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31 December, 2005

UC SECRECY ABOUT CORRUPT DEAL

When UC Davis Vice Chancellor Celeste Rose resigned under pressure last summer, the university gave her a new job with a new title, a $20,000 a year raise -- and very little responsibility. In fact, Rose, 55, isn't required to do any work at all. As part of a secret legal settlement negotiated to avoid a potentially embarrassing lawsuit, UC Davis promised to keep Rose on the payroll as the "senior adviser to the chancellor" for two years at an annual salary of $205,000, plus all the benefits of a senior manager, including health care, severance pay and a growing pension. Yet her new job has no formal job description or regular duties. She gave up her office on campus. And UC promised not to fire her, no matter how little she does. If Rose quits, she is still entitled to receive the remainder of her two years' salary under the agreement. In addition, UC Davis agreed to give her a $50,000 "transition payment" to help her find a new job, a letter of recommendation and a promise to tell reporters that she voluntarily resigned from her old position.

But in apparent violation of university policy, members of the governing Board of Regents were not told of the settlement and were not asked to give their approval. In fact, the June 1 agreement was handled so quietly that UC Davis spokeswoman Lisa Lapin said only a few people on campus know about it. "It's another instance of high compensation not being disclosed," said UC Davis law Professor Daniel Simmons, chair of the UC Davis Academic Senate. "This is the kind of disclosure that harms the university, because these issues always become public at one point or another."

As The Chronicle reported last month, the University of California last fiscal year gave employees hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, administrative stipends and other hidden compensation. In the wake of those stories, the Legislature has scheduled hearings into the issue next year, and UC President Robert Dynes formed a task force to look at revising the university's disclosure policies. Regent Joanne Kozberg, who was named co-chair of the task force, said she'll have the group look into why regents weren't told about the UC Davis agreement. "If there is a policy, it has got to be followed," Kozberg said. "If there is a violation, it needs to be looked into."

Rose's attorney, Melinda Guzman, said Rose received the settlement after threatening to sue the university for racial and gender discrimination. Rose is African American.

The dispute began in February when UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef told Rose in a private meeting she needed to resign at the end of June. Guzman said Vanderhoef didn't offer a reason for the decision, which Guzman claims is part of a pattern of discrimination at the campus. "The facts were compelling," Guzman said. UC has had a "repeated failure to either recruit or retain minority executive managers at the UC Davis campus." UC Davis officials denied they discriminated against Rose or any other executives. But citing privacy rights surrounding personnel issues, they said they could not comment on Rose's claim that she was essentially fired without a reason. "If she and her attorney wish to say things, that's their right," said Dennis Shimek, associate vice chancellor of human resources at UC Davis. "But that doesn't make what they are saying accurate."

Regardless of the merits of her claims, UC Davis quickly agreed to settle......

More here



NASTY BUREAUCRAT ATTACKS TUTORING PROGRAM

Maybe he thinks it shows up the inadequacy of his school

A nonprofit group that has tutored poor D.C. students for more than 15 years has been kicked out of its only school site because the school's new principal says no paperwork has been filed to allow the group to use the facility. Project Northstar, a D.C. tutoring program founded in 1989, has used the cafeteria of Lemon G. Hine Junior High School at Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast for one of its weekly tutoring classes since 1994. But Willie Jackson, who became Hine's principal late last month, asked Northstar to leave Dec. 5, saying the program did not file a yearly building-use agreement, as required by the public school system.

"It just doesn't make sense," said Sylvia Davis, 52, whose three foster children attend the weekly program. "Why would a school want to shut down a program that's helping children? It's really hard to find tutoring, and if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't be able to afford it. There's a lot of children in this community that need help."

A building-use agreement between the school system and Northstar has been renewed yearly since the program began using the facility, program officials said. "Every year we have to renew our lease, and every year we do," said Brian Carome, Project Northstar's executive director. "We submitted the most-recent request in June 2005, and we were told that we had been approved."

Mr. Jackson said Northstar's use agreement was lost or never was filed. When Northstar refiled paperwork per his request last week, Mr. Jackson rejected the new deal. "There's a lack-of-agreement issue," he said. "I can't go into this environment and try to participate when the rules aren't followed." Mr. Jackson refused to say why he rejected the agreement. "I cannot say at this time," he said.

Mr. Carome has provided The Washington Times with a copy of the building-use agreement he submitted in June and of previous agreements that had been approved. Unlike earlier agreements, the June submission was not signed by a school administrator. However, Patricia Tucker, assistant superintendent of schools, said Northstar had never submitted an agreement in the 11 years it has operated at the junior high school.

"Project Northstar ... has not currently or in the past submitted a building use agreement. This is legally required by all organizations and community groups," Miss Tucker said in a written statement. "The circumstances that led to the illegal use of the facility by Project Northstar are currently under rigorous investigation and will be addressed in a forthright manner."

In a letter Friday to Peter Parham, chief of staff for the superintendent, Project Northstar President Robert D. Evans disputes Miss Tucker's statement, calling it "false" and "derogatory." Mr. Evans notes that the program is scheduled to restart next month and asks that the issue be resolved by Thursday. "As you note in your e-mail, given the long history of service by Project Northstar to the children of our city, this should not be difficult," he told Mr. Parham.

Officials for D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey did not return calls for comment. Project Northstar was founded in 1989 by members of the D.C. Chapters of the Coalition of 100 Black Women and Concerned Black Men and lawyers from three local law firms. It serves about 200 poverty-level students once a week at six D.C. sites. The program is funded by grants from local foundations and private and corporate donations. During the 2004-05 school year, a reading assessment of 165 Northstar students found that 67 percent improved by at least one level and 41 percent improved by at least two levels.

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.

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

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

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30 December, 2005

VOUCHER PLAN TOO POPULAR

A rationing plan for enrolling students in more than 120 schools in Milwaukee's private school voucher program will be imposed for the 2006-'07 school year, the state Department of Public Instruction said Tuesday in a letter to administrators of those schools. Key advocates for the voucher program said if the rationing is imposed, hundreds, if not thousands, of students in voucher schools would be unable to continue in or to enroll in schools in the program, and substantial damage would be done to some of the schools.

The department's action will turn up the heat sharply on Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican legislative leaders to come to an agreement on the future of the voucher program and, perhaps, other Milwaukee school issues. All sides appear to agree that a decision on the number of voucher seats for next school year needs to come early in 2006 so families and schools, including many Milwaukee Public Schools, can make plans for the next school year. The main enrollment period for MPS begins Jan. 9. Private schools that want to be part of the voucher program have a Feb. 1 deadline to inform DPI of their plans.

The department's letter, even as it outlines a rationing plan, says the best resolution of the voucher cap issue is an agreement between the governor and the legislature. Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of schools, said in an interview: "We're hoping people of goodwill will come together." Evers said DPI had to announce a plan at this point: "There's no question the clock is ticking. We have a cap, we have no legislative solution for it, and we have an obligation to implement the law as written."

Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and a strong supporter of the voucher program, said: "I'm hopeful that this will awaken people to the fact that a cap on the choice program will be disastrous for broad education reform in Milwaukee. . . . I think this will affect the delivery of education to every kid in the city of Milwaukee, not just to those in the choice program."

But even with people on both sides of the deep divide on Milwaukee education policies saying the voucher cap should be lifted, prospects for a compromise are uncertain. Some key figures on both sides said they doubted whether the other side was willing to take a constructive approach - just as other leaders on both sides said they thought a compromise would be reached. Under the law, enrollment in the voucher program cannot exceed 15% of the enrollment in MPS. The voucher total has gone up every year but one since the program began in 1990-'91. DPI officials have not announced a final figure for this year but say enrollment is basically at the current cap of 14,751 and is sure to go over the cap of about 14,500 for next year unless rationing is imposed.

The voucher program - the oldest and arguably the most comprehensive such program in the country - allows students from low-income homes in Milwaukee to attend private schools, including religious schools. This year, state-funded vouchers pay up to $6,351 a student, and the voucher payments are expected to total $96 million.

In a nutshell, the rationing plan proposed by DPI would divide the cap figure for next school year (14,500) by the total of all the voucher seats schools say, as of Feb. 1, they have available. In the past, schools have submitted figures that were much above their enrollment in the end. For example, the number of potential seats for the current school year claimed by schools was almost 30,000. Dividing this year's cap into that total would leave a fraction to be used in a rationing of voucher seats so that schools could fill only that fraction with potential students. Under the DPI plan, if figures were about the same next school year, each school would be told it could enroll about 50% of its voucher capacity.

Voucher advocates say the plan could cause some schools to cut existing voucher seats, among other effects. "It really is one of the most draconian options that they could have taken," said Brother Bob Smith, president of Messmer Catholic Schools. "Which of the kids are we supposed to tell they can't come back to their schools next year, and what options are they presenting for those students and their families?"....

More here



HELP FOR CAMPUS CONSERVATIVES

Though Christopher Flickinger calls himself "dean" and poses in parodistic photos waving a small American flag and looking stern, he says he's never been more serious about eliminating what he claims is pervasive anti-conservatism on college campuses today. "When I was on campus, I had no help," the recent Ohio State University graduate told FOXNews.com. "I was harassed, intimidated, shouted down." Flickinger, schooled in broadcast journalism, said he wants to provide the support he never had as a lonely conservative in college. That's why in November he launched the Network of College Conservatives to act in part as "a link for these conservative students, to let them know they are not alone."

Running the Web site solo from his Pittsburgh, Pa., home, Flickinger said he wants the network to be much more than a shoulder to cry on. Conservative students are still easy targets of liberal intimidation, he claims, but more than ever, they have a growing body of legal and activist support groups to turn to — and he wants his organization to be top among those resources. Flickinger added that his group plans on "exposing and letting people know what is going on" on campuses by creating a clearinghouse on the Web site for students to pass along information about individual schools and professors. "By exposing left-wing educators, providing information on liberal and conservative activities on campus and educating students on conservative thoughts, views and opinions, the NCC will counter the liberal bias throughout America's institutions of higher learning," reads the network's mission statement.

But not everyone believes that conservative students are as harassed or marginalized as they say they are or might have been in the past. Megan Fitzgerald is director of the Center for Campus Free Speech , described on its Web site as an organization "dedicated to preserving the marketplace of ideas on college campuses across the country." Fitzgerald said her center defends speech by liberals and conservatives alike, and her own experience at the University of Wisconsin found that conservatives were vocal, organized and enjoyed the same platform as any other ideological movement on campus. "I would say, my senior year, the student government, probably a majority of the members would have identified themselves as conservative," said the 2003 graduate....

Several conservatives acknowledge that as the country has become more equally divided among conservatives and liberals, today's student bodies are more reflective of those ideological differences. "It used to be that some conservatives would concentrate on putting their heads down and just getting through," said David French, president of the legal group Foundation for Individual Freedom in Education, which recently supported the right of a University of Wisconsin resident assistant to hold Bible study sessions in his dorm. "Now they are more confrontational." French said when he was at Harvard Law School 11 years ago there "wasn't a lot of hope" about doing something to counter the anti-conservative bias on campus, but he has seen some positive signs at Harvard since then. "Now, there is a real sense that the cultural momentum in the [conservative] movement has actually made it to the academy," he said.

Sarah Armstrong, chairwoman of the Connecticut Union of College Republicans and a junior at Connecticut College, said her group has increased membership to 2,000 throughout the state and has even made inroads into Wesleyan University and other schools considered by many to be liberal bastions. "[We're] very aggressive," in terms of organizing, Armstrong said. Still, she said, the anti-conservative bias is alive and well and most of it comes from the professors, "the people who should know better."

Earlier this year, professors Robert Lichter of George Mason University, Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, released a surveywhich showed that 72 percent of college professors polled held liberal views on current topics such as abortion rights, the environment and homosexuality....

Wilson said conservative religious colleges across the country have much stricter policies regarding speech and behavior, and Web sites like NCC seek to work as "spy" sites that smack of fascist tactics to "out" liberal professors. Flickinger said he welcomes the criticism, and since launching NCC has received hate mail along with letters of encouragement. Meanwhile, the site has already registered conservative students from more than 60 colleges and universities in what he says he hopes will offer "camaraderie through numbers." "Hopefully, we'll bring this quiet revolution to a loud, boisterous battle," he 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.

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

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

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29 December, 2005

The Dirty Dozen

America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses. Princeton University's "Prostitute, Cross Dressing, and Same-Sex Eroticism" Course ranked as the most bizarre Class

As tuition rates climb to an average of over $21,000 per year, today's college students study prostitution, teeth whitening, and Beavis and Butthead. The following Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation's colleges and universities:

Princeton University's The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women examines "prostitutes," "cross-dressing," and "same-sex eroticism" in 16th - and 17th - century England, France, Italy and Spain

The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States at Occidental College in California explores ways "which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism."

At The John Hopkins University, students in the Sex, Drugs, and Rock `n' Roll in Ancient Egypt class view slideshows of women in ancient Egypt "vomiting on each other," "having intercourse," and "fixing their hair."

Like something out of a Hugh Hefner film, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offers the class Lesbian Novels Since World War II.

Alfred University's Nip, Tuck, Perm, Pierce, and Tattoo: Adventures with Embodied Culture, mostly made up of women, encourages students to think about the meaning behind "teeth whitening, tanning, shaving, and hair dyeing." Special projects include visiting a tattoo-and-piercing studio and watching Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding film, Pumping Iron.

Harvard University's Marxist Concepts of Racism examines "the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality" (emphasis added). Although Karl Marx didn't say much on race, leftist professors in this course extrapolate information on "racial oppression" and "racial antagonism."

Occidental College-making the Dirty Dozen list twice-offers a course in Stupidity, which compares the American presidency to Beavis and Butthead.

Students at the University of California-Los Angeles need not wonder what it means to be a lesbian. The Psychology of the Lesbian Experience reviews "various aspects of lesbian experience" including the "impact of heterosexism/stigma, gender role socialization, minority status of women and lesbians, identity development within a multicultural society, changes in psychological theories about lesbians in sociohistorical context."

Duke University's American Dreams/American Realities course supposedly unearths "such myths as `rags to riches,' `beacon to the world,' and the `frontier,' in defining the American character" (emphasis added).

Amherst College in Massachusetts offers the class Taking Marx Seriously: "Should Marx be given another chance?" Students in this course are asked to question if Marxism still has any "credibility" remaining, while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by "returning to [Marx's] texts." Coming to Marx's rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.

Brown University's Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay & Lesbian Plays "address[es] the identities and issues of Black gay men and lesbians, and offer[s] various points of view from within and without the Black gay and lesbian artistic communities."

Students enrolled in the University of Michigan's Topics in Literary Studies: Ancient Greek/Modern Gay Sexuality have the pleasure of reading a "wide selection of ancient Greek (and a few Roman) texts that deal with same-sex love, desire, gender dissidence, and sexual behavior."

Source



Diversity of everything but ideas

Mark 2005 as the year that the dirty little secret of higher education became part of the public conversation. Most of us on college campuses have long known that there is little intellectual diversity in higher education, especially when it comes to political ideas. But we learned to live with it as part of the artificial bubble that characterizes much of campus life. Consider these recent challenges to the leftward lean of thinking on college campuses:

-- Moderate U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander -- a former university president and one-time Secretary of Education -- told the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that the greatest threat to broader public support and increased funding for higher education is a "growing political one-sidedness which has infected most campuses."

-- The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in its recent report "Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action," said "the most serious challenge for higher education today is the lack of intellectual diversity."

-- Earlier this year, the broad-based American Council on Education issued a statement, supported by 30 higher education organizations, acknowledging the growing concern about "intellectual pluralism" and the "free exchange of ideas" on campuses.

Yes, people are now standing up to say that higher education, which has pioneered in every other kind of diversity -- ethnic, gender, same-sex benefits -- lacks diversity in the very heart of its mission: the development and transmission of ideas.

A liberal arts education has become politically liberal. The evidence of political one-sidedness on campus is strong, but not really new. Critics point to a survey by three scholars published earlier this year in The Forum showing that 72 percent of professors consider themselves liberal while only 15 percent say they are conservative. In the liberal arts, as opposed to hard sciences, the numbers are even more imbalanced. Studies of political party affiliations of Stanford and UC Berkeley faculty show registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 or 10 to 1. While disturbing, this kind of data isn't really new.

What seems to be new is a perception by students that professorial political opinions are now very much a part of the classroom, even in a course on Chaucer or biology. Professors once took pride in disguising their own views and making the classroom an objective laboratory of ideas. Now, some argue, in a postmodern world where everything is political, how can politics not be engaged in the classroom? As a result, a survey of students at 50 top universities showed that nearly half the students feel faculty use the classroom to present their personal political views, and that political discussions seem "totally one-sided."

The academy should take such concerns seriously because a lack of intellectual diversity undercuts the fundamental purpose of liberal arts education: to stretch and grow students through exposure to a wide range of disciplines and ideas. Marketing one political ideology to students throughout their four years of study, as happens on many campuses, not only leads to less intellectual creativity and policy innovation, but it continues to isolate an academic class in its "ivory tower." No wonder, then, that Sen. Alexander warns that Congress will be less and less interested in supporting a venture that leads to greater political divisiveness in the name of higher education.

So what is to be done to promote greater intellectual diversity on campuses? It won't be easy, given that tenure protects professors' jobs and academic freedom is used to defend almost whatever they choose to say. Still, there is plenty that can be done to broaden the range of ideas on campus.

Trustees and administrators should undertake a study of the diversity of thought on their own campuses. One way to balance what is presented in the classroom is to invite a greater diversity of outside speakers, or part-time adjunct faculty. Deans should look at the syllabus for courses to see if a range of ideas is presented in the readings and engage faculty on the issue. It doesn't violate academic freedom to have a conversation about a professor's reading list. As one of my bosses correctly said to me, "You have academic freedom to write what you want and I have freedom to say what I want about what you write." Intellectual diversity should be part of student course evaluations, and should be reviewed at the highest levels.

On the seal of my alma mater are the words, "Let the winds of freedom blow." We should remember that the winds of freedom blow right and center, as well as left, and that, in the academic world of ideas, diversity of thought may be the most important kind of diversity of all.

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.

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

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

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28 December, 2005

MARXIST GOBBLEDEGOOK -- BUT SURPRISINGLY HUMBLE

Below is part of a book review written in Marxist educational jargon which actually seems to come to surprisingly humble conclusions -- recognizing the value of traditional approaches and questioning the arrogance of theorists etc. I have inserted a few translations into plain English

Carlson and Apple are the editors of a collection of essays on democratic [Leftist] themes in education. According to the editors, these themes are "emergent, contested, and consequently always in the process of being constructed and reconstructed as a historical production" (p. 1). The book explores these themes, which concern democratic [Leftist] renewal of culture and education, by construing them as various types of [modified Marxist] critical theory. Ultimately, the aim of the book is to relate these theories to policy and practice. This theoretical discourse, which is positioned historically to address a transformational time of crisis in education and society, is part of The Edge: Critical Studies in Educational Theory. The series examines progressive educational theory by offering a variety of discussions about theory and practice during an era of perceived radical paradigm shifts in education.

Carlson and Apple introduce their text as a discussion partially of the stress that exists within and among neo- Marxist/neo-Gramscian and postmodern/poststructural theories. The authors believe that the discussion must be set in the cultural and historical context of present day conflicts between neo-liberals desiring privatization of public education and neo-conservatives desiring more traditional curricula that ignore multicultural issues. Carlson and Apple view this frame as appropriate since two of the major crises of the time are the neo-liberal call for privatization of public education resulting ostensibly from the failure of urban schools to serve inner-city children and the attempt by neo-conservatives to wage a "cultural war" against multicultural and student-centered approaches to education (p. 2).

A new approach to research on educational issues is vetted as well. The recognition that qualitative research narratives are partial at best and may be contradicted by other and subsequent narratives [the facts] is presented as a reason why researchers ought to adopt a modest stance, which acknowledges the democratic culture in education.

Interestingly, Carlson and Apple state that it is important to blur the lines between modern and post-modern theory. This blurring of the lines allows the theoretical discussion to revisit older practices in light of new theories. Carlson and Apple believe that post-modern theory dismisses "older practices" too quickly because many of the post-modern concepts are derived from existing culture and are therefore linked to existing practices. Further Carlson and Apple believe the language of postmodernism needs to become more inclusive and tied to the real world structures of every day life.

Another concern of the authors is the behavior of some "post-" theorists who appear to negate the possibility that more traditional approaches have value. The arrogance implied by such theorists' self-presentation of having the "right answers" to educational crises worries Carlson and Apple.

More here



Staff 'surplus to requirements' at corrupt Australian public university

I always thought that the people in charge were a pretty slimy lot when I taught at the University of NSW but I think they have got worse since. Note this previous case involving the same university

Further allegations are emerging ahead of a report due soon from the NSW Ombudsman's office into the handling of internal complaints by a top university. Senior management at the University of NSW hired a former doctor, who had been deregistered for having sex with his patient, for a sensitive and important education post, running the university's Educational Testing Centre, which contracts out services to schools, governments and business, according to complainants. The man, Alan Bowen-James, was previously found to have lied to the Medical Tribunal and the NSW Supreme Court.

But some university staff who questioned the wisdom of the appointment have run into trouble. The outspoken former ETC services manager, Peter Curtin, was found to be "surplus to requirements" after a review of the agency's structure and is now working in a country town. A staff representative on the governing university council, medical academic John Carmody, who also questioned Bowen-James's appointment, faced disciplinary charges for being disrespectful to another senior staff member over the affair. The internal charge was not proceeded with and Carmody has retired from UNSW.

The ETC, which runs the lucrative skills-based tests for primary schools throughout Australia and, increasingly, many international clients, has had a troubled recent history. After complaints from staff, in 2001 the NSW Audit Office found the ETC was poorly administered and was characterised by "cronyism and nepotism" under then director James Tognolini, who later left. The NSW Ombudsman's office found that about 25 per cent of the ITC staff were related to other staff. The woman who made these early allegations, under the Protected Disclosures Act, also lost her position, a trend that was soon to be established.

After this controversy the ETC, which was sliced from the mainstream university to a UNSW company called NewSouth Global (but whose officers were all appointed by the university), advertised for a new general manager and Bowen-James was appointed on a temporary basis. However, after he took over, some ETC staff who checked on him learned of his background. Bowen-James, a GP who was trained in psychotherapy by psychiatrist Wynne Childs (herself deregistered for having sex with her patients), was found guilty of sexual misconduct by the NSW Medical Tribunal in 1991. He admitted to the tribunal that many of the therapy sessions he had with a woman patient, identified under the pseudonym of M, were conducted at restaurants and coffee bars rather than in his waiting rooms.

Patient M said Bowen-James then invited her to his home (while his wife was overseas) and they had sex on a number of occasions. Bowen-James denied this, claiming M was suffering from borderline personality disorder and "was fantasising" about him. But in the majority decision, tribunal members believed M's version of events over Bowen-James's, after they determined that Bowen-James had made false statements in various job applications and to investigators during the Health Complaints Unit investigation. Bowen-James appealed the decision, which had been made on the tribunal chairman's deciding vote, to the NSW Supreme Court in July 1992. The Supreme Court upheld the tribunal's decision that he be deregistered and, in its judgment on reviewing the case, also found that Bowen-James had lied.

However, the decision did not stop Bowen-James from acting as a counsellor and he advised people such as Brendan Moran, the son of healthcare tycoon Doug Moran, who later committed suicide. After this background came out at UNSW, it was suggested to the then university vice-chancellor, Rory Hume, and his deputy John Ingleson by Curtin and Carmody that the university should not confirm Bowen-James's appointment. Curtin says: "I did not think it was appropriate that a deregistered doctor and someone who had perjured themselves should be appointed to such an important post at the university and I let my superiors know." A UNSW spokeswoman yesterday declined to comment.

Others at the ETC also questioned Bowen-James's curriculum vitae, which boasted 14 university degrees from a plethora of institutions, including degrees in law as well as medicine, business administration (masters), education, philosophy and information technology. But the university went ahead with Bowen-James's appointment anyway. However, Curtin says he soon had other reasons for concerns after some staff began complaining to him about alleged misconduct by Bowen-James.

Bowen-James, whose recent employment history had been in information technology, soon expanded the ETC's information technology section, hiring new staff, upgrading equipment and introducing new software systems, including one that was finally abandoned last year as a complete failure. It cost the university millions of dollars. In September 2003, Curtin wrote a letter "in confidence" to the NSG board and the university council expressing his disquiet. Eventually, after concerns were also raised at the council, especially by Carmody, the ETC let Bowen-James go. But after a review of the ETC in November 2003, Bowen-James's main accuser, Curtin, was made "surplus to requirements".

