppose it’s not such a stupid language,” he replied. One day that child may get a job.

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Teachers unions and civil rights groups block school choice for black students

Teachers unions, like the National Education Association (NEA), and many civil-rights organizations inadvertently sabotage the potential of black males by perpetuating failed educational visions. Black males will never achieve academic success until black parents are financially empowered to opt out of failed public school systems.

The American public education system is failing many groups, but none more miserably than black males. The numbers are shocking. The Schott Foundation recently reported that only 47 percent of black males graduate from high school on time, compared to 78 percent of white male students. This revelation is beyond disturbing because it exposes the fact that many public schools serve as major catalysts for the desolation of unemployment and incarceration that lies in many black boys’ future.

In many places the disparity between whites and blacks is nearly unbelievable. In Nebraska, for example, the white/black graduation gap is 83 percent compared with 40 percent and in New York 68 percent compared with 25 percent. The way urban city school districts fail black males is more disconcerting considering that black professionals are in charge. Urban districts are among the worst at graduating black males: Atlanta, 34 percent; Baltimore, 35 percent; Philadelphia, 28 percent; New York, 28 percent; Detroit, 27 percent; and St. Louis, 38 percent.

There are surely many reasons for such failure, and family breakdown must rank high among them. Schools may be powerless to transform black family life, but they should not be left off the hook for turning in a dismal performance. In a recent interview, Dr. Steve Perry, principal and founder of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Conn., repeatedly places the blame for the black achievement gap at the feet of the partnerships between the teachers unions and the NAACP, “a civil-rights relic.” The places where black students excel, says Perry, are those where students have access to choice. Sadly the NAACP and the NEA have long undermined the push for low-income black parents to exercise freedom to choose the best schools as a national norm.

For example, even with mounting evidence demonstrating that single-sex education for blacks males from low-income households represents one of the best opportunities for graduation, the NEA petitioned the Department of Education in 2004 to prevent single-sex options from becoming nationally normative, balking because “the creation of an artificial single-sex environment [will] ill prepare students for life in the real world.” What? The Eagle Academy for Young Men, a charter school in the Bronx comprised of primarily black and Latino students, the first all-male public school in New York City in 30 years, boasts a high school graduation rate of 82 percent. This summer, Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy, with a 100 percent graduation rate, graduated a class of 107 black male students all of whom are attending college in the fall.

The NEA exists, it seems, only to overfund failed systems and the non-performance-based salaries of adults at the expense of black students. Nothing prepares black males for life in the real world like graduating from high school and attending college, yet the NEA consistently lobbies against parent choices that lead to black male success.

Civil-rights groups including the NAACP, the National Urban League, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, recently released a joint statement objecting to the Obama administration's education reform proposal, which includes the closing schools of failing schools, increasing use of charter schools, and other commonsensical moves toward choice and accountability in education. These groups reject Obama’s so-called "extensive reliance on charter schools," expressing dismay about "the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities."

Even though there is overwhelming evidence supporting the success of charter schools for children from low-income households, the civil-rights groups resist the opportunity for parents to exercise freedom to choose those schools. Perry highlights the cost of such blindness, observing “that our nation’s urban public schools have prepared more children for poverty, the penitentiary, and premature pregnancy than they did for college.”

Even though charter schools, vouchers, and tax-credit programs reflect some progress, black parents need brand new and creative options that empower parents with absolute freedom to choose the best schools. In addition to school closings and faith-based options, “mass firings” like the ones in Washington, D.C., “home schools,” and other bold and innovative measures, are all important components of rescuing black males from the betrayal of teachers unions and civil-rights groups that refuse to acknowledge the dignity of low-income parents by blunting their right to choose what is best for their children. As long as teachers unions have influence in the black community and in institutions pledged to black empowerment, and black parents are not financially empowered to opt out of failing public schools, black males are doomed.

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Australia: Universities teach knowledge but not wisdom (?)

What a lot of Stalinist crap! Who is to say what wisdom is? Some people think global warming is wisdom. I think the Bible is humanity's greatest store of wisdom. So is the Bible going to be taught to all university students? Fat chance!

Schwartz has always had grandiose and only semi-coherent ideas and has been dogged by controversy wherever he went. I would diagnose him as an egomaniac, if not a psychopath

Modern universities are neglecting the teaching of wisdom to the detriment of its students, says vice-chancellor Steven Schwartz.

In his second annual lecture last night, the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University argued that worldwide the higher education sector was focused on teaching practical skills necessary for a career, with disastrous results. The financial crisis, the parliamentary expenses scandal in Britain and the home insulation program were cited as evidence of educated leaders making choices lacking in wisdom.

Professor Schwartz said a fixation with money had led to the decline in teaching students how to think broadly. "We once were about character building but now we are about money," he said at the university's North Ryde campus.

He said university courses had become more vocational with courses in golf-course management or hairdressing-salon management alongside the traditional subjects of law and pharmacy.

Professor Schwartz used the lecture to unveil a proposal to allow final year students at Macquarie to tie together the theoretical and practical sides of what they have learnt.

One of these capstone courses will be called "Practical wisdom", which the vice-chancellor nominated himself to teach. All new students will also be required to study both science and arts to broaden their education.

Dom Thurbon, a panellist for the lecture, said the premise forwarded by the vice-chancellor was an attractive but dangerous generalisation. He said the wisdom gained by a student depended on several factors such as degree choice and exposure to certain teachers.

"There is a a trend, however, towards a more instrumentalist view of education," said Mr Thurbon, the co-founder of ChangeLabs, an organisation that builds large-scale education and behaviour-change programs.

"The drive to commercially ready degrees means less time is spent on broad philosophical underpinnings of education. Ironically industry is genuinely needing people with a cross-functional expertise."

SOURCE



26 August, 2010

"For profit" colleges attacked while problems with non-profits are overlooked

The American higher education community contains three separate constituencies: They are public and private non-profit institutions, and proprietary or for-profit enterprises. There has long been a polite tension between the nation’s public and private non-profit higher education institutions. Both are in competition, in one way or another, for prestige, students, faculty, and philanthropy, and at the state and federal troughs. They expend millions of their operating budgets on lobbyists to promote individual institutions and their sectors in state capitals and Washington. Their respectful squabbles are periodically noted in the higher education and public media. Both not-for-profits appear to have a common perceived enemy that prompts their public indignation. In a tacit your-enemy-is-my-enemy alliance, they share a common enemy: for-profit higher education.

The Government Accountability Office’s— “the investigative arm of Congress” —undercover investigation of for-profit recruiting practices has been predictably followed by Congressional hearings and accompanying media attention. The latter has been particularly true in higher education’s major trade presses. These loyal allies tend to consistently promote a non-profit/public agenda at the expense of the for-profits. One higher education trade paper described the investigation as uncovering the “rot” in the for-profit sector.

The whole spectacle has prompted predictable sanctimonious delight among higher education’s self-ordained elite sectors—non-profit private and publicly funded institutions and their trade group lobbyists. The findings confirm their zealot belief that any enterprise that does not share their non-profit orientation must be suspect. How else could the for-profits be steadily attracting more students in recent years? They must cheat and have been finally caught in the act— or so the non-profits want to rationalize the otherwise bad news. The College Board and National Center for Education Statistics respectively report:

The proportion of all degrees that were awarded by for-profit institutions increased from 3% to 7% between 1995-96 and 2005-06. In 1995-96, 9% of associate degrees were granted by for-profit institutions. A decade later, that proportion was 15%.

The ratio of students attending private nonprofit colleges to for-profit colleges has fallen from 3 to 1 to approximately 2 to 1.

A relatively few bad actors have actually been caught, yet the whole for-profit higher education sector is now being castigated for unscrupulously selling degree programs to naïve prospective students that lead to careers with low pay, limited employment opportunities and huge education debt. The same might be asked of the flood of attorneys and public relations grads that flood the job market each year.

A cursory examination of the program recruitment brochures published by many second-tier-and-below non-profits and publics will suggest similar questionable marketing practices. The disparity between their brochure hype and the realities presented in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Occupational Outlook Handbook is sobering. These sanctimonious not-for-profits should undergo the same undercover scrutiny. Higher education consumers deserve a level playing field.

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Why does a British Conservative minister want to be a Stalinist social engineer?

Can we really believe what we are hearing? After only 100 days in power, the Tories’ David Willetts is sounding like a tired Labour minister bankrupt of ideas.

Once again it is education and social mobility that is the issue. Mr Willetts, the Coalition’s higher education minister, is right to be concerned. But he is very wrong on who to blame and what to do about it. He wants universities to promote social mobility by accepting candidates from poor backgrounds - even if their A-levels are lower than those of middle-class applicants.

But this is nonsense. It is not the universities who are at fault where this country’s lamentable failure over education and social mobility is concerned. Nor can they be expected to magically set everything right by giving a handful of young people the chance of a decent degree.

The problems are more fundamental and widespread. Our education system is a mess and every summer young people from every stratum of society are having their hopes blighted and their futures thrown away as a result. Universities are merely where the casualties of our education system hit the buffers.

Their heartbreak was summed up this week for me by two young men. One is the son of my neighbour. A bright, hard-working boy at a private school, he has just got four As at AS level.

Great, I said, but he was not happy. Two of his modules were a few marks short of 80 per cent. And in the surreal world of our educational system, he feared this would cost him a place at a good university next year.

At the other end of the spectrum is a young man I met at an inner-city state school. He has been declared academically gifted - in the top 10 per cent - under a government scheme. Surely he would be the perfect candidate for a top university. However, this summer, he is one of the 14.3 per cent of gifted pupils who failed to get five good GCSEs. He admits he is ‘bored out of my mind’ at school and is in trouble with the police.

Responsibility for the plight of these two young men lies squarely with the last government. Too many of our state schools are just not good enough and no amount of social engineering - squeezing out bright, middle-class teenagers to fit impoverished youngsters into our universities - is going to put it right.

Labour refused to address the real causes of education failure: too much government interference, poor heads and teachers who are just not up to the job.

Of course, no Labour minister was going to tackle bad teaching, even in the cause of social mobility. Why? Because they preferred to see the children of the poorest families fail year after year rather than take on the powerful teaching unions.

This was coupled to Labour’s determination to turn schools into a PR department of government. The first priority of schools was to make the government look good - education took second place as students were pushed into taking easier and easier exams and got better and better grades.

Now, just when we hoped for a change, here is more of the same. Instead of pointing out the problems and offering solutions to the state of education in this country, David Willetts is taking Labour’s easy way out and ordering around our universities, demanding that they indulge in social engineering.

He should take note of the remarks made this week by Dr John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

Dr Dunford said the best GCSE candidates in state schools aren’t being given the chance to excel, not through any lack of social mobility, but because of government exam league tables. The league tables focus on the percentage of pupils getting five A* to C grades. This means schools concentrate on getting C grades rather than stretching the brightest pupils. Dr Dunford described the situation as ‘one of the perverse incentives’ of the tables.

This is just one example of schools valuing their place in the league tables over the interests of their pupils. In order to meet government targets, schools are preventing able students from studying ‘difficult’ subjects, such as science and languages. But it is these traditional subjects that top universities want and why private school pupils appear to be favoured.

Private school pupils make up just 7 per cent of the school population, but get 37 per cent of A grades in chemistry. This is not for lack of gifted chemist students in the state sector — I met a number when I was researching my report on education. It is because too many state schools encourage students to take the vocational equivalent of a GCSE, which has double the league table value of a GCSE despite having no written examination.

As Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, said: ‘We know the school’s brightest students are on track to get As, but in subject combinations that essentially rule them out.’

This has had devastating consequences for poor students. They have to trust their schools to have their best interests at heart. But too often this is just not the case. It is a pity David Willetts is not taking their side.

Dilemma: Sir Richard Sykes, former rector of Imperial College, London, sums up the dilemma this presents the best universities: ‘The belief is that there are thousands of kids out there who come from poorer backgrounds that are geniuses - there may be, but we can’t take them at 18 if they’ve not been educated.’

Instead of addressing this situation, in a wonderful piece of perverse logic worthy of his Labour predecessors, David Willetts is attacking the one part of our education system that is working - universities.

Our top universities enjoy an international reputation. They are swamped by applications at home and abroad. In the real world, any company in those fortunate circumstances would expand. Instead, what is happening?

The Government has stopped good universities expanding in the way they want — by taking on the best students — and has created the present chaotic system.

Universities are turning away pupils with straight As, like my neighbour’s son, because the Government fines them £3,700 for every student that they recruit above ‘centrally planned quotas’.

And it is here that you have to pinch yourself. Centrally planned quotas? Are we living in Stalinist Russia with David Willetts as the Chief Commissar? Well, for the purposes of higher education, we are.

To understand the absurdity of the situation, apply the same concept to Tesco. You can just imagine Commissar Willetts addressing the supermarket’s management. ‘Your sales of cornflakes has doubled this month? Cut the supply by half or we will fine you for every extra packet you sell.’

But it gets even more perverse. Universities may be turning away British school leavers in their droves, but non-EU students get a different reception. They are warmly welcomed and, indeed, wooed. The reason is simple. Universities can charge foreign students £10,000 a year. They get less than a third of that for each British student.

Foreign students contribute £3 billion a year to universities — and this is vital when the Government is imposing funding cuts of at least a quarter. So desperate are universities for funding that they offer places to foreign, fee-paying students with results that are up to two grades lower than the hard-working son of my neighbour.

As a lecturer at Sheffield University remarked: ‘Yes, it’s a funny situation, but that’s how it is. It’s Government policy.’

In other words, it’s fine to sell those scarce packets of cornflakes to India or China, but don’t let anyone from Britain get their hands on one.

We have seen the effect of 13 disastrous years of Labour on our education system. We had hoped for something better from the Conservatives. Education Secretary Michael Gove is promising an imaginative and radical overhaul of our schools. Why not the same for our universities?

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Australian students asked to plan lethal 'terror attack'

The teacher must be some sort of Leftist nut

Western Australia's Education Department chief has apologised after a high school teacher set students an assignment to plan a terrorist attack to kill innocent people.

The society and environment teacher at the Kalgoorlie-Boulder Community High School asked Year 10 students to pretend they were a terrorist planning a chemical or biological attack on "an unsuspecting Australian community". "Your goal is to kill the MOST innocent civilians in order to get your message across," the assignment read. The students had to explain their choice of victims and decide the best time and place to release their weapon.

The assignment was withdrawn and the teacher counselled following a complaint made to the school after one 15-year-old student refused to do it, saying she was horrified and disgusted.

Education Department Director-General Sharyn O'Neill on Wednesday said the teacher had exercised "poor judgement" and was remorseful. She said the teacher, who has been teaching for three years, was "well intentioned" and her heart was "in it for the kids".

Ms O'Neill said her "deepest sympathy" was with families of victims of terrorism who may have been offended by the assignment. "We are very sorry for the pain and discomfort that this situation has caused," she said. "Certainly no ill was meant by this assessment task. I'm incredibly disappointed with the assessment item that was set by the teacher. "I think it was inappropriate, it was insensitive and rightly, people are upset. "This is not what we expect of professional educators."

School principal Terry Martino said he had the assignment withdrawn as soon as he was aware of its content, and he had talked to the teacher. "This is one mistake by a hardworking, keen young teacher who is highly regarded by staff, students and community," he told the West Australian.

Education Minister Liz Constable said she was pleased Mr Martino acted quickly to ensure the assignment was withdrawn and the teacher was counselled. "It was certainly an inappropriate method of exploring the issue of conflict and had the potential to offend and disturb parents and impressionable students," she said. "Schools take the education and teaching of these issues very seriously but this must be done in an appropriate way."

State School Teachers Union president Anne Gisborne said Mr Martino had taken the "appropriate" action under the circumstances. "I don't know the motivation behind the program... in hindsight the teacher is probably wishing they hadn't done this." Ms Gisborne said the objectives of the assignment could have been achieved in a more sensitive manner.

The issue ran hot on talkback radio in Perth on Wednesday with one caller saying he had a son fighting in Afghanistan who he thought would not appreciate the assignment. Another caller told Fairfax Radio the teacher should be jailed for giving the students the assignment.

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25 August, 2010

CA: New school to open with price tag of $578 million

A glimpse of why California is financially struggling. It's only taxpayer's money so who cares about getting value for it?

Next month’s opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968.

With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.

The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the crème de la crème of “Taj Mahal’’ schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting architectural panache and deluxe amenities. “There’s no more of the old, windowless cinder block schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,’ ’’ said Joe Agron, editor in chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.’’

Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic. “New buildings are nice, but when they’re run by the same people who’ve given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they’re a big waste of taxpayer money,’’ said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. “Parents aren’t fooled.’’

At Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex’s namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool, and preservation of pieces of the original hotel.

Partly by circumstance and partly by design, the Los Angeles Unified School District has emerged as the mogul of Taj Mahals.

The complex follows on the heels of two other Los Angeles schools among the nation’s costliest — the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.

The pricey schools have been built during a sensitive period for the nation’s second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, and the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall, and some schools persistently rank among the nation’s lowest-performing.

Los Angeles is not alone, however, in building big. Some of the most expensive schools are found in low-performing districts — New York City has a $235 million campus; New Brunswick, N.J., opened a $185 million high school in January.

Nationwide, dozens of schools have surpassed $100 million with amenities including atriums, orchestra-pit auditoriums, food courts, even bamboo nooks. The extravagance has led some to wonder where the line should be drawn and whether more money should be spent on teachers.

“Architects and builders love this stuff, but there’s a little bit of a lack of discipline here,’’ said Mary Filardo, executive director of 21st Century School Fund in Washington, D.C., which promotes urban school construction.

Some specialists say it’s not all flourish and that children learn better in more pleasant surroundings.

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The weird fashion for bashing faith schools

Comment from Britain: Far from being factories of conformism, many faith schools turn out youngsters with high levels of BS immunity.

As someone who attended faith schools from the ages of four to 18 - and also a faith nursery, faith youth clubs, faith swimming lessons, faith teenybopper discos, faith football matches and faith outings to the seaside - I find the commentariat’s fear of these institutions fascinating. Nothing freaks out today’s privately educated ragers against religion quite as much as a school where the teachers talk to the children about God. They need to calm down, because the real secret about faith schools, the hidden truth, is that they more often produce intellectual sceptics than mental slaves.

Some people look upon faith schools as alien institutions, the churners-out of brain-raped youngsters who will hate homos and want to strangle single mums. ‘[W]e have no idea what children are being taught in those classrooms’, says Catherine Bennett, providing Observer readers with their weekly satisfying shudder at the thought of how the other half live.

These schools ‘brainwash impressionable children’, the New Statesman has warned, quoting that old Jesuit boast, ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man’, as evidence. Now Richard Dawkins, like a bull in a Padre Pio bookshop, has caused the Bimonthly New Atheist Controversy - it’s like they have a contract with the papers - by saying faith schools should not be given ‘a free pass to do religious education in their own way’ and must be prevented from ‘indoctrinating’ children. He was promoting his scary-sounding Channel 4 show, Faith School Menace?.

There are at least three problems with this sport of Hate The Faith School. First there’s the insulting idea that the kids are being brainwashed. Are the social circles of the liberal, atheistic, PC classes really so narrow that they have never met anyone who attended a CofE, Jewish, Muslim or Catholic school? They mustn’t have, because if they had they would know that the idea that faith-school children have their minds turned to mush by all-powerful priests, rabbis and imams is hilarious.

Take my school. (Warning: anecdotal evidence ahead.) A convent-based school in a rundown part of north-west London, administered by Dominican sisters who saw it as their duty to beat – sometimes literally – us Catholic boys and girls into shape, it was fairly full-on, religious-wise. We prayed before lessons, read the bible, raised money for black babies, had a chapel. (I say chapel. It was more of a glorified shed, which, being made of wood, got damaged in the great storm of 1987.)

But were we Pope-fearin’ Stepford kids? Far from it. Me and a friend beheaded a statue of St Vincent de Paul. The school Bibles were awash with cartoon penises sticking out of Jesus of Nazareth’s smock and speech bubbles above the apostles’ heads saying ‘I am gay’. In flagrant defiance of priestly teachings, a legend scrawled on the walls of the boys’ toilet said: ‘Wanking is evil / Evil is a sin / Sins are forgiven / So get stuck in.’ In their own little way, those four lines pose a serious theological challenge to the many contradictions of the Catholic faith.

What the faith-school fearers forget is that, yes, 12-, 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds are wet behind the ears and sometimes dumb, but they also don’t believe everything they are told. They are developing a sceptical streak, which in 13-year-old boys might express itself crudely in the agonising cry ‘What do you mean I can’t masturbate?!’, but which nonetheless speaks to an inner questioning of supposed big truths.

When a teen is told that everything from bodily pleasure to playground arguments to wanting to be super-wealthy is sinful, he will instinctively recognise a contradiction between his desires and what is expected of him. This often leads, not to brainwashing, but to an instinct to ‘kick against the pricks’ (to quote Acts, chapter 9, verse 5). As Patrick West has argued, it’s a myth that faith schools are ‘factories for producing unquestioning, God-fearing drones’.

Indeed, in my experience, people who have been to faith schools often have a natural scepticism towards spiritual crackpots. Perhaps all those years ingesting, considering and often rejecting religious education strengthens our bullshit immune system.

Everyone I know who attended a Catholic school is now an atheist, an agnostic, a lapsed Catholic or a pretend Catholic (someone who attends Mass only so that his or her child will get into a Catholic school, hilariously giving rise to fake-faith schools).

Meanwhile, it is often the trendily and liberally educated who later in life most feverishly embrace New Ageism, Buddhism Lite or end-of-the-world environmentalism. Suckers. Some of us had done that whole finding God and losing Him again by the time we were halfway through puberty.

The second problem with the fashion for bashing faith schools is that it is seriously, properly illiberal. The idea, expressed by Dawkins and others, that educating a child in a religious faith is a form of ‘emotional abuse’ is really an attack on the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit.

In an Oxford Amnesty lecture popular amongst New Atheists, one militant secularist argues that children ‘have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas’. An alarmingly intolerant campaign run by the British Humanist Association seeks to bring faith schools to an end, in the name of children’s freedom of belief.

This is an Orwellian use of the language of ‘freedom’, for it is really an attack on adults’ freedom of association, on parents’ freedom to get together with whomever they please in order to share ideas and find the education system they feel is right for their children.

As Hannah Arendt, a far more profound thinker than today’s New Atheists, argued in the late 1950s: ‘To force parents to send their children to [a certain] school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies - the private right over their children and the social right to free association.’ Campaigning for the government to shrink the faith element in faith schools would force some parents into precisely this scenario.

And thirdly, in answer to Catherine Bennett’s hair-tearing question about what on earth is taught in faith schools, the fact is they increasingly teach much of the same nonsense as ‘normal’ schools. Catholic schools, for example, teach far less of that anti-sex, pro-God stuff and much more of ‘mankind’s a rotter for wrecking the environment, multiculturalism rules, the key lesson of the Holocaust is “don’t bully Johnny”, you shouldn’t eat chips’, and so on and so on.

My old school recently won a Friends of the Earth award for being super-green by sticking a solar panel on the roof and getting the children to recycle their rubbish. Not surprisingly, none of the brave warriors against faith schools has a word to say about children being ‘indoctrinated’ in the meek, fearful, self-loathing pieties of the liberal zeitgeist. I just hope the kids one day do to their recycling bins what I did to St Vincent de Paul.

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Absurd British middle-school exam: So easy a five-year-old has passed and a seven-year-old got an A star

A five-year-old girl today became the youngest child to pass a GCSE amid concern that tests have become too easy and that pupils are being pressured into taking exams too early. Pupils achieved record GCSE results this year, with more than a fifth obtaining top grades - nearly three times the number two decades ago.

However, despite the soaring number of A and A*s, teenagers now face being squeezed out of college courses by an increasing number of university rejects.

Today's results show the proportion of pupils achieving the top two grades has exceeded 22 per cent following year-on-year increases since the exam was introduced in 1988. And 70 per cent of teenagers gained at least a C grade - up two percentage points from last year.

Dee Alli from Southwark set the record for a five-year-old by getting a C in maths. She said: 'I treat maths as a game so I don't think of it as an exam. I find maths very easy.' Dee said she was inspired to take the exam by her friend Paula Imafidon, who with her twin Peter got the highest-ever grade in a Cambridge advanced maths exam at the age of nine. When asked whether she would like to do any more maths exams she said: 'I want to be a princess that lives in a big house so I can count my money.'

Seven-year-old Oscar Selby was celebrating after he became the youngest to achieve an A*. Oscar, from Epsom, Surrey, is believed to be the youngest to score the top grade in a GCSE.

He spent four hours every Saturday for nine months studying for the course through Hertfordshire-based Ryde Teaching.

But experts raised new fears that children are under too much pressure. Professor Alan Smithers said schools wanted to push pupils to pass while some parents were competing with each other over results. 'Our education system has become too dominated by exams,' he said.

While teenagers have been warned that as hundreds of thousands of A-Level students set to miss out on a university place, many will return to sixth form or college - meaning fewer places for pupils.

And pupils face increasing pressure as more universities are now selecting candidates on their GCSE results as competition for higher education places becomes tougher.

Schools minister Nick Gibb said: 'While celebrating individual success and welcoming the fact that there has been an enormous take-up of GCSEs in the individual sciences, we believe that more needs to be done to close the attainment gap between those from the poorest and wealthiest backgrounds.'

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union said: 'These are the best ever results but the worst ever outcomes now exist for young people. 'These fantastic results stand in stark contrast to some of the worst ever employment and training prospects for young people and the reality of rising youth unemployment as a result of the coalition Government's austerity programme.'

This year's GCSE exam pass-rate increased for the 23rd year in a row, however the number of entries has fallen again to 5.37million compared with 5.47million in 2009. After a drop in the number on English entries being awarded a C last year to 62.7 per cent, the pass-rate has risen this summer to almost two-thirds.

Despite the rise in passes, school leavers face being squeezed out of further education this year as college places go to older pupils who have failed to get into university.

However, more pupils are expected to fall into the 'neet' - not in education, employment or training category - as college places are snapped up by A-Level students who are set to miss out on a university place.

Many will return to sixth form to resit exams, take more A-Levels or to turn to qualifications like BTec and HNDs. And colleges will be keen to take on these higher-achieving older students to boost performance indicators, the lecturers' union warned, reducing the number of places available to 16-year-olds.

More than a quarter of students who applied for university still have no place, figures released yesterday revealed.

Dan Taubman, further education policy officer at the UCU, told the Guardian: ‘Schools and colleges are to a large extent judged to be a success or failure on their exam results. That’s a big incentive not to take kids who have just failed. ‘It’s just like the universities – they can be more selective, and the kids without are not going to get in.’

One assessment expert has warned that the exam questions have become increasingly 'predictable' and compared the relentless rise in results to currency inflation.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, suggested highly tailored teaching and 'built-in inflation' were responsible for the consistent rises in results. 'The questions themselves are becoming much more predictable; they are highly structured and teachers are increasingly familiar with them,' he said. 'Exams just seem to have the same built-in inflation that our currency has.'

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24 August, 2010

More Texans turn to home schooling

The first day of school will be different for the Blane family this year. Parents Eric and Melissa won’t have to pack their children’s lunches or send them to the bus stop this morning.

The Blanes of Montgomery County have joined a growing number of Texans forgoing public and private schools, deciding to home school their 11-year-old son, Cory, and their 8-year-old daughter, Madison. “It’s a desire we have to be the ones who are teaching them and motivating them,” said Melissa Blane, who will be the children’s primary teacher. “We’ll be starting bright and early.”

Melissa Blane plans to kick off her school year today to coincide with the return of roughly 4.5 million students to Texas public schools. Since 2007, state lawmakers have forbade school districts from holding classes before the fourth Monday in August.

Tina Robertson, a mom who runs New Beginnings, a support group for parents new to home schooling, lovingly chuckles when they follow the traditional start date. “Guess how much I care about August 23rd?” she asked the parents gathered for a meeting Friday night at a bookstore in The Woodlands. Robertson doesn’t care at all. She plans to take her own three children, whom she has taught since kindergarten, to the park today. She said she teaches them year-round. “Home schooling is a lifestyle,” Robertson said. “The line between learning and living gets blurred — and it should.”

Over the past five years, the number of Texans opting to home school has grown about 20 percent to an estimated 120,000 families and 300,000 children, according to the Texas Home School Coalition. “The economy does have an impact on folks,” said Tim Lambert, president of the coalition. “We saw families last year who had their kids in a private school, times were tough and they couldn’t afford to do that anymore, but they didn’t want to put them in a public school.”

The most recent survey of parents by the National Center for Education Statistics found that families primarily opted to home school because they wanted to provide religious or moral lessons to their children. Other top reasons include parental concerns about safety, peer pressure and the academic instruction at traditional schools.

Parents in Texas are not required to register with any agency or to get their curriculum approved. Legal rulings have upheld that parents simply are supposed to have a curriculum that teaches reading, spelling, grammar, math and good citizenship.

The Blanes said they wanted to start home schooling several years ago, but they were worried that Melissa wouldn’t have time to teach while also helping Eric with the family light-fixture business. Finally, Melissa Blane said, they decided to “pray and rely on the Lord.”

