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31 December, 2011

The NYT Online Learning Smear Campaign

Last week The New York Times published what can only be described as a “hit piece” against online learning and leading virtual education provider K12 Inc. Light on evidence and heavy on word count, author Stephanie Saul levels allegations of bloated class sizes, underpaid teachers, and unsupervised learning environments.

Online learning meets a wide range of student learning needs, is customizable, and is unrestricted by geographic boundaries. But the Times’s piece overlooks these advantages, failing to interview, for example, the student with disabilities who can work at his own pace or the student in a rural state who would never have had access to AP physics or Mandarin Chinese if it weren’t for online options. Instead, Saul dismisses the benefits that virtual education holds for so many students.

The growth of for-profit online schools, one of the more overtly commercial segments of the school choice movement, is rooted in the theory that corporate efficiencies combined with the Internet can revolutionize public education, offering high quality at reduced cost.

Tom Vander Ark, a director for the International Association of K12 Online Learning, writes of the Times’s article:

The sensational barrage is against K12, the online learning provider, but it really isn’t about the company. It’s the shift from print to digital, the shift from place to service, and the emergence of the private sector as an important partner in the delivery of public education.

The backlash from the Times is not unlike that from education unions, who view online learning as a direct threat to their power. But while the Times and the National Education Association may lament the growing availability of choice in education, families are fighting for more school choice options, including online learning.

Online learning is certainly not for every student. But the principle behind it is: At its core, this is a movement about choice. And that’s why opponents have reacted so vehemently to it.

The existing public education system, practically devoid of choice for millions of American families, is the antithesis of what online learning has the potential to produce: an education tailor-made for the individual student.

Thankfully, changes in education financing (which include permitting dollars to follow children to the school of their choice) and rapidly advancing technology have made better educational options of a family’s choosing within reach. And many families have already made this choice.

The Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi writes about the opportunity online learning is providing children in National Review Online and highlights a video of Rocketship Academy, a blended learning school that leverages online learning in combination with the traditional classroom. Out of 3,000 low-income schools in California, Rocketship is the fifth-highest-performing.

Rocketship’s performance is consistent with findings released in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Education. In a meta-analysis of more than 1,000 empirical studies on virtual learning, it found that “online learning has been modestly more effective, on average, than the traditional face-to-face instruction with which it has been compared.”

Every day, the customization of education is evolving as more and more online learning options proliferate and state education leaders work to free resources to help increase access for families. The shift toward online learning is a shift in the delivery of education. It’s a guarantee of access to educational opportunity and a giant leap toward providing a vast array of options for families.

SOURCE





The SkillForce experience

By Lord Dannatt, Chief of the British General Staff, 2006-2008.

Over the past four or five years, we have become accustomed to seeing pictures on our television screens of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines doing difficult, dangerous and often heroic things on behalf of our nation, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We may not have always agreed with what they were being asked to do but since about autumn 2007 we, as a nation, have been both vocal and generous in our support for our servicemen and women, and their families – long may this continue.

However, Service people start off in life as citizens like the rest of us – they grow up in a community; they then choose to spend time in the uniformed military ranks; and ultimately they return to the civilian community whence they came. But on their return, they are not necessarily quite the same people. The training, the experiences and the lives that they have led have had a transforming effect – for some more than others.

It is this realisation that has made SkillForce, one of the Telegraph’s Christmas appeal charities this year, the dynamic organisation that it is today. SkillForce recognises that the shy or awkward, fit or gangly young recruit coming to the barrack gate has, in nine cases out of 10, been transformed into a confident, disciplined and well-motivated young person who is prepared to do their duty, especially so if well led and inspired. SkillForce has made its main focus the export of this positive attitude from the military into civilian life.

I first came across SkillForce in its early days nearly 10 years ago when I was asked to give away the prizes at a secondary school in a small town deep in rural England. I prepared myself for a fairly modest experience. But almost immediately on arrival, I was told in glowing terms by the head teacher of the tremendous impact on the school that the SkillForce volunteers had had.

Previously, classes had been held back by disruptive students, who either had no desire or no motivation to study, to the detriment of all. The SkillForce team of ex-Service people had taken out of class those who had no apparent interest in learning and given them completely different experiences. They had been offered the chance to learn practical skills, have fun and appreciate the value of being in a team.

When reintegrated into the school their attitude to learning, while not on a par with Einstein, was nevertheless sufficiently positive that they began to acquire a basic education. This had come about thanks not to highly trained educational psychologists but because a bunch of former Regular and Territorial Service people had cross-applied the skills that they had acquired in the Armed Forces. That experience, for me, defines what SkillForce has become.

In the aftermath of the costly campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a sizeable cohort of young people who might have thought that the best part of their working lives would be in the military, but the circumstances of the battlefield have dictated otherwise.

Whether injured by physical or psychiatric wounds, they want to continue to apply what they have gained from their military experience to everyday life around them. The nature of their injuries means that further service in the Armed Forces is not an option, but they still want to contribute what they have acquired. It is this spirit that is at the heart of SkillForce. It is often said that you can take someone out of the Army (or, equally, the Navy or the Air Force) but you cannot take the Army out of them. That spirit remains.

The Government has come to understand the unique spirit that inhabits those who are serving, or who have served, in the Armed Forces. It has written that spirit into law by including the Armed Forces Covenant in the new Armed Forces Act. This has placed a specified task on many government departments to look after our Service people, their families and veterans, possibly even promoting the meeting of their needs above those of their civilian counterparts on occasions.

However, I think the Covenant also implies an invitation to those who have served, and who will now be looked after very well, to continue to contribute what they have learnt in the ranks to those around them. SkillForce is a wonderful model and example of just how to do that. What SkillForce offers will not suit everyone, but it brings a resource and a need together in a most beneficial way.

Like everything today, a programme such as this costs money – more than the Government can afford, and less than SkillForce needs to meet its ambition – but the benefits are multi-faceted and hugely deserving of support. I salute the Telegraph titles for recognising the value of what SkillForce can contribute to our society, and I thank readers for their generosity in supporting this most worthwhile cause.

SOURCE





British education chiefs' £500 payout to a teacher hurt restraining a pupil cost £60,000 in legal fees

Education bosses ordered to pay £500 to a teacher injured while restraining a pupil were landed with a legal bill of more than £60,000 for that single case.

This example is one of the most disturbing discovered as a Daily Mail investigation revealed a growing ‘compensation culture’ in the classroom.

Freedom of Information requests disclose that councils across England are being bombarded with claims from teachers, often for trivial injuries.

But, in many cases, the compensation payments are dwarfed by the legal fees run up by solicitors.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that teachers, often backed by their unions, are taking on no-win, no-fee lawyers to bring even the most speculative claims.

Last night ministers were urged to clamp down on the practice amid warnings it was having a ‘chilling effect’ on schools and other public services.

Our survey suggested that councils paid out an estimated £6.7million as a result of claims by teachers last year. But for every pound paid as compensation, another £1.25 went on lawyers and legal fees.

In one of the worst cases, North Lincolnshire Council paid £500 compensation to the teacher hurt restraining a pupil, but the authority also had to pay a bill for costs of £61,464.

A spokesman said fighting the claim in court had led to a big drop in the payout because of ‘contributory negligence’ but acknowledged it had resulted in much higher legal bills.

In another case, Wirral Council, Merseyside, paid £2,000 to a member of school staff who stubbed their toe on a box but then faced a bill for costs of £14,300.

Walsall Council in the West Midlands paid £1,500 to a teacher who suffered a strain falling over at school but had to pay £14,888 in costs linked to the claim.

In Southend-on-Sea, Essex, the council sanctioned a £13,500 payout to a teacher who was assaulted by a special needs pupil yet the bill for legal costs was £75,800.

In Dorset, a school employee was awarded £1,650 after slipping on posters left on the floor. Legal costs totalled £11,000.

In March, Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke unveiled proposals to reform the no-win, no-fee system. But last night, Tory MP Philip Davies said ministers may have to go further. ‘This is becoming a massive problem,’ said Mr Davies. ‘Taxpayers’ money we can ill afford is being diverted from frontline services to fund a growing army of lawyers.

‘The Government has to find a way of scaling back this compensation culture. That will require clamping down on the activities of no-win, no-fee lawyers. ‘It is quite wrong that people are able to pursue claims – some dubious at best – without any risk to themselves. ‘This problem is not limited to the education sector. It is having a chilling effect right across our public services.’

John O’Connell, research director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘It’s particularly frustrating that lawyers are ramping up charges way above the pay-out itself.

‘Sadly there is a growing compensation culture. It’s disappointing that big payments are often made for seemingly little more than everyday accidents, wasting taxpayers’ cash and making staff paranoid about carrying out their jobs.’

In total, 130 of the 152 education authorities in England responded to a survey about cases in the last year. They revealed the total of compensation and costs was £5.8million. When estimates for the other 22 councils are factored in, the overall total of successful compensation claims and costs comes to £6.7million. There were just over 400 successful claims for compensation, with the average cost to councils of £16,600 each.

Yet of that cash, the injured teacher collected £7,300 while legal fees amounted to £9,300.

David Bott, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, accused councils of pushing up fees by refusing to settle claims earlier. ‘The remedy is for defendants to put their own house in order. They need to stop dragging their heels admitting liability and agreeing settlements,’ he said.

But Government sources said councils were right to fight unjustified or excessive claims.

SOURCE



30 December, 2011

Degree of frustration with cost of college

Outcry grows on soaring tuitions

As tuition costs skyrocket and graduates walk away saddled with ever-rising amounts of debt, American colleges now face a choice: Remain a part of the problem, or begin contributing to a solution.

The average cost to attend a public university shot up 8.3 percent this year, while private institutions raised their prices 4.3 percent. Over the past decade, tuition rates have risen 72 percent, and universities are now taking more heat than ever from government officials, education specialists and middle-class families, all of whom think the higher-education sector hasn’t done enough to reverse the trend.

If the current trajectory continues, getting a college degree could soon become cost-prohibitive for average Americans.

“They need to do their part. Right now, they aren’t doing enough,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden said during a speech to Florida high school students this month. “Right now, there are no real incentives to dissuade colleges and universities from continuing to raise tuition. It’s not going to be easy, but there’s no excuse for complacency.”

Many aren’t surprised by the reluctance to tackle out-of-control tuition costs. Universities, along with the professors they employ, have grown accustomed to an open checkbook. Instructors at public institutions earn, on average, about $70,000 per year, yet many teach only one or two classes each semester. College presidents, often pressured to keep up with their peers, sign off on expensive new fitness centers, performing-arts facilities or top-of-the-line dining halls, options deemed more important than reducing tuition for their customers.

But the students keep coming. Since most borrow money or depend on government assistance to attend college, families have become numb to the increases. Diplomas are deemed necessary for financial success, and there’s only one place to get them.

“It’s a great product to have when everybody wants it. Colleges have had the corner on the credential market, and that has allowed colleges to do, essentially, anything they’ve wanted,” said Jeffrey Selingo, editorial director for the Chronicle of Higher Education, while speaking a Capitol Hill tuition forum earlier this month.

“The wake-up call has happened in the past couple of years. What we’re seeing now is, people are saying that a college education may be the ticket to a better life, but not at any cost,” he said. “We’re finally seeing that the sustainability of this model isn’t going to work. I think what you’re going to see over the next five or 10 years is a number of colleges start to rethink their model.”

Some schools embrace change

The rethinking process has already begun at several institutions. Several years ago, Colorado Mesa University eliminated all of its deans, saving more than $500,000 each year.

“We made the decision to do away with them. I don’t think our students are missing [deans] whatsoever,” Colorado Mesa President Tim Foster told a House subcommittee earlier this month.

Many of the professors at Colorado Mesa carry nearly twice the average teaching load, reducing the university’s number of full-time instructors. As a result, tuition has gone up by less than half the national average in recent years.

Indiana’s Grace College and Seminary now offers a three-year degree program, which requires more classes per semester for students, but can cut 25 percent off post-college debt.

Grace President Ronald Manahan, also speaking at the House hearing, said 48 percent of freshmen enrolled in the program this academic year. “We could not simply stand by and wait for help” in reducing prices, he said.

More HERE






All-girl classes at university 'lead to better grades' with some saying they are more comfortable without boys in the classroom

Girls perform better at university when taught in single-sex classes, research suggests. Academics who split their students into three groups – men-only, women-only and mixed – found that the women-only class received considerably higher marks at the end of the year.

The girls in the single-sex group said they felt more comfortable and confident in classes without boys.

The pilot project was designed to build upon the findings of earlier experiments with school-age pupils that showed girls were more willing to take risks and be competitive after being taught in single-sex groups.

For the latest study, University of Essex researchers Dr Patrick Nolen and Professor Alison Booth divided 800 first-year undergraduates into three groups for introductory courses in economics.

At the end of the year, the average member of the girls-only group did 7.5 per cent better on her exams than those in the other groups.

Attendance was a major factor, as girls were much more likely to turn up for classes if they were placed in single-sex classes. On average, girls in single-sex groups attended 71 per cent of the classes, while those being taught alongside boys attended just 63 per cent.

Although single-sex classes led to better exam scores among women, there were no significant effects on their coursework marks.

Study participant Corina Musat, 20, said: ‘I think the atmosphere was more friendly and we bonded because we were all girls.’

Emilia Matei, also 20, agreed. ‘I think it was the best class I had last year. I don’t know whether it was because it was a single-sex class or whether it was the teaching,’ she said.

‘In the all-girls’ class, you didn’t have to have that much courage to go to the blackboard and answer the question.’

The academics who carried out the study warned that girls who show less confidence in the classroom may be less competitive in the job market.

Dr Nolen, of the university’s department of economics, said: ‘I would like to see policy makers think about this. We should be investigating it and intervening pre-market in the environment in which students learn.’ His summary of the project in the New Economic Journal concluded: ‘This finding is relevant to the policy debate on whether or not single-sex classes within co-ed schools could be a useful way forward.’

The study that inspired the new research involved 260 teenagers from two girls’ schools, two boys’ schools and four co-educational schools in Suffolk and Essex.

The work showed that girls who went to single-sex schools were more competitive, even when they were in a mixed- sex environment.

Source





Boarding schools 'increasingly popular' among British sixth-formers

Rising numbers of sixth-formers are being enrolled at boarding schools as parents seek to ”acclimatise” children into being away from home before university. Figures show that the number of 16 to 18-year-olds boarding at independent and state schools in Britain has soared by a fifth in the last decade.

More schools are building additional boarding facilities and allowing children to take advantage of more flexible hotel-style arrangements to cater for rising demand.

School leaders claim that many pupils are choosing to board for the first time in the sixth-form as preparation for university – softening the blow of being away from home at 18. The Boarding Schools Association said that the experience acted as an effective “bridge” between school and higher education.

It was also suggested that families were opting for boarding because professional parents are being forced to work into the evening and weekends to make ends meet in the downturn.

Some parents are being attracted by the rise in “flexi-boarding” – more casual arrangements that allow children to stay for few nights a week without making a full-time commitment.

Richard Harman, chairman of the BSA and headmaster of fee-paying Uppingham School in Rutland, said: “It prepares youngsters for living away from home but in a structured way with an appropriate level of pastoral support and increasingly parents and the pupils themselves are seeing the benefit of that.

“At university, suddenly you are responsible for your own decisions and it can be a big jump for many people. You do get quite a high drop out rate for that reason; it is very easy for youngsters in the first year of university to get lost in the system and homesick. Boarding schools act as an effective bridge to university.”

According to figures, the number of sixth-form pupils in state boarding schools has increased from 1,102 to 1,790 over the last decade. Over the same period, teenagers admitted to the fee-paying sector have increased from 24,929 to 29,322. It represents an overall increase of 19.5 per cent to more than 31,100 in the last academic year.

The comments come despite a rise in boarding school fees in recent years, with the most elite institutions now charging as much as £30,000 for sixth-formers.

But Mr Harman said many families saw it as a worthwhile investment – making sure children maximised their A-level results and were well prepared for university.

John Newton, the headmaster of Taunton School in Somerset, said sixth-form boarding was also a “sound lifestyle choice for parents as well as pupils”.

“After years of ending work early to run children to sports clubs, ballet classes and orchestra practices, hard working parents realise that boarding is the most efficient way to educate children as roundly as possible, while liberating them to lead proper professional lives,” he said. “These days that involves flexible working, late hours and weekends.”

Louis Eastwood, 16, has just started at Wymondham College, a state boarding school in Norfolk, after previously being enrolled at a day school. “It is a really big jump to living at home with your parents to going to university,” he said. “I think boarding school is something in the middle. You have still got to do your own washing and have your independence but have the support of the school environment.

“Obviously I miss my parents and the family home but at the same time there’s more opportunities to socialise and work and there’s less temptation to just say I will do all my work on a Sunday night.”

SOURCE



29 December, 2011

Ariz schools' ethnic studies program ruled illegal

An administrative law judge ruled Tuesday that a Tucson school district's ethnic studies program violates state law, agreeing with the findings of Arizona's public schools chief.

Judge Lewis Kowal's ruling marked a defeat for the Tucson Unified School District, which appealed the findings issued in June by Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal.

Kowal's ruling, first reported by The Arizona Daily Star, said the district's Mexican-American Studies program violated state law by having one or more classes designed primarily for one ethnic group, promoting racial resentment and advocating ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individuals.

The judge, who found grounds to withhold 10 percent of the district's monthly state aid until it comes into compliance, said the law permits the objective instruction about the oppression of people that may result in racial resentment or ethnic solidarity.

"However, teaching oppression objectively is quite different than actively presenting material in a biased, political and emotionally charged manner, which is what occurred in (Mexican-American Studies) classes," Kowal wrote.

The judge said such teaching promotes activism against white people, promotes racial resentment and advocates ethnic solidarity.

Huppenthal has 30 days to accept, reject or modify the ruling. If he accepts the judge's decision, the district has about 30 days to appeal the ruling in Superior Court.

"In the end, I made a decision based on the totality of the information and facts gathered during my investigation — a decision that I felt was best for all students in the Tucson Unified School District." Huppenthal said in a written statement.

Messages left for a district spokeswoman Tuesday night weren't immediately returned. In the past, district officials have said they can't afford the financial hit that Huppenthal's decision would bring.

The battle over the ethnic studies program escalated shortly after Arizona's heavily scrutinized immigration enforcement law was passed in April 2010.

The program's supporters have called challenges to the courses an attack on the state's Hispanic population, while critics say the program demonizes white people as oppressors of Hispanics.

Huppenthal ordered a review of the program when he took office in January after his predecessor, Tom Horne, said the Mexican-American Studies program violated state law and that Huppenthal would have to decide whether to withhold funding.

Huppenthal, a Republican, had voted in favor of the ethnic studies law as a state senator before becoming the state's schools chief.

SOURCE






How a little-heralded, old-fashioned history book about great Britons has struck a nerve

Almost ten years ago, a survey was launched to find the most significant individuals in our nation’s proud history. More than a million people took part, and, not surprisingly, the winner was Sir Winston Churchill, unquestionably the greatest statesman of the last century.

Yet for one observer, who had served in the British Army before working in the City, the results of the Great Britons poll were deeply depressing.

Appalled that Princess Diana had somehow finished third, John Lennon seventh and the actor Michael Crawford in 17th place, Adrian Sykes decided to write a book celebrating the men and women who had really contributed to Britain’s glittering past.

Not even Mr Sykes, however, could have imagined how successful his enterprise would be. The result, Made In Britain, has not only attracted rave reviews from historians, it even has an endorsement from the most influential reader of all, the Prime Minister.

Asked what books were on his bedside table, David Cameron replied: ‘I’m reading something called Made In Britain. It’s a very nice, rather old-fashioned history book about the great figures and inventions of British history. ‘It’s just rather good — I’ve been reading bits with my children.’

There is something rather heartening in the fact that Mr Cameron has been whiling away the evening hours with such a patriotic tome. And, no doubt, Mr Sykes’s stirring accounts of the battles of Agincourt, Trafalgar and Waterloo helped to stiffen the Prime Minister’s sinews before he stood up to France’s latest two-bit Napoleon, the preposterous Nicolas Sarkozy, at this month’s European summit.

Yet behind the success of Made In Britain — which is, as Mr Cameron admitted, a rather old-fashioned kind of book, albeit a splendidly colourful and entertaining one — there is a profoundly depressing reality.

Recent polls show that nine out of ten adults can name all David Beckham’s children, yet one in three thinks Churchill was a fictional character and one in four believes Hadrian’s Wall was built to keep out the French.

Of course, historical ignorance is as old as history itself: even the Victorians used to berate their children for not knowing the difference between Robert the Bruce and Sir Robert Walpole. And yet behind these figures lies a deeply troubling modern malaise.

A report last week by the Commons All-Party Group on History found that, more and more, history is concentrated in private schools and grammar schools, while comprehensives opt for supposedly less difficult subjects.

Last year, fewer than one in three 16-year-olds in Britain’s comprehensives were entered for GCSE history, compared with 55 per cent of grammar school pupils. And in 159 state schools, almost incredibly, not one pupil was entered for the GCSE history exam.

In the poor Knowsley area of Merseyside, for example, just 11 out of a potential 2,000 pupils took A-level history last year — and just four of them passed.

At the root of all this is the unforgivable fact that, almost alone in Europe, British youngsters can drop history before they turn 16.

As a result, modern schoolchildren are force-fed with facts about the Nazis and the U.S. Civil Rights movement, but often know little about the rise and fall of the British Empire, the origins of Parliament or major events such as the Hundred Years War.
Legacy

Even many high achievers now leave school with only the vaguest knowledge of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the our last Catholic monarch, the despotic James II, was forced off the throne and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange.

In that moment, our constitutional monarchy was born; but how many youngsters are aware of it today?

Indeed, how many know about the Great Reform Act of 1832, which outlawed the corrupt rotten boroughs and paved the way for the expansion of the franchise, the rise of women’s suffrage and the birth of our modern mass democracy?

Through no fault of their own, thousands of our children are leaving school every year ignorant of what their parents and grandparents once took for granted: the inspirational, heart-warming knowledge of what we all once recognised as our national story.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that so many modern youngsters feel rootless and alienated, adrift in a landscape they do not understand.

But the study of our nation’s past is more than mere antiquarianism. The truth is that history is the fundamental subject from which everything else flows. All that we know, all that we are, is built on the legacy of our predecessors, from the language we speak to the latest technological gadgets.
Baffling

The study of the past is more than the dry recital of half- forgotten facts. It is a debate without end, offering youngsters the chance to develop their powers of deduction and to challenge the received wisdom.

And in an age of growing individualism, when greedy self-interest too often trumps social responsibility, history offers a rare chance to come together.

For contrary to the progressive doctrines fashionable since the Seventies, there is nothing reactionary or old-fashioned about teaching your own national history, or about inviting youngsters to be proud of their country’s past.

Indeed, it is baffling that so many card-carrying left- wingers, who spend so much time preaching about the values of community, are so indifferent to the one thing around which all decent British people can rally: our splendidly colourful, rousing and inspirational history.

For 13 years, New Labour, which positively gloried in its commitment to modernity and its scorn for history, spent much of its time bleating about Britishness lessons and citizenship classes. It would have done better to teach our children their own national story — the subject most likely to inculcate a real sense of community and identity.

For too long, in fact, our intellectual classes have been engaged in a gigantic cultural cringe, abasing themselves before unreadable Continental theorists and queuing up to disavow Britain’s imperial past.

Faced with this exhibition of masochistic servility, it is no wonder so many teenagers feel there is little to be proud of in our national story. Yet as Adrian Sykes’s book shows, the truth could not be more different.

Of course all nations love to think themselves important, and every country’s past is dotted with jaw-dropping landmarks, colourful characters and pulse-speeding stories.

But you merely have to scan the pages of Made In Britain to realise that for excitement, incident and sheer worldwide influence, our splendid history is second to none.

No drama, after all, can compare with the spectacle of the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and claimant to the English throne, besieged by her rival King Stephen in Oxford Castle in the winter of 1142, only to mount a stunningly audacious overnight escape through the snow, lit only by moonlight.
Smashed

Nor could any scene in a novel compete with the excitement of the future Charles II, fleeing from the victorious Roundheads after the Civil War battle of Worcester, hiding from his pursuers up an old oak tree.

No fictional character can compete with Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon warrior king who united the English people, smashed the Vikings, and spent his spare time translating books of philosophy, or with Oliver Cromwell, the great commoner who was called by God to cast out tyranny and superstition and in the process created parliamentary democracy.

Then there was Captain Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer coursing through the uncharted seas of the South Pacific, to discover the east coast of Australia, circumnavigate New Zealand and meet his death in a fight with natives on the sands of Hawaii.

And even modern history teems with unforgettably colourful characters, from Douglas Bader, the RAF air ace who won 20 dogfights despite having had both legs amputated, to Margaret Thatcher, the Grantham grocer’s daughter who defied the odds to become our first woman Prime Minister.

But there is more to the rich pageant of our national story than the great and the good.

One of Mr Sykes’s most memorable characters, for example, is the bare-knuckle boxer Tom Cribb, born near Bristol in 1781, who moved to London at the age of just 13 to work as a coal porter.

Known as the ‘Black Diamond’, Cribb won the national boxing championship in 1805 after fighting George Maddox for a staggering 76 rounds. And five years later, he became world champion after beating the American ex-slave Tom Molineaux in 35 rounds, although, in fairness, Molineaux was injured when the overexcited crowd invaded the ring.

To his credit, Mr Sykes finds room for our peerless literary and cultural heritage, from Shakespeare’s glittering verse to Dickens’s pungent social criticism. And as a real treat, there is a whole page of witticisms by my favourite Englishman of all, that supreme Tory maverick, Dr Samuel Johnson, the greatest literary figure of the 18th century.

‘The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous and the pleasure fleeting,’ ran the great man’s view on sex — one unlikely to be shared by another colourful Johnson, today’s Mayor of London.

And in a remark that would no doubt strike horror into today’s politically correct Anglican clergy, Dr Johnson had firm views on women priests. ‘A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs,’ he observed. ‘It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’

For all the jokes, though, Mr Sykes’s book reminds us that more than any other people on earth, it is the British who have contributed most to the comfort, ingenuity and enterprise of the modern age.

Where, after, all, would modern science be without Sir Isaac Newton, the passionately religious Lincolnshire boy, whose ideas about gravity and the laws of motion, first proposed in 1687, utterly transformed humanity’s understanding of the physical world?

Where, for that matter, would we be without the extraordinary polymath Robert Hooke, who surveyed the buildings of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666, discovered the law of elasticity, built some of the first modern telescopes and virtually invented the first modern plan-form map?

Then there was Michael Faraday, the self-taught Southwark youngster who transformed Victorian technology through his discovery of the electromagnetic field, his invention of an early Bunsen burner and his discovery of the principle of induction. Not for nothing did Einstein keep a picture of Faraday on his wall, next to that of Newton.

And perhaps above all, there was Charles Darwin, the Shropshire lad whose five-year voyage to South America, the Pacific Islands and Australia on HMS Beagle fuelled his ground-breaking ideas about evolution and natural selection, smashing the old theories about life on earth and utterly revolutionizing the way millions of people made sense of their place in the world.

On top of all that, where would the world be without the seed drill, the power loom, the sewing machine, the Valentine’s card, the typewriter, the pram, the corkscrew, the postage stamp, the flushing toilet, the smallpox vaccine, or, indeed, the computer? All these things were invented in Britain — yet very few of us know it.

Yes, our national story has its fair share of crimes and misdemeanours. But the truth is that, from free trade and parliamentary democracy to the glories of the English language and the reassurance of the rule of law, British history is a jewel without compare.

‘The past is a foreign country’, wrote L. P. Hartley at the beginning of his great novel The Go-Between. ‘They do things differently there.’

But while Adrian Sykes’s book makes a wonderfully old-fashioned introduction to that vast and impossibly rich continent, it can never compensate for the pleasures of a full guided tour, led by passionate and committed teachers.

Education Secretary Michael Gove has already spoken of his desire to reinstate history at the heart of the curriculum.
Inspiring

He must ensure that the journey back in time becomes the centrepiece of our children’s schooldays: a chance not just to tread the fields of Waterloo or the Somme, or to see Jane Austen and Isambard Kingdom Brunel at work, but to encounter an uproariously varied range of characters, to make lifelong friends, to draw lessons and parallels, and to meet humanity in the raw.

Without our history, we are nothing. It is precisely the record of our tremendous past that has inspired so many of our greatest names, including modern-day pioneers such as physicist Stephen Hawking and internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, to expand the boundaries of human achievement.

For too long, generations of British children have been denied the opportunity to enjoy the richest heritage of any nation on earth. Cheated of their birthright, they have been starved of the sheer intellectual pleasure that only history brings.

Putting Adrian Sykes’s labour of love in every teenager’s hands would be a fine start. But the task of inspiring our nation’s youngsters should not be left to retired City executives, no matter how enjoyable the results.
Mr Gove must take inspiration from the days when every child, rich and poor alike, grew up with a deep love of Britain’s magnificent history. In this respect, at least, it is time we turned back the clock.

SOURCE



28 December, 2011

The Continued Assault on For Profit Education

For profit education has been demonized over the past couple of years by the Obama administration. In the past few weeks, I have seen that attack take a different turn. In front of the Chicago Economic Club, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said we need to make a larger investment in community colleges.

The larger investment in community college education is not really an investment in education at all. It’s a carefully planned attack against for profit colleges veiled in the “invest more in human capital” vein. For a free market fiscal conservative, it’s a sticky tightrope to walk when you criticize their rationale.

Amid a myriad of problems in American education, there are two that potentially can be answered by community colleges. One, as Erik Hurst correctly analyzed, there is a mismatch right now in our economy between the skills of the labor force and the needs of the business world. It is one of the contributions to our high unemployment rate. Second, the amount of debt that our college graduates assume to get their degree hampers their ability to take risk and work once they graduate. By the way, this has a corollary with government debt and the US too.

Community colleges can be a great solution to the crippling amount of student debt that we are seeing as the cost of education spirals higher. For a variety of reasons, I went to a community college for two years before finishing my degree in the College of Business at Illinois. I graduated debt free, and it made a huge difference in my career. Because I didn’t have to burn through money paying off loans, I was able to take a lot of risk early in my life that helped me later on. Using a community college for your first two years can be a great, economical way to get a college education.

However, that’s not the target market for the Democrats. They are targeting the unskilled labor force that is unemployed. The idea is to retrain them and get them employed into jobs that the private market needs. It’s a noble goal, the real question is should government be behind the satisfaction of that goal? Maybe it’s a deeper question that that. Why haven’t the community colleges already responded to the forces in the market to tailor their curriculums to the needs of the market?

For profit colleges (FPC) have an entirely different set of forces that determine what courses and degree paths they offer. If they don’t offer degrees that allow their students to quickly monetize their investment, they go out of business. FPC’s must respond quickly to market changes by designing and implementing new programs so they can compete with all other forms of education.

After speaking with a person from a for profit college, I found that their thinking was very similar to a start up. They put out a product, and then keep iterating it based on feedback from students and employers. FPC’s are forced to be on the cutting edge of changes in the market because both sides of their supply and demand equation expect it. FPC’s aren’t unionized with legacy teachers unions. They can be run far more efficiently than community colleges.

When you invest in human capital, it’s an investment for life. All of the certifications and degrees you get throughout your life travel with you from job to job. That’s why private employers have found that it is a more efficient use of capital to decrease the amount of tuition reimbursement employees get for outside education. If they do reimburse, they tie it to time of future employment so the company gets a return on investment.

The employee does have opportunity costs. They have to put in the time and effort to get the certification or degree. But the benefit to them is they can take that shingle and get a better job somewhere other than where they are working today. They might be able to raise their wages in their current situation by pitting one employer against another if their degree is valuable enough.

In many cases, tuition reimbursement is creating grade inflation too. If colleges know that students will not get paid for classes they take when receiving a low grade, colleges have an incentive to give higher grades to keep revenue coming in from employers. Lower grades put more economic responsibility on the student, and too many low grades will hurt the supply chain of students coming in from private company tuition reimbursement programs. Grade inflation can affect both community colleges and FPC’s similarly.

Are FPC’s perfect? Not a chance. They have their own problems. But at least when they have problems they can go out of business. That’s not the case for community colleges.

I don’t think the goal of the Democrats is to create a better match between the market and community colleges. The real goal is to increase government spending on teachers unions that populate the community college campus, and to increase the unionized administrative jobs that will be created to support the increased spending at community colleges. It’s also to take unskilled labor and retrain them so they are prepared to take unionized jobs in emerging industries like home healthcare. Having a high unemployment rate along with a poorly trained workforce just gives them a convenient excuse to advocate for higher spending. They are simply trying to expand their base.

SOURCE






British parents driven to desperation in trying to find a safe school for their kids

An increasing number of parents are lying to secure places for their children at the most sought-after schools, figures reveal.

Over the past five years, more than 700 children are believed to have had their school places withdrawn after false information was submitted on application forms.

In the past year alone, some 420 parents are suspected of cheating the application process to ensure their children get into the best primary and secondary schools, a rise of 13 per cent on last year.

Falsehoods include claiming children have been baptised to get them into faith schools and using the addresses of friends or relatives within catchment areas.

Many parents are said to feel driven to ‘desperate lengths’. Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: ‘The assumption that parents need to shop around to find the best school has led parents into getting very anxious about admissions. ‘They are now more likely to go to fairly desperate lengths to get children into a particular school.’

The findings – the result of a freedom of information request to local education authorities in England - come amid fierce competition for school places. In the past year, almost one in six children failed to get into their first choice of secondary school. One in 20 children missed out on at least three schools listed on their applications.

Some schools, including independent academies, now receive as many as 11 applications for each place. Primary schools are also under pressure.

According to data from 93 councils, 421 suspected fraudulent applications were detected this year, which is a rise of almost 13 per cent when compared with the estimated 373 cases from last year. Since 2007, 738 places were withdrawn after false information was entered on application forms. In Birmingham, places were withdrawn on 67 occasions, while in Slough it was 63, Staffordshire, 21, and Kent, 18.

But in an example of the differing way councils deal with cheating, 20 authorities said they had never removed places even when parents were found to have lied. Newham, in East London, said it relied on schools themselves to check all parental information.

However, many local authorities – including Hertfordshire, North Somerset and Reading – randomly cross check around 10 per cent of applications against their council tax files. In over-subscribed schools, some authorities carry out checks on all applications, making unannounced home visits in some cases and setting up hotlines.

Demand for sought-after school places has also driven up house prices, with parents paying premiums of £77,000 to buy homes in catchment areas.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: ‘Parents have found themselves increasingly frustrated by the lack of good school places. We are ending this unfair rationing. ‘Our radical education reforms and our capital investment will mean there are more good schools, and more good school places, for parents.’

