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28 February, 2006

GOOD MOVE IN BRITAIN

If they can get it past the Left

Moves to cherry-pick the brightest children in England's state schools from the age of 11 for places at top universities are set to begin within weeks, The Times has learnt. The controversial plan, which will spark fears among Labour MPs of a new system of "super-selection", is hailed by academics as a way of opening up university admissions without lowering standards. But critics fear that students who develop later will be left out because the process hinges on tests in the final year of primary school.

Universities will be encouraged to select the brightest children by establishing early links with them. In coming weeks, secondary heads will be told the names of the cleverest pupils and that they will be held accountable if their students fail to get three A grades at A level. Leading universities will be asked to contact the children's families, uring them to join holiday courses or summer schools, with a view to applying later. The move, which turns the final-year primary school exam in effect into a university entrance test, is expected to be welcomed by the top universities anxious that wider access does not lower academic standards.

Critics will ask whether the national curriculum test is the best measure of a child's potential and point to the impact it will have on pupils who fail to make the grade. The revelation will also fuel fears of academic selection as Tony Blair prepares to publish the education Bill and makes a last-ditch case today for his reforms at a seminar in Downing Street. Labour rebels and unions fear that it could mean back-door selection at the expense of the worst off. One backbencher said last night that it was impossible to track a child's potential from such an early age.

The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, which is coordinating the register, is set to tell heads how many of England's top 5 per cent are in their schools and what they are expected to do to support them. The talent search has identified 180,000 children aged 11-17 from their Key Stage 2 exams, taken by all pupils attending state primary schools. Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the trust, is determined that no child should be overlooked as a result of a poor secondary school education. In the letter, he will tell heads: "We'd be grateful if you'd ensure they're given the necessary support to realise their potential and we're going to track these children independently at KS3, GCSE and A levels. And if these children don't get 3 As at A level we want to know the reason why. Because they should but the facts are that only about a third of them are."

Schools will be held accountable after studies showed that the top 5 per cent of 11-year-olds who go on to state school are half as likely to get three As as those who enter private schools. Heads will be urged to register the names with the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (Nagty) at Warwick University, which will act as a pool to coordinate support programmes. "What they don't want to be told is to lower their admission standards to meet some strange quota of comprehensive school intakes. I passionately believe you should only get into Oxford and Cambridge if you've qualified," said Sir Cyril. "But what is an outrage is that we have 20,000 very able children in comprehensives who don't get the three As at A level that they should do." If parents give the academy permission, pupils' details will be passed on to universities. Data protection rules will be amended to enable this.

The colleges at Cambridge have divided up England's regions between them and will contact the academy for the names of children in their area. Dr Geoff Parks, the admissions tutor, says that this will be fairer. "At the moment, it's a bit hit and miss . . . we're targeting some schools in given areas, but it could be more effective. Anecdotally, there are concerns that some schools are offering us the best behaved and not putting forward the most talented who can often be the most difficult," he said. Dr Parks, who is a member of the Nagty Friends Group, conceded that the Key Stage 2 test was "not perfect". Many private schools opt out of the final-year tests, leading to fears that pupils could be frozen out of the best universities.

Source



Top Australian boys' school accepts goods in lieu of fees

Anything to escape far-Left government schools



Private schools are allowing financially stretched parents to pay fees with cows, valuable art collections and even the embryos of livestock in lieu of cash payments. And with the ongoing drought having a major impact on the ability of many rural families to pay their children's fees, some schools now allow parents to pay when a crop comes in or a herd of cattle is sold at the market, education experts say.

The Council of Catholic School Parents executive director Danielle Cronin said the barter of goods for fees is one of several flexible payment options available. "Country families can often pay according to their crops or when they sell their cattle," Ms Cronin said. "There is even payment in kind being made to schools. If the school has an outdoor education centre, the family may give them cattle."

As well, rising school fees have caused an increasing number of people to dip into their home mortgages. "They might get a second job, they might dip into savings they have put aside for things other than education, and they may also consider dipping into the equity in their home," Ms Cronin said. "Fees can be a major cause of stress and concern for parents, particularly when there's a degree of uncertainty around how much they will increase each year."

Among the Sydney schools to consider the alternative and often creative payment options is The King's School at North Parramatta. "Any Christian and compassionate school has to be open to reasonable suggestions," headmaster Tim Hawkes said. "With the best will in the world people's financial situations change often for reasons that are out of their control, like drought. This time last year 120 families were seriously affected by drought. They asked the school to show creativity and compassion in handling the situation. "Some parents are cash poor but asset rich. So sometimes payment in kind is seen as an option. We have agricultural studies and the school has its own farm. We can introduce cattle there. There has even been an incident in the past where the school was offered cattle embryos." Dr Hawkes said any alternative payment arrangement had to be conducted carefully. "We can't have a wholesale defection to payment of school fees in kind," he said.

It is not unusual for schools to accept other items of value. Victorian school St Leonards College had accepted part of a valuable art collection from a family in lieu of a student's fees, Dr Hawkes said. He stressed that the most common outcome when a family was struggling financially was to waive part of the fees. "We also have a range of scholarships and bursaries available and we have increased those over the past few years." A fee deferment system may also be put in place to continue after the student has graduated.

NSW Parents Council executive officer Duncan McInnes said many top private schools would once not have considered such flexible fee options. "Schools are becoming more accommodating to family situations," Mr McInnes said. "I think it's healthy. Rather than being embarrassed or ashamed of their situation parents should be opening up to schools." Cranbrook School headmaster Jeremy Madin said: "The school dispenses about $1 million in financial aid a year. Schools are very human places; we have to be understanding."

Source

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

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

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

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27 February, 2006

California: High school, low expectations

Arturo Gonzalez is a formidable attorney. The son of unschooled immigrants, he graduated from the UC Davis, then Harvard Law School. Today, he is a partner at Morrison & Foerster. Last week, he told The Chronicle editorial board, "If (state superintendent of public instruction Jack) O'Connell had been my superintendent," when he was going to high school, "I would not have gotten a diploma." Gonzalez represents parents and students who are suing the state of California to put off -- once again -- the year when California students must pass an exit exam in order to receive a high-school diploma -- as mandated by a 1999 law. The lawyer's argument is that it is not fair to not grant a diploma to a student who has completed 13 years of school and repeatedly received passing grades in math, English and other classes, because the student cannot pass "one test."

The problem is that it is really not fair to graduate a high-school senior who can't handle basic math and English. The whole point of the exit exam was to make sure that students who go to low-performing schools get, at the very least, a basic education. If Gonzalez wins, ignorance scores a victory. A few other points: The exit exam is not a one-time sink-or-swim test. Students begin taking the exit exams' two tests -- a 9th-grade-level-math test and 10th-grade-level-English test -- in the sophomore year. Students need to score at least 55 percent in math -- which is multiple choice, so students only have to figure out which one of four answers is correct -- and at least 60 percent in English language arts. Once students have passed a test, they never have to take it again. If they fail, they can retake one or both tests twice in the junior year, then three times in the senior year. As Superintendent O'Connell sees it -- and he wrote the exit-exam bill -- if you fail the test, "It simply means your education is not complete." You don't have the minimum skills to succeed in this economy.

O'Connell noted that failing doesn't end a student's options. Those who fail can take a summer-school course or attend an extra year of school, or take the test without going to class for an "unlimited" number of tries. But wait -- as tacky commercials exhort -- there's more. School districts can elect to grant certificates of completion for students who pass other school requirements, but fail the test. Students who flunk the test also can go for a GED or earn a high-school diploma through an adult-education program.

Gonzalez argued that some students know the material, but fail because of "test anxiety." To the extent that is true, these kids don't stand a chance in real life. How can they survive a job interview? Or athletic competition? Gonzalez says one of his students wants to be a firefighter. That student will have to pass tests to become a firefighter -- or should cities dump firefighter tests too, in the hope that recruits won't be to anxious when a fire alarm sounds?

A plaintiff in his suit is Liliana Valenzuela, who has a 3.84 grade-point average and is 12th in her senior class of 413 students. She passed the math test the first time, but has failed the English test, Gonzalez said, because she came here from Mexico four years ago. "I want to go to college and become a registered nurse," Liliana wrote in a statement. "But this exam is unfair. I really want to wear my cap and gown, and I don't know what to do to make my dream a reality." I know what she can do: Study harder. Getting a legal loophole around the exit exam will not make this young lady educated or help make her dream to be a nurse come true. If she cannot pass the exit exam, how can she survive college?

It is harsh to not grant a full diploma to students who completed their coursework. It also is harsh to allow students to enter adulthood unable to read instructions on appliances or without understanding what it means when a sale price is 25 percent off.

On a personal note, Gonzalez told The Chronicle about his high-school career. He knew from a young age, he said, that he wanted to be a trial lawyer. But he was not good at math, and he needed to take algebra to get into UC. Guess what? Gonzalez took algebra and passed. Actually, Gonzalez would have had a diploma under O'Connell. Yet now he wants California schools to demand less than they demanded of him. He believes he is protecting minority students and immigrants, but he is protecting their right to graduate without 9th-grade-math skills or the ability to read what a sophomore should be able to read. It may well be that if Arturo Gonzÿlez had a lawyer like him when he was a student, he would not be the lawyer he is today.

Source



THE DECAY OF THE PTA

How a once venerable organization became a front for teacher unions

The hand-lettered sign outside the door to P.S. 166 on Manhattan's Upper West Side said "PTA Meeting Thursday." To be exact, it was a parent group that would be meeting, not the PTA.

The sign was proof of the extent to which "PTA" has become a generic term, like "Kleenex" or "Xerox." Many parents are unaware of just how far the century-old National Congress of Parents and Teachers (known since 1924 as the PTA) has strayed from its origins in social uplift or from the classic 1950s-era image we may still have of it--an organization devoted to school service, fund-raising (think of those bake sales) and wholesome parent-teacher relations.

In fact, the PTA has been losing members steadily for almost a half-century now, from a high point of more than 12 million in the early 1960s to a current membership of about half that. Today only about a quarter of K-12 schools in the U.S. have a PTA chapter. The reasons for this decline are familiar ones: money and politics.

The PTA had its beginnings in an era of women's clubs and settlement houses, when affluent, idealistic women went to work bettering the conditions of the urban poor. Although women still couldn't vote, they could exercise influence through thousands of civic organizations and social clubs around the country. Soon enough, they cast a critical eye on the conditions of children in the public schools. They sought to address such matters as nutrition and hygiene and to help Americanize the offspring of immigrants arriving in waves from southern and eastern Europe.

In 1897, the members of the first National Congress of Mothers--the name of the group that would eventually become the PTA--saw their mission as fostering "a love of humanity and of country . . .and the advantages to follow from a closer relation between the influence of the home and that of the school." The president of the national PTA declared at a recent convention: "We simply must change the country." What happened?

In "The Politics of the PTA" (2002), Charlene Haar explains that the PTA shifted its focus mainly because of its longstanding alliance with the National Education Association. Formed in 1857, the NEA once shared the parent group's concern for schoolchildren in such matters as school curriculum and the qualifications of public-school teachers. Indeed, in 1920, the National Congress felt so much in line with the NEA that it moved into the association's impressive Washington headquarters. Already allied with the teachers group on support for a "progressive" curriculum that would emphasize "life skills," the PTA would from then on curb its more general social programs and limit itself to matters directly affecting education.

Ms. Haar chronicles the major policies on which the two groups cooperated throughout the 20th century. Having begun as equals, the PTA gradually became the subservient partner. Both organizations refused to support the National Defense Education Act--passed in 1958 in the wake of the Soviet's launch of Sputnik--because, as Ms. Haar explains, it "provided funds for mathematics, science and other defense-related curricula but could not be used for teacher salaries."

By the 1960s, the PTA was known as "a coffee-and-cookies organization"--unquestioningly offering its seal of approval to the newly unionized NEA. It was the issue of teacher strikes, though, that dealt the reputation of the PTA its final blow. In 1961 the AFT, representing New York City's teachers, staged the nation's first citywide strike, and in 1968 Florida teachers followed with the first statewide strike. To avoid conflict, the PTA abandoned any pretense of independence and supported the walkouts.

A few years later, the PTA tagged along with the NEA, lobbying for a cabinet-level federal department of education. What followed were a series of legislative victories for the teachers unions. Among their outstanding lobbying successes, backed by the PTA, was the defeat of a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick Moynihan in 1978 proposing a tax credit for as much as half of private-school tuition. In the aftermath, many parents began their exodus from the PTA, including a large number of Catholics whose tuition fees for parochial schools would have become less burdensome under the plan.

Today the PTA supports all of the union's positions, including increased federal funding for education and opposition to independent charter schools, to vouchers and to tuition tax credits for private and religious schools. This "parent" group lobbies for teachers to spend less time in the classroom and to have fewer supervisory responsibilities like lunchroom duty. Moreover, they want a pay scale for teachers that is based on seniority, not merit. In November, the PTA even helped to defeat California's Proposition 74, which called for limiting teacher tenure by extending the probation period for new teachers from two to five years, a proposal designed to give administrators more time to weed out bad instructors.

With polls indicating that the union label is a liability with the public, an arrangement has developed whereby the NEA provides needed financial support for the PTA, which in turn bolsters union positions at the grass-roots level. As one union official put it: "[T]he PTA has credibility . . . we always use the PTA as a front."

Not only does the PTA support the NEA on issues that protect the public-school teachers' monopoly, the parent group also speaks up in favor of the NEA's more radical curriculum ideas, like sex-education programs that replace "don't" with "how to" and that propose the inclusion of a gay/lesbian unit starting as early as kindergarten.

Many parents have decided that they no longer want to fund this kind of nonsense: They feel that their dues money would be better spent close to home, on after-school programs, computers and school supplies. As the PTA becomes increasingly irrelevant to the lives of children in public schools and parents become less willing to pay its dues, it is gradually being replaced by alternative, mostly home-grown, organizations that may call themselves guilds or councils or associations but are generally known as Parent Teacher Organizations--PTOs. These groups collect no dues and follow no political line.

Tim Sullivan, a Massachusetts entrepreneur and former New York City public-school teacher, saw the need among the independent groups forming around the country for the kind of information and services once provided by the PTA. In 1999 he founded a company for independent parent-teacher groups. PTO Today publishes a magazine and maintains a Web site that provides opportunities for parent networking on its message boards. Both in print and online, PTO Today answers the kind of questions that parents of public-school children ask--how to organize a family night, how to raise money for extras like arts-and-crafts supplies and what kind of insurance is necessary for field trips. With any luck, the PTOs will put the PTA out of business entirely.

Source

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

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

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

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26 February, 2006

SUMMERS AGAIN: HARVARD STUDENTS MISS THEIR REAL-MAN PRESIDENT

If Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers was worried about how the undergraduates would greet him Wednesday night at his first scheduled event since announcing his resignation, those fears quickly were put to rest. He got a standing ovation after he walked in. He got a standing ovation before he left. A row of students with red letters painted on their chests spelled out "Larry."

Sarah Bahan, 22, was wistful as she left the meeting. She had kind words to say about Summers' emphasis on hard sciences. Mark Hoadley, 21, said Summers' monotone speaking style was balanced by a "dynamic mind." Troy Kollmer, 21, said "a lot of students feel bad for him and think he got a raw deal."

The show of student loyalty has come as a surprise to many faculty members and administrators at Harvard, who grew to loathe Summers during a five-year tenure that brought a raw blast of politics to the 370-year-old institution.

In the past, it had been Harvard's students who forced change. In the spring of 1969, amid unrest over the Vietnam War, students angered by a campus ROTC program raided University Hall and threatened to burn the card catalog at Widener Library. The turmoil hastened the resignation of then-president Nathan Pusey, a classics scholar who had little patience for such activism.

This time, students held back while the faculty fumed. Undergraduates were well-insulated from the tempestuous management issues between Summers and top administrators; and Summers had endeared himself to students by showing up at early morning rugby matches and by gamely boogieing at school dances.

But somewhere in the controversy surrounding Summers is evidence of a change in campus politics, one professor said: These days, it is not unusual for students to be to the political right of their professors. "This is a sort of 'I'm-not-a-feminist-but' generation," said J. Lorand Matory, a professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies. "I don't know if the word is 'conservative' as much as 'careerist.' "

The move to oust Summers began in earnest last year after he gave a speech that questioned whether "issues of intrinsic aptitude" explained the shortage of female professors in Harvard's math and science departments..... Many students, meanwhile, thought the "intrinsic aptitude" flap of last spring had been resolved. "Our complaints ended when there was a reasonable dialogue," said Jonathan Blazek, 21.....

Since Summers announced his resignation Tuesday, his most vocal defenders have been students. On a blog called "Summersville," students have placed memorial posters of their soon-to-be-departed president and floated plans for a protest at an upcoming faculty meeting. "I don't think everybody on campus loves him, but there is sort of a general sense the situation was handled poorly," Harry Ritter, 21, said. Ritter worries, he said, that the initiatives Summers began — the expansion of Harvard's campus, study-abroad programs and beefing up of the life sciences, among others — will founder. "If the faculty now feels it has the power to kick a president out … what precedent does this set for the university? How well will the next president deal with the climate?" Ritter said. "There are students really angry about what has happened."

Michael Broukhim, 21, an editorial chair for the Harvard Crimson, said some students grew to admire the same qualities in Summers that alienated professors — such as his clear enthusiasm for subjects with real-world applications, like stem cell research and globalization. "The fact that Summers worked in politics [as Treasury secretary] is indicative — he wants the university to be oriented, very practically, toward the public good," Broukhim said.

More here



AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC EDUCATION IN TROUBLE

Three reports:

Militant Islam invades NSW school curriculum

A radical Muslim thinker who inspired al-Qa'ida is being served up as subject matter for high school students in NSW. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian militant hanged in 1966 but still a powerful influence on violent Islamists, and the Pakistani fundamentalist Sayyid Maududi are the only two modern Muslim thinkers on a revised syllabus for studies of religion.

Experts this week condemned the prominence of political Islam in the new syllabus, and especially the inclusion of Qutb. "I am surprised and dismayed that the NSW religion syllabus narrows modern Islamic thinkers to its totalitarians," said Daniel Pipes, whose US-based Middle East Forum agitates against Islamic extremism. "Islam has a rich intellectual tradition. To pick these two writers is like representing modern German culture with Marx and Hitler."

Under the revised Higher School Certificate syllabus, students can choose to examine the "contribution to Islam" of Qutb and Maududi. Others they can study include two wives of the prophet Mohammed, legal scholars and Sufi mystics. Qutb figured as a "teacher and interpreter" in the old syllabus.

NSW Board of Studies president Gordon Stanley said experts and community leaders had had plenty of opportunity to comment on the syllabus. He was surprised to hear of criticism and offered a parallel: "If you study the Holocaust you've got to know something about Hitler, but that doesn't mean people are concerned about students becoming Nazis."

Catholic educationist John McGrath defended the syllabus, which he helped write: "Qutb was a significant figure in 20th-century Islam. "(His writings are) one expression of Islamic revival. We're not suggesting that he's representative of all Muslims."

But Ahmad Shboul, chair of Arabic and Islamic studies at Sydney University, said political Islamists did not fit easily within the study of religion. "Qutb has contributed to modern commentary on the Koran, but the influence of (Qutb and Maududi) has turned out to be more on the political side," he said, adding that Qutb was simply too controversial and complex a figure for study at school.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, commentators have pointed to Qutb as the intellectual inspiration for violent campaigns against the West and Muslim states seen as corrupted by modern values. Among those influenced by Qutb's writings is Ayman al-Zawahiri, seen as the intellectual force of al-Qa'ida. But Professor Shboul doubted Qutb would have approved of al-Qa'ida's violence.

In Pakistan, Maududi founded an Islamic political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, with the aim of making society and state wholly subject to Islamic law. His critics say he left a legacy of extremism; his followers say he opposed violence. Abdullah Saeed, director of the centre for the study of contemporary Islam at Melbourne University, said Muhammad Abduh, an Egyptian reformer, would have been a safer choice for the syllabus than Qutb. "Especially in the current political climate and context, the inclusion of Qutb presents more problems than it solves," Professor Saeed said. "When this becomes public I guess there would be various groups - Muslim and non-Muslim - who would feel very strongly about this."

Source



NSW report card ban challenged

Far-Left teachers resist the requirement to identify differences in achievement. All kids are equal, don't you know?

A ban by teachers on new report cards which grade students from A to E will be challenged by the Government in the courts on Monday. Premier Morris Iemma yesterday pledged to take public school teachers to the industrial relations commission. He accused teachers of "holding parents to ransom" over the issue, saying every family was entitled to performance data on their children. He also claimed that the NSW Teachers Federation was putting $3.7billion in Commonwealth funding at risk by breaching the National Schools Funding Agreement, which includes the new reports.

About 430,000 primary school students should have received an A to E grade for academic performance this year. But the Teachers Federation has advised its 50,000 school-based members to "continue to use their own reporting system". General secretary Barry Johnson [Stalin was a General Secretary too] said in a memo to members: "Many of the reporting requirements being foisted on schools are professionally and educationally unacceptable."

But Mr Iemma said the Government would protect the right of parents to receive clear and concise information. "The NSW Government will take the issue to the Industrial Relations Commission to have it resolved as a matter of urgency," he said. "I absolutely reject the position put by the federation. "It is the right of every parent to have this information and we will not allow this to be compromised by a blinkered and politically correct over-reaction. "We will not allow NSW parents to be held to ransom."

In August last year, the Government released the format of the new reports which provide detail on:

* A CHILD'S overall achievement rated in bands from A to E;

* MORE detail on how they are performing in English and Maths; and

* SIMPLER information identifying strengths and weaknesses and details of their social skills and development.

"The reports make it easier to track the progress of students and provide greater consistency," Mr Iemma said. "Every parent has a right to information that tells them in plain English whether their child is progressing well or falling behind and in need of help."

The federation said it had grave concerns about the philosophical underpinnings of the new report cards. Mr Johnson said it opposed the Federal Government's imposition of "simplistic and regressive" student reporting requirements as a pre-condition for continued federal funding. Mr Johnson said the new reports also had potential to greatly increase teachers' workload.

Source



Australian private school student numbers soaring

Australia's private schools have recorded record enrolments with an exodus of 200,000 students from the public education system in the past decade. The trend is strongest in Year 11 and 12, where 41 per cent of teenagers now attend private schools. Despite rising fees of up to $20,000 a year, new figures confirm a shift towards private schools since the election of the Howard Government in 1996. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' School Census yesterday revealed the number of children enrolled in private schools has jumped by 22 per cent in the past decade. The growth continued last year, with enrolments at independent and Catholic schools jumping by a further 20,000 students, to 1.1 million students.

John Howard, who once blamed the exodus from the nation's public schools on the "politically correct" attitude of the public system, last night welcomed the figures. Despite challenging the "university or bust" culture in Australia and urging teenagers who are offered a job or an apprenticeship to consider taking up the opportunity, he also welcomed an increase in retention rates. The census data also show the proportion of 17-year-olds enrolled as full-time students increased and the number of indigenous students enrolled increased from 87,200 to 135,100. "The figures show a strong increase in retention rates," the Prime Minister said. "I am particularly pleased with the very significant increase in the number of indigenous students. That is something to be very warmly welcomed."

Since 1996, the Howard Government has doubled spending on private schools, from $2.3 billion to $4.7 billion last year. Private schools now secure more taxpayer-funded grants than Australia's publicly funded universities. However, the proportion of male schoolteachers has continued to decline over the past decade. Almost 80 per cent of teachers in primary schools are now women. [I am surprised that ANY male teachers risk it] Despite recent data suggesting a surge in enrolments in public high schools in NSW, the figures confirm the 10-year trend away from public 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.

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

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

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



25 February, 2006

BIG DEMAND FOR TINFOIL HATS IN CANADIAN UNIVERSITY

A small Canadian university has ruled out campus-wide wireless internet access because its president fears the system's electromagnetic forces could pose a risk to students' health. Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario, has only a limited Wi-Fi connections at present, in places where there is no fibre-optic internet connection. According to president Fred Gilbert, that is just fine. "The jury is still out on the impact that electromagnetic forces have on human physiology," Mr Gilbert told a university meeting last month, insisting that university policy would not change while he remained president. "Some studies have indicated that there are links to carcinogenetic occurrences in animals, including humans, that are related to energy fields associated with wireless hotspots, whether those hotspots are transmissions lines, whether they're outlets, plasma screens, or microwave ovens that leak."

Lakehead University published a transcript of Mr Gilbert's remarks on its website. Spokeswoman Eleanor Abaya said the decision not to expand the university's few isolated wireless networks was a "personal decision" by Mr Gilbert. But the president's stance has prompted a backlash from students and from Canadian health authorities, who say his fears are overdone.

"If you look at the body of science, we're confident that there is no demonstrable health effect or effects from wireless technology," said Robert Bradley, director of consumer and clinical radiation protection at Canada's federal health department. He said there was no reason to believe that properly installed wireless networks pose a health hazard to computer users.

Adam Krupper, president of the Lakehead students' union, estimated about 1000 of the school's 7500 students have laptops that could pick up a wireless signal, and he said students "really, really" want Wi-Fi on campus. "Considering this is a university known for its great use of technology, it's kind of bad that we can't get Wi-Fi," he said.

Mr Gilbert is a former vice-provost of Colorado State University who holds degrees in biology and zoology. He was previously a zoology professor.

Source



Harvard professors oust Larry Summers. Now they must face their students

The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard turns the spotlight on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), which has consecrated more time and energy to his ouster than to any other project of the past five years. Until now, all blame has been leveled at the president: "Fear and manipulation have been used to govern maliciously," charged one professor, who has since been awarded with a deanship. But now that these cowering professors have successfully unseated their president, scrutiny will quite rightly be leveled at them. What do they gain from their victory, and what does the rest of the university stand to lose?

The movement to unseat Mr. Summers remains a mystery to most people outside Harvard. In the early days of his presidency, he challenged several tenured professors to account for the direction of their research and teaching. After some faculty had signed a petition urging divestment from Israel, he warned against the recurrence of anti-Semitism in a new guise. At an academic conference on the under-representation of women in science, he speculated on the implications of the differences between male and female test scores. At convocation ceremonies he congratulated Harvard students who served in the ROTC, which had been banned from the campus since the days of the Vietnam War.

Each of these actions offended one faculty interest group or another, and jointly they signaled a bold style of leadership in a direction broadly perceived as "conservative"--though it was in the service of once-liberal ideals.

Since most Americans think it appropriate for a president to thus demonstrate his stewardship and leadership, they could not understand why such actions should have triggered faculty revolt. Even members of the media had trouble understanding what the fuss was about: incredulous, for example, that academics would protest against any expressed opinion. The governing body that appointed Mr. Summers and gave him a mandate for change, the Harvard Corporation, seemed for its part to welcome the energy he brought to the job. Several neglected campus units, such as the Law School and the School of Education, flourished as a result of his interventions. Mr. Summers strongly supported new investments in science and technology, areas where Harvard had been falling behind.

Harvard students frankly blossomed under the special attention he paid them. No university president in my experience had ever taken such a warm personal interest in undergraduate education. Not surprisingly, the students return his affection, polling three to one in favor of his staying on. The day he announced his resignation, they were out in force in Harvard Yard, chanting "Five More Years!"

The student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, has been outspoken in its criticism of the faculty that demanded the president's ouster. "No Confidence in 'No Confidence' " ran the headline of an editorial demonstrating the spuriousness of the charges being brought against the president, and reminding faculty to stay focused on the educational process that ought to be its main concern.

Hence, supporters of the president are right to be dismayed by the corporation's decision to seek or to accept Mr. Summers's resignation. My colleague Alan Dershowitz calls it an "academic coup d'‚tat by . . . the die-hard left of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." A second colleague, Steven Pinker, thinks that the president may have lost the fight himself a year ago when he apologized to antagonists for his political incorrectness instead of holding his intellectual ground. For the moment, the attackers have won the day, asserting their right to dictate to the rest of the university the accommodations they favor.

But student response to the ouster suggests another long-term outcome. Although the activists of yesteryear may have found a temporary stronghold in the universities, a new generation of students has had its fill of radicalism. Sobered by the heavy financial burdens most of their families have to bear for their schooling, they want an education solid enough to warrant the investment. Chastened by the fall-out of the sexual revolution and the breakdown of the family, they are wary of human experiments that destabilize society even further. Alert to the war that is being waged against America, they feel responsible for its defense even when they may not agree with the policies of the current administration. If the students I have come to know at Harvard are at all representative, a new moral seriousness prevails on campus, one that has yet to affect the faculty members because it does not yet know how to marshal its powers.

As long as FAS went about its business as usual, no one may have noticed its skewed priorities, but its political victory sets its actions and inaction in bolder relief. The same professors who fought so hard to oust their president did not once since the events of 9/11 consider whether they owed any responsibilities to a country at war.

FAS continued to ban ROTC from campus on the excuse that the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy discriminates against homosexuals. Many students realize that this is tantamount to letting others do the fighting while advertising their moral superiority. Several years ago, the Undergraduate Council voted to give ROTC its approval. Although the faculty ignored this vote and simply waited for that cohort to graduate, other students will sooner or later stand up for their contemporaries who want to serve their country.

