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31 December, 2007

Why boys should be allowed to play with toy guns

Report from Britain

Playing with toy weapons helps the development of young boys, according to new Government advice to nurseries and playgroups. Staff have been told they must resist their "natural instinct" to stop boys using pretend weapons such as guns or light sabres in games with other toddlers. Fantasy play involving weapons and superheroes allows healthy and safe risk-taking and can also make learning more appealing, says the guidance. It conflicts with years of "political correctness" in nurseries and playgroups which has led to the banning of toy guns, action hero games and children pretending to fire "guns" using their fingers or Lego bricks.

But teachers' leaders insisted last night that guns "symbolise aggression" and said many nurseries and playgroups would ignore the change.

The guidance, called Confident, Capable and Creative: Supporting Boys' Achievements, is issued by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It says some members of staff "find the chosen play of boys more difficult to understand and value than that of girls." This is mainly because they tend to choose activities with more action, often based outdoors. "Images and ideas gleaned from the media are common starting points in boys' play and may involve characters with special powers or weapons. "Adults can find this particularly challenging and have a natural instinct to stop it. "This is not necessary as long as practitioners help the boys to understand and respect the rights of other children and to take responsibility for the resources and environment."

Children's Minister Beverley Hughes says 'imaginary games are good for their development as well as good fun' The report says: "Creating situations so that boys' interests in these forms of play can be fostered through healthy and safe risk-taking will enhance every aspect of their learning and development." It cites a North London children's centre which helped boys create a "Spiderman House" and print pictures of the superhero from the internet. This led to improvements in their communication, ability to develop storylines in their play and skills in drawing, reading and writing.

The guidance is aimed at boosting boys' achievement. They often fall behind girls even before starting school and the trend can continue throughout their academic careers. Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said: "The guidance simply takes a commonsense approach to the fact that many young children and perhaps particularly many boys, like boisterous, physical activity." "Although noisy for adults such imaginary games are good for their development as well as good fun."

But Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The real problem with weapons is that they symbolise aggression. "The reason teachers often intervene when kids have toy guns is that the boy is usually being very aggressive. We do need to ensure, whether the playing is rumbustious or not, that there is a respect for your peers, however young they are."

Chris Keates, general secretary of the The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) union said: "Many parents take the decision that their children won't have toy weapons."

Research by Penny Holland, academic leader for early childhood at London Metropolitan University, has also concluded that boys should be allowed to play gun games. She found boys became dispirited and withdrawn when they are told such play-fighting is wrong.

Source




Learning an Illegal Lesson in Our Public Schools

Nothing shocks us anymore, especially when it comes to illegal immigration. We've already seen the government on our southern border distribute millions of comic-book style guides to its citizens, informing them how to come to and survive in America illegally. (Read "Mexican Government's Official Guide to Illegal Immigration") Indeed, the "Guide for the Mexican Migrant" doesn't even pretend that it's intended to help legitimate legal immigrants.

The very first sentence of the Guide's introduction explains that readers will learn the answers to "some basic questions about the legal consequences of your stay in the United States of America without appropriate immigration documents, as well as the rights you have in that country once you are there, independently of your immigration status." But we digress, since that surprise came to light nearly three years ago.

The latest outrage is much closer to home. In fact, it's at home - in our nation's heartland to be specific - in a high school classroom in Ohio. We couldn't believe it when we saw the story in Saturday's edition of the Columbus Dispatch. But there it was in black-and-white under the headline "Students struggle as immigrants do." Public school students were assigned the role-play project of immigrating to and then living and working in the United States ... illegally.

That's right, according to the newspaper, a Spanish teacher at Olentangy Liberty High School told her students to "assume a Latino identity, build an imaginary life in your home country and develop a workable plan to immigrate to the United States." At first, the students were urged to "[t]ry it legally," so they "[f]illed out the correct documents" and "[f]ollow[ed] the proper steps," even spending "days completing the actual paperwork from the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services." But that was not the lesson that the students were supposed to learn, so the teacher "took out her red ink pad and stamped a big, fat DENIED across every [legal documented] request." Then, she told the students to come to America illegally.

The story went on to explain that the students were assigned to "forge [their] documents" and to "find a way across the border." The students also had to "research real [classified] ads and find a place to live in Columbus," not to mention "how to get food" and "how to survive." As a result, according to the newspaper, "the students had to go to real businesses and ask for Spanish-language job applications," as well as "visit a bank and ask for new-account documents written in Spanish."

And to teach what lesson? Well, the story reports that the teacher "caution[ed] that the point isn't to sway the students, only to teach them a little empathy." But while that's a nice sentiment, it's more than a little bit disingenuous since the same news story explains that, from the outset, the teacher promised her students "that the process - even in make-believe - would frustrate them."

Indeed, the feature article says that the teacher "hoped" her students would gain "an understanding of what is one of the most important political and humanitarian issues facing the U.S, government today." We could agree with that, except for the slanted view these students learned through this teacher's lesson - not to mention an illegal one.

Ironically, in justifying her lesson, the teacher explained: "These kids will become our leaders, maybe even the people who make the laws. At the very least, they'll certainly be the people who vote on them. Shouldn't they learn something about it all now?" Maybe so, but it would be better that they learn a legal lesson - rather than an illegal one - in our public schools.

Source





30 December, 2007

The tax credit option

A poll released last week by the Illinois Policy Institute and the Friedman Foundation revealed a surprising item on the Christmas wish lists of Illinois parents: a new school for their kids. Four out of five Illinoisans said they would opt out of traditional state public schools if given the chance. And they would choose private schools over public by a margin of two to one (39 percent to 19 percent).

Legislators can help grant that wish and save money at the same time. How? By expanding the state's education tax credit program. Education tax credits are a great way to use private funds to improve education and expand school choice for all families while saving taxpayers money. The credits reduce the amount a taxpayer owes the government for each dollar he spends on education. If a business donates $4,000 to a scholarship-granting organization, it could deduct $4,000 from its tax liabilities. Similar benefits for donations can be applied to individuals or to parents on education expenses for their own children.

Education tax credits, in other words, come in two forms. The first, tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations, can help support school choice for lower-income families. And the second, personal-use credits, can help middle-class families. Tax credits save the states money because the amount spent on each student on average is so much less. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, public schooling costs around $10,700 per child, while private-school tuition averages around $7,300. Education tax credits cover just what a family needs to send their child to a better school and turn what's pocket change to an education bureaucrat into a lifeline for thousands of children.

Three states now have modest forms of personal-use tax credits. Iowa allows 25 percent up to $1,000, and Minnesota allows 75 percent of non-tuition expenses up to a maximum credit of $1,000 per child. Illinois allows families to claim credits worth 25 percent of their educational expenses up to $2,500, which means a small $500 tax benefit. That's far too little to save much money or expand choice significantly. Lawmakers should build on current law by allowing a 100 percent credit on education expenses up to half of current per-pupil spending in the public schools for each child.

But a personal-use tax credit won't be enough for many lower-income families without a large tax liability. That's why lawmakers also need to pass a donation tax credit program for scholarships. Five states - Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island - have serious donation credits. Pennsylvania allows a 90 percent credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations and Florida allows a 100 percent credit, helping thousands of children from lower-income families attend good, independent schools.

Tax credits have already been expanded in a number of states, with the support of people that you might not expect. Democratic legislatures or governors helped to pass tax-credit programs in Arizona, Rhode Island, and Iowa last year, and Pennsylvania expanded its existing program.

This year a unified Democratic government in Iowa increased the tax-credit dollar cap by 50 percent to $7.5 million from $5 million. Many prominent African-American Democrats - most notably, Newark Mayor Cory Booker - support tax credits. Even New York's Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer supports tax credits and proposed an education-tax deduction in his first state budget. So there should be plenty of bipartisan cover for Republicans and Democrats in the Illinois legislature to come together and promise taxpayers they'll do right by their children this Christmas - and make good on that pledge in the New Year.

Source




Russia likes British education

They presumably have Oxbridge in mind, not British "Comprehensives"

Vladimir Putin's controversial youth movement is to send a select group of activists to learn at British universities - despite its disdain for Britain and its harassment of the British ambassador in Moscow. The 100,000-strong Nashi group, which is reportedly funded by the Kremlin, is to pay for dozens of its activists to study in Britain - because the excellence of the education will help make Russia a "world leader".

The move comes as Russia is threatening to forcibly close the St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg offices of the British Council, which promotes education overseas, as part of a diplomatic row. Nashi recently resumed its campaign against the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, after his speech on democracy to Putin opponents. Sir Anthony has called the campaign "psychological harassment bordering on violence", and complained that it had affected his wife and children. His car has been followed and he has been picketed on trips out of Moscow.

Yet despite its views on Britain, Nashi states: "We lag behind in knowledge and experience vital for making Russia a 21st-century world leader. British education is rated highly all over the world. The graduates of British universities are in great demand. This is because of the high quality of education and also control from the government."

Relations between Moscow and London have been soured by Russia's refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, wanted over the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Britain has refused to extradite Boris Berezovsky, who Russia accuses of financial crimes. An embassy source said: "The British Government supports young Russians who wish to study in the UK. This is a core activity of the British Council's three offices in Russia. We are delighted that Nashi clearly supports the objectives of the British Council."

Source





29 December, 2007

More Accidents After Driver Education

(Toronto, Ontario) According to an audit by the Transportation Ministry, driver education courses and instructors are substandard in Ontario. Apparently, people completing driver education programs are less capable drivers than those who never attend a course.

One problem identified is that driver education instructors are statistically worse drivers than the general public.

Auditor General Jim McCarter found that 360 of Ontario's 5,500 instructors have demerit points for driving infractions.

That's a rate of 6.5 per cent, well above the 1.4 per cent rate for the motoring public.

Actions are planned to assure better-qualified instructors are employed. Details were not disclosed.

The ministry will also regulate all beginner driver education courses in the wake of an alarming auditor's finding that new drivers who took the courses were more likely to be involved in collisions than those who did not.

This is the first study I've heard of regarding the effectiveness of driver education programs. Since licensing and insurance rates are often tied to completion of such courses, it would seem prudent to verify by some measure that all programs are effective.

Maybe there's a need for No Driver Left Accident-Prone legislation. Of course, it would be comical to have instances of drivers asking their insurance companies for a discount because they didn't complete driver education.



Elementary Mathematics being made more demanding

If the teachers can teach it

Joanne Tegethoff teaches algebra. Never mind that her students carry Disney princess and Thomas the Tank Engine backpacks and have the alphabet taped on their desks. The Montgomery County first-graders one recent afternoon were learning to write "number sentences" to help Lucy Ladybug. "Lucy wakes up and puts five spots on her back," Tegethoff told the class. "Then she gets confused. She wants 10 spots. What's missing?" Tegethoff used to teach what she called "very boring math," using worksheets of addition and subtraction problems. Now her lessons delve into algebraic thinking. By the third grade, Viers Mill Elementary students are solving equations with letter variables.

Long considered a high school staple, introductory algebra is fast becoming a standard course in middle school for college-bound students. That trend is putting new pressure on such schools as Viers Mill to insert the building blocks of algebra into math lessons in the earliest grades. Disappointing U.S. scores on international math tests have added to the urgency of a movement that is rippling into kindergarten. At stake, some politicians say, is the country's ability to produce enough scientists and engineers to compete in the global economy.

But education experts say students aren't the only ones who need more rigorous instruction. Too many elementary school teachers, they say, lack the know-how to teach math effectively. "You can't teach what you don't know, and your students won't love the subject unless you love the subject," Kenneth I. Gross, a University of Vermont mathematics and education professor, recently told a group of college mathematicians at a conference hosted by the U.S. Education Department and the National Science Foundation. "All of mathematics depends on what kids do in the elementary grades. If you don't do it right, you're doing remedial work all the way up to college. Arithmetic, algebra and geometry are intertwined."

Gross and others say many elementary and middle school teachers -- generalists relied on to teach reading, science and social studies and even to make sure a child's coat is zipped -- are drawn to teaching by a love of children and literacy. Most had little exposure to high-level math in college and are more at home with words than numbers. "Many of them fear math," said Vickie Inge, math outreach director with the University of Virginia's School of Continuing and Professional Studies. "Many of them had trouble with math themselves."

Educators, mathematicians and business leaders are working to bridge the knowledge gap. At an increasing number of schools, including Viers Mill, teachers work with a coach who helps boost their math knowledge, plan lessons and examine student work. The National Math & Science Initiative, funded by ExxonMobil, and the National Science Foundation are granting universities and school systems millions of dollars for programs to produce better math and science teachers.

In February, a panel of educators and mathematicians appointed by President Bush is slated to recommend ways schools can produce more algebra-savvy students. The panel will lay out skills students need to have starting in third grade to master algebra down the road. It will also recommend ways to improve teacher preparation.

Test scores released this month reignited concerns about math education in the United States. The Program for International Student Assessment found that 15-year-olds in the United States trailed peers from 23 industrialized countries in math. What's more, Michigan State University professor William Schmidt found that U.S. teachers scored at the bottom of the pack on an algebra test in a recent study of middle school math teachers from six countries. Teachers in Korea and Taiwan, where students earn high marks on international tests, had the best scores. "The U.S. performance was weak," Schmidt said. He found that U.S. and Mexican teachers had taken far less advanced undergraduate math courses than peers in Taiwan and Korea. He also found math knowledge isn't enough. Teachers also need strong training in instructional techniques.

In Virginia, George Mason University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and three other universities have teamed with local K-12 systems to improve math teaching through a master's degree program in math and educational leadership for elementary and middle school teachers. The program, begun in 2002, has about 60 graduates, who have returned to their schools and become a resource for colleagues.

Virginia Commonwealth University math professor William E. Haver, who is involved in the partnership, said elementary teachers need to know far more than the standard curriculum. With a depth of knowledge, teachers can help children understand relationships between numbers and solve problems in different ways. Without it, teachers often rely on memorization and aren't well-equipped to help struggling students. "Elementary math isn't elementary," Haver said. "There are a lot of deep ideas there. Usually, if a child doesn't get the right answer, there's a fair amount of good thinking along the way, but it got astray at some point. If you can pinpoint that problem, you're better off."

Gross runs the Vermont Mathematics Initiative, a graduate program that has trained more than 160 elementary teachers in math leadership. He drew an analogy to elementary reading instruction. "Would you want a teacher who has read 'Dick and Jane'?" he asked. "Or would you want a teacher who has read Shakespeare and the masters and has a fondness for reading?" Results in Vermont are promising. In schools with the math leaders, students are earning better math test scores than peers in similar schools. Achievement of students from poor families has also risen.

Judy Schneider, a 25-year teacher who is a math specialist at Widewater Elementary School in Stafford County, is midway through the Virginia program. She helps teachers understand math and reach students through dynamic lessons. Recently, she helped a fifth-grade teacher who was preparing to teach a lesson on fractions but didn't understand the material. Math wasn't always Schneider's strong suit, but after taking courses in algebra, geometry and statistics, she is able to help colleagues improve. "I was such a bad math student as a child, all the way through high school and even into college," she said. "Math was something I struggled with, and all of a sudden algebra makes sense to me. I want it to make sense for the kids."

Source




Grading Disparities Peeve Parents

With No Baseline Among Districts, Some Say Students Suffer

Marcy Newberger grew up in Montgomery County and attended Churchill High School. Then she moved to Fairfax County and had children, who attended McLean High School. Both were fine schools in good systems, with one irritating difference. Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.

Parents nationwide are increasingly frustrated with wild variations in grading systems that, they say, are costing their children thousands of dollars in merit-based scholarships and leaving them disadvantaged in college admissions.

Sensitivity to grading is particularly acute in Fairfax and Montgomery -- large, affluent counties that send more students to college each year than other local school systems. But grading disparities also have enraged students and parents elsewhere. In Simsbury, Conn., parents stumbled onto SAT survey data that showed that teachers in their state were unusually tough graders. Just 29 percent of SAT test takers in Connecticut reported A averages, compared with 40 percent in California, 42 percent in Florida and 49 percent in Texas. "There are no effective standards," said Robert Hartranft, a retired nuclear engineer from Simsbury who has scrutinized the issue. "Local grades and local GPAs are a crazy quilt of numerical values and systems."

Fairfax and Montgomery school officials reject the idea that grading discrepancies hurt students. Betsy Brown, Montgomery's director of curriculum and instruction, said colleges know grading systems vary and "work to even out what may be uneven across school systems and differences between private and public schools." Fairfax schools spokesman Paul Regnier said the county's students have done well in college admissions. He said people who want to change grading rules assume that college admissions officials "are inept and can be fooled. We believe it is a bad assumption."

Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment at Dickinson College, said his school and others do not depend only on GPAs in awarding merit scholarships. "Parents need to chill out about grades," he said.

But demographer Sara Pacque-Margolis, a Fairfax parent who with Newberger is surveying 60 colleges on this issue, said policies at Indiana University, Purdue University and the University of Miami show that Fairfax penalizes its students by failing to give the same grade-point bonuses as Montgomery for high-level courses. For example, Montgomery awards a bonus point for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate grades; Fairfax gives an extra half-point for AP and IB. Pacqu‚-Margolis said guidelines for merit scholarships at the three universities are based on a minimum SAT or ACT score and GPAs taken from high school transcripts, often inflated by bonus points. She said her son, an Indiana undergraduate, would have received thousands of dollars more in merit-based scholarships over four years if Fairfax had used Montgomery's bonus-point system.

While suburban parents suggest more reliance on the SAT and other national tests, advocates for low-income urban and rural students are calling for the opposite -- more emphasis on classroom grades, in which students from poor families are at less of a disadvantage.

The issue is complex and confusing, with little research to back either side. Governments are spending millions of dollars on analysis of standardized tests, but officials rarely provide much detailed information on grades, even though grades have more of an effect on students' lives. A failing grade on a report card can force a student to repeat a class and jeopardize college admissions, whereas a bad state test score usually has no effect.

In recent years, it has often been parents, not school officials, who have researched grading policies and called for changes. Newberger, a former teacher, and Pacqu‚-Margolis are gathering information they hope will convince Fairfax school officials that county students are hurt by rules that say 94 to 100 percent is an A (90 to 100 is an A in the Maryland suburbs, the District, Arlington and Falls Church). They also complain of bewildering differences in the way local schools award extra points for honors and college-level courses.

Often, teachers find ways to give as many A's as they like, no matter what their school's grading policy is. "Any teacher can make up an assessment on which many students or none will get 90 or 94," grading expert Ken O'Connor said. He has written a book for the Educational Testing Service that says grading standards should be made clearer and that practices such as grading on the curve or on attendance should be eliminated.

Hartranft said he has detected grade variations by year, by region (with New England tougher than the rest of the country) and by subject (with good math and science grades hardest to get). Scholars Philip M. Sadler of Harvard University and Robert H. Tai of the University of Virginia say their data show that high school science grades would be fairer and more consistent if schools added half a grade point for an honors course and one point for AP courses.

According to Hartranft's research, teachers in the Washington area grade harder on average than teachers in the Sunbelt, but are somewhat more generous than those in Connecticut. Among SAT test takers in the Class of 2007 asked about their grades, 38 percent in Maryland, 37 percent in Virginia and 30 percent in the District said they had A-plus, A or A-minus averages. The survey included students from public and private schools. D.C. students who reported A-minus averages had an average combined score of 1127 on the SAT math and reading sections. Maryland's A-minus students had a 1098 combined score and Virginia's a 1095. Connecticut's A-minus students had an 1146, while those in Texas had a 1039. Such data suggest that an A-minus is worth more in some places than others.

A College Board spokeswoman cautioned that the data need more analysis because Hartranft is comparing states with different SAT test-taking rates. Experts also note that the data rely on student recollections of grades, not transcripts.

Some scholars and college officials recommend giving more consideration to grades, despite variations. Researchers Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices, in a June report for the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley, concluded that high school grades -- like all measures of student achievement -- have flaws but are better predictors of performance in college than standardized test scores. The researchers, looking at the academic records of almost 80,000 U.C. students, said grades have another advantage: They are "much less closely correlated with student socioeconomic characteristics than standardized tests." A college that emphasized grades in admissions would be more likely to find low-income minorities who would do well in college, they said.

"High-school grades provide a fairer, more equitable and ultimately more meaningful basis for admissions decision-making and, despite their reputation for 'unreliability,' remain the best available indicator with which to hazard predictions of student success in college," Geiser and Santelices wrote.

Source





28 December, 2007

Flunking Free Speech

Post below lifted from Reason. See the original for links

In 1995, the liberal New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis advised his young readers-a constituency he mistakenly assumed existed-that if they felt wounded, were abnormally thin-skinned, or desirous of professorial protection against a delicate sensibility, they might consider enrolling at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an institution possessing rigorous safeguards against various forms of "harassment." This was all rather surprising to Lewis because, as he noted, "Speech codes at universities had seemed to be on the decline. Several were held unconstitutional. So it is of more than parochial interest that an extraordinarily sweeping code should be proposed in this supposedly liberal-minded state."

It is distressing then that, 12 years hence, these Stakhanovite commissars of sensitivity are still laboring against nature. The virus of teenage insensitivity has proven stubbornly resistant to social engineering schemes. According to a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an indefatigable organization devoted to protecting free speech on campus, Lewis's decade-old advice has sadly gone unheeded.

FIRE's "Spotlight on Speech Codes 2007" (PDF) found that a full 75 percent of the 346 colleges surveyed "continue to explicitly prohibit various forms of expression that are protected by the First Amendment." To qualify as a "red light" violator-the worst of three designated classifications-a school must have "at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech." These include overly restrictive anti-harassment policies and broadly worded prohibitions against "degrading comments" and "hostile" learning environments. It found further that only 4 percent-yes, 4 percent-of schools surveyed had "no policies that seriously imperil speech."

As reason contributing editor Cathy Young observed in 2004, and as both critical observers and wounded veterans of the previous decade's campus culture wars clearly misunderstood, political correctness, despite a concerted campaign to counter it, has proved surprisingly resilient. And it is doubtless true that FIRE's findings will be all too familiar to those currently enrolled in an American university.

After a period of sustained news coverage in the early 1990s, P.C. outrages went from shocking to de rigueur, with only the truly bizarre, the shocking and outrageous, escaping from the pages of student newspapers into the national-or even regional-press. Thanks to the intercession of FIRE, a recent case at the University of Delaware is a rare exception.

According to a dossier compiled by FIRE, incoming freshman were required to undergo "treatment" (the university's word) by residence hall apparatchiks, and forced "to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism." These young scholar-scamps in Wilmington are told solemnly that they are, according to the precepts of the university, carriers of racist original sin: "[A] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality." After pressure from FIRE, the university dumped the program, reluctantly releasing the little Ivan Denisovichs, still tainted by white skin privilege, into a vulnerable academic community.

That university administrators persist in their attempts to indoctrinate students is mystifying, says University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor and FIRE board member Daphne Patai. "What's amazing is that the universities aren't smart enough-and don't care enough about the liberal American tradition and respect for free speech-to, on their own, wise up and not put students through" these programs, she observes.

It should be noted that FIRE isn't, as some of its partisan critics contend, a conservative organization or a legal cudgel for the political right. Indeed, a look through its recent case load shows that while the attempted silencing of conservative viewpoints are overrepresented on campus, the group has defended protesters and political activists on both sides of the ideological divide.

When the University of Central Florida (UCF) prevented members of the (apparently reconstituted) Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from assembling, FIRE leapt to their defense. According to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, when a group of activists donning Burger King masks and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase "exploitation king" organized a protest against working conditions at the fast food giant, the campus police intervened. "[I]nstead of bringing awareness to their cause," the News-Journal noted, the students "drew the attention of the university police, who told them they had to move into a free-assembly zone or face arrest." Confining free speech to a particular area on campus requires, one presumes, a verbal waiver, absolving the administration from any hurt feelings sustained during debate. At the SDS's behest, FIRE petitioned the university president, calling the establishment of free speech "zones" not only unconstitutional, but "vague, contradictory, and confusing."

According to FIRE, the University of Massachusetts too has made little progress since Lewis's 1995 column. The school still ranks amongst the worst offenders in the 2007 report. Its "red light" status has provoked few, if any, protests on campus, with speech restrictions having apparently long been internalized and accepted by most students. (Indeed, a recent editorial in the UMass campus daily warned against "abusing the right" to free speech-a right, the author contended, constrained by the sensitivities of various ethnic groups.)

This is a hangover from the "speech wars" of the 1990s, during which former UMass chancellor David Scott argued that it was the job of the administration to balance two concepts that "the university holds dear: protection of free expression and the creation of a multicultural community free of harassment and intimidation." To many college administrators and activists, ensuring that the "multicultural community" was "free of harassment" requires that the weapon of free expression be curtailed (just what counts as harassment, after all?). During a meeting with faculty members, a participant in the meeting contemporaneously told me that Scott declared that speech codes weren't an abridgement but an improvement on First Amendment protections.

When Lewis warned of speech codes and the Zamyatin-like atmosphere on campuses like UMass, my erstwhile comrades harrumphed that fiddling with the Constitution was a necessary evil, one that civil libertarians need accept in favor of a more tolerant society. Alas, both predictions were correct. Lewis's fears proved prescient, as the FIRE report demonstrates. The radical activists have, in the short term, been largely successful, presiding over a deeply unfortunate shift in campus values.

Thankfully there exist organizations such as FIRE who have assumed the role of protector of the First Amendment on campus, forcing universities, however incrementally, to roll back policies that violate student's rights.




Britain: Mainstreaming of backward and disabled children not working

Teachers' leaders and opposition MPs have raised the alarm over increasing numbers of special needs children being excluded from schools. Figures unearthed by the Liberal Democrats show that for the first time in years more than half the children being excluded from school have some special need. They place a question mark over the success of the policy of integrating children with disabilities into mainstream schools.

The figures show 55 per cent of all exclusions involved pupils with special needs - up from 45 per cent four years ago. This amounts to 23,300 pupils with a statement outlining their special needs and 164,450 children considered to have special needs but without a statement.

The figures, included in an answer by the Children's minister Kevin Brennan to a parliamentary question by David Laws, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on children, schools and families, has prompted demands for a review of government policy towards "inclusion" - which aims to provide places for children with special needs in mainstream schools.

"Despite only making up a fifth of the school population, more than half of those children excluded have special educational needs," said Mr Laws. He said they risked falling behind in their education as a result of exclusion, adding: "Despite recent warnings from Ofsted and the Parliamentary Select Committee, government policy is continuing to fail children who require extra individual support - not exclusion from school. "I am concerned that ministers are not providing schools with the necessary support to integrate pupils with special needs into mainstream schools. This is likely to create behavioural problems which many headteachers simply don't have the resources to tackle."

The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, which has campaigned against disruptive behaviour in school, said it was "concerned" that the drive for inclusion "can lead to these pupils and their teachers being deprived of the specialist support and advice to which they are entitled".

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that the figures for permanent exclusions of special needs youngsters with statements had fallen since 1997 from 2,250 to 880. The parliamentary figures cover both fixed-term and permanent exclusion and include all children who need special help - regardless of whether they have a statement or not.

Source





27 December, 2007

Harvard's deep pockets lure bright Brits

A record number of talented British teenagers are snubbing Oxbridge and applying to Ivy League universities, lured by more substantial American bursaries. Students from families whose household income is 90,000 pounds qualify for financial assistance at Harvard. It also recently raised its threshold for free tuition and board for the poorest students.

Leading British schools say that some of their highest-achieving pupils no longer see Oxford and Cambridge as the pinnacle. Instead they are attracted by the broader curriculum and supposedly superior facilities at Ivy League universities - an elite group of eight in the northeast of the United States. It raises fears that the cream of British students will increasingly look abroad, potentially undermining the global standing of our top universities.

The number of British students applying to Harvard was 197 five years ago. By last year it had risen to 290. Applications to Yale from British teenagers have more than trebled from 74 in 1997 to 234 last year. Harvard students whose parents' income is less than 30,000 pounds have all tuition fees, accommodation, living expenses and flights home paid by the university - a package worth almost 25,000. Those with household earnings of between 30,000 and 90,000 pounds have to contribute only between 4 and 10 per cent of their income. Even families earning more than 100,000 can be entitled to assistance if they have dependants such as elderly relatives, or more than one child at university. William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, said: "We just take the best people wherever they apply from, and we fly to the UK every year to talk to schools about it."

Leading independent schools said that an increasing number of pupils had set their sights on the Ivy League. Clarissa Farr, High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School in London, said that about 15 sixth-formers were applying to American universities this year, a big increase on previous years. She said: "They see themselves operating on a worldwide stage. Our students still see Oxbridge as very desirable, but other pinnacles are appearing beyond those mountains." For many, she said, the attraction was that students did not need to choose their specialist subject until their second year. Ms Farr added: "The American universities are very well resourced and their facilities are much bigger. There is also a huge range of scholarships and bursary programmes."

Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College in Berkshire, said that about 10 per cent of his pupils were applying to American universities this year. He said: "I think British universities have had it too easy for too long, with students queueing up to join them. It's a stimulus to British universities and good for them to have some com-petitition. US univerities offer a great deal that UK universities don't: far broader courses, much greater recognition of all-round achievement and richer extracurricular life. They have a more generous student/teacher ratio."

Vicky Tuck, Principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College, said that more than a dozen of her pupils had applied for American universities this year. "There has certainly been an increase over the past two or three years," she said. "Some of the girls see their life prospects being enhanced by going to a good US university. "American universities are so well funded through philanthropic donations, it's just astonishing. I had one pupil from Poland who was offered places at Cambridge and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT had a huge bursary and she couldn't afford to go to Cambridge, so she went to America instead." Mrs Tuck said that in such a competitive markent Oxbridge could start to lose some of its best candidates. "People who want the best will go overseas if they think they're not getting it here."

Students at British universities are now an average of 30,000 pounds in debt when they graduate. But the brightest applicants can emerge debt-free from an American education because at some Ivy League universities admissions tutors have no idea whether applicants can afford their fees and are determined to attract elite students from around the world, regardless of cost. They can easily afford to do so with alumni donations creating huge endowments. Harvard's is worth $35 billion which is more than the combined annual funding for all English universities.

Source




Israel: Knesset panels vote to extend mandatory schooling to age 18

The Knesset's Finance and Education Committees decided Monday morning at a joint meeting to exclude a clause from the Economic Arrangements Law which cancels a law calling for mandatory schooling until the 12th grade. The law was initially filed by the Education Committee's chair, MK Michael Melchior (Labor Meimad).

The Economic Arrangements Law is a hodgepodge of treasury proposals that accompanies the budget every year. It is designed to bypass the regular legislative process to implement reforms and other changes that the Finance Ministry wants to push through quickly and usually without much debate.

In recent days, Melchior held long hearings with the Finance Ministry, concluding with the ministry agreeing to implement the law in exchange for a longer time period for its implementation.

Following Monday's meeting, Melchior said, "The law is underway, with the government committed to its implementation. This is a law that will save thousands of children, including new immigrants and children from rural areas, who will not be able to be expelled from their studies."

