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28 February, 2005

ARE THESE PATHETIC WHINERS THE SORT WHO SHOULD BE EDUCATING KIDS?

A 13-year-old student in Orange County, Fla., was suspended for 10 days and could be banned from school over an alleged assault with a rubber band, according to a Local 6 News report. Robert Gomez, a seventh-grader at Liberty Middle School, said he picked up a rubber band at school and slipped it on his wrist. Gomez said when his science teacher demanded the rubber band, the student said he tossed it on her desk.

After the incident, Gomez received a 10-day suspension for threatening his teacher with what administrators say was a weapon, Local 6 News reported. "They said if he would have aimed it a little more and he would have gotten it closer to her face he would have hit her in the eye," mother Jenette Rojas said. Rojas said she was shocked to learn that her son was being punished for a Level 4 offense -- the highest Level at the school. Other violations that also receive level 4 punishment include arson, assault and battery, bomb threats and explosives, according to the Code of Student Conduct.

The district said a Level 4 offense includes the use of any object or instrument used to make a threat or inflict harm, including a rubber band. Rojas plans to fight the ruling but her son still faces expulsion. "It's ridiculous, it's a rubber band," Rojas said.

The school's principal could not comment because the case is still under investigation. A district spokesman said there is still a series of meetings the district will have before Gomez is officially expelled.

Source



Bilingual education fails the kids but the Leftist elites still love it

(Of course! Keep the peasants in their place!)

When test scores came out recently showing that Latino immigrant kids are getting much better at reading and writing English, California Superintendent of Schools Jack O'Connell urged schools to find ways to move them out of special English and into mainstream classes. Good idea, since many can't get access to advanced placement courses for college so long as they're designated as "English learners" and kept too long in training-wheels-style English immersion classes.

I found it rich that O'Connell is urging schools to act. To a large degree, it's his fault they haven't. Under Proposition 227, immigrant children were only supposed to stay in special immersion for a year or so, then go to mainstream class. But O'Connell has refused to credit English immersion for soaring English literacy rates. His silence emboldens the anti-English ideologues who still strive to keep Latino kids in a separate world. Again this month, O'Connell refused to credit English immersion, telling the San Francisco Chronicle he won't guess why kids are learning English so well. Guess? Year after year, he's failed to crunch data that could compare kids still stuck in "bilingual" to those in English immersion. The state Board of Education finally ordered O'Connell to produce a study withthat in mind.

While we wait, I did my own study. I found that school districts like Los Angeles Unified - where moderate Democrats stamped out failing bilingual education amidst fierce lefty resistance - are producing big, lasting gains in English literacy. By contrast, districts controlled by left-wing Democrats with an attitude of "they won't be able to talk to grandma!" are producing smaller gains. In 2001, of 244,000 L.A. kids who weren't native English speakers, only 17 percent scored as "advanced or early advanced" on statewide English tests. Today, a stunning 49 percent get those high scores.

Back then, L.A. was paying 6,000 teachers a yearly bonus ($2,500 to $5,000) to teach in Spanish - the disastrous bilingual program. Now, only 679 teachers get the bonuses and teach "bilingual." See any pattern there, Mr. O'Connell?

By contrast, San Diego Unified was run by sad, fad-obsessed school honchos Alan Bersin and Tony Alvarado, who kowtowed to its anti-reform teachers union. It shows. In 2001, of 33,800 San Diego kids who weren't native English speakers, 24 percent got "advanced or early advanced" scores on the English tests. Today, 41 percent get those high scores - well behind L.A.

Virulently anti-Prop. 227 Berkeley Unified is almost frozen in place. In 2001, of the 1,000 Berkeley kids who weren't native English speakers, 42 percent scored "advanced or early advanced" on English tests. Today, 45 percent do. L.A. - far more urban and poverty-riddled - has blown past leafy Berkeley. O'Connell's silence emboldens these people. In Sacramento, legislators will soon hold education hearings aimed at dumbing-down Latino kids with a separate curriculum. The key guest speaker is an outrageous Pied Piper from the "bilingual" fiasco days, dead-wrong Canadian theorist Jim Cummins.

We should pray that pragmatic Democrats, the Republicans and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stop the hard left. But unfortunately, many Democrats are scared and Republicans are a minority in the Legislature. One pragmatic Democrat - Reed Hastings - just lost his job on the state Board of Education for defying the lefties on immersion.

While pragmatists from both parties base their views on facts, the left nurses its longtime religious fervor against immersion. Just to remind you how bad their fervor is, let's look back to 1998: Then-San Francisco school board President Carlota del Portillo declared that English immersion "has no educational basis and would set our students back 30 years." Jerry Perenchio, chief of Spanish-language Univision, spent $1.5 million fighting Prop. 227. A Republican, he adopted the views of lefty aides at Univision. One Perenchio aide derided English immersion - the most common method used in the United States - as an ''untested teaching method." Then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, now running for mayor of Los Angeles, denounced Prop. 227 as another Proposition 187. Then-state Sen. Richard Polanco insisted, "[Prop. 227] will do more damage to the [children] in the long run."

The left should grow up. Each year, California must educate a massive new influx of non-English speaking kids from Third World Mexico and other Central American countries, in numbers seen nowhere else in the nation. Ronni Ephraim, the gifted chief instructional officer at L.A. Unified, says Latino parents "recognize that at school their child should acquire a strong base of English, and at home they can support them in maintaining their home language. Parents want their children to be competitive."

So why is the Legislature still pursuing a separate curriculum and lower standards for Latinos, and inviting in one of the worst Pied Pipers of the bilingual fiasco? "I don't understand Sacramento," Ephraim told me. "Why would anyone want to hold a kid back?" Well, that's a true conundrum. But abetted by O'Connell's silence, that's precisely what's afoot.

Source

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

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

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27 February, 2005

UTAH REJECTS INEPT BUREAUCRACY

They can afford to

Utah's state Legislature is poised to repudiate the No Child Left Behind Act and spurn $116 million in federal aid tied to it because state policy-makers are fed up with federal control of education and dictates. "This is not a partisan issue; this is a states' rights issue," said Rep. Margaret Dayton, a 55-year-old Republican and mother of 12 who has led the rebellion to make Utah the first state to opt out of No Child Left Behind. "We share the same passion President Bush has for quality education, but there is not one opponent [to opting out] in the entire Legislature, which is 2-to-1 Republican," Mrs. Dayton said.

Mrs. Dayton's bill and another giving primacy to state education standards won unanimous House approval last week. The state Senate, whose education committee also unanimously passed the measures to pull out of No Child Left Behind, will act this week. No senator has voiced opposition, and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, is prepared to sign the measures, state officials said.

Bush administration officials have conducted round-the-clock negotiations in an attempt to prevent Utah from becoming the first state to ignore the school accountability law. The law establishes conditions for states and school districts with low-income families to receive about $13 billion a year in federal grants. Utah's share is about $116 million, which the state would lose if it spurns No Child Left Behind requirements.

Utah wants to use state definitions for "highly qualified teachers" and school quality rather than definitions prescribed by No Child Left Behind. The state has been demanding more flexibility in required student testing to measure reading and math achievement, saying handicapped students and children with learning disabilities in special education cannot keep pace with other students. State officials contend that the law is unfair because it labels schools "in need of improvement" if even one subgroup of students, such as those in special education, fail to make "adequate yearly progress" in reading or math two years in a row.

The state has more than 20,000 first- through third-graders who don't read at grade level, including a disproportionate number of special-education students and children whose primary language is not English. A major sticking point for the administration is Utah's insistence that students in special education and those whose primary language is not English be measured separately from the entire school population in order to gauge whether a school has met adequate yearly progress. The administration opposes the move because a primary goal of No Child Left Behind is to close a large learning achievement gap between white and minority students. Utah has a 20-point achievement gap between white and Hispanic students in both reading and math, according to the latest tests by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Eight other state legislatures -- in Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Vermont and Virginia -- are considering challenges to No Child Left Behind. Utah's action "sets the stage for what other states will do down the line," said Scott Young, an education policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver. "Other states are watching to see if the defiance convinces the federal government to be more flexible with its requirements."

Source



UPDATE ON THE CONTROVERSY AT COLUMBIA

Various Jewish students at Columbia have protested at the one-sided Islamic rants against Israel in various courses at Columbia. Supporters of the Islamist "teachers" at Columbia are defending themselves by saying that the students concerned are trying to enforce orthodoxy -- the exact opposite of what they are in fact doing -- which is to protest against an Islamic orthodoxy! Good old Leftist doublespeak. Orwell lives! Excerpt:

"Columbia students and faculty gathered in Jerome Greene Hall last night to hear a discussion of the historical relevance of the current controversy surrounding the MEALAC department at Columbia during a panel discussion entitled “McCarthyism and the University: A Historical Discussion on Free Speech and the Academy from the Cold War to the Present.”....

Schrecker also criticized Campus Watch and the student group Columbians for Academic Freedom for their involvement in the current controversy, and said that they are “trying to impose orthodoxy at this University, often in the name of academic diversity.” She said she believes such “interference” is detrimental to higher education.

Mamdani addressed the presence of McCarthyism at Columbia today and in the media coverage of the MEALAC coverage. “This particular threat to the University is probably the most serious in recent history,” he said of the allegations of academic bias presented by students..... The panel was sponsored by the Columbia ACLU."

More here. A further update here

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

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

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26 February, 2005

Three comments on academic bias from students:



ACADEMIC FREEDOM

The issue of academic freedom has been brought to the forefront in recent weeks. Apparently academic freedom is being extended so far, in some cases, that a professor in Colorado named Ward Churchill can replace his ethnic studies curriculum with radical, anti-American, anti-capitalist establishment propaganda.

Churchill describes with accuracy his feelings regarding the Sept. 11 tragedy. While he says he mourns for the losses of the individuals in the towers and planes, his mourning is coupled with rants on how so many of the victims had it coming, comparing them to Nazis at one point. He spends extended amounts of time rationalizing the terror tactics of those who hate America, demonstrating that he more fully understands radical Islam and the ideas that feed hatred than ideals such as democracy and justified military action against evil, perhaps even giving preference to the former.

In some disturbing cases, however, free thought is squelched so readily that the Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, cannot even mention the biological differences between women and men as a possible reason for women's under representation in the field of science without having several faculty members leave the room. Summers outlined a host of reasons why women do not often reach tenured professorships in science and math at a conference where such matters were a major topic. He offered inborn differences between the sexes among other factors in an informal and speculative discourse. Bear in mind, he was asked to consider all possibilities, and since his remarks, he has been repentant to the people he offended, something I could not do.

I liken the people who left the forum after Summers' remark, too offended to even ask him a question and discuss the issue further, with Churchill. These are modern fascists, secular-feminist-socialist operatives with a feeling of entitlement and self-righteousness so strong they can't even conceive of a person mentioning what Summers did, or being fired for teaching what Churchill has.

I do not know enough science to defend or refute Summers mentioning inborn differences. That is not the important point - Summers was doing what a learned person at a fine university should do: considering everything. He tossed into the ring a notion he did not say he believed to be completely veritable, but he paid for it, paid for trying to be a fair broker of intellectual discourse on the university scene.

That is a sad story. The neo-liberals who I'm discussing might, on a normal day, sound like the staunchest advocates of academic freedom, and they likely would come to the defense of people like Churchill. But I don't think that leaving a forum where issues are being discussed freely and provocatively is an example of tolerating another person's intellectual freedom.

It is clear that higher education is dominated by ideologues with their blinded vision of how and what young people should be taught. This is manifested in small things, like the limited credence granted to students who raise conservative or even moderate views in class, or who are at least pragmatic about the motives of "the learned" and detect plain-to-see bias. This fact also shows up in the curriculum of many courses, and especially the reading selections in courses at a public school like ours.

A good English course, especially at a private school, often revolves around a "Great Books" core of classic literature. My experiences to this point in two English courses have included a docket of new books where the majority of the content is driven by socialism and other radical interests but is treated as some form of enlightenment. Are academic elites really making a stand for open-mindedness and intellectual freedom when they only choose readings that reflect their views? I think not.

This is why academia is so troubled. A group of people who selectively enforce the rules of intellectual freedom, making it limitless for liberals and constricting it for others, dominate the university scene.

Think about this as you go about your schedule of classes, meet different professors and encounter different curriculums. Many professors are fair and have undetectable bias, but keep your eyes open for instances where academic freedom is restricted or abused. Even if you agree with a particular professor, consider the way that their argument is made and how they handle opposition. Usually teachers remind students to be politically fair and to keep an open mind. These days, however, it is often the teachers who need to be instructed.

Source



A PROTEST AGAINST POLITICS REPLACING EDUCATION

I was at my seminar last week wasting my share of $328 and some change by not participating in the conversation going on, but rather doodling, dare I toot my own horn, some pretty hot stick figures.... So, at my seminar someone mentioned that Laura Bush would be working during her second term to try to reduce the influence of gangs on "at-risk young men" and wanted to know up to five suggestions we would make to her. I awoke from my deep, deep doodling slumber and my ears perked up. "This could be interesting," I thought, but was immediately disappointed when we went on a long tirade about what I consider Laura Bush-bashing. I mean, this went on for several minutes. We ended class, an opportunity for great learning wasted, after only three people had each suggested only one idea for Laura Bush.

Call me a weenie, but for crying out loud, can we go 20 minutes in a class that is not directly related to our current government and refrain from bashing the current administration? Yes, he is a Republican; yes, he is from Texas; yes, like all the 42 presidents that came before, he is - gasp - male and white; yes, he has an interesting smirk; yes, wearing a cowboy hat with an expensive suit takes away from the business attire look; yes, a red tie should not go with every suit he wears; yes, he has introduced words in the English language that we have never before heard a president say. Do you really want to tell me that in all your years on earth you have never created a word of your own while conversing with one or more people?

But is all that I've mentioned what you came to college for? To find elaborate ways to say "I don't like?" When exactly is the part when we grow up to realize that we cannot get everything we want, deal with the situation as it is, (the fact that Bush will still be president for yet another term no matter what you say in a classroom), and, note: this part is important ... move on.

I am not at Smith to learn about the political background of my professors or my peers. I am here to learn subjects that cater to a specific major so that I may go out in to the world and take the next step. Be considerate; refrain from discussing issues like the shortcomings of our current administration when it has nothing to do with class.

There was so much that we could have done with my classmate's question. We could have asked why gangs are on the president's agenda in the first place. Are there such serious gang wars taking place all over the United States that it takes away our liberty to walk to the nearest Starbucks to get our cup of coffee in the morning? We could have asked why he has given this task to Laura Bush. Can America's problem with gangs, if it exists, be solved by the president's wife "educating parents and communities on the importance of promoting positive youth development," as the White House website says? How exactly will they be educating these parents and communities?

We could have asked what is and will be defined as a gang. Is the KKK, for example, considered a gang? If so, does "KKK" shown at baseball games represent gang pride as the quintessential gangs we think of show off their gang colors? My point is that with the time spent Laura Bush-bashing we could have really come up with great insights and interesting observations.

I was not the only one that made a $329 dollar mistake in class; it seems to me that we all did. We missed a classic opportunity to be Smithies that analyze an initiative that will surely affect our generation and spent it making a jest of an individual who probably does not give a rat's behind that we were talking about her in our classroom. Squash the bug of inequality and open the jar of freedom, people! Take back your class time.

Source



FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR LEFTISTS ONLY

Regardless of age, we have all heard the phrase, "First Amendment Rights," bandied about. Free speech has been the rallying cry of the liberal elite since the 60s, and every time violent protesters are beaten back by police or cordoned off from a rally, the ACLU comes a calling. However, the same team of trial lawyers, rebel billionaires and Deaniacs turn a blind eye toward the abuses of their academic brethren. America's colleges and universities are anything but free speech zones. Contrary to their mantra of universal tolerance, Stalinist professors and administrators see intellectual diversity as a disease. Unpopular viewpoints, like a belief in absolute truth or the Republican Party, are actively discouraged.

The reality of liberal bias on campus is so overwhelming that columnists and commentators are forced to choose between countless illustrations. Whether examining the anti-Christian bent at the University of North Carolina, where one student was labeled a sexist bigot for asserting his personal belief that homosexuality is immoral and Alpha Iota Omega Christian Fraternity was derecognized as a student organization for refusing to admit non-Christians, or the age-old liberalism of Berkeley, where researchers found that conservatism is a disease shared by Hitler and Ronald Reagan, the bias is clear. Liberal professors see conservative beliefs as vermin and our universities as their own, private roach motels. Ideally, conservative minds check in, but they don't check out.

Our professors have at least four years to scare us Democrat, and they seldom waste an opportunity. Studies show that liberals hire liberals; the faculty at elite institutions like Duke and Yale fall to the Left of Hillary Clinton. More frightening, however, is the condition of our average campus. Along with the elites, most state schools are stacked with Democrats and Socialists. Perhaps conservatives are just too stupid for academia, as Dr. Robert Brandon, chairman of Duke's philosophy department, once asserted. Myself, I tend to believe that hiring committees prefer "fellow travelers." And as for self-selection, I think most Right-wingers are smart enough to see the "CONSERVATIVES NEED NOT APPLY" sign hanging beneath the ivy.

Of course, campuses are larger than the classroom and the message of liberal professors might be drowned out by inappropriate speakers. That's why our faculty and administrators are careful to allocate the lion's share of funding to invite still more liberals. After all, if not for men like Ward Churchill, how would students come to understand the innate evil of America? A true conservative would never think to compare 9/11 victims to Nazis!

However, unfortunately for our Stalinist friends, control over class time and tuition only goes so far. Outspoken students might still convince their peers that John Kerry and Karl Marx don't have all the answers. Darn that First Amendment. It was so useful for flag burning.

Some universities try to institute campus speech codes, limiting dialogue to their understanding of political correctness. Most just lambaste conservative students. At UNC-Charlotte, the resident College Republican chapter recently hosted their third annual "affirmative action" bake sale. Treats were offered at lower prices to traditionally recognized minorities, protesting how "affirmative action universities" accept minorities with comparatively lower academic credentials. Kristen McManus, UNC-Charlotte's Associate Director for Academic Initiatives for Mentoring Students, was quick to label her students as racist. Titling the communiqu‚, "Racist Practice at UNCC," McManus e-mailed the press and warned them of the College Republicans' "egregious methodology." After this slur, will members of the UNC-Charlotte College Republicans remain comfortable coming to McManus for academic assistance? Would you feel safe around someone who called you a racist?

All considered, however, campus conservatives shouldn't feel too badly. The Stalinists will even cannibalize a Clintonite for speaking out of turn. When President Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard University speculated aloud that "innate differences" between the sexes might explain why fewer women succeed in careers of math and science, he was attacked by feminists and academics alike. The former treasury secretary has been threatened with a vote of no confidence by Harvard's faculty and thus far, no one is willing to let him forget his flub. I find it ironic that the presidents of Stanford, MIT and Princeton are in an uproar over their colleague's mere speculation, when none of them were offended by the Berkeley study that labeled conservatives as mentally ill.

Perhaps this sentiment is just a product of my diseased, conservative mind, but I get the feeling that academia isn't even fooling itself anymore. After all, if professors pretend that free speech rights exist on campus, someone might try to exercise them.

Source

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

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

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25 February, 2005

NEED FOR BIG REFORM BEING ADMITTED

With dropout rates rising, governors nationwide are being asked to lead a high school overhaul that demands more skills of students and help from colleges. The call for action, outlined Tuesday by leaders of an upcoming national summit on high schools, would change everything from core course requirements to state graduation standards. It came as the Educational Testing Service reported Tuesday that high school completion rates dropped nationally from 1990 to 2000, with about one third of students failing to graduate. It is the latest in a string of sobering assessments of high school performance. "Students can make it to the top of the K-12 ladder, only to find that they still can't reach the bottom rung of success for the rest of their lives," said Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, co-chairman of Achieve, a group formed by governors to help states raise academic standards. "In order to close this gap," Taft said at a news conference Tuesday, "we must pursue a fundamental redesign of a sacred institution - the American high school."

Governors from virtually all 50 states and five U.S. territories are expected to be in Washington on Saturday and Sunday for a summit hosted by Achieve and the National Governors Association. It is the fifth governors' education summit, but the first one on high schools. "We have this moment in time, where there is a growing understanding that high school redesign and high school reform must be a national agenda item," said Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, chairman of the governors association and a leader of this weekend's meeting.

Summit leaders released their goals in advance of the event in hopes of building attention and momentum. Given the scope of the policy changes they want, and the fact that each state decides what to demand of students, organizers know they have a sales job to do. It will start with the governors themselves - state chiefs who can help coordinate the efforts and missions of their states' overlapping education agencies. The goal is to unite governors, business executives and school leaders around a plan in each state to:

_ Demand tougher courses, and align graduation requirements with what's expected in college and the workplace. As one example, each state would need to require four years of rigorous English and math classes.