The Ombudsman's Office will also report on the treatment of complainants in the Bruce Hall case involving alleged research misconduct.

Source



UK: New plan sounds reasonable: "Ministers yesterday set out plans to encourage more teenagers to stay on at school or college after the age of 16 by introducing a range of new vocational qualifications. The government wants Britain's national staying-on rate of 70%, one of the lowest in OECD countries, to rise to 90% by 2015 as part of a 10-year timetable during which 14 new diplomas, covering vocational subjects such as engineering, plumbing and healthcare, will be phased in. The established A-level qualification, which ministers have pledged to retain, will be strengthened from 2008 , starting with trials next year of a harder paper and an "extended project" to stretch the brightest pupils. Announcing the implementation plan for new qualifications for the 14-19 age group, schools minister Jacqui Smith rejected criticism by Ofsted that secondary schools were failing to do enough to help pupils starting secondary school with below-average maths and English results."

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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.

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

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

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27 December, 2005

Arming Our Students with Knowledge

By teacher Nancy Salvato

When I was in Junior High School, I remember my mother complaining to me that the athletes at school received all the attention but if you were smart the only public accolades were having your name listed in a paragraph of very small print letting the community know you received Honor Roll or that you were a National Merit Scholar. She thought the priorities of our school system were all wrong. Apparently she wasn’t alone in her beliefs back then because I recently had the opportunity to read an article, “The Adolescent Society” in the winter 2006 edition of Education Next, in which James Coleman (“The Coleman Report”) essentially said the same thing. Interestingly he wrote his piece in 1961, a year before I was born and about 15 years before my mother made her personal observations in our kitchen during a conversation in which she was referring to my brother’s unheralded academic accomplishments. It was Coleman’s suggestion that in order to generate social pressure to excel academically, there needs to be intellectual games; group competitions to change the norms and values to encourage academics. Well, its 2005 and I can honestly say there is at least one program doing this, and I might add, doing this very well.

I recently had the opportunity to judge at the Illinois Hearings for the Center for Civic Education’s “We the People: the Citizen and the Constitution” which took place on the campus of McDonalds Corporation’s Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Illinois. Teams from 6 area high schools competed against each other for the opportunity to represent our state at Nationals. I must say that I was extremely impressed by the apparent time and effort put in by each group of students in preparation for the unit questions which they would have to answer with a prepared statement and for the follow up questions they would have to answer, without referring to notes or discussing their answers with teammates.

I listened to the various statements put together by 6 sets of students, explaining our system of federalism and what differentiated it from other forms of government. They then answered questions posed by us judges about such things as how federalism enters into NCLB and Hurricane Katrina. In their statements and answers were references to historical cases illustrating precedent for the more current situations we’re facing today, as well as pertinent quotes from the founders and framers of our country.

I was so very proud of each student because from what I could tell, they had put hours and hours into learning about the federal system of government in such depth that they made it look easy to have an informed discussion about what was happening in our country today. I could only imagine how nervous they had to be drawing on that reserve of knowledge to pull out the most compelling facts to convince us of the correctness of their opinions and illustrate that they were brilliant enough to earn the coveted spot at Nationals.

Although only one team, Maine South High School, won the Illinois competition, all the students were truly prepared to take on the responsibilities of citizenship and leadership which the framers believed are necessary to maintain the rights and privileges guaranteed under our Constitutional form of government. As for Maine South High School, their team will represent Illinois at the We the People: National Finals, a three day academic competition in Washington, D.C. April 29-May 1, 2006. More than 1200 students will demonstrate their knowledge of constitutional principles and their relevance to contemporary issues in a simulated congressional hearing before panels of judges composed of constitutional scholars, lawyers, journalists, and government leaders from across the nation. The ten finalists with the highest scores, based on the first two days of hearings, will compete for the title of national winner on the final day in congressional hearing rooms on Capitol Hill.”

I left the hearings with hope for our future; hope in the knowledge that future generations understand the importance of arming themselves with the information necessary to take care of this country which we inherited from our forebears so long ago.

Source



Freedom of Education: A Civil Liberty

One of the most amazing things about the many organizations and individuals who designate themselves “civil libertarians” (with the ACLU, naturally, being the most emblematic) is the utter absence of educational liberty from their shared agenda. It’s not even a blip on their screen. Why? Because it’s not explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights? These activists have no problem defending as civil liberties such phenomena as sexuality and abortion, neither of which is explicitly enumerated. So why not defend educational liberty with the same commitment given to, say, religious liberty?

There’s an even better question: Why defend religious liberty? No one asks it nowadays because we consider it a settled matter: “It’s in the Constitution!” But that’s not the way it was at the beginning, when people wanted to hear reasons—independently valid principles—that would explain why involvement with religion was not among “the rightful purposes of civil government” (Jefferson). And our Founding Fathers, notably Jefferson and Madison, provided those reasons—a good many. We should never forget what these reasons are, nor fail to consider their implications for (and thus application to) matters other than religion—such as, indeed, education.

First, however, we must consider what the Founders meant by religious “liberty.” The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .” Religious liberty includes both the freedom and the non-establishment of religion. Thus educational liberty would include not only the right of parents to determine the education of their children, but also the absence of any “public” (government) school system and its apparatus of compulsory attendance and taxation. Or as many describe it: the separation of school and state, on par with the separation of church and state.

Now, with that said . . .

Competition Improves Performance

In his “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1777), one of the three achievements (with the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia) of which he was most proud, Jefferson argued that by forcing a man to support (via taxation) “this or that teacher” (of religion), he is denied “the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions” to one of his own choosing. This guaranteed funding in turn eliminates the incentive (“rewards”) for such teachers to earn their wages through “earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind.” Furthermore, such government funding constitutes the “bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments,” of these teachers, which tends “to corrupt the principles” of their profession—with the government itself corrupted by its part in this bribery. Here is a critique of state cartelization equally applicable to all teachers—theological, academic, and otherwise.

In his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (1785), written in response to a proposed bill for a tax to fund Christian denominations in Virginia, Madison echoed Jefferson on this point (as he did on many others). He invites us (Point 7) to observe that establishment, “instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy” of religion, has had the opposite effect: “pride and indolence” and “ignorance and servility.” He wryly notes that if one asks people when Christianity “appeared in its greatest lustre,” they will invariably “point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy.” Yet if one then suggests a return of the church to its status in that earlier epoch, “many of them predict its downfall.” Similarly, while no one could seriously fault the supply and quality of private education in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America,* many today believe that privatization would destroy education for all but the wealthy.

Government Support Not Necessary

In his “Memorial,” Madison noted (Point 6) that Christianity had “both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human [that is, political] laws, but in spite of every opposition from them. . . . Nay, it is a contradiction in terms; for a Religion not invented by human policy, must have pre-existed and been supported, before it was established [socialized] by human policy.”

The state did not invent the church. It did not invent the school. Education, in a myriad of forms, existed before government and often in opposition to it. A recent example of the latter (in addition to private schools) would be parents who, at odds with the look-say, or “whole language,” reading methods used in the socialized schools, purchase the many commercial teach-your-child-phonics programs. Madison also warned that establishment would “foster in those who still reject [Christianity], a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.” We ourselves might wonder why the advocates of “whole language” (or any other pedagogical approach) are afraid “to trust it to its own merits” in a free market of education.

At this point we should probably address the many who from the beginning have been thinking, “But Madison and Jefferson supported public education!” True. However, Madison’s concerns about the future of education proved to be unfounded for a reason that he himself (in a March 19, 1823, letter to Edward Everett) understood in its relation to religion: “[T]here are causes in the human breast, which ensure the perpetuity of religion without the aid of the law.” The same “human breast” that provided its children with churches and bibles, provided them with schoolhouses and primers. The point is, just because the Founders didn’t connect every dot in their political philosophy, doesn’t mean we can’t. Not many of the civil libertarians who fairly worship Thomas “Wall of Separation” Jefferson would care to recall his views on “sodomy.”

Much 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.

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

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

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26 December, 2005

MORE ON THE STUDENT LOANS RACKET

For millions of Americans, the first big financial decision in life is whether to take on a student loan. Student loans are debt, of course, but they represent something different than credit card debt or a car loan: They are part of a quest for a better future. And they can have lifelong consequences, both good and bad, because for the unwise or the plain unlucky, a student loan can become an inescapable burden. It can almost never be expunged in bankruptcy, and the Supreme Court just ruled that even Social Security income can be garnisheed to pay for defaulted student debt.

The giant of the student loan industry is the Student Loan Marketing Association, better known by its friendly-sounding nickname, Sallie Mae. Many people think that Sallie Mae, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is sponsored by the U.S. government. And until recently it was. But at the end of 2004, Sallie became an independent, publicly traded company, completing a process begun in 1996. It is now radically different than it was even five years ago-an aggressive, highly profitable lender and a stock market superstar. Since 1995 its stock has returned over 1,900%, trouncing the S&P 500's 228% gain. Today Sallie's stock sells for 22 times earnings and almost ten times tangible book value, "an almost unheard-of valuation for a financial institution," as a Criterion Research report noted.

One reason for Sallie's growth is that during the past decade student loans have been among the fastest-growing areas of financial services because of the rapidly escalating cost of a college education. In addition, Sallie has expanded its business to encompass the whole spectrum of student lending, buying companies that make loans, running guaranty agencies, and purchasing debt-collection firms. (Fee-based revenue now accounts for roughly 30% of Sallie's business.) And while Sallie was always a large owner of student loans, today it is gargantuan-it owns about four times the amount of FFELP loans as its nearest competitor. Sallie has $81.6 billion of student loans on its balance sheet and another $39 billion in trusts off its balance sheet. (Sallie has sold the off-balance-sheet loans to third-party investors via securitizations, but it still manages and services the loans.) "We do not view the company as having a serious competitive threat," wrote Wachovia analyst Joel Houck in a recent report.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of privatization for Sallie Mae has been the freedom to make its own loans. It has eclipsed many of the nation's banks to become one of the top originators of new student loans-both FFELP loans and something known as "private credit" loans. Those are loans not backed by government guarantees that students use as supplements to or substitutes for FFELP loans-if, for example, they are maxed out on government-backed loans or if they attend a school that isn't eligible for the loans. Such loans have "skyrocketed" in the past few years, according to the College Board, as the cost of college has soared and the availability of FFELP loans hasn't kept pace. And because the government is not involved, they have no interest rate cap....

In meeting the competitive threat of direct lending, Sallie has been no less adept at wielding its clout on Capitol Hill. This year Sallie has had to face a major legislative challenge that could have altered the structure of student lending: the pending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which comes at a time when there is a congressional mandate to trim billions from student-loan budgets. A bipartisan effort would have reinvigorated direct lending by awarding extra grant money to schools that choose the program that is cheapest for taxpayers. It failed. In late November the House passed an HEA reauthorization bill that does cut the subsidies to lenders but gets much of its savings by raising the costs of loans to students. That bill still needs to be reconciled with a Senate version, but John Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Education Committee, told lenders in December that he thought they would be happy with the final results. "Know that I have all of you in my two trusted hands," he said.

Sallie, a creature of Washington, is of course no stranger to its ways. At a 2004 dinner that a company lobbyist threw for Boehner, 34 Sallie executives wrote checks for his political action committee, most for $1,000, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. "There is no question that members of Congress and their staffs listen carefully to Sallie Mae, probably too carefully," says Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy at the nonpartisan New America Foundation.

Alan Collinge took out $38,000 in loans, which he later consolidated with Sallie Mae, for his undergraduate and graduate degrees in aerospace engineering. He got a job as an associate scientist in aeronautics at Caltech and paid off $7,000 of his loans. But after leaving that job he was unable to find another one, and eventually he stopped making payments. He says he asked Sallie for a grace period, but the company refused. With compound interest, he now owes more than $100,000 and is unable to find work in his field because of his bad credit record. Instead he works in tech support for a nonprofit group in Tacoma. Collinge says he has offered to repay the $38,000 he borrowed, but he says the collection agency will not accept a compromise and is attempting to garnishee his wages.

So Collinge has become an activist. He has started a website called studentloanjustice.org, where former students share their stories of how their loans have wrecked their lives, and he has put together a presentation called "The Bully in the Schoolyard: Why Sallie Mae Must Be Stopped," which he is trying to get heard in Washington.

Collinge's loan, like others, has tripled not only because of compounding interest but also because of the fees-as much as 18.5% of the outstanding value-that get tacked on as a student loan passes from a lender to a guaranty agency to a collection agency. You can see how a defaulted loan could actually be quite profitable for a lender that also runs the guarantor and owns the collection agency. Collinge points to Lord's 2003 letter to shareholders, in which the CEO attributes Sallie's record earnings per share in part to the fees it made by collecting on defaulted student loans. Debt collecting, which can be an ugly business, now accounts for 18% of Sallie's revenues. (The company says that a loan that is being repaid is far more profitable than one that has gone into default.)

That is hardly the only way Sallie plays rough with students who have signed up for its loans. Right now there is a storm of controversy surrounding its business with for-profit schools, which are accused in multiple lawsuits in several states of using hard-sell tactics to recruit students, promising them high-paying jobs that don't materialize and leaving them with mountains of debt that they can't pay off.

Consider a complaint that was filed with the Pennsylvania Department of Education in 2004 against a school called Katharine Gibbs, owned by a for-profit chain called Career Education. Documents examined by FORTUNE, obtained by a source through a Freedom of Information request, indicate that a student took out a $6,500 loan from Sallie Mae. The student, who isn't identified, alleges that he was never told that the interest rate would be 14% annually. In fact, a copy of the loan document reveals that after Sallie tacked on a "supplemental fee" of 9% of the loan balance, the annual cost of the credit while the student was in school was actually over 28%. Today the student owes $18,000. (Sallie says its average private loan rate nationally is about 8%.)

The most recent furor of bad publicity for Sallie involves another Pennsylvania school, Lehigh Valley College, which is also owned by Career Education. LVC charges around $30,000 for degrees in subjects like massage therapy; in recent years Sallie has provided many of the loans. (A small bank in Oklahoma called Stillwater makes the initial loans, which Sallie then purchases.) Last spring a local newspaper, the Morning Call, published a string of stories recounting the experiences of students who found themselves paying double-digit interest rates and discovering that they owed as much as $100,000-roughly 22 times what they'd borrowed-because of compounding interest. At an informational meeting called by the Pennsylvania House Consumer Affairs Committee, Sallie admitted that it charges LVC students an average annual interest rate of 13% on their private loans, and that it sends the loans through Stillwater because the legal interest rate limit is 21% in Oklahoma, compared with 18% in Pennsylvania. House members were outraged. "Are you really doing a real service here by getting people into astronomical interest rate situations?" asked representative Reichley.

A lawsuit filed by former LVC students against the school alleges that LVC "led plaintiffs to believe that the loans ... were low-interest, government-guaranteed, or student loans, when in reality the loans were not government-backed loans and included interest rates in excess of 15%," and that LVC "intentionally hurried Plaintiffs through the financial aid process using aggressive sales tactics." Sallie, which isn't named in the suit, says it needs to charge high interest because students can be bad credit risks.

Career Education says its "intent is to address any issues that arise thoroughly, thoughtfully, and promptly." Sallie says that the controversy in Pennsylvania is the result of its attempt last year to acquire a not-for-profit state agency called the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Authority, or PHEEA, which is a major lender in the state. PHEEA flatly refused Sallie's bid; spokesperson Keith New claims that selling to Sallie "would have been a very bad outcome for students." But Sallie says that the politically connected PHEEA is protecting its own lucrative business and that the uproar over LVC is simply a "political exercise" ginned up by PHEEA.

In coming years Sallie will be facing a headwind, regardless of how the HEA legislation plays out. That's because of the breakup between Sallie and one of its major business partners, J.P. Morgan Chase. In early 2005, J.P. Morgan Chase sued Sallie to escape from a joint venture under which J.P. Morgan Chase sold Sallie all the student loans that were originated under its brands. J.P. Morgan Chase alleged that Sallie was pushing its own brands at the expense of the joint venture, and the two dissolved their partnership in March. This was big business-these brands accounted for some 60% of FFELP originations over the past few years-and the breakup is part of the reason that analyst Ken Posner at Morgan Stanley rates Sallie's stock underweight. In fact, Posner predicts in a report that the dissolution of the deal will cost Sallie $26 billion in cumulative lost volume by 2010. Many investors are sanguine because Sallie's growth has remained strong this year, thanks partly to its private credits. But in the future there may be more and more pressure on those loans to deliver profits.

And that leads to the larger question: Sallie's reputational risk. Student loans aren't just another business like software or laundry detergent. If the ugly headlines escalate, causing colleges, students, and politicians to think twice about Sallie Mae loans, its business will suffer. In the end, Sallie may find that if it doesn't do well by students, it won't do well by investors either.

More here



Campus Conscience Police?

"Over one's inner mind, and self, no one has coercive power." So write attorneys Jordan Lorence and Harvey A. Silverglate, authors of the just-published Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The Guide is yet another indication that political correctness is faltering on campuses across North America. To those who value the right of individuals to a conscience -- that is, to judge right and wrong for themselves -- this is welcome news.

Political correctness is the belief that certain ideas and attitudes are improper and, so, should be discouraged or prohibited by punishing those who advance them. Conversely, ideas and attitudes that are proper should be encouraged by being enforced. An example of a politically incorrect idea: inherent biological differences between the two sexes explain why there are more male than female scientists. The correct version: discrimination against women explains the 'gender imbalance' in science, and the discrimination must be remedied. Both preceding explanations may have merit but PC is not interested in weighing evidence. It acts to quash the ideologically incorrect idea and to champion the correct one.

Last January, when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers raised the mere possibility of biological differences as an explanation for the 'gender imbalance' in science, a vicious PC backlash forced him to apologize publicly no less than three times. After what some called his "Soviet-show-trial-style apologies," Summers made an act of contrition by pledging "to spend $50 million over the next decade to improve the climate for women on campus."

The most important aspect of the sad episode is not whether the explanation of biological differences is correct. It is that the idea cannot be so much as suggested without the 'offender' paying a terrible price in public humiliation and in his career. The cost to society is high; creativity and intellectual progress wither. The cost to individuals is higher; without competing ideas, people cannot adequately judge for themselves what is true and false, right or wrong, moral and immoral. For me, that private judgment is what constitutes a conscience, to which every human being has an indispensable and inalienable right.

The Summers debacle was a high-profile example of a PC process that has proceeded more quietly across North American campuses for decades. The ability of students to judge for themselves is restricted by limiting the ideas upon which those judgments would be passed. In turn, this impoverishes the quality of conscience.

FIRE's new Guide -- the fifth in a series of ideological survival manuals for college students -- describes both the manner in which the right of conscience is being attacked on campus and how the tide is turning toward individual rights. Three common ways in which universities limit a student's access to ideas are speech codes, mandatory 'diversity' tests or training, and 'non-discrimination' policies.

Speech codes prohibit expression that could give offense on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race or other 'historical disadvantage.' The codes are used primarily to protect women, minorities and gays from words or ideas that they might experience as insulting. The guidelines are often so vague as to prohibit the open discussion of issues like affirmative action or religious objections to homosexuality. Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania offers an example. In April 2003, the university defined harassment as any "unwanted conduct which annoys, threatens, or alarms a person or group." "[E]very member of the community" was required to adopt the administration's guidelines not only in his or her behaviors but also "in their attitudes." In 2004, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania issued a preliminary injunction against the university's codes as unconstitutional and they were repealed.

Mandatory diversity tests and training attempt to correct the unacceptable political views of students. The experience of Ed Swan, a self-described conservative Christian at Washington State's College of Education, offers an example. Swan expressed the belief that white privilege and male privilege do not currently exist in our society. In 2004 he was given low scores on a "dispositions criteria" by which some universities rank the "social commitment" of students. The university threatened to disenroll Swan if he did not sign a contract that committed him to further political screening and re-orientation. Due to a letter from FIRE and a high-profile protest, the contract requirement was dropped.

Non-discrimination policies, which are ostensibly inclusive, have been used to ban "dissenting" groups from campus and from receiving the student funds to which their members are required to contribute. Christian groups seem particularly vulnerable. For example, in April 2005, the group Princeton Faith and Action sought official student status. Its application was denied because FPA is connected to an outside organization (the Christian Union) that was not yet established at Princeton University. Other groups were not required to meet a similar standard. On May 13, the student newspaper the Daily Princetonian reported, "Nassau Hall has reversed its policy on the recognition of religious student groups after being contacted by an outside civil liberties organization that protested the treatment of one such group as an 'ongoing injustice'."

The right to judge for yourself what is true and false, what is right and wrong is a prerequisite for both freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The right of conscience is the bottom line of personal liberty itself. And it is being reasserted.

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.

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

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

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25 December, 2005

THE BIGOTED WASHINGTON STATE U

Paid hecklers!

It shouldn’t have taken a threatened law suit and being held up to nationwide public scorn but Washington State University officials have stopped paying student hecklers who shout down speakers with whom they disagree. Unfortunately, the stench remains strong at Washington State University of a Stalinist suppression of political views that deviate from the politically correct academic liberal orthodoxy.

Regular readers of this space will recall from this July column that the controversy began when it was learned university administrators were paying students to heckle the production of a controversial play by a student author. Student playwright Chris Lee warned attendees before his production was staged on campus that it would likely “offend everybody” and indeed some Mormon students who paid their own way to see the play silently protested its content.

But 40 other students repeatedly shouted “I am offended” and did everything in their power to shut down the production, including threatening performers on stage with physical harm. These protesting students were all Black, as is Lee. It was not merely that the Black students insisted on disrupting the production that set them apart from others like the Mormons in the audience who found Lee’s play disturbing. Guess who paid for the hecklers’ tickets? Washington State University’s very own Office of Campus Involvement, headed by Raul Sanchez. The same office helped organize the heckling. Lane Rawlins, the school’s president, even praised and defended the hecklers.

When university administrators not only refused to stop funding and otherwise aiding the hecklers, but also tried to censor Lee’s future productions, he appealed for help to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based non-profit that defends the First Amendment rights of students and others on campus. FIRE wasted no time in reminding school officials that the First Amendment guarantees every person’s right to speak their mind, but it gives no one the right to shout down those with whom they disagree. Using a public university’s tax dollars to support hecklers and the school’s campus cops to protect them is state-sponsored mob censorship.

Unfortunately, mob censorship by groups of hecklers shouting down a speaker is not an uncommon occurrence on many American university campuses these days, as conservatives like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin can readily attest. David French, FIRE’s president, explains why there was no question about the importance of stopping Washington State University. The school’s “defense of this vigilante censorship will encourage students to unlawfully silence others whenever they feel offended,” he said.

There ensued months of tense negotiations between university officials, student playwright Lee and FIRE’s First Amendment experts, as well as extensive coverage in the national media, much of it critical of the school. As a result, when Lee produced a second controversial play a few weeks ago, university officials warned the audience before each performance: “Please be aware that disruption to this performance, or any program will not be tolerated and will be dealt with accordingly, up to and including participants being escorted from the venue.” No disruptions have been reported since the notice was posted.

Future teachers subjected to brainwashing

But elsewhere at WSU the bitter scent of official suppression remains strong, especially in the Education Department where 42-year-old student Ed Swan was recently threatened with failure after allegedly violating two vague “disposition” standards. He was also forced to undergo “diversity training” after expressing his conservative political beliefs.

Not familiar with “disposition standards” on campus? Essentially, that’s a purposely vague name for grading standards used by a growing number of university education departments across America to make liberal definitions of diversity and social justice the norms against which aspiring primary and secondary school teachers are graded. Students who don’t measure up are failed or re-educated. “By using such vague and politically charged criteria for evaluating future teachers, colleges all but guarantee that students will be punished for their opinions rather than evaluated on the basis of their abilities,” said French.

It’s like the old Soviet trick of declaring as mentally ill anybody who dissented from official communist ideology and putting them in psychiatric hospitals for diversity training, er, excuse me, “treatment.” Often those treatments involved electric shocks and mind-altering drugs.

After FIRE protested on Swan’s behalf, WSU’s College of Education Dean Judy Mitchell pledged not to judge his political beliefs, but added ominously “he may not display prejudice in the classroom setting and expect to successfully complete this program.” How much you want to bet Mitchell finds a way to define professing conservative values such as respect for proper grammar and spelling to be a display of prejudice in the classroom?

