The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Greenie Watch, Political Correctness Watch, Dissecting Leftism, Immigration Watch, Food & Health Skeptic, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine, Eye on Britain, Recipes, Tongue Tied and Australian Politics. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************



28 February, 2010

End Fed ED

Obama's 'austere' budget calls for new $19 billion education boondoggle

President Obama recently announced that his proposed fiscal 2011 budget would freeze all non-defense discretionary spending. All, that is, except spending on education, and by default, the department that handles most of the money. It's an exception that casts considerable doubt on both the president's seriousness about killing wasteful spending, and his grasp of federal education reality.

With the national debt a gargantuan $12.4 trillion - or $40,200 for every American - it should be painfully obvious that Washington needs to cut every red cent of nonessential spending. Yet Mr. Obama's budget calls for an $18.6 billion increase in Education Department spending over 2010, with a total appropriation of nearly $78 billion. But wait - isn't education "essential?" Yes, but federal involvement absolutely is not.

For one thing, except for granting jurisdiction over the District of Columbia and empowering the feds to prohibit schooling discrimination by states, the Constitution gives Washington zero authority to meddle in education. That means every federal education program, and the department itself, is unconstitutional. Of course, these days mentioning that the Constitution gives Washington no authority to do something is like telling a drunk that chugging Long Island ice teas is verboten. It's completely accurate, gets to the root of the problem, but will almost certainly be ignored.

The Founders gave the feds no education power for good reason. They knew that a national government couldn't effectively govern education or anything else that works best when tailored to the unique needs of individual people and communities.

History has borne their wisdom out. Since the 1965 passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act - of which No Child Left Behind is just a continuation - federal education expenditures have been like the Alps, but academic outcomes like the Bonneville Salt Flats. Since 1970, inflation-adjusted federal spending per-pupil has risen almost 190 percent, while academic performance by 17-year-olds - our schools' "final products" - has stagnated.

How have things been in higher education? In particular, what have we gotten from decades of the federal grants, loans, work-study, and tax incentives through which Mr. Obama would like to furnish college students with more than $173 billion in 2011? More people have certainly gone to college: In 1960 - five years before passage of the seminal Higher Education Act - only 7.7 percent of Americans ages 25 and older had bachelor's degrees. By 2008, nearly 30 percent did. But that credential explosion has come at a steep, self-defeating cost.

First, there's a glut of degree holders: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 21 percent of jobs require bachelor's degrees - bad news for the tens of millions of surplus B.A. and B.S. holders.

Second, sheepskin has been seriously devalued. Among many signs of this, the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy reveals that the percentage of Americans whose top degree is a bachelor's who were "proficient" readers dropped by about 10 points between 1992 and 2003 - and only about 38 percent were proficient in 1992. Americans with graduate degrees saw similar drops.

But the greatest cost has been, well, college costs. Ever-growing aid has encouraged students to demand more from schools - extravagant recreation centers, gourmet food, luxurious dorms - and enabled schools to rapidly increase charges. It's no coincidence that since 1979, real aid per student - most of it federal - rose 149 percent, while public four-year college charges ballooned 105 percent and private prices 126 percent.

What to do? The solution is obvious: Get the feds out of education. They do little more than take money from taxpayers, shave off big sums for bureaucratic processing - Mr. Obama is calling for more than $1.8 billion to run the Education Department - and return the remainder with stultifying regulations attached.

Unfortunately, logic and political reality rarely meet. The primary political problem is that those whose livelihoods come from government-dominated education are most motivated and best organized to engage in education politics. The Department of Education exacerbates the problem, giving everyone from college lobbyists to teachers unions a Cabinet-level nerve center through which to command ever-more money and protection from accountability.

That said, the other political problem is that many Americans - who are generally too busy with other things to cogitate over why government fails - truly equate federal politicians interfering in education with improving education. But as decades of academic stagnation and belt-busting budgets have proven, that's just not the case.

Federal education meddling, and the department through which most of it is done, must end. Our fiscal and educational futures depend on it.

SOURCE




School asks students: 'why not' be sexually active

A team of lawyers who advocate for parental rights is working with parents whose children attend Ventura High School in Southern California to raise a formal objection after teachers had students fill out a survey on sex with questions such as "Are you sexually active" and "If not, why not?"

Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute, said the first step will be to file an administrative complaint. "The parents have tried to reason with school officials about this, but so far administrators have failed to grasp that giving the students this survey without prior written notice and consent was illegal," he said.

The survey was reported in the student Cougar Press in December. The report apparently was not included as part of the paper's ordinary online presentation, officials said, but was obtained by a parent who posted the pages only for other parents to see.

The newspaper, in addition to the sex survey results, included a page of photographs of students revealing what songs put them "in the mood," a sex crossword puzzle and other advocacy for being sexually active. A school spokesman said officials could not comment.

Dacus told WND schools should know that parents need to be able to trust their schools for the education system to work.

"When parental trust is breached, then school districts end up losing that participation," he said. "If school districts … want to be successful, they have to respect the rights of parents and not be caught doing things behind the backs of parents."

He said the primary issue is that a state law forbids such sex surveys without parental knowledge. He said the problem only was revealed because a student took a copy home, in violation of instructions she was given, and some parents found out. The questions included:

* What grade were you in when you lost your virginity?

* What is your overall number of partners you have engaged in sexual activity with?

* Were you sober the first time you engaged in sexual activity?"

* Have you or your partner ever had an abortion?"

* How often do you engage in sexual activity?"

* Are your parents aware of your sexual activity?

Pacific Justice said that according to the newspaper, the survey was given to 1,000 students in every grade in high school. The organization said it was administered with the knowledge and assistance of the high school during second class period and had no relationship to any subject the students were enrolled in at that time.

"The school allowed the use of instructional time to administer the survey and the teachers then collected it and handed it over to the newspaper," said parent John Silva, who obtained a copy of the newspaper from a concerned student.

"Because the sex survey was given without prior written notice and subsequent written consent by the parents or guardians, the school violated the law," said Kevin Snider, chief counsel of the Pacific Justice Institute. "By facilitating the newspaper to conduct the survey, we feel the school was complicit in violating the rights of the parents," said Julie Wilson, a parent of a high school student.

SOURCE




New High School qualification introduced by the British Labour party REALLY dumbs education down

Teenagers taking Labour’s new diplomas will learn “far less” about key subjects than A-level students, a Government advisor has warned. Sir Mike Tomlinson, former head of Ofsted, said the Government’s new qualifications in academic subjects would lack some of the “knowledge, content, concept and understanding” offered in other courses – damaging pupils’ chances of getting into university.

The comments are the latest in a series of attacks on diplomas which ministers claim could eventually replace GCSEs and A-levels altogether. The qualifications – for 14 to 19-year-olds – combine classroom study and work-based training. They are currently offered in 10 practical subjects such as media, construction and IT, with plans for seven more in coming years. This includes three in the traditional academic areas of science, languages and humanities.

Sir Mike suggested courses would have no more teaching time than A-levels, despite being far more complicated to run. “My worry is that the result of that may well be that we have far less knowledge, content, concept and understanding in what we do than is currently in A-level, which I think would greatly worry higher education,” he said.

Sir Mike was the author of a 2004 report on the qualifications system, which led to the development of diplomas. Labour has said diplomas could eventually become the “qualification of choice”, replacing existing courses altogether.

But in an interview with the Times Educational Supplement, Sir Mike said: “I think there is a huge commitment to the A-level and until such a time as an alternative is shown to be better than the A-level, people will want to stick with what they know.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "The Diploma is a very new qualification that is still developing. Those that have been introduced are increasingly popular. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions about those that haven’t even started yet.” He added: "Diplomas are delivering the mix of theoretical and practical skills that employers and universities value and for this reason they could indeed become the qualification of choice for young people."

SOURCE





27 February, 2010

Charter schools to become Federal schools?

The Obama administration plans to significantly expand the flow of federal aid to charter schools, money that has driven a 15-year expansion of their numbers, from just a few dozen in the early 1990s to some 5,000 today. But in the first Congressional hearing on rewriting the No Child Left Behind law, lawmakers on Wednesday heard experts, all of them charter school advocates, testify that Washington should also make sure charter schools are properly monitored for their admissions procedures, academic standards and financial stewardship.

The president of one influential charter group told the House Education and Labor Committee that the federal government had spent $2 billion since the mid-1990s to finance new charter schools but less than $2 million, about one-tenth of 1 percent, to ensure that they were held to high standards. “It’s as if the federal government had spent billions for new highway construction, but nothing to put up guardrails along the sides of those highways,” said Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

Charter schools operate mainly with state financing, and with less regulation than traditional public schools. A provision of the No Child law offers federal startup grants, usually in the range of $150,000 per school, to charter organizers to help them plan and staff a new school until they can begin classes and obtain state per-pupil financing. The federal money has provided crucial early support to many successful charter schools, but has also attracted many people with little education experience who have opened chaotic schools that have floundered.

The administration’s proposal for rewriting the law would increase federal financing for charter schools to $490 million in 2011 from about $256 million in 2010. It would also, for the first time, allow the funds to be used to finance additional schools opened by a charter operator, if the original school has been successful.

Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who is the committee chairman and helped write the No Child law, said in opening the hearing that the law’s requirements for annual testing had placed a spotlight on students across the nation who were falling behind. “But we also know the law didn’t get everything right,” he said, “and we cannot afford to wait to fix it.”

Much debate on Wednesday focused on whether charter schools educate disabled children in the same proportion as regular public schools. Thomas Hehir, a Harvard education professor, said that national research on that question had been inadequate, but that his work in the San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston and other school systems had shown that “charters generally serve fewer children with disabilities than traditional public schools.” Furthermore, Mr. Hehir said, charters in some cities educate only a minuscule proportion of students with severe disabilities like mental retardation, in comparison with regular public schools. That, he said, undercuts the assertions by some that charters are outperforming regular schools.

Eileen Ahearn, a project director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, said that charter schools faced unique challenges in educating disabled students but that many nonetheless do so successfully.

SOURCE




British private schools condemn 'social engineering'

Labour’s mission to “socially engineer” university admissions is built on flawed evidence, according to independent school leaders. Ministers are using unreliable research in an attempt to “blackmail” institutions into taking a larger number of pupils from the state sector, it was claimed.

Andrew Grant, chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents 250 top private schools, insisted most “independent-minded” academics and admissions tutors were resisting Government pressure by continuing to prioritise the brightest pupils irrespective of background. But, writing in The Daily Telegraph today, he warned that their ability to select could come under threat.

His comments came as another top head – Richard Cairns, from fee-paying Brighton College – called for all university applications to be “anonymised” to avoid any prejudice during the admissions process.

Vice-chancellors are already warning of a squeeze on university places this year following a record rise in applications. Despite the rush, Prof Steve Smith, the head of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said this month that institutions should still be allowed to make lower grade offers to pupils from poor-performing schools as part of the drive to “widen participation” to university. He quoted research from the Government’s Higher Education Funding Council that suggested students from state schools were more likely to get good degrees when compared with independent school peers on a like-for-like basis.

But Mr Grant said the evidence was “wholly unreliable” because it failed to take account of the fact that privately-educated pupils often took tougher courses. According to national figures, they are far more likely to study subjects such as the sciences and languages at university. Teenagers from the independent sector also take up more places at elite institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge.

The comments came as another headmaster said higher education applications should no longer feature the names of pupils’ schools to end the row over admissions and place all candidates on an equal footing. In a speech to the Army and Navy Club in London, Mr Cairns said: “No bright sixth-former - from a private school or a comprehensive school - should feel that there is some hidden prejudice against them. “In consequence, all applications to university should be anonymous. After all, when they sit their own finals exams their papers are sat anonymously. So it should be at the point of application.

“That way, universities cannot be accused of discrimination, sixth-formers will be certain that they will be judged on their own particular merits and, if state schools continue to be under-represented in our leading universities, ministers will have to face up to the fact that it is their fault - and act to address it.”

He said parents who paid for private education – often “going without new cars and holidays” in the process – increasingly feared their children would miss out on university. “So far, such fears are utterly unfounded,” he said. “Brighton College has 60 former pupils at Oxford or Cambridge, four years ago there were only 25. Nevertheless, the fears persist and that increases uncertainty in all quarters.”

SOURCE




Australia: Frequent weapons seizures in Queensland government schools

Not quite up to the machine pistols that are sometimes seized in British schools, though

MORE than 80 suspensions for violence with weapons or "objects" are handed out every week in Queensland state schools. As the State Government vowed to crack down on student violence and bullying yesterday, figures obtained by The Courier-Mail highlighted the extent of the problem. The figures, released by the Education Department, show more than 10,000 suspensions were handed out to state school students for "physical misconduct involving an object" over the past three financial years. More than two students were expelled every school week last financial year for the violation, with 89 recorded, up from 65 in 2003 to 2004.

Yesterday, Premier Anna Bligh announced state, Catholic and independent school representatives would form the Queensland Schools Alliance Against Violence, which will make recommendations on the best ways to stamp out the growing problem. It follows a recommendation from Professor Ken Rigby in his report on how the state is dealing with bullying, and the alleged fatal stabbing of 12-year-old Elliott Fletcher in his school's toilets at Shorncliffe last week.

Premier Anna Bligh acknowledged there was an "alarming culture of school violence", with the alliance set to address it. But Opposition deputy leader Lawrence Springborg accused the Government of "more talk and no action", saying it had established a youth violence taskforce in 2006 and claimed to have implemented its recommendations in 2009.

Education figures show there were 2797 short suspensions for "physical misconduct involving an object" in state schools last year, down from a six-year high in 2007 to 2008 when 3064 were recorded. But long suspensions – between six and 20 days – have climbed annually over the past six years in the category, reaching 456 in 2008 to 2009.

Education deputy director-general Lyn McKenzie said the type of objects used in the suspensions could include pencils and sticks, as well as knives. Replica guns have also been wielded by students.

Ms Bligh said while bullying had always existed, the playground no longer ended at the school fence and had been radically changed by technology, including social networking sites. She said the alliance would focus on preventative measures but also look at security and violent incidents in schools, including the use of weapons. The group is expected to meet within the weeks and start delivering recommendations within months.

SOURCE





26 February, 2010

Critics: "Anti-discrimination" bill “stifles free speech, advances ‘agenda’”

A bill in Congress that would prohibit discrimination in public schools based on sexual orientation or gender identity could stifle free speech and even lead to "homosexual indoctrination" in the nation's classrooms, critics say.

The Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA), or H.R. 4530, was introduced late last month by Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, with 60 co-sponsors. Polis, the first openly gay man elected to the House as a nonincumbent, said the legislation will put lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students on "equal footing" with their peers, much as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did for minorities and Title IX did for women. "Hatred has no place in the classroom," Polis, a Democrat, said in a statement on Jan. 27. "Every student has the right to an education free from harassment and violence. This bill will protect the freedoms of our students and enshrine the values of equality and opportunity in the classroom."

But some critics say the bill, if passed, could lead to murky definitions of harassment and provide a universal approach to the nation's public schools despite regional differences on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues. "The real danger is how this will be interpreted," said Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank. "The definition of harassment could be broadly interpreted that anybody who expressed a totally legitimate opinion about homosexual behavior could be made illegal. "That's a violation of those kids who want to express opposition to LGBT opinions or behavior. People have a legitimate reason to be concerned about this -- not because they're 'haters' but because you're now trying to balance different rights."

Other critics, meanwhile, say the bill will be used to push what they say is a homosexual agenda in public schools. "It seems pretty consistent with Kevin Jennings being appointed in the Obama administration," said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit public interest law firm, referring to the controversial founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network who now serves as the assistant deputy secretary for the Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools.

Jennings came under fire in September after acknowledging he should have better handled an incident in 1988 when he was a teacher and failed to report that a boy he believed was 15 years old told him he was having sex with an older man. (Since that time, the former student, referred to as "Brewster," has revealed he was 16 years old, the age of consent in Massachusetts, at the time of the incident.)

"When [Jennings] founded GLSEN, his idea of a safe school was one that pushed a radical homosexual agenda by even encouraging first and second-graders to engage in homosexual activity," Staver said. "So I think that's the impetus behind this bill. We have an administration that wants to push a radical social agenda."

According to the bill, discrimination against students based on sexual orientation or gender identity represents a "distinct and especially severe problem" that has contributed to high dropout and absenteeism rates, adverse health consequences and academic underachievement. "When left unchecked, discrimination, including harassment, bullying, intimidation and violence, in schools based on sexual orientation or gender identity can lead, and has lead [sic] to, life-threatening violence and to suicide," the bill reads.

Federal civil rights statutes explicitly address discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, disability and national origin, but they do not include "sexual orientation" or gender identity. "As a result, students and parents have often had limited legal recourse to redress for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity," the bill continues.

H.R. 4530 is closely modeled after Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex. It contains the threat of loss of federal funding for non-compliant schools and says that no state may be immune under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution from suit in federal court for violating the Act.

If this is passed," McCluskey said, "it's going to almost certainly in some places be interpreted far too broadly, and free-speech rights will be trampled."

Numerous liberal-leaning groups -- including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign and GLSEN -- quickly applauded the legislation when it was introduced. GLSEN Executive Director Eliza Byard said discrimination based on sexual orientation is a "pervasive problem" that negatively affects student performance.

Eighty-six percent of gay, bisexual or transgender students experience harassment at school due to their sexual orientation, and one-third -- five times higher than a national sample of all students -- missed a day of school in the past month because of feeling unsafe, according to GLSEN's 2007 National School Climate Survey. "Discrimination of any kind is wrong," Byard said in a statement. "Far too many schools do nothing to address the hostile environments that LGBT students face. We owe it to our children to do everything we can to make sure that discrimination is eliminated from our schools."

But critics say enacting federal law is not the solution. Matthew Ladner, vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based government watchdog group, agreed that discrimination of any kind is a "bad thing," but he questioned whether federal law will resolve differences of opinion regarding LGBT rights. "Those kinds of conflicts are not resolvable by a federal mandate," he said. "The question is, is there a one-size-fits-all policy for every school in the country on this? It's more appropriate to settle it on the state and local level. Some states would be far more in favor of this than others."

Staver, of the Liberty Council, said the legislation is intolerant of any "opposing or traditional" views and called on Congress to be more focused on the country's economic woes, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the threat of terrorism. "Those are serious matter that I think American people are concerned with," he said. He said he doesn't think the bill, which has bipartisan support, will pass, saying it's "completely contrary" to American values.

Asked if the Obama administration supports the measure, White House spokesman Shin Inouye said: "While we have not reviewed this specific legislation, the President believes that every child should learn in a safe and secure school environment."

SOURCE




A New Threat to Free Speech on Campus

This past fall, a student group known as “Temple University Purpose” (TUP) invited the controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders to give a speech on campus. Wilders, one of the leading European critics of Islamism and a possible future prime minister in the Netherlands, was slated to show Fitna, his provocative documentary showing how Muslim jihadists draw their inspiration from the Koran not by distorting its message but by taking its mandates literally. When finalizing the arrangements for Wilders’ appearance, TUP’s student leaders and Temple administrators agreed that the university would cover the necessary security costs for the event, as it does for all speakers. But as campus leftists stepped up attacks on administrators for allowing Wilders’ appearance, the university began to look for the exit sign. It settled on a back handed way of throttling free speech that is increasingly being employed by other schools, USC and UC Santa Barbara among them—forcing conservative student groups to pay costs for controversial speakers whose appearances become security problems because the campus left threatens violently to disrupt them.

When word of Wilders’ scheduled appearance was made public, Temple’s Muslim Students Association (MSA) pressured the administration to cancel the event. Despite its pedigree as a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, Temple’s MSA has standing with school administrators as an ethnic grievance group. But it was the implied threat behind their aggrieved protests about the speech that got the university’s attention—to raise hell if Wilders was allowed to appear. Yet Temple was in a bind because it had already okayed the event. Wilders might be controversial, but he was a figure of international stature. However provocative his message, suddenly reversing course and subjecting it to heavy handed censorship would cast the university in a bad light.

Temple let the Dutch politician complete his presentation, though the question-and-answer session had to be cut short when a number of students shouted threats at him, forcing security men to escort him from the stage. But six weeks after the event, on December 3, TUP received an unexpected $800 invoice from Temple University – to cover the costs associated with having provided extra security personnel “to secure the room and building” for Wilders’ appearance. When TUP’s interim president Brittany Walsh reminded Temple administrators, in writing, that they had agreed to pay any extra security costs associated with Wilders’ appearance, she was stonewalled. Walsh and TUP turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the free speech rights of students.

FIRE vice president Robert Shibley was shocked by the way Temple had used the fees to cast a chill on campus free speech and also, in effect, to bankrupt TUP and make it unable to bring other conservative speakers to campus. “In our nation,” Shirley said, “it is unconstitutional to charge a student group extra fees for security simply because a speaker’s views are controversial or don’t meet with the approval of Temple University administrators.” In a letter to Temple president Ann Weaver Hart, FIRE cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement, which determined that a local government could not charge higher-than-customary fees for police protection at events simply because they were controversial – reasoning that “speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.” As a public university, Temple was bound to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision. Just last week Valerie I. Harrison, Temple’s associate university counsel, notified FIRE that the school was waiving the $800 fee for TUP, though she offered no explanation for the decision.

But Temple’s retreat does not mean that this novel means of throttling free speech has been abandoned by administrators anxious to placate campus radicals. A similar controversy arose last November at the University of Southern California (USC), when the College Republicans hosted an appearance by guest speaker David Horowitz. The group was subsequently billed $1,400, ostensibly to cover the cost of additional security that the university had unilaterally arranged for the event. Ultimately a few angry trustees were able to convince the administration to drop these extra charges, although, in a manner reminiscent of the Temple case, USC’s administrators offered no explanation as to why they had reversed course.

Now another confrontation is brewing, this time at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), where former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove is slated to speak (and introduce his new book, Courage and Consequence) on February 25, at the invitation of the school’s College Republicans. Up to now, the projected cost of the event was expected to be $25,000, of which more than half ($12,933) would be covered by Associated Students, a nonprofit organization funded by undergraduate fees. But now, a local group known as SB Anti War, characterizing Rove as a “war criminal,” has announced that it plans to protest the event; some members have threatened to throw paint on Rove, leaving the implication that significant violence was possible if the event went forward.

According to Ryan McNicholas, the College Republicans’ event coordinator, the protest being organized by the left has caused security costs for Rove’s appearance to skyrocket. “Because of protester threatens to throw paint on Rove,” he says, “we have had to redirect more of the funds we received into security costs…. It’s costing us somewhere around $900 an hour to have all the Campus Security Officers and UCPD officers necessary to secure the area. And it’s absolutely ridiculous to force a small organization, like College Republicans, to foot that bill.”

In addition to its plans to demonstrate against Rove’s appearance, SB Anti War has been collecting signatures in an effort to rescind the funding that Associated Students has pledged for the event. The vice president of Associated Students, Chris Wendle, says the original decision to fund the Rove event was unrelated to latter’s character or political persuasion. Rather, it was in accordance with the legal code of even handedness that governs Associated Students. “We have to follow the rules,” Wendle explains. “We’re not going to debate the political opinion of an event, regardless of whether or not it’s Karl Rove. Basically, our decision to provide funding was objective.”

It remains to be seen whether the UCSB College Republicans, like Temple University Purpose and the USC College Republicans before them, will be able to fight off a campus left and its enablers in the administration trying asphyxiate their first amendment rights by a technique morally akin to the poll tax in the Jim Crow South. But even if they do, the era of fees and assessments to keep conservative groups from bringing another point of view onto the monochromatic university is upon us.

SOURCE




British Conservatives would scrap new legal burden for homeschoolers

The Tories would scrap a new duty that requires parents who educate their children at home to be registered with councils. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said that he would block plans which “stigmatise” home educators. Under the Children, Schools and Families Bill, which has almost finished going through Parliament, local authorities will setup databases of home-educating families and visit them to ensure that standards are met.

It came after a report into home education by Graham Badman, a former headteacher and director of children’s services, published last summer, who said that there was a need for greater regulation. England has one of the most liberal approaches to home schooling in the Western world and it is not known exactly how many children are taught at home, nor whether they are reaching an acceptable standard of education.

In a debate yesterday on the timesonline blog, Schoolgate, one parent said: “Home educators have no faith in government after being treated so badly by Labour. How can that be rectified?”

Mr Gove said that he thought parents who educated their children at home did a wonderful job. He said: “Government should support them and we won’t allow the current Government’s plans to stigmatise home educators to get through.” Mr Gove promised that clauses of the Bill relating to home education would never become law if the Tories won power in the general election.

A report into home education last year revealed a lack of regulation. It said: “It is a cause of concern that, although approximately 20,000 home-educated children are known to local authorities, estimates vary as to the real number which could be in excess of 80,000.” Mr Badman, its author, added: “I am not persuaded that under the current regulatory regime, that there is a correct balance between the rights of the parents and the rights of the child — either to an appropriate education or to be safe from harm.”

The review found evidence of a small number of extreme cases, where home-educated children had suffered harm because concerns were not picked up. Its recommendations, which were accepted in full by the Government, included parents having to submit statements of what they intend to teach over the coming year. It also said that local authority officials should have the right of access to parents’ homes, after two weeks’ notice, to check the child is making progress.

A spokeswoman for the Action for Home Education group said: “For years home educators have tolerated unfair treatment by local authorities whose understanding of home-based education is, with few exceptions, minimal or non-existent. We are tired of being subjected to unreasonable suspicion and unfair scrutiny when we are doing the very best for our children. “We believe there are moves afoot by government to restrict traditional freedoms to educate children outside the school system and we are determined to do our utmost to prevent this.”

SOURCE





25 February, 2010

Chaotic race obsession in San Francisco schools

After years of complaints from parents, the San Francisco Unified School District has just taken a serious step toward revamping its well-meaning but labyrinthine student-assignment system, which decides the educational homes for tens of thousands of children.

The current system — designed to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-fought federal desegregation case — involves a complicated computer algorithm that creates student “profiles,” using various economic and educational factors, with the aim of sending students of different backgrounds to the same schools. It has resulted instead in more segregation and has aggravated parents to a point where efforts to manipulate the system have become endemic.

This month, the school district rolled out a new plan. It is designed to more closely consider proximity between a student’s home and classroom. It is to be applied to every child headed for kindergarten. And once again, no one seems completely happy. “I’ll be honest with you; we’re really frustrated,” said Michelle Menegaz, the chairwoman of the Parent Advisory Council, which was established by the school board and has made recommendations on how to fix the assignment system. “We’re really concerned that what’s being put forward now doesn’t reflect the best of our research and it doesn’t reflect the needs the community expressed.”

What everyone agrees on is that the current system is broken. In a quarter of San Francisco’s public schools, more than 60 percent of the student body is of a single race, and academic performance by black, Latino and Samoan students continues to lag. In theory, parents choose up to seven schools for their child, but 20 percent of kindergarteners get none of their parents’ choices.

All of which has been a boon for private schools; San Francisco has a larger percentage of students in private schools — nearly 3 out of 10 — than any other major city in the state. Others families simply move away.

And while advocates of the new plan say it offers more flexibility and simplicity, whether that will be the case is unclear. At a school board meeting on Wednesday, Commissioner Jill Wynns seemed perplexed as to whether the plan would meet the board’s elusive goals of diversity and transparency. “If you don’t know it can be done,” Ms. Wynn said of the redesign team, “how can we trust it will be done?”

Such questions are ringing in the ears of parents throughout the city, especially those — like this reporter — who have a child entering kindergarten in the fall.

Here is how the current system works: Let’s say a 5-year-old — we’ll call him Jake, like my son — wants to go to kindergarten. His parents fill out an application and list seven schools they prefer. The more desirable schools get more applications than they have seats; in some cases that ratio is 20 to 1. That’s where the Diversity Index comes in. Known as “the lottery,” the index uses five factors to determine a child’s profile: poverty level, socio-economic status, English-language proficiency, academic achievement and, for upper grades, the quality of the student’s previous school.

Once that profile is built, the child is placed in one of his selected schools, in a class of students whose collective profile is as different from his own profile as possible. As each child is added, the class profile is adjusted, and more “most different” children are placed. Students living near their selected schools are considered first. The district also gives preference to children who have siblings at the same school and apply on time.

But there is no guarantee that a child will get in a selected school. And once the lottery has filled all the slots, those soon-to-be kindergartners who get into none of their choices are offered a place in a school with open positions. Proximity to their home and transportation are considered.

Designed to be race-neutral, the system has instead been widely criticized as too complex and opaque. “It’s all magic and voodoo,” Ms. Menegaz said, only half joking.

What Superintendent Carlos A. Garcia has now proposed is essentially a new algorithm that, in addition to siblings, weighs proximity to schools more heavily and — in a new wrinkle — considers whether a student attended pre-K in the same area as a selected school.

The fine points are of great interest — or frustration — to parents. But the discussion of the overall goal, diversity, is laced with the themes of race, class and equity. So discussions about it are awkward. For example, school officials say that part of the problem with the assignment system is that parental interest and resources can be inherently unequal. White and Asian parents tend to be very involved in the early stages of the process, while black and Latino ones are less so. The result is that more white and Asian children end up in preferred schools. ‘The applicant pools are not diverse,” said Orla O’Keeffe, the district official charged with redesigning the system.

In addition, schools in some low-income neighborhoods also tend to be less well-attended, draining the intangibles — and the fund-raising — that large and active parent-teacher associations can provide. “Not all of our schools are equal,” Ms. Menegaz said. “They’re not equally staffed, not equally resourced and not equally supported.”

All of which has led to a kind of obsessive paranoia among some parents, who chatter about the process endlessly. Amy Graff, a 35-year-old mother of two who writes about parenting at sfgate.com, became an online celebrity in parent circles when she blogged about trying to place her daughter in a good kindergarten, a process she called “crazy and irrational.” “The school you pick becomes your identity,” Ms. Graff said.

The process of picking a school involves many complicated decisions. Then there are the tours, an exercise wherein dozens of nervous parents — many armed with pads and pens, others taking notes on iPods — try to glean a sense of a school by crowding into classrooms and peering around for clues. Are there A-B-Cs on the walls? Are there computers? Are there cute drawings? (The answers are almost always yes, yes, and yes.)

Hopes are raised and dashed. At Grattan Elementary School — in the trendy Cole Valley neighborhood — I was part of a tour that was told about a fantastic kindergarten teacher who was retiring.

The school district tries to help. Every fall it hosts an enrollment fair. Every school in the city sets up a booth and tries to sell itself. (With financing tied to number of students, under-enrollment is a sin to be avoided.) The fair can be one-stop-shopping, and the resulting crush often resembles a middle-aged mosh pit, as parents jostle to grab brochures and ask questions.

There are reasons to be impressed. One of the strengths of the San Francisco schools is their ambitious language programs. And test scores from San Francisco public schools have regularly risen over the last decade, and are now within shouting distance of the state’s performance targets, lagging slightly behind San Jose but well ahead of Oakland and Los Angeles.

Still, the continuing debate over the best way to achieve diversity has led some to question the priorities. Zach Berkowitz, a San Francisco native and real estate developer who has two children, including a son about to enter kindergarten, said he remembered the conversations about diversity when he was a student. “Thirty years ago we were fighting about the same thing,” Mr. Berkowitz said. “And not once do they talk about education.”

As for my Jake, and thousands of other San Francisco children, admission offers will be mailed on March 12. Not that he seems too concerned exactly where. “I like going to school, Daddy,” he told me recently. “In San Francisco.”

SOURCE




We don’t need no state education

Someone recently said that a particular elementary charter school is a big improvement over government schools because the kids have longer days there and are already thinking about college. I wonder if that’s really an improvement. Kids spend too much time in the authoritarian classroom environment as it is. Homeschoolers are proud of how little time they have to put in to cover the state-required subjects.

And the “everybody must go to college” doctrine is hardly a blessing. How many young people are delivering pizzas with a diploma on the wall and a big student loan keeping them up at night? It’s true that the watered-down, increasingly worthless bachelor’s degree today is expected for nearly every job, but let’s not fool ourselves: For most grads it’s little more than a signal to potential employers that they had the perseverance to get up early four years running and jump through all the required hoops. That tells a human-resources (that term!) director enough about an applicant to separate her from a rival who didn’t to those things. It doesn’t say anything about what she knows or can do.

Charter schools and vouchers are much talked about, but they are objectionable on multiple counts. For one thing, they accept the premise that taxpayers should pay for schooling and that cross-subsidization is something government should compel. These things open the door to government control of private, independent schools. Yes, private schools are already regulated by every state, but they are not as regulated as the government’s own schools are. If the voucher plan is ever embraced in a big way, we can expect elaborate criteria for determining which schools may accept vouchers—and which may not.

Advocates of school choice ought to take seriously what some statists have long recognized. The Democrat Leadership Council pointed out some years ago that “A public school is not defined by who ‘owns’ it, but rather by two features: universal access and accountability to the public for results.” Therefore it matters little “whether public schools are run by a local school board, a group of parents, a teachers union, a Fortune 500 company, or the Little Sisters of the Poor.”

In other words, once “public money” is flowing to private schools, they are no longer really private. The government’s hooks will be firmly set, in the name of “public accountability.” “Follow the money” is not a bad piece of advice, but in this matter a better one is: Trace the money back to its source. That will provide good a indication of what to expect of its recipients.

Competition and Entrepreneurship

As long as politicians, bureaucrats, and anointed education experts control the money, competition and entrepreneurship will never reach full blossom. Competition, Hayek taught, is a discovery process, so until entrepreneurship can operate without political inhibition, we won’t know what we are missing. Providers of educational services — must they be schools? — should be accountable not to bureaucrats but to customers — parents and their children. Yet the various “school choice” plans maintain the State as the ultimate judge.