_ Redesign high school to provide all students with more choices and support. States would give priority to low-performing schools and provide more college-level courses.

_ Give all students excellent teachers and principals, particularly by offering incentives to draw top instructors toward the neediest schools.

_ Set clear, measurable goals for high schools and colleges, and vastly improve data collection and coordination between secondary schools and higher education.

_ Streamline education leadership. In most states, K-12 schools and postsecondary schools have separate governing boards and budgets, often contributing to competition over money.

Governors have become increasingly vocal about education reform, challenged to respond to unprecedented federal demands and complaints from employers. Arthur Ryan, chairman and CEO of Prudential Financial, said business leaders aren't happy with the pace of change. "Improving one high school at a time or one state at a time simply isn't fast enough," said Ryan, co-chairman of Achieve.

The high school graduation rate, meanwhile, remains the subject of debate. The new report by the nonprofit Educational Testing Service shows that the high school completion rate was 70 percent in 2000, down from 72 percent in 1990. It dropped in all but seven states. "This is a story of losing ground," said Paul Barton, the ETS researcher who wrote the report. "At the same time that the dropout rate is increasing and out-of-school education and training opportunities are dwindling, the economic status of young dropouts has been in a free fall since the late 1970s."

Source



ENGLISH EDUCATION DISASTROUS TOO

Tony Blair's principal claim to success in improving school standards was undermined yesterday by a devastating report from Ofsted. Almost half of boys and a third of girls continue to leave primary school unable to write properly, nearly seven years after the Government introduced the national literacy strategy. Ofsted blamed poor teaching and said that one in three English lessons were no better than satisfactory. A third of mathematics classes were just as weak, despite the introduction of the numeracy strategy in 1999.

The findings came as Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, faces a bitter split with the teaching profession today by ditching a radical reform of secondary school qualifications recommended by a government inquiry. Ms Kelly will reject plans to replace GCSEs and A levels with a new diploma drawn up by Sir Mike Tomlinson as a means of boosting achievement and staying-on rates. Charles Clarke, her predecessor as Education Secretary, appointed Sir Mike in 2002 to develop a blueprint for transforming secondary education.

Ms Kelly will insist, however, on retaining the "gold standard" of A levels and GCSEs, while promising to boost the standing of vocational qualifications.

Sir Mike, the former head of Ofsted, said that he would be very upset if the Government left the present structure essentially unchanged. A levels were now "strangling both teacher and student scholarship".

Ofsted's review of the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools made clear that huge numbers of children continue to enter secondary education ill-equipped to cope with the demands of the curriculum. Ministers have made much of the improvements in literacy and numeracy since 1997. The proportion of 11-year-olds achieving level four, the expected standard, in national curriculum English tests rose to 78 per cent last year from 75 per cent in 2003, the first rise since 2000.

Maths results improved by one percentage point to 74 per cent.

However, the English result masked a 20 percentage point gap in achievement in reading and writing. The expected standard in reading was met by 83 per cent of pupils last year, but only 63 per cent managed it in writing. Just 56 per cent of boys passed the writing test, compared with 71 per cent of girls. As a result, one in three pupils enters secondary school without the writing ability considered necessary to cope with the curriculum. Only 14 per cent of children who fail to reach the expected standards at 11 go on to pass five good GCSEs at 16.

Ofsted concluded that a lack of subject knowledge among a significant minority of teachers was a key failing in primary schools and said that the problems were serious enough to prevent further improvements in standards. "Teaching of this quality, while having no significant weaknesses, is not effective enough to improve the quality of pupils' learning and what they know, understand and can do," it said.

David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, said: "There are still schools where children are not receiving the daily diet of good teaching that they need in order to raise achievement further."

Tim Collins, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: "The fact that at least one in three primary pupils go on to their senior school without being able to write properly is one of the single biggest failings of eight years of Labour government. Ruth Kelly and her predecessors have managed to get so hung up on their departmental target culture that they have lost sight of the underlying problem of classroom literacy and numeracy."

The Government sought to boost achievement in schools by merging the two strategies last year into a broader "primary national strategy". Ofsted found that this was having little impact because few schools had embraced the change.

Source



Time is up for radical professors like Ward Churchill (By Joe Scarbough)

Radical college professors are finally being put on notice by middle America that anti-American views will no longer go unchallenged if a liberal arts professor mutters the words "academic freedom." But the question is whether our elected officials will have the guts to do anything about it.

For years, Americans have been led to believe that campus radicalism was confirmed to Ivy League institutions and left wing enclaves like Cal Berkeley. But the firestorm that has erupted over professor Ward Churchill's anti-American 9/11 screed has proven what college students have known for years: That colleges in middle America have long been led by left-wing leaders who are radical by any measure when it comes to politics, culture, and faith.

I loved my years at the University of Alabama, but my college professors were almost to politically left of center. And that was in the reddest of all states. Don't get me wrong. I learned a great deal by having professors who attacked Ronald Reagan as a dangerous war-monger, who questioned my religious faith, and who openly mocked my family's middle American values. There were a few notable exceptions, but only one or two.

So the question you need to ask yourself is this: Why are my elected officials using my taxes to promote values that are radically opposed to my own views? And if there is academic freedom and diversity of thought, why don't those two principals apply to conservative professors?

A recent study showed that an overwhelming number of college professors are big government liberals, while conservative professors rarely get a chance to teach college courses. This ideological monopoly ensures that another generation of college students will be brainwashed to believe that the values parents spent 18 years instilling in them are quaint, obsolete notions.

Enough is enough. It is time to call your state representative and demand action. It is time to call your governor and demand a full investigation into the political bias that is infecting the state colleges that you keep open with your tax dollars. It is time to put campus radicals back on their heels and tell them that simply chanting the words "academic freedom" will no longer cow us into accepting the status quo. It is time to take your college classrooms back. And if our elected officials won't do it, we will run them out of office and find someone who will.

This is not about free speech. It is about how your tax dollars being spent to promote agendas that the overwhelming majority of Americans would find deeply offensive.

Source

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

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

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



24 February, 2005

THIS ARROGANT NUT THINKS HE IS ENTITLED TO BRING HIS POLITICS INTO THE CLASSROOM

Ian Harvey's Florida teaching certificate, No. 653427, has been suspended for a year. The former Lely High English and media teacher has maintained he's a scapegoat, a lone voice for peace in a wilderness of warmongers. But the Florida Education Practices Commission met earlier this month, and in the settlement, Harvey signed off on the suspension. Commissioner of Education Jim Horne cited Harvey in violating nine teaching standards, including failing to take reasonable precautions to distinguish between his personal views and those of the school system in his classroom.

"The misogynistic, homophobic, racist warmongerers in the classroom there in Collier County-and there are plenty-have nothing to worry about because the School Board shares their views," Harvey wrote Friday in an e-mail to the Daily News.

After Sept. 11, 2001, things were never the same for Harvey. He taught in Collier County schools for 10 years with good evaluations. Then after 9/11, Harvey entered the media spotlight after participating in an anti-war rally with a couple of his students.

In February 2002, the Collier School District investigator found Harvey's teaching practices violated district and state teaching standards. And later that month, he was suspended without pay for three days and reassigned to an Immokalee adult education position. In the next year, the teacher made a couple of court appearances. In July 2003, he agreed to a plea agreement, pleading no contest and paying court costs of $160, after being charged with resisting arrest during a March anti-war demonstration in Fort Myers. Then in August 2003, police arrested the teacher on driving under the influence and drug charges. He later pleaded no contest - his driver license suspended for six months and agreed to participate in the diversion program, similar to probation, involving counseling.

School District officials fired Harvey in December 2003. Now, two years after district officials sent their findings to Tallahassee, Commissioner of Education Horne has settled the teaching allegations against Harvey by suspending his Florida teaching certificate for one year. District internal investigator Peter DeBaun found Harvey engaged in the following inappropriate conduct between August and December 2001.

- Used his mass media class as a forum to express his hostility toward the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, American business practices, social policy, mainstream media, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization

- Criticized and belittled students for disagreeing with his personal political views in class and caused them to feel their grade would be lowered if they continued

- Gave extra credit to students who sent e-mail supporting him after his appearance on the Fox television show "The O'Reilly Factor," but failed to give any credit to students who sent e-mails supporting the show's host

- Used curse words in class

- Encouraged students to attend anti-war rallies and failed to warn them that he had been threatened with physical violence

"They were going to suspend it (my teaching certificate) for one year for teaching peace before my August 2003 arrest, and since they are still going to suspend it for the same amount of time even after I broke the law, it's even clearer that my greatest 'crime' to the folks in charge of running the indoctrination, not education, system there in that balmy, polluted 'paradise,' is having pro-peace, pro-worker, pro-environment views, period," Harvey wrote.

Source



A LEFTIST EDUCATOR WHO ACTUALLY WANTS TO HELP KIDS!

For most of them making life smoother for teachers is what it is all about

"IMAGINE THIS: A progressive Democrat is elected president. In his early days in office he articulates his belief that America owes all of its citizens a quality education, and that long after Brown v. Board of Education this promise is still denied to far too many poor children, particularly children of color. He declares this ''achievement gap'' to be a national disgrace, saying that it is unacceptable that the average African-American and Latino child is doing in 12th grade what the average white child is doing in 8th grade.

The new president, with the active support of Senator Ted Kennedy, passes a law that puts the power of the federal government behind his vision for our schools, dramatically expanding its reach into public education. The law requires that all states adopt standards for what children need to know and assessments to determine whether all children, in all demographic groups, are meeting these standards, with real consequences for schools that fail to make adequate progress toward closing the achievement gap. Under the new law, states are required to allow parents with children in failing schools to transfer their child to a higher performing traditional public school or public charter school.

For progressives this should be seen as a dream scenario, a declaration that closing the achievement gap is the great civil rights enterprise of our time. Of course, you could be sure that conservatives would rage against this radical intrusion by the federal government into territory long reserved for state and local authorities. But you could also be sure that liberal activists and their allies in public education would staunchly defend the legislation's ambitious, egalitarian goals.

In fact, just such a momentous law has been passed and is now being implemented. But as painful as it is for me, a progressive Democrat, to acknowledge, it was a conservative Republican president who passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), and it is traditionally Democratic education groups and activists who decry the law as intrusive federal meddling. And true to the confusing and peculiar politics of education reform, instead of embracing the laudable goals of NCLB-and joining in a bipartisan effort to repair its flaws-the institutional players in education and their allies have put their energy into fighting it.

To veterans of the education wars at the state level, this peculiar political situation comes as no surprise. In state battles over reforming schools, liberal and conservative labels have lost their meaning. Instead, the battle lines are drawn between those who are willing to take on powerful institutional interests and contemplate systemic change and those who are not.

In Massachusetts we have seen this peculiar political situation play out in the contentious battles around implementing our own version of ''standards-based reform,'' the Education Reform Act of 1993 (which I coauthored). Passed in response to a crisis in public education, the theory behind Massachusetts' law is that if you give school districts a more equitable funding base, establish state standards for student achievement, monitor districts' progress through student testing, and empower school leaders by enacting significant management reforms-such as removing principals from collective bargaining-districts will figure out how to improve.

Many liberals and education associations bitterly fought the management reforms as well as the essential testing component of this strategy, MCAS, in both the state house and in federal and state courtrooms. Many continue the fight to this day, despite the fact that 10 years of standard-based reform has produced considerable progress. Massachusetts schools are now at the top in national comparisons, and despite dire predictions of mass failure 96 percent of seniors passed the high school MCAS requirement and now graduate with a high school diploma that actually means something.

Last week, in its decision in the Hancock case, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected the plaintiffs' request-supported by the teachers' unions and other institutional groups representing various educational interests-that the court order the state to send more money to underperforming districts. Other groups, such as the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (which I manage), are proposing a more comprehensive strategy which includes raising our expectations for student performance through a statewide ''campaign for proficiency,'' additional management reforms, and targeted new expenditures for expanding state assistance to school districts, early childhood education, and extended time on learning through a longer school day. Still arguing that money is all that is needed, and lacking any systemic reform agenda of their own, the institutional interests will continue to oppose changes in the system that will empower school leaders to tackle the many dysfunctions of underperforming schools".

More here

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23 February, 2005

Homeschooling And Socialization

"One of my biggest pet peeves as a homeschooling mother is the "socialization" myth. Anti-homeschoolers would have everyone believe that our kids are locked in a cramped house all day, forbidden to speak to outsiders. The truth is, the lack of school restraints gives us more opportunity for genuine socialization. Our kids aren't grouped with only those the same age as them, at a desk in a classroom, being told by a teacher, "You're not here to socialize!" We're out in the "real world" learning real things with real people from all races, faiths and ages. And our children are not exposed to the negative socialization that often is found in the school system.

Now please don't be offended if you're reading this and your kids aren't homeschooled. I'm not knocking your choice, only defending mine against the many critics in the mainstream media. I can't tell you how many stories I've seen done by the media where they bring some "homeschooler" out of the woodwork who's being charged with child neglect and abuse. Only to find out that they were never really true "homeschoolers" in the first place. Their kids were just truant. There was no homeschooling going on, but they want to throw that label on them to hurt our movement.

I remember sitting around with a group of fellow soccer moms in a middle school for a photo session. One of the moms asked me, "Why doesn't Amanda go here?" Then she said, "Oh...that's right..you homeschool." Then she went on about how she could never do that, and I told her it wasn't as hard as it seems. She then said in a very disparaging voice, "Well, I send my kid to school for the other kids." And all the moms around her nodded their heads vigorously.

My blood was boiling and I calmly waited for a chance to defend myself, but they were talking so much about how important socialization at school was that I could never get a word in edgewise. I later found out that the mother who instigated the attack on me is married to the county Superintendant of Public Schools here. Figures.

There's a wonderful story that ran on HeraldSun.com that gives a very accurate picture of what homeschooling is like and how we truly socialize. From the article:

Trash everything you think you know about homeschooling. Forget the images of a small family sitting around a table, working out arithmetic problems. Toss out the thought of children whose only friends are their parents, brothers and sisters. Today's homeschoolers say they are nothing like that. The kids meet regularly with other students for classes and activities. They have extensive networks for support groups, sports and clubs. "Most people don't home-school in a vacuum," says Julie Woessner, who has taught her two daughters from their house in Hillsborough for seven years. "People have the notion that we're weirdos, sitting around a kitchen table. We're not."

AND:

"Sometimes I think I need to clear my social calendar," said Towey, who lives in Durham. "There are so many people home-schooling, you could spend every day in the car going to see them." Towey's three children, 10, 7 and 4, attend Bible study, art and history classes and sports. The kids take dance lessons and practice karate. The association itself offers monthly enrichment, a time of fellowship with activities and playtime for the students and parents.

Then there's this article from CNSNews.com that cites a study that says homeschoolers are actually better socialized than their peers:

The study by the Fraser Institute, an independent public policy organization based in Vancouver, Canada, focused on home-schooled students in North America. According to the study's findings, the typical home-schooled child is more mature, friendly, happy, thoughtful, competent, and better socialized than students in public or private schools. They are also less peer dependent and exhibit "significantly higher" self-esteem, according to the study."

Source



FREE SPEECH A LOW PRIORITY AT COLLEGE

"Write about free speech on American college campuses occasionally, and you quickly come to realize that a good many people honor the concept mostly in the breach. Every column defending free expression generates a number of emails with this basic message: Of course I support free speech, I just don't think someone should be allowed to say that.

The anti-speech sentiment is not always couched quite that explicitly, of course. Usually the caveat is about the need to realize just how hurtful a controversial statement is to this group or that, whose self-image or self-confidence or self-worth will be irreparably injured by hearing or seeing something that offends or angers them. Indeed, when I did a column about the University of New Hampshire's absurd disciplinary action against a male student who put up a satirical poster suggesting that the women in his dorm might avoid the dreaded freshman-year weight gain if they took the stairs rather than using the elevator, even his mild jape, directed at no person in particular, invoked the same response.

You don't know what it's like to have someone make snide comments about your weight, replied some readers. (Actually, I do, having recently been denounced as a fat, pizza-gobbling ''pantload'' by one of the coruscating philosopher kings of the local talk-radio scene. That, apparently, is what passes as wit on talk radio, and in the spirit of the new year, I'd certainly grant that it's half-witty.)

My feeling is that people need to grow a little thicker skin if they expect to survive in this world. And that if colleges operate the way the PC gendarmerie prefer, they aren't preparing students for the real world so much as sheltering them from it.

Unfortunately, however, too often the prevalent notion on campus is that people have a right not to be offended, and that that right, and the goal of preserving an amorphous civility, should trump the right to free expression. David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit devoted to defending free speech on campus, says the foundation frequently encounters that sentiment among college administrators and faculty. ''One of the most common experiences we have at FIRE is for an administrator or a faculty member to pledge undying loyalty to the First Amendment even while they are censoring a student,'' said French. ''They claim to support free speech, and if you put them on truth serum I think they would still claim to, but they think if a person's feelings are hurt, speech has just gone too far.''"

More here

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

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22 February, 2005

Idiots at the chalkboard

Someone out there is worried. Due to the rapid growth in the popularity of homeschooling and the increasing obviousness of the concept's superiority, the legacy media has all but openly declared war on parents who wish to personally direct their children's education.

If an act of child abuse even tangentially involves children who don't attend a state-approved school, you can be sure that the media will not fail to mention that the children were "homeschooled" regardless of whether the parents were actually schooling them at home or torturing them instead. So much for accuracy in media. If those now-infamous Florida parents were homeschoolers, then Abu Ghraib was a military academy.

One argument often heard in defense of the public schools is that education is better left to those trained to teach, to the "professionals." Most teachers, after all, are required to have a college degree in education, and in many states they are forced to take tests purported to prove that they are not drooling idiots. Although one has to wonder what exactly is on those tests considering that after 59 percent of prospective teachers failed to pass the Massachusetts Teachers' Test in 1999, the test was assailed by FairTest, a teacher-run organization that opposes tests for teachers, in the following manner:

The MTT included many bizarre questions unlike those on any other state's teacher licensing exams. On one, candidates were asked to transcribe a portion of 'The Federalist Papers' as dictated from a low quality tape-recorder. Other items asked for dictionary definitions of words with questions such as "What is a preposition?" and "What is an adjective?"

Clearly, it is outrageous to expect public school teachers to know elementary grammar or be able to perform tasks that entry-level secretaries with two-year vo-tech degrees handle with ease. If the MTT is considered to feature bizarre and difficult questions, one can only imagine that tests in more teacher-friendly states such as Minnesota and New York must run something like this:

What is your favorite color?
a) red
b) green
c) blue
d) purply-pink

The immortal PJ O'Rourke once declared: "Anybody who doesn't know what's wrong with America's educational system never screwed an el-ed major." And while one has no doubt that he is correct, it turns out that there is more empirical evidence for the dismal state of teacher intelligence than Mr. O'Rourke's sexual history or the fear and loathing with which the teachers' unions regard competency testing.

In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported the average SAT score for intended education majors to be 481 math and 483 verbal. Only those interested in vocational school, home economics and public affairs scored lower. But while the SAT is considered to be a generally reliable intelligence test, the 2001 SAT is not the same SAT that many of us took prior to attending university. Those 2001 scores on the 1996 SAT, which was replaced this year by the New SAT 2005, are equivalent to pre-1996 SAT scores of 451 math and 403 verbal. In case any education majors are reading this, 451 plus 403 equals a cumulative score of 854.

Examining an SAT-to-IQ conversion chart calculated from Mensa entrance criteria, a combined 854 indicates that the average IQ of those pursuing an education major is 91, nine points lower than the average IQ of 100. In other words, those who can't read teach whole language.

Now, not every would-be education major goes on to complete her degree - 77.4 percent of those who do are women - nor does every college graduate with an education major go on to teach in the public schools. But since teaching's best and brightest so frequently quit upon exposure to the labyrinthine public school system and since most teachers who fail their competency tests are still allowed to teach - in Illinois, 7.8 percent of the teachers who have taken these extraordinarily easy tests since 1988 have failed them - it is not logical to conclude that the average teacher's IQ is any higher than the average would-be education major.

Many a parent has wondered aloud what sort of idiots were teaching the anti-intellectual poison that currently passes for a modern public school curriculum, but I doubt that most ever considered that the pejorative might be more literal than metaphorical. Instead of wondering if they are sufficiently qualified to homeschool their children, parents would do well to instead ponder the wisdom of turning over their offspring to demonstrably sub-optimal morons for daily indoctrination in the name of education.

