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31 December, 2004

In defence of charter schools

Below are some excerpts from a big defence of charter schools on A Constrained Vision

"Amy Stuart Wells, professor at Teachers College of Columbia University and long-time critic of school choice, tries to dismiss those pesky charter schools once and for all. She blames those evil free-market conservatives and their "well-funded think tanks" for this loser of a reform movement.... Even ignoring her gratuitous swipes at think tanks, conservatives, and free markets, there are a lot of problems with Wells's analysis. Three major points.

One, if charter schools are so terrible, why are they expanding so rapidly? Like Wells says, the Center for Education Reform reports almost 700,000 students in 2,993 charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia; this year alone, 405 new charter schools opened. Either all those families have been brainwashed by the evil conservatives or they're stupid enough to send their kids to schools that are bad for them or they have found something about charter schools that they like better than public schools. Since we generally don't assume that people are brainwashed or stupid, this point is difficult for charter school opponents to address and Wells hasn't done it adequately.

Two, Wells misrepresents the recent research on charter schools. Contrary to Wells's quick dismissal of disagreement, the methods used in these studies are hotly contested--see, for example, Joanne Jacobs's summary, Eduwonk's round-up of reaction to the latest NAEP study and William G. Howell and Martin R. West's thorough trashing of the AFT study (just a taste: "[O]n a methodological level, the AFT analyses are sufficiently pedestrian to be laughable.")--but even if we all agreed that the methods were fine, Wells gets the punchline wrong! From the Department of Education's NAEP study:

[T]he mathematics performance of White, Black, and Hispanic fourth-graders in charter schools was not measurably different from the performance of fourth-graders with similar racial/ethnic backgrounds in other public schools.

In reading, there was no measurable difference in performance between charter school students in the fourth grade and their public school counterparts as a whole. This was true even though, on average, charter schools have higher proportions of students from groups that typically perform lower on NAEP than other public schools have. In reading, as in mathematics, the performance of fourth-grade students with similar racial/ethnic backgrounds in charter schools and other public schools was not measurably different.

Because charter school demographics are very different from those of public schools, it is not a fair comparison to look just at overall test scores, as Wells seems to do when she declares unequivocally that "charter schools performed more poorly than public schools on the same tests." When you look at similar types of students, charter schools and public schools perform about the same. Wells and other charter school opponents would probably point out that this is not the magic improvement that advocates promised, but why does that matter? Charter schools are cheaper than regular public schools, parents are happier with charter schools, and bad charter schools can go out of business, unlike regular public schools--if the charter schools aren't doing any harm, why not allow them to exist just for those advantages? Charter school opponents have the burden of proof to show that charter schools are actually harming students, and again, Wells has not met that burden.

Three, evaluating charter school performance is exceptionally difficult. From issues like the one above--what is the proper comparison group?--to nitty-gritty econometric debates, there is very little agreement about what are the proper methods. Given the demographic differences, it does seem wrong to compare overall charter school performance to overall public school performance, as Wells does, and it does seem wrong to look only at one year of data, as the studies she relies on do. And there are many more difficult issues that Wells does not seem to consider. Here's a sampling:

- Charter schools have very different purposes. Some promote studying the arts, some promote studying cultural heritage; some focus on at-risk students, some focus on academically gifted students. Is it right to lump all of these schools into one big study? One study that attempts to address this issue, the Manhattan Institute's "Apples to Apples: An Evaluation of Charter Schools Serving General Student Populations," puts it well: "[C]omparing targeted charter schools to regular public schools is like comparing apples and zebras." When the authors compare "apples to apples," they find that charter schools outperform similar public schools.

- Charter schools with different purposes have different goals. Charter school opponents are some of the same people who vehemently criticize standardized testing for being one-dimensional, yet they now rely on those supposedly one-dimensional tests to malign charter schools. What about evaluating charter schools on other dimensions, such as graduation rates, student discipline problems, parent satisfaction, teacher turnover? Furthermore, should a charter school whose mission is to help students succeed in the arts, for example, be judged on its test scores? Or should charter schools whose students are special education students or high-school dropouts or kids in the juvenile justice system be judged on their test scores?

- Charter school students are different from public school students, if for no other reason than that they chose to leave the public schools. What is that difference and how do we control for it? Without some reliable way to adjust for that difference, we are again comparing apples to zebras.

Evaluating charter schools is difficult, but the schools are clearly popular. They must be doing something right and we owe it to all students to find out what that is. We should study the issue dispassionately and not resort to political cheap shots. We should use the most careful analysis that we can and not rely on simplistic analysis just because it is easy."



Judicial obstructionism again: "In a ruling the dissent characterized as driving 'a semi-truck' through a 'small window' in the U.S. Constitution, the full 1st District Court of Appeals in Florida on November 12 struck down the state's five-year-old Opportunity Scholarship program, ruling it violated a provision in Florida's Constitution barring public funds being used to aid any religious institution. ... Although they will be able to continue in their choice schools while the ruling is appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, the breadth of the appeals court decision places a cloud not only over the future of the Opportunity Scholarship program, but also over similarly funded post-secondary scholarship programs ..."

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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.

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

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30 December, 2004

PRIVATE PROGRAM MAKES A DIFFERENCE

Plugging a few holes in a leaky boat

As a student at New York University, Ruth Zemel dreamed of finding a job that would enable her to change the world. Three years later, she stands in front of a class of high school students in one of Washington's most underprivileged neighborhoods, teaching them mathematics. "I have homeless students, students who have been abused, students who need to take time off to translate for their parents, students who work 40 hours a week on top of school to help support their families," Zemel said.

Zemel is one of 3,000 teachers recruited under the Teach for America program working in some of the nation's poorest and toughest urban and rural schools this year. The private non-profit program seeks to mobilize talented and idealistic young people for two-year teaching stints, but over 60 percent choose to stay in education after their commitment is done. "We've found it is possible to go into a school and create a learning culture in the classroom and it is within a teacher's power to foster success," said Wendy Kopp, who came up for the idea of Teach for America when she herself was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 1989. The program has proved highly popular; only 14 percent of the 13,500 applicants last year were accepted. The program is expanding to 3,800 teachers next fall.

At Bell Multicultural Senior High School where Zemel is teaching, almost two-thirds of the students are Hispanic and another 25 percent are black. Assistant principals Darry Strickland and Dahlia Aguilar both started as Teach for America corps members and continued in education. "Part of my passion now comes from when I saw what was happening to black and brown kids, kids who are poor and those for whom English is a second language," said Strickland. "I fell in love with youth -- with my ghetto kids."

Racial disparities have long been one of the biggest problems facing the U.S. education system. By the fourth grade, students in low-income areas are already three years behind their peers in reading and mathematics. A new book by Harvard University education and social policy professor Gary Orfield finds that only half of minority students in the United States graduate from high school, a figure that is often disguised in official statistics. Among males, the figure is even lower. Orfield said many urban high schools had become "dropout factories" with devastating effects on both students and their communities.

Zemel said among her students truancy was a constant problem. "I do everything in my power to get them here. I always try to convey to my students how important it is for them to be here every day," she said. She raised money from a private donor to pay 10 students $8 an hour to tutor fellow students after school hours and has organized a college trip for nine outstanding students to tour campuses in New York. "We do activities showing how much more money people make if they have gone to college. These kids have the same talent as more privileged ones, but their skills are lower than they should be," Zemel said.

Despite their youth and lack of experience, Teach for America members produce higher test scores among their students than other teachers in the same schools, according to an independent study released last June. As for Zemel, she is staying at Bell for a third year. "It's a surprise to me. I didn't intend to stay in education but now I'm here, I can't see how I can leave," she said.

Source



Must try harder: Confederation of British Industry reports on school standards

THE CBI demanded a renewed government effort yesterday to improve the teaching of English and mathematics after it calculated that two million students have left school with poor skills since Labour came to power. It said that schools should be set a tough new target requiring them to get at least 70 per cent of teenagers to pass GCSEs in English and maths at grade C or better by 2007.

Digby Jones, the CBI's Director-General, said that schools were letting down 130,000 pupils a year by failing to reach this standard. Only 46 per cent of school-leavers have gained at least a grade C in both subjects on average since 1997. The employers' organisation said that this meant that two million students had left school with inadequate levels of literacy and numeracy since Tony Blair took office. Many of them faced a future of unemployment or low-paid work because they could not read, write or add up properly. Mr Jones called on Ruth Kelly, the new Education Secretary, to set the target in a government White Paper expected early next year in response to the Tomlinson report.

Mike Tomlinson, the former Chief Inspector of Schools in England, has proposed replacing GCSEs and A levels with a diploma for students aged 14 to 19.

The CBI opposes the reform, which is predicted to take a decade to implement, because it argues that schools will be distracted from the more pressing task of raising standards of literacy and numeracy. "Business is yet to be convinced that reforming the exam system is the best way to improve basic skills. It wants assurances that reform will change what young people achieve, not just what qualifications are called," Mr Jones said. "The school system must produce people ready for the world of work in the context of a fiercely competitive globalised 21st-century economy. That means the right attitude, an appetite for hard work and at least being able to read, write and count. Our goal is higher standards, not new structures."

The CBI plans to publish its own "basic skills action plan" in the new year, setting out ways to achieve the target.

This will include a call for ministers to extend the literacy and numeracy strategy from the early years of secondary school to cover pupils aged 14 to 16. The CBI said that the strategy should tell teachers what to teach and how best to go about it. "High skill levels are the greatest protection that any of us can have from the challenges of globalisation. That's why it's so worrying that so many youngsters are being condemned to a low-skilled poorly paid future," Mr Jones said. "My fear is that many who cannot read, write or add up properly will find themselves unemployable and the problem is only going to worsen. "This is a scandal but it is not a new scandal. It's not a problem that has been created by this Government. Indeed, ministers have done a lot to chip away at the problem since 1997. But let's be honest, no political party has cracked this one." He said that the CBI intends to make basic skills a key theme of its lobbying with all parties in the run-up to the general election, expected in May. "Business is not interested in the blame game or excuses. What we want is action with cross-party support. Let's get together as a nation, put the illiterate and innumerate at the top of the agenda, and produce tangible results."

The move comes after a CBI survey showed that 47 per cent of companies were unhappy about the level of school leavers' basic skills. A spokesman at the Department for Education and Skills said: "The Tomlinson report proposed that all young people acquire basic skills in literacy, numeracy and ICT as part of a new diploma qualification for 14-19 year olds. The Government will respond in the new year."

Source

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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.

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

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29 December, 2004

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND INTO THE FIRE

Thousands more British students are applying to American universities as generous scholarships and top-quality facilities compete with British institutions. With the introduction of university top-up fees in 2006, the US Education Advisory Service (USEAS) says that inquiries from British students have risen sevenfold.

America has more world-class universities than any other country, with 17 in the top 20, according to the annual table compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong university. Britain has the next highest, with Oxford and Cambridge in the top 20. "We can't ignore the introduction of fees to British institutions because, regardless of how much they are, we hear students saying that if they are going to pay, they might as well look at all the options," Anthony Nemecek, director of the USEAS, said. "We've seen a significant rise in interest and we anticipate an astronomical growth next year. Normally we have around 1,800 students attending our open day, this year it was 3,500." Overall more than 350,000 have registered on the USEAS website or called for advice. Next autumn the Fulbright commission is holding fairs in Edinburgh and London to attract British school-leavers.

Although a year at an Ivy League university costs on average more than $40,000 (20,650 pounds), compared with 6,500 pounds in Britain at the moment, Mr Nemecek said that a US degree is great value for students from poorer families. "Everyone has to fill out financial aid forms and, using a formula, universities determine what they consider a family can contribute," he said. "If that is just 200 pounds, that will often be all they pay."

In the past year 8,439 British students attended America's 4,000 universities and colleges. Overseas applications dropped by 28 per cent overall last year, but those from Britain rose by 1.5 per cent. The reasons are simple, according to tutors and students. Three quarters of American universities are private, so the market is competitive and each is under pressure to offer the best facilities and tuition. Also, students have to choose which subjects they "major" in only at the end of the second year.

Chris Conway, a university adviser at Shrewsbury school, said that there is also a perception that standards are falling in Britain. "There is a lot of concern among parents about discrimination, even if we don't see it . . . and a distinct unease about the standards at British universities," he said. Above all, several top institutions offer means-tested scholarships to students who have achieved the academic entry requirements.

Oxford University will pay 6 million pounds annually in bursaries from 2006, but Harvard will distribute $80 million in "direct need-based scholarships" this year alone. Around half of Harvard's students receive some sort of financial aid, which on average amounts to $28,000. The standard cost of attending Harvard based on tuition fees, books and living expenses is estimated to be $42,450. Families earning less than $40,000 pay nothing towards college costs. That compares with Oxford, where students whose parents earn up to 22,499 pounds a year receive 3,000 pounds in their first year and 2,600 pounds in subsequent years.

Source



There is an excellent cartoon here that sums up the curriculum at many American universities.

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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.

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

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28 December, 2004

REGULATORS BLOCK PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Nine years ago, Karen Feltch lined up overnight and slept on the sidewalk to get her 3-year-old daughter, Katie, into Friends Christian School in Yorba Linda. Katie is now in the seventh grade and hopes to attend a brand new Friends Christian High School, initially projected to open in 2006. Unfortunately, delays caused by the government's unrelenting regulatory process, especially the required environmental study and myriad of permits, mean the new high school may not be finished on time - or finished at all.

The trouble building this high school is just one example illustrating the findings in a new Reason Foundation study: State and local government restrictions are discouraging the construction of new private schools and driving up tuition prices at existing schools.

With more and more parents seeking alternatives to failing public schools, many private schools are filled to capacity, offering long waiting lists and increasingly high tuition prices - the result of high demand and low supply. But entrepreneurs interested in launching new private schools are guaranteed to be engulfed in red tape and bureaucracy. For example, Michael Leahy, founder of the Alsion Montessori Middle/High School in Fremont, estimated that the natural cost of building his school was $400,000, but the total cost came to about $1.2 million because of numerous regulations, like the one requiring that he install a red tile roof.

Ray Youmans, president of Innovative Component Groups Inc. in Sacramento, explained that he hoped to build a 10,000-square-foot roof on a school property, simply a structure without walls, to protect the area from the rain and sun. The government required his company to install a $40,000 sprinkler system even though the structure was made entirely of steel and had no chance of catching fire.

The construction of Friends Christian Church High School should have been straightforward. In 2003, the city of Yorba Linda agreed to lease about 32 acres of public land to the Friends Christian School system for the construction of a 1,200-student high school campus. The lease, projected to generate $80 million for Yorba Linda over 50 years, also allows the city to utilize the private school's facilities for community use. When the lease was signed, the church was expected to make a $400,000 payment by June 2004. However, regulatory roadblocks have pushed the payment back to June 2005. And as a result, the City Council says it will reassess the value of the property and may consider alternative proposals for the land (though council members say they still support the school).

What's the holdup? The initial environmental impact study alone examined more than 80 specific impacts, such as whether the high school would have an adverse impact on the scenic vista, have an adverse impact on federal wetlands, result in an increase in the ambient noise level, or result in inadequate parking capacity. Once those questions are answered to the government's satisfaction, the final report still must be signed off by the California Department of Fish and Game, the local Regional Water Quality Control Board and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Fostering a competitive education market, where private schools can flourish and expand the options for the many children who desperatelyneed them, requires legislators to act. Vouchers have long been debated in California. But even if the state ever awarded vouchers, there wouldn't be anywhere near enough private schools to handle the demand.

At the local level, zoning, parking and building codes, and environmental requirements must be reassessed for merit and streamlined. A performance-based system would replace land-use restrictions with specific performance standards requiring schools to meet guidelines for things such as drainage controls, density, floor area and so on. An approach designed to deal with real and measurable impact would require fewer regulations and less paperwork, resulting in a faster and simpler approval process.

Right now, state and local regulations ensure that many entrepreneurs shy away from even attempting to build or open new schools. The process also guarantees that all school construction, even public school construction (think of Los Angeles' Belmont Learning Center's nearly $300 million price tag), is more expensive and takes longer than necessary.

Parents like Linda Feltch are willing to sleep on sidewalks to get their children into a limited number of private schools. If Feltch's daughter, Katie, doesn't get to attend the new Friends Christian High School because regulators made it impossible for the church to finish the school, it will be one more example of a miserable educational system failing students and parents.

Source



HOW TO GUARD AGAINST QUACK HISTORIANS

"History is supposed to deliver more than a fanciful tale. The average person who picks up a history book on any topic expects to find within its pages some modicum of truth. That is what sets history apart from fiction. It is a reasoned reconstruction of past events based upon a dispassionate reading of evidence. As a result, people expect to be able use history to make real time, real world decisions.

Unfortunately, some historians have rejected this approach. For them, the spread of the Postmodern Movement transformed historical inquiry. Every form of Postmodernism is based, at some level, on relativism, the idea that there is no knowable, objective truth. In terms of historical study, this means that there is no evidence that can be called true, nor can historians separate themselves from their work and think objectively.

The result is that these newer historians have stopped trying to do good history, and have moved on to promote personal agendas through their work. Since they believe that no evidence is true, it doesn't matter how they use it. For instance, Bellesiles referenced sources destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Are they bothered by the fact that they approach their subjects with preconceived notions that they refuse to test? Certainly not. According to them, objectivity is impossible to attain. So, many newer histories dealing with race or gender, for instance, begin with the unchallenged premise that in any given situation, discrimination has already occurred, no matter what the evidence might say.

The trouble comes to a head when these authors deal with the public. Postmodern historians bank on the well-deserved reputation their more sensible colleagues built and maintain. Though postmodernists themselves know that their work is anything but tested and objective, they allow the public to assume it is. The result? Readers devour a book that in reality is nothing more than creative opinion, and then treat it as the gospel truth of history.

It is only a matter of time before Postmodern history collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Until that happens, how should we approach history tainted with falsehood? Some basic philosophical commonsense will serve admirably:

1. Ask questions about the author(s). Who are they? Have they written other books? How do they approach the topic? Are there any ideas they are presuming that we should know about? For instance, books by vocal political advocates should be taken with stock in a salt mine.

2. Ask questions about the content. How do they support their arguments? Be certain to use known facts to critically examine their claims. Do their conclusions actually follow from their evidence? Is the book internally coherent? An amazing number of sloppy historians never bother to think through their own positions. Book reviews can be very helpful. Townhall.com maintains a good selection of conservative reviews.

3. Read the footnotes carefully. Are they quoting from firsthand accounts or another historian's book? Do they seem to lean heavily on one particular source? If a book does not provide easy access to sources, it may have something to hide.

4. Read the Preface, Introduction, and Conclusion carefully. Authors are much more open in these sections, and let the readers see a little of their minds (in some cases, a lot). Paying particular attention here will often alert you to danger, as well as reinforcing the point of the entire work.

