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28 February, 2007

AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION: THE LEFT NO LONGER HAVE IT ALL THEIR OWN WAY

There are many parallels between the Australian and American education scenes but, under strong Federal government leadership, the ignorant and destructive Leftist stranglehold on Australian education is at last beginning to be unwound -- as we see in the four current articles below:

Teachers to be tested on literacy

Student teachers will sit a literacy and numeracy test when starting their university course and teachers will have to undertake continuing education to qualify for registration and higher rates of pay under proposals tabled in Federal Parliament yesterday. A two-year inquiry into teacher education calls for a national accreditation system of university teaching courses, with accreditation made a condition of receiving federal funds, and for national teacher registration, to be administered by the states.

The report, Top of the Class, also calls for an increase in funding for education students, both while at university and when undertaking their practical component, and a one-year induction program for beginning teachers. It recommends the practical component be funded separately and not wrapped into the larger university grant as at present, and that overall funding for teaching courses be increased by about $1800 a full-time student.

Under the induction program, based on a Scottish model, new teachers would spend 20 per cent less time in face-to-face teaching. They would be assigned a qualified mentor, observe classes and undertake professional development courses. The mentor would be trained, given time to properly perform the role, and be paid for the job. The scheme would be voluntary to start and funded by the Federal Government contributing 10 per cent of a starting salary, and by the employer.

It also calls on the Federal Government to ensure that it better allocates the funding of teacher education places to address shortages in the workforce. At present, Australia is training too many primary school teachers and insufficient maths and science teachers.

Tabling the report in the House of Representatives yesterday, the chair of the education and vocational training committee, Luke Hartsuyker, said teacher education was not in crisis but that improvements could be made. "If we invest $1 in teacher education, we're going to provide an increased return on investment in every other dollar in the system," he said.

The report dismisses the idea of setting a minimum tertiary entrance score, believing it would preclude too many applicants and particularly a diverse candidature including indigenous students and those from a non-English speaking or low socioeconomic background. It instead recommends a diagnostic test to identify student teachers' problems with literacy and numeracy and provide them with remedial teaching. "Attention should be focused on the capabilities graduates have at the end of their courses rather than at the beginning," it says.

The report says only four of the 31 Australian universities training teachers require students to have studied maths in Year 12 and that a further eight required students to have Year 11 maths.

Source



It's the teachers who teach the teachers who are at fault

How effective is teacher training in Australia? The question is more than academic. After all, the quality and effectiveness of the classroom teacher is one of the most important determinants of successful learning. The commonwealth report on teacher training, Top of the Class, released yesterday, suggests that all is well and that there is no crisis.

Wrong. As University of Melbourne emeritus professor Brian Start points out, teacher training suffers from provider capture and there is little attempt to measure effectiveness. In 2005-06, Start contacted 38 teacher training institutions, asking whether there was any evidence of a link between teacher training - indicated by admission procedures and graduation scores for prospective teachers - and success, however defined, after teaching for three to six years. Not only did about half of the institutions fail to return the questionnaire but it appeared that none had undertaken any research investigating how effective their courses were in preparing teachers for the classroom.

According to Start in a paper given in Philadelphia last year: "Teacher education is a legal requirement for entering the teaching profession. Universities have a monopoly on this process (as) the providers. They select, train, qualify and certify graduates as competent to teach. Yet there does not appear to be any validity checks on the near billion-dollar enterprise."

Start argues that teacher training institutes are unaccountable. For evidence, consider a paper related to establishing the National Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership prepared by the Australian Council for Educational Research. "To our knowledge," the paper states, "no teacher education program or institution has ever been disaccredited, yet variation in quality is known to be considerable." It goes on: "Teacher education is arguably one of the least accountable and least examined areas of professional education in Australia."

It is easy to find evidence that beginning teachers are not being properly equipped to teach. Says one submission to the commonwealth parliamentary inquiry into teacher education, written by the Australian Secondary Principals Association and based on a questionnaire to 600 beginning teachers: "The respondents indicated that their colleagues at school had provided the most worthwhile support and advice with relatively little value being given to that provided by university personnel."

Not only does the ASPA submission argue that teacher training must better prepare teachers for the classroom but it concludes that teacher education "was at best satisfactory" as a preparation for teaching and in "several areas it is clear that they felt that they were significantly under-prepared".

A 2005 survey of beginning teachers, funded by the federal Government, identified literacy, especially the basics represented by spelling, grammar and phonics, as one area in which teachers lacked confidence and knowledge of effective teaching. Fifty-seven per cent of primary school teachers felt unprepared to teach phonics and 51 per cent of secondary teachers interviewed felt unprepared to teach reading.

Of course, it's not the teachers' fault that they struggle in the classroom. Blame rests with teacher education institutions that appear to be driven more by politically correct fads such as whole language - where children are taught to look and guess instead of sounding out syllables and words - and new age theories such as constructivism, where teachers no longer teach. Students, in the words of the commonwealth report Teaching Reading, are treated as "self-regulating learners who construct knowledge co-operatively with other learners in developmentally appropriate ways". And there's more: "Adoption of a constructivist approach in the classroom involves a shift from predominantly teacher-directed methods to student-centred, active discovery learning and immersion approaches via co-operative group work, discussion focused on investigations and problem solving."

During the past few years The Australian has detailed example after example of how the curriculum has been dumbed down and how standards have fallen. While some suggest teachers are at fault, the real culprits are those responsible for teacher education who fail to provide them with the right tools to do the job

Source



Schools dump soft options

The number of subjects Queensland's senior students can study will be slashed to fewer than 20 in the latest phase of the most widespread education reforms since the 1970s. A two-year review has recommended non-mainstream subjects such as recreation, tourism, retail and marine studies be scrapped to enable children to gain a deeper and broader knowledge in their chosen areas of study. Education Minister Rod Welford said the aim of the review was to reduce the "curriculum clutter". "Subject options have been growing like Topsy," Mr Welford said.

But he claimed that while the new system would offer fewer subjects, students would receive a broader education because they would not be specialising so narrowly. "There has been a knowledge explosion and we have to adjust accordingly," Mr Welford said.

The latest changes come less than a week after the Queensland Studies Authority recommended students in Years 1 to 10 go back to learning plain English. Selective state school academies for gifted students have also been introduced, while last month the first intake of Prep Year students began school.

The reforms reverse the trend in recent decades towards "new age" teaching methods which have come under sustained attack from federal Education Minister Julie Bishop and conservative academics.

Mr Welford said the move to cut the current offering of about 80 senior school subjects to between 16 and 20 subjects would add depth and flexibility. It would give students new options to study core subjects at basic and advanced level as well as the option of specialising in their areas of expertise. The new system, likely to be in place by 2009, would result in current subjects such as tourism, recreation, retail, manufacturing and marine studies being subsumed into broader subjects to be known as fields of learning. Mr Welford said the "fields of learning" would include maths, science, English, humanities, technology and design and business. "It will allow for a broader inter-disciplinary approach to allow advance science students, for example, to study emerging fields like biotechnology and nanotechnology as well as the traditional physics and chemistry," he said.

Students opting for a business pathway, for example, would be able to include subjects like legal studies as well as accounting and economics. Mr Welford also hoped to give students the option to begin a foreign language at Year 11. At present that is possible under the international baccalaureate program but not the general Queensland public school system.

The senior syllabus review is being chaired by Griffith University Deputy-Vice-Chancellor Professor John Dewar. He said teachers, parents, Education Queensland, Catholic Education authorities, independent schools and TAFE were represented on the reference group. "We have had wide public consultation and we will be seeking more feedback when a proposal is finalised," Professor Dewar said.

Russell Pollock, principal of The Gap school in Brisbane's western suburbs, said his school had between 160 and 168 students in each year level and offered 30 to 40 senior subjects. "Sitting down with parents and a guidance officer at the end of Year 10 is essential for students selecting their subjects for Years 11 and 12," he said. Queensland Teachers Union President Steve Ryan said teachers were open-minded about the move but were generally satisfied with the current system. "It is important that students do not narrow down their options too early," he said.

Source



Tot schools' dubious nurturing claims

Here's one for parents keen to get ahead of the pack, writes Bettina Arndt. They can enrol their children in early learning programs. Very early learning programs. The good Bettina blames the destructive move on career-minded parents but it should be added that the parents concerned -- mothers in particular -- are just doing what the feminist Left have always preached: put a career first and farm kids out to group "carers". And that was also of course the Communist system -- both in the Soviet orbit and in the Israeli kibbutzim

For years now, Melbourne's Methodist Ladies College has run a school kindy that takes babies of six weeks and older. That's far earlier than the Perth school, St Hilda's, which attracted headlines last week by allowing 2 1/2-year-olds into its new junior kindy. Newspaper photos featured the tiny tots, complete with school uniform, satchel on their backs. Across the country, private schools are now increasing school enrolments by attracting pupils very, very young. It's proving popular with busy, affluent parents keen on the idea of putting their infants and toddlers into "enriching learning environments."

MLC's program promises even the youngest students will discover the fun of learning a language, explore computing and engage in gymnastics. The Cathedral School in Townsville boasts it offers babies a stimulating environment for promoting fine and gross motor skills as well as sensory development. Most of these schools are willing to take youngsters from 7am to 6pm, with a solid five hours of schooling in the middle. And they offer all this enrichment for 50 weeks a year.

What a cynical exercise. Shame on these schools for conning parents into believing children of that age benefit from this crazy hot-housing. If these programs are indeed put together by trained early education teachers, they should know better. Basic knowledge of early child development shows infants and toddlers are unlikely to thrive when they are separated from their primary carers for such long hours. And surely they learned something about the slower pace of these tiny children who need time to explore their world.

Walk down the street with a two-year-old and watch as the child stops to pick up a leaf, or dawdles along looking over a shoulder to examine his shadow or decides to sit down and look at her feet. Time is slow, the world is fascinating. So what are parents doing cramming these little children into uniforms at daybreak, rushing them into cars and dumping them at so-called "schools"?

The educational hook provides a convenient excuse to allow parents to justify their choice of minimalist parenting. For five years I lived in New York, where minimalist parenting was an art form. There was a childcare centre opposite where I lived and I'd watch sleepy toddlers dropped off well before sunrise and picked up long after dark, often not even by their parents but night shift nannies. Sports clubs were available to take older children off your hands not only afternoons but all weekend, delivered to your door late Sunday evening.

That would never happen in family friendly Australia - or so I thought. Last year, Queensland newspapers reported childcare services in seaside resorts were under pressure to open on Christmas Day - sometimes to help parents forced to work, but often because parents wanted to have a good time without the children.

So let's not kid ourselves that parents are putting babies or toddlers for long hours into this new school care because they have no choice. The high fees demand high earners - often affluent, two-income professionals who don't want children putting a brake on their careers. The real choice we should question is why they have children if neither parent is willing or able to cut back for a few years to provide some slack in the system.

The hot-housing may well misfire. We know spending long hours in even the most stimulating group care does not set children up for a brilliant school career. Solid international research shows these children are at risk of developing problem behaviours -- aggression, disobedience, conflicted relations with teachers, poorer work habits and social skills. Here are children who start off with one of life's great bonuses - educated, successful parents. How sad they hardly ever get to see 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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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27 February, 2007

Preschool for all? No thanks

Both in Australia and California there is a strong political push in that direction. Well-researched comment below from an Australian homeschooler

Politicians are calling for compulsory preschool and there is a lot of rhetoric around about ensuring all children have the benefits of a preschool education so they are not left behind when they begin school. But is compulsory preschool something we really want? Education Minister, Julie Bishop's argument in favour of compulsory preschool is: "many studies and research and analysis show that investment in high quality, large scale, early childhood programs find that early learning experiences, including pre-literacy and numeracy skills make the transition to school easier for children, and it increases the chances of school success."

University studies are often quoted to support the perceived academic benefits of preschool. What is not often mentioned is that, while these studies demonstrate preschool in a favourable light when compared with an impoverished home environment, preschool does not compare favourably with the average home environment.

Even Professor Edward Zigler, credited as "the father of Headstart" a widespread American preschool program admits "there is a large body of evidence that there is little to be gained by exposing middle class children to early education . (and) evidence that indicates early schooling is inappropriate for many four-year-olds, and that it may be harmful to their development".

If preschool were truly beneficial in terms of giving children a head start, those places with some form of compulsory preschool should do demonstrably better academically. The evidence does not bear this out. For example, the two states of America which have compulsory preschool, Georgia and Oklahoma, have the lowest results for fourth grade reading tests in the country.

In 2000, the Program for International Study Assessment (PISA) compared the academic scores of children from 32 industrialised nations in reading literacy, maths and science. The results showed that in countries where schooling starts at a young age they do not consistently outperform those who start later. Finland, which has a compulsory schooling age of seven, held the top ranking in all test subjects of the Third International Mathematics and Science (TIMS) results in 1999. Singapore, which also scored highly in the PISA and TIMS assessments, has no publicly funded early education programs.

By contrast, Sweden, which has one of the most comprehensive early child-care programs in Europe, was one of the lowest scoring nations. Hungary and Czechoslovakia, cut their day-care programs significantly in the 1990s after studies determined that institutional care damages preschool-aged children.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, the longitudinal studies often quoted to argue an academic advantage provided by preschool for lower socio-economic groups, actually also show that this "advantage" disappears by grade three.

But what about the much-touted social benefits of preschool programs? Here again, there is research to refute this. A 2005 Stanford University study reported: "We find that attendance in preschool centers, even for short periods of time each week, hinder the rate at which young children develop social skills and display the motivation to engage in classroom tasks, as reported by their [prep] teachers."

In 1986, Tizzard and Hughes compared the language environments at home and in preschools in the UK. Their method involved tape-recording the conversations of four-year-old girls at preschool in the morning and again at home with their mothers in the afternoon. They reported:

We became increasingly aware of how rich this [home] environment was for all the children (working-class and middle-class). The conversations between the children and their mothers ranged freely over a variety of topics. The idea that children's interests were restricted to play and TV was clearly untenable.

At home the children discussed topics like work, the family, birth, growing up, and death; they talked with their mothers about things they had done together in the past, and their plans for the future; they puzzled over such diverse topics as the shape of roofs and chairs, the nature of Father Christmas, and whether the Queen wears curlers in bed.

Many of these conversations took place during recognisably educational contexts - such as during play or while reading books - but many did not. A large number of the more fruitful conversations simply cropped up as the children and their mothers went about their afternoon's business at home - having lunch, planning shopping expeditions, feeding the baby and so on.

When we came to analyse the conversations between these same children and their [preschool] teachers, we could not avoid being disappointed. The children were certainly happy at school, for much of the time absorbed in play. However, their conversations with their teachers made a sharp contrast to those with their mothers.

The richness, depth and variety which characterised the home conversations were sadly missing. So too was the sense of intellectual struggle, and of the real attempts to communicate being made by both sides.

The questioning, puzzling child which we were so taken with at home was gone: in her place was a child who, when talking to staff, seemed subdued, and whose conversations with adults were mainly restricted to answering questions rather than asking them, or taking part in minimal exchanges about the whereabouts of other children and play materials.

In all this research, it is difficult to sort out to what extent there is a difference between compulsory preschool programs and optional preschool but it seems that there is enough evidence both to question the push towards compulsory preschool and to throw doubt on the theory that preschool is beneficial for all. Children at home with their families are not disadvantaged. Indeed they are very likely better off. So if your child does not wish to go to kindergarten, or you do not wish to send them, rest assured that you are not depriving them.

Relationships are the most important part of life. For small children especially, the time spent in the secure home environment is invaluable. Contrary to popular opinion, forcing children to separate from their parents before they are ready to is not necessary.

Preschool should remain optional so that parents are in control of the amount of time their children spend there. For some families this will be full time, for others, no time at all, but as a society we should stop pressuring families into thinking that a decision not to preschool their child is somehow irresponsible and will disadvantage the child. The evidence just does not support this view.

Throughout history small children have always been nurtured by their parents. Parents talk, read and sing to their preschoolers; they answer questions; they play games; they provide stimulating experiences and the security of cuddles and they accompany their children out into the world as mentor guides who interpret and explain new sights and experiences. Some families wish to supplement this rich rewarding education with a preschool experience. By all means make preschool freely available to all who wish to use it but why make it compulsory?

Source



CAIR Reacts To Dose Of KIMO

Post lifted from Riehl World

CAIR has filed a complaint which will likely get a school teacher disciplined, if not fired, for allowing Kamil International Ministries Organization (KIMO) to address some NC high school students on the potential dangers of Islam.

The AP defines KIMO as a Christian organization, which it is, but a little elaboration can't hurt. We wouldn't want people to think KIMO is a bunch of Southern rednecks, now would we?

Kamil Solomon, from Bany Ady town in Assiout Province, Egypt, became a Christian at the age of five in this intensely Islamic nation when his mother shared Jesus with him. Kamil became an apologist for the faith as he got older. Persecution in the Middle East became worse after Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. He preached in numerous churches in Cairo and throughout Egypt teaching the truth about Islam. The state police followed him, and after hearing his remarks about Islam, they arrested him in 1993. They confiscated all his belongings including his library and Ph.D. dissertation on "Church History in Arabia Prior to Islam." His dissertation was basically an argument against Islam and was later destroyed. He was tortured in numerous ways for Christ, which included being blindfolded, beaten, and enduring electric shock.

Kamil endured by God's power, and eventually, American Christian agencies worked together to get him released in 1994. His ministry was banned, and he was placed under house arrest. The American Embassy in Cairo granted him an asylum. In February 1996, he came to the United States and formed Kamil International Ministries Organization, through which he travels the country to teach the truth about Islam, including their desire for jihad on American soil. "Muslims are converting black men, white women, students and prisoners," says Kamil.

Kamil came to Providence because he was attracted to the college and international ministry here. "There are many Muslims coming to the area, and we should share Jesus with them while they are here as students." He also hopes to help plant desperately needed churches in Egypt.

Humbly, Kamil pleads for Providence members to put Jesus first and urges us to be ready to sacrifice what it may cost to evangelize. He encourages us to use money judiciously and spend it on people overseas or on the poor among us. Kamil's ministry also offers various tracts on Islam and Christianity. If you would like to receive this free literature, e-mail him at kamil@kimo4jesus.org

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- A high school teacher allowed a group whose declared mission is to "raise an awareness of the danger of Islam" to distribute literature in his class, including a handout titled "Do Not Marry a Muslim Man," according to an advocacy group.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations says a representative from the Kamil International Ministries Organization, based in Raleigh, spoke to a ninth-grade world history class at Enloe High School and distributed the literature, which also discussed Jesus.

The father of a Muslim student reported the incident, said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. The council wrote to Wake County schools Superintendent Del Burns asking that the incident be investigated and that the teacher be disciplined.

Burns had not received the letter, but an investigation is under way and officials will take appropriate disciplinary action, district spokeswoman Kristin Flenniken said.

Censoring students at Oxford? That is so gay

Welcome to the Oxford college where students can use the word gay to refer to a homosexual man but not to describe a rubbish pool shot.

In the quad at Merton College, Oxford, scruffily-clad students scurry to their lectures. But behind this everyday student scene, there lurks a rather bizarre controversy. The trendy college is renowned for its LGBT-friendly ethos (that’s LGBT as in ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender’), yet it has become a rather unlikely setting for a university-wide controversy over homophobic remarks. Recently, fourth-year Merton student Andrew Godfrey complained about some of the language being used by his fellow students. This led to official action by the executive of the Junior Common Room (JCR) warning the student body to refrain from ‘unacceptable and extremely offensive’ behaviour ‘even if you are not being intentionally malicious’. Students were reprimanded for contributing to ‘an uncomfortable atmosphere in college’.

What was the ‘unacceptable and extremely offensive’ behaviour? It consisted of limp-wristed impressions and the use of phrases such as ‘Oh don’t be such a poof!’ and ‘You missed that shot, you big gay!’ during a heated game of pool in Merton’s swanky Games Room.

In response to Godfrey’s complaint about this behaviour, the college’s JCR president, Laura Davies, sent out the following email to students (drafted by Godfrey in collaboration with student welfare and LGBT representatives): ‘JCR members have raised concerns after groups have been overheard in the Games Room and other communal areas of college using terms like “gay” and “poof” as joking insults. Please be aware that using language like this is unacceptable and extremely offensive, even if you are not being intentionally malicious and think you are being ironic or witty in some way. It creates an uncomfortable atmosphere in the college.’

Can students not take a joke anymore? Can they not handle the use of words such as ‘gay’ or ‘poof’ in a slang context, in a setting as informal as a Games Room? Both Davies and Godfrey admit that the students probably were not expressing anti-gay prejudice when they made these comments while making their wrists go all limp. As Godfrey himself says: ‘I never maintained that this was deliberately malicious homophobia because I didn’t feel like I had been harassed; otherwise I would have turned to the college authorities. They were basically acting the way guys do.’

And yet guys ‘acting the way guys do’ has now been redefined as ‘unacceptable and extremely offensive’ behaviour that apparently warrants a stern official warning. Davies tells me she had no qualms about sending an official admonishment to the entire student body in response to behaviour that she admits was not purposefully malicious or offensive. ‘One of the JCR members raised the fact that he was quite unhappy with someone using the word “gay” and that he personally found that very offensive’, she says. This is a world away from John Stuart Mill’s argument that opinions ought only to ‘lose their immunity’ when ‘the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act’ (1). His point, made in On Liberty in 1859, was that only in instances where words and actions might directly lead to violence could one make a case for curtailing freedom of speech. Fast forward 150 years and we have the new Merton rule – where JCR officials recognise that students saying ‘gay’ to mean rubbish and swinging their wrists around was not intended maliciously, much less was it likely to lead to violence; and yet because these antics offended the sensibilities of a single student they took it upon themselves to chastise all students in a hectoring missive about what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

This points to a worrying level of sensitivity among today’s students, and a lackadaisical attitude towards words, arguments and freedom of speech. The JCR’s aim seemed to be, not to protect students from harm, but to protect the college’s reputation for being caring and accepting from the ‘unmannered’ behaviour of some students playing a game of pool.

Apparently the term ‘gay’ is now in common usage among young people to mean ‘lame’ or ‘rubbish’. This has caused some controversy, especially among gay rights groups who don’t like the idea that being called ‘gay’ is now seen as something negative. Last year Radio 1 presenter Chris Moyles was the subject of an internal BBC inquiry after he described a ringtone on air as ‘gay’. Leaving aside the question of why there has to be an inquiry every time a broadcaster says something un-PC, it is reasonable to ask: where could young people have got the idea that ‘gay = rubbish’?

How about from another term, very closely associated with gay culture: ‘camp’. ‘Camp’, as Stephen Bayley argued in his scratch-their-eyes-out book on New Labour, Labour Camp, is just a synonym for rubbish. Or, as Susan Sontag observed in Notes on Camp, first published in 1964, ‘The ultimate Camp statement [is] it’s good because it’s awful...’ Sontag noted that Camp culture tends to emphasise ‘texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content’; and that ‘homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard - and the most articulate audience - of Camp’.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to re-work ‘camp’ as ‘gay’, especially when so many gay celebrities tend to wallow in kitsch. If you, like many people both straight and gay, think Graham Norton and Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (now there’s a show that emphasises ‘style at the expense of content’) are pretty dreadful, then surely no one could blame you for associating ‘gay’, at least in its cultural sense, with ‘rubbish’.

The self-censoring attitude of Merton’s JCR reflects a broader view taken by many today: that free speech is something that can be easily sacrificed in the name of protecting people from utterances they might find offensive. The idea that students should behave according to some predetermined college ethos stands in stark contrast to the old idea of universities as places where young people should be free to experiment, to think, to argue, to learn, to say what they please in a student common room…. Enforcing an official dogma about words, phrases and actions betrays an elitist view of what sort of behaviour is appropriate, and what is not.

Worse, it treats students as children who either must be reprimanded for saying naughty words or who must be protected from the jokey words of big ‘bully boys’ by student officials posing as social workers. This infantilises students – which is hardly conducive to creating an atmosphere where students can grow, both educationally and personally.

Some students have reacted against the JCR’s illiberal telling-off. Merton student Ben Holroyd created an online group called The Gay Appreciation Society, which argued that: ‘The word “gay” has several definitions, only one of which is “homosexual”. Others include merry, licentious and wanton. When I miss a pot at the pool table, I sometimes refer to said shot as “gay”. Obviously, I do not consider the shot in question to be homosexual. Having said that, I rarely miss, so I seldom offend the minority of pedantic, over-sensitive fools at Merton.’

Perhaps the most pernicious thing about the Merton ruling on when it’s okay to say gay is that it represents almost an attempt at thought control. According to the JCR officials, it is okay to say ‘gay’ to refer to a homosexual man but not to describe a ‘rubbish’ pool shot. What is being monitored here is not just the use of language, but thought itself, the meaning behind one’s use of the word gay. We are presented with a two-tiered attitude to the word gay, where it’s okay to use it responsibly to mean homosexual but not irresponsibly to mean rubbish. It seems the JCR wants to get into Merton students’ minds to see what is really going on when they speak.

Even if some students had been expressing anti-gay prejudice in their use of words such as ‘gay’ and ‘poof’, then censure would be no solution. The idea that monitoring student language can have an impact on certain people’s prejudicial views, or on discrimination in the real world, is ridiculous. It merely brushes issues under the carpet, seeking to silence certain arguments rather than challenging them. Prejudice – which is a more serious matter than banter around a pool table – can only be effectively challenged in open debate, through reasoned argument.

University should be a place where we are free to experiment and to express ourselves in whatever way we deem fit. Disagreements can and should be settled between students themselves. Official sanctions telling us how we should behave only thwart the advance of genuine tolerance, which is based, not on intolerant censorship of uncomfortable views, but rather on establishing through open discussion which ideas are good, valuable and useful, and which are not.

The campus thought-police have no right to tell us how to think, speak or behave, and certainly not when we are just hanging out with friends and playing pool. They should bugger off and stop being so gay.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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26 February, 2007

HOMESCHOOLING THRIVING IN BRITAIN

More parents appear to be turning away from school in favour of teaching their children at home because they are unhappy with state education. A government-commissioned study into home tutoring indicated that about 16,000 children in England were now being educated at home, which researchers said implied a threefold increase since 1999.

Home tutoring has become increasingly popular since evidence emerged that home-educated children frequently perform better in national tests, GCSEs and A levels. In 2002 a study of home-educated children found that 64 per cent scored more than 75 per cent on the performance indicators of primary schools assessment, compared with 5.1 per cent of children nationally.

All parents have the right to teach their children at home. Unless a child has been removed from school, parents in England are not obliged to tell the local education authority. While the authority may monitor the children who have been deregistered from school, parents also have a right to refuse access to the child.

The study of nine local authorities found that home-educating parents had removed their children from the state system because they were worried about bullying, poor behaviour and quality of provision. Others thought that the special-needs education on offer for their children was not up to scratch or that they were required to start formal schooling too young, the study by York Consulting, for the Department for Education and Skills, said. “Some of the parents interviewed felt that standards of education had declined,” the report said. “This, coupled with a view that the current education system is overly bureaucratic, inflexible and assessment-driven, prompted some parents to home-educate.”

Most parents who took their children out of school were white British, but religious and cultural reasons had also prompted Muslim, Christian, Gypsy and traveller families to teach youngsters at home. Overall, 65 per cent of those being home-educated were of secondary age, compared with 35 per cent who were of primary age. The study found that some parents used formal and highly structured methods, including following the national curriculum, using online tutors and hiring professionals. Others were less conventional.

Source



What Are Education Markets, and Why Do They Matter?

Broadly speaking, a free education market is a system in which parents decide what, where, by whom, and for how long their children will be taught. It is a system in which educators have complete control over the curricula they offer, the teaching methods t hey employ, the prices they charge, and the hours they work; in which anyone who wants to open a school has the right to do so; and in which the profit motive drives the innovation and expansion of some substantial share of the education sector. . It is also a system in which consumers are the primary payers and in which government schools do not enjoy a subsidy advantage over private schools–that is, if the government runs "free" schools, it must make a comparable level of financial assistance available to families who prefer independent schools.

Contrary to common assumptions, education markets are not a recent, untested idea. The first education system in the world in which schooling reached beyond a tiny ruling elite was the market that arose in classical Athens during the 5th century BC. Today, education markets thrive everywhere from impoverished slums and villages of the developing world to the multi-billion-dollar after-school tutoring sector in Asia. Conversely, though fee-charging, nongovernment schooling does exist to a limited extent in many Western nations, it would be a mistake to say that those schools currently constitute a free market in education, given that virtually all are nonprofit and must compete with a high-spending (and yet tuition-free) government monopoly.