SOURCE




When British parents move heaven and earth

So, 420 parents have been cheating on their schools’ application forms, according to The Daily Telegraph’s front page report yesterday. Desperate mummies and daddies have been caught lying about their address and church attendance in order to get their children into the best state schools.

Well, wouldn’t you? A bad state school condemns children to think seven sevens are 68, that T.S Eliot wrote Wuthering Heights and knives are part of the school uniform. Who can blame those enterprising parents who adopt Granny’s address as their own because she happens to live in the catchment area of a top state primary? Good parents will move heaven and earth (and home, too) to ensure their children get a good – and free – education. Property prices reflect this: when we moved to our present house, we were told that about 10 per cent of the steep price we were paying was due to the Chelsea Academy being built down the road. Once Ofsted rated it “excellent”, the estate agent assured us, the price would go up another 20 per cent; parents calculate that a mortgage costs less than the £30,000 per child per year needed for a public school education.

God, like certain neighbourhoods, is also experiencing a surge in popularity among parents of school-age children. Faith schools have once again topped the league tables; they not only got the best academic results in the state sector, they also came first in achieving the greatest improvement. No wonder atheists and agnostics suddenly find religion. Hypocrites? You bet – and I’d do the same in their shoes. A child’s future is worth a Mass.

The secularist intelligentsia, however, is choking on the confidence trick some parents play as they file into church each Sunday. I once clashed with the humanists’ high priestess, Polly Toynbee, on Newsnight over this issue. Even when the choice was between a sink school and putting in an appearance at the 10 o’clock children’s service once a week, La Toynbee was unyielding. Better compromise a child’s prospects than her own dogma. Thank goodness, for our children’s sake, that so many parents disagree with her.

SOURCE



27 December, 2011

Crony college capitalism

Besides studying Saul Alinsky, President Obama has apparently studied Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist who urged his fellow Marxists to go into education, the better to turn regular schools into training grounds for future radicals. Since its earliest days, the Obama regime has been concerned with extending its power in the realm of college education, giving economic rewards to college teachers and students, who are overwhelmingly Obama supporters.

Indeed, a recent piece in the New York Times suggests that Obama’s reelection campaign strategy now explicitly recognizes that it has to give up the white working class, except the tiny 7% that is unionized, hence able to contribute largely to the campaign. The working class was once a mainstay of the Democratic Party coalition. The new Democratic Party will consist of statist-inclined college educated groups such as professors, teachers, school and college administrators, therapists, lawyers, librarians, social workers, artists and designers, and their numerous dependents, along with key ethnic minorities.

You can see this calculation at play in Obama’s recent decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. The decision cost tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs, but it mightily pleased the environmental lobby, disproportionately college educated folks of statist mindset.

The tactics the Regime is using to corrupt higher education policy for its own benefit are the same it has used elsewhere: identify cronies, expand the size and scope of federal subsidies to them, and expand the size and scope of regulation to attack the cronies’ competitors. More succinctly, the Regime’s crony capitalist game in higher education is — as it is everywhere else — one of rewarding supporters and attacking their (and hence its) enemies.

Start with the rewards for the cronies. One of the Regime’s major “educational” initiatives was its socialization of the student loan industry, which happened just two years ago. A troika of key Regime players — Obama, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) — ended private funding of government-backed student loans (the most common student loans), under the theory that the private lenders (read: banks) were greedy, i.e., only after profits, and not truly interested in helping students achieve a decent education. Government, of course, is run by people incapable of greed, and motivated entirely by their concern for others.

The scheme included the usual outrageous accounting trick. Sympathetic congressmen claimed that by nationalizing student loans, they would “save” $87 billion over 11 years. In the same way, nationalizing GM and Chrysler has “saved” billions, and Obamacare will “save” even more. At the time, the CBO had dutifully scored the savings at $87 billion, but the Director of the CBO, Douglas Elmendorf, had signaled Congress (in a letter to Senator Judd Gregg) that the scoring did not reflect the risk that defaults could be higher than projected. But the Regime pushed its phantom “savings” with a straight face. It even used them to write down part of the costs of Obamacare and justify an expansion of educational Pell Grants (about which more below).

A posteriori experience from the student loan nationalization confirms what a priori economic reasoning would naturally suggest: the government generally runs things less efficiently than the private sector does. The Department of Education now reports that the default rate on student loans has surged by about one-fourth, from 7% in 2008 to 8.8% in 2009. Worse, because of another government accounting trick, these figures are deceptively low. The government loan program has options that allow some students to pay less that they really owe (these options are euphemistically called “income contingent” and “income based” repayment plans).

Besides rewarding its likely supporters with student loans, the Regime moved to expand the Pell Grant program — to double its funding, in fact. And it is resisting the efforts by the Republicans in the House of Representatives to rein in the program by requiring that recipients have a high school diploma or GED(!).

As a consequence of these policies, and the fact that in deciding who gets student loans the government doesn’t bother looking at the students’ assets or credit histories, the aggregate amount of college student debt has risen dramatically — up by 25% over the past three years, a time, please note, during which Americans generally reduced their personal debt load by 9%. Student debt now exceeds total consumer credit card debt. It now tops $1 trillion.

Of course, the Regime has revealed a solution for the problem it helped so much to create. It proposes to roll forward a law that helps college students mitigate and even get out of their student loan debts. Under current law, students must make monthly payments of 15% of discretionary income, with the balance of their loans forgiven after 25 years. (“Forgiven” means, of course, that the taxpayer eats the remaining cost of a college degree that mainly benefits the degree holder personally.) A law passed by Congress in 2010 and scheduled to take effect in 2014 will drop payments to 10%, with the balance of the loan forgiven after 20 years. Obama now wants this to take effect starting next year — which just happens to be his re-election year.

This is all on top of an existing program that allows students who enter “public service” (read: students who go to work for government or other nonprofit agencies — both areas in which employees tend overwhelmingly to vote Democrat) to have their loans forgiven after only 10 years. All of these “forgiveness” programs are projected to cost the treasury $575 million a year — quite unforgiving for the taxpayer.

Moreover, Obama is now proposing that students be able to combine their older (pre-Regime-takeover), federally-backed private loans together with the new government loans under a new lower interest as well as under the new rules.

All this is obviously aimed at buying the votes of all college students, but especially appealing to the ones whose degrees — say, in social studies, humanities, ethnic studies, women’s studies, and so on — make it likely they won’t earn high enough salaries to pay off the loans in 20 years....

Much more here





British crackdown on bad teachers branded a failure as figures reveal just four a week are being fired

Only four incompetent teachers are being sacked a week, despite David Cameron’s pledge to crack down on poor standards. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that 154 teachers at primary and secondary schools in 82 council areas were dismissed in the past 18 months.

If the pattern is repeated across the 448,000 teachers employed by all of England’s 152 councils, that works out at some 200 a year, or four a week.

The figure is far fewer than the 15,000 incompetent teachers that former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead has estimated exist. The FOI answers revealed that of the 740 teachers subject to complaint in the past 18 months, 154 were sacked, 174 resigned, 132 cases are unresolved and the rest stayed in post or retired. Some had received a written warning.

After the election the Coalition promised to tackle the scourge of bad teachers, and the Education Act streamlines procedures for dismissing them.

But Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said not enough was being done. ‘Too many poor teachers remain in their jobs year after year after year,’ he said. ‘They do harm. We owe it to the children to intervene effectively.

‘At present, it’s nearly impossible to prove a teacher is bad. On top of this, powerful unions fight on behalf of teachers.’

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that while the dismissal rate was low, teachers accused of poor standards are being ‘managed out of the classroom’ in other ways.

SOURCE





Australia: Negligent government college kills girl

And then does a coverup

A coroner has described a New South Wales TAFE report on the death of a student in a horse fall as being "not worth the paper it was written on".

Deputy state coroner Sharon Freund said jillaroo [cowgirl] student Sarah Waugh died from head and neck injuries after falling from a bolting horse that was unsuitable for a beginner.

In March 2009 the 18-year-old from Newcastle was learning to ride as part of a TAFE jillaroo course at Dubbo in the NSW central west.

The coroner criticised TAFE for not being thorough enough in assessing horses used for beginner riders and said the ex-racehorse Dargo had been obtained for use just days after running in a race.

Ms Waugh fell from the horse after it bolted in a paddock and she was unable to stop it.

The coroner said TAFE staff gave conflicting evidence at an inquest and that the teacher supervising Ms Waugh had little formal experience in teaching beginners how to ride.
Sarah Waugh in her Jillaroo gear, just days before she was killed falling from a horse in 2009. Photo: Sarah Waugh's parents hope her death becomes a legacy to help improve safety. (ABC)

Ms Freund said the TAFE investigation and report on the death was inadequate.

"That investigation and subsequent report failed to uncover or identify any failure of any workplace practices or procedures," she said. "The investigation and subsequent report was essentially not worth the paper it was written on."

Outside Glebe Coroners Court, Ms Waugh's father Mark welcomed the findings. "We feel relieved... relieved that the truth is finally out there. It's been a long process for us," he said.

SOURCE



26 December, 2011

Yes, NCLB Was a Failure

The following article from a Leftist source is probably right to claim that NCLB has achieved little but it is notable that he offers no alternative. Is he happy with the abysmal status quo? Not very "progressive"!

First, not everyone agrees that NCLB was a failure. Just last week, as reported in the education trade newspaper Education Week, the conservative Fordham Institute issued a study claiming that NCLB should be credited for having boosted math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress -- especially in the state of Texas, an early adopter of "accountability". The study concludes that the problem with America's public schools is not that NCLB has been a failure, but that it was only good enough to provide a temporary "shock" to our educational system, and another one is sorely needed.

The study's author, Mark Schneider, likens NCLB to the meteor strike that may have wiped out the dinosaurs and cleared the ecosystem for the rise of mammals -- no, I am not making this up -- and contends that the doctrine created a positive new "equilibrium." What's necessary now, he contends, is for "another meteor" to "come crashing into the school ecosystem."

The expected results for this apocalyptic wish? Another "uptick in math scores" -- if we're "lucky." And what if we're not . . . ?
Hyperbole aside (please), this effort to cherry pick data in order to draw a grand conclusion about the state of America's public schools wouldn't be so bad if it didn't overlook an overwhelming context of other information.

NCLB In Context

The "overwhelming context" is that although NCLB may -- or may not have (correlation is not causation) -- helped produce higher scores in math, there's very good reason to conclude that any "uptick" in math scores was likely at the expense of teaching a great many other subjects.

A recent national survey of 1,001 public school teachers found that an overwhelming majority -- two-thirds -- said that study of art, science, and social studies was "getting crowded out of the school day." From an article in Education Week about the survey:

Nearly all of the teachers who see time for English and math pushing other subjects aside say the main reason is state tests. In fact, 60 percent say their school is devoting more time in recent years to test-taking skills. And, the extra time for English and math is not simply for struggling students, but affects all students, conclude 77 percent of respondents.

Furthermore, now that nearly half of the public schools in America have been deemed "failing," according to NCLB standards, even though everyone agrees the standards for failing are "defective," most states are jumping through all kinds of hoops in order to get around what is still the law of the land. What results, of course, is time, energy, and resources going toward anything but the crucial matter at hand: real teaching and learning.

It's The Data, Stupid

The premise of NCLB was that by tracking "the data" produced by standardized tests, we could set our students free of "failed" schools. Instead, it's "the data" that appear to be failing us. In recent days, two articles from major news outlets illustrate the failure all too well.

First, Michael Winerip from The New York Times recounts the "scientific" exactitude of tracking school performance in New York over the past decade. Mocking the "finely calibrated" academic standards used by the state, Winerip traced the bizarre ups and downs of education assessments, in which student scores meander from "dismal" to "record levels," back to "ridiculously inflated," then to "statistically significant declines," without any particular rhyme or reason. And all the while edu-crats and politicians assure the public, over and over, that everything is "going in the right direction."

Then, over at Huffington Post, Joy Resmovits points us to a new study by policy analysts at Mathematica that blasts NCLB's reliance on "raw test data" as being "extremely misleading."

The analysts at Mathematica reasoned that NCLB's reliance on test data made it a flawed policy from the get-go because you can't "compare this year's fifth graders with last year's," and you can't use the results of a test "to measure short-term impacts of policies or schools," because you're measuring different groups of students. So differences in scores between two cohorts -- say, fourth graders one year and fourth graders the next year -- are more indicative of the differences in the students themselves as opposed to the quality of schooling they've experienced. And the results from these year-to-year snapshots that NCLB relied on generally led to "false impressions of growth or loss."

Nevertheless in 2012, the Obama administration's Race to the Top -- a competition that has states vie for federal funds by promising to implement reforms championed by the Education Department -- will, in fact, extend NCLB’s obsession with "year-to-year snapshots." By requiring that teacher evaluation be in part measured by the scores students get on exams, the intent of NCLB remains unwaivering.

The Coming Data-Based "Dropout Crisis"

As long as this illusion of "scientific precision" continues to guide education policy, we’ll keep chasing after these flawed "impressions of growth or loss." In fact, quite likely the first of these data-based chimeras to pop-up on the radar in 2012 will be a new "crisis" over dropout rates. Again, the crisis will be based on "the data," and again, "the data" will be completely misleading.

As US News and World Report revealed last week, "the official national graduation rates will likely dip between 5 percent and 10 percent next year." How do we know this?

Because "new federal rules that mandate states to report [high schooll graduation rates uniformly will go into effect for the class of 2012," most states will have to change the way they report graduation rates. For many of these states, it will mean lower graduation totals at the end of each year, even if the same percentage of high schoolers still earn diplomas.

The report explains: "Under current federal laws, states are allowed to lump in students who complete special education programs, night school, the GED, and virtual high school programs along with those who earn a traditional high school diploma." But after removing these students from federal allowances, graduation rates will definitely fall.

"That doesn't mean schools are doing anything differently or are graduating fewer students than in past years," the report observes. But nevertheless, whether you agree with the new federal mandates or not, "the data" will show a "dropout crisis."

Caution Signs In Order

This is not to say that data can't be an important element for guiding public policy. But there are currently too many gung-ho data devotees exhorting us onward when we desperately need some caution signs.

Few, for instance, have considered what it could mean to have these warehouses of our children's academic information potentially in the hands of profiteers. Need a mailing list of "failing students" anyone?

This week, the blog NYC Public School Parents connected the dots among reports from the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to reveal that student data from New York are being outsourced to a corporation run by Bill Gates and operated by a business owned by Rupert Murdoch.

A chilling excerpt from the documents obtained by the blogger makes it all too clear what the commercial intentions are for this project:

In addition to making instructional data more manageable and useful, this open-license technology, provisionally called the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), will also support a large market for vendors of learning materials and application developers.

"In other words, companies will be making more money off student's test scores," the blogger concludes.

Back To School?

Whether you agree or not that the current data obsession guiding education policy is more about making schools better or making money, the lesson from 2011 is that, either way, there are few benefits to our nation's children and youth.

What NCLB represented more than anything was a really bad way of thinking about public policy. Established on the notion that something as complex as a school system, overseeing something as ill-defined as "learning," can be evaluated and governed by specific and isolated "data outputs," NCLB was doomed to failure from the start.

But even as NCLB lays in ruins, there's every indication that lessons have not been learned and we're continuing down the same policy rat hole as before.

Every good teacher knows that one of the most valuable things you can impart to students is the ability to learn from mistakes. If they're right, we have a whole lot of policy leaders who need to go back to school.

SOURCE




The Affirmative-Action Myth

Jeff Jacoby

IF RACIAL PREFERENCES in higher education were good for racial minorities in higher education, we surely would have seen the definitive evidence of it by now. Instead, a widening shelf of empirical research suggests that the opposite is true -- that affirmative action in academia is not advancing minority achievement but impeding it.

More than 30 years ago, in the case of University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court gave colleges and universities a green light to admit applicants on the basis of race if their reason for doing so was to secure the blessings of a "diverse" student body. Many educators and policymakers concluded that lowering academic standards for black and Hispanic candidates – though awkward and controversial -- was a worthwhile tradeoff, since it would increase the number of minorities with advanced degrees and prestigious careers. Build racial diversity into each freshman class, it was widely believed, and more diversity among graduate students, academics, and professionals would ensue.

But it hasn't worked that way.

In a report published last year, the US Commission on Civil Rights explored why black and Hispanic students who enroll in college intending to major in science, technology, engineering, or math -- the so-called STEM fields -- are far less likely than other students to follow through on those intentions.

The problem isn't lack of interest. Incoming minority freshmen actually start out more attracted than their white counterparts to the goal of a science or engineering degree. Nor is racism to blame. The Commission found that discrimination "was not a substantial factor" in the rate at which black and Hispanic students give up on science and math majors. Yet the bottom line is disheartening: Even after decades of affirmative action, blacks (relative to their share of the overall population) are only 36 percent as likely as whites to earn a bachelor's degree in a STEM discipline -- and only 15 percent as likely to make it all the way to a science-related PhD.

And it's not only in science and math that the supposed beneficiaries of racial preferences fall behind.

According to research by UCLA economist and law professor Richard Sander, more than 51 percent of black students at elite law schools finish their first year in the bottom 10 percent of their class. Black students fail or drop out of law school at more than twice the rate of white students (19.3 percent vs. 8.2 percent). And while 78 percent of white law school graduates pass the bar exam on their first attempt, only 45 percent of black graduates do.

The inability of racial preferences to vault more minority students into high scholastic achievement shouldn't come as a surprise. When an elite institution relaxes its usual standards to admit more blacks and Hispanics, it all but guarantees that those academically weaker students will have trouble keeping up with their better-prepared white and Asian classmates. Minorities who might have flourished in a science or engineering program at a middle-tier state college are apt to find themselves overwhelmed by the pace at which genetics or computer architecture is taught in the Ivy League. Many decide to switch to an easier major. Others drop out altogether.

This is the cruelty of affirmative-action "mismatch" -- the dynamic by which racial preferences steer minorities to schools where they are underqualified and therefore less likely to succeed. Absent such preferences, black and Hispanic students would attend universities for which their credentials better suited them. Many would earn higher grades or degrees in more prestigious and challenging fields; more would go on to graduate school and careers in academia or the professions. If it weren't for race-based admissions policies, in other words, underrepresented minorities wouldn't be so underrepresented.

Racial preferences, says University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot, have backfired. She is one of three members of the Civil Rights Commission urging the Supreme Court to recognize the damage it unleashed when it allowed racial "diversity" to trump the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Skin color was always an ill-contrived proxy for diversity of experiences and beliefs. What more than 30 years of race-based admissions have made clear, Heriot argues, is that "even with the best motives in the world, race-based admissions do far more harm than good." Especially to the students they are intended to help.

SOURCE





British teachers who branded their primary school pupils 'thick and inbred' during Facebook conversations 'quit' their jobs after parent's outrage

Maybe what the teachers said among themselves was a bit too close to the truth

Two teachers who branded their pupils 'thick and inbred' on Facebook have quit their jobs after parents expressed outrage, it was revealed today. Former head Debbie Johnson and teacher Nyanza Roberts left Westcott Primary School following an investigation, Hull City Council confirmed.

Mary Wallace, the chair of governors, said in a letter to parents, that the two had 'decided to relinquish their posts'.

Print-outs of the Facebook comments were posted on fencing near the primary School and word quickly spread among the 250 pupils. One said: 'No wonder everyone is thick... inbreeding must damage brain development.' Another referred to seeing pupils queuing in a discount store.

The online exchange, allegedly between teachers at the school, prompted anger among parents.

In a letter to parents, Ms Wallace said: 'Further to my last letter in which I promised to keep you updated with any developments at the school I write to inform you the investigation into the Facebook matter which affected a number of staff within the school has now been concluded. The details will remain confidential for legal reasons.

'However, I am able to inform you Ms Johnson and Miss Roberts have decided to relinquish their posts at Westcott Primary School from December 2011 and will pursue other opportunities.

'For the other members of staff involved in this matter, this has now been concluded under the school's disciplinary procedure. Again, no details can be given for legal reasons.

'I can assure you that the children's education and welfare continue to lie at the heart of everything we do and the school is running smoothly under the leadership of Mr Roe, the deputy headteacher who will take over as acting headteacher until a new headteacher is recruited.

'All classes are being covered by qualified teaching staff and everyone is working hard to ensure that the children's education and well-being are not affected in any way.'

The Facebook conversation is said to have taken place on a Saturday, when the school was closed, and begins with teacher Stuart Clark writing that he is ‘fed up of bumping into children in town’.

Later Nyanza Roberts makes a reference to an area of the town and adds: ‘No wonder everyone is thick… inbreeding must damage brain development.’

Head Debbie Johnson responds: ‘You’re really on one today mrs…!!Xx’

Miss Roberts replies: ‘Haha I’m actually in a good mood!! If anyone reading this is offended, then get a grip!!’

Another teacher, Jane Johnson, then interjects: ‘Massive queue of Westcott year 5/6 kids in poundland!X’

Parents were furious. Emma Bywood, 30, who has two children at the school, said: ‘My son came home on Monday and I had to explain to him what inbred meant. ‘I’m fuming. If he wasn’t in Year 6, I would be taking him out of the school. But he is starting his Sats exams after Christmas.’

Beckie White, 33, who has a nine-year-old daughter at the school, said: ‘I know it’s Facebook and it’s out of school hours, but they have a responsibility. ‘They know these things might be seen by people and, of course, parents will be hacked off. There should at least be an apology.’

Another mother commented: ‘I’m disgusted and disappointed. I feel let down by the people who are supposed to be role models for our children. ‘I have lost confidence and respect for the teachers at the school. I have doubts about keeping my child at the school.’

Miss Johnson earlier insisted the comments had been taken ‘out of context’ and implied they did not refer to the children.

A council spokeswoman said: 'We are continuing to support the school and will now focus on moving forward to ensure that children get the best possible standards of education. For legal reasons we are not able to go into any more detail.'

SOURCE



25 December, 2011

The Leiden university rankings

You can see them for yourself here. You will note that the top rankings are overwhelmingly dominated by American universities.

Leiden university ranks other universities in the following way:

The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 is based on publications in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science database in the period 2005-2009. Only publications in the sciences and the social sciences are included. Publications in the arts and humanities are excluded because in these domains the bibliometric indicators of the Leiden Ranking do not have sufficient accuracy. Furthermore, only publications of the Web of Science document types article, letter, and review are considered in the Leiden Ranking.

Impact indicators

The Leiden Ranking offers the following indicators of the scientific impact of a university:

Mean citation score (MCS). The average number of citations of the publications of a university.

Mean normalized citation score (MNCS). The average number of citations of the publications of a university, normalized for field differences, publication year, and document type. An MNCS value of two for instance means that the publications of a university have been cited twice above world average.

Proportion top 10% publications (PPtop 10%). The proportion of the publications of a university that, compared with other similar publications, belong to the top 10% most frequently cited.

Publications are considered similar if they were published in the same field and the same publication year and if they have the same document type.

Citations are counted until the end of 2010 in the above indicators. Author self citations are excluded. The PPtop 10% indicator is more stable than the MNCS indicator, and we therefore regard the PPtop 10% indicator as the most important impact indicator of the Leiden Ranking.

In other words it looks at how often papers coming out of a given university are cited in other papers.

That rather explains the American dominance. There are a LOT of American universities (around 7,000 on some counts -- depending on what you define as a university). So what we are seeing is that all those American researchers mostly cite papers by other Americans. There are many reasons why that might be so with the excellence of the cited paper being only one of the reasons.

Being personally acquainted (via conferences etc.) with other people working in your field is another obvious reason. I know from my own experience during my research career that the heaviest use of my papers mostly came from people I knew personally from conferences.

So although the Leiden rankings are the most objective of the rankings available they are really only useful in ranking American universities. As rankings of universities worldwide they are essentially useless.

It is therefore all the more to the credit of the occasional non-American university that crept into the list. The highest ranking Australian university was the ANU, ranked 114th. The ANU was of course designed from the beginning as a research-heavy university so that is not unexpected.

The University of Melbourne came 163rd ,the University of Queensland (my alma mater) was 170th but the University of Sydney was 290th.

Most other rankings of world universities place Australian universities much higher.




School Superintendent Receiving Death Threats Over Santa Order

Serves him right for being such a misery

A Massachusetts school superintendent who banned Santa Claus from visiting classrooms has received death threats, despite quickly reversing his position, the Boston Globe reported.

Richard Langlois, superintendent of Saugus Public Schools, canceled the longstanding tradition of local firefighters dressing like Santa and visiting schools Monday, saying it conflicted with school policy banning the celebration of religious holidays. According to Boston ABC affiliate WCVB-TV, firefighters have organized the visits and coloring book giveaways for the last 49 years.

Outrage ensued, prompting Langlois to reverse the order the same day, clearing the way for the local Kris Kringles to visit the children.

Despite the reversal, Langlois has received threats, a school committee member told the Globe. “It’s a shame that an incident like this should blow up the way it has,” member Joseph Malone told the newspaper, adding that he believes police are investigating the threats. “Death threats — that’s just appalling.”

According to WCVB, Langlois contacted police after receiving one death threat in the mail. Investigators did not disclose to the station what the card said, but forensic tests were being conducted to try to determine where it came from.

SOURCE




Extremist Teachings Remain in Saudi Textbooks Despite Kingdom's Claims of Reform

Despite Saudi Arabia's promises to clean up textbooks in the kingdom, recent editions continue to raise alarms in the West over jihadist language.

The recent editions were obtained by the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, D.C., and the translations were first provided to Fox News.

“This is where terrorism starts, in the education system.” Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, told Fox News. Al-Ahmed, a Saudi national, said the textbooks, made and paid for by the Saudi government, were smuggled out of the kingdom through confidential sources.

In a textbook for 10th-graders, printed for the 2010-2011 academic year, al-Ahmed said teenagers are taught barbaric practices. “They show students how to cut (the) hand and the feet of a thief,” he said. In another textbook, for ninth-graders, the students are taught the annihilation of the Jewish people is imperative. One text reads in part: “The hour (of judgment) will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. ... There is a Jew behind me come and kill him.”

According to the textbook translations provided to Fox News, women are described as weak and irresponsible. And al-Ahmed said the textbooks call for homosexuals to be put to death "because they pose a danger at society, as the Saudi school books teaches.”

Al-Ahmed say the textbooks are both a Saudi and an American problem. “If you teach 6 million children in these important years of their lives, if you install that in their brain, no wonder we have so many Saudi suicide bombers.”

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there was an intense focus on Saudi Arabia and its educational teachings because almost all of the attackers were from the kingdom. In 2006, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Turki al-Faisal told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relationships that the Saudi king was determined to eradicate this ideology of hate.

“In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah recognizes that above all else education is the key, and he has put forth a program of reforms in this area," al-Faisal said. "In recent years, the kingdom has reviewed all of its education practices and materials and has removed any element that is inconsistent with the needs of a modern education. Not only have we eliminated what is objectionable from old textbooks that were in our system, we have also implemented a comprehensive internal revision and modernization plan. “

But the new textbooks, most from the 2010-2011 academic year, show the hateful speech remains.

In Atlanta earlier this month, the Saudi minister responsible for the textbooks talked about the importance of education for woman. Asked by Fox News about the textbooks, Prince Faisal Bin Abdullah Al-Saud said, “I always say to people, please come. Come, try to see us. But come without a preconceived idea. ... Especially when you want to raise the future, no one is going to introduce violence. Violence is absolutely against - I think this is, I don't know who put in those ideas.”

When Fox News offered to show the quotes to the minister, he said, “there are many quotes” and walked away.

Fox News also asked the Saudi Embassy in Washington D.C., for comment on the textbooks and the translations, but there was no immediate response.

SOURCE



24 December, 2011

Denmark: Schools drop Christmas traditions out of consideration for Muslim students

Schools are increasingly changing Christmas tradition in order to take into account a growing number of bilingual children.

At the Klostervænget school in Copenhagen, the school administration changed a few verses in the 'A Child is Born in Bethlehem' hymn sung by the children because they thought it would be preaching too much to the bilingual children.

At Møllevang school in Aarhus the school administration asked a music teacher to choose hymns that took into account the Muslim students, after students in a 3rd grade class and their parents protested that the children were expected to sing "Here come your little ones, Jesus".

At the Nørrevang school in Slagelse, the school administration canceled the Christmas ceremony in church, since the priest insisted on saying the Lord's prayer, and the school administration thought it would insult some of the students.

These examples show that various schools with many students of immigrant background are changing the way Christmas is celebrated. The schools feel they're in a dilemma between Christian traditions and taking into account the fact that increasing numbers of students are Muslim.

"By us it's important that all children have the same rights and obligations. Nobody should feel excluded, and therefore we won't go into a church with some of the children. Instead we're having the Christmas celebration at school," says Tom Schultz, principal of the Nørrevang school in Slagelse.

Anders Balle, head of the principal's union, asks principals to be pragmatic. "We shouldn't let go of the cultural part of Christmas, but they shouldn't be preaching either." He says students should be allowed not to participate in events in churches.

Education Minister Christine Antorini (S) doesn't want to intervene if schools decide to drop hymns. "But I think there's a fine balance that parents can ask that their children be exempt from religious events that are not part of the curriculum."

SOURCE





Teachers Union President Deems Education Too Complex for Tax-Paying Rubes

It’s so reassuring to have the intellectual elites in our nation’s teachers unions, like Sandy Hughes of Tennessee, looking out for us rubes.

Hughes, a local union president, is pitching the idea that school board membership be limited to people who “have worked in the education field,” because the issues at hand are “so complex” and too complicated for average citizens.

In other words, all will be well if taxpayers just get out of the way and let the wise and wonderful union folks run our schools, no questions asked. All we have to do is keep paying the taxes, then mind our own business.

This is a perfect example of the snobbery and arrogance that is so pervasive in the public education establishment.

A stay-at-home mom that wants to be on the board? Sorry. Business owners who know how to control labor costs and balance budgets? They don’t have the right skill set, according to Hughes. Public education is too "complex" for them.

Hughes didn’t happen to mention the 80% graduation rate in her county, the 52% of 3-8 graders who aren't proficient in reading or the 62% who aren't proficient in math. Perhaps she thinks those statistics are acceptable, and the public school accept them, too.

There's another issue at play here. Most communities throughout the nation elect school board members. Teachers unions throughout the nation provide millions of dollars in campaign contributions to get their hand-picked candidates elected, then lo and behold, they negotiate juicy, expensive contracts with their pet board members.

Union leaders have clearly thought this through. Some have actually produced How-To manuals, such as the Michigan Education Association’s “Electing Your Employer – It’s as easy as 1-2-3!” In it, the union details every step necessary to elect union-friendly school board members.

The only problem is that, with a board full of union supporters, nobody is looking out for the interests of students and taxpayers. But of course, people who aren’t dedicated to the union agenda have no business on school boards, according to Hughes. We obviously don’t understand the process. It’s all too “complex” for us.

SOURCE






Fewer black students at Oxford and Cambridge

Oxbridge recruits from a high IQ pool. Very few blacks would be in that pool

The number of black students being awarded places at Oxford and Cambridge dropped even lower last year, according to newly released figures.

Fewer than one in 100 students beginning courses at Britain's two oldest universities in 2010 were black, including just 20 of the 2,617 British students accepted to Oxford, a fall from 27 in 2009.

The number of new black students at Cambridge dropped to 16 among an intake of 2,624, compared with 25 the previous year, admissions data show.

The statistics come months after David Cameron branded the universities' ethnic admissions figures as "disgraceful", incorrectly claiming that just one British black student had been accepted by Oxford in 2009.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the incoming head of Ofsted, told the Sunday Times it was the role of schools to press more black pupils to apply for places at Britain's most prestigious academic institutions. He said: "The statistics clearly show that [state] schools aren't doing enough to encourage black and ethnic minority students to apply to the top universities."

Oxford said it had accepted 32 black students in 2011, an increase from last year, and said white pupils were more than twice as likely as black pupils to score three As at A-level.

Cambridge said 15 per cent of students at the university last year were from ethnic minorities, compared with five per cent in 1989.

SOURCE



23 December, 2011

TN bill would force failing eighth-graders to stay behind

A state lawmaker wants Tennessee schools to stop promoting eighth-graders to the ninth grade when they are not academically ready.

Teachers acknowledge that the practice — called social promotion — is fairly common, but state Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown, filed a bill that would force teachers to retain eighth-grade students who have failing grades at the end of the year or do not demonstrate basic skills in one or more subjects of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.

If the law had been in effect this year, at least 8,000 Tennessee eighth-graders would have been held back because that’s how many scored below the basic level in reading on the state exams they took in the spring of this year.

State Board of Education Executive Director Gary Nixon supports the proposal, but other teachers and school administrators fear it could lead to a higher dropout rate among embarrassed teenagers. “One reason we don’t retain is because of the research showing what happens when they get retained. … All the kids know, and hopelessness is the bigger issue,’’ said H.G. Hill Middle School Principal Connie Gwinn, an educator of 31 years.

Under Kelsey’s plan, students with disabilities would be exempt. All other students would have the opportunity to attend summer school, elevate their grades and go on to high school with their classmates in the fall. Opponents of the bill insist schools would need more money to fund additional intervention programs in the summer.

But Kelsey said something has to be done because too many students are coming out of high school without basic reading, math or other skills. “This will help our graduation rate and ensure students who enter ninth grade will succeed there,” he said. “Unfortunately, we set many of them up for failure right now.”

Roughly 20,000 Tennessee students in grades 4-8 score below basic each year but get promoted anyway, and find themselves unsuccessful in high school, the lawmaker said.

Kelsey said this bill is a natural progression in education reform. In 2010, legislators enacted a law requiring TCAPs to count for up to 25 percent of a student’s final grade. Earlier this year, lawmakers agreed to make third grade a gateway year, meaning that in 2012 students in the third grade must score “basic’’ or above in reading to enter the fourth grade.

Every spring, students in grades 3-8 are tested on grade-level reading, math, social studies and science on the TCAP. Depending on how many questions they answer correctly, they land in one of the following levels: below basic grade level, basic, proficient or advanced. In reading, for example, eighth-graders answer about 50 reading questions. Those answering about 85 percent correctly are considered advanced; those answering 41 percent or fewer are “below basic.”

Tennessee has joined Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas, and the Chicago and New York City school districts in implementing certain gateway grades for promotion.

Kelsey is confident this latest proposal will be adopted. The state board of education favors ending social promotion for third and eighth grades. “The state board is supportive of assuring students who are promoted have the skills to be successful in the next grade,” Nixon said.

Teachers and school administrators agree that retaining students in younger grades is more beneficial to the student. “The majority of our retentions are in kindergarten,” said Yvonne Smith, elementary supervisor for Wilson County Schools. “The earlier you can catch a child and find out what they are lacking, takes less time to get them caught up ... plus from a social aspect, it’s not as hard on them.” It may take 30 minutes of intervention per day in kindergarten, versus four hours per day for struggling fourth-graders, she said.

