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31 January, 2007

British top-grade graduates who aren't worth hiring

Lots of Brits with university honours degrees now "don't know nuffink": Poor social skills, poor mathematics skills and poor ability to write correct English. The universites are now teaching less than High Schools once did. But I guess they know that they have to save the planet and love Muslims, blacks and homosexuals

Half the country's leading employers are unable to fill graduate vacancies because studentss lack basic work skills, a survey revealed. Bosses are forced to leave prized graduate jobs open every year even though universities are turning out soaring numbers of students. Employers blame their continued recruitment difficulties on the low calibre of graduates - even those armed with first and 2.1s in their degrees. Many have such poor communication skills that bosses are worried about allowing them to answer the phone, sit in meetings or give presentations. One graduate going for a job at an investment bank began his interview saying: "You alright mate?"

The survey of 211 leading employers, including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Government departments and GlaxoSmithKline, reveals that bosses are finding it increasingly tough to recruit capable candidates - despite repeated warnings to students to work on "soft skills" such as team-working and commercial savvy. Forty-three per cent of employers polled by the Association of Graduate Recruiters said they had unfilled graduate vacancies last year, against fewer than a third in 2005. And 55 per cent of bosses are anticipating facing recruitment shortfalls in 2007. Of these, 62 per cent are not expecting to receive sufficient applications from graduates with the necessary skills.

In its winter review, the AGR says employers feel there is an "inadequate supply of applicants of sufficient calibre". It adds: "They go on to explain that candidates are normally academically proficient but lacking in soft skills such as communication as well as verbal and numerical reasoning." One telecoms company reported: "We received more than sufficient applications but I think whilst the candidates have the academic ability they didn't have the communication and soft employability skills so weren't getting through the assessment centres. "We lost quite a few students through the psychometric testing stages because of a lack of numerical and verbal reasoning skills."

Among organisations failing to fill their graduate posts last year, the average number of vacancies was 12. However five per cent left more than 50 jobs unfilled. The shortfalls forced bosses to call in expensive contractors to get the work done, the survey found. Carl Gilleard, AGR chief executive, said: "Much more effort needs to be made in schools to get the message across that going to university and coming out with a 2.1, while an achievement, is not enough to land a graduate level job. "You have to develop your skills and experience, and learn to demonstrate you have got those skills and experience. "People who put in applications full of spelling mistakes on online application forms deserve what they get. "Over the last few years, employers have raised the stakes. Their requirements have grown because of the demands of their business "They are looking for people of a higher calibre and graduates have not really caught onto that."

He added: "There are also some serious issues around science and technology courses as there are not enough students taking them. "The engineering and construction sectors are really struggling despite having some great career opportunities." Despite the difficulties recruiting top graduates, employers will be offering lower-than-inflation rises in graduate salaries this year. Starting pay packets will average 23,431 pounds, a rise of just 2.1 per cent on 2006 - the smallest increase in six years. This may be down to a predicted surge in the overall number of job opportunities available this year. Employers polled will offer 15.1 per cent more graduate-level posts in 2007. Mr Gilleard said: "Once again, we are seeing an increase in the number of graduate level vacancies which is great news for anyone applying for a graduate job this year."

Source



Nutty Britain to discriminate against educated families?

University applicants will be asked to declare whether their parents have a degree. The Government wants the information for its campaign to attract more working-class students into higher education, but critics say that it could be used to discriminate against middle-class candidates and raises suspicion of social engineering. The new question, asking whether parents "have been through higher education", will appear on application forms from next year. The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) will use it to build up a detailed picture of every applicant's background.

A spokesman for UCAS insisted that the information would not be used in the allocation of places, but would merely help universities to collect data on how successful they have been at broadening their intake. "It's just another attempt to establish the background of applicants for statistical purposes," he said. He added that applicants would not be forced to provide the information, but would merely be asked to tick a box, indicating "yes/no/don't know/decline to answer".

A compulsory question on the UCAS form already requires applicants under 21 to "give the occupation of your parent, step-parent or guardian who earns the most". Nick Gibb, a Tory education spokesman, described the new question as unwise. "At the very least it allows suspicions of social engineering to enter into the application process," he said.

Source



SIMILAR EDUCATION "REVOLUTIONS" IN BRITAIN AND AUSTRALIA

But Australia's Leftists don't seem to know what is going on around them

In the campaign for the 1997 general election in Britain the then Labour Opposition leader Tony Blair famously declared that his three highest priorities were "education, education, education". In 1999 he unveiled a 10-year reform agenda. Blair said that previous governments had neglected education, and promised to significantly increase funding as a percentage of gross domestic product. He said investment in education was essential to ensure the workforce was highly skilled to boost productivity gains and promised an "education revolution". Sound familiar?

Australia's Labor Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, has promised an "education revolution" underpinned by funding increases to raise expenditure as a percentage of GDP to boost productivity gains. Blair's so-called "Third Way" has become a template for democratic socialist parties around the world. Given Rudd has unashamedly lifted Blair's education terms and rhetoric, it is instructive to examine the Blair "education revolution" for the likely directions Rudd will take.

At the heart of the British reforms has been a much stronger focus on accountability and measurement of school performance. League tables which rank school performance were introduced in 1992, but Blair has expanded them and used school performance data to apply pressure and target funding. He said there would be "no hiding place for schools that were not striving to improve". The tables now include an "improvement index" to show which schools have shown steady improvement, or decline. More recently, Blair has added "value added" tables which show the average progress pupils make while at individual schools. This type of performance reporting has been introduced into Australian schools but has been fiercely opposed by education unions as well as state Labor governments.

School report cards are one of the most important performance indicators. In response to complaints from parents that they could not decipher the jargon on school report cards, it is now a condition of federal government funding that parents be provided with report cards in plain English and with children rated on a five-point scale. Unions have fought this at every turn.

One controversial aspect of Blair's reforms has been the involvement and funding support of the private sector in some government schools, contributing about a fifth of the capital cost and having a say in how a school is run, with limited influence over curriculum. Blair is reported to be considering plans to provide government schools with much greater autonomy through "radical reforms" that would give "more power to parents". This would involve giving school communities greater control over the hiring and firing of teachers and school principals and allow greater flexibility to innovate. It would mean parents being given a fuller picture of the individual progress of their children.

The Howard Government has consistently called for parents to be given more information about the performance of schools, teachers and students. The funding agreement also requires state governments to provide greater discretion at the school level to hire teachers, and requires a range of school performance data to be provided to parents.

With universities, the Blair Government introduced a scheme closely modelled on the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) introduced by the ALP. It has since introduced variable fees and received a report that recommended students pay about a quarter of the cost of their studies, the same average rate as for HECS. In recent times, the Blair Government has urged universities to reduce their reliance on public funding.

On January 7 Blair announced plans for tax relief for property owners if they donate their homes to their former universities, as part of efforts to create endowment funds for higher education. He also outlined plans for a scheme where cash donations to universities will be matched by government funds, to promote a culture of philanthropy. As the British Minister for Higher Education, Bill Rammell, said last year, "the UK Government is already a minority shareholder in universities" and "we should not worry if over time public funding continues to reduce as a proportion of the total funding the higher education sector is able to generate".

If Rudd is serious about a Blair-style education revolution, he will be disappointed to find that most of these reforms have been introduced by the Howard Government, and in some cases are further advanced than in Britain. These reforms have been resisted by state Labor governments and education unions. The key challenge for Rudd will be to deliver on the hype. No matter what form his education agenda takes, he will be confronted by staunch opposition from the all-powerful education unions and state Labor governments. Already the unions are threatening to withdraw election campaign funds from federal Labor. Rudd can steal the rhetorical clothing from Blair. He is yet to demonstrate he has the courage for the battle.

Source

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

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

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

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30 January, 2007

White students 'do better' in British universities

Below is a brief summary from a Leftist newspaper of an official British government report that does not appear to be online. It is difficult to dissect the sort of "massaged" statistics one has to expect from official Britain but I expect that the following is going on:

1). Blacks do badly as usual because of their low average IQ.

2). Chinese do badly because of their poor English skills. Most Chinese probably are not born in Britain and mastering English is very difficult for Orientals -- as mastering oriental languages is for us. Most immigrant blacks, by contrast, would come from places where at least a form of English is spoken (e.g. Nigeria, The Caribbean).

3). The "whites" include Jews -- who usually perform very well indeed and who are disproportionately present in higher education.

4). The female advantage comes from the black component. Black females are normally much better motivated than black males and take full advantage of the official and unofficial favouritism that is given to blacks.

5). Amusing that South Asians (Indians etc.) are not mentioned. The obvious inference from the omission is that they did as well as whites overall. So skin colour or "xenophobia" was not a factor.

Black and Chinese students are less likely to get top university degrees than their white contemporaries, a government report has found. The study suggested that ethnic minority undergraduates faced "a considerable cost" as a result because students who get first-class degrees increasingly command higher salaries.

The Department for Education and Skills report also found that students living at home were more likely to get firsts, women performed better than men, and older students tended to get better degrees.

Analysing data for 65,000 students, the researchers predicted the odds of different ethnic groups getting first-class degrees, 2:1s, 2:2s or thirds. The gap was widest for black Caribbean, black African and Chinese students. The analysis took account of factors such as gender, prior academic performance, subject studied and deprivation levels.

"A number of studies have found that attaining a 'good' degree carries a premium in the labour market, and that this premium has been increasing over time, as the higher education system has expanded," the study said. "As a result, there is a considerable cost attached to this attainment gap identified in relation to minority ethnic students."

It cautioned that the findings did not "automatically" imply "ethnic bias". The Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell said the Government was committed to ensuring people of all backgrounds could thrive in higher education."

Source



School curriculum outlines need to offer clear guidance

And the latest approach to an Australian national curriculum is too vague to be useful, writes Kevin Donnelly

Arguments in favour of a national curriculum are not restricted to Australia. While the US is also a federal system and responsibility for education rests at the local level, groups such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation argue for a national approach to detailing what students should learn and the expected levels of achievement. In a recent paper published by the Fordham Foundation, "To Dream the impossible Dream", four approaches are put forward to achieve a national curriculum.

The most aggressive approach is for the central government to enforce a national curriculum that replaces state-based models. The second approach is voluntary and states would be invited to opt into a national svstem designed by the federal government. A third approach is to allow states to continue to develop local curriculums, but to ensure that in each of the different syllabus or framework documents there is common content and skills. The final approach is to allow states to develop their own curriculum documents but for the central government to evaluate them against an agreed benchmark.

Given that both major Australian political parties, at the Commonwealth level, have signalled education as an election issue - in particular, concerns about standards, the quality of the curriculum and the possibility of a national curriculum - it is useful to relate the above four models to the Australian scene. In the same way that the Howard Government has mandated student report cards in plain English and with A to E gradings, the Commonwealth Government could try to force states and territories to adopt a national curriculum by threatening to withhold federal funding.

But Australia's Constitution makes such a course of action problematic and unlikely, as education is the preserve of the states, and the danger is that adopting a one-size-fits-all approach will enforce mediocrity if the model adopted is dumbed down and politically correct. Imagine Western Australia's outcomes-based education approach or Tasmania's Essential Learnings writ large across the nation.

During the early to mid-1990s, we attewmpted the second model, represented by the Keating government's national statements and profiles that detailed learning outcomes in various key learning areas and the expected levels of performance. Such was the substandard nature of the Keating national statements and profiles -- based, as they were, on the experimental and new-age OBE approach -- that the July, 1993, Perth meeting of education ministers refused to endorse the national curriculum.

Now, concerning Statements of Learning, the states and territories, in collaboration with the federal Government, are involved in implementing a variation of the third model. Statements of Learning are defined as "the key knowledge, skills, understandings and capacities that all students in Australia should have the opportunity to learn and develop in a domain, irrespective of the state or territory in which they live". Instead of coercing the states and territories or going to the expense of developing a comprehensive curriculum, a lighter approach is being adopted. The Statements of Learning do not cover a school's entire curriculum, restricted as they are to elements of core subjects such as English, mathematics, civics and citizenship, information and communications technologies and science. The statements relate only to years 3, 5, 7 and 9 and, while states and territories are being asked to integrate them into their own curriculum documents, there will still be a good deal of local variation as states and territories have the right to develop their own curriculums.

Given that the Australian education ministers endorsed the various Statements of Learning in August 2006 and states and territories have until January 2008 to implement the new curriculum approach, it is surprising that there has been no public debate about the usefulness and academic rigour of the statements. The first point to make about this third approach to developing a national curriculum is that it is low-risk and it plays safely into the hands of those responsible for the current parlous state of Australian education.

Whereas the practice in places such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and the US is to benchmark local curriculum internationally in order to ensure what is developed is of the highest international quality, the Statements of Learning are based on what exists within Australia. Instead of clearly defining essential knowledge, understanding and skills that all students are expected to learn, the statements are generalised and vague on the whole and in line with Australia's adoption of OBE.

The refusal to stipulate clearly what all students should learn, regardless of where they go to school, is based on the mistaken belief that schools and teachers must be given the freedom to relate what is taught to the special character of a student. As argued by those responsible for the Statements of Learning, the strength of the approach is that it "leaves systems, sectors and schools with flexibility and autonomy to integrate these statements into their own curriculums in a manner which suits the diversity of students' needs and types of schools across the country".

Again and again, research suggests that what teachers need are clear, concise and unambiguous syllabuses, or road maps, of what they are expected to teach. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel. teachers are thus freed to focus on improving classroom practice, mentoring one another and professional development. Neither the Keating government statements and profiles nor the Statements of Learning are syllabuses and, as such, are not of much practical use to teachers. If governments are serious about a national curriculum, year level-specific syllabuses in key subjects should be developed. Such syllabuses should be internationally benchmarked, academically sound, concise and teacher friendly and, if developed at the federal level, offered to schools on a voluntary basis.

Details about the "Statements of Learning" can be found here

The above article appeared in "The Australian" newspaper on January 27, 2007



Rubbery Australian university standards

MORE than a third of overseas students are completing their degrees at Australian universities with English so poor that they should not have been admitted to tertiary study in the first place. The results of a study by the demographer Bob Birrell confirm widespread concerns expressed by academics over the past decade that the Federal Government's focus on drawing fee-paying students from overseas has led to a collapse in university academic standards. They have complained about the way fee-paying students - who now number 239,000, and who contribute 15 per cent of tertiary income - have brought pressure on universities to ensure pass levels, and an epidemic of plagiarism among some groups of foreign students.

The study showed that 34 per cent of graduating students who were offered permanent residence visas last year were unable to achieve a "competent" English standard in their test scores. Among Chinese students, who are driving much of the growth in export education, the figure was as high as 43.2 per cent. More than half of South Korean and Thai students could not meet required English levels.

"It does raise serious questions about Australian university standards," said Professor Birrell, a Monash University academic and author of the report, published in today's People and Place journal. "How do they get in in the first place? The next [question] is, how do they get through university exams with poor English?"

The Department of Immigration will only issue higher education visas to students who reach band six - a "competent" standard - in the International English Language Testing System. But other types of visas only require students to reach band five. Many students arrive on these visas and use them as a back door to universities.

"We've got mountains of anecdotal data from individual lecturers complaining and people expressing concern [about standards], but this is the first time that confirms those concerns are correct," Professor Birrell said. Professor Peter Abelson, a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney, said universities often turned a blind eye to plagiarism and ineptitude among international students because they relied on their income. "[These figures] are a very stunning result, but not entirely surprising to people who are in tertiary education," he said. Students with poor English were able to pass through university because so much of their assessment work was not done under examination conditions, he said.

But universities said the data did not necessarily prove standards were softening. Professor Gerard Sutton, the president of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, said it was possible the foreign students who had failed to reach a score of six on the International English Language Testing System had scored poorly in the speaking component of the test, which may not have been a critical skill in the course they were taking. "I don't accept that there's a problem in universities in terms of soft marking of international students," Professor Sutton said. [How much evidence does he need?]

Professor Birrell said the results were an indictment on the professional associations that accredited students and allowed them to proceed with residency visas. The report said the Australian Nursing Council would not accredit graduates unless they scored seven in the language test. Dennis Furini, the chief executive of the Australian Computer Society, said his members had not complained about English standards. "In IT, it's more important to know the programming language than the English language."

Source

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

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

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

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



29 January, 2007

University: Who needs it?

Britain: As more and more pupils go to university – and pay ever more for the privilege – many are questioning whether they are getting a fair return

When Anthony Kluk set off for Leeds University to read physics with two As and two Bs in his pocket he thought it was going to be the first day of the rest of his life: a bright new start in a brave new world. It didn’t quite work out like that. “Once I got to university I found myself repeating the material I had studied for the last two years. I was forced to spend hours in the laboratory doing what can only be described as watching paint dry. It was so tedious that going back to halls and doing homework was the last thing on my mind. “And since Leeds was filled with alcohol-fuelled distractions, as well as my complete lack of motivation, I started every day with a hangover. I decided to cut my losses and start my career.” One year into his course he dropped out. Two years on he is happily employed as a corporate banker.

Similar self-doubt has also crept into the cloistered quads of Oxbridge. By the end of her first year reading English Lucy Tobin found herself sitting on the manicured lawns of Lady Margaret Hall on the banks of the Cherwell and wondering why. A year earlier the main thing on her mind had been not Alfred Lord Tennyson but Tanya from Footballers’ Wives, as she did a gap year on a tabloid newspaper. “The allure of Oxford swung my decision towards academia, but there are still times when I’m sitting in a crowded lecture theatre and wonder if I did the right thing swapping a salary for Malory.”

None of this is what Tony Blair wants to hear with his vision of a country where half the population is university-educated. At first glance the need for a degree is a no-brainer. Professions allow entry only to graduates, and many companies insist on recruits with a degree — or even two. Yet employers also insist that a degree alone is not an accurate measure of employability; indeed 40% of them believe the qualification has become devalued. Some of the most important skills — numeracy, literacy and communication — are supposed to be instilled in school but are still lacking in many students emerging from university.

So does a degree really mean anything any more? At £3,000 a year in most cases is it worth the mock-vellum it is inscribed on? Increasingly students and their parents (who usually have to stump up for the fees) don’t think so.

THE number of students starting university in the current academic year fell by 3.6% from 2005, although because the figures were up on 2004 it is not yet clear if it represents the beginning of a downward trend. What is certain is that it reflects the leap in tuition fees from just over £1,000 a year to £3,000. And with the top universities now lobbying for fees to rise even higher, possibly doubling to £6,000, those who are taking up what was once seen as a prestigious privilege are beginning to see it as a risky business proposition.

Eytan Austin, 20, saw his experience in those terms before pulling out of what he calls a “poor quality” course at Thames Valley University. “I enrolled in events management, but I quickly realised I would be better off learning independently,” he said.

“There was a day and a half of lessons per week, but they were teaching us how to be employees when I want to be an entrepreneur. I’m sure it was helpful for some people; but for me the course fees were not worth it. Now I’m in the real world I’m learning from my mistakes rather than sitting through lectures. Since dropping out I’ve got no regrets at all. I’m just really happy with life.”

Drop-out rates, particularly among the “new universities”, mostly former polytechnics, are disturbingly high and rising. London South Bank and East London universities as well as Bolton University all have projected drop-out rates of more than 27%.

It is not just those who drop out who are challenging the value-added nature of a university education. Those who are eager to stick it through are wondering if they are getting their money’s worth.

When Bristol University cut teaching time in history for third-year undergraduates from six hours a week to two last year, it triggered protests from both the students and their parents. Etan Smallman, 20, a history student, reckoned he was being short-changed. “We expect better services for more money, not reduced ones,” he said.

One Bristol undergraduate told the university’s student newspaper: “I thought I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library membership and a reading list.”

There is evidence now of a student revolt that has more in common with a consumer watchdog campaign than the campus politics of the 1960s. A maverick website called www.williseemytutor.com rates universities on student-to-tutor ratios and produces some damning comments. Several universities are rated by their own students as “rubbish” or “shocking”. The academic departments concerned are talking about legal action. But so are some students and parents. Jack Rabinowicz, an education lawyer whose daughter is a student at a northern university, complains that the number of seminars and tutorials seems to be decreasing drastically. Rabinowicz would like to see legally binding contracts spelling out what students are entitled to in return for their fees.

“Some students have one-sided contracts with the obligations on the student not to break university rules,” he said. “What is needed is a contract that the university has an obligation not to employ crap lecturers. I had a land law lecturer who was usually drunk. These people still exist.” Rabinowicz suggests that “mass actions for compensation — a hundred students getting together and claiming the return of £1,000 each — could be worthwhile”.

THE question is how much of this growing malaise is due to the government’s 50% target for pupils in higher education and how much is the result of a school system that does not teach students how to cope before they are herded into university.

“Now that kids are more force-fed at school and less educated to work independently, they need tutor-time,” said Alex Farquarson, who has one child studying in London and another at Sheffield. “I get cross when my daughter comes home and says she is sick of trying to work out what an essay question means while her tutor reads a book somewhere.”

Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College London and a respected authority on tertiary education, agrees that universities are accepting people who haven’t been prepared well enough at school.

“There is an issue here about whether our system encourages universities to accept people on courses who can’t cope with them,” she said. “Universities are under tremendous pressure to fill places if they don’t want their business model to go down the plughole.”

She disagrees with the target of 50% of young people going to university and challenges the idea that it is necessitated by “the supposed skills needs of the workforce”.

“I think the market should find its own level,” she said. “Graduates are coming out and getting jobs that do not need graduate level skills. I am really opposed to the idea that the government should decide how many people should go to university.”

Wolf’s own son read classics at Oxford but is now “an extremely poor” self-employed musician. “If and when he gives up being a self-employed musician will he be better off with a degree? I don’t know.” The American sociologist Charles Murray argues that only people with an IQ of 115 or better, which he puts at 15% of the population, are equipped to do well at university. According to Murray a good university education should teach “advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people”. Struggling students, he suggests, are like someone “athletically unqualified” trying to cope with top-level sport.

Murray suggests the other problem is social pressure: middle class kids go to university because it is what their parents want rather than what society needs. “Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason — the list goes on and on — is difficult . . . ”This is a lesson that the influx of skilled eastern European craftsmen is rapidly teaching us in Britain. Yet the old class-driven attitudes prevail and can lead to traumatic mistakes.

Philip Kitcher liked his job as a senior nurse earning £28,000 a year, but he thought he might improve himself by training as a lawyer to become a nurse advocate. With no A-levels, he applied as a mature student to six universities.Three accepted him. He chose the University of Greenwich, which in 2001 offered him a place on its LLB course over the phone, saying his nursing qualification was the equivalent of two A-levels. A year later, he felt badly misled, having lost his place through an external exam.

“I am £15,000 in debt, have no job and have just failed my first year exams,” he said at the time. “My confidence has been knocked sideways. So has that of many of the people on the course. The university is being cagey about just how many failed the exams, because some people are now doing resits, but last year one-in-three first years [30%] didn't go on to the second year.

“Since I now know that at the end of the second and third years there are further failures, I feel angry. I was never told that there was such a low probability of actually getting the qualification I need. And I don't think any of the other students who failed were told either.

“If I had been told that the failure rate was so high and the chances of success so questionable I would have thought very hard before turning my life upside down. It is a big con. I feel that I have been duped. Every year Greenwich takes lots of [law] students who will fail. It takes their money and they run up huge debts.”

Kitcher said that some tutors were unacceptably rude. “When I asked how we did in our last piece of coursework, one tutor said, ‘You were all crap’. I said, ‘Could you be more specific?’ and the answer was, ‘No, wait for your marks’.” Since leaving Greenwich, he has gained a vocational degree in emergency nursing and is now back doing what he likes best. Greenwich said it was reviewing the curriculum and support offered to law students.

Readers of Tom Sharpe (sadly not yet on the compulsory list for undergraduates studying English) might hear echoes of “Wilt” syndrome, the brutal apathy acquired by his hapless polytechnic lecturer required to give poetry lessons to “plumbers II and gasfitters III”.

There is a growing dysfunction between the teachers and the taught that reflects flaws in the structure of the higher education system. A prime reason for reduced teaching time is the requirement, set by government, for universities to produce more research. This, rather than time spent on teaching, significantly determines a university’s state funding. When it comes to a university’s income from students, the prime requirement is quantity.

At the same time the conveyor belt is fed by the fact that a degree is increasingly a basic essential for young people looking for almost any sort of job. According to Bah-ram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, “there is not a career left you do not need a degree for. I don’t know about chiropody or massage but physiotherapy you need a degree for, likewise nursing”.

Paradoxically, it is these new degrees that have the most obvious value as proof of a skill. If a “degree” is another name for a vocational diploma, we don’t want to be messed around by unqualified physiotherapists or masseurs.

Do such skills have to be taught in a “university”, however? Traditionally they were learnt through apprenticeships and day-release courses at technical colleges. They still are in Germany, France and Switzerland, where the proportions of young people at university are between 30% and 40%, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

And then there are the unskilled degrees, which equip students for nothing in particular except passing the first barrier in getting some sort of job. As Murray puts it, a university degree today, particularly in the arts, is simply “a screening device for employers”. Without one, your application is simply binned.

The second screening device is quality. Since the rebranding of polytechnics in 1992, employers put stock not only on how good a degree is but on the subject and the university at which it was earned. Under those circumstances it might be reasonable to expect higher student satisfaction and better job prospects from the members of the Russell Group, the 20-strong self-appointed “premier league” of British universities. Yet they are keen to call themselves “research-in-tensive” — which, as the Bristol experience has shown, does not automatically result in the best teaching.

Many academics, perhaps particularly those at Oxford and Cambridge and other top-flight universities, regard general degree-level teaching even to bright undergraduates as “a bore”. Nurturing the young is far less important to their own careers than publications on South African tort law or Renaissance theatre techniques. This is a world in which John Reid’s epithet “not fit for purpose” comes to mind. WHAT about the value of a university education in assuring future personal prosperity? The government would like us to believe that a degree buys a higher salary. Yes, this is valid as a rule of thumb, but it depends on whose thumb. As Wolf points out, the degrees with a high return are the quantitative ones: “Maths, physics, chemistry, the hard sciences, law, medicine. They earn you money . . . An arts degree is not the thing to do if you want to make a fortune.”

According to the government’s 2003 white paper, The Future of Higher Education, a degree can bring an additional 50% to 64% in salary. Even today, however, 41% of members of the Institute of Directors do not have a university degree. Furthermore, the government’s determination to push more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the best universities does not always pay off. The Council for Industry and Higher Education has found that graduates from poorer backgrounds go on to earn less than graduates from professional families with identical qualifications — by as much as 16% in the case of Oxbridge graduates.

Increasingly, large numbers of graduates emerging even from the Russell Group universities are finding themselves just one of the crowd and are drifting before they sort out what they can do for a living.

Hannah Fletcher signed up for a degree in Chinese at Cambridge but dropped out because her course “bore little relevance to the real world”. Part of her disillusion set in with seeing the finals-year girl in the next room spend months dressed in grubby tracksuit pants eating pasta in her room, swotting away and winning a first — only to end up burnt out and taking a job as a cleaner while she waited for decent offers.

Fletcher has seen “one bright, articulate graduate after another wave their devalued degree in front of indifferent employers”. Of her contemporaries, “one friend is working in a cider factory. Another has gone to teach English in Japan on a second gap year, while a third, with nothing better to do, has gone to visit her”. The most steady job any of them has is as an NHS administrator, taken to pay off debts.

So was it all a waste of time, effort and money? Wolf thinks it is still rational to go to university as “having a degree still pushes you up the potential shortlist for jobs”. She added: “In a society where lots of people have got degrees it is likely to go on being rational.”

The tipping point will be when so many people are going to university that “just having a degree does not earn you very much. Then the question will be — is it worth it? Will I be just as likely to do well getting three years’ work experience?” THE old idea of university education was to broaden the mind and to build independence and character; but it was also absolutely and unashamedly elitist. Evelyn Waugh defined this dream in Brideshead Revisited: “The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.”

Students continue to find university rewarding and fun, a place for social and sexual adventure. But the dream was over long before Waugh wrote it. The real truth was glimpsed decades ago in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Malcolm Brad-bury’s The History Man, both the products of bitter experience.

Universities today are driven by government targets, employers’ requirements, high fees and financially pressed students looking for a return on investment.

The Blairite concept of educational democratisation has turned the ivory towers into degree factories, turning out a product that has lost its niche status in a flooded market. Ironic when a factory was what the gifted young once went to university to escape.

Source



MUSLIM WASHROOMS???

Why must non-Muslims be barred from them?

A row has erupted over Muslim-only washrooms at La Trobe University [Australia] that can be accessed only with a secret push-button code. Muslim students have exclusive access to male and female washrooms on campus, sparking claims of bias and discrimination. The university and Islamic leaders have defended the washrooms as vital to Muslim students' prayer rituals.

A university student, who did not want to be identified, raised the issue with the Sunday Herald Sun this week. Australian Family Council spokesman Bill Muehlenberg said concerns over the exclusive facilities were valid. "Do we have a Christian washroom or an atheist washroom?" he said. "The whole thing is madness." Mr Muehlenberg said the separate facilities were divisive. "If Muslims are saying 'we are good Australians and want to integrate', why are they insisting on separate washrooms?" he said.

Victorian Muslim community leader Yasser Soliman said the washrooms were necessary. He said the separate facilities were also due to concerns from non-Muslim students. "Muslims need to wash their feet before prayer and in the past there have been complaints about them washing their feet in sinks, so this is a happy medium," he said. Mr Soliman said most universities provided Muslim-only prayer and washrooms for students.

A La Trobe University spokesman said the washrooms were established with the advice of senior Muslim religious leaders. He said the university also had a Christian chapel with a meeting room and four chaplains from major denominations had offices. La Trobe University Christian Union vice-president Richard Thamm backed the washrooms. "It's part of their religion, they need to wash in a special way before they pray," 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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



28 January, 2007

The PC campus - politically corrupt

I'm kind of tired of hearing about our "politically correct" colleges and universities. There's nothing "politically correct" about them. They are politically corrupt. Let me give you a personal and very recent example of what I'm talking about.

My eldest daughter was mostly homeschooled. Later, she found she had a love for art and interior design. She decided she wanted to pursue a career in that area. To enter the art school of her choice, she needed to take some basic educational courses and decided the easiest and most economical choice would be through the Northern Virginia Community College system.

As a graduate of the "public university" myself, I expected the worst in political indoctrination - even in this so-called "red state." But nothing could prepare me for the horror story my daughter told me after her first class in the fundamentals of design materials - a required course for her to advance to the prestigious art school she hopes to attend in a year or two.

The professor began the four-hour class by showing Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." That's right. That's what I said. The taxpayer-supported professor at this taxpayer-supported institution abused her students on the first day of an art class by showing them Al Gore's propaganda flick on "global warming."

But it gets worse - a lot worse. Following the two-and-a-half hour Al Gore presentation, the students were treated, according to my daughter, to 30 minutes of weeping by the professor who carried on about the terrible threat to the planet posed by this global warming menace. Keep in mind, this is an art class.