When education entrepreneurs need worry only about actual and potential customers who are laying out their own money — and not State functionaries — the political inhibitions will be gone, or at least will begin to fade. (As for the poor, see this.) Creativity will be unleashed and children’s individuality respected. Joseph Priestley, the scientist, classical-liberal political philosopher, and religious Dissenter wrote in An Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty,

[I]f we argue from the analogy of education to other arts which are most similar to it, we can never expect to see human nature, about which it is employed, brought to perfection, but in consequence of indulging unbounded liberty, and even caprice in conducting it…. From new, and seemingly irregular methods of education, perhaps something extraordinary and uncommonly great may spring. At least there would be a fair chance for such productions; and if something odd and excentric [sic] should, now and then, arise from this unbounded liberty of education, the various business of human life may afford proper spheres for such excentric geniuses.

The last thing we should expect from carefully guided “school choice” plans delivered by legislators and education experts is “unbounded liberty, and even caprice.”

It is only once education is free of the State’s yoke that we may begin to rethink the whole idea of school. It certainly needs rethinking. In the nineteenth century a Prussian-trained elite set out to take education away from parents so that children could be molded into homogeneous “good citizens” ready to take their designated places in the factories, bureaucracy, and military. Schools were correctional institutions. Things have changed little since then. Today the rationale for control by an elite is to prepare children for the competitive “global marketplace” that America’s leaders are constructing and determined to lead. (It’s hardly a bona fide free market.) The current White House occupant lectured the children last September that if they do poorly in school, they let their country down. (Conservatives applauded that message, relieved that Obama didn’t pitch his health care plan.)

From the beginning the government’s schools were dressed in the mantle of science. But as philosopher Bruce Goldberg wrote in Why Schools Fail, it is pseudoscience:

What one finds in schools is, not scientifically justified activities, but an assortment of tasks based on various educators’ subjective views of what knowledge is “worthwhile” or “nutritious” or “civilizing.” Those views are then transformed into scientific truths by labeling them as such. And, finally, the claim is made that children are being shaped, for their own good, by a process that has been shown scientifically to be indispensable for proper mental development. In every one of its guises that claim — and the authoritarian treatment of children based on it — is false.

But its falsity did not prevent huge, impersonal schools bureaucracies and dehumanizing schools from being built, mills for which our children are little more than grist. Finally ending the State’s monopoly — which means taking away the money — will let us bring education back to human scale, with all the respect for individuality that this implies.

SOURCE




British professor who claimed that degrees were dumbed down wins his case

But it's a long hard road for those who defend academic standards in modern-day Britain

An academic who took a stand against “dumbing down” the quality of university degrees won a long-running legal battle yesterday when the Court of Appeal accepted that he was forced out of his job. Professor Paul Buckland will be entitled to compensation from Bournemouth University after a previous ruling against him by the Employment Appeal Tribunal was overturned.

He resigned from the university’s chair of environmental archaeology in a dispute over marking after he failed 18 out of 60 second-year undergraduates who took examinations in 2006. When 16 of the students retook the paper, Professor Buckland failed all but two of them. He thought that “many of the papers were of poor quality”, the Court of Appeal heard. A second marker endorsed his scores, as did the university’s board of examiners, although it took note of the high failure rate and the need to address its causes.

But his department then had the exam papers marked for a third time and the marks were increased by up to six percentage points, moving several students from a “clear fail” to a “potential pass” depending on other results, the court heard.

Professor Buckland, who lives in Sheffield, took exception to the papers being marked for a third time, claiming that it was done “by somebody who did not have the relevant expert knowledge”. He accused Bournemouth University of cheapening degrees and making “a complete mockery of the examination process”. He claimed that the move was “part of a much larger process of dumbing down” and amounted to “an unequivocal affront to his integrity”.

The university held an internal inquiry that found in Professor Buckland’s favour. It said that he should have been consulted on the decision to mark the exam papers for a third time. But he remained unhappy and resigned in February 2007. He took the university to an employment tribunal, which decided in August 2008 that there had been a “fundamental breach of the implied term of trust and confidence” in his employment contract and that he had been constructively dismissed.

The decision was overruled in March last year by the Employment Appeal Tribunal but the Court of Appeal rejected that judgment yesterday and restored the original ruling.

Lord Justice Sedley said that the university could not defend the way it had undermined Professor Buckland’s status and it was the “inexorable outcome” that he had been constructively dismissed. Lord Justice Jacob said that it “ought to be entirely at the wronged party’s choice” whether to accept a repudiatory breach of contract and resign, or carry on in the job. If the university does not settle with him, Professor Buckland’s case will go to an employment tribunal for the level of compensation to be assessed.

SOURCE




Phonics to be enforced as part of literacy teaching throughout Australia

Ideology replaced by what works

ALL states and territories will be forced to follow a set program for teaching reading under the first national English curriculum, which stipulates the letters, sounds and words students must learn in each year of school. The curriculum, obtained by The Australian, dictates what students from kindergarten until the end of Year 9 are expected to know and be able to do in English, history, science and maths.

The English curriculum, to be released for public consultation next week, enshrines the importance of teaching letter-sound combinations, or phonics, giving examples of the sounds and words to be taught from the start of school. Students in their prep year will learn to sound out simple words such as "cat", recognising the initial, middle and end sounds; by Year 1, they will have learned two consonant sounds such as "st", "br" and "gl".

The national curriculum ends the piecemeal approach to what is taught in schools, with state curriculums emphasising different course content and teaching it at different stages of school. The new curriculum is a detailed document that provides specific examples and is longer than many existing state syllabuses, some of which are a couple of pages long for each subject.

The curriculum for the senior years of school, from Years 10 to 12, will be released separately by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority later this year.

The English curriculum places a strong emphasis on the study of grammar, from learning different classes of words such as verbs and nouns in the early years through to the difference between finite and non-finite clauses in high school. In a speech to the National Press Club yesterday, Education Minister Julia Gillard welcomed the "strong appearance" of grammar in the national curriculum. Announcing its release next Monday, she said the curriculum set out the essential content for each year of learning as well as the achievement standards students should be expected to perform.

"This will not be a curriculum `guide' or a supplement to what states and territories currently teach," she said. "It will be a comprehensive new curriculum, providing a platform for the highest quality teaching."

Ms Gillard also outlined the next phase of Labor's education revolution, including the external assessment of schools and the introduction of student identity numbers to enable parents and schools to track a child's individual progress through school.

After the speech, a spokesman for Ms Gillard said the government would investigate different systems for assessing school performance in coming months, including a form of school inspectors and the method used in Britain, where the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills conducts detailed inspections of schools and publishes its findings. "The government believes that some external inspection or assessment of schools would be an additional way of ensuring that our schools are providing the best possible education for our children." the spokesman said.

Ms Gillard said the government would examine "how every school can get the right support and scrutiny to make sure it is performing well and improving in the areas where it needs to improve".

The idea of external assessment of schools was mooted by the national teachers union for public education, the Australian Education Union, in a charter of school accountability reported by The Australian in December. The AEU proposal advocates a system of regular assessments against a set of standards by a panel of principals, teachers and education experts, and then working with struggling schools to lift performance. AEU federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said yesterday teachers wanted to see the detail of the government's proposal on school assessment before giving their support, although they were still committed to the principle of accountability and external review.

"But the government must consult with teachers," he said. "We're seeing announcement after announcement without consultation and the Rudd government has to realise that it needs to consult with the profession. "Ultimately, we're the ones who implement education policy." Mr Gavrielatos said the union was also not opposed in principle to the idea of student identity numbers and welcomed moves to improve the measure of student progress than that currently used on the My School website.

Tony Abbott said students already had unique identifiers in the form of names, and questioned why their results could not be tracked using their names.

SOURCE





24 February, 2010

Deep Thoughts in Plain White English

by Mike Adams

Dr. Adams,

My name is Claire. I am working on a story for the school newspaper, The (UNCW) Seahawk, about Dr. Maurice Martinez and his philosophy regarding Black English in his classroom. I would appreciate the opportunity to ask you a few questions on your views about this issue. I have read your column for Townhall.com and I am very interested in hearing your side of the debate about Black English. Please take some time to think about these questions and get back to me as soon as you have time. Thank you for your time.

Hello Claire. I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that I do not do interviews with the school newspaper because it has a 100% rate of error in representing my opinions. This is not because the reporters tend to be stupid. It is because they tend to be liberal and, therefore, tend to suffer from severe moral rather than intellectual hernia. For example, the last time your paper ran a story on one of my opinion pieces it was insinuated that I wished to bomb gay bath houses in San Francisco although there actually aren’t any gay bath houses in San Francisco. Thankfully, the paper stopped short of accusing me of attempting to rape a unicorn.

But there is good news. I am going to respond to all five questions you have submitted by making them the subject of my Monday column on TownHall.com. That way, the paper will not be able to misrepresent my views as they have in the past. TownHall.com is the premier conservative political website in America. So when university administrators try to attack my views it is sort of like Michael Jackson trying to attack Mike Tyson. It also keeps the university newspaper honest.

1. What is your response to Black English being taught in a UNCW classroom? What purpose does it serve to you?

My response is that I am developing a new course proposal to be submitted directly to UNC Wilmington Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo. It will be called EDN 201 “White English.” I’m going to spend an entire semester differentiating White English from Black English and see how long it takes for me to be removed from the classroom.

While I am on leave I will write a book about my experiences. I plan to call it Redneck Jihad: The Art of Sacred Cow Tipping. So my response to your question about “what purpose” this is serving me is simple. I plan to make money off the stupidity of far left professors just as I’ve been doing for years. I plan to use the profits from their stupidity to buy more firearms and go on more hunting trips.

2. Dr. Martinez teaches that one reason for implementing this philosophy is so children who speak this dialect won't be "condemned" for the way the [sic] speak; are his teaching methods an appropriate way to address "No Child Left Behind"?

No, absolutely not. The best way to address “No Child Left Behind” is to repeal it. The Republican Party leaders had it right in the 1980s when they considered eliminating the Department of Education. The federal government has had no business interfering with local schools since we had to send in the National Guard in the 1950s to stop racist Democrats from keeping little black kids from attending the public schools in Arkansas. I think we should get rid of the Department of Education after we first repeal “No Child Left Behind.” That program just proves that George W. Bush was really a big-spending liberal posing as a conservative.

3. Black English is a social dialect that has been defined by sociolinguists, and many claim that more knowledge could be learned to bridge the gap between social dialects and Standard English to help students in school; does this bring validity to Dr. Martinez and his claims, or is his "street talk" best left to the streets?

No, it does not bring validity to Dr. Martinez and his claims. Dr. Martinez was asked to defend his teaching of Black English in the wake of my column last week. This was done at a Black Faculty meeting. Afterwards, a black faculty member who was clearly angry with Martinez called my office. He claimed that Martinez had told them that in his class there were only a few pages of notes on Black English. I sent him the entire 75 page power point presentation. Now, that black faculty member is even angrier with Dr. Martinez. Dr. Martinez has suffered a very severe and self-inflicted blow to his credibility.

4. Controversy has stemmed from the naming of this dialect: is it racist to label Black English as "Black"?

It is not really racist but it is offensive. But I find the United Negro College Fund to be more offensive. Not to mention the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Oh yes, and the Black Faculty meetings at UNCW are offensive, too. Maybe Chancellor DePaolo could reinstate the “white” and “colored” restrooms in the name of diversity, tolerance, and inclusion.

5. In your column, you stated that many parents should request their tuition money back. Why do you feel that Black English is a waste of funds?

Well, thanks for asking about my feelings. I like talking about my feelings. But my feelings about Black English require little elaboration. Black English just makes me feel filthy when I repeat it. Kind of like when the feminists chant the c-word in The Vagina Monologues. In White Redneck English we say “At (not “dat”) just ain’t right.” By way of analogy, imagine that you see a large pile of dog manure in your front yard. There’s no need to walk over to the pile and pick it up to know it is manure. There’s no need to rub it on your face or take a bite out of it to know it is manure. You do not have to “immerse” yourself in it or in any way analyze it to know it is manure. You just need to scoop it off your lawn before someone steps on it and tracks it into your hizzie.

It’s the same way with Black English. It is self-evident that it is simply pseudo-intellectual manure. It has no place in higher education.

SOURCE




Islamic Indoctrination vs. Education

by Nonie Darwish

Remember the Muslim Television executive, Muzzammil Hassan, who decapitated his wife near Buffalo, New York? His TV station, Bridges TV, was created to promote the idea that Islam is a religion of peace and friendship. This station’s goals perfectly fit with the intense Saudi PR machine, which is spending tons of money to change the image of Islam in the West — even if it takes denials, fabrications and outright lies.

Several years ago, I debated Othman Shibly, a U.S. citizen of Syrian origin and a Sharia expert, on a Bridges TV program directed by his son, Hassan Shibly. Both bearded men are fierce apologists for Radical Islam and defend Sharia. Dr. Shibly holds a Sufi/Radical Islamist ideology and hides behind a thin veneer of “moderate” Islam, but that façade does not fool someone like myself from the same background. The Shiblys make no attempt to repudiate the claims of men like Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, or other radical Islamists like Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the Mufti of the Syrian Ministry of Religion under the regimes of both Hafiz and Bashar Assad and Kuftaro’s protégé, Sheikh Rajab Deeb. My interview with the two men was never aired and the Shiblys never sent me a copy of the taped interview as they promised.

That brings me to an email I recently received from a concerned American mother, who said that she was horrified at what her child is being taught by Islamic guest speakers at her child’s high school, Clarence High School in Clarence, New York. The speakers are none other than Hassan and Othman Shibly, who are now lecturing our kids on Islam at New York state public schools. That is done with the help of politically correct apologist educators.

Under their curriculum on the Ancient World, the New York State public schools as well as many other states around the country, require students to be taught about Islam, the spread of Islam, the Golden Age of Islam and the conflict between Muslims and Christians as part of the Crusades. That topic almost always turns political and accusatory when Muslims get very emotional about their history, jihad and religion. Islam by nature is extremely political and promotes a very elaborate legal system that Muslims must live under. To accommodate Islamic education with Western principals of freedom and the Bill of Rights is an impossible task. The two ideologies are at opposite poles in terms of the role of government, human rights, as well as women and minority rights.

Thus, the two systems must eventually become villains. To avoid being politically incorrect, public schools prefer to use Muslims experts or clerics rather than public school teachers to teach the topic of Islam. Our educational hierarchy refuses to see that many devout Muslim experts have a political agenda and are themselves indoctrinated and thus always on the defensive or offensive. I can only imagine what the poor American kids are subjected to. I was on the receiving end of such indoctrination when I was a young Muslim girl.

This is what the mother wrote to me:

“Hello Mrs. Darwish:

I need your help addressing a serious problem I’m currently trying to handle. Recently, my child came home from school and told me about a presentation his Global Studies 9 class had that was given by a man by the name of Hassan Shibly. My child was shocked and visibly shaken at home and told me about the things this man said to the class. The pretext for the presentation was for Mr. Shibly to talk to the class about Islam and dispel some of the ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘Islamophobia.’ Here are some of the things he said to these boys and girls:

‘ The September 11th attacks occurred because of America’s blind support of Israel and the men who carried out the attack were not Muslims, but atheists.’

‘Terrorism is an example of people reacting with their hearts and not their minds…if someone insulted your mother, wouldn’t you retaliate against them? Allah is more important than anything to a Muslim, and if you insult Allah, a Muslim can do anything to defend his belief.’

‘The news media lie…when a Muslim does something, they’re labeled as a Muslim while people of other religions who commit crimes are never identified by their religion.’”

She added that Hassan Shibly’s father, Othman, also came to speak at the school but to a different class. She expressed her outrage that these men were invited into a school to indoctrinate underage, impressionable minds with hate a filled ideology and a hidden agenda. She stated that she alerted the principal to a few links that show Shibly’s affiliations and added that she doesn’t think the principal is convinced. She concluded by saying that so far a decision has not been made whether to bring the Shilbys back to teach or not.

I was speechless after reading this woman’s e-mail. That is outrageous and what is worse is that I have heard similar claims from mothers in California where I live. I wanted to tell all the concerned mothers of America to stand up against this kind of “education” and never feel helpless. We must all speak out before the indoctrination strikes America at the heart. Perhaps this can be one of the causes of the Tea Party Movement. There are powerful forces trying to indoctrinate American children when it comes to Islam. Like I was as a Muslim kid, our kids are being discouraged and shamed from thinking for themselves when it comes to 9/11 or finding out the truth about Islamic terrorism. Their minds must never wander or, Allah forbid, blame Muslim culture or Islam for producing a never ending flow of terrorists.

Muslim propaganda is relentless in trying to misportray Islam in the eyes of the West. While mainstream mosques and Muslim leaders across the globe are shouting jihad, death to America, death to the Jews, and encouraging Muslims to take over the West, our children are told if you fear such threats you are an Islamophobe. When mainstream Muslim schools and universities teach that apostates must be killed and that jihad means “to war with non-Muslims to establish the religion” and that jihad is a permanent war institution against Jews Christians and pagans, we are told to never dare misinterpret this as encouraging violence. Islamic education, like communism and Fascism, must control children’s minds, which is the best system to produce adults who will submit.

I am not the one who compared Islam to communism and fascism; this comparison was made by none other than the most prominent Muslim scholar of the 20th century, Sheikh Abu Ala Maududi, who stated in his book, “Islamic Law and Constitution,” on p. 262, that the Islamic State:

“seeks to mould every aspect of life and activity…. In such a state no one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private. Considered from this aspect the Islamic State bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.” Maududi added “Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam.”

I wonder if the Shiblys will condemn this popular Muslim scholar to their students or perhaps call him an atheist.

Muslim petro-dollar powers have penetrated our educational system with permission and support from the highest levels of our governments. I cannot blame many teachers and school principles forced to teach this garbage and who are themselves subjected to demeaning sensitivity training on Islam. I blame the people on the top who are hell-bent on promoting Muslim propaganda with the blessings of Saudi Arabia.

If such propaganda continues, future generations in America will gradually become confused. They will doubt their instincts and their sense of good judgment will be weakened. Like the restless and confused populations of the Middle East, they will build tolerance to violence, extremism, hatred, discrimination, anti-Semitism and oppression of women and minorities.

Because of my background, I can smell and taste Muslim propaganda. It is coming to a school near you. The danger is, believe it or not, if you grow up with such propaganda, it can feel and sound normal and even holy. Intentionally or unintentionally, in the name of tolerance, we are bringing up a generation of Americans who will tolerate Islamic Jihad, in the name of cultural relativism and compassion.

Islamic tyranny, like all tyrannies, must use lies, propaganda and fabrications to justify the Muslim duty of jihadist violence to expand and conquer the world for Islam and Sharia. That is why the Arab world is having great difficulty in modifying its hate-filled educational system. Instead of changing, it is trying to change us and desensitize us to its violence.

If this is not immediately corrected, it will be one of the biggest mistakes in American history. What Mr. Shibly was teaching our kids is outright Arab propaganda justifying jihad, 9/11, retaliation as self-defense, and conspiracy theories against Israel. How monumentally foolish and dangerous it is to allow the likes of the Shiblys to have access to American high school kids.

SOURCE




In British education, the high fly, the rest sink. And no one acts

Selection by ability, normal in most countries, has become selection by cash. This is insular, hypocritical and damaging

On the conduct of wars the political parties can disagree, on the economy they can pretend to, but on a key subject for Britain’s future — selection in education — a conspiracy of silence reigns, which as the election approaches will become deafening.

For 13 years new Labour, to this day an almost religiously anti-selection party, has presided over the downgrading of the educational expectations of the lowest in society, the flourishing of the highest, and the extinction of competition between the two. Hence, in large part, the startling retreat of meritocracy in Britain compared with other countries: an LSE report in 2005 showed that in the past 30 years we had gone into reverse, mostly for educational reasons.

It is not about money. Under the hardline, anti-selection Ed Balls the greater the expenditure on education the wider the great divide between state and private. Labour remains neurotic about social class, and sure enough the most recent examination figures are a caricature of their class connotations: independent schools — 7 per cent of total pupils — scored 11,500 straight As against a piddling 9,725 sixth formers in comprehensives.

What will happen when the first starred As are published later this year? I think we know who will get the lion’s share. The result will no doubt be even more anguished contortions in university admission procedures, to avoid the embarrassment of too many starred pupils getting the best university places. Only in Britain ...

The situation would be less appalling if Labour’s defunct ideology were under challenge, but the Conservatives go along with it, and the Lib-Dems you can once again forget. The question the Tories never answer is how the independent schools they largely patronise can be selective in every sense — academically, financially, socially — while the party leadership abhors selection for people who do not have the cash?

Who would have thought that Conservatives would frown on those upstart grammar schools — a personal bugbear of Cameron it seems — as “entrenching advantage,” in the ill-chosen words of David Willetts. From a party with no criticism to make of parents who send their children to private schools (and nor should it), that is a phrase to be rolled around the tongue.

Meanwhile, all parties collude in masking the true position on university admissions, which is worse than people think. In Oxbridge they think something over 40 per cent are from the 7 per cent of private schools — shocking enough. But if you include selective grammars (in well-to-do areas, by and large) alongside selective independents, the 2008 figure is 63 per cent selective. The underperformance of the comprehensives, some 90 per cent of the system, in Oxbridge as elsewhere is tragic.

In Britain any debate on selection is cut off at the knees before it starts: “11 plus,” “a return to old-style grammars” and “writing off as failures” is all you need to say. No serious person proposes any of this. Sir Eric Anderson, former Provost of Eton and mentor to Blair and Cameron, says that the debate should not be about the 11-plus and whether or not to select, but how to do it. It could be later than 11, it does not have to be in separate schools, though that should be an option, since national standardisation introduces rigor mortis into the system.

The British non-debate on selection is insular, ignorant, class ridden, neurotic and to the nth degree hypocritical, especially in the upper reaches. The Sutton Trust’s report on selection in other parts of the world, due at the end of the year, will help. It exists in various forms pretty much everywhere. There are sophisticated systems in France and Germany, where it takes place at 14, and those who don’t make the Gymnasium (grammar schools) may have to content themselves with being doctors or well-paid engineers.

The Indians and the Chinese especially have no qualms about selecting the best suited to particular lines of study. In India vocational emphasis begins at 14, in China higher technical schools start at 15. With the talents of hundreds of millions to draw on, in time these countries will outclass us in field after field. We must hope that ambitious immigrants will increasingly challenge their host country’s indolent and evasive assumptions about how, without effort or distinction, or being drawn into the invidious position of accepting that one person can be more capable in some ways than another, somehow the Brits will always come out on top.

Though perhaps the British case is hopeless? It may be that ingrained cultural factors are at work, a perverse social consciousness that leads the British to think it normal that the upper reaches of society should be schooled according to one theory of education, with remarkable success it seems, while the non-affluent majority should be content to follow a manifestly inferior system. Where else in the developed world are two methods of examination developing, pretty much without comment, one largely the preserve of monnied folk — the International Baccalaureate — and a less demanding one for the rest?

Proof that the egalitarian experiment has run its course is mounting, but no one seems ready to contemplate alternative systems. Rather than face up to fundamentals, gimcrack ideas are imported from countries with a population smaller than London. Meanwhile, all our party leaders and most leading political figures were selectively or independently educated. Not their choice, of course, but it seems to have served them well, and I don’t see many of them sending their own children to the new, non-selective local city academy.

The culture of anti-intellectualism fostered by an egalitarian system means that it is no longer possible to discuss anything much without recourse to celebrity. The clinching argument in favour of a system that gives the non-advantaged a chance against the rest must, therefore, be that an increasing number of our pop stars, comedians, actors and sportsmen and women are privately (ie, selectively) educated.

Britain’s got talent, the TV programme tells us, and I suspect it has, but we won’t go far while selection can only operate on TV shows.

SOURCE




Australia: Schools leaving students at the mercy of bullying

QUEENSLAND schools are failing to properly deal with the two worst kinds of bullying and often don't even check how their existing anti-bullying measures are working, the Government's own expert has warned.

Current approaches to tackling bullying inside the education system are unlikely to stem the growing menace of cyber-bullying. They also are unlikely to curb the effects of children deliberately excluding others. The stark warnings are contained in a highly anticipated report by Professor Ken Rigby, commissioned last year by the State Government. The report says cyber-bullying and social exclusion are "now seen as the most damaging of all to the mental health of targeted children".

After a review of the state's schools, Prof Rigby has concluded they are failing to follow up on how well their existing anti-bullying measures are working. "This needs to be remedied before schools can discover, with confidence, what works at their school," his report said.

Prof Rigby also warned the Government that it needed to continually provide the best new advice to its education department. He recommended every school be made to report annually on its anti-bullying tactics and then be encouraged to note them on their website.

One in three children are bullied in class almost daily, according to research released by Education Queensland last year.

The Rigby report, Enhancing Responses to Bullying in Queensland Schools, highlights a lack of education in schools about the range of anti-bullying measures available. It wasn't all bad, however, with Prof Rigby saying he was "much impressed" during his visits to state schools on their "dedication and sheer inventiveness on what was being done to address bullying". "I have worked with schools in every state in Australia, and it is not my impression that Queensland schools are less dedicated or less effective in dealing with bullying than any other state or territory," he said. "However, I do believe that a good deal of useful advice and guidance can and should be provided by the Department of Education and Training and by other educational jurisdictions."

Prof Rigby acknowledged he only visited a small sample of schools, with only staff and stakeholders – not parents or students – interviewed.

Education Minister Geoff Wilson said he would "carefully consider" the recommendations. Mr Wilson said the report was an important step in his commitment to dealing with bullying and behaviour in Queensland schools.

SOURCE





23 February, 2010

ADF attorneys appeal to U.S. Supreme Court to protect school choice in Arizona

Tuition tax credit program under ACLU attack

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday, asking it to reverse a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that declared portions of a tuition tax credit program for students unconstitutional. ADF attorneys argue that the program--which allows state residents to claim a tax credit for donations to private organizations that provide scholarships to private schools--is constitutional because the program involves individual, private choices and funding, not government action or money.

“Parents should be able to choose the right school for their children. Arizona’s tuition program lets parents decide what schools their children and money go to,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel David Cortman. “This program involves private money that the government never touches and offers Arizonans a wide array of educational choices. The program is set up to allow any number of organizations to be created for the purpose of distributing donations to any and all types of students. There’s nothing unconstitutional about that."

Last April, the court stopped short of ending the tuition tax credit program as demanded by the American Civil Liberties Union. Instead, the court stated that its constitutional concerns regarding the program are whether all school tuition organizations should be forced to fund both religious and non-religious organizations. The court stayed its decision while the case is on appeal.

In response to claims by the ACLU and its allies that the program limits parental choice, ADF attorneys contend that the program’s existing structure gives Arizonans a broad range of educational choices. ADF attorneys argue that school tuition organizations that fund only religious schools do not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because they are private organizations that do not distribute any government money. They stress that Arizonans are free to choose other school tuition organizations that fund non-religious private schools, emphasizing that residents can even start such organizations on their own, if they so choose.

"School tuition organizations can legally fund any type of private school, whether religious or non-religious,” explained ADF Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco. “Such funding does not become unconstitutional just because non-religious organizations have not chosen to take advantage of the opportunity as readily."

SOURCE




Maine sickos consider banning "biology-based" restrooms in schools

'Transgender ID' in schools under scrutiny by human-rights commission. What harm does it do to anyone to go to the restroom that is best designed to suit their genital arrangements

A proposal by the Maine Human Rights Commission to establish a broad right for "transgender" boys to use girls restrooms in all Maine schools will be the subject of a public hearing scheduled by the commission March 1.

The plan, if given ultimate approval by the commission, will establish mandatory transgender restroom access rules for all Maine schools. The proposal was prompted by a decision last year that found a school in Orono, Asa Adams School, discriminated against a boy by denying him access to the girls' restroom.

Christian Civic League of Maine Administrator Mike Hein said it's worrying because he believes the draft of the proposed regulations was developed in a December closed-door session. "The Maine Human Rights Commission had a secret, closed-door session in December and the public wasn't notified. But Mary Bonauto (director of the Gay and Lesbian Activist and Defenders) was invited to the meeting and she was allowed to present a legal brief at that meeting," Hein said.

The commission said, in documents obtained through a Freedom of Access Act request by Maine's Christian Action League, the June determination that a school discriminated against a boy by not allowing him access to the girls' restroom was correct. "The commission has found reasonable grounds to believe that unlawful discrimination occurred in a complaint alleging that an elementary school had an obligation to allow a transgender student access to common bathrooms consistent with that student's gender identity, and the commission is a party to a court complaint in that case," the commission concluded.

Another document obtained in the same request details the proposal: "Transgender students must be allowed access to bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity or expression or, if they prefer, to existing single stall bathrooms."

It continues: "With respect to locker rooms and shower facilities that involve undressing in front of others, transgender students must be provided with accommodations that meet their needs and that take into account the legitimate privacy concerns of all student involved."

Bonauto has filed a brief with the commission that says the commission is acting properly in trying to deal with students' "identity" issues. "Practically speaking, making a transgender student with a female gender identity use the boys' restroom would be stigmatizing and have a serious, negative, emotional consequence for the student as well. It would be no less stigmatizing for that student to have to use the boys' room than it would be for any non-transgender girl to be singled out and made to use the boys' room," she claims.

Bonauto suggests restroom usage should not be based on biology. "Applying these rules, it is clear, for example, that an anatomy or biology-based rule for bathroom usage cannot be used to bar transgender students from using a facility consistent with their gender identity," Bonauto said. "Such a rule would fail to give effect to the non-discrimination mandate for gender identity, a result at odds with the plain meaning of the 'gender identity' portion of the statute," she said. "In addition, such a rule is at odds with the Human Rights Act as a whole, since the act seeks to remove obstacles to education, not to impose them. Finally, such a construction would render 'gender identity or expression' meaningless surplus usage with no intended consequences for how schools deal with transgender students," Bonauto said.

On the issue of sports, Bonauto supports rules that require the schools to open doors based on the students' sense of identity. "GLAD supports a rule that allows students the opportunity to play sports consistent with their gender identity, with no exceptions. The guidance provides this rule 'in most cases' and also states that, 'In very rare cases, legitimate questions about fairness in competitive interscholastic sports may need to be resolved on a case-by-case basis," Bonauto said. Bonauto did not respond to a request for comment.

But Hein said the proposals will have a derogatory impact on Maine's schools. "What it comes down to is that we are completely getting rid of the concept of gender. Gender is being stricken in all forms in Maine if this proposed guideline is adopted as is," he said. Hein says the issue of sports competition will be adversely impacted as well. "It completely turns on its head what we consider boys basketball, girls basketball. Gender normative sports will be completely erased under these guidelines. In addition, if the proposed guidelines are adopted, you will have biological boys in the middle school, high school or college setting showering with girls," Hein said.

The difficulties in sports are also a point of concern with the University of Maine. In a letter obtained through the FOAA request, University of Maine Office of Equal Opportunity Director Karen Kemble said the proposal raises some important questions. "As the current language acknowledges, there will likely be cases in which allowing a transgender student to participate in gender-segregated sports in accordance with the gender identity or expression will raise legitimate concerns about fairness in competitive interscholastic sports. Although such requests from transgender students may be very rare, among those, fairness of play may become an issue," Kemble said.

More here




When Free Speech Died

Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barrage with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

Coincidentally, just recently two Israeli officials, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon and ambassador to the United States Michael Oren had the unpleasant experience of confronting virulent anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Muslim students whose ideology on academic debate seems to be “free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Ayalon, who spoke at Oxford University, had his speech interrupted by several audience members, including one who yelled incessantly and called Ayalon a “racist” and “a war criminal” while waving a Palestinian flag, another student who loudly read passages of the incendiary Goldstone Report, calls from one charming scholar to “slaughter the Jews,” the intrusion of a third student who remained standing for the entire balance of the lecture while she hurled anti-Israel invective, and another radical brat who threatened to Ayalon that “we will do to you what we did to Milosevic.”

The genteel, soft-spoken Ambassador Oren did not fare much better during his visit to the University of California at Irvine, a notorious hotbed of radical anti-Israelism by Muslim students. During the aborted speech to some 500 people about U.S.-Israeli relations, which was loudly interrupted ten times, boorish hecklers screamed over Oren’s talk such profound observations as “Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech,” “I accuse you of murder,” “How many Palestinians have you killed?” and “Israel is a murderer.” Even after he took a 20-minute recess to let the crowd cool off and regain its collective composure, he returned to the podium with more volleys of invective, shouting, and speech-stopping bombast from the Muslim students, eleven of whom?eight from UC-Irvine (including the Muslim Student Union’s president) and three from UC Riverside—were eventually escorted out of the hall and arrested.

The fact that UC-I’s habitually craven administrators, led by feckless Chancellor Michael Drake, were even motivated enough by the students’ errant behavior to have them ejected from the event is a promising sign. While the University has always claimed to be dedicated to encouraging debate and scholarly inquiry by letting the Muslim Student Union mount annual hate-fests to demonize and vilify Israel and Jews, the MSU has effectively hijacked all discussion of the Middle East on campus, and their odious events are not platforms at which opposing views are aired and discussed. In fact, these so-called pro-Palestinians seem to care very little about the actual self-determination and state building of the hapless Palestinians. As is frequently the case when speaking about the Israeli/Arab conflict, the discussion often glosses over the real problems of Palestinian culture, politics, and society (including its cult of death), and targets all criticism on the perceived defects of Israel, Zionism, and Jewish power.