"Harvard's greatness has always come from its ability to evolve as the world and its demands change--to educate and draw forth the energy of each successive generation in new and creative ways." These words by Mr. Summers as he announced his resignation may yet prove true, although he would not be the one to put them into effect. It is inconceivable that the currently entrenched culture of grievance should be allowed to continue to sour the university. Perhaps the corporation ought to have put FAS into receivership before giving up on its president. Since it has given in for the moment, we will have to wait a little longer for this new student generation to teach us courage.

Source



ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON THE SUMMERS DOWNFALL

Twenty years ago the American philosopher, Allan Bloom, published a book called The Closing of the American Mind, a devastating indictment of the nation’s universities and, more broadly, of its cultural elites. Its premise was that the spirit of openness, a willingness to consider ideas freely, the great virtue of American life and the guiding ethos of a university had been perverted into a cultural relativism. From the 1960s liberal philosophy had taken hold, defiantly asserting that truth was in the eye of the beholder, and that notions of absolute ideals or virtues were anachronistic. In this new world, liberal democracy was no better than totalitarian theocracy, Plato’s philosophy was no more valid than Marianne Faithfull’s and Mozart should be considered on the same terms as the Monkees.

The resignation of Larry Summers as President of Harvard University this week indicates that the closing of the American mind is a continuing process, remorselessly squeezing the light out of its academic enlightenment. Mr Summers, elected to the top job at America’s richest and most famous university five years ago, never fitted the mould of a modern academic chief. He is fiendishly clever, for a start, a brilliant economist. If he hadn’t jumped into policymaking in his 30s, first at the World Bank, then as a senior official in the Clinton Administration, finally becoming Treasury Secretary in 1999, he would almost certainly have won a Nobel prize by now, as two of his uncles did.

These days the values more often prized in university heads have less to do with intellectual candlepower, and more to do with smoothness, access to influence, and above all, a capacity to generate hundreds of millions of dollars. Smooth, Mr Summers was not. In his often awkward personal habits, overweening intellectual self-confidence and execrable management style, he variously appalled and terrified. Never properly socialised, this impatient young man behaved in the rarefied surroundings of government departments, diplomatic salons and academic common rooms like a semi-housetrained wildebeest....

But it was not his arrogance, or his table manners, or even his envy-inducing genius that did for him at Harvard. It was his determined and ultimately futile effort to open the closed minds of America’s proudest academic elite. Though a liberal Democrat, Summers had a traditional view of what a university should be doing, pursuing truth and excellence wherever it led.As he surveyed the vast ranks of well-paid academic celebrities at Harvard, puffing out their ideologies on women’s studies and black history, he wondered what it was all about. His first run-in was with Cornel West, the black professor, who had produced more rap music in recent years than he had books or papers. After a very public row, West left for the more forgiving pastures of Princeton.

Mr Summers quickly challenged the other pillars of political correctness on which most American universities sit. He opposed an effort to block university investment in Israel and condemned attempts to ban the US Armed Forces from recruiting on campus. Note that these were not assertive steps designed to enforce a particular world view, but the opposite — attempts to keep minds open to the possibility that their accumulated prejudices might need to be re-examined. But his campaign was a challenge to the view that the approved answers of America’s academic elite to the great issues of our time and history were the whole truth, never to be reopened or re-examined.

Most famously, a year ago, he questioned whether that there were so few women professors at the top of their fields in mathematics and engineering might reflect not only sexual discrimination, but also gender-specific aptitudes in different disciplines. In the Index of Sins against modern academic political correctness, this is about as grave as it gets. Even to suggest the possibility that there might be innate differences between the sexes or races that could lead to different outcomes is to invite condemnation from the academic Church of the Closed Mind. Despite abject apologies for his errors (which he now regrets), the closed-mind crowd wanted his blood. And this week, after the threat of yet another vote of no-confidence from his faculty members, they got it.

Ironically, in the 20 years since Bloom’s book American universities have risen to even greater global pre-eminence. Floating ever-higher on a sea of cash from wealthy alumni, they are able to attract the brightest minds from around the world. In science and technology especially, this has yielded great strides in research. But in too many cases these great inflows of cash have done nothing to alleviate the poverty of philosophy that characterises intellectual life at so many universities.

More here

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

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

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

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24 February, 2006

California education bureaucracy continues to segregate "English learners" and make them permanent second class citizens

"Let them speak Spanish" seems to be the idea

Almost half of Sacramento County students who are learning English have achieved proficiency in the language, according to test results released Wednesday by the state. But less than 10 percent have been reclassified by their schools as being fluent enough in English to keep up with the academic demands of learning science, history and other subjects in a language they were not born into. The local trend is mirrored statewide, creating a discrepancy that puts many of California's 1.3 million English learner students in a linguistic limbo - their English skills are good by one standard, but not by another. Consequently, observers worry, students who can get by in English may not be learning the same material as their native-English-speaking peers.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell called attention to the difference between the number of students passing the test and the number being reclassified as fluent when he announced the most recent results of the California English Language Development Test during a press conference in Sacramento. "We need to look at why this gap continues to occur," he said. California has the most diverse student population in the country, and a quarter of schoolchildren here are English learners, O'Connell said. He called on local school districts to review the procedures they use to reclassify students from their status as English learners - who are supposed to receive specialized instruction - to the category of fluency, when they are to be taught the same as native English speakers. "There's not a uniform policy from district to district," O'Connell said. He hinted that that may soon change, saying the state board of education will likely consider creating a statewide standard for determining when English learners should be reclassified as fluent.

Their scores on the California English Language Development Test (CELDT) are one of four factors districts are supposed to use to determine if students should be redesignated. Officials also are supposed to consider teacher evaluation, parent opinion and student performance on the standardized tests all students take in most academic subjects. "The standard for moving them into reclassification is quite high," said Ted Appel, principal of Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento. At his school, 79 percent of English learners tested at the proficient levels on the CELDT last year. But only 3 percent were re-classified as being fluent in English. That's because in order to be reclassified at his school, Appel said, students must also have at least a C in history or science as well as high scores on the standardized math and English tests that are given to all students. Those high standards assure that all students who are reclassified know more than conversational English - they will be prepared to succeed in science, literature and history classes, Appel said.

On the other hand, observers point out, students who are proficient in English but are not being reclassified could be harmed by being held in classes that are too easy. "If they get stuck there, that's really problematic because it means they're not accessing the academic content they need to," said Elisabeth Cutler, an analyst with Education Trust West, an Oakland group that advocates academic achievement for minority and low-income students. Because the state lacks a student identification number that follows students through all their years in school, much remains unknown about California's English learners, Cutler said. For example, the state can't track how many years students spend as English learners before they are reclassified, or how many new students replace them when they advance out of the category.

It is also unclear whether students are being held in the English learner status because they are not ready to advance to mainstream instruction or for other reasons, such as social pressure. Some students may not want to go to mainstream classes because they are embarrassed by their abilities in English, said Patricia Gandara, an education professor at UC Davis.

Appel, the Burbank principal, said his staff is determined that students stay in English learner status only for academic reasons. "We are philosophically working very hard to look at students who have been in the U.S. a number of years and ... move them into mainstream classes and make sure they're receiving appropriate instruction," he said.

It's a challenge schools up and down California must now confront, Gandara said. "Everybody is very concerned about the kids being stuck in a track that is not providing them real opportunities to learn, year after year after year," she said. "This is a real dilemma because the other side of the coin would be bouncing them into the mainstream with teachers who are not trained to give them support."

Source



SURPRISING TOLERANCE AT U DELAWARE

No freedom of speech, though. The only way to survive if your views are non-Leftist is to shut up about it

Revelations that a University of Delaware research assistant and physics instructor is a leader in the regional white supremacy movement did not change his standing at the university, an institution that values free speech.

Ironically, The News Journal's Feb. 12 article that Robert T. Huber was living a dual life -- one on campus, the other in the white power movement -- brought criticism from a former mentor and creator of the national "Skinhead Hall of Fame." "I've seen it before. There are many who try to keep a job and keep a low profile as far as their political activities are concerned," says Richard Barrett, founder and leader of the white supremacist Nationalist Movement. "It usually doesn't wash. It's very controversial. Maybe he felt he could go it on his own."

The News Journal detailed Huber's association with Final Stand Records, a Newark-based Web site that promotes skinhead concerts, sponsors racist Internet chat rooms and peddles neo-Nazi and racist skinhead music, including CDs by three of Huber's bands. Huber plays lead guitar for the white power metal band Teardown, which has a Web site -- currently under construction-- that can be traced to a Newark post office box shared by Huber, whose former bands include Blue Eyed Devils and Nordic Thunder. In Nordic Thunder's "Born To Hate," the band sings:

A working class man with a gun in my hand
Out on the streets, I'm an angry White man
Pissed at the world and sick of the state
Gotta take action, can't you relate

As long as Huber's music doesn't mix with his course work, his noncampus interests should not count against him, said UD President David P. Roselle and a handful of students interviewed by The News Journal. However, at least one student expressed concern about how minorities might be treated by Huber. "Our best choice is to tolerate him," said Dean Carter, a 19-year-old English major. "Ninety-nine percent of the students won't agree with him. His views are upsetting, and we should support his right to have his opinions. However, his freedom ends where my nose begins."

Huber, 32, has been active in the white power movement since his early teens, when he joined Barrett's skinhead movement. He's a member of the "Skinhead Hall of Fame," a distinction noted on the Web site skinheadz.com, though he later broke from Barrett's group and struck out on his own. Huber did not respond to repeated phone and e-mail attempts to contact him during the week. Last month, Huber, along with a Pennsylvania-based racist group called the Keystone State Skinheads, held a rock concert in Middletown, Pa., that drew more than a hundred skinheads and neo-Nazis. It was one of a series of "hatecore" concerts promoted by Final Stand Records. Two days after the concert, Huber was back on UD's Newark campus teaching an introductory physics course to more than 100 students. The course final was held Feb. 4. A student in the class said Huber wore long-sleeves while teaching to conceal his tattoos and never talked about race or politics. Huber warned the class that he listened to "hardcore" music, so if they heard it during office hours they shouldn't be shocked.

Huber isn't teaching this semester, but he continues to study, has an office on campus and conducts research paid for by NASA.

Barrett has known Huber since Huber's early teens and once stayed at his Elkton, Md., home, where they organized a local chapter of Barrett's group. Barrett said Huber should have stayed active with the skinhead movement rather than going "underground" and concealing his beliefs. "He would have made an excellent national skinhead spokesman," Barrett said. "He would have been a compelling-looking, persuasive social reformer. Unfortunately, he has chosen a way that could cause him to be perceived as a cultist" -- which Barrett defined as someone more concerned about their image than white supremacist beliefs.

Barrett, a 63-year-old attorney, works out of his secured compound in Learned, Miss. According to the Anti-Defamation League, he has been successful in attracting violent skinheads to his group and is best known for staging public rallies where counter-demonstrators far outnumber the Klansmen and skinheads who are attracted to his cause. In a report released this month, the ADL outlined how the Internet and hatecore music have combined to increase the number of small racist skinhead groups, such as the Keystone State Skinheads, while national organizations have struggled to maintain membership.

After Sunday's News Journal stories on Huber and racist skinhead culture were published, the photo section of the Final Stand Records Web site, which contained pictures of Huber's concert performances, were restricted to the public. The site also restricted entry to its chat room. The catalog section of the Web site, which has more than 400 racist CDs for sale, remains operational. In interviews with white supremacist magazines, Huber says he started the Web site to have an outlet for his music. Huber answers e-mail sent to the site's contact address, but the site's owner is shielded by a proxy service.

University reaction:

After being told of Huber's activities by The News Journal, Roselle conducted an investigation and consulted with university attorneys and the American Civil Liberties Union. Roselle said Huber's status at the university will not change. "It's the same as before," Roselle said. "The advice is that that is the condition that needs to prevail." Roselle said he has not heard from any students who are worried about Huber's extracurricular activities, but several community members contacted him with concerns. Roselle would not discuss what they said. "It was nothing that would in any way be thought to be surprising," he said.

In a statement issued Thursday evening, Roselle said no complaints had been made against Huber and there was no evidence Huber discussed his beliefs in class. "It is a personal affront when persons with hateful beliefs espouse those beliefs, insist upon their right to make public displays of their beliefs or otherwise attempt to spread their venom," Roselle said in the press release. "But, a fundamental tenet of our nation is that my objection or, as in this case, the university's objection, is not sufficient reason to deny the right of free speech."........

Rabbi Eliezer Sneiderman, the university's on-campus rabbi, hasn't heard complaints from students, but community members have expressed interest and concerns. "He'll finish school. He can't get punished for his thoughts. " Sneiderman said. "He may not get a teaching position again, but if I was in Roselle's position, I would do the same thing -- unless there's a complaint."

More here

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

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

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

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



23 February, 2006

Testing adult authority

The UK government wants to turn teachers into shock troops against kids' bad behaviour. Not surprisingly, teachers aren't too keen

The attempt to reinstate teachers' authority in the classroom and instil a culture of respect among young people by allowing teachers to remove children's iPods seems doomed to failure before it starts. Few teachers seem to want the powers that Tony Blair keeps foisting upon them. Of course, a few newspaper journalists will jump on the bandwagon, calling on the government to get tough on unruly kids, but somehow those with the responsibility for actually caring for young people don't seem very keen to do so.

Schools minister Jacqui Smith announced that the government's new legislation 'will allow schools to punish pupils for unacceptable behaviour on the way to and from school...and ensure pupils are positive ambassadors for schools'. But the prospect of teachers confronting pupils on trains and buses doesn't seem to have caught the public imagination. It certainly does not seem very popular in the staffroom. As one colleague of mine put it, 'I am not confronting anyone'. There seems to be a mismatch between the government's desire for a respectful society and the practicality of instilling authority.

Just stamping your feet and declaring that you should be heard only makes your words jar awkwardly. Smith's insistence that 'A culture of disrespect will not be tolerated' might be a reasonable demand, but it rings hollow in a society that doesn't seem to have the stomach for a fight to reassert adults' authority.

The unions, long champions of the fight against unruly pupils, have gone strangely quiet over the government's agenda. The National Association of Schoolmasters / Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) even suggested that behaviour had already improved on the basis that fewer of its members had declared strikes against teaching unruly pupils. That might just mean teachers are getting on with their job rather than running shy of naughty children.

Nevertheless, the reluctance to jump up and declare support for the government's 'respect' agenda was echoed in a feeble endorsement for the proposed new powers by the Association of School and College Leaders. A survey of its members revealed that only 13 out of 100 thought the measures would significantly improve behaviour. Teachers I have spoken to think the government is raving mad. Ministers seem to expect schools to pick up the pieces in a society that seems to be paralysed to act when it comes to children. The lack of enthusiasm among head teachers for random drugs testing introduced previously by the government seems to bear that sentiment out.

Even suggesting that teachers need a law to allow them to confiscate pupil's possessions in lessons belies the frailty of adults' authority. Surely any teacher worth their salt would just take the offending object and be done with it. Where is the need for the law to intervene? It can only be because teachers fear the consequences of taking action against a child that the government is pressurised into acting. As Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), put it, 'Teachers need to be absolutely confident about their authority'. Presumably Sinnott makes this point because teachers singularly lack confidence in their own authority. The problem is, passing a law like this will not shift the balance back in adults' favour.

Of course, if we invite police patrols into the corridors to enforce teachers' demands it might start to impact upon behaviour. But I don't think we have quite got to that stage yet, even in Tony Blair's mind. However, the amount of police patrolling the school gates at the end of the day might tell a different story. It seems that the journey home has become a major political battleground against unruly children. You might be forgiven for thinking it was best to stay indoors at 3.30pm, as hordes of teenagers wearing overly large knotted ties and garish uniforms menace the streets. In fact, you can see why the government is so keen to ban mobile phones and iPods in schools if you consider that the police claim that possessing such items invites street crime.

Of course it is unfortunate that some kids have their possessions nicked, especially when those possessions cost their parents hundreds of pounds. But children having a go at each other at the end of the day is a normal fact of life. Running the gauntlet of the older children is a ritual and part of school. The fact that this now mimics adult crime and that it happens only a stone's throw from the school gates just confirms that youngsters are pretty sure adults won't do anything to intervene. Banning mobile phones and iPods is at base an admission that adults can't do anything to protect young people from each other.

The idea that as a teacher you will patrol buses and tube trains in an attempt to enforce better behaviour on the way home strikes me as absurd. Adults have given up on mass from disciplining youngsters, so it is a bit much to expect teachers to do it for us. Only a week ago it was reported that a teacher claimed damages from Birmingham council after a stranger confronted her in her own classroom. She won the case out of court, with a 330,000 pound settlement. She had not set foot in her classroom for five years, claiming she was traumatised. The response of the council was to say that it would tighten up on risk assessment procedures to protect its staff. But if teachers are reluctant to face the relatives of their charges in the classroom then how on earth are they going to face up to youngsters in public?

Source



The Sydney riots show that multicultural brainwashing in the schools has failed to lead to the "tolerance" that was preached

Cultural diversity is uncritically celebrated in the classroom, while our Anglo-Celtic heritage is thoroughly repudiated, writes Kevin Donnelly

If there is one positive thing to come out of the violence in Cronulla, it will be a long hard look at how schoolchildren are educated about Australian culture and what they are taught about their responsibilities as members of a civil society.

Judged by the age of many of those involved in abusing women, the mob violence at Cronulla beach and the subsequent destruction of personal property, many would have been of school age during the 1980s and '90s. While Al Grassby and Gough Whitlam sowed the seeds, this was a time when governments under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating spent millions on the multicultural industry. With the support of left-liberal academics, teacher unions and curriculum writers, the prevailing orthodoxy uncritically promoted cultural diversity, denigrated or ignored Australia's mainstream Anglo-Celtic tradition and taught children that our society is riddled with racism, inequality and social injustice.

The national Studies of Society and Environment curriculum developed during the Keating years argued that children must be taught "an awareness of and pride in Australia's multicultural society" and "develop an understanding of Australia's cultural and linguistic diversity". The 1993 Australian Education Union's curriculum policy argued that children must be taught that they "are living in a multicultural and class-based society that is diverse and characterised by inequality and social conflict".

Not only was the then academically-based school curriculum, especially in subjects such as history and literature, condemned as Eurocentric, patriarchal and socially unjust, but examinations were seen as favouring rich, white kids and culturally biased against recent migrants. Fast forward to more recent years and little has changed. The 1999 Australian Education Union policy on combating racism argues that government polices "are founded upon a legal system which is inherently racist in so much as its prime purpose is to serve the needs of the dominant Anglo-Australian culture". The AEU also states that racism in Australia is both overt and covert and that "both forms of racism are still widely practised in Australian society", especially as a result of the school curriculum supposedly being based on "the knowledge and values of the Anglo-Australian culture".

Politically correct

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

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

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

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

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

Much of the way history and politics is now taught also centres on the rights of the individual. Instead of emphasising responsibilities and giving allegiance to what we hold in common, individuals are free to define themselves how they will and to act as they wish.

By defining Australian society as socially unjust and divisive there is also the danger of promoting a victim mentality. Whereas past generations felt part of a wider community and believed that hard work would be rewarded, recent generations see only inequality and their right to be supported.

Nobody should condone the violence in Cronulla perpetrated by those wearing the Australian flag or the actions of young Lebanese Muslims abusing women, destroying property and burning churches. But we also need to recognise that the PC approach to teaching multiculturalism in schools in part underpins the recent violence.

As the American liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr has argued: "The militants of ethnicity now contend that the main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration and perpetuation of ethnic origins and identities. Separatism, however, nourishes prejudice, magnifies differences and stirs antagonisms."

Source

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

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

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

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



22 February, 2006

MATHEMATICS SHOWS UP THE DUMMIES

Math is a killer. There's no way around it. If anything can torpedo the hopes of the 120 high school students in Ernest Davenport's 11-week ACT/SAT prep class, it's the math on those college entrance exams. It's hard, and it's nearly impossible without taking the classes in high school to prepare you. Yet most of the teens sitting in Davenport's free class, nearly all students of color from the Twin Cities, will take the exams in April without having finished advanced algebra or geometry. It's an incredible handicap, like putting a novice on skis, shoving him down a double-diamond run, and then wondering why he keeps falling.

Minnesota needs more students of color to succeed in college. Minority high school student numbers will jump in the next decade while the number of white graduates falls, so the state's future depends increasingly on their success. High-level math is key. National research shows a student who finishes a course beyond Algebra II more than doubles the odds she'll earn a bachelor's degree. But many high school students never get to Algebra II.

Davenport has a few weeks to try to prepare the students, but all that math can't be learned over a few Saturdays. The practice tests that students took on the first day of the prep class in mid-January reflect that. Davenport makes his tests a little harder than the real ACT. Still, most of the prep-class students could correctly answer only three of 15 questions during a timed exam.

Why didn't they take algebra sooner? Did they worry about doing poorly? Was it because their friends wouldn't be there or they didn't get a push from family or counselors? Were the classes available? The questions linger with no single answer. These are highly motivated, capable students who perhaps didn't get the right guidance about what courses to take or advice on how hard they needed to push.....

Preparation is a huge issue, one that students of color realize perhaps more than the public. Last week, the nonpartisan group Public Agenda released national surveys showing minority high school students were more likely than whites to call math and science "absolutely essential" for real-world success but also were more likely than white students (31 percent vs. 20 percent) to say that not being taught enough math and science is a "serious problem" at their school.

Minnesota's average ACT scores always look great. Yet the state ranks low in the total number of high school students who take any math, let alone advanced math. "If you were a kid in a college-bound program and you came from a family that had the means and wherewithal to have high expectations for you, you were probably going to come out OK," said Bill Linder-Scholer former director of SciMathMN, a public-private group that encourages more math and science in Minnesota schools. "If you weren't in that situation, there were lower education expectations. Whether that was family, schools, teachers, certainly the system had lower expectations. "All the college-bound kids took three, four years of math and science. If you didn't know what you wanted to do, the expectations were clearly much lower," he said. "It's difficult to talk about without getting into very difficult social issues and even race issues."

When the Minnesota Office of Higher Education analyzed data on those who took the ACT last year, it found only 16 percent of black students, 29 percent of American Indian teens, 35 percent of Latino and 40 percent of Asian students were ready for college algebra based on their math scores, compared with 55 percent for whites.

The reality is that the seeds of these differences are sown before high school. The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation's report card, found some of the nation's worst test score gaps in Minnesota when it came to eighth-graders and math. Right now less than 5 percent of students of color earn a bachelor's degree from a Minnesota college within 10 years of their freshman year in high school, a recent Citizens League report noted. Many won't graduate from high school at all....

More here



The British Left has retained its remarkable powers of self-delusion

Mick Hume on the Left's hatred of selective schools

In normal circumstances I would agree that few politicians are more deserving of being booed to the rafters than Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. However, the Labour activists who booed Ms Kelly during their spring party conference, in protest at the Government's refusal to abolish the last grammar schools, are the ones who need egging off. For many in the Labour Party, it seems, schools that still select using the 11-plus have become the new foxhunters. It is quite an achievement, but their crusade against the grammars makes even less sense than the one to ban hunting.

I am an ex-grammar school boy, yet still consider myself on the Left (not something I learnt at my 1970s Surrey boys' grammar). If we were designing an education system from scratch, I probably would not propose including 164 English grammar schools. But who is supposed to benefit from getting rid of these few academically successful schools now? How exactly is abolishing a relative handful of good schools supposed to improve the bad ones?

Forty years ago the drive to replace academic selection with comprehensive education was motivated by a genuine, if idealistic, belief that all children might experience the quality schooling then enjoyed by a few. By contrast, the grudge campaign against the remaining grammars seems infused with a mean spirit of levelling down. Neither the existence of these grammar schools nor their abolition will make the world more equal. We should stop investing our hopes in education as a panacea for society's ills. But we should want to make an updated version of the non-vocational, mind-broadening education some of us received at grammar school available to all children - not as a tool for social mobility or social inclusion, but as a desirable end in itself.

Instead, despite the boos, the Government supports the anti-grammar activists in spirit. Indeed, until recently it supported them in public, dangling the prospect of abolition before the disaffected Left just as it did with the hunting ban. The only difference now, as Tony Blair makes clear, is that new Labour does not want "a war" over grammars with parents who have voted against abolition at every opportunity. However, the Government's other reforms will continue the drift away from academic education towards using schools as instruments of social engineering and control.

Those last few grammars are talked about as symbols of educational malaise. For me, a more telling symbol is what happened to Woking County Grammar School for Boys after we left: they turned the old stone building into a shiny police fortress.

SO WHAT can it mean to be left wing now? The question occurred to this old libertarian Marxist more than once this week: when the petty, illiberal ban on smoking in public was hailed as a victory for progressive forces (Liberte, Egalite - defense de fumer?), and when Gordon Brown made his big pre-prime ministerial speech.

Whatever else it has lost over the years, the British Left has retained its unsurpassed powers of self-delusion. The last illusion it clung to was that, once in power, Mr Brown would throw off the mask and emerge as the true face of "Real Labour". Now the Chancellor has spelt out not only that he would govern with the penny-pinching mindset of a Presbyterian accountant, but also that when it came to ruling via the politics of fear and turning every government department into "a department of security" he would be - wait for it - worse than Mr Blair. If Labour's 1983 manifesto, written at the Left's peak, was "the longest suicide note in history", Mr Brown's address sounded like a 9,000-word living will for the terminally ill Labour Left.



Dumb university teachers

This example from Australia

A university graduate student abandoned the institution in frustration after a marking fiasco during which a lecturer told him to produce "more smarter writing". Former Queensland University of Technology Master of Business Marketing student Rohan Duggan, 38, said his nine-month ordeal included seven meetings and hundreds of pages of correspondence, some farcical. The original marking of a 2000-word paper included a comment from lecturer Edwina Luck advising Mr Duggan to present "more smarter writing".

After Ms Luck graded the paper at 65 per cent, Mr Duggan questioned the grade and Ms Luck passed it to another staffer, Dr Yunus Ali, who downgraded it to 35 per cent. In re-marking, Dr Ali questioned the use of the terms "Yin" and "Yang", a Chinese concept of balance, and said they should have been listed as references in the bibliography (a list of the books used as reference material). Yesterday, Dr Ali admitted he had "no idea" what the terms meant and thought they were references to people's names. "We don't go into the deeper meaning," he said.

In response to further queries, Ms Luck sent Mr Duggan a short e-mail which, because her "s" key was not functioning, read as: "I knew you would be di appointed, o what I have done i taken the middle ground. I am uppo ed to take the econd mark, but I did not want to kill you that much. I do hope that you have learned from thi . Not the point of a king for explanation, but that we a lecturer are not totally illy!! Academic writing i difficult. I hope all our comment can be helpful in the future. Edwina."

Mr Duggan then took his complaint to higher authorities and his original mark was restored. Mr Duggan said the restored mark helped him achieve a distinction in the subject, although when he learned that Dr Ali would have been teaching him in second year he decided to go elsewhere and has now completed a Master of Marketing Managing degree at Griffith University.

QUT registrar Dr Carol Dickenson and Business Dean Professor Peter Little said that both Ms Luck and Dr Ali had been reprimanded and made to attend a seminar on Learning and Teaching Issues. They agreed their conduct was "obviously unacceptable". Professor Little said if due process had been applied, Ms Luck would have given the assignment to her (Luck's) head of department who would have selected a staff member himself to do the re-marking. He insisted Dr Ali was "very well qualified academically". [No evidence to the contrary is allowed, obviously]

Source

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

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

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

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21 February, 2006

CRAZY CALIFORNIA PRESCHOOL INITIATIVE

For those who believe that Rob Reiner's initiative to create a government-run preschool program for all four-year-olds is a slam-dunk for passage in June, think again. True, preschool seems like a warm and fuzzy issue. However, Reiner's proposed preschool program, which would be funded by a tax increase on high-income earners, is so replete with problems that it offers a vast array of targets for critics. And, it is important to point out, those critics are not just limited to limited-government conservatives.

For instance, one of Reiner's toughest opponents has been the Los Angeles Times. Last year, when Reiner first proposed his initiative, a Times editorial skewered the initiative. The Times slammed the concept of taxing the rich to fund specific programs: [In November 2004], voters approved a poorly thought-out measure to tax million-dollar earners to fund mental health programs. The line of good causes calling out for tax on the rich will only get longer. Citing the continuing structural deficit in the state budget and the cost of Reiner's initiative, the Times observed, The last thing California needs right now is to raise another huge sum of money -- $2.3 billion a year to start that can't be used to close existing gaps. Warning against ballot-box budgeting, the Times thundered: Let's repeat: The voting booth isn't the place to draw up the state budget.

The Times attack on the Reiner initiative has continued. Earlier this month, Michael Hiltzik, the papers usually liberal business columnist, described the initiative as another attempt at ballot-box budgeting featuring misleading PR and misguided pied-piper appeal. Hiltzik then ripped the RAND Corporation study, which has become the bible of Reiner's campaign, that claims that for every $1 spent on preschool, society will get back $2.62 in long-term benefits such as better student performance and lower crime.