Of course, the short answer is to read and think carefully about all important truth claims. This habit is more useful now than ever before; when some scholars refuse to think, it is up to the reader to do it for them.

More here

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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.

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

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27 December, 2004

SECURITY EDUCATION NOT ALLOWED

Furious students and faculty members at the Borough of Manhattan Community College are demanding that the school abandon plans for a certificate program on security management. They view it as an endorsement of the Bush administration's Department of Homeland Security. Like hundreds of other community colleges across the nation since the September 11 attacks, the two-year CUNY school in Lower Manhattan is hoping to take advantage of the surging demand for security training. The school's faculty proposed a program in May that would teach students about threats to homeland security and how to counter them. At a school where the student government headquarters is decorated with a poster of a tortured Abu Ghraib prisoner and another that calls President Bush a "madman," some students and faculty members have reacted to the proposed program with intense suspicion. While those who proposed the program argue that it will offer BMCC students sought-after skills to help them find jobs in the security industry, critics say the program is an oppressive outgrowth of the Department of Homeland Security.

At a meeting Wednesday of the faculty council, tempers flared, according to those who were present, as faculty members shouted questions at the designer of the proposed program, Elinor Garely, a professor in the business management department. The student government is handing out a "fact sheet" on the program with the header: "Stop BMCC 'Homeland' Repression Program Now!" "Faculty members point out that if BMCC becomes known as 'Homeland Security U,' this will intimidate and drive away many present and potential students, especially immigrants," the leaflet states. The president of the student government at BMCC, Jason Negron, said the proposal is "a very scary issue that students are very, very against." He said if the program were to be instituted, students would be exposed to "a lot of right-wing views" and about "a lot of things that other countries have done to America without giving the other side of the story." He said it was the "progressive" faculty members who voiced opposition to the proposal at Wednesday's meeting.

One of the courses proposed for the new certificate program, "Terrorism and Counterterrorism," provides an overview of guerilla warfare, hostage situations, and profiles of terrorists and their organizations. Another course, "Homeland Security," would invite a representative from the New York State Office of Homeland Defense to speak to students and would cover such topics as "The new strategy to secure cyberspace, ""Analysis and discussion of safety and security concerns in high-rise buildings after 9/11," and "How to protect the organization from outside investigators." The proposed curriculum also includes courses on "Travel, Tourism, and Hospital Security," "Crime Prevention through Environmental Design," "Legal and Ethical Issues in Security Management," and "Employment Trends in Security Management." The proposal anticipates first-year enrollment at 35 to 40 students.

It could take months before the college approves the certificate program. After the CUNY central administration reviews it, the proposal would be returned to the faculty for final approval. The senior vice president for academic affairs at BMCC, Sadie Bragg, said the administration at the college has listened to the concerns of those who are objecting to the proposal. "Their concerns will be voiced," she said.

It appears the program has the support of the administration. BMCC's president, Antonio Perez, asked the department of business management to devise a security program, Ms. Garely said. Mr. Perez is a member of a task force that the American Association of Community Colleges recently established to help develop programs related to homeland security at community colleges across the country. Mr. Perez did not return calls from The New York Sun yesterday for comment.

Ms. Garely said the objective of the program is not to promote the Department of Homeland Security but to train students in skills that are in high demand in the workplace. "The need for safety-and-security education is part of every industry," she said. "Whether you look at cruise ships, shopping malls, corporate headquarters, every bank, they all have security," she said. Ms. Garely said the program is geared toward students who want entry-level security positions and to security employees who are seeking promotion. She said the 30-credit program could be transferred to fouryear degree programs offered at such schools as the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, also part of the CUNY system.

According to her proposal, about half of the students at BMCC are employed, with an average income less than $15,000. Ms. Garely said she was taken aback by the angry reaction to the proposal from faculty members, whom she encouraged to read the proposal. "I think that the discussion and viewpoints are what an academic process is about," she said. "That's why we have colleges, so people can speak out."

Source



WHAT THE CURRENT PUBLIC SCHOOLS DO NOT DO

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you love your children, do not leave them in public schools, unless you have absolutely no choice. If that is the case, make sure you instill in them a love of learning for its own sake. Spend time with them, reading, instead of watching the television or letting them spend all their time playing video games.

The public school system is not doing its job. Rather, it is doing it too well. Our public schools are not teaching our children, but that is not the purpose of the schools. Surprised I would say that? Don't be. Our schools have as their primary purpose indoctrinating our children in socialist obedience. Take a look sometime at some of the textbooks that are used in our schools. Many of them do not include a complete text of the Bill of Rights. Also, look at the lesson plans of the teachers. Is Patrick Henry's famous speech to the Virginia Legislature covered? If not, why not? Are our children taught that the War of Northern Aggression was all about slavery, or are they taught that there were myriad causes of that war, with slavery only a very minor issue, until near the end? Are they taught that the 'great emancipator' used a small army of slaves to remodel and refurbish the White House?

Are our children taught logic and history and philosophy? Are they taught how to analyze problems effectively, wtihout preconceptions? Are our children taught the immense number of connections between history, religion, sociology, geography, and science? Are our children taught why our Founders rebelled against England? Are they taught how tyrants come to power, so they can recognize the signs and take action against such, when or if it occurs? Are they taught why free enterprise is the most efficient economic system, with the greatest benefit for the greatest number, over the long run? Are our children taught how to read? How to obtain information that is freely available, in almost any public library, or on the internet? How to evaluate the data they recieve, so they can assign a value to it, integrate it into their world view?

Do the teachers really teach, or are they just passing along regurgitated crap, going along with the system? How many of them make learning fun, so that the children temporarily in their care want to learn? How many school administrators are petty tyrants, abusing their authority and office? For example, refusing to allow a teacher to give children a copy of the Declaration of Independence, because it mentions god? Or perhaps suspending a high spirited young girl for the stated reason that she does cartwheels? (the real reason was that the school administrator involved in this one said the girl was 'defying authority') Defying authority? Isn't that one of the reasons this country was founded? Washington defied improperly used authority. Jefferson defied improperly used authority. Martin Luther defied improperly used authority. Martin Luther King defied improperly used authority. Jim Bowie, David Crockett, and a host of others, they all became heroes for defying improperly used authority.

More here

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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.

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

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26 December, 2004

A STORY FROM THE LEFT-DOMINATED EDUCATIONAL JUNGLE

Some excerpts from a book introduction:

"In the chapters that follow, I will depict the fall of one particular school and the way in which the inherent structure of our public schools made its decline possible. The school in question is the one at which I have worked for the majority of my career. It is called the Eastlands Center (EC) and lies in a suburb that is just slightly north of the city of Chicago. The Eastlands Center is an alternative education facility that meets the needs of about 250 students who were referred to us by one of five general education high schools1 that directly fund our operations. Around 200 of these students are eligible for special education services and the rest are regular education students who were expelled or transferred to our facility due to disciplinary violations. All of our students have one thing in common, which is that they cannot reintegrate to their home schools without meeting general behavioral conditions and requirements. I first began working at Eastlands in August of 1998 and resigned my position in July of 2004.

My school was jokingly referred to as "Gangsta Island" by its employees, but we were no mere island. The individuals who staffed the building were the product of the same education schools that have produced teachers all over the land. Their training differed little from the training of the staff at your local primary and secondary schools. Our staff was exposed to the same contemporary fads and trends that that are now all the rage in facilities across the nation. They never received a segregated "alternative education." Indeed, most of the characters I discuss never even specialized in special education. They are general educators who found themselves as special educators through the transfer or hiring process. Finding teachers with all the right credentials is no small trick, and administrators often have to hire under-qualified personnel just to ensure that there are bodies in the classroom. It used to be that these general educators were allowed to take a few classes and receive "a letter" from the state which allowed them to teach disabled students. Nowadays, they are required to do much more in order for the school to be classified as possessing properly certified personnel.

Since 2000, our own district discovered that a lethal combination of rampant spending and declining tax revenues has placed it firmly in the fiscal red to the tune of ten million dollars per annum. Its solution, although it took them awhile, was to begin cutting programs and staff. We were targeted along with the general education buildings. Every time, the proposed budgetary reductions started out as being very severe, yet, every time, the cuts eventually were reduced to a miniscule amount. This was due to the fact that the high schools quickly found that they couldn't live without us. Last year one teacher was laid off but come November, he suddenly reappeared in his classroom with a fresh group of students before him. Our regular education program is a frequent target for eradication, as it doesn't bring in reimbursement dollars from the state. In February of 2004 it was considered doomed, but by May of 2004, it was restored. In this era of zero tolerance, school principals and deans simply cannot survive without the services offered by an alternative school. How often have I heard, "What would they do with these kids without us?" It is a crucial question, as the home schools have little stomach for arsonists, thieves, batterers, and drug pushers congregating in their hallways. I firmly support the proposition that schools like ours are here to stay. Alternative schools are growing and they'll be in the news more and more in the decades to come.

Another challenge to Gangsta Island's universality is the character of Principal Chin. I readily admit that it is extremely rare to have someone with a full-blown personality disorder working as a principal in the public schools. She is comical, cruel, and unusual, but undeniably she is an aberration. I wish I could state that she is a figment of my imagination, but any of ten employees she ran out of our building this year would avidly testify that she is not. In my nine year career, I have worked under seven other principals, and they in no way were ever, even for a brief period, ever as dysfunctional as Mrs. Chin. Yet, while she stands in notable contrast with most of her administrative peers in the United States, the way in which she was protected by the bureaucrats above her is indicative of much that is wrong in contemporary education, because in countless situations around the country, the educational elite polices itself, which often means that there is no policing at all.

Several sources have thoroughly documented the deficiencies present in today's teachers and also in the teacher unions that represent them, but few address the psychology of the mediocre nobility that oversees the empire. This book showcases a tandem of administrators whose sole goal is to protect their jobs regardless of the harm they inflicted upon students or staff. While such a blatant refusal to act in the interests of others is undoubtedly abnormal, the fact is that, due to the lack of overseeing legal authorities, there is practically no one for whom insiders can appeal when administrators chose to deny that a Chernobyl has transpired on their watch. In the case of school, we were not directly subject to the purview of a school board, as our building was monitored by a gaggle of superintendents who had their own school boards with which to contend. It was highly unlikely that any of the parents on their boards had students at the Eastlands Center, so there would be no reason why any members would take even a casual interest in the specifics of what went on at our location. Yet, even in the case of school boards that represent non-alternative schools, it is sometimes difficult for them to know exactly what is going on behind closed doors. They rely on information that is relayed to them via the administrators who are seated before them during school board meetings, and if they wish to cover up something, it is not very hard for them to do so.

In this story, what is unswervingly transferable to the rest of the educational world is the unaccountability of our managers and leaders. As admittedly absurd as the character of Principal Chin is, what should most appall the average reader is that no one above her seeks to censure or reprimand her for any of the outrageous acts she commits. Her superiors made excuses for her at every opportunity and minimized the severity of the vendettas she directed towards staff. Nearly any person off the street could easily point out that running a couple of motor vehicles in an enclosed gymnasium in the presence of 250 children is a feat of criminal negligence (at the very least) and that Chin's choosing to bring an assault rifle to school as a present for another administrator was "a lawsuit waiting to happen." Yet, our magnates could not be bothered to supervise an individual whose history would enrich many a trial lawyer. In their minds, I suppose the fact that the district has its own legal protections and insurance in place dissuaded them from having to take a personal interest in the unbalanced behaviors of their prot‚g‚. Precious few individuals who I've met have ever worried about being sued personally.

In the chapter "Denial as Religion," we witness the supremos above Chin possessing a plethora of facts and testimony at their fingertips regarding her failures, but they consciously choose to disregard it in its entirety. Why would such highly educated adults purposely evade the truth? I would suggest three reasons. First, if you deny that a problem exists then, by definition, there is absolutely no need to address it because there is nothing for you to address. A second factor is plain and simple human greed. Our directors made over 100 grand every year and were as fat and happy as they could possibly be, so the last thing they would do is risk throwing it all away by uncovering the snake that they had accidentally deposited in the garden they were supposed to be tending. Mr. Ichada is the perfect embodiment of this kind of corrupt mentality. Many individuals are simply pleased to have their own office, but Jorge Ichada inhabited his own building, and it luckily placed him far away from us on the other side of the compound. It was a submarine without a periscope, and that was the way he liked it. A third and final justification for inaction regarding Chin was that she was one of them. She was an administrator, and as such had to be defended. It was not out of love for Louis XVI that the monarchies of Europe waged war against revolutionary France. It was due to their realization that when one dynasty falls, every royal domain is imperiled. Our aristocracy told everyone and anyone who'd listen to them that they were caring, "progressive educators," but, in the final analysis, they had no interest whatsoever in changing a thing. When it became more and more obvious to even disinterested observers that our principal had a bad case of sanity tremens, the ruling cabal sought to defend her against all foes because, if they didn't by that point, then people would wonder what kind of supervision they were performing for the first two years of her reign. Their habitual avoidance and denial of problems is yet another reason why this tale should resonate across educational circles.

Gangsta Island surveys the fall of an alternative school, and the events and characters within it are factually based and not fictitious props that enable the author to prove his point. The fact is that I have few intractable theorems to share regarding public education. My suggestions and solutions are often quite specific, and even when they are not, my tone is never strident. This topic is not like some of the broad-based political topics I mention above. It is apparent that we must work towards bettering the public schools. In my mind there are no simple, magical solutions-i.e., voting for my candidate will not solve the problems of public education. I know of no single partisan answer to the drama that will soon be laid out before you. This tale is true, and while there are lessons to be learned, those lessons do not include always voting for the Republican Party (although I would appreciate it if you did).

Earlier I mentioned the "prevailing sentiment" in education, and what I was referring to there is the reality that most of the educators I have known tend to associate themselves with the Democratic Party and would regard themselves as being "liberals." At one time I was no different from they. It was not until 2000 that I finally formally joined the side I was representing in spirit. Before then, I had voted for Democratic candidates in every election since I was first eligible to vote in 1988. I did so because my mother and father were Democrats and because, at an early age, it was explained to me that Democrats wanted to help the poor while Republicans only wanted to help the rich. This was something I learned from my father, who probably first heard it from his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That such a grotesque, fallacious view could remain entrenched in my mind for so many years is absolutely related to my never taking the time to listen to what the opposition was saying. Had I ever done so, I would have probably joined the GOP many years earlier.

I have found that numerous people in education are cognizant of their own political views but are ignorantly blissful as to what others believe. Without knowing what is thought on the other side of the hill, it is all too easy to paint others as extremists or caricatures. I recall being in a Counselors' meeting in December of 2000 and hearing a social worker exclaim, "I sure hope Al Gore wins because if he doesn't, the schools are in big trouble." I asked her why she thought so and she said that George Bush was going to de-fund education. Ironically, between the time he took office and February of 2004, President Bush has increased federal education outlays to the tune of $533 billion. Indeed, Bush seems to allocate vast amounts of money to any federal program that winks or begs in his direction, but many of my peers are unaware of his big government tendencies because they don't read about the specifics.

Unfortunately, sometimes the political ideas of teachers find their way into the classroom. My friend Ari loves to tell the story about the time, while walking down the hallway where he works (Southern High School), that he overheard a teacher inform his class that "Democrats are for the little guy, whereas Republicans support the rich." It was the exact same advice that my father gave to me nearly 30 years ago, but, unlike my father, the teacher had an obligation to keep his biases to himself. Ari, of course, was tactful enough to not interrupt the teacher's class to rebut him, but did try to engage him in a dialogue at a later date.

More here:



CHARTER SCHOOLS VERY LIMITED

"About the same time TIMSS and PISA came out, two reports about charter schools were released. The more prominent of the two was a National Assessment of Educational Performance (NAEP) study, which showed fourth grade charter students performing slightly lower in math and reading assessments than their traditional public school peers -- not bad considering that charters attract students who've struggled in traditional public schools. None of the results, though, were terribly encouraging. Not even one third of students, either in charter or regular public schools, were proficient in math or reading.

In the second report, Harvard University economist Caroline Hoxby showed that elementary charter school kids were 5.2 percent more likely to be proficient in reading, and 3.2 percent more likely to be proficient in math, than children in the nearest public schools with similar racial compositions. Of course, the normal public schools had set a low bar for charters to clear. Despite the importance of these results, numbers can only tell us so much. In his remarks at the NAEP unveiling, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Eugene Hickok acknowledged this, and highlighted an unquantifiable characteristic of charters that sets them apart: a "sense of ownership," a dedication to a school and its mission that charter parents and students have because they've chosen the school.

Unfortunately, a "sense" of ownership is about as close to real ownership as charter schools are likely to get, because in almost every other respect, they are renters, not owners, and their landlord is out for blood. Charter schools can't even exist without the permission of their government landlords: state governments must pass laws permitting them, and once state governments have spoken, other entities must grant the charters. In many states, those other entities are public school districts, which are often charter schools' primary competition - and chief antagonists. In the 2002-03 school year, according to the Center for Education Reform (CER), almost 43 percent of charters were issued by local school boards, and another 28 percent by state boards. So charters often start with their necks already between Dracula's fangs, and they have the teeth marks to prove it: CER reports that on average, charters receive smaller per-pupil allotments than traditional public schools, and, unlike traditional public schools, often must pay for facilities with those funds. Moreover, hostile politicians are constantly threatening to force new standards on charters, to shrink them, or to shut them down completely.

Even under the current, dismal circumstances, many charter schools provide at least some refuge from failed traditional public schools. But that's as far as charters will be allowed to go. As long as the Dracula landlords retain control, and treat competition like so many cloves of garlic, choice will be hobbled, restricted to cash-strapped charter schools or even worse public schools. For truly powerful choice to occur, the dark forces must be circumvented. Parents must be able to select their child's school - charter, private, or traditional public - and schools must be free to operate without the permission of antagonistic landlords. In other words, parents must have real ownership.

More here

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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.

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25 December, 2004

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

To all those who come by here on this great day

And may all those who recognize Jesus as Lord always walk in his wisdom

JEFF JACOBY GETS IT RIGHT:

"Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney described education reform the other day as "the great civil rights issue of this century." That is shorthand for the appalling racial gap in learning, whereby the average black high school graduate reads and writes at the level of the average white 8th-grader. The problem has been vividly chronicled by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in their recent book "No Excuses," and there is little question that black academic unerachievement is a key impediment to racial equality. As long as blacks learn less than whites do, they will continue to accomplish less than whites do, and to earn less, and in many eyes to be regarded as less.

Still, I would disagree with Romney. The great civil rights cause of the 21st century is the same as it was in the 20th: the struggle for a colorblind society. Part of what sustains the wretched learning gap is the glaring double standard of affirmative action. So long as blacks aren't held to the same criteria as whites in the competition for jobs or admission to college -- so long as racial preferences mask the harm caused by the learning gap -- the demand for reform will never boil over. The truest key to black equality is what it has always been: an insistence on seeing each other first and foremost not as members of racial classes, but as individual human beings".

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A U.N. curriculum in local schools?