Ambassador Oren is hardly what even his staunchest critics could consider an Islamophobe or even a rabid Zionist, perfectly willing to trample the Palestinian’s aspirations for their putative state. A Columbia and Princeton graduate, former Georgetown professor and fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, the American-born Oren is also the author of two seminal books on the Middle East, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, all of which clearly make him at least as qualified to speak about the Israeli/Palestinian situation as the raucous, boorish students who had decided, in advance of his UC-I appearance, that Oren was morally unfit to even appear on their campus.

This notion—that pro-Israel speakers and scholars do not even deserve, on a moral or intellectual basis, an opportunity to participate in scholarly debate is a very dangerous one, even if it comes from tendentious students. It starts with the assumption that Israel, because of its perceived moral defects and its oppression of the hapless Palestinians and the theft of their lands, does not even have the right to participate in intellectual debate, that academic free speech in Israel’s case can be modified and is not absolute. And while Muslim students and other campus radicals have, both at UC-I and other college campuses, seen to it that speech that they do not approve of, spoken by people with whom they disagree, is shut down with the “heckler’s veto,” they have never missed an opportunity to invite their own stable of slimy, anti-Israel, anti-American speakers. What is more, these speakers have never been shouted down, chased away, or jeered by those students and professors who might well have found their views to be repellant.

A closer look at the ideas tossed about by some of the MSU’s invited guests suggests both the moral incoherence and intellectual debasement that characterizes the human output of these events. Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, for instance, former Nation of Islam member, convert to Islam, and cheerleader for Hamas and Hezbollah, has been a ubiquitous, poisonous presence on the Irvine campus who never hesitates to castigate Israel, Zionists, Jewish power, and Jews themselves as he weaves incoherent, hallucinatory conspiracies about the Middle East and the West. Speaking from a podium with an execrable banner reading “Israel, the 4th Reich” in May 2006, Malik-Ali referred to Jews as “new Nazis” and “a bunch of straight-up punks.” “The truth of the matter is your days are numbered,” he admonished Jews everywhere. “We will fight you. We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious.”

At a 2008 event, dubbed “Never Again? The Palestinian Holocaust,” Malik-Ali was at his hateful best once again, standing behind a banner that read “Death to Apartheid“ while he wildly contended that “The Islamic revival should only be feared by those who support imperialism, colonialism, racism, occupation . . . Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah” are not the real terrorists at all, he proclaimed. No, the actual “terrorists are the United States; the terrorists are Israel!”

Another odious guest speaker who regularly makes appearances on the hate-fest circuit is Muhammad al-Asi, an anti-Semitic, anti-America Muslim activist from Washington, DC who has written, among other notorious ideas, that “The Israeli Zionist are [sic] the true and legitimate object of liquidation.” At a MSU-sponsored event in February 2008, “From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide,” which repulsively tried to draw parallels between the Holocaust and Hamas-controlled Gaza, al-Asi was a featured speaker. In his speech, he repeated the canard of Jewish control of world politics, suggesting that “Zionists or what some people call the Jewish lobby” had reduced the United States to playing “second fiddle to the Israeli government.”

Just months after 9/11, al-Asi had similar invective to utter towards Jews, in the context of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Using his favorite image of the ghetto when describing Jews, he observed that “We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly [sic] with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the Jew, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in Occupied Palestine.”

If ever there were utterances which deserved to be shouted down and drowned out with reason and fact, al-Asi’s hallucinatory ravings probably would qualify. But despite continual complaints from the Orange County Task Force on Anti-Semitism and other concerned UC-I stakeholders, the tenor and frequency of speakers at the MSU’s lurid hate-fests continue unabated, seemingly with the tacit approval of the university administration. The same Muslim students who could not abide even the presence of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, listen rapturously to the loathsome bloviating of Malik Ali, al-Asi, Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, and any other ideological thug who have come to UC-I’s campus with the purpose of vilifying Israel and defaming Jews.

It is, of course, the MSU’s choice to hear whatever opinions they wish from whichever speakers to whom they choose to listen. What is not their choice, however, is to be able to prevent other views from being heard on campus, particularly the complex and thorny Israeli/Palestinian conversation, merely because pro-Palestinian students have decided that they will not recognize the very existence or legitimacy of a sovereign nation, Israel, nor hear that ideas of individuals who are able to defend it and explain the Israeli side of the argument. University officials must repeatedly make clear that campuses must allow many different views and perspectives, and should not try to exclude unpopular thought from being heard in the proverbial marketplace of ideas.

Concern for the long-suffering Palestinians may be a commendable effort, but the exclusion and demonization of Israeli speakers and government officials from the academic community as a tool for seeking social justice for that one group “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavor,” observed commentator Melanie Phillips, “which is freedom of speech and debate,” something universities should never stop diligently defending. And they should certainly never abandon that pursuit to the baleful whining of ideological bullies intent on suppressing the views of others.

SOURCE





22 February, 2010

Welcome to UC Islam

by Mike Adams

Muslim students are not always cowards. But the Muslim Student Union (MSU) is often the least tolerant and most cowardly student group on a given college campus. The gulf between the speech they prevent and what they practice with administrators' consent is enormous. What follows is a summary of a recent, and increasingly typical, incident. I have included links to video of the incident for verification. I have also included the chancellor's complete contact information so that “infidels” can express disgust with unchecked Muslim bigotry and intolerance on our nation’s campuses.

Last week, MSU members sabotaged a speech by Israel's Ambassador to the U.S.A. This happened at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). UCI has a reputation for harboring a particularly aggressive Muslim student population. Ambassador Oren's well-publicized speech was open to the public. The audience numbered approximately 500. At one point, the ambassador had to leave the room, surrounded by body guards, for more than 20 minutes. Ultimately, he finished his remarks, but, due to the disruptions, there was no time for the planned question and answer session. It is worth noting that the speaker is American born and a Princeton and Columbia graduate. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown.

Before entering the hall, protestors prayed loudly outside the building. Ambassador Oren's speech was interrupted ten times. Each interruption was by a lone male student of middle-eastern descent. Each time, dozens in the crowd loudly acted up in support. Despite faculty admonitions, even expressions of faculty embarrassment, the interruptions continued.

The interruptions appear to have been pre-planned then coordinated on site. Witnesses described text messaging between the disruptors and at least one reading his interruption from a crib note. Apparently the protestor was unable to memorize a one-sentence line. Welcome to UC Islam.

Oren maintained his composure despite the chaos. Several times he spoke gently to the protesters, reminding them of mid-east hospitality customs and U.S. free speech rights. After the last interruption, the group loudly left in concert and continued protesting immediately outside the hall. Twelve were arrested.

UCI administrators had every reason to suspect trouble, yet did little or nothing to prevent it. Neither did they stop it once it began. At least one reliable organization gave UCI advance warning of the protest and how it would be orchestrated. Prior to Ambassador Oren's arrival, UCI MSU wrote a protest letter published in the school paper and on its own website.

For years, UCI MSU has sponsored a one week pro-Palestinian/virulently anti-Israel demonstration/fair. Recently it's grown to a two-week fair. Intolerance used to rule the day. Now, it rules the fortnight. Imported Arab and other speakers are viciously propagandistic. The hyperbole has increased year by year but there have been no shout downs. The MSU receives more tolerance than it is willing to give. The administration approves of this sort of free speech. For more than a year, the UCI administration has been "investigating" that certain MSU speakers publicly solicited, then forwarded, donations to Hamas. If true, this violates UCI regulations -- and federal law.

SOURCE




British Schools should not force girls to wear skirts - it discriminates against transsexuals, warns watchdog

How come that the rights of transsexuals trump the rights of everybody else?

Schools which force girls to wear skirts may be breaking the law - because the policy apparently discriminates against transsexuals. Official guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission says the dress code may breach the rights of girls who feel compelled to live as boys.

In a 68-page report on the human rights of transsexuals, the watchdog says that 'requiring pupils to wear gender-specific clothes is potentially unlawful'. It says that research conducted for its report found that 'pupils born female with gender dysphoria experienced great discomfort being forced to wear stereotypical girls’ clothes — for example a skirt'.

Many schools across the country insist on girls wearing skirts as part of a strict uniform code which they believe maintains good levels of discipline among their pupils. And although the Commission has threatened to use 'costly legal action' on schools who fail to comply, many are expected to maintain their rule on skirt wearing.

Elspeth Insch, head teacher of King Edward VI Handsworth school in Birmingham, said: 'The message is: not in my school. We’re sticking with our skirts.'

The guidance has been produced ahead of the Government’s Equality Bill which is likely to come into force this autumn. The bill, masterminded by Harriet Harman, the Labour deputy leader, makes it a legal requirement for public authorities, including schools, to consider the impact on minority groups of all their policies — including how school uniforms might affect transsexual people. They must do all they can to ensure transsexual children do not suffer discrimination, or face potential legal sanctions.

The bill extends new rights to people who believe they were born into the wrong gender. They gain this protection 'regardless of whether or not they intend to undergo, are undergoing or have undergone gender reassignment'. Previously transsexuals had to be under medical supervision or to had to have had a sex change to be covered by discrimination rules. There are an estimated 5,000 adult transsexuals in Britain.

The Commission's official guidance, entitled Provision of Goods, Facilities and Services to Trans People — Guidance for Public Authorities in Meeting your Equality Duties and Human Rights Obligations, says schools have a duty to be 'proactive' in ensuring transsexual students are not discriminated against.

It also cites existing human rights and sex discrimination laws. The guidelines state: 'Uniform is a key issue for young trans people at schools. Many schools have strict uniform codes where boys and girls are required to wear particular clothes, for example, girls cannot wear trousers.'

A spokesman from the Commission said: 'This is all about giving schools information which will help them interpret the law. 'It’s about schools taking a bit of time to consider their policies, how flexible they are in accommodating pupils with different needs, and what they might need to do to both help pupils get the most out of school and potentially avoid situations which might culminate in difficult and costly legal action.'

Girls wearing skirts to school became a thorny problem for St Albans Catholic High School two weeks ago. The catholic school, in Ipswich, Suffolk, banned female pupils from wearing skirts because students were failing to wear them in an 'appropriate manner'. It will force girls to wear trousers from September following concerns that some skirts were being worn too high.

Despite protests from students, the school, which has about 1,000 mixed students aged between 11 and 18, claims its policy has won support by parents and the wider school community.

SOURCE




Australia: Desperation places credentialism under attack

Fast-track teachers to get six weeks training. And they certainly need no more than that. I taught High School successfully without one second of teacher training. Requiring a four-year degree is bureaucratic madness. The "new" idea is obviously inspired by the "Teach for America" program, which has been operating since 1990 and does seem to produce better teachers

TEACHERS could take charge of the most challenging classrooms after just six weeks training under a controversial strategy being considered by the Queensland Government. People with professional qualifications will be sent to teach in disadvantaged schools to plug a shortage of specialist teachers under the Teach for Australia program, The Courier-Mail reports.

But unions have slammed the strategy – which aims to attract high-performing professionals and graduates from fields including law, economics, engineering, science, mathematics and English – as disrespectful to teachers and a Band-Aid solution.

Teach for Australia chief executive Melodie Potts said research shows similar models overseas produce more effective teachers. Education Queensland assistant director-general Craig Allen confirmed the program was being considered and talks were being held with Teach for Australia.

The program involves six weeks of intensive training for six days a week at university, with teachers then placed in disadvantaged secondary schools where it is hoped they will inspire children. Their university study continues part-time for two years and includes a mentor and adviser before they graduate with a Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching.

Mr Allen said the department was "exploring the potential of Teach for Australia" to attract and retain "high quality individuals in teaching". The teachers are given a reduced workload to help concentrate on their part-time study.

SOURCE





21 February, 2010

What union leaders really think

Today’s NY Post reveals a moment of honesty from a NY union official.

Albany Police Officers Union President Chris Mesley says that, regardless of the faltering economy, a no-raise new contract is unacceptable.

And to hell with the public. "I'm not running a popularity contest here," Mesley said. "If I'm the bad guy to the average citizen . . . and their taxes have go up to cover my raise, I'm very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership."

Mesley added: "As the president of the local, I will not accept 'zeroes.' If that means . . . ticking off some taxpayers, then so be it."

In the real world, when bubbles pop and markets contract, everyone has to take a haircut. In the world of politicians and unions, political muscle wins, regardless of economic circumstance.

Other unions are just as bad. When mayor Bloomberg proposed to increase teacher salaries by “just” 2 percent last month, the UFT responded, “The Mayor’s proposal is simply unacceptable… The UFT will continue - as we have always done - to work to protect the schools of New York City.”

But the teacher’s union recently turned down $700 million in federal funding for NY schools teachers because the extra money would have been paid based on performance. The NY Daily News reports:

“[T]he union submitted a document stating, "Test score data cannot be used for teacher evaluation or individual compensation." [Union president] Mulgrew also demanded extra arbitration for teachers found ineffective under a new grading system.”

In other words: whatever you do, don’t change our insane work rules, and don’t make it possible to get rid of ineffective teachers.

SOURCE




Tolerating Violence Against Jews on Campus

In a country where multiculturalism has a reverent following and criticism of protected minorities has essentially been criminalized as “hate speech,” it is more than ironic that on some Canadian campuses radical students have taken it upon themselves to target one group, Jewish students, with a hatred that is nominally forbidden for any others. And with a recent incident that took place at the beginning of February, York University in particular, has now revealed a troubling pattern of tolerating physical and emotional assaults by pro-Palestinian radicals against Jewish students and others who dare to demonstrate any support for Israel or question the tactics of Islamists in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state.

At a February 1st event, Hasbara Fellowships at York University, with the permission of the University, had set up a table to inform interested students about Hezbollah-kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as part of Hasbara’s ongoing campaign called “Free Palestinians from Hamas.” Typically, York’s outspoken and volatile pro-Palestinian students were less than willing to let such benign sentiments be aired, and, according to Hasbara’s co-president, Tyler Golden, demonstrated their displeasure by surrounding the table in an angry mob of some 50 activists, spewing forth anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs at the Jewish students.

“At around 4 o’clock,” said Golden, “several known anti-Israel faces on campus came to start questioning us and debate with us . . . Security has asked us, when we come across this type of situation, to call them, which we did. We also videotape so they can see the faces and hear the voices of the people that do it. A few students who were surrounding us were upset that there were cameras in their faces, so they started yelling and screaming. As they were trying to push the cameras out of the way, they actually hit two of our students.” Muslim student groups have consistently attempted to disrupt the speeches of guests whose view are considered “unacceptable” because they might cause discomfort or “intimidation” for students unwilling to face the reality of radical Islam and unable to see any villain in the Middle East except Israel.

And the recent brawling at York University is not the first instance of anti-Israelism gone amuck on that campus. York’s radicalized students had already revealed a rabid anti-Semitic leaning, when in February 2009, some 100 pro-Palestinian students initiated a near-riot, as police had to be called to usher Jewish students to safety after they had been barricaded inside the Hillel offices and were “isolated and threatened” by the physically and verbally aggressive demonstrators.

Parroting the morally-incoherent and factually-defective exhortations of Israel-haters elsewhere of “Zionism equals racism!” and “Racists off campus!” the York mob, members of both the York Federation of Students and Students Against Israeli Apartheid, demonstrated once again that what is positioned as “intellectual debate” on campuses about the Israeli/Palestinian issue has devolved into something that is not really a conversation at all. Rather, it is something more akin to an ideologically-driven shout fest with a new version of pro-Palestinian brown shirts who pretend that they are merely criticizing Zionism but are actually slurring Jews. So York’s supporters of the cult of Palestinianism apparently no longer felt even a bit uncomfortable voicing what was actually on their minds when the subject of Israel comes up: when the York Hillel students were trapped inside locked offices, surrounded by an increasingly violent and aggressive mob, the intellectual “debate” that day included such invidious and raw slurs as “Die Jew?get the hell off campus.”

That thuggery by pro-Palestinian Jew-haters had already become something of a tradition on the York campus. A year earlier in April 2008, Barbara Kay of Canada’s National Post reported, York’s Hillel had invited then-Knesset member Natan Sharansky to deliver an address. Not content with allowing anyone with a pro-Israel viewpoint to shares his or her views on campus, the Palestinian Students Association and Students Against Israeli Apartheid@York (SAIA) used the now common tactic of intellectual bullies on American and Canadian campuses: they jeered at and shouted down Sharansky, spoke loudly among themselves during his talk, and generally prevented anyone in the audience from listening to the content of the speech, but not before they had articulated their own vitriol with such comments as “Get off our campus, you genocidal racist” and “you are bringing a second Holocaust upon yourselves.”

Violence, and threats of violence, against Jewish students during conversations about Israel have occurred at other Canadian universities, as well. At the University of Toronto’s invidious 2009 Israeli Apartheid Week, for instance, the annual event had so devolved into a racist, rabid rally that proceedings were closed to cameras and reporters, and individuals who actually attempted to participate in a dialogue about the issues being raised by the noxious event in the first place were confronted with physical intimidation and threats, encountering the dark side of pro-Palestinianism.

One of these individuals, Isaac Apter, a Jewish alumnus of the University of Toronto, recounted how he and others in the audience of one evening’s events quizzed a speaker about why Hamas had persistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel—did “Israel have the right to exist?”—and when the speaker side-stepped the questioning repeatedly, some audience members shouted out, “Answer the questions!” Apter found himself approached from behind by a member of a private guard retained by Students Against Israel Apartheid, slapped in the head, yanked from his seat, and yelled at with the warning, “You shut the f–k up!” A second Jewish attendee was similarly assaulted that night by one of the hired security team and given a far more chilling warning, particularly in light of the barbaric practice of beheadings in the Middle East: “Shut the f–k up or I’ll saw your head off.” Not only was the Jewish state being attacked and degraded throughout these events, but now Jews themselves were being targeted for emotional and physical assault, an unsurprising outcome of a prolonged, virulent campaign against the concept of Israel as a Jewish state.

University officials regularly proclaim, as they did when they had to defend sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Week, that they have a “commitment to the principles of freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech and freedom of association.” But that empty exhortation has shown itself, repeatedly, to be, at best, disingenuous, and, at worst, a masking of their true intention: enabling favored victim groups to utter vitriol and libel against Israel and Jews, with the pretense that they have somehow encouraged intellectual debate and productive political discussion. This is not scholarship at all; it is Jew-hatred dressed up in academic clothes.

SOURCE




Basic sums baffle British grade-school teachers

Primary school teachers have such a poor grasp of basic maths that they struggle to solve sums that 11 year olds should be able to answer

A test of simple maths skills taken by teachers from schools across the country has revealed a "shocking" lack of mental arithmetic ability and basic maths knowledge. Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.

The results from 155 teachers in 18 schools, revealed in Channel 4's Dispatches programme, add to growing concerns about numeracy standards and teaching in England. Almost a quarter of children are leaving primary school with a poor grasp of maths, even though spending on the subject is about £2.5 billion a year. Around 135,000 pupils start secondary school unable to cope with their courses.

Richard Dunne, a maths education specialist who set the test, said a generation of teachers did not fully understand the subject. Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King's College, London, said: "I am actually horrified by the statistics. "I really think that our obsession with generic teaching skills has crowded out time in which we could be making sure that people actually have the basic content and knowledge of content that they need. "It doesn't mean that anybody who can do maths can teach maths, that is obviously not true - but I don't think you can teach maths if you can't do it."

The findings will fuel a political row over the qualifications needed to become a teacher. At present, the minimum maths requirement to train as a primary teacher is a grade C at GCSE. Many teachers will not have studied the subject beyond that. The Tories plan to raise the grade to B.

The material covered in the Dispatches test is contained in the primary national curriculum, yet the programme found that only 54 per cent of teachers could work out the correct value of 1.12 x 2.2 (2.464), even when told that 112 x 22 = 2,464.

Mr Dunne said: "What we have are tests from 155 teachers which illustrate that probably more than half of them know so little maths that they cannot be conveying mathematics to their children in the classroom."

Failings in maths teaching will also be identified this week by a leading academic in a Royal Institution lecture. Jo Boaler, professor of education at Sussex University, will say the children are being introduced to abstract concepts before they are ready, at age four and five. She attributes Britain's lack of international standing in maths education, in part, to the attempt to teach 'too much, too soon'. "We need to give primary teachers a few concepts so that four-, five- and six-year-olds are given a good base in understanding numbers, shapes, counting and sums," she said. "Instead they are given a massive list of methods. In most EU countries, there is no formal learning of methods until children are age seven. "When children in the UK find they don't understand, they are put in to lower sets and basically told 'You can't do maths.'

"In countries like Japan, China and Finland, which top the international league tables for maths, they believe all children should be able to do maths and are horrified by what we do here."

Fears were also raised last week that pupils at secondary school were not being prepared to study maths at higher levels because the GCSE was too easy. The Children, Schools and Families Select Committee heard that maths papers were being 'dumbed down' and modular courses, which are now the norm, were making the situation worse. Margaret Brown, a professor of maths education at King's College, London, told MPs: "There is competition between exam boards to make exams ever simpler. "More modular exams, which can be taken again and again create a fail-safe and that is a problem."

A National Audit Office report, published in 2008, criticised weaknesses in teachers' knowledge of maths and backed calls for a big increase in the number of specialist primary maths teachers. [Why would anyone good at maths want to be a British primary school teacher? Perhaps Britain is aiming to import teachers from Mars]

SOURCE




Australia: Desperate call for high school teachers in NSW

Not exactly surprising. Teaching was once seen as a noble profession. With today's chaotic schools, sensible people avoid a teaching career

MORE than 1840 high school classes are waiting for permanent teachers. The Education Department is also yet to fill hundreds of vacant positions. According to The Daily Telegraph, 421 teaching jobs are vacant in NSW, including 288 regular teachers and 133 head teachers.

Maths was one of the subjects hit hardest by the lack of head teachers, with 11 Sydney high schools and eight regional schools awaiting senior staff.

Based on the formula that every teacher takes an average of five classes of 25 students and head teachers take at least three classes, more than 50,000 students would be waiting for permanent teachers to replace casuals until the vacancies are filled.

A spokesman for the department said it took an average "five to six weeks" to fill teaching positions, meaning the wait to employ 421 teachers added up to more than 70,000 teaching hours.

Education Minister Verity Firth was clueless on the number of high school teacher vacancies. At a press conference that Ms Firth called on school security, she was asked whether schools would be safer if the state's 421 teacher vacancies were filled to improve supervision. "I'm not aware of that statistic which you are quoting," Ms Firth said. When told the figures were provided by her own department yesterday morning she said: "I need more information on what these vacancies are." The Daily Telegraph can tell her the figure includes 288 teacher vacancies in the secondary system.

After it was revealed this week that HSC students were forced to teach themselves via the internet in the absence of a qualified Year 12 maths teacher, the department revealed there were 52 vacancies for the subject. Apart from Davidson High School, there were 10 other Sydney high schools without head maths teachers including Bankstown Girls, Killarney Heights, Nepean, Parramatta, Punchbowl Boys, Quakers Hill, Rooty Hill, Ryde Secondary College, Sarah Redfern and Seven Hills. The list of regional schools included Boorowa Central, Broken Hill, Callaghan College at Wallsend, Coffs Harbour Senior College and Murwillumbah.

Opposition education spokesman Adrian Piccoli said the system of employing teachers was in urgent need of an overhaul. "It reinforces just how out of touch the Government is with priorities in education," he said.

SOURCE





20 February, 2010

Education: Too Important for a Government Monopoly

The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools. But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: "Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent." How revealing is that?

Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades. Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student -- more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I'll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).

The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country's educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?

Parents care about their kids and want them to learn and succeed -- even poor parents. Thousands line up hoping to get their kids into one of the few hundred lottery-assigned slots at Harlem Success Academy, a highly ranked charter school in New York City. Kids and parents cry when they lose.

Yet the establishment is against choice. The union demonstrated outside Harlem Success the first day of school. And President Obama killed Washington, D.C.'s voucher program.

This is typical of elitists, who believe that parents, especially poor ones, can't make good choices about their kids' education.

Is that so? Ask James Tooley about that. Tooley is a professor of education policy who spends most of every year in some of the poorest parts of Africa, India and China. For 10 years, he's studied how poor kids do in "free" government schools and -- hold on -- private schools. That's right. In the worst slums, private for-profit schools educate kids better than the government's schools do.

Tooley finds as many as six private schools in small villages. "The majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school, and these schools outperform government schools at a fraction of the teacher cost," he says.

Why do parents with meager resources pass up "free" government schools and sacrifice to send their children to private schools? Because, as one parent told the BBC, the private owner will do something that's virtually impossible in America's government schools: replace teachers who do not teach.

As in America, the elitist establishment in those countries scoffs at the private schools and the parents who choose them. A woman who runs government schools in Nigeria calls such parents "ignoramuses."

But that can't be true. Tooley tested kids in both kinds of schools, and the private-school students score better.

To give the establishment its best shot, consider Head Start, which politicians view as sacred. The $166 billion program is 45 years old, so it's had time to prove itself. But guess what: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found no difference in first-grade test results between kids who went through Head Start and similar kids who didn't. President Obama has repeatedly promised to "eliminate programs that don't work," but he wants to give Head Start a billion more dollars. The White House wouldn't explain this contradiction to me.

Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Reform, said, "If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true."

Choice works, and government monopolies don't. How much more evidence do we need?

SOURCE




Cookie-cutter elites required by the Ivy League

"There is no single academic path we expect all students to follow, but the strongest applicants take the most rigorous secondary school curricula available to them. An ideal four-year preparatory program includes four years of English, with extensive practice in writing; four years of math; four years of science: biology, chemistry, physics, and an advanced course in one of these subjects; three years of history, including American and European history; and four years of one foreign language." -- (From Harvard College Admissions)

Next year my son will be applying to colleges, so we are currently collecting information about colleges he might apply to. One thing that strikes me is the degree to which the elite liberal arts colleges almost all want the same thing in their applicants —a standardized record of academic accomplishment whose production will have consumed most of the educational opportunities of four years of high school.

Consider the passage quoted above. Despite the initial disclaimer, the description of an "ideal four-year preparatory program" implies a pretty uniform picture of the ideal student. It is a picture that any reasonably intelligent and hard-working student should be able to fit —provided that he is more interested in getting into Harvard than in getting an education.

Reading? Four years of English will include lots of it, almost all selected and required by someone else —a pretty good way of persuading a student that reading is something only to be done when someone makes you do it. Science? There are, perhaps, high school age kids who are interested in every science offered by their school, or at least able to fake it. But they are less likely to make a real world contribution than the enthusiast who reads up on relativity and quantum mechanics when he is supposed to be studying Dickens —and thinks biology is icky.

Studying a language is for some people an interesting intellectual activity; speaking a foreign language can be a useful skill. But the world is full of interesting things to do and skills to learn. This particular skill is well short of essential for someone living in the middle of some three hundred million English speakers. So why make it the key to Harvard —in preference to the ability to build furniture, or write sonnets, or survive in the woods?

It is a poorly hidden secret that the reason professors give multiple choice tests is that, whatever their limitations as a tool for measuring learning, at least they are easy to grade. The attitude seems to have trickled down to the admissions officers. Make sure there is a check mark in each box. If too many applicants manage it, they can always be ranked by SAT scores. Perhaps give an extra point to an applicant who seems to actually know something outside the curriculum or care about something other than checking boxes.

If all else fails, flip a coin. Perhaps I am being unfair—I have not discussed my reaction with any admissions officers. But reading those web pages leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

SOURCE




Australia: English teachers who don't know grammar

Grammar guide an 'education disaster'. The errors do seem to be bizarre. The author obviously knew nothing about grammar but just made it up as she went along. There is no logic or system in what she wrote -- JR

One of the world's most respected authorities on grammar has written to every school principal in Queensland, warning them of an error-strewn grammar guide distributed by the state's English Teachers Association. University of Queensland emeritus professor Rodney Huddleston says he was forced to write to schools directly because the English Teachers Association of Queensland refused to acknowledge or correct the 65 errors he had identified in its teaching guide on grammar, printed as a series of eight articles in its magazine.

In the letter, Professor Huddleston says the guide, called Grammar at the Coalface, "contains an exceptionally large number of errors -- over 60 in 15 1/2 pages of relevant text -- many of them very serious and basic, and including major misrepresentations of functional grammar". "It would be an educational disaster if teachers were to base their classes systematically and comprehensively on the Coalface Grammar," he says. "If students gave Coalface answers in tests and examinations, they would be marked wrong and generally regarded as lacking basic knowledge of grammar. "It is incontestable that it contains a great many errors, and I can see no justification for ETAQ's refusal to warn members of the dangers of using it as a teaching resource."

Professor Huddleston's view is supported by the former president of the Australian Linguistics Society, Randy LaPolla, who said Professor Huddleston was the "foremost expert on the English language and the grammar of the English language in the world".

Professor Huddleston, one of the principal authors of Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, first raised the errors in 2007 after the grammar guide appeared in the English teachers' magazine Words'Worth. As reported in The Australian in June 2008, Professor Huddleston wrote to the author, Lenore Ferguson, the magazine editor at the time, outlining the errors.

Dr Ferguson said at the time they were differences of opinion rather than errors, and the only mistakes she acknowledged were "mishaps" that had occurred in the editing process. Almost three years later, Dr Ferguson and the ETAQ still refuse to correct the guide, although the association has posted on its website until next month Professor Huddleston's critique and Dr Ferguson's response.

In her response, Dr Ferguson says the grammar guide "is now old business from a practitioner viewpoint" and "most of us have moved on". She says her intent was to provide a practical guide drawing on different types of grammar that would be useful in classrooms, but Professor Huddleston had replaced her "practical framing with a theoretical one and evaluates my articles from this superimposed perspective".

After being contacted by Professor Huddleston, Professor LaPolla, in his capacity as president of the linguistics society, wrote to Dr Ferguson in July 2008 urging her to publish corrected versions of the articles. In the letter, Professor LaPolla says his criticisms are the same as Professor Huddleston's, which were justified and not due to a different theoretical stance. Professor LaPolla told The Weekend Australian the mistakes in the grammar guide were basic errors and it was "bizarre" that school teachers in Queensland were telling Professor Huddleston he was wrong.

One of the errors cited by Professor Huddleston is "Sam's" -- as in "Sam's folder" -- being classified as a possessive pronoun, rather than the possessive form of a proper noun. Another example is the phrase "set of", as in "a set of bowls", being described as an adjective, which Professor Huddleston says is not a grammatical unit but a noun followed by a preposition.

SOURCE





19 February, 2010

NCLB Should Be Repealed, Not Revamped

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed into law by Bush in 2002, relied on financial coercion to improve state education standards and school district performance, with a focus on reading and math. This federal mandate, oddly supported by Republican lawmakers despite its obvious violation of limited government principles and states’ rights, was unnecessary and, according to some, unconstitutional.

Eight years later, the Obama administration wants to rewrite the act and pass a new law that will increase Washington’s role in the public school system and empower federal officials to address its perceived problems.

The success of private and charter schools is proof that the problem in education is the scope of government involvement itself, not the inadequacies of superintendents, principals, or teachers, as federal lawmakers would have us believe. American public schools are staffed by highly qualified individuals, many holding master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s, who know exactly what they’re doing. Their biggest obstacle to effective teaching is not lack of funding, but nose-poking bureaucrats whose educational philosophies are faulty at best, and more often intentionally injurious.

Washington has trouble enough running itself. Spending is out of control, a mountain of debt is piling up, and a majority of Congress seems not to understand the clear provisions of the Constitution regarding its own role in the nation’s affairs. How can we allow further intervention into a system that is deteriorating precisely because of said intervention? How, in good conscience, can we trust incompetent politicians to establish sound educational policies for our children?

Among the potential changes to NCLB proposed in Obama’s budget are increased teacher accountability standards, a competitive grant program for teacher recruitment and retention, competitive federal funding that would reward successful schools, and of course, tougher academic standards. The last is a vague goal voiced by every administration, while successful schools logically do not need federal “assistance.” That leaves the first two, which contradict one another.

A teacher’s job is to present information. Most students choose to learn the information, but some refuse. They attend classes because they are legally required to do so, but trudge through the system with poor grades until they are old enough to drop out. Assuming that an educator is qualified and teaches the established curriculum, why should he or she be reprimanded, or even punished financially, for the test scores of an apathetic pupil? Not only would this release students from taking personal responsibility and teach them to blame others for their own failures, it would also repel potential recruits.

What job-seeking teacher, perhaps fresh out of graduate school, would be attracted by the prospect of being held accountable for factors beyond his or her control, like student apathy or poorly devised curricula? Many might choose to work at a private school, gladly accepting a lesser salary to sidestep the bureaucratic hassle. The best way for lawmakers to assist in recruiting and retaining teachers is to get out of the classroom, and at any rate, district and state hiring practices should not be subject to federal oversight.

Obama is correct to revamp NCLB, but is mistaken about the proper action to take. Rather than use it as a foundation upon which to build an even more powerful and intrusive Department of Education, lawmakers would do better to simply repeal NCLB, pass the education issue back to the levels of government to which it belongs, and focus their attention on problems that the Constitution does authorize them to solve.

Congress has a recession, debt crisis, and ongoing war to deal with. Isn’t that enough without tackling education?

SOURCE




School accused of spying on students at home

Many American schools really seem to think they own the kids

A US high school has been accused of spying on students at home through webcams in their laptops. A lawsuit filed against the Lower Merion School District in Philadelphia claims laptop computers issued to students by the school came with remotely-activated webcams which it used to monitor their activities at home. The suit also alleges the school kept its ability to activate the cameras secret from students and parents when the laptops were issued.

The surveillance allegedly came to light after Harrington High School assistant principal Lindy Matsko reprimanded a student for "improper behaviour in his home". "Cited as evidence was a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff's personal laptop issued by the school district," the suit says. The boy's father then confronted Ms Matsko about the photograph and was told about the school's ability to turn the webcams on remotely, it claims.