Next, students were told they would have to see the movie at least two more times and write a paper about it. Did I mention this was an art class?

Next, students were given their homework assignments: Change incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent, plant trees, etc. Maybe you're asking yourself: "What does this have to do with art?" I was wondering the same thing. I asked my daughter. She explained that a few paragraphs of the material they would be reading in their textbook on design materials had to do with the environment. Thus, it wasn't a stretch for this activist masquerading as an art teacher to turn her entire class into a training center for eco-whack jobs.

I feel sorry for my daughter. She knows what's going on here. Imagine what it is like sitting through this kind of forced re-education because you are at the mercy of this professor if you want pursue your dreams? I'm so mad I could spit.

I wanted to call up my state legislator and complain. But then I remembered, this is not the exception, it is the rule! This goes on every day in colleges and universities across this country. It's just that I haven't been exposed to it firsthand in this way since I was a student myself. So, instead I vented on my brother, who thinks much like I do about such matters. He had a great line: "I always suspected libs needed a course on how to change a light bulb. This pretty much confirms it." He added: "And aren't they opposed to cruel and unusual punishment? Sitting through Gore's movie three times would certainly qualify even by Gitmo standards."

Unfortunately, all we do is laugh about outrages like this. We have to start seeing it for what it is - corruption, abuse of taxpayer dollars, government abuse of authority. Dismissing it as "political correctness" is just way too polite

Source



Australia: Phonics still being ignored by "unscientific" teacher-training colleges

Education faculties will have to abandon their unscientific ideology of reading if children across the nation are to be guaranteed basic literacy. This claim is made by Max Coltheart, a leading member of the group of 26 academics, mostly psychologists, whose open letter to former education minister Brendan Nelson inspired a national inquiry into how reading is taught. In his first assessment of the outcome of the inquiry, which reported in 2005, Professor Coltheart of Macquarie University has warned that unless Dr Nelson's successor, Julie Bishop, takes on the education academics he holds ultimately responsible for poor literacy, the inquiry will have been wasted.

Professor Coltheart, an advocate of the phonics method of teaching reading, said as far as he could tell not a single education faculty had shown any sign of heeding the reformist recommendations of the inquiry. The faculties were wedded to the failed whole-language method, he said. "They're so defensive, they won't do it unless they're compelled to," he told the HES. "Most of them are of a very unscientific frame of mind. They hate the idea that you can even measure reading. Is (Ms Bishop) going to compel them to (reform) or is she going to shelve (the report)?"

Ms Bishop said the commonwealth did not have the power to force education faculties to adopt the report's recommendations. But she pointed to the requirement that states submit from May next year to annual national literacy and numeracy testing for students in years three, five, seven and nine as a condition of the federal funding agreement. "This testing will place significant pressure on university education faculties to produce teachers with the skills to more effectively teach reading, grammar, mathematics and other key skills," she said. It was up to the states, as employers of most teachers, to insist that education faculties turn out graduates with the right skills to teach literacy.

Terry Lovat, from the Australian Council of Deans of Education, disputed Professor Coltheart's image of education academics as captive to the whole-language method and hostile to phonics and the Nelson inquiry. "I think that if the whole-language approach ever dominated, it has not done so for 15 years: it's a straw man," Professor Lovat said. He said the inquiry, on which he sat, had been influenced by the education deans in finding that classrooms needed a balance between direct instruction phonics and indirect "literacy saturation". Education faculties, including his own at the University of Newcastle, were well aware of the report's recommendations and were taking them into account in regular internal reviews.

The debate about teacher training is expected to reach a new pitch this year. A federal parliamentary inquiry into teacher education is expected to report before March. Labor's education spokesman Stephen Smith has unsettled teacher unions by endorsing "a rigorous assessment" of teacher performance in the classroom.

Professor Coltheart said the public debate about reading tended to assign blame to teachers but they themselves were victims of the unscientific culture of education faculties. "Somebody's got to be blamed for (poor literacy) and it looks to me it's the faculties, and if Julie Bishop does nothing she can be blamed, too," he said. He said surveys suggested that up to 20 per cent of children and adolescents emerged with very poor literacy.

With Melbourne University's Margot Prior, Professor Coltheart has written a 5000-word analysis of the Nelson inquiry and its aftermath. It is expected to be published soon by the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. "(The inquiry found that) the whole-language approach to the teaching of reading, currently the most widely used approach to the teaching of reading in Australian schools ... is not in the best interests of students, especially those students who are having difficulty learning to read," they write.

They say this method disapproves of direct instruction in rules for translating letters of the alphabet into sounds. They say the method holds that children learn to read and interact with texts to create meaning for themselves, just as they learn to talk without any explicit teaching. They say that any successful reading program has to begin with so-called synthetic phonics, in which children are taught to read by matching letters with sounds and putting them together into syllables. They say a thorough overhaul of teacher training is necessary. "(But) we know of no plans for the universities to improve the training of teachers in the science of reading, and in evidence-based methods for teaching reading and assisting children with difficulties in learning to read. "This is despite the fact, noted in the Nelson report, that it is currently possible for Australia's future teachers to complete a bachelor of education course with less than 2 per cent of total credit points devoted to instruction in the teaching of reading."

Source

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

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

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

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

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



27 January, 2007

Helping poor Indians crack toughest test

Big bucks not needed for good education



Santosh Kumar, son of a landless farmer from the dirt-poor Indian state of Bihar, has got through the entrance exam of the country's most prestigious engineering school, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). When you consider the fact that some 230,000 students from all over India compete for barely 5,000 seats in the country's seven IITs every year, you realise the significance of Santosh's achievement - he ranked 3,537. IIT graduates have gone on to head companies like Vodafone, Infosys, Sun Microsystems, United Airlines and McKinsey. There is hardly a US-based Fortune 500 company which does not have an IIT alumnus in its senior management.

Santosh and other underprivileged students in a state where nearly half the population cannot read or write have been helped by a small, derelict training school in the state capital, Patna. The private coaching school, named after famous Indian mathematician Srinavasa Ramanujan, has attained a cult status among academics and students for consistently churning out students who crack arguably one of the world's most competitive exams.

Most of the students are like Santosh, whose elder brother, Niranjan, never went to school. His younger brother, Saurabh, emboldened by his brother's feat, is pursuing his education. "We don't know what my brother Santosh has passed, but people say he will get a respectful job and earn good money when he starts working," says Niranjan.

Patna's four-year-old Ramanujan School of Mathematics is the brainchild of a local maths teacher, Anand Kumar. Consider the results of this 30-seat school run out of a ramshackle yard - during its first year, 2003, 18 of the 30 students cracked the IIT entrance tests. Next year, the number rose to 22. In 2005, 26 students sailed into IITs. Last year, 28 students passed the exam. "This year, my school may well hit a jackpot with all my 30 students passing the entrance test," said Mr Kumar, 34, who has never been to an IIT, but won critical praise for his work in mathematics.

Word has spread about his training school far and wide - some 5,000 students turn up from all over Bihar for a place in the school, run out of a thatched hut with fraying wooden benches and creaking tables. "We select 200 of them initially to train with us, and then finally, 30 are chosen depending on their talent, family background and education," says Mr Kumar.

The school charges a paltry 4,000 rupees ($89) annually from its students for the seven-month training, compared to other private coaching institutes who train students for IIT exams for nothing less than 40,000 rupees ($890) a year. But the handpicked 30 students who finally sit for the exam are given free coaching and food.

Anand Kumar says he set up the school after he himself was unable to cough up the money needed to finance his higher education when he received admission to Cambridge University. "I tried very hard to raise the money, but since I came from a poor family I failed. So I wanted to realise the dream to help poor students to crack the toughest engineering exam in the country," he says.

His school is run on a shoe-string budget - students often stand up because of a shortage of benches while Mr Kumar and his group of teachers give lectures. Among the teachers is also one of the senior most policemen in Bihar, additional director-general Abhyanand, who uses only one name. Mr Abhyanand, who himself went to an IIT, teaches physics without taking a salary from the school. "My remuneration is seeing the growing numbers of students coming from poor, rural families who succeed. I hope they pull their families and relatives out of penury," he says.

He is not wide of the mark - 11 of the 28 successful students who cracked the IIT test last year were from the lower castes, the bottom-most rung of Indian society. The parents of students like Anupam Kumar (rank: 2,299) and Priyanshu Kumar (rank: 2,379) and Suresh Ram work as auto-rickshaw drivers, watch mechanic and construction workers respectively.

Writer Sandipan Deb who has written a book on IITs says these students are "exposed to a whole new world" when they arrive on the IIT campuses. "The first thing they realise is that just because they spent their lives in a village does not make them any less bright than the kids from the metropolises. This is a huge confidence booster," he says. The training school's feat is amazing in a state where more than two million children are out of school, and the literacy rate is a shameful 47%.

Source



British pupils to learn the best of British

The nation was plunged into an uncharacteristic celebration of Britishness yesterday as new lessons in British history and the national identity were introduced to schools and Labour politicians with an eye on promotion vied to demonstrate their patriotic credentials. It was all very un-British.

Amid growing concerns that young people lack a sense of belonging and are in need of social and educational glue in today’s multicultural, multiracial society, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced that compulsory lessons in British history would be added to the citizenship curriculum under the heading Identity and Diversity: Living Together in the UK. The new lessons for pupils aged 11 to 16 will cover ethnicity, religion and race, and will explore Britain’s national identity through a study of immigration, the Commonwealth, the Empire and devolution, along with the extending of the popular vote and women’s rights.

Sir Keith Ajegbo, a Home Office adviser and author of the reforms, said that the new classes aimed to tackle feelings of marginalisation among young people from white and ethnic-minority backgrounds by encouraging them to discuss potentially sensitive issues in the “safe” environment of the classroom.

“It is the duty of all schools to address issues of ‘how we live together’ and ‘dealing with difference’, however difficult and controversial they may seem,” said Sir Keith, former headmaster of Deptford Green School, South London.

A “Who do we think we are?” week will encourage pupils to explore their differences and common values. Predominantly white schools will be encouraged to “twin” with schools that have a more diverse intake.

Sir Keith’s review amounts to a damning criticism of the way that citizenship has been taught in schools since its introduction in 2002 in response to a perceived lack of political and engagement among young people. Too much provision was patchy and too few schools had separate citizenship lessons, preferring to lump the subject in with personal social and health education. This, he said, was unacceptable, adding that more teacher training and specialised teaching material was needed to put things right.

Mr Johnson, a candidate for the Labour deputy leadership, agreed that pupils should be “taught explicitly about why British values of tolerance and respect prevail in society and how our national, regional, religious and ethnic identities have evolved over time”.His comments make him the latest in the line of Cabinet ministers to seize upon Gordon Brown’s theme of Britishness, after surveys suggesting that many people now struggle to identify typical British values. The idea is a key part of Mr Brown’s plan to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister.

At a separate event at the University of Oxford, Jack Straw, who is still considering whether to stand for the deputy leadership, called for a stronger “British story” to reflect the heroic nature of the country’s history and foster a greater sense of citizenship. Britain, he said, had much to learn from the way countries such as the US, Canada and Australia told their national story.

The British story would encapsulate the rights and responsibilities that went with the “non-negotiable bargain or contract” of being a British citizen. In a clear reference to religious fundamentalists, he said that it would challenge those with “a single, all-consuming identity” that was at odds with Britain’s democratic values.

“We have to be clearer about what it means to be British, what it means to be part of this British nation of nations and, crucially, to be resolute in making the point that what comes with that is a set of values. Yes, there is room for multiple and different identities, but those have to be accepted alongside an agreement that none of these identities can take precedence over the core democratic values of freedom, fairness, tolerance and plurality that define what it means to be British.”

The Conservatives welcomed the “grounding [of] citizenship on the teaching of British history”, but teaching unions gave warning that teachers could not be left to carry the burden of integration alone.

Source



Australian parents still fleeing government schools, despite high costs

Parents sending their children to southeast Queensland's leading private schools are facing fee hikes of up to 14 per cent. For some, the cost of private education will top $13,000 for senior students this year. Even at more affordable Catholic schools, rising fees are putting pressure on struggling families, according to Parents and Friends Associations of Queensland executive director Paul Dickie. "The cost is a big problem for parents," Mr Dickie said. "Some will find it extremely difficult. "Any increase is going to restrict the number of families that can afford to send their kids to Catholic schools."

This year most of the leading private schools in southeast Queensland have lifted their fees by around 7 per cent. That has pushed the cost of a senior education well above $10,000 a year for at least eight of the most prestigious institutions.

The Southport School is one of Queensland's most expensive, charging $13,115 for students in Year 11 and 12. Headmaster Greg Wain admitted some families would have trouble paying that. "Not all our parents can pay the fees easily," he said. "Some do struggle and we're very cognisant of that." Mr Wain said the higher fees reflected increased salaries for teachers, rising interest rates and new technology costs. "Certainly for our parents, there's an expectation that there be national to international level facilities, including such things as swimming pools, rowing programs, leadership programs and extensive music programs," he said. "All of them are quite expensive to resource."

While The Southport School offers an all inclusive fee, other private schools also impose regular levies, which add thousands of dollars to the annual bill for parents. At Brisbane's Anglican Church Grammar school at East Brisbane, parents will pay $12,982 to educate a child in Years 8 to 12. Churchie also charges a non-refundable enrolment confirmation fee of $1150, along with levies for book rental and outdoor education and a $300 compulsory annual contribution to the building fund.

One of Brisbane's leading girls schools, Somerville House at South Brisbane is charging $10,620 for students in Years 7 to 12 this year, with added technology and excursion fees and a voluntary building levy.

If students are boarders, the financial slug at most schools will be at least as much as the tuition fees. But Independent Schools Queensland operations director David Robertson said the increasing cost of private education was not deterring parents. "It would seem the enrolment growth in our sector is continuing, which would indicate that parents still believe they are getting good value for money," 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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



26 January, 2007

FRENCH ENFORCE MENTAL ARITHMETIC

A daily dose of mental arithmetic has been placed on the curriculum for primary and even nursery schools in France, under a government scheme to sharpen young minds dulled by television. Gilles de Robien, the Education Minister, has ordered children to carry out between 15 and 20 minutes of calcul mental every day from the age of 5, when they are in the final year of nursery school, as part of a back-to-basics programme. He also wants five-year-olds to resume the study of multiplication and division, as well as addition and subtraction, for the first time since the 1970s.

Mr de Robien moved after a report from the French Science Academy said that children who practised sums in their heads had better memories and quicker brains. "This subject has been neglected in primary schools much too much," he said. "It's time to bring it back." The minister said that the discipline would develop pupils' intellect and serve them in adult life. "It's important not to forget to link exercises to daily life. How do you calculate a reduction during the sales, for example?" Mr de Robien's initiative followed claims that mental arithmetic had been on the wane since the 1960s because of modern methods - a claim denied by teaching unions.

Pierre Luna, education delegate at the academy, pinned responsibility for the decline on pupils rather than teachers. "With children watching more than three hours of television a day there is a real problem of attention span and the mobilisation of memories," he said. "Their memories are more cluttered up than they were 50 years ago." He said that mental arithmetic necessitated a return to learning by rote - including, for instance, of multiplication tables. This liberated brain space for other subjects. "If a child takes two seconds to tell you that 7 x 8 is 56, it's obvious that the effort is less than if it takes two minutes of reflection."

The report went on to recommend the reintroduction of multiplication and division from the age of 5. Under the present curriculum five-year-olds are taught only to add and subtract. Unions say that mental arithmetic has never been neglected by teachers, and accuse Mr de Robien of trying to dictate a minute-by-minute timetable in schools.

His back-to-basics includes three hours of grammar in primary schools every week and a return to the "syllabic" method for teaching pupils how to read, rather than the more modern "global method".

Source



SWORDSMAN WINS



Rhode Island's education commissioner ordered a high school on Friday to publish a yearbook photo showing a teenage medieval enthusiast with a sword. Portsmouth High School authorities can regulate editorial content in the yearbook, but they acted unreasonably by rejecting Patrick Agin's photo, hearing officer Paul Pontarelli wrote in a ruling approved by Education Commissioner Peter McWalters.

Agin, a 17-year-old fan of the Middle Ages, wore chain mail and slung a prop sword over his shoulder for his senior portrait at Portsmouth High School. School officials said the picture violated a zero-tolerance policy on weapons and rejected the picture for the yearbook.

The Rhode Island branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Algin's family, has argued that the school has allowed students to pose for more than a decade with props that show their interests, including musical instruments and horses.

Portsmouth Schools Superintendent Susan Lusi did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Friday night. In the ruling, state education officials wrote that school officials offered to publish Agin's photo if it was part of a paid yearbook advertisement. "Tolerance for weapons can be purchased," Pontarelli wrote. "This is illogical."

Source



Democrats pass a sham student loan bill

Democrats last Wednesday were extolling their student loan bill for opening college to modest-income Americans when Rep. Tom Price, a second-term Republican from Georgia, took the House floor. "If only this bill did what they say," Price declared. His admonition constituted more than the usual hyperbole of congressional debate. The bill, passed by an overwhelming bipartisan House vote, was headlined as reducing the interest on federally subsidized student loans from the present 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent. Actually, it gradually reaches the 3.4 percent level on July 1, 2011. A student taking out a loan July 1 this year would pay 6.12 percent after graduation. Only 29 percent of all students getting loans would be eligible for this gradual cut. Other student loan programs will be cut to help pay for the $7 billion cost over five years. And, contrary to Democratic implications, the bill does nothing to slow skyrocketing college tuition.

Such details are obscured, however, by the brilliant success of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "first 100 hours." The student loan bill is one of the politically popular measures rushed through opening days of the first Democratic-controlled House session in 12 years -- without hearings, without committee authorization and without meaningful debate. While Democratic support has been unanimous, Republicans are divided and listless.

In contrast to ideologically diverse Democrats who controlled Congress in the past, today's House majority members look like automatons not only in the way they look but how they talk. The hand of Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, was apparent as Democrats newly elected under his chairmanship took the floor to deliver nearly identical speeches of how this bill will help poor students.

Rep. Ed Perlmutter, who won a previously Republican-held district in Colorado, in his floor speech used the now-common anonymous anecdote. He told of seeing "a woman whose kids have gone to school with mine" at a swim meet in Arvada, Colo. "She told me that one of her kids is in college now, and she has another that will be going in a couple of years. She is a single mom, and her kids have done well in school, but the cost of college has become prohibitive for their entire family. She said her kids have been excellent students, but she was fearful they could not get into college and be able to pay for it." Perlmutter added that this "single mom" thanked him for this bill changing "the cost of higher education." In fact, it has nothing to do with the prohibitive cost of college. It will have no effect whatever on her child now in college. If her second child is literally enrolling in a couple of years (January 2009), the interest rate would be 4.76 percent, to be paid after the student leaves college. The mom may have thanked Perlmutter too soon.

Because Democrats are now committed to "pay-go" (offsetting all spending increases), this bill means cutting $6 billion from other federally subsidized student loan programs on top of a net $12 billion cut by the last Republican-controlled Congress. On the eve of last Wednesday's House debate, the Consumer Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable sent a joint letter to members of Congress. The offset cuts in loan funding, the organizations warned, "cannot be absorbed by the nation's loan providers without compromising the kinds of benefits and services now provided to college students and their families."

This warning was not expected to impact heady Democrats, but should have promoted caution among Republicans. It did not. While Democrats were 232 to 0 for the bill, only 71 Republicans followed their leadership to vote against it. The 124 Republicans voting aye included such erstwhile conservative stalwarts as Todd Akin (Mo.), Virgil Goode (Va.), Chip Pickering (Miss.), Joe Pitts (Pa.), Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), Ed Royce (Calif.) and Todd Tiahrt (Kan.). The once militant, united House Republicans are demoralized and on the run. They were battered in the last campaign for cutting school loans in the previous Congress and are willing to go along with a sham bill, hoping for Senate gridlock and a Presidential veto.

Source

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

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

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

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



25 January, 2007

Official anti-white racism in British schools promoting resentment

White children living in mixed-race communities feel as marginalised and uncertain of their British identity as ethnic minorities, a controversial government report has found. A review of citizenship lessons in schools by Sir Keith Ajegbo, a Home Office adviser, concludes that white children are suffering “labelling and discrimination” that is severely compromising their idea of being British. His review will suggest that while most people assume issues about diversity or “cultural and community cohesion” centred on the black or Asian communities, just as much thought and resources need to be put into providing diversity education to white pupils.

White pupils in areas where the ethnic composition is mixed can often suffer labelling and discrimination, Sir Keith will say. “They can feel beleaguered and marginalised, finding their own identities under threat as much as minority ethnic children might not have theirs recognised. “It makes no sense in our report to focus on minority ethnic pupils without trying to address and understand the issues for white pupils. It is these white pupils whose attitudes are overwhelmingly important in creating community cohesion. Nor is there any advantage in creating confidence in minority ethnic pupils if it leaves white pupils feeling disenfranchised and resentful.”

The report will quote the example of one white pupil in her early teens who, after hearing in a lesson that other members of her class originally came from the Congo, Portugal, Trinidad and Poland, said that she “came from nowhere”. These issues were important in white schools as much as schools with a mixed race intake, the report will say. “Even though the white population who live in predominantly white areas might be removed from the immediate personal experience of ethnic diversity, it is still likely to be an issue for them because they encounter diversity through media representations.”

Sir Keith’s report is based on interviews with pupils, community organisations and faith groups across the country about what they thought of citizenship lessons. It was commissioned last year after the bombings of July 7, 2005, amid fears that extremism was rife in universities. It is expected to recommend that citizenship lessons focus on teaching what it means to be British, along with an understanding of values such as tolerance and justice.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, who will publish the Ajegbo review tomorrow, agrees that many white working-class children have negative perceptions of their British identity. He is likely to accept that more support is needed for predominantly white schools to support a wider understanding of diversity.

While the spectre of white marginalisation is regarded as an increasingly pressing issue, governments have been cautious of tackling it head-on for fear of being accused of racism. Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, said last night that he had long regarded this as a crucial issue. He highlighted a recent speech in which he gave warning that the “perception of inequality” existed among white as well as non-white populations. “Many of the white working class people who vote for the BNP sincerely believe that it is their colour that means that they are poor, or that their sons are failing at school, or that the council gives everything going to the Asians. “Not all of this is imagined. All the recent evidence shows that inequality based on race and faith is polarising our communities,” he said in the address last November.

Ian Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, welcomed Sir Keith’s findings, adding that it was about time the Government woke up to the issue. “For some white working-class boys, it appears to them that everybody else but them has somebody who worries about them. They feel they are at the bottom,” he said. “The issues that affect white working-class boys are the same as those that affect Afro-Caribbean boys.”

Source



West Australia scraps most of proposed "postmodernist" education system

Far-Leftist education "experts" rebuffed after public protests

The Western Australian Government has essentially abandoned most of its controversial Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) system in a major overhaul. OBE faced strong opposition from teachers and parents last year but the Government refused to back down, insisting many elements of the system would be introduced this year. But today, new Education Minister Mark McGowan said teachers would be allowed to assess year 11 and 12 students using traditional marks and grades, rather than levels and bands.

Other changes include the introduction of compulsory exams for all year 12 students, except those doing trade certificates. Teacher juries will be established to review 50 new courses for senior school and a new syllabus will be created for kindergarten to year 10 by the end of the year. The new mathematics course will be deferred until 2009.

Mr McGowan is expecting overwhelming support from teachers. "I don't see that there has been a great deal of wastefulness," he said. "What we've done is listened to where there needs to be some change and we've made those changes... "The key aims of what I've taken to the Curriculum Council are to give teachers a greater say over courses because they know what works best in the classroom, and I have great faith in the capacity and ability of teachers."

Association of Independent Schools spokeswoman Audrey Jackson says the changes to the education system are sensible. "Although it sounds as though it's a wholesale change, it's not, in terms of the way that teachers will teach and what they will teach," she said. "That hasn't changed, so I don't see the timetable as being a problem."

Catholic Education Office spokesman Ron Dullard says the overhaul is a marked improvement and will reduces the strain on teachers, parents and students. "If the parents and the teachers aren't working together and happy with it, the students can't do the job that they need to do," he said. "So I certainly think that it's in everybody's interest that we do this."

Source

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

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

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

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



24 January, 2007

A RATIONAL THINKER WOULD STOP FUNDING SOMETHING THAT IS NOT WORKING

But failure earns MORE money in State education. Comment from Minnesota below says it's not just devotion to government education as a sacred cow:

Gov. Pawlenty, sounding at least as obedient as any other governor of either party to the powers of government education, called for even more money to be spent on schools during his State of the State address. Year after year, more and more money is spent on a system that clearly is failing.

I have never heard a governor stand up before a large crowd and say, "Well, thank goodness our education system is working'' or "Let's have a big hand for the schools and the great job they are doing cranking out so many cracker jack kids.'' No, every year it is the same begging and pandering. In this state, if not every state, it is merely orthodoxy to believe that as much money as possible should get shoveled into the government schools. And, unbelievably enough, this is because the schools are failing.

I used to worry about this, the amount of money we spend on education. But I have stopped worrying about it. I can't do anything about it. And, to be perfectly clear, I am not a teacher basher. Most teachers love what they do, do it well and don't complain. They know, deep down, what they are up against. I can still be an administration basher, but that's a different story.

I have arrived at an entirely new theory that takes teachers off the hook. Actually, my theory takes everybody off the hook: teachers, politicians, taxpayers. Maybe human beings are just dumber than they used to be. Yes, I'll say it. Maybe we spend as much money as we do on education because we are trying to coax acceptable results out of stupid people. We even expect them to go to college! There. I said it. Stupidity could very well be the problem.

This never gets looked at. I don't know, maybe it is the modern diet, or the radio waves in the air from so many cell phones or the fertilizers they use on golf courses. I don't know where to begin to search for the root cause of so much stupidity, but I bet if you would be honest with yourself you would agree that stupidity is a problem. To this day I can still make myself amazed that a couple of years ago two kids, about 15, asked me for my hockey tickets. They were in Rice Park. I was walking to the game. For some reason I decided to quiz them. "If you tell me where Edmonton is, you can have the tickets,'' I said.

They could not. I know, it's not that big of a deal. But come on, we're spending billions of dollars on education. It's not just kids in school who might be a touch off their game. We have been sending more and more stupid people out into society. This point was driven home last week with absolute clarity. A 28-year-old mother of three children died, horribly, from water intoxication during a Sacramento, Calif., morning radio show stunt. The wacky morning radio crew on some station out there had a contest to see who could drink the most water without going to the bathroom. The winner would receive a Wii video game console.

The woman drank so much water she died. She even talked to the radio hosts on the air, complaining that she didn't feel well and the people on the air were so stupid they didn't realize the harm that was being done to the woman. And, of course, the woman must be held accountable as well.

I realize you don't have to go all the way to California to find examples of stupidity, but that one was so glaring it stood out. You don't have to go far at all to find examples of stupidity, and I'm not going to get into a contest with myself pointing out the local examples. Sometimes, when I find myself in deep thought about the newspaper business, I know with certainty that we will never go out of fashion. We might change our appearance. We might experience tough financial times. But we will never go out of fashion because much of what we do is chronicle stupidity.

That's why I was not alarmed when Pawlenty called for more money for the schools. Probably, we all know that stupidity is a problem that cannot be solved by throwing more money at it. And, as though to prove myself correct, that's what we do because we are so stupid. We spend more money.

Source



THE NYC MESS THAT NYC LIBERALISM WILL PERPETUATE FOREVER

RINO Bloomberg just talks and even a tough GOP guy like Mayor Giuliani could do little about it. No "compassion" for the many thousands of poorly educated kids that come out of the system, though. But liberal compassion never was more than a pose. "Must not fire unionists" -- no matter how useless they are -- is a much bigger priority

A flawed tenure system that grants teachers almost automatic lifetime protection - whether deserved or not - has allowed hundreds of terrible teachers to keep working throughout the city. Principals are supposed to decide on whether to grant tenure after a teacher's three-year probationary period, but this is mostly a rubber-stamp process. Right now, 99 percent of teachers receive tenure after their third year. And once a teacher gets tenure, it's tough to get rid of him.

In 2005-06, 981 teachers received unsatisfactory, or U, ratings during their annual reviews from their principals, 662 of them tenured. For 124 of the tenured teachers, it was their second consecutive U, and for 170, it was their second in five years. Yet, of the 187 tenured and nontenured teachers with two U ratings in five years, 145 are still working. "It's incredibly difficult to get rid of bad teachers," said the principal of a Bronx elementary school. "I had a teacher who fell asleep in a kindergarten class. She was lazy, she was incompetent, but she's still teaching somewhere."

The number of teachers deemed unsatisfactory is artificially low in the first place, with only 1.2 percent getting the U tag. That's because principals often use the detrimental score as a bargaining chip to force bad teachers to transfer out of their schools. "If you give a teacher a U, it's hard to get them out of your school," said one Manhattan middle-school principal. "So you offer them a satisfactory rating if they'll leave. It happens all the time."

It's not just low-performing teachers with U ratings - which can be appealed - who escape termination. It's also teachers facing serious accusations. Special Commissioner for Investigation Richard Condon investigates cases of misconduct by Department of Education employees. In 2006, his office recommended that 121 employees - mostly teachers - be fired. So far, only 41 have gotten the boot. In 2005, only 78 of the 124 employees recommended for firing were axed. In 2004, 48 of 78 were fired, and in 2003, only 39 of 113.

Source

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

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

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

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



23 January, 2007

LATER START FOR HIGH SCHOOL LESSONS?

SHAKESPEARE called it the "chief nourisher in life's feast", and sleep ranks up there with food, water and sex for survival of the species. As an adolescent psychologist, one of the most frequent complaints I hear from parents is the seeming inability of teenagers to get out of bed. Parents point out that they've been out late, watched DVDs all night, or spent the night online or texting mates.

But sleep researchers would beg to differ. While laziness and staying up all night do play a part, the main culprit turns out to be their brains. Circadian rhythms, or body clocks, were first scientifically analysed by the French astronomer Jean Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan in 1729. He was puzzled about why the leaves of mimosa plants went rigid in the day and drooped at night. He had stumbled upon one of biology's central facts: plants, insects and mammals move to a daily rhythm that is determined by their internal body clocks, not the environment.

In adults the body clock is on for about 16 hours a day, generally corresponding to daylight. As daylight disappears, the body clock switches off. We feel sleepy and it is hard to stay awake. Before the advent of the electric light, this was a non-issue. People hit the sack after a couple of hours by candlelight and stirred at daybreak. The invention of electricity has progressively detached all of us from the 24-hour cycle of light and dark.

But with teenagers, it is different. An error has crept into the hard-wiring of their internal body clocks. It is known as delayed sleep-phase syndrome. When puberty arrives, the body clock seems to work differently. Research shows that teenagers need about 9 1/4 hours' sleep. If your adolescent finally drops off at midnight, he is a long way from being ready to wake up when you throw the curtains open at 7am.