If you have a serious discussion with almost any public school teacher, principal, superintendent or trustee, you are likely to hear about the importance of local control and of protecting school curricula from outsiders who want to promote their particular set of values. Yet a new curriculum gaining steam nationwide, known as the International Baccalaureate program, confirms what critics of public schools have long suspected: a) educators embrace local control only when it suits them; b) they are more than willing to promote particular values, provided they are politically correct values.

IB is an international K-12 curriculum designed to promote world peace, multicultural understanding, environmental sensitivity, human rights and democracy. It sounds like inoffensive pabulum, but such lofty goals conceal troubling agendas. Instead of local control, the curriculum actually is devised by bureaucrats in Geneva, Switzerland, and Cardiff, Wales. Instead of guarding against outside agendas, school officials are inviting into their K-12 school systems a curriculum that, by its own admission, is not about academics but about changing worldviews and molding the minds of impressionable pupils.

There is much debate about IB, but a few things are unquestionably true. IB was originally funded and sponsored in part by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which was once so corrupt and anti-American in its advocacy that the United States withdrew its membership in 1984. Reportedly, UNESCO has improved itself, which has prompted renewed support by the Bush administration, but UNESCO's fundamental philosophy has never changed. IB programs are not academic. The goal is to promote the equality of all cultures, "sustainable" development and pretty much everything else you would expect from a UNESCO-related program. Check it out yourself at www.ibo.org ......

The Earth Charter (www.earthcharter.org) is radical stuff. It ignores the idea of property rights, promotes the notoriously corrupt United Nations as the key instrument of world peace, denounces the "dominant patterns of production and consumption," and promotes universal health care and the "equitable distribution of wealth." The IB curriculum and the Earth Charter are separate, but the charter gives you a good idea of the values that lie at the heart of the IB program. A lot of the IB curriculum is of the "be nice to your neighbor" variety. But a lot of the rest of it is propaganda.

The November issue of IB World magazine, for instance, includes a typical story of a primary school IB program. The students visited an animal sanctuary and took part in a debate organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature, in which they debated whether it is OK to keep animals in captivity. That's a politically charged agenda for grade schoolers, especially since they probably are not offered another side to the animal-rights story. Maybe this isn't that much worse than what kids are taught in U.S. public schools today - a point one Reagan administration official made in the Times article. But I'm astonished by the in-your-face social objectives of IB. Most troubling to me - and this is a fundamental IB doctrine - is the idea of the equality of all cultures.

I appreciate and respect most cultures. But all societies are not equal. America is better than Swaziland, where the life expectancy hovers around 40, or North Korea, which is run by a totalitarian cabal, or Iran, with its fundamentalist Islamic political and legal system. Those nations that value individual freedom are far better and more successful than those that enforce sharia or coddle dictators. Why should kids be taught anything else but that unvarnished truth?....

There's much to value in other cultures, much to be gained by understanding how other peoples view the world. I would never argue that the American perspective is always the right perspective, or that students ought to be indoctrinated with pro-American jingoism, or that problems in America should be sugar-coated or ignored. But students should not be taught that America is prosperous because of some geographic accident. The nation has succeeded because of the decisions of our founders, who created a Constitution that protects individual rights, private property, free markets, the rule of law and limited government.

Those are the true international values, likely to succeed in any nation where they are implemented. They are the values most likely to lead to the worldwide peace, harmony and prosperity that IB says it wants to advance. Why look to international bureaucrats for the right lessons, when they can be found so much closer to home?

More here

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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.

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24 December, 2004

CHARTER SCHOOLS HELPING NATIVE AMERICANS

Throughout Indian country, tribal officials are turning to charter schools as their best opportunity to reach a generation of Indian students who've dropped out or drifted through traditional public schools. Charter schools receive public money, but are free from many of the rules and restrictions that apply to other public schools. The idea is to encourage experimentation in education. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Education Reform, which tracks charter schools, counts at least 30 Indian charter schools in the country. Arizona has the most, with 12, followed by California with six. Indian charters have also opened in Minnesota and Michigan. Some have achieved results in a short time. The San Diego-area Barona Indian Charter School, for example, posted big gains in student performance on standardized test scores in the 2003-2004 school year, besting the state average.

But a tribal charter school was recently shut down after authorities had trouble with federal special education requirements and an audit, said Onnie Shekerjian, who sits on the Arizona State Board for charter schools.

Still, more Indian charter schools are in the planning stages, including a school in Alaska. Besides the standard curriculum it would offer "hunting, harvesting, building canoes, berry-picking - all different activities to reinforce native culture," said Sharon McConnell Gillis, executive director for the Doyon Foundation, one of the groups working on the proposal.

In Oregon, the idea for Nixyaawii Charter School had floated among the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation for more than a decade before the tribe decided this year to seek charter status. Principal Annie Tester was brought on board in July and hired her three teachers in August, only a month before the start of school, housed in a community center. Forty-eight students showed up for the first day of class. In the first few months at Nixyaawii (pronounced Nick-yah-we), a group of teenagers has emerged as a linchpin, helping to hold together a school on which the hopes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation rest. "We have to learn how to govern ourselves," said the group's de facto leader, 20-year-old Jess Stone. "You guys are leading by example. You have to lead yourself before you lead others."

Some come from high poverty families and have relatives who have battled with alcoholism and drugs, Tester said. Others have been tuning school out since junior high, one reason officials are hoping to eventually add seventh and eighth grades. The school emphasizes Indian culture. Students learn traditional beadwork and basketry in art classes, discuss native fables in English and, instead of Spanish or German, are getting instruction in the almost-lost Indian languages spoken by their ancestors.

Teachers are trying to emphasize learning through group projects, rather than the more traditional method of a teacher lecturing while students take notes. But teachers say there are too many times when students doze off in class, leave to get a drink of water and don't come back, or turn in an assignment weeks late. "We are doing a lot of unlearning before we learn," said Tre Luna, who teaches social studies at Nixyaawii, his first full-time job. Even some students say classroom behavior needs more work.

But Eddie Simpson, an 18-year-old born on the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, reservation said he's determined to get his remaining high school credits and graduate. He wants to train to be an EMT and sees Nixwaayii as his last, best chance. "If I don't do this, what's there for me?" Simpson asked. Tester and others said Nixyaawii's first year is a work-in-progress. After this year, she said, staff will know where their students stand and where they need to improve. At the start and end of each day, students and teachers gather in a circle for announcements and to talk about the day ahead or the day gone by. There's a perceptible weariness among students and teachers at the end of the day. "Even with the chaos today, it was a good day," teacher Luna told the students. "To those of you who had patience and stuck it out, thank you."

More here



Let The Market Work!

All colleges have classes where the demand for the course is greater than the available supply. Sometimes the constraint is material (no rooms big enough), other times it is related to the instructor (who doesn't want to grade more than 30 exams, or who knows from experience that a seminar of 12 people is the optimum size for a particular topic). The mechanisms that schools use to deal with these shortages vary in effectiveness and fairness, but always end up making people unhappy.

Professor Bainbridge half-jestingly suggests in these cases - open the process up to bidding, and let the high bidders into the class.

I think this is a fine idea. When I worked as a peon in the Records office at UCCS (which also handled registration), wait lists and staggered registration dates/times were a constant source of complaints and unhappiness. "But I have to get into this class!" was heard more frequently in our office than just about any other complaint. Of course, there's justification there - some people who didn't make it in really do need the class to graduate, while others are just taking it on a lark.

My suggestion was always the same: trash the wait lists and trash the staggered registration dates. Issue every student $1000 in registration scrip and let them bid for their class placement. (Give seniors $1500 instead of $1000 so that they have an edge over people who have more flexibility.) And then - this is key - sell additional scrip. Use the scrip revenue to fund scholarships, or long-deferred physical plant maintenance, or whatever problem area you currently have. If every student at UCCS bought $100 worth of scrip every semester to jockey for position, we'd pull in a million five per year.

Is such a system fair? If you really absolutely positively have to get into a class, then obviously it's worth more to you. Under the system of computer-assigned dates and random numbers, the fact that your desire or need for something is huge has no bearing on whether or not you get into the class. Under a market system, it does. The people who really didn't need the class will bid low, and not purchase extra scrip; the people who really do need it will bid high. We know that markets work; we should let them work in academia, too.

Source

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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.

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

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23 December, 2004

MORE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK CREDENTIALS

When first-year students at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, receive their grades, they may see As or Bs, even if their academic performance doesn't merit it. Under Success Equals Effort (SEE), a controversial new grading policy, freshman grades at the historically black university are calculated on a 60-40 formula: effort counts for 60%, academic performance for only 40%. In their second year, the formula is 40-60. Only in their third junior year will students be judged strictly on academic performance.

The SEE programme, which is being scrutinised by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges, was introduced a year ago by Benedict's president, David Swinton, who went to Harvard himself, but insists that incoming students lack the study habits and other skills necessary to succeed. It has caused an uproar among faculty members, and alumni too have wondered whether the quality of their own degrees will be questioned.

The fuss about the SEE policy has crystallised worries about black education in general (blacks score lower in normal exams than whites and Asians) and about "historically black" universities in particular. Benedict College is one of 105 such institutions that educate some 300,000 students. Many of them were founded in the South in the late 19th century to serve black students banned from attending segregated state universities. Martin Luther King, Spike Lee and Toni Morrison all attended black colleges. They may account for only 2% of America's student population, but they award a quarter of all bachelor's degrees given to blacks.

Black universities are still around 90% black.... Black colleges often take on students who might not otherwise go to university. Such students are often not just poorer, but need more time to achieve a degree. At North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, only a quarter of the students who entered in 1992-99 had graduated after four years. When such students leave, they tend to be more in debt.....

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US education gets low grade on ALEC report card: "'Overall, the facts presented by this year's Report Card on American Education give us no cause for celebration. In fact, they confirm the same trend presented in past years' reports: increased spending without corresponding improvement in student performance. Over ten years have passed since the Goals 2000 agenda was proposed, and America has failed to reach these goals, despite increasing per-pupil expenditures by more than 50 percent over the past twenty years.' That is the sobering conclusion of the American Legislative Exchange Council's 11th edition of the Report Card on American Education: A State by State Analysis: 1981-2003, released in September 2004."

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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.

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

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22 December, 2004

A GOVERNMENT-RUN SELECTIVE SCHOOL IN AUSTRALIA

Selectivity provides good grades but the grades are achieved despite don't-care adminstration

One of NSW's oldest boarding schools, Hurlstone Agricultural High School, maintains "traditions of bullying and preferencing" where senior students claim privileges over younger ones, a Department of Education review has found. The presumed right of older boarders to the first use of facilities meant that younger students were "preferenced" out of using the laundry and "could not ensure basic hygiene". Supervising teachers had also turned a blind eye to boarders using alcohol and possessing pornographic material. In extreme cases parents had removed their children after receiving an inadequate school response to complaints of physical and psychological harm.

It is the second scathing assessment of the boarding house since May. The latest report suggests cutting the year 7 intake by one-third over the next six years to allow for "cultural change". The review of the government selective school in Glenfield, ordered in August by the department's director-general, Andrew Cappie-Wood, found Hurlstone's 947 students had excellent academic results despite teachers paying little attention to the wealth of student performance data available. "There appeared to be little use of data to improve programs or identify areas for improved teaching," the review said. Some subject faculties had a "particular resistance" to using value-added data, the standard measure of how schools improve students' results over their years of study. The review recommended a shake-up of the school's discipline, welfare and assessment policies and said teachers who wanted to leave should be given priority transfers.

Mr Cappie-Wood said the review was "signalling a change" needed in the school. Teachers who "don't feel comfortable with those changes" might take up the rare priority transfer option. "It clearly is stating that if Hurlstone is to maintain that proud tradition, then things are going to have to be done," Mr Cappie-Wood said yesterday. "But what comes through in talking to the kids is they feel the school is serving them well and they really like the school." He said the issues in the boarding house, which now accommodates 287 students, were "clearly a concern".

Parents complained to the review team of a lack of specialised teaching for gifted students and that too many students were taking the easier HSC subjects. Nevertheless, the academic results were "sound and above state average" for the School Certificate, HSC and other external tests. Hurlstone also compared well against a random sample of other selective school students. Mr Cappie-Wood said the lesson for all schools from the review was to make better use of student results data. These should also be shared with parents to build confidence and pride. "The diagnostic tools that are available are extremely good and getting better every year," he said.

The review found that a vicious student website discovered in July was not initially reported as a "critical incident", as required under departmental policy, because staff felt it was "the technological version of graffiti painted on walls". The website - the third set up by Hurlstone students in the past two years - named teachers as pedophiles, thieves and drunks, recommending that two be "executed" and another set alight

Source



BORED EDUCATORS

This is the best explanation that I have yet heard for the criminal way literacy is mostly taught -- or not taught -- these days

My old guitar teacher has a saying: "You can educate yourself into boredom."... What he means is that you can study the classical guitar repertoire so thoroughly and for so many years that you simply become bored with it.... The same phenomenon may explain why so many education professors (and hence public school teachers) gravitate towards trendy educational methods that deny children a good foundation in reading. Not necessarily because of ill-will, stupidity, or ignorance. Boredom is the thing to look for.

As Professor Plum (a pseudonym for an education professor at a major university) writes on his blog, there is no mystery about how to teach children to read. What works is making sure that children are rigorously and systematically instructed in the basics: letter identification, sounding out phonemes (i.e., phonics), learning how to piece phonemes together into words, and then reading words that are progressively harder:

"[F]aced with quantitative data (1) from four different instruments; (2) measuring achievement (in math, reading, and spelling), self-esteem, and perceived control over one's own learning; (3) with tens of thousands of students; (4) in well over a hundred schools across the country; (5) comparing outcomes yielded by nine kinds of curricula, systematic and explicit instruction did the best for kids in the short-run and long-run. In stark contrast, the so-called child-centered, constructivist, wholistic, teacher-as-facilitator curricula actually worsened the percentile ranking of disadvantaged children in relation to the larger population. "The data meant nothing to the education establishment -- except as a threat."

Instead of settling on what demonstrably works, some education professors have pushed "whole language" instruction, in which children are taught to memorize the forms of whole words, rely on contextual cues, etc. But when they lack the ability to sound out individual letters and sounds, children inevitably run into difficulty whenever they face a word that they have not memorized wholesale. After all, it is hard to read entire words unless you are able to read their components: What six-year-old could distinguish between "phonograph" and "photograph" without sounding out each word's second syllable?

And yet, despite the obvious superiority of rigorous training -- whether in phonics or anything else -- successful methods are not always acknowledged. For example, consider the experience of a kindergarten-through-2d-grade school in Wisconsin: "Lapham [Elementary] bucked the Madison district's reliance on the Balanced Literacy reading program in favor of a grounding in explicit phonics for nearly all first-grade students. The results have been impressive. They have also been ignored." The results are indeed impressive: "In 1998, just 9% of Marquette black third-graders were considered 'advanced' readers, as measured on the third-grade state reading comprehension test; by 2003, 38% were 'advanced.'"

But why would such results be "ignored"? Why would the education establishment be reluctant to rely on something that works? In a word: Boredom. Professional educators have educated themselves into boredom with traditional methods. The tried-and-true methods of teaching children start to feel trite and routine, while newer methods seem more exciting, creative, and trendy -- even if ineffective. Plus, if you're an education professor who must "publish or perish," the most promising prospect is to come up with something new. (There is very little reward in academia for publishing yet another version of the same old thing that was found to work 40 years ago.)

But the purpose of education is not to satisfy education professors' desires for grand, tenure-worthy theories. Nor is the purpose to give teachers a chance to experiment with their own creativity. It would be far closer to the mark to say that education -- at least learning to read -- is about (1) finding a method that works, and then (2) repeating it ad nauseam for every group of children who come through the classroom. Similarly, any obstetrician does her best to deliver babies in a routine and normal fashion; she would never deliver a baby head first just because it was a creative thing to do.

It's a sad state of affairs when educators have become bored with the very methods that are effective. At least when classical composers become bored with beauty and write a piece whose raison d'etre is trendiness, the worst that can happen is that people refuse to listen to it. But when educators reject an effective method because they think it is too mundane or boring, their choice of new and unproven methods can ruin people's lives. As Martin Haberman of the University of Wisconsin notes, "Miseducation is, in effect, a sentence of death carried out daily over a lifetime. It is the most powerful example I know of cruel and unusual punishment and it is exacted on children innocent of any crime."

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21 December, 2004

CHEATING TEACHERS

Post lifted from Mahalanobis

High-stakes testing, like school choice, has become an increasingly prominent feature of the educational landscape. Every state in the country, except Iowa, currently administers state-wide assessment tests to students in elementary and secondary school. Federal legislation requires states to test students annually in third through eighth grade and to judge the performance of schools based on student achievement scores.

The debate over high-stakes testing traditionally has pitted proponents arguing that such tests increase incentives for learning and hold schools accountable for their students' performance against opponents who argue that the emphasis on testing will lead teachers to substitute away from teaching other skills or topics not directly tested on the exam. Along with Brian Jacob, I have written two papers that explore a very different concern regarding high-stakes testing -- cheating on the part of teachers and administrators. As incentives for high test scores increase, unscrupulous teachers may be more likely to engage in a range of illicit activities, such as changing student responses on answer sheets, or filling in the blanks when a student fails to complete a section. Our work in this area represents the first systematic attempt to identify empirically the overall prevalence of teacher cheating and to analyze the factors that predict cheating.

To address these questions, we once again turn to data from the Chicago Public Schools, for which we have the question-by-question answers given by every student in grades 3-7 taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) over an eight year period. In the first paper,(4) we develop and test an algorithm for detecting cheating. Our approach uses two types of cheating indicators: unexpected test score fluctuations and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom. Teacher cheating increases the likelihood that students in a classroom will experience large, unexpected increases in test scores one year, followed by very small test score gains (or even declines) the following year. Teacher cheating, especially if done in an unsophisticated manner, is also likely to leave tell-tale signs in the form of blocks of identical answers, unusual patterns of correlations across student answers within the classroom, or unusual response patterns within a student's exam (for example, a student who answers a number of very difficult questions correctly while missing many simple questions).

Empirically, we find evidence of cheating in approximately 4 to 5 percent of the classes in our sample. For two reasons, this estimate is likely to be a lower bound on the true incidence of cheating. First, we focus only on the most egregious type of cheating, where teachers systematically alter student test forms. There are other more subtle ways in which teachers can cheat, such as providing extra time to students, that our algorithm is unlikely to detect. Second, even when test forms are altered, our approach is only partially successful in detecting illicit behavior. We then demonstrate that the prevalence of cheating responds to relatively minor changes in teacher incentives. The importance of standardized tests in the ChiPS increased substantially with a change in leadership in 1996. Schools that scored low on reading tests were placed on probation and faced the threat of reconstitution. Following the introduction of this policy, the prevalence of cheating rose sharply in classrooms with large numbers of low-achieving students. In contrast, schools with average or higher-achieving students, which were at low risk for probation, showed no increase in cheating.