Why does it matter whether or not education is organized along free-market lines? It matters because a substantial body of international and historical research finds that education markets are a superior way to meet the public's educational goals, in terms of both individual needs and broader social effects. According to that research, market schools are typically more efficient, academically effective, well maintained, and responsive to the demand of families. In addition, students in independent schools in the United States have been found to exhibit levels of civic engagement and tolerance that are comparable to or better than those of their peers in public-sector schools. Systems in which parents can easily pick schools of their choice, and in which most education funding comes directly from parents, also reduce the cultural conflicts that arise over government-run, government-funded schooling. The less people are pressured to patronize or pay for school they disapprove of, the less social tension is created. Finally, in the industries in which markets have been allowed to flourish, they have driven dramatic improvement in quality and efficiency, spurred relentless innovation, and pressured producers into being responsive to the preferences of consumers.

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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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25 February, 2007

U.S. Test Scores at Odds With Rising High School Grades

High school seniors are performing worse overall on some national tests than they did in the previous decade, even though they are receiving significantly higher grades and taking what seem to be more rigorous courses, according to government data released yesterday.

The mismatch between stronger transcripts and weak test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation's report card, resonated in the Washington area and elsewhere. Some seized upon the findings as evidence of grade inflation and the dumbing-down of courses. The findings also prompted renewed calls for tough national standards and the expansion of the federal No Child Left Behind law. "We have our work cut out for us," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. "If, in fact, our high school students are taking more challenging courses and earning higher grades, we should be seeing greater gains in test scores."

About 35 percent of 12th-graders tested in 2005 scored proficient or better in reading -- the lowest percentage since the test was launched in 1992, the new data showed. And less than a quarter of seniors scored at least proficient on a new version of the math test; officials called those results disappointing but said they could not be compared to past scores. In addition, a previous report found that 18 percent of seniors in 2005 scored at least proficient in science, down from 21 percent in 1996.

At the same time, the average high school grade-point average rose from 2.68 in 1990 (about a B-minus) to 2.98 in 2005 (about a B), according to a study of transcripts from graduating seniors. The study also found that the percentage of graduating seniors who completed a standard or mid-level course of study rose from 35 to 58 percent in that time; meanwhile, the percentage who took the highest-level curriculum doubled, to 10 percent. "The core problem is that course titles don't really signal what is taught in the course and grades don't signal what a kid has learned," said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that supports No Child Left Behind. She added hyperbolically, "What we're going to end up with is the high school valedictorian who can't write three paragraphs."

Some experts say these educational mirages, which obscure low student achievement with inflated grades and tough-sounding class titles, disproportionately harm poor and minority students......

The potential for grade and course-title inflation is not confined to low-performing schools. Julie Greenberg, a math teacher at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, said she was under such pressure to raise grades that she used to keep two sets of books in her statistics class: one for the grades students deserved and one for the grades that appeared on report cards. "If a teacher were to really grade students on their true level of mastery, there would be such extraordinary levels of failure that it would not be tolerated, so most teachers don't do that," she said.

At a news conference yesterday near Capitol Hill, education experts expressed concern that white and Asian students continue to score consistently higher than black and Hispanic students in all subjects. They also said the overall discrepancy between the test scores and transcripts deserves close examination. Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversaw the exams and the transcript study, called the gap "very suspicious."

"For all of our talk of the achievement gap amongst subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap," said David W. Gordon, superintendent of Sacramento County schools in California. "There's a disconnect between what we want and expect our 12th-grade students to know and do and what our schools are actually delivering through instruction in the classroom."

Lawmakers said the low test scores would reinvigorate the debate over high school reform as Congress considers the renewal of No Child Left Behind. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said "disappointing" results underscore the need to recruit first-rate teachers to low-performing schools.

Source



California Teacher Upsets Muslims

Post lifted from Interested Participant. See original for links

As reported last week, a sixth-grade teacher at Riverview Elementary School, Randy Ingram, made comments in class about Muslims and Iranians which have produced a firesquall of controversy. The situation is quite troubling since I've seen statements made by Iranian President Ahmadinejad that were similar to, and more strident than, Ingram's remarks. If anything, Ingram was merely being candid in his discussion.

From Fresno Bee:

Kamal Abu-Shamsieh, director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, said that the teacher, during a lesson about the ancient Israelites, said Iranians are America's enemy because they want to destroy Israel. He also said that extreme Muslims and Iranians want to take over the United States, kill the teachers and hire their own teachers, Abu-Shamsieh said.

Students from Ingram's class were questioned by school officials with one recalling, "He said you don't have to be afraid of Muslims. It's the super-extreme Muslims who would want to hurt the United States."

However, one sixth-grade student's parents, Mashalah Boroujerdi and Rezvan Jamshidy, both Muslims from Iran, were upset by Ingram's comments, saying that their child was treated differently and distracted by the anti-Islamic remarks.

As a result, Boroujerdi called for the teacher to be disciplined, "... so this won't happen again." Also, Seyed Ali Ghazvini, a leader at the Islamic Cultural Center, weighed in and called for the installation of a discrimination hotline to allow families and students to report bigotry. Ingram faces possible reprimand as the investigation continues.



Extensive special treatment demanded for British Muslim pupils



Schools in Britain should allow girls to wear the headscarf in all lessons, including PE, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has recommended. Its guidance aims to ensure state schools meet Muslim pupils' needs. The 72-page document covers such topics as sex education, Ramadan and halal meals. It says schools should respect the decision of boys to grow a beard.

But head teachers warned that meeting any list of "demands" would pose major practical difficulties for schools. It says schools have an important part to play in fostering social cohesion. "Schools can play a vital role in facilitating the positive integration of Muslim pupils within the wider community and thereby preventing or at least beginning the process of tackling some of the problems of marginalisation."

In its examples of good practice, the MCB says the concept of "haya" or modesty must be respected by teachers and school staff. "In principle the dress for both boys and girls should be modest and neither tight-fitting nor transparent and not accentuate the body shape." Schools should allow girls to wear full-length skirts and boys and girls should be able to wear tracksuits in PE lessons.

The guidance criticises the "vast majority" of primary schools for asking boys and girls to change in mixed groups. "Muslim children are likely to exhibit resistance to this sort of compromising and immodest exposure, but are often pressurised to conform to institutional norms which do not take account of their own or their parents' beliefs and values," it says. Communal showering involves "profound indignity".

Muslim pupils should be allowed to sit out dance lessons, which are on the national curriculum for PE. "Muslims consider that most dance activities, as practised in the curriculum, are not consistent with the Islamic requirements for modesty as they may involve sexual connotations and messages." Headscarves for girls should be allowed, but the MCB guidelines stop short of endorsing the niqab or full-face veil.

Schools are urged to be particularly aware of the needs of Muslim pupils during Ramadan, the month of fasting. They should avoid scheduling exams during Ramadan and should refrain from sex education, as Muslims should avoid sexual thoughts and discourse at this time. Swimming lessons may also be problematic for some Muslim pupils, as there is a risk of swallowing water which they may believe breaks the fast.

MCB secretary general Muhammad Abdul Bari said: "Many of our schools have a cherished tradition of fostering an inclusive ethos which values and addresses the differences and needs of the communities they serve. "We are convinced that with a reasonable degree of mutual understanding and goodwill, even more progress can be made."

But the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said: "Schools are trying to create societies within their walls which are tolerant and celebratory. "I just worry that if the list of demands - if it is a list of demands - is too much, that it will simply create a backlash.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "This is not official guidance and is not endorsed by the government, nor does it have any binding power whatsoever on schools as some hysterical headlines claim today. "The Department for Education and Skills has no involvement with the document produced by the MCB."

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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24 February, 2007

DISASTROUS MATHEMATICS EDUCATION IN WASHINGTON STATE

Comment by a U Washington Prof. on the foolish "discovery" Math teaching method that now replaces the old but proven tell-and-practice method. Why are kids subjected to educational theories that sound fine but which do not have proven results? Do all the kids in a State have to be used as Guinea pigs just so some "educators" can feel good?

Washington students are coming to college unprepared for college math, with most unable to handle basic algebra. The math remediation rate in college is now 30 percent; 40 percent of high school students can't pass the WASL after two tries; math assessment scores of incoming freshmen have plunged at the UW; tutoring companies are enjoying triple-digit growth, and the move toward reform curricula is leaving students without the ability to do or understand math. Reform advocates like to parade Washington's average scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a mark of success. But varying demographics, curricula and application of this exam among states makes it a completely useless tool of comparison.

Supposed myth: Our state math standards are rated F. The truth: Our state math standards were rated an F and deserve it.

Reform math advocates like to paint the criticism of state math by the Fordham Foundation as the work of a conservative mind-set. In reality, the study that flunked our state standards was directed by an admittedly liberal California mathematician who selected the rest of the committee and was the primary author of the report. It's interesting that true-blue California was given the honors as having the best math standards in the nation.

Supposed myth: The WASL is a bad test. The truth: The WASL is not only a bad test, but it reinforces all the bad aspects of reform math.

The WASL exam reflects the reform math curricula that Warfield defends: Students are not taught, but asked to discover math for themselves, practice and competence with algorithms (such as long division and use of fractions) are neglected, and calculators are heavily applied. In fact, the WASL is too easy an exam and does not evaluate key ideas and skills needed in college and the real world. The WASL is also an extraordinarily expensive exam, and its development and scoring are done by one company, which also makes some of the leading reform textbooks. The WASL provides no usable information for the improvement of student learning or curriculum. Finally, because the WASL is used only in our state, we can't determine how well our students are doing compared with the rest of the country.

Warfield suggests the math problem will be solved if we just have more patience and put more resources into teacher training and parent education. That is a myth. The truth is that the reform math methods espoused by many in the educational community have made the situation infinitely worse and a generation of students are being lost to this experiment. More money is not the solution; better curricula that model the successes in those nations and states with the most success in math instruction is the only sure approach. Staying the course, as in international relations, is not always wise, especially when we already have entered the shoals of math failure and our children are the certain victims.

Source



ARROGANT ATTITUDE TO PARENTS

Comment from D.C. by Casey Lartigue

I tend not to address points raised by people commenting on posts. In the back-and-forth of such discussions, people sometimes say things they don't mean or take extreme positions. In other cases they are just trying to be provocative, especially when they can remain anonymous.

But a discussion on Greg Mankiw's blog caught my attention. That's because a couple of the folks suggested that parents don't really have the knowledge to make decisions about the quality of schools.

Between 2002-2004 I was actively involved in the fight to get school vouchers for families in DC. I often heard the argument that parents don't know how to choose between good and bad schools and that, anyway, parents had enough choices with the school system's "out-of-boundary" options and charters (that had also been opposed).

Without getting too deep into the out-of-boundary program, I'll point out that Woodrow Wilson HS, considered one of the best schools in the city, received 520 applications from parents out of the school's zone. That is even though it had ZERO available spaces for students to transfer to the school and parents KNEW there would be few spaces available. Deal Junior High, a feeder school for Wilson, had 532 applications, but only ten openings.

At the same time, D.C. parents shunned the low achieving schools. Anacostia Senior High School had 80 spaces available, but only seven applicants. Ballou SHS had 220 available spaces, but only three applicants. In 2002, fewer than 800 of the 7,000 children who applied for out-of-boundary spots were granted permission, mainly because many of the available slots are in low-performing schools (the same problem hindering NCLB). From my on-the-ground conversations with parents, visits to schools, going door-to-door in neighborhoods, based on community meetings I attended and speeches I gave, parents were quite aware of the level of violence and the level of achievement in the schools.

The main point is, based on what I wrote above: intellectuals, experts, and politicians greatly underestimate the knowledge and information that parents have about schools.

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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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23 February, 2007

Apple CEO Jobs attacks teacher unions

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers. Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs. "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference. "Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, 'I can't win.'"

In a rare joint appearance, Jobs shared the stage with competitor Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc. Both spoke to the gathering about the potential for bringing technological advances to classrooms. "I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said. "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap. "Apple just lost some business in this state, I'm sure," Jobs said.

Dell responded that unions were created because "the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good." "So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed." Dell also blamed problems in public schools on the lack of a competitive job market for principals.

Earlier in the panel discussion, Jobs told the crowd about his vision for textbook-free schools in the future. Textbooks would be replaced with a free, online information source that was constantly updated by experts, much like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. "I think we'd have far more current material available to our students, and we'd be freeing up a tremendous amount of funds that we could buy delivery vehicles with - computers, faster Internet, things like that," Jobs said. "And I also think we'd get some of the best minds in the country contributing."

Source



THE BRITISH ELITE VOTE WITH THEIR FEET WHEN IT COMES TO GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS

David Cameron said yesterday that he wanted to send his daughter to a state school and, like Tony Blair before him, entered into an educational controversy. Rather than choose a grant-maintained school, as Mr Blair did, the Conservative leader is opting for a faith school. “I’m quite a fan of faith schools and we’re looking at a church school we’re very keen on, but we’ll have to see what places are available,” he told You and Yours, the BBC Radio 4 programme.

Mr Cameron — who during his leadership campaign said that he did not attend church as often as he should — has become an active participant at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, West London, and hopes to get his three-year-old daughter, Nancy, into the highly prized and secluded school in the church grounds.

Mr Cameron’s regular appearances at the church risks raising speculation that, like many middle-class parents, his interest in the church could at least partially be influenced by his interest in its school. Mr Cameron’s aides denied the suggestion, insisting that he had always attended church regularly, near his home in London and in his Witney constituency. They said that he had been attending the church for about two years, that it had a crăche for his children, and that Nancy was 18 months from school starting age. “He goes to the church whenever he is in London on Sunday, which is very regularly,” a spokesman said.

St Mary Abbots Church of England Primary School lies less than two miles from Mr Cameron’s home. However, there are 46 other state schools that are closer, and not nearly as desirable. The ones closest to his London home are large and with low educational standards. The school, which was founded in 1645 and takes only 30 pupils a year, is among the best schools in the borough, with parents describing it as “gorgeous” and “traditional”. In stark contrast to his predecessors, Mr Cameron has often said that he wants to send his children to a state school. His four-year-old son, Ivan, who has cerebral palsy, attends a state special school.

Yesterday, in an uncanny echo of Tony Blair’s decision to send his children to the London Oratory School miles from Downing Street, Mr Cameron told the BBC that he wanted to send Nancy to a faith school. His main concern appeared to be that Nancy would be overwhelmed by an ordinary state school, with the two closest to his home having more than 300 pupils. “I do worry that some of the primary schools — maybe I’m being overprecious and protective of my daughter — but you sort of feel that your small child is going to go into this enormous state primary school and may get a bit lost,” he said.

However, unlike Mr Blair, who was criticised for sending his children to a selective school, there is no suggestion of hypocrisy. “I want parents to have a choice. In London you have a choice,” he said.

The school has a complex admissions procedure, but parents’ chances of getting a child in are far higher if they play an active part in the church. Father Gillean Craig, chairman of the governors, said: “We’re delighted with the way he [Mr Cameron] and his wife play a strong part in the church.”

Source



Australia: Literacy breakthrough?

Kids to learn plain English at last, apparently

QUEENSLAND students from Year 1 to Year 10 will have a new plain English syllabus from the middle of next year. It will emphasise the teaching of reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation and the importance of literature. "Curriculum waffle is out, clear English is in," Education Minister Rod Welford said. He said the new syllabus would take a "nuts-and-bolts" approach to help children write well and speak clearly while encouraging them to read and think.

The syllabus is being drawn up by the Queensland Studies Authority after a review of the preschool to Year 10 syllabus last year. The review was conducted by Sunshine Coast-based education consultant Ray Land, a former teacher and education official. Part of the draft syllabus will be available on the authority's website from next month for public scrutiny and feedback, and the full syllabus is to be ready for approval by the authority's board by October. This will allow support materials and teacher training to be provided ahead of the introduction of the syllabus from the start of Semester 2 next year.

The new syllabus was welcomed by Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations executive officer Greg Donaldson. "If this new QSA syllabus is going to improve the literacy levels of our kids we would support it," he said. Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said teachers had been heavily involved in the process and were satisfied with the new syllabus.

The redeveloped syllabus would be organised in three strands: speaking and listening, reading and viewing, and writing and shaping. "There will be greater emphasis on correct spelling, grammar and punctuation," said QSA assistant director (syllabus services) Bob Dudley. He said the syllabus would be more balanced in terms of the texts studied with wide range of books, poetry and plays to be read. He said material from the internet, films and television programs would also be included.

The syllabus will be much more specific than it is at present. For example, it is envisaged that by the end of Year 3 students will be able to:

* Identify and record main ideas and make simple inferences.

* Organise and sequence one or two main ideas with some supporting detail.

* Create texts that tell stories, recount, report on, explain, give opinions or transact.

* Use punctuation to signal the meaning boundaries of simple sentences.

* Create and play with representations of people, places, events and things for an audience by selecting descriptive words, images, facial expressions and gestures.

The syllabus requires teachers to use a range of measures, including phonics and whole word recognition, to teach reading to young children. Students' progress will also be tightly monitored under the new syllabus. The syllabus is being drawn up by a team of QSA staff with input from a panel of 20 teachers. Focus groups of parents have also been consulted

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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22 February, 2007

Future School

Alvin Toffler tells us what's wrong -- and right -- with public education

Forty years after he and his wife Heidi set the world alight with Future Shock, Alvin Toffler remains a tough assessor of our nation's social and technological prospects. Though he's best known for his work discussing the myriad ramifications of the digital revolution, he also loves to speak about the education system that is shaping the hearts and minds of America's future. We met with him near his office in Los Angeles, where the celebrated septuagenarian remains a clear and radical thinker.

You've been writing about our educational system for decades. What's the most pressing need in public education right now?

Shut down the public education system.

That's pretty radical.

I'm roughly quoting (Microsoft chairman) Bill Gates, who said, "We don't need to reform the system; we need to replace the system."

Why not just readjust what we have in place now? Do we really need to start from the ground up?

We should be thinking from the ground up. That's different from changing everything. However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.

Let's look back at the history of public education in the United States. You have to go back a little over a century. For many years, there was a debate about whether we should even have public education. Some parents wanted kids to go to school and get an education; others said, "We can't afford that. We need them to work. They have to work in the field, because otherwise we starve." There was a big debate. Late in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, business leaders began complaining about all these rural kids who were pouring into the cities and going to work in our factories. Business leaders said that these kids were no good, and that what they needed was an educational system that would produce "industrial discipline."

What is industrial discipline?

Well, first of all, you've got to show up on time. Out in the fields, on the farms, if you go out with your family to pick a crop, and you come ten minutes late, your uncle covers for you and it's no big deal. But if you're on an assembly line and you're late, you mess up the work of ten thousand people down the line. Very expensive. So punctuality suddenly becomes important.

You don't want to be tardy.

Yes. In school, bells ring and you mustn't be tardy. And you march from class to class when the bells ring again. And many people take a yellow bus to school. What is the yellow bus? A preparation for commuting. And you do rote and repetitive work as you would do on an assembly line.

How does that system fit into a world where assembly lines have gone away?

It doesn't. The public school system is designed to produce a workforce for an economy that will not be there. And therefore, with all the best intentions in the world, we're stealing the kids' future.

Do I have all the answers for how to replace it? No. But it seems to me that before we can get serious about creating an appropriate education system for the world that's coming and that these kids will have to operate within, we have to ask some really fundamental questions. And some of these questions are scary. For example: Should education be compulsory? And, if so, for who? Why does everybody have to start at age five? Maybe some kids should start at age eight and work fast. Or vice versa. Why is everything massified in the system, rather than individualized in the system? New technologies make possible customization in a way that the old system -- everybody reading the same textbook at the same time -- did not offer.

You're talking about customizing the educational experience.

Exactly. Any form of diversity that we can introduce into the schools is a plus. Today, we have a big controversy about all the charter schools that are springing up. The school system people hate them because they're taking money from them. I say we should radically multiply charter schools, because they begin to provide a degree of diversity in the system that has not been present. Diversify the system.

In our book Revolutionary Wealth, we play a game. We say, imagine that you're a policeman, and you've got a radar gun, and you're measuring the speed of cars going by. Each car represents an American institution. The first one car is going by at 100 miles an hour. It's called business. Businesses have to change at 100 miles an hour because if they don't, they die. Competition just puts them out of the game. So they're traveling very, very fast. Then comes another car. And it's going at 10 miles an hour. That's the public education system. Schools are supposed to be preparing kids for the business world of tomorrow, to take jobs, to make our economy functional. The schools are changing, if anything, at 10 miles an hour. So, how do you match an economy that requires 100 miles an hour with an institution like public education? A system that changes, if at all, at 10 miles an hour?

It's a tough juxtaposition. So, what to do? Suppose you were made head of the U.S. Department of Education. What would be the first items on your agenda?

The first thing I'd say: "I want to hear something I haven't heard before." I just hear the same ideas over and over and over again. I meet teachers who are good and well intentioned and smart, but they can't try new things, because there are too many rules. They tell me that "the bureaucratic rules make it impossible for me to do what you're suggesting." So, how do we bust up that? It is easy to develop the world's best technologies compared with how hard it is to bust up a big bureaucracy like the public education system with the enormous numbers of jobs dependent on it and industries that feed it.

Here's a complaint you often hear: We spend a lot of money on education, so why isn't all that money having a better result?

It's because we're doing the same thing over and over again. We're holding forty or fifty million kids prisoner for x hours a week. And the teacher is given a set of rules as to what you're going to say to the students, how you're going to treat them, what you want the output to be, and let no child be left behind. But there's a very narrow set of outcomes. I think you have to open the system to new ideas.

When I was a student, I went through all the same rote repetitive stuff that kids go through today. And I did lousy in any number of things. The only thing I ever did any good in was in English. It's what I love. You need to find out what each student loves. If you want kids to really learn, they've got to love something. For example, kids may love sports. If I were putting together a school, I might create a course, or a group of courses, on sports. But that would include the business of sports, the culture of sports, the history of sports -- and once you get into the history of sports, you then get into history more broadly.

Integrate the curricula.

Yeah -- the culture, the technology, all these things.

Like real life.

Like real life, yes! And, like in real life, there is an enormous, enormous bank of knowledge in the community that we can tap into. So, why shouldn't a kid who's interested in mechanical things or engines or technology meet people from the community who do that kind of stuff, and who are excited about what they are doing and where it's going? But at the rate of change, the actual skills that we teach, or that they learn by themselves, about how to us his gizmo or that gizmo, that's going to be obsolete -- who knows? -- in five years or in five minutes.

So, that's another thing: Much of what we're transmitting is doomed to obsolescence at a far more rapid rate than ever before. And that knowledge becomes what we call obsoledge: obsolete knowledge. We have this enormous bank of obsolete knowledge in our heads, in our books, and in our culture. When change was slower, obsoledge didn't pile up as quickly. Now, because everything is in rapid change, the amount of obsolete knowledge that we have -- and that we teach -- is greater and greater and greater. We're drowning in obsolete information. We make big decisions -- personal decisions -- based on it, and public and political decisions based on it.

Is the idea of a textbook in the classroom obsolete?

I'm a wordsmith. I write books. I love books. So I don't want to be an accomplice to their death. But clearly, they're not enough. The textbooks are the same for every child; every child gets the same textbook. Why should that be? Why shouldn't some kids get a textbook -- and you can do this online a lot more easily than you can in print -- why shouldn't a kid who's interested in one particular thing, whether it's painting or drama, or this or that, get a different version of the textbook than the kid sitting in the next seat, who is interested in engineering?

Let's have a little exercise. Walk me through this school you'd create. What do the classrooms look like? What are the class sizes? What are the hours?

It's open twenty-four hours a day. Different kids arrive at different times. They don't all come at the same time, like an army. They don't just ring the bells at the same time. They're different kids. They have different potentials. Now, in practice, we're not going to be able to get down to the micro level with all of this, I grant you, but in fact, I would be running a twentyfour- hour school, I would have nonteachers working with teachers in that school, I would have the kids coming and going at different times that make sense for them.

The schools of today are essentially custodial: They're taking care of kids in work hours that are essentially nine to five -- when the whole society was assumed to work. Clearly, that's changing in our society. So should the timing. We're individualizing time; we're personalizing time. We're not having everyone arrive at the same time, leave at the same time. Why should kids arrive at the same time and leave at the same time?

And when do kids begin their formalized education?

Maybe some start at two or three, and some start at seven or eight -- I don't know. Every kid is different.

What else?

I think that schools have to be completely integrated into the community, to take advantage of the skills in the community. So, there ought to be business offices in the school, from various kinds of business in the community.

The name of your publication is Edutopia, and utopia is three-quarters of that title. I'm giving a utopian picture, perhaps. I don't know how to solve all those problems and how to make that happen. But what it all boils down to is, get the current system out of your head.

How does the role of the teacher change?

I think (and this is not going to sit very well with the union) that maybe teaching shouldn't be a lifetime career. Maybe it's important for teachers to quit for three or four years and go do something else and come back. They'll come back with better ideas. They'll come back with ideas about how the outside world works, in ways that would not have been available to them if they were in the classroom the whole time. So, let's sit down as a culture, as a society, and say, "Teachers, parents, people outside, how do we completely rethink this? We're going to create a new system from ground zero, and what new ideas have you got?" And collect those new ideas. That would be a very healthy thing for the country to do.

You're advocating for fundamental radical changes. Are you an optimist when it comes to public education?

I just feel it's inevitable that there will have to be change. The only question is whether we're going to do it starting now, or whether we're going to wait for catastrophe.

Source



Australia: Big squeals about performance pay for teachers

The Federal Opposition says the only way to ensure the quality of teachers in public schools is to work cooperatively with the states. Education Minister Julie Bishop wants to introduce performance pay for teachers and says it could be determined by exam results or feedback from principals, parents and students. If the states do not submit to the plan in the next education funding agreement, the Minister says the Commonwealth could withhold some state funding.

But Labor's education spokesman Steven Smith says that is not the right approach. "Yes, the quality of the teacher in the classroom is absolutely essential, yes we want to reward quality teaching, but doing it simply on the basis of the outcomes of standardised tests, doing it on the basis of cheap political points is not the way to proceed," he said.

The Queensland Teachers Union says the Federal Government wants to take control of the portfolio from the states. Union state president Steve Ryan says members are looking at a loss of conditions if Ms Bishop gets her way. "There are two issues here one is the proposal itself regards performance-based pay and the loopy ideas the Minister has put out in today's press, and the second issue is of course how the Commonwealth treats the states," he said. "All teachers in the state system across Australia are employed by state governments and it's curious to see the federal minister trying to interfere in that process."

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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21 February, 2007

The Swedish School Voucher System

Post lifted from British blogger Sinclair's Musings. See the original for links

DK rightly asked, after my earlier post on the politics of school choice, if I could find some details of the Swedish system to back up my claim that school vouchers would not eliminate educational bureaucracy. I found the details in a study done by two researchers working for The Swedish Research Institute of Trade on behalf of Reform. The studies focus is on whether the number of independent schools would increase, it did, but it includes this section discussing the conditions attached to the voucher:

"However, in 1990 the system was altered and municipalities were given wider authority over their own schools. They were also given full financial responsibility for the school system. In 1992 the Swedish system was further advanced and a new school reform based on a system of school vouchers was implemented. As the objective of the new reform was to give independent schools funding on the same terms as municipality schools it radically changed the rules for funding independent and upper-secondary schools. Hence, under the new law, municipalities were obliged to give funding to independent schools on a per capita basis amounting to 85 per cent of what municipality schools received. The 85 per cent rule was seen to be necessary in order to avoid putting the municipal schools at a disadvantage, since the municipalities would still have to account for various administrative and overhead costs related to their overall responsibility for the school system. The system was further advanced in 2001. Funding of independent schools would now be decided in the same way as funding is given to municipal schools. This means that independent schools receive a municipality funding that is based on the undertaking of the school and the specific needs of each pupil. On its core, the new reform entails that anyone in Sweden can set up a school and receives public funding. Moreover, pupils and parents are free to choose whichever school they like.

Still, independent schools in Sweden must be approved by the Swedish National Agency for Education and meet certain criteria in order to receive funding. They have to meet the educational standards set up for the school system and must work in line with the targets set for the compulsory educational system. They must also be open to admit all children regardless of their ability, religion or ethnic origin. Last, they are not allowed to charge fees. Among the approved schools are schools owned by teacher or parent co-operatives, non-profit organisations and privately owned firms. Municipalities are allowed to give an opinion on whether they consider the establishment of an independent school to be harmful to existing schools, and the Swedish National Agency for Education takes their views into account. However, municipalities have no veto, and are bound by law to finance an independent school once it has been approved. On several occasions, the Agency has approved schools against the will of the municipalities."

