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31 January, 2006

REVOLUTIONARY IDEA: SPEND EDUCATION FUNDS ON TEACHING

Everybody wants more money in the classroom. No one wants a tax increase. The solution? Distribute education dollars differently, pouring money into classrooms without raising taxes. The idea is the basis of the 65 Percent Solution, a proposal that would require school districts to spend at least 65 percent of their budgets on classroom expenses. Proponents want to see all 50 states and the District of Columbia impose the requirement by 2008.

The notion has at least one deep-pocketed backer: Patrick Byrne, the president of Overstock.com, Inc., who has pledged $1 million to the cause. At least 12 states are considering the idea, with one - Texas - already implementing it. California voters may see the idea on a ballot as early as 2008. Proponents of the plan say it will make school districts spend money more efficiently. They say it also will improve student achievement by funneling dollars - $14 billion nationally and $1.5 billion in California - away from administration and toward student learning.

Districts nationwide spent an average of 61.3 percent of their budgets on in-class expenses in 2002-2003, the last year for which figures are available from the National Center for Education Statistics. California spent 60.8 percent. Only two states - New York and Maine - exceeded the 65 percent mark. "Before every dollar is spent outside the classroom, we want asked, could this dollar be spent inside the classroom?" Republican political consultant Tim Mooney said. Mooney runs First Class Education, the nonprofit group dedicated to advancing the proposal. "Right now, it seems like the default is outside the classroom," he said.

Lawmakers in Kansas and Louisiana already have set the 65 percent mark as a goal. Proponents plan to propose legislation - or have already done so - in Minnesota, Illinois, Georgia, Missouri and Florida. Mooney's group hopes to carry voter referendums in Ohio, Oregon, Colorado, Washington and Arizona this year.

Critics here recognize the plan's strength is its simplicity. That's also its weakness, they say. "It's a terrible idea," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators. "There is no free money out there where this would magically get more money into classrooms. ... The one-size-fits-all solution doesn't work for a state this size." Part of the problem, critics say, is the plan's definition of classroom expenses. The 65 percent includes teacher salaries and benefits, supplies, classroom aides, and sports and arts programs. But it doesn't include key items such as transportation, food service, maintenance, librarians, and teacher training. "It's an arbitrary standard," said Rick Pratt, executive director of the California School Boards Association. "Schools are expected to feed kids, provide after-school programs, provide transportation. ... Will we have to scale back on these things? These are decisions you don't make with formulas."

There's little evidence to support a direct link between student achievement and the percentage of funds that districts spend on classroom instruction. A recent study by Standard & Poor's found no significant relationship between the two.

Mooney pointed out that the five states that scored highest on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the "nation's report card," spent a bigger percentage of funds on instruction, on average, than did lower-ranking states. The five lowest-scoring states (including California) spent the least on instruction.

But critics say measuring student achievement isn't a simple thing. The top-scoring states also spent more per pupil overall - $3,000 more, on average - than did the bottom-scoring states that year. They also had significantly fewer racial minorities and lower poverty rates. The five states testing in the 20th percentile spent more in the classroom, on average, than did the five states testing in the 90th percentile.

The Austin-American Statesman reported in August that it had obtained a First Class Education memo that listed the 65 Percent Solution's "political benefits," including sowing dissent within education unions and helping build Republican credibility on education issues - thereby creating a base of support for charter schools and vouchers, which education unions say detract from public school systems. Mooney said this week that he penned that memo. "I'll stand by everything said in it," he said. The 65 percent plan would probably divide unions, he said. "That's not our goal. Our goal is simply to pass this policy." He added "good policy makes good politics, and whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, backing an issue this popular makes sense."

Pratt, of the state School Boards Association, said states should increase the flow of money to education, rather than forcing districts to shift existing dollars around. But Mooney said districts need to streamline spending before they ask for more funding. "Voters are saying, 'Show us you're spending your current dollars wisely,' " he said. "Then we'll talk to you about more dollars."

Source



UC CORRUPTION CONTINUES

It shouldn't be long now before abnormal psychology experts begin camping out at the University of California's 10 campuses for some field research. The constantly emerging stories over the last few months about UC leaders spending vast amounts on bonuses, perks and other compensation for top administrators without proper authorization initially seemed to be just an extreme version of institutional arrogance. But given the report this week about a UC Berkeley administrator receiving a $237,000 parting gift, this hauteur seems to have morphed into institutional derangement.

Remember, these sorts of outrages were supposed to be a thing of the past. In the wake of the worst of the revelations - a San Francisco Chronicle report in November detailing how UC doled out $871 million in hidden cash compensation - UC's leaders vowed they had learned their lesson. While they would continue to push to stay competitive on compensation with the nation's other top universities, they would do so in much more open fashion - and they would follow state rules.

Unfortunately, the taxpayer abuse reflected in the case of former UC Berkeley Chancellor Rogert Berdahl shows those promises were worthless. Berdahl resigned in 2004 under an agreement in which he took a 131/2-month leave while continuing to receive his chancellor's salary. In return, per UC policy, he promised to return to teaching for at least 131/2 months. If he didn't stay all 131/2 months, Berdahl agreed to pay back a prorated share of the $355,000 he was paid while on leave.

But during his leave, Berdahl lined up a new job - starting in May 2006 - as president of the Association of American Universities. It paid even more than his old UC gig. He notified UC officials that he would only teach for one semester, not the three he had promised. So Berdahl was required to pay back two-thirds of the $355,000, right? Wrong. That's what would be done in an ethical, honest government agency - but not the University of California.

Instead, according to reports this week, current UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgenau decreed on Jan. 4 that Berdahl didn't have to pay the money back because he would be of help to UC in his new job. Birgenau's lavish gift came 14 days after UC President Robert Dynes announced the hiring of an auditor to study UC's compensation practices and vowed a campaign to "gain total public confidence." Who does Dynes think he's kidding?

It gets worse: UC Santa Cruz officials confirmed this week that $30,282 in taxpayer money had been spent to build an "enclosure" for Chancellor Diane Denton's "two large and very active dogs." Does every UC campus act as if it is spending Monopoly money, not public funds? Enough is enough. Heads must roll. If UC's Board of Regents won't end this gross malfeasance, then the governor and the Legislature must step in - because there is no reason in the world to think UC will reform without a boot on its neck.

Source



The boring Left

Leftist professors are not enthusing the young. Post lifted from No Left Turns

Sam Graham-Felsen writes a long and boring article in The Nation titled, "The New Face of the Campus Left." Kind of a rah-rah-rah, we're finally getting organized, by something called Campusprogress, from the living-wage campaign (cleverly renamed the 1 John 3 Campaign when it wasn't getting anywhere; it still isn't), to anti-war, to guilt-free caffeine. It's all kind of pathetic, really. This sentence near the start of the story amused me -- they really want to pretend that university campuses are not overwhelmingly liberal:

"The assumption that America's campuses are impenetrable bastions of liberalism--where left-leaning faculty predominate, progressive student activism flourishes and conservatism is fiercely marginalized--still rules the day. But in reality, since the 1970s the conservative movement has become the dominant political force on many American campuses."

Since the 1970's? Are you kidding? I could help figure out their meaning with the following example. The day we went into Iraq a dozen or so Ashland faculty (all my age, have been on the Left their whole life, I am betting) picketed against the war on the corner of Claremont and College. The next day a dozen or so students were picketing in favor of the war. Still no students on the anti-war side.

What is most irritating to the Left professors--the ones that dominate the humanities and social sciences--and The Nation mag, is that they are not persuading the youth. They are there, but they can't reproduce themselves. Frustration sets in and the result is a focus on guilt-free coffee and other such serious causes.

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

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

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

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30 January, 2006

MORE EVIDENCE OF EDUCATIONAL DECLINE IN BRITAIN

When you look past fudged exam results to actual tests of what kids can do, the evidence is stark

It has become an annual rite of summer. Out come the Sats/GCSE/A -level results - take your pick - and up pops a government minister to say that grades are higher than ever, teachers and schools have done a fantastic job, but there's still room for improvement. Not everyone takes this at face value and there are a few grumbles about exams becoming easier. But even if there are suspicions that standards have dropped, no one has ever seriously suggested that children's cognitive abilities have deteriorated. Until now. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer, professor of applied psychology at King's College, University of London, concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.

"It's a staggering result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. "Before the project started, I rather expected to find that children had improved developmentally. This would have been in line with the Flynn effect on intelligence tests, which shows that children's IQ levels improve at such a steady rate that the norm of 100 has to be recalibrated every 15 years or so. But the figures just don't lie. We had a sample of over 10,000 children and the results have been checked, rechecked and peer reviewed."

To understand both the science and its implications, we need to step back 30 years, to when Shayer was part of a six-strong team of academics - including Margaret Brown, Geoffrey Matthews and Philip Adey - engaged in research at Chelsea College on concepts in secondary science and mathematics. "We realised that no one had actually bothered to investigate how children learned maths and science, or where the difficulties lay," he says. "So the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) funded a five-year project - the longest ever research programme of its kind - to find out."

As the time frame suggests, it was a slow process and Shayer has clear memories of a young, blue-suited academic - one Ted Wragg - being sent round after two years had elapsed to check up that the SSRC's money was being well spent. Wragg gave the Chelsea College team the thumbs up and in 1979 the research was published.

One of Shayer's main difficulties had been to establish a benchmark of ability. The psychometric tradition had obvious disadvantages. For one thing, the Flynn effect implied that an absolute scale of mental age was impossible, but there were other problems. A score of 105 might tell you that a child is slightly above average, but it does not tell you what maths he or she can or can't understand. For this reason, Shayer decided that using the developmental model of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was a better bet. "Although controversial, Piaget's descriptions do provide an underlying, logic-based, theoretical model to differentiate different levels of complexity," he says. "It describes the same behaviours - for example, the ability to control variables in experimenting - whether the subject is nine or 16." Crucially, the model met the statistical demands of being criterion-referenced and could be given equal interval properties.

According to Piaget's model, children go through four main stages of development - sensorimotor (infancy), pre-concrete (up to age 5), concrete (5-11) and formal (11-16) - each of which are divided into several sub-groups. Shayer's first task was to check this model against a broad cohort of 14,000 schoolchildren. "We conducted a wide range of tests on all the secondary-age year groups over the course of a year," says Shayer. "These were designed to assess a child's exact ability on the Piagetian scale."

Shayer's work naturally focused on the different sub-groups of the concrete and the formal. The concrete stage, in regard to maths, meant testing a child's ability to put things in order, use descriptive models and plot simple graphs. The formal stage involved testing more abstract concepts and the ability to predict. His results showed that Piaget had only described the top 20% of the population. "Like many scientists, Piaget picked the best specimens, so his results were weighted in favour of the most able children," says Shayer. "We took a broad section of the population and found that, far from being at the early formal level (3A) as Piaget had predicted, the average 11-year old was firmly back in the centre of the middle concrete level (2B)."

Not everyone was overjoyed by these findings. Many educationists found it hard to accept that children were less able than previously thought, and were reluctant to admit that there were huge differences in development that weren't purely attributable to environmental factors. To Shayer, though, it was no great surprise. "You would expect children of bright parents to be brighter than average," he says. "Similarly, you would expect children whose parents played with them regularly in a creatively challenging way to do better on developmental tests."

The main objection to Shayer's research came from those who argued that the Piagetian tests described only a child's ability to perform those particular functions and were of no predictive value with regard to general level of performance. "Shayer disproved this with his subsequent work in the 1980s," says Paul Black, emeritus professor of education at King's College and chair of the 1988 National Curriculum Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT), whose report formed the basis for the implementation of Sats. "He helped to develop two-year intervention programmes for those children who had been identified by the Piagetian model as being below average in year 7. Science and maths were the contexts through which the programmes were taught, but the prime focus was on general developmental skills. "These programmes [Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education and Cognitive Acceleration through Maths Education] both significantly increased the children's Piagetian scores and markedly improved their maths and science GCSE grades from those predicted at entry level testing. More important, these children also showed an improvement on predicted grades in other subjects, such as English and history. This showed the programmes had a generic impact, rather than just a specific effect."

Shayer's work was subsequently validated by similar research in Greece, Pakistan and Australia. It also managed to free itself of its purely Piagetian approach by assimilating some of the properties of psychometric testing into a unified developmental test. It became one of the criteria by which age-related attainment targets were benchmarked when the national curriculum was introduced in 1988. And there the story would have ended were it not for the fact that Shayer's wife, scientist Denise Ginsburg, was regularly employed by schools to run their Year 7 maths and science developmental testing to see which children needed the Case or Came programmes. "She reported to me that she had begun to notice a significant falling off in children's abilities," Shayer says, "and, because of this, I decided to investigate further." His research project was undertaken last year and involved the assessment of 10,000 year 7 children's performance on developmental volume and heaviness (VH) tests.

VH, which concerns the conservation of liquid and solid materials, internal volume and intuitive density, was chosen partly because it has substantial predictive validity for both science and mathematics achievement and is an effective way of alerting teachers to their students' range of abilities, but also because it is recognised as a test that measures abilities that are not directly teachable. As such, it was an objective research method, free from any process of adaptation to changing circumstance. "Similar tests conducted in the 70s showed a big difference between boys and girls," says Shayer, "with boys scoring noticeably better than girls. The new research reveals that the gender gap has disappeared, with both sexes deteriorating significantly. Boys have fallen by more than one Piagetian sub group - from the middle of 2B [mature concrete] to below the middle of 2A/2B [middle concrete]. By any standards, this is a huge and significant statistical change."

For the same reasons that he stood by Shayer's original research, Black believes no one should dismiss these current findings. "There are bound to be those who would prefer to ignore these results," he says, "because they find them politically unacceptable or inconvenient. But Shayer has a proven track record and you have to respect his science."

More here



Why Australia's greatest story is just not being told

The nation's heritage is being forgotten in history lessons, writes Kevin Donnelly

Was John Howard correct this week? Has the teaching of history fallen victim to a politically correct, New Age approach to curriculum, and are students receiving a fragmented understanding of the past? The evidence suggests "yes". Since the 1970s and '80s, as outlined in Why Our Schools Are Failing, left-wing academics, education bureaucracies and professional associations have embarked on the long march through the institutions to overthrow more conservative approaches to education.

The so-called traditional academic curriculum, with its emphasis on initiating students into established disciplines such as history and literature, and the belief that education can be impartial, have been attacked as misguided, Eurocentric and socially unjust. One of the first examples of the new history was the Keating government-inspired national studies of society and environment (SOSE) course outline published in 1993. History as a discrete subject disappeared and early drafts of the document were described as "a subject for satire" and "a case of political correctness gone wild". European settlement is described as an invasion, Australia's Anglo-Celtic heritage is either marginalised or ignored, indigenous culture is portrayed as beyond reproach and teachers are told they must give priority to perspectives of gender, multiculturalism and global future.

The 1999 Queensland SOSE curriculum, for one, was also decidedly New Age and one-sided. The values associated with the subject mirror the usual PC suspects, such as social justice, peace and ecological sustainability. In line with postmodernism, students are also taught that "knowledge is always tentative", that they should "deconstruct dominant views of society", "critique the socially constructed element of text" and examine "how privilege and marginalisation are created and sustained in society". Forget the ideal of seeking truth and developing a disinterested understanding of the world. Students are now told that everything is tentative and shifting and the purpose of education is to criticise mainstream society in terms of gender, ethnicity and class.

As a result of adopting an outcomes-based education model, all Australian history education documents adopt a constructivist view of learning. The student is placed centre-stage while the learning of important dates, events and the significance of great historical figures gives way to studying the local community or the life of such worthies as princess Di. As noted in Stuart Macintyre's The History Wars, detailing how history is taught in schools: "The traditional discipline came under increasing criticism from curriculum reformers for being old, stale and simply unrelated to students' needs. 'Relevance' became an educational ethos." Current approaches to history ask students to uncritically celebrate multiculturalism and cultural diversity without recognising that much of Australia's economic, political and legal stability relies on a Eurocentric tradition steeped in the Judeo/Christian ethic. A commitment to human rights, the rule of law and tolerance does not arise by accident.

The reality is that Australian society has proven to be such a successful social experiment because of those very values grounded in Western civilisation that can be traced back thousands of years via England and Europe to early Rome, Greece and biblical Israel.

Australian teachers are also told that how one interprets history is subjective and relative to one's culture and place. As argued by the History Teachers' Association of Victoria in the early '90s: "One of the great developments in history teaching has been the emphasis on the nature of representations, or versions, of history. There is no single version of history which can be presented to students. "History is a version of the past which varies according to the person and the times ... So not only is there no single version of history, but each generation re-interprets the past in the light of its own values and attitudes."

Taken to its logical conclusion, such a view allows Japanese textbooks to ignore the rape of Nanking and for British author David Irving to deny that millions were killed in the Holocaust. The belief that different versions of the past are of equal value and that each generation has the right to re-interpret history in terms of current values also allows revisionist historians to judge past actions in terms of what is now considered politically correct. As a result, today's historians describe the First Fleet as an invasion even though the Admiralty had given Governor Phillip express orders to co-exist with the indigenous population and Phillip, after being speared, did not punish those responsible.

As noted by the Monash University historian Mark Peel, of greater concern is that generations of students no longer understand or appreciate the grand narrative associated with the rise of Western civilisation and Australia's development as a nation. Peel states: "Students seem anxious about the absence of a story by which to comprehend change, or to understand how the nation and world they are about to inherit came to be. Indeed, their sense of the world's history is often based upon intense moments and fragments that have no real momentum or connection

Source



Puffed-up and self-righteous school officials can't bear being laughed at

Being laughed at is probably what they need most

A high school senior who was transferred to an alternative school as punishment for parodying his principal on the Internet is suing the district, arguing it violated his freedom of speech. Justin Layshock had used his grandmother's computer and the Web site MySpace.com to create a phony profile under the principal's name and photo. The site asks questions, and Justin filled in answers peppered with vulgarities, fat jokes and, to the question "what did you do on your last birthday?" the response: "too drunk to remember," according to the lawsuit filed on Justin's behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union.

School officials weren't amused. They questioned the teenager about the site on Dec. 21, and he apologized to the principal, the ACLU said. Then, on Jan. 6, the district suspended Justin for 10 days and transferred him to an alternative program typically reserved for students with behavior or attendance problems, according to the lawsuit. He also was banned from school events, including tutoring and graduation ceremonies. "The school's punishment affects his education," said Witold Walczak, Pennsylvania Legal Director of the ACLU. "In this critical last semester, Justin's opportunities to gain admission to college may be irreparably damaged."

According to the lawsuit, Pennsylvania State University notified Justin that his application had been put on "a registration hold" and asked for more information about the suspension. "It is unknown how or why the university had received this information, since it is supposed to be confidential under federal-student-privacy laws," the lawsuit says. Officials with the Hermitage School District declined to comment. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, seeks Justin's immediate reinstatement to his regular school. A hearing for a temporary order is set for Monday. "Not to excuse it, but school officials need to understand that they're not parents," Walczak said. "School officials can't reach into parents' homes and tell them how to raise their kids."

Source

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

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

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

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29 January, 2006

Schoolboy's bias suit: Argues system is favoring girls



So, using good politically correct logic, he asks for affirmative action for boys

It's not that girls are smarter than boys, said Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old senior at the high school. Girls are outperforming boys because the school system favors them, said Anglin, who has filed a federal civil rights complaint contending that his school discriminates against boys. Among Anglin's allegations: Girls face fewer restrictions from teachers, like being able to wander the hallways without passes, and girls are rewarded for abiding by the rules, while boys' more rebellious ways are punished.

Grading on homework, which sometimes includes points for decorating a notebook, also favor girls, according to Anglin's complaint, filed last month with the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. ''The system is designed to the disadvantage of males," Anglin said. ''From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you'll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this."

An international group that examines equity in education called the complaint of discrimination against boys rare. And Milton school officials denied that girls get better treatment than boys. But the female student body president, Kelli Little, voiced support for Anglin's views. Anglin, a soccer and baseball player who wants to go to the College of the Holy Cross, said he brought the complaint in hope that the Education Department would issue national guidelines on how to boost boys' academic achievement.

Research has found that boys nationwide are increasingly falling behind girls, especially in reading and writing, and that they are more likely to be suspended, according to a 2005 report by the Educational Equity Center of the Academy for Educational Development, an international nonprofit group with headquarters in Washington, D.C.

While school officials said their goal is to help all students improve, the Milton High principal, John Drottar, , suggested in an interview that there may be ways to reach out to underachieving boys. Drottar said the high school plans to reinstitute a mentoring program that will pair low-achieving students with teachers. While it will not specifically recruit male students, boys are likely to make up a large portion of the students served, he said. ''We're aware of it," Drottar said. ''We're looking into it. On a school basis, does that mean we should look at each classroom and see if we have to encourage boys a little more than girls now? Yeah, it probably does."

Anglin -- whose complaint was written by his father, who is a lawyer in Boston -- is looking for broader changes. He says that teachers must change their attitudes toward boys and look past boys' poor work habits or rule-breaking to find ways to encourage them academically. Without such changes, many boys now give up, he said. The school should also recruit more male teachers to better motivate boys, Anglin said. At the high school, 64 percent of the teachers are women, and 36 percent are men, according to the school system.

Anglin's complaint has set off a buzz among the 1,000 students at the school. Little, the student body president, said she disagrees with students who think Anglin is chauvinistic. Of the 22 students in her honors Spanish class, only one is a boy, said Little, a senior. She also said that teachers rarely ask her for a hall pass if she is not in class, while they routinely question boys walking behind her. As for assignments, she said, one teacher expects students to type up class notes and decorate their notebooks with glitter and feathers. ''You can't expect a boy to buy pink paper and frills to decorate their notebooks," Little said.

Larry O'Connor, another Milton High senior who supports Anglin, said teachers should do more to encourage freshmen boys to do well in school, because many lack motivation. O'Connor, who is taking two honors classes and one Advanced Placement class, said he is surrounded by a sea of girls in his classes. He said he ended up taking high-level courses because an English teacher had pulled him aside in his freshman year and had told him that he had the potential to succeed, and that the school needed more male scholars.

While some of Anglin's concerns appear to be supported by school statistics and anecdotal evidence, school officials say some of the solutions that he offers are far-fetched. For example, he proposes that the high school give students credit for playing sports, not just for art and drama courses. He also urges that students be allowed to take classes on a pass/fail basis to encourage more boys to enroll in advanced classes without risking their grade point average. He also wants the school to abolish its community service requirement, saying it's another burden that will just set off resistance from boys, who may skip it and fail to graduate as a result.

School official said they cannot give credit for sports [Why not? Why is sport less admirable than art?] and are unlikely to allow students to take courses without grades. Superintendent Magdalene Giffune said the school system will not consider changing the community-service requirement. ''It's an important part of teaching students to be responsible citizens," she said.

The US Department of Education is evaluating whether Anglin's complaint warrants investigation, said a spokesman, Jim Bradshaw. Anglin, who has a 2.88 grade point average, acknowledged that discrimination complaints are not often filed by white, middle-class males like himself. But he said: ''I'm not here to try to lower the rights of women or interfere with the rights of minorities. We just want to fix this one problem that we think is a big deal."

Gerry Anglin, Doug Anglin's father, said the school system should compensate boys for the discrimination by boosting their grades retroactively. ''If you are a victim of discrimination in the workplace, what do they do? They give you more money or they give you a promotion," Gerry Anglin said. ''Most of these kids want to go to college, so these records are important to them."

Source



The facts come first: All Australia's history must be taught in our schools

An editorial from "The Australian" newspaper below:

Many young Australians celebrated Australia Day in ignorance of what their ancestors accomplished and why. They will do the same come April 25th. Thanks to the way a generation has been taught, or rather not taught, history at school, young Australians are growing up completely clueless about how their country came to be the prosperous democracy they are proud of. As the Prime Minister warned yesterday, less than a quarter of senior school students study any history at all, and far fewer learn anything about their own country's past. The situation is equally awful in junior school years around the country. Certainly the previous premier of NSW, Bob Carr, recognised his responsibility to ensure students understand the importance of the great narrative of Australia's past, but too often our national story is little more than an optional educational extra.

To those who believe the primacy of the present means the past is irrelevant and that schools should exclusively prepare young people for further study or the workforce, this ignorance may not matter. For black-armed bedecked curriculum planners, out of sympathy with popular patriotism, it is a good thing because the national story they believe matters most is the story of the dispossession of indigenous Australians by white men, who also oppressed women and migrants. And because these are the people who have mainly held the heights in the state education departments it is their version of our past that has prevailed. In Victoria the fate of Aborigines, the evils of colonialism, and so forth and so on, are on the agenda. And because acting is an easy way of conducting a class in Queensland, students can be encouraged to learn history by role-playing oppressed people. So, instead of an overall narrative of our nation, and information on political events in European cultures that made us who we are, kids are taught bits and pieces of the past, as if history is an ideological grab bag, from which we can take whatever issues, ideas and events suit political agendas in our own age. This is a history that assumes young people need to learn our ancestors' failings first. Even more alarming, it bases what is taught on contested ideologies, that confuse patriotism with imperialism and judges people in the past by the standards of today. And it is all done independent of any narrative that explains the key events in our past and how they are connected to each other.

Advocates of the orthodox approach say an emphasis on facts and dates will always fail, boring students into ignoring irrelevant detail. Not if the epochal events of our national story are taught well it won't. And the idea that selectively sampling aspects of the past and using political ideas from the present to explain them ensures that students end up thinking the past is much like the present, only in fancy dress. It need not be like this. The task for history teachers in the junior school years is to give students a sense of the events and ideas that made us who we are. Inevitably that means an emphasis on the long march to democracy in Great Britain, Europe and North America. And it must include the story of Federation and the fight for women's suffrage at home. It probably does not matter much if 15-year-olds do not know the details of the deaths of Burke and Wills. But it is vital they understand how Australians developed universal suffrage. Selectively teaching what is wrong in Australia's past before young people are given the incontestable facts and dates they need to assess all the interpretations on offer is an affront to Australia's civil religion of an egalitarian democracy. It is time for all schools to give their students the facts about our past. And if crowded curriculums mean there is less time for political role play, that will be no bad thing.



A colony again: "There's this thing called the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which just came out and said that Americans not only can't read but are vigorously getting worse. Here it is, from the Washington ever-loving Post, December 25 in the Year of Our Decline 2005:"Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as `proficient' in prose-reading and understanding information in short texts-down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient-compared with 40 percent in 1992." That's college graduates, brethren and sistern! They can't read simple stuff. "See Spot run. Run, Spot.." What you think them other scoundrels can't do that ain't graduates? Halleluja, dearly beloved, idiots are us. Am us, I mean. Now, sure, you can make excuses, and say, well, this dismal revelation counts all the Permanently Disadvantaged Minorities and affirmative-action nonstudents and all the other people who shouldn't be anyway in what ought to be colleges but mostly aren't. But you're supposed to be able to read when you get out of freaking high school, aren't you? If they can't read, how did they into college, much less out the other end?"

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

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

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

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28 January, 2006

CALIFORNIA: MORE DEBAUCHING OF HISTORY

I must say I am on the side of the Hindus here. But I must admit a bias: I am so pro-Indian that I have four Indians living with me in my own house! Many British "old India hands" developed a great affection for India and I fall squarely into that tradition. It is however undoubtedly true that what most Westerners believe about the oppressed state of women in India is just about the reverse of the truth. I would much rather argue with an Indian man than an Indian woman!