Our second paper on this topic(5) reports on the results of an unusual policy implementation of our cheating detection tools. We were invited by ChiPS to design and implement auditing and retesting procedures implementing our methods. Using that cheating detection algorithm, we selected roughly 120 classrooms to be retested on the Spring 2002 ITBS. The classrooms retested include not only cases suspected of cheating, but also classrooms that had achieved large gains but were not suspected of cheating, as well as a randomly selected control group. As a consequence, the implementation also allowed a prospective test of the validity of the tools we developed in our first paper on the subject.

The results of the retesting provided strong support for the effectiveness of the cheating detection algorithm. Classrooms suspected of cheating experienced large declines in test scores (on average about one grade equivalent, although in some cases the fall in mean classroom test scores was over three grade equivalents) when retested under controlled conditions. In contrast, classrooms not suspected of cheating a priori maintained virtually all of their gains on the retest. As a consequence of these audits and subsequent investigations, disciplinary action was brought against a substantial number of teachers, test administrators, and principals.



U.K. TAXPAYERS GET A BREAK

Note that nobody could point out where the usefulness in the criticized courses might lie

Charles Clarke, the education secretary, has continued his assault on the great subjects of academe by revealing that he regards medieval history as "ornamental" and a waste of public money. Not long after expressing the view that he didn't think much of classics and regarded the idea of education for its own sake as "a bit dodgy", Mr Clarke, who read maths and economics at King's College, Cambridge, went one further. "I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them," he said on a visit to University College, Worcester. He only wanted the state to pay for subjects of "clear usefulness", according to today's Times Higher Educational Supplement.

Michael Biddiss, professor of medieval history at Reading University and a former president of the Historical Association, said: "Perhaps Mr Clarke and his spinners at the DfES are hoping to inspire the band of political yahoos who, in making New Labour ever more illiberal, must feel increasingly tempted to parrot Khrushchev's lament that 'historians are dangerous people - capable of upsetting everything'." Gillian Evans, a Cambridge University medievalist, said: "With a philistine thug like that in charge ... we need to protect the jobs of all the historians of thought and all the wordsmiths we can."

A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "The secretary of state was basically getting at the fact that universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change."

Jane McAdoo, president of the Association of University Teachers, said: "I cannot believe that a secretary of state for education can ... have such a terribly narrow view of what education is."

Source

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20 December, 2004

FROM THE BEGINNING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS MAINLY BENEFITED THE TEACHERS

Excerpt from here:

If public schools and compulsory attendance laws did not lead to increases in attendance, then why advocate either one? Or maybe a better way of phrasing the question is to ask how a system of public and compulsory education would benefit the educators and politicians who advocated such a system.

One benefit of compulsion to teachers was hinted at above-to increase their salaries. An increase in demand leads to an increase in price, ceteris paribus. So an increase in the demand for education, whether natural or coerced, raises the price of an education. These new students have to be educated by someone. And since the education system is being funded by tax dollars rather than by the demanders themselves, it becomes much easier to increase salaries (regardless of competence).

So by making the school system public rather than private, teachers and administrators also insulate themselves from the wishes of students and parents-the ultimate consumers of education. This insulation from market forces solidifies the power of the elite group of educationists for years to come. The suppliers, not the demanders, choose the curricula, the textbooks, decide the certification process for teachers, etc. They run the whole show, and only have bureaucrats to please rather than consumers. Not only are bureaucrats easier to please since they don't spend their own money, but if the politician/bureaucrat needs information to placate angry demanders, to whom do they turn? The educationists, in the positions of power, have all of the "relevant" information.

And what of the bureaucrat-what does he get out of this system? Public education, with the added feature of compulsion, reduces the cost to politicians of making wealth transfers. The cost of making transfers is diminished by reducing the opposition to transfers. If politicians can reduce the cost of transferring wealth by reducing the opposition to them, then they can continue to authorize transfers to interested parties for a price.

Public education reduces opposition to wealth transfers by teaching students that redistribution, public works, and democracy are the American way. War and crisis increases the size of government. Public education tells us we need government all the time. Public education introduces the mantras of democracy to the young. Democracy keeps the two major parties in power, keeps their spoils flowing in, and tells us that intervention is okay because the majority voted for it.

The conclusion is that public schools and compulsory attendance laws benefit educators, administrators, and politicians more than citizens or their children. But one could draw deeper conclusions. Through the Mises Institute and other free market organizations, one can find books on the evils of all kinds of intervention and democracy, and how once instituted these evils begin to destroy us as individuals, then our families, and even society itself.

Public education is the glue that holds all of these ideas together. It is how these ideas are spread to society at large. Thus, one might argue that public education is the greatest evil of all, and that it must be struck down in one mighty blow before we begin to find ourselves as persons, families, and a people again.



REFRESHING HONESTY ABOUT DEGRADED EDUCATION IN UK

Teachers shriek

The government's targets for extra university places must not be met by increasing the numbers on "mickey mouse" courses, the higher education minister, Margaret Hodge, warned yesterday. Mrs Hodge tried to reassure traditionalists, but angered the National Union of Students, by condemning unnamed courses which she said had little intellectual content and were not related to employment needs. She promised that most of the expansion in higher education would come from an increase in new vocational-based foundation degrees, two-year courses below the level of traditional bachelor's degrees, now being studied by 15,000 students. She said she could see some universities teaching only vocational subjects.

Speaking at a seminar organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research in London, Mrs Hodge hailed early successes with foundation degrees, being phased in through extended pilots. She added: "Simply stacking up numbers on mickey mouse courses is not an acceptable way forward." She refused to "name and shame" courses, and in the past Mrs Hodge has defended media studies, which most critics usually cite, as getting graduates into employment. She told reporters later that a mickey mouse course was one "where the content is perhaps not as rigorous as one would expect and the degree itself may not have huge relevance to the labour market".

But in her speech Mrs Hodge linked the phrase to unpopular courses which she predicted would eventually be forced to close. She believed widespread publication of student surveys as part of the government's new quality assurance regime for universities would encourage students to vote with their feet. "Once we publish far more open data about the nature of courses and how they help you lead to a job and we are asking students to contribute towards the cost of their teaching, I think students themselves will ensure that what is offered by universities not just meets their aspirations but also meets labour market needs," she said.

At the seminar, Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, said no one would call engineering a mickey mouse subject, yet it was suffering from a shortfall in student numbers. Mrs Hodge said that was not what she had in mind. Mandy Telford, president of the NUS, said: "NUS is dismayed by Margaret Hodge's comments, especially at a time when higher education needs all the support it can get. "It is appalling that the minister for higher education, who should be championing our cause in the run-up to the white paper, can make such a disparaging remark. NUS challenges her to define what a 'mickey mouse' course is."

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19 December, 2004

EVEN VERBAL PUNISHMENT NOT ALLOWED

Another lesson on how to destroy discipline

A New Jersey nun has been fired for allegedly threatening to discipline a mouthy sixth-grader by knocking out his teeth. Sister Catherine Iaouzze, an assistant principal at St. Cecilia's School in Iselin, caught the 11-year-old boy walking down the wrong staircase on Nov. 11. She allegedly told him he would "have no teeth left in his mouth if he had an attitude with her again," according to a harassment complaint filed by the boy's father.

The 69-year-old Iacouzze was fired Dec. 7 by the Diocese of Metuchen after an internal investigation. "The Diocese of Metuchen's first priority is the safety of our children, and we regret that one of our teachers spoke to one of our children in a threatening manner," diocese spokeswoman Joanne Ward said.

Iacouzze had worked at the school for about five years and served as an algebra teacher, guidance counselor and school disciplinarian. She could not be reached for comment yesterday. Her attorney, James Mackevich, said Iacouzze was misunderstood. "There was never any indication she was going to hit him. It was more sarcasm. She caught a problem child breaking rules. In that she used politically incorrect language, so be it. She did not make any physical threat to the child in any way shape or form," he told the Home News Tribune of East Brunswick.

Source



Florida: Teachers who fail : "More than half a million Florida students sat in classrooms last year in front of teachers who failed the state's basic skills tests for teachers. Many of those students got teachers who struggled to solve high school math problems or whose English skills were so poor, they flunked reading tests designed to measure the very same skills students must master before they can graduate. These aren't isolated instances of a few teachers whose test-taking skills don't match their expertise and training. A Herald-Tribune investigation has found that fully a third of teachers, teachers' aides and substitutes failed their certification tests at least once."

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18 December, 2004

PRIVATE EDUCATION CAN BE PROFITABLE

Shares in Australia's first higher education float rocketed on their stock market debut yesterday, propelling the company's founders to instant fortune. Shares in IBT Education more than doubled from their $1 issue price, finishing the day at $2.40 each. The float takes the two career educators who started the company into the ranks of the nation's wealthy elite.

Mr Jones and Dr Larsen founded IBT in Perth in 1994 as a means of helping international students to get through university courses. They identified that many foreign students who were sound academically were failing because of their difficulties with English and a lack of educational and cultural support. They designed a model to offer smaller classes with specialised help in English, IT and mathematics. IBT has links with six Australian universities - Edith Cowan, Macquarie, Deakin, Griffith, Curtin, University of South Australia - and provides foundation and first-year equivalent courses to about 10,000 students in Australia. It also operates in Britain, Africa and Sri Lanka.

Courses cost between $10,000 and $15,000 a year, with the majority of students coming from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. The stock hit the boards yesterday afternoon at $2.01 and climbed steadily through the day before closing at $2.40. The float was heavily oversubscribed, with institutions clamouring to get on board. Market watchers expected a share price of about $1.50, but the $2.40 close left many stunned.

More here



DISGRACEFUL GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS IN BRITAIN

One in three children at hundreds of primary schools still cannot read by the age of 11 because of poor teaching standards, it emerged yesterday. Seven years after the introduction of a compulsory reading hour in primary education, at least 35 per cent of pupils in 2,235 schools fail to read properly by the time they leave. David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, said the performance of these schools - one in 10 - which teach about 350,000 pupils in total, was "substantial cause for concern". The report by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, blamed poor teaching. Mr Bell added that too many schools adopted a "lacklustre" approach to teaching reading. "It is unacceptable that too many children do not learn to read properly because the adults who teach them lack sufficient knowledge to do so effectively," he said. "This might have been understandable a decade ago but not today."

The report said there was "an increasing gulf between those schools that successfully tackle weaknesses in reading and those that do not". Headteachers of what it termed "ineffective schools" often did not know enough about how to teach reading. In the low-performing schools, too many teachers had low expectations of how quickly pupils could learn to read through phonics - used increasingly in schools. One in four reading lessons was delivered unsatisfactorily, the study concluded, with teaching standards worse among seven to 11-year-olds than younger pupils. Teachers were criticised for too often leaving the slowest readers with classroom assistants who "did not always have enough confidence and knowledge about teaching reading".

Mr Bell said that he wanted to "nail one fashionable theory" that all would be well if children were "freed from the straitjacket" of the National Literacy Strategy. "This is bunkum," he said. "There is not pleasure in not learning to read and I, for one, do not want to return to the so-called good old days when many more children weren't taught to ready properly." He also wanted to "nail another myth that it's all to do with the background of the children". He said: "It is simply not good enough for some schools to lay the blame for low reading standards on the children, parents or outside influences."

The report said that schools were also failing to do enough to encourage youngsters to read at home. "In some schools, even able readers were restricted by the school's policy to follow the structure of reading scheme," the report said. It cited the story of one bright girl who took home a reading scheme book and finished it in a couple of days but was told by her teacher she would have to wait a week to change it "because you can only change it on a Tuesday".

Mr Bell also urged parents to do more to encourage their children to read. "Whether it be a brother or a sister, a neighbour or a parent, a book before bedtime or a book on the bus really does go a long way," he said.

Tim Collins, the shadow Education Secretary, said: "For a government that promised so much for education in general and literacy in particular, this makes for dismal reading." Stephen Twigg, the Education minister with responsibility for primary schooling, said the number of schools with more than one in three 11-year-olds struggling to read had fallen from 6,100 since 1997. But he added: "We know there is a tail end of underachievement - schools which could, and should, be doing better, even taking account of their circumstances."

The report called for action to retrain underperforming teachers and increase headteachers' knowledge of how to improve reading standards.

Source

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17 December, 2004

Why Dutch children are escaping city schools

More and more teens in Dutch cities are travelling long distances every morning to schools in outlying districts. Cormac Mac Ruairi looks at why they are running from inner-city schools.

Long before the Van Wieren killing, thousands of VMBO pupils in the major cities have been avoiding the school around the corner and travelling long distances to schools in quieter, outlying towns. Daily newspaper De Volkskrant has reported that 19 percent of VMBO students in Utrecht go to schools in nearby towns, many Rotterdam students go to Bleiswijk and students in The Hague to Rijswijk. VVO, the organisation representing managers in secondary education, has warned that schools will have to come to some kind of agreement to avoid city schools being bled dry and outlying schools overrun.

In the cities, at least, an increasing percentage of the students are from immigrant, and therefore non-white, families. As schools get a reputation as a "black school", a lot of Dutch parents tend to send their children elsewhere. Black schools, or Zwarte scholen, have become synonymous with poverty, under-achieving, violence and drugs. The situation in the VMBO schools mirrors the increasing mistrust between the various ethnic communities in the Netherlands.

The association of public schools, VOS/ABB, blames violence in schools on a continuation of the hardening of society

But the very fact that some VMBO schools have to post guards, mount check points and install security cameras is off-putting for many parents.

Speaking about the new security measures at Terra College, director Gerard van Miltenburg said on 29 January: "Students and teachers must again have the confidence they are safe here". But as one parent in Utrecht explained to De Volkskrant, she decided to send her child to a VMBO out of town precisely because the local schools emphasised their security measures.

"The first thing they said to me at the VMBO schools in Utrecht was that they had good contacts with the police, instead of saying 'we will make a person of your child'," she said. She said going from school to school in Utrecht was like visiting disaster after disaster: "I found myself in an environment I did not recognise".

This is a sentiment shared by many in Dutch society who claim that that life in the Netherlands is becoming bleaker. A student teacher told Expatica that she would rather be unemployed in the future than take a position in a VMBO school. "I am still looking for a placement, but I would sign up with a school two hours away by train rather than work in a VMBO in the city. VMBO schools are just awful," the student teacher said. "The children rule the roost: they decide what, when and where they are going to learn. And the teachers aren't supposed to correct mistakes, instead they have to praise the pupil for doing something right. "Children, particularly those in the VMBO system, need direction and discipline, but they are being allowed to run wild by both their parents and the system."

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THE ECONOMIST COMMENTS ON AMERICA'S ONE-PARTY STATES

Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of “diversity officers”. Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.

Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one among assistant and associate professors.

“So what”, you might say, particularly if you happen to be an American liberal academic. Yet the current situation makes a mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and creation” that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to, say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?

This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

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16 December, 2004

A "KIPP" CHARTER SCHOOL

A great school but the education establishment hates it. THEY want all the say in how kids are educated. Too bad about parents' rights

The newest public middle school in this mostly working-class town 11 miles north of Boston is a small six-room annex at the rear of a church. Its playground is an empty parking lot. There's no official gym, no theater, no science lab, no lockers, no room to spare. Yet for the 77 Lynn families who sent their fifth-graders to the brand new KIPP Academy charter school this past August -- a month before classes began at regular public schools -- this place is a godsend. The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a national network of 38 public schools across the country, has been widely acclaimed for its success putting underserved students on the path to college. Started in 1994 by two former Teach for America teachers, KIPP's flagship schools in Houston and New York City continue to outperform their district counterparts, and in the last 10 years each has risen to become one of the top-performing schools in its district.

Five months into their first year at KIPP Lynn, students are at home in their new classrooms. The atmosphere is one of quiet concentration, thanks to KIPP's strict standards of behavior, but the lessons are engaging and even spirited. In one math class, the teacher leads a group of enthusiastic fifth-graders as they clap their hands and shout their way through the multiplication tables in unison: "Boom! KIPP, KIPP, good as gold, let me see your fingers roll: 8, 16, 32, 40!"

And yet these children are not exceptional learners. As an open-enrollment school, KIPP draws from the same population found in its neighboring district schools, and, says principal Josh Zoia, is more heavily minority and has a higher percentage of special education students than the district as a whole. So what's KIPP's secret? According to the 31-year-old Zoia, who also wrote KIPP Lynn's charter, success comes from placing education at the center of children's lives and teaching behavior expectations as systematically as their lessons.

School days begin at 7:30 a.m. and last until 5:00 p.m., plus two hours of homework, four hours of class every other Saturday, and three to four weeks in the summer. "If students need extra help, teachers are available by phone until 10 p.m. each night," says Zoia. "If a mom can't rouse her child out of bed, we go and pick the kid up." After four years, Zoia explains, KIPP students will have spent up to 60 percent more time in the classroom than their public school counterparts -- an extra 2- 1/2 years of school.

Aside from the intrinsic draw of KIPP's program, for many Lynn parents the school simply represents another choice. Most have had few educational options for their children; unlike wealthier families, few can afford private schools or just pick up and move to the suburbs. To them, charter schools -- publicly funded schools that operate outside the regulatory constraints of most public schools -- seem a great alternative to their district options, and they've pinned their hopes on KIPP, sight unseen.

But not everyone in Lynn shares this zeal for charter schools. Last fall, the mayor of Lynn, the school superintendent, the School Committee, the head of the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, and several state representatives all fought to bar, or at least postpone, any new charter school in Lynn. For them, the issue was simple: The Lynn public school system could not afford to support a new charter school, no matter how good the program might be.

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Degrees of disillusion

There's a lot of useless education out there

A higher qualification doesn't guarantee you a job, reports Dylan Welch. Each year, from March, the big guns come to university campuses. They are representatives of law firms, management consultants, accountants and big business, and they want to attract the best and brightest to their firms. Over the course of their final year, candidates for graduate programs are whittled down. The ones who are rewarded with a job by November have usually gone through an application process involving group and individual interviews, a barrage of tests and quasi interviews, such as cocktail parties, which are used to gauge an applicant's social skills. Entry into graduate programs is highly prized. It's seen by many as a fast track to a stellar career: with on-the-job training and other perks such as mentoring and travel.

But what about those who miss out? Disappointment at rejection is intensified when classmates are boasting of three or four job offers. They see years ahead working with no career path and a wasted degree. Three months ago, Christine Neufeld graduated from the Law College of NSW after a three-year degree in psychology and a four-year degree in law. She had high hopes of getting a job after graduating but so far success has been elusive. According to Neufeld, she didn't expect the job market to be so competitive and she admits to being naive in thinking she would get a job straight away. "I probably should have started looking long before I graduated," she says. "It's been a big shock to me, definitely a big shock." She makes ends meet by working in administration at the University of Sydney two days a week and spends the rest of the week job hunting. She says it takes a full two days to prepare for an interview, which only compounds the disappointment when she misses out. But she says she remains upbeat and positive she'll find work.