The first paragraph is a little uncertain as to whether the voucher is for the full amount that state schools receive or if it is still 85% as in the original legislation. However, this article makes it clear; Sweden now has a voucher for 100% of the amount state schools receive.

The first thing to note is the similarity to the Conservative proposals for education at the last election in terms of preventing the topping up of the voucher by parents from their private income. I doubt this is a coincidence and it does make the major criticism, cited in my earlier post, that this will be a subsidy to the rich invalid. It is, I believe, more limiting than the old Conservative proposals in that our proposal under Howard was for voucher schools to be able to select by ability which is not allowed under the Swedish system; this does remove the "cream skimming" critique of school vouchers although it is a sacrifice in terms of educational freedom.

The second is that, as I predicted, the educational bureaucracy has not been abolished. There is still a DFES-style national organisation to set the overall standards and ensure that schools stick to them. Also, there is still municipal authority bureaucracy in order to determine the level of funding that is required (perhaps to account for greater costs in different regions); this does highlight that we may not want perfect equality of funding as schools with the hard job of teaching in deprived inner cities may need extra funds for specialist support.

After some more investigation the evidence is that this scheme has worked well so far. In particular this study suggests that independent school competition has improved the performance of state schools. Certainly this was the story with the privatisations of the Thatcher years; privatisations shook up the rest of the economy in a very good way. Equally, it is popular:

"As early as 1993, a poll conducted by the National Agency of Education found that "85 per cent of Swedes value their new school choice rights" and "59 per cent of Swedish parents think that teachers work harder when there is school choice" (CGR 1997: 2). This was true even though only two percent of Swedes had exercised those rights. When the Social Democrats returned to power in 1994, the benefits and popularity of school choice were already becoming evident. They were felt both by the children attending new independent schools and by those who remained in the government-run system, which was starting to respond to parental concerns. As one Swedish professor of education concluded, "one cannot deny that the reform has made municipal schools more efficient" (Miron 1996: 79)."

Another positive to think about in conservative terms, not discussed in the studies, is that once the principle of school independence and vouchers is introduced I would expect that, over time, this will build a sizeable constituency for allowing fees. Once the principle of the independent financing is admitted it will be difficult to deny those middle classes who would like to spend a little to improve their schools; particularly as these schools will be happy to make arrangements for bursaries in return. This reform would build demand for further conservative policies.

In conclusion, I think that the Swedish system's results suggest that the Conservatives had settled on a very appropriate solution with their educational policy at the last election. It was moderate enough to be politically realistic while adventurous enough to make a real difference to educational performance and political reality. I am unsure whether the political advantages of disallowing selection by ability is worth the sacrifice in educational freedom; there is also possibly something in the "cream skimming" argument. However, it is clear that even under the limited terms of the voucher in Sweden they are highly worthwhile both in terms of results and politics. Equally, there is no serious evidence they are a particular political risk, while we did not win in 2005 does anyone seriously think that was because of our education policy?

A great way for Cameron to use the positive public perception of him he spent last year cultivating would be to have another go at selling school choice under the Swedish model.



Too few science graduates in Britain

But plenty of sociologists, no doubt

GlaxoSmithKline has given warning that a lack of UK science graduates is forcing Britain's largest drugs company to recruit from overseas to fill key research posts. Jackie Hunter, a senior vice-president who leads one of GSK's main global drug development centres, said that Britain is suffering an acute shortfall of scientists. Dr Hunter said that it was "absolutely vital" for the UK to address the issue to ensure the long-term competitiveness of the country's pharmaceutical industry and to prevent a gradual drift of jobs and investment overseas. The sector contributed 3.4 billion pounds in exports to Britain's trade balance in 2004 - more than any other industry sector.

She said that the situation was forcing GSK to seek more and more recruits from France, Spain, Germany and India. In one area, synthetic chemistry, GSK said that just 40 of 70 new placements at its research facilities in Harlow, Essex, and Stevenage, Hertfordshire, were were graduates of UK universities. Dr Hunter said that the problem had been compounded by the decision of several universities, such as Cardiff and Exeter, to scrap their chemistry departments due to rising cost pressures. "A lot of universities look at laboratory-based courses as something that is very expensive for them to run," she said. "The issue is the number of places. There is a real need across the industry [for more UK graduates]."

In response to the staffing shortage, GSK has forged links with the Societe Francaise de Chimie and other overseas organisations to attract enough high-calibre graduates. "It's an increasingly globalised labour market," Dr Hunter said. GSK employs 15,000 people in research and development globally, 6,000 of them in the UK. Britain's pharmaceutical industry employed 73,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more indirectly in support roles. The value of UK pharmaceutical exports in 2005 was 12.2 billion, or more than 166,000 pounds per employee.

Source

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

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

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

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

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



20 February, 2007

The progressive destruction of medical education

By Dr Amanda Neill -- a former lecturer in anatomy and related disciplines

Medical education is in serious trouble, and has been for a number of years. Recently there have been several articles questioning the level of the most basic knowledge of the medical graduates, much of it coming from the new graduates and students themselves. Surveys - some of them initiated by medical students - have revealed that they do not feel they know enough anatomy, physiology and pathology; that they are not taught, but rather thrown into a "sea" to learn in a "self-directed" fashion, and that they do not feel prepared enough to go out to practise medicine. Never has a profession's education been so mutilated, mucked-about-with, or mucked-up.

It is obvious to anyone that to fix a human body one should at least know about its components (anatomy), how these components interact (physiology), and what can potentially go wrong with them (pathology). All the rest is smoke and mirrors.

Yet the smoke and mirrors is all that the medical schools are teaching. Students these days can have remarkably good understanding of technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging, while remaining startlingly ignorant of the bones, fascia and other structures of the hand. No GP surgery will have an MRI scanner, yet every GP will routinely see patients with sore or injured hands.

One of the major reasons for the shift in what is being taught is that medical education is not being taught by doctors. Doctors are not teaching student doctors; rather science and other graduates with or without PhDs have gazumped university staff teaching appointments. It is very difficult to find a medical graduate on any university staff, and even rarer to find them in the medical schools. This is no accident.

In the 80s and certainly the 90s, medical schools started to rid themselves in a determined fashion of medical graduates on their staff and employ science graduates with strong research backgrounds to teach medical students - when they had the time. These researchers on the whole did not have any vocational training, had never been on a ward or treated a patient, and did not have a strong interest in teaching. Certainly they did not have, and were not required to have, teaching as their main priority, and still do not. Teaching of vocational degrees such as medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and veterinary science should never have been given to those in a research-focused environment such as the modern university. Neither teaching nor research is then done well.

When medicine and then other vocational courses first became taken over by this shift in thinking, initially medicine was taught by medical graduates, who knew what was needed, had been on the wards, and had a thorough knowledge of the human body. Gradually the art of teaching medical subjects and the need to teach them became lost as the ever-increasing number of PhDs grew and vied for positions on the university staff. After all as John Collins, dean of education for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, wrote in Weekend Health (December 16-17, 2006), there has been an explosion of medical knowledge and technology.

Whatever explosion there may be, a leg is still a leg and a stomach still a stomach. Despite Darwin's theory of evolution, these are remarkably constant, and the structures are unchanging. To fix them (the leg and the stomach and all the other structures in the body), to understand them, the doctor needs to know where they are, what is above, below, in front and behind, and what common variations of these arrangements may exist. This knowledge should not just be the province of the surgeon and the radiologist.

We live in dangerous times. Universities are currently agitating to take over, or have already taken over, the teaching of other vocational courses such as for ambulance officers, paramedics, police, physiotherapists, chiropractors, occupational therapists and nurses - and in each case the pattern is the same. Less and less of the training is done by those who have been working in the relevant profession, and more and more PhD graduates with a research focus take on the teaching and designing of courses, with a view to teaching on the side and/or to protecting their area of expertise, no matter how irrelevant. They also have minimal teaching experience. Students learn more and more about less and less relevant material. They are less ready to take on their role as a doctor, or the work necessary to do this job.

Currently in many courses textbooks are no longer prescribed, but a recommended reading list and stacks of photocopied papers and hastily prepared lecture notes are given to the students. They are told to go and get on with it - and this is in the more structured courses. Others are completely self-directed and there is no actual teaching at all. This is lazy and cannot readily be evaluated. It is subject to change on a whim and leaves the student floundering in a sea of few definites. Facts, half facts, and fashionable views are weighted the same and it is difficult to gain an ability to determine what is true and what is "true for the moment".

Most doctors want to be doctors, and although many have open and enquiring minds and may want to go further into research and other developments, this is not what medicine is all about. It is about medicine, not the latest whiz-bang gadget, or the latest theoretical approach. By all means if this is the direction the student/doctor wants to take after graduation, so be it. But a lot of current research is too narrow, precisely because many researchers lack a basic comprehensive knowledge of the body's structures. For example, pathology of the liver can affect the eye, but research about the eye will be flawed if those conducting it lack this basic understanding of other organs and what relevance this may have.

Source



A teacher must not have girls sit on his lap

Another step towards making male teachers an endangered species

Prosecutors filed eight new child molestation counts on Wednesday against a substitute elementary schoolteacher suspected of inappropriately touching his young students. Each of the new counts against Eric Norman Olsen represents a new victim, meaning Olsen now stands formally charged with molesting nine girls. He faces up to 28 years in state prison if convicted as charged. Olsen pleaded not guilty to the new counts during a brief hearing Wednesday morning in West Valley Superior Court.

His attorney, Gina Kershaw, said afterward the allegations against Olsen have been blown out of proportion. "He's really a good guy who has been thrown into an unfortunate situation," the attorney said. Kershaw said no students have reported Olsen touched their private parts.

The only evidence suggesting his contact with them was at all sexual is a letter he wrote at the urging of police in which he admitted to gaining sexual arousal from having young girls sit on his lap. Kershaw said she believes Ontario police used coercive tactics to trick Olsen into writing a false confession. "They're good at what they do, they interrogate, that's what they did in this case," the defense attorney said.

Olsen was arrested Aug. 3 on suspicion of molesting a 10-year-old girl at the Berlyn School in Ontario. In that case, authorities said Olsen had the girl sit on his lap and rubbed her back underneath her shirt. He was charged with three counts of child molestation stemming from that case and he remained in jail while police sought other possible victims. Deputy District Attorney Jason Anderson said six of the new victims were students in the Central School District in Rancho Cucamonga. Olsen is accused of molesting all six on the same day, Dec. 20, 2005. One new victim is from the Fontana Unified School District. Authorities believe Olsen molested her sometime in the 2005-06 school year, according to a criminal complaint. The remaining victim is from the Ontario-Montclair School District. Prosecutors allege Olsen molested her sometime in March.

All eight girls were about 5 to 7 years old at the time of the alleged incidents. All the allegations involve Olsen placing the girls on his lap, the prosecutor said. "There are witnesses to it," Anderson said. "The young ladies are clear about who the teacher was and what the conduct was." Police have said at least 12 possible victims have been identified since Olsen's arrest, including the eight represented by the new charges on Wednesday.

Source. (To avoid the risk of a trial, the teacher eventually pleaded "No contest". Sentence has not yet been handed down)

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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



19 February, 2007

Colleges review ethics of textbook selection

Colleges are grappling with how to balance conflict-of-interest policy with professors' authority to choose textbooks. Prices have tripled in 20 years

A Miami Dade College professor took a trip to San Francisco, paid for by a textbook publisher. Weeks later, his three-member committee selected the publisher's book as required reading for all anatomy students at MDC's Kendall campus and the department chairman approved. Retail cost at the college bookstore: $178.50.

A recent state ethics finding on the trip two years ago has raised questions about MDC's ambiguous rules for choosing textbooks. And it has opened a window into the nation's $6 billion textbook industry, whose prices have tripled in the past two decades. MDC, the nation's largest community college, is a key market for publishers, with more than 100,000 potential customers paying an average $800 a year and up for books and supplies, according to federal statistics.

The state ethics commission found probable cause that anatomy professor Alfonso Pino knew or should have known the trip to San Francisco was given to influence him. The panel declined to treat it as an ethics violation, in part because the weekend trip, which cost less than $700 for airfare and hotel, ``left little time if any . . . to participate in junket-like activities.'' Pino declined interview requests. His attorney, Mark Richard, who also heads the union that represents MDC professors, said Pino volunteered his time to review books, an essential task for educators. ''It's far cheaper to ask professors to give of their time, for just expense reimbursement, than to pay us our hourly rates to review these things,'' Richard said.

The ruling comes as universities and colleges grapple with how to construct conflict-of-interest policies without compromising professors' authority to choose teaching materials. MDC has no rules governing what professors can accept from a textbook company or what they must disclose. Pearson Education, Benjamin Cummings' parent company, had offered Pino a $250 honorarium but never paid him, the investigation found.

Professors say lucrative offers from publishers are rare. One small company made headlines in 2003 when it offered faculty $4,000 to review and require books, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education report.

The man who lodged the ethics complaint against Pino, Christopher Turley, was a textbook salesman whose book wasn't chosen. Turley has since left John Wiley & Sons, which he said did not offer trips. ''I didn't see the point of going in and competing. . . . There's no transparency on anything,'' Turley said. Norma Goonen, MDC's top academic official, said, ``This is normal practice. It's not something nefarious or horrible.'' MDC prohibits professors from accepting payment in exchange for choosing books but allows honoraria for reviewing books, said MDC attorney Carmen Dominguez. Honorarium limits are not defined, and professors are not required to report them. ''Either the lack of effective disclosure procedures or the insufficiency of disclosure in this case is troubling,'' said Tony Alfieri, director of the University of Miami's Center for Ethics in Public Policy.

At the University of Miami, a private school, professors consulting for a publisher must recuse themselves from book-selection committees, said spokeswoman Margot Winick. Florida International University and Florida Atlantic University require professors to report outside income, but conflict-of-interest rules do not cover textbook vendor trips. ''Everybody is struggling with this . . . [to] make more specific guidelines,'' said Diane Alperin, FAU associate provost of academic affairs. Broward Community College has no separate policy beyond state ethics laws. Ken Ross, vice president for academic affairs, said faculty paid by publishers to review books or attend conferences should not pick textbooks. ''We're looking to make them [guidelines] a little clearer,'' he said.

MDC's textbook policy, like some from other colleges, deals only with potential conflicts arising from books written by professors, who may not participate in selecting their own books. MDC, like other community colleges, is covered by state ethics rules. Choosing textbooks is considered an academic freedom, and the choices tend not to be treated like typical government purchases, even when public universities are involved. The state ethics commission agreed that professors do not meet the legal definition of purchasing agents. By comparison, at the local government level in Miami-Dade County, no one involved in purchasing may accept a trip paid for by a vendor. ''It may be an issue that a lot of colleges and universities should look at,'' said Dominguez, of MDC.

It's not hard to find students complaining about the cost of textbooks. ''I was very shocked [by the price]. There were no used [books] left,'' said Bridgett Shane, 20, an anatomy student in Pino's class who calls him ``an awesome professor.'' Overall, prices for books and supplies rose at twice the inflation rate between 1986 and 2004, according to a 2005 federal government audit. Textbook companies have increasingly put out newer editions of books more quickly -- every three or four years instead of every four to five years -- making it harder for students to buy and sell used books. Publishers told auditors they update information and include more interactive extras to meet professors' demands.

The March 12, 2005, meeting attended by Pino included 14 other professors from across the country. ''It's pretty widely done,'' said David Hakensen, a spokesman for the publisher. ``This is the one way that we get feedback on our product.''

A spokeswoman for Pearson's rival McGraw-Hill, Mary Skafidas, said her company also schedules regular faculty focus groups around the country to get professional feedback, though not to review specific books. She said professors are chosen for their expertise.

Invitations to conferences seem to vary among schools and departments. English Department faculty members at FIU, for example, get pizza parties paid for by sales representatives, but not out-of-town trips, said Carmela Pinto-McIntire, the department chairwoman. Biology Department members get hors d'oeuvres trays, and some professors get a stipend of $100 or $200 to review books, said Gene Rosenberg, associate department chairman. ''Trips? Gosh, I wish,'' Pinto-McIntire said. ``Nobody's ever offered me a trip.''

Source



A NEW RELIGION FOR SCOTTISH SCHOOLS

In an email to Benny Peiser, economist Alan Peacock [pavone@blueyonder.co.uk] -- now aged 84 -- compares religious education of the past with Greenie education today. An abridged version appeared in "The Scotsman". A few days ago, Sir Alan Peacock celebrated his fiftieth anniversary of becoming a Professor of Economics, successively at Edinburgh, York, Buckingham and Heriot-Watt

On Friday 2nd February at the University of Edinburgh the Secretary of State for Environment etc. delivered an excellent piece of propaganda on the virtues of the latest UN report on climate change, with all the usual arguments for an apocalyptic view, succinctly presented. He revealed an interesting fact about the 'global' nature of his department's campaign to keep us on the straight and narrow - the issue of a pamphlet for schools. This is already claimed as a great success, getting the young in line to be in profound agreement with the Climate scientists backing the Minister.

Irreverent thoughts hit me at this moment in his disquisition. Did they use rhyming couplets - remember "coughs and sneezes, spread diseases"? I recalled the naughty cautionary tale attributed to Hilaire Belloc, suitably adapted by yours truly -"Uncle George and Auntie Mabel, fainted at the breakfast table, let this be an awful warning, never counter global warming!" No prizes to the elderly multitudes who remember the original last line!

The next thought I had was even more subversive. Could those of us who questioned whether the UN predictions were firmly based on best practice science and economics be permitted to enter the 'market' of ideas and issue schools with an alternative view? Of course, tender minds must be guarded against the threat of inflammatory documents that would corrupt the morals and manners of the young but this is no argument for 'zero tolerance' of views counter to officially approved scientific nostrums.

A reasonable case can be made out against inundating schools with a confusion of different standpoints on fundamental issues regarding our future. However, I would be less suspicious of raising barriers to entry against a different view on climate change had I not read, to my immense surprise, the written evidence of the Government Chief Scientist, Sir David King, to the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs (2005) concerning climate change. He categorizes sceptics who have no 'scientific training' (undefined) and other 'professional lobbyists' as likely as not to be hired guns, and, as some of other establishment figures have suggested, in the pay of the oil companies.

When some of us recently issued a detailed critique of the much-acclaimed Stern Report, which gives its economic blessing to the establishment view and is endorsed by the Royal Society, it was perhaps hardly necessary for us to state quite clearly that none of us received any financial or institutional support for our work. But it seemed advisable to do so. (See the journal, World Economics, October - December 2006 , p. 166)

I received a sound elementary education at the Grove Academy, Broughty Ferry (1928-33!) in grammar, spelling, arithmetic, singing, and bible studies for which I am immensely grateful. Of course, our daily input of religion was according to the doctrines of the Church of Scotland, but no attempt was made at converting us. I only remember one curious case where our routine was given over to the Band of Hope who were allowed to proselytize in a sensational manner on the moral and physical damage resulting from the consumption of alcohol. We were given an afternoon off in order to be conducted round a macabre visual display in large jars showing the corroding effect of alcohol on the human body with all the attendant excitement of a trip to Dundee, and then, some weeks later, were obliged to write an essay on The Dangers of Drink , and in school time .

I admit that there would be some teachers who would regard the Band of Hope's mission as entirely consonant with Christian doctrine, other than in regard to the medicinal properties of whisky. Likewise, environmental studies, which appear to be rapidly replacing traditional doctrine as the kernel of religious observance in schools, will admit the occasional display of the wares, say , of the World Wildlife Fund- much admired by the Secretary of State - or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, as friendly sects, whatever misgivings one might harbour about the effects that animal behaviour could have on emission of carbon and methane gases.



More school hysteria

To an Arizona middle school, Batman! Three schools in the north Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek were on lockdown for about 45 minutes Wednesday morning after a student at Desert Arroyo Middle School reported seeing a person dressed as Batman run across campus, jump a fence and disappear into the desert, Scottsdale police Sgt. Mark Clark said.

The student described the person as 6 feet 3 inches tall and possibly male. "We're assuming it was male, although they did have a mask on," Clark said. Officers combed the desert around the middle school. A nearby elementary school and high school also were on lockdown as officers sought the caped crusader. The result - no Batman. "It's just one of those interesting little stories that we looked into but we couldn't find anyone," Clark said.

Nedda Shafir, a spokeswoman for the Cave Creek Unified School District, said putting all the schools on lockdown was a precautionary measure. "We didn't want to take any chances," Shafir said. "We just don't want to put anyone at risk."

Source

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

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

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

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

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



18 February, 2007

Schools ban popular childhood games

Important learning experience short-circuited

Kids call "Not it!" when they gather to play tag, and some may never be "it" as a growing number of Valley schools ban the game at recess. Tag joins the list of childhood games such as dodgeball and tackle football no longer allowed at schools across the country because of too many injuries and squabbles. "Tagging turns into shoving, and someone's crying, 'He pushed me!' " said Cindy Denton, principal at Thew Elementary School in Tempe, where chasing games are prohibited except in gym class under adult supervision

Last year, schools in Boston; Cheyenne, Wyo.; and Spokane, Wash., banned tag, joining schools in Wichita, Kan.; San Jose; and Beaverton, Ore., that had done so. Half of the 17 schools surveyed in the Washington Elementary School District in Phoenix allow tag. At one, Acacia Elementary, children can play tag, but they can't touch each other. They stomp on each other's shadows instead. The bans are for safety and civility, though some worry that kids may not get enough exercise or enjoy a childhood rite of passage.

Acacia Principal Christine Hollingsworth started a "no-touch" policy four years ago. "There's a need for kids to be active, but we were seeing an increase in the number of kids being pushed down and hurt," she said. The only exception to the "no-touch" policy is that the older boys are allowed to play two-hand touch football with adult supervision on the far side of the playground. Since starting the policy, injuries have dropped dramatically, and Hollingsworth no longer is called on to settle fights that had escalated from an unintentional too-hard tag.

Kids often get hurt playing tag, said Sharon Roland, the nurse at Jack L. Kuban School in southwest Phoenix and vice president of the School Nurses Organization of Arizona. They split their chins, scrape their noses and graze their knees, the expected injuries of childhood. But they also knock out teeth and fracture bones.

E'Lisa Harrison's son, Grant, was 8 when he was pushed and fell during a game of tag at Kyrene de la Estrella Elementary School in Phoenix. It was an accident, but Grant spent weeks with a cast on his arm, missing out on a season of baseball. Kids still play tag at his school but no roughness is allowed.

Kim Yamamoto's son, Cameron, 11, also broke his arm on the playground when he was in fourth grade, though he was playing Red Rover, not tag, at Challenge Charter School in Glendale. Students there can play football, soccer and other contact sports only in gym class. Yamamoto said she thinks it's a shame. "I remember the skinned knees and bumps and bruises from playground activities. I would not have given up any to experience the fun we had at school," she said. "We need to remember that these are kids who need fun in their day. If we control every aspect of the time on campus, are we limiting the student's access to being kids and exploring their world?"

With 700 students at Acacia, Principal Hollingsworth knows someone is bound to get hurt. But, as the kids proved, there are ways of playing classic games without putting their hands on each other. Hollingsworth hasn't had any complaints from parents. Nor has Denton, the principal at Thew. There are plenty of other things for kids to do on the playground - four square, swinging, climbing, soccer and basketball - to burn energy.

At recess Monday at Acacia, fourth-grader Raeanna Wilkinson stood on the basketball court surrounded by girls. She's "it." The rules, she explains, are that you can't touch anyone and you can't argue if someone says they got you. "Scatter," Raeanna says, and the girls run. "Shadow tag" is like regular tag, but instead of touching players to get them out, whoever is "it" stomps on their shadow. In another version, whoever is "it" stomps on a shadow and yells, "Frozen!" Frozen players must stay still until someone sets them free by running through their shadow.

Ten minutes into the game, the girls shed their jackets and sweat shirts. Yulissa Urias, 9, said, "In regular tag, people push, and you fall down and you get hurt." Now no one gets hurt, said Diane Hernandez, 9. And the game is more challenging because the angle of the sun can make it hard to get to people's shadows when they're running, even if you are close enough to tag them.

Source



RACIST JOURNALISM EDUCATION DEFEATED

Race will not be used as a criteria for enrollment in more than two dozen urban journalism programs nationwide under settlement of a lawsuit filed for a white high school student who was rejected. Dow Jones News Fund, which sponsors the programs, and other principals agreed to the settlement in return for the legal challenge being withdrawn by the Center for Individual Rights, both parties said Wednesday. The center filed the class-action lawsuit in September on behalf of Emily Smith, 16. She said she was accepted last spring to the Urban Journalism Workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University, but one week later was rejected after program sponsors learned she was white.

The settlement requires VCU and other programs sponsored by Dow Jones to select students "without regard to race." The programs also agree to publicly acknowledge they will offer no preferential treatment or discriminate against any prospect "on the basis of race or ethnicity." Neither VCU, Dow Jones nor any of the principals admitted any wrongdoing. VCU agreed to pay $25,000 to Emily and her attorneys and admit her to the program next summer. "We're very happy with it," said Emily's mother, Jane Smith. She added she had "little concern" about Emily's reception at VCU. Emily is a junior at Monacan High School in suburban Chesterfield County.

Terence Pell, president of the nonprofit Center for Individual Rights, said the challenge was based on U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have established that colleges cannot operate programs which exclude members of any ethnicity or race. The public interest law firm litigates "reverse discrimination" cases and similar actions. "It's OK to target underrepresented people. You just can't do this based on race," Pell said in an interview.

Since 1984, VCU's College of Mass Communications has conducted the two-week summer journalism program during which students attend classes, live on campus and produce a newspaper. The program is intended to encourage minority students to pursue journalism careers. Pamela D. Lepley, a VCU spokeswoman, said the program would not change. "The program will continue and race-neutral criteria will be used by VCU in the selection of participants," said Ray Kozakewicz, spokesman for Media General Inc., which publishes the Richmond Times-Dispatch and is a sponsor of the VCU program.

The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Web site lists 27 programs in Virginia, Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. In a statement, Dow Jones said: "The settlement is consistent with the longtime intent and practice of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund to encourage young people of all races, cultures and physical abilities to be successful journalists."

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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17 February, 2007

Heavy discrimination against males in British education

We are now seeing the results of the feminized education that British schools offer: Many boys are turned right off

The gap between the number of men and women applying to university has grown fivefold under Labour as evermore women opt to take a degree. While the Government trumpeted record numbers of teenagers wanting to continue with further education yesterday, academics voiced concerns about the widening rift between the sexes. Between 1998 and 2007, 14,305 more men applied for university places, compared to 51,214 more women. This gap has increased every year for six years.

Malcolm Grant, Provost of University College London, gave warning that unless the trend slowed, colleges could become male-free zones. He said: "We are concerned because you'd think that if we had an equality of genders in society, it would be reflected in their performance at A level and university. "We need to understand what it is that's causing young men not to thrive in the A-level culture and not to choose to apply to university. The male participation rate is sufficiently divergent that we'd expect it to continue."

Professor Grant's comments echo widely-held fears, already expressed to ministers, that young men face being locked out of university and marginalised in the jobs market. Last year, 57 per cent of first degree graduates were women. In 1980, 60 per cent of university entrants were men. In 2005, 30 per cent of boys took A levels compared to 40 per cent of girls.

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Does Barnard Need Junk Academics?

Post lifted from Muqata. See the original for links

Its tenure time at Barnard College, and Nadia Abu El Haj is aspiring to attain the coveted Barnard professorship title in her field of Anthropology. Unfortunately, tenure for Nadia Abu El Haj does about as much to further Columbia and Barnard's academic standing, as Hamas has done to promote peace in the Middle East.

One only has too examine her doctoral thesis (and now a book), "Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society." to see that her analysis of "archaeological practice" has nothing to do with anthropological or archaeological analysis, and is just your run-of-the-mill anti-Israel rhetoric, masquerading as junk research.

Her analysis of Israeli society determines that it is a "settler-colonial community", and has "invented" an ancient history in the region by the use of archeology. She attempts to demonstrate how "(social) science generates facts or phenomena, which refigure what counts as true or real," and concludes that the "existence of the ancient Israelite and Hebrew kingdoms should be considered "a pure political fabrication." Historians are appalled by her junk research.

"El-Haj is not a practicing archaeologist. She hardly knows the Hebrew in which many Israeli archaeological debates are conducted. She has taken part in very few actual digs. Yet she confidently condemns Israeli archaeology as a tool of the Zionists. With only gossip to go on, she accuses one archaeologist of bulldozing non-Jewish strata to get to the levels that might offer details about ancient Israel. Bizarrely, she then concludes her book by reversing herself on such desecration, asking us to "understand" sympathetically the Palestinian mob that destroyed Joseph's Tomb on October 8, 2000. I guess it all depends on whose narrative is being bulldozed."