This is why, when school comes along, many parents tear their hair in frustration. I know of some who have resorted to playing their old John Denver records at high volume to encourage sleepy teenagers out of bed. I'm told Rocky Mountain High is particularly effective.

When the body clock turns off, the brain secretes the sleep chemical, melatonin. Sleep researchers have found that melatonin is produced in adolescents much later in the evening than in younger kids. By being forced to get up after only seven hours' sleep rather than nine, teenagers are building up a sleep debt, losing up to 10 hours or more every school week. These students will be up to 25 per cent less alert at school because they are missing out on deep REM sleep, vital for memory and learning. A lack of REM sleep is associated with anxiety, depression, poor immunity, accidents, and poor judgment and memory. Some make up for lost sleep by sleeping in on weekends, but many still show symptoms of severe sleep deprivation.

Given that the natural body cycles of teens mean they function better later in the day, there is a growing consensus that we should let them sleep in. Schools should vary start times for three main reasons. Clinical psychologist Andrew Fuller has tested later start times at two Victorian schools and found a 10am-4pm school day was associated with less bad behaviour and better academic results. Teachers also suffer from sleep deprivation, and their wellbeing would improve with a later start time. Roads and trains and trams would be less clogged if commuters did not have to compete with kids going to school.

Because melatonin levels change as children get older, the ideal situation would be to have staggered start times: earlier for primary school students, and later at high schools.

Source



GOVERNMENT BOARDING SCHOOLS IN BRITAIN

Parents working long hours are turning to state boarding schools to meet their education and childcare needs. Keen to take advantage of the wraparound teaching, pastoral and social provision provided by the boarding sector, but unable to afford the 20,000 pounds needed for leading independent schools, growing numbers of parents are now eyeing up the 34 boarding schools in the state sector. These charge about 7,000 a year because parents only pay for boarding, not tuition.

Demand for the 5,000 state boarding places in England has increased by 50 per cent in the past four years, according to the Boarding Schools' Association (BSA) with schools now three or four times oversubscribed. Demand for sixth-form places is particularly acute. Hilary Moriarty, national director of the BSA, has detected a sea change in attitudes towards boarding school, particularly for weekly boarding. "The notion of parents and children working hard all week and enjoying quality time together at weekends is quite seductive. This is particularly so when parents work late in the evening or commute big distances, while children reach an age when they have social and extra-curricular demands of their own in the evenings. "Parents are becoming acclimatised to the idea of sending a child to boarding school and less fearful of being branded a bad parent," she said.

The state boarding sector is undergoing a profound transformation, thanks largely to a 25 million expansion programme. Wymondham College in Norfolk has secured 9.8 million of funding for a building programme that includes 115 ensuite study bedrooms. A further 5 million has been allocated to Brymore School in Somerset to build a boarding house and refurbish an old one, Burford in Oxfordshire to increase its provision and to Lancaster Royal Grammar to replace existing provision. Old Swinford Hospital, in Worcestershire, has doubled its boarding places since 2000 to 44 for Year 7 pupils and a further 15 in Year 9.

Melvyn Roffe, the headmaster, said that state boarding was an old-fashioned solution to a modern problem. "For the amount of money parents would have to spend on childcare and running them around activities after school, it is extremely good value. "State boarding schools produce good results, which may have something to do with the lifestyle they offer. It helps children to develop their independence and parents regard it as preparation for university life," he said at the State Boarding Schools Association conference yesterday.

Norman Hoare, head of St George's, a mixed state boarding school in Hertfordshire, said that the 20 boarding places for Year 7 pupils were now four times oversubscribed. "Why should parents pay so much for boarding places in the independent sector, when they can get such good quality in the state sector?" he said.

The reversal in the fortunes in most state boarding schools follows moves to extend the school day by encouraging day schools to offer both breakfast and after school provision. It also coincides with plans to offer more state boarding places for children in care in new academies. One boarding academy, Kingshurst, is already under way in Solihull.

At Gratton Park, a state boarding school in Reigate, Surrey, Paul Spencer Ellis, the head, has developed a hybrid day-boarding system. "We offer 30 places in Year 7 for `day boarders'. They can attend school from 7.30am until their age group boarders go to bed and have all meals included in the fee, which is only 1,100 pounds per term. For September 2006 he had more than 100 applicants. "This shows how parents appreciate the longer day and the care of a boarding school," 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. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

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



22 January, 2007

Why is it morally good to use government schools even when they're bad?

Comment from Britain by Peter Hitchens

Once again the Labour government are impaled on their own stupid education policy, and once again the Useless Tories are coming to their rescue. Poor old Ruth Kelly has quite rightly put her child first and ignored the silly 'principles' that, as a Labour Education Secretary, she supported and must still publicly support.

Quite rightly, the Tories have praised her for looking after her child. But they haven't made any hay out of the fact that this makes nonsense of Labour's mad comprehensive obsession. David Cameron has cleared Miss Kelly of hypocrisy. Can this be right? The point is that the hypocrisy lies not in sending her child to a private school, but in doing so while clinging to the wretched policies which prevent the state education system from being able to educate her child properly. But the Tories cannot say this because they, too, are now equally committed to non-selective, rigour-free state schools, from which the only escape is through wealth, influence, luck or power.

The Labour elite's vast, despicable hypocrisy about schooling is their weakest point, the place at which their dishonesty and selfishness is most perfectly exposed. Famously, Anthony Blair said in May 1997 "what I want for my own children I want for yours". But what he turned out to want was places at the London Oratory, a near-unique school which - as I pointed out at the time - was comprehensive in the same way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terraced house. It was also not available to most of the rest of us.

His was only one of several methods used by Labour politicians to pretend to support comprehensive education while avoiding it in person. Here are some other methods used by these people: Buy a house in the catchment area of a good school; get your child into a grammar school; hire private tutors while continuing to send your child to a state school you know isn't good enough.

Because Mrs Blair is a Roman Catholic, the Premier's children qualified for the Oratory, a very special and exceptional school. Mr Blair was able to avoid the bog-standard comprehensives of North London, where he then dwelt, without having to commit the terrible sin of paying fees, which in those days would have destroyed his political career.

Why exactly is this is a sin, except in that he preaches to others what he doesn't practise himself? Why should it be morally better to send your children to a bad expensive school, kept going by tax money however bad it is, than to a good expensive school, kept going by private fees? Is it a matter of privilege? Well, not exactly. The parent who pays fees does not stop paying taxes. He still funds the costly state schools, whether good or bad, that he doesn't use. And by paying fees, out of taxed income, he helps create the school place he does use, with money that he might just as easily have spent on wine, or air fares. He doesn't deprive anybody of anything. If all the private schools were shut down, their excellence would simply disappear. It wouldn't, by being mixed into the state comprehensive system, miraculously raise its general standards. Private schools are good because they are not comprehensives.

True, if he didn't have the money, he couldn't pay at all. And this is deeply unfair, but only for a reason I'll come to in a moment. But nobody (at least nobody outside the ranks of the Communist movement) claims that it's wrong on principle that some people can spend more money on cars, or holidays or clothes than anyone else, especially if they have earned their money. It certainly doesn't disqualify anyone from being a Labour politician to do such things. Quite a lot of Labour MPs and peers are comfortably off, and many Labour supporters are very rich indeed. Yet, if you happen to have the money to spare, it is far more laudable, surely, to spend money on schooling the next generation in knowledge, manners and culture, than on a couple of weeks on a beach or on a cupboard full of fashionable high-heeled shoes. Better still if some of your fees go (as they often do) on bursaries to provide private education for children whose parents cannot afford it.

By comparison, what's so good about a rich and influential person using his knowledge and skills to wangle a place in a school miles from his home, which might otherwise go to a bright child from a poor home? Surely, that's a real abuse of the privileges of the middle class, since we all know there is a strictly limited number of good state school places, and the poor have hardly any chance of going private.

That is why it is so unfair that only the well-off can pay fees. In the 1960s the mid-range private schools were dying, losing pupils to the grammar schools. Now, even a bad private school can look good in the league tables because far too few state schools are any good, and many of those that are good are harder to get into than the most exclusive club you care to name. It wasn't always like this. Just 40 years ago, in this country, there were thousands of high-quality schools which didn't charge fees. Most of them were Grammar Schools (in Scotland, Academies). There were also Direct Grant schools, private schools which took a large block of pupils from the local state primary system. The parents of the children involved didn't pay fees at all.

As a result, many children from less well-off homes got a first-rate education. Alan Bennett's an example. His father was a Co-op Butcher, but he got to Oxford, with no special measures to help him. Many, many Labour MPs benefited in the same way. In fact, in the mid-1960s the grammar schools were taking over Oxford and Cambridge, even though they weren't specially-equipped (as the good private schools were) to deal with the classical subjects needed in the entrance exams that Oxbridge then held.

Nobody is saying that the system of 40 years ago was perfect. The 11-plus exam was too arbitrary. Germany has a selective system without any such exam. There were too few grammar schools. Many more could have been built at a fraction of the cost of going comprehensive. There were too few grammar places for girls. More should have been created. The Secondary Moderns, to which 11-plus failures went, were often not as bad as is now claimed - and in many cases better than the comprehensives of today - but badly needed improving. There were supposed to be technical schools, but they often hadn't been built. They should have been. But whatever was wrong, it was absurd to destroy the one part of the system that actually worked, like amputating a healthy leg and leaving the diseased one in place.

If we could reverse this foolishness, then Ruth Kelly, and many, many more without her advantages and income, could be sure that their children would be properly educated without needing to pay 15,000 pounds a year for what ought not to be a privilege. But Miss Kelly, as Education Secretary and as a politician, has set her face against this fair remedy. She is quite entitled to do all in her power for her young. I praise her for it. But how can she then continue to support the system which has failed her own child, and the children of thousands of others?

Source



The New Campus Dissidents: Conservatives try to add classics to the curriculum

"Higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students," declared Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind," a book that chastised a generation of academics and students with its biting, furious analysis about the decline of American liberal education. Twenty years ago, at the time of the book's publication, things looked bleak for those who shared Bloom's qualms about the effects of relativism on the academy.

Recently, Bloom's heirs have been hammering on the closed door, trying to reopen the American mind a bit. Their latest door-opening move has been an effort to create scholarly centers on campuses around the country: These centers would be devoted to the great books of Western civilization and the study of the American Founding, and they would be conducted in a rigorous, pre-1960s classroom style. Is there a chance of success?

The prototype of the idea--the Founding center, as it were--is the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, begun in the summer of 2000 by Prof. Robert P. George. The program has featured a traditional curriculum devoted, as advertised, to "American ideals and institutions," and it has attracted an array of visiting scholars, many of whom have gone elsewhere to try to seed similar institutions.

Importantly, the James Madison Program raises its own money, serving Princeton students and operating under the approval of the Princeton administration but, in certain ways, structuring its courses and hiring its faculty independent of the usual campus bureaucracy. Even Mr. George has copped to "a certain frisson one experiences with being a heretic" on a predominantly liberal campus, but he and his followers don't sound like right-wing culture warriors. Mr. George is famous for his civil tone and Socratic style, his commitment to taking ideas seriously and his relentless engagement with an older, nearly lost educational philosophy.

But one center cannot, by itself, open up America's narrow university culture. "If the light of veritas was going out when Bloom was writing," asks David DesRosiers of the Manhattan Institute, alluding to Yale's famous motto, "where are we now?" The answer seems to be that things are better, but only marginally so. To follow up on the Princeton model--to share the veritas--the Manhattan Institute has recently inaugurated the Veritas Fund, offering support to academics of a Bloomian bent. "To the degree that we find people that are interested in these subjects, in the name of intellectual pluralism we need to support them," says Mr. DesRosiers, the fund's executive director.

Patrick Deneen, who heads the newly formed Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University, attracted the attention of the Veritas Fund right away. He wants to return to "an emphasis on classic texts, and particularly the way in which the American tradition draws on classical Western tradition and biblical tradition." The Tocqueville Forum has adopted Georgetown's emblem as its own--an eagle clutching a globe, the calipers of rationalism in one claw, a Christian cross in the other. In October, Mr. Deneen hosted a conference on American civic education. Justice Antonin Scalia was the keynote speaker, and much of the conservative professorial elite was in attendance.

Mr. Deneen, who taught at Princeton from 1997 to 2005, notes that, "for many people, there was a sense that universities had largely been lost to the forces of political correctness, softheaded multiculturalism." The Madison Program, he says, "energized many people throughout the academy." It provided "a legitimate intellectual and academic space where the kind of questions that lie at the heart of a classic education could be discussed." The Tocqueville Forum is trying to open up a similar space on Georgetown's campus.

A few other established programs, like those at Duke and Claremont McKenna provide additional models for start-ups like the Tocqueville Forum and the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. On each campus, a center raising funds for itself has set up a roster of lectures, conferences and visiting fellows. So far--none is more than two years old--they have attracted a fair amount of student interest. And Clemson even boasts a couple of dedicated faculty members.

As worthy as such projects sound, setting up an quasi-independent institute devoted to the study of Western civilization can easily run afoul of university rules and regulations, not to mention university ideology. In late 1999, about the same time that Mr. George was setting up the Madison Program, political philosophy professor Hadley Arkes was working on a similar project at Amherst College and finding it much more difficult. Eventually, he established Amherst's Committee on the American Founding, but so far its staff consists primarily of Mr. Arkes himself. He says the university has stymied fund raising by demanding control of most of the money he has drummed up for the program.

"A week doesn't go by without someone in the administration trying to put restraints on the program or undercut the program," he says of both Mr. George's project and his own. Other scholars, at the moment wishing to remain incognito, are trying to start Madison-like programs on their own campuses, but they are meeting resistance from the faculty and administration, some of whom worry about the supposed conservative political agenda of such programs.

In November, Hamilton College decided to refuse a $3.6 million grant from alumnus Carl Menges to establish the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization. A swirl of outrage from the faculty culminated in a 77 to 17 vote "expressing concern" about the project. Perhaps this was less than surprising from a school that made headlines for its invitations to Ward Churchill, who compared the people killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns," and Susan Rosenberg, formerly of the Weather Underground.

Robert Paquette, a professor of history and one of the organizers of the Hamilton Center, pointed out that the center "did not seek to alter the curriculum of the college in any way, to create new courses arbitrarily, for example, or new faculty positions." It sought only to add another voice to the campus discussion. He contrasted his treatment with the treatment of the scientist who brings in an outside grant "from, say, the National Science Foundation. I know of no campus where such a scientist would accede to the faculty's demand to impose its choice of assistants on a proposed experiment." Mr. Menges has threatened to take the program's endowment elsewhere.

In defense of the study of Western civilization, and perhaps to give hope to those fighting for his vision in the present, Bloom wrote that "the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--the belief that the here and now is all there is." The organizers and funders of these centers are avoiding this tendency. They know that the past was different and the future still could be.

Source

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

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

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

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



21 January, 2007

NJ STUDENTS ROBBED OF THEIR HISTORY

"to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan..."

There has never been a more succinct statement about the obligation and privilege the nation has to care for its military veterans than that brief clause in Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. But the New Jersey legislature thinks setting aside a day on which to remember those who have bought our freedom with their blood is not as important as it used to be.

New Jersey legislators have unanimously passed a measure that includes a provision to remove the state mandate to teach about Veterans Day in the public schools. And not only Veterans Day: The bill would also remove requirements to teach about Columbus on Columbus Day, the Pilgrims around Thanksgiving Day, and even Commodore John Barry Day, which commemorates the Revolutionary War hero for whom a bridge is named, which spans the Delaware River to connect Bridgeport, N.J., to Chester, Pa.

It is the possible repeal of the law to teach about veterans on Veterans Day that has upset a lot of people, including, understandably, veterans. There are few enough who serve in today's all-volunteer military and a decreasing number of citizens who have relatives in the military, or know anyone in service. That makes it much more important for students to learn of the contributions made by veterans to secure the freedoms too many of us take for granted. Those freedoms mark the difference between American schools and those in dictatorial societies that are forced to teach state propaganda.

The ban on teaching about such holidays is included in a larger bill that passed the legislature last month. It is designed to help control New Jersey's spiraling property taxes. Governor Corzine has not indicated whether he'll sign it. He'd better not if he knows what's good for his Democratic Party. Have Democrats forgotten the 1988 campaign during which Republicans hammered presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for vetoing a bill while he was governor of Massachusetts that would have required all public school students in the state to recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Sure, it was wrong to question Dukakis' patriotism, but it worked politically for Republicans, who pounded him with the issue, along with the line about his being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU."

Since 1967, New Jersey schools have been told to observe Veterans Day and related holidays to promote "the development of a higher spirit of patriotism." Under the "law" of political correctness, apparently anything that promotes love of country, or God, or the military is now to be avoided. Thank Jupiter (it used to be "thank God," but He's been out for some time), public schools can still distribute condoms. Maybe a way around the law would be for veterans to teach sex education.

A New Jersey Veterans of Foreign Wars adjutant and veteran of the Army and Coast Guard, Hank Adams, said of the proposed law, "It's not right." Students "are not going to know the sacrifices that were made so they can enjoy the protections that they have." Other veterans groups are petitioning Governor Corzine not to sign the bill. But after campaigning on a pledge not to raise taxes and then reversing himself shortly after taking office, Mr. Corzine has already proved how out of touch he can be with average voters.

While New Jersey residents are steamed about their high taxes, they may get even angrier about the message this proposed law sends to veterans and how little governing officials appreciate their sacrifices.

A co-sponsor of the anti-Veterans Day measure, state Senator John Adler, said, "I don't think the state should be in the business of telling districts to do every single thing." Oh really? As most parents of public school students everywhere know, the state has been imposing its will on schools, students, and parents for quite a few years. That New Jersey is close to not doing so when it comes to patriotism and veterans communicates one message to those who have put their lives and limbs on the line for the rest of us: "drop dead."

Source



Give Top Teachers a Bonus: Little Rock rewards teachers; unions resist

Is there a bigger scandal in America than the low state of inner-city schools? Oprah Winfrey, utterly frustrated with the problem, last month discussed the $40 million she has spent building the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls--in South Africa. Ms. Winfrey said South African students want to learn, but in U.S. schools, "the sense that you need to learn just isn't there." Where'd it go?

There are multiple-choice answers to that question, and most of them are right. Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York offered one answer in his State of the City speech Wednesday: The desire to learn disappeared down the bottomless well of centralized public-school bureaucracies. Mayor Bloomberg proposed greatly increased autonomy for school principals--one irrefutably proven answer to making a school better. He also wants teachers to prove they deserve tenure, an idea so obvious that it probably has no chance.

One measure of the tenure decision for New York City teachers would be their students' test scores. News accounts said the city teachers' union is "certain to fight" linking test scores to tenure. This, too, is among the multitude of correct answers for why students have no incentive to learn in big-city schools.

Mike Bloomberg, a name difficult to keep out of conversations about national politics, has been known to make visits elsewhere in the country on what we political gamesters would call "exploratory" trips. Let me suggest that the mayor explore a Southern strategy in Little Rock, Ark., where five grade schools are continuing an experiment in linking teacher merit pay to student test scores, first described in this space in October 2005.

That column, "How One School Found a Way to Spell Success," described how teachers at the Meadowcliff School, formerly full of student underachievers, were promised bonuses linked to improvements in the standardized test performance of each student. (The column is available on OpinionJournal here.) The size of the bonus increased relative to the student's year-over-year test gains. A 4% improvement earned a $100 bonus, rising to $400 if the student gained 15% (some did). Everyone in the school was in the bonus plan, including the cafeteria ladies, who started eating with the kids rather than in their own lounge. It worked. Scores improved. Twelve teachers got bonuses from $1,800 to $8,600. The checks were handed out in a public ceremony. Oprah would love Meadowcliff.

Last year, they added Wakefield School to the bonus program (after the school's unionized teachers voted overwhelmingly for it), and this year three more grade schools--Geyer Springs, Mabelvale and Romine. All are urban schools of the sort everyone in America professes to be concerned about, notwithstanding that public concern gets a D+ for achievement every year.

The first formal attempt to analyze the Little Rock merit-pay experiment was released earlier this week by the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The study, led by the university's Gary Ritter, focused on the results in a single school, Wakefield, which had consistent student test scores across three years.

The Ritter study also summarized the expansion and refinement of the incentive program since its inception. At Wakefield (and the three newest schools), the bonuses are awarded for the average growth in test scores of each teacher's class, rather than per-student achievement as at Meadowcliff. At the fall start of Wakefield's first year in the program, its students tested in the 16th percentile; at year's end they were in the 29th percentile. Its teachers got $228,300 in bonuses. Meadowcliff's second-year bonuses totaled $200,926.

For consistency, the study looked at results on a standardized math test given at Wakefield School the past three years to each student, ending in the fourth and fifth grades. The school's teachers were covered by the bonus program last year. The students' math grades improved by a standard measure (called NCE) of 3.5 points, while those in three Little Rock comparison schools declined. That 3.5 point gain equals about one-sixth of the normally cited national average gap in math scores between black students and white students. If compounded for six years, the gap would close.

Too hopeful? It seems to be for the Little Rock teachers' union. A man versed in the downward slope of many such good intentions warned me last year to watch for the counteroffensive from either Little Rock's bureaucrats or its teachers' union. The union has made its move. In last fall's school-board election, the union ran a slate of candidates and gained control of four of the board's seven seats. It hopes to capture one more school-board seat this September. By June, however, Little Rock will have five grade schools inside the merit-bonus program. If standardized test scores rise in these three new schools as well, it would take a special brand of community self-destruction to throw out the bonus program at the union's behest.

There'd be one more bitter irony in that, too. Just a few days ago, the school board in Rogers, Ark., in the affluent northwest corner of the state, voted 6-1 to apply for federal funding of a merit-pay program under the U.S. Department of Education's Teacher Incentive Program. Where do you think at least some the highest performing, bonus-earning teachers in Little Rock's urban schools will migrate to if the union's school board flattens their merit-pay program? The University of Arkansas education researchers, incidentally, plan to work with Rogers from Day One to measure outcomes if the plan goes forward.

The original money for the bonus program at Meadowcliff school, and its design, came from the Hussman Foundation of Little Rock. Since then, Walter Hussman Jr. has been able to solicit support for the plan's expansion to the other grade schools from the Walton Family Foundation and the Brown Foundation of Houston. If the program isn't killed, he expects to find funding for more schools from other out-of-state foundations.

Building a school for girls in South Africa is fine by me. But imagine how electrifying it would be if a U.S. citizen could ever believe in the efficacy of starting a Leadership Academy for Girls in Arkansas. Who said something about having a dream?

Source



IMMIGRANT INFLUX OVERCROWDING BRITISH SCHOOLS

Pressure from an influx of children from East European immigrants has forced a council to draw up plans to build four new primary schools. Bradford council in West Yorkshire, where nearly 5,000 workers arrived last year, is one of many local authorities experiencing a shortfall of places in inner-city areas. Yesterday education chiefs there said two of its existing primary schools would need to be expanded and four new ones built to cope with the increased demand for new places. Bradford has the second highest birth rate of any part of Britain outside London, and coming on top of that, immigration has left its school system struggling, it said.

A council report said the high number of births 'has caused a shortfall in places in some parts of the district when combined with large numbers of Eastern European workers who are also moving into the district, sometimes bringing their families with them'. It added that it had been 'impossible to predict the increase in numbers of newcomers' and finding places for them is 'becoming much more difficult'.

Bradford is just one of many local councils reporting that it is under strain as a result of record levels of immigration from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. One in five primary school children are now from an ethnic minority, and some councils have been faced with massive bills to fund extra support such as interpreters as they are legally obliged to admit children from European Union member states. At least 27,000 school-aged youngsters have arrived with their parents in the UK since ten countries - including Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic - joined the EU on May 1, 2004.

Elsewhere in the country, Wrexham in North Wales has reported that its schools are facing a similar pressure - around 50 Polish children started school there in September. Agnieszka Tenteroba, a Polish teacher working with the newcomers, said: 'First it was the husbands coming to work. People who want to stay then bring their families so we will have more and more Polish children in Wrexham.'

Meanwhile in Slough, Berkshire, the council has reported that an influx of an estimated 10,000 Poles has left it facing going 15 million pounds in the red, with nearly 900 school pupils from non English-speaking backgrounds. And in Peterborough, where there were just 22 children of economic migrants enrolled in secondary schools in January 2004, that has risen to more than 100 with one secondary school warning it was being 'overwhelmed'.

The Government does not collect figures for the number of children brought with them by immigrant workers, so officials in Bradford are having to base their estimates on the number of new National Insurance permits being issued - 4,650 last year.

The council's executive will now be asked to recommend research into how to expand school provision to cater for the increased number of children. Colin Gill, executive member for children's services, said: 'In those areas of the district where there are substantial changes in population size and distribution, we will need to make alterations to ensure that we provide the right number of primary school places in the right locations.'

Bradford's birth rate, according to the latest figures, is the fourth highest in Britain, after Birmingham and the London boroughs of Newham and Hackney, with much of the growth thought to be within the city's more established immigrant communities

Source

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

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

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

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20 January, 2007

New Study Finds More Than $1 Billion in Public Funds to Improve California Schools Yielded Little Student Academic Improvement

Study also explores failures of CA's API system to adequately measure academic improvement and capture best practices

Approximately $1.25 billion in state public education funding provided to schools to help improve student academic performance has yielded little if any academic improvement, even though these schools met the state Academic Performance Index (API) requirements to exit the improvement program as successful. This analysis comes just as the state is set to carry out the agreed upon terms of last year's SB 1133 (Torlakson) and pour nearly $3 billion more into a similar program.

This finding is included in a new study released today by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a free-market think tank based in California. "Failing our Future: The Holes in California's School Accountability System and How to Fix Them" exposes the flaws in California's school accountability system, the API, and makes recommendations to improve it. The study, co-authored by James S. Lanich, Ph.D., president of California Business for Education Excellence and Lance T. Izumi, director of Education Studies at PRI, can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.pacificresearch.org/ and at http://www.cbee.org/ .

The study reviews the API system and finds that it is not an accurate or meaningful measurement of school and student academic achievement. The study also looks in-depth at two school improvement programs: the Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program (II-USP) and the High Priority Schools Grant Program (HPSGP). Each program offers additional money to schools, which according to the API, are low-performing schools. Review of student test scores at the 1,620 low-performing schools that participated in these programs over three years, versus low-performing schools that did not participate, shows no significant difference in academic achievement over time as measured by improvement in grade-level proficiency on the California Standards Test (CST).

Collectively these two programs have spent approximately $1.25 billion or an average of $771,604 per school. Despite this lack of improvement in achievement, these schools met their API growth targets established by the state for successful implementation with sufficient results for exiting the program. The lack of significant academic improvement by schools participating in these programs is particularly troubling given that the state is set to spend an additional $2.9 billion of state taxpayer funds to continue a program that does not require higher rates of improvement. AB 1133 (Torlakson), signed into law last year, uses the $2.9 billion settlement from CTA, et al. v. Schwarzenegger, et al. to continue the High Priority Schools Grant Program.

The study also finds the API's "growth" targets are so minimal that simply by achieving the state required "growth" each year, it would take a school with a starting API score of 635 or less (3,423 of California schools have this API) between 61 to 84 years to reach grade-level proficiency. "If we keep using the API as our benchmark for gauging school and student academic improvement, we'll continue to deceive parents and the public about how our students and our schools are really performing academically," said Mr. Lanich. "We should be gauging academic achievement on the single most important measurement: grade-level proficiency. It's simple, it's understandable, and it's the standard every parent expects and every student should meet every year."

Mr. Izumi added that grade-level proficiency is not only a more rigorous measurement than California's API, it is more meaningful because it allows teachers, administrators and parents to understand precisely what is working and not working in our schools. "Under the API, we have an 'accountability' system that isn't accountable."

Poor and Minority Children Left Behind Under California's API System

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires that not only a certain percentage of all students at a school attain grade-level proficiency in reading and math every year, but also that significant racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other subgroups of students achieve those proficiency targets as well. The eventual goal is to have 100 percent of students reaching grade-level proficiency in reading and math by 2013-14. Since the API system focuses on collective school-wide performance and growth, there is no incentive to intervene and improve schools with lower-performing students as long as enough higher-performing students keep the school's average scores above the API benchmarks. School-wide API measures fail to detect or address stagnant or declining minority student performance.

Recommendations

According to Failing Our Future, California should set higher expectations for improvement for all schools, abandon the complicated API, focus efforts on grade-level proficiency as measured by the CST, and replicate the best practices from high-performing schools, especially those with low-income and minority populations.

The study profiles two exceptional California schools, the C.A. Jacobs Intermediate School in Dixon and Laton High School in Laton. "For state school accountability systems to be effective, there must be swift interventions and meaningful consequences for the performance or non-performance of schools," said Mr. Izumi, "Unfortunately, as our study shows, California's system is severely deficient in this crucial area."

Source



Britain to abolish head-teachers?

The days of the "hero head", who manages everything in a school from hiring staff to ordering books, could be numbered, according to a report which suggests that business leaders with no classroom experience could run schools. Leaders with a classroom background would still be required for teaching and learning, but there was no reason why they should not report to a principal or chief executive, responsible for overall strategy and non-academic operations.

The report, prepared for the Government by the consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers, follows fears of an impending shortage of head teachers and concerns that workloads, bureaucracy and over-regulation were deterring deputies from applying for headships. Although ministers deny there is a recruitment problem, they acknowledge that the job of leading a school is now so complicated that a new, "modern" approach is needed.One of the biggest barriers to reform identified by the report is the "hero head" perception, among teachers, parents and heads themselves, which presupposes that for big decisions, "only the head will do". Distributing leading responsibilities among a team was often more effective, it concluded.

The report recommends that schools consider new types of leadership: a federated model brings groups of schools under one "super-head"; a multi- agency model has schools run by a team that includes teachers and staff from other agencies, such as health and social care. Schools could also be clustered into groups, with heads rotated from school to school.

The structure of governing bodies should also be changed, the report says, suggesting the creation of "meta-governors" working across a number of schools in a locality. It also recommended greater flexibility in the rewards offered to heads. As well as increasing the pay differential between heads and other staff, it suggests allowing heads to take time off during term time.

Teaching unions were divided over the findings. John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he was not opposed to non-teachers being brought into certain school leadership roles: "The possibility should be opened up that the best of school leaders who are not qualified teachers - the bursars and business managers - should be able to come through to the top job, provided that the person in charge of teaching and learning is a qualified teacher."

But Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The primary purpose of schools is to educate pupils, not to be commercial organisations. Head teachers have told the Government they do not believe that those without teaching experience can run our schools."

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said that the report's recommendations would be discussed with the teaching and support staff unions before any action was taken. The National College of School Leadership would be given 10 million pounds to support its strategy to help to identify future head teachers and cut the time that it takes to qualify, he said.