Wilson County school board member Vikki Adkins said retaining students would lead to overcrowding at the eighth-grade level because the failing students would join the new eighth-graders coming into the school. “It may mean a lot of portables in middle schools,” Adkins said. “I would be opposed to any legislation like this.”

Metro Associate Superintendent for High Schools Jay Steele said he’s not in favor of the bill because students fall behind for different reasons and should not all be retained.

“There is no reason a 17-year-old child should be in an eighth-grade classroom, so that’s where I think flexibility has to be built in so that a district can decide on a case-by-case basis what’s best for the child,” Steele said.

Metro Schools had already planned its own intervention program for over-aged middle school students more than a year ago, but the $1.5 million initiative has yet to begin. Currently, about 750 ninth- and 10th-graders older than their classmates are still struggling and not expected to earn enough class credits to graduate with their peers.

To support his argument, Kelsey points to a study done at the University of Colorado that analyzed Florida’s social promotion policy. Marcus Winters measured third-graders who failed state exams by a few points and were retained, put in summer school and then paired with high-quality teachers. He compared them with third-graders who barely passed exams and were not retained. Winters said he found a large increase in math and reading scores of the students retained.

“The long-term effect that we are most interested in, we can’t see yet, because our students aren’t old enough, like high school graduation rates and whether they go to college or how they do in the labor market,” Winters said. Research on ending social promotion in sixth through eighth grades is virtually nonexistent or has shown no real effect, he said.

A Chicago study found its dropout rates didn’t change after the system stopped social promotion.

In Georgia, which has gateway grades in third, fifth and eighth grades, school districts ignored the law and promoted failing kids anyway.

Bellevue Middle School grandparent Tonia Mattison said the system is flawed all around. Her grandson, a fifth-grader, lives with her and performs at the basic level on exams, but she pays for private tutoring.

She said eighth-graders should not be penalized because their parents or teachers never intervened. “Denying them at that age level is not something that just started at eighth grade. If there is a problem, isn’t it a problem to rectify at an earlier age?”

SOURCE




Class war as British universities seek to break 'middle-class monopoly'

Students applying to university will have checks made on their school and family background under a move to create a more diverse student population.

Two thirds of universities will use data covering students’ social class, parental education or school performance next year to give the most disadvantaged candidates a better chance of getting on to degree courses, reports the Daily Telegraph.

For the first time next year, they will be required to set targets for the number of disadvantaged students being admitted in a move that coincides with a sharp rise in tuition fees. It represents an escalation of the current rules that merely require institutions to generate more applications.

Figures suggest that more than 20,000 students at almost 100 universities are already admitted to degree courses each year using contextual data and this number could rise in 2012 and beyond. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills insisted that it was 'valid and appropriate' to use this information to pick out applicants with 'potential'.

Private schools will be alarmed at the move as this scheme risks penalising academic pupils from top performing schools.

In the latest study, researchers surveyed almost 100 universities on their use of contextual information. The report, by the organisation Supporting Professionalism in Admissions, which advises universities on admissions policies, found that 41.5 per cent of institutions used this data to admit students in autumn 2011.

But it said that almost 63 per cent of universities 'indicated that they plan to use it in the future', including for next year’s admissions when tuition fees will rise from £3,000 to a maximum of £9,000 a year.

The survey suggested that universities aligned to the elite Russell Group, which represents Oxford, Cambridge and other leading institutions were 'more likely to be using contextual data' than other institutions.

Almost 23 per cent of universities said they were planning to make 'lower offers' to some candidates from poor backgrounds — potentially awarding them places with worse A-level grades than students from top schools. This was up from 18 per cent in 2011.

SOURCE





Australia: A good school culture can have powerful effects

Religious schools generally have an advantage in that respect. And, being private, they don't have to put up with disruptive students

A SCHOOL in Melbourne's east founded on the principles of Christian Science has outperformed selective-entry government school Melbourne High in this year's VCE results.

Melbourne High has dropped off the list of top three schools for the first time since figures were made publicly available in 2003, outflanked by Mac.Robertson Girls High, Huntingtower School and Loreto Mandeville Hall.

Huntingtower School in Mount Waverley, an independent school based on the teachings of Christian Science, has enjoyed a meteoric rise through the rankings. In 2003, 15 per cent of its subject scores were 40 or above, and it was outperformed by 63 schools. This year Huntingtower School placed second, with 36.6 per cent of subject scores 40 or above. VCE subjects are marked out of 50, with a study score of 30 the average, and more than 40 considered an excellent result.

Huntingtower principal Sholto Bowen said the school encouraged its students to support one another rather than compete against each other.

"We are creating a sense they are all part of a team and not trying to beat [one another]. We are not trying to actually beat other schools," Mr Bowen said. "Every student knows it's their responsibility to help every other student when they are feeling stressed or under pressure. I don't think we do anything that couldn't be done by anyone - we are just creating that culture of kindness and understanding and support."

Mr Bowen said the school believed that every child expressed the infinite intelligence of God. "We want them to get the idea they have no limits," he said.

Christian Science is derived from the writings of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, and the Bible. No doctrinal instruction in religion is given at Huntingtower and all faiths are welcomed.

The school's website says that while Christian Science is perhaps best known for its emphasis on healing by spiritual means, the wishes of parents of Huntingtower students for medical attention for their children is respected at all times.

Kahli Joyce, one of 57 VCE students at Huntingtower, attributes the school's success to a strong network between students and teachers.

"It was not only about the academic side of things, we also took time out to bond as a year level," said Kahli, who hopes to study biomedicine at Melbourne University.

Year 12 students attended a weekend retreat early in the year, where they discussed team and individual goals, and wrote positive affirmations about every student.

"Throughout the year we were always together as a year level, and in the common room we would take time out to find out how everyone was going. That really helped give us a positive learning environment."

Meanwhile, Jewish schools also performed extremely well, with Bialik College, Yeshivah College and Mount Scopus Memorial College all in the top 10. The top Jewish schools were Bialik College in Hawthorn and Yeshivah College in St Kilda East, which both had 33.3 per cent of study scores 40 or above.

SOURCE



22 December, 2011

Hamline University, Minnesota: Closed Hearts, Closed Minds, and Closed Doors

“At Hamline, students collaborate with professors invested in their success. They are challenged in and out of the classroom to create and apply knowledge in local and global contexts, while cultivating an ethic of civic responsibility, social justice, and inclusive leadership and service.” – From the Hamline University website

Hamline University is not a liberal arts college as it claims to be. It is an illiberal arts college that has just disgraced itself in the national court of public opinion. Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer was hired to teach at the school but then abruptly canned by those who did not want even a single high-profile conservative faculty member. So much for the “civil and open exchange of ideas” Hamline promises to prospective students. It is nothing short of false advertising meant to lure students into an ideological echo chamber that will leave them deep in debt and shallow on exposure to controversial ideas.

Tom Emmer holds conservative views on taxes and health care reform but neither of those issues mattered in the eyes of those who wished to exclude him from the Hamline faculty. Hamline officials reneged on a job offer for one reason and one reason only: Tom Emmer has publicly stated his opposition to same-sex marriage. And the faculty will not tolerate such intolerance.

The view of some faculty members and some in the Minnesota media can be roughly summarized as follows: If Tom Emmer supports marital discrimination then he cannot claim to be a victim of viewpoint discrimination at the hands of Hamline progressives.

That sort of rationalization is dangerous, of course, because it knows no bounds. There was virtually no discussion of this issue on campuses until the late 1990s. The idea that everyone must jump on the same-sex marriage bandwagon in order to retain a job they have already been given is sure to kill any remnant of diversity that might be found on the campus of Hamline University. Imagine the strange variations of this kind of we-can-discriminate-against-you-because-you-advocate-discrimination logic:

1.)You support the African American Center therefore you cannot claim to be a victim of traditional marriage laws that exclude same-sex marriage.

2.)You support the Women’s Resource Center so you can’t complain that you were denied a job because you are black.

3.)You supported the firing of Tom Emmer so you cannot claim to be a victim of sex discrimination.

Tom Emmer was hired to teach business law not to teach Sociology of Marriage and Family. His most important qualification is a law degree and extensive law practice in the State of Minnesota. It should not matter that he lacks a certificate of completion of sensitivity training from the local LGBT Resource Office.

Aside from the same-sex marriage controversy, there is an issue over the general character and integrity of the supporters of the Emmer firing. Some of those supporters of the firing say it really was not a firing because there was never really a hiring – just a pending hiring. Internal memoranda and emails put the lie to that rationalization.

In an Oct. 6 e-mail, a Hamline professor/administrator urges Emmer to make a quick decision on when he can teach, not whether he will teach, so she can prepare the spring schedule for business students.

An Oct. 7 e-mail, from an associate dean for academic affairs, states that Emmer “will be joining” the Hamline faculty within the School of Business. In other words, upper administration, not just lower administration, characterizes the hiring as a done deal.

If you click on the two links I have provided (above) you will see additional supporting documentation. I thank my readers in Minnesota for directing me to this information. They are helping to hold an allegedly Christian university accountable to the truth, if not the Truth.

It is a shame that Tom Emmer will not be teaching at Hamline. Given that he received over 43% of the vote in the Minnesota governor’s race, he probably would have been good for fund raising. Tom Emmer also would have been good for the ascertainment of truth. Sociology professors could have invited him to guest lecture and to debate in their classes. Even if they thought his positions were wrong, students could have benefited from a greater appreciation of the truth via its collision with falsity.

Maybe progressive faculty members at Hamline are just insecure with their beliefs. Or maybe I misunderstood the United Methodist Church with which Hamline is affiliated. I knew they had open hearts, open minds, and open doors for those who support the gay agenda. I thought they also had room for those who place God above contemporary notions of social justice.

SOURCE






"Obesity" used in Massachusetts to hobble Christmas cheer

Westford school officials are getting tough on classroom holiday parties. They’re banning sugary snacks and sweetened beverages from the celebrations this year.

Students are being told to leave the Christmas cookies, cakes, candy bars, and soda at home and to bring fruits, unsweetened juices, popcorn and raisins instead.

Superintendent Everett Olsen says the ban on holiday sweets has nothing to do with being politically correct, rather, his motive is simply promoting a healthy lifestyle.

“We aren’t trying to take the Christmas out of Christmas. We’re not trying to take the enjoyment out of children’s lives. We’re just trying to act responsible,” he told WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Mike Macklin. The school’s goal is to avoid the types of sweets that pile on empty calories and contribute to childhood obesity.

School officials say they’re also hoping to protect the growing number of children with severe food allergies.

The new policy comes as schools across Massachusetts get set to implement stricter state-mandated food policies aimed at reducing child obesity.

SOURCE





Teach primary pupils mechanics: British education boss calls for schools to adopt Far Eastern-style curriculum

Primary school pupils are to be given tougher lessons to ensure they keep up with those in the Far East, in a sweeping shake-up of education.

It means schools in England will borrow some principles from their high-achieving counterparts in Asia.

That includes teaching separate lessons in grammar rather than treating the discipline as an optional ‘add on’, amid concerns that too many pupils get to 16 without even a basic grasp of spelling and punctuation.

Primary school children should also receive lessons in basic scientific concepts such as how machines work and how plastic is made, according to the interim findings of an independent review ordered by Michael Gove.

The Education Secretary wants to stiffen up the National Curriculum to create a ‘gold standard’ lesson plan modelled on the world’s most rigorous exam systems. To do that, teachers should look to the Far East, he said - in particular the high-performing countries of Singapore, China and Hong Kong.

A government-commissioned review of the curriculum, to be published tomorrow, reveals children in Singapore are introduced to scientific concepts in year six. But in England, children do not learn about 'motion around a pivot' or the 'operation of simple machines' until between years seven and nine.

The report, by the Expert Panel, will also say that successful Asian education system make sure all pupils have mastered a subject before moving on to tackle the next part. That is in stark contrast to England where some children are left behind if they do not grasp the topic.

A Whitehall source told the Sunday Times: 'It is wrong to conclude that England should simply import these examples lock, stock and barrel. 'But the consistent theme that does emerge is that some countries do set materially higher expectations in some areas in terms of what they believe children can and should master at different ages.'

A new curriculum had been planned for 2013 - with alterations to the English, maths, science and PE syllabuses. Other subjects would have been introduced from 2014. But all changes will now be delayed until 2014 so more radical proposals can be debated.

The move has prompted criticism from Labour, who have suggested the review is 'in chaos'. A spokesman said the panel was being sent back to the drawing board for failing to fit Gove's 'ideological creed'.

SOURCE



21 December, 2011

Skills gap an America-wide problem

Federal Reserve policy makers say that while the American job market shows signs of improving, they are still concerned with the “elevated” level of unemployment. One reason may be because employers can’t find qualified help, according to economists like Dean Maki.

The number of positions waiting to be filled this year has climbed to levels last seen in 2008, when the jobless rate was around 6 percent. The housing bust and ensuing financial crisis put people out of work whose skills may not correspond with those needed by the health-care providers and engineering firms where jobs go wanting.

“What’s going on here is a mismatch of the skills of the unemployed and at least some of the positions that are becoming available,” Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital in New York, said in an interview. “This seems to be slowing the pace of filling those job openings.”

The issue has come to the forefront in Maine, particularly through meetings Gov. Paul LePage has held around the state with employers. Employers have consistently said they have open positions – looking for everything from skilled machinists to computer programers — that go unfilled, due to a lack of qualified applicants.

Nationwide, a dearth of skilled applicants may prevent the unemployment rate from declining further and could crimp consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. Companies also may remain reluctant to expand their workforces as the threat from Europe’s debt crisis and political gridlock in the U.S. weighs on the economic outlook.

Over the three months ended in October, the average number of positions waiting to be filled climbed to 3.26 million, the most in three years, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday in Washington. The jobless rate, which averaged 5.8 percent that year, was at 9 percent in October. It fell to 8.6 percent last month, in part reflecting a drop in the size of the labor force, the agency’s data showed earlier this month.

Compared with the 13.9 million Americans who were unemployed in October, that means that that there were about 4 people vying for every opening, up from about 1.8 when the recession began in December 2007, the report showed.

During the years leading up to the 18-month U.S. recession, millions of Americans sought out jobs in industries that are now struggling, according to economist Julia Coronado.

“A lot of people went into real estate, construction and finance and acquired a lot of skills that are now not as useful to the current economy,” Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York, said in an interview. “You just have a skills mismatch in this economy.”

Sixteen percent of small-business owners said they had openings that were difficult to fill in November, up 2 percentage points from the prior month, according to results of a survey issued yesterday by the National Federation of Independent Business. While the share is usually between 20 percent and 30 percent during economic expansions, last month’s reading was the highest since September 2008.

“There’s no doubt that employers need more hiring flexibility, but at the same time they continue to struggle to find talent with mission-critical skills,” said Jonas Prising, president of the Americas for Milwaukee-based Manpower Inc., the world’s second-largest provider of temporary workers. “The lack of demand for products and services and the ongoing skills mismatch profoundly impact hiring decisions.”

Manpower’s 2011 Talent Shortage Survey, issued in May, showed 52 percent of companies polled said they found it more difficult to find qualified help. That was up from 14 percent in 2010 and the highest percentage in the survey’s six-year history.

In addition to the displacement caused by the recession, the relationship between job openings and unemployment may have shifted because of the extension of jobless benefits or the detrimental effects of long-term unemployment, according to Zach Pandl, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs in New York. The change means the equilibrium level of joblessness, or the rate equated with steady inflation, has probably climbed to 6 percent from 5 percent before the economic slump, Pandl wrote in a Dec. 8 research report.

“The economy has been expanding moderately, notwithstanding some apparent slowing in global growth,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement at the conclusion of its meeting Tuesday in Washington. “While indicators point to some improvement in overall labor market conditions, the unemployment rate remains elevated.”

Concern over the economic outlook may also be affecting employment. The threat that the euro region may slide into recession, causing a global slowdown that would also limit U.S. growth, may be encouraging companies to hold back.

For example, the performance of the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, also known as the VIX, which measures the cost of using options as insurance against declines in the S&P 500, also foreshadows payroll gains, Maki, a former Fed economist, said.

“When the VIX index is elevated, it means job growth is going to be more subdued,” he said. The gauge climbed as high as 48 in August and closed yesterday at 25.4. It averaged 16 in the five years leading up to the recession that started in December 2007.

SOURCE





British Pupils could be forced to study history and geography until the age of 16 in curriculum shake-up

Pupils may be forced to study history and geography until they are 16 under plans for a shake-up of the national curriculum. An independent review ordered by Education Secretary Michael Gove called for the move yesterday as part of a wider drive to address concerns that England’s schools are falling behind the rest of the world.

A separate report yesterday warned of a sharp decline in history teaching, with 159 schools not entering a single pupil for a GCSE in the subject last year.

Recent studies have exposed a shocking ignorance about history among school-leavers. One found that half of all 18 to 24-year-olds did not know Nelson led the British to victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, with a similar proportion unaware that the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall.

Under the proposals, all pupils in England would be required to study history, geography, a foreign language, design and technology and the arts until at least 16, even if they are not planning to take a GCSE in them.

At present pupils can drop these subjects at 14. An expert panel appointed by Mr Gove found that the curriculum in England narrows earlier than in countries with more successful education systems, where pupils are required to study key subjects such as history for longer.

As a result, many youngsters are ‘deprived of access to powerful forms of knowledge and experience at a formative time in their lives’, the panel said.

A move to make these subjects compulsory would tie in with the Government’s new English Baccalaureate, awarded to pupils who gain at least five Cs at GCSE in English, maths, science, history or geography and a foreign language.

Tory MP Chris Skidmore, vice-chairman of the all-party history group, warned that the decline in history teaching had potentially far-reaching consequences.

Mr Skidmore, who will use a Commons debate today to call for history to be made compulsory, said: ‘At the moment we are the only country in Europe, apart from Albania, that allows children to finish history at 14. ‘There are dozens of schools where not a single pupil is studying history beyond that point. ‘Yet history is a subject that binds us as a nation. Having a common understanding of the past helps us to create a more coherent and tolerant society.’

Mr Skidmore said the subject was becoming increasingly confined to the most academic schools, particularly in the south.

Yesterday’s proposals are part of wider reforms designed to boost England’s competitiveness by improving the curriculum. Other suggestions include requiring children to learn their times tables at a younger age.

SOURCE





New patriotic computer game for Australian schools

GRADE 3 students will be asked to play a patriotic computer game as part of a program to help them embrace what it means to be Australian.

The Aussie Clue Cracker game has been approved by the Australia Day Council and will be included in the history curriculum across the nation next year to help students better relate to Australian symbols.

As well as all of Australia's national symbols and days, students will solve questions to identify symbols such as the MCG, the Melbourne Cup, the Sydney Opera House, a didgeridoo and a Digger.

The education program designed by the Australia Day Council includes activities allowing students to design their own individual flags to show what best represents them.

National Australia Day Council chief executive officer Warren Pearson said the program was designed to reinforce the power of the symbols that all Australians could relate to.

"This is the bread and butter of being Australian," Mr Pearson said. "These are the things that resonate in our hearts and minds as Australians. "There is nothing in this list of symbols that excludes anybody, these are things we can celebrate - different aspects of our identity."

The program will be available for all schools and teachers to use in their lessons, but will not be made mandatory.

Similar to a web-based version of the popular board game Guess Who, grade 3 students will work through questions to identify the 24 national symbols, either as individuals or small groups on school computers, or as classes working on electronic whiteboards.

Mr Pearson said the Aussie Clue Cracker would be released next month, before Australia Day. It would be available for schools to use as part of their history lessons throughout the year and was relevant to all national days and events, he said.

The interactive lessons will incorporate sound bites, images and music to reinforce Aussie symbolism.

SOURCE



20 December, 2011

'Alarming' Achievement Gap in Seattle Schools



(Seattle, Washington) School officials have analyzed student performance by correlating language spoken at home and student test scores.

African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home — typically immigrants or refugees — according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools.

District officials, who presented the finding at a recent community meeting at Rainier Beach High School, noted the results come with caveats, but called the potential trend troubling and pledged to study what might be causing it.

Michael Tolley, an executive director overseeing Southeast Seattle schools, said at the meeting that the data exposed a new achievement gap that is "extremely, extremely alarming."

The administration has for years analyzed test scores by race. It has never before broken down student-achievement data by specific home language or country of origin — it is rare for school districts to examine test scores at that level — but it is unlikely that the phenomenon the data suggest is actually new.

In fact, some national experts said the trend represented by the Seattle data is not surprising.

Besides being "extremely alarming," the results are contentious and will be the basis of many heated discussions.





Palestinian Hip-Hop Group Comparing Israelis to Nazis Performs for Oregon Public High School Students

An online petition has been landing in the inboxes of pro-Israel Americans this month, many of whom are expressing shock at the Portland public school system for allowing a Palestinian hip-hop group with offensive lyrics justifying terrorism and comparing Israelis to Nazis to perform at a city high school.

The group, named DAM, was invited to perform at Lincoln High School last month. Simply knowing the band’s name, DAM – blood in Arabic and Hebrew – raises serious questions why school officials would position this group in front of impressionable students. Their lyrics raise even more questions about the judgment of these school officials.

Sponsored by Portland State University Christians United for Israel, the petition states:

The lyrics demonize Israeli Jews, calling them rapists and Nazis, justifying terrorism against them.. (”You’re a Democracy? It’s more like the Nazis…Your raping of the Arab soul gave birth to your child: The suicide bomber.”) These lyrics are threatening to Jewish students at Lincoln, and do not represent the mainstream opinions of Palestinians and Arab Israelis.

A sample of the group’s work: one DAM song called “Min Irhabi” or “Who’s a Terrorist?” is filled with anti-Israel propaganda and in-your-face lyrics, that many parents – regardless of their political stripe – would just as soon not have their children get a free helping of at school. With these few lines, one gets the picture:

Chorus:
Who’s a terrorist? I’m a terrorist?
How am I a terrorist while I live in my country
Who’s a terrorist? You’re a terrorist!
You’re swallowing me while I live in my country
Killing me like you killed my ancestors […]
Click here to find out more!

Democracy? I swear you’re Nazis
With all the times you raped the Arab spirit
It got pregnant and birthed a boy called the suicide bomber
And here you are calling us terrorists

The petitioners say even though students and parents voiced their concerns about the band’s content to the school board, the board went ahead with the performance, “despite the physical and emotional fears of the students.” The petition is asking the school board to apologize and assure students that “events with hate speech will not be tolerated again. Presently, the school board has found no breach in Lincoln High School’s policies on hate speech.”

The Jewish Review reported on the November 4th concert at a Lincoln High School student assembly. Teachers tried to prepare classes before attending the assembly. One teacher didn’t bring his class, because he felt he didn’t have enough time to prepare them. Students reported the event lasted an hour with band members speaking English, but some of the lyrics were not translated. The report did not say if the song “Who’s a Terrorist” was performed. One attendee said many “asked the trio what they thought could be done to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:”

“One of their answers that really bothered me was that they said the land of Israel should not be controlled by a Jewish government. It seems innocuous on the surface, because it looks like they are advocating for fairness and equality.” But what “went over a lot of heads at the assembly,” she explained, was that if there is no Jewish state, then eventually there will be no Jews in the Middle East. There is currently “only one Jewish country” among all the Muslim/Arab ones, she said, and “they are saying that the Jewish state doesn’t have the right to exist.”

[A Wilson high school student who also attended, Jewish Student Union President Becky] Davidson said that a lot of kids in the audience “just didn’t know. They were like, ‘Yeah, we want equality, too.’ It’s really idealistic, but it’s not the reality.”

After the rappers’ comments, Davidson said that [student Shoshi] Singer heard a girl in the audience say, “Oh, my God, I hate Israel! It so sucks.”

According to Davidson, when DAM members said, “We need to have equality for all people in Israel” they suggested that this would be accomplished when Israel was no longer a Jewish state.

The Jewish Review also reports the school allowed a panel discussion on November 1st to address concerns over the hip hop group’s invitation. The assembly three days later was called “optional,” meaning teachers could decide if to bring their students.

It reports the public school’s Arab Studies Program is funded by Qatar Foundation International, which also sponsored the hip hop group’s visit to the high school. Last year, Israeli, Spanish and British newspapers reported that the Qatar Foundation had given money to extremist Muslim cleric Yusuf al Qaradawi who advocates “terrorism, wife beating and anti-Semitism” and that the foundation gives money to the terrorist group Hamas:

Michael Cahana, senior rabbi for Congregation Beth Israel, attended the panel discussion as the rabbi of many families whose children attend Lincoln. He said, “This is not a free speech issue; it is an educational issue. Certainly from a Jewish perspective the lyrics of DAM’s songs promote terrorism, which strikes me as really inappropriate to bring them to a high school. To have a vibrant discussion [outside of a school] makes sense. But when you bring a group into a classroom” or, in this case an assembly, “it carries a certain responsibility. And I don’t see that responsibility being met.” […]

From the sidelines Peyton Chapman, Lincoln High School principal, jumped in with, “If the word ‘Nazi’ comes up at the assembly, we’re going to discuss it.” The Holocaust “was an incredible horror. We don’t want to have it repeated.”

If the concert during school hours wasn’t offensive enough, the school’s Arabic teacher, Sarah Standish, posted a notice on her blog to which the school’s website links offering students extra credit if they attended an off-campus screening of a documentary about the group and submitted a 300-word essay about the experience. In the same post she included a letter trying to assure parents that “DAM does not advocate violence of any kind.”

Perhaps a Lincoln senior Emilie Cohen summarized the issue most eloquently:

“My biggest concern is that our principal is supposed to keep us physically and emotionally safe. And with this group and their published videos it makes me feel like they hate Jews; they hate Israelis. I personally don’t feel emotionally safe knowing that these people – who hate me without even knowing me – come into my public school, spreading their message. …why would our principal allow this group to come in?”

The anti-Israeli curricula and atmosphere on American college campuses has faced scrutiny in recent years; this Portland case suggests there may also be a growing problem in K-12 schools.

It should be noted the members of DAM are Arab citizens of Israel who identify themselves as Palestinian. Their opinion of the city where they were raised – Lod, next to Ben-Gurion International Airport – is that it’s occupied Palestinian territory, not Israel. Or, in other words: there is no place in their world view for Jews to have their national homeland.

SOURCE





The school where pupils have etiquette lessons: British government school hires expert to teach students how to get a job

A state school is hiring an etiquette expert to teach teenage pupils how to act and dress to get a job. The day-long course covers posture, how to 'dress for success', speaking clearly and using the right cutlery.

There is even guidance on the correct way to eat asparagus, spaghetti and the tricky consumption of shell prawns.

The 16 to 18-year-olds at the co-educational Bishop Heber School, in Malpas, Cheshire, will also learn how to enter a room and greet people properly.

Headteacher David Curry said. 'On paper everyone is the same - the only discerning difference is what an interviewer sees in person. That ability to carry yourself is hugely important. “The children don’t find it patronising, they are genuinely eager to take these skills on.”

Mr Curry asked the company Public Image to organise the course - due to be held next month - after a talk on the importance of social skills from an outside speaker.

The pupils will be filmed doing role play exercises which they can then watch to see how they are coming across to employers.

Parents have been asked to pay towards the cost of the course at Bishop Heber. The school, which has over 1,000 pupils, has been rated as outstanding by Ofsted

Diana Mather, managing director of Public Image, said the training helps put state and privately educated pupils on a 'level playing field'.

She told the Daily Telegraph: 'Privately educated students and school boarders are given much more of this sort of training. 'Whether it’s the debating society, school presentations or attending functions with people from older generations, they become more at ease communicating appropriately.

'Women in particular need a bit of help judging what’s appropriate. If girls wear low-cut tops and short skirts to an interview then she’s got to expect some sort of reaction, after all we’re all human.'

Miss Mather, a former television presenter, already runs courses at private schools which include a talk on what is expected of young adults in the 21st century.

Susan Anderson, Confederation of British Industry director for education and skills, said the majority of schools fail to teach pupils what employers are looking for in the workplace. She said: 'Competition for jobs is intense and unemployment remains high, so [schools] need to explain these skills better and make sure they embed them in teaching.'

SOURCE





A world of offers for Australia's brightest students

I tried to persuade my son to go to Oxford for his doctoral studies because of its recognition factor but he eventually decided that an Australian university was the best one in his field

THE answer to the ritual question among school leavers - "where are you going?" - is throwing up some startling answers, as well as a challenge to Australia's leading universities. What began as a trickle is now a small stream of outstanding academic talents using their HSC as a passport to travel.

Rowena Lazar, 18, first in the state in Italian beginners, couldn't pick up her award from the Education Minister last week; she was in Oxford, interviewing for a place for next year. Timothy Large, 17, first in extension two maths, had flown in on the morning of the ceremony from his interview at Cambridge. Harry Stratton, 18, first in classical Greek and Latin, has his heart set on Harvard or Yale.

Large and Stratton, from Sydney Grammar, both secured the highest possible ATAR ranking of 99.95 but neither will complete their undergraduate degree in Australia. And they will be followed by many of their peers. Schools such as Grammar and Queenwood run information nights at which US colleges make their pitches. This year as many as 30 Grammar school-leavers have applied to overseas universities, a figure which has alarmed Australian rivals.

Record numbers of Australians are now studying their first degree in the US, with about 1500 undergraduates at American colleges and universities in the 2010-11 academic year, an increase of 14.6 per cent.

Many leading schools report a growing trend among their best and brightest to aim immediately to begin their tertiary study overseas. "It's definitely increasing and it's confirmation that we measure ourselves on global standards, not on regional or even national ones," said Tom Alegounarias, the president of the NSW Board of Studies.

James Harpur, the principal of Queenwood, said numbers were rising. "This year we've got five UK applications and two to the US," he said. "It's often fuelled by ambition and a desire to broaden their horizons. That's the confidence they have which students didn't have several generations ago. It wasn't on our horizon."

The trend has disturbed domestic universities, which attempt to attract the sharpest minds with lucrative scholarships. But Mr Harpur said departures were motivated by ambition rather than a belief there was "anything inherently wrong with Sydney universities".

Sydney University and the University of NSW target top performers with scholarships, some exclusively for those with the highest ATAR in the state.

The University of Sydney Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), Derrick Armstrong, said: "We would argue that we were one of the leading universities in the world. The education here is very high quality in a research intensive environment." However, he said it was understandable students would seek the opportunity to study overseas.

Peter Taylor, the executive director of the Australian Mathematics Trust, said an increasing number of Maths Olympiad students were heading overseas, particularly to Cambridge University, but they were not necessarily getting a better education.

"It's a perception they've got, but I can't see why, because for instance Sydney University runs an outstanding course for high flyers. They're absolutely in as good quality company as anywhere else."

Professor Taylor said some were attracted to a degree from Cambridge's Trinity College as a status symbol. "If someone's determined to go to Trinity, it's pretty hard to stop them."

Tyson Churcher, 17, from Northern Beaches Christian School, wants to study maths at Cambridge. He's just back from an exam and interview. "The opportunity to study at Cambridge would be enormous. You can't really call any university the best but it's certainly up there," he said.

Tyson, shortlisted for a scholarship at UNSW, has applied for a scholarship at Cambridge. He's unsure what to do if he is accepted. "I would have to think about it because the cost is certainly daunting but the opportunity is great," he said.

SOURCE



19 December, 2011

An 'end point' for race-based admissions

WHEN THE SUPREME COURT, in the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, narrowly upheld the use of racial preferences at the University of Michigan Law School, it emphasized that such preferences were barely tolerable under the Constitution. They could be used only as a last resort, the court ruled, they must not unduly harm non-minorities, and public universities had to start finding ways to phase them out.

"We are mindful … that '[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race,'" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for a 5-4 majority. "Accordingly, race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time…. We see no reason to exempt race-conscious admissions programs from the requirement that all governmental use of race must have a logical end point…. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

But eight years later, race-based admissions show no sign of moving toward "a logical end point." If anything they are more entrenched than ever. Far from using skin color as a last resort, many universities make it an explicit condition – as Abigail Fisher, a white high school senior, discovered when she applied to the University of Texas in 2008. Roughly one-fifth of the freshman class is selected according to a formula that takes race into account; when Fisher was rejected she sued the university on the grounds that its racial preferences violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Relying on Grutter, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the university's policy. Now Fisher is appealing to the Supreme Court.

Perhaps in 2003 there was some justification for O'Connor's expectation that universities, noting Grutter's many caveats – the majority used the words "narrow" or "narrowly" 20 times -- would be extremely wary of employing racial preferences. There is no such justification today, and it would be a fine thing if the Supreme Court used the Texas case to say so. It ought to reiterate what Chief Justice John Roberts – who was not on the court in 2003 – memorably wrote in a more recent opinion: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

There are many reasons to do so, beginning with the sheer moral repugnance of judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. More than 140 years ago, New York attorney John Jay – grandson of the nation's first chief justice – urged the Supreme Court to proclaim that the post-Civil War amendments had "destroyed the only exception recognized by the Constitution to the great principle of the Declaration of Independence, and that … all state legislation establishing or recognizing distinctions of race or color are void." Had the high court laid down that principle then, decades of segregation, repression, and racial cruelty might have been avoided.

Nowadays, of course, racial preferences in higher education are justified as both a means of benefiting minorities and of adding diversity to the universities that admit them. But as the Pacific Legal Foundation, the National Association of Scholars, and several other public-policy organizations argue in a friend-of-the court brief, those ends can be achieved without resorting to racial preferences. As proof they point to California, which has banned the use of racial preferences in public higher education since enacting Proposition 209 in 1996.

California's colorblind policy hasn't deprived underrepresented minorities of access to higher education. Quite the contrary. Between 1997 and 2010, the number of black, Latino, and American Indian students offered admission to the University of California system soared -- from 7,385, or 19.6 percent of all students accepted, to 16,635, or 42.6 percent of the total.

"Since Proposition 209 became effective in 1997, minorities continue to seek and be offered admission to the University of California in greater numbers without resorting to racial preferences," the amicus brief argues. "Accordingly, the University of Texas's argument that a race-conscious admissions policy is necessary to ensure a diverse student body rings hollow." Nor is California alone in rejecting racial preferences: Similar measures have recently been adopted in Michigan, Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, and Florida.

"Racial classifications, however compelling their goals, are potentially … dangerous," O'Connor wrote in Grutter. In a nation as multiracial and multiethnic as ours, it is not only unjust but unsafe to allow public institutions to indulge in racial preferences. Fortunately, it is also unnecessary.

SOURCE





The death of History: Experts fears after shocking figures show subject is all but extinct in some areas of Britain

Experts have warned of the ‘death of History’ after shocking figures revealed the subject is becoming virtually extinct in some areas of the country.