The new law, which was passed earlier this year, requires mandatory schooling until the age of 18, instead of the current age 16, enforcing that every child in Israel would have 12 years of schooling. At the time, Education Minister Yuli Tamir opposed the law, as did the coalition, out of concern it would take away from other factors in the ministry's general budget.

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26 December, 2007

Large-scale high school failure in Florida

Kids need to go to community colleges to learn what they should have learnt in High school

Marcus Brown writes sentences the way he text messages. Mike Cote passed the FCAT in high school on the first try, but doesn't always know the difference between its and it's or that "should of" should be "should have." Simone Ashman's words get all jumbled up when she types and sentences come out like this: "The eating disorders is very dangerous because it can cause the person to die from less weight."

The three are recent high school graduates, yet standardized tests show they need remedial - now called "preparation" - classes before they'll be ready for college-level work. About 55 percent of students entering Florida's public colleges and universities find themselves in the same educational purgatory, learning fundamental reading, writing and math skills in college prep classes that they didn't get in high school. Those classes cost taxpayers $70 million in 2005, according to a state report released this year.

This year, more than 29,000 community college students are enrolled in courses to prepare them for college-level classes. Of those, just 52 percent are expected to complete those classes. That means of the 15 or so students sitting with Brown, Cote and Ashman in Palm Beach Community College Professor Valerie Lazzara's English preparation class, about seven are expected to pass their prep courses. "These kids are learning things for the first time in this class," Lazzara said in October, the beginning of a second-level writing class. "Sometimes I wonder if they have undiagnosed learning disabilities. It's like in high school, if they showed up, that was a great thing. That was enough."

A task force charged with reducing the number of students needing college preparation classes made recommendations this month that include requiring all high school students to take more academically rigorous classes and adopting a state definition of "college and career readiness." Colleges have taken the lead in improving remedial pass rates, scheduling courses back-to-back to immerse students in a subject. Also, students are not allowed to take other classes while completing remedial work.

But teachers and students confront more than academic barricades. There are social hurdles, too. In Lazzara's PBCC classroom, the phone number for campus security is written in green on the whiteboard behind her. Early in the semester, the instructor had one student who slept through class. Another turned around in his chair to chat incessantly with the student behind him. Both cursed her out in front of other students when she tried to discipline them, and three weeks into class, she threw them out for good. After one charged menacingly back into the classroom, she began wearing a vial of pepper spray on a cord with keys around her neck.

"There are a lot of them who don't want to be here," said Lazzara, 42, who, after ridding the class of the troublemakers, grew to adore her students. She stopped wearing the pepper spray midway through the semester. "I had to take my class back. There were students who were dedicated from day one." And in the end, after the grueling, make-or-break, 75-minute final essay, one student had perfect attendance, another wrote a story so good it neared a perfect score and a third already was planning her classes at Florida Atlantic University.

In general, Florida has seen little change in the percentage of students needing remedial education. Over the past several years, it has fluctuated between 47 percent and 55 percent... Only Florida's 28 community colleges and Florida A&M University are allowed by law to offer remedial classes.

Some students end up in remedial classes because they are bad test takers, said Judith Klinek, supplemental services director and former principal for the Palm Beach County School District. Others may be adults going to college for the first time, she said. The longer people are out of school, the more likely they'll forget the fundamentals needed to score well on standardized tests. "Overwhelmingly, our students are prepared for college-level work," Klinek said of Palm Beach County graduates. Yet the state has recognized there is a problem of students entering college unprepared.

That's part of the reason then-Gov. Jeb Bush introduced the FCAT in 2000 as a measure of student competence. But the test ends in the 10th grade, meaning it doesn't evaluate what a student needs to know as a high school senior preparing for college. If students take few high-level courses in their junior and senior years, they may graduate but might not be able to pass college-level placement tests.

In 2006, legislators passed bills to increase academic rigor in middle and high school, requiring high school students to take an extra year of math and choose a major field of study. "Just recognizing we need to do something is important," said Judith Bilsky, executive vice chancellor for Florida's community colleges...

Community colleges, however, aren't waiting on the state. Palm Beach Community College is requiring remedial students to take a college skills class that teaches them note-taking and study skills, as well as how to use the campus computer lab and library. This semester, PBCC also changed its scheduling so students take a yearlong course in one semester by taking classes four days a week instead of two....

Source




The facts: Education expansion unlikely to do much good

Comment from Australia

IMAGINE you are Julia Gillard. As the new federal Education and Employment and Workplace Relations Minister, it's your job to reform the Coalition's Work Choices legislation and to implement Labor's election promises on education. You are itching to get started, but wading through the paperwork on your desk you discover two other pressing problems demanding your attention. First, employers are complaining about a skills shortage. After 15 years of sustained economic growth, we are running out of skilled workers. Forecasters predict a shortfall of 250,000 by 2016.

Second, unskilled workers are finding it difficult to get jobs. Official unemployment is at its lowest for 30 years, but many jobless people have been transferring to the Parenting Payment or Disability Support Pension. Many of these people could work but relatively few of them have formal qualifications and most of the new jobs created today are for graduates.

As you ponder how you may solve these two problems, there is a knock at the door and in come representatives of the business community, the education profession and welfare organisations. Speaking with one voice, they demand that you expand education and training. The business groups want an increase in the number of youngsters completing high school. In 1980, one-third of Australian pupils completed Year 12. Today, three-quarters do. But this upward trend has stalled in recent years. The Australia Industry Group says the Year 12 retention rate should be raised to 90 per cent. The educationists agree with this and add that you should expand the universities, too. The number of university places has doubled since 1980 and 40 per cent of young people are in higher education, but the delegation tells you we need more if we want to be a smart country.

The welfare organisations want more training for the unemployed. The Coalition emphasised getting people off welfare and into work. The thinking was that any job was better than no job. But the welfare lobby says jobless people should not be required to take dead-end jobs. They should be trained and given new skills so they can compete for well-paid jobs in the new skills economy.

Relaxing in the bath later, you mull over what you've heard, then: Eureka! You realise you can solve both your problems with the same bundle of policies. Increase Year 12 retention rates, expand university numbers and boost training for jobless adults, and the result will be an increase in the supply of skilled labour and a fall in the number of unskilled, jobless people on welfare. What's more, expanding education and training will be popular. The pressure groups will love you and the voters will get a warm glow. Nobody will criticise you for increasing education spending.

Next morning, you summon your bureaucrats and set out your plans. "First," you tell them, "I want Year 12 retention rates raised to 90per cent." There is some coughing and shuffling of feet before one brave soul outlines the evidence. Pupils doing vocational courses beyond Year 10 receive no benefit when it comes to getting jobs. And while bright students who remain at school improve their earnings and their employability, this is not true for low-ability students. Their risk of unemployment increases with two additional years of schooling and their earnings fall. If you push retention rates beyond their present level, a lot of children will end up taking courses for which they are not suited and that may even damage their prospects.

"Well," you respond, "we can still expand the universities. This country needs more graduates." Another awkward silence. It turns out that 500,000 graduates (more than 20 per cent) are unemployed or doing jobs for which a degree is not required. There are shortages in some specialist areas, but the country is drowning in arts graduates.

You throw your final dice. "Surely," you say, "it makes sense to train jobless people on welfare. Employers report skills shortages, let's train the unemployed to fill these jobs." The same deathly hush. Someone pushes an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report across the desk that shows training jobless adults rarely does any good. Middle-aged women returning to the labour market after rearing families do benefit from training; they are motivated and they have skills that just need brushing up. Few others get anything out of it.

"If you want to solve the skills shortage," one adviser tells you, "it makes more sense to delay early retirements, increase skilled immigration and attract more women back into work. All these people already have skills. "Training unskilled welfare recipients doesn't work."

You send the bureaucrats away. It seems this government lark is more complicated than it appears. Policies that sound attractive don't necessarily work. But how do you break this to the PM? You take a deep breath and pick up the phone. "Hi Kevin, it's Julia."

Source





25 December, 2007

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

Government schools thrive on Orwellian terms like Separate but Equal [now Different but Equal], More is Less, Education Lottery, Classroom Management and Child [or Student]-Centered Learning. One of my favorites is Classroom Management. Before I try to explain it, let me first show you the results of modern strategies for managing classroom behavior. Recall these tragedies:

Moses Lake, WA (1996) - 3 dead, including teacher; 1 wounded. Shooter opened fire during algebra class.

Pearl, MS (1997) - 3 dead, including shooter's mother; 7 wounded. Shooter said to be Satan worshiper.

West Paducha, KY (1997) - 3 dead; 5 wounded. Shooter shot fellow students as they participated in a prayer circle.

Jonesboro, AR (1998) - 5 dead, including teacher; 10 wounded. Shooters shot fellow students when they rushed outside in response to a false fire alarm.

Edinboro, PA (1998) - 1 dead, a teacher; 2 wounded. Shooting took place at a middle school dance.

Springfield, OR (1998) - 6 dead, including shooter's parents; 22 wounded. Students shot in school cafeteria.

Littleton, CO (1999) - 15 dead, including a teacher and both shooters; 23 wounded. Shooters, who were said to be "Goths," had planned to kill more than 500 students at Columbine High School.

Savannah, GA (2000) - 2 dead. Shooting took place following high school sponsored dance.

Santee, CA (2001) - 2 dead; 13 wounded. Shooter hidden in bathroom as he shot fellow students.

New Orleans, LA (2003) - 1 dead; 3 wounded. Gang-related shooting by four teenagers who were not students at the same high school of their victims.

Red Lake, MN (2005) - 10 dead, including shooter's grandfather and family friend, a school security guard, a teacher and shooter.

("A Timeline of Worldwide School Shootings")

Violence has become commonplace in public schools, but violence isn't the whole story. About a year ago, 12 first and second grade boys were suspended from a St. Louis elementary school after they sexually assaulted an 8-year old girl during recess. Forget about tag being too rough. What about rape?! Who would have imagined boys as young as 6 years old would be so perverted to participate in gang rape? Who'd suspect such beastly behavior from mere babies? And where did these boys get their moral training? The sad truth is most kids learn how to be violent and/or sexual predators at home, but public schools take advantage of this moral depravity in order to turn undisciplined punks into sociopaths.

Dr. Bruce Shortt, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools, Marlin Maddoux, Public Education Against America, and Joel Turtel, Public Schools, Public Menace, tell us that kids are indoctrinated with moral relativism, starting as young as kindergarten. But it's easier to brainwash some kids than others, particularly those that haven't been taught any moral standards at home. If you're a parent who cares about the moral values your child develops, you need to understand who opposes you - other parents and the government school system.

Brainwashing is a multi-step process. Kids want to be accepted by their peers, so they tend to conform to the social pressures of their group. This susceptibility is manipulated by public schools. Those kids left in a moral vacuum at home where the TV does the parenting are easier to brainwash. They have no imprinted values to wash away. Your Christian kids may require some work.

They begin by removing your Christian kids from your Christian home at age 5 and shoving them into an intensely anti-Christian environment. For at least six hours a day, your kids will be taught that the values they learned at home and church don't apply at school. They'll have to "leave it at the door" if they've been taught absolute moral standards. Don't you feel better knowing your 5-year old is learning about safe sex and how homomania is perfectly normal and acceptable, and those who believe otherwise - like you - are homophobic bigots who must have their 1st Amendment rights annulled for the good of the nation?

The government says it's okay for its schools to tell your child he or she is wrong to mention the name of Jesus or Moses but not Mohammed or Buddha. Your child should feel ashamed for believing in Jesus. That guilt will eventually beguile your child into agreeing with the majority, denying your value system and conforming to State-supported Humanist's doctrines like socialism, moral relativism and Darwinism. As children grow older, their lack of fixed moral standards results in confrontations, usually with other students but quite often with The System that manufactured them. But that's okay. They've been brainwashed to believe they evolved from animals, so it's only natural that they act like beasts.

Back in the Stone Age of public schooling, or roughly 40 years ago, kids were still expected to respect each other and especially the teacher. Failure to do so prompted a visit from the original Board of Education, whose wisdom was universally recognized. I recall my 8th grade English teacher explaining her point of view to me personally. When Mrs. Hobbs finished explaining her concept of acceptable behavior, there was no ambiguity on her part or confusion on my part. She got her point across, and I resolved not to displease my teacher - the authority in the classroom in those days.

But a series of court decisions starting in the 1980's put Mrs. Hobbs' attention getter out of business and took her authority with it. All infractions, no matter how severe, must receive due process. The ACLU has taken over the classroom. From now on, no matter what the infraction, authority to enforce the rules is denied. Rules are nominal and discipline has gone the way of literacy. In fact, discipline has been re-defined - reformed. Now we have Classroom Management.

The experts talk in circles and never really define what they mean by classroom management. They'll say that effective teachers manage their classroom while ineffective teachers discipline their classroom. They fail to explain who manages the discipline when discipline is what's needed most to get certain students to sit down, be quiet, be respectful and do their assigned work. One thing is certain; the teacher has no authority to do anything! His or her classroom does not belong to him anymore. Besides, he is not a teacher anymore but a facilitator - one who facilitates endless classroom discussions, occasionally discussions that appertain to the information that used to be taught back when teachers were allowed to teach.

I'm not saying the teacher can't do a lot to set up his classroom in an orderly way to alleviate possible disruptions in the daily routine. And I agree with the concept of displaying a list of academic and behavioral expectations - call them rules - so that students understand what is expected of them. But what do you do with those students who defy the rules? They know from kindergarten, no rule is absolute. Lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, even murder are justifiable, depending on the situation. [See situation ethics.] Here's what the experts will advise you to do if a student breaks a nominal rule:

Verbally warn that student not to break the rule again. [Try not to shake your finger as you issue this verbal reprimand.]

If student persists, give the student a written warning not to break the rule again. [Please use recycled paper but save a copy for your records. You'll need it in court.]

If student persists, call mom and/or dad. [This is more fun than plucking nose hairs.]

If student persists, refer student to an administrator. [First update your resume.]

Usually, the administrator will respond to your referral form in two or three days. Meanwhile, the student brags there is no consequence for violating rules. If the administrator decides in the teacher's favor, the student may get a written warning from the administrator, be assigned to ISS [In-school Suspension] or OSS [Out-of-School Suspension]. The latter is used sparingly for doing so makes the student absent from school, causing the school system to lose funding, which is based on the average number of students present for school each day. Yet another option is to send serious offenders to an Alternative School, sort of a mini-prison for students who've committed violence or found in possession of illegal drugs. The school system keeps its funding, and these students get hands-on experience at the prison life many of them will come to know before they reach 18.

Quite often the administrator does not decide in favor of the teacher. Teachers who refuse to follow modern, multicultural teacher strategies [The Seven Deadly Sins of Public Education] will not get cooperation from administrators, parents or school boards. These teachers are targeted for elimination for not being "team players."

One afternoon as I was monitoring the hallway between classes, a wanna-be gang member stepped in front of me. He asked me what I'd do if he spit in my face. Without hesitation, I told him I'd rip his lips off. He tried to smile and look tough. His buds laughed at him as he stepped back, turned and slumped away. Since we were having an English department meeting with the principal that afternoon, I relayed the almost-incident. My principal took a deep breath, shook his head and stared across the room. I was one of those teachers he and his assistant wanted to make unpersons, so I suspected he was going to vaporize me. Instead, he said he couldn't blame me if I reacted that way, but if it ever really happened, please report to his office immediately and bring the punk's lips with me.

I was glad his assistant principal wasn't there. She'd have had me shot. She was the reason the aforementioned young man thought he could be so disrespectful in the first place. When I referred him and a few of his buds for disrupting my class one day, she went after me, not them. She claimed their behavior was my fault, that because I was expecting them to actually read their literature assignment, something diverse learners are never required to do, I was "frustrating them" and "they were simply acting out their frustrations" in my class. Classroom management skills - that's what I needed, not the authority to deal with undisciplined punks before they hurt someone. That dear lady is the reason I decided to quit teaching and a major motivation behind my writing Legally STUPiD. Thanks, Brookie.

Christian parent, you love your kids and try to teach them right from wrong. Please understand though that most parents only teach their kids wrong, and so their children are going to be the perfect bad example for your kids to follow or be injured by. Please understand too that public schools are going to go beyond bad examples and brainwash your children to believe what the State wants them to believe. Finally, please understand that when you turn your kids over to government schools, you forfeit your parental rights. Maybe you shouldn't put them in public schools in the first place.

Source




ARE PARENTS BECOMING A FOSSILIZED THING OF THE PAST?

This last year I can hardly take a breath as I hear of assault after assault on parents, marriage, our children and our most basic traditions! You may recall the wonderful and glowing news of some schools now handing out birth control to our 11 year old girls! Us pesky parents should know that our 5th graders will be sleeping around and they have to have protection from pregnancy. You know as I do with the economy stretched in a time of war, abortions are expensive for a little girl. Lets try and keep her from them.

Of course, what am I thinking...some schools in California will get your girl to an abortion clinic without even telling us parents. After all, it is confidential information. Why should a concerned parent know if their 13 or14 year old is doing something silly and small like MURDER and possibly hemorrhaging on a mystery-operating table? It is their right. WE HAVE NONE! Especially if you are a nasty Christian and actually think sleeping around and getting pregnant before marriage is wrong!!

Then there was good old Arnold and friends in California cleaning house of nasty, evil and racist words in school books like...Mommy and Daddy...Husband and Wife..Just think of the hatred behind those words. I have made the hideous mistake of saying them a few times, LIVE, on my national radio show. I am hoping the FCC doesn't fine my socks off!

They had to start purging the textbooks because a few gays, tries, flies, bies, trands and SHAMS might feel left out. Its just plain homophobe, racist and mentally ill to not include everyone in textbooks so lets wipe out the VAST MAJORITY OF FAMILIES in the USA!

Ok, what are the new books from hell going to define family as??? "Suzie loves her parents...4 lesbians, 2 gay guys, 1 transgender, 3 undecideds, 2 dogs, a lizard, the ACLU, and an atheist Judge?"

So, this Christmas season I pause to reflect that I am a fossilized parent who wants to apparently deny the sexual rights of my children and actually guide them morally. How evil and short sighted of me. Oh yeah..mental also. Lets ad up the list of syndromes I have..Islamaphobe, homophobe, illegal alienaphobe.just to name a few. There is not enough medication for me!

The latest news I heard this week was about Judge Scott Johansen in Utah threatening to cease a Mom's children if she dared to home school them. She had been doing home schooling for 9 years and of course that was her right...but then again...the BIG and GRUMPY parent, the Judge and the public school had different definitions of rights. After all, if she continued to home school her children, they might not experience the joys of "gay silence day in school to honor gay kids," or get the much needed birth control pills, or hear the communist and atheistic roots of our country in history class. Christian roots be dammed. Truth of our history and support for our country be dammed.

In horror from the threat of losing her children, the Utah Mom enrolled her kids in public school. She has obviously rethought this and has since abandoned her very home, furniture and and fled to an undisclosed house in another state. She has no beds, no furniture, must be absolutely exhausted with this stupid fight from hell, but at least she is exercising her parental rights and caring the best she can for her kids.

Its absurd with all the fights put in our face these days that we must now work hard to protect our rights as parents and kids against rogue judges, many public schools, the ACLU and other pervert, anti American groups who want to indoctrinate and pollute the minds and bodies of our precious children.

Stand up and fight for your parental rights and protect your children!!! If you stand it may be easy. It may get ugly. It may be expensive and IT MIGHT SAVE THE HEART AND SOUL OF YOUR CHILD! Guide them with real morals, not politically correct bull rot! Here are a few tips for those of you who might be confused. This is what I have told my 11 year old girl. "It is physically dangerous and morally dead wrong for you to sleep around and have sex before marriage. Lets talk about those feelings, temptations and societal messages you hear in school and on the TV. I will support you as you grow, develop and struggle with sexuality but you will not have sex and I won't allow it even if you want it...I love you and I will not turn you over to a trend, a physical temptation..and Satan.

If your kids are in a public school, stand up and be heard. Find out what is actually being taught to your children. Demand real history is taught in the school your kids go to and find out what "special" sex group is being crammed down their throat. If you find your public school is a nightmare of indoctrination, pull your kids out and find another alternative, like home schooling. Merry Christmas! Keep fighting the good fight and pray for our country.

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24 December, 2007

Surprise! Seattle's gifted program has mostly white kids in it

And I'm guessing that a lot of the others are Asian

An outside review of gifted education in Seattle Public Schools said the district should act aggressively to diversify its program. Almost three-quarters of the students enrolled in the Accelerated Progress Program (APP) are white, compared to about 40 percent districtwide. Concerns about APP were noted by a group of consultants from the University of Virginia who were hired by the district to review the program. Their report was released today.

About 1,500 students in APP are admitted after testing in the 98th or 99th percentile nationally in cognitive ability and reading and math skills. They can spend almost their entire public-school experience together, starting at Lowell Elementary School, on to Washington Middle and finishing at Garfield High. But according to the report, APP is perceived to be "elitist, exclusionary and even racist," and that some of its African-American students are bullied and isolated. Administrators are committed to addressing issues of racial and socio-economic diversity, the report added.

The report also raised concern about student selection, saying admission to the program relies too much on a single test and is unfair to low-income students and students without parental support. "I think that we are going to work really hard to bring [up] the representation of all the different students in our advanced learning programs," said Bob Vaughan, director of advanced learning for the district. "The process we have now for selection is not sufficient."

The program's curriculum lacks vision, the report said, and rigor in classes is inconsistent. "The philosophy and definition of giftedness in Seattle do not reflect current developments in the field of gifted education," it said. The review is one of several the district has launched, including evaluations of curriculum, special education and alternative programs.

Source




D.C. education chief says school choice shouldn't be reserved for the rich

"I see it as a social justice issue--I want them all to be in excellent schools. The kids in Tenleytown are getting a wildly different educational experience than the kids in Anacostia, so our schools are not serving their purpose." So says D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has brought an unusual sense of urgency to her new job. One of her first decisions was to get rid of the furniture. When she arrived last summer, she says, there was a whole area, complete with couch and chair and TV for lounging in her sprawling, pink-carpeted office. Wasted space, she thought, "When am I ever going to have time to sit?"

That was a pretty good prediction for a woman whose first five months on the job have been a whirlwind of jousting with the dinosaurs in the city's education bureaucracy. So far, in her quest to turn around the public school system, she's taken on the unions, the city council and, most recently, hundreds of angry central-office workers.

This week, the city council gave preliminary approval to Chancellor Rhee's request for authority to fire nonunion employees in the central office. She knew it was going to be a political firestorm, but she's worked hard to convince her skeptics that protecting an ossified bureaucracy isn't in anyone's best interests. "I think it's a critical piece of this equation," she says of the personnel legislation, "and if someone like me can come in, guns blazing, and make all the hard calls . . . we can actually see how much progress we can make for the kids."

In a chic gray suit, with her black hair long and loose, the 37-year-old Korean-American does not fit the profile of the usual urban school superintendent. Nor does she have the most first-hand experience with the education bureaucracy she is trying to wrangle. After teaching for three years in a tough school in Baltimore, she spent the majority of her career running The New Teacher Project, a group that studies best practices in school systems nationwide. She figured her value was as an external player, poking and prodding from the outside, and her first thought about the chancellor job was "absolutely not." The reason she changed her mind was Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty.

Her name first came to Mayor Fenty's attention through Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City School system. She was known as an out-of-the-box thinker, a relentless advocate of reform. And that made her just what the young mayor was looking for. The alliance she and the mayor formed that day is now one of the strongest cards in the chancellor's hand. Their agreement was that as long as she acted in the best interests of the kids, he would back her up no matter how loud the screaming of the unions and community groups. "And since then, he has been unwavering," Ms. Rhee says with a note of awe in her voice. "He has never ever said to me, well, we need to think of the political ramifications."

That commitment is facing one of its toughest public tests, with the chancellor's plan to close 23 schools citywide--18 more than any other chancellor in the city's history dared propose. Parents and community groups are screaming bloody murder. The night before our interview, Ms. Rhee and her staff held their first local meeting to hear from her constituents directly. When several hundred irritable residents showed up, her staff was mapping the exits. "I came out of it and I was like, 'That wasn't that bad" the chancellor laughs now. "My staff looks at me like, 'You are crazy.'"

Yes, she understands the grieving process. "People have to have the opportunity to vent, to be angry, and they want to do that at me specifically," she says. Less tolerable is the politics that always seems to run against real reform. "I sat in a meeting where one of the City Council members said, you can close down as many schools as you need to, just not in my ward."

When she's not closing schools with low enrollment, she's building on those that are succeeding--with expanded campuses and courses, from music classes to gifted programs. One she looks to as a model is Langdon Elementary, where the percentage of poor minority students is very high and so are achievement levels. Why? The answer begins with a committed principal communicating her priorities and standards to her staff.

Another is Peabody, a small school on Capitol Hill that's pre-kindergarten through second grade, and running a program for three- and four-year-olds that has a long wait list. "People cry when they don't get in and that sort of thing," she says. With Ms. Rhee's help, the school's leadership and faculty are expanding to four more sites. "Why wouldn't we?"

To be effective, Ms. Rhee believes, reforms must begin with the people closest to the children. When she first took the job, she made time to meet individually with all 159 principals in the school system. "People thought I was crazy, and it was very time consuming," she says, "but it was the best use of time . . . it was very telling." Telling of what? Ms. Rhee quickly came to the conclusion that principals who were succeeding in their schools were her best resource. They were the ones who could tell her what she needed to do. She called in a group of top-tier principals and asked them for their wish lists: "I called them together and told them, 'You're the unsung heroes. This place creates such a bureaucracy that you can't get stuff done efficiently. Be creative, tell me what you want to do.'"

At first, the principals looked at her blankly. "They were like, what? And then when they got it, they were so excited." One principal asked for permission to run her school as a STEM school--focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. And she said that she wanted to keep her kids all the way through 8th grade. She explained that if parents had a school they believed in, they'd be less likely to take them out of the public system.

Those are important strides being made on the ground level. But reform also means, inevitably, taking an axe to dead wood elsewhere in the system. In the case of the plan to reclassify the 545 central-office workers as "at will" employees, Ms. Rhee's plan for reform is on delicate ground with the city's powerful public-sector unions. Though the administrative workers aren't union employees, her plan hasn't sat well with labor leaders, including those for bus drivers, cafeteria workers and clerical workers. Explains Ms. Rhee, they said, "We're opposed to this because our job is not just to protect our members but to protect the rights of all workers. We think you're going to start with them and then we're going to be next." She says she respects George Parker, head of the teachers union. "I believe he has the best interests of the kids at heart" and supports reform. But it's a struggle to bring along his rank and file, and the forces of inertia. "I think that somebody like me coming along has probably made his life more difficult."

Ms. Rhee grew up in Toledo and went on to school at Cornell and Harvard before joining Teach for America, the program that landed in her at Harlem Park Elementary in Baltimore. She taught second grade, and the 36 kids in her class ran her ragged. "It was a life altering experience for me and the reason I'm here today." She says that she and a colleague worked day and night to prepare for their classes, and saw their group of kids go from the bottom of the heap to where 90% of them were scoring above the 90th percentile. "I don't believe you can do this work, or be engaged in it at any level, unless you believe in your core that poor minority kids can achieve at the highest level despite all the obstacles."

Ms. Rhee says that her mission is not incremental change, and she doesn't plan on making being a school superintendent a career. "This is a one-time gig for me," she laughs, "so I can make every single decision in a way in which I think is in the best interests of the kids--without the politics, without owing people, just with that in mind." And her motivation? She's a working mother with two daughters in the school system. "That gives me a different sense of urgency about my work."

Mayor Fenty is the first D.C. mayor to have direct control of the city schools (in lieu of a school board)--a set-up that's also been key to turnaround efforts in Chicago, New York and Boston. There's a powerful demand for quality education in the nation's capital that hasn't been met by the public school system, as evidenced by the 30% of the district's kids who attend charter schools. "For way too long in this country, choice in education was something that was reserved for rich people in the suburbs," Ms. Rhee says.

That same desire for innovation in the schools has been behind the success of the District's Opportunity Scholarship Program--the country's first federal voucher program. Signed by President Bush in 2004, the program gives around 1,900 students from low-income families up to $7,500 to attend private schools of their choice. The five-year pilot program is up for renewal next year, but Ms. Rhee doesn't see school choice as a threat to her mission in the public schools. She shakes her head. "I would never, as long as I am in this role, do anything to limit another parent's ability to make a choice for their child. Ever."

Instead, she sees the competition presented by school choice and charter schools as part of the process of raising standards in the public school system at large. "We have an excellent choice dynamic for parents here. . . . I'm a huge proponent of choice, but I'm also an unbelievably competitive person, and my goal is . . . to create schools within the system that I believe are the most compelling choices."

People have tried to get her to commit to a ratio of public schools to charter schools. Ms. Rhee won't play that game. "I don't enter this with defensiveness, about protecting [D.C. public schools'] share of the market. I believe we should proliferate what's working and close down what's not. Period."

She says she keeps hearing from worried city council members that some teachers and administrators are frightened of her. They are feeling pressure and that's a problem. Her answer? Get used to it. "I'm going to hold people accountable and I'm going to hold their feet to the fire. If they're feeling pressure--good! I feel pressure every day because I have the education of 49,000 kids in my hands"

Source




Students so much more than future cogs in the great GDP machine

Comment from Australia by Kevin Donnelly

WHAT is the purpose of education? Judged by the Australian Labor Party's education policy and subsequent comments by Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard, the answer is straightforward. In a recent interview in this paper, Gillard, on being asked the core purpose of her portfolio, replied: 'So while my portfolio can be a mouthful, I'll be happy to be referred to simply as 'the minister for productivity'.' Such a utilitarian view of education is mirrored by Labor's policy document entitled Establishing a National Curriculum to Improve Our Children's Educational Outcomes, released last February.

The opening paragraph, in justifying the need for a nationally consistent curriculum in core areas such as mathematics, the sciences, English and history, argues: 'For Australia to succeed in a highly competitive global economy, our children need to have the best education possible. 'Better education outcomes deliver a real and tangible benefit to our nation's economy, lifting productivity and allowing people to get better jobs that pay more.' Referring to a speech by Productivity Commission head Gary Banks, Labor's national curriculum paper justifies investing more in education by linking raised standards to increased productivity and building human capital. Another paper released early this year, Federalist Paper 2: The Future of Schooling in Australia, written on behalf of state and territory governments, also justifies the needto strengthen standards by linking education to higher economic efficiency and workforce participation.

In justifying his offer to buy computers for all Australian senior school students -- ignoring the fact the overwhelming majority already have access to computers -- and to provide internet connection, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd repeats the mantra that students need to be information-rich and computer-literate to succeed in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.

For many years the cultural Left, represented by groups such as the Australian Education Union, the Australian Council for the Deans of Education and the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, has argued that a competitive, academic curriculum is elitist and guilty of reinforcing disadvantage. The solution? Force the education system to be more socially inclusive by promoting equality of outcomes and enforce a politically correct curriculum.