For the first time, Hindu organizations are pushing to change the way their religious history is taught in California schools. While Jewish, Muslim and Christian groups have long spoken up during the Department of Education's textbook revision process, Hindus are new on the scene. Their efforts to alter sixth-grade textbooks about ancient history have inspired vitriolic, all-too-personal debates among scholars and community groups vying to see their versions of history in print.

The debate is noteworthy not just for its contentiousness, but for its far-reaching effects. Many states follow California's lead in textbook adoptions, so any decision about what children learn here will likely affect public schools across the country. The state education board is now faced with questions that are difficult to answer: Who gets to tell the story of a civilization? What happens when even the scholars don't agree? "History is probably one of the most emotional and difficult subjects to sort out," said Glee Johnson, president of the California Board of Education. "People care about these issues. It's their blood. But it's not always easy to tell what's factual in this arena, and when you're trying to distill world history to sixth-graders you need to be really careful."

California adopts new social studies textbooks every six years. The state requires students to learn about ancient civilizations, including the origins of Hinduism, in the sixth grade. In September, several religious groups proposed hundreds of changes to history textbooks the state board was considering adopting. The vast majority of the proposals came from two Hindu groups: the state chapter of the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation of Austin, Texas. Most of the proposed changes would erase or alter passages dealing with caste and gender discrimination in ancient South Asia. The changes also were aimed to dispute the notion that Aryan peoples from outside India played a key role in the formation of Hinduism.

In one case, the original text read, "Men had many more rights than women." The Hindu Education Foundation offered to replace that sentence with, "Men had different rights and duties than women." The group called for the deletion of another passage that said people in the lowest tier of society "performed work other Indians thought was too dirty, such as collecting trash, skinning animals or handling dead bodies."

In November, Michael Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, entered the process with a letter signed by nearly 50 other professors. The Hindu groups' proposals were "unscholarly," and adopting them, he wrote, would "trigger an immediate international scandal." Armed with citations from scripture and academic texts, the two sides went to war. Witzel and his supporters said the Hindu groups were promoting a cultural nationalist agenda that had recently led to controversial textbook rewrites in India. The Hindu groups termed Witzel a racist with leftist leanings and demanded that Harvard shut down his department.

Hindus who support the proposed changes say they have no agenda beyond fair representation of their culture, pointing out that the textbooks don't always mention discrimination in other ancient civilizations. They also say that detailing a culture's failings may not be appropriate in a textbook designed for children. "We're talking about sixth-graders, who are very impressionable," said Suhag Shukla, legal counsel for the Hindu American Foundation, which has thrown its support behind the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation. "There are so many positives to every world religion. Sixth grade is not the right arena to pull out all the garbage." Further, while the California guidelines state that content standards should "instill in each child a sense of pride in his or her heritage," some Hindus say the current textbooks make their children ashamed. "My son came home from school one day and told me he didn't want to be a Hindu anymore," said Milpitas resident Madhulika Singh. "There were comments in the playground about men beating up their wives and he was very distraught."

On the other hand, opponents, including other Hindu groups, say the textbook changes promote an inaccurate point of view and conceal discrimination that persists today. "They're completely whitewashing history and sanitizing Hinduism," said Anu Mandavilli, a volunteer for the Bay Area-based group Friends of South Asia. "It's like saying slavery is hurtful to white children, so let's not talk about it. ...These are extreme ideologies. This is not my Hinduism, it's not the way my parents brought me up."

In the face of conflicting information, the state board charged its advisory panel on curriculum in November to evaluate each proposed change on the basis of historical accuracy. But the scholars don't always agree on what constitutes accuracy. "The proposed edits come out of a very sectarian approach to history," said Witzel, the Harvard professor. "They view all of Hinduism through one narrow lens. ... It's people on the very fringe who want to dispute these points." "I don't think you could find a single scholar of Indian history in the entire United States who teaches at a research university who would support (the Hindu groups') position," said Vinay Lal, a history professor at UCLA. "Most people on their side are Indian engineers, physicists, chemists, who think their opinion is just as good as those who have spent a lifetime studying these subjects."

But Shiva Bajpai, a California State University, Northridge, historian who was hired to evaluate the changes and recommended many of them, said he's aiming to avoid viewing ancient cultures according to "modern concerns." "We should be judging people by the values they held at the time, not the values we hold now. ... Inequality is a modern concept, whereas now it's a burning issue for us," he said.

In December, an advisory panel to the state board recommended most of the changes that Bajpai had endorsed, even though another state panel of scholars that included Witzel suggested otherwise. In a move that departs with standard procedure, members of the state board then met with Witzel and Bajpai in a closed session earlier this month to get information on each point of view. The two scholars debated the changes for nearly five hours. Witzel found Bajpai to be "religiously minded;" Bajpai found Witzel to be "close-minded." Confronted by what then-board President Ruth Green called a "barrage" of mail from every side, the state board voted on Jan. 12 to create yet another panel, this one consisting of five board members, to conduct a new analysis of the proposed changes. The board could vote on the changes as early as March.

Source



Leftists protest over call to teach a balanced Australian history

Australia's national day of celebration was marked by a renewed outbreak of the culture wars as education experts debated the way Australia's story is taught in schools. The latest hostilities were provoked by John Howard's comments at the National Press Club on Wednesday, where he claimed the teaching of history had degenerated into a "fragmented stew" of post-modernist ideas with no clear narrative thread. His comments renewed the longstanding dispute between those who oppose the so-called "black armband" view of Australian history and those who argue that any single, authorised account of our story only serves to marginalise the powerless.

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley yesterday agreed with the need for "decent narrative history" but dismissed the Prime Minister's comments as coming "straight out of the right-wing playbook of the US".

Education expert Kevin Donnelly backed Mr Howard's concerns about the history curriculum being taught in schools but lamented the lack of change in history teaching after a decade of conservative government in Canberra. He pointed out that many currently fashionable ideas about the subject had taken hold under conservative state governments.

But history teachers attacked Mr Howard's emphasis on Australia's British heritage. Australian Education Union secretary Andrew Gohl told The Australian: "We know that John Howard says we shouldn't have a black armband view of history, but what does that mean? Does it mean we can't talk about the invasion of Australia, or the appalling treatment of indigenous Australians?"

State education ministers were also on the counter-attack yesterday, with South Australia's Jane Lomax-Smith saying politicians should not "dictate details of the curriculum". Victorian Opposition education spokesman Victor Perton backed Mr Howard, saying history courses were "all slanted against the European settlement of Australia". But acting Education Minister Jacinta Allan said history should be taught in a way that "encourages healthy debate".

A spokesman for NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said NSW had a well-established curriculum of traditional Australian history and said the subject was compulsory from years seven to nine. However, the NSW curriculum for younger students shows that, as in the other states, history is being taught as part of "human society and its environment" rather than as a free-standing subject. The NSW curriculum also stipulates seven "perspectives" that should be applied to the subject matter: Aboriginal, civics and citizenship, environmental, gender, global, multicultural and work.

Mr Donnelly argues the relativist approach, in which no single perspective dominates, is inherently contradictory. On the one hand curriculum documents point to the subjectivity of historical understanding, while on the other mandating approaches such as feminism and environmentalism as templates for students' understanding. The difficulty with reforming the system, he said, was that changes mandated from above were implemented by state-based education bureaucrats and professional associations with their own agendas.

Source

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

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

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

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27 January, 2006

CALIFORNIA DUMPS HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY ONTO FAILING SCHOOLS

And that will do as much good as it has done in NYC and Washington D.C.

Modern politics - and the media coverage of it - is all about conflict, so the biggest news in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal hasn't received much notice beyond the first-day headlines. Since few in the Capitol are seriously upset about his proposal to dump an astounding amount of new money on the public schools, the issue has gotten only a fraction of the attention it received a year ago, when the governor was accused of shortchanging education. Schwarzenegger's proposal would give the schools $1.7 billion more than is required by the state constitution, an 8 percent increase that represents $600 more per student than the current year's $7,427 in state and local tax dollars. Counting federal aid and other sources of revenue, the schools would be getting $11,000 per student next year.

The increase the governor proposes would come on top of the $400-per-child boost that Schwarzenegger and the Legislature gave the schools this year. What will all that new money buy? That's the big question, and how the money is spent, not the total amount, will probably be the subject of the most debate in the Capitol as the budget is hammered out this spring.

The good news is that Schwarzenegger is mostly resisting the temptation to meddle in local school policy. He is proposing to give the lion's share of the new money to local districts with no strings attached. The biggest chunk - about $2.3 billion - would pay for a 5 percent cost-of-living increase for every district, plus enough money to accommodate higher enrollments in those districts that are still growing. Another $400 million would make up for past inflation that wasn't covered by the budget and help reduce historical inequities in general purpose revenue between various districts. More good news: The governor proposes nearly $300 million to reimburse the schools for mandated programs the state imposed on them but didn't pay for. This includes $133 million in ongoing funding.

But Schwarzenegger, like past governors, can't completely keep himself from trying to micromanage the schools. It's natural, apparently, for people in power to think they know better how to spend the money than do the people on the front lines. Plus, some people within the education lobby itself, and some Republicans in the Legislature, do not want to give all the new money to the schools without restriction because they fear that most - if not all - of it would go to higher teacher salaries.

More here



PROFILE OF A UCLA PROFESSOR



"Philosophy of Education" professor Douglas Kellner is something of a buried treasure on the UCLA campus. While in public not much of a fire-starter, especially compared to the roustabout behavior of his more active radical colleagues, Kellner is an absolute tiger on paper. A close look at Kellner's personal history and theoretical background reveals a professor whose political views are a witch's brew of worldwide conspiracy, Marxoid theory, "critical pedagogy," and an overwhelming dose of anti-Bush hatred.

In Kellner's brief memoir titled "Philosophical Adventures," he describes his fairly stable middle-class upbringing and subsequent adolescence. The tale, predictably enough, is narrated in an ironic tone full of retroactive progressive insights. In one instance, Kellner puts a radical spin on random childhood anecdotes. Through these red-colored lenses, his youthful attempt to buy candy for all his fellow neighborhood children becomes a nascent exercise in communism. Kellner likewise feels obligated to highlight every stereotypical point in his transformation from boomer kid to young radical. Kellner tells of discovering the big city, Little Italy in particular, which was where he "bought [his] first ounce of grass." Like so many of his counterparts, Kellner ended up taking a long sojourn through Europe, where "A bad flu and free medicine taught [him] the rationality of socialized medicine." As if that weren't groovy enough, Kellner also "learned the emancipatory possibilities of free love." All this leads to the logical question: could Kellner's youthful rebellion possibly be more clich,d? In a word, yes. Kellner returned to the United States and by 1968, "was studying continental philosophy at Columbia University when the student uprising erupted." While "unprepared for the explosiveness and impact of the student rebellion," Kellner caught on quickly and "became active in New Left politics, participating in major anti-war demonstrations."

While many baby-boomers were radical during their college years, Kellner's political extremism never faded. The first reason is that by becoming a professor, Kellner never had to actually leave the theory-based fantasy world of college to pursue a real job. Second, Kellner didn't catch on with just any school. No, after earning his Ph.D., Kellner took a position at the University of Texas-Austin, home of one of the loopier, more extreme faculties in the country. While nominally in the heart of conservative cowboy country, Austin is really in a countercultural world unto itself. Kellner contributed to the scene in his own freaky way by joining a "University of Texas Progressive Faculty" group, and by co-hosting, with fellow radical Frank Morrow, a public access cable television show called "Alternative Views." The views were indeed alternative. The show, which ran from 1978 to the mid-1990s, was a true piece of black helicopter conspiracy madness. "Alternative Views," investigated everything from "The Elites Who Govern Us" (apparently the Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations), to supposed links between Nazis and Republicans, to the more pedestrian white supremacist threats like the Ku Klux Klan.

Most inflammatory of all was a number of "Alternative Views" episodes which aired allegations of connections between the CIA, the Mafia, and George H.W. Bush; between the Bush family and the Nazi party of Germany; and, for good measure, the Bush family's intersections with the savings and loans scandals of the early 1990s. This obsessive lunacy would form the bedrock of Kellner's later preoccupation with President George W. Bush, a man who in his mind represents evil incarnate.

Kellner's mania against Bush was only reinforced by the murky circumstances under which Kellner left his comfortable, tenured position at the University of Texas. As Kellner tells it:

"The Austin adventures came to an end in the mid-1990s when George W. Bush became Governor of Texas and a rightwing cabal took over the UT-Philosophy Department. Austin had been a great place to live with a vibrant counterculture and political culture and for decades the University of Texas had been an excellent location to teach. But as the University became more rightwing during the Bush years, many of us saw the (w)righting-on-the-wall, saw Austin and UT drowning in the sewer of corruption and mediocrity that distinguished Bush family politics, and decided to move on, leaving Texas to the Bushites."

While Keller's story seems instructive, there's clearly just as much not being said. Even Kellner's devotees, always alert to the distant thump of black helicopter rotors, must have experienced a certain amount of doubt at his suggestion that newly elected Texas Governor George W. Bush concerned himself with the ideological composition of one state school's philosophy department. Even California Governor Ronald Reagan, elected in 1966 on explicit promises to "clean up the mess in Berkeley," took only broad actions in all but a very few cases. While Reagan did oversee the ouster of card-carrying Communists like Angela Davis and Blas, Bonpane, his control was typically higher level, as in his role in the dismissal of UC President Clark Kerr. No doubt there is some sort of story behind Kellner's careful phrasing, but it's far more likely to have the stench of sour grapes.

For that matter, UCLA's decision to hire Kellner, especially in the post in question, has the stench of politics about it. Kellner, from the time that he was hired to his departure in 1997, was a philosophy professor at UT. But at UCLA, Kellner came nowhere near the philosophy department. Instead, he was installed into the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSEIS) Education Department, with an inscrutable specialization in "Philosophy of Education." The situation has the inarguable appearance of a position being created for Kellner, not of Kellner filling a pre-existing job opening. Fitting a position around the academic is a rare courtesy extended only to true academic superstars. By normal standards, Kellner would not qualify. But to the GSEIS faculty like Peter McLaren and Daniel Solorzano, a fellow extremist like Kellner was valuable property, and someone well worth the professional courtesy.

MUCH, much more here

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

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

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

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26 January, 2006

EDUCATORS FINALLY ACCEPTING THE REALITY OF SEX DIFFERENCES

Spend a few minutes on the phone with Danny Frankhuizen and you come away thinking, "What a nice boy." He's thoughtful, articulate, bright. He has a good relationship with his mom, goes to church every Sunday, loves the rock band Phish and spends hours each day practicing his guitar. But once he's inside his large public Salt Lake City high school, everything seems to go wrong. He's 16, but he can't stay organized. He finishes his homework and then can't find it in his backpack. He loses focus in class, and his teachers, with 40 kids to wrangle, aren't much help. "If I miss a concept, they tell me, 'Figure it out yourself'," says Danny. Last year Danny's grades dropped from B's to D's and F's. The sophomore, who once dreamed of Stanford, is pulling his grades up but worries that "I won't even get accepted at community college."

His mother, Susie Malcom, a math teacher who is divorced, says it's been wrenching to watch Danny stumble. "I tell myself he's going to make something good out of himself," she says. "But it's hard to see doors close and opportunities fall away." What's wrong with Danny? By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy."

With millions of parents wringing their hands, educators are searching for new tools to help tackle the problem of boys. Books including Michael Thompson's best seller "Raising Cain" (recently made into a PBS documentary) and Harvard psychologist William Pollack's definitive work "Real Boys" have become must-reads in the teachers' lounge. The Gurian Institute, founded in 1997 by family therapist Michael Gurian to help the people on the front lines help boys, has enrolled 15,000 teachers in its seminars. Even the Gates Foundation, which in the last five years has given away nearly a billion dollars to innovative high schools, is making boys a big priority. "Helping underperforming boys," says Jim Shelton, the foundation's education director, "has become part of our core mission."

The problem won't be solved overnight. In the last two decades, the education system has become obsessed with a quantifiable and narrowly defined kind of academic success, these experts say, and that myopic view is harming boys. Boys are biologically, developmentally and psychologically different from girls—and teachers need to learn how to bring out the best in every one. "Very well-meaning people," says Dr. Bruce Perry, a Houston neurologist who advocates for troubled kids, "have created a biologically disrespectful model of education."

Thirty years ago it was girls, not boys, who were lagging. The 1972 federal law Title IX forced schools to provide equal opportunities for girls in the classroom and on the playing field. Over the next two decades, billions of dollars were funneled into finding new ways to help girls achieve. In 1992, the American Association of University Women issued a report claiming that the work of Title IX was not done—girls still fell behind in math and science; by the mid-1990s, girls had reduced the gap in math and more girls than boys were taking high-school-level biology and chemistry.

Some scholars, notably Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, charge that misguided feminism is what's been hurting boys. In the 1990s, she says, girls were making strong, steady progress toward parity in schools, but feminist educators portrayed them as disadvantaged and lavished them with support and attention. Boys, meanwhile, whose rates of achievement had begun to falter, were ignored and their problems allowed to fester

Boys have always been boys, but the expectations for how they're supposed to act and learn in school have changed. In the last 10 years, thanks in part to activist parents concerned about their children's success, school performance has been measured in two simple ways: how many students are enrolled in accelerated courses and whether test scores stay high. Standardized assessments have become commonplace for kids as young as 6. Curricula have become more rigid. Instead of allowing teachers to instruct kids in the manner and pace that suit each class, some states now tell teachers what, when and how to teach. At the same time, student-teacher ratios have risen, physical education and sports programs have been cut and recess is a distant memory. These new pressures are undermining the strengths and underscoring the limitations of what psychologists call the "boy brain"—the kinetic, disorganized, maddening and sometimes brilliant behaviors that scientists now believe are not learned but hard-wired.

When Cris Messler of Mountainside, N.J., brought her 3-year-old son Sam to a pediatrician to get him checked for ADHD, she was acknowledging the desperation parents can feel. He's a high-energy kid, and Messler found herself hoping for a positive diagnosis. "If I could get a diagnosis from the doctor, I could get him on medicine," she says. The doctor said Sam is a normal boy. School has been tough, though. Sam's reading teacher said he was hopeless. His first-grade teacher complains he's antsy, and Sam, now 7, has been referring to himself as "stupid." Messler's glad her son doesn't need medication, but what, she wonders, can she do now to help her boy in school?

For many boys, the trouble starts as young as 5, when they bring to kindergarten a set of physical and mental abilities very different from girls'. As almost any parent knows, most 5-year-old girls are more fluent than boys and can sight-read more words. Boys tend to have better hand-eye coordination, but their fine motor skills are less developed, making it a struggle for some to control a pencil or a paintbrush. Boys are more impulsive than girls; even if they can sit still, many prefer not to—at least not for long.

Thirty years ago feminists argued that classic "boy" behaviors were a result of socialization, but these days scientists believe they are an expression of male brain chemistry. Sometime in the first trimester, a boy fetus begins producing male sex hormones that bathe his brain in testosterone for the rest of his gestation. "That exposure wires the male brain differently," says Arthur Arnold, professor of physiological science at UCLA. How? Scientists aren't exactly sure. New studies show that prenatal exposure to male sex hormones directly affects the way children play. Girls whose mothers have high levels of testosterone during pregnancy are more likely to prefer playing with trucks to playing with dolls. There are also clues that hormones influence the way we learn all through life. In a Dutch study published in 1994, doctors found that when males were given female hormones, their spatial skills dropped but their verbal skills improved.

In elementary-school classrooms—where teachers increasingly put an emphasis on language and a premium on sitting quietly and speaking in turn—the mismatch between boys and school can become painfully obvious. "Girl behavior becomes the gold standard," says "Raising Cain" coauthor Thompson. "Boys are treated like defective girls."

Two years ago Kelley King, principal of Douglass Elementary School in Boulder, Colo., looked at the gap between boys and girls and decided to take action. Boys were lagging 10 points behind girls in reading and 14 points in writing. Many more boys than girls were being labeled as learning disabled, too. So King asked her teachers to buy copies of Gurian's book "The Minds of Boys," on boy-friendly classrooms, and in the fall of 2004 she launched a bold experiment. Whenever possible, teachers replaced lecture time with fast-moving lessons that all kids could enjoy. Three weeks ago, instead of discussing the book "The View From Saturday," teacher Pam Unrau divided her third graders into small groups, and one student in each group pretended to be a character from the book. Classes are noisier, Unrau says, but the boys are closing the gap. Last spring, Douglass girls scored an average of 106 on state writing tests, while boys got a respectable 101.

Primatologists have long observed that juvenile male chimps battle each other not just for food and females, but to establish and maintain their place in the hierarchy of the tribe. Primates face off against each other rather than appear weak. That same evolutionary imperative, psychologists say, can make it hard for boys to thrive in middle school—and difficult for boys who are failing to accept the help they need. The transition to middle school is rarely easy, but like the juvenile primates they are, middle-school boys will do almost anything to avoid admitting that they're overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything they do or say by a single yardstick: does this make me look weak?" says Thompson. "And if it does, he isn't going to do it." That's part of the reason that videogames have such a powerful hold on boys: the action is constant, they can calibrate just how hard the challenges will be and, when they lose, the defeat is private

When Brian Johns hit seventh grade, he never admitted how vulnerable it made him feel. "I got behind and never caught up," says Brian, now 17 and a senior at Grand River Academy, an Ohio boarding school. When his parents tried to help, he rebuffed them. When his mother, Anita, tried to help him organize his assignment book, he grew evasive about when his homework was due. Anita didn't know where to turn. Brian's school had a program for gifted kids, and support for ones with special needs. But what, Anita asked his teachers, do they do about kids like her son who are in the middle and struggling? Those kids, one of Brian's teachers told Anita, "are the ones who fall through the cracks."

It's easy for middle-school boys to feel outgunned. Girls reach sexual maturity two years ahead of boys, but other, less visible differences put boys at a disadvantage, too. The prefrontal cortex is a knobby region of the brain directly behind the forehead that scientists believe helps humans organize complex thoughts, control their impulses and understand the consequences of their own behavior. In the last five years, Dr. Jay Giedd, an expert in brain development at the National Institutes of Health, has used brain scans to show that in girls, it reaches its maximum thickness by the age of 11 and, for the next decade or more, continues to mature. In boys, this process is delayed by 18 months.

Middle-school boys may use their brains less efficiently, too. Using a type of MRI that traces activity in the brain, Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, director of the cognitive neuroimaging laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., tested the activity patterns in the prefrontal cortex of children between the ages of 11 and 18. When shown pictures of fearful faces, adolescent girls registered activity on the right side of the prefrontal cortex, similar to an adult. Adolescent boys used both sides—a less mature pattern of brain activity. Teenage girls can process information faster, too. In a study about to be published in the journal Intelligence, researchers at Vanderbilt University administered timed tests—picking similar objects and matching groups of numbers—to 8,000 boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 18. In kindergarten, boys and girls processed information at about the same speeds. In early adolescence, girls finished faster and got more right. By 18, boys and girls were processing with the same speed and accuracy.

Scientists caution that brain research doesn't tell the whole story: temperament, family background and environment play big roles, too. Some boys are every bit as organized and assertive as the highest-achieving girls. All kids can be scarred by violence, alcohol or drugs in the family. But if your brain hasn't reached maturity yet, says Yurgelun-Todd, "it's not going to be able to do its job optimally."

Across the nation, educators are reviving an old idea: separate the girls from the boys—and at Roncalli Middle School, in Pueblo, Colo., administrators say, it's helping kids of both genders. This past fall, with the blessing of parents, school guidance counselor Mike Horton assigned a random group of 50 sixth graders to single-sex classes in core subjects. These days, when sixth-grade science teacher Pat Farrell assigns an earth-science lab on measuring crystals, the girls collect their materials—a Bunsen burner, a beaker of phenyl salicylate and a spoon. Then they read the directions and follow the sequence from beginning to end. The first things boys do is ask, "Can we eat this?" They're less organized, Farrell notes, but sometimes, "they're willing to go beyond what the lab asks them to do." With this in mind, he hands out written instructions to both classes but now goes over them step by step for the boys. Although it's too soon to declare victory, there are some positive signs: the shyest boys are participating more. This fall, the all-girl class did best in math, English and science, followed by the all-boy class and then coed classes

One of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school rests on a single question: does he have a man in his life to look up to? Too often, the answer is no. High rates of divorce and single motherhood have created a generation of fatherless boys. In every kind of neighborhood, rich or poor, an increasing number of boys—now a startling 40 percent—are being raised without their biological dads

Psychologists say that grandfathers and uncles can help, but emphasize that an adolescent boy without a father figure is like an explorer without a map. And that is especially true for poor boys and boys who are struggling in school. Older males, says Gurian, model self-restraint and solid work habits for younger ones. And whether they're breathing down their necks about grades or admonishing them to show up for school on time, "an older man reminds a boy in a million different ways that school is crucial to their mission in life."

In the past, boys had many opportunities to learn from older men. They might have been paired with a tutor, apprenticed to a master or put to work in the family store. High schools offered boys a rich array of roles in which to exercise leadership skills—class officer, yearbook editor or a place on the debate team. These days, with the exception of sports, more girls than boys are involved in those activities.

In neighborhoods where fathers are most scarce, the high-school dropout rates are shocking: more than half of African-American boys who start high school don't finish. David Banks, principal of the Eagle Academy for Young Men, one of four all-boy public high schools in the New York City system, wants each of his 180 students not only to graduate from high school but to enroll in college. And he's leaving nothing to chance. Almost every Eagle Academy boy has a male mentor—a lawyer, a police officer or an entrepreneur from the school's South Bronx neighborhood. The impact of the mentoring program, says Banks, has been "beyond profound." Tenth grader Rafael Mendez is unequivocal: his mentor "is the best thing that ever happened to me." Before Rafael came to Eagle Academy, he dreamed about playing pro baseball, but his mentor, Bronx Assistant District Attorney Rafael Curbelo, has shown him another way to succeed: Mendez is thinking about attending college in order to study forensic science.

Colleges would welcome more applications from young men like Rafael Mendez. At many state universities the gender balance is already tilting 60-40 toward women. Primary and secondary schools are going to have to make some major changes, says Ange Peterson, president-elect of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, to restore the gender balance. "There's a whole group of men we're losing in education completely," says Peterson.

For Nikolas Arnold, 15, a sophomore at a public high school in Santa Monica, Calif., college is a distant dream. Nikolas is smart: he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of weaponry and war. When he was in first grade, his principal told his mother he was too immature and needed ADHD drugs. His mother balked. "Too immature?" says Diane Arnold, a widow. "He was six and a half!" He's always been an advanced reader, but his grades are erratic. Last semester, when his English teacher assigned two girls' favorites—"Memoirs of a Geisha" and "The Secret Life of Bees" Nikolas got a D. But lately, he has a math teacher he likes and is getting excited about numbers. He's reserved in class sometimes. But now that he's more engaged, his grades are improving slightly and his mother, who's pushing college, is hopeful he will begin to hit his stride. Girls get A's and B's on their report cards, she tells him, but that doesn't mean boys can't do it, too

Source



Australian schools: Basics missing in 'sandpit science'

Science curriculums in Australian schools are becoming dangerously unscientific as education departments bow to the politically correct dogma of cultural relativism. Teachers and academics claim students are being taught "sandpit science" dictated by a dumbed-down syllabus that ignores basic scientific teaching. They say so-called "outcomes-based education" portrays science as subjective and culturally determined, and encourages students to treat established scientific principles with scepticism and disdain.