The 2003 GradStats, a report on the employment activities of graduating classes in 2002, by the Graduate Careers Council of Australia, shows a levelling-off of jobs for new graduates. It states that 80.1 per cent of 2002's graduates were in full-time employment within four months of completing their degree, a fall of 1.9 per cent on the previous year. "The market has been flat," says the executive director of the council, Cindy Tilbrook. "We tend to reflect what overseas markets are doing and September 11 caused a dramatic downturn in the graduate market in the US and the same thing happened here."

Nathan Laird, the president of NSW Young Lawyers, says competition for jobs with the big law firms, such as Minter Ellison and Blake Dawson Waldron, is becoming increasingly intense among the 5000 law graduates each year in NSW.

But it's not just law students who are finding the competition fierce. Adam Antonio enrolled in a bachelor of computer science and technology at the University of Sydney in 1998, during the heady days of the dotcom boom. But by the time he graduated, in 2001, the bubble had burst and there were slim pickings in IT jobs. "I'd apply for a job and I'd never hear anything about it again," he says. He applied for more than one hundred jobs but got only six interviews. "In the first few months I would ring and ask whether I had progressed to the next stage and a typical response was, 'We had over 600 applicants for this position, we couldn't afford to contact them all, if you haven't been contacted by this stage you can safely assume that you haven't made it."'

In the field of multimedia, Nicole Frost, who graduated with a bachelor of arts from UTS in 2002 has also found the going tough. To date, she has applied for more than 200 jobs in multimedia, gone through 40 interviews and is becoming resigned to never getting a job in multimedia. She says by far the worst part of her experience has been the jobs she almost got. "If the interview went badly you knew why you didn't get it," she says. "But there was one job where I got down to the final four and I didn't get hired. That was worse than just getting knocked out in the first round."

Tilbrook says that many undergraduate students can be unprepared for the modern job market, failing to grasp that there is more to landing that dream job than just high distinctions and first-class honours. Academic results are really only the starting point. "We've been talking to graduate recruiters recently and some of the big graduate recruiters will get five or six thousand applications," she says. "They're looking for things like leadership, or teamwork, communication skills. If a graduate can say, 'I've either worked at McDonald's and I was a shift manager', or 'I was the captain of my netball team and have managed all the events for the team', then that will be held in good stead as a demonstration of some of those other skills." Graduates should look beyond the glamour of big firms to increase their chances of getting a job. Suburban and country firms take on graduates and can provide them with a strong start.

The manager of the UTS careers service, Malcolm McKenzie, says that despite big firms being the most visible recruiters of graduates, it doesn't mean they represent the wider employer market. "These big employers are only a small proportion of the whole field. We have maybe 100 firms come to campus but many, many more than that recruit our graduates. By all means try for these [large firms] but if you miss out, it's not the end of the world." McKenzie says students restrict their chances of work by not applying to lots of firms. "One of the things we've seen is students are becoming more selective in their choice of employers. Instead of applying for a wide number of jobs, they tend to restrict themselves to only the four or five that they want."

Source

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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.

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15 December, 2004

INNOVATIVE THINKING CONDEMNED -- OF COURSE

A millionaire has announced plans to "bribe" parents and children in one of the poorest parts of England to regularly attend school. Irvine Laidlaw, who has a personal fortune of o500 million, intends to offer affordable restaurants, healthcare and adventure training courses to persuade people in Newcastle to back his plans to fund a controversial new city academy. Lord Laidlaw said that he wants to create "not just a school, but a community centre," and "to give something back" to children with a less fortunate start than himself. His plans have been condemned by union leaders and Jim Cousins, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, who said that he feared the scheme would exacerbate social exclusion and hand the community's control of its education to a "benevolent dictator".

City academies are a controversial government scheme to replace failing schools with high-tech, multimillion-pound ventures, backed by private-public sponsorship. Each school costs about 25 million pounds to build, double the cost of a comprehensive, and is beyond council control once set up.

Lord Laidlaw, 61, had hoped to fund a similar project in Scotland but was thwarted by hostile teaching unions concerned about the influence of private sponsors over public schools. Now his focus is West Gate Community College in Newcastle, where 33 languages are spoken, 60 per cent of pupils get free school meals and 43 per cent are registered as special needs. "I'd like to give something back to a community which has not had such a fortunate start and I feel that a city academy is a good way of doing it," he said. Lord Laidlaw aims to regenerate the community with the 1,750-strong school by providing a restaurant with healthy, affordable meals and healthcare facilities on site. School uniforms would be mandatory, teachers would do exchanges and pupils go on adventure training courses. "They may not be able to fund all that from revenue grants, so as a sponsor I'd be prepared to help. In taking on a school you take on more than just providing education, you must ensure they're on healthy diets and so on," he said.

In four years, Jim Farnie, the headmaster of West Gate College, has turned it around. About a third of pupils this year have achieved an A-C grade in five GCSEs compared with just 8 per cent in 2000. He is a hesitant supporter of the changes which will mean closing his school and moving to new premises in September 2008.

Today parents will receive a letter spelling out the offer, but Mr Farnie says that most seem happy with the plans. "I have talked to a couple whose view is that if a state-of-the-art school is to be built in the west end of Newcastle, they would like their kids to be part of it." The plan for an IT business enterprise academy to prepare students to run their own business as well as following academic courses will be debated by the city council next month.

Mr Cousins fears the loss of community control over the new school and that the vocational emphasis may duplicate the work of a local further education college. "I don't write the script, I look at the script given and this script is not good enough for me or Newcastle. It will compound social division, not help it," he said.

This summer, the Government committed itself to building 200 city academies by 2010. However, in a recent survey, more than half the 113 councils not involved in a city academy project said that they would not wish to take part. Last year four of the twelve academy heads left their posts citing too much pressure to get results. The Government has spent about 425 million pounds on 17 academies. Private sponsors invest around 2 million pounds, which gives them the right to half the seats on the board of governors and a say in how the school is run.

Source



Mental Health Trumps Individual Accountability

Large numbers of teachers believe themselves incapable of meeting the learning expectations placed on their institutions by the No Child Left Behind Act. Like the characters in Atlas Shrugged, they find themselves having to deal with problems they did not create within the constraints of a system designed to fail. In order to remain in their chosen profession, those caught in the middle must place blame elsewhere in order to find an "out." Those who refuse to "work within the system" disappear. Mediocrity rises to the top and excellence disappears.

Public education has cried "wolf" one too many times, claiming that lack of money is what is wrong with our schools. The public is not voting for tax increases. School districts have had to resort to other means to assure that their increased public funding habit is met. Lawsuits have been filed against state governments for not providing the financial means necessary for an optimal education. "Activist Judges" who use rule based on research generated by the very mouths this research is designed to feed, have ordered governors and legislators to come up with more funding.

Educational Mandatory mental health testing not only provides an "out" for academic failure by providing labels that excuse individual actions; it generates more funding to provide special services for those labeled with deficiencies. The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFCMH) represents a massive victory for those activists and lobbyists who champion the cause of pharmaceutical companies who produce medication for those deemed "mentally ill and unable to function in `normal' capacity." It is a blow against those fighting to preserve the rights of individual liberties guaranteed under the US Constitution. With individual liberty comes individual responsibility, but that is not expected of someone excused from the standards that apply to everyone else.

The NFCMH has made it easier to justify irresponsible behavior such as impulsiveness and other unrefined character bi-products of the "me first" and permissiveness era, heralded in by Dr. Spock. Today's children are granted adult rights while retaining minor status, for example; having an abortion without parental consent and being guaranteed their right to privacy in other areas, as well. Judicial activism selectively emancipates minors. Those who behave irresponsibly while accepting no responsibility can site a variety of mental disorders as their "modus operandi" and dismiss the consequences of their actions!

Just look at the liberals who can't get over Bush's reelection. They're not bad sports. They have Post Election Selection Trauma as a result of losing the election. Their inappropriateness is justifiable given that they cannot help themselves. The therapists are making beaucoup bucks helping them adjust to reality and these blowhards don't have to be responsible for their disregard for civility.

Rather than address the real problem which is inadequate teaching and classroom management stemming from poor pedagogy, children can be labeled with a mental disorder that excuses their academic performance and behavior. Public education, seemingly forced to account for their performance, has been dealt the ultimate trump card. The Orwellian conclusion to legislating away accountability is that whether or not a child performs is no longer up for discussion. What matters ultimately, is the excuse given for not meeting expectations. A label changes everything.....

Behavior disordered children who aren't expected to achieve and do not adopt a moral code are perceived as victims of their upbringing. But in the long run, misbehavior and disrespect for authority in the classrooms translates to crime in the streets. How many parents are afraid to spank a child for fear of being cited for "child abuse?" "Tolerating" a child's excessive behavior is seen as a positive parental trait. Educators, not students, are supposed to adapt to any given situation. Given these circumstances, everyone in the whole village is needed to take responsibility for the child except for the family.

Judicial Activism, bad pedagogy, and labels all erode the individual rights and responsibility necessary to maintain our system of government. We are sacrificing the freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness by shirking our responsibilities and giving the decision making power to the government and not the people. One must play the cards that are dealt and make the best of a given situation. Excuses do not keep the trains running.

More here

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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.

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14 December, 2004

ELECT THE PRINCIPALS

Competition in a free market prompts people to excel and continually pursue greater achievements. This is why the United States is a prosperous country and that our population as a whole lives much more comfortably than most others around the world. Choice in education provides those needing educational services more options and a competitive product. If a product isn't up to speed, people will not seek it out. Universal Tuition Tax Credits are the only option that would allow consumers from any socio/economic background the opportunity to pursue the education that best fits their needs without drawing from public education dollars. There are additional ways to insert competition into the public school system.

One suggestion worth considering has educators run the public educational system by electing their principals. It's worth noting that everyone has been given the opportunity to change the present system of education in our country except the teachers, who have been given no power in the system. Teachers often fear losing their jobs or offending the principal or others if they truly voice their opinions.

Electing the principal would remove the fear teachers have of expressing their true beliefs about how things should go. It would also introduce an element of competition. Next, principals would serve as the school board members because they are infinitely more knowledgeable about how the tax dollars should be spent in their district.

These same principals would elect one of their own to serve as superintendent for a term -in charge of appointing and hiring teachers. Teachers would no longer have to answer to untrained school boards and administrators who are removed from the every day problems of the classroom. Classroom teachers could simply vote out those who impede the educational process.

If there must be a teacher union, it will be to do the job for which it was established; to seek proper benefits and working conditions for the members. That would be the extent of any union role in education.

It is the teachers who have the proper training and classroom experience necessary to run the school system. It must be acknowledged that in the sum of their practical experience and training lie the only answers to the question of what works in education.

More here :



THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF MODERN PUBLIC SCHOOLONG

The only book by Laura Ingalls Wilder I've read is Farmer Boy, which is about the life of Wilder's husband, Almanzo Wilder, when he was ten years old and growing up on a farm. I was surprised by his life, which wasn't all that long ago--in the 1860's.

Almanzo had a place and a purpose in the family, and an important one. The functioning of the farm was very much dependent on him, and Almanzo didn't mind at all. He enjoyed it a great deal. How many teenagers today can say the same? How many today just live with their families, but don't truly feel part of them? As for school--ugh.

There was something very interesting about Almanzo's life. He hated school passionately and apparently only attended a few months at the most in his entire life. Yet he grew up intelligent and well-read.

He also remembered nearly everything that happened to him when he was young. I remember little, mostly because I spent most of my time in school, and it was the same meaningless thing day after day. I couldn't tell one day from the other. I have few memories from between the ages of six and 11. I'm not the only one..........

I've come to the conclusion there is no hope for the public schools. They bore kids, they destroy their imaginations, they give them no meaning or purpose. I'd shut them down on the spot if I could. How many kids like school? Almost none. Doesn't that tell people something?

Why in the world do we need 12 years of schooling anyway? What exactly does it take 12 years to learn? And that doesn't include college and graduate and post-graduate work. Is all of this necessary? It isn't a good thing, of that I am convinced. I read an article several months ago about a rather strange man who lived in a cave with his 12-year-old daughter. He taught her out of a set of old encyclopedias. When the police finally found them, investigators said the daughter was "usually intelligent and knowledgeable."

I'm certainly not recommending living in a cave with your kid, only pointing out perhaps schools aren't only not necessary, maybe they are instead a obstacle to true education. Watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off sometime. It reminds me of a nightmare I sometimes have: it is the last day of high school, and for some horrible reason I won't graduate and have to go another year. It is the only nightmare I have repeatedly.

It'd be better if a lot of kids started as apprentices at 12 years old. I've known several people who just simply could not finish high school. All of them later became successful in their field. One friend who lived next door to me when we were in high school dropped out, and later became an airline pilot. None of them could find a place, a meaning and a purpose in schools they attended.

As for families, I do know one thing; the State is the cause of most of their problems. Interference by public schools, interference in the economy, destruction of neighborhoods and communities...all of these things are created and exacerbated by the State. Interference by the State takes away the meaning and purpose of people's lives, and tries to replace it with its meaning, which is generally bureaucracy, militarization, war and empire.

More here

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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.

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13 December, 2004

LOS ANGELES SCHOOL DISTRICT IS BROKE BUT STILL WANTS TO PAY TEACHERS MORE

More evidence that American schools are run primarily for the benefit of the teachers rather than the students. In any private business, the teachers would have to take a cut

Two looming deadlines have created a "perfect storm" for Los Angeles Unified officials, who face the prospect of proposing teacher raises while officially reporting that the district's finances are uncertain. If the LAUSD board doesn't pinpoint $137 million in potential budget cuts by Wednesday, it will have to submit a "qualified" rating for the first time in district history. That qualified rating, down from "positive," could cost the district higher interest rates on billions of dollars in school construction bonds as well as more oversight by the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

The board also is grappling with a self-imposed Jan. 18 deadline to propose pay raises for teachers -- a decision fueled by intense pressure from United Teachers Los Angeles, which helped elect a majority of the school board. Most board members are pushing for the raises even as they face the prospect of telling the county that the district's financial future is unclear

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What Does it Take to Create a Marketplace in Education?

Giving parents the freedom to choose their child's school is the most important element in ensuring that an education environment operates as a competitive marketplace, according to a panel of policy experts who spoke recently at a Cato Institute Policy Forum on "Creating a True Marketplace in Education." In fact, for one of the panelists, parental choice was the only thing that mattered. "It's parents that have the information about what's best for their children," said John Wenders, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Idaho. "The closer we can come to making the choices down at the bottom of the system, the better."

That's how the free market works to provide "almost limitless choices" in almost every other sector of the economy, noted conference organizer David F. Salisbury, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. Yet the U.S. K-12 education system operates as a command economy where government determines where and when children will go to school and what they will learn. So Salisbury asked: If we want to create a market-based education system, what are the three most important requirements?

Non-discrimination was the top requirement for John Merrifield, professor of economics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Non-discrimination, he explained, means the government treats everyone's children the same, regardless of which school they go to--public, private, charter, or religious. If the government provides support for education, he said, it should provide that support to all children. Merrifield's second requirement for a competitive marketplace was for low entry barriers, and his third requirement was for prices that would motivate the marketplace.

Lisa Snell, director of education and child welfare at the Reason Public Policy Institute, suggested it was money that motivated the marketplace. "The most important thing is that the money follows the child. ... The money is attached to each child and they take it wherever they want," she said. "There has to be competition for the money." Snell's second condition was that the money allotted to each child should be from a stable revenue source and have sufficient purchasing power for companies to be interested in investing in new school capacity. Her third condition was to allow for-profit companies to own and operate schools because, she contended, it is only for-profit companies that will make the R&D investments necessary to develop specialized schools.......

However, in Lieberman's view the school choice movement has made only minimal progress over the past 45 years in broadening the schooling options available to parents. By contrast, the teacher unions--the major opponents of school choice--have made considerable progress in consolidating their influence over the public school system. While no teachers were represented by a collective bargaining agreement in 1960, today between 75 and 80 percent of public school teachers fall under a collective bargaining agreement.

Over the past decade, the school choice movement has made negative progress, according to Lieberman, because leaders of the movement oversold charter schools and other severely limited school choice programs as examples of "the free market." Now, he said, the limited results from these limited programs are being used by opponents as examples of how the free market really doesn't work very well in education.

Snell had a different perspective on charter schools. While admitting charter schools are basically contract schools, she said they still exhibit some characteristics of the private marketplace. First, she noted, charter schools have added substantial new school capacity, some 3,000 new schools in total. Second, each of the for-profit providers--White Hat Management and National Heritage Academies--has developed a successful school model, branded it, and set about replicating it.

More here

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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.

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12 December, 2004

UNETHICAL AMERICAN SCHOOLS

Two apparently unrelated stories that appeared in newspapers on the same day are in reality not nearly as unrelated as they might seem. One story appeared under the headline, "High School Students Debate Steroid Ethics." The other story had the headline: "Economic Time Bomb: U.S. Teens Are Among Worst at Math."

We have known for a long time that teenagers in Japan scored much higher on international math tests than American teenagers do. But did you know that teenagers in Poland, the Slovak Republic, Iceland, Canada, and Korea -- among other places -- also score higher than our teenagers? Out of 29 countries whose teenagers took a recent international math test, American teenagers ranked 24th. Americans also scored near the bottom on tests of general problem-solving.

What about the ethics of using steroids? Kids can talk about this at home or on the streets or just about anywhere. What about the ethics of using up precious school time for such chatter when there are serious deficiencies in our children's ability to measure up to international standards in an increasingly competitive international economy? Presiding over classroom chatter is no doubt a lot easier than teaching the Pythagorean theorem or differential calculus. But teachers who indulge themselves like this, at the expense of their students' future, have no business conducting discussions of "ethics" about athletes using steroids -- or any other ethics issue. Jason Giambi may have done some damage to his own career, and to George Steinbrenner's pocketbook, by taking steroids. But that is nothing compared to the damage done to schoolchildren whose time is frittered away talking about it when there is serious work that remains undone.

With all the outcry about the "outsourcing" of American jobs, especially in computer work, there has been relatively little said about the importing of brains from foreign countries to do mentally challenging work here because the brains of our own students have simply not been adequately developed in our schools. For years, most of the Ph.D.s awarded by American universities in mathematics and engineering have gone to foreigners. We have the finest graduate schools in the world -- so fine that our own American students have trouble getting admitted in fields that require highly trained minds.

A finer breakdown of American teenagers' test scores shows that while white and Asian American students meet international standards in math, blacks and Hispanics fall well below those standards. Those students who are already less fortunate have the most to lose by turning classrooms into chatter sessions. The children of affluent and well-educated parents can learn a lot at home, even if the schools waste their time on "activities" and "projects." But the kid from a low-income family in the ghetto or barrio usually has just one shot at a decent life -- and that shot is in the school. Teachers who fail to equip these youngsters with mental skills send them out into the battles of life unarmed.

