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31 July, 2008

The Greatest Scandal

The profound failure of inner-city public schools to teach children may be the nation's greatest scandal. The differences between the two Presidential candidates on this could hardly be more stark. John McCain is calling for alternatives to the system; Barack Obama wants the kids to stay within that system. We think the facts support Senator McCain.

"Parents ask only for schools that are safe, teachers who are competent and diplomas that open doors of opportunity," said Mr. McCain in remarks recently to the NAACP. "When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children." Some parents may opt for a better public school or a charter school; others for a private school. The point, said the Senator, is that "no entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity."

Mr. McCain cited the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program, a federally financed school-choice program for disadvantaged kids signed into law by President Bush in 2004. Qualifying families in the District of Columbia receive up to $7,500 a year to attend private K-12 schools. To qualify, a child must live in a family with a household income below 185% of the poverty level. Some 1,900 children participate; 99% are black or Hispanic. Average annual income is just over $22,000 for a family of four.

A recent Department of Education report found nearly 90% of participants in the D.C. program have higher reading scores than peers who didn't receive a scholarship. There are five applicants for every opening.

Mr. McCain could have mentioned EdisonLearning, a private company that took over 20 of Philadelphia's 45 lowest performing district schools in 2002 to create a new management model for public schools. The most recent state test-score data show that student performance at Philadelphia public schools managed by Edison and other outside providers has improved by nearly twice the amount as the schools run by the district.

The number of students performing at grade level or higher in reading at the schools managed by private providers increased by 6.1% overall compared to 3.3% in district-managed schools. In math, the results for Edison and other outside managers was 4.6% and 6.0%, respectively, compared to 3.1% in the district-run schools.

The state of California just announced that one in three students in the Los Angeles public school system drops out before graduating. Among black and Latino students in L.A. district schools, the numbers are 42% and 30%. In the past five years, the number of dropouts has grown by more than 80%. The number of high school graduates has gone up only 9%.

The silver linings in these dismal clouds are L.A.'s charter high schools. Writing in the Los Angeles Daily News last week, Caprice Young, who heads the California Charter Schools Association, noted that "every charter high school in Los Angeles Unified last year reported a dropout rate significantly lower than not only the school district's average, but the state's as well."

On recent evidence, the Democrat Party's policy on these alternatives is simply massive opposition. Congressional Democrats have refused to reauthorize the D.C. voucher program and are threatening to kill it. Last month, Philadelphia's school reform commission voted to seize six schools from outside managers, including four from Edison. In L.A., local school board members oppose the expansion of charters even though seven in 10 charters in the district outperform their neighborhood peers.

It's well known that the force calling the Democratic tune here is the teachers unions. Earlier this month, Senator Obama accepted the endorsement of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union. Speaking recently before the American Federation of Teachers, he described the alternative efforts as "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."

Mr. Obama told an interviewer recently that he opposes school choice because, "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The Illinois Senator has it exactly backward. Those at the top don't need voucher programs and they already exercise school choice. They can afford exclusive private schools, or they can afford to live in a neighborhood with decent public schools. The point of providing educational options is to extend this freedom to the "kids at the bottom."

A visitor to Mr. Obama's Web site finds plenty of information about his plans to fix public education in this country. Everyone knows this is a long, hard slog, but Mr. Obama and his wife aren't waiting. Their daughters attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school. When the day arrives that these two candidates face off, we hope Senator McCain comes prepared to press his opponent hard on change, hope and choice in the schools.

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Increasing number of British children being taught by classroom assistants

Children are being increasingly taught by untrained classroom assistants, despite fears over lesson standards, teaching union leaders claim.

Schools are relying on poorly-paid assistants - most of whom do not have full teaching qualifications - to plug gaps in the teaching workforce leading to accusations of teaching on the cheap. Some physical education lessons are even being taken by staff without training in how to use heavy equipment - fuelling fears that children are at risk of serious injury.

But Lord Adonis, the schools minister, insisted that schools should be allowed to leave classes in the hands of assistants, provided they are properly supervised by trained teachers.

It followed claims by Voice, the 35,000-strong teaching union, that assistants were being "routinely abused" by schools who demand they work as full teachers for just a fraction of the wage. Speaking at the union's annual conference, delegates said it was cheaper for schools to use support staff than pay for supply teachers - if regular teachers were absent. Most earn an average of just $100 a day, compared to supply teachers who earn $300.

Rhena Sturgess, a school nursery nurse from Leicestershire, said: "Teaching assistants are professionals who play a key role in our schools but their hard work, dedication and knowledge of the children should not be taken advantage of by schools that are using them as cheap labour A as cut-price teachers." She said schools were "exploiting them because it's cheaper than bringing in supply teachers and because they can't say 'no'".

In the last 10 years, the number of teachers in England has increased by ten per cent from 399,000 to 440,000. At the same time, the number of classroom assistants has soared almost three-fold from 61,000 to 177,000. They are supposed to be used - under the supervision of a fully-qualified staff member - to give teachers more time to plan lessons and mark children's work. But Mrs Sturgess said assistants were often providing lesson cover for teachers, even in PE, where many lack specialist health and safety training.

Lord Adonis said: "Provided teaching assistants are properly managed by both teachers and headteachers we don't think it is right to unduly constrain the roles they do in schools."

Nick Gibb, the Tory shadow schools minister, said: "Teaching assistants are a very helpful addition in schools to enable teachers to focus on the core task of academic teaching, but they should not be used to take classes. It can only serve to reduce standards of teaching and therefore the quality of education children are receiving."

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30 July, 2008

Cadet forces in schools would restore discipline says British union

Military cadet forces should be set up in schools to restore discipline and control unruly pupils, a teaching union will hear this week. Voice, which has 38,000 members, will discuss a motion that it should welcome the establishment of cadet units in state schools. This clashes with the stance of the NUT, the biggest teaching union, which voted in March to oppose military recruitment campaigns in schools. One teacher told that debate that military cadet forces should be barred from schools because they were used for recruitment.

But two months later, a report commissioned by Gordon Brown said more cadet corps should be set up in schools, and recommended the inclusion of lessons on the Armed Forces’ role in society in the national curriculum. It also said more military personnel should visit schools. This has found favour with Peter Morris, the retired teacher who is making the latest proposal. He will tell the Voice annual conference on Wednesday that a military presence at school would foster patriotism, integrity, loyalty and courage. “Society as a whole is becoming less disciplined,” he is due to say. “As a profession, we continually complain about the indiscipline of pupils. The establishment of cadet units will, I am sure, help with discipline in our schools. They will give pupils an insight into the role of the armed forces.”

Mr Morris will tell the event in Northamptonshire that having a cadet force on site will help prevent low-achieving pupils from dropping out of school and drifting into crime. He is expected to say: “I have seen a pupil lift a computer monitor above his head ready to throw it at a teacher. I have seen pupils barring the way of a teacher along a corridor. “Pupils are well aware of their rights these days and exercise those rights to the full, often leaving teachers with little or no power to restore discipline.”

An IT teacher for 15 years, Mr Morris was formerly a policeman, but retired after suffering assault while on duty. In an apparent allusion to the NUT stance, he will tell delegates: “No doubt left-wingers in our profession will try to sabotage the government’s plan for cadet units, just as many colleagues in another teaching union recently voted to ‘actively oppose’ the army making visits to schools. “The structure which is lacking in the lives of so many young people today is offered by cadet units, and there is nowhere better to house these cadet units than in schools. “These units can work well for high achievers as well as those who will drop out of school early - with the consequential risk of falling into a life of crime.”

Mr Morris will tell the conference that cadet forces will “inculcate some of the values which we, as a society, are missing: self discipline, self-reliance, loyalty to one’s comrades, to one unit and to one’s country, courage, respect and integrity.”

Voice, formed from what was the Professional Association of Teachers, and other unions, counts teachers, lecturers, heads, support staff, nannies and childcare professionals among its members. Speaking to The Times, Mr Morris said many discipline problems in the classroom were caused by having mixed-ability lessons, during which both high and low achievers became bored. He said cadet units could engage some pupils by giving them a sense of purpose and achievement, and showing them how a career in catering or music could be pursued within the military. They could also be used to help schools provide after-hours activities. The Government wants all schools to become “extended” by opening from 8am to 6pm.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said at the time of the report to Gordon Brown: “I believe combined cadet forces can make a huge difference to the young people who join them and the schools and communities in which they are based.”

Source




Texas financial aid proposal may emphasize academics as well as need in award distribution

With a limited pot it makes sense to give the aid to kids who are smart as well as poor

When it comes to qualifying for the state's biggest pot of college financial aid, being poor may no longer be enough. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board forwarded a plan to lawmakers and Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday that could fundamentally change the design and mission of the TEXAS Grant program. It would favor students who excel academically, shifting priority away from those with the greatest financial need.

Kimberly Anderson of Dallas fears the proposed changes could prevent some students from going to college. The 2008 graduate of Carter High School is headed to the University of Texas at Austin in the fall and plans to pay with grants and scholarships. "I understand they don't want to waste the money," she said. "I think it's still fair to go off needs."

Thursday's move paves the way for debates in the coming legislative session about spending priorities for higher education. Since 2004, the state hasn't provided enough money to cover all students eligible for the grants, which provide about $5,200 a year - enough to cover average tuition and fees at public universities. For the coming school year, the coordinating board estimates there will be enough grant money for only 28,000 of the 70,000 new students who qualify. Thursday's action is a move toward deciding which students deserve the money most.

"It is not a good message to send to poor students that by virtue of the fact you're poor, you're going to get aid," said Raymund Paredes, the state's higher education commissioner. "Students from all income classes should be sent the message that you should be expected to perform as well as you can."

But state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, said the changes could hurt the very students the program was supposed to help. "Don't be in a position where we end up being penny-wise and dollar-foolish. The plan is working," said Mr. Ellis, who led efforts to create TEXAS Grants in 1999. Under current rules students must take a college-preparatory curriculum in high school to qualify for the grants. The vast majority of Texas students meet that standard today.

The proposed changes come at a time when political and business leaders are pressing public universities to enroll more low-income and minority students - people who make up a growing share of the state's workforce. The bulk of TEXAS Grants goes to students whose families make less than $40,000 a year. Three-fourths of recipients are minorities.

Last year, the Legislature ordered a review of state aid programs to make sure money is spent efficiently. The coordinating board hired a private consultant to come up with recommendations. The consultant recommends that to receive TEXAS Grants, students either score 1350 out of 2400 on the SAT or 18 out of 36 on the ACT; graduate in the top half of their high school class; or complete the state's most rigorous high school curriculum. Dr. Paredes offered an even tougher set of recommendations Thursday. They include requirements that students either score 1500 on the SAT or about 21 on the ACT; graduate in the top 30 percent of their high school class; or graduate high school with a B average.

While board members voted to send the consultant's report to the governor and lawmakers, they didn't expressly endorse it. Nor have they endorsed Dr. Paredes' recommendations. Rather, several board members said they need more information on how the proposed changes would affect lower-income and minority students. Board member Robert Wingo of El Paso said more study is needed "so we are not putting the very students we're trying to help at risk." ...

TEXAS Grants don't begin to cover the total cost of attending a four-year public university in Texas - add in books, room, board and other expenses, and the total averages $17,500 a year.

Keshav Rajagopalan, student government president at UT-Austin, said adding some academic standards makes sense, but the consultant's report leaves out a key issue. "There is nothing that talks about actually funding these programs," he said. "You can't just say we've got programs and then not put money toward them."

Coordinating board officials said any changes in eligibility wouldn't take effect for several years.

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29 July, 2008

Charges against California Home Schooling Family that Led to Homeschool Ban Likely to be Dropped

The family court judge overseeing the two homeschooled children has terminated his jurisdiction over them

The charges against a California family that led to an Appellate Court decision to ban home schooling in the state have been dropped by the family court judge involved in the original case. The Appellate Court's ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, California, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Two years ago, court-appointed lawyers had asked that the two youngest Long children be ordered to attend a school outside the home. That request became the basis for the Appellate court's February ruling that homeschooling is illegal in California.

The family court judge overseeing the two homeschooled children at the center of the case, however, has now terminated his jurisdiction over the children. Now Mr. Long's attorneys are asking the Appellate court to drop the homeschooling case altogether.

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said the decision of the family court to terminate jurisdiction will likely lead to the Appellate court dismissing the case. "This development likely means that the horrible Court of Appeals decision outlawing home schooling in California will not be resurrected," he said. "That's good news for the 200,000 home-schooled kids in that state." "Apparently the state decided it either didn't want to pursue the parents or the court decided that they couldn't pursue the parents," Mr. Hausknecht explained. "And so, essentially, there is no case left, no parties left for the appellate court to actually apply their decision to."

Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, said the Appellate Court is expected to decide in the next few weeks whether to drop its earlier ruling. "If that were to happen, we would be back at square one as if this whole mess had never taken place - at least legally speaking - because there'd be absolutely no precedent on the books," Mr. Dacus said in the Focus on the Family Action report.

Mike Farris, chairman and founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said, "This is a significant favorable development toward preserving homeschooling freedom in California."

With both state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger throwing their support behind the state's homeschoolers, it appears increasingly likely the Appellate Court will reverse its earlier decision. O'Connell released a statement supporting the rights of parents to homeschool their children, despite the Second District Court of Appeals ruling to the contrary. "I have reviewed this case, and I want to assure parents that chose to home school that California Department of Education policy will not change in any way as a result of this ruling. Parents still have the right to home school in our state," O'Connell said.

Governor Schwarzenegger said the court ruling stating that parents must have a teaching credential to home school their children was "outrageous." "Every California child deserves a quality education and parents should have the right to decide what's best for their children. Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children's education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don't protect parents' rights then, as elected officials, we will," he said.

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In Rochester (NY), Almost Half of 7th and 8th Graders Fail Exam -- Even When Given Some of the Answers

Given how much grief charter schools and other creative initiatives get from the government-school establishment if they don't instantly turn at risk kids into Einsteins, along with the hounding of homeschoolers that seems to be on the rise, this story shouldn't be allowed to fall through the cracks, or remain confined to its local area.

Last Sunday's Rochester Democrat and Chronicle story (HT One News Now), which really should be read in full, would be humorous ("Kids Get Answers, Still Can't Pass") if it weren't for the fact that real children are clearly not getting educated. This systemic failure will affect them, and, to at least a slight degree, everyone reading this, for years to come:

Rochester students get peek at exam questions

Thousands of city school students got a sneak peek at dozens of questions on two exams last month - a scenario that has baffled testing experts, outraged local officials and raised concerns about the validity of the exams and the Rochester School District's method of test preparation. The multiple-choice questions appeared in review materials produced by the district and issued to teachers to prep seventh- and eighth-graders for their final social-studies exams, one of four required district exams.

..... District officials could not say how many of the 4,329 students who took the exams had also participated in the review sessions or received copies of the materials. But those who did so were drilled on multiple-choice questions and answers that were identical to and presented in the same sequence as those on the tests.

..... Each of the exams totaled 100 points, and the multiple-choice questions were each worth one point. The exams, in turn, accounted for 25 percent of the final grade in each course.

..... District officials defended studying actual exam questions in advance of a test as a legitimate method of preparation and expressed little concern about the potential impact that repeated questions might have on the validity of the exam's results. They noted that the final social-studies exams, unlike those for math and English, have no bearing on whether a student is promoted to the next grade.

Connie Leech, the district's supervisor for secondary schools, said the fact that the questions and their answers appeared in the same order on the review as the exam was "probably not in the best judgment" but added that she doubted any student could commit the order of so many questions to memory. "I'm not concerned that it's a cheat," Leech said. "What we were doing is giving kids a better sense of the knowledge that they needed for the test. It's like giving them an open-book test. This isn't a Regents exam."

..... Exactly half of the seventh-graders passed their exam, an increase of 6 percentage points over last year, according to the district. The passing rate in the eighth grade was 56 percent, compared with 51 percent a year earlier

In my opinion, the newspaper's headline and text characterizations of the students' exposure to answers as "peeks" represent a deliberate attempt to understate the seriousness of what is being described. The district is acknowledging that at least some students "received copies of the materials." Some "peek."

Reporter Dave Andreatta appeared not to ask if any disciplinary actions would be taken; based on Ms. Leech's defense, it would appear not. Andreatta also used what happened as a jumping-off point to air teacher grievances over having to "teach to the test" -- as if any of that is relevant to what really should be seen as an obvious case of cheating. Finally, even though the mulitple-choice questions were only a part of the exam, he seemed oddly indifferent to the appalling failure rate, even given the artificial help.

You can explore the paper's pages over the week that has since transpired to gauge reader reaction, which you will see ranges from understandable calls for get-tough measures to inexcusable excuse-making.

This story is a more glaring example of what I believe is a common local media tendency to cut underperforming public schools -- especially urban public schools -- breaks they don't deserve. Meanwhile, as noted earlier, media sympathies usually are not with ideas designed to help parents looking for better alternatives that will enable them to break away from the public school monopoly, or with those who choose to take on the serious responsibility of educating their children themselves, and tend to perform that task fairly well. Why is that?

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Helicopter parents

The New York Times devotes some of its front page to a story about overbearing parents who torture summer camp administrators with their specific instructions, whiny demands for exceptionalism, and unreconstructed anxiety. This is an excellent use of that newspaper's valuable real estate. Anxious and controlling parents are as great a threat to this country's posterity as, say, climate change or Islamic terrorism. As the article makes painfully obvious, parents are teaching their children all the wrong lessons with their interventions, which include attempts to eliminate every discomfort, redress every injustice, and break any rule (such as the ban on cell phones) if it is an obstacle to intensive parent-child contact. These parents are teaching their children to be easily discomfited, hypersensitive in the defense of their own prerogatives, and disrespectful of rules, all traits that are opposite to those required to be a good citizen.

There is some good news in this, at least if you believe that social mobility is a good thing (and I certainly do). Most of these children are from affluent, highly-educated families. If by dint of their upbringing they turn out, on average, to be as dependent and petulant as is the likely consequence of this much parental intervention, they will not be successful and will be displaced in the upper quintile by the children whose parents actually taught them to be adults.

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28 July, 2008

Richard Brodhead: The Duke of Disdain

Some background on one of the men behind the near-lynching of the three innocent Duke university lacrosse players. Richard Brodhead was President of Duke at the time. He spoke and acted precipitously against the players, presuming their guilt before they had a chance to defend themselves in court . The account below is by famous Melville scholar Hershel Parker. Parker shows that Brodhead was a mainstream product of the politically correct culture that pervades American universities and that the lacrosse players were not the first who were victimized by Brodhead's disregard for truth and justice. Brodhead is still President at Duke, despite compensation to the players costing Duke heaps -- said by some to be $18 million. Duke obviously considers his behavior to be satisfactory

History is replete with records of those in high office who display a haughty contempt toward folk of a lower standing, but in the twenty-first century a reservoir of disdain is not what you expect in an American university dean or president. Yet Richard H. Brodhead as Dean of Yale College and after 2004 as President of Duke University has repeatedly allowed disdain to color both his writings and his treatment of living human beings. In the years after 23 June 2002, when he defamed me as a scholar while obliterating all record of my hard-working mentors and other scholars in his New York TIMES review of the second volume of my biography of Melville, I have become something of an authority on Brodhead's disdain.

Perhaps the best way of seeing Brodhead's habitual disdain in its unforced, free-flowing form is to look at it when it is not directed at living persons such as the Yale instructor James Van de Velde, me and my older colleagues, or Duke lacrosse players and their families and the lacrosse coach. I point first to Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne (1986), where the reader trips hard against this remarkably invidious and quite gratuitous comment: "Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a once-admired poet more forgotten now than even the word 'limbo' can suggest, found his poetical vocation while reading Longfellow." As someone who knows first hand just how much pain Brodhead's snide innuendo can inflict, I wince at the disdain in this sentence as I retype it. Poor Aldrich! Not even lying in limbo--still more forgotten than that! Yes, popular writers fall out of favor, and may become neglected, but here Brodhead's elitist contempt is grotesquely misapplied.

How misapplied? Brodhead is egregiously slurring a man he should have been studying. While preparing a book called The School of Hawthorne a genuine scholar at Yale (since 1953 something of an oxymoron) would have inched down the aisles of the Sterling Memorial Library and compulsively read old novels. A scholar would have seized on that very Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Stillwater Tragedy. Aldrich, a proud member of the school of Hawthorne, opens The Stillwater Tragedy with a passage written in loving homage to Hawthorne's set piece in The House of the Seven Gables on the passage of a night and morning while a corpse awaits discovery. Aldrich and other writers lost beyond limbo in Brodhead's opinion (writers including Harriet Beecher Stowe in her remarkable New England novels) ought to have been given at least a few pages in any book entitled The School of Hawthorne. Ignorance and arrogance compound the foulness of Brodhead's habitual disdain. It's not smart to make fun of someone you ought to have recognized as highly relevant to your survey of Hawthorne's possible influence on several dead white men.

Disdain was at work in Brodhead's treatment of the Yale instructor James Van de Velde who had the misfortune to be a teacher of a student who was murdered. In an article on 6 June 2006 Michael Rubin explained: "On December 4, 1998, senior Suzanne Jovin was found stabbed to death and left at an intersection in a neighborhood adjacent to the Yale campus which housed many Yale professors and graduate students." Brodhead, acting for Yale, was obsessed with avoiding adverse publicity. Rubin continued, "When Jovin was murdered, justice took a backseat to damage control. Within days New Haven police and Yale officials publicly fingered political scientist James Van de Velde, Jovin's senior essay adviser." As Rubin explains, "Yale administrators did not care that there was neither evidence nor motive linking Van de Velde to Jovin. Her body had been found a half-mile from his house. Just as at Duke, Brodhead spoke eloquently about the principles of due process, but moved to subvert it. Citing the New Haven Police Department's naming of Van de Velde among 'a pool of suspects,' Brodhead cancelled Van de Velde's spring-term lecture, explaining that 'the cancellation of the course doesn't follow from a judgment or a prejudgment of his hypothetical involvement in the Jovin case.' As at Duke, Brodhead insisted that due process would prevail. Despite Van de Velde's stellar student reviews and distinguished record, Brodhead then let his contract lapse. Van de Velde left New Haven, his career in shambles."