The South Australian curriculum describes Western science as "the most dominant form of science but it is only one form among the sciences of the world", while in the Northern Territory science is treated "as a way of knowing ... constructed in a socio-cultural context". While the traditional view of science is based on absolutes that can be empirically tested, the West Australian curriculum says truth is culturally determined. "(Students) recognise that aspects of scientific knowledge are constructed from a particular gender or cultural perspective," it says.

As education expert Kevin Donnelly points out in The Weekend Australian today, supporters of the relativist approach to science ironically include many who oppose the teaching of "intelligent design" creationism in schools.

Perth-based senior science teacher Marko Vojkovic said the foundations of science were not being properly laid in many secondary schools. "Last time I checked, Newton's theories of motion hadn't changed, the periodic table hasn't changed, the basic atomic theory hasn't changed and I don't think it's going to either," he said. "In a lot of primary schools the kids are getting no hard science. They are drawing holes in the ozone layer and saying that's why we've got global warming." Mr Vojkovic, a co-founder of the West Australian education lobby group PLATO, lamented the push towards activity-based learning, which often failed to provide content. "I call that sandpit science. Just let the kids into the box, let them play around and investigate. They learn absolutely nothing."

Australian Science Teachers Association president Paul Carnemolla yesterday defended constructivism, arguing against a return to a traditional, "transmissional" approach. "Trying to pump knowledge into an empty vessel has proven ineffective because it ignores the fact that students come into the classroom with all sorts of preconceptions, and if those are not dealt with appropriately, learning cannot take place," he told The Weekend Australian.

Source

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

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

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

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25 January, 2006

Sham neo-Nazi finds himself between a Reich and a hard place

Jacques Pluss has accomplished the impossible. He has managed to get himself hated by everyone. Nazis, socialists, lefties, righties, academics, nonacademics -- if they have any feeling about Pluss, those feelings are negative. I may be the only person in America who appreciates what he has done. And what he has done is to single-handedly expose the myth of academic freedom in America.

Pluss did this with an unprecedented -- some would say nutty -- piece of guerrilla theater that just came to light the other day. At this time last year, Pluss was a quiet and otherwise unremarkable part- time history teacher at the Fairleigh Dickinson University campus in Teaneck. Then in March, the student newspaper received a mysterious letter postmarked from a small village in Ireland. The letter alleged that Pluss was a member of a neo-Nazi group in America and was also, among other things, an Irish Republican Army member who was being investigated concerning a recent drive-by killing in Belfast.

The neo-Nazis and the IRA generally don't move in the same circles, so that should have tipped off the college kids that something about the letter was a bit fishy. But then a bit of investigation turned up the curious fact that Pluss had been holding forth on an Internet radio station hosted by the National Socialist Movement.

Before long, Pluss was summarily booted from his teaching post and told not to show up on campus again. Fairleigh Dickinson officials said the firing had nothing to do with his politics. The dismissal was, they said, the result of some absences that had, coincidentally enough, come to their attention at the same time they learned of his tendency to march around in a brown shirt wearing black boots.

Having gotten that bit of legalese out of the way, they then went on to denounce Pluss for his political views. "It's not politics; it's hate mongering," a dean by the name of John Snyder told the Bergen Record. "It's just hatred directed at the very students he taught."

When I phoned Pluss at the time, he protested the hypocrisy of the FDU faculty. Murderous leftist movements of all types are welcome on campuses all over America, he told me, but their right-wing equivalents are repressed. Back when he was a professor at William Paterson University some years ago, Pluss told me, a fellow professor had a huge hammer-and-sickle banner on her office wall. Che Guevara's a big hit among college kids these days, and Chairman Mao's not far behind, he noted.

I agreed with Pluss on that point. But when he launched into a spiel about the subtle but overlooked charms of that Austrian politician formerly known as Adolf Schickelgruber, I began to think he was a few Stukas short of a squadron, if you know what I mean.

It now turns out Pluss is not a Nazi; he's just a post-modernist. The other day, Pluss posted an article on the History News Network Web site (http://hnn.us/) titled "Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi." The episode, he writes, was inspired by the great French deconstructionists Jacques Derrida and Michele Foucault, who had insisted on "the need for the historian to 'become' her or his subject."

When I phoned him yesterday, the 52-year-old Pluss said his experience, which he expects to turn into a book, has brought him even more hatred from the academics who had hated him already. "I had thought there would at least have been some more academically and intellectually oriented responses," said Pluss, whose Ph.D. in medieval history is from the highly respected University of Chicago.

Meanwhile, the storm-trooper wannabes he had befriended want to do to him what Hitler did to the Danzig Corridor. They've been phoning him with death threats, he said. "They're a real bunch of misfits," Pluss said. But they're good material for a historian. And Pluss said he couldn't have gotten that material without immersing himself in the movement. "The theory behind my actions came from legitimate scholarship," Pluss said. "I thought to myself, 'Let's do a method-acting approach to the study of history and see how it works.' I chose the Nazis because they were absolutely the most obnoxious, whacky group I could find."

The academics were a close second, however. Pluss wanted to test their reactions as well, which is why he mailed off that nutty letter when he was vacationing in Ireland. The FDU officials took the bait. So much for academic freedom. Pluss was not only booted from the campus but shunned by all of his former colleagues. "I knew them to be a bunch of jerks," he told me. "If they wanted to dump me for my political views, why can't they just come out and say it?"

Pluss plans to write up the whole experience in the form of a historical novel. That gave me an idea. I had just read "A Million Little Pieces," that bogus memoir of drug rehab by James Frey that became a million seller. If hanging out with a bunch of bored druggies makes for a best seller, how about hanging out with a wacky bunch of nutty neo-Nazis? "I've got just one more question," I said to Pluss before he had to go. "Have you had your people contact Oprah?"

Source



Unscientific science teaching is now normal in Australian High Schools

Last year, a group representing Australia's leading scientific bodies signed an open letter arguing intelligent design is unscientific and should not be taught alongside the theory of evolution. The scientists argued that whereas evolution can be tested, teaching science students that a supernatural being was responsible for creation "would be a mockery of Australian science teaching and throw open the door of science classes to similarly unscientific world views - be they astrology, spoon-bending, the flat-earth cosmology or alien abductions".

Unfortunately, for those who oppose ID by arguing that science should only deal with what can be proved or disproved in a rational way, by being tested and open to the rigours of scientific explanation, the horse has already bolted. The reality, as a result of Australia's adoption of outcomes-based education, which includes such fads as whole language, where children are taught to look and guess, and fuzzy maths, where memorising tables and mental arithmetic go out the window, is that Australia's science curriculum is already unscientific.

One of the defining characteristics of outcomes-based education is that learning is no longer based on the traditional disciplines associated with an academic curriculum and the belief that knowledge is impartial and objective. Now, for example, the time available to teach geology may be reduced to accommodate teaching about the environmental damage that mining can cause, a different concern unrelated to basic science knowledge. Applications of science can be given priority over that basic knowledge. Tertiary academics in subjects such as physics and chemistry lament the way first-year courses have been watered down over time and that school science is more about sociology than teaching the structure of the discipline.

Even Geoff Masters, head of the Australian Council for Educational Research and a strong supporter of experiments such as outcomes-based education, accepts that Australia's approach to curriculum is far from perfect. "During the 1990s, considerable effort went into reform of the curricula for the primary and middle years of schooling, resulting in new state curriculum and standards frameworks," he says. "It is not clear that these efforts have improved levels of mathematics and science performance in Australian primary schools."

As noted by the South Australian academic Tony Gibbons in his book On Reflection, much of Australia's school curriculum adopts a relativistic view where science, instead of being based on an objective view of reality, is considered subjective and culturally determined. The South Australian curriculum states: "Viewing experiences, ideas and phenomena through the lenses of diverse cultural sciences provide a breadth and depth of understanding that is not possible from any one cultural perspective. Every culture has its own ways of thinking and its own world views to inform its science. Western science is the most dominant form of science but it is only one form among the sciences of the world." The Northern Territory science curriculum adopts a similar approach; described as a "social-constructivist perspective" and one where "science as a way of knowing is constructed in a socio-cultural context".

While the more traditional view of science is based on the belief that there are some absolutes that can be empirically tested - water boils at a certain temperature, the air we breathe is constituted a particular way - the West Australian curriculum also argues that our understanding of the world is subjective and culturally determined: "People from different backgrounds and cultures have different ways of experiencing and interpreting their environment, so there is a diversity of world views associated with science and scientific knowledge which should be welcomed, valued and respected. "They [students] appreciate that when they make observations, they do so from their own point of view and way of thinking. They recognise that aspects of scientific knowledge are constructed from a particular gender or cultural perspective."

Those familiar with the culture wars in the US, where new-age, politically correct academics argue that Galileo, Newton and Einstein are simply dead white European males and there is nothing superior or privileged about Western civilisation, will be familiar with the argument. As noted by Gibbons: "The implication is that Western science is a limited social construction and that other cultural sciences can make up for the limitations of Western science."

In addition to arguing that science is culturally determined, Australia's curriculum embodies a postmodern, constructivist view of knowledge. Constructivism places the student centre stage by arguing that learners construct their own learning and that more formal, explicit methods of teaching are unwarranted. Constructivists also suggest that learning is subjective as there is no external reality and each one of us constructs our own intensely personal and idiosyncratic view of the world. The result? Learning is defined as engaging and entertaining students and process takes precedence over content. On reading state and territory science curriculum, it is also obvious that Australia's approach is based more on teaching politically correct ideas and values than giving students a rigorous and objective grounding in science as a subject. Whether Tasmania, the Northern Territory, Queensland or South Australia, science as a subject disappears in favour of so-called essential learnings such as: personal futures, social responsibility, world futures and the inner, the creative and the collaborative learner.

Beginning with the national science statements and profiles, developed during the mid '90s, and continuing with current curriculum documents, teachers are urged to make science more girl-friendly, environmentally sensitive, contemporary and activity-based. The combination of ignoring the central importance of Western science, by arguing that it is culturally relative and simply one view of science among many, and defining science by what is politically correct has led to a dumbed down curriculum. As a result not only are boys disadvantaged, as science activities and tests are now more a measure of literacy skills, in which girls do better, but many teachers and academics argue that standards have fallen and that students are scientifically illiterate.

John Ridd, a retired Queensland secondary schoolteacher, whose PhD thesis examined maths teaching at the secondary level, argues: "Syllabi for both maths and science up to year 10 are long on fashionable educational theory, short on content and are pitched at a low academic level." Further evidence of low standards is the performance of Australian students in the 1994 and 2002 Trends in International Maths and Science Study. While Australian students always perform above the international average, they are consistently outperformed by countries such as The Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea.

Of greater concern is that at the year four level, based on a comparison of the 1994 and the 2002 results, Australia's performance remained static and many countries we once outperformed are now above us. Unlike Singapore, where 25 per cent of year four students achieved at the advanced level, there is a related concern that only 9 per cent of Australian students achieved at the same level. Debates about intelligent design and its place in the curriculum are important. Of greater significance is the broader question of how science is taught, or not taught, in our schools and the question of standards.

Source

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

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

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

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



24 January, 2006

What Colleges Forget to Teach

Higher education could heal itself by teaching civics-not race, class, and gender

The university is worth fighting for. No other institution can carry the burden of educating our young people. That's why we must redouble our efforts to restore integrity, civility, and rigorous standards in American higher education-particularly in the area of civic education.

I'll be the first to admit that the situation is dire. I sympathize when critics throw up their hands in despair. I sometimes feel that way myself. Darkness often prevails in places where the light of learning should shine. I often trade horror stories with my friend Hadley Arkes, a distinguished scholar of jurisprudence and political theory at Amherst. On one occasion, I explained that the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton was sponsoring a viciously anti-Catholic art exhibit-one that it would never even permit were some favored faith or cause, such as Islam or gay rights, its target. Every year, some outrage along these lines seems to prove that anti-Catholicism really is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals, though anyone familiar with academic life today knows that anti-Semitism itself is making a run at being the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.

Professor Arkes listened sympathetically and said, "Things have gotten pretty bad here at Amherst, too: we've granted tenure in political science to a guy promoting a theory explaining the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush by reference to his alleged homoerotic attraction to Ronald Reagan." "Well," I replied, "Princeton has topped that. We've given a distinguished chair in bioethics to a fellow who insists that eating animals is morally wrong, but that killing newborn human infants can be a perfectly moral choice." (This professor has since gone on to say that there would be nothing wrong with a society in which large numbers of children were conceived, born, and then killed in infancy to obtain transplantable organs.)

And so we go back and forth with each other, in a macabre game of one-upmanship.

Still, teaching at Princeton is in many ways a joy. I have the privilege of instructing students who actually know when the Civil War took place. Even before arriving at Princeton, they know that Lee surrendered to Grant, not to Eisenhower, at Appomattox Court House. Most know that Philadelphia, not Washington, D.C., played host to the constitutional convention. Few would list Alexander Hamilton among the most important presidents, because they know that he was never president. Some can identify the cabinet office that he held and even give a decent account of his differences with Thomas Jefferson. Speaking of whom, all my students know that Jefferson owned slaves-but then, everybody seems to know that, even those who know nothing else about him. My students, though, also know that it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, not his cousin Teddy, or Harry Truman, or JFK, who promised Americans a New Deal. Some can even tell you that the Supreme Court invalidated some early New Deal legislation and that FDR responded with a plan to pack the Court. Yes, my students and students at elite universities around the country come to campus knowing American history pretty well-and wanting to know it a lot better.

Many of these young men and women value historical knowledge not merely for its own sake but because they want to be good citizens. More, they seek to be of genuine service to fellow citizens. Many hope to be legislators, judges, even president. They know that knowledge of American history is vital to effective citizenship and service. But they also need an understanding of American civics-particularly the principles of the Constitution. For all their academic achievement, students at Princeton and Yale and Stanford and Harvard and other schools that attract America's most talented young people rarely come to campus with a sound grasp of the philosophy of America's constitutional government. How did the Founding Fathers seek, via the institutions that the Constitution created, to build and maintain a regime of ordered liberty? Even some of our best-informed students think something along these lines: the Framers set down a list of basic freedoms in a Bill of Rights, which an independent judiciary, protected from the vicissitudes of politics, would then enforce.

It's the rare student indeed who enters the classroom already aware that the Framers believed that the true bulwark of liberty was limited government. Few students comprehend the crucial distinction between (on the one hand) the national government as one of delegated and enumerated powers, and (on the other) the states as governments of general jurisdiction, exercising police powers to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to advance the general welfare. If anything, they imagine that it's the other way around. Thus they have no comprehension as to why leading supporters of the Constitution objected to a Bill of Rights, worried that it could compromise the delegated-powers doctrine and thus undermine the true liberty-securing principle of limited government.

Good students these days have heard of federalism, yet they have little appreciation of how it works or why the Founders thought it so vital. They've heard of the separation of powers and often can sketch how the system of checks and balances should work. But if one asks, for example, "Who checks the courts?" they cannot give a satisfactory answer. The students' lack of awareness flows partly from the conception of the American civic order that they have drunk in, which treats courts as if they aren't really part of the government. Judges, on this view, are "non-political" actors whose job is to keep politicians in line with what elite circles regard as enlightened opinions. Judicial supremacy, of the kind that Jefferson and Lincoln stingingly condemned, thus winds up uncritically assumed to be sound constitutional law. The idea that the courts themselves could violate the Constitution by, for example, usurping authority that the Constitution vests in other branches of government, is off the radar screen.

Lacking basic knowledge of the American Founders' political philosophy and of the principles that they enshrined in the Constitution, students often fall prey to the notion that ours is a "Living Constitution," whose actual words matter little. On the Living Constitution theory, judges-especially Supreme Court justices-serve as members of a kind of standing constitutional convention whose role is to invalidate legislation that progressive circles regard as antiquated or retrograde, all in the name of adapting the Constitution to keep up with the times.

It doesn't take much to expose the absurdity of this theory. The purpose of enshrining principles in a constitution is to ensure that the nation's fundamental values remain honored even if they fall out of fashion. As for adapting the nation's laws to keep up with the times, legislators can-and should-take care of that task. The proper role of courts when they exercise the power of judicial review is essentially a conserving (you could even say "conservative") one. It is not to change anything but rather to place limits on what one can change.

More here



A small but significant revival of liberal arts teaching in Australia

Last week's column was a series of bleak reflections on the declining levels of literacy in Australian schools and universities. This column, in contrast, is about some welcome developments in tertiary education - the opening for business of Campion College in Sydney and its new degree course in the liberal arts. What difference will a private, Catholic college with an initial intake of only 30 students make to the Augean stables of the local humanities establishment? Time will tell, of course, but my guess is that it will make a difference out of all proportion to its size and sooner than many expect.

Campion is an overdue and welcome addition to the tertiary sector in Australia. It takes as its models the American and continental liberal arts colleges - Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran and indeed secular - and a modified version of the Great Books Program. The core of the course, amounting to about 70 per cent of the units, is compulsory. It involves close reading of demanding, seminal texts. Classes are small and the tutorial system is geared to ensure more than just a nodding acquaintance with the canon.

It will be the only humanities course of studies in which Google won't more or less guarantee that you pass. Corporate employers and headhunting firms, who tend to be familiar with American liberal arts courses and the calibre of the graduates they produce, will be taking a keen interest in Campion's first cohort. I expect that word of this will get out very quickly among arts students, and that many of them will be wondering whether their degrees from sandstone institutions are overpriced by comparison.

The deans of the various arts faculties will be inclined to sneer at a small, fledgling institution, and to be especially disdainful of its connection with the Catholic Church. Academe in Australia tends to take its own Enlightenment assumptions and particularly its secularism for granted as self-evidently good things. But many of the great universities of the West, including Oxford and Cambridge, were essentially monastic foundations and the idea that contemporary ecclesiastical affiliations could compromise the character and functions of a university would cut very little ice among America's Ivy League.

Campion promises to be a rather more Catholic institution than the Australian Catholic University. Its staff will be expected to swear an oath of fidelity to the Pope and the teaching magisterium of the church, for example. However, the college recognises, as John Paul II expressed it in Ex Corde Ecclesiae: "The right of individual scholars to search for the truth, wherever analysis and the evidence lead them." Relatively unfettered scholarship within the context of a campus dedicated to the ideals of Christian humanism may strike some as strange, particularly if they haven't read John Henry Newman on the subject.

To my mind it is no stranger - and far less inimical to intellectual liberty - than the politically correct pieties and Left-conformity of Australian public universities in general and their humanities departments in particular. What's more, Campion's emphasis on engaging with primary texts means that students will read ancient historians and Renaissance playwrights in their own words, rather than mostly seeing them through a fog of Marxist commentary or a filter of Michel Foucault.

It is only natural that many university lecturers should be appalled and confronted by this sort of back-to-basics educational fundamentalism. After all, it challenges their own pedagogical methods, their scholarship and much of what they stand for as teachers. Still, just imagine how captivating many parents will find it. Campion is designed primarily, though not exclusively, for Catholic undergraduates. They and their parents are likely to have had to live hard, sub-optimal choices all the way to matriculation. For example, many thoughtful Catholics regard the parochial system as at best a second-rate scholastic option and a proven failure when it comes to cultural maintenance and the transmission of faith.

They quite often prefer to send their children to conservative Anglican or Lutheran establishments, where theological modernism is less rampant, or to state schools where the agenda is merely secularist rather than noisily heretical. Many more have gone to endless trouble home-schooling their children and are now on the lookout for a comparably nurturing tertiary environment. For the thousands of parents in those sorts of predicament, Campion will stand out like a good deed in a naughty world. They will note with pleasure that the college offers Latin as an option, that it has hired one of Sydney's foremost church musicians for the chapel and prefers conservative liturgies and traditional devotions.

It's also just about the only place where students might still be encouraged to mount a Gilbert and Sullivan production - The Pirates of Penzance, perhaps - or where there'd be the enthusiasm and expertise to stage Henry Purcell's English opera, Dido and Aeneas.

Traditionally minded parents with no strong religious ties and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans who can't afford American college fees may well be tempted by Campion. More to the point, perhaps, they may feel moved to follow suit and start liberal arts colleges of their own. The establishment of a few more of them would have a cascading effect, akin to the reintroduction of the gold standard.

Reading the course outline for the three-year program, it's hard not to be consumed with envy of the 30 lucky little blighters about to be chosen for the first intake. Six semesters of history, concentrating on religion and culture from antiquity to the present, sounds just the sort of grounding that educated people need. The same goes for the core sequences in literature, philosophy and theology. It's hard to imagine coming out the other end of such a course without a good grasp of the best that's been thought and said since Plato.

Liberal arts has also tended to emphasise the importance of hard science in the curriculum. At Campion you can opt to undertake up to four units of maths and history of science, but biology is compulsory (and a creationist-free zone) along with a course on science and society. Another elective which is likely to prove popular is human bioethics.

It's all a far cry from the chaos of the summer of '68 - ground zero of the revolution - when I matriculated and enrolled at Flinders University. There the arts students had to belong either to the school of language and literature or the school of social sciences. Inspired by some once-modish theory, the system forced us to choose between English or other modern languages and the competing attractions of history as a major. It was almost impossible to manage a joint honours degree straddling the two schools. It was an obvious barbarism and I've heard similar horror stories about other Besser brick universities both at the time and more recently.

Apart from having an admirably integrated classical curriculum, Campion will be a qualitatively different experience from mainstream campus life in other ways. The most striking is class sizes. In many universities these days it's common for first-year lectures to be delivered to 500 students and for tutorials to comprise 20 people. At Campion, in the third year of operation, after a planned influx of international students, there won't be many more than 150 undergraduates. Everyone will know one another and tutorial sizes will never be over 15. The benefits of such an arrangement are obvious. The potential dangers are a tendency to group-think and a claustrophobic atmosphere in which young people can become inordinately focused on the dynamics of a small group.

Campion has residential facilities, but students are also free to make their own arrangements and live off-campus, which should help minimise those risks. Parents of prospective students can go to the web for more information. Before they do, I suppose I should warn them that tuition fees per semester are $6000, or $12,000 a year. For purposes of comparison, it's in the same league as a full-fee place in the arts faculty of the better sandstone universities. FEE-HELP, a Commonwealth student tuition loans scheme, will be available and it works along similar lines to HECS. Students repay their loans through the tax system once they're earning above a threshold income of about $36,000 a year. It's heartening to note in conclusion that Catholic dioceses throughout the country have also come to the party and begun to endow scholarships.

Source

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

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

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

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



23 January, 2006

Legislatures Fight Perceived Left-Wing Bias in Colleges

Christian DeJohn returned from a National Guard tour in Bosnia only to fight his own war with academics at Temple University who he says have held up his master's thesis because of political conflicts in the classroom.To some conservatives, the case represents a national trend by some liberal professors to infringe on conservative students' right to free speech at public colleges and universities.

The debate has reached more than a dozen state legislatures, which dole out the taxpayer funds to those schools, but so far there's been more talk than action. Legislation modeled after an "academic bill of rights" advocated by conservative activist David Horowitz, founder of Students for Academic Freedom, was introduced in at least 15 states last year, but none has passed it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Among other things, the document exhorts professors to present a wide spectrum of intellectual views in the classroom and discourages them from basing students' grades on their religious or political beliefs.

Julie Bell, the conference's education program director, said legislatures have not forced the issue because even public universities typically enjoy considerable autonomy in setting academic policies and procedures. "Most legislatures have backed away because they really do acknowledge that separation," Bell said. An Ohio state senator suspended his push for legislation last year after state universities approved a resolution requiring them to ensure students are not graded based on political opinions.

In Pennsylvania, legislators investigating whether their state's public colleges are hospitable to divergent intellectual and political views traveled to Temple for a hearing last week where a small number of students including DeJohn voiced their complaints. DeJohn, who entered graduate school four years ago, said he suspects that approval of his thesis is being delayed partly because of conflicts he had with a military history professor who, DeJohn said, often criticized the Iraq war and the Bush administration during class. DeJohn contends the delay is also retaliation for a critical response he sent to a professor after he received an e-mail invitation to a campus war protest while he was serving six months in Bosnia. "These are people who are sitting in judgment on whether I graduate," DeJohn told the lawmakers. The student's professors both said their decision was based on academic reasons and not on DeJohn's military status, according to Rep. Lawrence Curry, a committee member who said both testified during the public-comment portion of the hearing.

Pennsylvania's inquiry was authorized by the state House at the behest of Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong, who says he merely wants the committee to assess whether political orthodoxy is a widespread problem and whether a legislative remedy is warranted. "I don't think anyone on this committee is interested in seeing the government ... interfere in what happens in our state college classrooms," the Republican said at the hearing.

William E. Scheuerman, vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, said universities fear the prospect of government micromanagement. "Merely the threat of government intervention is enough, believe me, to frighten college administrators and some faculty so they are less likely to raise tough questions," he said.

Advocates for tighter controls are trying other strategies, as well. At the University of California, Los Angeles, a conservative alumni group offered students money to police professors accused of pushing liberal views - a move that sparked a former congressman and two others to quit the group's advisory board, saying Wednesday that the tactic was extreme.

Horowitz said verifying the accuracy of every bias complaint is difficult. But he told the lawmakers at Temple that the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found last year that half of students surveyed said professors frequently comment in class on politics - even when it is not relevant to the course. "I would not be here if I weren't persuaded by 20 years of walking around campuses and seeing this," Horowitz said.

Source



Myth: Schools Need More Money

The NEA says public schools need more money. That's the refrain heard in politicians' speeches, ballot initiatives and maybe even in your child's own classroom. At a union demonstration, teachers carried signs that said schools will only improve "when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." Not enough money for education? It's a myth.

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student. Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money. America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

In 1985, some of them got their wish. Kansas City, Mo., judge Russell Clark said the city's predominately black schools were not "halfway decent," and he ordered the government to spend billions more. Did the billions improve test scores? Did they hire better teachers, provide better books? Did the students learn anything? Well, they learned how to waste lots of money. The bureaucrats renovated school buildings, adding enormous gyms, an Olympic swimming pool, a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium, and a wildlife sanctuary. They added intense instruction in foreign languages. They spent so much money that when they decided to bring more white kids to the city's schools, they didn't have to resort to busing. Instead, they paid for 120 taxis. Taxis!

What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district's history.

A study by two professors at the Hoover Institution a few years ago compared public and Catholic schools in three of New York City's five boroughs. Parochial education outperformed the nation's largest school system "in every instance," they found -- and it did it at less than half the cost per student.

"Everyone has been conned -- you can give public schools all the money in America, and it will not be enough," says Ben Chavis, a former public school principal who now runs the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, Calif. His school spends thousands less per student than Oakland's government-run schools spend.

Chavis saves money by having students help clean the grounds and set up for lunch. "We don't have a full-time janitor," he told me. "We don't have security guards. We don't have computers. We don't have a cafeteria staff." Since Chavis took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst middle schools in Oakland to the one where the kids get the best test scores. "I see my school as a business," he said. "And my students are the shareholders. And the families are the shareholders. I have to provide them with something."

Source

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

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

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

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22 January, 2006

The problem with Boehner

More on the student loan ripoff

Rep. John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, wants to be House majority leader. The job is open with the departure of Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican now sinking into the Abramoff scandal, and amid calls for campaign-finance reform. Let's talk about Boehner and the financing of campaigns — specifically, his. Boehner raised $172,000 from student-loan companies during 2003 and 2004. What made him worthy of that healthy sum? The answer can be found — but not easily — in the budget reconciliation bill now awaiting final approval from Congress.

Chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee, Boehner had orders to find $13 billion in cuts from the student-loan program. The bankers were initially worried, but Boehner reassured them. "Know that I have all of you in my trusted hands," he told the annual meeting of the Consumer Bankers Association, adding, "I've got enough rabbits up my sleeve."

The federal student-loan program has been an open-pit gold mine for banks. The taxpayers guarantee the companies against both deadbeat borrowers and risks posed by rising interest rates. Uncle Sugar even offers a free hedge against changes in interest-rate spreads that could harm the lenders' bottom line. (Other businesses must go to Wall Street and pay for such services.) "In American history, this is the most outrageous giveaway ever extended by the federal government to private lenders," says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

The king of the student-loan business is Sallie Mae. Once a quasi-government agency, Sallie Mae is now an independent, publicly traded company — SLM Corp. The company's stock price has risen 1,900 percent over the past 10 years. And from 1995 to 2004, former CEO Al Lord raked in $225 million. Lord now leads an investors group trying to buy the Washington Nationals baseball team. Who would have thought there was that kind of money in a government program designed to help working-class kids pay for college and trade school?

Boehner and friends could have saved billions by just taking some honey out of the lenders' subsidies. They did eliminate a "floor" on the guaranteed interest rates — and put on a big show about how they were taking money out of the banks' hides. But actually, they more than made up for that setback with fine-print changes that will let lenders rake in more money than ever.

For example, Boehner's legislation gives banks the power to stop certain borrowers from leaving their clutches and entering a federal program for people who can't earn enough money to pay off their loans. (They make money whether their captives pay or default.) The Clinton administration started a program that provides loans directly to students, cutting out the private lenders. The Direct Student Loan Program is also cheaper for taxpayers. Boehner has written into the bill a subtle plan to kill it off: Move the administrative account for student loans out of the entitlement category and into a discretionary budget. That makes it easier for Congress to chop funding for the account. When that happens, the private lenders win in two ways: There's less money to oversee their activities, and the direct-lending program that competes with them is undermined.

As we can see, license to abuse student borrowers is as important to building the banks' fortunes as outright taxpayer subsidies. In a hard look at Sallie Mae, Fortune magazine reported on a $38,000 student loan that ballooned to $100,000 after the borrower had been out of work for a while. It found that the annual cost of credit for another person still in school was an astounding 28 percent. That happened after Sallie Mae tacked its exorbitant fees onto its predatory rates.

The Fortune piece questioned what might happen to Sallie Mae's stock price if taxpayers and students got wise to the game. Boehner makes sure they don't, by writing complex laws that only insiders can understand. It should surprise no one that Sallie Mae is Boehner's most generous benefactor. Boehner is now on the Fox News Channel insisting that the campaign-finance laws don't need to be changed, just better enforced. And his prospects for becoming House majority leader? That would depend on how self-destructive Republicans are feeling at the moment

Source



FASCIST NY COLLEGE LOSES IN COURT

Yesterday, a New York appeals court ordered Le Moyne College to reinstate Scott McConnell in its graduate education program. The school took first prize in the Collegiate Network's 2005 Campus Outrage Awards (the "Pollys") after the administration expelled McConnell for writing a paper rejecting multiculturalism and advocating light spanking in elementary school classrooms. Despite receiving an "A-minus" on the paper and earning exemplary grades in all his coursework, McConnell received a letter from the Director of his program stating: “I have grave concerns regarding the mismatch between your personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the LeMoyne College program goals…. You will not be allowed to register for any additional courses. Your registration for Spring 2005 courses has been withdrawn.”

The NY appeals court ruled, however, that Le Moyne had failed to respect McConnell's due process rights. The college's own handbook states that a student may not be disciplined or expelled simply for expressing unorthodox views. Terry Pel, president of the Center for Individual Rights, the group that represented McConnell during the legal proceedings, commented on the appeals court decision: "Institutions that claim to believe in academic freedom cannot selectively protect only the speech they happen to favor."

Stephen M. Klugewicz, Executive Director of Collegiate Network, which sponsors the Polly Awards, declared: "This court victory again proves the old adage, 'sunlight is the best disinfectant.' It also highlights the impact of the Campus Outrage Awards. Scott's case would not have garnered so much attention had it not been for the fact that we awarded Le Moyne College first place for its outrageous attempt to squash free thought on its campus."

Source



CALIFORNIA GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS WATERED DOWN

The beginning of the end of the exit test

Approximately 25,000 California high school students with disabilities in this year's graduating class will not have to pass the state's exit exam under an agreement announced Thursday by leaders of the Legislature, the state Department of Education and the governor's education office. After several weeks of negotiation, officials agreed to fast-track a bill by Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, that will free high school seniors in special education from passing the controversial math and English exam that is a graduation requirement for the first time this year. The deal is backed by the disabled-rights group that brought a suit challenging the exit exam.

Only students who meet certain criteria would be able to graduate without passing the test. They must have an active special education plan, take the exam at least twice after 10th grade and at least once during 12th grade, attend exam preparation classes offered by their school and fulfill all other graduation requirements of their school. The bill, SB 517, "will uphold the integrity of the high school exit exam and at the same time give our schools more time to provide special education students with the skills necessary to pass the exam," said Jack O'Connell, superintendent of public instruction, in a conference call with reporters.

While test supporters described the agreement as the only reprieve that would be created, test opponents hailed it as the first of many steps toward undoing the harsh consequences of the exam. Romero said "the debate is really just beginning" over the regular education students who are still being held to the test in order to graduate in June. "I am disappointed that there isn't a solution yet for the other 100,000 students who may be denied a diploma this year, who may meet all the requirements for graduation and not pass the exam," she said.

More here

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

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

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

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



21 January, 2006

ANOTHER SOVIET IN NORTH CAROLINA

By Mike Adams

It probably comes as no surprise that the third university in my "colleges to avoid" series is located in North Carolina. Recently, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy published a report criticizing the UNC system for its blatant in intolerance of free expression. Of the sixteen campuses in the system, only one university - Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) - was not criticized in the report.

While students in North Carolina may want to consider attending ECSU, they would do well to avoid The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Among other things, UNCG has an Orwellian policy that outlaws "disrespect for persons." Surely, Lucien Capone, the university attorney for UNCG, is aware that banning "disrespect" at a public university poses First Amendment problems. Nonetheless, administrators at UNCG act like "untouchables" with little fear of violating federal laws with which they disagree.

A good example of the lawlessness and arrogance of UNCG officials can be gleaned from their response to a recent protest led by students Allison Jaynes and Robert Sinnott. The protest was a peaceful, quiet, outdoor gathering of about 40 people. Located just outside the UNCG library, they didn't cause any kind of disruption. One could say that it was precisely the kind of protest that the framers of the First Amendment had in mind when they protected "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." One could also say that it was the kind of protest our brave soldiers fought to defend in the First and Second World Wars and even now in the War in Iraq

When the UNCG protestors held up signs saying "UNCG Hates Free Speech" they were protesting a "free speech zone" policy that any seventeen-year-old taking high school civics would recognize as unconstitutional. Of the 200 acres on the UNCG campus, only two small areas are designated as "free speech zones" - areas designed to accommodate the expressive activities of 15,000 students.

What happened after the protest was predictable. UNCG issued "citations for disrespect" to the students which, in effect, sent the following message: UNCG students are not allowed to freely speak if they are going to say that UNCG hates free speech. Few homeless illiterates could ever come up with such an absurd statement. Indeed, it takes a PhD to devise such logic. And such indifference to principle requires profound arrogance that could only be attained at a postmodern American university.

But I'm afraid the story only gets worse. After UNCG lawyers said that they would re-evaluate the "speech zone" policy, the university decided to go ahead with the trials of Jaynes and Sinnott. These two students who were charged with "violation of respect" - for refusing to follow the administration's order to move to a free speech zone - were never actually impolite or disrespectful. They were just standing in the wrong place when they expressed their love of free speech. They were standing in the middle of an American college campus.

But it gets even worse than that. The UNCG student attorney general told Sinnott and Jaynes that neither could take any notes out of the hearing with them or even talk about the hearing with anyone else after the fact-basically imposing a complete "gag order." In other words, they were asked to destroy any evidence of whatever constitutes - or does not constitute - "due process" at UNCG. And, in case you have forgotten, this demand to never, ever, ever say anything about what UNCG was doing to them resulted from the students' proclamation that "UNCG Hates Free Speech." But we aren't to the worst part of the story yet.

UNCG dropped the "speech zone" charges against the two students the week before the trials and, instead, substituted a new charge. The new charge was for violating a direct order by not turning over the contact information of every single person at the protest. UNCG borrowed this trick from the State of Alabama, which perfected the procedure in the 1950s. Back then, the NAACP was harassed by white racists who demanded to know the identity of all persons involved in another form of "petition(ing) the government for a redress of grievances."

Of course, the grievance back then was racial segregation. After a fifty year struggle for civil rights, the difference between racial segregationists and college administrators is barely discernable.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court intervened in 1956 to put an end to such totalitarian methods. In so doing, they gave new strength to the First Amendment and formal recognition to the concept of "freedom of association." But half a century later the meaning of this seminal case is still lost upon Counselor Capone and the administration of UNCG. This is the state of North Carolina where college administrators are untouchables and federal law is optional.

But, fortunately, all of this mess happened at a singularly inopportune time for the UNCG administration. The joint report by the FIRE and the Pope Center has been picked up by media outlets across the state. And, thanks to these two fine organizations, the UNCG administration has now caved in and dropped all charges against Allison Jaynes and Robert Sinnott. The UNCG administration did not capitulate because of a love of free speech. These cowards capitulated because they hate public humiliation more than they hate the First Amendment. And that is why I would never, under any circumstances, send my child to UNCG



Reading, writing and Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!

By Arlene Peck

I grew up in the South. We learned the `three r's... readin, `ritin and `rithmatic, and our `delicate' ears were shielded from all talk that might leave bad impressions on our youthful minds. We answered Yes sir, no Sir when a `grown-up' spoke to us. Old America, where a child chewing gum or caught running in the halls was reason enough to be sent to the office. If it was true, back then, that we were babes in the woods, today Muslims babies are being trained to become youths in ambush. Witness what they are being taught in Arab schools. Hate-filled garbage delivered unfiltered and specifically designed to warp the minds of children! We grew up going to summer camp. These people send their kids to camp also, terrorist camps, where they learn how to grow up and blow up.

Check out www.pmw.org (Palestine Media Watch) and educate yourself about what these cultish fanatics are up to. Gawd! What else could future generations of Arab Muslim children be, other than virulently anti-infidel fanatics, whose lives will emphasize the dehumanization of Jews, Christians, and any other thing that breathes - but is not Islamic? Inhumane? Of course it is. Insane? Who can doubt it? Child abuse? Don't ask the ACLU, UN or any of our leftist agitators who remain silent as this travesty unfolds, but scream like stuck pigs when Israel protects herself from them! Women's rights? Yeah, right. They treat their farm animals better than their women.

Don't fall for thinking they have no understanding of what they do or that they are not masters of this education. For a start, they are clever enough to realize they have to begin with the very young, if they are to accomplish their goals. They also know they need to create an accepting international atmosphere, if they are not to be discarded as fringe lunatics. And we are falling right into their well thought-out plans. Are you aware that many school districts in the US, the UK and elsewhere are teaching Islam in their classrooms, polluting young minds under the guise of political correctness and multicultural sensitivity? Do you know that any mention of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism or Buddhism is strictly off-limits? The beliefs of Islam are cultural, and so are not only protected but also actively promoted, while ours are religious and therefore cannot be taught.

However, it gets worse. Many of our public schools, which prohibit Christian students from reading the Bible or displaying the Ten Commandments, are headed toward prohibiting even mention of the word G-d. Somehow, CAIR and the ACLU have managed to see to it that students in California, and elsewhere, are indoctrinated into the wonderful culture of Islam. I wonder why isn't the ACLU now protesting this abomination?

Growing up in the very heart of the Bible belt, I have had questions, even misgivings, about the motives and purposes of those who always knew the word of the Lord when it came to merging Church and State. I remember being singled out as the only Jewish kid in the class and rebuked for not singing the Christmas 'Christ is King' songs. Yet, I never felt any discomfort about the word G-d being used in daily life.

However, that is not what is happening today. Our parents reared us to believe that there is good in all people and to respect everybody. However, that ideology has come back to bite us in the tush, in much the same way as I see it biting Spielberg, who might have begun his movie Munich with good intentions but sadly crossed over and glorified the savage Palestinians who slaughtered the Israeli athletes.

The multi-headed monster attacking our youth is not limiting itself to prohibiting G-d in the classroom either. Our schools, in their efforts to be 'politically correct' by their insistence on the words militant and freedom fighter instead of murderer, as the press regularly does, have distorted the message of education. As difficult as this may be to believe, Excelsior Elementary School in Byron, California, as part of their seventh-grade curriculum, ran a three-week course where students assumed Islamic names, recited prayers in class, memorized and recited verses from the Koran. They even had the children pretending that they were 'sharing in Ramadan' fasting by going without something for a day. Their final exam required a paper assessing Muslim culture. When researching this unbelievable event, I didn't notice whether they included beheading and rape classes for these impressionable minds. Perhaps that comes after Graduation. Or is it just a natural extension of Koranic principle? I do know that they played jihad games. This adorable and oh-so-American program had students imagining they were Islamic soldiers and Muslims on a Mecca pilgrimage. All the while chanting Allah Akbar, Arabic for God is great. I wonder by what logic the ACLU can knowingly turn a blind eye to this sort of brain-washing indoctrination, yet continue with their demands that our courthouses remove the Ten Commandments and that our children stop saying the Lord's Prayer in schools?

In case you think I'm exaggerating, check out Hugh Fitzgerald http://www.pmw.org.il commenting on www.dawanet.com, where Muslim parents are given precise guidelines on how to 'win over' teachers and principals. It even covers the optimum timing for inviting the teachers and administrators home to have a delicious meal of chicken and pita. Man, they have it down to a fine art, calculated to ensure that whatever demands they make on a school, from setting aside prayer rooms, to letting students out for such prayer, is agreed (which could never happen for other faiths). When it comes to permitting Muslims essentially to conduct propaganda-- da'wa-- freely in the schools, under one guise or another, (Sharing Ramadan Outreach, promoted by CAIR, is granted happily), they know their wishes will be quickly honored. At this rate, they'll soon offer, Trample you classmates 101

Maybe I ought to go over and teach them that this particular group are not now nor ever will be soldiers. In Beirut, June of 1982, I personally witnessed thousands of these cowards running, with hands in the air, to surrender to the Israel soldiers, before the first bullet was fired. It wouldn't matter. These are terrorists and will never qualify for the honorable name, soldier. It's their cultures preferred model, to bomb and cause indiscriminate mayhem anywhere they settle.

Unfortunately, too many of our student and even Jewish organizations seem to be unaware of the real plans behind all of the chairs for Islamic culture which are popping up at an alarming rate in our universities. Their curriculum is aimed primarily at educating university students how best to destroy Israel. It is frightening how many students belong to the International Solidarity Movement, founded by a Canadian Moslem which even sends Jewish (in name only)students to Israel on Birthright. Some are even joining Hillel.

The Muslim tentacles of influence are deeply attached to the heart of our universities. Recently, Georgetown and Harvard universities accepted twenty million dollars in 'blood money' from Prince Alwaleed Ben Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family, for a chair to promote the study of Islam and the Muslim world. A further $15 million was given to establish the first two centers for American studies in the Middle East, at universities in Beirut and Cairo to teach the Arab world about the American situation. Of course these are supposedly part of philanthropic efforts to promote interfaith understanding. In reality, they will be teaching their version of the 'situation' to these impressionable minds. I wonder? Will terrorist camps be available for the really good students? I wonder what the barometer for excellence in the Islamic world is? As yet, the world has seen nothing from them that hasn't been soaked in blood and suffering.

In a display worthy of a true sycophant, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia gushed how deeply honored he was by Prince Alwaleed's generosity. President DeGioia breathlessly informed us that their plan is to endow three faculty chairs, expand programs, and academic outreach, provide scholarships for students and expand library facilities. I find it chilling how they are now able to foment their hate-speech and shape our youths minds, under the guise of 'charity'. The Prince said, Now we can run workshops and conferences on the subject of, What is the actual relationship between the West and the Muslim world? Is Islam compatible with modernization? and a lot more!

This money is going to be used to expand the activities of the University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding..., in other words to anyone with half a brain that means a pro-Islam and even pro-terrorist viewpoint (along with being anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli). Maybe they could hire Tony Kushner, who was Spielberg's mentor and writer on Munich, to decorate? Where is Rudolph W. Giuliani when we need him? The Giulliani who threw back this same Prince's tarnished money when he tried to donate ten million after 9/11. John Esposito obviously has no problem accepting the $20 million 'donation' to Georgetown; like me, do you wonder how much went in other pockets? This is not isolated either. Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers is also waiting, with eager, outstretched hands for his 'donations'.

Interestingly enough, I'm writing this on the same day that the front page of the LA Times has a headline, U.S. Faults Saudi Efforts on Terrorism. It seems someone in the Bush Administration is finally complaining how militants are pouring into Iraq from the Saudi kingdom and money is still flowing to Al Qaeda, officials say. On one hand, it's fine to accept their millions for our schools to mould impressionable minds and receive campaign funds to ease the way, but, on the other, it's not a good thing for the Saudis to give money to militants to destroy us on the battleground? I thought we had laws that dealt with funds associated with terrorism? Is this how we fight The War on Terror? If you can't beat them, join them?



These guys are fit to work as teachers?

Trust your government to protect your kids!

Convicted stalkers, heroin addicts, frauds and former prisoners have been given the green light to teach [in the Australian State of Victoria]. Documents show the Victorian Institute of Teaching has allowed nine of 12 teachers with serious criminal convictions to remain registered. The Education Department said it would employ only two [Only two? Sure that's enough?], but would not say whether they were employed, citing privacy reasons. The others can work in the private system and interstate.

Child sex offenders are automatically deregistered. Those who remain registered include these three teachers: A WOMAN convicted in 2001 of heroin possession, receiving stolen goods and obtaining property by deception. A VIT panel hearing her case found she had been addicted to heroin "but there is no indication . . . this affected her ability to carry out her professional duties".

A MALE teacher who was convicted of stalking a 16-year-old boy in 2001, behaviour a magistrate said was "creepy". The VIT panel was told he repeatedly called the boy and posed as a Cosmopolitan photographer to get the boy to meet him. But it decided his "misconduct in his private life had not been followed in his professional life".

A TEACHER who spent more than two years in jail after pleading guilty to a hit-run accident in 2000 that left a pedestrian for dead. He'd been drunk and concealed it from his school; but the VIT panel found he'd matured and developed "insight and reflection" about the crime and "would make use of his learning and that this would enhance his contribution as a teacher".

Opposition education spokesman Victor Perton said the community would be shocked to learn these teachers were allowed back in class. It raised questions about the VIT's ability to properly register teachers. "The department might know of their conviction but what about the independent, Catholic and interstate schools?" he said. Parents Victoria president Elaine Crowle said the cases make a mockery of the registration process....

A Catholic Education Office spokesman said none of the nine worked at its schools. Association for Independent Schools of Victoria head Michelle Green said teachers were employed by the schools; the association did not keep such records.

More here

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

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

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

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



20 January, 2006

BRITISH EDUCATIONAL "IMPROVEMENT" A SHAM

Nearly six out of ten GCSE students in state schools failed to earn good grades in English and mathematics last year despite an apparent record improvement in examination results, new figures show. Ministers claimed that the performance tables of GCSE and A-level results, published today, showed that schools had achieved the "biggest single improvement in standards for a decade". The proportion of students who passed five GCSE subjects at grade C or better, the Government's benchmark for success at 16, rose by by 2.6 percentage points to 56.3 per cent in 2005. But it fell by 12 points to 44.3 per cent when English and maths were included. It dropped to 42 per cent once results for independent schools were excluded.

The headline rate of improvement masked a deeper failure in boys. Only 37.8 per cent in state schools passed five good GCSEs, including English and maths, last summer, compared with 46.2 per cent of girls. Almost 97 per cent of pupils in grammar schools and 74 per cent in private schools reached this standard. Nearly 200,000 boys and 156,000 girls in state schools did not. Schools are ranked in league tables of results by the proportion of students passing five good GCSEs in any subject.

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, has ordered changes to include English and maths from next year, amid suspicions that schools are entering students for softer subjects to disguise failure in the basics. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) carried out a pilot study to show how the reform would have affected each school's results this year. But it refused to release the data before publication of the performance tables, saying the information would be released on its website today.

Jacqui Smith, the School Standards Minister, said that 52,000 more students gained five good passes in English, maths and three other subjects than in 1997. She acknowledged that schools had to "raise the bar even further on improvement". "That is why we are publishing these figures and incorporating them into the league tables from next year," she said. Figures released by the DfES show that the gap has widened since 1997 between the proportion of pupils passing five good GCSEs in any subject and that of pupils whose passes include English and maths, despite massive spending to raise standards of literacy and numeracy.

The proportion of school-leavers with five good GCSEs rose by 11.2 percentage points between 1997 and 2005, from 45.1 per cent to 56.3 per cent. But it went up by only 8.7 percentage points, from 35.6 per cent to 44.3 per cent, over the same period when English and maths were included.

Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said that the figures showed that too many students were being "nudged" into easier subjects such as vocational GNVQs, equivalent to four GCSEs.

The tables also revealed that half of Tony Blair's flagship city academies were among the worst schools for GCSE results and truancy. Only 14 of 27 academies have been open long enough for 2005 results to be included. Three were in the bottom 50 schools and seven were in the worst 200. Three were in the bottom 50 for truancy. The DfES said that results had improved at all seven academies in the bottom 200.

Teachers' unions made their annual call for the abolition of "distorted" league tables. Mary Bousted, of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: "What parents want is a school where their child will be safe, happy and well-educated, but tables encourage them to rely on dubious statistics.

Source



UCLA Alumni Group Is Tracking Radical Faculty

A fledgling alumni group headed by a former campus Republican leader is offering students payments of up to $100 per class to provide information on instructors who are "abusive, one-sided or off-topic" in advocating political ideologies. The year-old Bruin Alumni Assn. says its "Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors" initiative takes aim at faculty "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic." Although the group says it is concerned about radical professors of any political stripe, it has named an initial "Dirty 30" of teachers it identifies with left-wing or liberal causes.

Some of the instructors mentioned accuse the association of conducting a witch hunt that threatens to harm the teaching atmosphere, and at least one of the group's advisory board members has resigned because he considers the bounty offers inappropriate. The university said it will warn the association that selling copies of professors' lectures would violate campus rules and raise copyright issues.

The Bruin Alumni Assn. is headed by Andrew Jones, a 24-year-old who graduated in June 2003 and was chairman of UCLA's Bruin Republicans student group. He said his organization, which is registered with the state as a nonprofit, does not charge dues and has no official members, but has raised a total of $22,000 from 100 donors. Jones said the biggest contribution to the group, $5,000, came from a foundation endowed by Arthur N. Rupe, 88, a Santa Barbara resident and former Los Angeles record producer.

Jones' group is following in the footsteps of various conservative groups that have taken steps, including monitoring professors, to counter what they regard as an overwhelming leftist tilt at elite colleges and universities around the country. He said many of these efforts, however, have done a poor job of documenting their claims. As a result, Jones said, the Bruin Alumni Assn. is offering to pay students for tapes and notes from classes. "We're just trying to get people back on a professional level of things. Having been a student myself up until 2003, and then watching what other students like myself have gone through, I'm very concerned about the level of professional teaching at UCLA," said Jones, who said he is supporting himself with a modest salary from the organization and is its only full-time employee. He said he plans to show what he considers biased material to professors and administrators and seek to have teachers present more balanced lectures or possibly face reprimand.

UCLA administrators say they are planning no immediate legal action, other than to notify Jones and to alert students that selling course materials without the consent of the instructor and Chancellor Albert Carnesale violates university policy. Patricia Jasper, a university lawyer, said UCLA would reserve the right to take legal action if any students engaged in unauthorized selling of materials.

Adrienne Lavine, chairwoman of UCLA's academic senate, agreed that the university could do little more at this point. She said she found the profiles on the alumni group's website "inflammatory" and "not a positive way to address the concerns that Mr. Jones has expressed." Still, she said, "I certainly support freedom of speech and that extends to Andrew Jones as much as it does to every faculty member on campus."

The group's recent campaign has upset a number of targeted professors and triggered the resignation last weekend of Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, a prominent affirmative action opponent and former UCLA professor, from the advisory board for Jones' organization. Thernstrom said he joined the alumni group's more than 20-member advisory board last year because he believed it "had a legitimate objective of combating the extraordinary politicization of the faculty on elite campuses today." Still, Thernstrom said, "I felt it was extremely unwise, one, to put out a list of targets of investigation and to agree to pay students to provide information about what was going on in the classroom of those students. That just seems to me way too intrusive. It seems to me a kind of vigilantism that I very much object to." Thernstrom said a fellow advisory board member, Jascha Kessler, an emeritus UCLA English professor, also resigned for the same reason. Kessler could not be reached for comment, but Jones confirmed that Kessler had resigned.

Jones said other members of the advisory board include Linda Chavez, former federal civil rights commissioner in the Reagan administration and head of a Virginia-based anti-affirmative action group; former Republican Rep. Jim Rogan; and current UCLA professors Matt Malkan and Thomas Schwartz.

Jones said he has lined up one student who, for $100 a class session, has agreed to provide tapes, detailed lecture notes and materials with what the group considers inappropriate opinion. He would not name the student or the professor whose class will be monitored. Jones characterized the work as non-commercial news gathering and advocacy that does not violate university policy.

On one of its websites, the Bruin Alumni Group names education professor Peter McLaren as No. 1 on its "The Dirty Thirty: Ranking the Worst of the Worst." It says "this Canadian native teaches the next generation of teachers and professors how to properly indoctrinate students." McLaren, in a telephone interview, called the alumni group's tactics "beneath contempt." "Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism. Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility," he said.

The website also lists history professor Ellen DuBois, saying she "is in every way the modern female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory, and radical - very radical." In response, DuBois said: "This is a totally abhorrent invitation to students to participate in a witch hunt . against their professors." But DuBois minimized the effect on campus, saying "it's not even clear this is much other than the ill-considered action of a handful, if that, of individuals."

The group's leading financial backer, Rupe, is a UCLA alumnus. He said his foundation donated $5,000 because "I think there's not enough balance on the campus. Some families are going into hock to send their kids there, and are not getting their money's worth." Rupe said the group's plan to pay students to record alleged bias "would be ideal if it could be done legally." Rupe's philanthropy is not centered on conservative causes. His foundation donated $500,000 to UC Santa Barbara in 1998 to endow a professorship studying the effects of the media on social behavior. Ronald E. Rice, who holds the professorship, said Rupe told him he was "really interested in the truth. He wants to bring people with different perspectives together to really argue."