Teachers who think they are doing something good for those kids by sympathetically dwelling on racial grievances are giving them chips to carry on their shoulders instead of brainpower in their heads. Is anybody going to be more employable with a chip on his shoulders? Is anybody more likely to be work hard on improving himself when he is led to believe that his problems are caused by other people? The message that gets through to many minority youngsters is that you are a chump for trying when The Man is not going to let you get anywhere anyway. Those minority students who still try hard are often accused of "acting white" -- and that accusation can bring anything from social ostracism to outright violence.

Schools that give easy grades are setting their students up for a very hard life without the skills to compete. Instead of giving students and their parents a realistic picture of where they are, while there is still time to do something about it, schools are passing the job of confronting reality on to employers who get these youngsters when it is usually too late. Yet schools think they are teaching "ethics" when their whole abdication of adult responsibility is profoundly immoral.

Source



Tennessee: Girl must be taught at school, not home: "In a rare case of alleged education neglect, a home-schooled Franklin teen will no longer be taught by her parents after tests showed that she was years behind her peers academically. This week, the family of the 16-year-old girl agreed to enroll her in a private school. It was part of an agreement with state officials, who investigated the family. The high school girl tested at the elementary level in math, science and social studies, but her reading skills were on track. ... The name of the family and the girl are not being released because of privacy concerns. It isn't clear how long the home-schooled teen struggled academically nor why it wasn't discovered earlier. ... Kay Brooks, founder of a statewide information clearinghouse for home schools, said this appears to be a personal issue that spilled over into home schooling. She said her heart goes out to the family, but she hopes this incident doesn't cast a long shadow over home schooling statewide."



Spelling: "English is written in a Code. Remember that! Think in terms of how to read a code; how to write in a code. Soon you will find yourself becoming stronger and more confident in the use of this wonderfully rich language. The Code -- phonics -- is the only way to become an excellent user of the language, because we have an alphabetic language that is represented by phonograms designated to represent specific sounds. Good readers who think that they do not need phonics are only fooling themselves."

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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.

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

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11 December, 2004

Higher education in decline: "College costs have risen dramatically over the last several decades. In many cases, it's difficult to find a college where per-student costs are under $20,000 each year. Most often, tuition doesn't measure the true cost because taxpayer and donor subsidies pay part of the expenses. While costs are rising, education quality is in precipitous decline, particularly at the undergraduate level." ...

A Zogby survey was commissioned by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to compare the general cultural knowledge of today's college seniors to that of yesteryear's high school graduates. The questions for the survey were drawn from those asked by the Gallup organization in 1955 covering literature, music, science, geography and history. The results were reported in a NAS publication titled "Today's College Students and Yesteryear's High School Grads." It concludes that "Contemporary college seniors scored on average little or no higher than the high-school graduates of a half-century ago on a battery of 15 questions assessing general cultural knowledge."



Intellectual diversity in the classroom: "Although conservatives complain loudly and often about liberal bias in the mass media, the truth is that one is far more likely to read a conservative perspective in the New York Times than hear it from a college professor. At least the Times publishes an occasional conservative on its op-ed page. At many universities, just finding a Republican anywhere on the faculty is problematic. Two recent studies by Santa Clara University economist Daniel B. Klein prove my point."

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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.

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

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10 December, 2004

An Evaluation of Florida's Program to End Social Promotion

Students learned more when they were not automatically promoted

Nine states and three of the nation's biggest cities have adopted mandates intended to end "social promotion"- promoting students to the next grade level regardless of their academic proficiency. These policies require students in certain grades to reach a minimum benchmark on a standardized test in order to move on to the next grade. Florida, Texas, and seven other states, as well as the cities of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, have adopted mandatory promotion tests; these school systems encompass 30% of all U.S. public-school students. Proponents of such policies claim that students must possess basic skills in order to succeed in higher grades, while opponents argue that holding students back discourages them and only pushes them further behind.

This study uses individual-level data provided by the Florida Department of Education to evaluate the initial effects of Florida's policy requiring students to reach a minimum threshold on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) to be promoted to the 4th grade. It examines the gains made in one year on math and reading tests by all Florida 3rd graders in the first cohort subject to the retention policy who scored below the necessary threshold, comparing them to all Florida 3rd graders in the previous year with the same low test scores, for whom the policy was not yet in force. Because some students subject to the policy obtained special exemptions and were promoted, the study also uses an instrumental regression analysis to separately measure the effects of actually being retained. The study measures gains made by students on both the high-stakes FCAT and the Stanford-9, a nationally respected standardized test that is also administered to all Florida students, but with no stakes tied to the results.

The authors intend to follow the same two cohorts of students in future studies to evaluate the effects of this new policy over time. The findings of this study, evaluating Florida's program after its first year, include:

* Low-performing students subject to the retention policy made gains in reading greater than those of similar students not subject to the policy by 1.85 percentile points on both the FCAT and the Stanford-9.

* Low-performing students subject to the retention policy made gains in math greater than those of similar students not subject to the policy by 4.76 percentile points on the FCAT and 4.43 percentile points on the Stanford-9.

* Low-performing students who were actually retained made gains in reading greater than those of similar students who were promoted by 4.10 percentile points on the FCAT and 3.45 percentile points on the Stanford-9.

* Low-performing students who were retained made gains in math greater than those of similar students who were promoted by 9.98 percentile points on the FCAT and 9.26 percentile points on the Stanford-9.

........

The findings of this study demonstrate that after one year, Florida’s retention policy has significantly improved the academic proficiency of low-performing third-grade students. Further research on this and other programs will add vital information to the debate over objective retention policies. For now, however, the early results are quite encouraging for the use of retention based on standardized tests to improve academic proficiency.

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INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS EXPOSE THE DECEIT OF BRITISH EXAMINATION RESULTS

England's position in the world education league has slipped after not enough pupils and schools sent in results.

The Government has dismissed the embarrassing results, drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, as inconclusive and not comparable to other years and other countries. It was the only OECD country to fail the criteria for the study this year and the poor results have raised suspicions that the Government was happy the see them left out.

In the second three-year study of about 250,000 students from 41 countries, English 15-year-olds scored worse in maths, science and reading than 17 other industrialised nations, including Liechtenstein and Macau, a region of China.

Maths tests for 14-year-olds at Key Stage 3 return ever-improving results year on year and the number gaining GCSE passes in English and maths is rising. The OECD study, released by the Programme for International Student Assessment, however, appears to show standards falling against an international criteria.

In 2000, the programme's study ranked England eighth in maths and reading and fourth in science out of forty countries. In the past three years students have apparently fallen to No 18 in maths, No 12 in reading and No 11 in science. David Miliband, the Schools Minister, said: "The OECD say themselves that the data cannot be compared with UK past performance or the performance of other nations as it doesn't meet their technical requirements. "We've made clear our disappointment that the UK response rate was below the technical requirements. We remain fully committed to international comparison studies and aim to learn the lessons with a view to full inclusion in Pisa 2006."

Although almost two thirds of Britain's schools returned results the OECD ruled that too few schools and pupils had responded to be eligible. The Government said yesterday that it would seek to ensure that sufficient schools participate in the next tests in 2006.

Alan Smithers, the director of education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, added to the Government's woes by pointing out that England's pupils were ranked No 18 overall on the basis of achieving 519 points in maths, but they could rank as low as No 24 if there were any bias. "If the response rate is low, it is likely that the better-performing schools and pupils would have taken part in the tests. So it is fair to assume that our results are an overestimate," he said.

Professor Smithers said that he did not believe that the latest results reflected a particular downturn in teaching; rather that the study in 2000 was out of kilter with all previous findings, particularly in maths. He added: "The Government should ask itself how it is that the results of national tests keep bounding up, whereas the performance in international tests are at best static and at worst falling."

Source

[Yes. The source is the London "Times", despite the illiteracy above of "an international criteria"]

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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.

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

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9 December, 2004

It's not just American blacks who can't do Math: "For a nation committed to preparing students for 21st century jobs, the results of the first-of-its-kind study of how well teenagers can apply math skills to real-life problems is sobering. American 15-year-olds rank well below those in most other industrialized countries in mathematics literacy and problem solving, according to a survey released Monday. Although the notion that America faces a math gap is not new, Monday's results show with new clarity that the problem extends beyond the classrooms into the kind of life-skills that employers care about. And to the surprise of some experts, the US shortcoming exists even when only top students in each nation are considered."



A city's schools test a new way

School privatization gets a boost from good results in Philadelphia

When the Philadelphia School District was struggling several years ago, one of the lifelines tossed to it was thrown by Edison Schools, Inc., a New York-based for-profit offering a can-do approach to public education. Since then, the nation's largest educational management company has had troubles of its own, ranging from failure to perform successfully in a number of the public schools it was serving to a virtual collapse in the value of its stock.

But if privatizing school management has not proven to be the panacea many in Philadelphia had hoped, neither has Edison been the district's undoing, as activists and others warned when the firm was brought in during the rancorous and bitter state takeover of the district in 2002. On the contrary, test scores are up district-wide, and some of the most impressive gains have come in 20 of the toughest schools, those turned over to Edison in a last-ditch effort to jump-start them into performing. "They've done a superb job with the most difficult schools," said James Nevels, chairman of the state-appointed School Reform Commission, which took over after the school board was disbanded.

Many thought the company itself wouldn't last. Stock prices had plummeted by 2003, some districts canceled their contracts, and the company went private that spring. But Edison spokesman Adam Tucker says the company's slide has been reversed and it enjoyed its first operating profit in its 12-year history at the end of last year. The district, says chairman Nevels, has seen no evidence of financial troubles, but is free to terminate the contract "at will."

"Centralized control is not working in American urban education," says Paul Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University. One way to find out what does work, he insists, is to explore a range of options in a Philadelphia-like mix. Before the state takeover, the school district, with 200,000 students and 276 schools, seemed badly in need of new solutions. The Reform Commission, which hired CEO Paul Vallas, formerly head of Chicago schools and credited with positive reforms in that district, selected Philadelphia's 45 worst-performing schools and divvied them up for intensive care.

Edison got the worst of the lot, including eight middle schools generally thought to be among the most intractable.

Edison "did a number of things right," said Nevels. They brought in their curriculum model, high in structure, heavy in math and reading, and full of opportunities for staff development. Edison's centerpiece, many believe, is a benchmark assessment component, in which students are tested every six weeks. Scores are available immediately. Unlike traditional achievement tests, where results come well after students have moved on to the next grade, the Edison model immediately detects strengths and deficiencies in classes as a whole as well as in individual students. Students are then grouped according to the precise skills needing more attention. "We can be more diagnostic in our approach," said Sharif El-Mekki, principal of Shaw Middle School.

Among the year's achievement highlights, student scores on the 2003-04 Pennsylvania state tests were up substantially in the district as a whole, and Edison's gains mirrored the district's. Edison's average annual gain in the number of students scoring at or above proficiency level was 10.2 percentage points in fifth- and eighth-grade reading, and 9.6 percentage points in math. Prior to the partnership, the same schools' average annual gain in proficiency was less than one-half of one percentage point. Having Philadelphia's worst-achieving schools hold their own is a source of pride to Edison and a confirmation to the district that private management can work.

More here



THE ABANDONMENT OF DISCIPLINE CONTINUES TO BEAR FRUIT

Teachers and class aides across New South Wales are being punched, kicked, spat at, head-butted and threatened with knives, replica guns, petrol bombs and other weapons in the classroom. The incidents, details of which have been obtained by The Daily Telegraph under Freedom of Information, are part of a catalogue of dozens of violent acts perpetrated on teachers in schools across NSW during the past year. More than 1000 serious incidents in state schools - many involving violence - have been reported to the Department of Education.

In one, a box of animal parts was left on a school teacher's desk with a "vile" letter threatening violence, rape and death against her. Police were called to Cumberland High School in the city's west after the animal parts were left for a teacher by three female students - two in Year 11 and one in Year 7. Another female teacher suffered an electrical shock from a student's "stun gun" pen, numbing her arm and hands for more than hour. At Rooty Hill High School a male student gave the pen to his female teacher saying it was jamming. When the teacher pressed the pen's top she suffered a "significant electrical shock". Teachers have had chairs thrown at them, struck with rocks, bitten and had their cars vandalised. In one serious incident at Baulkham Hills in Sydney's northwest an ex-student tried to run over a male teacher.

Cyber violence is also on the rise with the internet increasingly used to make threats against teachers and schools. Threats to a teacher's life were posted on the website of Newtown North Public School and pictures of a known terrorist pasted next to the teacher's class page. The serious incident report filed to the Department of Education said: "The teacher is experiencing extreme distress and is on leave for two weeks and has filled out a worker's compensation form." At Macquarie Boys High School a student used the school computer at lunchtime to post a request on the internet for a teacher to be killed.

Education Minister Andrew Refshauge said yesterday the safety of students and teachers was a "top priority at our schools".

"From next year principals will have even stronger authority to discipline disruptive students," he said. "Principals soon will have the power to suspend students who carry weapons or inappropriately use new technologies such as e-mail and SMS."

But parents also have made serious threats on school staff, the documents show. One father was overheard to say he would put a laser sight on a gun and put a bullet in the principal's head.

A student at Cooranbong Public School at Lake Macquarie placed nails against the teacher's tyres causing punctures. Another teacher had the bonnet of his car badly scratched. Weapons in schools are also causing concern. Scissors are frequently used but in one case a meat cleaver was produced and in another a gun was found under a demountable.

Source

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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.

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8 December, 2004

REALITY BITES

As rebellious teenagers they chanted "we don't need no education", but 25 years later the former pupils from Islington Green School disagree with the sentiment of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall". The Times has tracked down the anonymous choir members who once called for their teacher to "leave those kids alone" and found that, as well as pursuing a legal action for unpaid royalties from the song, they are now singing from a rather different hymn sheet.

Ian Abbott, 40, was one of 13 pupils whom their music teacher, Alun Renshaw, sneaked into the Britannia Row studios to record the chorus for the song in 1979. "We don't need no education does not hold, especially with children," he said at the weekend. "Some of my nieces, for example, have been having problems at school. I say to them: 'You must knuckle down', and they say: 'But why? Look at what you sang'.

"But education is so important. I really regret the fact that I did not do an awful lot at school and I would like to go to university now and get a degree. But work gets in the way when you get older."

With Pink Floyd in tax exile, the pupils, aged 12 to 15, never met the band and were robbed of fame because Margaret Maden, their infuriated head teacher, banned any publicity when told of the controversial lyrics. She had been brought in to turn around Islington Green School, then regarded as a sink-estate school. She had sought to increase the number of children from Islington's new influx of middle-class families.

Now a respected educationist, Professor Maden said: "The influence of middle-class and ethnic children was quite palpable on all kids. We believed in a balanced intake and this reflected the area we were in."

Tabitha Mellor, 38, now a teacher in Hackney, said: "There was a real mix of Cockney and the bohemian middle class. We were lucky to have that education and I was privileged to have lived in such an area. Maden was fantastic because I think she got the highest grades ever and saw us right through. She was an educational genius and was one of the inspirations for me to become a teacher. I now try to inspire my kids like that. It helps that I can tell them that I had a No 1."

Mirabai Narayan, the granddaughter of Stephen Swingler, the former Labour minister, is now a learning mentor dealing with problem children at a primary school in Camden. She said: "It's strange now because I do wonder whether that song has influenced my choice of career. My job now is to help to overcome barriers to learning for kids and if I listen to the song now it makes me shiver - especially the line about `dark sarcasm'. Nowadays as teachers we are told never to use sarcasm with children."

Source



THE FALLACY OF "INVESTING" IN HIGHER EDUCATION

A recent New York Times op-ed by economist Jeff Madrick takes the tone and sophistication of a cable-TV ad in trying to convince Americans that we need to toss more money into subsidizing college education for students. "To economists," Madrick writes, "higher education is like motherhood or apple pie. It will cure just about anything, from globalization and outsourcing to technological change and income inequality." Wow! Get my credit card and hand me the phone! Madrick admits to some hyperbole in that sentence, but proceeds to argue seriously that the taxpayers would be foolish not to spend more on higher education for more students. Why?

For one thing, people who have college degrees earn more, on average, than people without them. Quoting Madrick, "According to the 2000 census, for example, the median income of an American man with a college degree was about $52,200, 60 percent higher than the $31,600 for those with a high school degree." He doesn't explicitly draw the conclusion, but apparently Madrick believes it follows that individuals who didn't pursue college would necessarily have had higher earnings had they done so, as if there were some automatic connection between years of formal education and earnings.

And that is nonsense. Rather than looking at median earnings of the two groups, which for college graduates is pulled up greatly by the superwealthy (Michael Jordan, for example) and for nongraduates is pulled down by many people who scarcely work at all, we should focus on individuals at the margin. That is, among those people who might have gone to college but chose not to, would their earnings be significantly higher if they had gotten a degree? Consider a young man who has just graduated from high school with mediocre grades and an SAT score that could have landed him a place in one of the nation's many nonselective colleges. He decides that he would rather just start earning a living; so instead of applying to colleges, he enrolls in a school that teaches auto mechanics. After a few months of study, he is ready to start working and gets a job as a trainee mechanic at an auto dealership.

Did he make the wrong choice? Would his financial future be better if he had gone to college instead? It is hard to see that it would be. He wouldn't be paid more as a mechanic for having first obtained a bachelor's degree before learning that trade, and would be in the hole for all the costs and forgone earnings of his college years.

But, Madrick would probably reply, he would have become qualified to pursue many other, higher paying jobs. The trouble with that argument is that there are many people today with college degrees who have learned that they aren't the guarantee of high-income employment that they had supposed. One of our hypothetical auto mechanic's classmates might have chosen to enroll in at a nonselective university, earned a degree in any of dozens of popular majors, and after graduation entered the job market only to find that the best job he could get was delivering pizza. In her book Bright College Years, Anne Matthews noted that a third of the Domino's pizza deliverers in the Washington, D.C., area have B.A. degrees. Such anecdotal evidence of the fact that a degree is no assurance of landing a good job was backed up by economists Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer in their book Who's Not Working and Why, in which they noted that an increasing percentage of college graduates are taking what used to be regarded as "high school jobs."

The dirty little secret behind the glossy promotional material so carefully crafted by colleges and universities is that many will accept just about anyone, and in order to keep students happy enough to stay in school-and paying, of course-the academic requirements are abysmal. A large percentage of the students enrolled in college today are what Professor Paul Trout calls "disengaged students." They are in college just because they want a credential, not because they have any desire to learn. They don't read, resent assignments, won't accept criticism, and are quick to complain about professors who don't treat them the way they want. Hordes of those young people, most of them educationally handicapped by their years in government schools, get degrees every year, but are turned down for jobs more demanding than delivering for Domino's or serving Starbucks.