The suit was filed on behalf of the student and his family as well as all other students and families who were affected. The Lower Merion district includes two schools with an estimated 1800 students.

It is alleged the school district, its board of directors and its superintendent violated several laws including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Civil Rights Act.

SOURCE




Shortchanging Our Students

Today’s college seniors lack basic knowledge of American history and institutions

Even in the depths of the Great Depression, with the economy bottomed out, Americans showed they could still think big. In just over a year, construction crews built a landmark that still stands proud, one recognized worldwide as a symbol of our country: the Empire State Building.

I recently visited the building to speak to an enthusiastic group of King’s College students about the need to return to the principles of our Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, as a new study shows, many students simply aren’t learning what makes America unique. In fact, what they are learning all too often helps divide rather than unite Americans. This study, titled “The Shaping of the American Mind,” is the latest in an annual series from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI.org), where I’m proud to serve as a trustee.

There’s no mystery as to why today’s college seniors lack basic knowledge of American history and institutions. Previous ISI reports revealed that schools of higher learning aren’t teaching these principles. At some elite universities the seniors know less than the freshmen. The reports also show that Americans agree colleges should teach students about our shared history and civic principles.

But does knowing the fundamental principles of “the American experiment” influence the beliefs of our citizens? That’s what this year’s report aimed to find out. ISI researchers directed 33 questions to a representative sample of roughly 2,500 Americans. Many questions were taken from U.S. naturalization exams and high-school achievement tests. The report reached some important conclusions.

For example, even though colleges aren’t teaching civic knowledge, it can be learned elsewhere: through religious institutions, patriotic organizations and books such as “We Still Hold These Truths,” by Matthew Spalding of The Heritage Foundation.

And that leads to the report’s second finding. Civic knowledge, however learned, has a broader and more diverse influence on Americans’ thinking than college does. To cite one example, the report found that having more civic knowledge makes a person “more likely to agree that prosperity depends on entrepreneurs and free markets; but less likely to agree that the free market brings about full employment.” In other words, civic knowledge seems to make one more pragmatic but not more dogmatic. Those are traits Americans will need if we’re to pass along a better world to coming generations.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the report concluded that additional civic knowledge increases a person’s belief in American ideals and institutions.

The ISI survey showed that, overall, “Sixty-three percent of Americans disagree that America corrupts otherwise good people, 61 percent of Americans disagree that America’s Founding documents are obsolete and 56 percent of Americans agree that prosperity depends upon entrepreneurs and free markets.”

It further found that people with greater civic knowledge are less likely to believe that America corrupts otherwise good people, less likely to believe that the Founding documents are irrelevant, and more likely to believe that the free enterprise system works.

As our economy works to recover from another meltdown, we need to keep thinking big. We need to help more Americans learn the basic principles of civil society. The way forward is in understanding our great shared history.

When the Empire State Building opened, former New York Gov. Al Smith said it was “built by the brains, the brawn, the ingenuity and the muscle of mankind.” The same applies to the United States. Let’s make sure we pass the very concept of American greatness down to the next generation.

SOURCE





18 February, 2010

"Green" Student Indoctrination in Michigan

Michigan eighth-graders are 36th in the nation in math and 33rd in reading. But legislators are making sure they excel at what matters — like greening school buses by checking their tire pressures.

In 2006, Michigan created a bipartisan “Green School” law that tasked government to recognize schools with green programs. To qualify, an institution must task its students to complete half of a list of 20 green options, including:

— Making sure their school “has adopted an endangered species animal and posted a picture of it in a main traffic area.”

— That students participate in “a planned program of energy savings, including dusting coils on cafeteria refrigerators, placing film on windows, setting hot water heaters one degree lower, seeing how plants and trees strategically placed can save energy, and checking proper inflation on bus tires and other school vehicles once a month.”

— That the school be visited by an “ecological spokesperson, a representative of the Sierra Club, an endangered animal species show, or a similar presentation.”

— That “the school has solar power presentations or experiments, such as a solar cookout.”

— That “the school has science class projects in which students do several home energy improvements, such as . . . clean coils on home refrigerators, and install draft guards for the doors.”

— That “the school's classes visit internet sites where clicking saves rainforest habitat.”

In short, a program to indoctrinate students as green missionaries spreading the green gospel in school, home, and the community. Some 500 schools now participate in the program, reports the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, with legislation pending [PDF] this year to upgrade schools to “Emerald School” status (15 tasks completed) and “Evergreen School” status for completing all 20.

Michigan is one of a handful of states with a green-school program. Call it America’s Race to the Bottom.

SOURCE




Christian views on health matters not allowed to be mentioned?

Brad Lopez is one of several Fresno City College instructors who teach Health Science I, which the catalog describes as a survey of "contemporary science concepts and medical information designed to promote health." Topics include sexuality, nutrition, substance abuse, physical fitness and heredity. One would reasonably expect to encounter a variety of scientific explanations and discussions in such a setting. After all, the goal of education is not merely to impart politically correct pablum but rather to help students learn to evaluate data and think for themselves.

Unfortunately for Mr. Lopez, he is also a Christian, a designation which seems to have gotten under the skin of the ACLU and two of Lopez's students. Therefore, the ACLU is calling into question his ability to express his opinions, scientific theories and interpretations. Were he a mere Marxist at an American college, it is doubtful anyone would have taken notice of his interpretation of scientific data.

The ACLU of Northern California has written a letter to the school's administration complaining that Lopez quoted the Bible as proof that human life begins at conception and that he characterized homosexuality as a mental illness. The letter claims that such teaching violates California laws protecting gays from discrimination and prohibiting religious indoctrination at public schools. The ACLU asks Fresno City College "to act immediately to ensure that all its health classes provide only accurate and unbiased information."

First, such a statement about homosexuality is certainly one of a number of scientific positions regarding the “health” of gay behavior. For example, both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association maintained such a position well into the 1970's. It is now a minority opinion but one still held nonetheless by a number of scientists. There is no such thing as “unbiased” information when it comes to assessing homosexuality. Sexual behavior is hardly comparable to the law of gravity. All scientists and thinkers interpret the data and emerging research. Shall Mr. Lopez not offer his own interpretation or should he instead ask what interpretation the ACLU would categorize as “unbiased” and “accurate”? After all, he is the teacher of the class, and that is what teachers do – share their opinions and interpretations of the data.

Jacqueline Mahaffey, 24, had Lopez as a teacher last semester, and said his personal beliefs appeared on the first day of class when he made a point of contradicting their textbook, which listed cancer as the leading cause of death. Lopez told the class that abortions kill more human beings than cancer. Of course, Mr. Lopez is technically correct although that fact seems not to hold much weight against a tidal wave of political correctness. Again, what might be “accurate and unbiased” information regarding the beginning of human life?

Most scientists (and theologians) agree that human life begins at conception. What they dispute is when a human receives a “soul.” But few scientists deviate from the idea of human life's beginning at conception.

Ms. Mahaffey said she nonetheless stayed in the class and earned an A. Lopez clearly was not inculcating religious belief, or Ms. Mahaffey's disagreements with his positions would surely have prevented her from earning an A in the course.

Evidently, in the ACLU's world, only one interpretation is welcome: An interpretation where abortion is not viewed as destroying a human life and one where homosexuality is seen as a lifestyle equivalent to any other. That is their definition of “accurate” and “unbiased;” to disagree invites censoring. And I thought universities were places for the free exchange of ideas and thought. Silly me.

It is little wonder that American college campuses contain the last vestiges of Marxism in the world. Free speech is refused, free inquiry is denied and free thinking is squelched, all in the name of political correctness. Bill Ayers would be proud. And the ACLU should be embarrassed.

Some thoughts and ideas simply cannot be explored. Feelings are more important than truth. And that is a scary place to be.

SOURCE




British government school rejects educational excellence in favour of Leftist ideology

Labour Party member Joanna Leapman became a governor at her children's school to make state education better for everyone. Here she explains how the system has failed and why she ended up resigning

The appointment of our new junior school head teacher in 2008 seemed too good to be true. For the last few years, I had slowly come to accept my children would never benefit from the same sort of education that I had had in a small village school. The school my three children attend, in a multiracial London neighbourhood, has its fair share of problems, and head teachers had long brushed off its below-average results with excuses of 'pupil mobility’, 'high need area’ and 'vulnerable children’. Everyone had seemed too busy dealing with discipline to give anyone a chance to shine, flourish or even enjoy their education.

In 2006, I had been elected on to the governing body which served both the infant and junior schools – but I soon felt I was banging my head against a brick wall. In our area of London, there are a fair number of middle-class families but many opt for church schools or private education instead. Yet my ideas for attracting more of these parents were ignored. I was told it was not the done thing to compete with other schools or play the same game as private schools by selling ourselves. I had eventually persuaded the infant school, which had a separate head teacher, to host open days for prospective new parents but when they turned up they received a lengthy presentation on our 'strong inclusion agenda’, meaning that we catered well for children with special needs or behaviour problems. Got a bright child? Look elsewhere.

The number of disruptive and violent children in our children’s classes was high. They were never excluded — even temporarily. And their behaviour was made worse by disruptions to their learning, such as job-shares often used to accommodate weak teachers whom the head couldn’t bring herself to get rid of.

But suddenly in 2008 we had a new head at the junior school. A former banker turned teacher, he was full of determination and spark. His language was refreshingly jargon-free and optimistic. He ripped the school budget apart, weeded out ineffective staff, came down hard on poor behaviour with temporary exclusions, reorganised the classes to put similar children together, introduced setting in Year 6, brought in excellent teachers and built a science lab.

More importantly, he gave children an enthusiasm for learning. For the first time in a long time, my eldest child, aged eight at the time, had a smile on her face. And it wasn’t just our child. Other bright children such as our daughter felt they were being challenged, not just biding their time while the teacher dealt with the difficult kids. For once, I saw children leaving the school gates enthused, excited and motivated. Even parents of the 'difficult kids’ were pleased. They told me they were happy their children were finally being dealt with, not being given a series of mixed messages by a stream of educational welfare officers, educational psychologists and behaviour specialists.

Within a year, the junior school’s SAT results had turned round. With a 17 per cent increase in maths results, it was ranked the fourth most improved primary in Croydon. The authority’s own inspectors had moved it from a 'notice to improve’ school to 'good’ in just two terms of his headship.

And the head’s new projects and ideas were just flowing in. Now a specialist science school, we had a school house system named after Galileo, Newton and Darwin, with children competing to sit on top table at lunch. Enlisting a local inventor, pupils pitched their ideas to join a mini Dragon’s Den club and became the only school to take inventions to the Inventors’ Fair in Alexandra Palace last year. The best scientists in the school were treated to an astronomy day at University College London. And money was coming in left, right and centre too. The head knew how to draw up a bid and attracted sponsorships for a variety of projects including a new amphitheatre in the school grounds. And there was talk of a deal with a coffee shop to put in a quiet area for staff and parents.

He just did things. When he needed a classroom, he found a disused area and created one. Storage areas and medical rooms were not being used, so he brought in a builder during the holidays to knock them through. He even sold an unused kiln on eBay for school funds.

Parents at neighbouring schools pulled their children out and put them into ours, some even moved from private prep schools. Suddenly we were full, with a waiting list. The school was on a fast track to being outstanding. And at last, as a senior governor, my work with the new head was starting to make a difference.

It was in stark contrast to our sister infant school, whose head teacher – like many others – went along with the institutionalised box-ticking and consultation exercises that are squeezing the creativity and excellence out of our public services. Several highly disruptive and violent children were still in the school in the name of 'inclusion’ and had contributed to the resignation of a couple of excellent teachers. Many classes were being run by supply teachers or job-shares, as teachers took time out to train or help out at a nearby struggling school, as part of some new Government strategy.

The needs of higher ability pupils were never a priority in the infant school. The Government’s Gifted and Talented scheme was set up to address this but were never fully implemented. Under the scheme, the top 10 per cent of children are supposed to be identified, tracked and specially catered for in every lesson. But the infant school’s most able pupils attend a 10-week course run by a teaching assistant and are then taken off it to give the less able a chance. Run properly, a good Gifted and Talented programme should keep the more academic children challenged and enthusiastic about school but many teachers don’t believe in it, and now, it seems the Government is following their lead. As The Sunday Telegraph revealed last month, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) intends to scrap the scheme entirely.

So, when our governing body took the decision last year to merge both our infant and junior schools under one head teacher, and both head teachers competed for the job, some of us parents assumed there could only be one winner. This new superhead should have just walked into the job, right? Wrong.

Instead the governing body chose the head teacher who had been at the infant school for 14 years but had not worked with junior schoolchildren since at least 1995, predating the introduction of SATs. Our chance of becoming something very special had just been snatched away. The superhead will be out of a job this summer – after just two years in the post.

Here was fresh life being breathed into a stale education system weighed down by paperwork, statistics, targets and policies. But the governors, and ultimately the local authority, who had to verify the appointment, didn’t want it.

But I had seen it coming. Other governors didn’t like his ideas because they were not in keeping with “the way things are done in education”; his confidence and determination for excellence was put down as 'arrogance’; and they were angry that things such as the House System had happened without endless weeks of consultation with every parent and 'stakeholder’.

Instead they were happy to congratulate the infant head teacher for signing off policies, involvement in Government initiatives, producing the right graphs, analysing the performance of every minority group and gaining an Inclusion Charter Mark – an enormous box-ticking project that was a pat on the back for accommodating difficult kids at the expense of other children. This new logo that can be added to our headed paper is just one of a number of awards that have become part of the culture, including Healthy Schools Award, Arts Mark, Investors in People, Sports Award, Basic Skills Award and the Eco-schools Green Flag. All of these take teachers away from the business of teaching – not to mention the misdirection of DCSF resources....

During my time as chair of the personnel committee, I was astonished at the lack of commitment to tackling poor teaching standards and practice. The calibre of candidates at interviews was very low. Four candidates applying for a deputy headship had two A-levels between them. The people running our schools should at least be reasonably bright, not people who have cobbled together Mickey Mouse GCSE passes in textiles and media studies and then took conversion courses at the local college. David Cameron was on to something when he announced last month that Tory policy would not allow graduates with a Third to enter the profession. Many primary schools are lucky to attract graduates at all.

My case is not unique. Throughout the system we see new targets being pushed instead of the actual job of teaching. The inclusion agenda has turned many of our state schools into places preoccupied with the needs of difficult and disruptive kids. Teaching has become second-place, with many senior teachers seeing themselves as social workers. Heads are even fined in some areas for excluding troublemakers.

I’m a Labour Party member who became a school governor because I had a firm belief in state education and was determined to do my bit to make it better for everyone. But the system has let me down. Some of our local head teachers are hell-bent on pushing inclusion but have their own children in private schools. They seem happy to accept state schools as sink schools which should not be catering for the middle classes.

But the ones who suffer most are the bright kids from working-class families who can’t afford to move or go private. They are the ones left behind, along with those heads who accept mediocrity instead of pushing for excellence.

More here





17 February, 2010

Clever! Sydney University (Australia) dumbs down its image

A Latin motto is dignified and a mark of interest in scholarship but U. Syd would rather be "modern". They claim to be aiming at making themselves stand out but in fact have just joined the common herd. It is a long time since I graduated from U. Syd but if I were a recent graduate I might well feel that my degree had been devalued -- that I had graduated from an ordinary university rather than a distinguished one. But I guess that the Left who dominate academe these days despise all traditions -- even a tradition of high scholarship. Perhaps they suspect -- probably rightly -- that they are not up to the standard of their predecessors



After 150 years the University of Sydney has abandoned its status quo, dropping the Latin motto from its redesigned coat of arms and logo. Students and scholars have turned to the new technology of social networking to launch a campaign calling for the reinstatement of the Latin inscription.

The university spent almost $750,000 on the research and redesign that axed the motto: "sidere mens eadem mutato" - a reference to Sydney following the traditions of universities in the northern hemisphere. A further $500,000 was spent replacing marketing material such as banners and street signage, the university said.

The motto - most commonly translated as "the constellation is changed, the disposition is the same" - has been part of the university's coat of arms since 1857. As a first-time astronaut, Greg Chamitoff, a former university staff member, even took a patch of the crest into space on the shuttle Discovery in 2008.

Marian Theobald, the university's external relations executive director, said market research, overseen by the Chicago-based firm Lipman Hearne, had found the university relied too heavily on its sandstone heritage and something "bolder, more energetic and more modern" was needed. "The opinion of thousands of students, academics, alumni, donors and business groups was canvassed, and we discovered the university was struggling to differentiate itself from other elite Australian institutions, in the domestic and international market place," she said. "We needed to engage better with the outside world. The removal of the Latin motto during the joint design work by Lipman Hearne and the Australian firm Moon Design was purely practical. It's hard to reproduce and read online. It was impossible to read when reduced in size. "The motto will still be used by the university and will be maintained for more formal purposes, such as on testamurs."

Ms Theobald said suggestions that between $5 million and $13 million had been spent on the branding project were ridiculous. Costs had been kept to a minimum by allowing supplies of old stationery stock, publications and merchandise to exhaust naturally.

Emily Matters, president of the Classical Language Teachers Association, said the removal was hugely disappointing. "I think this goes against everything what universities stand for where one generation hands over its culture to the next," she said.

Anthony Alexander, president of the Classical Association of NSW, who also teaches Greek and Latin at the University of Sydney, said the deletion was far from a dumbing down of the university or a denigration of Latin. "What matters is what we teach, what we actually do in the classrooms," he said. "I don't think it compromises Latin, which is stronger than ever."

Elly Howse, president of the University of Sydney Students' Representative Council, said rebranding or a new logo was a failed approach at modernising the university's image. "The money should have been spent on teaching and learning facilities," she said.

A Facebook page titled "Bring back the old USYD crest" calls for reinstatement of the Latin motto, saying the new design was better suited to a primary school.

The University of NSW, meanwhile, said it had no intention of removing its Latin motto, "manu et mente" (with hand and mind) from its coat of arms.

The university adopted its new logo and the styling of its coat of arms with a soft launch in mid-January. The coat of arms mantling and the shape of the escutcheon (shield) have changed and the motto scroll is removed. The mane and fur of the lion have been changed, along with the number of lines in the open book and the coloration.

SOURCE




U.S. schools are doing their intended job

I sometimes grow weary listening to people complaining that the government schools are doing a terrible job. I have many objections to this horrid system, but I must give it credit for accomplishing its actual – but unstated – purpose, namely, to dumb-down the minds of people so as to make them unquestioning and obedient vassals of the established order. There is nothing so disruptive to the status quo as a society of self-directed, independent-minded people both capable of and insistent on informed, analytical thought. It has been the purpose of government schools to assure that such conditions do not arise; to continue to produce a society of capable workers but who, nonetheless, have passive and contented minds.

The contrast between systems of learning that focus on helping students become epistemologically independent and competent, and the government schools, is often difficult to make other than by anecdotal examples. When I was in the eighth-grade in a government school, we were required to study Latin. That revelation, standing by itself, conveys little to a listener. Only occasionally am I able to find some past curricular evidence with which to compare modern school offerings.

Thanks to the Internet, however, I have rediscovered an interesting item that helps make my point. It is an eighth grade exam that students in Salina, Kansas, were required to pass in order to advance to high school (i.e., the ninth grade). The exam was given in 1895, and consists of the following subject areas and questions.

"Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.

3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.

4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.

5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.

6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.

7–10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?

8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?

2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?

4. Give four substitutes for caret "u."

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final "e." Name two exceptions under each rule.

6. Give two rules of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.

8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

9. Use the following correctly in sentences: Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?

3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

4. Describe the mountains of N.A.

5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.

8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

1. Where are the saliva, gastric juice, and bile secreted? What is the use of each in digestion?

2. How does nutrition reach the circulation?

3. What is the function of the liver? Of the kidneys?

4. How would you stop the flow of blood from an artery in the case of laceration?

5. Give some general directions that you think would be beneficial to preserve the human body in a state of health."

If you have any eighth-grade children in government schools, you might consider taking this set of questions to your next parent-teacher conference and ask if the students are learning at a substantive level that would allow them to provide intelligent answers. If you feel even more courageous, you might ask the teacher whether he/she is capable of giving the kinds of responses once expected of thirteen year-olds in Kansas. You will probably be told that the subject matter of this earlier test is peculiar to the time and place in which it was given; and that nineteenth-century teenagers would likely be unable to name the first winner on the "American Idol" program, or to write a sentence that includes the phrase "fer sure, dude", or to locate the site (sight? cite?) of Neverland Ranch!

SOURCE




Unionized Rhode Island Teachers Refuse To Work 25 Minutes More Per Day, So Town Fires All Of Them

I hope the town sticks to its guns. Far too many teachers are overpaid prima donnas

A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system. Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring.

The teachers' union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands. The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000. This exemplifies a nationwide trend in which public sector workers make far more than their private-sector counterparts (with better benefits).

The school superintendent has responded to the union's stubbornness by firing every teacher and administrator at the school. A sign of things to come?

SOURCE





16 February, 2010

U.S. public schools face cash crunch as “stimulus” scam winds down

Since many private schools get by on half as much money per pupil, a way out of the problem is in principle available

The nation's public schools are falling under severe financial stress as states slash education spending and drain federal stimulus money that staved off deep classroom cuts and widespread job losses. School districts have already suffered big budget cuts since the recession began two years ago, but experts say the cash crunch will get a lot worse as states run out of stimulus dollars.

The result in many hard-hit districts: more teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, smaller paychecks, fewer electives and extracurricular activities, and decimated summer school programs.

The situation is particularly ugly in California, where school districts are preparing for mass layoffs and swelling class sizes as the state grapples with another massive budget shortfall.

The crisis concerns parents like Michelle Parker in San Francisco, where the school district is preparing to lay off hundreds of school employees and raise class sizes because it faces a $113 million budget deficit over next two years. "I'm worried they're not going to have the quality education that's going to make them competitive in a global society," said Parker, who has three kids in district elementary schools.

Around the country, state governments are cutting money for schools as they grapple with huge budget gaps triggered by high unemployment, sluggish retail sales and falling real estate prices. A recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that 41 states face midyear budget shortfalls totaling $35 billion. "The states are facing a dismal financial picture," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy.

The Obama administration's $787 billion federal stimulus package provided roughly $100 billion for education, including $54 billion to stabilize state budgets. In October the White House said the stimulus created or saved 250,000 education jobs.

But many states have used most of their stimulus money, leaving little to cushion budget cuts in the coming fiscal year. Experts say the looming cuts could weaken the nation's public schools, worsen unemployment, undermine President Obama's education goals and widen the achievement gap between students in rich and poor districts.

Wealthier communities are filling school budget gaps with local tax increases and aggressive fundraising, but could worsen inequality and undermine the larger system for paying for public schools, said John Rogers, who heads the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.

In Michigan, which has the nation's highest unemployment rate, school districts lost 2 percent of their state money this year and could lose another 4 percent next year because of a projected government shortfall of $1.6 billion. Most of more than $1 billion in federal stimulus money is gone. Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm has proposed an incentive program to entice about 39,000 public school employees to retire, but that plan has been criticized by the state's largest teachers union.

In Washington state, school districts that lost $1.7 billion in state money over the past two years are bracing for another round of cuts as lawmakers try to plug a $2.8 billion state deficit. Seattle Public Schools, the state's largest district, plans to lay off nonunion staff, freeze hiring, create more efficient bus routes and increase class sizes further to close an expected budget shortfall of $24 million.

In Florida, public schools are being squeezed by state budget cuts and an unexpected increase in student enrollment, including an influx of Haitian students in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake. Districts have been coping by closing schools during breaks, cutting energy costs and changing transportation routes, but the next round of cuts is expected to hit classrooms. "We're at a point now where you just can't stretch that rubber band any further," said Bill Montford, CEO of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents.

More here




British High School league tables 'skewed by vocational courses'

Secondary schools are dramatically inflating their positions in league tables by entering more pupils for practical courses, despite fears they lack quality, it has been claimed. New figures show that results for 16-year-olds taking vocational qualifications has improved twice as fast as those for pupils only studying GCSEs. The disclosure – in data published following a Parliamentary question by the Liberal Democrats – prompted claims that pupils were taking “easier” courses just to boost rankings.

Some vocational qualifications in subjects such as computing and travel and tourism are worth the same as four GCSEs, despite taking half the time to teach. Last month, it emerged that the number of pupils taking a course in information and communication technology (ICT) had soared six-fold in just two years, despite being branded of “doubtful value” by Ofsted. The watchdog found that qualifications – such as the OCR National in ICT – were “often less demanding” than other mainstream exams.

David Laws, the Lib Dem schools spokesman, said: “These new figures raise some serious concerns about the real causes of the increase in take-up of some qualifications. “The Lib Dems are passionate about enabling more students to access vocational courses, but we should not be encouraging schools to push pupils towards certain qualifications simply to improve their school’s league table position.”

The Tories have pledged to remove vocational qualifications from GCSE league tables to stop schools attempting to manipulate official rankings. Mr Laws rejected the move, but added: “It must now be time for a fundamental review of the equivalence of different qualifications to remove the present perverse incentives.”

Official league tables show the number of pupils gaining five GCSEs graded A* to C. It also counts “equivalent” qualifications – such as BTECs and GNVQs – which are converted into GCSE points to give a comparable score. According to figures, some 45.1 per cent of pupils who took GCSEs in 1997 gained five good grades – the same as the number taking GCSEs and equivalent courses. A year later, 46.2 per cent of GCSE pupils gained five good grades, but when equivalents were added the score increased to 46.3 per cent.

According to official data, the gap between raw GCSE results and those including other qualifications has widened ever since. By 2009, some 57.5 per cent of GCSE pupils gained five A* to C grades, but it jumped to 69.7 per cent when equivalents were added. It means the pass rate with practical courses has increased twice as fast as the score without.

Last month, the headmaster of Harrow warned that poor children were being deceived into taking “worthless qualifications” that failed to prepare them for the world of work. Allowing teenagers to apply for jobs armed with “soft” GCSEs and A-levels was the same as allowing an X-Factor contestant to believe she could be the next Britney Spears when she could not sing, it was claimed. Barnaby Lenon warned that the drive to arm pupils will growing numbers of specially-tailored qualifications was simply “dumbing down” the education system.

SOURCE




Australia: Failed trainee teachers 'allowed to graduate'

It shows how desperate the system is to get warm bodies into failing government schools

TRAINEE teachers who fail their teaching rounds in schools are being allowed to graduate and take charge of classrooms, according to the Victorian Principals Association. Primary school principals have accused universities responsible for teacher training of ignoring their advice that some trainee teachers are unfit to graduate.

University students studying to become school teachers must complete part of their coursework in teaching rounds at schools to gain practical experience and put theory into practice. But Gabrielle Leigh, president of the VPA, which represents principals from private and public primary schools, has told The Age school leaders are angry about the incidence of universities rejecting their school's assessment of a trainee teacher's performance.

"If there's a situation where the school feels the student teacher is not ready to teach, a lot of the time the university tutor will overturn the school's recommendation," said Ms Leigh. "The institution says the person is fit to teach, they graduate and then they come into schools. There are enough instances of this happening for us to be concerned about it."

The association has written a position paper on teacher quality, prompted by a groundswell of concern from its members about the training system's flaws.

Ms Leigh said previous federal government funding cuts to universities had also weakened education faculty tutors' ability to oversee the teaching rounds of trainees. "We get a very limited service from most universities," she said. "In the past a tutor might have come out twice to see how a trainee was going. Now you might get one flying visit, if that."

Victorian Institute of Teaching chief executive officer Andrew Ius urged the association to give him details of cases where school reports on unfit trainees had been rejected. The institute is responsible for accrediting teacher-training courses and registering teachers. "I'm disappointed we have not heard from the VPA because the issue is something we would be very concerned about," he said.

The Victorian Council of Deans of Education, which represents universities that provide teacher training, rejected the principals' criticisms. Its president, Annette Gough, said she did not know of any cases where school decisions had been overturned without a university consulting the school. Under university protocols, students who fail a teaching round are given a second chance to repeat the round at another school. Those who fail two rounds are liable to be suspended for a year and have to reapply to finish their course. "We greatly value supervising teachers' opinions," Professor Gough said.

"A student could fail one round but end up graduating because they've passed other rounds at other schools." However, she said the teaching-round component of teacher training was in crisis because successive federal governments had failed to provide enough funds to universities to cover the cost. Universities were battling to find classroom teachers to supervise trainees. Only 25 per cent of teachers in government schools, 12 per cent in Catholic and 10 per cent in independent schools were willing to do the job, according to the council's research.

SOURCE





15 February, 2010

Children of the British poor a year behind when they start school, study says

Children from poor families are already a year behind in vocabulary tests when they start school, according to research published today. It reveals the full impact of upbringing and home life on attainment [Utter rubbish. It is another confirmation of the amply documented fact that the average IQ is lower among the poor. A smart kid from a poor background usually doesn't stay poor. He usually moves into the middle class one way or another -- and then his kids mostly stay outside the ranks of the poor too], and how those from troubled or impoverished homes can fall behind at a young age. Many never catch up with better-off classmates and become stuck in a cycle of underachievement.

The report, by the Sutton Trust, highlights the importance of activities such as bedtime stories and taking children to museums and libraries. In isolation, these appear to have a bigger impact on progress than wealth.

It shows that home environment has an overwhelming influence on children’s academic achievement and raises questions in the build-up to the general election about whether social mobility has declined under Labour. [It certainly has some influence but genetics is the main influence. I come from a poor background but I was reading Homer in my teens and have never looked back --JR]

Researchers from the trust, a charity that aims to cut inequality in education, said that politicians had oversimplified the problem by using phrases such as “Broken Britain”, and polarising the argument of whether poverty or parenting was the root cause.

They tracked the performance of more than 12,000 five-year-olds, and found that the poorest fifth were almost a year behind pupils from middle-income families and 16 months behind those from rich backgrounds when they started school.

The report said: “Parenting style, for example rules about bedtimes and factors like parental reading and trips to museums and galleries, contribute up to half of the explained cognitive gap between the lowest and middleincome families.”

Forty-five per cent of children from the poorest backgrounds were read to every day at age 3, compared with 78 per cent from the richest families. When all other factors were equal, those read to daily had a vocabulary two months ahead of peers. Children taken to the library regularly were 2.5 months ahead, as were those who had regular bedtimes. Parenting and home environment were responsible for almost half of the gap in achievement, the report said. Material possessions such as internet access, cars and good living conditions, or lack of them, caused about 30 per cent of the difference. Maternal and child health accounted for about 10 per cent, and whether the mother was employed and the type of childcare was responsible for the other 10 per cent. [No mention about how much each of those factors was influenced by IQ]

However, there was an overlap between wealth and home life. A third of children from the most impoverished homes were born to parents without a good GCSE, and the parents of two thirds had split up by the time the child was aged 5.

The report said: “In some poor households, good parenting can still overcome these limitations and lead to high-achieving children.”

It recommended setting up children’s centres to offer effective parenting programmes. It also said that the funding intended to pay for free nursery places for all three and four-year-olds should be diverted to provide 25 hours of nursery education for all two to four-year-olds from the most disadvantaged families.

Lee Elliot Major, research director at the trust, said: “We suspect parenting is an even bigger factor than the statistics show. Good parenting trumps adversity in terms of poverty, but at the same time poverty is a big factor in this. There’s a political debate; David Cameron was quoted as saying it’s warmth not wealth that matters in parenting. But sometimes these are nuanced issues that get politicised and polarised to parenting vs poverty, which is an oversimplification.”

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, accused the school system of failing the most deprived children. According to analysis by the Tories, only 45 children on free school meals get into Oxford or Cambridge each year, but an average of 82 pupils a year went to Oxbridge from one leading independent school, Westminster.

SOURCE




Australia: No mathematics teacher in a NSW government High School? Due to lack of money says schools boss

So a teacher is replaced by a website. It's not money that is needed. It's a congenial working environment. Teaching was once seen as a noble profession. With today's chaotic schools, capable people avoid a teaching career. Some previous imbecilic comments from the pig's Trotter here (3rd article down)

NEW South Wales schools are doing all they can to attract maths teachers but are competing with higher-paying employers for a small pool of talent, a senior education official says.

The comments come after revelations that HSC students at Davidson High School in Sydney's north were being forced to teach themselves maths online because of a teacher shortage. The students have been without a qualified 2-unit maths teacher for the first month of year 12, following the retirement of a teacher last year.

NSW Department of Education and Training director-general Michael Coutts-Trotter says Davidson High School is searching for a permanent teacher and an interim teacher will be sent to the school tomorrow.

Mr Coutts-Trotter says he understands the frustration of parents and students, but the school has done all it can to support the students and to try to find a suitable permanent teacher. "They've begun the HSC year with a whole lot of undesirable changes, but the school has done everything it possibly can to support the people in that class," Mr Coutts-Trotter told Fairfax Radio Network.

"Nationally in the last 15 years people are taking fewer challenging maths and science subjects through their schooling, and as a result there is a shrinking pool of people of real ability in maths and science to take up teaching positions. "We're also competing for their skills against the finance sector particularly."

Mr Coutts-Trotter said about $7 million a year was being spent on scholarships, retraining and a range of inducements to encourage more people to train as teachers.

SOURCE




Stigma, Gay Philosophers, And Christian Colleges

Maybe I am missing something here but it seems to me that the American Philosophical Association is making it MORE difficult for homosexuals to get jobs at Christian colleges. In the current job market, the college should have a big range of choice among potential philosophy teachers and should be able to find one that suits it just fine -- JR

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning that Calvin College, a “distinctively Christian” liberal arts college, has become the first institution to run afoul of a new rule adopted by the American Philosophical Association “requiring any college that violates any part of the association's anti-bias policy to have job listings with the association flagged.” The rule was adopted last year because of the opposition of many philosophers to “having their association list jobs from institutions that do not hire gay professors.”