Source



THE PARENTAL ROLE

Some "isms" are contemptible (e.g., totalitarianism). Others stir our hearts (e.g. patriotism). A lesser known, but crucial "ism" is "liberal parentalism." It's a phrase coined by Professor Stephen Gilles of Quinnipiac University School of Law in Hamden, Connecticut. The phrase embraces the tradition of parents' freedom to choose how their children will be educated.

When parents are not permitted (or are too apathetic) to make decisions regarding the training of their children, government takes the reins. The result can be inimical to the desires of most parents, such as the current situation in which God is utterly banned from public schools.

The concept of liberal parentalism holds that parents are best able to make decisions concerning how their kids will be raised-particularly how they will be educated. No government entity, no matter how intellectually endowed, has the motivation or concern in choosing a school for a child as has the child's own parents. That's the essence of liberal parentalism. Professor Gilles' concept was ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court's dramatic decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, which decisively approved school choice in the broadest of terms. The Court said, in effect, that competitive efficiency and educational freedom are as inseparable as-to use a household comparison-flour in a cake.

No matter what you call it-"liberal parentalism" or educational freedom-the critical role of parents in education is rooted deeply in our history and religious tradition. "Listen, my son, to your father's instruction and do not forsake your mother's teaching," reads Proverbs 1:8 (NIV). And a later proverb advises, "Discipline your son, and he will give you peace; he will bring delight to your soul." (Proverbs 29:17 NIV)

Those opposed to educational freedom long to show that parental control is a new and maybe even un-American notion. Some think that freedom of choice has suddenly popped up in recent times. But during a long stretch of our nation's history, educational institutions were voluntary, cooperative endeavors, which involved parents, teachers, religious institutions, charitable organizations, and, sometimes, local government.

The American public school grew in the wake of the wave of immigration that swept across the nation in the nineteenth century. It was then thought by politicians that government control of education was the tool to assimilate the immigrants' children, as well as to dodge conflicts over any state subsidization of religious schools. So, the critics and the unknowing don't admit or don't realize, that the United States has a long and rightful history of valuing and guarding the freedom of educational choice. The country's 8,000 Catholic schools, for example, are a testament to that freedom, though parents who have chosen private schools have also been compelled to support the government school system through their taxes.

Although school choice now is legal, it still serves a relatively small number of students. Many states have charter schools and more than a million children are home-schooled. But those who can't stand the thought of such educational freedom are trying to stifle the trend toward parental choice. They seek, for instance, to trap existing charter school academies in a tangle of new regulations. Such rules would mandate everything from faculty to curriculum.

California has made it almost impossible for parents to home-school their children. That state, known for its bizarre customs, requires that students learn only from a credentialed tutor, a state-approved charter school, or a home-school study program supervised by the public school district.

Tragically, there will always be some parents who care little what happens to their children. They see school as a place to get their kids out of the way so they can indulge in illegitimate pursuits. The kids come to school with similar distorted attitudes.

But what most parents through the years have wanted for their children were educational options that matched sound cultural and moral or religious beliefs and traditions. They want constitutional protections, such as freedom of expression, association, and religion. Few Americans want the government involved in the intimate details of family life or educational regulations aimed at homogenizing the student body.

Parents have a moral duty to use freedom responsibly by making good decisions for their children. For its part, government has a duty to provide the space necessary for exercising that freedom. Allowing a diverse variety of educational institutions to flourish accommodates the deepest beliefs and desires of a diverse population. It is the "liberal" thing to do.

Source

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

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21 February, 2005

NAACP BAD FOR BLACKS

It's Leftism that motivates them, not the best interests of blacks

A Houston school district plan that might turn three low-achieving but historically important schools in minority neighborhoods over to private contractors triggered a stinging rebuttal Friday from black and Hispanic community leaders who accused officials of neglecting the schools, then sidestepping responsibility for fixing them. Yolanda Smith, president of the Houston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said her organization is outraged by the possibility of turning Yates, Kashmere and Sam Houston high schools over to for-profit educational companies. The NAACP, she said, will seek an injunction to stop the effort. "Houston taxpayers hold HISD accountable for closing the gaps in educational opportunity and student achievement and do not expect our public dollars to be spent on private entities," Smith said. " ... We did not create a public entity in HISD to then have the public entity outsource this responsibility."

Terry Abbott, spokesman for the Houston Independent School District, said indignation over the plan, which was outlined earlier this week by Superintendent Abe Saavedra during his annual State of the Schools address, is misplaced and based on media accounts that he contends are inaccurate. While contracting with for-profit entities to run the schools is a possibility, Abbott said, the district also welcomes reform proposals from district employees and community groups. Texas education officials have decreed that the schools, which have been deemed "low-performing" for two consecutive years, must be dramatically improved or closed.

Yates Principal George August has advised HISD that his school's administrators, teachers, parents and other community members will offer trustees a "bold, innovative redesign and restructuring of the entire instructional program at Yates to improve student achievement." August declined to elaborate on his group's proposal Friday. Also at the NAACP news conference were U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, and representatives from the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Houston Area Urban League, Houston Federation of Teachers and other groups. Jackson Lee admonished HISD to seek more community input before making a decision to privatize the schools......

Earlier this week, Saavedra, the district's first Hispanic superintendent, told those attending his State of the Schools speech that "small steps toward improvement" would no longer suffice for the trio of academically unacceptable schools. "HISD," he said, "will seek applications this spring from reform providers to submit their plans to totally redesign these schools. These redesigned schools must be fundamentally different from what exists now," Saavedra added. "The reform groups that take over these schools will have to correct the deficiencies, raise academic standards, redesign management practices, improve capacity among staff members or replace staff and engage parents in improvement efforts."

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Takeover as a Reform Strategy

Detroit Public Schools is currently operating under a five-year reform plan implemented by the Michigan legislature in March 1999. Although the measure provides that the mayor of the city appoints six of the seven board members, it is commonly referred to as a "state takeover" because it temporarily removed Detroiters' ability to elect a school board. The Detroit district is hardly the first to be subject to a "takeover" by city or state government officials in an effort to produce systemic reform.

In the spring of 2002, the National Association of State Boards of Education published the study, "Do School District Takeovers Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of City and State Takeovers as a School Reform Strategy," by Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen. The report provides a useful overview of state and city takeovers of school districts between 1988 and 2000. According to the authors, takeovers "either by a state authority or by the mayor" are allowed in 24 states and the District of Columbia. Actual takeovers during the period occurred in 18 states and in Washington, DC, whose schools are now governed by a board of five elected members and four mayoral appointees--a reform structure created by the D.C. Council.

Eleven of 15 "comprehensive" district takeovers--interventions with "financial, managerial, and academic components"-- have occurred since 1995, "including the highly publicized takeovers in Chicago (1995), Cleveland (1997), and Baltimore (1997)." In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City initiated a takeover of the city's 900-school district.

Concerning the effectiveness of the takeovers, the authors find "research ... is lagging behind the pace of policy and practice, and overall `there is a scarcity of research on the effects of state takeovers.'"

Source



ACADEMICS ARE NOW THE ENEMIES OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Now that they are overwhelmingly Leftist....

Academic freedom - which endows members of the university with the right to hold, express and teach any views they deem fit, and to research and publish their findings without restraint - is widely recognised as essential to the pursuit of knowledge. As a 1998 report by UNESCO observed, academic freedom is 'not simply a fundamental value', but also 'a means by which higher education fulfilled its mission'. Even those politicians, bureaucrats and administrators who are, by temperament, hostile to academic freedom feel compelled to defend it......

Paradoxically, direct attacks on academic freedom often come from within the university. There is a mood of intolerance towards those who hold unconventional, unpopular opinions, especially in the area of politics. Some academics do not simply challenge views that they dislike; they often seek to ban them and to prevent individuals who advocate them from working or speaking on their campus.

Traditionally academics, particularly social scientists, were at the forefront of defending free speech. Today, some academics actually attempt to deny their colleagues the right to free speech. The campaign to ban Tom Paulin from speaking at Harvard for being anti-Semitic, and the censoring of Israeli academics by the editor of an academic journal in Manchester on the grounds that they are Israeli, are testimony to the illiberal tendencies that prevail in academia.

Academic freedom has become negotiable. Consequently, only the more grotesque attacks on this freedom tend to provoke a reaction on campus. One such example is the recent revelation of a memo issued to colleagues in arts and humanities at Durham University, which said lecturers would have to obtain approval from an 'ethics' committee if they wanted to give lectures and tutorials on subjects that might offend students - including abortion or euthanasia.

This illiberal policy is not simply the handiwork of few philistine zealots. It is the inexorable consequence of an academic culture that is increasingly prepared to censor itself and others. That Durham assigned an ethics committee the role of Chief Inquisitor and Censor is not surprising: for some time now, such committees have made pronouncements on which kind of research is ethical and which is not. Extending the role of these committees from policing research to censoring academics' views was a logical next step. Academics who treat ethics committees with derision, as a minor nuisance, should realise the extent to which their freedom is under threat.

The Durham memo may have stated its case rather bluntly. But its premise - that words that offend students should be banned - is now widely accepted and institutionalised in British higher education. Virtually every British university has adopted rules of conduct or codes of practice that convey the message: 'the student must not be offended.'

To take a random example: the University of Derby's 'Code of Practice For Use of Language'. In an Orwellian tone, the code announces that 'the use of language should reflect the university's mission and support relationships of mutual respect'. It demands that staff and students 'try to be sensitive to the feelings of others in the use of language'. In case academics fail to get the message and mistakenly think that being 'sensitive' is a question of individual preference rather than a mandatory form of behaviour, the code warns that the 'university recognises that individuals are responsible for their own use of language but expects line managers to help staff carry out the terms of this policy'. This is unlikely to create a climate where the free exchange of opinion can flourish.

That academics are expected to work within such a code, which explicitly demands that the pursuit of knowledge and expression of ideas should be restrained by the need to spare the feelings of others, is a symptom of our times. Such censorious speech codes have been institutionalised through the UK, without any serious opposition from staff or students. Once upon a time, instructions on the use of language were for schoolkids; today they are aimed at restraining the speech of the academic.

Of course words can offend. But one of the roles of a university is to challenge conventional truths - and that means academics questioning the sacred and mentioning the unmentionable. A proper university teaches its members how not to take hateful views personally, and how not to be offended by uncomfortable ideas. It also teaches its members how to deal with being offended. And it never turns to the Inquisitor or the Censor for the answer......

Today, lecturers need to ensure that their teaching is consistent with bureaucratically devised 'learning outcomes'. One young academic was recently asked in an interview for a sociology post how his work fitted in with his potential employer's mission statement. 'Fitting in' with rules and procedures - it seems that conforming to the imagination of the bureaucrats is the freedom offered to new academics.

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20 February, 2005

Good Bye, Lenin! A Movie with a Message for American Academe

Review:

In a great little movie about the fantasy of idelogical views of reality, Wolfgang Becker's 'Good Bye, Lenin!' is a classic that should be required viewing for students of recent history.

Alexander Kerner's mother, Christiane is a devout Marxist Leninist living in East Berlin before the collapse of communism. Her husband abandons her to go live in the West and she was commited to a mental hospital for eight weeks. When she was released, her whole life became enwraped in promoting the cause of socialism.

Then, just before the Berlin Wall fell, she had a heart attack and fell into a comma for eight months. After she regains consciousness, the doctor tells her son Alex that she could easily have another heart attack if she becomes excited.

But Alex realizes that the news of recent events, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the end of state socialism in East Germany, etc, would excite her to the extreme.

So there is only one solution; surround his mother with a Potemkin Village of continued socialism, of course! Alexes Quixotic attempt to keep his mothers illusions alive for her is a dramatic symbol of the Western Academ, especially of the US where the last hold outs for Marxism still control the Universities and colleges of the nation that won the Cold War in grande style.

This movie is a humorous portrayal of that ideological obsession with fantasy that allows one to continue to entertain prefered delusions over blatant reality that swirls all around. If you plan to go into any post-graduate program in humanities in the US, this movie is a must see!

Amazon reviews here



Patriotic symbols now politically incorrect at school

"A Mont Pleasant middle school student is taking her freedom-of-expression fight to federal court, claiming Schenectady school officials have no right to ban her from wearing a handmade red, white and blue necklace to class. The beads, which Raven Furbert got as a string-it-yourself Christmas gift, symbolize love of country and respect for soldiers serving in Iraq, according to the lawsuit her mother, Katie Grzywna, filed in U.S. District Court in Albany. Among those soldiers is her uncle, J. Barnes, who is a member of the Army National Guard's 42nd Rainbow Division, and three other relatives. Barnes shipped out to Kuwait in October, and went on active duty in Iraq the first week in January.

Raven, 12, made the necklace over the Christmas vacation and wore it on her first day back to school on Jan. 4. She said it was to commemorate Barnes' move into a danger zone and that it is her way of trying to protect him. She said she can't understand what the big deal is. "I just want to wear them for my uncle," she said. "I'll be really glad when this is all over."

Schenectady school officials immediately banned her from displaying her unique neckwear in a belief such "gang-related" jewelry violates policy, court papers alleged. Raven was threatened with suspension if she continued to wear the beads. "I still don't see anything wrong with this," her mother said of the case that has created a stir. It was featured last week on the Fox News Channel program "Hannity & Colmes." "(School officials) even said on that program that they do not have a gang problem in the Schenectady school district," she said.

And that isn't all, added the frustrated mother. Grzywna said it seems now that Raven is being targeted, and the child who used to sail through her school days without incident is now tagged frequently for in-school detention and other disciplinary measures. Grzywna said she tried to explain to school officials that the necklace was nothing more than a show of patriotism. But they wouldn't listen. On Jan. 14, word came home that the beads had been banned, she said. Officials then said beads could be worn but not displayed, she said. So Raven began wearing the jewelry under her clothing, her mom said.

This week, on both Monday and Tuesday, administrators again told Raven to remove the beads, Grzywna said. She complied. But then put them back on. Named in the federal action are Assistant Superintendent Eric Ely, Mont Pleasant Middle School Principal Gary Comley and Assistant Principals Nicki DiLeva and Matthew DeLorenzo. Sherry Greenleaf, who is employed full time as the school district's attorney, said she couldn't comment specifically because the school district hadn't yet seen any court papers. "But certainly we believe the policy is valid and properly enforced," she said.

Bob Keach, a lawyer who specializes in civil and constitutional rights violations cases, said several of Raven's friends also have been told not to wear the beads even though the Mont Pleasant dress code does not mention beaded jewelry as a banned item. Grzywna is seeking a permanent injunction preventing the school district from banning expressive clothing. She also wants monetary damages and declaratory judgment, which allows a judge to decide whose position is correct. "As of today's date, the wearing of the red, white and blue beaded necklace made by a 12-year-old to show support for soldiers dying to protect this country's freedom is still forbidden ... under penalty of suspension from school," Keach said in court papers. And the mascot for the Schenectady City School District is a patriot, he pointed out: "So school colors are red, white and blue." "Patriotism is a virtue to be fostered among the young," he said. "It is not 'gang-related.' We can't believe we've had to take it this far." "

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BIASED BRITS

No place should be more committed to freedom of speech than a university. And perhaps no issue deserves more balance, more variety of voices, and more critical thinking than the Middle East, given its importance in world affairs. Universities should be grounds for critical thinking and pluralism of opinion, not brainwashing. Still, when it comes to the Middle East, the difference between should and is can sometimes be as great as the one between night and day.

Before you think Columbia University and the recent controversy surrounding some of its Middle East studies scholars, or Hamilton College and Ward Churchill, think England and the great tradition of scholarship on the Orient that made U.K. universities so distinguished, their scholars so renowned, and their works so enduring. And before you surmise that scholars manipulate their students into uncritical and one-sided thinking, look at the students. Judging by how this generation promotes free speech and a diversity of opinions, one gets the impression that students don't need bad teachers to stifle their learning: They are doing well enough on their own.

Enter the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), a famous institution of learning in the heart of London, which is part of the University of London college system. Its faculty is dedicated to subjects ranging from the Far East to Africa and much in between, and it includes a wide range of scholars with diverse opinions and expertise on the Middle East. There is no room for complaint about a lack of views and opinions among those imparting wisdom to the next generation. SOAS invites scholars of all backgrounds. Some university forums - such as the University of London, SOAS-based Sir Joseph Hotung Programme for Law, Human Rights, and Peace Building in the Middle East - are so one-sided that their public activities border on pro-Palestinian propaganda. But the Middle East program can be faulted for little.

Scholars there play fair, but their students have a different idea of what higher education is about. Maybe what the next generation wants is not wisdom. It does not seek tools to form independent judgments. Rather, it seeks ready-made answers and a conventional wisdom that no alternative voice should be allowed to challenge.

Consider the following: SOAS's student union recently hosted Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi, PLO ambassador to London Afif Safieh, and a two-day extravaganza dedicated to boycotting Israel. Not to be accused of one-sidedness - past guests of various student associations include Columbia University professor Joseph Massad and Haifa University professor Ilan Pappe, both avowed supporters of Israel's end as a Jewish state - the Palestine Student Society also had an Israeli speaker recently: Azmi Bishara, the lone pan-Arabist anti-Zionist Israeli parliamentarian, whose solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute is a bi-national state, code for the end of the Jewish state. With such a range of opinions, who needs an additional speaker from the Israeli embassy or, indeed, an Israeli student society? That is what the Student Union thought and still thinks.

Until last year, an Israeli society was unthinkable at SOAS: It would have violated official Student Union policy, which states that "Peace requires the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism and foreign occupation, apartheid, Zionism and racial discrimination in all forms..." Official policy also condemns "Any form of racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Zionism and other forms of racism on campus," and on those grounds the university until recently prevented pro-Israel students from forming their own organization. But then, SOAS exerted enough pressure on the union to allow for an Israel society - alongside an existing Jewish society - to be established.

An intolerable act of censorship of students' independent judgment, or a rare moment of sanity among union's leaders? Don't hold your breath for the latter.

Pro-Israel students can now have their society, but that does not mean they can hold events. The Israel Student Society invited a speaker, Roy Gilead from Israel's embassy, to speak on campus on February 22. The Union voted to force the sponsors to disinvite him. Again, a swift intervention from the administration had the Union backtrack and the event can now go on. Still, Kavita Meelu, co-president of the Union, said in a statement, "we have advised the society that the student body... has explicitly expressed that they do not wish for this speaker to be allowed a platform, and therefore will not be actively supporting the society's event."

Veiled threat or grudging concession? Hard to say. Don't anticipate a Student Union welcoming committee when Gilead arrives.

What is obvious is that when it comes to students, at SOAS dissenting views have no place. It is only thanks to pressures exerted from above - and Professor Colin Bundy, head of SOAS, should be commended for coming down on the side of freedom of speech - that a lone Israeli embassy spokesman could get a one-time chance to offer an alternative view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, before the old tune is monotonously sung again by the usual suspects.

So what's the trouble? Perhaps what Gilead has to say terrifies the Student Union's thought-control police - with the notion that one or two students might actually start thinking with their own minds. And that, even more than a Zionist speaking on campus, would be truly terrible.

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19 February, 2005

GREAT STUFF!

Some pressures on the taxpayer-fed slackers at last

The Bush administration is pressing California to toughen its rules for identifying failing school districts — a change that could add 310 school systems to a watch list this year and eventually threaten the jobs of superintendents and school board members throughout the state. The U.S. Department of Education warned that it could cut off money to the state if California did not change the way it classified struggling districts under the No Child Left Behind Act. The federal law calls for states to place districts on a watch list if the number of students doing well on math and English standardized tests fails to increase enough two years in a row. Such districts can face sanctions if they continue to falter. California, however, lets districts avoid the list if students from low-income households reach a set score on a separate measure of achievement.

Federal education officials believe the state policy amounts to an escape valve. The policy violates No Child Left Behind by reducing the number of districts identified as needing improvement, the officials have told the state Department of Education. Only 14 of California's 1,000 school districts were placed on the state's watch list this year. But hundreds of districts could be considered failures within two years if California yielded to Washington's demands, according to state education officials.

The expanded list would feature some of California's highest-performing school districts, including Santa Monica-Malibu Unified and Cupertino Union near San Jose. Even though these districts are well regarded, they could still find themselves publicly labeled as troubled if certain groups of their students — those in special education, for example — were not making enough progress. At the extreme, these school systems and the others could be abolished or restructured, or their superintendents and school board members could be replaced by state-appointed trustees.

Leaders of several California school systems said it would be unfair to identify failing districts in the middle of the school year without any notice or time to respond. The district officials wondered where the money would come from to create new programs aimed at improving student test scores. "The entire notion of how No Child Left Behind has been enacted is very narrow, very myopic and very draconian," said Santa Monica-Malibu Unified Supt. John Deasy. "It sets up a very negative dynamic for schools that have successfully shown they can raise achievement over time."