Source



Perils of multicultural education

If there is one positive thing to come out of the violence in Cronulla, it will be a long hard look at how schoolchildren are educated about Australian culture and what they are taught about their responsibilities as members of a civil society. Judged by the age of many of those involved in abusing women, the mob violence at Cronulla beach and the subsequent destruction of personal property, many would have been of school age during the 1980s and '90s. While Al Grassby and Gough Whitlam sowed the seeds, this was a time when governments under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating spent millions on the multicultural industry. With the support of left-liberal academics, teacher unions and curriculum writers, the prevailing orthodoxy uncritically promoted cultural diversity, denigrated or ignored Australia's mainstream Anglo-Celtic tradition and taught children that our society is riddled with racism, inequality and social injustice.

The national Studies of Society and Environment curriculum developed during the Keating years argued that children must be taught "an awareness of and pride in Australia's multicultural society" and "develop an understanding of Australia's cultural and linguistic diversity". The 1993 Australian Education Union's curriculum policy argued that children must be taught that they "are living in a multicultural and class-based society that is diverse and characterised by inequality and social conflict". Not only was the then academically based school curriculum, especially in subjects such as history and literature, condemned as Eurocentric, patriarchal and socially unjust, but examinations were seen as favouring rich, white kids and culturally biased against recent migrants.

Fast forward to more recent years and little has changed. The 1999 Australian Education Union policy on combating racism argues that government polices "are founded upon a legal system which is inherently racist in so much as its prime purpose is to serve the needs of the dominant Anglo-Australian culture". The AEU also states that racism in Australia is both overt and covert and that "both forms of racism are still widely practised in Australian society", especially as a result of the school curriculum supposedly being based on "the knowledge and values of the Anglo-Australian culture".

On reading curriculum documents developed during the '90s, once again, it becomes obvious that all adopt a politically correct approach to issues such as multiculturalism and how we define ourselves as a nation. Cultural diversity is uncritically celebrated and students are taught, in the words of the Queensland curriculum, to "deconstruct dominant views of society" on the basis that the Australian community is riven with "privilege and marginalisation".

In Western Australia, as evidenced by the Curriculum Framework document, students are told they must value "the perspective of different cultures" and "recognise the cultural mores that underpin groups and appreciate why these are valued and important".

The curriculum policy of the South Australian branch of the AEU is underpinned by "five core values". One of the underlying values is that there should be respect for diversity and "no discrimination on any grounds".

The contradictions and weaknesses evident in the way multiculturalism has been taught in schools are manifold. Tolerance, the rule of law and a commitment to the common good are the very values needed if people are to live peacefully together. Cultural relativism and an uncritical acceptance of diversity denies such values and leads to what Robert Hughes terms, in his book The Culture of Complaint, the balkanisation of society.

It's also the case that Australia's legal and political system, while imperfect, best safeguards such values. Instead of denigrating Australian society, students should be taught the benefits of our Anglo-Celtic culture: a culture strongly influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition and from which our laws and morality have grown.

Much of the way history and politics is now taught also centres on the rights of the individual. Instead of emphasising responsibilities and giving allegiance to what we hold in common, individuals are free to define themselves how they will and to act as they wish. By defining Australian society as socially unjust and divisive there is also the danger of promoting a victim mentality. Whereas past generations felt part of a wider community and believed that hard work would be rewarded, recent generations see only inequality and their right to be supported.

Nobody should condone the violence in Cronulla perpetrated by those wearing the Australian flag or the actions of young Lebanese Muslims abusing women, destroying property and burning churches. But we also need to recognise that the PC approach to teaching multiculturalism in schools in part underpins the recent violence. As the American liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr has argued: "The militants of ethnicity now contend that the main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration and perpetuation of ethnic origins and identities. Separatism, however, nourishes prejudice, magnifies differences and stirs antagonisms."

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.

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

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

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24 December, 2005

MEDIA COVER PUBLIC SCHOOLING ONLY

Daily newspapers hold an honored place in American tradition as the principal forum for the public's conversation, but that seems to be changing. Americans today rate daily newspapers less "believable" than local and national television news, and a majority think newspaper reporters are out of touch with mainstream society.

This study, based on telephone surveys of education print reporters and analysis of 403 education-related articles published over eight months by four daily news publishers in Virginia, suggests the criticism may be warranted when it comes to daily newspaper coverage of elementary and secondary education.

Newspaper reporters unanimously agree that K-12 education is a complex issue, and nearly two-thirds (63%) say too little attention is paid to it. Most Americans would likely agree. Public education consistently ranks at or near the top of their domestic concerns, in part, because it is undergoing dynamic reform and innovation. Yet readers would have to look long and hard to find the larger education story in their daily newspapers:

Newspapers rely on the public school industry to set the education news agenda. Nearly two-thirds of journalists surveyed (63%) say the most common trigger for an education news story is "an announcement or press release by a federal, state, or local education agency." All journalists named federal and state Departments of Education, local public school boards and officials, teachers, and parents as sources used by their news organizations in the last six months. Half or fewer named public policy "think tanks" and independent research organizations as sources used during the same period (50% and 38%, respectively). Journalists cited the public school industry as their primary source of information on vouchers and tuition tax credits, despite that industry's open hostility to these innovations.

Newspapers' education news coverage is largely a conversation of, by, and for the public school industry. 65% of published articles related to topics of foremost interest to the public school industry, namely, public school funding, public school staffing, and public school wage and benefit proposals (261 of 403 articles).

Other topics of public interest received substantially less attention: 22% addressed student achievement/state Standards of Learning performance (88 articles);

7% discussed the federal No Child Left Behind Act (28 articles); 3% were related to miscellaneous matters such as school boundary proposals (14 articles); and

3% addressed public education reforms and innovations such as charter schools, home schooling, vouchers, and tuition tax credits (12 articles).

95% of all sources cited in all articles were government/public school-affiliated sources (1,364 of 1,438 sources); 5% were non-government/public school-affiliated sources (74).

Newspapers disenfranchise other constituencies with a stake in the public education service and an interest in reforms and innovations to deliver the service more cost-effectively and better.

Taxpayers who bear the cost of the public school service received scant attention from newspapers. In 261 public school funding-related articles, individual taxpayers were quoted six times (less than 1%) and taxpayer advocacy groups were never quoted.

Only two of the 403 articles addressed vouchers and tuition tax credits, two public education innovations favored by about half of all citizens and parents, according to state and national polls.

Source



ANOTHER ARGUMENT FOR PRIVATIZED SCHOOLING

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that it was unconstitutional for a Pennsylvania school district to present ``intelligent design'' as an alternative to evolution because it is a religious viewpoint that he dismissed as a ``relabeling of creationism.'' In the nation's first case to test the legal merits of intelligent design, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, in a harshly worded opinion, rebuked an ``ill-informed faction'' on the Dover Area School District board for adopting a religiously motivated policy that violated the separation of church and state. The broad, precedent-setting and detailed 139-page opinion examined the scientific, religious and legal roots of the evolution debate. Jones concluded that the theory of evolution ``represents good science,'' and intelligent design does not.

Intelligent design holds that the theory first promulgated by Charles Darwin cannot explain the emergence of highly complex life forms. It implies the existence of an unidentified intelligent force or designer.

``In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question'' of whether intelligent design ``is science,'' Jones wrote in Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District. ``We have concluded that it is not, and moreover'' that intelligent design ``cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.''

An appeal is unlikely given that eight of the nine board members who approved the policy that prompted the lawsuit were voted out in last month's election, and their replacements have said they do not support teaching of intelligent design in science class. Recently elected school board chair Bernadette Reinking said the new board was planning to take up the issue of intelligent design at its Jan. 3 meeting but will in all likelihood not appeal the case. ``I'm glad that it is finished,'' Reinking said. ``The board wanted some finality to this.''

Eleven parents in Dover, a growing suburb about 20 miles south of Harrisburg, sued their school board a year ago after it voted to have teachers read students a brief statement introducing intelligent design in ninth-grade biology class. The statement said there were ``gaps in the theory'' of evolution and that intelligent design was another explanation they should examine.

Source



Students attack university journalism course

Scores of dissatisfied and angry students in the University of Queensland's journalism course have attacked the quality and standards of their program, according to a report in The Australian newspaper. The complaints are from both local and international students. UQ once laid claim to having the best journalism school in Australia, but standards appear to have plummeted since the former Department of Journalism was forced into a bitterly-opposed amalgamation with communication studies and public relations. It resulted in the departure of most senior journalism staff including the head of department and foundation professor, as well as revised courses and fewer practical assignments. The students have expressed their views on a dedicated blogspot site.

Meanwhile, the former Head of the UQ journalism school has struck out on his own and founded a private and now fully accredited Jschool of his own which is having great success at turning out students who are recognized for their skills. See here. Private enterprise beats insane bureaucracy again. Why the UQ powers that be decided they wanted to merge different departments into one super-Department remains something of a mystery. Some old-fashioned "big is better" thinking, apparently. The "small is beautiful" idea has been around for a long time now but has apparently not as yet reached the bureaucratized dinosaurs running UQ. If "big is better", how come General Motors is now on the verge of bankruptcy?

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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.

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

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

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23 December, 2005

CONGRESS PUTS BANKERS AHEAD OF STUDENTS

Congress just passed the single most anti-competitive, anti-consumer law in America in the wee hours of the morning on Monday. They outlawed the refinancing of student loans. Yet news of it was missing from the AP reports. Below are two explanations of what they did (written before they did it):

"The largest lenders in America have a plan to improve the federally guaranteed student loan program. They want to 1) Eliminate competition; 2) Raise prices; and 3) Hope no one notices. If not for Hurricane Katrina grinding all business in Washington to a stop, they might have gotten their way - and raised the prices of attending college by $10 billion a year, costing the average student more than $6,000 for more expensive student loans.

But student loan legislation is back on track, with legislators expected to create a new education bill in the next two weeks. In the meantime, lots of people are wondering why student loan borrowers can't have more choice, lower interest rates, better terms, and more competition among lenders. Especially when it also means reducing the federal budget deficit.

This heightened awareness of student loan programs comes every five years or so when Congress reauthorizes the Higher Education Act. Since the last legislation, the student loan market has been hit with what Citizens Against Government Waste calls a "perfect storm" of more students going to college, tuition doubling and the annual volume of student loans tripling to $50 billion - all in less than ten years.

Last year, the Student Loan Marketing Association, the former federal agency that controls the vast majority of the industry with more than $100 billion in student loans, went private and has quietly become one of the most profitable companies in America.

So a lot has changed since the last time Congress looked at student loans.

And a lot more change is on the table. Chief among these changes is what to do with student loans in an era of changing interest rates. Many students and parents want the option to refinance their loans at a lower, fixed rate over a longer period of time with the lender of their choice. Just like any other loan.

Today, some can - and do. But current law says most cannot: If students get their loans from a single lender, they cannot change that lender - even if another lender offers them better rates, terms or service. It's called the Single Holder Rule, and it helps ensure Sallie Mae and the other big lenders keep their customers safe from competition.

It works.

The same law also says most borrowers can only consolidate their loans once. It worked, too, until some students and parents recently discovered a loophole they could use to move their loans to a lender offering better rates.

But the big lenders are determined to use their legislative muscle to protect that business.

Student loan experts agree that this kind of anti-competitive practice would not be allowed in most business situations. But this is not a business school seminar. This is a real world situation with one of the most profitable financial businesses in America.

"Big lenders that participate in the student loan program do not like the federal consolidation program because the lender is forced to pay fees and taxes to participate and because it increases competition in the market - as most students (but not all) can shop around to find the best deal and service for their loans," said Sarah Wasserman of the United States Student Association in front of a congressional committee. "Due to low interest rates in the past few years, more and more students have consolidated their loans, increasing the likelihood that these students will switch lenders. The lenders that hold the lion's share of the total outstanding student loan debt would like to eliminate the current low-fixed rate benefit in order to do away with the competitive market so that they can protect their portfolios and profit margins."

"Most big financial institutions don't like consolidation loans because they're less profitable," said Barry Morrow, CEO of Collegiate Funding Services, in congressional testimony. "Opponents of the consolidation loan program claim that the program benefits primarily doctors, lawyers and other high-income professionals. However, data we are providing to the Committee shows quite the opposite. Less than 4% of consolidators are doctors and lawyers - and nearly 20% are nurses and teachers. Their average age is only 27. This is not a program that favors the affluent."

Wasserman, Morrow and many others say students and their parents should be allowed to refinance their students loans whenever they want, with whomever they want, at whatever rates and terms the market will bear. Just like a home loan. But first, parents and students will have to change some hearts and minds in Congress.

New legislation passed by the House of Representatives would give the students the choice between fixed and variable rate consolidation loans, but with a twist: the loans would carry more fees and a higher interest rate, removing the major incentive to consolidate in the first place.

Another provision would eliminate a student's right to consolidate their loan before leaving school in order to lock-in lower rates.

"The new legislation is clearly toward big lending institutions and their hefty profits, not students and their thin wallets," said Congressman George Miller of California.

The Senate version is not as onerous. But it would fix the rate on all new loans at 6.8% for students and 8.5% for parents. Hardly a bargain in today's market, and if market rates should go down over the coming years, students and parents would be paying a hefty premium to scrape together the money needed for school.

In a company newsletter, Sallie Mae executives said they support the move from a fixed to a variable interest rate consolidation program even though it will actually diminish their profits".

Source



Ohio Congressman Boehner's "Tricks" Are Not For Kids

When Ohio Congressman John Boehner recently told a gathering of student loan bankers that he had some "tricks up my sleeve to protect you," he wasn't talking about new tricks. He was talking about the oldest trick in the book: "Protecting" business people from competition and innovation. Stopping consumers from getting lower rates and better terms for their student loans. These tricks are not for kids.

The student loan business is now one of the most profitable in America, says Fortune Magazine. And it did not get that way because student loan bankers are smarter, better or less expensive than bankers in other industries. It is more profitable because they have more protection from competition. And now Boehner, head of the House Committee that oversees student loan legislation, is promising them even more protection from the one force that drives down prices, improves service, and stimulates innovation: Competition, of course. Which in the student loan business in almost non-existent. Thank you, Congressman Boehner.

That is the way it was until earlier this year, when in January, the Department of Education ruled that borrowers looking to reconsolidate their student loans could sidestep the longstanding anti-competitive rule against doing so. It was cumbersome, but effective. Borrowers had to use a two-step process of reconsolidating into the federal governement's Direct Loan Program, then reconsolidating again with a private lender offering better rates. Before then, borrowers were locked in to their current lender no matter what other lenders offered them a better deal.

In May, the Department of Education set aside another longstanding anti-consumer policy by ruling that borrowers who are still in school could convert their variable rate student loans into fixed-rate consolidaton loans before rates increased in July. That way they could take advantage of historically low interest rates, much as millions of other borrowers do with their home loans.

While borrowers celebrated, consumer bankers plotted. Enter Boehner. Buried deep in legislation to raise prices on student loans are provisions that will largely outlaw the reforms that introduced so much competition into student loans earlier this year. If passed, student loans would once again be the only thing sold in America that cannot be freely refinanced.

Columnist Dick Morris calls the anti-refinancing scheme an "obnoxious .. ripoff." Terry Savage, the financial columnist of TheStreet.com, says there is "no way" borrowers should support this plan." The New York Times calls it "Robbing Joe College to Pay Sallie Mae," the country's largest student loan provider. The Times Union of New York, calls plans to outlaw refinancing a "student loan shame.' Boehner's tricks are not for kids.

Source



Australia: Boys' education funds unveiled

Feminize education and then throw money at the problems that creates: Brilliant!

More than 800 schools across Australia will receive Federal Government funding to target the education of boys in an effort to bridge the gap with girls. Education Minister Brendan Nelson said 801 schools would receive grants in round one of the Government's $19.4 million Success for Boys program. Dr Nelson said the first round of funding would result in 235 individual schools and 113 school clusters receiving grants of between $10,000 and $80,000 to help them improve the way they work with boys.

The program aimed to support boys at risk of disengaging from school, and improve their learning outcomes and engagement in school, he said. Three key intervention areas of benefit to boys will be addressed by schools - giving boys opportunities to benefit from positive male role models and mentors, improving literacy teaching and assessment and using information and communication technology to engage boys in learning. "It is imperative that nothing is done which undermines the important and necessary progress made in the last 20 years in the education of girls," Dr Nelson said. "However, the evidence is overwhelming that boys are falling behind in our education system. Many boys enjoy school and are successful in their studies. However, it is of concern that many others are under-performing in a range of key educational areas and broader social indicators. We know that boys are underperforming in literacy, are less engaged with school, and overwhelmingly outnumber girls in disciplinary issues."

Since 2003, the Federal Government has committed more than $27 million to improve boys' educational and social outcomes, he said.

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.

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

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

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22 December, 2005

University denies charter to Christian group

The usual unconstitutional anti-Christian bigotry

California State University, San Bernardino has refused to allow a Christian group to organize on campus, saying it would discriminate against non-Christians and homosexuals. The Christian Student Association's proposed constitution included a statement on sexual morality and required members and officers to be Christian. State law prevents student groups at public universities from excluding people based on religion or sexual orientation. "We are not permitted to charter them under Title V," said Christine Hansen, director of student leadership and development in the office of Student Affairs. She was referring to a section of the state education code.

Ryan Sorba, who tried to form the association, accused the university of discriminating against Christians. "This is about whether or not the First Amendment is allowed to exist at Cal State San Bernardino and whether or not Christians are allowed to exist," Sorba, 23, who also is president of the College Republicans, said Monday. Similar controversies are playing out on other California campuses.

A group called the Alliance Defense Fund filed a lawsuit last month against the California State University campuses in Long Beach and San Diego, alleging that Cal State's systemwide policy forces students to abandon their Christian beliefs if they want benefits that other organizations receive. Chartered student groups are eligible for money from student fees and can invite speakers to campus, post fliers and use university rooms for meetings.

Several Christian organizations began campaigning on Monday to force the university to approve Sorba's club. "This is political correctness gone amok. There is no way we are going to let this thing pass," said the Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman and founder of the Traditional Values Coalition in Washington, D.C. Sorba has generated controversy in the past by using the College Republicans' name on anti-gay signs and coordinating an affirmative action bake sale at which minorities were offered snacks at reduced prices.

Source



Australian university admission standards low too

Students are gaining entry to university despite failing Year 12, prompting a warning from Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson that academic standards are "unacceptably low". A new Department of Education website shows for the first time the minimum academic scores for every undergraduate course in the country. The site, www.goingtouni.gov.au shows that students secured places at the Royal Melbourne Institute's Bachelor of Applied Science course this year with a minimum entry score of 48 if they were prepared to pay $15,600 a year for a full-fee degree course.

Dr Nelson yesterday urged vice-chancellors to review their entry standards after warning that some students "shouldn't be at university". Describing the university entrance score as a "black science", he said some students with entrance scores in the low 50s had told him privately their raw score for Year 12 results was in the mid-30s. Their results were "scaled up" as part of the process to arrive at a Tertiary Entrance Rank or Universities Admission Index.

University chiefs confirmed that some students had gained entry on even lower scores, through special entry schemes which take into account disadvantage and illness. Dozens of university courses have a cut-off score of below 55, including Central Queensland University's Bachelor of Arts at Bundaberg, the Bachelor of Business at Gladstone and the University of Adelaide's Diploma in Wine Marketing. Nursing degrees had a minimum entry score of just 53.5 at the University of Ballarat, and 55 at James Cook University. While students require 99 or above to secure a place in law at the University of Sydney, the cut-off score at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory is just 60.

The figures reveal students can cut 10 points or more from the score they require to gain entry to their preferred course if they are prepared to pay up to $200,000 for a degree.

Dr Nelson forced universities to publish the information as a requirement of the 2003 changes allowing universities to increase HECS charges and lift the price cap on full-fee degrees. "It is obvious we will still see in 2006 a significant number of people going into university who should not be," Dr Nelson told The Australian. "I think universities accepting students with tertiary entry scores in the mid-50s or less need to seriously think about standards," he said. "The black science which is the ultimate enter score ... is such that those students who are getting UAIs of 55 actually have raw scores in the 30s."

Dr Nelson signalled that he was prepared to consider an overhaul of university funding to allow greater flexibility. Currently, a "use it or lose it" rule applies to university student places, forcing vice-chancellors to lower the entry standards for courses or hand the places back to the commonwealth. "We're basically rewarding universities for filling every place irrespective of the standard of the applicant, and we effectively penalise those that hand places back," Dr Nelson said. "It goes without saying that the lower the tertiary entrance result the less likely it is that the student is going to be academically equipped for the academic program."

At Deakin University, students could secure entry to a Bachelor of Arts course with an entry score of 51. The University of NSW required a score of 99 or above for HECS students wishing to study law, but only 94 for students prepared to pay for a full-fee degree costing $19,000 a year or $100,000 for a degree. The gap between the cost of a taxpayer-supported HECS degree and a full-fee degree for students who miss out on marks is shrinking. For example, at the University of Tasmania students can study law at a cost of $6000 a year for a HECS degree, which can be paid back after graduation.

Melbourne University deputy vice-chancellor Peter McPhee said the critical issue when setting entry scores was the demand for places. High-demand courses such as law and medicine attracted a higher score simply there were so many applicants. "The cut-off score is really about who gets an offer of a HECS place," he said. However, he stressed that students who failed to secure 50per cent or more in Year 12 were not told they had failed. "They're not told they failed Year 12, they just get a score," Dr McPhee said. "That's not the language they use. They say the person has completed Year 12."

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.

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

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

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21 December, 2005

Dangerous Class Assignments

Post lifted from Dr. Helen

If you think that boys don't suffer from abuse at the hands of women, than you have to read this. It is the story of a 13-year-old boy who was first abused by his mother and then by the school system who treated him as a criminal rather than a victim of abuse. Why is it that liberals will go to great lengths to fight for the rights of people who are not really victims and then deny the real victims any solace? It is hard to believe that such an abusive counselor is allowed access to a school system--if I were this kid's parent--I would be down at this school in a flash. Here is a portion of the story:

My cousin rarely cries. I figure he picked that up from one of us, his brother, me, or one of my brothers. But now, he’s practically in tears. Why? Because the class assignment was for them to write about their experiences with the causes of rape. The girls had to write about times they felt “pressured” by boys. And the boys… well, they had to write about times they tried to “force” themselves on girls. Not pressure them, force them.

This is the sort of fmnst trite that keeps boys silent. I wonder how many of the boys in that class have been abused. I wonder how many of them have been raped. I wonder how many of them go home to a house full of violence and say to themselves, “I won’t be like this when I grow up” only to have some moronic narcissist say, “You have a penis. Yes you will.”

Since when do counselors in schools have a right to abuse children in this way? And any 13-year-old boy who dares stand up to one of these "feminists" is made to feel powerless, both by the school who allows this indecency and by the lack of support from other parents and school administrators. Everytime something like this happens in a school--there should be a backlash--against the person who advocated such a stupid assignment and against the school that allowed such a person to victimize innocent young people. Raising hell against this state-run form of mental abuse is the only way to get this outrageous behavior to stop.

Update: Now this rape indoctrination is extending to college campuses-- read Lionel Tiger's article in the Wall Street Journal.



Thousands of Scottish pupils failing on the basics

Thousands of Scottish pupils are failing to achieve basic standards in literacy and numeracy, according to a league table of academic standards published for the first time today. The figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal a picture of acute failure by Scotland's education system. More than three in ten pupils at S2 level - their second year at high school - are failing to achieve the basic standards in reading, while just under half failed the standards for writing. Just six in ten pupils achieved the requisite standard for maths. The one bright spot is that the number of pupils achieving the basic standards has increased on all three measures since 2002....

The new figures will, for the first time, allow parents to compare the performance of pupils at S2 level - seen by experts as a vital stage in their academic development. The Level E assessment is a national benchmark of attainment across the school curriculum, which the majority of pupils should have reached by the end of S2, when they are typically aged 13 or 14.

The Scottish Executive remains opposed to publishing school league tables, although such information is available in England. Westminster MPs have argued that the publication of results encourages excellence and allows parents to make a more informed choice of which school to choose for their child. Scotland's education minister, Peter Peacock, has said parents should not have access to raw data unless the social status of pupils is included.