Source



FAR-LEFTIST LAW SCHOOLS

Democratic senators have repeatedly questioned whether Samuel Alito is in the legal "mainstream" during the opening days of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. To see what the "mainstream" means for the legal elites in the Democratic party, look no further than the law school "clinic." These campus law firms, faculty-supervised and student-staffed, have been engaging in left-wing litigation and advocacy for 30 years. Though law schools claim that the clinics teach students the basics of law practice while providing crucial representation to poor people, in fact they routinely neither inculcate lawyering skills nor serve the poor. They do, however, offer the legal professoriate a way to engage in political activism--almost never of a conservative cast. A survey of the clinical universe makes clear how politically one-sided law schools--and the legal ideology they inculcate--are.

In the last few years, law school clinics have put the Berkeley, Calif., school system under judicial supervision for disciplining black and Hispanic students disproportionately to their population (yes, that's Berkeley, the most racially sensitive spot on earth); sued the New York City Police Department for its conduct during the 2004 Republican National Convention; fought "gentrification" (read: economic revitalization) in urban "neighborhoods of color"; sued the Bush administration for virtually every aspect of its conduct of the war on terror; and lobbied for more restrictive "tobacco control" laws. Over their history, clinics can claim credit for making New Jersey pay for abortions for the poor; blocking job-providing industrial facilities; setting up needle exchanges for drug addicts in residential neighborhoods; and preventing New Jersey libraries from ejecting foul-smelling vagrants who are disturbing library users.

Law school clinics weren't always incubators of left-wing advocacy. But once the Ford Foundation started disbursing $12 million in 1968 to persuade law schools to make clinics part of their curriculum, the enterprise turned into a political battering ram. Clinics came to embody a radical new conception that emerged in the 1960s--the lawyer as social-change agent. Ford Foundation head McGeorge Bundy declared in 1966 that law "should be affirmatively and imaginatively used against all forms of injustice." No one can object to fighting discrimination and poverty. But no one elected a Ford-funded "poverty lawyer" to create a new entitlement scheme. If that lawyer can find a judge who shares his passion for welfare, however, the two of them will put into law a significant new distribution of rights and resources that no voter ever approved.

Today's clinical landscape is a perfect place to evaluate what happens when lawyers decide that they are chosen to save society. The law school clinics don't just take clients with obvious legal issues, such as criminal defendants or tenants facing eviction. They take social problems--unruly students in school, for example--and turn them into legal ones. Florence Roisman, a housing rights activist at the Indiana University School of Law, has inspired clinicians nationwide with her supremely self-confident call to arms: "If it offends your sense of justice, there's a cause of action."

The original rationale for many clinics disappears under their political agenda, even though schools still invoke it. Harvard, for instance, explains why law students should enroll in a clinic by emphasizing craft training: "Practical learning . . . should not be deferred until after law school graduation," the faculty declare. But what "skills of legal representation," in the faculty's words, will students in the Gender Violence, Law and Social Justice clinic pick up in researching "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered awareness" for the Massachusetts trial courts, or in helping with the "development of a new self-defense program" to prevent acquaintance rape?

New York University's Brennan Center Public Advocacy Clinic explicitly disavows advancing a student's lawyering knowledge: It is simply a vehicle for every type of left-wing political advocacy. The center spearheaded one of New York's most powerful welfare-rights groups, and, to make sure that the supply of left-wing agitators remains high, it also developed a "community advocacy" curriculum for high schools. Nor does another NYU clinic, this one on immigrant rights, limit itself to law matters. Students help lead protests and then rustle up media coverage for those protests--part of what the clinic calls "explor[ing] . . . ways of being a social justice lawyer." Students in Georgetown's State Policy Clinic work on "building a new economy that is inclusive, participatory and environmentally sustainable." Yale's Legislative Advocacy Clinic aims to move Connecticut toward "a more progressive agenda in taxing and spending revenue."

Plenty of litigation still does emanate from law schools, mostly aimed at substituting an unelected lawyer's judgment about the allocation of taxpayer resources for the legislature's. Yale just created an education clinic as a vehicle for suing Connecticut over its school-funding formulas. Stanford's Youth and Education Law Clinic put the East Palo Alto school district under judicial oversight for its special-education policies. Georgetown's Institute for Public Representation has been suing United Airlines for years for its decision to subject a passenger to a heightened security check after 9/11.

Ask why more clinics don't represent small-business men and you'll hear: We are "people's lawyers," representing clients who cannot afford attorneys. Oh, really? Georgetown University's Institute for Public Representation represents the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association in tobacco litigation. The idea that these charitable behemoths could not pay for lawyers is silly.

Environmentalism is hardly a grass-roots poor-people's movement, yet environmental clinics have been a law school staple since the 1970s. One famous environmental fight demonstrated just how specious is the environmental clinics' claim to be defending the poor. In 1997, Tulane's environmental law clinic got a planned plastics plant barred from a predominantly black township between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The clinic claimed that it was fighting "environmental racism," but many town residents, backed by the NAACP, had worked for years to win the Shintech company's new PVC plant for their parish. After Shintech withdrew, Louisiana's governor, furious at the loss of jobs, persuaded the state supreme court to require that Louisiana law clinics actually represent poor people: Under the new rules, students could represent community groups only if 51% of the group's members had incomes below 200% of federal poverty guidelines.

The legal elite rose up in outrage. NYU Law School's Brennan Center, the New York firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Association of University Professors, UC Berkeley's Center for Clinical Education and the ACLU sued the Louisiana Supreme Court for violating professors' and students' First Amendment rights. Happily, federal courts threw out their case.

That leaves one final rationale for clinics: consciousness-raising. Yale's legal-services clinic provided an especially up-close opportunity for such experiential learning. In the mid-1990s, the clinic wanted to stop a police plan to evict vagrants from the New Haven train station. Director Stephen Wizner encouraged his students to spend the night with them to experience their plight and to dissuade the police from taking action. The students did camp out in the station, and the police left the "homeless" in place.

Mr. Wizner calls such interventions "human learning." But did the students learn about the addictions, mental illness and social disaffiliation that keep these people on the street? Did they bond with the maintenance men who must clean up the feces, urine, and discarded paraphernalia left by the "homeless"? And are they confident that they know how keeping the "homeless" in public spaces affects their "clients'" motivation to seek help?

In light of the pedagogical claims made on clinical education's behalf, you would think that employers would demand to see such courses on an applicant's resume. In fact, the marketplace shrugs. Former Cornell Law School dean Roger Cranton observes: "A lot of hiring partners disparage clinical education. They think of it as a policy mishmash, not as an opportunity to learn skills." If law schools were really serious about preparing students for their legal careers, every one would have a transactional clinic for small businesses. The vast majority of lawyers advise clients on business deals--negotiating contracts, setting up corporations and partnerships, trying to avoid legal and tax liabilities, and arranging securities offerings and registrations. Struggling businesses, including those run by minority entrepreneurs, are hurting for lack of such counsel.

For schools interested in giving students hands-on training, representing the unrepresented, and providing "human learning," there is a world of clients and causes (however politically incorrect) that meet every justification offered for the current one-sided array of clinics: small landowners barred from developing their property because of zoning regulations or government eminent-domain actions, victims of crime, cops wrongly sued for false arrest, and many more. If the schools think they must provide political advocacy experience, clinics could organize inner-city residents to demand crime-free neighborhoods through, say, tougher sentencing laws. Students could help entrepreneurs lobby for less confiscatory tax policies.

The Samuel Alito hearings will demonstrate the end result of law schools' political myopia. The proponents of social justice lawyering are unlikely to acknowledge any time soon that their revolution has been a failure. At the very least, however, law schools should offer students the chance to question for themselves whether such lawyering is the best way to help society. Opening up clinics to radical perspectives on the benefits of limited government and personal responsibility would be a good place to start.

Source

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

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

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

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19 January, 2006

Self-Discipline May Beat Smarts as Key to Success

The article below is rather unrealistic in downplaying the importance of innate ability but what it reports is nonetheless of great importance. Nobody could deny the importance of self-discipline or the grievous results of lack of it. Given my own background in educational research, however, I guess I have to note that most research on delay of gratification (including that reported below) generalizes far more widely than the evidence allows

Zoe Bellars and Brad McGann, eighth-graders at Swanson Middle School in Arlington, do their homework faithfully and practice their musical instruments regularly. In a recent delayed gratification experiment, they declined to accept a dollar bill when told they could wait a week and get two dollars. Those traits might be expected of good students, certainly no big deal. But a study by University of Pennsylvania researchers suggests that self-discipline and self-denial could be a key to saving U.S. schools. According to a recent article by Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E.P. Seligman in the journal Psychological Science, self-discipline is a better predictor of academic success than even IQ.

"Underachievement among American youth is often blamed on inadequate teachers, boring textbooks, and large class sizes," the researchers said. "We suggest another reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline. . . . We believe that many of America's children have trouble making choices that require them to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain, and that programs that build self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement."

But how, educators, parents and other social scientists want to know, do you measure self-discipline? Duckworth, a former teacher studying for a doctorate in psychology, and Seligman, a psychology professor famous for books such as "Learned Optimism," used an assortment of yardsticks, including questions for the students (including how likely they are to have trouble breaking bad habits, on a 1-to-5 scale), ratings by their teachers and parents and the $1-now-or-$2-later test, which the researchers call the Delay Choice Task.

The results: "Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable, including report card grades, standardized achievement test scores, admission to a competitive high school and attendance. Self-discipline measured in the fall predicted more variance in each of these outcomes than did IQ, and unlike IQ, self-discipline predicted gains in academic performance over the school year."

The study looked at one group of 140 eighth-graders and another group of 164 eighth-graders in a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse magnet school in a Northeast city. The names of the city, the school and the students were not revealed, so this reporter attempted a very small and unscientific version of the Delay Choice Task at Swanson. Of the 10 eighth-graders approached during their lunch period, eight chose to forgo $1 right away in exchange for $2 in a week. The mothers of Zoe and Brad, who both declined the $1 offer, said they were not surprised by their children's decisions and thought the correlation of self-discipline with academic success made sense.

"I remember when Zoe was in the second grade, they had to do this poster of what they would do with $1 million," recalled her mother, Arlene Vigoda-Bellars, a former journalist. Her daughter said she would use it to go to Harvard. In preparation for that college competition, Zoe is taking intensified algebra and second-year Spanish, has a voice scholarship at a music school and plays first flute in Swanson's symphonic band.

Bertra McGann, a technical writer married to a Foreign Service officer, said that when Brad was 4, the family lived in Kenya and he was put in a class with older students. "He would come home from school and hand me the flashcards and work on his sight reading -- an extraordinary amount of self-discipline for a 4-year-old," she said. Now 13, Brad plays clarinet and basketball and earned his black belt in tae kwon do by practicing two hours a day, six days a week for two years.

Some experts expressed doubt about the Delay Choice Task. "I'd assume it was some kind of scam, take the buck and run," said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a nonprofit group that is critical of over-reliance on testing in U.S. schools. Zoe refused to take the $2 at the end of the experiment. "I think it is rude to take money from strangers," she said. Zoe always does her homework the minute she gets home from school at 2:30 p.m. Her friends, however, are not so diligent. During a telephone interview, Zoe noted that several of her friends' "away messages" -- put up on their online instant-messaging systems to explain why they aren't responding -- said they were doing their homework. "It's Sunday night," she said. "I finished mine Friday."

Some educators said schools can teach self-discipline. Rafe Esquith, an award-winning Los Angeles teacher, often tells his low-income fifth-graders about a study that showed that hungry 4-year-olds willing to wait for two marshmallows were more successful years later than those who gobbled up one marshmallow immediately. Ryan Hill, director of the TEAM Academy Charter School in Newark, N.J., said students at his school, a Knowledge Is Power Program middle school in a low-income neighborhood, are required to stay at school until their homework is done if TV interfered with study the night before. "Over time, they learn to just do their homework before watching TV, delaying gratification, which becomes a habit of self-discipline," Hill said.

Educational psychologist Gerald W. Bracey noted the power of self-discipline in sports, citing tennis star Chris Evert, who triumphed over more talented players because she practiced more. Martha McCarthy, an education professor at Indiana University, said such habits could be taught in early grades, with methods such as "giving students time to visit with their friends if they have been attentive during a lesson."

Will there be a Self-Discipline Test, the SDT, to replace the SAT? Most experts don't think so. Clever but lazy college applicants could "pretty easily figure out what the right answers would be to appear self-disciplined," said University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham. Bruce Poch, vice president and dean of admissions at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said self-discipline was good but not necessarily the only key to success. Albert Einstein, Poch said, "wasn't the most self-disciplined kid, at least according to his math grades through school."

That hasn't stopped Duckworth, who has two small daughters, from using her findings at home. Her eldest daughter, Amanda, 4, gets only one piece of saved Halloween candy each night after dinner. Asked why, Amanda says slowly and carefully, "It is de-LAY of gra-ti-fi-ca-tion."

Source



"INVESTIGATING" AN EGREGIOUS LIAR: WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE

Post lifted from Pirate Ballerina

Does CU honestly believe it has convened a "fair and balanced" investigating committee? After being caught slipping pro-Churchill ringers into the process, does CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (SCRM) actually believe it has put together an impartial and informed panel?

First of all, the current composition of the Ward Churchill Investigating Committee (formed of three CU professors and two outside academics by SCRM) is sadly but unsurprisingly comprised of the same proportion of leftists as academia itself-at least one of the panel may be a Marxist; at least three are radical leftists. This hardly seems impartial.

More importantly, however-and apparently overlooked in the selection process-is the fact that with one exception, none of the five committee members knows diddly-squat (a technical term meaning zippo, nada, zilch) about Indian history or Indian law. CU's SCRM apparently decided Indian scholarship was inconsequential to one of the most important allegations: Whether Churchill bent (or simply made up) history to support his argument.

Here's the current membership of SCRM's Churchill Investigating Committee:

• Jos‚ E. Lim¢n, professor of English, Mexican-American Studies, and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Robert N. Clinton, professor of law at Arizona State University.
• Marianne Wesson, professor of law at CU.
• Marjorie McIntosh, distinguished professor of history at CU.
• Michael Radelet, chairman of the department of sociology.

Missing from the qualifications of these professors is any hint of knowlege or even casual awareness of Indian history (with the aforementioned exception of Professor Clinton, whose expertise in Indian law theoretically, at least, requires a knowlege of Indian history). The allegations against Churchill are serious and require of the panelists a serious knowlege of academic plagiarism and/or Indian history to properly discharge their duty. Is it that hard to find an academic who A) has a scholarly expertise in one of the areas pertaining to the allegations against Churchill, and B) hasn't come out in a very public manner as pro-Churchill? 

It's not as though no such experts exist. We've found a solid list of academics and experts who, while some (or all) of whom may share academia's leftist tilt, at least bring to the investigation some expertise in Indian history (we'll look at plagiarism experts at a later date). In no particular order:

• Charles Wilkinson, University of Colorado - Boulder. Professor Wilkinson has published extensively on Indian sovereignty and law.
• Joseph McGeshick, Fort Peck Community College. Fort Peck is the tribal college for the Assiniboin tribe, who were greatly affected by the 1837 smallpox epidemic. Professor McGeshick has the added cache of being an enrolled Chippewa, and is an expert on the history of the local Plains Indians.
• Shepard Krech, Brown University. Professor Krech is the author of a book on the ecological aspects of Indian life.
• Elizabeth Fenn, Duke University. Professor Fenn has published an award-winning book on American Indian smallpox epidemics, as well as an award-winning article on biological warfare in American history (including deliberate smallpox infection).
• C. Adrian Heidenreich, Professor of Native American Studies at Montana State University-Billings. Professor Heidenreich is an expert on Plains Indians history.
• Michael K. Trimble, Ph.D. Dr. Trimble is the chief curator for the Army Corps of Engineers; he served as the lead forensic archeologist on the team that investigated the mass graves found in northern Iraq. He also happens to have written his dissertation on the Mandan smallpox epidemic of 1837.
• Michael O'Brien, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Professor O'Brien led the excavation of Fort Clark, the site of the 1837 smallpox outbreak among the Mandans. He also supervised the above-mentioned Michael Trimble's dissertation on the 1837 epidemic.
• W. Raymond Wood, University of Missouri-Columbia. Professor Wood is an expert on Plains Indians.
• Barton H. Barbour, Boise State University. Professor Barbour is the author of Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade, in which he examines the Mandan smallpox epidemic.

Surely at least one of the above-noted experts in Indian history has some free time to examine the scholarship of Ward Churchill. With all this expertise out there (and if we can find nine experts, there must be hundreds, if not thousands), it makes one wonder what SCRM is thinking when it stacked the deck with a Mexican folklorist, a feminist lawyer, a British history expert, a death penalty opponent, and a single Indian law expert. Did they just use a dart board?

Or-since from the panel's lack of expertise it seems obvious that investigating charges of plagiarism and fabrication of Indian history are not truly the mandate of the panel-did SCRM have some other outcome in mind?

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

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

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

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18 January, 2006

BOSTON PURSUES THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

A growing number of parents, teachers, and local education advocacy groups are pressing the committee searching for Boston's next school superintendent to find a new chief who is not afraid to make radical changes to help black and Hispanic students do better in school.

They say they worry that the School Committee has launched its search seeking someone too similar to departing Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant. They point to the draft of the superintendent's job description, approved by the School Committee, which trumpets Payzant's accomplishments over the past decade but does not urgently call for a dynamic leader to lift the schools to greater heights.

The search, they say, should be driven by what needs to be accomplished, and they especially want a leader with a proven record of closing the achievement gap for black and Hispanic, special-education, and English as a Second Language students. They also want a superintendent who has succeeded in increasing the hiring of minority teachers and administrators, reducing the dropout rate, and building strong relationships with parents.

''A position description that leans too heavily on staying the course will run the danger of discouraging strong leaders from applying," said John Mudd, director of the Boston School Reform Project at Massachusetts Advocates for Children. ''The tone could be read to communicate a sense of complacency rather than urgency; to be searching for a caretaker to continue past innovations rather than a leader to help us face new challenges."

Boston has raised its overall scores on standardized tests over the past decade, but black and Hispanic students continue to trail their white classmates. More work needs to be done in closing that gap, Payzant has acknowledged....

Some teachers, principals, and community leaders said the next superintendent should feel at ease among minority and immigrant groups, and be able to build alliances with them, while also ensuring that administrators and teachers are trained to understand and work with students from diverse cultural backgrounds.

''The thing this person needs to have that Tom has struggled with is, at the gut level, to understand and identify with the culture of the kids," said Jacqueline Rivers, executive director of MathPower, which trains middle school math teachers and advocates for change within the school system.

Others said they are concerned about the dwindling number of black and Hispanic students in the pipeline for the city's three exam schools. More than half of the students in the fourth through sixth grades who are enrolled in accelerated classes that prepare them for the exam schools are white and Asian, even though black and Hispanic students make up more than three-fourths of Boston students. The disparity continues through high school, when black and Hispanic students are more likely to drop out.

More here



MODERN-DAY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AS ONE OF THEIR TEACHERS EXPERIENCED THEM

A professor from a small Southern college sent this in to Rate Your students. It shows what negligible discipline produces

"I recently experienced a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder as I looked at my roll for this semester. A student in one of my classes had the same name, GM, as a student that had driven me crazy when I used to teach high school in the same state. I was relieved this week to meet a new GM. This one actually stayed in his seat during the entire period, didn't ask for the bathroom pass every 5 minutes, and left his desk clear of vandalism.

It's easy to whine about students, but everyday I remind myself how relatively easy I have it now. In high school, I was supposed to teach students that were reading at a 3rd grade reading level, a couple others who thought it was funny to destroy school property, and even a few with severe emotional and behavior issues that cursed me out in class. Now at the college level, I am blessed with students that are 99% just generally nice people. Yes, they can drive me crazy at times, but I am learning to appreciate the small things about my students. A student who asks if I need help carrying my stack of syllabi to class. Another who volunteer hours to charities in the area. The student that who always spoke up to ask an interesting question in class and later told me that she learned a lot in the class. An adult student who suffered from a disfiguring and painful disease, but always brought a smile and enthusiasm into the classroom. Students who came from relative poverty, and are working their way through school to make a better life for themselves.

In college, we are left with the cream of the crop, although it's easy to forget about that. The reality of education is that "no child left behind" is impossible to fulfill. If you've ever been in a public school classroom, as a teacher or a student, you probably know there are always a few that are going to be left behind. It may sound harsh, but thank goodness for that.

So I will probably never see the former GM in my college classroom. I hope he's not in jail, and I wish him success in the "real world". The classroom was just not the right place for him."

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

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

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

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17 January, 2006

WHY THE DECLINE IN LITERACY?

Australian writer Christopher Pearson comments on the American figures headlined here yesterday

What, apart from rage, is the most appropriate response to the American data and emerging evidence of similar trends in Australia? I suppose it's to acknowledge the official confirmation of what most of us have long suspected. The jig is up. Thirty-odd years of curricular experiment and faddish methods of teaching reading have demonstrated their true worth. Thirty-odd years worth of students have been increasingly denied the most powerful means of meritocratic advance, of general self-betterment and, most importantly, of access to the canon of great works which are the core of Western civilisation.

The French have a phrase to cover betrayals of this order. They call it le trahison des clercs, the treason of the clerical classes. Implicit in it is the notion of conscious delinquency, of knowing better and still behaving irresponsibly. That is the charge that the subliterate young, here as well as in America, are entitled to level at many of their teachers, lecturers and the vast armies of education bureaucrats.

The rot set in when primary school teachers abandoned conventional methods of teaching reading in favour of more fashionable trends which involved less drudgery and less tiresome assessment of outcomes. The drift away from measuring skills and relative competency covered a multitude of pedagogical failures. And how natural it was that, as measurable outcomes began to decline sharply, Australian teachers' unions should have begun to echo their American counterparts and mounted the case that the process of measurement and notions of success and failure were inherently anti-educational and elitist.

It's important to acknowledge that not all teachers deserve to be tarred with the same brush. The loopy policy of automatic promotion through primary school meant that very often problem students suddenly became the responsibility of overworked teachers with no remedial reading experience and all sorts of other responsibilities. The prevalence of remedial reading courses at university level about a decade later suggests the dimensions of the dilemma.

By the time teenagers reached the second year of senior school, it would have taken a fair amount of courage in the early '80s to buck the system and refuse to promote them just on account of reading difficulties. It might well have been viewed as a vote of no confidence in colleagues and the system as a whole, a kind of whistle-blowing. No doubt many conscientious primary and secondary teachers dedicated time out of school hours to discreet remedial reading lessons, well before their principals began to acknowledge the existence and extent of a literacy crisis. Things would also have been much worse had it not been for the efforts of countless unpaid volunteers, belatedly doing the work that primary teachers should have performed years earlier.

Primary and secondary systems once served to certify not just adequate attendance but the acquisition of prescribed levels in certain skills. As the certification process began to fail, the universities ought to have intervened more effectively to preserve the value of their own currency. Instead they have presided over its gradual debasement. There are honourable exceptions in some of the sciences and engineering. But few first degrees are as demanding now as they were 30 years ago and, despite the unprecedented rate of growth in most domains of knowledge, very few are more onerous. In the humanities and social sciences, the dumbing-down process is at its most obvious and debilitating.

The Australian education sector as a whole is inclined to put a lot of the blame on external factors such as political interference. It's certainly true that Robert Menzies' sudden expansion of universities was a benignly intended catastrophe. Had he been more of a conservative, he might have realised the truth of Kingsley Amis's line: "More means worse." Again, a fuller account of the local literacy crisis would take account of the state government policies, especially those of politically correct Labor administrations, which sanctioned and concealed declining standards. The Dawkins era of philistinism triumphant - and the collapse of the distinction between vocational training and a liberal education - no doubt helped to ensure the emergence of the worst educated and also perhaps the dimmest generation of trainee teachers in the span of a century.

However, even making allowances for all the external factors, most of the blame for the present state of the teaching profession must lie with teachers themselves, especially but by no means exclusively with those in the public sector. Had they acted more like a body of professionals, it's far more likely they would have been treated as such. Instead there has been a burgeoning vicious circle. When 40 per cent of senior secondary students in Victoria enrolled in private schools last year, they and their parents may not all have known what they were buying into but we can be reasonably confident that they knew what they had spurned.

Some calculations from the Australian Scholarships Group, an education investment fund, were released on Thursday. The cost to parents of putting a child born in 2005 through the public system to matriculation is reckoned at $110,000. The price of a three-year first degree was estimated at an average of another $140,000. Brendan Nelson, the federal Minister for Education, should be monitoring levels of literacy throughout the cycle to give parents a better idea of just what they can expect to be getting for their money.

More here



THAT UNENDING LEFTIST LOVE OF CRIMINALS AGAIN

Protecting criminals and pedophiles is more important than protecting children in socialist Britain

Hundreds of blacklisted teachers, including paedophiles, are being allowed into schools so long as they avoid certain types of pupils, The Times has learnt. Headteachers are having to accept supply staff into classrooms without knowing if they are on the blacklist or have criminal records. As a picture emerges of a child protection system in chaos, the Government is preparing to strip ministers of their power to let sex offenders work with children. Police will receive a new advisory role. The practice of giving convicted paedophiles permission to work in schools with pupils of a different age or sex from those they desire was disclosed by The Times this weekend.

Yesterday a former teaching agency official who had access to List 99 confirmed that this procedure was widely known among companies providing supply teachers. Yet it appears to have come as a surprise to teachers’ leaders and parents. There are about 15,000 on the blacklist compiled at the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Gerard Connolly, who held the names of all problem teachers on a computer in his office from 1996 to 2004, said that many had “caveats”. Most forbade teachers from working with one gender of pupil, or children above or below a particular age. Some had geographical restrictions placed upon them. A few were banned from individual schools. “You used to see them every other page or so with a restriction on,” Dr Connolly said. He estimated that between 700 and 1,000 names on the blacklist had permission to teach particular categories of pupil. “I have no way of knowing how many were working in schools but they were certainly free to do so,” he said.

Last night an Education Department spokesman said: “The list is held by the department and the criminal records bureau. We certainly don’t recognise that figure. Dr Connolly was puzzled by the Government’s delay in telling the public about the number of sex offenders who are entitled to work in classrooms. “It surprised me, people coming on television saying they don’t know,” he said. “All they have to do is count them.”

The unexpected scale of the problem added to the woes of the DfES, which has struggled to keep up with the pace of disclosures about paedophile teachers. Ruth Kelly told the Commons last Thursday: “List 99 covers those barred for life from working in schools.” On Friday her officials were still claiming that List 99 was an “absolute bar” on teaching. Then The Times reported that in 2001 Estelle Morris had allowed Keith Hudson — who was placed on the sex offenders register after compiling scrapbooks containing pictures of boys masturbating — to work in girls’ schools. A convicted molester who was fixated on boys in white underpants has permission to work with children aged 14 and over. Both are on List 99.

Officials changed their story. A spokesman said: “In 2000 we introduced regulations to make sure that barring someone convicted of sexual offences against a child was absolute.” But that explanation imploded yesterday when it emerged that in January 2005 Ms Kelly allowed William Gibson to work in schools. He had a conviction for indecently assaulting a 15-year-old female pupil. Mr Gibson’s case highlights that teacher-supply agencies are a weak link in child protection. After being removed from three schools in the North East he found a position teaching mathematics in Bournemouth.