Jonathan Burack, The Family Security Foundation, December 28, 2006

Archaeologists have criticized her book harshly:

The dean of Middle Eastern archeology, William Dever of the University of Arizona, "who has authored more than 20 books on Middle East History, said Ms. Abu El-Haj seems intent on writing Jews out of ancient Middle East history, and demonizing a generation of apolitical Israeli archaeologists in the process. Barnard should deny Ms. Abu El-Haj tenure, he said, `not because she's Palestinian or pro-Palestinian or a leftist, but because her scholarship is faulty, misleading and dangerous.' " Campus Watch

"At the heart of her critique is an undisguised political agenda that regards modern and ancient Israel , and perhaps Jews as a whole, as fictions. "Abu El Haj's anthropology is undone by her... ill-informed narrative, intrusive counter-politics, and by her unwillingness to either enter or observe Israeli society... "The effect is a representation of Israeli archaeology that is simply bizarre... Filling in what is missing from her text becomes fatiguing. In the end there is no reason to take her picture of Israeli archaeology seriously, since her selection bias is so glaring. "Abu El Haj has written a flimsy and supercilious book, which does no justice to either her putative subject or the political agenda she wishes to advance. It should be avoided." Alexander H. Joffe, Lecturer in Archaeology, Purchase College, SUNY Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Chicago: Oct 2005. Vol. 64, Iss. 4; p. 297

"Perhaps the most astonishing part of the book is a discussion on the last page of the text (p. 281). Abu el-Haj describes and condones the attack, and subsequent ransacking, by a Palestinian mob on what is known as "Jacob's Tomb" in Nablus in 2001. Several people were killed as a result of this attack; the gleeful tone in which she describes this act of vandalism exemplifies how her political agenda completely overcame her duties as a social scientist. "This book is the result of faulty and ideologically motivated research. One can but wonder how the 1995 dissertation on which it is based was authorized at Duke University and how a respected publisher like the University of Chicago Press could have published such unsubstantiated work."

Maeir, Aren, Professor of Archaeology, Bar Ilan University, Isis, volume 95 (2004), pages 523-524, Solomonia Blog

It's ironic that while supposedly advocating archeology, Abu el-Haj indelibly aligns herself with the Palestinians, who have absolutely no regard or respect for Biblical archeology whatsoever. Doing everything in their power to destroy the archaeological remnants from the Temple Mount, Palestinians dug out a huge underground Mosque in the "Solomon's Stables" area of the Temple Mount, and proceeded to destroy and dump everything they could find of historic significance, while repeating the mantra, "There were never any Jewish Temples in Jerusalem."

As Arab mobs riot these days over Israel's attempts to rebuild a bridge to the Temple Mount and the to excavate outside the Mugrabi Gate (and therefore, outside the Temple Mount complex and Mosques), one has to wonder why Barnard College is demeaning itself by offering tenure to junk academics, bent on the denying the legitimacy of the Jewish State.

Are you an alum of Barnard or Columbia? Why not drop an email to Barnard College President, Judith Shapiro, (jshapiro@Barnard.Edu) or Columbia College President Lee Bollinger (Bollinger@columbia.edu) and let them know that tenure for Nadia Abu El Haj degrades your alma mater.

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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



16 February, 2007

Elites to Anti-Affirmative-Action Voters: Drop Dead

The University of California has spent a decade wiggling around Proposition 209

In 1996, Californians voted to ban race and gender preferences in government and education. Ten years later, the chancellor of the state-funded University of California at Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, announced a new Vice Chancellorship for Equity and Inclusion, charged with making Berkeley more "inclusive" and "less hostile" to "underrepresented minority . . . groups." This move is just the latest expression of the University of California's unrelenting resistance to the 1996 voter initiative, in every way possible short of patent violation. Stasi apparatchiks disappeared more meekly after the Soviet Empire's collapse than California's race commissars have retreated after voters tried to oust their preference regime.

The last decade in California shows the power, and the limitations, of the crusade for a colorblind America led by Ward Connerly, architect of the 1996 anti-preference initiative. Without a doubt, Proposition 209, as that measure is called, has cut the use of race quotas in the Golden State's government. But it has also exposed the contempt of the elites, above all in education, for the popular will. "Diversity"-meaning socially engineered racial proportionality-is now the only official ideology of the education behemoth, and California shows what happens when that ideology comes into conflict with the law.

When Prop. 209 passed, a few politicians, such as San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, loudly vowed to disobey it. Most public officials, though, were more circumspect. Doubtless they counted on a highly publicized lawsuit, filed the day after the election, to eviscerate the new constitutional amendment before it affected their operations. A coalition of ethnic advocacy groups and big labor, represented gratis by some of the state's top law firms, had sued to block the amendment from taking effect. The plaintiffs argued, remarkably, that requiring government to treat everyone equally violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The plaintiffs could not have found a more sympathetic audience than Judge Thelton Henderson, one of the federal bench's most liberal activists. He quickly issued an injunction against Prop. 209, on the grounds that American society is so racist and sexist that only special preferences for minorities and women could ensure their constitutional right to equal protection.

Henderson's 1996 ruling was the high point of the preference racket's reception in the courts. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Henderson the next year, declaring that Prop. 209's ban on discrimination and preferential treatment was fully compatible with the Equal Protection clause-a point evidently not obvious to the crSme of the state's lawyers.

From then on, both state and federal judges would show an admirable respect both for voter intent and for the plain meaning of the state's new constitutional amendment. Not so California's bureaucrats and pols. Many chose passive resistance or tried to hide noncompliance under Orwellian name changes: San Jose's affirmative-action bureaucracy rechristened itself the "Office of Equality Assurance," for instance.

Without the efforts of a small public interest law firm, some of the state's largest government employers would still be using racial preferences for hiring and would be requiring contractors to do the same. The Pacific Legal Foundation has had to drag into court the city and county of San Francisco, the Sacramento municipal utility district, the state lottery commission, the state bond commission, and the California community college system, among others, to vindicate the people's will. The Los Angeles and Berkeley school districts continue to assign students and teachers by race, even though the foundation has won suits challenging the practice in other school districts.

California's then-attorney general, Bill Lockyer, filed an amicus brief supporting San Jose's continuing preferential-outreach requirements for contractors. As for enforcing the state constitution against violators of 209, Lockyer could not be bothered. Members of the state legislature have also busily tried to thwart the voters' fiat, often under pressure from Latino advocates. In a particularly desperate move, the state assembly in 2003 adopted a definition of discrimination put forward by the 1969 UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, whose terms would have restored racial preferences in contracting. California courts saw through this ruse and overruled it in 2004.

Ward Connerly estimates that by now, 65 to 75 percent of California's agencies no longer use race in hiring or contracting-hardly resounding compliance but a huge improvement over the pre-209 era. A pro-preference organization, the Discrimination Research Center, claimed in 2004 that transportation-construction contracts awarded to minority-owned business had dropped 50 percent since 1996 and that the percentage of women in the construction trades had declined by one-third. These figures suggest the extent to which race and gender discrimination had been keeping many noncompetitive enterprises afloat.

California's university system is a different matter entirely. That diehard center of race and gender obsession has managed to stay out of court (except for one sweetheart suit brought by pro-preference advocates) through fiendishly clever compliance with the letter of the law, while riding roughshod over its spirit. In doing so, university officials have revealed a fatalism about the low academic achievement of blacks and Hispanics that they would decry as rankest bigotry in a 1950s southerner.

After Prop. 209's passage, UC Berkeley, like the rest of the UC system, "went through a depression figuring out what to do," says Robert Laird, Berkeley's pro-preferences admissions director from 1993 to 1999. The system's despair was understandable. It had relied on wildly unequal double standards to achieve its smattering of "underrepresented minorities," especially at Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive campuses. The median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics in Berkeley's liberal arts programs was 250 points lower (on a 1,600-point scale) than that of whites and Asians. This test-score gap was hard to miss in the classroom. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action "a disaster," recounts that "they admitted people who could barely read."

The downward trajectory of those students was inevitable, Searle says. "You'd be delighted to find that your introductory philosophy class looked like the United Nations, but that salt-and-pepper effect was lost after six to eight weeks," he recalls. "There was a huge dropout rate of affirmative-action admits in my classes by mid-terms. No one had taught them the need to go to class. So we started introducing BS majors, in an effort to make the university ready for them, rather than making them ready for the university." Searle recalls a black studies class before his that was "as segregated as Mississippi in the 1950s." One day, Searle recounts, the professor had written on the blackboard that a particular tribe in Africa "wore colorful clothing."

Even though preference beneficiaries often chose the easiest majors-there were, and still are, virtually no blacks and Hispanics in the most competitive engineering and computer science majors, for example-graduation rates also reflected the qualifications gap. The average six-year graduation rate for blacks and "Chicanos" (California-speak for Mexican-Americans) admitted from 1991 to 1997, the last year of preferences, was about 20 percent below that of whites and Asians. The university always put on a happy face when publicly discussing the fate of its "diversity" admits. Internally, however, even the true believers couldn't ignore the problems. A psychology professor at UC San Diego recalls that "every meeting of the faculty senate's student affirmative-action committee was a lugubrious affair. They'd look at graduation rates, grades, and other indicators and say, `What we're doing is failing.' "

Yet for the preference lobby, a failing diversity student is better than no diversity student-because the game is not about the students but about the self-image of the institution that so beneficently extends its largesse to them. Thus, when "underrepresented minorities" accepted at Berkeley dropped by half in 1998, the first year that Prop. 209 went into effect, and by nearly that much at UCLA, the university sprang into crisis mode. Never mind that the drops at other campuses were much smaller. Berkeley's then-chancellor, Robert Berdahl, came to Berkeley's Boalt Law School, recalls a law professor, and demanded that the faculty increase its shrunken minority admissions. When another professor asked how Boalt was supposed to do that consistent with 209, Berdahl responded testily that he didn't care how they did it, but do it they must. UCLA law professor Richard Sander was on a committee to discuss what could be done after 209. "The tone among many of the faculty and administrators present was not `How do we comply with the law in good faith?' but `What is the likelihood of getting caught if we do not comply?' " he says. "Some faculty observed that admissions decisions in many graduate departments rested on so many subjective criteria that it would be easy to make the continued consideration of race invisible to outsiders."

Like Proteus caught in a net, the University of California struggled furiously over the next decade to rework its admissions formulae, trying to re-create its former "diversity" profile without explicitly using race. If, in 1967, an Arkansas fire department had devised pretextual, ostensibly nonracial, job qualifications to foil a desegregation order, it would have been judged in violation of the Constitution. But legal elites will never object to such pretextual surrogates for race in order to engineer a certain level of representation for "underrepresented minorities."

The university's attitude was as damaging as its actions. How to explain the significant drop-off in black and Hispanic applications to UC's most elite campuses after Prop. 209 passed? The then-dean of Boalt Law School, Herma Hill Kay, gave PBS's NewsHour the pro-preference answer: "I think that there was a feeling that California in general had turned its back on minority applicants. People felt that they didn't have to come here if they weren't welcome here." Another explanation, of course, might be that minority students, well aware of how much they had previously benefited from preferences, realized that without those preferences they stood little chance of getting in to the most selective campuses.

UC could have responded to the charge of being "unwelcoming" with a resounding rebuttal: "We welcome students of all races and ethnicities. Every student will be judged according to his accomplishments, and anyone who meets our standard-equally high for all-will win admission. UC has never discriminated and never will." Instead, UC continued throwing its weight behind the argument that the only way to "welcome" minority students is to make sure that they get in whether or not they match the academic qualifications of white and Asian students.

University spokesmen constantly convey the idea that 209 is forcing them to do something unjust. "It's a hard message to send-persuading kids that they have a place at the university, when we deny so many qualified students," says administrator Nina Robinson. (Robinson masterfully blends the "unwelcoming" topos with the university's current line that students who would only be admitted under affirmative action are all "highly qualified.") But the University of California rejects many white and Asian applicants with credentials identical to those "qualified" underrepresented minorities, and no one accuses UC of being unwelcoming to rejected Asian students with combined SAT scores of 800 and 2.85 GPAs, say. If proportionally far fewer black and Hispanic students qualify for admissions than whites and Asians, the problem lies with the systemic academic weakness of those students, not with the admissions standards. But this is a truth that, post-209, the university has persistently denied.

Only in 1998 did the university's admissions processes operate without either explicit racial preferences or stealthy surrogates for race. The results were telling: at Berkeley, the median SAT gap shrunk nearly in half, to 120 points; black and Hispanic admits logged an impressive 1,280 on their combined SATs. The six-year graduation rates of this class would increase 6.5 percent for blacks and 4.9 percent for Hispanics, compared with the class admitted two years earlier.

The more pedagogically and socially sound environment that resulted didn't matter to the race-mongers, however, who flung themselves into their long experimentation with different admissions schemes, with one purpose: "To maintain a racially and ethnically diverse student body," as former UC associate president Patrick Hayashi wrote in 2005. The first scheme that the university tried was to give an admissions preference to low-income students. This device backfired, however, when it yielded a lot of Eastern European and Vietnamese admits-not the kind of "diversity" that the university had in mind. So the campuses cut their new socioeconomic preferences in half and went back to the drawing board.

Various components in the system began diluting their academic requirements. Boalt Law School reduced the role of the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and college grade-point average (GPA) in ranking students, and it lowered the LSAT cutoff score that would disqualify a student for consideration-measures that previously it had applied only to minorities but would now technically apply to all students. It also removed the quality adjuster for high school GPAs, so that a 3.8 from a school where half the students drop out before graduating counted as much as a 3.8 from a school where the student body is frantically competing to rack up academic honors.

Other schools created pretextual institutions in the hope that they would be minority magnets. UCLA's law school established a specialization in critical race studies, a marginal branch of legal theory contending that racism pervades nearly every category of the law and that writing about one's personal experiences grappling with that racism is real legal scholarship. College seniors who say that they want to specialize in critical race studies on their UCLA law school applications get a boost in the admissions process: as the school discreetly puts it, a student's interest in the program "may be a factor relevant to the overall admissions calculus." In 2002, UCLA rejected all white applicants to the program, even though their average LSAT score was higher than the average score of the blacks who were admitted.

The university as a whole started admitting all students in the top 4 percent of their high school class, regardless of their standardized test scores, hoping that this would net more kids from all-minority schools. The public justification for this practice, which Texas and Florida have also implemented in response to affirmative-action bans, is that getting to the top of one's class signals the same academic talents regardless of whether your school awards As just for showing up. But a 2005 college board study found that 30 percent of the African-American and Hispanic students with an A average have mediocre SAT verbal scores of 500 or lower. Indeed, while only half of the blacks and Hispanics who rank in the top tenth of their class also score over 600 on either section of the SAT, all the whites in the top 10 percent do. And contrary to the claims of affirmative-action proponents, the evidence is irrefutable that students with 900 combined SATs, say, are far less likely to do well in competitive colleges than students with test scores several standard deviations above that. In addition, UC also started giving preferences to students who had attended university-sponsored tutoring programs, which, while technically open to students of all races, target underrepresented minorities.

None of these new admissions measures produced the numbers of "underrepresented minorities" at Berkeley and UCLA that the diversity ideologues and the ethnic lobbies in the state legislature demanded, however. The legislature's Latino caucus told the university that more of "their people" at Berkeley and UCLA was the price of budgetary support. Clearly, the university remained too wedded to its old, meritocratic ways to achieve the "critical mass" of minorities that diversity advocates claim is necessary for a sound education. So the university began to "question all criteria, including criteria that have long been regarded as reflecting high academic achievement," in the words of former associate president Hayashi. Incredibly, it began to ignore entirely its applicants' objective academic rankings.

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Disenfranchised: The Buzz in Education Reform

The word that most aptly describes the momentum behind education reform going into 2007 is disenfranchised. This can be applied to students in grades P all the way to 16. It can also be applied to adults who want to go back to school, who never completed school, or who are learning English as a second language. It can be used to describe those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. This word can be mixed and matched with pretty much any type of person that is deserving of more opportunity; and who isn't?

To be sure, the word disenfranchised will inevitably be used to call for more education funding, to fight for more equitable education and to appeal for universal education. Disenfranchised is the sort of descriptor that can be mixed and matched by any education reformer for any type of reform because it appeals to the conscience; it begs the decent person to look out for those amongst us who might need a little action on their behalf. "It is the right thing to do." But be forewarned; those whose heartstrings are being pushed and pulled in every direction must try and be discerning about the various offerings and work through the maze of rhetoric so that the disenfranchised are truly helped by our efforts. Like it or not, sometimes the solutions can become part of the problem.

The effort behind universal pre-school stems from the notion that some children are better prepared for Kindergarten than others. For a multitude of reasons, underprivileged children are not accumulating as much practice playing with the English language and they are not exposed to the types of concrete experiences which lay the foundation for learning abstract mathematical concepts. In my own observations with "disenfranchised" children, I've discovered that they are lacking at a much more basic level.

Some are not used to interactions where they are expected to listen, and conversely, they don't expect others to hear them. Accustomed to this deficit, and having their needs met by Power Rangers and X-Men, they tune out people and events and succumb to the symptoms of having insufficient relationships with caring responsible adults, these being stunted curiosity about the world and lack of civility. This type of child most definitely benefits from a preschool that offers opportunities for exploration and language development. But this child profits more from the consistency offered from caring adults who teach them social skills and provide them with the most basic of needs. Conversely, children growing up in homes rich in one-on-one interaction with one or two parents with the time and resources to devote to raising a child will not benefit more from the experience of preschool where a teacher's time is divided between 18 needy children. Children, whose needs can be met at home, gain much more tumbling and swimming at the local park district than if placed in universal pre-school.

Children are disenfranchised when expectations are lowered for their potential. Whether or not a child is labeled ADD, EL, LD, Gifted, or anything else, really doesn't matter if in any given situation the child isn't pushed to his or her maximum ability. When a label is used as an excuse for not meeting needs, this is when the solution has become the problem. If mainstreaming prevents some students from making optimum academic gains, the solution has become the problem. The bottom line is that while everyone is not equal, everyone should be given equal opportunity. This might not always look the same in every given situation. In sports, one child might be learning to sink or swim while another is practicing Butterfly. While the two students would not be expected to be treated the same way, this isn't the case in academics. Some serious rethinking must take place in our elementary and middle schools. In these circumstances, it must be, "one "hellava reality check" to suddenly find one self competing and placed in leveled classes upon reaching high school in this day and age. How about when it comes to looking for a job?

It used to be that everything important could be learned by the end of 8th grade. Now, colleges are finding many students cannot read or write at an 8th grade level. How is it that some students are accepted into college when they haven't met the requirements of the preceding grades? Community colleges are expected to remediate students who are not prepared for college level courses yet at the same time are awarding more and more course credits to record numbers of students who are testing out of classes because of prior AP or IB programs. How can that be? Is it because everyone is not equal but everyone should be given equal opportunity?

I used to joke that I went to college on an 8th grade education because I did the absolute minimum to get by in high school, much more concerned with socializing and rebelling than in my future. But I also tested at the 11th grade level in many areas when I was still a preteen. This is because students were grouped and challenged according to their ability in the elementary and middle grades. Perhaps I was disenfranchised in high school, for whatever the reason. One of 125 students per teacher, maybe I needed larger amounts of attention which I couldn't receive under those circumstances.

Smaller class sizes and a smaller school might have made all the difference in the world, or not. On the other hand, would I have been better off in single sex classes, where I wasn't so concerned with boys? This is not a universal rule applicable for everyone. Some students thrive amongst large numbers of people and unimaginable opportunities. This is why there should be choice in education. One size does not apply to all. One universal rule does not always benefit everyone. Beware of equalizing instead of equal opportunity. This has the effect of disenfranchising some groups while ensuring rule of the majority or minority.

Colleges should be kept affordable but not if those who can afford to supplement the cost of an education are given the responsibility of this burden. As long as there are student grants and loans and scholarships to offset tuition costs, colleges will not have the incentive to streamline their offerings and keep costs down. If colleges are not held accountable for the relevancy of their course offerings, for the quality of their teaching, and for the success of their graduates, they will not have to be held to the same standards as other businesses that must satisfy a customer base. When the government has to supplement or bail out a business, in the long run it isn't doing the economy any favors. What disenfranchises students is graduating with no appreciable skills and with a lot of debt.

Disenfranchised is a very powerful word. It can be used to further equalize everyone or it can be used to provide everyone with equal opportunity. Be careful when deciding which educational reforms to get behind in 2007.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



15 February, 2007

No classroom left alone

Once upon a time when their party believed in small government, balanced budgets, and federalism Republicans ran on promises to dismantle federal bureaucracies and unnecessary government agencies. The Department of Education was a the target of particular animus. Ronald Reagan called it "President Carter's bureaucratic boondoggle." Republicans routinely inveighed against creeping federal control of education and pleaded for the return of control to local school boards.

As sincere as they seemed at the time, in the 18 years Republicans have held the presidency since the Department of Education was created, they have been no more successful in dismantling it than in evicting the Muppets from their home at public broadcasting. Advocates of small government and local control of education really got their comeuppance with George W. Bush. Lulled into a fog by the rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism," those who liked the old grumpy, small government variety of conservatism were mortified to see the federal government extend its reach into every classroom in America. Not even LBJ could have imagined No Child Left Behind.

The legislation sounded good on its face. Many children, especially in inner cities, were trapped in poor schools, standards seem to be invisible, and American children were falling further and further behind their foreign counterparts. What to be done? Since the federal government had such a magnificent track record in eliminating poverty and family fragmentation, politicians ranging from Teddy Kennedy to George W. Bush decided to give it one last assignment: improve K-12 education. Complaints from local school boards, teachers' unions, and fiscal conservatives were ignored. As only the federal government can do bureaucrats were hired, federal funding conditioned and reams of regulations enacted, in particular requirements for standardized tests, to ensure children were actually being taught.

Fast forward just a few years and we now have the specter of the federal government threatening the local school board of one of the most successful school districts in the country with a loss of funds because the local school board has balked at the prospect of testing (and then inevitably failing) non-English speaking students in English as the federal bureaucrats have deemed necessary. No really. Apparently federal education officials didn't like the reading exams that Fairfax and other local districts had devised for students learning English, because the tests according to the federal officials they were not equivalent to tests given to students fluent in English.

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, "In a sharply worded letter, Deputy Secretary of Education Raymond Simon said he is 'greatly distressed' that some school districts, including Fairfax County [in Northern Virginia], might violate the No Child Left Behind Act. Simon urged Virginia to enforce the law. If it does not, he said, federal education officials could step in, possibly withholding funds." Sensing the growing ire of parents who were now on to the bullying tactics of the Education Department, Secretary Margaret Spelling dashed off her own short piece for the Post claiming the local school district was "dragging its feet" in complying with federal testing dictates.

The victims in this tale of bureaucratic rapaciousness are not of course limited to less affluent, non-English speaking children. Ask any parent in this school district (largely populated by children of well to do, highly educated parents) which indisputably is successful whether they think the testing wrought by No Child Left Behind is a good thing and you will be greeted with much eye rolling and laughter. Real learning stops in April so curriculum can be diverted to daily drilling of students and test taking preparation. Days of classroom time each May are then taken up by the testing itself. With the help of the federal government students then lose weeks of classroom instruction.

The irony is delicious. We now have a federal bureaucrat put there at the behest of a Republican president dictating to a highly proficient local school board what questions should and should not be on the tests of Virginia school children. The Republicans' former natural constituency -- affluent and well-educated parents -- is now disgusted with the busybodies in the Bush Education Department.

With Republicans bemoaning the absence of a "real" conservative standard bearer for president in 2008 it would seem a good place to start for an aspiring Republican candidate would be to champion repeal of No Child Left Behind. Such a candidate would be on solid philosophical footing and appeal to the army of disenchanted parents. What's more, in this era of new found bipartisanship, they might even make some friends in the teachers' unions.

Source



INDIA SHOWS THE WAY IN EDUCATION

But the Australian Left (like most Leftists worldwide) is still ignoring the obvious with their paradoxical belief in the magical power of money

In Thomas Friedman's bestseller The World Is Flat, he explains how India positioned itself to become an invaluable player in the global economy. It began in the late 1990s with the boom in long-distance fibre-optic infrastructure. This enabled American companies to outsource a lot of tedious code-cutting work in the lead-up to the supposed Y2K meltdown of the world's computers. India had an enormous pool of highly educated English-speaking people who could perform the work at rock-bottom prices. Next, multinational companies began outsourcing ever more sophisticated work to India. Reuters newsagency, for instance, outsources news bulletins to Indian reporters, and US accounting firms sent 400,000 tax returns to Indian accountants in 2005.

The Indian middle class has blossomed, and clever young Indians no longer have to leave their families and migrate to Western countries to make something of themselves. They can do that right at home. We have grown used to speaking to women from Bangalore when phoning Diners Club to report a lost credit card. India was so well poised to capitalise on the technology that enables the "flattening" of the world economy, Friedman says, because it had a huge pool of well-educated workers. For an impoverished country, that was no mean feat, shaming Australian claims that lack of money is the sole cause of our higher-education woes.

In 1951 India's leaders decided to make good-quality education a priority, establishing the first of the nation's seven Indian Institutes of Technology, which became "islands of excellence". "India mined the brains of its own people," Friedman writes, "educating a relatively large slice of the elites in the sciences, engineering and medicine."

But, as Gurcharan Das wrote in Newsweek last year, it's no longer just the elites getting a decent education: "Government-run schools are a mess . . . But private schools - which can range from expensive boarding schools for the elite to low-end teaching shops in the bazaar - are proliferating. "Even the poor now send their kids to private schools, which can charge as little as $1 to $3 a month in fees and are spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India." Two-thirds of children in India's three largest states attend private schools and their reading and maths scores are significantly higher than those of other students.

Which brings us to Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's education "revolution". He gets top marks for identifying education as his first election issue, crucial to economic growth. And while India's experience shows us resources aren't everything, Rudd's point that Australia's spending on universities has declined 7 per cent since 1995, while spending by OECD countries has risen on average by 48 per cent, struck a chord. In fact, the picture is worse than that, since the money is spread so thinly over a variable array of universities.

Rudd, who beavered through the summer break on his education policy, has already managed to convey a substantial message in a way his predecessors never could, with his clear link between the nation's future prosperity and the education level of its people. He argues that the way to boost Australia's flagging productivity is to invest massively in "human capital": education from preschool to university.

However, Rudd's first fleshed-out policy, a plan to offer universal preschool education, may backfire. While on the committee of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in 2005, I became aware of a powerful desire by the education establishment to push formal education down into the preschool years. The thinking goes like this: if children are having trouble learning to read in primary school, it is not because the methods used to teach them are inadequate, it is because their families have not equipped them with what are called "pre-reading" skills - familiarity with books and the concept that the black stuff on the page has meaning.

While there is evidence that pre-reading skills are useful, especially for socially disadvantaged children, the evidence that intensive systematic phonics instruction is most effective in teaching most children to read is overwhelming. Yet there are still entrenched pockets of influential resistance to phonics-based teaching, in universities and various teacher associations.

As the literacy inquiry found, fewer than 10 per cent of course time in university teacher education departments is spent teaching teachers how to teach reading. But instead of fixing such problems, Rudd's early-education plan runs the risk of shifting responsibility for reading failures in primary school to preschool. That's no way to compete with India.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



14 February, 2007

Rhode Island school bans talking!

A Roman Catholic elementary school adopted new lunchroom rules this week requiring students to remain silent while eating. The move comes after three recent choking incidents in the cafeteria. No one was hurt, but the principal of St. Rose of Lima School explained in a letter to parents that if the lunchroom is loud, staff members cannot hear a child choking.

Christine Lamoureux, whose 12-year-old is a sixth-grader at the school, said she respects the safety issue but thinks the rule is a bad idea. "They are silent all day," she said. "They have to get some type of release." She suggested quiet conversation be allowed during lunch. Another mother, Thina Paone, does not mind the silent lunches, noting that the cafeteria "can be very crazy" at the suburban school south of Providence.

Principal Jeannine Fuller did not immediately return a call seeking comment, but a spokesman for the Diocese of Providence described the silence rule as a temporary safety measure. Spokesman Michael Guilfoyle said the school does not expect complete silence but enough quiet to keep students safe. Lori Healey, a teacher at the school who also has a son in third grade, said "silent lunch" means students can whisper. "They know it's not for punishment," she said. "It's for safety, and they'll be the first ones to tell you." Stacey Wildenhain, a teacher's assistant at St. Rose, said her 7-year-old son does not mind the policy. He told her: "The sooner we eat, the sooner we can get out to play," she said.