Brodhead himself was an eminently safe man, hitherto almost untested, having been an undergraduate at Yale, graduate student at Yale, assistant professor at Yale, and successively promoted until he became Dean of Yale College. What's wrong with that? In Brodhead's case, as far as academic work goes, it meant that he never learned how to learn to do research. He learned how to be a critic, not how to be a scholar, a person who actively adds to knowledge. The New Criticism had been dominant at Yale since 1953, when Charles Feidelson replaced Stanley T. Williams, the teacher of the great Melville graduate students of the 1940s. After Feidelson, scholarly research all but died at Yale, where one critical dissertation after another was written and accepted in partial fulfillment of the PhD degree. The original New Critics of the 1940s, including some who taught at Yale, had been trained as scholars, but the Yale English Department became a place where those who had never done scholarly research taught those who would never do scholarly research, and would be distrustful and hostile toward it. Even aside from the disaster of having each Yale generation farther and farther from real scholarly work, it's always bad for a school to hire its own, bad for the department and the one who is hired. All his academic life Brodhead had been the wealthy curled darling of Yale (to allude to one of Brodhead's favorite plays, Othello).

Van de Velde was a non-ideologue with world-experience who was intruding upon safe, conventional Yale behavior. As Rubin says, Van de Velde had been "a former White House appointee under George H. W. Bush and a member of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves." He did not fit in: "Most Yale professors lean to the left of the student body; few in the political-science and international-relations departments have real-world experience. Van de Velde was the subject of personal jealousy and political animosity. Many faculty members -- including Brodhead -- looked askance at his desire to emphasize practical policymaking over theory." In the American Spectator for 19 June 2006 Clinton W. Taylor, one of Van de Velde's students at Yale, supplemented Rubin's account.

Indeed, Van de Velde was a forceful, splendid misfit at Yale, "certainly an anomaly." Van de Velde was no cosseted, genteel junior appointee such as Brodhead had been in the 1970s. His bearing was military, Taylor specified, as befitted a lieutenant commander in Naval Intelligence. According to rumormill blogger Patriotlad (9 August 2001), Van de Velde's "schedule was all work, study, and working out." Taylor specified that Van de Velde was "in good shape and knew martial arts." He was a marathon runner, according to the New York TIMES (19 June 2001), and not a slacker: 4 hours 10 minutes in a San Diego race. Van de Velde knew how to take care of himself physically, that's clear, but he was not equipped to deal with a dean who (as Rubin says) was eager to allow "public relations to trump principle."

Now there is news. Here is Rubin again 10 December 2007 in "Richard Brodhead's Second Chance?" (National Review Online): "Years before the Duke lacrosse case, while still dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead punished Yale lecturer James Van de Velde for a crime, it turns out, he could not have committed (the DNA evidence exonerated him). Absent the hard work of a figure like KC Johnson, Brodhead never bothered to apologize to a man whose career he ruined for the sake of short-term public relations. Now it seems an independent commission will start from scratch its investigation of the Jovin murder at Yale. As the Yale case proceeds, it will be interesting to see whether Brodhead has learned any lessons from his Duke fiasco. He might begin with a formal, public apology to James Van de Velde." Brodhead, we know, is not good at apology. When he finally makes an attempt at one we see that he thinks he needs a committee to tell him, next time, what he might say. Anyone not on that Duke committee could tell him he might be better off not to act with instinctive disdain when human lives are involved. In a 12 December 2007 article in the YALE DAILY NEWS Rachel Boyd wrote about a new Jovin Investigation Team "charged with solving the Yale senior's murder by bringing fresh eyes to a crime that may have needed a more thorough effort from the start." Boyd dropped in the mention of an extremely important development: "And just yesterday [11 December 2007] after more than a year of judicial silence, a federal judge resurrented Van de Velde's claims against Yale and the New Haven Police Department." This story is not over.

Brodhead's trashing of Van de Velde's reputation was followed in 2002 by his trashing of mine in the Times review already cited. Not knowing how to do archival research, he regarded me as maniacal, comparing my supposed singlemindedness to that of crazy Captain Ahab, calling me a "demon researcher," and then explaining that I merely surmised some of the events I said really happened. I had surmised that Melville completed a prose book in 1853 and had been the only one ever to surmise that Melville completed a book of poetry in 1860. Plainly, I had devoted years of work to a flawed project and could be wondered at but not trusted. Because both books have been lost, they never existed.

The truth, of course, was that I built in the first case, the novel Melville tried to get Hawthorne to write, on work done by Yale scholars of the great 1940s crew, starting with Hayford, who in 1946 showed that Melville had worked on a book in early 1853, continuing with Davis and Gilman, who in the LETTERS (1960--a book cited by Brodhead in his own book on Hawthorne and Melville) showed that Melville had finished the book, and going on with Sealts, who in 1987 mustered more precise dates for Melville's bringing the completed manuscript to New York to offer to the Harpers. Since 1960, everyone knew that Melville had finished a prose book in 1853. In 1987 I discovered the title, The Isle of the Cross, and the day of completion (or something very close to it), 22 May 1853. In 1990 I had published an article about it in the then-respectable Duke journal, AMERICAN LITERATURE. There was absolutely no doubt in the minds of the great living Melville scholars in 1987 or thereafter, as long as they lived, that I had put a copestone on the monument they had been erecting since the 1940s.

Brodhead's denial of POEMS (1860) is even weirder to try to explain, since everyone had known about it since 1922 and since Melville's memo to his brother Allan on the publication of his verses had been printed then and reprinted often, as in LETTERS (1960) and CORRESPONDENCE (1993). Is it credible that anyone could have published on Melville and been called a "Melville scholar" and not know about POEMS? Not known that the manuscript had been turned down by at least two publishers? The evidence was quoted right there in the biography Brodhead was reviewing. I think that the only way of understanding what Brodhead did in his review of my biography is to recognize in him a pervasive, corrosive character flaw, a disdain for people unlike him which drives him to hasty wrong judgments. In his experience, his own kind had rallied behind him, closing ranks against Van de Velde. He would be safe in smearing me, knowing that no one living had done the sort of archival work I had done in my attempt to carry on the work of Hayford, Sealts, and the great Jay Leyda, all dead by 2002.

Brodhead's disdain of real scholarship as opposed to criticism may have been mingled with suppressed jealousy. Who knows? It is not the sort of thing that can be explained rationally. What kind of person spreads falsehoods that could be challenged the next day? I didn't challenge, thinking that the New York TIMES would never make an apology. In fact, Brodhead was home free: Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz, two other critics who had never done archival research on Melville, repeated his accusations that I had made up the two lost books Melville wrote.

Brodhead was not only trashing me. He was denying that Hayford, Davis and Gilman, and Sealts ever lived and labored. He was denying that Meade Minnigerode, Willard Thorp, Jay Leyda, and many others ever lived and labored. All of these were worthy men and some of them were very great scholars: Jay Leyda was magnificent. All the toil that had gone into trying to describe Melville's career was obliterated in Brodhead's saying that I merely surmised what generations of scholars had been learning about. Brodhead disdained what he was not trained to do and not equipped to do. He should have told the New York TIMES BOOK REVIEW editor that he was not equipped to review a scholarly biography. But Brodhead does not know when to admit that he is not qualified for a job. Otherwise he would not have accepted the presidency of Duke University.

"Richard Brodhead's Test of Courage" is the title of Chapter 10 in Stuart Taylor, Jr., and KC Johnson's remarkable book, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND THE SHAMEFUL INJUSTICES OF THE DUKE LACROSSE RAPE CASE (2007). Brodhead's casual trashing of Van de Velde's reputation in 1998 and his casual trashing of my reputation in 2002 was followed in 2006 by his trashing of the reputations of Michael Pressler, the lacrosse coach, and lacrosse players at Duke. Taylor and Johnson say of Pressler on 144: "It had not yet really hit the coach that his career and reputation had been ravaged--not for anything he had done wrong, but to suit the agendas of others." Brodhead distinguished himself by rushing to judgment, once again, and to the wrong judgment. NEWSWEEK on 10 September 2007 linked Brodhead as equal partner with the corrupt and now disbarred District Attorney: "Brodhead and Nifong had an almost willful disregard for the facts." The title of the article? "A Rush to Judgment."

Brodhead's disdain for the students is clear in UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT p. 92, where Taylor and Johnson describe the audience Brodhead granted to the four team captains and two Duke representatives as well as the lawyer Robert Ekstrand: "The captains decided beforehand that Dave Evans, the most eloquent among them, would handle most of the talking. Evans spoke with emotion during the meeting about how much Duke meant to him and how badly he felt that the party had caused so many people so much pain. [Faculty representative Kathleen] Smith was crying. Brodhead's eyes filled with tears. He said the captains should think of how difficult it had been for him. They needed to be held accountable for their actions, which had put him in a terrible situation." Taylor and Johnson quote the lawyer: "Ekstrand felt his blood starting to boil. Here, he thought, is a comfortable university president wallowing in self-pity in front of four students who are in grave danger of being falsely indicted on charges of gang rape, punishable by decades in prison."

Brodhead, having shed hot tears of self-pity, went on to trash of the reputations of the lacrosse players in the notorious 20 April 2006 comment to the Durham Chamber of Commerce: "If our students did what is alleged it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn't do it, whatever they did was bad enough." They were bad actors. Some lacrosse players had hired a stripper to dance for them and some lacrosse players had drunk some alcohol. They all played a contact sport--a game that required a helmet. They were like a swarm of muscular younger Van de Veldes! They were all fit objects of general disdain and the worst culprits among them should have faced trial and punishment. Trustee Steel, the man who hired Brodhead, was content that three lacrosse players would be sentenced to jail for two or three decades since if they were proved innocent they would win their freedom on appeal. Rather than trying to protect Duke students from false accusations and false prosecution, Brodhead handed them over to the wolves, as he had tossed Van de Velde to the New Haven wolves.

One of the great news stories of the twenty-first century is the way a handful (and then a hoard) of Internet bloggers looked at the evidence, saw that it exonerated the lacrosse players, and forced it on the attention of the nation. A sad undercurrent in it is the depiction of the character of Richard Brodhead, the man who never knew how to say he was not equipped to take a job offered him, a man when he had a chance to do right instead suffered what Taylor and Johnson call "a moral meltdown" (UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT, p. 137).

Now the Daniel Blue Committee has praised Brodhead's leadership. The Duke of Disdain has free rein to rush to new judgments and trash reputations anew. Who will be the next victim of his "pride, haughtiness, opinion, and disdain"? That's 1 Henry the Fourth. Perhaps now we should look beyond Shakespeare to Jeremiah 48:29 on "loftiness," "arrogancy," "pride," and "the haughtiness of his heart." We have to fear that whatever disdainful judgment Brodhead next rushes to will be "bad enough" to savage a reputation or two.

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Mississippi Looks to Raise Bar in Classroom

State Superintendent of Education Dr. Hank Bounds says it's not that Mississippi students aren't smart, it's that the bar is set too low. So with the new school year, the department of education is looking to raise student achievement and not only increase test scores. But lift up the entire state with them. "We're on too many lists where we're number 50 and we're also on too many lists where we're number one and we shouldn't be," said Dr. Bounds.

So Dr. Hank Bound and the state department of education will take a drastic step to changing that. They'll raise expectations in the classroom which they believe will increase student achievement. "Every time we've raised the bar in the past the students have met that challenge," said Brad Johns, high school math teacher.

McLaurin High School math teacher, Brad Johns helped create the new curriculum for the state. Johns and Hattiesburg schools superintendent, Dr. Annie Wimbish see students and teachers meeting this challenge. Classroom instruction will no longer be basic recall of information, but using the information to problem solve. "And we haven't always been integrating that type of instruction in our courses," said Dr. Wimbish.

The new test was taken this past spring. The results were down from previous years. The majority of students showed either basic or proficient knowledge of language arts and math. Only two thirds of students passed the English two and Algebra I tests. The numbers are about what state educators expected. "Without pain there is no gain and with this pain we will get great gain in Mississippi," said Blake Wilson, President, MS Economic Council.

Bounds says the gains will be fewer drop outs, career and college ready students, and better results on national exams. "We will be uncomfortable for a while but that's okay... we're going to figure out how to meet the needs of boys and girls," said Dr. Bounds.

The state department of education says the first year of a new standardized tests usually sees the lowest results. The goal of the new testing is to reach the national average by 2013.

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Australian teachers strike over decaying government houses

The Torres Strait is a long way from the State capital and most of the people there are black, so who cares? -- apparently. Houses are provided by the State government to teachers who are sent to teach in remote areas

Teachers living in leaking, mouldy and flea-infested houses could be pulled out of their schools for their own safety if a strike in the Torres Strait, Cape and Gulf scheduled to take place over the next two weeks is unsuccessful. Around 500 teachers from 28 schools will be involved in the 24-hour stop-work action to protest against the State Government's chronic neglect of teacher housing in remote areas.

Hundreds of reports of leaking roofs, electrical faults and mouldy living conditions have reached the Queensland Teachers' Union and it is a problem which president Steve Ryan said must be addressed swiftly and properly. "We've literally got teachers living in houses that are falling down, where doors are missing and broken, termites are taking over and up to one third of air-conditioning units are broken," Mr Ryan said. "If we cannot get the funds required to fix these uninhabitable properties - which the Auditor-General estimated to be around $37.2million - then we will be forced to take more drastic action and withdraw teachers from their schools. "Obviously this will adversely affect students and our teachers do not take these actions lightly, so this shows how huge the problem is."

Mr Ryan said he had hoped one-hour stop-work meetings held in April would force the state government to take notice of the situation but that the 2008/2009 Budget announced in June failed to deliver the funding levels required to provide adequate housing, falling short by $20.2million. "We cannot wait until next year's budget to get this funding. There is such a backlog of work to be carried out that by then these houses will have fallen down," Mr Ryan said. "Our plan is that the government takes this strike seriously and sees some sense."

A report by the Auditor-General's found that the sub-standard living conditions directly resulted in difficulties securing and retaining staff, consequently "affecting the ability to provide services in remote and regional areas".

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27 July, 2008

Judge says Texas High schools must teach in Spanish

A federal judge on Friday gave the state of Texas until the end of January to come up with a plan to improve education programs for secondary school students with limited proficiency in English, criticizing the state education agency for "failing to ensure equal education opportunities in all schools." U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice said the Texas Education Agency is violating the civil rights of Spanish-speaking students under the federal Equal Education Opportunity Act. Furthermore, the state's monitoring of programs for students with limited English-language skills is "fatally flawed" because of unqualified monitors, undercounting of students with limited English proficiency and arbitrary standards, Justice said.

The 1981 Bilingual and Special Education Programs Act, a measure passed by the Texas Legislature 27 years ago that staved off court action addressing discrimination in Texas schools, has not improved the schooling of secondary students with limited English proficiency, Justice ruled.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization that helped litigate the case on behalf of other advocacy groups, said primarily Spanish-speaking students in Texas have higher dropout rates, lower graduation rates and lower achievement rates than their English-speaking counterparts. "The clear failure of secondary LEP students unquestionably demonstrates that, despite its efforts, TEA has not met its obligation to remedy the language deficiencies of Texas students," Justice wrote. "After a quarter century of sputtering implementation, defendants have failed to achieve results that demonstrate they are overcoming language barriers for secondary LEP students. Failed implementation cannot prolong the existence of a failed program in perpetuity."

The ruling gave the TEA until Jan. 31, 2009 to come up with plans to improve secondary school programs for students with limited English proficiency and the monitoring of those programs. Those plans must be implemented by the 2009-2010 school year. Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe declined to comment Friday night, saying she hadn't seen the ruling.

In a statement, MALDEF hailed the ruling as the "most comprehensive legal decision concerning the civil rights of English language learners in the last 25 years." Justice's ruling affects "every single high school in Texas," Luis Figueroa, a MALDEF attorney, told The Associated Press. "Every school district is going to have to realize the TEA is going to be looking at their accountability of English language learners." Justice did say in the ruling that the problems in secondary schools are not seen in the state's elementary school programs.

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Huge failure-rate of black males in Indianapolis Public Schools

19% graduated in 2005-06, report finds. The main fix being tried? Keep the dropouts in some sort of school no matter what

Superintendent Eugene White pledged to make IPS the nation's best urban school system by 2010, and a new study shows just how far behind the district was when he made that promise three years ago. The study, based on the 2005-06 school year, pegged the graduation rate for black males in Indianapolis Public Schools at 19 percent -- the lowest among 63 urban districts in the study. The rate for white males was also 19 percent, which was better than only Detroit. "This continues to emphasize what I've been trying to emphasize: the urgency of turning this district around as fast as possible," said White, who took the helm of the district in 2005. "I think we have the things in place now to do that."

IPS has introduced dropout prevention programs, sought to ease the transition into high school and avoided handing students permanent expulsions. The rates reflect IPS' concentration of poverty, a key predictor for dropping out. The rankings, compiled by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, include urban districts elsewhere that encompass much larger areas and include more wealthy students. Only about a quarter of public schoolchildren in Indianapolis attend IPS. And the district -- by big-city standards -- is not especially large, with 35,000 students, and shrinking. It is shrinking, in part, because parents increasingly are sending their children to charter schools. Others move from the district or, in affluent neighborhoods, send children to schools outside the district.

All of those factors can play a role in concentrating impoverished students in the district, children more likely to have parents with less education and without the means or flexible work schedules to be more involved in schools.

White cautioned that the statistical estimates in the report aren't as accurate as the method Indiana began using two years ago, which tracks individual students. He added that not all districts report graduation numbers the same way. A district spokeswoman said the 2005-06 graduation rates calculated by the district are nearly the same as those in the report. She said graduation rates appear to have increased in the past two years, but numbers were not immediately available. School Board President Mary E. Busch said it would surprise her if the district was the worst in the nation but said the 2005-06 school year was before the district's push to connect with students and require alternative schools rather than expulsions. "We're working hard to bring the graduation rates up," she said. "We have special initiatives and strategies in place to truly address the situation. We're not pleased with where we are."

White's administration has placed great stock in the new initiatives. Last year, he launched 21 alternative schools, some of which helped bring dropouts back into school while others provided classes for students who otherwise would be suspended or expelled. This school year, all students two or more grades behind in elementary and middle school will be assigned to a special program with intensive math and reading instruction and a network of support staff.

Arlington High School and Marshall Middle School have been converted to "community high schools" and are designed to prevent students from dropping out when they can't make the transition to high school. An initiative launched by the Chamber of Commerce in June will pair mentors from the business community with hundreds of IPS students. Those initiatives are a start, but the community lacks the leadership at its highest levels needed to resolve the problem, said Mark A. Russell, director of education at the Indianapolis Urban League. "There is not a person in the state Department of Education charged specifically with addressing the achievement gap between blacks and whites. Does the IPS board have a committee on it?" he asked. "If we're wanting to save these children, where is the effort?"

At Marshall Community High School, the only IPS high school in session Friday, students said it didn't surprise them to learn IPS was at the bottom of the list nationally. Adrian Taylor, a black freshman, said he knows many people who have dropped out of school. He puts much blame on teachers who don't seem to care. "I think it's the students' fault, but most of it has to do with the teachers," he said, adding that he won't drop out and aspires to attend Harvard University.

Another freshman, Dominique Wright, put more of the blame on his peers. "We need to step up our game," he said. The Rev. Reginald B. Fletcher, pastor at Living Word Baptist Church and a high school teacher, said the programs White has put in place have started the community down that path. But the issues are too deep for a school district alone to combat, he said. Absentee parents and teenage pregnancies continue the cycle of low educational achievement and poor parental guidance. That, he said, feeds violence on the scale such as the city has seen this month. "It just creates a cesspool in terms of a lack of hope and an apathy that sets in," Fletcher said. "We have to really rally together as a community where we come together and not live in our isolated homes." [Good luck with that!]

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26 July, 2008

Deprived white boys inspired by action stories, British regulator says

Goody-goody feminist pap useless

White boys from deprived backgrounds need action-packed stories about danger or sport to inspire them in lessons, Ofsted, the education regulator, said yesterday. They do worse at school than any other group, which has increased concerns that white, working-class boys are becoming an educational underclass.

Advice on how schools should engage with such pupils was published yesterday by Ofsted after it looked at 20 schools where white boys from low income families had done comparatively well. It recommended rigorous monitoring but also teaching boys how to communicate and express emotions. They needed active involvement in lessons, explicit targets to work towards and approachable teachers, the report said. "In the most successful literacy activities, teachers took care to choose texts that interested the boys," Ofsted said. "These tended to focus on action-packed narratives which emphasised sporting prowess, courageous activities in the face of danger and situations where characters had to overcome challenges."

The report said schools that successfully raised the attainment of white boys from poor backgrounds shared features including developing boys' organisational skills, emphasising the importance of perseverance, a curriculum structured around individual needs and listening to pupils' views.

Emotional support was also important, with one school appointing teaching assistants who kept a "mood watch" on the most vulnerable pupils. Another school had success with boys after asking a group that was being rewarded with cakes for doing well why it was predominantly made up of girls. One girl said: "It's not that boys are not clever. They mostly are, but they need quick results. You just have to be showing them the cakes."

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Australia: Men too afraid to teach

WHERE have all the male school teachers gone? Figures obtained by The Bulletin reveal there has been a consistent decline in male teachers across the Gold Coast region, with females outnumbering males by almost four to one in the classroom. Poor salary and a negative perception of the industry has been blamed for the drop in the number of males taking up teaching.

Since 2003, there has been nearly a 2 per cent decrease in the number of full-time male state school teachers -- from 29.1 per cent to 27.2 per cent. But figures reveal males still dominate the hierarchy in teaching with just 53 female state school principals in the south coast region compared with 80 males.

Queensland Teachers Union President Steve Ryan highlighted two main reasons for the dearth of male teachers. "The level of salary to attract particularly males to the teaching workforce is very low," he said. "Males tend to look at engineering and computer work because there is more money." Mr Ryan said the salary for a beginner teacher was about $48,000 and ranged up to $72,000 for senior teachers.

"Then you've got a principal of large school of about 1000 kids who would be on something like $100,000 with probably more than 150 staff. "The thing is, if you were running a company of that size you'd be on much more."

Mr Ryan said the other issue was that male teachers felt 'very vulnerable'. "The ongoing negative reports and emphasis on pedophiles and sexual assaults gives the job a bad name," he said. "For males there's a problem if a little Grade 1 kid comes up and grabs them on the leg. "It's got to be about changing the attractiveness of the profession and the perception, because right now people think you can't be a male in the teaching profession because allegations can be made against you."

Mr Ryan said increases in the quality of people entering the teaching profession was an essential step to changing the industry's image. "We'd like to see more of the higher OP people going through because it's important to have good quality teachers," he said. "We need to have this perception that this is a rewarding career."