The job came via Step Teachers, an agency aware of his conviction in 1980 for indecent assault and his imprisonment in 2000 for deception, forgery and theft. Mr Gibson has been suspended. James Newman, the agency’s director, said: “Step Teachers undertakes not to discriminate against an application on the basis of a conviction or other information. It is unfortunate that the teacher is still very much in shock over the circumstances and the way he is being treated.” The agency had provided Mr Gibson without alerting the head that he was a convicted child molester. Agencies bear responsibility for checks of criminal records and List 99 entries. Step Teachers claimed it was forbidden from telling schools about convictions. “Under the terms of the agreement with the Criminal Records Bureau, we would not be able to tell the school,” Mr Newman said. “We would have to destroy all that documentation because of data protection laws.”

Source

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

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

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

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16 January, 2006

Literacy of College Graduates Is on Decline

Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation. "It's appalling -- it's really astounding," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University at Fresno. "Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder."

While more Americans are graduating from college, and more than ever are applying for admission, far fewer are leaving higher education with the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure and physical activity, according to the federal study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Experts could not definitively explain the drop. "The declining impact of education on our adult population was the biggest surprise for us, and we just don't have a good explanation," said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of education statistics. "It may be that institutions have not yet figured out how to teach a whole generation of students who learned to read on the computer and who watch more TV. It's a different kind of literacy." "What's disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels," he added.

The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading -- such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose -- reading and understanding information in short texts -- down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient -- compared with 40 percent in 1992. Schneider said the results do not separate recent graduates from those who have been out of school several years or more.

The results were based on a sample of more than 19,000 people 16 or older, who were interviewed in their homes. They were asked to read prose, do math and find facts in documents. The scores for "intermediate" reading abilities went up for college students, causing educators to question whether most college instruction is offered at the intermediate level because students face reading challenges.

Gorman said that he has been shocked by how few entering freshmen understand how to use a basic library system, or enjoy reading for pleasure. "There is a failure in the core values of education," he said. "They're told to go to college in order to get a better job -- and that's okay. But the real task is to produce educated people."

Other experts noted that the slip in scores could be attributed to most state schools not being particularly selective, accepting most high school graduates to bolster enrollment. In addition, Schneider said schools may not be taking into account a more diverse population, and the language and cultural barriers that come with shifting demographics. That would account for the dramatic drop in average prose literacy for Hispanics, which slipped by 18 percentage points, he said. "The Hispanic scores were somewhat understandable based on the changing demographics," Schneider said. "Diversity may lead to more difficulties in education."

Dolores Perin, a reading expert at Columbia University Teachers College, said that her work has indicated that the issue may start at the high school level. "There is a tremendous literacy problem among high school graduates that is not talked about," said Perin, who has been sitting in on high school classes as part of a teaching project. "It's a little bit depressing. The colleges are left holding the bag, trying to teach students who have challenges."

On average, adult literacy is virtually unchanged since 1992, with 30 million people struggling with basic reading tasks. While adults made some progress in quantitative literacy, such as the ability to calculate taxes, the study showed that from 1992 to 2003 adults made no improvement in their ability read newspapers or books, or comprehend basic forms.

One bright spot is that blacks are making significant gains in reading and math and are reaching higher levels of education. For instance, the report showed that the average rate of prose literacy, or reading, among blacks rose six percentage points since 1992. Prose and document reading scores for whites remained the same

Source



Australia: Parents dig deep to pay for choice in education

Soaring costs are squeezing some families out of private education as fees top $12,000 a year at prestigious Brisbane schools. But enrolments are still expected to rise, with parents willing to "make significant sacrifices" to put children through their "school of choice". Even Catholic education was becoming unaffordable for some families, Federation of Parents and Friends Association of Queensland executive officer Paul Dickie said. "Increasingly poor Catholic families can't afford to attend Catholic schools," Mr Dickie said. "I know that principals do a lot to assist families, and we say that no one will be denied an education in a Catholic school because of their financial situation, but the thing is a number of them don't come because obviously they don't like coming up and saying, 'Well, I can't afford to go there.' "So the Catholic schools try to keep fees to a minimum, but because of increasing costs, fees will go up more than the consumer price index."

Fees at some Catholic schools are at the bottom of the cost ladder. The Southport School is Queensland's most expensive, charging tuition fees of $12,276 for a student in Year 11 or 12. At Brisbane Grammar School, parents will pay $12,270 to educate a child in Years 8 to 12. At the Anglican Church Grammar School at East Brisbane, "Churchie" parents will pay $11,124 for a son in Year 12. One of Brisbane's leading girls' schools, Somerville House at South Brisbane, will charge $9882 for tuition in Years 7 to 12, but this does not include levies for technology, excursions, bus travel and house expenses....

Association of Independent Schools of Queensland operations director David Robertson said enrolments were still increasing by about 4 per cent a year. Parents were willing "to do anything" to make sure their children attended their school of choice. "All of the research and data that we see keeps on coming back to the same issues," Mr Robertson said. "It's about parental choice, those parents value the partnership between the school and parents. There is a high sense that there is a very high quality of teachers in independent schools and issues like good discipline, academic outcomes - parents value all those things very highly."

Mr Dickie said demand for Catholic education also continued to increase because of their caring pastoral program, competent teachers and academic excellence, which all created "a happiness factor" that attracted mums and dads.

More here



Stupid in America: "For 'Stupid in America,' a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students 'stupid.' We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America. The American boy who got the highest score told me: 'I'm shocked, 'cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us.' The Belgians did better because their schools are better. At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education. This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse. In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says schools chancellor Joel Klein." (Update: There are a lot of comments on this story here)

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

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

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

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15 January, 2006

OPPONENTS OF THE ACADEMIC LEFT ARE MAD, OF COURSE

The modern-day American Left does not of course have access to Stalin's psychiatric prisons as a means of dealing with dissenters but accusations of insanity do nearly as well. Never mind the fact that calling your opponent insane is completely "ad hominem" and, as such, an argument of no scholarly merit whatever. The article below deals with the Australian anthropologist (Derek Freeman) who conclusively demolished Margaret Mead's lies about the sexual permissiveness of primitive societies -- Lies which were for a long time immensely influential and eagerly seized on by Leftists.



The article summarizes a thesis put forward by Hiram Caton and if "ad hominem" arguments are of interest, I might note that in my own conversations with Prof. Caton, when he was Head of the "School of Applied Ethics" at Griffith University in Queensland, I found him to have some very odd views of his own (he thinks AIDS is a myth, for instance). He may even be right in his views but I would certainly not accept any of his judgments willy nilly. Those who live in glass houses .....

Just how far should scholars go in debunking intellectual opponents? Is persistence, to the point of ignoring one's own pursuits, a sign of mental instability? The case of Derek Freeman, the contentious Australian anthropologist who died in 2001 at the age of 84, raises both questions. For decades he relentlessly dissected and attacked the work of the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, who died in 1978. Freeman sought to persuade his colleagues that Mead's pathbreaking work on Samoa was fundamentally misbegotten. In particular he criticized her first book, the one that made her reputation: Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (1928). In it, Mead depicted casual sex among Samoan teenage girls to argue that adolescence is not a stressful time in all cultures....

Freeman was convinced that Mead had been duped into believing that Samoa was a sexual Shangri-La. He laid out his argument in two books: Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Westview Press, 1999). Freeman also participated in the making of a 1988 documentary, "Margaret Mead and Samoa", which included an interview with one of Mead's original informants, Fa'apua'a, who said, in the film's dramatic final moments, that indeed, she and her friends had fooled Mead....

Hiram Caton believes he has found compelling evidence to explain what drove Freeman. The recently retired professor of history and politics at Griffith University, in Australia, specializes in political psychology, with a particular interest in cult leaders and followers. He worked closely with Freeman from 1983 to 1993 and stayed in touch with him until his death. In "The Exalted Self: Derek Freeman's Quest for the Perfect Identity," published last year in the Canadian journal Identity, he argues that the anthropologist, who had a reputation for eccentric and antagonistic behavior, had a clinically diagnosable narcissistic-personality disorder. Freeman's urgency stemmed as much from that disorder as from his critique of Mead and cultural anthropology, Mr. Caton believes.

Not surprisingly, this starkly psychoanalytic view discomfits some scholars. Peter Hempenstall, a professor of history at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, is preparing a biography of Freeman with Donald F. Tuzin, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego. While he finds some of Mr. Caton's ideas "suggestive," Mr. Hempenstall says, the "presentation of Derek Freeman's personality as the result of a clearly established clinical pathology is too extreme and unconvincing."

The question of Derek Freeman's mental health and its role in his scholarly work is not new to close observers of the battle over Margaret Mead and her legacy. As Mr. Caton notes, Freeman was "shadowed by a reputation that he was a 'difficult man' who suffered from a mysterious psychological disorder." "Until his last breath," Mr. Caton says, "he denied imputations of a disorder, styled them 'defamatory,' and unequivocally affirmed his complete mental health and self-control."....

Mr. Caton says he became keenly aware of what he calls Freeman's "unusual psychology" during their extended collaboration. They conferred closely in a campaign to get social scientists to consider biological perspectives in their scholarship. During that time, Caton writes, Freeman gave him access to a large amount of his current personal correspondence and agreed to extensive interviews on his beliefs. That led Mr. Caton to ponder the complexities of the anthropologist's personality.

For instance, despite the obvious intensity of the two breakdowns, the correspondence unearthed by Mr. Caton reveals that Freeman did not suffer from long-term mental illness. No psychiatrist would suggest that Freeman was, say, schizophrenic. Rather, Mr. Caton argues, the documents suggest that Freeman's attacks on his opponents — whether real or perceived — stemmed from a narcissistic personality disorder. People with a narcissistic-personality disorder are generally arrogant, exploitative, and unempathetic, while exhibiting a grandiose sense of self-importance, observes Mr. Caton. They are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success or brilliance, and they believe that they are "special" and can be understood only by other special people.....

Other anthropologists differ on whether Mr. Caton's use of the play and other evidence to argue that Mr. Freeman had a personality disorder is helpful, or even responsible. Paul Shankman, a Samoa specialist and professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says the strength of Mr. Caton's analysis is his ingenuity in using such clues as Freeman's response to Mr. Williamson's play. That makes clear the dimensions of Freeman as "a deeply troubled individual," Mr. Shankman says. Moreover, he says, Mr. Caton "suggests how Freeman's psychological problems — with sex, aggression, dominance, and conflict — came to be personified in Margaret Mead."

Mr. Tuzin, of San Diego, is in the opposite camp. Mr. Caton's article, he says, "must be added to the long list of works that approach Derek Freeman ad hominem — this one with a vengeance — and prefer to dwell on his style and personality instead of the quality of his arguments."

Another former colleague of Freeman's, Michael W. Young, finds the article, and a similar one that Mr. Caton will soon publish, "compellingly argued" and "very persuasive." Both works "confirmed in a scientific manner what I knew about him intuitively," says the professor of anthropology at Australian National University, who knew Freeman and who in 2004 published a highly regarded first volume of a biography of Bronislaw Malinowski, the social-anthropology pioneer and South Pacific expert, titled Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920 (Yale University Press).

And yet, Mr. Young says, "there is something about Caton's relentless dissection that is reminiscent of Freeman's own ruthless attempts to 'expose' others and demolish them. I sense an almost scary determination to lay the man bare. The overall effect, of course, is to diminish Freeman in some way — as all psychological biography tends to do — so it comes as something of a surprise when right at the end of his second paper Caton says something to the effect that he was an immensely talented man."

More here



SOWELL ON EDUCATIONAL DECLINE

Recent news that school children in Charlotte, North Carolina, had the highest test scores among children in big cities across the country had a special impact on me. Back in the late 1930s, I went to school in Charlotte and, while I don't know what the test scores were then, I do know that we were far behind the children going to school in New York. That became painfully clear when my family moved north and I enrolled in a school in Harlem in 1939. From being the top student in my class down in North Carolina I was suddenly the bottom student in my class in Harlem -- and struggling to try to catch up.

Decades later, my research turned up the fact that the kids I couldn't keep up with in that school back then had an average IQ of 84. Contrary to fashionable beliefs, it was not the racial segregation that made the education inferior in Charlotte, since the school in Harlem was also a black school. It was common in those days for a kid from the South to be set back a full year when he entered school in New York. The difference in educational standards was that great. I had somehow persuaded the principal to let me be an exception. It was a mistake on his part and mine. I was clearly a year behind the kids who had gone to school in Harlem.

Three years later, I had caught up and pulled ahead, and was now assigned to a class for advanced students, where the average IQ was over 120. That does not mean that IQs don't matter. It means that I had a lot of work to do to get my act together in the meantime, in order to overcome the disadvantage of an inferior education in North Carolina.

Fast forward a few more years. I am now in the Marine Corps, going through boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. When the mental test results from my platoon were tabulated, the man in charge expressed amazement at how many high scores there were. "Where are you guys from?" he asked. "New York? Pennsylvania?" We were from New York -- and the high quality of our schools at that time was undoubtedly a factor in the high test scores we made.

No one in those days would have thought that Charlotte schools would end up turning out better educated students than the schools in New York. I don't know what has happened in Charlotte but I do know what has happened in New York.

Some years ago, when I looked at the math textbooks that my nieces in Harlem were using, I discovered that they were being taught in the 11th grade what I had been taught in the 9th grade. Even if they were the best students around, they would still be two years behind -- with their chances in life correspondingly reduced.

New York City has two kinds of high school diplomas -- its own locally recognized diploma, that is not recognized by the state or by many colleges, and the state's Regents' diploma for high school graduates who have scored above a given level on the Regents' exam. The Regents diploma is for students who are serious about going on to a good college. Only 9 percent of black students and 10 percent of Latino students receive Regents diplomas.

That a Southern city's school children would now top the list of big city test scores may be due to the fact that the South has not jumped on the bandwagon of the latest fads in education to the same extent as avant garde places like New York City, where spending per pupil is about 50 percent above the national average.

These fads now include the dogma that racial "diversity" improves education, as does emphasis on racial "identity." In reality, a recent study shows that black students who perform well in racially integrated schools are unpopular with their black classmates. They are accused of "acting white," a charge that can bring anything from ostracism to outright violence. The same is not true to the same extent among blacks attending all-black schools. Hispanic students' popularity likewise falls off sharply -- even more so than among blacks -- as their grade-point average rises.

Is it surprising that white and Asian American children do better without these self-inflicted handicaps to academic achievement? Is it surprising that New York City schools are now paying the price for avant garde educational dogmas?

Source



US EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS MAY HAVE SLIPPED BUT SO HAVE STANDARDS ELSEWHERE (As any reader of this blog would know)

I know it's absolutely dreadful to speak the truth in these matters but it is only the blacks and Hispanics who make the USA look bad comparatively. But don't take my word for it. Read what the frightfully proper Educational Testing Service says in their report on the subject:

"If we adjust the mean NALS scores for U.S. adults under age 65 to exclude all foreign-born adults as well as native-born Blacks and Hispanics, then the mean prose and quantitative scores of the remaining U.S. adults (Asian and White, native-born) would rise to 288, ranking the U.S. second highest-tied with Finland and Norway-on the prose scale and fifth highest on the quantitative scale.. The findings clearly suggest that future gains in the comparative, international literacy standing U.S. adults will require substantial improvements in the literacy proficiencies of Blacks, Hispanics, and the foreign born from all racial/ethnic groups." [ETS Report, P.23]

More here

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

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

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

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14 January, 2006

OFFICIAL BRITISH COVERUP OF PERVERT TEACHER COMES UNGLUED

The man who led the police inquiry into Paul Reeve, the sex offender allowed to work as a teacher, yesterday challenged claims by Education Department officials that the PE teacher had not meant to access child pornography. Detective Inspector Paul Cunningham, of Norfolk police, told colleagues that Mr Reeve admitted in 2003 paying to access pornographic images of children and did so with his own credit card. The disclosure contradicts the main reason given by officials at the Education Department for allowing Mr Reeve to return to work.

A police source close to Mr Cunningham said: "He [Mr Reeve] was cautioned for inciting the downloading of child porn using his credit card. The fact that the Department of Education (DfES) didn't seem able to find this out or check with Norfolk police is a matter of record, and very surprising."

A letter was sent to Mr Reeve in May last year on behalf of Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. Now known to have been signed by Kim Howells, then a Minister of State at the DfES, the letter stated that he was "not unsuitable for working with children".

The letter, which made specific reference to Mr Reeve being on the sex offenders register, gave reasons for the decision, including that Mr Reeve denied "intentionally accessing child pornography".

More here



Pope Center/FIRE report — and UNC's audacity

Posted lifted from The Locker Room

Famous WWII Gen. George S. Patton's motto, which he took from Frederick the Great, was "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace" (audacity, audacity, always audacity). It served his generalship and the Allied cause well in war. I think that motto's spirit serves the Academic Left in their cultural war against American principles, including the First Amendment's protections of religion and speech. They audaciously restrict liberty on many fronts and dare the students to sue them — knowing that in most cases, the students won't, because they're either ignorant of their rights or cowed by the prospect of fighting the university and all the hateful labels that the higher minds of the university culture will rain down on them.

Consider the culture at UNC-Chapel Hill over just the past few years:

* A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against UNC-CH’s attempt to prevent a Christian outreach fraternity from choosing its members based on agreement with the group's faith

* The Office of Civil Rights ruled that a UNC-CH lecturer racially and sexually harassed a student in her class

* The Carolina Women's Center excluded a student group from participating in its "Women's Week" events on the ideological grounds that the group was pro-life.

Those we know about because the affected students were audacious enough to cry foul. What of the ones who don't? Remember, only one of the many religious student groups that UNC-CH threatened with derecognition for not allowing nonbelievers to lead the groups actually complained. The rest ceded their liberty in the face of UNC-CH's aggression.



Australian students waking up to what a poor investment many university course are

Australia's volatile higher education sector has fallen victim to the strong job market, with increased competition for students already starting to hurt smaller universities. One regional university, Central Queensland, has lost $5million in funding after being forced to return 490 student places to the federal Government for redistribution, having failed to attract enough students.

University applications continue to fall - down 3per cent, or 6607, this year, on top of a 5per cent fall last year - and the increased competition for students is driving a wedge into the higher education sector. Western Australia, with its low unemployment rate, has suffered the biggest drop in applications - down 8per cent on top of a 10per cent fall last year. According to figures compiled by the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, and released yesterday, Victoria is down 5per cent, Tasmania 3per cent and NSW and the ACT down 1per cent. Strong population growth has enabled Queensland to defy the trend with an increase of 3per cent, albeit after a 7per cent drop last year.

Australian National University vice-chancellor Ian Chubb yesterday warned that the dramatic student shift could have unintended political consequences for the Howard Government as it pursues major reforms in the sector. "The whole equilibrium is very fragile as we see a decrease in the number of fee-paying places, a substantial shift in student preferences, some universities handing back places and apparently other institutions offering low entry," Professor Chubb said. "So there is a whole different dynamic than there was a few years ago."

The strong job market, a push towards trades and higher university fees have meant students are responding in ways that were not predicted in the Government's education blueprint. Softer demand has brought lower entry scores and seen many students opt for the big brand institutions at the expense of smaller regional campuses. Acting vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland, Michael Keniger, said students could now get into metropolitan universities with lower scores than in the past so they were moving to the city. "We find it harder to fill places on our regional campuses," he said....

Professor Keniger said students were being more selective about what they wanted to study and where, rather than using the first-year as a bedding-down period. "I think we're certainly starting to see a separation of institutions," he said. "And that's a risk or an advantage."

Last year the Government injected an extra 10,665 new places into universities, rising to 39,000 by 2009. But with fewer students applying to university, the increased supply has driven entry scores down, prompting Education Minister Brendan Nelson to warn last month that standards were "unacceptably low".

More here

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

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

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

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13 January, 2006

UK: MEET YOUR FRIENDLY SEX-OFFENDING TEACHER

AT LEAST ten convicted sex offenders have been cleared by ministers to work with children over the past three years, The Times has learnt. Officials are now trawling through another five years of records to discover how many more teachers and school staff have been allowed to work with children despite being on the sex offenders register.

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, admitted yesterday that "a small number" on the register were not on List 99, banning them from schools. But she refused to say how many cases there were or how long the situation had being going on. An intense search was under way last night to establish exactly how many teachers had avoided List 99, the government blacklist barring them from schools, since the sex offenders register was set up in 1997. The Education Secretary said that she took "full responsibility for all the decisions taken in the department on whether individuals should be placed on List 99". But she implied that other ministers had been at fault by announcing that she had taken charge "with immediate effect" of decisions on all List 99 cases involving people on the register.

Ms Kelly will come under intense pressure to disclose more information when she faces MPs at Education Questions in the Commons today. The Conservatives demanded last night that Ms Kelly "come clean" on the scale of the problem. Tony Blair sought to shore up his embattled Education Secretary by authorising a Downing Street spokesman to break with precedent and state that Ms Kelly would not lose her job in a reshuffle expected within days. Asked whether the Prime Minister retained full confidence in her, the spokesman said: "The answer is yes."

The controversy erupted after it emerged this week that Paul Reeve began a job as a PE teacher at the Hewett School in Norwich, Norfolk, last month. Mr Reeve was on the sex offenders register after accepting a police caution for accessing paedophile websites. He had disclosed his status as a sex offender to the school and presented a letter from the Safeguarding Children Unit of Department of Education, on behalf of the Secretary of State, dated 5 May 2005. It stated that Ms Kelly had ruled he should not be placed on List 99 and "was not unsuitable for working with children". The letter made specific reference to Mr Reeve being on sex offenders register and gave reasons for the decision, including: "In particular you deny intentionally accessing child pornography". The Secretary of State gave weight to "the advice from her senior medical officer who did not believe you presented a risk to children in your care". It added: "You did not fully appreciate the vulnerable position you put yourself in".

Mr Reeve was suspended by the school and later resigned after Norfolk police raised their concerns with the head. It had not been contacted by the DfES about Mr Reeve's case.

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Boston advanced classes see dip in "diversity" after racial favouritism dropped

The only surprise is that people are still surprised

Advanced classes like Maureen Costa's at Hennigan Elementary School, where students learn physics as early as fourth grade, have been the best ticket into Boston Latin and the city's other elite exam schools for years. But inside the accelerated classes at the Hennigan and other public schools in the city, the pipeline to exam schools is starting to look a lot less like Boston's public schools. Black and Hispanic students fill 44 percent of the 968 seats in the accelerated classes in the school district, though they make up more than three-quarters of Boston's students overall. White and Asian students now occupy 55 percent of the seats, though they are only 23 percent of the district. In particular, the number of black students, now at 239, in the classes has dropped by half since 1999, when the city stopped using racial quotas to assign students to the classes. [Surprise!]

The low enrollment of the school system's largest racial and ethnic groups in the classes renews debate about whether all children, particularly black students, are getting equal opportunities in the city's schools, an issue that has long rocked Boston. ''It's not a true picture of what the city is," said Costa, who presides over a majority white and Asian fourth-grade accelerated class in a school that is 85 percent black and Hispanic. ''You can't tell me that all black children aren't capable of achieving like white children. I wouldn't buy that."

Prior to 1999, black students filled about half of the seats in the advanced classes. Now, all students are admitted to the classes based only on their score on a national standardized test. School district leaders feared lawsuits if they kept racial quotas for the program; a 1998 federal court ruling banned racial quotas in exam school admissions. Since then, black and Hispanic enrollment at Boston Latin, the most competitive exam school, has declined. In an interview last week, Boston School Committee chairwoman Elizabeth Reilinger said she was unaware that the proportion of black students had dropped so dramatically in the advanced classes. She said she wants the school system to scrutinize the advanced-work program as a whole. ''The fact is, it merits review," she said. ''I certainly plan on asking for us to take a hard look at it in the spring."

The accelerated classes for students in grades 4 to 6, known as advanced work, began decades ago to prepare public school students to compete for spots at the exam schools with Boston residents who had gone to private schools. The city's public schools are now responsible for slightly more than half of the students entering Boston Latin, while the rest come from private or charter schools.

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Family Structure and Children's Educational Outcomes: "A comprehensive review of recent academic research shows that family structure - whether a child's parents are married, divorced, single, remarried, or cohabiting - is a significant influence on children's educational performance. Family structure affects preschool readiness. It affects educational achievement at the elementary, secondary, and college levels. Family structure influences these outcomes in part because family structure affects a range of child behaviors that can bear directly on educational success, such as school misbehavior, drug and alcohol consumption, sexual activity and teen pregnancy, and psychological distress. There is a solid research basis for the proposition that strengthening U.S. family structure - increasing the proportion of children growing up with their own, two married parents - would significantly improve the educational achievements of U.S. children".

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

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

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

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12 January, 2006

BRITISH SCHOOLS STILL HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO

A million children are being failed by schools eight years after Tony Blair pledged that education was the Government's priority, a National Audit Office study indicates today. The education of almost one in four children at secondary school is at risk of being substandard, the NAO cautions. Some poor schools are taking four years to improve, blighting pupils' entire secondary education. Other schools are being closed because they are failing to improve despite total investment of more than 1 billion pounds last year, the independent body says.

In another blow to Mr Blair, the Government's flagship health policy is described today as "ill-judged and confused" by a cross-party Commons committee. The Health Select Committee says that the NHS has been exposed to a "cycle of perpetual change" that does not help the delivery of healthcare. The damning report on schools comes as Mr Blair and Ruth Kelly, his embattled Education Secretary, try to face down a big Labour revolt over their plans for self-governing trust schools. The Prime Minister is being warned that his plans could not be pushed through the House of Commons without Conservative support.

The National Audit Office reveals that 23 per cent of secondary schools and at least 4 per cent of primaries are "poorly performing". Although just 577 schools are judged to be failing or have "serious weak- nesses" by Ofsted, the report highlights that the number of schools failing to provide a decent education are far higher. "We estimate that these 1,557 schools educate around 980,000 pupils, or 13 per cent of the school population," it says. Although most schools provided high standards of education, "a sizeable number of schools encounter problems that put children's education at risk, and some do not provide good value," it adds.

Ministers [taxpayers] spent 840 million pounds on improving struggling schools last year and 160 million pounds on replacing failing comprehensives with city academies. The NAO acknowledges that the number of failing schools halved between 1998 and 2005 and the number of low-achieving secondaries had fallen by 75 per cent.

Source



THE BRITS CAN'T EVEN FIND HEAD TEACHERS FOR THEIR SCHOOLS

Poor teaching, weak governance and a lack of outside support are highlighted today by the National Audit Office as key reasons for failure in more than 1,500 of England's schools. With more than a quarter of primary schools and a fifth of secondary schools lacking a permanent head, teachers' unions say that the entire education system is at risk unless the Government helps to raise their numbers and gives them greater backing. Head teachers are blaming a daunting workload and long hours for problems with recruitment and say that, with a quarter of all teachers retiring in the next decade, the system is at breaking point.

In today's report, the National Audit Office (NAO) authors say that heads are the "key to sustaining performance and improvement in any school", but they also acknowledge that the numbers of "appropriately experienced people" applying for the posts are falling.

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, told The Times last week that plans in the education White Paper for schools to collaborate would ease the shortage. But according to the NAO the problem is more complex. "In some places, head teachers have been asked to act as `executive head teachers' and lead more than one school. This approach works in some cases and can help poorer schools by linking them with good schools, but it can also be risky given the challenges of school leadership and the importance of the personal presence of the leader."

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that the lack of heads was one of the most important issues facing the Government, and that unless it was solved all other reforms would be virtually impossible. He said that teachers were put off by becoming heads for several reasons: the high risk of taking the blame for a failing school; the extra workload to allow colleagues time for planning, preparation and assessment; and the minimal differential paid to heads as opposed to senior teachers. "For another œ12.50 a week, who wants to take up that extra stress and responsiblity?" he said.