Amanda Karhuse, of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said that students should not run wild during lunch, but that they also should not have to remain silent. "It seems kind of ridiculous in our opinion," she said. "Kids need that social time, and they just need time to be kids at that age."

The principal's letter also spelled out other new lunch rules, including requiring students to stay in their seats and limiting them to one trip to the trash can. Any child who breaks the rules will serve detention the next day. Paone's 6-year-old son, Joey, said he accepts the changes, but some of his classmates were having trouble obeying the rules. Kara Casali, who also has a 6-year-old son at the school, said the rules against talking will be tough to enforce. "I can't imagine having a silent lunch," she said.

Source



Corrupting the British curriculum

Why is it ‘brainwashing’ when faith schools teach values but ‘raising awareness’ when the state teaches the pieties of environmentalism?

So what’s the difference between subjecting children to the zealous propaganda of their elders in a faith school and in a secular school? According to today’s cultural commentators, it is ‘brainwashing’ when carried out in a faith school, but ‘raising awareness’ when conducted in a so-called secular environment.

The current wave of hysteria about the apocalyptic consequences of climate change, following most recently the publication of the IPCC summary on 2 February, is being harnessed towards ‘re-educating’ schoolchildren. According to proposals due to be published this week, cautionary tales about global warming will become integral to the British school curriculum. This instruction about global warming will masquerade under the title ‘geography lessons’, but in truth it constitutes a new kind of behaviour management.

This was clear when UK education secretary Alan Johnson announced his new moralising enterprise last week. Johnson said he wants children to alter their behaviour. ‘We need the next generation to think about their impact on the environment in a different way’, he declared. This project, aimed at manipulating how children lead their lives, is justified through appealing to a higher truth. Johnson claims that ‘if we can instill in the next generation an understanding of how our actions can mitigate or cause global warming, then we lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’. Literally save the world! That looks like a price worth paying for making some changes to the geography curriculum. In truth, the moralisation of education will only nurture ignorance.

The school curriculum has become a battleground for moral campaigners and entrepreneurs keen to promote their message. Public health officials constantly demand more compulsory classroom discussions on healthy eating and obesity. Professionals obsessed with young people’s sex lives insist that schools introduce yet more sex education initiatives. Others want schools to focus more on Black History or Gay History. In the widespread media outcry over the sordid scenes of moral and cultural illiteracy on Celebrity Big Brother, many demanded that schools should teach Britishness.

The government hasn’t yet announced any plans for introducing Appropriate Behaviour on Reality TV Shows into the curriculum…but nevertheless, Alan Johnson is a very busy man. Not only is he introducing global warming studies, he has also made the study of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade a compulsory part of the history curriculum.

For Johnson, the subject of history, like that of geography, must be subordinated to a higher good. He is not interested in the slave trade as part of an academic discipline with its own integrity; rather he sees slave trade studies as part of a moral crusade. ‘This is about ensuring young people understand what it means to be British today’, he said in defence of his reorganisation of the history curriculum. Johnson’s title, education secretary, is something of a misnomer. He seems to have no interest in education as such. His preoccupation is with using the classroom to transmit the latest and most fashionable prejudices. He can’t even leave school sports alone, recently announcing that PE lessons will now stress the importance of a healthy lifestyle and will raise awareness about the problem of obesity. So after children have received instruction on how to behave as green consumers, lead responsible sex lives and feel very British, they’ll be taught how and why to lose weight.

This ceaseless attempt to instil in schoolchildren fashionable values is symptomatic of a general state of moral confusion today. Instead of attempting to develop an understanding of what it means to be a good citizen, or articulate a vision of public good, Britain’s cultural elites prefer to turn every one of their concerns into a school subject. In the classroom, the unresolved issues of public life can be transformed into simplistic teaching tools. Citizenship education is the clearest example of this corruption of the curriculum by adult prejudices. Time and again, school inspectors have criticised the teaching of citizenship, which is not really surprising considering that leading supporters of citizenship education seem to have little idea what the subject is or ought to be about.

Nick Tate, former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, argued that citizenship education was ‘about promoting and transmitting values’, ‘participation’ and ‘duties’. But the obvious question of ‘values about what?’ was carefully avoided. Instead, those advocating citizenship education have cobbled together a ‘hurrah list’ of unobjectionable and bland sentiments that have been rebranded as values. Alongside fairness, honesty and community, even participation and voting have been turned into values. Professor Bernard Crick, a key adviser to the government on citizenship education, stated that ‘students must demonstrate a commitment to active citizenship, commitment to voluntary service and concern for the environment’.

A few years down the road and the meaning of citizenship is even less clear than when schools started teaching it as a subject. Last month, a review of how schools teach citizenship found that the subject failed to communicate any sense of what it means to be British. Anyone with the slightest grasp of pedagogy will not be surprised by the failure of successive social engineering projects in the classroom. The absence of any moral consensus in Britain today will not be solved through subjecting children to sanctimonious platitudes. Those who are genuinely interested in educating children and inspiring them to become responsible citizens will instead look to real subjects, which represent a genuine body of knowledge. Propaganda campaigns around the latest fashionable ‘value’ only distract children from learning. Values-led education has helped create a situation where children learn that the Holocaust was awful, but do not know which country suffered the greatest number of casualties during the Second World War. It will produce children who know that the slave trade was bad, but who are ignorant about how the right to vote was won in Britain.

And they will learn in geography that we face human extinction, but will not be able to name the highest mountain in Europe. In other words they will be values-rich but uneducated.

Source



British students to be disciplined for publishing Mohammed Cartoon

Cambridge University is in effect putting its behind up in the air and saying to the Muslims: "F**k me". Cambridge has of course long been a traitorous place. Post below lifted from Pub Philosopher

While the French establishment was leaping to the defence of Charlie Hebdo, the authorities at Clare College were considering taking disciplinary action against students who published one of the Mohammed cartoons in the college magazine. The magazine, Clareification, had been renamed Crucification for a special issue on religious satire.

According to the local paper, the student who wrote the piece containing the cartoon is in hiding and the college chaplain has met leaders of Cambridge University's Islamic society and local Imams in an attempt to reduce racial tension. 

This may just be a precaution but the college clearly has some concern that the cartoon might provoke a violent response from Muslims at the university or in the town.  Even so, most of the authorities' wrath has been directed at the students who produced the magazine. Clare College fellows have called for a Court of Discipline to be convened, something which has not happened for many years. Officials of the college, the students union and Cambridge University have queued up to condemn the publication of the cartoon.

Printing this cartoon may have been an irresponsible act but if you can't push the boundaries of free speech in an academic environment, where can you do it?  Universities are supposed to be places where people experiment, test ideas and think the unthinkable. If people are not free to defy conventions and make themselves unpopular in a university,  they will not be free to do so anywhere.  The university authorities should be saying that they disapprove of the cartoon and find it in poor taste but are nevertheless duty-bound to defend the students' right to publish it. 

The great and good in France may still appreciate the importance of defending free speech.  Cambridge University, the second oldest in the English speaking world, now seems to have other priorities.

Update: Local Muslim leaders have expressed outrage over the printing of the cartoon and are demanding public apologies from all the students involved.      

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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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



13 February, 2007

See No Jihad, Hear No Jihad: Determined censorship of the truth about Islamofascism in American universities

In a decision that reveals the state of denial on American campuses, the editorial board of the Georgica Tech student paper - The Georgia Tech Technique - has rejected an ad from the Terrorism Awareness Project warning students about the threat that radical Islam poses to America. Nor is it the first campus publication to chill open debate on radical Islamic terrorism. Entitled "What Americans Need To Know About Jihad," the ad warns students that "the goal of jihad is world domination," and that "Jihad's battle cry is `Death to America.'" The ad includes quotes from several radical Islamic leaders, such as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has declared, "Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute. Death to America. I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide."

The Technique ad department initially accepted the ad and processed payment for it. But then the editors got a hold of it and killed the deal. When asked to explain why the ad was rejected, an editor at the Technique declared that it was "hateful," "offensive," and "misleading." In particular, the editor was upset that the ad draws a connection between Islamic radicals and the Nazis. This complaint refers to the pamphlet titled The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad, which is advertised in the ad. The pamphlet describes the role that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the universally recognized father of Palestinian nationalism, played as a follower of Adolf Hitler during WWII. When a representative from TAP offered to alter the ad, the Technique replied that everything in it was offensive and no alteration would help.

"The Technique's rejection of this ad reveals exactly why the Terrorism Awareness Project is needed on America's campuses," commented TAP National Coordinator Stephen Miller, who is currently a senior at Duke University. "Universities and Middle East Studies Departments turn a blind eye to the threat of radical Islam, resulting in ignorance and denial. The editors of the Technique claimed that our ad was `hateful' and `misleading,' and refused to print it even if it were limited to actual quotes from radical Islamic leaders. In other words, the Techique's editors are simply trying to suppress the truth about the radical Islamic threat."

The Technique is one of 15 college newspapers which have so far been approached about running the TAP ad. Several other universities-including Purdue, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan-have rejected the ad, some without providing any reason for its rejection.

Jeffrey Wienir, who has been responsible for placing the ad in many of campus newspapers across the nation, also handled rejection calls. "When they reject the ad, I begin asking piece-by-piece: `What can we change to make the ad acceptable for your publication? What if we remove this, or that?'"

The editors, he said, usually branded the ad "hateful" and "misleading," without specifying any change that could be made. One campus newspaper told Wienir it refused to run the article, because it feared those scanning the ad might think it was a pro-jihad organization (which does not speak well of the educational level of its students). Another said, incredibly, that any description of Islam would be misleading, because it was "not produced by a member of that group-as if I couldn't speak about jihad unless I was a jihadist."

The TAP ad has been accepted for publication at a number of universities, including some of the most left-wing (and pro-Palestinian) campuses in the country: San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Duke University.

TAP has also produced a short flash video entitled The Islamic Mein Kampf, which documents the genocidal agendas of Islamic radicals like Iranian president Mahmoud Achmadinejdad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The video was distributed to more than 850,000 individuals across America this week, including the entire liberal arts faculties of several universities.

The Terrorism Awareness Project (TAP) is a new national program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. It was launched this week to alert the American public-and particularly American college students-to the threat posed by radical Islam. The TAP ad and video clip can be viewed on the program's website at www.terrorismawareness.org.

Source



Australia: Federal Leftist leader echoes conservative tough talk on teachers

Despite all the contempt heaped on him by journalists and "intellectuals", Australia's unassuming conservative Prime Minister still sets the agenda for political debate. The great lack of anything original to say on the Left helps, of course

Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has thrown down the gauntlet to teachers' unions, calling for sharp improvements in school performance.

Echoing the sentiments of the Government on the quality of curriculums and reporting standards, Mr Rudd told a conference of Labor's National Left in Canberra yesterday he was prepared for a fight to get his way: "This may result in resistance from some teachers' unions,' Mr Rudd said. "I understand this, but I will not be signing blank cheques unless we can improve the quality of what we teach our children.

Mr Rudd's speech was a clear attempt to demonstrate his conservative credentials on school standards -- an issue Prime Minister John Howard has nominated as a priority for his Government in the rundown to the end-of-year federal election.

"This is like walking into the lion's den," one senior Rudd aide said yesterday, describing the Opposition Leader's decision to take on the unions.

Mr Rudd said teachers were "dedicated professionals (who) deserve our support -- not our condemnation". "But I am deeply concerned about how we go about in practical terms lifting curriculum standards, curriculum outcomes and the resources necessary to achieve those ends. "It is not just about investing more in education but also in improving the quality of our education outcomes". [words cribbed from the Prime Minister!] "This means taking on the hard questions of curriculum standards and resources. This will involve a contract between ourselves and the education sector -- to boost our national investment but in exchange for better, measurable curriculum outcomes for our young people."

Queenlsland parents and teachers groups have hit back at Mr Howard's plan for a national curriculum. The Prime Minister last week cranked up his campaign to reform the state-based education systems, labelling some curriculums "incomprehensible sludge". His comments have been dismissed by the Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations and the Queensland Teachers' Union.

"From a parental point of view, there are some real benefits in leaving the system as it is," P&C council operations manager Greg Donaldson said. 'We have one of the best curricula in Australia and we have a good say in what is being taught in schools. Parents would have less say in these things if it was done from Canberra."

QTU president Steve Ryan said attacks by Mr Howard and Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop on state schools were really about industrial relations. The big picture here is a push to get teachers on to Australian Workplace Agreements."

The above report by GLENN MILNE and DARYL PASSMORE appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on February 11, 2007



Australia: Leftist State government goes elitist in its need to train more doctors

Leftists usually think that they are the elite and everybody else must be levelled down: Elitism for me but not for thee

A new super state school will prepare gifted students to be the doctors and dentists of the future. Education Minister Rod Welford said the school, to be based on the Gold Coast, would give students access to experts and facilities at the state-of-the-art Griffith University Parklands campus. It will be built beside the Gold Coast's second public hospital, which also is part of the Griffith campus, becoming Queensland's third "super school". It follows the opening in Brisbane of the Science Maths and Technology Academy at Toowong and the Creative Industries Academy at Kelvin Grove. Like those schools, the new academy will select students in Years 10 to 12 on the basis of an entrance exam later this year. Year 11 and 12 students will complete the International Baccalaureate rather than follow the state syllabus to get an OP score.

Mr Welford said the International Baccalaureate's focus on science would suit the college, which would have an emphasis on health sciences. Students would be likely to go on to study courses such as medicine, dentistry, radiography, physiotherapy and biomedical science at university. He expected several hundred students to enrol in the first year. "It will broaden the options available to Gold Coast students and will also be accessible to those in Beenleigh and Logan and even the southern suburbs of Brisbane," Mr Welford said. "The Gold Coast campus of Griffith, with more than 13,000 students, is the fastest growing university in the state."

Griffith University vice-chancellor Professor Ian O'Connor said the Health Science Academy would benefit from its proximity to the university's health science schools and research facilities. These include the Institute for Glycomics, headed by Professor Mark von Itzstein, an Australia Prize winner for his efforts in developing the anti-influenza drug, Relenza.

Griffith Deputy vice-chancellor Professor John Dewar said the students would have the chance to work with academic staff, especially on tasks such as the 4000-word project that was part of the International Baccalaureate. Under that program, each student does English, maths, at least one and often two science subjects, a foreign language and a choice of psychology or business, with the Creative Industries Academy offering subjects such as drama, film, art or music instead of the second science.

Mr Welford said the Gold Coast Academy, which would be beside Griffith University's student accommodation, would also offer Year 8 and 9 students the chance to undertake school holiday science courses to see what opportunities the subject had to offer.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



12 February, 2007

DEMOCRAT CONGRESS STILL PROTECTING STUDENT LOAN ABUSES

It looks like a rich company has got a lot of congresscritters in its pocket

With lots of fanfare, Congress recently made student loans slightly less expensive for future students. But they completely ignored the biggest abuses in the student loan program, abuses that make student loans the most lucrative to collect and the most onerous debts to carry. The process can be so bad for borrowers that Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren told the Wall Street Journal, "student loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious." And no one makes the mobsters greener than Al Lord and his Student Loan Marketing Corporation, the largest student loan provider in the country. It's also known as Sallie Mae - one of the most profitable companies in America.

As the founder of the largest student loan borrower group in America, Student Loan Justice recently began our nationwide tour to reform student loan abuses by visiting the offices of Congressman David Wu in Portland. Wu will be among a handful of congressional leaders who will reform student loans.

The problem with student loans began ten years ago when Congress privatized student loans, largely through a strange arrangement with Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae assumed all the rewards, but the federal government took all the risks. In addition to legislating draconian collection powers, outlawing bankruptcy protection and imposing huge penalties for delinquent debt, Sallie Mae convinced Congress to outlaw re-financing and other forms of competition for student loans. With these powers and protection from competition, Sallie Mae's stock price increased nearly 2000 percent in 10 years, with its robust profits coming from collecting penalties on defaulted student loans. Meanwhile, the borrowers suffer.

Student Loan Justice (www.studentloanjustice.org) has received thousands of stories from citizens whose lives have been shattered by their student loans. These stories are from decent citizens who have been forced to live off the grid, had their livelihoods taken away, been forced to postpone marriage and children. Some have gone so far as fleeing the country and committing suicide.

Such borrowers quickly find themselves unable to function in society, and are faced with a decision to either continue the paralysis and live in fear, or begin making payments on a massively inflated amount - often three or four times more than what they originally borrowed. That is why Student Loan Justice is working to:

1. Pass legislation which allows borrowers who have been in default for 5 years or more to repay what the government paid for their loan (which includes principal plus interest), and get on with their lives.

2. Give borrowers the right to refinance their debt with lenders willing to give better terms.

3. Ban "school as lender" programs, where universities steer students to certain lenders due to financial incentives. In the business world, that is called kickbacks.

4. Return standard consumer protections to student loans.

5. Make student loan repayments tax deductible

Almost all of these steps could be accomplished with Senator Hillary Clinton's Student Borrower Bill of Rights. The present situation is not what Congress intended when it created the student loan program, and Congress must undo the program if we are ever to make student loans a stepping stone for middle class opportunity - not a cash cow for Sallie Mae. As one of the most influential members of the Education Committee, Congressman Wu is in a unique and important position to restore sanity and equity to the student loan program. That is what we need him to do.

Source



More academic corruption in Australia

This sort of thing -- lowering standards to preserve fee-paying enrolments -- is an old story in Australia. Protesters such as the guy below are the saviours of Australian academic standards and should be praised and encouraged, not harried. The shortsightedness of the administrators who are endeavouring to destroy the asset they depend on -- the reputation of their university -- is incredible

A leading Queensland academic quit his university post in disgust after being told to pass fee-paying overseas students he had intended to fail. The academic, who asked not to be named, said he refused to pass the students attending a Queensland university last year, even though he was put under "enormous pressure" from senior academic staff. "I was told, in no uncertain terms, to pass some particular students, who in my opinion, had not met the standards required – not by a long shot," he said. "To pass the subject, there were several components: an exam, an essay and a practical assessment, none of which these students had passed. "They had not even come close to passing. "If it were a mark out of 100, I would have given them a five and yet I was told to somehow get them through."

His claims came after a recent report by Monash University demographer Bob Birrell in Melbourne which found more than one-third of overseas uni students were graduating with a lower standard of English than what was required. But Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop challenged the findings and has asked anyone with evidence of favouritism towards full fee-paying students to come forward. "This is a very serious allegation and I want to see the evidence: which universities, which professors, which courses," Ms Bishop said.

The academic said he believed a cash-for-degrees culture was growing at all Queensland tertiary institutions, due to Federal Government budget cuts. "What happened to me is by no means an isolated incident," he said. "I have spoken to many other academics and they have had similar experiences."

National Tertiary Education Union Queensland secretary Margaret Lee supported the academic's claims. "The National Tertiary Union is certainly aware members are under enormous pressure," she said. "There is anecdotal evidence that some members have felt pressured, either directly or indirectly, to ensure high pass rates for their international students. "They are told that a fall in international student numbers would pose income difficulties for their university." Ms Lee said that, on average, Queensland universities received 18 per cent of their income from international student fees.

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Australia: Federal call for a return to quality education

Article below by Federal education minister Julie Bishop

There is no doubt that education plays a key role in the economic and social fabric of any society. Early childhood education and our primary schools should provide fundamental skills, such as literacy and numeracy. Students at secondary school should develop more advanced but equally valuable skills, such as greater initiative and analytical abilities.

Vocational education should provide skills and knowledge that are specifically required for various occupations. And our universities not only equip graduates with skills for the professions and industry but also create new knowledge to underpin our economic prosperity and international competitiveness. But our education system is not only about personal attainment. It is also a driver of economic growth directly related to the quality of the education students receive.

Quality is the key determinant in education's contribution to economic growth. The determinants of economic growth, for example, were analysed in a study of 100 countries, including Australia, from 1960 to 1995 by Harvard researcher Robert J. Barro. His research found that the quality of education was far more important than quantity when looking at the impact on economic growth.

At the heart of this debate about quality is the decline in academic standards in our school systems. This is the new frontier of the education debate. The quality of our teachers is critical. After parents, teachers are the most important determinant in educational outcomes for school students. Our teachers are a precious national resource. They should be respected and rewarded for their significant role in educating our children.

But like other professionals they deserve career incentives. That is why I am developing options for greater consistency in professional development for teachers as well as calling on the states to provide higher salaries, with an element of performance or merit-based pay and greater workplace flexibility. For example, we should be rewarding teachers who work in our most disadvantaged schools and achieve outstanding results, or specialist teachers such as in science or maths. But let us focus on what our schools are being asked to teach our students.

I am concerned that students, teachers and parents are being let down as many aspects of school education get hijacked by teachers unions and state education bureaucrats. This has led to the role of teachers being redefined from someone who teaches a syllabus to someone who facilitates; many children lacking basic numeracy and literacy skills; parents lacking meaningful feedback about the performance of their child and their school. Instead of learning basic facts in subjects such as history, children are being taught according to an ideological agenda. And the values and discipline parents teach at home are not being reinforced at school.

The problem is the growing number of students at the tail end who don't have the fundamental skills to even hold down a job. A growing number of remedial English and maths classes are being offered by the nation's universities and other tertiary institutions to bring first year, and in some cases PhD, students up to appropriate English standards. Employer groups have reported that school and university graduates lack generic skills such as grammar. In terms of literacy and numeracy, recent reports of statistics, such as those released in my home state of Western Australia, reveal that about one in five students who completed Year 7 last year are functionally illiterate, that is, failing to meet national benchmark standards in reading, writing and spelling.

We are already making our funding for the states and territories conditional on a number of areas of reform: plain-English report cards and making more school performance information publicly available. With commonwealth funding of $1.8 billion going directly to the states for literacy and numeracy standards, we have established national benchmarks in literacy and numeracy in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The first national assessments will be carried out next year.

Literacy and numeracy skills are not a "tired old cliche" as Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford said recently. These skills are the fundamental, the essential, the enduring foundations for an educated society. Yet the study of English, for example, is not compulsory in the senior secondary years in Queensland. When the issue of compulsory teaching of English is raised, Welford defends this by saying that most senior students take English anyway.

What he doesn't reveal is the level of English those students take. Students can elect to study standard English, English extension (literature) or an English communication subject, or none at all. Standard English is the subject we would expect every student to take, and which would meet community expectations. English literature is more advanced, but English communication is the soft option. It is a disturbing fact that between 1992 and 2005, the number of students studying standard English or English literature dropped from 93 per cent to 80 per cent of Year 12 students, while the number of students studying English communication rose from 6per cent to almost 20 per cent of Year 12 English students. The number of Year 12 students studying soft option English in Queensland went from 2376 to 8494 a year, almost tripling in a decade and a half.

The teaching of English is essential in primary and secondary schools and must include not only reading and comprehension but spelling, punctuation and grammar. On leaving school students must have the ability to not only express themselves orally but also to write comprehensible prose. I note that in some states SMS messaging is part of a tertiary entrance English course. Apart from the fact students know more about the language of texting than their teachers, it will not help a student write a CV for a job or a letter to customers.

We see similar trends in science and mathematics where students are choosing to study, if at all, the soft options of these important subjects. Research shows that the study of science and mathematics and the acquisition of these skills is fundamental to the ongoing economic prosperity of a nation. We must capture the imagination of students on the wonders of science and mathematics early, and ensure that they have the skills to continue to study in these areas in Years 11 and 12. Otherwise they will not go on to university and take up careers based on science or mathematics.

Now is the time for the states and territories to put aside their parochial differences. With an increasingly mobile work force, we must put the interests of parents and students first, for their interests coincide with the national interest.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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11 February, 2007

Only in Kannada, eh?

Hostility to private school superiority and the English language is destructive

You’ve probably never heard of Kannada – the native language spoken by 7 out of 10 Karnatakans. You’ve probably never heard of Karnataka either. But there’s a good chance you’ll chat with a Karnatakan if your iPod ever locks up or you have trouble installing the new Windows Vista operating system. That’s because Karnataka is the Indian state whose capital city, Bangalore, is "the back office to the world." Bangalore is awash in call centers for Western companies such as Apple and Microsoft, boasts over 200 high tech companies of its own, and is reported to enjoy the highest number of engineering colleges of any city on Earth.

But if an Indian court doesn’t step in soon, the out-sourcing capital of the world may put itself out of work. As of this April, the government of Karnataka will force 2,000 private elementary schools – enrolling nearly 300,000 students – to shut down. Their crime? Teaching in English instead of Kannada.

Bangalore’s incredible success in the information technology field stems not just from its wealth of skilled workers, or the lower cost of employing them relative to U.S. or Canadian workers, but from the fact that so many are fluent in English. And that’s a skill they are likely to have picked up in private schools. English is the mother tongue of only a tiny fraction of Indian citizens, and public schools use regional native languages (like Kannada) for the majority of instruction. English is relegated to a separate course, usually not taught until the later grades.

But, as many Canadians have discovered, teaching a second language as just one course in the curriculum is less effective at promoting fluency than immersion programs that teach all subjects in the second language. Many Indians have discovered the same thing. So, dissatisfied with the performance of public schools and their lack of English immersion programs, Indian parents have fueled the growth of a vast private education sector that teaches primarily or exclusively in English. In parts of India, the majority of students are now enrolled in private schools – even in some of the country’s poorest urban slums.

Karnataka’s ban on these schools is technically the result of a 1994 court ruling – a decision that remained unenforced until last September. But, in the wake of increasingly vigorous and finally successful lobbying on the part of Kannada language activists, the trigger was finally pulled. There is no question as to why the government dragged its feet for so long on enforcing the ruling. If the crackdown on these schools succeeds, the English-fluent high-tech labor pool will gradually drain away and the sucking sound of jobs leaving Bangalore will be audible all the way to North America.

In fact, that’s a lesson that Kannada activists could learn from… Canada. In a fascinating 2004 study of interprovincial migration, geographer Kao-Lee Liaw showed that non-Francophones were five times more likely to emigrate to another province if they lived in Quebec than if they lived in Ontario. And there’s no end in sight. A new report from the Association for Canadian Studies finds that, in 2006, Quebec incurred its single largest net population loss since 2000.

Given that attracting and retaining skilled immigrants is an important ingredient to sustained economic growth, the effects of this non-Francophone exodus are inevitable. Quebec’s economy consistently lags those of Ontario, Canada, and the United States. In fact, Quebec's per capita income ranks 54th in North America—behind all but two U.S. states and four Canadian provinces.

It is impossible to precisely apportion blame for this dismal performance between Quebec’s economic policies and its English-hostile language law, but there is certainly enough blame to go around.

Fortunately, just as Karnataka seems poised to repeat Quebec’s mistake, there is a glimmer of hope. This week, the New Delhi-based Centre for Civil Society launched an India-wide school choice campaign. The ultimate aim of that campaign is to make the option of independent schooling universally affordable, letting families, not judges or bureaucrats, decide how children will be educated.

So these are the dueling visions of Karnataka’s – and perhaps India’s – educational future. Forcibly ban English as the primary medium of instruction because it is viewed by some as a threat to native languages and a legacy of colonial government oppression (is there a word for irony in Kannada?), or make it possible for all parents to decide what sort of education is best for their children – public or private, English, Kannada, or some other language altogether.

Source



IRANIAN EDUCATION

The Iranian education system is preparing its students for a global war against the West in the name of Islam, according to an independent study of 115 textbooks and teachers guides released today. With Tehran accused of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons arsenal and the United States dispatching a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, the report by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace highlights the uphill task Washington faces trying to persuade Iranian youth to distance themselves from the hard-line Islamist regime.

The study, which claims to be the first of its kind, catalogs how pupils as young as 9 are conditioned to take part in a global jihad against such "infidel oppressors" as Israel and the United States. "Hate indoctrination is a professed goal of Iranian textbooks," said the report's author, Arnon Groiss, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated journalist who also has written critical studies of the Israeli, Palestinian, Syrian, Saudi and Egyptian education systems.

According to Mr. Groiss, Iranian pupils learn from an early age that the Islamic republic is in mortal combat with Western powers bent on its destruction. One 11th-grade textbook, quoting former spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, refers to the United States and its allies as "the World Devourers" and says that if they "wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all of them."

Students are drilled for battle from age 12, when they are obliged to take defense-readiness classes, according to the study by the Israel-based nongovernmental organization. Some also are drafted into the Revolutionary Guard and other elite combat units, where they are taught how to handle shoulder-propelled rocket launchers, the study says.

Through stories, poems, wills and exercises, martyrdom is glorified as a means of defending the Islamic republic and attaining eternal happiness, the report says. A Grade 10 textbook on "defense readiness" boasts that during the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, half a million students were sent to the front and "36,000 martyrs ... were offered to the Islamic Revolution."