Source



Aztecs vs. Greeks: Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise

BY CHARLES MURRAY

If "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we're talking about no more than a few people per thousand and perhaps many fewer. They are cognitive curiosities, too rare to have that much impact on the functioning of society from day to day. But if "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force--a lot of people.

In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements--medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia--the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs over 120. Evidence about who enters occupations where the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy large proportions of positions in the upper reaches of corporate America and the senior ranks of government. People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.

Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence

How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.

But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized--it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level. The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good. The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been more true.

All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.

In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.

The goals that should shape the evolution of American education are cross-cutting and occasionally seem contradictory. Yesterday, I argued the merits of having a large group of high-IQ people who do not bother to go to college; today, I argue the merits of special education for the gifted. The two positions are not in the end incompatible, but there is much more to be said, as on all the issues I have raised.

The aim here is not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. Accept that some children will be left behind other children because of intellectual limitations, and think about what kind of education will give them the greatest chance for a fulfilling life nonetheless. Stop telling children that they need to go to college to be successful, and take advantage of the other, often better ways in which people can develop their talents. Acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it.

Source

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

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

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

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



19 January, 2007

WILL THE DEMOCRATS STOP THE STUDENT LOAN VAMPIRES?

If they REALLY stood for the little guy they would

When Congress amended the Higher Education Act 10 years ago, defaulted student loans became the easiest and most lucrative debt to issue and collect. The amendments imposed huge fees on defaulted student loans and took away bankruptcy protection for student borrowers. It banned refinancing of many student loans, and also allowed draconian collection measures to be taken against student borrowers, including wage garnishment, tax garnishment, withholding of professional certifications, termination from employment, and even Social Security garnishment.

Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren told The Wall Street Journal that "student loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious." And no one makes the mobsters greener than Al Lord and his Student Loan Marketing Corporation, also known as Sallie Mae. Lord and current CEO Tim Fitzpatrick have made about $367 million since 1999, making them some of the highest-paid executives in the country. Sallie Mae stock has also gone up almost 20 times in the same period. Way more than Microsoft.

There are only two ways to get that kind of growth with that kind of profit. 1) You do things smarter, better, fast. 2) Do what Sallie Mae did: get into a business where government assumes all the risk - guaranteed student loans - but where a private company gets all the reward. As a result, Sallie Mae became largest student loan company in America, bigger than most of their rivals combined.

In the company's annual report, Lord attributed his company's 29% core cash earnings-per-share growth in large part to fees collected from defaulted loans. He forgot to mention that the law allowed him to forbid Sallie's customers from refinancing with competitors offering better deals. Meanwhile, the borrowers suffer.

Many student loan debtors in default find themselves unable to function in society, and are faced with a decision to either continue the paralysis and live in fear, or begin making payments on a massively inflated amount - often double, triple or quadruple what they originally borrowed. StudentLoanJustice.Org has received thousands of stories from citizens whose lives have been shattered by their student loans. People who default on student loans are typically decent citizens who, for one reason or another, were not able to capitalize on their education. Most agree that they are responsible to pay back what they borrowed, but most cannot afford to pay back the wildly increased amounts that the federal law has allowed to be imposed upon them.

The student loan system in the U.S. has been hijacked by Albert Lord and his friends. Let there be no mistake: These are not creative geniuses who invented a new product or service. These are not captains of industry who built markets and competed their way to the top. Rather, these are nothing more than well-connected executives who took an existing market and used their weight in Congress to erect insurmountable barriers to competition.

Here are just two examples: Sallie Mae convinced Congress that allowing borrowers to reconsolidate student loans would cost taxpayers money, so they banned it. Then they sidestepped the law against inducements (also known as kickbacks) by permitting Sallie Mae to loan schools money to make student loans in the school's name, then sell them to Sallie Mae for a "commission." Imagine if any other business tried that. It would be ridiculous. Or illegal. For Sallie Mae, it was a business model. This cannot be what Congress intended when the Higher Education Act of 1965 was created. And it must be among the first things the new Congress fixes this year.

Source



What's Wrong With Vocational School? Too many Americans are going to college

BY CHARLES MURRAY

The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges. Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.

In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.

Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living--and would do better in vocational training.

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.

Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.

For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.

The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. One glimpse of the future is offered by the nation's two-year colleges. They are more honest than the four-year institutions about what their students want and provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly. Their time frame gives them a big advantage--two years is about right for learning many technical specialties, while four years is unnecessarily long.

Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Research resources on the Internet will soon make the college library unnecessary. Lecture courses taught by first-rate professors are already available on CDs and DVDs for many subjects, and online methods to make courses interactive between professors and students are evolving. Advances in computer simulation are expanding the technical skills that can be taught without having to gather students together in a laboratory or shop. These and other developments are all still near the bottom of steep growth curves. The cost of effective training will fall for everyone who is willing to give up the trappings of a campus. As the cost of college continues to rise, the choice to give up those trappings will become easier.

A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.

Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.

Source



Only drastic surgery can save Britain's schools

The university where I whiled away my misspent youth had a notoriously tough entrance procedure, full of trick questions to trip up the unwary and humiliate them into the bargain. Oddly, however, the exams you took at the end of your three years weren’t much harder. The reason is clear to me now. The lecturers were far too grand to do anything as dreary as teaching, and the students were far too busy getting drunk. So the authorities had to make sure that they let in only students who knew enough when they arrived to pass their finals three years later.

I’m sure that this eccentric approach has been purged by now. But I was reminded of it last week when I read of the Government’s plan to raise the age at which children can leave full-time education from 16 to 18 — because I have a sneaking suspicion that many comprehensives are operating today rather like my old university operated 30 years ago. The brightest kids could easily sail through their GCSEs almost as soon as they come into the school at the age of 11 or 12. Instead, they spend five years getting more and more bored. But at the other end of the spectrum, at least 20 per cent of pupils couldn’t pass five GCSEs if they were kept in our current school system till they were 94. Or so the league tables suggest.

It’s against this lamentable background, and the monumental failure of the Government to tackle the problem of the failing 20 per cent, that this airy-fairy proposal to raise the school leaving age must be judged. Forget for a moment the billions of extra funding needed. What’s preposterous is the notion that a system incapable of teaching a huge number of children the basics of literacy, numeracy and decency after 12 years of full-time schooling should somehow magically be able to do so after 14 years.

The result of keeping disaffected kids in the system till they are 18 could be catastrophic. Perhaps you don’t recall the last time the school leaving age was raised — in 1972, when it went from 15 to 16. I have wry memories. A few months before going to university, I did work experience in a local school, and watched with incredulity as a bunch of stroppy 15-year-olds who had expected to escape the previous summer were forced to kick their heels for three more terms — and proceeded to run amok. The legacy of that misconceived move lingers still. Is there anyone, apart from dutiful Blairites, who believes that today’s 16-year-old school-leavers are better educated than the 15-year-old leavers of the 1960s?

There is a way to raise the leaving age without going through that pointless chaos again. But it would require a radical reshaping of the entire school system. Here, just for your amusement, is what I would do.

First I would extend primary-school education by two years (mirroring the prep schools in the private sector). That would allow these enlarged primary schools to beef up their arts, sports and music — because the best specialist teachers would be attracted by the chance to take older children to a higher level. It would give primary teachers six extra terms in which to drum the basics of reading and arithmetic into slower learners. And most crucially, it would allow the the decision about appropraite secondary education to be deferred until children were 12 or 13, when it is far easier to know whether a child is cut out to be “academic”.

Those that are academic would pass a wideranging test at 13 and get a “certificate of basic education” (let’s call it the CBE, just to be confusing) covering the minimum literacy and numeracy skills normally needed in life. They would then move to secondary schools that would prepare them for a much tougher and broader set of A-levels than we have at present.

Non-academics would take a different path. They would still work towards their CBEs, but also develop the vocational skills needed to go straight into work at 18. Indeed, they would spend much of each term on work placements: old-fashioned apprenticeships, except in contemporary industries such as IT, food technology and retailing as well as the old blue-collar trades.

“Aha!” I hear the Islington liberals cry. “You are simply reviving the old apartheid system with grammar schools and secondary moderns, albeit with a 13-plus exam instead of the old 11-plus.” Not so. The problem in the old days was the stigma of failure attached to non-grammar-school children. My system would invest the vocational educational route with as much dignity, pride and rigorous standards as the academic route. It is the only way forward if British craft and trade workers are to compete in an increasingly global market place. Ask yourself why London is heaving with foreign plumbers, welders, electricians and carpenters who do a far better job than their British counterparts.

And it’s also the only way forward if we want to stop our educational system from churning out thousands of unemployable teenagers each year. Grafting makeshift vocational courses on to the existing state educational structure is useless.

But such a big rethink calls for political courage. Forget it, then. What the Government has concocted is a headline-grabbing gimmick that applies sticking-plaster to a festering wound. How typical. Is there anyone, apart from Blairites, who believes that today’s 16-year-old school-leavers are better educated than the 15-year-old leavers of the 1960s?

Source

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

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

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

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18 January, 2007

Intelligence in the Classroom: Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them

CHARLES MURRAY speaks some unpopular truths

Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon. Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.

How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability--"g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.

There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."

This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.

To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.

While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.

That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

Source



CAPABLE BRITISH TEACHERS DESERTING A SINKING SHIP

The number of teachers taking early retirement in England has almost doubled in the past seven years, with the majority coming from state secondary schools, newly published figures show. The number retiring has shot up from 5,580 in 1998-99 to 10,270 last year. Early retirement rose in state secondaries by 93 per cent, compared with a rise of 52 per cent in primaries. Most complained of having to juggle poor classroom behaviour with endless new government initiatives.

The figures, which came from a parliamentary question posed by the Conservatives, emerged as Tony Blair and Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, doubled the number yesterday of aspiring "chief executive" heads and deputies to work in London's toughest inner-city secondaries.

After a year training 20 teachers under the American- inspired Future Leaders programme, the Government decided to expand the course, having received positive feedback from schools and staff. The expansion, announced by Mr Blair and Mr Johnson, is designed to recruit more candidates into the classroom from outside education. The aim of the scheme is to break the cycle of poverty and educational failure in inner-city areas.

With a quarter of all head teachers retiring in the next decade, John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has applauded the move.

Source



Australia's mathematics teaching below India's



The quality of maths and science education in Australia has been ranked below countries such as India, where 40 per cent of the population cannot read or write. In its annual report on global competitiveness, the World Economic Forum ranks Australia 29th for the quality of its maths and science teaching and 12th for the quality of its educational system. Singapore, Finland and Belgium lead the 125 countries assessed on the quality of their maths and science education, with India ranked in seventh place, the Czech Republic in eighth and Tunisia ninth. Other countries ranked higher than Australia include Romania, Estonia, Barbados, the Slovak Republic, Serbia and Montenegro, Lithuania and Indonesia, as well as OECD countries including New Zealand.

The assessment by the WEF, an independent organisation that hosts an annual gathering of global political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, is at odds with other international studies assessing the performance of Australian students in maths and science. These include the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment, which ranked Australian students fourth among 41 countries in scientific literacy in 2003.

The world's longest-running study of maths and science - Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study - also assessed the mathematical and scientific knowledge of Year 4 and Year 8 students in 2003 and ranked Australia in the top 15. But the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia said yesterday the WEF rankings were based on an assessment by industry and major business of Australia's maths-science capabilities. APESMA chief executive John Vines said the lack of confidence expressed by business in the standard of Australian education reflected workforce issues. "It's consistent with the concerns we've been expressing for some years about the shortage of qualified maths and science teachers in the classroom," Mr Vines said.

He said the federal Government's failure to address the problem by providing incentives for scientists to retrain as teachers indicated it was not "fair dinkum" about solving the problem. "It's a clear strategic issue for Australia whether it wants to be a country that has the capacity to design and develop its own infrastructure and resources defence capabilities," he said. "They're all underpinned by strong skills in science and there doesn't seem to be the evidence that the Government is taking that issue seriously enough."

The Australian reported earlier this month that a big package of initiatives in school education and science taken to cabinet by Education and Science Minister Julie Bishop was rejected. The newspaper has also reported on the low prestige attached to studying science, reflected in university entrance scores that require a higher mark to study fashion design, sports management or traditional Chinese medicine than a science degree.

The WEF report, released late last year ahead of next week's Davos gathering, calculates a global competitiveness index based on factors judged critical to driving economic productivity and competitiveness. They are grouped into nine pillars that include health and primary education, and higher education and training. The rankings are based on an analysis of available data as well as the results of an executive opinion survey of more than 11,000 business leaders last year. The quality of education measures secondary and tertiary enrollment rates as well as the quality of education as assessed by the business community. "In particular, we take into account the quality of science, maths education, and management schools, as well as the availability of specialised training for the workforce," the WEF says.

The report says education and training are emerging as key drivers of competitiveness: "Today's globalising economy requires countries to nurture pools of well-educated workers able to adapt to their changing environment."

Source



20 years needed to fix Australian science education

Australia has already lost its scientific knowledge base, creating a problem that will take two decades for the education system to redress. CSIRO chief of mathematical and information sciences Murray Cameron said yesterday the decline in maths and science skills would take 20 years to solve. "We haven't generated enough of the next generation (of scientists and mathematicians) and our capacity to do so will decline markedly over the next 10 years," he said.

President of the Australian Council of Deans of Science John Rice said the knowledge base of science and maths teachers in schools was 20 years out of date and said governments were doing little to upgrade their skills. "We have lost our level of scientific and mathematical knowledge. It's already gone," he said.

A study by the World Economic Forum, reported yesterday in The Australian, ranked Australia 29th out of 125 countries for the quality of its maths and science education as assessed by business and industry. The rankings by the WEF, an independent organisation of global political and business leaders, placed Australia behind India, the Czech Republic and Tunisia. But the WEF report is at odds with international assessments of the academic performance of Australia's students, which rates them in the top 15 or higher out of up to 50 countries.

Professor Rice, dean of science at the University of Technology, Sydney, said the discrepancy reflected the ability of students to perform well academically without skills required by industry. Professor Rice and Dr Cameron said the lost scientific knowledge base was caused by declining numbers of students choosing careers in maths and science. Talented students turned to more lucrative courses such as law and medicine.

A large proportion of science and maths teachers were not qualified in the discipline, meaning students were not taught the same depth of knowledge and were eschewing advanced maths and science courses. "Because people have downplayed science and maths, you aren't getting the higher calibre students taking up maths and science. They're going elsewhere to other jobs, leaving a very large vacuum," Professor Rice said. "The turnaround time to change that is quite long. In the end, it's 20 years." He called for an overhaul of maths and science teaching, which he described as too removed from real world.

Dr Cameron said the WEF findings reflected the loss of high-calibre students from science and maths. While first-year maths at university 30 years ago attracted the top 100 students in the state, today they were doing well to attract 10 of the top 100. "We need more good graduates going into schools to excite students and then become the next generation of good teachers," he said.

Engineers Australia president Rolphe Hartley said the number of engineers trained in Australia was half the OECD average. "Governments have lost the plot in this area. We have a shortage of qualified maths and science teachers and governments need to look at teacher education," he said. Business Council of Australia director of policy Patrick Coleman urged governments to invest in the development of teachers.

Source

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

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

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

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



17 January, 2007

The gummint skools

"That biological parents are the enemies of their offspring"

A Dec. 31 Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial detailed some of the $7 billion in spending the members of the 2007 Nevada Legislature have already proposed - all while earnestly bleating that no tax hikes will be required. "Atop the list," we noted, "is a mandatory program to round up all of Nevada's children and lock them away from the subversive influence of their biological parents in day-long, tax-funded baby-sitting centers, not at the age of 6 (which is bad enough), but at the age of 5."

A well-intentioned soul objected that the "references to all-day kindergarten in Sunday's lead editorial are so sarcastic that few readers will give them credence." But no sarcasm was intended. Those interested in the history that backs up that brief reference might start with "The Tyranny of Compulsory Schooling," a speech by former multiple-year New York City (and state) PUBLIC SCHOOL Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto. There you will find:

"Sweden, a rich, healthy, and beautiful country, with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything, won't allow children to enter school before they're seven years old. The total length of Swedish schooling is nine years, not twelve, after which the average Swede runs circles around the over-schooled American. Why don't you know these things? To whose advantage is it that you don't? ..."

Then, explaining why our government seeks to get it hands on our kids at a more formative stage, purposely seeking to divorce children from the subversive influence of their own biological parents, Mr. Gatto details the Prussian connection. After that German state's "humiliating defeat by Napoleon in 1806, a new system of schooling was the instrument out of which Prussian vengeance was shaped, a system that reduced human beings during their malleable years to reliable machine parts, human machinery dependent upon the state for its mission and purpose," Mr. Gatto has learned. "When Blucher's Death's Head Hussars destroyed Napoleon at Waterloo, the value of Prussian schooling was confirmed. ...

"By 1905, Prussian trained Americans, or Americans like John Dewey who apprenticed at Prussian-trained hands, were in command of every one of our new institutions of scientific teacher training: Columbia Teacher's College, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, Stanford," Mr. Gatto continues. "The domination of Prussian vision, and the general domination of German philosophy and pedagogy, was a fait accompli among the leadership of American schooling. "You should care about this for the compelling reason that German practices were used here to justify removal of intellectual material from the curriculum; it may explain why your own children cannot think. That was the Prussian way - to train only a leadership cadre to think.

"Of all the men whose vision excited the architects of the new Prussianized American school machine, the most exciting were a German philosopher named Hegel and a German doctor named Wilhelm Wundt. ... G. Stanley Hall, one of Wundt's personal proteges (who as a professor at Johns Hopkins had inoculated his star pupil, John Dewey, with the German virus) ... shrewdly sponsored and promoted an American tour for the Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud so that Freud might popularize his theory that PARENTS AND THE FAMILY WERE THE CAUSE OF VIRTUALLY ALL MALADJUSTMENT (emphasis added) - all the more reason to remove their little machines to the safety of schools. ...

"Teacher training in Prussia was founded on three premises, which the United States subsequently borrowed. The first of these is that the state is sovereign, the only true parent of children. Its corollary is that BIOLOGICAL PARENTS ARE THE ENEMIES OF THEIR OFFSPRING. When Germany's Froebel invented Kindergarten, it was not a garden for children he had in mind but a garden of children, in which state-appointed teachers were the gardeners of the children. Kindergarten is meant to PROTECT CHILDREN FROM THEIR OWN MOTHERS. ...

"The best-known device to break the will of the young, practiced for centuries among English and German upper classes, was the separation of parent and child AT AN EARLY AGE. Here now was an institution backed by the police power of the state to guarantee that separation. ..."

The theory is advanced that mandatory government day-care for 5-year-olds is necessary to ameliorate the burden of day care expenses on young parents. (Were you under the impression they were going to teach them to read? Current pedagogical doctrine is dead-set against that, since the educrats don't want the kids to actually escape at any earlier age from the other end of the indoctrination tunnel, let alone discover that reading real books is actually easy and FUN, which might encourage them to run about reading stuff other than their tedious, dumbed down, government-assigned pabulum.)

In fact, the real purpose here, in addition to severing at the earliest possible age the subversive impact of parents teaching kids to question authority, is to expand the beneficiaries of the teacher full employment act by an additional 10 percent - new recruits to join the endless chorus of whining that our graduates only get dumber every year because these union members are "underpaid."

Why do young parents need to pay for day care? Because two full-time salaries are now required to support a family, leaving no parent at home with the kids during daylight. This was not true in America until the 1960s. What changed?

The reason one salary will no longer support a family with a car and a free-standing home is because Americans have been progressively impoverished by the purposeful government policies of inflation and higher taxation. Basically, mom now works to pay the higher taxes on dad's inflation-devalued salary.

What do those taxes support? In addition to the expanding Social Security and Medicare Ponzi schemes - wealth transfers to further fragment the family by encouraging grandma and grandpa to live independently near their money somewhere in the Sun Belt - the main beneficiary of all that extra tax loot are the monstrously expanding government monopoly youth propaganda camps, which teach our kids wacko new environmental and social doctrines, while substituting sound bites about "dead white slave-owners" and the (mythical) wise ecological husbandry of the noble, peaceful Red Man for any detailed knowledge of our true political, philosophical, and technological history.

In other words, day-long day care for 5-year-olds receives its real electoral support because parents want some relief from the expense of child day care for 5-year-olds, which has been made necessary by the fact that both mom and dad now have to work outside the home to fund day-long government day care for 6-to-18-year-olds. Compare this to the days before 1960, when economic necessity under a far smaller government required most people to marry before having children and moms could generally afford to stay home with their young kids.

What on earth could convince young parents that the current system - which produces high school graduates increasingly devoid of complex literacy - is somehow better? Nothing could possibly achieve this fantastic result except the most massive, dedicated, and successful archipelago of government indoctrination camps ever devised. "It's very useful for some people that our form of schooling tells children what to think about, how to think about it, and when to think about it," Mr. Gatto concludes. "It isn't very healthy for families and neighborhoods, cultures and religions. But then school was never about those things any-way: that's why we don't have them around anymore. You can thank government schooling for that. ...

"I think it would be fair to say that the overwhelming majority of people who make schools work today are unaware why they fail to give us successful human beings, no matter how much money is spent or how much good will is expended on reform efforts. This explains the inevitable temptation to find villains and to cast blame - on bad teaching, bad parents, bad children, or penurious taxpayers." Instead, Gatto urges us to consider the possibility that "School may be a brilliantly conceived social engine that works exactly as it was designed to work and produces exactly the human products it was designed to produce" - fragmented adults who can't imagine how to survive without the state.

Educrats and their enablers may express outrage at Mr. Gatto's research. But significantly, few of them will actually allow themselves to read their esteemed former colleague at any length (his greatest book, The Underground History of American Education, can be downloaded online for free), let alone look up, read, and evaluate his references. For you see, they don't teach them to do that any more, in the schools.

Source



Now a cloak of invisibility falls on British school standards

By Chris Woodhead

When Labour won the 1997 election the prime minister, much to my amazement, decided both to keep me in the post of chief inspector of schools and to continue the rigorous approach to testing and school inspection the Conservatives had introduced in the late 1980s. That approach was beginning to deliver, and I was happy to stay. By autumn 2000 when I decided I could no longer continue in the post it had become clear that any commitment to rigour was fast declining.

Last week it disappeared completely. The secretary of state for education, Alan Johnson, announced that the government is set to abolish the national curriculum tests children currently take at 7, 11 and 14. Instead, they are to be assessed when they are “ready”, and, if the school does not like the result, then the child can be tested again until, presumably, the desired score is achieved.

This decision is the final nail in the coffin of school accountability. Nobody will know quite how the tests have been administered, and it will be impossible to compare one school to another. At secondary school level “personalised learning” will lead to students taking GCSE and A-level exams at different times. So here, too, comparisons become difficult.

Johnson, of course, pretends otherwise. League tables, he blusters, will still exist. Parents will still be in a position to make an informed choice about the school they wish their child to attend. It is nonsense, of course.

The truth is that ministers will no longer have to face the annual humiliation of admitting that they have failed once again to hit their self-imposed targets for improvements in literacy and numeracy. They will no longer have to try to persuade us, as Jim Knight did last week, that the appalling fact that only 45.3% of 16-year-olds achieve five good GCSE grades including English and maths is actually good news.

What a U-turn. At the beginning Labour made it clear that mastering the basics — being able to read, write and do sums — meant more than anything else. But last week’s revamped government league tables based on five good GCSEs tell a different story. It’s disgraceful that after 10 years fewer than half of 16-year-olds are reaching basic standards in English and maths.

At some schools the difference made by including English and maths in the GCSE tally is stark. At Madeley court comprehensive in Telford, for instance, just 16% of pupils got five good GCSEs including English and maths last year. Before the basic subjects were included in the scoring, the figure was 82% (boosted by entering pupils for a controversial GNVQ in information technology, which counts as a ridiculous four GCSEs).

Parents are expected to make sense of this kind of swing in fortune. They are meant to ponder new “value added” league tables which purport to register how successful schools are in teaching children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds or ethnic minority families. No grammar school appears in the top 100 schools in this league table, and schools which languished at the bottom of the conventional table now shoot miraculously to the top.

Confused? So am I, but don’t worry. We are meant to believe a new educational dawn is about to break. Free from the burden of external scrutiny our teachers will focus on the needs of each of the 30 children in their class. They will adapt the boring constraints of the national curriculum to the interests of each child. Learning is to be “personalised”. Creativity and innovation will flourish.

In some schools, perhaps; in most, I suspect not. The truth is that the government has given up. It has abandoned the reforms which, in time, would have improved education.

Schools, like children, need challenge. Transparency matters. How, after all, are problems in failing schools going to be solved if we do not know which schools are failing? Who really thinks that real teachers in real classrooms can or should respond to the individual needs of each of their pupils? The truth, of course, is that learning cannot be “personalised”. Learning French grammar is learning French grammar. Full stop. Good teachers will help individual pupils overcome their individual problems as they always have, but beyond this platitude the concept of “personalisation” has no meaning.

The rot began with David Blunkett, who, for all his tough public talk, was never comfortable with “naming and shaming” failing schools and who oversaw a review of the national curriculum that emphasised the teaching of “learning skills” over the mastery of factual knowledge.

In 2000 my successor as chief inspector, Mike Tomlinson, announced that in future inspection was to be “something we do with schools rather than to schools”. The school was to be a partner in its own inspection, but, Tomlinson added defensively, “the rigour and objectivity of inspection” will not be affected.

It has, of course. In 2005 a new system of inspection based on the school’s evaluation of its own performance was introduced. The period of time the inspectors spend in the school has been reduced to a day or two. Most teachers will not even see an inspector. So much for rigour and objectivity.

Source

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

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

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

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16 January, 2007

WORKING-CLASS PUPILS BENEFIT MOST FROM SELECTIVE EDUCATION

In the light of the considerations presented below, a cynic might suggest that the continuing hatred of (selective) grammar schools emanating from the British Left is NOT about equality: it's their hope of turning the mass population into dumb docile sheep who can be pushed around by Leftist politicians. Grammar schools are and always were the best avenue of upward mobility for the British working class. Note that the BNP -- Britain's most working-class and least elite party -- pledges to restore all those that have been closed, and open them in every community that wants them.

There are three problems with our schools. We are failing to give an excellent education to cleverer boys and girls. We are failing to give a sound basic education to less able pupils, especially in deprived areas. And we are failing to stimulate the social mobility that good education makes possible.

Your educational chances, and your life chances, depend too much on where you live. The Government's City Academy programme attempts to address the problem of the underprivileged areas. It is expensive and unproven. Sadly, money and buildings do not solve all educational problems. We can expect successes and failures. On the other two problems, the Government's silence is deafening. Yet in the 21st century, Britain cannot afford to educate its people less well than the best in other countries. It is a personal tragedy as well as a national loss when many of our best youngsters are not helped to fulfill their potential. We have to educate everyone well if we are to compete with the rest of the developed world and the emerging economies of the East.

We have some very good individual schools, including some good comprehensives, but the system as a whole simply does not achieve enough. International results put Britain so far down the league tables that it must be time to look at another way of doing things. Between 2000 and 2003, for instance, the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) [And PISA is very undemanding!] showed the UK slipping from fourth to 11th in science and from eighth to 18th in maths.

However, there was one dazzlingly good result: when Pisa divided state schools from the private sector in 31 developed countries, our independent schools came top of the 62 groups. So if Britain is running the best schools in the world, why are we not also running the best state schools?

I think, after 46 years in and around teaching, that I know the answer. An outworn ideology prevents the country from learning from the successful model in its midst. One of the most important lessons is that independent schools are schools of choice. They deal with reasonably willing pupils, with teachers who care about their subjects and their students, and with parents who are supportive. Independent schools are, in the real sense of the word, selective: the parents select the school and the school selects their sons and daughters.

Where selection remains in the state system - in those English counties which have fought to retain grammar schools, and particularly in Northern Ireland - we can see its value. Their results show that selection works better, not just for the very able, but for the student body as a whole. In Northern Ireland, 10 per cent more pupils achieve five A*-C grades at GCSE than in England, and 30 per cent of A-level papers get an A grade compared to 22 per cent in England. That makes the Government's recent legislation intended to abolish selection in Northern Ireland particularly regrettable.

But education is about much more than just exam results - and as well outperforming the rest of the UK in tests, Northern Ireland also provides the model for what a selective system can achieve for social mobility. There, 42 per cent of university entrants come from less privileged backgrounds, compared to only 28 per cent in England. The concentration of our remaining grammar schools in a small number of mostly higher-income areas means that many able children from poor families miss out on the opportunities selective education can provide.

Yet it is the poor who benefit most from access to grammar schools. Recent research from the University of Bristol compared the results of selective and non-selective LEAs. While the average level of attainment was not significantly higher, the minority of children from poor families who made it to grammar schools did 'exceptionally well', bumping up their average GCSE scores by seven or eight points - equivalent to converting their grades from Bs to As. This compared to a four-point uplift for grammar-school pupils as a whole.

There is a way of extending these opportunities to pupils from all backgrounds in every part of the United Kingdom. It is not a case of reverting to the 11-plus, nor of creating a few good schools for the academically able and forgetting about the rest. A pamphlet published this week by the Centre for Policy Studies (www.cps.org.uk), Three Cheers for Selection: How Grammar Schools Help the Poor, proposes a selective system which would free schools to choose their students; which would offer ladders of opportunity to clever boys and girls from deprived areas; and which would create a national network of specialist academic schools. This is the debate we should be having: not a debate about whether or not to select, but on how to do it.

Selection is unmentionable in political circles only because it is a synonym for the 11-plus [A scholastic aptitude test once universally taken at age 11 -- which tended to dictate the child's future educational chances]. I would not want to go back to that. We should be debating more flexible methods of how best to choose pupils for schools and when. Almost everyone - except the lunatic fringe that would like university places decided by lottery - accepts selection at 18. But since good students have fallen by the wayside by then, what about 16, or 14? Why is it all right to select pupils for 'Gifted and Talented' programmes at a much younger age (and even to offer vouchers to the top 10 per cent, as the schools minister Lord Adonis proposes), but not to select them for particular schools? Why can specialist schools select 10 per cent of their intake for being good at languages or general studies, but not because they may be clever?

New polling undertaken by ICM for the Centre for Policy Studies shows that the public is no longer in agreement with the politicians. Despite the years of public argument against selection, the majority favour it. The idea that more academic children maximise their potential through streaming, or by attending selective schools, is backed by 76 per cent of the public - and 73 per cent believe that this applies to less academic children, too. Even if the majority would still opt for a mixed-ability school for their own children, as many as 40 per cent would now choose a selective school if it was on offer. More than 50 per cent were in favour of schools being set free to choose their pupils by a mix of exams, interviews and head teachers' recommendations.