MPs have been appalled to read new research stating that in one local authority – Knowsley, on Merseyside – just four pupils managed to pass the exam in the entire region.

The report concludes that a child growing up in the Home Counties is 46 times more likely to pass A-level History than a pupil living in deprived parts of the North.

The findings, contained in a report being published tomorrow, come amid growing alarm in Government over the lack of historical knowledge being demonstrated by school leavers.

Education Secretary Michael Gove was horrified by a recent survey that found that half of English 18 to 24-year-olds were unaware that Nelson led the British to victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, while a similar proportion did not know that the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall.

Mr Gove has ordered schools to widen their teaching away from narrow syllabuses which have been mockingly summarised as ‘Cowboys and Nazis’.

The report, produced by Tory MP Chris Skidmore for the Commons All-Party Group on History, shows how the subject is being concentrated in private schools and selective grammars – and increasingly neglected in comprehensives.

Last year, less than 30 per cent of 16-year-olds in comprehensive schools were entered for GCSE History, compared with 55 per cent of pupils in grammar schools and 48 per cent in private schools.

Alarmingly, there were 159 comprehensives where not a single pupil was entered for GCSE History; and in a majority of state secondaries, less than a quarter of pupils now take the exam.

Mr Skidmore says the fact that the subject is increasingly being confined to the most academic schools – which tend to be concentrated in the south of the UK – has produced a growing North-South gulf.

Teachers in comprehensives appear more likely to put their pupils forward for ‘soft’ subjects such as Media Studies, which are less valued by employers.

He will argue this week that pupils should no longer be able to drop History at 14, with the subject instead being made compulsory until the age of 16.

In Knowsley, one of the most deprived areas in the country, out of nearly 2,000 18-year-olds who had been eligible to take A-levels, just 11 pupils took the History exam and only four passed. In the whole of Leicester, out of 1,638 A-level candidates, just 68 passed History.

This contrasts with affluent southern areas such as Cambridgeshire, where 665 pupils (out of 6,038 candidates of A-level age) took the exam and 557 passed.

Even if Knowsley were as populous as Cambridgeshire, according to the analysis, only 33 pupils would have taken the exam and just 12 obtained passes – making it 46 times less likely that they would leave school with the qualification.

Mr Skidmore, MP for Kingswood, said: ‘There are now areas of the country where History has become a dead subject, forgotten by schools and pupils once they are able to drop it at 14.

‘The future study of the past is being eradicated in entire regions. A subject that should unite us as one nation has now become the subject of two nations. In entire communities and schools, often in some of the most deprived areas of the country, the study of history has been shunned; elsewhere, it has become the preserve of more affluent areas and schools.

‘This cannot be healthy for the future of the nation. This needs to end. There has never been a stronger case for making the subject compulsory to 16.’

Last night, Mr Gove said reforms he had introduced, including the introduction of an English Baccalaureate, had already started to reverse the decline in the number of history students.

‘Every child deserves a chance to study history,’ Mr Gove said. ‘It helps us appreciate the heroism and sacrifices of those who fought to make this country a home of liberty and it enables all students to analyse evidence so they can sort out good arguments from bad. ‘Under the last Government, history was neglected and the poorest students in the most deprived areas suffered most.’

SOURCE





Don't give ground to Labour's free school critics or they will go 'in for the kill', says Lord Adonis

A former Labour Education Minister warned against giving ground to Labour critics of the Coalition’s ‘free schools’ because they would seize on any concession and ‘move in for the kill’, writes Simon Walters.

Lord Adonis said opponents of the schools, such as the journalist Fiona Millar, partner of Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, ‘would stick pins in their eyes’ sooner than agree with any aspect of the flagship policy, which switches power from town halls to parents.

The comments by Lord Adonis – who helped Tony Blair launch academy schools, which paved the way for free schools – are revealed in a new book by writer and free schools advocate Toby Young.

During a cab journey after both appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, Mr Young, founder of the West London Free School, asked Lord Adonis if, rather than dealing with his opponents ‘aggressively’, he should enter talks with people such as Ms Millar who, like her partner, is a strong supporter of comprehensives.

Young says Lord Adonis gave him ‘a look of withering contempt’, and said: ‘They’re not interested in constructive dialogue.

‘Don’t you get it? If you extend any sort of olive branch they’ll see it as a sign of weakness and move in for the kill. I dealt with the same people – the Socialist Workers Party, the Anti Academies Alliance, the NUT – for most of my ministerial career and they would rather stick pins in their eyes than admit they have common ground with someone like you. ‘Their attitude to free schools is the same as to academies: they won’t rest until every last one has been razed to the ground.’

Mr Young says Lord Adonis persuaded him to ‘stick to my guns – and I was right’.

SOURCE



18 December, 2011

Public School Defends Posting Nativity Scene Despite Potential Church-State Challenges‏

A superintendent at Green County Tech Primary School in Paragould, Arkansas, is taking a strong stance in support of a Nativity scene at an elementary school in his district — a scene that has been posted for 20 years without incident.

After ordering the bulletin board be taken down, Superintendent Jerry Noble has decided to allow it once again.

The traditional Nativity scene includes the words, “Happy Birthday, Jesus,” which Noble, a Christian, is adamantly defending. After receiving two complaints this year, the superintendent initially consulted with lawyers and decided to remove the Nativity. But — the community’s reaction led to a change of heart.

“Enough is enough,” Noble explains. “It’s His birthday. We celebrate Jesus’ birthday. One person should not be offended by that. We don’t leave it up all year. We’re not promoting religion. It’s not an effort to convert anybody.”

He explains that he initially removed the Nativity, because he didn’t want to put the school district at risk. “I could not take it upon myself to get the school in a legal entanglement over separation of church and state because we would have to use tax dollars to fight it and that’s not my job to do that,” he explained. But once he removed the display, the community criticized the decision.

Then, a group came forward to support the school if and when a legal challenge against the display was waged. So, Noble decided to put the board up again. “To be honest with you, we offended a lot more people by taking it down than leaving it up,” he said.

The Paragould Daily Press has more about the legal issues potentially facing the district:

…the school district’s attorney, Donn Mixon, who advised him to have the decoration removed. Mixon admitted he was not given all of the details surrounding the controversy and was simply asked whether a nativity scene displayed in a public school was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. [...]

“I gave the opinion that yes I believe, based upon what I was told about it, that if challenged, it could well violate the First Amendment,” Mixon said. “Prayer at graduation, the posting of the Ten Commandments, those are all issues that have been litigated under that establishment clause. The courts have generally held that if public schools do those types of things… that can violate the Establishment Clause.”

The district’s pro-Nativity stance is already frustrating those opposed to Noble’s actions. The American Civil Liberties Union Arkansas (ACLU) has already said that the school must abide by the Constitution. Rita Sklar, the state’s ACLU director, has come out strong, saying that it’s sad to see Noble and others not respecting the First Amendment. Fox News Radio has more about the controversy:

The Nativity scene was erected by Kay Williams, a counselor at the primary school. She’s been doing it for more than 20 years without any hint of controversy.

“We do live in the Bible Belt,” Williams told the Paragould Daily Press. “One thing that really disturbed most of [the supporters] was we hear about things like this all the time in other parts of the country. But, this is kind of a first for the Bible Belt, here in Arkansas.”

Noble says that Christians have been silent for too long.

SOURCE





British Children must learn times tables by age nine under tough new curriculum plans

Children will have to learn their times tables by the age of nine under plans to toughen up the National Curriculum.

Education Secretary Michael Gove wants to create a ‘gold standard’ lesson plan modelled on the most rigorous exam systems in the world.

He will signal the change on Monday when an independent review publishes evidence that standards in England lag far behind other countries.

The report by Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment, a research group and exam board attached to Cambridge University, found that pupils in Singapore are expected to master times tables and division by the age of nine, compared with 11 in England. And secondary school pupils are taught quadratic equations at 13, a year or more before their English counterparts.

Meanwhile, pupils in Hong Kong learn about plant and animal cells aged ten, while the subject is not tackled by English students until secondary school.

Mr Gove is also expected to introduce separate grammar lessons in response to fears that many get to 16 without a basic grasp of spelling and punctuation.

He will also set more rigorous reading lists, including Homer, Sophocles and Shakespeare, after learning that countries with ‘fast improving’ education systems such as Poland expect their pupils to read extensively.

The Government had originally intended to publish details of the new curriculum in the New Year, but ministers have decided to delay the move for a further 12 months because they want such a radical re-write.

A Government source said: ‘We want to create a gold standard National Curriculum that survives longer than a government’s term of office.’

SOURCE





Many Australian Schools steer clear of Christmas

CHRISTMAS greetings, nativity scenes and carols are under attack in a growing number of Australian schools, kinders, businesses and organisations.

As our cultural diversity increases, more people are trying to secularise the holidays or appeal to a broad range of faiths, rather than just Christians celebrating Christmas.

After 39 years of nativity plays and carol-singing, Albert Park Preschool no longer celebrates Christmas. It is having an End of Year Concert rather than a Christmas concert, and there will be no nativity play or Christmas carols.

The final newsletter to parents does not mention Christmas, instead wishing parents a "happy holiday season" and a "count down towards holidays and a variety of celebrations".

"We are a community kindergarten and our community is very mixed in terms of a variety of cultures and beliefs," teacher Melissa Popley said. "I believe - and I have had to convert others about this - that to focus on just one religion is not inclusive of our kinder community."

Ms Popley said children chose to sing non-carol Christmas songs at the concert, including Jingle Bells and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. The only Christmas decoration is one tree made of tinsel and decorated with children's hand prints, she said. Ms Popley said the new approach was a reflection of the new teaching framework that requires preschools to "show respect for diversity".

Kerrimuir Primary School in Box Hill is wishing its students "Happy Holidays" rather than Merry Christmas on its
website this year.

Other schools to opt for "Happy Holidays" include Sandringham College and Bright P-12 College. Hundreds of Victorian companies are also now using Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas in messages.

Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Helen Szoke said people shouldn't feel shy about celebrating Christmas. "If employers with a diverse work force want to tailor additional greetings then they could do so," she said.

SOURCE



17 December, 2011

Minn. High School Apologizes for ‘Incest’ Prank Involving Blindfolded Kids Kissing Their Parents‏

What perverted mind came up with this idea?

When we watched this video in the Blaze newsroom, several audible gasps rang out and numerous hands covered mouths. The video shows several Minnesota high school students at a pep rally standing blindfolded. The students are then presented with a kissing partner. What ensues is some passionate lip-locking. It was meant to be a prank. The prank part? The kids didn’t know it, but they were actually kissing their parents.

Yes, you read that right. Citypages.com explains more about what happened at Rosemount High School:

These poor kids reasonably assumed they were about make out with their classmates. But the assembly organizers had something else in mind: their parents.

Footage of the assembly shows a scene that would make even Sigmund Freud cringe. Dads kissing daughters. Mothers kissing sons.
And these are not just innocent pecks on the lips. The parents are intimately lip-locking their children for several seconds. One even progresses to rolling around on the gym floor. In another instance, a mother moves her son‘s hand south so he’s grasping her butt.

After the make-out session comes to an end, the still-blindfolded kids are asked to guess who kissed them.

Now, the school is apologizing. “As principal I am responsible for everything that happens in the school so, ultimately, I am the person that needs to answer for this,” school principal John Wollersheim told KARE-TV on Wednesday.

“I know there are people who are upset about what they have seen and as principal I am responsible for what happens here. For all the people who are offended, they are genuinely offended, and I owe them an apology,” Wollersheim said.

Still, he says the video is only a snippet of what went on and doesn’t tell the whole story

SOURCE






Betrayed by schools, the bright British seven-year-olds who fail to shine at 11

The devastating extent to which primary schools are failing bright pupils was revealed yesterday. Up to 51,000 11-year-olds who achieved top grades at age seven have effectively gone backwards after being left to coast in maths and English. Four in ten youngsters who were above average in the three Rs at seven are failing to fulfil their early promise, official league tables show.

Around half of primary schools – more than 7,500 – have failed to get each of their brightest pupils up to the highest grades in Key Stage Two tests at 11.

Among these schools, more than 800 could not get all their young high achievers even up to the national average.

This left around 1,300 pupils at a disadvantage when they started secondary school in September. Despite their flying start, they were still struggling to grasp the point of a story, write sentences using commas or add, subtract, multiply and divide in their heads.

The Department for Education has identified a hard core of 15 schools where more than 20 per cent of pupils who were high attainers at seven sank to the ranks of the lowest achievers at 11.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said the Government was ‘shining a light’ on these schools.

Critics claim the figures are a damning indictment of a league table culture which has encouraged schools to concentrate on youngsters of low to middle ability at the expense of the brightest.

Schools are judged on how well they do in getting pupils to level four, the expected standard, in the basics and many teachers focus their efforts on borderline pupils to improve their league table positions.

The Department for Education yesterday published school-by-school data for around 15,000 state primaries in England, based on national curriculum test results in English and maths.

The tables reveal for the first time how low, middle and high achieving pupils at seven go on to perform in the Key Stage Two tests four years later. The statistics show that more than 2,000 primary schools are serving their middle achievers better than their brightest pupils in English lessons.

There is at least a 20 percentage point gap in the levels of progress made by middle versus high achievers in the subject in 2,160 schools.

This emphasis has also contributed to 11 per cent of children – around 32,000 – who were ‘middle’ achievers at seven rising to join the ranks of the highest achievers at the age of 11.

The figures show that 74 per cent of pupils achieved level four in both English and maths this year, up one percentage point in 12 months.

The proportion of bright boys and girls exceeding the standard expected – level five – fell by four percentage points to 29 per cent in English and increased by one percentage point in maths to 35 per cent.

Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University said children in the top ability range are ‘perhaps too often left to their own devices’. He said: ‘The way schools are judged has a massive effect on their behaviour. If they are asked to account for how many children are getting to level four, that’s where their effort is going to go. ‘We don’t do enough for the really able in our education system.’

Nearly one in ten state primary schools face possible closure or takeover after failing to hit Coalition targets in the three Rs. Nationally, 1,310 are falling short of Government benchmarks in English and maths.

Ministers have already identified the 200 worst primaries which will be pulled out of local authority control and turned into academies under new leadership teams as early as next September. Hundreds more will now be ordered to improve or face similar intervention.

The head of one of the country’s best primary schools has attacked the Coalition’s education reforms. Paul Fisher, of Oakridge Primary School in Stafford, claimed yesterday that the changes would focus on facts instead of skills, and said: ‘Do we want a society that’s great at pub quizzes or one that’s great at thinking and problem solving?’

Nearly all the 34 children at his school taking English and maths tests exceeded the standard expected of their age to gain the higher level five.

SOURCE






Australia: Private schools all but vanquished from top 10 list

Select your pupils on academic ability and then find that those students outperform students who are not selected that way? Not much of a surprise!

THE stellar performance of students at NSW selective high schools continues apace with only one private school, Moriah College, making the top 10 of the Herald's annual list of top-performing schools as judged by HSC results. Sydney Grammar (ninth last year, now 12th) and SCEGGS Darlinghurst (13th) both dropped from the top 10 this year.

James Ruse again topped the rankings, based on HSC subject scores of more than 90 compared with number of students. Among the elite academic schools, North Sydney Boys produced particularly outstanding results, moving from eighth to second place.

Yesterday 71,415 students began accessing their HSC results from 6am; this morning from 9am those who hope to enter university will learn their ATAR university entrance rank.

There were 31 non-government schools in the Herald's top 50, including Wenona, with its results helped by Madeleine Pulver, the Sydney schoolgirl who had a fake collar bomb chained to her neck at her home in August. Madeleine scored more than 90 in advanced English.

A slim majority (52.3 per cent) of the 16,420 students on the Distinguished Achievers List - those with a result of more than 90 in a subject - are from non-government schools. Some 36.7 per cent are from independent schools and 15.6 per cent from Catholic systemic schools.

The principal at North Sydney Boys', Robyn Hughes, said selective schools would "share the love". "The selective school principals are an incredibly collaborative network," she said. "We meet on a regular basis through the year and we share in each other's successes."

But Ms Hughes rejected any suggestion her school was an "academic hothouse". "It's not about that coaching culture; it's about the holistic development of these young men, really getting them engaged in a wider world and seeing beyond themselves.

"This group of young men have done a lot outside of just pursuing academic excellence and that's what I think is the secret of their success. It's a balancing act, but that's where they get joy and engagement and, ironically, the busier they are the more organised they have to be with their study."

Julie Greenhalgh, the principal of Meriden, which rose from 53rd to 18th, said the improvement was the result of strong departmental leadership and changes at the school. "I think we're seeing the fruit of some very, very good programs in our junior school and our junior secondary years, really focusing on the quality of teaching and learning," she said.

Hunter Valley Grammar School leapt from 199 to 51. The principal, Paul Teys, said it was the school's best result on record. "We've been on a journey the last few years to lift our performance so these kids have been part of that strategy and they are the beneficiaries of the whole school effort in lifting the HSC performance," he said.

That strategy included a focus on individual or small tutorials, examination technique and information days, but he said the most effective was the relationship between the staff and students and students' involvement in their school. "We've got a young group of people who are really committed to their school and that's the most significant feature of these results," Mr Teys said.

SOURCE



16 December, 2011

A fine example of Leftist hate-speech from Australia

Written by John Birmingham below under the restrained and balanced heading "Why are we subsidising ignorance, stupidity and hatred?"

The fact that private schools actually cost the taxpayer LESS per pupil than government schools is just one of those silly little facts that must not be allowed to interrupt the flow of bile. The Australian Federal government does subsidize some of the costs of private schools but not all.

And the fact that the church is upholding standards that embody the wisdom of the ages cuts no ice with Mr Birmingham, of course. He knows better!

A small pic of the happy Mr Birmingham below. One pities any partner he might have




It’s heartening, but not entirely surprising that the Catholic Church overturned the decision of the Sacred Heart Primary School in Broken Hill to reject the enrolment of a young girl whose at-home parents, two women, are in a lesbian relationship.

Heartening for the little girl, even though the mums have wisely decided to spare her the inevitable unpleasantness of attending a school where she’s not wanted. But not entirely surprising, because if the Church had allowed this story to spin out of control it risked having to answer some very awkward questions about just how much money it sucks off the public tit, when it’s unwilling to comply with public standards as expressed in legislation such as the Anti-Discrimination Act.

The Catholic Church and its fellow travelers in the other denominations are pretty much out on their own when it comes to punishing kids for the sexuality of their parents. And be assured, that’s what was at stake here, and what Bishop Kevin Manning has avoided airing in public with his order to Sacred Heart to enrol the child.

All religious schools in this country, not just Catholic ones, enjoy the benefits of a grotesque double standard, where they put their hands out for a hand out, and a massive one at that, draining off billions of dollars from the education budget, while not having to measure up to the same standards demanded of public schools, most of which are woefully underfunded because of subsidies to the private sector.

Surely if the private religious schools are to trouser billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, at the expense of taxpayers who can’t afford to send their own children to those privileged institutions, more might be demanded of them when it comes to, say, not behaving like ignorant, medieval bigots. There's no reason they can't hang onto their vile opinions, but there's no reason the rest of us should have to pay for them.

As long as they enjoy a free pass from the Act, however, we will continue to subsidise their ignorance, stupidity and hatred.

They know it too. Or at least the smart ones do. That’s why they moved so quickly to shut down debate on this most recent outrage.

SOURCE




Twisted sex stories

The BBC has a report up this morning that claims that the number of students in sex work has doubled. But the story is paper-thin – the NUS says they’re being misreported, and the BBC gives no useful figures to support the claims in their report.

The article’s headline says “NUS: Students turning to prostitution to fund studies”. The basis of this claim is not an NUS report or even an NUS press release, but a comment given by an NUS officer on the BBC’s own story. And the content of the story is weak, to say the least.

To begin with, the story is based on a statistical fudge. It reports the change, without any concrete numbers. But relative figures are only useful if you have the original numbers to see where the change has taken place. An increase from two people to four isn’t very significant but, if expressed in terms of the change, it’s the same as an increase from 10,000 to 20,000. And, obviously, if you’re dealing with very small numbers it’s hard to say that a “doubling” of an extra ten or twenty people is statistically significant. That the number of students who know someone working in the sex industry has risen from 3% to 25% in the last ten years doesn’t say very much about the actual numbers doing so, especially given the nebulous status of the term “sex industry”.

Next, the BBC story interviews a woman who “turned to escorting during her A-levels when she found out her education maintenance allowance (EMA) was in danger of being cut.” Note the weasel words there – if Clare was studying for her A-levels and getting an EMA, she would continue to get it until June 2012. So Clare hasn’t actually been getting less money from the government at all, and won't until June next year.

Far from being forced by poverty into sex work, Clare says “I began looking for jobs, but the hours were unsociable.” I’m sympathetic to Clare – she says that she was misled by a “friend” into escort work, which is grotesque. But for the BBC to appropriate this story to support their flimsy thesis about students being forced into sex work is exploitative to her and deeply misleading to its readership.

There are people resorting to illegal sex work because of poverty. This is very, very bad, especially because the prohibition of a lot of sex work has made it a violent and dangerous type of work. But this BBC article has hijacked this very real problem in order to promote a specious non-story that misleads readers.

SOURCE




British Teachers giving students exam questions before they sit High School exams

Teachers are giving students the exam questions before they sit GCSEs and A-levels after secret conversations with examiners, whistle-blowers have told The Daily Telegraph.

Secondary school teachers have alleged that they are under so much pressure to deliver high exam grades that they have been forced to adopt questionable tactics.

The information given to pupils is so detailed that earlier this year a teenager disclosed a forthcoming question for an A-level law exam on an internet bulletin board after his teacher had a meeting with an examiner.

One whistle-blower, an examiner for one of the main exam boards, said the “cause of the rot, ultimately, is competition between exam boards”.

The heads of the country’s main exam boards will be questioned by MPs today over the growing scandal in the examinations system after disclosures by The Daily Telegraph last week.

This newspaper reported that teachers were paying up to £230 a day to attend seminars with chief examiners, who advise them on exam questions and the wording pupils should use to get higher marks.

One examiner from WJEC, the Welsh exam board, was recorded by this newspaper saying: “We’re cheating.”

Another, Steph Warren, the chief examiner for Edexcel GCSE Geography, told an undercover reporter considering taking the company’s tests “you don’t have to teach a lot” and there is a “lot less” for pupils to learn than with rival courses.

The exam boards are expected to claim today that these examiners spoke out of turn and there is no evidence of widespread wrongdoing.

However, The Daily Telegraph has been contacted by dozens of teachers, pupils and examiners who allege a system riddled by dubious practices. Last night, a dossier of evidence provided by whistle-blowers was passed to the committee of MPs who will question examiners, exam board executives and regulators about the system.

The latest claims include:

Allegations that one of the main exam boards was warned that a teenager had posted a correct exam answer online before an A-level law test after his teacher met an examiner. Last June, students at two high-performing schools were also allegedly openly discussing the content of a forthcoming A-level history paper on Facebook.

An English examiner who says that over the past decade the standard to receive a C grade has “markedly deteriorated” and that “what has happened is a travesty against learning”.

A teacher who was visited by chief examiners who dropped “big hints on what to expect in the summer exam”. The teacher left last year, disillusioned with the system.

A science teacher from Wales who said he and colleagues were told by their head of department to “leave information up on the board” or “displayed on the power point [presentations]” so pupils could “copy it down” in an exam.

Teachers who contacted The Daily Telegraph raised concerns that they were being urged to help students “cheat” to increase grades.

One science teacher said he and colleagues were put under pressure to help students with the answers during an exam. “Basically, it was said to us to cheat,” he said.

Another teacher from south London said students’ coursework grades were being inflated to increase the pupils’ marks. The same teacher claimed that students were given answer booklets when completing an online test.

There is also evidence that teenagers are being told of forthcoming questions. In the case of the law A-level, a student wrote on an internet forum last Jan 26 about “a few hints” from his teacher.

He wrote: “If it is (and he is sure) general defences, then this will be the question, (again from the examiner dude). Evaluate any two genera; [sic] defences that you have studied and put forward proposals for reform of any one. And he also said, they will not specify which defences you do.”

The following day, the exam question was: “Write a critical analysis of any two of the general defences (insanity, automatism, intoxication, consent, self-defence/prevention of crime). Include in your answer a consideration of any proposals for reform of one of your chosen defences.”

An A-level law teacher from Formby in Merseyside, who has also acted as an examiner, said her school had complained to AQA, the board that set the paper, after seeing the student’s posting. “He clearly had insider information,” she said.

After receiving the complaint, AQA said there were “no irregularities”. A board spokesman said: “This case was drawn to our attention and we conducted a thorough investigation which found no evidence of malpractice.”

AQA said it had not informed Ofqual about the incident because its own investigation had not found malpractice. Headmasters have raised concerns that the increasing commercialisation of exam boards has led to a fall in standards.

Nick Gibb, the schools minister, said there would be “major changes” to GCSEs, including marking papers on the basis of spelling and grammar – and scrapping modules.

SOURCE



15 December, 2011

Australia: PC police strike Christmas at Inner Sydney Montessori School

'Merry Christmas' replaced with 'Happy Holidays'. I think the father who objected to this has his kid in the wrong school. Montessori schools have always been "progressive" -- though whether it's "progress" to be doing the same thing for over 100 years is an interesting question. Most of the other parents probably agreed with the school and see Christmas as just a quaint folk custom of no particular importance

A SCHOOL is accused of stealing Christmas after removing all references to Santa, carols and Christianity in end-of-year celebrations.

Three to six-year-olds at the Inner Sydney Montessori School replaced the festive lyrics "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" with "We Wish You A Happy Holidays".

One angry parent said he would withdraw his daughter from the Balmain school next year, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The dad, who did not wish to be identified, said: "There were about five songs and not one of them mentioned Christmas. There was no Santa or Christmas decorations or a Christmas tree or any reference to Jesus. "Is this politically correct? I don't understand."

He said some of the children were so confused they blurted out the word Christmas while singing: "They should not force this on young kids. Christmas is meant to be all about Santa and presents."

The Inner Sydney Montessori School said it offers an "inclusive co-educational, non-denominational" education for children from diverse backgrounds from birth to age 12. Principal Cathy Swan said the complaining parent had misinterpreted what went on at the school.

"This is the first complaint I have received about this ... I am sorry this parent felt that way. We have Christmas activities going on all over the building," she said.

"Our policy is that we give children keys to the world and we show them many celebrations including Christmas. We look at all cultures and the particular ways that people celebrate such as Easter, Christmas and Chanukah." Ms Swan said the end-of-year songs without Christmas references may have been an "attempt by one teacher to address the fact that she had Hindus and Jewish children in the classroom".

"Chanukah is happening at this time of year as well. Our parents are multicultural but so are my staff ... we do celebrate Christmas," she said.

Montessori Australia Foundation office manager Sandra Allen said each school was independently owned and operated and had its own policy. "It is a secular education system so no particular religion is taught," she said. "Some schools may choose to celebrate holidays such as Chinese New Year or Chanukah or look at these events from a cultural point of view.

"I have had an email from a concerned member of the public and I pointed them to our website. "It is one school only that I've heard of - it (complaints) are not widespread."

Australia has 190 Montessori schools and 25,000 in 120 countries around the world.

SOURCE






"Studio schools" to open to cut teenage unemployment rate in Britain

Thousands of teenagers will be able to transfer to a new wave of “studio schools” at the age of 14 to boost their chances of finding a job, it is revealed today.

Ministers will announce the creation of a dozen new-style schools that are designed to act as a bridge to the workplace and cut the number of NEETs – young people not in education, employment or training. Under plans, schools will operate longer days and work outside standard academic terms.

Each pupil will be expected to spend between four hours and two days a week on work placements with businesses linked to the school and teenagers will be assigned a personal coach to act as an academic “line manager”.

The reforms come amid fears that too many teenagers are currently finishing full-time education lacking the skills needed to succeed in the workplace.

According to a recent report from the Confederation of British Industry, more than two-thirds of employers believe school and college leavers lack vital “employability skills” such as customer awareness, while 55 per cent say they are unable to manage their time or daily routine.

Last month, it emerged that the number of NEETs had hit a record high, with almost one-in-five young people – 1.16m – being left without a job or training place.

But the latest move is likely to be criticised by teaching unions who claim it risks creating a “two-tier” system, with brighter children remaining in mainstream schools and colleges while others transfer.

Today, the Department for Education will announce the establishment of 12 studio schools – catering for around 3,600 teenagers – in areas such as Liverpool, Stevenage, Stoke-on-Trent and Fulham, west London.

Each one, opening in 2012, will be linked to a series of local employers, with the Fulham school partnered with the BBC and Fulham FC. Six are already open in Luton, Huddersfield, Durham, Manchester, Maidstone and Coalville in Leicestershire.

Under plans, pupils will be able to transfer out of ordinary schools to attend them between the age of 14 and 19.

The Government said all subjects would be taught “through projects, often designed with employers” – with disciplines such as science being linked directly to local engineering firms or hospitals.

Schools will operate a longer day to give pupils a better understanding of the demands of the workplace.

Along with their studies, pupils will carry out work placements for four hours a week, rising to two days a week of paid work for those aged 16 to 19. They will also get the chance to take vocational qualifications linked directly to the needs of local employers.

Ministers have already announced plans for dozens of University Technical Colleges – similar schools for 14- to 19-year-olds in which pupils spend roughly 40 per cent of the week learning a trade such as engineering, manufacturing, fashion and information technology.

But the National Union of Teachers has already claimed that the new schools could effectively lead to a two-tier system with weaker pupils pushed onto vocational courses while the brightest are encouraged to take A-levels.

SOURCE





Struggling British schools 'being let down by poor teaching'

More than a third of schools inspected under a tough new Ofsted regime have been branded not good enough amid continuing concerns over poor teaching.

Some 35 per cent of primaries and secondaries visited in July and September were rated no better than satisfactory, it emerged.

Ofsted said fewer than one-in-seven of the 873 schools subjected to recent inspections were awarded its highest mark of outstanding. It was down sharply on the fifth of all schools falling into the category but an improvement on judgments made during the last academic year.

The disclosure comes just weeks after the watchdog warned in its annual report that too many state schools were being let down by “variable” standards of teaching.

It found that underperforming schools relied too heavily on worksheets and a narrow range of textbooks during lessons, while teachers spent too long talking and set “low-level” tasks that failed to develop pupils’ knowledge.

In a report published today, the watchdog said there was a “strong relationship” between the overall judgement made on schools and the quality of teaching, with the same mark “being made on 90 per cent of inspections in this period”.

The move comes after a speech by Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, in which he suggested hundreds of schools did not deserve the “outstanding” accolade because their teaching was not up to scratch.

“It is a worry to me that so many schools that are still judged as ‘outstanding’ overall when they have not achieved an outstanding [in] teaching and learning”, he said.

Ofsted currently rate schools on a four-point scale – inadequate, satisfactory, good and outstanding.

Since 2009, inspections have been more closely focused on the worst schools, with those previously given higher marks left for longer and weak establishments given more regular visits.

According to figures, some 20 per cent of schools are currently judged outstanding based on their last inspection, with 50 per cent rated good, 28 per cent satisfactory and just two per cent inadequate.

Based on inspections carried out in July and September this year alone, just 13 per cent were judged outstanding and 52 per cent were good – suggesting they are finding it much harder to win the very top rating.

A further 33 per cent of schools were merely satisfactory and two per cent were given the lowest mark.

However, the figures were a significant improvement on inspections of schools carried out under the new Ofsted system throughout the 2010/11 academic year, when just 11 per cent were outstanding and 44 per cent were given the two lowest marks.

From next year, inspections will be subjected to further reform, with Ofsted rating schools on four key areas: teaching, pupil achievement, behaviour and leadership.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “We’re driving up standards across the board – recruiting the brightest graduates and giving them outstanding training.

"The tough new inspection regime coming into force next month will root out weak teaching. There is compelling evidence shows that poor teaching has a critical link with bad behaviour – it’s right take a hard line on this.”

SOURCE



14 December, 2011

CA: Minorities hit hardest in epidemic of expulsions

Lots of blacks obviously can't help their unacceptable behavior but that's no reason to allow them to inflict that behavior on others

As he waited for his first disciplinary appeal hearing to begin this fall, the sixth-grade student began sobbing.

He was barely 11 years old. He had been expelled again - for the rest of the school year – from his Bakersfield elementary school district, this time for alleged sexual battery and obscenity. The offense: “Slapping a girl on the buttock and running away laughing,” according to school documents.

The boy’s pro bono attorney, a retired FBI agent, was appalled. “This, on his record, puts him right up there next to the kid who raped somebody behind the backstop,” said Tim McKinley, who spent 26 years in the bureau, much of it locking up murderous members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

For the boy’s local school board in Kern County, the punishment fits the crime. It upheld a panel’s initial approval of expulsion.

For McKinley, the discipline is dramatic overkill sure to prove counterproductive for both the child and the community at large.

These days such disagreements are hardly unusual. In California’s southern Central Valley, Kern County is at the leading edge of a contentious debate over where to draw the line in exacting school discipline. Teachers want a safe environment in which to teach. Parents want to know their children are secure and not getting bullied. And no-nonsense school districts in this conservative oil and agribusiness region are suspending and expelling students for a broad range of indiscretions.

Meanwhile, a national reform movement is growing, fueled by reports that suspension and expulsion policies are disproportionately targeting minorities, and doing more harm than good by killing kids’ attachment to school and putting many on a fast track to failure.

Roots of a trend

Since the 1970s, multi-day, at-home suspensions and long-term expulsions have been on the rise nationally, many of them meted out not for violence, but for lesser violations like insubordination, according to research by associates of the Civil Rights Project of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Punishment of minority students is rising especially rapidly, the researchers have found. Between 1973 and 2006, the percent of black students suspended at least once during their K-12 years grew from 6 to 15 percent nationwide while Latinos’ rate rose from 3 to almost 7 percent. White students’ rate grew more slowly, from about 3 to almost 5 percent.

A root cause for the rise in removal of students is fear, especially fear of gun violence. The 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act required each state – as a condition of federal funding – to enact laws mandating a year-long expulsion of any student caught with a firearm, with little local discretion to reduce the duration of the punishment.

The “zero tolerance” phenomenon accelerated after the shocking 1999 suicidal shooting spree by two students at Colorado’s Columbine High School, which killed 15 and injured 24.

Against that backdrop, state legislatures began adding more specific infractions that could lead to suspensions and expulsions. California lawmakers, for example, approved a law in 2008 barring students from using cell phones and email for “cyber bullying,” and this year voted to add social networks to that mix.

At the local level, school boards, administrators and individual schools began exercising their discretion more broadly in deciding how tough to be in their interpretation of behavior codes.