No Child Left Behind requires schools to give standardized English and math tests annually in the third through eighth grades, and to increase the numbers of students who score high enough to be labeled proficient. The law calls for states to set annual improvement goals and to identify schools and districts as in need of improvement if they fall short......

No Child Left Behind requires districts that are not on the list, but that have low-performing schools, to provide tutoring. L.A. Unified is spending about $25 million of its federal money to offer after-school tutoring to more than 16,000 students. But if the district were put on the watch list, students would have to go elsewhere for tutoring — to private companies, for example.

Members of the Los Angeles Board of Education will hold a hearing today to discuss that issue and other challenges posed by No Child Left Behind. Board members said they were concerned that a negative rating for the district would dampen enthusiasm at schools and further erode support for public education. "It's a stigma that doesn't drive thoughtful change. It's controlling and punitive rather than encouraging," said David Tokofsky, who chairs the board committee holding today's hearing.

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STATE'S RIGHTS ASSERTED IN UTAH

In the most specific challenge by any state to President Bush's signature education law, the Utah House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill yesterday requiring state officials to give higher priority to local educational goals than to those of the federal law, and to spend as little state money as possible to comply with it. The bill challenging the federal law, known as No Child Left Behind, will go to the Utah Senate, where it enjoys considerable support, said its sponsor, State Representative Margaret Dayton. Federal officials had sought to prevent the bill's passage, and Utah officials said a delegation from the Department of Education was expected in Salt Lake City today.

"Our goal is to maintain state sovereignty," Ms. Dayton said, moments before the 75-member House voted 72 to 0 in favor of her bill, with three lawmakers absent. The House has 57 Republicans and 18 Democrats. Ms. Dayton is a conservative Republican and a supporter of Mr. Bush, but she said in an interview that she was passionate about states' rights to control their own schools. That view appeared widespread among her bill's supporters. "We are strong supporters of President Bush," Representative Stephen Urquhart, the majority whip, said in a statement posted on his Web site. "But that doesn't mean that No Child Left Behind isn't seriously flawed."

The federal law requires standardized testing in Grades 3 through 8 and once in high school and imposes penalties on schools in which students fail to make steady progress. Congress passed the measure with bipartisan support in 2001. Support from Democrats has since withered, but vigorous challenges have come from Republican state legislators who view the measure as an unwanted mandate from Washington in an area traditionally left to states. Utah officials have frequently complained about the law's reporting requirements. In the debate yesterday, Ms. Dayton said federal officials were demanding new reports that would cost $400,000.

Last year, the Utah House approved a measure prohibiting the spending of state money to comply with the federal law. But the Bush administration persuaded the Senate to kill the bill after threatening the state with the loss of $106 million in federal education money. The action last year by the House inspired similar actions nationwide. Legislatures in some 30 states considered challenges to the federal law. This year, the legislatures in Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Vermont and Virginia are considering challenges. "No Child Left Behind is one of the most important issues of federal intrusion in state affairs that we've faced," said State Representative Kory M. Holdaway, a Republican, speaking for Ms. Dayton's bill in yesterday's debate. "This is a message bill. We want to send a message to the federal government that Utah has a great education system and we know best how to manage it."

The bill orders officials in the Office of Education and in the state's 40 local school districts to "provide first priority to meeting state goals" when they conflict with the federal law and to "minimize additional state resources that are diverted to implement federal programs beyond the federal monies that are provided to fund the programs." Patti Harrington, the state superintendent of public instruction, had endorsed the bill, which also had support from Utah groups including the teachers' union, the Utah School Boards Association and the conservative Eagle Forum. Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a Republican who took office last month, criticized No Child Left Behind during last year's campaign.

Source

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18 February, 2005

MISALLOCATION OF RESOURCES

Political deals trump both the needs and the wishes of the people

While taxpayers in Florida’s Miami-Dade School District aren’t getting the new schools they want and need, taxpayers in Jersey County, Illinois, are getting new schools they don’t want and don’t need, despite rejecting --by a 71-29 percent vote--a 1999 school district referendum to build two new schools. School enrollment in Jersey County has been falling for the past eight years.

According to information provided by the Coalition for Public Awareness of Jersey County, Illinois, the repair estimate for bringing the district’s existing high school into compliance with state code was $531,000 in 2000. A year later, the district’s repair estimate had jumped more than 20-fold to $13.99 million, with the cost of building a new high school pegged at $12.8 million.

The higher repair estimate permitted the district to access a grant of $20.53 million from the state’s Capital Development Board to build two new schools with a local bond issue of $14.0 million, for which no referendum was required. Local taxpayers, who did not want new schools, now see new schools being built and are awaiting the increased tax bills that will be imposed on property owners to pay for them.

Many Illinois school districts on the state’s financial watch list have taken advantage of the same school construction grant program, according to Coalition for Public Awareness Chairman Jeff Ferguson.

Source



ANOTHER ARGUMENT FOR PRIVATIZING ALL EDUCATION

After 18 years of commuting back and forth to one public school, I transferred to another public school that is closer to home. Each school has a different school climate because their respective student populations are culturally distinct. The school I left was dominated by military dependents. The school closer to home is dominated by Hawaiian and local Hawaii culture.

At the school dominated by military dependents, most students could function in a classroom environment, and a minority of students—as their behavior demonstrates -- belong in a classroom without walls. At the school closer to home, the student populations are just the reverse: there are a few students who do very well in a classroom environment, while most students --- as their behavior demonstrates -- belong in classrooms without walls. Yet teachers are managed at each school as though the student population of each school is exactly the same -- as though all students belong in a classroom environment.

Students who belong in educational environments different than existing classrooms are not being serviced by public schools. And just as bad, students who do very well in classrooms are being inefficiently serviced by teachers who are forced to deal with students who belong in classrooms without walls. So the classroom becomes an environment that inefficiently services students who do well in school; and the classroom completely fails to service students who belong in wall-less classrooms because their needs as learners are not recognized by a standardized system of accountability. And, again, just as bad, the standardized system of accountability leaves no room for teacher spontaneity and student creativity -- since what is to be taught and what is to be learned are becoming more restricted by the standards.

The pathetic situation we find ourselves in -- a reform movement whose sole criterion for success is the score of a test -- is a reflection of the 22 year national debate about reform of public education. The national debate about public education has no vision. Policy makers and legislators are blinded by economic reductionism and empirical studies. The question that needs to be answered is why public classrooms do not represent the society that surrounds them? Our schools, to quote a man who but for one vote would have been a state superintendent of schools, are a wasteland compared to the technologically enriched environment that nurtures children at home. The national crisis outlined in A Nation at Risk ("unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament," April 1983) will remain the status quo until policy makers and legislators turn to teachers and students as resources for direction in national policy......

You would think -- if indeed we even think anymore -- that the recent presidential campaign would have noticed that public education has become public daycare.

The life experiences and collective will that have created and shaped "the standards" and the tests that "measure" their attainment, belong to an elite segment of American culture. The standards of the American elite -- those who can afford eighteen thousand to forty thousand dollars per year for private school tuition, per child, from kindergarten through post-doctorate -- are not the standards of the masses.

To hide the socio-economic differences between those who deserve what they have and those who have what they deserve, public school officials adopt the descriptive language of private institutions. In their efforts to rebuild and restructure "physical plants," we hear elite descriptors: schools within schools, academies, and chief executive officer. Having restructured the physical plant and their managers with descriptors, there is no need to actually alter the walls and interiors of the actual school that remains a technological, stuffy, sweaty, gum strewn wasteland.

All of the students who fall outside the unspoken socio-economic foundation of "the standards," and their numbers belong to the largest segment of the American population, are not being served, but instead are being contained by public school policy. Their containment seems to be in the best interest of the day-to-day activities of the financial, industrial, service, labor and private institutions who do not want to be bothered by the actual conditions and attitudes that exist inside classrooms.

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17 February, 2005

Le Moyne College Dismisses Student for Personal Beliefs, Violates Own Policy on Free Expression

"Administrators at New York's Le Moyne College, which claims to protect academic freedom, have summarily dismissed an education student for writing a paper advocating strict discipline for students. The chair of Le Moyne's education department expelled master's student Scott McConnell because of a "mismatch" between his personal beliefs and the goals of the college's graduate education program.

"Le Moyne College says it respects academic freedom, yet it has dismissed a student purely for expressing personal beliefs that are different from those espoused by administrators," stated David French, president of FIRE. "This shows a profound lack of respect for the opinions of its students. Le Moyne must not promise freedom and then allow extensive and arbitrary censorship on an administrator's whim."

In November 2004, McConnell submitted as part of an assignment a paper expressing his personal views on classroom management, including various ideas for attaining a classroom environment that is "based upon strong discipline and hard work" and that allows "corporal punishment." The paper received an "A-," with his professor noting that his ideas were "interesting" and that she had shared the paper with the department chair, Cathy Leogrande. McConnell ultimately received an "A" as his final grade in the course.

Yet in January 2005, with no prior warning, Leogrande dismissed McConnell from Le Moyne. In the dismissal letter, Leogrande stated that she had reviewed McConnell's grades for courses he took during the summer and fall semesters and had "discussed" his work with his professors. Leogrande wrote, "I have grave concerns regarding the mismatch between your personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the Le Moyne College program goals. Based on this data, I do not believe that you should continue in the Le Moyne [Master of Science for Teachers] Program." At the time he was dismissed, McConnell had achieved a grade-point average of 3.78 for the fall semester and had received an "excellent" evaluation for his work in an actual classroom.

"Scott McConnell is being kicked out of school for an `A-' paper," noted FIRE's French. "It appears that at Le Moyne, ideological uniformity trumps any other ideal."

McConnell soon contacted FIRE for assistance. On February 3, FIRE wrote Le Moyne President Charles Beirne and reminded him that dismissing a student based solely on his expression would undermine the college's own standards, which state that students who interfere with others' expression are subject to "the maximum penalty of suspension or dismissal." FIRE noted that making an arbitrary administrative decision to censor expression "sends the message to the campus community that official censorship is acceptable and that those with controversial ideas should keep silent or risk being deemed a `mismatch' and summarily dismissed." Furthermore, FIRE pointed out that Le Moyne's acceptance letter to McConnell stated that his academic performance, not his personal beliefs, would be the determining factor as to whether he was allowed to continue with the master's program.

On February 8, Le Moyne responded to FIRE, stating that "the College does not believe it is appropriate to enter a public debate with your organization concerning the College's admission decision concerning any particular student."

"The fight for the academic freedom of Scott McConnell and for all Le Moyne students will not end just because administrators don't feel like addressing the issue," remarked Greg Lukianoff, FIRE's director of legal and public advocacy. "Le Moyne College administrators must learn that the freedom to dissent is everyone's business."

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U.K. Teachers to be protected from parental lawsuits over outings

Long overdue

"Teachers were offered an assurance yesterday that they will be protected from litigious parents if pupils are hurt on school trips. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, promised to issue guidelines making it "absolutely clear" that teachers enjoy a presumption of innocence if accidents occur. Schools and local education authorities should indemnify staff provided they had taken reasonable care, followed employer guidelines and carried out straightforward safety checks.

The second-largest classroom union, the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), has advised its members not to go on school trips because of the risk of being sued by "increasingly litigious" parents. Ms Kelly said that the majority of schools already provided field trips and other outdoor activities for pupils. But she acknowledged that there were real concerns and said that she wanted to work with unions, parents, teachers and school-trip providers to produce a manifesto for outdoor education. This would afford all children the opportunity to go on a residential trip with their school. Research for the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) last year showed that 86 per cent of primary schools and 90 per cent of secondary schools already make this offer to pupils. Seven million pupil visits take place each year, ranging from field trips to a week at an activity centre.

A DfES spokesman said that the guidelines, which will be issued in the summer, would emphasise the need for fair treatment for staff by employers and parents. "Staff who take reasonable care and follow the guidelines will, in the event of any unfortunate accident, be protected by the law," the spokesman said. "By carrying out straightforward, compulsory safety checks, teachers can protect both pupils and staff on a school visit and minimise the risk of litigation. The guidance will also make clear that employers must treat staff fairly when a pupil gets injured and that we expect parents to respond fairly, too."

Chris Keates, the general secretary of the NASUWT, called the new guidance an "extremely helpful and welcome development". She said: "When the detailed guidance is published, I am confident that the national executive will wish to respond positively."

The Commons Education and Skills Select Committee issued a report last week that urged teachers to stop worrying about the threat of legal action and to lead more school trips. David Hart, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that schools would welcome the Government's initiative.

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16 February, 2005

Conservative teens say school is biased against them

Soft-spoken and casually dressed, Chris Bowler does not look the part of a political firebrand. But his new conservative club has ignited considerable controversy at Hudson High School. To advertise the club's first meeting in December, Bowler put up a poster that included the website of a national organization for high school conservative clubs. The page includes links to videos of beheadings by Iraqi insurgents, saying the links are meant to show what terrorists can do. The posters immediately drew administrators' ire. Within a few hours, the posters were removed and access to the Web page was blocked on school computers. An attempt to display the posters last month was also squelched. "The material was way beyond what I believe the school should be advertising," said principal John Stapelfeld. "It seemed to be supporting violence more than supporting the conservative message."

Bowler and his supporters believe the response stems from a political bias in the school against conservatism. To them, it's ironic that students should be censored in a school that has won praise for innovative civics and community service programs. "They pride themselves on giving everyone a chance to say what they feel, up until this," said Bowler, a senior at the school. "We just want people to hear both sides."

Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va., said schools in the United States can legally curb speech only if it will create a "substantial disruption" in the school. In this case, he said, the students appear to have the law on their side. "That's not an easy standard to meet," he said. Goodman said Massachusetts law provides even greater free speech protection for public school students than does the First Amendment.

Stapelfeld said his decision to limit student access to the site had nothing to do with the club's political views. He said he was initially "thrilled" about the idea of a conservative club to spark political discussions. But Stapelfeld said the brutal images implicitly condoned violence as a way of "solving problems" and did not reflect "mainstream conservatism." "There are limits [to free speech] and there are clearly limits in the schoolhouse," he said. He added that showing terrorist murders did not address the more central problem of growing anti-Americanism abroad. "Unfortunately, we really haven't dealt with the fact that we're not well received in the world anywhere," he said. "That's the issue."

Bowler said Stapelfeld's comment typifies what he sees as the school's pervasive liberal bias. He and other club members say teachers have urged them to attend war protests, have confronted conservative students, and have inserted their liberal political views into discussions of both current and historical events. Several club members said one social studies teacher hung in her classroom a poster of George W. Bush with a foolish expression and a comment he made in jest in 2000: "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

Club members said they hoped that by banding together they could feel more free to express conservative views. "I think the teachers have tried to intimidate us," said James Melillo, a senior. "But it's had the opposite effect."

Stapelfeld said he wants the faculty to discuss divisive political and social issues frankly, but he acknowledged he had spoken with some teachers about injecting their personal views.

Tim Bueler, the 17-year-old founder of the High School Conservative Clubs of America, which he said has about a dozen chapters nationwide, said he was angered but not surprised by the Hudson decision to take down the posters that gave a link to his website. "This kind of reaction is typical," he said. "Public schools play by a different set of rules when it comes to the First Amendment." Bueler generated widespread controversy when he started a similar club two years ago at his Rohnert Park, Calif., high school and posted fliers attacking "liberal traitors" and illegal immigrants.

Stapelfeld said he believes the conservative club will ultimately provide a worthwhile alternative to the majority political outlook. On that point, the conservative students agreed, saying their club is a necessary counterweight. "We already feel we are getting the liberal side in class," said junior club member Sarah Berube

Source



GOVERNMENT MAKES EDUCATION DEARER, NOT CHEAPER

"We must open the doors of college to all Americans," declared the president in his State of the Union message. "To do that, I propose . . . The largest increase in Pell grant scholarships in 20 years." Do you remember hearing George W. Bush say that last week? Actually, you don't. Those words are from President Clinton's State of the Union address in 1997. But if you tuned in to Bush's speech on Feb. 2, you heard him say something quite similar: "We will make it easier for Americans to afford a college education by increasing the size of Pell grants." The new budget he unveiled this week would gradually raise the maximum annual grant to $4,550, an increase of $500.

Presidents come and go, but laments about the high price of higher education are eternal -- and so are calls for ever more federal aid to mitigate it. For 60 years, the federal government has been shoveling money into programs meant to make college more affordable -- yet a college degree today is more unaffordable than ever. Rarely has Washington so comprehensively worsened a problem it was determined to solve.

Beginning with the GI Bill in 1944, federal tuition aid has metastasized into a dizzying array of subsidies, most of which are now encompassed in the Higher Education Act. In addition to Pell grants, there are Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity grants and Federal Work-Study jobs, as well as Perkins Loans, Family Education Loans, Direct Student Loans, and Stafford (or Guaranteed) Student Loans. In 2005, these will account for more than $73 billion in overall federal financial aid to college students. Then there are the billions of dollars' worth of tuition credits and deductions written into the tax code -- the Hope Tax Credit, the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit, the higher education expense deduction, the student loan interest deduction, and the tax-exempt Qualified Tuition Plans, known as "529s."

And the result of this energetic government campaign to hold down the cost of a college education? The cost of a college education is skyrocketing -- and has been for years. Tuition and fees were up 10.5 percent at state colleges and universities last year. The year before that, they were up 14 percent. Every year for nearly a quarter-century -- since before most of today's college students were born -- higher education costs have raced ahead of inflation. And far from slowing this runaway train, government aid serves only to stoke the engine.

How could it do otherwise? Every dollar that Washington generates in student aid is another dollar that colleges and universities have an incentive to harvest, either by raising their sticker price or reducing the financial aid they offer from their own funds. Higher Education Act funds "are seen by colleges and universities as money that is there for the taking," observes Peter Wood, an anthropology professor at Boston University. "Tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else we think can be extracted from parents. Perhaps there are college administrators who don't see federal student aid in quite this way, but I haven't met them." In 10 years of attending committee meetings on the university's annual tuition adjustment, says Wood, "the only real question was, 'How much can we get away with?'"

It's an old story. City University of New York began charging admission in 1976, ending a century-old tradition of free tuition. As New York's deputy commissioner of education later explained, that decision was eased considerably by the knowledge that students would qualify for government aid. The anecdotal evidence is backed up by scholarship. In a new monograph for the Cato Institute, political scientist Gary Wolfram surveys the literature on the effect of financial aid. "The empirical evidence is consistent," he finds, in showing that "federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation's colleges and universities."

The cat has been out of the bag for a long time. In a 1987 New York Times column titled "Our greedy colleges," Ronald Reagan's education secretary, William Bennett, rebuked colleges and universities for repeatedly jacking up tuition far beyond any reasonable adjustment for inflation. "Increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions," Bennett charged, "confident that federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase."

Isn't it time to stop pouring fuel on this fire? Instead of renewing the Higher Education Act, Congress should phase it out, thereby forcing colleges and universities to compete on price. That would leave financial aid to the private sector, which can target it far more effectively -- and where it should have been left all along.

Source



MORE CHOICE -- BUT NOT FOR THOSE PESKY PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Under a socialist Australian State government

The 133-year-old notion of free and secular public education could be ditched in a radical plan to rewrite Victoria's education laws. Also on the table are raising the school leaving age of 15, giving parents a greater choice of public schools and tough new standards for private schools - including banning corporal punishment. A new regulatory body to govern all schools is also proposed, charged with maintaining education quality. The State Government has thrown open for public debate the guiding principles of education in Victoria as it prepares to rewrite the Education Act of 1872.

Releasing a discussion paper, Education Minister Lynne Kosky said the time had come for a "wholesale remaking of the act". "I believe we now need an Education Act that underpins our aspirations and hopes for education in 2005 and beyond," she said.

The review was welcomed by teacher, principal, parent and private school groups as an opportunity to shape and debate education in Victoria - although they differed on key issues such as school accountability, voluntary levies and punishment. The State Opposition accused the Government of being able to find money for the review while children with disabilities were unable to get help and schools were falling apart.

The 1872 legislation commits to free and secular education. The Government has suggested the principles could be modified to reflect school realities. Controversy has raged about whether state education is actually free, with schools charging parents "voluntary" levies that are often viewed as compulsory. Ms Kosky said that even the original act included charges beyond core subject areas. "I just think we need to have a proper discussion about that," she said. "Is that notion of free - when clearly there are voluntary levies provided - is that notion correct any more? Or is there better wording acknowledging that that's what does take place?" Ms Kosky said she doubted that the voluntary nature of levies would change, "but we might as well be more honest, I think, than even the original act was".