Last night, opposition politicians and parents' groups called for an end to "the culture of excuse-making" and said the Executive needed to find ways of engaging with families who had rejected education across the generations. Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Scottish Conservative education spokesman, said the percentage of pupils achieving Level E needed to be much higher and said Scottish education was suffering under the comprehensive model. "These very poor figures once again illustrate that Scottish education is suffering from too many politicians and bureaucrats running our schools, too few parents being allowed a choice in selecting a school for their child and headteachers not having enough freedom to decide what is best in their own unique school environment for each individual child. "The Executive's comprehensive one-size-fits-all approach to schooling in Scotland is becoming more and more discredited. Tony Blair could not have put it better himself when he said: 'For the better-off, the British education system is full of options. But for a middle- or lower-income family, whose local school is the option and which is underperforming, there is nothing they can do, except take what they are given'."

Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish National Party's education spokeswoman, said: "These statistics don't tell us anything new. The problem is that they allow the Executive to hide behind poverty as their excuse for failing these children. Generations of parents have been switched off by schools and need to be encouraged to get involved in their children's education."

However, last night education bodies and COSLA, the local authority umbrella group, said the figures had to be interpreted with care and said what appeared to be poor results may be due to deep-seated social factors, such as poverty and ill-health. The Rev Ewan Aitken, COSLA's education spokesman, said: "It really infuriates me the assumption that, taken on their own, these figures in themselves tell us anything significant about the effectiveness of our schools. "Every school has its own context. That context includes issues such as levels of poverty, levels of support from parents and the community, levels of support from business, transport, the quality of the school building, relative mobility of the cohort and much more. "For example, one school I know of in a middle-class area has low results because every year up to 80 per cent of the school population can change because it serves a barracks. That does not mean the children are doing badly; it simply means that the cohort being assessed is not the cohort that the targets were set for."

Ronnie Smith, head of the EIS teaching union in Scotland, said: "If the percentage rate in reading or writing changes, it could have something to do with the cohort of pupils being different, or perhaps the difficulty in finding English teachers that year. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with gathering and publishing these figures, but it serves no real purpose unless we drill down and see if there are any underlying factors."

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.

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

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

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20 December, 2005

A FEW SCRAPS OF DISCIPLINE TO RETURN TO BRITISH SCHOOLS

Headteachers, teachers and their assistants will have "a clear legal right" to tackle school bullies, restrain disruptive pupils and confiscate mobile phones under measures to be published in the Government's education Bill. Schools will also have the power to act on bad behaviour by collaborating with each other to set up more "cooling off" units for permanently disruptive pupils in an attempt to restore teachers' authority and tackle bad behaviour in the classroom. The move to strengthen teachers' disciplinary powers comes after repeated calls by teaching unions and schools' taskforces for a new law to give teachers an automatic right to discipline pupils.

The measures, which will be in the education Bill in February, will give headteachers the right to delegate the power to discipline pupils to all teachers and assistants as they see fit. Those who will exercise the disciplinary powers would be properly trained and could use them on the school premises and on school trips. Their powers would extend to journeys to and from school to prevent bullying outside the school gates.

Until now the ability to discipline pupils has been based in common law but, by enshrining it in statutory law, headteachers hope there will be less occasion for parents and children to challenge them on the grounds of their legal rights. "Our White Paper will strengthen teachers' authority and give them the confidence to take measures on all forms of bad behaviour," Jacqui Smith, the Schools Minister, said yesterday. She added that it would "strengthen the message for parents and pupils that the culture of disruption and failure to take responsibility will not be tolerated".

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said that he fully backed the plans and hoped that they would "end the inappropriate challenges by parents on behalf of their badly behaved children". Schools will also be encouraged to work together to provide on or off-site "sin bins", in addition to the existing pupil reform units for unruly children who cannot be educated in school.

The Government said yesterday that 289 secondary schools across 21 local education authorities had agreed to work together to deal with disruptive children.

Source



INDIANA HIGH SCHOOLS BETRAY BOTH BLACK AND WHITE KIDS

State Higher Education Commissioner Stan Jones has news for those in Central Indiana who think the state's dropout crisis is limited to Indianapolis: It's a white, suburban problem too. If anything, the typical dropout in the heart of Central Indiana, as in the rest of the state, is white and likely to reside in small towns or in Marion County's suburban townships. Some high schools in counties surrounding Indianapolis have graduation rates nearly as low as those of Indianapolis Public Schools.

The failure of state and local educators to report realistic graduation rates, however, conceals such dismal performance. Says Jones: "They think their schools have nice facilities and things are fine, when in fact things are not." As Central Indiana goes, both economically and socially, so will the rest of the state. Which means that failing to deal with the educational destinies of its children, especially the poor, will bode ill for Indiana's future. A Star Editorial Board analysis of preliminary data from the Indiana Department of Education shows abysmal performance for many high schools in 18 major school districts in Central Indiana. Only 8,400, or a mere 66 percent of Central Indiana eighth-graders who made up the original class of 2005, graduated on time. Where are the remaining 4,400? Most likely not still in school. IPS, with a graduation rate of 39 percent in 2005, remains home to the region's worst dropout factories. But the district's numbers improved four percentage points from the previous school year.

And poor results are spread throughout the region. Three Marion County suburban township districts -- Pike, Wayne and Decatur -- graduated 60 percent or less of their students on time. Some districts, including Carmel Clay, have graduation rates over 80 percent. Other districts clearly are struggling...

One of the schools is Shelbyville High -- 90 percent white -- where just 199, or 64 percent, of the 300 or so freshmen who made up the original class of 2005 graduated four years later. For first-year principal Tom Zobel, it means accepting "the numbers are what they are" and working to stem the tide. Two of the school's "goal action teams" are developing ways to lure students into regularly attending school. A social worker was hired to help at-risk students obtain services such as counseling or welfare. To improve basic skills, the entire school now devotes 20 minutes each morning to reading.

Shelbyville High's problems are similar in some ways to IPS' -- many low-income students struggling in school and in life; children falling behind in early grades; in some cases inadequate support and motivation from parents for their children's academics. Says Zobel: "We fight the same issues that everyone else is fighting."

In turn, Central Indiana's problems are reflected throughout the state. Only 72 percent of the statewide class of 2004 graduated; nearly 20,000 dropped out. Rural and industrial parts of the region, like other areas of the state, are struggling to transition from traditional manufacturing to a more knowledge-based economy. Meanwhile, Marion County townships, now more urban than ever, are confronting the same social and economic ills that have long confounded IPS.

The state's inaccurate method of calculating official graduation rates -- districts such as Shelbyville can claim 96 percent of students graduated in 2004 -- has created complacency. While a more accurate method for calculation will debut with the 2006 graduating class, inflated rates will continue to be fed to the public and the federal government until then. While some Central Indiana districts, notably IPS, have begun to acknowledge their problems, candor needs to become more common. School administrators, especially in suburban districts, too often have refused to admit the reality of low graduation numbers. But when nearly a third of Indiana students don't graduate from high school on time and the state ranks 46th in the nation in the education level of its work force, the time for platitudes about student achievement has long passed.

Source



War of the words: "Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has launched a war of words in an effort to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Villaraigosa has rhetorically lambasted the leaders of the LAUSD over lagging test scores and dismal dropout rates. Villaraigosa has impeccable progressive credentials, but his attempt to improve the grim status of the LAUSD has led him into a conflict with the same teacher's unions that he once served as an organizer. ... Villaraigosa believes that improvement of the public education system is vital to the city's economic future. The spectacle of seeing a committed progressive struggling against the unions is not as surprising as it might seem at first blush. Anyone making a sincere attempt to challenge the status-quo inevitably comes into conflict with unions."

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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.

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

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

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19 December, 2005

A CHARTER SCHOOL SUCCESS

Success through a lot of work

As young teachers at a large San Jose high school, Greg Lippman and Jennifer Andaluz could have claimed success: All the Mexican-American students in their humanities program were admitted to college. Instead, they faced a frustrating truth: “We were taking students who were doing well coming in to high school and were going to college with us or without us,” Andaluz said. “We weren’t making a difference.”

Meanwhile, Hispanic students from poor and blue-collar families were lost in the system. Half dropped out; only 10 percent went on to a four-year college. Successful students from low-income, Mexican immigrant families were like needles in a haystack, Andaluz and Lippman concluded. They didn’t want to spend their careers sharpening a few needles. “We wanted to educate the haystack,” says Andaluz. So they started a charter high school, Downtown College Prep, to prepare left-behind students to succeed at four-year colleges.

To make sure they were making a difference, they recruited students with less than a C average in middle school and students who would be the first in their families to go to college, if they got that far. Some 85 percent in the first class were Mexican-American— the children of janitors, construction workers, cooks and cashiers. The average ninth grader entered with fifth-grade reading and math skills. Many had been passed along from grade to grade without doing homework or mastering the basics.

Charter schools are independently run public schools freed from some regulation in exchange for improving performance. Downtown College Prep received the same state funding as the average California school, but no money to pay for classrooms, much less for educational extras. The founders raised the extra money they needed for small classes and a longer school day from Silicon Valley philanthropists. They opened their school in 2000 in cramped classrooms rented from a church and a bankrupt fitness center six blocks away. At first, Lippman and Andaluz thought they could boost achievement simply by setting high expectations and motivating students to work toward the goal of college. Quickly they realized students needed more than ganas: — the desire to succeed. Most needed to learn fractions; some needed basic reading skills. Recent immigrants needed help with English.

As a charter school, Downtown College Prep had the flexibility to try ideas, look at what wasn’t working and try something else. The founders cheerfully admitted their mistakes, learned and improved. “We’ll do whatever’s legal in the state of Californiato educate our students,” Lippman said. Over time, students came to accept long hours, uniforms, daily homework assignments — and calls to their parents when homework wasn’t done. They became hooked on the attention they got at the school and willing to do almost anything — even homework — to remain in the school community. Each year, the new students come from more disadvantaged families, measured by parents’ income and education. Yet the school’s score on the state’s Academic Performance Index now surpasses the California average. All graduates have gone on to four-year colleges.

Downtown College Prep is making a difference. And it’s not alone. Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit, compared high-minority, high-poverty high schools that have a “high impact” on student achievement with “average-impact” schools that don’t make much of a difference for low-performing students. High-impact schools give extra help, such as mandatory summer school or after-school tutoring, to students before they fail. Average-impact schools wait. Downtown College Prep requires all incoming ninth graders attend a summer school orientation and requires a daily 70-minute study period for all students in ninth through 11th grade. (I was a volunteer tutor.) High-impact schools assign teachers based on their specialties and students’ needs; in average-impact schools, seniority and teacher preferences determine who teaches what. Often the most experienced teachers choose to teach the easiest students while the neediest students make do with inexperienced teachers.

Downtown College Prep doesn’t have a lot of easy students; it’s staffed by non-union teachers who’ve chosen to teach there because they share the school’s values and believe in the mission. At most schools, students who are behind get extra time to learn English and math. But the high-impact schools make sure students also meet college-prep requirements while average-impact schools put students on a remedial track that keeps them out of college-prep courses. Downtown College Prep’s ninth graders who take remedial English and remedial math also take the college-prep English 1 and Algebra 1 course, even if it’s very likely they’ll fail the first time. They can try again in summer school. If necessary, they can repeat ninth grade. It’s not easy for a high school to make a difference in students’ lives when they arrive with a long history of failure and frustration. It’s not easy. But it can be done.

Source



COLORADO HIGH SCHOOLS NOT PREPARING KIDS FOR COLLEGE

Nearly one-third of Colorado high school graduates who enrolled in public in-state colleges last year needed remedial classes in math, writing or reading, according to a study released Tuesday by the Colorado Commission on Higher Education. CCHE Executive Director Rick O'Donnell said the data show an "expectation gap" between the state's high schools and colleges and a clear need for rigorous statewide high school graduation requirements, an effort the commission tried unsuccessfully to push through the legislature last year. "Either higher education is expecting too much . . . or our K-12 schools are expecting so little, it's a scandal," O'Donnell said.

Of the 28,268 students who went from Colorado high schools to Colorado public colleges in fall 2004 - the most recent year for which data are available - 8,366, or 30 percent, needed remediation. That's up from 28 percent the previous year. The numbers are particularly troubling, O'Donnell said, because they include only students who went straight from high school to college. High school graduates who took time off before college are not included. "This probably understates the problem," he said.

There also are costs to taxpayers. The CCHE estimates that providing the remedial classes cost the state nearly $11 million last year. The study also found that minority students needed remediation at a higher rate than white students, and women needed help more often than men. Jefferson County Public Schools, the state's largest school district, is home to the high schools at the top - and bottom - of the remediation ranking. More than 70 percent of graduates of Jefferson County Open School, an "options school" focused on hands-on learning, required remedial help when they arrived at a Colorado college or university. In contrast, just 1 percent of graduates at Jeffco's D'Evelyn Jr./Sr. High School needed any remediation.

D'Evelyn Principal Mark Hartshorne said the school's graduation requirements are tougher than the district's. That's possible because D'Evelyn, like the Open School, is an options school that students must apply to attend. So while Jeffco doesn't require foreign language study to graduate, D'Evelyn students take three years of it. "Some people think we only accept kids based on test scores, (but) that's not true," Hartshorne said. "We have a random lottery (selection process). Do we have some really, really bright kids here? Absolutely. We also have quite a number of kids who are just plain kids like everybody else."

His school's success supports, he believes, the argument for raising high school graduation requirements, whether in the district or across the state. If D'Evelyn students representing 54 Jeffco elementary schools can do the work, why not others? "I really think, for the very large majority of students, whatever bar you set, they can achieve at that level," he said.

Colorado is one of just three states that does not have statewide high school graduation requirements, according to Achieve Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that helps states raise academic standards. Instead, local school boards set the requirements, resulting in differences across Colorado's 178 school districts. So the CCHE, in an attempt to toughen graduation requirements, approved admissions standards in 2003 for the state's colleges and universities. They go into effect in fall 2008, meaning current high school sophomores will be the first to face the standards, which are higher than many district graduation requirements.

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.

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

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

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18 December, 2005

BRITISH STATE SCHOOL PRODUCTS LESS AND LESS FIT FOR UNIVERSITY

Except for affirmative action, there would be even fewer of them

More middle-class children are attending Britain's elite universities, despite government schemes aimed at widening access for poorer students. The class system is being perpetuated by teachers advising pupils according to their own university experiences, say the authors of a new study. From The Margins To The Mainstream, a report on widening participation in higher education, will raise pressure on top universities before tuition fees of 3,000 pounds start next year.

In spite of institutions paying lip service to improving opportunities, in reality only the newer universities are embracing the agenda, as "equality of participation by students from lower socioeconomic groups remains a challenge", the authors say. The study found that last year the Russell Group of 19 top universities accepted 30.5 per cent of their students from families of higher managerial and professional occupations, compared with 33.5 per cent in 2000. They took 11.9 per cent from families of lower managerial positions last year, compared with 11.2 per cent in 2000. The report stated: "Applicants from the highest socioeconomic groups have increased their share of applications to the more selective institutions."

For 2005-06, universities were granted 284 million pounds by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to widen participation and increase retention rates. At least 30 million was meant to help to target students in worse-off areas. In 2002-03 England had the lowest rate in the UK of poor children at university, with 28.6 per cent, compared with 41.6 per cent in Northern Ireland.

Part of the reason, says Liz Thomas, of the Higher Education Academy and an author of the report, is that teachers who select pupils for outreach programmes are out of touch and projecting their own memories on to the universities. "If they are thinking what higher education was like when they went there, they may be directing their students to the same institutions and so perpetuating the class system," she said. One way to change that, Dr Thomas said, would be to engage teachers better with top universities' open access schemes.

Source



WIDESPREAD ENGLISH ILLITERACY IN THE USA

An estimated in one in 20 U.S. adults is not literate in English, which means 11 million people lack the skills to perform everyday tasks, a federal study shows.

From 1992 to 2003, the nation's adults made no progress in their ability to read a newspaper, a book or any other prose arranged in sentences and paragraphs. They also showed no improvement in comprehending documents such as bus schedules and prescription labels.

The adult population did make gains in handling quantitative tasks, such as calculating numbers found on tax forms or bank statements. But even in that area of literacy, the typical adult showed only basic skills, enough to perform simple daily activities.

Perhaps most sobering: Adult literacy dropped or was flat across every level of education, from people with graduate degrees to those who dropped out of high school.

Inside the numbers, black adults made gains on each type of task tested in the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, run by the Education Department. Hispanics, though, showed sharp declines in their ability to handle prose and documents. White adults made no significant changes except when it came to computing numbers, where they got better.

The results are based on a sample of more than 19,000 adults, age 16 or older, in homes, college housing or prisons. It is representative of a population of 222 million adults.

The 11 million adults who are not literate in English include people who may be fluent in another language, such as Spanish, but are unable to comprehend text in English.

Source



UNIVERSITY WHISTLEBLOWERS PERSECUTED

They have become the victims of a desperate attempt by an Australian university to cover up a threat to its reputation

Clara He was the respected head of a University of NSW medical research laboratory based at Liverpool Hospital in western Sydney four years ago. Today she is in a cubbyhole buried so deep in the hospital bowels that mobile phone radio signals usually cannot reach her. To get her pay, she has to report her hours to the cleaning manager of the hospital, her direct employer. But He counts herself luckier than colleague Juchuan Chen, who doesn't even have a desk and who is on a UNSW [University of New South Wales] contract that runs out at the end of this month.

Most days Chen visits He, who has been banned from her former laboratory and does little research for the university. They have a cup of coffee together and quietly rue the day they became whistleblowers. UNSW has maintained Chen, its direct employee, has been treated well. After much soul-searching during an extended university investigation of their complaints, He and Chen (and a former PhD student at the laboratory) went public with allegations against their boss, respected immunologist Bruce Hall. They said he had bullied them and, more seriously, had mis-stated some of his research findings and details of a research-funding application.

After they made their allegations, which continue to be all strongly denied by Hall, He says they were the subject of rumours and threats, possibly by some opponents of their complaints - not by Hall himself. "We first complained to the hospital and university shortly after 9/11 and we were called terrorists," He says. "Then they [the opponents] played the racist card, as I was told our complaint was really about the Chinese denigrating Australian research. This is total nonsense. It was about the vital principle of scientific integrity." After she went on television, He says, she received threatening phone calls and her house was stoned.

There had been difficulties at Hall's laboratory for some time, and in October 2001 some staff members at the immunology and transplant laboratory complained to He as head of the laboratory. "When I approached Professor Hall about this he was very abrupt," she says. "Instead of taking me into his office to discuss the situation, he abused me in the hall in front of my colleagues and other hospital staff."

Some complaints revolved around Hall's managerial style, but most of the more serious scientific allegations arose from Chen, a veterinary microsurgeon who performed surgery and carried out experiments on test rats at the laboratory. Hall, a physician, is an expert in immunology, the body's defence system for fighting disease and foreign bodies, including foreign organs commonly transplanted today, such as kidneys, hearts and livers.

Human transplant patients are given powerful drugs to suppress the body's immune response and usually have to take them for the rest of their lives, opening them to the possibility of infections and even cancers. But Hall believes he has detected certain immune cells that are the main ones responsible for tolerance of foreign organs. This is the holy grail of the transplant world; if he can turn on these cells, patients will not have to take powerful drugs for the rest of their lives. Hall's experiments have involved injecting treated cells into test rats that have had heart transplants to see if they can tolerate the transplants better than control rats that do not receive the cells. "The problem was that repeated tests showed that the controls [rats] had the same reaction as the treated rats," Chen says. "Whenever I tried to talk to Professor Hall about this, he berated me and told me I was doing it incorrectly, that I was incompetent. He never questioned whether his hypothesis was right or not."

Then Hall wrote a scientific paper for the Transplant Society of Australia and New Zealand and put Chen's name on it, even making him the point of contact, allegedly without telling Chen. Chen disagreed with the paper and claimed it included "embarrassing inaccuracies" - such as an experiment that Chen believed had not occurred - that "ruined my scientific credibility". These problems soon led to even more serious allegations that other tests in another paper were false; were not done. These results were used in the laboratory's applications for grant money from the federally funded National Health and Medical Research Council, the supreme research body.

He initially complained to the hospital about Hall's management style and these scientific matters, but she says she was told she should go to university administration because Hall was a member of university staff and funded mainly through the university. He and the two other laboratory members then made an official disclosure about the operations of Hall's unit, particularly about the scientific allegations, to the university administration under the Protected Disclosures Act, which is supposed to protect whistleblowers. The university, then under vice-chancellor John Niland, appointed the then dean of medicine, Bruce Dowton, to investigate it. He says they felt isolated and ostracised and that their side was not being listened to fully by the university. UNSW denies this. After more than four months passed without any decision, He and Chen went to the ABC and publicly revealed their grievances, which were also reported in The Weekend Australian.

Dowton's report came out only after the media reports. It criticised Hall's management style and recommended he apologise to certain staff members and undergo management training. It also criticised him over the authorship issue, but on the more serious charges it found that Hall was not guilty of any wilful scientific fraud or misconduct. But members of the university's governing council, who by then had heard the allegations in the media, were not satisfied with this and they forced a report by an independent group of eminent experts. That group consisted of former High Court chief justice Gerard Brennan and three medical professors: John Chalmers from the University of Sydney; Judith Whitworth, director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research; and David Weatherall, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University. They concluded - in a report that was made public after Hall took the university to court to stop its publication - that Hall had behaved with a "reckless disregard for the truth" and had "deliberately deceived" and "seriously deviated" from "commonly accepted" scientific practices.

But that was not the end of the saga. Hall maintained his full innocence and said that the investigating committee had been misled and "did not understand the science". The university management then organised its own committee of experts to examine the Hall allegations. This report, accepted by the then vice-chancellor, Rory Hume, found that Hall was guilty of academic misconduct but not the more serious charge of scientific misconduct. Hall was not dismissed and UNSW paid the rental for a new research unit for Hall and his wife, neurologist Suzanne Hodgkinson, at the Australian Technology Park in inner Sydney.

Chen is now effectively redundant and the university has indicated it will not review his contract at the end of the year. Chen says: "I would advise people to think very, very carefully before they become whistleblowers." But He is just as determined as she was four years ago. "I'm not leaving," she says. "I'm not going to give them the satisfaction. I believe in the principle and I believe I was right." The NSW Ombudsman's Office has been investigating the handling of UNSW whistlelowers including Chen and He and it's understood a report on its findings will be released early next 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.

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

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

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



17 December, 2005

For Professors' Children, the Case for Home Schooling

If you want to bring a conversation to a dead stop on the academic cash-bar circuit, just mention casually that you are home schooling your children. You might as well bite the head off a live chicken. Most professors are likely to be appalled, and those who are not will keep their mouths shut. Still, all indications are that the number of families who home school is growing rapidly - somewhere between 5 percent and 15 percent per year, according to the U.S. Department of Education -- and the number of home-schooled children now hovers somewhere between one and two million. A recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll indicates that 41 percent of families had a positive view of home schooling in 2001, as opposed to only 16 percent who did in 1985. By almost every measurable outcome, home schoolers in general outperform their public-educated peers, and many colleges are beginning to rework their admissions procedures to accommodate the growing numbers of home-schooled applicants.

Nevertheless, I have spoken with more than a few professors who say that home schooling is dangerous: It is a threat to public education, it is anti-feminist, it isolates children, it is a form of religious fanaticism, it is a means of avoiding diversity, and - most withering of all - it is an instrument of ideological conservatism. They sometimes joke about home education by mentioning horror films such as Carrie and Children of the Corn.

I'm an English professor, and my spouse used to work in academic administration. We have three daughters, ages 6, 4, and 2. And we have been home schooling them for two years now. If all goes well, we plan to continue teaching them at home at least until they are old enough for high school. We always planned that one of us would stay home while our children were young, but the idea of home schooling only developed recently in the context of our present circumstances. Teaching our daughters to read and write, beginning around the age of 4, seemed like a natural thing for us to do. Along with potty training, it was just part of the ordinary business of being a parent. Being avid readers ourselves, we have about 4,000 books in our house, which now includes a children's library. I suppose it was inevitable that we would spend a lot of time reading to our children, and they would have an early desire to learn to read for themselves and for each other.

We live surrounded by woods and farmland, so our daughters are constantly asking us to look up plants and insects in the Audubon field guides. We have a reasonably well-supplied children's science lab and art studio. And, in the course of routine travel and shopping, it's easy to cultivate our daughters' curiosity about the world by visiting museums, zoos, libraries, schools, factories, and farms. These are things that most parents do, though they may not regard their activities as part of some kind of curriculum.