One aim of the policy, proponents said, was to then be able to lobby colleges to change their policies. Some philosophers are now trying to do just that with a petition urging the college to accept gay professors. “One might puzzle over a form of Christianity that is committed to the inequality of people, and in particular of job applicants for positions in philosophy. More disturbing, however, is the stigma Calvin College feels entitled to place upon those who are doubly exposed: as lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgendered in a society that has yet to accept them, and as people seeking jobs during difficult economic times.

I don’t want to address the substance of this issue here. For what it’s worth (about what you paid for it), I don’t believe employers should discriminate against gay applicants, and I also believe religious institutions deserve broad exemptions from anti-discrimination laws and regulations that violate their religious beliefs.

But I do want to address two petition points quoted above, one of which I question as a matter of fact and the other strikes me as just whiningly silly.

First, the questionable fact: I wonder if the “stigma” Calvin College allegedly inflicts on gays by refusing to hire them is actually greater in our society and culture at large (not to mention among the opinion-shaping elites) than the “stigma” suffered, especially in academic circles, by “distinctively Christian” institutions and individuals. Clearly representatives of Calvin College and similar institutions would be no more welcome at meetings of the American Philosophical Society or other assemblies of culture-producing citizens (despite the “diversity” they would provide to such gatherings) than gay professors are at Calvin or than blacks were at Bob Jones University when its tax exemption was revoked.

Now the whiningly silly: I’m sorry philosophers are having trouble finding jobs, but I don’t think their difficulty imposes any additional duty to be nice to them on Calvin College, nor does it make them “doubly exposed.” All those “seeking jobs during difficult economic times” are equally “exposed,” and that exposure is no worse, no different, for philosophy applicants (even gay philosophy applicants) than for anyone else.

Do philosophers really want to argue that since gay philosophy applicants are “doubly exposed” they deserve special, preferential treatment? Oh wait, don’t answer that....

SOURCE





14 February, 2010

Dishonest British exam marks betray kids

Grades are so inflated that real ability can only be guessed at. I am not entirely sympathetic with the kid below, though. Why would he want to study English? He can read all the poems and novels he likes on his own and where is it going to get him anyway? English was by far my best subject but I did not major in it as I could not see the point of wasting a university education on it. My worst subject was always mathematics but I ended up teaching statistics for most of my university teaching career. Reality is often far from the ideal but it pays to recognize it

A new A-level grade intended to help universities pick the most able applicants risks falling victim to the grade inflation it was meant to solve. Candidates are being rejected by universities despite being predicted to score at least three A*s in their A-levels this summer, when the grade is awarded for the first time.

With about one in eight A-level candidates now scoring straight As and thousands rejected each year by Oxford and Cambridge alone, it had been hoped that the A* would identify the academic elite. Figures released last week showed applications to degree courses were up by 23% on last year and the A* has increased the pressure on pupils.

Among those who have been turned down is Robert Kehoe, 18, a grammar school pupil from Lincolnshire, who says he has been rejected by Cambridge and three other universities despite being predicted to win three A*s and an A. To gain an A*, candidates must achieve an average of 80% in exams across their two years of A-level study and 90% in exams in the second year.

Only a handful of universities include A*s in their offers — most successful applicants to Cambridge are told they must gain at least one of the grades this summer. The university is understood to have made its first three A*s offer within the past few days.

Research by the university suggests that even three A*s may not set candidates apart from the crowd. Cambridge analysed the A-level marks scored by present undergraduates and found that 45% of science students and a quarter of those in arts subjects would have gained three or more A* grades. At least 70% of science students and 55% of those in the arts would have merited at least two A*s.

Tutors believe this is likely to be an underestimate of the numbers who will obtain the grades this summer.

“We are told by teachers that students are working much harder than they used to when they knew they were on target for an A grade,” said Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge.

Tim Hands, master of Magdalen College school in Oxford, who co-chairs the main independent schools universities committee, said his school had been advised by Cambridge that applicants to study medicine might need A*s across all their subjects to stand out. He added that Cambridge was being “commendably open and helpful”, in contrast to other universities which had said they would not even acknowledge the A*, potentially magnifying the injustice to pupils. “Students should be aware that admissions systems are heading for a dishonourable and confusing meltdown,” Hands warned.

Kehoe is a pupil at Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Horncastle. His application to read English has been rejected by Christ’s College, Cambridge, by two other colleges at the same university and by Durham, Warwick and University College London. In addition to his predicted A-level A*s, he obtained 10 A*s at GCSE. Kehoe does not know how much better he is expected to do. “I was determined not to lose hope and felt gently reassured by my four As at ASlevel,” he said. “Unfortunately, at present, my Ucas form serves only to depress me.” He is now hoping for success from his remaining university choice, Leeds.

The universities that rejected Kehoe would not comment on his case this weekend, but all said that entry to their English courses was highly competitive. This meant that many candidates with impressive academic credentials had to be turned away. University College London said it had received 1,500 applicants and interviewed 300 for just 70 places. “There are some very good people who fall by the wayside,” it said.

SOURCE




British Mathematics teachers fail primary level test

If you were good at mathematics, why would you want to teach in a British school? To get better teachers you need a more civilized school environment, for starters. Many schools are now so dysfunctional that you would have to be a dummy to work there

Primary school maths teachers are failing to attain the standard of arithmetic expected of 11-year-olds, new research has claimed. Only 20% of the teachers tested for a Channel 4 television documentary were able to work out that the solution to 4+2x5 is 14, not 30 — multiplication takes priority over addition.

The results have led to renewed calls from business leaders for the government to improve standards of maths teaching — last year, more than 20% of pupils left primary school without reaching the expected level of maths in their Sats tests. Justin King, chief executive of Sainsbury, tells tomorrow’s edition of Dispatches: “Any system that only succeeds 80% of the time in terms of achieving its basic result needs changing. If we saw that in our business we would be working out how we close that gap. “I don’t think it is about inherent skill. I genuinely don’t believe that many, if any, of our youngsters need to be left in a position of not having basic skills in maths.”

His comments follow those last year by Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, who attacked “woefully low” standards in schools which leave private sector companies to “pick up the pieces”; and Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks & Spencer, who said many school-leavers were “not fit for work”.

For its programme Kids Don’t Count, Dispatches used a test devised by Richard Dunne, a maths consultant and former Exeter University academic. The test comprised 27 straightforward questions, most of which, according to Dunne, were of the standard required of an 11-year-old. On average, the teachers answered just 45% of the questions correctly. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14. Currently, primary school teachers in England need only C grades in GCSE maths to be admitted on to teacher training courses.

Dunne said the tests showed that teachers “know so little maths that they cannot be conveying mathematics to their children”. However, Vernon Coaker, the schools minister, denied the claims of poor standards. He said: “The fact is that 100,000 more 11-year-olds are reaching level 4 in maths compared with 1997 because of record investment, great teaching and a strong focus on the basics for all pupils.”

Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College London, said she was “horrified” by the Channel 4 findings and that teacher training was to blame. “Our obsession with generic teaching skills has crowded out time in which we could be making sure that [teachers] have the basic knowledge,” said Wolf. “I don’t think you can teach maths if you can’t do it either.”

SOURCE




Imprisoning kids

by John Stossel

Obama's newest "deficit-conscious" budget calls for a 9% increase in federal education spending. Instead of dumping the money on our flailing public K-12 system, he should try something that actually works. Today's Wall Street Journal suggests that he look at the voucher program in Milwaukee:

In 2008 the graduation rate for voucher students was 77% versus 65% for the nonvoucher students, though the latter receives $14,000 per pupil in taxpayer support, or more than double the $6,400 per pupil that voucher students receive in public funding.

I don't consider graduation rates the best comparative measure. Schools may graduate kids who are uneducated and unprepared. But other studies of voucher programs find that voucher kids' test scores rise. That's a better measure.

It's unlikely that the president will support vouchers. In Washington D.C., Obama killed the Opportunity Scholarship program even though it raised test scores while spending half as much money as government schools spent. The unions give to Democrats, and the unions don't want competition to their public school monopoly.

Unless we allow parents more choice, we effectively imprison kids. I will do a show on that soon. Suggestions invited.

SOURCE





13 February, 2010

State meddling hamstrings schools

To show the results of union dominance of the public education system, John Stossel, host of Fox News' "Stossel," on a recent show held up a convoluted chart that detailed, in small print, the amazing lengths to which New York school administrators must go to fire an incompetent teacher. The viewer sees a long and detailed chart filled with boxes connected by arrows. Then, Stossel reveals that what he's holding up for the camera is only the beginning, as he lets falls to the floor several more pages that had been hidden, accordion-style, behind the first page of the termination procedures chart.

The joke - actually much sadder than funny - is on us, as we realize that there's no way that even the worst teacher can get sacked and that it's basically impossible to reform the public school system as it is currently structured. Yet local, state and federal officials go on proposing reforms that will surely turn the nations' bureaucratic, government-controlled public school systems into models of efficiency and high-performance learning.

Many proposals have a point, but trying to reform these unruly systems is like trying to improve a crumbling, crooked old building resting on a cracked foundation by installing new dual-pane windows and nicer carpeting. No one, quite frankly, wants to strike at the root of the problem, which is the existence of a monopoly school system run by the government, financed by tax dollars and dominated by union employees who don't have to please any customers.

California's Legislative Analyst's Office, which has a deservedly fine reputation for analyzing budgetary matters, last week released a report, "Education Mandates: Overhauling a Broken System," which jumps into the fray. It identifies a real problem - the proliferation of state mandates that require districts "to perform hundreds of activities even though many of these requirements do not benefit students or educators." The report pins the annual compliance cost for school districts at more than $400 million. Furthermore, because of a voter-approved 1979 initiative, Proposition 4, the state is supposed to reimburse local school districts for the mandates it imposes on them. California owes districts more than $3.6 billion - and the state tends to defer these reimbursements, rather than paying up in a timely manner.

"In short," the report explained, "districts are required to perform hundreds of activities - many of dubious merit - without regular pay, resulting in billions of dollars in state debt."

Of course, many of these mandates were imposed by the Legislature to improve the often-poor quality of public education across the state and try to assure that all districts were teaching some standardized curricula. But whenever education is politicized (and all public education is political, in that the decisions are made through a political process), this is what will happen. Legislators will pass reforms, many of which are transparent attempts to promote one special-interest group's agenda over another's. You get the good, the bad and the ugly. And all of it is expensive and, ultimately, counterproductive.

The LAO report points to a chart evocative of the long, pointless chart Stossel displayed. This "Mandate Determination Process" reveals a convoluted route by which local districts can seek reimbursement from the state. This reimbursement issue is going to become increasingly contentious in these tough budget times.

Ironically, on the same day the LAO released its report, the leading Democratic contender for state attorney general, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, advocated some costly new education mandates during a Senate Public Safety Committee hearing on school truancy. Harris has been particularly aggressive in using law enforcement in her city to battle truancy, implementing a controversial program that prosecutes the parents of truants and subjects them to jail time and fines. She also proposed a statewide database to track truants - a system that would tie a district's state funding to the adoption of such a tracking system.

Truancy issues typically are local issues, which prompted a reply from Republican attorney general candidate Tom Harman, a state senator from Huntington Beach: "What I wonder is how creating another statewide bureaucracy to monitor it will keep kids in school. I don't think the state is in any position to create yet another new program - especially regarding an issue traditionally handled by locals."

None of this will actually improve the functioning of the school systems. At best, the Harris approach will coerce more people into sending their kids to ill-performing schools, which epitomize the "customer service" approach common in government: Offer poor products and inefficient services, then force people to buy them.

Harris' campaign, by the way, boasts her endorsement by a former state superintendent of public instruction, Delaine Eastin, best known for trying to use her authority to shut down home schools, under the theory that home schooling is a form of truancy. Let's hope a Harris victory doesn't signal a return to these dark days of California education policy. Home-school advocates already are fearful that Harris' approach could endanger home-schooled kids.

The LAO offers this solution to the mandate issue: "We recommend comprehensively reforming K-14 mandates. If a mandate serves a purpose fundamental to the education system, such as protecting student health or providing essential assessment and oversight data, it should be funded. If not, the mandate should be eliminated."

Whom do we thank for that groundbreaking suggestion? Of course, good mandates should stay, and bad ones should go, but in a political process, there's no way of waving a magic wand and making that happen. Maybe the LAO can develop a wall chart with the detailed process the Legislature can follow to attain that unquestionably worthy goal.

The state already spends more than 40 percent of its budget on education. There are stacks of mandates and volumes of legislative reforms passed in recent years. The system still stinks. The only solution is competition. Only competitive systems value the customer and create incentives for efficiency and performance. Happy customers are a better sign of success than long flow charts and endless calls for new legislation and reform.

SOURCE




British private school pupils 'being rejected from university'

Leftist class war still raging in Britain. Karl Marx would be proud

Private school pupils with straight-A grades are being rejected from elite universities in unprecedented numbers, it can be disclosed. Headmasters are blaming a shortage of university places caused by funding cuts, combined with the effect of Labour’s “social engineering” drive that prioritises bright children from under-performing comprehensives.

Two out of three top independent schools approached by The Daily Telegraph said teenagers were finding it harder to get into higher education this year compared with 12 months ago. In some cases, pupils predicted to get three A*s at A-level – along with a string of perfect GCSE results – are being turned down from all five of their choices. Entry to Oxbridge is especially hard this year, heads claim. Some schools reported a drop of around three-quarters in the number of students with offers from Oxford and Cambridge.

Heads said the squeeze was being exacerbated by the Government’s “widening participation” policy. It encourages universities to give lower grade offers to bright pupils from poor schools showing the most potential. It is also feared that universities are prioritising foreign students who can be charged far higher fees.

Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, said: “The financial pressures and the social mobility agenda are leading to a situation where children who have worked very hard to get the grades that their forebears got are finding it more difficult than their predecessors to get into university.”

One student from Brighton – rated among Britain’s top 20 schools in a recent league table – has been rejected from Oxford, University College London and Durham, despite being predicted three A*s at A-level, on top of straight As at GCSE and AS level.

The Telegraph interviewed the heads of 30 leading independent schools and two-thirds reported concerns over the admissions process. In many cases, they said universities imposed last-minute rises in A-level entry requirements – often after students had applied.

The disclosure follows the publication of figures this week showing applications to degree courses are up 23 per cent compared with 2009. More than 100,000 extra applications have been made and demand for places at some institutions has doubled in just 12 months. The rise is being driven by students reapplying after being turned down last year combined with a dramatic increase in demand from mature students returning to education because of a shortage of jobs in the recession.

Despite the surge, separate research from the Telegraph suggests that as many as a quarter of universities are actually cutting the number of places for British undergraduates after a drop in budgets. Last week, universities were told that spending would be slashed by £449m in the autumn, including a £215m reduction in cash for teaching and warnings of further reductions in the future.

Steve Smith, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, told the Telegraph that admissions tutors still had a “duty” to identify good students with poorer grades despite the admissions crisis – potentially placing further pressure on places for independent school pupils. “Many students who have shown a desire to go to university are going to be very disappointed this year,” he said. “But data shows that people often do better coming in with lower grades from a poorly-performing school then if they come in with higher grades from a well-performing school.”

Antony Clark, the head of Malvern College in Worcestershire, said outstanding candidates who would have received five offers from top universities were now lucky to receive one or two. “I think admissions tutors are looking closely for the rough diamond who has not been through the private school system but is showing huge potential,” he said.

Peter Roberts, the head of Bradfield College, Reading, said: “We will have some boys and girls who are turned down for all five universities they apply for in the upper-sixth and that’s very hard for a young person who has worked hard and done well.”

Many independent schools send a small number of students to Oxbridge every year. But some told the Telegraph that numbers had plummeted in 2010. Woodhouse Grove School, West Yorkshire, said it usually had three offers, but only received one this year. Elizabeth Enthoven, head of sixth form, said: “I think the competition is much fiercer, and they have their agenda about open access.”

Sunderland High School said it had no Oxbridge offers, despite normally receiving around two. One boy had three A* predictions and straight As at GCSE and AS level but was rejected.

Queen’s College, Taunton, said the three or four places pupils normally gained had dropped to one, while Emanuel School, Battersea, said numbers dropped from around three a year to one in 2010.

Mark Hanley-Browne, Emanuel headmaster, said: “It’s harder to get into the top universities in 2010. We had very good students that didn’t make it who in previous years would have done - people with 10 A*s at GCSE and four As at AS level.”

Other schools told how students were finding it significantly harder to get into other universities, suggesting that the squeeze is being felt across the sector.

In a separate disclosure, the Telegraph surveyed 30 top universities. A quarter said they planned to cut student numbers. This included Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester and the West of England. At least half said numbers were being frozen. In all, between 750,000 and 800,000 students are expected to compete for around 480,000 places. Graham McQueen, head of sixth form, Warminster School, Wiltshire, said: “It’s never been more competitive to get into the Russell Group universities.”

King’s School, Rochester, said the grades offered for red brick universities were noticeably higher. Kevin Jones, head of senior school, said: “My main concern is what happens in the summer. The people who miss their grades by a whisker are going to have problems. “It’s going to be much more difficult to negotiate on results day.”

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, denied that private school pupils faced discrimination. “Although admissions are rightly a matter for individual institutions, the Government is committed to ensuring that entry to university is determined by aptitude, potential and merit, not where a student was educated,” she said. “There are a record number of students – over 2m – at university. That’s 390,000 more than in 1997 and next year we expect there will be more students than ever before. “But getting a place at university has always been, and should be, a competitive process. Not everyone gets the grades and some decide university is not for them. “But, it is early days and students haven’t even sat their A-levels yet.”

SOURCE




Australia: Bullsh*t program to help poor readers

Teaching them about phonetics and spelling rules is what is needed but instead they get anything but

PRIMARY school children with poor reading skills are making bug-catchers in a summer school program run in Queensland with federal government money allocated to improve literacy skills. The summer school for literacy held in January and last September is intended for children in Years 5 to 7 whose skills are below the minimum standard in the national literacy tests.

The focus of the school is to teach them how to evaluate and make inferences from what they read and to analyse the way authors have expressed their points of view about a topic.

The need for knowledge of letter-sound relationships and sounding out words to read them -- known as decoding -- is downgraded. "The summer schools literacy emphasis is on discussing the meanings of texts and on making judgments about topic sentences and word choices rather than on coding and decoding," information provided for teachers says. "Teachers are encouraged to read texts aloud so that learners can concentrate on the higher-order thinking involved in making reliable inferences. "Teachers are also able to annotate their students' work where necessary, so that encoding difficulties do not prevent students from showing what they understand and can do."

In information provided to parents, the department says the literacy summer school will teach students "how to evaluate texts". "It is important that students understand that authors (the creators of written text, documentaries, stories, films, advertisements, screenplays, video clips, chat shows etc.) all have a particular purpose and point of view," it says.

One of the literacy activities outlined for teachers to do with their students is to build an insect catcher, or "pooter", after reading a magazine about invertebrates. The instructions for making the pooter are out of order and students must rearrange them before they can make the insect catcher. The summer school program is one of the strategies devised by Queensland under the national partnership on literacy and numeracy, for which the federal government has provided $540 million to help struggling students. It will also pay financial rewards to states that lift their performance in the national tests. The Queensland government is spending $5m of its $139m allocation over the next four years on the summer schools.

Queensland Education Minister Geoff Wilson said summer schools had been popular, with parent satisfaction ratings of about 95 per cent. He said about four in five students who attended the September summer school showed improvement in at least one area of literacy or numeracy, with 85 per cent of students saying it made them feel more confident about reading, writing and maths. Other initiatives introduced by the Queensland government included literacy and numeracy coaches in schools and "turnaround teams" to help schools identify and solve problems.

Macquarie University education professor Kevin Wheldall, developer of the remedial reading MULTILIT program, said the Queensland Education Department was ignoring the recommendations of the national inquiry on teaching reading. Professor Wheldall said the inquiry echoed the findings of similar studies in the US and Britain that teaching children letter-sound relationships and how to put sounds together to form words was the necessary first step in learning to read for all students. "I don't understand how they're allowed to spend federal money doing this, given that the money was earmarked for kids struggling with reading," he said. "We know this doesn't work, it's precisely the approach that's failed these kids in the first place. and they're just offering more of the same at summer school."

Award-winning literacy teacher John Fleming, who advocates the teaching of letter-sound relationships, said the summer school approach showed the need to ensure reading was properly taught from the first days of school. Mr Fleming, now at Haileybury school in Melbourne and the 2006 winner of the national award for outstanding contribution to literacy and numeracy, said if students failed to pick up decoding skills, that was difficult to overturn when they were at the end of primary school. "What they're advocating is trying to engage the kids because a lot of them by this age feel reading is not their go," he said. "To be fair, at least they're trying to give them an opportunity to engage in the activity first, but if these kids didn't pick it up when they were in the first two or three years of school, they will find it difficult now."

Mr Fleming said the students' main problem was "instructional deficit" and that they had not been given the skills needed to develop as readers in the first years of school. "They've been immersed and gone through a school that said `When the kids are ready, they will pick it up'," he said. "Unfortunately, for these sorts of kids, that's not true."

A spokesman for Education Minister Julia Gillard said the summer schools program was one of a number of initiatives by Queensland to improve literacy and numeracy, and all the measures adopted by the states and territories under the national partnership were required to be backed by evidence. The spokesman said the bug-catcher activity aimed to engage students in literacy through a practical activity.

SOURCE





12 February, 2010

Study finds lack of civic learning in U.S. college graduates

College fails to teach civic knowledge - including American history and national institutions - and has an influence on liberal leanings among students, a new study says. The study, conducted by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, specifically cited typically liberal positions on gay marriage and school prayer.

Richard Brake, the director of ISI's Culture of Enterprise Initiative, said high schools could be partly to blame for a lack of civic knowledge but college courses should provide more concentrated study. "You should reinforce it and go beyond it," he said. "Learning is about reinforcement."

The study tested 2,508 Americans with various education levels on 33 basic civic knowledge questions that included political literacy, American history and economics. The overall average score was 49 percent. College graduates scored at 57 percent. Respondents also answered questions about 39 social issues. The answers were compared with those from a 2006-07 study that tested more than 14,000 college freshmen and seniors on similar issues.

Mr. Brake said college students scored better on questions relating to the history of the 1900s, including those involving Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. He added that this is some indication of the focus of study in the classroom.

A previous study by ISI found that the average college student has taken an average of only four political science, economics and history courses, although they are considered to be parts of a general education curriculum. Mr. Brake said the study found that students who took more than four of these courses scored higher, but his main concern was of the quality of education. He said a fragmented discipline often allows students to avoid taking basic courses that would teach civic literacy.

One portion of the study found that 58 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 compared with 68 percent ages 45 to 64 disagreed that America corrupts otherwise good people.

Mr. Brake said he is uncertain what variables could be affecting the results. He said it might be natural for younger people to be more skeptical, or that the older generation was educated differently.

The study shows a correlation between college education and an increase in liberal opinions on four polarizing social issues. Of those whose education has not extended beyond high school, 24.6 percent believed gay couples should be allowed to legally marry. That compares with 39.1 percent of respondents with college degrees. More than half - 56.6 percent - of those with a high school education, compared with 39.4 percent of those with a college education, thought public school teachers should be allowed to lead prayer at public schools. The report also found that 74.2 percent of those with a high school education agreed that the Bible is the Word of God, while 63.5 percent of those with college education agreed.

When asked whether non-Christian religions could have affected this result, Mr. Brake said the number of respondents who identified themselves as non-Christians was small.

The responses, however, were less predictable at the Ph.D level of education. Those with doctorate degrees answered more conservatively to marriage and public school prayer questions and more liberally with the Bible question and two additional questions.

Mr. Brake said public opinion is complex. "There are all sorts of things that contribute to why you think a certain way," he said.

An additional finding of the study concluded that civic knowledge broadens a person's frame of mind. It said respondents who scored higher on the civic literacy test were more likely to agree that prosperity depends on entrepreneurs but less likely to agree that free markets bring about full employment.

Mr. Brake said the study shows only that there is a lack of civic education at the college level, and that it does not define right or wrong public opinion. "A lot of this has to do with making more informed consumers," he said. "That's the whole purpose of this initiative."

SOURCE




School Choice Bad for the Environment?

No. It's not a joke. It's the finding from a new paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The argument is school choice leads to more driving which results in more vehicle emissions. The abstract says, "that eliminating district-wide school choice (i.e., returning to a system with neighborhood schools only) would have significant impacts on transport modes and emissions" and the findings "underscore the need to critically evaluate transportation-related environmental and health impacts of currently proposed changes in school policy."

George Mason economist Don Boudreaux appropriately responds in an open letter to the authors:

Why stop with education? Perhaps another future study can be on the environmental impact of supermarket choice. After all, with people free to drive wherever they wish to buy groceries, it's almost certainly the case that too many of us drive hither and yon unnecessarily, wasting our time and fouling the air. I'll bet that your research will show that restricting each American to shopping only at that supermarket nearest to his or her home will reduce vehicular emissions and, hence, help the environment.

Indeed, the possibilities suggested by your research are infinite. No telling how much filth is spit into our environment everyday by people needlessly driving to churches, restaurants, shopping malls, gyms, physicians' offices, night clubs - even friends' homes - when they could easily go to (and, hence, should forcibly be restricted to) churches, restaurants, etc. - and even to the homes of friends - who are located closer to their where they live."

Although it sounds implausible and probably is, environmental policies designed to restrict consumer choice already exist or members of our government are proposing them. Our government is picking off individual freedoms and slowly but surely reducing consumer choice. Vehicle regulations to increase fuel efficiency make cars smaller and less safe. The phase-out of incandescent light bulb will commence in 2012. There are some who want to ban bottled water because it creates too much waste and uses too much energy.

And if there are serious concerns about vehicle emissions, we should measure the inconsequential effects additional driving would have on health and global warming against the benefits of school choice. Having choice is an invaluable benefit of being an American and the more the government attempts to restrict it, the less it will be taken for granted.

SOURCE




History of England starts at 1700, says British university

Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700. It was claimed that the move by Sussex University risked jeopardising the nation’s understanding of the subject and “entrenching the ignorance of the present”. Under plans, research and in-depth teaching into periods such as the Tudors, the Middle-Ages, Norman Britain, the Viking invasion and the Anglo-Saxons will be scrapped, along with the Civil Wars.

The university will also end research into the history of continental Europe pre-1900, affecting the study of the Napoleonic wars and the Roman Empire.

The university said it was “reshaping” its curriculum and research following a £3m cut in Government funding. Last week, universities across the country were told their budgets were to be slashed by £449 million next year, including a £215m reduction in teaching funding, with threats of further cuts in the future. Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, has claimed that institutions can use the opportunity to focus resources on their strongest areas.

But in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, 17 leading historians said the move was short-sighted and risked undermining the public’s understanding of the past. “To cut everything but the most modern puts in peril the public function of history, entrenching the arrogance of the present and making a mockery of the claim by the minister behind these cuts that 'we also wish to keep this country civilised',” said the letter.

The academics, who all trained at Sussex, said that the decision to sever ties with European history before 1900 was a particularly retrograde step. “For a university which has long prided itself on its European links to abandon the serious study of such pivotal areas of modern history as the French Revolution will mean depriving Sussex graduates of the mental furniture of educated Europeans,” said the letter. “The university risks damaging its reputation as a centre of knowledge for European culture and history more widely.”

The letter to the Telegraph was signed by historians from universities including Nottingham, Southampton, Trinity College Dublin, Michigan, Sydney University and the University of London Institute in Paris.

Sussex is among dozens of universities being forced to make savings following savage budget cuts announced by the Government. The University and College Union estimated that more than 15,000 jobs – the majority academic posts – could disappear in the next few years. Positions are being cut at King’s College London, Westminster, Leeds, Sheffield Hallam and Hull, while entire campuses belonging to the universities of Cumbria and Wolverhampton are being shut. Several loss making courses are also being scrapped across the country. The University of the West of England has already scrapped French, German and Spanish, and Surrey has dropped its BA in humanities.

The letter called on the university to stop proposals to withdraw from “research, and research-led teaching, in English social history before 1700 and the history of continental Europe before 1900”.

Prof Paul Layzell, deputy vice-chancellor, said: “The proposal put forward by the University of Sussex to withdraw from certain areas of research and specialist teaching in history reflects three factors: first, a strategic determination to focus our research in areas of sustainability and strength; second, to align undergraduate provision with areas of demonstrable demand; and, thirdly, a need to reflect the Government’s financial policy for higher education. “The history degree at Sussex, as befits a programme offered by one of the top 20 departments in the country, will continue to be broad based and intellectually challenging.”

He insisted there were no plans for teaching to be “entrusted with non-specialists”.

SOURCE





11 February, 2010

Queer Theories and Theologies

by Mike Adams

I've decided to enter the ministry. And I'm going back to school in order to prepare. My choice of schools is Meadville-Lombard Theological School. I want to go there so I can take the course "Queer Theories and Theologies" under Laurel C. Schneider. [Meadville Lombard Theological School is a theological school serving Unitarian Universalism and liberal religion]

Professor Schneider's description of "Queer Theories and Theologies" is, to say the least, pretty queer, especially given that it's offered in a seminary:

"This course is a close examination of the development of `queer theory' out of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered liberation movement on the one hand, and the international development of critical theory on the other. Our particular interest throughout the course will be first in exploring queer theory as a public academic discourse and second in discussing what impact this discourse may have on theology and ministry."

Professor Schneider's course objectives are perhaps the most appealing aspect of "Queer Theories and Theologies":

"1. To get confused and yet not give up on thinking.

2. To improve in critical thinking about the intersections of theory (system of rules or principles) with public action so that we may be better able to recognize the ways in which theory often flies `under the radar' in the public realms of church and ministry, government, social movements, and culture.

3. To make at least one practical connection between queer theory as you come to understand it and public theology."

I'm pretty confused by some of those objectives. But I'm not quite ready to give up on thinking. There's hope for me yet.

Whenever one is confused in Professor Schneider's course he (or she or it or undecided) has an opportunity to submit a "weekly reflection." This is the part of the reading schedule that includes a "reflection question" meant to help guide reading for the session. The good news is that the student can use the question to frame a one-page response to the reading, or (and I'm quoting directly from the syllabus) the student can "ignore the question and address one of (the student's) own that emerged for (the student) in response to the session's reading."

I can hardly wait for this part of the class because the readings are both godly and scholarly. For example, students read "The Queer God" by Marcella Althaus-Reid. Later, they read an article by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, which is in "God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism." Mark Jordan's "The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology" also makes the list. But the highlight of the readings is none other than professor Laurel Schneider's article "What Race is Your Sex?"

I thought about writing a rebuttal to Schneider's article called "How Tall is Your Age?" But I decided to call it "What color are your brain farts?"

By session nine of "Queer Theories and Theologies" the student is expected to formulate a central question or thesis statement for a project, which constitutes 30% of the final course grade. Mine will take the form of a final paper called "Why Queers Enter the Ministry."

Some years ago, a man asked for my opinion on why his good friend, an atheist, had decided to go to Yale Divinity School. I told him that the Enemy could do more harm trying to destroy an institution from within than from without.

And so it is with the so-called GLBT (Gilbert) movement. The Gilbert has equal rights. He is not fighting for anything. He is only seeking to destroy anyone or anything that will not validate him. That is why only 4% of gays who live in states giving them a "right" to get married actually do get married. They do not seek to enjoy marriage. They seek to destroy marriage. All because it denies them validation.

Originally, all Unitarians and Universalists were Christians who didn't believe in the Holy Trinity of God but, instead, in the unity of God. Later, they stressed the importance of "rational thinking" and the "humanity" of Jesus. Since the merger of the two denominations in 1961, Unitarian Universalism has emphasized "social justice." Hence the interest in the Gilbert movement.

We live in a time when Gilberts are invading Christian denominations in an effort to destroy their core Christian beliefs. I intend to enroll in Meadville-Lombard Theological School in order to reverse this trend and bring the Unitarians and Universalists back to Christianity.

I want to set them straight, so to speak. I want to save them before their symbol, the flaming chalice, is replaced by a flaming phallus.

SOURCE




Immigration judge: German anti-homeschooling policy 'repellant to everything we believe as Americans’

A U.S. immigration court Tuesday granted political asylum to a German homeschooling family, finding that the German government’s persecution of the family violated the family’s basic human rights. The judge in the case reportedly called Germany’s anti-homeschooling policy “repellant to everything we believe as Americans” at a hearing held Thursday. The Alliance Defense Fund provided funding to the Home School Legal Defense Association for the case.

“Parents have the right and authority to make decisions regarding their children’s education without undue government interference,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “The immigration court has clearly recognized that basic human rights are being violated by the German policy of persecuting home-schooling families. Many Americans are simply unaware of just how bad the policy is. We hope this ruling sheds light on a predatory policy that the German government ought to end immediately.”

“There is no safety for homeschoolers in Germany,” said Mike Donnelly, staff attorney and director of international relations for HSLDA and an ADF-allied attorney. “The two highest courts in Germany have ruled that it is acceptable for the German government to ‘stamp out’ homeschoolers as some kind of ‘parallel society.’ The reasoning is flawed. Valid research shows that homeschoolers excel academically and socially. German courts are simply ignoring the truth that exists all over the world where homeschooling is practiced.”