Hiltzik notes that RAND's calculations are based on a Chicago program aimed at black children in that city's poorest neighborhoods. Although the study's main author says that the Chicago program is the most relevant for comparison purposes with Reiner's envisioned California program, Hiltzik notes that the two programs are hardly identical. The Chicago program provides health screening, speech therapy services, meals, home visits and continual and intensive parental involvement efforts. None of these elements, observes Hiltzik, is specifically funded by the Reiner initiative.

Further, whereas the estimates of the benefits of the Chicago program are based on tracking students for decades, the estimates of the benefits of a California program are, in Hiltzik's words, an extrapolation applied to a program that doesn't yet exist. Thus, RAND's benefit claims should be seen as a projection, not a measurement.

The Times, however, is not the only unlikely home of Reiner skeptics. Academics at the University of California have issued studies that have undercut key arguments of the Reiner campaign. In January, UC Santa Barbara researchers found that whatever student achievement gains can be attributed to preschool attendance largely evaporates after a few years in elementary school. Because of this fade-out effect, the researchers question the long-term impact of preschool: Yet because the achievement impact of preschool appears to diminish during the first four years of school, while the achievement gap especially for Spanish-dominant language minority students increases, preschool alone may have limited use as a long-term strategy for improving the achievement gap without strengthening the schools these students attend or without additional support during the school years. In other words, unless California?s under-performing public K-12 system improves, don't expect preschool to produce all those long-term benefits that Reiner claims.

Reiner and his campaign try to dismiss such evidence by arguing that unlike many current preschool programs, their initiative will guarantee "high-quality preschool." Key to their definition of "high-quality" is the initiative's requirement that all preschool teachers must have a bachelor's degree and a post-bachelor's teaching credential in early childhood education. Yet, there is a great deal of data to suggest that a four-year degree and a special teaching credential have little, if any, effect on student achievement.

UC Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller, who has battled conservatives over school choice issues, and two fellow researchers issued a study last year that examined the research on teacher education and preschool. What they found was that many of the studies claiming to show a connection between teachers holding bachelor's degrees and better student performance were statistically and methodologically flawed. Thus, they concluded, Claims that a Bachelor's degree further advances child development simply cannot be substantiated by studies conducted to date. In addition, given the higher salaries that will have to be paid to preschool teachers under the Reiner initiative, To pay-out higher reimbursement rates based on the number of BA-credentialed teachers will be costly and may not yield significant benefits to children.

Finally, even Georgetown University professor William Gormley, who supports universal preschool and whose research on Oklahoma's universal preschool program is often cited by the Reiner campaign, admits that, A universal pre-K program may or may not be the best path to school readiness. This acknowledgement is probably due to the fact that in Gormley's own studies of the Oklahoma program, there is inconsistent evidence as to whether universal preschool helps improve the short-term performance of middle and upper-income children. And, indeed, there is no long-term evidence that preschool helps non-disadvantaged children a fact that undercuts the entire basis for a universal program.

Given the opposition of key elements of the major mainstream media and academia, plus the gaping holes in the evidence supporting a universal preschool program, Reiner's initiative is vulnerable. The recent Public Policy Institute of California poll that found 63 percent of Californians support the Reiner initiative may be flawed because poll respondents were read only a concept description of the initiative rather than the official title and summary. In other surveys, much lower levels of support were recorded when the official title and summary were read to respondents. Even if the 63 percent is accurate, however, it is a relatively low level of support given the warm fuzziness of the issue and the media ad campaign that has already started in support of preschool for all children.

Exposing the initiative's inherent problems will certainly cause a great deal of doubt, if not outright opposition, from many of those who now think the initiative sounds good. Thus, a determined, informed, substantive and adequately funded campaign against the initiative stands a good chance of succeeding.

Source



Williams Does Diversity

A rather restrained post (in the circumstances) lifted from the NAS

K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College—CUNY

On EphBlog, I've been following the debate at my former institution, Williams College, which is in the process of launching a new "diversity" initiative. This is "diversity" defined very narrowly: as college president Morton Shapiro explained, ideological or even religious diversity "are considered to be a characteristic that is acquired rather than intrinsic," so this initiative will focus exclusively on race. Among the initiative's chief recommendations: "Continue to allocate FTE to curricular areas in which we are likely to attract minority candidates." In other words, the skin color of the likely applicant pool will play as important, or even more important, a role as curricular or pedagogical need in allocating new lines. This is a disconcerting revelation.

For an outside perspective on faculty issues, the college turned to Professor Evelyn Hu-DeHart director of Brown's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Hu-DeHart last published a scholarly monograph in 1984; since then, she seems to have devoted herself almost full-time to administrative tasks geared toward championing a peculiar vision of higher education. Hu-DeHart seems to believe that on issues associated with "diversity," people of good faith cannot disagree. Scholarly critics of the diversity agenda, she has contended "provided cover for white supremacists to oppose affirmative action," while subjecting African-American and Hispanic students to "oppressive public scrutiny" and "extremely harsh attacks." And what typified this "oppressive" activity? Publication of Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. In Hu-DeHart's academy, apparently even scholars of the prestige and talent of the Thernstroms cannot explore issues related to race and ethnicity in America unless they affirm Hu-DeHart's conclusions.

While Hu-DeHart has absurdly labeled scholarship questioning some of the foundations for affirmative action as an "extremely harsh" attack on students of color, she herself has demonstrated a tendency to issue blanket statements based on race or ethnicity calling into question her ability to envision a campus in which all students can do their best. To provide one example: in fall 2005, talking with students at Wesleyan College, Professor Hu-DeHart wondered why more people didn't question the objectivity of "all these dominant white professors [who] are studying European history or the [history of] white Europe." Can a scholar's objectivity be questioned solely on the basis of the color of his or her skin? Imagine the (appropriate) outrage if a white professor leveled such a condemnation of "all these minority black professors who are studying African history or the history of black Africa."

On curricular matters, Hu-DeHart has championed the Curriculum Transformation Project -- an initiative that seems to have more to do with imposing a specific ideological perspective on all classes rather than on "diversity" as commonly understood. The CTP's "curriculumt [sic] transformation" website urges colleges to utilize "the classroom as democratic space in which students can dialogue about and practice new ways of relating across race, class, and gender." (An education in the traditional disciplines of the liberal arts, apparently, does not allow for a sufficiently "diverse" perspective.) The CTB's first "resource" is a guide to "teaching about Hurricane Katrina," developed by the New York Collective of Radical Educators. The site urges professors to focus on how Katrina illustrates "the criminalization of poor people of color"; "the capitalist interests that govern public policy"; "militarism"; and "consumerism and related environmental degradation." Such analysis was last fresh around 1969.

These curricular proposals all revolve around what Professor Hu-DeHart terms the "social action approach," in which courses identify "important social issues and take actions to help solve them." This concept, she maintains, is "central to the values of a liberal arts education." Literally and theoretically, though never in practice, Williams could define a number of causes as "important social issues," and "take actions to help solve them." Perhaps the diversity curriculum could champion Israel's right to self-defense, so as to defend innocent civilians against suicide murderers; or celebrate a Roman Catholic anti-abortion initiative, so as to promote justice by preventing the destruction of innocent life; or oppose affirmative action, so as to achieve a socially just, color-blind, legal code. We all know, of course, that Professor Hu-DeHart does not have such initiatives in mind.

These ideas, while extreme even among "diversity" advocates, might not distinguish Hu-DeHart from the roster of consultants from which a college might choose when seeking to embrace the "diversity" approach. But Hu-DeHart also has an administrative record of translating her ideas into action. Before coming to Brown, she chaired Colorado's ethnic studies department for more than a decade. Her highest-profile hire was none other than Ward Churchill. Indeed, in April 2005, Hu-DeHart described Churchill as "her hire." Most observers consider the hiring, early tenuring, and finally promotion of Churchill, who lacked a Ph.D. and has faced credible charges of massive plagiarism, weak scholarship, and lying about his ethnic heritage, as an example of exactly how institutions of higher education ought not to function.

Moreover, Hu-DeHart has been less than candid about the relationship between her "diversity" ideas and Churchill's career. To a reporter at Brown, she claimed that no special considerations relating to "diversity" helped Churchill get his job. But this assertion that was directly contradicted by internal documents recently released by Colorado, which showed that the then-chair of the Communications Department, which originally hired Churchill, listed two reasons for doing so: Hu-DeHart's request, and how Churchill's claim that he was a "Native American" would improve the department's diversity. Ironically, one of Hu-DeHart's final acts before leaving her department chairmanship at Colorado in 2002 was to put in motion the first of four merit-pay raises that Churchill received between 2001 and 2005.

I would think that a figure who played the key role in rewarding Churchill with a lifetime position would not be in a position to supply guidance on academic policy to other institutions.

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

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

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

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20 February, 2006

AN EMAIL FROM A FLORIDA SCHOOL TEACHER ON CHARACTERISTIC BLACK BEHAVIOUR

From a teacher with an academic psychology background:

"I would like to enumerate a few observations I have made as this stealth social anthropologist, teaching in the science classrooms of a ****** middle school:

1- The black child (largely referring to males here) is highly driven by "rules of the 'gangsta' (read: black gangster) culture". A 'gangsta' is a label a white such as a teacher like me cannot apply to any black child, because it is almost a devilish notoriety that the child considers to be an insult. However, at the same time, they tacitly attempt to reach a kind of 'gangsta stature' among peers. Such a stature means you are viewed as exceedingly tough.

2- Toughness is the ultimate attainment. At the same time, I have heard no informal accolades bestowed upon others in the peer group to reflect this high status. At the same time, those determined to be weak or vulnerable are labeled "soft". Another title deserves mention. A friend among peers is called "my niggah". A black female student who apparently has some degree of admiration for me saw me in the halls one day and gave me the ultimate compliment by saying "Hi, my niggah." Sociologically, I would imagine that "my niggah" is the bond between those who perceive themselves to be oppressed or those who seem to acknowledge empathy/sympathy, some alignment with them. However, as you might imagine, it is absolutely taboo for a white teacher to call any black student "niggah" or "my niggah". In fact, the students often cite in the middle of verbal attacks on one another the prohibition for any teacher to say "damn, hell, you stupid, you jerk" or other such relatively benign name calling. A few times, I have let words slip out that warrant immediate red flags by students often in the middle of calling each other four letter words, or more often simply calling one another bitch, "ho", garbage or stupid "niggah".

3- The toughness battle is waged via verbal wars and physical encounters. This is often between the sexes, although a black girl is in my view quietly understood to be popular or in some way successful by being a frequent target of abuse and attacking back in some way physically or verbally. Most common content of attacks from males to females include: 1) You are "a ho", 2) Your "momma is a ho" 3) You're "very poor and I'm not" and 4) Brief sexual grabbings or whispered sexual insults only from boy to girl, not the other way around.. I'm usually not able to see the grabbing or hear the insults, but what I do see is a young black girl running after a black boy in the class slapping him.

4- I have seen a few real punches thrown between boy and girl, and a few between girls, but the most common physical encounter one sees is between boys, that is, in the vast majority of times a kind of rough-housing involving head locks, wrestling and punching in the mid- section. Usually there is mock anger. Rarely there is squaring off in serious sparring. This kind of fighting is extremely common and involves 90% of the boys in any one classroom, particularly in the low end of the IQ spectrum. There is also a Hollywood Western kind of simulation to the jousting, with make believe landed punches, but no shortage of real tackling and then stomping on the tackled one by several at once, as hunters over a nearly killed fallen deer. This is classroom behavior mind you. When I have tried to break up fights by simply pulling on a child's clothing, I am immediately cited for doing a proscribed act by the child. The child may be in the throes of being beaten up, in one case being thrown by several into a large garbage can, but when I made an attempt to intervene by trying to lift the child out of the can, he yelled at me "Don't touch me. Don't touch me. You can't touch me."

5- Aspersions boy to boy over each other's sexual prowess are very common. This kind of ranking is coupled with a frequent attempt to self-aggrandize one's status vis a vis the girls in the class. However, when I enter the fray with "I would agree, Wally here is no real object of any girl's affection", I am ignored by the same girls who had just laughed their head off at him. Wally, I might add, is a class clown and rabble rouser who actually enjoys some degree of begrudged popularity. Again, this is by way of simply being involved in many interactions with many different children in the class, rather than ever hearing any one boy or girl say anything nice about him.

6- I have seen many different white, hispanic and black children in various secondary school settings where I have taught here in *****, often as a substitute teacher. Since November, I have been a regular science teacher at the middle school I refer to in the above comments. It is 95% black, with the rest a smattering of white, Asian and Hispanic. What is very overwhelming to me is the racial difference in the degree of fighting, particularly physical fighting noted compared to non-black classroom settings. (In other schools dominated by blacks, in the case of my experience poor blacks such as my present location, there is again a culture of heavy physical fighting.) What is very intriguing to me is the answer to the question you have pondered through a great body of research, "To what degree is this physicality purely genetic?""

Update:

My correspondent adds further:

"I can use no legal physical force to stop fighting, a problem complicated by savvy students who cry the equivalent of "white brutality" or "racism" should I lay a finger on them.

I wish I could legally have a hidden camera in the room to show the magnitude of the fighting, and the associated sexual themes so dominant in the classroom. The male bear hugging of one another is almost homosexual in appearance. But there are few if any outwardly homosexual children. Such hugging of females if usually transient, then broken up by me verbally- usually the girl will follow orders; students are much less inclined to give intimate holds to the opposite sex in the classroom.(it's initiated only by boys). And female to female fighting is far less common than the most common interaction-male to male, with male to female holding solidly in second place.

The other day, I brought in a whistle to try and stem the incessant talking and yelling to one another. One student accused me of using it as if to quiet animals. I had no comment.

There are often other "tribal activities"- spontaneous singing of rap songs from artists heard on the radio and hair grooming- usually by girls to other girls but at times girls work on the hair of boys. There are also frequent bursts of group hip hop type dance and at other times spontaneous "drop a beat" sessions, during which one student will drum on a desk, while another raps improvisationally as others gather round nodding or saying the equivalent of periodic "amens"."



California bureaucrat puts unions ahead of schools

One example of where all California's "education" money goes. Cheaper construction costs not allowed. And the unions are now trying to get via a legal interpretation what they could not get via direct legislation

Attorney General Bill Lockyer is forbidding one school district from piggybacking on a second district's contract to buy modular classrooms and install them without seeking separate public bids. Lockyer's recent legal opinion may impose 90-day delays and up to $25 million in extra costs on cash-strapped school districts, said Mike Henning, a board member with the School Facility Manufacturers' Association, a Sacramento-based group that represents a dozen modular building makers. Districts aren't happy, said Thomas G. Duffy, legislative director and lobbyist for the California Coalition for Adequate School Housing. "They'll have to change what they're doing."

California school district administrators have used contract piggybacking for years to skip costly and time-consuming state rules that require them to seek competitive bids. One district uses another's competitive bid contract to quickly add classroom space - perhaps at a volume discount - and ease overcrowding amid enrollment surges. Modular facility builders often win such contracts, angering unionized construction firms and their workers who complain modular structures deny them a chance to bid on school projects.

Lockyer's opinion affects projects where several modular building components (wall and floor systems) are transported to a school and installed on a permanent foundation, not factory-built portable or relocatable classrooms delivered in two pieces and placed on temporary foundations. The opinion does not define what is meant by permanent foundation.

Kirtus Doupnik, co-owner of Gary Doupnik Manufacturing Inc., a Loomis-based family business that makes modular school buildings and other structures, said the opinion appears to favor conventional construction companies. "This could hurt 50 percent of my business, depending on how it plays out," said Doupnik, adding that lawyers are arguing what "permanent foundation" means. Doupnik is concerned the opinion might affect a deal he is discussing with Gilroy Unified School District in Monterey County for the purchase of two modular buildings and the lease of three more.

The California State Building & Construction Trades Council, which represents labor unions engaged in more conventional school construction, has endorsed Lockyer's campaign for state treasurer. Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar said Justice Department lawyers research and write opinions and are not influenced by campaign endorsements.

Last fall, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a Senate bill that tried to resolve the dispute between advocates of modular and traditional school construction, saying restrictions on contract piggybacking would cause delays and cost overruns.

Source



Union rhetoric drives Australian parents from public schools

The community wants its own values taught to children, not necessarily those of teachers, writes Kevin Donnelly

Much of the education debate focuses on issues such as resources, standards and accountability and the respective quality and standing of government and non-government schools. Equally important, evidenced by the way politically correct teacher unions, professional associations and teacher academics define education as a key instrument in reshaping society, is the way the education system is used to promote a one-sided view of society. While it is wrong to say that education should be values-neutral, the traditional approach is one that sees education as impartial and balanced. Education is not indoctrination, and social engineering should not be confused with critical inquiry and searching for the truth.

On reading the 2005 and 2006 Australian Education Union annual general meeting speeches by the union's federal president Pat Byrne, it is clear she is in no doubt on the need to promote certain values and the union's right to shape the social debate and the work of schools. Byrne's 2006 speech attacks what she sees as a federally inspired, backward-looking education agenda, the Government's industrial relations policy and human rights record, the Prime Minister's response to the Cronulla riots, the Government's anti-terrorism legislation and what she sees as its conservative response to the availability of the abortion pill RU-486. Byrne describes 2006 as "the greatest period of social and political change since Australia's federation" and believes the AEU has a special role in influencing Australia's education system and how we define ourselves as a nation. She states: "The Australian union movement has a track record of over 100 years of shaping the very values that we regard as quintessentially Australian" and argues teacher unionists "need to continue to speak out, to fill the growing vacuum in thoughtful public discourse on issues of social justice and human rights".

Byrne's 2005 speech also places the union centre stage in the battle of ideas, when she states: "Through well articulated policies, courage, commitment and campaigning over more than a century, we have significantly influenced the way our society functions." In addition to arguing that unions best reflect Australian values, Byrne also contends, as a result of upholding values such as "empathy, responsibility, protection, fairness, fulfilment, freedom, honesty, trust, co-operation, strength, community", the AEU is the true guardian of the public education system.

Wrong on both accounts. Instead of reflecting mainstream opinions, the AEU, according to Byrne's own admission, champions a left-wing view of the world enmeshed in the culture wars against conservative values. In bemoaning the re-election of the Howard, Bush and Blair governments, the AEU president admits: "This is not a good time to be progressive in Australia; or for that matter anywhere else in the world." Anyone familiar with AEU policies will know the teacher union, along with other cultural elite groups such as the ABC, teacher academics and assorted artists and intellectuals, consistently attacks Australian society as socially unjust and champions a range of left-wing causes.

The union also argues that Australian society is riven with "inequality and social conflict" and that education, instead of representing a ladder of opportunity, reinforces privilege and meritocracy. The result? Given the union's commitment to overthrowing the status quo, the school curriculum is no longer impartial or balanced since teachers are asked to embrace a politically correct approach in areas such as gender, ethnicity and class.

Traditional academic studies, a belief in competition and the right of parents to choose non-government schools are all attacked by the AEU as simply ways by which the more privileged in society are able to maintain power and prestige. Equally as facile as the AEU's argument that it best represents mainstream values is Byrne's argument that the union is the guardian of the public education system. Instead of strengthening the government system, the union has been instrumental in causing the move to non-government schools.

By imposing a politically correct curriculum, in opposition to one with a strong academic focus, by adopting feel-good student reports where all are winners and by failing to hold teachers accountable for performance, the AEU undermines confidence in government schools. By becoming politically active in its support for the ALP, by aligning itself with the trade union movement and by refusing to free government schools from provider capture, the AEU also shows that it cares more about politics than it does about education.

Evidence that the AEU's approach to education is counterproductive is found in a survey carried out by Irving Saulwick and Associates. On being asked why they chose non-government schools, "respondents talked about the reduction, as they saw it, in educational standards -- a lack of rigour in teaching the 'three Rs', a lack of discipline and respect in schools, and poor teaching. "They did not think that all state-employed teachers were poor teachers. Far from it. But many did think that they were teaching under difficult conditions, and that some, who were poor teachers, could not be dismissed."

After reviewing NSW government schools, Tony Vinson, a defender of the public system, reaches a similar conclusion: "Some parents expressed doubts about the environment of such schools, the handling of unsatisfactory teachers, and whether sufficient emphasis is placed upon students' acquisition of good values." If Byrne and the AEU were serious about strengthening government schools, the way forward, as in the US and England, is with innovations such as charter schools and vouchers. Empowering local communities by allowing parents to establish charter schools improves standards and builds the types of values embedded in social capital.

Source

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

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

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

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19 February, 2006

Higher Learning, a Tutorial

Quick quiz: Is the cost of a college education worth it? (No.) Is there an alternative? (Yes.)

Let's say that you're the parent of a high-school senior who has finally sent off all her college applications. (Feb. 1 is about the last deadline.) The fog of stress has lifted, and a sense of normalcy has returned to family dinners. Now it's time to check your savings account. If your daughter or son is accepted at one of the 10 most expensive schools in the country--George Washington University, say, or Kenyon College--then your tuition bill will be more than $33,000, a figure that doesn't include room, board, books and fees, which can total about $12,000 more a year. If little Madison is bound for the University of Wisconsin at Madison, you'll fare better, but even state-college tuition can be rough: The University of Massachusetts, for example, costs about $14,000 a year, including room and board, if you're a state resident and much more if you're not.

There are federal loans and grants, of course. And private schools often provide financial aid to half of their students, a kind of capitalism/socialism hybrid according to which the families with money subsidize those without (the Swedes like this sort of thing). But even so, higher education has to be considered one of America's greatest market failures: absurdly expensive, with little price competition, tuitions increasing ahead of inflation and no good gauge to measure quality. After all, Cornell might be worth $30,000 a year, but is La Verne University, in La Verne, Calif., worth $22,800, not counting room and board?

If any industry is crying out for new models--for a little Yankee ingenuity--it's higher ed. Other models do, of course, exist. They are cheaper, more efficient, lower-frills, but none of them seems likely to work in the U.S. A brief survey of these competing versions suggests that Brown, Vanderbilt and Ohio State have little to worry about. Take the "Wikiversity" (please). It's a movement spun off Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia whose software allows users to build, maintain and edit new entries. There are now Wikipedia entries for everything from Luke Skywalker to the Gospel According to Luke--over 950,000 entries in English, according to the site, with more than one million more in languages like French and German. True to the open-source movement, the Wikiversity is a never-ending, user-generated online compendium of syllabi, primary sources and even courses taught by volunteer faculty.

The Wikiversity will sound familiar to anyone who remembers the "open university" movement of the 1960s, which emphasized open admissions and distance learning, just as the Wikiversity does. But whereas Britain's Open University, for example, has no admission requirements, it does seek out talented, well-trained faculty, which it hires and pays. Very few courses have been posted so far at Wikiversity, but the early signs are not encouraging: The "head" of creative writing is a 23-year-old whose own poems contain lines like: "Desire is an acid soaked wand."

At first glance, the Wikiversity looks similar to the online universities that already exist, like the University of Phoenix. Founded in 1976, Phoenix bills itself as "the largest private university in the United States." Phoenix, which is for-profit, has dozens of campuses, but the majority of its 315,000 students learn by computer. There is something to be said for this model. It's cheap: The Philadelphia campus charges $10,800 for a full-year online course load. The many campuses and online options do serve working men and women, parents and others who can't carve out time to go back to school in the traditional sense. And the online student is not distracted by fraternity initiates wearing silly beanies, freshman sex ed, sensitivity training or weekend kegstands.

But for such an education to be worth the money, the professors have to be good, and with a faculty of many thousands, most of whom never meet each other, quality control must be quite the challenge. I might hire a secretary with an online degree, but I don't want my nurse to have received her master's over the Internet.

So if you conclude that the best learning is done face-to-face, and that some subjects--foreign languages, laboratory science, physical therapy--can't be taught without human contact, then are we condemned to $30,000 tuitions? Not necessarily; you have a few other options. If you're willing to forgo intercollegiate sports, fancy dorms and the senior class dance, you could attend any number of European state-funded universities that rival ours in intellectual quality and cost far less. And hey, if you're really willing to scale down on certain frills of college social life, remember that the Roman Catholic Church will happily pay for the education of seminary students headed for the priesthood.

But I have a better solution, one that's even more radical but allows you to stay in your American suburb, work within the old-fashioned American free market and avoid religious vows. How about banding together with some other students to hire tutors? There are thousands of under-employed Ph.D.s in America who could be paid to offer college-level courses in your living room. If 10 students banded together and put up $10,000 each--students who, say, couldn't care less about football, don't need a Women's Center and have no urge to join Delta Delta Delta--they could hire two high-end intellectuals, pay them $50,000 each and get personal instruction.

The learning might well be more intense than the usual lazy college classroom, the demands more concentrated, the instruction more neatly tailored to the abilities and needs of each student. Many a doctorate-owner has overlapping areas of expertise. Tutor A could teach, for instance, religion, history and politics in the mornings, while Tutor B could teach law, literature and grammar in the afternoons. Actual essay tests would be possible with such a small group; papers too: No longer would the teacher feel the need to avoid writing requirements lest he be stuck, for hours on end, having to read the bad student prose of, say, a huge survey course.

For research, students could use the public library or buy short-term passes to university research libraries. For fun, the class could read novels, play pickup basketball at the public park or, on snowy days, watch cable TV--the Learning Channel, of course. Speaking of which, my cable costs $40 a month, a lot cheaper than what most colleges charge their captive dorm residents--yet another reason to abjure the overpriced American university.

Americans like their churches big, their servings of Coke big, their universities big. But in schooling, big has become unbearably expensive. We may as well try returning to the small: a teacher, some students, some books. Such an arrangement used to be reserved for the wealthy aristocracy in ancient Greece or Enlightenment France, but now it would actually result in a much lower tuition bill for the middle-class American family. As a postmodern Marxist tutor might be the first to tell you, you have nothing to lose but your debt, and you have a world to win.

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CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS TO BECOME HOMOSEXUAL INDOCTRINATION CAMPS

(AB 606 is a draft law presently before the California legislature)

It's no surprise that liberals in the California legislature are continuing their efforts this year to convert our public schools into indoctrination camps where young, impressionable minds are manipulated to fit nicely into the liberal mold. Our schools have ceased to teach children HOW to think and instead teach them WHAT to think.

It is becoming increasingly more difficult for parents, especially conservative, religious parents, to safeguard the hearts and minds of their children enrolled in the public school system. Young children are being told that they should embrace thoughts and ideas that directly conflict with what they are taught in the home. Public schools are no longer partnering with parents in the goal of teaching children concrete academics. Instead, they are becoming institutions that generally consider parents as the adversary. Conservative parents stand in the way of children becoming leftist soldiers, a new generation of activists who can carry the banner of ultra-liberal causes.

AB 606 (D-Levine, Van Nuys) is the most recent and most outrageous example of the liberal agenda for our public school children. AB 606 was amended in late January to require broad-sweeping changes to indoctrinate school children concerning homosexual, bisexuality and transsexuality. As amended, it would require California school districts to take specified actions to increase awareness and prevent incidences of discrimination and harassment based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender. It would also encourage curriculum read by young school children to contain information on accepting and embracing these various forms of sexuality. If a school district fails to comply with the provisions in AB 606, the state superintendent has carte blanche discretion to withhold state-funding from that school district. Although the stated goal of AB 606 is to prevent "violence," the real goal is to teach children to accept and celebrate different versions of sexuality.

In order for you to understand exactly how disastrous AB 606 really is, you need to know a little background information. AB 606 builds on AB 537, the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000 (SSVPA). AB 537 added two new forms of discrimination (actual or perceived sexual orientation and actual or perceived gender) to the list of discrimination prohibited in California's public schools. In the spring of 2000, Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin established the AB 537 Advisory Task Force to identify, research, and recommend guidelines for implementing the SSVPA. The goal was to ensure that "AB 537 did not become another law that sat on a bookshelf."

AB 606 is an effort to codify (make mandatory) some of the more outrageous AB 537 Task Force recommendations. The AB 537 Task Force recommended that "exemplary educational resources" be used to "eliminate discrimination, harassment, and hate-motivated violence based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity." The AB 537 Task Force recommended that resources be used to "create positive, grade-appropriate visual images that include all sexual orientations and gender identities for use in school common areas throughout the school year."

The Task Force also recommended that public schools "acknowledge lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender historical figures and related events, concepts, and issues in the revisions of content standards and curriculum frameworks, when appropriate." Additionally, it recommended that public schools "identify and expand the available lesbian, gay, bisesxual, and transgender resources for school library materials."

These specific goals are satisfied by AB 606. AB 606 would repeal current provisions in the law that keep curriculum from being forced on school districts in order to advance SSVPA objectives. In other words, AB 606 would mandate that curriculum and classroom time be used to teach children to embrace homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality. While AB 606 does not spell-out that pro-homosexual curriculum will be forced on young school children (and supporters of AB 606 would never acknowledge this), because AB 606 removes the protections against pro-homosexual content in curriculum, this will be the result.