In a typical day, our 6-year-old daughter will study phonics, spelling, writing, history, geography, and math. She may perform some elementary science experiments, or she may work on an art project in emulation of Seurat or Pollock. On some days other children - not necessarily other home schoolers - will come to our house to play. Sometimes they'll open our costume chest and dramatize something they've been reading, such as The Hobbit. Other times they'll go outside and play hide-and- seek or go on an "expedition" to find specimens for the family museum. Even though our younger daughters have not yet started their formal schooling, they are eager to imitate their oldest sister, and the pace of learning seems to accelerate with each new child. On good days, home schooling seems like the most natural method of elementary education one could imagine.

We are not ideologically committed to home schooling any more than we are opposed to public education. And we are aware of the limitations of home schooling under some circumstances, just as we are aware of the difficulties faced by many public schools, even in relatively well-financed school districts. Ultimately, we want the best education for our children, and, on the whole, home schooling seems like the best option. It is also one that our daughters seem to desire, and, if any of them wanted to go to the nearby public school, we would certainly consider it.

Nevertheless, my spouse and I do feel the sting of criticisms that we hear in academe from people who don't know that we are home schoolers - or, worse, from those who do. Of course, we agree that these criticisms apply in some cases. But we also think it is unfair to judge a diverse range of home-schooling practices by associating the movement - if it can be called that - with its most extreme and marginal practitioners.

In search of some reassurance, I have had many discussions with other professors who home school, primarily at my home institution but also with a number of faculty members in other parts of the country. From those conversations I have noticed a number of common motives, circumstances, and beliefs among faculty members who educate their children at home:

They are rarely religious or political extremists. Many professors observe that it is difficult to achieve consistent moral training in public education. They sometimes state that private education in religious schools is too doctrinal or resistant to modernity, particularly in the sciences. Some lament that public and religious education seem to have become battlefields for activists for whom the "vital center" has been abandoned, along with a spirit of civic responsibility.

They want the best education for their children, but they are not wealthy. Professors are usually well informed about what constitutes a good education in terms of methods and resources. The experience of small classes and one-on-one tutoring inevitably convinces teachers of the effectiveness of methods that can easily be replicated in the home, though they are prohibitive for all but exclusive private schools that are usually beyond the reach of academics with more than one child. Home schooling, therefore, becomes a logical choice when the costs of private education and day care become greater than one parent's income.

They enjoy learning. For nearly all professors, the chance to review and expand their own youthful education in a variety of fields is a treat that almost transcends the educational needs of their children. Mathematicians, for example, relish the chance to reread the literature they half-missed when they were mastering geometry, and English professors, like me, enjoy the chance to relearn the astronomy they once loved before calculus crushed their hopes for a scientific career. They often see themselves as learning with their children rather than simply teaching them.

They are confident in their ability to teach. Professors often see teaching their own children as part of a continuum of pleasurable obligations to the next generation; they seek to integrate the values of their profession with the values they live at home. Since professors often teach the teachers, they tend to believe - perhaps with some hubris - in their ability to teach effectively at all grade levels. But more often, they recognize their limitations and seek collaboration with other parents - often professors themselves - with different areas of expertise.

They benefit from flexible schedules. Academics tend to work about 50 hours per week during the academic year, but they also have control over their schedules and long periods of relative autonomy. Most professors have a co-parenting ideal, but in practice one partner - usually the mother - becomes the primary home educator, while the father assumes a secondary role with some seasonal variation. Some express discomfort with this circumstance because they recognize the sacrifices that each partner requires of the other.

They value unstructured learning. Professors know how much time is lost by learning in an institutional setting. A large portion of the time spent in school is devoted to moving students around, dealing with disruptions, health problems, different amounts of preparation, and unequal rates of learning. Without all the crowd control and level seeking, the formal requirements of education can be completed in only a few hours a day, leaving lots of time for self-directed learning and play. As a result, home-schooled children generally learn faster and with less boredom and less justified resentment.

They see the results of public education. Every professor seems to complain that most high-school graduates are not really prepared for college, either academically or emotionally. More and more, our energies are devoted to remedial teaching and therapeutic counseling. Most believe that something is wrong in public education, or the larger culture, that can only be dealt with, in part, by selective withdrawal. Home-schooled students are not always perfect, but they seem more respectful, attentive, mature, and academically prepared than their peers. And they do not automatically perceive teachers as "the enemy" out of peer solidarity.

They privilege the family over peer groups. Professors often celebrate diversity as a value in education, and, among those who home school, many mention the value for their children of cross-generational experiences instead of identifying only with a peer group. In large families, children also benefit from teaching their younger siblings, who are generally eager to keep up. Home-schooled students are less likely to become alienated from their families as a result of antisocial, anti-intellectual peer conformity. They develop a set of values that enable them to resist the negative socialization that outweighs, by far, the benefits of segregation by age.

They have negative memories of their own education. Although it takes some probing, nearly every professor with home-schooled children mentions traumatic childhood experiences in school. Professors, as a group, tend to have been sensitive, intelligent children who were picked on and ostracized. They foresee the same treatment for their own children, and they want to do everything they can to prevent the children from experiencing the traumas they experienced. Professors recognize how many of our most brilliant students have been emotionally or physically terrorized for a dozen years before they arrive at college. School sometimes teaches otherwise happy and intelligent children to become sullen and secretive and contemptuous of learning.

It is hard to overemphasize this last point as a motive for home schoolers. In my own memory, the difficulty of school was never the work; it was surviving the day without being victimized by students whose violence was beyond the capacity or desire of adults to control. My spouse remembers the cruelty of girls in cliques, who can be even more cunning at the infliction of pain and permanent emotional scarring than any of the boys who sometimes sent me home with torn clothes and a bloody nose.

No doubt, my spouse and I have had to forgo some career options for our present way of life. Home schooling our children means we have to live on an assistant professor's salary. It also means living in a small town in the Midwest instead of an expensive city on one of the coasts. It means living in an old farmhouse that I am, more or less, renovating by myself. It means not eating out or going on vacations very often. It means driving older American cars instead of shiny new Volvos. But the big reward is the time we get to spend with our children.

I suppose, on some level, my spouse and I are rebelling against an academic culture that tells us we should both be working at demanding professional jobs while our children are raised by someone else. But we value this time with our children more than career advancement for its own sake. We don't regard ourselves as conservatives. We feel like we're swimming against the mainstream of a culture that has sacrificed the family for economic productivity and personal ambition. We don't think home schooling is right for everyone, but it works for us, for now. Of course we will make some mistakes, but on the whole, we think home schooling our children may be the most important thing we will ever do.

Source



Lucky North Carolina taxpayers

A massive influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, into North Carolina has thrust thousands of non-English speaking students into the public school system, leaving local teachers and administrators with a daunting task in their efforts to educate this expanding population. "In the last 10 years, 1.4 million new residents settled in the state," concluded a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in Washington D.C. "The equivalent of adding five Raleighs.[t]his large-scale population growth is bringing traffic, pollution, overcrowded schools and lack of affordable housing in the state, decreasing quality of life and straining vital natural resources."

FAIR's Immigration Impact Report also said the trend was seen some years ago when, in 2002, statistics showed attendance in the Limited English Proficiency/English Language Learning instruction programs jumped 494 percentage points within 10 years. And the numbers keep climbing. The United States Census Bureau estimates that the Latino population increased by 138,654 in North Carolina between the 2000 Census and July 1, 2004, from 378,963 to 517,617, a gain of nearly 37 percent, with an estimated 300,000 of those being illegal immigrants.

The problem has become so acute that officials have named it one of the major challenges facing county government across the state. "Hispanic and Latino residents are transforming county services," said a report taken from the Long-Range Planning and Visioning Project after the N.C. Association of County Commissioners School of Government met in Chapel Hill in August 2004. "Hispanic and Latino populations present social, cultural and fiscal challenges for county health and public education services. Counties are asked to help educate and assimilate the growing Hispanic population who come from different parts of Mexico, South America and Central America."

The 1982 Supreme Court decision of Plyler v. Doe forced public schools to provide both documented and undocumented youngsters a primary and secondary education. This "don't ask, don't tell" policy has overwhelmed school systems throughout the state and left them searching for solutions. North Carolina State Board of Education Chairman Howard Lee says dealing with the huge numbers of immigrants coming into the state is extremely challenging. "It's very overwhelming," he said. "I get a lot of complaints from superintendents and principals from all over the state that tell me these children are interfering with the education process of the other children."

Jack Martin, Special Projects Director for FAIR said the children of illegal immigrants degrade instruction to American kids. Not only do the children of undocumented workers put a strain in the classroom, Martin said, but these children also empty the pockets of valid North Carolina citizens who are responsible for footing the enormous bill. "[The illegal immigrants] are breaking the piggy bank," he said. "In North Carolina it costs $450 million for educating children. It's a big expense and the taxpayers are picking up the cost." Martin's assessment isn't off base. In 2004, the United States General Accounting Office estimated the per-pupil expenditure for illegal alien children was $6,000.

Chairman Lee said there are also additional costs associated with educating immigrant children, including the support staff and social workers needed at individual school sites to help the children. "It's a tremendous financial burden," he said. "It's being borne by the taxpayers who underwrite the cost of 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.

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

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

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16 December, 2005

DESTRUCTION OF THE UNIQUE OXFORD UNIVERSITY UNDERWAY

How sad to tamper with one of the world's most successful educational systems. The personalized nature of an Oxford education is widely held to be the secret of its success and that is precisely what is being undermined

College tutors will lose their historic right to select students for admission to Oxford University under plans for sweeping reform announced yesterday. Students will apply to Oxford, not individual colleges, as part of proposals to centralise admissions. A working party on reform said that the changes could be agreed within six months and implemented in 2008. It admitted in a report that the present system left Oxford vulnerable to accusations that bright students, particularly from comprehensive schools, were being rejected unfairly because they did not know how to play the college game. There was a "widespread perception" that candidates could boost their chances of success by choosing the right college, because of differences in the size of different colleges and the number of applicants in each subject. "It is the view of many - both inside and outside Oxford - that we still fall short in terms of having systems in place that can ensure that the very best who apply to Oxford are admitted, irrespective of college choice," the report said.

A central admissions system, in which groups of subject tutors, rather than colleges, chose students, would ensure that Oxford admitted only the best applicants. "Eliminating the perception that college choice can make a difference would also help to encourage more applications from good candidates at schools and sixth-form colleges where there is limited knowledge and experience of Oxford," the report said. It acknowledged that college tutors might object to the loss of their freedom to select the students they wished to teach, but said that this had to be weighed against "the enhanced equality of opportunity for all candidates that should result". "Without central ranking and high levels of co-ordination, colleges are more likely to fill their places from their own cohort of first-choice applicants than to look outside that cohort for candidates of higher quality," it said.

The report was published as Oxford released figures showing that the number of admittances from state schools fell by 1.4 percentage point from 2004 to 46.4 per cent this year, and those from fee-paying schools rose by 1 percentage point to 43.9 per cent. The initiative is the latest by John Hood, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, to modernise procedures. He has already clashed with dons over plans for performance management of academics and to transfer control of Oxford to a board of governors. The working party set out two models for change. Under the first, colleges would tell departments how many places they had available for each subject. Students would apply without naming a college and subject tutors would rank them and conduct interviews. Candidates would be asked if they had a preferred college once they had been offered a place. Under the second model, students would be able to nominate a college but subject tutors would decide whether they were ranked highly enough to merit an interview. Students would be interviewed by the preferred college and one other college before subject tutors decided whether to offer a place.

The working party, chaired by Sir Tim Lankester, President of Corpus Christi College, said: "The aim is to provide further assurance that - with more and more good candidates relative to the available places - the colleges and subject departments and faculties are doing all they reasonably can, together, to select the very best." It acknowledged that the reforms were also driven by a need to show the regulator, the Office for Fair Access, that Oxford was doing all it could to encourage applications from able state-school students

Source



Australian Liberal students celebrate end of 30-year campaign to rescind compulsory unionism for students

Note that in Australia the major conservative party is called the Liberal party. Unlike American "liberals" they really do believe in liberty

Triumphant Liberal students spent the weekend celebrating the enactment of the Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-Front Student Union Fees) Bill 2005 - better known as voluntary student unionism. Australian Liberal Students Federation president Julian Barendse and ALSF treasurer Rohan D'Souza watched the event live on the internet at Melbourne's Treasury Place. When the result came, they reacted with extreme elation, Mr Barendse said. It had been a tense afternoon; Mr Barendse knew the bill was going to be put, but said there were no guarantees. "It was a very nervous moment," he said. "Anyone watching it would have had butterflies in their stomach." He said it was a sweet victory on a number of levels: for those who had fought for VSU for 30 years; because it came despite Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce's opposition ("he has been shown up with egg on his face"); and because the result came during the annual conference of the National Union of Students. One Liberal student immediately jumped on a plane to fly from Sydney to Melbourne to join the party.

Mr Barendse said he and about 30 other VSU supporters went out in Melbourne on Friday to restaurants and pubs. Later in the weekend he travelled to Ballarat to visit Liberal delegates at the NUS conference. Monash University Students Union president Michael Josem said all students owed pro-VSU campaigners "a debt of gratitude for saving them from these fees". He watched the event live on the internet. "It's excellent," he said. "It vindicates all the efforts people have put in." Mr Josem celebrated the win with a few beers in a restaurant ("nothing outrageous") with friends on Saturday night. He said students would not notice much difference in the short term, but in the long term they would see that services would continue and even improve. "The world will keep spinning," he said. In a statement, the ALSF said students across the country would be "celebrating being released from the shackles of compulsory unionism".

He praised Liberal senators Mitch Fifield and Sophie Panopoulos for fighting for an uncompromised version of the legislation. Mr Barendse said he had been asked to help federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson draft the legislation because "the Government recognised our expertise". "I have no sympathy for the universities and the vice-chancellors who failed to reform themselves; it took the Government to impose VSU on them when they had the opportunity over 30 years to do it themselves," he said.

University of New England Students Association president Samantha Aber praised members of her council who had fought for VSU. "I believe that I could not have delivered a better Christmas present than providing external students who rarely, or even never, visit our campus with the right to chose whether they will fund student union services," Ms Aber said in an email forum.

Outgoing NUS president Felix Eldridge said the union's national conference at the University of Ballarat was stunned by Friday's result. "Things became a lot more positive a couple of hours later after the conference resumed," he said. "We were happy to have it resolved. We suddenly realised what we have to do to save the NUS and other organisations." Mr Eldridge scoffed at claims by Mr Barendse that Left attacks on Liberal students forced the early closure of the conference.

Source

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

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

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

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

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15 December, 2005

Britain: The Trojan horse of sex education

From Melanie Philips

When this government falls into a hole it knows exactly what to do. It digs even faster and deeper, burying more and more victims in the process. All the evidence suggests that its sex education policy is a disaster. Britain has the highest rate of under-age teenage pregnancies in Europe. The proportion of 13- to 15-year-olds who are getting pregnant is rising. Sexually transmitted diseases among young people are going through the roof. Even the apparent drop in under-18 pregnancy rates is no more than a statistical sleight of hand, since the number of 16 year-olds using the morning-after pill has doubled since it was made available over the counter in January 2001.

Faced with the egregious failure of the strategy, government advisers have now proposed a brilliant remedy. Apply it even more widely! Their solution is to make sex lessons compulsory for all children starting at the age of five, so that detailed knowledge about sex should become a routine part of their education. No sooner will a child have found his or her coat-peg and be measuring up the competition for the climbing frame than some teacher will be rattling off where babies come from. So while many children are not taught to read properly at five - indeed, a disgraceful number can barely read and write when they leave primary school at the age of 11 - they will be given `more rounded' lessons on sex and relationships. Is this not grotesquely inappropriate?

The assumption behind compulsory sex education is that not enough of such information is reaching children to promote responsible behaviour. On the contrary - children can hardly move for this stuff, and it is the message that it carries which is irresponsible. During the past decade, school sex education programmes promoting a `safe sex' message have hugely expanded. Government-funded services advise on how to have sex, where to get the morning-after pill and how to spot sexually transmitted diseases. Girls as young as 13 are even being offered sex advice by text message; they tap in questions on their mobile phones and receive answers from sexual health workers.

Yet all this has not brought down the rate of sexual activity; far from it. The more such value-free sex education and contraceptive advice is given to children, the more their sexual activity increases. And the earlier in their lives this encouragement is provided, the earlier their sexual activity takes place. This is because adult values are being loaded onto children who are too emotionally immature to cope with them. Teaching children that premature sex is permitted, appropriate and fun encourages them to try it out. This is hardly rocket science.

To believe that teaching them to link sex to `relationships' will make them behave responsibly is simply risible. A `relationship' is a concept that is so slippery as to be meaningless. It belongs to the world of TV soaps, which is about the level of reality that defines so many teenage - and a dismaying number of adult - sexual encounters to which the notion of permanent commitment is entirely foreign.

The increase in sexual promiscuity among children and teenagers is not due to ignorance but to the deliberate destruction of the notion of respectability. Not only are official blind eyes turned to enforcing the legal age of consent, but sex education actually targets under-age children. Moral guidance is nowhere. Instead, sex education seeks to `clarify' the child's own values. But children need clear boundaries of behaviour. Treating them as if they have adult values is to abandon and even abuse them.

According to these government advisers, sex education for five year-olds would be confined mainly to `relationships and friendships'. But who can trust even this anodyne formulation, given the wildly inappropriate sex `education' materials used in some schools? One such video shown to nine and ten year-olds enlightens them about different positions for heterosexual, bisexual, gay and lesbian sex. Other programmes require children to act out sexual behaviour. Such material looks like propaganda for sexual license; some is so exploitative it verges on the predatory. Is it surprising that more and more children are acting out sexual behaviour, a common response to sexual abuse?

The worst of it is that such materials are not shown to parents who, on the rare occasions when they do stumble across it, are invariably aghast and furious at this abuse of both their children and of their own role. But then, the state is increasingly undermining parents and usurping their responsibility to guide their own children in the most private and personal areas of life. Schools dish out contraceptives and pregnancy tests to 11 year-olds, and provide abortion services to under-age children without telling their parents. When Susan Axon challenged this abortion practice in court, the Family Planning Association said in evidence that the idea that `parents know what is best' for their children was out of date and the views of health professionals should take precedence.

According to the Government, parents increasingly cannot be trusted to impart to their children qualities such as self-worth, restraint, friendliness, empathy and resilience, so schools must now teach `emotional literacy'. Accordingly, 14 separate emotional areas are to be taught, under titles such as `getting on and falling out', `relationships' and `good to be me'. This is nothing less than a state grab for control over the way children think about the world - a creeping nationalisation of childhood that is steadily destroying the independence of family life. What's more, guidance on behaviour cannot be taught. It is learned by example, by being brought up in a loving, stable environment where identity and moral values are forged. Children brought up by their two parents are far less likely to have sex under 16 than those who are not.

More and more families are becoming unstable and fragmented. Yet instead of shoring up the married family - the best antidote to irregular behaviour - the government is ruthlessly undermining it by promoting the idea that all lifestyles are equal. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority says primary schools need to cover a wider range of relationships than the traditional nuclear family, and must teach children that families include same-sex couples, single parents and children in local authority care.

Ministers have progressively loaded the dice against marriage, making it ever more meaningless. Now they are undermining it still further with gay civil union, which comes into force today. Contrary to the claims being made for this measure, it is not about equal rights or greater self-discipline. It is part of a wider onslaught on the whole notion of moral norms by separating sex, marriage and procreation and destroying the unique place of marriage in our society as the institution that best safeguards the healthy regeneration of human identity. Both adults and children are being funnelled instead towards a sexual free-for-all. This is surely why the government is so opposed to sexual abstinence education.

All the evidence is that abstinence works in preventing irregular sexual activity. But the government doesn't want to prevent such activity. On the contrary, it wants to promote it in order to produce `equality' between lifestyles - while tidying away any inconvenient consequences such as teenage pregnancy. Sex education is therefore not a means of protecting this country's fundamental values. It is a weapon in the war being waged against them.



PUSH FOR MORE CHARTER SCHOOLS IN CALIFORNIA

Despite Big Labor's success in defeating California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's reform initiatives last month, a few brave officials are still willing to challenge the public employee unions at the local level. Take the burgeoning charter school movement, which now has 570 schools in the state serving about 3% of the state's public school enrollment. They are about to be joined by one of the state's largest high school districts, fast-growing Grossmont in San Diego, which wants to convert all 10 of the high schools serving its 25,000 students into self-governing charter schools.

Charter schools are a halfway house between traditional public schools and the use of vouchers. Schools remain public, but can ditch the state's massive rulebooks and have control over their own hiring and firing. In exchange, they must show gains in student achievement or risk the loss of their charter. It's performance-based education, and most parents love it.

But school bureaucrats do not. Bruce Seaman, the president of the local teachers union in Grossmont, calls the idea "the first step toward the privatization of public schools." Nonsense, says Ron Nehring, the chairman of the local elected school board and a booster of charters. "The schools would be governed by a board elected by the parents which would report to the school district's trustees," he told me. "What can be more democratic and sensitive to what parents actually want?"

The proposal has been praised by Grossmont Superintendent Terry Ryan, who told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Mr. Nehring "is calling for a full discourse on charters, and that's really what should be happening." In fact, even the supporters of the status quo are pushing a plan to convert one local high school in the district to charter status, although half of the seats on the board governing that school would be guaranteed to be filled by teacher union representatives.

The debate over reforming public education in California is increasingly between those who want real reform and those who recognize the public is demanding change but still want to have the new system controlled by the status quo behind the scenes.

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.

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

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

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



14 December, 2005

BLACKS NOW TURNING TO HOME SCHOOLING TOO

When Denise Armstrong decided to teach her daughter and two sons at home instead of sending them to public school, she said she did so thinking she would do a better job than the school of instilling her values in her children. At the time, Ms. Armstrong was the only black parent at gatherings of home-education groups. But she said that has been changing. "I've been delighted to be running into people in the African-American home-schooling community," said Ms. Armstrong, who lives in Chesterfield County.

The move toward home schooling, advocates say, reflects a wider desire among families of all races to guide their children's religious upbringing, but it also reflects concerns about other issues like substandard schools and the preservation of cultural heritage. "About 10 years ago, we started seeing more and more black families showing up at conferences, and it's been steadily increasing since then," said Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, a national advocacy group.

Nationwide, about 1.1 million children were schooled at home in 2003, which was about 2.2 percent of the school-age population. That was up from about 850,000, or 1.7 percent, in 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics in the Department of Education. The center said a racial breakdown of students being schooled at home was not available. But Michael Apple, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin who tracks home schooling, said the numbers were still very low.

Professor Apple said much of the increase was in cities where there were histories of racial tension and where black people felt alienated and marginalized. He said some families chose home schooling because they were concerned that the public schools were not adequately teaching African-American history and culture, others taught their children at home to protect them from violence, and, "for some, it's all of this and religion."

Ms. Armstrong said she wanted her children to have a "moral Judeo-Christian foundation" that public schools could not provide. "I felt that my husband and I would be able to give more of a tutorial, individual learning situation than a teacher trying to address 40 kids at one time," she said. To help guide black families though home schooling, Joyce Burges and her husband, Eric, started the National Black Home Educators Resource Association in 2000. Ms. Burges said many black families were unaware that home schooling was a legal option. But she said that she and other blacks who school their children at home had been considered turncoats by people who think they have turned their backs on the struggle by blacks to gain equal access to public education. Still, she said, when schools are not teaching children to read, or are failing to provide a safe place to learn, the children should come first. "You do what you have to do that your children get an excellent education," she said. "Don't leave it up to the system."

Professor Apple said improvements in public education depended on the mobilization of parents. By home schooling, parents are "trying as hard as they possibly can to protect their children," he said. "For that," he added, "they must be applauded. But, in the long run, protecting their own children may even lead to worse conditions for the vast majority of students who stay in public schools, and that's a horrible dilemma."

Source



CHRISTIAN TEXTBOOKS SPURNED IN CALIFORNIA

For the UC to be rejecting textbooks because of "bias" is a huge joke. What about all the Leftist bias that they DO accept?