An Education Queensland spokeswoman said the department actively promoted teaching, particularly for primary schools where there were fewer male teachers. "Positive male teacher role models are very important, both in terms of educational and social impacts and in demonstrating to our students that teaching is a vital and rewarding profession," she said. "The issue of male teachers requires particular attention and is one of the challenges facing the department."

Education Queensland said the proportion of male primary school teachers was about 18 per cent, about 40 per cent at secondary schools and 19 per cent in special education. The gender breakdown of staff in all of the classified teaching positions in the south coast region including principals, deputy principals, heads of department, heads of special education services and heads of curriculum is 440 female compared to 267 male.

In a bid to increase male teacher numbers, the department instigated a Male Teachers' Strategy which it conducted between 2002 and 2005. The department said Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre data indicated an improvement in the number of males seeking teaching qualifications. "Since 2002, the number of males enrolling in an education course has increased significantly by 365 (49.8 per cent)," said the spokeswoman. But local universities enrolments do not reflect this figure. Bond University reported nine males and 31 females were currently enrolled in education courses. At Griffith University there are 1082 males out of 4205 students studying education this year.

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25 July, 2008

British State schools join the revolt against 'too easy' High School exams

Fifteen schools yesterday became the first state schools to ditch A-levels for a more traditional rival. A total of 50 schools – including 15 state-maintained schools and colleges – will offer pupils the new Cambridge Pre-U, designed along the lines of the pre-coursework A-levels with tougher essay-style questions, when it becomes available for the first time in September.

The new exam poses a threat to the Government's A-level reforms, which will see the introduction of an A* grade for the first time for students starting their course in September. Supporters of Pre-U claim the reforms are "too little, too late".

One school, King Edward VI grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, a 500-pupil boys' school, will abandon A-level English on the ground that it no longer prepares pupils for university study, according to its headteacher, Tim Moore-Bridger. The school may also switch pupils to Pre-U in German and French. "I have for a long time been dissatisfied with the present structure of A-levels," he said. "I am sure what we're giving pupils at the moment [with A-levels] is not good preparation for university success – in particular the fact that they can go up without having written an essay to speak of." He said that the new modern languages syllabus for A-levels – also to be introduced in September – had cut out the study of literature to concentrate on speaking and listening skills. "New A-levels have pretty well removed literature totally from modern languages," he added.

Mr Moore-Bridger said other subjects could follow suit, with maths next in line: "Who knows? If it is successful, we could be all Pre-U in five to 10 years." He said he disliked the A-levels' "retake mentality" whereby pupils could sit a module again if they failed to make their required grade the first time.

Coloma Convent Girls' School in Croydon, south London – a 1,050-pupil Catholic school, is to become the first comprehensive to switch from A-level to Pre U, offering a Pre-U in business management. Andrew Corish, its headteacher, believes the new exam will offer pupils a better opportunity to develop a business plan than the A-level. He said A-levels did not allow pupils to develop thinking skills.

The Pre-U, devised by University of Cambridge International Examinations, includes three-hour essay-style questions. A-level questions tend to give pupils 15 minutes to develop an answer. The Pre-U will have nine different grades – including three distinctions (D1, D2 and D3) which would roughly be the equivalent of an A-grade pass in A-level – now awarded to one in four scripts. Even with the introduction of the A* grade, it would still offer university admissions tutors a better way to distinguish between high-flying candidates.

It has already won accreditation from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the Government's exams watchdog, which means schools can receive government funding to offer it, and the University and College Admissions Service is expected to rank it alongside A-levels.

This autumn the Government is launching specialist diplomas in five subjects, and some schools are offering the International Baccalaureate. The Government announced yesterday that it is drawing up proposals to rank schools on their pupils' well-being. In evidence to the Commons Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families, it agreed that too much emphasis was being placed on test or exam results in ranking schools. The ranking for pupil well-being will take account of how much sport is played and whether children are healthy or overweight.

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Report: US behind in doubling science grads

A high-profile push by business groups to double the number of U.S. bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States in science, math, and engineering by 2015 is falling way behind target, a new report says. In 2005, 15 prominent business groups warned that a lack of expert workers and teachers posed a threat to U.S. competitiveness and said the country would need 400,000 new graduates in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields by 2015.

In an update published July 15, the group reports the number of degrees in those fields rose slightly earlier in the decade, citing figures from the years after 2001 that have become available since the first report was published. But the number of degrees has since flattened out at around 225,000 per year.

The coalition, representing groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Defense Industrial Association, said there has been substantial bipartisan support in Washington for boosting science training, including passage last year of the "America Competes Act," which promotes math and science.

But Susan Traiman, director of education and work force policy for the Business Roundtable, an organization of corporate CEOs, said there's been insufficient follow-through with funding to support the programs. Other countries, she said, are doing more to shift incentives toward science training. "The concern that CEOs have is if we wait for a Sputnik-like event, it's very hard to turn around and get moving on the kind of timeline we would need," said Traiman, referring to the Soviet Union's launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957, which prompted a massive U.S. commitment to science investment. "It still takes a minimum of 17 years to produce an engineer, if you consider K-12 plus four years of colleges," she said.

Some critics have called concerns from business about the number of science graduates overblown and self-serving. They have argued that if there really were a pent-up demand for scientists, more students would naturally move toward those fields without massive incentives from taxpayers. But William Green, CEO and chairman of Accenture, a giant global consulting company, called such criticisms "nonsense," adding the whole country benefits from competitive companies. "This is on the top three CEO agendas of every company I know," Green told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Green said Accenture, which will hire about 58,000 people worldwide this year, will spend $780 million on training. "I feel like I can step up to the table and say I'm doing my part. Other companies are doing the same thing," Green said. "What I'm suggesting is I really could use more raw material. That's about having federal leadership." Elsewhere in the world, he sees "a laser focus," both in the public and private sectors, on developing work forces for competitive companies.

The report, by the group Tapping America's Potential, which has grown to represent 16 business groups, also argues that the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform has hurt U.S. competitiveness by making it difficult to retain high-skill workers who study at American universities.

Although there appears to be, if anything, a surplus in the job market of scientists with doctoral degrees, the case for boosting bachelor's degrees is stronger--especially for people who go into teaching, where teachers who have college-level subject training are generally more effective.

Last week, the National Research Council--a group that provides policy advice under a congressional charter--issued a report calling for more support for professional master's degrees programs. The idea would be to provide advanced training to more people in fields such as chemistry and biology, which require less time and money than doctoral degrees.

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24 July, 2008

Why do we allow a school for scoundrels?

Despite a report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Va., has continued to use textbooks that teach hatred of everyone not of their specific brand of faith, the U.S. State Department has yet to act to close down the school. Officials of the academy, which has about 1,000 students in pre-kindergarten through grade 12, promised to excise passages in the textbooks that disparage Jews and Christians, but according to an examination by the Washington Post for the 2006-07 school year, though "much of the controversial material had been removed, at least one book still contained passages that extolled jihad and martyrdom, called for victory over one's enemies and said the killing of adulterers and apostates was 'justified.' " Once again, Islamic Saudi Academy officials have promised to clean up the text.

There are at least two questions that should be asked. One: Are they telling us the truth this time? Probably not. Two: Why do we allow such schools in our country when nothing close to a Christian, Jewish or even secular school would be permitted in Saudi Arabia, whose government specifically treats as contraband any religious text other than the Koran and prohibits even private worship of any God but Allah? Unfortunately, such schools and hate material are not limited to the United States. According to Andrew Cochran, writing on the blog counterrorism.org, "it appears to be more of a systemic effort by numerous Muslim educators worldwide to brainwash their children.

Textbooks used in Iran refer to the United States as the "Great Satan" and to Israel as "the regime that occupies Jerusalem," according to a study released in February by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace. In a separate statement, the co-authors write, "The books reveal an uncompromisingly hostile attitude towards the West, especially the United States and Israel. In fact, the curriculum's declared goal is to prepare the students for a global struggle against the West which bears alarming Messianic-like features to the point of self-destruction."

This isn't the first time the Saudis have been discovered brainwashing Muslim youth, writes Cochran: "Last year, Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom released a report analyzing Saudi Ministry of Education textbooks in use for elementary and secondary students. The authors found that the books "(c)ommand Muslims to 'hate' Christians, Jews, 'polytheists' and other 'unbelievers,' including non-Wahhabi Muslims, though, incongruously, not to treat them 'unjustly' ... teach that 'Jews and the Christians are enemies of the (Muslim) believers' and that 'the clash' between the two realms is perpetual" and "instruct that 'fighting between Muslims and Jews will continue until Judgment Day, and that the Muslims are promised victory over the Jews in the end.' "

The Center for Islamic Pluralism (www.islamicpluralism.org), a Web site that bills itself as a voice of moderate Islam, quotes David D. Aufhauser, a former Treasury Department general counsel, who told a Senate committee four years ago that estimates of Saudi spending on these schools worldwide are "north of $75 billion." The Center says that the money financed construction of thousands of mosques, schools and Islamic centers, the employment of at least 9,000 proselytizers and the printing of millions of books of religious instruction. In 2006, the noted Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis, called Wahhabism, the Saudi brand of Islam, "the most radical, the most violent, the most extreme and fanatical version of Islam."

Why should a school funded and controlled by the Saudi government be expected to modify its beliefs to accommodate Western, Jewish and Christian sensibilities, unless it might make us lower our guard? The Center for Islamic Pluralism says Saudi Arabia has a "pervasive influence on Islamic education in the United States (that) has led to the development of a new breed of American: the jihadist."

The $2.2 million lease with Fairfax County, Va., which allows the school to operate, at least through June 2009, permits county officials to terminate the lease if the county board of supervisors determine it necessary for public "health, safety and welfare." One would be hard-pressed to find a greater threat to public health, safety and welfare than this training ground for a new generation of jihadists. The State Department isn't known for having a spine in such things. Does Fairfax County, or will it pretend it can take Saudi money without suffering consequences?

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Lessons from Britain's Primary school marking meltdown

Hopelessly inaccurate marking of final grade-school exams has further undermined confidence in a British State school education

And so, a week after finding out that private school fees have rocketed, we continue with the SATs debacle. Is it really any any surprise at all that so many parents would be keen to leave the state sector if only they could afford it? Private schools, after all, can choose not to send their national curriculum tests to be externally marked and have largely escaped the whole depressing experience. The rest of us can only worry that our children are being marked wrongly, and that it will be difficult to properly measure their progression. If we care about the bigger picture (which hopefully many of us do), then our children's schools may also be wrongly penalised in league tables.

Just to add to the whole experience, we're now told that millions of 11-year-olds may end up sitting new tests when they start secondary school. Many headteachers are apparently so unwilling to trust the current system of testing, they think they have to find out for themselves.

Where does this leave us? Firstly - and most straightforwardly - it shows us that ETS (the firm marking the tests) should be removed. Secondly it leaves a huge, huge mess, with so many re-marks inevitably demanded, that an already shaky system can only collapse further. Thirdly, it seems to leave us, after all that stress and pressure, with tests that are of little use. But there are other knock-on effects too, and in some ways they are more serious.

They affect us, the parents and our children. Once in secondary school, children take exam after exam. Surely this fiasco can't have helped their confidence and faith in the examination system? Think about what they've learnt from this unhappy experience - that despite you putting in the work, results don't come when expected, and that when they do, they may be completely wrong.

But above all, I think this leaves parents depressed, disappointed and lacking in confidence. At the end of another school year, it's not just SATs that are at stake - it's the whole state school system.

People talk about going back to basics. Why don't we? Let's work out what tests we need and why. Then perhaps the Government should try to figure out whether the current system is working - if it's helping or hindering teachers and parents in their quest to give millions of children the best education possible. This whole saga is not just about some tests being marked late. It may have seemed that way at the beginning, but now that's definitely not true. State school education should not be seen as second rate, but it's increasingly looking that way. And all this from a government who seemed to genuinely want to make education a real priority.

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23 July, 2008

Good Scholarship Is Worth Honoring

The University of Chicago recently announced it will create a new institute to add to its outsized reputation in economics, business and law. This became controversial because of the name: the Milton Friedman Institute. Some 100 members of the faculty last month wrote the university president to object that this would imply that the Chicago faculty "lacks intellectual and ideological diversity."

Any implication that Chicago is staffed mostly by conservatives and libertarians is amusing -- after all, one Barack Obama taught law there until he became otherwise engaged. But the larger point is that what Friedman stood for, more than any particular idea, was the importance of doing the hard work of research. This sounds like a useful thing for academia in a world with hard policy problems to address, especially in this information-focused era when we expect right answers and wrong answers and to know which is which, preferably ahead of time.

Friedman, the onetime Keynesian whose research turned him into a monetarist, defined the Chicago School of Economics as "an approach that insists on the empirical testing of theoretical generalizations and that rejects alike facts without theory and theory without facts." What had been a softer social science could be transformed to more useful knowledge, whatever ideology might be supported by the outcome. "Chicago has regarded economics as a serious subject that has something to do with the real world," he wrote. "It has considered economics a positive science, a method of analysis which has broad applications to many topics."

The work of serious economics is hardly done, two years after Friedman's death. At the Chicago business school hangs a long row of framed photographs of the 25 Nobel Prize winners in economics with affiliations to the university -- with wall space ostentatiously left to make room for many more. Yet there's also the occasional humble nod that theory, such as the idea of man as rational economic actor, can overstate reality. A favorite campus joke describes an economics student running up to Friedman and fellow economist George Stigler to ask why they had stepped over a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. Their reply: "Don't be foolish. If there had been a $100 bill, someone would have picked it up."

One result of more than 50 years of the Chicago School is that we no longer believe there's any such thing as a free lunch, even though policy makers sometimes pretend there is. Indeed, wishful thinking upended from just this past week's headlines: Federal programs to subsidize homeownership do indeed eventually cause problems. Bailing out banks does create moral hazard and the likelihood of more bailouts. And as Friedman might have written on these pages were he still alive, going after short sellers or oil traders may be politically cathartic, but it also makes information more scarce and markets less efficient.

In other words, the Friedman approach is still needed. Despite this tempest on the Midway, U of C President Robert Zimmer shows no sign of slowing down the plan to fund the $200 million institute. It will focus on interdisciplinary analysis, with the topics to be studied including the Friedman favorite of monetary and tax policy ("This research features both the construction of dynamic stochastic equilibrium models rich enough to pose interesting macroeconomic policy problems and a formal statement of how the private sector interacts with a government"); the relationship between decentralized markets for credit and insurance; and "how the quality of government institutions influences economic growth." Note to well-heeled Wall Street Journal readers: Donors at the $1 million mark can join the Milton Friedman Society and attend workshops and seminars.

Perhaps because of its focus on empirical research, Chicago is unusual among campuses in trying to keep itself apolitical, preferring nonpartisan scholarship. When I was an undergraduate there in the late 1970s, there was a big to-do when a faculty award was given to Robert McNamara for his work on world peace. Liberals were outraged because of his role in the Vietnam War, and conservatives objected because of his work at the World Bank. The result was a consensus that nonscholars shouldn't get awards in the name of the university.

Even royals. The mayor of Chicago once asked the president of the university to give the visiting queen of England an honorary degree. "We're happy to consider it," was the reputed reply. "Please send copies of her scholarly work."

The lesson of the Friedman Institute, even before it opens, is that we could use more forceful theories from academia, so long as these are backed up by real research and not by posturing. This is how good scholarship is done by people of all political stripes and how useful information is created. More than 90% of the Chicago faculty did not sign the letter objecting to the institute, perhaps a broad recognition that everyone on campus, Friedman followers or not, should be free to choose.

Source




Catholic University of San Diego Changes Mind - Rejects Radical Non-Christian Feminist For Theology Chair

In a stunning reversal, the University of San Diego has informed LifeSiteNews that it has rejected the selection of a radical eco-feminist theologian to an honorary chair in its Catholic theology department. Just last week LifeSiteNews had reported that Professor Rosemary Radford Ruether, who calls God "Gaia," supports abortion and contraception, and a host of other views that put her in conflict with essential Catholic and Christian beliefs was going to assume USD's honorary Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology for the 2009-10 academic year. See here.

LifeSiteNews had contacted USD for comment about the reasons for Ruether's selection. Today USD Assistant Vice President for Public Affairs Pamela Gray Payton contacted LifeSiteNews via e-mail and stated that Ruether will not assume the honor. "Upon review of the specific purpose of the Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology, the University of San Diego is no longer considering the appointment of Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether as the 2009-2010 Chair holder," Payton informed LifeSiteNews. "The appointment of a chair for the 2009-2010 academic year will be announced in the future."

Ruether's selection to the Theology chair came just months after the Benedict XVI's April visit to the United States in which the pontiff told Catholic educators to be faithful to Church teachings and not to use academic freedom in a way that "would obstruct or even betray the university's identity and mission."

A USD press release had said Ruether is a "leading Church historian and pioneering figure in Christian feminist theology" and would be teaching one undergraduate course in the fall semester of 2009 and also deliver the annual Portman Lecture. LifeSiteNews reported the selection was an oddity since Ruether has a rather undisguised rejection of and antipathy toward Christianity, especially the Catholic Faith.

Ruether is also a member of the pro-abortion dissident group, Catholics for Choice, which has been condemned by the US Catholic bishops as "not a Catholic organization" and "an arm of the abortion lobby in the United States and throughout the world."

The removal of Ruether allows the USD to select a candidate that actually embraces the Catholic mission of the university - besides the core tenets of Christianity - and embodies the principles behind the establishment of the theology chair. When USD created the Portman Chair for its theology department in 2000, then-president Alice Hayes had stated, "It will be a strong and palpable symbol of the depth of the university's commitment to Catholic theology as an academic discipline and another sign of the Catholic character of the university."

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22 July, 2008

Renegade parents teach old math on the sly

Math Wars rage as traditional methods give way to concept-based math

On an occasional evening at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, N.Y., Victoria Morey has been known to sit down with her 9-year-old son and do something she's not supposed to. "I am a rebel," confesses this mother of two. And just what is this subversive act in which Morey engages - with a child, yet? Long division. Yes, Morey teaches her son, who'll enter fifth grade in the fall, how to divide the old-fashioned way - you know, with descending columns of numbers, subtracting all the way down. It's a formula that works, and she finds it quick, reliable, even soothing. So, she says, does her son.

But in his fourth-grade class, long division wasn't on the agenda. As many parents across the country know, this and some other familiar formulas have been supplanted, in an increasing number of schools, by concept-based curricula aiming to teach the ideas behind mathematics rather than rote procedures. They call it the Math Wars: The debate, at times acrimonious, over which way is best to teach kids math. In its most black-and-white form, it pits schools hoping to prepare kids for a new world against reluctant parents, who feel the traditional way is best and their kids are being shortchanged.

But there are lots of parents who fall into a grayer area: They're willing to accept that their kids are learning things differently. They just want to be able to help them with their homework. And very often, they can't. "Sometimes I'll meet up with another parent, and we'll say, 'What WAS that homework last night?" says Birgitta Stone, whose daughter, Gillian, is entering third grade in Ridgefield, Conn., next month. "Sometimes I can't even understand the instructions." Funny, perhaps, but also a little sad. "It's frustrating," says Stone. "You want to help them. And sometimes I can't help her at all." Still, Stone agrees that kids should be thinking differently about math. And so she doesn't interfere by teaching her kid the old ways. "I don't want to confuse her," she says.

Morey, on the other hand, feels no guilt. She says her son was relieved to learn long division. "He wants a quick and easy way to get the right answer," she says. "Luckily he had a fabulous teacher who said long division wasn't in her plan, but we were free to do what we wanted at home."

And as for the concepts-before-procedure argument, she quips: "Would you want to go to a doctor who's learned about the concepts but never done the surgery? Would you want your doctor to say I had the right IDEA when I removed your appendix, though I took out the wrong one?"

Such reasoning is not unfamiliar to Pat Cooney. As the math coordinator for six public schools in Ridgefield, which over the last two years have implemented the Growing in Math curriculum, she's seen a lot of angry parents. "I had one parent who was probably as angry as a parent could be," Cooney says. "I've had irate phone calls. Some think we're giving the kids misinformation. They think we're not doing our jobs."

One problem, Cooney says, is that parents remember math as offering only one way to solve a problem. "We're saying that there's more than one way," Cooney says. "The outcome will be the same, but how we get there will be different." Thus, when a parent is asked to multiply 88 by 5, we'll do it with pen and paper, multiplying 8 by 5 and carrying over the 4, etc. But a child today might reason that 5 is half of 10, and 88 times 10 is 880, so 88 times 5 is half of that, 440 - poof, no pen, no paper.

More here




Correct speech rediscovered in Britain

A British school has banned its pupils from using "street slang" as part of a strict behaviour policy which is transforming its exam results.

Pupils are not allowed to use the phrase "innit" or other examples of "playground patois" when talking to teachers. Formal language must be used at all times in communications with adults and pupils have been told that street slang should be "left at the school gates".

The measure, along with a strict uniform policy, is part of a tough stance on discipline at Manchester Academy, in the city's deprived Moss Side area, has restored order. Since the school became an academy in 2003, exam results have improved from about 10 per cent of pupils achieving five good GCSEs to 33 per cent and the proportion who leave without a job or college course to go to is down from 26 to 6 per cent.

"Language is really important and we have to make sure pupils realise that," said Kathy August, the head teacher. "You can get five A* to Cs in your exams but if you go to an interview and you can't shake hands, look someone in the eye and speak in the appropriate register, you are not going to get the job or place at university. It is hugely important. We have high expectations. It makes me angry when I see… pamphlets on drug education or anti-gang material. They are appalling. The way they are written suggests that if you are black and from a particular postcode you will only understand the message if it is presented in a certain informal way, in a "street" form. It enforces the stereotype and ends up glamorising what it is supposed to be preventing.

"There are 64 languages spoken at the school and 80 per cent of pupils are from ethnic minority backgrounds," she added. "We realised very early on that children were coming into the community and picking up the lingo that young people use and that the intonation and patterns of speech of formal language were lacking."

She said that the message had been drummed into pupils that street slang was "just not academy". Children are pulled up when using colloquialisms and told directly that it is unacceptable. "You have to be consistent. We make it clear in our tone of voice and with short imperatives that we are not happy. So it's not 'excuse me, do you mind not doing that, it's not very nice'. We say 'Stop. We don't do that. Thank you.'"

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21 July, 2008

The Declining Value of Your College Degree

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck. Just ask Bea Dewing. After she earned a bachelor's degree -- her second -- in computer science from Maryland's Frostburg State University in 1986, she enjoyed almost unbroken advances in wages, eventually earning $89,000 a year as a data modeler for Sprint Corp. in Lawrence, Kan. Then, in 2002, Sprint laid her off.