Her home office will do double-duty as a classroom, with computers, a desk and a bulletin board on the door. The children can read in their bunk beds if they choose, but they will have to change out of their pajamas and do their hair every morning.

Their son is excited, Melissa Blane said, while their daughter is concerned about missing her classmates. “She’ll still have time for friends,” the mother said, adding that their schedule will include field trips with other families who home school.

The Rangel family of Houston also plans to try home schooling this year, with their 3-year-old daughter, Sophia. She’s too young for pre-kindergarten, but mom, Angela, wants to give her an early start and to test whether home schooling works well for the family.

“Since I went to private school my whole life, I really had wanted her to go to private school,” Angela Rangel said. “I have looked into it, and the one that I like, there’s a waiting list, and it’s very pricey. It kind of depends on where we are income-wise. My husband and I are leaning more toward home schooling.”

Rangel spent the weekend converting an apartment attached to their home into a classroom. One corner houses the library; posters about colors and shapes line the walls; and supply boxes with crayons and glue sit on top of a small table with two red chairs.

She doesn’t expect the school day to last more than an hour and a half, beginning with a Bible lesson and working up to learning to read. Rangel plans to begin class at 8:30 a.m. today.

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Final High School exam results: Yet again, the education system has failed Britain’s teenagers

Soggy-minded adults are responsible for an educational culture that flinches from all forms of grading or selection

Year after year, we fail the test. And it’s a test not only of intellect and memory, but of nerve, of honesty, and of will. As the A-level results are published and the nation’s teenagers rejoice, their elders lower their eyes in the shameful knowledge that, once again, they have let down the young.

Make no mistake: the annual controversy about grade inflation is about the failure of adults, not of pupils. Which is why Michael Gove’s declared determination to do something about this debauched educational currency is – potentially – one of the best reasons to support the Coalition.

This year’s debacle has two aspects, intimately related. The first is that more than 8 per cent of candidates received the new A* grade: to achieve this, they had to get more than 90 per cent in their final year examination. This means that already, in its launch year, the proportion of candidates gaining the new elite grade is the same as those awarded an A – the previous highest grade – in 1965.

In other words, A* is the new A. If the system is left to itself, the new super-grade’s value will diminish steadily in the years to come, compelling the introduction of an A**, an A***, an A****… well, you get the picture.

Second, there is a grievous mismatch between the demand for university places and the supply of teenagers looking for them. More than 180,000 were scrambling for last-minute places this weekend, many considering the option of pursuing higher education abroad. A measure of disappointment, of course, is intrinsic to the system. Competition for places at university is just that: a competition. And, by definition, not everybody will succeed.

More worrying is the impact that grade inflation is having on the fairness of the selective process. When 27 per cent of all A-level candidates gain an A or A* and the overall pass rate rises for the 28th year, how are universities supposed to distinguish between applicants?

The case of Ben Scheffer, the Brighton College schoolboy who could not find a university place in spite of A* grades in maths, economics and physics, and As in further maths, chemistry and German, is an extreme example of a common phenomenon. So many applicants to university have the highest grades that it becomes impossible for institutions to distinguish between them.

Like citizens of the Weimar Republic pushing wheelbarrows full of marks to buy a loaf of bread, today’s school-leavers are forced to sit ever greater numbers of A‑levels to distinguish themselves from the crowd – and even then have no guarantee of securing a university place.

I disagree profoundly with those who say that teenagers today have it easy. When I was a sixth former, we were only expected to take three A-levels, and that struck me as plenty. A quarter-century later, it is perfectly common for 18-year-olds to take seven or even more: a monstrous amount of work with which to fill your sixth-form days, with no certainty of a college place at the end of it.

Teenagers know perfectly well (or at least intuit) that the A-level “gold standard” disappeared long ago and make the best of a wrecked system to distinguish themselves by any means necessary. The Baby Boomers and Generation X don’t know how lucky they are. This generation is infinitely more resourceful and stoical than its immediate predecessors.

To give Mr Gove due credit, he has been urging root-and-branch reform of A-levels (and classroom assessments in general) since becoming Shadow Schools Secretary in July 2007. In Opposition, he appointed Sir Richard Sykes, the former rector of Imperial College, to investigate our system of tests and qualifications – an inquiry which concluded in March that “the usefulness of the system has been eroded by the politicisation of assessment outcomes” and “universities’ loss of confidence in A-levels as a certificate of readiness for university study”.

Now, in office, Mr Gove is conducting his own review, much influenced by the best sections of Sir Richard’s report: AS-levels (the first half of A-levels) are set to be abolished, as are the infantile “modular” courses that have afflicted Western civilisation for far too long. Universities will be closely involved in the overhaul of A-levels, and – one hopes – will play a much greater part in their future administration and the maintenance of this particular academic currency.

As the Sykes Report argued, behind the debasement of the A-level “gold standard” lies politicisation – not only in the direct sense that politicians always want to announce good news and increased tractor production, but in the subtler respect that political culture pollutes all systems of calibration and measurement. In the case of A-levels, an insidious “group-think’’ intervened and tore the currency to shreds.

Part of the contamination was caused by New Labour’s obsession with targets and central control – an obsession that led to the A-level scandal of 2002, in which the then Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, clashed in public with Sir William Stubbs, the chairman of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, over a grading fiasco (the resulting Tomlinson Report was all but ignored by the Blair administration).

Deeper still is the horror of academic selection that is enshrined in the comprehensive school system, but leaks into the nation’s education at every tier. Tony Crosland’s war on the grammar schools did not just destroy the principal engine of social mobility in this country’s history. It encouraged a fear of educational competition generally, and an unstated belief that all must have prizes.

The 11‑plus [exam taken at age 11 to assess eligibility for selective schooling] is spoken of like polio, a scourge upon the young that has been wiped out by the march of progress. We inhabit a culture in which it is apparently acceptable for children’s educational future to be determined by catchment area, but not by academic criteria. Infantile as it is, there is still a collective flinch from all forms of grading or selection. How much easier for soggy-minded adults for all children to get As at A-level – or, in due course, A*s.

As in so many aspects of its programme, the Coalition’s task here is cultural before it is administrative. It has to introduce afresh the idea that if all have prizes, none do. And that if ever-increasing numbers of candidates get the highest A-level grades, the university application process will become nothing more than a lottery, an arbitrary process of selection between candidates with straight As for a limited number of places. This may be a bitter pill, but it is not teenagers who are reluctant to swallow it. The pupils are not the problem. It is time for the adults to start acting like grown-ups.

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Australian Muslims Push for Islamic ‘Perspective’ in School Curriculum

Recently the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and the University of Melbourne’s Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies issued a booklet, “Learning From One Another: Bringing Muslim Perspectives into Australian Schools,” which maintains that “every Australian school student would be taught positive aspects about Islam and Muslims — and that Australia is a racist country.”

Presumably every Australian child should be taught about the fabled past of Islam and imagine the worst of Australia in order to avoid the challenges Islam poses to this peacefully integrated nation.

The report contends that there is a “degree of prejudice and ignorance about Islam and Muslims,” conditions that Australian students should oppose as they embrace diversity as the standard of civic duty. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are mentioned as famous names synonymous with traditional Islamic ideas, but there isn’t any reference to terrorism.

The truly remarkable dimension of this report is that a largely immigrant community, comprising a small minority, is demanding that classes be taught from its perspective rather than the perspective of the nation to which most chose to come. Australia is demonized as racist while the real challenges posed by Islam are overlooked. Moreover, it is precisely the communal values and institutions in Australia that made it a worthy destination for immigrants in the first place.

Most tellingly, Australia’s so called “racist impulses” were fomented by radical Islamists responsible for the death of 100 Australians in Bali and terrorist plots in Australia itself in which at least twenty people have been jailed.

According to the report, “most Muslims are outspoken in their criticism of terrorism regardless of the perpetrator. This is because Islam only allows for a just war. … From their perspective, the enemies of Islam are the terrorists and they are the warriors of the faith.” In addition, the authors of this booklet contend that “morally, Australia is not a good place to rear children,” citing as evidence drugs and illicit relations. They argue that these conditions militate against integration. It is also an argument employed for their own system of law, sharia.

What this adds up to is a minority intent on changing the environment in which it finds itself rather than seeking an accommodation with the prevailing norms. It seems to me the authors of the report have failed to address several obvious questions: If Australia is an undesirable place to raise children, why emigrate there in the first place? If sharia is the legal code you prefer, why not move to a nation where this code is in place? Why should the Australian school system comply with the requests of this Muslim minority?

It seems to me imprudent that the demands in the booklet are made at all. Suppose a Jewish minority in Iran argued that Talmudic law should be introduced across the board for this group. By any reasonable standard this request would be rejected. There simply is no reason for the Australian government to balkanize itself and, in the process, legitimate a minority hostile to law, custom, and tradition.

That integration of minorities may tolerate a degree of loyalty and affection for the “old country” is understandable. But there isn’t any justification for altering the school curriculum in the adopted nation. If anything is the case, Muslim students will be handicapped if, by virtue of a diversity standard, they learn about Islam but remain ignorant about the nation in which they reside.

Moreover, since Western nations have made an effort to welcome Islamic immigrants through programs that engender understanding, it seems to me reciprocity is warranted. But is it possible to promote women’s rights in Saudi Arabia? Or does the school curriculum in Pakistan include a history of constitutional provisions? Do Syrian schools incorporate the history of the Kurdish minority into their school curriculum?

What the Australian Muslim minority wants is what Australia can not grant: capitulation to a state within a state. A separate Muslim school system or one that emphasizes the unique aspects of Muslim life would be a first step toward the dissolution of Australia. No wonder there is pushback. Who would expect anything else?

SOURCE



23 August, 2010

Tea Party Crasher Quits teaching job Before Getting the Ax

He needed to go, the man was a bit much to keep as a teacher. The Oregon teacher who declared his mission to “dismantle and demolish” the Tea Party movement resigned before getting the ax, a school spokeswoman told FoxNews.com. “He resigned earlier this week, on Monday,” Maureen Wheeler of the Beaverton School District said. “He resigned in lieu of termination.”

Wheeler said Levin learned the results of the district’s investigation and resigned. She would not comment on those investigative results.

Conestoga Middle School media lab teacher Jason Levin became national news back in April when he announced his intention to bring down the Tea Party on his “Crash the Tea Party” website and in media interviews.

The now-ex Conestoga Middle School media lab teacher said in April that he would seek to embarrass Tea Partiers by attending their rallies dressed as Adolf Hitler, carrying signs bearing racist, sexist and anti-gay epithets and acting as offensively as possible -- anything short of throwing punches.

In a post on his now defunct website, Levin once called on his supporters to collect the Social Security numbers—among other personal identifying information—about as many Tea Party supporters as possible at rallies taking place across the country on Tax Day.

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

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

Complaints from around the nation flooded the school district’s office and Levin was suspended in April as the school district investigated whether he had used school time or resources to engage in political activism. The state’s licensing board also launched its own investigation.

On Friday, the Oregonian reported that the teacher’s state licensing board is still conducting their own investigation into Levin.

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Why British graduates are losing jobs to immigrants

British workers are too poorly educated to rival immigrants for jobs, a report warned yesterday. Employers believe that standards are declining fast among graduates and school leavers and want migrants to fill jobs instead, it said.

One in five firms have recruited migrant workers this summer and a similar number will do so during the autumn. A third of the immigrant staff will be brought in from outside Europe, according to the study.

Managers believe that British candidates do not have the skills to match migrants and that the readiness of Britons for work is getting worse year by year. [It can get worse?]

Four out of ten employers think literacy and numeracy among British graduates and school leavers has worsened over the past five years. Fewer than one in ten believe these basic skills have improved, the report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and accountants KPMG also said.

A third think that business acumen has fallen off among British candidates and more than a third think their personal skills are worse now than five years ago.

The Labour Market Outlook report said that demand for immigrant workers is rising in line with improvements in the economy. But author Gerwyn Davies warned that multinational companies will shift jobs abroad if they cannot get qualified staff in Britain. He said that the proposed migration cap, which is due next year, comes at a time when many employers are still struggling to fill skilled vacancies despite the high unemployment rate. The resulting shortfall of skilled candidates following the cap could damage British companies, according to Mr Davies.

He said: 'The training of local or British workers to fill skilled jobs currently occupied by migrant workers will not happen overnight. If a cap is to be introduced, it has to be gradually phased in to avoid harming UK competitiveness.'

But Immigration Minister Damian Green said: 'Businesses are going to have to reduce their reliance on migrant workers as this has done nothing to help the millions of unemployed.'

Numbers of skilled workers coming in from outside Europe this year were cut by five per cent in June as an 'interim measure' before the overall cap comes into effect next year. The Tories had pledged to bring annual net immigration down to 'tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands'.

Mr Green added: 'We are consulting with business on how the limit should work in practice and will operate the limit in a way that continues to meet the needs of UK business.' Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think-tank, said: 'For every skilled worker imported, that is a British worker not trained.

'Employers should stop complaining and start training. 'If we make it easy for employers to take skills off the shelf from abroad they have no incentive to train British workers.' The CIPD/KPMG report was based on the views of 600 companies. It found that 42 per cent of employers thought the literacy levels of graduates have declined over five years while only six per cent thought they had improved. Their rating of the performance of school leavers was similar.

Only six per cent of bosses thought that graduate numeracy had improved, while 35 per cent thought it had declined. For school leavers, eight per cent saw improvement but 43 per cent saw a decline in numeracy.

Nearly half of firms said it was hard to fill vacancies. About a fifth of jobs in engineering, IT, and accountancy were being taken by immigrants. Some 37 per cent of migrants taking jobs come from outside Europe, the study found.

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Australia: Schoolchildren 'wrongly diagnosed'

The medicalization of behaviour marches on. We we will all be in some diagnostic category eventually. I wonder what I will be labelled with? "Senile hostility" perhaps?

DOCTORS are being pressured to diagnose children with behaviour disorders to get them extra assistance in schools, labelling many with diseases they probably don't have, researchers warn.

South-western and western Sydney have become hot spots for children, especially boys, being given diagnoses of behaviour disorder and emotional disturbance. The children are then enrolled in special schools and support classes, according to research soon to be published by Macquarie University academics.

Macquarie University researcher Linda Graham said three separate studies pointed to "pressures on paediatricians to inflate diagnoses so kids get support in class".

The research shows enrolments for "behaviour disorder" rose in NSW special schools by 254 per cent between 1997 and 2007, while kids with physical, hearing and visual disabilities fell 60 per cent over that period.

In support classes in regular NSW primary schools, emotionally disturbed diagnoses rose 139 per cent, while in support classes in regular NSW high schools, autism diagnoses grew by 280 per cent, emotional disturbance increased by 348 per cent, and behaviour disorder by 585 per cent during the same period.

Behavioural disorder diagnoses sharply rose from 2002, when NSW began building special schools for children with behavioural problems.

Children are "being diagnosed with things they don't have", Dr Graham, a fellow with the Centre for Research into Social Inclusion, said. . South-western Sydney, which accounts for 17.5 per cent of total enrolments in NSW government schools, has 26.5 per cent of enrolments in special schools and support classes, while western Sydney accounts for 13.7 per cent of total school enrolments but 17.8 per cent of enrolments in special schools and support classes.

Northern Sydney, with 11.5 per cent of school enrolments, has only 5.7 per cent of children in special schools and support classes.

Australian Medical Association paediatrics spokesman Choong-Siew Yong said he was not surprised at the disparity: parents in wealthier suburbs could afford non-government assistance for struggling children.

Dr Yong said sometimes schools will tell parents their child's behaviour "matches other kids with particular problems" and recommend they take the child to see a paediatrician to seek a diagnosis and therefore see if the child is eligible for special education funding assistance.

But Dr Yong said only a very small number of parents come looking for a particular diagnosis for their child and that paediatricians were "not placed under undue pressure". "I don't think people are lying and ripping off the system," Dr Yong said.

While parents are increasingly clamouring for greater funding for assistance, the researchers have shown special education costs rose from 7.2 per cent in 1997 of NSW government school recurrent payments to 12.8 per cent in 2007.

NSW Teachers Federation deputy president Gary Zadkovich said there was "no clear outcome" in the debate over whether too many children are being diagnosed or overmedicated. "I can say unequivocally more students are presenting in Australian schools with special education needs just because of developments in medical science," he said.

SOURCE



22 August, 2010

L.A. Unified presses union on test scores

The district wants new labor contracts to include 'value-added' data as part of teacher evaluations

The Los Angeles Unified School District will ask labor unions to adopt a new approach to teacher evaluations that would judge instructors partly by their ability to raise students' test scores — a sudden and fundamental change in how the nation's second-largest district assesses its educators.

The teachers union has for years staunchly resisted using student test data in instructors' reviews.

The district's actions come in response to a Times article on teacher effectiveness. The article was based on an analysis, called "value-added," which measures teachers by analyzing their students' performance on standardized tests. The approach has been embraced by education reformers as a way to bring objectivity to teacher evaluations.

John Deasy, the recently appointed deputy superintendent, sent a memo to the Board of Education on Friday afternoon spelling out the district's value-added plans. He said he hopes that labor negotiations can be completed before The Times publishes a database containing the names and value-added rankings of more than 6,000 elementary school teachers. In the meantime, the district plans to use that data internally to help identify teachers who need extra training.

The Times plans to publish the database later this month. The newspaper has provided the opportunity for teachers to view their scores and comment on them prior to publication. So far, more than 1,200 teachers have received their scores.

Deasy said he had contacted the leadership of both United Teachers Los Angeles and the administrators union, and that he believed negotiations could be successful and swift.

Reached by cellphone, United Teachers Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy refused to respond to a reporter's questions.

UTLA spokeswoman Marla Eby said Duffy was busy preparing for a speech to 800 union leaders Friday night at the union's annual leadership conference in Palm Springs.

Administrators union head Judith Perez said in an interview that opening formal negotiations hasn't been discussed but that she is aware of Deasy's proposal and would be willing to sit down and hear about it.

Sources said Deasy had a series of meetings with city business leaders, district officials and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who urged Duffy to reconsider his stance.

In an interview, Deasy said, referring to the union, that he has "reason to believe that the leadership is desirous of finding a way to significantly improve evaluations and finding a … way forward that doesn't embarrass teachers."

"The district is available this evening to begin these talks," he said. "We look forward to making decisions about value-added analysis with teachers and school leaders; not to teachers and school leaders," he wrote in his memo.

The Times reported that Los Angeles Unified has long had the ability to use value-added analysis but has never done so. District leadership has largely shied away from it because of inertia and fear of the teachers union.

In California, officials have pledged to make value-added analysis at least 30% of teacher evaluations by 2013 in response to the requirements of the Obama administration's competitive Race to the Top grant program. Union leadership declined to sign an agreement to abide by that plan.

In an interview last week, Duffy criticized value-added analysis because it depends on standardized test scores that he considers flawed. He said that he wasn't opposed to principals using it confidentially to give teachers feedback, but that it had no place in a formal evaluation. Value-added will "lead us down a road to destroy public education," he said.

But other teachers unions throughout the country have agreed to use value-added as one of several measures to evaluate instructors.

In a meeting with the Times earlier this week, Weingarten said she has negotiated 54 contracts with local unions and their school districts that include some form of value-added analysis. She also said parents have a right to know if their child's teacher received a satisfactory review.

Weingarten announced in January that her union would seek to revamp teachers evaluations. She said value-added accounts for 10% to 30% of teachers' performance reviews and it is one of multiple measures to evaluate teachers. In New York City, for example, 20% of a teachers evaluation is based on a value-added rating, she said. "Teacher evaluation has been broken for years," Weingarten said. She said the current system is ineffective; most principals make brief, pre-announced visits to classrooms and merely fill out a checklist.

SOURCE






High School exams are a mess, says top British headmaster

Britain's examinations system is a "complete mess" and A-levels need major reform to allow the brightest students to flourish, a leading educationalist has warned. Dr Martin Stephen, the head of St Paul's School, London, said the new A* grade was nothing more than "statistical trickery" which will only serve to stifle "creativity, imagination and the willingness to take a risk".

He spoke out after last week's A level results produced the 28th successive increase in the overall pass rate, with 8.1 per cent of results being graded at A* - more than had been expected.

Writing for The Telegraph, Dr Stephen said: "The frightening truth is that if we are to rescue our ailing examination system, all we have to do is put the clock back.

"We need to recognise that the top 15 per cent of the ability band are both a priceless asset to the nation and a special-needs category who require specialist teaching. For all their faults, the old grammar schools did recognise this. "We need an extra tier at A-level, with material that can stretch and yet set free the most able, and is marked by those who understand what it is all about."

Dr Stephen continued: "Our examination system is a complete mess, and the new A* A-level grade - awarded for the first time this year - has done nothing to clear it up. The A* is the right idea, but dreadfully executed."

Figures published by the Joint Council for Qualifications showed that the overall pass rate rose to 97.6 per cent, with 27 per cent of papers graded at least an A, compared with 26.7 per cent a year earlier. The number of A grades awarded is more than triple that of the early 1980s.

Dr Stephen, high master at the 500-year-old school in south-west London where basic fees are £5,800 a term, said the A* had been misconceived and insisted that standards should be set by universities and not by civil servants.

"It's madness to invent a new grade without basing it on testing new material, and the A* is simply statistical trickery, giving the new top grade to those who score over 90 per cent in their three modules," he said. "It means that a candidate could get 100 per cent in one module, 89 per cent in another, and be denied the A*. This means candidates and teachers will suffer.

"The huge pressure not to drop a mark will mean we demote creativity, imagination and the willingness to take a risk. It does not reward those capable of brilliance, but simply rewards those who make the least mistakes."

He proposed that candidates with A* potential should sit an additional advanced paper, or write a 2,000 word essay on an original topic with a viva to guard against plagiarism.

"One of the greatest ironies of the A-level is that our universities exercise virtually no influence over the exam that is meant to decide their entry," he said. "We must reinsert universities back in to the management structure of the A-level. If nothing else, this would address the problem of exam boards that have moved from an academic to a commercial agenda."

Exam boards told schools they had made their papers more "accessible" - which Dr Stephen said was a euphemism for "easier" - because they were under pressure to increase their market share of candidates sitting each subject.

A-level marking schemes restrict the most able students because they leave no scope to express original thought, he said. "I well remember a very bright student who got an E grade on his Shakespeare paper. "He had answered the question 'Is Hamlet mad?' by arguing that far from being mad, he was the only sane person in the play. It was the rest of us who were mad. "Brilliant idea, but not one the examiner was allowed to give credit for because it stepped outside the narrow boundaries of the mark scheme."

Dr Stephen went on: "We have turned the word 'elite' into a swear word, denying the fact that all the world's leading universities are an elite. "In the past, that elite discovered the double helix and invented the internet. In the future, it is only that elite that will find the answer to global warming and a cure for cancer.

"We will not get an effective A-level until we tell those responsible for it that it is okay to give the exam a fast lane, and for it to be used as a means of identifying the most able."

Last week, John Schmitt, head of English at Charterhouse, criticised the A-level as an "increasingly meaningless" exam which "no longer discriminate between the able and the outstanding". He advocated the use of alternative systems such as the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme.

Isabel Nisbet, chief executive of qualifications regulator Ofqual, said: “You can be confident that those who have been awarded an A* have achieved it consistently and have been marked fairly. "Other ideas for the A* are a legitimate and important debate. “We would welcome high-level public and academic input into A-levels.”

On the allegation that marking regimes stifle the brightest students, she said: “This year the criteria for marking the A2 papers were particularly aimed at allowing creativity and originality.”

Miss Nisbet urged Dr Stephen to come forward with any evidence he had that exam boards had made papers easier for commercial reasons.

SOURCE





Australia: Vocational colleges to offer degrees

More attempted verbal magic that will just downgrade all degrees. Will it get to the point where you get a Ph.D. for being able to read and write? That's the direction of travel

TAFE institutes are to offer bachelor degrees and could compete with universities for students under a bold plan aimed at combating skills shortages.

The government-owned institutes want funding from next year to offer degrees in areas such as accounting, community services, finances and information technology.

In February next year, TAFE's Sydney Institute will begin offering a bachelor of design through its Enmore Design Centre. More bachelor degrees are expected to be offered by TAFE's Northern Institute and Western Institute in 2012.

NSW TAFE was last month accredited by the state government, under national guidelines, to become a higher-income education provider, allowing it to follow Victoria's TAFE, which is already offering a limited number of degrees.

The head of TAFE in NSW, Pam Christie, said she was reluctant to name specific degrees because the board had yet to approve those that would go ahead.

TAFE wanted to extend opportunities to all communities to gain the sorts of degrees industry was demanding, she said. "We're not trying to compete with universities; we're trying to build relationships with them," she said.

This would include associate degrees offered in conjunction with universities across many of TAFE NSW's 10 institutes and 130 campuses, as well as bachelor degrees.

TAFE bosses in Victoria say enrolments so far are small, and their ability to offer a wider range of degrees to more students is being stymied by a biased funding system that means TAFE students pay more for their degrees than university students - the federal government subsidises only university degrees.

TAFEs say they have also been approached by industry to provide degrees in areas such as optometry, psychology, dentistry, project management, architectural design, technology, social work and aviation.

The head of TAFE Directors Australia, Martin Riordan, said TAFE degrees would give poor and regional students better access to higher education. "Many students in TAFE are from low socio-economic areas and are motivated to go beyond a diploma and do a degree," Mr Riordan said. "This is a way to help them get the degrees they deserve."

He said the plan would also help the federal government achieve its goal to increase the number of people aged 25 to 34 with a degree, from about 32 per cent now to 40 per cent by 2025.

Universities Australia boss Glenn Withers said it would be difficult to ensure the quality of a TAFE degree and the sector's fragile international reputation could be damaged.

"We've already suffered enough from problems with colleges collapsing and international student issues," Dr Withers said. "While we support the idea of TAFEs offering degrees to address skill shortages … the quality-assurance mechanisms just aren't good enough yet."

SOURCE



21 August, 2010

Many U.S. Teacher Layoffs Stand Despite $10 Billion Fund

“[W]e can’t stand by and do nothing while pink slips are given to the men and women who educate our children,” said Barack Obama on August 10th from the White House Rose Garden. That was the day the House passed another $26 billion states bailout, which included $10 billion for state education spending.

Obama insisted that the passage of the bill was urgent, and that if it was not passed, teachers would be fired. “I urge Congress to pass this proposal so that the outstanding teachers who are here today can go back to educating our children,” he declared. So urgent was it, you will recall, that Nancy Pelosi hurriedly brought the House back from August recess to pass the bill.

Well, now, the teachers are getting fired anyway. According to the New York Times, several school districts will be stockpiling the money for 2012, when more budget cuts are expected. Others are hesitant to spend the one-time bailout, because it undermines year-to-year stability in budgeting.

“We’re a little wary about hiring people if we only have money for a year, but we know that’s the intent of the bill,” said the chief financial officer of Clark County schools, Jeff Weiler. Others, like, like Lydia Ramos of the Los Angeles Unified School District, intend to use the money tackle the “herculean task [of] next year’s deficit.”

This comes amid other news that over $100 billion of infrastructure projects in the original $862 billion “stimulus” has gone unspent, as reported by the Washington Post. Although most of the original $145 billion dedicated to states was spent, which included $87 billion for Medicaid and another $53.6 billion to balance state and local budgets, the unspent moneys piling up calls into question Obama’s urgent rationale for yet more spending.

Congressional Republicans have argued for using the unspent funds to pay down the national debt, amongst other things. Instead, it appears that the financing will lay idle for the time being, while states figure out how to fix their worsening budget pictures.

One thing Obama apparently did not anticipate were states prioritizing a sustainable budget over one-time handouts.

The hoarding by state and localities of the funding also reveals that they have learned what the American people already know — that the “stimulus” is indeed a failure. It’s not a down payment, and it has not brought about immediate growth. Now we know the states know it, too.

Despite promises that the “stimulus” would lead to a V-shaped recovery, states that put off making necessary cuts to their budgets last year are now caught in a bind as revenues have failed to recover, nor are they expected to next year. This is in turn has undermined the political fortunes of state lawmakers, with Republicans expected to pick up new majorities in several state legislatures this year.

These states now face a choice: Use the money today, as the public sector unions are demanding, and risk even steeper cuts next year, or hoard the money since the law allows it to be spent as late as September 2012.

Other states, like Texas, are rejecting the money out of hand since the $10 billion fund “mandates that the governor guarantee the Legislature will provide a certain level of state funding through 2013, a funding scheme prohibited by the Texas Constitution,” according to Katherine Cesinger, Deputy Press Secretary of Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Still other states have complained about the mandatory nature of the funding contained in Section 101(8) of H.R. 1586 which states that if a governor fails to apply for funding within 30 days, “the [Education] Secretary shall provide for funds allocated to that State to be distributed to another entity or other entities in the State … for support of elementary and secondary education, under such terms and conditions as the Secretary may establish.”

According to a statement issued by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s press secretary yesterday that “the Governor will apply for the education funding passed by the House today in order to ensure it is managed and distributed to local school districts by the State of New Jersey, and not the federal government.”