In a small room at the University of California's headquarters in downtown Oakland, UC counsel Christopher Patti sat beside a stack of textbooks proposed for use by Calvary Chapel Christian School in Riverside County -- books UC rejected as failing to meet freshmen admission requirements. Biology and physics textbooks from Christian publishers were found wanting, as were three Calvary humanities courses. "The university is not telling these schools what they can and can't teach," Patti said. "What the university is doing is simply establishing what is and is not its entrance requirements. It's really a case of the university's ability to set its own admission standards. The university has no quarrel with Christian schools."

The Association of Christian Schools International, which claims 4,000 member schools including Calvary Chapel and 800 other schools in California, disagrees. On Aug. 24, it sued the university in federal court for religious bias. The lawsuit marks a new front in America's culture wars, in which the largest organization of Christian schools in the country and the University of California, which admitted 208,000 freshmen this year, are accusing each other of trying to abridge or constrain each others' freedom.

Unlike recent court cases -- such as the challenge to the school district's decision in Dover, Pa., to teach intelligent design (a ruling from the federal judge is expected soon) or the decision by the Kansas Board of Education to teach that such things as the genetic code are inadequately explained by evolutionary theory -- the suit against UC does not pit Darwinism against creationism and its intellectual offspring. Rather, by focusing on courses that Calvary Chapel planned to offer this fall -- in English, history and social studies -- courses that were turned down by UC, it sets competing interpretations of academic merit against each other. "The university is in a way firing a shot over the bow," said Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., "saying to Christian schools that they may have gotten away with this in the past, but no more. And that will have a chilling effect across the country."

In its suit, the association and its co-plaintiffs objected "to government officials ... dictating and censoring the viewpoints that may and may not be taught ... (in) private schools. ... (They) have rejected textbooks and courses based on a viewpoint of religious faith, for the first time in the University of California's history." The rejections, the suit asserted, "violate the freedom of speech of Christian schools, students and teachers."

On Oct. 28, UC asked U.S. District Judge S. James Otero to dismiss the suit. The university was not "stopping plaintiffs from teaching or studying anything," it argued. "This lawsuit is really an attempt to control the regents' educational choices. Plaintiffs seek to constrain the regents' exercise of its First Amendment-protected right of academic freedom to establish admissions criteria."

A hearing is scheduled today on the motion to dismiss. "I think there's a good chance the judge may take (the suit) very seriously," Haynes said. "The implication is now all religious schools have to clean up their act if they want their students to get into the university."

Hollyn Hollman, a church/state attorney for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C., said the plaintiffs face "a high burden ... to prove they are being discriminated against," based on the rejection of a handful of courses alone. But Wendell Bird, lead attorney for the schools, believes, "This is a liberty case, the right of nonpublic institutions to be free. I'd be bringing the same case if the clients were Jewish or Buddhist. It's very troubling to the largest Christian school organization in the country because it restrains freedom and could spread. Many trends tend to start in California." ......

"The question here," Haynes said, "is whether a public university can disadvantage students from these schools because the science or English they took is not up to par. I wouldn't teach Emily Dickinson in a Christian context, but the point is they have the right to put it in the context of their faith."

Calvary Chapel students have been successful in gaining admittance to UC. In the last three years, said Patti at university headquarters, 18 of 25 of its applicants have been admitted. He said he did not know how those students were faring in college. Calvary Chapel says their students score better on standardized tests than California public school students. The school, in Murrieta (Riverside County), describes itself on its Web site as, "first and foremost a Christian school, which seeks to provide our student population with a Biblical world view." The plaintiffs include six Calvary Chapel students. One is the president of the school's national honor society, another the quarterback of the football team. They were chosen, said a school lawyer, because they all had the grades and scores to qualify them for admittance to UC. ....

Among the courses turned down were a history class, "Christianity's Influence on America"; a social studies class, "Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic"; and, most contentiously, an English course, "Christianity and Morality in American Literature." None is being taught because of the dispute. The English course would have included reading material from many major authors, from Hawthorne to Tolkien. The syllabus called it, "an intensive study in textual criticism aimed at elevating the ability of students to engage literary works." The primary text, published by A Beka Press, of Pensacola, Fla. -- whose biology text also was rejected -- was to have been "American Literature: Classics for Christians."

In turning down the English course, Sue Wilbur, the director of UC undergraduate admissions, checked two categories as "inadequate" on a standard form: "Lacking necessary course information," and "Insufficient academic/theoritical [sic] content." She added a note that said: "Unfortunately, this course, while it has an interesting reading list, does not offer a nonbiased approach to the subject matter." And she also commented that "the textbook is not appropriate." During the interview, Patti said the textbook was an anthology and that UC demands some full texts be read.

But Bird scoffed at the explanation in his soft Southern accent as a "post-hoc rationalization. Unless I can't read, there's no objection to its being an anthology." In their suit, the schools argue that UC has accepted courses in "The Jewish Experience" and Islam, and also allowed courses in "Military History and Philosophy," "Gender, Sexuality and Identity in Literature" and "Children's Literature." These acceptances, they claimed, undercut the university's rationale in rejecting Calvary's history course as "too narrow/too specialized." ....

Ravi Poorsina, a university spokeswoman, disputed the criticism. "Their (students') ability to enter UC is not hindered," she said, explaining that other Calvary Chapel courses in the same academic fields did pass muster.

Another of the plaintiffs' lawyers, Robert Tyler, who has a son at Calvary Chapel, said the issue was simple fairness. "This is America. We have the right to send our kids to private schools, and have them study from a Christian perspective," he said. "The university has no right to tell any person of any faith they're not going to accept courses because they're taught from a Christian perspective. They have every right to look and see if it's sufficiently rigorous, sufficiently analytic.

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.

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

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

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



13 December, 2005

PRIVATE EDUCATION EVEN FOR THE LEFTIST POLITICAL ELITE IN BRITAIN

Tony Blair and David Cameron may be on opposing sides at the dispatch box, but both belong to the same elite club in the House of Commons, according to a study published today. The Labour and Conservative leaders are among the one in three MPs who were educated at private schools, nearly five times the national average. The research by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, also found that one in four MPs is a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. Mr Cameron was educated at Eton and Oxford, and Mr Blair went to Oxford from Fettes College in Edinburgh, often described as the "Eton of the North".

The trust, which promotes social mobility, said that its report showed that our parliamentary representatives were unrepresentative of the public. Just 7 per cent of Britons were educated privately, yet 32 per cent of MPs went to fee-paying schools. A further 25 per cent attended selective grammars, and 42 per cent went to comprehensives. Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the trust, said: "This is symptomatic of a wider issue - the educational apartheid which blights our system and which offers the best life chances to those who can afford to pay for their schooling."

Mr Cameron deflected comments about his privileged upbringing during the Tory leadership campaign, but most of his Shadow team seem to have had a similarly fortunate start in life: 19 of the 35 MPs appointed last week were educated privately, including the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne (St Paul's). Oliver Letwin, Director of Policy, Hugo Swire, Shadow Culture Secretary, and Boris Johnson, Shadow Higher Education Minister, are all old Etonians, like their leader. Of the sixteen members of Mr Cameron's team educated at state schools, only six went to comprehensives and ten to selective grammars.

The Government is unrepresentative of the population and of Labour MPs as a whole, according to the trust. A quarter of ministers enjoyed a private school education, compared with 16 per cent of backbench Labour MPs. Ministers and shadow ministers are also more likely to be Oxbridge graduates than their backbench colleagues. The proportion from public schools is 62 per cent in the House of Lords. Almost a third of the 391 privately educated peers went to just five schools, with 82 from Eton, 11 from Winchester, and 10 each from Harrow, Westminster, and Stowe.

Source



IDIOT AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR

Excerpt from Miranda Devine

Either Mem Fox's comprehension skills are impaired or she hasn't read the report of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, which was released last week. But the celebrated children's author didn't let ignorance get in the way of damning the report as "extreme phonics" and "back-to-the-'40s nonsense", and suggesting the inquiry may have been corrupted by "vested interests".

As Mark Latham's Read Aloud ambassador, Fox was supposed to be Labor's secret weapon in the last election. The ploy backfired because, unlike Fox, most people know it takes more than reading Possum Magic aloud to teach children how to read. For all her claims about wanting to improve children's literacy, Mother Fox just seems intent on fanning the flames of the Reading Wars: the destructive four-decade ideological battle between two methods of teaching reading, the phonics approach and the whole-language approach.

I was one of 12 members of the committee that produced the Teaching Reading report after a year of careful examination of the reading research. There is nothing "extreme" about finding that the most effective way to teach children is to show them how to link sounds with letters and break the code of reading. This is called explicit phonics instruction. It is not the only element of teaching reading but it is essential.

The whole-language approach, which once held sway in Australian schools, assumed that learning to read is natural and that all children will learn by osmosis, by being immersed in a "literature-rich" environment. At the beginning of the year, even some members of the committee (which included teachers, parents and deans of education) thought the inquiry was an unnecessary exercise because Australia had few literacy problems.

But the fact is, as many of the 453 submissions to the inquiry pointed out, there is a problem. Up to 20 per cent of Australian adults have "very poor" literacy skills. One in 10 students in years 5 and 7 is failing to meet the minimum national benchmarks for reading. Universities are forced to provide remedial reading courses for students who have left school barely literate.

But in Fox's Pollyanna world, if parents just read aloud "a minimum of three stories a day to the children in their lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation". Reading aloud to children is lovely, and the report encourages it, while stressing that "schools have the main responsibility to teach children to read and write".

But for up to 30 per cent of children no amount of reading aloud is going to be enough to teach them to read proficiently.

Pretending otherwise just lays unfair burdens of guilt on parents and offloads responsibility for teaching reading from schools. It also makes second-class citizens of children whose parents are unable or unwilling to read to them.

As for vested interests, Mem Fox sells millions of books because the education establishment endorses her. She is no Roald Dahl, and yet wildly enthusiastic teachers, unions, school librarians and journalists never miss an opportunity to thrust her unremarkable picture books down children's throats. So she is hardly likely to alienate her best salespeople by suggesting there might be a better way of teaching children to read....

Perhaps there is a clue in an interview she gave Andrew Denton this year: "I haven't got time for self-doubt. The job is too important for self-doubt. You can't. You just have to say, 'I know what I'm talking about. I'm 59' . . ."

Even 59-year-olds can be wrong, no matter how many books they sell.

More here

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

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

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

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

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



12 December, 2005

OSTRICH CALIFORNIA

They try to pretend that money grows on trees

California's perennial angst over financing education was the nucleus of the just-concluded ballot measure battle, with the California Teachers Association accusing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of shorting schools by $3 billion as part of a successful strategy to undermine his public standing and thus destroy his four measures.

While the CTA emerged victorious from this latest clash, the years-long debate over school finance is far from resolved. The union and its Democratic allies will be pressing Schwarzenegger to pony up more school money. More than likely, he'll accede with a to-the-victor-belong-the-spoils gesture, even though it would enlarge the state's chronic budget deficit. And as long as the deficit continues, which is indefinitely, school financing will remain central because it's the largest single portion of the budget.

With state school aid protected by a unique constitutional lockbox (Proposition 98, enacted by voters in 1988), the state budget has become a three-cushion billiards game - school money vs. money for prisons, health care, colleges and other programs vs. the perpetual deadlock over raising taxes. One example: Schwarzenegger reneged on his vague school aid promises - thereby incurring the CTA's wrath - on the rationale that to protect the economy, taxes shouldn't be raised and giving educators what they wanted would require draconian cuts in health care and other non-school spending.

Californians never face the three-sided question directly. They are occasionally presented with one of the three, often as a ballot measure, and express their opinions in ignorance of interaction with the other two. Most voters might agree if asked only whether schools need more money (they did so directly by passing Proposition 98 and indirectly by rejecting Schwarzenegger and his measures last month), but they might also say they don't want spending on health care or colleges to be reduced, or prison inmates to be released, and probably would reject major new taxes that they would pay.

Even without the other two fiscal facets, the school money debate breaks down to two competing world views: Whether more money would lead to improvements in educational achievement or whether school performance hinges on other factors, such as academic standards and parental involvement.

The CTA and its allies, of course, argue the former, incessantly noting that California ranks rather low among the states in per-pupil spending and implying that academic results would soar were we to emulate high-spending states. But to do so would require substantial increases in taxes. Matching New York's per-pupil spending (raising it from about $8,000 a year to more than $12,000), for example, would cost about $25 billion more a year, as Children Now notes in its "assessment of children's well-being." That's the equivalent of increasing the state's general fund budget by more than 25 percent, or doubling the state sales tax....

Could it be that despite all the propaganda, money is not central to educational success? Perhaps it's how we spend the money (California's teacher salaries are among the nation's highest, nearly 50 percent higher than those in Texas), or demographics (California has the highest percentage of English-learning students, nearly 40 percent), or the lack of parental and civic involvement (Texas is particularly known for the latter). Rather than casting envious glances at New York, perhaps we should be finding out whether Texas is doing as well as its test scores indicate, and if so, why?

Source



TEACHER SHORTAGE IN CALIFORNIA?

That better disciplined schools might encourage people to want to work there is not mentioned

California will face a shortage of up to 100,000 teachers in the next decade as retirements crest even while schools cope with tougher federal requirements for student learning, according to a report released Wednesday. At the same time, enrollment has been dropping in teaching-preparation programs in the state - from 76,000 in 2002 to 67,500 in 2004, according to the report from the nonprofit Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, based in Santa Cruz. Center director Margaret Gaston said the 2005-06 school year could be one of the last in a long time when the supply of teachers meets demand.

California schools have about 306,000 teachers and hire about 22,000 a year just to cover normal attrition, Gaston said. But the baby boomers, about one-third of the current teachers, are expected to retire within 10 years - meaning the state is going to have to step up recruitment. "There is a very narrow window of opportunity," Gaston said. "So it really is incumbent upon the policy community to act now to mitigate this situation." While struggling with short staffing, schools with the most students from minority and low-income families will also get unevenly large shares of the least-experienced teachers.

California sends 85 percent of intern teachers to these schools, Gaston said. Schools that rated lowest in the Academic Performance Index were five times more likely to have underprepared teachers than higher-performing schools, according to the report. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has faced sharp criticism this year over education funding, plans to focus on the issue next year, according to his education secretary, Alan Bersin. "This is a huge and critical infrastructure need that the governor understands as we experience this generational shift," Bersin said. The governor this year added $49 million in incentives for school districts to attract teachers into the lowest-performing schools, Bersin noted, and an agreement was made with the University of California system to train an additional 1,000 math and science teachers over the next five years.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, officials said they have been working hard to recruit new teachers and to reduce the number working with only temporary or emergency credentials. "We never stop recruiting. We are already two months into recruiting for next year," said Deborah Ignagni, the LAUSD's director of certificated recruitment. Most of the recruiting is done within California, with some nationwide and in Canada, she said. In the past, the district has also recruited in the Philippines, Spain and Mexico, and it might do so again this year. The district hired 2,376 teachers this year, bringing the total to 34,610, although the biggest need for new teachers is in math, science and special education. The district has also reduced the number of emergency credentialed teachers from 3,749 in 2002 to the current 249......

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.

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

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

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11 December, 2005

Surprise! Teachers who are paid by results 'do a better job'

Performance-related pay awards have inspired teachers to raise their game and achieve better results for GCSE pupils, according to a study of the scheme. In spite of initial hostility to the idea among teachers, researchers from the University of Bristol have found that children whose teacher had received a financial performance reward, achieved half a grade higher in each subject at GCSE.

The Performance Threshold scheme was introduced in 2000 to give an incentive to experienced teachers, who had been previously paid on a unified basic salary scale and could only raise their wages by taking on extra administrative duties.

Five years ago, the concept of bonuses for individual teachers was condemned by unions for being divisive and unfair. But in Paying Teachers by Results Simon Burgess and Carol Propper, of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation, found that the introduction of the scheme achieved "on average half a GCSE point more than equivalent pupils taught by the same teachers before the scheme was introduced". The academics, who assessed the results of 181 teachers at 25 schools from the Midlands to Bristol, tracked the average progress of their 14-year-old pupils at Key Stage 3 and later at GCSE level, before and after the reform.

By looking also at the scores of those staff who were not eligible for the increased pay awards and comparing both sets of results, they concluded that higher pay did achieve better grades. They also found that the less achieving 14-year-olds made more gains in their tests than higher-scoring pupils The Performance Threshold system resulted in the scrapping of a nine-point pay scale, under which five years ago teachers could be paid anything from 14,658 to 23,193 pounds

Passing the threshold leads to an annual 2,000 pound bonus per year until the end of their careers. The Government allocated 908.5 million pounds funding last year to schools on the basis of the number of "threshold and post-threshold teachers". The increases, which can take a teacher's pay up to 30,000 pounds, are assessed against rigorous criteria and annual targets. They are paid for out of the schools' funds and have marked a sea change in how children are taught.

Marcia Twelftree, head teacher of Charters school in Ascot, has 104 teachers to about 1,600 teenagers. She insists that good schools have always rewarded hard-working staff members. "I pay teachers what they are worth. I believe that a good school can only be a good school if you pay the teachers properly."

In the past, the Bristol team said, many heads claimed that they would have liked to reward staff but could not afford to. Nowadays they are bound to do so, if their teachers have met the strict criteria.

The National Union of Teachers, which opposed the scheme, found little praise for it yesterday. Arguing that the vast majority of staff who applied for the extra money were granted it, a spokesman said: "It shows the daftness of performance- related pay because the majority of children are taught by good teachers. They are not be granted performance-related pay if they have taught for less than five years, so it's not a valid comparison."

Source



School Considers A Religious Holiday For Muslims

To be fair, no doubt Greeks will now deserve a holiday to celebrate the heroic stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae; The Hindus must of course be allowed to celebrate Diwali; atheists will want a holiday to celebrate the birth of Charles Darwin and Russians will want to celebrate all their holy days according to their own Julian calendar ..... I could go on...

Muslims may get a religious holiday recognized by a public school in the Hillsborough County school district. Terrace Community School, a charter school housed at the Museum of Science & Industry, is considering changing its school calendar to give a day off for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. The school's board will vote on the proposal at its monthly meeting at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

The proposal came from Principal Gary Hocevar after controversy erupted in the Hillsborough County school district. Last month, the Hillsborough County school board decided to eliminate all days off coinciding with religious holidays except Christmas, which falls during winter break. The move came after a group of Muslims asked for a day off for Eid al-Fitr. After receiving thousands of e-mails and phone calls and much national news media attention, the board reversed that decision but still did not add a day off for the Muslim holiday. The issue raised questions by Terrace Community students, and Hocevar proposed changing his school's calendar at November's board meeting.

Hocevar expected the proposal to be controversial, so Terrace Community board members decided to delay the vote until December. But Hocevar said he has received only one phone call in opposition to the change. "Most of our parents were really supportive of the idea since our school is so diverse," Hocevar said.

About 5 percent of the school's 352 students are Muslim. Charter schools operate as public schools but without many district restrictions. They are free to create their own calendar, but most operate on the district's schedule to accommodate school services and parents who might have children in other schools. If the charter school board approves the new calendar, it will be the first time the school's schedule will differ from the district's. The school's calendar still would include days off for Yom Kippur and Good Friday.

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.

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

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

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10 December, 2005

Report Says States Aim Low in Science Classes

Nearly half the states are doing a poor job of setting high academic standards for science in public schools, according to a new report that examined science in anticipation of 2007, when states will be required to administer tests in the subject under President Bush's signature education law. The report, released Wednesday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, suggests that the focus on reading and math as required subjects for testing under the federal law, No Child Left Behind, has turned attention away from science, contributing to a failure of American children to stay competitive in science with their counterparts abroad.

The report also appears to support concerns raised by a growing number of university officials and corporate executives, who say that the failure to produce students well-prepared in science is undermining the country's production of scientists and engineers and putting the nation's economic future in jeopardy. Dozens of academic, corporate and Congressional leaders emerged from a meeting on competitiveness here on Tuesday to warn that the nation needs to expand its talent pool in science to stay ahead of countries like China and India that put vast resources into science education. "Many states are not yet serious about teaching science," said Michael Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy of the institute, a group that supports education reform. "The first step is to set higher expectations, and too many states have low or a lack of expectations to respond to the new global competitiveness."

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a strong proponent of more testing to measure how effectively schools are teaching, said she was not surprised by the findings. "I'm a what-gets-measured-gets-done kind of gal," she said in an interview. She cited the reluctance of many districts to teach algebra before high school as an illustration of the nation's problem with science and math, adding, "If children are not taking it until the ninth grade or ever, we are in a world of hurt."

The report set out to identify how states set academic standards for science, asking whether their courses include suitably challenging content, whether they are properly organized and whether they incorporate "pseudoscientific fads or politics," a reference to the recent drive to teach intelligent design as an alternative explanation to evolution. The results, a grade ranking for each state and the District of Columbia, serve as a marker for progress as the next phase of the No Child Left Behind law approaches.

Starting with the 2007-2008 academic year, science will become a subject that students will be tested on at least once in grades 3-5, once in grades 6-9 and once in grades 10-12 - although the results will not be used to measure whether a school has made "adequate yearly progress," as is the case with reading and math. Schools that fail to make progress are subject to sanctions.

Ms. Spellings said she favors using testing for additional subjects, like science, to assess progress. The authors of the report analyzed each state and awarded a numerical score that translated to a grade. Only seven states, including New York and California, got an A, with 12 receiving a B, and 8 plus the District of Columbia receiving a C. Seven states got a D, and 15 got an F. Iowa was not included in the report because it does not set standards for any subject.

In a separate assessment of how states are currently teaching evolution, the authors awarded 22 states a D or F, with Kansas winning a special distinction, F minus, for its recent decision to redefine science so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations, and allow for the teaching of alternative theories, an opening to consideration of intelligent design. The report cited mounting "religious and political pressures" over the last five years as undermining the teaching of evolution. But Paul R. Gross, its chief author, said in an interview that a willingness by schools in Kansas and elsewhere to consider alternative theories to evolution was only a small part of a "larger cultural problem."

Mr. Gross said that more critical has been a retreat from an emphasis on all science instruction, which is leaving students ungrounded in basic subjects like biology, human physiology and the environment. "In general," Mr. Gross said, "science education is not good enough now in the context of what people need to know in a reasonably effective way in our culture."

Source



Disturbed Australian children ignored by education bureaucracy



John Nelson is walking through his school playground. A girl walks past and gives him a high-five. He grins. Kids gravitate towards him. Nelson has been principal at Preston Primary in Melbourne's north for the past 15 years. At the end of the school year he will retire, aged 55. It has been a wrenching decision. "I'm really, really sad to be leaving," he says. Working with children as they embark on their education has been "the dream job".

But Nelson is angry about the cracks in the Victorian education system and the children who fall into them. While he is preparing to leave, he is not about to go quietly. With the candour of someone who has nothing to lose, he talks about primary schools in disadvantaged areas being in crisis as they struggle to deal with a substantial and increasing number of children, aged five to 12, with severe social and emotional problems.

Pressing for the establishment of "special settings" for these children, he says teachers and principals are working in situations that are "close to hell", while the system has become so inured to the presence of disturbed children that "the abnormal is accepted as normal". Nelson says the Government is not "fair dinkum" [genuine] about the problem and that requiring schools to deal with it is outside their educational charter and child mental health "on the cheap".

These are not, Nelson says, naughty children who respond to normal discipline and relationship-building but disturbed and violent children who are constantly suspended or expelled, whose behaviour disrupts the education of other children, who don't want to do what's fair and reasonable, who can't be left in the playground for too long because they don't know how to play, who attack other students and their teachers, who "wreck classrooms, punch, spit and act defiantly". "Schools are not trained, and they are certainly not resourced, to deal with it," Nelson says.

His accusations draw a fierce response from Victorian Education Minister Lynne Kosky. She says principals, including Nelson, who are pressing for special settings are trying to "wash their hands" of troubled children and make them "someone else's problem". "I'm not going to let schools off the hook when students are a challenge," she says. "Frankly, the principals have to take responsibility for all students."

Nationwide, the problem of students with behaviour disorders is growing. In the last NSW budget, the state Government announced a $73.6 million four-year school behaviour and discipline plan. It includes funding for 35 "behaviour schools" (there are presently 28) and 20 "suspension centres" by 2007 catering for students in years 5 to 10. Last month, the Queensland Government announced the establishment of six new centres for disruptive students, on top of the existing five, but the Queensland Teachers Union is pressing for many more. In Victoria, there is a strong philosophical aversion, one government adviser says, to taking troubled children "off-line" and "giving them a tag and putting them in a school for naughty boys".....