Gillard is also Social Inclusion Minister and it is here that one finds a second justification for Labor's so-called education revolution. Put simply, and harkening back to Gough Whitlam's wasteful disadvantaged schools program, the purpose of education is to remedy economic and social inequality. That social inclusion is central to the Rudd Government's education revolution is evident by a speech given by Gillard at an Australian Council of Social Service conference just before the federal election. Gillard said that education was critical to social inclusion and that a Rudd government would quickly establish a social inclusion board, with a social inclusion unit placed within the PM's Department.

There is an alternative to defining the value of education by its ability to increase productivity and reduce social inequality. Instead of restricting the work of schools to economic objectives and what often amounts to utopian social engineering, the true value of education lies in its cultural dimension; its ability to cultivate and enrich the moral, emotional, spiritual and intellectual aspects of individuals and the society in which they live.

David Green, an analyst at the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, summarising an address to the Mont Pelerin Society given by English historian Max Hartwell, describes this cultural view of education as embracing 'civility, morality, objectivity, freedom and creativity. By civility he (Hartwell) means respect for other people; by morality, the elementary maxims such as honesty and fairness; by objectivity, belief in the disinterested examination of facts and arguments, without fear or favour; by freedom, the principle that children should be equipped to exercise personal responsibility; and by creativity, belief in the advance of knowledge, not the perfectibility of man, but the possibility of progress.' Music, literature, history and art may not have any immediate application or practical use, but to ignore them is to give students an impoverished, superficial and largely barren education. It should also never be forgotten that much of contemporary culture is driven by the need to make a profit and to entertain, and thus provides little of lasting or real value.

US writer and child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and American academic Joseph Campbell argued that literature, especially those myths, fables and legends associated with the Western tradition and classic texts such as Euripides's Medea, Homer's Iliad and the works of Shakespeare, deal with human nature in a profoundly moving and illuminating way. Such works also introduce students to archetypes and emotional and existential challenges that define what it is to be human.

The purpose of studying history is not only to learn about the past to better understand the present and to predict the future; equally as important is the way history allows individuals to partake in a narrative that provides meaning and a sense of belonging to something larger and more enduring than one's day to day routine.

Music and art, especially that of the great masters, helps cultivate a sense of the spirit and the sublime and, once again, while not of immediate economic use, can enrich one's character and, to use poet William Blake's phrase, cleanse the doors of perception; allowing a richer and more nuanced understanding of the world. With schools being forced to embrace a managerial approach to education, where accountability and testing prevail, the dangers of ignoring and undervaluing a cultural view of education are plain to see. As shown by research sponsored by the Australian Scholarship Group and released last October, one-third of those students interviewed felt stressed and unable to cope with the demands of school and peer relationships.

Melbourne-based adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg also suggests all is not well, observing that many young people feel disengaged, and lack resilience and a sense of purpose in life; hence the rising tide of youth suicide, street violence and the endemic drug culture associated with city nightlife.

Although there is no guarantee that the type of liberal education associated with studying literature, history, music and art will address such concerns, it is also true that education represents a powerful humanising force and, as suggested in the Bible and epitomised by the Christian ritual of Christmas, man does not live by bread alone.

Source





23 December, 2007

Judge investigated for homeschooling threat

A threat by a Utah judge to take away a homeschooling mom's children if she failed to enroll them in public school, and make sure they were in attendance every day, has been escalated to the level of the state Legislature, according to a homeschooling leader. "I can tell you there are several legislators working on this, including one on the judicial retention committee," John Yarrington, president of the Utah Home Education Association, said. "There's no excuse for this kind of bias and prejudice."

At issue are the threats issued by Judge Scott Johansen, who serves in the juvenile division of the state's 7th Judicial District. He said in a court hearing for the homeschooling mom, Denise Mafi, that he would order the removal of her children from her custody if she failed to enroll her children in the public school district and keep them in class every day, unless they had a physician's note excusing them. Mafi, who has homeschooled for nine years, told WND that she already had enrolled the children, for fear the judge would carry out his threat.

WND earlier reported the confrontation developed after the school district apparently lost an affidavit Mafi had submitted for the 2006-2007 school year. Mafi already had submitted her state-mandated affidavit for the 2007-2008 school year for her children, and had received her exemption. However, when she appeared in court with her juvenile son to have the charges dismissed (under a case held in abeyance procedure) stemming from a clash among children, she suddenly was presented with four counts against her for failing to comply with the state's compulsory education requirement. The counts each carry up to six months in jail.....

WND contacted the judge's court, but was told to call the state judiciary's office, and a spokeswoman confirmed that the situation was being reviewed, but she couldn't comment on a pending case. The district attorney's office didn't return a telephone request for comment.

Yarrington said a lawyer for the UHEA is working on the case, as are lawyers for the Home School Legal Defense Association. He said court records show the judge told the woman that she was in court with her son "because you homeschool," even though the case at hand had nothing to do with homeschooling. And the judge told the woman that homeschooling fails 100 percent of the time and he wasn't going to allow it.

"This guy's nuts. He has no clue," Yarrington said. "He's [stepped] on so many rights it's ridiculous." The lawyers were awaiting the remaining paperwork in her dispute before taking their next step, Yarrington said. He said the judge would have to be "insane" to try to get away with such actions. But he's not entirely surprised, because there have been "a quite a few of these situations," in Utah in recent years. "We're constantly in a push and shove with districts, and sometimes with the state school board," he said, even though a recent state law limits the state and district involvement in homeschoolers' lives if they file the required affidavit annually.

He also said the group constantly advises parents to send the affidavits in by registered mail or another service that provides a written confirmation of delivery. That apparently is what Mafi failed to do. "Unfortunately, people get in a hurry, and they don't know about this 'Gotcha,'" used by school districts, he said. No numbers are compiled on such situations by homeschool groups, often because homeschool parents frequently seek their own legal advice and get their situations resolved without informing the association, Yarrington said. But he said he knows of "numbers" of such situations. "Several districts have gotten cranked up and decided to show how tough they are," he said.

He said he was aware of one recent case in which a mother was charged with violating state law regarding educational neglect and truancy even though she had a doctor's note regarding her son's absences, a health situation that prompted her to move to homeschooling. "This fine principal actually called the doctor. That's way outside the bounds," Yarrington, who represents about 7,500 homeschooling families in Utah, said. "The principal gave the doctor the kid's name, and said, 'Is there any reason this kid can't come back to school?' "The doctor, without the case in front of him, said, 'It's probably okay,'" he said.

Cracking down on homeschooling is "pretty obviously" a goal of the state, he said, although state officials disagreed. Scott Peterson, of the state Department of Education, said there are more than 8,000 homeschooled students in the state, many of them who choose to continue to participate in various classes or activities at their local school districts. But he admitted comments such as Johansen's have no place in education. Asked if he thought the judge was out of line, he replied, "If that is what he said, it would be, yes."

Homeschool officials said local school districts get about $7,500 per student in tax payments, but the state said that figure was closer to $2,500, although there were additional funds that also were involved.

As WND has reported, such threats and actions are becoming more common in Germany, but that nation still makes homeschooling illegal under a law launched when Hitler expressed a desire to control the minds of youth....

Source




Australia: National literacy exams planned for all schools

If the new Leftist Federal government doesn't overturn them. But Leftist State governments have agreed to it all so the only immediate peril is dumbing the whole thing down

SPELLING, grammar and punctuation will be assessed nationally for the first time next year with the introduction of uniform tests for students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The national literacy and numeracy tests, to be held over three days in May, will include an extra test on language conventions in the literacy assessment, in addition to reading and writing. The language conventions test will comprise about 50 questions, half on spelling, half on grammar and punctuation.

Sample tests show that Year 3 students will be asked to correct misspelt words in sentences such as "we jumpt on the trampoline", choose the correct tense of a verb to insert in a sentence and show where quotation marks or capital letters should go. By Year 9, students will be asked to correct misspellings such as "apreciate" and "seperate", place apostrophes and identify whether "a" in the sentence "a product" is a noun, definite article or indefinite article.

The national testing regime includes separate tests on reading, writing and numeracy, with students in years 7 and 9 to sit two for maths, one using calculators and one without. In reading, students will be given several passages of writing of different styles, varying in number from six for Year 3 students to eight in Year 9, and asked to answer mostly multiple choice questions. The writing task next year is to compose a narrative, with students in all years given the same brief. The sample question is based on discovery, and gives students half a dozen sentences about people discovering new ideas, objects or secrets, from which they are expected to write astory. Previously, states and territories set literacy and numeracy tests in years 3, 5 and 7. Results were manipulated to compare students in different jurisdictions against national benchmarks.

Under pressure from the Howard government, the states and territories agreed to replace their tests with common literacy and numeracy tests and include Year 9 students in the assessment. University of Western Australia professor Bill Louden, who has written reports on literacy education, said constructing a separate test for spelling and grammar was a better way of assessing students' skills than marking it as a part of a writing assignment. Professor Louden, head of the graduate school of education at UWA, said parents, teachers and employers tended to regard students' spelling and grammar as markers of their quality. "Students may not be aware people draw all sorts of inferences from the general ability to spell and construct grammatical sentences, so tests are important to draw students' attention to that," he said.

Australian Education Union acting federal president Angelo Gavrielatos had concerns that a national testing regime was being introduced before the development of a national curriculum. "We appear to be going at this the wrong way; we're talking about reporting first then assessment before we've had a conclusive discussion about curriculum," he said. "Curriculum must be centre stage."

Terry Aulich, executive officer of the Australian Council of State School Organisations representing government school parents, said the tests should be trialled on adults as well as on the students to ensure they were an accurate reflection of ability. Mr Aulich expressed concern about the sophisticated language skills required in the sample tests, with the use of words such as "dugong" and "habitat" in the Year 3 reading test, which he said were not part of the average eight-year-old's vocabulary

Source




FROM TONGUE-TIED:

Today's posts on TT are school-relevant so I reproduce them below

Student Claims Teacher Asked Her to Cover Up Lesbian-Themed Shirt

I am inclined to see the ACLU as the good guys in this one -- though if the message had been ANTI-homosexual they would have been nowhere to be seen:

"A Virginia high school student said she was asked by a teacher to cover up a lesbian-themed shirt or face suspension.

Bethany Laccone, 17, said she was asked to cloak a logo of two interlocked female symbols while attending a class this month at I.C. Norcom High School in Portsmouth. She's a full-time senior at nearby Woodrow Wilson High School, where she has not faced a similar ultimatum.

In a letter sent Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia asked Norcom administrators to remove any mention of the incident from Laccone's records and agree not to similarly censor other students.

The school's dress code prohibits "bawdy, salacious or sexually suggestive messages." ACLU leaders want administrators to clarify that students can express political views.

Source

Ohio Teens Sue High School over Facebook 'Parody'

We read:

"Three teenagers have sued school officials over lengthy suspensions they received for setting up a Facebook page that identifies a teacher as a pedophile. The entry on the social networking site included the face and last name of the teacher and referred to him as a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, which supports sex between men and boys.

"They're not saying it's true, they're saying it's just parody," the students' attorney, Marc Mezibov, said Friday. The boys were suspended from Taylor High School for the maximum 90 days for creating the entry in November. They've served 10 days and were told the rest of the punishment would begin Jan. 2, when classes resume after the holiday break.

U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott ordered school officials to let them return pending a hearing on the lawsuit Jan. 10. "Each of the boys has written an apology to the teacher and questioned whether they exercised their best judgment," their attorney, Marc Mezibov, said Friday.

The students and their parents filed the federal lawsuit Dec. 14 after the Three Rivers School District board voted to uphold the punishment. They argue that the Facebook entry should be considered protected speech because it was parody. The plaintiffs also allege the district overstepped its bounds because the Web page was created away from school with access limited to seven people, Mezibov said.....

There have similar cases across Ohio and the country, said Scott Greenwood, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney. Courts have ruled that students can't be punished by schools for such off-campus acts and that such suspensions violate free speech, he said.

Source

The "parody" claim seems far-fetched but it sounds like a private communication to me -- so would seem to be covered by privacy protection. If all negative private communications had to withstand legal assault we would be in a huge mess.





22 December, 2007

School Prankster Orders Electro-Shock of Teen Boys

(Boston, Massachusetts) Seven staffers at the Judge Rotenberg Education Center, a group home for developmentally disabled youngsters, have been fired for unknowingly participating in a hoax last August when two boys were given dozens of electric shocks.

A prank caller ordered the shocks be given in the early morning hours of August 26th. After the two boys, ages 16 and 19, were awakened in the middle of the night, their arms and legs were bound and shocks were administered.

From 2 to 4:45 a.m., one teenager received 77 shocks, while another got 29, according to the report by the state Department of Early Education and Care, which licenses group homes.

As the two youths screamed, other residents woke up and insisted the accused teenagers had violated no rules. One even told staff that the caller might be a prankster.

Staff members did not realize their mistake until one of them called the central office and determined that no punishment orders had been given for the teenagers.

The Rotenberg staff members were fired for failing to stop the cruel treatment even though there was sufficient reason to doubt the validity of the caller's orders.

Fortunately, authorities have identified the prankster and are considering the possibility of criminal charges.

Notably, the Rotenberg facility is believed to be the only special education center in the U.S. that employs electro-shock treatment. Although it remains controversial, many officials and parents are convinced that the treatment is effective for hard-to-teach children.

Outrage is essentially absent which is the exact opposite of the avalanche of worldwide outrage that thundered when American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison pretended to use electro-shock on terrorist detainees. Maybe readers can reconcile the difference.



FSM's Second Annual `America's Most Dangerous College Courses'

It's been two years since I've begun investigating insipid, scary and yes, downright dangerous college courses - sometimes funded by tax dollars - and unfortunately, little has changed. Arrogant professors, protected by tenure and faint-hearted administrators, use their classrooms to spread their twisted views of America and its allies. Sometimes, entire courses are focused on anti-American views; other times, professors take time from non-political classes, such as math or Kinesiology, to complain about George Bush, the war on terrorism, social justice, and whatever it is that happens to bother them at the time of their rants. Consequently, students are not being taught properly and universities and colleges are robbing their students of the well-rounded educations they are paying for and deserve.

As was the case with the first installment of this list in 2006, courses for this list are based on a variety of criteria:

* The course must focus on the issue or issues detailed in the syllabus or class description. That is, a math course with a professor who may rail against America will not be considered.

* The course must also express an agenda far beyond any honest or accurate academic cause. That is, professors who teach courses that lie, manipulate facts, propagandize students, or express a dishonest and fact-deficient extremist view on the class topic, will be considered.

* Courses that may be required as part of a "core" curriculum will also be considered if they offer nothing more than to stroke the ego of the professor's fascination with silly topics that offer little academic value to students.

These courses represent the worst seminars offered by a university or college in 2007-2008, and should be avoided if you appreciate honest and rational debate - and if you wish to steer clear of anti-American rhetoric. Courses that rob students of facts, and professors who stroke their egos and indoctrinate students, are dangerous. Now, on to the list:

10. Collegiate Sexualities at Occidental College.

9. Body Politics: Power, Pain, and Pleasure at Williams College.

8. Issues Dividing America at Columbia University.

7. Whiteness and Multiculturalism at Ithaca College.

6. Truth, Lies, Politics, and Policy at Portland State University.

5. Introduction to Labor Studies at the University of Washington.

4. Speaking Out at Bucknell College.

3. Imperialism in American History at the University of California, Irvine.

2. Movements in Social Justice at Occidental College.

1. Islam in Global Contexts at DePaul University.

And now, the analysis:

10. "Collegiate Sexualities" at Occidental College.

It's hard to believe that this course for freshmen at Occidental College - my alma mater - is one that focuses on the "hook up" culture of college students. Offering not an iota of academic value, the course aims to debate such titillating questions as, "Do hook-ups require drunkenness?", "What are college students' sexual identities or dis- identifications?" and "What are the political ramifications of identifying as gay, lesbian, straight, bi, queer, asexual, spectral, or something else?"

For those of you not up to date on the extremist politically correct language on sexuality, "spectral" apparently "suggest[s] that homosexuality or lesbianism are threatening specters feared by the heterosexual mainstream" (I had to look up this word.) When was the last time someone you know identified his sexuality as "spectral"? I'm willing to wager not recently, if at all, leading one to believe that this course's aim is to brainwash freshman into thinking heterosexuals in the mainstream fear homosexuality (read: we're all homophobes).

Much more here




A Texas version of Head Start does no good either

But it's a great honeypot for educrats

A groundbreaking effort to prepare Texas preschoolers for kindergarten has eaten up millions of taxpayer dollars but has yet to deliver on the investment, according to a new report released by the Texas Education Agency.

The findings spotlight a lack of budget transparency, little accountability and a lot of administrative overhead in the Texas Early Education Model, or TEEM, a state program run out of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. The program "operates in a netherworld of state finance" far removed from TEA oversight, according to the report by Edvance Research Inc., a San Antonio consulting firm.

State officials have pumped more than $45 million into the program since 2003. Yet the report found no proof that most children fared better in TEEM than in conventional preschool programs. "I thought those were pretty damning conclusions," said Samuel Meisels, a critic who runs the Erikson Institute, a Chicago graduate school that specializes in early-childhood development.

TEEM's leader defended the program, saying the consultant's report paints an inaccurate picture. And TEA officials said they're trying to improve the program but stressed that its performance has met the agency's expectations.

Last year, just under 27,000 children in 33 Texas communities participated in TEEM, which is expected to become the state's blueprint for all preschools. More than 100 classrooms in Dallas, Irving, Garland, Lancaster and Little Elm participate. TEEM is different from conventional pre-kindergarten programs. The model depends on the state's support for structured lesson plans and coaching for teachers at private day-care centers and federal Head Start programs. It also operates in some public school district preschools. It also places certified public school teachers in private day-care centers as mentors for less-educated workers.

The consultant's report drew a misleading portrait of an otherwise landmark effort, said Dr. Susan Landry, a UT researcher who oversees the program as director of the Texas State Center for Early Childhood Development. Dr. Landry's operation bills itself as the early-childhood arm of the Texas Education Agency, which regulates public schools. TEA spent about $374,000 on the consultant's report. She said the report treated TEEM like a program with deep roots and deep pockets instead of a start-up with limited money and manpower. "They [Edvance consultants] had a certain charge from TEA, and they did their jobs," she said. "But there were other things that could have been looked at."

TEEM grew out of state lawmakers' attempts to add structure and value to preschool, an area of education known for finger painting and afternoon naps. More states have turned to preschool as a way to close achievement gaps between wealthy and poor children, which is harder to do when kids are older. Dr. Meisels, who has tracked the Texas Early Education Model, says it's a mistake to put an unproven preschool program on the fast track.... The report pointed out other problems, including:

* Dr. Landry's group reported expenses in vague detail.

* About 40 percent of the state program's budget appeared to go to salaries, benefits, travel and other expenses.

* The program's system of collecting cost and student records was somewhat incomplete and lacked uniformity.

TEA officials said they're taking steps to achieve more detailed accounting and more closely oversee TEEM. But they emphasized that Dr. Landry's group has met the agency's expectations. "I think people see a huge amount of money flowing to the state center, and they have the impression that the state center is keeping that money, and they really are not," said Gina Day, deputy associate commissioner at TEA. "They're running pretty lean, frankly." ....

The Texas Early Education Model primarily targets poor children in certain areas, but supporters want to see the program extended to every corner of the state. Dr. Landry's group also developed a voluntary preschool ratings system to grade private and public preschools on how well they groom kids for kindergarten. No one else has attempted to level the playing field of preschools, Dr. Landry said. "To be at the point we're at with that small of an investment is quite amazing," she said. "Programs across the country don't do this kind of evaluation."

Source




Australian universities get tough on bad English

This is a sensible measure but how long will it be before we hear shrieks of "discrimination" and "racism"?

INTERNATIONAL students, Aborigines and newly arrived migrants face tougher English language requirements to get into Victorian universities after institutions complained they were not performing as well as local students. The Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre has allowed universities to raise the entrance scores required for students who have completed English as a second language instead of English in their final year of school.

Secondary school students who have been in an English-speaking country less than seven years, are here studying from another country or Aborigines whose first language is not English are entitled to study ESL, which was previously worth the same marks as English. But under the changes to start in 2009, ESL students will have to get five points higher than students studying English to meet university entrance requirements.

The move came as Swinburne University decided to test the English language skills of incoming international and domestic students. Those who perform badly will be required to undertake extra English classes as part of their undergraduate degree. The University of Melbourne, the Australian Maritime College, Monash, La Trobe and Deakin universities have indicated they will increase ESL scores for course selection, making it five points higher than the minimum score needed for English. But RMIT University, Victoria University and the University of Ballarat have decided against the increase for 2009 entry and Swinburne University is waiting for the results of its new English testing project before deciding whether to raise ESL scores.

Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre director Elaine Wenn told the HES VTAC did a review of VCE English and ESL scores after requests from universities. She said institutions had done their own research and discovered ESL students often could not compete with local students who had studied English. "They found that students entering university with ESL were not doing as well, some even had a higher rate of failure than the students who had the same study scores in English," Ms Wenn said.

She said the VTAC study compared five years worth of VCE English and ESL results with general aptitude tests taken by the students. The research found there was a difference in the way the English and ESL students performed on aptitude tests. "It was telling us that a higher score was required for ESL to get the same score in English," Ms Wenn said. "We are just trying to be fair," La Trobe University admissions and selection chairman Peter Stacey said. He said the aim was to establish equivalent standards.

Monash University demographer Bob Birrell backed the move, saying there was strong anecdotal evidence international students with poor English skills enrolled in Australian high schools as a way of getting into university.

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21 December, 2007

How to cut time spent on getting a Ph.D. degree

This is all amazing to me. 10-year Ph.D.s? I completed my psychology Ph.D. at a major Australian university in the minimum two years -- while I was a High School teacher. I actually had all the work done after one year. So I filled out the second year getting stuff published. There must be an awful lot of dummies getting Ph.D.s these days

For doctoral students, the clock is always ticking. How many years of fellowship support do you have left? How long can you delay starting a family or bringing home a real paycheck? How old do you want to be while still being a student? How many good jobs will disappear before you have a Ph.D.? But what about the professors who supervise doctoral work? Does the clock tick for them enough to motivate them to be realistic about dissertation expectations, to be sure to get comments back on that chapter draft, and to both encourage and prod their Ph.D. students to the finish line?

A series of new policies in the humanities and the social sciences at Harvard University are premised on the idea that professors need the ticking clock, too. For the last two years, the university has announced that for every five graduate students in years eight or higher of a Ph.D. program, the department would lose one admissions slot for a new doctoral student. The results were immediate: In numerous departments that had for years had large clusters of Ph.D. students taking eight or more years to finish, professors reached out to students and doctorates were completed. No exceptions were made, and Harvard officials believe that their shift shows that there is no reason for a decade-long humanities Ph.D.

"People get lost. Being a graduate student can end up being a very lonely experience. You've got this enormous dissertation to write, and your children are born and your partner wants you to get a new job," said Theda Skocpol, who is finishing up a term as graduate dean at Harvard and who created the new policies. Skocpol ruffled a few feathers in turning down professors who wanted exemptions, but she said that the costs to students and their universities are too high to ignore the impact of 10-year-plus Ph.D. efforts, many of which don't even result in a degree. "Losing somebody from one of these very selective Ph.D. programs after the investment of many years of faculty and student time and the students' own life and after we've invested a quarter million dollars or Harvard's money is really tragic," she said.

Harvard's new approach also includes other features, such as full financing for a year of dissertation writing, and a rule that students in the dissertation writing year cannot be assigned or accept teaching assistant positions. But Skocpol said that she believes the potential lost admissions slot is key. And at a time that many groups are focusing on time-to-degree issues, the fact that this was a policy change and not just another instance of Harvard spending some of its billions may make the shift something others could follow.

Here are the numbers that suggest the impact of the new policy, which was announced 18 months ahead of enforcement with the idea of giving professors time to get more of their Ph.D. students over the finish line: In December 2005, 16 of the 24 departments offering Ph.D.'s in the humanities and social sciences were told that based on then-current data, they would lose a total of 33 admissions slots. (Departments admit anywhere from 1 to 25 or so doctoral students and many of the programs are sufficiently small that losing even a single slot is a big deal.)

A year later, 14 departments were at risk of losing a total of 23 slots. And by the time this year that the policy was enforced, all but two of those departments were in compliance and those two lost only one slot each. If you think departments might have just kicked out slow finishers, that doesn't seem to be the case. Skocpol said that some students really had "already moved on," and that most departments avoided the admissions slot punishment by helping students finish. Indeed, in the two years after the policy was announced, the number of humanities Ph.D.'s awarded increased to 99 from 71, and the number of social sciences doctorates increased to 110 from 95. (Entering cohort size has been flat for years and so does not explain those increases.) Meanwhile, over the last five years, the percentage of doctoral students in their ninth year (or higher) has decreased to 4.5 percent from 8.5 percent.

While taking a decade to finish a Ph.D. may seem unthinkable to academics in disciplines (generally in the sciences) where half that time is the norm, decade-long Ph.D.'s are actually common in the humanities, which makes Skocpol's timeline (and her success at enforcing it) notable. Recent data from the Council of Graduate Schools, for example, show that only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10.

Skocpol said that it is important to recognize that some fields (those requiring fluency in multiple languages or extensive fieldwork, for example) will have longer duration of doctoral work than others, but that there is no reason ever for a 10-year doctoral program. "Graduate students need to get on to a life where they have their own careers or income before they are entering middle age," she said. In addition, she said that private donors and government agencies are scared away from supporting humanities and some social sciences doctoral education because it takes so long. "If we are going to make claims on resources, we have to do better."

That means real changes, she said. For starters, she said that professors need to have "realistic" expectations about dissertations, and to factor in the value of getting done along with the value of exploring every possible nuance. "You have to get to a point in a dissertation where you say it's good enough. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's time to get it done as good enough," Skocpol said.

Another change she advocates is that departments view entering cohorts of Ph.D. students as true cohorts, such that there is a goal of students taking their generals at roughly the same time. Treating the process as entirely individual, she said, seems to encourage a slower pace.

Altin Gavranovic, a Ph.D. student at Harvard in American studies, is the humanities representative on the Graduate Student Council. He said he isn't sure that many graduate students are aware that new policies have been put in place to speed up their completion, "but they are benefiting." At many top universities, graduate students in the humanities just assume it will take 10 years to finish up. "I think the culture where people think about being here for 10 years, I think that has past," said Gavranovic. "The idea is that the Ph.D. should be a transitional stage," not a permanent one. "My intent is to get done in five."

Liz Olson, a graduate student in anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and president of the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students, said that she had never heard of a policy like the one at Harvard. But she said that the issue it addresses (professors and Ph.D. students not both facing pressure to finish up) is widespread. She said it was important in carrying out such a policy not to increase the stress on students by compressing a 10-year program into 7, but by coming up with a 7-year program. Of Harvard's rule, she said, "I think that making it something that impacts the department is a good idea."

While the Harvard plan does put pressure on departments, Skocpol said that various pressures on doctoral students will also be a factor. She took seven years to finish her Harvard doctorate, and she said she was "totally unrealistic" about material to cover in it. "I wouldn't have finished it on time, but I was going to get fired from my first job if I didn't finish it," she recalled. "You have to get to the point where you want this thing - no matter what."

Source




Britain: Private schools should not be a 'guilty secret'

Parents should not be embarrassed at sending their children to private school but should feel the same pride they do in buying expensive jewellery, the new leader of Britain's independent girls schools has said. Vicky Tuck, the incoming president of the Girls Schools Association and principal of Cheltenham Ladies College, said people should not feel apologetic or "sheepishly" hide the fact that they are buying a good education

"We are not embarrassed by paying a decent sum for a nice house or a nice jacket or a nice engagement ring," she said. "Yet if you decide to spend your earnings on the most valuable thing you can do - to give your children an education - you are damned for doing so."

Mrs Tuck, who takes over the association in the New Year, said that the public school sector in the UK was renowned around the world, and that the "sheepishness" some parents felt about admitting to using it was not apparent in other countries. The head launched a strong defence of the right of families to choose. "It goes back to this question of opportunities and life chances," she said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph. "If you are able to afford it, you are giving your child a better life chance - I can see the moral dimension to that. "But we should not be embarrassed by the fact that we are providing something that is excellent just because, sadly, it is not available to everyone. We would be perfectly happy not to have to exist. If the state provision was so excellent, it would be inconceivable that you would pay twice for education.

Official figures published last month showed a rise in the proportion of children aged 11 to 15 in England attending the independent sector, from 7.1 per cent in 2004 to 7.3 per cent this year. The figures show the Government's failure to persuade the middle classes that state schools have improved so much that parents no longer need to opt for the private sector.

However, despite the increasing popularity of independent schools, some parents feel reluctant to admit their "guilty secret". Earlier this year Ruth Kelly, at the time communities minister, faced criticism from backbenchers when it was revealed she had decided to send her son to private school. While Tony Blair - who attended Fettes College, in Edinburgh - supported colleagues who went private, Gordon Brown has pushed his state school credentials and stated that his children will attend the local school.

Mrs Tuck, who has been credited with modernising the regime at the o26,000-a-year Cheltenham Ladies College, said the Government had created a climate where the independent sector felt "under siege". "At one level the Government is clearly aware of all the quality that we are providing in our schools," she said. "Yet at another level we still feel under siege. There seems to be an idea that we are having an easy time but people couldn't work harder than our staff here."

Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, said the emphasis on widening access to university and social mobility was "tending to engender a certain unease" about private schooling. "By drawing attention to the gap you make people feel guilty," he said

Source




Australia: School reduced to cartoons and PC self-loathing

A youthful voice of intelligence below

As one who recently graduated from one of Queensland's best private schools, I view the Rudd Government's promise to consult a team of education experts in drafting a national curriculum with trepidation. These so-called experts, remember, inflicted on us entire terms of work on Queen Kat, Carmel & St Jude Get a Life and The Simpsons, not to mention long assignments on designing advertising campaigns and the front covers of teenage magazines. The justification for The Simpsons was that it contains myriad references to Dante. Too bad hardly any of the students knew what he'd written before or after that term. My five years of high school English were dominated by some of the most vapid aspects of our culture. In history, meanwhile, we took a suffocatingly PC approach that emphasised all that is wrong about our nation's past and identity.

Studies are repeatedly showing that standards in literacy and numeracy are slipping. Regrettably, the Howard government failed to halt this trend. But at least it, unlike Labor, recognised the link between falling standards and the time spent analysing the values espoused by, say, a Vegemite jar.

Luckily, many Australian children are indeed articulate and well-read. But this is in spite of their schooling, not because of it. They are fortunate to have parents who see the problem, correct their spelling and grammar and guide them towards better literature than Harry Potter. As for the young people who dispute that this is even an issue, in many cases their education has been so inadequate that they don't even realise its deficiencies. Even if most students can read and write at what the government deems an appropriate standard, the question remains: could they do better?