The legislative ban on religious education in government schools is also up for review. This is because schools now offer optional religious education. "If you followed the act, probably every school around the state's doing the wrong thing" she said. The state was also funding private schools that were clearly non-secular. Another key area is the minimum school leaving age, now 15. The debate will be over raising the leaving age as a way of keeping students at school longer, or what appears to be a preferred option of committing the state to proving an entitlement to 13 years of schooling.

The review is also looking at enshrining the right to choose among government schools, moving away from the idea that students automatically go to their neighbourhood school. One of the most contentious proposals is tough new standards for private schools, which receive state money. The Age reported last year Ms Kosky was planning new regulations demanding private schools meet minimum standards in literacy, numeracy and other curriculum areas. The discussion paper proposes the same minimum standards for government and private schools. It proposes an expert body to ensure quality in all schools.

Source

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

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

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15 February, 2005

COMPULSORY HOMOSEXUAL INDOCTRINATION IN THE SCHOOLS

A California school district may be taken to court after a group of high school teachers began blatantly promoting homosexuality in their classrooms. Recently a group of lesbian teachers in the Scotts Valley Unified School District (Santa Cruz County) started hanging pro-homosexual posters in their classrooms, discussing homosexuality in their classrooms, and providing referrals to homosexual and bisexual organizations to students questioning their sexuality. Numerous parents have complained to school officials, who said they would investigate matters. However, no administrative correction has been initiated in response to the complaints.

Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, says the teachers are engaged in a campaign of homosexual indoctrination, and are using anti-harassment laws as a soapbox for state-sponsored endorsement of their lifestyle. And they seem to be getting the support to do so, not only from the district, but from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and area homosexual organizations as well. "We know it's a very liberal community," Dacus notes, "a very hostile, intolerant community for the rights of parents, and intolerant towards those people of faith who do not openly accept and embrace homosexuality and other forms of deviant lifestyles." Although he says PJI is not really expecting the Santa Cruz County school officials to implement changes, he says his legal group is "hoping they'll take it under serious consideration."

The PJI attorney feels the school district is being hypocritical since, even as the teachers are engaging in their pro-homosexual conduct under the guise of tolerance, posters celebrating traditional families are not allowed. However, he points out that complaints from outraged parents have had virtually no effect on the school administrators. The officials have even ignored requests from district parents that the pro-homosexual posters be taken out of the classrooms and pinned instead on public bulletin boards where a student would have the option of reading or ignoring them, or that they be placed alongside posters showing competing viewpoints.

A number of the dissenting parents have argued that the students are a captive audience being forced to confront high-pressure influence from militantly pro-homosexual teachers who stand in a position of authority over them, as well as from aggressive homosexual students. According to PJI's sources, a student who is not interested in joining a "diversity club" at school is sometimes subjected to obscene gestures and other forms of harassment from homosexual peers.....

PJI sent an attorney to address the trustees of the Scotts Valley School Board at a meeting held last Monday, which focused exclusively on the poster controversy. At the heart of the discussion was a complaint filed more than two years ago by a district parent regarding the display of the pro-homosexual posters in district classrooms. The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that more than 400 people attended the February 7 school board meeting, which went on until almost 11 p.m.

The Scotts Valley School Board took no action, but board president Sue Roth and Superintendent Stephen Fiss planned to meet again to discuss the issue further. Roth was quoted in the Sentinel as saying she is not sure anything needs to be done, but she would hope the parent who filed the initial complaint will not pursue a lawsuit.

More here



USELESS EDUCATION

In many areas of the country, schools are funded by property taxes that often are as much each year as the sale price of the house 25 or 30 years ago. Have the schools improved over that time? No, they have not. More children are enrolled and "completing" their public school years, but to what end?

Colleges used to be affordable, for just about anyone. Now, tuition costs are exorbitant and many local community colleges will take anyone who walks in the front door. Instead of taking the courses taught as basics years ago, many of these students are taking in their first year of college what I took in 9th grade 50 years ago! This isn't progress. This is criminal abuse of children!

As the internet becomes more and more advanced, with more and more information available online, schools are turning to the computer and the internet - but forgetting that just because you can turn on the machine does not mean you can use it to its best advantage! Without a basic background in English grammar, the ability to spell correctly, and the knowledge of how to use the English language, hours using a computer are not going to be very educational!

Regardless of what a lot of politicians would like you to think, the Constitution does not specify any "right to education." It wasn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights, because education was part of bringing up a child, not a function of government! Children were either taught at home, by parents or tutors, or sent to small private schools paid for by the parents.

We can probably thank Karl Marx for our public school system - which was historically established to train workers for the Industrial Revolution, not to educate inventors, scientists or great thinkers! The airplane was not invented by an aeronautical engineer; it was invented by 2 bicycle mechanics. The telephone came out of an experiment to make a hearing aid. It took hundreds of failed attempts for a 3rd grade drop out to invent the light bulb, among hundreds of other useful things that he invented and perfected. Did taxes pay for the education of these and others like them? No! .....

Children in schools who ask questions and question authority are considered trouble makers. Often, they are the brilliant ones who, given the opportunity, will someday invent, create, or improve something important. Children who ask "why" need to learn how to find the answers, not be told "because I said so" or "it's what the books says." They do not need to be punished for being able to think!

And so we come to the future! More and more parents are pulling their children out of public schools to teach them at home. This trend is most likely going to accelerate, as the cost of transportation and personnel in school districts continues to rise. Communities are soon going to find that education, done the "conventional way," is no longer worth the cost involved.....

Computers used to be expensive. Now, one can buy a good used computer system, internet ready and able to do anything a student would need, for under $300. Children need very little instruction on using computers if they can read, spell and type! Typing programs are usually games and are fun for them to use. With Google planning to scan in searchable books by the thousands, anyone with a computer would have access to an awesome library system. As it is now, many libraries have information online.

In the next few decades, if we wish to continue to prosper in this nation, we need to allow our children to learn and not try to "educate" them! This is the 21st century. Classical education is much more valuable now than is vocational education, for things change so rapidly that one needs to be educated in order to survive, not merely "trained"! Lifetime learning is vitally important to progress and to maintaining a viable civilization.

More here



THE SUPERFICIALITY OF UNIVERSITY STUDENT LIFE

Some observations from Australia of 30 years ago that still seem relevant. Excerpt:

Of course, the rich brats flirt with Marx (as they have since the 'twenties). Especially his early work ["Grundrisse"], which Marx himself rejected, because it doesn't involve nasty difficult things like economics. They talk a lot about 'The Workers' and 'The People' and 'The Masses'. Mostly they've never worked in their lives, except for a summer vacation job at DJ's [Department Store], and they despise any beer-swilling, football-following unintellectual Alfs they actually meet. ('Alf is their word, popularised by those naughty but oh so witty boys from Oz). You can see their total inability to communicate with ordinary Australians when they try to talk with ordinary Australians who happen to be black at Abschol demonstrations. They despise the worker's ambition for a better home for his family from its sand-blasted glass front door to its wall-to-wall carpets, his pride and joy in his car, his harmless entertainment watching teev or sport. They have no conception of his heroism in the drudgery of his daily life, his courage in the face of difficulties they never face, his devotion to his family, his ill-expressed but often profound wisdom about men and affairs, his quick nose for the slightest hint of a phoney (their blindness to this last hardly surprises). They sneer at his son battling his way through engineering and playing Rugby [football] on Saturdays. Perhaps the workers are not very admirable in many ways, but it is odd that those who profess to champion them should emphasise their deficiencies so much. (This characteristic of student radicals to rubbish the working classes refutes the otherwise plausible explanation of a University as an institution to care for those unable to reconcile conflicting beliefs -'cognitive dissonance' as it is called. Students are as good at it as anyone.)

The nearest we've seen to the Student-Worker Alliance was a lady graduate student who shacked up with a wharfie [longshoreman]. Naturally, for it wouldn't do to flout the really fundamental social norms, he was an exceptional wharfie, with an honours degree in Arts. (The reaction of students to the relationship, before they found out that last significant fact, was very revealing.) Naturally too, he was not a success in his unusual vocation, and was chucked off the wharves.

Lots of the rich kiddies play prols, of course, and move out to the slums in a brave gesture of independence. They disturb the sleeping locals with expensive stereograms and send their washing home to Mummy. But when the shit hits the fan it's marriage and a steady job and a home in a good suburb. The number of self-styled radicals, student editors and so on who have already started buying a Nice Home is extraordinary; although some are sufficiently snobbish (or awake to a good investment) to put their money down in some newly-fashionable area like Balmain. Of course it's rude to point out such inconsistencies, or compare their sound investment with the bourgeois life-style they reject or the proletarian aspirations they despise. But it helps to clear up their views on private property; where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.

In fact, of course, they are bourgeois to the core. Their drug market works on straight free enterprise principles, and they're all in it for the money. They outdo each other with clothes, records, the whole, fashionable status symbol scene in a way embarrassing to a pleb who merely likes his new car. Beads do not a rebel make, nor tie-dyed clothes a rad. Look at the litter they leave and see what they think of pollution. Watch how they treat their birds and see what they think of Women's Lib. Watch how they treat each other and see what sort of society they believe in.

More here

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

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

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14 February, 2005

SAVVY FRENCH STUDENTS WANT TO PROVE THEIR ABILITY

Tens of thousands of lycee pupils joined demonstrations across France yesterday to demand the right to sit end-of-school examinations. The lyceens were protesting against a French government plan to modernise the two- century-old Baccalauriat by scrapping about half the written papers and replacing them with continuous assessment. They say that the reform, introduced by Francois Fillon, the Education Minister, would undermine the egalitarian nature of the national certificate that determines access to universities in France.

In the biggest in a series of simultaneous protests in the main cities, thousands of demonstrators blocked the centre of Paris. One group marched past the Palais de Justice in the French capital calling for M Fillon's resignation and holding up a banner which said Sauvons Notre Education (Save Our Education). Middle-aged passers-by, many of whom took part in the May 1968 student riots, clapped their hands in encouragement, although some pointed to the irony of the situation. Here were teenagers defending tradition against a centre-right Government that they accuse of ill-prepared innovation.

Ministers are concerned. The row has become the focal point for widespread discontent over education policy, prompting fears that it could "pollute" the referendum on the European Union constitution this year. With teachers already grumbling over what they say are cuts in secondary schools, supporters of President Chirac are concerned that the movement could spiral out of control and lead to a bout of social unrest. Luc Ferry, a former Education Minister, said: "Lyc,ens are like toothpaste. Once they are out of the tube, you can't put them back in." Last night, the Minister said that he would delay implementation of the reform for two months while he consulted education specialists and teachers' unions.

Many MPs on the government benches are angry with M Fillon for igniting demonstrations over what they say is a minor, technical reform. However, the Minister says reform is necessary to save the examination from bureaucratic collapse. Originally intended for the elite, it is now taken by 63 per cent of school leavers. Several measures in the Education Bill that he will present next week have been criticised, notably a change to the national curriculum that detractors say will squeeze economics and social sciences out of lyc,es.

Source



BRITAIN'S NEW EDUCATION CHIEF

"If the paranoid left of British letters are to be believed, schools in Britain could soon become very frightful places indeed. The new education secretary, Ruth Kelly, you see, has promised to bring more discipline to the classroom, and she is a member of a mysterious religious cult that requires no small measure of it. She is said to regularly attend rituals involving candles, funny clothes and archaic languages. She willingly hands over part of her hard-earned salary to a central authority and presumably has agreed to abide by ancient edicts handed down by a high power. She may even, like some members of the cult, forgo fun things or endure minor discomfort to help herself empathize with her redeemer.

The cult is called Roman Catholicism. Ms. Kelly, a 36-year-old mother of four named to Tony Blair's cabinet in December, has committed the unpardonable sin of admitting that she has a belief system to which she prefers to adhere. After weeks of scary headlines about this belief system, Ms. Kelly admitted in an interview with the BBC's David Frost earlier this month that she receives "spiritual guidance" from a Catholic lay organization known as Opus Dei.

Everyone, of course, knows all about Opus Dei from "The DaVinci Code." They know that its adherents, backed by legions of albino monks wearing spiky garters, fiendishly keep Christianity's deepest secrets, murdering nuns and anyone else who threatens to expose them.

The hysteria in the British commentariat about Ms. Kelly's ascendance into the Blair cabinet was about as restrained as Dan Brown's bestseller was accurate about Opus Dei, an organization of conservative Catholics whose 85,000 members take their faith more seriously than the average once-a-weeker. The Scotsman newspaper found someone from a support group for cult victims to wonder aloud whether Opus Dei adherents would soon be recruiting in Britain's schools. The Times tracked down scientists who professed to be horrified by the prospect of Ms. Kelly's religious beliefs interfering with stem-cell and other "vital" research. The Independent even created a new word for the movement: Catholofascists....

Anyone with firm convictions scares the relativists who dominate public discussion in Britain these days. Anyone who professes to know the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil, seems to scare them. Unless, that is, those firm convictions are founded in a faith other than Christianity. If Ms. Kelly were a Sufi Muslim, say, her belief system would surely be of little concern to the commentariat. Or, more accurately, it would be a cause for celebration. There surely would be no snide asides about buttock-thwacking pilgrims en route to Mecca or dervishes whirling down the halls of 10 Downing St...."

More here



CHRISTIAN STUDENT GROUPS NOT ALLOWED

Across America, more and more colleges are forcing Christian student groups to admit non-Christians or face being dissolved or punished. It is part of a wave of political correctness that accuses believers of discrimination if they want to limit their fellowship to like-minded believers. But some students are fighting back now. CBN News visited one such group at Arizona State University. There is really one main reason why Christian law students like Francisco Sirvent and Bethany Lewis want their own organization: Lewis said, "If you have a skiing club, the purpose there is to bring together people who love skiing and are devoted to skiing. Our organization -- the purpose there is to bring together Christians to walk out our Christianity together at the law school."

But Arizona State University has a problem with that, because the Christian Legal Society chapter demands two things of its members. Sirvent said, "We would just like to ask that our members and our leaders have Christian beliefs and believe in what the Bible says." Lewis remarked, "You have to be a Christian to be a part of our student organization. And then the other part is, implicit in our statement of faith is the idea that sex is only to be practiced within the bounds of marriage, so that would exclude homosexual conduct."

But ASU's Student Code of Conduct prohibits "engaging in discriminatory activities ... on the basis of (among other things) ... religion, (or) sexual orientation."

The Christian Legal Society at the school is represented by lawyers like Greg Baylor at Christian Legal Society's northern Virginia headquarters. The ASU Christian law students and the lawyers tried to get an exemption from ASU, but they were unsuccessful. Baylor said, "They said flat-out 'No, we're not going to respect your religious liberty.'" So the students have sued ASU and the Arizona Board of Regents, known as ABOR.

Baylor says ASU tells student organizations that 'you have to promise not to take religion or sexual conduct into account when you're choosing your voting members and your leaders'. And Baylor adds, "Our leader looked at that and said, 'Well, we can't do that. We're the Christian Legal Society. We're about allegiance to Jesus Christ, and therefore we want our voting members and our leaders to sign a statement of faith demonstrating their commitment to Christ and to live a life that's consistent with God's moral laws.'"

But there are real consequences if the law students refuse to comply. Sirvent said, "The first step is, ASU de-recognizes us as a student organization, and that takes away a lot of the benefits and privileges that student organizations have on-campus, which is meeting on-campus -- receiving some funding." And if the university wanted to get really personal, it could impose on the Christian students "...suspension, expulsion...which probably never would get to that level...but those are options for them," said Sirvent.

ASU would not give CBN News an interview, but did send us a news release accusing the Christian Legal Society of asking ASU "to permit the student chapter of the Christian Legal Society to discriminate against non-Christians and homosexuals." The release suggests that it is not going to happen because 'ASU is committed to diversity and respect for all of its students.' And it goes on to say that 'student organizations on ASU campuses are required to comply with applicable law and with the ABOR Student Code of Conduct.'

But Lewis insists, "In good conscience, we can't sign that non-discrimination policy." She added, "We've had problems in the past with members of different religions wanting to become members of our organization and lead Bible studies, when they don't agree with the essentials of Christianity." And both the students and Baylor say they are fighting because this is about far more than one club. He said, "The application of religion and sexual orientation non-discrimination rules is the most significant threat to religious freedom in America right now."

Baylor says it is almost like a fad spreading nationwide: universities ignoring federal law and cracking down on religious student groups. That is why the Christian Legal Society finds itself fighting cases like the one with ASU on at least four other campuses. Baylor said, "All of the laws that ban religious discrimination in employment have an exception for religious organizations. Because the law recognizes that it's simply not wrong for religious organizations to take religion and sexual conduct into account when choosing their people. I don't know why universities and other folks can't understand that. But the law in other contexts recognizes and respects religious freedom." So while the university feels it is fighting discrimination, the Christian Legal Society chapter wonders, 'Isn't it just a matter of common sense that Christians are the only people allowed in the Christian Legal Society?'

Source

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

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

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13 February, 2005

HOMESCHOOLING REPORTS

I am on a discussion list that has been comparing public schooling and home schooling. Below are a few posts from it:

From America (1):

You are quite correct to point out that some parents do a poor job of home schooling. However, all the recent research indicates that on the whole the students best prepared for college are first the home-schoolers, next the parochial school students, and last (and least!) public school students.

Also, our friends in the United Kingdom should realize that very often in our public schools very young children are iintroduced to age inappropriate materials designed to sensitize students to the problems of gays and lesbians. Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddie's Roommate are designed to indoctrinate children between the ages of six and nine with the progrmmatic demands of gay activists. Please understand that I believe it is essential to treat all people with dignity and respect and this includes those who have same sex attractions. However, I believe that parents have the right to teach their children that it is morally wrong to act on these inclinations if that is what their religious beliefs are. Those I know who teach their children at home do not introduce issues concerned with homosexuality until the early adolescent years and then they balance instruction on the need for respect for all with their own traditional attitudes about sexual morality. Children in the public schools are often led to believe that their own parents are behind the times because they oppose same sex marriage on moral grounds. Yes, we do have in this country hate mongers who exploit people's fears and ignorance. But there is a serious threat coming from the ultra-liberal crowed who would like to classify even the most civil language used to teach traditional sexual morality as "hate speech". I believe that this will in the near future pose a very serious free speech problem as it already has in certainly European countries (the Lutheran minister in Sweden jailed for reading biblical passages on homosexuality).

Home-schooling in America was started by evangelicals (many in the South) who objected to the secularist agenda of the public schools. Not all of these were opposed to teaching evolution, but they wanted a faith perspective integrated into their children's education and this was not possible in the public schools. The next wave of home schoolers (and these were found in almost all fifty states) were Catholics who objected to the hostility toward the teaching of John Paul II and the authentic interpretation of Vatican II that had become very common in the parochial schools. After the nuns abandoned the educational forms of service to become advocates for the poor in the inner-cities, the religious education establishment went with watered-down touchy-feely catechesis. Lots of radical feminism (God as mother, agitation for ordination of women, married priests, gay friendly sex education, etc., etc.) and an odd spin of the conservative social doctrine of the Church in the direction of liberation theology (a sort of baptizing of Marxian socialism!). Catholics who were sympathetic to the reforms of Vatican II and who oppossed the radical feminist spin to every area of doctrine started educating their children at home.

Finally, the third wave of home-schoolers were parents who had no particular ideological objections to the secularist framework for public schools. However, they strongly objected to the "dumbing down" feature of so much of recent public school instruction. When I graduated from grade school, I had already studied (in a parochial school) world and American history and geography, mathematics through pre-algebra, fundamentals of English grammer including the art of diagramming sentences, an expose to famous American writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Baltimore Catechism, health and basic science, spelling all eight grades, and civics (study of the U.S. Constitution and the structure of our states government and the various types of local government. When I taught in a high school shortly before retirement, there were very few students who had graduated from public schools who had basic reading skills, most were clueless about what adjectives, adverbs, etc. were, and none knew what a continent was or how many there were! I used to ask them what century the first world war was fought in and they often replied the thirteenth! Many did not know that the Crusades happened after the birth of Christ! They were unable to name a single figure from the Protestant reformation. Now you see why some parents threw up their hands in desparation and said to themselves "We can do better than this!"

Finally a true story on the state of Education at any rate in parts of California. I knew a young girl from California. Not a stupid girl, and as it happens a re-enactor (her period was Renaissance). At one time I showed her a map of America and she asked:

"What's all that stuff at the top?"

I said "That is Canada."

"Oh," she cried. "I thought Canada was a little place."

I promise I am not joking - and neither was she.