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Teaching by the book: All texts are not equal; some are much better than others

Below is an editorial from Australia's national daily, "The Australian"

It's back to the books for Victorian students - literally - with the state's Curriculum and Assessment Authority acknowledging literature is central to the study of English. Anyone out of touch with fashions in education theory might be surprised that anyone actually has to say this. But for years the idea that great books are anything special in studying literature has been dismissed by education ideologues who have encouraged the study of all sorts of "texts" - including websites and movies - at the expense of classic novels, poetry and plays of the English-language canon. As a VCAA discussion paper suggested in 2004, all sorts of print and electronic texts were suited for study, "rather than privileging traditional notions of literature". The idiotic idea that literary works that have entertained and instructed readers for centuries should compete for curriculum space with Salam Pax, a pseudonymous Baghdad blogger, reached its nadir late last year when the VCAA decided to reduce Year 12 English to just one book, plus a movie. And to ensure students were not overworked, they defined "book" to include film scripts.

While this was a first-class reform for education theorists who dislike any suggestion Shakespeare is superior to The Sopranos, it failed politics 101. Teachers rebelled and, before parents had a chance to join them, Education Minister Lynne Kosky said there would be no dumbing-down of Year 12 on her watch. The VCAA duly interpreted Ms Kosky's text and backed down. And now it has stated the centrality of literary texts for all English study in a revised statement of doctrine for all teachers issued last month. There is still a great deal of guff about the role of texts, including posters and advertisements. But at least the document asserts that literature "is fundamental to the English curriculum" and "that literary texts are identified as a primary focus for the study of English". As a statement of the bleeding obvious, this is hard to beat. And it is hardly a ringing endorsement of the universal values that great works of literature can teach us about other ages, and our own. But at least it acknowledges the primacy of literature in the teaching of English in Victorian schools.

This is good news. The Australian has always condemned the lazy, cynical sophistry that says one text is as good as any other in setting subjects for school study. By reducing the numbers of novels, plays and poems that high school students have to study, the curriculum commissars in state education departments around the country do their charges a disservice. They deny them the chance to engage with complex, creative work. And by prescribing digital detritus from our own era, instead of ageless literature, they have only confirmed for students what the young always know - that nothing interesting happened before they arrived in the world. The VCAA statement is one short step on the long road back to an emphasis on the academic excellence that comes from studying demanding texts. But it is a start.

Source

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

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

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

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11 January, 2006

Supreme Court OKs funds in schools case

Lawyers for the American Jewish Congress had alleged that the federal AmeriCorps grant program crossed the line between church and state by paying $4,725 in financial aid to teachers in some of the nation's neediest secular and religious schools. They had urged the justices to use the case to reinforce "crucially important constitutional limits of government sponsorship and funding of religious indoctrination." The court declined, without comment.

Last year, the federal appeals court based in Washington ruled that the government was not using the grants to promote religion or as incentives for participants to teach religion. In doing so, the appeals court reversed a trial judge's finding that the program lacked clear criteria for selecting the groups to train the teachers and had failed to monitor properly whether the organizations used government money for religion-related expenses.

AmeriCorps grants are administered by 28 secular and six "faith-based" programs that train teachers, who are placed in public and private schools. All of the religious groups identified themselves with Christian faiths, and most were Roman Catholic. The groups receive $400 for each participant they train -- a small amount of money that the appellate court said fell far short of the actual training costs.

The numbers of teachers involved is also small, according to a government filing in the case. Of the 19,000 people who sought the grants in 2001 -- the latest data available -- 2,000 chose religious groups as their sponsors and only 565 worked in private schools. Teachers must fulfill a service requirement of 1,700 hours of secular instruction to receive federal money. They are allowed to teach religious subjects and participate in religious activities, such as leading students in prayer, while working at a religious school. But they cannot count the time spent in such religious activities toward the 1,700-hour requirement.

Chief Justice John Roberts did not participate in the case.

Source



The 'Hitlerisation' of history teaching

The UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has criticised the way history is taught to post-14 year olds. Secondary school teachers are urged to concentrate less on Nazi Germany. One suggested remedy to this 'Hitlerisation' of the subject is the study of 'many histories' into the syllabus. According to the QCA report, the education system 'undervalues the overall contribution of black and other minority ethnic peoples to Britain's past, and ignore their cultural, scientific and many other achievements'. For commentators concerned with fragmentation in Britain, though, such a move will weaken rather than strengthen social cohesion. Surely the solution is to develop 'a sense of British cultural identity' instead?

Meanwhile, the conservative think-tank Civitas has announced that historian David Starkey is set to 'do a Jamie Oliver' on history teaching. Where Oliver got schools to change what they dish up for lunch, Starkey is looking to 'reconnect children with the blood and battles of history that have, for a generation, been put aside in favour of social history and learning skills'.

As is so often the case with history, debates surrounding the discipline say more about the political and social climate than they do about the subject itself. Take, for instance, the focus on the Third Reich. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, the teaching of the Nazi period and its defeat by the Allies flattered the old British elites' sense of moral superiority. It became the last major event to make Britain appear, well, Great. In recent years, though, the 'Hitlerisation' of history has been motivated by a broader, and in many ways more worrying, angst about the human condition; today it's often about highlighting how innately barbaric human beings are. The QCA is right to criticise the preoccupation with the Nazi regime, but it's only the most obvious example of dwelling on the historical dark side.

For instance at GCSE and AS level, studying American modern history concentrates exclusively on racial oppression, gender inequality and political persecution. Any historical signposts of America's progressive qualities - its advanced productive capabilities, its liberal constitution, its superior culture - are either footnotes or ignored. The conservative historian and journalist Max Hastings doesn't question why there is a preoccupation with death and destruction in history. Instead he believes the discipline should 'broaden the agenda', that 'comparative studies of Hitler' be slotted alongside Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin. Leaving aside that postwar historical inquiry has often twinned Stalin alongside Hitler, school history books do put Stalin in the dock too, albeit for very contemporary reasons.

At GCSE level, history school students can study The Rise and Fall of Communism 1928-1991. While clumsy and ahistorical comparisons between 'totalitarian' Nazi Germany and 'totalitarian' Soviet society are still made, the Bolsheviks' great error was apparently their 'dogged belief' in modernisation. Up until recently, the 20 million people who died under Stalin served to discredit communism; now Stalin's industrialisation policies are recast as the dangers of trying to emulate Western modernisation - while the Industrial Revolution itself is presented in schools as catastrophic for 'local communities' and the environment. Far from exclusively singling out the Nazi regime, the modern age is presented as singularly tyrannical and repressive.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the one event of modern European history that is not covered is the Age of Enlightenment, the period that believed reason, rationality and science could assist human advancement. For as much as it would be beneficial for students to study the Enlightenment, to counterpose this as an alternative would be as misguided as Hastings' 'Britain first!' proposals. The problem isn't just the units on offer, but the lack of universal historical thinking that now dominates the discipline.

Until recently, the subject was studied as historical periods rather than particular units. When I studied European Social History at A level 20 years ago, the line of inquiry webbed together every major development between 1760 and 1945. No doubt certain interpretations were open to historical revision, but at least students could grasp the movement of history, how one event (for example, the signing of the Versailles Treaty at the end of the First World War) could shape and influence other events (the outbreak of the Second World War). Thus, the study of the Nazi regime wasn't presented as a grim morality tale, but as an outcome of wider social forces at play in Europe. Studying specific historical events in a broader international context was not an ideological imposition, but a concrete reflection of how modern societies are interconnected.

Today, of course, approaching history as a linear, universal narrative would fall foul of contemporary sensibilities. In place of an overarching framework - the web that connects humanity together - historians are encouraged to focus their inquiry on the local and particular. The QCA's proposals for the inclusion of 'many histories' will only accentuate this fragmentary and non-historical approach further. Likewise, Max Hastings' call for a list of British greats - of 'Waterloo, Pepys and Newton' - isn't much of an alternative. It simply counterposes one particular story for another.

It seems Hastings is as keen to use history as a form of social engineering - to recreate a lost 'sense of Britishness' - as is the QCA. This is perhaps why it's also keen to stop the subject being marginalised from the school's syllabus. For all its encouraging criticisms of history being assessed on its work-based 'relevance', it's arguable that the QCA has an instrumentalist agenda too. It tends to see the teaching of history as only 'relevant' to the institutionalisation of multicultural thinking.

The QCA is right to question the narrow focus on Nazi Germany in school history teaching. But this is only symptomatic of a syllabus that puts all modern societies in the dock. While it is tempting to call for a pro-modernity balance, this would only be falling into the one-sided, particularistic trap. Instead, the process of man making history, as opposed to being chained by history, is best served through studying historical periods in a linear and universal fashion. By doing so we can accurately account for the two-fold character of modern society, its achievements and atrocities, its advancements and backwardness.

This might deny both spokespeople for the privileged and oppressed their rightful claim to 'History', but it can provide us with guidelines to humanity's future. Somehow the QCA's proposals won't be addressing that

Source

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

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

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

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10 January, 2006

Does the First Amendment Ban Public Schools?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

In the two centuries since it was written, the original language of the First Amendment has been expanded in two directions. The Doctrine of Incorporation holds that the XVth amendment imposes the restrictions of the Bill of Rights on the states. And modern courts expand "establishment" to cover not only established churches-which existed in England and some of the states when the Constitution was drafted--but any violation of religious neutrality, giving us the doctrine of separation of church and state.

The judge who recently held it unconstitutional for public schools to be required to teach the theory of intelligent design correctly argued that doing so would be to support a particular set of religious beliefs-those that reject evolution as an explanation for the apparent design of living creatures. His mistake was not carrying the argument far enough. A school that teaches that evolution is false is taking sides in a religious dispute-but so does a school that teaches that evolution is true.

The problem is broader than evolution. In the process of educating children, one must take positions on what is true or false. Over a wide range of issues, such a claim is either the affirmation of a religious position or the denial of a religious position. Any decent scientific account of geology, paleontology, what we know about the distant past, is also a denial of the beliefs of (among others) fundamentalist Christians. To compel children to go to schools, paid for by taxes, in which they are taught that their religious beliefs are false, is not neutrality.

Or consider history. The spread of Islam in its first few decades is one of the most extraordinary historical events known to us. When Mohammed left Mecca for Medina, the Arabs were bit players in local politics, allies of one or the other of the two great powers of that part of the world. Within a generation, Muslim Arabs had conquered all of the Sassanid empire and much of the Byzantine. It is rather as if, between 1960 and 1980, Guatamala had annexed the U.S. and a considerable chunk of the USSR.

The Moorish political scientist Ibn Khaldun, writing about six hundred years ago, offered a simple explanation: The expansion of Islam was a miracle. Allah put courage in the hearts of the Arabs, fear in the hearts of their enemies. What could be more obvious? A Muslim teaching the relevant history would give that explanation; I would not. He is claiming Islam is true, I am claiming that it is false. Neither of us is, or should be, neutral.

My conclusion is that the existence of public schools is inconsistent with the First Amendment. Their purpose is, or ought to be, to educate-and one cannot, in practice, educate without either supporting or denying a wide variety of religious claims.

Source



BRITAIN STILL STRUGGLING TO ACKNOWLEDGE ABILITY DIFFERENCES

Pupils would be divided into sets according to ability for all classes in state schools under new Conservative education plans unveiled in The Times today. David Willetts, the new Shadow Education Secretary, makes clear that the party has abandoned years of free-market ideology on education, and that he accepts market forces and parental choice are not enough to drive up standards. There was an important role for government in day-to-day classroom activity and in ensuring that teachers used the best methods, Mr Willetts said. He called for a restoration of "setting", saying that classes based on ability should be the norm in every school.

However, a Conservative government would also seek to ensure that there was no return to the 11-plus, with selection limited to a maximum of 10 per cent of pupils. David Cameron, the Tory leader, will set out the new thinking in a speech today in Essex. Mr Willetts said that Conservatives would use the powers of central government more aggressively than Labour to set national standards. "The evidence that setting works is very powerful indeed, and yet you still have got more than half of lessons not taught in sets, where you can target your teaching methods to children with a particular level of skill."

He said that he realised that not every class could be run in sets. "What I will be looking at in the months ahead is how best to spread setting, and I would not rule out using the powers of central government more in this area," he said. Schools can currently set as much as they wish, and attempts by head teachers to introduce more setting by ability are often resisted by teachers. The latest figures show that only 38 per cent of classes are set by ability.

Selection within schools would be accompanied by a national admissions code under a Conservative government, which would ban a return to the 11-plus but extend the powers of specialist schools to select 10 per cent of pupils on aptitude.

Under Labour, schools can specialise in ten subjects, including maths and science. But only schools that specialise in four non-academic subjects - performing arts, sports, modern languages and technology - can select pupils on aptitude. Tony Blair has attempted to make selection a dividing line between Labour and Conservatives to try to shore up support for his plans for trust schools. He will argue that the new Tory policy is still selection, even if it is limited to 10 per cent.

Mr Willetts said that he welcomed Mr Blair's plans for trust schools to become their own admissions authority. He pledged Conservative support as long as he stuck to the key principles - that popular schools should be able to expand, parents have powers to set up new trust schools and that the trusts have control over admissions, subject to the national code.

Source

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

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

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

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9 January, 2006

Tufts: Absurd Affirmative Action in computer science

Tufts has more female faculty than male even though the great majority of graduates are male! Below are a few excerpts from an article bewailing the small numbers of women students in computer courses and asking how to entice them into computer courses.

As a long-time academic FORTRAN programmer myself, I do know a bit about where the bodies are buried in all this and the utter blindness of the article briefly excerpted below is stark. They would not of course dream of mentioning that programming is pure intelligence and requires the most rigorous logical thinking -- and at the top level of general intelligence and mathematical ability (which are highly correlated) women are comparatively rare. Given their rarity in the top range of mathematical ability, women are in fact probably OVER-represented among computer graduates -- presumably because of affirmative action. There is of course more to computers than programming, but programming is basic. If you can't program or understand at least the basic technicalities, you are not going to be much use elsewhere. The woman mentioned at the end of the excerpt below exempifies what the problem is: A stark lack of technical understanding and knowledge.

Nothing I have said above excludes SOME women from being good with computers. The person who taught me programming was a woman. But expecting women in general to be as good with computers as men in general are is the height of absurdity. There will be always more men than women in computing while work with computers requires the high level of ability that it does today.

And even in normal everyday personal computer support work, the customers are most likely to be women and the techies men. I myself can not remember a time when any adult male has asked me for help to get his PC working properly but I am always helping women to get their computers to behave

"Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps. Next spring, when 22 computer science graduates accept their Tufts diplomas, only four will be women.

Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. In the early 1980s, it had one of the highest proportions of female undergraduates in science and engineering. And yet with remarkable speed, it has become one of the least gender-balanced fields in American society.

In a year of heated debate about why there aren't more women in science, the conversation has focused largely on discrimination, the conflicts between the time demands of the scientific career track and family life, and what Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers famously dubbed ''intrinsic aptitude."

In the wake of the dot-com bust, the number of new computer science majors in 2004 was 40 percent lower than in 2000, according to the Computing Research Association. The field has seen ups and downs before, and some think the numbers for men will soon improve at least a bit. But the percentage of undergraduate majors who are female has barely budged in a dozen years.

A Globe review shows that the proportion of women among bachelor's degree recipients in computer science peaked at 37 percent in 1985 and then went on the decline. Women have comprised about 28 percent of computer science bachelor's degree recipients in the last few years, and in the elite confines of research universities, only 17 percent of graduates are women. (The percentage of women among PhD recipients has grown, but still languishes at around 20 percent.)

When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist. Her father is a programmer, and she took Advanced Placement computer science in high school. Because she scored well on the AP exam, she started out at Tufts in an upper-level class, in which she was one of a handful of women. The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant nothing to Espiritu. She never raised her hand. ''I have not built my own computer, I don't know everything about all the different operating systems," she said. ''These people would just sit in the front of the class and ask these complicated questions. I had no idea what they were talking about.""

More here



SOME SPINE SHOWING IN CALIFORNIA

Seniors who do not pass the California High School Exit Exam this year should be allowed to continue their education, but diplomas will be awarded only to students who pass the test, Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction, announced at a Sacramento news conference Friday morning. Within hours, lawyers who oppose the exam said they will sue the state in the coming weeks to try to lift the exit exam as a requirement for this year's graduating class.

O'Connell's announcement followed a three-month review of possible alternatives to the controversial math and English exam that was adopted in 1999 and is a graduation requirement for the classes of 2006 and beyond. To the disappointment of scholars and advocates who have urged the state to develop another path to graduation for students who fail the test, O'Connell said he believes no alternative exists that would show students have learned material tested on the exam. "I'm convinced the only way to make sure all our graduates have the critical skills is through passage of the high school exit exam," O'Connell said. But he drew a distinction between alternatives to the test and options for students who fail. He laid out ways students who don't pass the exam can continue to go to school and try. They include:

* Enrolling in an additional year of high school or independent study, subject to school board approval.
* Enrolling in an adult school program run by a K-12 school district.
* Enrolling in a charter school.
* Attending a community college that has a diploma completion program.

O'Connell also said students could obtain a diploma equivalent by passing the General Educational Development (GED) test or the California High School Proficiency Exam. And he said he is working with the Legislature to change laws to allow more students to attend adult school, summer school and independent study, and to allow students without diplomas to seek financial aid for community college. "Failure to pass the exam simply means their basic education is not yet complete," O'Connell said.

His decision applies to students in regular education - O'Connell said seniors with disabilities should be exempt from passing the exit exam this year. A lawsuit seeking to waive the exam for special education students goes to court Tuesday. A separate lawsuit - seeking relief from the exit exam for all other students in the senior class - is likely to follow.....

Supporters of the exit exam, including business leaders and education advocates, say the test is so basic - measuring performance on sixth-through 10th-grade skills - that relaxing the requirement would harm students in the long run. They joined Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in applauding O'Connell's position. "This is a test of California's will," said Russlynn Ali, director of Education Trust West, an Oakland group that advocates academic achievement for low-income students. "Do we believe students can learn up to a middle school level education? And will we do what it takes to get them there? If not, let's not pretend we're doing them a favor" by granting diplomas to those who can't pass the test, she said. At the start of the school year, an estimated 90,000 seniors had not yet passed the two-part exam.

More here

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

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

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

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8 January, 2006

VOUCHER SETBACK IN FLORIDA

The Florida Supreme Court struck down a statewide voucher system Thursday that allowed children to attend private schools at taxpayer expense - a program Gov. Jeb Bush considered one of his proudest achievements. It was the nation's first statewide voucher program. In a 5-2 ruling, the high court said the program undermines the public schools and violates the Florida Constitution's requirement of a uniform system of free public education.

Voucher opponents had also argued that the program violated the separation of church and state in giving tax dollars to parochial schools - an argument a lower court agreed with. But the state Supreme Court did not address that issue.

About 700 children are attending private or parochial schools through the program. But the ruling will not become effective until the end of the school year. "I think it is a sad day for accountability in our state," Bush said. He said the voucher program had a positive effect because it "put pressure on school districts to focus on the underperforming schools."

The voucher setup was a part of an education program on the governor's part that also includes testing at virtually every level and a school grading system that offers performance-based rewards and punishments. Bush said he will look for ways to continue the voucher programs, such as finding private money, changing state law or amending the Florida Constitution. "I don't think any option should be taken off the table," the governor said. "School choice is as American as apple pie in my opinion. ... The world is made richer and fuller and more vibrant when you have choices."

Under the 1999 law, students at public schools that earn a failing grade from the state in two out of four years were eligible for vouchers to attend private schools. Chief Justice Barbara Pariente said the program "diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools," which are the sole means set out in the state constitution for educating Florida children.

The ruling was a victory for public schools across the state and nation, said Ron Meyer, lead attorney for a coalition that challenged the voucher program. "Students using vouchers will now be welcomed back into Florida public schools," [Amid rejoicing all round, no doubt -- NOT] Meyer said in a statement. "It decides with finality that the voucher program is unconstitutional."

Anticipating the possibility of an adverse ruling, the governor has been working on a backup plan to keep voucher students in private schools by providing tax credits to corporations that give students scholarships. Clark Neily, an attorney who argued the case for voucher advocates, called the decision "a setback for those parents and children trapped in failing schools."

The U.S. Justice Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support the state. Voucher opponents included the state teachers union, the Florida PTA, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters. The ruling did not directly affect nearly 30,000 students in two other voucher programs for disabled and poor children, but it could be cited as a precedent.

Source

A feisty comment from Dick McDonald on the ruling:

Proclaim a victory for Karl Marx and all he stands for. The Supreme Court of Florida has ruled that a voucher system that allows children to receive the funding that would otherwise be given to the public schools be given to private schools of the parent's choice is unconstitutional under Florida law. Unconstitutional because it "undermines" the sick public school system our children are presently indoctrinated into.

In other words, the "state", that revered institution of Karl Marx, the Democrat Party, the MSM and the NEA wins another battle in the fight of individuals for the liberty our Founders promised. The leftists have again stolen the rights of the many for the rights of the few elite socialists who want to decide what is right for our children. The problem is that they are failing miserably and will not surrender their power to the majority of Americans, especially blacks.

Unlike the lower court, the Supreme Court of Florida did not address the separation of church and state issue; another issue leftists are using to stop competition from entering any arena especially the school system. But let's be fair folks, competition is the death knell to our socialist handlers. It would cripple the entire structure of the Democrat Party and their "socialist" special interest groups like unions, teachers, state employees, etc. all of which are directed by their socialist leaders without approval of their members.

And so the beat goes on: the individual versus the state. The deciding Court is the most overturned Court in the land next to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. They support unfairness in favor of their Democrat Party as evidenced by their totally irrational decision to ignore standards in the counting of ballots in the 2000 election. I call them the "Manson Court"; they support helter skelter if it serves the Democrat purpose. Here again, the only thing "undermined" is the rights of the people. The state has a responsibility to educate. It hasn't. So what is new? Just more Karl Marx and his worship of the totalitarian submission of proletariat.



Market forces keep students out of useless courses

Expensive university fees have been blamed for a sharp drop in people seeking a tertiary education, as demand stagnates for full-fee places. University admissions figures show applications for entry to Victorian institutions fell 4.2 per cent, compared with courses last year. For NSW and the ACT, they are down 1 per cent.

As Year 12 graduates prepare for next week's first round of offers of university places, data from the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre shows the number of students vying for a spot fell 1.6 per cent. "School leavers and their families are starting to raise more questions about the worth of going on to university," said Richard James from Melbourne University's Centre for the Study of Higher Education. "The costs of university courses have gone up" and that had been widely discussed in the media, he said.

The figures were delivered to Victorian Education Minister Lynne Kosky in a brief, which also revealed a plateauing of student applications for full-fee-paying places. "Preferences for fee-paying courses have barely changed, totalling 1725," the brief says.

Ms Kosky said it was clear that the federal Government's plan to increase university places through fee courses was not working, and students were unable to afford higher education without financial relief. "The FEE-HELP scheme is there but students are not picking it up," Ms Kosky said. "If that's an assumption the federal Government has made about the way they're going to grow higher education places, and the attitude is they can't pay either now or through FEE-HELP, that has some serious implications for the higher education of this nation."

The Victorian figures also reveal a sharp decline in applications by non-school-leavers. They were down by almost 2300, or 7.7 per cent. "They're the ones who've been applying year after year and they're obviously giving up," Ms Kosky said. The Minister said the data did not remove the need for extra commonwealth-funded university places in Victoria - a demand she made after a decline in federal revenue. "The shift is very slight in demand for university places. It's about 4000 students who miss out, so we still need extra places to meet the demand," she said.

Universities Admissions Centre data for NSW and the ACT shows Year 12 applications are down by 0.4 per cent and non-school-leaver applications are down 2 per cent.

Source

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

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

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

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7 January, 2006

THE RELENTLESS DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP CONTINUES

An affirmative action appointment shows its merit: A law professor who talks about the law while having not the faintest clue about it

Yesterday radio host Hugh Hewitt interviewed Rosa Brooks, a professor who teaches constitutional law at the University of Virginia Law School and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, who has raised the idea of impeaching President Bush for spying on al Qaeda terrorists' phone conversations with Americans. Radioblogger.com has a transcript:

Brooks: I think it seems to me that the NSA surveillance program on its face violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and--

Hewitt: Now, you have read United States v. United States District Court, right?

Brooks: Uh, Hugh, you're pushing me here.

Hewitt: It's--

Brooks: Refresh my memory.

Hewitt: United States v. United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, in which the United States Supreme Court specifically says, Justice Powell writing, we are not going to consider whether or not the president can, in fact, conduct surveillance of this sort.

Brooks: What sort?

Hewitt: Foreign agents communicating with their agents in the United States, even if those latter are citizens.

Brooks: OK.

Hewitt: So they specifically reserved the question to one side, and the foreign intelligence surveillance court appeals board, in In Re Sealed Case No. 2 [link in PDF], also said no, the president has the authority to do this. So given that the federal authority--

Brooks: Well, you know, Hugh, I mean, you've got the case law at your fingertips, and I'm not going to challenge you on it, because I don't.

Post lifted from Taranto



Students Identified as Being of 'Unknown' Race Tend to Be White, Study Finds

(From The Chronicle of Higher Education)

More students are declining to reveal their racial or ethnic identity on their college applications, but, as it turns out, many of those students are white, according to a report released on Wednesday. The number of students whose racial or ethnic classification was reported by their colleges as "unknown" nearly doubled from 1991 to 2001.

The report, "'Unknown' Students on College Campuses: An Exploratory Analysis," was issued by the James Irvine Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. The study on which the report was based is part of the organization's Campus Diversity Initiative, an effort to help California's underrepresented students succeed in college.

Comment from The Corner

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that a new study has concluded that many students who refuse to check a racial box on their admissions forms are (horrors!) white. Here's my favorite paragraph in the story: "The study's main conclusion is that colleges need to collect more-precise data on the racial and ethnic backgrounds of their students. Otherwise, some students stand to gain an unfair advantage by being considered minority students in the admissions process." Now, let's see. "More-precise data"-as in, perhaps, DNA tests, birth certificates, that sort of thing? Great idea! And I love that "unfair advantage"-I mean, we can't let schools get away with mistakenly awarding a racial preference to which a student isn't properly entitled, now can we?

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

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

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

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6 January, 2006

SOME CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS FOR BLACK EDUCATION

Yes, various nonwhite immigrant groups continue to find a place in American society and to do well, but there remains, in more than a few instances, a wide gap--in income and cultural identity--between America's white and black citizens. Indeed, the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy to have a large, racially distinct underclass where unemployment, criminality and fatherless families are too often the norm.

Why this is so and what we are to do about it is the principal theme of John McWhorter's splendid "Winning the Race." In particular, Mr. McWhorter examines why the optimism that defined the years of the civil-rights movement has been replaced by defeatism and alienation in the black community--even as America's racial attitudes and policies have changed so dramatically for the better.

Mr. McWhorter's answers are anything but orthodox, and little wonder: He is routinely classified--and, in certain circles, dismissed--as a "black conservative." But his views are not easily labeled. He advocates some drug decriminalization, for instance, and favors affirmative action for those in economic need (but not for middle-class children or the children of immigrants). He didn't even vote for George W. Bush. Still, he argues compellingly that the widely accepted ideas that try to explain the persistence of racial inequality--leftist views, for the most part--stand in the way of black progress.