At high school, I can remember a grand total of five English lessons on language. In Year 8, we had one on synonyms, which was so puerile it was insulting (for example: "big, enormous"), and in Year 11, noticing that many students were still making mistakes in elementary punctuation, our teacher endeavoured to explain the difference between "its" and "it's". Oh, but I'm forgetting, we learned these things in primary school, didn't we? And apparently, grammar and spelling were better taught integrated into all our subjects. Perhaps my (first-rate) physics teachers should have taught me some French as well?

I read seven novels in my five years of English classes. We did study a few works from the canon: four of Shakespeare's plays, A Room with a View and Pride and Prejudice (though we tended to watch the cinematic adaptations to analyse film techniques).

However, since everything is a text (even a table, one teacher told us), and all texts are of equal merit, it didn't matter whether we were reading Macbeth or watching Australian Story. We still churned out essays on dominant discourses, foregrounding, privileging and marginalisation. I recycled these essays from one year to the next, and still ended up with good grades.

All I learned from five years of English was that "texts" can have multiple "readings", and that it is not necessary to choose the one the author intended. What a profound observation. Never mind the subtle nuances of our beautiful language, as employed by Blake, Hardy or Steinbeck. "Critical literacy" taught me to become a critical thinker: critical, that is, of what the education authorities disapproved of.

Subsequently, I became an authority on the marginalisation of the working classes in Pride and Prejudice. I became well-practised at disparaging the West. After a term studying racism, my understanding of American and Australian history surely lacked nothing, except perhaps some knowledge of the oldest constitution in the world, or the war with fascist Japan. I knew plenty about the binding of women's feet in ancient China. But was I aware of the beginnings of democracy in Greece?

After a term on the Vietnam War, everyone had grasped that Americans are stupid. What a shame we never studied the Cold War as a whole, and that nobody mentioned the millions of people who died under Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. How about the Holocaust, the foundation of Israel and the subsequent turbulence in the Middle East?

It gets worse. Of my eight terms of history, one was spent on popular culture, one on foot-binding, one on East Timor, and one on racism. In selecting only those periods in history to study, our teachers made it clear what their views were. Yet surely it is inappropriate for them to show political affiliations of any persuasion. Their task should be to provide students with the facts (yes, the facts), discuss arguments on both sides, encourage us make up our own minds and to aspire to great things. At the moment, though, we're made to feel ashamed of most of our history, and to wallow in the cultural mire that is postmodernism.

We were continually being told at school that we were getting a world-class education. Frankly, though, I feel cheated in the humanities. The teaching of other subjects was excellent. Other young Queenslanders may protest that their own experience was nothing like mine. If that is the case, they were fortunate not to attend a school that boasted of "leading the way" in progressive education. Unless Julia Gillard has significantly more influence over the teachers' unions and the state bureaucrats than her predecessor, I am certain that all students will soon have to endure the same boredom that I did.

Source





20 December, 2007

British universities cut back on research

THE PhD - seen as a foundation for an academic career - is becoming redundant for many lecturers as they are increasingly sidelined into teaching-only roles.

The claim is made in a research paper presented to the Society for Research into Higher Education annual conference this week, which links the increased selectivity of the research assessment exercise with a rise in the number of teaching-only contracts. It warns that the RAE has put pressure on academics to publish the "right sort of papers in the right sort of journals" or to risk being "consigned to the waste-land of the research-inactive".

The paper by Stephen Court, senior research officer at the University and College Union, warns: "There is a danger that entrants into the profession will be over-qualified if staff with PhDs end up in a post that does not require research." He explains: "Academics may have started their careers conventionally, investing three or more years in a PhD, and if they find themselves in a teaching-only role that would be quite damaging."

The paper highlights rapid growth in the number of teaching-only posts, up from 12,000 to 40,000 in a decade. They now account for a quarter of all academic staff positions. The biggest teaching-only employers are found across the sector, including the research-intensive University College London, the University of East Anglia and post-92 institutions with less research activity.

Mr Court adds: "It is a part of the academic culture of the past 50 or 100 years that teaching goes hand in hand with research, and to be removed from that position must be very painful."

The paper says the proportion of academics classified as doing teaching and research that were counted as research-active for the purposes of the RAE fell from about 66 per cent in 1995-96 to 58 per cent in 2001-02, and appears to be in further decline as 2008 RAE entries were finalised last month. It says: "Often, if universities do not feel that an academic's research is up to RAE standard, those considered not research-active will be put on a teaching-only contract."

Lisa Lucas, senior lecturer in education at Bristol University, said the days when a masters was enough preparation for a career in academia were "long gone". She said: "Just because someone is not submitted to the RAE and is therefore deemed research-inactive doesn't mean they are not doing research that has a bearing on their teaching."

Arwen Raddon, a lecturer at Leicester University's Centre for Labour Market Studies, said the PhD was now a prerequisite for many academic posts regardless of the role. She argued that the view of teaching as the poor relation of research was a modern one. "The PhD was traditionally seen as an entry qualification that gave you a permit to teach," she said.

"It is only more recently that the emphasis in the academic role has shifted towards research and away from teaching. Retired academics I spoke to were actually discouraged from doing research in their early days and urged to focus on teaching because they were told this was what higher education was really about."

Dr Raddon said that some postgraduates, far from seeing teaching as a backwater, were put off by the pressure to publish early in their career. "One told me they were considering going into further education, where they would be able to teach but without the pressures of the RAE," she said. "Similarly, among early-career academics, having the emphasis taken away from teaching is not a positive experience, as this is one area they enjoy and where they feel they can 'make a difference'. "So if those in teaching-only posts feel they are overqualified, perhaps this is more a reflection of the way in which teaching now seems to be less valued in the higher education environment where the pressure to publish is everything."

William Locke, assistant director of the Open University's Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, also saw value in teachers having research training - with benefits for students and their careers. He said: "High levels of scholarship are required to teach in higher education, and a PhD is one means of training for this. "Young academics may also move on to posts that require research expertise later in their careers. Or the policy of selectivity or higher education institutions' strategies for the next RAE may change, requiring research alongside teaching responsibilities."

Ron Barnett, professor of higher education at the University of London's Institute of Education, said he could understand the frustration of those in teaching-only posts who saw themselves as potential researchers but questioned how many fell into that category.

He said a teaching-only role did not preclude scholarship, which he argued was still possible even when contracts fail to encourage it. "Many worthwhile publications are not dependent on primary empirical research: it just needs good libraries and thinking time," he said. "If teaching-only contracts allow time in the library then they allow implicitly for thinking and writing. "So an individual could develop a writing profile even though their contract did not include an obligation of that kind. "Einstein wrote several of his papers while working in a patent office, and wasn't Trollope a Post Office clerk?"

Source




UC gets ever more racist

No chance of concentrating on the individual, I suppose

Candice Shikai doesn't like math. She took advanced math classes in elementary school only because her parents pushed her. "Other students said that because I was Asian, of course, I was going to be in the advanced class," said the UCLA senior. "But I struggled immensely in math. Now I'm a history major."

Being held up collectively as the "model minority" is a disservice to some Asian American students, say University of California administrators and student groups that pushed to change the way the UC system collects students' ethnic data. "Forty percent of UCLA fits under the Asian category, and it is presumed that we don't have any educational problems," said Shikai, who is Japanese American. "That is not true."

The UC system announced recently it will become the first public higher education institution in the state to collect data on an expanded list of Asian ethnic groups, from Tongan and Fijian to Hmong and Cambodian. UC's undergraduate applications next year will include 23 Asian American and Pacific Islander categories, nearly three times the eight currently recorded. Dividing Asian and Pacific Island students into more precisely defined ethnic groups will allow universities to monitor graduation and retention rates and tailor outreach programs to groups that need them, officials say. "We expect that the more detailed breakdown for Asian Americans will help us find out, for example, the extent of differences in university admissions and enrollment trends among Hmong, Guamanian, or other Asian students," Pamela Burnett, director of undergraduate admissions for UC Davis, said in an e-mail.

Thousands of UC students behind the "Count Me In" campaign that pushed for the new applications argued that knowing more about who is enrolled will result in a more balanced, inclusive admissions policy. "I totally support it," said Kathy Her, a vice president of the Hmong Student Union at UC Davis. Recently, in preparation for a Hmong workshop at a conference for students of color at UC Santa Cruz, she and a friend tried to find retention and drop-out rates for Hmong. "We wanted to compare our different schools," she said. But the exact numbers didn't exist. "That's because when we applied for college we had to check the 'other' Asian category," she said. "I wanted to know how many have gone to UC Davis and what has kept them here." Her wondered if a retention program called Southeast Asians Furthering Education is keeping Hmong classmates in school - and if scholarships are helpful in bringing them to the Davis campus.

Vic Ramos, principal of Rosemont High School, said having better information on which Asian ethnic groups are getting into UC will help high schools focus on students who need more preparation. "It will allow us to collect data to see how successful we are with different populations," he said.

Bill Kidder, special assistant to the vice president for student affairs for the UC Office of the President, said the information will be important for diverse areas such as the Sacramento region. Census Bureau figures from 2006 show Sacramento is home to more than 188,000 Asians - from 119 Bangladeshis to more than 39,000 Chinese and 11,692 Laotians. "The student population we have today looks different than we had 20 years ago, but our categories had changed very little over those years," said Kidder.

Ethnicity cannot be used in UC's admission process - not since the 1996 passage of Proposition 209 - but the campuses still keep track of who gets accepted. This year's class of in-state freshmen at UC is 35.5 percent white, 35.3 percent Asian American, 18.7 percent Latino and 3.6 percent African American.

Asian American students involved in the "Count Me In" campaign pointed out the significant difference between newly immigrated Asian Americans from poor countries and groups who have been in the United States for generations. Less than 10 percent of recently immigrated Hmong Americans have earned a college degree, compared - for example - with 40 percent of Japanese Americans who have at least a bachelor's degree. "We've been asking for (more detailed data) for a very, very long time," said Wendy Ho, director of Asian American studies at UC Davis. "We find that many of our communities do very well, but many are struggling. The nuances and specificities of cultures can now be made visible."

Her, the UC Davis student, estimated that there are about 400 Hmong on campus. But that is a guess. "In the application process and around campus, nobody really knows who we are," she said. "If you are tan, dark-haired and have small eyes, you are automatically assumed to be Chinese or Japanese. "I've been called Korean. But I'm Hmong. I may have some of the same facial features. But unless somebody asks me, they will never know."

Source





19 December, 2007

Ohio: Class Project Teaches How to Illegally Immigrate

(Columbus, Ohio) For the fifth straight year, a high school Spanish teacher has assigned her students a three-week project to devise a workable plan for a Latino to sneak into the U.S., plus find shelter and food to survive.

Try it legally, Erica Vieyra told her 40 senior Spanish students at Olentangy Liberty High School. Fill out the correct documents, follow the proper steps. And then, after they spent days completing the actual paperwork from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, she took out her red ink pad and stamped a big, fat DENIED across every request.

Now, she told the students, come illegally. Forge your documents, find a way across the border. Then, research real ads and find a place to live in Columbus. Figure out what it would cost, how to get food. Plan how to survive.

The students had to go to real businesses and ask for Spanish-language job applications. They had to visit a bank and ask for new-account documents written in Spanish.

Vieyra promised them that the process -- even in make-believe -- would frustrate them. But they would gain, she hoped, an understanding of what is one of the most important political and humanitarian issues facing the U.S. government today.

Kind of one-sided, I'd say. After all, instead of having the students simulate being generic, non-descript Latinos, Vieyra could have them pretend to be MS-13 gang members sneaking into the U.S. to develop crime networks.

Alternatively, Vieyra could have the students imagine themselves as intelligence operatives for Venezuelan marxist thug Hugo Chavez, charged with infiltrating the U.S. government to conduct espionage.

However, it's not to be. Vieyra's teaching of the Spanish language has taken a back seat to propagandizing the students with her leftist political beliefs. She cautions, though, that she's not trying to influence the students, rather just teach them "a little empathy."

As such, I'd recommend renaming the course from "Spanish V" to "Empathy for Illegal Aliens in the U.S."

Tipped by a very unhappy Olentangy Schools taxpayer.



China: Teachers Sentenced in Student Prostitution Ring

(Guizhou Province, China) A middle school teacher, Chi Yao, has been sentenced to death and another teacher, Hai Long, received 11 years in prison for their roles in a sickening prostitution ring involving young teen girls. The teachers' wives, Zhao Qingmei and Li Huiyan, operated the ring and one of them was also sentenced to death.

Reportedly, the ring forced 23 girls, six being younger than 14, to have sex with men during the period from March to June 2006. More than 20 young girls were given to men seeking virgins and 22 of the girls were local primary or middle school students.

From Shanghai Daily:

Zhao Qingmei, 28, the mastermind, was sentenced to death in Weining County last Friday, the report said. She sold snack food on campus after working as a temporary teacher at the Central Primary School in Xinfa township of Weining, the report said. Her husband Chi Yao was a teacher at the township's middle school.

In March 2006, Zhao planned with a local woman identified as Wei Yaqin, who is still on the run, how to earn money by forcing teenage girls into prostitution.

Interestingly, Zhao's husband, Chi Yao, was also sentenced to death but with two years' probation. It's unclear what that means.

Fourteen other people were also prosecuted for their involvement in the ring and received prison sentences from one year to life. Many were hostel owners. Meanwhile, Wei Yaqin is on the lam.



Britain: Student teachers 'bullied' away from working in private schools

Ingrained Leftism at teacher-training colleges again

Student teachers enrolled on state-funded training courses are being told they risk "selling their souls" by working in independent schools, according to a new report. Some graduates joining fee-paying schools are said to have been made to feel like "pariahs" as teacher training colleges "bully" students towards state schools, it is claimed

The findings - in a survey by the Independent Schools Council - will fuel suspicions over increasing hostility in the public sector towards private education. Almost 40,000 students completed teacher training courses at universities and colleges across England last year. Under existing regulations, they are required to work in a school for at least a year before being considered fully qualified. But according to an ISC survey of 750 graduates, one in 10 were told by tutors that it was "not possible" to do an induction year in the private sector, which is untrue.

Four in 10 teachers said they had been given "no information" about the possibility of working in independent schools, suggesting that many trainees were being diverted towards state schools. Only 32 per cent of new teachers reported that university and college tutors were supportive of those attempting to work the in the fee-paying sector. Some teachers reported "negative comments and attitudes" from staff, revealing a "quite striking level of hostility and ignorance" towards schools. One teacher said tutors' reactions ranged from "quiet disappointment to utter indignation". Another insisted: "They attempted to make pariahs of us - almost like institutional bullying."

The report said: "Other tutors had been openly hostile, criticising the morality of squandering one's training in the independent sector, and suggesting that there was an obligation to give something back to the state, society, and the British taxpayer." One teacher told researchers: "It was very clear that they wouldn't have given me a place had they known, and told me to 'examine my social conscience'." Another revealed: "I was made to feel that I was selling my soul."

Surprisingly, the report made particular criticism of Oxford and Cambridge universities. Of 35 Cambridge trainees quizzed, just six said they had received a positive response to working in private schools. Only one of the 17 Oxford graduates was told to consider working in independent schools.

The ISC, which represents schools educating 80 per cent of children in the private sector, has now written to 150 training colleges asking demanding fairer treatment. "We would expect that factually accurate information concerning all teaching and induction opportunities in all schools is imparted to trainee teachers in a professional manner," said Judith Fenn, director of recruitment. "We would also hope that this professionalism be extended to the even handed treatment of any and all trainees who are successful in finding employment in any school."

The report comes amid growing concerns over public sector attitudes towards the independent sector. Under legislation published this week, fee-paying schools are being forced to register directly with Ofsted for the first time - a move branded a threat to their independence. A recent shake-up of charity law also means fee-paying schools no longer have an automatic right to call themselves charities - a status which brings tax breaks worth œ100 million a year.

The Training and Development Agency for Schools, the teacher training quango, said: "Newly-qualified teachers can complete their induction in independent schools affiliated to the ISC with the support of a qualified teacher. Clear induction guidance is available on the TDA website."

Source




Petty Connecticut principal centrally plans recess to avoid "competition"

Even though competition is a major part of life

One local school principal has basically abolished recess for students. He is endowed with all sorts of theories about how to socially engineer young people and mould them into the shape he wants and recess is something he doesn't particularly care for -- at least not the traditional recess.

He has banned students from playing tag, kickball, soccer and the like. Why? He doesn't think students should be allowed to play anything where there are scores. It might hurt someone's feelings. And he doesn't like the idea that play was unstructured, that it didn't have a central planner telling the children what to do and when to do it.

This loon is Mark Johnson of Oakdale School in Montville, Connecticut. Parents inundated him with complaints after he started his social engineering experiment with their children so he relented a bit. He will now allow kickball provided that the children do not keep score.

Johnson sounds like some chic, lame brained, trendy Lefty. He tells people that he doesn't like games that encourage competition because competititon is conflict. The children should learn to cooperate. Of course in real life the competitve market is one of cooperation all the time. What irks the central planners is that the cooperation is done without them.

Kids play games and they play games with each other. That requires them to cooperate. A baseball game with two teams requires numerous children to cooperate. Without that cooperation they can't form teams and play the game. What is irking this bureaucrat is not that there is no cooperation but that it is uncontrolled. He is upset because he is not directing it. This is the mindset of the bureaucrat/politicians -- the belief that others absolutely "need" them. In reality we'd be better off with them 99% of the time.

He says that when kids play on their own, without his control, "kids are made to feel badly." His solution is to make all of them equally miserable by forbidding them from playing games they like. This man is Nanny run amok. He told the New York Times that kids can still move about -- how nice of him! For instance they "are free to walk the grounds with the school nurse" -- god forbid they walk the grounds without a nurse in tow! They can "sing in the chorus" or "pick up liter". Pick up liter!!! His childish version of the Gulag includes having the kids labor.

Johson, with all of five years experience as a petty bureaucrat, wants to undo a tradition of hundreds of years. During their free time children play. And they play quite spontaneously. They don't need the moronic class of petty officials to structure their play for them. If it is structured it isn't play. Johnson just drones about how: "We're really responsible for what kinds of people these kids will be..."

What kind? Apparently he thinks the kind of adults they should be are those who look to central authority to structure every facet of their life. His view requires people who obey and don't think for themselves. His view pushes the idea that people are incompetent and inherently bad. They need an expert to order them about and keep them under supervision.

Source




Schools are having virtually no impact on the progress of 11 to 14-year-olds in maths

According to a study by University of Manchester researchers

Professor Julian Williams from the School of Education led the investigation which found that year on year improvements in mathematics were almost nonexistent for higher and lower achievers. Specially devised, independent tests revealed that the performance of 12,591 English 5 to 14-year-olds remained almost static in secondary schools - what Professor Williams calls 'the plateau effect'. Primary school test scores did rise every year in the 120 schools studied by the team, though the increases slow down gradually with age.

The team also identified that children born in the summer who start their education as the youngest in the class are lower achievers than children born in the summer who start as the oldest in the class. However, the extra year's advantage is reversed by the time children get to 11.

Professor Williams said: "Our data confirms that children across a range of abilities make practically no progress in maths between the ages of about 11- and 14-years at school. "This pattern between 11 and 14-years is not significantly different for the higher or lower achieving child.

"At this rate of progress it would take ten years of extra teaching for a lower achieving classmate to catch up with his or her higher achieving peer, and five years for the lower achiever to score as well as the average in the class. "We did record short term improvements in test scores around the period of national testing at key stage 1 and 2 (years 2 and 6). "However, these increases were short term and the overall trend continued shortly afterwards in years 3 and 7, suggesting lack of lasting gain in children's understanding.

"The implications seem to us so serious that, rather than look for alternative explanations for our data, policy makers should as a matter of urgency seek to survey performance by large scale representative samples."

He added: "The figures also suggest that 'early years' children in the next year up are doing much better than a child of the same age in the younger class, having perhaps experienced as much as a whole year's extra schooling.

"A natural interpretation here is that the year two children have had up to a year longer in school and this extra teaching and curriculum exposure is reflected in enhanced performance. "However, this advantage would seem to have disappeared by the end of primary school, and goes into reverse in secondary school.

"It seems that the extra year of schooling as a 'small fish in a big pond' is disadvantaging the younger learners born in August. Starting school in September seems to disadvantage these children."

Source




Teachers 'bullied more' in Australian public schools

TEACHERS at government schools are bullied more frequently than their colleagues in the independent and Catholic sectors, with a survey suggesting the problem is rife in Western Australia and Queensland. Preliminary findings from a national survey conducted by the University of New England found government teachers were commonly criticised for their work, excluded from decision-making, threatened, intimidated, shoved and sexually harassed.

The voluntary internet survey attracted more than 800 responses, with 99.8 per cent reporting they had been bullied at school by fellow teachers, principals or parents. Senior lecturer in business, economics and public policy at UNE, Dan Riley, said the results showed that a disturbing proportion of teachers were being bullied regularly. "Government schools are not very attentive to bullying," he said. "Claims made (by bullied teachers) often take a long time to be investigated or are ignored altogether."

The survey found bullying was less common in Catholic and independent schools. The most common instance reported at independent schools was insulting emails. Most complaints were made by teachers in NSW, about 40 per cent, but teachers in Western Australia and Queensland were over-represented in the survey.

The acting federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, stressed that the survey was voluntary. "It needs to be recognised that the respondents had self-selected to participate in the survey ... although the issue of bullying is of concern in any workplace, and this is no exception," he said.

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18 December, 2007

Another kid-hating school

An elementary student in Marion County was arrested Thursday after school officials found her cutting food during lunch with a knife that she brought from home, police said. The 10-year-old girl, a student at Sunrise Elementary School in Ocala, was charged possession of a weapon on school property, which is a felony. According to authorities, school employees spotted the girl cutting her food while she was eating lunch and took the steak knife from her.

The girl told sheriff's deputies that she had brought the knife to school on more than one occasion in the past. Students told officials that the girl did not threaten anyone with the knife. The girl was arrested and transported to the Juvenile Assessment Center.

Source




Successful charter school discriminated against

When it opened in September 2003, Sacramento Charter High School faced the challenge of turning around a troubled inner-city high school in which academic performance had plummeted. Where other schools do a phase-in at the start - such as Rosemont High School, which began with 345 ninth-graders in 2003 and added a grade each year - the Sac High charter took over the existing ninth- through 12th-grade student body. This was a transformation school, not a startup.

As the school board considers charter renewal Thursday, members should remember that context. In a short 4« years, the Sac High charter has made progress that should be the envy of any major urban school district. On the state's yardstick for measuring school performance, based on various test scores, the old Sac High had an Academic Performance Index of 568 the year it closed. The Sac High charter improved to 631 by last year. That's still short of the state goal of 800 (on a scale of 200 to 1,000), but the school is making progress.

And consider improvement in the API for one subgroup, black students: It was 474 in the old Sac High 2003-2004 but rose to 624 at the charter by last year, up 150 points. Compare that to Hiram Johnson High School over the same period: 460 to 535, a 75 point gain. And college acceptance rates for the class of 2007, the first class to graduate from the charter, are the highest among the district's high schools.

How has the charter school accomplished this? All students have an individual learning plan. They are expected to visit four-year colleges and win acceptance to at least one. They attend school from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Students who miss assignments attend "Friday Night Blues" sessions to finish work. All students are expected to do 40 hours of community service a year. Discipline is tight.

And now, the PS 7 charter, a K-8 program, is about to send its first class of ninth-graders to the Sac High charter in fall 2008. That school has an API of 749 and fosters a college-going mind-set at an early age. No one should doubt that academic performance at the high school will improve in the next five years.

That's not to say that the Sac High charter hasn't faced problems. One big problem: Exclusion from the recruiting pipeline. While McClatchy, Kennedy, Hiram Johnson, Luther Burbank and the Sac High charter have had enrollment declines, there is a difference. The district doesn't list the charter as a high school, bars it from the open enrollment process, denies it access to middle-school fairs and won't provide names of eighth-graders to the school.

The district and the charter school need to negotiate a separate agreement on recruiting. Other California districts allow independent charters such as Sac High to prepare mailings to eighth-graders where the district affixes the mailing labels (to preserve confidentiality). The other recruiting avenues are noncontroversial and freely accepted elsewhere.

The Sac High charter is embraced nationally as a model for inner-city high school transformation. It should be embraced locally, too. The school board should renew a five-year charter Thursday - and begin negotiations to open the recruiting process. Let the transformation continue.

Source




A Nazi judge in America

A homeschooling mom in Utah has been ordered by a judge to enroll her children in a public school district within 24 hours, and have them in class tomorrow, all because of a paperwork glitch that very well could be the fault of the district. The mother, Denise Mafi, told WND that she already has enrolled her children in the district, under the threat from Judge Scott Johansen, who serves in the juvenile division of the state's 7th Judicial District, that he would order her children taken away from her.

As WND has reported previously, such threats are becoming more and more common in Germany, but that nation still lives by a Nazi-era law that makes homeschooling illegal. Mafi told WND that not only is homeschooling legal in Utah, she's been at it for nearly a decade. So what's the problem here?

It seems that an affidavit she faxed to the local school district for the 2006-2007 school year, documenting her homeschooling plans, was lost by the district. So when she went to court with her juvenile son to have the charges dismissed (under a case held in abeyance procedure) stemming from a clash among children, she suddenly was presented with four counts against her for failing to comply with the state's compulsory education requirement.

She thought she was meeting the court's demands earlier when she enrolled her two youngest children in classes, and put her two older children in an online curriculum connected to the public school. "Well everything fell apart in court today. I had to enroll my two oldest in public school. They start on Monday. If I didn't the judge said I would lose custody of my children. He threw out the plea and we go to trial on January 9th. I have NO CHANCE with this judge. He will find me guilty. He already has. So I will probably be spending some time in jail. Please pray for my children," she noted in an online forum connected to a "Five In A Row" homeschool curriculum she had used when her children were younger.

She said her public defender had reached a plea agreement she thought would be satisfied by her action, an agreement hammered out with the prosecutor. However, the judge rejected everything, she told WND. "It is a long story but basically it boils down to the school district says I didn't file my homeschool affidavit last year. I faxed it to the school district office on Oct. 27, 2006. Somehow it was lost. I have my copy," she said on the forum. "The judge is very anti-homeschooling. Stated last week that homeschool was a failure. I am a total nervous wreck," she said.

She is part of the Utah Home Education Association and she was seeking advice from that organization, but officials could not be reached Friday or Saturday by WND. She is not a member of the international organization concerned with homeschooling called Home School Legal Defense Association, but a spokesman for the organization told WND officials were reviewing the situation, and the initial reaction was that the prosecution of the woman was simply outrageous.

Mafi also told WND that the judge's other demands are that her children are not allowed to miss school unless they have a notice from a doctor, and the judge initially wanted to issue an order that she was not allowed to move out of his jurisdiction for two years. "This is all because the school district says they never received my 2006-2007 homeschool affidavit. I have a copy of the signed affidavit. I have already received my exemption for the 2007-2008 school year," she said.

A WND call to the prosecutor in the case did not get a response, nor did other judicial officials respond to inquiries about the situation.

Mafi told WND the worst part is that because it is a misdemeanor, Utah law does not allow her to demand a jury trial. But it also carries with it a maximum penalty of six months in jail, on each of the four charges. She said she had received a confirmation the fax to the school was received when she sent it, but likes to clean out her paperwork before the start of a new school year, and apparently had disposed of it. She said she has asked her public defender to work on a complaint against the judge and she's trying to raise funds to have a private lawyer continue her case. "If it was any other person in the state, they can put their children in an online public school and it's acceptable," she told WND. "I can't do it. I cannot pull my children out and put them in a private school of my choice." "He [the judge] just does not want them under my supervision," she said.

Mafi said the state has made no allegation of education neglect, and her children are performing work at grade level. But she objects to the public schools' anti-Christian world view, she said.

As WND has reported, German authorities operating under the law stemming from Hitler's desire to control the minds of youth have ruled not only that homeschooling is a basis for child endangerment charges, but a local government was remiss in allowing a mother to take her two children to another country where homeschooling is legal. The recent decision from the Federal High Court in Karlsruhe, Germany's highest court, was reported by the German edition of Agence France-Presse as well as Netwerk Bildungsfreiheit, an advocacy organization for Germans who wish to homeschool.

Now the organization is noting the similarities with earlier court rulings, when Adolf Hitler was in power. A ruling from the State Court in Hamburg dated 1936 pointed to "endangerment of the mental wellbeing of children, who would have been denied participation in the national community.," a premise that corresponds to the recent Federal Supreme Court decision, the group said. "Only the words have been chosen somewhat differently by the Supreme Court in order to conceal the fascist spirit of the decision," the analysis said. "It is quite chilling that the reasons stated by the authorities and courts in child custody terminations in Hitler's regime . correspond in their spirit exactly to the decision recently rendered by the Federal Supreme Court," the analysis said.

It said what courts used to call the "national community" now is the "public" and what was "participation in the national community" now has been called a justified interest in "counteracting the formation of religiously or ideologically characterized parallel societies and integrating minorities in this area."

The analysis found that the "National Socialist (Nazi) regime" specifically targeted members of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization, including the State Court in Hamburg decision from 1936 in which judges found: "Custody rights shall be terminated for parents who, as fanatical Bible students, cannot rear their children in accordance with today's State and because this endangers the mental wellbeing of the children, who are thereby prevented from participating in the national community." Hundreds of children were taken from their families for reasons no more important than they failed to sing Nazi songs with others, the analysis noted.

"Authorities, who interpreted the civil code according to their national socialist legal notions, considered it beyond question that the childrearing practices of Jehovah's Witnesses was 'endangerment of child welfare' and 'mental and moral neglect,'" the analysis said.

WND has reported previously how German officials targeted an American family of Baptist missionaries for deportation because they belong to a group that refuses "to give their children over to the state school system." A teenager, Melissa Busekros, also returned to her family months after German authorities took her from her home and forcibly detained her in a psychiatric facility for being homeschooled. And WND has reported on other families facing fines, frozen bank accounts and court-ordered state custody of their children for resisting Germany's mandatory public school requirements, which by government admission are assigned to counter "the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different world views."

In the case involving Melissa, a German appeals court ultimately ordered legal custody of the teenager, who was taken from her home by a police squad and detained in a psychiatric hospital for being homeschooled be returned to her family because she no longer is in danger. The lower court's ruling had ordered police officers to take Melissa - then 15 - from her home, if necessary by force, and place her in a mental institution for a variety of evaluations. She was kept in custody from early February until April, when she turned 16 and under German law was subject to different laws. At that point she simply walked away from the foster home where she had been required to stay and returned home.

Wolfgang Drautz, consul general for the Federal Republic of Germany, has commented on the issue on a blog, noting the government "has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different world views and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole." Drautz said homeschool students' test results may be as good as for those in school, but "school teaches not only knowledge but also social conduct, encourages dialogue among people of different beliefs and cultures, and helps students to become responsible citizens."

The German government's defense of its "social" teachings and mandatory public school attendance was clarified during an earlier dispute on which WND reported, when a German family wrote to officials objecting to police officers picking their child up at home and delivering him to a public school. "The minister of education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling," said a government letter in response. "... You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. ... In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement."