Before we can fully understand what is intended by AB 606, it is necessary to look at the AB 537 Advisory Task Force recommendations. Because the task force recommends "positive," pro-homosexual "visual images" and recommends that pro-homosexual "concepts and issues" be included in curriculum for young school children, that is exactly what will happen if AB 606 passes. And don't forget - the state superintendent can withhold money from a school district if he determines they are violating the provisions in AB 606. One of the recommendations that could be made by the superintendent for a school district to be compliant is for them to integrate pro-homosexual curricula.

AB 606 doesn't seem that extreme until you read the task force recommendations. When taken by itself, it is difficult to understand the full extent of AB 606's goals. But the task force recommendations are loud and clear. AB 606 would likely lead to all public schools being required to do what San Leandro High School has done. At San Leandro High School, a rainbow-flag poster, with pink triangles and other symbols of homosexual pride, and containing a pro-homosexual message, has been ordered to be posted in all classrooms. Five teachers have protested, based on their religious convictions. This has resulted in a standoff between these teachers and the school administration.

Pushing homosexual indoctrination on young children is being packaged and sold in the name of "preventing violence." No one wants incidences of violence to occur on school campus. Violence is never acceptable on public school grounds. AB 606, however, goes beyond addressing violence on school campus. If the goal were simply to prevent violence, legislation could be enacted to ensure that public school administrators promptly address all incidences of violence when they occur, regardless of what they are about. AB 606 is not about safe schools, it's about molding and shaping the minds of young children to accept various forms of sexuality regardless of what their parents or religious beliefs tell them.

Far-left activists want to push parents out of the equation and seize classroom time so that they have unrestrained access to young children. If AB 606 becomes law, it's only a matter of time before it violates parental rights and infringes upon both parents' and students' religious convictions.

Source



'Pappy' Shot Down by Campus Ignoramuses

It's well known that college students today aren't as educated in our nation's history as they should be, but it's still hard to grasp the mind-bending political correctness just displayed by the University of Washington's student senate at its campus in Seattle. The issue before the Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed "Black Sheep" squadron in the Pacific.

The student senate rejected the memorial because "a Marine" is not "an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce." Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: "We don't need to honor any more rich white males." Other opponents compared Boyington's actions during World War II with murder.

"I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution," Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington's history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, "Black Sheep Squadron," a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington's heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it's an unusual UW student who'd be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it's spoon-fed to him by TV.

As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent. "Colonel Boyington is luckily not around to see how ignorant students at his alma mater can be today," says Kirby Wilbur, a morning talk show host at Seattle's KVI Radio. Perhaps the trustees and alumni of the school will now help educate 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.

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

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

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18 February, 2006

CREEPS WHO TARGET KINDERGARTENERS

Capitol Hill is waging a legal battle against charter schools. And I don't mean Congress, mind you, but Capitol Hill the neighborhood, where residents are trying to block 3- and 4-year-olds from attending a public charter school -- and are seemingly willing to take on Congress to do it. These residents, who collectively call themselves the Northeast Neighbors for Responsible Growth, have read more than a few pages of Democrat George Wallace's textbook on public schooling. These neighbors have filed a lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court that asks the court to block the city government from giving the Apple Tree Institute for Educational Innovation the necessary permits to renovate and operate a new charter school for preschoolers. These irresponsible neighbors claim, among other things, that the preschool would have a "devastating effect on the residential and historical character of the neighborhood." Their suit also says that noise, traffic and parking will pose "irreparable" harm to Capitol Hill residents.

Now, I am no fan of preschool programs, whether they are called Head Start or Apple Tree. My heart of hearts tells me that young children should be in nurturing environs, not thrown to the whims of one-size-fits-all programs that mass produce kindergarteners. I am, however, a cheerleader for school choice and the rule of law, and these Capitol Hill elitists have really gotten under my skin. And so have their allies in City Hall. But I'll calm down and back up so you can get a clear picture of what's at stake.

It's been 15 years since Minnesota passed the nation's first public charter-school law, opening the doors for states around the country to offer meaningful school-choice options for parents whose children were trapped in underachieving and violent public schools. Many states followed Minnesota voluntarily. The District of Columbia, whose elected and appointed politicians have moved in lockstep with unions since the 1970s, had to be dragged along. Congress wrote the D.C. School Reform Act in 1995, and it took effect in 1996 after being signed by Bill Clinton. The law, like many of those in the various states, exempts public charter schools from statutes, policies, rules and regulations established for the D.C. Board of Education, and even the D.C. Council and the mayor, so as keep political meddlers, including anti-school-choicers, out of the way. Because of Congress' explicit language, the D.C. school-choice movement gained broad support. There were only 300 children in two D.C. charter schools in 1996; today there are estimated 18,000 in 51 schools.

The District isn't the only jurisdiction with surging charter-enrollment numbers. Michigan, which passed its charter law in 1993, expects enrollment to surpass the 100,000 mark next school year, and Detroit's public school system has lost an estimated 10,000 students since last school year, while charter enrollment hit 22.5 percent. New Jersey, like the District, has 51 charters, with an enrollment of 15,000. The demand is so high that education officials recently announced the approval of six new charter schools. (To find your state, visit uscharterschool.org.)

Of course, there always are rejectionists standing at the ready. In the case of Capitol Hill, they want the mayor, or at least his charges in the Office of Planning, to rewrite zoning laws that would effectively prohibit Apple Tree from opening its preschool on its own property. The anti-choicers say theirs is a prima facie case, even without the rewrite, because zoning laws define a public school as a building under the aegis of the Board of Education, which most charter schools -- thanks to congressional oversight -- are not.

So, to recap. A group of taxpayers wants to block the doors of a legitimate -- and much in demand -- public school. The taxpayers file a lawsuit. A legal threat to public charter schools in the nation's capital is a threat to charter schools everywhere.

Source



Denver Archdiocese uncovers sexual abuse bias in favor of public school teachers

In a continuing battle against what many of the state's faithful call an unfair bias against Catholics, the Archdiocese of Denver has uncovered a previously unseen, but sordid list of sexual abuses by many of Colorado's public school teachers. The Archdiocese has lifted the lid on some 85 Colorado Department of Education reports of sexual impropriety among teachers since 1997. Reportedly, the state had revoked or denied teaching licenses, all for reasons involving sexual misconduct with minors. But critics charge, the punishment ended there.

According to a report in Denver's Rocky Mountain News, the list revealed teachers "who prey on grade-schoolers, plying them with love notes.Teachers who download pornography on their desktop computers while students sit before them.Teachers who encourage students to meet them surreptitiously after school, on out-of-town trips, and who give them marijuana or alcohol in exchange for sex."

Recently, all three of Colorado's bishops blasted proposed state legislation which seeks to eliminate or modify statutes of limitation allowing sexual abuse victims to wait up to 40 years before filing suits against Catholic and other private institutions in the state.

The problem, they say, is that the bills would unequally punish the Catholic Church while public school teachers and coaches accused of abuse would--because of state sovereignty laws--be all but exempt. In a letter, read last week to all parishioners in the Archdiocese, Denver's Archbishop Charles Chaput said that every one of the proposed pieces of legislation "ignores the serious problem of sexual abuse in public schools and other public institutions, and focuses instead on religious and private organizations." In other words, he said, "some Colorado legislators seem determined to be harsh when it comes to Catholic and other private institutions, and much softer when it comes to their own public institutions, including public schools. And it will be families, including Catholic families, who suffer."

The bill's sponsors--led by state Senator Joan Fitz-Gerald argue that there is no anti-Catholic intent in the bills, but even the state's secular newspapers and talk radio hosts question that assessment.

Rocky Mountain News columnist Vincent Carroll, wrote recently that special legislation aimed squarely at the Church "would be entirely out of line and Senate presidents never toy with anything so improper." He pointed out however, that the "only allegations Fitz-Gerald or anyone else seems to mention in relation to her legislation involve the church. And that the only organization already targeted by a smoothly functioning coalition of high-powered plaintiffs' attorneys and victim groups is the church."

Archbishop Chaput has called this "an extremely serious moment" for the Church in Colorado and has encouraged the state's faithful to contact their local representatives and demand an end to what he sees as terribly biased bills.

Source



BRITISH UNIVERSITY FEE INCREASE CUTS ENROLMENTS

A good start but enrolments are probably still far too high relative to the use that a degree is

The prospect of paying top-up fees has put far more school leavers off applying to university than had been predicted. The number of applications has dropped for the first time in six years as thousands of young people reject higher education in favour of getting a job for fear of future debt. Last month Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, predicted that the number of applicants would fall by about 2 per cent, but for those under 21 it is down by 3.9 per cent. The number of male applicants dropped by 4 per cent, or almost 6,773, compared with last year, leaving women outnumbering men by 56 to 44 per cent.

With almost 13,000 fewer students in total and 4.5 per cent fewer English applicants studying subjects from law to electronic engineering, according to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas), student leaders called on the Government to review the fees.

Mr Rammell downplayed the drop and said that he was "reasonably encouraged". He said that although there had been a fall since last year's record rush to beat tuition fees, there were more applications than in 2004. "What we're seeing here is the kind of trend we saw in 1998 when tuition fees were introduced. There was a dip, but slowly the trend went up, and if you take the two years together, there's still an increase of 12,500 students, or 4.8 per cent," he said. "The figures also show there's been no drop in applications from lower socio-economic groups - which has remained at 31 per cent for the past two years."

The Government wants to get half of 18 to 30-year-olds into higher education by 2010. But among the most worrying findings in the latest Ucas results is the 4 per cent drop among male teenagers applying to university. Mr Rammell agreed that persuading white working-class boys into higher education was a challenge, but said that the Schools White Paper published last year and the 14-19 Agenda to change the way that schools assessed children offered possible longer-term routes into higher education.

Courses suffering most include law, psychology, computer science and electrical engineering. Kat Fletcher, president of the National Union of Students (NUS), said that the drop was extremely worrying. "We could be missing out on thousands of doctors, teachers, scientists, engineers because the fear of debt has put them off," she said. She urged the Government to think again. "If figures are going down now, imagine the scenario we could be faced with if universities are given the green light to charge whatever they like per year," she said.

However Drummond Bone, president of Universities UK, said he did not believe that many courses would close and that after a recent massive rise in applications for psychology, a "bounce back from the boom years" was inevitable. Research from Thomas Charles, a debt solutions consultancy, shows that student debt has already grown to more than œ10,000 for tens of thousands of students. From September, most universities and colleges in England and Northern Ireland will charge annual fees of 3,000 pounds.

Last night Mr Rammell was embroiled in a row after suggesting that it was "no bad thing" if students were dropping subjects such as classics and philosophy for courses "with more vocational benefits". [Bravo!] Philosophers, historians and academics said the remarks were short-sighted and out of date

Source

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

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

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

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17 February, 2006

U.K.: IDEOLOGY SHACKLES GIFTED CHILDREN

Bright children are being denied a chance to win the support of a centre for the gifted because their head teachers think that it is too elitist. The Government wants to register the top 5 per cent with the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (Nagty), but some heads believe that it fails to meet pupils' needs. While more than half of schools have registered with Nagty, parents and politicians now fear that children at 40 per cent of schools are missing out.

At Christopher Whitehead Language College, a comprehensive school in Worcester, ten pupils achieved ten A* GCSEs each last summer. But no pupil has signed up for the academy, and Neil Morris, the head teacher, is not encouraging them to do so. "We don't feel that it is suitable for our children and we don't feel it is hitting their needs," he said. "More importantly, the parents don't want to subscribe to it. We've got 210 on our own gifted and talented register that we stretch in the best way we can."

Carol Muston, a town planner and single mother, feels that the academy does have something to offer and is asking a school near by to put forward her 12-year-old. "Clearly with Nagty, there are specialist tutors with specialist skills to get the best out of children. That's perhaps not available at normal schools," she said. Since the academy opened three years ago, 83,000 children have been put forward by 60 per cent of schools in England. But in November Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, revealed huge regional variations. Ninety per cent of schools in Swindon had Nagty members but only a quarter in northeast Lincolnshire.

The Government decided to track the most gifted children after a study by David Jesson of York University found that state secondary pupils who had been identified as being, at age 11, in the top 5 per cent were only half as likely as those at fee-paying schools to achieve three A grades at A level. Academics have criticised Nagty, however, for offering just 1,000 places at the summer schools and for excluding students from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Some worry, too, that universities will use Nagty membership as a short cut for selection.

Deborah Eyre, the director, said that 87 per cent of students found Nagty membership valuable and it was hard to understand why schools would deter them. "It is not intended to be an either/or for schools. We would expect them to make provision for their brightest students, but this is at a national level," she said. "It's like saying, we offer very good football lessons and out-of-hours coaching with the local club, so we don't need to work with Manchester United." She added that a minority of schools had an "ideology problem", which was based on a misunderstanding.

Source



Affirmative Blackmail: The ABA orders law schools to practice racial preference--even if they have to break the law

According to its mission statement, a primary goal of the American Bar Association is to "promote respect for the law." In the interest of mandating racial preferences in admissions, however, the ABA has just ordered law schools to do the opposite--in fact, to violate the law--and is resorting to blackmail to achieve its end.

Meeting in Chicago this past weekend, the ABA's Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar voted in favor of "equal opportunity and diversity" standards. Under these standards, any law school that seeks to maintain or acquire ABA accreditation will be required to engage in racial preferences in hiring and admissions, regardless of any federal, state or local laws that prohibit of such policies. Since only graduates of ABA-accredited schools may take the bar exam in the vast majority of states, the association has, in effect, a legal monopoly on accreditation standards.

The new Standard 211, styled "Equal Opportunity and Diversity," will govern admissions and faculty hiring policies. It says nothing about treating people from different groups equally, and lots about "diversity"--a code word for affirmative action preferences. "Consistent with sound legal education policy and the Standards," part (a) says that a law school must provide "full opportunities for the study of law and entry into the profession by members of underrepresented groups, particularly racial and ethnic minorities," and it must also commit "to having a student body that is diverse with respect to gender, race and ethnicity."

Part (b) says, "Consistent with sound educational policy and the Standards, a law school shall demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to having a faculty and staff that are diverse with respect to gender, race and ethnicity." This sounds innocuous, since law schools can reasonably differ on what constitutes "sound legal education policy." Some might think that the educational benefits of a racially heterogeneous student body justify significant racial preferences; others might give more weight to data showing significant educational costs resulting from preferences.

An empirical study by Richard Sander of UCLA, for example, confirms anecdotal evidence that student beneficiaries of such preferences tend to struggle in law school and end up at the bottom of their classes. Statistics published in the year 2000 also reveal that under current affirmative action policies, 42% of all African-American matriculants to law school either never graduate or never pass the bar (compared with 14% of whites). Some schools might conclude dooming a huge percentage of African-American students to failure is contrary to sound educational policy, and limit their "diversity" efforts to recruitment and retention.

That will not be possible, according to the "interpretations" of Standard 211, which have "equal weight" to the rules themselves. Interpretation 211-1 states that "the requirements of a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of gender, race, ethnicity or national origin in admissions or employment decisions is not a justification for a school's non-compliance with Standard 211." Racial preferences will thus generally be necessary to comply with Standard 211--despite the fact that several states, including California and Florida, ban race as a factor in law school admissions or hiring or both. Equally outrageous is Interpretation 211-2, which states that, "consistent with the Supreme Court's decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, a law school may use race and ethnicity in its admissions process to promote equal opportunity and diversity." This is a complete misstatement of the law, and the attorneys who wrote this are either incompetent or, more likely, intentionally dissembling.

First, Grutter held only that racial preferences in higher education are legal when used to promote diversity, not when used to promote equal opportunity. The Supreme Court has consistently disapproved of the use of racial preferences other than for either educational diversity, or to remedy past discrimination, and nothing in Grutter is to the contrary.

Second, Grutter did not hold that any law school may use race in its admissions process to promote racial diversity. Rather, the court stated that it was deferring to the Michigan Law School's "educational judgment that such diversity is essential to its educational mission." Other law schools may not share that educational judgment, particularly if the only way to achieve such diversity is by admitting underqualified minority students. Nothing in Grutter would permit such a law school to engage in racial preferences.

Ironically, left-wing lawyers and law professors used to scream that the Grutter litigation posed a threat to academic freedom by trying to prohibit law schools from tailoring the racial balance of their student bodies to enhance the students' educational experience. Now they want to use the heavy hand of ABA accreditation to deny academic freedom to law schools that would not choose racial preferences.

It's worth remembering that the fifth vote in Grutter was provided by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who apparently thought that her opinion would permit, but not require, law schools to use racial preferences for diversity purposes. Now that the ABA is trying to turn "may" into "must," one wonders whether Justice Samuel Alito will be similarly sympathetic to the assertion that allowing racial preferences in admissions enhances academic freedom.

An even greater irony, however, is the ABA's role in all of this. One can be quite certain that despite the plain language of the "interpretations" quoted above, the ABA will claim that it is not really trying to force law school faculties and administrations to violate both the law and their consciences in pursuit of racial "diversity." But in the past, ABA accreditation officials have bullied law schools into precisely that position, even in the absence of written authority backing their demands. The new written standards will only embolden the accreditation bureaucracy, composed mainly of far-left law professors, to demand explicit racial preferences and implicit racial quotas--all in brazen defiance of the law.

Source

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

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

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

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16 February, 2006

SLOPPY EDUCATION RESEARCH (1)

Opponents of school choice have just released two major studies claiming to show that public schools actually perform better than private schools. One study made the front page of the New York Times. Unfortunately, both of them are seriously flawed. What’s more, a much larger body of much better studies reaches the opposite conclusion. The studies were released within about a week of each other, and by the same organization: the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. While this may have made it a good week for the center in terms of publicity, it was an awful week in terms of scientific credibility.

The first study found that when you control for demographic factors like race and income, public school students actually have higher test scores than private school students. The authors have been aggressively touting this study as though it showed that public schools were better than private schools. In fact, it shows nothing of the kind. They take snapshots of student achievement in isolated years rather than tracking achievement over time. That may not sound important, but it’s crucial. If you don’t track students over time, you can’t find out why one student has a higher score than another. Single-year test scores mostly reflect student quality, not school quality. A student with high test scores is usually just a good student. It takes a student whose test scores are rising to prove that the school is good.

A much more likely explanation for these data is that the students who enter private schools tend to be slightly worse students than those of the same race and income who enter public schools. That makes perfect sense, because within each racial and socioeconomic group it’s the low performers whose parents will want to make the sacrifices necessary to put them in private schools.

The other study looked at Cleveland’s ten-year-old voucher program. Using a new statistical model to analyze a previously existing data set, it finds that kids remaining in Cleveland public schools do better than voucher users. This study is even more flawed than the previous one. The data set it analyzes does not allow for valid comparisons between similar student populations. The voucher students and the public school comparison groups in the data set are dissimilar not only because one group uses vouchers and the other doesn’t, but also in a host of other ways, and there’s no way to disentangle what’s really causing the test score difference. The study compares apples and oranges.

As it happens, numerous studies that avoid these methodological problems find that private schools do better. Most convincing are seven studies that compared students who won a random lottery to use a school voucher at a private school to similar students who lost the lottery and stayed in public schools. All seven found that voucher kids did better. Studies using other methods also favor private schools overwhelmingly.

Not all of the work sponsored by this organization is as bad as these two studies. It has promoted good, solid research showing that competition from school choice improves public schools. That’s even more impressive given that it’s housed at Columbia University’s Teachers College, the greatest academic stronghold of the teacher unions anywhere in the nation. But the center also has a dark side. From time to time it will release badly flawed studies purporting to show the inferior performance of private schools. With these two studies, it has just had probably its worst week ever. Let’s hope this misleading research doesn’t distract from the real scholarly consensus finding that private schools do better, and that school choice works.

Source



SLOPPY EDUCATION RESEARCH (2)

Post lifted from The Locker Room

Douglas Reeves, CEO and founder of the Center for Performance Assessment, comments on a recent study by Peggy Hsieh and Joel R. Levin published in the Journal of Educational Psychology. Hsieh and Levin showed that only a small percentage of education research uses a randomized experimental design (random assignment to control and experimental groups), and over the years, the percentage has been decreasing.

They point to two reasons for this. The first is a growing preference for qualitative research, a product of post-modernism and relativism in the academy. The second reason is that, empirical research is difficult to conduct and yields unpopular results, many authors simply take their studies down an easier path. I think the latter explanation is key

Recently, I wrote a Spotlight on the failure of class size reductions in low income and low performing elementary schools. The evaluation team used an experimental design to assess the class size reduction program and found that the experimental group did no better than the control group. Needless to say, these results were unpopular, so unpopular, in fact, that the State Board of Education did not post the entire report on its website.

The significance of research design is lost on those who compared the state's program with other research that has been done on small class sizes. But the problem is not the critics but the education researchers who have done even more to diminish the credibility of the profession.

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

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

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

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15 February, 2006

JUDICIAL TYRANNY IN FLORIDA

By Sid Dinerstein

I am Dred Scott.

In 1847 I tried to buy my freedom for $300. In 1858 Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Democrat, ruled that I must remain a slave. I died the following year.

In 2006, I asked the taxpayers of Florida to buy my educational freedom. Chief Justice Barbara J. Pariente, a Democrat, ruled that I must remain an educational hostage. I died another death.

The five liberal justices on the Florida State Supreme Court took away the Opportunity Scholarships for all Dred Scotts because the receiving schools – the private schools – weren't "uniform" with the failing public schools. That's true. They were better. Children learned there. Safely. Ritalin free.

ACLU'ers pick their children's, or their grandchildren's, schools on this "uniform" concept. An ACLU'er can only go to a public school that is "uniformly" excellent, like Dreyfoos or Suncoast or Bok Middle School, or most schools in Boca Raton, Palm Beach Gardens or Wellington (in South Florida). But try to find an ACLU'er in a "uniformly" challenged school like Glades Central or Roosevelt Middle School, and you will come up empty. ACLU'ers only go to schools that "uniformly" resemble the private schools that they won't let poor children go to.

The liberals on the Court say that "uniformity" is defined by the curriculum. Rest assured. The public schools of the ACLU children have curricula much closer to St. Andrews (private) or The Benjamin School (private) than they do to Glades Central.

All ACLU'ers love vouchers. They love the GI Bill vouchers that sent their uncles to St. John's University. They love the Pell Grant and "Bright Futures" vouchers that send their grandchildren to Florida State University or Palm Beach Atlantic University. They use their own Medicare vouchers at JFK Medical Good Samaritan Hospital. And the only reason we haven't mentioned Food Stamps or Section 8 Rental Housing Vouchers is because ACLU'ers are too rich to need them.

And yet, when the Dred Scotts of today ask for their vouchers, the ACLU just says: "No!" So what is really going on? The answer is, money. Dred Scott was sold in 1847 and Dred Scott is being sold every day in 2006. The NEA, the National Education Association, what we often call the Teachers' Union, takes in $350 million each year. And what does it buy? The better question is, "Who" does it buy?

Here are a few: Protect Our Public Schools is an organization dedicated to wiping out Charter Schools. The NEA gave them $500,000.

The Congressional Black Caucus was bought for $40,000.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute was bought for $35,000.

The National Organization for Women was bought.

So was the NAACP.

And Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

People for the American Way held out for $654,000.

And, of course, last, but not least, the ACLU took NEA money in exchange for selling the potential of our at-risk youth.

In other words, this organization, and all of its sister left-wing organizations, takes money from the fabulously rich NEA. And all you have to do is sell Dred Scott, again and again and again. The ACLU takes the money. Dred Scott loses his potential. It's all very black and white. The Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution has one common theme: 10 times over it says people come before government; by picking their own religion, owning their own guns, keeping their own counsel. And when the Bill of Rights runs out of specific areas to protect the citizens from the government, it adds the blanket statement reminding us that the ambiguous always goes to the people.

The people of the great state of Florida, through their constitution, are no less generous or just. When we ask for quality public schools we seek optimism and opportunity, not pessimism and imprisonment. And when parents have determined that uniform quality public schools require a School Voucher to an outsourced institution, the Bill of Rights reminds us that "we the people" come before the narrow interests of the government schools. Quality education is the uniformity that our state constitution guarantees, not special interest payoffs from one educational possibility, the local government school district. Dred Scott will return to the government schools when they have earned his participation, no longer at the wrong end of the bullwhip.

If there are lawyers who think I have it wrong, I have two suggestions: First, go back to law school and get a refund. Then go visit the Joseph Littles-Nguzo Saba Charter School and ask them to take your law school money and sell you a heart. School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century – and the ACLU is the hired gun for the "separate but unequal" crowd. I believe, upon looking at the faces of the young, that everyone will understand the cruelty of the ACLU. When that happens, free yourself by standing up and saying: "I am Dred Scott!"



U.K. teachers being given wider powers of punishment

Discipline creeping back

Teachers in England will have a new legal right to confiscate pupils' mobile phones or music players and punish unruly children beyond the school gates under government plans set out yesterday. Youngsters misbehaving on public transport or in the street on the way to or from school will be targeted under the moves, which are part of the prime minister's "respect" agenda.

New powers to introduce a clear legal right for teachers to discipline unruly pupils and restrain them using "reasonable force" were published in the education white paper - soon to be bill - last October.

Many headteachers already operate a system of pupils being regarded as "ambassadors" for their school while they are dressed in uniform outside the school. But under the government plans, teachers would have the power to discipline pupils who misbehave on the way to and from school strengthened, with a legal right to take action.

The schools minister, Jacqui Smith, said yesterday: "It takes only a handful of poorly behaved pupils to make life difficult for teachers and disrupt the education of other pupils. This is why our white paper proposes to take forward the recommendations of Sir Alan Steer to provide teachers and support staff in lawful control of pupils with a clear legal right to discipline. This will ensure that staff can insist confidently and without fear of challenge, for example when confiscating inappropriate items from pupils - it will mean an end to the 'You can't tell me, Miss' culture." She went on: "It will also take discipline beyond the school gate, allowing schools to punish pupils for unacceptable behaviour on the way to and from school - to tackle bullying and ensure pupils are positive ambassadors for their schools when travelling on buses and trains."

Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Europe's biggest teachers' organisation, said: "Whatever the other faults with the white paper, the government's proposal to give an unambiguous right to teachers to discipline pupils is welcome and long overdue. Teachers need to be absolutely confident about their authority. I want the government to understand that it is the teacher who has the responsibility for discipline and the imposition of sanctions within the classroom. The legislation must focus on enhancing the authority of the teacher."

Earlier, Ms Smith predicted that the government would get its education reforms through parliament as "useful discussions" with rebel MPs continue. She said there was "considerable support" for the "building blocks" of the white paper plan. Her remarks - to a conference organised by the Institute of Public Policy Research - followed a compromise in a letter to rebel MPs on Monday which was designed to win support for the proposals to give schools more independence.

Source

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

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

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

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14 February, 2006

From fixing cars to farming, math more important than ever

As Tennesseans consider the wisdom of requiring a fourth year of high school math, it's important to keep a few things in mind about the modern workplace and workforce. First and most importantly, today even students headed for a technical education instead of college must have excellent math skills to succeed. The line between what college-bound students and technical students need to know has become blurry indeed.

In the 1970s, students who couldn't do anything else enrolled in automotive classes because they required the least proficiency in basic skills such as math and reading. Today, auto mechanics is one of the most challenging curricula in technical schools, with the advent of computer-controlled automotive systems and computer-driven diagnostics. These days, to succeed in auto mechanics school and in the workplace diagnosing problems and repairing cars, students need very strong math and reading skills. The engines are all different, the manuals are online, and automobiles are increasingly complex. Sure, there will always be a need for people to change the oil, and that doesn't require math, but stepping up to be Mr. Goodwrench does.

Many other program areas at Tennessee Technology Centers also call for advanced math skills. Certificates in drafting, electricity and industrial maintenance all demand a good grasp of intermediate algebra and trigonometry, while a field such as machine tool technology requires advanced algebra, solid and coordinate geometry and trigonometry. So advanced mathematics is in no way irrelevant to the technical track in high school.

Second, some argue that college-bound students who have already decided to pursue studies that don't require much math shouldn't have to take a fourth year of it in high school. But the reality is that on average, people change their major three times while they're in college and change their jobs seven times during their working lives. Over 11% of the students enrolled in Tennessee Board of Regents universities have "undeclared" majors, meaning they haven't yet decided on any course of study, much less a career plan. So, preserving all the options for young people requires strong grounding in math, science and reading.

Finally, careers that don't necessarily require any education beyond high school and that might seem math-free really aren't anymore. Being a homebuilder requires knowledge of measurement, geometry, trigonometry, ratios and proportions along with a little algebra. Graphic artists, especially those working in animation, have to understand sines and cosines from trig plus key concepts from calculus and how mathematical functions and equations work. Farming demands the ability to use weights and measures, basic arithmetic, rates and ratios, geometry and area, interest and percentages and computers to run soil tests and the new generation of farm machines linked to satellites.

