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29 February, 2008

No existing U.S. program approximates a free market in education

In a new City Journal essay, prominent school voucher advocate Sol Stern declares that competition and choice "may not be a panacea," and recommends that choice supporters shift emphasis to standardizing the curriculum. He's not alone.

Conservatives have long championed central planning in addition to parental choice, but in recent years centralization has been ascendant. Department of Education alumni William Bennett, Chester Finn, and Diane Ravitch, all appointed under Republican administrations, now place greater emphasis on national standards than on choice. Last month, Mr. Finn faulted Ohio's charter school system for placing "too much trust in market forces."

Their faltering support stems from disappointment with the impact of existing U.S. charter school and voucher programs, and what they think it says about market reform in general. Stern, for instance, laments that while Milwaukee's voucher program has benefitted the low income students who gained access to private schools, it has not dramatically improved the city's public schools.

But criticisms such as those of Finn and Stern don't reveal any failure of market education, because existing U.S. "school choice" programs do not constitute, or even closely approximate, free markets. That anyone imagines otherwise shows how poorly markets are understood, even among conservative education reformers.

Do charter schools really rely too heavily on "market forces"? Consider some key elements of free markets: prices determined by supply and demand, private ownership of businesses, low or no barriers to the creation of new businesses, few or no barriers to workers entering the profession, minimal regulation, the ability of owners and investors to profit from their efforts, and payment by consumers rather than a third party. With charter schools, these features are either grossly hobbled or absent. Yes, charter schools produce some attenuated competition and parental choice, but to imagine that those two diluted ingredients are sufficient by themselves (or even excessive!) suggests a badly mistaken notion of what a market is.

Milwaukee's voucher program has indeed helped many children, but it also falls far short of a market. First, it is capped at 22,500 students. That's too little to justify large-scale R&D investment by education entrepreneurs. If the market for computers were limited to 22,500 customers, Microsoft, Apple, and Dell would cease to exist. Private schools must also accept the voucher as full payment, but such price controls are almost universally derided by economists as counterproductive. If it were not for the fact that electronics manufacturers could once charge $1,000 for a DVD player, it would never have become possible for the units to sell for $30 today.

The initially high prices of innovative new products and services are what encourage the R&D that eventually brings down their cost.

Even if Milwaukee's voucher program were big enough and free enough to create a vigorous marketplace, the public schools still might not improve dramatically. The most significant advances in market economies generally occur when better products or methods replace old ones. The loom did not improve hand-weaving, it supplanted it. Even in the highly regulated and not especially market-like school choice programs of Chile and the Netherlands, private schools already enroll most students.

Though markets have been marginalized by "free" public schooling, they still thrive in niches such as tutoring, where programs like Kumon and Sylvan Learning show their effectiveness and responsiveness to consumer demands.

In many slums and villages across the developing world, where state-run school systems are particularly dysfunctional, majorities of poor parents are currently paying for their children to attend ultra-low-cost private schools - though free government schools are available. These education markets, as researchers such as Orient Global Education Fund president James Tooley and Oxford professor Geeta Gandhi Kingdon have shown, outperform state-run schools at a fraction of the cost, and they teach what families want. The vast international research literature on school governance and funding systems strongly favors competition, minimal regulation, private ownership of schools, parental choice, and some level of direct payment of tuition by parents.

It is possible to give all families access to a free education marketplace - by dramatically expanding and liberalizing existing choice programs, or adopting new ones, like Cato's public education tax credit proposal. But you can't expect current programs to produce free-market results in the absence of free markets.

Source




Detroit schools

Expensive and terrible. It’s time to offer vouchers

A new report shows that less than 1 in 3 ninth-graders in the Detroit city schools will graduate from a Detroit school in 4 years, a federally funded study by Michigan State University found. The official state figure is a graduation rate of 66.8%.

Poor underfunded Detroit city schoo … Wait. Detroit spends $11,112 per student. The statewide average in Michigan is $9,340. Inefficient and expensive.

Board President Carla Scott does not believe the results of the Michigan State study. “It doesn’t seem credible to me,” Scott said. “You can make data for anything you want it to say, but (they) should have factored in the reasons why they left. “If you look at children moving out of the city, of course you’re going to see a decrease. There are all kinds of reasons why children leave the city, that doesn’t mean they’re dropouts.”

That’s a good point. But it underscores how terrible — and expensive — Detroit schools are. Kids are moving out to graduate. They give up on Detroit schools. If that indeed is the explanation. The answer? The Detroit News reported:

Gov. Jennifer Granholm has proposed increasing the dropout age to 18 and creating smaller high schools to boost graduation rates. “Governor Granholm recognizes that we must provide a quality education for every child and provide them with the tools they need to be successful in the 21st century,” Liz Boyd, Granholm’s press secretary, said in a statement. “She has called on education leaders and lawmakers from both parties to join her in solving the dropout problem.”

More money. How trite. Hmm, if this were health care, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would be decrying those “greedy” teachers and bureaucrats and would be calling to slash spending and use more technology.

The simpler solution is to give them vouchers for $5,000 a year each and let them attend parochial schools.

Source




Australia: Better teacher selection needed

Elements in the NSW Teachers Federation have strongly resisted the mild proposals put forward by the NSW Director-General of Education, Michael Coutts-Trotter, to improve the processes of selecting teachers for our public schools. Principals of NSW secondary public schools have for years been seeking a more effective system of staffing their schools, and see the latest proposals as a small step in the right direction. A balance between local selection by school-based panels and statewide staffing processes would bring NSW into the 21st century, as well as ensuring students were being taught by teachers who really wanted to be in their school.

The NSW Secondary Principals' Council, the professional association that represents the vast majority of principals in the government sector, has developed a position paper that calls for just that: a balance. The SPC would like to have 50 per cent of staff chosen through local selection, with the remainder determined by state needs. Principals are rightly held more accountable than they used to be for the educational outcomes of students in their schools, but have very little say over the selection of their teachers. Greater authority to do this would lead to a better match of teachers for every school, and teachers would be able to make more informed decisions about where they might like to teach.

Schools in all parts of NSW would benefit from the adoption of the principals' position paper, as it calls for improved incentives to attract and retain teachers in rural and remote areas. Salary increases and termination bonuses after five years' service might well attract more teachers to these schools. Students in isolated areas deserve experienced teachers just as much as students in coastal and metropolitan schools do, and genuine incentives would make this possible.

The current transfer system works against the interests of many teachers who don't attract enough points to be able to move to a school that they would like to be in and to which they could make a great contribution. Some of our really great young teachers resign after a few years and either travel or work in the private sector once they realise that the present selection process is an impediment to them. More Generation Y teachers are teaching in our schools and they have a much more flexible approach to work. They don't want to be locked into a system that sees them as points on a scale rather than as a teacher who wants to work in a variety of locations. A young teacher told me a couple of weeks ago that this would be one issue he wouldn't take industrial action on. He wants the option of seeing what is available in a school before applying. He is not alone in thinking like this.

Parents want the best for their children. Knowing that the teachers of their children want to be in their school, have been selected through proper, fair processes to be there, and will be professionally developing themselves to enhance their future prospects should give parents much more confidence in their local public school.

Let's hope that NSW schools can move into the 21st century, and that the proposal by our school leaders for an improved staffing process will influence both the department and the Teachers Federation.

Source





28 February, 2008

Crazy U.S. science education

Amazingly inflated credentialism. A REDUCTION in government funding is needed

Recently, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wrote an editorial titled "'Global' Science Advocacy." He calls for scientists to be advocates not only on Capitol Hill through their professional societies, but also by recruiting friends, neighbors, city council members, etc., to the cause of science advocacy. This is written in response to the proposed FY2009 budget request Bush made to Congress in which some agencies "such as the NIH, are slated for flat funding or worse." After reading this, I decided I must heed the call and do a little science advocacy.

Before I go on, there is an interesting aside. Mr. Leshner (the CEO of AAAS) states that "US research will see its fifth consecutive year of decreased support (in inflation-adjusted constant dollars)." Basically, US research hasn't received a cost-of-living raise in 4 years: it's feeling the inflation tax, and it hurts!

From 1998-2003, the NIH budget was doubled. I started graduate school during this time period, and things were booming. The way I heard it, Bill Clinton doubled the budget, but Mr. Leshner writes that John Porter, Arlen Specter, and Tom Harkin led the effort. Regardless, a lot of this doubling actually went to Big Science - large budget, long-term projects usually requiring a lot of infrastructure. This is as opposed to individual scientists (called Primary Investigators, or PI's) at universities receiving the money through research grants. In fact, the fraction of money going to PI's fell during this period.

Since 2003, however, the funding has remained stagnant in terms of actual dollars, and has decreased in terms of what those dollars can buy. But the Big Science research centers haven't been closed, of course, so PI's and universities have had their funding cut. Actually cut. Not just "not increased at a fast enough rate." Grants are not getting renewed, or are getting renewed at a lower level than before.

It makes things tough. Stress is high and scientists are pessimistic. To add to the woes, this large influx of money between 1998-2003 had to be spent. So universities built new buildings, hired new faculty, and recruited more students. The buildings will require continuing revenue to maintain and the new faculty are applying for their own grants (in competition with the existing faculty). So it's been a typical Boom-and-Bust (the bust is still forthcoming...I'd say we're in a science-recession).

My incoming class to the Berkeley biology program was the largest class to date. And all of the ones that followed my class were even bigger. In my view, this was incredibly irresponsible, although unavoidable when grants are inflated. Thousands of biologists are graduating with PhD's every year and they need jobs. But, we've all just been kicked out of the nest and told "Good luck. You'll need it."

Over the course of the last 30 years, a PhD has become essential to climbing the ladder at a pharmaceutical company. And now, one or two postdoctoral fellowships (2-4 years each) are needed to land almost any job in biology. This is inflation of education. Try getting a job doing completely mindless work at your neighborhood biotech with a high school diploma. Those jobs are reserved for people with Bachelor's degrees from good universities. Do you want to actually apply the knowledge you learned in your senior-level lab course and develop an experimental plan? You'll need a Masters or PhD for that. From Harvard.

At the AAAS national meeting last week, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sent representatives to address the scientists that had gathered. Not surprisingly, they call for "big boosts to research funding." This sounds a lot like a stimulus package, and it's typical pandering to a special interest group by promising more money and everything will be free. Of course, this is welcomed by many scientists: the outgoing President of the AAAS reportedly stated that Congress has passed "a budget that does not meet the needs of American Science." An NIH budget that is 100% higher than the one ten years ago does not meet our needs. Whoops! I mean: A budget that is 0% higher than last year does not meet our needs.

If you watched the MTV presidential candidate forum last month, you'll recall that students are all going to get a lot of federal money from Hill-bama to pay for college (you'll also recall that the entire studio audience was college students, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence).

I think we already have too many college graduates in this country, but soon there will be more. Then they, too, will get PhD's when they find out that their B.S. is just that. At some point, 15 years as a postdoctoral fellow will be the norm, which means scientists will start their first job at age 42 (as opposed to 30 currently: diploma at 18 + 4 years for college + 5 years for grad school + 3 years for postdoc).

This is a terrible system, and inflating it with evermore funding is not going to fix it. Last year, the NIH funding was not increased (3.8% cut accounting for official inflation). We need more of this, and by "this," I mean NIH budget cuts. That means universities will have to train fewer PhD's, and they will be hiring fewer research professors. Private industry as well as academia will have to start giving people with less education more responsibility. It will be painful, but healthy. Who knows: maybe the next biotech innovation will be that they will start promoting people with good college educations (but no additional letters behind their name) to managerial positions, allowing them to increase expenditures on capital (instead of letters) and really take medicine into the future.

So call your city council member and get them to resolve that this madness must stop. Write your representative in DC and tell them that private industry and charities will best be able to fund the future of medicine. Advocate for the future of science in America!

Source




Dumb students "out" themselves

The controversy over electives in the Albuquerque Public Schools curriculum heats up. Should students who do poorly on state tests be forced to take remedial classes and not allowed to take electives? Wednesday, students themselves responded in the Albuquerque Journal newspaper -- but may not have proved the point they intended. The Journal said the letters are from students at Jefferson Middle School. Of eight letters published, seven of them are full of grammar and spelling mistakes:

"I know I wont wont my eletive tooken away. wht about the sped kibs? Hae you thought about that!"

The students are responding to the possibility of APS taking electives away from students who fail state tests for math and reading.

Another student writes, "I dissagree with your oppion. If students dont have there electives we will have no reason to come to school. And if kids start not coming to school it will be your fault."

Melissa Armijo has a child at Jefferson. She agrees with the statement, but said the mistakes in the letter are scary. I think that they should have a medium of being able to still give a child an elective and also having that child learn how to read and write correctly,"Armijo said.

The Albuquerque Journal is a partner with KOAT. The Journal said the letters that were published were representative of the letters they received. Many of the letters came from an e-mail sent by their teacher and then a few from the students themselves. The Journal said they confirmed every letter that ran in the paper but chose not to run the students' names. There were several letters the Journal did not run that had even more serious grammatical and spelling errors.

Jefferson students did well on last year's math and reading tests but the school did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. More than half the APS high school students tested last year did not pass the math or reading sections of the standard tests. APS said those students may soon have to replace electives with remedial classes in those subjects. The district is waiting for guidelines from the state before implementing any new policy.

Source




Australia: Literacy taught by illiterates

By Christopher Bantick

It is not just this newspaper that is questioned by Ilana Snyder over its position on literacy. In her book The Literacy Wars: Why Teaching Children to Read and Write is a Battleground in Australia, I am cited several times, and not because I have written on this page. I do hold the view that literacy can be taught with rigour and tested for performance. Snyder suggests: "It was the Murdoch paper's crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education that motivated me to write the book. In recent years, The Australian's in-house opinion shapers have been accorded astonishing privilege and power. Their goal has been to dictate a reactionary model for the secondary-school curriculum. It is time to hold them to account." But while Snyder can attempt to marginalise The Australian's role in the literacy debate, this is misleading.

It is not my intention to examine and dismiss Snyder's often fatuous, niggardly arguments in her intemperate book. The point here about Snyder and fellow travellers who endorse the view that literacy is an experience rather than a learned discipline is that opposition of any kind - call it conservatism - is ridiculed. It is a neat ploy to say that the so-called Right, for which this newspaper is supposedly a mouthpiece, is narrow and prescriptive in its appreciation of literacy. The enemy has been identified. Meanwhile, those on the Left are expansive, welcome new ideas, are progressive and embrace theory. But this is a deceptive argument.

Literacy transcends the Right or Left positions. It is critics such as Snyder who wish to reduce it to the old Left-Right debate. Moreover, if opinion is even marginally conservative, it is immediately treated as suspect. The problem with Snyder's reductive argument is that she denies the reality that literacy education in Australia is in serious trouble. There are many children who cannot read, write, spell, understand grammar, construct a clear sentence and punctuate with meaning. The reason is palpably obvious.

The students accepted into university teaching courses are often simply the leavings, the lees if you like, after the better students have opted to undertake more prestigious and ambitious degrees. One has only to look at the entrance scores for teaching, some as low as 56, to see that high-flyers are not entering the classroom. The result is teachers who are not proficient in literacy are teaching children. Is it any wonder that Australia is producing illiterate children when they are taught by illiterates? It is for this reason that the NSW Government has introduced tests for five-year-olds in literacy and numeracy from this year in an attempt to head off early learning difficulties. It makes sense.

The reality is that literacy instruction in Australia has been of questionable quality for decades. It is also easy to trace the decline in proficiency to the introduction of progressive, child-centred, jargon-based theory that took over many Australian classrooms during the 1970s. What Snyder and the strident voices of the Left do not grasp, or seem to care about, is that if children are not taught literacy, then they are effectively disenfranchised for life.

Recent research by Australian National University economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan, entitled How Has School Productivity Changed in Australia, points out that today's teenagers are less literate than those of the '60s. The reason is simple: poor teaching.

While Kevin Rudd makes much of his so-called education revolution, which is supposedly going to leap off a laptop keyboard, he has been noticeably silent on the much harder question: will the federal Government be insistent that schools lift their literacy standards? Before the election, Rudd promised to publish primary and secondary school results in reading and writing and numeracy in years three, five and nine. Earlier this month Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard, when referring to the national action plan for literacy and numeracy, said: "The Rudd Government understands that literacy and numeracy are the building blocks of a good education." Well, prove it.

The Rudd Government needs the will and preparedness to take on the entrenched interests in university education departments that work against structured, phonetically based language instruction. It should expose where literacy instruction is deficient and take necessary remedial action. This can be measured by a published state-by-state, school-by-school comparison. But these results should not ossify hidden in some departmental journal but be published in newspapers, much as the Year 12 results and school rankings are done in Victoria. It will soon become evident why it is that some schools in the same socioeconomic band, with the same cohort of children, are doing better than others. This does two things: expose the schools and expose deficient teachers.

While Snyder's book will be welcomed by the literacy luvvies as a justification for their failure to instruct children properly, the truth is that the Left resists accountability. Do parents really care about the literacy wars? Hardly. They just want their children to learn to read and write.

Source





27 February, 2008

"Moderates" and conservatives in college

Post below lifted from Newsbusters. See the original for links. Reporting on endeavours to deny that it is Leftist bigotry that chases conservatives away from higher ed.

Rush Limbaugh fans have often heard the conservative talk radio host suggest that people who consider themselves politically moderate just can't make up their minds on important issues of the day. A recent study about ideological differences which drive more liberals to seek Ph.D.'s than conservatives might offer some answers as to why that is. Published by the American Enterprise Institute, "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates" presented some pretty compelling ideas about what's causing the liberal bias problem at America's colleges and universities:

Every year, self-identified liberals apply to Ph.D. programs in far greater numbers than do conservatives. However, the reasons for this ideological imbalance are far from clear. Those on the political right tend to regard academia's liberal slant as evidence of discrimination against conservatives. By contrast, those on the political left may conclude that their overrepresentation in the academy is due to superior intelligence and abilities....

The ideological imbalance among college students is evident immediately in figure 1. The graph reveals that self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives by a substantial margin. Additionally, the figure shows that those on the political left are more likely to express an interest in pursuing a Ph.D.

Interestingly, the authors of the piece, Dr. Matthew Woessner and Dr. April Kelly-Woessner, are a married couple with disparate political views themselves. As the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote on Friday:

During a recent Thursday-morning get-together over scrambled eggs and toast, the conversation at Kuppy's [diner in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania] focused on the U.S. presidential election. As usual, Mr. Woessner's colleagues were taking shots at him. Why did he originally favor Rudy Giuliani? one [sic] of his colleagues wanted to know. "I really want to make sure I have a president who is going to bomb more countries," Mr. Woessner quipped.

It is the kind of over-the-top statement Mr. Woessner is famous for. The young professor relishes the role of conservative contrarian inside the liberal academy, a role that puts him in a distinct minority not only here but in higher education generally.....

In fact, Mr. Woessner gets along so well with Democrats that he married one. Ms. Kelly-Woessner teaches a course on women and politics, among others, at Elizabethtown College. She and Mr. Woessner didn't like each other at all when they first met at Ohio State. She even once told her future husband that she could never date a conservative. So when the couple announced their engagement, the director of their graduate program at Ohio State was stunned. "They really were opposites," says Herbert F. Weisberg, chairman of the political-science department at Ohio State. "They were always debating each other."

Regardless of their political differences, the couple produced excellent work in this paper:

There is reason to assume that liberals and conservatives have different experiences in college. If critics of the academy are correct, the liberal enclave provides a chilly environment for conservatives. This may not even be the result of intentional discrimination. Rather, conservatives may simply find themselves to be in the minority and disconnected from the rest of the campus. This minority status may affect their assessments of the educational experience and their overall satisfaction with college. According to previous research, satisfaction with the college experience does help to predict whether a student will complete an advanced degree.

And here's the part Rush Limbaugh and his fans will love:

Variations in reported grades do not vary as a function of conservatism, but rather as a function of moderation. Moderates consistently report lower grades than do their liberal and conservative counterparts. Concerned that less intelligent students might have self-identified as moderates, simply because they did not comprehend the ideological classifications used in the survey question, we reclassified the respondents based on their answers to a battery of political questions included near the end of the student survey. We found that students who take objectively moderate positions on important political issues do earn lower grades than their ideological classmates do.

Interesting, wouldn't you agree? Maybe this suggests an errancy in the debate concerning intellect and ideology always centering on liberals and conservatives whilst typically ignoring moderates. As this election might be decided by folks not committed to one of the major political parties, maybe greater focus should be given to what makes a moderate tick rather than the inner-psychological workings of liberals and conservatives. Of course, that wasn't the point of this paper:

Whatever the basis of ideological identification, however, the differences between liberals and conservatives translate into differences in policy attitudes, behaviors, and dispositions, not all of which have direct political implications. For example, liberals and conservatives tend to differ on measures of the widely-used NEO Personality Inventory. Liberals tend to score higher in creativity and excitement seeking, while conservatives outperform in orderliness and striving for achievement.

It is reasonable to assume that these differences in personalities and values translate into differences in career goals. For example, if liberals and conservatives have different notions of authority, this would theoretically translate into liberals selecting careers that are less hierarchical and that allow greater personal autonomy. In fact, Lindholm argues that the need for autonomy, independence, and intellectual freedom is the most cited reason college professors give for choosing academic careers.13 These career goals would appear to be more commonly associated with liberal ideologies. Similarly, if liberals are more likely to value creativity, as Carney et al. suggests, they may be more likely to self-select into the arts and humanities, with the more practical conservatives opting for professional fields. ...

Only 9 percent of the far left and 18 percent of liberals major in professional fields, as compared to 33 percent of conservatives and 37 percent of the far right. Since liberals already outnumber conservatives among college students, this tendency for conservatives to congregate in professional degree programs means that liberals outnumber conservatives two to one in the humanities and social sciences - fields most associated with doctoral degrees.

The professors offered some suggestions for academia:

First, in light of our prior research, which shows that students react negatively to overt partisanship, professors within the social sciences and the humanities should make a special effort to depoliticize their classroom.18 This does not suggest that political science or history courses should be bland or noncontroversial. Rather, striving to present both ideological perspectives on contemporary issues and debates would likely reduce the conservatives' relative dissatisfaction with their social science and humanities classes. If conservatives enjoyed these courses more, we might see a rise in conservative majors and in Ph.D. candidates.

Second, since conservatives place an especially high priority on financial security and raising a family, the academy needs to make efforts to adopt more family-friendly policies....

While a host of concrete indicators (overall satisfaction with college experience, grade point average, contact with faculty, etc.) do not tend to support the assertion that conservatives are frequently the victims of discrimination, academia may create an environment that appears hostile to young conservatives. Just as academic institutions have, in the pursuit of racial and ethnic diversity, taken great care to foster a climate of tolerance, so too, academic programs might consider how their doctoral programs might be made more inviting to ideological conservatives. Ultimately, the academy's relevance is dependent on its ability to recruit and retain scholars from every intellectual tradition.

Great points all. Unfortunately, not everybody agreed with the Woessner's conclusions. Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy blog wrote Friday:

I am somewhat skeptical about the particular variables emphasized by the Woessners. If interest in making money were a crucial variable in steering conservatives away from academia, one would expect their representation to be much higher in high-paying academic disciplines such as law, where faculty members routinely make six figure salaries and often have extensive consulting opportunities. Yet the ideological imbalance in legal academia is very large and fairly similar to that in other academic fields.

In my view, a focus on raising a family should make academia more attractive to conservatives rather than less. Relative to other professional jobs, academic careers are actually quite family-friendly. Unlike most other professionals, professors have a high degree of control over their schedules. They can also do a much higher proportion of their work at home, which makes it easier to spend time with kids. Universities also tend to have extremely generous family leave policies for faculty. Moreover, universities often give substantial tuition discounts to children of their faculty - an important benefit for social conservatives with large families. Some schools even subsidize private secondary school tuition for faculty children.

Somin raised another issue that might be particularly relevant to libertarian readers:

Like other studies of academic ideology, the Woessner and Kelly-Woessner paper also suffers from the failure to consider libertarians separately from conservatives. As I discuss in this post, libertarians are about 10-15 percent of the general population and are likely to be disproportionately represented among non-liberals likely to be interested in pursuing academic careers. Relative to conservatives, libertarians are about 20% more likely to be college graduates (see Table 10 in the linked paper) and threfore more likely to be potential candidates for academic jobs.

Although I'm not aware of survey evidence on this point, I strongly suspect that libertarians are closer to liberals than to conservatives in their interests in doing research, developing a philosophy of life, and raising families. Yet libertarians are almost as underrepresented in academia as conservatives are. Certainly, they are nowhere close to constituting 10 percent of faculty in any field other than economics. It is possible that libertarians are more interested in making money than liberals are; the claim is often made, though I have yet to see any systematic study that proves or disproves it. But even if this stereotype is true, it doesn't explain why they aren't better represented in law and other high-paying academic fields.

Maybe after they read this piece the Woessner's will comment on how libertarians impact this equation. Stay tuned.




Australia: Faddish educational experimentation condemned

It is time to stop introducing change in the nation's classrooms without discovering whether students' learning improved as a result. In an interview with The Australian just before stepping down as president of the NSW Board of Studies, Gordon Stanley also questioned whether school curriculums contained too many subjects, making it difficult to sustain quality across the board.

He said school systems had placed a premium on innovation for its own sake, without evaluating what worked. "The people most opposed to the collection of evidence hold a strong philosophical position, and they're not interested in any challenges to that position," he said. "But one needs to support those belief positions. It's unfortunate if you just want to have debates about philosophical positions without coming down to an analysis of what the implications of these are for learning. "When you're focused on evidence-based practice, you keep focus on the question of what really works instead of having a debate about the philosophy you hold."

Professor Stanley is stepping down after 10 years to become the Pearson professor of educational assessment at Oxford University, and the founding director of the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment. During his tenure, the NSW Higher School Certificate has been held up as the gold standard for the nation and is recognised internationally.

While Professor Stanley nominates the integration of vocational courses in the HSC as one of his biggest successes, he questioned the range of subject choices facing students. "I suspect we have too much choice, and too much choice can be confusing for students," he said. "It's worth asking the question whether we've gone too far in differentiating the curriculum. "The more offerings you have, the harder it is to provide well-trained teachers in all these areas. At an individual school level, it's hard to provide all those options for students. And the more differentiated the curriculum, the more expensive it is to deliver."

NSW has also been more successful than other states and territories in withstanding the fads that pass through education, such as integrating history and geography into Studies of Society and the Environment, as occurred elsewhere in the nation. Professor Stanley said NSW "connects with (educational fads) but we don't yield to them without trying to get an understanding of whether in balance they're the appropriate direction to go".

Source





26 February, 2008

US School Districts Cover Up Teacher Sex Abuse with Confidential Agreements and Payouts

An expose by the Oregonian daily newspaper shows that US teachers who sexually abuse their students are often given a pass into other teaching jobs as a cost-saving measure. A search for the phrase "sex abuse cover-up" in the Google internet search engine produces news reports almost exclusively focused on the Catholic Church. But advocates for sex-abuse victims have long known that the problem of persons placed in authority abusing minors is far from being restricted to clergy.

The Oregonian reported yesterday that in some US school districts teachers found to be abusing students are being paid off with letters of recommendation, cash settlements and health insurance in confidential agreements, in return for a quiet immediate resignation. In the agreements, district officials promise not to tell potential employers of the teacher's past misconduct.

Kenneth John Cushing was a recipient of one of these pacts, and left Claggett Creek Middle School in 2004 after allegedly molesting some of his female students. The Oregonian obtained a copy of the deal in which school officials promised not to reveal Cushing's behaviour to prospective future employers.

The paper says it has obtained 47 similar confidential settlement agreements between district officials and teachers. The document said school officials would mention "personal reasons" for Cushing's resignation and make "no reference to this agreement". Cushing's license was eventually revoked in 2005 by the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission.

Another teacher, Stephen John Koller, who left his job at Illinois Valley High School, was found to be living with a 17 year-old student. Three Rivers School District offered Koller $10,000 in severance, six months of health insurance and a letter that said, "He is personally committed to his work and will work extra hours to be successful."

The paper reports that in the past five years, "nearly half" of Oregon teachers disciplined for sexual misconduct left their schools with such pacts. The practice is well known throughout the country, with officials nicknaming it "passing the trash". Out of 767 cases of teacher misconduct over the past ten years 165 cases were sex-related offences, making them the most common.

The Oregonian writes that confidential agreements came into use because of economic pressure, and officials admit that the agreements are the cheapest and fastest way of getting a problem teacher out of a particular school. One of the deterrents to firing teachers who are caught molesting students outright is expensive court battles with the unions. Keeping a teacher on paid leave while the teacher is under investigation can also be costly. Hillsboro Superintendent Jeremy Lyon told the paper, "The whole world of reference checks has become a legal arena. You are in a precarious place if you say anything positive or negative about a past employee."

The paper cites several systemic reasons for the problem of teachers abusing students, including enormous backlogs of investigations that can extend up to a year, inconsistent reporting methods, inadequate background checks on potential teachers, and the fact that older teens are not protected under state laws.

But victims' rights advocates say that such agreements undermine the ability of victims to come to terms with abuse, and perpetuate the problem. The Oregonian quotes Mary Jo McGrath, a school law attorney and sexual abuse expert in Santa Barbara, California, who said, "The secret deals are one of the main things that keep the wheels greased on the machinery that keeps passing around the molesters."

The secret deal solution may be short lived, however, as victims sue. Similar deals in California were dropped by school boards when the state Supreme Court ruled that districts can be sued for having them. In the 1997 case of a 13-year-old student who was sexually molested by a middle school vice principal in Livingston Union School District, the Court ruled that the girl could sue the three districts who had previously employed the man for fraud and negligent misrepresentation after all three districts had offered him confidential agreements.