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17 December, 2007

Honor Roll Schmonner Roll

(Wilton, Connecticut) Congratulations to the students and faculty of Wilton High School. An astounding 67 percent of the student body made the honor roll.

It appears logical to speculate that inclusion on the honor roll will someday carry the same importance, value and distinction as being listed in the phone book.

Meanwhile, there's no news being reported on the death of the bell curve.




Student Suspended for Warning of Sex Offenders in School

(Gig Harbor, Washington) Last week, a student at Gig Harbor High School, Raydon Gilmore, was suspended for posting warning fliers about two convicted juvenile sex offenders who attend his school. Holy moly!

Three other students, names are withheld, were also suspended for the same infraction. The sex offender students are listed as a Level 1 and a Level 2, respectively considered to be low-risk and moderate-risk of re-offending.

According to Gig Harbor Principal Greg Schellenberg, Gilmore and three other students were suspended for three days for harassment and misuse of school equipment.

The students, he said, used a school printer to produce "dozens" of fliers with the sex offenders' pictures, home addresses and other personal information.

Schellenberg said the students taped the fliers on vending machines and a pingpong table and dropped them outside bathrooms. The school's security cameras caught some of them in the act.

The principal said the students should have brought their concerns to a teacher or an administrator. They also violated a rule that state officials must approve any materials that students post on campus walls.

Apparently, legislative guidance on notifications regarding sex offenders in school is minimal. The sheriff notifies the principal and the principal notifies the sex offender's teachers. That's it. Neither students nor parents are notified. In fact, all cognizant parties are cautioned to be low key regarding the sex offender's presence among other students.

Principal Schellenberg says that the school administrators "at least periodically, try to point parents where to find information."

If students want to talk about a sex offender who attends school, that's fine, he said. Distributing offenders' information and opening their convictions to a "public forum" at school isn't.

"We want everybody to feel safe and comfortable," Schellenberg said. "It's hard to imagine anyone feeling that way with fliers being posted about them."

Therefore, the school makes "everyone" feel safe and comfortable by not disclosing when a sex offender is present. Simply put, they are kept in the dark. Like it or not, that's the system. Unfortunately.

All responsibility resides with the principal to make sure adequate measures are implemented to confidentially monitor the sex offender students and hopefully preclude any future criminal behavior. As a reminder, the sex offender information is available but one has to specifically be looking for it.

All in all, the issue remains contentious as Gilmore and his mother, Meloney Garthe, continue to complain about the suspensions. Gilmore maintains that he was concerned about vulnerable girls in the student body and he would do the same thing again. His mother says that she is proud of her son for doing a public service.

My take? Convicted sex offenders should not be allowed near public high schools, much less inside.




The problems of outdoor play for British kids

I am not positively advocating that we encourage our children to fall out of trees or get whanged off roundabouts moving at 200 rpm. But the scabophobic measures we have taken to protect our children have had consequences we could not have intended. Ed Balls yesterday called for children to rediscover the joys of the playground, and the football kickaround. He painted a Brueghelian picture of children swarming to play hopscotch and tag and British bulldog, and though we all share his ambitions he could have been more honest, frankly, about the real reasons for the decline in outdoor play, and the role of government in the disaster.

Let us take the surfaces of playgrounds, the ones that used to abrade our knees. Under an EU regulation EN 1176 local authorities are advised not to install playground equipment more than three metres high, and to use soft surfacing on the ground: hence the decline in scabs. To be fair to Brussels, this regulation is not compulsory, but authorities are so terrified of litigation that they slavishly enforce it. The measure does not seem to have made much difference to playground fatalities: there has been roughly one death every three or four years for the past 20 years. But the surface is extremely expensive, costing 7,000 pounds for 100 square metres, and that extra expense has certainly played a part in reducing the overall total of playground space available.

According to play expert Tim Gill, who has written a book on the subject, there are now roughly two square metres of public playground space for each child under 12, and that is not enough. So the next time Balls wants to talk sphericals about what the Government is doing to get more children to play outdoors, I suggest he has a couple of long introductory paragraphs about the baleful effect of over-regulation and litigation - followed by a heartfelt apology for everything he has done to encourage them.

He should then move on to acknowledge the real reason why parents are so reluctant to let their children play outside, and that is their fear of crime and thuggery - a fear that is not always unreasonable. When I was a child we used to knock around Camden on our bicycles; we used to walk to school and back without even thinking about it; and even though we used to trot off to buy Mr Whippys with a flake, we took so much outdoor exercise that an obese child was a genuine curiosity. We now have a world in which three per cent of young people carry a knife, and 20 per cent of 10-11-year-olds have been assaulted at least once in the past 12 months. Too many parks and play areas are dominated by intimidating gangs, and unless you have taken the trouble to become part of the gang, and to show the requisite levels of bravado and aggression, you may be nervous of playing in the same area.

It is a profound and sad change to the quality of children's lives, and there are several plausible explanations. One might cite the revolution in the relationship between adults and children, and the weird terror with which we all seem to regard the younger generation, and the loss of respect in the way they treat adults. There is a chronic shortage on the streets of any adult willing to exert any kind of authority - and that, these days, generally means the police. It does not help that 14 per cent of all police officers' time is spent on patrol, compared to 19.3 per cent on "paperwork"; but until we can find ways of getting more police out there, too much of our public space will be filled with a vague sense of menace.

Take that together with over-regulation of playground equipment, and no wonder children are deterred from playing outside. No wonder they are all glued to their blooming PlayStations. They have playgrounds that are at once scary in their inhabitants and tedious in their equipment - and the answer, of course, is to reverse the position. We need to stop the crazy culture of litigation, which has seen local authorities reduce the number of roundabouts they buy because roundabouts are now deemed too dangerous.

Teachers and expedition leaders should be protected from civil negligence claims unless they have shown "reckless disregard"; the law should be changed so that there is no obligation on local authorities to warn of an obvious risk (a roundabout goes round, for instance), and we must above all stop these judges from making ludicrous rulings in favour of compensation - and we could do that by insisting, as they make their rulings, that they allow for the benefits to society of encouraging kids to play outside.

What we need is less health and safety in the playground, and more safety on the streets, and no more initiatives from Mr Balls until he has got to grips with the real problem.

Source




Britain: Do schools exist for the kids or for the teachers?

Note that the teacher below was not asked to prove HER claims. If the problem is real it is she who should have been asked to move to another school

An eight-year-old was banished from her classroom after the teacher complained she was allergic to the fabric softener used on her clothes. Hope Nichols was made to work in a corridor because her class tutor kept developing a blocked-up nose and watering eyes. The school asked Hope's mother to change the fabric softener she uses - but she refused as Lenor is the only brand that does not irritate the girl's eczema and dermatitis.

Sarahjane Nichols was also asked to consider moving her daughter to a different school, she said. As the problem has not been resolved, Hope often has to sit at the back of the class. Her teacher takes breaks when she begins to develop a reaction, during which a classroom assistant takes over. Mrs Nichols, 39, said: "My daughter's allergy means she ends up literally scratching her skin off. "She gets it on her face, arms, stomach and back. "I am very sympathetic about the teacher's problem but Hope should not have been taken out of the classroom. "It was terrible for my little girl. All the other children think is that Hope has been asked to sit outside because she smells funny."

Hope joined Howard Junior School in Gaywood, near King's Lynn, Norfolk, in September. But last month Mrs Nichols was approached by her teacher. "She asked me to stop Hope spraying perfume on herself because it was upsetting her allergy," she said. "I thought it was a joke at first. I told her she doesn't use perfume. I just use washing powder and fabric conditioner like anyone else. "I went home and didn't think too much more about it because it seemed so strange. "But a few days later I got a letter from Gregory Hill, the head, saying I must change my washing powder and conditioner or reduce the amount. "I wrote back explaining that she had dermatitis and eczema and it would upset her allergy if it was changed.

"The head then wrote to me and asked for a doctor's note to prove what I was saying. "Hope uses creams and antihistamines so I got a doctor's note. Then the head asked me to come into the school for a discussion about how to resolve the situation. "But in the days before the meeting, Hope told me she had been put in the corridor and made to do her work from there sitting at a desk on three occasions."

Mrs Nichols, who is divorced and also has a 13-year- old daughter, added: "When I had the meeting with Mr Hill he asked if I would be offended if I was asked to move Hope to a different school. "But we live just a short distance away and the next nearest place is 20-minute walk away and I don't drive."

The school said that Hope had only been asked to leave the classroom on one occasion and this was "for a very short period". Mr Hill said: "This is an extremely unusual situation and one that we are working closely with Hope's mother to try to resolve. "Hope is a valued pupil at the school and is well liked."

Lenor has been made by Proctor & Gamble since the Sixties. Spokesman John Bailey said: "You can never say the chances of getting an allergic reaction are zero but they are negligible. "Some people do have a sensitivity to certain smells but this is not an allergy. "It can produce an emotional reaction and from the sounds of it in this case, a physical reaction." Using Lenor with a different fragrance might solve the problem, he added.

Source




Australia: A totally irresponsible government school system

Sounds a lot like Los Angeles. And Australia has nowhere near the ethnic problems of Los Angeles

It has been dubbed the roughest school in NSW. Gangs of marauding students beat one another up and even assault teachers. Staff at Queanbeyan High have threatened to take legal action after the latest brawl left teachers and a student with broken bones. Students have also set upon staff with sticks, refused to go to class and threatened teachers with violence outside school hours. The school is so dangerous, teachers recently took the extraordinary step of moving a no-confidence motion in the principal and his deputy. Talks are also under way about taking legal action against the NSW Education Department for failing to provide a safe working environment for staff and students.

The latest incident involved two separate attacks that left two teachers and a 15-year-old student seriously injured. The student's father told The Sunday Telegraph his son was king-hit from behind by a Year 12 student. "Three male teachers and one female teacher went to help my son, and were escorting him to the office when they were attacked by seven other students," he said. "One male teacher broke his ribs, another has possible fractures - and the female teacher got elbowed in the temple. "My son ended up with a broken nose and broken ribs."

The father, who asked that his name not be published, has accused the school of failing in its duty of care to protect his son. Despite the seriousness of the injuries, the school had refused to call an ambulance, he said. The school suspended all eight students, although the seven involved in the attack are believed to have been allowed back to class.

The father has written to Education Minister John Della Bosca and the NSW Teachers Federation seeking an explanation. According to staff statements obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, the incident was one of many at Queanbeyan High, described by federation officials as the roughest school in NSW. In May, seven teachers tried in vain to stop a brawl between Year 9-10 students and Year 11 students. In a statement, one of the teachers involved said a student had warned the deputy principal that a brawl was brewing. "This information should have been passed to staff on duty," the teacher said. "The deputy principal's response was that boys will be boys, and that they generally tire themselves from punching and stop before too long."

In October, a teacher helping a special-needs student who had fallen over was hit across the head with a large stick by a female student after she was told to go to class. A department spokesman said the issues raised by the union were being looked at. "The department has a zero-tolerance policy towards violence in schools," he said. [What good is a "policy"? Action is needed]

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16 December, 2007

New Campus Watch Website Feature: Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch readers are no doubt familiar with the numerous smears, false allegations, and hysterical accusations leveled against us by our opponents. Frequent charges of "McCarthyism," "censorship," "silencing professors," and "threats to academic freedom" are hurled at Campus Watch by those unaccustomed to the rigors of simple criticism. The hermetically sealed world of academia lends itself to this paranoid mindset and its ideologically sympathetic defenders have adopted a similar approach.

This attitude is even more prevalent in the field of Middle East studies, which was thrust into the spotlight after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and, more often than not, found wanting. Middle East studies academics are none too pleased at the justifiable criticism that has resulted. But instead of addressing the politicization, shoddy scholarship, and apologetics at the heart of the matter, those on the receiving end of Campus Watch's critiques tend to go on the attack, as do their allies. And truth is the first casualty.

Up until now, Campus Watch has responded to mischaracterizations via our blog, where, in the past seven months alone, we have posted a series of rebuttals and corrections. For those who missed the original posts, the links – in no particular order – follow:

Campus Watch Critiques, UC Santa Cruz Paper Cries "Censorship!"
Correcting the Record: Inaccuracies in Bangkok Post's Portrayal of Campus Watch
David Castle of Pluto Press Discredits Himself While Mischaracterizing Campus Watch
Howard Zinn Gets Campus Watch Wrong in Plugging Pluto Press and Joel Kovel's "Overcoming Zionism"
Priyamvada Gopal of Cambridge University Gets Campus Watch Wrong, Laments Cancellation of UCU Boycott Debate
National Lawyers Guild President Marjorie Cohn Misrepresents Campus Watch, Others
Pipe Dream at Binghamton, Badger Herald at Wisconsin Misrepresent Campus Watch
Correcting the Record: Jesse Walker at Reason Misinterprets Campus Watch Archives on Nadia Abu El-Haj
In Truth: Richard Silverstein's Fictions about Campus Watch, Paula Stern, and Nadia Abu El-Haj

Due to this proliferation of misrepresentations and falsehoods, Campus Watch has now set up a website feature to address them on a regular basis: Setting The Record Straight. The section can be accessed by passing one's mouse over the "About Campus Watch" category in the left-hand tab and clicking on "Setting The Record Straight." There are a number of items posted thus far, the links for which appear below:

MSU Stands Against Daniel Pipes
Fighting for a Better University
More Nuggets From A Nut House
The New McCarthyism
From "Pointless" to Intolerance: Islamofascism Week
Lobby Group Pressure Hinders Academic Freedom
The Culture War Descends on Columbia
The Campaigns to Silence Critics of Israel

Stay tuned for upcoming additions, as, inevitably, there will be plenty of opportunities to set the record straight.

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Why Harvard costs so much

Harvard University got some nice press this week by announcing it will reduce tuition for middle-class families. It already allows students whose parents earn less than $60,000 a year to attend Harvard free. Now it promises that families making up to $180,000 will pay no more than 10% of their annual income to finance the $45,600 that a year in Cambridge now costs.

Drew Gilpin Faust, the school's new president, said the policy is designed to help families facing "increasing pressures as middle-class lives have become more stressed." Before applauding Harvard's altruism too loudly, however, readers should know that the school also had its back against a wall. In September, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley held hearings on whether colleges should be forced to spend a higher percentage of their endowments each year.

While private foundations have been required for decades to shell out 5% of their total assets annually, universities decide for themselves and average close to 4%. The difference may seem small, but the money at stake is very large. Harvard's endowment is $35 billion, and growing, with implications that Fay Vincent illuminates nearby. Mr. Grassley wants to know why rich schools don't spend more of their money to reduce ballooning tuition.

When the hearings began, Kevin Casey, the senior director of federal and state relations at Harvard, told the Crimson student newspaper that "it may not be the best thing for Congress to dictate the formulas by which financial aid and endowment spend-out should be connected." Mr. Casey is right. But given the hundreds of millions of dollars that the university receives from the government each year, Senators inevitably start to think that Harvard's business is their business.

Ironically, these government handouts are creating the tuition problem. Tuition has risen about three percentage points faster than inflation every year for the past quarter-century. At the same time, the feds have put more and more money behind student loans and other financial aid. The government is slowly becoming a third-party tuition payer, with all the price distortions one would expect. Every time tuition rises, the government makes up the difference; colleges thus cheerfully raise tuition (and budgets), knowing the government will step in.

As a result, "colleges have little incentive to cut costs," says economist Richard Vedder, the author of "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much." Mr. Vedder explains that there are now twice as many university administrators per student as there were in the 1970s. Faculty members are paid more to teach fewer hours, and colleges have turned their campuses into "country clubs." Princeton's new $136 million dorm, according to BusinessWeek, has "triple-glazed mahogany casement windows made of leaded glass" and "the dining hall boasts a 35-foot ceiling gabled in oak and a 'state of the art servery,' " whatever a servery is.

Our financial-aid system also hurts middle-class applicants. Parents who have saved money for their child's tuition quickly find that, by the strange calculus of financial aid, they are charged more for college tuition than if they had blown their savings on a bigger house. Mr. Vedder wonders why universities should get to ask the income of their students before telling them how much they'll be charged. That sounds like price discrimination: If a car dealer tried to make you fill out the form students have to fill out for financial aid, he notes, "you'd run to a consumer protection agency."

So is college still worth it? Though academic standards have certainly fallen, college graduates still, on average, make about twice as much over the course of their lifetimes as people with only a high school diploma. So if the government got out of the higher education business, a lot of families might decide to make the sacrifice anyway, even without the tuition aid. But they might also decide that they can live without the mahogany windows.

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Australia: STUPID AND IRRESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT SCHOOL



When Connor Wilson was turned away from after-school care because his name wasn't on the list, he took matters into his own hands and decided to walk home - all 15km. That threw his mum, his school and police into a panic. Police found the six-year-old walking along Geelong's busiest road, the Princes Highway, more than 6km into his journey to his Whittington home.

Mum Ruth Wilson was furious with Corio South Primary and has pulled Connor out of the school. Ms Wilson said Connor could have been abducted or hit by a car.

On Wednesday morning last week, she organised for him to attend care that afternoon. But when he arrived for the after-school session, the carer told him his name was not on the list and he left. The school contacted police when they realised Connor was missing after 5pm. Ms Wilson said it was the second time in two months Connor had left school after being turned away from care. "I am extremely angry that this has happened again," she said. "Anything could have happened to him."

Ms Wilson said Connor's name was put on the care list for the following morning, Thursday, by mistake. Principal Neil Lynch said the school had apologised for the mistake. All students were routinely told to go to the school office if their parents didn't turn up to collect them, Mr Lynch said. Ms Wilson said Connor was familiar with the route home from the daily drive to and from school. "He is a smart little boy but he certainly won't be doing that again," she said. Ms Wilson said that Connor now knows that if there is a next time he is to go straight to the office.

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15 December, 2007

What a return on our "investment!"

One of our local collectivists wrote in recently, claiming to have had "a rip-roaring good laugh over the comments" of a reader who "thinks that because parents chose to have children they should be responsible for paying for the education of their kids. ... "What he needs to realize is that when he pays his share for education ... one of the children we are all educating might be the guy operating on us in 10 years, or the judge handing out a sentence to the guy who murdered your neighbor," asserts our cheerful would-be Young Pioneer. "Education has a trickle-down effect. Paying for a child's education now brings greater rewards for our society as a whole later. We can choose to educate them and give them a chance for a bright, productive future -- or we can use your tax dollars to build bigger prisons and more homeless shelters."

Look at that word "choose." Kind of makes it sound like we're being encouraged to voluntarily "choose" to contribute to the scholarship fund for poor kids at the local academy, doesn't it? In fact, school taxes are no more voluntary than meeting a holdup man in a dark alley, and such "investment" rhetoric is completely bogus. There's no "return on investment" -- that doctor isn't going to send you a share of his earnings (or even give you free or reduced-price care) because you "contributed" to his education by paying your property taxes years ago, any more than a Russian doctor today feels obliged to pay back the neighbors who were forced to finance his care and feeding after Comrade Stalin shot his parents.

That Russian doctor is now practicing in Miami, thank you very much, and quite rightly declares the "greater welfare of Soviet society" can go stuff itself. Russian collectivism meant medical students and their families didn't invest directly in their own educations, and weren't allowed to profit from their own educations, so the health care system worked about as well as our DMV. If you want to see the kind of wonderful care our current government schooling regime has in store for you in 40 years, go to Moscow, where male life expectancy is 59 and falling.

Compared with the illiterate young thugs with whom the letter-writer threatens us if we don't pay up (and there doesn't seem to be a current shortage of recruits for such duty), Alexis de Tocqueville found ours to be the most literate working class in the world in 1831 -- and crime was so rare that an un-escorted woman could travel the length of the Mississippi without locking her stateroom door. Before we had these collectivist, compulsion schools.

Care to try that now, after a century and a half of imposed pacifist enlightenment and busy kindling of the light of learning in the most profligate government youth camps in the history of the world? And why should this doctrine stop with schooling? Isn't it equally true that "feeding children has a trickle-down effect; paying for a child's food now brings greater rewards for our society as a whole later"? Why don't the collectivists require that I feed other people's children, too? Oh, wait, they do. I'm also made to fund "food stamps" and free hot breakfasts and lunches for school kids, too, whether I like it or not.

But once the complete care of offspring becomes a collective responsibility, doesn't the Great Collective have a right to step in and limit costs by restricting families to one child apiece, requiring the abortion of any further children -- the same way it can ban helmet-less motorcycle riding because it costs "us" too much in hospital bills? Of course it can. The Chinese communists do this, already. Anyone who objects is just being "selfish and greedy."

This returns us to our suggested experiment from last week. Let's poll a representative sampling of current high school upperclassmen or recent graduates, seeking to determine whether the government youth camps are surreptitiously propagandizing our kids on issues far afield from grammar and algebra: Ask our sample group whether marrying young -- at 19, say -- and starting a large family is a wise and admirable undertaking, or whether "teenage pregnancy is a dead-end behavior likely to trap you in permanent poverty" -- and please note the consistent absence of the important qualifier "unwed" before "teenage pregnancy."

I'm not saying either answer is necessarily right for every young person. But as the fertility rate of Americans descended from persons who came here legally before the Second World War falls toward the replacement rate, this country faces a demographic and cultural shift reminiscent of that now confronting large sections of Western Europe, where reproduction rates below 2.1 among the older racial and cultural group facilitates a de facto takeover by immigrants of massively different race, language and culture -- a nonviolent version of the intended conquest which Charles Martel so famously halted at Tours in 732. (Whoops, delete that "nonviolent" part. As I write this, "disenfranchised" black and Muslim immigrant youth are burning libraries and day care centers -- noted wellsprings of racial oppression -- in the suburbs of Paris.)

Because religions with substantial followings still advise their followers to "be fruitful and multiply," you'd expect the answer to our fertility question to be hotly debated. Instead, I suspect more than 90 percent of our test group will drone out the answer "dead-end behavior," almost as though it's memorized. How could this be, unless the schools have been actively propagandizing their charges on this issue?

If foreign enemy agents were sneaking into America and poisoning our water supplies with sterilizing agents, we'd consider that important. So why shouldn't there be a wide-ranging public debate about any doctrines concerning marriage, reproduction and family size, taught surreptitiously to our young by government agents, that have the same long-term effect?

The purpose of such surreptitious indoctrination of the young is to foreclose debate on these issues, with anyone who raises such questions being jeered as a racist, homophobe, child-hater or promoter of mass illiteracy before he or she can finish a sentence. But as Mark Twain warned us -- or was it Josh Billings? -- it's not the things we don't know that hurt us; it's the things we think we know that just ain't so.

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Which Came First: The Intellectual or the Leader?

There's been a lot of talk within the past, oh three election cycles, about how the "smartest" or most "intellectual" candidate would make the best president. Coincidentally, they are all Democrats:

* In 2000, Al Gore was considered more "intellectual" than George W. Bush, despite the fact that his college transcript was rife with Cs and C-minuses. He also dropped out of the Vanderbilt Divinity School after receiving a number of Fs.

* In 2004, John Kerry was touted as being "smarter" than George W. Bush, even though his undergrad GPA was one point lower than Bush's - a fact that was conveniently unavailable until after the election.

* Hillary Clinton has been anointed the best and brightest of the class of 2008, followed closely by the "clean and articulate" Barack Obama - although don't expect to see Mrs. Clinton's grades anytime soon; they likely have been sequestered like her papers from her days as First Lady.

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the above politicians really are intellectually superior to their rivals. We can therefore ask not only why George Bush beat two "intellectuals" in their respective presidential races, but also, do intellectual types really make the best leaders? If "conventional wisdom" is correct, Al Gore didn't lose the election, it was stolen from him. Seriously, though, we must consider other factors such as personality and likability. In 2004, Bush beat Kerry in the "likability" category by large margins. Similarly, Al Gore was characterized as a "stiff campaigner," less likely to inspire that all-important likability factor.According to Richard Benedetto,

The vote for president, unlike balloting for mayor or governor, is as much a personal choice as it is an issue choice. Americans want to like their president as well as agree with him. They often will overlook differences on issues if they like or trust the person. Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower are recent cases in point. Bill Clinton's likability helped him survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Think about it for a moment. Political ideology aside, who would you prefer to sit down and chew the fat with? George Bush, who spends his vacations wearing jeans and wielding a shovel at his ranch in Crawford, Texas? John Kerry, who enjoys skiing at expensive resorts and slaking his thirst with bottles of vitamin-enriched water? Or Al Gore, who vacations extensively in Europe and flies around in a private jet?

Many average Americans can't afford to travel to Europe in coach, let alone private jet, nor can they enjoy pricey ski getaways. But they often can, and do, spend vacation time working around the house and yard. Yes, George Bush came from money and the size of his Texas ranch puts the modest homes of many Americans in the shade. But it's oddly comforting to see a president who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty. It gives the impression that he isn't afraid of hard work, which is important for one who seeks the highest office in both America and the world.

Now obviously George Bush is not running for office again, but I use him as an example because so much emphasis has been put on the "smart" vs. the "dumb" candidate -- "dumb" being equivalent to President Bush. When you realize that an entire industry has sprung up around Bush's "inferior" intellect, with numerous books, calendars, and other items for sale that impugn his IQ (and focusing largely on his propensity for mispronouncing words like "nuclear"), he's an obvious choice for discussion. (What will these entrepreneurs do when President Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009?) If being smart was the only qualification for being a leader, one would assume from his treatment in the media that George Bush should never have gotten near the Oval Office. But there are other qualities that people look for in a leader.....

Think back to the know-it-alls in your experience, both in school and the workplace. Just because they may have more actual knowledge than you in a particular area, does that automatically mean they are the best choice for a leadership role?

Liberals were, remember, in high dudgeon both in 2000 and 2004. They felt, by rights, that the candidate they believed to be the smartest one should have won. Those who place a high premium on intellectualism automatically assume that, as the best and the brightest, they deserve all the accolades society has to offer. But in a capitalist society like ours, this is not always the case. Robert Nozick, writing for the Cato Institute, has a hypothesis that goes back to one's schooldays

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

Nozick is writing here about why intellectuals at large oppose capitalism, but his ideas about those who excelled in school expecting to excel in other areas of life (and feeling cheated when they don't) is very telling.

This brings us to the role of schools in today's leaders. I asked Dr. Candace de Russy, a nationally recognized writer and lecturer on education and cultural issues, for her thoughts on the subject:

For some decades our academic system has been indoctrinating rather than truly educating students, thus producing intellectuals whose minds are clouded with ideology and whose judgment is impaired. Given the usurpation of higher education and K-12 teacher hiring processes by the left, it is also now in the self-interest of many intellectuals to exercise poor judgment, in scholarly matters as well as in the political realm. Some of the great declinists connected weak and pusillanimous - decadent - leadership with societal affluence. Perhaps many of our intellectuals are too materialistic and self-centered to bother with the rigors of exercising leadership and wise judgment.

Rather than teaching students to think, many educators take it upon themselves to fill their students' heads with propaganda and groupthink. This explains why conservative campus clubs such as the College Republicans have relatively small memberships, while you can count on large numbers of college students to turn up at anti-war rallies sponsored by International ANSWER and other Communist front groups. Ben Shapiro, author of the bestselling book Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, discusses the phenomenon of elitist liberal professors that seem to dominate higher education:

This [second] group [of liberals] feels that conservatism is simply dumb. Professors tend to be intellectually arrogant anyway, and liberalism by its nature is an extremely elitist ideology. Many professors feel that conservatism is too simplistic to waste time on in the classroom. I cite numerous examples of this in Brainwashed. Professors say that if you're conservative, you're unqualified to clean highways, much less teach a classroom of students. Four professors even created a fully funded study designed to conclude that conservatives are less "integratively complex." Of course, they had to lump together Stalin, Castro, Hitler, and Reagan in order to do this, but the end justifies the means.

Being spoon-fed a particular ideology (one that espouses a worldview where entitlement plays a major role), coupled with the assumption that higher education automatically confers superiority, and you have people who wonder why a "dummy" like George W. Bush could ascend to the presidency not once, but twice. And rather than take a look at the qualities and convictions that played a major role in his electoral success, they whine and cry about "stolen" and "rigged" elections - because, as Dr. de Russy says, indoctrination - not education - is the name of the game.

Intellectuals will likely always feel as though they are more deserving of leadership roles in our society. But if we take a serious look at our educational system from the bottom up and revamp it to highlight problem solving and critical thinking skills over ideological brainwashing, perhaps that group will shrink to a more manageable size. For not only do we need independent thinkers in our political class, we also need independent thinkers in the electorate. Our future as a democratic republic depends on it.

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14 December, 2007

Video Games Gain Support from Educators

USC Professor Developing Game for Preteens that Intends to Teach Outside-the-Box Lessons

Many parents wish their kids would spend less time at the computer playing games and messaging, and concentrate more on homework, sports or family activities. One university professor, however, has come up with a combined solution that would integrate educational role-playing video games into the classroom. Doug Thomas, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, is developing a game for students ages 10 to 12 that aims to teach ideas and skills not found in traditional textbooks, Reuters reports.

"Because games are experiential they might be good at teaching things that you learn through experience, and that are difficult to teach through books," Thomas told Reuters writer Nichola Groom. His game, "Modern Prometheus," uses the story of "Frankenstein" to teach ethical decision making. The player assumes the role of Dr. Frankenstein's assistant, who is forced to make a series of difficult choices that impact the game's outcome.

To complicate matters, Thomas and his team added a twist—the assistant must help the doctor cure a plague that is threatening the town's residents. One dilemma is whether or not to steal body parts from a cemetery—a key requirement for curing the disease. "Stealing a brain is hard to justify ethically, but doing all this work that seems kind of shady in the present is actually going to save the town in the long run," Thomas said. "We want them to really wrestle with doing things and ask 'Is it good for me, or is it good for everyone else?' There is no right way or wrong way to play it.”

The aim, Thomas said, is for students to play the hour-long game individually, then discuss the choices they made with their teachers and classmates. "It's not just a game but also the conversation that happens around it," Thomas told Reuters. "When kids play games they don't just play them, they also talk about them with each other. There's a huge amount of informal learning that goes on."

One challenge for "Modern Prometheus" and other classroom games is finding teachers willing to incorporate them in their lesson plans. "It's really hard for teachers to work with an unfamiliar technology that the kids know more about than they do," Thomas said. "They feel like 'my job is hard enough already."' He also acknowledges that the game doesn't quite fit into many established middle-school curricula. To overcome that obstacle, Thomas is collaborating with Indiana University Professor Sasha Barab, whose "Quest Atlantis" game is used by 4,500 students around the world. Currently in beta testing, "Modern Prometheus" is expected to be in some U.S. classrooms by spring.

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Drugged up students

A pity that no-one tells them that in the end there are no shortcuts

As final exams approach, many students are facing deadlines for papers, research projects, group projects, theses and, for a lucky few, take-home exams. As colleges have made their curricula more demanding, students are falling behind in classes, grades and health. The need to keep up with an ever more competitive field of students in academia has taken a toll on the mental and physical health of students. Striking a balance between a social life, studying, sleep and, often, a professional life has become increasingly difficult. "You can choose two of three things in college," said Barbara Criag, a Latin professor at LSU, "sleep, party, or study. It's all about time management."