There is a general correlation between earnings and technical skills required in a job, and mathematics forms the basis of technical skills. While some students have more aptitude for math than others, most students, if they apply themselves, can learn it quite well. Why decide to limit exposure to such an important tool at such an early age? Math is good for students, and it's good for Tennessee

Source



CHOICE FOSTERS ACHIEVEMENT -- SO LEFTISTS HATE IT

California again

They're among the San Juan Unified School District's most beloved institutions - and among its most controversial. San Juan's eight public "choice" schools are models of academic success, regularly posting some of the district's highest scores on state tests. But some say these schools foster racial and economic segregation by drawing savvy, education-minded parents away from lower-performing schools throughout the district. [And what is wrong with that?]

In December, Superintendent Steven Enoch proposed changes to San Juan's open enrollment policy. In doing so, he turned up the heat on a long-simmering debate over whether the district's choice schools are equally accessible to all. "I'm very mindful of the pros and cons of our system, which has a long standing in this district," he said recently. "The reality is our choice schools, for a variety of reasons, are generally successful. ... But there is a question about whether or not it is a level playing field."

The district typically assigns every family to a neighborhood school that must accept all comers within a geographic boundary. But many families opt instead for the district's choice schools, which have no geographical boundaries, offer alternative teaching styles and admit students who apply through a lottery system called open enrollment. The popularity of open enrollment is part of the fast-growing school-choice movement. Most states offer some choice in the form of charter schools, vouchers, and transfers within or between districts. School choice advocates say the movement puts pressure on low-performing schools to improve and offers families more options. Opponents say choice debilitates public school systems and threatens the ideal of free and equal schools for all. "The underlying tension in American education today is between those who want to advance the spirit of common schooling ... versus those who believe that market forces are sacred," said Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

In San Juan Unified, the growing furor over choice schools illustrates the larger rift over the goals of public education. Critics say the schools "skim the cream" and leave neighborhood schools bereft of involved parents. Proponents say they attract parents who might otherwise head for private schools, charter schools or other districts - an important consideration for San Juan Unified, which is struggling with declining enrollment. Regardless of their stance, many people seem to agree that choice is necessary to accommodate children's different learning styles. But making neighborhood schools more appealing, some say, is just as important. "I would like for us to be a place where all our schools are perceived to be very strong community schools," said San Juan board President Larry Miles. "If you decide to go to El Camino (a choice high school), it's because something there attracts you - not because you don't want to go to Mira Loma or San Juan."

There's long-standing precedent for San Juan's choice schools. In the 1970s, parents and employees successfully lobbied the board to establish a few alternative schools that offered innovative teaching styles. Some were "open," stressing hands-on, self-directed learning. Others were "fundamental," emphasizing structure and discipline. Meanwhile, magnet schools were popping up nationwide. These schools, aimed at desegregation, usually lacked traditional geographic boundaries and drew white students to African American neighborhoods with alternative programs.

San Juan Unified soon adopted the magnet school concept for purposes other than desegregation. In the late 1970s, declining enrollment on the west side led the board to establish a set of alternative magnets near its western border in Sacramento. Within a decade, San Juan had eight such schools across the district: six elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. They were so popular the district eventually switched from a first-come-first-served system to a randomized lottery. "We had families that actually stayed up all night, and they were lined up around the buildings in sleeping bags and lawn chairs so they would be first in line for enrollment," said Pam Costa, director of schools and programs for elementary schools.

Today, a student at one of San Juan's choice schools is more likely to be white and well-off than is an average district student. But the schools do reflect the demographics of the census tracts in which they're located, according to figures from the state Department of Education and the 2000 U.S. Census. The same can't be said of the district's lowest-performing schools. For instance, 20 percent of students at Dyer-Kelly Elementary on Edison Avenue are white, but the census tract in which the school is located is 66 percent white, according to state and census data. Fully 95 percent of Dyer-Kelly's students qualify for reduced-price lunch, a key indicator of poverty, while in the surrounding neighborhood, just 38 percent of families with school-age children fall under the poverty line.....

As part of his redesign plan, San Juan Superintendent Enoch has proposed that each choice school approach the board for approval every three years. "These schools get to distinguish a philosophy and set expectations that are maybe more restrictive than neighborhood schools - and it seems like that's a privilege," he said. For their part, however, parents who have children at choice schools embrace the programs, saying they offer distinct teaching styles and strong extracurricular opportunities. Fair Oaks resident Dená Leineke said that after years at her assigned elementary school, one of the district's best in terms of test scores, her fifth-grade daughter still couldn't write a sentence. "She didn't fit into the cookie-cutter shape," she said. After a year at Green Oaks Fundamental Elementary in Orangevale, she said, her daughter writes multi-page essays. Leineke said the difference is the school's structured program. "I don't think Green Oaks is better, exactly, but they set high standards and they're really teaching the kids to respect discipline and responsibility," she said.

More here



Comment on yesterday's posts about the Queensland meltdown -- From Education Unbound

Recent reports out of Brisbane concerning the poor literacy standards of Queensland Year 7 students should make all parents sit up and take notice, but there is more to the story and the official responses to it than just the issue of poor literacy.

Colin Lamont who has had experience both as a teacher and as Queensland chairman of the Australian Council of Educational Standards has put his finger on the real issue when he lays the blame squarely on educational bureaucrats and not the teachers. This is not to say that teachers are all perfect. Many who went through the system in the later 70's and 80's were themselves products of a flawed education, but on the whole most teachers try hard and let's be honest they are teaching primary and secondary kids here not university students. So why is there so much fuss about teacher standards? Because it deflects attention from the real masters of the system and the real culprits in the mess that is public education - the educational nomenclature in their ivory towers in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane etc. What made the Sunday Mail test so relevant is that its marking was not controlled by the bureaucracy and so could not be massaged to hide the failings of the system.

Make no mistake - it is the system that is at fault not teachers as a group. The response of the Education Minister was clearly written for him by a member of his Department. It is designed to soothe and reassure that the Department is doing something about literacy but that in general all is well in the cloud-cuckoo land of state education. Likewise the response of the Teacher's Union reflects only the cosy relationship of the leadership of that group with the Department. Both have a vested interest in things as they are. Both will screw the actual teachers in the front line as the easiest scapegoats. When I was growing up, "professional" meant working "autonomously" today it means keeping your mouth shut about the failures of the system. The failure of the current Education System is systemic not individual. It is time we got rid of bureaucrats and employed more teachers to teach basic knowledge that kids can use to access other areas of life. Education is about opening doors not giving guided tours.

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

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

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

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13 February, 2006

SUMMARY OF THE GREAT DECLINE IN EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS IN THE AUSTRALIAN STATE OF QUEENSLAND

Another example of a phenomenon to be seen in most of the English-speaking world

The State Government has launched an urgent overhaul of child literacy as a former education boss accuses Queensland schools of failing students. Education Minister Rod Welford told The Sunday Mail the reforms would target reading, writing and spelling skills amid widespread public concern about falling standards. The announcement came as Colin Lamont, former state chairman of the Australian Council for Education Standards, warned our children had been "dumbed down" and today's students would be no match for their counterparts of 50 years ago.

The shocking appraisal was backed by the dismal results of a basic spelling test set by The Sunday Mail for a Brisbane Year 7 class. Almost two-thirds of the 11 and 12-year-olds failed, with some unable to spell any of the words. Mr Lamont, a former Liberal MP, blamed the state's education bureaucrats for an "appalling" lack of child literacy and numeracy skills - not teachers, whom he says are overburdened with administrative work and are given limited in-service training. "Thirteen and 14-year-olds today do not understand basic literacy and numeracy," Mr Lamont told The Sunday Mail. "They learn about fundamental, day-to-day stuff - like how to send a text message - because it is supposed to be relevant."

Mr Welford acknowledged growing public concern over a decline in standards. "I am aware that there is a lot of interest in the community, especially from parents, with literacy and numeracy," he said. "That is why this year literacy is going to be one of the key areas we focus on." Mr Welford said the literacy overhaul would involve the release of an information guide to schools this week. It would include a "framework" on how to change the curriculum to deal with the teaching and learning of literacy from pre-school to Year 10. Mr Welford had also commissioned the Queensland Studies Authority to do a general review of the curriculum up to Year 10. "We will look at what are the essential things that young people must learn to be competent by Year 10," he said. "Literacy will be one of the top priorities."

However, Mr Welford urged caution when comparing the scholastic ability of children today with those in the past. "Children in the 1950s could do some things better than some children do now and there are children doing things today that kids 30 years ago would not have had a clue about - such as Powerpoint presentations and designing things on computers," he said. "The skills we need to focus on today are different from the past, but that does not mean literacy." Mr Welford said it was crucial that youngsters were better prepared for life after school. "Children are getting a very good education in our schools, one that is more relevant to the 21st century. However, that doesn't mean that literacy and numeracy skills should be neglected," he said. The State Government last year announced a $127 million reform package aimed at delivering better education and higher skills.

Source

NOTE: You can find here the English exam taken in 1955 by Queensland schoolchildren at the end of Primary school. Most High School graduates would have difficulty with it today.



MORE ON THE BETRAYAL OF QUEENSLAND CHILDREN BY THE EDUCATION BUREAUCRACY

A former education boss has delivered a damning assessment of Queensland's schools, accusing bureaucrats of failing our children. Colin Lamont, a former Liberal state MP and Queensland chairman of the Australian Council for Education Standards, warned children were being "dumbed down". Mr Lamont, who teaches at Griffith University, said he was appalled at the lack of literacy and numeracy skills. Spelling and grammar had been "sacrificed on the altar of relevance" and primary school students in 2006 were no match for their counterparts of 1955. "Thirteen and 14-year-olds today do not understand basic literacy and numeracy," said Mr Lamont, who also taught English and history at secondary school. "They do not have a reference to our rich, cultural heritage. They learn about fundamental, day-to-day stuff - like how to send a text message - because it is supposed to be relevant."

He blames the bureaucrats, not the teachers, who are overburdened with administrative work and have change thrust upon them almost invariably without relevant in-service training. In a stark example of how education standards had diminished, Mr Lamont said 50-year-old scholarship papers (which all primary school children had to pass before gaining free secondary education) would be too difficult for children today. "The degree of difficulty in the maths paper is such that I doubt many of today's teachers would pass it. But we were 13 at the time and found little or no difficulty with the content," he said.

"The English paper was equally beyond today's teacher, but of course no one is taught grammar any more, so there is a distinct disadvantage. "Nothing in it was irrelevant to a good, sound preparation to turn out articulate and literate graduates, to a level unknown today. "Even the social studies paper reveals a wide general knowledge of the world which is non-existent today - in a classroom that deals with suburban history and geography in the name of 'relevance'."

The two-hour, eight-question English and social studies exams were sat on the same day. The mathematics paper - done without the aid of a calculator - came the following morning. The Sunday Mail has provided two questions from each exam (with pounds, shillings and pence adjusted to dollars, and miles to kilometres) for our readers' interest.

Education commentator Christopher Bantick said that 50 years ago children straight out of Year 8 - then the last year of primary school - were employable at that young age because they knew how to read, write and add-up. "Kids today don't know enough about the structure of words to spell," Mr Bantick said. He said a Federal Government report last year revealed students could not pass primary school tests from 50 years ago. "The curriculum of 50 years ago was a lot narrower. A lot of time was dedicated to spelling, grammar and arithmetic. "The performance level today across a range of subjects might be better . . . but the great black hole is that they don't know their own country, they don't have a sense of their own place and what makes it up geographically or economically."

State Opposition education spokesman Stuart Copeland said there were "real concerns" in the community about the standards of education. "A lot of the basics are being neglected . . . they are out of vogue, not as trendy," he said. He said parents told him students were not being taught simple numeracy and literacy. "It is affecting us as a nation and our viability on the international stage. We have got to make sure our children are well educated."

Source



RESULTS OF THE QUEENSLAND SPELLING SURVEY

Tech-savvy Queensland children are struggling to spell even common words. While many six-year-olds know how to write mobile-phone text, children are failing basic classroom spelling and grammar. The results of a spelling test given this week to pupils aged 11 and 12 will shock parents. The Sunday Mail gave the test, compiled by a former teacher and education expert, to a typical class of students. They were words the expert considered that a "typical" child of that age should be able to spell.

More than 7 per cent of students could not spell a single word from the list of 23. More than 65 per cent misspelled half of the words or more. Almost 8 per cent of the students got just three words right. Less than 12 per cent got 20 or more right. One student aged 11 was able to spell every word in the test except one. The results fuel fears the growth of text messaging is affecting children's spelling and grammar.

Education expert Christopher Bantick said he was not surprised by the results and said the situation was "shameful". He said people a generation ago could "spell infinitely better" and there was a whole generation who had not been taught spelling and grammar. "Imagine if we did not have spell-checkers," Mr Bantick said. "These are common words which are used in the media, in conversation, in advertising and in society. "Kids will learn to spell if they are taught properly . . . and teachers have to carry part of the weight. "You have 22-year-olds and 24-year-old who are teaching kids . . . and they have never been taught themselves. "We are making kids dumber and we are making them dumber because we are not giving them what they need." Mr Bantick said texting was changing the way society used language. "My concern is that kids will start to spell as they text and text will become the new speech."

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said the test results were not representative of the student population. He said Australian students rated very highly internationally for literacy. "We shouldn't condemn a whole cohort of students based on a narrow test," Mr Ryan said. "Yes, the issue of spelling is a concern and has to be addressed but in general we'd expect the results would be better than that. "Schools are doing the best they can with the resources being given the them." [So how come the schools of yesteryear with far fewer resources did so much better?]

The children were asked to spell article, disappoint, government, height, knowledge, privilege, permanent, announcement, trousers, mountainous, improvement, elastic, obstinately, referee, chimney, thieves, principal, principle, stationary, stationery, separate, orchardist and civil.

Source

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

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

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

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



12 February, 2006

The Education Monopoly and Intelligent Design

With the recent election results in Kansas and Delaware, the debate continues to intensify over teaching evolution and “Intelligent Design” in the public schools. There is much at stake, from scientific integrity to philosophical baggage. The stakes are greater than they ought to be because of the way our country delivers educational services.

Evolution refers to two different but related areas in science. On one hand, evolution is an observable mechanism by which life evolves in modest increments over time. This evolution is an indisputable scientific theory, supported on empirical grounds. On the other hand, evolution is also used to refer to a largely unobservable process by which today’s observable range of life supposedly developed from the earliest days on the earth. In this case, evolution is a hypothesis, proposing that the development of life is an unguided process.

“Intelligent Design” fully accepts evolution in the former sense. But it proposes an alternative hypothesis for the development of life: The development of life was a guided process, caused by an intelligent designer of some sort. This, too, is intuitively compelling. When one sees something complicated and meaningful (for example, Mount Rushmore), it is easy to infer that it was designed. As today’s most famous evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, has said: What we see today has “the appearance of being designed.” Is the apparent design real or an illusion?

Scientific considerations aside, this issue provokes such controversy because the dominant provider of education has such strong monopoly power, and most consumers have little ability to avoid its dictates. Let’s see why this is the overarching problem, and how we could avoid it.

Imagine that the government decides that food is important, so everyone can eat for free at the government-run restaurant in their neighborhood. A government bureaucracy, the manager of the restaurant and a local “Food Board” would determine the menu. And passionate constituents would try to influence their choices. Proponents of the Atkins diet would clamor for all meat, vegetarians would argue for all veggies and other people would want a range of options. This is a recipe for turmoil. For example, if the Atkins people were politically persuasive, the vegetarians would be deeply offended, and the others would not be wholly pleased, either.

The solution is as easy as the problem is silly. The government would allow different types of restaurants to compete, based on consumer preferences. Better yet, government would get out of the restaurant business, leaving that to the private sector, intervening only to help the needy afford food through vouchers or other subsidies to individuals.

The same is true with education. Leaving aside the question of moral obligations, if one group wants their children taught sex education with cucumbers and condoms in the fifth grade, that is their prerogative as parents. But that shouldn’t be forced on other people. Another contentious example is school prayer. Some parents want a prayer to Jesus Christ. Many parents want a prayer to the lukewarm deity of civil religion. Others want no prayer at all or prayer to other gods. By providing options, school choice deals with such issues in a far more effective manner than a government entity with significant monopoly power.

Who doesn’t want this freedom for others? Elitists and theocrats don’t. They wage battle within the monopoly, hoping to capture the process and force their view of truth down the throats of others. (Ironically, these two groups despise each other, but they’re more alike than they realize.) More important, the special-interest group that enjoys its monopoly power is not interested in such freedom. All producers prefer as little competition as possible; the market for education is no different.

For self-proclaimed liberals, this should be an easy decision, given their usual penchant for individual choice and support for the poor. Instead, they are often captive to the dominant interest group. Conservatives generally support competition and the private sector, but they are not passionate enough in this context to carry the day. Libertarians strongly favor breaking up government monopolies, but they are not yet numerous enough to make a difference.

Science, religion and politics. Real wars and now “culture wars” have been fought in their name. Let’s put down our weapons and give all Americans freedom to educate their children as they see fit.

Source



It Takes Government to Create a Reading Crisis

When Horace Mann and his colleagues launched the public-school movement some 175 years ago, they made extravagant promises. Turn the education of children over to enlightened altruistic experts working under government auspices, they said, and illiteracy, vice, and crime will become things of the past. I’m not kidding.

Most people don’t know about these promises, so they don’t know how badly the government’s schools have failed by their own standards. Apologists for state schooling often defend their abysmal record by saying that no one should expect the government’s teachers and administrators to efficiently educate children who bring all of society’s problems with them to the classroom. But that’s what the founders of what used to be called the “common school” pledged.

The broken promises continue. The schools have a hard time teaching reading. Consider the U.S. Department of Education’s latest literacy figures. The department’s press release began thus: “American adults can read a newspaper or magazine about as well as they could a decade ago, but have made significant strides in performing literacy tasks that involve computation, according to the first national study of adult literacy since 1992.” Of course, this raises the question of how well adults could read a newspaper or magazine a decade ago. Therein lies the tale.

The department defines literacy as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” Now let’s look at what percentage of high-school graduates, college graduates, and graduate-school students and degree-holders qualified as “proficient” in the three kinds of tasks used in the study. The three tasks are “prose,” able to perform tasks using continuous texts; “document,” able to perform tasks using noncontinuous texts in different formats; and “quantitative,” able to do computations with numbers embedded in printed material. “Proficiency” is defined as having the “skills necessary to perform more complex and challenging literacy activities.”

According to the study, in 1992, 5.3 percent of the high-school graduates tested were proficient in the three kinds of tasks. In the latest study (2003) this percentage dropped to 4.6. For college graduates the percentages were 36 in 1992 and 29 in 2003. For graduate students or holders of graduate degrees, the percentage went from 45 to 36. When the three kinds of tasks are broken down, we find no improvement in the ten years. The best that can be said is that in a couple of categories, the results were unchanged.

Results were slightly different for changes in the “intermediate” literacy category, defined as having skills to perform “moderately challenging literacy activities.” The percentage of high-school graduates in this category declined slightly from 44 to 42 in the ten years. For college graduates and graduate-level students, there were increases, from 48 to 53 for the former category and from 45 to 50 for the latter.

When you look at the percentages in the basic literacy and below-basic categories for high-school and college graduates and graduate-level students, the results are downright depressing. In many cases the ranks of these categories have grown; in others they improved a little or stayed the same.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement of government schooling. Despite what the state’s teachers and experts might imply, learning to read is not that difficult. Children used to teach themselves with only light guidance from a parent. It takes a government to create a national reading crisis.

These results will undoubtedly be used to justify more government spending on education. President Bush is proposing more than a $100 million to promote education in foreign languages — in the name of fighting terrorism. (Oh, please!) It is time we stopped being fooled by the people who are responsible for the education mess. As if we needed more evidence, this latest study shows that it’s time to separate school and state.

Source

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

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

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

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11 February, 2006

ANTISEMITIC PROFESSORS

It took a lot of pressure for them to back down

A planned conference by the American Association of University Professors imploded Wednesday amid reports that the group accidentally distributed to invited attendees an anti-Semitic article, published in a magazine affiliated with Holocaust deniers.

The conference was already under fire over an invitation list that critics said was tilted toward scholars who have backed academic boycotts of Israeli universities. The additional turmoil of the article prompted AAUP leaders to apologize early Wednesday. But the three major foundations that are sponsoring the invitation-only conference called for it to be delayed, and the AAUP's own executive committee voted to do so. For much of the day, the AAUP had a statement on its site saying that the conference would go on, but last night, association officials announced that they would postpone it.

People involved in the AAUP were using words like "disaster" to describe the fallout they feared from the incident. In the apology published on the AAUP Web site, the association acknowledged an "egregious error" in which it had distributed "a deeply offensive article by a Holocaust denier." The apology stated that the article had been collected during research for the conference, but was not intended for distribution to anyone. All conference participants were notified of "this blunder," the statement said, adding that "nothing of this sort will ever happen again."

The article in question is "The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany," which argues that the Nazi government did not come to power in Germany with the intent of any mass violence against Jews, and that Jewish leaders antagonized Hitler and other Germans by organizing boycotts against Germany. The article appeared in The Barnes Review, a publication that sells books and promotes articles that - among other things - question the respect Americans have for President Lincoln, argue that the deaths at Auschwitz were overstated, and suggest that the contributions of Germans to society do not get enough recognition. The New York Sun first reported the distribution of the article.

It doesn't take more than a quick glance at the article or the Web site of The Barnes Review to become aware of the nature of the material. Ruth Flower, director of public policy and communications for the AAUP, said Wednesday night that the association was "trying to reconstruct" how the article came to be included in the materials given out to attendees. She said that she believed that many articles involving boycotts of any sort were downloaded and that somehow this article was included in the materials for participants.

Jane Buck, president of the AAUP and a retired professor of psychology at Delaware State University, said that the executive committee voted unanimously to postpone the conference "out of concern with our reputation and our relationship with our funding agencies." Buck said that she believed that the conference was "salvageable," but that the association needed to regroup, rather than having the session next week.

The idea behind the conference grew out of debates over a movement last year by Britain's main faculty union to boycott two Israeli universities. The AAUP and many other academic groups criticized the boycott as antithetical to academic freedom and the boycott was eventually rescinded. In the wake of that controversy, the AAUP started drafting a statement about academic boycotts (strongly opposing them) and organizing the conference scheduled for next week. The conference was to have been held at Bellagio, in Italy, where 22 scholars from around the world were to have gathered to discuss academic boycotts.

Even before the snafu over the article, critics were upset about the invitation list for Bellagio. British academics who opposed the boycott said it was inappropriate to have so many boycott supporters attend. Last week, Roger Bowen, general secretary of the AAUP, defended the invitations, saying that the association wanted to have a range of opinions represented, and had no intention of endorsing boycotts.

Some AAUP leaders also question how the group was put together. Cary Nelson, the Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that when the conference was first described to him, he was told that it would involve leading thinkers about boycotts and academic protest, engaged in serious discussion. He said he didn't think it would involve so many partisans, or people - like the boycott supporters who were invited - who are heavily involved in Middle Eastern political matters.

Nelson, a vice president of the AAUP currently running for president, said that had he been invited to Bellagio (he wasn't), he would have withdrawn, based on the attendees. "I was quite stunned" to learn who was invited, Nelson said. "I didn't see how this could be a calm philosophical discussion if this was largely focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict."

Nelson and other AAUP officials were even more stunned when they learned about the materials distributed to attendees. A statement issued by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation - two of the financial sponsors of the conference - said that the meeting needed to be postponed. "While we accept that this offensive paper does not reflect the views of the AAUP, we believe its errant inclusion in the conference materials has undermined the credibility of this conference as a forum for intellectually honest and rigorous exchange," the statement said. The Rockefeller Foundation, which also supported the conference, also called for it to be delayed. So to did the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights anti-Semitism.

Caryl Stern, associate national director of the ADL, said that her group deeply appreciated the AAUP's "strong position" against boycotts of Israeli universities. But she said that the makeup of the conference had already undercut the meeting, and that the incident involving the material that was distributed suggested "a hijacking of the agenda" of the conference, in a way that could do serious damage. Having the conference now would "taint the statements" of the AAUP opposing academic boycotts, Stern said.

While the AAUP ended the day by postponing the conference, that announcement came only after the executive board sent Bowen, the general secretary, its request that he do so. For much of the day, a statement on the AAUP Web site defended having the conference - even with all the controversy. "The conference should be held now, with the same group of invitees, and with every intention of mounting an academically rigorous conference," the statement said. Foundations and others concerned about the material distributed "have AAUP's assurance that the proceeding and publications issuing from it will not become a forum for hateful and divisive agendas, nor will AAUP's strong stance against academic boycotts waver."

Source



LEGISLATORS ATTACK CORRUPT UC LEADERSHIP

But are satisfied with mere promises again

Incensed lawmakers demanded greater transparency of University of California executives' pay packages, but questioned whether meaningful changes would ever be made by a system that failed to reform years ago. Speaking at a legislative hearing Wednesday, lawmakers cited a 1992 special investigation by former Legislative Analyst Alan Post that recommended deep reforms in the way UC paid its top administrators. Many of the reforms - such as limiting severance packages, housing allowances and other perks - were never implemented. "Why are we here again today? Why has UC not learned from its mistakes?" asked Sen. Jack Scott, chairman of the Senate Education Committee. "Mr. Post's words ring as true today as they did 14 years ago," said Scott, D-Altadena.

A chastened UC President Robert C. Dynes apologized to committee members and promised a "cultural change" at the university that would allow for greater public scrutiny of executive salaries and perks. "My ethics are as upset as yours are," Dynes told lawmakers. "It really is time for us together to straighten the course." "This institution has been drifting for a number of years," Dynes said later in the hearing. "It is time for us in California to face up to this."

UC administrators' salaries and severance packages have been the subject of news stories in recent months that revealed large payouts to top administrators that in some cases were never publicly disclosed or approved by the Board of Regents, the UC governing body. Lawmakers have ordered an audit of UC leaders' pay, and the regents have adopted a new policy requiring them to approve pay raises, bonuses and other stipends for UC employees earning more than $200,000.

On Wednesday, lawmakers focused on a controversial settlement agreement with former UC Davis Vice Chancellor Celeste Rose. Rose entered into a settlement last summer with UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef after she threatened to sue the university for race and gender discrimination. Under the terms of the agreement she is paid $205,000 a year for two years to act as a special adviser to the chancellor. She works from home with no set job duties and has performed no work for the university since July 2005. She also was granted a $50,000 "transition payment." "She gets two years' pay to sit home, watch TV and do nothing," said Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria.

Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, quizzed Dynes if UC had held its leaders accountable for the secret deals. "Given what we know, has anyone been fired?" she asked. "No," answered Dynes. "Has anyone resigned?" she asked. "No," said Dynes. "I have questions whether it borders on criminality," Romero added.

Jeff Blair, an attorney with the Office of the UC President, said that Vanderhoef has been in contact with Rose to find her "suitable employment." Blair added that the agreement with Rose should have been approved by the UC Regents, but there was "confusion" within the Office of the President about the procedure to do that.....

UC staff, union officials and student leaders also testified that the disclosures on high salaries have been hurtful and maddening, especially at a time when rank-and-file employees have not seen pay increases in more than three years and students fees have jumped dramatically in recent years. "On campuses right now, there is a general sense of outrage among the student population regarding the increasing compensation being offered to top-level administrators while it seems like students are getting the short end of the stick," said Anu Joshi, president of the UC Student Association....

More here

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

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

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

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10 February, 2006

DREAMS OF TEACHER QUALITY IN CALIFORNIA

Sorry to mention it but it's mostly people with very limited talents and options who will be willing to stand up in front of most California public school classes every day

Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, giving his third annual state of education speech Tuesday, called for a massive investment in boosting teacher quality as one of several efforts to maintain the state's position as an international powerhouse of technology and entrepreneurial innovation. In a sweeping speech touching on California's schools, economy and demographics, O'Connell described a huge gap between what students are learning today and the future demands of the job market. "The simple yet terrible fact is that the population of students that is growing the fastest in this state is the population that is lagging the farthest behind," he said, describing the performance of Latino students in English, math and science.

Hours before his speech began, opponents of the California High School Exit Exam announced that they are filing a lawsuit today challenging the test's legality. O'Connell, in his speech, said the state must stand by the high school exit exam as a graduation requirement. "We've held firm on demanding that a high school diploma actually mean something," he said. "The high school exit exam measures absolutely the least our students must know as they move on to their next step in learning and earning."

He addressed another controversy in education: the ongoing clash between the state's methods for measuring school performance and the federal process under the No Child Left Behind Act. The California system, known as the Academic Performance Index (API), measures student growth on test scores from one year to the next. The federal model, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), sets performance targets students must reach each year regardless of the previous year's scores. O'Connell, a Democrat, said he will work with the Schwarzenegger administration to align the two systems this year. "We simply cannot continue along the confusing and ultimately debilitating path of two separate models," he said.

It was a proposal that drew support from a group of business leaders that typically criticizes O'Connell's views on school accountability - California Business for Education Excellence. Jim Lanich, president of the group and a supporter of the federal accountability system, said melding the two systems would help students and teachers "know what is success, how to measure it and how to improve." "It's not necessarily about API and it's not necessarily about AYP," Lanich said. "It's about getting all kids to grade level in reading, writing and mathematics."