In granting asylum to the Romeikes, a Christian family from Bissinggen, Germany, U.S. Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman reportedly called the German government’s attempt to stamp out “parallel societies” by persecuting home-schoolers “odd” and “silly,” finding that the rights being violated in the case, In the Matter of Romeike, are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate. According to Donnelly, the judge agreed that homeschoolers are a particular group that the German government is trying to suppress and that the Romeike family has a well-founded fear of persecution that makes them eligible for asylum. A written order from the court is forthcoming.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children fled persecution in August 2008 to seek political asylum in the U.S. In Germany, they were fined several times for home-schooling their children and left their home country when it became clear they could lose custody or be jailed. They now live in Morristown, Tennessee.

SOURCE




Christian teacher 'forced out' of British school after complaining Muslim pupils praised 9/11 hijackers 'as heroes'

Hate speech and racism from Muslims is OK, apparently

A Christian teacher yesterday claimed he was forced out of his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as heroes. Nicholas Kafouris, 52, is suing his former school for racial discrimination. He told a tribunal that he had to leave his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the 'racist' and 'anti-Semitic' behaviour of Year 4 pupils.

The predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class and described the September 11 terrorists as 'heroes and martyrs'. One pupil said: 'Don't touch me, you're a Christian' when he brushed against him. Others said: 'We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up', and 'The Christians and Jews are our enemies - you too because you're a Christian'.

Mr Kafouris, a Greek Cypriot, taught for 12 years at Bigland Green Primary School in Tower Hamlets, East London. According to Ofsted 'almost all' its 465 pupils are from ethnic minorities and a vast proportion do not speak English as a first language. The teacher claims racial discrimination by the school, its headmistress and her assistant head after they failed to take action about the comments made by pupils to him.

He said there was a change in attitude of the pupils after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. They told him: 'We hate the Christians' and 'We hate the Jews', despite his attempts to stop them. He said he filled out a Racist Incident Reporting Sheet but claimed headmistress Jill Hankey dismissed his concerns.

In a statement submitted to the Central London Employment Tribunal he said: 'Miss Hankey proceeded to excuse and justify the pupil's behaviour, conduct and remarks to me as if I had no right to be offended by the child's remarks and conduct. 'Amongst Miss Hankey's justifications for the child's remarks, she said, "If the child was older, say 15, I might take it more seriously. He's only nine - he's only doing it to wind you up".' He added: 'I felt the head's behaviour and conduct towards me amounted to direct religious discrimination. I was intimidated in the way she spoke to me which indicated "Don't come back with such issues again".'

Mr Kafouris, a bachelor, said the comments became more frequent after the head did nothing about the initial incidents. 'In late November and December 2006, a number of unacceptable and blunt racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian remarks were being made by various children in Year 4 where I taught, such as, "The Twin Tower bombers are heroes and martyrs". 'Some children were expressing delight at the death and killing of people of other cultures and religions.

'In the last week of November 2006 a child was talking about stabbing another child and I told him this was dangerous talk and that a lawyer had recently been stabbed by teenagers. His reply was, "I'm glad that man died". "Why?" I asked. "Because he's a Christian and English and we're Muslim".'

He claimed that during a religious education lesson about Jonah and the whale, one of the pupils asked if Jonah was a Jew, before shouting: 'I hate the Jews, they're our enemies.'

Mr Kafouris said he again tried to speak to Miss Hankey about it. 'The head's response was hostile and offensive again. The very first thing she said to me was, "Oh, you again! You're the only teacher that reports these things! Nobody else does!" 'Four times she repeated, "It's because of your lack of discipline that they're saying these things".'

Mr Kafouris was signed off with stress by his GP at the end of February 2007 after assistant head Margaret Coleman warned him not to challenge the pupils in class about their remarks. He says the lack of support from the school has made him clinically depressed and unable to work. He was sacked in April last year.

SOURCE




"Diversity" Research Advances Progresses Accumulates

In a long, interesting, and valuable article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Peter Schmidt reviews what he describes as the "increased nuance and complexity" of a "new wave of research on campus diversity." The new research, he writes,

holds the promise of improving how colleges serve students of different hues. On the fundamental question of whether racial and ethnic diversity produces educational benefits, the latest studies' bottom line is: Sometimes. With the right mix of students. If handled delicately.

Left unsaid, at least out loud, is what such faint and attenuated praise of the new work says about the quality of the old work it attempts to move beyond. At least some of the new scholars are willing to admit that the first generation of "diversity" research left a good deal to be desired.

Many of you will recall the controversial report by University of Michigan psychologist Patricia Gurin that played such an important role in UM's defense of its racial preference policies. (Those two posts, by the way, did not discuss the competence of Gurin's work so much as its honesty.) Now some scholars are having second thoughts about this and other similar work. "n the period leading to the Grutter decision," Schmidt writes,

researchers had been focused on the basic question of whether diversity produced any educational benefits, because the courts' view of the legality of race-conscious admission policies appeared to hinge on the answer.

"There was a rush to get stuff out quickly," says Mr. Milem, of Arizona, who helped generate research used by proponents of affirmative action to make their case. "The lawyers did not want the nuance. They said, `Show us what the outcomes are.' They pushed us to sort of talk in better, shorter sound bites because that is the way it needs to be communicated."

The debate over the persuasiveness of research on this point has remained very much alive in the years since Grutter. In an article published in the Stanford Law Review in 2006, for example, Justin Pidot, who was then a third-year Stanford law student and now is a Justice Department lawyer, reviewed the research that had been before the Supreme Court in 2003 and found it inconclusive on the key question of whether colleges must maintain minority enrollments above certain levels to achieve educational benefits.

Even former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who relied on that research in her infamous Grutter opinion, now may have doubts about whether that research "clearly demonstrate[d] the educational benefits of diverse student bodies."

Of course one need not be a new scholar, or the author of new scholarly research, to find enormous and fatal flaws in the research of Gurin and other early apologists for "diversity." For example, the Michigan Association of Scholars demolished this research (without, somehow, persuading Justice O'Connor et al.) in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Grutter (which I discussed in some detail here). "In an effort to quantify the educational benefits of diversity," they wrote,

the University solicited and then issued a report written by Patricia Gurin, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Professor Gurin sought to correlate the racial diversity of classrooms on the one hand with hundreds of educational outcomes on the other. Among her results was the conclusion that students' self-reported intellectual self confidence improved more sharply in classrooms where there was greater racial diversity. But only by wading through pages of regression tables will one find the fact (not much emphasized by the University!) that student self-reported intellectual self confidence in racially mixed classrooms increased for white students. For black students Prof. Gurin found either no correlation or a negative correlation. Black student self-confidence, according to Prof. Gurin, either did not improve, or it declined in more racially mixed classes.

As the University would have it, the University is justified in abandoning normal admissions criteria so as to boost the number of black students in order that white students (but not black students) may feel more self-confident. Whether this shows a need for diversity at all is arguable; that it shows a compelling need for diversity is absurd.

The Michigan scholars argued, in short, that racial diversity is not constitutionally compelling because it is not in fact compelling.

Schmidt's article surveys a number of recent studies - some of those, such as those by Thomas Espenshade of Princeton I've already discussed - and his entire article is well worth reading. I was particularly interested, for a reason you will see below, in Schmidt's comments about one of those new studies:

Among the latest studies is a soon-to-be-published paper by two Duke University scholars - Peter Arcidiacono, an associate professor of economics, and Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor of public policy and economics - suggesting that colleges interested in promoting educational diversity face a Catch-22: If they relax admissions standards to take in more black and Hispanic students, their white and Asian-American students are much less likely to reap educational benefits, at least as measured by their acquisition of diversity-related skills assumed to increase long-term earning potential.

On the whole, the study, slated for publication in the journal Economic Inquiry, found only weak evidence that the racial composition of a college's student body has a long-term impact on the success of white and Asian-American students in the areas it measured. And where colleges enrolled black and Hispanic students whose academic credentials were lower, on average, than those of other students, the effect of diversity on the success of white and Asian-American students appeared, if anything, to be negative.

Note well - in fact, note very, very well - the dramatic but unacknowledged assumption here that virtually screams, in vain, for recognition: the value of "diversity" consists of its effects on white and Asian students. The authors, of course, recognize that "diversity" may have other justifications, but they clearly recognize what most "diversity" advocates prefer to disguise: that the justification for "diversity" because of what it does for whites and Asians, not the preferred minorities. Here is their abstract:

This article evaluates the frequently argued but heretofore little tested hypothesis that increasing minority representation in elite colleges generates tangible benefits for majority-race students. Using data on graduates of 30 selective universities, we find only weak evidence of any relationship between collegiate racial composition and the postgraduation outcomes of white or Asian students. Moreover, the strongest evidence we uncover suggests that increasing minority representation by lowering admission standards is unlikely to produce benefits and may in fact cause harm by reducing the representation of minority students on less selective campuses. While affirmative action may still be desirable for the benefits it conveys to minority students, these results provide little support for "spillover" effects on majority-race students....

The hollowness of the "spillover" justification for "diversity" (actually, its only legal justification) has been noted before, such as by the Michigan Association of Scholars quoted above ("... the University is justified in abandoning normal admissions criteria so as to boost the number of black students in order that white students (but not black students) may feel more self-confident").

And, if I do say so myself (well, who else is going to say so?), the discordant, grating song that "diversity uses blacks for the benefit of whites" has been sung here, loudly and frequently, since 2002 (!). Critics of "diversity" often note the unfairness of excluding some whites and Asians so that other whites and Asians could receive the alleged benefits of being exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. They properly regard such treatment as unfair, I noted in the November 2002 post just quoted,

because they were not treated with what Ronald Dworkin (and others) would call "equal respect." Their interests were subordinated to the (presumed) interests of others in being exposed to more "diversity" than the rejected applicants could provide. In short, they were treated as a means to the more important ends of others.

But, I also noted, the same point could be made about the successful, "diversity"-providing minority applicants.

Even though they were awarded the prize of admission, they too were treated as a means of providing a benefit to others, i.e., the non-minorities who will benefit from being exposed to them. They are not treated as individuals. They are not admitted, after all, to provide "diversity" to themselves but to others. True, they may receive some benefit from being in a "diverse" student body. But they would receive that benefit no matter what majority-white institution they attended. That is, admitting the preferentially treated blacks admitted to any highly selective university does not provide them with any diversity benefits they would not receive at less selective majority-white institutions. The diversity benefit that preferences are said to provide, that is, flows to the non-minorities exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. This is treating them as a means, not an end, every bit as much as the rejected whites....

I've played this song so many times it has become a broken record - such as here, emphasizing that "whatever benefits derive from diversity are provided by the preferentially admitted minorities, not to them."

They may well receive some benefit from being admitted to more selective institutions than they would have absent the racial preference they received (or course, they are also less likely to graduate), but the diversity benefit they receive cannot justify those preferences because the preferentially admitted minorities would have received the same diversity benefits at the less selective institutions they would otherwise have attended.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the elite institutions that offer racial preferences are using minorities to provide "diversity" to their non-minority students. In return, those students are allowed entry into institutions whose requirements would have excluded them if they had been judged by the same standards as the other students. This bargain may or may not be beneficial to the instiutions or to the preferentially admitted, i.e., differentially treated, minorities, but it is a fallacy to point to diversity benefits allegedly received by the preferred to justify the preferences extended to them. If "diversity" justifies racial discrimination, it is because of the benefits received by the non-minorities who are exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. To claim otherwise is less than honest.

And here I discussed Hostages to Diversity, a white student was denied access to a math and science magnet program because allowing his transfer would have a negative "impact on diversity." Similarly, two Asian-Americans kindergartners were denied transfers to a school with a French immersion program because allowing the transfer would have deprived the students in their current school of the benefits of being exposed to them. When their parents pointed out that the new school has as few Asian-Americans as their current school, the Montgomery County, Maryland, Superintendent of Schools replied to the school board "that nothing in the school system's policy permits `robbing Peter to pay Paul' by hurting the diversity of one school to help it at another."

I could quote more, such as Paul Brest, former dean of the Stanford Law School, being

honest enough to recognize that admitting minorities so that the other students may benefit from being exposed to their allegedly different perspectives places a burden on them. He notes that "[w]hile minority students complained of the burden of constantly having to educate their white classmates, the minority students learned as well." Of course they did, but the fact they did does not validate the diversity justification for racial preferences. They would also have learned at the schools to which they would have been admitted without preferences. The diversity argument is based on the contributions the preferentially admitted minorities make to others, not on the benefits they undoubtedly receive.

Since Brest defends racial preferences, he obviously thinks the burden their "diversity" preference bestows on minorities is worth bearing.

Tote that barge! Lift dat bale!

SOURCE





10 February, 2010

Debauching children

A new report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation is advocating that children as young as 10 be given extensive sex education, including an awareness of sex's pleasures. The report, "Stand and Deliver," charges that religious groups, specifically Catholics and Muslims, deny their young access to comprehensive sexual programs and education.

"Young people's sexuality is still contentious for many religious institutions. Fundamentalist and other religious groups — the Catholic Church and madrasas (Islamic Schools) for example — have imposed tremendous barriers that prevent young people, particularly, from obtaining information and services related to sex and reproduction. Currently, many religious teachings deny the pleasurable and positive aspects of sex." the report states.

The report demands that children 10 and older be given a "comprehensive sexuality education" by governments, aid organizations and other groups, and that young people should be seen as "sexual beings."

"Young people have the right to be informed about sexuality and to have access to contraceptives and other services," Bert Koenders, the Netherlands Minister for Development Cooperation, wrote in the foreword to the report. It was his organization that helped fund the report. The report argues that sex education should be "recast" to show sexuality as a "positive force for change and development, as a source of pleasure, an embodiment of human rights and an expression of self."

Much like a U.N. report released last August that advocated teaching masturbation to children as young as 5, "Stand and Deliver" has set off a wave of protest among religious and conservative groups. Ed Mechmann, spokesman for New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, charged that Planned Parenthood was "trying to teach children sex without values and that sex is a matter of pleasure and done without consequences." He said religions like Catholicism and Islam teach sex as part of a much bigger picture and that Planned Parenthood was trying to de-link sex from traditional values. "It is part of an effort to get children to reject traditional values and accept a liberal American-European view," he said. "In many traditional countries — Catholic and Muslim — it won't work and should be seen as cultural imperialism."

Mechmann also charged that Planned Parenthood's report was compromised because it has a financial stake advocating the changes. "The difference between Planned Parenthood and us is that we don't make money off what we teach and say. They do. They make money off contraceptives and abortions," he said.

Michelle Turner, president of the Maryland-based Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, said Planned Parenthood was simply trying to eliminate parental say. "What are they trying to do? They are trying to eliminate the role of mom and dad in the family," Turner said. "For Planned Parenthood to decide that governments, private organizations and religious organizations should make decisions about kids' sexuality is just going too far." "It is part of a bigger push to change the way we think about sex," she said. That sex is all about pleasure and there are no consequences. They are wrong. No matter how much we teach children, some will make mistakes. They will forget. And Planned Parenthood doesn't want to deal with that," she said. "They see religious groups, especially those that counsel abstinence and waiting until marriage, as bad guys," she added. "We aren't."

Planned Parenthood said it was unable to comment because the report was issued by its European office and it was unable to contact them.

SOURCE




Fracking the Academic Left

By James Lewis

Two seemingly unrelated stories this week came together in my mind:

* Howard Zinn is dead.

* "Horizontal fracking" will produce much larger-than-expected amounts of clean, inexpensive natural gas over the coming decades.

What do those headlines mean? Well, Howard Zinn was the mendacious professor whose Marxist People's History of the United States is now a principal indoctrination tool of the college Left -- our "progressives" -- in order to turn out the likes of Barack Hussein Obama and other people who think the United States is a malign force that should go around apologizing for itself.

Howard Zinn, who just gave up the ghost, was the Barack Hussein Obama of American historians, at least in the Audacity of his Mendacity. His book has been assigned to tens of millions of students, making him a wealthy man.

Once upon a time, historians used to try to tell the truth. Professor Zinn was more the medieval kind of moral fabulist, whose self-appointed role it was to collect the mortal sins of the people -- or at least the American people -- and turn the entire history of America into one long catechism of grievances. Oh, well...whatever floats your boat.

The trouble is not so much the existence of obsessive grievance-mongers like Howard Zinn as it is his enormous popularity among the towering intellects of the Left and the enthusiastic adoption of him by thousands of mind-molding pseudo-historians on the campuses of America in order to crank out even more thousands of P.C.-washed young minds ready to be guilt-tripped by the national Organs of Propaganda for the rest of their lives. The Democrats then give more money to the campus indoctrination machine so that even more tenured professors can cut and paste more prefab Lefty fantasies onto the brains of their helpless subjects. It's a sort of perpetual motion scheme, except that nothing productive comes out. Howard Zinn industrialized the anti-American propaganda machine, like some colony of national brain parasites living off its host.

The result is visible on all our campuses, where free speech has now gone up in smoke. If you are caught saying a politically incorrect thought out loud, you may find yourself witch-hunted and fired -- just as Larry Summers was driven out of his job by the harridans of Harvard University before Obama picked him up. If they can destroy the president of Harvard for saying an Evil Thought out loud, they can get anybody. That's why they did it -- to scare all the other Incorrect Thinkers at Harvard.

I sometimes talk with friends who teach in such places, and rumor has it that the well-oiled P.C. apparatus is bigger today than ever. Every once in a while, there is another public witch-hunt; the evil non-P.C. meanies are punished or humiliated, or they just leave. Everybody is now thoroughly guilt-tripped, far more than any old-fashioned Catholic peasant going to weekly confession with the parish priest. At least Catholics would receive absolution for their sins. There is no absolution for the sins of whiteness, or maleness, or heterosexuality -- just a lifetime of taxes and mental drudgery.

The Indoctrination Campus is a reactionary and regressive institution, something the Saudi King would love. That is why Islamism is making such strides on the P.C. Campus -- it has exactly the same sort of dogmatic medieval outlook, it's just as historically ignorant, it's just as self-indulgent, and above all, it blames the same "enemy" -- America and the West, which are directly responsible for the prosperity and well-being of their reactionary parasites.

Indoctrination should have no role on a university campus. But the last jihadi suicide bomber to nearly make it to Paradise flying over Detroit was a big man on campus at University College, London, where he headed the Muslim Student Association. Panty-Bomber was a pure product of the modern university, with a little AQ thrown in. He could learn all his basic ideas just by listening to the BBC, and now even bin Laden is blaming the West for...global warming. At his college campus, the Christmas Day bomber certainly learned nothing positive about Western civilization -- such as the idea that we don't wantonly kill innocent men, women, and children for the greater glory of Allah. Somehow he never got that basic point in his expensive education.

We can see from twenty years of global warming fraud in our "educated media" how the most basic principles of science and scholarship have suffered on campus. No one is more ignorant and mentally fixated than the old media gatekeepers. No one has less basic education in science, the humanities, mathematics, or real history. No one is less capable of elementary reasoning. Our media peasants are just as mind-numbed as their millions of placid victims.

Some time ago, David Brooks, the rumored conservative at the New York Times, said that "the educated class" is at odds with the regular folks of the United States -- the vulgar mob, in other words. But Brooks has it exactly backwards, as you might expect from someone who has to spend his waking hours in durance vile on 42nd Street. The "educated class" is just the indoctrinated class today -- the mass of P.C.-whipped, totally predictable minds. If you want to see individualism -- if you want to see courage, creativity, and original thought -- don't look at the college-educated class. They all march in mental lockstep, even as the WaPo marches to the drum and fife corps of those brainiacs at the NYT.

On the P.C. campus, science and scholarship have withered right along with education. I've spent decades trying to teach college students, and I think I can say after all these years that I've never succeeded in educating anyone. Not even one. Occasionally education has been seen to happen in my classes, or at least I would like to believe so. But education always comes from within. Students bring their eagerness to learn with them; you can't make them educated any more than a parent can "grow" a child. People aren't carrots. You can't "grow" them. They either grow due to some fortunate concatenation of circumstances, or they don't. Education happens sometimes, and you can stand by and cheer when you see it, but you can't take the credit. That's why our colleges don't turn out people who are better-educated than their parents who never went to college. The dreary procession of years sitting in a schoolroom does not an education make. College-trained Americans are so easily suckered that most of them voted for the last Democratic candidate for president. Can you believe that? I still can't. The election of 2008 proves the utter failure of our "education" system.

A politically correct campus is incapable of educating students because it suffocates free thought. The kids know that. They get their real education elsewhere, or they just allow themselves to be brain-stomped. Indoctrination is not education. The only kids to be really educated on the P.C. campus are the young conservatives, because all that brainwashing forces them to think for themselves. The others just end up reciting the catechism.

A college student I know boasted that he voted for Obama "because Hillary was just too white." Years of "education" have taught him to be a racist, if even only a reverse racist. For that we have to thank the Howard Zinns of this world. Thank you, Howie, and don't let the door slam on your way out. You left the United States worse than you found it.

If Howard Zinn is reason to despair, horizontal fracking is a reason for hope. H.F. is a wonderful new technology, a genuine step forward in recovering natural gas bubbles embedded in hydrocarbon-bearing shale. It's a way of drilling horizontally into carbon-rich rock and using high-pressure water to dissolve the rock so the natural gas can be collected in trillions of cubic feet.

H.F. is going to save our cookies, even with all the mendacious eco-madness we see from the politically correct meatheads of our media. Natural gas is the cleanest hydrocarbon fuel. It can be utilized for all the same purposes as oil, and it is many times more efficient than the scientifically wacky "green energy" schemes that Barack Obama seems to love. That means that we can manufacture aspirin tablets from it as well as fuel to keep the world alive. And because vast reserves of clean natural gas are available in Canada and the United States, we stand a chance of surviving the mad oil monopoly of the Saudis and the Twelver Suicide Cult in Tehran.

That is honest progress. The Left will never, ever discover anything as wonderful as horizontal fracking. They can't. They are too reactionary, too stuck in the past with old Karl Marx.

All the preening "progressives" are Zinnian reactionaries, and all the engineers, chemists, and honest scientists -- there still are a few left -- are just keeping the world moving toward a happier and healthier future. If only there were some way to drill into the layer of left-wing intellectuals spread over higher education and frack it to release the academic gas trapped therein.

SOURCE




More On Espenshade On Affirmative Action

I have written a number of times about the recent research on the racial achievement gap and affirmative action by Princenton Professor Thomas Espenshade and various co-authors: here, here, here, here, and most recently here. He is also one of the new scholars writing about "diversity" that Peter Schmidt mentioned in an article I just discussed here.

Please read those posts for a more thorough discussion than I will provide here, but an un-nuanced (though not, I think, unfair) summary of Espenshade's research on data from eight elite colleges is that he and his co-authors find a massive racial achievement gap, correspondingly massive racial preferences in admissions that benefit blacks and Hispanics and bar large numbers of Asians, combined with a commitment to "diversity" that causes them to refuse to recognize the discrimination against Asians for what it is and even to lament what they see as the imminent demise of the race preference regime.

For example, as I noted here, Espenshade and Alexandra Radford noted in a recent article that

[c]ompared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage.

Thus, not surprisingly,

[d]oing away with racial preferences for underrepresented minority students would substantially reduce the number of such students at selective colleges.

And, by doing so, it would also substantially increase the number of Asian and Asian-American students at those selective colleges.

I bring all this up, again, because Prof. Espenshade steadfastly continues, either obstinately or obtusely, to acknowledge what his numbers, charts, graphs, and statistical analyses clearly reveal: that "affirmative action" as practiced by admissions officers at elite colleges results in massive discrimination against Asian-Americans. (I discussed an earlier example of this refusal here and here.) He professes, lamely, in a recent interview about his new book with the Princeton News Service that he can't conclude that

because I've never actually sat in on an admission committee. But I'm convinced they don't have an equation like this and say, "OK, if you are Hispanic, you get a certain number of points; if your SAT scores are in this category, you get a certain number of points," right down the list.

In fact, his refusal to recognize the discrimination against Asians that his research clearly reveals is worse than lame; it is silly, as in:

People may read this and want to say, "Oh, because I'm Asian American, my SAT scores have been downgraded." That is not really the way to interpret these data. Many times people will ask me, "Do your results prove that there is discrimination against Asian applicants?" And I say, "No, they don't." Even though in our data we have much information about the students and what they present in their application folders, most of what we have are quantifiable data. We don't have the "softer" variables -- the personal statements that the students wrote, their teacher recommendations, a full list of extracurricular activities. Because we don't have access to all of the information that the admission office has access to, it is possible that the influence of one applicant characteristic or another might appear in a different light if we had the full range of materials.

If this passage means anything, it means that those Asians may look good on paper (grades, test scores, etc.) but for all Espenshade knows they may all share an inability to write admissions essays that can compete with those written by blacks and Hispanics and a similar inability to garner enthusiastic letters of recommendations from their teachers.

This is neither lame nor silly; it is both dumb and offensive.

SOURCE




85% of British young people want more grammar schools created

British "Grammar" schools are academically selective schools that are taxpayer supported. The Labor party hates them, even though they are a highroad to social mobility, which the Labour party claims to support

There is huge support for grammar schools among recent school leavers and first-time voters, a poll showed yesterday. Eighty-five per cent of those aged 18 to 24 would like to see more created, the ICM survey found. And 76 per cent of all age groups would support new grammars, more than three decades after many of the schools were replaced by comprehensives.

The findings prompted fresh questions over David Cameron's decision to abandon the Conservatives' historic support for selective education. The 164 existing grammars already face the threat of closure due to a lack of Government support for the system. Grammar school chiefs said that under Labour their schools were liable to be forced to join with comprehensives to form 'comprehensive academies' or merge with groups of less successful schools. But they said they were also vulnerable in Tory-controlled areas because of a lack of 'top-level political support'.

The poll, commissioned by the National Grammar Schools Association, found that support for grammars is strongest among 18 to 24-year-olds, followed by 25 to 34-year-olds. Seventy per cent of the 1,015 adults surveyed supported retaining the existing grammar schools in Britain and Northern Ireland. Among 18 to 24-year- olds the figure was 75 per cent. Seventy-six per cent are in favour of the introduction of new grammars, especially in urban areas where there are none. This rose to 85 per cent for 18 to 24-year-olds.

Grammar schools across most of the country were converted into comprehensives during the 1960s and 1970s or forced into the fee-paying sector.

Mr Cameron has insisted that selective education is 'unpopular with parents', who 'don't want children divided into successes and failures at 11'. He has pledged to protect the remaining grammars but in 2007 he ruled out creating any more except in existing selective areas with a rising pupil population.

Robert McCartney, chairman of the NGSA, said this did not go far enough. 'The popularity of politicians is at an extremely low level and a general election is due very soon,' he said. 'It's unbelievable that none of our three largest political parties seriously supports either existing grammar schools or the idea of opening new ones where there's parental demand. 'If they want our votes, they should offer what the public wants.'

He said the 'effectiveness and existence' of many grammar schools was threatened by Government initiatives such as the drive to 'federate' neighbouring schools together in formal partnerships. There are also examples of grammar and non-selective schools being forced to merge. 'Such measures usually mean that fewer 11-year-olds are offered the opportunity of a grammar school education,' said Mr McCartney.

A Tory spokesman said: 'We set out our policy on grammar schools in 2007 and it hasn't changed.'

SOURCE





9 February, 2010

N.C. Schools: Those Who Erase History

It is one thing to forget, ignore or misinterpret our nation’s history, but a group of uber-liberal educrats in North Carolina is taking the radical revisionism of America one step further. These politically-correct, taxpayer-funded “thought police” are actually trying to erase American history from our children’s textbooks. What do they want to replace it with? Radical environmental propaganda from left-wing extremists who view American liberties as obstacles to overcome, not safeguards to be defended.

In perhaps the most glaring example to date of our government’s descent into socialist madness, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is attempting to remove all American history prior to 1877 from its textbooks, replacing it with a “global studies” curriculum. Rather than learning about George Washington crossing the Delaware or Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves (while studying from documents like the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation), high school students in North Carolina would instead be indoctrinated with more multicultural rhetoric and the fuzzy science of climate change (while studying from the Koran and the “Copenhagen Accord”). This sort of raw indoctrination is worse than misguided – it’s treasonous.

If this new anti-American curriculum is adopted, American children would no longer learn about the principles on which this nation was established – and the blood that was shed in defense of those principles – they would instead be spoon-fed Obama administration talking points on how intolerant, imperialist America owes a huge financial debt to the rest of the world, one that we can start repaying immediately by helping developing nations “combat global warming.”

“What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach (history) where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day,” the chief academic officer for North Carolina’s school system told FOX News.

What rubbish. These government censors are trying to rewrite history, pure and simple. By removing the entire first century of American history from our children’s textbooks, these radicals are doing more than just putting a “liberal spin” on things – they are trying to fundamentally alter the world view of future generations of U.S. citizens. They are trying to rip out American democracy by its roots and replace it with what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has dubbed the “New Socialism,” the exploitation of climate-based fear-mongering as a means to facilitate a massive wealth transfer from American taxpayers to third-world governments, many of which are hostile to the United States.

Joseph Goebbels would no doubt be proud of such a curriculum – and the objective behind it. Unable to convince the “America of today” to blindly follow Obama’s socialist vision, these “Green Nazis” are endeavoring to create an “America of tomorrow” that is more receptive to their agenda – even as the scientific case for climate change continues to crumble all around them. This attempted indoctrination must not stand. Not only must this so-called curriculum be rejected, but the educrats pushing it must be dismissed and never allowed near our children again.

An abiding respect and appreciation for America’s bedrock freedoms and founding wisdom are the only things currently keeping these socialist hordes from overrunning this county – which is no doubt why they are now being targeted. America was founded on a set of fundamental principles – a core collection of “self-evident” truths that forms the basis of who we are as a people. We cannot allow those truths to be erased – or those principles to be discarded – for anything, least of all the latest liberal zeitgeist.

SOURCE




British schools ‘forced to spend on IT which doesn’t work’

Governments and IT are usually a bad combination

An academy designed to be the first fully wireless school has been blighted by computer problems since being opened by Gordon Brown more than two years ago. The head of the £24 million Bristol Brunel Academy — a beacon of Labour’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme — said that its wireless system had yet to work properly, teachers still did the register on paper because of problems with swipe cards and fingerprint recognition systems were unreliable.

Brunel’s problems, similar to those experienced in other schools, raise questions about the education department’s £1.65 billion annual expenditure on IT for classrooms, which accounts for a significant share of the £55 billion BSF programme.

Armando Di-Finizio, the head of Brunel, said that millions of pounds were being wasted on “white elephant” technology in schools. He said that his school — the first to be rebuilt under BSF — had continuing technical difficulties. “The school was designed to be completely wireless but I have yet to see a school where wireless works well. “We have been told that we have one of the most powerful systems in the country, but it is still not enough. We keep being told that lots of lessons have been learnt. We have had to beef it up out of our own budget.”

Mr Di-Finizio criticised the millions of pounds being spent on technology in schools, and suggested that there was a fixation with constantly updating classrooms with the latest gadgets. A government drive to provide state schools with the latest technology has seen most equipped with a large number of computers and “interactive whiteboards” in classrooms. Some have installed swipe cards, fingerprint recognition systems, and have “virtual learning environments” to allow children and teachers to access the curriculum online.

Mr Di-Finizio said that there were pressures on schools to buy expensive equipment. “One could be led up the wrong path by IT experts. Is it worth having card-swiping and fingerprint detection systems in place, if the teacher still has to do the register? “We introduced a system of swipe cards because it encourages children to use them in the library and to pay for lunch, rather than carrying cash. We spent all this money installing a swipe-card room entry system but the teacher ends up having to do the register anyway, because how do you know a child has not stolen someone else’s card, or isn’t covering for a friend?”

He said that there were problems with some of the latest fads, such as fingerprint recognition systems, which apparently do not work properly if the child has dirty fingers. But he did not call for the removal of technology from schools, saying that it had been useful for raising attainment.

Schools spend £1.65 billion a year on information technology, with one computer to every three pupils in secondary schools, and one to six in primary schools. Yet some heads, particularly those involved with the BSF programme complain that they have lost freedom over their IT budgets, and are forced to buy expensive equipment through designated suppliers.

SOURCE




Western Australia: Gifted kids let down by system

THOUSANDS of potential child geniuses are going unrecognised in schools, leaving many in danger of never reaching their full potential. For some of WA's 35,000 gifted children, their overlooked "gifts" have become a burden, forcing them to turn to misbehaviour or switch off from lessons.

According to US child intelligence expert Deborah Ruf, the education system - particularly primary schools - is failing to get the most out of gifted children. Dr Ruf, who will be speaking at the University of WA this week, said schools spent more time focusing on struggling pupils. "The brightest children spend nearly the entirety of their school years being instructed far below their capacity to learn, with the result that we are losing them and what they could become," she told The Sunday Times.

"Many of these exceptionally bright children are living right now in homes and learning in classrooms where the adults responsible for them often don't know or don't fully understand their potential. "Some of them are mistakenly labelled as behaviour problems. Others flounder in classrooms designed to meet the needs of children who are far behind them in their learning."

Gifted and Talented Children's Association of WA spokeswoman Kriss Muskett said gifted children went unnoticed because teachers did not know how to identify them. She called for teachers to be trained "at an undergraduate level" to recognise different levels of giftedness and how to deal with those children.

The Education Department said gifted primary school pupils were given the opportunity to extend themselves through the Primary Extension and Challenge Program. The part-time program is available to students in Years 5, 6 and 7. There are also 16 secondary schools that offer selective programs.

David Axworthy, executive director of school support services, said WA was the only state to test every student in Year 4 to see if they needed to be challenged, and more than $7 million a year was spent on public school programs designed for gifted students. Education Minister Liz Constable said she was committed to the development of gifted children because she had completed her PhD in the area.