A recent study by Harvard University indicated that more people are sleeping less than six hours every night, and 75 percent of students are troubled by insomnia a few times every week. Sleep deprivation can lead to many health problems such as high blood pressure, weight gain and a decrease in the immune system's power to fight off infection, which often is the culprit for outbreaks of the cold and flu each year. Most students have seen at least one person fall asleep during class at some point in their career, but according to health experts, it is becoming an all too common sight. Sleep deprivation can lead to falling asleep during the daytime, which can cause injuries, traffic accidents and, more common among students, mental errors which lead to misunderstanding a question and subsequently giving the wrong answer.

To circumvent the lack of time for sleep, some students have taken to experimenting with prescription drugs such as Adderall. "I split a 20 milligram pill the night before the exam to study, then another one an hour before the exam to cram and focus during the test," said Jenna, who wishes to have her identity withheld. "I don't have a [prescription], so I just ask friends who have them and buy them lunch in exchange."

Though the pill may give an edge to students who are in desperate need of a study aid, it doesn't come without risks. Adderall, or amphetamine-dextroamphetamine, includes side-effects such as hot flashes, profuse sweating, nausea, stomach pains and even involuntary movements. Doctors say not to take the drug unless it has been prescribed to you. "I'm not worried about any side-effects anymore," said Jenna. "I was the first couple times I tried it, but now it's a pretty smooth ordeal with no issues, except that I can't sleep for about six hours after I've taken one."

Another alternative to sleep is the new generation of caffeine, chiefly, Red Bull. It emerged from the dawn of the dotcom era, and somehow managed to survive the extinction of so many 2 a.m. conference calls and offices with fold-out beds. Now it is marketed toward college students, and not just at bars, which mix it with cheap vodka so that patrons can get a buzz and maintain awareness. But at $1.99 for just 8.3 ounces, it isn't a very cheap alternative to old-fashioned dozing. Students across America and Europe have given billions of dollars to the company by downing its product, which has only endured one change to its line-up: sugar free. The brand is so successful that it has never printed an ad or launched a Web campaign.

Caffeine, however, also has its side effects, such as diarrhea, frequent urination, and even facial flushing. The biggest problem with caffeine is that it is addictive, and if a consumer stops drinking it cold-turkey, he or she can experience withdrawal symptoms, like headaches, anxiety, depression and fatigue. "I try not to drink it too often, but a cup at CC's in the library every morning is all I need to get a quick pick-me-up," said Michelle Port, an English junior. "Eventually, the guys behind the counter memorize what you get every day, which reminds me of how much money I spend on coffee." At about $2 for a cup of Joe, it's not difficult to spend more than $40 a month to get a few jitters before and/or during class, but when a student has a hang-over from too much Red Bull and vodka the night before, coffee is often the next vice to which they turn for help.

Doctors say that staying in shape is the best way to consistently get a good night's sleep and to maintain a healthy metabolism. Exercising produces endorphins, which allow the body to be able to relax more easily and be better prepared to cope with stress.

In a study by the University of Chicago, reducing the amount of sleep to just four hours a night for a week produced dramatic changes in glucose tolerance and endocrine function, which resembled the early stages of diabetes, just within one week. Getting at least six to eight hours of sleep each night, doctors recommend, is the best way to stay sane and healthy throughout college. Using stimulants to stay focused may work every now and then, but it will eventually take a toll on the health of students. Finally, to be clear, there is presently no evidence that supports the theory of learning by osmosis, so it is not necessary to sleep with a book as a pillow.

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Australia: WA dumps Leftist Outcomes Based Education (OBE)

WESTERN Australia has officially dumped the controversial Outcomes Based Education (OBE) program with the introduction of a new syllabus. WA Education Minister Mark McGowan today announced the reintroduction of a kindergarten to year 10 syllabus at the beginning of the 2008 school year. In a reference to the controversial OBE program, which was heavily criticised by teachers, Mr McGowan said the new content would mark the end of ``content free and woolly objectives in education''. "We want to assure parents that students are being provided with the highest standard of course content possible,'' Mr McGowan said. "The fad of the 1990s to dispense with syllabus caused considerable anxiety among teachers, many of whom were left without any clear guidance about what to teach or how to assess students.''

The minister said the new syllabuses were developed in consultation with more than 6,000 teachers, administrators and academics. Among the changes, the new syllabus places a greater emphasis on history teaching, and the importance of play for kindergarten to year three children. State School Teachers Union of Western Australia president Mike Keely welcomed the move, saying it would bring certainty and support to teachers.

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13 December, 2007

Saudis Funding Islamic Curriculum at U.S. Colleges

Two years ago this month, a Saudi prince caused a media splash — and raised eyebrows — when he donated $20 million each to Georgetown and Harvard universities to fund Islamic studies. Although few details have been released about how the money has been spent, at Georgetown, the money helped pay for a recent symposium on Islamic-Western relations held in the university's Copley Formal Lounge. The event attracted about 120 persons: students, Catholic priests, men in business suits and several women in colorful head scarves who all came to hear religion experts from several American universities, as well as from Bosnia, Ireland and Malaysia.

A member of the Norwegian royal family said he flew in just for the event. "I just came here to learn the language scholars are using about these things," Prince Haakon of Norway said.

Some call the Saudi gift Arab generosity and gratitude for the years American universities have educated the elite of the Arab world. Others say the sheer size of the donations amounts to buying influence and creating bastions of noncritical pro-Islamic scholarship within academia.

"There's a possibility these campuses aren't getting gifts, they're getting investments," said Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "Departments on Middle Eastern studies tend to be dominated by professors tuned to the concerns of Arab and Muslim rulers. It's very difficult for scholars who don't follow this line to get jobs and tenure on college campuses. "The relationship between these departments and the money that pours in is hard to establish, but like campaign finance reform, sometimes money is a bribe. Sometimes it's a tip."

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The Scapegoats of Khartoum and CUNY Faculty Union

The Sudanese regime officially pardoned British teacher Gillian Gibbons for the “crime” of insulting the prophet Mohammed by allowing her seven-year-old students to choose the name Mohammed for the class teddy bear. But will the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) regime of CUNY in like manner grant a pardon to Dr. Sharad Karkhanis who is being slammed with a $2 million lawsuit for the “crime” of insulting a prominent PSC faculty union leader, Professor Susan O’Malley? Both Gibbons and Karkhanis were used as scapegoats to distract attention from the menacing issues confronting both these troublespots in the East and here in the West.

Now that the failed strategy of the clerics and scholars of the Sudanese regime has backfired and brought mounting international focus on the Darfur genocide and widespread clamor to free Gibbons, Sudan President Omar al-Bashir has dropped all charges and freed Gibbons from prison. The strategy of the academic elites and scholars of the PSC to persecute and silence a defiant critic with a lawsuit filed by O’Malley has also backfired bringing a resumption of interest in the fraud and abuses of the PSC and further support for Karkhanis’s case from both the left (e.g. John Wilson) and the right.

In Sudan, one of the most barbaric places on Earth and the safe haven for every Islamic terrorist organization on the planet, genocide continues unabated after four years of mass murder, violence and forced exile of millions directed by Khartoum. In a land ruled by Sharia law, Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation for the offense of blasphemy and threatened with 40 lashes and six months in prison for inciting religious hatred. According to Times of London columnist Ben Macintyre, this was an orchestrated attempt by President Bashir and his regime to scapegoat an infidel Western woman and stir up fiery Muslim rage over her offensive actions toward their religion, in order to deflect world attention from the murder and mayhem in Darfur, and to demonstrate Sudan’s hard-line Islamic credentials to the fundamentalist world. When the plan was bamboozled by the mounting focus on Darfur and the county’s medieval system of Islamic law, and British diplomats were sent to persuade the Sudanese government to release Gibbons, Bashir had no choice but to grant a presidential pardon.

Taking a page out of Khartoum’s playbook, PSC leader O’Malley, notorious for trying to censor The Patriot Returns, has now filed a lawsuit charging her most outspoken critic with libel and defamation to scare him and any other would-be dissenters into silence, in order to distract attention from the fraud, abuse and incompetence of the PSC leadership. The PSC, also notorious for shutting down forums for free speech when they became too critical, now wants to hide damaging disclosures before the upcoming elections for some union stalwarts. It was initially reported in the New York Sun that the PSC failed to deliver a decent contract and they squandered the member’s welfare fund by the sum of 97% on political causes and contributions to the legal funds of terrorists. Now O’Malley, former chair of the University Faculty Senate (UFS), who sits on the PSC executive board, is running for election for the Kingsborough Community College seat on the UFS in the next two weeks. Trying desperately to duck bad press and avoid the glare of the media spotlight, she has maintained a low profile saying nothing about the lawsuit except that it is “very, very silly” in an interview with New York Sun reporter, Annie Karni.

But the plan for scapegoating Karkhanis has backfired and failed to scare him into silence. Rather it has put O’Malley in the spotlight of bad publicity hurting her chances for election. There has been considerable buzz from the blogosphere, including FIRE, Free Speech at CUNY, Mitchell Langbert’s Blog, History News Network, Phi Beta Cons, Inside Higher Ed, and many others, as well as New York media, New York Post, and New York Sun.

The PSC and UFS leadership has utterly misjudged Karkhanis’ character. Instead of groveling to the whims of an elitist PSC regime and pleading for forgiveness, as they must have surmised, he has determined to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. He will fight forever for his First Amendment right to dissent, to criticize and satirize in written expression, and so will I, as well as many other friends and unsolicited defenders of free speech and freedom of the press.

It remains to be seen whether or not the PSC will follow in the footsteps of their Sudanese cohorts and grant a pardon to Karkhanis and retract this “silly” lawsuit or continue routine illegal activities defrauding the dues paying members, in this case funneling the union dues to pay for Susan O’Malley’s lawyers in a protracted highly visible court case. This private legal affair, which will be under the lens of severe scrutiny, is not a PSC or UFS case and any CUNY union funds used for O’Malley’s frivolous libel suit to censor free speech will be brought to light.

The PSC leadership has erred by not taking the time to research the political and literary background of Dr. Karkhanis. Examination of his background would have revealed a long distinguished career championing the inviolable rights of freedom of speech and conscience and especially fighting for freedom of the press in his native land, India. He published a book, Indian Politics and the Role of the Press highly critical of Mrs. Indira Gandhi's emergency regime, which censored the press. In a repressive environment he dared to challenge the ruling establishment, admonishing India’s Prime Minister that “press censorship was resented all over the world” and despite deteriorating social conditions as the justification for invoking emergency rule, defending freedom of the press is vital for safeguarding democratic institutions. But instead of meeting with a hostile reaction or punishment, Karkhanis’s remonstration was amicably received in a candid meeting with Mrs.Gandhi. Why should we expect anything less critical from him as a professor at CUNY with respect to the censorship and fraud of the PSC?

Karkahnis’s wise counsel to all of us is to stick to principles and don’t be afraid to speak out and rock the boat. Most people keep their lips sealed and won’t criticize when they see something wrong, because they feel they may be penalized or their careers may suffer. Karkhanis proved them wrong in the past and will prove them wrong again in the present legal case. In the long run, only benefit will ensue if one is bold enough to expose the flagrant abuses and hold their leaders accountable for their actions. His message to Susan O’Malley, whom he has long held to account on the pages of The Patriot Returns, is that her obsession to censor critics in addition to “her obsession with finding jobs for terrorists” to teach in the City University system is harmful to CUNY as well as her own career. Perhaps to demonstrate how the outrage has spread, the NYPD message board said it best recently in this officer’s quote regarding the lawsuit: “O'Malley forgot that when you're in a snake pit, you're going to be bit by a snake. And she's hanging out in a snake pit of terrorist(s).”

Source




Child games: Another backflip by British Labor

Millions of pounds will be spent on new play and leisure facilities as part of a government plan to reverse the decline of childhood and make sure that children in England are both seen and heard. Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, said yesterday that he wanted to move away from the “no ball games” culture of the past, which curtailed the freedom of children and young people to learn and develop by playing independently outside the home.

Outlining details of the Government’s ambitious ten-year Children’s Plan, Mr Balls said: “The main message that children and young people have given us is that they wanted more and better things to do, particularly after school and at the weekends,” he said.

Most young people recognised their responsibilities towards society, but felt their own contributions were too often undervalued or ignored. “We want kids to be seen and heard,” Mr Balls told the House of Commons, adding that he wanted to make Britain the best place in the world for children to grow up. The plan aims to strengthen the children’s workforce by requiring all newly qualified teachers to gain a masters degree in education during their first year in the job.

The suggestion received a cautious welcome from teachers, who were pleased at the increased professionalism this will allow, but concerned about the timing, since the first year of teaching is the hardest for most new recruits. The plan also seeks to find better ways of dismissing poor teachers and striking them from the professional register maintained by the General Teaching Council.

There will also be a review of the way sex and relationships education is delivered in school. This is in response to concerns raised by young people in a recent report suggesting that sex education is taught so badly that many teenagers are left in complete ignorance about how to avoid sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy.

The plan also set out options to help children born in the summer months, who often lag behind classmates born the previous autumn. Although the difference is most pronounced in the reception year, there is evidence that it lasts right up until the age of 16 in some children. Ministers will examine whether summer babies would benefit from the option of starting school the following January, or even the next September when they are five. Although the law already allows for some flexibility, many local authorities have withdrawn January starts saying that it makes it even harder for summer babies to catch up. As part of his curriculum review, Sir Jim Rose will examine whether it would be appropriate for even greater flexibility in start dates.

Free nursery education will be available for some two-year-olds in particularly deprived areas. The most recent research found that children from disadvantaged homes are up to a year behind in their learning than those from more privileged backgrounds by the age of three. From next year, every family will be entitled to 15 hours of free nursery education, up from 12½.

As part of the plan, the government also said that 90 per cent of five-year-olds would meet the agreed standard across the 13-part early years foundation stage by 2020. The most up-to-date figures from the Office for National Statistics found that only 45 per cent of children met the correct standards in the key areas of personal, social and emotional development, and communication, language and literacy this year. The department said across all 13 parts, 71 per cent of children had passed. The plan, which has the backing of Gordon Brown, aims to shift policy from the narrow confines of education to a broader focus on children.

Source





12 December, 2007

CANADIAN JEWISH STUDENTS FLEE FROM MOB

York University saw the worst antisemitic display ever on that campus last week, said Ben Feferman, senior campus coordinator for the Canadian region of Hasbara Fellowships, an Israel advocacy organization spearheaded by Aish Hatorah. The Betar-supported Campus Coalition of Zionists (CCZ), together with Hasbarah, manned a table in Vari Hall, with permission from the university, with pamphlets and brochures about the danger emanating from Iran. However, the situation became very difficult for the students who participated. They were vastly outnumbered by pro-Arab students who surrounded them, and eventually the pro-Israel activists fled. As they left, there was cheering by the pro-Arab mob.

According to Feferman, "I've never seen anything like this at York. We weren't even discussing the issues anymore. It was pure Jew hatred. That's what it's come to."In fact, Feferman noticed an acquaintance there and said hello, but received no acknowledgement. She emailed him later that day to apologize, explaining that she didn't want everyone to know she was Jewish. To Feferman, this episode is a red light. "We know there's a crisis when a student on campus is afraid to reveal she's Jewish and feels unsafe," he said.

Another disturbing issue that day, according to Feferman, was that a Hillel executive was standing nearby, watching. Feferman can't understand why he didn't take action or get his students to help out.

When asked why they didn't offer to support Hasbarah and CCZ, Tilly Shames, associate director, Hillel of Greater Toronto, did not answer the question directly referencing a program Hillel had held previously that experienced no protest.

Shames said, "Hillel @ York ran an extremely successful Israel program in a very public space (Vari Hall) on campus last Thursday. The Israel program was received positively and embraced by the student body. Hillel experienced no protest for running a public Israel program."

"This is one of the first issues we've moved forward with in a pro-advocacy way, rather than being put in a reactive situation later on," said Orna Hollander, executive director of Betar Canada.

The following day, Palestinian Media Watch's Itamar Marcus addressed York students on the daily indoctrination of children living under the Palestinian Authority to hate Jews. "It was absolute chaos," Hollander declared. "It was impossible to moderate. People would ask loaded questions. Marcus wasn't given an opportunity to respond. He refused to get into a screaming match. One girl, raised in Canada, said she herself would gladly be a suicide bomber and would have no qualms raising her daughter to become a shahid."

A couple of weeks ago, when US-based anti-Israel professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky was scheduled to address York students via satellite, CCZ and Hasbarah joined forces to provide information about what Chomsky stands for.

"We wanted to do a protest," Feferman said, "but the university administration wouldn't allow it, saying they didn't want a lot of noise and they were afraid that signs could be used as weapons." The students settled for a table with handouts about Chomsky and two large posters, one depicting Chomsky with [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah. One poster quoted Chomsky's statement: "I see no antisemitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even in denial of the Holocaust."

The event was successful in providing information, Feferman said. "Over the course of four hours, a few hundred people came by. About half of them were moderate people who said they had heard about Chomsky in their English class and didn't know he had these views. The other half were people who condemned Israel and insisted Hezbollah isn't a terrorist organization. At one point they came together and surrounded us, argued about issues and blamed America and Israel. We had good security, including non-uniformed security guards. We succeeded in raising awareness of Chomsky's worldviews, although at times it was confrontational. We're now organizing a protest for the Finkelstein event at U of T on Thursday."

Hasbarah and CCZ are making plans to launch a presence at Ryerson University, where the vice-president of the student union has made several unsuccessful attempts in recent months to impose a boycott, divestment and sanctions motion against Israel and has organized a number of anti-Israel programs on campus.

(Last week, when a couple of Ryerson Student Union leaders tried to introduce a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel at the annual congress of the Canadian Federation of Students, more than two-thirds of the voting plenary rejected the call. B'nai Brith had called on the Federation to reject categorically the boycott proposal.)

"Two [Ryerson] students in the past few weeks called me and said they need help doing something," Feferman said. "We're going to try to find the students there and hope to start advocating properly on campus."

After the anti-Jewish near-rioting at York last week, one student representing the "Independent Body and Advocates of Peace and Humanity," handed out flyers stating its opposition to any comparison of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmanidejad with Hitler and claiming that CCZ was marginalizing Iranians by attacking Iran's leader. It should be noted that the same students who resent any criticism of Ahmanidejad and worry about a negative impact on Iranian students are active proponents of anti-Israel activity. "Freedom of speech is only for them," Feferman said. "The right to censure a country's leader is only for them."

At the senate meeting, no discussion followed the statement in favour of removing CCZ from campus. However, in a Facebook chat room later that evening, a member of the Independent Body and Advocates of Peace and Humanity wrote: "I just wanted the top authorities of the university to be informed.. Right after the meeting, other senators approached me and showed me their FULL support, whom of which [sic] control many things at the university."

According to Feferman, "that group wanted to use its freedom of speech in their anti-Israel campaign. Now they're adding a new element: Pursuing political and administrative means. They feel they have had success in reaching so many people over the years for their cause. They feel they can succeed further. Because of a lack of overall pro-Israel advocacy on campus, they have been `educated' by them. "At the end of the day, there's the issue of dignity," he added. "We have soldiers dying to protect us in Israel. We have to protect Israel's image on campus."

Source




American Education Fails Because It Isn't Education

The debate over public education grows more heated. Regularly, reports are released showing that the academic abilities of American students continue to fall when compared to those in other countries.

Twenty years ago the U.S. ranked first in the world in the number of young adults who had high school diplomas and college degrees. Today we rank ninth and seventh, respectively, among industrialized nations. Compared to Europe and Asia, 15-year-olds in the United States are below average in applying math skills to real-life tasks. The United States ranks 18 out of 24 industrialized nations in terms of relative effectiveness of its education system. Knowledge in history, geography, grammar, civics and literature are all in decline in terms of academic understanding and achievement.

To solve the crisis, politicians, community leaders, and the education community all preach the same mantra. Students fail, they tell us, because "expectations haven't been set high enough." We need more "accountability," they say. And every education leader and nearly every politician presents the same "solution" to the education crisis: more money, better pay for teachers, and smaller classroom numbers so the children get enough attention from the teachers.

Consequently, there are two specific categories in which the U.S. excels, compared to the rest of the world. First, the U.S. ranks second in the world in the amount we spend per student per year on education = $11,152. The U.S. is also a leader in having some of the smallest classroom numbers in the world. Yet the slide continues. American students grow more illiterate by the year. How can that be? We're doing everything the "experts" tell us to do. We're spending the money. We're building more and more schools. We're raising teachers' pay.

Every American should understand that these three items: higher pay, smaller classrooms and more money for schools are the specific agenda of the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA is not a professional organization for teachers. It is a labor union and its sole job is to get more money into the education system, and more pay for its members. It also seeks to make work easier for its members - smaller classrooms. Clearly the NEA is not about education - it's about money and a political agenda.

Clearly the nation's education system is not teaching the children. They can't read or work math problems without a calculator. They can't spell, find their own country on a map, name the president of the United States or quote a single founding father. America's children are becoming just plain dumb.

Yet we have been focusing on a massive national campaign to "fix" the schools for the past decade or more. Now we have ultra high-tech, carpeted, air-conditioned school buildings with computers and television sets. We have education programs full of new ideas, new methods, and new directions. In the 1990's we set "national standards," accountability through "national testing" through Goals 2000. Through that program we declared that every child would come to school "ready to learn," "no child would be left behind," and pledged that our kids would be "second to none" in the world. Above all, we've spent money, money and more money. The result, American students have fallen further behind, placing 19th out of 21 nations in math, 16th in science, and dead last in physics.

With all the programs and attention on education, how can that be? To coin a well-worn cliche - "it's the programs, stupid." More precisely, it's the federal programs and the education bureaucracy that run them. It is simply a fact that over the past twenty years America's education system has been completely restructured to deliberately move away from teaching basic academics to a system that focuses on little more than training students for menial jobs. The fact is, the restructured education system has been designed to deliberately dumb-down the children. (Note: the NEA hates that phrase!)

Most Americans find that statement to be astonishing and, in fact, to be beyond belief. Parents don't want to let go of their child-like faith that the American education system is the best in the world, designed to give their children the academic strength to make them the smartest in the world. Politicians continue to offer old solutions of more money and more federal attention, almost stamping their feet, demanding that kids learn something. Programs are being proposed that call for teacher testing to hold them accountable for producing educated children. More programs call for annual tests to find out if children have learned anything. The nation is in panic. But none of these hysterical responses will improve education - because none of them address the very root of the problem.

The truth is, none of the problems will go away, nor will children learn until both parents and politicians stop trusting the education establishment and start ridding the system of its failed ideas and programs. Parents and politicians must stop believing the propaganda handed down by the education establishment that says teaching a child in the twenty-first century is different and must be more high tech than in days past. It simply isn't so.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

Today's education system is driven by money from the federal government and private foundations, both working hand-in-hand with the education establishment headquartered in the federal Department of Education and manned by the National Education Association (NEA). These forces have combined with psychologists, huge textbook publishers, teacher colleges, the healthcare profession, government bureaucrats, big corporations, pharmaceutical companies and social workers to invade local school boards, classrooms and private homes in the name of "fixing" education.

The record shows that each of these entities has benefited from this alliance through enriched coffers and increased political power. In fact, the new education restructuring is working wonders for everyone involved - except for the children and their parents. As a result of this combined invasion force, today's classroom is a very different place from only a few years ago.

There is simply not enough room on these pages to tell the entire history of education restructuring and transformation. It dates back to the early efforts by psychologists like John Dewey, whose work began to change how teachers were taught to teach in the nation's teacher colleges. The changes were drastic as education moved away from an age-old system that taught teachers how to motivate students to accept the whole scope of academic information available. Instead the new system explored methods to maneuver students through psychological behavior modification processes. Rather than to instill knowledge, once such a power was established the education process became more of a method to instill specific agendas into the minds of children.

As fantastic as it seems, the entire history of the education restructuring effort is carefully and thoroughly documented in a book called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book was written by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former official at the Department of Education in the Reagan Administration. While there in 1981 - 1982, Charlotte found the "mother lode" hidden away at the Department. In short, she found all of the education establishment's plans for restructuring America's classrooms. Not only did she find the plans for what they intended to do, she discovered how they were going to do it and most importantly why. Since uncovering this monstrous plan, Charlotte Iserbyt has dedicated her life to getting that information into the hands of parents, politicians and the news media....

Professor Benjamin Bloom, called the Father of Outcome-based Education (OBE) said: "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students." B.F. Skinner determined that applied psychology in the class curriculum was the means to bring about such changes in the students values and beliefs simply by relentlessly inputting specific programmed messages. Skinner once bragged: "I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule." Whole psychological studies were produced to prove that individuals could be made to believe anything, even to accept that black was white, given the proper programming.

The education system is now a captive of the Skinner model of behavior modification programming. In 1990, Dr. M. Donald Thomas perfectly outlined the new education system in an article in "The Effective School Report" entitled "Education 90: A Framework for the Future." Thomas said: "From Washington to modern times, literacy has meant the ability to read and write, the ability to understand numbers, and the capacity to appreciate factual material. The world, however, has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. The introduction of technology in information processing, the compression of the world into a single economic system, and the revolution in political organizations are influences never imagined to be possible in our lifetime. Literacy, therefore, will be different in the year 2000. It will mean that students will need to follow

*Appreciation of different cultures, differences in belief systems and differences in political structures.

* An understanding of communications and the ability of people to live in one world as one community of nations.

* In a compressed world with one economic system...it is especially important that all our people be more highly educated and that the differences between low and high socio-economic students be significantly narrowed.

* Education begins at birth and ends at death.

* Education is a responsibility to be assumed by the whole community.

* Learning how to learn is more important than memorizing facts

* Schools form partnerships with community agencies for public service projects to be a part of schooling.

* Rewards are provided for encouraging young people to perform community service."

In this one outline, Dr. Thomas provides the blueprint for today's education system that is designed to de-emphasis academic knowledge; establish the one-world agenda with the United Nations as its center and away from belief in national sovereignty; replace individual achievement with collectivist group-think ideology and invade the family with an "It takes a village" mind-set. Dr. Thomas' outline for education is the root of why today's children aren't learning. These ideas permeate every federal program, every national standard, every textbook and every moment of your child's school day.

Much more here





11 December, 2007

EDUBLOGGER WANTED

There are quite a lot of education bloggers around so I am pleased to say that this blog survives the competition well enough to get around 150 hits per day. That may not seem much but it is better than 99% of all blogs.

What I put up here is basically whatever I come across in my days's reading that interests me both from a libertarian/conservative point of view and from my point of view as a former teacher at both the High School and University levels.

Education is however a huge field and I am acutely aware that I cover only a small fraction of what I could cover. And I think that a wider coverage would lead to more readers. So I would be very pleased if I could get a co-blogger who would help expand what the blog covers. Getting access to an established blog is a lot easier than starting a new blog so I hope someone will contact me about this.

Their general orientation would of course have to be libertarian/conservative but I think that any regular reader of this blog would fill the bill. The most consistent message of the blog so far has been that there should be much more privatization of schooling. I write from a country where over 40% of High School students already go to private schools so that is not totally blue-sky.




Academic Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

By Richard L. Cravatts

As evidence of what Professor Edward Alexander has called "the explosive power of boredom" in rousing the liberal professoriate to its ideological feet, Harvard's own Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies, L. Roland Matory, called upon his academic peers once again in a November faculty meeting to foster

"a civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas."

And what were those "reasoned" ideas that had caused professor Matory to feel "unsafe" on Harvard's insulated campus? Criticism of Zionism and Israel, of course, an issue about which Professor Matory and others have many notorious opinions, but which are being suppressed, in his view, through "widespread censorship of dissent about Israel-Palestine." Professor Matory's implication is that on this one issue-criticism of Israel-the sacrosanct notion of "academic freedom" is being threatened by those pro-Israel opponents who wish to stifle all speech critical of the Jewish state.

But like many of his fellow travelers on the academic left, Professor Matory makes the mistake of assuming that academic freedom, and its stepchild academic free speech, is a bundle of rights that can be exercised without regard to those two other fundamental principles of higher education: academic responsibility and a fervent commitment to actual scholarship, as opposed to ideology parading as what he calls "reasoned and evidence-based ideas." With great regularity, academic imbecility and fraudulent scholarship have been substituted for reasoned inquiry on our campuses, and, observes Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "academic freedom is meant to protect scholarship, not replace it."

Professor Matory is not the first academic to bemoan the oppressive and fearful might of pro-Israel forces in stifling any criticism or discussion of Israel; and his outrage and trepidations might inspire sympathy save for the inconvenient fact that the sheer volume and frequency of chronic, unrelenting, vitriolic, and one-sided demonization of Zionism and Israel on campuses worldwide makes Professor Matory's claims of being cowered into silence by Israel's supporters a bit disingenuous.

In that respect, Professor Matory shares a similar view with the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt, who, with University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, recently published The Israel Lobby, a book-length version of an earlier paper that revealed the existence, in their minds, of a powerful, cabalistic lobby in America working to sway public policy and jeopardize America's international standing, all to Israel's advantage.

"The goal [of the Israel Lobby]," they wrote, in words similar to Matory's own wild observations, "is to prevent critical commentary about Israel from getting a fair hearing in the political arena." While their insidious bit of scholarship, which Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, called an "inept, even kooky academic work," soared to the top of the non-fiction bestseller's list and sent the pair off on a nationwide book tour, they still manage without embarrassment to proclaim that they are, like Matory," touching the "third rail" of political discussion and fearfully go public with criticism of Israel.

Professor Matory also recalled how another luminary of the academic netherworld, Norman Finkelstein, was disinvited from Harvard because of his unrelenting criticism of Israel. Finkelstein is a man who Professor Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa has called a "pseudo-scholar and Holocaust trivializer" who "used his position at DePaul University in Chicago to promote his open celebration of Middle East terrorism." His best known screed, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, minimizes the magnitude of the Holocaust while simultaneously making the perverse accusation that it is used by Zionists to extract sympathy from the world community and to justify the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinians by Israelis.

Finkelstein, who was recently denied tenure at DePaul, has now also adopted the position that his failure to thrive, academically speaking, is the direct result for being bold enough to speak up against Zionism and Israel-and he has been punished into silence accordingly, even while he regularly visit college campuses nationwide where his forbidden speech apparently is heard by eager audiences.

What Professors Finkelstein, Walt, Mearsheimer, and Matory have all apparently failed to realize is that they have not been silenced at all in their unrelenting rants against Israel; in fact, the very opposite is true: they have achieved world-wide notoriety and, in some quarters, wide acclaim for their views. More importantly, in their zeal to preempt the insulating force of this notion of "academic freedom," they have sought to deprive their ideological opponents of the same rights and protection; that is, while they want to be able to utter any calumny against the Jewish state and suffer no recriminations for their speech, they view any speech from those challenging their views to be oppressive, stifling, unreasonable, and, in the popular term used by those who frequently utter second-rate ideas, "chilling."