One has to wonder that since the federal government intended to force reluctant governors to accept the money, if it will now attempt to force states to spend the money for the upcoming school year as proposed. They’re already hijacking sovereign state decisions about whether or not to accept federal money — a clear violation of the 10th Amendment — so what’s to stop the Obama Administration from forcing states to allocate money in the precise manner it wishes?

Perhaps upon learning about the reluctant states and localities not spending the money right away, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will speedily reconvene Congress to pass billions of dollars of more spending that they must use this year. Or, maybe not.

Maybe they’ll just pretend that they “saved” the jobs, even though they didn’t.

SOURCE






The A-level refuseniks: 70,000 British students give up on biggest ever battle for place at university

Seventy thousand students left scrambling for university places after being disappointed in their A-level results have become 'refuseniks' and simply given up. Admissions chiefs said 'very large numbers' of applicants were planning gap years or other alternatives to escape the most intense rush for degree courses ever seen.

The thousands who have turned their backs on the system include well-qualified students who missed out on prestigious universities but are not prepared to settle for their back-up choices or clearing places which they consider inferior. They believe the courses do not warrant the effort or money. They are expected to re-apply next year, hoping a gap year will improve their prospects, while many others will apply overseas or pursue college places, job-related training or apprenticeships.

The ranks of applicants opting out are expected to swell over the coming week as sought-after places in the clearing system, which matches students to vacant courses, disappear.

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service yesterday estimated that more than 150,000 applicants will end up without places this year.

Around a seventh of available clearing places were snapped up within 24 hours of hotlines opening. By yesterday morning, 4,083 of an estimated 30,000 places had been filled. But there are 190,183 candidates eligible to be considered for the remaining places, compared with 140,000 this time last year.

Universities reported that switchboards had jammed and that there had been a 'substantial increase' in parents ringing to 'interfere' on their children's behalf. Professor Les Ebdon, vice-chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire, said: 'Lots of mothers have been calling up and pouring their hearts out. They are very demanding and are fighting hard for their children to get places.'

But many youngsters have already chosen to give up. Mary Curnock Cook, UCAS chief executive, said: 'We've got about 70,000 who have rejected their offers or who have withdrawn from the system.

She said some had not used their choice of back-up options prudently in their original university application, and so had been unwilling to settle for their second choice or lower. 'It will be over 150,000 who are, for one reason or another, unplaced or who withdraw from the system, but it will be another week or so before we have got a better idea of what that number will be,' she added.

Students choosing to defer applications for a year have been warned that competition is also likely to be fierce in 2011, with this year's huge increase in applicants thought to be partly down to the thousands of students who deferred last year.

Aaron Porter, president of the National Union of Students, said: 'They are being encouraged by ministers to re-apply next year but can be offered no assurance in return that there will be a resolution to the annual places crisis.'

SOURCE






A-level results: How the great university boom has defrauded Britain's students

Feeding the product of low quality schools into low quality universities achieves nothing -- except to burden the young people concerned with debt

Wakey, wakey, it’s Hangover Friday. After yesterday’s release of A-level results, thousands of young people will roll out of bed today with a tongue like a battered flip-flop and acid drops for eyeballs. The majority will have celebrated achieving the results required for university entrance. Congratulations to them. But for a very significant minority – those who fell short and cannot secure a place through clearing – last night was about drowning sorrows, making this morning’s headache doubly painful. It ought not be like this.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a cultural shift in the United Kingdom, away from vocational training in favour of higher education. It began with the Conservatives’ decision to allow polytechnics and colleges to rebrand themselves as universities, and was compounded by Labour’s target of channelling 50 per cent of school-leavers into degree courses.

Much of the enthusiasm for this recalibration of skills development was well-intentioned, albeit misguided. For the stormtroopers of social engineering, however, fiddling with educational provision and selection has been an opportunity to strike back against ambitious middle-class parents whose “crime” is to invest time and money in their children’s future. Only this week, Nick Clegg denounced school-leavers from affluent homes for taking a “disproportionate” number of degree places, implying that some form of crafty theft is involved.

The truth is rather more prosaic. In a report for the think tank Civitas, Peter Saunders, a sociology professor at Sussex University, concludes: “Children benefit if they are born to supportive parents who care about their education and make sacrifices to help their kids excel. And not everyone has parents like that.”

Yes, good parenting can overcome class barriers, but there is another ingredient that matters even more, one which very few politicians are willing to acknowledge: IQ. According to Professor Saunders: “Half of the explained variance in the occupational destinations achieved by the 1958 birth cohort was due to just one variable – how well they scored on an IQ test when they were aged 11. This is a much better predictor of their eventual fate than class... school... or any other social factor.”

More than 200 years ago, Edmund Burke warned: “Those who attempt to level never equalise.” This is the lesson of Britain’s flawed education policy over the past 40 years, including the razing of grammar [selective] schools, the diminution of A-level standards, and a guerrilla war against independent schools (fought, in part, through that ghastly institution, the Charity Commission).

As even Mr Clegg admits: “There is evidence to suggest that – contrary to expectations – increased levels of attendance at university have not translated into higher levels of social mobility.”

And why might that be? Is it because all the extra capacity has been stolen by degree bandits from comfortable homes? Or is it that a qualification from some of the new universities, into which unknowing (mainly working-class) applicants are herded, is, on its own, no passport to success in a competitive jobs market?

For many ill-advised students from second-rate schools (including a few in the private sector), the conveyor belt into weak universities is a journey into debt, fuelled by the promise of a salary premium that will never be realised. In effect, they are victims of fraud.

According to the National Student Survey, the average debt of a university entrant, starting this year, will be £25,000. But, it is claimed, the average graduate will, over the course of a career, earn £100,000 gross more than former schoolfriends who could have gone to university, but chose to get a job at 18.

This figure is, at best, a guess, constructed with the sticky tape of wishful thinking. Yesterday is no guide to tomorrow, because the number of young people entering university has soared from 6-7 per cent when I went in the mid-1970s, to more than 40 per cent today. As in any market, over-supply results in falling prices.

In 2003, when the last government was softening up the system for the introduction of higher top-up fees, it cited research indicating that graduates would, over a lifetime, earn some £400,000 more than non-graduates. But a 2007 survey by Universities UK downgraded it to £160,000, and since then, according to a committee led by Lord Browne, the income boost for degree holders has been eroded to just £100,000.

Even if this is correct, an average is just that. So for every first-class physicist from Imperial College who ends up earning £200,000 as an analyst in the City, there must be an origami graduate from the University of Coketown who is suffering hard times.

Too many would-be students and their parents fail to appreciate the vast discrepancy in quality between universities, and what this means for job prospects and pay. They live the dream, only to discover after graduation that many leading employers recruit primarily from Russell Group and 1994 Group institutions, which between them account for just 39 of the UK’s 130 universities.

Most companies are not interested in being vehicles for social mobility; they simply want to hire the brightest people. In a heartbeat, they work out where to look. At the top end of the university tables, Cambridge is demanding A*AA passes at A-level for entry on just about all its courses. At the bottom end, some universities are accepting students with CC or even less.

Nine universities – Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Imperial, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, University College London and St Andrews – have an intake that comprises more than 30 per cent from private schools. This has nothing to do with snobbery or elitism; it’s about maintaining standards. A vice-chancellor from one of them told me that his institution was “straining” to admit more state-school candidates, but too few were able to meet the minimum requirements.

As Lord Adonis, Labour’s minister for schools 2005-08, wrote recently, instead of dreaming up schemes for a graduate tax (which will be uncollectable from foreign students and Britons who become expatriates), the Government should focus on “eradicating the long tail of seriously under-performing comprehensives”. The aim should be to improve state schools, because throttling private providers serves no purpose other than to cheer up Lord Prescott and his miserable crowd.

Nobody wants to stamp on the hopes of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Of course they should be encouraged to go to university, but only if they know the true costs and likely benefits. Moreover, there is no reason for those who didn’t make the grades this week to despair.

You don’t need to be an entrepreneurial hot-shot – a Richard Branson or a Philip Green – to make it to the top without a degree. Some of the most prestigious jobs in conventional British industry are filled by those who avoided university, among them the chairmen of BAA (Sir Nigel Rudd), Vodafone (Sir John Bond), Marks & Spencer (Sir Stuart Rose), British Airways (Martin Broughton); the senior partner at Deloitte (John Connolly) and the chief executive of HSBC (Mike Geoghegan). All is not lost.

Source



20 August, 2010

Wishy-washy Christians in education

Mike Adams

If Christianity dies in America it will not be for a lack of evidence of its truthfulness. It will be for a lack of dissemination of the evidence of its truthfulness. And the blame for the lack dissemination of that evidence will fall squarely on the shoulders of Christian men who are simply too weak and passive to deserve to be called “Christian” or “men.”

In the last few months, I have been in no less than one dozen arguments with “Christian men” who have attempted to persuade me to stop my advocacy of, and direct involvement in, litigation against public universities. This is despite the fact that the universities are seeking to curtail the rights of Christian students and professors.

Three common arguments I have heard, and my brief responses to them, follow: Argument for passivity: In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek to whoever slaps us on our right cheek. How do you reconcile that with your assertion that “a lawsuit a day keeps the atheists at bay”?

Response: This one is easy. A slap on the face is a personal insult. Jesus is clearly admonishing us to ignore such personal insults; He isn’t saying we can’t aggressively call out evil. Jesus Himself aggressively called out evil as recorded later in the same Gospel (Matthew 23).

This coming year I am planning a series of legal challenges to universities that have launched “Queer Resource Centers” and “LGBTQIA Centers” on campus. The goal is not to shut the centers down but, instead, to force them to present issues in a more balanced fashion.

For example, those centers using mandatory student activity fees to bolster the case for gay marriage will be pressured (legally) to invite speakers like Frank Turek who will argue the other side of the issue. We will rely on the ten-year old Southworth case in our efforts to ensure that student fees are spent in a viewpoint neutral manner.

When I launch these challenges the “liberal” blogs will say I am secretly gay. That is the way they always respond. It’s a silly personal insult revealing nothing more than the unfortunate fact that many gays secretly hate themselves. I will simply ignore such insults and proceed with the lawsuits.

I would urge everyone – especially those who trumpet the importance of “context” - to read the entire Sermon on the Mount. When they do, they will realize that Jesus also said that those who are persecuted in His name will be richly blessed. The tallest blade of grass is the one that gets cut first. Similarly, the Christian who stands tallest is the one that gets persecuted first. Therefore, those who stand tall and do not roll over will be the first to be blessed.

Argument for passivity: In Luke 6:29, Jesus urges that one who has his coat taken from him to should also hand over his tunic. Doesn’t that suggest that we should not resist campus efforts to take away Christian rights?

Response: The coat and tunic are material things. We would do well to hand over material things to those in need. If we were more generous on the front end, people would be less inclined to steal. But religious liberty is not a material thing. It is a non-material thing that is the principal basis for this nation’s founding. It belongs to everyone and, therefore, cannot be handed over by any one individual to any other individual.

Put simply, we have a right to hand over our own tunic. But we cannot hand over someone else’s tunic as well. When we give away our rights we give away the rights of others without their consent. That is not a requirement of Christianity. It is a hallmark of cowardice.

Argument for passivity: Doesn’t the Bible tell us to abide by laws and submit to the authority of government?

Response: It sure does. And the First Amendment is the law of the land. When it is violated, we should protest by using the First Amendment. If our protests are ignored we should use civil litigation to uphold the laws that lawless secular humanists seek to destroy. The key word here is “civil.” Christians should not hurl stones in the streets. They should remain civil by filing civil suits.

The Apostle Paul tells Christians they should not sue one another. But he did not say we should not sue heathens. Let us never forget that a large proportion of what is written in the New Testament was written by Paul from inside prison. He was boldly asserting his rights as a Roman citizen. He was not cowering in the face of abject evil, as so many man-boy “Christians” are today.

SOURCE







3,500 British straight-A students miss out on university

Dozens of universities declared themselves full yesterday as a minister triggered fury by urging thousands of high- achieving students to settle for 'less competitive' degree courses.

Institutions filled up more quickly than ever as record-breaking A-level results allowed 388,000 applicants to claim their chosen places. Incredibly, around 3,500 students with straight A grades could be left high and dry and forced to reapply next year.

Pass rates rose for the 28th successive year despite a toughening up of the exam system, while one in 12 pupils scored the new A* super-grade. It left more than a quarter of university applicants - 187,625 - without confirmed places and facing the biggest scramble for ten years to find last-minute vacancies through the clearing system.

Research by the Mail indicates that more than 20 universities - including Bristol, Birmingham, Warwick, Exeter, Bournemouth and Leeds Metropolitan - have effectively put up 'closed' signs, while a further 18 have just a handful of places left.

Half as many courses were being advertised in clearing this year compared to 2009 - 18,500 down from 32,000, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service said.

With universities under threat of hefty fines for exceeding strict recruitment targets and applications up 10 per cent on last year, some 150,000 applicants are expected to miss out altogether. While nearly 48,000 students found courses through clearing last year, the number this year is expected to be closer to 30,000.

Universities Minister David Willetts, who has predicted that 3,500 candidates with three As will be left without places, drew a storm of criticism after suggesting that well-qualified applicants faced with rejection should lower their expectations. He told them 'I am sorry', and added that one option would be to 'look at applying for slightly less competitive universities for next year'.

But Sally Hunt, a university union boss, said: 'I am astounded that the Government's insulting response to the university crisis is simply to advise some people to temper their ambition. After years of being inspired to aim higher the coalition government is actually telling students to aim lower.'

The row erupted as A-level students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland celebrated yet another crop of record-breaking performances. The inexorable rise in results continued despite the introduction of open-ended essay-style questions aimed at restoring the credibility of the 'gold standard' exam. Candidates were also expected to study fewer units but in more depth.

While 8.1 per cent of exams - one in 12 - were awarded the new elite A* grade, for students scoring 90 per cent in their final exams, the proportion of A grades rose for the 13th straight year to 27 per cent - up 0.3 per cent. The pass rate covering A to E grades, meanwhile, rose to 97.6 per cent. It means only one in 42 exams were failed.

John Dunford, representing secondary school and college principals, said: 'No question, those examinations have been harder and yet the results have been maintained and indeed slightly improved.'

SIX As BUT NOT A SINGLE OFFER

Benedikt Scheffer has discovered that good grades are not enough to secure a university place. Ben Scheffer achieved three A*s and three As yesterday but does not have an offer from a single university.

The 18-year- old student at Brighton College had applied to study economics at Oxford, London School of Economics, University College London, Bristol and Warwick. The teenager, who lives with his family in Munster, Germany, was turned down by all the institutions despite being predicted to get two A*s and three As.

Ben had already achieved an A in German A-level during his lower sixth studies at the independent school. Yesterday, he went on to get As in chemistry and further maths and A*s in maths, physics and economics.

He said: 'I'm really pleased with my results but don't understand why I didn't get a place. The system is wrong when so many are missing out. There just aren't enough places.'

Ben plans to take a gap year before reapplying next year. His headmaster, Richard Cairns, said his case showed the ' vagaries' of the admissions system and the need for an overhaul.

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Australia: The collapse of school discipline again

Parents threaten legal action to remove primary school 'bully'

PARENTS of a six-year-old boy may take legal action to remove an alleged bully who has been tormenting their son in class.

Taner, a pupil at Roxburgh Homestead school, in Melbourne, has allegedly been kicked, punched, ridiculed and verbally abused by a classmate for several months.

But Taner's parents, Sue and Cane, yesterday accused the school of failing to protect him even though staff had admitted the perpetrator was "fixated" on their son and a psychologist had recommended he be moved.

Sue, who asked that the family's surname not be published, said Taner had become so distressed by the bullying that he was admitted to hospital after vomiting and complaining of stomach cramps and breathing problems. "He said, 'Mum, I can't go to school. Every time I go he's just going to hit me and hurt me all the time'," she said. "He's been kicking him in the legs, punching him in the arms. He's having nightmares, he's extremely distraught."

Taner, who is being kept at home, said the attacks made him sad and he hadn't learnt much this year. "He hits me every school day. I say, 'Stop it, I don't like it', I give him one warning and then a second or last warning and then he hits me," he said.

Sue said the Roxburgh Park school had promised to deal with the issue, but the attacks had continued. It is believed the alleged bully has autism.

Taner's parents want the other boy removed from the class, but so far the school has offered only to transfer Taner. A child psychologist has recommended that Taner remain in his class, but an Education Department student wellbeing officer has told the parents the alleged bully will not be moved.

When told that the parents were considering legal action, the officer allegedly said: "I'll see you in court." It is believed this has been disputed.

Cane said the school had admitted the alleged bully's fixation on his son, but the family felt let down by the school and the department. "We are the victims but we are being made to feel like we're the guilty party," he said.

Roxburgh Homestead principal Barb Adam said the school had been dealing with the issue and wanted to continue talking with both families to resolve it. "There have been mechanisms that have been put in place to support both students," she said. "We're really confident we can resolve this issue but because it appears to have become a legal matter it would be inappropriate for the school to comment further."

The department confirmed it was investigating the matter. "We're working with both families to resolve the issue," a spokesman said. "No bullying is tolerated in our schools." [Except when it is!]

Parents Victoria spokeswoman Elaine Crowle said there was rarely a win-win situation in these matters. "The child and the parents deserve to feel supported by the school and we would always encourage parents to try and have it handled by the school," she said.

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19 August, 2010

Too many middle class students at university, says British Liberal leader

Upbringing blamed. Must not mention the role of IQ or genetics. Brains help you to get rich and you pass on your higher IQ to your children genetically -- so kids from affluent backgrounds are more likely to be born smart and thus do well in education. There will ALWAYS be a class gap in educational achievement and ignoring that is pissing into the wind

Nick Clegg attacked middle class dominance of university places yesterday, denouncing what he called 'educational apartheid' on the eve of the A-level results.

The privately educated Deputy Prime Minister revived memories of Labour's war on the middle class by complaining that the huge increase in the number going to university has done nothing to improve social mobility.

Mr Clegg used a speech on improving the life chances of the poor to point out that the vast majority of new university entrants have been students from affluent homes. The LibDem leader, who says he benefited from a 'very lucky upbringing' and education at the exclusive Westminster public school and Cambridge University, said that 'a disproportionate number of university students come from the middle and upper classes'.

With up to 160,000 pupils, who get their A-Level results today, expected to fail to win a university place, Mr Clegg suggested that the vast expansion of university spaces over the last 20 years may not have been a good thing. The number of students attending university has gone from 15 per cent of school leavers at the start of the 1990s to 40 per cent now. At one stage, Labour's target was for 50 per cent of all 18-year-olds to attend university.

But Mr Clegg said: 'There is evidence that - contrary to expectations - increased levels of attendance at university have not translated into higher levels of social mobility. 'This is why I feel so passionately that we need to attack the educational apartheid that currently exists between vocational and academic learning.'

His comments were reminiscent of Gordon Brown's outspoken attack on Oxford University after it rejected straight-A comprehensive school pupil Laura Spence ten years ago. The then Chancellor's comments backfired when it turned out that the admissions department in question had an impeccable record of admitting talented students from underprivileged backgrounds.

Mr Clegg used a speech to the think tank Centre Forum to blame middle class dominance of the universities and 'closed professions' such as medicine, the law, politics and the media for a decline in social mobility under Labour.

But the Deputy Prime Minister did admit that he might not be where he is today without such a privileged upbringing. He said 'the evidence is absolutely overwhelming' that the circumstances of your birth determine your opportunities in life.

Mr Clegg said that good parenting is more important than poverty in determining life chances. He suggested government should look at encouraging parents to help their children with their education. 'Parents are in the frontline when it comes to creating a fairer society, in the way that they raise their children,' he said.

'According to one study, the amount of interest shown by a parent in their child's education is four times more important than socioeconomic background in explaining education outcomes at age 16.

'This is not an area where the state can simply pull a lever or two and put things right. These are also potentially perilous waters for politicians. But at the same time we must not remain silent on what is an enormously important issue. 'Parents hold the fortunes of the children they bring into this world in their hands.'

Mr Clegg is to run a Government campaign to improve social mobility to try to persuade voters that the coalition 'is about much more than cuts'. He also confirmed the appointment of former Labour Cabinet minister Alan Milburn as a 'social mobility tsar', reporting to Parliament on whether the Government is helping the less well off get on in life.

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Graduating no longer guarantees a promising career

Comment from Wales

The results are in and the clearing process is well under way. As A-level students up and down the country plan their next step into higher education, record numbers face a desperate scramble for university places. But with spiralling costs and unprecedented competition, Gareth Evans asks whether the stresses and strains are really worth it?

TODAY marks the dawn of a new era for thousands of students across Wales, but what happens next is by no means certain. Record numbers are expected to be disappointed and could need to look elsewhere. Fortunately, scoring a degree is not the only key to being successful. Music mogul Simon Cowell left school with no qualifications and Sir Richard Branson ducked out at 16 to launch a magazine. A limited education has done neither particularly badly, and starting work in your teens has never been so appealing.

University vice-chancellors are this year expecting fewer places, despite a UK Government pledge to increase numbers by 10,000.

Society is changing at an alarming pace and higher education is undoubtedly the 21st century norm. But the phenomenal rise in demand, triggered by a debated rise in standards, is in danger of bringing the system to an abrupt halt. The number of students predicted to lose out this year could be as high as 200,000 following an increase in applications of more than 11%.

Knuckling down and working hard no longer guarantees progress, as it might have done 30 years ago. The reality is that highly-motivated and qualified learners are now commonplace and still struggling to find work years after graduating.

A university degree, in all its different guises, is not as saleable as it once was – and anything less than a 2:1 is regularly frowned upon.

Those lucky enough to progress into higher education are met with a wealth of options, from the traditional to the outright bizarre. There is literally something for everyone in institutions the length and breadth of the land. Selection is crucial and the likelihood of future employment must be weighed against short-term credibility and enjoyment.

Some qualifications, so narrow and niche, confine their reader to incredibly limited opportunities. There are only so many forensic experts and sports scientists in the world and vacancies are scarce.

But university is as much about social mobility and “finding oneself” as it is classroom learning. The pressures of settling down in a new town or city cannot be underestimated as young learners evolve into young adults in a little under three years. But is a crash-course in life skills and the headache of a highly-competitive jobs market really worth the predicted £25,000 debt?

According to the results of this week’s Push Student Debt survey, UK undergraduates now owe on average £5,600 for each year of study. Fees have gone up, the cost of living has spiralled and the “bank of mum and dad” is running dry after the recession. Average debt for students at university in Wales is, at £6,411, considerably greater than anywhere else.

UK Universities Minister David Willetts provided hope this week, declaring: “Graduates on average have better employment prospects and can expect to earn at least £100,000 net of tax, more than non-graduates across their working lives.”

But, as defiant NUS Wales president Katie Dalton has warned: “The governments in Westminster and Cardiff Bay need to ensure that they are taking action to provide young people with education, employment and training opportunities and do not relegate a generation of young people to the dole queue.”

The conundrum is clear for all to see and the plethora of recent university-fuelled press coverage has thrown up few surprises.

Government plans to scrap the fixed retirement age has not helped, with new workers hindered by older staff wanting to stay in employment beyond their 65th year.

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) this year saw a 63% rise in applications from the over-25s. Chief executive Mary Curnock Cook told the Western Mail: “More young people are doing well in their studies and, faced with a difficult job market, older applicants feel that they need better qualifications.”

Thousands of school-leavers facing disappointment in this week’s clearing crisis are preparing themselves for a stressful scramble.

But studying part-time or at home is a viable option, with the Open University in Wales reporting a 45% increase in 18 to 24-year-olds choosing from its range of 600 qualifications. Traditionally the domain of the mature student, the OU is attracting a new generation of learners warned away from the bright lights of live-in university.

Last week, the principal of a Cambridge college said the academic gap between school and university was widening, partly because the attention spans of students had been shortened by “bite-sized” A-levels.

A major international study is due to be launched by England’s exams watchdog Ofqual to check whether the country’s A-levels are as testing as their global equivalents.

Just when you thought the outlook could not get any bleaker, research published this week revealed the risk of a teenager dropping out of school, training and work has risen by 40% since the start of the recession. Just over 9% of young people with Level 3 qualifications, which include A-levels, were classed as NEET – not in education, employment or training – in the second quarter of 2010, up from 6.4% in the first quarter of 2008.

But the analysis of the Labour Force Survey, conducted by the ippr think-tank and the Private Equity Foundation, revealed young people who left school with no qualifications were the most at risk of dropping out of education and work.

Lisa Harker, co-director of the ippr, said: “While it is true that those with A-levels and degrees have seen their risk of becoming NEET increase the fastest, they remain much better protected than young people who have no qualifications, and they are likely to do better when the economy recovers.”

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GA: Parents applaud Governor Sonny Perdue for his crackdown on test-cheating

Teachers and school officials at the minimum condoned it by their inaction, and may also have been actively involved

Like many parents in Atlanta, Governor Sonny Perdue has had enough. In a surprise statement today, the governor said that he’s cracking down on alleged CRCT cheating and the state Board of Education. So much so that Governor Perdue has appointed a special investigator with subpoena powers to get to the bottom of the CRCT cheating issue. "If the results warrant, they also will be forwarded to law enforcement for possible criminal investigation," the governor told the Board of Education.

He also said that it’s a sad day because the Board of Education was unable to clear up the CRCT mess on its own. "I know you share my deep disappointment with the results. To this day, we still have not gotten to the bottom of what was revealed in the 2009 CRCT results," Perdue told the board.

Once excessive erasures were discovered, the individual school systems were allowed the opportunity to look into the issues. According to Governor Perdue, the individual investigations were “woefully inadequate, both in scope and depth.” The head of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement reported major problems with the investigations, stating that the staff at six of the schools targeted with cheating problems wouldn’t cooperate with the investigation.

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, Atlanta schools spokesman Keith Bromery said, "APS welcomes the Governor’s call for a special investigator to look into this matter, and the district will fully cooperate with all aspects of that investigation."

What? Why are the school systems so ready to “cooperate fully” when they did not do so in the first place? If they had, Governor Perdue would never had to launch a separate investigation. Jeers to you, school officials. And cheers to you, Governor Sonny Perdue. Parents in Atlanta applaud your efforts to stand up to the systems that refuse to get to the bottom of the on-going matter.

Cheating should not be tolerated on any level at any time, but especially as it relates to our children and the annual Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. It seems that cheating issues have been reported the last few years, and it’s time for it to stop. Good for you, Sonny Perdue. You have the support of parents.

The same can’t be said of Atlanta Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall. Although she has accepted full responsibility for the cheating scandal and calls it “a painful chapter in our history,” her actions don’t reflect her words. It may be a little too late for Beverly Hall to save face with parents and school administrators. Is it time for Hall to step down and bring in a fresh new face to move forward in a new direction? This parent certainly thinks so.

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18 August, 2010

Promiscuous sex not good for student grades

There is good news for parents who worry that their teenagers’ sex lives are affecting their school performance: A provocative study has found that teens in committed relationships do no better or worse in school than those who do not have sex.

The same is not true for teens who hook up. Researchers found that those who have casual flings get lower grades and have more school-related problems compared with those who abstain.

The findings, presented yesterday at a meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, challenge to some extent assumptions that sexually active teens tend to do less well in school.

It is not so much whether a teen has sex that determines academic success, the researchers say, but the type of sexual relationship he or she is engaged in. Teens in serious relationships may find social and emotional support in their sex partners, reducing their anxiety and stress levels in life and in school.

“This should give some comfort to parents who may be concerned that their teenage son or daughter is dating,’’ said sociologist Peggy Giordano of Bowling Green State University, who had no role in the research. Teen sex is “not going to derail their educational trajectories,’’ she said.

Last year, nearly half of high school students reported having had sexual intercourse, and 14 percent have had four or more partners, according to a federal survey released this summer.

For the study, sociologist Bill McCarthy of the University of California, Davis, and University of Minnesota sociologist Eric Grodsky analyzed surveys and transcripts from the largest national follow-up study of teens that began during the 1994-95 academic year. The researchers said not much has changed in the past decade in terms of attitudes toward teen sex.

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Back to School? Bring Your Own Toilet Paper

Big bureaucracy to support. Kids and parents come second to clerks and "administrators"

When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school's must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs.

"The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor," Emily's mother, Kristin Cooper, said of the list, which also included perennials like glue sticks, scissors and crayons. Schools across the country are beginning the new school year with shrinking budgets and outsize demands for basic supplies. And while many parents are wincing at picking up the bill, retailers are rushing to cash in by expanding the back-to-school category like never before.

Now some back-to-school aisles are almost becoming janitorial-supply destinations as multipacks of paper towels, cleaning spray and hand sanitizer are crammed alongside pens, notepads and backpacks...

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University crackdown on British High School exam resits

What a mess British university entrance is!

Leading universities are introducing rules to regulate A-level resits as record numbers of teenagers rejected from degree courses prepare to take exams again. Many institutions are imposing “bans” on resits for some courses or demanding that students who take tests a second time score higher marks.