In 2004, a report from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights revealed that teachers are more likely than priests to sexually abuse minors. The report said that previous studies from the early 1980's to 1991 showed that one in four girls and one in six boys is sexually abused by a teacher by age 18. Another revealed that 17.7 per cent of males who graduated from high school and 82.2 per cent of females reported sexual harassment by faculty or staff during their years in school.

Source




Australia: Muslims want university classes to fit prayer times

They will push and push for more and more special treatment until someone says No

MUSLIM university students want lectures to be rescheduledto fit in with prayer timetables and separate male and female eating and recreational areas established on Australian campuses. International Muslim students, predominantly from Saudi Arabia, have asked universities in Melbourne to change class times so they can attend congregational prayers. They also want a female-only area for Muslim students to eat and relax. But at least one institution has rejected their demands, arguing that the university is secular and it does not want to set a precedent for requests granted in the name of religious beliefs.

La Trobe University International chief executive director John Molony said several students had approached the Bundoora institution about rearranging class times to fit in with daily prayers. Mr Molony said the university was attempting to "meet the needs" of an increasing number of Muslim international students, including doubling the size of the prayer room on campus.

La Trobe University International College director Martin Van Run said that although it was involved in discussions with the Muslim students who had made the requests, the university was not planning to change any timetables. "That would seriously inconvenience other people at the college and it is not institutionally viable," he told The Australian. "We are a secular institution ... and we need to have a structured timetable." Mr Van Run said that Saudi students were fully aware that the university was secular before coming to study there. "They know well in advance the class times," he said.

A spokesman for RMIT University would neither confirm nor deny reports that Muslim students had requested timetable changes.

One university source told The Australian that the requests by Muslim international students for timetable changes included a petition. "Some of the students would prefer that lecture times were organised so it would be easy for them to attend prayers," he said. "But it wouldn't be a good precedent to set."

Islamic leaders yesterday backed the push by Muslim students to have their lectures arranged to accommodate prayer sessions, but said such a move would be essential only for congregational Friday prayers. Female Muslim leader Aziza Abdel-Halim said yesterday it was a religious duty for those who followed Islam to preach with their fellow believers on Fridays. But the former senior member of John Howard's Muslim reference board said there was nothing in Islam that indicated men and women be segregated when it came to educational activities. "There's nothing in Islam that says there should be complete segregation, especially in educational institutions," said Sister Abdel-Halim.

She said afternoon prayers for Muslims - Zhohor, at 1.10pm, and Asr, at 4.50pm - could be performed until 10 minutes before the following daily prayer, so it was more appropriate to alter prayer times than lecture schedules. "It's reasonable to ask for the lectures to be shifted around on Friday," Sister Abdel-Halim said. "But if it's going to cause havoc with the timetable, I don't think it's really feasible to ask for every single prayer to be catered for

Source





25 February, 2008

The dumbing down of America

The article below highlights disturbing social trends but fails to lay the blame where it overwhelmingly lies: In dumbed-down education. Blaming computer games is a cop-out in my view -- blaming a symptom rather than the cause

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

Source




A realistic solution to the British school mess

You read stories to your children every night when they were young. You racked your brains trying to understand the mysteries of modern methods of teaching maths and you did not miss a single parents’ evening. You spent hours studying inspection reports and the league tables before you decided on the secondary school you wanted them to attend. Now you learn that their names are to be put into a hat. Egged on by a government obsessed by the wickedness of pushy middle-class parents who want the best for their children, your local education authority (LEA) has decided to substitute the vagaries of a lottery for the ideal of parental choice.

Lotteries, ministers tell us, are one of the fairest ways to allocate places at oversubscribed secondary schools. They want, in other words, to spread the misery. They seem to think that if every school has equal numbers of disadvantaged and/or difficult children, every school will be equally successful. The possibility that successful schools will be dragged down to the level of the rest has not, it appears, crossed their minds.

If everyone cannot be educated in a successful school, nobody will be. Old Labour, red in tooth and claw, reeking bitterness and envy, is creeping centre stage. You care about your children’s education? You want them to have the best possible start in life? Forget it. The politicians and their bureaucrats know best, and if they have their way no parent will be able to manipulate the system in order to secure, as some see it, an unfair educational advantage for their child.

At present, grammar schools are allowed to select pupils on grounds of academic ability, city academies can admit up to 10% of their intake on the evidence of “aptitude” in a particular subject, such as music or technology, and faith schools can still take into account a family’s commitment to a particular religion.

But those freedoms are under ever fiercer attack. Changes to the admissions code that dictate what teachers can and cannot do make the exercise of individual professional judgement more and more difficult.

Many in the world of education want schools to be forced to admit certain percentages of children from different social backgrounds and I have no doubt that ministers are attracted to the idea. Parental choice now risks becoming an evil that will have to be stamped upon in the name of equality of opportunity.

The truth, of course, is that successful schools are successful because they are in control of their own destiny. Crucially, they can decide the pupils who are likely to benefit from the kind of education they offer and they can expel pupils who cannot or will not conform. They respect the aspirations and concerns of parents who have decided that this is the right school for their child. In education, as in any other market, those who deliver what the customer wants will prosper.

Northern Rock, the prime minister told us last week, is in “temporary public ownership”. Not so state schools, which, whatever the colour of the government, seem set to remain the property of the state for ever. This is why standards in so many state schools are so low. The sooner these schools are freed from state control and allowed to compete one with another for the custom of prospective parents, the better.

Would this mean that every school would immediately try to turn itself into a grammar school? Well, not if they all wanted to survive. As in any other market, the challenge is to identify and meet the needs of different customers. Some schools would certainly transform themselves into highly academic institutions; others would be equally effective, but would educate children with, say, emotional and behavioural difficulties. It happens now in the fee-paying sector. Why not in the state?

The state would continue to fund education but would abandon its hopeless attempts to micro-manage every aspect of school life. Funding would follow the child, and children who for whatever reason are more difficult and therefore more costly to educate than others would attract more funds; schools would therefore have an incentive to cater for their needs. Schools that failed to attract enough pupils would close. Their pupils would – as, again, happens now in the fee-paying sector – move to other schools, or a new operator would take over the running of the school.

There is no reason a market of this kind could not operate efficiently. Equally, there is no reason to believe that the current centrally managed system of admissions will ever deliver anything approaching equality of opportunity. Lotteries may be considered a solution by some LEAs because, nationwide, demand for good secondary education outstrips supply. In many parts of the country there are not enough credible schools and so provision has to be rationed. So much for a centralised system that tells schools and parents what they can and cannot do.

The freedom to choose the kind of education you want for your child is a fundamental democratic right. We need to liberate schools from the tyranny of social engineering, and we must allow every school to define its ethos and educational approach in response to market demand and to set an appropriate admissions policy. The only real solution to the crisis in secondary admissions is to create more good schools, and top-down reform has failed to do this. So, the way forward could not be clearer; the tragedy is that none of our politicians can see it.

Source




Shockingly low levels of literacy in Australia

AUSTRALIANS are putting their lives at risk because they can't understand medical prescriptions or basic health information, a new study has revealed. The Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, found six in 10 people aged between 15 and 74 do not have the basic knowledge and skills to take care of their health and prevent disease. The findings reveal too many people are:

* Unable to perform basic health checks for diseases such as breast, skin or testicular cancer.

* Not aware when they need to contact a doctor.

* Unable to understand instructions on prescribed medication.

* Unable to interpret food labels in order to follow a special diet, such as low fat or low sugar.

The survey, the first of its kind in Australia, has alarmed health experts, who are calling for the Federal Government to introduce a national focus on "health literacy". Prof Robert Bush, director of Queensland's Health Communities Research Centre, said people were putting themselves in danger. "This information should send alarm bells ringing," he said. "Many of our health-promotion initiatives assume a basic level of literacy, such as reading a prescription label so people don't overdose, following a basic health promotion guide, or deciding when it's time to consult a doctor. "Without this basic knowledge then people are putting their lives at risk."

Prof Bush urged the Government to launch a health education program to run in schools, workplaces and aged care homes. "Achieving even a basic level of health literacy to join in ways to better health would seem a fundamental aspiration for Australia," he said. The Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey was completed by 9000 Australians living in urban and rural areas across all states and territories.

Source





24 February, 2008

Higher Education Gap and Economic Mobility

The story below is from the NYT so it takes a bit of unspinning but, if you just look at the facts reported and ignore the pontifications, it would seem that the declining influence of affirmative action has meant that fewer blacks are going to college and more whites are. Not exactly a surprise.

It is also not a surprise to hear that the children of blacks who have got into good jobs with the help of affirmative action are falling back down the income scale -- to about where their innate ability places them -- more evidence that IQ really is hereditary. An artificially affluent environment did not help the children concerned

Economic mobility, the chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades, a study being released on Wednesday says.

The authors of the study, by scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, warned that widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families.

The researchers found that Hispanic and black Americans were falling behind whites and Asians in earning college degrees, making it harder for them to enter the middle class or higher. "A growing difference in education levels between income and racial groups, especially in college degrees, implies that mobility will be lower in the future than it is today," said Ron Haskins, a former Republican official and welfare expert who wrote the education section of the report.

There is some good news. The study highlights the powerful role that college can have in helping people change their station in life. Someone born into a family in the lowest fifth of earners who graduates from college has a 19 percent chance of joining the highest fifth of earners in adulthood and a 62 percent chance of joining the middle class or better.

In recent years, 11 percent of children from the poorest families have earned college degrees, compared with 53 percent of children from the top fifth. "The American dream of opportunity is alive, but frayed," said Isabel Sawhill, another author of the report, "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Mobility in America." The report is at economicmobility.org. "It's still alive for immigrants but badly tattered for African-Americans," said Ms. Sawhill, an economist and a budget official in the Clinton administration. "It's more alive for people in the middle class than for people at the very bottom."

The report and planned studies constitute the most comprehensive effort to examine intergenerational mobility, said John E. Morton of the Pew Trusts, who is managing the project. It draws heavily on a federally supported survey by the University of Michigan that has followed thousands of families since the late 1960s.

A chapter of the report released last fall found startling evidence that a majority of black children born to middle-class parents grew up to have lower incomes and that nearly half of middle-class black children fell into the bottom fifth in adulthood, compared with 16 percent of middle-class white children.

The Pew-sponsored studies are continuing with the involvement of research organizations and scholars. Another report expected in the spring by the more conservative Heritage Foundation will focus on explanations for the trends described in the current report.

Stuart Butler, vice president for economic studies at the Heritage Foundation, said, "It does seem in America now that for people at very bottom it's more difficult to move up than we might have thought or might have been true in the past."

Mr. Butler said experts were likely to disagree about the reasons and, hence, on policies to improve mobility. Conservative scholars are more apt to fault cultural norms and the breakdown of families while liberals put more emphasis on the changing structure of the economy and the need for government to provide safety nets and aid for poor families.

"We may well have an economy that rewards certain traits that are typically passed on from parents to children, the importance of education, optimism, a propensity to work hard, entrepreneurship and so on," he said. To the extent that the economy rewards those traits, he added, "you'd expect the incomes of children to track more with that of their parents."

The small fraction of poor children who earn college degrees are likely to rise well above their parents' status, the study showed.

More than half the children born to upper-income parents, those in the top fifth, who finish college remain in that top group. Nearly one in four remains in the top fifth even without completing college.

Evidence from model programs shows that early childhood education can have lasting benefits, Mr. Haskins said, although the Head Start program is too uneven to produce widespread gains.

In addition, he said, studies show that many poor but bright children do not receive good advice about applying for college and scholarships, or do not receive help after starting college. "If we did more to help them complete college," Mr. Haskins said, "there's no question it would improve mobility."

Source




Black crook keeps her teaching job at Columbia



Appoint a dummy because she is black and have low expectations ever after, I guess

Robert notes that Madonna Constantine, the Columbia professor who claimed a noose was left on her door a few months ago, has been has been found guilty of plagiarizing the work of two students and another professor - in no less than two dozen cases. Sure, college administrators say Constantine has been punished, but they delicately refuse to specify how. They also make clear that, because she is tenured, she will keep her job.

The case in question involves more than a mere gaffe or slip of the memory. Serial plagiarism is word piracy and cheating, and it should disqualify professors from the high tasks of teaching on campuses and mentoring students.

Whatever sanctions Columbia has placed on Constantine, they do not fit the crime. Neither tenure nor the cowardice of administrators should be allowed to shield academics who steal the thoughts and words of others. Constantine should be fired, and students and the public have a right to be informed that they no longer need be concerned about such untrustworthy professors. As Tracy Juliao, one of the students who cooperated in Constantine's investigation, rightly stated, "You go in as a student thinking you should be able to trust your faculty."

Source. See also here




Muslim sexual hangups on campus

Amir Mertaban vividly recalls sitting at his university's recruitment table for the Muslim Students Association a few years ago when an attractive undergraduate flounced up in a decidedly un-Islamic miniskirt, saying "Salamu aleykum," or "Peace be upon you," a standard Arabic greeting, and asked to sign up.

Mr. Mertaban also recalls that his fellow recruiter surveyed the young woman with disdain, arguing later that she should not be admitted because her skirt clearly signaled that she would corrupt the Islamic values of the other members. "I knew that brother, I knew him very well; he used to smoke weed on a regular basis," said Mr. Mertaban, now 25, who was president of the Muslim student group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 2003 to 2005. Pointing out the hypocrisy, Mr. Mertaban won the argument that the group could no longer reject potential members based on rigid standards of Islamic practice.

The intense debate over whether organizations for Muslim students should be inclusive or strict is playing out on college campuses across the United States, where there are now more than 200 Muslim Students Association chapters. Gender issues, specifically the extent to which men and women should mingle, are the most fraught topic as Muslim students wrestle with the yawning gap between American college traditions and those of Islam. "There is this constant tension between becoming a mainstream student organization versus appealing to students who have a more conservative or stricter interpretation of Islam," said Hadia Mubarak, the first woman to serve as president of the national association, from 2004 to 2005.

Each chapter enjoys relative autonomy in setting its rules. Broadly, those at private colleges tend to be more liberal because they draw from a more geographically dispersed population, and the smaller numbers prompt Muslim students to play down their differences. Chapters at state colleges, on the other hand, often pull from the community, attracting students from conservative families who do not want their children too far afield.

At Yale, for example, Sunnis and Shiites mix easily and male and female students shocked parents in the audience by kissing during the annual awards ceremony. Contrast that with the University of California, Irvine, which has the reputation for being the most conservative chapter in the country, its president saying that to an outsider its ranks of bearded young men and veiled women might come across as "way Muslim" or even extremist.

But arguments erupt virtually everywhere. At the University of California, Davis, last year, in their effort to make the Muslim association more "cool," board members organized a large alcohol-free barbecue. Men and women ate separately, but mingled in a mock jail for a charity drive. The next day the chapter president, Khalida Fazel, said she fielded complaints that unmarried men and women were physically bumping into one other. Ms. Fazel now calls the event a mistake.

At George Washington University, a dodge ball game pitting men against women after Friday prayers drew such protests from Muslim alumni and a few members that the board felt compelled to seek a religious ruling stating that Islamic traditions accept such an event.

Members acknowledge that the tone of the Muslim associations often drives away students. Several presidents said that if they thought members were being too lax, guest imams would deliver prayer sermons about the evils of alcohol or premarital sex. Judgment can also come swiftly. Ghayth Adhami, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled how a young student who showed up at a university recruitment meeting in a Budweiser T-shirt faced a few comments about un-Islamic dress. The student never came back.

Some members push against the rigidity. Fatima Hassan, 22, a senior at the Davis campus, organized a coed road trip to Reno, Nev., two hours away, to play the slot machines last Halloween. In Islam, Ms. Hassan concedes, gambling is "really bad," but it was men and women sharing the same car that shocked some fellow association members.

More here





23 February, 2008

Lying journalism school head

Why am I not surprised?

Faculty at Northwestern University's journalism school said Tuesday that they "are deeply troubled" about their dean's use of anonymous sources in his alumni magazine columns and called on him to provide proof that he didn't fabricate the quotes. A statement signed by 16 Medill School of Journalism instructors, along with a letter they wrote to Medill Dean John Lavine, comes after a columnist for The Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper, questioned Lavine's use of anonymous quotes in two introductory letters Lavine wrote for the Medill alumni magazine last year.

The two-page statement, signed by tenured faculty members as well as contract lecturers, also was given to Northwestern President Henry Bienen and Provost Daniel Linzer, the letter stated. "This matter has become a crisis for the school," the statement said. "The principles of truthfulness and transparency in reporting are at the core of Medill's professional and academic mission."

Northwestern's office of the provost is reviewing Lavine's use of unnamed sources and "the veracity of the quotations," according to a statement by spokesman Al Cubbage, who declined to comment further. In addition, students and alumni joined the new "Save Journalism at Medill" group on Facebook. On Tuesday afternoon, there were nearly 90 members of the group, which was created to discuss "concerns about the issue of the dean's anonymous sourcing, as well as other recent changes in the journalism school."

At issue are two columns Lavine wrote in Medill's alumni magazine. In a column in last spring's magazine about a class in which students developed "a fully integrated marketing program," Lavine quoted "a Medill junior" saying: "I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken." In the same piece, Lavine quotes "one sophomore" who glowingly praises a new reporting program, concluding, "This is the most exciting my education has been."

Lavine's use of anonymous quotes seemed suspicious to David Spett, a Medill senior and Daily Northwestern columnist. He said he figured out which marketing class Lavine had mentioned and then tracked down all 29 students. Each denied making the "I sure felt good" comment, his column stated.

At Medill, one of the country's premier journalism schools, professors emphasize that unnamed sources should be used sparingly, in line with professional media standards. Students routinely are required to submit names and contact information for every person quoted in their articles as a guard against fabrication.

Lavine, 67, told the Tribune last week that the quotes in his columns "came from real people," though he couldn't recall whether they were provided by e-mail or during face-to-face conversations. He said he writes student comments in a reporter's notebook he carries and also receives comments by e-mail. He said comments from that time period have been deleted.

He defended his use of anonymous quotes by drawing a distinction between a news story and a letter to alumni in a magazine. "Context is all-important. I wasn't doing a news story. I wasn't covering the news," Lavine said. "When I write news stories, I am as careful and thorough about sources as anyone you will find. . . . This is not a news story. This is a personal letter."

That argument didn't sit well with some journalism faculty members, who called the explanation "at best inadequate," according to their statement. "It is wrong to argue that the forum in which the questionable quote was used, the school's alumni magazine, is not subject to the same standards as other publication venues," according to the statement.

Medill professor Donna Leff said law and ethics instructors first broached the idea of issuing a statement. The position statement then circulated to a larger pool of professors, Leff said, many of whom felt it was important to take a public stand. "This is not something that played out in the newspaper as though it were an internal matter. It's a newspaper matter that then got played out in school," said Leff, who teaches media law and ethics, science writing and urban reporting. "We're actually asking him exactly what we would ask of any reporter if we were the editor." The faculty requested a meeting with Lavine, Bienen and Linzer.

Lavine also defended his writings in an e-mail to faculty in response to the Feb. 14 Tribune story, saying that the quotes "are what students told me." "They are real quotes, a fact that was demonstrated by my including in my letter to the alumni a link to a student video that showed students making the same kind of points," Lavine wrote. "There was no shortage of material from students for these quotes." Of the 16 instructors who signed the letter, 10 are full-time professors while the remainder are lecturers or retired faculty members. There are 51 full-time Medill faculty members.

Source




Britain: Privileged children excel, even at low-performing "comprehensive" schools

Charles Murray pointed out long ago that richer people have higher IQs and that IQ is the main factor in educational attainment. What the report below skates over is the safety concerns many British parents have about sending their children to "sink" schools

Middle-class parents obsessed with getting their children into the best schools may be wasting their time and money, academics say today. They found that children from privileged backgrounds excelled when they were deliberately sent to inner-city comprehensives by parents opposed to private schooling. Most of the children "performed brilliantly" at GCSE and A level and 15 per cent of those who went on to university took places at Oxford or Cambridge.

To give their children "the best start in life", many parents choose to live in catchment areas of high-performing schools, "find God" to gain their child a place at a faith establishment or make financial sacrifices to pay for their child's independent schooling. However, the researchers decided to analyse the progress of the offspring of "those white, urban, middle-class parents who consciously choose for their children to be educated at their local state secondary, whatever the league table positioning".

This group attended average or poorly performing schools in working-class or racially mixed areas. Here they thrived academically and were often given special attention by teachers keen to improve the school's results, according to the study by professors in education from the universities of Cambridge, Sunderland and West of England (UWE).

The only failure was in social integration, which had been the very reason most parents sent their child to the school. Most children from middle-class families mixed only with pupils from identical backgrounds. The research found "segregation within schools, with white middle-class children clustered in top sets, with little interaction with children from other backgrounds".

Professor David James, from UWE, said: "But we wanted to discover what motivates parents who instead choose to send their children to local comprehensives that appear to be performing poorly. "Most children who had this choice made for them have gone on to perform brilliantly in GCSEs, A levels and then on to university entrance, including a much higher than average entry to Oxbridge."

The researchers interviewed 124 families from London and two other cities. Eighty-three per cent of the parents had degrees and a quarter were educated to postgraduate level. They included three Labour Party activists and two who worked in a social exclusion research unit. In 70 per cent of families, one or both parents worked in the public sector. Most described themselves as left-wing or liberal.

The report found: "Some parents were motivated by a commitment to state-funded education and egalitarian ideals and many had an active dislike for privileged educational routes on the grounds that they were socially divisive. Many wanted their children to have an educational experience that would prepare them for a globalised, socially diverse world. "These parents positioned themselves in a way we termed `a darker shade of pale', as part of a more culturally tolerant and even anti-racist white middle class. "They felt strongly that higher-achieving schools would not provide the kind of experience of the `real world' that their children needed."

However, the researchers said such parents did not consider that they were sacrificing their children's education, with many seeing it as a worthwhile, if risky, strategy. "Many parents said they could and would pull out if things did not go well," the report said. Some parents who attended privileged schools made the choice as a "conscious reaction to their own schooling". Others wanted their children "to compete in ordinary circumstances". It added: "Anxiety was not absent, especially when their children were attending schools that were pathologised - or even demonised - by other white middle-class parents."

But even though those sending their children to comprehensives were open and tolerant of other backgrounds, in some cases researchers noted "elitism and a sense of intellectual and social superiority - a sense that would be confirmed by their own child's relative success".

Source




Australia: Othello becomes a tragedy of the system

LITERATURE, the soul of the English language, has been marginalised by ideology and social theory in its study in schools and universities. Reader in English at the Australian National University Simon Haines said the literature part of the subject English had been squashed and marginalised during the past 30 years, pushed aside to teach theories from other disciplines. "Literature is the heart of English and if we're not doing that, then the subject loses its soul," he said after addressing the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney yesterday.

Dr Haines said university academics in English and literature over the past two generations had "colonised" other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and linguistics. As a result, it had become the attitude in English schools to question the primacy of the text in the belief that the text should be used to illustrate theories from the other disciplines. "And so Othello has become a tragedy of race rather than a tragedy of jealousy," he said. "It hasn't always been; up until the 1960s, it was a tragedy of jealousy. "It's not the teachers' fault - they're just reflecting what they've heard for two generations in universities, which is that literature as core of the subject English is in the end dispensable and theoretical."

Dr Haines is the director for the ANU of the International Centre for Human Values, a joint venture with the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and is a former diplomat and analyst with the Office of National Assessments, and was chairman for three years of the OECD budget committee before pursuing a career in academia.

Dr Haines said the English syllabus in schools had become much more crowded over the past three or four decades. "It's all the more reason not to dilute English with other disciplinary or ideological approaches. There just isn't time," he said. "The best you can hope to have is an understanding of the context of the play, so you don't want to narrow it down into one ideological approach. What you get then is a teacher who doesn't understand Marxism and feminist theory as thoroughly as a university academic trying to give students a half-baked version at the same time as teaching Othello. Students end up with a mishmash.

"By all means study Marxist theory when you're at university, where you can study it thoroughly, but don't try to do it in a half-baked way at school." Dr Haines said in this way, Othello had become a tragedy of race not jealousy, which makes the play narrower, more polemical and ideological than Shakespeare intended.

Source





22 February, 2008

Teach Your Children Well

Cleon Skoussen would say, "I told you so."

With the coming general election, and the impressive youth movement within, one can only conclude Skoussen was a visionary. When watching today's young people gush over Barack Obama, pledging allegiance to the Democrat Party, the phrase "Mission Accomplished" comes to mind. The former FBI agent, in his 1958 book, "The Naked Communist", enumerated several goals the left would take to obtain, and maintain, power in the United States. Some of those "goals" included.

"Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda.

"Get control of the teachers associations.

"Gain control of all student newspapers."

But when it comes to today's successful infiltration into academia, the phrase "Give `em an inch, and they think they're rulers" come to mind. According to Paul Rogers of The Mercury News, "A Silicon Valley lawmaker is gaining momentum with a bill that would require "climate change" to be among the science topics that all California public school students are taught. "You can't have a science curriculum that is relevant and current if it doesn't deal with the science behind climate change," Simitian said. "This is a phenomenon of global importance and our kids ought to understand the science behind that phenomenon."

It's not enough that today's youth seem ill equipped with the basics. There is this FedEx commercial where a young employee can't find China on a map. We have another commercial where a young man completes an online stock transaction for a company in Hong Kong, and then tries to impress us with his knowledge that Hong Kong is in China. Insurance commercials targeting young buyers today use cartoons. And we wonder why Russia and China are so cocky.

While I'm only the son of an educator, wouldn't we best spend our time teaching kids the basics, instead of pumping their little heads full of science that is, despite what Al Gore says, not conclusive?

I asked Dr. Timothy Ball about his thoughts on this California curriculum proposal and he replied, "The blunt truth is if you don't understand the science you simply have discussions in ignorance. You also have the problem that teachers can push there own political agenda consciously or subconsciously. Unfortunately, most parents have no idea what is being taught in the classroom, and too often it is not education, it is indoctrination. This extends through to the university, where idealistic young minds are like a tabula rasa eager for ideas and vulnerable without experience.

Dr. Ball concluded, "So we are a science based society with only about 20% who even have a glimmering of understanding of science. As you can see, everywhere you look it is a serious problem because it is ripe for exploitation of fear and lack of knowledge. Gore's movie is a classic example. It is pure unadulterated propaganda which is why an Oscar from Hollywood, the land of make believe, was so appropriate. It employed all the gimmicks of visual and sound imagery that science and technology can provide. As you know even in the radio industry the gimmicks and techniques used to "underscore" a story. The challenge I have made to educators and others is what would you show to provide the other side of the climate issue from Gore's piece? The challenge is you have to present accurate technical boring science. As somebody said you can't spin the truth like you can its perception."

Instead of teaching "science" most of the teachers won't understand, because we're talking about something as inconclusive as the weather, maybe we should be making sure our kids can master the basics. You know, little things like Basic English so young adults can fill out a job application and read an equipment manual for a job. Little things like mastering Basic Mathematics so they can balance a checkbook and calculate how much change to give from a cash register.

Turning our kids into little, intolerant Democrats may have served a short-term goal, but mandating schools spend valuable class time "teaching" climate change that conveniently omits The Sun as a "warming" factor is a continued and dubious disservice, and waste of taxpayer money.

The basics are the basics for a reason. Using kids for political gain is a tactic not beneath the left. It is a reality. If you really care about the future, be concerned about the morons being pumped out of schools that will be the leaders of our nation tomorrow. You know, our nation. That's in North America!

Source




AN AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION ROUNDUP

Four current articles below -- no good news

Rudd's education "revolution" at work

THE Rudd Government will axe a $1.2 billion program which has allowed schools across NSW to upgrade toilets, landscape their grounds and improve facilities. The Investing in Our Schools scheme - one of the most popular policies of the former Howard government - will not be continued after the money runs out this year.

Angry primary principals are seeking an urgent meeting with new Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard at which they are expected to voice a strong complaint about the decision. A storm of protest following The Daily Telegraph's report this morning has forced Ms Gillard to defend the decision. She said the Government would continue investing in schools via other means. "The Investing in Our Schools program was only ever a four-year program," Ms Gillard said.

Ms Gillard's office earlier confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that Labor's "education revolution" - with heavy emphasis on computers and trade schools - does not extend to Investing in Our Schools. A spokeswoman said the $1.2 billion already promised to schools would be delivered, allowing schools to "build and repair vital infrastructure". "Under the previous Liberal Government there was no funding provided for the program beyond the 2007-08 Budget and therefore the program cannot be continued," the spokeswoman said.

Primary Principals' Association president Geoff Scott said schools - particularly in the government sector - were disappointed to learn the program had been dropped. "It will be a terrific shame if it is not replaced by something else that gets funds to schools," Mr Scott said. "Under this scheme a little bush school could get equal access to funds. It allowed them to get money directly for a host of things such as covered walkways, outdoor learning areas and play equipment."

One recipient of Investing in Our Schools funds has been Oxley High School at Tamworth, where students use old railway carriages as a study centre and computer room. Parents & Citizens' president Wendy Newby said the school had received $100,000 from the program which would be "put to good use". "We are very grateful for the funds . .. the P&C does as much as it can," she said.

State Opposition education spokesman Andrew Stoner said principals "could not speak more highly of the Investing In Our Schools program". "This was a $1.2 billion program making a real difference to NSW schools - often where the State Government had failed to provide adequate facilities," he said.