SOURCE





8 February, 2010

Balancing act: conservatives weigh means against ends as liberal opinion-makers embrace teacher accountability and school choice

THE Obama administration's signature education initiative, Race to the Top, has produced genuine headline news: The Democrats, usually seen kowtowing to organized labor's demands, for once are standing up to a powerful union constituency. The Race to the Top grant competition would remunerate states for using students' test scores in teacher evaluations, a practice the teachers unions have fought for years. A number of conservative reformers are backing the measure, but Texas governor Rick Perry, a Republican, recently announced that his state would not participate in Race to the Top. What's the catch?

The situation is reminiscent of another time Democrats stood up to organized labor: in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton backed passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) over the objections of the unions. In both cases, the fight between the Democratic party and its union backers dominated the media's coverage. But then as now, a different and more interesting question preoccupied conservatives: Does the policy in question cede too much local power to a national or transnational authority?

At the heart of the question is a debate over means and ends. Not many conservatives in the 1990s argued, as the unions did, that NAFTA would result in the loss of tens of thousands of American jobs. Nor do many conservatives today side with the teachers unions in support of rules that make it nearly impossible to fire incompetent educators. In each case, mountains of empirical evidence slowly persuaded liberal elites and Democratic reformers to agree at least partially with conservatives that a certain end--free trade and teacher accountability, respectively--was worth pursuing.

By 1993, it was no longer plausible to argue that free trade was on balance deleterious to a nation's prosperity. Economists across the political spectrum agreed then, and still do, that removing trade barriers between two countries allows each to increase its total output and thereby grow richer. The only intellectually defensible way to argue against free trade is to make the debate about something other than wealth, such as equality, labor rules, or environmental standards. In the NAFTA debate, accordingly, opponents argued that U.S. companies would move jobs requiring fewer skills to Mexico, weakening the power of unions to bid up the price of unskilled labor and causing the gap between rich and poor to widen.

But liberal opinion-makers were not persuaded that the country should sacrifice its overall prosperity to preserve union clout. NAFTA supporter Michael Kinsley, then of The New Republic, zeroed in on the opposition's advantage in the debate when he wrote that "the person who will get a job because of NAFTA isn't even aware of it yet; the person who may lose a job because of NAFTA is all too aware." Newsweek admonished Americans to "beware the new protectionist preachings. Trade is good for you." And the most influential liberal in the country, Bill Clinton, supported NAFTA.

It is equally difficult to argue now that teacher quality and student test scores are not correlated. Empirical studies from groups such as the New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and the Brookings Institution have demonstrated that teachers matter, and that test scores are a reliably accurate tool for measuring how much they matter. A Brookings study of Los Angeles public schools published in 2006 concluded that "having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap."

As in the debate over free trade, liberal journalists and policymakers are increasingly embracing the evidence. I first learned of the Brookings study from a Steven Brill article in The New Yorker that absolutely eviscerated New York's United Federation of Teachers for blocking reforms that would make it easier for schools to use tests in teacher evaluations. Amanda Ripley of The Atlantic recently wrote about Teach for America's groundbreaking efforts to track test-score data, link it to each of the organization's teachers, and use it to assess their effectiveness. Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist, wrote a column in January praising Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, for her grudging acceptance of the notion that standardized test scores should be part of the evaluation process. (The National Education Association, AFT's much larger cousin, remains opposed.)

In large part, these journalists are following the administration's lead. Obama's appointment of former Chicago public-schools CEO Arne Duncan to lead the Department of Education was viewed by many conservatives as a decent pick, based on Duncan's advocacy of teacher accountability and charter schools. Race to the Top reflects Duncan's support for these concepts: States with laws prohibiting the use of test scores in teacher evaluations are not eligible to compete for the $4.3 billion in grant money available under the program, and other eligibility requirements encourage states to lift caps on charter schools. In general, states make themselves more attractive applicants the farther they move in the directions of accountability and choice.

This is not to say that Obama has been great, or even good, on education. To the dismay of conservatives and inner-city Washington parents, he signed a bill that stripped the District of Columbia's school-voucher program of its funding. He supports a bill that would effectively nationalize the provision of student loans. And one of his appointments to the Department of Education, Kevin Jennings, founded a group that advocated the inclusion of gay-and-lesbian-themed literature on school reading lists, including books that contain graphic descriptions of sex acts between minors and adults.

For these reasons alone, conservatives would be right to approach any of this administration's education initiatives with a profound skepticism. But conservative objections to Race to the Top go beyond Obama himself. Many on the right (including NATIONAL REVIEW's editors) opposed President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act on the grounds that conservatives should fight any bill that entrenches the federal role in education--even if, in theory, it would put the government to work toward laudable ends. Governor Perry reflected this point of view in announcing that Texas would not apply for Race to the Top funds: "Our state and our communities must reserve the right to decide how we educate our children, and not surrender control to the federal bureaucracy."

Few remember now, but similar sovereignty concerns bedeviled some conservatives when Bill Clinton, in an effort to make NAFTA more palatable to union interests and environmentalists, negotiated side agreements on labor and the environment to placate them. Conservatives worried that these deals would create panels with authority to recommend sanctions and other measures to compel compliance.

Though the sovereignty concerns were not without merit, those powers of punishment have proven to be a net benefit in the enforcement of U.S. trade agreements. Consider the World Trade Organization (WTO). One of the best things about the WTO is that it presents a solution to the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. The Bush administration's decision to levy tariffs on imported steel imposed a tax on steel consumers for the benefit of a few domestic steel companies. The WTO ruled against the U.S. and authorized the EU to levy retaliatory sanctions, thus concentrating the cost of the tariffs on other industries, which were better organized than steel consumers and better able to fight back. Under pressure, Bush relented and repealed the tariffs.

Race to the Top seeks to address the same problem, using a carrot instead of a stick. Tenure rules and caps on charter schools benefit a powerful and well-organized special-interest group at the expense of unorganized taxpayers and parents. But state governments, going broke and desperate for federal funds, have already responded to Race to the Top's incentive structure. So far, eleven states have amended or repealed bad laws to make themselves more competitive candidates for the money, despite union opposition.

Conservatives have legitimate concerns about delegating power over education to the federal government. But state governments have their own flaws, which a little delegated power can mitigate. It's a delicate balance, and it's hard to say right now whether Race to the Top tilts too far in the direction of centralized decision-making. But at least conservatives can take heart that the tide of elite opinion is turning against the teachers unions--and in favor of accountability and choice.

SOURCE




New British teachers lack the training to handle violence in the classroom, survey reveals

Nearly half of new teachers have not been given enough training to deal with violence in the classroom, a survey showed today. Figures also suggest two-thirds of newly qualified teachers have received no clear guidance on restraining violent students. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), which carried out the survey, has called for such training to be made compulsory.

According to the union, 49 per cent of newly-qualified teachers and probationers in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland felt they had not had enough training to deal with challenging behaviour. One in five said they had been provided with clear guidance on restraining violent pupils, with nearly 30 per cent saying they had not yet covered this area ofthe job in their training.

Guidance by the Department for Children, Schools and Families lists the types of force teachers can use on children. It can include passive physical contact such as blocking a pupil's path and active contact such as leading a pupil by the hand or arm. In more extreme circumstances, 'appropriate restrictive holds, which may require specific expertise or training', may be used, it says.

ATL says the problem with the official guidance is that teachers are not clear on how to interpret it. Sharon Liburd, from the ATL, told the BBC: 'These violent confrontations can erupt very very quickly, they [teachers] need to be clear about what sort of steps they can take to try to stop the situation from escalating, if they have to physically intervene and how, in fact, they do that.'

But National Association of Head Teachers general secretary Mick Brookes said there was no need for compulsory training in schools because many never saw a violent incident. The ATL surveyed 1,001 of its members across the UK.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said new teachers were given support to ensure they had the skills they needed and said the Government's 'behaviour tsar' Sir Alan Steer had noted progress in pupils' conduct across Britan. He said: 'Good behaviour and an atmosphere of respect should be the norm in all schools. 'In his recent review, Sir Alan Steer said that behaviour standards have improved and are good in the majority of schools. 'We are determined to tackle poor behaviour and raise overall behaviour standards - that is why we have given schools clearer and stronger powers than ever before to ensure good school discipline.'

SOURCE




Australia: Something's rotten in the state of NSW - comprehensive public schools

The comprehensive public school classroom is an unreformed rotten borough of public policy. The My School website represents the first significant, successful reform of the Rudd/Gillard era and a welcome departure from decades of union resistance to desperately needed educational change.

Education is a sector sufficiently charged with mythology and vested interests that it's virtually impossible for us to tell each other the truth. At the risk of unfairly disparaging a legion of inspirational teachers, I will now have a crack at that task.

Education in NSW is delivered in five distinct packages: state selective schools, elite private schools, other independent schools (Anglican, Muslim, other religious and non-religious), the Catholic parochial schools, and the state comprehensive schools. The competing power centres, in order of influence, are the NSW Department of Education, the education unions, the federal Ministry of Education (essentially a funding and testing body), principals, teachers and parents. Four out of five pistons are firing - all effort must now be concentrated on lifting the teaching and learning environment of the comprehensive public school.

From a "consumer value" perspective" the selective state school is at the top of the food chain. It costs little to attend, requires little parental involvement and is the most ruthlessly exclusive model. Almost all students attending these schools are the children of first-generation migrants, mainly from Asia and the subcontinent. The smart parents of these smart kids worked out quickly which side of the bread the butter was on. By spending a few thousand dollars on coaching in primary school they can avoid shelling out 50 times that amount to gain access to the quality of teaching and the peer group they want for their children. In terms of results, it's a subsidy worth paying. The Anglo Australians are either too dumb or too complacent to make the same commitment to their children's future.

The selective government school system was extended in the 1980s and '90s as a response to the growing tide of evacuation from public to private schools - worse in NSW than any other state. The NSW Department of Education widened the range of selectivity from academic and agricultural to include centres of excellence in sport, technology and the performing arts. The move was largely successful in fostering great public schools, by drawing on motivated teachers and creating a positive peer-pressure environment.

The problem for public schools generally had been a vacuum of culture. While the non-government schools could define themselves by some coherent religious (or Steiner or other) ethic and community, the public system, in the absence of selectivity, took refuge in concepts of inclusiveness and tolerance, which lacked the horsepower to inspire commitment from parents, teachers and students. The resulting vacuum has been filled by behaviourally challenged students and defensive, disengaged parents - a problem massively exacerbated after the state selective schools and the non-government sector hoovered up the most talented and motivated students.

The so called "comprehensive" school lost its student role models. One public high school principal confessed to me the difficulty he was facing in getting students to accept academic awards at speech day for fear of being mocked and bullied in the playground.

In that climate, the academic results and overall school discipline went into free fall. Many outer suburban "comprehensive" schools, with no effective means to discipline chronic misbehaviour, became a chapter out of the Lord of the Flies. There is a tipping point where the forces of bullying, abuse, high staff turnover and low common-room morale, vandalism and outright violence overwhelms the educational project. Teachers become mere child minders, enduring a job they hate, trying desperately to do something for the few kids who really want to learn. With limited government budgets and without a supportive school community, there is no money for new initiatives.

The comprehensive primary school often evidences a complete drought of male teachers. Low remuneration, low prospects of merit promotion, the risk of sexual allegations in a low-trust culture, and the militant feminism of the teacher unions, creates an intensely male-unfriendly environment. The absence of strong, sporty male teachers is a disaster for boys' education. Education unions, rightly sensing the odds were stacked against them, adopted a strategy of resisting any kind of accountability for teacher and school performance and resisting the empowerment of principals that might distinguish one school from another. Most have no ability to select their own staff or nurture their own ethic, instead suffering a revolving door of department-directed staff transfers.

The unions have worked to maintain a victim culture under which the answer to every question is "more funding", putting all their creative energy into political campaigns that are designed to provide cover for the abysmal performance of most (but not all) outer-suburban comprehensive public schools.

However, there is hope. All the research shows the strongest ballast against the forces of darkness is an inspiring principal. I have witnessed non-selective public schools, drawing heavily from housing department estates and low-income suburbs, that bristle with pride, energy, courtesy and learning - invariably revolving around an inspirational principal..

The My School website is an excellent first step towards parent empowerment and engagement. It allows high-performing public schools to receive the credit they richly deserve, and flushes out the complacent among the privileged private schools.

It should be expanded to include: the number of teacher absences, the turnover of teaching staff, the number of teachers on stress leave, the number of former teachers in litigation with the department, physical assaults, the ratio of male to female staff and some metric for the effectiveness of the school council and the P&C association. It must now be accompanied by genuine devolution of budget and policy autonomy from the department to principals, and opportunities for merit promotion and more money for the motivated teachers we so desperately need to retain.

SOURCE





7 February, 2010

Michigan needs to change tenure rules to remove ineffective teachers

Michigan students deserve the best teachers, not rules preventing bad ones from being removed. Michigan has unfinished business when it comes to improving education. It’s time for the Legislature to tackle the big one: teacher tenure. The state’s teacher unions for decades have prevented change, including last year. But 2010 can and should be the time for reform. Laws must be changed so that good teachers are encouraged, supported and respected. And roadblocks to removing ineffective teachers must be dismantled.

What’s changed? Plenty. Most significant is the wave of teaching reforms rolling across the nation. Making an especially big splash: Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union. Last month she announced her group backs teacher evaluation systems that take student achievement into account, as well as “a fair, transparent and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers.”

Her dynamic leadership has given her members new clout in the national conversation on improving and valuing the teaching profession. Meanwhile, the AFT’s rival group, the larger National Education Association, is looking like a dinosaur — and many of its leaders and members know it. Pressure is building on the NEA and member groups (including the Michigan Education Association) to stop defending outdated tenure systems and start creating new systems that support teacher excellence.

Another example: Major urban school districts are crafting teacher incentive pay programs based on effectiveness. Most notably, the Tampa, Memphis and Pittsburgh school districts, plus some Los Angeles charter schools, are taking part in a $300 million teacher excellence program funded by Bill Gates. He has challenged them to create smart and supportive teacher evaluation programs that incorporate mentoring and systems of gathering feedback from students, parents and fellow teachers. He has also set aside $45 million to study fair, reliable measures of effectiveness.

Such national forces make it difficult and unwise for the MEA not to adapt. Feeling this pressure, MEA President Iris Salter recently said she “has no interest in protecting bad teachers,” But she also stated “absolutely no change to (Michigan’s) basic tenure model is necessary.”

An influential reform group, the National Council on Teacher Quality, doesn’t agree. It just released an encyclopedic state-by-state analysis of teacher quality policies. It gave Michigan a “D-” overall, and a “D” for its poor system of “exiting ineffective teachers.” Florida had the highest overall grade, but even that was a “C.” The group’s conclusion: “Taken as a whole, state teacher policies are broken, outdated and inflexible.”

The Press in 2008 dug into what protracted tenure battles can mean for taxpayers. It found that 17 districts had paid $763,251 in salaries and benefits in order to oust 29 teachers for poor performance or bad behavior. And that figure didn’t include the cost of substitute teachers or legal fees, which often hit $75,000 per case.

In December the Michigan Senate made steps toward reforming teacher tenure. It passed a bill sponsored by Sen. Patty Birkholz, R-Saugatuck, who said many teachers support the bill because they are embarrassed by bad performers who demean the profession. The measure didn’t survive intact as part of a successful package of major school reforms to qualify Michigan for the federal Race to the Top grant competition. Birkholz and other supporters shouldn’t let that setback deter them from seeking a successful reform bill this year. The national reform wave is only gaining power. It should sweep Michigan along with it.

SOURCE




A new idea for Britain: Private schools plan to set up a university

A new college would put the emphasis on teaching, not research, The university, to be named after Edward Thring, could be sited at Wye college (below). Britain has a rich tradition of private education at primary and secondary level but tertiary education has long been heavily government-dependant



A GROUP of leading independent schools are studying plans to set up an elite private university for families frustrated by the quality of education at mainstream institutions. The university would be modelled on American liberal arts colleges, which concentrate on providing high-quality teaching for undergraduates rather than research. Fees would be at least £10,000 a year. The plan is being considered by the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) of independent schools and has been drawn up by Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of Buckingham, the only private university in the country.

The backers believe complaints about impersonal teaching and oversized classes at many traditional universities mean there will be strong demand for higher education at the standard provided by independent secondary schools. It may also attract pupils worried about government pressure on top universities to discriminate in favour of state school-educated pupils.

Bernard Trafford, headmaster of the Royal grammar school, Newcastle, and former chairman of the HMC, said: “I don’t think you’ll find many parents who are happy that at age 18 their children go to university and get four hours’ teaching a week. “When they paid school fees they got a lot more. I can see an awful lot of independent school pupils would see this as an attractive alternative. It would be all about dependable quality and high accountability to the people paying the fees.”

David Willetts, the shadow universities secretary, said he would welcome the setting up of the institution if the Tories came to power. “A more diverse university sector, with a range of organisations delivering higher education, is no bad thing,” said Willetts. “As long as they reach the required standard, it would be the most blinkered ideology to stand in the way just because they were privately run.”

The plan is at an early stage but its proponents have made approaches to at least two philanthropists about funding the set-up costs. Kevin Riley, headmaster of Harrow International School in Bangkok, an offshoot of the London public school, said tycoons in Thailand might also back it. HMC schools, whose 243 members include Eton, Winchester and St Paul’s, would provide governors and help to design the curriculum.

Kealey has made inquiries about siting the university at Wye college, a disused agricultural teaching institution in Kent which is now owned by Imperial College London. The HMC has held initial discussions and will study Kealey’s plan in more detail in the next few weeks. The provisional idea is for the university to be named after Edward Thring, a 19th-century educationist who founded the HMC and was headmaster of Uppingham school in Rutland. It would offer arts, science and medical degrees to about 2,000 British and overseas students.

James Tooley, professor of education at Newcastle University, who was involved in early discussions and is expected to advise on the development, said: “The idea is that the independent sector should not be dependent on the whims of government dictating who is and is not let into university.”

Initially the university would cater for a small number of students on the Buckingham campus before becoming a separate institution and applying for the royal charter it would need to award its own degrees. Kealey estimates that at least £25m would be needed to launch the project.

The idea of opening a private university is likely to provoke charges of elitism and of private school pupils trying to remain separate from mainstream education. Kealey pointed out, however, that tuition fees in mainstream universities are likely to rise sharply. He added that within 20 years it could be possible for the university to have an endowment fund big enough to offer “needs-blind” admission to successful candidates, regardless of parental income.

Kealey argues in an article in The Sunday Times today that “state-funded universities have been so battered that they are reeling ... step forward our private schools.”

SOURCE




A-level physics is not available at one in four British schools

More than one in four secondary schools are unable to offer A-level [matriculation] physics because of a shortage of teachers. At least 500 secondary schools with sixth forms do not offer advanced study in the subject, an MPs’ inquiry was told yesterday. Peter Main, of the Institute of Physics, who provided the figure, blamed “incoherent” policy changes.

The number of pupils studying A-level physics has fallen from about 45,000 a year in the late 1980s to about 29,000 now, although the figure has begun to rise slightly. Girls make up only 22 per cent of A-level physics students, MPs on the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee were told. Professor Main said the fall coincided with the introduction of GCSE science exams, criticised as being easy.

David Perks, head of physics at Graveney School, Tooting, South London, blamed curriculum changes intended to make science relevant. Changes such as encouraging students to debate the case for nuclear power or the dangers of genetic engineering had moved science from being a laboratory and experiment-based discipline to one more focused on arguments, he said. Such changes failed to recognise that science was interesting in itself. “The essence of all reform to the science curriculum in the past ten or 15 years has been to reduce content and replace it with something else,” Mr Perks said. Schools and students also had incentive to choose vocational courses such as a BTEC in science because they were much easier but had equivalent status to GCSEs, he said.

Sir John Holman, science director at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, said every school should offer separate GCSEs in physics, chemistry and biology.

Several witnesses criticised the Conservatives’ plan to refuse to fund teacher training of graduates with a third-class degree. John Oversby, of the Association for Science Education, said such a move paid no regard to how long ago a prospective teacher took their degree and so might stop a graduate who had spent their early career deepening their subject knowledge from retraining to be a teacher.

Scientists told the inquiry that some physics graduates were put off a career in teaching by fearing they would also have to teach chemistry and biology, and said schools should be more flexible and allow physics graduates to teach mathematics.

SOURCE





6 February, 2010

So Much for the Evidence

Vouchers and the absurd but unkillable Headstart program again. 45 years of failure and Headstart is still lavishly funded! It has become a Leftist icon -- a fitting Leftist icon: An icon of folly and failure

In a major education address last March, President Obama declared that his administration would "use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: it's not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works." Unfortunately, the test that seems to guide the Obama administration's education priorities is not whether a policy works, but whether it serves a political constituency. Nothing illustrates this disregard for evidence better than the administration's treatment of two federally funded programs: the D.C. voucher program, which it is helping to kill, and Head Start, on which it has bestowed billions more dollars. If the administration actually made its funding decisions based on results, its positions would be just the opposite.

How do we know that the D.C. voucher program works? Take a look at the rigorously designed studies released by the Obama administration itself. Last April, the Department of Education put out its official evaluation of the voucher program. The evaluation, which used a gold-standard, random-assignment research design, found that after three years, D.C. students who won the lottery to attend a private school with a voucher significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery. The gap between voucher and control students was the equivalent of about five months of extra instruction in reading. Rather than embracing what manifestly worked, however, the administration stood by as Congress worked to phase out the D.C. voucher program. "Big picture, I don't see vouchers as being the answer," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the Washington Post. They're certainly not the answer that the pathologically anti-voucher teachers' unions wanted him to embrace.

Meanwhile, the administration fully supports the government-operated Head Start preschool program, despite excellent evidence that the program doesn't work. Obama has said that Head Start is "the first pillar of reforming our schools . . . [and] that's why the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I signed into law invests $5 billion in growing Early Head Start and Head Start." He might have added that this would come on top of the more than $100 billion that taxpayers have spent on Head Start since 1965. But the Department of Health and Human Services' official evaluation of Head Start, released last week, confirms what several earlier studies have found: kids get no lasting benefits from participating in the program. By the end of kindergarten and first grade, students who had been in Head Start are no further ahead academically or behaviorally than students who lost the lottery to enter the program.

The way the administration released the two reports also spoke volumes. The D.C. voucher study was released after a key congressional vote that declined to reauthorize the program--and the study came out on a Friday, without an official press release to draw attention to it. The Head Start findings, on the other hand, were not released on a Friday and came with a press release--but the release contained false claims from administration officials about the program's effectiveness. It quoted Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Carmen Nazario saying that "Head Start has been changing lives for the better since its inception" and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declaring that "research clearly shows that Head Start positively impacts the school readiness of low-income children"--even as the study showed that Head Start had done no such things. Again, the ideological priority to expand union-backed federal programs trumped an official eva! luation, conducted, as with the D.C. voucher study, using a gold-standard, random-assignment research design.

If the administration really wants to show that it's guided by evidence and not ideology, it might consider changing its policy positions when solid evidence contradicts them. Empirical evidence shows that D.C. vouchers work; that program should be expanded, not killed. The evidence also shows that Head Start is a long-running failure; that program should be wound down, not funded with new billions. Even diverting a few hundred million from Head Start into a reauthorized D.C. voucher program would go some way toward restoring the administration's credibility.

SOURCE




Pope says separate Catholic schools help combat sectarianism in Scotland

The old Protestant hatred of Catholics dies hard in Scotland. The Pope appears to think that keeping them apart is for the best. Scotland does have a substantial Catholic minority, mostly of Irish ancestry. Protestant “Orange Men” in Scotland still celebrate July 11 as a great patriotic holiday when “King Billy slew the Papish crew, at The Battle of Boyne Water.”



The Pope has launched an unprecedented defence of separate Catholic schooling in Scotland, claiming that the system helps to combat sectarianism and promote good community relations. His comments, which came in an address to Scotland’s bishops, will reignite the debate over Catholic schools. One former Scottish education minister last night took issue with the Pontiff, and said Catholic schools were the reason for the country’s deep-rooted problem of sectarianism.

Religious bigotry has long been recognised as a scar on Scottish society. In 1999, the composer James MacMillan gave a speech that described sectarianism as Scotland’s shame. His views were later repeated by Jack McConnell, then first minister, who hosted a summit in an attempt to form a national strategy on the issue.

In his speech, the Pope praised Scotland’s Catholic schools, and urged the country’s 11 Catholic bishops, in Rome on a five yearly ad limina visit, to protect Catholic education and promote it as a tool for tackling sectarianism. “You can be proud of the contribution made by Scotland’s Catholic schools in overcoming sectarianism and building good relations between communities,” he said. “Faith schools are a powerful force for social cohesion, and when the occasion arises, you do well to underline this point.”

The Pope courted further controversy by suggesting that Catholic teachers should place special emphasis on religious education in order to produce “articulate and well-informed” followers capable of taking part in the highest levels of Scottish public life. “A strong Catholic presence in the media, local and national politics, the judiciary, the professions and the universities can only serve to enrich Scotland’s national life, as people of faith bear witness to the truth, especially when that truth is called into question,” he said.

Opponents of separate Catholic schooling expressed dismay over the speech. Sam Galbraith, a former Scottish education minister and Labour MP, rejected the Pope’s argument that Catholic schools were helping to reduce sectarianism. “I don’t think Catholics get any skills different from anyone else,” he said. “My view of Catholic schools are that they are the basis of sectarianism in Scotland and as long as we continue to have them we will never get rid of the problem.”

In other remarks, the Pope called on the bishops to “grapple” with the challenges presented by “the increasing tide of secularism” in Scotland, including embryo experimentation and assisted suicide.

More here




Australia: The products of an "everyone wins" education are losers in the job market

EMPLOYERS are refusing to hire Generation Y workers because they lack a work ethic and spend too much time talking to friends in work hours. "Employers come to us about Gen Y, saying they're looking for a staff member but they don't want anyone in that 20s age bracket because they find they don't understand common courtesy in the workplace," Kristy-Lee Johnston, director of Footprint Recruitment told The Courier-Mail.

And the complaints don't only come from managers and bosses. Social researcher Mark McCrindle said: "They also come from other people in the team who are of another generation."

Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland policy general manager Nick Behrens said the global financial crisis should act as a wake-up call. "The chamber is hoping Gen Y will learn from this, that they can no longer take for granted the good times and will no longer get away with the luxuries they have been given."

SOURCE





5 February, 2010

Ohio High School Promotes Obama Agenda in Classroom

And still no apparent action against the propagandist. It was just a silly mistake, apparently. What would have happened if the material promoted Sarah Palin? Not hard to guess

An Ohio high school teacher's giving students job applications for a Democratic organization that included suggested radical reading material has raising concerns of indoctrination in the classroom. The government teacher at Perry High School in Massillon, Ohio, handed out forms recruiting students to intern for Organizing for America, a grassroots organization with direct ties to the Democratic National Committee and the successor organization for Obama for America. Included on the forms was a suggested reading list that included Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and Organizing for America's mission to build on the "movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change."

No Republican equivalent was offered to the students, according to Perry schools' Superintendent John Richard. In an interview with FoxNews.com on Wednesday, Richard acknowledged that distribution of the forms violated school policy and said they were never submitted to school administrators for approval, but the teacher remains on the job. "We don't take sides politically, nor should we, and we certainly would not support students being indoctrinated politically or religiously or anything along those lines," he said.

Richard said the social studies teacher, whom he did not name, had no intent of proselytizing his students and was "given the material by another person." Richard said he "addressed" the issue with the teacher, though he declined to say what disciplinary action, if any, had been taken. "The teacher should have looked through this material," Richard said.

Reaction to the forms, first posted on the conservative blog site, Atlas Shrugs, has sparked national outrage, particularly in the blogosphere. Some bloggers called it a "sick intrusion" and said it was nothing more than an attempt to indoctrinate students, while another, Elliott Cook, wrote: "This is all voluntary!!! No one is forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to do."

One blogger claiming to be the parent of a girl in the class, wrote that students were given no option of signing up for a Republican internship. "The only handout was this one," blogger Gracenearing wrote. "My daughter even asked if there was anything else."

The school also has been bombarded with e-mails calling for Richard to be fired, along with Perry High School principal Don Gregoire. "I've been told to go apply in Cuba for a job," Richard said, adding that angry e-mailers have labeled him a communist.

In a Feb. 1, 2010, letter obtained by FoxNews.com, Gregoire apologized to parents, saying the incident was "not acceptable." "We apologize that your son or daughter was given this information without approval," Gregoire wrote. "This error in following Board Policy has been addressed and has been clearly communicated to staff."

SOURCE




NYC: School creep's detention haul

Easy money for millionaire exile

A Queens teacher who collects a $100,000 salary for doing nothing spends time in a Department of Education "rubber room" working on his law practice and managing 12 real-estate properties worth an estimated $7.8 million, The Post found.

Alan Rosenfeld hasn't set foot in a classroom for nearly a decade since he was accused in 2001 of making lewd comments to junior-high girls and "staring at their butts," yet the department still pays him handsomely for sitting on his own butt seven hours a day. In 2001, six eighth-graders at IS 347 in Queens accused Rosenfeld, a typing teacher who filled in for an absent dean, of making comments like "You have a sexy body," asking one whether she had a boyfriend and making others feel uncomfortable with creepy leers.

Because the Department of Education could not produce all the students as witnesses, he was found guilty in only one case. A girl testified that Rosenfeld stopped at her locker, where she was standing with a friend, and "said I love him because I talk to him so much." A DOE hearing officer gave him a slap on the wrist -- a week off without pay -- for "conduct unbecoming a teacher." He was cleared to return to teaching.

Instead, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has kept the scruffy 64-year-old in a Brooklyn rubber room, deeming him too dangerous to be near kids, officials said.

The DOE can't fire him. "We have to abide by the union contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said. So Rosenfeld simply collects his $100,049 salary -- top scale for teachers -- plus full health benefits and the promise of a fat pension, about $82,000 a year if he were to retire today. His pension will grow by $1,700 each year he remains. He could have retired at age 62, but he stays. He has also accumulated about 435 unused sick days -- and will get paid for half of them when he retires. With city teachers trying to negotiate a 4 percent pay hike, Rosenfeld stands to get the raise.

All this largesse comes as Mayor Bloomberg threatens to cut 2,500 teachers to help close a $4 billion budget gap. Meanwhile, the multimillionaire Rosenfeld lords over the rubber room, where he is the oldest and most veteran of 100 teachers. He reports promptly at 7:30 a.m. to the cavernous "reassignment center" on Chapel Street and spreads out at a table cluttered with used paper cups, plastic utensils, bags of food, news clippings and files.

He "smells like he hasn't taken a shower in months," an insider said.

SOURCE




'Bully' British deputy head teacher is fired after death of bulimia victim

Thus closing the barn door after the horse had escaped. Brilliant!

A deputy headmistress has been sacked over allegations that she bullied a colleague who died at school of bulimia. Moira Ogilvie, 39, was suspended from her job at a junior school after the death of fellow teacher Britt Pilton. The 29-year-old was found collapsed on a toilet floor last February and died despite attempts to resuscitate her. Miss Pilton had the eating disorder bulimia and had been prescribed anti- depressants. She died from health problems caused by her illness.

On the day of her death she was said to have been 'in a panic' over teaching notes that had gone missing from a photocopier. She believed the teacher who had been bullying her was responsible. The teacher accused of bullying Miss Pilton at High Greave Junior School, Rotherham, was not identified at the inquest into her death last June. But Kelly Parkin, a colleague and friend of Miss Pilton, told the hearing: 'The teacher involved would go round and bully a different teacher until they left and Britt felt she was the next one. 'Two or three other teachers left as a result of the bullying.'

The local education authority has since investigated and yesterday revealed that the teacher had been dismissed. A close friend of Miss Pilton confirmed Miss Ogilvie was the teacher sacked.

Miss Pilton's inquest heard her bulimia may have been made worse because of the levels of anxiety she experienced. A pathologist said she died of bulimia syndrome associated with lack of blood flow to the gut. Dr Len Harvey said: 'People with bulimia literally can just die for no apparent reason.'

Miss Pilton, from Woodlaithes, Rotherham, had complained to the National Union of Teachers about the bullying but the teacher she blamed found out and confronted her, a colleague told the inquest. She was engaged and had been planning to marry last summer. Those plans and her love of teaching meant she felt unable to leave her post, the hearing was told.

Her father Trevor, a retired deputy headmaster, said her stress at work was 'almost the sole topic of conversation'.

Teaching assistant Rachel Green told the hearing of Miss Pilton's panic over the missing notes: 'She was sure with events going on at the time that a certain person had taken them to spite her, to go and see the headteacher about the standard of her lessons.'

Rotherham Coroner Nicola Munday recorded a narrative verdict, saying Miss Pilton had faced 'additional pressures in her working environment which led to considerable levels of anxiety over a period of months'.

A spokesman for Rotherham Council said: 'This case has now been resolved and the teacher involved has been dismissed. 'The result of this case will now be passed on to the General Teaching Council to consider.' The GTC is the profession's official body and if it finds a teacher guilty of breaching standards they can be permanently struck off.

The school refused to comment and Miss Ogilvie was unavailable for comment. Miss Pilton's fiancé James French refused to comment, but confirmed Miss Ogilvie was the teacher involved.

SOURCE





4 February, 2010

Mosque University

Dutch politician Geert Wilders is being tried in Amsterdam over some controversial remarks he made about terrorism and Islam. I’m glad I live in the United States of America, where such a trial would be prohibited by the First Amendment. I’m also glad I don’t teach at Temple University in Philadelphia, where students now have to pay an unconstitutional after-the-fact security fee levied by the university. This fee was for hosting none other than Geert Wilders.