Just days before the publication of A-level results, Cambridge said new grades obtained after re-taking an entire year would only be considered in “compelling mitigating circumstances”. Oxford said students had to make a “very compelling case” to explain why they failed to perform to the required standard first time.

Others including Birmingham, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Surrey and University College London said students may need to achieve better grades than the standard entry level in some subjects when exams are taken a second time.

A spokesman for Leeds said: “In some cases we look for better grades from those students who are taking re-sits to reflect the fact that these students are usually taking only one or two exams, compared with their peers who are sitting three or four full A-levels at once.”

The disclosure comes amid a rise in the number of people expected to re-sit their A-levels this year after missing out on preferred university places.

Yesterday, the Council for Independent Education, which represents many colleges specialising in A-level resit courses, said the number of website enquiries were up by two-thirds compared with last year.

More students are expected to miss out on their preferred university place after applications soared by 12 per cent as more teenagers push for higher education in the recession. An extra 68,000 students are competing for places, figures show, with demand swelled by some 57,000 people reapplying after failing to win university places last year.

It is believed between 30 and 50 per cent of pupils re-take some papers. But as competition for degree places grow, some universities are now devising policies to regulate re-takes.

Birmingham said that – for most subjects – it was happy to make offers to candidates re-sitting A-levels but they “may occasionally be one grade higher” than the standard offer. Some subjects including law, dentistry and medicine would not consider candidates taking resits, the university said.

Sheffield said full A-level resits were not accepted in medicine degrees, while UCL insisted that students taking law or medicine needed to “achieve the grade requirements in one sitting”.

Edinburgh said resits for medicine and veterinary medicine were only considered in special circumstances and in other subjects offers will be “above the minimum stated entry requirements.”

Reading said it accepted resits but would “prefer students to have taken exams together, to demonstrate their ability to cope with a reasonable workload in one go”.

Schools warned universities against imposing new rules on resits. Geoff Lucas, secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents top independent schools, said: “In the past, this practice was quite sporadic but this evidence suggests it is becoming more systematic. "If universities are going to set new requirements there should be a lead time of at least the two year duration of an A level course."

James Wardrobe, from the Council for Independent Further Education, said: “The advice that I would strongly give to any student thinking of re-taking A-levels is that they ring up specific admissions departments and ask what their policy is on re-takes.”

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17 August, 2010

Arne Duncan Gets a Failing Grade This Time

One of the few bright spots in the Obama Administration has been its efforts regarding public education, an arena in which the federal government has become far too invasive. Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, have taken on ever so slightly some of the education bureaucracy – a startling development, considering that the education unions threw $50 million or more at Obama’s campaign and those of other Democrats. Obama had made some statements about challenging the educational establishment in The Audacity of Hope, but somehow it seemed like empty campaign rhetoric. So amidst this glint of optimism, it was profoundly disappointing to hear that Duncan laid a giant egg in his recent statements about the length of the school year.

At first glance, Duncan’s comments to the National Press Club were appealing. The Secretary spoke candidly about how the country has to get serious about education. He joked about kids going to school 13 months a year, but also thoughtfully observed that we must introduce significant reforms into a public education system that, after all, originated over a century ago when America had an agrarian economy. He said “In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and 11-12 months of the year.” Continuing this theme, he added “This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that, but you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, and robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, and ESL classes.” He also pointed that, where students attend school for 25-30 days more than we do, the countries are beating us. Considering the source, this tough talk was unexpected.

Then reality set in, and it should be obvious that there are two very compelling reasons that this proposal is so far off base. Yes, there are other countries whose children attend school for longer periods, and this needs to be considered as part of our educational reforms. We must also keep in mind that curriculums are more complicated today. The most sophisticated math taught in the high schools of forty years ago is now taught in 7th or 8th grade, and this increased complexity is reflected in the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry.

Mr. Duncan’s proposal does not confront the crux of the problem with today’s system. For many generations, Americans were taught in this “agrarian economy” system and actually received an education. They could read, write, add, and subtract. They read classic literature, could speak a foreign language, and knew history, especially American history. The students graduating today can do almost none of this, and adding 25-30 days to the school calendar will not change that fact.

Last year, a friend of mine told me about one of his new employees, a recent graduate of a major university. He was appalled by how poorly the young man wrote a simple business letter. A year later, my friend still reviews all of his outgoing correspondence. This may seem like one person in a large society, but that would not be the case. This corroborates the observations of almost everyone in my generation, who are horrified by the inability of so many young Americans to write and communicate -- not to mention their near non-existent knowledge of history or geography.

Contrast this with a recent viewing of a video of the Rat Pack. In 1966, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. performed for a charity event in St. Louis. Near the end of the show, Sammy pleads “Can we just do this song?” Immediately – and obviously unrehearsed – Frank and Dino jump in from different sides of the stage, turn to Davis, and say “It’s ‘May we?’ Sammy, ‘May we?’” These two palookas, neither of whom completed a full year of high school, knew proper English 45 years ago. Today, many high school graduates can barely form a sentence, let alone know whether it is proper English.

It isn’t for lack of resources. We have been pouring billions into the school system with very disappointing results, and we are repeatedly being misled as to how much money is spent. Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute analyzed the expenditures of school districts across the country and found they routinely omitted health and pension costs for teachers, capital budgets for the schools, and a myriad of other necessary expenditures. In fact, the real costs per pupil are 50% to 150% higher than the average cost claimed by the districts. For example, the stated per-pupil cost for L. A. Unified is $10,053 when it is really $25,208. In Beverly Hills, they say that they spend $11,205 per student, but actually pay out $20,751.

More money and more time will not cure the problem that has been created by a system not aimed to serve the customer – the child and the parents of the child. Until Mr. Duncan reforms the system to serve the need of the customers – not those of the employees or bureaucrats – he could have the kids sleeping at the school and their education will not improve.

The other flaw with Mr. Duncan’s suggestion is that it smells of the nanny state. Let’s have the kids at school 12 hours a day, 12 months a year, under the supervision of government/union employees – so they can be further indoctrinated by the state and barely see their parents. The parents can watch them in plays and wrestling matches, but will only see them at home in their beds. Why don’t we dispense with parents and just have breeders, and then have the state care for the children?

In the past, Mr. Duncan has seemed like someone willing to confront the true problems of our school systems – systems that have been administered by Democrats for over fifty years in every major metropolitan area, and consistently run into the ground with the help of their union buddies. Until he assaults the real villains in this debacle, he should not start romanticizing about a utopian future where the state controls our children from nursery school.

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Who'd be an 18-year-old today? My generation's lies have wrecked their dreams

Comment on the low educational standards and credentialism in Britain today

What happens when a regime decides to brainwash a population, making them believe the most pernicious lies? With luck, the people eventually rebel and scream 'No!' - but not before much misery has been endured.

Let's not delude ourselves that lies are only told in totalitarian states. We're telling them right now to the very people who are this country's future: our young adults. When will they rise up and shout defiance - rejecting all the lies they have been told by successive governments?

I'd like to think it might happen sooner rather than later. That is, if today's 18-year-olds are not beaten down by gloom over the bad hand they've been dealt. They've been told for years that they must go to university - so there they are, competing desperately for fewer places than ever on the basis of A-level grades which have been systematically inflated.

As the Mail reported yesterday, that means thousands of those who receive three A grades - supposedly the highest level of achievement - must hope to sneak into what Tory minister David Willetts euphemistically calls 'less competitive' institutions.

Those who do secure a precious place then face crippling student debt. To cap it all, there's an uncertain job market for graduates - as well as for everyone else.

Never mind the longer-term worries about getting together the money to buy a house and save enough to start a family, or even - heaven forbid - build up a nest egg for their retirement.

All this lies in wait for our school leavers, while the world bombards them with demanding junk culture and plenty of worries, but little guidance or inspiration. Worst of all, no one teaches them how to cope with the real world.

Who would be an 18-year-old in 2010? My generation was so much luckier. On my bookshelf is a paperback of the selected poems of the Russian activist Yevgeny Yevtushenko, with the year I bought it written inside - 1969.

As a mini- skirted student, I approvingly ticked the famous poem Lies, which begins: 'Telling lies to the young is wrong.' Today I find myself rather embarrassed by that knowing tick because I knew so little - I was a complacent part of that very generation which has let this one down so badly. 'We never had it so good - but we have handed on so much that is bad to young people who deserve better.

When I first read Yevtushenko's poem, nobody had ever lied to me. My small, girls' grammar school gave me a challenging, academic education. As a student at University College London, I benefited from one- on- one tutorials, a generous local authority grant and an almost cast-iron guarantee of work.

Oh, but we found much to complain about. From the exam system, to the Vietnam war, to the capitalism on which the very prosperity of the West was founded - it was all up for noisy protest. We chanted 'We shall fight and we shall win' about a war on the other side of the world, in which no British soldiers were getting killed - as they are today.

No wonder young people today sometimes look at all the ' summer of love' posturing and think: 'How ridiculous.' Really, they ought to be angry - because that posturing has an ongoing effect on their lives.

I've often looked back with nostalgia at all that was good in the values of my generation - an idealism that sincerely wanted to make the world a better place. But Yevtushenko writes 'Forgive no error you recognise/ it will repeat itself, increase' - which is why I am not going to make excuses for what we got so wrong, the way our ideals folded in on themselves to create downright lies about what was possible.

Yes, there is a world recession, but that cannot explain away the mess these young people have inherited. How can it be separated from changes that have happened in the past 30 years - since we privileged baby-boomers took control?

One problem is those laissez-faire attitudes to education which have their roots in the radicalism of the Sixties, and go on betraying today's hopeful young. Another is the liberal-left mentality which refused to teach spelling, grammar or mathematics in case it created inequalities.

This was finally given the ultimate badge of respectability by Tony Blair when he declared ten years ago, with colossal vanity, that 50 per cent of young people should go into higher education.

Imagine if he had decreed that half of young people should excel (to competitive level) at a sport of their choice - and to do so, they would receive the intensive training to 'follow their dream' (as the absurd modern phrase puts it).

The reality of varying levels of natural ability would have quickly scotched that nonsense . Instead, the one- size-fits-all mantra did great harm to young people who should be celebrated for richly varied talents and skills, which need to be harnessed in different ways.

Everybody across the political spectrum told the young to aim high, aim for a degree - even if that meant creating ludicrous 'qualifications' which couldn't possibly lead to paid employment. With this went a criminal neglect of those most in need of attention - the working-class child who needs to be stretched.

Who was 'assisted' by the gradual erosion of standards? A teaching profession (I'm sorry to say) grown too attached to child-centred shibboleths and not enough to the red pen of constructive criticism. Who was served by grade inflation?

Head teachers, infected by the 'target' mentality of New Labour, whose empire-building vanity was fed by 20 hapless pupils going off to study Mickey Mouse courses - rather than one lad finding a rare apprenticeship in an honourable trade.

Universities expanded without resources, which meant they needed to sting far more foreign students for fees, and the numbers game meant that the recent generations of students lacked real attention from their tutors. When my own son dropped out, nobody noticed. My daughter (doing an English degree at Warwick) had far less teaching than I had.

We have sold out the young by telling them that aiming high is the same thing as becoming a student. Wouldn't it be better to encourage many of these desperate A-level students to learn a skill - or enter a job through the menial back door? Plenty of high-fliers began by making the tea.

Why does everything from carpentry to nursing now require high- flown paper qualifications? The Cathedral at Chartres was build by people with no City & Guilds or B.Techs - or lengthy architecture degrees, either. Florence Nightingale did not think she had to have a degree in nursing to save lives.

Missing out on university is only a real loss if you have an absolute passion for an academic subject worthy of study. This is the truth which young people should grasp - and celebrate.

Let them rebel against the one-size-fits-all pressure and think outside that particular box. Let them realise that none of this is their fault. Let them be valued as individuals, not numbers.

As for we who are older - it's time we agreed with Yevtushenko that instead of offering our children the lie of impossible dreams, we should be honest and 'Say obstacles exist they must encounter/Sorrow happens, hardship happens'. And if we don't? Then (in the poet's words) 'our pupils will not forgive in us what we forgave.'

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Australia: Difficult school gets a capable principal for once -- so the bureaucrats fire her

They should have stood up for her but were too gutless

SUSPENSIONS have almost tripled and truancy has doubled at Coober Pedy Area School since the ousting of principal Sue Burtenshaw. Figures obtained by The Advertiser, have shown an alarming decline in student attendance, with almost half the school's 230 pupils not attending on a regular basis.

In 2009, 31 students were suspended under Ms Burtenshaw, who was removed from her role this year following complaints over her tough stance on students and treatment of parents. But under the leadership of interim principals this year, behaviour has "swung out of control" with 86 students suspended and three excluded while only half-way into the school year.

Figures show that in May and June, student absences ranged between 86 to 124 students a day, compared to 36 to 66 students at the same time last year under Ms Burtenshaw.

Coober Pedy Area School assistant principal Kym Taylor has chosen to speak out on the issue, saying the school is in a "state of chaos" following the departure of Ms Burtenshaw, who joined the school in 2008 after the school had employed seven principals in nine years. "The school is in a state of chaos with kids not coming to school, children not staying in class and running in and out of classrooms, and swearing at teachers," Ms Taylor said.

"What we are doing is creating a generation of children at risk here. "We had policies in place, but because the policies were implemented by Sue and some people didn't like (them), there is now nothing in place."

After a six-month investigation into alleged misconduct, Education Department chief executive Chris Robinson announced last month that it was in "the best interests of the students, staff, community and Ms Burtenshaw that a new principal be appointed to Coober Pedy Area School".

But Opposition education spokesman David Pisoni said he found it "extraordinary" that a principal who was able to improve attendance, reduce suspensions and improve NAPLAN results was removed from the school in the "interest of the students".

Education Minister Jay Weatherill said: "We now have a principal appointed for the rest of 2010 and are working to ensure there is a permanent principal appointed as soon as possible to start next year."

Ms Burtenshaw has appealed the decision.

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16 August, 2010

MA: Surge in charter school requests

Law relaxed expansion limit

The state this year has seen a surge in applications for new charter schools, most targeted for the neediest urban districts, following the passage of legislation last winter that loosened longstanding limitations on their expansion.

By the Aug. 2 deadline, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had received 42 applications, the most in more than a decade, and three times as many as last year, when it received 14.

Twenty of the schools are targeted for Boston and eight for Springfield, both cities where low-income families have long clamored for better educational options.

Proponents of charter schools laud them for their freedom to deviate from union and district requirements and embrace innovative teaching.

“We challenged the charter school community to help us meet the needs of students stuck in the achievement gap, and they have responded with a record level of interest,’’ Governor Deval Patrick said in a prepared statement. “I look forward to working with the best charter operators and the best in-district innovators to raise the level of performance of all our kids.’’

Opponents of charter schools, which include many school districts, say they worry that an increasing number of such schools will drain vital dollars away from traditional public schools and create a divided system in which select students attend charter schools and students with special needs fill the traditional schools.

“If this is not done carefully, it will have a very negative impact on the state,’’ said Ed Doherty, assistant president of the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts. “We worry that we’re creating a system for the haves and have-nots. . . . The other [concern] is they basically drain money from traditional public schools.’’

Students who leave a public school district to attend a charter school — an independent public school that operates free of district oversight — take with them a slice of state aid that would have gone to the local district. This can amount to as much as $15,000 per student.

This academic year, there will be 63 charter schools in the state, or about 3.5 percent of the 1,831 public schools in Massachusetts.

Patrick and state lawmakers pushed through legislation earlier this year that doubled the number of charter school seats in districts with low MCAS scores as part of an effort to compete for $4.3 billion in federal dollars made available by President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which has sought to prod states to overhaul their public schools.

The spike in proposals represents the highest number of applications the state has received since 1997, when it lifted the cap that districts could spend on charter schools to 9 percent of their budgets. The law passed in January allows underperforming districts to increase their spending on charter schools to 12 percent of their budgets this academic year and then by 1 percent each year, until 2016, when they would reach the limit of 18 percent.Continued...

Some supporters of charter schools argue that the Patrick administration hasn’t moved quickly enough to boost the number of these institutions, noting that about 26,000 children are now on waiting lists, as many as are enrolled in such schools. They add that the state has only approved the opening of six charter schools in the past four years.

“How could this be a success for this governor?’’ said Rick Gorka, a spokesman for Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles D. Baker. “We want to see a charter school process devoid of politics, and we want to see access increase to address the increasing demand.’’

Patrick once resisted lifting a cap on charter schools but last year submitted legislation calling for their expansion and aggressively lobbied for its passage.

Jonathan Palumbo, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Education, said the administration has proved its commitment to increasing charter schools with the new legislation and noted that the paucity of new schools reflects how most districts, especially those in big cities, had already reached their budget limits.

“Schools couldn’t open there because there was no room to do so,’’ he said. “We proposed lifting the cap to meet the growing demand. . . . It’s worth noting that the previous administrations all tried unsuccessfully to raise the charter school cap, while we were able to double it in the districts where student need is greatest.’’

He added: “We don’t want to open schools for the sake of opening schools; we want to see high-quality schools opened.’’

The applications the state received this month are the start of a six-month process. Over the next month, school officials will vet the proposals and winnow the number of applicants. Those with the most appealing plans will be invited to make more lengthy proposals.

State education officials will review the final applications, seek public comment, and award new charters in February. Last year, the state reduced its 14 proposals for charter schools to seven. Only one was approved.

The directors of charter schools said they hope the odds will improve this year. Rebecca Cass, executive director of Excel Academy Charter School in East Boston, which opened in 2003 and now has 210 junior high school students, has sought to build four new charter schools, one in Chelsea and three in Boston. “We hope the new law allows us to meet the demand,’’ she said.

Alan Safran, executive director of the MATCH school, which runs a high school in Kenmore Square and a middle school in Jamaica Plain, has proposed a new school in Boston for 700 nonnative English-speaking students. “We see ourselves as working with the Boston public schools, not against them,’’ he said. “This should be a cooperative effort. We want to learn from their work, and we want them to learn from our work.’’

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Cheat Sheet on Academia

Currently, the FBI director is scratching his head trying to figure out how many agents cheated on their agency exams. All of us might ponder where this drive to take what was once deemed an unacceptable shortcut comes from.

“Eighty percent of high school students admit to cheating,” Caroline Crocker of the American Institute for Technology and Science Education said at a Capitol Hill press conference on July 28, 2010. Another study found that “70 percent of students at Duke cheated,” Dr. Crocker said at the news briefing, which was sponsored by the Traditional Values Coalition.

A cell biologist by training, Dr. Crocker has seen this deterioration in standards up close and personal at universities she has been affiliated with. “I found that cheating by pre-med students was being winked at at George Mason University [GMU] and Creighton and now I see it when I tutor,” she said.

Nor is the practice confined to one side of the podium in lecture halls. “I’ve seen medical slides in medical school that come from Wikipedia,” she averred.

She personally will not stand for it, a policy that has cost her professionally. A student she caught cheating at GMU accused her of teaching creationism. Although Dr. Crocker can produce students to rebut the claim, guess who got asked to leave GMU’s Fairfax, Virginia campus. For posing “questions about evolution” at George Mason, she was “banned from lecturing.”

“She has two letters from the provost complimenting her for the high student ratings she received before the Darwin lecture,” we noted in 2007.” She has a few letters and e-mails from students who heard the lecture on Darwin and attested to her fairness in presenting the often-times contentious material.”

“They switched my 3-year contract to a one-year contract,” she stated in her recent appearance in the Capitol. When she took legal action, the school hired away the law firm that her attorney worked for.

Dr. Crocker is the author of Free To Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters. Full disclosure: I wrote a jacket blurb for the book.

We first covered Dr. Crocker’s travails three years ago. “Want tenure?” I wrote. “Learn to love Charles Darwin.”

“Want to keep your tenure? Work his name into your license plates. Want to keep your job? Never, never cast aspersions upon academia’s favorite butterfly expert.”

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Get the government out of British University education

I'm beginning to wonder whether any government programme or regulation actually helps the deserving groups that it is advertised as helping. Too often, I think, they help rather well-paid administrators, anti- poverty lobbyists, special interest groups and the friends of politicians.

Take higher education. It is heavily subsidised by taxpayers because it is supposed to help the whole country. But does it? By far the greatest beneficiaries are students themselves. The association of university heads has calculated that, over a lifetime, graduates earn £160,000 more than non-graduates. But graduates leave university with an average debt of just £23,000. That's a pretty spectacular return on investment.

Gordon Brown used to spend much of his available spleen, which was considerable, on chiding the universities for taking too many students from well-off families, and too many with a public school education. Try as he might, with all kinds of financial bullying and incentives, he just couldn't make it any different. So it's a double imbalance; not only do we subsidise universities that raise the incomes of their graduates well beyond the benefit to anyone else, but those students also come from better off backgrounds too. The young person who leaves school to become a bricklayer in Bootle pays higher taxes to send Old Etonians to Oxford to become Prime Minister.

If the universities were privatised, this would change in short order. For a start they would probably introduce, like the private University of Buckingham, snappy two-year degrees that kept down the cost and made student loans less daunting. If they charged those who could afford it realistic fees, and used the money for bursaries to gifted but poorer students, it would do more to open up opportunity, increase access, and spread benefit through the whole country than what we do today.

And what is true of universities is probably true of other government programmes. If you really want to help the people you say you want to help, rather than well-off people and public-sector administrators, the market can probably help you do it far more effectively than some public sector programme.

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15 August, 2010

“No Christianity Please, We’re Academics”

That’s the title of an essay Wheaton College Professor Timothy Larsen published recently on Insider Higher Ed. In the essay, Professor Larsen recounts the story of a public university student who repeatedly encountered professors hostile to Christianity. For example, an English professor reduced the student’s grade because he quoted C.S. Lewis, reasoning that it was inappropriate to quote “a pastor.” (Of course, Lewis was not a pastor but was a professor – of English — at Cambridge.)

Larsen also recounted one of his own experiences. Yale University Press publishes a series called “Rethinking the Western Tradition” that reprints influential texts along with original essays. Larsen proposed a volume on T.S. Elliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society. The editorial committee rejected his proposal, despite acknowledging that the proposal was well-crafted and had identified excellent scholars (including an outspoken atheist) to write the essays. That they rejected the proposal is not the point; instead, the comments members of the editorial committee made to justify their rejection of the proposal illustrated their irrational antipathy towards all things Christian.

Larsen (correctly) observed that the hostility he and his student experienced appears to be widespread. Those of us at ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom — and our clients — can certainly concur. At the conclusion of his essay, Larsen asserted that “scholars ought to be concerned that Christians often report that the academy is a hostile environment.” He called for an effort to systematically examine this apparent problem and propose appropriate remedies. However, he conceded his pessimism about “the academy being willing even to investigate the possibility of discrimination against Christians, let alone attempt to eradicate it.”

A principal purpose of ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom is change the academic culture by confronting the sort of anti-Christian animus Professor Larsen describes in his essay. Such hostility is always wrong, and frequently illegal. We share Larsen’s pessimism that the academy will eradicate the problem on its own. If you experience such animus, let us know. We stand ready to help protect academic freedom and restore the civility and respect that is all too often missing from the academic environment.

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Un American American History Courses

Arizona's new law that requires the police to ask people to show ID, which was just knocked out by a supremacist judge, may not be the most controversial Arizona law about illegal aliens. Gov. Jan Brewer signed another law this year that bans schools from teaching classes designed to promote solidarity among students of a particular ethnic group.

This law bans classes that "promote the overthrow of the United States government" or "promote resentment toward a race or class of people" because schools should treat all pupils as individual Americans. The issue arose because the Tucson School District offers courses in Mexican-American studies (known locally as Raza Studies) that focus on that particular group and its influence.

The law doesn't prohibit these classes so long as they are open to all students and don't promote ethnic resentment or solidarity. However, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, says the basic theme of the Mexican-American studies program is that Latino students "were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle- and upper-class whites."

Among the goals listed for the Mexican-American Studies are "social justice" and "Latino Critical Race Pedagogy." Pictures of the classroom showed the walls decorated with "heroes," such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Tucson also offers courses especially for African-American and Native-American students. These classes obviously divide the student population by race, a practice we thought was not supposed to be tolerated anymore.

Greta Van Susteren interviewed former Tucson high school teacher, John A. Ward, who was removed from teaching the class for Mexican Americans and reassigned because he questioned the curriculum. For raising concerns, Ward was called a racist. And since he is of Mexican heritage, Ward was also called a vendido (Spanish for sellout).

The state of Arizona requires students to take a course in American history in order to graduate, but Ward said the course was actually not about American history at all. He said it focused solely on the history of the Aztec people, which is the group to which Mexican-American activists ascribe their lineage.

Others who have looked at the books used in these courses say they refer to Americans as "Anglos" or "Euroamericans" rather than as "Americans." The books do not recognize the United States as a country, but claim Arizona is part of "Aztlan, Mexico" (even though the Aztecs never lived in what is now the United States).

The Mexican version of history is not the only foreign propaganda masquerading as American history in public school courses and textbooks.
Five chapters promoting Islam were inserted in a world history textbook that is authorized and recommended for seventh-grade students by the state of California.

This world history textbook, called "History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond," gives the history and beliefs of Islam lengthy and favorable treatment far above and beyond what is given to every other religion, according to Stephen Schwartz in The Weekly Standard (Aug. 9, 2010).

The textbook uses what he calls a "sanitized vocabulary" to conceal Muslim practices that are criminal in the United States. These include forced marriage, forced divorce, marriage to children, polygamy and punishments imposed by Sharia law, such as public beheadings, amputations, cruel floggings and stonings.

Muhammad is the only person in this world history textbook who rates an entire chapter. Jesus gets only one sentence, and the contrast between the treatment of Islam and Christianity is shocking.

The book gives an entirely positive account of Muhammad's teachings, saying, for example, "He preached tolerance for Christians and Jews as fellow worshipers of the one true God." It says nothing about Jesus' teachings, but it does describe examples of Christian persecution of non-Christians.

This textbook tells students that the first year in the Muslim calendar is "the year of Muhammad's hijrah" (his escape from Mecca to Medina in the year 622). The book doesn't say from what event our Christian calendar dates, instead replacing A.D. with the trendy term "C.E." (Common Era).

William J. Bennetta, editor of The Textbook Letter, published a detailed analysis of this book's distortions, which he calls "pseudohistory." Bennetta documents how it was influenced by a Muslim pressure group, the Council on Islamic Education (CIE), which boasts of successfully "collaborating" with "K-12 publishers" to present a benign view of Islam to impressionable American schoolchildren.

Parents should check out how American history is taught, and NOT taught, in their children's schools. Is Islamic or Mexican propaganda masquerading as "American history"?

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Red tape on British school expulsions 'to be axed'

Rules forcing schools to share badly behaved pupils could be scrapped, it emerged today. The Coalition said the requirement for schools to admit an unruly pupil for every one expelled would be reviewed amid fears it eroded head teachers’ powers to maintain discipline.

Other rules forcing schools to record all “significant incidents” in which teachers use force to restrain violent children could also be axed. The move forms part of Government plans to cut red tape and give heads more control over their own schools.

It comes just weeks after the Coalition announced a raft of new powers to crackdown on bad behaviour, including scrapping the required 24 hours notice on detentions and allowing teachers to search pupils for any banned item.

But the move has been criticised by one teaching union which said it could lead to an escalation of classroom disruption, bullying, gang-related violence and truancy.

Under rules due to be introduced next month, all schools are supposed to join “behaviour partnerships” – groups of local state secondaries that share resources to combat indiscipline.

The move – enshrined in an education Bill passed by Labour – requires schools to operate “one out-one in” expulsion policies. It was designed to ensure that all schools shared the worst-behaved pupils and unruly children were not concentrated in one place.

The legislation also forced schools to meet new truancy targets and record all incidents in which teachers physically restrain pupils. The measures have now been frozen subject to a review by the Coalition. They could be scrapped altogether.

A Department for Education spokeswoman said: “Most schools already record incidences of use of force without these regulations and all schools are working to improve behaviour and attendance. “We are looking at whether imposing a legal requirement to do this would be an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. “This is about putting our trust back in front line professionals. We have already committed to strengthening the guidance and if necessary legislation around the use of force to give teachers the confidence to use these powers.”

But the NASUWT union said the move would undermine standards of behaviour as schools refuse to cooperate on discipline issues.

Chris Keates, general secretary, said: “The Coalition Government’s decision to roll back on changes designed to tackle poor pupil behaviour and truancy could prevent many schools from developing effective and sustainable solutions to these problems.

“Pupil behaviour problems often require schools to work together with the police and with other agencies to develop preventative and remedial strategies. “There is a real danger that revoking the requirement for behaviour partnerships risks increased classroom disruption, bullying, gang-related violence and truancy. This will cost the taxpayer more in dealing with increased antisocial behaviour.”

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14 August, 2010

Equipping Children With Spiritual and Political Armor

As my friends' kids leave the nest for their first year away at college, I think of the monolithic ideas with which they will surely be bombarded in an environment that is supposed to expose them to a variety of ideas. Are they prepared to resist the seductive but destructive message?