Source

Rudd's school computer promise comes unplugged

THE Rudd Government has backed away from an election pledge to provide every upper secondary school student with their own computer. Education Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday the Government would provide the resources but conceded it could not force schools to provide individual computers to each student.

The Opposition seized on the concession, accusing the Government of reneging on its promise and disappointing the almost one million private and public students in Years 9-12.

Mr Rudd's education revolution, including the $1 billion National Secondary Schools Computer Fund, helped him steamroll into Government last year. A 15-page policy document labelled A Digital Education Revolution said: "A Rudd Labor Government will revolutionise classroom education by putting a computer on the desk of every upper secondary student. It said: "Students will have their own computer and access to the school's extranet and classroom content - both from their desktop and remotely. Schools will be able to apply for grants of up to $1 million . . . this could include personal laptops."

But in fiery exchange in a Senate standing committee yesterday, bureaucrats told Queensland Liberal Senator Brett Mason there was never a pledge to give students their own computers. Some schools might choose to have computer laboratories on school campuses, they said. An animated Senator Mason seized on the comments, offering to read the ALP brochure to Innovation Minister Kim Carr. "Unless I'm stupid and every 9-12 student I know is stupid, every one of them thought the Government would be providing them with a computer," Senator Mason said.

During an interview later in the day, Ms Gillard argued the Government had not changed the goalposts. "There will be sufficient resources so that schools can put a computer on each child's desk for Years 9 to 12," she said. "We are leaving it to the school how they do it , we are not mandating that every desk have a computer on it but we are saying the aim of the program is to make sure every student has access to a computer."

Senator Mason also accused the Government of fudging costs because the costs of maintaining broadband connections were not included in the $100 m broadband plan. "During the election, Kevin Rudd said that the buck would stop with him. We now discover that the buck has been passed on to others, including hard-working parents trying to put their children through school," he said. "As anyone with internet knows there are monthly costs associated with maintaining a connection."

Source

Mathematics education still a low priority

CASH-STRAPPED university administrations diverted most of the millions of dollars meant to reverse the maths and statistics skills crisis to other purposes, confidential research has found. At least 50 per cent and as much as 80 per cent of new money allocated by the former Coalition government to the national priority disciplines appears to have been retained for administration, a draft report to the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute suggests.

The report on a national questionnaire of university maths departments found that despite the $2729 in extra funds for each student place in maths and statistics granted by former education minister Julie Bishop last May, there were almost 40 fewer maths teaching and research staff at the start of this year compared with 2007.

National Committee for Mathematical Sciences chairman and University of Melbourne professor Hyam Rubinstein told the HES that, based on the survey, he estimated about $25 million nationally had been allocated to universities to support the recruitment of new staff and teaching students in maths and statistics. "But we are only getting 20per cent or less, or about $4 million to $5 million actually flowing to departments nationally," he said. Professor Rubinstein said he understood that universities were in a tight financial situation. "Universities have to make money. This issue of national priorities has become secondary to what will pay the bills. That's the difficulty."

Australian Mathematical Society president and Melbourne University professor Peter Hall thought Rubinstein's estimate was generous. "I understand that some universities need the freedom to put these funds where they are haemorrhaging most seriously, but it's clear they don't see offering maths as playing a serious role in science." Professor Hall said that having a sufficient supply of maths-qualified researchers was increasingly influential in multinationals' decisions to locate significant research facilities.

Only five of the 10 universities contacted by the HES yesterday responded to queries about how much extra they earned from enrolling maths and statistics students and how much was passed on to departments. The Australian National University rejected the suggestion it had not passed on the increase, saying it had allocated 85 per cent to the relevant areas and the rest to student support. The University of NSW failed to provide figures but said it had advertised for three professorial chairs following retirements and resignations. The University of Western Australia said it had upwardly adjusted funding weightings for maths, and the University of Adelaide employed four extra maths staff.

The AMSI report said despite initial euphoria over the funding boost and high starting salaries for graduates sparked by the skills shortage, an air of pessimism had descended on many university maths departments. One respondent said that when a senior university administrator was confronted with the failure to pass on extra funding, he said the federal education department wouldn't be concerned and that the minister wouldn't get involved in such detail.

Australian Council of Deans of Science president John Rice said he was hopeful the Rudd Government's planned $111 million maths and science HECS relief plan would encourage far greater numbers of students. Australian Council of Engineering Deans president Elizabeth Taylor said universities were working with schools as hard as they could to encourage greater numbers of students. "Students see maths and science as harder options, which would come at the expense of a nicer life and their social life," she said.

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Julia Gillard said universities had discretion over the funds. The proportion of Australian school-leavers taking advanced maths fell from 14 per cent in 1995 to 10.4 per cent in 2006, according to AMSI figures.

Source

A bleak future for those with poor literacy and numeracy

No matter how much spin you put on the recent benchmark figures for Queensland's literacy and numeracy, the state is not doing well. Cold comfort though it may be, it is not alone. Victoria has one in five students falling short in maths and besides the Northern Territory, Tasmania remains the national bottom feeder. ...

What is unambiguous is that the long-term fallout of poor literacy and numeracy affects the economy. While federal Treasurer Wayne Swan can say: "Around the kitchen tables Australians understand absolutely that inflation has been rising", to do this, you need numeracy skills. In Britain, a country which has had a national curriculum for 20 years - plus entrenched and continuing low literacy and numeracy levels - the economic danger signs of what this means are evident. People who require the greatest welfare support are those with low numeracy and literacy skills.

While Australia has low housing affordability, the fact is that buying a house is the biggest financial decision we make. If we don't understand the numbers, such as interest rates and repayments, then this is potentially disastrous.

British MP Boris Johnson, a candidate for Mayor of London and former editor of The Spectator magazine, recently summed up the reality of low numeracy skills for people securing a mortgage: "It involves concepts of percentages and interest and there is abundant evidence that millions of Britons either do not care about the debt they are taking on, or do not really understand the meaning of these squiggly figures for their future prosperity. It's not that they are stupid. It's just that they haven't been educated to understand the maths."

Johnson could have as easily been talking about Australia. The key word here is education. It is something recognised by one of the country's biggest charities, The Smith Family. As from this year, the charity has stopped welfare and put its emphasis on education. The reason is that "passive assistance", as The Smith Family describes welfare services, does not support children's education.

The reality is that in Queensland, as is apparent elsewhere, the most economically vulnerable are those who have not succeeded in education. The importance of high levels of competence in literacy and numeracy cannot be stressed enough. To this end, Queensland's indifferent performance on the benchmarks is cause for concern. The long-term health of the economy is dependent on high educational standards underpinning it. Some children do not have them.

Source





21 February, 2008

Racist Harvard Affirmative Action Policy

Harvard, my alma mater, discriminates against Asians in admissions. Asians are less likely to be admitted at any GPA or SAT score than members of other races - they are vastly less likely to be admitted than blacks or Hispanics, the beneficiaries of racial preferences, and somewhat less likely to be admitted than whites.

Although the statistical evidence is overwhelming, the Harvard Crimson claims there is "no definitive proof." It speculates that that Asians are being rejected because they are grinds, not because of their race, and that that explains why Asians are less likely to be admitted than members of other races at any given level of academic achievement. People concerned about discrimination against Asians, it claims, must first take into account Asians' possibly lesser "community involvement, leadership capabililities, [and] distinction in extracurricular activities."

This is no basis for this speculation. The current crop of Asian high school students participate in extracurricular activies at least as much, on average, as students of any other race.

I don't really know how to respond to this baseless downplaying of Harvard's discriminatory and Orwellian "diversity" policy, which punishes Asians because they have the temerity to succeed in school.

My 3-year-old nephew is part Korean. Should we try to hide his ethnicity when he applies for college? Given the shape of his eyes, that may not be possible. It is a disgrace that his racial identifiability may expose this little boy to prejudice by both reactionary bigots and politically-correct college admissions staff.

We previously discussed the ridiculously racist theory of some "diversity" trainers that members of different races have inherently different ways of thinking, such as in our Supreme Court amicus brief in the Seattle case.

Source




Overworked Students?

This article in U.S. News & World Report suggests that American high-school students are having a rough time keeping up with academic requirements and suffering stress as a result. Excerpt:

Earning a high school diploma this spring is going to take just a little more effort for students in Maine. This is the first year that all public high schools in the Pine Tree State are requiring seniors to complete a college application to graduate. It's an effort aimed at boosting the number of students who attend two- and four-year colleges in the state with the lowest college degree attainment rate in New England. Already the requirement has caused some anxiety among parents of students with disabilities and other parents who are worried that applying to college could lead their kids away from home.

Another, more immediate worry for these high school students and their families: Is it one task too much? While Maine is the only state to pass such legislation requiring students to apply to college (admittedly, not the most onerous assignment), many high schools across the country are making students complete similar-and often more time-consuming-extracurricular projects in order to get their diploma. These tasks are intended to boost the teenagers' learning experiences, but they also raise the question of how much work students can handle.

Some education consultants do say that such additional requirements, particularly capstone projects at competitive high schools, make it harder for students to distinguish themselves from their peers when applying to selective colleges.... There is also a danger that struggling students will feel overwhelmed by the additional work and drop out.

On the other hand, we have the following, also from U.S. News & World Report, in a different article:

Two million minutes is the estimated time that students spend in high school. It is also the title of a new documentary film that suggests American students squander too much of that time. While their peers in China and India study longer hours to sharpen their math and science skills, top students from one of the best high schools in the U.S. are playing video games and watching Grey's Anatomy during a group study session...

...American teenagers' attitudes toward academics differ sharply from those of their peers in India and China, who seem more motivated and focused. Take, for example, 17-year-old Apoorva Uppala, who attends Saturday tutoring sessions to prepare for her university entrance exams. She wants to become an engineer, which she calls "the safest" profession in India. In Shanghai, Jin Ruizhang, 17, preps for international math tournaments. He is already the top math student at his school and hopes to get into a prestigious university offering an advanced math program.

As an educator of some thirty-five years, I can sum up very quickly what's wrong with educational practices today: (1) the concept of an integrated core curriculum, including basal readers in elementary schools, has been abandoned in favor of worshipping at the copying machine; and (2) educators' jockey to use special projects as public-relations tools and as the means to getting a positive evaluation from an overseeing administrator. Both of those mistakes also lead to disciplinary problems in the classroom, in effect making enemies of students and teachers.

In some of the most prestigious schools all over the United States, students are subjected to all sorts of activities at the expense of learning the three r's. Furthermore, many dedicated high-school students see the basic flaw and opine, "Teachers don't really care about us learning any more." Compounding the problem is the fact that schools are trying to be all things to all people, to meet all the students' educational needs--from the gifted and talent to the mentally retarded.

It never ceases to amaze me that the spartan one-room-schoolhouse education of the 18th and 19th Centuries led to the rise of some of the greatest minds and inventors in history, including various political leaders and inventors such as Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. The old McGuffey Readers and the Blue-Backed Speller, plain as they were, worked; effective use of those textbooks, along with many parents' emphasis on their children "getting their lessons," inspired students to go beyond what was taught in the classroom! Back then, without all the bells and whistle and "experts," many students managed to learn what they needed to know--in part, because their self-esteem was not the primary concern of parents and educators.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that the homeschool movement, which harkens back to the idea of a core curriculum emphasizing the three r's, keeps catching on?

Source




Australia: Parents are too dumb to be told all the facts

That is the elitist and typically Leftist attitude we see below, anyway

EDUCATION Minister David Bartlett has rejected a call to make league tables of school performance available to parents.

Liberal education spokeswoman Sue Napier yesterday called on the Government to release more data to help parents compare schools. Her call comes after the Mercury revealed that government schools were developing a new series of key performance indicators to measure and improve their results in areas such as literacy, numeracy, attendance and retention. "This is exactly the sort of information to which parents are entitled, particularly after 10 years of a state Labor government during which time the performance of our students in many key areas has actually gone backwards," Mrs Napier said. "This is about transparency and accountability and the desperate need to boost education standards in our schools."

But Mr Bartlett said he would not allow the Opposition to use figures to stigmatise struggling schools. "Every Tasmanian school already reports directly to its parent body about its performance on literacy and numeracy and a number of other benchmarks," he said. "Every single individual school produces an annual report to its school community with relative figures of literacy and numeracy and improvement or otherwise and I think that's very important. "That data is being used already for school improvement and, as I've said, in a disaggregated fashion most of that data is already publicly available. "What I won't ever stand for is people like Sue Napier using this data for political purposes to berate or run down particular schools."

Mr Bartlett said there was already sufficient information for people who needed it. "What we're talking about here of course is my goal to empower principals to make more local decisions about their school that reflect the aspirations of their school community," he said. "The public has access to data already ... and they can research that data and compare schools as they see fit."

Mrs Napier said the current push to implement performance indicators was "hardly rocket science".

Source





20 February, 2008

The Left Wing School Agenda and the Banning of Patriotism

An article by Mark Loftin [markcloftin@yahoo.com]

When Winston Churchill was dropped from the UK school curriculum last July, one had to wonder if patriotism itself was next. Now it's official. The Institute of Education, a leading educational body, has warned teachers not to instill pride in students when speaking of great moments in British History:

"To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption. And there's the rub for patriotism."

The recommendations singled out specific moments in history that students should now feel "ambiguous" about:

1750-1830 The Industrial Revolution: exploitation of the poor versus great wealth creation and growth

1807 Abolition of the slave trade. Britons were both practitioners of the trade and responsible for abolition

1947 Indian independence and Partition. How well did Britain manage its withdrawal from the sub-continent?

2003 Iraq war: was it liberation or occupation?

This shouldn't come as a surprise. The UK schools' leftist agenda has been in full steam over the last year:

* Last month, "Mum and Dad" become forbidden in British schools because it assumes a child's parents are different genders, and The Three Little Pigs was banned so not to offend Muslims.

* Last July, as mentioned, Winston Churchill was dropped from the UK school curriculum.

* Last April, teachings about the Holocaust were dropped as to not offend Muslims.

* Last March, schools began teaching 4-years olds about homosexuality through books like "King and King," (which is about a prince that rejects three female princesses before falling in love with a prince).

* An Inconvenient Truth is regularly shown in 3400 UK schools, instilling paranoia in 7-11 year olds.

Here in the U.S., the leftist agenda is also sinking its teeth into our schools at an equally disturbing pace. Leading the charge is California:

* San Francisco is debating an anti-war textbook, which features corporate American celebrating the spoils of war and Ronald Regan hugging Osama Bin Laden. Pete Hammer of the San Francisco Unified School District, who approved the book, says "The topic is one that a lot of teachers would have an interest in bringing into the classroom."

* A current bill gaining momentum by California lawmaker Joe Simitian (D - Palo Alto) would require California schools to include climate change as part of the science curriculum

* Last October, "Mom and Dad" were banned from schools, along with "Husband and Wife." In the same bill, public schools were ordered to allow boys to use the girls' restroom or locker room, and vice versa, if they choose

* Last June the state passed a homosexual education bill SB 777, which: ".requires textbooks and other instructional resources to cast a positive light on homosexual `marriages,' cross-dressing, sex-change operations and every other facet of homosexual and bisexual lifestyles."

* More hatred of Israel, as seen by anti-Israel speakers and the atmosphere that appears on the UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State campuses .

While there is not a specific mandate here in the US to "ban" patriotism - or any specific heroes that defined it - with more of the left's agenda taking up course time, one must wonder what will be slighted to make room.

A 2003 poll from California's Santa Monica High School said that 1/3 of students were not proud to American and 40 percent said America itself was "unjust". One can only imagine what the numbers would look like today in the name of "progress." Of course, you can't blame young, impressionable students for not being proud to be an American if that is what they are taught. The way the left commonly twists the meaning of the word, not being proud to American could be taught by a teacher as "patriotic."

In typical Doublespeak fashion, the left has been adamant about manipulating patriotism's definition for years. The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines patriotism simply as "love for or devotion to one's country." In 2001 Senator John Kerry redefined patriotism to mean "not drilling in the Arctic refuge." In 2006, Kerry redefined it again to mean "wartime dissent." Air America has defined it as "pointing out the flaws in your country." Entire Web blogs are dedicated to this trickery, such as US Patriots United which issued it's "10 commandments of patriotism." A few entries:

(someone who),

"respects the diversity and culture of all nations, recognizing that our continued success lay not in spite of other nations but in alliance with them in a uniform approach toward promoting the global general welfare."

"ensures that the basic rights of those we hold dear to access quality healthcare and education is steadfastly supported, uncompromisingly and without discrimination based on race, color, creed, gender, or orientation."

"offers foreign humanitarian aid unconditionally without tying it to religious dogma"

"exercises the right to openly challenge (the president) and hold accountable at all times, even and most particularly in times of war"

Multiculturalism? Socialized Healthcare? Government- administered education? Wartime dissent? If the left had their way, being a patriot would be officially redefined to mean.being a liberal democrat.

At Nathan High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a project was started in 2005 to hang a picture of George Washington in every classroom. John Pribram, chairman of Project George Washington and a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart said:

"I'm grateful (for the success of the project). After Sept. 11, we were united at that point. Flags in front of every house. Patriotism was rekindled. George Washington does the same thing."

One can only speculate at the heated debate that would occur in California over whether George Washington - military hero and devout Christian - deserves the classroom wall. Unfortunately, with Churchill being pulled from the walls in Great Britain, there is now a precedent for more patriotic disillusionment from California's schools.

Perhaps Leo Lacayo, San Francisco Republican Party media surrogate, put it best with his response to San Francisco's anti-war book: "We're not teaching them -- we're basically washing their brains with liberal mish-mash."

FINIS




College Tuition Inflaters

Okay, Washington politicians, we get it. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are hoarding lots of money while tuition prices skyrocket, and states sometimes cut funding to public colleges. That's all very troubling, but with reauthorization of the Higher Education Act passed by the House yesterday and a final version likely to come up for approval by all of Congress soon, please stop throwing blame around and address the heart of the college cost problem: your constant lavishing of aid on students that pushes tuition up, up, up.

By now, probably everyone has heard the righteous wailing from Washington, led by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), over well-endowed institutions of higher education that don't spend their cash to keep to tuition low. "Parents and students have a right to expect these universities with big endowments to end the hoarding and start the helping with skyrocketing tuition costs," Grassley declared last month.

Grassley's assault on wealthy colleges has generated lots of press and made for great grandstanding, and there's certainly something wrong when ivory-tower endowments, which are tax exempt because colleges supposedly serve the "public good," lose hardly a tuppence in service of the public. But the fault lies with government for giving colleges favored status, and endowment hoarding is hardly driving tuition costs.

Just look at the number of schools with big endowments. A few weeks ago, Sen. Grassley and Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) sent a letter requesting information to every college and university with an endowment over $500 million. How many schools was that? Just 136, or about 3 percent of the nation's nearly 4,300 colleges and universities. That's hardly enough to make much difference on overall average tuition levels.

Despite the small number of schools being directly harassed over their endowments, most higher education lobbyists are on high alert, especially against threats from Grassley and others to make colleges spend 5 percent of their endowments annually. Unfortunately, to protect themselves colleges and their Washington defenders are pointing at an even more popular scapegoat for rampant tuition inflation than Harvard and Yale: tight-fisted states. "A primary reason that tuition has been rising is that state funding has been flat," Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) told a gathering of higher education officials in Washington last week, exhorting them to close the "communication gap" between themselves and politicians on Capitol Hill.

But Washington pols, as the HEA reauthorization bill proves, have been hearing that message loud and clear. If the bill passed yesterday is enacted, the federal government would withhold funds from any state that cut higher education spending below its previous five-year average. In other words, states would have to spend taxpayer money to make taxpayer money.

So who are the real culprits behind higher education's ever-higher price tag? Sadly, just like the endowment blow-up, blaming tuition inflation on impecunious state spending is a dodge. State financing of public institutions, for one thing, has no direct effect on the nation's roughly 2,600 private colleges or their tuition prices. Moreover, state spending on higher education hasn't actually been flat. According to the latest federal "Digest of Education Statistics," after adjusting for inflation state higher-education expenditures rose from $46.8 billion in academic year 1990-91 to $53.9 billion in 2003-04, a 15 percent increase. Despite that, the average real cost of in-state tuition and fees at public four-year institutions rose 86 percent in that time, from $2,460 to $4,587. So much for the cheap states theory. But what, then, is the real cause of the college cost crisis?

There are many cost-driving excesses in higher education - luxurious dorms, unused classroom space, growing bureaucracies, expensive academic journals, and the list goes on - that are intermediate causes of the college cost problem. They are all, however, undergirded by a single reality: You can't charge an arm and a leg unless people can pay it, and to curry favor with colleges, kids, and parents Washington ensures that those limbs keep coming, taking them from taxpayers and giving them to students and schools.

The growth in federal student aid makes this clear. According to data from the College Board, real federal aid - including grants, loans, and tax credits - ballooned from $48.7 billion in the 1996-97 academic year to almost $86.3 billion in 2006-07, a 77 percent leap. On a per-pupil basis, aid per full-time equivalent student - most of which came through Washington - rose from $6,627 to $9,499, a 43 percent increase. Meanwhile the per-pupil cost of tuition, fees, room and board rose 29 percent at private four-year schools, from $25,031 to $32,307, and 41 percent at public four-year institutions, from $9,657 to $13,589. In other words, college prices kept rising because aid made sure they could.

So who are the real culprits behind higher education's ever-higher price tag? Not endowment hoarders or cheap states, but the Washington politicians who blame everyone else for the problems that they themselves have caused.

Source





19 February, 2008

Wow! Radical new idea! Get rid of dud teachers and hire new ones!

It looks like a typical day at a typical American grammar school: Students proceed in single file down hallways, a class of fourth-graders listens to their teacher read aloud, and students in another class work in small groups on independent projects. But Andre Cowling, the tall, imposing new principal of Harvard Elementary on Chicago's South Side, shakes his head in wonder at it all. Last year, he says, "this wouldn't have been possible."

Harvard is one of several public schools here to get a top-to-bottom housecleaning in recent years - including replacing the principal and most teachers - in a bid to lift student achievement out of the nation's academic basement. The drastic approach is known as "turnaround," and Chicago is embracing it more than any US city, though it's unproven and is controversial among teachers, many parents, and students.

"It's risky in that it's new and has an untested track record," says Andrew Calkins, senior vice president at Mass Insight, a nonprofit group focused on school reform, and coauthor of a report on turnaround schools. "It's logical in that the other choice is to keep on doing what's been tried before, and we know what the results of that will be. What you try to do if you're Chicago is to minimize the risk and maximize the possibility of a good outcome" by thinking through everything that's needed to improve the climate for learning at a school.

As Principal Cowling sees it, the risk paid off. Until Harvard Elementary went through turnaround, the school was like "Beirut," he says - 50 kids running through the halls at any time, holes in the floors and peeling paint on the walls, fights on or near campus, no order in the classrooms. "Now, you can tell it's a school," Cowling says.

For an encore, the city is proposing simultaneous turnarounds at eight Chicago schools in the fall: four high schools and four elementary schools that feed into them. Even for a city that already leads the nation in school-reform ideas, the proposal is unusually bold and sweeping. Districts across the US - many with schools facing reconstitution requirements under the No Child Left Behind law - are watching with interest.

"We want to give families the opportunity to have a high-performing option in the neighborhood throughout [a student's] entire education," says Alan Anderson, director of the Office of School Turnaround for Chicago public schools. "There are a handful of schools that just aren't progressing at the rate we'd like them to," he says. "We know we need drastic change. It's not a decision we take lightly."

The eight schools slated for turnaround are among the worst performers in the district: At the high schools, an average student misses at least 35 days of school a year, dropout rates are above 10 percent, and the passing rate on state tests hovers at about 10 percent. Still, some families wonder whether this will be just another reform that disrupts their kids' lives and replaces teachers they've grown close to, but yields no change in the quality of the education.

Teachers, of course, are upset about a reform that requires a school's entire staff to be let go, even if teachers can reapply. "What kind of instability are you creating for children coming from environments that are challenging and already have instability?" asks Marilyn Stewart, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. "You're having to recruit and train teachers, and then have another turnover. No industry can survive that kind of turnover of personnel."

Ms. Stewart suggests a less drastic reform, already undertaken in several Chicago schools with some promising results, in which the principal is replaced, but not the teachers. "We're not resistant to change," she says. "But we're resistant to this kind of upheaval where you're throwing out the baby with the bath water."

Administrators acknowledge the challenge of finding enough high-quality teachers willing to work with poor children in low-performing schools. But recruiting is easier if there's a dynamic principal who can get people to buy into a new mission for a school, they say. It's also one reason Chicago chose a nonprofit, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), to manage the turnarounds at several of the schools: the Orr High School campus, made up of three small schools, and two elementary schools that feed into them. AUSL, which also manages the turnaround at Harvard Elementary, trains and recruits teachers for urban classrooms. Its proposal for Orr, in fact, includes setting up the new high school as a teacher training academy, where mentor teachers would be matched with those just learning.

"Effective teachers want supportive leadership, positive working conditions, adequate resources, and positive interactions with students and parents," says Donald Feinstein, AUSL's executive director. "When you embed that in a school culture and climate, you can attract more effective teachers."

That wholesale staff turnover - giving a new principal the ability to shape who's working for him or her - is the most crucial element to a turnaround's success, says Mr. Calkins of Mass Insight, but it's not the only one. Other key elements are added time for teachers to plan and collaborate, longer school days or school years, clustering turnaround schools so they can learn from one another, local authority over budget and curricula, and support for teachers and administrators from outside the school, such as the district or an outside group like AUSL.

At Harvard Elementary, Cowling had the whole school repainted, moved his office so he was more visible to the older kids, separated the seventh and eighth grades into single-gender classes, and has the teachers work together for five weeks in the summer to map out the school year and start on the same page. He ended up rehiring just three of the school's original teachers and hired 17 AUSL-trained teachers. "This wouldn't be possible with the same teachers," he says. "The kids would have come back with new paint, and the pedagogical insufficiencies would still be there."

Cowling, who traded a $130,000 corporate job for a $40,000 teacher's salary several years ago and who knows every child in his school by name, says his students' parents are now many of the biggest supporters of the changes at Harvard. But he acknowledges it was controversial at first.

At a hearing last week on the turnaround proposal for Orr, the district office was packed with teachers, parents, and students, many arguing against the change. "We are not science experiments," Bianca Davis, a junior at one of the small Orr schools, told the hearing officer. "On the television, it seemed like you slandered the teachers," added Melissa Winston, a parent, in impassioned testimony. "Society has failed these kids, not the teachers."

That plea to consider the harm to teachers carries little weight with Cowling. The real focus, he says, needs to be on students. "I hired who I thought would be the very best for our kids," Cowling says. "We have a moral obligation. It took some drastic measures to get this building turned around the way we did."

Source




Islamists: Prof Who Objected to Sharing Panel with IDF Veteran Gets $500k to 'Initiate a Dialogue'

The U.S. Department of State has awarded a grant worth $494,368 to University of Delaware political scientist, Brookings Institution fellow, and Pentagon consultant Muqtedar Khan, who last fall objected to serving on a panel with a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to a UD press release, the grant is to be used, "to initiate a dialogue on religion and politics between key members of religious and community organizations in the Middle East and the United States." The press release continued:

Under the grant, participants from Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be on campus this summer for a brief period before traveling to other locations, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Later a group of American scholars will travel to Egypt and Saudi Arabia to take part in similar activities in those countries. A documentary film is planned of the visit to the U.S.

The choice of Khan to oversee a program dedicated to expanding dialogue between religious communities is beyond parody, as Khan himself has a record of thwarting dialogue, at least with Israeli veterans. Moreover, his award is part of a larger pattern of coddling Islamists within the bureaucracies of the State Department and Pentagon.

Last October 23, Khan objected to the presence of IDF veteran and Campus Watch associate fellow Asaf Romirowsky on an academic panel at UD. Organized by students to discuss "Anti-Americanism in the Middle East," the panel was set to go when Khan-writing from Washington, DC, where he had delivered a workshop at the Pentagon-sent the following email to undergraduate Lara Rausch, one of the key organizers of the event:

Laura, I have to speak at the Pentagon tomorrow. My workshop is from 12-4. I hope to catch the 5 pm Acela from DC and will be back in town by 7 pm. I will come directly, but may be late. I am also not sure how I feel about being on the same panel with an Israeli soldier who was stationed in West Bank. Some people see IDF as an occupying force in the West Bank. I am not sure that I will be comfortable occupying the same space with him. It is not fair to spring this surprise on me at the last moment.

Romirowsky, contacted via email, was asked what he thought of the State Department's action of singling out Khan for a substantial award to encourage dialogue, was taken aback. "I seriously question the type of dialogue this will promote given the fact that he wouldn't share space with me on an academic panel," Romirowsky replied. "Dialogue is good if you have something to dialogue about-starting with accepting the others' right to exist," he continued. "Yet, by not sitting on a panel with me due to my IDF service, he basically questioned Israel's right to exist within safe and secure borders." "That itself should throw into question the integrity of any dialogue he might initiate."

In the two months following the story's October debut, Khan offered no fewer than three additional explanations for why he acted as he did. I documented these in December, and concluded that the reasons he gave in the October 23 email above rang truest: IDF vets are off-limits on panels in which he participates. The other excuses were little more than a smokescreen, set off in a vain attempt to reduce the embarrassment his intolerance had brought to himself and the University.

Khan's large grant from the State Department, coupled with his role as a Pentagon advisor, further exposes a troubling trend within those federal departments of coddling Islamists and turning a blind eye toward intolerance. Hesham Islam, special assistant for international affairs in the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, has made news lately for allegedly calling Joint Chief analyst on counterterrorism Major Stephen Coughlin, who also reported to England, a "Christian zealot with a pen" and pressing for his removal.