O'Connell said more must be done to recruit new teachers, train existing ones and encourage the best to work in the lowest-performing schools. Those are all changes supported by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, which released a report in December describing an upcoming surge in teacher retirements. Alan Bersin, Schwarzenegger's secretary of education, said he agreed with O'Connell's focus on teacher quality and recruitment. "His priorities for this year are very much in accord with the governor's proposals," Bersin said.

Source



Teach students how to use skills to serve their community

The idea below is a good one -- as students do remember much better things that involve them in real life -- but it could very easily degenerate into a Leftist propaganda exercise

Those so-called 3 R's (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic) are not enough for pupils in United States public and independent schools. Our schools should be turning out small "d" democrats as well as readers and thinkers. And there's a step toward this goal that has been missing in teacher preparation for a couple centuries. Those studying to be teachers in the vast majority of US colleges and universities don't do any community service integrated with their course work. They don't learn the strong connection between helping to meet community needs and the study of civics. Nor do they learn how to integrate community service with the teaching of civics, and other academic subjects.

A teacher in a service-oriented large city public high school was the coordinator of the student community-service club, and because of the work connected with that activity, she taught only two classes a day: beginning and intermediate typing. She had never done any community service when she was in college preparing for her teaching career, and she had never had an instructor in civics ask her to study how some voluntary civic service should be integrated with the study of civics.

Twenty-three years after she began teaching, she signed up for a course I taught in the combining of course work and community volunteer service to meet license requirements. At the first meeting of this in-service course, she was asked by the instructor to tell about the types of civic service her typing students were doing. "None." Then she explained, "My course is rigorous, and every single student passes the typing test at the close of each course."

The instructor asked whether the teaching included how to make mailing labels, and learned, of course, that yes, it did. And before the instructor could say anything more, the typing teacher literally opened her mouth wide, flung both arms out to each side, and whispered, "Oh, my goodness, we could learn how to do this for a nonprofit that needs labels. Oh, my, we could have been doing this for the past 23 years!"

Those studying to be foreign language teachers are seldom asked to provide community service for those whose language they are learning, yet the opportunity to practice the language and to provide a needed civic service would go a long way to prepare them to guide their future students in that type of service-learning.

The student-teacher majoring in Spanish in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas could, for example, spend time in a day-care facility at a courthouse, providing needed translation work. Or perhaps offer to help with translation - written or oral - at a community center. Or begin a pen-pal relationship with a native Spanish speaker in a local nursing home.

And why? These are activities their pupils will want to take advantage of to learn how the civil society in their local community works as a democracy, and to provide them with practice in their foreign-language course work.

The teacher who has never done any civic service, who has never integrated some form of community service with academic course work, and who commutes to the school site from a community with a radically different socioeconomic base, may be able to guide students to success with the three R's, but is not able to provide the US with learned citizens skilled in being democrats.

Why is it true, nationwide, that the 18-25 age group votes the least and does the least civic service? Aren't these our most recent high school graduates? They should be the first to serve and to vote. Integrating community service work into classroom lessons will help our schools turn out vibrant, participating members of civil 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.

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

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

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9 February, 2006

BASIC PROBLEMS WITH CURRENT UNIVERSITIES -- AND ALTERNATIVES TO THEM

Go ahead and sneer; cringe and shudder — get it out of your system. Oh the horror, running a profitable business that includes many of the facets of a traditional higher education. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that a disproportionate amount of the Ivory Tower is socialistically inclined; subconsciously they may fear that the market value of their research, teaching and professional existence subsists among relatively strange bedfellows, those whose productivity fluctuates along the poverty line.

Will distance education and online courses replace the intimacy of round table discussions with high-caliber teachers? David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, does not think so. Based upon my own experiences I would have to agree. However we both believe a free market in degree granting. One liberated from political regulation and business myopia, is just around the corner. The proliferation and enthusiasm of such degrees is due in part to the fact that they can often times be earned in a more convenient medium, for a fraction of the cost and in a time-efficient manner. Say goodbye to commuting, as well as student fees you never took advantage of. Nor will you have to rearrange your life so you can attend a class whose instructor instills information that could have just as easily been gleaned from a $50 textbook. As the late Peter Drucker succinctly put it, "Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast."

Out with the old, in with the new, right? How will the traditional educational model, built for agricultural and industrialized economies, based on residential living, survive an ever-expanding mouse-accessible information age? Is the cultivation of inquisitiveness only available for four interest-bearing payments of $19,999 at State U.? Are there drawbacks? Like any other undertaking there are always opportunity costs; activities you forfeit in order to pursue alternatives. By enrolling into an online program, Utopia will not spring forth from earth's bosom nor will you sleep on cloud nine. You will still get flat tires and computer viruses, maybe even a headache or two.

Is college as an institution of higher learning going to survive? The top-tier, the Ivies (both public and private), the flagships, those with enough political and economic pull will all perhaps survive into the future. Perhaps various departments such as those comprising STEM (e.g. science, technology, engineering, math), Law or Medical school — perhaps any and all, but as Peter Drucker succinctly put it, residential life will, sooner rather than later, go the way of the Dodo.

The point of all this is that many universities and colleges are simply not organized to run like a profit-making business. Rather than focusing on revenue generating specialties, they overextend and misallocate resources — ultimately beyond their fiduciary capacity thus find themselves asking for handouts (e.g. donations). This is not to say that the modern institution as a whole will be done away with, but rather they will inevitably be forced to confront the subsidy bubbles that insulate assorted pursuits. How they deal with the reality of market forces will ultimately determine whether each institution lasts.

Why go to college in the first place? For some individuals, attending college is viewed simply as a quick and easy way to hit a monetary jackpot. Like many other illusions of grandeur, it is reminiscent to the unscrupulous business plan of South Park's Underpants Gnomes:

Feeding this spurious dream are State subsidized loans which encourage and create distortions in the labor market, not to mention the reallocation of productive capital. Arguably it may be difficult to compare today's Van Wilder University with the "classical" schools of Oxford or Cambridge. Nevertheless, for the academic school year 2005-2006, the average tuition, fees, room and board of attending a four-year public institution: $12,127. For a four-year private institution: $29,026.

One of the justifications for the price tag is that, in the long run, a college-educated individual would make more money than someone without said education. And since being wealthier "benefits society at large," efforts promoting this lifestyle should be undertaken. However, as Neal Zupancic points out, this is a non sequitur as the causal relationship is not directly connected. This fallacious logic however, did not prevent State intervention from Senator Claiborne Pell who in 1972 pushed legislation which subsidized student loans - under the inauspicious name, a Pell Grant.

Relatively cheap financing (due to these subsidies) coupled with lower admission standards has led a surge in student populations at State universities across the board. Despite alternate financial sources (such as federal grants and private donations), per capita spending has significantly decreased over the past five years. While the demographics may shift, the attendance trend is not decreasing for the foreseeable future.

The central underlying element to Senator Pell's reasoning was skewed: those with college educations earned more money not because of the framed stamped and signed parchments hanging on the living room wall, but because they had some kind of intellectual training that gave them a competitive and productive edge over their non-educated brethren. And for the better part of 30 years, this "go to college and become rich" mentality has been successfully drummed into the minds of several generations of not only boobus Americanus, but much of the developing and industrialized world too.

Arguments regarding sub-standard educations aside, the fiscal outlook of those involved in following the accredited institution route has been documented and demonstrated to be a Pyrrich victory, as noted by Christopher Westley. Not that these individuals are unsuccessful upon graduation, but that they become broke, indebted and even bankrupt — all in the pursuit of a hyped Potemkin lifestyle.

Much like health care or even voting (e.g. what is the market value for a single vote, close to zero?), the industry of higher education has been sheltered from market pressures. Campuses across the country, especially those run at large State institutions are inefficient planned economies — microcosms of socialism in action. As Rothbard's law predicts, the University is not specializing in what it does best. Like an octopus, its tentacles end up in many unrelated pies in which scarce resources are diverted to enterprises and endeavors that stray from what its human capital does best: research and scholarship. The administration involves itself in a smorgasbord of activities that range from acting as surrogate parents and landlords to maintaining campus hospitals and transportation services. Monopolizing food services, dorm-room cleaning (which now apparently involves class-warfare) and even landscaping - no enterprise is too small to be left alone nor too big to be undertaken.

For instance, cell phones have dramatically altered one traditional revenue stream of many universities -- that of long-distance phone calls. As a result, some colleges have raised other student fees to compensate for the budget shortfalls. Or, as Rothbard's adage literally rings true, several universities are now offering their own cell phone plans to counter this trend.

Despite the sizable endowments, grants and discretionary donations that many research universities have, the return on investment from licensing internal innovations is next to nil. This coupled with increased annuities wrought by tenure systems has potentially delivered a crippling blow to an entrenched order. The tenure-system was originally created to secure academic freedom for professors — offering flexibility and openness to speak and research freely without fear of repercussion. (See the Hoppe debate.) However from a financial perspective Stephen Kerr notes that, "raising an employee's salary creates an annuity for his or her organizational lifetime. Furthermore, since future increases are normally calculated as a percentage of salary, erroneously increasing someone's pay will tend to become geometrically expensive over time." In other words, a firm should reward productivity, not tradition or longevity. Therefore performance-based contracts can be used in place of a tenure system, an idea now-embraced by numerous college presidents as well.

Many colleges, particularly those that are State-managed, must change their business models with the times. This is not some pie-in-the-sky ultimatum; according to a recent survey of college presidents by The Chronicle of Higher Education, many "are more preoccupied with financial issues than educational ones." One plausible solution to these monetary quagmires has an irksome kick to it, "53 percent of the respondents said they believed that tenure for faculty members should be abolished in favor of long-term contracts, but those who had been professors with tenure supported it more than those who had not."

Over the past decade, many state universities have learned that they must locate alternate sources of funding as they can no longer solely live off the State dole. In fact, whether they like it or not, many of the flagship State-funded institutions are marginally becoming privatized. For instance, through a charter initiative adopted last year, the University of Virginia (along with Virginia Tech and William & Mary) now has the freedom to modify tuition rates and operate free of numerous state regulations such as those pertaining to procurement, capital outlay, finance and personnel. This quasi-privatization is a step in the right direction, as it should provide better accountability to those who actually finance educations. And it should be noted that these budget shortfalls are not regionally isolated instances on the East Coast.

While some commentators suggest that specialization is for insects, a large portion of school rank and reputation is weighted in research, which directly correlates to publishing in peer-reviewed journals (i.e. impact factor). For example, numerous departmental performance appraisals require that tenured or tenure-track professors spend the majority of their time on original research and publishing -- and the residual is spent teaching (i.e. publish or perish). In many cases this creates a negatively dichotomous relationship between meticulous research and supportive instruction. Unfortunately, many bright researchers lack the personality or training needed to be effective instructors and vice-versa (thus one of the main differences between research universities and teaching). Because of this, many universities hire individuals who have longer curriculum vitae's than they do vibrant personalities. However, this bittersweet yin-yang has its own sense of irony, as specialization and the division of labor are the most promising solutions to an otherwise ruinous situation.....

While pedagogy (the formal discipline of teaching) has been around for several hundred years, humankind has spent the better part of its existence training and otherwise instilling values, beliefs and information into its brethren and progeny. Throughout its storied evolution and development, theoretical frameworks ranging from blank slates to statistical models have been constructed to explain and prescribe the best way to school and educate one another.

Although the Catholic Church and Jesuit Order are historically credited for organizing the first universities to train their priests, Prussia, architect of the modern Welfare state, unsurprisingly had its hand in the creation of the modern education system, including that of Higher Education. John Taylor Gatto, among others, has noted that it was Prussia that first enacted compulsory attendance at the primary school level, in a concerted effort to erect a martially disciplined and compliant populace. Rigid hierarchies of authority (teacher vs. student) were established in an effort to bridge obedience to both military commanders and technocratic civil servants. Some of these positivist methods and theories trickled into higher education and are extensively chronicled by proponents of the deschooling movement and Montessori approach.

And while some professors lament the latest bugaboo known as the Internet, to be historically consistent they should throw sticks and stones at descendants of Johannes Gutenberg, for inventing a more efficient and systematic process of printing texts — thus eliminating a traditional role of scholastic scribes (though, arguably creating in return a plethora of professions, industries and markets in the process — i.e. creative destruction). Perhaps these same instructors could venture into the terra incognita and partner with startups such as Digital Universe, or hawk their expert knowledge to the highest bidder.......

Much more here



The Myth of the Math and Science Shortage

Why do we keep falling for this? Once in every second-term presidency, the chief executive lectures the country about the impending disaster of a shortage of mathematicians and scientists. People think: oh no, we'd better get on the stick and create some in a hurry! Thus does the President want to spend $50 billion over 10 years — a figure these people made up out of whole cloth — and we are all supposed to submit, cough up, and turn our sons and daughters into natural-science brainiacs. And the President is just sure that his great job-training mission is not limited to Silicon Valley but extends to all cities, rural areas, and ghettos in America.

He is not only raising false hopes, diverting career paths, and wasting money, he is raising a non-problem and purporting to solve it with a non-solution. The central-planning approach to boosting science was tried and failed in every totalitarian country, and the same will be true in nominally free ones as well. Still, it seems that megalomaniacs just can't resist the urge to push the idea, which is why mathematicians and scientists leftover from Soviet days are driving cabs and tending bars in today's Russia.

Let's say the president made a huge stink about the shortage of teeth cleaners, web designers, dancers, or piano tuners. We might more clearly recognize the error. Professions are things chosen by individuals as they follow market signals. If there is a shortage, the wages of the people with these specializations would go up, thereby drawing more people into the profession. People would rush to study teeth cleaning and the like. This influx of new labor would push wages down again. When the wages get too low, people leave these professions and find others.

Thus does the market for labor specializations work rather well, here, there, and everywhere. Wages aren't the only consideration for why people go into some fields and not others, but it is a major factor. The market provides a helpful signaling mechanism to assist people in the development of certain skills. Shortages and surpluses resolve themselves.

No presidential speeches are necessary. No commission needs to be established. No taxpayer dollars need to be expended to make it all happen. We need only pay attention to the signals of the market and follow our own self-interest. The shortages and surpluses are systematically driven toward equilibrium, provided there is no government intervention to spoil the process.

Think of how jobs have changed. We have fewer people around today who know how to farm because fewer people are necessary to do the job. More kids than ever are going into computer sciences because of the perception that these fields will be lucrative in the future. In neither case was a government program necessary. People entering the job market find out quickly what is in demand and what isn't and compare that to their own capacity for doing the job.

The reason the whole math and science racket bamboozles us again and again has to do with our own limitations and our perceptions of foreign countries. We think: heck I know nothing of these subjects, so I can believe that there is a shortage! And surely math and science are the keys to just about everything. And look at those Japanese kids in school that we see on television. They can run circles around the tattooed bums that populate American public schools. We are surely "falling behind!"

In the first place, it wouldn't actually matter if it were true. The whole point of the international division of labor is that we benefit from the skills of everyone around the world. If there were one country in the world where everyone knew math and science — call it Nerdistan — and one other country in the world where everyone specialized in art and literature — call it Poetistan — both countries would enjoy the benefits of both talents provided they were engaged in trade. The Nerds could enjoy poetry and the Poets would have lots of hand-held contraptions. And since the professions in both countries were presumably chosen by market means and voluntary choice, that configuration of talent yields the best of all possible worlds.

Apart from that, however, there is another consideration: none of the past predictions of a math-and-science shortage have ever come true. In fact, when Al Gore raised the same frenzy some years ago, some commentators noted that it is actually easier to make a case that we face a shortage of less skilled workers: people to drive trucks, work in warehouses, clean kitchens and hotels, take care of kids, and work on docks. Here is probably where we are going to see the wage growth in the future.

In any case, people who have studied this in detail have reached an inconclusive verdict, except to observe that current unemployment rates among math and science people with PhDs are higher than the general population. Also, as Daniel Greenberg writes, "Average salary scales for professors show the marketplace value of different disciplines: law, $109,478; business, $79,931; biological and biomedical sciences, $63,988; mathematics, $61,761." He points out that the editor of Science Magazine even noted the absurdity: "Why do we keep wishing to expand the supply of scientists, even though there is no evidence of imminent shortages?"

Actually, Donald Kennedy's entire article is worth a read. He points out that the worst thing that could happen is for government to attract people into a technical field that they really can't handle. They only end up working outside the area in which they are trained, or adding to the ranks of the unemployed. The scientists themselves know how hard the job market is, and of course they don't want more people in their field driving down wages. But the point stands: if wages were high enough, good people would be attracted to these fields without subsidies, badgering, and lecturing.

And what pretense does government have for purporting to know better than the market what jobs are necessary in the future? Somehow it seems especially egregious for the political class to get into this act, for this group is probably the least well educated in technical fields. Their specializations are in duplicity, glad handing, and handing out other people's money to those who are willing to participate in the racket of the redistributivist state. What do they know about the market for mathematicians?

So why does government continually badger us about the impending shortage of mathematicians and scientists? Maybe it is just a big excuse for getting and spending our money, and one excuse is as good as another. But maybe there is something more sinister at work. Perhaps government would like to create a glut of mathematicians and scientists who cannot find work in the private sector, and so these people would have no alternative but to go to work for the Pentagon and other warfare state agencies. Here, politicians imagine, they would create great gizmos to spy on people, centrally plan, and create smart bombs and other toys for politicians to play with.

Sound crazy? I'm open to any explanation, and perhaps this "conspiracy" view supposes the political class to be smarter than it really is. Regardless of the real reason, let us not suppose that the real reason is the one they give: that we face an imminent shortage. We don't. And if we did, the political class would be the last to know about it. To the extent they succeed, they will end up wasting people's time and money, and the person repainting your house might just have a PhD in mathematics.

Source

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

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

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

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8 February, 2006

MANY BRITISH GRADUATES UNEMPLOYABLE

Britain's biggest companies gave warning last night that, despite a record number of graduates entering the job market this year, many will lack the basic skills needed for employment. Almost half of businesses said that they did not expect to receive “sufficient applications from graduates with the correct skills”. Last year 598 positions were left unfilled as a third of employers said that they could not find candidates of sufficient quality.

Managers cite a series of shortcomings in potential recruits. These include: Too much time spent working on degrees and not enough joining clubs and societies, where students might work in teams. Not enough experience of giving presentations in tutorials, leaving new graduates unable to communicate ideas in the work place. Poor spelling, grammar and mathematical ability mean that graduates are making basic mistakes, writing illiterate memos and are in need of constant supervision.

The recruitment crisis comes at a time of record growth in the graduate market. Starting salaries are expected to average £23,000 and the number of vacancies available is likely to rise for the third year running. But a survey by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) shows that many of the 260,000 graduates are being let down by the university system. Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the AGR said: “[Graduates] must have the right aptitude, which partly comes down to the skills they can offer. If they concentrate purely on academic studies and have no work experience, they are not going to impress the employer.” Mr Gilleard admits that business is partly to blame, by shifting the balance in favour of more academic degrees. Companies are setting ever-higher entry requirements in an attempt to find the cleverest applicants. As a result, students are concentrating on getting a 2:1 degree or better and letting their extra-curricular activities drift.

Mr Gilleard is confident that, when top-up fees are introduced in September, universities will work harder to improve student career prospects. “Variable fees should act as a catalyst because students will gradually take the approach that ‘this is an investment and the university can help me get more from my life’,” he said.

Helen Bostock, a vice-president at JPMorgan, said that most of the bank’s candidates have attained four grade As at A level and good degrees, so students should consider what will make them stand out. She recommends doing summer jobs, volunteering or work experience but insists that “soft” skills do not outweigh the value of a degree. “In some roles they are weighted more than others, but you must have good academics whatever job you want,” she said.

More than a third of vacancies for graduates with the leading employers this year will be with accountants, professional service firms or banks. While more than half of the jobs are in London or the South East, only 4.2 per cent will be in Scotland and 1.6 per cent in Wales. Nearly one in ten posts (8.8 per cent) will be offered abroad. The South West of England is the only area in the country where these employers predict fewer vacancies than last year

Source



Inattentive and sloppy teachers in Germany

A new bestselling book has branded German teachers as idle incompetents who are passing on the onus of education to increasingly frustrated parents. School education - once the pride of Germany - has become a "game preserve for human failures", argues the author of The Teacher Hate Book.

The 220-page diatribe by Gerlinde Unverzagt sparked hundreds of e-mails of support and has touched a popular nerve. A Parents' Power Party is starting up to demand that teachers salaries should be based on performance rather than on seniority. German educational standards have been slipping, according to international comparisons of pupils' writing and reasoning skills. The country is now at the lower end of the European league tables in literacy and maths. Yet, according to Frau Unverzagt, teachers have responded by becoming even more sloppy. "Blatant spelling mistakes are not marked as wrong, but are rather awarded a question mark in the margins as if the correct spelling was somehow a matter of debate." Elementary mathematics is rendered incomprehensible, geography teachers muddle continents.

More and more parents have to compensate for poor teaching, she says. Parents' evenings are dedicated to explaining the new German spelling rules. The parents are then supposed to ensure that all homework is written correctly before it is submitted to the teachers. Josef Kraus, president of the German Teachers Association, has personally protested to the publishing company, claiming it was unfair to blame teachers for the ills of society.

"But the truth is, nothing will change until the teachers accept the need for change," says Frau Unverzagt, a journalist and single mother of four children. She argues that teachers should not be given civil servant status - which makes them almost unsackable in Germany. Frau Unverzagt wrote the book under a pseudonym to protect her younger children. Teachers are not only lazy, she says, but also vindictive. "My eight-year-old son's teacher came into class, held up the book and pointed at him, declaring `your mother did this'." The boy nodded nervously. "When he came home, he was a nervous wreck and told me `Mummy, I've betrayed you'."

Germany's education system is regionally based. The new book directs its criticism at Berlin but in Bavaria, where there is better funding and higher standards, there is less parental anger. A comprehensive survey by Dortmund University, however, showed general German dismay with teachers. Schools have become a social battlefield. Some now insist that German is spoken in the playground and during classroom breaks to promote the integration of immigrants. Teachers have been put in the position of patrolling the corridors on the alert for non-German words and yet unable to impose any meaningful penalties on linguistic offenders.

Source

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

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

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

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7 February, 2006

California: Preschool Initiative's Misguided Approach

Considering how hard it is to find prominent individuals with a selfless impulse toward public service, we shouldn't begrudge the film director Rob Reiner his efforts to expand preschool education in California. But that's not to say that Reiner's Preschool for All initiative, which will appear on the June ballot as a constitutional amendment, is a good idea. On the contrary, it's another attempt at ballot-box budgeting featuring misleading PR and misguided pied-piper appeal.

Reiner's initiative would make three hours of daily preschool available to all California children in the year before they enter kindergarten. It would establish state standards for pre-K education, including a mandate that teachers have a bachelor's degree, and give jurisdiction to the state Department of Education. The funding would come from a 1.7% tax on household incomes over $800,000. This would boost those taxpayers' top marginal rate to 11% and yield about $2.4 billion a year by 2010.

No one disputes that such a program would be a good thing in principle; overwhelming evidence shows that children benefit from preschool, and disadvantaged kids benefit the most. Business, concerned about lagging student performance, is getting behind the initiative (judging by support from some local chambers of commerce) as are public employee unions and civic leaders.

The issue for taxpayers and policymakers, however, is more complicated: How else might the state spend $2.4 billion in annual revenue? Might any of that spending be equally necessary - or more so? How about arranging for every child in the state to be medically insured? Or providing every child access to textbooks, supplies, qualified K-12 teachers, a nutritious lunch and a safe learning environment?

That $2.4 billion would pay the annual interest on a $53-billion infrastructure bond (at 4.5%), allowing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to almost double his infrastructure plan. It could rebuild the Sacramento Delta levees, the condition of which threatens the lives, homes and livelihoods of millions of Californians.

Incidentally, the 1.7% levy would raise the top state income tax rate to a level not seen since 1995; after this, squeezing more money out of these wealthy stones will be almost impossible. (Earners of more than $1 million are already charged an extra 1% of the excess to fund a mental health program, so their top rate would be 12%.) If the Reiner initiative passes, not a dime of that money would be available for anything but preschool. Ever.

Not only would the principle of free preschool be enshrined in the state Constitution, but so would a particular approach to preschool. Suppose educational experts determined down the line that the most effective program combines preschool with smaller primary-school classes, or that the most appropriate teacher training might not require a BA? Tough. The rules will be written into the Constitution and, accordingly, hard to change. State educational practice will be embalmed, the clock stopped at 2006. Yet, even today's educators disagree about the right approach. Some contend, like the initiative campaign, that the only sure way to reach the neediest children is to make preschool available to all children, not just the most disadvantaged. "There's never been a targeted program that reaches 100% of the children who are eligible," says Karen Hill-Scott, an education consultant working with the campaign.

Others say that targeted programs yield the best results and that preschool gains rapidly fade if primary schools don't pick up the slack, perhaps via full-day kindergarten (not common in California) and follow-up services for four or five years (not part of the Reiner initiative). The proper place to weigh these disagreements is in a legislative hearing room. The initiative's sponsors chose not to go the legislative route; they have their own vision of preschool and want us to believe it's the only option.

Promoters of initiatives love to portray their projects as silver-bullet cures. That's already happening in this case. The Reiner team claims that Rand Corp. researchers have "found" and "confirmed" that, for every $1 spent on preschool, the state will get $2.62 back. We'll undoubtedly hear this figure repeated ad nauseam for the next four months. But it's a subtle misstatement of the Rand study. The study's author, senior economist Lynn Karoly, based her calculations largely on a Chicago program aimed almost exclusively at black children in the city's poorest neighborhoods. She called that program "the most relevant to an analysis" of a universal program in California. But the two programs are hardly identical. Chicago's serves a homogeneous disadvantaged population; California's goal is to reach all economic classes within the state's uniquely diverse population.

As Karoly observes in her study, the Chicago program also provides "health screening, speech therapy services and meals," along with home visits and training for parents and continued support for some students in primary school. None of these elements is specifically funded by the Reiner initiative.

Researchers have calculated the fiscal return from Chicago's program at $7.14 for every dollar spent. Not only are the subjects less likely to repeat grades, drop out or land in jail; they also earn more over their lives than others raised in similar circumstances but unexposed to the program. But these are empirical data, derived by carefully tracking ex-preschoolers through age 20 or older; by contrast, Karoly's figure is an extrapolation applied to a program that doesn't yet exist. Accordingly, Karoly told me, she tried to be "as conservative as possible," and her study should be seen as a projection, not a measurement.

The initiative promoters may not be so circumspect. The debate over our children's educational future risks being turned over to electioneering press releases and TV spots featuring heart-tugging slogans. Are we about to be led down the wrong path?

Source



Schools of Re-education?

For those who have been troubled by the tendency of universities to adopt campus speech codes, a worrisome new fad is rearing its head in the nation's schools of education. Stirred by professional opinion and accreditation pressures, teachers colleges have begun to regulate the dispositions and beliefs of those who would teach in our nation's classrooms.

At the University of Alabama, the College of Education explains that it is "committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism." To promote its agenda, part of the program's self-proclaimed mission is to train teachers to "develop anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist . . . alliances."

The University of Alaska at Fairbanks School of Education declares on its Web site: "Teachers often profess 'colorblindness' . . . which is at worst patronizing and at best na‹ve, because race and culture profoundly affect what is known and how it is known." Consequently, the program emphasizes "the interrelatedness of race, identity, and the curriculum, especially the role of white privilege."

Professors at Washington State University's College of Education evaluate candidates to ensure they exhibit "an understanding of the complexities of race, power, gender, class, sexual orientation, and privilege in American society." The relevance of these skills to teaching algebra or the second grade is, at a minimum, debatable.

Brooklyn College's School of Education announces: "We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism; and invite them to develop strategies and practices that challenge [such] biases."

One can sympathize with the sentiments at work. Moreover, in theory, academics can argue that merely addressing these issues implies no ideological bias. But in practice, education courses addressing "white privilege" and the "language of oppression" typically endorse particular views on issues such as affirmative action and student discipline. These codes have real consequences.

Ed Swan is pursuing a degree in teacher education at Washington State. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that he flunked an evaluation of dispositions last year. The teacher who failed him explained that Swan, a conservative Christian and father of four Mexican American children, had "revealed opinions that have caused me great concern in the areas of race, gender, sexual orientation and privilege." Washington State insisted that Swan agree to attend sensitivity training before being allowed to do his student teaching -- where observers could observe his classroom performance.

In 2005 Scott McConnell was informed by LeMoyne College's Graduate Program in Education that he was not welcome to return and complete his degree. His offense? He wrote a paper advocating the use of corporal punishment that was given a grade of A-minus. The department chairwoman's letter to McConnell cited the "mismatch between [his] personal beliefs . . . and the LeMoyne College program goals."

The conviction that teachers should hold certain views regarding sexuality or social class is rooted in a commendable impulse to ensure that they teach all students. But even if scientific evidence established that certain beliefs or dispositions improved teacher effectiveness, colleges should hesitate to engage in this kind of exercise. The truth, of course, is that no such body of rigorous, empirical evidence does exist.