From America (2):

A relative of mine put his 7 year-old daughter in the Cleveland public schools temporarily until he could find a Catholic or private school. Everybody knows the schools in most every urban area are rotten in every way. I guess he figured how bad can it be for only a few weeks. Well, within a couple weeks his daughter was nearly gang-raped by some of her fellow "students." Three or four of the little monsters had her pinned to the floor with her dress up over her head with one or two others standing-by ready to do the deed. Luckily, someone intervened in the nick of time. Keep in mind, we're talking about the second grade. Anyway, when he took the matter to the school officials it was a farce. He said the first person he was directed to was some hippy-type white women whom he suspected was under the influence of some kind of narcotic. Not getting any satisfaction from her, he took the matter to the principal, whom was a black women. Immediately, she tried to dismiss the whole thing as just kids playing and when he insisted that it was a sexual assault, she called him a racist at which point he realized the situation was hopeless.

To make a long story short, he ended up putting the kids in a Catholic school for a couple years and eventually had to leave the area when bullets started whizzing through his yard. Now he lives 80 miles away in a rural area and commutes two hours each way to his job.

Maybe some people unfamilar with the situation will assume I'm exaggerating, but the truth is there are many details I left out.



From America (3):

I attended public schools in the southern USA in the years just after forced racial integration. EEK, talk about scary and violent! I was so terrified at times that I would come home practically begging to be schooled elsewhere. My liberal parents who were either ignorant as to how bad things had gotten or just didn't care told me that this experience was good for me and I had to learn to get along with all classes of people because that's what the real world was like. What a bunch of garbage.. in the real world you can call the police if someone hurts or threatens you, when you're a young child in public school you are absolutely helpless.



From America (4):

The area in which I live has one of the highest concentrations of homeschooling families in the country. In the county which I reside, and the county next to it, there is a group called LEAH (Loving Education At Home), which shares books, knowledge, and the parents help each other out, especially when getting to the high school levels of curriculum, since some parents are especially good at teaching chemistry, they might teach a class of high schoolers on that, or math, etc...

The largest complaint in the area about homeschooling is the public school teachers who whine about lack of socilization among home school pupils....That is not always the case. In the LEAH groups, they have sports teams, field trips, and plays they perform. I think all in all, it's pretty well rounded. I know a young lady who was homeschooled throughout K-12, and she is one of the most mature teenagers I could ever meet. She is academically brilliant as well. Her lessons didn't take her 8 hours a day to do...Often, by the senior year (she graduated at 17), she needed to only spend about 1.5 hours a day on her studies to get them done. Tells us something about the time and effort wasted on public schools, doesn't it? If I am especially gifted at history, and I do the reading on my own, and the study, and do well on the tests, I still need to sit through 45 minutes of history class a day. If I am poor at math, I only get 45 minutes, which I have to share with an entire class room of kids, a day, then, after my 8 hours in a class room, seek out extra help elsewhere. If I'm poor at math in homeschool, there is the chance to spend more time on that subject, which I think can inspire more confidence in the student when they do well.



From America (5):

My niece had home-schooled her four children from pre-school to 7th grade. They are currently in a private, Christian high school whose emphasis is on a classical education (as well as theology, the Bible, etc.). Her kids are so far advanced compared with the mainstreamed kids of the same grade/age. They also perform full-length Shakespearean plays and their knowledge--no, mastery-- of math, history, science, literature, languages, and all the classics is exemplary.

I don't denounce mainstream education; most of it is very good. But having seen my niece's kids, their home-schooled friends, and so many more, I'm convinced it goes beyond the "very good" into the realm of "excellence."

These young people are no shrinking violets who have been sheltered from "real life" at mainstream schools. Quite the contrary; they are debaters, athletes, and budding politicians, actors, artists and educators-in-the-making. Needless to say, I'm rather proud of my niece and her children for the level and quality of education they have absorbed. And they are not "geeks!" These young people shine. They are happy, grounded, humorous, kind, sensible, and feel a real duty to serve mankind.

I only wish more kids could be home-schooled, even during just the early years, to get a foundation and firmer foothold on what it's like to be successful in other diverse arenas besides the traditional academic or athletic fields of endeavor in our schools.



From America (6):

There is a teacher in Santa Barbara, California, that I am seeking to have dismissed. She is currently on "administrative leave" due to the complaints of the parents of nineteen children she abused to tears to "teach them a lesson about discrimination." The way she treated these children would be prosecuted as a "hate crime" if her victims had been black. She marked them with tags that designated them as "inferior," which got these children signaled out for tormenting.

The children in Santa Barbara at Monroe Elementary are only in the third grade, but this sort of nonsense goes on at the university level as well, starting with "freshmen orientations" that are basically just indoctrination with "guilty White" speeches and "exercises" that actually constitutes hate speech and violates federal anti-hazing laws.

If young people manage to survive all this while in school, they can still be subjected to it at the corporate level in mandatory "sensitivity training" or "diversity training" seminars employees must attend to keep their jobs. I am a woman who would be terrified of men taught gender sensitivity with the tactics used to guilt-trip Caucasians. A perfect gentleman before the seminar could actually be a danger to women after he left, which is precisely why I think these "anti-racist" propogandist are nothing but skinhead factories.

Nothing that demeans another human being is acceptable to me. I am just sick of these double standards that require us to believe that whether or not an act is even considered racist depends on the race of the racist.



From England:

In Britain most children who have the basic State "education" - including those who go to what are laughingly termed "Universities" - cannot spell or write a sentence of gramatical English. They are, however subjected to hours of propaganda of a nature that any one before the 1960s would have termed extremist and also to a "socialisation" process which consists essentially of de-civilising them and encouraging them (often on pain of physical intimidation) to adopt the language and manners of the lowest classes.

If home schooling taught them nothing at all it would at least keep them out of these State hell-holes.

A friend of mine who was a teacher sent her chilren (at the cost of re-mortgaging her house) to a private school which she knew to be very bad (that was all she could afford) just t keep them out of the sort of hell-hole schools she herself taught in. She was frequently insulted, assaulted and robbed by pupils. This was an ordinary South-London black-majority comprehensive. There are hundreds of them. If your school is not like that, lucky you! And luckier your pupils who have no choice about being there!

My dearest friend taught English for years at a University and attests to the abysmal standards of pupils direct from the State school system. Many Universities now spend part of the first year doing remedial English of the sort that would have been done in primary schools in the 1950s.

Some of the books that chldren are made to study at A-level contain language, incidents and attitudes that no decent parent would permit in the house.

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

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12 February, 2005

Creating a climate of fear

Crafty college and university professors have figured out how to intimidate their students and get praised for it. Thankfully, some students are no longer standing for this. By manipulating public respect for the First Amendment, some professors disguise intellectual pressure tactics as mere expressions of opinion offered in the spirit of open debate. What they are really doing is using their positions of authority to bully students into agreement. And for this they often are praised by their peers and bosses.

Take, for example, Keene State Professor David Stowell, who has some 15 political statements (left-wing, of course) displayed on his office door. The anti-war slogans (such as "How many Iraqi children did we kill today?") angered Shane Calchera, a veteran who happened to have Stowell as a professor. Calchera alerted the college that Stowell was creating an atmosphere that amounted to harassment of veterans. If Calchera's door had been plastered with anti-woman slogans, a student would have won easily. But making veterans feel bad about themselves by calling them baby killers is still considered OK on campus. Calchera lost.

Stowell, in turn, has filed a complaint with the ACLU, saying, "I was investigated because of my political views because someone objected to them, and that's frightening."

No, professor, you were investigated because you used your position to create a climate of fear. There is a huge difference between stating your views on your own time and using public property and a position of authority to badger people whose academic destinies you partially control. Professors, no matter their political views, ought to act like professionals and refrain from political sloganeering in the workplace. It is a breach of decorum, even if done with the most innocent motives. It is deliberate intimidation of subordinates (students) when done with malice. Of course, removing open politicking from professors' offices and the classroom will never happen. So at the very least professors ought to consider the effect their proselytizing might have on students who disagree with them and do it with the utmost tact - assuming they have any.

Source



BAD PUSHES OUT GOOD

NYC now has to pay such high salaries to get teachers for its public schools that it makes the parochial schools unable to compete for teachers without raising salary costs to unaffordable levels

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn will close 22 elementary schools in Brooklyn and Queens at the end of the school year in the biggest round of Catholic school closings in the city's history. Falling enrollment and rising salaries for teachers and administrators made the closings necessary, Monsignor Michael J. Hardiman, a diocese education official, said Wednesday.

The 4,000 affected students can enroll in the remaining 125 schools in the diocese. Officials told The New York Times they expect many of the 250 teachers will find work at the other schools. "It's wrenching to see this happen," Frank DeRosa, a spokesman for Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio, told the newspaper for Thursday editions. "We know how much good has been accomplished in those schools for so many students, by dedicated teachers, for so many years. But the reality of the situation now requires this kind of action."

The decision does not affect schools in Manhattan, the Bronx or Staten Island, which fall under the Archdiocese of New York.

Source



If higher spending is sure to improve schools, why hasn't it done so in past?

At a press conference last week, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell once again called for higher taxes on parents as the putative remedy for California's lagging student performance. In so doing, he attempted to perpetuate the myth that more education dollars will mean a better education product for California taxpayers. The bad news for Mr. O'Connell is that taxpayers and voters are wising up. The education establishment has in the past repeatedly asked for more money with promises of better performance and has been consistent only in disappointing us.

As to the current condition of California's educational product, there is little debate. A recent study by the Rand Corp. analyzed national standardized testing and ranked California public schools at the bottom of the 50 states. Asked for an explanation, Superintendent O'Connell blamed Proposition 13, asserting that if his agency had more money, schools would improve. The Rand study found that the amount California spends on public education falls in the top half of the 50 states. California is one of the highest-taxed states, and public education consumes $50 billion of the state's $109 billion total budget. If there were a correlation between governmentspending and student performance, then California schools should at least score in the top half of the nation, not dead last.

In his press conference, Superintendent O'Connell announced his plan to improve California school performance in response to the Rand study. Does this plan have anything to do with the curriculum, accountability, grading policies, student discipline or reducing state bureaucratic and union control over local schools? No. Instead, Mr. O'Connell said he "will focus on increasing state money [by a] campaign to reduce the threshold necessary to pass local parcel taxes."

In other words, he wants to gut Prop. 13 by making it easier to raise property taxes, then send the money to Sacramento.

More here

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

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11 February, 2005

THE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF COLUMBIA

There is a war going on over the Middle East - right in the middle of Manhattan, at Columbia University. The school's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, known as MEALAC, has been credibly accused of anti-Semitism and intimidating pro-Israel students (Some Jewish students have even made a documentary, "Columbia Unbecoming," which includes interviews with the cowed students.)

In fact, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz told an audience at Columbia, the faculty of MEALAC go further than merely being anti-Israel; they actively encourage Islamic terrorism, reports the New York Sun. Columbia is the university that raised $4 million - including a contribution from the United Arab Emirates - to create the Edward Said endowed chair in Arab studies.

Dershowitz, speaking to a full house at Columbia, reminded those gathered that Said was an extremist, and he ripped the university as a whole on the issue of its anti-Israel bias. "The kind of hatred that one hears on campuses like Columbia - and let me say, especially Columbia - is a barrier to peace," Mr. Dershowitz said. "They are encouraging the terrorists. They tell the terrorists you will have academic support even if you oppose the peace process. This is the most unbalanced university that I have come across when it comes to all sides of the Middle East conflict being presented," he said. "I have never seen a university with as much faculty silence."

To back up Dershowitz's point, the New York Sun reports that two authors attended a Columbia panel on the Middle East conflict last week entitled "One State or Two? Alternative Proposals for Middle East Peace." In the guise of talking peace, Sol Stern and Fred Siegel were witness to Columbia professors like Rashid Khalidi, the recipient of the endowed Said chair, and Joseph Massad opening wide the "floodgates of hatred," with Massad "demanding of one Israeli student, 'How many Palestinians did you kill today?'" and using "the phrase 'racist Israeli state' more than two dozen times."

Dershowitz blasted ivory-tower elitists for everything from their silence to trying to divest from Israel, singling out Massad, "who in 2003 called on the university to divest itself of financial holdings in companies that support Israel," reports the Sun. "Anybody who advocates for divesting only from the Jewish state ... at a time when Iraq was posing a great threat to the world, when Iran was posing great threats ... when China is oppressing million of Tibetans, when the Kurds are still denied independence and statehood, to single out only Israel for divestiture at that point in time cannot be explained by neutral political, even ideological consideration," Dershowitz said. He added, "I'm appalled at how many professors at Columbia University privately support Israel, and privately support many of the students, but are publicly afraid to speak out." For a solid hour, Dershowitz ran up one side of the Columbia faculty and down the other, saying at one point that peace in Israel has a better chance than it does on campus right now.

University president Lee Bollinger did put together a committee to look into complaints about the MEALAC, but Dershowitz pulled rank, so to speak, and warned that if Bollinger's group came to a "biased" conclusion, he would get a panel of Nobel Prize winners together to look into the Jewish students' complaints.

Source



LEFTIST TEACHER ARROGANCE IN AUSTRALIA TOO

A senior education adviser has blamed the education profession for the re-election of the Coalition Government, expressing his disappointment that former pupils had voted for John Howard. NSW English Teachers Association president Wayne Sawyer's extraordinary remarks in a teaching journal have sparked a heated debate about the appropriateness of pushing politics in the classroom and the responsibility of teachers to adhere to the principle of impartiality. Associate Professor Sawyer, the former chair of the NSW Board of Studies English Curriculum Committee, said English teachers had failed to encourage critical thought. "We knew the truth about Iraq before the election - did our former students just not care?" Professor Sawyer wrote late last year in an editorial for the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. "We knew before the election that 'children overboard' was a crock, but as it was yesterday's news, did they not care about that either? Has English failed not only to create critical generations, but also failed to create humane ones? What does it mean for us and our ability to create a questioning, critical generation that those who brought us balaclava'd security guards, alsatians and Patricks Stevedoring could declare themselves the representatives of the workers and be supported by the electorate?"

The article sparked a political backlash yesterday, with Education Minister Brendan Nelson warning it confirmed "the worst fears" of parents that teachers were peddling political views. Dr Nelson said he hesitated to "give any dignity whatsoever to what has been written here". But he told The Australian: "It confirms in part what is held as the worst fears of parents that often teachers are seeking to impose their own particular views which they are perfectly entitled to have, but to impose those views on students. This person is doing a great disservice to English teachers generally and their representation."

A spokesman for NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said guidelines were in place stipulating students be taught in an "impartial and objective manner". He added: "The guidelines are in place and we would expect teachers to adhere to them."

Associate Professor Sawyer, who teaches at the University of Western Sydney, defended his article yesterday, saying "this is not about teachers becoming Leftist politicians in classrooms". And he said the article, an editorial in the journal, was his opinion rather than the position of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. "This is about the idea that students have to be able to analyse language and be critical of language and that's an important thing for citizens in a democracy to be able to do," Professor Sawyer said. "And I was throwing down the gauntlet to the idea that if we are going to create critically literate citizens in a democracy then the last two elections, in particular, have been run around the use of language." He said the Howard Government had used language effectively, coining emotive phrases such as queue-jumpers for asylum seekers. He said political material from both major parties could be analysed in classrooms when teaching critical literature to students.

Source

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

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10 February, 2005

No Wonder Teachers Union Hates Merit Pay

In response to my Sunday column about the teachers union and education establishment fearing competition from charter schools, one teacher called me and -- before he started screaming obscenities at me -- made the same argument all these union people make: there is no way to measure teacher performance. It's unfair to judge teachers based on test scores, they argue. Therefore, they say, there is no fair way to institute a merit pay plan. As a result, we -- the hard-pressed taxpayers who lack a powerful union to lobby for our interests -- should all accept that the lousiest teachers earn the same amount as the good ones.

This is an absurd argument. In every line of work outside government, people are evaluated on their skills in whatever it is they do. My editor does not judge me based on some objective measurement of, say, the newspaper circulation, but on her evaluation of my work performance. In other words, our bosses judge us and render a verdict. That's the real world outside the protected government civil-service/tenure system. We are "at will" hires, which means that, generally (barring certain protections in the law), our bosses can determine our fate based on any reason at all. That keeps us on our toes. In government, you cannot get fired short of some grievous activity ... and even that is questionable, as the firefighter scandal in Sacramento is proving. Why can't principals decide which teachers are good and which ones are losers? Why can't they give higher increases to the good ones and fire the bad ones? Gee, such a radical idea. No wonder the teacher was screaming.

Source



BUT PERFORMANCE PAY IS HAPPENING IN SOME PLACES (SORT OF)

Gone are the days when teachers' salaries rose automatically with years of experience, or academic credits. In this idyllic Mississippi River town, teachers get an annual raise only if they set and fulfill performance goals. The idea of performance pay — a notion once reviled by most teachers — is getting a warmer reception here. Teachers are trying hard to prove they're worth the money, from more frequent student testing, to e-mailing parents, to trying out different styles for their students. "Just rewarding people for having put in a lot of years, that's one of the things the public gets upset about — and justly so," said Kris Sandy, a high school English teacher. "In terms of having some more reasonable examples of what we do every year to improve our curriculum and be better teachers, that's perfectly reasonable."

The pilot project in the La Crescent-Hokah district and a handful of others in Minnesota comes as several other states examine the way teachers are paid. "Ten years ago, if you were for performance pay, you were a nut. Now we can have a discussion about it with the unions in a very constructive, positive way," said Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who wants to see merit pay on a much wider scale. "It's not meant to be a punishment. I think we're all big enough to realize the system we have now is outdated."

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for his state to demand teacher pay on merit and tie teachers' continued employment to their classroom performance. In Denver, residents will vote in November on a property tax increase allotting $25 million for a performance-pay model.

Teachers in Chattanooga, Tenn., can earn four-figure bonuses for boosting student achievement; in Douglas County, Colo., which established a merit model a decade ago, performance factors into raises for everyone from teachers to janitors. "We're seeing more action and not just rhetoric," said Michael Allen, who tracks teacher trends for the Education Commission of the States.

The idea hasn't worked everywhere. Cincinnati teachers were moving toward such a pay plan before pulling back in 2002, citing flaws in the proposed evaluation system. In Colorado, the Steamboat Springs school board reversed course after finding the program too expensive to implement. Teachers unions, most notably the National Education Association, are leery about losing the pay security of the traditional system of experience and academic credits. They worry performance pay can be too subjective, and that test scores — a measurement tool often linked with merit pay — aren't a fair way to judge student progress.

The Minnesota PTA, a parents group, favors blending the traditional system with bonuses for superior teaching performance. "They're trying to do this business concept where we look at a couple factors and make it nice, cut-and-dried, simple and easy. Education is not simple and easy," said Phillip Enke, the group's president. Pawlenty, Minnesota's governor, has proposed setting aside $60 million for districts that adopt some form of the merit pay system. His proposal would eliminate the old system and have teachers reviewed by administrators and peers; student achievement would be considered in awarding raises.

In the La Crescent-Hokah model, pay can never go down. However, teachers can go without an increase indefinitely if they don't make progress toward their goals. Superintendent David Krenz estimated 90 percent to 95 percent of the district's teachers succeeded last year, adding $750 to their base salary. Raises varied under the old system. For example, teachers saw a $220 bump between their first and second years. A 25-year veteran with a master's degree could count on $430 by coming back the next year. Darrel Collins, a social studies teacher in his 30th year, said he's noticed a difference in how his colleagues approach their jobs. Collins said the program has worked because peers are involved in the evaluations and teachers get some leeway on what constitutes progress. "It's not a game where you are trying to make yourself look good. We're not giving teachers the raise on whether or not they actually achieved (a stated goal)," said Collins, the head of the local teachers union.

Four years into the pilot project, it's not clear if it's made a difference for students. Reading and math test scores for third-graders have climbed steadily, but exam scores for fifth-graders have fluctuated.

Source

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

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9 February, 2005

EVASIONS UNDERLIE CURRENT EDUCATIONAL THEORY

Post lifted from Turin He is discussing an influential educational reformer who helped get busing introduced in Boston

Kozol's school, with white teachers and Black students, was in chaos. "White was overcome in black among them, but white and black together were overcome in chaos."(P. 29.) What was the source of the chaos? For Kozol, the school's discipline and the racial bigotry of the teachers were the sources of the chaos. Of course, many social observers said that the chaos was already inside the students when they came to school. This view was the official position of the Boston school board. The chaos was created by social disorganization of the Black family and community. Kozol tackled this issue by retelling a conversation he had with a white (presumably Jewish) landlord in Roxbury. "I remember a talk that I had around that time with a man who owned a lot of property in the Negro section and who made a great deal of money out of this property..."(P.140.) The landlord thought that the schools gave a poor education to the Black students; nonetheless:

"'The schools are doing a wonderful job with what they've got. You take these kids from homes like those and parents from all over no place and everything all mixed up and nobody living right and how on earth do you expect a day in school to change that child's life?'"(P. 140.)