"I thought I might be looking a few weeks or months at the most," says Ms. Dewing, now 56 years old. Instead she spent the next six years in a career wilderness, starting an Internet cafe that didn't succeed, working temporary jobs and low-end positions in data processing, and fruitlessly responding to hundreds of job postings. The low point came around 2004 when a recruiter for Sprint -- now known as Sprint Nextel Corp. -- called seeking to fill a job similar to the one she lost two years earlier, but paying barely a third of her old salary.

In April, Ms. Dewing finally landed a job similar to her old one in the information technology department of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., where she relocated. She earns about 20% less than she did in 2002, adjusted for inflation, but considers herself fortunate, and wiser. A degree, she says, "isn't any big guarantee of employment, it's a basic requirement, a step you have to take to even be considered for many professional jobs."

For decades, the typical college graduate's wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn't grow, even among those who went to college. The government's statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor's degree, adjusted for inflation, didn't rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level.

College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only. What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.

To be sure, the average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed. Yet while that so-called college premium is up from 40% in 1979, it is little changed from 2001, according to data compiled by Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank

Most statistics he and other economists use don't track individual workers over time, but compare annual snapshots of the work force. That said, this trend doesn't appear due to an influx of lower-paid young workers or falling starting salaries; Mr. Bernstein says when differences in age, race, marital status and place of residence are accounted for, the trend remains the same.

A variety of economic forces are at work here. Globalization and technology have altered the types of skills that earn workers a premium wage; in many cases, those skills aren't learned in college classrooms. And compared with previous generations, today's college graduates are far more likely to be competing against educated immigrants and educated workers employed overseas.

The issue isn't a lack of economic growth, which was solid for most of the 2000s. Rather, it's that the fruits of growth are flowing largely to "a relatively small group of people who have a particular set of skills and assets that lots of other people don't," says Mr. Bernstein. And that "doesn't necessarily have that much to do with your education." In short, a college degree is often necessary, but not sufficient, to get a paycheck that beats inflation.

Economists chiefly cite globalization and technology, which have prompted employers to put the highest value on abstract skills possessed by a relatively small group, for this state of affairs. Harvard University economists Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin argue that in the 1990s, it became easier for firms to do overseas, or with computers at home, the work once done by "lower-end college graduates in middle management and certain professional positions." This depressed these workers' wages, but made college graduates whose work was more abstract and creative more productive, driving their salaries up.

Indeed, salaries have seen extraordinary growth among a small number of highly paid individuals in the financial sector -- such as fund management, investment banking and corporate law -- which, until the credit crisis hit a year ago, had benefited both from the buoyant financial environment and the globalization of finance, in which the U.S. remains a leader.

Richard Spitzer is one of those beneficiaries. He received his undergraduate degree in East Asian studies in 1995 from the College of William and Mary and graduated from Georgetown University's law school in 2001. The New York firm for which he works, now called Dewey & LeBoeuf, has a specialty in complex legal work for insurance companies. There, Mr. Spitzer has developed an expertise in "catastrophe bonds." An insurance company sells such bonds to investors and pays them interest, unless an earthquake, a hurricane or unexpected surge in deaths occurs.

Experts in these bonds are "probably a rarefied species -- there's only a few law firms that do them," says Mr. Spitzer, 35 years old. He typically spends two to four months on a single deal, ensuring that details like timing of payments or definition of the triggering event are precise enough to avoid disputes or default.

Mr. Spitzer's salary has doubled to $265,000 since joining in 2001, in line with salaries similar firms pay. But not all law graduates are so fortunate; many, especially those from less-prestigious schools, have far lower salaries and less job security. Similarly, some computer-science graduates strike it rich. But their skills are not as rare as they were in the early 1980s, when the discipline took off, and graduates today must contend with competition from hundreds of thousands of similarly qualified foreign workers in the U.S. or overseas.

That helps explain Ms. Dewing's experience. She was raised in a family that prized education. Both her parents went to college on the G.I. Bill, which pays tuition costs for servicemen and some dependents. Four of their six children earned college degrees. In 1979, she earned a bachelor's degree in government and politics from George Mason University in Virginia. Several years later, then a single mother, she decided to get a degree in computer science.

Her first job out of college was with the federal government, earning about $35,000 in today's dollars. "For 16 years I had no trouble at all finding jobs," she said. Earlier this decade she ended up at Sprint designing databases -- a specialty called "data modeling" that isn't widely taught in schools and usually requires hands-on experience.

In 2002 Sprint, reeling from the collapse of the telecommunications industry, initiated a wave of layoffs that eventually totaled 15,000 workers in 13 months, Ms. Dewing among them. She remained in the Kansas City area, posting her r‚sum‚ on job boards. When recruiters called, she would usually put her expected salary at something close to her old salary. As time went by without an offer she lowered it steadily, to $60,000. She found herself competing for jobs with employees of outsourcing firms brought over from India on temporary visas, such as the H-1B.

A few months ago, Ms. Dewing got a call from a recruiter calling on behalf of Wal-Mart. Company officials pressed her during her interview on how she had kept up her data-modeling ability during her six years away from the specialty. She noted that while at Sprint she had revived the Kansas City chapter of a data modelers' professional association and, long after being laid off, continued to attend its seminars where invited experts would describe the latest advances. She even cited her short-lived Internet caf‚ as evidence of how she could solve diverse problems.

When she landed the job, she says, "I felt, 'All right, I'm a professional again.'" Even so, Ms. Dewing has a newfound appreciation for how insecure any job can be and how little a college degree by itself stands for. "There is enough competition for entry-level positions that employers are going to ask, 'What else have you done in your life besides go to college?'" she says. "And in information technology, a portfolio of hands-on experience with programming is a really good thing to have."

Source




British government education bungling

Could it be that, after over 11 years of the Labour Government's making a complete dog's breakfast of almost everything it touches, we just haven't the energy to complain any more? Do you, like me, notice how disasters and failures that, a couple of decades ago would have resulted in the immediate execution of a minister, and possibly even worse than that, instead pass almost without comment, because we have become so resigned to being governed in this third-rate way?

This must be the case, for I can think of no other reason why the appalling Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, still has his bottom on the Consolidated Fund this morning. Why, when one in five primary schools has not had its Sats results and the entire credibility of the testing system is in ruins, does this man remain in office? He is not the Health Secretary, or the Immigration Secretary, or the Corned Beef Secretary. He is the Schools Secretary. That means, unless somebody is keeping something rather important from us, that schools and the means of regulating them are his responsibility, and he has failed. That is not, though, the way Mr Balls sees it.

He has perfected the approach that so disgusts millions of voters, and which sets an atrocious example to our country today: he blames somebody else, and with maximum indignation. Rather than arguing, as used to be the case in high office, that the buck stopped with him, he instead proclaims that he is "angry" and "upset" with ETS, the firm which marks the papers. He says he wants "an explanation about why ETS has not delivered on its obligations". I am sure I am not the only one who would also like an explanation of why this bombastic little man has not delivered on his.

But this, of course, neglects an important consideration. Mr Balls is special and he is different. He is the anointed of Gordon Brown and he expects, God help us, to be the next prime minister. He has, as many who have met him readily testify, the sort of charm that curdles milk. His belief in himself is epic; sadly, it is a belief that recognises no scintilla of fallibility. Therefore, when something goes wrong, it cannot possibly, or feasibly, be Mr Balls's fault.

This is not an isolated incident of Mr Balls's recklessness and foolishness. How can we forget his disgraceful attack on faith schools earlier this year, where he either invented or exaggerated faults with them in order to do down establishments that by and large achieve much better results than the comprehensive system he and his sort worship so intently?

Mr Balls couldn't care less about how schools are actually run. He wants to leave as his monument, when he ceases to be Schools Secretary, the fact that he furthered the socialist, anti-elitist creed. That will help wreck the life chances of scores of thousands of children, but it will make him the hero of the most bigoted, ignorant, spiteful and narrow-minded sect within his own party.

We are so poorly governed today not least because, when ministers fail, it is now acceptable for them to blame someone further down the food chain. Their colleagues, who are all in the same boat, encourage this. For what do they do if they lose their jobs? Who would employ someone even supposedly so clever as Mr Balls, given his record of achievement? Would you want him on your board of directors, or on the board of a company in which you or your pension fund held shares?

Schools' rankings in league tables will be unfairly affected by the failure to mark the Sats papers properly. The reputations of teachers may be called into question. Bad decisions about children's futures may be made. If Mr Balls could stop playing politics and thinking about himself, he might see these matters are not trivial. Unlike him.

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20 July, 2008

Obama: Beginning government education at birth?

Recently, after reading an excellent article at American Thinker, I decided to take a glimpse at Senator Obama's education plan. This plan is presented in a more detailed format in a document titled "Barack Obama's Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education." What I read there was more than a little disturbing, particularly his early childhood education plan.

Sen. Obama's plan begins with a "Zero to Five Plan". That is not a plan for pre-kindergarten students; it is a plan for infants beginning just after birth. In fact, one of his "Success Through Education" header statements is "A Pre-School Agenda That Begins At Birth". Sen. Obama would plunk $10 billion a year in federal tax dollars down to provide "high-quality child care" for children, to expand access to Early Head Start (is this redundant?), Head Start, and pre-school, and create a council to the president (himself) which would coordinate these efforts nation-wide.

While Sen. Obama's plan does appear to delegate responsibility for these programs to the various states, one comment in the document gives pause to that thought. Sen. Obama's plan calls the current state of early child education a "patchwork" that is "inadequate". So while the Senator may claim that states will have options within the plan, one might easily assume that funds received from this proposed $10 billion would come with significant strings.

This seems to me to be the policy beginnings of nationalized child care, not simply education. It only rides in the Trojan Horse of "education reform". Sen. Obama's plan dovetails seamlessly with a recent report by the National Health Institutes that the percentage of unmarried births to women age 20-24 has risen to 58%. Why should a young, single mother worry about raising her child? For that matter, why would a young woman of any background think twice about having a child that she probably can't raise without great difficulty? The government will take care of the child - an Obama administration would allow for the child's care and education (read: child rearing) from year zero. And that is the beginning of real state indoctrination.

Source




Teacher quality getting some attention in Australia

They'll be pissing into the wind until they do something effective about the discipline problem, though

TOP university graduates would be aggressively recruited and given financial incentives to work in some of the nation's toughest classrooms, under Federal Government plans to boost teaching quality and revive interest in the profession. Education Minister Julia Gillard is also examining ways to track students and give parents unprecedented information on school performances in what she described as a "new era of transparency" for the public and private education systems.

With a third of serving teachers aged over 50 and university entry scores for teaching courses as low as 60, Ms Gillard last night called for the "urgent" creation of a national scheme to recruit talented graduates - from any field of study - to work in the most challenging schools. "We need to re-establish in Australia something that the labour movement has long recognised: that there is no higher vocational calling than teaching," said Ms Gillard, speaking at a John Button lecture in Melbourne last night.

She said she wanted to examine two contentious but successful international programs: the Teach First initiative in Britain, and the Teach for America scheme in the US. Under these programs, graduates are aggressively recruited and offered financial incentives to teach in struggling schools. They get access to accelerated teacher training and intensive mentoring from business and community leaders, and sign on to work in the system for about two years.

State Education Minister Bronwyn Pike endorsed the idea last night, having signalled in December that she was considering the Teach First program for Victoria.

But teachers called for better wages to back the rhetoric. "We need to see the necessary respect and valuing of the profession . which doesn't happen with words alone," said Australian Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos.

In a wide-ranging speech, Ms Gillard said she wanted more detailed school-by-school data showing the socio-economic make-up and numbers of disadvantaged children. The minister also:

* Said perceptions of teaching would improve if top teachers were rewarded, in comments interpreted by some as another example of the Government's shift towards performance pay in schools.

* Rejected suggestions that differences in student results could be explained solely by socio-economic status.

* Said it was wrong to believe the education system could be divided into two groups: disadvantaged public schools and highly resourced non-government schools. "There are schools that struggle with limited resources, trying to serve disadvantaged communities, in both groups," she said. "I specifically reject the proposition that the only way to debate differential need in our school system is through the prism of the public-private divide."

Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andrew Blair said he was "absolutely all for" collecting data on individual students to identify learning difficulties, but raised concerns about comparing schools. "We all know that you can't compare a Balwyn high school and a Broadmeadows high school because you have a completely different clientele," he said.

Shadow education minister Tony Smith said the Coalition's attempts, when in government, to reform the profession had been "consistently blocked by teachers' unions and state governments".

Source




Schools in Australia and the USA compared

Australia and the United States have much in common--language, political institutions, the influence of British settlement, and, more recently, fighting together on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. They also have a lot in common in the field of education.

Books like Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, and Diane Ravitch's The Language Police make clear how effective America's Left has been in its long march to take control of education, especially the curriculum, in an attempt to transform society. The Left has targeted education in Australia, too. Over the last 30 years or so, professional associations, teachers' unions, and academics in teacher-training institutions have consistently attacked more traditional, competitive curricula as elitist, socially unjust, and guilty of enforcing a Eurocentric, patriarchal, and privileged view of the world.

In 1983, Joan Kirner, who eventually became the state of Victoria's education minister and then its premier, argued that education had to be reshaped as "part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument for the capitalist system." More recently, the editor o! f the journal for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English argued that the John Howard-led conservative government's victory in 2004 was a result of the nation's English teachers' failure to teach young people the proper (i.e., left-wing) way to vote.

Currently, eight Australian states and territories have the power to manage what is taught in their schools, but the recently elected, left-of-center national government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is trying to develop a national curriculum. Such is the Left's control of education that the effort is cause for concern: any federally imposed curriculum will likely be ideologically driven and politically correct. During the early and mid-nineties, for example, the Commonwealth of Australia's left-leaning government developed a national curriculum so politically correct and dumbed-down that, after public outcry led by conservatives and the media, it was eventually rejected at a meeting of state, territory, and commonwealth education ministers.

Like America, Australia has both public and private schools. (As the German researcher Ludger Woessmann notes, one characteristic of stronger-performing education systems, as measured by international tests, is a muscular private-school sector.) On the whole, Australian private schools are more academically minded than their public counterparts, especially at the high school level. Private schools also have a better chance of escaping destructive curriculum initiatives like the "whole language" approach to reading instruction, as well as feel-good assessment systems that refuse to tell students that they have failed.

One striking difference between the United States and Australia, however, is that the Land Down Under doesn't need a formal school-voucher system like those in some American localities. In Australia, students attending private schools automatically receive funding from state governments and the commonwealth, with the amount of taxpayers' money received per student varying according to each school community's socioeconomic profile. While the figure never fully covers the cost of educating students (the average cost of educating a state-school student is $10,000, while the average government subsidy to private-school students is $5,000), private schools have become increasingly popular. In 1997, approximately 30 percent of students attended private schools; by 2007, the figure had grown to approximately 34 percent. Surveys suggest that parents choose private schools because they have a strong academic focus, better reflect parental values, and promote excellence.

While private schools must register with the government and conform to regulations in areas like health and safety, teacher certification, and financial probity, they enjoy flexibility when it comes to curriculum and staffing. They have been particularly effective in more affluent, middle-class areas, where they have forced government schools to promote a more disciplined and academic environment.

The curriculum debate now revolves around questions of increased testing and accountability, teacher performance, and developing a national curriculum in order to become more internationally competitive. However, since we have left-of-center governments at all levels--state, territory, and commonwealth--I fear that future education policies will be premised on statism, instead of opening schools to the type of accountability, choice, and competition represented by the market. Further, the commonwealth's minister for education, Julia Gillard, defines the purpose of education in terms of its utilitarian value, by linking it to increasing productivity. No one disputes the importance of economic growth, of course. But it's vital that we don't lose sight of the broader cultural, spiritual, and ethical value of education as well.

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19 July, 2008

Archaeologists and political correctness

I suppose I should by now be inured to the news the academics, NGOs and scientific organizations are often agenda-driven propagandists and not truth seekers, but this report cinches it:

A recent mission to Iraq headed by top archaeologists from the U.S. and U.K. who specialize in Mesopotamia found that, contrary to received wisdom, southern Iraq's most important historic sites -- eight of them -- had neither been seriously damaged nor looted after the American invasion. (Snip) The article has caused confusion, not to say consternation, among archaeologists and has been largely ignored by the mainstream press.

Stick claims of extensive looting of archeological treasures of Iraq during the US invasion in the packet labelled Afghan quagmire,Lancet casualty figures, etc.

You might be interested to know that despite being directly involved in spreading the disinformation about Iraqi archeological treasures, that academic community represented in the World Archeological Committee (WAC) is weighing in against any aggressive acts against Iran:

The members reportedly considered a lengthy statement urging colleagues to refuse any military requests for a list of Iran's sites that should be exempt from possible air strikes. Finally they settled for a shorter July 11 press release. Among other things, the final press release says that WAC "expresses strong opposition to aggressive military action . . . by the U.S. government, or by any other government." The release quotes WAC's president as saying that WAC "strongly opposed the war in Iraq and . . . we strongly oppose any war in Iran" and that "any differences with Iran should be resolved through peaceful and diplomatic means."

It doesn't take much to believe that the grossly wrong early reports on Iraq were not the result of scientific error, but rather the product of anti-war (and perhaps anti-American) views.

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McCain on Education

In his NAACP speech today, Senator McCain said this:

After decades of hearing the same big promises from the public education establishment, and seeing the same poor results, it is surely time to shake off old ways and to demand new reforms. That isn't just my opinion; it is the conviction of parents in poor neighborhoods across this nation who want better lives for their children. In Washington, D.C., the Opportunity Scholarship program serves more than 1,900 boys and girls from families with an average income of 23,000 dollars a year. And more than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all have in common is the desire to get their kids into a better school.

Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. In remarks to the American Federation of Teachers last weekend, Senator Obama dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as, "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." All of that went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave families and their children who are stuck in failing schools?

Over the years, Americans have heard a lot of "tired rhetoric" about education. We've heard it in the endless excuses of people who seem more concerned about their own position than about our children. We've heard it from politicians who accept the status quo rather than stand up for real change in our public schools. Parents ask only for schools that are safe, teachers who are competent, and diplomas that open doors of opportunity. When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children. Some parents may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private school. Many will choose a charter school. No entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity.

We should also offer more choices to those who wish to become teachers. Many thousands of highly qualified men and women have great knowledge, wisdom, and experience to offer public school students. But a monopoly on teacher certification prevents them from getting that chance. You can be a Nobel Laureate and not qualify to teach in most public schools today. They don't have all the proper credits in educational "theory" or "methodology" - all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it. If we're putting the interests of students first, then those qualifications should be enough.

If I am elected president, school choice for all who want it, an expansion of Opportunity Scholarships, and alternative certification for teachers will all be part of a serious agenda of education reform. I will target funding to recruit teachers who graduate in the top 25 percent of their class, or who participate in an alternative teacher recruitment program such as Teach for America, the American Board for Teacher Excellence, and the New Teacher Project.

Senator McCain is exactly right to embrace, and strongly argue in favor of school choice (as well as the other elements of his education agenda). I hope he does it more often and in more venues. Equal educational opportunity is, after all, the civil rights issue of our time. School choice would bring about enormous good to those who need it most. And for Senator Obama to dismiss school choice as "tired rhetoric" is itself an increasingly tiresome tactic of his. He seemingly dismisses every idea that is different than his, or every criticism that is directed at him, as "tired" and "old." At some point, Senator Obama might consider examining the quality of an argument. He might even discover that some old ideas are good ideas. I suppose it's also worth pointing out that the best new idea in years - the 2007 surge in Iraq, which dramatically altered our strategy there and has led to stunning successes - was opposed by a certain senator from Illinois who himself had become tired and weary and wanted to surrender in a war of enormous importance to America.

In any event, Senator Obama's opposition to school choice and his intimate embrace of the education establishment (memorably referred to by Bill Bennett as "the blob") is more evidence that Obama is himself a completely conventional liberal. Which means, in this instance, he is an obstacle to education reform and the improvement in the lives of low-income children.

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17 July, 2008

The dishonesty problem with Middle East Studies

by Daniel Pipes

As one of the few pro-U.S. and pro-Israel voices in the field of Middle East studies, I find my views get frequently mangled by others in the field - thus I have had to post a 5,000-word document titled "Department of Corrections (of Others' Factual Mistakes about Me)" on my website.

Usually, the precise evolution of such mistakes escapes me. Recently, however, I discovered just how one developed in three steps and confronted the two academics who made the errors. Their unwillingness to acknowledge their errors illustrates the mixture of incompetence and arrogance of Middle East studies as it is, unfortunately, too often practiced in the academy.

(1) In "The Muslims are Coming! The Muslims are Coming!" National Review, November 19, 1990, I wrote about some of the reasons for Western fears of Muslims:

Muslims have gone through a trauma during the last two hundred years - the tribulation of God's people who unaccountably found themselves at the bottom of the heap. The strains have been enormous and the results agonizing; Muslim countries have the most terrorists and the fewest democracies in the world. Only Turkey (and sometimes Pakistan) is fully democratic, and even there the system is frail. Everywhere else, the head of government got to power through force[,] his own or someone else's. The result is endemic instability plus a great deal of aggression.

Despite such problems, I concluded, "none of this justifies seeing Muslims as the paramount enemy."

(2) Yahya Sadowski, then of the Brookings Institution, quoted the bolded line of the above paragraph in an entirely different context in "The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate," Middle East Report, July-August 1993, p. 14. Discussing Western considerations of democracy's prospects in the Middle East, Sadowski wrote:

The thesis that Middle Eastern societies are resistant to democratization had been a standard tenet of Orientalist thought for decades, but in the 1980s a new generation of Orientalists inverted some of the old assumptions and employed a new vocabulary which allowed them to link their work to a wider, international debate about the relationship between "civil society" and democratization. These updated arguments sought to prove not only - as neo-Orientalist Daniel Pipes put it - that "Muslim countries have the most terrorists and the fewest democracies in the world," but that they always would.

Sadowski quoted my words accurately but turned their meaning upside-down; he transformed my rather prosaic observation of fact into part of a grand theory that I never enunciated - and which, for the record, I repudiate. Throughout my work, I stress mutability and change and argue against historical essentialism concerning Islam. I see the Muslim world as changing and avoid extrapolations from present-day circumstances to the future. I make a point not to say something will "always" be a certain way. Further, contrary to Sadowski, I hold that Islam and democracy are indeed compatible.