The notion that it is permissible to charge a student group extra fees for security simply because a speaker's views are controversial (read: not approved of by university administrators) might be acceptable at the University of Havana or the University of Beijing. But it should never happen in America.

Geert Wilders came to Temple University on October 20, 2009. Wilders was invited in the wake of a controversy surrounding his film “Fitna” which was released in 2008. The film was controversial because it features passages of the Koran interspersed with scenes of violence on the part of Muslims. The movie was shown during the presentation at Temple. Extra security was provided and there was no disturbance.

On December 3, Temple University Purpose (TUP) – the group that hosted Wilders -was surprised with a bill from Temple for $800 for a "Security Officer." This came with the explanation that the charge was for the costs "to secure the room and building."

TUP Interim President Brittany Walsh pointed out that Temple had said – prior to the event - the university would pay any extra security costs. But, after repeated emails, she has received no substantive reply. This is odd because, as one can see from their mission statement, TUP is not a conservative group – the type most likely to be singled out for such treatment:

“The mission of Temple University Purpose is to advocate for justice and equality of oppressed and underrepresented populations. The Temple University Purpose welcomes the whole of the student body of Temple University’s Main campus schools. Demonstrated through advocacy, on behalf of vulnerable populations, towards the eradication of oppression, and guided by the NASW Code of Ethics, the Temple University Purpose honors diversity and is dedicated to social change, social justice, and social unity. The Temple University Purpose provides an open forum in which conventional and unconventional views are exchanged and challenged to enhance understanding of and appreciation for others’ strife, values, devotions, and passions. The voice of every member is most valued, shall always be heard, and genuinely considered, as it is the foundation of the Temple University Purpose. Through active participation in the community, it is possible to contribute to the development of not only one as an empathic human being but, also, to the growth of our immediate and surrounding society. The Temple University Purpose firmly believes in embracing and challenging scholarly discussion of most-critical issues and debates on present developments concerning the open field of social work and society in all parts of our country and world.”

Obviously, this group is being punished financially because it hosted a speaker likely to offend a particularly volatile segment of the population. As a consequence, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has written to the president of Temple. In that letter, FIRE cited the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (1992), which says, "Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob."

Temple is a public university and is bound by the Supreme Court's decisions. If they are smart, they will go the way of four other public universities—the University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Massachusetts Amherst; University of California, Berkeley; and University of Arizona—and abandon such security fees before they get sued.

Two years ago, Temple's speech code was struck down by the Third Circuit. That lawsuit was handled by my friends at the Alliance Defense Fund. If the university does not begin to respect the First Amendment, additional humiliation and litigation are certain to follow.

My message to Temple University President Ann Weaver Hart is simple: You have been warned. Reverse your course of action or face the consequences. If you do not think I am serious, just ask former Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough.

SOURCE




What a degree's really worth in earnings

A COLLEGE education may not be worth as much as you think, the Wall Street Journal reported today. In recent years, the nonprofit College Board touted the difference in lifetime earnings of college grads over high-school graduates at $US800,000 ($899,000), a widely circulated figure. Other estimates topped $US1 million ($1.12 million). But now, as tuition continues to skyrocket and many seeking to change careers are heading back to school, some researchers are questioning the methodology behind the high projections.

Most researchers agree that college graduates, even in rough economies, generally fare better than individuals with only high-school diplomas. But just how much better is where the maths gets fuzzy. The problem stems from the common source of the estimates, a 2002 Census Bureau report titled "The Big Payoff." The report based estimates on average high school and college graduates' earnings then multiplied the difference by 40 years, a rough working life span, to get the result.

"The idea was not to produce a definitive 'This is what you'll earn' number, but to try and give some measure of the relative value of education attainments," says Eric Newburger, a lead researcher at the Census and the paper's co-author. "It's not a statement about the future, it's a statement about today."

Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, a non profit research organisation based in Washington, calls it "a million-dollar misunderstanding." One problem he sees with the estimates: They don't take into account deductions from income taxes or breaks in employment. Nor do they factor in debt, particularly student debt loads, which have ballooned for both public and private colleges in recent years.

SOURCE (See more in the WSJ article linked at the source)




Failing government schools entrench the grip of the middle classes on top British universities

ELITE schools and the middle classes are tightening their grip on top universities, defying years of government attempts to curb their dominance, according to evidence presented to inquiries ordered by Lord Mandelson. The Sutton Trust, a social mobility charity favoured by Gordon Brown, has blamed “stark inequalities” in standards between comprehensives, grammar and independent schools for hindering change.

The trust finds that in 13 leading institutions, an elite of 200 schools won nearly 38% of places in 2007, a figure that had hardly changed since 2002. At Oxford and Cambridge they took 44.4% of places.

The evidence gathered by the trust, chaired by Sir Peter Lampl, the philanthropist, is likely to be used as ammunition by supporters of “positive discrimination” policies, when universities automatically favour candidates from poorly performing comprehensives.

“Universities, schools and the government have made considerable efforts to widen access to highly selective universities,” said Lampl. “But this evidence reveals the extent of the challenge we are facing.”

The study has been sent to Sir Martin Harris, former vice-chancellor of Manchester University, who has been ordered by Mandelson to draw up guidance for how universities should increase the numbers of students from state schools and poorer families. The trust recommends that they ought to create additional places reserved for these applicants. Harris’s inquiry, which will report in March, is expected to form part of the “aspiration” agenda backed by Gordon Brown and Mandelson for the election. It has led to fears that universities will be pushed into “rigging” admissions.

Critics argue it is justifiable to use talent-spotting schemes to favour individual pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds with strong ability. But they oppose “handicap systems” used by universities including Durham, which apply “modifiers” to help the applications of every pupil at a school with poor GCSE grades.

John Morgan, head teacher of Conyers comprehensive in Stockton-on-Tees and president of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “I don’t think any of us are happy with the idea that if you go to a particular school you are given modified points or a lower offer. It has to be about the individual.”

The Sutton Trust study also analysed admissions to three groups of universities — Oxford and Cambridge, the Russell Group of 20 research universities and its own selection of 13 institutions — and found similar patterns in each. The report will also be submitted to a review of university funding chaired by Lord Browne, former head of BP, the oil firm.

Between 2002 and 2007 the proportion of independent school pupils admitted by the top 13 universities, for example, rose from 32% to 33%, while those from the poorest socio-economic groups stayed at 16%. The figures contrast with a report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England that found big rises in university attendance by poorer groups. However, this looked at higher education as a whole and did not analyse research institutions separately.

The trust attributes the dominance of independent and grammar schools not to social elitism by universities but to their better performance at A-levels and their teaching of more academic subjects, such as science and languages.

Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, said the trust’s figures were “a little out of date and do not reflect the fact that efforts by Russell Group universities to widen access and improve results in schools are making inroads into the stubborn problems of educational disadvantage”.

Tim Hands, master of Magdalen College school, Oxford, who chairs the joint universities’ committee of two independent school groups — the HMC and the Girls’ Schools Association — said: “With funding cuts and the emphasis on strategic subjects such as science and engineering, of which we are the key providers, this situation will only become more pronounced. “What is required is honest attention to problems in our education system which have been government-induced, not ineffectual social engineering.”

SOURCE





3 February, 2010

NYC education standards hit a new low

A NEW YORK teacher turned his classroom into a boxing arena for two feuding students, telling the boys to settle their beef with their fists. Their stunned classmates watched the bizarre spectacle, the New York Post reported today.

To make sure no one found out his teaching technique, the instructor, Joseph Gullotta, 29, allegedly supplied the kids with excuses for the nurse to explain away any injuries.

In one corner was a 10-year-old. His opponent was a year younger. Before beginning the match at the impromptu fight club at PS 65 in Ozone Park, Queens, Gullotta instructed a girl to close the classroom door. He ordered the rest of his pupils to make way for the battle, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said yesterday.

During the bout the older boy's head rammed into the younger one's mouth. The younger boy suffered a cut lip, the older one, a bruised head.

Teacher's aide Abraham Fox, 43, was in the classroom during the clash, but did nothing to break it up, Brown said.

It was alleged that the 9-year-old was eventually allowed by Gullotta to visit the nurse after supplying him with a cover story for his injuries. He was to tell the nurse that he dropped a pencil and bashed heads with his classmate as they both bent down to pick it up. The nurse sent him back to get his adversary. The teacher escorted the 10-year-old to the nurse's office and allegedly told him to repeat the made-up story. The incident was discovered only after one of the boys' parents heard the child talking about it.

Gullotta and Fox were charged with two counts each of acting in a manner injurious to a child under 17 and could face up to a year in jail if convicted.

SOURCE




Is it still worth going to university in Britain?

I think this question is simplistic in any country. For some career paths university is beneficial or even essential, but for most career paths it is superfluous -- as many a burger-flipping or taxi-driving humanities graduate will tell you. Credentialism has become a metastatic growth -- JR

It's a tough time for graduates, as we report in the paper today. But it's also a tough time for undergraduates, post-graduates and aspiring students too. There's so much demand for places, fewer jobs, (one survey suggested that a quarter of vacancies for this September will be filled by last year's graduates) and huge pressures on the universities themselves to cut costs (not to mention those student debts).

All this doom and gloom made it the perfect time to focus the next School Gate debate on universities, and to ask a very big question - is is still worth going to university? Here recent graduate Sarah Beard, gives her thoughts:

"I graduated in 2009 without a job. Was going to university a complete waste of time for me? I don’t think so.

Despite ‘graduate unemployment reaching 7.9 per cent, a level not seen since 1996’ and ‘the prediction that student debt will soon average £23,000, I’m pleased I went. My four University years were (so far) the best of my life. I was able to taste real independence for the first time, mix with people I would never normally meet, be educated on a subject of great personal interest and experience the most amazing social life. On top of that, I came away with a 2:1 degree and many lifelong friends.

That's not to say that graduating into a recession is easy. In fact, I explained my situation last year on School Gate and received a torrent of abuse. Much of this centred around claims my University experience had been a waste of time but only because I had chosen to study Business & Tourism at the University of Lincoln. A sample comment was ‘what do you expect when you go to a mediocre university like University of Lincoln and your degree is what most employers would regard as "Mickey Mouse-esque?’

As a graduate, I have taken part in the Shell Step Programme, which gave me a valuable 8-week placement, and I’ve been accepted onto an MA course. It might come as no surprise then, that I think university is a superb investment and is one that’s available to any student, regardless of whether they choose to attend a Russell Group University or an emerging one. This is rightly, a view that still appears to be upheld as there is ‘unprecedented demand for higher education, which has seen applications to some universities rise by 35 per cent’

Tom Mursell, founder of notgoingtouni.co.uk would, however, disagree with me because he believes "Degrees are already not worth what they used to be, so by 2020 they'll be worth even less’ and that university simply sees teenagers ‘saddling themselves with thousands of pounds of debt’. Tom has since handed his company over to Craig Spencer in order to become an apprentice of Dragons Den millionaire, Shaf Rasul.

Vice-Chancellor David Greenaway, from the University of Nottingham, rejects such views, as he believes that ‘the benefits of higher education to individuals and to society are significant and persistent. Graduates benefit from a wage premium, which lasts for their entire working lives; and there are important links between investment in education and economic growth. If we want more wealth creation and poverty alleviation, we need more growth’

“Non-economic benefits are no less important. Having better educated, more tolerant, more socially responsible citizens deliver great returns for society as well as for individuals."

SOURCE




Australia: "My School" brawl exposes teachers' culture of mediocrity

"My School" is a new Australian Federal government website that enables parents to compare results from different schools. I myself received what I regard as an excellent education at a country State school. I still remember much of the German "Lieder" and Latin grammar I learnt there around 50 years ago. I even remember enough basic physics to know what a crock global warming is. And I sent my son to a State school for part of his education. So I have no great objection to State schools as such. But it is when discipline is abandoned and the curriculum is dumbed down to politically correct pap that an alternative is needed -- and it is often sorely needed these days-- JR

In the mid 1990s the teachers credit union Satisfac came up with a kindly and seemingly innocent idea to celebrate the excellent work of its teacher members. The credit union, which historically had served teachers but like many other institutions now has a wide customer base, decided that to recognise the role of the teaching profession in its own development it would establish an annual awards event called The Best Teacher Awards.

But when the awards were initially proposed the reaction from the teachers union was one of outrage and dismay. Satisfac was told in no uncertain terms to shelve the idea, with the union arguing it was the height of impertinence for a credit union – or anyone else for that matter – to declare that some teachers were better than others.

This quaint Marxist view of the world has been on full display this past week as teachers unions around the country descend into apoplexy over the Rudd Government’s apparently wicked policy of letting parents know how their kids’ school compares to other like schools.

The unspoken backdrop to the unions’ long-standing hostility to any form of comparative rankings is, obviously, industrial self-interest. The danger which a website such as MySchool presents to the union is that parents might start asking hard questions if they see that their school is performing well down the list of comparable schools. For the first time, this website provides the public with data that is so rich that it’s possible to discern a drop-off in certain years or certain subjects.

There could be several reasons for a decline in performance. It could be a funding shortfall, which can be sheeted home to the relevant state government or education department. It could be explained by a change in the profile of the students in a certain year. It could also be that one of the teachers is no good.

It’s this last point which the teaching unions object to the most. They have taken the all for one, one for all philosophy to such a ludicrous extent that they have made the profession less enticing for passionate people who might consider a career as an educator, if not for the fact that you will forever be held back in terms of both workload and remuneration by the non-performance of the minority of disengaged or dud teachers.

If the unions were intellectually honest, this website would be welcomed as a long-overdue vindication of the excellence of most public schools. As the proud graduate of a public school, I’ve taken a perverse delight in monitoring the non-performance of some of the toffiest schools in the land, seeing nuggetty little public schools kicking the stuffing out of joints that charge several thousand dollars a term with an unchallenged promise of a better level of learning.

My School has shown that many parents are effectively being fleeced by this empty promise. They might get one of those nice triangular stickers for the back of the Range Rover, and young Angus might end up rubbing shoulders with a future front rower for the Wallabies, but if it’s reading and writing you’re after, you might do better to skip down the road to the local public school.

My School is not without flaws – we spent a couple of hours on it the other night, our child’s school, in Sydney, was compared to a school in Ballina, which at 739km away is a heck of a commute. But the fixation on such glitches – which are inevitable and can be easily recognised by the average user anyway on a website of this size – is an obvious ploy by the teaching unions to undermine the credibility of the entire venture in a fruitless bid to shame the government into its withdrawal.

There’s one criticism levelled against the site which carries much more weight and which the Federal Government must take very seriously. Opposition education spokesman Chris Pyne is absolutely right when he says there is little point identifying systematic problems with the performance of a minority of teachers, without also giving principals the industrial power to act against them. And to anyone who would say this is a teacher bashing exercise, it is not. It’s the polar opposite of one.

In the new age of transparency created by My School, it is logical and right to shift next to a discussion of performance pay. And it should have less to do with punishing the minority of bad teachers than giving greater reward and opportunity to the enormous pool of dedicated and brilliant teachers.

Thinking back to my school days I can only remember a couple of teachers who were so bad that they should have been frogmarched off the school grounds. They really should have been. There was one guy who seemed to be motivated by nothing other than a pathological dislike of young people. He would habitually tell kids at this largely working class school that they were so dim that they would be better off leaving immediately and going for an apprenticeship popping rivets at the nearby Mitsubishi factory.

And then there were teachers such as Anna Polias, an English teacher who would habitually write 10 or even 15 A4 pages of comments on your essays, stay back after school to organise extra-curricular stuff such as cycling days, bookshop visits into the city, where she would take us out to coffee, talk about politics and travel and our futures. People such as Ms Polias represent the majority of teachers in the public system. She should have been paid half as much again as what she was earning; the fellow I mentioned before had no right to be in a schoolyard at all.

I suspect there are a lot of hard-working teachers who privately believe that things should change but are afraid to say so for being marginalised by the union crowd.

The most appropriate memento from my school days for illustrating this entrenched hostility towards assessment and ranking is the absurd trophy I “won” while playing Aussie Rules for the Under 13s. In keeping with the post-70s educational zeitgeist, it had been decreed that it was unfair to simply have a best and fairest and that, just like at the Easter Show, every player should win a prize. The humiliating gong I won read “Most Attentive at Training” but should really have been inscribed “Most Incompetent Back Pocket” or “Pea-hearted pretender who avoids the hard ball”. Rather than getting a pat on the head as a reward for my uselessness, the coach should have taken me aside and explained politely that I was to Aussie Rules what Gary Ablett was to romantic poetry, and pointed me in the direction of the library.

Pretending that everybody is doing quite well at almost everything is no way to prepare them for later life. And teaching is the one profession where the unions believe that this same bankrupt philosophy should apply to working adults.

SOURCE





2 February, 2010

St. Louis U’s Inverted Values

by David Horowitz

On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week I was in Washington, where I visited with three U.S. Senators and three Congressmen, including the whips of both houses. I was meeting Eric Cantor for the first time, but all the others had appeared at events I had hosted or provided blurbs for my political books. Jon Kyl, the Minority Whip in the Senate invited me to a lunch to address the Republican Senate leadership lunch on my next trip to Washington. I mention this because while I was waiting for my return flight in Dulles airport I received a call from my office informing me that a speech I had been invited to give at St. Louis University two weeks later would be cancelled because of conditions that had been set by university administrators that could not be met.

In particular, the administrator in charge, Dean Scott Smith, had told the student whose group had invited me that “Horowitz would never be allowed to speak on a platform alone at Saint Louis University. He could be invited only if there was another speaker on the program to oppose his point of view.” Moreover, the dean continued, while my speaking fee had to be paid by the College Republicans who had invited me, my designated opponent would have his fees and expenses paid by the university. The clear message was that the St. Louis University would not allow its own funds to be tainted by such an unwelcome speaker.

This was the second attempt by the students to invite me, and the second time Dean Smith had thrown a roadblock on their invitation. In October, he had said I could not speak unattended because I would “insinuate that all Muslims are fascists,” something I have never done. In fact, there are videos of my speeches all over the web in which I say just the opposite.

It should be said that while administrators apply these restrictions to critics of radical Islam, no such rules are invoked for Holocaust deniers or supporters of communist genocides. Both Norman Finkelstein and Angela Davis have been invited as standalone speakers at St. Louis University, without anti-communists and defenders of Israel on stage to refute them.

I decided to call Smith’s bluff and suggested that I debate Cary Nelson, the well-to-the left president of the American Association of University Professors, on the subject of academic freedom. I called Cary and he agreed. Smith didn’t like this because he was aware that Nelson had responded to his attempt to bar me from speaking by saying that St. Louis University was a “university in name only.” So Smith asked the student host Dan Laub why the subject had changed from Islamo-fascism to academic freedom. Why indeed!

But again I decided to test his mettle and told Dan that the subject we would debate would be Academic Freedom and Islamo-Fascism. Curve ball. Smith came back with a new caveat. There would have to be a third speaker to mind Cary and me and put our discussion in the framework of “Catholic Values.” Some joke. What Catholic Values did the communist Angela Davis or the atheist Norman Finkelstein express when they spoke alone?

Better yet, this weekend Dean Smith and the Catholics at St. Louis University hosted a three day conference put on by the Muslim Student Association, a well-established front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The conference dealt with religious themes such as why requiring two women to be a witness or letting them inherit only half of what a man does or requiring them to submit to their husbands represents “the perfection of our religion.”

SOURCE




A brilliant British pupil -- by State school standards

I often mention posts from other blogs, as there is so much out there worth reading. But I recently read one which I wanted to share in more detail. It is a brilliant read - and extremely thought provoking.

Miss Snuffleupagus is a black teacher in London who's never scared to speak her mind. She writes a fantastic, honest, blog, To Miss With Love , about teaching in the inner-city. She's a talented writer and it really is worth reading what she says - often about the frustrations of pupils who don't care about learning and don't take it seriously.

A few months ago, I mentioned one of her posts because it tied in so beautifully with another piece I had just posted. The topic was Oxbridge, and whether colleges were now discriminating against private school applicants. Just a few days after posting on this, I read an article by Miss Snuffleupagus where she said, as a state school teacher, that the universities must be discriminating - otherwise all the places would go to the privately educated....

It's ironic that this topic has now reared its head again, in a beautifully written, heartfelt post, entitled the best they've ever seen. Here Miss Snuffleupagus and the head of her school are in shock. A pupil she calls Brilliant didn't get into Oxford. "Brilliant is one of the brightest girls I have ever known," she writes. "She is also kind, determined, responsible and utterly superb in every possible way. We thought for sure she’d get in. If she doesn’t get in, then who does?" The school has been told that the Oxford college took six pupils and that Brilliant was number seven. Miss S thinks it's "unlucky."

"My Head winces at my statement," she writes. "‘Well, no, I just wish I could be like the old boys and ring up someone and say Hello, this is Mr Contacts here, I’m just wondering ahem, about you know, well, I understand there isn’t a place for her at your college, but might we not find her a place at another college?’

I draw my eyebrows together demonstrating disagreement.

‘Well that’s what they say in the books about how it’s done!’ My Head shouts.

‘Yes, but that was ages ago… I don’t think that now…’

My Head laughs. ‘You know they said that her essays were the BEST essays that they have ever seen from a state school student before!... The BEST! What does that mean? She’s the best but we won’t have her?’

I nod, thinking lots of things, and not saying any of them.

My Head shakes his head. ‘Well, I won’t go into it, we all know there are issues with Oxbridge taking state students and well, I won’t waste time talking about it.’"

Why didn't Brilliant get in? Was it because of her school? Was it because she actually wasn't good enough? Or wasn't she prepared properly for the interview. We all know that Oxbridge is incredibly over-subscribed. Not everyone can get in. Everyone who applies is extremely clever and the interviews do really matter - private schools make sure their pupils are extremely well prepared. But one phrase haunts Miss S. She writes:

‘From a state school applicant’… the words reverberate around my head as I walk down the hall. If Brilliant is the best that we can produce and all that means in the grand scheme of things is that her essays are only good by state school standards, then what on earth are they doing in private schools?

What must they be teaching in private schools? What are they able to do with their kids that we cannot do? I guess they aren’t chasing loads of bad behaviour. I guess they’re actually able to teach for an entire lesson. I guess they plan their lessons according to what would make for good learning, as opposed to what will keep them in their seats. I guess they can teach their children whatever they want and are not bound by the national curriculum and influenced by the madness that all lessons must be ‘fun’. I guess they simply live in a different world."

The state school/private school divide continues and we shouldn't expect universities to pick up the pieces. I am not at all convinced that the top universities discriminate against state school pupils. I think they want to teach the best overall and will make their decision to reflect that. But I feel sorry for Brilliant and the school.

SOURCE




Australia: Incompetent teachers must be given the boot

More power for principals to hire and fire would help

THE suggestion that poor children will not do well at school is both offensive and misguided. Anyone who knows much about education and teaching understands this simple fact: quality educational outcomes are directly related to quality teaching. It is the sleeper in the My School website.

Research has persistently shown better teachers mean better results. Do you think I am overstating the case? Well, consider this. According to the findings of the benchmark 2005 Department of Education, Science and Training's national inquiry into the teaching of literacy: "Highly effective teachers and their professional learning do make a difference in the classroom. It is not so much what students bring with them from their backgrounds, but what they experience on a day-to-day basis in interaction with teachers and other students that matters. Teaching quality has strong effects on children's experiences of schooling, including their attitudes, behaviours and achievement outcomes.

"Thus there is need for a major focus on teacher quality, and building capacity in teachers towards quality, evidence-based teaching practices that are demonstrably effective in maximising the developmental and learning needs of all children."

Even so, Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority chairman Barry McGaw, in The Weekend Australian, trotted out the tired and irresponsible argument that governments need to do more to "reduce the impact of demography on school results".

The demographic argument has been used by state governments for years to justify low school achievement. No matter that before the My School website indicated performance nationwide, the Australian Council for Education Research could demonstrate that it was not a question of where you lived but who taught you that affected educational outcomes.

If this was not the case, why then are the Teach for Australia flying squads of super university graduates targeting underperforming schools? While the Teach for Australia idea is significantly flawed in terms of adequate classroom preparation of teachers, it has identified that good teachers make a difference. McGaw cites evidence that, on the basis of comparable OECD data, in Australia "poorer schools and schools in poorer communities struggle to a greater extent". However, the answer is not physical resources or postcodes but who is in front of the class. I am a secondary teacher. I came from a poor family, lived in a working-class area and was superbly taught in Victorian state schools. My father was a storeman and bought me a desk, on hire purchase, so I could do my schoolwork. There were many children just like me. I owe my tertiary education to gifted teachers.

Why does the Australian Education Union cover for incompetence? What the AEU fails to address with any kind of serious intent is working co-operatively with governments to get rid of poor teachers. Education Minister Julia Gillard is savvy on the question of quality assurance in the classroom. This is why she can say: "A poor child can get fantastic results." How? Teacher quality must improve.

National primary and secondary principals associations have recognised that there is a direct correlation between a principal's ability to select staff and school results. Leonie Trimper, president of the Australian Primary Principals' Association, pithily noted last December: "Name any company that sits back for Centrelink to ring and say, `Here's your 10 staff.' "

In Victoria, taking a leaf out of Queensland's approach, there are $50,000 golden goodbyes on the table for poor teachers.

While the AEU can recite the mantra that the My School website - as federal president Angelo Gavrielatos did on ABC radio on the morning of the launch - is "inaccurate, incomplete and invalid", the question every parent in the country should be asking is: Does my school have quality teachers? If not, why not?

Those who link demographics with student performance are simply not facing reality. Poor children deserve quality education. If they do not get it, then look to the teachers.

SOURCE





1 February, 2010

So your freedom-loving kid is going to college, part 2

Taking the anxiety out of picking a congenial school

In Part I last week I offered a few suggestions on finding a congenial school for a freedom-loving college-bound child. The focus there was on “fit” and the importance of teaching. This week, I elaborate on both and offer some other suggestions.

It is simply impossible, short of attending Hillsdale or Grove City College or some religious colleges, to avoid the fact that the vast majority of college faculty members will have a worldview different from yours and your child’s. The classroom will inevitably reflect their views, just as my classes are colored by my views. The concern about potential “indoctrination,” however, should arise only if agreement with the teacher’s views determines the evaluation of the student’s work. In my experience such behavior is more the exception than the rule. The majority of left-leaning faculty, especially where teaching is valued, are not after students who agree with them but rather students who show a capacity for critical thinking, can express their views cogently in writing and in speech, and support them with evidence.

To gauge this, explore how focused the school is on helping their students acquire skills in writing, speaking, critical thinking, and research. Are these goals featured prominently in the college’s promotional materials? Are there clear places in the curriculum where those skills are taught? And notice that “taught” is not the same thing as “assigned.” Teachers who assign papers and speeches might assume students already have adequate skills. Actually teaching them how to become better writers, speakers, and researchers is much harder (and more necessary) work. Also ask if the institution commits resources to helping faculty engage in such instruction.

Where faculty members are publicly committed to teaching communication skills, their evaluation is far more likely to be on the process by which students create their work and the skills they demonstrate in doing so, rather than on the particular content.

Fairness Is Possible

Another useful strategy is to have your child ask other students if they feel they are graded on the basis of their ideological views. It’s perfectly possible for a faculty member to have strong views yet grade student papers purely on how effectively they argue for their own views. This tends to happen when the teaching of writing and speaking is a priority, but it’s always worth seeing what the students themselves say.

It is worth investigating whether other students and/or faculty members share your child’s political interests. The presence of libertarian or conservative student groups can provide not only fellow students to share ideas and concerns with, but also a potential source of extra-curricular learning. Such groups often invite guest speakers or organize book discussions. Various freedom-oriented organizations are funding student groups on an increasing number of campuses, including smaller ones.

Finding libertarian-leaning faculty can be important as well, even if the student has no interest in the faculty member’s specialty. Often those teachers serve as formal or informal advisers for student groups and can be important advocates for students if they find themselves being treated unfairly for what appear to be ideological reasons. How well that faculty member has been treated by the institution can also be a guide to the college’s openness to diverse opinions.

Beware the Victim Mentality

Finally, a word of caution: It is important not to fall into the victim mentality. I have seen too many cases where conservative students complain about “ideological discrimination” when the real problem is that they are not offering arguments and evidence that are sophisticated enough for the college classroom. Even if you think, as I do, that left-leaning faculty sometimes let left-leaning students get away with lazy arguments, be above reproach. The more that freedom lovers whine about being victims, the less seriously will our ideas be taken.

So to students I say: Find the college that is best for you academically and socially, and make sure it has a commitment to teaching generally and to instructing students in communication skills and critical thinking specifically. If it does, see if there are other freedom-minded students and faculty on campus and get a sense of the institutional tolerance for diverse ideas. Then read my earlier column “The Low Road and the High Ground” and follow its suggestions on knowing both sides of major issues inside and out, arguing your views clearly and with evidence, and doing it all with a smile.

Conservative and libertarian students can have a very good experience in most colleges in the United States if they take their work seriously and respect those with whom they disagree.

SOURCE




Britain pays hefty bribes to keep its dysfunctional public schools staffed

THE salaries of the best-paid state school headteachers have risen to almost £200,000, overtaking the pay packet of the headmaster of Eton College, according to new figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The data show that two principals at academies, Labour’s semi-independent state comprehensives, were paid between £190,000 and £199,999 in 2008/09. Tony Little of Eton, is paid £180,000—£189,999 and is believed to be the highest-paid private-sector head.

The data show the emergence of an elite of at least 11 academy principals, condemned by critics as “fat cats” paid more than £150,000. This was an increase from six the previous year. A third of academies have yet to submit accounts.

In addition, seven heads working for local authority-controlled schools were paid in excess of this figure in 2008, the latest year for which figures were available.

The salaries may even understate the total packages received, because many heads receive generous bonuses and add-on payments for running spin-off businesses based on school premises. Some also charge consultancy fees for advising other schools on how to improve results.

Vernon Coaker, the schools minister, said: “Being the head of a school is a very challenging, but also very rewarding role. We know that the best heads deliver leadership which raises aspirations for all pupils and makes everyone feel part of a team. The difference good leadership can make is beyond measure; it can make or break a school. “That’s why it’s right salaries are competitive and we allow schools further flexibility to reward the best candidates meaning schools that are underperforming or have challenging circumstances can actually recruit and retain the best heads.”

Academies, which are often among the toughest inner-city schools to run, are not subject to the same salary restrictions that apply to mainstream state schools and they pay high figures to attract the best candidates.

Alasdair Smith, national secretary of the Anti-Academies Alliance, said: “In addition to millions squandered on consultancies, we now have unaccountable, fat-cat headteachers shamelessly enriching themselves at public expense. “It is yet more evidence that the academies programme is not fit for purpose and it is a pointer to what will happen if the next government extend the market in education.”

According to a study received last week, the average secondary school head earns £74,000. Although the maximum salary possible is in theory £109,658 for inner London and £102,734 elsewhere, pay is in practice raised far higher by bonuses and other deals.

State school teachers were once seen as under-paid, but have seen salaries soar under Labour. This helped plug shortages in key areas of teaching, but has led to a series of rows over “excessive” pay packets for heads.

Sir Alan Davies, former headmaster of Copland, a comprehensive in Brent, west London, is being investigated by Scotland Yard over a series of generous payments. In a single year, he was allegedly paid more than £400,000 in a single year after clinching a series of lucrative deals including a contract to work as “project manager” on a development at his own school. His extra payments are said to have totalled £600,000 over five years in addition to his six-figure salary. Davies resigned amid claims of financial mismanagement by the governors.

Greg Martin, head at Durand primary school in Stockwell, south London, more than doubled his £70,000 salary by charging fees for managing the school’s health spa and other facilities.

SOURCE




Australia: Catholic schools teach Catholicism! How shocking!

Why send your kid to a Catholic school if that's a problem? I sent my son to a Catholic school despite my Protestant background and he enjoyed his religion lessons greatly -- and got high marks in them. Should I have expected anything else?

CATHOLIC schools are forcing Year 12 students to sit a TEE religion subject that will count towards their university entrance score. Outraged parents are taking their children out of Catholic schools because they believe the now mandatory Religion and Life subject will create an unfair workload on students. Students already studying courses like physics and chemistry will have an extra three-hour exam to cram for. And non-religious students will be forced to rigorously study Catholic values if they wish to get into university.

The Sunday Times understands that the idea to make all Catholic school students sit a religion exam came from Archbishop Barry Hickey. Catholic Education Office of WA director Ron Dullard conceded the decision had upset some parents. "Initially, there was some concern," he said. "I don't think the parents totally understood the implications that it actually does count towards their (child's) TEE and university entrance - and the fact that, irrespective of whether they were doing the exam, they still had to devote that amount of time as part of the policy of their Catholic education obligation to religion anyway."

One southern suburbs parent told The Sunday Times they had pulled their son out of a Catholic school. "My son didn't want the added pressure of juggling his religion exam studies with subjects like physics and chemistry," she said.

Mr Dullard said the mandatory religion exams should be a benefit for students. "It should give them an advantage, particularly if they've been doing RE (religious education) for 12 years in a Catholic school," he said. "I think the students will be better prepared for RE than any other of the new courses of study."

The subject Religion and Life was designed to be non-denominational by the Curriculum Council so that students from every school could study it. Curriculum Council chief executive David Wood said Catholic students would answer questions from the perspective of their faith. "The course is set up so that kids can draw on their knowledge and experiences in whatever faith they're in to respond to the questions," Mr Wood said.

SOURCE







Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.


TERMINOLOGY: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.


The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed


Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.


Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor


I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.


Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".


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


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


A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.


Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.


Comments above by John Ray