The 40-year experiment with comprehensive education has failed. It was meant to provide, in Harold Wilson's words, 'grammar schools for all', and to lead to increased social mobility. It has done neither. It has not raised standards - and, as the Sutton Trust has recently shown, we now have a less mobile society than in the 1950s and 1960s. In effect, selection by ability has been replaced by selection by neighbourhood. That is neither sensible, nor egalitarian. It is time to rid ourselves of an outworn dogma and explore practical ways of making our schools as good as we can make them.

Source



BRITAIN'S CRUMBLING CLASSROOMS

Huge tax increases have led to what? Stifling bureaucracy, mainly

Hundreds of thousands of pupils will be taught in dilapidated classrooms because the Government is abandoning its targets for a 45 billion pound schools rebuilding programme. The plans, heralded by Gordon Brown in successive budget speeches, have become mired in red tape, forcing the Government to admit that three years after promising to rebuild all 3,500 secondary schools before 2020 not a single project has been completed. It expects to open just 14 of the 100 new schools it had planned to by the end of this year, according to official Department for Education and Skills figures, The Times has learnt.

Pupils, parents and teachers who had been promised new facilities are having to continue using buildings that have been described as not fit for purpose, with a lack of modern facilities and many temporary structures. The programme, Building Schools for the Future, is in such chaos that construction firms have pulled out, the official in charge has been replaced and the accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers have been brought in to review the mess.

When it launched the programme in 2004, the Government promised to spend 3 billion a year rebuilding or refurbishing every secondary school in the country over the next 15 years, in what it said was the biggest schools investment programme in Britain ever. It said that the first 100 building contracts would be signed in 2006, and the first 100 new schools would open in 2007.

But according to the figures, obtained by the Conservatives, only five building contracts have been signed and the Government now expects to open only fourteen new schools by the end of this year. The first new-generation school is not scheduled to open until this summer, in Bristol. Next year 200 schools were planned to open, but just 56 are now expected to do so. The problems mean that the Government has been unable to spend much of the money set aside by the Treasury for building schools. This financial year it has failed to spend 700 million promised by Mr Brown, and the last financial year it failed to spend 166 million.

George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, said: “These admissions are yet more evidence of Gordon Brown’s spin on education. In every Budget and pre-Budget statement he claims to be giving more money to education, but he is still not building the new schools he promised.”

The delays have caused anger and frustration among teachers and parents. Steve Sinnett, the general-secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the mess was “absolutely unforgiveable” and that there was no doubt that it was affecting education. “We have a building stock that is not fit for purpose. Some schools are little better than slums,” he said. Malcolm Trobe, president of the Association of School and College leaders, said: “The youngsters, parents and the community have an expectation of a new school and it’s getting delayed and delayed.”

The Department for Education and Skills has brought in Tim Byles, a former chief executive of Norfolk County Council, to take control of Partnership for Schools, the agency in charge of the programme. Mr Byles is talking to ministers about abandoning the building targets and hopes to announce new ones later this year. He told The Times: “The early forecasts were too optimistic. We need to be realistic about the timings for this programme . . . and I believe that needs to be reset in the light of experience.” The delays were a result of insisting that schools were being properly built, he added. “Do you want to get this multigenerational investment right, or roll it out as quickly as possible? We took the decision to get it right.”

But schools and construction firms blame red tape, which has made the procurement process cumbersome and expensive. They also blame a lack of expertise among local authorities and school headteachers, who have no experience of overseeing such vast building projects. Mr Byles said he was confident that the programme could be brought back on track over the next 15 to 20 years. The Department for Education said in a statement: “Addressing decades of investment will not happen overnight. We were always clear that we would learn from the lessons and get this project right. “Every child being taught in world-class facilities in 50 years time will be grateful that we took the time to get this right.” [But why does it take so long to get it right?]

Source

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

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

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

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15 January, 2007

EU BRAINWASHING IN BRITISH SCHOOLS

The EU has been accused of using underhand means in the classroom to try to 'brainwash' British children into becoming enthusiastic supporters of the European project. A new teaching pack on the EU has been introduced for use in Key Stage 3 and 4 'citizenship' classes that claims to offer a balanced view of the organisation and its role. The taxpayer-funded materials - available to schools in bulk and at no cost from the European Parliament's UK office - hail the effectiveness of EU legislation on everything from smoking and workers' rights to genetically modified organisms and food labelling.

But Eurosceptics were up in arms last night about elements of the lesson notes and pupil worksheets, which guide teachers and pupils in 'de-bunking' the views of a man who is critical of a lack of democracy in the EU. The UK Independence Party, which blew the whistle on the pack, also attacked the way the Eurosceptic character featured in the pupil worksheets - 'Portsmouth plumber Charlie Bolton' - is an ageing, white man who contrasts with other young, smiling, fresh-faced people. Below a chart showing how the various institutions of the EU, such as the European Parliament and European Commission, interact, Charlie Bolton says: 'Europe - it's just faceless bureaucrats - none of them elected. 'And they impose their laws on us from Brussels whenever they fancy. All that red tape to make our lives harder.'

It then guides pupils to reject the notion that the EU is anti-democratic by reminding them of the elected European Parliament. 'Do you agree with Charlie? What does the flow chart tell you about how laws are made?' it asks. The teacher is also instructed to show pupils how to counter his argument and to lead the pupils to conclude that he is wrong and that the EU is democratic. The lesson plan reads: 'Discuss Charlie Bolton's attitude to EU legislation. If Charlie knew that the Members of the European Parliament are elected and that the Council of Ministers represents our governments, do the students think that he would change his mind?'

Yorkshire's UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom hit out last night at the pack, branding it 'bias and propaganda, masquerading as neutral fact'. 'At a time when the Government has been downplaying Britain's history and political traditions in our schools, taxpayers are instead forced to pay for our children to learn EU systems,' he said. 'Given that up to 75 per cent of our laws are now made in Brussels, I suppose it does make some sense, but I am sure that most parents would want their children to learn our political systems and institutions rather those that are being imposed upon us. 'It is obvious that the EU has given up on persuading the grown ups, so now they have started on the children.'

Shipley's Tory MP Philip Davies, spokesman for the Better Off Out campaign, added: 'The EU gets more like the Soviet Union every day when it resorts to brainwashing children. 'All it does is confirm my worst fears. 'But it's not just Charlie Bolton who's sick of the EU - opinion polls show that more and more people are fed up with membership and now a majority of businesses are against it. 'It smacks of utter desperation on their part because they know they've been rumbled.'

The European Parliament insists that the pack is impartial and that it helps pupils make their own minds up about the EU. 'The resources have been designed to offer a balanced introduction to the European Union and the European Parliament, to encourage students to take part in discussion and to form their own view on the subjects covered in the resources,' say the officials responsible for the pack

Source



British Labour party minister axed 2,700 special needs places

RUTH KELLY, who was heavily criticised last week for educating her dyslexic son privately, presided over the closure of more state special school places annually than any other Labour education secretary since 1997, new figures show. In 2005, the only full year Kelly ran the education department, school closures led to the loss of more than 2,600 places for children with special needs. The closures continued in 2006, when Kelly was in charge until May.

Her record has angered parents who cannot afford private education and rely on state schools where there is often inadequate expertise.

The figures add to the claims of hypocrisy faced by Kelly, now the communities secretary, when it emerged she was prepared to spend £15,000 a year on a place at a private school in Oxfordshire.

She defended the decision on the grounds that her local council, Tower Hamlets in east London, could not provide for her son’s “particular and substantial learning difficulties”. The nine-year-old is understood to have dyslexia and dyspraxia, which affects co-ordination.

David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, who asked the question that led to the figures emerging, said he backed a moratorium on closures. “Every week I get letters protesting at special schools being closed,” he said. “It is an incredibly sensitive subject.”

The figures obtained by Willetts show that 2,770 places in special schools were closed in 2005 and another 2,051 in 2006. Some of these have been replaced by small units attached to mainstream schools.

Local councils have been under pressure to close special schools in an inclusion drive by Labour to educate children in mainstream schools wherever possible.

However, in 2005, as the closure of special schools was gathering pace under Kelly, Baroness Warnock, whose 1978 report on special educational needs paved the way for the policy, admitted it was leaving “a disastrous legacy”.

Last year there was a slight policy shift when Lord Adonis, schools minister, said there would be a tightening of conditions that had to be met before special schools could be closed.

Jackie Gibbon from Hereford whose nine-year- old daughter is dyslexic and dyspraxic, said: “I’d love to be in Ruth Kelly’s position, but we can’t afford it.”

Source



Australia: Year 12 English students study SMS, podcasts

Literature??

Show and tell is one assessment task suggested for Year 12 English students in South Australian schools by the state's curriculum board. Changes to the state's English curriculum this year also include the study of SMS, podcasts, graphic novels and song lyrics. Teaching resources authorised by the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia for assessing students in the English Studies course, which is the literature course, include ideas for "non-text-based" activities. "Choose three objects which are of significance to you, and explain their importance in your life," the document says. Other activities suggested include giving demonstrations of packing a picnic basket, reading astrology charts, making a cake, giving a facial or grooming a dog.

English Studies is based on the critical study of texts, while English Communications is a broader study of the power and role of language in society. From this year, as part of their study of personal communications, English Communications students in Year 12 will have the opportunity to study text messages, along with family gatherings, letters and telephone calls. Other forms of communication studied under the various topics include talkback radio, junk mail, press releases, chat rooms, online shopping and podcasts.

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday lamented the studying of text messages in lieu of time-tested classics such as Shakespeare, particularly in states such as South Australia and Queensland that do not have English as a compulsory subject for all school students. Ms Bishop said that as part of the development of a national curriculum framework in English, she would like to see Shakespeare included as a compulsory text. "I strongly encourage state education authorities to include Shakespeare and other classics in their curriculum," she said. "An appreciation of the best literature available should be an essential part of schooling. I would encourage state education authorities to aim higher, for higher standards."

Ms Bishop described the study of text messages in Year 12 as illogical, and said most students would know more about it than their teachers. "By replacing the teaching of the classics with courses that encourage them to text, are you encouraging students to take the easy path? It's not challenging or stretching students." Ms Bishop said the introduction of national literacy tests from 2008 would include assessment of spelling, grammar and punctuation not currently tested in state-based assessments. "The difficulty is not having students learn how to send text messages, but having them speak correct English."

Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide, Penny Boumelha, welcomed the idea of English being compulsory for school students. Professor Boumelha said that teaching students how to write text messages was of little value in an English course. In the curriculum document, text messages form part of the communication study. A spokesperson for the assessment board was unavailable yesterday.

Source

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

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

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

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



14 January, 2007

Special needs are universal now

Comment from Britain:

My children are special to me, and they have needs (like they need to be told to get up for school). But I don’t think they have special needs. The way things are heading, that alone may yet make them part of a “special” minority. The Ruth Kelly ballyhoo [where a British government minister put her kid into a private school to help him with his dyslexia] highlighted one problem with special needs education: the policy of “inclusion” which means sticking children with serious difficulties in mainstream schools without specialist help, to the detriment of all. But an even bigger problem is the crazed expansion of the category “special needs”.

According to the Department for Education, almost 1.5 million children in England now have special educational needs — around 18 per cent of the total. Call me stupid, but how could that possibly be? It must reflect the fashion for medicalising childhood problems — see apparent epidemics of everything from autism to attention deficit disorder. It could also have something to do with special needs being a ticket for schools to obtain resources and parents to get their children school places.

And that’s not all. This week Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced plans for all schools to adopt “personalised learning and teaching”. Today’s official mantra is that every child is unique — that is, they all have special needs.

God knows the system is bad enough, but this could make it worse. Even if state schools had resources for one-to-one teaching, a personalised system means abandoning the democratic ideal of a universal education. Except in rare cases, most kids surely do best by interacting with others and learning through a teacher who is more than their mentor or mate — not sitting in a personal ghetto with only their personal computer from which to copy the answers.

Source



REVIVAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE STUDY IN AUSTRALIA?



The Bard may soon return to Queensland schools as the Federal Government considers making Shakespeare compulsory for English students. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said the compulsory study of Shakespeare was one of a range of options being considered for English students. Ms Bishop, expected to step up her overhaul of Australian education this year, said that for centuries schoolchildren had been enriched by the English playwright. She was considering reintroducing the Bard as a compulsory part of the English curriculum, she said. "I would say that is one option. But English itself is not even compulsory in Queensland schools at the moment," she said.

Ms Bishop has indicated a willingness to use federal funding as a bargaining chip to force states to improve curriculums. She wants English and history reintroduced as compulsory subjects across the nation. Ms Bishop noted British research released this week showing Shakespearean language "excites the brain".

Ms Bishop said Shakespeare's plays were not the only literary classics she wanted back in the classroom. Australian literature from Banjo Paterson to Patrick White also could enrich young minds, as opposed to "deconstructing that trashy reality show Big Brother".

The Federal Government has backed its belief in the Bard with a $50,0000 investment in the Bell Shakespeare Regional Teacher Scholarships program, which kicks off this year. The investment will provide 12 English teachers from regional and remote schools with a program to build expertise in bringing Shakespeare to life.

Source



When government schools are no good ....

There is a huge demand for private education in Australia in a desperate attempt to escape Left-run non-education in State-government schools. Around 40% of Australian teenagers are now sent to private schools. But huge demand forces up prices -- as it always does. Australia's most famous conservative government -- the Menzies (Federal) administration -- long ago instituted a semi-voucher system by giving grants to private schools -- thus going over the heads of the State governments. Federal grants to private schools are however still much less per head than what State governments spend on their schools

Some of Sydney's most prestigious private schools are charging parents as much as $4000 in non-refundable fees to enrol their children, on top of tuition fees that can cost more than $20,000. Annual fees for senior students this year will be as high as $21,117 at Cranbrook, $20,967 at Kambala, $20,913 at King's and $20,826 at Sydney Grammar. At Cranbrook School, a non-refundable enrolment fee of $4615 is payable on acceptance of a place. Parents must also pay a non-refundable fee of $300 to make an enrolment application. The school generates about $1 million each year from enrolment fees and more than $23 million in tuition fees. Under its funding arrangements for private schools, the Federal Government no longer takes into account the amount of non-refundable fee income a school generates.

Lyndsay Connors, who heads the NSW Public Education Council, said schools were no longer penalised for the extra income. "This kind of impost by private schools on parents would normally be their own business," she said. "But in this country, these schools are not only provided with public funding, but with ever-increasing amounts of it. The least they could be required to do is let all of us shareholders know what all this public and private money is being spent on. What exactly are we subsidising?"

St Ignatius' College, Riverview, charges a non-refundable enrolment fee of $4000, King's $3600 and Sydney Grammar $3470. Loreto Normanhurst and Loreto Kirribilli each charge $3000 and Abbotsleigh $1720. St Andrew's Cathedral School charges a non-refundable enrolment fee of $2000 a family. Overseas students are also required to pay an enrolment bond of $18,500 and a NSW Board of Studies charge of $700 for each year 12 student sitting the HSC. Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) charges students $1000 to enrol and another $2000 to confirm the enrolment. Both are non-refundable and in addition to annual fees. Year 11 and 12 students pay a total of $37,950 over two years, paid in five instalments.

Its headmaster, Timothy Wright, said the fee was designed to deter parents from making an application if they did not seriously intend to enrol their child. "You might find parents put their names down at four or five schools and four of those schools make plans for that child arriving," Dr Wright said. "If a school suddenly found that 10 per cent of their expected enrolments didn't come, they would have a serious problem." Dr Wright said income from non-refundable fees helped fund the sizeable costs associated with running the enrolment office.

The Association of Independent Schools' executive director, Geoff Newcombe, said non-refundable fees were intended to provide certainty for parents and schools and to discourage parents from making multiple applications. "In many cases, a late withdrawal means that the school would have difficulty in filling that place for a term or two - even though they have waiting lists - because the parents have enrolled in another school," Dr Newcombe said. "Many schools use that as a contribution towards the school's capital fund and towards the bursary scholarship fund."

Source

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

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

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

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



13 January, 2007

DECEPTIVE LEFT-DOMINATED EDUCATION IN AN AUSTRALIAN HIGH-SCHOOL

I have received the following email from a reader who is an inmate of a government High School:

As a year 11 student in **** with more than a passing fancy for history, I took Modern History as one of my choices in the second semester of school. I wouldn't know anything about Australian history from that class, there was not a single mention of it apart from a very brief look at Australia's role in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War is a case in point about why History in schools is failing miserably, or at the most generous, being changed into -- as you so eloquently put it -- a "politically correct, ideological prism." The Vietnam War was portrayed in a rather interesting fashion, as a Communist North reaction against American imperialistic ambitions on the region. No mention was made of the North's continued covert support of terrorists or its intentions to invade and then annex the South.

The class even from the very first was told to look critically at the American conduct of the war. We looked at the Mai Lai massacre, which was a horrible abomination, but instead of treating it as an isolated case (which it was probably not). It was used to illustrate an imaginary trend and we then proceeded to spend the six weeks examining American conduct in great deal.

A personal favourite was the curriculum's view of the Tet offensive; it was not treated as a communist attack on cities full of non combatants on a national holiday. Instead we looked at the conduct of the Americans in dealing with it, every report of heavy handedness, every possible picture that could possibly be used to attack America was brought up. No mention was made of the massacres which the communists perpetrated in which thousands were killed.

Even more entertaining was the constant left wing rants from many of my co-students. I have heard communism called many things in front of me, but a good system which helped all the people, that was a first. So I guess that Marx must have been rolling in his grave when the Soviet Union was formed, with Gulags (people need to go somewhere), with the God-Comrade Stalin (better a man who tries to be god than god), with the KGB (someone needs to keep the Proletariat and reactionaries in order) and with the mass starvation of the Poles and Ukrainians (they tried to be different) and all the other trappings of the Russian version of communism. He must have died again when China fell to God-Comrade Mao better than God-Comrade Stalin (he was a peasant), then died again when God Comrade Mao used peasants instead of Marx's beloved industrial workers (is that communism?), then once more when Mao then proceeded to starve millions, and Marx's beloved industrial workers and less than loved peasants (Stalin at least cared, he hoped). Which sadly the class did little to damp or in anyway impede in fact it encouraged it.

A measure of respect can be aimed at people who have read Marx and understand the finer principles of Communes and the like, even if they like a grievously flawed philosophy. There were too many flaws in the way the class was presented to list but that is one example. The teacher was exemplary. The scorn in this letter is directed solely at a curriculum that is so utterly biased it destroys the notion of history: A curriculum in which questions for essays in which the only answers could be biased (however hard I attempted to do otherwise), where evidence for the exam could have come from a whose who of left wing images and views of the Vietnam War, where choices were coaxed to fit a narrow biased view that a bunch of left wing ideologues intent on ruining the world under the weight of their "good" intentions want the entire world to meet.



BRITAIN: PATHETIC JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL RESULTS

Less than half of the students passed overall -- even including lots of "soft" subjects -- and BritGov says that's good! And the teachers want grading scrapped so nobody will know how badly the schools are doing. What a mess! Marvellous what years of Leftist educational practices will do. Note: Passing is no longer called passing. It is now called meeting a "gold standard". Beware the dreaded "tinplate standard", I guess. Amazing rubbish!

More than 300,000 secondary school pupils failed to reach the Government's target of five good GCSE passes in subjects including English and maths, league tables released yesterday show. In a quarter of England's 3,100 secondary schools, 70 per cent of pupils (105,000), failed to meet the gold standard of five A* to C grade passes in subjects including maths and English. Overall, 45 per cent of 15-year-olds achieved five A* to C grade passes at GCSEs including maths and English. When those two core subjects were not included, 58.5 per cent achieved five good GCSE passes.

The poverty of teenagers' literacy and numeracy skills was most acute in one in ten secondaries, where four fifths of pupils failed to meet the benchmark. It was also revealed that 26,000 pupils sat neither maths nor English GCSE last summer and less than half (49.8 per cent) took an examination in English, maths, science or a modern foreign language.

Nevertheless the Government insists that standards are rising and 375,000 more pupils have gained 5 GCSE passes in the past nine years. Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said that he was determined to continue working to improve underperforming schools, but praised pupils for getting record numbers of five good GCSEs. "The results clearly show that our record investment continues to drive up standards faster than ever," he said.

However, many schools plummeted down the league tables after Ruth Kelly, when she was Education Secretary, insisted last year on the new target. In the past heads have admitted that they have encouraged children to take easier vocational exams in an effort to push their schools up the tables.

Tony Blair wants 400 schools to become academies [charters] by 2010. But yesterday's results showed that only a fifth of pupils in the 46 new schools gained 5 good GCSEs, including maths and English. Mr Knight defended the schools and said that huge parental demand for places was proof of their success. Of those pupils who achieved five good GCSEs, 88 per cent took academic subjects, while 9.7 per cent of them took vocational qualifications as part of their five passes. All students of English and maths passed GCSEs.

But David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that pupils were being short-changed as less than half had attempted "rigorous core subjects". "We need to ensure that every pupil leaves school with a decent education in the basics - not just in maths and English, but in the sciences, history, and modern languages. "Instead pupils are being pushed into subjects which will meet targets without providing them with an education which will benefit them throughout life," he added.

Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman, said that the new benchmark showed the "perverse incentives" created by the league tables and called for them to be scrapped. Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, echoed her call and said that children should not be written off for failing to gain a C grade. "They may have achieved wonders to get to a grade D," he added.

Last night independent schools reacted angrily to the exclusion of International GCSE (IGCSE) results, for academic subjects such as maths and physics, from the tables.

Source



Swedish Supreme Court: Uppsala University Guilty of Anti-Swedish Discrimination

Late last month Uppsala University was found guilty of discrimination against Swedes by the Swedish Supreme Court (Hoegsta domstolen). Three years ago, the university refused to enroll Cecilia Loenn and Josefine Milander in its Law Faculty even though they had better grades than thirty other students with a foreign background.

In 2003, thirty of the available places for the law courses had been reserved for students with a foreign background. Cecilia Loenn and Josefine Milander, both with better grades than all of those thirty students who were allowed in, were refused by the university. The two young ladies sued the university. They won twice in lower courts. Now the Supreme Court, too, has ruled in their favor and ordered the university to pay them a compensation of SEK 75,000 (approximately 8,200 Euros). The court expenses they made, about SEK 41,000 (approximately $4,500), will be reimbursed by the state.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the two women question the principle of positive discrimination, as long as it is practised between candidates who are equally qualified. Not so, however, when somebody with a foreign background is favored even though the Swede had better grades, since this is not positive discrimination, but just plain discrimination. Hence the Supreme Court wanted to set a clear example of what cannot be considered to be positive discrimination and therefore is illegal.

Of course, the two students have had two tough years. Ironically, however, the whole case may turn out to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage to them. As law students, they now have practical experience in bringing a case to court and taking it up to the level of the Supreme Court. Moreover, the fact that they have participated and won an important case will undoubtedly help them in their careers.

Source

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

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

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

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



12 January, 2007

Radical Islam and British Universities

Leading Muslim terrorists have been educated at Britain's universities

British Universities have long been centers of radicalism, usually of the brand of amateur socialism espoused by the Socialist Workers Party or its ugly sisters Militant and the Worker's Revolutionary Party. Pretending to understand Dialectical Marxism and Trotskyite "permanent revolution", the leftist radicals infested, and still infest, campuses across Britain.

Since the 1970s, these activists have promoted the myth of Palestinian perpetual martyrdom, and portrayed Israel as a bogeyman. During the 1980s, they supported the women who camped rough outside RAF Greenham Common, a US-linked air base in Bedfordshire, Britain. Though ignored by most students, activists promoted an agenda of anti-Americanism and anti-semitism that has infected at least two generations of post-graduates.

Ultimately they contributed to British media's fawning over the notion of Palestinian, and by extension all Muslims', victimhood. Now grown up, the former student union activists are the first to hurl the term "Islamophobe" at anyone who questions the spread of radical Islam. In such a climate, it has been easy for Islamic radicalism to flourish, and even to be welcomed on Britain's campuses.

On September 26, 2005, Britain's Social Affairs Unit published a report by Professor Anthony Glees and Chris Pope from Brunel University. This report, entitled "When Students Turn To Terror", listed 24 universities where radicalism flourished, including Birmingham, Brunel, Durham, Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan, Luton, Leicester, Manchester Metropolitan, Newcastle, Nottingham, Reading, Swansea, and Wolverhampton.

Coming out while Britain was still reeling from the horrors of 7/7, when 52 people died on London Transport, Professor Glees' report galvanized the UK media. Already mosques and radical preachers had been named as contributing factors to the bombings of July 7, 2005. Universities had thitherto been ignored. Yet Britain's campuses had long been the playgrounds of amateur radicals and Islamists.

Many leading Muslim terrorists have been educated at Britain's universities. Azahari bin Husin, the senior bomb-maker from Jemaah Islamiyah who masterminded the Bali bombings of October 12, 2002 (killing 202 people) and October 1, 2005 (killing 20), studied at Reading University in the 1990s. He gained a doctorate in engineering before going off to join Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef drove a truck carrying a 1,200 pound bomb laced with cyanide into the car park beneath the World Trade Center. The ensuing blast killed six and injured 1,000. Four years before he committed this atrocity, Yousef completed a degree in engineering at West Glamorgan Institute (now Swansea Institute of Higher Education). Dr Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi, Saddam Hussein's "Doctor Germ", responsible for his biological warfare programs, learned her trade in Britain. In 1984, she gained a PhD in plant toxins at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia.

Individuals such as the above did not flaunt their Islamist credentials at college. Other individuals in British universities linked to terrorism have been allowed to lecture. One such person is 52-year old Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi, who is alleged to be a founder of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Like Sami al-Arian, who formerly lectured at the University of South Florida, Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi was, as recently as 2003, an occasional lecturer at Birkbeck College at the University of London. Here, he taught Islamic studies. In the 1990s, Nafi collaborated with al-Arian in Florida. Accused by the US of being the UK leader of PIJ, Nafi has denied the claims.

In 2004, Professor Anthony Glees claimed that academics in Britain's universities were actively hampering attempts by security services to defend the nation against Islamist threats. He claimed that many academics were "hostile to the idea of intervention in international affairs and have, since 1980, harbored strong suspicions of American motives." In July 2004, the Times reported that two UK universities, the University of Wales and the University of Loughborough, had given official approval to two Islamic colleges which supported both the Taliban and terror-group Hamas. The rector of the Markfield Institute of Higher Education is a member of the extremist party in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, who was said to have praised the Taliban. Markfield was supported by Loughborough University and has been praised by the pro-Islamic Prince Charles.

The European Institute of Human Sciences in Llanybydder, West Wales, was validated by the University of Wales. It teaches Arabic courses inspired by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Times claimed.

During the 1990s, a new phenomenon emerged on campuses and colleges in Britain - that of open radicals who loudly proclaimed their contempt for Western values, and unequivocally pronouncing their jihadist intentions.

Bizarrely, as Melanie Phillips reported in her book "Londonistan", the department of MI5 which dealt with radical Islamism was closed in 1994, while they considered the issue of the IRA to be more important. With the cat put away, the rats come out to play, in full force. During this hiatus in surveillance, two groups came to the fore, both connected with the Syrian-born Islamist preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed.

Bakri had arrived in Britain in 1985 as an "asylum-seeker", after he was deported from Saudi Arabia for belonging to a group classed as too "extreme" even for the center of Wahhabism. This group was called "Al-Muhajiroun", or "the emigrants". Bakri, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood had founded this group in Saudi Arabia in 1983 as a front for Hizb ut-Tahrir, the "revolutionary" Islamist group which is banned in most Middle Eastern countries.

When he arrived in Britain, Bakri founded the British branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir. In 1996, he also established Al-Muhajiroun in Britain. These two groups have the aim of establishing Britain as an Islamist state, and yearn for the restoration of the Caliphate, a system of Islamic central government. The last Caliphate, that of the Ottomans, was dissolved in 1924.

On Britain's campuses, the two groups established their influence during the latter half of the 1990s, particularly after MI5 stopped treating Islam seriously. Hizb ut-Tahrir members regularly threatened to kill Peter Tatchell, a homosexual rights campaigner, and Al-Muhajiroun openly pronounced their hatred of Jews. In the fall of 2000, they hung posters at university campuses which proclaimed: "The last hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill the Jews."

Threats and slogans aside, both groups had a more real danger inherent in their activities. The presence of Al-Muhajiroun on campuses in various universities led MI5 to set up a unit to monitor student Islamism at the dawn of the millennium. In early 2001, Russian authorities urged Britain to ban Al-Muhajiroun, as their intelligence showed that students from the London School of Economics had been recruited by the group to become terrorists in Chechnya.

In December 2000 Mohammed Bilal, a young British Muslim, who had been studying his "A-levels" at a sixth form college in Birmingham, went to India. Bilal had links to Al-Muhajiroun. He blew himself up in a stolen car. This suicide attack at an army barracks in Kashmir killed six soldiers and three civilians.

In October 2001, Al-Muhajiroun claimed that three British Muslims were killed by a US rocket attack in Kabul, Afghanistan. The group claimed that 1,000 British Muslims had gone to Afghanistan since 9/11.

In November 2001, Hassan Butt of Al-Muhajiroun announced that five British Muslims had died in Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. Butt said: "They all died as martyrs fighting the so-called coalition against terrorism. They went out there to fight for the Taliban and were prepared to give their lives." On January 7, 2002, Butt told the BBC's Today program from his base in Lahore, Pakistan, that many of the British Muslims in Afghanistan would, upon their return, launch terror attacks which would "strike at the heart" of Britain. Butt boasted of personally recruiting 200 people to fight the coalition.

Bakri cannily denounced Butt's claims, saying that Al-Muhajiroun did not support military actions. He also said that Butt was no longer a member of the group and was no longer its spokesman. Bakri was lying. At a meeting in Sparkbrook in Birmingham, held less than a week after 9/11, Al Muhajiroun urged listeners to join the armed jihad against coalition troops. One speaker said that Muslims who supported the invasion of Afghanistan were to be urged not to do so. "But if they do not listen, they are Kufr (unbelievers) too and so it is our duty to fight and even kill them." Leaflets at the meetings proclaimed: "The final hour will not come until the Muslims conquer the White House." In Derby, Bakri used to regularly visit Al-Muhajiroun members, who had a strong following in the town. In 2000, he told a meeting there that Muslims must send armies "to fight the aggressors and occupiers and establish the Khilafah (Caliphate)." He issued a fatwa saying that "the Israeli cancer in Palestine must be uprooted."

While Al-Muhajiroun targeted students with an attempt to inspire them to jihad, the other group headed by Omar Bakri Mohammed was making inroads at universities and colleges throughout Britain. Hizb ut-Tahrir began to infiltrate student unions and Islamic societies, and its message was equally uncompromising. Hizb ut-Tahrir's approach was similarly supportive of violence, and used intimidation to achieve its ends. Its most notable influence was to force Muslim women students to wear the hijab or Muslim headscarf. This item had been only used by the older generation of Muslim women until the 1990s. Before the campaigns from Hizb ut-Tahrir, the item had hardly been seen on a campus.