Joel Beinin of Stanford University and Joe Stork of the Middle East Report then gave the Sadowski article legs by reprinting it in their co-edited 1996 University of California Press book, Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report; I am quoted on p. 34.

(3) Then along came Yakub Halabi, at the time a Ph.D. student at the University of Denver, with "Orientalism and US Democratization Policy in the Middle East," International Studies, 36 (1999), pp. 385-87. Halabi relied on Sadowski's distorted version of my words and further elaborated on it, now in the context of his discussion of Western attempts to understand how a passive Muslim people could have brought off the Iranian revolution:

The neo-orientalist school emerged in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution. It was an attempt to remove the anomaly in the orientalist approach that could not explain why a Muslim society rebelled against the Shah. . Orientalists as well as neo-orientalists, however, ignore any sort of modernity or novelty in Islamic societies in general and in the Iranian revolution in particular.

Halabi went on to note that some analysts depicted Islamic movements as not just radical but also anti-Western and anti-modernist.

One such writer Daniel Pipes, for example, depicts Muslims as "permanent" anti-democrats and terrorists. In his words: "Muslim countries [not only] have the most terrorists and the fewest democracies in the world, but that they always will."

"In his words"? Hardly; I said nothing of the sort. Halabi changed my meaning by ascribing the word "permanent" to me, though it appeared nowhere in my essay; by adding two words in square brackets; and by falsely ascribing Sadowski's phrase to me. To complete the transformation, he even altered Sadowski's language, changing the final bolded word from "would" to "will."

As with Sadowski's perversion of my sentence, I disavow the fictitious quote Halabi attributes to me.

Comments:

(1) Sadowski and Halabi turned my simple statement into the linchpin of their quite distinct generalizations about "Orientalism."

(2) I wrote to each of Sadowski and Halabi, requesting a retraction and an apology. Sadowski did not respond. Halabi wrote back and justified his inaccuracy with a reference to post-modern subjectivity, with its convenient insouciance toward such concepts as truth and falsehood: "This is the way I understood and interpreted your article. When you write an article, you cannot control the way others interprete [sic] it." Such defiant subjectivity undermines the scholarly enterprise.

(3) How to explain that two specialists hostile to my outlook each mangled my words? I see two possibilities: That they did so purposefully; or that bias colored their reading. I doubt they did so intentionally - no one wishes to be caught out and ridiculed for making errors. My hunch is that, in their eagerness to discredit someone whose approach differs from theirs, they read my analysis hastily and prejudicially, prompting the sequence of mistakes documented here. Such attitudes have contributed importantly to what Martin Kramer characterizes as "the failure of Middle Eastern studies in America."

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Decision in Arizona case restores Fourth Amendment to schools

In a major slap-down to public-school control-freakery, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (PDF) that there actually are limits to the power of educrats to grope and humiliate their charges in search of illicit over-the-counter medications. From the opinion, here are the details of the search of 13-year-old Savana Redding, which took place in Safford, Arizona:

First, Savana removed her socks, shoes and jacket for inspection for ibuprofen. The officials found nothing. Then, Romero asked Savana to remove her T-shirt and stretch pants. Embarrassed and scared, Savana complied and sat in her bra and underwear while the two adults examined her clothes. Again, the officials found nothing. Still progressing with the search, despite receiving only corroboration of Savana's pleas that she did not have any ibuprofen, Romero instructed Savana to pull her bra out to the side and shake it. Savana followed the instructions, exposing her naked breasts in the process. The shaking failed to dislodge any pills. Romero next requested that Savana pull out her underwear at the crotch and shake it. Hiding her head so that the adults could not see that she was about to cry, Savana complied and pulled out her underwear, revealing her pelvic area. No ibuprofen was found. The school officials finally stopped and told Savana to put her clothes back on and accompany Romero back to Wilson's office.

Yes, the school had a firm-and-fast rule against the sort of medications almost everybody keeps in their medicine cabinet for casual use. As insane as that seems, it's a concern best addressed separately.

Earlier court decisions had given a rousing thumbs-up to Redding's ordeal, but the appeals court had second thoughts. Writing for the majority, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw said:

Common sense informs us that directing a thirteen-year-old girl to remove her clothes, partially revealing her breasts and pelvic area, for allegedly possessing ibuprofen, an infraction that poses an imminent danger to no one, and which could be handled by keeping her in the principal's office until a parent arrived or simply sending her home, was excessively intrusive.

Logically enough, the court found that "The strip search of thirteen-year-old Savana ... was conducted in violation of Savana's Fourth Amendment rights."

Good. Not only is that ruling a sound recognition of the rights of the individual, but it will spare many fathers and mothers the unpleasant necessity to go forth and do violence to school administrators who abuse their children.

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Formidable Ignorance

One of many good comments yesterday from Taranto:

From a Cornell University press release:

Climate change and its effects on ecosystems is the No. 1 crisis facing the world, according to Cornell faculty--but it is a phenomenon not easily reversed. The most important problem that is more easily solved? Insufficient education in science, critical thinking and environmental issues.

If even the faculty of an Ivy League university is foolish enough to think that "climate change" is "the No. 1 crisis facing the world," then it is wildly optimistic to think that "insufficient education in science, critical thinking and environmental issues" is a solvable problem.





16 July, 2008

Sack race is banned as health risk in British school

The sack race and three-legged race have been banned from a school sports day because the children might fall over and hurt themselves. Parents and campaigners described the move as “completely over the top”. Teachers at John F. Kennedy Primary School in Washington dropped the events after discussions with Beamish Open Air Museum, where the Edwardian-themed sports day is being held today.

About 375 children are dressing up in period costume for the event. Running, hopping and throwing table-tennis balls into buckets will be allowed.

Laura Midgley, founder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, said: “It’s health and safety rules gone mad. I think it’s completely over the top. The worst thing that could possibly happen is the children fall over.”

Simon Woolley, head of education at Beamish in Co Durham, said: “We looked at a three-legged race and a sack race but what we want to do is minimise the risk to the children. We thought we would be better to do hopping and running instead because there was less chance of them falling over.”

Source




Bullying in Australia's government schools forces many families into home schooling

PARENTS of both bullying victims and expelled bullies are turning to home schooling in a bid to salvage an education for their children. There are now an estimated 22,000 students learning from home in Queensland, double the number counted by a government working group in 2002.

The bullying epidemic in the state's schools is behind the increase, according to the Home Education Association. Association spokeswoman Colleen Strange said it had become the last resort for both the bullied and their bullies. "It's disturbing. I even have teenagers contacting me saying, 'Please talk to my mother and tell her what she has to do because I can't spend another minute in that school'," Ms Strange said. "I even have people who have been excluded from school for bullying contacting me. They have no choice, they have to be educated somewhere."

Home education is a "lawful alternative" for students of a compulsory school age, but Education Queensland sets out strict guidelines. Those wishing to go to university have to sit a special tertiary admissions test.

Last week's Sunday Mail investigation into bullying in Queensland schools sparked a huge response from readers. One Brisbane mother was driven to release details of a diary she kept of the daily trauma suffered by her disabled son at the hands of classmates. She was one of hundreds of readers who contacted The Sunday Mail following our report, which found up to one in six Queensland schoolchildren were victims of schoolyard abuse and 70 students, some as young as five, were suspended every day for assault.

The mother said her 14-year-old - who has autistic spectrum disorder, which affects his social and communication skills - had been subjected to a decade of physical and mental attacks, which left him reclusive and on anti-depressant drugs. "It started from Day One, they didn't give him a chance, they didn't give him a go," the mother said "His disorder means he can't socialise properly, anyway, and now almost every single day he comes home crying. He has no self-esteem. "He says, 'Mum I can't take it any more, I just can't do it any more'. And that is heartbreaking, really heartbreaking."

For the past 18 months the mother - whose identity has been withheld to protect her son - has kept a diary of every incident involving her son. She said "there is not one single day where something hasn't happened". The abuse began with name-calling and escalated to him being grabbed around the throat and choked, beaten with a mallet in manual arts, punched in the genitals and hit with a rock.

The mother said she had pleaded with school authorities and even confronted her son's bullies, and now had no choice but to join thousands of other Queensland families who were rejecting mainstream education in favour of home schooling. "If he stays where he is it will be devastating," she said.

Parents and children who contacted The Sunday Mail said they felt powerless to deal with the situation. "I now believe that the only way to stop the bullying is for my son to stand up to them, but the problem is that he doesn't know how to be physically violent. Oh, and by the way, he is only nine years old," one email revealed.

Another parent said her daughter had attempted suicide: "Four years onwards, many counselling sessions later, two suicide attempts, my daughter is barely living. She was a bright, caring, talented musician. This is sadly the cost to families left to deal with the effect of senseless degrading of a human being."

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15 July, 2008

Anti-Asian Bias Alleged at Princeton

A young Asian immigrant, Jian Li, has claimed that he was rejected by Princeton University because of an anti-Asian bias on the part of admissions decision-makers.

Consequently, the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights is reviewing Princeton's admissions process, looking for evidence of discrimination.

Critics say admission quotas remain a dirty little secret in academia.

"There is almost no other area that colleges consistently lie about," said Russell Nieli, a professor in Princeton's department of politics, who recently published an essay titled "Is there an Asian Ceiling?"

Princeton, for its part, denies using quotas. The university declined, however, to release admissions data broken down by race and test scores, spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said, "because we don't want anyone to make the mistake that we make admissions decisions by category."

The federal review at Princeton -- which adamantly denies it discriminates against Asians -- was sparked by a complaint filed in 2006 by Livingston High School graduate and Asian immigrant Jian Li. He claims he was rejected by Princeton and other elite universities despite graduating in the top 1 percent of his high school class, earning various honors outside the classroom and nailing perfect SAT scores.

Nieli said Li's complaint, because it was made by an Asian-American, may carry more weight with proponents of racial preferences.

"The people making these decisions are post-'60s guilty white limousine liberals," Nieli said. "They don't take a protest by a white person as seriously as one by a Chinese or Japanese or Korean student."

I guess it's a foregone conclusion that an anti-white bias exists but it's not considered to be discrimination. After all, we must remember that:

A commitment to "acting affirmatively to ensure diversity," Cliatt said, is not the same as discriminating.

I hope everyone else is clear on that because it sounds like double-talk to me.




Anti-Asian bias back again

Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links

Hans Bader has a terrific letter in USA Today criticizing an editorial that I should have criticized here several days ago. Bader expands on the points made in his letter here.

Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, another reader/commenter, also made some excellent points about the weird editorial, here. The editorial acknowledged that “high-scoring Asian students face higher admissions hurdles” than others. It mentioned the study by two Princeton scholars (discussed here, here, and here) who found that

if students were admitted on grades and test scores alone, the acceptance rate for African American and Latino students would plummet while the rate for Asians would rise sharply.

But to USA Today the fact that Asian Americans face higher hurdles in college admission than others and that if preferences to blacks and Hispanic were eliminated the numbers of Asians admitted would increase substantially “can feel like discrimination” but “it does not necessarily prove discrimination.” Yes, it necessarily does.




British toddlers to be taught about human rights

Toddlers are to be taught about human rights and respecting different cultures in a scheme condemned as an "absurd" waste of time. Nurseries across the country are adopting the project, which will see teachers explaining to children as young as three that people across the world live different lives but everyone has a right to food, water and shelter. Staff will also be expected to ensure that children are treated as independent human beings, and have the "right" to choose their toys or have a drink of water whenever they want.

It is an extension of a Unicef scheme already in use in primary schools, in which pupils analyse the responsibilities of fairytale characters and sign a joint declaration with teachers of how people should be treated.

The move comes amid growing concern about the Government's "nappy curriculum", a set of 69 learning targets for under-fives which experts say will leave young children confused and demotivated. Sue Palmer, a former headteacher and author of the book Toxic Childhood, said: "Toddlers are still working at a very emotional level. They should be told stories and allowed to sing and play. That's what will turn them into normal people."

Dr Richard House, of the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education at Roehampton University, added: "The idea that this kind of learning is appropriate for nursery-age children is absurd, and betrays a complete lack of understanding of child development. "Modern culture seems determined to treat children like 'mini-adults' in all kinds of ways, and with major negative effects in terms of their premature growing-up."

The Unicef scheme is designed to promote the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children everywhere have the right to survival, freedom to develop, protection from abuse and the opportunity to participate in society. Primary and secondary schools can already win a Rights Respecting Schools award from Unicef by putting up posters by the main entrance, signed by everyone from dinner ladies to the headteacher, which states their commitment to upholding the rights charter. Each classroom is also meant to contain a set of pupils' rights and responsibilities, while wall displays are expected to continue the theme. Pupils in one school made a poster showing the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk asking: "What about my rights?". It lists his "right to have a castle" and "right to be bad".

The Unicef scheme is now being adopted by private and state-run nursery schools in six areas from Durham to Dorset and from Rochdale to Wandsworth. Its organisers insist it will be tailored for younger children and that the abstract concepts of human rights will make sense to them. Pam Hand, an early years advisory teacher from Hampshire who is a key figure in the scheme, said: "The work is about rights and knowledge of the UN Convention, and is shared with children at an appropriate level for them. "It is helping children be aware that they have a lot of things in common with children everywhere, such as the right to clean water and being cared for. It's about awareness that we have different experiences but being tolerant.

"There are very simple things they can understand, like the right to be looked after and have food. "It also looks at how much the children are given a voice. In practice it would be looking at can the children choose what toys are out to play with, and where it's possible do they have a choice of whether they are outside or inside."

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14 July, 2008

Australia: Safety warnings about fairytales?

TEACHERS are being urged to give children safety messages after reading them fairytales warning not to copy characters such as Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and Hansel and Gretel. A new child protection curriculum being implemented by the Education Department also requires teachers to refer to children's "sexual parts" and use their correct anatomical names with children as young as three.

Child development experts have backed the measures, but critics believe they are an example of political correctness overkill that could turn children into "little nervous wrecks".

Parents across SA are being briefed on the impact of the new curriculum, which aims to teach children from preschool upwards the early warning signs of being unsafe and recognising abuse.

Teachers have been trained to be wary of storybooks in which characters put themselves at risk - and to respond by offering safety messages. For example, children would be warned not to talk to people they don't know as Little Red Riding Hood did with the Big Bad Wolf; not to walk around unsupervised like Goldilocks; and not to enter unknown houses like Hansel and Gretel. Popular modern books would also face scrutiny. The picture book Pig in the Pond, in which a farmer strips off to have a swim on a hot day, would be followed by explaining that it would be inappropriate to undress in front of someone you did not know.

Emeritus Professor of Child Development at UniSA, Professor Freda Briggs, who was consulted in the curriculum's development, supported the measures, calling for them to be implemented nationally. "This is about appropriately empowering the child," she said. "Kids are talking about sex at age five now. It's so in-your-face, I'm afraid that innocence is gone. They are sexualised younger and younger. "We need to use correct body terms because by giving children silly names or names that only the family understands, you're telling your child that you can't cope with talking about it. How does a child get help if nobody understands?"

But Australian Family Association spokesman Jerome Appleby said the measures - the first update to the child safety curriculum in more than 20 years - encroached on the domain of parents. Putting safety messages on fairytales risked frightening children unnecessarily. "You don't want to scare children too much and create an environment of fear," he said. "We don't want to create little nervous wrecks. "Parents are best placed to determine how much they need to tell their children and at what age."

Mr Appleby said teaching young children about the correct names for their "sexual parts" would contribute to the early sexualisation of children. "This will destroy the innocence of children too early," he said. "I don't think it's appropriate for very young children. They aren't ready for those sorts of adult concepts and it's a sad indictment on society."

Social commentator David Chalke said drawing modern morals from fairytales was fine, if stories or characters were not altered. "A lot of nursery tales are cautionary tales in their original sense, so I don't see a problem with making it relevant to today," he said. But Mr Chalke said it was "political correctness overkill" to introduce pre-schoolers to sexual concepts. "This is bureaucratic meddling; it's absurdity and it smacks of overkill," he said.

"To me, this is education bureaucracy getting above itself. "The heavy hand of the state is impinging on the parent-child relationship. They are saying that you must be correctly programmed from the age of three. We're talking about children who can neither read nor write. Leave the pre-schoolers alone."

Federation of Catholic School Parent Communities spokeswoman Ann Bliss said it was positive for pre-school teachers to incorporate safety messages into fairytales. "It's a good compromise. We're not throwing the fairytales out but we're engaging in conversations with our children, keeping them safe," she said.

In an emailed response, an Education Department spokesperson said: "There's no easy way to deliver a message about such a sensitive topic, and that is why the State Government enlisted the advice and assistance of local child protection experts in developing the program. The curriculum is taught in a way that is relevant and appropriate for each year level, and includes the use of anatomically correct and respectful language."

The Keeping Safe program was developed in conjunction with SA Police, Family and Community Services, the Australian Education Union, the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.

Source




Australia: Mathematics teaching dumbed down

STUDENTS are being taught maths at the most superficial level by teachers rushing to pass on the basic skills while shying away from complex ideas. In yet another example of children being failed by national school curriculums, a special report for the state leaders finds maths teaching is failing students by setting the bar too low.

The National Numeracy Review report, released to The Weekend Australian, criticises the national benchmarks in maths, which assess students against minimum standards rather than requiring a desirable proficiency. "The implication (is) that minimum standards are good enough, at least for some students," says the report on numeracy commissioned by the Council of Australian Governments. "All students and their families, however, have a right to expect high-quality - not minimum - numeracy outcomes from their schooling."

The review committee, chaired by the former head of the NSW Board of Studies Gordon Stanley, says the time spent teaching maths in classrooms has decreased over the past decade, yet students are expected to learn about a greater number of mathematical concepts. "Curriculum emphases and assessment regimes should be explicitly designed to discourage a reliance upon superficial and low-level proficiency," the report says. It recommends phasing out the streaming of students according to their ability, citing research that says it has little effect on achievement. "It does produce gains in attainment for higher-achieving students at the expense of lower-attaining students," it says.

The report recommends that all teachers, regardless of their intended speciality, be trained as numeracy teachers and maths be taught across all subjects. The report says primary school students should spend five hours a week and high school students four hours a week on maths and numeracy, including time spent learning maths in other subjects. The report also suggests introducing specialist maths teachers to work shoulder-to-shoulder with other teachers, particularly those without specialist training in maths teaching. It says students from the early years of school should be given complex maths problems and the language of maths should be explicitly taught.

The review was commissioned by the human capital working group of COAG to review international research about teaching maths and advise ways in which teaching standards could be improved. The report says literacy has received enormous attention and resources in recent years but numeracy provides a bigger challenge for schools. It uses the term numeracy, as opposed to maths, to describe the mathematical understanding required in today's workplace, defining numeracy as the capacity to bridge the gap between maths and the real world. "The mathematical knowledge, skill and understanding people need today, if they are to be truly numerate, involves considerably more than the acquisition of mathematical routines and algorithms," it says.

The report cites research that says Australia suffers from a "shallow teaching syndrome". Compared with other high-achieving countries in international maths tests, Australian schoolrooms have the highest percentage of repetitive problems and the highest percentage of problems of low complexity.

While the new national numeracy tests introduced this year will assess students against levels of proficiency, previously students were only judged against a benchmark set at the minimum level of knowledge required to progress through school. "They do not describe proficiency in numeracy or even the minimum standards that the community expects from Australian schools," it says.

The low standards expected of students are compounded by remedial programs targeting students failing to meet those minimum standards rather than aiming to assist all students to acquire some proficiency. "The rush to apparent proficiency at the expense of the sound conceptual development needed for sustained and ongoing mathematical proficiency must be rejected," it says. "From the earliest years, greater emphasis (should) be given to providing students with frequent exposure to higher-level mathematical problems rather than routine procedural tasks, in contexts of relevance to them."

Part of the problem facing schools is trying to teach more maths in less time, with some evidence suggesting the class time spent on maths has diminished over the years. One study estimates a Year 4 student in Australia spends about 250 minutes a week and a Year 8 student 210 minutes a week on maths. The report recommends primary school students spend 300 minutes a week and high school students 280 minutes a week on maths.

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13 July, 2008

College for veterans

A new, much-improved GI Bill, signed into law last week, will go a long way toward helping combat veterans pay for college. With billions in new federal dollars available – an estimated $62 billion over 10 years – college leaders are thinking about how to attract veterans, in part by matching more money with, well, more money. Ohio’s governor on Tuesday signed an executive order extending lower in-state tuition rates to GI Bill enrollees from out of state. Nazareth College, in Rochester, recently announced a new veterans scholarship to supplement the G.I. Bill. It’s worth up to $7,500 per year for four years.

But, beyond money (obviously quite important), what’s going to make them stay? “I think people are starting to look at veterans as a population and looking at how we can integrate them and transition them into higher education,” said Kathy Snead, president of the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges Consortium. “I know we are getting questions and inquiries from a lot of groups about, ‘What do the numbers look like; how many veterans do you think will enroll in college?’ That’s hard to tell. But obviously colleges that are more well-equipped, who anticipate the needs of veterans, will certainly draw the attention of veterans.”

Snead said key priorities identified by student veterans include peer-to-peer advising programs, specialized orientations and veteran student centers or lounges. She advocates that colleges set up task forces to identify “military-friendly” approaches they can adopt in academic and student services, counseling, and other domains. “It’s fertile ground, so there are all sorts of possibilities for what colleges can do.”

One of Schupp’s students witnessed the hanging of burned bodies over a bridge in Iraq. “You go from that situation to sitting in English class trying to learn about dangling participles with 18-year-old freshmen asking if you killed anybody. You can see the transition is pretty hard,” Schupp said.

Cleveland State’s SERV represents one institution’s unique approach to easing the transition. Schupp, who’s not a veteran himself, was first inspired to start such a program after hearing about the academic and adjustment issues faced by a student who’d been deployed to Kosovo. He began asking veterans from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars what they would have wanted out of their colleges. Out of their answers came SERV, built around five ideals – including lowering the bureaucratic barriers that stand between the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which distributes the GI Bill benefits, and the university (barriers that the veterans themselves are often left straddling). SERV also aims to connect prospective employers with veterans, and, for their first two semesters, offers veterans-only general education classes.

This spring, Cleveland State offered its first four general education courses for veterans. No one has to enroll in the veterans-only classes: Out of around 300 veterans expected on campus this coming fall, Schupp projects that each of four general education classes will attract 20 to 25 students each. Out of 14 in Schupp’s chemistry class this spring, 10 got a C or better, two withdrew for medical reasons, one withdrew because of a family problem and “one joined a fraternity so I lost him, he’s gone.” ("I just never saw him,” Schupp said.)