Coughlin is widely celebrated as one of a small number of Pentagon analysts who are consistently tough on Islamism-a stance that has made enemies within the Defense bureaucracy. His thesis from the National Defense Intelligence College, titled "`To Our Great Detriment': Ignoring What Extremists Say about Jihad," is celebrated by terrorism experts as a clear-sighted warning that too few in Washington care to heed.

Although the Pentagon took Hesham Islam's biography off its web site, stories of his fate, along with that of Coughlin, are mixed. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), who investigated the matter, wrote on February 5 that Coughlin told her there was never a conspiracy to remove him from his job. Some reports claim that Islam himself is on his way out, but Claudia Rosette, who investigated the matter closely, says on her blog that a call to the Pentagon produced a denial of that story. Steven Emerson has detailed Islam's past relationships with Islamists.

One thing, however, is certain: by entrusting Middle East studies specialists such as Muqtedar Khan with huge grants to bring Saudis and Egyptians to America, the State Department and Pentagon are remaining true to form. From former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes's stated fondness for the works of Wahhabi apologist John Esposito-a man who shares Hesham Islam's predilection for Christian-bashing-to Khan's previous work for the Pentagon, our federal departments entrusted with protecting America from Islamists are in fact employing them.

Source




Britain: More wasted education spending

Shocking to say so but there are some things that governments can't fix.

Labour's attempts to cut the numbers of students dropping out of university have cost nearly 1 billion and had virtually no effect, a committee of MPs is expected to warn this week. More than a fifth of students drop out before graduating, a figure that has improved by less than one percentage point since 2000. The drop-out rate is worse in former polytechnics. Even more students are giving up on part-time degree courses, which are to be expanded sharply by Gordon Brown and John Denham, the universities secretary. More than 44% of students fail to complete such courses. MPs on the public accounts committee would not comment on their report in advance of publication, but one Westminster source said: "It is depressing. This shows universities are simply flatlining. Too many students are not getting the higher education they were promised."

The MPs will blame the increasingly impersonal nature of universities that has accompanied Labour's mass expansion of higher education for failing to keep students committed. Many senior academics now take little interest in teaching undergraduates, as most of their department's government grant is based on their output of research papers. Some students complain of going through their entire degree with no academic knowing who they are. A large proportion of students who give up on their studies calculate that the value they gain from their degree does not justify the debts they incur.

Spending on "retention" schemes, such as mentors to support students who are considering leaving, may even make the situation worse - the 800 million pounds spent over the past five years has mainly been taken from teaching budgets. The worst performers include Bedfordshire University and Anglia Ruskin University, based in Cambridge.

Source





18 February, 2008

Breaking: Equations Not All That Important In Engineering!

Post below lifted from Phi Beta. See the original for links

Soon after the Larry Summers debacle, Charles Murray summarized the reason for the gender gap in math and science:

[There is] a distributional difference in male and female characteristics that leads to a larger number of men with high visuospatial skills. The difference has an evolutionary rationale, a physiological basis and a direct correlation with math scores.

Well, a Smith College professor found a way around that for getting women into engineering: Ignore the math. From the Chronicle:

[The curriculum] emphasizes context, ethics, and communication as much as formulas and equations. Smith, the first women's college to offer an engineering degree, graduated its first class of engineers in 2004, and since the program's creation, in 1999, has attained a 90-percent retention rate

I'm no expert, but I'm not clear on what you can engineer with "context, ethics, and communication." I hope the Chronicle is wrong in saying that this engineering curriculum emphasizes sociology and philosophy "as much as," um, engineering.

To be sure, if teaching in this way improves women's performance on actual engineering tasks, as opposed to just luring them into enrolling and sticking around, I'm all for it. But I find it hard to believe such distractions would improve on a focused curriculum, and I can't seem to find any information on (A) how these students compare to those who got into sex-integrated engineering programs and (B) how these women do when they graduate. Certainly, were the program working well, it wouldn't need affirmative-action deals like this:

Students who maintain an overall GPA of 3.5 and a GPA of 3.5 within the major are automatically admitted to graduate study in an engineering discipline at Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, Tufts University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan.

UPDATE: Here I focused on the reason the Chronicle discussed for having a different curriculum - drawing in more women. An engineer reader, however, writes to say there are legitimate reasons to push engineering instruction in this direction:

An increased emphasis on communication is, to me, a no-brainer. My work is highly numerical in nature; and I have spent a good portion of my academic life reading and reviewing papers and books, and interacting with my colleagues in classrooms, seminars, and conferences. So personal experience definitely guides my view. I *heartily* endorse any effort to improve both the written and spoken communication skills of my future colleagues.

And another great point:

There is some variability as to what makes a good engineer. . . . It would not surprise me or bother me if women innately excel in different areas of engineering than others. If that is the case, then it seems natural to me that Smith would exploit that knowledge and tailor their curriculum to suit.

More Handwringing Orthodoxy From The College Board

Post below lifted from Discriminations. See the original for links

This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a new report from the College Board on the demographics of its Advanced Placement exams. Once again (similar results last year), the overall numbers are encouraging; the numbers for blacks are not. And the College Board blames, well, everybody (except for the tests and the test-takers). First the numbers:

... 24.9 percent of the 2.8 million students who graduated from American public high schools in 2007 took at least one AP test, and 15.2 percent of them earned a score of 3 or higher on at least one test. Those numbers are up slightly from the previous year.... [NOTE: This isn't completely clear, but a check of last year's article reveals that the 15.2 percent refers to all high school graduates, not 15.2 percent of the 24.9 percent who took AP classes - jsr.]

Underrepresentation of African-Americans

However, only 3.3 percent of the students who scored 3 or higher on a test were African-American, despite the fact that black students represented 14 percent of all high-school seniors last year.... African-American students also are less likely than their peers to take AP classes.... Black students accounted for only 7.4 percent of AP test takers last year, according to the report. White students, by contrast, accounted for 61.7 percent of test takers and 64 percent of graduating seniors.

In many states, American Indian and Hispanic students' participation matched their representation in the student body. Nationally, Hispanic students made up 14.6 percent of the high-school-senior population, and 13.6 percent of them scored at least a 3 on an AP test.

In short, black students were significantly "underrepresented" among AP test takers and among those doing well on the test. Trying to explain this "underrepresentation" is a great challenge to our country, requiring the efforts of, among others, our best scholars (such as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their impressive book, NO EXCUSES: CLOSING THE RACIAL GAP IN LEARNING). What doesn't help, however, is the moralistic finger-pointing engaged in almost reflexively by representatives of elite institutions such as Trevor Packer, the director of the College Board's Advanced Placement program.

The board sees a "true and startling lack of equity," Mr. Packer said. "African-American students in particular are not receiving encouragement and support."

Does Mr. Packer have any evidence, beyond the "underrepresentation," that black students "are not receiving encouragement and support"? Who does he believe is guilty (and if there truly is a "true and startling lack of equity," it is guilt we are talking about) of not providing the missing "encouragement and support"? Teachers? School administrators? Parents? Peers? If you're going to point your finger at shortcomings in equitable treatment, it at least ought to be clear whom you're pointing at.

Finally, it would be nice to know whether Mr. Packer believes that Asian-Americans, who are no doubt "overrepresented" among the high achievers, have been receiving a disproportionately and hence inequitably high level of "encouragement and support."

Perhaps what the College Board should propose is an Equiable Support and Encouragement Redistribution Act, taking some equitable treatment away from those who receive an excess of it and redistributing it to those who are not given enough.




Starting school at 4 'no help to children'

Children in England start school lessons earlier and sit more tests but still perform no better than in other countries, researchers say today. They find school "stressful" as they are subjected to academic lessons in English and maths at the age of four. In countries such as Sweden and Finland, where children do not start school until seven, pupils often outperform English children by the age of 11.

English primaries are also bigger than in most other countries - with an average of 224 pupils against 128 in Scotland - and make pupils sit exams more often, at a younger age and in more subjects.

In a damaging conclusion, it is claimed more parents educate their children at home or in alternative Steiner schools because they believe schools are "too constrained by the imperatives of performativity".

The findings - made as part of a two-year review of primary education by Cambridge University - will fuel fears that the target-driven nature of modern schooling is damaging childhood.

Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, described the findings as "devastating". He said: "When it comes to testing in England, the tail wags the dog," he said. "It is patently absurd that even the structure and content of education is shaped by the demands of the tests."

The Department for Children, Schools and Families said it had commissioned a "root and branch review of the primary-level curriculum". This will attempt to ease the transition from early years into school and will also "consider whether it would be appropriate to allow greater flexibility in school start dates", said a spokesman. She added: "The idea that children are over tested is not a view that the Government accepts. The reality is that children spend a very small percentage of their time in school being tested. "Seeing that children leave school up to the right standard in the basics is the highest priority of government."

In a further conclusion, today's report shows that English schools focus more lessons on politically correct themes such as "diversity, tolerance and multi-culturalism" than in other nations. A study by Glasgow University said this was "especially evident" in RE, history, geography and citizenship. France and Japan were more prepared to celebrate home-grown values in the curriculum.

Source





17 February, 2008

Welcome to "Palestine Awareness Week" at the University of Michigan

Post below lifted from Anti-racist Blog. See the original for links

Today marked the start of "Palestine Awareness Week" at the University of Michigan. The inaugural lecture was performed by anti-Israel Wayne State University anthropology professor Thomas Abowd. The theme of the event was supposed to be "Introducing Palestine", but the event instead focused on "demonizing and de-legitimizing" Israel.

Anti-Semitic Ann Arbor extremists were out in full force for the launch of the week's events.

You may remember this guy (pictured above and below) from a past ARA/WSU protest at Wayne State, where he held an almost identical sign. ARA/WSU is an anti-Israel/anti-Semitic group based out of Detroit. Most people believe the guy with the sign is Ann Arbor attorney Blaine Coleman, known for his irrational outbursts and public protests.


Below you can see anti-Zionist, and many would say anti-semitic (by most standards) Ann Arbor protester Dr. Catherine Wilkerson, who attended the event. She recently made news after being arrested by the Ann Arbor police.


Catherine spends her weekends intimidating Jews who worship at Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor. Check out Dr. Wilkerson and her wacko companions at the S.P.U.R.N. website, dedicated to exposing their activities.

Below you can see the back of Catherine's t-shirt. Of course, she doesn't mind spreading the apartheid lie about Israel. Good thing telling the truth isn't a requirement of practicing medicine, or she might be in trouble. [Update: It seems that Catherine Wilkerson has been fired from her job recently. Her creepy disruptions of in front of Beth Israel congregation seemed to cause some tensions with her employer.] Some members of the week's main sponsor, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), also wore these shirts.

Before the presentation began, Thomas Abowd apparently told some pro-Israel observers at the lecture not to take any pictures or video of him (like this picture of him speaking at an ARA/WSU rally), or they would face unnamed consequences. This is despite the fact that his lecture was open to the public, and was held in a lecture auditorium of a public law school. Why so shy professor Abowd?

On a similar note, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) called the police on one pro-Israel Michigan student who was videotaping the lecture (hopefully he'll send us the link if he puts the video on You Tube). The student was well within his rights to videotape, and it was hypocritical for SAFE to object to the taping since SAFE reportedly allowed at least three other video cameras to record the event (of course the three cameras weren't owned by Israel supporters). Unfortunately, the hypocrisy label and the law didn't stop SAFE from sicking the police on this student and asking that he be removed. After over 10 minutes in the hall with the police, the student was allowed back in, with instructions from the police to stop taping, on SAFE's orders.

It is clear that SAFE supports Freedom and Equality for themselves, but not for those who disagree with them. Certainly not for those who support the safety and security of Israelis. Anti-Racist Blog has been saying for months that SAFE cares little about free speech and free expression- they are just an anti-Israel group with a misleading name- and SAFE proved this to be true at the presentation tonight.

Below you can see a kafiyah wearing audience member. Did her dog chew on the scarf, or is she going to blame Israel for that too?

During the presentation Professor Abowd falsely accused Israel of ethnic cleaning, and apartheid like behavior. One of Abowd's most outrageous moments was when he questioned why "Zionists" would "cry" when Palestinians say they want to push Israelis into the sea; because according to Abowd, the Israelis did just that to the Palestinians. No sympathy for Israelis from Abowd. Professor Abowd also warned that Israel can keep all of Jerusalem, or it can have peace, but not both.

Here are a few more pictures of the audience, which did not come close to filling the lecture hall.

Readers report that in the Q & A, Professor Abowd was asked by an audience member whether he agreed with the message on the swastika sign held by the protester (probably Blaine Coleman) outside. Abowd stated that comparing Israelis to Nazi is tactically a bad idea, and not a comparison he would make. However, Abowd couldn't explain why he compared Palestinians to Jewish victims of the Nazis in his paper entitled "Memories of Flight and Rights in Jerusalem."

In that paper, Abowd wrote,

"Jerusalem’s future status, therefore, must be dealt with...Luckily, there exists a precedent for dealing with and remembering crimes committed decades ago. The theft of Jewish property by various European countries and banks (most notable Swiss banks) during the 1930’s and 1940’s have been brought up with greater intensity in the last decade by various Jewish bodies. These powerful claims for reparations and for the return of stolen property are legitimate, even fifty years later, and those whose property was stolen by Germany and others in the 1940’s must be compensated fairly. But if this principle of restitution applies to these Jewish victims from Europe, should not the same principle also apply to Palestinians...?"

Mr. Abowd also announced that he has a book forthcoming, which will be published by a University Press in California (surprisingly not Pluto Press). He wasn't specific, but the same publisher also published at least one notorious book by Hezbollah supporter and disgraced former professor Norman Finkelstein. Not a great gift for Hanukkah.

Most outrageous in terms of audience statements was when one man called Israelis "savages" and another falsely accused Israel of "genocide" during the Q & A. This hatefest was despicable, but unfortunately all too common on college campuses.




The state of higher edukation in Colorado

Post below lifted from Jammie wearer. See the original for links

First up is this little bit about the Colorado Department of Higher Education trying to block a proposed piece of legislation to grant free tuition to wounded and disabled veterans. They of course make their argument in monetary terms. What these veterans sacrificed for on their behalf can not be measured in monetary terms. The legislation was actually sponsored by a Democrat in their state house.

In an e-mail Monday to two dozen Capitol lobbyists, Cathy Wanstrath, a lobbyist for the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, laid out a plan to kill the measure when it is heard by the Appropriations Committee on Friday. "I think you all agree we need to kill this bill, and (the Colorado Department of Higher Education) has been happy to take the lead," according to the memo obtained Tuesday by the Rocky Mountain News. "However, we need your help in the next couple of days to count the votes to kill it in committee."

I wonder if they would be making this argument if it was for, say, in-state tuition for undocumented extended family members of illegal aliens?

But the staff noted that if 10 undergraduates took advantage of the tuition waiver at CU-Boulder for four years, it would cost the school $216,720. A "hugely constrained" budget has no room for such a waiver.

Contrary to popular belief, veterans do not get free tuition, the government doesn't pay for college after your service. That form of tuition assistance for veterans died during the Carter administration. There are two separate sets of rules governing this. One for the Vietnam veterans and another for those of us who served post-Vietnam.

Folks need to get the facts and quit assuming that the educational benefits of today's veterans match those of previous generations. There are plans, but all of them call for the service member to have contributed money to the fund during the time he was serving and there are a lot of strings.





16 February, 2008

A professor who sticks to what she knows about

A few months ago, I received an e-mail offering me a "very exciting" opportunity. Unlike most such e-mails, it was not after my money. It was after what I guard much more carefully: my time and my ideological commitment. It asked Brown University's philosophy professors to participate in a national movement called "Focus the Nation" and to "devote a portion of class time" on Jan. 31 or during that week "to teach about climate change as it relates to your discipline."

This prospect enticed me about as much as the frequent e-mails offering Viagra at a reduced price. So I did not use class time to teach about climate change. Here are four reasons why not.

Reason 1: Climate change is not what students signed up to study in my courses.

Neither of the courses I am teaching this term has anything to do with climate change. I would not pay my veterinarian if he talked about climate change instead of examining my cat. I would not pay a piano teacher for a full hour's lesson if she spent part of that time teaching me about climate change instead of teaching me piano. My students are entitled to the same respect from me that I expect from service providers. This means providing the service my students signed up for rather than whatever I decide is most important. I could avoid the problem by changing my course titles to "Whatever Professor Ackerman Decides Is Most Important," but that might leave me with no students to teach at all.

Reason 2: I am unqualified to teach about climate change.

I am not an expert on climate change. I am not an expert on how climate change might relate to philosophy. Rather than taking the time to become an expert on these topics, I prefer to pursue the intellectual interests I already have.

Reason 3: My students can have better opportunities to learn about climate change.

Brown University has physicists, geologists, chemists, biologists and engineers. Brown probably also has non-scientists who are interested in becoming experts on climate change as it relates to their disciplines. Experts can offer courses and teach-ins on climate change. Why not leave the teaching about climate change to them? One possible answer is that while many students may not be interested enough to take such courses or attend such teach-ins, these students are unlikely to get up and leave if climate change comes up in a course they are already taking on some other topic. In other words, professors should take advantage of a semi-captive audience. Is this any way to respect students?

Reason 4: I do not think climate change is the most important social problem in the world.

I am not disputing the scientific consensus about the technical aspects of climate change. As a non-scientist, I would have to be a crackpot to think that I know more than scientists about scientific matters. But I can have my own views about priorities. Climate change holds danger of future catastrophes. But other catastrophes are happening right now. They are what I would focus on if I were willing to take class time away from my courses' subject matter. The life expectancy in most African countries is under 60 right now. In America, millions of people lack health insurance right now. Are you prepared to tell an African, or an American with cancer and no health insurance, that climate change is the most important social problem in the world? I am not.

I would rather tell students that my classes are not designed to address the most important social problems in the world, and that's okay. My classes are not my students' whole lives. Students can use their ample time outside my classes to address whatever social problems they find most important, which may or may not include climate change.

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Australian teacher cleared after slapping student

Good to hear that SOME effective discipline for unruly children is still possible

CORPORAL punishment has been banned in Queensland schools for 13 years, but a Gold Coast magistrate has ruled it is legal for a teacher to slap a student in the face. An assault charge against a Gold Coast high school teacher who admitted slapping a Year 8 student in class was thrown out yesterday after the magistrate accepted he was practising "domestic discipline" - a 109-year-old law that allows a teacher to use reasonable force "by way of correction, discipline, management or control".

Slapped student Aidan Pascoe's parents Wayne and Michelle were furious. Mrs Pascoe stormed out of court after the decision, describing it as "disgusting". "Now all teachers can go and slap anyone they want and get away with it," she said. Mr Pascoe said Aidan had been "denied an education" as a result of the incident. "I had to pull him out of school and he's now doing an apprenticeship," Mr Pascoe said.

He said that in the six months leading up to the slapping incident, he had asked the school several times to remove Aidan from Justin Ransfield's classes because of a "personality conflict". "It's a bloody joke. A teacher has no right to hit a kid in the face," he said.

Southport Magistrate's Court was told Upper Coomera State College teacher Mr Ransfield slapped Aidan in the classroom in December 2006 and told another student to lie about what happened. The court was told Mr Ransfield, 37, and Aidan, 14, clashed physically after the student disobeyed a direction to start work. They tapped each other on the face before Mr Ransfield gave Aidan what fellow students testified was "a loud and hard slap" which left a red mark.

Arguing for the charge to be dismissed, barrister Frank Martin said while the slap may have been outside teachers' guidelines, it was not unlawful. "'He (Mr Ransfield) knew what he did was wrong . . . but there is no law that a teacher or a parent cannot discipline a child by striking," Mr Martin said. Mr Martin said Aidan had a history of misbehaviour, having been suspended from school four times.

Magistrate Graeme Lee ruled that the domestic discipline provision of the Criminal Code did apply in the case and dismissed the charge. "The defendant, as a teacher in charge of a classroom full of pupils, is entitled to manage the class in an orderly fashion," Mr Lee said. Mr Ransfield was congratulated in the courtroom by a tearful woman and was hugged outside by a student. Outside court, he would only say: "One in three male teachers are leaving the profession and I'm about to join them. "

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Australia: 'Rich' schools hit back

In Australia, private schools receive substantial subsidies from the Federal government

PRIVATE school lobby groups have denied being "wealthy" or "elitist". Catholic and independent school chiefs have hit back at revelations of exactly how much in government subsidies Tasmania's richest schools are receiving each year. Tasmanian private schools -- which educate 26 per cent of the state's school students -- will receive $170 million from state and federal governments this year.

Catholic education director Dan White said parents at private schools were entitled to government funding because they paid tax. "Parents at Catholic schools, along with all other parents, contribute fully to the taxation system," Dr White said. "It is only right and equitable that these parents are supported in the education of their children by both federal and state governments."

Recent research also indicated that, far from being wealthy, more than half of Catholic primary schools in Tasmania served communities that nationally fell into the low or very low socio-economic profile. "Based on information from the 2006 Census, four out of every five students in Tasmanian Catholic schools are from middle or low-income families," Dr White said.

The Association of Independent Schools of Tasmania accused the Mercury of "fanning the fires of envy and division" by publishing the funding breakdown. "Far from costing the taxpayer money, they are in fact saving government around $5.5 billion -- the additional expenditure it would require to educate those students in government schools," executive director Tony Crehan said.

Australia has one of the highest rates of public funding of private education in the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Federal funding for private schools will top $7 billion this year and is growing at three times the rate of funding for public schools. Among local schools, Friends' School will be given $6.4 million this year, The Hutchins School $4.3 million and St Michael's Collegiate $3.8 million. The Federal Government has vowed to review funding after it was revealed that private schools would receive overpayments of $2.7 billion over the next four years.

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15 February, 2008

White Gentile Males are now UNDER-represented in the academy

They have been edged out by women, Asians and Jews

Back in the early years of the last century, American Academia was dominated by white gentile males (hereafter, WGM's). Members of racial minorities were hardly to be found, either among the professors or among the students. Women were severely underrepresented, compared to their numbers in the population as a whole, and were excluded altogether from some of the most elite schools. Jews were subject to quotas that kept their numbers far below what they should have been, based on academic merit alone.

But by the 1970's, all that was just a memory. The anti-Jewish quotas fell in the 1960's. Standards for high school g.p.a.'s and test scores were relaxed for minority applicants, sometimes dramatically, in an attempt to achieve "parity" with their representation in the overall population. Though a few schools remained all-male, they hardly threatened women's academic opportunities: women were already well on the way to their present day relative over-representation in the undergraduate population.

Still, today, the perception remains that WGM's continue to enjoy an unfair advantage in the academic world and that affirmative action remains as necessary as ever to counterbalance that advantage. But is it true?

Let's look at one major facet of this issue - and the facet which, I think, has the most to tell us, not only about where we are now, but where we are headed in the future: undergraduate admissions. Even after all the civil rights gains of the last few decades, are WGM's still over-represented in the ranks of undergraduates at our most prestigious colleges and universities?

Coming up with the relevant numbers on this took me some doing, and the results are compromised by the fact that I had to rely on three different sources that are imperfectly coordinated. Still, I was able to come up with some rough and ready estimates - and I think they might surprise you.

First source: the National Center for Education Statistics breaks down student populations at individual schools by gender and by race/ethnicity. Second source: Hillel, the Jewish student organization, provides estimates of the numbers of Jewish students on most campuses. Third source: Wikipedia has general information on the demographics of the United States.

Using those sources, let's work through a particular example: my own alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley. According to the NCES, 32% of Berkeley's undergraduates are "White non-Hispanic" (rounding to the nearest percentage point). According to Hillel, about 10% of Berkeley's undergraduates are Jewish. So, defining "gentile" simply as "not jewish," about 22% of Berkeley's undergraduates are white gentiles. According to the NCES, again, Berkeley's undergraduates are 46% male. So the percentage of WGM's at Berkeley should be about 46% of 22% - i.e., about 10% (again, rounding to the nearest percentage point).

Unfortunately, there's a complication: 9% of Berkeley's undergraduates are listed by the NCES as "Race-ethnicity unknown." So this 10% has to be divided by .91 to get WGM's as a percentage of all students of known race/ethnicity. Result: 11%.

Finally, how does that compare to the representation of WGM's in the U.S. population as a whole? According to Wikipedia, the U.S. is now 74% white. Deducting 2% for the Jewish population, and multiplying by .5, WGM's would seem to make up about 36% of the U.S. population today. Dividing 11 by 36, one concludes that the representation of WGM's at Berkeley is about 31% of their representation in the U.S. population as a whole.

Compare that to the underrepresentation at Berkeley of non-Hispanic blacks, which has been the subject of so much controversy since Proposition 209 abolished affirmative action in California schools. According to the NCES, 3.5% of Berkeley undergraduates are black. According to Wikipedia, 12.4% of Americans are black. Dividing 3.5 by 12.4, one concludes that the representation of blacks at Berkeley is about 28% of their representation in the U.S. population as a whole.

So WGM's at Berkeley are represented at about 31% of parity, blacks at about 28%. Now isn't that interesting? Would you have expected that result?

Berkeley, of course, though especially interesting to me, is an exceptional case in all kinds of ways. So I used the same procedure to come up with figures for all of the top twenty schools in the latest U.S. News and World Report ranking - which, though far from perfect, will do well enough to be going on with. And here are the results (For each school, I first list the percentage of WGM undergraduates compared to all undergraduates of known race/ethnicity, and second their percentage of parity with WGM's in the U.S. population as a whole):

1. Princeton: 24%, 67%
2. Harvard: 15%, 42%
3. Yale: 16%, 44%
4. Stanford: 16%, 44%
5/6. Penn: 9%, 25%
5/6. Cal Tech: 29%, 81%
7. M.I.T.: 29%, 81%
8. Duke: 24%, 67%
9/10. Columbia: 12%, 33%
9/10. Chicago: 21%, 58%
11. Dartmouth: 25%, 69%
12/13. Washington U. of St Louis: 19%, 53%
12/13. Cornell: 18%, 50%
14/16. Brown: 14%, 39%
14/16. Northwestern: 18%, 50%
14/16. Johns Hopkins: 24%, 67%
17/18. Rice: 22%, 61%
17/18. Emory: 11%, 31%
19/20. Vanderbilt: 30%, 83%
19/20. Notre Dame: 22%, 61%

Summary: WGM's appear to be underrepresented, compared to the overall population, in all twenty schools. In seven of those schools, they are represented at less than half of parity. In ten out of the twenty (Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Penn, Duke, Columbia, Washington University of St. Louis, Brown, and Emory) they are even more underrepresented than blacks - who also remain underrepresented at all twenty schools. So, believe it or not, it would seem that, at America's top schools today, white gentile males are about as underrepresented as African Americans. Run the numbers yourself, if you doubt me.

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Retired Teacher Reveals He Was Illiterate Until Age 48

John Corcoran graduated from college and taught high school for 17 years without being able to read, write or spell. Corcoran's life of secrecy started at a young age. He said his teachers moved him up from grade to grade. Often placed in what he calls the "dumb row," the images of his tribulations in the classroom are still vividly clear. "I can remember when I was 8 years old saying my prayers at night saying, 'please, God, tomorrow when it's my turn to read please let me read.' You just pretend that you are invisible and when the teacher says, 'Johnnie read,' you just wait the teacher out because you know the teacher has to go away at some point," said Corcoran

Corcoran eventually started acting up to hide his illiteracy. From fifth through seventh grade he was expelled, suspended and spent most of his days at the principal's office. The former teacher said he came from a loving family that always supported him. "My parents came to school and it no longer was a problem for me reading because this boy Johnnie the -- native alien I call him -- he didn't have a reading problem as far as the teachers were concerned. He had an emotional problem. He had a psychological problem. He had a behavioral problem," said Corcoran.

Corcoran later attended Palo Verde High School in Blythe, Calif. He cheated his way through high school, receiving his diploma in June 1956. "When I was a child I was just sort of just moved along when I got to high school I wanted to participate in athletics. At that time in high school I went underground. I decided to behave myself and do what it took. I started cheating by turning in other peoples' paper, dated the valedictorian, and ran around with college prep kids," said Corcoran. "I couldn't read words but I could read the system and I could read people," adds Corcoran.

He stole tests and persuaded friends to complete his assignments. Corcoran earned an athletic scholarship to Texas Western College. He said his cheating intensified, claiming he cheated in every class. "I passed a bluebook out the window to a friend. I painstakingly copied four essay questions off the board in U.S. government class that was required, and hoped my friend would get it back to me with the right answers," Corcoran said.

In 1961, Corcoran graduated with a bachelor's degree in education, while still illiterate he contends. He then went on to become a teacher during a teacher shortage. "When I graduated from the university, the school district in El Paso, where I went to school, gave almost all the college education graduates a job," said Corcoran. For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher's assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students. "What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn't the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher's assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin," said Corcoran.

In retrospect, Corcoran said, his deceit took him a long time to accept. "As a teacher it really made me sick to think that I was a teacher who couldn't read. It is embarrassing for me, and it's embarrassing for this nation and it's embarrassing for schools that we're failing to teach our children how to read, write and spell!"

While still teaching, Corcoran dabbled in real estate. He was granted a leave of absence, eventually becoming a successful real estate developer. It wasn't until he was 48 years old that he gave reading and writing another chance. He drove to an inconspicuous office with a sign he couldn't read. He studied and worked with a tutor at the Literacy Center of Carlsbad. Assigned to a 65-year-old volunteer tutor, Eleanor Condit, he was able to read at a sixth-grade level within a year. "I'm just an optimistic hopeful person that believes in the impossible and miracles," said Corcoran. Carlsbad City Library literacy coordinator Carrie Scott said people of all walks of life go through the reading program, including teachers.