Describing Iran's school system as a "global war curriculum," Mr. Groiss said the emphasis on military training from such a young age instilled a "siege mentality" among many students. "It is a form of child abuse to install such notions in children's minds," he told journalists at a briefing in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Israel, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly has said should be "wiped off the map," is not recognized in atlases and is portrayed as a danger to Islamic states.

More here



PM Howard on education reform:

The Australian Prime Minister is heavily pushing the restoration of educational standards

For a long time, the education debate focused almost exclusively on inputs and quantity - on money spent, student-teacher ratios and the like. This was the territory staked out and defended fiercely by the state education bureaucracies, curriculum designers and the teachers' unions. One of our achievements has been to open up the debate and to focus it on quality. Our great challenge as a nation is to improve the quality of Australia's education system. Schools reform centres on three key areas:

* GREATER choice and accountability;

* HIGHER standards; and

* MORE national consistency.

These are the foundations of a quality education system. Many of the fads and politically-correct fashions that have found their way into our schools undermine the quality of education. When Big Brother or a text message jostles with Shakespeare and classical literature for a place in the English curriculum, we rob children of their cultural inheritance.

By obfuscating the need for teachers to impart specific knowledge and for rigorous testing of achievement, we rob children, especially disadvantaged ones, of the one proven path to individual achievement and social mobility. And by denying parents clear statements of their child's performance we are letting new-age fads get in the way of genuine accountability.

Few debates are as vital as those over education, whether it be in upholding basic standards on literacy and numeracy, promoting diversity and choice, or challenging the incomprehensible sludge that can find its way into some curriculum material.

I am an unabashed supporter of choice for parents. I am a product of the government education system in Australia. I believe in a strong, well-funded and academically rigorous government school system. Yet I am a staunch defender of the right of parents to send their children to non-government schools and to have government support for that choice.

Choice has intrinsic value in a free society, especially in an area like education where we are dealing with the most important decision parents have to make - their child's future.

I am also an unabashed supporter of competitive examinations, teacher-directed lessons and the importance of academic disciplines. I make no apologies for the fact that the Commonwealth has played a role in pushing the states and territories on to higher ground on issues like standards, testing and "Plain English" report cards in our schools. High standards can only be achieved if teachers have clear road maps as to the knowledge and concepts to impart. Formal competitive examinations are essential to assessing what a child has learned.

And there is something both deadening and saccharine in curriculum documents where history is called "time, continuity and change", and geography becomes "place, space and environment". Experiments like "outcomes-based education" not only short-change parents and children, they also put unjustified demands on teachers, with jargon-ridden curriculum statements leaving teachers overwhelmed when it comes to what must be taught and what standards of student achievement are expected.

I also have serious concerns about the way in which the teaching of English has been allowed in some cases to drift into a relativist wasteland - where students are asked to deconstruct "texts" using politically-correct theories in contrast with the traditional view that great literature has something profound to say about the human condition.

There is, of course, a degree of irony in some recent comments about the need for an education revolution in this country. The key point is this - the Labor Party (leg-roped as it is to its allies in the teachers' unions) is very much a "Johnny-come-lately" to the cause of commonsense education reform in support of parental choice, higher standards and sound curricula. It was this Government's schools policy in 1996 - opposed by Labor - which really opened up choice for Australian parents by facilitating the huge expansion in low-fee independent schools.

It was David Kemp more than anyone who campaigned to put testing of basic literacy and numeracy on the national agenda. It was Brendan Nelson who fought to ensure that Australian parents are given Plain English report cards. And now Julie Bishop is taking forward a new wave of school reforms in the areas of national consistency, higher curriculum standards, principal autonomy and teacher quality. Our goal is simple: we don't want uniformity, but we do want nationwide high standards in schools to ensure every Australian student receives the best possible foundation in core subjects.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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10 February, 2007

We do use books that call Jews 'apes' admits head of British Islamic school

A King Fart Fahd school at work, no less

The principal of an Islamic school has admitted that it uses textbooks which describe Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs" and has refused to withdraw them. Dr Sumaya Alyusuf confirmed that the offending books exist after former teacher Colin Cook, 57, alleged that children as young as five are taught from racist materials at the King Fahd Academy in Acton.

In an interview on BBC2's Newsnight, Dr Alyusuf was asked by Jeremy Paxman whether she recognised the books. She said: "Yes, I do recognise these books, of course. We have these books in our school. These books have good chapters that can be used by the teachers. It depends on the objectives the teacher wants to achieve." In another exchange, Dr Alyusuf insisted the books should not be scrapped, saying that allegedly racist sections had been "misinterpreted".

The school is owned, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. Mr Paxman asked: "Will you now remove this nonsense from the Saudi Ministry of Education from your school?" Dr Alyusuf replied: "Just to reiterate what I said earlier, there are chapters from these books that are used and that will serve our objectives. But we don't teach hatred towards Judaism or Christianity - on the contrary."

During the programme Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside and chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, accused the school of inciting racial hatred and hit out at Ofsted inspectors for failing to discover the textbooks. She said: "This whole situation is unacceptable. It is incitement. It is part of a deliberate Saudi initiative to install Wahabbism extremism among Muslims and in the rest of society. If Ofsted has not drawn attention to this, that is a failing of Ofsted. "It is unacceptable and we should look to see if this is happening in other schools as well. This is about teaching children. I think the school should take immediate action and so should the regulatory authorities."

In his employment tribunal claim Mr Cook, who taught English at the school for 19 years, has accused it of poisoning pupils' minds with a curriculum of hate. Arabic translators have found that the books also describe Jews as "repugnant".

Dr Alyusuf initially claimed that the books were "not taught currently", saying: "We teach a different curriculum. We teach an international curriculum." Asked by Mr Paxman, "Would you discipline any teacher who has used these teaching materials?", she replied: "Of course I would." The principal, who has been in the post just under six months, also claimed: "I monitor what is taught in the classrooms. I have developed the curriculum myself."

Asked by Mr Paxman whether she agreed with the suggestion in teaching materials that non-believers in Islam are condemned to "hellfire", she said: "We don't teach that. We teach Islam and it is important for our students to assert their identity."

Mr Cook, of Feltham, was earning 35,000 pounds a year and is seeking 100,000 in compensation. In legal papers submitted to a Watford employment tribunal, he alleged that pupils as young as five are taught that religions including Christianity and Judaism are "worthless". He also alleges that when he questioned whether the curriculum complied with British laws, he was told: "This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia". Pupils have allegedly been heard saying they want to "kill Americans", praising 9/11 and idolising Osama bin Laden as their "hero".

Mr Cook claims he was dismissed last December after blowing the whistle on the school for covering up cheating by children in GCSE exams. He is bringing a tribunal claim for unfair dismissal, race discrimination and victimisation. The school is vigorously defending his claims

Source



British Islamic school pledges to amend racist books

Cutting half a page out is unlikely to alter the overall intolerant tone of the books

A Saudi-funded Islamic school at the centre of a row over text-books that allegedly brand other faiths as "worthless" bowed to public pressure yesterday and pledged to remove the offensive pages from the books.

Although insisting that teachers did not use the extracts, in which an early Islamic scholar is quoted as saying "the monkeys are the Jews and the pigs are the Christian infidels at Jesus's table", Sumaya Alyusuf, the head teacher, said that the half-page of text would be cut from all 34 copies in the library of the King Fahd Academy in Acton, West London. She had said during an interview on Newsnight on BBC Two that the books were taught.

However, while King Fahd Academy sought to clear its reputation as a tolerant faith school yesterday, three people claiming to be former pupils accused it of being racist, on the website facebook.com

One contributor, who said that she was a former pupil now aged 21, said that she was taught that Jews were "monkeys", while another, also 21, claimed that he was told that "people of other religions were not on a par as human beings with us".

Source



"Streaming" returns to an Australian school system

Leftist State government forced to recognize that not all kids are equal

Students in Queensland's state secondary schools would be grouped according to their ability levels in subjects such as maths and science, Education Minister Rod Welford said yesterday. The plan was designed to boost classroom quality and student outcomes. Separating students (or "streaming") was common across schools a generation ago but has fallen out of favour in recent years as politically incorrect.

But Mr Welford said Queensland's shortage of maths and science graduates and the needs of all students meant it was time to try it again. "The concept is that high performing students need to be grouped together so teachers can motivate and challenge them," he said. "Struggling students who need more attention need teachers with different skills to accelerate their learning."

He said he was keen to generate debate about what was taught in schools, including a discussion of English course material. Mr Welford challenged Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop to "provide me with $50 million-a-year special funding for professional development for teachers for higher performance learning".

Education Queensland would trial maths and science streaming from next year. Students would be grouped by teachers and subject heads according to their classroom work and test results, with the potential for students to move between streams if they caught up or experienced difficulties. Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said senior students already were streamed according to whether they took Maths A, B or C for Years 11 and 12. "Provided it is discussed at local level and the community agrees on how it will happen it should not be a problem," Mr Ryan said. "I would rather a student learn some basic maths they can master than struggle with maths that was too hard."

Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Association president Brett Devenish said the proposal had credibility, provided teachers were properly prepared. "You do get classes where some of the students are coasting and others need a lot of special help, and the hardest thing the teacher has to do is work out to allocate their time between the different groups," Mr Devenish said.

Source

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

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

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

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



9 February, 2007

Black Activist Takes Issue with School Choice Opposition

Project 21 Fellow Suggests Senator Kennedy's Antipathy to "No Child Left Behind" Voucher Provision Reveals Liberal Elitism and Allegiance to Big Labor

Senator Edward Kennedy's (D-MA) opposition to a proposed revision of the federal "No Child Left Behind" educational policy to allow school choice is evidence of an elitist attitude and a willingness to put the desires of the teachers' unions over the needs of students according to a fellow with the black leadership network Project 21. "When public schools are failing our children, parents should have accessible school choice options to meet their child's educational needs," said Project 21 fellow Deneen Borelli. "To deny children the opportunity they need in order to preserve the status quo is something Senator Kennedy and his colleagues should be ashamed of doing."

With No Child Left Behind up for congressional renewal this year, last week Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings outlined changes the Bush Administration would like to make to the policy. These changes include making schools accountable for science test scores, improved gathering of data on graduation rates, publication of school test results and a more vocational bent to some math and English curricula.

The key revisions would allow students at "chronically underperforming" schools - schools that fail to meet defined standards for a period of five years or more - to be given vouchers worth thousands of dollars that they could use to attend other public or private schools. Underperforming schools could be turned into charter schools and union contracts could be overruled to move teachers to other schools. In an interview with The Washington Times, Secretary Spelling said, "We've given [these schools] a chance, we've given them resources and it's time for us to say [the law] is a real promise and other options have to be brought to bear." A bill to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind policy is expected to be introduced in March or April.

In response to the school choice revision, Kennedy, who now chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that will conduct hearings on the reauthorization bill, said: "I am disappointed that the Administration has once again proposed siphoning crucial resources from our public schools - already reeling from increased requirements and budget cuts - for a private school voucher program. I'm also disappointed that the Administration has proposed circumventing state law with respect to worker protections and other issues. We need to focus on how to help public schools improve and not use this reauthorization to push an ideological agenda that detracts from this goal."

Reg Weaver, the president of the National Education Association teachers' union, similarly criticized the proposal for allegedly trying "to strip collective-bargaining agreements."

"Our educational policy should be focused on the children, but it seems that Senator Kennedy wants to rename this policy 'No Union Member Left Behind,'" said Project 21's Borelli. "We must remember that Senator Kennedy is the son of privilege. In his formative years, he went to the Fessenden School - the alma mater of Howard Hughes and Senate colleague John Kerry. He also attended the Milton Academy, a school that today boasts a $150 million endowment and a 125-acre campus for less than 700 students. He effectively had school choice because his family could afford to enroll him in the best schools. Now, however, as a lawmaker, he wants to force less fortunate students to stay in underperforming government-run schools so that unionized teachers can maintain the status quo. It's a classic case of do as I say, not as I do."

Source



Britain: `Test teaching ideas before imposing them on children'

So sad that this is not axiomatic everywhere

Children are missing out on the best possible education because teaching techniques have never been tested rigorously, one of Britain's most senior scientists has said. Education needs to learn from medicine and other scientific disciplines by using rigorous experiments to determine which approaches work best, according to Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, the country's largest independent funder of bio-medical research.

He told The Times that Labour and Tory governments had reformed the education system on the basis of political dogma without any reliable evidence that their policies would benefit children. Whereas the merits of drugs were assessed by randomised controlled trials before they were given to patients, children were taught according to the ideological hunches and opinions of politicians and educationists, who could not know whether their strategies would work.

Questions such as optimum class size, whether boys and girls were better taught separately, and how best to teach literacy and numeracy, had never been investigated by scientific experiment, he said. The best way to identify the best methods was to split similar children into study and control groups and teach them differently, emulating the way that drugs were tested against a placebo. "Many more matters of public policy are susceptible to experiment than is often assumed," Professor Walport said.

The notion of conducting controlled experiments in education is often criticised as unethical, as one set of children would miss out on the superior technique, but Professor Walport said that that was no worse than subjecting every child to untested policies. "It's not unethical to do experiments in education. It is unethical not to," he said. "Many of the educational policies that are put into action are experimental as it is. They are just experiments without controls. When I raised this in Whitehall, I got the response: `You don't possibly expect to compare educational outcomes like this, do you?' But that missed the point. The point is that you do this when you don't know."

Some policies are tried out in pilot studies, but these rarely feature control groups, and the initiatives are introduced nationally before the study's outcome has been evaluated. Research is often conceived to find evidence to support existing policies, rather than to decide what works before policy is decided. "The scientific method, which is to ask the question, is almost the antithesis of the political method, which is to say I'll tell you the solution," Professor Walport said.

The Department for Education and Skills's research budget, now about 4.5 million pounds, was far too low, he said, and the department needed to appoint a chief scientist responsible for ensuring its research meets rigorous scientific criteria.

His call was welcomed by Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, who said that too many education policies had been introduced without evidence. He said: "The look-and-say method of teaching children to read is a prime example. Where were the pilot studies that showed it worked? When the first proper study was done in Clackmannanshire, it found that synthetic phonics was a much more effective strategy. It was so successful that children were withdrawn from the control group as it would have been immoral to continue."

Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, said that it was not always simple to conduct controlled experiments into educational strategies. "There are so many factors that affect success, including the background and ability of pupils and the skill of teachers, that it can be hard to separate out the effect of any one factor," he said. "And the findings of research are rarely strong enough to overturn prior conceptions."

In the balance:

Reading: Whole-word approach to learning to read was introduced without evidence that it was more effective than phonics. Phonics is now making a comeback after research suggested it was more effective

Coeducation: There is little good evidence from properly controlled studies that shows whether boys and girls learn better when taught together or separately

Literacy and numeracy strategies: Introduced across the country after only minimal pilot studies into their likely effects

Specialist schools and city academies: Introduced across the country even though there was no research showing that either would have a beneficial effect

Class size: Little good research exists on the optimum size of the groups in which pupils are taught

Source



Australia: More power to principals plan

Under-performing teachers could be sacked under a radical proposal to give school principals the power to "hire and fire" their staff

Setting up education as a key election battleground, Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday launched a full-frontal attack on what she dubbed the "all-powerful teachers' unions". Rejecting Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's notion of an "education revolution", Ms Bishop said teaching appointments should be in the hands of individual principals and not state education departments.

She put forward higher standards as the issue on which the education agenda should be fought. The higher standards would be created by greater autonomy for principals, performance incentives for teachers and improved literacy and numeracy skills, she said. "Many school principals across Australia cite as their biggest frustration the fact that centralised education bureaucracies parachute teachers into schools or summarily remove valued teachers," Ms Bishop said. "Giving the power to principals will fix the problem of state governments, captive of the unions, unable to deal with under-performing teachers."

The proposal is expected to be formally raised with state governments at the next Ministerial Council on Education scheduled for April. Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith offered in-principle support, saying he believed principals should have a greater say in who was teaching in their classrooms. "I'm happy to have a conversation with my state ministers about it," he said. [A conversation! How radical! Will they talk about football too?]

State Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith said South Australian schools already had the ability to choose the best teacher for the job. Ms Bishop said she would work co-operatively with the states but warned the Federal Government could use funding as a "leverage". "Education is a national priority and it is too important to be left at the mercy of state parochialism and union self-interest," she said.

Australian Education Union state president Andrew Gohl rejected Ms Bishop's assertions, saying her plan for principal autonomy was "out of touch". "If you extend Julie Bishop's plan to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the most highly experienced, highly skilled teachers end up in small clusters of already highly advantaged schools," he said. "An education system has a responsibility to all students, regardless of where they live, to provide access to quality teachers."

During her speech, Ms Bishop also said: SHE would be putting a proposal to the states to offer rewards and incentive payments to well-performing teachers; THE Government would explore alternative pathways for teacher registration; STATES should provide further details about individual schools' performance; INCREASES in public spending had to improve standards; REITERATED her criticism of literacy and numeracy standards around the nation.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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8 February, 2007

SCHOLARSHIPS FOR THE NEW COLLEGE MINORITY: WHITE MALES

Minority Scholarships Today: Who Gets the Money?

If you think about it, white guys are right now the least likely to get most of the college scholarships—many are earmarked for women or minorities. The other outstanding scholarship criterion is “financial need.” So white males from really poor backgrounds have the most advantage, and considering the terms of quite a number of scholarships—economics do constitute a “minority” category.

The Era of Over-Compensation

“Underrepresented” and “minority” – both descriptive adjectives for the majority of scholarships, do not include white males. A number of years ago, in sync with the national outcry over a disparity between white males in jobs related to engineering, math and the sciences, there was an immediate reaction on the part of government and corporate America to remedy the gap. Scholarships that targeted females and minorities reproduced like rabbits. Now, according to a wide array of statistics the number of white males in engineering is declining, while the numbers that are female and minority continue to climb. Goal achieved, right?

Revamped: Minority Scholarships Must Include White and Male

Suddenly it must have occurred to some that if you dug down into the nitty-gritty of Civil Rights and analyzed the ills of Affirmative Action, you could make a good legal argument contesting the Constitutional validity of most scholarships today, particularly those offered through federally-funded institutions. Over the last five or six years conservative watchdog groups like the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) have called universities like the University of Michigan, Southern Illinois University, and SUNY on the carpet for racial discrimination in their admissions practices. At question are the scholarships restricted to minorities. In response to the threat of legal action, all have revamped their “minority” and female-focused scholarships to include white students and males. And it’s not just the CEO speaking out; charges emanate from an increasingly disgruntled applicant pool frustrated with access to college programs.

A New York Times article in early 2006 underscored the current tide of minority scholarship controversy. The allegations have drawn deep concern from the Department of Education and put the public university system at large on legal alert, many with changes swiftly afoot.

The Center for Equal Opportunity continues to verbally spar with the University of Michigan over allegations of “racial discrimination.” The CEO’s mission is to make sure higher education becomes a more equal proving ground, inclusive to all. This includes the increasingly excluded white male, who may be the next most “underrepresented.”

New Crop of Propositions

You’ve likely Heard of California’s Proposition 209, which in 1996 made it illegal for public colleges and universities in California to consider admissions on the basis of race, creed, sex or color. Michigan’s recent Proposition 2, a.k.a. Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, is cut from similar fabric. It was passed in early 2006 and makes the same educational admissions processes illegal as well.

Obviously the critics of such legal propositions argue that the educational process will only roll backwards, with scholastic and professional opportunities once again falling into the hands of a predominantly white male crowd, but for the moment, we’re hardly there. According to recent statistics 57% of the college crowd is female with a growing gender gap on American campuses. The problem is laced with a smorgasbord of potential reasons, say experts, only part of which is attached to scholarship money.

Political Fallout—the Satire of White Male Scholarships

All this hoopla over college scholarship dough draws a line in the sand between Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, college officials and student body. The Fall 2006 “Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship,” concocted by the Boston University College Republicans was intended to titillate the campus student body and open up communication on the issue of race in college admissions. Instead, it hit mainstream media like shotgun fire, where it fomented the controversy already in play. Eight students applied for the “satirical” $250 award that also required them to construct an essay on the meaning of being Caucasian.

White Male Looking for a Single Good-Looking Scholarship

Today’s white male college student may be suffering from the sins of the fathers. What were closely related outgrowths of equal rights, civil rights and affirmative action are now wreaking havoc on the ability for a white male to qualify for a scholarship of any kind unless he’s inordinately short, or can demonstrate some other idiosyncrasy that may be criterion for an oddball scholarship. Maybe white guys need to suffer a bit longer, eh? Maybe they need to have a history of oppression behind them first in order to feel privileged to gain some perks. Maybe they need to earn a lower station in life first.

Caucasian Scholarships at an HBCU-A Best Bet

Maybe one of the best places to shop for a “minority” scholarship aimed at white males is through one of the public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The system of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) was established to provide African Americans with a viable place to secure a rightful college education, at a time when they were afforded the same legal rights to a higher education, but in many instances could find none. Now many HBCUs are scrambling to diversify—they have to, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which clearly states that any institution that receives federal aid may not discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed or sex. This means that public HBCUs must recruit students from all backgrounds.

If you read up on the minority and Affirmative Action issues, you might assume from various stats and editorial commentaries that white enrollment is on the increase at the HBCUs, but according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, this so-called trend is nothing more than hot air. HBCUs remain predominantly black. And even in cases where there are now scholarship incentives for whites, “white students usually opt to go elsewhere.”

A few state’s public HBCU systems have been involved in bitter and lengthy legal battles over the issue of segregation. Various decisions have forced quite a few predominantly black institutions to begin aggressively marketing “minority” scholarships to white students:

• Tennessee State University is so down in its minority—white—population that the State is now funding “scholarships for Caucasian Tennessee residents.” These scholarships are rooted to the recent outcome of a lengthy court case known as the Geier case that has called over the last two decades for desegregation of Tennessee’s “dual educational” system of which TSU was a part. Long range plans for the desegregation have included assuring a balanced student body. During the mid-1980s the agreement put in motion a new system of other-race recruitment: black recruiters for white colleges and white recruiters for black. To those ends the Geier called for stepped up scholarships and financial aid to boost the process. In late 2006, the Geier case was finally dismissed on the grounds that the State had in fact effectively undone its dual system, thanks to the urgings of the Geier case over the years. The scholarships for whites cover room and board for eligible candidates.
• Diversity Scholarships for both undergraduate and graduate white students are a special program of Alabama State University and Alabama A&M University. The goal is to boost enrollment of those underrepresented in the school: whites and Native Americans, specifically at ASU and “Caucasians” at Alabama A&M. In fact as the result of a discrimination case, a federal court judge in 1995 commanded both ASU and Alabama A&M University to vigorously diversify.¹ The court case raised scrutiny over the fact that both schools had almost exclusive black student bodies and had been remiss in recruiting “other-race” students, especially whites. Since then large chunks of money have been earmarked each year to attract white students. Initially GPA requirements were set at 2.0, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, so low as to offend black students required to comply with a GPA minimum of 2.7. Since then, in response to threats of legal repercussions, the universities have raised GPA reqs for whites. Scholarships may cover full or partial tuition.
• Jackson State University in Mississippi has a student body composition of over 6,000 African Americans and about 200 Caucasians.² The university’s Diversity Scholarships are restricted to Caucasian applicants. Mississippi, like Alabama, has had to scramble to rollout diversity scholarships at its public HBCUs, following a landmark segregation case. Under terms of the settlement the state’s public HBCUs are required to bring levels of “non-black” students to 10 percent of their student body at which time they will receive critical funding to bring their programs up to speed with the other public universities in the state, the initial crux of the legal fight. In response JSU, along with Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley have all ramped up recruitment of their biggest minorities—whites. It’s not that they want to, but they now have a monetary carrot dangled before them.
• Diversity Scholarships through Alcorn State University in Mississippi are given to “non-black” applicants. Full and partial scholarships are awarded and candidates must have at least a 3.0 GPA to qualify.
• Mississippi Valley State University offers undergraduate and graduate Diversity Scholarships. Grad scholarships may cover a full tuition while the undergrad version awards $700. Applicants for both must be “non-black.”

Special Interest Private Colleges Not Offering Minority Scholarships for White Males

Good luck locating a minority scholarship exclusively for whites, much less white males, at any of the private HBCUs, including the prestigious Howard University, Morehouse College, and Tuskegee University (formerly Tuskegee Institute). This would likely be the one thing they would avoid at all costs.

Financially active and well-endowed alumni make sure their alma maters are able to remain true to their belief systems and core missions. You will find small, private HBCUs like Voorhees College in South Carolina that make every effort to promote themselves as non-discriminatory.

No, there are not any scholarships offered for “Caucasians” or “white males,” but Voorhees’ list of scholarships makes not one mention of race or gender. The school has a total enrollment of about 700, about 6 percent of which is white.

But without discriminating you also will not find scholarships for white males at any of the prestigious private women’s colleges, either. While some are now admitting males to graduate programs, they do not offer specific funding for any males--White, Hispanic, Black, Asian or purple. Legions of alumnae contribute annually to make sure they never have to. Like Blacks and other ethnic minorities, women as well have suffered under the weight of a traditionally white, male-centric university system.

You might think that even those traditionally women’s colleges with a recent history of coeducation might offer a minority scholarship for males. Hood College in Maryland turned to a coeducational platform in 2003, but still makes its “minority” scholarships exclusively available to applicants “traditionally underserved” in higher education.

Forget About Hispanic-Serving and Tribal Colleges

Tribal colleges not only offer a college, career-focused education to Native Americans, but they unabashedly consider everyone regardless of race, color, creed or sex. It’s just that your typical American college student has access to a wealth of other college options.

Most tribal colleges are rural, even remote, and can’t provide anything more than what a typical community or technical college may provide. White males won’t find minority scholarships to Tribal Colleges, but neither will anyone else due to a lack of funding. And unlike the public HBCUs, no one is offering scads of federal funding to ramp up scholarships for whites and/or males.

As for colleges that serve Hispanics, they are just that: Hispanic-serving. Sadly, this minority population doesn’t even have its own college system.

Scholarships Won’t Be Anymore Plentiful in the Future

Perhaps it’s associated with majorities, money, statistics and the who’s-getting-what of scholarships, but don’t expect White Male Scholarships to multiply like rabbits. There are too many objections, too many historical complexities and theologies of blame to give way aggressively on the issue.

So even though clearly something’s up, white guys still have the burden of proving themselves a minority, a claim that remains a topic to be rolled around a bit more, poked at by pundits, accounted for by accountants and otherwise analyzed until its day has come. In the meantime, if you are one of the “white guys” you might consider going for a former minority-driven scholarship at one of the larger public universities especially where there’s been a legal shake-up in Affirmative Action. Or grab up a fleeting “Caucasian” scholarship from one of the public Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Somewhere down the line we can hope college admissions, like everything else, will no longer have eyes for color or gender.

Source



ENGLAND TO TEACH CORRECT ENGLISH AGAIN

But lots of other bumf as well

Teenagers will be taught to speak properly, and recognise how to use standard English in formal settings, under an overhaul of the school curriculum for 11-14 year-olds. The proposals will place strict emphasis on teaching children to banish expressions such as "they was", "I done", "them books" and "I ain't" from use in debates and presentations and to use colloquial language such as "anyway" and "okay" only where appropriate.

Sue Horner, head of development at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), said that since this part of the curriculum was revised in 1995, demands from employers for schools to emphasise skills in spoken English had increased. According to research by the QCA, young people in their first jobs said that one of the biggest challenges they faced was speaking confidently on the telephone to a stranger. "They were very clear that they didn't really know how to do it. They were crying out for help," Ms Horner said.

Under the new proposals, students will continue to study Shakespeare and Jane Austen, but will also be taught to correct their English using spell-check programs and to use an online thesaurus to expand their vocabulary.

Learning about the British Empire and key dates in history, as well as how to draw up a spreadsheet and speak Mandarin, are also proposed in the new curriculum for secondary schools in England. The new focus on broadening knowledge and communicating it effectively is part of a wider attempt by the Government to drive up the basic skills of school-leavers.

The changes are intended to give teachers greater flexibility while retaining core elements of learning. But critics gave warning that far from allowing greater freedom, the proposals were packed with advice for teachers to cover everything from social diversity in the Middle Ages to the Holocaust and "political and cultural achievements of the Islamic states from 600 to 1600".

In history, the 21st century focus is away from a thematic treatment and back to learning dates and facts in chronological order. There will also be emphasis on promoting cultural and ethnic diversity through the study of the slave trade and the British Empire. "Pupils should learn that people and societies involved in the same historical event may have different experiences and views and develop a variety of stories, versions, opinions and interpretations of that event," the review states.