Pryor and Schaffer write that "The low functional literacy of many university graduates represents a serious indictment against the standards of the U.S. higher educational system." Actually, it is an indictment against the standards of the entire government education system. The crucial point is that sending even more of these students through college will do no one any good. It won't make the slightest dent in that "liberal" b^te noire, income inequality, to confer college degrees on still more marginal students. Nor will it stop outsourcing. Sometimes American firms turn to workers in other countries when they can't find the labor they need here, but that alleged problem won't be solved by sending more young Americans on a four-, five-, or six-year detour through college where they will learn little of any use.

But isn't it true that more and more jobs require a college education? Recently, I have been looking at an array of employment ads and have observed that many jobs which call for little background skill or knowledge-for example, bank teller, purchasing agent, loan officer-now "require" a college degree. That doesn't mean, however, that the work is so intellectually demanding that it couldn't be done by someone without the supposed skills of a college graduate. It simply indicates is that the employer has decided to use the absence of a degree as a preliminary screening device, concluding that since so many young people now go to college, it's reasonable to assume that anyone who hasn't would be difficult to train. (As further proof that these "requirements" often have nothing to do with skill or knowledge, I also found cases where two companies were hiring for the same job, one insisting that applicants have a degree and the other not.)

Thanks to subsidies, including the very low tuition at many state universities, we already have far too many students going to college. What students need and employers want is not the paper credential of a college degree, but trainability. If you really desire to give the poor an opportunity for a better life than menial labor, don't put them through college. Instead, make sure that they get a solid primary education so they can use English well and handle basic math. Doing that doesn't require more "investment" in college, but radical change in our woeful K-12 system.

Source

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7 December, 2004

WHAT A DISGRACE!

Australian kids are having to go to hospital in order to learn how to read. The problem is particularly bad in the State of Victoria -- which has Australia's most Left-wing government. That the schools are being run for the benefit of the teachers rather than for the students is the obvious conclusion

Children's clinics at hospitals across the country are clogged with patients whose real problem is their inability to read rather than a medical ailment, says the chairman of the Federal Government's inquiry into reading. Ken Rowe, appointed last week to head the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy, said psychology clinics at hospitals were straining to cope with the deluge of children seeking medical attention for problems caused by their failure to learn to read at school. "Hospitals are complaining that their clinics are being filled with kids who are being referred for things like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," he said. "But once the pediatricians sort out the children's literacy problems, the behaviour problems disappear. What is essentially an education issue has become a health issue."

The Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne is overhauling its clinical services after an internal audit revealed that a quarter of all children who attended the emergency department and other outpatient services for medical help were diagnosed as having non-medical conditions such as learning difficulties and behaviour problems. Vicki Anderson, director of the hospital's department of psychology, said she and her colleagues were stunned by the audit's findings on all outpatient referrals to the hospital. "The figures show that families and GPs are voting with their feet to see pediatricians to deal with these kinds of non-medical problems, when they should be dealt with in the education department," Professor Anderson said.

About 500 children have been treated at the hospital's Learning Difficulties Centre in the past year; demand for its services has almost doubled each year for the past five years. Professor Anderson said many children who were sent to the clinic because their teachers, families and GPs believed they had ADHD did not have the condition. Rather, the child's inattention or poor behaviour in class was secondary to their failure to learn to read at school.

"ADHD is clearly overdiagnosed," Professor Anderson said. "The appeal of a pill for ADHD is much easier than arranging twice-a-week remedial reading sessions. It's cheaper for the school and much less time-consuming to put an ADHD label on these kids. By doing that, you put the problem on the child, not on the system." Professor Anderson said specialists in charge of child psychology clinics at large hospitals in other states had similar concerns about the growing number of struggling readers attending their clinics. She said families often sought help at the hospital's learning difficulties clinic because they faced long waiting times at schools - sometimes up to six months - to have their child's learning problems assessed by educational psychologists employed by the education department.

A spokesman for Victoria's education department said the department was unaware of long waiting lists for assessment of learning problems. "The department is quick to assist any students who are struggling to learn," he said.

Source



CHOICE FOR BLACK PARENTS ONLY (IN AUSTRALIA)

Why not for all?

Aboriginal parents will have a say in selecting teachers and managing public schools that will open for extended hours under sweeping changes to be announced by the State Government. Reclassifying schools with high concentrations of Aboriginal students as "community schools" would eventually affect 50 to 150 schools, the Minister for Education, Andrew Refshauge, confirmed yesterday. Aboriginal parents on new school management boards would hand-pick staff in consultation with the principal, the schools would have flexible hours - for after-hours and holiday use - and be able to focus on Aboriginal culture and languages. The measures are recommended in a yet-to-be-released review of Aboriginal education obtained by the Herald.

In another state first, Dr Refshauge indicated yesterday that community school teachers may be paid based on their performance, rather than the union award, a measure supported by the Federal Government but opposed by teacher unions. He said the community schools and personalised study plans for 33,600 Aboriginal school students would be implemented in 2006 as part of a 10-year scheme to raise the low academic standards of indigenous students. The study plans will be developed between the school and family and could include home reading strategies and school attendance agreements.

The Government has not decided if the boards of the community schools would control their budgets, which would set a precedent in NSW public schools, where funding is allocated for specific purposes by a centralised bureaucracy. "We haven't determined what is the best way of handling that," Dr Refshauge said.

The senior vice-president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Angelo Gavrielatos, said devolving budgets to schools would "cut them adrift" from the Department of Education and allow the Government to shift responsibility for poor academic performance to the Aboriginal communities. He said the union was prepared to vary teaching awards so these schools could open for 48 weeks a year and negotiate other industrial issues that were "above minimum staffing agreements". "But we will not tolerate the politics of deregulation ... where governments devolve budgets and in doing so shift responsibility and, more importantly, blame," he said.

The review by the Department of Education was ordered by Dr Refshauge after decades of poor school results by Aboriginal students. Now comprising 4.5 per cent of public school enrolments, fewer than 40 per cent of Aboriginal students finish year 12 - half the rate of all other students - and truancy is a serious problem from late primary school onwards. The new school model will include financial incentives to attract experienced teachers to remote towns, with the "possibility that performance pay could be part of it", Dr Refshauge said.

More here

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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.

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6 December, 2004

Too many graduates not ready for work or college: "Elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. are failing to equip many high school graduates with the skills necessary to succeed in college-level coursework or workforce training, concludes a new report from ACT. To prepare students properly for college and the workplace, the report urges strengthening the high school core curriculum and ensuring K-8 students have mastered foundational skills in reading, writing, and math before entering high school. Since the publication of A Nation At Risk in 1983, ACT has advocated a 'core' curriculum of required courses, consisting of four years of English and three years each of math, natural sciences, and social sciences."



A testing time for teachers as panel examines literacy policy

Phonics coming back in Australia?

The way teachers instruct and the way they are trained will come under the microscope in the Federal Government's national literacy review. International reading research and the various methods used to test the reading skills of primary school students will also be investigated under the review's terms of reference released yesterday by the federal Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson.

Dr Ken Rowe, a research director with the Australian Council for Educational Research who will chair the inquiry, said its most important aspect would be gathering and analysing national and international research on the teaching of reading to ensure government decisions were based on best practice. He also said that when it came to international literacy standings, Australia was "right up there" with Finland, New Zealand and Canada, and was performing better than Britain and the United States. "But there is still a concern that because we're living in an information society which demands an increasingly high level of verbal and written communication skills, some children are not getting on to a growth trajectory as early as they should in terms of literacy," he said.

The review was announced by Dr Nelson last month after he was lobbied by a small group of psychologists, linguists and speech therapists, collectively known as The Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy network. When interviewed by the Herald two weeks ago - and before his new appointment - Dr Rowe described the actions of the network and its spokesman, Kevin Wheldall, as "a form of attention-seeking behaviour", and said that while there was an element of truth in Professor Wheldall's criticisms of the widely used Reading Recovery program for students struggling in literacy, it was not the whole truth. "To claim [Reading Recovery] is not effective is absurd," he said, adding that teachers were "not that stupid" to believe that one teaching method, and one teaching method only, would succeed in equipping all students with competent reading skills.

Dr Rowe will now chair a committee comprising a number of education academics, including the president of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, Professor Terry Lovat, the chair of the National Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership, Dr Gregor Ramsey, and Professor Alan Rice, the interim dean of Macquarie University's Australian Centre for Educational Studies. Other committee members include a teacher, a school principal, the mother of a child with learning difficulties, and the Herald and Sun-Herald columnist Miranda Devine.

Source

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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.

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5 December, 2004

Home-schooling is about learning, not teaching "Ignore the individuals who claim that parents need to be certified in order to teach their children at home. What arrogance on the part of any schoolteachers and administrators who speak such nonsense. Are any of those people certified to teach every subject, K-12? How many of them are even certified and qualified to teach the classes to which they are assigned? That last question is the only part of the No Child Left Behind legislation that I find interesting, even comical. Schools are having to report how many teachers are, and have been, teaching classes in subjects they have never studied; never attended training; hold no certification. Sur-prise, Sur-prise!"



NEW SURVEY OF LEFTIST BIAS IN ADADEME

Liberal professors routinely harass conservative students

Most Journal readers over a certain age can remember going all the way through college without politics intruding in the classroom. Until the Vietnam War, for instance, few students knew their professors' views, and even then most politicking took place on parts of the campus where participation was voluntary. That is no longer true--and, as a new survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) documents, it is making many students uneasy.

The ACTA survey was conducted this fall by the Center for Survey Research & Analysis at the University of Connecticut, among students at 50 top U.S. universities and colleges. It sought to ascertain the perceived levels of classroom politicization and of intellectual intolerance among faculty members. The results were striking.

For instance, nearly half said that their professors "frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course" or use the classroom to present their personal political views. In answers to other questions, the majority acknowledged that liberal views predominate. Most troubling, however, were the responses to the survey item "On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade"--29% agreed.

ACTA's president, Anne Neal, is alarmed. "One case of political intolerance is too many," she says. "But the fact that half the students are reporting [some] abuses is simply unacceptable. If these were reports of sexual harassment in the classroom, they would get people's attention."

A recent informal survey at Yale, where students answered questions about academic freedom posed by the Yale Free Press, the conservative/libertarian student paper, also deserves attention. Although the entire first run of its November issue containing the study was stolen on campus, it can be downloaded at www.yale.edu/yfp. To sum up: While some Yalies said that politics either didn't arise in class or caused no problem because they shared the professor's views, others recounted unpleasant experiences. One example:

"My teacher came into class the day after the election proclaiming, 'That's it. This is the death of America.' The rest of the class was eager to agree, and twenty minutes of Bush-bashing ensued. At one point, one student asked our teacher whether she should be so vocal, lest any students be conservatives. She then asked us whether any of us were Republicans. Naturally, no one volunteered that information, whereupon our teacher turned to the inquisitive student and said, 'See? No one in here would be stupid enough to vote for Bush.' "

Some students undoubtedly find such banter fun. But for others it can be chilling. And just as teachers' freedom of speech must be protected, so must students' freedom to learn, if it is threatened. After all, as ACTA's Anne Neal points out, "The inability to benefit from a robust and free exchange of ideas-- intellectual harassment if you will-- goes to the very heart of the academic enterprise."

Source



LACK OF DISCIPLINE COMES HOME TO ROOST

A primary school head teacher was admitted to hospital after being attacked in a classroom by an eight-year-old pupil. The boy, who has not been named, was at the centre of a police investigation yesterday after the incident last week at a school in Glasgow. Strathclyde police confirmed that an inquiry had begun and the boy would be reported to the children's panel in connection with the alleged assault. It is understood that the incident last Wednesday at Pinewood Primary School in Drumchapel came after an argument between Margaret Henderson, 47, the head teacher, and the boy. It is claimed that Ms Henderson, who was in charge of a class of 33 pupils, was pushed and fell over a table. She was taken by ambulance to Glasgow Royal Infirmary where she received treatment for back injuries. She was later discharged but has yet to return to work. A Glasgow City Council spokesman said the authority would consider what action to take after police inquiries had been completed.

Teaching unions and politicians condemned the incident which came after the publication of a government report showing record levels of violence and lack of discipline in some of Scotland's schools. Willie Hart, the Glasgow area secretary for the Educational Institute of Scotland, the country's biggest teaching union, said: "I very much regret the fact that this has happened. We want a proper inquiry into this."

Figures from the Scottish Executive reveal that in 2004 there has been a significant rise in violence against teachers. The survey of 1,800 Scottish teachers found that 59 per cent believed that discipline in schools was a serious problem, compared with 36 per cent in 1996. The study found that teachers blamed the changing nature of society for a "lack of automatic respect for authority and a greater readiness to challenge adults, as well as a rising awareness of young people's rights which was not matched by a corresponding awareness of their responsibility". Figures showed that 8 per cent of secondary school teachers had experienced aggression from pupils compared with 1 per cent in 1996. Secondary heads reported that they suffered physical aggression from 17 per cent of pupils in 2004 compared with 2 per cent in 1996. In primary schools, teachers reported a drop in aggression among pupils but a rise in aggression directed at staff. The survey revealed that 12 per cent of primary head teachers said that they or their staff had experienced physical or verbal aggression from children.

Ewan Aitken, education spokesman for the local authority umbrella organisation Cosla, said: "Any physical aggression towards teachers is unacceptable but the reasons for this kind of destructive behaviour are much more to do with all of society and not just schools. "Children are only at school 15 per cent of the time so you have to ask what is happening the other 85 per cent of the time to make them behave like this. What we are talking about here when kids are expressing violence is something more deep rooted than school."

Pinewood was built 35 years ago on the Drumchapel estate. Its concrete classrooms are due for demolition and some parents claim that standards at the school have fallen in recent years. It was alleged by one parent that an Asian teacher at the school left after serving just one year because she was subjected to racist insults from children. On one occasion it was claimed that she was stabbed in the hand with a pen. Another parent praised Ms Henderson and said she hoped the head teacher would return to work. "She is really good. She won't tolerate any nonsense. I just hope what has happened won't put her off and she comes back."

A spokesman for Strathclyde Police said: "A 47-year-old woman was injured after an incident at Pinewood Primary in Drumchapel on Wednesday, November . "An eight-year-old boy will be the subject of a report to the children's panel in connection with the incident."

Source

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4 December, 2004

INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY? NOT ON CAMPUS

By Jeff Jacoby

(Note: This column is slightly expanded from the version that appears in The Boston Globe.)

The left-wing takeover of American universities is an old story. As far back as the 1930s, Irving Kristol recalled in "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," City College of New York was so radical that "if there were any Republicans at City -- and there must have been some -- I never met them, or even heard of their existence." Soon the virus had spread to the nation's most elite institutions. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution he had just graduated from.

Today, campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant, as another newly-minted graduate of another prominent university -- Ben Shapiro of UCLA -- shows in "Brainwashed," a recent best-seller. "Under higher education's facade of objectivity," Shapiro writes, "lies a grave and overpowering bias" -- a charge he backs up with example after freakish example of academics going to ideological extremes.

No surprise, then, that when researchers checked the voter registration of humanities and social-science instructors at 19 universities, they discovered a whopping political imbalance. The results, published in The American Enterprise in 2002, made it clear that for all the talk of diversity in higher education, ideological diversity in the modern college faculty is mostly nonexistent.

So, for example, at Cornell, of the 172 faculty members whose party affiliation was recorded, 166 were liberal (Democrats or Greens) and 6 were conservative (Republicans or Libertarians). At Stanford, the liberal-conservative ratio was 151-17. At San Diego State, it was 80-11. At SUNY Binghamton, 35-1. At UCLA, 141-9. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, 116-5. At the University of Texas-Austin, 94-15. Reflecting on these gross disparities, The American Enterprise's editor, Karl Zinsmeister, remarked: "Today's colleges and universities . . . do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America."

At about the same time, a poll of Ivy League professors commissioned by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found that more than 80 percent of those who voted in 2000 had cast their ballots for Democrat Al Gore, while just 9 percent backed Republican George W. Bush. Asked to name the greatest president of the last 40 years, 26 percent chose Bill Clinton; 4 percent said Ronald Reagan. While 64 percent said they were "liberal" or "somewhat liberal," only 6 percent described themselves as "somewhat conservative" -- and none at all as "conservative."

And the evidence continues to mount.

The latest campaign-finance records reveal that the most partisan organizations in America, as measured by employee donations to a presidential candidate, are the University of California and Harvard. Together, the two institutions accounted for $942,000 in contributions to the Kerry campaign -- 19 times the amount donated to the Bush campaign.

Last month, The New York Times reported that a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows Democratic professors outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, according to a separate study that included professors of engineering and the hard sciences, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is even more lopsided: 9 to 1.

Such one-party domination of any major institution is problematic in a nation where Republicans and Democrats can be found in roughly equal numbers. In academia, it is scandalous. It strangles dissent, suppresses debate, and causes minorities to be discriminated against. It is certainly antithetical to good scholarship. "Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent," writes Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "deteriorates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. . . . Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition."

Worse yet, it leads faculty members to abuse their authority. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released the results of the first survey to measure student perceptions of faculty partisanship. The ACTA findings are striking. Of 658 students polled at the top 50 US colleges, 49 percent said professors "frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course," 48 percent said some "presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided," and 46 percent said that "professors use the classroom to present their personal political views." That nearly half of the respondents expressed those views is all the more striking, since only 13 percent described themselves as conservative.

Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students' right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe -- liberals and conservatives alike.

"If this were a survey of students reporting widespread sexual harassment," says ACTA's president, Anne Neal, "there would be an uproar." That is because universities take sexual harassment seriously. Intellectual harassment, on the other hand -- like the one-party conformity it flows from -- they ignore. Until that changes, the scandal of the campuses will only grow worse.



BUREAUCRATIC HATRED OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS SURFACES IN BRITAIN

There was not even a pretence at justice

"Test results at one of the country's top junior schools have been annulled because investigators found evidence of cheating. Waltham Holy Cross Junior School in Essex was stripped of its results for 11-year-olds in English, mathematics and science, sending it to the bottom of performance tables published today. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which monitors the national curriculum tests, said that it believed that pupils had not completed papers unaided.

Diane Stygal, the head teacher, said that the school had been condemned by a kangaroo court. Mrs Stygal said: "We vigorously deny that anything went on. Just two months before the tests, we had an Ofsted report that said our children were in line to achieve very challenging targets." Waltham Holy Cross was rated among the top 5 per cent nationally for test results last year. But the QCA took the unusual step of awarding the ninety-one pupils zero scores in all three subjects after its inquiry at the school in June.

"We concluded that the results did not reflect the independent and unaided work of pupils," a QCA spokeswoman said. The authority's concerns were thought to focus on the invigilation of the tests.