Schupp described the courses as still experimental, and said he’ll be evaluating outcomes after the first year. ("As a research person, being a chemist, I look into why things work and why they don’t work and getting a cause behind it and finding a solution,” he said.)

Asked whether separating veterans into their own classes isolates them, Schupp said he recommends that students take at least one course with civilians, and pointed out that the veterans-only classes only extend through the first two semesters. “The goal is not to isolate them, the goal is to have them slowly transition,” he said, arguing, for instance, that many veterans have an easier time concentrating when, instead of being surrounded by civilians they’re trained to protect, they’re encircled by other veterans, their “team.” “They’re trained to assess crowds and assess situations and find the danger in them. That’s what they’re trained to do, not to focus on a test. The team is what helps you survive. College campuses are all individual. All I’m trying to do is recreate the team concept,” Schupp said.

“When you’re in a large boxed-in area, you may tell yourself, ‘I’m in school, I’m in college,’ but you automatically have that fight-or-flight response. The veterans classes are smaller. You’re surrounded by people who did similar things as you in the same area,” said Joshua Miller, a former infantry medic who started classes at Cleveland State this spring. “I liked the idea of vet-only classes because as much as I didn’t miss being in Iraq or Afghanistan, I did miss the camaraderie I had when I was in the military,” Miller said. “Just because you got out of the military doesn’t mean you stop being a soldier. You’re always going to be a soldier. And you’re always going to take care of each other. That’s what you do.” .....

Many interviewed for this article described offering specialized services for veterans – administrative, social and, in the case of Cleveland State, academic – in seemingly counterintuitive terms. The specialized programs, they stressed, are ultimately intended to integrate veterans into the broader campus community. Snead, of the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges Consortium, said that she’s not concerned about whether such programs could instead have the opposite effect of isolating veterans. “By and large, students lean on people like them, peer groups and support groups, to transition, whatever special interest they might have,” Snead said. She added that, over time and through various classroom and campus interactions, “the differentiation between veteran and nonveteran may become very, very blurred.”

Snead said that the consortium has joined with some other higher education associations in developing a national survey to assess the scope of on-campus veterans programs. Without any hard data yet, it’s her sense anecdotally, she said, that the majority of colleges have not yet designated veterans student lounges and the like.

Yet, the progress and now passage of the new GI Bill does seem to be generating an uptick of interest in, for instance, setting up one-stop student services shops for veterans, or establishing veterans centers or lounges. A bill introduced in January by Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-Tex.) and Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) — which, according to Hinojosa’s staff, is included in compromise legislation to renew the Higher Ed Act – would authorize a federal grant program for colleges that set up “model programs to support veteran student success.” Under the terms of the legislation, qualifying colleges would establish a Center of Excellence for Veteran Student Success, develop a veterans support team involving representatives from admissions, registration, financial aid, veterans benefits, academic advising, health, career advising, disabilities and other relevant areas, hire a full- or part-time coordinator, and monitor veteran student enrollment, persistence and completion.

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Australian schools ignoring the Holocaust

The Left has now reverted to its prewar antisemitism so this omission from Left-dominated curricula is no surprise

An obsession with Australian history in curriculums has left students able to leave school without knowing that the Holocaust occurred. In a speech to high school principals, NSW education department head Michael Coutts-Trotter regretted the omission of the Holocaust from the state's mandatory history course. "I discovered for the first time about a month ago that you can get through compulsory schooling in NSW and never know that the Holocaust, the destruction of Jews in Europe, actually happened," he said. "You will know a lot about Don Bradman, and that's terrific. But I think to live life, you need to know the Holocaust happened."

The only mention of the Holocaust in the NSW syllabus for Years 7-10 is in the beginning, with the rationale for the course starting with a quotation from a Holocaust survivor about the importance of learning history. Compulsory history or social studies courses for schools in the other states also fail to mention the Holocaust.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Board of Studies said the history course for Years 7-10 had a lot to cover and the board did not want to overcrowd the curriculum. "There are opportunities to study the Holocaust and its consequences in a number of ways in both mandatory and elective history," she said.

Asked about those opportunities, the board pointed to the website of the Sydney Jewish Museum, which highlighted links to NSW syllabuses. The museum suggests it could be the subject of a site visit, compulsory for Year 9 students, and for Year 10 students looking at post-war Australia to the 1970s, it suggests examining the contribution of Jewish migrants.

The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies said yesterday it had been concerned for some time about the omission of the Holocaust from school history, and was working with the education department and the board of studies on the issue. Board chief executive Vic Alhadeff said the Jewish community regarded as essential the signposting across the curriculum of issues relating to discrimination, racism and genocide, including the Holocaust. "It is indeed possible to complete 13 years of schooling in NSW without having studied the Holocaust," he said. "This is a matter of great concern to the Jewish community, which works towards social cohesion as a matter of principle."

Wollongong University professor of history and politics Gregory Melleuish said the nation had become increasingly obsessed with Australian history over the past 10 or 15 years. "So we tend to look at things like World War I and II as Australia's involvement rather than what was at stake, why did it occur and what was going on," Professor Melleuish said. "Part of the problem of doing it from the point of view of Australia is students get the perspective that Australia saves the world."

Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said the Government had asked the National Curriculum Board to develop a rigorous world-class curriculum for all students in four initial areas, including history.

Opposition education spokesman Tony Smith said it should not be possible for a student to leave school without being taught key events such as the two world wars, the Holocaust and the Cold War.

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12 July, 2008

McCain to talk pocketbook education issues

Sen. John McCain intends to talk about how teachers are paid and tutoring for poor kids when he goes before the NAACP convention next week. The likely Republican presidential nominee wasn't expected to roll out an education platform until the end of the summer, but his remarks July 16 to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People annual meeting in Cincinnati were expected to touch on his support for expanding merit-pay programs for teachers who improve their students' academic performance.

McCain education adviser Lisa Keegan told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the Arizona senator decided his appearance before the civil rights group was the right opportunity to talk about America's schools.

Keegan said McCain supports changes but not a scrapping of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education law. It was enacted in 2002 with the stated goal of getting all students reading and doing math at their proper grade levels by 2013-2014. Schools must test kids in those subjects and face consequences such as replacing staff for scores that fall short of state goals.

Unlike Democratic candidate Barack Obama, McCain is not calling for increasing the roughly $23 billion the federal government now spends to implement the law. Much of that goes toward educating poor children. Keegan said McCain would reallocate how the money is spent. For example, more would go toward merit-pay programs for teachers. School districts are increasingly experimenting with programs like that, in part because of a Bush administration program that helps pay for the initiatives. The national teachers' unions oppose linking student test scores to teacher pay. Obama supports the idea when teachers help negotiate and craft the merit-pay plans.

McCain also will discuss allowing poor students to get academic tutoring with federal money more quickly than is allowed under the education law. "The senator is very impatient for kids to have interventions when they need it," Keegan said. McCain also would increase the choices kids have when they are in schools that are failing to meet academic benchmarks, Keegan said, adding that he would support a school voucher program for poor children in failing schools under some circumstances.

Vouchers, generally supported by conservatives and opposed by many Democrats, can be politically divisive. "He would not take that option off the table," Keegan said. "We are failing all over the place."

Obama has called for changes to the law, though he also has expressed support for some aspects of it. He says the federal government hasn't adequately funded the law. Obama also is speaking before the NAACP next week.

Source




Children need risk to thrive as adults

The obsessive "safety-first" culture in schools will rob Britain of the next generation of entrepreneurs just when the country needs them most, a leading businessmen has claimed. Simon Woodroffe, founder of Yo! Sushi and a judge on the BBC show Dragons' Den, has told The Times that children must be exposed to more danger to help them to cope with the daily risk-taking required in the modern business world.

He said that he was in despair when he heard that schools were no longer taking pupils canoeing or camping in case they injured themselves. "My greatest fear is our children will grow up expecting to be looked after their whole lives, and expect corporate reasonableness for their entire working life. There would be no way we could compete with India and China with that attitude. Businesses there are doing everything they can to succeed," he said. "We need to encourage children to push themselves, to go beyond their limits, in order to build a nation of bold and confident people."

Mr Woodroffe, 56, is patron of the Go4It awards for schools, run by the Heads, Teachers and Industry (HTI) enterprise, to encourage sensible risktaking and rivalry among pupils. The awards were launched last year by Lord Jones of Birmingham, Minister of State for Trade and Development and a former Director-General of the CBI, in response to concerns of employers over the "cotton-wool kids" culture. HTI is the leading agency that links education with business and is a key adviser to the Government.

Lord Jones and other HTI leaders were horrified at last year's Go4It awards to discover that one of the winning schools was not allowed to attend because the locals authority deemed the journey to London too risky for the pupils. There is increasing concern that health and safety is stifling schools, some of which have banned traditional playground games such as conkers, snowball fights and cartwheeling, or prohibited pupils from doing the backstroke in swimming lessons.

Mr Woodroffe said: "We need to expose ourselves to danger to build the muscles of self-protection. If you don't learn to protect yourself when you are young, you may end up in even more danger later on." It was worrying that while people of his generation thought that health and safety was getting out of control, young people thought it was natural to ban adventurous activities because they might be dangerous, he said.

Mr Woodroffe left school at 16 with two O levels and spent 30 years in the entertainment business. He helped to stage Live Aid in 1985 and went into television before setting up Yo! Sushi in 1997. A new venture to produce extreme sport videos in the 1990s was a flop. He said, however, that he had not been afraid to fail and neither should children.

The Go4It awards will be presented tonight to schools which have developed a positive approach to risk. One winner is Langdale, a primary school in Cumbria, where pupils have just swum across Windermere and take geography lessons up mountains.

Meanwhile, the Children's Society is conducting a two-year inquiry about the pressures and restrictions on young people. It found that the average distance a nine-year-old girl is allowed to roam has been reduced from 840 metres in 1970 to 280 in 1997. The limit today appears to be the bottom of the garden, the charity said. Sue Palmer, an education expert and author of Toxic Childhood, argues that play has changed radically since the 1970s with outdoor activities replaced by screen time indoors. "What's happened is a sort of sedentary, screen-based existence has crept up on children. They used to be free-range and now they're practically battery children, living indoors, experiencing through the medium of a screen," she said.

Source





11 July, 2008

Obama tackles merit pay after getting NEA endorsement

He actually does have some spine!

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Saturday thanked the National Education Association for its endorsement but also made it clear that he continues to support merit pay for teachers. His position is a controversial one with the 3.2 million member group and it has earned him criticism when he addressed the NEA in 2007.

"Now I know this wasn't necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year but I said it then and I'm saying it again now because it's what I believe and I will always be an honest partner to you in the White House," said the Illinois senator, who spoke to the group via satellite from Montana.

Obama proposes to raise teacher pay through merit based rewards for work above and beyond their positions. The issue has long been a widely opposed proposal among the NEA due to its potential for abuse through favoritism and "subjective" evaluations.

The senator pledged to fix the unpopular "No Child Left Behind Act," saying, that while the law had been passed in 2002 with good intentions, it had ultimately failed to produce the desired results. "Let me be clear NEA, opposing No Child Left Behind alone is not an education policy it's just the starting point. We've got more work to do," Obama said and then listed the votes in presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) record that he deemed wrong on education.

"He voted against funding the hiring of 100,000 more teachers," Obama said, noting that McCain also voted against increasing funding for a laundry list of NEA backed initiatives. "He even applauded the idea of abolishing the Department of Education."

The NEA has said it is prepared to spend $50 million on the 2008 elections. McCain was also invited to address the annual convention, but declined the invitation.

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Taboo research in authoritarian Canada

Ask Russel Ogden why he studies suicide, and the sociologist answers by quoting Shakespeare: "To be or not to be?" The Bard's question has never been more relevant, Ogden said in an interview about his studies of people with terminal diseases who take their own lives.

Hamlet's question might also apply to the latest phase in Ogden's research. Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the British Columbia institution where Ogden works, is trying to prevent him from observing assisted suicides. An ethics review board at the university approved the research, but the university has since barred Ogden from carrying out his plans. While suicide is not illegal in Canada, assisting a suicide is illegal, and the university has equated Ogden's proposal to observe assisted suicides with assisting suicides himself.

The dispute has become public in the last week, with Canadian faculty groups charging that the university's actions are a violation of academic freedom, and that the principles cited by the university endanger not only Ogden's research, but the work of social scientists throughout the country who study illegal acts in part by observation. Sociologists in the United States say that the case is important for them as well - and illustrates how studying some of the cutting edge issues in bioethics can create challenging ethical and political issues for academics and universities.

Ogden is no stranger to controversy or to suicide, which he has been studying for 18 years. He first became interested in the subject when "as a teen, I had a couple of close friends who took their lives," he said. "Those suicides had a profound impact on me." Ogden doesn't romanticize suicide. "I regret that they died. I wish that they were still here."

But with legal and political debates growing about whether people with incurable diseases should be able to end their lives - and with some people not waiting for the law, and doing so - Ogden found the topic to be one in need of sociological inquiry.

Even before he decided that he wanted to observe assisted suicides, he has faced lengthy legal battles. He wrote his master's thesis at Simon Fraser University on the decision of some AIDS patients to take their own lives, and he interviewed some of those involved, promising full confidentiality under terms of a research protocol that had been approved by the university's ethics committee.

He spent several years in the '90s in courts over this research, successfully fighting off demands from the Vancouver coroner's office that he reveal information he considered confidential relating to one of the deaths. At the same time, he fought with Simon Fraser, which didn't back him in court and only later agreed to provide some of his legal expenses.

Since then, assisted suicide has continued to divide members of the public, in Canada and the United States. A petition drive has been filed in Washington State to permit medically assisted suicide. Ogden's research has been cited over the years both by proponents and critics of assisted suicide. He describes himself as "supportive of individual choice" for a terminal patient to decide whether to live or die.

But Ogden is quick to say that supporting choice does not mean he or his research are designed to encourage anyone to make that choice. Ogden said he is interested in the decisions people make - to consider suicide, to carry it out - and the impact this has on survivors, medicine, medical professionals, and so forth. He stressed that he does not want to actually help a person commit suicide, but to watch and, as possible, interview those doing so - typically with his having conducted numerous interviews beforehand.

Among the many protections he worked into his research protocol was one designed to prevent a would-be suicide from being influenced by his presence: Ogden would tell anyone contemplating suicide that he is as interested in those who opt to stay alive as those who take their lives - so a last-minute decision to live would in no way disappoint him or his research. He also makes clear that he will in no way help with a suicide.

The various protections Ogden outlined won the approval of his university's ethics board. But then the university administration got involved, and told him that he couldn't proceed because the university believed that his research might be illegal. The university declined to discuss the case, but released a statement outlining in its views in general terms.

"As a university, we encourage and support research which addresses important issues, including controversial issues, in a responsible manner," the statement said. University reviews "take into account the legal and ethical dimensions associated with the proposal, the means by which the researcher intends to address those legal and ethical dimensions, and the appropriate protections for research subjects." In this case, the university consulted with "one of Canada's foremost criminal lawyers about the legal implications of the proposed research. Based on our due diligence, including the lawyer's opinions, we concluded that there were real and unacceptable legal risks associated with the proposed research. In the circumstances, we could not allow the research to take place in its proposed form with Kwantlen's support."

Not only have faculty groups already obtained countering legal opinions, but they say that the opinion the university obtained wasn't based on knowledge of all the protections Ogden put in place. Faculty groups also note that the standard being applied is completely different from that used in other cases. If Kwantlen is not challenged, they argue, much other research could be hindered.

John Lowman is a criminologist at Simon Fraser who was director of graduate studies when Ogden was a graduate student there, and backed him in the dispute over the earlier research. Lowman studies prostitution and much of what he observes for his work is illegal. "I routinely witness criminal activity," he said. "I am a field criminologist. That's what we do. What good would it do if criminologists just study those who have been caught," he said.

Lowman said that the blocking of Ogden's research is "a flagrant violation of academic freedom."

The Canadian Association of University Teachers appears to agree. James Turk, executive director, said that his organization commissioned a legal opinion backing the research. He said that professors can't be in the position of going through a strict ethics review, getting the appropriate sign-off, and then having senior administrators veto their work. "He's a respected social scientist doing research on illegal behavior, but many sociologists study criminal behavior," he said. "If this is upheld, much important social science research would be blocked."

The association has started a formal inquiry into whether Kwantlen has violated Ogden's academic freedom. In addition, numerous academics in Canada are now speaking out about the case - trying to build public pressure to let Ogden go ahead with his studies.

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10 July, 2008

ADHD as a reaction to feminized schools

If you were an energetic nine-year-old boy who loved school, did your best but also loved charging about, trying to beat your friends at every game possible, imagine the hell of our currrent state school system where ball games are banned from the playground in case someone gets hurt, there is no outside play in bad weather and you are constantly in trouble for being too competitive because winning is not what it's about. And, worse, Jamie Oliver fruit smoothies have replaced sponge pudding in your school dinner, so you're starving by two o'clock.

Sue Palmer is a former head teacher, literacy adviser and the author of 21st Century Boys. She says it is a biological necessity that boys run about, take risks, swing off things and compete with each other to develop properly. "If they can't, a lot of them find it impossible to sit still, focus on a book or wield a pencil," she says, "so their behaviour is considered `difficult', they get into trouble and tumble into a cycle of school failure."

Boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school, and 75 per cent of children supposedly suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are male. "We are losing boys at a rate of knots, particularly in literacy," Palmer says, "because at some point in the past 30 years, masculinity became an embarrassment."

Research by Simon Baron-Cohen, a respected Cambridge professor, that began as an investigation into autism, puts a solid case for biological male/female differences in the brain, with boys tending to be "systematisers" and girls "empathisers". This explains why boys generally are less keen on reading and comprehension, and lag behind girls in literacy. A lot of boys find it easier to explain the workings of a watch than to discuss how a character in a story is feeling. "But now," says Palmer, "apart from the very bright ones, boys aren't even doing better at maths and science."

Some people blame this nosedive, first noticed in the mid-Nineties, on the "feminisation" of education - too many women teachers, girl-friendly classroom environments and modular exam systems that suit girls' study skills but disadvantage risk-takers. "Geniuses are much more likely to be male," Palmer says, "but if you don't tick the right boxes, you fail."

There are seven times as many women primary school teachers as men, but Christine Skelton, Professor of Gender Equality in Education at Birmingham University, argues that there have always been far more female teachers than male. "Obviously there are some women who understand active boys, and some men who don't, just as there are energetic girls and inactive boys," she says.

The current generation of teachers, though, were born and raised in an atmosphere dominated by women's liberation and "non-gender-specific" education that began in the Seventies. Barbies were banned, most protagonists in books were female and there was no tolerance of war or superhero play. As a head teacher, Palmer remembers making her reception teacher remove all the cloakroom pegs that depicted tractors for boys and bunnies for girls. "The belief was that you were shaped by your environment, and it was the teacher's responsibility to `socialise' boys away from their natural inclinations and to encourage girls to study traditionally male subjects such as physics and technology," she says.

Palmer would never deny that some of it was absolutely necessary - but with movements such as Reclaim the Night, Greenham Common and Gay Pride, groups that offered an alternative perspective to the traditionally dominant male view taking centre stage, masculinity became suspect. "I really think," she says, "that the almighty cock-up of the sisterhood in the Seventies was that we believed we could turn boys into girls."

Palmer says that most women are not natural risk-takers, so for teachers who have not helped to bring up brothers and who don't have sons, boys' behaviour can be frightening. "Play-fighting, for example, reaches a peak at age 7 or 8 but is not actually aggressive," she says. "It's social - it's the way boys get to know each other and see how the other one ticks. A lot of women teachers are horrified when I suggest that they should let boys get on with fighting and shouting because eventually they'll come out the other side and start negotiating."

Another problem for boys seeking adventure is that, because we live in an increasingly risk-averse society, children are rarely allowed to play unsupervised. When did you last see a group of boys climbing a tree? "There is a rational fear of increased traffic but also an irrational fear of stranger danger, fanned by media reporting of child abduction," says Palmer. "Parents are worried about being considered irresponsible, so they never let their children out of their sight." And because we are not used to seeing boys playing outside, when we do it feels hostile even when what is going on is not particularly boisterous.

Dan Travis, a sports coach, argues that it is very important for boys to muck about on their own. "Coaching is formal and necessary but should only take up 20 per cent of the time they play," he says. "The informal 80 per cent is where most of the learning and practising occurs - away from adult supervision." Travis is running a campaign to bring competition back to school sport. "The Sport for All ethos took hold in the Seventies and never let go," he says. "Games are only about inclusion, with no winners allowed." This is disastrous for boys, who need to compete to establish their place in the hierarchy, which is how they organise their friendships and something that they understand from nursery age onwards. It is also bad for sport. Palmer adds that "self-esteem" arrived from America and now no child is allowed to "lose" at anything.

Palmer is not suggesting that boys should be allowed to behave in any way they want. What we need, she says, is to celebrate what makes them boys and help them to understand the things that don't come naturally to them. That means getting them outside more, particularly as space gets squeezed in urban schools. "Not letting boys be boys is not only detrimental to them but also to girls, many of whom become overcompliant with what is considered `good' behaviour and could do with a shove outdoors to take more risks," she says. "I certainly wish that had happened to me."

Palmer is especially enthusiastic about the few "outdoor nurseries" that we have in this country, and about the Scandinavian system that puts off formal learning until the age of 7 or 8, concentrating instead on playing outside and the development of social skills. In the ideal Palmer world, everyone would go to a Scandinavian-style school. What we are doing instead is bringing in the Early Years Foundation Stage, a new government framework that becomes law in September. It says that by the age of 5 children should be writing sentences, some of which are punctuated. "That would be impressive for a seven-year-old," says Palmer. "So rather than tackling the imbalance in the way that we have treated boys for too long, we are going to make them sit still and learn even younger. I'd call that little short of state-sponsored child abuse."

Source




Nutty Leftist "terror studies" in Australia

Why are these clowns funded when medical schools are greatly underfunded for the demand on them?

University departments dominated by so-called critical terror studies are consigning themselves to ever greater irrelevance, according to security analyst Carl Ungerer. Dr Ungerer, who left the University of Queensland in January to join the Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said security agencies were open to outside advice and "deeply interested in engaging with the academic community". But he said policymakers could see no value in critical terror studies, which in its hostility to sovereign states implied a moral equivalence between terror and counter-terror and even blamed open societies for the rise of religious extremists.