There will also be a new emphasis on life skills, such as healthy living, cookery and financial literacy. In modern languages, the watchdog suggests that students should learn Urdu and Mandarin as well as European languages. In science, the review suggests "a shift away from content towards the scientific process or how science works". Students will study drug abuse, psychology and the implications of developments such as in-vitro fertilisation. The new curriculum will also introduce a new system of peer assessment.

Susan Anderson, director of human resources at the CBI, welcomed the emphasis on mastery of basic skills. Employers are crying out for numerate, literate and IT-savvy youngsters who can work as part of a team, make decisions and take on responsibility." Teaching primary school children philosophy and the thinking skills of Socrates brings a lasting gain in intelligence, according to follow-up research, published yesterday, into pioneering teaching techniques in schools in Clackmannanshire, Central Scotland.

Source



BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS: Police take home-taught student to psych ward

German government agencies objected to her parent-led courses in math, Latin

A nation whose education officials already have warned that they will, when necessary, "bring the religious convictions of the family into line" with state requirements, now has removed a 16-year-old girl from her family and placed her in a child psychiatry unit after she turned in below-expected grades in math and Latin. The news of nearly two dozen officials and uniformed police officers physically taking the teen from her home in front of her shocked family is just the latest horror story to come out of Germany, where homeschooling was placed under a ban by Adolf Hitler and der Fuehrer's law still is enforced.

The stories are concerning to homeschoolers in the rest of the world, including the United States, because of the real potential that international law eventually could be used to ban such activities in places where it now is legal.

The newest German case was reported in a statement delivered to WND by Netzwerk-Bildungsfreiheit (Net-Education Freedom), an organization that works for homeschoolers' rights in Germany even though it is illegal there. A spokesman for that group had contacted WND after the news website broke the story that a German government official had warned that families' religious beliefs will have to be brought into alignment with required school attendance laws.

The government at that time had responded to a parent concerned about children being forcibly placed in custody by police officers and then delivered to the mandatory public school system: "In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement," the government said.

The student in the newest case was identified by the German organization as Melissa Busekros. She has been removed from her parents' custody, and placed in the Child Psychiatry Unit of the Nuremberg clinic, her father, Hubert Busekros, told the homeschool group. "What is being done to a sensitive and musical young girl, just because the bureaucrats want to set an example? In their zealous drive to enforce compulsory schooling (which by Melissa's age is only part-time) at all costs, they readily accept the trauma caused to the unassuming and lovable Melissa," the German homeschooler said. "The Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit condemns this inconsiderate and totally incommensurate behaviour on the part of the officials involved and demands that they give Melissa her freedom and return her to her family immediately."

The case began developing in the summer of 2005, when Melissa, then 15, was told she'd have to repeat the 7th grade at the Ernst High Gymnasium, a public school, due to her grades in math and Latin. "The situation in the class played no small part in creating this state of affairs - the high noise levels and cancelled classes prevented her from receiving the educational assistance she needed during school hours," the German organization said. Since she had good grades in all the other classes, she and her parents decided she would be tutored individually at home to meet her needs. She still took part in music and sang in her school's choir.

But school officials were unhappy, and expelled her, so the Busekros family continued educating her at home. At the end of the 2005-2006 school year she was no longer subject to full-time attendance requirements, but the Jugendamt, or Youth Welfare Office still created a case in Family Court and ordered the family to appear at a hearing.

Then this week social workers accompanied by police officers appeared at the home one morning, demanding that Melissa be handed over to them immediately, providing as authorization a ruling by the Erlangen Court dated Jan. 29. It said, "The relevant Youth Welfare Office is hereby instructed and authorized to bring the child, if necessary by force, to a hearing and may obtain police support for this purpose."

The teen was taken to the Child Psychiatry Unit and interrogated for nearly four hours, after which she was returned home, the Netzwerk said. However, the worst was still to come. On Thursday, the Family Court judge, staff members of the Youth Welfare Office, and 15 police officers "marched up to the Busekros home, to haul Melissa off to the Child Psychiatry Unit." "This treatment was justified by the psychiatrist's finding, two days previously, that she was supposedly developmentally delayed by one year and that she suffered from school phobia," the Netzwerk said. "It is not known when Melissa's parents and siblings will be able to see her again, as the official approach in cases of 'school phobia' is to completely prevent the 'patient' from having any contact with those closest to him or her, as such contact supposedly enables the phobia," the Netzwerk said.

Such issues are alarming U.S. homeschool leaders. Michael Farris, cofounder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, has called for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to protect the right of parents to educate their children at home, in light of such developments in Europe. One of his major concerns is that if the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a plan already accepted as law by many nations around the globe, were ratified by the Senate or adopted by the federal courts as enforceable international law, American homeschooling could be banned.

A homeschool advocate in Germany earlier wrote to WND that, "We are not far away from an intolerant dictatorship in our country. Parental rights are more and more abolished. If you do not the way the state wants, to so-called Jugendamt (youth welfare office) is quickly to check out if they can take away the custody of your children." He was not being identified because of his position in Germany. "As long as you practice your faith in a church building you have no problems, but as soon as you act in accordance to your faith, for example, in the education of your children, the freedom ends rapidly," he said. He likened the situation to that of families under the Nazi regime, or "like in the former Soviet Union under the Communists."

The HSLDA also has pleaded for help for the German community. "The situation, unfortunately, is not getting any better, and they need your prayers and support," the organization said recently. "Most recently, a decision was handed down by the European Court of Human rights (which) . completely turned the European Union Constitution's Article 14, the section on parent's rights to control the education of their children, completely upside down."

That decision will allow any nation in the EU, should it choose, to outlaw homeschooling. "Meanwhile, the German homeschoolers continue to be unmercifully persecuted. In our last report, we explained that there were approximately 40 families in court at one stage or the other. Families are fleeing regularly to other foreign countries in order to continue homeschooling."

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



7 February, 2007

Utahns win a hard-fought victory for school choice

The late Milton Friedman, who was the nation's foremost advocate for school choice, would be more than pleased with the news coming out of Utah. By a vote of 38-37, the Utah House last Thursday approved the first-ever statewide universal school choice plan. Despite the close vote, the program now faces relatively smooth sailing. The bill now goes to the state Senate, which twice before has voted for a similar program. Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican, won election in 2004 in part by campaigning for school choice, and he has said he will likely sign the final bill.

Until now, school choice has been an idea that works but has only been spottily implemented, in part due to the fierce opposition of teacher unions and the rest of the educational-industrial complex. Maine and Vermont have allowed students in rural districts without their own high school to attend private schools for over a century. Struggling inner-city school districts in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington allow low-income parents to obtain vouchers. My colleague Jason Riley has noted the extensive academic research finding that where choice is allowed, parents are much more satisfied with their children's education, and local public schools have improved their performance.

Utah's plan is modest, and at the same time revolutionary. It would reimburse parents sending their children to private schools between $500 and $3,000 a year based on their family income. Parents whose kids currently attend private school would not be eligible unless their income was low enough. But all new kindergartners would qualify, so that by 2020 all private school students would be eligible for vouchers.

State Rep. Steve Urquhart, the bill's chief sponsor, says the breakthrough in winning House approval was the realization that it wouldn't harm public education. The bill stipulated that for five years after a voucher student left the public system, the district would get to keep much of the money the state had paid for his education. Given that the average district gets $3,500 from the state and the average voucher is expected to be $2,000, a typical school district would gain some $1,500 every time a student left its system.

Mr. Urquhart was so confident of his math that he started an interactive Web site modeled after the interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia. He posted his bill on it and invited comments. Thousands of people logged on to www.politicopia.com and participated. "If anyone can show evidence (not just alarmist rhetoric) that public education does not come out financially ahead with this bill, post your arguments and data in the comment section," Mr. Urquhart challenged his readers. No one was able to effectively rebut him.

By the time the bill came up for a floor vote, the debate was more philosophical and substantive than demagogic. "The debate was of the highest caliber that I've seen in my 13 years here," said Speaker Greg Curtis. "I find it fascinating that not a single person spread the myth that [choice] would be harmful to public education."

There are other reasons that school choice supporters were able to surmount the political odds and win in Utah. It's worth pondering them as the battle to offer parents alternatives to the one-size-fits-all public-school model moves to other states.

* School choice supporters were persistent and relentless. Doug Holmes, chairman of Parents for Choice in Education, and Patrick Byrne, chairman of Overstock.com, are both passionate believers that every child deserves a quality education. Although Utah is known for its large Mormon population (62% as of 2004), Mr. Holmes points out that the biggest beneficiaries from the enhanced options parents will have in Utah will be the state's surging Hispanic population, now about one-ninth of Utah's 2.6 million people.

Mr. Byrne gave $500,000 last year to fund private scholarships for low-income children. He also gave money to a political action committee that leveled the playing field in education politics by ensuring that school choice supporters wouldn't be steamrollered out of office by the powerful Utah Education Association. "It's no longer a question of legislators asking if they should vote their conscience or vote with the union," says Elisa Peterson, the director of Parents for Choice in Education. "Legislators who vote for school choice know we will be there to defend them--and if they vote against choice, they know there will be consequences. The teachers union isn't the only game in town anymore."

* A profile in courage. The choice bill would have gone down to defeat had Rep. Brad Last not changed his vote. Just last month, Mr. Last, himself a former public-school official, voted against the bill as a member of the Education Committee. Last Thursday, he voted "yes," prompting gasps from the visitor's gallery. "I believe history will demonstrate to supporters and detractors that this is a good choice," he told a hushed chamber. "To those of you in public education who want to kill me right now, I'm really sorry. I understand your pain. I would ask you, go read this bill, and don't say a word to me until you read this bill."

Another surprise supporter of the bill was freshman Rep. Keith Grover, a vice principal at a junior high school, who said during the floor debate that "everyone knows how I make a living" and that he had wrestled with his conscience on how to vote. He said he believed public education needed the innovation that choice could bring.

* Public opinion matters. Over several years, school choice supporters were able to shift the debate in their direction. A poll taken last month for Salt Lake City's Deseret News and KSL-TV found that 48% of Utah residents favored a government voucher or tax-credit for private school tuition and 46% opposed the concept. A year earlier, the same poll gave choice opponents had the advantage by 54% to 40%.

Groups such as the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation were tireless promoters of the benefits of choice. They helped sponsor trips by public officials and civic leaders to Milwaukee, where they could see a functioning education alternative in action. "Public-school officials in Milwaukee told them that the city had redefined the concept of public education," says Robert Enlow, executive director of the Friedman Foundation. "It had become education that truly served the public, whether it be more flexible public schools, charter schools or private schools."

Gradually, the message sank in that choice was all about making public education work, rather than dismantling it. "I come from a family of eight children," says Ted Gardiner, a student from Taylorsville, Utah. "Each one of my siblings is a very unique individual. My mother has often said she wanted to sent me to a private school. However, eight children is a lot of mouths to feed, and it was never feasible for us." When school choice becomes law, it will be.

Rep. Urquhart said the public also responded to the argument that no school district would be docked money if students left for private schools, and indeed that such districts would actually gain income. He said it was a necessary political concession. "It doesn't make a lot of sense, if [districts] lose a student, to be financially rewarded," he told the Deseret News. But he said it was essential to communicate that the bill was about enhancing opportunity and not taking money from public education.

* Leadership counts. Rep. Curtis made it clear after he became House speaker in 2004 that school choice was a major priority for him. He steered a choice bill to within a few votes of victory in 2005 and vowed to try again. "We do not reward excellence in education," he told State Legislatures magazine. "We don't fund it, we don't demand it, and don't encourage it. If we did we would have every ability to compete at the global level in math and science."

Unions representing teachers and other government employees took notice of his apostasy and vowed to punish it. Last year, they mounted a concerted effort to defeat him. They came close; Mr. Curtis won re-election last November by only 20 votes. But far from being intimidated, the speaker realized that the best way he could survive politically was if he passed choice and made people realize it worked.

Rob Bishop is a former speaker of the Utah House who also worked as a high school teacher for 28 years before being elected to Congress as a Republican in 2002. He told me Mr. Curtis is demonstrating all the qualities of leadership voters say they want but don't always demand. "He understood he was on the right side of history," he says. After all, Mr. Bishop notes, that "choice in education is already all around us."

He's right. Kids under 5 now get federal day-care vouchers. College students get Pell grants. Even at the elementary and secondary levels, many kids with special educational or behavioral challenges are sent to private schools at state expense. Mr. Bishop says, "It makes sense to expand the existing choices we offer to every child in K-12, and that is what Utah is now leading the way in doing."

Source



Another brainstorm from Britain

The traditional school timetable should be abandoned and replaced by a radical approach in which subjects are taught together and entire weeks or days are turned over to single topics, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will say today.

The authority is to propose the changes as part of its plans to reform the Key Stage 3 curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds. Mick Waters, its director, told The Times that schools needed to find better ways of managing time to ensure that children were not turned off learning in the crucial first few years at secondary school.

Teachers will be encouraged to engage in joint subject teaching across a range of subjects and lessons will be divided into different lengths, some lasting no more than a few minutes. The proposals have been prompted by concerns about pupil disaffection; a dip in performance among pupils in their first years of secondary school; and the high dropout rates at 16. Britain has one of the worst rates among industrialised countries for dropping out of school at 16.

Resolving this problem has to go farther than merely changing the subject matter that pupils are taught. It also needs to focus on the ways they learn, Mr Waters told The Times. "We have to show students the link between the subjects so that learning makes better sense to them," he said. "If we can make them see the relevance of what they learn in school to life outside school, they may want to stay on in education."

Science lessons on anatomy, for example, could be taught jointly by science and PE teachers, helping pupils to see the practical application and relevance, say, of theoretical learning about how muscles or ball-and-socket joints work.

Other combinations could work just as well: languages and music (learning a song in French) or languages and financial literacy (learning how to convert different currencies); history and geography (studying patterns of local settlements); or maths and PE (collecting and charting scores and fastest times). "Wouldn't it be lovely if the PE teacher turned up in the history lesson to show examples of how great sportsmen through the ages had exercised leadership and control?" Mr Waters said. He added, however, that some subjects would need to be taught separately and in depth so that youngsters could build up a solid body of knowledge and facts in core areas.

He likened the new approach to the preparation of a mixed salad: "Imagine the programme of study in a school as the ingredients in a salad. The way you put them together to create the salad is the crucial bit in making it appetising. There is nothing to say that a school has to offer 40 minutes of tomatoes, followed by 40 minutes of lettuce, followed by double onions. "The challenge for schools is to work out which ingredients need to be taught separately, so that children quarry learning in real depth; which ingredients need to be taught by the drip-feed method for a few minutes every day; and which can be taught jointly."

Under guidance accompanying today's Key Stage 3 document, schools may also decide to adopt a total immersion approach to a subject, such as ICT, and to spend an entire week studying it, with teachers in every subject area focusing uniquely on the use of ICT in their own field for that week. Schools may also decide that some subjects, such as modern languages or maths, are best learnt by the drip-feed method, with constant repetition several times during the day. "They might be timetabled for a few minutes two or three times a day," Mr Waters said.

Timetables could also be adapted for different groups of children. Those who arrive at secondary school unable to swim, for example, could do only swimming in games and PE until they can swim. Those who can already swim could experiment with a range of new sports. Mr Waters said that schools also needed to adopt a new approach to skills. Pupils are currently taught research skills in each of their separate subjects, when equally these could be taught separately in a dedicated class to avoid repetition.

Source



The "dance of the lemons" in Australia too

A familiar "dance" to California and NYC -- where incompetent teachers are sent from school to school rather than being fired

Incompetent teachers are being shuffled between schools rather than being sacked while many new graduates are being put in charge of the most difficult students. And principals have little say in fixing the problem because they have little control over who they can hire and fire, according to Teachers and the Waiting Game, a new paper that argues for deregulation of teacher appointments in the public system. "Principals in NSW and other states have no say over who is dismissed from the school. They're not the person who decides whether a teacher is incompetent or whether they are guilty of misconduct," said the report's author, Jennifer Buckingham, from the Centre for Independent Studies.

Teachers who failed to prepare lessons or did not understand a syllabus were difficult to discipline or dismiss because a principal's "hands were often tied" by state education departments that were in the grip of teacher unions, Ms Buckingham said. "The process of examining a teacher's performance can take up to 12 months and it can happen in a couple of schools before eventually the teacher is dismissed."

Apart from Victoria, state and territory education departments often decide by whom and where teachers are recruited, often based on length of service at a school or seniority. Unlike Victoria, where principals can immediately advertise jobs, other state principals must choose from a department list of eligible teachers before advertising externally. "For example (in NSW) if a school needs a maths teacher, rather than advertising or selecting candidates from an employment list, the school will contact the department and they are sent a teacher, most of the time with no consultation," Ms Buckingham said.

The result had been a trend to send new graduate teachers to the most disadvantaged schools. "In order to work your way up to the top of the (school transfer) queue to be offered other jobs throughout the state, you have to put in time in a school that is hard to staff - and the reason those schools are hard to staff are because the kids are hard to teach," Ms Buckingham said.

In NSW, 30 per cent of graduate teachers were concentrated in 3 per cent of schools that were difficult to staff either because a high proportion of students had behavioural problems or were from non-English speaking backgrounds, she said.

NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt rejected Ms Buckingham's thesis. "In 2005 we reformed staffing procedures to give local school communities more opportunities to choose their principals and, for the first time, their classroom teachers. In 2006, we introduced legislation to streamline the process of identifying, assisting, and if necessary, removing poor performing teachers."

Australian Education Union president Pat Byrne said the teacher shortage was not related to centralised recruitment processes. "The issue is not whether the school has the say or the selection, the issue is whether or not people perceive the position to be worthwhile in terms of the salary, conditions and accommodation," Ms Byrne said."

Source

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

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

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

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6 February, 2007

BRITISH LIBERTARIANS ATTACK POLITICIZATION OF SCHOOLS

The Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties policy institute, today denounces the new policy of the British Government to indoctrinate all schoolchildren with the lies of the global warming lobby. According to The Independent newspaper on Friday 2nd February 2006, "The plans, to be published on Monday, will ensure that, for the first time, issues such as climate change and global warming are at the heart of the school timetable. Pupils will also be taught to understand their responsibilities as consumers - and weigh up whether they should avoid travel by air to reduce CO2 emissions and shun food produce imported from the other side of the world because of its impact on pollution."

Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Sean Gabb, says: "This is political indoctrination lifted in all but its content from Soviet Russia. Children are to be taught the at best highly questionable claims of the global warming lobby as if they were facts. They are then to be marked up or down in their examinations according to how well they can parrot these alleged facts. "To environmentalism is to be added propaganda about racism and sexism, and every other politically correct obsession.

Ten years into the creeping totalitarianism of New Labour, the final link is to be severed between state schooling and education of children in the values of their parents. From now on, the function of schooling will be to produce a new nation, created in the image of George Monbiot and Yasmin Alibhai Brown. "Our ruling class has taken to heart the old Jesuit maxim: 'Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man'. The only difference is that raising the school leaving age will give them the child till he is eighteen. "The Libertarian Alliance calls on all parents to resist the brainwashing of their children."

Source



$34.06 an Hour: That's how much the average public school teachers makes. Is that "underpaid"?

Who, on average, is better paid--public school teachers or architects? How about teachers or economists? You might be surprised to learn that public school teachers are better paid than these and many other professionals. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker.

In the popular imagination, however, public school teachers are underpaid. "Salaries are too low. We all know that," noted First Lady Laura Bush, expressing the consensus view. "We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more." Indeed, our efforts to hire more teachers and raise their salaries account for the bulk of public school spending increases over the last four decades. During that time per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled; overall we now annually spend more than $500 billion on public education.

The perception that we underpay teachers is likely to play a significant role in the debate to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. The new Democratic majority intends to push for greater education funding, much of which would likely to go toward increasing teacher compensation. It would be beneficial if the debate focused on the actual salaries teachers are already paid.

It would also be beneficial if the debate touched on the correlation between teacher pay and actual results. To wit, higher teacher pay seems to have no effect on raising student achievement. Metropolitan areas with higher teacher pay do not graduate a higher percentage of their students than areas with lower teacher pay.

In fact, the urban areas with the highest teacher pay are famous for their abysmal outcomes. Metro Detroit leads the nation, paying its public school teachers, on average, $47.28 per hour. That's 61% more than the average white-collar worker in the Detroit area and 36% more than the average professional worker. In metro New York, public school teachers make $45.79 per hour, 20% more than the average professional worker in that area. And in Los Angeles teachers earn $44.03 per hour, 23% higher than other professionals in the area.

Evidence suggests that the way we pay teachers is more important than simply what they take home. Currently salaries are determined almost entirely by seniority--the number of years in the classroom--and the number of advanced degrees accumulated. Neither has much to do with student improvement.

There is evidence that providing bonuses to teachers who improve the performance of their students does raise academic proficiency. With our colleagues at the University of Arkansas we found that a Little Rock program providing bonuses to teachers based on student gains on standardized tests substantially increased math proficiency. Researchers at the University of Florida recently found similar results in a nationwide evaluation.

Of course, public school teacher earnings look less impressive when viewed on an annual basis than on an hourly basis. This is because teachers tend to work fewer hours per year, with breaks during the summer, winter and spring. But comparing earnings on an annual basis would be inappropriate when teachers work significantly fewer hours than do other workers. Teachers can use that time to be with family, to engage in activities that they enjoy, or to earn additional money from other employment. That time off is worth money and cannot simply be ignored when comparing earnings. The appropriate way to compare earnings in this circumstance is to focus on hourly rates.

Moreover, the earnings data reported here, which are taken directly from the National Compensation Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, do not include retirement and health benefits, which tend to be quite generous for public school teachers relative to other workers. Nor do they include the nonmonetary benefit of greater job security due to the tenure that most public school teachers enjoy.

Educators sometimes object that hourly earnings calculations do not capture the additional hours they work outside of school, but this objection is not very compelling. First, the National Compensation Survey is designed to capture all hours actually worked. And teachers are hardly the only wage earners who take work home with them.

The fact is that teachers are better paid than most other professionals. What matters is the way that we pay public school teachers, not the amount. The next time politicians call for tax increases to address the problem of terribly underpaid public school teachers, they might be reminded of these facts.

Source



Australia: Teacher trainees not being trained

Typical government management of supply and demand

A leaked report by a State Government working party says West Australian schools are increasingly reluctant to allow undergraduates into classrooms for the work experience they need to get a teaching degree. As the Carpenter Government battles to fill a record shortfall of more than 200 teachers this year, the report warns that some student teachers may not be able to graduate due to a lack of work experience places in the state's schools. The trend has universities worried about the next generation of teachers.

In 2005, some Victorian student teachers were unable to graduate because of a lack of work experience placements, the report says. The report, Teacher Supply and Demand and Student Placements in Western Australia, was completed late last year. It includes claims by Murdoch University that it struggled to place student teachers in schools despite using small gifts to try to entice teachers to take them. "Murdoch tries to do PR and gives small gifts and certificates, but it is stressful having to go to the same teachers time and again and fewer want to be involved," the report stated.

The severe teacher shortage facing government schools in Western Australia - the shortfall had dropped yesterday to 166 full-time and 44 part-time teachers following an urgent recruitment drive - has reached some independent schools.

Independent schools told the authors of the report that it was increasingly difficult to fill positions in rural Western Australia. And it was extremely difficult to place teachers in Aboriginal communities. Those who went rarely stayed more than a year. [I wonder why?] "This staff turnover compounds the disadvantage experienced by the schools," the report says.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



5 February, 2007

Greenie propaganda to be part of the British geography syllabus

Teenagers will learn about the threat to the environment from climate change and what they can do about it, under reforms to geography teaching. They will be encouraged to recycle consumer goods and to question whether they really need another imported pair of trainers. Other topics to be studied include the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said: “With rising sea temperatures, melting ice-caps and frequent reminders about our carbon footprints, we should all be thinking about what we can do to preserve the planet. Children are the key to changing society’s attitudes to the environment. Not only are they passionate about saving the planet but children also have a big influence over their own families’ lifestyles.”

In a parallel move, the Department for Education announced that it would send a copy of Al Gore’s film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, to every secondary school.

The reforms, to be published next week by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, follow criticism by scientists of the way schools have addressed issues such as climate change. Last month the Royal Society of Chemistry said that textbooks were out of date and that lessons had “omissions, simplifications and misrepresentations”. The changes, part of a review of the curriculum for pupils aged 11 to 14, were welcomed by Rita Gardner, director of the Royal Geographical Society.

Source



A government school system at work

Nobody cares. If it was their own money they would

A recent audit of cash-strapped Camden, N.J. school district's finances found it was paying an employee $130,000 annually - and he's been dead for more than three decades. City officials were shocked by the discovery.

The independent audit of Camden schools found fiscal mismanagement and lax controls for payroll, purchasing, and accounts payable, reported WPVI-TV in Philadelphia. Camden has been plagued with scandal and is known as the nation's poorest city.

The audit also found outside vendors have been overpaid more than $17 million. In one case the district forked over $953,000 for copy equipment even though the purchase order was for only $55,000. "It's just totally unbelievable and absolutely incredible that we can have such a dysfunctional system in place," said school board president Philip Freeman. [I've got news for you, Phil]

Source



Is this some black history that SHOULD be taught?

At least this story is factual

A 25-year-old student angry that his technical school wasn't teaching about black history walked into his business class Friday and stabbed three school officials with a screwdriver, police said.

Kevin Mair of Plantation walked into his classroom at Atlantic Technical Center using a cane and sound-blocking headphones similar to those used in a gun range, said Officer Anthony Avello of the Coconut Creek Police Department. Mair became agitated and "expressed his displeasure about the lack of black history being taught at the school," Avello said. February is Black History Month. The teacher asked Mair to leave and called for staff assistance, he said.

Mair then attacked the three victims with a screwdriver he took to school, officials said. An assistant director of the school was stabbed in the back and two security specialists in the arms. The three were later released from the hospital.

Mair fled in his car, was involved in a car crash and tried to run from officers but was apprehended. He will be charged with multiple counts of aggravated battery, authorities said.

Source



Australia: Government schools in expensive suburbs can't cope with enrollments

Matching supply to demand is too hard for governments

Public schools are turning away students because they have run out of classroom space and do not want to fill their playgrounds with demountables. Changing demographics, a flow of students back into public schools and the State Government's $710 million class-size reduction policy are all placing an extra strain on resources. Most affected are schools in the high-density eastern- and inner-city suburbs, where there is limited space to expand.

Bronte Public School has had to turn away pupils from outside its local area. "Demand is growing," principal Pam Crawley said. "We are limited to [taking students from] within the area and siblings simply because we don't have any more space," Ms Crawley said. She said an increasing number of people were eager to send their children to local public schools. "People value the fact their children are starting in their local school and getting a sense of community," she said.

Kensington Public School principal and Public School Principals Forum spokeswoman Annie Jones has had to turn away up to 50 children from kindergarten each year - and between 20 and 40 from years 1 to 6 - because of a lack of space. She does not want to take in any demountable classrooms which she said would encroach on the playground area.

NSW Teachers Federation eastern suburbs and inner city representative Michelle Rosicky said the schools experiencing a lack of room tended to be older and had limited land. "The problem is, in the eastern suburbs, if those parents can't get their kids into Coogee, Clovelly and Bronte [public schools] they will send them to private schools."

Source

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

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

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

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

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



4 February, 2007

A PATHETIC HISTORY PROFESSOR

Comment by Stanley Kurtz

Russell Jacoby, a U.C.L.A. historian, has penned a bizarre review of the forthcoming anthology, Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys. This is a Mary Eberstadt edited collection, to which I am a contributor.  (The review is in the current Chronicle of Higher Education, and is subscriber restricted.)  I kid you not: Jacoby’s main complaint is that the book is well written, which supposedly proves that conservatives are superficial.

"Almost without exception", Jacoby begins, "each essay is lucid and articulate". "Would it be possible to assemble a countercollection by leftists that would be equally limpid?" "Unlikely," Jacoby answers. The leftist professorate, he admits, “distrusts clear prose as superficial.  Oddly, English and literature professors led the way....they became convinced that incomprehensibility equals profundity....Compared to that, much conservative writing has a deft, light touch.”  The villain here?  “...conservative think tanks, which encourage readable prose for a reading public.”  Yes, Jacoby admits, “these conservatives are best at puncturing liberal, especially academic, balderdash.”  “On the basis of this volume, conservatives are excellent writers–and facile thinkers.  Perhaps the two go together.”