Like others, Mr. McWhorter blames open-ended welfare and the fashions of the white counterculture--especially its glorification of drug use--for damaging precisely the generation of blacks that should have reaped the benefits of civil-rights change. But he also blames an academic establishment and intellectual elite that seem unwilling to judge the dynamics of black life by the standards that it applies to other groups.

A former professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (he is now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute), Mr. McWhorter has a keen eye for the foibles of social scientists--that is, for the way they maneuver their methodology to find the big idea (the "golden key") that will explain black poverty. He inspects each big idea in turn--deindustrialization, housing segregation, slum clearance, drug supply, high-rise public housing--and finds it less than compelling. Indeed, he finds that such big ideas only help to induce a sense of impotence that impedes black America's rise from poverty.

Thus he counsels against "the plangent image of young black men 'spatially mismatched' from factories that move away." To accept such an image as an explanation "is to agree that the only humans in history incapable of adapting to changing employment conditions were descendants of African slaves in the United States." Of those who blame ghetto life on the flight of middle-class blacks to the suburbs, he asks: "What other group of poor people besides black Americans has been depicted as going to hell because middle-class ones were not around?" Many scholars, he notes, suggest that "there is something sinister and small about the millions of us who moved away from the ghetto." But their logic suggests, in turn, "a kind of permanent racial balkanization." He is impatient with those who contend that the crack epidemic is responsible for the black community's plight, as if "poor blacks are so vulnerable, so devoid of any human agency, that all one has to do is wave a crack pipe in front of them and about every second one of them will leap at it like a dog grabbing a pork chop."

And then there is hip-hop. Mr. McWhorter is clearly familiar with the whole hip-hop scene and even values some of its music. But he insists that, on the whole, hip-hop, or rap, neither conveys the reality of ghetto life nor points young blacks in the right direction. Meanwhile, intellectual apologists "tie themselves up in knots trying to criticize and yet excuse rap's sexism in the same sentence." The plain fact is that rap is "the most overtly and consistently misogynistic music ever produced in human history."

Clearly Mr. McWhorter is concerned less with public policy than with black America's psychological readiness to join the competitive mainstream. Like welfare, he argues, the outlook of the underclass requires reform. But such reform will not occur as long as a set of corrosive beliefs holds sway advising blacks that the system is rigged against them and encouraging in them "therapeutic alienation"--an exaggerated sense of victimhood. There is consolation in such beliefs, Mr. McWhorter concedes, but they are no way to win the race.

More here



Pre-school: The usual Leftist policy of the bludgeon

Parents should be forced to send their children to pre-school or face the loss of their family tax benefit payments, according to Labor MP Craig Emerson. Family payments were meant to compensate parents for the extra costs of raising children, the federal Labor backbencher said yesterday, but the money was being handed out to families with no obligation to spend it on the children.

"It is now generally accepted that early childhood development is crucial in determining the life chances of young people," he told The Australian. "Access to a pre-school education is vital in ensuring children are ready to learn from day one at school." It made no sense that some payments carried obligations while others did not, Dr Emerson said. The federal Government had so far tackled only reciprocal arrangements for Aborigines, parents on unemployment benefits and those getting single-parent payments. "Why should black and white families in urban areas be excused from any reciprocal obligation?" he said. "Family payments are passive welfare. If you have dependent children you receive family payments directly into your bank account, no questions asked."

The comments follow demands by Liberal backbenchers who claim some state-run pre-schools are so poor parents are opting for long daycare instead. But the backbenchers say long daycare fails to provide children with the basic literacy skills needed for primary school.

Dr Emerson's plan is controversial because politicians from both sides of politics have treated family tax benefit payments as obligation-free handouts from the federal Government. But Dr Emerson said it was odd mutual obligation did not apply to family payments. "It's a large area of payment - it's $14billion that's spent on family payments, essentially no questions asked." Under his scheme, pre-schools would be available for all children so parents could fulfil their side of the bargain. He said parents whose children were regularly absent from school should be interviewed by Centrelink and threatened with having payments withheld. Dr Emerson said his plan was different to the Government's mutual obligation schemes - which have so far targeted only Aboriginal families - because parents would be offered support, not just punishment. "Commonwealth and state support staff would be made available to assist with transport, remedial learning, positive parenting and counselling," he said. [More bureaucracy! Hooray!] "Opponents of proposals like this argue for the rights of the parents," he said. "But parents do not have the right to neglect and abuse their children. Defenceless children have rights, and we must protect them."

Source

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

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

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

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5 January, 2006

Teachers' Pets: The NEA gave $65 million in its members' dues to left-liberal groups last year

If we told you that an organization gave away more than $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington and dozens of other such advocacy groups, you'd probably assume we were describing a liberal philanthropy. In fact, those expenditures have all turned up on the financial disclosure report of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union.

Under new federal rules pushed through by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, large unions must now disclose in much more detail how they spend members' dues money. Big Labor fought hard (if unsuccessfully) against the new accountability standards, and even a cursory glance at the NEA's recent filings--the first under the new rules--helps explain why. They expose the union as a honey pot for left-wing political causes that have nothing to do with teachers, much less students.

We already knew that the NEA's top brass lives large. Reg Weaver, the union's president, makes $439,000 a year. The NEA has a $58 million payroll for just over 600 employees, more than half of whom draw six-figure salaries. Last year the average teacher made only $48,000, so it seems you're better off working as a union rep than in the classroom.

Many of the organization's disbursements--$30,000 to the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, $122,000 to the Center for Teaching Quality--at least target groups that ostensibly have a direct educational mission. But many others are a stretch, to say the least. The NEA gave $15,000 to the Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights." The National Women's Law Center, whose Web site currently features a "pocket guide" to opposing Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito, received $5,000. And something called the Fund to Protect Social Security got $400,000, presumably to defeat personal investment accounts.

The new disclosure rules mark the first revisions since 1959 and took effect this year. "What wasn't clear before is how much of a part the teachers unions play in the wider liberal movement and the Democratic Party," says Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, a California-based watchdog group. "They're like some philanthropic organization that passes out grant money to interest groups."

There's been a lot in the news recently about published opinion that parallels donor politics. Well, last year the NEA gave $45,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, which regularly issues reports that claim education is underfunded and teachers are underpaid. The partisans at People for the American Way got a $51,000 NEA contribution; PFAW happens to be vehemently anti-voucher.

The extent to which the NEA sends money to states for political agitation is also revealing. For example, Protect Our Public Schools, an anti-charter-school group backed by the NEA's Washington state affiliate, received $500,000 toward its efforts to block school choice for underprivileged children. (Never mind that charter schools are public schools.) And the Floridians for All Committee, which focuses on "the construction of a permanent progressive infrastructure that will help redirect Florida politics in a more progressive, Democratic direction," received a $249,000 donation from NEA headquarters.

When George Soros does this sort of thing, at least he's spending his own money. The NEA is spending the mandatory dues paid by members who are told their money will be used to gain better wages, benefits and working conditions. According to the latest filing, member dues accounted for $295 million of the NEA's $341 million in total receipts last year. But the union spent $25 million of that on "political activities and lobbying" and another $65.5 million on "contributions, gifts and grants" that seemed designed to further those hyper-liberal political goals.

The good news is that for the first time members can find out how their union chieftains did their political thinking for them, by going to www.union-reports.dol.gov, where the Labor Department has posted the details. Union officials claim that they favored such transparency all along, but the truth is they fought the new rules hard in both Congress and the courts. Originally, the AFL-CIO said detailed disclosures were too expensive, citing compliance costs in excess of $1 billion. The final bill turned out to be $54,000, or half of what the unions spent on litigation fighting the new requirements. When Secretary Chao refused to back down, the unions took her to court, and lost.

It's well understood that the NEA is an arm of the Democratic National Committee. (Or is it the other way around?) But we wonder if the union's rank-and-file stand in unity behind this laundry list of left-to-liberal recipients of money that comes out of their pockets.

Source



BRAINWASHING 201

“Fascists have no right to speak!” yelled a left-wing protestor, stomping onto the stage at the premiere of Evan Maloney’s new film, Brainwashing 201. It was a dramatic example of what Maloney’s picture is all about—the lack of fairness on college campuses, where liberal academics turn their classrooms into pulpits for political indoctrination, while conservatives “have no right to speak.” For those who haven’t been on college campuses recently, Maloney’s documentary is eye opening. Non-left academics are harassed for their political views. Students who show a conservative bent are threatened. Military recruiters are driven off campus.

The movie builds on Maloney’s earlier work, Brainwashing 101, released in the fall of 2004. Maloney, who edits his films himself, shows a growing command of the medium, and this second effort is tighter and livelier than the first. Several times, police escort Maloney and Stuart Browning (who holds the unusual dual credits of film financier and cameraman) away from campuses. Even at Maloney’s alma mater, Bucknell, the head of campus security tries to arrest him in front of an audience. “I can understand why these guys want to shut me up. People who are abusing power usually don’t want cameras around. Fair enough. But students and professors are being punished simply because of their ideas, and somebody has to tell their story,” Maloney states in the film.

The scenes featuring Laura and Roger Freberg are a cogent demonstration of this abuse. Laura teaches psychology at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Her husband owns a business in town and is an active Republican. During the recall election of Governor Gray Davis in 2003, people started to notice that Laura and Roger shared the same last name. “People would come into my office, close the door and say, ‘Please tell us this is a mixed marriage,’” Laura says on camera. “One colleague really lost his temper and said ‘We never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican.’” “No one in the administration of Cal Poly is a Republican,” Roger states. “No one in Laura’s department is a Republican. I’m unaware of anyone in the school of liberal arts who is a Republican except for Laura.”

Someone attempted to break into their house, swastikas were burnt into their lawn, and their children were threatened, according to Roger. Laura suffered daily harassment at work and endured countless meetings with her dean and others to “talk about her problem.” Laura and Roger finally went to federal court and won. Afterwards, students told her they always knew she was a Republican. At first she was surprised: All she talked about were neurons. They explained: “It’s because of what you don’t say.” Accustomed to hearing liberal politics in every classroom, they knew that when a teacher didn’t discuss current events it could mean only one thing—that he or she was conservative.

Indeed, students in the film express amazement at how left-wing academics manage to wedge politics into nearly every subject. “It’s pretty inventive,” says one. “In geography class I learned that gender is socially constructed,” illustrates another. “I really don’t know why issues such as global warming, globalization, and militarism are brought up in a class in German literature,” puzzles a third student.

A university setting should be about learning, suggests Maloney. And students “are learning. They’re learning to keep their mouths shut if they don’t agree with their professors.” Professors have power over their charges, and one recent study showed that nearly a third of students fear they’ll receive a bad grade if they don’t agree with their professors’ political and social positions. Sometimes this power becomes extreme. The film interviews a Kuwaiti student who survived the August 1990 invasion by Iraq. He attended California’s Foothill College and wrote a pro-American essay praising the U.S. Constitution. A political science professor called him into his office and asked him to explain himself. He accused the student of being biased because he was Kuwaiti, threatened his visa status, and ordered him to receive regular psychological counseling.

There are also many humorous moments in the film, as when Maloney goes in search of the “Men’s Center” on various campuses. He appears at each college’s “Women’s Center” and asks for directions to their counterpart. “We figured it was like the men’s room and the women’s room. The bathrooms are right next to each other,” he states. While seemingly laughable, Maloney points out that under the federal Title IX rules that have been used to push a feminist agenda at universities, not having a “Men’s Center” might actually be illegal.

Campuses are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas where issues stand and fall on their merits. Brainwashing 201 demonstrates effectively that this is now far from the case.

Source

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

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

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

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4 January, 2006

How the NEA spends its money

Post lifted from The Locker Room

One of the few reforms that I can think of that actually makes things better is the recent reform of the reporting requirements for labor unions. Secretary of Labor Chao has succeeded in amending the forms on which unions have to declare how they spent their funds. Whereas union political spending used to be mostly a matter of guesswork, now there are some hard numbers.

This editorial in today's Wall Street Journal discusses the National Education Association's disclosure; to no one's surprise, a lot of money goes to support NEA politicking. What is somewhat surprising, however, is the fact that it also doles out money to a host of leftist policy groups whose missions have nothing to do with education.

Big Labor tried frantically to block Secretary Chao's initiative, claiming that compliance would be too costly. The real reason should be obvious: union members might not be happy about having to pay dues to help support all sorts of leftist groups. In fact, they can't legally be forced to pay for things that are not germane to collective bargaining -- that's what the Supreme Court held in the Beck case. With the truth about union spending now exposed to sunlight, I'd expect to see an increase in the number of workers who want to avail themselves of their "Beck" rights.



Inquiry backs teachers' fears about nutty new methods

Teachers critical of a radical overhaul of education in Western Australia are suffering "substantial anxiety" and their concerns are valid, a parliamentary inquiry has found. A committee examining the controversial rollout of outcomes-based education - a system in which no student can fail and all subjects are equal - in Years 11 and 12 has recommended delaying a range of courses unless the curriculum council can produce subject information by early next year. "The concerns of teachers and schools remain valid and there needs to be recognition that both the stress levels of teachers and the educational needs of students will not be served by courses of study being commenced with insufficient resources," the committee reported yesterday.

More than 100 of the 182 submissions received by the committee, chaired by Labor MP Tom Stephens, addressed the issue of readiness. "The anxiety felt by some teachers is exacerbated by a perception that the new curriculum is being developed, at least in part, on the run," the report says.

The curriculum for outcomes-based English and engineering studies has been completed and will be introduced to Year 11 next year. Curriculum council acting chief Greg Robson said the 50 outcome-based courses - which include dance, food science and technology, and philosophy and ethics - were being developed in phases, which might give the wrong impression. "It's a well-planned, well-considered process - it's just that it's phased over time," he said. "People may draw from this that courses are being developed on the run, but the reality is there's been a long and extensive development process for all the courses." Mr Robson said the curriculum council could meet the deadlines and was confident all the courses would be implemented by 2009. However, if there were any glitches in the preparation of support material for teachers, the council would recommend a delay.

People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes spokesman Greg Williams, a maths teacher, said there was not "a snowball's chance in hell" the council would have the material ready. Melbourne education consultant Kevin Donnelly said the report was almost an admission that teachers had been 100per cent right in their criticism. "I find it quite bizarre they concluded that, but they are not going to put it back, they are going to keep going," he said. Outcomes-based education "is fundamentally flawed and misconceived, in my opinion".

Source

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

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

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

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3 January, 2006

BIG DEMAND FOR PRIVATE SCHOOLING IN AUSTRALIA

But rising demand pushes up prices too, of course. New schools are not set up overnight in today's heavily regulated circumstances

Parents at Sydney's richest schools are struggling to keep pace with the cost of a year's education, which in one case has rocketed to almost $22,000 after another fee increase of more than double the inflation rate. A Herald survey of 44 of the state's elite secondary schools has revealed fee rises as high as 15.5 per cent and an average of 6.5 per cent. The inflation rate to September was 3 per cent. It is the fifth year in a row that private schools have lifted their fees by at least twice the inflation index, a move principals say is required to account for the increase of about 5 per cent in teachers' salaries next year and the cost of complying with insurance and workplace laws. The most expensive education in NSW and possibly Australia is provided by Shore, which charges $21,804 for year 11. It was the first school to top $20,000 last year and has lifted its fees by a further 5.8 per cent....

Murray Williams, whose son is going into year 11 at SCECGS Redlands at a cost of $19,800, said parents were tired of the "same massive fee rises and bullshit excuses. "The problem for people like me is that we got the kids into schools when it was reasonably affordable, but with the compounding rises it's now very expensive - and you can't just drop your kids out a year from the HSC. "It used to be that we slaved to pay off the mortgage, but the fact is that mortgage repayments today are truly petty cash alongside this stuff. With two kids costing $20,000 each and a third at $18,000 - all after tax - plus trips, books, uniforms, sports, you have to earn $140,000 before getting out of bed."

Several parents said they were concerned about meeting the cost of spiralling fees in coming years. The director of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, Geoff Newcombe, defended the 6.5 per cent increase, saying "the cost of education, like health, is always much higher than inflation - to make a comparison between them is meaningless". Schools were spending 70 per cent of their budgets on teachers' salaries, "which keep going up and up", Dr Newcombe said. "[Schools are] so conscious of complying with occupational health and safety legislation, [NSW] Board of Studies requirements - they're actually employing people to monitor compliance."

But a teacher at one of the most expensive schools confided: "Principals say they have to lift fees to pay us, but the money mostly goes into their $300,000-plus pay packets, not to mention the corporate jobs they keep creating: business managers, marketing directors - all six-figure salaries."....

In Britain, where independent school fees have risen by more than three times the rate of inflation over the past 20 years, the top 50 schools have recently been found guilty of price-fixing. The chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Graeme Samuel, said although he had received no allegations of impropriety, "if there was a perception that prices were rising at a regular rate across the board every year, we'd certainly be interested to know why".

More here



High-school Lesson one: Finish Year 12 to get work

Young people who leave school without finishing Year 12 are twice as likely to be unemployed after a year as those who complete secondary school. And the trend gets worse a year further on, a study of a group of 3500 young Victorians in post-school years has found. The University of Melbourne survey was released yesterday by Victorian Education Minister Lynne Kosky, who urged students to stay at school. "Students who have completed 13 years of school are more likely to have work, spent less time looking for work and work more hours," she said. "Students thinking of leaving school without any education or training options should think again, go back to school next year or start a TAFE course."

While 10 per cent of students who completed Year 12 were unable to find work or study a year out from school, the figure was double for those who left after Years 10 or 11. Of those still trying to find work or education a year later, 85per cent of the group who finished Year 12 entered the workforce or full-time study, but just 59 per cent of the early leavers had the same success.

The survey found schools in poorer regions had far higher proportions of students leaving without finishing Year 12. More than 30 per cent of students in the poorest regions quit school early, while just 15per cent did so in the wealthiest regions. About two-thirds of all students who left school early were male.

Friends Sam Kerbage, Liam Oliphant and Luke Stanza have finished Year 12 and believe it is the best option for the long term, but say they have friends who quit school early and found solid work that pays well. Sam, 19, left school in 2003 and started a computer science course, but deferred it to make some money before embarking on a career in hospitality. "People who drop out of school early, sometimes they achieve even more than other people do," he said.

Source

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

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

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

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2 January, 2006

War on Charters

Post lifted from Eric Kendall

The war on charter schools continues apace, prosecuted by a coalition of teachers unions and other special interests tied to the public education establishment. The latest battle in this protracted struggle is taking place right now in front of the Ohio Supreme Court in Columbus, which is currently hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed in 2001challenging the constitutionality of charter schools as presently organized and funded here. A central issue, according to an account in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The coalition contends the alternate system of publicly funded charter schools violates the constitutional requirement of a common system of schools because they are privately run - often by for-profit firms - and lack the oversight of an elected school board.

For your edification, here is what I take to be the relevant passage of the Constitution of the State of Ohio (Article 6, Section 2):

Paragraph 2: Schools funds

The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.

How should one define "a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state" exactly? I can only presume that the current system of government-run primary and secondary schools, administered by local school districts and funded, at least in part, by the state, is deemed to fulfill this constitutional requirement. Indeed, the anti-charter crowd seems to want the constitutional definition of "common schools" strictly limited to institutions of that particular mold. But why? From the Plain Dealer:

Carney and Chad Readler, a lawyer representing several charter schools, countered that charter schools are public schools in every sense of the word:

They are publicly funded and nonsectarian, they don't charge tuition, they don't discriminate, their teachers are state-certified and they administer state-required tests.

There is certainly nothing in the text of the Constitution of the State of Ohio itself that necessitates such a narrow definition of "common schools" as that which the anti-charter forces prefer. The fact of the matter is that the coalition of interests who brought this suit simply do not want their de facto monopoly over primary and secondary education challenged or curtailed in any way. This suit isn't about education; it's about power and privilege.



SAN FRANCISOCO GOOD FOR WHITES, BAD FOR BLACKS

Bourgeois values produce a good environment for bourgeois kids?

San Francisco Unified is governed by an elected Board of Education and, like all other public school districts in California, reports to the state Department of Education and receives the bulk of its funding from the state. The mayor has no official role in the public schools, with the exception of the ability to appoint replacements for school board members who leave office before their terms end. That said, mayors depend on the reputation of public schools to lure families and businesses to the city.

One thing that's crystal clear: San Francisco's scores on the state's Academic Performance Index have steadily improved. This year, the district posted a 745 on a scale of 200 to 1,000 with 800 considered excellent. Other scores include 643 in Fresno, 649 in Los Angeles, 688 in Sacramento, 713 in Long Beach and 726 in San Diego.

All ethnic groups in San Francisco are improving, though African American students in particular continue to struggle greatly, posting the worst scores of any African Americans in the state. Their most recent scores in San Francisco are 576, compared to 636 for Latinos, 832 for Asians and 833 for whites.

For that reason, school board President Eric Mar, who has clashed with Ackerman and by extension Newsom, said the city's test scores aren't necessarily worth bragging about for Newsom or anybody else. "It strikes me that he's listened to the public relations department of the school district," Mar said. "If he looked a lot more closely, he would see that there are many challenges, especially for low-income and African American students in the district that we have to address."

More here

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

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

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

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1 January, 2006

MORE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY CORRUPTION

One of the nation's largest health care universities, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, agreed on Thursday to give a federal monitor sweeping oversight of its finances and management to avoid criminal prosecution for fraud. The United States attorney for New Jersey, Christopher J. Christie, said his investigation found that the university had defrauded the federal and state governments of at least $4.9 million in a scheme that involved the "purposeful overbilling of Medicaid." Senior administrators at the university were aware of the fraudulent billing for years, he said, yet allowed it to continue until November 2004.

The university's trustees voted to accept the federal monitor on Thursday after Mr. Christie warned them last week that he had enough evidence to prosecute the university. Such a move would have made it ineligible to receive federal money and would have effectively shut it down.

Patients made more than two million visits to the New Jersey university's health care facilities and faculty members' practices around the state last year, according to the university.

The agreement, which Justice Department officials say is the first instance of a federal monitor's being installed to oversee a public university, does not prevent Mr. Christie from prosecuting university officials responsible for the double-billing or other misdeeds, and he warned the trustees last week that indictments were expected, people who were in the meeting said. The university's action comes as Mr. Christie continues to investigate allegations of widespread cronyism and insider deals that have exposed the institution's political underside.

Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that university officials padded the payroll with patronage employees, curried favor by making contributions to elected officials and politically connected charities, doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts, some for which no work appears to have been done, and awarded huge salaries and bonuses to top officials.

Mr. Christie said that he hoped the agreement would help President John J. Petillo overhaul the university's management and fiscal practices, and restore the image of an institution that is now widely viewed as a monument to New Jersey's nefarious political culture. But he acknowledged that the scope and severity of the university's questionable practices meant that the investigation was likely to intensify in the coming months. Dr. Petillo has said he welcomes the monitor so the institution can move forward. And Mr. Christie said he intended to help the university turn the page on its scandal. "But it's a big page, so it's going to take a while," he said.

The agreement, which went into effect immediately on Thursday, is likely to cause little disruption to the patients treated at the university's hospitals, or to its 4,500 students or 11,000 full-time faculty and staff members. In a meeting with more than 100 faculty members and managers on Wednesday, Mr. Christie assured them that the monitor would oversee only the institution's finances and leave the academic and medical decisions in the hands of educators and doctors.

But the move to install a federal monitor has already bought changes: Last week, two days after Mr. Christie confronted the board of trustees, the university's chief counsel and two compliance officers were pressured to resign. When he begins his duties as monitor next week, Herbert J. Stern, a former United States attorney, will have far-reaching influence to shape the way the university conducts business. He will have access to financial documents, background information about vendors and companies that bid for university contracts, and the power to make recommendations to the board regarding the hiring or firing of senior management.

But his most powerful tool will be the shadow of the United States attorney, who could move forward with the criminal complaint he filed in federal district court on Thursday if the university balks at overhauling its operations. Mr. Stern will send a written assessment of the institution's progress to Mr. Christie every three months. One crucial appointment will be to fill a new position of chief compliance officer, which the university agreed to create as part of its agreement with prosecutors.

More here



TENNESSEE DITHERS ABOUT BULLYING

No one has to define bullying forAndy Giron. The Metro fifth-grader said he and nearly everyone he knows at Bailey Middle School have seen bullying, endured it or done it themselves. "It's when somebody with more power hurts somebody with less power over and over again, purposefully," said Andy, 11, who can read about Metro's policy against intimidation and bullying in the system's 2005-06 student handbook. "They enjoy it."

Andy, his parents and teachers and those in many area school districts have a guide if they need it, but school districts in Sumner and Maury counties are tinkering with language in their anti-bullying policies this week. They are scrambling to meet a state-imposed deadline of Jan. 1. A state law introduced by state Sen. Diane Black, R-Hendersonville, passed earlier this year and pushes systems to improve school safety by defining "bullying" and stepping up efforts to combat it and give students, staff and parents clear information about how to report it.

A spot check of Metro and 12 surrounding districts shows that nearly all have already revised their existing policies or adopted new ones in order to comply with the rule. "It's always been intimidation to us. It's something that we've always been sensitive to, whether it's called by that name, bullying, or not," said Steve Doremus, spokesman for Sumner County schools, which weaved anti-bullying language into an existing policy. "The language of the new legislation means that we'll have a specific label. It will definitely increase awareness because some of the things that were bullying in the past will definitely be called that in the future."

Some systems provide specific examples of bullying in the revised policies, defining it narrowly or linking it broadly with activities ranging from sexual harassment to hazing and intimidation. Metro, for example, defines bullying as "conduct such as drawing inappropriate, unwelcome or cruel cartoons or caricatures, making cruel or inappropriate jokes, or any conduct that could be considered verbal or physical abuse."

"It's horrible. They push you, push you around," said Jakkia Buchanan, 11, a sixth-grader at Bailey Middle, who added that schools need to punish bullies. "They make other people cry, fall down." Hani Mohamed, 14, an eighth-grader at Bailey, stays clear of bullies. "Some kids bully other kids to look good," she said. "I just don't really say anything. I just get out of their way."

As part of the new policies, each school is supposed to do a better job of letting students know whom to talk to — and what they can expect in terms of a response — if they report bullying. "Sometimes you're scared, like you can't really go tell a teacher," said Sarah Vaughn, a fifth-grader at Bailey, who has known people who were bullied. "You have to speak up to help others. If you were in that position, you'd want somebody to help you."

Students, too, recognize that words on paper won't stop bullies unless schools back them up with tougher action against students who intimidate others. "Most students, when they're in trouble — like they get suspended — they don't care because they don't care about their life. They're happy they're not in school," said Umeka Thomas, a seventh-grader at Bailey Middle. "You got to talk to them because they have low self-esteem."

Carol Snow, who recently started the peer mediation program at Bailey Middle School, talks to students about controlling their anger and trusting adults, but the students play a critical role in doing away with bullying in schools, she said. "A lot of it happens because they don't talk about it and it builds up. It's a serious issue," said Snow, a specialist with the Students Taking A Right Stand, or STARS, program. "I'm trying to teach the kids the difference between snitching and reporting. I tell them school is a safe place, adults are there to supervise you, and you need to report it until something is done."

More here

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

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

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

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