In any event, there's good reason to be skeptical of claims that to be effective, teachers must have certain views or attitudes. Given that both kindhearted and callous doctors may be effective professionals, it's not clear why we should expect good teachers to be uniform in disposition. In fact, with the array of students that schools serve, it may be useful to hire teachers with diverse views and values. Ultimately, screening on "dispositions" serves primarily to cloak academia's biases in the garb of professional necessity.

Schools of education are not merely private entities. Rather, in each state, they are deputized by licensure systems to serve as gatekeepers into the teaching profession. Even the vast majority of "alternative" training programs are sponsored by a school of education. The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education -- which established requirements that would-be teachers embrace "multicultural and global perspectives" and develop "dispositions that respect and value differences" -- has tried to backpedal recently by protesting that it didn't "expect or require institutions to attend to any particular political or social ideologies." Much more is needed. The cultivation of right-thinking cadres has no place in America's colleges and universities.

Source

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

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

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

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6 February, 2006

SHAFTING BOYS

(By Ilana Mercer)

Boys (and men) have been in trouble for some time, but "progressives" have only just noticed. In "The Trouble with Boys," Newsweek, a representative of the species, articulates the problem:

"By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001.. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent."

The magazine then implicates the perennial "progressive" bugaboo: "quantifiable and narrowly defined academic success," for which "activist parents" are responsible. The writers blame parents for ensuring that "school performance has been measured in two simple ways: how many students are enrolled in accelerated courses and whether test scores stay high."

Other than pushy parents, Newsweek also faults "curricula [that] have become more rigid." Too much teaching at the expense of the cult of the "whole child" has, seemingly, caused boys to stumble. The scribes, four women and one man, must be confusing America with Singapore. Curiously, the magazine allows that boys used to do okay at school. What happened to change that is an enigma, best left to the experts. The experts-also the people who put boys in this predicament in the first place-aver that, while a considerable investment was made to empower girls, boys were neglected.

There's a problem with this reasoning. If boys used to do well at school, then an "investment in girls" would not explain their deterioration. Unless "investing in girls" is Orwellian for privileging girls at the expense of boys, which is precisely the impetus behind Title IX and other legislative loadstars. Presently, boys toil under elaborate affirmative action initiatives in secondary and tertiary schools that subordinate merit to the equal representation of girls in every field of endeavor, including sports. "Experts" such as the National Education Association-the largest union in the country and the al-Qaida of education-will say we spend too little money and tolerate unacceptable teacher-student ratios. Oh, come off it. We shell out more per child than any other developed country, and at 1:16.5, the teacher-student ratio has never been lower. Soon there'll be more adults than children in the system.

The travails of boys, moreover, need to be put in perspective. American high-school kids, boys and girls, have been crowned the cretins of the developed world, as measured by every conceivable international test. That carnivorous girls have climbed to the top of this pile is no great achievement. No, the galloping ignorance among American students is proportional to budgetary profligacy.

The problems plaguing boys are not pecuniary, but paradigmatic: the progressive, child-centered worldview and feminism. For decades now, America's educators have insisted that learning be made as natural and as easy as possible, when it is neither. To this end, content-based, top-down teaching was replaced with pop-culture friendly, non-hierarchically delivered flimflam. But as classicists such as E. D. Hirsch Jr. have pointed out, effective, analytical and explicit instruction is very definitely not a natural but a highly artificial, often-unintuitive process.

Evidence abounds that boys thrive in the more disciplined, structured learning environment. America's loosey-goosey schools, however, shun discipline and moral instruction. Boys are also biologically predisposed to competition. But in the progressive school, cooperative experiences and groupthink are preferred to individual achievement. And girls favored over boys.

When boys bubble over with unbridled testosterone, instead of challenging, disciplining, and harnessing their energies, as teachers once did, they are emasculated or medicated. The former means being made over in the image of woman; the latter entails being diagnosed as "learning disabled" and drugged with Ritalin. It is a consequence of the demonization of male biopsychology.

The school is a microcosm of society. Both have been thoroughly feminized. The false feminist narrative suffuses every aspect of a boy's life. Women everywhere are depicted as brawny, brainy, and beautiful; men as buffoons. On celluloid, an 80-pound waif manages to wallop a 200-pound gangster with no punctures to the silicone sacks. When male teachers manage to infiltrate the public school system, they are of the androgynous genus-and every inch as feminist as their XX-carrying colleagues. The quintessential male role models-the Founding Fathers-are persona non grata in courses, as are other so-called pale, patriarchal pigs. A boy risks purgatory and worse should he mention weaponry or female anatomy.

In addition to a core-curriculum, banished too from America's feminized and foolish schools is the "archaic" idea of a literary canon. Not only do boys have to internalize feminism's lumpen jargon; they must also synchronize their male brains to Oprah's challenged synapses. English teachers expect them to study "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "The Secret Life of Bees."

If epic literature worms its way into the school's shopping-mall assortment of flimsy courses and frivolous subject matter, then it is duly deconstructed and shred: Boys are taught to see great works of art through feminism's grim and distorting prism. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot were members of the ruling class of oppressors; their artistry no more than a manifestation of the alleged power relationships in society.

Progressive schools-and the feminist and feminized "education" they inflict-are ultimately extremely bad for boys and girls alike. But while they favor girls, casting them as a besieged class of helots; they are hostile to boys, who are perceived as members of a ruling elite that refuses to let go of patriarchal privilege and power.

In an e-mail to me a young man described his daily grind under this mirthless and unmerciful ideology:

"I cannot seem to escape the biases of feminism no matter where I turn. Every female teacher somehow manages to bring the argument around to point out that males overrun everything. If I produce any artwork with any sort of tall thin form in it, I'm immediately criticized for producing artwork that involves phallic symbolism. Thus meaning that I obviously am promoting male dominance in society."

He said he felt "worn down" by the experience. Others like him just walk away.



Florida Supreme Court Sends Students Back to (Public) Schools

Florida's Supreme Court recently ruled 5-2 to strike down the state's Opportunity Scholarship Program, more commonly referred to as school vouchers, which are continually given to students in the state's failing schools. CFIF Senior Vice President & Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino recently spoke with Clark Neily, one of the attorneys who argued the case before Florida's high court, about the impact of the decision on 733 schoolchildren at 53 schools statewide. What follows are excerpts from the interview that aired on "Your Turn - Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense" on WEBY 1330 AM, Northwest Florida's Talk Radio.

GIACHINO: Clark, I have invited you back on the program to discuss the same case that we have following with you - that is the case that you helped argue before Florida's highest court, the case commonly referred to as the school voucher case -- although I think the technical term for the program is the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Before we turn to that subject, can you please share with the listeners some information about the Institute for Justice?

NEILY: The Institute for Justice is a libertarian public interest firm based near Washington, D.C. and we basically sue the government to try to secure the right for people to engage in the occupation of their choice, to own and enjoy private property, to express themselves under the First Amendment and, of course, also to send their children to schools of their choice and not where somewhere bureaucrat tell them where they should send their children. If people want more information we have a website and it is ij.org. We would love to have you check out the website and we would love to hear from you if you have any questions or if you have anything that you want to talk with us about.

GIACHINO: Clark, you mentioned that one of the missions of the organization is to sue the government. But in the case that we are going to discuss, am I right that you were actually on the same side as the Florida state government?

NEILY: Yes. This is one of the settings in which the Institute for Justice does actually end up on the same side as the government. The reason for that is that there are some state governments and even local governments that have been very forward looking on the issue of school choice. Florida is frankly the most forwarding-looking state in the country - they have the highest number of school choice programs and the broadest applicability of such programs. So really Florida is delivering school choice to the most number of people in the country. The good news, that is the silver lining of this case, is that continues to be true even in the wake of this very unfortunate Florida Supreme Court ruling striking down the Opportunity Scholarship Program. There are just over 700 kids in that program. They want to be able to finish up the school year. But the program is going to be over as of the end of this school year. The good news is that there are over 30,000 children in other school choice programs in the State of Florida and those have not been challenged yet so they are going to continue to go on.

GIACHINO: Clark, before we talk more specifically about the ruling in the voucher case, I want to back up a little bit for the benefit of some of the listeners who might not have tuned in during either of your two previous appearances with us. If you would please describe for the listeners what we are talking about when we say school choice and school vouchers here in the State of Florida.

NEILY: Sure. There is a basic philosophical difference there. Some people believe that the government is in the best position to tell you where your kids should go to school. Then there are people who believe that the parents are best situated to make that choice. And what really is going on here in Florida is that the governor decided that the best way to make sure that kids are getting a good education in the State of Florida was to say to parents, "look if your child is trapped in a school that is not getting the job done, if your child has been trapped in a school that has been rated by the state as failing, we are going to give you the option of taking your child out of that school and either sending them to a higher performing public school or to a private school of your choice. And the state is willing to give you a voucher so you can send that child to a private school."

It is a wonderful, wonderful program and it has had a wonderful impact both on the children who have been receiving the state aid to go to the private schools and also on the schools that have been forced now to compete for the students and recognize that they cannot just keep going on as business as usual. There have been four different independent studies of the program and every single one of those studies shows that public schools exposed to competition from this program improved dramatically and it is very, very unfortunate that the program is not going to be around much longer to spur that kind of improvement.

GIACHINO: Am I right - I think that the last time that you joined us you explained that these vouchers don't just come into play after the school has received its first failing grade but that they are given multiple opportunities to improve that grade before the voucher program may be invoked in their physical school?

NEILY: Yes, that is true. To become eligible for the voucher program, a school has to have gotten two "F" grades - two failing grades, within any two consecutive years. So, yes, you are right, it is not as if the state just steps in out of the blue and says that all of the kids here qualify to transfer out. Instead it is targeted at schools that have a chronic problem and just are not able to get the job done.

It is a common myth that this is some how an attack on the teachers or the people who work at this school. It is no such thing. There are a lot of basic structural problems in our public education system that would prevent even very effective teachers from being able to really educate the kids in their classroom. My father is a public school teacher. I know this for a fact and have seen it in his job and he has told me of the things that he faces that prevent him from doing an effective job in his classroom.

So really all this program says to parents is that we are not going to demand that you leave your children trapped in a failing public school - this chronically failing public school, while we tinker with it and try to straighten it out. Which who knows how long that might take - a year or five years or even ten? Even one day in a chronically failing school is too long for anybody's child and I think the only way that anybody would put up with that is if it were somebody else's child who is going to be trapped in that failing public school. I have never met a single person in the whole State of Florida with a child trapped in a failing public school who wasn't a supporter of this program.

GIACHINO: When the parents then make it known that they want to be a recipient of the voucher or that they want to be a part of the Opportunity Scholarship Program, the state doesn't dictate which schools that they go to right - it is up to the parents?

NEILY: That's right. It is up to the parents. And of course they have a choice of remaining in the public school system and transferring to a higher performing school if that is at all an option. But of course one of the problems there is that the higher performing public schools are more popular and will not have the class size to accommodate these new kids. So sometimes the only real option for these parents is to transfer into a private school and the state would pay at least a portion of the tuition - they get a voucher and there is a maximum cap on that voucher. Of course these parents are able to take their children out of that failing public school and enroll them in a private school of their choosing.

Of course I should add that this is a form of school choice that wealthier parents exercise every single day throughout this country. People with enough money to do it exercise school choice either by putting their children into private schools or by moving to school districts where they have good public schools. We believe that everybody in the State of Florida should have the same ability to exercise school choice and to ensure good educational opportunities for their children, regardless of whether they have the money to afford private school or to afford living in fancy school districts. That is what this case is all about and that is what this program is all about. I am sad to say that the Florida Supreme Court really turned its back on that in this case....

More -- much more -- here

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

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

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

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5 February, 2006

Only 98% left behind

From a charter school teacher

Last March, in Learning is easy - Education is complex, I wrote about charter schools in Minnesota, and expressed a general opinion that educational opportunities are improved by the presence of charter schools, but that it's a damned shame that the entrepreneurial people starting and running charter schools can't instead open PRIVATE schools on a level playing field with public schools.

Charter schools ARE public schools, of course, but with a bit more freedom in some ways. In other ways, they are even more constricted than the large traditional schools. Their regular oversight is perhaps less stringent, but their results are more harshly judged. We've come to expect poor results from traditional schools... to understand that those school systems are so well insulated and protected that hoping for real change is fantasy. Charter schools, because they don't enjoy the patronage of the teachers union or the maze-like insulation of the public school bureaucracy, are sort of hanging out there in the breeze, tolerated by the powers that be. There are those who enjoy the failure of a charter school.

I'm doing a bit of teaching in a Minnesota charter school... just started my 2nd quarter teaching art at a charter high school, as an unpaid volunteer. The school serves a special student need... it's for students who have had a substance-abuse problem and have been through treatment. That's what the students all have in common, and dealing with that issue is a significant part of the way the school helps their students. Because the people in the school understand the abuse problem, they can and do provide a helpful setting for the students. Students must remain clean to remain in that school, which gives them an incentive and reward for staying clean.

This "Sobriety High" is of real value... providing a good choice where none existed before. I will opine that the traditional public high schools are of almost no help for a student who has fallen into some sort of substance abuse. More likely that they make the problem worse and are even a contributing factor to the original occurance.

At a time in life... the teenage years... when young people are struggling to identify and develop their own individuality, that place where they spend all day, 5 days/week is a damned important context. Large schools cannot deal with students as individuals, and that is precisely what teens need. To condemn teens (or any children) to big slab-walled, prison-like institutions is contrary to the develoment of inquisitive, intelligent minds. Remember... our public school system was copied from the Prussian system, which had as its goal the creation of compliant, obedient workers for the government. Individuality was (and remains) a negative trait in such schools.

Charter schools are, to be blunt, a half-assed solution to the public school problem. They're a wonderful choice, but only when compared to the miserable standard of public schools. If they were free of the regulation and bureaucracy of the public school system... free to really innovate... free to please nobody except the parents and their children, there is no doubt in my mind that they would take a giant stride forward in effectiveness. Parents can move their child from a big traditional school to a charter school, at no extra cost to them, but if they could take that same money to any private school, unfettered by government control, we could at last see a return to the spectacular learning that our nation once had.

For those of you who believe that the poor would suffer from elimination of "public" education... do some study of the history of learning among blacks and other immigrant peoples in America BEFORE the idea of government-controlled schools was introduced. Back then, poor people didn't allow their children to suffer in violent, drug-ridden, depressing inner-city schools... they organized their own schools, and literacy, even among the poorest, was higher than it is now.

Some people working in charter schools are not likely to appreciate what I've said. I've listened to leaders of some of the prominent charter schools, and, unfortunately, they speak the same education double-speak one can hear from the entrenched bureaucracy... language designed to say little but give a glowing impression... spoken with that practiced constant smile intended to give the impression that all is swell here. I imagine that they too have designs on moving up the governmental administrative career ladder. They also have to worry about not rocking the boat and about pleasing those who can remove their charter.

Charter schools are another "program" that's supposed to demonstrate that the public school behemoth is innovating and serving special needs. Sure, it's an improvement for a few children... 17,000 in Minnesota, out of about 810,000. That's just 2%, and Minnesota is a "leader" in charter schools. That only leaves 98% "left behind".

Source



DUD TEACHERS PROTECTED AT THE EXPENSE OF STUDENTS

This article is about the situation in the Australian State of New South Wales but a similar problem can be found almost anywhere in the Western world

If you want to know who the bad teachers are in a school, ask the students. They are good judges. So when the year 5 students in an OC - opportunity class for the gifted and talented - complained about their teacher, detailing scenes of unusual classroom chaos, parents took notice. They contacted the school. At first their voices fell on deaf ears. So some parents protested with their feet; several students were taken out of the prized OC places they had won through competitive examination and went back to their local primary school. "There was no control in the classroom and no evidence of any work being done," a parent told me. Another said: "She was floundering, out of her depth." Parents felt sympathy for the teacher, who had one year's teaching experience and was trying. But the inadequacies could not be ignored.

The parents got lucky. They were middle-class and assertive, and angry at the broken promise of special "opportunity" for their children. As well, they had the option of putting the children back into local schools. The threat of mass defections with attendant bad publicity could have undermined the reputation of the OC program. Their concerns were heeded. It took only until mid-second term for the teacher to be shifted to a non-teaching job out of the school. It was done mainly for "health reasons", much easier grounds for removal than incompetence.

Most children in regular schools are not so lucky. It is notoriously difficult to remove poor-performing teachers. "Teachers have to have two heads to be kicked out," a former Department of Education bureaucrat told me. Principals have no real incentives to weed out the time-servers and non-performers. They have no motivation to rock the boat. There is no pressure of competition in the public sector; most parents are trapped, feeling they must wear the dud teacher. There is no performance-based remuneration for principals or teachers, so nothing is lost or gained by confronting the non-performers. And there is no stomach to fight the NSW Teachers Federation. Industrial relations concerns rather than professional ethics have dominated thinking about bad teachers.

Teachers' rights need to be protected from malicious students and interfering parents with absurd expectations. Not every teacher is a Mr Chips; mediocrities abound in any profession and are not the issue here. Terrible teachers are easy enough to identify. Just ask the children. But in any dispute over teacher competence, the customer - the student - is rarely right. The balance of rights and responsibilities is out of kilter.

With another school year under way, parents can only cross their fingers that the good teacher falls their way. It is no secret what constitutes a good teacher. When Tony Vinson conducted his inquiry into public education in NSW, he found students identified the qualities easily - expertise in the subject, ability to control the classroom without shouting, dedication, and being approachable and fair.

Most students can survive a year, or a subject, taught by an incompetent teacher. But sometimes the consequences are more serious. It can colour a year or shape a life. In the junior years, it can determine whether a child learns to read, and by the end of high school, a bad teacher can ruin a child's chance of getting into a desired university course. The OC students, for example, suffered further instability, after their teacher's removal, under two casual placements before a permanent teacher started at the beginning of term four. She had only a few weeks to turn things around before the children sat the in-school and, in March, the external exams for entry to selective high schools. Compared with previous years when virtually all the OC students made it to the local selective high schools, few of the crop for this year did so. And while there may be several explanations, including the possibility that the group overall was not so bright, and the instability was not the factor, parents have been left thinking the system let them down.

Wonderful teachers change lives, are remembered forever, though rarely thanked. But in today's workforce, teachers occupy an unusual place. They have virtual life tenure, yet are protected from the scrutiny most other professionals undergo. No one can follow them into the classroom, except the children, whose views are often discounted. Teachers spend years marking and assessing children's work, yet get no systematic feedback from the children on their own strengths and weaknesses.

If there is a beacon of hope it lies with the new NSW Institute of Teachers, an independent statutory body, which has put in place a mechanism for accrediting and licensing teachers, and even for differentiating between the competent, the accomplished, and the leaders. For the first time this year, teachers with about one year's experience will have to be accredited in order to continue to teach after meeting stipulated standards, providing evidence of classroom work, and assessment by the principal or a senior teacher. It will make it easier for principals to be freer in their comments, and ensure poor teachers are not accredited. With a high proportion of teachers due to retire over the next seven years, it was considered a waste of resources to try to cover the old hands. It is a start. But what a pity students will have no input into the teacher evaluations when they are the real experts.

Source

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

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

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

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4 February, 2006

The Media's Ancien Regime: Columbia Journalism School tries to save the old order

Excerpt from a close-up look by Hugh Hewitt. He thinks that journalists are doomed by their bias and lack of specialized knowledge to permanent low status. He finds that Columbia is trying to deepen their knowledge-base but thinks that they are still going to be largely uncomprehending of most of the things they write about

To enter Columbia University's graduate school of journalism is to enter the highest temple of a religion in decline. A statue of Thomas Jefferson guards the plaza outside the doors, and the entry room is suitably grand. Two raised platforms proclaim the missions in bold gold letters: "To Uphold Standards of Excellence in Journalism" and "To Educate the Next Generation of Journalists." The marble floor tells you that the school was endowed by Joseph Pulitzer and erected in 1912 in memory of his daughter Lucille. A bronze quotation from Pulitzer's 1904 cri de coeur in the North American Review is on the wall:

Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve the public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. . . .

There is a new high priest in the dean's office on the seventh floor--Nicholas Lemann, veteran writer for the New Yorker, and before that the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, where he spent 15 years after stints at the Texas Monthly, the Washington Post, and the Washington Monthly. Lemann began his scribbling for a New Orleans alternative weekly, the Vieux Carr, Courier, while still a high school student, covering everything from boxing to city hall to the private school network of the region. Upon entering Harvard in 1972, he immediately "comped" for the Crimson, only to be rejected in his application to join the editorial board of the greatest brand in undergraduate newspapers. "Harvard is filled with this sort of humiliation," Lemann told me in a conversation last fall that capped a two-day visit to the school. He reapplied for a position as a reporter, and the second time was successful, rising through the ranks to become the paper's president in the 1975-76 academic year. Now 51 and two years into a new career, Lemann will need the same persistence if his legacy as dean is to be something other than a footnote in the history of the decline of American media power.

On my first day at Columbia's graduate school of journalism (CSJ), the poster boy for all that has come to plague elite American media--former CBS anchor Dan Rather--took to the podium at Fordham Law School to denounce the "new journalism order." On day two, the New York Times Company announced a cut of 500 employees from its already pared down workforce of 12,300. (The company employed 13,750 as recently as 2001.) On that same day Knight-Ridder slashed its Philadelphia papers' editorial staff by 75 positions at the Inquirer and 25 at the Daily News. "I get 50 calls a day about the crisis in journalism," Lemann deadpanned when I posed the "crisis" question. "Only 50?" I thought.

The story of what is going on at CSJ cannot be separated from the collapse of credibility of the mainstream media, also known as "elite media" and "old media" among its detractors. The fortunes of the big five papers--the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the old TV networks and big weekly newsmagazines--are visibly in decline. The upstart blogosphere is ever at the ready to "deconstruct" the work product of the old media's old guard. The very best investigative reporting is being done not by big names at the big papers, but by people like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' journalist in residence Claudia Rosett, who almost singlehandedly unraveled the U.N.-Saddam Oil-for-Food scandal, with much of her work published online. Dan Rather's CBS, eager to impugn George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard, got duped by fraudulent documents it took months to obtain and only hours for bloggers and readers to shred.

This story in its small way partakes of the seismic shift underway. Its origin is an email request from Lemann last spring: Would I be willing to be the subject of a New Yorker profile? I agreed, on the condition that I could have reciprocal access to Lemann and the Columbia Journalism School for this piece. Hedged with some qualifiers--he could not commit any of his faculty to talk to me or guarantee access to classrooms, though everyone proved to be very welcoming--Lemann agreed.

Reactions to his profile of me varied among family and friends, but I thought it complete and fair. Before I sat down with Lemann I had read everything he'd written for the New Yorker and was impressed with his profiles of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. (The Cheney profile earned Lemann some animosity among colleagues, who thought him too gentle with the only man the left fears as much as Rove.) The scorn on the center-right for the "objectivity" and "professionalism" of the mainstream media is deep and sincere. I went to Columbia to see if Lemann was the exception that proves the rule, and to test the rule itself. What's the rule? That the elite media are hopelessly biased to the left and so blind to their own deficiencies, or so in denial, that they cannot save themselves from irrelevance. They're like the cheater in the clubhouse, whose every mention of a great round of golf is met with rolling eyes and knowing nods....

Soon Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, arrives. With Michael Shapiro, Hoyt team-teaches the class "Advanced Reporting," into which Wallace and 15 other students are headed, and introduces me to Shapiro, who quickly welcomes me to observe the hour. Shapiro is a gifted teacher who, three weeks into the term, already knows all of his students' names and engages them with ease and good humor. The first half of this hour is given over to outlining a large assignment--a profile of some recently deceased person or the reconstruction of a crime. Shapiro is clearly hoping the students will go for the profile, and spends considerable time instructing his charges on how they might go about selecting their subject.

He fences his instructions with cautions about engaging the bereaved ("You need to know, but you can't be a vampire") and tips on tracing the details of the life to be profiled. Hoyt contributes key bits of experience, and the students are curious and attentive to these practical lessons. "You need to make your first phone call today," Shapiro insists. "Tomorrow becomes the next day, which becomes next week. Good reporters make the first call on the first day."

The 16 students are not evenly split--there are 14 women and just two men. Two-thirds of the M.S. class this year are women, a reflection of what Lemann calls the "feminization" of journalism programs across the country. Robert Mac Donald, the assistant dean for admissions and financial aid, ran down the demographics for me: The average age of an M.S. student is just shy of 28, the mean is 26, the youngest is 20, and the oldest is 63. Whites make up 69 percent of the new class; 11 percent are African American, 7 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, 3 percent Middle Eastern, and 4 percent South Asian. The school doesn't yet keep stats on religious background, though Mac Donald believes there has been a significant increase in Muslim students post 9/11. A fifth of the students are from the New York area, and between 37 to 40 percent are from "the corridor"--from Boston to Washington. Another fifth are from the west coast, and 10 percent are foreign. It is a pretty "blue" student body, and willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of their credentials. A year at CSJ--tuition, living expenses, incidentals--comes to $59,404 according to Mac Donald, though 85 percent of the students receive some financial aid, with packages ranging from $1,000 to $50,000. The average scholarship is $5,200, which means that these students are putting a lot of money into the program.

The "blue" nature of the student body is further confirmed by my polling of the class I attended, done with the permission of Shapiro. Six of the 16 were English majors, two studied history, and the balance spread across the humanities. No one had a background in the physical sciences. No one owned a gun. All supported same-sex marriage. Three had been in a house of worship the previous week. Six read blogs. None of them recognized the phrase "Christmas Eve in Cambodia"--though Shapiro not only got the allusion but knew the date of the John Kerry Senate speech in which he made the false claim about his Vietnam war experience. Three quarters of them hope to make more than $100,000 as a journalist, 11 had voted for John Kerry, and one for George Bush (three are from abroad and not eligible, and one didn't vote for either candidate). I concluded by asking them if they "think George Bush is something of a dolt." There was unanimous agreement with this proposition, one of the widely shared views within elite media and elsewhere on the left. The president's Harvard MBA and four consecutive victories over Democrats judged "smarter" than him haven't made even a dent in that prejudice....

"Authority is a construct," Lemann tells me on my second day at the school. And the "authority" of journalism with the American public is clearly at a modern low point. Lemann intends to reconstruct journalism's shaky reputation via an infusion of specific and measurable skills--either you can or you can't do regression analysis; either you can or you can't follow a case citation sequence or decode an annual audit report--and thus ignite a demand among editors not for the bright young reporters from campus newspapers, but for really smart alums of graduate schools of all sorts who can be tempted into the field despite its pay and present status somewhere near the carnival barker's...

Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.

More here



Other People's Money Poisons Higher Education

Supporters of the statist quo usually recoil in anguish from the idea of deregulation. They can be counted on to try to discredit it at almost every turn. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education does just that. In "The Lessons of Deregulation" (January 20), Gordon Davies, director of the National Collaborative for Postsecondary Education Policy, argues that the United States should not copy the "deregulation" of higher education that has occurred in New Zealand, calling it "market experiment gone bad." That phrase caught my attention; in my view, true market experiments that go bad are rarer than alligators in the Yukon. So what was going on?

The "market experiment," Davies notes, was New Zealand's policy, beginning in 1989, of allowing a proliferation of postsecondary educational institutions, only some of which grant degrees, to tap into . . . state funding. The idea was to encourage greater consumer choice. The result, of course, was an explosion of sub-degree programs. In just a few years government grants to such programs went from half of what was provided to degree-granting institutions to parity.

As Davies points out, many if not all of the sub-degree (or certificate) programs are flimsy academically. Davies provides a number of excellent examples, including funding for "Maori singalong courses" and programs in "golf studies." One polytechnic institute scammed more than $9 million for a course that consisted of nothing more than sending students a CD for them to study at home. Davies concludes that this policy of "deregulation" has been enormously wasteful, writing, "[T]he money in New Zealand is now spread out over so many institutions and so many programs of questionable value that support for important but high-cost programs -- like those in medicine, computer science, and engineering -- is unrealistically low."

Undoubtedly, a lot of higher-education money is being wasted in New Zealand, but it's an abuse of English to call this policy a "market experiment." Yes, free markets maximize choice for consumers, but another condition is necessary: that consumers spend their own money. You don't really have a free market where the government puts money in people's pockets and then says, "You're free to spend it here, here, and here."

Davies worries that similar "market experiments" might spread to the United States. He notes that in several states, policymakers are asking for greater autonomy for public universities. "Colorado, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and others have been lured by the call of the open market," he says. Better not allow it, he cautions, at least not without making sure that the state keeps enough control to fulfill "a public agenda that meets the needs of [its] residents." Davies proceeds to praise Virginia because it ties "deregulation" of its institutions to commitments to "provide greater access regardless of student income, to improve retention and completion rates, to increase research support, to create partnerships with schools, and to be actively involved in economic development."