Kozol countered that the physical facilities of the school were poor and uncomfortable. Windows were broken. A window fell in on Kozol's class. Two classes shared the same room. Attentive teaching and learning was physically impossible. The landlord responded:

"'We did it, and we never had any fancy schools either and nothing special for us, no special classes or stuff like that. And if we did it then I don't see why can't they?'"(P.140-141.)

"We" were the Jewish families and Jewish community who lived in Roxbury a generation earlier. Jews had been able to obtain social mobility through education and move out of Roxbury's poor buildings. Jews had been advance in the face of discrimination and prejudice. Why could not African Americans do it also? That indeed was the question. Kozol, who was Jewish, evades it. (Instead of answering the question, Kozol accuses the landlord of hypocrisy. On the basis of Black rents, Kozol notes, the landlord sent his child to a "sophisticated little French school outside of Boston" [p. 141].)

There was no way for Kozol to answer the question. In 1965, the Department of Labor released Daniel Moyniham's report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The report documented - again - the well-known fact of Black family instability and its consequences. (Du Bois and Frazier had both analyzed it at length earlier.) The contrast to the strong family structure of the Jews and the role of the Jewish family as the base of Jewish community culture was obvious and clear.

It was not the law of the land in America (as it was in France, for instance) that the family was the basis of the nation's social structure; so it was not the law of the land that social policy should establish racial equality in family stability. It was the law of the land, however, that social policy should make schools equal; so schools bore the burden of repairing the damaged subjectivities of children attending them. And this is the story Kozol tells while disguising and evading the central issue.



SURPRISE, SURPRISE!

LOS ANGELES: The L-A Unified School District spent nearly 50 (m) million dollars on a computer reading program that failed to improve student literacy skills.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the district bought the system four years ago to boost test scores at low-performing elementary schools. The Waterford Early Reading Program was used to supplement language arts instruction in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. However, a review of school district records reveal the system had no affect on most students and had a "negative impact" on some kindergartners whose teachers substituted it for primary reading lessons.

In other cases, some teachers were too busy covering the district's rigorous reading curriculum to devote enough time and energy to the computer lessons. Some teachers simply didn't know how to use the program, and some couldn't because of computers that froze and broken headsets. The findings prompted the district to order schools to limit the technology's use to struggling students. Now, school officials are questioning whether the program was worth so much of the district's funds.

Source

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

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8 February, 2005

UNSCIENTIFIC SMITHSONIAN

Further to my post of 31st January regarding the anti-religious thought-police at the Smithsonian and their persecution of Dr. Sternberg, I have received the following interesting email from a reader:

The Smithsonian has NEVER been an unbiased museum. A good example is the blatant attempt to rewrite history and say that Samuel Langley's attempt at powered flight would have been successful.

Langley's first attempt plummeted like a rock into the Potomac almost killing the pilot. At the second attempt the rear wings, (the plane had TWO SETS OF WINGS,) folded up at launch. However, the head of the Smithsonian in 1914 wanted to build up Langley, so had Glen Curtis rebuild the plane (with extensive modifications) and fly it. (Curtis was involved in patent disputes with the Wrights, so would have loved to shoot down the Wright patents.)

It took until 1942 before the Smithsonian admitted to the shenanigans, and 1948 before the Wright flyer was displayed in the museum. (It had been in the British museum till then.)

See here

THERNSTROM ON CHOICE AS THE KEY TO QUALITY

Abigail Thernstrom spoke with passion to Louisville's School Choice Scholarship group last week about the achievement gap between black and white students. She said Americans should be outraged about the poor achievement of black students and should demand change in the system.

After visiting schools all over the United States, Thernstrom said, while schools may fail for a variety of reasons, all successful schools share certain characteristics that you can spot within a couple of minutes. First, they are clean and orderly. You don't see trash on the floor or graffiti on the walls. Second, they have a great principal who has control of his budget and his personnel. In other words, he gets to decide how the money will be spent in his school; he has control over hiring; and he has the power to get rid of teachers who are not performing to his satisfaction. Third, if a student chooses to be disruptive or not to apply himself as required by the school, the school has the power to show him to the door. "If you don't want to be here, you don't have to be here. There are plenty of other children who would love to take your place."

Thernstrom said one definition of middle class is that people who are in the middle class have the power to choose their child's school, either by moving to the neighborhood from which that school draws its students or by paying tuition to a private school. However, poor people do not have the power to choose their child's school and therefore frequently are trapped in the worst-performing schools.

Thernstrom's book, No Excuses - Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, explores the issue of the racial learning gap in great detail -- shooting down the conventional wisdom about class size, funding, and "resegregation" and describing what needs to be done to solve the problem. Thernstrom is a supporter of vouchers, saying that the money should be strapped to the child's back and should follow him or her to any school the parents choose, as long as the school meets the government's standards.

The teacher's unions are strongly opposed to Thernstrom and to the voucher movement, due to their fear of competition. Many conservatives also oppose the voucher movement, fearing that it gives the government greater influence over private schools and will gradually convert them into government-controlled schools, with all the problems inherent in a government-controlled education system. Privately-funded scholarship programs, such as School Choice Scholarships, currently provide a non-government alternative that has had tremendous success with minority and white low income children. However, these scholarship programs have very limited resources. Some states have instituted tax credits for those who contribute to private scholarship programs, making it easier for resources to be allocated to those very successful programs while substantially reducing the amount of tax money that has to be spent on public schools.

More here

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

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7 February, 2005

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS

Another attempt to intimidate conservatives

A UNLV professor under fire for comments he made about homosexuals during a class lecture last year demanded Friday that the university stop threatening to punish him. "I have done absolutely nothing wrong," said the professor, Hans Hoppe, a conservative libertarian economist with almost 20 years teaching experience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, on Hoppe's behalf, sent a letter to UNLV officials alleging that the university violated Hoppe's free speech rights and his right to academic freedom. "The charge against professor Hoppe is totally specious and without merit," reads the letter from ACLU attorney Allen Lichtenstein. He said they would sue the university if necessary, though they hope to avoid it.

UNLV officials would not comment on the case, saying they cannot talk publicly about personnel matters.

Hoppe, 55, a world-renowned economist, author and speaker, said he was giving a lecture to his money and banking class in March when the incident occurred. The subject of the lecture was economic planning for the future. Hoppe said he gave several examples to the class of about 30 upper-level undergraduate students on groups who tend to plan for the future and groups who do not. Very young and very old people, for example, tend not to plan for the future, he said. Couples with children tend to plan more than couples without. As in all social sciences, he said, he was speaking in generalities. Another example he gave the class was that homosexuals tend to plan less for the future than heterosexuals. Reasons for the phenomenon include the fact that homosexuals tend not to have children, he said. They also tend to live riskier lifestyles than heterosexuals, Hoppe said. He said there is a belief among some economists that one of the 20th century's most influential economists, John Maynard Keynes, was influenced in his beliefs by his homosexuality. Keynes espoused a "spend it now" philosophy to keep an economy strong, much as President Bush did after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks....

But within days of the lecture, he was notified by school officials that a student had lodged an informal complaint. The student said Hoppe's comments offended him. A series of formal hearings ensued.

He said university officials first said they would issue him a letter of reprimand and dock him a week's pay. That option was rejected by Hoppe's dean and by the university provost, Hoppe said. More hearings ensued, he said. In the end, the university gave him until Friday to accept its latest offer of punishment: It would issue him a letter of reprimand and he would give up his next pay increase. Hoppe, a tenured full professor, contacted the ACLU on the recommendation of an attorney friend of his. Hoppe is now their client. "I felt like I was the victim," he said, "not the student."

ACLU officials said the validity of Hoppe's economic theories does not matter. It is his right to espouse them in class. "We don't subscribe to Hans' theories and certainly understand why some students find them offensive," said Gary Peck, the ACLU of Nevada's executive director. "But academic freedom means nothing if it doesn't protect the right of professors to present scholarly ideas that are relevant to their curricula, even if they are controversial and rub people the wrong way."

Hoppe said he is dumbfounded by the university's response to the student's complaint. It is not his job, he said, to consider how a student might feel about economic theories. "Our task is to teach what we consider to be right," he said. The offended student, he said, should have been told to "grow up."

More here



PHONICS: NOBODY SAYS IT BETTER THAN PROF. PLUM

Post lifted whole from the good Professor's site. More here

There's a ton of solid data showing that systematic (planned, logically progressive), explicit (clear models, definitions, and rules), focused instruction is highly effective.  In fact, Professor Plum has clogged this blog (note the clever approximation to a rhyme) with sprightly verbiage on that very subj, here.

In addish, as you may know, there are many field-tested commerical programs in reading, math, writing, spelling, science, logic, and history based on principles of systematic, explicit, focused instruction.  These go by the name Direct Instruction, as discussed here and here.  Programs very close to DI are by Saxon Math (at least it used to be the case), Singapore Math, and many programs sold by Sopris West and Curriculum Associates.

Natcherly, "little" di (systematic, explicit, focused instruction in general) and commercial DI programs are despised by the majority of pedagogues and decision-making eduhacks--possibly because these nitwits know that effective, efficient programs will put them out of business. Witness the evil nonsense going on in Rockford, IL.  The idiocy in the remarks of Ms. Hayes as she defends her decision to get rid of DI and replace it with whole language (which edufrauds call  "balanced literacy") is so blatant you'd think she'd have noticed--or perhaps not.

As principal, Parker used teacher-led direct reading instruction with a heavy dose of phonics. Chief Instructional Officer Martha Hayes, who arrived with Superintendent Dennis Thompson in May, wants more student-centered reading called "balanced literacy."

Hayes said Lewis Lemon's success did not translate to higher fifth-grade reading scores. Parker said direct reading instruction was new to the upper elementary grades and was not given time to show results.

You can read the latest here. 

Whole languagists and other intellectually impaired inhabitants of Edland are clever reptiles.  OF COURSE DI is not going to raise fifth grade reading scores YET; the school started using it in the LOWER grades.  This is akin to arguing that a medicine does not work even though no patients have taken it yet.  How people this stupid are able to put on their pants without strangling themselves or setting the house on fire is a great mystery.  I wonder if they THINK of these lines ahead of time, or if their madness just leaks out.

Having watched whole languagists, pseudo-child-centrists, and progressives since 1967, we know them to be unrepentant liars, cowards, and mentally negiligible hysterical harpies.

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

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6 February, 2005

ACADEMIC DOUBLE STANDARDS

It seems that liberals are confused about why conservatives care so deeply about what goes on in the groves of academe. They do not get why conservatives are very vocal about political bias in the classroom, which is combined with lessons in everything from anthropology through to zoology.

2005 is proving already to be something of a vintage in this respect. First, we had the debacle over comments offered by Larry Summers at Harvard on women in science. Now we have a Colorado professor, Ward Churchill, hopefully no relation to the great statesman Winston Churchill, who wrote an essay comparing those who died in the horror of September 11 with the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust.

Liberals are confused about these skirmishes as well, and do not see any contradiction between their condemnation of Mr. Summers on the one hand, and their collegial support for the professor on the other. Mr. Summers is to be forbidden the defense of First Amendment rights, though he was positing an idea for intellectual debate in the best traditions of liberal academia. Meanwhile, our erstwhile professor is to have full access to the First Amendment defense for making insulting remarks in a third-rate essay.

Though perhaps not highbrow enough for his university's reading lists, the Dr. Doolittle novels featured something called the Push-me Pull-you animal. This confusing animal had a head at two ends and couldn't always decide which way to go. So he always seemed to be going in two different directions. Sound familiar?

In the debate raging across campuses up and down the country, this animal is often seen in human guise. The absurdity of academics jumping to the defense of the professor is that it now seems intellectually acceptable to call American people Nazis, but please do not call them Christians....

When President Reagan talked about Russia as the evil empire back in the 1980s, no doubt the professor was in the back row sniggering. Perhaps Mr. Reagan's rhetoric had too much that was abstract for some. When President Bush talked about evil in the wake of September 11, he meant it and we saw it, and we saw what evil men can do.

Of course, evil is one of those embarrassing words that secularists, and many liberals, like to dismiss. It is an embarrassing four-letter word that causes more distress to them than some other four letter words that we prefer not to hear in polite company.

Like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, evil is a word that means just what it says it means, neither more nor less. Certainly, there is much to be said for a balance of ideas and opinions, and we should freely express our understanding in order to test our ideas against other opinions. The problem occurs when this process gets narrowed down to a politically acceptable set of biased views, and where disagreement is fine so long as you agree on the boundaries of what is disagreeable. In this scheme of things, many conservative and religious views are considered to be beyond the boundary.

So, here's the beef conservatives have. They care deeply that much of what is taught in universities, colleges and schools across the country is not reflective of America, nor is it intellectually rigorous. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the young students of today are being taught by the young students of yesterday, and they in turn will teach the young students of tomorrow. The system becomes self-perpetuating, with many academics having little exposure to the realities of the outside world. This enables them to entertain the most fantastical propositions, apparently without the need to test them empirically against how the world actually works. George Orwell put it best when he explained that there are some ideas so idiotic that only intellectuals would believe them. Well, the professor has certainly proven the point.

From David Cowan



An education chief who cannot even count! "Ontario Education Minister Gerard Kennedy got low marks for spelling and math this week when discussing the possibility of a strike by the Canadian province's teachers. "I think strike is a bit of a five-letter word in education and that gets people nervous," Kennedy said on Wednesday, according to media reports. After it was pointed out that the word strike has six letters, Kennedy, a member of the Liberal Party, said that he meant to say something else all together. "Pardon me, I was going to say four, but it really is a tough word in education."

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5 February, 2005

Marxism Dying Hard on College Campuses

Written by Hans Zeiger

"Marxism is dying globally," writes columnist and recent UCLA graduate Ben Shapiro. "But it's alive and kicking at America's universities." Shapiro's list of communist courses, texts, and activities in American higher education spans a chapter in his new book Brainwashed: How America's Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth.

Students can minor in Marxist Studies at University of California Riverside. A class in "Marxist Literary Theory" is offered at Rutgers University. There is "Black Marxism" at University of California Santa Barbara, and "Taking Marx Seriously" at Amherst College. "Engaging Cuba: Uncommon Approaches to the Common Good" is a course at the Evergreen State College that glorifies Castro's Cuba for its successes in education, health care, and agricultural production. These courses are more than partial to communist theory - they are actually like Red propaganda sessions. Capitalism - along with its accompanying institutions - is roundly portrayed as the source of all greed, inequality, and evil in general.

It would seem that the university communists have difficulty reconciling their belief that capitalism is evil with their other contention that there is no good or evil at all. A 2002 Zogby poll of 401 college seniors for the National Association of Scholars revealed that classroom relativism is overwhelming. Seventy-three percent of seniors said that the most frequent ethical position of their professors was: "what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity." Only a quarter of a college seniors replied that in their classrooms, "there are clear and uniform standards of right and wrong by which everyone should be judged."

At first glance, it may seem that the majority of college students are mindlessly following the lead of their professors. "Acceptance is the easiest road, and the road most often taken," writes Shapiro. "If the professor says that the sky is green, the sky must be green." Voting patterns suggest that college students become increasingly liberal as they move through their years of higher education. And one study between 2000 and 2003 showed that while 52 percent of students reported having attended church on a regular basis prior to college, only 29 percent were still going to church in their junior year. As William F. Buckley wrote in Up From Liberalism, "There is a correlation between the length of time one spends studying at the feet of liberals and the extent to which one comes to share their views."

Yet there are signs that today's students are not following everything their professors believe. According to a 2003 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, most college and university students consider themselves spiritual, but find that their campuses do little to encourage their spirituality. Researchers surveyed 3,680 students at 46 institutions to discover that 73 percent of American college students find religion and spirituality to have helped in the development of their identity. But 62 percent report that their professors never encourage discussion of religion or spirituality. The report found that "students have deeply felt values and interests in spirituality and religion, but their academic work and campus programs seem to be divorced from it."

Still, the percentage of students who consider spiritual matters to be "very important" or "essential" in their lives rose from 51 percent in 2000 to 58 percent in 2003. In addition, those who consider a full personal worldview to be "very important" or "essential" rose from 43 percent to 52 percent, and those who believe that it is "very important" or "essential" to demonstrate compassion by helping the less fortunate climbed a remarkable fourteen points from 60 percent to 74 percent. Despite the efforts of the professors to sterilize their campuses of spiritual concerns, discussions, and practices, the growth in importance that students attach to their spiritual lives is significant.

Perhaps the most instructive gulf between professors and students is over the issue of abortion. According to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and Luntz Research Associates, about one percent of college professors support a legal ban on abortion. A 99 percent pro-abortion professoriate is a powerful majority. But every year since 1990, with the exception of one, the support of college freshmen for abortion has fallen. In 1990, 64.9 percent of freshmen supported a right to abortion. By 1999, that number had fallen to 52.7 percent. According to a 2000 Gallup poll, 40 percent of 18 to 29-year olds - a higher percentage than any age group surveyed - believed that abortion should be restricted to a greater extent than it is now. And in 2004, 60 percent of 18 to 29-year olds said they supported a complete ban on abortion or minimal exceptions, according to a Zogby poll.

Source

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4 February, 2005

British schools crisis as discipline standards fall in classrooms

A growing discipline crisis and thousands of persistently failing schools are undermining efforts to raise education standards, the head of Ofsted gave warning yesterday. David Bell said that one in ten schools had made no real progress between inspection visits in the past three years. Of the 10,000 schools visited since 2001, a tenth had made "unsatisfactory, poor or very poor" progress. Applied to England's total number of state schools, this would produce a figure of 2,500 schools that had made no real progress nationwide.

Mr Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, cast doubt on the Government's approach to weak schools and suggested that it was time for more aggressive action. He also highlighted rising levels of classroom disruption a day after Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, promised "zero tolerance" of even the mildest forms of misbehaviour by pupils. There had been a sharp increase in the percentage of schools where discipline was "unsatisfactory or worse". Levels of good behaviour were at their lowest since Labour came to power. Behaviour was good in only two thirds of schools compared with three quarters in 1997. Discipline was poor in 9 per cent of schools compared with 5 per cent a year ago. Mr Bell said that no schools were free from low-level disruption caused by a minority of pupils. He added: "All schools, to a greater or lesser extent, even if they are otherwise orderly or successful, have to deal with a number of pupils who cause disruption. "You can have relatively small numbers of pupils having quite a substantial and disproportionate effect on the others."

Presenting his third annual report as Chief Inspector, Mr Bell said that the proportion of schools where behaviour was poor "shows no sign of reducing". His findings come just months before a general election, expected in May, in which discipline and classroom standards are set to be key issues of controversy between Labour and the Conservatives.

Tim Collins, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: "Conservatives are convinced that schools which perform poorly in their teaching assessment are those with the worst discipline record. It is therefore no surprise that Ruth Kelly has decided to raise this problem just weeks before an election - having ignored it for nearly eight years. We will not make the same mistake. "On Day 1 one of the new Conservative government, we will bring forward measures to restore head teachers' authority over pupil behaviour and teaching, so that the people who know and care for our children are put back in charge."

Mr Bell said that inspections in 2003-04 showed that England's education system was improving and contained "many of the preconditions for further improvement". But Ofsted's report still showed that the number of failing schools jumped by 18 per cent to 332 in 2003-04, the second successive increase. Mr Bell said that more schools had failed because Ofsted had raised its expectations.

From The Times



DOGGED HATRED OF THE MILITARY IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

Surely Americans of all points of view can agree that in an age of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the military can use the best attorneys it can get. So it's a disgrace that some of the nation's law schools, objecting to the Pentagon's "discrimination policies," refuse to permit military recruiters to make their pitch on campus, relegating them instead to unofficial off-campus venues. Law students pondering their first career move can be wined and dined by fancy firms that set up recruitment tables at campus job fairs, but they have to stroll over to the local Day's Inn to seek out the lonely military recruiter.

To put it another way, the same liberals who object that the military includes too many lower-class kids won't let military recruiters near the schools that contain students who will soon join the upper-class elite. It's almost enough to make us contemplate restoring the draft, starting with law school students.

Needless to say, such scholastic shenanigans don't go down well with Congress, which in 1994 passed the Solomon Amendment, named for the late New York Republican, Gerald Solomon. The law requires schools that receive federal funds to provide equal access to military recruiters. Today, the House is scheduled to vote on a resolution brought by Alabama Republican Mike Rogers that would restate the House's support for the Solomon Amendment. Something similar passed the House and Senate by overwhelming margins last year and was incorporated into the Defense Authorization bill.