During this decade, while the British government downplayed the seriousness of Islamic radicalism as part of a global movement towards dominance, the behavior of Hizb ut-Tahrir should have raised alarm bells. Britain's Channel 4 even made a documentary of Omar Bakri Mohammed, filmed over a year in and around his base in Tottenham, north London. Screened on April 8, 1997, this show, entitled "Tottenham Ayatollah" portrayed Bakri as a clownish buffoon. The documentary's approach was almost consciously misleading. In 1996, Bakri had tried to invite Osama bin Laden to Britain, to attend an "Islamic Revival Rally". Though the show supplied evidence of Bakri's preaching of hatred towards Jews, it was condemned by various Muslim groups. Makbool Javaid, chair of the Association of Muslim Lawyers, tried to prevent the broadcast going out.

There was nothing funny about Omar Bakri Mohammed. Before the documentary was shown, Bakri had addressed 200 students at the Newham College of Further Education, on Thursday, February 23, 1995. Bakri had a core group of supporters at this college in east London. The following day an African student, Ayotunde Obanubi, was stabbed in the arm at the college by a Hizb ut-Tahrir supporter. On Monday February 27, a group of several Hizb ut-Tahrir supporting students, led by Saeed Nur, again attacked Mr Obanubi. The Nigerian student was accused of "insulting Islam". The group was armed with hammers and knives. Struck on the head with a hammer and stabbed through the heart, Ayotunde Obanubi died on the steps of the college. Bakri's followers had claimed their first victim.

More here



Shockingly low level of literacy in West Australian students

About one in five students who completed Year 7 in Western Australia last year are functionally illiterate, failing to meet minimum national standards in reading, writing and spelling, and performing well below the national average. But two years ago when the same group of students were in Year 5, they recorded one of the nation's highest performances in literacy tests, with more than 90per cent reaching the minimum standard.

The 2006 results of the West Australian Literary and Numeracy Assessment released late last year show almost 84 per cent of Year 7 students met national reading standards while about 85 per cent met writing standards and 84 per cent met numeracy benchmarks. By comparison, 92 per cent of the same students in Year 5 met reading standards for that level of school, with 87 per cent meeting the Year 5 writing standard and the numeracy standard. Nationally, 91 per cent of Year7 students in 2004, the latest available figures, met the reading benchmark while among Year 5 students nationally, almost 89 per cent met the reading standard. When last year's group of West Australian Year 7 students were in Year 5 almost 94 per cent met the reading benchmark, a national report says.

The head of the federal Government's literacy review, Ken Rowe, said part of the problem had been the poor teaching of reading in previous years, with inadequate teacher training compounded by the whole language method, which relied on children recognising words rather than sounding them out. Dr Rowe, from the Australian Council for Educational Research, and the University of Western Australia's Bill Louden, who have just completed a literacy and numeracy review for the state Government, said a flattening of results was expected between Years 5 and 7, reflecting the onset of adolescence and the more demanding standards.

But national reports show some states report a rise in student performance, compared to when the same students were in Year 5. The national benchmarks adopted by all states and territories define the levels of literacy and numeracy a student needs to make sufficient progress at school. The reading standard for Year7 says students should be able to identify the main purpose and idea of a text and make connections between the ideas and information. The examples given include labelling a step in a flowchart, identifying the meaning of an unknown word and interpreting a simple simile such as "spaghetti ends dribbled from his mouth like wet mop ends".

The acting executive director of curriculum standards in the West Australia Education Department, Chris Cook, said the literacy and numeracy trends remained stable over time, indicating student performance had not significantly changed. "To achieve the Year 7 benchmark in reading, students are expected to apply sophisticated interpretation and comprehension skills to dense and complex texts that take into account the reading ability required in secondary school. This is significantly more demanding for students than the standard expected in Year 5," she said.

Professor Louden said the state's results had remained stable over the past few years. "My first hypothesis if there's a drop-off in the score is that the benchmark has changed or the items around the benchmark were a bit harder."

Source



Unfortunate victims of fashion: If you can read this, don't thank outcomes-based education

One need not have a doctorate in education to understand that if one stops penalising students for spelling and grammar mistakes in English classes, and instead allows them to treat a promotional movie poster as a "text" equivalent to a book published between proper covers, academic standards will inevitably decline. Or to grasp that an overweening emphasis on largely disproven student-centred teaching methods such as constructivism might not be good for teaching students the fundamentals. Or to think there might be something wrong when teacher training colleges spend just 10 per cent of their time teaching how to teach. Yet in falling for precisely these fallacies, the educational establishment of Western Australia - and indeed state governments across the country - have allowed young people to make it to Year 7 and beyond while remaining functionally illiterate.

The verdict is in on Western Australia's great experiment in throwing over musty old teaching methods in favour of the trendiness that is outcomes-based education, and the results are not pretty. According to figures from the state's Department of Education, just 80 per cent of Year 7 students meet the reading benchmarks, or base standards. The numbers also show this same cohort of students has gone backwards since being tested two years ago. And similarly poor results have been recorded in the field of numeracy.

While it is easy to snicker at the outrages of Western Australia's curriculum boffins, it must never be forgotten that ultimately lives and careers are at stake. The one in five Year 7 students found to be functionally illiterate will, if corrective measures are not taken quickly, help form a low-skilled underclass with few employment prospects - all due to an educational fad. Nor is this a problem solely confined to Western Australia. Urgent remedial reading programs are required to try to catch those students left behind by fads and trends. And education ministries across the country need to abandon the faddism that threatens to create a permanent underclass at a time when Australia is in urgent need of skilled workers.

Source

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

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

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

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



11 January, 2007

LEFTIST HATRED OF MERIT AND ABILITY AT WORK IN BRITAIN

A lottery is OK to select pupils but evidence of ability is not

Schools will be able to allocate places by “lottery” to ensure fairness between all applicants and to stop middle-class families from dominating the best secondaries, under a new admissions code for England. The mandatory code, which will come into force in September 2008, is being introduced to tackle “back-door selection”, where schools cream off the best students and pick pupils by social background. Many of the best state schools have become largely the preserve of families who can afford to buy homes nearby or expensive uniforms or who can show their commitment to the school through generous donations.

Labour MPs demanded that the code be toughened during the revolt against Tony Blair’s school reforms last year. Alan Johnson, the Education and Skills Secretary, said that the code would create a system where all children, regardless of their background, had a fair opportunity of gaining a place at the school they want to attend. “[It] puts mandatory measures in place to ensure that this is the case at all schools, including the few schools that persist in using unfair or unnecessarily complex arrangements that can disadvantage some families and reduce the life chances of thousands of children,” he said.

Lottery systems, which are already common in countries such as the United States, could be used to counter the house price effect by giving children from all backgrounds a chance to enter a draw for places. “Random allocation of school places can be good practice, particularly for urban areas and secondary schools,” the code states. “It may be used as the sole means of allocating places or alongside other oversubscription criteria. Random allocation can widen access to schools for those unable to afford to buy houses near to favoured schools and create greater social equity.”

However, it adds that the practice might not be suitable for rural areas, where schools draw children from a wider geographical area and where children who did not win a place through the lottery draw might otherwise have to travel a considerable distance to an alternative school. A spokesman for the Department for Education said that lottery systems were most likely to be used to allocate places left over after the use of other admissions criteria, such as distance or membership of a faith group. They could be open to challenge by local parents who lost out for not benefiting the local area, he added.

The code will also ban covert forms of selection such as requirements for expensive school uniforms, sportswear or costly trips, unless arrangements are put in place to ensure that parents on low incomes can afford them. It will also ban admission interviews. Comprehensive schools will still be allowed to operate sibling policies, which allow children automatically to follow older brothers and sisters into the school.

However, in the case of the 39 partially selective state schools, which select more than 10 per cent of pupils, the schools must ensure that their admission arrangements do not exclude families living nearer the school. Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman, said: “This new tighter code is welcome, but it will only make a difference if it is rigorously enforced. Heads and governors must realise that they will not get away with ignoring or flouting the new rules.”

Source



A REVIEW OF INTOLERANCE AT JOHNS HOPKINS

In a recent controversy simmering on the Johns Hopkins University campus, university administrators seem to be giving credence to an observation by Abigail Thernstrom, who categorized left-leaning, politically correct institutions of higher education as "an island of repression in a sea of freedom."

Instead of actually functioning as marketplaces of ideas - "to protect the university as a forum for the free expression of ideas," as described in Johns Hopkins' own student handbook - universities continue to punish what they categorize as "offensive" speech and behavior that do not conform to the acceptable, liberal views of politics, race or sexuality.

When posting invitations on Facebook.com, an online social networking site, for a "Halloween in the `Hood" party to be hosted by his Sigma Chi fraternity, junior Justin Park included some racist comments, crude stereotyping and such vivid descriptions as likening Baltimore to a "motherf---ing ghetto" and "hiv [sic] pit" - all of which drew the not-surprising accusation that the party was not only "offensive," as critics of the party put it, but pointed to "institutionalized racism" at Johns Hopkins.

Apparently Johns Hopkins administrators found offense as well: on Nov. 20, Park was suspended from the university for one year and ordered to perform 300 hours of community service, read and write thoughtful reviews of 12 books, and participate in mandatory workshops on diversity and race relations.

There are troubling issues here, putting aside the basic question of fairness of punishing a student with a draconian, life-altering college suspension because he exhibited loutish behavior. He received his punishment, not because he participated in actual illegal harassing or intimidating behavior, but because some individuals were "offended" by speech that was not even made directly to them.

Students have a right to be offended by the speech - even hate speech - of their fellow students, but they also have a Constitutionally protected right to be offensive, provided their conduct is within the bounds of the law. When did universities stop teaching students how to think and instead begin indoctrinating them on what to think?

And the Johns Hopkins administration has previously demonstrated its own hypocrisy when dealing with issues of free speech. In May this year, 2,000 copies of the conservative, student-run Carrollton Record were confiscated from parts of campus by University officials who were unhappy with a published story that questioned why students' funds were used for an April lecture by gay pornography director Chi Chi LaRue, an event sponsored by the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance (DSAGA). In the curious world of campus "free speech," a lecture to students by a sexually deviant pornographer is not offensive, but reporting about it somehow is.

Administrators at Johns Hopkins seemingly hold the notion that free speech is only good when it articulates politically correct, seemingly hate-free, views of protected victim or minority groups. But legal scholars, including such jurists as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., have always been dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones.

"If there is any principal of the Constitution," he observed, "that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principal of free thought - not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."

Source

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

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

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

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



10 January, 2007

British government minister who sent child to private school 'has let down Labour Party'

(It offends against their "all kids are equal" kneejerk)

A Cabinet minister is facing pressure to justify the decision to place a child in a private boarding school for pupils with special needs after rejecting state provision as inadequate. The decision was attacked by several Labour MPs as wrong. One left-wing MP called it a betrayal of the party’s principles.

The Mail on Sunday reported that the minister withdrew the child from a state school, choosing instead a preparatory school for children with learning difficulties which has annual fees of £15,000, saying that local state provision was inappropriate. The newspaper withheld the minister’s name on the ground that this would identify the child, but said that he or she had been “closely involved with Tony Blair’s education policy”.

Ian Gibson, the Labour MP for Norwich North, said: “I am fascinated to know who it is because there have been examples of this in the past and it has caused anger among Labour backbenchers. “I think it’s wrong. You should set an example as a minister and support your local school. It is a slap in the face for the teachers and the pupils in the school that the child has been taken out of.”

His words were echoed by Ann Cryer, the MP for Keighley, who said: “MPs should try to get state provision for their children because that is what we believe in.” Lynne Jones, the MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, said: “I think it goes against the principles of the Labour Party. It makes me wonder about the sort of people who achieve high office who are in New Labour.” Margaret Hodge, a Trade and Industry minister, said that politicians’ children should be kept out of the spotlight, but admitted: “Given our commitment to state education, it is an issue of public interest.”

Neither the child’s former school nor the new one was identified. Nor was the local authority named, but more details emerged when The Sunday Times reported that the minister had spent time “working in the education team” in the Government and gave details of the child’s condition.

The school in question, where pupils board weekly or termly, is in a country house in the Home Counties. It has 60 pupils aged 7 to 13 and offers extensive grounds, a heated swimming pool, tennis courts, golf and horse-riding. Its main purpose is to help children with the child’s condition to pass exams for top public schools. Its pupils have gone on to Winchester, Harrow, Rugby and Gordonstoun in recent years.

One of the minister’s officials refused to comment when approached by The Times. The minister is understood to have sought the help of the Press Complaints Commission, the industry’s voluntary regulator, to block publication of all details that might identify him or her. The commission’s code of practice states that young people should be free to complete time at school without unnecessary intrusion and editors must not use the position of a parent as sole justification for publishing details of a child’s private life. Human rights legislation also gives a right to privacy.

The case has the potential to embarrass the Government by highlighting how a minister who has been involved in education policy is dissatisfied with the special needs provision in their area. The Government has faced criticism for closing special schools while seeking to cater for special needs children in mainstream schools under its policy of inclusion.

The Department for Education and Skills refused to discuss the case but defended its record on provision for children with special needs. It said: “We are increasing spending on pupils with special educational needs so that the quality of education available to them is improved. This year we will spend more than £4 billion on SEN, an increase of more than £1 billion in only three years.

“This is being made available both to special schools and to mainstream schools in order to improve their support for pupils with specific learning difficulties. Our policy is clear that every child with special educational needs must get a high-quality education which meets their individual needs.”

Source



The minister replies:

Ruth Kelly launched an emotional defence yesterday of her decision to send her son to a 15,000 pounds-a-year private school, saying that he had "substantial learning difficulties" and she wanted to do the right thing for him. "Bringing up children in the public eye is never easy," she added.

Having failed in her attempt to keep her move secret in the interests of her child, the former Education Secretary said that she had removed her son from a state school after professional advice recommended that he be placed in a school "able to meet his particular needs". Ms Kelly emphasised that her three other children were in the state system, that she intended her son to return to the state secondary sector, and that none of the cost of the private schooling would fall to the taxpayer.

With Ms Kelly facing charges of hypocrisy for choosing to opt out of the state sector, her friends insisted that her son was facing more than one serious learning difficulty - it is thought dyspraxia as well as dyslexia - and that the state schools in her area could not meet his needs.

But one Labour MP called on Ms Kelly to stand down from her current job as Communities Secretary and others strongly criticised her decision. She has chosen to send her son to a school based at a country house which offers 60 pupils aged up to 13 the use of a swimming pool, tennis courts and a music room. The school refused to comment yesterday.

Labour was criticised while Ms Kelly was Education Secretary for closing schools that cater for children with learning difficulties. Some 138 have shut in the past ten years. The Government's "inclusion" policy suggests that children with special needs should be taught in ordinary schools alongside their peers where possible.

Ms Kelly said: "I appreciate that some will disagree with my decision. I understand why, but we all face difficult choices as parents and I, like any mother, want to do the right thing for my son - that has been my sole motivation."

Dyspraxia is a learning difficulty that makes it difficult for people to co-ordinate their movements and to process information. It can affect speech and the fine movements that children need to hold a pencil and write, and often accompanies other conditions, such as dyslexia.

Ms Kelly received backing from Downing Street and the Conservatives. The Prime Minister's official spokesman said that Tony Blair did not believe being a minister barred a parent from sending his or her children to schools outside the state system.

David Cameron also defended Ms Kelly's right to choose, saying that he did not think she was being hypocritical. "Some people are going to say it's hypocrisy. Well, if they were going to abolish private education, then it would be hypocrisy, but they're not. He added: "People should recognise that politicians, like everyone else, are parents first and will act in the best interests of their children."

A spokesman for Tower Hamlets Council, the local authority involved, said that it had been rated highly by Ofsted and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. "We have a strong track record in helping children with a wide range of learning needs to succeed. We are confident that our schools are well resourced and provide high-quality education for all learners, including those with special needs."

Ken Purchase, Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East, called for Ms Kelly to resign. "It's extremely disappointing that a person who was in charge of our schools clearly shows no commitment to state education." But Ian Austin, Labour MP for Dudley North, said: "I think Ruth's child ought to be able to get on with his or her education without being subjected to this sort of scrutiny."

Source



HAWAII: Educational Apartheid ratified in 9th Circuit

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ratified racism that celebrates Native Hawaiian ancestry with tortured reasoning reminiscent of Jim Crow. The 9th Circuit's 8-7 en banc ruling in Doe v. Kamehameha Schools (Dec. 5) upholding a racially exclusionary admissions policy for Kamehameha Schools marks manipulative judging at its worst.

King Kamehameha I's signature contribution to Hawaii's legal and political culture was the general erasure of distinctions between Native and non-Native Hawaiians. The king anticipated United States Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone's admonition that racial distinctions are odious to a free people.

The Kamehameha Schools were created under a charitable testamentary trust established by the last direct descendant of King Kamehameha I, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop. The trustees chose to confine admissions to students with at least one Native Hawaiian ancestor because the exclusion of non-Native Hawaiians was thought to represent the wishes of Mrs. Bishop. Native Hawaiians were not preferred to overcome past legal, social, economic or other discrimination. Indeed, Native Hawaiians have been special favorites of the law for more than a century since annexation. Nor were Native Hawaiians favored to promote educational diversity. The exclusion of non-Natives impaired that objective. In sum, the admissions policy amounted to racial exclusion or the sake of exclusion.

A non-Native applicant challenged the Kamehemeha Schools' "Native Hawaiians Only" admissions policy under a federal civil rights statute prohibiting racial discrimination in making or enforcing contracts, Title 42 of the U.S. Code, Section 1981. (The social ostracism unleashed against persons in Hawaii who challenge the political correctness of Native Hawaiian preferences obligated the plaintiff to sue under the pseudonym "John Doe.") The Supreme Court held in Runyon v. McCrary (1976), that Section 1981 prohibits private schools from racially discriminatory admissions policies. Indeed, the high court later held in Bob Jones v. United States (1983) that an unexpressed public policy of the United States prohibited tax exemptions for discriminating private schools.

The 9th Circuit, speaking through Judge Susan P. Graber, insisted, nevertheless, that the racial exclusivity of the Kamehemeha Schools was a proper remedial measure. But a remedy implies a wrong. And Native Hawaiians have never received less than equal treatment under federal or state law. Further, Native Hawaiian enrollees are not vetted for past discrimination. Their families may be highly privileged.

Judge Graber absurdly maintained that, "Native Hawaiian students are systematically disadvantaged in the classroom." She was unable to point to any class activity or instruction indicating Native Hawaiians were treated differently from non-Native Hawaiians. The judge simply recited that as a group Native Hawaiians displayed less academic success than their non-Native Hawaiian counterparts. But lesser performance does not establish discrimination. If it did, every subperforming minority group would hold a federal civil rights claim against every public or private school in the country.

Judge Graber argued Kamehameha Schools' racial exclusiveness was justified to help perpetuate Native Hawaiian culture. But that reasoning endorses racial balkanization, and turns E Pluribus Unum on its head. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, etc. would be permitted monochromatic schools to promote their respective cultures.

Judge Graber scolded plaintiff Doe for complaining about his race-based exclusion. She lectured that "students denied admission by Kamehameha Schools have ample and adequate alternative educational options," a variation of the "separate-but-equal" doctrine that the Supreme Court repudiated 52 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

In a feat of Orwellian logic, the judge scorned Doe's legal expectation of nondiscriminatory treatment because Kamehameha Schools' racial discrimination had been notorious for 118 years: "When the schools began, a non-Native Hawaiian had no expectation of admission to the schools. ... In the intervening 118 years, the schools' admissions policy, and therefore the expectations of non-Native Hawaiians, has remained constant. Thus, denial of plaintiff's application for admission [based on race] 'unsettled no legitimate, firmly rooted expectation.' " With that reasoning, Jim Crow would still be thriving in the South because blacks knew at the inception of the Civil Rights Movement they confronted a racism that had been continual since the end of Reconstruction and thus had no reasonable expectation of equal treatment.

Judge Graber fancifully argued that the schools' 118 years of racial exclusiveness was temporary, not perpetual, and thus satisfied relevant precedents regarding preferential admissions. The exclusiveness is scheduled to continue until the achievement gap between Native Hawaiians and non-Native Hawaiians has been eliminated. But exclusiveness for more than a century has done nothing to narrow the gap. Adding more zeroes to zero still equals zero.

The 9th Circuit surrendered reasoning, law and moral justice to placate a moblike atmosphere in Doe. It embarrassed many of the profiles in judicial courage that accelerated that end of Jim Crow.

Source

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

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

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

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9 January, 2007

ASIANS AS THE NEW JEWS

When Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.

This is in part because getting into Berkeley - U.S. News & World Report's top-ranked public university - has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year's freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from "the old Blues" - older alumni named for the school color - "who complain because their kids can't get in," says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.

Across the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation's best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.

And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher. Asians have become the "new Jews," in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates," is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, "Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science."

As if to illustrate the point, a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) - despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.

To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses. "This is just a very, very egregious system," Mr. Li told me. "Asians are held to different standards simply because of their race."

To back his claim, he cites a 2005 study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, both of Princeton, which concludes that if elite universities were to disregard race, Asians would fill nearly four of five spots that now go to blacks or Hispanics. Affirmative action has a neutral effect on the number of whites admitted, Mr. Li is arguing, but it raises the bar for Asians. The way Princeton selects its entering class, Mr. Li wrote in his complaint, "seems to be a calculated move by a historically white institution to protect its racial identity while at the same time maintaining a facade of progressivism."

Private institutions can commit to affirmative action, even with state bans, but federal money could be revoked if they are found to be discriminating. Mr. Li is seeking suspension of federal financial assistance to Princeton. "I'm not seeking anything personally," he says. "I'm happy at Yale. But I grew up thinking that in America race should not matter."

Admissions officials have long denied that they apply quotas. Nonetheless, race is important "to ensure a diverse student body," says Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman. But, she adds, "Looking at the merits of race is not the same as the opposite" - discrimination.

Elite colleges like Princeton review the "total package," in her words, looking at special talents, extracurricular interests and socioeconomics - factors like whether the applicant is the first in the family to go to college or was raised by a single mother. "There's no set formula or standard for how we evaluate students," she says. High grades and test scores would seem to be merely a baseline. "We turned away approximately half of applicants with maximum scores on the SAT, all three sections," Ms. Cliatt says of the class Mr. Li would have joined.

In the last two months, the nation has seen a number of new challenges to racial engineering in schools. In November, the United States Supreme Court heard a case questioning the legality of using race in assigning students to public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. Voters are also sending a message, having thrown out racial preferences in Michigan in November, following a lead taken by California, Texas, Florida and Washington. Last month, Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, announced his next potential targets for a ballot initiative, including Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska.

When I ask the chancellor at Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, if there is a perfect demographic recipe on this campus that likes to think of itself as the world's finest public university - Harvard on the Hill - he demurs. "We are a meritocracy," he says. And - by law, he adds - the campus is supposed to be that way. If Asians made up, say, 70 percent of the campus, he insists, there would still be no attempt to reduce their numbers.

Asian enrollment at his campus actually began to ramp up well before affirmative action was banned. Historically, Asians have faced discrimination, with exclusion laws in the 1800s that kept them from voting, owning property or legally immigrating. Many were run out of West Coast towns by mobs. But by the 1970s and '80s, with a change in immigration laws, a surge in Asian arrivals began to change the complexion of California, and it was soon reflected in an overrepresentation at its top universities.

In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment. University administrators and teachers use anguished words to describe what has happened since. "I've heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all," says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. "What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster - for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it's been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian."

The diminishing number of African-Americans on campus is a consistent topic of discussion among black students. Some say they feel isolated, without a sense of community. "You really do feel like you stand out," says Armilla Staley, a second-year law student. In her freshman year, she was one of only nine African-Americans in a class of 265. "I'm almost always the only black person in my class," says Ms. Staley, who favors a return to some form of affirmative action. "Quite frankly, when you walk around campus, it's overwhelmingly Asian," she says. "I don't feel any tension between Asians and blacks, but I don't really identify with the Asian community as a minority either."

More here



MONTESSORI METHOD STILL STRUGGLING ON IN ENGLAND

Like most alternative methods, it seems to work if the teachers are able enough and committed enough

The Montessori teaching method, in which children learn at their own pace and testing is banned, has been adopted by a second state primary school in England. Teachers at the Stebbing Primary School, near Great Dunmow in Essex, which has 90 pupils, began to pilot Montessori teaching in September and say that it has already had a dramatic effect on the behaviour of pupils. Teachers removed brightly coloured wall displays and brought in natural wood furniture and equipment. The children now behave more calmly and can work effectively for three hours without a break.

Janet Matthews, the head teacher, said that the school would evaluate the success of the move after a year before taking a final decision. “But what is overwhelmingly coming across is the calmness of the school,” she said. “Children are working for sustained periods of time on the activities they are choosing, and the maths and literacy levels seem pretty good. The classroom was a typical reception classroom, very bright displays, brightly coloured doors and floors. Over the summer holidays we calmed everything down.” The changes have been funded by 20,000 pounds from the Montessori St Nicholas Charity.

In Britain, Montessori teaching had a strong following until the 1970s when it was condemned as elitist. While increasingly popular in nursery schools, the current focus on raising standards and testing means that it is still largely rejected at primary and secondary level. That could change. Ministers set out plans last week for changes to state school teaching with greater emphasis on personalised learning and pupils designing their own education.

Recent research from the US found that children at Montessori schools were better at basic word recognition and mathematics and were more likely to play co-operatively. By 12, they are more creative and better able to resolve social problems.

Gorton Mount became the first state primary to adopt Montessori two years ago. The school, based in inner Manchester and with many disadvantaged pupils, was judged to be failing by Ofsted. The switch had dramatic results. Inspectors praised the calm atmosphere and high concentration. A Department for Education and Skills spokeswoman said: “The conditions attached to maintained schools apply to Montessori, such as providing the national curriculum and participating in national curriculum tests and assessment, as well as staff holding qualified teacher status.”

Source



The Narcoleptic Teacher

Post lifted from Sigmund et al

From the ‘You just can’t make this stuff up‘ department, comes an exchange on a forum for teachers.

The thread, Teacher Sleeping During Nap Time? that asked if it was appropriate for teacher of kindergarteners to sleep during nap time.

That’s right- a teacher, entrusted by parents to teach and look out for the safety and well being of students, wants to know if it’s OK to sleep while children are under their care and supervision.

What makes the thread interesting is are the responses of some of the teachers. Take a few minutes and go through some of the responses.

Adults are discussing and debating the question.

Somebody shoot somebody.

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

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

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

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



8 January, 2007

HOW PUBLIC SCHOOLS DUMB-DOWN OUR CHILDREN

Mary loved that her father shared his work with her, shared his love of science and engineering. It was what got Mary fascinated with science since she was three years old, sitting on her father's lap in front of the computer screen, while he let her click the mouse as he was designing. But she didn't have time to do that now. "No Daddy, I have to talk to you about something first," she said.

"O.K. sweetheart, what is it?," he said, as he turned around in his chair and gave her his full attention. Mary loved her father's kind, bright, playful brown eyes. "By the way," he said, "how come you're home in the middle of the morning? Shouldn't you be in school?"

"That's what I want to talk to you about, Daddy. I got this letter from my science teacher. The principal told me to give it to you. He said it was about the note I wrote to my science teacher, Miss Johnson. Here's the letter from her. Josh took the letter and read it.

The letter said, "Dear Mr. Hanlan, I must speak to you about your daughter, Mary. She wrote me an insulting and inexcusable letter criticizing my teaching. We cannot allow such behavior from our students. You must come to see me immediately, or serious measures will be taken against your daughter. Please call me as soon as possible for an appointment."

Josh looked up from the letter at his daughter, who had a worried, but angry look on her face. Josh knew that look. His daughter was so bright, but also willful when she thought she was right.

"What's this about, honey? What letter is Miss Johnson talking about."

"Oh Daddy, I was so bored with her science class, I could just scream. Daddy, I want to learn science. I love it so much. You know that, don't you?

"Of course sweetheart."

"Well, Miss Johnson does the silliest, stupidest things in class. For a science project, she had the whole class pick up bird seed with the bottom of wet spoons, to show us how birds use their tongues. She makes us do projects like that all the time, and they're all just as silly.

"Then after we do these projects, she has all the kids sit in a circle holding hands, and each kid has to tell their feelings about the project. Daddy, I like the other kids in class, but I don't care about their feelings when they pick up bird seed. Why is Ms. Johnson doing this? It's stupid and a waste of time. I want to learn real science." "And the textbook is so simple it bores me to death," continued Mary. AI can't sit still in class, and I annoy Miss Johnson by always raising my hand to ask questions. Daddy, I knew most of the stuff in that textbook when I was six years old from what I read myself and what you taught me. Here, look at the textbook, Daddy."

Josh took the textbook and looked through it. He was appalled. The book was filled with pictures like baby books, and the reading level seemed geared to six-year-old kids just learning to read. Also, the book had too many stories about global warming, save-the-polar-bears, and other environmental propaganda. "Honey, do all the kids in all the science classes read textbooks like these?," asked Josh.

"Yes, Daddy. The textbooks in the higher grades are a little harder, but not much. I know everything in those textbooks already. Daddy, I don't want to spend three more years in science classes that bore me so much and where I don't learn anything. I would rather be home with you. You could teach me so much more than I could ever learn in these stupid classes."

"Honey," Josh Hanlan said, "did you ask Miss Johnson if you could skip grades and go into the more advanced science classes for seniors, or a more advanced class in your grade? "Yes, Daddy. I asked her so many times. But she said they don't have advanced classes anymore. She said the school doesn't allow special classes for students who learn quickly. Ms. Johnson said it would be unfair to the other students if she put me in an advanced class or with the seniors. She said it would hurt the other students' feelings. So they don't allow it. And I'm stuck in this class with this same teacher for the next three years."

Josh was shocked at what his daughter said. "They don't let you take advanced classes because it would hurt the other students' feelings? That's what Miss Johnson said?" He couldn't believe his ears. "Honey, do they follow this policy in all your classes, like math and English? You mean they don't have any advanced classes for faster-learning kids anymore?" "Yes, Daddy, the whole school works the same way. Every class I take bores me, but especially science. I got so mad that I sent Miss Johnson a note telling her how I feel. I thought maybe she would help me. This is the note I gave her." Josh took the note and read:

"Dear Miss Johnson,

I am so bored in your class. You are not teaching us real science. I think the projects you make us do are silly and such a waste of time. Why don't you give us real science projects and teach us more difficult stuff? And why do we have to sit in circles and talk about our feelings? I want to learn science, Miss Johnson. Some day I will be a great scientist. And you are wasting my time. Please teach us real science that is challenging."