More HERE




Leadership shortage as British schools struggle to recruit new head teachers

Schools are facing a leadership crisis as primaries and secondaries across England fail to recruit head teachers, according to a new report.

More than a third of primary schools and almost a fifth of secondaries struggled to find a head after advertising the position last year.

Roman Catholic schools are being left with the most acute shortages because they traditionally restrict recruitment to religious applicants.

Head teachers’ leaders blamed rising workloads, the target culture in schools and a real-terms cut in pay, saying that teachers were reluctant to take on the extra pressure of headship – despite the publication of official data earlier this year that showed 700 heads or deputies earned more than £100,000.

Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the report showed “worrying trends in the school labour market at the very top level”.

“Headship is a wonderful job, with challenges and satisfaction in equal measure,” he said. “We want people to become heads and experience the unparalleled power to make a difference to young lives. Against this are the prospect of a 20 per cent real-terms pay cut over the next four years despite rising targets, longer hours, increasing threats of violence and lower job security.’’ Mr Hobby added: “We run the risk of running out of heads, with dramatic damage to the trend of school improvement.”

A report by Education Data Surveys analysed the recruitment of senior school staff in the 2010-11 academic year.

It found that about 36 per cent of primary head teacher positions had to be advertised more than once after failing to find a successful applicant the first time, compared with 34 per cent a year earlier. At the same time, some 19 per cent of secondary school jobs were advertised more than once – the same as 12 months earlier.

According to figures, the number of vacancies for deputy heads dropped, suggesting that existing deputies are remaining in the job for longer – and failing to aspire to top positions.

The report – which was commissioned by the NAHT – described the development as “very concerning”. “As existing deputies come closer to retiring, there is a real danger that schools will face even greater difficulty in recruiting head teachers in years to come if there is not an available and ample supply of deputy head teachers from which to draw candidates,” it said.

Earlier this year a government consultation document outlined plans to hand Britain’s brightest students £20,000 to train as teachers in an effort to improve standards. Under the reforms, graduates with first-class degrees would be eligible for the most generous bursaries to teach shortage subjects such as science and maths.

The plans were designed to raise the profile of the teaching profession amid fears that English state schools were falling behind those in other developed nations.

Ministers also signalled their intention to train more students in schools – instead of universities – in a move seen as an attack on the Left-wing teaching establishment.

Under the strategy, student teachers will be expected to display better standards of English and maths before being allowed to qualify – scrapping a rule that gives trainees unlimited attempts to pass basic tests in the three-Rs.

The Government will also attempt to encourage former Armed Forces personnel into the classroom with the establishment of a new “Troops to Teachers” programme.

SOURCE





Public vs. private school: Which is better?

The following rather amusing and clearly biased defence of Australian public schools relies heavily on the fact that public schools have to take ferals. She seems to think that is a point in their favour. But that is very much a major reason why 39% of Australian parents send their kids to private High Schools!

The eternal question rears its ugly head [Ugly to whom?]: Do private or public schools provide the best education?

The research published in The Australian Economic Review released last week uses NAPLAN results to report that private schools produce better results than government schools, even once differences in student background are taken into account.

This is hardly surprising news. For some years more and more parents have been flocking to private schools based on the assumption that they produce "better" academic outcomes than their public counterparts.

But the study wasn't intending to generalise about the success of private education but rather to examine student performance on the NAPLAN test when socioeconomic status is not a factor. By the researchers' own admission they didn't take into account the discrepancies in funding and the needs of the students.

Here's some more unsurprising news: private schools are able to provide their students with better resources and more access to technology because they have more money. And on the whole private schools take fewer students with special needs, fewer indigenous students and fewer students whose first language is not English.

Meanwhile, public education cater for all, including high and low-achieving students. They are required to keep students with behavioural difficulties within the system until they're 17 and students with disabilities or learning difficulties are accommodated and provided with support.

Even when taking socio-economic status out of the equation, public and private schools have widely differing student bodies. Comparing their literacy and numeracy results is like comparing apples and oranges, and expecting them to taste similar.

Public education enrols the vast majority of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, yet operates on a budget that's close to 70 per cent of independent schools.

It's actually extraordinary what they do. If the MySchool website was to report individual students' literacy and numeracy improvement from test to test it would find that government schools far outperform private schools.

And while private schools have higher rates of students finishing year 12 and send proportionally more students to university, internal [unpublished?] research from Melbourne University shows that it is students from public schools who perform better in their first year of university, as they are required to be self-motivated and apply high levels of self-discipline while at school.

But NAPLAN doesn't report on students' independent study skills or self-discipline. These are also qualities usually developed in the high school years, but the research from The Australian Economic Review reported only on year 3 NAPLAN results.

In fact, the performance of public school students at university shows that the "real world" is the great leveller. When they're not being propped up by extra resources or facilities, the performance of public school students is equal to that of a student hailing from the private sector. [More precisely, a student who has SURVIVED the public sector]

But the purpose of school is not to get every member of society a university degree, and tertiary study is certainly not for everyone. The vast majority of school-leavers take other worthy paths, which include TAFE, apprenticeships or employment, all of which are encouraged as viable options in public schools.

Academic success can be measured in different ways. The fact is that NAPLAN and its partner in crime [Measuring student knowledge is a "crime"??], the MySchool website, reports on one narrow facet of education. Yes, literacy and numeracy are very important factors in a child's education, but they represent a small piece of the puzzle.

Parents who choose to send their children to public schools needn't necessarily think that they are getting a second-rate service. Public education produces commendable results given that its purpose is to educate the whole spectrum of students, regardless of their ability, special needs or their capacity to pay fees.

Public schools do extremely well to meet the individual needs of the 71 per cent of Australian school students who attend them, particularly considering that Australia is ranked towards the bottom of the OECD in terms of spending on public education.

But as long as NAPLAN is used as the sole measure to report academic "success", the myth of a failing public education system will continue to be perpetuated.

SOURCE



13 December, 2011

Team O's Denial on College-Cost Crisis

Want to do exactly the wrong things to fix US higher education? You can't do much better than the recent offerings from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. To a system blackout-drunk on taxpayer money, the Obama administration would deliver even more booze while only whispering about tough love.

Speaking at a Nov. 29 Las Vegas gathering of financial-aid administrators, Duncan addressed exploding college costs, a problem highlighted by Occupy Wall Street protesters angry over rising student debt. He lauded loan forgiveness and repayment reduction, and exhorted colleges to do, well, something to become more efficient.

While trumpeting the bogus claim that the average college graduate will earn $1 million more over his lifetime than someone with just a high-school diploma, he didn't even hint that taxpayer-funded student aid (including easily forgiven loans) enables schools to blithely raise their prices.

In short, Duncan said all the wrong things. Start with the "million-dollar jackpot." While there is an average net gain for those who actually complete four-year degrees, the "$1 million prize" doesn't factor in lost earnings while in college, the high cost of schooling or other variables. Include those, and the average lifetime premium is probably closer to $300,000. And, by definition, roughly half of all grads won't even hit that average.

Yet the real problem is this: Only about 57 percent of people who start four-year programs finish within six years, and most of the remaining 43 percent will probably never graduate. So lots of people will gamble for $1 million, but few will win.

Of course, the jackpot isn't the only reason millions keep paying even as tuition skyrockets. There's something even bigger: ever-expanding government aid.

Between 1985 and 2010, inflation-adjusted federal student aid rose from about $30 billion to about $140 billion, a 367 percent leap. Pell Grants alone ballooned from $8.1 billion in 1985 to $41.7 billion in 2011.

Add various tax credits and deductions to that, and it's no wonder college prices have inflated even faster than health care: Government has ensured that ever-higher bills can be paid.

But hasn't the real culprit been declining state support for colleges, forcing schools to raise prices? Duncan cited that one, too; it's another dodge.

Consider: State funding doesn't much affect private colleges, yet their tuitions perpetually boom. Plus, while public institutions do raise their prices when state support falls, they also raise them when support is rising.

Anyway, state and local support hasn't been gutted. From 1985 to 2010, inflation-adjusted state and local funding rose from about $54 billion to $75 billion. Support only appears to drop when looked at on a per-pupil basis, because higher-education enrollment has also ballooned.

Which brings up the last point: The Obama administration has set the goal of leading the world in the percentage of the population possessing a college degree.

But the reality is that we've already got armies of people in college who'll never finish. There's little reason to think we could get even more people in and through.

But there's a plan to deal with that — sort of. Duncan says the administration will "challenge" schools to improve their graduation rates. Great.

Colleges' most likely response will be to run warm bodies through to graduation, while giving them few if any college-level skills. Indeed, we've been seeing this for years, with literacy for degree-holders dropping and earnings for people with only a bachelor's degree falling, too.

Ultimately, none of Duncan's prescription will make college much cheaper or more effective. Only taking the jet fuel — federal student aid — out of college pricing, and being frank about the real value of higher education, could do that.

But Duncan didn't even hint at such things — because that would really be tough love.

SOURCE





Don’t just try

He stood in front of my desk, fidgeting, and avoiding eye contact. This was a necessary but not pleasant conversation.

"Look," I said, "to get a B in the class, you will need to do just a little better on the final than you have so far on your previous tests. But just a little. Remember: Students usually raise their averages on the final exam. You have seen most of this material before. You understand it better now. And since the final is weighted more heavily than the other tests, I'd say you are in a pretty good position to pull out a B. Can you do it?"

He looked up from the floor. "Well, I'll try."

It's a conversation I have multiple times toward the end of every semester. A student wants to clarify where he stands in the class and what he needs to earn on the final to both maintain his current grade and to perhaps even raise it.

It's a short, one-act play in which we both know our parts. I pull out my calculator and show the student the necessary score. Often, I'll add that I am not saying that he has to ace the final but only improve his previous performance by a small, marginal amount.

And then the student says, "Well, I'll try."

It wasn't until the most recent semester that this retort began to bother me. I have long known of the insidiousness of this attitude, yet I rarely noticed when it stood right in front of me, wearing blue jeans and a grey North Face jacket.

The thing is, I teach in a college of business, with an emphasis on the word teach. Although I am very active in research, I have not forgotten that the primary social function of the professor is to profess the truth about the world, or at least his area of specialty, from one generation to the next — and that we prove our worth to the extent that we achieve this in the classroom. To be sure, we also prove ourselves by refining and adding to the present understanding of how the world works, but this is all for naught if the present understanding is not continuously transmitted from professors to students, year after year after year.

When the great liberal economist Ludwig von Mises defined education as the transmission of doctrines and values, he also noted its limitations. Contrary to some of the promotional literature of many of our leading business schools, Mises wrote that qualities highly valued in market economies such as innovation and genius cannot be taught. Did Steve Jobs really learn to be Steve Jobs during his semester at Reed College?

Still, this does not diminish the importance of understanding correct doctrines and values.

In my area of interest, economics, we have learned over the last few years what happens when the received wisdom of centuries of thinking is poorly transmitted to the present generation that populates society's institutions. For instance, we have forgotten that creating money derived from nothing results in a stealthy transfer of wealth to whatever groups get to spend the new money first. Scholastic thinkers as early as Nicholas Oresme, writing in the 14th century, knew well of this effect of fiat money. This Catholic prelate, philosopher, and author of the De Moneta would hardly be surprised by changes in capital ownership, productivity, savings, and wages in the years since 1971, when the United States and the world officially ditched gold-backed currencies for fiat money.

But that's not what I want to tell my student, who is standing before me, promising to try his best. As a teacher in a college of business, I know that business isn't about trying. It's about achieving results. Colleges of business should not be in the business of graduating a bunch of triers. Successful entrepreneurs do not simply try, nor do they waste their money hiring employees simply to try. Those who actually accomplish their assigned tasks — ethically, consistently, and with purpose — are those who both reap the greatest benefit from their business degree and will be the most likely to live out successful vocations in business.

We serve students poorly when we teach them that if only they try, they will succeed. Trying is necessary but not sufficient for success in a competitive business environment. That students are conditioned to think it is necessary and sufficient occurs for several reasons. One is that colleges themselves promote the idea. One ironic aspect of colleges of business is that they are often staffed by individuals who would not survive in business in the first place and who, as a result, gravitated toward academia. In fact, many have tried in business and failed, and then found academia as a second vocation.

Universities tend to contribute to this mentality as well because it lowers the bar for student success and allows for a greater number of students and, by extension, student-loan and tuition revenue. Even universities with reputations for academic rigor maintain less-publicized programs that offer easier degrees to tuition-paying students. By providing avenues through which those who simply try can get degrees too, universities diversify rigor and maximize enrollment and revenue.

Ohio University economist Richard Vedder wrote about perverse university incentives to reject performance-based scholarships in his important 2004 book Going Broke by Degree. When students are assured scholarship money not tied to actual outcomes, Vedder noted that they change majors, take light loads, and continue to take courses after meeting graduation requirements. When achieving specific outcomes (such as graduating in four years) is not rewarded relative to simply trying, students remain in college for fifth or sixth years and universities can lengthen the demand for their services.

The emphasis on trying alone is also a carryover from the public-school mentality that the way for students to survive is not to question the system in which they are compelled to operate. Getting along is the overriding value in the public schools, and those who think critically about education and perhaps even resent its focus on subservience to authority are often labeled delinquents worthy of shame, punishment, and Ritalin. But if you get along — or at least show a willingness to try to get along — you will survive through high school while helping to pay the salary of many an administrator in the process. Meanwhile, anything of value that you learned you probably would have taught yourself anyway.

It's a mentality that colleges of business should thwart if their business degrees are to signify any value to entry-level labor markets, because no business will survive if the bulk of its workforce is content with just trying to achieve its objectives.

Woody Allen may have said that 80 percent of life was simply showing up. That may be true for life in the public sector, which so often looks like a glorified jobs program, subsidized by the plundered wealth of the productive. In that sector, the primary bureaucratic concern is spending this year's budget so as to justify an increase in next year's budget. The employment-results relationship is weak by design.

It's surely not true for life at a Dell or a Macy's or even your local grocer, where a firm's very survival is based on its ability to convince customers to engage in voluntary trade for one more day, and where showing up and merely trying at work does not guarantee meeting those objectives necessary for customer satisfaction and firm success.

Colleges of business should punish those who only try. We do those firms that hire our graduates no favors when we don't.

SOURCE






Australia: Shocked Education Minister orders probe into student suicides, mental health issue among teens

The abandonment of effective discipline has given free rein to bullies and we are seeing the result of that

VICTORIAN Education Minister Martin Dixon has ordered an investigation after schools registered "a spate of alerts" about the mental health of students during VCE exams last month.

Department officials have found that, on average, one Victorian student attempts suicide each week of the school year. Preliminary findings show 24 students, in government schools alone, are believed to have taken their lives over the past four years.

Mr Dixon, a former secondary school principal, said he was shocked. "These are lives that are lost, or these are lives that are in obvious turmoil," he said.

Mr Dixon is calling for open discussion about mental health and the huge pressures facing today's teenagers and younger children. "It's something we just can't hide under the mat any more," he said. "Any statistic in this field is tragic, whether it's one or it's 30."

The Education Department's figures, which are based on initial "alert reports" by schools, also detail other causes and indicators of severe "mental stress".

In 2011 so far, there have been 122 reports of students threatening to commit suicide, self-harming, or suffering as the result of another person's suicide. This compares with 96 last year, and 77 in 2008.

Mr Dixon said he wanted to bring attention to the previously taboo topic because "(now) the best clinical advice is that we can't turn a blind eye to it and pretend the problem doesn't exist".

"I had been made aware of alerts coming into us, where schools had reported incidents regarding children self-harming and threatening to self-harm. "There just seemed to be a spate of them. It was around (VCE) exam time, and I thought, 'I need to go a bit deeper on this and see what's happening'."

Suicide rates across Australia have fallen over the past decade, including among teenagers, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

But one-in-four young people will experience a mental-health problem over the next 12 months, according to Orygen Youth Health.

Dr Vicki Trethowan, Education Department senior psychologist, said mental-health problems were distinct from "normal adolescent behaviour, where moods will fluctuate".

SOURCE



12 December, 2011

The Savings of Freedom in Public Education

One of the more common complaints of people opposing vouchers is that the use of vouchers will drain money away from public education. From a factual standpoint, this complaint has no merit unless you accept the premise that “public education” must take place at public schools. If not, then it becomes apparent that the use of vouchers neither adds nor subtracts from the money used except in the case where vouchers are issued at a lower value than that sent to schools on a per pupil basis, in which case there is a net savings. (I have never read or heard of a case where a voucher system was approved funded at a larger rate, with the possible exception of vouchers for special needs children.)

There can be an argument made that vouchers take money away from public schools, but does the argument hold up when all factors are considered? Funds are lost from the public school that would have been allotted had the child attended. That much is certain. What is seldom examined is the potential cost reductions that would come with a fully funded voucher system, and how those reductions might affect the school district’s bottom line as far as cash available. There are any number of areas that might see cost reductions, from staff cuts to lowered bus maintenance required, but this time of year in particular brings to mind a particularly distasteful cost.

Any web search at this time of year will bring up a number of cases where schools and townships are accused of religious discrimination, whether for something the school permits or something it denies. Regardless of the merit of such cases, money is lost from the school’s primary purpose, that of education, to deal with the complaints. If a lawsuit is filed, direct legal costs will ensue even if the case is eventually settled out of court. If the case does make it to court, the costs will increase. And, due to the nature of such litigation, if the school loses the case it will likely have to pay legal costs for itself and the persons filing the complaint. Should the school win, it is more than likely that it will still be liable for it’s own legal fees. In a system where the majority of principals have reported that they have had lawsuits filed against their schools at least once, the costs run high and do nothing to contribute to the education of students.

While lawsuits on religious discrimination and freedom of speech draw great attention, they are by no means the only reasons that school lawsuits are filed. Across the nation right schools schools are suing and being sued for such causes as improved funding, bullying, inadequate teaching, unsafe environments, and discipline practices. Even schools that are not sued spend large amounts of money and time documenting procedures and actions as a defense against possible litigation.

A well instituted voucher system will not put every student in an ideal school, but it will allow for the elimination of many types of lawsuit against the district before they even begin. Don’t want God mentioned in the curriculum? Fine. Stick with the government schools. On the other hand, if you want your child brought up learning not only writing and math (or perhaps really learning writing and math), but also the history and practice of Christianity or Judaism or Islam or most anything else, you have the chance. If the demand is there, the market will not ignore it. If you would rather your child didn’t spend time learning to put condoms on cucumbers or getting yanked out of class to provide stage props at the latest union rally, you can arrange it. If you would rather have your child get a swap on the rear rather than attend a week long sensitivity class for making an improper remark, you might be able to do that to. If you value great books, history, and art above great political sloganeering, this could be your chance. Not through lawyers and courts and months of unsatisfying litigation, but by banding together with parents and negotiating with schools, schools that would now be dependent on your good will to survive.

At the same time, while the school would be dependent on the students and parents, it would have to consider the needs and desires of all of the students and parents. Since the attendance at any particular school would be voluntary and subject to the agreement of the schools and the families, no single voice could drown out the others. Since the terms of attendance and discipline would be contracted, civil rights lawsuits could largely be eliminated. When they did occur, the expense would be the responsibility of the litigants, not the city, county, or state.

It is a continuing amazement to me that for all of the trumpeting that “diversity” receives, most of the professional educators still cling to a “one-size-fits-all” model of public schooling. I can understand it to an extent. Teacher’s unions (another huge drain on education dollars) have spent large amounts of cash, often taken against the will of their members, convincing people that school choice would be the end of public education as we know it. In reality, it has the chance to be the end of what public education has become and the beginning of something a great deal better.

University Teacher Attacks Military, College Republicans

An Iowa State University lecturer is under a firestorm of criticism after he insulted the U.S. military and condemned efforts by College Republicans to collect gift boxes for American soldiers.

“Why do Republicans care so much about the military?” Thomas Walker wrote in a letter to the Iowa State Daily. “Because the military-industrial complex is dear to their simplistic laissez-faire fantasies: a bottom-line patriotism that excludes the people at the bottom.”

Walker is a lecturer in the university’s English and orientation program. He ridiculed the charitable actions of the young college students and questioned their motives.

“Soldiers are to Republicans as fetuses are to them: prized,” Walker wrote. “But once out of the womb-like army, Republican solicitude for hapless veterans goes where extracted zygotes go.”

Walker was referring to a newspaper article detailing efforts by Iowa State’s College Republicans to show their support for America’s fighting men and women.

“Donating toiletries, boxed and canned foods, socks and beanies to U.S. soldiers who can already deodorize themselves, who eat better than the poorest Americans and who are gallantly garbed, is an eleemosynary travesty,” he wrote. [Wow! Big word: "eleemosynary". He is a show-off as well as a hater. Just a big ego all round. I am familiar with the word from its church associations but I doubt that I have ever used it]

His comments have created an outrage among students and supporters of the university.

“I, along with many Iowans, was offended and disgusted by the unfortunate and highly inappropriate remarks made against our soldiers in uniform,” Regent President Pro Tem Bruce Rastetter told the Quad-City Times. “Not only did Mr. Walker insult our sons and daughters in uniform – he also questioned the kind and humanitarian efforts made by our students to ensure that our soldiers know we care about them and are exceedingly grateful for their service.”

Iowa State University President Gregory Geoffroy was a bit more subdued in his remarks – explain that he respects freedom of speech, but disagreed with Walker’s letter.

“Please understand that Mr. Walker’s opinions do not in any way represent Iowa State University, and as a military veteran myself, I strongly disagree with his comments,” Geoffroy stated in a release provided to Fox News & Commentary. “I do however respect every individual’s right to freedom of speech, which is so highly valued in our nation, and which is one of the cherished values that our troops are fighting to defend in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Walker remains employed by the university.

SOURCE




More than 1,000 failing British primary schools are facing closure

More than 1,000 primary schools face closure or takeover after failing to hit Coalition targets in English and maths.

Official league tables published next week will reveal they are still not ensuring youngsters get a good enough grasp of the three Rs, despite the billions poured into education under Labour.

Ministers have warned that by the end of this year, headmasters must meet a minimum of 60 per cent of 11-year-olds reaching the standard expected in English and maths.

Schools failing to reach this target can gain a reprieve if they prove children are making necessary progress between the ages of seven and 11.

The escape clause is designed to counter critics who claim some schools are punished for having large numbers of pupils from troubled backgrounds, who are far behind their classmates.

Last year, school-by-school data published by the Department for Education showed 962 primaries – which were attended by 269,000 pupils – failed to hit the official benchmarks.

However, full results were only recorded for 11,500 schools after almost a quarter boycotted the tests.

Education experts expect the number of schools failing to meet the targets to rise to around 1,200 when the data for all primaries in England is published on Thursday.

These substandard schools will go on a Government ‘hit list’. They face being closed and reopened as academies under the leadership of a new headmaster, or being merged with a successful neighbouring school. The weakest 200 will be pulled out of local authority control and converted into academies as early as next September.

Schools are supposed to ensure that at least 60 per cent of their pupils gain ‘level four’ – the standard expected of their age – in both English and maths. They are also expected to satisfy ‘pupil progress’ measures designed to chart improvement between the ages of seven and 11.

Statistics show that 74 per cent of 11-year-olds reached ‘level four’ this year in English and maths, up from 73 per cent last year. However, this still means more than 142,000 do not understand the basics.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: ‘Since overall performance has only gone up by 1 per cent, one could expect 1,200 or more schools are failing to meet the expected standard this year.

‘It’s very disappointing so many children are leaving primary school not able to handle words and numbers properly. 'The Government is quite right to want to tackle this.’

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, accused ministers of being heavy handed, adding: ‘Having failed to persuade the majority of primary schools to become academies, the Government has resorted to bullying.’

SOURCE






Queering the Schools

At a high school in prosperous Newton, Massachusetts, it’s “To B GLAD Day”—or, less delicately, Transgender, Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian Awareness Day. An advocacy session for students and teachers features three self-styled transgendered individuals—a member of the senior class and two recent graduates. One of the transgenders, born female, announces that “he” had been taking hormones for 16 months. “Right now I am a 14-year-old boy going through puberty and a 55-year-old woman going through menopause,” she complains. “I am probably the moodiest person in the world.” A second panelist declares herself an “androgyne in between both genders of society.” She adds, “Gender is just a bunch of stereotypes from society, but I am completely personal, and my gender is fluid.”

Only in liberal Massachusetts could a public school endorse such an event for teens, you might think. But you would be wrong. For the last decade or so, largely working beneath public or parental notice, a well-organized movement has sought to revolutionize the curricula and culture of the nation’s public schools. Its aim: to stamp out “hegemonic heterosexuality”—the traditional view that heterosexuality is the norm—in favor of a new ethos that does not just tolerate homosexuality but instead actively endorses experimenting with it, as well as with a polymorphous range of bisexuality, transgenderism, and transsexuality. The educational establishment has enthusiastically signed on. What this portends for the future of the public schools and the psychic health of the nation’s children is deeply worrisome.

This movement to “queer” the public schools, as activists put it, originated with a shift in the elite understanding of homosexuality. During the eighties, when gay activism first became a major cultural force, homosexual leaders launched a campaign that mirrored the civil rights movement. To claim their rights, homosexuals argued (without scientific evidence) that their orientation was a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus deserved the same kind of civil protections the nation had guaranteed to blacks. An inborn, unchangeable fact, after all, could not be subject to moral disapproval. There ensued a successful effort to normalize homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, gays in the military, and other signs of civic equality.

But even as the homosexual-rights campaign won elite endorsement and lavish funding, even as supportive organizations proliferated, the gay movement began to split internally. By the early nineties, many gay activists viewed goals such as gay marriage or domestic partner unions as lamely “assimilationist”—an endorsement of standards of behavior that “queers,” as they called themselves, should reject as oppressively “straight.” And they militantly began defending the “queer lifestyle” not as an ineluctable fate but as the result of a fully conscious choice.

Underlying this militant stance was a radical new academic ideology called “queer theory.” A mixture of the neo-Freudianism of counterculture gurus Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse and French deconstruction, queer theory takes to its extreme limit the idea that all sexual difference and behavior is a product of social conditioning, not nature. It is, in their jargon, “socially constructed.” For the queer theorist, all unambiguous and permanent notions of a natural sexual or gender identity are coercive impositions on our individual autonomy—our freedom to reinvent our sexual selves whenever we like. Sexuality is androgynous, fluid, polymorphous—and therefore a laudably subversive and even revolutionary force.

Rutgers English professor Michael Warner, a leading queer theorist, observes that categories like “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are part of “the regime of the normal” that queer theory wants to explode. “What identity,” he writes, “encompasses queer girls who f*&k queer boys with strap-ons, or FTMs (female-to-male transsexuals) who think of themselves as queer, FTMs who think of themselves as straights, or FTMs for whom life is a project of transition and screw the categories anyway?” To overturn the old dichotomies of hetero/homo and even male/female, Warner encourages continuous sexual experimentation.

A relatively recent arrival on college campuses, queer theory has swiftly dominated the myriad university gender-studies programs and spread its influence to other disciplines, too, “queering” everything under the sun. Type “queering” into Amazon.com’s search engine, and up comes Queering the Middle Ages, Queering the Color Line, Queering India, and many other books, many from prestigious academic presses.

It would be tempting to dismiss queer theory as just another intellectual fad, with little influence beyond the campus, if not for gay activists’ aggressive effort to introduce the theory’s radical view of sexuality into the public schools. Leading the effort is the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN, pronounced “glisten”), an advocacy group founded a decade ago to promote homosexual issues in the public schools. It now boasts 85 chapters, four regional offices, and some 1,700 student clubs, called “gay/straight alliances,” that it has helped form in schools across the country.

GLSEN often presents itself as a civil rights organization, saying that it is only after “tolerance” and “understanding” for a victim group. Sometimes, therefore, it still speaks the old gay-rights language of unchangeable homosexual “identity” and “orientation.” But it is, in fact, a radical organization that has clearly embraced the queer-theory worldview. It seeks to transform the culture and instruction of every public school, so that children will learn to equate “heterosexism”—the favoring of heterosexuality as normal—with other evils like racism and sexism and will grow up pondering their sexual orientation and the fluidity of their sexual identity.

That GLSEN embraces queer theory is clear from the addition of transgendered students to the gays and lesbians the group claims to represent. By definition, the transgendered are those who choose to change their gender identity by demeanor, dress, hormones, or surgery. Nothing could be more profoundly opposed to the notion of a natural sexual identity. Consider as evidence of queer theory’s influence, too, the GLSEN teachers’ manual that says that middle-schoolers “should have the freedom to explore [their] sexual orientation and find [their] own unique expression of lesbian, bisexual, gay, straight, or any combination of these.” What is this but Michael Warner’s appeal to pansexual experimentation?

One of the major goals of GLSEN and similar groups is to reform public school curricula and teaching so that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender—or LGBT—themes are always central and always presented in the approved light. GLSEN holds regular conferences for educators and activists with workshops bearing titles such as “Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls: Creating a Safe, Supportive School Environment for Trans, Intersex, Gender Variant and Gender Questioning Youth” and “Developing and Implementing a Transgender Inclusive Curriculum.” Every course in every public school should focus on LGBT issues, GLSEN believes. A workshop at GLSEN’s annual conference in Chicago in 2000 complained that “most LGBT curricula are in English, history and health” and sought ways of introducing its agenda into math and science classes, as well. (As an example of how to queer geometry, GLSEN recommends using gay symbols such as the pink triangle to study shapes.)

Nor is it ever too early to begin stamping out heterosexism. A 2002 GLSEN conference in Boston held a seminar on “Gender in the Early Childhood Classroom” that examined ways of setting “the tone for nontraditional gender role play” for preschoolers. To help get the LGBT message across to younger children, teachers can turn to an array of educational products, many of them available from GLSEN. Early readers include One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads; King and King; and Asha’s Mums.

As for teaching aids, a 1999 book, Queering Elementary Education, with a foreword by GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings, offers essays on “Locating a Place for Gay and Lesbian Themes in Elementary Reading, Writing and Talking” and “How to Make ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ in the Classroom”—the scare quotes showing the queer theorist’s ever present belief that categorizing gender is a political act.

For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K–12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include “role playing” exercises to “counter harassment,” where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; testing students to see where their attitudes lie toward sexual “difference” (mere tolerance is unacceptable; much better is “admiration” and, best of all, “nurturance”); getting students to take a “Sexual Orientation Quiz”; and having heterosexual students learn 37 ways that heterosexuals are privileged in society. In turn, principals should make an “ongoing PA announcement”—once a week, the manual says—telling students about confidential support programs for LGBT students.

Teachers, the manual suggests, should demand that public school students memorize the approved meanings of important LGBT words and terms, from “bigenderist” to “exotophobia.” Sometimes, these approved meanings require Orwellian redefinitions: “Family: Two or more persons who share resources, share responsibility for decisions, share values and goals, and have commitments to one another over a period of time . . . regardless of blood, or adoption, or marriage.”

Two videos come particularly highly rated by gay activists and educators as tools for making primary school queer-friendly. Both films strive to present homosexuality in a favorable light, without saying what it actually is. It’s Elementary, intended for parents, educators, and policymakers, shows how classroom teachers can lead kindergartners through carefully circumscribed discussions of the evils of prejudice, portrayed as visited to an unusual degree on gays and lesbians. In That’s a Family, designed for classroom use, children speak directly into the camera, explaining to other kids how having gay and lesbian parents is no different from, for example, having parents of different national backgrounds.

GLSEN even provides lesson plans for the promotion of cross-dressing in elementary school classes. A school resource book containing such lesson plans, Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers, has already been used in second-grade classrooms in California. A children’s play in the book features a little boy singing of the exhilaration of striding about “In Mommy’s High Heels,” in angry defiance of the criticism of his intolerant peers:

They are the swine, I am the pearl. . . .
They’ll be beheaded when I’m queen!
When I rule the world! When I rule the world!
When I rule the world in my mommy’s high heels!

Some of the LGBT-friendly curricular material aimed at older children is quite sexually explicit. The GLSEN-recommended reading list for grades 7–12 is dominated by such material, depicting the queer sexuality spectrum. In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth features a 17-year-old who writes, “I identify as bisexual and have since I was about six or seven. . . . I sort of experimented when I was young.” Another GLSEN recommendation, Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, has a 16-year-old contributor who explains, “My sexuality is as fluid, indefinable and ever-changing as the north flowing river.”

Some of the most explicit homosexual material has shown up in classrooms. An Ohio teacher encouraged her freshman students to read Entries From a Hot Pink Notebook, a teen coming-out story that includes a graphic depiction of sex between two 14-year-old boys. In Newton, Massachusetts, a public school teacher assigned his 15-year-old students The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a farrago of sexual confusion, featuring an episode of bestiality as one of its highlights. Such books represent a growth industry for publishers, including mainstream firms.

More HERE



11 December, 2011

Cost of High School Dropouts Draining US Taxpayer

High school dropouts on average receive $1,500 a year more from government than they pay in taxes because they are more likely to get benefits or to be in prison, according to a U.S. study released on Wednesday.

"Dropping out of high school before receiving a high school diploma places a substantial fiscal burden on the rest of society," wrote Andrew Sum of Northeastern University, an author of a study of Illinois and Chicago residents done on behalf of the Chicago Urban League and some education groups.

The findings, based on U.S. Census Bureau data from 2009-2010, illustrate the cost advantage of programs that persuade dropouts to re-enroll in school instead of becoming a financial drain on society, the study's sponsors said.

The cost of getting a high school dropout back to school and through to graduation is $13,000 a year, or roughly $33,000 total, said Jack Wuest of the Alternative Schools Network, one of the study's sponsors.

And yet over a dropout's entire working life, he or she receives $71,000 more on average in cash and in-kind benefits than paid in taxes. The societal costs may include imprisonment, government-paid medical insurance and food stamps.

In contrast, high school graduates pay $236,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and college degree holders pay $885,000 more in taxes than they receive.

Lifetime earnings of dropouts totaled $595,000, the study found, compared to $1,066,000 earned by high school graduates and $1,509,000 by those with a two-year junior college degree.

In Illinois, the fifth-most-populous U.S. state with nearly 13 million residents, 11.5 percent of adults aged 19 to 24 left school without earning a high school diploma, and 15 percent in that age group dropped out in Chicago.

The highest dropout rates were among black and Hispanic men, at up to 30 percent.

High school dropouts accounted for 51 percent of Illinois' prison population, the study found.

The cost of housing an inmate is $22,000 annually, and adds up to more than $1 billion a year for the 46,000 prisoners being held in the state, according to state statistics.

Among men aged 18 to 34, 15 percent of the dropouts were in prison, an incarceration rate that was five times higher than high school graduates'.

SOURCE




Showdown for British exam cheats: Board chiefs will be hauled before emergency session of MPs for a grilling over 'coaching' of teachers

In Britain it's the examiners who are cheating, as well as the students

The heads of the country’s exam boards are being hauled before MPs in a bid to restore public confidence in GCSEs and A-levels, it was revealed yesterday.