But the issue is far more obvious than the professors care to realize, and much less insidious. Those who speak back to ideologues such as Matory, Finkelstein, Walt, and Mearsheimer do so not to suppress criticism of Israel; academic freedom grants the professors the right to spew forth any academic meanderings they wish, but it does not make them free from being challenged for their thoughts.

"Free speech does not absolve anyone from professional incompetence," says Michael Rubin; and those who question divestment petitions, or critique the anti-Israel and anti-American "scholarship" parading on campuses as Middle Eastern Studies, or answer back when a work purports to reveal a sinister Jewish cabal controlling U.S. foreign policy, or correct such notions as Professor Matory's that Israel is "quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel's founding in the late 1940s" are not stifling debate about Israel. They are using their own academic freedom to rebut what they see as distortions, half-truths, propaganda, mistakes about history, or outright lies.

There is nothing unseemly about countering speech-even hateful speech-with more speech. In fact, that is the very heart of the university's mission. Professor Matory claims that he is seeking a greater civility on campus through reasoned academic discourse, but his real intention seems to be to create that civility by having only his side of the discussion be heard-without the uncomfortable necessity of hearing other, dissenting views. Like many of his fellow academics, he proclaims widely the virtues of open expression, but only for those who utter those thoughts with which he agrees. But true intellectual diversity-the ideal that is often bandied about but rarely achieved-must be dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, representing opposing viewpoints, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones.

Source




Professor Matory and Larry Summers

Professor L. Roland Matory of Harvard, the subject of Richard L. Cravatts' AT article today, is further revealed in this post by Hillel Stavis, owner of the former Wordsworth Bookstore, a favorite hangout of mine in Harvard Square in years past, on Solomonia (hate tip: Powerline).

Attending a recent lecture by Matory, Stavis was stunned to find himself attacked by name on apparently false grounds. He goes on to describe this other and even more disturbing aspect of the lecture:

But what is most disturbing about Professor Matory's apparent obsession with Israel and Jews (at one point he referred to "a moneyed and media connected American Israeli defense force" - I guess we can dispense with the usual coded language observation) is the unavoidable realization that for Professor Matory who was at the epicenter of ousting Larry Summers, ostensibly for sexist remarks, Israel was the primary trigger. It seems clear that for Professor Matory, Summers' original sin was his opposition to the Harvard divestment - from - Israel campaign expressed long before his (in)famous speech on women in the sciences.

It would seem that Professor Matory has a bad case of Jews-on-the brain. He is beset by Israeli colonizers and their minions on campus: Practitioners of "character assassination, dis-invitation, and other losses of career opportunities campaign contributions, income or friends, and, above all, the damage done by fervent Zionists to the process of intellectual inquiry and debate in this university". By dis-invitation, he was referring to the wide opposition to the Harvard English Department's invitation to Tom Paulin, an Irish poet who has called for the murder of all Jewish settlers, including men, women and children (a position predictably skipped over by the Professor). Continuing his breathless rant he claimed that even his teaching compensation was not off limits for the vaporous cabal: "Even my annual salary is set by officials who appear to feel threatened by my bringing up this issue."

Source




Yet more messing around with British primary schooling

The Labour government just runs around in circles. Nothing is ever thoroughly pretested. What is right today is wrong tomorrow

Children are to be taught and tested at their own pace and primary school pupils will study fewer subjects to concentrate more on the basics and a foreign language, under a radical shake-up to be announced tomorrow. Some of the traditional subjects such as history and geography, or art and music, could be rolled into one, The Times has been told. As well as French and German, primary pupils may get the chance to learn Urdu and Mandarin.

The system of "one size fits all" national curriculum tests taken annually by all 11-year-olds and 14-year-olds will be swept away and replaced by twice-yearly tests pitched at the level of individual children. The changes will come in a ten-year "children's plan" to be outlined by Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, who admitted yesterday that the British system was not yet "world class".

The aim of the changes will be to ensure that the very bright are continually stretched and the stragglers are given sufficient support. The rigidity of the present national testing system, which challenges schools to ensure that as many as possible reach minimum levels of achievement for their age, will go. Instead a child would take a level four test, for example, not at a given age but when they reach that level.

The new system would allow most pupils to take two shorter tests when they are ready, instead of one longer test fixed at age 11. Pupils could sit their tests either in the summer or the winter, instead of all during one week in May. The reforms are intended to stop teachers spending too much time drilling pupils to pass the tests because children will only sit the assessments when their teachers believe that they are ready. The results will still be published in tables to show parents and authorities how schools are progressing.

Head teachers welcomed the reform but gave warning that schools would still face too much pressure if the results are used to compile league tables. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "We think the concept of when-ready testing is the right concept. I agree we want to get away from the rigidity of the current system."

Mr Balls wants to take out "some of the clutter" from the timetable and make the teaching of a language at primary school compulsory. Sir James Rose, who led the review that promoted phonics as the primary way to teach reading, is to head the first "root-and-branch" review of the primary curriculum for ten years. Mr Balls told BBC 1's Andrew Marr programme yesterday that the curriculum needed to have "more space for maths and more space for reading and also to make sure that every child is being taught a foreign language in primary school."

Recent research from Manchester University suggested that around 51 per cent of teaching time is already devoted purely to English and mathematics as teachers drill young children to pass their SATs tests. The plans respond to concerns that, after ten years of steady improvement, progress in the three `r's at primary school has come to a standstill.

Mr Balls denied that the need for a Children's Plan after ten years in government was an admission of failure. There had been "a sea-change" under Labour, he insisted, adding: "We are doing better than we were, but it's not good enough. We aren't world class. "I want to move to a much more flexible approach to testing which will take the burdens off children and be better for teachers to track the individual progress of every child."

Source





10 December, 2007

No need to read a book to pass an English exam in England

Teenagers could soon be able to pass an English exam at GCSE level without having to read a single novel, poem or play. Instead of studying the canon of English literature, they would study practical use of the language. This could include the use of English in travel brochures or marketing material. The course, which is being developed by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, would result in a BTEC qualification, equivalent to a GCSE. The proposal, reported in The Times Educational Supplement (TES), comes after the reading skills of Britain’s 15-year-olds were criticised this week after the UK dropped from 7th to 17th in an international ranking. A separate study last week found that England’s 10-year-olds had fallen from 3rd to 19th place.

The trust sees the BTEC as a solution to these disappointing results by adopting a totally fresh approach to English teaching. The new examination would be very different from existing English GCSE courses, which require students to study set texts, from a list provided by the examination board. The idea of the new qualification is to build up the functional English language skills of students who may be daunted by the requirement to read a whole book. The course would focus instead on the kind of writing that students would encounter in their daily lives.

But Ian McNeilly, director of the National Association for the Teaching of English, questioned the plan. “It seems to me that promoting an English qualification that does not involve picking up books, plays or poems is losing sight of what the subject is about. “If there is a case to answer that English teaching is not inspiring kids, I don’t see how creating a new qualification would improve that,” he told the TES.

The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust is already piloting a similar course in functional maths in 50 schools. That course is designed specifically to engage with young people who feel that they are no good at the subject. It does this by applying maths skills to real-life situations, such as collecting data on sporting performance or designing a Formula One car. David Crossley, the trust’s director of achievement, said: “Every child has talent and aptitude and we need to find their strengths. This will help give students confidence to continue studying.” He added: “The BTEC qualifications would be designed to run alongside GCSEs, not replace them. It would also complement the diplomas, which will be offered from next year and will have a functional skills component.”

A spokesman for the trust added that the new qualification was in the very early stages of development. “The BTEC Maths pilot has proved successful and popular in supporting students taking their maths GCSE and we are interested to see if this can be replicated in other subjects. “English is the obvious next step, but it is very early days and we haven’t even started to look at its possible content. However, if this does go ahead it will follow the principle of motivating students and focusing on their strengths by teaching it in an applied way.” It will discuss the plan with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the Edexcel examination board and hopes to give the English BTEC a trial in 2009.

A spokeswoman for Edexcel said that it had not yet got plans for a new qualification. She added: “We believe that any new qualification that engages and rewards students for whom the GCSE English language and literature are not appropriate would be well received.” The BTEC would not count towards a school’s league table position for pupils achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths, although ultimately the trust hopes to persuade the Government to include it.

Source




Australia: Muslim school raided and shut down

A MUSLIM school in Perth has been raided by police and shut down by WA Education Minister Mark McGowan. The school's head faces a stealing charge. Mr McGowan said he had taken the extraordinary step of closing Muslim Ladies' College in Kenwick because of allegations, including fraud and the use of unregistered teachers who were focusing mainly on religion, rather than the WA curriculum.

The school's acting director, Zubair Sayed, appeared in East Perth Magistrates Court charged with stealing. The court was told the charge related to an alleged theft offence - of $355,934 - in April, when Mr Sayed, of Sarah Close, Canning Vale, was a company director of Muslim Links Australia Ltd.

It is alleged the school was overclaiming for state and federal government funds for students. Police prosecutor Sgt Scott McCormick told the court that detectives had discovered the money had been sent to Pakistan. "This is a matter which is of extreme seriousness, whereby Mr Sayed obtained public money from the commonwealth by deceit," Sgt McCormick said. "The state wishes to put on the record that this is a very serious charge."

The court was told that Mr Sayed wrote a Commonwealth Bank cheque for money from the Federal Government that was meant for the Muslim Ladies' College to educate students. At the time, Mr Sayed's brother was principal of the college. Magistrate Vicki Stewart granted Mr Sayed bail, with conditions he surrender his passport, not be within 1km of international sea or air ports, report to a police station each Wednesday and reside at his home address. He was released on $100,000 bail and a $100,000 surety to reappear in Perth Magistrates Court on January 2 next year.

On Friday, Mr McGowan said: "I want to make it clear that this decision (to close the school) has not been made because this is a Muslim school. "This decision has been made because this is a school that is not educating students properly. "An investigation into the operations of the college by the Department of Educational Services began in December 2006 - following complaints about the conduct of the principal-administrator, staffing of the college and the educational program.'' Key areas investigated included whether teachers were registered, the appropriateness of qualifications of teachers, inadequate educational leadership and standard of education, and the sufficiency of the school's resources.

Mr McGowan said other concerns were about the college's governance structure, the condition of buildings, and facilities and enrolment, and attendance procedures. He said it was found that teachers were inexperienced in teaching and understanding the curriculum framework, and students weren't being taught all required subjects. "The college has employed a number of unregistered teachers and many with limited authority to teach,'' he said. "Teachers are not spending 50 per cent of the school day on literacy and numeracy, as required. "Instead (they) spend a large amount of time on religious studies. This is clearly unacceptable and seriously damaging to the student's academic well-being. "The school is not being properly led because the director of the college (Anwar Sayed) is in Afghanistan and has been for most of the year."

Mr McGowan wrote to the school's governing body to notify them of his decision, which took effect from Friday. He said enrolments had declined in the past year, from about 90 students at the beginning of 2007 to about 50 or 60 students currently.

Source





9 December, 2007

How Leftist teachers hate classical literature!

The “Jabberwocky approach” to poetry teaching in schools, which relies too heavily on “lightweight” nonsense verse and too little on the classics, risks turning an entire generation away from the art form. A report from the schools inspectorate Ofsted gives warning today that poetry teaching in England can be repetitive and dull, with the same few poems chosen time and again for study. In primary school teachers tended to chose nonsense or whimsical poems such as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat and Spike Milligan’s On the Ning, Nang, Nong, poems that tell a strong story, such as Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners, or poems that are easy to imitate, such as Roger McGough’s The Sounds Collector.

William Blake’s Tyger was the most popular classic poem taught in primary schools. Only a minority tried poems such as Wordsworth’s Daffodils or Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As many secondary schools also included The Listeners and Jabberwocky, it is therefore likely that some pupils study the same small number of poems.

Secondary pupils also often studied individual poems rather than poets, so their experience of poetry tended to be of single poems written by different writers. Common choices were Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et decorum est, W. H. Auden’s Funeral Blues and Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.

There was widespread agreement that Shakespeare, Blake, Hughes and Heaney should be taught in secondary schools, with John Agard and Benjamin Zephaniah named as the most-popular poets from other cultures. But few teachers could give inspectors a satisfactory explanation for their choice of poetry and inspectors cited a survey by the United Kingdom Literacy Association, which found that more than half of teachers could not name more than two poets.

The National Curriculum requires primary pupils to cover both modern and classic poetry. Secondary students should read poetry from the English literary heritage and poems written for young people and adults. At both stages, pupils should also study poetry from different cultures and traditions. In primary schools teachers often knew too little about poetry to teach it properly and are unsure how to respond to pupils’ own writing, a report found. At secondary level, pupils spent too much time trying to imitate the work of popular poets, but were given too little encouragement to develop their own style. Inspectors noted with regret that at GCSE level, pupils spent large amounts of time studying poetry, but almost never composed anything of their own. One girl aged 16, told inspectors: “I can’t remember the last time I wrote a poem.”

While younger children told inspectors that they liked poetry, those in secondary school found the subject dull. In some cases, little more was required of pupils than to count the lines or list the rhymes. “The overuse of tasks like this means that pupils’ enjoyment diminishes and poetry becomes a chore rather than a pleasure,” inspectors concluded. While inspectors found that the standard of teaching poetry was good in two thirds of schools, overall it was weaker than other aspects of English teaching. Lessons were rated “outstanding” in only seven of the 86 schools inspected.

The report, Poetry in Schools, urged teachers to make sure they allow children to study a wider range of poems from classic writers and other cultures. It also suggested that schools provide more opportunities for pupils to write independently. Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said it was vital that poetry was taught in an engaging way. “Teachers should embrace but not be confined to the classics. There is a myth that poetry is obscure, which teachers can explode by introducing pupils to a broad range of poets.”

Source




The value of history

We have been here before. Almost every event has a precedent, never exact, but often revealing. Politicians and the media, however, often behave as if everything is new, risking a repeat of past mistakes. Demonstrating the relevance of history is the goal of the History and Policy website, a collaboration of Cambridge University, the Institute of Historical Research and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This involves a network of historians and 60 short briefing papers on topics such as climate change and national identity.

What history can contribute was the theme of a lively symposium in the Churchill Museum in London on Wednesday. Professor David Reynolds argued that historians could help via case studies from the past, such as by providing a larger sense of process, beyond the short-termism of normal politics; and thinking in time. The right question, he said, was not “What’s the problem?”, but “What’s the story?” – meaning: “How did we get into this mess?” Tracing the way in may help to point the way out.

Professor Reynolds, a diplomatic historian, gave some pertinent examples: “Beware nods and winks” – Tony Blair’s sometimes self-deluding hopes after his meetings with George Bush; “Watch your stereotypes” – Baroness Thatcher’s view of the Germans; “Cultivate teamwork” – like Ronald Reagan and George Shultz; and “Play it long” – John Major and Mr Blair’s successful efforts in Northern Ireland.

Professor Pat Thane, a social historian, stressed recurring challenges and arguments: for example, debates over means testing or targeting go back well before the Beveridge report of 1942, and those on the children of single mothers to the Poor Law in the late 16th century. Both Peter Lilley, the Social Security Security in the Major years and Baroness (Patricia) Hollis, a junior minister in that department after 1997, complained about the lack of past or international experience available to them.

Professor David Cannadine argued that Whitehall departments should have historical advisers and that the Government should have a chief historical adviser. This would go well beyond safeguarding records. It would be especially valuable in areas such as constitutional reform, where debates about the Union and Home Rule have long antecedents.

The role could be like a historical conscience, akin to the Chief Scientific Adviser. But the public statements of the Chief Scientific Adviser have to be in line with government policy, though Sir David King, the outgoing adviser, has interpreted that broadly with his attacks on antiscience prejudice. Would a historical adviser be speaking truth unto power in secret? And should not historical insights be an automatic part of policymaking and done by permanent secretaries, embodying the institutional memory of departments? Hence, Professor Reynolds’s suggestion that ministers make more use of historically trained advisers.

The implicit target of many comments was Mr Blair (who knew little history before 1997) and the explicit hope was Gordon Brown (with his PhD in history). The key, however, is being willing not just to think historically but to discuss parallels and precedents openly. That is much harder for any minister.

Source





8 December, 2007

'Indoctrinate U': What Really Happened

Post below lifted from Taranto. See the original for links

A few weeks ago, a colleague passed along a Nov. 15 blog entry by Tom Smith sounding the alarm about a possible case of censorship:

Apparently some major state university has threatened a lawsuit against the movie "Indoctrinate U," and the websites about the movie have been temporarily (one hopes) frozen. What is going on here? Which university has threatened them? And what with? This should be exactly the sort of thing one should be able to find out about in the blogosphere, but I see nothing on Instapundit, Volokh or the usual suspects (I may have missed it though; if so, sorry. Maybe I am the only one who doesn't know. It wouldn't be the first time.)

This is news, oh fellow bloggers. [Evan Maloney, director of "Indoctrinate U"] is understandably reluctant to comment. I suspect he has gotten a cease and desist letter, and he and his lawyers are deciding whether to push on and risk suit or perhaps seek a declaratory judgment in some court or other. I am not First Amendment scholar, but I use the First Amendment nearly every day. Surely the sort of political commentary that the movie is, would have a wide latitude under the Constitution, reviled post-colonial document enforced by hegemonic white males though it may be. So what gives? Minorities in the academy want to know.

Smith linked to a post on Maloney's blog:

Due to a threatened lawsuit from a major taxpayer-funded university, the Indoctrinate U homepage has been taken down temporarily. On The Fence Films LLC is deciding how best to proceed, and we will not be commenting on anything until after our final response has been executed. Don't worry, though, this will not derail the film. Indoctrinate U will be back.

Soon enough, it was. "Darren," a blogger who describes himself as "a conservative teacher," wrote on Dec. 4 that "in what I can only assume is a victory for free speech and yet another loss for fascist lefties, the Indoctrinate U web site is back up."

We contacted Maloney as soon as we got word of the shutdown of his Web site. He told us he wasn't yet able to discuss the matter, but promised to fill us in when he was. Having had our own brush with political censorship as a college student lo those many years ago, we too assumed this was a case of "fascist lefties" trying to protect themselves from exposure.

The reality is more ambiguous. Maloney sent us a statement explaining the situation, which we've posted here. This is, at least ostensibly, an intellectual-property dispute that has nothing to do with the content of the movie. In brief, a lawyer representing Indiana University wrote to Maloney's company early last month claiming that the "Indoctrinate U" logo was similar to IU's. Maloney does not concede the claim of infringement, arguing that differences between the two logos are "readily apparent" and that in any case his movie does not compete with IU's educational offerings. But he decided to stop using the logo anyway, figuring it was cheaper than fighting.

"In an act of good faith, we voluntarily took the Indoctrinate-U.com site offline while we reviewed our options," he writes. He didn't publicly name the university because that "would have caused needless controversy and made it harder to reach a mutually agreeable resolution to the dispute." The Web site returned once the logo had been stripped from it, from the promotional videos and from the movie itself. That's that, right? Well, not quite. According to Maloney:

The university is now demanding we hand over a sum of money that would essentially bankrupt On The Fence Films. I have to say, I'm a bit stunned. I understand that some academics might have a problem with our film; it covers academia's dirty little secrets. Nobody likes to be criticized. But Indiana University is not mentioned in the film at all! So their heavy-handedness seems a bit extreme.

Rather than ascribe negative motives to Indiana University, I'd rather assume it's just a matter of ignorance about our film: "Indoctrinate U" hasn't been screened within a six-hour drive of Indiana University, so perhaps their legal team is just unaware of its content. Maybe they're worried that we snuck our cameras onto campus once or twice. If that's the case, then I hope everything can be resolved by my personal assurance to the Trustees of Indiana University: You can breathe easy. Your school isn't in the film. So please--call off the dogs.

We've seen "Indoctrinate U," and the university officials who are featured in it come across looking both thuggish and incompetent, to very entertaining effect. If we were running a university, we would be at pains to stay off Evan Maloney's radar screen. But then maybe the guys at IU have decided the best defense is a good offense.




Britain: National test scores are annulled after cheating by teachers is exposed

Five schools caught cheating in national tests were stripped of their results yesterday. Investigators found evidence of malpractice in the Key Stage 2 Sats tests taken by 11-year-olds. Four of the schools lost all their marks in English, maths and science, and a fifth had its results removed for English. Two of them were among the best primaries in England in previous years, but will now be at the bottom of the league tables.

Teachers' unions said that the excessive pressure of targets and league tables was driving some teachers to cheat. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "It is deeply sad to see some schools fall into the trap of malpractice. This demonstrates the extreme pressure that some schools and some teachers feel to perform to targets which may not reflect the ability of the children in their midst. "We need an assessment system that promotes professional integrity and this one does not."

Mr Brookes criticised ministers for failing to listen to schools' concerns over the tests. Figures show that the number of schools accused of amending their pupils' results rose from 101 in 2005 to 115 last year. A report into maladministration said that examples of this included teachers who had previous knowledge of the questions coaching children for the test. They were also alleged to have given pupils too much help during the test or to have made changes to their papers after the exam.

About 500 schools are investigated by the National Assessment Agency each year, after parents, teachers or test-markers raise concerns. The five found guilty of malpractice included St Charles's Catholic Primary School, in Liverpool. The teacher at the centre of that incident is thought to have buckled under pressure and subsequently left the school.

Examiners contacted the NAA after noticing that tests at Brockswood Primary School, in Hemel Hempstead, and St Bernadette's Roman Catholic School, in St Albans. The schools are in Hertfordshire and a county council spokeswoman said: "The NAA found that test papers had been altered. Investigators were called in but it was not possible to identify how alterations had been made in either case. However, it was felt that lax administrative procedures had contributed." The test results were also annulled for Springfield Community Primary School in Hackney, East London. William Cowper Primary School, in Birmingham, was stripped of its English results.

Teachers who falsify results run the risk of ruining their careers. In the past six years the General Teaching Council has heard 30 such cases.

Source





7 December, 2007

Missouri Taxpayers Defeat Billion-Dollar School Lawsuit

Three members of the board of directors of the Show-Me Institute, a free-market think tank, helped make Missouri the latest state to strike down a lawsuit claiming inadequate funding for education. The Committee for Educational Equity (CEE)--a group of 236 public school districts--had claimed in a lawsuit filed in January 2004 that the state's funding levels failed to meet the constitutional requirement for all students to receive an adequate education. The group's experts testified the state would need to spend an additional $1 billion annually to fulfill their interpretation of its constitutional spending requirements.

In August 2007, Cole County Circuit Judge Richard Callahan ruled the plaintiffs failed to prove the state's current funding formula was unconstitutional. He refused to impose on the legislature a funding formula higher than required by the state's constitution. Importantly, the judge ruled individual taxpayers could assist defendants in constitutional battles over school spending.

By the time Callahan rendered his decision, CEE had spent $3.2 million on the case and had forced defendants to spend $1 million. About $800,000 of the latter sum was contributed by Show-Me Institute President Rex Sinquefield, who--along with Institute Secretary Bevis Schock and Treasurer Menlo Smith--were allowed by Callahan to become "defendant intervenors." Sinquefield believes it's been worth the investment. "Judge Callahan's ruling saves Missouri taxpayers more than a billion dollars," Sinquefield said. "This proves that the plaintiffs tried to get something out of the state legislature, and when they failed they went to the courts. Hopefully, this ruling will discourage the use of taxpayer dollars to sue the state."

While it's not unusual for plaintiffs to include intervenors--in this case, CEE was joined by the St. Louis school board, which is performing so badly it has been taken over by the state--legal experts believe this is the first time individuals have been allowed to "intervene" to work with a state attorney general to defend a case. "We decided to try it in this case because we didn't think the attorney general was adequately representing the taxpayers of Missouri," said Joshua M. Schindler, lead attorney for Sinquefield and his colleagues.

Schindler said Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon took only two depositions since the lawsuit was filed almost four years ago. After Sinquefield got involved, 52 depositions were filed, including that of Michael Podgursky, an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a member of the Show-Me Institute's board. Several calls to Nixon's office were unreturned.

Podgursky testified about the relationship between school funding and student performance. "We put on a very vigorous defense," Podgursky said. "Having these individual intervenors allowed us to bring up issues about a lack of competition and single-salary schedules for teachers, and to show the non-relationship between the spending and student achievement--to get a lot of information out in the open." Podgursky was able to counter claims that teachers are underpaid by noting Missouri has decided to lower its student-teacher ratio to 13.8:1. The national average is 15.8:1. He testified the state could give every teacher a 14 percent raise by moving to the national student-teacher ratio. "Many common misconceptions about school performance, accountability, and per-pupil spending were brought to light because of this case," Sinquefield said.

Even without individual intervenors, the Missouri decision is part of a national trend of school districts unsuccessfully suing based on claims current funding formulas don't produce enough revenue to ensure each student receives an "adequate" education. While adequacy lawsuits have been filed in 21 states, they are not having the success of those filed during the 1990s. Those earlier actions challenged the constitutionality of school funding systems relying primarily on property taxes, reasoning that districts with lower property values have less to spend on their students. Adequacy lawsuits also have failed in Alaska, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and South Carolina over the past five years, Podgursky said.

The Council for Better Education in Kentucky set the tone for the rest of the nation with its successful equity lawsuit in the early 1990s. But earlier this year, a Kentucky judge ruled--in a decision similar to Callahan's--that the legislature, not the courts, should decide how to dole out school funds, in a second case filed by the group, this one an adequacy lawsuit. Taxpayers were not involved in resolving either Kentucky case.

In Missouri the outcome would likely have been different without taxpayers' personal involvement, Schindler said. "The dynamics of the defense changed rather dramatically after the intervenors were allowed," Schindler noted. "When a taxpayer is involved at the table in the courtroom, they're more likely to see it as a defense of tax dollars."

Source




Australian conservatives slam Leftists for education buckpassing

The Opposition yesterday accused Education Minister Julia Gillard of taking the lazy option of blaming Howard government neglect for Australia's fall in international reading and maths tests, instead of holding state Labor governments accountable. Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop, the former education minister, said Ms Gillard had to recognise state governments ran schools and set curriculums and as a result were responsible for educational standards. "If Ms Gillard continues to refuse to recognise that state governments are responsible for standards in their schools, then standards will go backwards," she said. "If this is her best response, it's a warning sign that Ms Gillard is not up to the task of managing her own super portfolio."

Ms Gillard said on Tuesday that the decline in Australia's international standing in reading and maths tests reflected the decade of neglect by the Coalition government. Her comments were in response to the OECD's latest Program for International Student Assessment of 15-year-olds in 57 countries, which showed reading and maths skills among Australia's top students were falling.

Ms Bishop said the Coalition government had provided $1.8billion to the states and territories since 2005 to improve literacy and numeracy standards. "It's critical Ms Gillard ask state governments to account for how they have invested that $1.8 billion," she said. Ms Bishop said teacher unions and professional associations had some responsibility for falling educational standards. "Over the past 20 years, the influence of the education unions on school curriculum has led to the embrace of fads and political agendas rather than on the core skills of literacy and numeracy," she said.

But teachers' organisations blamed the falling standards on the Coalition government, accusing it of a decade of underfunding public schools compared with private schools. The Australian Association for the Teaching of English said the PISA results should be welcomed by parents and teachers because Australia's overall position remained high. AATE president Karren Philp said: "Care needs to be exercised in how the PISA test data is interpreted. It is wrong to immediately assert the results indicate declining standards of literacy in this country."

Ms Philp said the test results backed Australia's approach in the teaching of literacy rather than the "back to basics" initiatives adopted in Britain and the US, which rank well below Australia. She told The Australian the fall in performance among top students was of concern, but she was not sure if it represented a drop in standards. "I'm not sure yet. We're going to look very closely at the report," she said.

But the Australian Education Union, representing government school teachers, and the Independent Education Union, representing teachers in the private sector, agreed the results suggested a decline among top students. AEU acting federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said yesterday: "Based on the results released by the OECD, we have been overtaken, and we are at risk of seeing our international education ranking decline." Asked if he stood by earlier comments on standards made by AEU president Pat Byrne, Mr Gavrielatos said: "Teachers have always been and will always remain concerned about standards in our schools. We don't get into hysterical and deceitful debates advanced by the previous government wanting to divest its funding responsibilities."

Source





6 December, 2007

U.S. students do worse in science and math

The PISA tests are not exactly demanding, either. More demanding tests would almost certainly show up bigger differences

U.S. students are lagging behind their peers in other countries in science and math, test results out Tuesday show. The test, the Program for International Student Assessment, was given to 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries last year. It focused on science but also included a math portion. The 30 countries, including the United States, make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs the international test. The average scores for U.S. students were lower than the average scores for the group as a whole.

U.S. students also had an average science score that was lower than the average score in 16 other OECD countries. In math, U.S. students did even worse - posting an average score that was lower than the average in 23 of the other leading industrialized countries.

The test also was administered to students in about two dozen countries or jurisdictions that are not part of the industrialized group. When compared with the broader group, the U.S. students fell in the middle of the pack in science and did somewhat worse in math. There was no change in U.S. math scores since 2003, the last time the test was given. The science scores aren't comparable between 2003 to 2006, because the tests aren't the same. U.S. girls and boys did about the same on the science and math portions of the test.

Finland's 15-year-olds did the best on the science test, followed by students in Hong Kong and Canada. Students in Finland, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong were the top performers in math.

Source




Canadian universities say no to affirmative action for men

Females outnumber men by 60-40 split

Despite a growing gender gap on Canadian campuses, universities are balking at a fledgling movement in the United States to make special efforts to attract more men, such as adopting affirmative action initiatives that favour male applicants over female ones. Campus recruiters and admissions managers from Memorial University of Newfoundland to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver say they are taking no extra steps to target male students. Nor do they consider it a problem -- at least not yet -- that female university students outnumber men by about 60-40 on average nationwide.

"It hasn't really come up as a flag," said Andrew Arida, associate director of enrolment at University of British Columbia, summing up the sentiment of several recruitment specialists. "As public universities that take public funds, we have to respond to what the public wants and if more female members of the public want it than male, I can't see us wanting to do something like affirmative action. "That only makes sense if you believe the group for which you are putting the affirmative action in place has experienced some sort of systemic barriers to progressing."

Statistics Canada, in a recent report on future post-secondary enrolment trends, suggested universities and colleges could offset a potential slump that may surface in about 10 years, when the last of the echo baby boomers graduate, by tapping into a "reservoir" of young men who are passing up higher education.

Herb O'Heron, senior adviser for the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, said that campus recruiters are well aware of the gender imbalance on campus, but that "we're not at the point of affirmative action" to fill the gap. "I would say if you talk to any university enrolment manager across the country they would be aware of the higher levels of female participation and be considering things that would help to attract young men across the country."

For the last 20 years, women have outnumbered men on campus. There are several theories behind the change, including assertions that the grade school system is tailored to girls, there are higher expectations from educators and parents that females will pursue post-secondary education, and that men have less motivation to pursue degrees and diplomas because they can earn good money straight out of high school.