It's the second time this year questions have been raised about the treatment of mentally unwell children in Victoria. In August, University of Melbourne psychology professor Margot Prior, formerly director of psychology at the Royal Children's Hospital, and Ric Pawsey, a 25-year veteran of mental health, said the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service was a mess that should be replaced. "It's a basket case," Prior says. "Because I'm now out of it, I can be honest."

Nelson first rang the bell on the problem of disturbed children in primary schools 18 months ago, when he led a group of 21 principals calling for these students to be removed from their schools and taught in separate centres. These special settings, he proposed, would pool the resources and expertise not just of the Department of Education and Training, but also the Department of Human Services, CAMHS, universities and local councils. "In many classrooms, teachers and students work in an environment where, due to the severe emotional and behavioural disturbance of a student, teaching and learning plays second fiddle to surviving," he wrote in one of several papers circulated within the education department.

Schools are being used as "the first line of intervention" when intensive clinical intervention is needed to deal with a group of children on the extreme margins of the community, with problems he suspects are fuelled by family breakdown, violence, neglect, sexual abuse, drug and alcohol problems, mental illness, poverty, unemployment and inter-generational dysfunction.....

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.

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

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

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9 December, 2005

EVEN LIMITED CHOICE UNDER ATTACK IN CALIFORNIA

The San Juan Unified School District is getting ready for open enrollment season, a three-day period in January when parents sign up to place their children in schools outside their own attendance boundaries. The annual ritual, at least 15 years old, is grounded in the notion that parents should have a choice about where their children attend school. About 4,500 San Juan students - roughly 10 percent of the district enrollment - take advantage of the policy every year. The number is close to 5,000 (just under 11 percent of enrollment) in Sacramento City Unified.

Families who opt for open enrollment often scope out campuses as if they're prepping for college admissions season. Some middle schools in the San Juan district offered tours last week to fifth-and sixth-graders. High schools, too, sell their campuses. Rio Americano High in Sacramento is showing off its grounds to prospective freshmen today by appointment. McClatchy High in the Sacramento city school district will have two open-house days next week for its selective Humanities & International Studies Program.

But critics in San Juan say the policy has some less-than-desirable effects. They say it hurts people who can't afford to provide transportation to the new school - a district requirement. And not everyone can spend hours a week volunteering, as some of the more sought-after schools ask parents to do. As a result, some say, neighborhood schools get weaker as they lose involved families to high-powered schools elsewhere. Kids at the 10 district schools that accept students only through open enrollment are more likely to be well-off, white and fluent in English than are students at other district schools. "It's a have/have-not situation," said Sydney Walker, a parent who chairs a district committee that recommends school closures.

Superintendent Steven Enoch said he will address the open enrollment policy when he presents a district redesign plan to the school board next week. In an interview, he wouldn't specify his ideas, saying he wanted the board to hear them first. "We have two all-American values that potentially clash a little," he said. "One is promoting neighborhood schools, and another American value is choice. ... They can indeed bump up against each other a bit. I want good neighborhood schools - that's fundamental to our system - but at the same time I certainly understand and honor parental choice."

Parents who visited Arcade last week said they hoped Enoch wouldn't try anything too drastic. "I would really hate to see the district give up open enrollment," said Sue Akiyama, as her son Max waited for a tour to start in the school lobby. "I just think it gives parents some control over education." Akiyama and other parents said their neighborhood schools were perfectly good options - but most were gunning for Arden, a high-scoring school in Sacramento, and Arcade.

More here



Homeschooled boy wins national science contest : "A 16-year-old, homeschooled California boy won a premier high school science competition Monday for his innovative approach to an old math problem that could help in the design of airplane wings. Michael Viscardi, a senior from San Diego, won a $100,000 college scholarship, the top individual prize in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology. Viscardi tackled a 19th century math problem and his new method of solving it has potential applications in the fields of engineering and physics."



Law schools against free speech : "Anyone who has attended law school will attest to the lunacy of interview season, wherein law students trade in jeans and sweatshirts for rumpled navy suits and heroically endure an uneasy session with an uneasy recruiter in an airless room. Imagine how much worse it might be when that recruiter hails from the U.S. Army, the student is met by jeers and catcalls, and the law school has posted a sign outside the interview reading: 'Welcome to Satan's Lair.' Well, that, my friends, is the future of military recruitment on campus."

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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.

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

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

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8 December, 2005

Universal preschool is inviting universal disaster

Ideas that seem great in theory are often a disaster in practice. California's Preschool for All initiative being pushed by director-turned-child advocate Rob Reiner is just such an idea. This is not mere ivory-tower doom-mongering. This is what a sober assessment of a similar universal day care program in Quebec suggests.

If Reiner's initiative is approved in June, individuals making more than $400,000 a year ($800,000 for families) will face a 1.7 percent tax increase to raise $2.5 billion to finance three hours of free preschool a day for all of California's 4-year-olds -- even the 62 percent who already attend preschool without universal subsidies.

Reiner's initiative is a statewide version of Proposition H, the universal preschool program that San Francisco voters approved in March and that will be started in 22 preschools clustered in four low-income communities in a few months. It authorizes $20 million from the city's general funds over five years for public schools to offer pre-school services.

The arguments Reiner and San Francisco child care advocates make are identical to the ones made in Quebec eight years ago. They claim that an investment in preschool will pay for itself not once, but many times. A Rand Corp. study estimates that every dollar spent on preschool will yield $2.50 in savings for the state by, among other things, boosting graduation rates and diminishing juvenile crime.

Setting aside the inherent difficulty of accurately quantifying such nebulous and distant benefits, such calculations inevitably underestimate the ultimate bill because they don't take into account the inflationary pressures that the program itself creates. The final price tag for Quebec's day care program is 33 times what was originally projected: It was supposed to cost $230 million over five years, but now gobbles $1.7 billion every year.

With this kind of spending, one would think that Quebec was offering top-notch day care to every tot, toddler and teen. Think again. Much of the increased spending has gone not toward increased access, but increased costs. Day care worker unions, on the threat of strike, negotiated a 40 percent increase in wages over four years. The cost of care has doubled since the program began, with the annual per-infant cost now exceeding $15,000.

Besides unions, the other major reason for the skyrocketing costs is that when people don't pay the full price for a service, they consume more of it -- what economists call the problem of the moral hazard: Quebecois taxpayers pay 80 to 90 percent of the cost of care, requiring parents to pitch in only $7 a day. Such low co-pays have encouraged mothers who might otherwise have stayed at home with their newborns to return to work. But any hope that the program would be able to meet the demand that it created was doomed right from the start, because it banned new centers and barred existing ones from participating, decimating the private day care market. (It has since reversed this policy).

Literally overnight, long lines of desperate parents vying for a "free" day care spot emerged. Parents registered babies yet to be conceived. And when they did land a spot, they paid their $7-a-day to hold it -- even if they were months away from using it.

But perhaps the most shocking part of Quebec's program is that it is reinforcing the very inequities it was meant to eradicate. Many low-income parents, who lost their child care tax deductions in order to finance the program, have been crowded out by middle- and upper-income parents more savvy at negotiating the system. According to research by Peter Shawn Taylor for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, half of Quebec's day care spaces are taken by families in the top 30 percent income bracket.

Is there any reason to believe that California will dodge Quebec-type cost overruns or shortages or inequities? None whatsoever. It is true that California's program will be for only 4-year-olds, somewhat limiting demand. However, this will be offset by the greater moral hazard in the program, because parents won't be required to contribute anything toward their child's care. At the same time that it will fuel demand, the program -- by its very existence -- will shrink supply in the private sector. Unlike Quebec, California's program won't ban new private preschools or bar existing ones from participating. But private preschools that don't participate will be hard-pressed to find parents to pay when competing against fully subsidized schools.

Preschools that do participate will have to pay wages on the K-12 teacher scale negotiated through a mandatory collective bargaining process that the unions lobbied for. They will also face other onerous regulations such as minimum staff-child ratios. All of this will raise the cost of doing business, driving many private day care centers out of the market and leaving fewer affordable options for low-income parents for whom three hours of state-funded day care covers less than half their needs.

Will California's program enhance school readiness of children in its care and improve educational outcomes, one of the main arguments of child care advocates? Not if Quebec's experience is any indication. Pierre Lefebvre, an economics professor at Universite du Quebec, has just completed a study comparing 4- to 5-year-olds in Quebec with kids elsewhere in Canada and found that Quebec kids have no better scores on the Peabody vocabulary test -- the most widely used indicator of school readiness.

California's private day care industry already serves the needs of a majority of parents effectively. In addition, California and San Francisco already offer child care assistance to needy parents through welfare-to-work and myriad other programs. Instead of instituting a huge, new pre-school entitlement, the best way to deal with any remaining need might be to strengthen such programs.

Universal preschool sounds progressive, but actually has pernicious unintended consequences for the parents and children it seeks to help.

Source



Britain: The inspectors who praise bad schools

If Her Majesty's inspectors were to assess the progress of Her Majesty's government in education honestly, they ought by rights to give it an extremely bad report. National literacy strategy - failed. Sure Start programme - failed. Achievements for children in care - very poor indeed. Planning - weak and inconsistent. Spending - ill considered. Two major reports published last week have shown that both the national literacy strategy and the Sure Start programme for young children have proved to be worse than useless. In particular they have failed the most vulnerable 20% of children, whom this government had most intended to help. It is hardly an exaggeration to call this a national scandal.

Unfortunately, however, one cannot rely on Her Majesty's inspectors to give the most objective of reports. One of the many unpleasant facts to emerge last week about the mess the government has been making of our children's lives is that Ofsted has failed to sound alarm bells. On Thursday Jim Rose's eagerly awaited literacy report pointed out that Ofsted has somehow managed to find no fault with some of the country's worst-performing primary schools.

On the contrary, Ofsted inspectors have heaped praise on the dozen primary schools at the bottom of the performance tables. Schools at which only a tiny minority of 11-year-olds achieved the standard expected for their age were described as effective and good value for money. None was listed as seriously weak or in need of special measures - a list that Ofsted has been under government pressure to reduce. As I said, it is hardly an exaggeration to call this a national scandal.

To be fair to the government, it did, presumably when panicked by educational realities and the outrageous cost of the remedial reading recovery programme (2,500 pounds per child), commission this review. The Rose report has overturned 30 years of fashionable and failed orthodoxy, and new Labour's botched attempt to reform it through the much vaunted national literacy strategy. Rose recommends a return to phonics, now rather irritatingly called synthetic phonics, to distinguish it from less effective phonics teaching. It simply means your child learns to read by decoding words, putting each sound together as in th-a-t.

Many people have imagined that the national literacy programme was doing this. No, it was undermined from the first by squabbling, and reduced to a hodge podge of different methods used all together, none of which is teacher-proof or child-proof, and all of which fail to teach the simple, essential skill of decoding words by sounds. Today 30% of children fail to learn to read properly by the age of seven, which almost every child ought to be able to do, if correctly taught, including the very slow learners.

At the same time, reports by various authors at Birkbeck College (coyly sneaked onto the internet at the same time as the headline-grabbing Turner report on pensions) argued that the ambitious Sure Start scheme to provide care and early education for children from conception onwards has harmed more children than it has helped. Either Sure Start has made little difference, or in the case of children from problem families - teenage mothers, single mothers and jobless parents - those who have been through Sure Start scored worse on verbal ability and social competence, and higher on behaviour problems, than similar children who hadn't. It defies belief. More than 3 billion pounds has been spent. Many billions are earmarked for future spending.

Given new Labour's high ambitions and good intentions for children, its failure to "deliver on" its promises - to use its annoying expression - is all the more remarkable. The government is failing in its top priorities and not for lack of spending. Child obesity is worse, truancy is shocking, classroom disruption and bullying are shameful, exam standards are collapsing, the brightest children have been failed as well as the least able, testing is at best dubious and the illiteracy level, masked by years of ill-conceived testing, is simply unacceptable. Nothing could be more disastrous.

To send a poor child into the contemporary world illiterate and ignorant is like sending him naked into a Dickensian storm. It is to push him into unemployment, poverty, rage, crime, drug abuse, Asbos and jail. An illiterate girl might just as easily fall into all that and into single motherhood as well, condemned to breed more underclass babies and antisocial teenagers....

My view is that the problem has been old-fashioned [Leftist] ideology, so long a-dying, and the government's failure to recognise it, or when it has recognised it, its moral failure to stand up to it, not least because various cabinet ministers have shared the ideology. Synthetic phonics was condemned by the "progressive" orthodoxy as regimented, repressive, uncreative, old-fashioned and involving grouping according to progress. In practice it has been almost impossible to fight this orthodoxy. Even now most local authorities are unwilling to accept independent new synthetic phonics programmes with clearly proven success records, because they are "commercial".

Similarly with Sure Start, the need to "target" the most needy was undermined by the terror of "stigmatising" them. As usual, the mothers and children in most need have got least out of it, and indeed have been rather wary of it, whereas the aspirational middle classes have taken full advantage. Sure Start has distracted professionals from the most needy, enticing them into brightly coloured and comfortable Sure Start centres, and away from the hard-to-find families in need in the mean streets.

If the government cannot find ways to bypass left-wing orthodoxy, it is condemned to more of the same disgraceful failure.

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.

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

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

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7 December, 2005

BRITISH SCHOOLS REDISCOVER INTELLIGENCE

National talent search is being planned to track the brightest 150,000 children through school and into top universities. Thirty thousand children will be invited each year to join the Government's National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth, using results from primary school tests taken by 11-year-olds. The initiative comes as teachers were accused of being ideologically opposed to singling out gifted children for special help after it emerged that 40 per cent of secondary schools had never recommended any child to attend the academy.

The talent search is certain to anger Labour MPs, who are already threatening to rebel against Tony Blair's education White Paper over what they see as plans to introduce back-door selection to secondary schools. Members of the Russell Group of leading universities would be given the names of pupils who were members of the academy so that they could recruit them to degree courses. Advocates say that this would end the imbalance at Oxford, Cambridge and other elite universities between students from state and fee-paying schools. Critics will see it as a renewed attempt at social engineering by giving state students a head start in the race for university places.

The initiative comes after The Times published research by Professor David Jesson, of the University of York, who found that the brightest 5 per cent students were only half as likely to achieve three A grades at A level in state schools as in the fee-paying sector.

Under the new scheme, promising children in state schools would be tracked from the age of 11 and those who fulfil their academic promise in GCSE examinations at 16 would be approached by admissions officers from Russell Group universities in their first year of sixth form. Officials at the academy, which is based at the University of Warwick, are in discussions about the scheme with the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) and the Department for Education and Skills. They expect to recruit the first children under the scheme in September.

Until now, the academy has relied on teachers at individual secondary schools to recommend candidates for its "gifted and talented" programme from the most able 5 per cent of pupils. But official figures released to Nick Gibb, the Shadow Education Minister, last month showed huge variations in the willingness of schools to identify bright children. Teachers in 40 per cent of schools have failed to nominate a single pupil since the academy opened in 2002.

Sir Cyril Taylor, the chairman of the SSAT, said that the brightest 11-year-olds would be identified from their scores in national curriculum tests of English and mathematics. Secondary schools would also use non-verbal reasoning tests to confirm the abilities of pupils and to identify any whose potential had not been spotted from the national curriculum exams. Staff at the academy would then contact the children and their parents to invite them to enrol. "There is a commitment in the White Paper for a national talent search using the scores in English and maths and we are going to do it," Sir Cyril said. "The people at Warwick have agreed that, instead of relying on teacher recommendations, they will get 30,000 names of 11-year-olds each year."

This would build over five years to a national register of the country's most gifted 150,000 children aged 11 to 16, whose talents would be nurtured through regular summer schools, short courses and other activities.

Sir Cyril said that children who fulfilled their potential by passing at least seven GCSEs with A* and A grades at age 16 could be identified to Russell Group universities. Admissions tutors could then approach the teenagers to encourage them to apply for places, pointing out to those from poorer families that bursaries and other financial aid was available. "The Russell Group are saying, `give us the names'," he said. " We can't think of a more effective way of getting very able children from comprehensive schools into the better universities."

Mr Gibb said that there was an "ideological opposition" among teachers in many schools towards singling out gifted children for help

Source



British buckpassing about teacher evaluation

What the jury did not hear were comments made by Sharif to a class of young children shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers. "Hands up everybody who has relatives in New York? Well, they're dead," she reportedly announced one morning, making an abrupt change from reading the form register and singing a few verses of All Things Bright and Beautiful. She also reportedly added: "I'm on Osama Bin Laden's team." The school at which she was teaching - Grampian primary - received numerous complaints from parents, and Select Education, the agency which had supplied Sharif, was told never to send the woman their way again.

She denied saying the words and the judge ruled them inadmissible, as being based on the uncorroborated evidence of young children.

We may not be certain of the exact words uttered by Sharif, but we know that she was ticked off and agreed her comments had been "inappropriate". One hopes she agrees it is wrong to exult in mass murder.

It is this business that bothers me. "Parveen's teaching ability has never been brought into question," Select Education said at the time. It hasn't? What precisely would it take a teacher to do in class for such suitability to be questioned then? "Um, that's a very good question," a chap from Select told me. "But we would have no option but to let her apply again if she wished to do so. We couldn't stop her. I mean, ha ha, you can imagine the difficulty we'd have stopping her, couldn't you? It's very delicate. It's a very thin line."

Yes, I understand all too well, I suspect: delicate, difficult, thin line, etc. Luckily, she has not applied to rejoin Select's books (she left two or three years ago). "In any case, final responsibility rests with the school," the chap remarked. But I wonder if it will say on her references "reprimanded for inappropriate comments about the massacre of thousands of innocent people on 9/11". Hands up everyone who thinks probably not.

Derby city council cannot stop her teaching, either. Sharif was never on the local education authority's list of supply teachers - but then she did not need to be in order to gain employment. "She came from an agency," the council told me. "We couldn't stop her teaching. It's up to the schools, really."

Poor schools. I'll bet they think that the deep vetting is done somewhere else and that it is not up to them. Can you imagine these institutions taking a similarly indulgent view if a teacher had championed paedophilia in the classroom? Or suggested that homosexuals were warped and deviant? Or announced that all Muslims should be banged up? Meanwhile, Sharif has expressed a wish to teach in, or even found, an Islamic school. I don't suppose anybody will be remotely inclined to stop her.

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.

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

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

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6 December, 2005

WHERE ARE THE BOYS? (1)

Surprise: Feminized education favours females!

A stealth revolution, unplanned and largely unnoticed, is changing the face of American higher education. In a trend that began in 1980, but only recently grew large enough to catch national attention, men now attend and graduate from college in numbers far lower than women. Every year, women increase their presence on campuses nationwide, while men do not. The percentage of young men going from high school to college today has scarcely changed since 1968, hovering around 61 percent. By contrast, the percentage of women enrolling in college increases every year, reaching 72 percent in 2004. Men outnumber women in the 15-24 age bracket by under 1 percent, yet women accounted for about 60 percent of all associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees awarded in the United States in 2004. Michigan's numbers were in line with the national average.

"Women continue to march right along," said Tom Mortenson, a researcher at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education who has studied this shift for 10 years, "and the guys are apparently just looking for the next video game or pickup football match."

Among the state's universities, only the University of Michigan has a nearly even split in its freshman class. The next closest is Michigan State University, where male freshmen constitute 43 percent. This disparity is not the result of any favoritism in admissions. Simply put, far more girls apply to college these days than boys. Jim Cotter, MSU senior associate director of admissions, concedes officials have begun to discuss "in a light-hearted way whether we should look at recruiting strategies that might attract young men."

Experts cite several reasons why men might be underperforming, starting with frustration in school. These experts point to the relative difficulty boys have picking up reading and writing, and suggest that the elementary and secondary educational system simply fits girls better than boys.

William S. Pollack, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School who heads the Center for Men and Young Men, calls schools "some of the most boy-unfriendly places on Earth." Movement and hands-on manipulation, he says, are central to the ways boys learn -- yet it's precisely this tendency to fidget and squirm "that drives teachers crazy." Girls, on the other hand, learn to sit still and pay attention at an earlier age. Pollack also notes that boys learn to put words together and read, on average, "six months to a year later than girls. And their fine-motor skills are less-well developed," affecting their ability to pick up writing.

Reading scores offer the clearest sign of disparity between the genders. In the fourth grade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, boys trail girls by 7 percentage points. By eighth grade, that gap widens to 11 points. The upshot, Pollack suggests, is that boys on average struggle more in elementary school, are more prone to frustration, and therefore are less likely to emerge from school seeking higher education.

Employment realities may also play a role. Many experts note that young men can get jobs right out of high school, such as in construction, that pay far better than entry-level positions for women. Some authorities also speculate that boys still believe their gender will guarantee them success no matter what, while girls feel they must prove themselves. Robert Massa, Dickinson College vice president for enrollment, suggests that boys just seem less motivated than girls. "I say this as a father of both a son and a daughter," he said from Carlisle, Pa. "Boys just seem less interested in proving themselves. I wonder whether there's a safety issue about staying at home and not worrying about your future -- a problem I think is endemic among the male population today."

Once in college, some men seem to have different priorities than women. A 1999 study by the Higher Education Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that women study more and participate more in school activities. Men, on the other hand, excel at exercise, partying, watching TV and playing video games. "We call that the Bart Simpson syndrome," said Stephen Lawton, Central Michigan University's chairman of educational administration.

The gender shift raises other issues as well, notably what women with higher degrees will do when it's harder to find a man who's their educational peer. It's a problem that Courtney McAnuff, Eastern Michigan University's vice president for enrollment, suggests is particularly acute in minority communities. "When you have urban school districts where half the males don't finish," he said, "that's important."

This male-female disparity exists across all racial groups. Among white 18- and 19-year-olds in 2002, women outnumbered men on campus by about 2 percentage points. Among blacks, the figure was 6 percentage points and 5 percentage points for Hispanics. In all cases, the gap widens as the student population ages....

Pollack, in the introduction to his book, "Real Boys," sketches an emergency that goes far beyond academics. American boys, he writes, are "cast out to sea in separate lifeboats, and feel they are drowning in isolation, depression, loneliness and despair."...

"All the studies show that college degree holders earn over a million dollars more in their lifetimes," says EMU's McAnuff. "Maybe we should be selling that to boys -- 'Could you use an extra million?'?" But perhaps men who ditch college are just making rational calculations. Researcher Laura W. Perna of the University of Pennsylvania found that although a college degree raised a young woman's starting salary 45 percent, men saw no initial payoff over what they would have earned right out of high school, further discouraging them from pursuing higher education.....

More here



WHERE ARE THE BOYS? (2)

In the 1990s, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught -- literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at these words -- this is not really who I am." That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in the District. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."

Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.

The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a significant crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"

It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry -- men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and George Bushes -- and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by...

Most frightening, the old promise that schools will take care of boys and educate them to succeed is also breaking down, as boys dominate the failure statistics in our schools, starting at the elementary level and continuing through high school ....

When I worked as a counselor at a federal prison, I saw these statistics up close. The young men and adult males I worked with were mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that didn't promote education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they had attended. They were passionate people, capable of great love and even possible future success. Many of them told me how much they wanted to get an education. At an intuitive level, they knew how important it was.

Whether in the prison system, in my university classes or in the schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem with how we teach and mentor boys that I call "industrial schooling," and that I believe is a primary root of our sons' falling behind in school, and quite often in life.

Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids). For many kids, this system worked -- and still works. But from the beginning, there were some for whom it wasn't working very well. Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for them.

Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys. Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a lot of boys "in line" -- competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child's education.

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.

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

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

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5 December, 2005

CAPITALISM IS EVEN GOOD FOR SCHOOL DISCIPLINE

A way out now that other forms of discipline are severely restricted?

Bad words are costing Hartford Public and Bulkeley high schoolers $103 each. Police officers assigned to the schools have fined about two dozen students for cursing in a new program to curtail unruly behavior. The joint effort by school and police officials targets students who swear while defying teachers and administrators. "We're sending a message to the parents and to the teachers," said Sandy Cruz-Serrano, senior adviser to Superintendent of Schools Robert Henry. "We are trying to bring back order to the schools."

Parents are required to pay the fines if the students cannot. "Our heads are spinning with that," said Sam Saylor, president of the district Parent Teacher Organization. "The kids are really indecent with their swearing and they're swearing at teachers. This is their way of curtailing it -- making the parents pay."