Corcoran is now an education advocate. "I believe that illiteracy in America is a form of child neglect and child abuse and the child is blamed and they carry the shame, if we just teach our people how to read we'd give them a fair chance," Corcoran said.

He has written two books, "The Teacher Who Couldn't Read" and "Bridge to Literacy." He is also the founder of the John Corcoran Foundation. The foundation is state-approved as a supplemental service provider for literacy in Colorado and California - providing tutoring programs for over 600 students in small group settings, and individually in homes through an online program.

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14 February, 2008

Antisemitism at LSE

An attempt to brand Israel as an "apartheid" state by students at one of Britain's leading universities fell by just seven votes last week. But members of the Jewish and Israel societies at the London School of Economics may have to return to the students' union debating chamber after a challenge to the conduct of the ballot. The union's constitutional committee is understood to have called into question the 292-285 vote against the motion, although a decision was not due to be announced until yesterday.

The resolution - whose proposers included the head of the students' Palestine Society - called for a campaign to lobby the LSE and the National Union of Students to "divest from apartheid Israel". More than 600 students - six times the usual attendance for union meetings - cast their vote, which was held by secret ballot rather than a show of hands to prevent intimidation. But the union's returning officer received complaints that some students had been unable to get into the crowded hall to hear the debate, and that ballot papers lying around may have been used by people not entitled to vote.

The result of the debate, however, buoyed Jewish students, who had only 48 hours to mobilise opinion after learning that it was to take place. Marilyn Carsley, president of LSE's Israel Society, said that there had been "a lot of anti-Israel rhetoric" on campus recently and that the outcome of the debate had been "uncertain. We were all on edge." Sam Cohen, an MA student, who led the campaign against the resolution, said: "The response has been phenomenal. Jewish and non-Jewish students proudly opposed extremist language at LSE and have shown that we want a moderate, sensible and constructive debate around the issues of the Middle East. "I really hope this is the last time people try to polarise the student body in this way."

An editorial in this week's LSE student newspaper, The Beaver, commented: "The LSE has been in real danger of alienating Jewish and Israeli students, and this motion was another example."

When new students arrived at the London School of Economics last autumn, they received a welcome pack from the students' union that would have been distinctly unwelcome to many Jewish freshers. Its contents included a letter from two union officials, one the head of the Palestine Society, telling them of the union's twinning with the West Bank university, An Najah, and accusing Israel of having killed 800 Palestinian children. It was a taste of what was to come. Pro-Palestinian campaigners have turned up the heat on Israel over the past year, sporting "Make Apartheid History" T-shirts while handing out leaflets denouncing the Jewish state. "It is time for us to call Israeli apartheid by its name and press our universities to divest and stop funding it," Palestine Society head Ziyaad Lunat told the JC this week.

But the intense lobbying "has made a lot of Jewish students feel intimidated by the atmosphere this year", said Sam Cohen, an activist in the Jewish and Israel societies. "They feel particularly targeted because the anti-Israel voice is so loud, extreme and polarising." There are 36 Israeli postgraduates and three undergraduates at LSE, according to an official website aimed at encouraging applicants from the country. But one third-year Israeli postgrad, Lior Herman, said he would now think twice about advising compatriots to join him. "I would definitely recommend LSE for academic reasons, but the atmosphere among students is not so pleasant."

If last week's resolution labelling Israel as apartheid had passed, Mr Herman believed that many Jewish and Israeli students "would have found it hard to be members of a student body that says if you don't agree Israel is an apartheid state, or side with the boycott, you're not one of us." Ms Cohen said that Jewish students had come to her in tears, for example after the term "apartheid" had been "tossed around in class". An MA student in human rights, she said that in one of her own classes, "I have heard students accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing and of being an apartheid, racist state."

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Low grades cost 87 SUNY students their dorms

Rather a good idea

SUNY Old Westbury has removed 87 residential students from their dormitories for having grade point averages below 2.0, enforcing a policy that appears to be the only one of its kind on Long Island. The policy has been blasted by faculty and students, but an administrator said Friday that the rule -- which he described as an effort to raise academic standards -- would continue. "Our goal is to have students with us who are serious about their studies," said Michael Kinane, assistant to the president.

The students were removed from their dorm rooms last month. The Faculty Senate then unanimously passed three resolutions seeking to have the policy suspended, largely because that group feels it is inconsistent with best practices and disproportionately impacts freshmen, said Faculty Senate chair Maureen Dolan, a mathematics and computer science professor. "I have not heard yet a single faculty member support this policy," she said. Twenty-three of the evicted students did not register for the spring term, Kinane said.

Sandy Pierre, 20, of Brooklyn, who said she is a junior, said she received a letter during winter break that she would have to leave her dorm because her grade point average was 1.9. "It came as a shock to me," said Pierre, who wants to go into public relations and said she is on the school's dance team. "I was thinking of withdrawing from this semester, which I don't want to do." Pierre said her mother now drives her to and from campus each day, but the travel is taking a toll. "I am enrolled, but it's really hard for me to actually have to commute," Pierre said. About 1,000 of the school's 3,500 students live in dorms.

The policy has been in effect since at least 1994, Kinane said, but had not previously been enforced. University president Calvin O. Butts III had sought to do so two years ago, Kinane said, but didn't feel the school had communicated it well enough to students. As the fall semester began, students received letters and each dorm had a meeting about the policy, Kinane said.

The overall grade point average for Old Westbury students is 2.83, down from 2.84 in fall 2006, Kinane said, while the freshman class score from fall 2007 was 2.87, up from 2.80 for the previous year's class. It is too soon to tell how the policy impacts grades, he said.

Professor Runi Mukherji, chair of the school's psychology department, said the policy is "draconian" and punishes vulnerable students. "I support the idea that we should have high standards and high expectations for our students," she said. "This is not the way we should achieve it." Freshmen, who have taken few classes and may have trouble adjusting to college life, are the most at risk, she said. Mukherji said some students removed from the dorms were unable to commute and did not have anywhere to go. Kinane said the college did not offer assistance for affected students to find alternative housing.

Esther Goodcuff, an associate vice president at Adelphi University in Garden City, which has no policy linking grades to residential life, said in a statement: "Isolating students from campus may exacerbate the student's poor academic performance, rather than help them."

On Old Westbury's campus, students voiced mixed feelings about the policy Friday. "There's some people that got affected by it. They were partying," said Faith Rivera, 26, a senior from the Catskills. "But then there were people who were trying their hardest." But other students, including Joseph Walker, 19, a sophomore from Flushing, said the policy is fair. "A 2.0 is not really that hard," he said.

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13 February, 2008

Obama and student loans -- comment by Victor Davis Hanson

(In pursuit of the youth vote, Obama has proposed that the Federal government completely take over the admittedly corrupt student loan business. In support of that idea, he has complained that he and his wife have only recently been able to pay off their student loans. That the existing corruption is largely the result of government legislation is not being mentioned. See here on that)

OK, already - enough about those loans. I think the Obamas really need to cool it on their personal angst stories about their student loans. Two Harvard Law tuitions are not an entitlement, but a gamble-one of going into short-term debt to have marquee credentials for long-term security.

In their case, their joint professional careers and incomes (apparently nearly a million last year) paid off well and more than justified their savvy undergraduate and professional school Ivy-League gambit.

But consider:

(1) that their Ivy-League student loans are hardly proof of first-hand experience with typical student indebtedness;

(2) that their availability (e.g. why is the public subsidizing Harvard Law School?) should instead be a reason for gratitude to the government for the subsidy rather than anger that it had to be paid back;

(3) that a better source of criticism would be the universities themselves whose tuition rises faster than inflation, and whose billion-plus tax-exempt endowments could subsidize tuition far better, as Congress is now arguing;

(4) that the remedy of eliminating private lenders and creating or expanding another federal agency, is, by liberal universities' own admission, going to raise not cut costs.

There is a familiar theme here unfortunately: the expansion of middle-class entitlements is a birthright that only government can grant; and the experience of relatively affluent Harvard-trained lawyers gives them first-hand empathy with the middle-class ordeal.

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The willingly blind: Letter to the Editor of "The Beacon" from Florida International University faculty member

"The Beacon" is the student newspaper of the Florida International University

It is sad to read the shackled thinking of Matt Luciano, Contributing Writer to The Beacon ("Americans should demand solidarity for Palestine," Jan. 31, 2008). Mr. Luciano unwittingly does a deep disservice to the cause of human rights by linking it to the victimology of Hamas in Gaza, whose demagogues he quotes uncritically and whose terrorism he supports in his article. Mr. Luciano is shackled to uncritical thinking.

The article attacks Israel for its right to defend itself against arbitrary murder. Yes, that is what Mr. Luciano implies when he dismisses "rocket fire" at Israeli towns as if it were harmless firecrackers. Instead, these explosive missiles are fired indiscriminately, with the intent to kill as many civilians as possible and to spread terror. Targets have been schools and shopping centers. In response, the Israelis have pursued individual Hamas officers who instigate the violence as well as defend its borders, and that is the reason the Hamas attacks have been less successful of late.

In addition, the article impugns America for its own network of defense, accusing our government of sending "tax dollars in aid" to our closest ally in the Middle East. That aid is substantially less than the cost we pay just for keeping U.S. soldiers in Germany, in order to defend Europe, or in South Korea to defend its territory, or even just in the tiny Arab kingdom of Kuwait. Further, Mr. Luciano "believes the United States is responsible" for the Palestinian people, but fails to mention the billions we send in aid to them and the twenty-two Arab countries supporting them; in particular, Egypt..

The removal of hatred and threats against Israel is all that's required for peace and territorial compromise-the whole world knows that. Instead of murderous missiles, all the Gazans need to do is something completely nonviolent: to recognize Israel's right to exist in exchange for statehood. This article in The Beacon twists the truth around. The students and faculty of FIU should know that they can find a measure of objective truth in the free press of the only real democracy in the Middle East. Simply read it for yourselves at the Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com ) or Haaretz (www.haaretz.com ). Mr. Luciano, your education deserves exposure to a democratic objectivity such as Israel's-which does not fail to criticize its own policies-even if you are disposed to accuse the United States for your disaffection.

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Modern-day schools guarantee that there can be no new George Washingtons

By Vin Suprynowicz



George Washington remains the greatest man of our age. But he was no genius. That our children don't really know of Washington's greatness is a devastating indictment of our current schools. As little as a century ago, American children memorized the farewell address, with its stern warning against "entangling" European alliances. Why do you suppose that's now gone? Too many big words?

Washington's officers wanted to march on the capital for their back pay and install him as king. He pulled on his eyeglasses and declined. I have met a few modern politicians who might have had the decency and humility to turn down such a serious offer: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Mo Udall. But I have trouble visualizing any of them also winning the action at Trenton, let alone Monmouth.

Monmouth receives little attention in the history books, because it was "indecisive." The Brits were withdrawing from Philadelphia to New York. Washington was determined to make his presence felt. But he arrived on the scene to find Gen. Charles Lee -- we will be kind and call the man who requested the honor of command merely incompetent and confused -- withdrawing in disarray. Witnesses report Washington halted the retreat by mere strength of personality but then sat his horse for some seconds, dumbstruck, as his men waited to see what he would do.

This was not some desperate raid, like Trenton. A major battle was in the offing; Washington's troops had just been found running the wrong way; he was suddenly in personal command, and he had not even surveyed the ground. Then, that indomitable spirit took command. As Teddy Roosevelt Jr. was to do when he found himself on the wrong beach in Normandy 166 years later, the general decided to start the battle right where he was.

For no better reason than because no one would dare disappoint Washington himself, an army that had been on the verge of rout lined up as directed, stood their ground, and killed the advancing infantry of the greatest army in the world all day in the hundred-degree heat. When it was finally dark enough, the Brits withdrew -- leaving the much-ridiculed "Yankee Doodles" in possession of the field, and the whole of New Jersey. Washington didn't need any French fleet that day.

Yet to many of his contemporaries, Washington was a mere hick, and not a particularly bright one. John Adams called him "too illiterate, too unlearned, too unread for his station and reputation." Washington's father died when he was 11. His older brother got everything. Determined to make it on his own, George started with nothing. "Washington had no schooling until he was 11, no classroom confinement, no blackboards," notes John Taylor Gatto in the first chapter of "The Underground History of American Education."

"He arrived at school already knowing how to read, write, and calculate about as well as the average college student today. ... Full literacy wasn't unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn't admit students who didn't know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn't been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary."

Why? Phonics. How did the educrat conspiracy make literacy seem hard, in order to stretch out the schooling process for more than a decade? The "whole word" method. "Killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in this country," said Theodor Geisel -- Dr. Seuss -- in 1981.

There were no "school projects" gluing together pictures clipped out of magazines when Washington was 11. He immediately took up geometry, trigonometry and surveying. Before he turned 18, Washington had been hired as the official surveyor for Culpepper County. "For the next three years, Washington earned the equivalent of about $100,000 a year in today's purchasing power," Mr. Gatto, the former New York state Teacher of the Year, reports.

How much government-run schooling would a youth of today be told he needs before he could contemplate making $100,000 a year as a surveyor -- a job which has not changed except to get substantially easier, what with hand-held computers, GPS scanners and laser range-finders? Sixteen years, at least -- 18, more likely. George Washington attended school for two years.

"We know he was no genius, yet he learned geometry, trigonometry and surveying when he would have been a fifth- or sixth-grader in our era," Gatto reminds us. "In light of the casual judgment of his contemporaries that his intellect was of normal proportions, you might be surprised to hear that by 18 (Washington) had devoured all the writings of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Daniel Defoe. ... He also read Seneca's Morals, Julius Caesar's Commentaries, and the major writing of other Roman generals like the historian Tacitus. ...

"Years later he became his own architect for the magnificent estate of Mount Vernon. While still in his 20s, he began to experiment with domestic industry where he might avoid the vagaries of international finance in things like cotton or tobacco." Hemp and flax didn't work out. "At the age of thirty-one, he hit on wheat. In seven years he had a little wheat business with his own flour mills and hired agents to market his own brand of flour; a little later he built fishing boats: four years before the Declaration was written he was pulling in 9 million herring a year."

In the meantime, as a sideline, he had marched to war with Braddock at Fort Duquesne, survived a campaign that killed many men of lesser constitutions, and become the best-known soldier on the continent.

Today, in comparison, "No public school in the United States is set up to allow a George Washington to happen," Gatto points out. "Washingtons in the bud stage are screened, browbeaten, or bribed to conform to a narrow outlook on social truth" -- basically, locked away in sterile isolation for 12 years.

"Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of 13 would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

"Anyone who reads can compare what the American present does in isolating children from their natural sources of education, modeling them on a niggardly last, to what the American past proved about human capabilities. The effect of the forced schooling institution's strange accomplishment has been monumental. No wonder history has been outlawed."

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12 February, 2008

AN EDUCATION ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Education is a hot political issue in Australia at the moment. Four current articles below

Report shows students in 1960's better educated

DESPITE a much lower level of funding. Another proof that the constant teacher cry for more money is NOT the answer

SCHOOL students in the 1960s could read, write and count better than those today, according to a new report. Australian National University researchers found student literacy and numeracy had not improved since Sir Robert Menzies was prime minister and the Beatles topped the charts. Dr Andrew Leigh and Dr Chris Ryan tracked literacy and numeracy standards by comparing student results from the same tests over successive years for their report, How has school productivity changed in Australia? "Over the past three to four decades, neither literacy nor numeracy have improved, and may even have declined slightly," Dr Ryan said. "In numeracy, the typical young teenage student in 2003 was approximately a quarter of a grade level behind his or her counterpart in 1964."

The researchers said this was despite increased government spending on education over the past 40 years. Spending increased by 238 per cent from 1964-2003, they said. "It is possible the additional education spending over the past few decades was misdirected," Dr Leigh said. "This additional expenditure does not seem to have succeeded in raising literacy or numeracy."

Dr Leigh said government policy could have contributed to the declining student standards. "Decisions to reduce class sizes while allowing teacher salaries to decline relative to other professions may not have been in the best interests of students," he said. Dr Leigh said lower salaries had led to a fall in teacher quality from 1983-2003, which would have contributed to a decline in student results.

State education departments need to focus on evidence-based policy making, he said. "We need to measure different practices to see which are the best," Dr Leigh said. "Results from one class with small student numbers should be compared against another class which has a top teacher."

Victorian Education Minister Bronwyn Pike recently applauded grade 3, 5 and year 7 students for meeting, and often exceeding, national benchmarks for literacy and numeracy. Figures from the National Report on Schooling in Australia, released earlier this month, showed more than 96 per cent of grade 3 and 5 students met the writing benchmark, out-performing every state and territory in Australia. The Victorian Government has also committed $11.7 million to employ 45 literacy specialists.

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'Back to basics' the key for Aboriginal schools

Recognition that trendy Left educational fads have badly harmed blacks

THE nation's most prominent Aboriginal academic, Marcia Langton, has called on federal, state and territory politicians to acknowledge the "comprehensive and systemic failure" of Aboriginal education and to implement back-to-basics reforms. Professor Langton, foundation professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, said there had been inadequate recognition of the "parlous" state of Aboriginal education and the "entrenched poverty" that flows from it.

"Reading Kevin Rudd's remarks about education, you would swear the biggest problem facing the nation is digital deprivation," she said. "There's been insufficient recognition of Aboriginal education by a prime minister who pledged an education revolution for all Australians. Are we not Australians?" She said the failures, reflected in the fact that less than 48 per cent of indigenous students met national benchmarks for numeracy in Year 7, while only 27 per cent of remote Aborigines met the literacy benchmark, could be sheeted home to federal, state and territory government inaction. She called for "clear and regular testing and reporting" on the performance of Aboriginal children, and a sustained attempt to build relationships between remote Aboriginal communities and schools.

"We need a structured curriculum, an emphasis on the students' capacities and competencies as well as the gaps and weaknesses in their learning, and intervention strategies to ensure children at the end of each year have learnt the required curriculum," she said. "If that means putting them into a special class then that's what you have to do. "So many of the unionists and the politically correct folk in the cities have such a poor understanding of the extremely low levels of literacy and numeracy in black communities and the poverty that stems from it. "They throw their hands up and say this (hard-line approach) is an abuse of human rights. But it's not. It's standard practice around the world."

Professor Langton criticised Aboriginal communities for their failure to ensure children attended school. "Nothing would be achieved without regular school attendance," she said.

An anthropologist with a PhD from Macquarie University, Professor Langton said several generations of Aborigines had been the victims of "ideological experiments" that had failed to deliver literacy and numeracy in the classroom. The time had come for specialised teacher training with a back-to-basics emphasis for remote communities, she said.

"Teachers need special training for this. We need teachers trained to work in remote-areas schools where the existence of Aboriginal languages, poverty and lack of social capital are the obstacles to children learning the pedagogy developed in the cities for kids with lots of social capital. When we train teachers, it's not enough to impart some fuzzy notion of Aboriginal children's special needs. We need to know precisely what those needs are."

She praised the achievements of the earlier generation of missionary teachers who recognised the importance of English while respecting Aboriginal languages. "The Aboriginal kids of that generation learned English because it was drummed into them in structured classes," she said.

Her remarks are supported by a paper on Aboriginal literacy released last year by the Cape York Institute, which acknowledged a "literacy crisis in Cape York without historical precedent", and conceded: "Many grandparents in Cape York communities possess greater functional literacy than their grandchildren."

The paper found more than 100 indigenous students leave Cape York schools every year unable to read at or above the minimum level expected for their age. "At every year level, indigenous students are up to four years behind the non-indigenous average." In some Cape York schools, less than 21 per cent of indigenous students achieved minimum benchmarks.

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Australian medical schools going back to basics

Uni answers call to boost anatomy

THE teaching of anatomy will be more than doubled for medical students at the University of Sydney, and teaching of other basic sciences will be expanded, after students complained they were graduating with gaps in their knowledge. The changes, which come into effect with the new term starting tomorrow, will bring a huge increase in the number of lectures on basic sciences, with at least 50 new hourly sessions in the first eight weeks of the graduate-entry program. Over the entire four-year course, the amount of time for anatomy lectures will rise from 500 hours to 1200 hours.

The new curriculum - compiled after a year-long review - will also restore the practice of dissection as a means of teaching anatomy. In recent years dissection, in which students cut up body parts under the guidance of a tutor, has been largely replaced by other teaching methods, including "prosection" - where students observe specimens already cut open by somebody else. The new course will give students more scope to be involved in research, and will harmonise teaching practices among the university's six different clinical schools, after they were found to vary dramatically.

Students have welcomed the changes, which follow controversy over previous cuts to basic science teaching in Australia's medical schools generally. Australian Medical Students Association president Michael Bonning said: "We applaud Sydney for the fact they have listened to their student body." Mr Bonning's deputy Tim Smith, also a final-year medical student at the University of Queensland, said AMSA surveys in the past two years had shown "the vast majority" of medical students nationwide wanted to learn the scientific fundamentals. "From our experience, it's students in medical schools across the country that are asking for more basic science teaching," Mr Smith said.

Tessa Ho, Sydney University's head of medical education, said the review was launched because the previous curriculum was 11 years old and "had not adjusted to a number of changes in the healthcare system". "A number of key issues had been raised by clinicians and students about what was being offered in the curriculum," Associate Professor Ho said. Graduates felt unprepared in areas such as anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and pathology, she said. [And they were right to "feel" that!]

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The 'fake' school teachers

There's a lot of this is Australian schools. I know something about it myself. I was twice hired to teach High School geography despite having studied it only up to middle school level. I have always taken an interest in the subject, however and it seemed to work well enough. I just kept a chapter ahead in the textbook. And the kids got good exam results. But if I had been asked to teach some other subjects -- such as mathematics or French -- it would have been a disaster

SCHOOL teachers are taking classes in subjects they know little or nothing about, such as languages they're not fluent in - new research has shown. A report by the Australian Council for Educational Research revealed 43 per cent of high school principals asked staff to take additional classes outside their area of expertise. Primary schools are also not exempt from the problem, with 14 per cent of principals getting teachers to work outside their area.

The findings were published in the 183-page report, commissioned by the Federal Government, and canvassed the responses of more than 10,000 teachers and 2000 heads of schools.

According to unions, the figures are further proof the nationwide teacher shortage is crippling the education sector. Angelo Gavrielatos, president of the Australian Education Union, said the severity of the shortage is being masked by teachers having to take classes outside their faculty. He added that until the Rudd Government can commit an extra $2.9 billion in funding for public schools, the problem will continue to manifest itself. Jim McAlpine, president of the NSW Secondary Principals' Council agreed that "it's a general problem in all education departments''.

The matter was magnified even more in rural and remote areas. "The difference there is that they are smaller schools with smaller numbers and because there are fewer teachers, you have less chance of having a trained teacher in that area.'' Music, creative arts, languages and information technology are the subjects considered to be the hardest hit as a result of the shortage.

Anthony Sleeman, a mathematics teacher at Ariah Park Central School in the Riverina region has been taking Spanish classes since 2005, even though he isn't fluent in the language. Mr Sleeman said, due to a lack of staff, he was asked to lead a combined Year 7/8 languages class and has continued to "bluff'' his way through since. "In a sense you have to use your skills as a teacher to try and teach something you don't know much about,'' he said.

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11 February, 2008

Adding Up to Failure: Ed schools put diversity before math

A good education requires balance. Students should learn to appreciate a variety of cultures, sure, but they also need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Judging from the courses that the nation’s leading education colleges offer, however, balance isn’t a goal. The schools place far more emphasis on the political and social ends of education than on the fundamentals.

To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word “math.” We then computed a “multiculturalism-to-math ratio”—a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate. Our survey covered the nation’s top 50 education programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, as well as programs at flagship state universities that weren’t among the top 50—a total of 71 education schools.

The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82 percent more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word “multiculturalism” or “diversity,” while only three contain the word “math,” giving it a ratio of almost 16.

Some programs do show different priorities. At the University of Missouri, 43 courses bear titles or descriptions that include multiculturalism or diversity, but 74 focus on math, giving it a lean multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 0.58. Penn State’s ratio is 0.39. (By contrast, the ratio at Penn State’s Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania, is over 3.) Still, of the 71 programs we studied, only 24 have a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of less than 1; only five pay twice as much attention to math as to social goals.

Several obstacles impede change. On the supply side, ed-school professors are a self-perpetuating clique, and their commitment to multiculturalism and diversity produces a near-uniformity of approach. Professors control entry into their ranks by determining who will receive the doctoral credential, deciding which doctoral graduates get hired, and then selecting which faculty will receive tenure. And tenured academics are essentially accountable to no one.

On the demand side, prospective teachers haven’t cried out for more math courses because such courses tend to be harder than those involving multiculturalism. And the teachers know that their future employers—public school districts—don’t find an accent on multiculturalism troubling. Because public schools are assured of ever-increasing funding, regardless of how they do in math, they can indulge their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, and prospective teachers can, too.

Accrediting organizations also help perpetuate the emphasis on multiculturalism. In several states, law mandates that ed schools receive accreditation from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). NCATE, in turn, requires education programs to meet six standards, one entirely devoted to diversity, but none entirely devoted to ensuring proper math pedagogy. Education schools that attempt to break from the cartel’s multiculturalism focus risk denial of accreditation.

Ensuring quality math instruction is no minor matter. The Programme for International Student Assessment’s latest results paint a bleak picture: U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 24th out of 30 industrial countries in math literacy, tying Spain and surpassing only Greece, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, and Turkey, while trailing Iceland, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and all of our major economic competitors in Europe and Asia.

The issue isn’t whether we should be teaching cultural awareness in education colleges or in public schools; it’s about priorities. Besides, our students probably have great appreciation already for students from other cultures—who’re cleaning their clocks in math skills, and will do so economically, too, if we don’t wise up.

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Australia: "Stolen Generations" report attacked

A report that has become the basis for widespread miseducation in Australian schools



"Bringing Them Home", the landmark report that found indigenous children were systematically taken from their parents to "breed out" Aboriginality, was built on the "misrepresentations and misinterpretations" of professional historians, according to Keith Windschuttle. In a preliminary extract from his forthcoming book, Mr Windschuttle questions the existence of the Stolen Generations and claims the policies involved were largely benevolent and contained elements that should be revived today. His arguments have already been dismissed by some leading academic historians as absurd and blinkered.

Mr Windschuttle accuses University of Sydney history professor Peter Read of forming the NSW version of the Stolen Generations and says his own research has uncovered only one NSW file, among 800 examined, in which Aboriginality is cited as the reason for removal. The claim undermines one of Ronald Wilson's key findings in 'Bringing Them Home' in 1997, which was the basis for claiming the forced removal of Aboriginal children constituted "genocide".

Professor Read yesterday rejected Mr Windschuttle's interpretation of the files. "There are remarks made about the Aboriginality of the children, the way in which they were living or the number of brothers and sisters they had, where it is perfectly clear the children are being targeted because they are Aboriginal," Professor Read said.

Mr Windschuttle concedes there were "obnoxious" attempts to "breed out" Aboriginality in Western Australia and the Northern Territory but says those policies concentrated on intermarriage, not removal, and were undercut by the ineptitude of the bureaucrats involved. While he says his findings pull the rug out from under Kevin Rudd's planned apology, Mr Windschuttle insists the Prime Minister should accompany the symbolic gesture with $50 billion in compensation.

The conservative historian and incoming Quadrant editor, whose 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History questioned historians' claims of massacres of Aboriginal communities, estimates fewer than a third of the young Aborigines removed from their parents in NSW between 1915 and the late 1960s were aged under 12. Of these "almost all were welfare cases - orphans, neglected children (some severely malnourished), and children who were abandoned, deserted and homeless". In his new book, Mr Windschuttle says the vast majority of older Aboriginal minors were removed to be trained as apprentices, after which they returned to their families. "It is a policy that could well be revived today to rescue children from the sexual assault and substance abuse of the hellholes in the remote communities," he writes.

Mr Windschuttle said yesterday he anticipated a similarly strident reaction to The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume 2: The "Stolen Generations" as had greeted the earlier volume: "They will attempt to demonise me for my morals and they will make a lot of minor criticisms of my research and pretend that they are major."

Mr Windschuttle insisted he was not being mischievous by suggesting Mr Rudd's apology on Wednesday should be accompanied with $500,000 for every Aboriginal family in Australia. "Any apology in the parliament that is not backed by compensation will be a PR gesture in the best tradition of spin-doctoring in politics," he said.

Melbourne University history professor Stuart Macintyre, who is teaching at Harvard, dismissed Mr Windschuttle's claims against Professor Read as absurd. "He was involved in research on and for families that had been separated by the NSW government, under legislation that was racially discriminatory in its ambit and purpose," Professor Macintyre said. "It is refreshing to hear that Windschuttle thinks an apology ... should be accompanied by compensation, but disingenuous of him to suggest that this would involve the payment of $50 billion."

La Trobe University historian Robert Manne, who edited a collection of essays condemning Mr Windschuttle's earlier book, said he was "very pleased that Windschuttle has finally conceded that the chief protectors in both the Northern Territory and Western Australia during the 1930s supported a policy of 'breeding out the colour' of the Aborigines. Unfortunately, he does not understand the connection between this policy and systematic female 'half-caste' child removal". "The protectors believed the girls needed to be completely separated from the Aboriginal world to turn them into suitable wives for lower-class white males," Professor Manne said. "Windschuttle calls the policy 'obnoxious'. Why is he incapable of admitting that it was profoundly racist?"

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10 February, 2008

Biased history curriculum revealed

Here's a quiz: Get a pencil and paper and jot down the 10 most famous Americans in history. No presidents or first ladies allowed. Who tops your list? Ask teenagers, and they overwhelmingly choose African-Americans and women, a study shows. It suggests that the "cultural curriculum" that most kids - and by extension, their parents - experience in school increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.