"So, the traditional policy analysis work is now being done by ASPI and the Lowy Institute and the Kokoda Foundation and others," Dr Ungerer said. "If any point comes across strongly since I've been here (in Canberra), it's the way in which the gap between academe and the policy community has widened, which is interesting because the Rudd Government is tapping a wide range of voices. "(But) in the security field they're just not interested in these critical theory ideas. It offers them absolutely nothing to be told that we need to rethink sovereignty or that (terror is) our fault."

In 2006 Dr Ungerer and UQ colleague David Martin Jones first spoke out against the rise of critical terror studies. They said the policy implication of this emerging discipline was "radical pacifism". This week Dr Ungerer described as "eyebrow raising" the February appointment of critical theorist Anthony Burke to the University of NSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy. "The lecturers at ADFA are teaching the next generation of military leaders," Dr Ungerer said.

Speaking from Israel, Dr Burke, the author of Beyond Security Ethics and Violence: War Against The Other, said he did not oppose "controlled and measured" use of military force. He said nation states were ambiguous since they could provide citizens with security as well as subject them to abuse. Some state actions -- such as Israel's approach in the "occupied territories" and possibly the sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- were similar to terrorism in that they targeted civilians and sought to inflict suffering and fear for a political purpose, he said. Dr Burke said critical terror studies was a new discipline with lively internal debate. To say it dominated academe was "a neoconservative, highly culture wars-type argument".

Soon after the September 11 attacks, Dr Burke wrote: "These events have brought enormous levels of organised military violence -- intensifying Israeli Defence Force operations in Palestine, the war on Afghanistan and sabre-rattling against Iraq -- but also quasi-military, normalised patterns of violence and coercion in the form of domestic security, surveillance, and the 'deterrence' of asylum-seekers."

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9 July, 2008

The hysterical persecution mounted by Purdue University tells us that American Politics Aren't 'Post-Racial' yet

The not-quite-concluded racial drama playing out at Purdue University in the last months can't be ranked with the embittering rape charge scandal at Duke that so recently mesmerized the nation. And as news it's not in the same league as the total war waged against Harvard president Lawrence Summers for having had the temerity to suggest that factors in addition to prejudice might have something to do with the underrepresentation of women in math and the sciences. Still, what happened at Purdue is a pungent reminder of all that's possible now in the rarefied ideological atmosphere on our college campuses - and in this presidential election year, not perhaps only on our campuses.

The story began prosaically enough. Keith Sampson, a student employee on the janitorial staff earning his way toward a degree, was in the habit of reading during work breaks. Last October he was immersed in "Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan."

Mr. Sampson was in short order visited by his union representative, who informed him he must not bring this book to the break room, and that he could be fired. Taking the book to the campus, Mr. Sampson says he was told, was "like bringing pornography to work." That it was a history of the battle students waged against the Klan in the 1920s in no way impressed the union rep.

The assistant affirmative action officer who next summoned the student was similarly unimpressed. Indeed she was, Mr. Sampson says, irate at his explanation that he was, after all, reading a scholarly book. "The Klan still rules Indiana," Marguerite Watkins told him - didn't he know that? Mr. Sampson, by now dazed, pointed out that this book was carried in the university library. Yes, she retorted, you can get Klan propaganda in the library. The university has allowed no interviews with Ms. Watkins or any other university official involved in the case. Still, there can be no disputing the contents of the official letter that set forth the university's case.

Mr. Sampson stood accused of "openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers." The statement, signed by chief affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston, asserted that her office had completed its investigation of the charges brought by Ms. Nakea William, his co-worker - that Mr. Sampson had continued, despite complaints, to read a book on this "inflammatory topic." "We conclude," the letter informed him, "that your conduct constitutes racial harassment. . . ." A very serious matter, with serious consequences, it went on to point out.

That was in November. Months later, in February of this year, Mr. Sampson received - from the same source - a letter with an astonishingly transformed version of his offense. And there could be no mystery as to the cause of this change. After the official judgment against him, Mr. Sampson turned to the Indiana state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose office contacted university attorneys. Worse, the case got some sharp local press coverage that threatened to get wider.

Ludicrous harassment cases are not rare at our institutions of higher learning. But there was undeniably something special - something pure, and glorious - in the clarity of this picture. A university had brought a case against a student on grounds of a book he had been reading.

And so the new letter to Mr. Sampson by affirmative action officer Charleston brought word that she wished to clarify her previous letter, and to say it was "permissible for him to read scholarly books or other materials on break time." About the essential and only theme of the first letter - the "racially abhorrent" subject of the book - or the warnings that any "future substantiated conduct of a similar nature could mean serious disciplinary action" - there was not a word. She had meant in that first letter, she said, only to address "conduct" that caused concern among his co-workers. What that conduct was, the affirmative action officer did not reveal - but she had delivered the message rewriting the history of the case. Absolutely and for certain there had been no problem about any book he had been reading.

This, indeed, was now the official story - as any journalist asking about the case would learn instantly from the university's media relations representatives. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved - if not much - by the extraordinary efforts of these tormented agents trying to explain that the first letter was all wrong: No reading of any book had anything to do with the charges against Mr. Sampson. This means, I asked one, that Mr. Sampson could have been reading about the adventures of Jack and Jill and he still would have been charged? Yes. What, then, was the offense? "Harassing behavior." While reading the book? The question led to careful explanations hopeless in tone - for good reason - and well removed from all semblance of reason. What the behavior was, one learned, could never be revealed.

There was, of course, no other offensive behavior; had there been any it would surely have appeared in the first letter's gusher of accusation. Like those prosecutors who invent new charges when the first ones fail in court, the administrators threw in the mysterious harassment count. Such were the operations of the university's guardians of equity and justice.

In April - having been pressed by the potent national watchdog group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) as well as the ACLU - University Chancellor Charles R. Bantz finally sent them a letter expressing regret over this affair, and testifying to his profound commitment to freedom of expression. So far as can be ascertained, the university has extended no such expressions of regret to Keith Sampson.

This case and all its kind are worth bearing in mind for anyone pondering the hypersensitivity surrounding the issue of race today. The mindset that produces those harassment courts, those super-heated capacities for perceiving insult, is not limited to college campuses.

Its presence is evident in this election campaign, which has seen more than a touch of readiness to impute some form of racism to all tough criticisms of Barack Obama. The deranged response that greeted Bill Clinton's remark that certain of Sen. Obama's claims were "a fairy tale," told the story. No need to go into the now famous catalogue of accusations about the Clintons' "sly racist" tactics.

There will be much more ahead, directed to the Republicans and their candidate. Some more, no doubt, about the Willie Horton ad of 1988, whose status as a quintessential piece of racism is - except for a few rare voices of reason - accepted throughout our media as revealed truth. To be sure, the Willie Horton charge has for some time been overshadowed by ominous predictions of all the Swiftboating Republicans are supposed to be readying.

And Mr. Obama himself, the candidate of racial transcendence, has now taken a plunge of sorts to old-style race politics. In a pre-emptive dismissal of future criticism, he warned a Florida audience on June 20 of the racist tactics the Republicans planned. "We know the strategy," he said. Republicans planned to make people afraid of him. They'd say "he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"

All this may be far from the world of the universities. But to those aforementioned campus ideologues, the thinking is familiar.

Source




Australia: No strings school funding 'a failure'

GIVING disadvantaged schools extra money without tying it to specific interventions fails to lift the performance of students from poorer backgrounds. A review of funding programs designed to overcome social disadvantage says current arrangements are failing to reduce or neutralise the effects of a child's background on their achievement at school.

The study by University of Melbourne researchers contains a lesson for the federal Government in pursuing its education revolution, and its commitment to fund schools according to the needs of their students. Education Minister Julia Gillard has proposed a new funding agreement with the states and territories to fund schools according to the socio-economic status of their students. The study underlines the importance of funding being tied to programs designed to tackle problems identified by the school. One of the review's authors, Stephen Lamb from the university's Centre for Post-compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning, said merely allocating resources to schools without a clear idea on how they would or should be spent, fails to improve student performance. "It's an ongoing problem around the world," he said. "It's no use just handing over money to schools; in fact, you could be putting out good money after bad. We need to work out what works and fund that."

The review was conducted into the equity programs run by the NSW Government that are intended to close the gap in achievement between students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds. Among the programs reviewed was the general equity program, called the Priority Schools Funding Program, which targets 21per cent of the most socially disadvantaged students, giving extra resources to about 25per cent of the state's schools.

The PSFP received about $20 million of commonwealth funding in 2004, with the state Government providing an additional 280 teachers to those schools. The review also analysed a pilot program called the Priority Action Schools Program, which gave 74 disadvantaged schools between $100,000 and $400,000 each. The PSFP hands money to the schools to spend how they see fit, with all schools receiving the same amount regardless of the level of disadvantage. But schools received funding under the PASP only after identifying strategies to address specific problems in their schools, linking the money to programs that then had to be monitored and evaluated for their effectiveness.

Comparing the results in literacy and numeracy tests and the Year 10 School Certificate between disadvantaged schools on the different programs, the review found that non-PASP schools tended to experience falls in the mean levels of student achievement in literacy and numeracy tests. In contrast, PASP schools tended to experience gains, and in some cases the change in achievement was statistically significant.

The report says the main approach to addressing social inequality in public schools in NSW in the past is largely based on fiscal compensation. "The assumption is that money is necessary and sufficient to improve the quality of schooling in disadvantaged areas," it says. "This leads to a situation in which there is little accountability from schools, and little control over how schools use the funds and whether or not they are employed to develop programs that target the needs of the students."

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8 July, 2008

Study allegedly debunks theory that Asian students are top notchers in US

This study does not seem to have passed peer review and I can have a good guess why. Grouping all "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders" together is absurd. Polynesians and Filipinos are of below average IQ while Japanese and Chinese are of above average IQ. No wonder averaging out two such opposite groups produced average results! Not to put too fine a point on it, the "study" is a propaganda con-job

A belief that Asian-Americans are taking over US universities, outperforming other groups and grabbing the bulk of math, science and engineering degrees has been debunked in a landmark study.

American popular culture is full of claims that Asian Americans are "overrunning college campuses with high enrollment" but "such impressions exaggerate" their presence in US higher education, the study said.

Entitled "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders -- Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight," the study was conducted by New York University, a group of mostly Asian-American educators, and the College Board, a group that holds standardized tests for mostly high school students.

The study showed that the number of Asian-Americans at institutions of higher learning was inflated by foreign students from Asian nations and that not all were top students gaining easy entry to the best colleges and universities to become doctors and engineers.

"Contrary to the fiction that Asian American and Pacific Islander students are taking over colleges and universities across the country, the increase in (their) higher education participation has mirrored the increases found among other populations during the same time period," according to the report.

"Because of the assumption that they are doing well and are high achievers, many people assume that they don't have needs, and they are ignored in education and social policy," Robert Teranishi, a New York University education professor and key author of the report, told AFP.

Asian-Americans, he said, had long been missing from discussions in educational research and policy, and "remain in the shadows of America's commitment to equality and social justice.

"A lot of Asian-Americans are doing well, we don't dispute that but that's not the only story that needs to be told," he said.

The "landmark" study was debated recently in the first education "summit" of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), comprising US lawmakers from the communities.

"The myth of student achievement throughout our communities has masked particular linguistic and cultural needs of our young people for far too long," said Mike Honda, a Japanese American lawmaker who heads CAPAC.

The report shows "how the 'model minority' stereotype is harmful, often leading teachers to overlook (these) students, many of whom may require additional academic support," said Vivien Stewart of the US-based Asia Society and who was on the panel that compiled report.

It said that Asian-American student population was "concentrated in a small percentage of institutions, giving the false impression of high enrollment in higher education overall."

They have a wide range of academic interests, including the social sciences, humanities and education as opposed to just science, technology, engineering, and math, it said.

Furthermore, Asian Americans cannot be generalized as they are an ethnically diverse population having many different languages and dialects with varying economic, social, and cultural factors, the report said.

The US Census Bureau estimates that there are now almost 17 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, an umbrella term for 48 different ethnic groups from such historically different places as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands.

Some entered the country because US employers needed their expertise, while others came as refugees with few resources and opportunities or just to study and then return home, the report said.

Yet they are perceived to be so ubiquitous in higher education and seen as the same studious, self-sufficient high achievers, the report said.

Source




The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire

When Michael Olneck was standing, arms linked with other protesters, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” in front of Columbia University’s library in 1968, Sara Goldrick-Rab had not yet been born. When he won tenure at the University of Wisconsin here in 1980, she was 3. And in January, when he retires at 62, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be just across the hall, working to earn a permanent spot on the same faculty from which he is departing. Together, these Midwestern academics, one leaving the professoriate and another working her way up, are part of a vast generational change that is likely to profoundly alter the culture at American universities and colleges over the next decade.

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate. “There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”

Individual colleges and organizations like the American Association of University Professors are already bracing for what has been labeled the graying of the faculty. More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969. How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets.

Yet already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade. At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology. At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military.

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce. But a new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger. “These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says.

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations, summoning Barack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

With more than 675,000 professors at the nation’s more than 4,100 four-year and two-year institutions, it is easy to find faculty members, young and old, who defy any mold. Still, this move to the middle is “certainly the conventional wisdom,” said Jack H. Schuster, who along with Martin J. Finkelstein, wrote “The American Faculty,” a comprehensive analysis of existing data on the profession. “The agenda is different now than what it had been.”

With previous battles already settled, like the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments, moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum. David DesRosiers, executive director of the Veritas Fund for Higher Education Reform, which contributes to conservative activities on campuses, said impending retirements present an opportunity. However, he added, “we’re not looking for fights,” but rather “a civil dialogue.” His model? A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George.

More here





7 July, 2008

Children who WILL be left behind

In a few instances inspired teachers can help students like this but such teachers are rare. Only high discipline schools could fix this on a nationwide basis. But such schools are out of fashion -- effective though they once were

I was talking to a friend the other day who teaches at an elementary school and has a student whom I shall name Shakir. Shakir is ten, and he's barely literate. My friend's class is not a large one; she has five to eight students. She also has a teaching assistant, and between them, the kids receive a lot of personal, one-to-one attention. Nevertheless, Shakir still can't read.

The why of this phenomenon is quite important; you see, there are lots of Shakirs in the black community. For he is one of many kids flunking his way through the educational system, even as he advances through it. I think there are many causal factors for Shakir's non-performance in school; amongst them are Shakir himself and his priorities; the instability of his family; his community culture; and, the school system itself.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I am not going to point the finger first at the school. After all, Shakir is not a receptacle whose lid can be raised so that some teacher can stuff in the knowledge he needs. Education is a participative process, you see. The school and teachers have their part, and the kid and his family have their role to play.

A large part of the problem is that Shakir refuses to do his bit to educate himself. Given classwork in school, Shakir engages in a series of acts of avoidance. He will disrupt, pick fights with his classmates, curse, destroy objects in his environment, sleep, declare that he will do nothing, or take the entire day simply to write his name. No amount of cajoling, promises, or behavioral modification methods can change Shakir's mind. For him to work for a little bit, there must be some immediate object or event that he finds desirable to attain or participate in. Even then, when the gain is weighed against the effort required to work, Shakir may well determine that the work is not worth doing to obtain the prospective reward.

At the root of all his disruptive behavior is Shakir's acknowledgment that he cannot read, his frustration with his illiteracy, and his stated unwillingness to use the kindergarten level materials that will help him to read. Shakir will neither let his teacher nor her aide help him --that requires him to work; plus, he has to represent before his peers -- nor will he go to the kindergarten or the reading teachers both of whom have offered assistance. Given homework that will help him to solve his problem, Shakir either refuses to take it home or, if he does, does not return it. Compounding the problem, Shakir cannot get help at home.

Shakir's family situation is a significant part of his problem. He is one of four children to a twenty-something mother who has three other children by three different men, and she might well be pregnant again by her current boyfriend. Shakir's mother is unemployed and on welfare. She and her current boyfriend tend to have loud fights which can become physical, and often her boyfriend, who can be a positive influence on Shakir, will disappear for weeks at a time to avoid doing violence to her. Shakir's father is currently in prison, scheduled to be released some time later this year; his current stint in prison is not his first, and I fear it is not likely to be his last.

The uncertainty of the shifting relationships in the boy's life is compounded by the constant housing moves to which his mother subjects the family. On welfare and a recipient of a Section Eight housing grant, Shakir's family experiences a regular housing cycle from apartment in a tough neighborhood to government-sponsored motel/hotel and back before the cycle repeats all over again. What determines the move from apartment in a tough neighborhood to a motel/hotel is his mother. Given an apartment found by the proper authorities, Shakir's mother will not pay rent, even though she receives money to do so.

Eventually, the family will have to move to a motel, and his mother will acquire a new cell phone number along with a new address. Shakir is deeply ashamed that his family lives in a motel/hotel, even temporarily, and he avoids telling his classmates anything about where he resides. If his teachers tell him they know how to contact his mom when he misbehaves, Shakir will flare up and curse because he believes that his teachers are putting his business on the street.

The instability in his home life, characterized by the constant moves and the stress under which the child lives because of his shame and fear, means that, for Shakir, education is not a priority. He has no stable home with books, magazines, or trips to the library. His mother is either a high school dropout or limped her way to graduation with a poor academic record herself. She does not check his book-bag, makes no effort to ensure that he does his homework, nor does she provide any assistance with his reading.

What she will do, when school authorities call her to complain about her son's behavior, is come to the school ready to curse and fight his teachers. No matter how badly Shakir acts in school, his mother will, in front of him, blame his teachers. Often, she will add to the lack of stability in the boy's life by changing his school because she thinks his teachers are out to get him. Thus, Shakir has been to several schools in his district and has even gone to schools in a neighboring state. Nevertheless, Shakir still can't read.

Community plays an important role in the behavior and priorities of individuals. For instance, if a child belongs to a community in which education is prized, then he will have an external force compelling him to achieve in some way because he does not wish to be out of step with his peers. Regrettably, in low income communities like Shakir's, the external force compels kids away from educational achievement, in spite of the efforts of some to turn things around. For many of Shakir's peers, educational achievement is a mark of whiteness; thus, the high achieving black kid has to deal with issues of authenticity.

If he does not sound ghetto, he experiences a loss of black identity. More than that, he will be preyed upon by the gang-bangers and thugs who will consider him easy prey. So, he has to be tough, and educational achievement is not part of the toughness.

Shakir's peers are not focused on education. Instead, their everyday talk is of gang-related activities, shooting with B-B guns, fighting, or engaging in illicit activity. For instance, Shakir and his friends are already gang members. That is the way of the community in which he lives, when he lives there. Since his neighborhood is high crime, with assorted toughs standing on the street corners, there is always some sort of violence on a daily basis. Somebody gets shot, robbed, beaten up. The neighborhood is not for the faint-hearted; big dogs in their teens and twenties prey on the little dogs who are excited by prospective gang membership. This is the life they know. For them, there is excitement in talking about who got shot or assaulted. Some of Shakir's peers express their disdain for quieter and more residential communities because there is no action in them-meaning no gun play and such.

Thus, neither Shakir himself, his family such as it is, nor his community seem to have much interested in his education, in him learning to read. So, then, what about the school system?

In the school system, Shakir, whatever enthusiasm he might have started out his school career with, by the age of ten has none. He has spent the years since kindergarten fighting, cursing, and distracting away from his reading problems. Each teacher he has encountered has made an active effort to help him. Each has been beaten by the combination of forces outside of the school system and by the child himself. Tired of his behavior, of his resistance and refusal, even when he is held back, his teachers have passed him on to the next grade where he is ill-prepared to do that grade's work because he never mastered the content matter of the previous grades.

All across America, schools are confronted with Shakirs who either do not show up for school or who attend school but hang out in the hallways, bathrooms, and other hideaways. Even in well disciplined schools, there are Shakirs who go to class and put their heads on the desk. They refuse to work; the same way, their parents refuse to attend parent-teacher meetings. They sleep, they disrupt, curse, fight, and do no work. Many of those who do work, do it indifferently; they go through the motions expecting to achieve high marks for minimal effort. Moreover, even when these Shakirs have done no work at all, they expect to graduate.

What can the schools do, confronted with thousands of Shakirs all across America? Many schools are just passing the kids through, just biding time until the kids are no longer the responsibility of the school. Why Shakir can't read is the same reason many black kids in America can't read: the kid's own lack of interest in education, his unstable home life with a single parent who doesn't care, a community that regards education as being destructive of black authenticity, and school systems which are burnt out with the stress of dealing with such kids.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the school cannot do it all; for, education is essentially reciprocal. Therefore, the first three must change before school systems can produce Shakirs who can read.

Source




Walter Shakespeare? More evidence of the decline in British education

The questions, you might think, are child's play. But the number of adults who struggled with the answers paints a disturbing picture of a nation of dunces. In a test carried out for an information website, many were unable to answer questions aimed at children as young as seven. And some were guilty of the most appalling howlers, including giving Shakespeare's first name as Walter, the capital of Sweden as Oslo, and the cube of 2 as 24.

More than 2,000 adults were asked ten questions based on the Key Stage Two curriculum, which is studied by children aged seven to 11. Only 5 per cent answered all ten questions correctly and 3 per cent scored a dismal one out of ten. Critics will cite the findings as an indictment of the education system, which has been accused of failing to adequately teach schoolleavers important facts and figures.

The average score was just six questions right. In the South East and South West the average was seven, dropping to three in the North West. Seventy-seven per cent could not spell the word 'skilful', 35 per cent did not know that a heptagon has seven sides and 58 per cent incorrectly named the capital of Sweden, with some thinking it was Gothenburg or even the Finnish capital Helsinki.

Twelve per cent suggested that the Bard's first name was Walter and 7 per cent believed that Henry VIII was on the throne in 1900. In all, 39 per cent could not name Queen Victoria as the reigning monarch at the start of the 20th century. The dates of the Second World War, the medical term for the skull and the name of the planet nearest the sun also caused problems.

The test was sat only by adults but based around questions that children aged seven to 11 would be expected to be able to answer. Andy Salmon, founder of thinkalink.co.uk, which undertook the nationwide general knowledge test, said: 'Considering that these questions could be answered by at least a seven-year-old, you might say the test was easy and so an average score of six out of ten is pretty weak. 'Of course, it's not that any of the questions were particularly difficult, we have all been taught the information, it is retaining the knowledge that is the hard bit.' Mr Salmon's website advises people to remember facts and figures by linking the answer to a memorable phrase.

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6 July, 2008

British schoolboys punished with detention for refusing to kneel in class and pray to Allah

Two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during a religious education lesson. Parents were outraged that the two boys from year seven (11 to 12-year-olds) were punished for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped. They said forcing their children to take part in the exercise at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent - which included wearing Muslim headgear - was a breach of their human rights.