Thank you. Mary Hanlan

Josh Hanlan threw his head back and laughed uproariously. He laughed for a long time, looking at his daughter with delight. He loved her spunk and her innocent directness. Mary at first looked sternly at her father, because she thought this was no laughing matter. But then, because she loved her father so much, and she loved his infectious laugh, she started laughing also. When they finished laughing, Josh re-read his daughter's note, then read Miss Johnson's letter again. Miss Johnson's letter had something ominous about it that he didn't like. He decided to take care of this matter immediately. "O.K. sweetheart, we'll go see Miss Johnson tomorrow. I don't want you wasting your precious time either. But first I want to do a little research on public schools before we meet your teacher. Do you want to help me?"

"Yes, Daddy," said Mary. She loved sitting with her father at the computer and loved especially when he asked her to help him. Her father did a search for "public schools" on Google and then Yahoo, and the two of them sat engrossed for the rest of the afternoon, absorbing everything they read like sponges. The next day, they found themselves in a dingy office with green walls sitting across from Miss Johnson. She was in her mid-thirties, with loose brown hair down to her shoulders, and wearing a paisley print dress. Her eyes were brown, and she had a prim, tight little mouth.

Miss Johnson said, a little red in the face, "Mr. Hanlan, I asked you to come here to talk about Mary's letter and her behavior. The letter she wrote me was absolutely incredible. I have been teaching for 15 years now, and I have never gotten such an insulting letter from one of my students. Most of my students enjoy my classes, so I was shocked at your daughter's letter. Not only that she wrote the letter, but that she said such insulting things to me. I have talked to the principal and he has agreed with me that Mary must write an official apology letter before we can allow her back into my class. We cannot allow our students to insult teachers in this manner. And if Mary is not allowed back in class, she will fail this class and be left back."

Josh Hanlan listened quietly to Miss Johnson. By the time she finished, his eyes had become a little colder and he felt anger rising in him. He said, "Ms. Johnson, my daughter is very bright. She loves science. She told me about the silly science projects you do in class, and about how you make the children sit in a circle and talk about their feelings. She's also told me that your public school does not have advanced classes for faster-learning students anymore, that you frown on such classes because they might upset the feelings of the other children. She also showed me the textbook you use in your class, which looks like a baby book suitable for a six-year-old, not for bright ten-year old girls." "I have to say that I agree with my daughter completely. You are wasting her time, and the time of all your other students. Mary only wrote you that letter because she loves science so much and she wants to learn so much, and she doesn't want to waste her time. She didn't mean to insult you, but was asking for your help. She was just telling you the truth as she saw it. Are you or your principal so frightened of criticism that you want to expel my daughter for telling you how she feels about your class?"

"I'd also like to ask you why your textbooks and teaching methods seem so simple-minded? Why is the textbook so dumbed-down? These childrens' time is as valuable as yours. These are their precious years in which they learn the basics of science and reading for their future life. If you don't expect much from them, you are hurting them. If you teach them that learning is boring and something they have to endure, that attitude will affect them their whole lives. You are supposed to be challenging their minds, not teaching them meaningless drivel so their feelings don't get hurt."

As Josh spoke, Miss Johnson's mouth got tighter and tighter, and her face got whiter and whiter. When Josh finished, she seemed ready to burst out like a steam kettle. "Well," she exploded, "I see where Mary gets her attitude from. Mr. Hanlan, I have been teaching for fifteen years. I went to teacher's college. I have had the best teachers-ed training available. Whatever projects I give in class are for a good reason, based on the best-known educational theories. We don't just teach dry facts or boring basics anymore, Mr. Hanlan. That went out thirty years ago. We now concentrate on our student's feelings and their self-esteem. That's why we have simple, fun projects. It's why we sit around in circles telling each other about our feelings. We can't make the textbook too difficult because the slowest children in the class would be upset that they couldn't keep up with the rest of the class. It's far more important that we protect the feelings of our slowest-learning children than give advanced classes to our faster students."

"Why should children who are lucky enough to be born fast learners take advantage of the slower students? Why should we give them special privileges like putting them in advanced classes? Such uncaring ideas have been discarded by our public-school experts long ago. In fact, we now require our faster-learning students to tutor the slower students, so they learn to share their skills. The feelings of all our kids are much more important than the fact that Mary is bored in class because she is a fast learner. Our kids' feelings are far more important than Mary thinking she is wasting her time. That's also why no student ever fails in our school. We automatically advance them to the next grade, no matter how well they know the material from the previous grade. This makes all our kids happy." "And who does Mary or you think you are, criticizing our teaching methods? These methods have been approved by the best educational experts in the field, experts who devote their whole lives to finding the best ways to teach children. We will not have our teaching methods insulted and criticized by a mere girl like Mary or by any parent. We know what is best for your child, Mr. Hanlan, and the faster parents like you realize this, the better off you'll be."

"Now as I said in my letter, the principal has agreed with me that Mary has to submit a formal apology letter before we will let her back in class. Will you make Mary write that apology?"

Mary looked at her father. She was shocked. She had never seen that look of rage on her father's face. In all her years with him, he had only looked at her with delight and serious attention. Even when he was arguing with someone from his company on the phone, she saw that it was a stimulating, challenging argument for her dad. She had never seen the murderous rage she now saw on her father's face.

Josh Hanlan forced himself to control his feelings. He wanted to slap Miss Johnson's face. Instead, after a few long moments, he said, "Why certainly, Miss Johnson, I will write that apology letter. But my letter will be to Mary, not you. I have been almost criminally negligent with my child's education. I will humbly apologize to her for not having investigated your school a long time ago. I will apologize to her for having let her remain in your school at all. "I have never heard such vicious horse manure in all my life as what you just told me.

Regarding your so-called expertise in teaching, and the so-called quality of your teacher colleges, that is a joke. Most of your teacher colleges are the laughingstock of the academic community. Most student-teachers who graduate from these colleges have never majored in the subject they are supposed to teach our kids. I understand that they stopped teaching phonics instruction in these teacher colleges 30 years ago. How can student-teachers who never leaned phonics or majored in science, teach kids these subjects? It's like the blind leading the blind. And I don't blame these teachers. They can't teach kids what their so-called teacher colleges never taught them."

"And your so-called theories of education are just junk pseudo-science, psychological gibberish foisted on unsuspecting parents and children. Over the last 40 years, your public-school theorists have concocted one nonsense theory of education after another. After each one failed, your education bureaucrats then came up with yet another goofball theory with which to torture 40 million school kids around the country. Every so-called education theory your "experts" have tried has been a miserable failure. SAT scores in this country are near the lowest they have ever been. Our high-school kids place in the bottom third on standardized tests among all the industrial countries in reading, math, and science skills. Millions of kids who graduate from public schools can barely read a bus schedule or write simple paragraphs, and 30 to 50 percent of our children now drop out of school." "Your schools cripple our kids' ability to read with whole-language or balanced-literacy reading-instruction methods, instead of teaching them intensive phonics. Our kids don't learn basic arithmetic because you have them using calculators since kindergarten. That's why so many kids can't even figure out change when they buy something at the store for their mom."

"You claim that you want to protect our kids' self-esteem by using easy textbooks and not failing the kids if they don't do their work or pass tests. You do just the opposite. You give them a false sense of self-esteem. When these kids hit college, or worse yet, when they apply for a job, then reality hits them-the reality you tried to fake for them by "protecting" their feelings and self-esteem." "Real self-esteem comes from working hard to meet challenges. By testing yourself. By persevering to learn difficult material. By not giving up. By being held accountable for the work you do. By achieving real learning skills and real goals from personal effort, and by gaining real self-confidence in your ability to learn and solve problems. Instead, your so-called teaching methods destroy children's real self-esteem and cripple their minds. Only you delay their day of reckoning, which can ruin the rest of their lives."

"I don't know why you use these idiotic teaching methods. I think you get away with it because your public schools are government-run monopolies. Most everything government controls turns to poison, and I don't see why public schools should be any different. Public schools don't go out of business no matter how bad they are or how stupid their teaching methods because they are government monopolies. That's a prescription for education disaster. If you really cared about our kids, you would agree with me that your public schools should be shut down and education turned over to the free-market." "I know that you and your principals and administrators don't agree with that, right? Because of tenure rules, you get job security, good salaries, and fat pensions and benefits, whether our kids get a good education or not. That's why you can be so arrogant or condescending with parents. Parents can complain till they are blue in the face, but your compulsory, tax-supported schools don't have to give our kids a decent education, right?

I know there are many good teachers in your schools, but many of your best teachers quit after a while because they can't stand the strangling regulations they work under. I see now that your public schools are like education prisons that promote mediocrity and dumb-down our kids' education to the lowest level. "Well, not with my child. I am hereby immediately withdrawing Mary from your school. I'll teach her at home or send her to a private school, even if I have to work two jobs to pay for that private school. I'm also going to get a little more active on this issue. I am going to tell every parent I know about your public schools. Maybe I can shake things up a bit so more parents take their children out of public school, permanently." "Let's go, Mary," Josh said, as Mary beamed up at her father with adoration. As they got up and left the room, Miss Johnson had a look of utter shock and rage on her face.

Source



Standards being rediscovered in West Australian schools

Apparently a response to great public dissatisfaction with previous "postmodernist" policies

The WA Government could banish unruly public school students to special units, under tough new discipline measures. Education Minister Mark McGowan said he would look at setting up the units later this year as part of moves to improve order in state schools. He also wants students to wear traditional uniforms, including blazers and ties.

The Minister insisted he was not trying to be heavy-handed. But he said he was concerned that one or two disruptive students could spoil a classroom. "I just want to ensure that parents can send their kids to government schools which have pride and offer a safe, disciplined learning environment,'' he said. "I think that's what parents want. "I don't want to expel students. Every student has a right to an education and I want kids to go to school until they're 17.

"But, certainly, we can look at alternative education options for seriously disruptive students where they won't be able to disrupt classrooms. And I would want to do this later this year. "We can look at having special reintegration units, where we take the most difficult students out of classes and make sure they are intensively managed by professionals trained to deal with such problems.'' He said that in regional areas the units could be on school premises. In the metropolitan area, there could be separate facilities. "It's also not fair on students who don't fit into a normal school environment to have to continue in a place where they don't learn anything,'' he said. "So this would help those students, as well.''

Mr McGowan also said he did not want state schools to emulate their US counterparts, which had poor quality uniforms, causing image problems. WA schools can choose their own uniforms within certain parameters, such as restrictions on wearing denim, which started this year. "But I would certainly encourage schools, particularly at a high school level, to go for more traditional styles of uniform,'' he said. "This would be button-up shirts, blazers and even ties for boys. And for female students, proper dresses and skirts and blouses. "I won't force schools to do this because I know one size can't fit all in WA because of different weather conditions, but they should do it where possible. "I think a decent uniform shows that the students have pride in their school. It represents to parents a sense of discipline and it helps teachers identify any intruders in the school. "And it's often a cheaper option where you don't have the fashion contests that have sometimes gone on when we've had a bit more of a liberal uniform policy in the past.''

He said presentation was "incredibly important'' in encouraging parents to send their children to public schools. "The appearance of young people is an important part of that overall presentation,'' he said. "And just having pride in your appearance and your school would improve the behaviour of students. "I want public schools to be excellent and I want them to be able to compete with private schools and attract parents on the basis of choice.''

Source

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

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

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

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7 January, 2007

Classics in British schools are 'facing extinction'

The teaching of Classics in British schools has become a postcode lottery, with Latin and Greek likely to disappear from the state sector in some parts of the country in as little as five years. A study into the demise of classical languages suggests that they could vanish from all schools within 25 years unless substantial changes are made to the GCSE.

Bob Lister, one of only two lecturers in England to train Classics teachers and author of the research, said that the subjects will soon become the preserve of a wealthy elite, unless urgent steps are taken. Since Latin and Greek became optional under the national curriculum in 1988, geographical blackspots have begun to emerge, where virtually no children study the languages. Fewer than one in ten state schools now offers both subjects at GCSE and in the past 18 years the numbers taking Latin in comprehensives has dropped by 63 per cent to just 1,707.

In the East Midlands, only nine schools — of which just two were comprehensives — offered Latin candidates for GCSE, while eight of the nine were in Lincolnshire, the only county in the region with grammar schools. In contrast, three times the number of schools in the West Midlands offered candidates. In the South East, where there are large numbers of grammar schools, 73 put forward pupils for the exam.

Harrius Potter et Camera Secretorum and Latin translations of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit may be flying off the bookshop shelves but, according to figures in Mr Lister’s forthcoming book, Changing Classics in Schools, the number of schools entering Classics candidates at GCSE has reached a low. He told The Times that part of the problem is that the amount of time allocated to study the course has decreased, making Latin one of the toughest subjects in which to achieve top marks at GCSE.

“I can’t see how Latin can survive in the next 25 years unless substantial changes are made to the GCSE,” Mr Lister, a Cambridge don, said. “It’s not that it’s necessarily more difficult, but it’s more difficult in the timetable available — especially when kids compare it to languages like French and see what they have to do to get an A or A*.”

Earlier this year a study by Durham University of the GCSE and A-level results of 200,000 students, revealed that, at grade C, Latin was a grade harder than the next hardest most difficult subjects, such as chemistry or physics.

Overall only 257 state schools entered pupils for Latin GCSE in 2003, of which 86 were grammar schools. Of those, 11 per cent entered a single candidate, 24 per cent entered fewer than five, and 49 per cent fewer than ten candidates.

The danger, according to Mr Lister, is that schools may drop Latin from their GCSE options. He said that the Latin GCSE should be made easier, with less translation from the original and more about the cultural aspects of Roman civilisation. He added: “There is now a serious danger of a downward spiral, with schools dropping Latin from the curriculum if they are unable to recruit Classics staff, leading to fewer classicists from maintained schools on classical language courses at university, fewer therefore eligible for the [teaching degree] and fewer newly qualified teachers likely to go into maintained schools.”

Source



IMPRACTICAL CLAPTRAP FROM BRITAIN

Where would they get the thousands more high-quality teachers they would need? Teacher standards are already dropping, not rising

Pupils would be able to choose what they study, ask each other for help in answering questions, mark their own work and grade their teachers' performance under ambitious government plans to tailor education to the needs of individual children and young people. Traditional grades or marks would go, to be replaced by "feedback", where the teacher would suggest what steps a pupil could take to improve performance. Pupils would be entered for exams as soon as they were ready to take them, rather than wait until they reached a certain age.

Catch-up classes for those who trail behind and extra tuition for the brightest pupils are also recommended in a review of personalised learning published today. The review, written by Christine Gilbert before her recent appointment as head of Ofsted, sets out the Government's vision for schooling by 2020. It aims to stop some children falling behind by replacing a "one size fits all" approach to teaching with one designed to fit the needs of each child. At the centre is a relentless focus on "keeping up", through regular assessments and individual target-setting. This could involve grouping children according to attainment, not age. There would also be surveys of pupil and parental satisfaction to ensure a shared understanding of each pupil's goals.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, emphasised that personalised learning did not involve teaching each child differently. It meant involving each child in its own learning. He said: "Many disadvantaged pupils are bright and talented but lose interest or motivation. We need to make sure that no one is left behind at any point - from the most gifted and talented children at the top of the class to the uninterested child at the back."

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said that the personalised classroom would look very different. "[It] might involve `traffic-light cards' to show if they are confident they understand - and asking those who show `green' to explain to those who show `red'," he said.

Personalised learning has long been an objective, and one that has become more urgent with the widening of the gap between pupils who perform best and worst. Yet the focus on standards, national testing and the perceived inflexibility of the national curriculum have made it difficult to achieve. Today's report notes that "many pupils still report that their experience of school is marked by long periods of time listening to teachers or copying from the board or a book". It suggests "learning conversations" with teachers so that pupils get into the habit of thinking about their learning and how to make progress. It also suggests that all pupils be allocated a "learning guide" - a teacher or classroom assistant to monitor their progress.

Teaching unions gave the report a guarded welcome. Chris Keats, of NASUWT, warned ministers against the development of an "overly bureaucratic processes" to put personalisation in place.

Source

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

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

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

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6 January, 2007

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY GETS AN ALLEGED QUALITY INTELLECTUAL

He's a Leftist loony but he's black so that's just fine



The Vanderbilt Register is the "paper of record for Vanderbilt University. An official publication, it appears once every two weeks.

It recently published a profile of one of Vanderbilt's new professors, Houston Baker. The article highlighted Baker's telling of his past achievements in "typically self-effacing fashion," and offered a fawning tone throughout. The chair of the English Department, Jay Clayton, hailed Baker as "one of the most wide-ranging intellectuals in Americatoday in any field of the humanities. He is prolific and writes to an audience far broader than academic specialties." [Translation by JR: All he is capable of are ignorant rants]

Here's how the article described Baker's behavior last spring, in a tone and content that suggested admiration for his activities: "He also was the leading dissident voice inside Duke University regarding that administration's handling of rape accusations against members of its lacrosse team."

How did Baker become the "leading dissident"? The paper doesn't actualy tell people at Vanderbilt.

In late March, lamenting the "college and university blind-eying of male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain," Baker issued a public letter denouncing the "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." To act against "violent, white, male, athletic privilege," he urged the "immediate dismissals" by Duke of "the team itself and its players."

Has Baker adopted a more tolerant attitude between last March and the penning of the Vanderbilt publication? It appears not. A mother of an unindicted lacrosse player recently wrote him, "asking for your help." She noted,

Over the past eight months, much of the evidence has revealed that the three falsely indicted young men have been the victims of rogue DA Nifong. They have been denied due process and are the victims of a possible conspiracy. Whatever you believed in March, I am sure you must be questioning the actions of DA Nifong. Therefore, I respectfully request that you join Pres. Brodhead in asking for a special prosecutor. In addition, I respectfully request you petition Pres. Brodhead to allow Collin and Reade to resume classes this spring.

Our paths may have been different, but I am sure all of us seek the truth and justice. This can only be accomplished with an impartial prosecutor. Collin and Reade, along with Dave, have had to put their lives on hold due to a false accusation. I trust that with the filing of ethics charges by the NC State Bar and the Conference of District Attorneys calling for DA Nifong to recuse himself, we can all agree that justice can best be served with Nifong's removal.

Here is the full text of Baker's reply:

LIES! You are just a provacateur on a happy New Years Eve trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of white males! You know you are in search of sympaathy [sic] for young white guys who beat up a gay man [sic] in Georgetown, get drunk in Durham, and lived like "a bunch of farm animals" near campus.

I really hope whoever sent this stupid farce of an email rots in .... umhappy [sic] new year to you ... and forgive me if your really are, quite sadly, mother of a "farm animal."

So speaks "one of the most wide-ranging intellectuals in America today in any field of the humanities."

Source



Australia's anatomy courses for doctors given an F by the students

Largely because of trendy bullsh*t teaching methods

Almost three in four medical students say they are taught too little anatomy during their medical degree - and more than a third don't even think they have been taught enough about how the body works to be a competent doctor when they graduate. A survey of more than 600 medical students also found more than half - 53.7 per cent - thought their knowledge of anatomy was inadequately assessed. And nearly 90 per cent of students agreed that the traditional, guided style of anatomy teaching was "more effective" than the alternatives.

In many medical schools, traditional teaching has been increasingly replaced by a self-directed process where students research topics themselves in groups. The findings - which have already been sent to the federal Government as part of a submission for its current review of medical school curriculums - are likely to reignite a controversy revealed in The Australian earlier this year, after senior doctors warned the state of anatomy teaching in Australia's medical schools was so bad that public safety was at stake.

The survey was conducted by the Australian Medical Students Association, partly in response to the revelations. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said the findings would be considered as part of the government review, which is due to report later this year. Ms Bishop called on medical school deans to consider the findings carefully. "If 75 per cent of medical students believe the quality of education they are receiving is wanting in some way, that should be taken seriously by our medical schools," Ms Bishop said. "It reinforces the Government's action in setting up this inquiry in the first place."

The survey found more than half the students also cited pharmacology and radiology alongside anatomy as subjects that were given too little time in courses. Many students also criticised selection interviews, with about a quarter saying they were not objective enough, and the trend to tutors who are not medically qualified.

And while most students were in favour of the modern problem-based learning techniques, the report found there was "significant room for improvement as 25 to 30 per cent of students didn't respond positively" to all questions on the topic.

AMSA president Rob Mitchell, a fifth-year medical student at Monash University, said the survey showed medical education was still of high quality. Overall, 71.3 per cent of surveyed students agreed their course would turn them into competent doctors. "There's a perception, and I emphasise it's a perception, that students don't receive enough anatomy teaching," Mr Mitchell said. But students also valued the newer subjects that had squeezed traditional subjects including anatomy - such as ethics, communication skills, and cultural awareness - and did not want them cut back.

Survey respondent Claire Wise, a fifth-year student at Monash, said she could "echo a lot of students' concerns" on anatomy teaching, which she said needed to be more guided and relevant. "When there's 10 students standing around a cadaver and dissecting a muscle, it's not as clinically relevant as when a doctor sits us down and tells us about a patient with a head injury he had last week, and which arteries were damaged, and we can see an MRI scan," she said. "We can relate it to a patient, and more time needs to be devoted to that."

Barry Oakes, a former associate professor at Monash University and a longstanding critic of the cutbacks to anatomy teaching, said universities had "failed miserably" to compile written benchmarks detailing what medical graduates needed to know.

Paul Gatenby, a member of the Committee of Deans of Australian Medical Schools, agreed time for anatomy and some other subjects had been cut back but said this was inevitable given the "explosion of medical knowledge in the past 50 years". "Is there so little anatomy taught that students are dangerous? I don't accept that at all," Professor Gatenby said.

Source



Anatomy of a crisis: Medical students vent spleen at substandard teaching

(Editorial comment from "The Australian" national newspaper)

Eight months ago, The Australian reported that anatomy training was in many cases so poor that students could make it to the last year of medical school and not be able to visually distinguish between a beating heart and a liver, or correctly identify the location of the prostate gland. So it is not surprising to discover that Australians studying to be doctors are increasingly concerned they are not being taught the fundamentals, according to a survey just released by the Australian Medical Students Association. It does not make for happy reading. A majority of students do not feel their training places enough emphasis on vital subjects such as anatomy and pharmacology. About 30 per cent of students are neutral or pessimistic when asked whether they will leave college well-equipped to become competent doctors. And less than four in 10 respondents agreed that when they finished their medical course they would "know enough anatomy to become a competent doctor".

There are many reasons why medical students are not getting the training they want and so vitally need. Among them is a concern expressed by AMSA members that the Howard Government's drive to increase medical school places might ultimately come at a cost to quality. Culturally, too, medical schools have, like so many other institutions, fallen victim to the fashion for dismantling traditional structures without replacing them with anything similarly useful or effective. Thus traditional lectures have been replaced by such supposed innovations as problem-based learning, where instructors (who are often not doctors) are not allowed to tell students what is right and what is wrong, leaving them to work it out for themselves. Hard science must compete with an increasing emphasis on soft topics such as cultural sensitivity. Certainly medicine is about more than just mechanics, and doctors should be trained to deal with patients' minds as well as their bodies. But while humanities courses can be watered down without harming anyone beyond those paying for the degrees, medicine is a serious business. To go down the same soft road in medical faculties is to write a prescription for disaster.

Source

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

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

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

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



5 January, 2007

MORE CULTURE LOSS: NOW DUMBING DOWN LIBRARIES TOO

If classics are no longer mentioned in schools, there will be no "demand" for them, of course

You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch. It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them. Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region's largest library system is taking turnover to a new level. Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system's return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves -- and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone -- even if they are classics. "We're being very ruthless," said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. "A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that's a cost."

That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books. So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes. Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare's plays, "The Great Gatsby" and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week. But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah's Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

"I think the days of libraries saying, 'We must have that, because it's good for people,' are beyond us," said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association and director of Princeton Public Library. "There is a sense in many public libraries that popular materials are what most of our communities desire. Everybody's got a favorite book they're trying to promote." That leaves some books endangered. In Fairfax, thousands of titles have been pulled from the shelves and become eligible for book sales.

Weeding books used to be sporadic. Now it's strategic. Clay and his employees established the two-year threshold 18 months ago, driven, they say, by a $2 million cut to the budget for books and materials and the demand for space. More computers and growing demand in branches for meeting space, story hours and other gatherings have left less room for books.

And nowadays, library patrons don't like to sit at big tables with strangers as they read or study. They want to be alone, creating a need for individual carrels that take up even more space. And the popularity of audiovisual materials that must be housed in 50-year-old branches built for smaller collections only adds to the crunch. To do more with less, Fairfax library officials have started running like businesses. Clay bought state-of-the art software that spits out data on each of the 3.1 million books in the county system -- including age, number of times checked out and when. There are also statistics on the percentages of shelf space taken up by mysteries, biographies and kids' books.

Every branch gets a printout of the data each month, including every title that hasn't circulated in the previous 24 months. It's up to librarians to decide whether a book stays. The librarians have discretion, but they also have targets, collection manager Julie Pringle said. "What comes in is based on what goes out," she said.

Classics such as Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" are among the titles that haven't been checked out in two years and could be eliminated. Librarians so far have decided to keep them.

As libraries clear out titles, they sweep in new ones as fast as they can. A two-month-old program called "Hot Picks" is boosting copies of bestsellers by tracking the number of holds requested by patrons. This month, every Fairfax branch will display new books more prominently, leaving even less space for older ones. "We don't want to keep what people don't use much of," Clay said. Circulation, a sign of prestige and a potential bargaining chip for new funding, is on pace to hit 11.6 million in the Fairfax system this year, part of a steady climb over the past three years.

No other system in the Washington area is tracking circulation as quickly -- or weeding so methodically. Montgomery County, a similar-size suburban system, has not emphasized weeding in several years, said Kay Ecelbarger, who retired last month as chief of collection management. In the District, library director Ginnie Cooper said she has not tackled weeding and turnover policy in the system, which is struggling to increase circulation. She hopes to address those concerns with a recent infusion of cash from the D.C. Council.

There are no national standards on weeding public library collections. As Fairfax bets its future on a retail model, some librarians say that the public library may be straying too far from its traditional role as an archive of literature and history. Arlington County's library director, Diane Kresh, said she's "paying a lot of attention to what our customers want." But if they aren't checking out Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," she's not only keeping it, she's promoting it through a new program that gives forgotten classics prominent display. "Part of my philosophy is that you collect for the ages," Kresh said. "The library has a responsibility to provide a core collection for the cultural education of its community." She comes to this view from a career at the Library of Congress, where she was chief of public service collections for 30 years.

The weight of the new choices falls on the local librarian. That's especially hard at the Woodrow Wilson branch in Falls Church, one of the smallest in the Fairfax system. It's a vibrant place popular with Latino and Middle Eastern immigrants, the elderly and young professionals. Branch manager Linda Schlekau, who has 20 years of experience, says she discards about 700 books a month. "Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill" sat on the top shelf of a cart in the back room one day in late December, wedged between Voltaire's "Candide" and "Broke Heart Blues" by Joyce Carol Oates. The cart brimmed with books that someone on Schlekau's staff had pulled from the shelves. Sometimes she has time to give them another look before wheeling them to the book-sale pile. Sometimes she doesn't.

The Oates would return to the shelf, "because she's a real popular author at Woodrow Wilson," even if "Broke Heart Blues" isn't, Schlekau said. The Voltaire would go. An obscure Edgar Allan Poe volume called "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" might be transferred to another branch. Schlekau hesitated over the volume of O'Neill plays, which was in good condition but had been checked out only nine times in its lifespan at the library, falling short of the system's new goal of 20. She sighed. "The only time things like this are going out is if they're [performing the plays] at the Kennedy Center." But, she said, she's disinclined to throw O'Neill into the discard pile: "That's the English major in me."

Source



Black schoolkids make NJ library unusable

Low discipline schools spread their poison



Every afternoon at Maplewood Middle School's final bell, dozens of students pour across Baker Street to the public library. Some study quietly. Others, library officials say, fight, urinate on the bathroom floor, scrawl graffiti on the walls, talk back to librarians or refuse to leave when asked. One recently threatened to burn down the branch library. Librarians call the police, sometimes twice a day. As a result, starting on Jan. 16, the Maplewood Memorial Library will be closing its two buildings on weekdays from 2:45 to 5 p.m., until further notice.

An institution that, like many nationwide, strives to attract young people, even offering beading and cartooning classes, will soon be shutting them out, along with the rest of the public, at one of the busiest parts of its day. Library employees will still be on the job, working at tasks like paperwork, filing, and answering calls and online questions. "They almost knocked me down, and they run in and out," said Lila Silverman, a Maplewood resident who takes her grandchildren to the library's children's room but called the front of the library "a disaster area" after school. "I do try to avoid those hours."

This comfortable Essex County suburb of 23,000 residents, still proud of its 2002 mention in Money magazine on a list of "Best Places to Live," is no seedy outpost of urban violence. But its library officials, like many across the country, have grown frustrated by middle schoolers' mix of pent-up energy, hormones and nascent independence. Increasingly, librarians are asking: What part of "Shh!" don't you understand?

About a year ago, the Wickliffe, Ohio, library banned children under 14 during after-school hours unless they were accompanied by adults. An Illinois library adopted a "three strikes, you're out" rule, suspending library privileges for repeat offenders. And many libraries are adding security guards specifically for the after-school hours. In Euclid, Ohio, the library pumps classical music into its lobby, bathrooms and front entry to calm patrons, including those from the nearby high school.

A backlash against such measures has also begun: A middle school in Jefferson Parish, La., that requires a daily permission slip for students to use the local public library after school was threatened with a lawsuit last month by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Librarians and other experts say the growing conflicts are the result of an increase in the number of latchkey children, a decrease in civility among young people and a dearth of "third places" - neither home nor school - where kids can be kids. "We don't consider the world as safe a place as it used to be, and we don't encourage children to run around, hang around and be free," said Judy Nelson, president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, part of the American Library Association. "So you have parents telling their kids that the library is a good place to go."

More here



BRITAIN: BLINKERED LEFTIST RESPONSE TO SCHOOL FAILURE

You need to know what it is about the entry into the EU on Monday of Bulgaria and Romania that is problematic. It's the same problem as when, on January 1, 2004, eight other new member states joined the EU: the people who gained access to the British labour market are too good. They either work too hard, or they are too skilled. 447,000 workers from that first new batch of member states applied to register under the Workers Registration Scheme in the first two years since their accession. Including the self-employed, the total working in Britain has been well over 600,000. And that excludes the illegal workers. Economically, this is good news. Jobs can be done better and cheaper thanks to this new pool of labour. But there is a downside: many British manual workers can't compete with them.

The mistake that is usually made is to concentrate on the immediate cause of this problem: the rights of those workers to come here. The real cause of the problem, however, is nothing new and has nothing to with the EU. The real cause is our failure to manage the basic task of educating children properly.

After nearly ten years in office, Tony Blair's pledge to make "education, education and education" his top three priorities is the dog that barked but didn't bite. There has certainly been some improvement in standards. But when ministers celebrate the improved statistics, it's akin to a football team that regularly gets a 3-0 hammering taking comfort from losing 3-1. The most recent Department for Education and Skills study, in 2003, found that 16 per cent of the adult population would fail to pass an English GCSE and 29 per cent of adults could not calculate the area of a floor, even with a calculator, pen and paper.