Liberal elites have dominated most university faculties for years, but it seems they've become bolder, more radical and more militant. It is not their ideas I fear, because Christianity and conservatism stand up to truth challenges. It is the moral preening, the politicization of academics, the peer pressure, the revisionist distortions and the potential discrimination against dissenters.

You know the drill. The professorate will aggressively beat into your children's heads that America is not the greatest nation in history, but largely responsible, through action or inaction, for much of the suffering in the world and that it is imperialistic, exploitive and selfish. They'll say that Christianity is narrow, intolerant, anti-intellectual, anti-science, homophobic, hateful and judgmental and that capitalism is corrupt and skewed toward the "rich" and big corporations. They'll say or imply that political conservatism is inherently racist, homophobic, sexist, militaristic, unenlightened, close-minded, mean-spirited and uncompassionate.

As parents, are you aware that the above scenario is likely to play out to some extent at most universities? Do you disagree or think it's not a big deal? Do you believe your kids are immune from this inevitable onslaught? Are you confident that even if they are exposed to such slander, they will reject it as inconsistent with their own personal experiences?

Are you sure, for example, that your kids have the discernment to recognize the disinformation that Christianity and conservatism are hardhearted, selfish, hateful, bigoted and intellectually backward and the strength to oppose it? Apart from your kids' presumed respect for you, do they have the intellectual ammunition and the spiritual armor to resist the pressure to conform?

Parents who find themselves in this position must not be complacent, assuming naively that they've done all they can do and that their kids have picked up, by osmosis or example, a proper and sustaining worldview orientation. Though they have been exposed to a culture war since they first started watching TV and going to movies, they are about to enter a new, intensified phase of it.

Christian parents should not assume their kids are equipped to filter out the false claims they will likely encounter. Christianity is the opposite of how it is often portrayed in our culture and is none of those negative things indicated above. You owe it to yourselves and your kids to anticipate the attacks and think through how they can be countered. Don't assume your excellent child rearing will be enough. We must stand up to the challenge and test our own faith, if necessary, reviewing what and why we believe. If we can't explain it, should we expect our kids to understand it?

Please don't dismiss these warnings as my opportunistic construction of a straw man. As my friend Frank Turek warns, "Christian young people are leaving the church at an alarming rate, mainly because they are not equipped to examine the skepticism and atheism they encounter, often coming from their college professors, after leaving home." So do your homework and help arm your kids. Or consult other sources for help, such as Frank's website, CrossExamined.org, which has information on how you can help teach or reinforce in your kids why Christianity is true and reasonable -- and loving.

Likewise, as politically conservative parents, you should help insulate your kids from the propaganda coming their way. You might want to first remind them that a strong majority of Americans are center-right and reject most of the ideas being forced on us by the vocal, strident and extreme leftist minority in this country. Next, of course, you need to address the specific libels hurled at conservatives and substantively respond to and refute the claims that they are bigoted, selfish and unreasonable.

If you have time to address little else, at least strive to explain to your kids in a thoughtful way why conservatism is not only not uncompassionate but also more compassionate, open-minded, tolerant, science-compatible and consistent with our human experiences than liberalism. You must do what you can to help prevent your kids from being shamed into liberalism through its false claim of having a monopoly on compassion.

Parents, are you prepared? Are your kids? Can we agree we have some work to do?

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American teachers should revolt

A little over a year ago, I wrote a column suggesting that due to the blatant hostility the National Education Association was expressing towards Christians, it was time for Christian teachers to withdraw their membership from the NEA. As it turns out, the focus of my call to abandon this radically left lobby group was a bit too narrow. As evidenced by its own website, the NEA is not merely anti-Christian, they are anti-American as well.

How else can you explain the plan that appeared on the NEA's "Diversity Calendar" instructing teachers to make October 1st a special recognition of the Communist revolution in China? The NEA recommended teachers celebrate how the world's most notorious butcher, Chairman Mao Zedong, proclaimed the "Chinese people have stood up," as he established the regime that would slaughter more innocent human beings than any other in world history. [Editor's note: The NEA has since removed the October 1 event from their website, following a rapid spread of the news about it.]

As incredible as it may seem, such a proposal is completely consistent with other actions of the NEA. On their page highlighting recommended reading for teachers, the group touts the work of self-proclaimed Satanist (and Obama motivator) Saul Alinsky. In calling Alinsky, "an inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community," the NEA encourages those charged with educating our children to immerse themselves in the tactics of progressive community organizing. They heartily endorse Alinsky's 1971 book, Rules for Radicals – a socialist how-to guide for gaining power and redistributing wealth.

As commentator Brannon Howse explains, "The NEA is a group of radicals who are opposed to parental authority, opposed to accountability, and they're not for traditional education....They are for a progressive, liberal, anti-American worldview." It's why the NEA applauds the work of communists like John Dewey and domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, all the while publishing guides on how to defeat the "religious right."

Why conscientious, patriotic teachers continue sending their money to these Marxists is beyond comprehension. As I wrote last year:

"Sure, there are excuses we can use to justify our capitulation and spineless allegiance to causes we know to be wrong. We can accept the fear-mongering about how we'll all lose our jobs without the NEA. We can delude ourselves into believing that when we check the box stating our dues can't be used for political purposes that we aren't still contributing to the very executive councils, legal offices, and management that is publicly acknowledging their hatred towards everything we stand for. We can rationalize that it's impossible anymore to keep from spending our money on things we don't really support. But we shouldn't do it any longer. Our consciences shouldn't allow it." (Read the entire column from July 20, 2009)

Here's the truth: no teacher has to affiliate themselves with the NEA. There are two excellent alternative organizations – the Christian Educators Association International and the Association of American Educators – that provide sometimes double the amount of liability coverage to teachers for a fraction of the NEA's price for membership. They can do this because they, unlike the NEA, aren't using the dues of teachers to lobby for left-wing social and political causes.

And even in those states where the law requires membership, there are legal alternatives for opting out. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation offers assistance to any such teacher.

Moreover, besides just individuals, there is no reason that local associations should continue affiliating themselves under the leadership of such a backwards organization. A local association can willfully choose (in most states) to operate independently of the NEA's belligerently left-wing leadership. And those that do find they operate much more effectively.

The NEA and its state affiliates have proven themselves disinterested in the business of actually improving the quality of education for students. As the NEA's own summer convention demonstrated, they are preoccupied with using dues dollars to advocate: repeal of all right-to-work laws, federal funding of sexual orientation instruction, federal funding to educate illegal aliens, universal healthcare, and (of course) killing human children in the womb.

The NEA's support of these positions is not just symbolic. According to the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the NEA is the top spender in national and state politics, spending four times more than any other donor. And – surprise, surprise – 95 percent of that money went to the Democratic Party and leftist ballot initiatives.

Simply put, there is no excuse for any American teacher (Christian or not) who believes in the values and principles of Western civilization to remain associated with the NEA. They are a culturally Marxist organization that holds a flagrant antipathy towards this country and its traditions.

Fellow teachers, let's drain them of their dues.

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Leading British universities snub top students as political pressure means top grade is ignored

It was billed as the super-grade that would help the brightest sixth-formers stand out. According to a Daily Mail survey, however, most leading universities have ignored the A*, meaning some high achievers will be left without a place on a degree course at all.

The grade, introduced by Labour, will be awarded for the first time this summer to students who score 90 per cent or more in their second-year exams. But the previous government has been accused of putting universities under 'overt pressure' to shun the A* in case it led to a surge in private-school pupils winning places.

It told universities not to use the grades for at least three years, until the accuracy of grade predictions had been tested. As a result, many, including Oxford, said they had inevitably turned away applicants expected to achieve one or more A*s.

Some experts believe the A* will actually benefit state school pupils. And independent school leaders said universities were 'spineless' for refusing to acknowledge academic prowess.

Cambridge is unique in embracing the grade this year. It believes state pupils will not lose out. Out of 3,000 offers of places it made this year, 2,800 specify that candidates must achieve A*AA when A-level results are published on Thursday. Another 80 must gain two A*s and an A. Three must be awarded three A*s.

But the reluctance by other universities to take the grade into account, even as competition intensifies, means thousands vying for places could find their A*s count for nothing. Of 38,000 who achieved three As in 2009, some 3,000 failed to land a university place. With a further rise in those gaining A grades expected next week, record numbers pupils face missing out.

Our survey of 30 of the most selective universities shows how the A* has made little impact this year. Some 23 said they had not taken any account of teachers' predictions of A*s.

Oxford said: 'We have not used the A* in the first two years because we got a clear message from teachers that they could not predict who would get the grade.'

Others, including Imperial College, Nottingham, Leicester and Surrey, said they considered all predicted grades. But only five said they made conditional offers using the A*.

Cambridge had made the most use of it, with Imperial College, University College London, Warwick and Loughborough using it in some cases.

Geoff Lucas, of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, representing 250 fee-paying schools, said the A* was 'spurring the very bright kids'. But universities had faced 'pretty overt pressure' not to consider it.

Dr Geoff Parks, Cambridge admissions director, said: 'It may be the balance shifts slightly towards what Alastair Campbell described as the "bog-standard comprehensive" and away from the independent sector.'

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13 August, 2010

Obama's school spending brings out the carpetbaggers

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school-turnaround experts as they compete for the money.

A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents or the authorities in several states in its charter school management business has now opened a school-turnaround subsidiary. Other companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.

Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither the federal government nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington.

“Many of these companies clearly just smell the money,” Mr. Jennings said.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling strategies to improve schools. “This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans,” Dr. Crew said.

The Obama administration has sharply increased federal financing for school turnarounds, to $3.5 billion this year, about 28 times as much as in 2007. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is pushing to overhaul 5,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools in the next few years.

More HERE





The Assault on For-Profit Universities

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan want the United States to lead the world in the percentage of people who graduate college by 2020, which will mean increasing by at least 8 million the number of students completing college over the next 10 years. President Obama noted in a speech yesterday that by “making college affordable … we’ll reach our goal of once again leading the world in college graduation rates by the end of this decade.”

But new proposals for regulating the for-profit higher education industry outlined by the Department of Education could actually have the opposite effect. For-profit higher education is serving the needs of students, as evidenced by the significant increase in enrollment over the past two decades.

According to a new report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, since 1986 alone, enrollment has increased nearly sixfold and has now reached nearly 1.8 million students. While traditional public universities and nonprofits have grown just 1.6 and 1.4 percent (respectively) each year, for-profit institutions have enjoyed an 8.4 percent annual growth rate. This growth rate has been achieved because for-profit universities serve a wide range of student needs, from more traditional degrees to vocational and technical schools. According to a new report:

Traditional universities are configured as non-profit organizations whose stated mission often invokes a service of the public good. In contrast, for-profits are structured as profit-maximizing firms whose success depends of providing a valuable service to the student/customer. For-profit institutions can only be profitable if they are able to provide a service that is valuable to the student.

While there are likely bad actors in the for-profit industry, the Department of Education has proposed capping costs at any for-profit that receives federal subsidies. This would affect virtually all for-profit, private higher education institutions since nearly all of them accept students who receive federal subsidies in some form.

But what would this mean for achieving the Administration’s goal of increasing the number of college graduates? For-profits have been particularly popular among those students historically underserved by the traditional college model. African-American and Hispanic students are enrolling in for-profit universities at a greater rate than in traditional universities, and female enrollment in for-profit institutions has skyrocketed in recent decades. For-profit institutions also serve non-traditional students who are often older and have to work full-time jobs outside of their academic pursuits.

But the Obama Administration argues that increased regulation is also needed in the for-profit sector because students attending these schools tend to default at higher rates than students in traditional four-year institutions. This is true: Average default rates for students attending for-profit schools stood at 11 percent in 2007, compared to just 5.9 percent at public universities. But some argue that these higher default rates are a function of serving a student population that has been shut out by public and nonprofit institutions.

Neal McCluskey over at the Cato Institute points out that in a recent Congressional hearing about the for-profit industry, Senator Tom Harkin (D–IA) stated that “GAO’s findings make it disturbingly clear that abuses in for-profit recruiting are not limited to a few rogue recruiters or even a few schools with lax oversight.” But findings from the GAO’s investigation, released just last week, found that “results of the undercover tests and tuition comparisons cannot be projected to all for-profit colleges.”

So the question becomes: Is it the profit in for-profit that has the Administration uneasy?

Federal subsidies for higher education have increased significantly over the past several decades. But—probably as a result of those increases—so has tuition. It has become a vicious cycle whereby the federal government increase subsidies for college, increasing students’ purchasing power, in turn allowing universities to raise tuition, which increases the demand for student subsidies. For some students, the for-profit market has broken this cycle, eliminating a barrier to entry to postsecondary education.

While there are certainly bad actors—as with any industry—the answer isn’t to expand federal control and regulation over an industry that is meeting the needs of millions of students. The answer is to increase transparency and information about what students can expect to get in return for their investment in these schools. Vedder et al. said it best in their report:

The roots of market-based education stretch as far back as classical Greece in the fifth century B.C., when proprietary schools and traveling teachers for hire … provided instruction to students willing to pay for their services. The Greek citizenry’s growing demand for educational services combined with the freedom of educators to establish private for-profit schools led to the emergence of a nimble educational system. … In response to the needs of the students and their families, educators taught the subjects students wanted to learn.

One-size-fits-all approaches don’t work in education, and they certainly don’t work in the higher education industry. If the Administration really wants the United States to lead the world in college graduates, all options should be allowed to flourish to meet the needs of students.

SOURCE





British university funding cuts of 35% will be worst since the Great Depression

Students face a major increase in the cost of studying for a degree as universities prepare to be hit with the worst cuts to their budgets since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Undergraduates face being taught in 'crumbling' lecture theatres or at home over the internet, despite having to pay more for a university education.

Universities have been told to prepare for a cut of 35 per cent to their funding over four years – equivalent to cash per student being slashed from £5,441 a year to £3,537. The cuts would represent the biggest loss of resources since the 1930s cutbacks, higher education experts claimed yesterday.

Universities say they would be forced to scrap courses, crowd more students into lecture theatres and neglect facilities such as libraries and computer suites. Thousands more undergraduates would be required to study at home using internet resources.

Institutions are also likely to look abroad to recruit new students to help compensate for the loss of public funds. Meanwhile home students face a significant increase in the cost of going to university, to be repaid after graduation. Fees for 2010/11 are £3,290 a year, up from £3,225.

The cuts warning came in meetings between Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell and university chiefs, according to the Times Higher Education magazine.

Chancellor George Osborne will confirm the scale of cuts for all Whitehall departments in October but Sir Gus has told universities it would be ‘prudent’ to prepare for a 35 per cent cut between 2011 and 2015. Ex-BP boss Lord Browne will report on the future of student finance in the autumn.

Professor Roger Brown, an expert in higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University, said cuts would lead to ‘increased student-to-staff ratios and greater pressure on physical resources, such as libraries’. The prospect of cuts to facilities budgets spells a ‘nightmare scenario’, he added.

‘You are charging students more – assuming fees will go up after the Browne review – and at the same time they are being taught in crumbling lecture theatres.’

Professor Gareth Williams, a higher education expert at London’s Institute of Education, said: ‘If the numbers quoted are realised, it would be far worse than anything universities have experienced since the 1930s. ‘In terms of expenditure per student, it is far worse than anything in recent memory.’

Students could increasingly be taught via distance learning, studying mainly at home and attending campuses less frequently, he suggested.

‘It probably would be possible to provide the basic training that goes on at most universities at the sort of price that is being talked about. ‘But it would be a very different student experience from what we take for granted. It raises big questions about the nature of a university experience, what a university is for, why people go to university.’

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: ‘The Cabinet Secretary’s advice to everyone in the public sector is that, until we find out exact budgets in the autumn spending review, it would be prudent to prepare for cuts at the higher end of the range.’

SOURCE



12 August, 2010

Dems, advocates blast food stamps cuts in educrat welfare bill

Some Democrats are upset and advocacy groups are outraged over the raiding of the food-stamp cupboard to fund a state-aid bailout that some call a gift to teachers and government union workers.

House members convened Tuesday and passed the multibillion-dollar bailout bill for cash-strapped states that provides $10 billion to school districts to rehire laid-off teachers or ensure that more teachers won't be let go before the new school year begins, keeping more than 160,000 teachers on the job, the Obama administration says.

But the bill also requires that $12 billion be stripped from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, to help fund the new bill, prompting some Democrats to cringe at the notion of cutting back on one necessity to pay for another. The federal assistance program currently helps 41 million Americans.

Arguably one of the most outspoken opponents on the Democratic side is Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who has blasted the move as “a bitter pill to swallow” but still voted yes.

“I fought very hard for the food assistance money in the Recovery Act, and the fact is that participation in the food stamps program has jumped dramatically with the economic crisis, from 31.1 million persons to 38.2 million just in one year,” DeLauro said in an e-mail sent to FoxNews.com. “But I know that states across the nation and my own state of Connecticut also desperately need these resources to save jobs and avoid Draconian cuts to essential services for low income families.”

The Houston Chronicle reported Tuesday that several state advocacy groups, including the Texas Food Book Network and the Houston Food Bank, rallied for House members to strike down the legislation, which passed 247-161 in the House. Three Democrats voted against the measure, while two Republicans voted in support of it.

Democratic rank and file members, including Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, say the cuts won’t take effect until 2014 and will merely return food stamp benefits to pre-stimulus levels.

The Food Research and Action Center said a family of four would see benefits drop about $59 per month starting in 2014.

"While we support the education initiatives (in the bill), we adamantly oppose using food stamps to pay for them," said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center. "The rain on food stamps to pay for other things absolutely has to stop and stop now."

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures, the number of people on the food stamp rolls has been growing to record levels for 18 straight months. Nearly $5.5 billion in aid went out to beneficiaries in May alone. The number of May recipients marked a 19 percent increase from a year ago and the USDA projects that next year's enrollment will reach about 43.4 million.

Republicans, meanwhile, vocally opposed the state aid bill. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told Fox News it rewarded "irresponsible states" and their unions.

"It is basically taxpayers from fiscally (responsible) states bailing out fiscally irresponsible states. ... Medicaid funding, teacher funding, the more popular of the public unions, what this is, it's a bailout to prevent states from doing the necessary spending prioritization that they need do," he said.

The Obama administration pushed hard for the $26 billion bill. The White House argued that it is essential to protecting 300,000 teachers and other nonfederal government workers from election-year layoffs and will not add to the national deficit.

"If we do nothing, these educators won't be returning to the classroom this fall, and that won't just deprive them of a paycheck, it will deprive the children and parents who are counting on them to provide a decent education," Obama said in the White House Rose Garden shortly before the bill passed on Tuesday.

"This proposal is fully paid for, in part by closing tax loopholes that encourage corporations that ships American jobs overseas. So it will not add to our deficit," he said. "And the money will only go toward saving the jobs of teachers and other essential professionals...I urge members of both parties to come together and get this done, so that I can sign this bill into law."

SOURCE






Parenting isn’t a bunch of skills that can be taught in a British school

British proposal to have a High School course in parenting would denigrate both what it means to be a parent and the purpose of education

If the Lib-Con education secretary Michael Gove really means business and plans to keep his promise to raise educational standards, then he should politely reject Frank Field’s hare-brained proposal to put parenting on the GCSE curriculum. At a time when far too many schools are struggling to teach their pupils basic literacy and numeracy, Field has proposed a formal exam for 16-year-olds which would turn them into the ‘five-star parents’ of tomorrow.

When I first read the proposals, drawn up by Labour’s Field but now being considered by the Lib-Cons, I thought it might be a clever work of satire designed to poke fun at Britain’s inept and meddling politicians. Hitherto, the dishing out of gold stars and smiley faces was confined to increasingly sceptical schoolkids; now, however, parents could find themselves infantilised by having their methods and behaviour judged by a star system in school classrooms!

What better way to degrade education than to suggest, as Field does, that ‘schools will want to teach this to boost their standing in the league tables’. At a time when many British schools already try to manipulate league tables by encouraging their students to opt for soft, unchallenging subjects, exhorting schools to embrace yet more nonsense in a dumbed-down curriculum just seems surreal.

Hopefully, there are still some serious policymakers who will understand that a school course on parenting would do nothing to improve the quality of family and community life. Parenting is not a skill or an academic subject that can be effectively communicated in an institutional setting. The core assumption of social engineers, and of policymakers like Field, is that child-rearing consists of a range of practices that mothers and fathers need to learn. On the surface of things, no one could dispute this assertion: every human relationship involves learning and gaining an understanding of the other person. A parent needs to learn how to engage the imagination of a child; how to stimulate him or her; how to restrain him or her from doing something harmful. Yet these things cannot simply be taught to prospective parents; instead, experience shows that effective child-rearing is learned on the job. Why? Because the most crucial lessons parents are learning have little to do with abstract skills and instead are about the very relationship they are developing with their children. Learning how to manage this relationship in order to guide a child’s development is the crux of effective parenting.

The issue is not so much whether parenting needs to be learned, but whether it can be taught. Everyday experience tells us that not everything that has to be learned can be taught. Parenting can’t be taught, because it is about the forging and managing of an intimate relationship. And when it comes to relationships, people learn principally from their experiences. Relationships have unique characteristics that are only really grasped by the people involved. People learn through reflecting on their experience of joy and pain, the exhilaration and the disappointments of their interactions with someone who is significant to their lives.

When it comes to a real school subject, such as maths or science, it is possible to teach facts without the student having personally to experience and discover them for himself. It is possible to teach skills that can be applied in all scientific experiments. But this is not the case with parenting. The very instability of parenting advice, and the regularity with which yesterday’s authoritative recipe for ‘good parenting’ is dismissed as hopelessly inaccurate and replaced with another, indicate that the idea of ‘teaching parenting’ is really prejudice masquerading as a skill. It is sad that a respected political figure like Frank Field has not yet learned that parenting is not a skill, but a relationship – and a messy one at that.

Sadly, we live in a world in which virtually every social problem is associated with poor parenting. The simplistic doctrine of parental determinism spares policymakers from engaging in the serious business of grasping complex social phenomena. Parenting has become an all-purpose causal agent that apparently explains all the bad stuff. Solving this apparent parenting deficit is presented as a way of fixing society. At a time when parenting is more extensively discussed than ever before, it is curious that Field states that ‘our nation has fallen out of love with the art of being good parents’. In the real world, parenting has acquired a sacred, quasi-religious character. Parenting is culturally valued more than ever before. Indeed, there is now a veritable parenting industry and there has never been a time when British fathers and mothers have felt so anxious and concerned about their roles. Thirty years ago, parenting was not seen as a suitable issue for policymakers. Today, it has become a focus for political discourse. And as I argued in my book Paranoid Parenting, this obsession with parenting has had the perverse effect of eroding parental confidence and complicating family life.
Fiddling with the curriculum

Field’s proposal is bad news for parents. But if implemented, it would have serious damaging consequences for education, too. Some hoped that after the defeat of New Labour, policymakers would resist the temptation to politicise the curriculum. But sadly, some politicians remain addicted to the dead-end strategy of attempting to fix the problems of society through fiddling with what is taught in schools. Anyone familiar with the experiences of the past two decades knows that our schools have become the target of competing groups of policymakers, moral entrepreneurs and advocacy organisations, all of whom want to use the curriculum to promote their own ideals and values. As a result, pedagogic issues are continually confused with political ones.

The school curriculum has become a battleground for zealous campaigners and entrepreneurs. Public-health officials constantly demand more compulsory classroom discussions on healthy eating and obesity. Professionals obsessed with young people’s sex lives insist that schools introduce yet more sex-education initiatives. Others want schools to focus more on Black History or Gay History. In early 2007, the then New Labour education secretary, Alan Johnson, announced that not only was he introducing Global Warming Studies, but that he would also make Britain’s involvement in the slave trade a compulsory part of the history curriculum.

At a time when educators feel unable to endow their vocation with real meaning, they continually turn to new causes in order to transmit at least some semblance of values. This was the intention behind Johnson’s announcement, in February 2007, that ‘we need the next generation to think about their impact on the environment in a different way’. Johnson justified this project, aimed at shaping the cultural outlook of children, through appealing to a higher truth: ‘If we can instill in the next generation an understanding of how our actions can mitigate or cause global warming, then we lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world.’ ‘Saving the world’ looks like a price worth paying for fiddling with the geography curriculum and using it to instruct children about global warming. But behind the lofty rhetoric lie some base assumptions.

The curriculum is increasingly regarded as a vehicle for promoting political objectives and for changing the values, attitudes and sensibilities of children. Many advocacy organisations who demand changes to the curriculum do not have the slightest interest in the subject they wish to influence – as far as they’re concerned, they are simply gaining recognition for their cause. That is what Nick Clegg, deputy PM and leader of the Liberal Democrats, was doing when he argued that education must tackle homophobia and that Ofsted inspectors should assess how well schools are managing the problem of homophobia. Sex experts continually demand that the amount of time devoted to sex education be expanded. In July 2008, the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV noted that pupils were getting inadequate instruction because sex education was not a compulsory subject. The same month, the Family Planning Association argued that children as young as four should receive age-appropriate ‘compulsory sex education’, with sex and relationship education enjoying a position in the curriculum similar to other compulsory subjects, like maths and English.

While the campaign to transform sex education into a compulsory school subject is sometimes questioned by traditionalist critics, many similar initiatives around different causes are not remarked upon. In September 2008, the New Labour government announced changes to the national curriculum that will instruct boys as young as 11 on how to be good fathers. Children would be taught that if they abandon their offspring they will face prosecution and a possible jail sentence. Where did this initiative come from? It certainly doesn’t represent a response to a pedagogic problem identified in the classroom – rather it emerged from the deliberations of policymakers and experts who feel strongly that something should be done about ‘deadbeat dads’. And when that question ‘what should be done?’ is posed, they inevitably come up with the now-formulaic solution: deal with it in the national curriculum.

So Janet Paraskeva, chair of the UK Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission, stated that: ‘There needs to be something in the national curriculum to make children aware they will need to take financial responsibility for their children.’ Parakeva insisted that she meant business, arguing ‘this won’t be a simple bolt-on to the national curriculum’ since ‘we want to give children at a young age a good understanding of the financial commitment of becoming parents’.

Pareskeva’s proposals expose the fundamental flaw in all this curriculum meddling. It assumes that the problems of the adult world can be fixed through instruction in the classroom. But of course, it is not a lack of information that is responsible for anti-social behaviour or the disorientation of the adult world. Forcing children to deal with adult problems exposes them to issues that they can’t do anything about, while depriving them of a real education. Field argues that disadvantaged children in particular will benefit from studying for a GCSE in parenting. I beg to differ. What disadvantaged children need is high-quality, subject-based education. They can’t afford the luxury of wasting time on well-meaning social experiments. Experience shows that the proliferation of social-engineering initiatives on the curriculum benefits no one, while disproportionately penalising those with minimal access to intellectual capital.

SOURCE






Australia: Leftist school expenditures no help in financial crisis

WE'LL say it again. Labor's capital works stimulus spending could not have "saved" Australia from recession, as Julia Gillard claims. This is because the crisis had passed by the time the hard hats got on to the school building sites.

This was clear from last week's review of the Gillard Building the Education Revolution, which showed that less than half of the $14 billion earmarked for primary school halls had yet to be spent by June this year.

And now an Auditor-General's review of the $550 million stimulus spending on 137 "strategic" local government projects similarly finds that the construction work ramped up after the recession risk had passed.

Labor's stimulus promised a "timely" counter to the global financial crisis that hit in September 2008. The $550m of strategic projects, part of the Regional and Local Community Infrastructure Program, were supposed to be concentrated last year.

The Treasury's stimulus estimates assumed that "timely and efficient" program delivery would result in "minimal lags" in boosting the economy. But the Auditor-General finds the scheme was flawed from the start, mismanaged along the way and plagued by council porkies [lies].

A "large proportion" of projects were not ready to proceed, were always going to take longer "than necessary to provide timely stimulus" and were hit by "high project delivery risk". By the end of last September, only a quarter of the 137 projects were reported as having started. By then, however, the economy already had been growing for three quarters in a row.

And Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens assessed the economy's downturn to be "mild".

Even then, the Auditor-General finds, local councils and the federal government seriously over-reported the construction progress. The Commonwealth Co-ordinator-General's progress report claimed that "over $248m" had been paid to councils by the end of last year "based on their construction progress". But the Auditor-General disapprovingly finds that 97 per cent of the $247.8m actually paid to councils by then "did not relate to construction progress".

Much of the money was paid well in advance of actual construction. And the Auditor-General's random site visits found that council reporting was not "sufficiently accurate". In NSW, construction of a Bega Shire Council aquatic centre did not start until February this year, even though reporting to the federal government claimed work had begun in October last year.

Labor can stick to its combined 2009 and 2010 stimulus estimates, but it can't claim this stimulus avoided a recession because much of it was pushed into this year, when the economy already had dodged the bullet.

SOURCE



11 August, 2010

Gender-bias impacts women physicists? Perhaps not

The author below obviously knows very little of the academic literature on stereotyping, even though her study is of stereotyping.

She has confirmed that there is a stereotype of men as better at physics but neglects to ask why. She would appear to think it is irrational or some evil male plot.