A U.S. study published two years ago in the journal Economics of Education Review revealed many American universities appear to favour men in university admissions as applicant pools become more female. There also have been numerous news story in the United States in which universities and colleges have conceded they give male applicants an easier ride than female applicants in an effort to equalize the gender ratio.

One reason cited by registrars for rejecting special recruitment efforts is enrolment is exploding in most provinces and universities have not had to cast wider nets to attract more students. But even schools that are suffering an enrolment drop, including St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, N.S., and the University of Regina, say they haven't tried to make up the shortfall by trying to recruit men in particular. "I would say that the University of Regina is more focused on general recruitment," said Barb Pollock, vice president of external relations. "I think universities have to be careful to be as accessible as possible to all people.

Source





5 December, 2007

The British Inquisition Goes Global

Recently, an American-Israeli, Asaf Romirowsky, was asked to step down from a University of Delaware panel discussion on anti-Americanism because one of the participants, the University's Muqtedar Khan, expressed an unwillingness to appear on a panel discussion with anyone who had once served in the Israel Defense Forces. Khan did not bother to assert, much less prove, that the past performance of (compulsory) military service by an Israeli was something illicit. He merely pretended that such conduct is self-evidently deserving of ostracism.

Why the pretense? Perhaps because it was a handy distraction from the discrimination increasingly deployed against Israeli Jews in the academy. Most Israeli Jews (but not Israeli Muslims) perform military service and to exclude on this basis is to impose a virtually blanket ban on them.

This occurrence at University of Delaware is part of a wider pattern which originated in Britain. In April 2002, two British academics, Steven and Hilary Rose, initiated an academic boycott campaign against Israel, calling for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel until Israel pursues peace talks along the lines of the faux peace plan put forward by the Arab League in 2002.

In June 2002, Mona Baker, a professor at UMIST, sacked two Tel Aviv University academics from the editorial boards of the two journals she edits. She offered them however, the choice of retaining their positions if they sever ties with Israel and leave the country. In 2003, an Oxford pathology professor, Andrew Wilkie, rejected an Israeli research applicant, explaining that his detestation of Israel's policies impelled him to reject an Israeli citizen, irrespective of the individual's personal views or merits. Similarly, two Israelis highly critical of Israel - one Jewish and one Arab - had their submission to an English academic journal returned with an editor's note advising that it had been rejected because its authors were Israelis - though in this case, the two were offered reconsideration if they inserted some paragraphs likening Israel to apartheid South Africa.

In 2005, Britain's Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to impose an academic boycott on two Israeli universities. The country's other major union, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), voted in May 2006 in favor of a boycott of Israeli lecturers and academic institutions that do not publicly dissociate themselves from Israel's "apartheid policies."

The British pattern has been replicated globally: a petition for boycotting research and cultural links with Israel was taken up quickly in the U.S. (April 2002) and Australia (May 2002), with similar initiatives following in France, Italy, Belgium and in the Scandinavian countries.

It has also spread beyond academe: In May 2006, the Canadian Union of Public Employees Ontario, the Ontario wing of Canada's largest union, voted to join an international boycott campaign against Israel "until that state recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination ." This April, British journalists implicitly confirmed past complaints about anti-Israel bias (always indignantly denied) when its National Union of Journalists voted by 66 to 54 to boycott Israeli goods. This was followed in May by a group of 130 British doctors calling for a boycott of the Israel Medical Association (IMA) and its expulsion from the World Medical Association since, in their words, the IMA had "refused" to protest about Israeli "war crimes."

Injustice and discrimination aside, the results of boycotting individual Israelis occasionally have been absurd: thus, in 2003, the chief of Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital's gene-therapy institute, engaged in research to cure a blood disease prevalent among Palestinians, was refused assistance from a Norwegian colleague.

What is one to conclude? That shunning Israeli Jews takes place on the inquisitorial presumption that terrible guilt attaches to each individual Israeli Jew unless innocence is proved. In short, Israeli Jews are guilty until proven innocent. Innocence, in turn, may only be demonstrated (occasionally, at least) by explicit condemnation of the policies of its democratically elected government - in short, by Soviet-style denunciations. Nor has dissent from this position been adjudged an admissible alternative by the inquisitors. For them, political orthodoxy has become an ideal.

Academics from even truly tyrannical and vicious regimes like North Korea, Burma, Saudi Arabia or Iran face no such test or sanction, nor has it occurred to anyone that they should. It is an elementary principle that private individuals are not responsible for the actions of their governments. This principle evidently does not apply to the British Inquisition.

Others have rightly noted of this incident that Khan was wrong to avoid vigorous debate with an opponent. But that point is scarcely the most important. It was not debate alone that Khan avoided. Rather, he was repudiating Israeli Jews within the precincts of academic debate. The British Inquisition operates on a similar principle of excluding Israeli Jews from rights and privileges accorded everyone else. It is part of a wider strategy for their ostracism - and it is gaining a presence in America.

Source




Bias against ability and the rich fading in Australian medical school admissions

A pity about students who have already been discriminated against by these evil processes though. In a rational world admission interviews would have been tested for predictive power BEFORE they were introduced. But evidence did not drive their introduction. Class-hatred did

AUSTRALIA'S biggest medical school is scrapping interviews for student selection as "useless", saying they are too prone to bias and there is no evidence interviewers can pick which applicants will perform well during the course. The decision by the University of Queensland means the 400 students accepted into its medical course next year will be assessed on their academic record alone, without having to face an interview panel. The university expects other medical schools may follow suit -- and the move seems likely at least to reopen a debate about the merits of interviews, which attracted controversy last year over allegations of bias.

There has also been unease over the growth of expensive courses that coach students what to say in interviews to maximise their chances of being accepted. Some universities have already been scaling back the emphasis on interview performance. Adelaide University last year adjusted its assessment procedures to give equal consideration to a school-leaver's tertiary entrance rank and marks at interview, instead of giving most weight to the latter. Earlier in the year the university had been accused by its former deputy chancellor of "unwritten discrimination" against applicants from private schools and medical families -- charges the university strongly denied.

As a graduate-entry medical school, UQ's new arrangements mean applicants will be considered if they score more than five in their grade-point average, the summary of their academic work in their previous degree course. After passing that hurdle, those considered will be ranked for entry according to their marks in the Graduate Australian Medical School Admissions Test, or GAMSAT. Previously, the interview has been the third part of UQ's selection process.

Until this year the University of Sydney also chose students solely on the basis of performance at interview, but now gives equal weight to marks in the GAMSAT. Dean of medicine Bruce Robinson said the university was now conducting a review of the admission procedures, due to report in March.

UQ's decision, recently approved by the university's Senate, came after months of research to find out to what extent the interview scores of candidates were correlating with their subsequent performance during the medical course. "The answer was not very much," said David Wilkinson, head of UQ's school of medicine. The research showed that performance at interview predicted only 10 per cent of the variation in academic performance during the course.

The grade-point average was the best predictor of performance during the course. Although the GAMSAT correlated only slightly with how well students did later on, the fact that the same test was sat by all applicants meant it remained useful for ranking applicants, Professor Wilkinson said. "All the evidence shows that the interview is useless," he said. He said the potential bias of the interviewers was also a valid concern. "Even though we have had very rigorous training programs for interviewers, there's inevitably a level of subjectivity there, and there have been some questions raised about quality control, standardisation and fairness, and defensibility," he said.

Peter Brooks, executive dean of UQ's faculty of health sciences, said the change was "a big deal" and the university now had "data that it (the interview) doesn't really do all that much".

Source





4 December, 2007

The Myth of the Middle-Class School

As middle-class suburban homeowners cling precariously to their dwellings in the midst of the current housing slump, many comfort themselves, as they write out their high mortgage payment checks, that at least their children can attend good neighborhood public schools. Unfortunately for these parents, all too often these supposedly “good” public schools have bad records when it comes to student achievement.

In California, for example, there are hundreds of regular public schools in middle-class and more affluent neighborhoods where less than half of the students in at least one grade level fail to perform at the proficient level in English or math on state tests. These schools are located throughout the state, on the expensive coastline, in suburbs and exurbs, and in conservative inland “red” counties. Here are a few examples.

Just east of Sacramento is Placer County, the most Republican county in the state. Republicans dominate Placer’s congressional and state legislative delegations. Embattled Republican congressman John Doolittle, fighting accusations of improper campaign contributions stemming from the Abramoff fiasco, represents the area. The GOP also controls local bodies such as city councils and school boards. Big new tract homes and big box stores fill the landscape. Yet, for all this seeming suburban coziness, the performance of students at one of the supposedly top local high schools leaves a lot to be desired.

At Oakmont High School, which sits in a zip code where the median home price earlier this year was in $450,000 range, less than half of tenth graders and only four in 10 eleventh graders scored at the proficient level on the state English exam in 2007. In mathematics, the scores were even worse. Only about a quarter of students taking either the state algebra I or algebra II exams scored proficient, while less than one in five taking the geometry test scored at that level.

The city of San Mateo, just south of San Francisco, has produced such notables as entertainment legend Merv Griffin and two-time Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady. Like other towns along peninsula from San Francisco to San Jose, San Mateo has astronomical home prices. Hillsdale High School in San Mateo is in a zip code with a median home price of more than $800,000. Yet, in 2007, less than half of eleventh graders scored at or above the proficient level on the state English exam.

Another bad sign for many California high schools in middle-class and affluent areas is the low proportion of 11th graders who test at the college-ready level on the California State University’s Early Assessment Program (EAP) exam, which is supposed to spot students who may need remedial instruction in English or math as freshmen. Take, for instance, Newport Harbor High School in posh Newport Beach in conservative Orange County.

Newport Harbor High is now best known as the site of MTV’s reality show Newport Harbor: The Real Orange County. While the television show focuses on the usual teen rivalries and love triangles, little is said about the achievement of students at the high school. That may be just as well, at least for school officials, since in 2006 less than one in four Newport Harbor’s eleventh graders taking the EAP English exam tested at the college-ready level.

The beach community of Torrance near Los Angeles is another example. It is home to some the most famous high schools in America. Torrance High was the setting of Beverly Hills 90210 and South High, the location of the 1999 film American Beauty. But when only slightly more than half of those high-school students score proficient in English, and less than a third test college-ready, the fancy facades aren’t much consolation to parents paying mortgages on $700,000 homes.

Parents in such upscale areas as Santa Barbara, the Silicon Valley, the Northern California wine country, and San Diego enclaves like La Jolla all had similar low college-ready rates among their students. California, however, is not alone. Nationwide, an average of six out of 10 4th and 8th grade students who are not poor score below grade-level proficiency in math and reading on the Nation’s Report Card.

It is time for the broad middle class in America to realize that their “free” suburban schools are, in many cases, not as good as they have been led to believe. Once they understand that they are not getting the bang for their mortgage and tax buck, they can then wield their large political clout to demand the freedom to choose their children’s schools regardless of where they live. Strapped “house poor” middle-class parents can benefit from a school-choice voucher just as much as parents in low-income areas. Only with such choice options will middle-class homebuyers finally get what they paid for.

Source




Poor professor Matory

J. Lorand Matory is a professor at Harvard, in anthropology and African and African-American studies, and he is feeling mighty oppressed today because some people on campus disagree with him. Scott Johnson of Powerline writes today on the professor's expressed plight, and excerpts enough of his writing to demonstrate the point that the professor is sadly lacking in the logical argument department.

[W]hy does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people's claims on European bank accounts, property, and compensation for labor expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel's founding in the late 1940s?

Let's do a cursory glance at Matory's positions. A larger number of Jewish refugees left Arab lands than Arabs who left Israel. They left penniless, after being stripped of their assets. The Arab refugees left at the prompting of their leaders (in part) who broadcast their plans to wreak devastation on their way through Israel as they promised to push the Jews into the sea.

Let's ponder his equivalency argument over the genocide committed against European Jewry-the destruction of a people-against the displacement of Arab refugees who left of their own volition. These Arab refugees consists not only of those who left in 1948 but ALL OF THEIR DESCENDENTS-accorded this unique status by virtue of the UN which established this UN Agency just for Palestinian refugees: UNRWA-United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

Over the years billions have been sent to these refugees to aid them. UNRWA has also aided them in their terror efforts -- admitting that it has terrorists on its payroll and being forced to admit that its offices have been used as hideouts for terrorists. Its employees are exclusively Palestinians.

The Jewish refugees who were pushed from their homes in Arab lands did not have the benefit of aid flowing from the United Nations. Instead, they had to struggle to make new lives for themselves in Israel and elsewhere. This they accomplished because Israel welcomed them; in contrast, Arab nations kept Palestinian refugees locked up in camps and, with the exception of Jordan, denied them citizenship, rights to engage in various professions, and rights to own property. Arab refugees have been abused-by their own brethren and their own leaders. This does not equate them to victims of genocide.

Maybe it is time for Harvard to take some of its billions of dollars and find some better qualified professors.

Source




Australia: Maths skills sink to a five-year low

MATHS skills among Year 7 students have fallen to their lowest level in five years. Unpublished figures to be released next month, and obtained by The Weekend Australian, show that more than one in five Year 7 students failed to acquire the necessary maths skills to progress through school. The proportion attaining minimum standards in maths has fallen below 80 per cent for the first time, to 79.7 per cent, and is down from a high of 83.5 per cent in 2002. The report looms as the first major challenge to confront incoming deputy prime minister Julia Gillard, who has been handed the role of implementing Kevin Rudd's education revolution.

In a further indictment of the national education system, an OECD report released this week shows Australia trailing Estonia and New Zealand in science skills. The OECD Program for International Student Assessment conducted last year among 15-year-olds in 57 countries focused on science skills. It ranked Australia eighth on the students' mean scores, behind Finland in first place followed by Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan, Estonia, Japan and New Zealand. The previous PISA test, carried out in 2003, ranked Australia sixth in science, fourth in reading and 11th in maths.

The Australian Council for Educational Research, which administers PISA in Australia on behalf of the OECD, said that when statistical difference was taken into account, Australia tied in fourth place for science with a number of other countries. ACER chief executive Geoff Masters said Australia had maintained its performance from the previous PISA test, in which it ranked fourth out of 41 countries.

The 2006 years 3, 5 and 7 National Benchmark Results were sent to the state and territory education ministers this week for approval before their scheduled public release by the end of the year. The 2006 results show the general trend among Year 3 students is a stable proportion of students meeting the benchmarks with 91 per cent passing reading, 92.7 per cent passing writing and 92.6 per cent passing numeracy. The results for Year 5 students are more patchy, with an increasing proportion of students failing to meet the benchmarks. In 2006, about 12 per cent of Year 5 students failed to meet the reading benchmark, 6 per cent failed to meet the writing benchmark and 10 per cent failed to meet the numeracy standard. By Year 7, the proportion falling behind had widened further, with about 11 per cent failing the reading benchmark, 8 per cent failing the writing benchmark and about 20 per cent failing to meet the numeracy benchmark.

The report seeks to discredit the huge difference in Year 7 numeracy skills, saying the benchmark appears to be too hard. "This apparent drop in progress can in some way be attributed to a concern that the benchmark standard for Year 7 has been set at a higher level than for the other year levels," it says. The Year 7 numeracy benchmark requires students to deal in whole numbers to seven digits, and use decimals with two place values in familiar situations, such as money and measurements. The national benchmark results also highlight the gap between the indigenous community and the rest of the nation.

Source





3 December, 2007

Just say no to `No Platform'

Britain: A student at the University of East Anglia strikes a blow for free speech against the NUS's censorious policies

Last week, the students union at the University of East Anglia passed a policy introduced by Richard Reynolds, stating that `in order to discredit illiberal, extremist or racist ideologies, it is necessary to openly confront these ideas and not merely pretend they do not exist'. This runs counter to the policy of the National Union of Students, which is to deny a platform to extremists. Here, we republish the UEA students' pro-free speech policy:

Fight Fascism, End `No Platform'

* You can't win the war against fascist ideas if you don't fight the battles. Banning things just makes us look like we are scared to take them on;

* Saying you `believe in free speech, but...' is meaningless, just as saying `I'm not racist, but...'. Either we are free to say and think what we believe or we are not;

* If fascist groups were to come to campus to debate, our representatives should be inside the room arguing with them and proving them wrong, not just protesting pointlessly outside;

* If we ban these groups, we give them the moral high ground - they can claim they are unfairly treated and accuse those who do believe in democracy of being hypocrites;

* Part of being a student is coming across new ideas, not all of these will be nice, but we learn from them all.

Some myths about `No Platform':

* `Fascist groups will come to, or are going to be invited to, campus'

This does not mean we want them here or we are extending an invitation. They can anyway, it is beyond the power of the Union to stop them.

* `By arguing with such groups (giving them a "platform") we are giving them credibility'

The whole point of arguing with someone is to see who is right; it does not imply we think they are right, quite the reverse is true. Our arguments can always be made better and we can further understand what is wrong with their position - just like when we study outdated academic ideas on our courses.

* `Fascist/racist groups will attack people, especially ethnic minorities, LGBT students and other discriminated against groups.'

This may be true. However, if it is, this is a matter for the police as it would be a criminal offence. You cannot assume people are guilty, however unpleasant they are, before they act.

* `Ethnic minorities, LGBT students and people from other discriminated against groups will be too uncomfortable to debate with such people in the room.'

Democracy requires debate; sometimes that debate can be messy, but to sacrifice controversy for an easy life is to sacrifice democracy itself. Why should we presume that minority groups need special protection? Surely they are as capable as anyone else? To suggest otherwise is not only patronising; it is the very essence of discrimination, which we should be fighting against.

* `The NUS conference would be invaded by extremists!'

The conference was not invaded before NUS had a `no platform' policy. These `extremists' would have to be elected as delegates, like every other NUS conference delegate. And if they don't follow the rules, then, like everyone else, they can be chucked out.

Source




School Newsletter Omits Christmas from December 'Important Dates'

A Freudian slip?

They made a list, but they should have checked it twice. In a December newsletter to the families of elementary school students, Spokane Public Schools' list of "important dates" didn't include Christmas. Hanukkah, Human Rights Day, winter break, the Islamic holy day Eid al-Adha, first day of winter and Kwanzaa all made the list. But no Christmas.

"It was absolutely an error of omission," district spokeswoman Terren Roloff said. "In our efforts to be inclusive, we missed the obvious." The omission drew complaints from some parents that Christians are being overlooked in favor of other cultures and beliefs. Greater Spokane Association of Evangelicals Executive Director John Tusant said the error surprised him. "The stores have been decorated for the last month. How do you overlook that?" Tusant asked.

Hutton School parent Jane Harper noted the absence of Christmas but didn't think the omission was meant as a message to Christians. "Christmas is so dominant in our society. I don't know that anyone should feel slighted," Harper said.

Roloff said the district would not have included Hanukkah and Eid al-Adha if it had intended to avoid religious celebrations. She said her office has been fielding calls about the newsletter from concerned parents, and that most have been understanding about the mix-up. Christmas had been added to the "important dates" section of the online version of the school district's newsletter by Thursday afternoon.

Source





2 December, 2007

Police failure at Oxford U

No police interest in free speech. Quite to the contrary. They were there to "facilitate protest" -- i.e. to prevent it. About what we expect of Britain's politicized police. Law and order comes a distant second to political correctness

Police in Oxford were today embroiled in a row after being accused of "outrageous" failures in containing anti-fascist protests against a debate at the university last night. Evan Harris, a speaker at the event, said that officers were to blame for failing to stop protesters infiltrating into the debating hall and preventing the Oxford Union debate taking place. The demonstrators were protesting against the inclusion of Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, and the historian David Irving, a convicted Holocaust-denier, on the list of speakers.

Despite a heavy police presence, around 30 protesters managed to storm the union and staged a sit down protest at the debating table. Police estimate up to 1,000 people joined the protest but, despite the invasion, no arrests were made.

Amid the fallout from the protests, Mr Harris, the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, criticised police for allowing protesters to get in and said a cordon should have been in place around the premises. "The failure of the police is outrageous," he added. In response the force claimed that the Oxford Union had taken charge of its own on-the-door security and that the union was at fault for allowing protesters to get in. "It was not our responsibility to prevent protestors from entering the Union. That was the responsibility of the event organisers," a Thames Valley Police spokeswoman said. "As we have said from the beginning, our primary responsibility was to facilitate lawful protest. "The protestors who entered the debating chamber were not committing a criminal offence, but civil trespass and therefore we did not have powers to arrest them."

In a statement, Chief Inspector Dennis Evernden said most protesters had been peaceful. "A small minority seemed intent on causing problems but police intervention prevented any criminal acts or disorder," he said. Mr Evernden refused to go into detail about officers deployed on the protest today, saying it contravened the force's security procedures.

The debate eventually went ahead more than a hour late with the speakers split into two groups for safety. Mr Irving, who was jailed for three years in Austria for denying the Holocaust, spoke alongside broadcaster and author Anne Atkins and Liberal Democrat Mr Harris in the debating hall while Mr Griffin was among debaters speaking in the main Union building.

Nearly half of the students who had tickets for the event failed to get in after the crowd outside the union blocked the gates. Those who did make it in faced jeers of "shame on you". Union security officers said the protesters got into the building by jumping over the wall while others created a diversion by gathering and crushing at the front gate.

The Oxford Union had argued that the pair should be allowed to take part in the name of free speech. Luke Tryl, the union's President, said: "I think David Irving came out of that looking pathetic. I said in my introduction that I found his view repugnant and abhorrent because I wanted that on record."

Source




Australian education as it was

When a newspaper columnist once suggested a contest for the best book ever written, excluding the Bible and Shakespeare's works, I was tempted to nominate the fifth book of The Victorian Readers series. This, in my distant day, was the main teaching aid (it would now be called a resource) in Year 5, other than talk, chalk and the blackboard.

It is hard to think of a better book for teaching nine and 10-year-olds about their country. The class particularly loved Henry Lawson's ballads The Fire at Ross's Farm and The Ballad of the Drover, and his short story The Drover's Wife. There was also John Shaw Neilson's poem Old Granny Sullivan, pieces about the explorer Matthew Flinders, an Adventure with the Aborigines and a poem about the pioneers.

The sixth book had the even more memorable Banjo Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow and Dorothea Mackellar's My Country ("I love a sunburnt country...").

Nor was it all parochial. The fifth book had approximately equal Australian and overseas content and included pieces on Giotto the Italian shepherd boy, Switzerland's William Tell and the apple, Robert Bruce, and the story of King Kaid of India and the spider. While World War II raged far away, about 40 pupils (a few years later it would be more like 50) would read the livelier items rhythmically as a class, sing-song like the multiplication tables of the previous lesson: "Across the stony ridges, across the rolling plain, young Harry Dale the drover. . . "

But each child also had to read aloud before the class, one by one, and few would not do their best and be found out as a weak reader, which would involve being kept in after school for further teaching. (An even worse fate, and thus spur to effort, was to be kept back to repeat a year; but it was effective remedial education if it happened.)

The teacher, Mr Dunell, would walk up and down the aisles of twin-seater desks while children read and rap on the knuckles with his wooden ruler anybody who talked, giggled or dozed off. His favourite poet - who, I was surprised on checking to find was in the sixth, not the fifth book - was William Wordsworth. He introduced us to Wordsworth's Daffodils, which we had again the following year.

The books and curriculum varied from state to state, but the spirit didn't vary much. These and similar verses and short articles were primary school favourites for generations, until the curriculum purges of the reforming 1970s led to their ouster for various reasons, including a move against rote learning and the suspicion that they were remnants of imperial history.

However, when I read now of the debates over the place of history, especially Australian history, in the secondary school curriculum, I wonder if many educators have forgotten, or not known, how much Australian and general history was once packed into the humble primary school. It was not so much taught as infused in the classroom day. The readers and also the monthly School Paper merged reading, literature, history and geography. The black-and-white sketches brought distant times and lands to life and were themselves an introduction to art. Lawson, Paterson and other ballads introduced children to the story of the grazing industries, the battle of squatter and selector, bushfires and inland geography.

Billy Bear was a memorable cartoon figure in my School Paper, a koala-like chap who toured the sources of our food and household goods: Goulburn Valley for fruit, Gippsland for milk, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) for tea, Java (Indonesia) and Malaya (Malaysia) for rubber.

History lessons proper devoted much time to the explorers. The crossing of the Blue Mountains built on Captain Cook and the First Fleet. Flinders taught us as much geography as history. The journeys of Edward John Eyre, Ludwig Leichhardt, Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt taught us more inland geography and a feeling for the early 19th century, with white adventurers moving into the vast plains and deserts sparsely inhabited by Aboriginal tribes.

The explorers were once heroes. When I moved on to high school, the sports houses were named for them. There is many a Flinders, Sturt or Mitchell street still and three Leichhardt postcodes.

The fairly common belief that imperial history is discreditable and must only be studied harshly, if at all, should be re-examined. In practice, avoiding it means little history is taught at all, or becomes the "fragmented stew" that John Howard complained about. For better or worse, empires were the main way of ruling the world between ancient Rome, if not earlier, and World War I. The British Empire was the biggest and, arguably, the best.

Those who feel that imperial history in Australia insults Aborigines have a point. It needs sensitive, but not evasive, treatment. To ignore pioneering history or to present it only as suffering victims of invasion is to avoid explaining how the society we live in came to be. The Aboriginal reaction to white occupation, where recorded, shows rapid and shrewd adaptation, but with lots of problems.

Though much of what has been written is contested, balanced secondary school lessons should be possible, but it seems too complicated for younger children. On looking back through all eight of the Victorian Reader books, I thought the coverage of Aborigines was not too bad: perhaps seven out of 10 marks. There could have been more, but none of the articles was demeaning or patronising, unless it is perceived as politically incorrect to depict Aborigines other than as guerilla fighters or social workers.

Schoolbooks initiated 90 years ago are unlikely to appeal today, and no doubt were losing effectiveness after 50 years of service. And of course most teachers work hard under difficulties. Nevertheless, though secondary school grabs the headlines, teachers say part of the difficulty is that primary schools today turn out too many pupils who do not know enough or read or spell well enough. Formation in reading, arithmetic, grammar, spelling, poetry, history, geography and nature study should not be too much to ask, especially as it once could be done for a fraction of the present cost and fuss.

The above article by Robert Murray appeared in "The Australian" (Review section) on November 24, 2007





1 December, 2007

British Stealth curriculum is `threat to all toddlers'

This is rather hysterical but imposing a single uniform government requirement on every kid in the country, regardless of mental age or maturity, is nonetheless objectionable. It actually makes the Hitler Youth look tolerant. You could opt out of that. Applying the system to State-educated children only would be some improvement



A new national curriculum for all under-5s will cause untold damage to the development of young children, a powerful lobby of academics says today. The highly prescriptive regime for pre-school children, which is due to become law next year, has been introduced by stealth, they say. It will induce needless anxiety and dent children's enthusiasm for learning, according to the group of experts in childhood development. They say that the severity of the compulsory measures, which will apply to an estimated 25,000 nurseries across the private and state sectors, has gone virtually unnoticed and risks an array of educational and behavioural problems for the country's children.

A letter signed by the group, and seen by The Times, is highly critical of the Government's drive to make children aged 3 and 4 write simple sentences using punctuation, interpret phonic methods to read complex words and use mathematical ideas to solve practical problems. The group, including the leading child psychologists Richard House, Dorothy Rowe and Penelope Leach, and Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, are today launching a campaign called Open Eye to promote the message that babies and young children learn most naturally and effectively through free play, movement and imitation, rather than formal teaching.

"An overly formal, academic and/or cognitively biased `curriculum', however carefully camouflaged, distorts this learning experience," they say. "An early `head start' in literacy is now known to precipitate unforeseen difficulties later on - sometimes including unpredictable emotional and behavioural problems."

The new early-years foundation stage framework (EYFS), which becomes law next autumn, will affect all nurseries and kindergartens in England. The system requires children to be continually assessed according to 13 different learning scales, including writing, problem solving and numeracy. It could also have profound implications for thousands of non-mainstream preschool organisations, such as Steiner kindergartens, where formal learning is not introduced until children reach 6«. Montesorri schools, which also have a less academic approach, will also be affected.

Richard House, senior lecturer in psychotherapy and counselling at Roehampton University, southwest London, said that the element of compulsion surrounding the new legislation been introduced "by stealth". Unlike the national curriculum for schools, which does not apply to independent schools, the framework will apply to all pre-school settings - state, private and voluntary. "What is most objectionable is that the framework is compulsory. The central State is defining what child development is. It means that a pre-school would have to pursue the Government's defined view of healthy child development, even if it contradicts their own view," Dr House said. "Some people do not want their children doing synthetic phonics or quasi-formal learning at 3 or 4 but they could be left with little choice. There would be a very strong case for mounting a legal challenge under the human rights legislation," he said.

Experts believe that the legislation will impose a system of "audit and accountability" on children that will profoundly affect the way in which teachers interact with them. Margaret Edgington, a leading independent early-years consultant, said: "We are going to end up with lots of children who can read and decode print but who haven't got the skills to understand what the words mean."

Source




Missouri State U Reverses Decision About Removing Christmas Tree

A Christmas tree that had been removed from the atrium of Strong Hall at Missouri State University will return, along with other religious holiday symbols in that building, school president Michael T. Nietzel said in a news release Thursday morning. A meeting that had been scheduled Friday to discuss appropriate MSU holiday decorations has been canceled, he said.

"We decided this is the right thing to do, and I am glad there was widespread agreement about it," Nietzel said in the release. "Missouri State is an institution at which many different religions are represented, and we try to be sensitive to the many views people hold." "After having had a chance to air this out a bit more and consider the various perspectives of our campus community, I am happy that the Christmas tree will be back up along with the many others that were already on campus. I hope we can have it on display before the end of the day."

The 20-foot artificial tree had been taken down Monday after Lorene Stone, dean of the College of Humanities and Public Affairs, was told by the co-chair of the president's diversity commission that a Jewish faculty member said the tree showed "a lack of sensitivity" to those of other religions. Courts have ruled that Christmas trees are secular symbols, along with the Jewish menorah.

Stone, who put the tree up the day before Thanksgiving, said she didn't use any religious symbols on it. Stone said Jewish faculty members were invited to put up a menorah display but declined, telling Stone they were worried the display would be stolen.

Daniel Kaufman, a philosophy professor, said he didn't have a complaint about the tree but has had issues with the university scheduling major events during important Jewish holidays when Jews can't participate. In the past, the school has held a major conference on the Middle East during Passover and an Ozarks Festival during Yom Kippur. Kaufman said the school "shouldn't just recognize one religion." "It's a matter of being nice," he said. "It would be nice to publicly display something (for other religions)."

Jana Estergard, who heads MSU's Office of Equity and Diversity, said the courts have held that a Christmas tree is a secular symbol "unless it has crosses on it and a baby Jesus." Earle Doman, dean of students, said the student union is decorated for the holidays but not with religious symbols. "It's not a big issue," he said. "Some people raised the question about the tree and the best way to approach it was to take it down to discuss it."

Source