Instead of the necessary wholesale reforms, tackling the fundamental flaws in school structures and teacher training, the Government has introduced a piecemeal variety of initiatives and schemes. Last week we learnt of the latest, a 65 million plan to give 800,000 of the most able pupils an "e-credit". The pupils will be allocated about 80 pounds in credits, which their schools can use to buy extra lessons from companies, independent schools, universities or other academic bodies. It is a thoroughly sensible idea, which no one committed to excellence could oppose. So, naturally, it has been opposed by a number of Labour MPs and teachers.

But for all the plan's merit, it is symbolic of the Government's failure. By proposing such a scheme, the Government shows that it understands the benefits of competition and a variety of teaching options. Instead of acting on that understanding, however, it restricts it to the most gifted. And it refuses even to contemplate any wider extension of the voucher principle. Why not?

There's a perfect example of a "because I say so" dismissal of a logical extension in a speech made by Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, in November. Intriguingly, he argued that: "To break the cycle of educational disadvantage we need to give parents in the most disadvantaged areas more than preference. They should have choice . . . The evidence suggests both that choice programmes (abroad) helped raise standards across all schools and that the most disadvantaged pupils benefited most."

All good stuff. And to bring about that choice, he proposed a weighted voucher: "I believe that parents with children in those schools where performance has not crossed these thresholds (of success) for two or more years should be given a new right to choose an alternative school. They would be given an education credit weighted to be worth perhaps 150 per cent of the cost of educating the child in their current school. This would give a positive incentive to the alternative school to take them and to expand their intake numbers."

Even better stuff. Mr Milburn clearly grasps the need for choice, and how the market empowers the most disadvantaged and raises standards. But then he shows how the only word that really counts in the phrase "new Labour" is "Labour": "The credit . . . could be used in any state school." At a stroke, Mr Milburn circumscribes the impact of his proposed voucher by limiting its application to state schools. And he offers no explanation why other schools should not be able to compete for the pupils' custom.

Even when Labour sees the benefits of competition, it rules it out in any but the most limited form, for no reason beyond ideology. The same holds in health. Patients are to be given a choice of provider for treatment. But the choice will be from a limited list and there will be no wider application of the acknowledged benefits of competition. Why not?

Source

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

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

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

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4 January, 2007

Long Live Military History

Saving a disappearing portion of Academia. Excerpt from a post by Milbogger Mind in the Qatar

A long important part of the study of history, has been the study of the subset of military history. It is incredibly important to understand both U.S. and global military history, as many significant events across time have involved and been driven by military influences of one form or another.

However in the increasingly leftward tilt of the ivory tower of higher education, military history is "...dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn't dead and buried, it's either dying or under siege..." This according to John Miller in his National Review article "Sounding Taps" from earlier this fall.

"A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today, more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him.

The chair remains vacant, however, and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. "We won't search for a candidate this school year," says John Cooper, a history professor. "But we're committed to doing it eventually." The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn't actually want a military historian on its faculty. "

In fact Miller points out that a look at more than a thousand history professors from the top 25 History Departments around the country, only 21 listed military issues amongst their specialties. Fortunately, military history does have a few benefactors out there, and I would like to present one of my favorites. I do this since I have never seen any mention of it anywhere on any milblogs.

This one resource that I find most interesting is the Pritzker Military Library.



I discovered Pritzker purely by chance, as I was searching the iTunes Music Store for military related podcasts. They exist as a real brick & mortar library in Chicago, which offers a collection focused on "history of the military, military fiction, and the military's current practices as part of the belief that Citizen Soldiers are an essential element of a democratic society." They also offer a tremendous number of live events on site featuring military authors and historians, as well as 'Front & Center' symposiums on varieties of military issues, and lastly their invaluable 'Medal of Honor' series presenting living history through the words of actual CMH winners



Australia: Gloves off for the rumble in the blackboard jungle

Kevin Donnelly says school education has become a burning issue that will only get hotter in 2007

Education has certainly been a barbecue stopper in the past 12 months. On these pages, as well as across the media more generally, barely a week has gone by without debates about topics as diverse as Australia's second-rate ranking in international maths and science tests, the dumbing down impact of outcomes-based education and the fact that state governments are under-resourcing schools; both government and non-government.

At the start of 2006, Prime Minister John Howard entered the debate with his comments about the parlous state of history teaching in our schools. Not only are students taught a black-armband view, but as a consequence of the "new history", the focus is on victim groups and students no longer celebrate the grand narrative associated with our growth as a nation.

The Prime Minister entered the culture wars with his complaints about the destructive impact of postmodern gobbledegook on English as a subject, especially literature. The moral and aesthetic value of literature is lost as students are made to analyse texts in terms of power relationships, and graffiti and SMS messages are on the same stage as Shakespeare and David Malouf. It is significant that David Williamson, somebody not normally associated with the PM's conservative agenda, also publicly criticised the way classics are undermined as a result of forcing students to interpret literature through a politically correct, ideological prism.

While much of this year's debate has focused on national issues - such as the need for plain-English report cards, the introduction of assessment of students on a five-point scale of A to E and the viability of a national curriculum - state and territory issues have also been prominent.

Such were the concerns in Western Australia about the destructive impact of extending outcomes based education into years 11 and 12 and the inept and insensitive way the then state education minister, Ljiljanna Ravlich, handled the situation, that Premier Alan Carpenter was forced to hose down the issue by postponing the introduction of the new certificate and, eventually, by dumping the minister from the portfolio.

In Tasmania, as a result of teachers being forced to adopt what was termed essential learnings - an approach to curriculum where traditional subjects are replaced by generic skills such as world futures and social responsibility - the education minister responsible, Paula Wriedt, nearly lost her seat at the state election and, like Ravlich, was eventually demoted.

While some educationalists, such as the Adelaide-based academic Alan Reid, argue that the education debate is being fuelled by social conservatives, the fact is that in Tasmania, much of the fight against essential learnings has been led by the local branch of the Australian Education Union. The union argued that teachers were being drowned in a bureaucratic, cumbersome and confusing curriculum regime that destroyed the joy of teaching.

As is evident on Perth-based internet site www.platowa.com, much of the criticism of OBE has been led by classroom teachers of various political persuasions. That opposition to OBE transcends political boundaries is highlighted by criticisms made by the NSW Labor Education Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, midway through the year in support of the PM's stance, and the way both Kevin Rudd and new federal shadow education spokesman Stephen Smith are echoing widespread concerns about falling standards and a lack of academic rigour in the curriculum.

There is no doubt education will continue to be a significant issue in 2007, especially given the coming federal election. As with this year, much of the debate will focus on the value of OBE and whether students are receiving a sound education. Debates about the impact of the culture wars on subjects such as history, English and science will alsocontinue.

What other issues might be on the agenda? While not receiving much publicity over the past 12 months, except for calls for increased accountability, the need to attract teachers to the profession and to properly reward them will be seen as vital.

Research by Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan, both academics at the Australian National University, suggest that teacher quality, as reflected by the academic aptitude of beginning teachers, has fallen. Teacher surveys carried out by the Australian Education Union show that many of those who have recently entered the classroom do not see teaching as a long-term commitment.

Teachers need to be paid more and better supported in their professional development. Instead of having to re-invent the wheel by designing their own syllabuses, teachers should be given clear, concise road-maps of what to teach, and be given more time to mentor one another.

While accountability is important and better teachers should be rewarded and underperforming teachers dealt with, it is vital that any proposed system is not overly intrusive and bureaucratic and that the complex and demanding nature of teaching is recognised.

Coupled with properly rewarding teachers is the need to give schools the power to hire and to fire staff and to allow decisions about the school curriculum and management, as far as possible, to be made at the local level.

Supporting parental choice in education will also be on the agenda in 2007. The fact that about 40 per cent of year 11 and 12 students now attend non-government schools - and given the attraction of selective government schools, especially in NSW - it's obvious parents want to choose where their children go to school and that a "one size fits all" approach no longer works.

In the US, school vouchers, where the money follows the child, are increasingly popular in areas such as Washington DC and Milwaukee and the reality is that Australia already has a de-facto voucher system - depending on which non-government school the child attends, both state and federal governments subsidise a percentage of the cost.

As a general rule, while education is often debated, Australians tend to spend more time discussing sporting events and sportsmen and women such as Shane Warne, Ian Thorpe and Cathy Freeman. In 2006, education became a topic of strong media interest and public debate, and 2007 will be no different.

Source

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

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

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

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3 January, 2007

How to chase people with choices out of teaching

"Modern" approaches to discipline degrade teacher quality

Compensation payments to Scottish teachers injured as a result of assaults by pupils have risen tenfold over the past year, new figures show. In 2006, 55,000 pounds was paid out to members of Scotland's largest teaching union as a result of assaults, compared with just 5525 the previous year. The dramatic increase in compensation will spark renewed concerns over rising levels of indiscipline in schools.

The number of incidents resulting in compensation recorded by the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) doubled from four in 2005 to eight last year. One teacher was paid 26,000 compensation after an attack by a pupil, while another received more than 18,000 for facial injuries following an assault. Two teachers were given payments of 2475 and 1500 following injuries they received while trying to break up fights between pupils. Last year, the total amount of compensation paid following accidents or assaults to teachers and college lecturers by local authorities and the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board was 170,000, the same as 2005. Figures obtained by the Scottish Tories in September showed a 25% increase in attacks on teachers in 2005-06, with 2768 incidents of physical violence against school staff.

A Scottish Executive-backed survey two months ago by the National Foundation for Educational Research found that primary and secondary teachers thought schools had become more violent since 2004. In November, primary headteachers called for school staff to be offered lessons in how to restrain violent pupils. Ronnie Smith, general secretary of the EIS, said: "These cases are at the extreme end of the scale and there are more than 52,000 teachers in our classrooms. It is nonetheless discouraging that this is happening at all. "We don't want to get to a situation where it was felt that this sort of violent incident came with the territory because that would be a major deterrent to recruitment and would have an impact on the quality of teaching."

Mr Smith said teachers should always report serious incidents. "Teachers, in common with many other public service workers, are far too often on the receiving end of assaults in the course of their work. "Employers have a duty to assess and minimise the risk facing teachers, and also to send a clear message that all violent conduct - physical or verbal - will not be tolerated."

David Eaglesham, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association, echoed the concerns. "We haven't had as much support as we could have from the local authorities. The executive has at least agreed the problem needs addressed," he said. "We want to encourage a zero-tolerance approach, but it requires a sustained, long-term campaign by everyone involved in education."

Charlie Gray, education spokesman for Cosla, which represents local authorities, said councils treated the safety of all employees seriously. An executive spokeswoman added: "It is important to remember that most Scottish children behave well in school and most schools deal effectively with indiscipline."

Source



Australia: Plan to send parents back to classrooms

Better late than never to give people the education they should have got first time around

Western Australia's new Education Minister wants to send parents back to school in an effort to improve the reading, writing and numeracy skills of their children. Mark McGowan said yesterday there was "anecdotal evidence" that giving parents the right teaching skills would improve their children's education.

The state's smartest student, Christopher Mofflin, 17, from Hale School, Perth, yesterday credited parental support for his 99.95 Tertiary Entrance Examination score, saying they encouraged his reading at an early age. "I first started really reading in Year 3 when they gave me a copy of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings," Christopher said, after being awarded one of two Beazley medals in the state.

Mr McGowan said pilot programs could be made available to all parents, but they should be targeted at those who had children with learning difficulties. "Where children aren't doing as well as they could ... we could invite parents back, work with them, show them how to teach their children these basic skills," he said. "It's about getting parents involved to show parents what they can do to assist their children. There is concern about young people not being able to have the basic competencies ... and it would be irresponsible of me not to investigate options to deal with that."

Mr McGowan has recently touted an overhaul of the state's history curriculum as he tries to boost the Carpenter Government's tarnished standing in the education sector. Former minister Ljljiana Ravlich had a year of calamities in the job.

Christopher's Beazley Medal was based on results including 100 per cent for French and 98.8per cent for physics. Student Michael Gibbings, of Harvey College of Agriculture in the state's southwest, won the vocational studies Beazley Medal

Source



Australia: Continued teacher resistance to grading

Morris Iemma made it personal when he said he couldn't understand his children's school reports. The NSW Premier strongly advocated the use of A to E grades in school reports on the ground that they would alert parents to any learning difficulties as early as possible. But it seems his Education Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, has not personally interfered with the reporting system at her child's school, which has ignored the Government's requirement for all reports to include the A to E scale.

Schools were originally told to grade subjects from A to E, but opposition from teachers forced Ms Tebbutt to soften her position and allow schools to use an equivalent five-point scale that describes grades as outstanding, high, sound, basic and limited. Schools using the alternative scale had to provide a key showing how the A to E grades matched up with the descriptive scale. "Schools who choose to grade students using word descriptors instead of A to E must explain on each report that the words equate to the A to E scale," Ms Tebbutt said at the time. But in its end-of-year reports, the school Ms Tebbutt's child attends used a descriptive scale without any reference to the A to E scale. The word "achieved" was used instead of "sound".

The Federation of Parents and Citizens' Associations of NSW said the C grade had caused confusion for many parents who had associated it with a poor performance. The president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Maree O'Halloran, said Ms Tebbutt's child's school had made a professional judgement about its report format. "I hope that the Government supports them, just as the Teachers Federation supports them in that choice," she said. Ms O'Halloran accused the Government of trying to put a positive spin on the new reports by commissioning a study of parent responses. "The focus group commissioned by the Government didn't really test parent opinion because the questions they asked were very narrow and the methodology they used was flawed," she said. "The Government is trying to put a positive spin on what has been for them a debacle."

The president of the Federation of P&C Associations, Dianne Giblin, said she had received mixed feedback from parents. A spokesperson for the minister said 80 per cent of public schools had adopted the five-point grading scale for their end-of-year student reports.

Source

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

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

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

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



2 January, 2007

A GOOD EXAMPLE OF HOW LEFTISM DESTROYS ACADEMIC AND INTELLECTUAL STANDARDS

It hugely degrades thinking and standards of argument even among those who should be most competent and careful. Post lifted from Keith Burgess-Jackson

John Deigh is a "professor" of law at the University of Texas at Austin. (I put the word "professor" in quotation marks, since Deigh has no legal credentials. His training is in philosophy.) Deigh is the editor of Ethics, a prominent philosophical periodical. In the most recent issue, dated October 2006, he editorializes about the fallacy of deriving an "is" statement from an "ought" statement (not to be confused with the fallacy-known as Hume's Law-of deriving an "ought" statement from an "is" statement). Deigh gives two illustrations of the fallacy. The first concerns "Stalin's efforts at falsifying the photographic record of Russia's October revolution and the early history of the Soviet Union" (page 2). The second concerns the war in Iraq. Let me reproduce the two paragraphs about the war in Iraq:

The Soviet Union was of course a totalitarian regime. Its rulers had vast power over their subjects. Nothing like this sort of propaganda campaign, it is easy to think, is imaginable in modern liberal democracies. Yet the propaganda campaign undertaken by President Bush and his administration in the run up to the invasion of Iraq and during the subsequent occupation of that country should make us think twice. It too was propelled by the fallacy of deriving `is' from `ought'. And it too used false and misleading representations of fact to gain support for its architects' ends. Thus Bush and the leading members of his administration loudly denounced the Iraqi government as an evil regime whose malignancy not only threatened to destabilize the Middle East but placed the Western world in grave peril as well. A regime this wicked ought to be in league with the most diabolical enemies of the West, plotting our destruction, and it ought to be amassing weapons of such destructive power as to give it a real chance of succeeding in these plots. So there followed from the Bush administration a steady stream of alarming, now discredited statements about the regime's ties to al-Qaeda terrorists, its active program for developing nuclear arms, and its stockpiling of huge stores of chemical and biological weapons. In the words of the head of British intelligence, reporting in the secret Downing Street memo of July 23, 2002, on the Bush administration's prewar strategy, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." One could not give a better description of the fallacy.

The result has been a major human disaster, whether one measures it by the common conservative estimate of nearly 50,000 civilian Iraqi deaths since the invasion or by the radical estimate published this month in the Lancet of over 600,000 civilian Iraqi deaths or by something in between. And while the death toll in any case is dwarfed by that of Stalin's tyranny, such comparisons will bring no comfort to the Iraqi people or to the many families of soldiers who have died in the war or have returned home horribly and permanently maimed. A human disaster of this magnitude calls for investigation into its causes. Has it been due to undemocratic features of America's political institutions? Was it by exploiting them at an opportune time that a determined clique of government officials was able to grab the levers of power and push through policies of unnecessary war and conquest? Or should we conclude that the institutions of liberal democracy themselves have become less reliable safeguards against such efforts than we thought? These are questions for political scientists and perhaps eventually historians. For philosophers the disaster does not appear to have generated new questions for study. Our discipline's research is not as responsive to current events. But we are not isolated from them. And one thing we can do is to acquaint our students with the fallacy of deriving `is' from `ought', to alert them to the ease with which it is committed, particularly in government propaganda. (pages 2-4; footnotes omitted)

My first reaction upon reading Deigh's editorial was that it's a paranoid rant that has no place in a serious philosophical publication. It might be fit for a blog, or even a newspaper op-ed column, but it's not appropriate for a scholarly organ. My second reaction was that my first reaction was uncharitable. So let's put the best spin on Deigh's editorial, even if he doesn't put the best spin on the Bush administration's reasoning, for he claims to be making a serious philosophical point. Did President Bush commit the fallacy of deriving an "is" statement from an "ought" statement?

I don't see it. Deigh refers to a "propaganda campaign" undertaken by the Bush administration. But he doesn't support this claim. He says the Bush administration used "false and misleading representations of fact to gain support for its architects' ends." The implication is that lies were told. But a lie is not merely a false statement; it is a false statement uttered with intent to deceive. If Deigh believes that President Bush lied, then, given the seriousness of the charge, he has an obligation to supply the false statement together with evidence that, at the time it was uttered, it was known by President Bush to be false. Furthermore, he must adduce evidence that President Bush uttered it with the intent to deceive. That one or more of President Bush's factual claims was false, or turned out to be false, doesn't make it a lie; nor does it make it propaganda. In short, Deigh makes a number of wild and unsupported assertions. We teach our students not to do that sort of thing. Indeed, we grade their term papers down when they do.

Deigh next complains that President Bush described the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein as an "evil regime." Was it not an evil regime, by any reasonable standard? How many thousands of people did Hussein have murdered, tortured, raped, and mutilated? How many people did he terrorize, and for how long? Does Deigh deny that it was an evil regime? If it was an evil regime, what is wrong with saying so and acting accordingly? And keep in mind that President Bush did not have to speculate about Hussein having evil intentions toward the United States. There was plenty of evidence that he did, including Hussein's own statements over a period of many years. As for President Bush's belief that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, this wasn't something that the president cooked up for propaganda purposes. Almost everyone in American government, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, believed it. Deigh has to show not that the belief was false, for there can be justified false beliefs, but that it was unjustified or unreasonable. He goes no way toward doing this. Deigh's discussion of President Bush's beliefs, decisions, arguments, and actions is uncharitable in the extreme-to the point where Deigh's honesty must be called into question. There is a lesson here for students of philosophy, but it's not the one Deigh supposes.

As for the Iraq war being a "disaster," that requires both elaboration and argumentation. Calling it a disaster several times does not make it a disaster. (Students, take note.) Yes, people have died in Iraq since the invasion. Lots of them, on both sides. But people die in every war. Does that make every war unjustified? How many people died fighting Hitler? If Deigh believes that the war in Iraq was unjustified, he must make his case. He must state his principle of just war and apply it to Iraq. He doesn't. He simply assumes that the war was unjustified and goes on to "explain" why it occurred. That's called begging the question. Students should take note. That Deigh's audience (professional philosophers) overwhelmingly believes that the war was unjustified is neither here nor there. Is he merely preaching to the choir? What would be the point of that? He should do what philosophers routinely do, or profess to do, which is to try to persuade those whose minds are not already made up. But this would require more than the three pages he devotes to the topic, and it would require a lot less manipulative rhetoric. Deigh's editorial is drive-by philosophy. No wonder philosophers get no respect!

Deigh compounds his problem by trying to explain how the "disaster" came about. Doesn't that have the cart before the horse? First he must establish that there has been a disaster (by what standard?); then he must explain (in a plausible way) how it occurred, so that similar disasters can be prevented or averted. Suppose we used Deigh's technique on Deigh's editorial. Suppose we assumed, without argument, that Deigh published a scurrilous, poorly reasoned editorial, and then set about to explain how it could have been published in a journal as prestigious as Ethics. We might say that since Deigh is its editor, nobody had the power or the courage to stand up to him, or to tell him that his editorial is nothing more than a paranoid rant. Or perhaps we would explain it in terms of the left-wing bias of the academy. Everyone to whom Deigh showed the editorial, we might speculate, shared his values, so he got no disinterested feedback. Or maybe it's just a case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. And so on. I don't think Deigh would appreciate having his editorial dismissed in this way. So why does he dismiss the arguments of the Bush administration in this way? President Bush made a multi-pronged case for invading Iraq-before he invaded. Other people, including serious scholars, have made a case for war. Deigh ignores these arguments. This, I assure you, is not in keeping with philosophical practice. It is, in fact, a disgrace.

I've been teaching logic for almost a quarter of a century. Nothing in Deigh's editorial convinces me that President Bush committed the fallacy of deriving an "is" statement from an "ought" statement. If anyone has committed any fallacies, it is Deigh. He's lucky he's not my student. If I were grading his editorial, it would receive a D.



D.C.: Let the money follow the student

Mayor-elect Adrian M. Fenty has pledged to make education reform his administration's top priority. Unhappy with the progress of embattled DC Public Schools superintendent Clifford B. Janey, Fenty plans a New York-style mayoral takeover of the system. He may be popular enough to succeed, but unless he supports policies that fund students instead of failing schools, his coup cannot trigger an education revolution in the District.

Even without new ideas, a takeover may do some good: it would sideline a fractious and sluggish local school board and give the new mayor a chance to rid the DCPS of its most egregiously corrupt personnel and practices. But no managerial shake-up will rid the system of the honest but substandard teachers and techniques that keep District schools in the national-rankings basement year after year.

Only by empowering parents to choose their children's schools can Mayor-elect Fenty achieve his goal of a quality education for every child. He should increase public school choices, lift the arbitrary cap on the number of charter schools allowed in DC, and expand the district's nascent but promising school voucher program.

Poor teaching quality, one of the District's worst problems, is exacerbated by public school administrators who prefer to hire education majors instead math and science majors, even though the latter make better teachers in their subjects. Giving parents the ability to choose which public schools get their money discourages these and other counterproductive practices, as Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby has found.

Hoxby's work suggests that public schools that compete for funds and students are more likely to hire the most capable teachers available, improving results for students at all schools. But the DCPS still assigns students to schools largely by neighborhood. Fenty should recommend a city-wide open enrollment program for public schools to allow the most successful schools to expand their capacity and serve larger numbers of students.

Second, Fenty should unleash a new wave of Charter school entrepreneurship in the District. Charter schools have blossomed in recent years and now serve over 17,000 students in the District of Columbia. Although about three quarters of DC's charter school students come from low-income families, and virtually all are racial minorities, they routinely outperform DCPS students on math and reading tests, according to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute.

Despite good academic results and high rates of parental satisfaction, Washington's charter school movement is hobbled by an arbitrary cap of 20 new charters per year. Fenty should support lifting this cap. Equally important, he should smooth the way for charter schools to lease sought-after DCPS building space that is currently going to waste.

Finally, Fenty should rethink his former opposition to DC's promising new Opportunity Scholarship Program. The program offers scholarships of up to $7,500 to low and moderate income families who wish to enroll a child in a private or parochial school in the District. Both scholarships and places in participating schools are awarded on a lottery basis.

The program is too new to evaluate for educational results yet, but studies of similar programs elsewhere indicate that-while school choice benefits all students-African-American voucher recipients reap the largest academic gains. In a city with a painfully large academic achievement gap between white and minority students, the Opportunity Scholarship Program could be an important force for equity.

But only if it is expanded. While the program is probably priceless to many of the 1,802 students it serves, it is too small to provide meaningful competition for DC's public schools. A much larger program would not only benefit more scholarship recipients, it would also benefit the remaining DCPS students by forcing the public system to pull its socks up and improve the educational services it offers to local families.

Mayor-elect Fenty has promised to provide "qualified teachers for all children." If he is serious about that, he should put parents, not bureaucrats beholden to the American Federation of Teachers, in charge of choosing schools for them. To do so, he needs merely to embrace and expand existing programs that allow funding to follow students to the educational opportunities they deserve.

Source

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

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

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

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



1 January, 2007

CLINGING TO MARX

The Young America's Foundation has come out with their 2006 list of the most bizarre and Politically Correct college courses of the year and it shows, once again, the foolishness being called an "education" that is foisted upon our children in our colleges and universities.

The number one most ridiculous is Occidental College's "The Phallus", supposedly a study on the relation "between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism."....

There were a myriad of other "courses" that our highly priced and woefully inadequate universities have wasted time and effort upon, many of which attack America, the male of the species, white people and western culture. Of course, they all assault the sensibilities of any student who wants to actually learn something useful.

But, to my mind, the worst one on the list was Amherst College's "Taking Marx Seriously: Should Marx be Given Another Chance? Let me answer that query with a word even the pointy heads at University might understand: NO. A resounding no! Here is Amherst's course description:

Should Marx be given yet another chance? Is there anything left to gain by returning to texts whose earnest exegesis has occupied countless interpreters, both friendly and hostile, for generations? Has Marx's credibility survived the global debacle of those regimes and movements that drew inspiration from his work, however poorly they understood it? Or, conversely, have we entered a new era in which post-Marxism has joined a host of other "post-" phenomena? This seminar will deal with these and related questions in the context of a close and critical reading of Marx's texts. The main themes we will discuss include Marx's conception of capitalist modernity, material and intellectual production, power, class conflicts and social consciousness, and his critique of alienation, bourgeois freedom and representative democracy. We will also examine Marx's theories of historical progress, capitalist exploitation, globalization and human emancipation.

In light of the 100 million human beings murdered over the last 100 years or so by people inspired by Marx, it is a continual amazement to me that certain types of people still wonder if the failed theorist's ideas could still work "if only it were tried right".

Marx's ideas have nearly all proven chimerical at best and murderous at worst, yet we get one person after another traipsing about our college campuses claiming the mantle of thoughtful, professor positing the absurdities of Marx and his many murderous acolytes and ruefully pontificating upon their unrealized potential.

These are the same sorts of people who point to things like the Spanish Inquisition and the many wars launched under the name of Christ in previous centuries as reasons to de-legitimize Christianity. They proclaim Christianity's hypocrisy because of the many that have died in Christ's name. Yet, far more people have died as a result of Marx's religion than any other ever created. And not a word about the millions upon millions of Marx's victims is ever acknowledged by the ivory tower set.

So, according to such people, religion should be cast out because of such depredations, religion should be banished from the mind of man and excised from the university because of such historical excess, yet the excess caused by Marx? Well, let's not bring that up shall we? After all, they plaintively claim that Marx's ideas were never "really" implemented right as this fetid course description seems to allude, so his ideas must deserve a second look. Marx's followers just didn't get it because of how "poorly they understood it". Regardless of what Marxism has led to, let's give it another shot. no pun intended.

So, why can't we use the same argument for religion? Why can't we say religion has never been tried right, too? Not that I am equating Christ to Marx, far from it. But the pointy heads don't see their dichotomy. In fact, they don't even acknowledge it as a legitimate query.

Marx has proven an utter failure through every manner of implementation of his ideas on both large and small scale and does not behoove the time spent on him as a legitimate course of study unless it is as an adjunct to political science or history, and then only as a negative example therein. Marx deserves nothing but the contempt of everyone. And our universities don't deserve much better for their slavish love for this murderous, beast at this rate. Yes, he should be taught. But he deserves to be placed as the worst human being in human history. Worse than Hitler, worse then Stalin, even worse then Torquemada.

Source



MONEY, SHMONEY! THE BRITISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT NEITHER KNOWS OR CARES ABOUT MILLIONS IT IS SUPPOSED TO SUPERVISE

If someone owed me millions, I would know all about it all the time

The government has been forced to release official accounts showing that in its rush to sign up city academy [charter school] sponsors it may have failed to collect millions of pounds pledged by wealthy businessmen. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has released figures showing that it has received only 32 million pounds of the 74m pledged to build academies that have already opened. Ministers said that for seven academies they "did not know" how much money had been paid by sponsors. It is not clear whether the money has not been paid, is not formally due, or whether the figures reflect lax accounting at the DfES.

The disclosure, made in a written parliamentary answer on the day Tony Blair was interviewed by detectives investigating the cash-for-peerages scandal, comes amid increasing concern over the city academy programme. Blair is desperate to sign up hundreds of sponsors before he steps down in the new year amid fears that Brown may halt the scheme. The premier has lauded and honoured businessmen backing academies. City academies are controlled by wealthy men or companies who have pledged 1.5m to 2m. The money is supposed to pay for the construction of the buildings.

However, the new figures show that for the 45 academies already open, the government can account for the full sponsorship pledged from only five donors. Teaching unions and other critics were led to believe that the sponsorship would be paid before any academy opened. The biggest shortfall in the DfES figures appears in the payments pledged by United Learning Trust (ULT), a Christian charity that has Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, on its board. The ULT has pledged 14.6m for the academies, but the government said it could account for only 2,979,000 received. The government has paid more than 120m towards the capital costs of building ULT academies.

In some cases, the DfES figures appear to be out of date. Lord Harris is recorded as having paid 1,157,000 of the 4.5m he pledged for four academies. However, yesterday he detailed how he had given all the money due so far. Last week ARK, the charitable group headed by Arpad Busson, the financier, which has opened one academy, also insisted it was up to date with its pledges, raising questions over the internal accounting system of the DfES.

The DfES figures also show that Barry Townsley, the stockbroker who secretly loaned Labour 1m before being nominated for a peerage, has handed over only 896,000 of his 2m. He said recently that he was up to date with his payments. Peter Shalson, another Labour donor, is said to have handed over only 989,000 of his 1,490,000. He could not be reached for comment.

Paul Holmes, a Liberal Democrat on the Education Select Committee, described the figures as outrageous. He said: "Nobody - either politician or DfES official - has ever been able to give clear figures on the finances of the academies. There's also a question over what is being handed over `in kind'." Under the system, each donor forms a trust that oversees the construction and running of the new school. The DfES then hands over tens of millions of pounds and the private sponsor provides their share of the money. The development plans are jointly agreed and regular accounts and invoices are submitted to the DfES.

Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman, called for urgent action. She said: "The government does not know whether sponsors are actually giving the money to the academies. ULT has had 120m of public money and yet parents can't tell whether their schools have had any sponsorship."

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"

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