Researchers gave blank paper and pencils to a diverse group of 2,000 high school juniors and seniors in all 50 states and told them: "Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history." Topping the list: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. Three of the top five - and six of the top 10 - are women.

Sam Wineburg, the Stanford University education and history professor who led the study along with Chauncey Monte-Sano of the University of Maryland, says the prominence of black Americans signals "a profound change" in how we see history. "Over the course of about 44 years, we've had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story," Wineburg says. "There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.

Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey? She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says. "These are people who have a kind of popularity and recognition because they're distinguished in so many venues."

Joy Hakim, author of A History of US, says taking out the presidents "isn't quite fair" but concedes that the list isn't too shabby. "I sometimes ask students to imagine themselves in a classroom 500 years from now. What will their teacher say about the 20th century? What were its lasting accomplishments? Of course, we don't know where future historians will focus, but I'm guessing that the civil rights movement and the incredible scientific achievements will be the big stories."

For what it's worth, when the researchers polled 2,000 adults in a different survey, their lists were nearly identical. To Wineburg, that shows that what's studied in school affects not just children but the adults who help them with their schoolwork.

The study acknowledges that the emphasis on African-American figures by the schools leaves behind not only 18th- and 19th-century figures but others as well, such as Hispanic icon Cesar Chavez, Native American heroes such as Pocahontas and Sacagawea and labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers and Eugene V. Debs.

At the same time, the study, scheduled to appear in the March issue of The Journal of American History, notes that teachers the researchers talked to while giving the quiz predicted that student lists would be top-heavy with entertainers and celebrities. Aside from Winfrey and Marilyn Monroe, entertainers appear "nowhere near the top" of the lists.

Dennis Denenberg, author of 50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet, says it's no surprise the civil rights era still resonates. "Since it so redefined America post-World War II, I think educators feel it's truly a story young people need to know about because we're still struggling with it," he says. "The Cold War is over and gone. The civil rights movement is ongoing."

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BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS: Intelligent design costs prof his job

Regents reject tenure request without evidence, testimony

Iowa State University regents, who earlier ruled against accepting evidence or hearing testimony from a professor in a dispute over the school's denial of his tenure, now have turned down his appeal. The case involves Guillermo Gonzalez, an honored assistant professor of astronomy who has been actively working on theories of intelligent design, an effort that ultimately cost him his job, supporters say. Tenure is roughly the equivalent of a lifetime appointment.

The school has continued to deny the handling of Gonzalez' case was related to his support of ID, even though the Des Moines Register documented e-mails that confirmed Gonzalez' colleagues wanted him flushed out of the system for that reason. "I think Gonzalez should know that some of the faculty in his department are not going to count his ID work as a plus for tenure," said one note, from astronomy teacher Bruce Harmon, before the department voted against tenure for Gonzalez. "Quite the opposite." The newspaper reported what was revealed in e-mails was "contrary" to what ISU officials said when they rejected Gonzalez' request for tenure. And Eli Rosenberg, chairman of the ISU astronomy department, also confirmed to World Magazine Gonzalez's book, "The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery," played a role in his being rejected.

Now the regents, at a meeting Thursday, voted against his appeal in the case. "The board of regents would not allow into the record extensive e-mail documentation showing Dr. Gonzalez was denied tenure not due to his academic record, but because he supports intelligent design," said Casey Luskin, program officer in public policy and legal affairs for the Discovery Institute, where Gonzalez is a senior fellow. "Then the board refused Dr. Gonzalez the right to be heard through oral arguments. Does it come as any surprise that now they denied his appeal?" Luskin asked.

"We are extremely disappointed that the board of regents refused to give Dr. Gonzalez a fair hearing in his appeal," said Chuck Hurley, the professor's lawyer. "They say in Iowa that academic freedom is supposed to be the 'foundation of the university.' That foundation is cracked." "They've denied his due process rights throughout this entire appeal," said Luskin. "This kangaroo court decided its verdict long before today's deliberations even began." Hurley said the most "disheartening" part of the appeal was that regents refused Gonzalez the opportunity present his case to the board. "The board of regents had an opportunity to give justice to an outstanding scientist who is a leader in his field," continued Luskin. "Instead, they caved in to political pressure and threw academic freedom to the wind."

According to the Intelligent Design website, the theory confirms that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not a random, undirected force such as natural selection, which is part of the foundational faith of evolutionists.

Luskin told WND the 7-1 vote against Gonzalez showed there only a single member of the board who was willing to buck the political pressure from the university to "rubber-stamp" the rejection of Gonzalez.

A website highlighting an academic freedom petition in support from the freedom of thought needed by faculty, teachers and students also has been created.

The Discovery Institute said it also had reviewed the e-mail record regarding Gonzalez' teaching, and found "an orchestrated campaign conducted against Dr. Gonzalez by his colleagues, with the intent to deny him tenure because of views he holds on the intelligent design of the universe."

As WND reported earlier, Gonzales was one of three members of the ISU faculty denied promotion or tenure of the 66 considered at the time. The rejection followed earlier opposition to his work because of his acknowledgment of intelligent design. In 2005, three ISU faculty members drafted a statement and petition against intelligent design in the science curriculum that collected 120 signatures. "We . urge all faculty members to uphold the integrity of our university of 'science and technology,' convey to students and the general public the importance of methodological naturalism in science, and reject efforts to portray intelligent design as science," the statement said.

Officials with Evolution News, which has reported extensively on the case, earlier said two of the professors linked to the statement were in the astronomy and physics department: Prof. Steven Kawaler, who has linked to the statement on his website, and University Professor Lee Anne Willson, who is married to ISU math professor Stephen J. Wilson, who signed it. Evolution News also debunked Rosenberg's claim that there was something deficient about Gonzalez's research record. "You take a look at somebody's research record over the six-year probationary period and you get a sense whether this is a strong case. Clearly, this was a case that looked like it might be in trouble," Rosenberg had said.

"Really?" questioned Evolution News in its commentary. "Was Gonzalez somehow derelict in publishing 350 percent more peer-reviewed publications than his own department's stated standard for research excellence? Or in co-authoring a college astronomy textbook with Cambridge University Press? Or in having his research recognized by Science, Nature, Scientific American and other top science publications?" In 2004 Gonzalez department nominated him for an "Early Achievement in Research" honor, his supporters noted.

According to Robert J. Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor, he checked a citation index of journal papers, and found one of Gonzalez' research papers had 153 citations listed; another had 139. "I have sat on oodles of tenure committees at both a large private university and a state research university, chaired the university tenure committee, and have seen more tenure cases than the Pope has Cardinals," he said. "This is a LOT of citations for an assistant professor up for tenure." Gonzalez' appeal to ISU President Greg Geoffroy also was unsuccessful.

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France: Teacher held for hitting abusive son of policeman

A school teacher in northern France is at the centre of a national storm over respect in the classroom after police detained him for 24 hours for slapping the 11-year-old son of a gendarme who had sworn at him. The case of Jose Laboureur, 49, a technology teacher at a secondary school in the town of Maubeuge, near the Belgian border, has prompted the wrath of teachers and many parents, who say that it exemplifies the breakdown of discipline and values.

The affair began when Mr Laboureur slapped the boy for calling him a connard, an insult equivalent to c***, after he had asked him to tidy his desk during a lesson. The boy's father had Mr Laboureur arrested and held for a night and a day in a civilian cell. He was charged with serious assault against a minor, which carries a maximum prison term of three years, and ordered to appear in court next month. No action was taken against the boy until the story broke and Xavier Darcos, the Education Minister, ordered the school todiscipline him. He was suspended for three days.

Mr Laboureur regretted his action but said that the response of the authorities was unjustified. "In 30 years of teaching, no one has ever spoken to me like that," he said. "I saw red and slapped him. It was a spontaneous reaction . . . I felt like a criminal, being jailed in run-down, cold quarters, photographed, finger-printed and giving a DNA sample. It was completely out of proportion."

Parents and colleagues rallied to Mr Laboureur's side, praising him as a dedicated veteran who should not have lost his temper but who had been provoked. The father has been pilloried for abusing his authority and polls have shown sympathy for the teacher.

Teachers' unions have gathered tens of thousands of signatures on internet petitions in support of Mr Laboureur, despite prosecutors' allegations that he lifted the boy against a wall and slapped him hard. Francois Fillon, the Prime Minister, voiced sympathy for Mr Laboureur.

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9 February, 2008

The "boy parent dilemma"

As we send our young sons back to school, millions of boy parents are apprehensive, dreading the pain of the "boy parent dilemma." Modern schools are not suited to boys' personalities and learning styles. This can be seen from the time boys enter school, when many of them are immediately branded as behavior problems. The line of 10 kids who had to gather every day after school in my son's first grade class for their behavior reports-all boys. The names of kids on the side of the chalkboard who misbehaved and would lose recess-all boys. The kids as young as five or six who must be drugged so they will sit still and "behave"-almost all boys.

By any measure, our schools are failing our sons. Boys at all levels are far more likely than girls to be disciplined, suspended, held back, or expelled. By high school the typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading and writing, and is less likely to graduate high school, go to college, or graduate college than a typical girl.

Success in school is tightly correlated with the ability to sit still, be quiet, and complete work which is presented in a dull, assembly-line fashion. The boy parent dilemma is that as parents we must support the authority of our sons' teachers and schools, while at the same time it is obvious to us that the methods and structure they employ are not suited to our sons' needs. Boy parents agonize and doubt every step of the way. We punish our sons when they "misbehave" (i.e., act like boys) because we want them to fit in and do well in school. Yet in the back of our minds-as we cajole, demand, offer, threaten, reward, and punish-we wonder, "what is this doing to my little boy?"

Helping our sons will require a conscious, national effort to retool our schools and create boy-friendly classrooms and teaching strategies. Since many boys are bodily kinesthetic learners, lessons need to be more physical, hands-on, and energetic. Teachers should use the physical and visual spheres as a bridge to the verbal and written ones. Employing boys' imagination also helps, as does using boys' tendency to learn by exploration.

Cooperative learning is useful in moderation, but educators also need to use boys' natural competitiveness and individual initiative to their advantage. Lessons in which there are no right or wrong answers, and from which solid conclusions cannot be drawn, tend to frustrate boys, who often view them as pointless.

Also, boys in particular need strong, charismatic teachers who mix firm discipline with a good-natured acceptance of boyish energy. Concomitantly, a sharp increase in the number of male teachers is also needed, particularly at the elementary level, where female teachers outnumber male teachers six to one. Same-sex classes can also be helpful, and schools should have the power to employ them when appropriate.

Administrators, school districts, and, ultimately, the taxpayer will also need to realize that creating boy-friendly classrooms can be time-consuming and expensive. Most teachers are competent and dedicated but they are weighed down by paperwork and secretarial labor which limits the amount of time they can spend planning and delivering creative, hands-on, boy-friendly lessons. In addition, large classes often make it difficult for teachers to have the time to determine each student's learning style and how best to connect that student with the teacher and the lessons. To help boys, both of these will need to change, and while it will cost money, the cost to society of uneducated, disengaged boys is far greater.

In addition, we need to rethink the current focus on testing, which has exacerbated boys' problems by forcing teachers to narrow their methods in order to prepare students to take the required tests.

This afternoon, millions of us will pick our little sons up from school and hope to hear that it was a good day. Yet many of our boys will have spent much of the day being scolded and punished, often for doing nothing more than being boys. And with each of these mistreated little boys-waving their arms and running toward us across the yard, happy to be away from that place where everything feels so unnatural and they somehow always seem to be doing something wrong-comes the boy parent dilemma.

Source




Bob Parks comments on the college scene

Bob is a black conservative

While Republicans are scurrying to galvanize the conservative and Latino vote, they neglect one group of the new electorate at their peril: the youth. The left has made great gains at creating little liberals. One need only watch the responses of younger voters, while being stereotypically flaky, these young people are today caught up in the trendy winds of "change". The word "Republican" is a dirty word, and they efficiently recite the obvious sentiments of their progressive professors. Let me give you a couple of examples of how this works..

Let's say a college was to hold a forum on obese people. One would figure they'd have a panel of five or six fat people all giving examples of how it is to be living large in America. I'd be willing to bet there'd be no one on that panel who'd play Devil's Advocate, calling them whiners and giving an opposing point of view. THAT would be "mean-sprited".

A few years ago, I was invited by a student to be a guest panelist for a discussion on "The Rise of Black Conservatism" at Stanford Law College. Judging from the name of the topic alone, I assumed that the panel would be made up prominent Black conservatives who would proudly articulate our positions. I was deeply flattered to be included in such a panel. But what was I thinking.?

As it turned out, I was the ONLY Black conservative invited to speak at the C-SPAN-televised discussion. Instead of explaining my conservative views, I found myself having to defend them against liberal and Marxist professors. I think I held my own.

After the forum, I was invited to a reception in one of the dormitory lounges. The two professors split, and I found myself surrounded by very curious students who had never heard someone who looked like myself, saying what I was saying. For the next 90 minutes, I fielded questions and debated issues with students who were starved for opposing points of view as to come to more informed conclusions.

Let's look at the gay marriage debate. Many students believe Republicans are anti-gay. Why is this? While running for Massachusetts state party chairman, I warned conservatives what would happen when you let the opposition define your positions. I know of NO Republican who is against "gay marriage", but it depends on what your definition of "marriage" is.

When two people in America want to get "married", what's the first thing they do? They apply for and get a "marriage" license. That is the law. With license in hand they are, for all intents and purposes, "married". In many states, gay couples are granted "civil union" status for all purposes legal. Conservatives have no problem with that. However, "marriage" is another thing.

If two people were to go to a church and get married, without a state-issued marriage license, that "marriage" wouldn't be legally recognized. "Marriage" is purely a religious ceremony, and I contend, the gay activist push for "marriage" is simply their way of giving that trendy middle finger to the church. Thus, the conservative opposition to "gay marriage."

There are always two sides to every story, yet students (and their parents who are paying good money for their education) are only getting one side: the liberal side. I've made concerted efforts, from Day One, to tailor my written, verbal, and video presentations to a younger demographic. I understand the need to make sure that young people are not all Republicans. However, if we sit back, they will all become liberals and it's never a good thing to only have one side of an issue.

You Republican candidates had better wake up and recognize the youth vote for what it is. This year, we're not dealing with unreliable Rock The Vote types. These kids today are motivated, will be counted, and are proudly progressive. An appearance with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert isn't the answer. We are not welcome on most college campuses, but through the print and video windows of the Internet, it is possible to reach thousands of young voters every day.

Source





8 February, 2008

Educational bias against military veterans

When Sean Lunde enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 2005, he expected his four years of training and experience as an Army medic in Kosovo, Germany, and Iraq would earn him as much as 50 college credits, or about a year and a half of courses. He received none. "I went to medic school for 12 hours a day, six days a week, for four months," he said. "None of that was accepted."

When recruiting, the military highlights its educational advantages, promising young men and women that service will give them a leg up toward a college degree and a better career. But many of the thousands of veterans who attend college after tours of duty are denied credit for military courses and specialized skills despite an accreditation system set up to award it, veterans' advocates and students say. That forces students to take more courses than they expected to, straining already thin GI Bill benefits.

In response to veterans' criticism, colleges say they are fairly evaluating military courses and that a good deal of service training does not match with academic subjects. But in the minds of veterans, the denial of credits casts doubt on the academic qualifications of their military training, coursework, and specialties. That leaves many feeling bitter and disillusioned. "When I went into the military, they told us we would get credit for military experience," Lunde said. "But hardly anyone I know that served gets the credits they thought they deserved. So it hasn't worked out like I expected."

The issue is an increasing point of tension on campuses as waves of veterans return from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and enroll in college, taking advantage of a range of public benefits and hoping to build on skills acquired during their service. The military offers a wide range of educational opportunities to service members, and has created a comprehensive, if complicated, system that translates military courses, training, and occupations into potential college credit. The American Council on Education, the chief coordinating body for higher education institutions, acts as a kind of accrediting agency for the armed forces. It assigns civilian academics to evaluate military courses and duties and make recommendations for how much credit should be awarded.

Veterans also contend that military training and jobs that correlate to academic subjects deserve as much credit as coursework, just as many college students receive course credits through internships. For example, veterans say a stint as an Army cook should earn credit for a culinary arts program; and a sergeant supervising 100 soldiers should receive credit in business management.

That evaluation process, which military officials describe as rigorous and fair, documents soldiers' skills and responsibilities and recommends how much college credit they should receive. While colleges widely recognize the transcripts, they are not bound to honor them, and those who work closely with veterans say many colleges award the credits arbitrarily. "Many people handling transfers aren't aware of it and don't know how to do it, so they just don't accept it," said Louis Martini, director of military education at Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey and president of the Council of College and Military Educators. "It's a problem that comes up a lot."

Such hurdles lead many veterans to attend colleges known to be "military friendly" to maximize their credits, military education specialists say. These colleges usually belong to Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges, a Washington, D.C., consortium of 1,800 schools dedicated to helping service members receive college degrees.

Surveys by the American Council on Education found that 14 percent of colleges and universities do not award any military credit, and 30 percent do not award credit for occupational experiences, just for coursework. Colleges that do not award credit for military training contend that most service-related experience is incompatible with academic programs. "We don't have a process for evaluating [military service] for credit," said Kathleen Teehan, vice chancellor for enrollment management at UMass-Boston. "I think that's fairly standard." The school does consider giving former service members credit for academic classes taken while in the military that were offered through accredited colleges.

Jeffrey Cropsey, director of Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support, which oversees education in the Department of Defense, said that while some veterans are frustrated by colleges' denials, overall they saved an estimated $141 million last year in tuition costs through credits earned during service. "The devil is in getting the information out," he said. "Some academic advisers are fairly junior people who are not totally conversant with the system, especially if they aren't near a military base."

But Jack Mordente, director of veterans' affairs at Southern Connecticut State University, and a former president of the National Association of Veterans' Programs Administrators, criticized the military for exaggerating the amount of academic credit veterans will receive. "Students have the expectation that they are going to walk into college and get all sorts of credit, and it just doesn't happen," he said. "I really think the problem is in what they are being told." Mordente and other college administrators said a good deal of military training is too technical to transfer to a college program.

Bill Blanchard, 26, a Framingham State College business student, left for basic training just before his senior year at American University. While in the Army, he took intensive classes in Army psychological operations, which American later refused to accept for credit. "A marketing student would be very jealous of our training, and yet I didn't get a single class. They told me I was misinformed." Unwilling to continue at American, he transferred to Framingham State, which accepted most of his military classes toward his degree. Blanchard completed his degree and returned to active duty.

Donald Morrison, 28, an Army reservist from Brookline who worked in logistics during a 2004 tour in Iraq, said UMass-Boston rejected his request for transfer credit, although the American Council on Education contends that his training should count toward a management or business administration degree. "Veterans assume they are going to get taken care of when they get back to school, and so does the general public," he said. "But they're not."

Source




Democrats find history awkward

Last month, I received a handwritten letter from George W. Bush. He had read my book "A Magnificent Catastrophe," on the race that put Thomas Jefferson in the White House. "I think you did a magnificent job capturing the 1800 election," Mr. Bush wrote. "I appreciate your contribution to history." It turns out that Mr. Bush isn't only a student of history, he also sympathizes with Jefferson, a president the Democratic Party traditionally counts as one of its own. I envisioned Mr. Bush identifying more with the conservative incumbent defeated in 1800 -- John Adams. From his comments, though, Mr. Bush had closely read the book.

I shared this letter with a historian at Yale, the president's alma mater, who told me that Mr. Bush regularly reads history and has invited historians from Yale and elsewhere to the White House for informal discussions. Apparently, Karl Rove introduced the president to the joys of history.

This episode reminded me of an inquiry posed last fall by a respected public radio producer. After interviewing me for a program on campaign history, he asked me to suggest prominent Democrats who might comment for the show. He wanted the views of a few politicians to compliment those of historians, but he could only think of Republicans who knew much about history.

Having once worked for Congress, I started running through its members in my head. Various Republicans sprang to mind, but no living Democrats. Finally I hit on former Sen. George McGovern as probable and a couple of others as possible, but it was tough.

A few days later a journalist asked me this question: Why do conservatives like history more than liberals? Most historians vote Democratic, I assured him, but I realized that there might be something to his query. The current Republican candidates for president often refer to past presidents from both parties, he noted, while the Democratic candidates rarely do. (Barack Obama has expressed admiration for Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln and the inspirational leadership of John F. Kennedy.)

At one time, Democrats everywhere staged Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners to honor their party's founders much like Republican still hold Lincoln Day Dinners. Democrats now keep their founders at arm's length. Jefferson may have written that all men are created equal, but he owned slaves and allegedly sired children by a black woman he never freed. Even worse, although Andrew Jackson personified popular democracy and battled the national bank, he not only owned slaves but ordered the massacre and removal of Native Americans. Last week, I attended a performance in Los Angeles of "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," an edgy rock musical clearly not written by conservatives. The printed program posed the question implicit throughout the show, "Was Old Hickory a great president or an American Hitler?" If this is how they view it, no wonder liberal Democrats don't dwell on their party's past.

For the party faithful, there are a lot more blemishes on the Democratic record. The spokesman for the modern Democratic reform impulse, William Jennings Bryan, ended his life battling the teaching of evolution. The progressive standard-bearer Woodrow Wilson was also a notorious racist who led the country into World War I. Franklin Delano Roosevelt instigated the internment of Japanese Americans as well as the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson brought us the Vietnam War in addition to Civil Rights legislation and Medicare. In a liberal historian's tableau of American history, these are the party's jewels whose half steps forward marked the nation's democratic progress.

Liberal Democrats have always looked to the future with hope and embraced marginalized groups. When they look back, even to the deeds of their own former leaders, they see trails of tears like the one over which Andrew Jackson drove out the Cherokee. Blemishes on past presidents, even those who pointed the way toward future progress, tend to stain them wholly for at least some key elements within the Democratic coalition.

In contrast, conservative Republicans look to the past for inspiration but often to the future with trepidation. Originalists at heart, they tend to see only the shining city on a hill of earlier times and not its darker neighborhoods. George Washington's slaves are forgotten along with Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts. For some Republicans, both Lincoln and Robert E. Lee become models of Christian virtue as if they never ordered millions of men into battle against the other. As his letter to me suggests, even Mr. Bush can embrace Jefferson by selecting aspects of the third president's character and career. Our political leaders can best learn from history by appreciating its rich complexity. We are served neither by its neglect nor by its uncritical adulation.

Source




Farting follow-up

Post below lifted from Taranto. See the original for links

Yesterday's Zero-Tolerance Watch highlighted a story in the Knox County (Maine) Times about a school that had banned "intentional farting." Reader Bruce Kyle writes to tell us the Times got the story badly wrong:

As the father of an eighth-grade boy at Camden-Rockport Middle School, I regretfully report that your Zero Tolerance Watch entry yesterday regarding a ban on intentional flatulence is in error. The source for the Knox County Times story, Fire Cracker, is not the school newsletter, but a gag sheet written by eighth-grade girls, published and distributed around school for the first time last week. While their intention (civilizing future prom dates) was good, their attempt at advocacy journalism blew up in their faces, so to speak.

CRMS Principal Maria Libby addressed the national attention this story has received with good humor and a touch of seriousness regarding ethics for budding journalists yesterday in the school's actual newsletter, Tuesday Times.

According to my son, what happened is this: A boy cut the cheese with considerable volume in science class. This resulted in extended hilarity, followed by mimicking (hand in the armpit, etc), and--when the conditions were right--real farts delivered with much bravado. The teacher merely informed the boys that this sort of intentional disruption would, like all intentional disruptions, earn a detention.

What's interesting at this point is that Knox County Times continues to trumpet the impact their story has had as a triumph, without acknowledging the absurd source and the fact that it simply isn't true. Apparently, 13-year-old boys aren't the only ones who take pride in their stinkers.

But there is a saving grace to this embarrassing story. Kyle writes: "I forwarded your comment to Mrs. Libby. She tells me that your 'students are discouraged from trying to pass' is among her favorite one-liners to come out of this episode."





7 February, 2008

My own experience with Leftist bias in the academy

My personal comments on this blog generally consist of little more than an introductory sentence or two. I basically let the articles I have collected speak for themselves. So I think it is about time that I said a bit more about my own experiences in academe:

I had a small grumble recently about the fact that I have not been awarded a D.Sc. (Doctor of Science) even though my academic publication record would normally warrant it. I also pointed out however that a D.Sc. is an honoray degree that is awarded as a result of approval from one's peers and that my conservative views do NOT get approval from most other academics in the social sciences. Psychologists are nomally Left-leaning and I am the rare maverick who rejects such views. So the situation there is simply no surprise.

The surprise is that I DO have another doctorate -- the Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) -- which is a degree awarded as the result of a formal process of study and writing. But I very nearly did not get that degree either. The major component of that degree is a dissertation -- which is a book-length research report of some kind. And a doctoral dissertation is normally "marked" by academics who are expert in the field concerned -- and that means that they are normally "external" -- i.e. they do not work at the university from which the dissertation emanated.

And my Ph.D. dissertation contained findings which called some popular Leftist theories into question. So that was a high-risk strategy, given the known biases of psychologists generally. And the riskiness did show. Of the three referees who agreed to mark my dissertation, one praised it highly as an exceptionally comprehensive body of work on the matters it discussed, one simply threw it in the bin and the other one rejected it on grounds that would have disqualified almost all psychological research.

The first referee -- the one who praised the work -- was John Western of the University of Queensland, who had himself done similar work. I had in fact consulted him personally about his work before beginning my own. I imagine that his views tended Left but he was far more interested in careful research than anything else. The second referee -- who would appear simply to have thrown the dissertation in the bin, and who certainly failed to reply to all letters from my university about it -- was Seymour Martin Lipset -- a highly praised American sociologist who seems to have been a fairly moderate Leftist but whose theories my findings directly contradicted. He apparently could not even consider the possibility that he might be wrong and did his best to sabotage me. My work was much more methodologically thorough than his own so ignoring it was the only way he could deal with it, I guess. In good Leftist style he was basically an armchair theorist rather than a rigorous researcher.

The third referee was Fred Emery from the Australian National Univesity in Canberra and he obviously did not like my work either. But it was very thorough and careful work by the normal standards in the field so he had difficulty in finding reasons to reject it. The reason he eventually gave was that I had used parametric statistics. But something like 99% of psychologists do use such statistics so his criticisms were rightly regarded as eccentric and were ignored. Other markers was turned to who gave my dissertation the nod.

So it was a close-run thing and the whole process ended up taking four years -- mainly due to Lipset's obstructionism. The university where I submitted my dissertation (Macquarie university) would give him many months to reply to each letter that they sent him but they never received a single reply. The only letter they ever got from him was his initial agreement to mark the dissertation -- before he actually saw it.

So Leftist bias very nearly denied me my doctorate. How childish most Leftists are, though. They know how poorly-founded their views are but they are also unable to retreat from those views -- so disagreement threatens them to a point where they just cannot respond in any kind of mature way.

The dissertation did subsequently generate rather a large number of published academic journal articles (proof that Prof. Western was right) but the article which best encapsulates what the dissertation as a whole had to say is a book chapter here.

I once had a chat with the administrator at Macquarie University who handled the whole matter and he remarked that it was the most difficult dissertation assessment he had ever managed. He particularly remarked on the completely opposite assessments given by Western and Emery.

Getting my doctorate was of course not the end of my experiences of bias. Getting journal articles published is difficult at any time but I had extra hurdles to surmount. See here for a paper which I once presented on that very topic. In the paper I spoke of "personal factors" being held against me and of my being a "norm violator" but everybody present knew what the norms were: political ones. That I did surmount the hurdles I had before me you can see here




The Presidential education budget

More School Vouchers, Fewer Programs

President Bush would freeze the Education Department's discretionary spending at $59.2 billion, cutting or consolidating dozens of programs while expanding school vouchers and restoring funding for a No Child Left Behind reading initiative that Democratic lawmakers slashed.

The budget would add $300 million for Pell Grants for Kids, a new voucher program aimed at giving low-income students in struggling schools aid to help them switch to private schools. It also would provide $1 billion for Reading First, up from the $393 million that Congress appropriated for the current fiscal year. The reading program has been beset by allegations of conflicts of interest.

Some Democrats and education groups contended that the budget would shortchange schools of money needed to carry out the six-year-old No Child Left Behind law and such other priorities as career and technical education. Democrats also attacked the voucher proposal.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the budget would cut "ineffective" and duplicative programs to allow a nearly 3 percent increase in funding for poor schools. The budget would nearly double, to $200 million, funding to help states and localities develop teacher merit-pay plans. It also would add $2.6 billion to Pell Grants for low-income college students, raising the maximum award to $4,800.

Source




Kids to be punished for farting

The Merriam Webster Dictionary definition for flatulence is brief: "flatus expelled through the anus." And while it's a natural bodily function, it seems some Camden-Rockport Middle School eighth-grade boys are taking it to new heights and making a game of seeing who can expel the loudest and grossest flatus. According to this week's Fire Cracker school newsletter though, the joke's on the boys as the penalty for "intentional farting" is now a detention.

"Strange, but true, thanks to a bunch of 8th grade boys, intentional farting has been banned from CRMS," the newsletter said. "It started out as a funny joke and eventually turned into a game. This is the first rule at CRMS that prevents the use of natural bodily functions. The penalty for intentional farting is a detention, so keep it to yourself!"

According to a group of seventh-grade students milling around downtown following Friday's storm-related early release, the eighth-graders' escapades are well known in the school. "They would do it in science class and other places," said Jordan Tyler. "It's a natural occurrence and we all do it 16 times a day." When questioned where he learned that information, Tyler and the other students all said it was true, though they couldn't remember where they heard it.