Keila Ayala, 17, a Hartford Public sophomore, said she was ticketed for shouting an expletive in an officer's face while handcuffed for taking a swing at him. "It'll stop me from swearing," she said. "Well, it won't stop me from swearing, but I won't cuss at the teachers."

George Sugai, who teaches school discipline at UConn's Neag School of Education, is skeptical of the effort. "Research says that punishing kids doesn't teach them the right way to act," he said.

But Hartford Police Officer Roger Pearl said the program is working. "Before, the kids were swearing all the time. It went from many incidents to almost nothing," he said. "It's quiet in the halls."

Source



CHARTER SCHOOLS IN NEW ORLEANS

Post lifted from Betsy Newmark

The Wall Street Journal has been very strong in supporting the charter school movement, particularly in New Orleans. Today they have an editorial about how Louisiana is turning towards charter schools to help them after Katrina. Given the horrible record that the New Orleans public school system had before the hurricane it isn't surprising that the state government wants to take authority away from them. Everyone is happy, except, of course, the teachers union. There is this amazing quote from Walter Isaacson, formerly of CNN, who is heading up a group to raise money for New Orleans and rounding up sponsors for new New Orleans charter schools,

"We discussed whether we could do this with the unions," said Mr. Isaacson, "and it was decided that it was very hard to have the workplace flexibility you need. Charters don't have the same union rules, and that's the biggest thing they have going for them."

Exactly. What makes charter schools successful is that flexibility and teacher unions are anathema to that sort of nimbleness in adjusting to new situations. I've taught in regular public schools and now teach at a charter high school. It is so clear how wonderfully flexible a charter school is. When before a decision in the regular public school would take several months as it got kicked up through various layers of bureaucracy, can now get decided instantly by sending an email to the principal. Bravo to Isaacson for recognizing this and how it works.



Will universal pre-school give all kids a head start? "This is the great danger: the presumption that government can raise children better than parents. If universal preschool is voluntary, then it may merely create another massive and ultra-expensive bureaucracy that accomplishes little. If it is compulsory, then universal preschool will extend the government's usurpation of parenthood so that all 3- and 4-year-olds are under state supervision."

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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.

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

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

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



4 December, 2005

"ACTING WHITE" IS A PROBLEM OF INTEGRATED PUBLIC SCHOOLS ONLY

Yes. "Diverse" schools are BAD for blacks and Hispanics

My analysis confirms that acting white is a vexing reality within a subset of American schools. It does not allow me to say whose fault this is, the studious youngster or others in his peer group. But I do find that the way schools are structured affects the incidence of the acting-white phenomenon. The evidence indicates that the social disease, whatever its cause, is most prevalent in racially integrated public schools. It's less of a problem in the private sector and in predominantly black public schools.

With findings as potentially controversial as these, one wants to be sure that they rest on a solid base. In this regard, I am fortunate that the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Adhealth) provides information on the friendship patterns of a nationally representative sample of more than 90,000 students, from 175 schools in 80 communities, who entered grades 7 through 12 in the 1994 school year. With this database, it is possible to move beyond both the more narrowly focused ethnographic studies and the potentially misleading national studies based on self-reported indicators of popularity that have so far guided the discussion of acting white.

Even after taking into account many factors that affect student popularity, evidence remains strong that acting white is a genuine issue and worthy of Senator Obama's attention. Figure 1, which plots the underlying relationship between popularity and achievement, shows large differences among whites, blacks, and Hispanics. At low GPAs, there is little difference among ethnic groups in the relationship between grades and popularity, and high-achieving blacks are actually more popular within their ethnic group than high-achieving whites are within theirs. But when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA (an even mix of Bs and Cs), clear differences start to emerge.

As grades improve beyond this level, Hispanic students lose popularity at an alarming rate. Although African Americans with GPAs as high as 3.5 continue to have more friends than those with lower grades, the rate of increase is no longer as great as among white students.

The experience of black and white students diverges as GPAs climb above 3.5. As the GPAs of black students increase beyond this level, they tend to have fewer and fewer friends. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer friends of the same ethnicity than a white student with the same GPA. Put differently, a black student with straight As is no more popular than a black student with a 2.9 GPA, but high-achieving whites are at the top of the popularity pyramid.

My findings with respect to Hispanics are even more discouraging. A Hispanic student with a 4.0 GPA is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and Hispanic-white differences among high achievers are the most extreme.

The social costs of a high GPA are most pronounced for adolescent males. Popularity begins to decrease at lower GPAs for young black men than young black women (3.25 GPA compared with a 3.5), and the rate at which males lose friends after this point is far greater. As a result, black male high achievers have notably fewer friends than do female ones. I observe a similar pattern among Hispanics, with males beginning to lose friends at lower GPAs and at a faster clip, though the male-female differences are not statistically significant......

The patterns described thus far essentially characterize social dynamics of public-school students, who constitute 94 percent of the students in the Adhealth sample. For the small percentage of black and Hispanic students who attend private school, however, I find no evidence of a trade-off between popularity and achievement (see Figure 2). Surprisingly, white private-school students with the highest grades are not as popular as their lower-achieving peers. The most-popular white students in private schools have a GPA of roughly 2.0, a C average.

These data may help to explain one of the more puzzling findings in the research on the relative advantages of public and private schools. Most studies of academic achievement find little or no benefit of attending a private school for white students, but quite large benefits for African Americans. It may be that blacks attending private schools have quite a different peer group.

I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students' popularity.

That acting white is more prevalent in schools with more interethnic contact hardly passes the test of political correctness. It nonetheless provides a clue to what is going on. Anthropologists have long observed that social groups seek to preserve their identity, an activity that accelerates when threats to internal cohesion intensify. Within a group, the more successful individuals can be expected to enhance the power and cohesion of the group as long as their loyalty is not in question. But if the group risks losing its most successful members to outsiders, then the group will seek to prevent the outflow. Cohesive yet threatened groups-the Amish, for example-are known for limiting their children's education for fear that too much contact with the outside world risks the community's survival....

Minority communities in the United States have yet to generate a large cadre of high achievers, a situation as discouraging as the high incarceration rates among minorities who never finish high school. In fact, the two patterns may be linked. As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high. To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end.

Much more here



Killing Thinking

You can't judge a book by its cover - but you can tell a lot from the title. Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities is an uncompromising attack upon the process that has turned the British university from a place of higher education and thinking, however imperfect, into a site of 'battery farming for the mind', where academics and students are enslaved by the principles of audit, assessment, and regulation, and the role of the university is reduced to meeting the needs of the market in Britain's so-called knowledge economy.

When it was first published a year ago, Killing Thinking received acclaim from the academic community. This autumn, Continuum has brought out a new, cheaper paperback version to stimulate discussion among a wider general audience - parents, would-be students and the many others who are perturbed by the concern that a university education ain't what it used to be. Mary Evans' critique remains accessible and fresh, raising some important questions about the value of higher education in a culture increasingly driven by instrumental considerations.

In the introduction to Killing Thinking, Evans, who is professor of women's studies at the University of Kent, explains that the book was 'inspired by the experience of working in a British university in the latter part of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first' - which 'has not been a happy time'. From the expansion of the higher education system under the Tories in the 1980s to the Blairite goal of getting 50 per cent of young people into university, from the self-conscious introduction of a market ethos into academic life to the spawning of new, all-powerful regulatory bodies such as the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), Evans exposes the relentless way in which knowledge, creativity, and education have been drummed out of British universities, to be replaced by 'the painting-by-numbers exercise of the hand-out culture and [the transformation] of much research into an atavistic battle for funds'.

And that's only on the first page. Killing Thinking is a slender book, passionately written and free from jargon, and it pulls no punches in describing the miserable state of the British academy today. The chapter on 'audit and compliance' is titled 'The Heart of Darkness'; the chapter unravelling the democratic-sounding language employed by the regulatory system makes extensive use of comparisons with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Evans is not alone in her objections to the audit culture - as she explains, such complaints frequently appear on the pages of academia's trade journal, the Times Higher Education Supplement. What is refreshing about Evans' critique, however, is that she refuses to pay lip-service to the leftist-sounding justifications that are given to the expansion and modernisation agenda - that it is more democratic and equal than what went before.

Evans makes clear that she is not harking back to some golden age, in which the university was 'a world of intellectual conversation, engaged students and limitless indulgence'. To do so would be 'to depart to the realms of fantasy' - 'we cannot easily defend the past, or invoke that past as an attack on the present'. As a professor of women's studies, Mary Evans can also hope to avoid the caricature of those who criticise the modernisation agenda as fusty old men, bent on preserving their position at whatever cost. Unlike many critics, Evans recognises that a combination of political and cultural agendas has set the modern university on its disastrous course, making it impossible simply to blame the political right, or the cultural left: 'The attack on the traditional 'high' culture of universities has come, in Britain, from a complex coalition: left-wing modernisers, Tory pragmatists and all-party and all-class philistines'.

Whoever instigated this process, its outcome, according the Evans, is no good for anybody - particularly its purported beneficiaries, students from less-than-privileged backgrounds, or women. 'Increasingly students are being asked to pay for the costs of the regulation of higher education rather than the education itself', she argues in the introduction - and as the new universities proliferate, the elite institutions of Oxbridge and London have become more desirable to students, yet less attainable: 'More people are allowed access to higher education than ever before, but the most valuable rewards of higher education are, arguably, more concentrated (and at least as exclusive) as in the past'.

As for women, whose all-but exclusion from the ivory towers has been replaced by a greater number of female than male undergraduates, Evans contends that the sheer burden of regulatory demands means that 'women are not just as disadvantaged in contemporary universities as those of the past but arguably more so'. Women have been given access to the university at the very time that this means conscientious conformity to the tick-box demands of the QAA, regular outputs to the RAE, and generally behaving as 'the "good girls"' rather than creative thinkers capable of great things.

So it has not been a happy time, indeed. What, if anything, can be done to rescue the keen minds and educational resources that still exist in most universities from the mindless conformity of the battery farm? Mary Evans hopes that this is the kind of discussion that will be sparked by the republication of her book. 'The first reaction, when it was originally published, was a lot of recognition from academics and students about what is going on in universities', she tells me. 'The second was: "Yes, it's all terrible, but what can we do?" - a terrible sense of passivity, as if academics didn't own the university, and this was just how it is. That was what I found the most depressing. I hope now that we can have a public discussion about what can be done'.

A little book like Mary Evans' may not tell the full story of the crisis in Britain's universities, but it's enough of a start for a debate that goes beyond the walls of the academy. The government has the regulators, the proscriptions and the financial clout, but when it comes to any kind of vision for the future of high education, it cannot see beyond the next set of A-level results. Instead of putting up and shutting up, disgruntled academics, sold-short students and anyone else with an interest in education should think about adding their own thoughts and writings to those of the unhappy dissenters, and formulating their own vision about what a university should be for.

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.

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

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

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



3 December, 2005

PHONICS SET TO RETURN TO ALL ENGLISH SCHOOLS AT LONG LAST

The way children are taught to read in primary schools in England needs to be changed, says a government review. It has backed the method synthetic phonics, which teaches children the sounds of letters and combination of letters before they move onto books. The review, by an ex-Ofsted director, says this should be the first strategy used by primary schools for all pupils.

Education Secretary Ruth Kelly said she accepted the findings and saw a "real opportunity" to teach the system. She would make sure the system was taught as early as possible in schools, she told BBC Breakfast. "There is a real opportunity to teach synthetic phonics systematically, but also other skills so necessary to children learning to love reading and learning to speak and communicate effectively."

Phonics is practised in most schools but in various forms. The review, the full details of which are being published later, was carried out by a former director of school inspections at Ofsted, Jim Rose. It is expected to recommend teaching of reading must go hand in hand with developing children's speaking and listening skills. The review will call for "early systematic, direct teaching of synthetic phonics" to be the first strategy taught to all children learning to read, introduced by the age of five. It will also focus on the need for some children to have intensive "catch-up support".

Mr Rose is expected to say there is general agreement phonic work is "essential though not sufficient" in learning to read, but that there is also much debate about the best way to do it. "Despite this positive consensus about the importance of phonic work, there are deeply divided professional views about how phonic work is best taught," he will say. "The review is therefore centred on judging the best way forward from the standpoint of the learners, that is to say children who are beginner readers and writers."

The final version of the Rose review, expected early next year, will inform the government's redrafting of its literacy strategy, planned for 2007. In pure synthetic phonics, children learn to read using the sounds of letters rather than the names. So a letter "D" is said "duh" not "dee". They learn to put the sounds together to make simple words such as "c-a-t". They also learn blends of certain letter sounds, such as "ch" or "bl".

Only once they have learned all the letter sounds and the blends do they progress to reading books. The system also helps children to break down unknown words, experts say.

Many schools in England already use phonics, combined with other methods to help children to read, but proponents of synthetic phonics argue it should be followed strictly and not be mixed with other approaches.

In Scotland, schools are already being encouraged to take up synthetic phonics. The success of a pilot scheme in a school in Clackmannanshire brought widespread attention to the system of teaching. Patricia Sowter, head teacher of Cuckoo Hall School in Edmonton, north London, has been using a synthetic phonics system called Read Write Inc., developed by Ruth Miskin, for two years. "It has made a huge difference to standards of reading in particular. We now have a 100% at level four in Sats tests for reading, including children with special needs," she told the BBC News website.

A total of 31% of children at the school have special educational needs, she said. "Almost half of our children have English as a second language and it helps them because it is a systematic approach to reading, writing and spelling." Newcomers to the school who do not speak much English are put into "catch-up" programmes and small group work is used to bring children on at their own pace. The head teacher believes the success of the system is also due to it being followed across the school, by teachers and learning assistants alike

Source



A defeat for 'trendy Wendy' teachers

Comment from The Times

Arguments about the best way to teach children to read are among the most bitter and divisive in education, to the utter bewilderment of most parents. Jim Rose's report marks the longest of U-turns back to orthodoxy. Phonics was established practice 40 years ago, but was swept away by advocates of "progressive" child-centred theories in the Sixties and Seventies. Methods such as "real books" and "look and say" took hold, in which children were expected to work out the meaning of whole words from their "context" and their association with pictures. Critics dubbed it "look and guess".

The shift coincided with the demise of the 11-plus examination, which removed external pressure on primary schools to maintain high standards. A generation of parents soon learnt that their offspring were not discovering how to read very well. James Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister, highlighted the "unease felt by parents and others about the new informal methods of teaching" in his 1976 speech calling for a "great debate" on education. Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives introduced the national curriculum and testing of pupils 12 years later. After a prolonged boycott by teaching unions, the first national tests of 11-year-olds in 1995 exposed massive levels of illiteracy, with more than half of pupils failing to reach the expected standard.

Traditionalists complained that teachers continued to emerge from training colleges steeped in failed "trendy Wendy" methods. Labour took office in 1997 promising to restore rigour through a national literacy hour in all schools, the first time any government had sought to tell teachers not only what to teach, but how to teach it.

Supporters of phonics, including Mr Rose, then director of inspection at Ofsted, pointed to a growing body of new research that confirmed its central role in helping children to make sense of the alphabet. But the Government's desire to introduce reform quickly and without opposition from schools led to compromise over the content of the literacy strategy. Instead of emphasising the importance of phonics, David Blunkett, the then Education Secretary, adopted a "searchlights" model that encouraged schools to select from different teaching methods, including "knowledge of context" and "word recognition".

Mr Rose is obliquely scathing of the progressive dogmas that have failed so many, saying: "It cannot be left to chance, or for children to ferret out, on their own, how the alphabetic code works."

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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.

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

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

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2 December, 2005

CHARTER SCHOOLS GET BETTER RESULTS

Test scores of students enrolled at least two years in city charter schools improved at a faster rate than their peers in traditional public schools statewide, according to a report being released today. The report, which analyzed state test data and other information, shows students in city charter schools bucking a national charter school trend of mediocre achievement. At four Indianapolis charters -- 21st Century Charter School, Christel House Academy, Flanner House Elementary and Andrew J. Brown Academy -- the percentage of students in all grades tested who passed the ISTEP-Plus test increased 22 percentage points from 2002 to 2004.

In contrast, the statewide overall ISTEP-Plus passing rate improved by just 1 percentage point during the same period, according to the report. The findings are in an 88-page accountability report issued by Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, an annual document touting the successes -- and acknowledging some shortcomings -- of these nontraditional public school alternatives. There are 13 mayor-approved charter programs in Indianapolis serving nearly 2,000 students with about 500 on waiting lists to enroll.

But charter school critics remain unconvinced the schools help children learn more. "In all of this charter school stuff, it's almost like a boutique, with one school trying this and another school trying that," said Marilyn Haring, a Purdue University education professor and former dean of the School of Education. "They're tinkering with education -- and they're not educators, they're politicians."

The mayor's system for monitoring charter schools drew attention this fall when his staff ordered Flanner House Higher Learning Center to shut down after spotting irregularities in financial oversight and attendance records. Scheduled to shutter for good on Dec. 23, the school could close sooner, said Thomas Major Jr., the trustee appointed by the city to oversee student transfers to other schools and adult education programs, and to recoup any assets. "We're knee-deep in transition and now getting more focused on the business end of things," Major said Tuesday.

The report provides other details on mayor-approved charters such as parent and staff satisfaction with the schools and expert reviews of the schools' academic programs, management and financial operations. Aside from Flanner House Higher Learning Center, the report found no serious problems. Some issues were noted, however, such as the need to involve teachers more in decisions at Southeast Neighborhood School of Excellence (SENSE). Teachers who have cell phones so students can reach them around the clock at KIPP Indianapolis College Preparatory School risk burnout, the report also cautioned.

Peterson and the city's charter schools staff admit they're not education experts, which is why they contract with those who are to assist in evaluating strengths and weaknesses of the programs. Ruth Green, with the Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning at the University of Indianapolis, has been in many of the mayor-approved charter schools to see how they're doing and says the schools for the most part are high-performing and give families a range of educational options.

For the first time, the mayor's report emphasizes Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus scores, the mandatory assessment for Grades 3-10 public school students

Source



An Australian reformer who's in a class of his own

Four years after he took over the portfolio, Education Minister Brendan Nelson has a message for academics and teachers suffering reform fatigue: It's not over yet. The changes the Howard Government is preparing to deliver will continue to blur the traditional divide between public and private funding. This week, Nelson flagged a new push to introduce a US-style graduate school approach in the nation's universities that would encourage students to complete a generalist degree in arts or science before obtaining professional qualifications in law or medicine at sandstone graduate schools.

Nelson is also proposing to introduce significant teacher training reforms to tackle children's literacy skills and considering a new national Year 12 certificate with common curriculum in key areas including physics, maths, English and chemistry. Urging the states to put away their "understandably parochial interests", he argues the reforms are in the national interest. "You can't say to people they should learn the same thing, on the same day, on the same week of the year and have the same test," he says. "But in some areas, surely, elements of mathematics, physics and chemistry are common to everyone; [it] doesn't matter where you are."

But the great paradox of the deregulation agenda the Howard Government has pursued remains the demand to exercise even greater centralised power over curriculum, research and course content from Canberra. The system is confronting a future where the divide between the public and private system has collapsed. The old barriers are dissolving as the future of the education system emerges from the class war approach to private school funding and the death of a free university education. It's a trend that predates Nelson's appointment but has accelerated under his tenure. Last year, taxpayer funding from the commonwealth for private schools outstripped that delivered to publicly funded universities.

While the states retain responsibility for the lion's share of public school funding through GST revenues, the growth of funding to private schools has been significant. The states fund about 88 per cent of public school budgets, while the commonwealth provides about $7.6 billion to independent and Catholic schools and $4.8 billion to state schools. Commonwealth funding to independent schools has increased at twice the rate as to state schools.

After pledging to "take the heat" out of the divisive schools debate, Nelson can claim authorship of the devastating line that the ALP had a "private school hit list" in the lead-up to last year's election, an attack that successfully diverted attention away from claims he should have invested more in the nation's public schools. Racing between appointments at universities and a conference on the Year 12 certificate this week, there's more. Nelson wants five-year-olds tested for their basic reading skills when they start school and even the state-controlled early childhood education system is in his sights. "I think that early childhood education is a mess. It's a question of luck in many parts of Australia as to whether your child will get access to early childhood education and, if so, what the quality will be," he says. "I think that is one of the major frontiers for further reform that is a product of federalism at its worst. "

After a call for action from the University of Melbourne's vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, he is also prepared to debate even greater deregulation of universities' ability to generate fee income, including debate on lifting the 35 per cent cap on the proportion of full-fee degree places that can be offered to students who miss out on marks. "Volume, too often, has been at the expense of quality," Nelson says. "As far as the future is concerned, I think we need to move towards an environment where there is much less regulation that applied to our research-intensive universities. "They should have a smaller undergraduate load. They have to ask themselves whether world-class quality is compatible with very large undergraduate enrolments."

Marking his fourth anniversary in the education portfolio - he was appointed to the ministry and straight into cabinet on November 23, 2001 and was sworn in four years ago today, November 26 - Nelson doesn't seem to have run out of ideas.....

From publishing attendance records of teachers employed by the states to demanding workplace agreements are offered to TAFE teachers, commonwealth funding has come with a price. The Government has preached the choice mantra over schools but demanded the right to determine curriculum and reporting standards for parents or starve the states of funding. The failure of the Howard Government to confront this contradiction is not lost on critics of the intellectual rigour of the reform agenda. Institute of Public Affairs executive director John Roskam, one of the authors of a 2003 education paper that called for the introduction of a voucher scheme, argues the theme of greater government control over curriculum is at odds with Liberal Party tradition. "It is ironic that the Liberal Party appears to advocating a national curriculum given that it fought against the idea when Labor proposed it in the 1980s and 1990s," he says. "There is no reason school curriculum should be uniform across the country. A single nationwide curriculum would eliminate the ability of the states to compete against each other to improve standards. Whether we like or not, the best curriculum is developed through trial and error and this would be impossible under a national curriculum.

"The best argument against a national curriculum comes by looking at what Joan Kirner tried to do to school education in Victoria in the 1990s; she lowered standards, reduced course content and removed competitive assessment. If Kirner had been the federal education minister and if there had been a national curriculum, the consequences for the entire country would have been horrendous. Different curriculum systems are the only safeguard we have against this happening." Yet the concept remains a popular one among parents, particularly those who must confront the different state systems when moving interstate.

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.

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

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

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1 December, 2005

It will take more than a catchy slogan for the LAUSD to fight off reform

Los Angeles Unified School District officials last week unwittingly validated Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's bid to gain control of the district when they responded to his effort by starting to plan a public relations blitz against this reform effort, as they have similar efforts in the past.

Whether LAUSD officials find a way to dip into their $13 billion budget for a few million, or tap their unions and other anti-reformers, they no doubt will get expert advice in developing a slick public relations operation to blitz the media with scare tactics and a catchy marketing slogan or two.

Government at all levels has found that it can often obscure the failure to solve people's problems and deliver on promises with a smoke screen of half truths and outright lies. Clearly, public officials are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws. Los Angeles' City Hall has used such tactics extensively for years, but found such tactics can backfire. The Department of Water and Power, for instance, threw millions of dollars to a P.R. firm only to find the money was wasted when it led to federal investigations and indictments. Is that the kind of image-making LAUSD board members want?

Yes, the district has made some inroads into boosting school achievement and reducing overcrowded classrooms with a massive school construction project still under way - and its small in-house public relations staff has done a good job of communicating its achievements to the world at large. But none of that has changed the fact that many people want the district broken up into manageable pieces, want more power for parents and teachers, and want more students to graduate instead of dropping out.

It's absurd to argue that the $862,000 the LAUSD spends each year for its communication staff is inadequate. The LAUSD was created to educate children, not to mislead the public about reform efforts. Schools ought to be non-spin zones. If the district wants to get some kudos, it must earn them. Student achievement, happy parents and inspired teachers are the best P.R. that money can't buy.

Source



Tokyo teacher embattled over war history: "Miyako Masuda is a 23-year veteran of public schools here. Like many Japanese history teachers of her generation, she dislikes new textbooks that frame Japan as the victim in World War II. It bothers her that books claiming America caused the war are now adopted by an entire city ward. In fact, Masuda disapproves of the whole nationalist direction of Tokyo public schools. Yet until last year, Masuda, who calls herself 'pretty ordinary,' rarely went out of her way to disagree. Few teachers do. But when a Tokyo city councilman in an official meeting said 'Japan never invaded Korea,' her history class sent an apology to Korean President Roh Moo-hyan -- an action that sparked her removal from her classroom."

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

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

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

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

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