When politicians write legislation that aims at pleasant-sounding but vague objectives, they hardly ever accomplish anything. "Greater access" means trying to get a few more marginal students into college rather than into the job market on the assumption that more formal education is always better -- but it isn't. "Improving retention and completion" means efforts to keep weak students from dropping out -- on the same assumption. The result is primarily to increase the number of college graduates with poor skills who will end up taking "high school" jobs. (That trend is documented in Who's Not Working and Why by economists Frederick Pryor and David Schaffer, who lament the low standards of American higher education.) Putting more money into "research" sounds good, but a lot of the research that goes on in our universities is of negligible value. "Partnership" with schools (government schools, that is) won't do anything to overcome the inherent flaws in government-run education. And it is mission creep to call on universities to become involved in economic development, which, if needed, will happen spontaneously.

More to the point, though, even if some or all of those policy notions worked, they would not solve the problem of higher-education dollars being drained away into academically feeble programs and courses. That started happening long before anyone was talking about "deregulation." American colleges and universities have majors like golf-course and casino management -- perfectly useful fields in which on-the-job training has always been adequate. They also have had lots of "identity" programs -- Women's Studies, African-American Studies, "Latina/o Studies," and so on -- that don’t transmit a body of knowledge to students, but attempt to engender certain attitudes of resentment. And they have numerous vapid courses on pop culture. Just as in New Zealand great amounts of money are spent on the equivalent of educational junk food. Why?

As Milton Friedman says, 'No one spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own." When it comes to education, students (and parents) are largely spending taxpayer money. Davies correctly observes that students are not wise decision-makers: "Too many naive young people will opt for the offer of a free cellphone or for a 'fun' program like surfing rather than select the education that they truly need." That's undoubtedly true, and all the more reason not to put young people in a position to squander other people's money.

The recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy shows that despite the prodigious sums lavished on education, we have a startling low level of literacy in this country, even among people with college degrees. If parents, students, and other interested parties were putting up their own money, they would take far more care than they do now to assure that it wasn’t being wasted on educational cotton candy. Because education is mostly paid for by government, however, many students drag out their years of formal schooling, often accomplishing less in 16 years than people a century ago did in eight.

If we are serious about the waste of education dollars, we ought to focus our attention on the real problem -- government funding. There is nothing wrong with greater consumer choice in higher education, as long as the people who make the choices are spending their own money.

Source

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

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

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

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



3 February, 2006

What the Heck is Going on at DePaul University?

Post lifted from the Volokhs

Courtesy of FIRE: In the latest of several examples of intolerance by DePaul University's administration to non-left-wing ideas, the powers-that-be shut down an "affirmative action bake sale" and are now "investigating" the organizer for "discriminatory harassment."

DePaul, of course, is a private Catholic university, and has the general right to suppress speech, even for extremely stupid reasons. However, DePaul also has contractual obligations, and those obligations include following its own "discriminatory harassment" policy, which claimes that "DePaul University values the free and open exchange of ideas within a university community." And that "DePaul University is committed to the principles of academic freedom and inquiry." The caveat is that DePaul states that "discrimination and harassment" are not protected. So I ask, rhetorically, whom did the students involved in the bake sale "harass"; against whom did they "discriminate"? (yes, technically the white male students who had to pay more for cookies, but I'd like to see the DePaul Adminsitration make that the basis of their case with a straight face). Apparently, at DePaul expressing ideas contrary to the administration's views on affirmative action constitutes at least a prima facie case of "harassment," which I think a reasonable person would say is absolutely ridiculous.

FIRE is, of course, on the case, but I'm wondering if its strategy needs to be less reactive and more proactive when it comes to consistent offenders like DePaul. What if some DePaul students got together and sued the university for misreprentation, fraud, or whatever relevant causes of action state and city laws permit? I'm not generally inclined to use litigation for "political" purposes, but if I were a student at DePaul, and felt constrained to express my own views for fear of being the administration's next victim, I'd certainly be inclined to consider my legal options for making DePaul either fullfil its commitment to academic freedom, or acknowledge forthrightly in its policies that "at DePaul every student's and professor's right express his views is subject to the ideological whims of the university administration."

And click this link for some previous thoughts of mine on "affirmative action bakesales" and freedom of speech.



TEACHER TRAINING ABSURDITIES

What is the best way to raise standards and to ensure that students are well educated? Forget about more money and smaller classes. Why not, as Newsweek has argued, close the schools of education? Those schools, instead of giving beginning teachers a mastery of their subject matter, especially in areas such as primary literacy and numeracy, are more concerned with inculcating politically correct values.

The late 1960s and '70s was not only about Woodstock, moratoriums and flower power: equally important was the Left's long march through the institutions and the way education was targeted as a key instrument in the culture wars. In the US, academics such as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argue that "inequalities in education are part of the web of capitalist society" and that "an equal and liberating school system requires a revolutionary transformation of economic life". In England, sociologists such as M.F.D. Young argue that there is nothing inherently superior or worthwhile about academic studies. What counts as knowledge is a socio-cultural construct used to marginalise so-called disadvantaged groups.

As Monash-based teacher educator Georgina Tsolidis notes in her summary of teacher training in Australia, education is redefined as a political process whereby students have to be empowered to challenge the status quo. "Many of us cut our teaching teeth in a climate of advocacy related to student-centred pedagogy, curriculum and assessment," she says. "Notions of empowerment [popularised by Paulo Freire] have been the bread and butter for those of us concerned with teaching, particularly teaching involving the 'other'. Our job was to produce young adults who would challenge the status quo through skills of critical inquiry. Within the classroom of the self-styled liberatory pedagogue there existed clear distinctions between the marginal and the mainstream."

Judged by teacher training at many Australian universities and the work of professional groups such as the Australian Council of Deans of Education and the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, little has changed. Future teachers at Deakin University are taught "a clear awareness of the sociopolitical role of education in society, an understanding of the impact of economic and ideological change on the practice of educators" and are urged to "work for social justice". Charles Sturt University also expects teachers to develop a "socially and politically responsive view of education", a "commitment to social justice" and to view schooling as "socially and historically constructed". Flinders University expects teachers to act as "agents for social change and justice". The Victorian University of Technology's school of education proclaims its "commitment to social justice and equity as the purpose and outcome of both school and teacher education".

Literacy was once about reading and writing. Not so at Griffith University, where literacy is taught within a "critical social-constructivist framework" and defined as "multi-modal mediated texts that are influenced by cultural and social factors".

To make matters worse, teachers are generally given a left-wing view of such matters. As argued in Making the Difference, widely set for education courses during the 1980s, Australian society is "disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction".

Education, instead of providing a ladder of opportunity or dealing with what Matthew Arnold termed the best that has been thought and said, is defined as "the process of liberation" and teachers are told "to decide whose side they are on". The ACSA also views education as a "social and historical construction" that "typically serves the interests of particular social groups at the expense of others". Based on the work of the French leftist Pierre Bourdieu, the association argues that teachers must acknowledge the "role of education in the reproduction and transformation of society".

The traditional academic curriculum, competition and a belief in merit and ability are attacked as socially unjust and instrumental in maintaining the power of dominant groups in society. In addition to promoting a left-wing view of education, of equal concern is that those responsible for teacher education uncritically promote a new-age, faddish view of curriculum. The University of Tasmania's faculty of education describes its agenda as embracing "radical curriculum change in Tasmanian schools by adopting the new Essential Learnings Framework". Ignored is that the framework is full of education jargon and has little academic merit. Melbourne's RMIT adopts all the cliches associated with a social-constructivist view of learning: so-called new learners have to think strategically, be risk takers, juggle multiple perspectives and become deep and lifelong learners.

As the ACDE has argued in New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education, old-fashioned ideas about right and wrong answers and teaching the three R's have to be jettisoned in favour of the new basics. The new basics are defined as developing "self-awareness, problem-solving and intercultural skills" so that learners are equipped with "multiple strategies for tackling a task and a flexible solutions-orientation to knowledge".

What's ignored is that high standards and higher order skills depend on rote learning and mastering the basics. Also ignored is that in the real world there are right and wrong answers and that generic skills such as problem solving are subject-specific.

Source



MI: A big reason to graduate in Kalamazoo: "Talk about a future. Public schools in the western Michigan town of Kalamazoo are starting to bulge after a nameless local benefactor promised to fund the college education of any student who graduates from one of Kalamazoo's three public high schools. Beginning with the class of 2006, students who attend the city's public schools from kindergarten through grade 12 get a full ride, with a sliding scale down to 65 percent funding for those who complete four years of high school in the district. They must attend a university or college in Michigan. The cash outlay is expected to reach $10 million to $15 million a year."

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

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

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

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2 February, 2006

Imam Teaches Propaganda at Diablo Valley College

(By Lee Kaplan)

Readers who follow academic infiltration by subversives on our college campuses are probably familiar with my previous article about my attendance in Imam Amer Araim's class, Politics of the Middle East 155B, during the last spring semester at Diablo Valley College (DVC), as well as my follow-up article after meeting with DVC's President Mark Edelstein, and Vice President for Academic Affairs Alice Murillo.

So what was the outcome of my investigative reports? Did Diablo Valley College decide to remove Araim from its list of part-time instructors for incompetence or for indoctrinating his students rather than educating them? Didadministrators take responsibility for course curriculum taught by the imam or make corrections like they should?

Nope. DVC's administration drew the wagons in a circle instead.

After meeting with college President Mark Edelstein and giving him time to "investigate" the matter, and not receiving a promised response as to the disposition of Araim's teaching courses, and repeatedly not having my phone calls returned, I called college Dean Lyn Krause to ask if Araim was still teaching Politics of the Middle East 155B. I was assured he was not. "The course catalog shows the course is not being offered this semester," I was told. I assumed that Araim, a temporary part-time faculty member, had been removed. But the student who tipped me off to Araim's teaching methods during a previous semester (which spurred me to attend Araim's course) did a little checking and found Araim still on the schedule for the Fall 2005 semester through Spring 2006, only now he was teaching three courses at DVC instead of just one. I called the dean back.

I then learned how things really operate at Diablo Valley College.

You have to hand it to the administrators at Diablo Valley College in Northern California, especially President Edelstein and VP for Academic Affairs Alice Murrillo, but also Sociology Department Dean Lyn Krause and Department Chair John Dravlin. When confronted with an imam who teaches blatant Middle Eastern fabrications against the United Statesand Israel in his classes, what do they do to take action? They increase his teaching load from one class the previous semester to three, including adding courses in Introduction to U.S. Government!

What's wrong with Araim, a Muslim imam, teaching Introduction to U.S. Government to lower level college students? Aside from the fact he may not even be a U.S. citizen (something the college district refused to reveal), the man has a track record of conveying to his students the impression that American foreign policy is only a matter of duplicity and opportunism against the Muslim world. He lauds democracy coming to the Middle East, but America gets no credit for it. What's more, Araim has no background in teaching or research on the U.S. government on his resume. A former diplomat for Saddam Hussein, his Ph.D. dissertation was on OPEC and the economics of oil.

When I attended his lecture, some of the juicier bits of knowledge imparted to students at DVC in Politics of the Middle East 155B included:

1) Israel is an "apartheid state" was taught repeatedly every session. (Israel is a pluralistic democracy with equal civil rights for all its citizens and does not practice apartheid like South Africa).

2) Women are not stoned in Iran. (Women are stoned in Iran for adultery and other offenses, including sometimes even for refusing to be raped).

3) Jews, Christians and women are not discriminated against in Middle Eastern Muslim countries. (Common knowledge, anyone who reads a newspaper knows this isn't the case).

4) Hamas and Hezbollah are "liberation" movements, not terrorist groups.

5) Jordan was not part of the Palestine Mandate of 1922 as promised in the Balfour Declaration and reneged by the British against the Jews.

6) Jewish Zionists prior to 1948 stole land from Arabs. (All land that was in fact legally purchased by the Jewish Agency).

7) Israel is a "colonial state" (It was set up by the United Nations much like the Arab states, colonies of Great Britain that were set up after World WarI and is not a colony)

8) U.N. Resolution 242 says that all land in the West Bank belongs to the Arabs (it does not say that per its author, Eugene Rostow).

9) Israel initiated all wars against the Arabs who were victims of Israeli aggression (the Arab League has refused to make peace with Israel for nearly 50 years).

10) The Sheba Farms region of Israel, an area Hezbollah uses as a reason to carry out terrorist attacks on Israel, belongs to Lebanon (the U.N. even signed off on the area as belonging to Israel when it withdrew from Lebanon in the 1980's).

11) According to the student who originally tipped me off to the class, Araim also stated that Saddam Hussein did not gas the Kurds, the Iranians did it.

12) The United States is "hypocritical" in its approach to democracy in Arab states such as Jordan and elsewhere.

13) Araim also provided reading material that claimed that reform Jews practice the Sabbath on Sunday (it's Saturday) and suggests that Jews are not the same as "Zionists."(This separation of Jews from Zionism is used by anti-Israel advocates to claim they are not really anti-Semitic).

14) Tiny Israel intends to conquer all the lands from the Nile River to the Euphrates in Iraq (we were given a one-hour lecture during the last class with this conclusion).

15) Sharia, or Islamic Law, as state law is compatible with democracy (despite its misogyny and denigration of religious minorities).

The Arab newsreel footage I screened in class was filmed in Iraq while Araim worked for Saddam Hussein in 1972 and showed Jews being hanged publicly in Baghdad was "propaganda" according to Araim, who denied the accuracy of the film while telling students that false history taught in a PLO propaganda film he presented earlier was based on actual facts. Araim had a habit in class of making personal attacks and calling me a "propagandist" when confronted with errors of fact or untruths, a highly unprofessional practice for a college instructor.

And Araim allowed information from Arab Internet websites to be presented in class as factual. But they were based more on totalitarian propaganda than facts. In lecturing on the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Araim stated that the organization, set up by Islamic countries to oppose Israel, was started after "Zionists set fire to the Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem." He got this information off the OIC website. In fact, a fire was set at the Al Aksa Mosque by a Christian tourist from Australia who had a history of mental illness and who was arrested by Israeli authorities and prosecuted. In another instance, Araim allowed a student during his presentation on Palestine to state the Palestinians were over 3,000 years old as a nationality and culture. This is untrue and something the student admitted he obtained from an Arab website without scholarly verification.

Araim's third class is titled International Relations Now, and may simply be a renaming of the course I exposed earlier, and possibly a place where Araim will again be free to teach students factually incorrect information about the Middle East.

It is possible that Araim knows no better, and was teaching from his "perspective" no matter how untruthful, as DVC President Mark Edelstein tried to claim in our meeting? If that was the case, he is at best--as an academic--incompetent. More likely, Araim's teaching is a way to indoctrinate students in his personal political goals against United States' foreign policy and against Israel in general. Claiming ignorance on Araim's part (as weak a defense as any) does not explain, however, his dissembling when confronted with the truth.

According to Dean Krause, who has advised me that he considers me a "troublemaker," "Araim was retained because there is a shortage of teachers available, and his `evaluations were all good.'" These included evaluations by students and fellow faculty members. Most students' knowledge of Middle East history and even current events can be questionable when it comes to their being under the influence of an instructor with an agenda. I asked Dean Krause, "As for fellow faculty members, how would they evaluate Araim's course content when they did not attend the class?" It seems Araim is a popular fellow and rather charming. Araim is alleged to have obtained his position from contacts made through an interfaith group located in the DVC's college district. The validity of course material or balance is irrelevant if one is a popular instructor.

Department Chair John Dravlin explained Araim's retention is because he has a Ph.D. from the State University of New Yorkand because he used to work for the United Nations. "He's overqualified for what we have," Dravlin explained to me. "Most of our instructors are only required to have a master's degree." When I told Dravlin that I could produce an article by another Arab Ph.D. that said that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make matzoh and that the United Nationsis corrupt, half of it composed of dictatorships (like Araim's former country under Saddam Hussein) and that Mohammar Gaddafi is on the Human Rights Commission, he claimed he had to dash to a meeting.

I decided to do a little more research on Araim. It seems he earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghampton. His dissertation was on the economics of oil and he is an expert on OPEC. He has no academic background in his resume on studies in U.S. government. In fact, as mentioned, the college administration refused to even tell me if he is a U.S. citizen.

Since he was teaching International Relations also, I checked what he did at the United Nations. He had worked as a diplomat for Saddam Hussein apparently (a good impartial educational background) but later left the dictator's diplomatic corps to work for the United Nationsas a "political affairs coordinator" dealing with "apartheid and colonialism" and had participated in the Durban Conference on Racism. "Political Affairs Coordinator" is a fancy title used by totalitarian groups for "propagandist." The United States was forced to withdraw from the Durban Conference because it was turned into an anti-Semitic diatribe against Israel's right to exist, which explains a lot about Araim's sentiments in the class room.

More -- much more -- here



A textbook case of making Australia's past a blame game

School's back. That means pressing uniforms, searching for the elusive school tie, scraping out last December's lunch from the bottom of the school bag and covering a new batch of textbooks. And, after last week's address by the Prime Minister, wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to teaching our children about Australian history. So on Sunday I picked up a brand new history text book for first year high-school students. And, there, in chapter nine, under the heading of Australia 1788-1900: Colonisation and Contact are more than 30 pages devoted to the politics of shame. So this is what all the fuss is about.

Students learning about the colonisation of Australia are given a black and white portrait, so to speak. Black is good. White is bad. The textbook quotes a speech by Pat Dodson to describe the idyllic way Aboriginal Australians lived at the time "white invasion is just about to occur". "About three days in every week would be devoted to gathering your food," he says. "Hunting, collecting - a bit less in places of plenty, a bit more in the hard country. The rest of your time would be spent socialising, or in religious observances of different kinds." There is a "rich and complicated legal system" and the "children are more deeply loved than perhaps any children on earth".

Then, into this world comes the "white invader. Their first act is to say the land is terra nullius, that no one owns the land, that it is not used ... Thus begins the Australian Civil War." And that war continues to this day, Dodson says. The author of the text is on Dodson's side, complaining that "the myth of terra nullius" has been "left out of the history books". It is bad enough that this account is factually inaccurate. Terra nullius is not in the history books because, as Michael Connor has shown in his book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, it was a recent concoction. A bogus legal theory propounded to justify political objectives in securing Aboriginal land rights.

But even worse than the promotion of this legal mythology is the continued peddling of the romance of the noble savage. A pre-1788 utopia where much of the week is spent chatting among friends, bowing before spirits and loving children. Even for an alpha male such as Dodson, this is a stretch. One would have thought that, in between recounting the sense of community and sharing - and the bucolic pleasures that filled daily life before "the invasion" - students would also be told of the less sharing side to tribal life - the inter-tribal violence or the brutal treatment of women. But there is no rounding out of history here. Just a one-sided Disneyfication - more Fantasia than Mickey Mouse - of the noble savage. This is not just a dumbing down of history. This is ideology - inculcating a sense of shame in young students about Western civilisation.

There is no mention of British colonisation contributing anything much to Australia - no mention of civilised society or the rule of law. Instead, all the talk is of dark forces reaching Australian shores: forces that are individualistic and competitive and concerned with material gain. There are sneering references to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Charles Darwin - as examples of Europeans who believed in the "superiority" of Western civilisation, over, say the hunter-gatherer existence of local indigenous people. Reading the text is like learning about Darwin's evolutionary theory in reverse gear. Progress is rather nasty and a source of embarrassment to the authors.

Last week, when John Howard criticised the way history is taught to Australian children, all he sought was some balance. Acknowledge the injustices to indigenous people, but also recognise the "great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation", he said. But the education commandos pounced. We've moved on from the PM's old-fashioned ideas of teaching, they complained. We're teaching children "more sophisticated historical skills, like using historical sources appropriately, questioning those sources, analysing and interpreting, looking at perspectives and interpretations", the NSW Board of Studies history inspector, Jennifer Lawless, said.

But if critical thinking is the aim, schoolchildren need critical information. They need to learn that historian Lyndall Ryan admitted that "historians are always making up figures" when she was challenged by Keith Windschuttle - author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - for inflating the number of Aborigines killed by white men. Instead, students are given a one-sided version that shuns critical analysis. This is history pressed into the service of progressive politics, imbuing students with political agendas, rather than encouraging genuine learning.

We know it is all about politics because the teachers unions have told us so. Last year Pat Byrne, the Australian teachers' union president crowed about the fact that progressive educators "had succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities". And she said those "conservatives" - presumably people such as Howard who are calling for a more balanced approach to teaching - "have a lot of work to undo the progressive curriculum". An audacious admission. And who can forget the less triumphant, but no less political, observation from Wayne Sawyer, a former chairman of the NSW Board of Studies English curriculum committee. He admonished teachers after the last federal election for failing to produce a more "questioning, critical generation" of students because they were now voting for Howard.

Brazen politicking is evident in how students are taught to read. In the politically charged nether world of academe sits Brian Cambourne, associate professor of education at the University of Wollongong. He is one of the driving forces behind the whole language approach to literacy where children are expected to learn to read by being immersed in literature rather than learning the sounds that make up the words. He has spoken openly about the whole language philosophy as "literacy for social equity and social justice". He regards literacy as innately political and language as simply a tool used by those interested in power and wealth. He says politicians criticise his philosophy because they "have become aware of just how threatening a school system which produced thousands of highly critically literate students might be to the current ways of power and wealth distributed in our society".

Indeed, Cambourne admits his educational philosophy is thick with his political views. "Most of the work I do is based on the political prejudices I have and these must of course impact on what I research, and how and why I teach the way I do," he says.

So, as you finish covering your child's school books, flick through them to see what all the fuss is about. There are many fine teachers trying to do their best with second-rate materials. But at least there is agreement on one point: there is much work to be done in undoing the progressive curriculum foisted on Australian schoolchildren.

Source

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

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

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

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1 February, 2006

Silencing the truth about UCLA

College students looking to score some extra dough to pay for textbooks at UCLA lost a potential source of income this week when the head of the Bruin Alumni Association, Andrew Jones, announced he was putting a halt to the group's offer of $100 for documentation of leftist bias by UCLA professors. Too bad, for Jones' actions galvanized international media scrutiny on an issue that needs addressing: the incessant advocacy of liberal dogma in the classroom by college professors. Jones and his Bruin Alumni Association figured it was about time that someone documented just how revolting the push for leftist political thought in America's taxpayer-funded universities had gotten.

And the Bruin Alumni Association wisely realized the best way to share their findings with the world was to publish them online. To stir the pot a bit more, Jones made the decision to offer up to $100 to students at UCLA for material proof of improper conduct by their professors. Bravo!

The motivation and motives of Jones and the Bruin Alumni Association is pure genius that should be celebrated by America's conservative leaders. Instead, some of my fellow travelers in the conservative movement have been less than kind to Mr. Jones, et. al because of the unfavorable coverage of this story from some of the more liberal bastions of the news media. Former Congressman Jim Rogan, a man who I count not just as a respected conservative, but also a personal friend, angrily resigned from the Advisery Board of the alumni association saying he was "uncomfortable to say the least with this tactic." Los Angeles-based radio talker, Al Rantel, who is another friend and fellow conservative working for the same radio network as I do, also resigned, saying that, "it looks like a bunch of crazies who were trying to go after innocent professors, which certainly wasn't what I supported."

With all due respect to my good friends and fellow conservatives, they've missed the boat on this one and done a great disservice to the Bruin Alumni Association. For decades, conservatives have mashed their hands together in never-ending frustration over the fact that such a liberal faculty dominated America's publicly funded colleges and universities. We've whined and moaned about the fact that it was an offense to the taxpayers of America that they were forced to pay the bill for what has essentially become the recruiting campus of the Democrat National Committee and liberal political action groups like MoveOn.org. And yet, despite all of our complaining, there hasn't been much "the Right" has done about it.

While parents took the initiative to start the homeschool movement to counter liberalism in K-12 education, the best rebuttal we've offered at the university level was Hillsdale College in Michigan. While a great school, Hillsdale alone isn't enough to educate all of America's undergrads. And so that takes us back to Andrew Jones and the Bruin Alumni Association.

Their website has collected a treasure trove of information that ought to be made public, so parents know what kind of professors are employed at the schools they contemplate sending their children to. Like UCLA, "Philosophy of Education" professor, Douglas Kellner, who as a member of the "University of Texas Progressive Faculty" group, co-hosted a cable access program that made allegations of wrongdoing by President George Bush. They included warped fantasies involving subversive activities with the CIA and the Mafia, and up-until-now secret ties between the Bush family and the Nazi party of Germany. That must make for one interesting family reunion at the Bush residence given Michael Moore's assertion that the Bush family is secretly in cahoots with Osama bin Laden's clan as well.

The UCLAProfs.com website also includes a profile on Chicano Studies Professor Juan Gomez-Quinones, who co-wrote a thesis on the proper role of Hispanics in America today. According to Gomez-Quinones, a Hispanic living in the United States who assimilates as an American instead of identifying with their Mexican heritage "is a person who lacks self-respect and pride in one's ethnic and cultural background." He insists that, "students must constantly remind the Chicano administrators and faculty where their loyalty and allegiance lie." Apparently, that loyalty and allegiance is not to the United States of America.

The list of offensive professors and their history of egregious behavior goes on and on, and its all documented at the UCLAProfs website - and it should be. Parents have a right to know what they are paying for - and so does the American taxpayer. If these college professors are so uncomfortable with the light of public scrutiny, then this should serve as a signal to them that they know deep down inside that their attempts to use public universities as political recruiting tools for the American Left is shameful, improper and inappropriate.

The focal point of this entire episode should be on the shameful conduct and actions of a large segment of academia today. Blaming the college students who document such behavior is simply shooting the messenger. And unfortunately that is what conservatives like Congressman Rogan and talk-show host Al Rantel have done. They've helped the liberal media to silence the few people who had the nerve to step up and speak out and take the heat for doing something to correct a problem. And that's a horrible message to send to a group that is finally taking action to raise debate over an issue that the conservative movement has not satisfactorily addressed despite decades of abuse.

Source



The Dumbing-Down and Neutering of America Continues

Post lifted from The Autonomist

About one month ago, I attended a speech by David Horowitz that was held at the University of Rhode Island. At the end of his talk, Horowitz held a question and answer session with the audience.

The students who participated in the Q&A session were mostly antagonistic towards Horowitz, and they asked him a variety of questions on topics ranging from reparations for slavery to the War on Islamist Terror.

I was amazed at, and depressed by, the level of deep ignorance exhibited by almost every student who rose to ask Horowitz a question. The lack of rhetorical skills displayed by most of the students, coupled with what appeared to be their near-total inability to think critically and logically, was embarrassing to behold.

What the students excelled at though, was the spouting of leftwing claptrap that had evidently been poured into their brains by some of their quasi-Marxist professors. Click the picture below to view a good example of the muddled type of "thinking" that leftwing indoctrination in America's high schools and colleges results in.


URI student fires a mindless tirade at David Horowitz

Now, an editorial in the Waterbury Republican-American succinctly describes how incompetent and uneducated millions of incipient American college graduates actually are:

"More than half of college students nearing graduation lack the capacity to perform complex but common tasks, such as computing the cost per ounce of food, grasping the arguments of newspaper editorials, summarizing results of surveys and understanding credit-card offers.

'It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they're not going to be able to do those things,' said Stephane Baldi, who directed a study for the American Institutes for Research. Kind of disturbing? That millions of soon-to-be graduates lack the capacity to perform basic real-world functions is the product of a cruel scam perpetrated by the higher-education elite.

This study adds credence to what Derek Bok, a former Harvard University president, found while researching his new book, 'Our Underachieving Colleges.' Summarizing his work for The Boston Globe, Mr. Bok said undergraduates increasingly are intellectually underdeveloped when it comes to 'critical thinking, moral reasoning, quantitative literacy and other vital skills.' But fewer than 10 percent of professors pay even passing attention to research critical of their teaching methods and performance, he said, and instead spend hours in intramural debates on curricular minutiae.'

Consequently, colleges don't help students improve their competence in writing or quantitative methods. Most leave college "still inclined to approach unstructured 'real life' problems with a form of primitive relativism, believing that there are no firm grounds for preferring one conclusion over another.' " (Emphasis added)

An accurate statement, to be sure, and one that dovetails nicely into a recent observation made by blogger, "Vanderleun," at The American Digest.

While listening to Hugh Hewitt's recent evisceration of anti-troop, LA Times columnist Joel Stein, Vanderleun heard something strange, but familiar, in Stein's voice: "... Above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a "gay" voice. Not that at all. It is neither that gentle nor that musical. Nor is it that old shabby lisping stereotype best consigned to the dustbin of popular culture. No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all. It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered. And in this I mean that of the transitive verb: To castrate or spay. The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.' "(Emphasis added)

I've heard this odd manner of speech many times, usually from the young people who attend the expensive universities that dot my surroundings. I view it as subtle evidence of the success that the postmodern Left has had in affecting the "de-balling" of America - the men speak in a faux-gentle, effete, halting sort of way - there's little "manliness" in their voices. The women possess a lilting syntax with a slight rise at the end of almost every sentence. The prominent qualities present in the speech patterns of both the males and the females I describe are: near absence of conviction, a subtle malaise and an ever-present whiff of arrogance.

Vanderleun has a name for this vocal flaccidity: "the voice of the neuter"

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

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

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

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