One of the other students, Kyle Ruger, said the act by the boys was funny, but he had mixed feelings about whether it was appropriate. Jordan Knowlton minced no words when she expressed how she felt, saying, "It's gross." Remy LeVine said he was in the class when CRMS science teacher Brad LaRoche talked to all the eighth-grade boys about the issue, as well as the consequences.

Attempts to reach CRMS Principal Maria Libby Friday afternoon were unsuccessful and school Superintendent Patricia Hopkins said she had not heard anything about the issue or the alleged suspected result, though she did get a good chuckle out of the news.

Source





6 February, 2008

TAKING ON THE ISRAEL BASHERS

Both Judeophobes and Judeophiles agree that Jews are smart, but when it comes to thwarting anti-Semitism, Jews can be pretty dumb.

In 2004, Israeli Cabinet minister Natan Sharansky attempted to convene the heads of Israeli universities to devise counter-strategies to the then-temporarily subdued movement to boycott their scholars and campuses. Immured in their ivory towers, they were so oblivious to the gathering threat that it took Sharansky six months to facilitate the meeting, where they insouciantly dismissed his concerns: "When [the boycott movement] gets stronger again, we'll get organized."

By contrast, rabid enthusiasm always dominates the annual internationally co-ordinated Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), the fourth of which unfolds on six Canadian university campuses Feb. 3-10. Jubilant promotional material informs us that IAW 2008 will be "celebrated" for the first time at Palestinian universities. More ominously, IAW 2008 will include the founding conference of "High Schoolers Against Israeli Apartheid." Toronto's Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid pronounces itself "a proud participant in the global movement."

Tonight, I am speaking to the Jewish community of London, Ont., about academic bias against Israel. I will have with me my review copy of Academics Against Israel and the Jews, for which Sharansky wrote the foreword, including my column's opening anecdote. Holding it aloft, I will declare, "Everything you need to know about global campus anti-Zion-ism and how --and how not -- to fight it is contained in this book. If this Jewish community cares about Israel's survival, you will read it and act on it now."

A collection of essays by knowledgeable scholars and pro-Israel activists, Academics Against Israel and the Jews is an important new information resource, for it is the first comprehensive analysis of this subject extending beyond a single country.

Case by case, and with rigorously documented thoroughness, knowledgeable insiders offer their respective forensic analyses of the activism and the intellectually corrupt ideologues fueling it in various academic hotspots as familiar as Canada's York University and as unfamiliar as the Universities of Utrecht and the Australian National University in Canberra.

The essays are sobering but reader-friendly, and written with a view to education, not retaliation. Amongst other fascinating facts, we discover in these pages why only one university in Spain (Navarre) is friendly to Israel; why United Kingdom academics are particularly boycott-obsessed; and why Jewish students in North America are far better placed to combat anti-Zionism than those in Europe.

In a particularly distressing probe by Palestinian Media Watch directors Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, we see scarifying evidence that revisionist history and open anti-Semitism of the vilest kind is common currency amongst "scholars" in Palestinian universities. If only shameless historical lies and routine classroom incitement to hatred were criteria for collegial shunning -- the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a standard "text" for Palestinian students -- rather than trumped-up charges of a non-existent "apartheid," Palestinian universities would be instant pariahs. Alas, thanks to our postmodern intellectuals' weakness for moral inversions, it seems even university-sanctioned incitement to literal genocide is no barrier to acceptance in the West's Islamophilic groves of academe.

Canada holds the dubious honour of providing material for two chapters: an overview of the Canadian campus scene in general, and a chapter on the ferment leading to the 2002 Concordia Netanyahu riot, an often-cited case study in appeasement and a primer in how not to deal with ideological scofflaws.

Manfred Gerstenfeld, the book's editor and chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is a prolific, authoritative writer on the subjects of anti-Semitism and world Jewish communities.

Gerstenfeld is also a canny activist. If the cumulative effect of so much of the book's bad news is demoralizing, Gerstenfeld's bullish emphasis on remedies, and abundant proofs that the smart activism of a few can be effective in pushing back, are re-moralizing. A particularly absorbing narrative chronicles Gerstenfeld's own successful tide-turning intervention at the notoriously anti-Zionist School of Oriental and African Studies in London (known to the cognoscenti as the "School of Orchestrated Anti-Semitism").

Gerstenfeld's summary chapter is an education in itself. Here, an uninformed reader can assimilate the essentials: how to distinguish criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism; the nature and effectiveness of various present and past boycotts; contemporary Arab anti-Semitism and the recycling of old motifs; anti-Semites' contradictory images of the Jew; and Israel's plight as a paradigm for the West's future.

As universities are a feeder system into the elite cultural ranks of the general population, campus anti-Semitism is more than a threat to Jews alone. Widespread anti-Semitism is always a symbol of decline in a society, as the sorry situation in Europe makes clear (Sharansky calls North American universities "little islands of Europe"). Cultures in which anti-Semitism becomes the reigning ideology, like Nazi Germany and most Arab states since 1917, are by definition failed cultures.

At York University in 2003, a Jewish student told Sharansky, "For me as a Jew, the existence of Israel is a big problem. I want to be a normal person... If Israel did not exist, I would feel much easier." If a Jewish student can't feel "normal" on a university campus because Israel "exists," is he not already studying in a failed culture?

Source




Social class bigotry in British education

Good state schools are being barred from choosing pupils from middle-class families by the government's education watchdog on admissions. The schools have been hit by a series of rulings which block them from doing anything that might be seen as giving preferential treatment to middle-class applicants. The policy is being forced through by the government in a drive to use admissions to tackle "segregation" in society. The judgements, which set a precedent extending throughout the state school system, include:

- Banning headteachers from asking parents why they want to come to the school, in case this puts non-English speakers at a disadvantage;

- Barring schools from asking for children's birth certificates in case this identifies the parents' jobs, which might give professional families a competitive edge;

- Forbidding a discussion with parents of the school's Ofsted inspection report as this might discriminate against parents who "do not understand bureaucracy";

- Stopping schools asking parents whether they support its ethos because this might be considered "patronising" to less well-educated or ethnic minority parents.

This weekend the moves were attacked as "social engineering" by opposition politicians who said they were likely to make parents feel guilty for taking a close interest in their children's education. "Schools should not be about social engineering, they should be about providing the best education," said Michael Gove, shadow schools secretary. "The determination of the government to micro-manage the admissions process reflects the fact that they don't have enough places in good schools. They are trying to find more and more interventionist ways of rationing access to good schools."

It follows a government-commissioned report last week which called for the greater use of lotteries to award places at popular schools to stop middle-class parents colonising catchment areas and monopolising entry.

The rulings have been issued by Philip Hunter, the chief schools adjudicator, who decides if councils and schools policies comply with the government's code on admissions. He said: "Parental choice in the market leads to segregation." [An explicit refusal to allow parental choice! What a Fascist!] He is acting in line with demands by Jim Knight, the schools minister, that a new law on admissions be firmly enforced to prevent "pushy" middle-class parents from dominating places at the best schools.

Hunter, who denies that he is pursuing a policy of social engineering, said that local authorities and schools were involved in delicate judgements. "At some stage when the market is travelling in that direction someone has to say that level of segregation is OK but that one is not. That is a very difficult decision to make," he said. "Local heads and admissions forums and local authorities have to make that decision. That is not easy. They have been asked to make it in the code, they have got to address it.

"Everyone has got to understand that it is a very difficult judgement. Even more difficult is if they decide it is an unacceptable level of segregation and they are going to do something about it. At that point you say to parents that their parental choice is being denied." Jim Knight, the schools minister, last month warned councils that they had to work harder to enforce the code which was passed into law last year. "No ifs or buts," he warned them. "There is absolutely no excuse not to comply with the law to stamp out unfair and covert admission practices," he said.

But Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham university, special adviser to the Commons schools select committee, said the code was "untenable" as it tried to stamp out covert selection by intervening in "minor matters", but at the same time still allowed schools to retain catchment areas and faith-based allocation of places, both of which tend to favour middle-class families. "It just encourages game-playing ," said Smithers. "We are stuck with this fudge of a code and the result is these adjudicators dancing around on the head of a pin."

Source




Australia: Teacher unions balk at any suggestion of teacher merit

All teachers are equal, apparently

NSW schools will now be able to appoint teachers under a State Government shake-up of staffing arrangements, a move which has angered the teachers union. School principals will be able to advertise positions and select their own teachers from the second term in 2010, under changes announced by NSW education minister John Della Bosca. The Department of Education will have to sign off on appointments, but schools need no longer accept the teacher at the top of the department's transfer list.

School principals say the move will give them greater freedom, but the union has threatened industrial action over concerns the plan would leave schools in disadvantaged areas worse off and the transfer system would be dismantled.

Mr Della Bosca said the changes would not affect the number of positions or teacher tenure. "While the department will retain its obligation to ensure every class has a qualified teacher, we are giving principals the option of choosing the right teacher for their school from a larger number of qualified applicants," Mr Della Bosca said in a statement. "More schools will now have the option of either having a teacher centrally allocated or choosing their own through open advertisements." Mr Della Bosca said open advertisements had been used at schools in regional NSW and south-west Sydney, which had attracted large numbers of applicants. "Under the old system, fewer than 3 per cent of vacancies are open to all qualified teachers and a transfer can take many years," he said.

NSW Secondary Principals Council president Jim McAlpine said principals believed they could be more effective leaders if they had the right to select teachers. "Principals for years have been saying they would like a greater say in the staffing of their schools," he told Fairfax.

But NSW Teachers Federation president Maree O'Halloran said the move would benefit some school communities and disadvantage others. "We are taking this extraordinarily seriously," she told The Daily Telegraph. "It will result in unqualified teachers and larger class sizes." Teachers federation senior vice-president Gary Zadkovich also slammed the move, saying the statewide transfer system "provides security of employment ... and also ensures teachers are supplied to schools in western Sydney and country areas where teachers are less likely to want to work".

Mr Della Bosca said the incentive transfer system to attract teachers to remote and difficult to staff schools would continue. He said 50,000 teachers and principals were being briefed on the changes this week.

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5 February, 2008

Segregation comes to Canada

I am sure that Leftists will want to bus some whites into these schools -- or am I missing something? "Diversity" IS good for education, isn't it?

Toronto's school board is expected to vote over harsh opposition tomorrow to approve Canada's first "Afro-centered" high school, which likely would open next year. Black parents have been central in pushing for the institution, which is touted as a solution to dropout rates that range between 25 percent and 40 percent among Toronto's black students, many of whom are of Caribbean heritage.

Critics have reacted viscerally, calling the plan a step toward the sort of segregation that once troubled U.S. schools but has seldom been an issue in Canada. "The majority of Torontonians are against it," said school trustee Michael Coteau, who added that he had never seen such a strong reaction. Many of his constituents have condemned the idea, he said, but "when there were reports of skyrocketing dropout rates among black students, no one called."

Since 1991, studies have shown dropout rates of more than 40 percent among the city's black Caribbean students, and of 25 percent to 30 percent among the children of recent immigrants from Africa. This compares with rates of 25 percent among white students and 18 percent for Asians.

One of the strongest advocates of the school is Donna Harrow, one of two black women who approached the school board in 2003 to petition for an alternative, special-needs school. Toronto has schools for other "at-risk" student groups, including homosexuals and American Indians. The United States has a few schools specifically for blacks, including in Cleveland and Milwaukee. Mrs. Harrow said the Canadian press had wrongly presented the project as a form of segregation, or suggested that students who attend would be seen as unable to survive in the real world. "Any student - whether white, black or Chinese - who wants to celebrate the unity of people as part of being prepared for postsecondary education and opportunity is welcome," she said.

After months of study and community input, the school board released a 156-page report recommending the creation of one alternative school for 150 to 200 students, along with black-focused streams in three other schools at a total cost of about $800,000.

Despite the public opposition, the measure is expected to be approved when the board votes tomorrow. Although the school would be open to all students, it is not clear how many non-blacks would apply.

Trustee Josh Matlow opposes the plan. He fears the school for black children will start a domino effect that will splinter the city's 558 public schools into ethnic and racial educational ghettos. "It's a Pandora's box," he said, while quoting Martin Luther King's dream of all-inclusiveness. Even if the black-focused school doesn't fracture the school system, Mr. Matlow said, its success cannot be measured until "after my lifetime."

Three private schools in Toronto serve black students up to the sixth grade. Zakiya Tafaria, who teaches at the Umoja Learning Circle, said that in the 12 years since the school's inception, 90 percent of its graduates have been put forward a grade when evaluated for admittance to mainstream middle schools. Mr. Tafaria called the alternative school a good idea, but warned that many families will not want to participate if it is placed in an area stigmatized as a black crime zone.

Education in Canada is a provincial responsibility, and the country's early schools often were segregated by law. In the 1800s, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario schools were established to segregate black students. In Nova Scotia, the last separate school for blacks closed in 1986, said Angela Wilson, who joined Mrs. Harrow in pushing for the Toronto school.

During slavery in the United States, public schools were integrated in Toronto, but many Ontario communities enforced segregated education. In 1853, Ontario's chief justice ruled that no matter how poor the quality of the school, blacks must attend. Yet during this same period, William Hubbard, the son of refugee slaves and a graduate of the city's integrated schools, was elected to 14 consecutive terms as a Toronto alderman and served as acting mayor.

The proposed school will teach the basic Ontario curriculum along with some black history that is not taught in mainstream schools, Miss Wilson said. It also will provide a culturally sensitive environment where teachers don't react with hostility to black students who use slang or wear dreadlocks. Miss Wilson said her teenage son and daughter attend mainstream schools but they understand the need for this alternative. "This is about choice," she said.

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Britain: Special favours for Muslim schools

Even I, who have written constantly about the British government's lethally flawed strategy of appeasing Islamism, am left breathless by today's story in the Telegraph:

Private Muslim schools have been given the power to police themselves, despite widespread fears over religious segregation, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. In a controversial move, they have won the right to appoint their own Ofsted-style inspectors. A new independent watchdog has been set up to be more `sensitive' toward Islamic education. The decision comes despite concerns some private Muslim schools are already failing to prepare pupils for life in modern Britain.

Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the Commons schools select committee, told MPs last month local councils were finding it `difficult to know what is going on in some faith schools - particularly Muslim schools'. But religious leaders defended the move, saying the curriculum and religious traditions in faith schools demand specialist knowledge. Under present legislation, most state and private schools are inspected by Ofsted, the Government's standards watchdog. The Association of Muslim Schools and the Christian Schools' Trust applied to the Government to set up a separate inspectorate for a small number of private faith schools. The Daily Telegraph has learned the Department for Children, Schools and Families [DCSF] approved plans for the Bridge Schools' Inspectorate last week, giving it the power to inspect about 60 private Muslim schools and 50 Christian schools.

It really is hard to believe this. There is a crying need for much more rigorous state inspection of Muslim schools. Ofsted, which is supposedly going to police this new Muslim/Christian inspectorate, is hopeless; having progressively emasculated its inspection processes generally, it has already failed to identify Islamic extremism in the Muslim schools it inspects (see the evidence revealed in the recent Policy Exchange report of the bigoted teaching materials used at the King Fahad academy in west London, to which Ofsted gave a clean bill of health). The only way to address Islamic extremism is to take the toughest line possible against the dissemination of hatred and incitement. That means that the state must make it its business to find out where children are being thus indoctrinated and stop it. And that means the state must inspect all Muslim teaching institutions and take action against them where it finds that this is happening. To withdraw instead, as the government is now doing, and allow these schools to police themselves is to give a green light to the extremist production line.

Furthermore, it also bows to the Islamist insistence that British Muslims must develop parallel institutions to the British state, a fundamental element of their strategy to Islamise this country. For although this is presented as a Muslim/Christian initiative, no-one can be in any doubt that the main thrust comes from British Muslims. The website of the Christian body involved, the Christian Schools' Trust, is being rejigged so information on it is sparse; but it appears to be a marginal fundamentalist body. Certainly there is no indication that Christian schools in general, or Jewish schools for that matter, are pressing for their own inspectorate.

Many people still think that the idea that Britain could ever be `Islamised' is just too preposterous and silly to be taken seriously. It is not. It is well advanced. What it relies upon is three things: the refusal of the British public to take it seriously; the Islamists' ability to manipulate moral and intellectual liberal confusion and the resulting paralysis over `Islamophobia', `discrimination' and `minority rights'; and the craven desire by the British government to buy off the implicit and explicit threats of Muslim social unrest and yet more terrorist attacks by giving in to the Islamists' demands. Truly moderate British Muslims who want to live under the umbrella of British laws and institutions are thus grievously undermined, and the entire country is put at ever greater peril from the pincer movement of cultural and terrorist attack. Members of Parliament with an elementary sense of national self-preservation simply must not let this pass.

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BIG REWARDS FOR FAILURE IN WASHINGTON DC

These guys would get the boot for the poor performance of the system that they supervise if they were employees of a private company -- but in government failure just gets more money thrown at it

School superintendents in the Washington area will collect salaries ranging from $157,200 to $279,340 in the fiscal year that ends June 30. Factor in benefits and perks, however, and the average annual compensation package swells to $351,730.

Compensation for the school chiefs goes well beyond the salaries reported to the public, according to a review of contracts for 12 superintendents in the District and its suburbs. Contracts routinely allow superintendents to collect tens of thousands in deferred compensation and to cash in weeks of unused leave annually. Superintendents enjoy supplemental insurance policies and retirement plans on top of the benefits available to all public school administrators.

In Montgomery County, the $242,686 salary paid this year to School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast represents not quite half of a total compensation package valued at $489,763. John E. Deasy in Prince George's County will receive $424,080 in total compensation, with less than two-thirds coming from salary, according to figures provided by the school system.

The compensation packages help school boards attract quality educators to a job that is becoming increasingly hard to fill. Superintendent salaries nationwide have increased by almost half in the past decade, in an ongoing bidding war for talented candidates. Superintendent tenures are declining, and the lengths of superintendent searches are growing, as top educators leave the field for jobs with less stress and better pay, according to the American Association of School Administrators.

There are "not enough qualified superintendents," said James E. Richmond, superintendent of Charles County schools, adding that there are "plenty of openings all over the country." Superintendent contracts are structured with layers of benefits and perks, allowing school systems to minimize taxpayer outcry.

Information about superintendent contracts was first reported in The Washington Post on Dec. 25. The above chart presents details of the compensation packages, including salary, cost-of-living adjustments and bonuses; deferred compensation; health, life and disability insurance; pension contributions; compensation for unused vacation time and for job-related expenses; a car and, in the case of the Prince George's and D.C. superintendents, someone to drive it.

The figures were supplied by school systems and represent actual or projected earnings. One superintendent included in the Dec. 25 analysis, Rebecca L. Perry of Alexandria, left the job this month. Before her departure, she was drawing an annual salary of $226,243 as leader of the city's 10,570-student system. In the 2006-07 school year, she received total compensation of $285,765.

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4 February, 2008

Girls who threw french fries face 'missile' charges

What pathetic worms these school administrators are for involving the police in such a minor disciplinary matter

Three 13-year-old girls accused of throwing french fries during lunch at their school in Wyoming have been cited by police for "hurling missiles".. The principal of Laramie Junior High and a police officer warned students during assembly the day before the french fries' launch they would suffer consequences if they threw food, Laramie police chief Bob Deutsch said. The warning came after school officials heard rumours of an impending food fight. "They saw it as really the planning of a riot, when you think about it," Deutsch said.

The girls decided to test the warning, he said. "It wasn't a spontaneous thing - a couple of kids giggling, throwing a french fry at each other," Deutsch said. "They intended on getting everybody involved in this and starting something that no doubt would have the potential of getting out of control."

Some observers are saying police and school officials went overboard, and even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) weighed in. "It certainly seems that this was an overreaction to a situation that could have been handled differently," said Linda Burt, Wyoming director of the ACLU. The girls were also suspended for three days.

City prosecutor Ashley Castor didn't return phone messages. Principal Steve Hoff declined to comment, and schools Superintendent Brian Recht did not return messages.

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"Training" is replacing education in Britain

`Black Monday', with its economic chaos and confusion, was nothing compared with British PM Gordon Brown's self-inflicted educational disaster of `McMonday'. Yesterday, 28 January, Brown announced the New Labour government's latest educational wheeze: a proposal to allow the fast-food chain McDonald's, the low cost airline Flybe, and Network Rail to award qualifications at school level. These were immediately dubbed `McA-levels', `McGCSEs'; Network Rail is even thinking of offering doctorates in railway engineering: McPhDs, if you like. This is the first substantial move by the government to allow private companies to award British educational qualifications.

Brown introduced and defended these new awarding powers on GMTV early on Monday morning. He argued that the government was not dumbing down its qualifications, and companies like McDonald's would ensure that standards would not fall and even ensure that the 51 per cent non-completion rates for apprenticeships would be tackled. John Denham, secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills, said it was an important step towards ending the division between company training schemes and national qualifications (1). Nick Gibb, the opposition Conservative Party school spokesperson, was enthusiastic, too, arguing that: `They may well be better vocational qualifications. because they relate to the real world of work.' (2) Even the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) considered that `employer-led qualification routes with a specialised vocational background may prove a valuable route into higher education' (2).

A proposal to offer qualifications with about as much intellectual nourishment as a Big Mac should have upset public sector unions, teachers and educationalists. However, initial criticism has been muted and technical. Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), expressed some concern about giving private companies the power to award educational qualifications and demanded that they meet stringent requirements. Others questioned the new qualifications' academic rigour; their transferability to other workplaces; whether they would be accepted by other employers; and whether they could devalue traditional qualifications.

The muted criticism is easily explained: ever since the government commissioned the Tomlinson Committee report in 2005, there has been a broad base of support for its proposed radical overhaul of qualifications for 14- to 19-year-olds, and for the aim of eventually replacing A-levels with a personalised `Diploma' (3). Careful readers of the Tomlinson report would have noted that Carmel Flatley, the director of human resources and training at McDonald's, worked for a time as a member of the committee (4). The Tomlinson report suggested vocational routes for children as young as 14 to allow those with vocational rather than academic interests to follow their inclinations. Educationalists have accepted the government's argument that Britain faces a major skills gap and needs to ensure that young people have the skills, often `learning to learn' skills, that would serve them well in the new world of work. However, Tomlinson's much-heralded reform proposals were not implemented. The New Labour government, then under Tony Blair, seemed to lack the confidence to bring in such sweeping changes; instead it kept the `gold standard' of A-level qualifications, which were seen as academically respectable.

One of Gordon Brown's first acts when he became prime minister in June was to split the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) into the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). The missing word in the titles of these reorganised departments was `education'. This was more than trendy re-branding. It showed how the government has undermined the idea and the essence of Education, of knowledge and learning, and replaced it with Skills instead. When the emphasis is on can-do skills rather than abstract ideas and thinking, it makes sense to transfer `educational training' over to the business world and to transform universities into `training institutions' for the world of work.

Following `McMonday', the newspapers were full of references to `McQualifications'. `What a joke!' commentators proclaimed; or as one union official put it: `Nothing is stranger than life!' McDonald's is, of course, the brand that every member of the chattering classes loves to hate. And it helps that it is easy to play the McDonaldisation Game by adding the `Mc' prefix to everything one dislikes about modern life. Yet in reality, the fundamentals of the McDonaldisation thesis - of applying efficiency, calculability, predictability and control to education - have already been accepted by almost everyone in the worlds of government, teaching and unions. Mocking McDonald's and its new role in education is a way of avoiding the profound denigration of education that has already occurred, and which has brought us to this situation.

From seeing that fewer pupils are excluded from schools to ensuring that 50 per cent of the population go on to higher education: efficiency in education goes unchallenged today. Often this means making examination and assessment varied, or to be truthful, making them easier. Calculability, in terms of league tables, is questioned by some educationalists, but not by those who perform well in the tables. Predictability, in terms of common learning outcomes and standardised degrees, is now accepted by educationalists across the board. And the most threatening form of McDonaldisation - control, through the standardisation of teacher training in all sectors - is universally celebrated. This serious McDonaldisation of the education system has severely undermined the unpredictable, creative and exciting process of education, reducing it to a list of dull, predictable skills. It was the government that made education the equivalent of learning how to flip burgers - signing up McDonald's was the next logical step.

There is no real opposition to the skill-crazy philistinism within education. Further Education (FE) lecturers have always taught skills, of course; but in the past they argued for something called `vocational education'. Now even former radical educators in Britain sneer at the idea of `education for its own sake'. This, too, is a product of the post-Tomlinson consensus. One of Tomlinson's stated aims was to overcome the academic/vocational divide. This brought everyone on side as it seemed, particularly to radical educationalists, to provide parity for working-class children who might be more practical-minded and hence vocationally orientated. In truth, the removal of the academic/vocational divide looked more like a cover for the fact that many working-class children are not being provided with a first-class, gold-standard education; it was a way of selling out these children, effectively giving up on their educational aspirations, but it was dressed up to look like a radical move in favour of the `vocationally minded'.

It is the consensus over the need for a skill system that is bringing about the McDonaldisation of education. The irony is that the academic/vocational divide is being overcome: parity will finally be achieved when there are only vocational qualifications left.

Source




Small classes labelled a waste of money

Decades of research finally heeded

AUSTRALIA'S new education tsar has surprisingly come out in support of large classes. Barry McGaw, charged with co-ordinating a new national curriculum, said reducing class sizes was a waste of money and more specialist teachers should be hired to help struggling students instead.

The decorated academic and policy maker argued that slow learners slipped through the cracks just as easily in smaller classes as they did in larger classes. "Teachers unions have pushed for reduced class sizes but I think it's not the most important thing," he said. "It's a waste of money, you don't get the best bang for your buck."

Finland, with the highest literacy rate of 15-year-olds in the world, invested heavily in the early years of education, Mr McGaw said.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appointed Mr McGaw as chair of the National Curriculum Board this week. The 12-member board will include representatives from all state and territories and public, Catholic and independent schools. Expert consultants will be employed to develop a nation-wide curriculum from kindergarten to Year 12 in English, maths, science and history.

The Howard Government's Australian history curriculum for Years 9 and 10, which was developed before the coalition's defeat in the November election, would also be considered in the new plans.

But Mr McGaw's comments on class sizes have outraged Australian Education Union Victorian branch president Mary Bluett. [They would!] The powerful union boss labelled the remarks as absurd and said smaller classes were the best way to improve academic results and school retention rates. "There's no substitute or alternative to getting class sizes down," Ms Bluett said. She said studies had shown students in smaller classes had stronger friendships and also had more respect for their teachers. [But don't learn any more]

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3 February, 2008

No law broken but kid charged and punished

Fanaticism about drugs gets out of hand again. The slightest reference to guns or drugs causes American school administrators to lose their marbles

Denton County prosecutors decided Friday to wash their hands of a case against a Lewisville middle school student accused of trying to get high by sniffing his teacher's hand sanitizer. Three days after filing delinquency charges against the youth, prosecutors did a turnaround and decided that the common cleaning gel is not an abusive inhalant under the Texas Health and Safety Code. "It's not a crime. Hand sanitizer does not fall within that statute," said Jamie Beck, first assistant district attorney in Denton County. "The police agency brought it up mistakenly thinking it was."

Richard Ortiz, the father of the seventh-grader, welcomed the news late Friday but expressed frustration that the case, which began in October, went as far as it did. Mr. Ortiz, who asked that his 14-year-old son's name not be published, said the boy was embarrassed and humiliated by the charge. He described his son as a well-behaved teenager who makes good grades. "They were going to prosecute my son," Mr. Ortiz said. "He still has that stigma. People know him as a drug user, and he's not."

Mr. Ortiz's attorney, J. Michael Price II of Dallas, said he believes that the Denton County prosecutor's office acted quickly to drop the case once he brought the matter to the attention of Ms. Beck on Friday morning. "I told her I didn't think a law had been violated," Mr. Price said. "She made the appropriate decision without a lot of delay."

Mr. Ortiz said the family's ordeal began Oct. 19, when his son picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his fifth-period reading teacher at Killian Middle School in Lewisville. He rubbed the gel on his hands and smelled it. In the view of school officials, the boy "inhaled heavily," according to Mr. Ortiz, who said his son sniffed the cleanser "because it smelled good." The youth was sent to the principal's office, and the Lewisville police officer assigned to the school began investigating.

"The event happened at the campus," said Dean Tackett, a spokesman for the Lewisville Independent School District. "But once the police took it over, it was a police investigation. They decide if there are charges and what kind of charges."

The teen was required to serve a brief in-school suspension and was also fingerprinted and photographed at the Lewisville Police Department. He returned to regular classes at the school, including one with the teacher whose sanitizer he sniffed.

Mr. Ortiz said he believed the matter was over until Tuesday when he was served with a petition charging his son with delinquency for inhaling the hand sanitizer to "induce a condition of intoxication, hallucination and elation." He said he couldn't believe that his son would have to go to court for smelling hand sanitizer. "I think it's ludicrous," said Mr. Ortiz, who blames overzealous police and prosecutors for initially pursuing the case.

Joni Eddy, assistant police chief in Lewisville, said Friday that hand sanitizer has become a popular inhalant. "That is the latest thing to huff," she said. She said officers felt they were acting properly when they pursued the case against Mr. Ortiz's son under a complex state statute governing volatile chemicals that could be abused. "The charge said he was using the product other than its intended use," she said. "Huffing hand sanitizer is certainly using it for something other than its intended use." Hand sanitizers usually contain a high percentage of ethyl alcohol, a flammable liquid used in a wide range of industrial products and alcoholic beverages.