The Commons’ education select committee has called an emergency session in the wake of the scandal over school teachers being ‘coached’ by examiners in how to improve their pupils’ pass marks.

Education Secretary Michael Gove hopes to de-commercialise the exam system so that each subject is tested by one board only – so rival boards would not be driven to offer tests that are easier than their competitors’ to try to win business from schools.

Rod Bristow, on behalf of Edexcel, and Gareth Pierce, chief executive of the Welsh board WJEC, will appear before the select committee on Thursday, alongside Mark Dawe, chief executive of OCR, and Andrew Hall, chief executive of AQA.

The exams regulator, Ofqual, and representatives from the Daily Telegraph have also been invited to give evidence. An undercover investigation by the newspaper exposed how teachers pay up to £230 a day to attend seminars with chief examiners, during which they have been advised on exam questions and the wording pupils should use to get higher marks.

Two examiners have been suspended from WJEC, after being filmed giving detailed guidance on forthcoming GCSE history exams.

Another examiner was suspended from Edexcel after being recorded claiming the course content in her board’s geography GCSE was so small she did not know how it had been passed by the regulator. The select committee is already investigating the country’s exam system. It now wants urgent answers from the exam bosses over the ‘shocking’ evidence unearthed.

Graham Stuart, chairman of the select committee, said: ‘One of the areas we’re already looking at is conflicts of interest – the commercial exploitation of their position as awarding bodies and whether the way the examination system is structured incentivises the right behaviour in awarding bodies.

‘This…tends to suggest the pressures and competition within the system are driving them to behaviour that is not in the best interests of good standards of education.’
Paul Barnes was filmed apparently telling teachers they could ignore some parts of the syllabus as they wouldn't appear in the exams

Paul Barnes was filmed apparently telling teachers they could ignore some parts of the syllabus as they wouldn't appear in the exams

He added: ‘The whole session will be on the evidence unearthed and the questions arising from that. ‘It will be about how we can have confidence in the system if the very people who are providing the awards appear to be complicit in gaining an encouragement of an approach which isn’t truly educational. We are already conducting an inquiry into exam boards and the need for reform.

‘The stories are shocking and suggest there may be a need for radical changes. The committee will question the heads of the exam boards to hold them publicly to account. We will also want to ask the regulator how such alleged breaches have been allowed to happen and explore what can be done to ensure that our qualifications support and encourage real learning rather than undermine it.’ Former senior examiner Martin Collier, who worked for Edexcel, told the committee last week that he wanted to see a single merged exam board because ‘it was wrong to put children’s qualifications into the marketplace’.

Mr Collier, who was an A-level history examiner between 1996 and 2011, told MPs: ‘One of the reasons why grades have gone up and up is the issue of market share. ‘Exam boards are very wary of saying, “this year there have been fewer A grades”.

‘What the exam boards are worried about is that if they hit children hard one year and the number of top grades diminish they fear people will go elsewhere.’

Mr Gove has ordered an official inquiry into the scandal and the regulator, Ofqual, must report back before Christmas. Chief executive Glenys Stacey has outlined a number of possible sanctions including pulling ‘examinations set for January and for next summer with awarding bodies providing substitute scripts’.

The Education Secretary said he is preparing to reform the exam system early in the new year, but is awaiting the findings of the investigation before finalising his proposals. His current plans would see exam boards compete to provide a single exam for each subject.

‘The first response that most people understandably have is, “Why don’t you just have one exam board?”’ he said last night.

‘And as someone who grew up in Scotland I naturally sympathise, because we just had one exam board. I think it is the most compelling answer at the moment. But I owe it to students and to teachers to let the investigators come up with their recommendations.... and present all the facts.’

SOURCE





Big jump in university fees for maths and science study at a time when Australia needs more such students, not fewer

AUSTRALIA'S ambition to become the "clever country" is in tatters because it cannot produce enough experts in the two most critical disciplines - mathematics and science.

Top scientists and mathematicians, furious about the Gillard Government's $400 million cut in HECS fee relief and axed school science programs, warn Australia is in serious danger of losing its mantle as a world leader in education.

In a bid to return the Australian economy to surplus Treasurer Wayne Swan has taken the razor to education, increasing annual HECS fees for university science and maths students from $4691 to $8353 - cancelling the incentive to study those subjects.

Barry Jones, a former science minister in the Hawke government, said just 9 per cent of Australian university students enrol in the sciences of physics, chemistry and mathematics when the OECD average is 13 per cent and in South-East Asia it is 26 per cent.

"It looks bad," he said. "There are serious problems in maths and sciences in Australia generally."The "deficiency" starts in primary schools with a high proportion of teachers themselves uneasy with maths and science and by high school, students move on to other interests, Mr Jones added.

And the crisis is set to worsen by 2020 when Australia will have more PhD mathematicians retiring from the workforce than entering it - despite a 55 per cent increase in demand across all sectors of the economy.

The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute is so worried about the decline it is planning a national advertisement campaign on buses and trains to promote the impact of maths and statistics on people's "daily lives and on their health and wellbeing".

The head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of NSW, Anthony Dooley, warned the cut to HECS would affect student numbers in the core subjects.

"The country needs more mathematicians and scientists ... our enrolments have been going up by 10 per cent a year and that growth is a realisation that maths and science are crucial to the world's future," Prof Dooley said.

"We need the Government to realise that this is a crucial national priority ... we need to be clever and we need people with mathematical skills to drive the economy forward."

The number of advanced maths students across Australia dropped by 25 per cent between 1995 and 2008, while university maths majors fell by 15 per cent between 2001 and 2008. The Australian Academy of Science also urged the Government to do more to support the subjects.

"We are slipping behind neighbouring countries in maths and science performance at secondary school and there are growing shortages in the workforce of young people with maths and science skills," president Suzanne Cory said.

"Australia's robust economic future depends upon innovation.," she said.

A spokesman for Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans said the HECS subsidy was being abolished because it had not proven to be a cost-effective way of lifting maths and science attainment.

"By the time young people are making university choices many have already made the decision to drop the study of advanced maths and science subjects at high school," he said. "It's for that reason that the Government has asked the Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, to work with the science community to develop new means for further lifting student participation rates in maths and science."

Federal Schools Minister Peter Garrett said that science and mathematics were two of the first four subjects to be rolled out under the new national curriculum.

Universities Australia said alternative programs to improve school science and maths and university enrolments were vital while the University of Sydney was seeking more funds to support the most talented students.

SOURCE



10 December, 2011

Occupy Geniuses: Cut Education Costs by Giving Free Stuff to Teachers

We have come to appreciate the Occupiers for their fundamental misunderstanding of economics. We’ve also come to look forward to the latest arrest statistics or video of delusional protesters weeping for their Lost Tent City.

I shudder to think what America would look like if they truly had any decision-making power.

Consider the latest zany idea from one “MrMiller” of Sandy, Utah:

Here is my proposal for opening up cheaper education to people in our country. It is my opinion that we don't need to pay professors quite so much money if we go about providing for them in a different way. What if we were to IMMEDIATELY find ways to provide for teachers to live life for free and paid their housing, (or collectively built them new houses, free of charge), gave them free food and also healthcare? If we collectively found a way to eliminate THEIR overhead, then we wouldn't all have to pay so much for them and this would thus drive down costs for all? I have been thinking about this for a LONG time and have decided that that would be the single greatest step towards reducing the costs of education period if we all worked together to do it. It's not even a hard thing to imagine. Anyone disagree?”

Um…me?

The teachers unions are constantly preaching that teachers are professionals. Is this how “professionals” should be treated? Who in the world would want to go into teaching if it meant living in a government house (small and energy efficient, no doubt), driving a government car (ditto), eating government food (something from Michelle Obama’s garden, perhaps?) and being subjected to government-run healthcare (oh, that’s right … ).

These are really the best ideas coming out of OccupyWallStreet? And the teachers unions are actually standing with these clowns?

This is utter nonsense and no one wants to be treated this way, including, I’m guessing, the progressive teachers. But, hey, if the teachers unions are supporting OccupyWallStreet and OWS is coming up with this nuttiness, let’s do it. I’m all for driving down the price of higher education.

Randi Weingarten, what say you?

SOURCE





British small businesses find ill-educated youth unemployable too

There have been many complaints from big business about this

More than a quarter of small businesses struggle to find 'suitably skilled' staff despite rising unemployment, a survey revealed yesterday. The report by the Federation of Small Businesses said many of its members were desperate to hire workers but could not find them.

It warned many school leavers and graduates lacked basic skills needed for a job. These range from turning up on time for an interview to being able to write basic English or do the most elementary maths. The survey of more than 1,500 small businesses showed a 'worrying' 27 per cent have 'found it difficult to find suitably skilled staff'.

The issue will be investigated as part of an inquiry into entrepreneurship by the Federation of Small Businesses and MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Small Business Group.

Brian Binley, Tory MP and chairman of the parliamentary group, said: 'Small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs are expected to be driving economic growth in support of Britain's recovery. 'But they are finding it difficult to get the right people to help them in that task.'

One of the big problems was 'the poor performance in our primary and secondary schools, especially with regard to literacy and numeracy'.

Unemployment has jumped to a 17-year high of 2.62million, amid warnings it will continue to rise as the Government cuts the state workforce.

Despite the massive number of people looking for a job, there are still 464,000 unfilled vacancies, according to the Office for National Statistics.

To add to the problems facing small firms, the report also found 34 per cent had 'difficulty securing finance'. The Federation of Small Businesses is calling on the Government to create more competition on the high street to break up the dominance of the 'big five' banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Santander and RBS.

The Department for Education said the Government was 'prioritising' literacy and numeracy by 'recruiting specialist maths teachers, introducing a phonics-based reading check for six-year-olds and restoring the rigour of GCSE and A-level exams'.

SOURCE





Transgender lessons for British pupils aged five: Classes will 'overload children with adult issues', say critics

Children as young as five could be given lessons on ‘transgender equality’ under Government plans. Information about transgender people is set to be included in the curriculum for personal, social and health education lessons, which are taught in thousands of primary and secondary schools.

The proposal is part of a Coalition policy programme entitled ‘Advancing transgender equality – a plan for action’, which was published yesterday.

In it, ministers warn a wide range of steps are needed to combat ‘transphobic bullying’, which is defined as the taunting of children who express ‘gender variant behaviours’.

The document was produced by the Home Office, which is responsible for equality policy within Government. It states that schools need to be ‘more inclusive for gender-variant children’. ‘We know that over 70 per cent of boys and girls who express gender variant behaviours are subject to bullying in schools,’ the document states.

‘Schools should be a safe and supportive environment for children to learn in. ‘Tackling transphobic bullying helps to address unacceptable behaviour and ensures that our society becomes more tolerant.’

As part of its review of PSHE, the Department for Education will consider adding ‘the teaching of equality and diversity, including transgender equality’ to the curriculum.

But critics said there was a danger that children were being overloaded with ‘adult issues’ as a result of such lessons.

Margaret Morrissey, founder of campaign group Parents Outloud, said: ‘These are adult issues and we should leave it until children are older or until they ask. ‘The problem is we are overloading our children with issues that they should not have to consider at a young age. PSHE is already overloaded with other issues. ‘We have given them sex education and teenage pregnancies have risen year on year.

‘We have told children about drugs education and we have a serious problem with drugs. We have told them about drinking and cigarettes and we have more children with alcohol problems and smoking.’

Transgender people include those who have had sex change operations and people who have both male and female sexual organs.

Other measures proposed as part of the equality drive include help for transgender job seekers and rules for the NHS designed to ensure transgender people are dealt with fairly. The move comes after a Government survey found nearly nine out of ten transgender employees suffered discrimination or harassment at work. Also announced yesterday were longer jail terms for murderers who are motivated by hatred of transgender people.

The basic sentence for anyone convicted of such killings will be 30 years, Kenneth Clarke said. Similar attacks on disabled people will also face the same tough minimum term.

The Justice Secretary said that offenders ‘should be in no doubt that they face a more severe sentence for these unacceptable crimes’.

Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone said: ‘Too many transgender people still face prejudice at every stage of their lives, from playground bullying, to being overlooked for jobs or targeted for crime.’

This year it emerged British passports will no longer contain details of the holder’s sex. The move is designed to spare transgender people and those who are ‘intersex’ from having to tick ‘male’ or ‘female’ on official documents.

SOURCE



9 December, 2011

French school head held hostage by parents demanding a 'tyrant' teacher is sacked

Furious parents today took a headmistress and four other members of staff hostage to try and get a 'tyrant' teacher sacked from a French school.

The extraordinary stand-off saw police flooding into the Roman Catholic Notre-Dame de Caderot school in Berre l'Etang, a suburb of Marseilles, in the south of the country.

'We want one of the teachers fired because he's not up to standard,' said one of the 15 parents occupying the site. 'More generally, we want to see a huge improvement in standards, because at the moment are children are not getting a good enough education. 'We have taken a few hostages, but our children have been held hostage at this school for months.

'The teacher concerned is a tyrant – he treats are pupils abominably. He rants and raves at our kids, causing them psychological problems.'

Christophe Planes, another parent, said: 'We are very worried that the pupils are falling behind in school. 'We think our children are in danger. That's why we have decided to hold the headmistress and a couple of teachers hostage. We want things to change.'

Headmistress Christine Courtot said via mobile phone: 'We had a meeting with parents to discuss their concerns, and then they decided to kidnap me with two teachers.'

The main focus for the parents' anger is a male trainee teacher who is in charge of pupils aged 9 to 10. He has not been named. A spokesman for the school said they had agreed to transfer the teacher to another school, but the parents said they wanted proof.

The siege started late on Tuesday evening when the parents broke into the building and barricaded themselves into a classroom along with the headmistress, two other teachers, and two secretaries.

Although police have surrounded the school, and entered the building, they are under orders not to intervene in the dispute. An Education Ministry spokesman said the school was privately run, and needed to sort out the industrial dispute themselves.

French workers have a tradition of kidnapping bosses during industrial dispute, but this is believed to be the first time that a head teacher has been taken hostage.

SOURCE





Why Britain's private schools have a moral duty not to support government schools

According to Anthony Seldon, head of Wellington College, Berkshire, fee-paying private schools have a “moral duty” to help run failing government schools in deprived areas. However private schools are right to question the wisdom of this approach.

First, it is important to remember that the government initially intervened in education in the late 19th century to help support the growth and development of education in deprived areas. However, instead of subsidizing parents and allowing them to choose between a variety of different schools, previous governments directed all public subsidies towards its own free schools, whilst neglecting and ignoring all private alternatives. This subsequently forced the closure of thousands of private and voluntary schools leaving only a small number of private schools to cater for families on a higher income.

As a result, instead of focusing on the development of education in deprived areas, the government soon found itself attempting to manage and control the vast majority of schools serving both rich and poor alike. Unfortunately, any system of education which restricts the freedom of parents to choose will hit those on low incomes the hardest. While better off families can either move to the suburbs in search of a better school or purchase private tuition, those on low incomes who live in deprived areas are forced to accept their local government school, irrespective of how it performs. Government intervention has therefore had the opposite effect from the one that was originally intended.

However, after forcing the vast majority of private and voluntary schools out of business and after creating a system of education which restricts parents’ right to choose and penalises those families living in deprived areas, the government now attempts to blame the remaining private schools for all of the problems which they themselves have just created. And to put things right the guilty private schools must now give a helping hand to the failing government schools which they have helped to create. However, let’s be clear - all apartheid, social division and barriers in education are a direct result of the way in which all previous governments have directed public funds to government schools only, thereby denying parents their fundamental right to choose and eventually crowding out the majority of private alternatives.

Second, to suggest that Eton can help to transform a failing inner city comprehensive government school is to completely misunderstand the nature of the problem. First, I suspect that the knowledge and experience required to educate children who live in deprived areas is slightly different from the knowledge and experience required to educate children who attend Eton. Therefore as Eton will have very little if any knowledge or experience of educating children who live in deprived areas, it is difficult to see what they can bring to the table. Second, all failing (or coasting) government schools located in deprived areas exist because of the way in which all previous governments have directed public funds to government schools only, thereby denying parents their fundamental right to choose and eventually crowding out the majority of private alternatives. It should therefore be blatantly obvious that the only way to solve this problem is for the government to change the way they fund education by creating a level playing field, giving all schools an equal opportunity and by directing all public funds to parents.

Third, by lending their support to failing government schools, private schools will help to prolong the life of a stagnant and immoral government system, which restricts the fundamental right of parents to choose and restricts the freedom of a variety of different organisations to invest and compete in the delivery of children’s schooling. Private schools therefore have a moral duty not to support failing government schools.

Fourth, during the period in which the government proceeded to distort, disrupt and completely undermine the natural growth and development of education in the UK, the private schools that survived have simply gone about their business, doing what they do best, which is providing a unique educational experience to those parents who can afford to purchase it. Therefore to accuse these schools of perpetuating social division, suggests that freedom in education will make those who receive this education better off, only at the expense of those who don’t receive it who will end up worse off. However, one of the key reasons to justify government subsidies in education is because education has some public good qualities, in that the education received by some children will not only benefit these particular children but will also benefit the wider public, who can enjoy the benefits of living in a more educated and civilised society. The better education that one child receives can therefore only be a good thing for the child concerned and for the rest of society.

That said, if Wellington College want to help transform a failing government school then as a private and independent organisation, they are perfectly free to do so. However, attempting to claim the moral high ground by undertaking such an act is a different matter altogether and one that fails to take into account the reason why these schools are failing in the first place and the desperate need for the government to change the way it subsidises and intervenes in education. Therefore, if private schools want to help improve education in deprived areas, they could do much more good by lobbying the government and promoting a change in policy.

In the meantime, if some government schools want to benefit from receiving a service from a local private school then they should be prepared to pay for it. In education, as elsewhere, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

SOURCE






The current British High School exam system is "discredited": Inquiry into cheating row as teachers are 'coached by examiners'

Education Secretary Michael Gove last night ordered an inquiry into claims that examiners have been advising teachers on how to boost GCSE and A-level results. Chief examiners were filmed giving teachers advice on the words pupils should use to get top marks.

Mr Gove said that the footage ‘confirms that the current system is discredited’ and ordered the exam regulator Ofqual to investigate.

The disclosures will add to the row over claims of grade inflation over the past decade and fears over the ‘dumbing down’ of standards.

The undercover investigation found that teachers are paying up to £230 a day to attend seminars with examiners where the advice appeared to go beyond what is allowed. At one such meeting, one of the chief examiners for GCSE history from exam board WJEC was filmed by the Daily Telegraph telling teachers which questions should be expected in the next round of exams.

Paul Evans told teachers at the course in London last month that the compulsory question in the first part of the exam ‘goes through a cycle’.

‘This coming summer, and there’s a slide on this later on, it’s going to be the middle bit: “Life in Germany 1933-39” or for America, it will be “Rise and Fall of the American Economy”… So if you know what the compulsory section is you know you’ve got to teach that,’ he was filmed saying.

When questioned by a teacher on whether this meant they did not have to teach the whole syllabus, he replied: ‘We’re cheating. We’re telling you the cycle (of the compulsory question). Probably the regulator will tell us off.’

In November, at the AQA GCSE English seminar in Brighton, teachers were reportedly told that students could study only three out of 15 poems even though the Qualification and Curriculum Authority states it should be all 15.

In England there are three main exam boards offering GCSEs and A-levels – OCR, AQA and Edexcel – although the Welsh exam board, WJEC, has become more popular.

Critics last night said that the findings were proof that exam boards were lowering standards as they compete with one another to win business from schools. They also warned that it showed examiners were encouraging ‘teaching to the test’.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education said: ‘These findings are shocking, but not surprising, the whole system is rotten to the core. There is no question that standards are going down. Exam boards are competing for custom from schools and the only way to get more schools is to make the exams more attractive. We need to abolish these individual commercial exam boards and create one national exam board that has integrity.’

Announcing the investigation into the claims, Mr Gove said: ‘Our exams system needs fundamental reform. ‘The revelations confirm that the current system is discredited.

‘I have asked Glenys Stacey (the chief executive of Ofqual) to investigate the specific concerns identified... and to report back to me within two weeks with her conclusions and recommendations. ‘It is crucial our exams hold their own with the best in the world. We will take whatever action is necessary to restore faith in our exam system. Nothing is off the table.’

Last night, a spokesman for WJEC said: ‘The advice given in this particular context, relating to nine studies in depth and three thematic studies, is clearly set out in the GCSE History Teachers’ Guide. ‘The examiner at the training course attended… was confirming long-standing guidance on this subject. ‘The alleged use of the word “cheating” appears to have been injudicious, as well as inaccurate; we shall investigate this further.’

SOURCE



8 December, 2011

If there's no Santa in your kid's school don't just whine

Neal Boortz

We have some government school bureaucrats in Texas who have decided that there will be no Santa Clause in the classrooms this year. Their first excuse was that Santa was representative of a particular religion. Then, when the inevitable stink arose, they switched their stance and said it was all because Santa Clause would be a distraction. Yeah right. The reason that they didn’t want Santa in the classroom was because he is competition, not a distraction. Remember, this is government; and government doesn’t like competition. What’s more, unlike the private sector, government can step up and end competition by edict and force when it cares to.

Before I go any further here, a word to the parents of the little government indoctrination subjects in this Texas school who are voicing whining about the school dissin” Santa. It’s this simple: If you can easily afford to have your precious little mini-me in a private school somewhere, yet you turned your child over to the government to be educated; or if you have the means and the temperament to home school your child; or (your last available excuse) you are NOT actively working with your legislators, both local and federal, to promote the cause of school choice, then would you do us all a favor and just keep your opinions about Santa in the classroom to yourself? When it comes to preparing your child for life, just sitting around and complaining doesn’t cut it. Either do something, support those who are trying to do something, or put a sock in it.

Now think about this. When you child was about six years old you made the decision to turn him or her over to the government to be educated. Just how much thought did you actually put into this decision? My guess is that you asked the government which school your child was supposed to attend, bought the government school suggested list of school supplies, and packed the little tricycle motor off on day one with nary an additional thought. But after all, that’s what everyone else does, right? You’re no better than they are, and if government schools are good enough for their kids, well you certainly don’t want to be a show off or something, do you?

Tell me: Did you really look into private schools? My guess is that you could have found a private school somewhere near you that wouldn’t have cost you all that much more than a good day care school did before your child became school age. You didn’t search around? No surprise. The government was there for you, so why explore other options?

Maybe home schooling? Did you look into that? No, you don’t have to spend six hours a day hammering the three Rs into your kid. There are Internet assets and plenty of organizations out there to help. College professors will tell you that they can recognize the home schooled child on the first day of class due to their poise, intelligence and maturity. But no, you didn’t look into that, did you? After all, you paid your property taxes and this is all the government’s job, right?

Well, let me ask you this. How much time did you spend looking into the history, purpose and quality of the government school that swallowed up your child? Did you realize that the very people who designed our system of government schools around 100 years ago made a conscious decision to establish a system that would educate your child to the point that he would make a good employee or government subject, but not to the point that he might present a threat to his employer or those who hold power in government? Guess not.

So now there you are, telling everyone how troubled you are that Santa has been sent to detention; but isn’t that pretty much what you did to your child? My guess is that you put far more thought into the purchase of your last car than you did into the education of your child, and that car will be in a junkyard in about 15 years…pretty much the same thing that is going to happen to You, Jr.

Now what was that reason I gave for some government schools to send Santa back to the sleigh? Oh yeah, competition. You chose the type of school: Hebrew Academy, Baptist private school, Catholic parochial school or Muslim madrasah. Every single one of these schools, while teaching educational basics such as reading, science and math, will also try to inculcate the students with a sense of allegiance to the entity running the school; whether Jewish, Christian, Catholic or Muslim. Now just why would you think that a government school would be any different?

In American government schools our children are relentlessly indoctrinated with the idea that the government is there for them when any need arises. In the Christian school it may be “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” In government schools it’s “The government is my keeper, I need not rely on myself.” This is how power is built and maintained, beginning the indoctrination process with the impressionable minds of youth.

I still remember that visit Michelle Obama made to a government classroom here in Atlanta. A picture of her in the classroom interacting with the kids appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. On the classroom wall behind Michelle were the typical alphabet signs; one sign for each letter strung along the wall. Under each of the letters was a word beginning with that letter. Under “M” we had the word “monkey.” Under “N” we had not one, but two words. Those words? “National Government.” They chose not to use “notebook,” something in virtually ever classroom. Maybe the teacher could have used “necklace” or “necktie.” But no. It just had to be “National government.” Never miss an opportunity to keep the federal government foremost in the minds of your children. You certainly don’t think a Muslim madrasah would miss the chance to extol the virtues of Allah, do you?

And Santa? Well the problem is twofold. First of all, Santa is a symbol of a Christian holiday. You don’t want to remind the children that some people worship God, rather than government. Secondly … When it comes to people asking for someone to bring them a present – to give them something for nothing – well, that’s the government’s job. Santa is, as I said, competition and cannot be allowed to survive.

If just half the parents who gnash their teeth and wring their hands over political correctness in our government schools would dedicate a few hours a week to promoting school choice we would take giant steps toward preserving liberty and saving our republic.

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The Greatest English Teacher

The Rev. John Becker, S.J., sat at the front of the classroom, paperback in hand, glasses pushed to the end of his nose. As he spoke, he looked intently from one student to another.

“This semester, I am going to teach you how to read 'King Lear,'” he said. “It may be Shakespeare’s most difficult play. But it has a powerful message to tell.”

When we were done reading “Lear,” the priest promised, we would not only understand it, but we would have learned the secret of understanding any thing written in English -- anything, that is, with a meaning to discern.

And we would love Shakespeare.

At the time, I don’t think any of us understood what Father Becker meant. But the things he started teaching us that day made him the greatest English teacher I ever had.

That was in 1974 at Saint Ignatius, the all-boys Jesuit high school in San Francisco.

For several weeks, Father Becker sat patiently with our class as we read “King Lear,” line by line -- out loud. Whenever we came to a word or phrase he suspected we did not understand, he would look with mock ferocity at one student and jovially ask another on the other side of the room to explain what it meant.

When it was clear no one knew, we would look it up in the glossary. Father would then pick someone to read the definition out loud. Then we would read -- again -- the line where the troublesome word had been found.

Reading “King Lear” like this was tedious -- at first.

But as we read deeper into the play -- then moved on to “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” -- we needed to stop and start and visit the glossary less frequently. But we appreciated the need for doing so more. We discovered Father Becker was right. The more we understood Shakespeare’s plays, the more we loved them. Our hard work and attention to detail was rewarded with the ability to detect, understand and appreciate even the subtle nuances of the greatest works of literature ever written.

Then there was the memorization and recitation. At first this, too, we faced with dread.

Father gave us a quota of lines from each play. Each student could choose which ones to memorize and when to recite them. But by the end of the semester, each was responsible for completing his share.

By the time everyone had recited their quota, it was possible Father Becker’s students were as familiar with the most popular lines from that semester’s Shakespeare play as from the latest Grateful Dead or Eagles album.

Then there was the continuous writing and rewriting. Father made us write one essay per week. He gave us some freedom in choosing a topic, but no freedom from the rules of grammar.

He often returned a graded paper with a neat “A/F” inscribed at the top. The “A” was for the merits he thought he detected in your creativity or thought. The “F” was for mangling English.

Father Becker did not give these “Fs” arbitrarily. Using a red pen, he meticulously marked every mistake with a code -- “A61,” D128,” “H53.” Each referred to a specific rule in the Writing Handbook -- a clear, systematic and exhaustive 592-page text published in 1953 by two Jesuits. A student with an “A/F” needed to look up each rule he had broken and rewrite the paper to correct the errors. Father Becker would then change his grade to an “A/A.”

This, too, I found incredibly tedious. But then I went to college.

Father Becker was one of the teachers who recommended me to Princeton. I was accepted. I read more Shakespeare -- and Chaucer and Pope. I earned a degree in English literature. I became a professional writer and editor. Along the way, I had the opportunity to learn from many great English teachers. Yet, as time passed, I more deeply appreciated the teaching of Father Becker.

At St. Ignatius -- in Father Becker’s class and all others -- we wrote the letters AMDG at the top of our papers. They stand for “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam” -- To the Greater Glory of God. These are the strategic watchwords of the Jesuit order: Everything ultimately must serve this purpose.

Father Becker taught us that Shakespeare was great not only because of the power and wit and poetry in his language but because his plays truly served the greater glory of God. They helped readers see good and evil and the consequences of choosing one over the other.

Father Becker also taught by example. He had the skills to succeed in many lucrative professions. But he took a vow of poverty and spent five decades as a good and faithful priest teaching boys to become strong and confident Christian men in an increasingly secular world.

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The leather lady loses: Controversial rules over free places for the poor in private schools to be torn up

Rules requiring private schools to give free places to poor pupils are to be torn up, after a crunch court ruling. In a victory for independent schools, the Charity Commission was ordered to scrap its controversial guidance, which orders schools to offer bursaries or risk losing charitable status.

Judges on the Upper Tribunal – a body which rules on contentious areas of law – gave the Commission three weeks to withdraw its most sweeping guidelines or have them quashed completely.

The ruling comes after a fierce political row over demands that fee-paying schools must provide wider ‘public benefit’ in order to keep millions in tax breaks. The ‘public benefit’ rules were widely seen by independent schools as a crusade by Dame Suzi Leather, the Labour-appointed quangocrat who heads the Charity Commission.

That has pressed private schools to open up their playing fields and sports facilities to local state schools and offer tuition to some local pupils. But they balked at being forced to hand out free places in order to remain in business after the Charity Commission said providing bursaries was the most straightforward way of satisfying the rules.

School heads claimed that would drive up fees for existing parents and price some families out of independent education altogether.

In October, the Upper Tribunal ruled parts of the Commission’s guidance were ‘erroneous’.

The Independent Schools Council had brought a case against the Commission arguing its guidance must be quashed because it was too vague and claimed the commission was guilty of ‘micro-managing’ individual charities. The commission argued its guidelines were clear and it had only provided ‘supportive assistance’ to help schools keep charitable status.

Yesterday the Commission was told to withdraw parts of its guidance, specifically that relating to public benefit and fee-charging charities, which includes independent schools.

Crucially, the judges also decided each case depended on its own facts and it was a matter for the trustees of a charitable independent school – rather than the Charity Commission or the tribunal – to decide how trustees’ obligations to provide public benefit should be achieved.

ISC general secretary Matthew Burgess said: ‘We were vindicated last month when the Tribunal agreed the Commission’s approach to the public benefit of independent schools was wrong. ‘We trust this ruling will now persuade the Commission to discharge its duty to hundreds of thousands of charity trustees to produce clear and accurate guidance.’

A Charity Commission spokesman said: ‘We have received the Upper Tribunal’s decision and, in accordance with this, will be voluntarily agreeing to withdraw the limited parts of our guidance found by the Tribunal not to be correct. ‘We will do this as part of our review of the guidance, which we said we would carry out regardless of the outcome and is already in hand.

‘It remains that in accordance with the judgement, fee-charging schools cannot be charitable if they exclude the poor from benefit and, if established as charities, they have to make provision for those who cannot afford the fees which is more than minimal or tokenistic.’

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7 December, 2011

Save the World on Your Own Dime

The taxpayers are being beaten to death by liberalism. Meanwhile academic liberals are complaining that they are taking a beating with recent budget cuts, which they claim are unjust. For the first time in a long time, I agree with the liberals. The budget cuts are unjust. In my view, they aren’t deep enough. If you disagree, consider this: One public university in North Carolina has just found money to start (in the midst of a budget crisis) a new scholarship to reward feminists for engaging in feminist political activism on the job.

Here in the Tar Heel state, this year’s budget cut in higher education is nearly 16%. But there was still enough money in the pot to create a new Janet Mason Ellerby Women and Gender Studies Scholarly Award. The award was created to recognize Ellerby’s “significant contributions to feminist scholarship and activism.”

What are those contributions? Let’s start with activism.

Some years ago, Janet Ellerby learned that the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders were slated to make an appearance at UNC-Wilmington. Ellerby joined an effort to keep the Cowgirls from coming to our campus. Why? Well, you know the reason. They wear too little clothing and help promote unhealthy (read: sexist) images of what a woman should look like. The Cowgirls were young, thin, and happy. UNCW feminists, on the other hand, place a premium on being old, plump, and angry. The Cowgirls had to go!

Of course, anyone who has ever been to UNCW recognizes the futility of banning scantily-clad women from campus. Our co-eds generally make the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders look like nuns. That’s why UNCW is sometimes referred to as UNC-Whorehouse. Personally, I’m offended by those who refer to our young women as “whores.” That’s why I was disappointed when UNCW hired a rapper to come to campus to call women “bitches” and “whores” back in 2003. (Note: He made $130,000 in the process!). But the rapper, unlike the cheerleaders, was not banned from UNCW by the feminists. Some UNCW feminists consider promiscuity to be empowering. So I suppose “whore” is just a term of endearment.

Speaking of whores, another example of Janet Ellerby’s activism would be the fight for free health care for prostitutes. While under the direction of Janet Mason Ellerby, the WRC placed a large display in the lobby of the UNCW library. The display made an argument for free health care for prostitutes with no moral condemnation of prostitution whatsoever. In fact, the display declined to refer to the women as prostitutes. It called them “sex workers.” If you haven’t seen the connection between these first two examples of feminist activism, I’ll just spell it out below (in bold letters):

FEMINISTS DO NOT WANT MEN LOOKING AT CHEERLEADERS. THEY WANT THEM TO HAVE HEALTHIER SEX WITH PROSTITUTES!

None of this should come as a surprise to my readers. Janet Mason Ellerby was the “activist” who placed pictures of naked children in the lobby of the UNCW library as a part of Women’s History Month. Oops! That’s Womyn’s Herstory Month. She did so in connection with her official capacities as director of the Women’s Center. The provost tried to move the naked pictures to another location because pedophiles had previously been caught downloading child pornography right there in the UNCW library. Ellerby had a conniption. And she enlisted the help of the Faculty Senate in the name of academic freedom.

As a result of Janet Mason Ellerby’s activism, faculty members now face no time, place, and manner restrictions on their desire to display pictures of nude post-pubescent minors on public property. But UNCW still refrains from using the term “Christmas Tree” lest they offend the irreligious. Now it’s a holiday tree, wait, no! That’s too holy, now it’s just a tree! And the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are still banned from the UNCW campus. Man, these bitches and hos are relentless!