Mrs Stygal said that staff had no opportunity to defend themselves because they were never told what the allegation was or who made it. QCA officials had told the school that there was no mechanism for appealing against its decision. "It has been extremely stressful and it is beginning to tell on all of us. But the parents of the children concerned were fabulous, and many of them have written wonderful letters of support," she said. Lorraine Kent, the chairman of the school's governors, said that the QCA was "unable to find any direct evidence relating to the allegation". She added that the governors continued to have confidence in Mrs Stygal, who has been head for nearly five years. "The governors and head teacher of the school are dismayed at the way QCA have dismissed the teachers' and children's hard work in this way, and by someone seemingly wishing to do harm to the school," she said.

Essex County Council said that the inquiry was triggered by a complaint against the school by a member of the public".

More here



THE LEFTIST VERSION OF VALUES

In the first attempt to include a set of values in an Australian schools curriculum, Victoria will adopt five "principles" that all schools must follow as the Government prepares to release its new curriculum within weeks. The new principles have drawn immediate criticism, with the head of the Independent Education Union of Victoria, Tony Keenan, describing them as "just a statement of the bleeding obvious". "Teachers will roll their eyes," he said, also noting the academic focus of the principles. The introduction of the five principles follows the rejection by Education Minister Lynne Kosky of a more detailed set of values, which created heated debate when proposed earlier this year.

The question of values in schools has been a key issue this year, after claims by Prime Minister John Howard that the drift of students to private schools was partly because government schools were "values neutral". A national study conducted for The Age by the Australian Council for Educational Research also found that a mix of "traditional values" was the main attraction for parents who chose private schools.

The new curriculum and its principles will apply to both government and private schools in Victoria. Openness of mind, pursuit of excellence and respect for evidence are among the new principles. The other two are "learning for all" - the idea that all students can learn - and "engagement and effort" - if students work hard, they will improve. Ms Kosky told The Age the five principles were "a higher set of principles that really are fundamental to a democracy".

But Mr Keenan said: "If she's hoping to avoid the values debate, which we think is a bit of a non-issue anyway, I don't think that will do it." Mr Keenan said there was nothing offensive about the principles, but they did not deal with issues such as respect for others and co-operation. "And they're not even difficult areas," he said.

The body in charge of writing the new curriculum, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, originally proposed a list of 10 values, agreed by state and federal education ministers five years ago. The Age reported last month the list had prompted an intense debate over what values should be taught. Those proposed included tolerance and understanding, respect, social justice and freedom. Only one of those values has made it into the new principles - pursuit of excellence.

More here

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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.

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3 December, 2004

Government Failure: Essays Debunk Public Education

Book review by Chad Adams

(Edited by James Tooley and James Stanfield: Government Failure: E. G. West on Education; Institute for Economic Affairs; 2003; 201pp.; $15, paperback)

This illuminating book was designed to commemorate the achievements and to spread the ideas of the late Edwin G. West. Professor West, who lived from 1922 to 2001, did pioneering work in the economics and history of education and his studies have been critical in refuting the pretensions of government education. Those who wish to show that government fails to educate students well and to restore a free market in education will find that E.G. West was one of their greatest allies.

Gathered here are nine of West's essays on education. Professor James Tooley, who has made great contributions to the debate over government-provided education himself, writes in his introduction that he initially approached West's work with the intention of refuting it. As he read and thought about West's arguments, however, he found himself being won over. "For me, the fact that governments rightfully intervened in education was a taken-for-granted norm - so taken for granted that it didn't really come up in discussion," he writes. "Any deviance from the status quo - such as moves towards markets in education - needed to be justified, not state intervention itself. E. G. West's argument threatened to completely overturn this cozy presumption."

West's first discovery - still normally ignored in schools, departments, and institutes of education - was that, before the Forster Act of 1870 established the first tax-funded schools in England and Wales, school attendance and literacy rates were well above 90 percent. The educational situation in the United States at about the same time seems to have been sufficiently similar for Milton and Rose Friedman, while they were working on their book Free to Choose, to change their minds about government compulsion and funding by examining the works of West. Friedman would later recommend that the Hoover Institution give West the first Alexis de Tocqueville Award for the Advancement of Education Freedom. Friedman himself made the presentation.

West's wider international influence appears to have been greater than his effective influence on either the United Kingdom or the United States. The movement toward educational choice in the United States has been minimal, owing to the vociferous opposition of the education establishment of any movement whatever away from the status quo. In the United Kingdom, under the government of John Major, a limited voucher system known as Assisted Places was established, but, as the editors appear to have overlooked, it was immediately abolished by the incoming Blair administration in 1999.

The prime evidence of West's wider influence is provided by the fact that he was commissioned to produce, and duly produced, two papers for the International Finance Corporation ( the private finance arm of the World Bank). Those papers were entitled "Education with and Without the State" and "Education Vouchers in Practice and Principle: A World Survey." They actually succeeded in persuading the IFC and World Bank to revise their education policy to favor a greater role for the private sector.

Much of West's work was focused on the economics of politics (or public choice economics, as it is now called). As he said, "benevolent government does not exist. The political machinery is. in fact, largely. operated by interest groups, vote-maximizing politicians and self-seeking bureaucracies." As the writings of Myron Lieberman have taught us, the teacher unions are among the most powerful of such "self-seeking bureaucracies." West led the way in demonstrating the utter folly of expecting good educational results from a system dominated by the producers rather than the consumers of education services.

A particularly fascinating contribution in the current volume is Chapter 5, "The Economics of Compulsion," in which West used his knowledge both of history and public-choice economics to show that the compulsion to attend school has never been a major cause either of increased school attendance or any general improvement in human behavior.

The final essay in the book, "Education Without the State," speculates as to how much better off education consumers would have been if Britain had not taken the steps to establish universal tax-supported schooling. He concludes with these words of advice, "The choice of school movement, it is maintained, has been to a large extent misinformed. What is needed is choice in education."

Those who seek to move away from government-schooling monopoly, whether in the United Kingdom, the United States, or elsewhere in the world, will find this book to be of enormous value.

Source



CANUTE TRIES TO HOLD BACK THE COLLAPSE OF BRITISH HIGHER EDUCATION

Useless courses are swamping useful ones but all he can do is wring his hands. He wants to have his cake and eat it too, of course. Who wouldn't? Giving the useful courses real priority is something that political correctness just forbids him from doing

Charles Clarke sought to shore up key university subjects yesterday by publishing a list of courses considered to be of "national strategic importance". The Education Secretary asked the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) to report on whether intervention was needed to prevent universities abandoning subjects such as chemistry and Arabic. But he ruled out additional government funding to protect departments threatened by closure. Mr Clarke said that he had consulted Cabinet colleagues before compiling the list of courses considered vital to the national interest.

Arabic and Turkish language studies and courses on the former Soviet Union regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia were included for "strategic security and inter-cultural awareness reasons". Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and other Asian languages and area studies were listed "for business and trade purposes". Durham University decided last year to close its Department of East Asian Studies.

Mr Clarke placed science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses on the protected list, saying that they were necessary to protect Britain's productivity. Several universities have announced plans to end the study of chemistry. The latest, Exeter, declared last week that closure of its department, along with at least one other, was necessary to cut losses of œ3 million. It last night approved a proposal by Professor Steve Smith, the vice-chancellor, to wind down the music department over the next three years. The university is still discussing the fate of the Italian department, which is also under threat. Meanwhile, about 1,000 students protested on Monday against Cambridge University's plans to close its architecture department. Mr Clarke said vocational courses of interest to employers in areas that were of growing importance to the economy, such as the creative industries, should also be covered, with degrees relating to the new member countries of the European Union.

Mr Clarke asked David Young, the chairman of Hefce, to advise on how best to retain degree courses in these subjects. But he said that universities remained independent bodies, free to make their own decisions, and he was "not looking for a new set of possible initiatives, nor a bid for extra funds". Mr Clarke said: "Any sensible government needs to take a long-term view of what our students are studying and whether we have enough graduates in the subjects needed to help our economy and society thrive." He said these subjects had been highlighted because there were "particular concerns that on current trends we may not be able to produce enough graduates in these fields."

A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said that the initiative had been planned for several months and was not a response to Exeter's announcement. The plan to close Exeter's chemistry department has already prompted Sir Harry Kroto, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996 for discovering a new form of carbon, to return an honorary degree in protest. The Association of University Teachers said that Mr Clarke had done too little too late to prevent a growing crisis.

Source

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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.

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2 December, 2004

PLAGIARISM: BY STUDENTS? NO. BY THE EDUCATION WATCHDOG ITSELF!

British bureaucracy at its most arrogant

Ofsted, the government's education standards watchdog, has admitted that parts of an inspection report given to a top Birmingham school were copied from a report on another school more than 100 miles away. Lordswood Girls' School - judged in government league tables to be the best in the country for improving pupil performance - is planning to sue Ofsted after discovering that two pages of a critical review were identical to an earlier report on Parkside School in Bradford. 'When I realised my school's report contained judgments on areas that the Ofsted team had not inspected during their visit, I became suspicious,' said Jane Hattatt, the headteacher at Lordswood. 'I thought: "What would a stupid child have done if they wanted to pretend to have completed work they had not done?" [So I] typed key phrases into the internet to find where they came from.'

The fact that an Ofsted report contained inaccurate information from another school will be highly embarrassing for the institution. Parents looking for the best schools read Ofsted reports closely and a good report can lead to a school being over-subscribed. Bad reports can have the opposite effect. Lordswood's challenge is one of a growing number of legal actions facing Ofsted. The beleaguered watchdog raised a storm of protest last Thursday when it announced that 37 further education colleges in England had failed inspections, most of them in the south. 'Claims made by Ofsted that a rise in failing colleges this year was a "national disgrace" are highly inappropriate,' said Dr John Brennan, chief executive of the Association of Colleges (AoC). 'It is inappropriate for immoderate language of this kind to be used about a sector which achieves remarkable success in the face of continuing government underfunding.'

Ofsted admitted this weekend that the inspection team for Lordswood failed to give an accurate and fair portrayal in the section relating to leadership and management of the school. It has promised to amend the report and add an addendum on its website about the school. But Hattatt, who has been head of the 900-pupil school in Harborne for 15 years, and who launched a high-profile complaint against the Ofsted inspection system in February, plans to take her concerns to an independent adjudicator. 'I have no confidence in the system,' she said. 'I would advise anyone with concerns who is going through the complaints procedure to keep on going because they need to be challenged.'

Hattatt raised 31 objections to Ofsted's report, six of which have been upheld, including the duplication charge. In a written response, Ofsted said: 'The number of errors and the duplication of the leadership and management section in the draft report are not acceptable. We have asked the lead inspector to add an addendum to the published report of the school. In addition, we will monitor the work of the lead inspector.'

Ofsted's original report into Lordswood also contained incorrect data on achievement at the school, claiming that no students achieved A or B grades in English A-level when in fact half of them did. Ofsted amended the error in the final document, but failed to update judgments made about performance in the subject based on the results. It has now agreed to make changes.

Lordswood Girls' School is just one of a growing number of schools threatening to challenge Ofsted inspections: in September, the Business Academy, Bexley, in south-east London, threatened to take Ofsted to court over a finding of 'significant weaknesses' in its teaching. Sir David Garrard, chairman of Minerva plc, which sponsors the 31 million pound flagship academy said it was taking a stance 'on behalf of all schools and teachers against the irrational, inconsistent and preposterous posturing of Ofsted.... The inspectors imposed an artificial environment by forcing unqualified and trainee teachers to conduct the lessons alone,' said Garrard. 'The academy is deeply disappointed at Ofsted's failure to have taken into account the legitimate objections to its unsupportable analysis and its refusal to meet with representatives or acknowledge its error. I believe Ofsted is accountable, as are we all, and it has refused, in these circumstances, to be accountable at any level.'

Source



MORE ON INHERITED ABILITIES

Note this post:

The graph below is from a fascinating new paper, What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families?, by Bruce Sacerdote. Holt's International Children's Services places children, primarily Koreans, with families in the United States. Holt has an interesting proviso to their adoption contract, conditional on being accepted into the program, children are randomly assigned. Sacerdote has collected data from children who were adopted between 1970-1980, and thus who today are in their mid 20's or 30's, and their adoptive parents.

The graph shows how parent income at the time of adoption relates to child income for the adopted and "biological" (non-adopted) children. The income of biological children increases strongly with parental income but the income of adoptive children is flat in parent income.

In other words, environment had NO EFFECT on achievement. Kids adopted into high income households did no better than kids adopted into low income households. What made the difference was genetic inheritance. If the kid was the genetic progeny of high income parents he tended to do well and if he was the progeny of low income parents he tended to do poorly. So those poor souls featured in the Time magazine article I discuss immediately below who could not figure out why middle-class blacks kids did poorly at school weren't even looking in the right direction. Class background has NO EFFECT on achievement. It is irrelevant. So no wonder putting black kids into a middle class background did not make them high achievers. It does not make ANYONE a high achiever! Putting it another way, genetic background is overwhelmingly more important than class background. Sad for Leftists with their dreams of social manipulation, I guess, but that's reality.

All the twin studies of IQ show the same thing, of course. In predicting a child's IQ, family background tells you nothing but genetic inheritance tells you heaps. If anybody wants to explore what I have said on these matters more fully, here would be a good place to start.

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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.

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1 December, 2004

INHERITED ABILITY LEVELS SHOW, NO MATTER WHAT

A recent big article in Time magazine reports that middle-class black students from middle-class areas do much more poorly at school than do their white peers. Everybody, including Joanne Jacobs, seems to treat this as a great puzzle. But it is no puzzle at all. Middle class blacks are at the extreme top of the range for blacks whereas middle class whites are not. So the children of middle class blacks are much more likely to suffer from regression to the mean (i.e. to be less exceptional and hence lower achievers than their parents). And their parents probably made it into the middle class mainly because of affirmative action anyway so even if black children had precisely the same abilities as their parents, they would be less able than their white peers. I guess I must be breaking a lot of taboos in saying that but it does happen to be the truth.

The only way that it would be a puzzle that the black children do less well is if educational achievement were purely a function of class background -- and just to name that assumption is surely to expose it for the absurdity it is. Though what seems obvious to me after my 35+ years as a psychometrician may not be obvious to everybody, I guess. So let me just say that there is now nearly 100 years of solidly replicated psychological research to show that academic ability is mainly inherited. Though I think that there can be few people anyway who are unaware that smart kids mostly come from smart parents and thick kids mostly come from thick parents.

The sad thing is that ignoring heredity ends up putting most unfair pressures on the black children described in the Time article. They are undoubtedly being made to feel that they are a disappointment even though they are probably doing as well as they can. So if anyone thinks I am a moral degenerate for mentioning heredity in such a "sensitive" area, what are we to call those who are treating the children concerned in such an unfair and oppressive way?



SCRUTON ON BRITISH EDUCATION

The recent memo purloined from Prince Charles made the accurate observation that ‘child-centred’ education, by encouraging false expectations and discouraging effort, seriously hampers the one who receives it. University teachers know this, since they have to deal with the products of an education which puts self-esteem before real achievement. Despite the plethora of As and Bs gained through dumbed-down examinations in dumbed-down subjects, young people tend to enter university without the skills required for real study. The likelihood that an incoming undergraduate can read a book or write an essay diminishes from year to year, and only the entrenched sentimentality of the educational establishment prevents it from acknowledging that the cause of this lies in the culture of self-esteem. The ruling principle of our educational system seems to be that children should be made to feel good about themselves. The curriculum should therefore be ‘relevant’ to their interests, and examinations should make no judgment of their linguistic or literary skills.

Education is possible only if we persuade children that there are things worth knowing that they don’t already know. This may make them feel bad about themselves, but feeling bad now is the price of feeling good later. The culture of self-esteem has the opposite effect: by making children feel good now, it makes them feel bad later — so bad indeed that they blame everybody else for their failure, and join the growing queue of resentful litigants. Education involves transmitting knowledge and skills, not illusions, and a practice devoted to persuading children that they are fine just as they are does not deserve the name of education. The acquisition of knowledge requires both aptitude and work, a truth so obvious that only decades of egalitarian propaganda could have induced so many people to deny it.

The fracas over the Prince’s memo touches on deeper matters, however. Education is an end in itself. But it is also a means to social advancement. And there can be social advancement only where there is social hierarchy. In a society of equals there is neither failure nor success, and despair is conquered by the loss of hope. Real societies are not like that: they are shaped by competition, conflict, friendship and love, all of them forces that have distinction rather than equality as their natural outcome, and all of them profoundly antipathetic to the culture of self-esteem. A society of real human beings is quite unlike the society for which children are prepared by a ‘child-centred’ education. It is one in which you can lose or gain; in which talent, skill and hard work are rewarded and arrogance and ignorance deplored. Social hierarchy is the inevitable consequence of this: not necessarily the static hierarchy of inherited social class, nor the hierarchy of property that tends to replace it, but a hierarchy all the same, in which influence, affection and power are unequally distributed.

Those elementary truths used to be acknowledged by our education system. When I was awarded a place at our local grammar school, my father, a socialist who jealously guarded his working-class identity, foresaw with a curse that I would ‘get above my station’. And he was right, thank God. Both my father’s resentment and my own success testify to the same underlying reality: that you can rise to a higher station in society by getting a good education. Thanks to my grammar school I gained a scholarship to Cambridge, and thanks to Cambridge I gained the kind of education that opened my thoughts, skills and ambitions to a world that I had never dreamed could be mine. And all this without costing my family a penny.

As a result of the culture of self-esteem, however, the helping hand that I received from the state has been withdrawn by the state. Grammar schools have been largely abolished, the curriculum has been vandalised (and also compelled) and the subjects which contain worthwhile knowledge — maths, the hard sciences, Latin, Greek and ancient history — have been driven to the margins of the system. And having destroyed the schools the state would now like to destroy the universities, by forcing them to take the dumbed-down products of its vandalism. All this shows a deep hostility to social hierarchy. But egalitarian dogma does nothing to abolish social hierarchy: it simply ensures that children at the bottom are given no chance to rise to the top. The way to make hierarchy acceptable is not to pretend that it can be abolished, but to provide poorer children with the means to rise in it. In other words, it is to replace aristocracy and plutocracy with meritocracy. And that means doing the kind of thing that was done by my grammar school, and which is done by the Prince through his admirable Trust, namely, to provide young people with the opportunity to develop their talents and to reap the full reward for their work.

Now there are hierarchies only if there are people at the bottom of them. The advocates of self-esteem are so exercised by this fact that they try to invert the social spectrum, to represent the bottom as the top and the top as the bottom. Slovenly speech is praised as socially authentic, and ignorance as ‘difference’. All forms of knowledge that require aptitude or work, or which aspire to a higher culture than that of the street, are dismissed as ‘elitist’ and driven to the edge of the curriculum. The music mistress who wishes to help her class to understand sonata form and its role in the classical symphony will be criticised for the ‘irrelevance’ of her lessons, which ought instead to be concentrating on the kind of music that young people prefer — Oasis, for instance. The suggestion that we ought to be teaching young people to prefer something better will be dismissed as arrogant and oppressive. This anti-elitism has the reverse effect of that intended, since it confines young people to the social position from which they start....

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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.

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