Shirley Simson, a spokeswoman for the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington, said in an e-mail that the agency had no data about hand sanitizers being abused as inhalants. She noted, however, that there have been news reports of some people drinking hand sanitizers for their alcohol content.

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British white working class boys failing

Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs [intermediate High School qualification] including maths and English last year. Among white boys from more affluent homes - 45% achieved that level of qualification. Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better - with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.

Ministers say they are narrowing the gap between affluent and poorer pupils. The national average for all pupils in England achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths (A* to C) was 46% last year.

Liberal Democrat spokesman David Laws said: "We should be ashamed to live in a country where there is such a huge gap between rich and poor children. "To have 85% of white boys from poor families failing to achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths is truly shocking. "The government has failed to tackle the chasm that exists between the opportunities of most of the poorest and the richest in our society. "We need a massive targeted increase in funding for deprived young people, to allow more catch-up classes and additional support to give every child a chance."

Shadow children's secretary Michael Gove said: "The government's failure to improve standards in education has hit the poorest hardest. We need a school system that allows bright children to succeed regardless of their economic background. "We can only achieve this by focusing on the basics like getting all children reading after two years of primary school. Instead we still have a system where the achievement gap between rich and poor pupils grows as they progress through their school careers."

GSCE performance data released by the government in November did not include details of pupils receiving free school meals - an indicator of poverty. Those details have now been published.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said: "Closing the attainment gap in education remains a top priority, and we have made encouraging recent progress. "There has been good news on our efforts to address social mobility, with pupils eligible for free school meals improving faster than average. "Between 2003 and 2007, pupils eligible for free school meals who achieved 5 good GCSEs rose 11.1 percentage points from 24.4% to 35.5%. For non-free school meals pupils, the increase was 7.6 percentage points, from 55.2% to 62.8%. "Alongside pupils on free school meals, previously disadvantaged groups are also doing better. Over the last four years, black pupils have made the biggest improvement, at almost twice the national average." Policies had been introduced to try to help underachieving boys, he said.

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The ability to look at pictures is just as good as being able to read

That seems to be the nutty idea of education put forward by a very mixed-up Australian Leftist below -- as far as one can tell

An academic and former high school teacher has returned fire in the literacy wars, claiming that universal skills tests advantage "certain groups of students and marginalise others". Monash University's Ilana Snyder accuses The Australian of running an ideological campaign against outcomes-based education. In a new book, The Literacy Wars, Dr Snyder questions the motives of those favouring a return to a more rigorous and literature-based senior English curriculum. And she questions this newspaper's advocacy of correct grammar and basic literacy skills, labelling it as a push to restore "something resembling the cultural heritage model associated with Matthew Arnold at the end of the 19th century".

"Some students possess the cultural and social capital that helps them to understand the particular language associated with testing and to decode the questions, but for others there are no such advantages," Dr Snyder argues. "As a result, differences in literacy achievement as measured by standardised tests need to be approached with caution." If a test measures print-oriented skills, for instance, this might disadvantage children "who prefer digital forms of literacy". [Meaning pictures? Or does she mean that reading words in a book is different in kind from reading the same words on a computer screen? Wacky, however you look at it] Dr Snyder goes on to argue that literacy itself is a "highly contested word". It is not a notion like 'car' or 'holiday' which demand a reasonable level of agreement about their meaning," she writes.

Macquarie University Professor of Education Kevin Wheldall said such theories were "barking mad". "Many middle-class children will learn to read and to appreciate literature in spite of what happens at school," he said. "I am concerned about the children who are not surrounded by books at home and whose parents are not able to help them with reading and writing. "If I was cynical, I would say those who oppose teaching phonics and giving all children the chance to appreciate literature are out to keep Aboriginal children, poor white kids, and migrants for whom English is a second language, in their place. To use the awful jargon, the current approach privileges those who have help at home.

"I come from a working-class family in England and had it not been for the 11-plus exam (a test taken at the end of primary school in England) getting me into a grammar school I would probably be a baker like my father rather than a professor of education."

Dr Snyder, an associate professor of education who taught high school English for 10 years, repeatedly singles out this newspaper's reports, editorials and columnists -- including Kevin Donnelly, Luke Slattery and Christopher Pearson -- for her criticism. She admits it was "the Murdoch paper's crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education" that motivated her to write the book. "It is time to hold them to account."

Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian and The Weekend Australian, said he was more than happy to be "held to account" and the literacy wars were not about a conservative versus leftist political agenda. "A good grounding in reading, writing and maths, followed by a broad, traditional liberal education gives children, especially the poor, the best chance to do well in life," Mr Mitchell said. "Dumbing down the curriculum hurts everyone, but it hurts disadvantaged children the most." He said The Australian had run a wide-ranging debate on a very important subject, covering all points of view.

Yesterday, Dr Snyder said that she had written the book because she was "irritated by the polarisation of the debate" and by what she regarded as "misrepresentations of what is taught in English and in teacher education at universities". In the book, she is critical of The Australian for embracing the findings of the Teaching Reading report from the national literacy inquiry, which called for a return to phonics as part of the mix in teaching reading. The inquiry, headed by Ken Rowe, found that trainee teachers needed to be taught how to teach reading through phonics as well as whole-word recognition.

Yesterday she said that, like the inquiry, she favoured students being taught to read with a combination of phonics and whole word recognition. "It's not a case of either/or," she said.

Describing herself as a "book lover", Dr Snyder -- who enjoys Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, Shakespeare and the Greek playwrights -- said she had no objections to students studying Shakespeare from modern perspectives such as Marxism. She also said it was essential that students studied popular culture such as teenage magazines and films so they were able to be critical of it. "Fights over a Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare or a text message on an exam miss the point," she writes. "At their core, the literacy wars are the result of competing views and beliefs about society -- what it is, what it has been, and what it should become."

Dr Snyder now wants the debate to move to the issue of extra funding for state schools. In her book she accuses The Australian of a "particularly ferocious campaign" against outcomes-based education, introduced as "a way of increasing social justice" and in response to the quest for greater accountability. Dr Snyder says the push by "conservatives" for a return to more traditional English literature in secondary school is "related to deeper political discussions about the moral ordering of life and the regulation of people".

Ensuring students study "books from the Western canon" can "also train students to be governed by an aesthetic and moral code associated with the cultural heritage model, an approach that originated in Victorian England with little relevance to Australia at the beginning of the 21st century."

Dr Snyder said research showed that working with computer games in literacy classrooms "provides students with additional means of expression and communication to those dependent on print skills". [So kids need to go to school to learn how to play computer games? The woman really is barking mad]

University of Queensland professor Ken Wiltshire said the critical literacy movement offered nothing positive to the education debate. "It seeks to destroy the fundamentals and principles of sound curriculum development as practised in all countries of the developed world and most emerging ones as well," he said. "Make no mistake, this author is part of a sinister assault on Australia's educational standards and values. Her approach, like the movement she represents, is an elitist one, since the only students who are really competent to handle critical literacy are the ones who already have an excellent grounding in the basic literature."

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Australia: "Expert" on America not Leftist enough

A POLITICAL scientist who insists that globalisation is not the enemy of the Left will be the first leader of the controversial United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Geoffrey Garrett, an Australian-born academic who has made his mark in the US as an analyst of global politics and economics, is expected to take up the post as chief executive inMarch.

The centre's stated rationale is to remedy a lack of serious study of the US at a time of rising anti-American sentiment. Critics on the Left dismiss it as a propaganda vehicle. Former prime minister John Howard and News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, whose company owns The Australian, were both instrumental in setting up the centre.

Professor Garrett, president of the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, said the Sydney centre offered "an almost unique opportunity" to study the overlapping roles of Australia and the US as "the Asia-Pacific century" unfolded.

He said globalisation was more complex than implied by leftist critics and boosters on the Right. For example, in the developing world, globalisation had helped China but not Latin America. "Twenty years ago, everyone on the Left believed that globalisation was the death knell of traditional Left intervention in the economy," he said. "(Yet) there is smart government involvement in the economy, which helps you compete. A classic example of that would be education, where the market tends to undersupply." [The man is a fool if he believes that. The world is suffering from OVER-credentialization. And that has been known for years to be so.]

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2 February, 2008

Student punished for "Confidential" survey remarks at University of Georgia

I have some comments on this on today's "Tongue-Tied" posts

A student who wrote disparaging comments on an anonymous course evaluation now finds himself facing University sanctions. Brian Beck, a landscape architecture major from Gordon, was found in violation of three University Code of Conduct regulations in a decision announced last week by University Judiciary. Beck was found in violation of the code due to:

* Disruption of the teaching evaluation process

* On grounds of multiplicity

* Harassment based on presumed knowledge of the associate professor's sexual orientation

Beck's violations stem from comments made on two course evaluations in Joseph Disponzio's History of the Built Environment course sequence. On the first course evaluation, Beck was asked "What aspects of the course could use improvement or change?" Beck wrote: "Joe Disponzio is a complete asshole. I hope he chokes on a dick, gets AIDS and dies. To hell with all gay teachers who are terrible with their jobs and try to fail students!"

During a phone interview with The Red & Black, Disponzio said, "As always, there were good comments and bad comments. I am a difficult professor. After receiving the comment [in January] I went to my dean about it. I was not amused by it."

College of Environment & Design Interim Dean Scott Weinberg said he told Disponzio, "He probably needs to go see people in Legal Affairs." According to an e-mail sent from Disponzio to Kimberly Ellis, associate dean for Student Affairs-Office of Judicial Programs, Weinberg "essentially said that since the evaluation was anonymous, there was little he could do. [Weinberg] does nothing to address the situation among the staff and faculty of the (College of Environment & Design)."

After consulting Legal Affairs, Disponzio said he did not pursue the matter because of academic responsibilities. The University did not take action. "Ultimately, I let the whole thing drop," Disponzio said, but "at the end of the spring semester, I received a similar comment."

Beck answered the evaluation question "What were the most helpful/useful aspects of the course?" with "Joe Disponzio needs help with his issues dealing with homosexuality. Fags are not cool and neither are ney [sic] yorkers."

After comparing the two evaluations to exams from the class, Disponzio said he was able to identify the student he thought made the comments. "I am a New Yorker and a gay man ... but I have no idea what the student's issues were," Disponzio said. "Systematically you go through this, then I realized that I found the culprit."

On June 11, Disponzio went to Weinberg's office and left copies of the two evaluations along with copies of the exams he believed to be those of the offending students. No action was taken at this point because Weinberg was out of town. On. Aug. 21, Weinberg referred Disponzio to Cheryl Dozier, associate provost for institutional diversity. Disponzio and Dozier met the next day and the matter was referred to Ellis. Two days later, an official complaint was filed with the Office of Judicial Programs.

A letter was mailed to Beck's home address on Sept. 6 stating "it is alleged that Mr. Beck wrote threatening comments on course evaluations that were directed to a faculty member. Such comments indicated that he wanted the faculty member to die. Also the comments may have violated the University's anti-discrimination and harassment policy in that comments made may have been discriminatory regarding sexual orientation." Beck was directed to contact the Office of Judicial Programs and a hearing was set for Oct. 15.

The University retained a handwriting document examiner to confirm the author of the evaluations. Roy Fenoff, a 2004 graduate of the University and forensic document examiner, was faxed the evaluations in question and Beck's class exams. He "concluded that the questioned writing was indeed authored by Brian Beck." Fenoff came to this conclusion by examining "ink patterns, slant, size, fluidity of movement, entry strokes, final strokes, spacing of letters, the connections, letter form, punctuation, numbers, and abbreviation," according to judical programs' records.

Beck's punishment includes writing a 1,200-word essay on how his remarks affect the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community and interact with a greater intolerance of the campus LGBT community, a letter of apology to Disponzio including constructive criticisms of his teaching style, and meeting with Michael Shutt, assistant dean of students, to discuss completion of SafeSpace training or other programs deemed appropriate. Beck received a reprimand/warning and was told he is expected to follow University Conduct Regulations in the future.

Disponzio wrote in a letter to Weinberg: "Though the evaluations are 'confidential'; such pointedly directed hate removes all rights to confidentially. Whether it is the student I suspect, or another, I will do whatever is necessary to find [him or her]."

Members of the LGBT community say they are not satisfied with how the University handled the case. "Lambda is going to be up in arms. [We're] upset it took almost a year," said Moira Gillis, an anthropology major from Richmond and the director of public relations for Lambda Alliance, a group whose purpose is creating a safe and supportive environment for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.

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New Report: Asians, Not Whites, Gain When AA Ends

Post below lifted from Discriminations. See the original for links

This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on yet another study that confirms Asians benefit much more than whites when racial preference policies are eliminated. In fact, the proportion of whites admitted often decreases when race preferences are curtailed. An earlier study, discussed here, found that

when one group loses ground, another has to gain - in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent.

Similarly, a Dan Golden article in the Wall Street Journal, which I discussed here, also found that

Asian-American enrollment at Berkeley has increased since California voters banned affirmative action in college admissions. Berkeley accepted 4,122 Asian-American applicants for this fall's freshman class -- nearly 42% of the total admitted. That is up from 2,925 in 1997, or 34.6%, the last year before the ban took effect. Similarly, Asian-American undergraduate enrollment at the University of Washington rose to 25.4% in 2004 from 22.1% in 1998, when voters in that state prohibited affirmative action in college admissions.

The University of Michigan may be poised for a similar leap in Asian-American enrollment, now that voters in that state have banned affirmative action. The Center for Equal Opportunity study found that, among applicants with a 1240 SAT score and 3.2 grade point average in 2005, the university admitted 10% of Asian-Americans, 14% of whites, 88% of Hispanics and 92% of blacks. Asian applicants to the university's medical school also faced a higher admissions bar than any other group.

The new study, which will be published next week in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, also finds, according to one of its authors, that

Asian Americans' share of enrollment has shot upward at selective public universities that have been forced to abandon affirmative-action preferences, he said, and the Asian-American population has not increased nearly enough to explain the trend. Meanwhile, a report on the study's findings says, white enrollments, as a share of the student body, actually declined slightly at the universities examined.....

It sounds as though this new study largely confirms the findings of earlier ones, but, based on the Chronicle's summary, it also sounds as though the authors are uncomfortable with their findings. Whether for that reason or simply in an attempt to convince readers they are not racist, right-wing Republican meanies (sorry for the redundancy here), they engage in some wholly gratuitous and unsupported insults to critics of race preferences.

The report says, for example, that its findings that Asians, not whites, benefit from the demise of race preferences "`can hardly be satisfying' to `those who campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage the admission of white students.'"

And who, exactly, are "those who campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage the admission of white students"? Do the authors assume that all those who oppose race preferences do so because they believe whites will benefit? It would be nice to have some names of who the authors have in mind, or perhaps they are afraid of libel suits.

Not only did those who "campaigned" against race preferences do so in a mistaken effort to benefit whites. In the future, now that the facts are known, those who continue to campaign against preferences will no doubt do so in order to deprive Asians of the benefits they receive when they are nt longer victims of double-standard discrimination.

The report predicts that white people might begin actively opposing race-neutral admissions policies if Asian Americans continue to make gains. "Whites are still too influential in politics and in the private sector to sit quietly while this trend continues," it says.

Such comments are not only dumb - where is the evidence? - but offensive.

I was just about to post the above comments when I saw Roger Clegg's comments on the same study. If I'd only read his first, I could have saved myself some trouble and posted what I usually feel like saying after reading something Roger has written: "What he said." Anyway, here's a part of what he said:

I'm prepared to believe that Asians may be discriminated against more than whites by PC admissions policies, but the evidence is overwhelming - in, among other places, the dozens of studies done by the Center for Equal Opportunity - that both groups are discriminated against (and sometimes Latinos as well). I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just another desperate effort by the proponents of such discrimination to stem the tide that is running against them, this time by trying to persuade whites that they shouldn't care about colorblind principles, since it is only those darn Asian kids who benefit from them. It's an ugly tactic, and it won't work. Those of us "who campaigned" against racial preferences did so not because we care about white kids and not Asian kids - we're doing so because we don't like discrimination against anyone. I think the overwhelming majority of those supporting these initiatives feel this way.

The grand inquistion: destroying teens to save them

It appears the entire student body of Parkland High School ought to be registered sex offenders, if the law were applied. But the local police and district attorney are not going to apply the law because virtually the entire school is guilty of possession of child pornography.

State police have been sent to the school to scare the bejeesus out of the students into co-operating. Apparently images of two girls were distributed by cell phone from one student to another. In one case the girl involved had taken a photo of her breasts herself. District Attorney James Martin said of this girl, "she's a victim and she's not a victim." There's a clear legal standard.

Another girl was photographed having oral sex with an unidentified boy. Police can't, or won't, say if this is was done with her knowledge. So we don't know if she too is "a victim and not a victim".

Police have gone to the school to ensure that every student erases any such images from their cellphones or the students face prosecution for child pornography. In fact, the district attorney is being very careful with his wording. He said: "Our thrust has been to get the kids to come forward and we've indicated we will not charge them for possessing the images." Please note that that the word indicated is one of those lovely weasel words. It doesn't mean "promised" it merely means that the district attorney has said this is possible. It is a sign of something not a confirmation.

The real reason that they are hedging and hawing over this is that if they actually applied the laws as they stand they would have to prosecute most the teens at this high school and many in other schools who also saw the images. Samantha Smith, a junior at the school, clearly noted the problem: "The school isn't going to get everybody because it is everybody. I don't know anybody who didn't get the pictures." And in this case the everybody includes about 3,200 students.

Now to prosecute 3,200 students means around 6,400 angry parents. It means outraged grandparents and cousins. It means pissed off neighbors. In other words it means the district attorney would be toast in the next election. So here the law will be selectively enforced to save the DA's ass.

But as noted the DA only "indicated" that there won't be prosecutions. He hasn't promised it. And he's also being very political here. He wants to have the option to prosecute someone just in case the anger goes the other way. He said: "I'm not sure what we're going to do with the participants at this point." Actually that should have been what he was going to do "to the participants" not with. With implies they are happy participants in the DA's actions and I doubt that is the case.

The DA refers to the participants which, I assume, includes the girl who took a photo of her own breasts, that's the girl he said was "a victim" and "not a victim" at the same time. So the DA is implying that they face a real possibility of being prosecuted as child pornographers even though they were the children in question.

This wouldn't be the first time. The courts have backed up the sex panic laws that apply to kids as much as adults. Teens who stupidly record their own sex lives, in any way, can be, and have been, prosecuted as child pornographers. The Florida state appeals court has ruled that this legit. In the case they heard a 16-year-old girl and 17-year-old boy took some sexual photos of themselves. These digital photos were then sent from the girl's computer to the boy's e-mail. At no time did they distribute the photos to anyone else. Court records are unclear but somehow the police learned the photos existed and both teens were arrested for victimizing themselves. And the boy was charged with possessing child pornography (the photo of himself and his girlfriend) as well.

Now the courts have ruled that the teens can have sex without facing prosecution. But if they photograph those acts then they become heinous criminals, a threat to Western Civilization, cause Jesus to weep bloody tears, and encourage terrorism. Well, not quite but damn close.

The robed morons in Florida had some unique arguments in the case. Judge James Wolf though it fine to ruin the lives of these kids in order to not ruin their lives. He argued, in the majority opinion, that it didn't matter that these "victims" hadn't shown their own photos to anyone. He said they could still sell the photos to child pornographers (someone should let this moron know that because one is a minor in the law doesn't make one a child -- teens are not children. They may not be adults yet but neither are they children.) Apparently the judge imagined that these two kids would be able to find child pornographers. Perhaps they are listed in the Yellow Pages. And he assumed these pornographers, who didn't exist in the case, would actually want to buy these photos.

But this ignoramus said "the statute was intended to protect minors like appellant and her co-defendant from their own lack of judgment..." Even if one accepts that premise how does turning these teens in sex offenders protect them? They face a life time of harassment because they did something silly as teens. Apparently the judge is like the Inquisitors who were willing to execute someone in order to save them.

He also wanted them convicted because the "mere production of these videos or pictures may also result in psychological trauma to the teenagers involved." If it were a crime to be stupid this man would have been jailed long ago. Does this "judge" actually think that these photos, taken by the teens themselves, are actually more traumatic than being arrested, hauled before idiots in robes, and convicted as child pornographers? Talk about irrationality in the courtroom.

The reality is that pornographers who want photos of teens of that age can find them legally and easily because that is the age of consent in most of Europe. The U.S. is unique in having a much higher age of consent than other countries when it comes to such matters. The age of consent for porn used to be 16 in the United States: so it is unlikely any of the teens we are talking would have been criminals under the old law. The law was changed by one of the worst attorney general's in U.S. history, Ed Meese. Meese was a professional panic-monger when it came to sex and he was doing his level best to eradicate the "porn menace".

Meese had the federal law changed to 18-years-of-age. He argued that while 16-year-olds might be able to consent that teens younger than that can't. But some teens who are 14 appear to be 16 so to protect them he had the law raised to cover all teens until they turn 18. The idea was supposedly to protect teens younger than 16, not teens older than 16. Of course once Meese got his way things really took off. In fact, at that time the U.S. government claimed there was a massive increase in child porn. Duh! What they didn't tell the public was that the porn in question had been legal until a few days earlier. The increase was entirely due to the change in definition. But with the increase in arrests the sex panic industry got rolling.

From that point, until today, the police and prosecutors, under both Democrats and Republicans, have been expanding their ability to arrest and incarcerate Americans for having consenting sex lives and sometimes for less. During the reign of Attorney General Janet Reno, a real sexaphobic monster, things got worse. Some of the cases I remember include a university student arrested for owning a video of teenaged girls, fully dressed, using a mink's tail to pretend to whip each other. A grandmother who went to take a bath decided to bath her infant granddaughter at the same time. The husband thought it was beautiful and took a photo. They were prosecuted as child pornographers and the grandmother accused of "imminent lesbianism". In another case a man was convicted for owning a photograph of a teenaged boy who was shirtless. The courts ruled that since the man allegedly found the photo appealing it qualified as child pornography.

No one questions the necessity of the law to protect children. But there is plenty of reason to think the law defines child far too broadly. And there is plenty of evidence that prosecutors are doing more harm to the alleged "victims" in these cases then they are doing good. The reality is that the legal system is exploiting a common fear among parents and that fear is being used to harm lots of teens in the process. When teens are traumatized by police, courts and being registered sex offenders, in order to protect them from themselves then things have really gotten out of hand.

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1 February, 2008

British education failing at the basics

To develop skills requires a basic level of education. And while some skills require no reading and writing ability, would it not be helpful to be able to read an instruction manual, or understand written instructions from a client? Yet according to official government figures, 20% of pupils leave primary school unable to read or write. And going into secondary education unable to understand what they are looking at or listening to is hardly likely to grab the attention of the attention-deficit-disorderly queue lining up to be excluded at the first possible opportunity.

The reason for this abject failure, we are told by the education experts, is that targets and administrative burdens are getting in the way of teaching that class sizes are too big pupils too unruly and wanting to fail facilities sub-standard. Then there's the issue of pay and motivation.

People are not drawn to teaching by the stratospheric salaries, in much the same way that doctors are not lured into their seven-year induction to the world of patient abuse by thoughts of great pay (although it obviously helps). And, like medicine, teaching can be a very rewarding occupation. Trouble is, it can also be totally frustrating, intimidating and virtually impossible to do well. But unlike the medical profession, society sneers at teachers, as though they are somehow getting away with it - big holidays, short days, etc - and somehow seems able to begrudge them a not unreasonable 2.4% pay rise.

But lurking beneath the public sneers, there is a real concern that seems to be sidelined whenever teaching becomes the latest hot topic of conversation: the quality of teaching. There are certainly plenty of inspirational individuals within the system who do an amazing job turning uninterested youths on to the concept of learning and driving those with talent to go as far as they can. But for every great teacher, there seems to be at least a couple of out-and-out duds, backed up by a bulk of 'adequate' under-performers.

Of course, this charge could be made about any job in any profession. The difference is that only teaching has the opportunity to shape minds when they're at an impressionable age, apart, that is, from religion - which is one good argument against faith-based schools.

So where is the quality control in the teaching system? The schools inspectorate, Ofsted, is doing its level best to turn schools into hotbeds of beancounting - forcing otherwise successful, but perhaps slightly shambolic schools to toe the line on the admin front. But Ofsted somehow misinterpreted the government mantra as 'targets, targets, targets', and seems to be more concerned with the performance of the school, rather than the performance of the individuals within it. And wherever there are targets, there are small-minded individuals trying to get around the criteria, fake a way through the system.

And while the beans are being counted, inspirational teachers are leaving the profession in their thousands (more than 90,000 between 2000 and 2005), driven out by the mad rush for statistical and administrative excellence, and paving the way for administratively gifted but perhaps educationally challenged individuals to rise to the top. It seems that people who can't teach... teach.

Bad teachers struggle with class discipline, struggle to get their lessons planned and to hit the targets set by the inspectors. But by working ridiculously long hours, they manage to get their paperwork done. As a result, it looks like they're doing a fine job.

So who's been appointing these poor miseducators? And who lets them get away with it? HR must take its share of the blame. And while the profession will no doubt point to a lack of talent among applicants and the fact that families should be demanding more from their children's teachers, sadly for HR, parents don't appoint the useless ones.

Of course, we have a two-tier education system and one half - the privately funded half - is doing fine, thanks very much. Now, I'm no fan of public schools, but if they failed to deliver at the same level as state-run institutions, they'd soon go out of business. They cannot afford to fail, as people are paying directly for the privilege. And despite the fact that all our taxes are paying for the rest of the schools, the current state of affairs suggests that the state education system may be the last vestige of the old-style nationalised world of unaccountable public sector working - where failure is the norm, and possibly even encouraged where cash is poured down the drain, lining the pockets of no-one in particular and educating hardly anyone.

So, as laudable as the government's skills drive might be, it will be virtually impossible for businesses and government agencies to deliver as long as one-fifth of the working-age population cannot read or write. And it's that fifth who will be required to step into the breachif the government ever hits its 50% degree-educated target. So it definitely is time to get back to basics: the basic task of employing the right people to do the right job. The nation's children deserve a better service. And the nation will be better served by a properly educated workforce. It's not rocket science.

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UK Government Education Guidelines: Don't use terms "Mom" and "Dad"

And here's one reason why Brit schools are failing to teach basic knowledge and skills: They are too busy inculcating Leftist propaganda

Government guidelines for training school officials to be more sensitive to homosexuality, instruct teachers not to use the terms "mum and dad" when referring to students' parents, and to treat "even casual" use of terms like "gay" as equal to racism. The guidedance was commissioned by the Labour government directly from the homosexual lobby group Stonewall. The document was launched today at a Stonewall conference by Schools Secretary Ed Balls.

Ed Balls said, "Homophobic insults should be viewed as seriously as racism." "Even casual use of homophobic language in schools can create an atmosphere that isolates young people and can be the forerunner of more serious forms of bullying."

The guidelines say that the word "parents" must replace "mum and dad", and that teachers should educate pupils about civil partnerships and gay adoption rights.

In Britain's current political climate, even young children have been subject to police interventions on accusations of making "racist" or "homophobic" comments. In October 2006, a 14-year-old school girl was arrested by police and detained in a cell for three hours after she asked to be moved into a group of students who spoke English in class. Stott was denounced to police for "racism" by her teachers. In April 2007, a ten-year-old boy was questioned after the boy sent an email calling another boy "gay".

In the "Frequently Asked Questions" section of the guidelines, in answer to the question, "We have to respect cultural and religious differences. Does this mean pupils can be homophobic?" the guidelines specifically state that those with religious views regarded by the homosexual movement as "intolerant" must be silent. "A person can hold whatever views they want but expressing views that denigrate others is unacceptable."

For Stonewall, youth and sexual innocence is no reason for an exemption. To the objection that primary school students are too young to understand issues of homosexuality, the guidelines respond, "Primary-school pupils may be too young to understand their own sexual orientation but it is likely that some primary-school pupils will know someone who is gay." "Homophobic language is used in primary schools without the pupils necessarily realising what it is that they are saying. Primary schools should respond to homophobic bullying in an age-appropriate way whilst demonstrating that it is not acceptable in school."

For parents who object to their children being exposed to instruction on homosexuality, the guidelines say, "Regardless of their views on gay people or sexual orientation, parents and carers have to understand that schools have a responsibility to keep pupils safe."

Stonewall, perhaps the most successful homosexual activist organization in the world, has been accepted by the Labour government, first under Tony Blair and now by Gordon Brown's leadership, as the leading voice on all issues regarding homosexuality. The guidelines take this a step further in actually allowing the lobby group to author a government document.

Under Tony Blair's "New Labour" government, Section 28 - the law which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools, was repealed. Since then, homosexual activists have used their influence in Parliament to implement a full roster of training for both teachers and students in normalizing homosexuality.

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Deal would save Wisconsin virtual schools

Virtual schools in Wisconsin would remain open under new regulations forged in a compromise announced by state lawmakers Jan. 24. A court ruling had threatened to close a dozen Wisconsin virtual schools starting as early as next school year. But lawmakers say those schools would be allowed to stay open with few changes and receive the same level of state aid as they do currently under their bipartisan plan.

Virtual-school teachers would have to be certified in their subject matter and receive at least 30 hours of training in online teaching. Schools would have to offer a certain number of hours of instruction per year. State Sen. John Lehman of Racine, Wis., says those measures would ensure high-quality instruction and increase accountability. The schools allow students to learn from home under the guidance of their parents and instructors who teach over the internet. They are growing in size and number.

The state's largest teacher's union says lawmakers should analyze whether virtual schools divert money from traditional public schools before passing the bill. Lawmakers, however, are predicting both houses will soon move to pass the compromise.

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