Have you have ever wondered why I refer to “feminist scholarship” as an oxymoron on a par with “jumbo shrimp?” Just read Intimate Reading, the personal memoir of Janet Mason Ellerby. It will help you better understand her desire to post pictures of naked children in public libraries. In a soft pornographic romance novel sort of way, Ellerby gives a graphic account of losing her virginity at age 16. She talks in great detail about the experience – including her effort to clean the blood off the couch where she had that first sexual experience. From there, she proceeds to write about blood running from her vagina in the shower afterwards. And, regrettably, the graphic account is required reading for many students in Women’s Studies classes.

The Ellerby sex scene might not be true scholarship. But it does have some symbolic value. Whenever feminist scholarship is taken seriously, we all lose a measure of our innocence. And someone is stuck cleaning up a big mess in the aftermath.

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British charter schools obliged to promote marriage

The importance of marriage is to be taught to every pupil at the Government's flagship free schools and academies.

The schools will be made to sign up to strict new rules introduced by Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, setting out what pupils must learn about sex and relationships. Headteachers will be told that children must be "protected from inappropriate teaching materials and learn the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and for bringing up children".

But the decision to spell out an explicit endorsement of marriage in the curriculum for tens of thousands of children is highly politically significant, and likely to be welcomed by Conservative traditionalists who have been concerned at a perceived failure by David Cameron's Government to deliver on pledges to support married life.

Mr Gove has introduced the "model funding agreement" as a template for how every new free school and academy is run. Ministers want a dramatic increase in the numbers of both types of schools.

The new rules on marriage are set out in clause 28 of the funding agreement – an echo of the controversy under Margaret Thatcher's government when Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Bill banned schools from promoting homosexuality.

The agreement is a distinct change from current guidelines which state that children should learn the nature and importance of marriage and of stable relationships for family life and bringing up children. The reference to "stable relationships", which alludes to couples living together outside marriage and homosexual partners, has not been included in the model funding agreement documents.

The wording of the section suggests a strengthening of traditional values in schools, but will also provoke opposition from those who believe marriage should not be given a privileged status in the curriculum.

Including the teaching of marriage in funding agreements puts a legal compulsion on headteachers to comply. English, maths, science and RE are the only other curriculum subjects guaranteed in the model document.

If the terms of the agreement are broken, funding for the school can be withdrawn by ministers. It may also be possible for parents to legally challenge schools that are not abiding by the letter of their funding agreements.

The funding agreement clause also bans the use of "inappropriate materials" in schools. It is likely to be seized on by campaigners who last week attacked the use of "explicit" sex education material in primary schools and called for a ban on Channel 4's "Living and Growing" DVD used in thousands of primary schools which shows cartoon characters having sex in a variety of different positions.

Lessons in personal, social and health education (PHSE), which include sex and relationship education, are currently under review as part of the Government's general overhaul of the national curriculum, which applies in schools which are not either academies or free schools.

Tens of thousands of children are now taught in academies across the country. The number of "independent" state schools, which receive funding directly from Government and have freedom over finances, curriculum and teachers pay, has mushroomed under the Coalition.

All schools, whether primary or secondary, rated "outstanding" by inspectors can now become academies without going through a lengthy application process, which has triggered a rise in numbers from just over 200 in 2010 to 1,300 now.

The funding agreement marriage clause also applies to the 24 free schools, set up by parents, teachers, faith groups and charities. Sixty more are in the pipeline and Mr Gove has made their expansion his flagship policy.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: "Given the benefits that derive from marriage for young people, a short statement requiring that pupils learn its importance is entirely sensible."

But Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: "For children brought up by unmarried parents or single parents being told that marriage is the only valid family arrangement will be totally contradictory to everything they know about the world. It opens the door for religious schools to teach a really narrow version of what constitutes an acceptable relationship. "It is telling our children that their own family structure is somehow inferior. A lot of church schools would love to do that and this gives them license to do it."

Putting marriage at the heart of the curriculum will make Mr Gove popular among many Conservatives, but inflame tensions with the Liberal Democrats.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, promised to recognise marriage in the tax system in this Parliament. But the plan went on the back burner in coalition talks with the Liberal Democrats, who fiercely oppose special recognition for marriage.

Mr Cameron has said that he intends to honour the pledge before 2015, but George Osborne, the Chancellor, suggested last month there would be no room for tax cuts before the election. In the same month, in a keynote speech to the Conservative Party Conference, Mr Cameron urged party members to back gay marriage.

New Office for National Statistics figures show that marriage is steadily declining, with married couples now making up less than half the population.

However research by the Centre for Social Justice, set up by Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary for work and pensions and the main proponent of tax breaks for married couples, found that children have better outcomes if their parents are married.

However, the issue of marriage is steeped in controversy. But critics said that at a time when the number of cohabiting couples was at record levels, focusing on marriage in lessons would confuse and alienate children.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "Academies and free schools have to teach a broad and balanced curriculum. They are required to have regard to the statutory guidance covering sex and relationships education."

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Oxford's feared admission interviews

This year’s Oxbridge interviews begin tomorrow. I only know this because a friend asked me if I would give her niece a mock one, as she is at a state school where they don’t coach pupils in interview technique, not with quite the same ruthless efficiency as they do at public schools, anyway.

She is hoping to read PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics] at Oxford and as I read one of those Ps as a postgraduate - philosophy, at Durham - my friend thought I could perhaps come up with some questions that would test her. She also thought that because I interview celebrities for a newspaper I must know how to throw a curve ball. I tried to explain to her that the average celebrity has a much meaner intelligence than the average Oxbridge candidate, but she wasn’t having it.

We met on Wednesday, then - convenient for the niece because her school was on strike. I don’t know about her, but I learnt a lot. The first thing is that, if she is representative of 17-year-olds, our state education system is far from dumbed-down. Yes, she is expected to get the usual three As, but she was also articulate, composed and thoughtful. And not once in 40 minutes did she say “like”. She even made good eye contact, which I certainly couldn’t at her age.

When I asked her loaded questions - such as “Is a good person more likely to be a good president?” or “Can it ever be moral to cut benefits from the poor?” or “If you have never been to Canada, how do you know it exists?” - she gathered her thoughts for a moment and then gave considered answers.

Before the interview, I’d asked some colleagues who had been to Oxford what kind of questions I should ask. One said that if the niece is asked to throw a brick through the window, she should open it first. Lateral thinking, see. Another said there are no right or wrong answers to the sometimes strange-sounding questions: they are merely opportunities to demonstrate your originality, logic and ability to argue.

This was borne out by Professor Mary Beard on Radio 4. She said that, contrary to the myth that she and her fellow dons are eccentric sadists who enjoy humiliating very bright and very nervous teenagers, all their questions are intended to help rather than hinder the interviewee. “We want them to talk themselves into a place, not out of one.”

Above all, it seems, candidates are judged on their merits, regardless of background. That seems to be confirmed by the news that even Tony Blair couldn’t persuade Oxford to offer a place to Gaddafi’s son in 2002. Saif al-Islam had to make do with a place at LSE (also known as the Libyan School of Economics). I wonder how Saif would have answered one of the questions I put to the niece: Is dictatorship sometimes a better option than democracy?

I’ll leave you with a story a colleague told me. He turned up 24 hours early for his Oxford interview, due to a date mix-up. He sat outside the tutor’s office for an hour before realising, then had to spend the night in college without a change of clothes. The stuff of anxiety dreams, indeed. When it came to the interview he landed a PPE scholarship, but two weeks into his first term he gave up and switched to history, because he found he hated economics.

The politics don was not pleased - but blamed the economics don for not asking him any questions at interview, because he was too keen to disappear for his pre-lunch sherry.

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6 December, 2011

Apology in 'No Santa' Case

(Nanuet, New York) This story has understandably received a bunch of attention.

After widespread holiday jeers, a teacher at Nanuet's George W. Miller Elementary School has apologized to her second-grade classroom after reportedly telling them there's no Santa Claus.

Leatrice Ann Eng of Pearl River issued the apology a day after she was accused of saying "no" to Ho-Ho-Ho during a geography class last Tuesday.

When the 7-year-olds told her they knew about the North Pole because of its white-bearded inhabitant, Eng reportedly responded that Santa did not exist and that Christmas presents were bought by their parents.

I suggest it's sinful to corrupt the innocence of children.

Robert Owen's vision of educational reform as a road to Socialism

John Dewey (1859 – 1952) is regarded as a great reformer of American education. One of his prime influences was an early advocate of socialism called Robert Owen.

Robert Owen played a large role in Dewey’s formulating ideas. Owen was a social and educational reformer. He was one of the founders of socialism and the cooperative movement. Owen believed that moral reform could only come through the reform of the environment. Once Owen gained ownership of New Lanark, he began to put his vision for its factories and schools into place.

Living in New Lanark, Scotland in the late 1700’s, Owen had the opportunity to purchase the Chorlton Twist Co. Owen openly admired how the previous owner had shown respect for the children of the people working for him which included children. He then went on to purchase the Lanark Company where he found conditions deplorable and implemented a standard of hygiene. The community as a whole found his concern for the welfare of his workers admirable.

At a time when workers in the mills of New Lanark needed saving, Owen provided his workers with decent housing, and banned children under 10 years old from working in his mills. He argued against physical punishment in schools and factories, as well he ensured that this was a standard upheld in his own facilities. Owen hoped that his treatment of children would influence other factory owners to do the same.

Owen’s ideas were shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment and his contact with progressive ideas in Manchester, England as a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society. His general theory was that character is formed by the effects of the environment upon the individual. Hence, education was of central importance to the creation of rational and humane character and the duty of the educator was to provide the wholesome environment, both mental and physical, in which the child could develop. Physical punishment was prohibited and child labor was restricted. In theory, man being naturally good, could grow and flourish when evil was removed. Education, as one historian has put it, was to the "steam engine of his new moral world."

At New Lanark, Owen involved himself in the public affairs of the day, the most important being education, factory reform, and the improvement of the Poor Laws. His first public speech was on education (1812) and was elaborated upon in his first published work, The First Essay on the Principle of the Formation of Character (1813). Together with three further essays (1813-1814), this comprised A New View of Society, which remains Owen’s clearest declaration of principles. In 1816, he opened the New Institution for the Formation of Character and then the Infant School.

Since most children were taken out of school by age 10, Owen offered evening classes, which allowed the children to continue their education while working. Considering the cost of books, paper, and ink, the schooling was nearly free.

Owen’s denunciation of religion evoked a mounting negative campaign against him which in later years damaged his public reputation and the work associated with his name. By the late 1820s, Owen’s roots in New Lanark were loosening. Owen now set about his mission to bring about the new moral world through his plan for well-regulated communities. England, Scotland and Ireland seemed indifferent, but the United States opened up new prospects and in 1824 Owen crossed the Atlantic and viewed the Rappite community at Harmony, Indiana, which was for sale. (Rappite being a Religious Celibate society called the Harmony Society). Owen bought the land in April 1825, initiating New Harmony. The New Harmony community was not a success. By May 1827, there were ten different sub-communities on the estate, and a year later failure was apparent.

About the same time, Owen became convinced that the world of competitive industrial capitalism had reached a stage of crisis and that the leaders of society would now turn to him in their hour of need. What Owen was offering the working class Owenites was social salvation!

These views were expressed in his weekly periodical, The Crisis (1832-1834), and had a following particularly among the labor aristocrats of London who sought to exchange their products according to the labor theory of value at the Gray's Inn Road Labour Exchange, which Owen opened in 1832.

Breaking with these labor movements in 1834, Owen turned back to his plan for a community and founded a journal, The New Moral World (November, 1834) and an organization, the Association of All Classes of All Nations (May, 1835) to prepare public opinion for the millennium.

In the 1840s, Owen embarked on a new settlement. He secured capital from a consortium of capitalist friends and built a luxurious mansion, Harmony Hall, to house a community "normal school" which would train Owenites in a correct communitarian environment. Owen’s concept of a "normal school" was not what many Owenites had hoped for, and in 1844 the annual Owenites Congress rebelled against his despotic control of community policy.

From the age of two the children were cared for and instructed by the community. The youngest spent the day in play school until they progressed to higher classes. There the Greek and Latin classics were discarded; practice in various crafts constituted an essential part of the program. The teachers aimed to impart what the children could most readily understand, making use of concrete objects and avoiding premature abstractions. They banished fear, all artificial rewards and punishments and appealed instead to the spontaneous interest and inclinations of the children as incentives for learning. Girls were on an equal footing with boys.

The educational reformers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dealt with the two, what they thought, were distinct aspects of a young child’s problems. One concerned the claims of childhood as a specific and independent stage in human growth. This perennial problem arises from the efforts of adults to subjecting growing children to ends foreign of their own needs and two, pressing them into molds shaped not by the requirements of the maturing personality, but by the external interests of the ruling order.

Owen put a lot of emphasis on observation and experience as a means of educating. Visual aids, diagrams, pictures, and models were incorporated into lessons and were thought to help facilitate learning. However, toys were never used. Owen believed that children could amuse themselves and if they became bored the teacher would provide something that would educate and interest them. Lectures, when they took place, were to be made short and stimulating, as to make the lesson memorable and compensate for the students' short attention spans.

In addition, lessons on dancing and singing played a key role in the students' education, a vast contrast to the education of the present. Furthermore, military style exercises were a major feature of Owen's schools. School marches and uniforms were incorporated to reinforce conformity.

The word "socialism" first became current in the discussions of the "Association of all Classes of all Nations" which Owen formed in 1835 with himself as Preliminary Father. During these years his secularist teaching gained such influence among the working classes as to give occasion for the statement in the Westminster Review (1839) that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them.

In 1854, at the age of 83, despite his previous antipathy to religion, Owen was converted to spiritualism after a series of "sittings" with the American medium Maria B. Hayden (credited with introducing spiritualism to England). Owen made a public profession of his new faith in his publication “The Rational” a quarterly review and later wrote a pamphlet entitled “The future of the Human race; or great glorious and future revolution to be effected through the agency of departed spirits of good and superior men and women.”

After Owen's death spiritualists claimed that his spirit dictated the "Seven Principles of Spiritualism" to the medium Emma Hardinge Britten in 1871.

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British government appoints hardline disciplinarians to drive up education standards in schools

Michael Gove is seeking to appoint a team of hardline disciplinarians into top jobs in a bid to drive up standards in schools. The Education Secretary wants to put individuals who share his ideas to be handed some of the most powerful positions in the schools system and Whitehall.

The appointments come amid growing frustration from Mr Gove and his allies about the 'left wing' stranglehold on the country's education establishment.

Many of the appointments will go to senior figures at Absolute Return for Kids, an educational charity co-founded nine years ago by the hedge fund tycoon Arpad Busson. Ark runs 11 academies — state schools free of local authority control — mainly in inner London.

The appointees include disciplinarians such as Sir Michael Wilshaw, who is leaving his post as director of education at Ark to become chief of Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. Mr Wilshaw, once described as 'my hero' by Gove, is known for his hardline approach to sub-standard teachers.

Ofsted's chairwoman is Baroness Morgan of Huyton, an adviser to Ark's board and former political secretary to Tony Blair, who was appointed by Mr Gove earlier this year.

Amanda Spielman, the charity's research and development director, who used to work in private equity, has been appointed on Mr Gove's recommendation to shake up the exam system as chairwoman of Ofqual, the qualifications regulator.

Others being lined up for senior posts include Sally Coates, principal of Burlington Danes academy, an Ark school in White City, west London. Among the roles she may be considered for are head of the School Teachers Review Body, in charge of wage negotiations, running teacher training or replacing one of a swathe of senior officials at the Department for Education who have announced their departures recently.

Critics have accused Mr Gove of becoming far too close to a 'cosy cartel' and that Ark was wielding influence out of all proportion to its size.

But senior Department of Education sources insisted: 'We are just trying to get the best people into the best jobs. Ark is a fantastic organisation which has transformed schools and driven up standards. It is not surprising that their top people are getting these jobs. 'One of the appointments was Baroness Morgan, a leading Blairite. So it is ridiculous to suggest these appointments are political. All the appointments have gone through the official processes.'

But John Bangs, visiting professor at the Institute of Education at London University, said: 'The thing that concerns me most about this development of cosy cartels of super-heads in the penumbra of government benevolence is that... we have a gaping absence of a strategy and policy for engaging teachers as a profession and enhancing their learning.'

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: 'There is a real issue about public interest and how public interest is being safeguarded when you have the political manipulation of key bodies that are there to hold the system to account. 'Part of the issue is that Gove has this very small circle of people like Ark who seem to share his philosophy and vision.'

A spokeswoman for Ark said: 'It is not our policy to shoehorn our people into positions of influence — that [appointing them] is Michael Gove's opportunism to a certain extent. 'It is nonsense to say we have disproportionate power.'

SOURCE




British supermarket forced to retrain school-leavers

The standard of school-leavers is so poor that one supermarket has sent back three-quarters of its recruits for "remedial pre-job training" before they start work.

Morrisons, Britain's fourth-biggest supermarket with 135,000 employees, found that many of its applicants in Salford, Greater Manchester, lacked even the basic skills needed to stack shelves and serve customers. While some had a poor grasp of maths and English, others lacked simple skills such as turning up on time and making eye contact.

Norman Pickavance, the human resources director of Morrisons, said: "Many of the people were just not job ready. They lacked a lot of confidence and social skills. It is quite clear the education system has failed them. "Whatever the environment has been at school, it has not been conducive to instilling basic skills. It is a crying shame."

The warning will fuel concerns that schools are failing to teach the skills necessary for young Britons to find jobs, forcing firms to recruit migrant workers instead. The number of unemployed 16-to-24-year-olds now stands above one million, with one in five people in the age group now categorised as "Neets" – not in education, employment or training.

When Morrisons drew up plans for a new store in the employment black spot of Ordsall, Salford, it promised to give jobs to local youngsters. Of the 210 staff who will start work when the store opens tomorrow, half left school with not a single GCSE to their name.

Morrisons sent back 150 of them for three to six months of remedial training including refresher courses in literacy and numeracy. Some learnt customer service skills at Salford College while others were sent to Create, a social enterprise where "excluded" individuals practice working in a not-for-profit café and call centre.

Garry Stott, the chairman of Create, said: "Can these people read? Yes, they can. Can they write? That's more of a challenge. With maths most people have the basic skills but they struggle with the confidence to use it." He said the main problem was school-leavers whose parents and grandparents who had never worked and lacked the aspiration to work.

He added: "It is too simple to say it is because of the failure of the education system. It's more complex than that. "But when I left school, many of my contemporaries were kicked out of the door on Monday morning by their Mum and Dad and told to go to work. For whatever reason that is not happening."

Government figures show that in 2.5 per cent of households in north-west England, no adult has ever worked – the highest in the country after inner London.

Morrisons is not the first major employer to lamented the standards of school-leavers. Sir Terry Leahy, the former chief executive of Tesco, the country's largest private employer, said two years ago: "Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. "Employers like us are often left to pick up the pieces."

A survey of big employers six weeks ago found that thousands of young people arrive at interviews without the "vital employability skills" required by employers such as a suitable grasp of English, punctuality and a "can do" attitude.

SOURCE



5 December, 2011

Obama Issues New 'Diversity Guidelines' for Schools

(Washington) Released after working hours Friday, the new guidelines include creative affirmative action measures.

The Obama administration has released new guidelines aimed at encouraging school districts and colleges to keep and pursue policies that promote racial diversity. In the process, they withdrew directives put forward during the administration of George W. Bush.

“Diverse learning environments promote development of analytical skills, dismantle stereotypes, and prepare students to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world,” U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder said in a statement Friday. “The guidance announced today will aid educational institutions in their efforts to provide true equality of opportunity.

“Racial isolation ... denies our children the experiences they need to succeed in a global economy, where employers, coworkers, and customers will be increasingly diverse,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement.

The new guidelines are more detailed than the ones they replaced and seek to reverse what officials characterized as a chilling effect on diversity programs based on cautious interpretations of Supreme Court rulings on integration efforts.

The new rules even opened the door, in narrow circumstances, for race-based preferences, commonly known as affirmative action. The guidelines encourage the use of programs that are technically race neutral but informed by race, such as giving school admission preferences to students from a certain ZIP Code. Some school districts have used geography as a stand-in for race.

The new federal guidance was issued jointly by the Justice Department and the Education Department



Texas student's refusal to say Mexican pledge, anthem starts controversy

Every day students in Texas public schools pledge allegiance to the flags of the United States and Texas. But when a teacher in a Rio Grande Valley high school assigned students to stand and pledge allegiance to the Mexican flag and sing Mexico's national anthem, one student refused.

The resulting controversy has one East Texas lawmaker wanting changes in the state's curriculum on how culture and patriotism are taught in schools.

15-year-old Brenda Brinsdon entered her sophomore year at McAllen ISD's Achieve Early College High School just wanting to do well in her classes.

But in mid-September she got an unexpected lesson on personal conviction and taking on the system. "I feel that I did what's right," Brinsdon said. "And I know what I did what's right [...] I'm going to stand my ground."

Brinsdon said she stood her ground by staying seated when first-year Spanish 3 teacher Reyna Santos assigned her class to stand and recite Mexico's pledge of allegiance.

Students stood with right arms straight out and palms down, which is how the school district says Mexicans say their pledge.

Calling the lesson "un-American," Brinsdon recorded the class, which occurred the week of Mexico's Independence Day and also the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

The teacher also told students to memorize and recite the the pledge individually.

And when the time came for the part of the assignment to sing Mexico's national anthem, Brinsdon again refused. With that, Santos asked the class to stand and led the class in the anthem.

"I told her, I was like, 'I thought this was a Spanish class,'" Brinsdon recalled. "And she's like, 'Well, yeah it is, it's like, it's a cultural thing.' And so I was the only one that sat down."

She was given an alternate assignment.

Brinsdon's father, William, backs his daughter. He said that reciting a pledge to any other nation has no place in public schools. "What are we to do? Just lay down and let it happen?" Mr. Brinsdon said. "Or should we stand up for our country?"

Santos couldn't be reached for comment.

The school district declined several News 8 requests to interview someone with the district. But in a statement, said it was a single lesson on Hispanic culture in one class at one campus, the lesson will be reviewed and students recite the U.S. pledge daily.

This Spanish class assignment, Brenda Brisdon's refusal and the school district's response caused a firestorm on the right.

Conservative websites erupted, getting the attention of Republican State Representative Dan Flynn of Canton. "It was a shock to me," he said.

The Texas Education Agency says the state curriculum outlines what must be taught, but local districts decide how it's taught.

Flynn said since the state allows that much discretion, he'll file a bill again to require more mandatory studies on the U.S. Constitution.

"I do have a problem if we're making that the assignment for young people to stand up and pledge to another country," Flynn said. "It lessens the value of the pledge to the United States flag."

After no one with the district agreed to an interview, News 8 confronted McAllen School Board President Sam Saldivar after a meeting. He indicated he didn't agree with the lesson. "I would have taken a different approach, again I'm not an educator," Saldivar said.

But as the leader of the board that sets policy, Saldivar said there's no decision yet on whether to change the curriculum. "That's a curriculum, a teacher working with the administration," Saldiver said. "As I understand it, it's going to be reviewed, and more likely a better approach will be taken in the future."

Dallas Democratic State Representative Roberto Alonzo said to question the loyalty of the teacher and school district is unfair.

"This is a class," Alonzo said. "This is not doing allegiance to Mexico, it's not you know you are going to be part of Mexico, this is just a class to learn Spanish - to learn an aspect of what is Texas."

Brinsdon said she's been pulled from Santos' class and gets her lessons separately now. Despite the controversy, she has no regrets. "I really hope that I was an inspiration to a lot of youth in America to stand up for what's right," Brinsdon said.

SOURCE




California Dream Act: 3 times more costly than previously projected

New research suggests that the recently passed California Dream Act may actually cost taxpayers more than originally estimated. Due in part to continually rising tuition costs, the revised estimated figure stands at $65 million per year, starting in 2013. This is more than 3 times the initial estimate.

Consequently, the amount of funds available to legal California residents applying for student aid will be impacted. There will be less funding available which will be more widely distributed. The end result is less funding available for legal California residents per individual.

Critics have long asserted that in light of current economic conditions, passage of the Dream Act was and is a misguided option, unfair to legal residents, and representative of thinking based on unrealistic evaluations of current financial and economical trends. Many feel that financial aid to illegal citizens should only be considered in a scenario where a surplus of funding exists, not when state and federal budgets are in a state of extreme deficit.

Those who support a referendum on the Dream Act should contact their local state representatives before January 6th. At least 505,000 signatures are needed in order to put the measure on the November, 2012 ballot. The referendum, sponsored by State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of Hesperia, primarily deals with the second part of the Dream Act. This is the provision that allows for undocumented citizens to apply for taxpayer funded state aid. "This is a really, really bad idea," Donnelly said. “At a time when we're broke, when we have two million people unemployed, when state colleges are underfunded and overbooked, we're creating a brand new entitlement." Donnelly also believes the Dream act will create further incentive for increased illegal immigration.

SOURCE






Row as British school tells 11-year-olds to write letter to PM about retirement income for teachers

A school has been criticised for telling pupils to write letters to David Cameron - asking him not to cut teachers’ pensions. Parents were horrified to learn the Year Six pupils had been ordered to write to the Prime Minister arguing he should not reduce public sector pensions.

The children – aged 10 and 11 - were left bewildered by the task, with some even having to ask teachers what a pension was before starting their letter.

Parents have accused the school, which was closed this week after so many teachers went on strike over pension changes, of trying to politicise the youngsters. One, who did not want to be named, said: ‘Surely this is far too political, especially at the moment, for 11-year-olds to be questioned on. ‘About half of the kids in the exam had no idea what a pension was. I believe a number of the children even asked the teachers.’

The pupils were asked to write the letter as part of a three-hour entrance exam in the top stream at the over-subscribed Poole High School for September next year.

‘These exam questions are to test the children’s ability with English and spelling and how to construct sentences,’ the parent added. ‘They are normally asked to write about a journey or holiday or something like that. ‘The subject matter in this instance was totally inappropriate. ‘It was bringing politics into the classroom and was in danger of politically influencing young minds.’

After complaining to the school the parent was told the question had been a mistake, and the teacher who set it was to be formally rebuked. ‘When I complained to the deputy head teacher she was quite open about it,’ the parent said. ‘She said she was shocked and only realised what the question was two days later. ‘She agreed that it was a completely inappropriate question to ask and that she was sorry. ‘I was told the teacher who set the exam question was due to go before the chair of governors for a telling off.’

The school, where three quarters of staff belong to unions which chose to strike over pension changes this week, is partially selective. The three hour examination process is something parents can choose to send their children to.

The school has since apologised, admitting the test was ‘inappropriate’.

Mrs Fan Heafield, deputy head at Poole High School, said: ‘Students are required to take a three hour academic test as part of the school’s annual admission process. ‘This includes a short writing task on a topical subject in the media, of which the students may have some knowledge.

‘The purpose of the exercise is to assess students’ competency in spelling, punctuation, structure of writing and vocabulary. ‘The writing produced by students in this task is intended solely for the purpose of internal marking by an experienced teacher and is not for wider distribution to external individuals or organisations.

‘Clearly, on this occasion, the subject chosen for this task was inappropriate and we would like to apologise unreservedly for any concerns this may have caused parents or students. ‘We will ensure that our pre-test procedures do not allow this situation to arise again.’

Poole High School has recently been accepted to be a specialised school for Business and Enterprise to train pupils to become ‘wealth creators’.

SOURCE



4 December, 2011

Kicking is sexual harassment?

The school is the sick party here

The mother of a Boston elementary school first-grader being investigated for possible sexual harassment for hitting another boy in the groin says her son acted in self-defense.

Mark Curran, 7, tells FOX 25 another boy came up to him on the school bus and strangled him so he defended himself by kicking the boy.

His mother says he was visibly shaken when he got off the school bus following the incident. “He said some kid choked me on the bus. I said excuse me? He said he choked me and stole my gloves,” says Tasha Lynch.

Lynch says she anticipated a simple resolution when she contacted the school to discuss what happened. “They both had a fight. They both should’ve shaken hands, said sorry and they both should have done punishment extra school work,” says Lynch.

Instead of extra school work, Tynan Elementary School in South Boston informed Tasha Lynch of the sexual harassment violation.

A spokesman for the school says the principal is looking into an incident that occurred on one of the school buses, but they will not publicly discuss a student.

Lynch has kept her son out of school for two weeks since the incident fearing for his safety. She says kicking the boy was wrong, but it should not be a sexual harassment issue.

This is a code of discipline by the Boston Public Schools and is not being investigated by police. Mark Curran has a disciplinary hearing on Monday during which the school reserves the right to suspend him for three days if found guilty of the violation.

SOURCE





British teacher suspended for 'gross misconduct' after giving stranded dyslexic pupil a lift

What a messed-up world we live in!

A supply teacher has been suspended for 'gross misconduct' after giving a lift to a 17-year-old pupil. Martin Davis, who has been teaching for 23 years, risks losing his job permanently because he drove a dyslexic boy home when the student did not have money for the bus. He said: 'I still can’t believe what’s happened. I was just trying to do this boy a favour and now I could be out of a job.'

Mr Davis, 58, who teaches maths and science, is appealing against the judgement by the recruitment agency for which he worked.

He had been posted to Tyne Metropolitan College, in North Tyneside, and was giving individual support to a number of dyslexic boys. Two weeks ago, he agreed to give one of his pupils a lift home after school because the boy had forgotten his bus fare.

But father-of-two Mr Davis was later told by a school official that he had been 'stupid' to agree to take the pupil in his car, and he apologised.

Brook Street recruitment agency then told him he would not be allowed to return to the school because of his alleged gross misconduct.

When he tried to argue against this decision, agency bosses led him to believe that he had been dismissed, and he has now been told that he must not work until an investigation into his actions has been concluded.

He told the Daily Telegraph: 'I spoke to the class tutor and she was devastated. I also spoke to the boy in question to say goodbye and he was upset and angry about what was happening because he said I had been a great help to him.'

The agency claimed it was only following 'procedures'. A spokesman said: 'The worker in question has acknowledged there is a safeguarding issue, and he has been suspended whilst we complete this investigation, which is required by regulation.'

Tyne Metropolitan College said it had no involvement in the decision to suspend Mr Davis.

SOURCE




Australia: Boys and girls may be split in Victorian classrooms

THE Baillieu Government will encourage state schools to adopt single-sex classes if a current trial lifts academic results.

Education Minister Martin Dixon said the grassroots trial by at least six primary and secondary schools would examine whether students were more likely to thrive in same-sex classrooms.

He said the model potentially offered students the benefits of a private school-style single-sex learning environment, while giving them the social benefits of co-education.

"If this has benefits, and I think it has, you'll find it makes schools a one-stop shop in terms of social and learning experiences for children," Mr Dixon said. "We're certainly not going to mandate it, it is more a matter of facilitating it."

Oberon Secondary College principal Anne Murphy said the Geelong school would trial two single-sex classes in year 8 next year and consider expanding it schoolwide if successful.

"If, educationally, we find that the kids' learning is advanced from being in a single-sex classroom then I would be hard-pressed to justify not offering that more," Ms Murphy said.

"I know several parents will feel this is a co-educational school and they want their children to have a co-educational experience. In a co-educational school we can give them the best of both worlds."

Dromana Secondary College principal Alan Marr said the school had split boys and girls in year 9 maths and English classes.

"It has been a positive experience, so positive we're considering bringing it down into year 8," he said.

"We've noticed the girls have been much calmer and less hesitant to act things out, and the boys have been more confident to express their own opinions."

Some schools, including Essendon Keilor College and Camberwell High School, have been running boys-only classes for several years to address gender imbalances caused by girls attending local all-girl state schools.

Victoria has seven single-sex girls' public schools but only one for boys. Mr Dixon said it was up to individual schools to decide whether to adopt single-sex classes.

"We will make the findings and all the background material (relating to the trial) available to all the schools in the system and say here is an option that may work for your cohort of students," he said.

Parents Victoria executive officer Gail McHardy said schools considering same-sex classes needed to work around families, many of whom wanted their children to learn alongside the opposite sex. Broad consultation with the school community was critical.

The Queensland Government last week extended trials of single-sex classes after participating schools reported improved results.

SOURCE



3 December, 2011

Why we must save our sons from feminized education

I have myself seen evidence of the advantages for boys of having male teachers. I sent my son to a private High School where his mathematics teachers were all male and enthusiastic about mathematics. He now has a B.Sc. with a first in mathematics and is working on his Ph.D. in it at a university known for its excellence in mathematics -- JR

By David Thomas


Fred and his father

So now it’s official — young women are outdoing men at work. The Office for National Statistics has confirmed that female twentysomethings earn more than their male peers — 3.6 per cent more, to be precise. As the father of two daughters in their 20s, I can’t say I’m surprised.

I’m incredibly proud of my girls. Holly, 23, is working day and night to make her way in journalism, a profession that is even more competitive and insecure than when I started out 30 years ago.

Lucy, 22, is training to be a doctor, a profession which, it emerged this week, will have more women than men in just six years’ time. I’ve seen how much effort and determination both have displayed, from their first GCSEs onwards.

They went to a comprehensive, so they weren’t spoon-fed their A-grades. They had to put in the hours, keep themselves motivated and sweat for their achievements. They’ve earned their success.

I also have a 13-year-old son, Fred. He attends the same school as his sisters did. He has just as much energy and, when he puts his mind to something, just as much determination. But he is growing up in a world that seems more and more biased against boys; one in which our sons are falling behind our daughters in almost every measurable way.

A world in which politicians still obsess about every conceivable form of discrimination against women, but ignore the young men who so desperately need help.

That’s why it’s time to send out an SOS message: Save Our Sons.
Huge numbers of young men are effectively being thrown on the scrapheap when they are barely old enough to shave. It’s not just that they are failing or choosing to fail within the education system: the system is failing them.

Let’s just start by looking at the facts. Barely half the pupils in this country get five or more GCSE passes at grades A-C. Of those who do, well over half are girls. The majority of boys in this country, therefore, are failing to reach the basic level of educational attainment. Every year hundreds of thousands of teenage boys leave school with virtually no chance of getting any kind of decent, well-paying job.

In fact, of all the class, race and gender groups in this country (with the sole exception of the tiny number of traveller children), working-class white boys perform the worst. A staggering 85 per cent of boys from poor white families fail to get those five good GCSEs.

The prevailing dogma in early education now demands that both lessons and sport are devoutly non-competitive. It requires children to sit still around tables in which they work together as groups, rather than alone at desks. It is, in other words, perfectly suited to sociable little girls and anathema to boisterous, competitive little boys.

Thus it is all too easy for boys to conclude early on that school is what girls are good at — and they, by extension, are not.

And yet it does not have to be this way. When my daughters went to a small village primary school, the teachers were all women. They were absolutely dedicated to their pupils, but they could not relate to the boys as naturally as to the girls. And then, for a single year, a young, male teacher took over the Year Five and Six class of ten and 11-year-olds.