Yet the great preponderance of the stereotyping literature that actually asks the "why" question concludes that stereotyping has what Allport long ago called a "kernel of truth". See relevant literature summaries here and here.

So the first thing the Bug lady should have asked is whether or not men REALLY ARE better at physics. That she did not reveals her own biases

While some might argue that the lack of women in physics is down to personal choice or perhaps even biological determinism, Amy Bug, a physicist at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA instead claims it could be due to small, unconscious biases in the evaluation of female physicists that can add up to have a significant impact on their careers.

Bug videotaped a series of lectures using professional actors - two male, two female - who posed as physics professors. After the 10 minute lecture, 126 physics students were then asked to fill out a survey evaluating the lecture and the professor's performance.

Detailing her finding in August’s Physics World, Bug’s study found that, on average, male professors received higher scores than their female counterparts. The experiment also revealed that there is a distinct gender bias from both male and female students when it comes to gender-stereotypical attributes, for example associating a male professor as good with science equipment, and a female professor as more helpful.

Interestingly, Bug found that while female students gave slightly higher marks to the female professors than they did to the men, male students rated the male professors vastly better. Bug’s findings show that not only does the gender of a physics professor determine how lectures are received, but also the student’s gender plays a role as well.

These results are consistent with the theory that people associate different genders with different aptitudes and predilections. Female physicists break such associations prompting a negative perception. Together with small disadvantages such as smaller start-up grants and unequal wages these can accumulate over time and have dramatic consequences on a career.

According to Bug, progress towards more equality will depend on the continuous effort of educational, professional and funding institutions. “Today, the big issues are acknowledging and correcting the implicit bias, workplace policy reform, bringing in students from ethnic minorities, retaining girls between school and college, and seeking equality in the developing world.” writes Bug.

SOURCE






College transparency: Uncharted territory

Jane just got accepted to a prestigious private university. Tuition is over $40,000 a year and her parents do not qualify for financial aid because of their high incomes. They write out a check for $160,000 and Jane is on her way to earning a four-year degree.

John also received an acceptance letter to the same school. In his case, his parents are not so well off so he qualifies for both federal and state financial aid. Because of his high GPA he receives college scholarships as well. Still unable to afford college, he is offered and accepts several loans because he believes that going to a more expensive college means that his degree will be worth more and will eventually get him a high paying job. Eventually, he figures, he will be able to pay off those loans.

Most students at college tend to fall somewhere between those two cases. After wading through the bog of muddled information from college admissions offices about financial aid, parents are relieved to have even made it through the process alive, figuratively speaking. Little time or energy is then left to investigate questions like “What does my tuition money actually fund?”

College campuses are set up like miniature governments. The endless red tape and long lines. The faculty senate. The handbook, codes, rules. The unnecessary bureaucracy. Offices of disabilities and abilities alike. Signature collection, approvals, stamps, mailboxes, and forms. Even at private universities, you can expect to run into your fair share of government documents to fill out regarding employment, finances and running your affairs.

Colleges are very heavily subsidized by the government — through the current stimulus package, especially through aid and loans for students as also through a variety of other means. In turn, colleges know that they can raise tuition prices through the roof and get away with it. Government, which is to say the taxpayers extorted by the government, will always be there to provide the money. Right? This allows colleges to continually add more employees and limitless layers of bureaucracy, simply because they can afford it. An illusion is created that the college is progressive, growing and innovative. In reality, they’re simply unnecessarily wasting resources.

A truly free market would lack the subsidies that distort the current education market. In a stateless society, to be specific, market discipline would create the expectation that “what you pay for is what you get.” Admissions offices would boast of their efficiency; recruiting new students by pointing to comparisons of the costs versus benefits of attending their school — because that information would be easier to meaningfully identify without market distortions. Instead of cost alone, students and parents would be looking at the actual educational value to be received for their money. Colleges wouldn’t be pressured to give tenure to a horrible professor simply because of how long he had taught at the school. Rather, they would reward instructors based on merit as determined by consumer choices in the market.

From the perspective of the average person, meaningful financial transparency on college campuses is currently rare. With students lost in loan rules la-la land, chasing elusive job openings, and facing overall exhaustion with the current system, it can be arduous to investigate where the money students pay is going. With the current state of the economy, however, students and parents will have to wake up and ask these important questions of transparency, choosing the most cost effective and truly productive school. Such challenges to authoritarian institutions of all sorts will increasingly become crucial to the financial survival of the ordinary person.

SOURCE





British Primary school results 'inflated' by teachers

The extent to which children’s grasp of core subjects is being “artificially inflated” by schools is laid bare in damning figures which have been published for the first time. New-style tests show that results in science are up to a third lower at the end of primary school than previous scores suggested.

The figures – based on a small-scale “sample” designed to give a more accurate picture of national achievement – will fuel fears that pupils have been “taught to the test” to boost schools’ positions in league tables at the expense of a proper understanding of the subject.

It will also cast fresh doubts over Labour’s education record and raise questions over standards in other core subjects such as English and mathematics.

In the past, all children in England took Sats tests in science at the end of primary school. Last year, almost nine-in-10 reached the standard expected for their age and 43 per cent exceeded national targets.

But the science test was scrapped following complaints that schools drilled children to pass by repeatedly forcing them to sit practice papers, undermining their education. It was replaced with a sample test taken by just one-in-20 pupils nationally. Under the new system, individual schools are not identified and results do not contribute towards league tables.

Figures published by the Department for Education show that 81 per cent of 11-year-olds reached the national target for their age group – Level 4 – in the sample test. This compared with 88 per cent of those who took Sats last year.

It means fewer children can use tables and bar charts to record measurements, identify organs in the human body and understand the difference between solids, liquids and gases. At the same time, only 28 per cent gained an elite Level 5 in the sample test, compared with 43 per cent last year – a drop of around a third.

Prof Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: “With these sampling tests, the schools are not individually identified so there isn’t the same pressure to artificially inflate the result.

“When rewards and sanctions are attached to the test, teachers can push up results simply by training children in the sort of questions that will come up and scores quickly get out of line with the actual understanding of the children. In a sense, sampling provides a more accurate picture. “If we want to discover how well the education system is going, this is the way to do it.”

Statisticians from the Department for Education admitted that the results this year could not be compared with those of the past because previous tests “fed the school accountability framework”.

Ministers have refused to axe Sats tests in English and maths and the latest results will fuel speculation that results in those subjects are also artificially higher. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has already announced a review of the way primary school pupils are assessed.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The sample tests point the way forward and I urge the Secretary of State to conduct his review of national curriculum assessment with a view to putting the sampling system in place for both English and mathematics."

The sample science test results are also lower than teachers’ own assessments of pupils’ abilities in the classroom. Teachers informally assess children’s grasp of English, maths and science throughout the final year of primary education, with results being published alongside Sats scores. Assessment scores released last week suggested 85 per cent of children were at Level 4 and 37 per cent were at Level 5.

SOURCE



10 August, 2010

The higher education bubble

Back at the beginning of the summer, I had a column in this space in which I predicted that higher education is in a bubble, one soon to burst with considerable consequences for students, faculty, employers, and society at large.

My reasoning was simple enough: Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. And the past decades’ history of tuition growing much faster than the rate of inflation, with students and parents making up the difference via easy credit, is something that can’t go on forever. Thus my prediction that it won’t.

But then what? Assume that I’m right, and that higher education - both undergraduate and graduate, and including professional education like the law schools in which I teach - is heading for a major correction. What will that mean? What should people do?

Well, advice number one - good for pretty much all bubbles, in fact - is this: Don’t go into debt. In bubbles, people borrow heavily because they expect the value of what they’re borrowing against to increase.

In a booming market, it makes sense to buy a house you can’t quite afford, because it will increase in value enough to make the debt seem trivial, or at least manageable - so long as the market continues to boom.

But there’s a catch. Once the boom is over, of course, all that debt is still there, but the return thereon is much diminished. And since the boom is based on expectations, things can go south with amazing speed, once those expectations start to shift.

Right now, people are still borrowing heavily to pay the steadily increasing tuitions levied by higher education. But that borrowing is based on the expectation that students will earn enough to pay off their loans with a portion of the extra income their educations generate. Once people doubt that, the bubble will burst.

So my advice to students faced with choosing colleges (and graduate schools, and law schools) this coming year is simple: Don’t go to colleges or schools that will require you to borrow a lot of money to attend. There’s a good chance you’ll find yourself deep in debt to no purpose. And maybe you should rethink college entirely.

Many people with college educations are already jumping the tracks to become skilled manual laborers: plumbers, electricians, and the like. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that seven of the ten fastest-growing jobs in the next decade will be based on on-the-job training rather than higher education. (And they’ll be hands-on jobs hard to outsource to foreigners). If this is right, a bursting of the bubble is growing likelier.

What about higher education folks? What should they (er, we?) do? Well, once again, what can’t go on forever, won’t.

For the past several decades, colleges and universities have built endowments, played moneyball-style faculty hiring games, and constructed grand new buildings, while jacking up tuitions to pay for things (and, in the case of state schools, to make up for gradually diminishing public support).

That has been made possible by an ocean of money borrowed by students -- often with the encouragement and assistance of the universities. Business plans that are based on this continuing are likely to fare poorly.

Just as I advised students not to go into debt, my advice to universities is similar: Don’t go on spending binges now that you expect to pay for with tuition revenues later. Those may not be there as expected.

Post-bubble, students are likely to be far more concerned about getting actual value for their educational dollars. Faced with straitened circumstances, colleges and universities will have to look at cutting costs.

Online education, and programs focused more on things that can help students earn more than on what faculty want to teach, will help to deliver more value for the dollar. In some areas, we may even see a move to apprenticeship models, or other approaches that provide more genuine skills upon graduation.

Meanwhile, for the states, and big donors, who fund those portions of higher education that the students don’t, a post-bubble world will bring some changes, too. Many states have been cutting aid to higher education, content to let higher tuition pick up the slack.

Some may choose to change that (if they can afford it) but regardless I expect more direct oversight of state institutions from those who fund them. Universities’ priorities will be brought closer to states’ priorities.

For private schools, government oversight is less direct -- but to an even greater extent than state schools, private institutions have been dependent on a flood of government-guaranteed credit, and they are likely to see more scrutiny as well if that is to continue.

As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously remarked, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money, and that’s likely to be the problem facing higher education, too.

Graduation rates, employment after graduation, loan default rates, and so on are likely to get a lot more attention. Institutions may even be forced to absorb some of the cost of student loan defaults, as an incentive not to encourage students to take on more debt than they can repay.

Finally, for the entrepreneurs out there, this bubble-bursting may be an opportunity. One of the underpinnings of higher education is its value as a credential to employers: A college degree demonstrates, at least, moderate intelligence - and, more importantly, the ability to show up and perform on a reasonably reliable basis, something that is of considerable interest when hiring people, a surprisingly large number of whom do neither.

But a college degree is an expensive way to get an entry-level credential. New approaches to credentialing, approaches that inform employers more reliably, while costing less than a college degree, are likely to become increasingly appealing over the coming decade.

Those who find a way to provide them will do well. So to any entrepreneurs reading this: Good luck. And after the bubble bursts, and you get rich, please do what you can for a poor law professor . . . . .

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Good High School exam results no guarantee of a university place in Britain

Students with good A-levels face being rejected from university this summer amid mounting competition for degree courses, the Government has admitted. David Willetts, the Universities Minister, warned that an increase in the number of undergraduate places in 2010 would not be enough to prevent many high-achieving students missing out altogether.

Just over a week before the publication of A-level results, Mr Willetts said more sixth-formers should consider re-sitting their exams or taking an apprenticeship as an alternative to university.

The comments come amid growing concerns over the pressure on higher education places this autumn. Figures show more than 660,000 people have applied for a university place – up almost 12 per cent on last year’s record-breaking figures.

Some 68,000 more applications have been made in 2010 as growing numbers of young people attempt to get into university instead of the workplace during the economic downturn. Competition is being swelled by some 45,000 people reapplying after being rejected in 2009.

Speaking on Sunday, Mr Willetts said the Coalition had made an extra 10,000 places available this year, meaning record numbers of people would start courses. But he warned: “It is going to be tough. There are young people who sadly are not going to get a place, including perhaps some people who really have got good A-level grades, and for them there is a whole range of options.”

In a sign of the competition for traditional university courses, Mr Willetts told the Andrew Marr show on BBC1 that more sixth-formers should consider college or apprenticeships as an alternative to higher education. “I think we should get away from the mindset that there is only one option, which is at the age of 18 going away from home to university for three years,” he said.

He added: “Obviously there is the opportunity of re-sitting their exams. They may wish to reapply next year, they may want to do things that increase the strength of their CV and make them stand out more to universities.

“There are other ways of getting training. They can go into work and try to get training through apprenticeships, with 50,000 extra apprenticeship places, [and] there are more places at further education colleges. “We are absolutely doing our best to increase the number of opportunities available for young people even in tough times.”

A-level results for students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be published on Thursday, August 19. Academics are already predicting another record round of results, with the proportion of A grades expected to top last year’s total of 26.7 per cent.

For the first time this year, an elite A* is being introduced following claims from universities that record rises in the number of A grades makes it increasingly hard to pick out the most exceptional candidates. Students must score more than 90 per cent in the second year of A-levels to achieve an A*.

But on Sunday the introduction of the new grade was surrounded in fresh controversy after independent schools accused the official qualifications watchdog of underestimating the number of students capable of achieving it.

Ofqual is using last year’s A-level results to predict the proportion of sixth-formers expected to gain an A* in each subject. They can order exam boards to cut the number of A*s if provisional results indicate that the proportion achieving it is at least two percentage points above the targets.

But Geoff Lucas, secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents top private schools, said the system failed to take account of the fact that pupils were “more motivated” because of the presence of the top grade this year.

“When we asked Ofqual if they had taken this extra motivation of wanting to win an A* into account, they said they had not,” he said. “We are worried that this could lead to widespread injustice.”

An Ofqual spokeswoman said: "If candidates are motivated to perform at a higher level this year than candidates were last year, then this year's candidates should get higher marks to reflect their higher achievement. "The reference points which the regulators and the awarding organisations used to help inform the awarding of the A* grade this year used modelling work based on A-level outcomes in 2009.

"However, these were no more than starting-points for discussions between the regulators and the awarding organisations to make sure that where marks were higher or lower than the reference-points, there were sound reasons for that."

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Anger over lack of medical internships in Australia

What's the point of half-educating future doctors? The British Labour Party government was well-known for such bungles so it is deplorable that several Australian State Labor Party governments seem to be doing the same. Just the usual Leftist bungling, I guess

NSW medical students are demanding the federal government stop increasing university places after more than 100 graduates failed to get internships in public hospitals this week.

The crisis comes three years after the government increased university places to solve the state's crippling shortage of doctors, but failed to employ extra staff in NSW hospital to supervise interns.

About 115 international students, who each paid more than $200,000 for their degrees, were told yesterday they would have to wait until Friday for final offers but there was little chance they would be employed, forcing many of them to return home.

"The intern year is a 12-month period of postgraduate training that is required for general medical registration," the president of the Sydney University Medical Society, Jon Noonan, said. "Without it, a medical degree is not worth the paper it is printed on.

"At this point last year more than two-thirds of locally trained internationals had been offered an internship within NSW. The fact that none have been placed has come as a shock to our colleagues, who had been repeatedly reassured they would be taken care of," he said.

A spokeswoman for the Institute of Medical Education and Training, which allocates internships, said 747 positions were available this year, more than enough for the state's 685 graduates, but NSW had been swamped by applicants from other states.

Last year, when the same problem occurred, the government invoked a priority system because it did not have enough money to offer internships to all graduates wanting to work in NSW.

Under that system, international students trained in NSW are only offered positions once all Australians and New Zealanders trained in Australia and overseas-trained applicants are employed, a decision that has angered the Australian Medical Students Association.

"We have a government which provides huge incentives to get these doctors back once they have left [Australia] and it seems illogical to me to do so when we have people who've been trained here to our standards," its president, Ross Roberts-Thomson, said.

"A medical degree qualifies you for nothing but an internship. If you don't get an internship, you essentially have a piece of paper which allows you to drive a taxi - or not even that."

Mr Noonan agreed, saying it defied logic that state and federal governments would shut the door on Australian-trained international students while relying on foreign-trained doctors to fill gaps in the health workforce.

Mr Noonan said his group wanted the state government to guarantee internships to all graduates in NSW and join with other states to adopt a consistent and co-ordinated framework for intern allocations.

Two years ago, the Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, said she was aware clinical training places were "a pressure point within the system" but the government had no plans to cut university places for medical students.

"This was a crisis that was always going to happen," the former chief executive of the Australian Medical Association, Bill Coote, said yesterday.

"There has been very rapid growth in the number of medical schools and the expansion of existing schools - and there is the parallel issue of how medical schools have been allowed to attract full-fee paying students to subsidise their activities when we can't provide all graduates with appropriate training."

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9 August, 2010

British university degrees to become a lifelong financial burden?

Middle-class professionals face being charged much more for their university degrees under plans for a new “graduate tax” system, according to research. GPs could pay some £70,500 to cover the cost of tuition fees while teachers are charged almost £50,000, it was claimed.

The findings came as David Willetts, the Universities Minister, insisted that graduates should make a “bigger contribution” towards higher education to keep universities strong during the economic downturn.

Speaking on Sunday, he appeared to endorse plans set out by Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, last month for student fees to be replaced with a levy based on earnings when graduates start working.

The Coalition claim this would end the current situation in which teachers, care workers and research scientists are expected to pay the same for their studies as top lawyers, surgeons and City analysts.

But the University and College Union warned that the changes risked escalating the cost of a degree for all students – and leaving millions of people in even more debt.

In a new report, the union, which represents lecturers, analysed a series of different financial models to test the consequences of a new-style tax on earnings. The UCU said a university-educated nurse on average wages would pay a total of £36,871 if the Government introduced a five per cent tax on graduates' total earnings over 25 years.

By contrast, under the current system, the same nurse graduating from an English university this year would be charged £10,300 to pay off the £9,440 tuition fee loan for their three-year degree. Even a three per cent rate of graduate tax over 25 years would work out significantly more expensive, at £22,123 for a nurse earning the average full-time salary of £29,497.

The conclusions come as the Government prepares to publish the findings of an independent review of student tuition fees in the autumn. The review – led by Lord Browne, the former head of BP – is widely expected to lead to a rise in the existing £3,225-a-year cost of a degree. Lord Browne has been asked to consider the graduate tax plan as part of his review.

Sally Hunt, union general secretary, said: "Parents and students will judge proposed changes to student finance on whether they make university more expensive or not.

"Whatever scheme is proposed to replace fees, the Government must ensure that studying for key professions remains attractive and that the prospect of prohibitive costs over a lifetime will not put off the next generation of innovators and public servants. "We urge Vince Cable to look again at the idea of taxing big business for the substantial benefit it gains from a plentiful supply of graduates, rather than merely looking to penalise students further."

But speaking on BBC1, Mr Willetts admitted the Coalition was looking at some “tough options”. This included forcing former students to make a “bigger contribution back towards the cost of the university education they have enjoyed”. “If you look at the overall position, we want to carry on providing finance for universities, but we think more of that finance should come from people after they have graduated, after they are in well paid jobs, and then making a contribution back,” he said.

Under a five per cent graduate tax on all earnings over 25 years, a secondary school teacher on average wages would pay £46,046, a social worker £37,550, a research scientist £46,418 and a doctor £70,526. According to UCU figures, if the rate was set at three per cent over 25 years, the same teacher would be charged £27,628, the social worker £22,530, the scientist £27,851 and the doctor £63,338.

Paying off a £9,440 tuition fee loan under the present system of funding for higher education costs the teacher £10,025, the social worker £10,272, the scientist £10,017 and the doctor £9,696.

The UCU said its research prompted fears that introducing a graduate tax could lead to shortages in teaching and social work, and would make "embarrassing reading" for Mr Cable. Mr Cable has admitted that some people were likely to end up paying more under a graduate tax system. But he said it was "unlikely" that those with degrees would have to make contributions for life.

He said: "It surely can't be right that a teacher or care worker or research scientist is expected to pay the same graduate contribution as a top commercial lawyer or surgeon or City analyst whose graduate premium is so much bigger."

But the UCU's conclusions have been criticised by the National Union of Students which has advocated a graduate tax system as an alternative to up-front fees. Aaron Porter, NUS president, said: "It would be quite wrong to make sensationalist and simplistic judgements before we have even seen the detail of Vince Cable's proposals.

“NUS supported the call for a move away from the ‘poll tax’ of top-up fees and towards a graduate contribution that is fairer for students. "Any analysis of [the] proposals must be based on robust data and realistic scenarios which take account of the complexities of the debate about the future of higher education and student funding."

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Another attack on for-profit colleges

With a brief blog post appearing in its “College” section The Huffington Post joined in the chorus of liberal media outlets demanding more government control of businesses.

The article entitled, ‘Degreed And Jobless, For-profit College Graduates Turns to Stripping’ presents readers with a false idea of what the article is discussing.

The blog posts tells the tale of Carrianne Howard, a graduate of the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale (a for-profit college) who secured a job in the video game industry after she graduated. She made $12 an hour until her position was eliminated. She is now working as a stripper.

But Howard’s story just led to an argument for government regulation of for profit colleges. “Howard's story is not entirely unique -- and experiences like hers are driving the government's investigation into the efficacy and recruiting practices of for-profit colleges,” the unnamed blogger wrote.

“This week, a Government Accountability Office report detailed how for-profit recruiters often promise potential students unobtainable jobs and high salaries, and tell them to lie to procure more federal financial aid,” the Huffington Post said.

The article didn’t document the GAO’s qualification to determine what constitutes “unobtainable” positions or pay in the dozens of industries for which students study. Nor did it furnish instances of dishonest financial aid coaching. Still, the demand for increased government regulation did not stop there.

“At a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on the report Wednesday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) slammed for-profit institutions, saying that the report made it "disturbingly clear that abuses in for-profit recruiting are not limited to a few rogue recruiters or even a few schools with lax oversight," The Huffington Post said.

The fact is, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress have targeted for profit colleges, and the Huffington Post was just helping to publicize the effort. Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard explained the issue in his article ‘Obama’s Crusade Against Profits, Coming soon to a College near you.”

“We should quickly stipulate that for-profit colleges are hardly delicate flowers of free enterprise. They are creatures of government subsidies without which they would become unrecognizable. And they are happy to meet the government on its own terms,” Ferguson wrote.

That said, Ferguson painted the all-too-familiar and utterly predictable result of the Obama administration taking an interest in a given industry:

If the administration gets its way and the regulatory regime continues to tighten, the for-profit education industry won’t cease to exist. More likely it will regress into a form of state capitalism, as a kind of public utility: utterly dependent on government subsidy, hence utterly submissive to government authority, which can set prices and profit margins. The health insurance industry, with the passage of health care reform, is halfway there already.

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Baby boom creating 'critical' shortage of primary school places in England

The baby boom is a side effect of the vast influx of foreigners allowed by Britain's former Labour government. Around half of the births are to non-British mothers

A baby boom is creating a 'critical' shortage of primary school places, it emerged last night. It will also affect class sizes, with more than half a million primary school children expected to be taught in classes of more than 30 from next month.

Schools are prevented by law from allowing classes in the first two years from exceeding 30. But that often simply means head teachers are forced to create much larger classes for older age groups.

The scale of the problems is such that thousands of pupils will be taught in temporary buildings when the new school year begins. A leaked Government report revealed new classrooms are needed immediately for as many as 60,000 pupils.

Ministers have attacked Labour for failing to prepare for the influx of new pupils, despite warnings schools did not have the places. Figures show the number of children at English primary schools will rise for the first time in a decade, to 3.96 million. And over the next four years they are expected to grow by another 320,000.

The report said: 'A considerable number of local authorities [are] claiming that they have been "caught out" by recent changes in demographic patterns and [are] seeking additional central funding for some 60,000 additional pupil places.'

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8 August, 2010

Do computers make kids dumber?

I've really got no dog in this fight but the findings below seem problematical to me. I suppose getting a computer may cause students to do less homework so that is reasonable enough -- but note that this is about kids who get computers in late grade school. My son could bring up his own educational computer game at age 2, and that is 21 years ago now. So it may have been mainly kids from poor families who got computers relatively late and we are simply seeing here the usual socioeconomic divide in educational achievement

Efforts to close the "digital divide" and boost student achievement by supplying students with home laptops have been getting a lot of attention in recent years. What's still unclear, though, is whether that sort of thing could make a difference.

In an effort to get a handle on that question, researchers Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd studied statewide data on North Carolina students from 2000 and 2005—a period of time when computer access expanded noticeably and many areas of the state were just getting access to high-speed internet service. The study focused on students enrolled in 5th through 8th grades.

The researchers were able to figure out which students had computers at home because North Carolina students fill out surveys asking them about computer use and ownership in tandem with the state exams they take every year. To determine whether areas had internet access, the researchers relied on zip code data and Federal Communications Communication reports on the rollout of Internet services.

The news was not good, though: The researchers found that students who gain access to a home computer between 5th and 8th grade tend to experience a slight—yet persistent—decline in reading and math scores. With regard to the introduction of Internet access, the researchers found that the technology had a more negative impact on some students than others—possibly because parents of those students exercised less control of their activities on the Internet.

"For school administrators interested in maximizing achievement test scores, or reducing racial and socioeconomic disparities in test scores, all evidence suggests that a program of broadening home computer access would be counterproductive," the study concludes.

One caveat the researchers offer, though, is that this study does not look beyond test scores. For instance, computer-literacy could pave the way to better job opportunities for some students. We'll never know from this report.

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There are no excuses for the state of Britain's education system

British schools are a disaster zone, churning out masses of pupils lacking even the most basic skills, argues Neil O'Brien

What’s the best reason to be angry with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair? The expenses scandal? Tripling the national debt? Trying to fight two gory wars on a shoestring budget? Actually, I think it’s their abject failure to improve British education. Our schools are a disaster zone, churning out to many pupils lacking even the most basic skills. Last week, we learned that more than a third of children are leaving primary school unable to read, write and add up. And in two weeks’ time, A-level results will be out, and we can have our annual debate about how much further standards have been allowed to slip.

The last government tried to silence debate on the subject, suggesting that any discussion of whether standards might be falling amounted to an “attack on the hard work of pupils and teachers”. But the best research has concluded that an A at GCSE today is the equivalent of a C in the 1980s. In 2000, British teenagers were ranked seventh in the world for reading and eighth for maths. In 2006, they were 17th and 24th.

Yet our traditional summer argument about grade inflation – important as it is – is obscuring much bigger problems. Essentially, our schools are dominated by an anti-work, anti-achievement culture, which crushes pupils’ aspirations and opportunities. And those that fight their way through it find themselves enmeshed in a university system whose output is completely mismatched to the country’s needs.

From my own time at school, I can remember only one teacher who ever tried to explain how much difference working hard could make to the rest of our lives. He had spent years in the worst inner-city schools, and was the only teacher I can recall ever wearing a suit. “Ninety per cent of the wealth in this country is owned by 1 per cent of the population,” he explained. “They want you to fail. They don’t give a monkey’s, because their kids are all off at private schools. But you aren’t going to fail, because you are going to work your guts out.”

Within our current system, though, there is precious little push for aspiration – which, as Sainsbury’s told Parliament in a written submission, is one reason why firms often prefer to hire immigrants, who have a far more satisfactory work ethic.

In this area, we could learn a huge amount from KIPP, a highly successful chain of state schools in the US. They operate in the most bleak, deprived inner cities, and do several brilliant things. First, they work a much longer school day (7.30am to 5pm) and force the pupils to attend summer school. As a result, the kids spend 60 per cent more time in class than the average. Second, they raise aspiration by aiming to send all the kids to university, from places where no one has ever gone to college.

Most importantly, however, they have a robust programme teaching respect and manners. It aims to break the prevailing culture, dominated by gangsta rap and the code of the street. Kids are taught to sit up and pay attention. Even President Obama has endorsed this approach: “This is what we have to teach all of our children,” he said. “No excuses. No excuses!”

In theory, Michael Gove’s new “free schools” should allow similarly radical methods to be adopted in the UK. However, they would face huge opposition. The unions would fight any prospect of extra hours or shorter holidays – even if they were compensated. And many members of the educational establishment would rather eat their own fingers than endorse the idea that schools could “challenge” the prevailing culture – a liberal cringe that has a huge cost for the poorest children in Britain.

For a lack of order is not just a problem in America. The average teacher here loses 50 minutes every day to delinquent behaviour, which makes many of their lives an utter hell. Efforts to resolve this are undermined by a thicket of restrictive rules and laws: one teacher I met was disciplined for standing between a pupil and the door when she was telling him off. (Apparently, children must have a route out of the room.)

If you can’t keep order in schools, it is impossible to create a culture of hard work and achievement. And things were made worse by the last government, which pressed schools to reduce expulsions, using fines and threats to drive down the number. Michael Gove has, mercifully, changed tack, and wants to abolish the appeals tribunals which can overturn schools’ decisions to expel pupils. Though such cases are small in number, they hugely undermine teachers’ authority. (Meanwhile, there are roughly 70,000 excluded students warehoused in appalling “Pupil Referral Units”. Given their staggering cost – £15,000 per head per year – we might be better off just sending them to Eton.)