Jacoby’s review betrays no profundity, lucid or otherwise.  It’s merely an angry litany of what struck Jacoby as the most odious conservative views affirmed by the various authors of Why I Turned Right.  Anyway, snaps Jacoby, today’s conservatives are merely reacting to campus culture, not to the sort of truly serious oppression we found in the old Soviet Union.  (Somehow Jacoby missed the account of my trip to the old Soviet Union.)  And Jacoby complains that the authors of Why I Turned Right have nothing to say about a variety of important issues–like civil rights.  (Guess my discussion of the betrayal of liberal civil rights ideals by the movement for race and gender preferences doesn’t count.)

Panning Why I Turned Right as well written but superficial is a risible excuse for a critique.  These pieces are personal statements, not detailed policy documents or philosophical disquisitions.  If you want something intellectually meatier, take a look at, say, The Future of History. (I admit that even this is easier to understand than the nonsense penned by many postmodern English professors.)  But liberal academics don’t bother engaging conservative policy analysis, no matter how serious it is.  Instead, they bridle at the thought that a book by conservatives might actually be read and enjoyed by the general public.

Anyway, what do you say about a review that confirms every stereotype of the crotchety, jealous, humorless, politically correct zealots who run our academy.  Get real, professor Jacoby.  Good writing is not a disqualification.  Has the other side really been reduced to this?  You might have tried graciously conceding that the essays read well, and then moved on to some thoughtful criticism.  This sort of silliness merely shows how completely removed from public discourse our academics actually are.  Remember, these folks are supposed to be teaching America’s children.

So I give you Why I Turned Right: in the words of its bitterest critics, “lucid, articulate...limpid...written with a deft, light touch, [penned by] excellent writers...readable prose for the reading public.”  Note to publisher: first blurb for paperback now available.

Source



N.J. Schools Test Students' Urine for Weekend Drinking

An extraordinary invasion of privacy. What kids do on the weekend in their own homes is no business of the school

Teens who drink alcohol could be caught three days later under a high school's new testing policy for students. The test, which will be given randomly to students at Pequannock Township High School, can detect whether alcohol was consumed up to 80 hours earlier. The legal drinking age in the United States is 21.

Other districts already use the test. Middletown began using it last spring for students suspected of using drugs and alcohol. This month, the district expanded it to include a random pool of about 1,800 students.

Pequannock Superintendent Larrie Reynolds said the policy approved last week should be a deterrent to students who feel peer pressure to drink. Under the program, students who test positive will not be kicked off teams or barred from extracurricular activities, Reynolds said. Instead, they will receive counseling - and their parents will be notified. "Most kids who think they can get away with it might be tempted to stop and think about it," he said. The test costs will be paid with federal grants, Reynolds said.

Urine screenings look for ethyl glucuronide, produced by the body after it metabolizes alcohol. School officials acknowledge the test is sensitive, and false positive readings can be the result of using products containing ethanol, including mouthwash and Balsamic vinegar. But Reynolds said in order for students to test positive, they would generally have had to consume the equivalent of one or two drinks.

Critics have said the testing does not work and invades students' privacy. "Medical care and treatment are issues between parents and children," said Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

Source



A core curriculum for all Australians: Why should schooling change at every state border?

Following is an editorial from "The Australian"

The politics of Australian education are pathetically predictable, with sensible ideas that will disturb the status quo in schools always exciting ire among state ministers. Yesterday, they responded to a proposal from their federal counterpart, Julie Bishop, for common school subjects across the country as if she wanted to put cannibalism on the curriculum. But Ms Bishop's proposal that all schools across the country adopt a common curriculum makes a great deal of sense. Australia is a big country, but Australians are one people and the idea that students in Bunbury and Bundaberg need to learn entirely different things in radically different ways makes no sense. And no sense in some of the areas that matter most is what we have now.

As a new report from the Australian Council of Educational Research makes clear, a great many of our school syllabuses have all the consistency of 19th-century rail gauges, particularly in areas especially important to education union ideologues and curriculum commissars - English and history. There are 18 university entry high school English courses in Australia, but no novels, poems or plays are on all of them. And less than half the topics taught in Australian history are common across the country. The existence of nine state and territory systems ensures ample opportunities for fads and fashions to be imposed on children. From the social engineering exercises of the Victorian curriculum introduced at the end of the 1980s to the utterly discredited Outcomes Based Education plan that crippled the credibility of the Carpenter Government in Western Australia last year, the absence of a single set of national standards and subjects means education planners get away with curriculum crimes at a state level that would never be allowed if all the whole country were involved.

There is no need for it to be like this. The laws of physics do not change in the middle of the Murray. Nor does the Nullarbor transform the rules of grammar. And curriculum experts in maths and science around the country know it. According to the ACER, course content in advanced mathematics, physics and chemistry is almost identical all over Australia. But not in the humanities, the subjects that shape what students understand Australia to be about. There the education establishment pushes barrows piled high with their different political values. It beggars belief that what students need to know about our national achievements, and failings, differs in Darwin or Devenport. And it makes no sense for students who share a common culture to be taught different novels in different ways.

The tide is running against states' rights education orthodoxies. The Howard Government has long pushed for basic skills to be taught in schools and for pupil progress to be reported in ways parents understand. And it looks like Labor under Kevin Rudd is not interested in backing state governments that impose education fads such as OBE. But nobody should expect an outbreak of common sense on the subject of a national curriculum. State ministers are responding to Ms Bishop's suggestion just as they always do when anybody advances an idea that involves change. Canberra should butt out because everything is under control, some say. Others will add that schools are a state responsibility, before demanding more money from the federal government. The especially brazen will bluster that a common curriculum will dumb down standards in their state.

There is nothing new in any of this. When the last Labor government was in power in Canberra, the Liberal states used these lines. And while the roles are now reversed, the arguments remain the same. But Ms Bishop should persevere. The idea of a common curriculum is one whose time must come. It does not mean that across the continent every school should teach exactly the same thing in exactly the same way at exactly the same time every day. It does not mean there is no room for regional diversity. But it does mean that just as knowledge and core Australian values do not change at state lines, neither should the way they are taught.

Source



Australia: Wherefore art the classics?

Senior Queensland English students can choose to organise a rock concert or learn about workplace rights rather than hunkering down to study classical English texts. The Federal Government yesterday used the Queensland Studies Authority's own website to hit back at claims by State Education Minister Rod Welford that English communications courses were not a soft option. Mr Welford said the courses focused on good writing, grammar and spelling - and were designed for students proceeding to vocational education, training courses and jobs.

But Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said it was difficult to imagine how organising a concert met community expectations of what students should study in an English class. "Parents expect their children to learn the skills that will support further learning or their ability to find and hold down a job," Ms Bishop said. "Mr Welford's defence of these types of courses explain why he is so dismissive of the concerns of parents about standards of literacy and numeracy, which he recently described as a "tired old cliche".

Ms Bishop, who released a report this week which showed a lack of national consistency in classroom curricula, urged Mr Welford to read it as it made "a compelling case for higher standards and greater national consistency in schools". Ms Bishop said Australia had nine different senior secondary certificates with a bewildering array of variations. The Minister is devising a plan to standardise the core subjects - English, maths, physics, chemistry and Australian history - at Australian schools.

Prime Minister John Howard said that standardising core school subjects in states and territories across Australia was common sense and fair. "I can't understand how anybody could object to having a sufficiently common curricula around the nation to ensure that children who in any given school year go from one state to another are not disadvantaged," Mr Howard told ABC Radio. He said 70,000 Australian children travelled between states each year and he wanted to ensure their education did not suffer. "It is very disruptive and very damaging that you still don't have a situation where a child can go from Western Australia to Queensland without suffering a very significant disadvantage," he said. But he said a national education system would not mean every school's curriculum would be identical. "That doesn't mean that every classroom in every state should be teaching the same thing at the same time every day. It plainly doesn't mean that," he said.

Ms Bishop will present the plan to state and territory education ministers at a meeting in April.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



3 February, 2007

BAD ATTITUDE PART OF THE BLACK PROBLEM?

If attitude does not matter, how come immigrant blacks do better than native-born ones? Could it be that immigrants try harder etc.?

Black students with U.S. ancestry appear to be less represented in college than race-based statistics indicate, as immigrants make up a disproportionate share of admissions, a Princeton University analysis found. First- or second-generation immigrants made up 27 percent of black freshmen entering 28 top-ranked colleges in 1999, according to the study released Tuesday. Such immigrants accounted for only 13 percent of all U.S. blacks aged 18 or 19 that year, the researchers found.

'Double their share'''In other words, the representation of immigrant-origin blacks at selective institutions of higher education was roughly double their share in the population,'' said the report by Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey and his colleagues at the New Jersey school and at the University of Pennsylvania.

The findings may revive claims that affirmative action designed to help the descendants of slaves are more likely to benefit high-achieving immigrants from countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Jamaica, the authors wrote.

Goes beyond race preferences''It's a very complicated, messy issue,'' said Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education.''If it were easy, we would have figured it out a long time ago.''

The study highlights a problem with college admissions that extends beyond disputes over racial preferences, said Harvard University law professor Lani Guinier. ''This is not a debate about affirmative action; this is a debate about the very core mission of higher education,'' Guinier said. ''I want them to tell me what their graduates are doing to serve the larger society, not what their applicants got on a timed test.''

OK, Lani. How about Colin Powell and Barack Obama? Are they "serving society"? They are of black immigrant origin. Disproportionate success among black immigrants is not confined to the exam room. That bad attitudes are a problem among American blacks is also shown by the way black females do much better than black males

Source



The evolution of education

Australian education writer Kevin Donnelly states the argument for a traditional education in specific knowledge, as opposed to the prevalent approach that simply learning anything is better than nothing

In arguing that the school curriculum should be centred on particular subjects such as mathematics, history and English. the American Federation of Teachers draws on a view of education closely associated with the rise of Western civilisation that can be traced back hundreds of years. Where the approach known as outcomes-based education - especially the various versions adopted in Tasmania, the Northern Territory, the ACT and Western Australia - gives priority to so-called competencies and generic skills, the AFT approach is to place the disciplines centre-stage. Yet the Australian Education Union and other local professional bodies are staunch advocates of OBE.

In part, the reason for the AFT arguing its position is that after experimenting with OBE during the early to mid-1990s, all American states dropped it in favour of what is termed a standards approach. Similar to a syllabus approach to curriculum, a standards approach is year-level specific, focuses on traditional subjects, regularly tests students, and gives teachers a clear and concise road map of what students should know and be able to accomplish after a set period of time.

Since the time of the early Greek philosophers and sophists, evolving over the centuries and incorporating aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition and historical movements such as the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, a liberal-humanist view of education is concerned - to use English 19th-century poet and schools inspector Matthew Arnold's expression -- with "getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said'".

As noted by Australian former educationist academic and writer Brian Crittenden, while subjects have evolved, there is also much that has remained constant: "In any area of systematic knowledge there is a range of key concepts, basic theories and method. They are not immune to change, but are relatively long term. They are the defining features of a discipline or area of systematic knowledge. In several areas (such as the physical sciences) content has changed fairly rapidly, although methods have tended to be more enduring and, in all cases, there is at least a core of relatively stable knowledge. The acquisition of a discipline's skills of inquiry needs to be closely related to the learning of its key concepts, theories and other content."

While OBE is consumed by the tyranny of relevance, a liberal-humanist view of education acknowledges and values the past. The reason for studying history is not simply so we are saved from repeating the same mistakes. As important is the recognition that, as individuals and as a society, we are involved in an unfolding narrative that began thousands of years ago and which continues to unfold into the future. Being part of that narrative promotes a sense of belonging to something more lasting and significant than the often mundane routine of day-to-day existence.

One of the strengths of a liberal- humanist view of education, in an era of social dysfunction, alienation and loss of meaning, is that there is a strong and life-affirming story about how Western civilisation has evolved and how, while being far from perfect, we are no longer ruled by superstition, bigotry and ignorance.

David Green, an analyst at the London- based Institute of Economic Affairs, in summarising an address to the Mont Pelerin Society given by historian Max Hartwell, describes a liberal-humanist view of education as follows: "The content of a liberal education, he [Hartwell] says, should embrace civility, morality, objectivity, freedom and creativity. By civility, he means respect for other people; by morality, the elementarv maxims such as honesty and fairness; by objectivity, belief in the disinterested examination of facts and arguments, without fear or favour; by freedom, the principle that children should be equipped to exercise personal responsibility; and by creativity, belief in the advance of knowledge: not the perfectibility of man, but the possibility of progress.

"Hartwell points out that a liberal education can be more easily defined negatively than positively: it is not utilitar- ian or interest-serving; it is not vocational or professional; it is not specialist or one-sided; it is not conformist and uncritical: it is not education for doing: it is disinterested, it is general and universal, it is critical and inventive, it is education for thinking and understanding."

Bruce Wilson, the man partly responsible for Australia's adoption of OBE, acknowledges that any curriculum must recognise the importance of particular subjects. After referring to the research associated with an American publication, How People Learn, undertaken by the National Research Council of the US, he says: "The report offers powerful confirmation of the key idea in this paper: that transferable, higher order learning, what I am calling deep understanding, is inseparable from a well-organised body of content knowledge which reflects a deep understanding of specific subject matter."

A liberal-humanist view of education values the aesthetic, the moral and the spiritual, as well as the rational. A well-rounded education should encompass the spiritual and moral value of the literary canon represented by Greek tragedies, Shakespeare and the romantic poets as well as great artworks and classical music. As noted by 20th-century US writer and child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, young children need a steadv diet of those myths. fables and legends that tell us so much about emotions such as betrayal, love and bravery and, as a result, help to develop psychological maturity and resilience.

It is also the case, contrary to the belief that all learning is subjective and relative, that there are certain interpretations of the world that are closer to the truth than others. Ptolemy's version of the heavenly movements was superseded by Copernicus, and William Harvey dispelled many of the beliefs about the heart's operation and how blood circulated around the body.

Contrary to the criticism that the traditional academic curriculum is unchanging, history shows us that disciplines evolve, and what is accepted as true at one stage is open to scrutiny and debate. As noted by Tony Gibbons, when discussing science as a subject: "The purpose of science is to seek explanations of the physical world. Proposed explanations are tested against the physical world and. depending upon the success in accounting for that physical world, may be accepted as a step in the search for truth. The matter is a search, a quest, for the condition of scientific inquiry is one in which there is progress from one theory to the next."

One of the most strident criticisms of a liberal-humanist education is that it is used to reproduce capitalist societies, where those already privileged are able to maintain and consolidate their power and control. If such were truly the case, then why is it that members of the Left have been so successful in their long march through the education system? The reality is that the very system attacked as socially unjust and closed has granted them the freedom to mount their critique and to subvert the school curriculum. A traditional education, instead of simply reinforcing the status quo, provides a vantage point from which to criticise and improve the world.

In relation to literature. for example. one need only read poems such as William Blake's Holy Thursday, novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the plays of Bertolt Brecht for evidence of the conservative curriculum's powerful and damning critique of society. When studying history, in particular the advent of popular sovereignty, the rule of habeas corpus, the abolition of slavery, the Chartist movement and the movement to universal franchise, it soon becomes obvious that the education system provides an independent site to measure our freedom. Instead of stifling debate and preserving elitism, a liberal-humanist education provides the very knowledge, understanding and skills needed to improve society.

While many politicians, bureaucrats and teacher educators seek to use the education system to further their own agendas, often based on short-term political expediency, ideological bent or self-interest, one of the strengths of a liberal-humanist education is that it is based on the belief that schools and universities should remain autonomous and free of outside interference. Education should not be used as a handmaiden for those either on the Left or the Right who are seeking to impose a form of managerialism that reduces learning to what is cost effective.

The above edited extract from "Dumbing Down" by Kevin Donnelly appeared in "The Australian" newspaper on January, 27, 2007



(Conservative) Australian Federal government push for national High School curriculum

Labor premiers have been challenged by the Howard Government to embrace a national education framework, after a high-level report found "bewildering" inconsistencies across school curriculums. In the latest challenge to states' rights, Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday promoted a unified system - and signalled she would push the national agenda at a key meeting in April.

"I am concerned that students, teachers and parents are being let down as many aspects of school education get hijacked by teachers unions and state education bureacrats," Ms Bishop said. "Instead of learning basic facts in subjects like history, children are being taught according to an ideological agenda." ....

Ms Bishop, addressing a business audience in Brisbane, ramped up her push for national consistency as she released a report highlighting the depth of the problem across five subject areas. The Australian Council for Educational Research study portrayed an alarming jigsaw of Year 12 curriculums. In one of the most glaring cases, the study found 27 different types of maths classes for pre-university students, and 20 different history courses, with only two called "Australian history".

There was only 25 per cent consistency in English courses, while 50 per cent of history classes used the same material. The results were more positive in more challenging subjects such as chemistry and physics, where there was up to 95 per cent consistency across the nation.

Flagging a showdown with the states at the national meeting of education ministers in April, Ms Bishop cited the growing number of remedial English and maths classes being taught in universities as evidence that the states were failing on standards. "There is nothing to stop the state and territory governments from adopting a nationally consistent approach at any time in the past," she told the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia. "The differences are grounded in history of the states and territories and their education systems, and in the different sets of compromises that have had to be struck by curriculum and assessment agencies with their respective stakeholders over the years."

With a population of just 20 million people, Australia had nine different senior secondary certificates with a "bewildering array of variations", Ms Bishop told the conference. "There are differences in the number and types of subjects that are offered, assessed and certificated; differences in assessment methodologies and differences in the codes used to report results."

ACER chief executive Geoff Masters said the findings reinforced the need for common subject content across the nation's schools. "There's a pretty strong case for having a very significant proportion of courses common across all states and territories," Mr Masters said.

But state ministers hit back at their federal counterpart, saying her national agenda was politically driven and out of date. They had been working together towards greater national consistency for several years. "NSW already has a rigorous, highly regarded curriculum and end-of-school credential, and we are concerned that any move to impose a national system would result in a lowering of standards for NSW students," NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said. "Where it can benefit students and the wider community, NSW supports moves towards greater national consistency, something we have been working co-operatively towards for several years."

Victoria treated the proposal with scepticism. "What Victoria doesn't want to do is lower the high quality educational standards in Victoria just to meet some artificial target proposed by Ms Bishop to satisfy a political agenda," Education Minister John Lenders said.

South Australian Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith said the federal Government had commissioned many reports into curriculum issues without serious financial investment. "This is just another distraction to take attention away from federal Labor's funded education plan for real improvements in science and mathematics."

The ACT welcomed alignment of curriculum standards provided it did not compromise its education system. Federal Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith said he favoured a national curriculum "with the obvious and sensible local and regional variations".

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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2 February, 2007

See no dissent, call it science

It is a sign of how politicized global warming has become when a father's push for his daughter's junior high school science class to present both sides of the global warming controversy becomes a national story -- with the father being portrayed as the villain. To recap, Frosty Hardison, the parent of a seventh-grader who attends school in Federal Way, Wash., was troubled to learn that science teacher Kay Walls had planned on showing her class Al Gore's global-warming pic "An Inconvenient Truth" -- without presenting any contrary information.

Hardison is an evangelical Christian who, as the Washington Post reported, sees global warming as "one of the signs" of Judgment Day. That is, Hardison fits the sort of stereotype bound to attract national media attention under the rubric: religious zealot fights science in schools. The school board put a moratorium on showing the movie -- since lifted -- while it investigated whether Wells was violating a school policy that requires that when class materials "show bias," that educators "point out the biases, and present additional information and perspectives to balance those biases."

On the one hand, it is a sad commentary that districts see a need to restrict teachers' ability to communicate -- and that this country has become so sensitive that parents feel a need to muzzle what teachers can say in class. On the other hand, we've all seen teachers who think their political views are gospel. In this case, Walls told the Washington Post that she could not find any authoritative articles that counter "An Inconvenient Truth" -- other than a 32-year-old Newsweek article. CNN apparently went to the same school as Walls, as it aired a segment in which University of Maryland professor Phil Arkin asserted, "I don't think there is legitimately an actual opposing viewpoint to the 'Inconvenient Truth' film."

Allow me to present a few names. Massachusetts Institute of Technollogy's Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen complained to the Boston Globe about the "shrill alarmism" of Gore's flic. Neil Frank, who was considered authoritative when he was the director of the National Hurricane Center, told the Washington Post that global warming is "a hoax." Hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University believes the Earth will start to cool within 10 years.

University of Virginia professor emeritus Fred Singer' co-authored a book," Unstoppable Global Warming -- Every 1,500 Years," that argues that global warming is not human-induced but based on a solar cycle. Last year, 60 Canadian scientists signed a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper in which they argued that there is no consensus among climate scientists.

Odd, isn't it? Global warming believers heap scorn on religious zealots for not valuing science and knowledge. Yet the thrust of their argument to prove apocalyptic global warming relies on denying the existence of views and scientists who clearly exist.

A Boston Globe editorial mischaracterized the controversy as the mischief of some parents objecting "to having their children see 'An Inconvenient Truth' " -- despite the fact that Hardison had told the Seattle Times that he wanted the teacher to present "a whole broad spectrum of facts." Buying into the teacher's argument that she cannot find heterodox articles, the editorial suggested that Walls find her "balancing 'data' in Michael Crichton's novel 'State of Fear.' It's science fiction." That was supposed to be clever.

It is fascinating to watch Gore's acolytes belittle Crichton for being a novelist, apparently undaunted by the fact that they getting their science from a movie and a politician. At least Crichton is a Harvard Medical School graduate -- which suggests that he has some appreciation for the scientific method. When Gore took natural science classes at Harvard, the Washington Post has reported, he received a D as a sophomore and a C+ in his senior year.

Over the phone Monday, Lindzen remarked on Gore's grades, as he noted that global warming believers have tried to argue that there is consensus since 1988 -- when fewer scientists believed in climatic apocalypse. And those who deny that credible scientists have opposing views are "expressing their will, not their finding. They want this to be so, so they'll ignore anything else." So who is the real zealot -- the father who said he is happy both sides will be shown? Or the teacher who denies the existence of scientists with heterodox views?

Source



More British schools fail to make the grade

A quarter more primary schools were failed by inspectors last term under tougher inspections, according to Ofsted. Overall, the number of England’s schools judged not to be giving children a decent education rose by almost a fifth between last August and December. By the end of last year, inspectors had put 243 schools into special measures, Ofsted’s worst category, which threatens a school’s closure unless it improves.

The latest figures were released after Christine Gilbert, chief inspector of England’s schools, said that one in eight secondaries and one in twelve schools overall was inadequate. Of the 2,942 inspections last term, the results were particularly bad for primary schools, with 171 in special measures — a rise of 25 per cent since the end of the summer term. Another 367 schools in England were found to be inadequate and served with notice to improve, the education watchdog said. It noted that 82 new schools had been put into special measures, and a further 113 were given a “notice to improve”. Another 91 schools had “serious weaknesses”.

Ofsted put the rise down to inspectors asking more of schools. “Ofsted has been clear, since a new inspection framework was introduced in September 2005, that we have raised the bar of expected performance for schools because what was considered good ten years ago is not be considered good any longer,” a spokesman said.

Jim Knight, Minister for Schools, said that the number of schools in special measures still remained below 1 per cent of the total, half the number that were in special measures in 1998. He said: “The number normally increases at the end of the autumn term when there are more inspections, before returning to previous levels in the summer. But we’re not complacent and are turning these schools around more quickly.”

“We have raised the bar, so that schools which previously would have avoided attention now find themselves in special measures. We make no apology for this tough stance against failing or coasting schools.”

Alan Smithers, director of education and employment research at Buckingham University, said that the rise in the number of primary schools in special measures should be a serious cause for concern. “At the very least it indicates that the Government’s natural wish to improve primary education has stalled,” Professor Smithers said, adding that a shortage of primary head teachers could be contributing.

Teaching unions said that ministers had scored a “a spectacular own goal” but that it was not surprising schools were struggling with the bureaucratic burdens heaped on them. “In ‘raising the bar’ the Government has given the impression that standards of education in schools are going down, whereas the reverse is true,” Mick Brookes, of the National Association of Head Teachers, said.

Source

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

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

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

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1 February, 2007

New British curriculum will 'make every school lesson politically correct'

Children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science - under controversial changes to the school curriculum announced by the Government. In music and art, they could have to learn Indian and Chinese songs and instruments, and West African drumming. In maths and science, key Muslim contributions such algebra and the number zero will be emphasised to counter Islamophobia. And in English, pupils will study literature on the experiences of migration - such as Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, or Brick Lane, by Monica Ali.

One critic accused Education Secretary Alan Johnson of 'politicising' lessons with the new agenda. Tory MP Douglas Carswell, a member of the Commons education select committee, said schools will be vehicles for multicultural propaganda and classrooms turned into 'laboratories for politically-correct thought'. Mr Johnson was also attacked over attempts to put Britishness on the curriculum as it emerged that suggested core values are so woolly they could apply to many countries.

With concerns that standards in the three Rs are unacceptable, ministers will also face accusations that they are diverting attention away from vital subjects. Under the recommendations - put forward in a report by former headmaster Sir Keith Ajegbo -teachers will be expected to make 'explicit references to cultural diversity' in as many subjects as possible. A new central theme covering 'identity and diversity' will be added to citizenship classes, which have been compulsory since 2002. Pupils should be encouraged to discuss topics such as immigration, the legacy of the British Empire, the Commonwealth and the EU.

Teaching on immigration, including recent population movement from Eastern Europe, should touch on the benefits it brings to the economy and society, while also bringing 'political discontent and criticism'. Pupils could even be tested on their attitudes to diversity in A-level and GCSEs, which will be redrafted to ensure they include 'issues related to diversity'.

But Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, asked: 'Do the Government have in mind a Britishness test for youngsters born in this country, as they do with people who arrive from other countries?' Meanwhile, information technology lessons would involve joint Web projects or video-conferencing with youngsters around the world.

Sir Keith, whose report was commissioned following last July's suicide bomb attacks in London, warned that pupils could become 'disaffected' and 'alienated' if they felt unable to discuss cultural issues in subject areas. 'Education for diversity must be viewed as a whole-curriculum focus,' he said.

However, Mr Carswell said: 'This report is prescribing precisely the wrong medicine to heal the wounds of a society that multiculturalism has divided. This is a stark example of the politically-correct lobby hijacking the citizenship agenda. 'Recent arrivals to this country have all the more reason to be given a sense of what we are all about so they can become part of it and share it. But instead this will give the green light to every politically-correct Left-Wing educationist to further undermine our society.'

Teachers' unions warned that the curriculum is too crowded already to cope with extra demands. John Dunford, general secretary of the headteachers' union ASCL, said: 'Once again, the burden is falling on schools to fix a problem which has its roots in the wider society.'

Source



More cash fails to budge school scores

A familiar phenomenon in America: Now in Australia too: More money leads to WORSE education

Literacy and numeracy levels have fallen in NSW public schools despite increased government funding per student. The proportion of year 3 students achieving national benchmarks dropped 0.8 of a percentage point for reading and 0.9 of a percentage point for numeracy between 2003 and 2004, the Productivity Commission's annual report says. In that period the Government increased its expenditure by $686 on each full-time primary student and about $500 on each secondary student.

The literacy and numeracy skills of students in years 3, 5 and 7 are measured against national benchmarks each year, but the results are not released until more than two years later. These most recent figures show there has been little change among NSW students, with variations of less than 1 percentage point in each of the categories, despite the increased spending. The performance of year 5 and 7 students was better, with slight improvements from the previous year in their numeracy skills, but fewer students in both groups met the reading benchmark than had done so the previous year. Just over 92 per cent of year 3 students in NSW achieved the reading benchmark, and nearly 96 per cent met the writing and numeracy benchmarks. By year 7, less than 80 per cent of students could meet the numeracy benchmark.

The NSW Government spent $9,546 on each primary student and $12,024 on each secondary student in 2004-05. The best performers in NSW were those who lived in metropolitan or provincial areas, girls and non-indigenous students. Indigenous students were closest to the state average in year 3, but dropped in each subsequent year and most dramatically in numeracy, where close to 90 per cent achieved the benchmark in year 3, but less than half by year 7. The commission's report shows the proportion of students achieving the writing benchmark rose in all groups.

The federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, called for a national curriculum last year to arrest what she said were falling literacy and numeracy standards in schools. But her department admitted it did not have figures on literacy and numeracy beyond 2004, and therefore lacked the proof that standards were falling. Last year's basic skills test saw primary school children's literacy scores slip by 0.1 of a percentage point since 2005, a tiny negative fluctuation after 10 years when scores had been mostly consistent.

The State Government said then that three out of five pupils who failed to reach minimum literacy standards in year 3 had raised their performance to acceptable levels by year 5, but gave no data to support the claim. The NSW Government commented in the commission's report that it planned to invest more than $616 million in literacy and numeracy programs.

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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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