Suddenly the boys in the class had someone they could talk to about football, computers and other Boy Things. There was someone who understood them, and they blossomed. Then that teacher left, and it was Girl Time again.

Seeing that convinced me I would pay for Fred’s prep school education if it meant he would be taught by male teachers and be given the chance to play competitive sport. Sure enough, he thrived in that environment.

By the time they get to secondary school, though, too many boys who don’t have that opportunity are actively hostile to education. That hostility is a defence mechanism, of course, a way of masking their own sense of alienation, but if that outlook continues until they are 16, they may well be headed for the scrap-heap.

Some will get one of the ever-decreasing number of manual jobs that remain in manufacturing and industry, others will join what’s left of the Armed Forces. But many more slip into the twilight, underclass world of unemployment, drugs, crime and the feckless spawning of children who are then effectively fathered by the State via the benefits system.

These young men have little to offer women, no lasting contribution to make to society, no hope for their own lives. They cost society a fortune, all the way from the dole queue to the prison cell. And if that’s not a major social and political issue, I don’t know what is.....

This may be a politically incorrect and sexist observation in the eyes of some delicate Guardian-reading souls, but most women still want a man who can provide for his family, and who is confident enough in his own status not to feel insecure about his partner’s.

And this leads us on to a deeper, more human issue that has nothing to do with statistics or incomes. We have, as a society, lost the ability, or the will, to acknowledge that our sons have anything at all to offer the world as men.

Our daughters, raised in the era of Girl Power, have rightly been encouraged to believe that anything a man can do, they can do, too. But they’ve also been told again and again that they have qualities men lack. They are more emotionally mature, more sensitive, better communicators, better team-workers, and so on.

In other words, they have been taught that men and women are equal — except for all the ways in which women are superior.

There is now a massive equal rights industry that is obsessed with every real or imaginary form of female inequality. But equality must work both ways, and if it is now boys who are lagging behind, then the political and educational establishment must make it a priority to help them.

Though they are rarely celebrated any more, there are solid male virtues that still exist in decent men: reliability, stamina, physical strength, the desire to provide for and protect their families, and sometimes, as unfashionable as it might be, the ability not to be too emotional. There are times when an arm round the shoulder and the offer of a drink can do more good than all the agonised empathy in the world.

All of us, men or women, are moved by pictures of soldiers coming home from war. The men reach down, their arms open to greet the children running towards them in an image that embodies the strength and courage of a warrior and the love of a father.

But who is telling our sons about that kind of positive, benevolent manliness? Who sets them a good example? Having more male teachers, especially in primary schools, would be a start.

And we should stop being afraid to say anything positive about men, or masculinity, for fear of offending women. In a culture in which so many young men do not have father figures at home or at school, too many boys take their lead from the ill-disciplined brats of Premiership football; the swaggering, misogynist materialism of rap music; or the psychotic violence of computer games.

Our boys — including my own son Fred — are full of potential, full of energy and full of ambitions. All they need is the encouragement and the attention to help them realise their dreams.

More HERE





British schoolchildren to be banned from using calculators amid fears of generation growing up with poor maths skills

Pupils are set to be banned from using calculators in primary schools amid fears a ‘sat-nav’ generation of children are growing up with poor maths skills. Schools minister Nick Gibb said pupils should not ‘reach for a gadget every time they need to do a simple sum.’

It is understood that in future, teachers could be told to stop allowing children aged under nine to use calculators in state schools. Maths exams taken by 11-year-olds are also likely to be reformed – scrapping an existing section that allows pupils to use calculators.

The move comes after a recent survey revealed that Britain was falling behind its international rivals in league tables rating children’s mathematics skills.

British teenagers are now ranked 28th among peers in developed nations after slumping dramatically in the last decade, while Singapore, which has virtually no calculator use for 10-year-olds, was second.

Almost half of all adults have basic maths skills that are no better than those of children aged nine to 11, Government-commissioned research has shown. More than five million people were also found to be struggling with simple reading and writing.

The latest Skills for Life survey questioned more than 7,000 16- to 65-year-olds in England to examine literacy and numeracy levels. The findings reveal that many adults still have maths and English skills similar to those expected of primary school children.

Campaigners warned that there are 'far too many' people with poor basic skills, and more needs to be done for them. In total 16.8million adults - or 49.1 per cent - have numeracy skills at Entry Level 3 or below. This level is equivalent to the achievement expected of a child aged nine to 11.

In literacy, 5.1 million adults, or 14.9 per cent, were at Entry Level 3 or below. Adults with numeracy skills below this level would struggle to pay household bills, or understand price labels on pre-packaged food.

The survey showed that millions of adults are no better at maths and English than five to seven-year-olds.

In total, 2.3 million people in England were found to be at Entry Level 1 or below - the level of attainment for five to seven-year-olds in numeracy, while five per cent were at this stage for literacy. Adults below this level may not be able to write short messages to family, or select floor numbers in lifts.

According to a previously published report, adults are considered to have 'functional' literacy skills if they are above Entry Level 3, and 'functional' numeracy skills if they are above Entry Level 2. Today's survey reveals that 8.1 million adults in England (23.7 per cent) are at Entry Level 2 or below.

Carol Taylor, director for research and development at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace), said: 'We have far too many people with very poor basic skills in this country and the system isn't working for them.

'The headline results of today's survey show a welcome increase in those adults working at Literacy Level 2 (GCSE equivalent) from 44 per cent (in 2003) to 57 per cent, which proves the powerful impact the Skills For Life strategy has had. 'However, it's alarming that 15 per cent of the adult population are performing at Entry Level 3 or below in literacy and 24 per cent in numeracy at Entry Level 2 or below.

'Put simply, around one in six of the adult population has difficulty with aspects of reading and writing which means they are seriously disadvantaged as employees, citizens and parents.

'And around one in four of the adult population struggle with the basics of numeracy, a skill which can have a greater impact on life chances than literacy. 'This is why we're calling for a specific challenge fund to help those with the lowest skills.'

SOURCE





Sex-Ed Classes and the Rape of Our Children's Innocence

As outrageous as it is to hear about the new sex-ed curriculum for New York City schools, beginning with middle schools, there are some school districts for which the program does not start early enough. And so, in June, 2010 the Provincetown, Massachusetts school board voted unanimously to begin distributing condoms to elementary school children upon the student’s request, beginning in first grade and without parental knowledge or consent. (What possible use could a 6-year-old have for a condom?)

After a public outcry, the district agreed to consider restricting condom distribution to grades five and up, meaning, to kids as young as 10. According to the official policy, “the school nurse is to give counseling and abstinence information to a student prior to handing out the condom,” although without parental knowledge or consent.

As for the question of criminality, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16 (under certain circumstances, it is 18), and in answer to the question posed by a 16 year-old boy who was having sex with his 13 year-old girl girlfriend, the SexLaws.org website explained that, “Any sexual conduct with a child age 13 [is] a very serious matter in Massechusetts [sic] whether you are a minor or an adult” (their emphasis).

Doesn’t that mean that this school’s condom distribution is contributing to criminal behavior, not to mention to dangerous and harmful behavior? How can this be allowed?

In a recent article for American Thinker, family activist Linda Harvey notes “that America as a whole is still horrified by child sexual abuse” yet she points to books recommended by GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, better named the Gay, Lesbian, Sex Education Network) that recount the sexual experiences of boys as young as 13 with men more than twice their age. How is this not criminal?

Think about it. We are rightly outraged when we hear of the alleged acts of child rape by trusted adults (such as Jerry Sandusky at Penn State), but is there not a rape of a different kind – at the least, an assault on innocence – when schools show virtually pornographic movies in sex-ed classes or conduct lessons in which girls put condoms on boys’ fingers? (For a shocking report, see this article by Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Policy Institute.) And in the countless cases where these kids are anything but innocent, at the least, these schools are condoning, if not actually encouraging immorality.

One mother posted this on my Facebook page: “I visited the sex-ed teacher at the high school our children were going to attend in 1992. I had heard stories about some of her techniques and was very concerned. When I asked her about modesty, she told me that is something she tries to get the kids over as quick as possible. My daughter brought home the curriculum from the class and I was appalled. There were several pages of vocabulary they would have to know, including every perversion I had ever heard of and some that I never heard of. The definition they had for virgin was someone who had never had the opportunity to have sex. The list included polygamy but not monogamy. It even said that sometimes it is beneficial for a marriage if there is an affair.” And that was back in 1992.

On November 30th, a high school teacher from New York City called into my radio show, wanting me to know that things were far worse in the schools than I could imagine, from the way the kids dress and act to the fact that many of them spend far more time playing terribly violent (and often sexually charged) video games than reading books.

He also told me that in his school, there is a table in the hallway with condoms and lubricants. The students can take them freely, as desired. (Does this surprise you?) The other day, a student put a pile of Gideon’s Bibles on the table, also for the students to take freely. As a result, there was outrage in the school – outrage over the presence of the Bibles, not the presence of the condoms.

Is it an exaggeration to say that we need a massive moral and cultural revolution?

During that same broadcast, I received another called from a man in New York City who was involved in teaching sex education to high school students. As part of the program, he tells these students which condoms work best, among other things.

When I asked him, “Then shouldn’t you also teach the kids about responsible drug use and give out clean needles to intravenous drug users?” he responded, “Yes, we also teach about them drug use as well as where they go for clean needle exchanges.”

We need a revolution.

SOURCE



2 December, 2011

Outpouring of hate from a British "progressive" school

It is shameful but Leftists are hate-driven so it is no surprise. When accused of bullying, they proved the accusation true by being bullies. Amazing. Leftists just can't help themselves. The bile just pours out of them

Amanda Craig

What is it that makes people want to send vitriolic abuse, including death threats, to a total stranger? I can’t begin to imagine. But this year, thanks to Twitter and Facebook, I do know what it is like to be on the receiving end of such embittered hatefulness.

Why? Because I’d dared to write a piece in this newspaper about my teenage years spent at Bedales, the progressive public school that was embroiled in a scandal earlier this year concerning shoplifting and under-age sex.

As a pupil at the school in the 1970s, I had experienced a level of bullying and abuse that I still find disturbing to think about to this day and which inspired my second novel, written 20 years ago, A Private Place.

Yet when I set down my painful memories of my formative years on paper, I never imagined I’d be setting myself up as a sitting target for a new breed of modern-day bullies, who choose not the school playground, but the internet to target their victims.

‘Cyberbullying’ isn’t confined to children — it is a contemporary menace in which people can be targeted anywhere, at any time. When my email inbox began to fill up with awful messages, my first reaction was one of exasperation, quickly followed by cold contempt.

I was totally unprepared for the slew of virulent messages that, for the next month, pinged into my inbox via both my Twitter account and my public Facebook page. Many of these messages are unpublishable in a national newspaper, but they included threats to my personal safety, disgusting sexual abuse, venomous comments about my looks and personality, a flurry of one-star Amazon reviews of my novels — and several attempts to hack into my Wikipedia entry.

Astonishingly, those behind them were girls and boys of between 15 and 21 years old, many of whom declared themselves to be current or former pupils of Bedales. They defended the school by calling me bitter, greedy, bitchy and, what’s more, claimed that I ‘deserved to be bullied’. Then they said that the school was wonderful, and that bullying didn’t exist there, and that ‘every single one of (the abusive comments that had been posted about me) was understandable and acceptable’.

The poisonous mob mentality these messages displayed actually did far more to show any current or prospective parent the ugly side of a ‘liberal’ education than what I had written. I was told that ‘we know where you live, so watch out’, ‘your [sic] dead, bitch’, ‘die, you ugly c***’ and so on.

‘You are insulting an establishment you show no understanding of, in a way in which you can only expect a [sic] outraged reaction. You have not only insulted our way of life, our home but us as individuals. I feel personally attacked,’ wrote one boy.

A couple of current pupils were moved to express sympathy and to assure me that things had changed, but these, like the nicer kind of Bedalian student of my own time, seemed far and few between.

One posted a more moderate, thoughtful comment about my article — and his peers turned on him: ‘Stop s***ing her d**k Toby, and stick up for the f*****g school. Your [sic] the minority here!’ wrote one who called himself George Zealington Vaughan-Barratt.

The abuse was so remarkable that two national newspapers picked it up, and one even wrote a leader page column. Yet when the Head of Bedales, Keith Budge, was approached for comment, his response, as quoted in the Daily Telegraph, was to say his pupils were simply defending their school.

The Old Bedalian magazine, edited by a former member of staff, decided to publish a sneering piece, which included a photograph of me printed upside-down and — a lovely touch — an encomium of the school’s creativity by Kirstie Allsopp.

Nobody in authority has attempted to contact me to apologise, and no pupil, as far as I know, has been reprimanded. Now, I don’t take the ravings of over-excited teenagers seriously. But neither do I think anyone should be allowed to get away with this kind of behaviour — least of all the privileged pupils of a £30,000-a-year school.

For such mindless venom to come from privileged children living in conditions which the majority can only dream of, and attending an institution that prides itself on its liberal outlook would be especially offensive.

Every contemporary school is aware of the life-long emotional and psychological damage that bullying can cause, and the responsible ones, both in the state and private sectors, have strong protocols about dealing with such issues, especially online.

Cyberbullying is worse and more cowardly than playground bullying. Even as an adult, I found the abuse deeply offensive. It was extraordinary that I was being addressed as if I were still the vulnerable, innocent 12-year-old I had been all those years ago. What I had described was so painful that I thought nobody in their right mind could feel anything but shame and compassion — and, more importantly, concern about whether the ills I described were still happening.

Instead, it seemed to provoke the opposite reaction. It was extraordinary — and ludicrous. But that’s the thing about the internet. While it has transformed the way people can communicate, it has also allowed some to say the most unkind things to someone they don’t know, have never met, and wouldn’t dare to confront face-to-face.

These so-called ‘trolls’, inspired by envy, rage and spite, appear to live in a parallel universe in which they believe they can threaten, stalk, intimidate and libel anyone with impunity.

You don’t have to do something as provocative as write about your unhappy schooldays to set them off. Just being pretty, happy, or good at what you do is enough. Whole families can be affected by the fall-out, if my experience is anything to go by.

‘Why do people keep saying horrible things about you on Facebook just because you were bullied at school?’ my 15-year-old son asked me, bemused. ‘Because they’re total losers,’ replied my 18-year-old daughter. Having been forewarned by their schools about how to handle online abuse, they were far better placed to deal with it than me.

My husband was the most shocked — and angered — at the hate-filled messages I showed him. He was the one who then had sleepless nights — and who became the most worried about our physical safety.

I am not easily intimidated, but I was admittedly depressed by this evidence of how little had changed about the mentality of bullies. On the flipside, however, the attempts to undermine me caused something rather wonderful to happen.

A number of distinguished authors, journalists and lawyers — many of whom had, ironically, become friends of mine through Facebook — saw what was being posted on my page and sprang into action, unasked, to defend me with both eloquence and wit.

To see the likes of Philip Hensher, Nicholas Lezard, Louisa Young, Chris Priestly and Katy Guest all pouring scorn on these abusive bloggers was rather like the scene at the end of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novel, The Silver Chair, when the bullies who have been terrorising the children at the progressive Experiment House are punished.

Alarmed by this unexpected challenge, the trolls began, one by one, to delete their messages. Today, they are all gone — though I, and several others, took copies of them, in case they feel tempted to strike again.

People who do not have Twitter and Facebook accounts may be rather mystified by all of this. Meanwhile, those who do may wonder why I have dared to risk further online abuse by describing my experience here.

The answer is two-fold. One is that I believe bullying will never stop unless there is a concerted effort from the top to confront it, and that while any school continues to appear to condone its own smug cult that will not happen. Second, if you haven’t experienced bullying, you have no idea what a scar it leaves on the soul. Just because I learnt how to use my rage in creative, positive ways, writing novels, doesn’t mean that it’s not there.

Connecting with readers and writers through the web can be one of the greatest delights of 21st-century life, as Twitter and Facebook host a vast virtual conversation, in which people share views and exchange ideas about everything, from trivial thoughts to breaking news. But more and more bloggers and writers are complaining about the intimidating attacks made on them.

Caroline Farrow, a vicar’s wife and mother-of-three who blogs for the Catholic Voices website, recently revealed she receives at least five sexually threatening emails a day.

One of the least offensive read: ‘You’re gonna scream when you get yours. F*****g slag. Butter wouldn’t f*****g melt, and you’ll cry rape when you get what you’ve asked for. Bitch.’ That anybody can get away with writing in such a horrific manner to another human being beggars belief — but, thankfully, the law is slowly catching up.

The Police Central e-Crime Unit is responsible for investigating malicious communications. For example, a man of 60 has been charged with sending threatening Twitter messages to MP Louise Mensch.

Perhaps the threat of arrest, a criminal record and punishment will help the bullies think twice. For the victim, an abusive Twitter message or email is no different from receiving verbal abuse, or getting a poison-pen letter.

For the bully, though, there is one key difference: although they think the internet affords them anonymity, every message can be traced back to a location and a specific computer. Cyberbullies would do well to remember that before they click the send button.

SOURCE





Why my school will stay open during the strike

Striking British teachers are part of a culture that is quick to whine and slow to find solutions

Striking teachers will today subject children and parents across Britain to serious inconvenience. I think they’re wrong to do so. For the past 10 years, I have been head teacher at Woodberry Down primary school in Hackney, and I am executive head of four schools in total. Woodberry Down will stay open today. The other three schools in the group will not, because of union action. That is a shame. Striking should be the last resort for teachers, and we should think carefully before returning to the days of downing tools at the slightest pretext.

This strike demonstrates a lack of realism among teaching unions. Someone has to pay for public sector pensions – we’re all living longer, the economy is stagnating, and teachers ought to understand these facts.

I worry, too, about the example being set to children. I remember the teachers’ strikes in the Eighties. It was fun to be out of school for a day, but we had no respect for those who went on strike. We felt that the proper teachers were the ones who were still there, teaching. We were annoyed, actually. I remember that distinctly. I recall thinking: if it’s that easy to remove yourself, by going on strike, do they actually need all the people in the building? I wouldn’t want to make myself disposable in that way.

Other aspects of the strike disturb me. I’ve heard some staff saying they’re not marching, but are going out “for a jolly” today. I hope that’s not the case. We get 13 weeks off a year and, while lots of us work long hours, taking a free day to go Christmas shopping is an insult to parents. What happens if a mother, forced to take a day off work, bumps into a teacher out lunching today? What message does that send?

The unions have their own agendas. For example, I appeared on breakfast television with Christine Blower, the leader of the NUT, and she criticised synthetic phonics, a proven system for improving literacy. It was only afterwards that she said she had never seen synthetic phonics being taught in a school. Here was the head of the country’s largest teaching union passing judgment on something she had not seen. This suggested that the ideology was more important than the reality. You have to use the teaching methods that work. Synthetic phonics is one, but Christine Blower hadn’t bothered to see how it worked.

It’s the same with Sats. They’re not perfect, but if you don’t have tests, you cannot tell which schools need help. And yet, when I sat in on Lord Bew’s review of Key Stage 2 tests, I heard union after union demanding an end to Sats without offering any credible alternative. They seemed prepared to jeopardise the educational wellbeing of children – since external assessment such as Sats is essential if you are to have a system of accountability that lifts standards in schools.

This is the paradox about the unions: on the one hand, they’re very Left-wing and want money poured into deprived areas, but, on the other, they reject the measures that do some good for children in poor communities. Sadly, some unionised teachers have lost sight of why they came into teaching. Trying to improve failing schools, I have faced obstruction from militant teachers who have become so bound up in ideology that they have forgotten the children. Very often, the unions won’t tolerate anything that threatens their beloved “work-life balance”.

What makes the schools I run successful is that we have teachers who realise that, especially with pupils who start from a low base, you need to go the extra mile. That’s where vocation comes in. The drive and energy that you need to inspire children will never fit into the NUT’s rigid work-life policy. To make education work you need dynamism, not people who sigh, shrug their shoulders and moan.

Compare teaching with the medical profession and you’ll see that there’s a different ethic there. There’s an ethos of service. We have lost that in teaching, and that is a shame. Either what we do matters, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t matter, and the children can genuinely afford not to be at school for two or three days a year, then why don’t we just increase the holidays?

It all comes down to this: a school exists for one thing, to educate children. Whatever fight you have with the system, engage in the fight in a way that doesn’t undermine you and let down the pupils.

Today’s strike is a symptom of a culture in parts of the educational establishment that is quick to complain and slow to find solutions. I can understand why people are concerned about pensions. Clearly what issues there are need to be resolved. But I think a lot of that concern has been whipped up by unions determined to criticise whatever the Government does. And these unions are determined to live in a world where reality, including financial reality, does not exist.

I didn’t come into the profession for the money. I trained as a teacher because I wanted to improve people’s lives. This is what we try to do in our federation of schools. I love teaching. In fact, I’m looking forward to going into work today. By coming to school I will have helped to make a positive impact on children’s lives, and on their chances of finding fulfilment and reaching their potential – something I would not be able to do standing on Victoria Embankment waving banners.

SOURCE





Chancellor Miller Tear Down This Wall

Mike Adams

Dear Dr. Miller:

Let me first express my great satisfaction over your selection as our new chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I am delighted to have a former Mississippi State Bulldog in charge of our university. I am also impressed by your qualifications. Unlike your predecessor, you were not selected on the basis of your gender or any other irrelevant demographic characteristics. You were selected on the basis of your qualifications. You deserved the position you were awarded. And you’ve been doing an outstanding job so far.

Unfortunately, some of the actions of your predecessor have damaged the climate for free expression at UNC-Wilmington. Among those actions was a decision to post our Seahawk Respect Compact on the wall of every classroom at the university. My purpose in raising this issue is fourfold. I want to 1) highlight (by underlining) a portion of the respect compact that I believe to be problematic, 2) explain how I think it could be misinterpreted, 3) relate a recent classroom incident that shows how it is, in fact, being abused, and 4) propose a solution to the problem.

The Seahawk Respect Compact is indented below. Note that the bold portions are not my emphasis. I have underlined only one small portion for emphasis:

In the pursuit of excellence, UNC Wilmington actively fosters, encourages, and promotes inclusiveness, mutual respect, acceptance, and open-mindedness among students, faculty, staff and the broader community.

~ We affirm the dignity of all persons.

~ We promote the right of every person to participate in the free exchange of thoughts and opinions within a climate of civility and mutual respect.

~ We strive for openness and mutual understanding to learn from differences in people, ideas and opinions.

~ We foster an environment of respect for each individual, even where differences exist, by eliminating prejudice and discrimination through education and interaction with others.

Therefore, we expect members of the campus community to honor these principles as fundamental to our ongoing efforts to increase access to and inclusion in a community that nurtures learning and growth for all.

As you can see, Chancellor Miller, I have a problem with the suggestion that there is some sort of “right” that extends to “every person” and which entitles him to be the recipient of “respect.” Let me explain why this is wrongheaded by sharing a few examples:

* Several years ago, an N.C. State visiting professor expressed the view that all white people needed to be “exterminated” from the face of the earth. He was invited to debate me on Fox News and he declined. When I went on Fox to denounce him, I was not concerned about “civility.” He was not entitled to it. He’s a violent racist. Nor was he entitled to “respect” for his violent racist views. In fact, given his advocacy of violence and fear of debate he was not even entitled to respect as a human being. He just needed a good public shaming.

* Around that time, a professor here in North Carolina wrote to me saying that the Holocaust was the greatest “hoax” perpetrated in modern history. I went on national television to rebuke her. She was also invited to debate me on Fox News. Like the other racist at N.C. State, she declined. I did not - nor do I now - respect her views. I do not even respect her as a person. Put simply, nothing can make me respect an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.

* Finally, there is a professor here at UNCW who has reportedly articulated the view – in class, mind you – that 911 was the result of a planned conspiracy between Bush and “the Jews.” Because she has tenure, UNCW is stuck with the 911 conspiracy theorist as well as her anti-Semitic views. But what about the occasional Jewish student in her classroom? Should she be required to “respect” her professor’s anti-Semitic views?

I hope you see the danger in granting a “right” to be respected. Once students begin to believe that respect is an entitlement they are granted - and not a privilege they must earn - the academic work product suffers. Bad ideas are placed on equal footing with good ideas and eventually the pursuit of truth suffers as a whole. But the pursuit of truth is already suffering here at UNCW. Earlier this semester, there was a vigorous discussion in one of our social science classes. Ideas were exchanged and disagreement was articulated. But, following the conversation, something unfortunate happened. The professor sent an email to all of his students reminding them that they were required by the Seahawk Respect Compact to maintain a climate of mutual respect and civility. An important question follows: Is there any chance that the professor’s email will not adversely affect future discussions by creating a chilling effect on free speech?

You know as well as I do that student discussions are not bound by the Seahawk Respect Compact. At this public university, they are bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Therefore, I ask that you order the Seahawk Respect Compact to be removed from every classroom at UNCW. I furthermore ask you to replace it with a copy of the First Amendment so students will be reminded daily that the right to be unoffended is to be found nowhere in our constitution.

This action will also remind our students that the UNCW handbook is not the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the law of the law. It has not been preserved by the blood and sacrifice of the easily offended.

With all due respect and civility,

Mike S. Adams

SOURCE



1 December, 2011

Is this the future of American education?

The Look Like America bill, originally H.R. 1533, seemed a perfectly ordinary piece of feel-good legislation when proposed by Barack Osama Obama. “Our diversity is our strength,” he said. “We must increase the representation of minorites in our institutions to reflect our diverse population and ensure the fairness for which America stands.” Congress passed the bill without reading it. It was the sort of thing one passed. Besides, there was no money involved, and the bill was not obviously anti-Semitic.

Not obviously. But then one of the obscure policy shops that abound in Washington, the Committee for Ethnic Piety, filed suit against Harvard for noncompiance. The proximate cause was an article in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper, about a course called Math 55, the hardest math course at the univrsity and thus, Harvard liked to think, in America. The students in Math 55, reported the Crimson, were 45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, and 100 prcent male. The class didn't, said the Committee for Ethnic Piety, look like America.

It certainly didn't.

Harvard, ever sensitive to questions of justice, which it conflated with federal funding, agreed to make the class Look Like America. The administration asserted that only through inadvertence had it failed to notice the clear racism, sexism, and continent-ism occurring under its nose. It established a committee of reform, which set to work.

The first and most ticklish hurdle was The Jewish Question. Jews were two percent of the American population. At 45 percent in Math 55, they were over-represented by a factor of over twenty. The injustice was undeniable. Two percent of a class of twenty-five meant that Math 55 should contain half a Jew. It would then look like America. The Jewish students would have to go.

As news of the proposed ethnographic hecatomb spread across the country, alarm erupted among the prejudiced. Over seven hundred departments of engineering across the country protested. They could see where Looking Like America was going. Math departments, Silicon Valley, the National Institutes of Health—all reeked of injustice, meaning Koreans, Jews, Indianss, and Chinese, and were conscious of sin. They didn't Look Like America. They Looked Like Math 55. In the Bay area, the proportion of geniuses from India in computing was alarmingly high. Some laboratories Looked Like the Punjab. These malefactors knew well that the coming of justice would gut their enterprises.

Desperate to maintain their positions of racial and patriarchal privilege, they pointed out that the Jewish kids, like all the students in Math 55, had 800 math Boards and had done things like independently develop tensor calculus by the age of three. The view from the Gulch was expressed off-the-record by Dr. Gud Soma Darjeeling, president of Santa Clara Neurocomputing, which employed seventy PhDs in solid-state physics, including three Anglos. “Look, the US is in intellectual collapse. The average American university wouldn't qualify as a high-school in Japan. It's crazy. The whole world know it's crazy. But take out the Kims, Khans, Nguyens, Wangs, and Cohens, and what's left is Albania in 1750.”

The lead attorney for CEP, Patricia Mikoyan-Gurevich, wasn't having it: “Ability doesn't exist, and occurs equally in all groups, and anyway justice is more important than patriarchal-racist abstractions. Sexism is clear at Harvard. When an entire class is male, it isn't by accident.”

With this, no one was in disagreement.

Asians were as problematic as Jews. If a Jewish pppulation of two percent required half a Jew in a class of twenty-five, then a six percent population of Aisans required an Asian-and-a-half. Various solutions were proposed. Perhaps a short, light-weight Gujarati would do, or maybe a prodigy of ten from Mumbai. Otherwise, admitting three Asians every two years might serve.

The paucity of females in Math 55 was easier to address. Harvard had already established that there was no difference in mathematical ability by firing a president who thought there might be. Since ability didn't exist and was found equally in everyone, the sxual balance was quickly rendered equitable by eliminating entrance requirements.

Harvard then set about the intricate matter of making the class thirteen percent black, sixteen percent Hispanic, a tenth of a percent Iroquois, and so on.

Meanwhile, CEP turned its attention to the lush pastures of music. The New York Philharmonic, being in New York, was discovered to consist disportionately of Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and so on. It Looked Like New York, which wouldn't do. The American Association of the Musically Hopeless, consisting of the deaf, tone-deaf, mutes, and amputees, filed suit on grounds that their membership was not represented at all. (They carefully overlooked the fact that they were over-represented among rock bands.) This brought up an important juridical question: Since most Americans could not play an instrument, should not the orchestra reflect this?

Thirteen years after the passage of the Look Like America bill, the United States ranked in international measures of mathematics just behind the Central African Republic, the New York Phil couldn't play Happy Birthday, and racial and sexual justice flourished. Yet the vexed problem of Math 55 had not been entirely solved. Progress had been made, yes. The class looked almost like America, counting on its fingers and showing no trace of patriarchalism, which in any event it couldn't spell. However, CEP's Committee on Oppressed and Marginalized Indigenous Peoples of Color noted that the class contained no student from oppressed peoples of the Amazon rain forest. CEP regarded national boundaries as essentially phallic, since they were longer than they were wide, and thus beneath notice.

Harvard, distraught at finding yet another instance of its institutional racism, cast about for a suitable indigene.
After a laborious search the university discovered Wunxputl, a member of the Tloxyproctyl tribe of the Amazon Basin, consisting of twelve people who lived on yams and the flesh of the Three-Toed Sloth. Wunxputl was at Wellesley, where he served in a minor administrative position that had no responsibilities. He had been brought there seven years earlier by the anthropology department, so it could atone for White Guilt. It didn't matter that Wellesley was guilty of nothing. The atonement was a pleasant form of narcissism, allowing the faculty to congratulate themselves on their moral purity.

Harvard arranged with Wellesley to borrow Wunxputl for three minutes every seven years, which it had calculated would satisfy the demands of ethnic proportionality. Justice, at last, had been achieved.

SOURCE






Zero Tolerance Insanity

Desperation is slowly setting in with the educational overseers of our prepubescent and adolescent inmates at America’s public schools. Zero tolerance for innocence is now the rule. Normal affection between human beings has become grounds for opprobrium and punishment at school.

In Palm Bay Florida, for example, a middle school student was suspended for hugging a friend in the hallway between classes.

There’s a zero-tolerance for hugging policy at this school. There’s no difference between an unwanted hug, or sexual harassment, and a hug between friends according to Southwest Middle School's student handbook and strict zero-tolerance for affection policy.

The kid gave a quick hug to his best female friend. The principal saw it. The hug was innocent. He knew that. But both kids were brought to the dean’s office. Both were suspended for violating the zero-tolerance for hugging policy.

“[W]e cannot discriminate or make an opinion on what is an appropriate hug, what's not an appropriate hug," a school district spokesperson explained. "What you may think is appropriate, another person may view as inappropriate."

Elsewhere in Florida, a hysterical Orange River Elementary School administrator called the cops when a 12-year-old girl was spotted planting a kiss on a boy during recess.

On the playground one day two little 12-year-old girls were apparently discussing the matter as to which of them liked a 12-year-old boy more when one of them just walked over and kissed the lucky lad.

Lee County Sheriff’s deputies were immediately dispatched to the playground scene of the “crime” by a call from the schools assistant principal to deal with the situation between two consenting school children who shared an innocent little kiss.

"They called us and said they caught two children kissing on the playground," Sgt. Stephanie Eller told Fox News & Commentary. The deputies took a report and documented the incident, but determined no crime had been committed. No one was arrested, she added.

"If it had been a crime at all it would have been a simple battery,” said Eller. “The battery consists of the unwanted touching of one person to another."

So now I suppose that innocent games of tag on playgrounds all across America will give rise to “crimes” of unwanted touching – battery in the schoolyard – for which the little ones involved will be arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the police station for booking and punishment.

Zero tolerance for touching. Zero tolerance for discretion. Zero tolerance for common sense. Will a pat on the back or the shaking of innocent hands be next?

SOURCE




Bright British children to be sent to 'maths schools'

A rather strange idea -- but it may be a reasonable response to a shortage of good math teachers

A new generation of maths schools will be created as part of a Government plan to boost Britain’s economic competitiveness, it emerged today.

Around 12 specialist institutions for 16- to 18-year-olds will be opened to give pupils expert tuition under the guidance of university mathematics departments

Unveiling the plans in his Autumn Statement, George Osborne said the colleges would help produce graduates in academic disciplines seen as vital to the country’s economic recovery.

On Tuesday, the Chancellor announced that a total of £600m would be earmarked for 100 new “free schools” – establishments opened and run by parents' groups, charities and private companies free of local council interference – between 2013/14 and 2014/2015.

Of those, around a dozen will specialise in maths for teenagers, he said. “This will give our most talented young mathematicians the chance to flourish,” Mr Osborne told the Commons. “These ‘Maths Free Schools’ are exactly what Britain needs to match our competitors – and produce more of the engineering and science graduates so important for our longer term economic success.”

But teachers condemned the move. Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “At a time of unprecedented economic pressure it is incomprehensible that the Government is committing that sum of funding to creating 100 new free schools when so many existing schools are in desperate need of investment.”

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: “In naked pursuit of the Coalition's elitist vision of education, 100 free schools and a handful of pupils get £600m while children in 22,000 other schools fight over a few hundred pounds.”

In a further announcement, it was revealed that another £600m would be spent creating additional school places in areas with the greatest “demographic pressures”. It is already feared that many infants are being forced to travel miles to primary school because of an acute shortage of places caused by a baby boom and influx of migrants in some areas. Many schools have been forced to turn hundreds of children away while others have created extra space by educating pupils in mobile classrooms or local church halls.

The biggest pressures have been reported in parts of London and cities such as Bristol and Birmingham.

On Tuesday, Mr Osborne said money would be allocated to places with the greatest need to deliver an additional 40,000 school places between 2012/13 and 2014/15. This comes on top of £800m a year already allocated each year – and an extra £500m for 2011/12.

SOURCE






Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.


TERMINOLOGY: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.


The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed


Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.


Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor


I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.


Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".


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


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


A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.


Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.


Comments above by John Ray