Yet even if we can get our schools to produce better pupils, there are major problems with our universities, too. Currently, we have a centrally planned system, where the state sets the number of places on particular courses. It’s basically a genteel, donnish version of the command economy that did so much good for Eastern Europe. This lack of a market creates a huge mismatch between what our education system is turning out and what our economy needs. For example, a recent CBI survey found that two thirds of employers have trouble recruiting people in science, technology, engineering and maths. At the top end, our leading research universities are underfunded, forcing star scientists and great thinkers to look to America. At the bottom, duff courses are heavily subsidised, meaning that masses of kids are doing courses that are a waste of their time: an essay a term, minimal contact with academics, and a ludicrous drinking culture. There are six universities where between a fifth and a quarter of students drop out every year. Overall, one in 10 of students fail to complete their courses.

We need to replace this with a proper market in higher education. That means raising the cap on fees, and allowing universities to charge different amounts for different courses. Hopefully, this is what Lord Browne’s review of fees will recommend later this year. If we make universities publish their data on graduate earnings, and create a market, people will be able to make better choices. And far from limiting the university system to the middle classes, I suspect the numbers attending university will actually rise, because the quality of courses will be better, and university more worthwhile.

In the modern world, Britain’s only hope of competing is to live by its brains – but our schools and universities are simply not up to the job. The reforms we need will be controversial. But they are, nevertheless, utterly essential.

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Has the Australian Labor Party suddenly discovered an uncharacteristic love of Christianity?

Labor [akin to the U.S. Democrats] promises more school chaplains but it will be interesting to see how they define "chaplain". Let me guess that there will be NO Exclusive Brethren chaplains but quite a few "humanist" chaplains.

Amusing, though, to think how this promise will p*** off their urban sophisticate base

UP to 1000 additional schools, including those in remote or disadvantaged areas, will get a chaplain service under a re-elected Labor government. The National School Chaplaincy Program already provides the service to 2700 schools.

If Labor wins the August 21 election, the program would get $222 million to reach more schools, and secure existing chaplains for a further three years. Labor last year committed funding to run the program for the full school year in 2011.

A national consultation process will consider the scheme's effectiveness and how it fits with other student support activities, with a discussion paper to be released by October.

In a statement, the Labor party said it recognised that some schools in rural, remote and disadvantaged locations had so far missed out. They would be better considered in the new round, and in rural areas, funding could be pooled so chaplains could service a number of schools. Labor says funding for the policy would be offset over the forward estimates.

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7 August, 2010

Texas at war with the Federal Democrats

Led by Sen. John Cornyn , 20 members of the Texas GOP congressional delegation have sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., urging her to strip a Texas-specific provision out of an upcoming spending bill.

The amendment, inserted by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, requires Texas to preserve current education funding levels through 2013 in order to receive $820 million in federal funds to protect teacher jobs. Texas is the only state to face specific requirements.

Republicans, including Gov. Rick Perry, say the provision violates Texas' state Constitution. "By adding the additional two-year requirement, the House language only punishes Texas students and teachers," the letter says. "Therefore, we urge you to strike the previous House-passed provision in the bill."

Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville, is among the eight North Texas representatives to sign onto the letter. "This ridiculous education funding provision, which some have even called 'wacky,' was written to only impact Texas and has got to go, so that Texas teachers and students are provided the same opportunities as teachers and students in every other state," Burgess said.

In an interview Thursday, Doggett said Republicans were concocting "phony legalistic arguments," and that the amendment is intended to ensure that the federal funds were not diverted elsewhere.

The amendment is included in a $26 billion state aid bill passed by the Senate on Thursday. The House will vote on the bill next Tuesday.

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Coalition pledge on three-Rs as third of British pupils fail basic grade-school test

More than a third of pupils left primary school after 13 years of Labour without a proper grasp of the basics, it has emerged. Sats results published today showed 35 per cent of 11-year-olds in England failed to reach the standard expected for their age in reading, writing and mathematics. Scores in reading actually slipped for the second year in a row, despite the launch of a multi-million pound programme designed to help the worst performers catch up.

It means hundreds of thousands of children will start secondary education without "getting the point" from passages they read, using proper spelling and punctuation in writing and being able to employ the 10 times table.

Today the Coalition pledged a renewed focus on the core subjects amid claims too many children were failing to get the “fundamentals right”. Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, said the Government would emphasise mental arithmetic in maths and prioritise back-to-basics methods of reading in English lessons.

A new reading test will also be introduced for all six-year-olds to pick out those struggling the most at the start of primary school.

Sats results soared when Labour first came to power but progress has practically stalled in recent years.

Mr Gibb said: “Despite pupils’ and teachers’ hard work one-in-five pupils are still not reaching the expected level in either English or maths and over a third are not achieving this level in reading, writing and maths combined. “We need to ensure government gives teachers the support they need to get the basics right.

"Getting the fundamentals right – being able to read and write and having a solid foundation in Maths – is crucial to a child’s success in secondary education and throughout their adult life.”

He added: "The Coalition Government is committed to promoting the use of systematic synthetic phonics in primary schools and to ensuring that pupils are fluent in arithmetic and basic maths by the time they move to secondary school. We will provide the help teachers need to do their job even better."

But the publication of today’s results also prompted renewed controversy over the use of Sats tests to measure education standards. In an unprecedented wave of industrial action, more than a quarter of state schools in England – 4,005 – boycotted the exams this year amid claims they narrow the curriculum and force schools to “teach to the test”. Unions also said the high-stakes tests jeopardised teachers’ jobs. Figures show 155,000 out of 575,000 children failed to sit tests this year.

But the Coalition insisted the sample was large enough to proceed with the publication of national results.

For the first time this year, the Government published the results of teachers' own assessments of pupils in the classroom alongside official Sats scores. Under the less formal system, 81 per cent of children made the grade in English and a futher 81 in maths – almost mirroring the Sats results.

Labour welcomed the publication which they said proved major reforms of primary education over the last 13 years had worked. When Labour came to power, only half of children gained good scores in English and maths.

Vernon Coaker, shadow schools minister, criticised the Coalition for failing to support Labour’s flagship policy of more one-to-one tuition for children falling behind in reading and writing between the age of seven and 14. “Around 100,000 more children now leave primary school secure in the basics than in 1997,” he said. “But there is obviously more to do, particularly in reading where the results are disappointing.

“These results show why the coalition’s cuts to the budgets of successful catch-up programmes like Every Child a Reader, which we were rolling out across the country, are so short-sighted and disastrous for educational opportunity.”

The Coalition insisted one-to-one tuition and the intensive reading scheme would continue for another full year, while more money was being earmarked for the poorest schools to run other similar programmes in the future.

According to Government guidance, to achieve Level 4 in reading children must display an understanding of ideas, themes, events and characters in texts and use inference and deduction.

In writing, pupils should be starting to use grammatically complex sentences. Spelling should be accurate, pupils should use joined up handwriting and sentences should contain full-stops, capital letters and other punctuation in the correct place.

Guidelines on maths say children should be able to multiply numbers up to 10 x 10 in their heads and add or subtract numbers to two decimal places.

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Huge waste of money in putting up new Australian school buildings -- the evidence spreads

No spending discipline or attempt to get value for money -- so everything costs twice as much as it needs to. Good for builders but bad for everyone else

FOR the past 18 months, the federal government has dismissed reports of problems with its $16 billion school building program. This is despite a litany of concerns revealed in The Australian. But the government's refrain that the Building the Education Revolution is a success was erased yesterday by the release of the price paid by the Victorian government to build a school hall.

Like NSW, Victoria is paying twice as much as the Catholic school system and well above standard industry costs. Of necessity, The Australian's series of reports documenting concerns about the BER has focused on NSW; until yesterday, it was the only state to have made public its building costs.

The federal government has dismissed reports of inflated costs as being confined to NSW but the story is similar in Victoria and, presumably, around the nation. The onus is now on the other states and territories to reveal the figures. The lack of information about BER construction costs is unnecessary and unacceptable.

The biggest spend on schools in the nation's history requires a commensurate level of scrutiny. Yet The Australian is the only newspaper to have consistently asked where the money was going.

The BER stimulated the economy, helped Australia through the financial crisis and gave schools new buildings. But schools, parents, principals, teachers and other taxpayers have a right to expect value for money.

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6 August, 2010

Federal bailout for teachers in cash-strapped States

This just delays the unavoidable need for cost cutting -- easily achieved by slashing the bloated school bureaucracies. When I was in grade school there were only teachers in the school, no clerks or "administrators" at all -- and I got a great education. We learned to read by phonics ("The cat sat on the mat") and I started reading a couple of books a week at age 8. There were no computers or TV then so books were a major source of entertainment -- JR

A bill championed by Democratic lawmakers that would restore the jobs of teachers and other education professionals cleared the Senate on Thursday.

The $26 billion H.R. 1586, the Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act, will provide an emergency $10 billion to hire teachers and school workers and $16 billion to help keep state workers on the job caring for the elderly and sick. It is estimated that this fund will help keep nearly 140,000 teachers and other school workers employed next year. The bill will go before the House for a rare August vote on Tuesday to approve the legislation and send it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Solano, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and a major proponent of the bill, introduced the Local Jobs for America Act in March to help create and save public and private sector jobs and restore vital services in local communities. The provision in the bill to support education jobs was initially included in the Jobs for Main Street Act of 2010, which passed the House in December.

While a pared down version of the bill moved forward Thursday, locally, school districts could stand to receive millions in one-time aid.

"I applaud the Senate for passing this emergency legislation that protects not only our teacher jobs but our economic competitiveness," Miller said in a statement. "Next week, my colleagues and I in the House will return to Washington to take this important vote -- a vote we've taken twice already in the House -- to keep thousands of teachers in their jobs.

"We need this bill to ensure our teachers remain in the classroom and our students continue to learn. It's clear our students, our teachers and our country will reap the benefits of our decisive action. This investment will save jobs and help prevent districts from shortening the school year, increasing class sizes and closing libraries in the wake of horrific and damaging budget cuts. While this latest round of funding isn't enough to avert all layoffs, it is a critical investment in our children and in our future."

According to U.S. Department of Education projections, California could stand to receive about $1.2 billion.

But with school starting in the coming weeks for area school districts, it is unlikely the money, while desperately needed, will arrive in time to have an immediate effect.

In places like the Vacaville and Travis unified school districts, budget cuts have already increased class sizes, resulted in teacher layoffs and, in Vacaville's case, a shortened school year.

Vacaville Unified School District Superintendent John Aycock estimates that the district could potentially see about $150 to $200 more per student should the bill pass. That could equate to somewhere around $2 million -- roughly a quarter of what the district had to slash from its 2010-11 budget.

"Of course, any money is good money," Aycock said. But the money will first have to roll its way out from the federal government to the states, and ultimately to school districts, a process that Aycock guessed could take several months. "There is no easy and quick pass through," Aycock said.

Assuming the money does arrive, a plan would be drafted and the Governing Board would vote on how to use the funds.

During a budget session in June, multi-year projections showed that Vacaville Unified would need to cut another $2.9 million from its budget in 2011-12. This latest round of stimulus could go a long way toward easing the burden.

According to Miller's office, the bill includes provisions to ensure that states use the money to preserve jobs in elementary and secondary education. Amounts from the Education Jobs Fund may not be used for purposes such as equipment, utilities, renovation or transportation. The bill prohibits states from using any of these funds to add to "Rainy-Day Funds" or to pay off state debt.

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Parents' outrage over halal-only school dinners planned for British primary schools

A council has triggered a backlash among parents and animal welfare groups after introducing halal-only menus at state schools. Only meat from animals killed in line with Islamic teaching will be offered at 52 primary schools in Harrow, following a switch by ten secondaries to halal menus.

But parents have voiced concern over the methods used to slaughter animals in this way and say they haven't been properly consulted over the changes.

Harrow Council is among the first in Britain to encourage halal meat. It says dieticians recommended the policy due to difficulties storing and preparing two sorts of meat.

According to the 2001 census, the North-West London borough is among the most religiously diverse areas in Britain. Just under half of the population is Christian, a fifth is Hindu, 7 per cent is Muslim and 6 per cent Jewish. The council says the composition of the area's primary schools is now significantly different and the Muslim population is larger.

Halal slaughtering involves cutting through the large arteries in the neck with one swipe of a blade, while a Muslim butcher recites a religious verse. All blood is then drained away since the consumption of blood is forbidden under Islamic law. Animal welfare campaigners say the method, which is exempted from welfare laws, is inhumane as animals are not stunned before being killed.

Harrow resident Sheila Murphy called the council's move 'appalling'. 'The Farm Animal Welfare Council has lobbied the government in the past to get the kosher and halal method of slaughter banned,' she said. 'The halal method is deemed cruel by some animal-lovers, who object to the slow death it involves.

'Harrow Council's decision is also taking away the choice of children and their parents over what meat they eat and I urge residents to make their views known to Harrow Council and get this decision overturned.'

Contracts signed with the council's preferred catering company, Harrison's, stipulate that only halal meat is served. The firm has been providing nine of the borough's secondary schools with meals for two years and will take on the final high school next month. The contract for providing meals to Harrow primaries is up for renewal and the council is planning to bring in Harrison's.

The council says primaries do not have to use its preferred caterer and governors are free to negotiate their own deals if they wish. Only two primaries have so far signed up.

Masood Khawaja, president of the Halal Food Authority, said: 'It is commendable for schools to provide halal meals but there must be an alternative for non-Muslims. 'Some people are opposed to halal and kosher meat on animal welfare grounds and they should be given the choice not to eat it.'

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: 'By only offering halal meat there is an assumption a Muslim's conscience is more important than someone who is concerned about animal rights.'

Councillor Brian Gate, portfolio holder for schools and colleges, said: 'The decision about whether to use an individual provider is for schools to make, as funding is delegated to them. 'At present we are not proceeding to roll this programme out but this is because of the cost constraints and the level of interest from parents.'

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British parents 'threatened with court' by union after criticising school

Parents have been threatened with legal action after raising concerns about their children’s primary school. Two people were warned by a teaching union that they could be taken to court for “harassment” following a series of complaints directed at the head teacher. It followed a public meeting called by mothers and fathers of children at St Alban’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Cardiff.

Families raised concerns over the suspension of three staff members as well as education standards, the turnover of teachers and allegations the school had abandoned Holy Communion.

But two people at the meeting – Sue Evans and Martine Paterson – then received letters warning them against making “slanderous statements” about Jane Vaterlaws, 51, the head teacher. In the letter, the National Association of Head Teachers said: "Your actions are viewed as malicious and as harassment and you are warned that should you continue to make false and slanderous statements about Mrs Vaterlaws, you are likely to find yourself in court.

"Please be in no doubt that action will be taken against you and any other individuals that persist with what is an illegitimate campaign. "The NAHT will not tolerate any malicious campaign against any one of our members and you should take heed of this warning."

Parents at the 200-pupil school claimed they had been left in the dark about the head's decision to suspend the three members of staff. Some parents also claimed some children as old as nine did not have basic literacy, teachers did not always know children’s names because of high staff turnover and the school was failing to offer Holy Communion.

Last month’s public meeting – held in a church hall – was led by Mrs Evans who later wrote to the Roman Catholic archdiocese listing a number of "areas of concern".

The letter to the two mothers was signed by Annie Hovey, the NAHT regional officer. Mrs Hovey’s letter said: "You are strongly advised to consider your position carefully as what you are doing is wholly illegitimate and is open to direct challenge from us as well as from the school, Cardiff council and the diocese. "We have advised Mrs Vaterlaws to consult the police with a view to taking action against you for harassment.”

Mrs Evans said: "They are very threatening letters. The other parent involved has been absolutely distraught about the one she received. "We have been told the church had a letter as well, about us using the parish hall for meetings. "But we have got to keep on with this now; we can’t let these parents down."

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5 August, 2010

Massachusetts on track for $655 million from feds for Medicaid, educrat welfare

Massachusetts stands to receive some $655 million in federal Medicaid and education funding to prevent budget cuts, under a state aid package that narrowly cleared a key hurdle in the U.S. Senate this morning.

The money would save more than 2,400 public education jobs in Massachusetts, according to Sen. John Kerry, who supported the measure. “Gov. Patrick, mayors, teachers, parents, and first responders are breathing a sigh of relief now that the Senate has finally thrown them a lifeline,” Kerry said in a statement after the vote.

Final approval in the Senate is expected later this week, before the measure goes to the U.S. House, where it would be expected to pass.

The legislation, a $26 billion national aid package, is paid for by spending cuts and a tax hike on multinational corporations. The bill prevailed over a Republican filibuster by a vote of 61-38.

Sixty votes were required to overcome the GOP's procedural roadblock. Two Republicans broke ranks and supported the measure: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine.

The Bay State's junior senator, Republican Scott Brown, voted against the bill, saying there were better options for paying for it. “We can pay for that by not increasing taxes in the middle of a two year recession,” said Brown, in an interview after the vote.

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Britain's coming good degrees guide: Consumer crackdown on 'Mickey Mouse' courses by showing future prospects

Degree courses will be rated for teaching quality, salary prospects, tuition time and value for money under plans to unleash 'consumer power' on universities. Poor quality 'Mickey Mouse' courses will be exposed on a website - similar to those used to select car insurance or electricity - allowing potential students to compare them.

The 16 statistics students most want to know about courses before making their applications were revealed in a report published yesterday by England's higher education funding quango. They include the proportion of graduates employed in professional or managerial jobs, their average salary, the quality of teaching on the course, weekly hours of teaching time and the quality of library and IT facilities.

All measures should be published 'as a minimum' for each degree course in the country in a web-based format that will allow comparisons, the report said. The higher education watchdog should assess the 'accuracy and completeness' of statistics provided by universities and publicise failure to give full information.

Data on university courses is currently limited and scattered around several sources. So ministers hope the move will drive up academic standards by harnessing consumer pressure. Weaker courses would be forced to improve or wither on the vine. They also believe drop-out rates from university will fall if students have a better idea of what to expect from their degrees.

Yesterday's report, commissioned by the funding council and carried out by Oakleigh Consulting and Staffordshire University, said universities are facing increasing competition. Lord Browne's forthcoming proposals on reforming university fees and grants are 'likely to reinforce the idea of students as consumers or customers', it said.

The researchers questioned nearly 2,000 prospective and current students about university statistics they would find 'very useful'. The answers showed 'very little variation' between students.

The most valuable information was considered to be current students' satisfaction with standards of teaching on the course and overall satisfaction with the experience.

Employment data, including details of professional bodies recognising the qualification, was also rated highly, as were costs linked to the course, such as hall of residence charges and maximum available bursaries. 'A standard set of information should concentrate on satisfaction with teaching, actual employment outcomes and costs,' the study said.

Women, Asians and applicants with top A-level grades were most likely to seek out course information, it found.

The information must be attractive to all groups and available either through institutions' own websites or the UCAS service, the report recommended.

But Professor Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, urged students not to be put off studying subjects such as philosophy or classics which may not guarantee immediate salary returns. 'The point of a degree is to enhance your life and there's no guaranteed route to a well-paid job from any particular qualification - that depends very much on the person you become,' he said. 'You are most likely to become yourself if you are study something you find fulfilling at university.'

The development follows calls by Universities Minister David Willetts for prospective students to be given a wealth of information about courses. He has previously criticised the 'reluctance' of universities to release data on their graduates' success on the job market - and has threatened to compel institutions to publish information if they fail to do so voluntarily. Speaking after taking up his ministerial brief, Mr Willetts called on universities to embrace 'transparency'.

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Fear of information from Australian education elites

School league tables splashed across newspapers earlier this year, heralding an unprecedented era of education openness in this country, are on death watch.

A coalition of teachers unions, academics and public education advocates are well advanced with their mission to strangle through technological modifications any further league tables in 2011.

The tables ranking of individual schools for literacy and numeracy were the most sensational outcome the MySchool website, arguably Prime Minister’s greatest reform triumph as Education Minister.

The information they so succinctly presented in a ranking form offered fodder for a million dinner table and bus stop debates about education choice. Overnight, parents were empowered with knowledge, even if it was a brutal outing of school performance.

But the league tables, run in various forms in newspapers including The Australian, Herald Sun and the The Sydney Morning Herald, were not an authorised part of MySchool, more like its bastard child.

MySchool helpfully compares individual school results on national literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) tests to the Australian average and a group of “statistically similar” schools. It was the media that took the next obvious step of producing league tables ranking schools.

Many of the 1.4 million visits to MySchool in its first four days were due to teams of journalists and support staff making thousands of repeat visits to strip out its NAPLAN data to create their league tables.

While the MySchool website will be back in 2011, possibly with enhanced features that will be welcomed by parents, a new round of league tables may not be possible.

The website changes, should they not be stopped, could mean attempts to collect the data in 2011 for league tables will now take weeks or months of commitment, possibly putting their creation beyond the resource availability media organisations.

The tables were an extraordinary tearing to shreds of the secrecy shroud that hid the vast differences in the performance of individual schools based on national tests and between private and public systems.

As popular as the league tables were with parents, they also enraged teachers unions and the public school lobby which saw them as the education equivalent to opening the gates of hell.

Australian Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said that the league tables were based on “simplistic” data that was highly damaging to individual schools, teachers and students.

It was never publicly stated, but there was a fear in the public school lobby the rankings might further encourage the flight to private schools.

Following threats of industrial action to stop the next round of NAPLAN tests going ahead in May, Ms Gillard appointed a working party of teacher unions, school representatives, academics and professionalised parent groups, to respond to their concerns about use of NAPLAN data.

That working party has already reported back to the national education watchdog, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), with a list of technological proposals to prevent league tables when MySchool 2.0 is launched in 2011.

The ACARA media unit has confirmed that work is progressing on making the NAPLAN data much more difficult to strip out of the MySchool website next year.

Under one likely change, anyone logging on to check a school in 2011 will be confronted by a lengthy “click wrap” of up-front terms of conditions banning commercial use of the data they must formally agree to every time they log in, slowing down all access to a crawl.

A letter by ACARA chief executive Peter Hill, dated June 21, outlines options for changes to the 2011 MySchool website to “address” concerns expressed by the Australian Education Union and other groups.

Along with other recommendations, like adding information on funding sources, the document states that “Ministers have endorsed” investigating “action to minimise misuse” of the information on MySchool. It is clearly stated that ministers had endorsed the working party presenting “ways of deterring or preventing automatic scraping of data from the website”.

A final decision on the measures would be presented to a ministerial council of education ministers in August and October.

Australian Parents Council Executive Director Ian Dalton, a member of the appointed working party, said technical changes would stop “unauthorised usage” of MySchool data next year. Mr Dalton could not say whether the changes would prevent league tables, although he said it was important “to stop publishing data that misrepresented information included on the MySchool website”.

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Simon Crean, Ms Gillard’s replacement, would not comment on the proposal, referring all questions to ACARA.

Despite the move towards blocking league tables, there is strong evidence that the publication of league tables in NSW was handled sensibly by parents. There were no walk outs from schools that performed poorly, or any immediate flight to private schools.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act 1989 from the Department of Education and Training on enrolment changes on all schools between the period January 27 to February 28, 2010 showed no unusual enrolment changes compared to the same period in 2009.

Among those placed near bottom of league tables, Airds High School had more students withdraw in the 2009 period than in the 2010 period after My School was available and league tables were published. The school had 24 students leave in 2010 compared to 51 in 2009.

Another struggling performer, Lurnea High School had 84 students leave in 2010, compared to 100 in 2009, while another high school that was placed low in tables, Chifley College, Bidwill, had 52 enrolment withdrawals, down from 60 last year.

As well as no evidence of walkouts from individual schools, there was also no evidence of a flight from public to private schools. The documents showed there were 23,570 students who left the NSW public school system, about 2000 fewer than the same period in 2009.

But there were some parents who did react. Mum Gaynor Reid admits she quickly changed the kindergarten enrolment of her daughter Kiara Inman-Ried from Fort Street Public to Paddington Public after examining the MySchool website the night before. Fort Street recorded results below the average of schools in the inner city area in the NAPLAN test areas, so she contacted Paddington public immediately the next morning.

Ms Reid, a public relations manager with a large hotel group, even had to borrow a school uniform from a friend for the new school. “We literally had to change that very day. We had already bought the uniform for Fort Street and Kiara had even done an orientation and met a ‘buddy’ to look out for her,’’ Ms Read said.

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4 August, 2010

National Education Association Orders Members to Read Communist Guide Book

The National Education Association (NEA) is the premier teachers union group in the country. As such it is instructive to learn the sort of reading material that the biggest of all teachers unions tells its own members to study so that they can more adequately represent teachers in America today.

A look at the NEA website reveals a shocking recommendation to its members. The union that represents the teachers that we send our children to every school day suggests that its members read the communist-like manifesto of famed left-wing agitator Saul Alinsky.

That’s right, the NEA wants its members, America’s teachers, to become programmed by the ideas and policy prescriptions in a communist manifesto.

And while making the recommendation, the NEA also absent-mindedly seems to forget that Alinsky was an avowed socialist that wanted to remake America from a representative democracy into a communist state.

Here is how they describe Alinsky’s books:

NEA recommends the following Saul Alinsky books to those members of our Association who are involved in grassroots organizing, especially Association Representatives (ARs) — also known as building reps or shop stewards — and leaders at local affiliates.

Saul Alinsky is widely recognized as the father of, and pre-imminent expert in, grassroots organizing, which is why we recommend that ARs and local leaders become familiar with his theories & materials.

Saul Alinsky is also “widely recognized” as a communist sympathizer, socialist theorist, and left-wing radical. I guess the NEA “forgot” to mention that, eh?

The left-wing tracking site DiscoverTheNetworks.org reminds us of what else Alinsky “widely recognized” for:

Alinsky’s brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it, “Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” He advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform.”

THIS is the un-American agitator that the nation’s largest teachers union wants to expose the teachers we send our kids to, folks. This is why these unions need to be defeated.

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After 13 years of Labour Party rule, one in three primary pupils are still failing the 3Rs in Britain

More than a third of children left primary school this summer struggling to read, write and add up – despite Labour’s £2.5billion drive to raise standards in the three Rs.

The Government yesterday pledged a return to traditional lessons in English and maths after warning that achievement had ‘flatlined’ for much of Labour’s time in office. This will include a fresh focus on arithmetic and the ‘synthetic phonics’ reading scheme.

About 200,000 11-year-olds – 35 per cent – failed to reach the expected standard for their age in reading, writing and maths, national SATs tests results showed yesterday.

It means they start secondary school next month unable to grasp the point of a story, write extended sentences using commas or add, subtract, multiply and divide in their heads.

Reading standards slipped for the second year running, with 84 per cent making the grade this summer compared with 86 per cent last year and 87 per cent in 2008.

While results for writing improved, boys fell further behind girls, which will raise fears that many will fail to cope at secondary school.

Results for English overall – reading and writing combined – showed a slight improvement on last year, with 81 per cent of 11-year-olds reaching the required ‘level four’ grade against 80 per cent last year. Maths standards also rose, edging up from 80 per cent to 81 per cent.

But just 65 per cent of 11-year-olds reached ‘level four’ in each of reading,writing and maths, the results from the Department for Education showed.

Ofsted earlier this year estimated the cost of delivering Labour’s literacy and numeracy programmes since 1998 at £4.5billion across the education system – £2.5billion for primary schools and £2billion for secondary.

Despite former prime minister Tony Blair’s ‘education, education, education’ mantra, inspectors said progress had been ‘too slow’, particularly over the last four years.

Ministers are concerned that standards have barely risen in recent years. Schools Minister Nick Gibb said yesterday: ‘We need to ensure Government gives teachers the support they need to get the basics right.

‘Getting the fundamentals right – being able to read and write and having a solid foundation in maths – is crucial to a child’s success in secondary education and throughout their adult life. ‘This is why the coalition Government is committed to promoting the use of systematic synthetic phonics in primary schools and to ensuring that pupils are fluent in arithmetic and basic maths by the time they move to secondary school.’

Ministers will launch a review of the curriculum in the autumn and outline plans for boosting the status of traditional synthetic phonics, where pupils learn the 44 letter sounds of English and how they blend together. Other systems of phonics involve learning the sounds that make up whole words first, then splitting them up.

Plans for a new reading test for six-year-olds to ensure those who are struggling are identified early will also be unveiled.

Yesterday’s results came with controversy after 26 per cent of primary schools – 4,005 – refused to carry out the tests this spring as part of a campaign of industrial Government to scrap SATs. About 155,000 children were caught up in the boycott.

The Government was unable to publish authority-wide results for 20 local authorities because too few pupils took SATs for scores to be valid. Parents will be forced to rely on results in teachers’ own assessments when assessing schools’ performance.

Education secretary Michael Gove, who has pledged the tests will go ahead in 2011, is heading for a showdown with unions next summer if, as expected, the boycott gathers pace.

Results of teacher assessments of pupils aged 14, also published yesterday, showed 79 per cent achieving the expected standard in English – up two percentage points on 2009. Eighty per cent hit the target in maths – up one point – and 80 per cent in science, up from 78 per cent.