The impetus for Mr. Rogers's move is a November ruling by the federal appeals court in Philadelphia in favor of a group of law schools and legal scholars that had contested the Solomon law. The 2-1 opinion found that the Solomon Amendment violates the schools' First Amendment rights to free speech and association. Next stop is the Supreme Court, which is expected to take the appeal that the Justice Department plans to bring.

There are many peculiarities to this lawsuit, starting with the fact that the group that brought it--the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights--declines to release the names of the 26 law schools and faculties that belong to its coalition. Some of the participants (New York University and Georgetown, for example) have outed themselves since the suit was brought in 2003, but others steadfastly maintain their own don't-ask-don't-tell policy

In any event, there should be no legal question about Congress's right to put conditions on grants of federal funds to universities. It does this all the time--including requirements that colleges adhere to certain civil rights and gender standards. With a few exceptions, universities have no trouble going along and courts have no problem letting them.

If, as is likely, the Supreme Court overturns the appeals court decision, that will be the end of it. Almost all universities, public and private, take millions of dollars in federal money that would be next to impossible to give up. That's especially true of the elite schools, both public and private. Still, it would be nice to think that the nation's universities would welcome the military for reasons other than the mercenary. Patriotism, perhaps?

Source

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3 February, 2005

BUREAUCRATIZED EDUCATION IS BORING

So no wonder kids learn so little

To this day, I believe those Dick and Jane readers are mostly what did me in. I did not like to read back then, and I think it was because of them. They were not only boring, they were excruciatingly boring, and so was nearly everything else throughout my years in school. Not liking to read is a little odd, because I started to teach myself to read when I was four.

Fortunately, when I was 11 years old, I found a tattered, falling-apart ACE 1963 copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars ("Hidden Menace on the Red Planet"), and boom!, just like that, I understood the importance of imagination, and how the purpose of school is to, however unwittingly, destroy it. Whoa, I thought, what is this book? Gigantic Martian-eating apes, with six arms?! Cackling Mad Scientists? Huge spiders, with fangs? Heroes, villains, damsels in distress? Sword fights, disintegrator rays, invisibility cloaks? Battles galore, in warships floating in the sky? Wow! I was in a tizzy. I had never experienced anything like this. I was in awe, a condition I describe as a combination of love and wonder and fear. And I liked it. Why, I wondered, wasn't I given stuff like this to read when I was six, instead of Dick and Jane? I don't care if they went on adventures with Spot and found a toad in the bushes, that was nothing compared to Tan Hadron of Hastor using his sword to defend the woman he loved from the insane cannibals of U-Gor!

Years later, when I started reading fairy tales, I was surprised to find the ones that aren't bowdlerized (which are the ones most people are familiar with) are blood-thirsty horror stories. In the unexpurgated "Cinderella," for example, her sisters cut off parts of their feet to try to make them fit into the slipper (which points out what greedy people will do for money and power and fame). You'll never see that in a Walt Disney film--and Walt admitted he knew he was altering the original tales. Cinderella was, of all things, a very feisty girl, one who would never give up. How's that for some "Grrl Power"?

I was puzzled about these old children's stories; I really was. These are what adults in the past read to kids? And I got Dick and Jane and their boring white-bread lives in the suburbs, with their parents dressed like Ward and June Cleaver in a suit and tie, and pearls? But weren't kids supposed to be kept innocent as long as possible? Weren't they supposed to not know about awful things like violence and battles and swords and guns and death and destruction and romance and even--yuck--kissing? Wouldn't these terrible stories give them nightmares and permanently damage their tender six-year-old psyches? Well, it seems to me that Dick and Jane and all the rest of those innocent boring stories are what damaged me. Those blood-thirsty stories with the swordfights and all the killings not only didn't damage me, they introduced me to a world of wonder I didn't know existed, one so amazing I actually felt grateful about my luck. And if there is one (actually two) thing(s) I am absolutely convinced is an inherent component of happiness, it's gratitude, and a humility that comes from that gratitude.

What's worse--being bored all the time as a kid in school, or having an occasional nightmare, if that nightmare is the price of being introduced to wonder and amazement and awe? Personally, I'll take the nightmare. I'm an adult, and I still have nightmares. Only now, the only regular one I have is about being stuck in high school on the last day and not being allowed to graduate. They're so bad they wake me up. I've never woken up from the Mad Scientist Phor Tak chasing me with a disintegrator pistol, or a huge spider gnashing its fangs and chasing me down a valley. Not yet, at least.

If stories for kids are boring, kids certainly aren't going to want to read. And if they don't read, then they can't take much advantage of all the knowledge available in literature. That's saying bye-bye to all the accumulated wisdom of the human race. So, in order for children's stories to be interesting and exciting, they have to contain all that "awful" stuff. On top of that, kids like the stuff.

As an experiment, read some dumbed-down stories to young children, and then read some of the real fairy tales, and watch how they react. I've done this many times. They quickly get bored with the first, but always remain fascinated by the second. And they want more, even if they don't fully understand everything.

I remember the first time I read "The Little Match Girl" to some kids who were less than five. I've never seen such looks on their faces before. They learned about pity and mercy and horror from that story, about how lucky they were to have parents and a home and warmth and enough to eat, unlike the little match girl. And such things are why those stories are so important, because kids learn to deal with all sides of life in the safety of their imaginations.

Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, claimed fairy tales and similar stories were necessary for children because they allowed them to work through various feelings they all had. I won't go so far as to agree with his Freudian intrepretation, but I understand his point. I am reminded of that modern-day mythic movie, A Christmas Story, in which Raphie has to deal with bullies, boring school, a nutcase for a little brother, a harried mother, a goodhearted but somewhat dense father, and the various problems all kids have to deal with. Eric Rabkin agrees with Bettelheim, commenting upon the importance of the storytelling function in his book, The Fantastic in Literature. He explains that the cruelty in fairy tales indeed can be beneficial to children because "they can see danger handled safely and symbolically and thus, their own fears can be mastered."

We are never going to see truly interesting and educating stories for kids in the schools. If kids came home and told their parents about about those great stories they were being told--the old fairy tales--some of them would throw fits and call the schools right then. To which I say: bah. You have no idea what you're doing.

I see no solution to any of these problems except to get rid of the government schools. Unfortunately, private schools aren't going to be any better if they imitate the government schools. But at least they'll stand a chance, something that's never going to happen in schools run by the government. It has now become a truism that every time the government gets involved in something, it doesn't make it better; it makes things worse. These days, nearly everyone complains about the schools, and what all these schools have in common is that they are "public"--read "government run"--schools. Most of these schools seem to have become masters at making kids hate them. Most kids see their time in them as a prison sentence to be served. What they learn is to dislike school, and, quite often, reading and learning.

More here



GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM

School reformers are attempting to shore up an existing educational system which is, by its very nature, destined to fail. Misguided policy solutions for American education attempt to salvage a system that is unsalvageable--a system that is intellectually, socially, and economically backward. Reformers refuse to admit or to understand that the American system of compulsory public education has foundered precisely because it is public--that is, government-controlled. The only solution to the serious education problems in America is to proclaim the separation of school and state, and allow education to be bought and sold through the free and unhampered market process.

Public schools--like all public agencies--are inherently unable to evaluate their own performance accurately in terms of the satisfactions derived by their constituents, i.e., students and their parents. The absence of proper evaluation lies in the inability of the educational bureaucracy (or any government agency) to calculate profits or losses in terms of numerical assignments to monetary units. In other words, public bureaucracies cannot perform economic calculation.1

Economic calculation is the process of comparing and contrasting opportunity costs (prices) among a variety of choices facing an individual actor or group of actors regarding the means to achieve a desired end. For a private firm operating within the parameters of a market economy, economic calculation consists in comparing and contrasting the outputs (expenses) and inputs (revenues) in order to arrive at the most efficient use of scarce resources in the satisfaction of the consumers' most urgent wants.

In the market sector, outputs and inputs (expenses and revenues) are linked through the determination of profit or loss. A profit indicates that the private firm succeeded in providing a commodity or service that consumers valued more than the costs expended in bringing it about. A loss indicates that the private firm failed to provide a commodity or service for which consumers were willing to pay more than the costs expended in its creation. Profits are an implicit declaration by consumers that the scarce resources used for the creation of a given commodity were prudently applied. Losses are an implicit declaration by consumers that scarce resources were squandered and should have been employed in a manner more conducive to their satisfactions. Regardless the profit or loss outcome, however, all private firms, operating within the confines of an unhampered market economy, are offered the ability to positively or negatively evaluate their own performance for the immediate accounting period precisely because they have the use of economic calculation.

Government bureaucracies have no such ability. The essence of bureaucracy is that it cannot evaluate performance in terms of consumer satisfaction because of the absence of economically calculable profits or losses. This is why bureaucracies are encumbered with regulated structural procedures. By their very nature, government educational agencies cannot link outputs (expenditures) to inputs (tax revenues). There is no relationship between the taxpayer who is coerced into financing all educational expenditures, and the student who is the consumer of what such expenditures have created.

Because the educational bureaucracy exists within a sea of capitalist economic calculation, bureaucrats can calculate and budget expenses. But, because government agencies do not operate on a profit-and-loss basis, these administrators have no way of relating expenses to tax revenues to determine if the expenses were prudently applied. They do not know whether the resources taken from taxpayers were employed according to the most urgent demands of consumers. Government agencies are deprived of profit-and-loss accountancy methods, precisely what is necessary to economically evaluate past performance and make changes based upon the information provided.

From an economic point of view, then, the government education system in America is like a ship lost at sea with neither a compass nor a lighthouse to guide it. Absence of evaluative information in the form of profits or losses makes rational navigation impossible......

Market-based schools would have the incentive to provide a top quality educational experience to students at a competitive price. If a school did not enforce rigorous programs and a thorough curriculum, their graduates would be ill prepared to compete in their respective fields. The school would earn a poor reputation as its graduates would be unable to command respectable incomes, thus discouraging prospective students, causing financial loss, and forcing the school to re-evaluate its performance. Conversely, those schools providing the best education to their students would earn profits, thus reflecting their proper employment of scarce resources. In either case, economic calculation in terms of profits or losses would enable schools to accurately evaluate their performance in terms of the demands of education consumers.

Competition among educational entrepreneurs would tend to weed false prophets and educational quacks from the market. The general nonsense which now pervades most government school systems would not long survive the market-driven search for truth and excellence. Students would no longer be captive to the ideological or political biases of teachers and administrators. Rather, teachers and administrators would be required to provide a valuable educational experience to their students in a peaceful learning environment or find themselves unemployed.

Americans must begin to realize that the separation of education and state is equally as important as the separation of church and state. Only then will American students begin to experience academic diversity, intellectual growth, and a crime-free learning environment. Only then will we be liberated from the bureaucratization of the mind.

More (much more) here

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2 February, 2005

CALIFORNIAN EDUCATION NEEDS FUNDAMENTAL REFORM

And it might just take a Republican governor to do it. Remember that old lie about Republicans being the party of the status quo?

There is no question that California's education system is looking a lot like the Titanic, and there is also no question that our current superintendent of public instruction, Jack O'Connell, has a lot of experience in the education world. In the Senate, Superintendent O'Connell chaired the Education Finance Budget Subcommittee. He had more to do with how and how much our schools spent than any other single individual for eight years prior to becoming superintendent. He was an important member of the Assembly's governing leadership in the years before he went to the Senate. He had the ability to take an active role to turn our education system around. If any one person was positioned to restore our education system to excellence, it would have been him.

In fact, during his time, education spending has gone up, and the quality of the education system has gone down. So his recent comments that the governor is trying to undermine the "restoration" of our school system's excellence by "starving our schools" rings hollow. He claims that we are not "investing in our future" by spending more money on schools.

First, his comments are false. The governor is spending more money on schools than last year, just not as much as O'Connell wants to spend. Second, if money were the problem, as I have demonstrated before, California would have solved this crisis long ago. The state has almost doubled per pupil spending in the last ten years, and test scores have gone down, meanwhile, salaries for the adults making money off the system have skyrocketed. School superintendent salaries are approaching $200,000 per year, and O'Connell whines that the schools don't have enough money. He advocates raising your taxes and spending more money on our current failing system. He also wants to make the system bigger by including pre-school in the current system. That's real smart-we should give the system more of our money and more of our kids so they can mess things up even more.

Perhaps if O'Connell would have held school bureaucrats accountable for their failures in the Legislature, or even in his current position, the state's system would not be in the mess it is in now. But rather than demanding more from the adults and unions who are making lots of money off the system, O'Connell has chosen to become their apologist and chief cheerleader. Like Captain Smith, O'Connell would drive the ship into greater danger following the common wisdom rather than thinking outside the box. Maybe he should just do his job, and let the governor fix the system. Our kids would be better off if he did. To twist a clich‚ a little bit, continuing to spend money upgrading the deck chairs on the Titanic is missing the point.

More here



HOME SCHOOLING FOR TOP QUALITY EDUCATION

People once thought that home schooling was a result of extremist-religious groups and isolationism. Today, home schooling enrollments double each and every year in the United States and internationally. The reasons why are that the quality and variety of curriculums and programs are truly remarkable, and because virtual classrooms are the future of public and university education.

You can continue, year after year, to deny that children are stressed by dull 10-hour days, curriculum work loads, homework over-loads, harried teachers, and proficiency tests, or you can educate your child without stress, with literally a world of curricula, including a host of proficiency test aids, very superior programs in art, music, foreign languages, and physical education, and completely flexible school hours and styles. Parents must investigate today's home schooling opportunities. They employ the latest technologies, award-winning on-line curriculums and educational models, and they are being accessed by the brightest and most gifted children in the nation because they are superior programs.

There's a whole world of educational opportunity for children. There are many options to over-crowded and noisy classrooms and parents forced to sign documents swearing their children have mastered weekly or monthly subject matter. Parents, however, must be responsible for the quality education.

Always remember that public schools are, first and foremost, government institutions. This means agenda, agenda, agenda. This year, two agenda items were clearly global warming and controlled burning of forests. These two topics were squeezed into every subject, including math, and in every grade level. Obviously, the concepts of global warming and controlled burning of forests are to be forced into the consciousness of the upcoming generation, and all but guaranteed we will see these topics over and over again in public school curriculum as sustainable development takes root in the United States.

If you want superior education for your children, and you want them to compete in tomorrow's universities, you are going to have to educate your children with efforts that far surpass the passing of proficiency tests alone. Proficiency tests will soon be used to label and certify your children in particular subject areas. These certifications will determine the higher education tracks, college loans and grants, and career potential for your kids.

Form information-spreading groups, and educate your children far beyond what government curriculum is offering to them. It is imperative that you do if you have hopes for their attendance in fine universities or for them earning masters and doctoral degrees. Most children who now attend public schools will never have these degrees because their proficiency ratings will disqualify them.

More here

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

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1 February, 2005

Liberate us from the Educators

The state’s monopoly on education is perhaps the worst thing that has ever happened to children in America. From the earliest days of the republic, education was provided by parents, churches, and local communities. The first proposals for state-supported schools were merely calls to address an absence of schools in isolated pockets of rural poverty. No one suggested that parents could not or would not be responsible for their own children’s learning — in fact, throughout the discussions of school funding it was always understood that the group targeted by such funds was only a minority of the poorest children.

Over time, the education bureaucracy — particularly teacher-training institutions — and affiliated interest groups began to lobby for a greater role for the state in education. Despite claims that public schools were established to serve the children of the poor and working class, it was not uncommon for people within those groups to resist such measures, for they feared the effects of allowing “elitist” interests to control their children’s learning. These elites were often very explicit about their desire to use the schooling establishment to mold children like “pieces of clay” to serve the interests of the state.

John Holt, a radical proponent of school reform and children’s rights, writes in his excellent book, Freedom and Beyond, that “universal compulsory schools are not and never were meant to be humane institutions, and most of their fundamental purposes, tasks, missions, are not humane.... There is one prime, legitimate, humane mission or function of the schools,” he continues, and that is “to promote the growth of the children in them.”

Holt spent years teaching in both public and private schools in Colorado, Massachusetts, and California, and found that most people’s definition of “education” is far from this ideal. Schools are seen essentially as giant cookie cutters — and children are the dough. We’ve locked our children in a giant bureaucracy where they and their parents have very little, sometimes absolutely no, say over their own development and learning....

Carlisle Moody, Ph.D., a professor of economics at William & Mary College, wrote in April 2003 that “in Virginia, the average per pupil expenditure in the public school system is approximately $7450, of which the taxpayers of the Commonwealth pay 86 percent. So, it costs Virginia taxpayers roughly $6400 (.86 x $7450) to educate one child for one year, not counting the capital costs of the buildings.” And that does not even include hidden costs. For example, if all of those who currently homeschool or privately educate their children were to instead send their children to a public school, and those who have no children were to have children and send them to public schools, the public school system would have to raise taxes radically to maintain this per-pupil expenditure. In short, education officials depend on taxes extracted from those who do not even use their system — and even with this windfall they cannot seem to make ends meet. They are hiding the true cost of their system from taxpayers.....

Most important, there’s the cost that cannot be measured in dollars. Students face a one-size-fits-all approach to learning that they must endure whether they like it or not, whether it is good for them or not. The grades he receives from this system will haunt the student throughout his academic life....

If many children have nothing better to look forward to in life, as Holt feared, than “pointless, stupid, stupefying work,” then the public schools are an excellent preparation for this eventuality. For 12 years, children are force-fed a diet of subjects they often neither understand nor care anything about, but must digest in order to avoid the wrath of their teachers. Schools are typically unresponsive to the most basic needs of students (except perhaps to label the child a problem and administer the appropriate behavior-modifying drugs), and, despite claims that they foster individuality, they instead demand rigid uniformity.

Holt describes “the business of the schools” as being “to make Robert MacNamaras at one end and Lt. William Calleys at the other. They are, each in his own way, perfect products of schooling: the one unshakably convinced that his cleverness and secret knowledge give him a right to exercise unlimited and godlike powers over other men; the other, ready at an instant to do without question or qualm everything, anything anyone in a position of authority tells him to do.” Doesn’t this sound a little bit like the typical teacher-student relationship? ....

It is time to liberate parents and children from this system. Government officials and large segments of the population are often quick to denounce so-called monopoly business practices, yet somehow tolerate a government that has monopolized the most precious of spheres — the growth and development of the individual child. Let’s get government out of the education business and let parents and children chart their own course in the learning process.

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EXIT EXAMS ARE NO CURE-ALL

Arizona state senator Thayer Verschoor emerged as an unlikely hero to many Arizona high schoolers this week, announcing his intention to dismantle the state’s AIMS test, an accountability measure that essentially acts as an exit exam for potential graduates. Verschoor, a Republican who favors school choice and private school vouchers, is being embraced by many parents and teachers’ union officials who have alleged that the test is unfair and even discriminatory. Standardized tests are anathema to school bureaucrats loath to be held to account for the quality of education they provide.

According to the Arizona Republic, Senator Verschoor believes that graduation requirements “should be a local control issue,” stating, “This should not be mandated by big government and a state school board. To me, we are saying that we don't trust our teachers." Senator Verschoor is correct, inasmuch as our responsibility for providing public education should not fall under the auspices of the federal government. Indeed, the best thing we could do with the U.S. Department of Education would be to turn it into a parking garage. But the Senator’s claim that administering high school exit exams implies that we don’t trust our teachers misses the point. Tests such as the AIMS exam are implemented by many states precisely because we often cannot trust many of our public school teachers and administrators, who have methodically dumbed down academic standards over the past few decades through their condemnation of fact-based instructional methods and student discipline.

Similar outcry erupted in 2003 over Florida’s FCAT exam, when some 13,000 high school seniors failed to pass the test that year and were in danger of not graduating in the spring. Amazingly, students only needed the relative equivalent of a 40 percent to pass the FCAT -- a benchmark that was originally set higher, only to be lowered to save about a thousand more students from failing.

Overnight ideas like high school exit exams are nothing new. Education reformers have tried for years to convince taxpayers that standards in America's schools are not disastrously low. For instance, syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell has written that several years ago Virginia required its students to pass a state exam in order to retain its accreditation. When 93 percent of all students failed to pass, the requirement was waived.

It is counterproductive to lower standards to the point where our children fail to gain the knowledge that society demands. Only when we focus more on instilling academic values in students instead of worrying constantly about hurting their feelings or damaging their almighty self-esteem, will our schools finally begin to recover ground lost to the specter of low expectations. Doing so will do more to account for increased standards than any exit exam ever could.

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

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