Shadow schools minister Vernon Coaker said English and maths results were ‘encouraging’ and ‘the culmination of a transformation in school standards thanks to Labour’s investment and reforms’. But he added: ‘There is obviously more to do, particularly in reading.’

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Australia: Father fined for confronting child's bully

What are you supposed to do when your kid is bullied at school? The schools and the police are useless. Kids have been killed because handwringing is all that schools do about bullying

An Ipswich dad has been fined $300 for confronting bullies who relentlessly teased his daughter at school.

Ipswich Magistrates Court was told the man's daughter had been teased at her school after she was scarred in an accident.

But the 34-year-old father, who had no previous criminal history, took matters into his own hands after he saw his daughter's tormentor at a shopping centre.

Prosecutor Senior Constable Adam McDonald said the man grabbed the bully by his shirt and said, "If you touch my daughter again I'll kill you".

The juvenile then went to Karana Downs police station to complain about the assault.

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3 August, 2010

'Higher Education' Is A Waste Of Money

An old-fashioned call below for critical thinking to be encouraged. The guy hasn't got a hope. Indoctrination is the new aim of education. Just mention global warming in almost any American classroom and you will soon see the truth of that

Professor Andrew Hacker says that higher education in the U.S. is broken. He argues that too many undergraduate courses are taught by graduate assistants or professors who have no interest in teaching.

Hacker proposes numerous changes, including an end to the tenure system, in his book, Higher Education?

"Tenure is lifetime employment security, in fact, into the grave" Hacker tells NPR's Tony Cox. The problem, as he sees it, is that the system "works havoc on young people," who must be incredibly cautious throughout their years in school as graduate students and young professors, "if they hope to get that gold ring."

That's too high a cost, Hacker and his co-author, Claudia Dreifus, conclude. "Regretfully," Hacker says, "tenure is more of a liability than an asset."

Book excerpt:

Our concern, both in this book and for the world at large, is with the undergraduate years. We regard this as a span when young people are sufficiently mature yet still not fully formed, when they can begin to discover themselves and take on the universe. But before we go into particulars, we'd like to specify what we do not regard as higher education's obligations.

• As we've noted, we want to distinguish education from training. Today's young people are likely to live to be ninety. So there is no need for them to start preparing themselves for careers while they are in their teens. We join Diane Ravitch, who laments that "American higher education has remade itself into a vast job-training program." Indeed, since the mid-1960s, English majors have dropped 51 percent in relation to all degrees, history has experienced a 55 percent decline, and students opting for mathematics are down a whopping 74 percent, despite a putative demand for high-tech experts.

• Nor do we feel undergraduate years should be an apprenticeship for a PhD, let alone a first step toward an academic career. We feel obliged to say this because too many college courses center on topics of interest only to professors. But professors don't have a monopoly on erudition. We believe that the arts and sciences, properly understood, must have a broader and deeper base.

• Perhaps the best way to get support for higher education, or so it is thought, is to warn that the United States is falling behind other nations in skills needed in a competitive world. But the alarms so resoundingly sounded don't decry that we are lagging in philosophy or the humanities. Rather, it's that in countries like China, India, and Korea more students are specializing in the sciences and engineering. The worry is that our workforce —including college graduates —isn't ready for a high-tech age. At this point, we'd only ask, if our economy needs more scientists and engineers, why students aren't enrolling?

• Please give us a hearing while we suggest that a purpose of college is not to make students into better citizens. Of course, we'd like everyone to be committed to their communities. But we aren't convinced that we should look to colleges to instill "the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy," as Harvard's Derek Bok puts it. The unstated assumption here is that people who have attended college will end up being better citizens than those who have not.

For our part, we're not that sure that the kinds of insights and information imparted in college classrooms lead to a higher quality of civic engagement. Nor should we forget highly educated cadres described as "the best and the brightest" have plunged us into unwinnable wars and onto economic shoals. For our own part, we haven't found that ballots cast by college graduates express more cogent thinking than the votes of other citizens. Even now, as a nation, are we more thoughtful than the Illinois farmers who stood for three hours as they pondered the Lincoln-Douglas debates?

• Or listen to Shirley Tilghman, Princeton's president, speaking at its 2009 commencement: "Princeton invests its considerable resources in its students in the belief that we are preparing young men and women to become leaders and change the world for the better."

Had we been there, we're sure we would have applauded. Still, to our mind, leadership refers to a willingness and ability to rouse people to a party, a purpose, a cause. Here, too, we're not convinced that what happens in classrooms or on campuses nurtures leaders more than other settings — than, for example, back roads of the Mississippi Delta or lettuce fields in California. We will agree that college graduates are more likely to attain positions where they rank ahead of others. Yet if Princeton and other colleges boast strong contingents of such people, most of them got to their corner offices by being appointed or promoted. If that's all Shirley Tilghman meant, we can agree.

What do we think should happen at college? We want young people to use their minds as they never have before, thinking hard about realities and issues that strain their mental powers. They should be urged to be imaginative and inquiring, to take risks without having to worry about their transcripts or alienating their teachers. To quote a friend, colleges should be making their undergraduates more interesting people. Higher education is an ongoing conversation, created for students poised at adulthood, which can and will continue throughout their lives.

This is a natural process, one for which young people are already fitted. After all, curiosity comes with being human. The problem today is that too much college teaching seeks to channel thinking into tight academic grooves. That is why we've deliberately avoided using terms like cognitive and analytic, or phrases like critical thinking and moral reasoning. There's nothing inherently wrong with these rubrics, it's just that they've been recast to force freshmen to view the world through professorial prisms.

In fact, there are thousands of undergraduate teachers who regard education as a lively interchange. We have sat, admiringly, in many of their classes. Yet few of them are recognized beyond their campuses, since they haven't conducted the research their disciplinary peers demand. So we'll cite some better-known models. There is Princeton's Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate, who makes economics explicable in the New York Times. Or Jill Lepore of Harvard, who brings history to life for readers of The New Yorker. Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who loves meeting with high school students and brings his Nobelist friends to chat with them. These professors do not set boundaries between how they address a general audience and what they do in their classrooms. For them — and for us — it's all higher education.

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Thousands left confused by British grade-school results

The war on assessment goes on. Teachers hate it because it exposes incompetent teaching and parents hate it when it shows that their little treasure is no genius: "He was just having a bad day/month/year"

Children and parents will be left in confusion as national Sats results and teacher assessments for around 600,000 pupils are published together on Tuesday for the first time, education experts have warned. Pupils who sat this year’s exams face being awarded different marks in the same subject if teachers’ appraisals do not match their test scores.

Sats were designed to give parents an indication of the academic standard their child has reached and to help schools stream pupils into the correct classes. Teachers now assess each pupil’s performance over the year and grade them based on their overall ability.

But confusion arose after Ed Balls, the education secretary at the time, decided last November to publish the two sets of national figures side by side. The move was designed to placate unions which had threatened to boycott the exams after teachers claimed they were forced to drop subjects including art, history, geography and PE in the final year of primary school and drill pupils to pass the tests.

A quarter of England’s 15,000 primaries refused to stage the exams in May, meaning pupils at around 4,000 schools will be judged on their teachers’ assessments alone.

There were calls last night for the Government to publish one set of results. Prof Alan Smithers, from the University of Buckingham, said: “Publishing the two sets of results together is confusing. If you are getting contradictory results that is a problem. But it is also information overload and what we need is good, simple, reliable information.”

Anastasia de Waal, the head of family and education at the think tank Civitas, said: “We would be much better off sticking with one system. “Testing needs to be a snapshot of what the children are learning, whereas at the moment all they are learning is the snapshot.”

Sats for 14 year-olds were scrapped along with the science exam for 11 year-olds after teachers complained they had to teach to the test, leaving gaps in the curriculum. Many secondary schools retest pupils in their first few weeks because they do not view Sats results as an accurate measure of ability.

Parents also called for the exams to be abolished, arguing that they were an unreliable measure of children’s ability. Margaret Morrissey, the founder of Parents Outloud, a campaign group, said: “Sats really should not exist. Most children do not perform that well under pressure. “It is a big possibility that they may get two different marks, and parents will be even more confused by this system than before.”

Sats tests were introduced for 11 year-olds in 1995. Teachers have been asked to assess their pupils individually since 1996, with these unofficial results released to parents alongside the test score.

Unions warned last night that pupils might receive worse marks from teachers than in their exams because they were unable to fulfil their potential in a curriculum geared towards the test.

One in five pupils could be given the wrong grade in Sats papers due to inconsistent marking, the exam watchdog Ofqual warned last month.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has admitted there are “flaws within the current testing system” and is committed to a review.

SOURCE





A Damascene conversion for the Australian Labor Party?

How come the centralizers have discovered decentralization?

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard might describe herself as an atheist. But yesterday's speech arguing that principals and parents should be given the freedom to manage their own schools represents a road-to-Damascus experience when it comes to empowering school communities.

While the Prime Minister's statement that a re-elected ALP government will work "to ensure that core decisions that make the most difference to student outcomes are devolved to schools" is commendable, Gillard's record as minister for education proves that her epiphany is more about political opportunism than conviction.

It also smacks of catch-up politics when the ALP releases a policy giving principals power over their schools just weeks after the Tony Abbott-led opposition promised to give school leaders control over school infrastructure spending - a policy condemned by federal Education Minister Simon Crean. During Gillard's time in charge of education, even though schools are a state's responsibility and the commonwealth government neither employs teachers nor manages schools, all roads led to Canberra and, as a result, classrooms have been paralysed by a command-and-control model of education.

During her nearly three years in charge of education, Gillard championed a raft of centrally inspired programs involving a national curriculum and assessment regime, national literacy and numeracy testing and a national approach to teacher registration and certification.

It's widely accepted that the Rudd-Gillard education revolution is inflexible and statist in its approach. Not surprisingly, the eminent educationalist Brian Caldwell from the University of Melbourne, gives the education revolution 2/10 for school autonomy and 1/10 for introducing models of innovative school governance. Across Australia, primary as well as secondary principal professional organisations have bemoaned the educational straitjacket being imposed by the ALP's education revolution and called for increased school autonomy.

One cannot but conclude that any Gillard-inspired school autonomy program, not starting until 2012 and only with a sample of schools, will be a Clayton's one. The promise to give school principals and parents freedom and flexibility at the local level amounts to nothing if schools are constrained and shackled by the type of government directives and demands exemplified by the ALP's education revolution.

Best illustrated by the fate of government schools under the Building the Education Revolution fiasco, the result of Gillard's approach is that state schools are denied the power to manage their affairs and tailor programs and initiatives to best suit their needs.

Whereas Catholic and independent schools, given the freedom and flexibility they have, are able to deliver school infrastructure efficiently and economically, government schools have been plagued by dodgy deals, cost over-runs and white elephants.

Yesterday's admission by Gillard that "without control over decision-making, principals are limited in their ability to respond to problems and are impeded in attempts to improve educational outcomes for their students" makes a good deal of sense.

Unfortunately, it comes too late for government schools shackled with useless infrastructure, and cannot absolve her of the failure to give state schools the power to properly implement the BER program over the past two years.

Doubts about yesterday's conversion to school autonomy in the middle of an election campaign, three weeks before judgment day, are reinforced by Gillard's inaction on the issue during her term as minister for education.

Under the Howard government a report was commissioned into school leadership and principal autonomy, undertaken by Educational Transformations and completed in December 2007. The report, based on national and international research, concluded that school autonomy was critical for raising standards, and that Australian principals are concerned about the adverse effect of the centralising of control over education.

Not only did Gillard, while she was minister for education, bury the report for nearly two years, finally releasing it in November 2009, but the Labor government has failed to adopt any of the report's recommendations.

At the 2007 election, the then Rudd opposition promised to give every senior school student a computer and to build a trade centre in every secondary school; neither promise has been fully implemented.

There must also be doubts whether the promise on school autonomy will ever be delivered. As the NSW ALP-led government learned a couple of years ago when it attempted to allow principals to hire and reward staff, the Australian Education Union is vehemently opposed to giving state schools control over their own destiny.

It's no secret that the AEU regularly campaigns in support of the ALP, injecting millions into marginal seats campaigns and funding anti-Coalition advertising. If the ALP is re-elected, it should not be a surprise if the promise to deliver school autonomy is put on the back burner and that it disappears into the byzantine bureaucracy represented by bodies such as the Council of Australian Governments.

SOURCE



2 August, 2010

A SMALL ROUNDUP

Three of the four posts below are ones that I put up on other blogs yesterday but they clearly have a place here too




Secular attempt to dictate religion in Australia

Creationism is a historic Christian doctrine so Christian parents have every right to have their kids taught about it. If they don't want to have their kids taught about it, nobody is telling them that they have to. It's not "hijacking" anything to teach the doctrines of your faith.

Kids have all the rest of their school time to hear the evolutionist side of the story so what is so bad about a different view being given at least some exposure? Where is the "tolerance" and respect for "diversity" among those who oppose it?

I am an atheist but I sent my son to a Catholic school precisely because I wanted him to hear the other side of the story. He seems to have emerged unharmed from the experience and in fact enjoyed his religion lessons at the time. So it is possible to practice tolerance as well as preach it -- JR

Primary school students are being taught that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together and that there's fossil evidence to prove it.

Fundamentalist Christians are hijacking religious instruction classes despite education experts saying Creationism and attempts to convert children to Christianity have no place in state schools.

Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.

Critics are calling for the RI program to be scrapped after claims emerged Christian lay people are feeding children misinformation.

About 80 per cent of children at state primary schools attend one half-hour instruction a week, open to any interested lay person to conduct. Many of the instructors are from Pentecostal churches.

Education Queensland is aware that Creationism is being taught by some religious instructors, but said parents could opt out.

Australian Secular Lobby president Hugh Wilson said children were ostracised and discriminated against if they were pulled out of the class. In many cases, the RI lay people were not supervised by teachers. {So...?]

Kings Christian Church youth worker Dustin Bell said he taught "about creation" in Sunshine Coast schools. Set Free Christian Church's Tim McKenzie said when students questioned him why dinosaur fossils carbon dated as earlier than man, he replied that the great flood must have skewed the data.

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said teachers were sometimes compelled to supervise the instructors "because of all the fire and brimstone stuff". Mr Ryan said Education Queensland had deemed RI a must-have, though teachers would prefer to spend the time on curriculum.

Buddhist Council of Queensland president Jim Ferguson said he was so disturbed that Creationism was being aired in state school classrooms that he would bring it up at the next meeting of the Religious Education Advisory Committee, part of Education Queensland. He said RI was supposed to be a forum for multi-faith discussion. [Since when?]

Education Queensland assistant director-general Patrea Walton said Creationism was part of some faiths, and therefore was part of some teaching.

New research shows three in 10 Australians believe dinosaurs and man did exist at the same time. The survey, by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, shows a "worrying" lack of basic scientific principles.

"The results underscore the need for students to be exposed to science and mathematics through a well resourced education system, rather than learning about science through Jurassic Park," FASTS president Dr Cathy Foley said.

PhD researcher Cathy Byrne found in a NSW-based survey that scripture teachers tended to discourage questioning, emphasised submission to authority and excluded different beliefs. She said 70 per cent of scripture teachers thought children should be taught the Bible as historical fact.

A parent of a Year 5 student on the Sunshine Coast said his daughter was ostracised to the library after arguing with her scripture teacher about DNA.

"The scripture teacher told the class that all people were descended from Adam and Eve," he said. "'My daughter rightly pointed out, as I had been teaching her about DNA and science, that 'wouldn't they all be inbred'? "But the teacher replied that DNA wasn't invented then."

After the parent complained, the girl spent the rest of the year's classes in the library. [That is punishment?? I didn't realize that books are such a bad thing]

SOURCE






For decades American college students have been taught a Communist version of history

The prominent "progressive" historian Howard Zinn, whose books are force-fed to young people on many college campuses, was not only a member of the Moscow-controlled and Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) but lied about it, according to an FBI file released on Friday.

The file, consisting of three sections totaling 423 pages, was made available on the FBI's website and released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from this writer.

Zinn taught in the political science department of Boston University for 24 years, from 1964 to 1988, and has been a major influence on the modern-day "progressive" movement that backed Barack Obama for president.

Although Zinn denied being a member of the CPUSA, the FBI file discloses that several reliable informants in the party identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week.

What's more, one of the files reveals that a reliable informant provided a photograph of Zinn teaching a class on "Basic Marxism" at party headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. A participant in the class said that Zinn taught that "the basic teaching of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present."

The FBI file also includes information on Zinn's pro-Castro activism and support for radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Black Panther Party. Much of the latter was in connection with Zinn's support for a communist military victory in Vietnam. His dealings with the Communist regime in Hanoi included a visit to the communist capital.

Zinn was included on the "Security Index" and "Communist Index" maintained by the FBI. The "Security Index" was more ominous and included individuals who could be detained in the event of a national emergency.

The files confirm Zinn's membership in the party from 1948-1953 and one says he was "believed to be a CP member as of October, 1956." However, he denied membership in the party when interviewed by the FBI in 1953 and 1954 and claimed to be just a "liberal" or "leftist." He did admit involvement in several CPUSA front organizations, the documents say.

A 1964 FBI memorandum refers to Zinn as "a professor and writer who has a background of known membership in the Communist Party (CP) and has continued to demonstrate procommunist and anti-United States sympathies." It says that while Zinn had denied membership in the CPUSA, his denial "was not supported by facts"-a reference to the substantial evidence and eyewitness testimony provided by informants in the CPUSA.

Much more HERE






More brainwashing coming up

Everybody from the Jesuits to Hitler have tried to capture the education of the young as the best way to perpetuate their ideology

Hey mama grizzlies, it appears as if the White House wants more time with your cubs. Yep, I guess Barack and his socialistic cabal have had a rough go at “fundamentally transforming our nation” in dealing with the increasingly-jaundiced thinking adults who’ve lost the Obama buzz, still dig America, love God and our Constitution, and ask questions (and crap like that). So, like good brainwashers who cannot bamboozle adults, they go in for our babies.

Yep, for the sake of socialism and with an eye to “changing our traditions, our history,” as Michelle Obama said, BHO’s boy Arne Duncan is tabling a plan for parents to give “them” more time with our tots. That means “alone time,” as in big chunks of alone time with the teachers whom “they” have fed a steady diet of “America sucks and socialism is yummy” sauce.

It’s the same stack of teachers the NEA has greatly encouraged to read Saul Alinsky’s commie rag, Rules for Radicals. And you won’t have to worry about them being physically harmed while they’re away from your gaze, Mr. and Mrs. Grizz, because radical gay activist Kevin “Fistgate” Jennings will make sure your kids are okay. Especially your teenage boys.

This past week, Secretary of (Re)Education Arne Duncan said at the National Press Club that he’d like to have schools open 12 to 14 hours a day and 11 to 12 months out of the year. Dr. Evil couched his desires for huge chunks of time spent with your children in the most flowery of language, musing aloud that he wanted to have your children for an extended period to help them “compete internationally.”

Really, Arne? Correct me if I’m wrong, but we used to compete internationally … as in run the flippin’ planet … didn’t we? That is until dipsticks like you and your progressive posse decided to toss God, the Constitution, common sense, a clear delineation between right and wrong, and discipline out of school and replace it with Muslim sensitivity training classes, books about Penguins sodomizing each other, and social justice as you passed out condoms to first graders and provided secret abortions for 13-year-old girls. It’s funny that America never had a problem excelling until secular progressives, with their Marxist bent, became the pace car for the public school system.

The ambitious Obama administration is not content with trying to rule our freedom of speech (especially squelching critiques of their feckless policies), but they also want to put the joystick of our economy, our car companies, our health care, our self reliance and independence, our retirement, and now our kids into their sweaty palms because, you see, they’re wiser than we are in regard to what our kids need to know about how the world should tick—thus Duncan’s talk about more time to uh … um … “educate” your cubs.

This is no surprise, however, as the re-education of our kids has been the wet dream of Bill Ayers, domestic terrorist and Obama’s buddy, as well as his radical ilk for a long, long time.

For mama grizzlies truly concerned about the health and well-being of their cubs and the environment they grow up in (i.e. the USA), you have two options for this public school mess: either get into the system and fight this virulently anti-American agenda … or remove your children from it.

SOURCE




Children at risk in 'failing' British nurseries

Thousands of children are being left in the hands of “inadequate” childminders, nurseries and crèches, according to Ofsted. Figures show more than 800 childcare providers have been branded as failing in the last two years, while almost 12,000 were no better than satisfactory.

In all, almost a third of early years care is said to be not good enough since the introduction of Labour’s “nappy curriculum” in 2008, it was disclosed. According to Ofsted, many were also given the lowest possible rating for keeping under-fives safe, raising fears that adults may not have been given criminal record checks.

Nurseries and childminders can also be failing in their duty towards “safeguarding” for a lack of first aid, unhygienic premises and a poor health and safety record.

The disclosure follows the announcement of a major review of early years education by the Coalition Government amid fears that many children are not being given a “good start”. The review – led by Dame Clare Tickell, chief executive of the charity Action for Children – will cover child welfare, education and early development.

Ministers have refused to rule out abolishing the Early Years Foundation Stage – a series of 69 targets introduced by Labour that must be followed by all state and private childcare providers.

New figures published by Ofsted chart standards achieved by childcare providers in England since September 2008 – when the rules were made compuslory.

According to the watchdog, two per cent of the 40,081 nurseries, childminers and crèches inspected over the last two years were “inadequate”. A further 30 per cent were merely rated satisfactory. The watchdog has previously said that satisfactory – the second lowest rating – was not “good enough”.

Figures show that two per cent of all providers were also inadequate at keeping children safe – one of a series of criteria that nurseries and childminders are judged against. Some 27 per cent were merely satisfactory.

Sarah Teather, the Children’s Minister, said: “Early years professionals should be congratulated on their hard work to drive up standards. “However, we want to see more children from poorer backgrounds getting the right support so that they have the same opportunities to achieve as their peers.” She added that Dame Clare’s review would aim to “ensure all young children are getting the best early learning, as well as keeping them safe and supporting their healthy development”.

The bureaucracy involved with the Early Years Foundation Stage has been blamed for a sharp drop in the number of registered childminders. The latest figures show the equivalent of 520 childminders left the profession in the three months to the end of June. Numbers have now dropped by 6,396 – 10 per cent – following the introduction of the compulsory rules two years ago.

The number of “non-domestic” early years providers – such as nurseries – fell by 134 in the last three months.

SOURCE



1 August, 2010

Schools leaving ever more children behind

Fewer top rating schools, more under review

About half of Delaware's schools failed to make adequate progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, a dramatic increase from a year prior.

The number of top-rated schools dropped as federal standards for test scores in math and reading increased from the year before. The state's school accountability ratings also showed that 20 percent fewer schools received a "superior" ranking from the state Department of Education.

"We have to take big, giant steps toward radically improving our education system quickly enough to have this generation of students ready to compete for the next generation of jobs and opportunity," state Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery said in a statement.

Delaware officials determine school accountability ratings based on three components: annual progress toward federal goals in student reading and math performances; more rigorous state requirements that also consider science and social-studies performances; and the school's accountability history.

The school ratings, released late Friday afternoon, included ratings and AYP status for 192 of the state's 210 schools. This year, 66 schools were ranked "superior," 17 were "commendable" and 46 were on "academic review." Another 63 were considered to be "under improvement" for failing to make adequate progress for two consecutive years. Last year, 83 schools ranked "superior," 34 were "commendable" and 28 were on "academic review." Another 50 were considered "under improvement."

The designations -- "superior," "commendable," "academic progress" and "academic watch" -- tell parents how well their children's schools are progressing toward federal goals.

Schools considered "under improvement" receive sanctions, such as being required to offer free tutoring to struggling students or to restructure by hiring a new principal or changing curriculum.

The ranking came on the same day Gov. Jack Markell signed a new law that ties teacher ratings to new performance standards. The law -- which is mentioned in the state's winning $119 million Race to the Top plan -- requires that teachers must show two years of student growth within three years before the teacher may receive tenure. Tenure provides the highest rating, which provides for special job protections and will make the teacher eligible for bonus pay programs under Race to the Top.

"We are all aligned -- our state's parents, teachers, administrators and employers -- on the need to work together to strengthen our schools," Markell said in a statement. "From earlier in the year, when we won Race to the Top and implemented tough new regulations, to today's new law linking student achievement to new teacher evaluations, we've got to work together to ensure the best tomorrow for our kids."

The state is currently engaging teachers in a conversation to help shape the exact definition of student growth. Markell and Lowery promised Friday that the measurement would be rigorous and fair. The new teacher accountability law will begin in the 2011-2012 school year. The state is working out how test scores will be used to determine teacher effectiveness and has enlisted teachers to help decide what will work best.

Not all believe that standardized test scores are the best way to rate teachers. Teachers unions in several states have fought efforts to tie teacher pay and performance rankings to standardized test scores.

Bob Hamper, professor and interim director of the University of Delaware's school of education, said he believes Delaware's efforts to connect test scores and teacher evaluations is misguided.

"Universities devote painstaking attention to a wide range of evidence of effectiveness, and our public schools should do the same," Hamper said in an e-mail. "To yoke tenure to one indicator is unwise, just as it is unwise to grant tenure after only three years."

Teacher accountability is one part of the state's Race to the Top application.

Delaware's plan also includes restructuring 10 schools with low academic achievement rates. Until now, those schools' improvement plans have included mainly changes in curriculum, but no big staff changes.

State officials have not released the names of the first few buildings that will enter the turnaround program yet. Those schools will be named in late August. Some school districts have already begun replacing principals at low-achieving schools that are likely to face interventions.

SOURCE








360,000 troublemakers suspended from British schools last year

The sheer number of such suspensions shows what a futile disciplinary measure it is

More than 360,000 children were suspended from school last year amid Government warnings that classroom behaviour remains a “significant problem”. Pupils were temporarily barred from lessons 86,000 times for attacking teachers and classmates, while 3,440 suspensions were meted out for sexual misconduct.

Official figures show that large numbers of very young children were also excluded from state schools in England. Some 4,000 pupils aged just five or under were suspended in 2008/9, with a further 70 expelled altogether.

But data from the Department for Education showed an overall drop in the number of children kicked out of lessons compared with a year earlier.

The disclosure will fuel claims that schools are reducing the number of suspensions following the introduction of rules by Labour requiring them to educate pupils excluded for more than a week.

Ofsted has already warned that many secondary schools are giving children “managed moves” to other comprehensives to get around the policy.

The Coalition has pledged to crackdown on bad behaviour by introducing new powers to allow teachers to retain “control of the classroom”.

Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, said: “Despite the fall in exclusions, poor behaviour remains a significant problem in our schools. “Tackling poor behaviour and raising academic standards are key priorities for the Coalition Government,

“We trust teachers and that's why we have already announced a series of measures to put head teachers and teachers back in control of the classroom – including ending the rule requiring schools to give 24 hours written notice for detentions and increased search powers. “We will introduce further measures to strengthen teacher authority and support schools in maintaining good behaviour.”

According to figures, children were suspended 363,280 times last year – representing almost 4.9 per cent of the school population. In primary schools, 39,510 children were suspended. The average length of a suspension was two-and-a-half days and boys were three times more likely than girls to be punished. In all, 6,550 pupils were also permanently expelled from schools in England, compared with 8,130 a year earlier.

Physical assaults on fellow pupils were named as the main reason for fixed-period exclusions. Children were suspended 69,090 times for attacking peers, while a further 17,200 suspensions were made for assaulting staff. Pupils were barred on 93,000 occasions for threatening pupils and staff, while 3,440 suspensions were made for sexual misconduct, 8,580 for drug and alcohol use and 3,930 for racism.

SOURCE






Australia: Arrogant education bureaucrats upsetting parents in Victoria

PARENTS are losing patience with the failure of some principals and education bureaucrats to resolve festering disputes with schools.

Parents Victoria executive officer Gail McHardy said poor communication from some principals was traumatising mums and dads. "Schools are very quick to slap a trespass order on someone rather than actually deal with the problem, and that's not helpful," she said.

Ms McHardy said that though dispute resolution had vastly improved in the past few years, an independent commissioner was needed to resolve lingering complaints.

"It could be just a personality clash, but then that festers and gets bigger than Ben Hur. And it didn't need be," she said. "Often it's the result of the initial situation not being managed correctly and schools not getting appropriate support, like more welfare officers."

Cases reported to the Herald Sun include that of a Bendigo student who almost died in a car crash and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He was expelled for truancy and, despite intervention by the department, the school will not take him back.

Another mother complained to the ombudsman that an outer western suburbs school, and the department, had failed to properly address bullying of her daughter.

Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Brian Burgess said intervention orders against parents were a last resort. "In the main, complaints are handled well. But in a small number of cases we need to make sure that the communication is better and the response timely," he said.

Opposition spokesman Martin Dixon said parents' legitimate complaints were being smothered. Education Minister Bronwyn Pike said parents were given new advice last year on lodging complaints.

SOURCE





Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.


TERMINOLOGY: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.


The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed


Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.


Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor


I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.


Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".


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


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


A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.


Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.


Comments above by John Ray