One parent, Sharon Luinen, said: "This isn't right, it's taking things too far. "I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn't join in Muslim prayer. "Making them pray to Allah, who isn't who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that they were told they were being disrespectful. "I don't want this to look as if I have a problem with the school because I am generally very happy with it."

Another parent Karen Williams said: "I am absolutely furious my daughter was made to take part in it and I don't find it acceptable. "I haven't got a problem with them teaching my child other religions and a small amount of information doesn't do any harm. "But not only did they have to pray, the teacher had gone into the class and made them watch a short film and then said 'we are now going out to pray to Allah'. "Then two boys got detention and all the other children missed their refreshment break because of the teacher. "Not only was it forced upon them, my daughter was told off for not doing it right. "They'd never done it before and they were supposed to do it in another language."

"My child has been forced to pray to Allah in a school lesson." The grandfather of one of the pupils in the class said: "It's absolutely disgusting, there's no other way of putting it. "My daughter and a lot of other mothers are furious about their children being made to kneel on the floor and pray to Islam. If they didn't do it they were given detention. "I am not racist, I've been friendly with an Indian for 30 years. I've also been to a Muslim wedding where it was explained to me that alcohol would not be served and I respected that. "But if Muslims were asked to go to church on Sunday and take Holy Communion there would be war."

Parents said that their children were made to bend down on their knees on prayer mats which the RE teacher had got out of her cupboard and they were also told to wear Islamic headgear during the lesson on Tuesday afternoon. Deputy headmaster Keith Plant said: "It's difficult to know at the moment whether this was part of the curriculum or not. I am not an RE teacher, I am an English teacher. "At the moment it is our enterprise week and many of our members of staff are away. "The particular member of staff you need to speak to isn't around. I think that it is a shame that so many parents have got in touch with the Press before coming to me. "I have spoken to the teacher and she has articulately given me her version of events, but that is all I can give you at the moment."

A statement from Cheshire County Council on behalf of the school read: "The headteacher David Black contacted this authority immediately complaints were received. "Enquiries are being made into the circumstances as a matter of urgency and all parents will be informed accordingly. "Educating children in the beliefs of different faith is part of the diversity curriculum on the basis that knowledge is essential to understanding. "We accept that such teaching is to be conducted with some sense of sensitivity."

Source




British experts want sex education from age four to cut teen pregnancies

This is ridiculous. Let kids be kids

Two leading sexual health charities are calling for children as young as four to be given compulsory sex education. Brook and the Family Planning Association argue that teaching children about sex from a young age would help cut abortion rates and sexually transmitted infections when adolescents. The charities said children should be taught the names of body parts and about sex and relationships.

The Brook chief executive, Simon Blake, said: "If we get high-quality sex and relationships education in every primary and secondary school across the UK all the evidence shows teenage pregnancy rates will continue to fall and will improve young people's sexual health. "While sex and relationships education continues to be patchy, another generation of children and young people do not get the education they need to form healthy relationships and protect their sexual health." He wants every primary and secondary school to be legally required to provide sex and relationships education and secondary schools to ensure young people have access to free confidential contraceptive and sexual health services.

He told the BBC: "Many young people are having sex because they want to find out what it is, because they were drunk or because their mates were." He added: "All the evidence shows that if you start sex and relationships education early - before children start puberty, before they feel sexual attraction - they start having sex later. They are much more likely to use contraception and practise safe sex." The Department for Children, Schools and Families issued new draft guidance on wellbeing for schools yesterday.

The Sex Education Forum, the national authority on sex and relationships teaching, called for personal, social, health and economic education, which includes sex and relationships, to be made statutory. Julie Bentley, the Family Planning Association chief executive, said: "This is not about teaching four-year-olds how to have sex ... it's like maths - at primary school children learn the basics so that they can understand more and more complex concepts at a later stage." She added: "Parents are concerned that if they are told about sex they will go straight out and have it but the research shows the complete opposite. They have sex later and when they do, they have safer sex."

At present all children have to learn about the biology of reproduction but parents can opt to remove children from personal, social, health and economic education lessons, where they learn about the emotional and relationships side of sex

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5 July, 2008

New drive to ban race preferences

Initiatives in three states would prohibit affirmative action in public realms

Tensions are running high in the latest affirmative-action battlegrounds. In Arizona, Nebraska, and Colorado, supporters of ballot initiatives that would ban "preferential treatment" are counting up petition signatures - and opponents are scrutinizing their validity - to see if there's enough support to bring the issue to voters in November.

The American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI), led by Ward Connerly, is pushing the initiatives, which would change state constitutions to prohibit preferences based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the public realms of employment, education, and contracting. Similar ballot measures have succeeded in only three states: California in 1996 and later in Washington and Michigan.

Proponents of affirmative action learned from those votes not to wait until the fall election to make their case to the public. So they've been mustering volunteers now to wage "decline to sign" campaigns.

The initiative fight is one area where race and politics intersect in this election cycle. Some backers of the initiative cite Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic primary as evidence that people of any color can succeed in today's society - though the candidate himself recently stated his opposition to such ballot initiatives. In Nebraska, a pro-initiative radio ad opens with a clip from an inflammatory speech by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, followed by a voice-over noting that "colorblind government" is a way to "reject the politics of race and hate."

The polarization sparked by these battles "makes it difficult for people to think about what's at stake in a more practical way," says Carol Swain, a law and political science professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. It "continues to politicize the discussion of issues that should be on the table ... given where we are demographically." Examples she'd like to see more dialogue about include immigration reform and class-based, rather than race-based, affirmative action, an idea she supports.

ACRI, a nonprofit in Sacramento, Calif., backed initiatives in five states this year. The efforts in Missouri and Oklahoma came to a halt without enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. In Colorado, the validity of signatures has been challenged in court - a scenario that appears likely in both Arizona and Nebraska after the signature deadlines, July 3 and 4 respectively.

"It's not only morally wrong, but ... often counterproductive for the question of someone's skin color or race to be a factor ... when the government interacts with an individual," says Mr. Connerly, founder and president of ACRI. A former member of the University of California Board of Regents, he championed passage of that state's 1996 ballot measure, and he also led the efforts in Washington State and Michigan.

Connerly acknowledges that there is still discrimination but says society has changed to the point that whites can no longer always be presumed to be the "oppressors." In some cities, whites feel discriminated against by majority-black governments, and in others, blacks feel shortchanged by Hispanic leaders. "Nobody has a monopoly on being able to discriminate," he says. Connerly sees the direct appeal to voters as the best hope for changing laws.

His opponents believe just as strongly that affirmative action is still an important tool to promote equal opportunity for minorities and women, as well as to reach goals such as diversity in higher education. When they explain to people that the initiatives would threaten scholarships and efforts to hire women and minority faculty, many decide not to sign the petitions, they say.

Still, once the matter is before voters in the privacy of the ballot booth, "if an overwhelmingly white electorate is given an opportunity ... to uphold white privilege, the majority are going to do it," says Donna Stern, coordinator of a Detroit-based group called BAMN: Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary.

Opponents have accused Connerly's campaigns of hiring paid signature-gathering groups that show a pattern of violating rules and misleading voters. Some opponents have videotaped petition circulators to try to prove their claims. "Paid signature-gathering isn't inherently bad ... [but some] organizers don't feel accountable to the rules," says Kristina Wilfore, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive group in Washington that helps document fraud and pushes for reforms. (Ballot initiatives are allowed in 24 states.)

Connerly and state initiative organizers deny such allegations. They fault their opponents for giving voters incorrect information - by saying, in Nebraska for instance, that the proposal would threaten breast-cancer screenings.

Despite activist "blockers," Connerly and state initiative organizers say they expect to turn in signatures in Arizona and Nebraska beyond the minimum needed to qualify. At press time, they were not ready to state how many they had gathered.

In Arizona, universities generally don't use race as a factor in admission. What's at stake are programs such as one to help Hispanic women improve their college graduation rate or another to support women studying engineering, says State Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D), chair of Protect Arizona's Freedom, a coalition against the initiative. Other programs that could be affected include state and local goals for getting bids from minority and woman-owned businesses.

The policies that would be subject to change vary state by state, but higher education is where the debate over affirmative action, or preferences, has played out most strongly in recent years. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court struck down a University of Michigan undergraduate admissions policy that assigned points to race, but it upheld the law school's more narrowly tailored policy. The law school considered race as one element in efforts to promote the educational value of diversity.

In 2006, the Connerly-backed initiative passed in Michigan with 58 percent of the vote, making the law there more restrictive than what the high court allowed nationwide. The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor revamped its admissions policies to promote diversity while complying with the law, says Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs.

This year's freshman class is projected to be about 10.5 percent African-American, Hispanic, and native American, down slightly from 10.9 percent last year. In 2003, these groups made up about 13 percent of undergraduates.

Mr. Monts says he's glad the declines are not as strong as what the University of California experienced after the change there in 1996. But, he says, educators in other states are right to believe their diversity efforts are threatened by such initiatives: "We've had to increase our admissions staff [and] our financial-aid budget. Other universities may not be in a position to do those kinds of things."

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More Driver Drivel

One of the downsides of my "job" (I use the term loosely) providing your peephole/telescopic/microscopic view into the wonderful world of discrimination (not to mention my filter/sieve service, separating the chaff from the really bad chaff) is that I have to read so much offensive, militant nonsense from know-nothings like Shanta Driver, national chairpersonwoman of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), the battering ram used by the Democrats to do the dirty work of supporting racial preferences, such as disrupting meetings and sending out threatening "blockers" to intimidate petition-signers.

She's still in Arizona (where we encountered her only last week, here), and still spouting angry, duplicitous nonsense. One saving grace of having to read her, however, is being reminded that she's so far around the bend that she doesn't realize how offensive she sounds to most people, such as when she unblushingly reveals her disdain for democracy and the blighted, racist Americas who struggle to make it work.

The head of a group opposing an initiative to end affirmative action and other preferential programs said she wants to block the measure from getting on the ballot in part because she fears a majority of Arizonans will vote for it.... Driver said putting this measure before Arizona voters, even in 2008, would be like asking Alabama residents in the 1950s to vote on equal rights for blacks.

I'm sure Arizonans will appreciate being compared to racist white Alabamians in 1950, but that comparison makes as much sense as describing a measure that would prohibit discrimination as discriminatory. Nor does Driver seem to recognize that her opposition to colorblind equality depends upon a definition of "civil rights" that is distorted beyond all recognition.

Shanta Driver, national chair of By Any Means Necessary, said it is improper to push the measure as a "civil rights" initiative. She said that term connotes something to help minorities

There is no control over what "connotes" what to Ms. Driver, but "civil rights" denotes the right to be free from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, etc. As if Driver's distorted connotions weren't enough, for some reason she thinks a supporter who admits that she didn't read the petition she signed strengthens her case.

"Civil rights applies to all people, regardless of their race or their sex," [director of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative Max] McPhail said. "To give someone preference based on something like a characteristic like race goes against what civil rights really means."

But Pamela Brown, one of the people who signed the petition, said there is no question that the use of the words "civil rights" was designed to mislead. Brown, who is black, said she grew up in the 1950s and 1960s watching TV coverage of fire hoses being turned on civil rights protestors in the South. "When you say `civil rights' to a person of my era, that's what we go back to," she said.

McPhail said anyone who actually read the text of the initiative, which legally must be attached to the petition, would see that it bans preferential treatment. Brown, who signed the initiative, conceded that she did not look at the language.

Driver and her un-reading supporter, Brown, thus believe that discriminating against many Asians and a few whites to help blacks and Hispanics is what "civil rights" is all about. Well, that must be the case, since that's what Brown learned watching TV.

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Britain: Leading Jewish state school is cleared in race bias case

A leading Jewish state school was cleared yesterday of racially discriminating against the son of a convert in a ruling that shores up the whole faith school system. JFS, formerly the Jewish Free School, refused a place to an 11-year-old boy whose mother had converted to the faith. His father took legal action on the ground that the school's admissions code breached race laws, by favouring children with Jewish-born mothers over religiously observant families who had converted. A High Court judge decided, however, that the school had not discriminated on racial grounds and said that Jewish status could not be determined by secular courts.

Mr Justice Mumby recognised that, if the case had succeeded, it would probably have rendered unlawful "the admission arrangements in a very large number of faith schools, of many denominations". He said that members of a religion did not necessarily have to practise that faith. Judaism is passed on through the maternal line, or through conversion. Religious state schools are allowed to use faith-based criteria to decide which children to admit.

The father of the boy, known as M, was seeking a judicial review because he said that the school in northwest London used ethnic rather than religious reasons for refusing his son a place. Children from two other families who consider themselves Jewish have also been turned away from the school, which achieves high results and is very oversubscribed.

One was the daughter of the school's head of English, Kate Lightman, whose husband David is an Orthodox Jew. She converted more than 20 years ago under Israel's Chief Rabbi, but her daughter was not deemed to be Jewish by the Office of the Chief Rabbi in Britain, which controls JFS's admissions.

Dinah Rose, QC, representing M, said that the school would accept a child of Jewish-born "committed atheists" but exclude others who are "Jewish by belief and practice" because of their mother's descent.

Rejecting the legal challenge, the judge said the admissions policy was "not materially different from that which gives preference in admission to a Muslim school to those who were born Muslim, or preference in admission to a Catholic school to those who have been baptised". He said such policies were a "proportionate and lawful means of achieving a legitimate end". The judge said the school had the right to give preference for those from a certain religion, even if they had fallen away from that faith. Russell Kett, chairman of governors at JFS, said: "The school abhors all forms of discrimination and welcomes the judge's express finding that JFS does not racially discriminate."

Simon Hochhauser, president of the United Synagogue, said: "We are pleased that JFS's admissions procedures and policies have been so fully endorsed. We acknowledge the judge's ruling that Jewish status can only be defined by Jewish law."

Philip Hunter, the chief schools adjudicator, ordered JFS last year to scrap admissions criteria designed to be used if it were ever undersubscribed.

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4 July, 2008

Nutty British schools honcho

Deception is a stock in trade of the Left so I guess we should not be surprised that he wants more of it

Head teachers have expressed their astonishment after Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, suggested that the best way to prevent six and seven-year-olds from getting stressed about exams was simply not to tell them they were being tested. Mr Balls said that he was angry with schools that had informed parents in advance when children in primary school would sit their compulsory Key Stage 1 tests, sometimes known as SATs. “I cannot believe they are doing that. They should not be doing that,” he said in an interview published today in the New Statesman.

“The best head teachers will ensure that no six or seven-year-old knows they are doing SATs. If you are telling pupils in Year 2 that they are doing SATs then that’s the wrong thing. You should not be stressing the children.” He added: “They don’t need to do the SATs in a sit-down environment. It’s something that can be done as part of the school day. Honestly. And there are loads of schools doing that.”

But his remarks drew an angry response from head teachers. David Fann, head of Sherwood and Broughton primary schools in Preston, and chairman of the Primary Committee of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said Mr Balls had very little idea of the daily realities of running a school. “Children very soon work out when the national tests are going on. Parents hear rumours from parents of children at other schools so it makes no sense to keep the dates a secret. That would add to the stress,” he said. “At my schools we invite in the parents in April to explain the procedures. We do it in a relaxed manner. “When the tests do happen, it is in the usual classroom with a teacher the children know, so it feels normal to them,” he added.

Other head teachers said that they routinely informed parents about the Key Stage 1 testsbecause a warning ensured that children were not taken on holiday that week, were given plenty of sleep and were in school on time. Mr Fann said that a little bit of stress could be good for children, if it was well managed. “Head teachers want to keep stress to reasonable levels, but we also want to motivate and challenge children to do their best,” he said.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the NAHT, said he was glad that Mr Balls had admitted that children found tests stressful. Mr Balls will announce an ambitious expansion of the newly formed children’s trusts today. The trusts, which are designed to act as a focal point for integrated service, will become a statutory requirement in every area, placing a legal duty on police, youth justice officials, social workers, and health agencies and other children’s services to include at least one representative from local schools on their board.

Mr Balls will argue that schoolchildren are still being let down by the failure of different parts of the public sector to communicate properly. “Many schools still find it more difficult than they should to get support and specialist help when they need it,” he will tell a conference in London organised by the children’s charity NCH. Mr Balls will also announce powers for central government to force local councils to take over underperforming schools. “It’s important these powers are used appropriately, which is why we are going to bring in legislation to require local authorities to consider formal warning notices when these are clearly justified,” he will say.

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How our Marxist faculties got that way

It's August 1968. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators have just wrecked the Democratic national convention in Chicago and ruined Hubert Humphrey's chances to become President. So what did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next?

They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses. And they stayed in the top half of their class. This effectively deferred them from the military draft, a draft that discriminated against young men who didn't have the brains or the money to go to college. That draft also sparked the wave of grade inflation that still swamps our colleges. Vietnam-era faculty members lowered standards in order to help the "Hell No, We Won't Go" crowd.

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon ended the war and Congress ended military conscription. So the Marxist anti-war activists -- activism is now a full-time profession -- had to do something else. Most of them went to work in the real world. But a meaningful number remained in school and opted for academia, especially the humanities and the social sciences. If they got a Ph.D., they might even become university teachers, and many of them did. They then climbed academia's ladder, rising from instructor to assistant professor, from assistant professor to associate professor, and from associate professor to full professor. These last two ranks usually carry tenure, which means a guaranteed job until one decides to retire or is fired for raping little children in the streets.

Forty years have passed since the 1968 Democratic national convention. During that time, American academia has been transformed into the most postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society. It is now a bastion of situational ethics and moral relativity and teaches that there are no evil people, only misunderstood and oppressed people. American academia is now a very intolerant place, As Ann Coulter, who has been driven off more than one campus podium because of her conservative views, has put it, "There is free speech for thee, but not for me."

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Marxism collapsed in Russia and in Eastern Europe. But it survived in U.S. universities, where politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge, and where politically-correct emotions are now more important than logic and critical thinking. Our students and graduates are well trained, but badly educated. Outside of what they must learn to make a living, they don't know very much. But they have been taught to feel sad, angry or guilty about their country and its past.

In the main, our students and graduates, no matter where they went to school, don't understand that China, in return for Sudanese oil, is supplying the weapons used to commit genocide in Darfur. But they feel bad about the Drfurians. They don't now that the Palestinians have rejected every opportunity to have a state of their own. But they feel sorry for them and they blame the Israelis for their plight. They aren't familiar with the Koranic verse "the Infidel is your inveterate enemy." But they keep searching for the "root causes" of Muslim hatred and many of them believe that terrorism is the result of what the United States and Israel, obviously the two worst countries on this planet, do or do not do.

Deficient in history, geography, and economics, our college-trained citizens cannot fathom that the main reasons for high gasoline prices are the speculation in oil futures and the continuing industrialization of Japan, China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and other countries. Instead, they blame the "greedy" U.S. oil companies, whose "obscene" profit margins are not as high as many other industries. Nor do they understand that their simultaneous and illogical opposition to nuclear power, coal, liquified petroleum gas, on-shore and off-shore oil drilling, and new refineries guarantees that we will have energy shortages and high energy prices.

Their professors don't make the big bucks in America. What their professors do earn, however, are huge psychological incomes in the form of power -- the power to shape the minds of their students and the power to influence their colleagues who want raises, sabbaticals. grants, promotions, and tenure. One of the best ways to influence students, colleagues, and the citizenry at large is to hire, promote, and tenure only those people who agree with you. Duke University is a case in point. Some time ago, its psychology chairman was asked in a radio interview if his department hired Republicans. He answered: "No. We don't knowingly hire them because they are stupid and we are not."

If I were a psychologist, Duke would never hire me, for I am a Republican, and a Jewish one at that. Moreover, when I was an active academic during and after the Vietnam War, I audaciously taught politically-incorrect courses: civil-military relations and the politics of national defense.

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3 July, 2008

State frees teachers to criticize evolution

Global warming, origins of life, cloning also may be scrutinized. Genesis was written around 3,000 years ago. If the theory of evolution cannot withstand a challenge from a 3,000 year old book it is not much of a theory

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal this week signed into law the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allows school districts to permit teachers to present evidence, analysis and critique of evolution and other prevalent scientific theories in public school classrooms. The law came to the governor's desk after overwhelming support in the legislature, including a unanimous vote in the state's Senate and a 93-4 vote in the House.

The act has been criticized by some as an attempt to insert religion into science education and hailed by others as a blow for academic freedom in the face of pressure to ignore flaws in politically correct scientific theories.

Robert Crowther, director of communications for The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank on science and culture, called the act necessary. In an article posted on The Discovery Institute's evolution news website, Crowther wrote, "The law is needed for two reasons. First, around the country, science teachers are being harassed, intimidated, and sometimes fired for trying to present scientific evidence critical of Darwinian theory along with the evidence that supports it. Second, many school administrators and teachers are fearful or confused about what is legally allowed when teaching about controversial scientific issues like evolution. The Louisiana Science Education Act clarifies what teachers may be allowed to do."

Specifically, the act allows teachers in the state's public schools to present evidence both for and against Darwinian theories of evolution and allows local school boards to approve supplemental materials that may open critical discussions of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, human cloning and other scientific theories.

Teachers are still required by the act to follow the standardized science curriculum, and school districts are required to authorize both the teachers' classes and additional materials. The state's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will have the power to prohibit materials it deems inappropriate, and the act prohibits religious instruction. Section 1D of the act states that the law "shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion."

Despite section 1D, many national voices, including the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a New York Times editorial, and the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the measure. Marjorie Esman, state director of Lousiana's ACLU told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, "To the extent that this might invite religion in the public school classroom, we will do everything we can do to keep religion out."

John West, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, however, said opponents of the bill are misunderstanding it. Rather than being about infusing intelligent design or creationism into the classroom, he contends, the bill is about giving teachers the freedom to talk about the debates that already exist in science, even among evolutionists themselves. "This bill is not a license to propagandize against something they don't like in science," West told the Times-Picayune. "Someone who uses materials to inject religion into the classroom is not only violating the Constitution, they are violating the bill."

Gov. Jindal released a statement at the time of the signing that read, in part: "I will continue to consistently support the ability of school boards and (the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education) to make the best decisions to ensure a quality education for our children."

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British faith schools undermined by 'Government witch hunt'

Faith schools are being undermined by a Government-backed "witch hunt", according to a new report

Ministers have exaggerated claims that Christian, Jewish and Muslim schools cherry-pick the best pupils to justify a series of "plots and threats" against the religious sector, it is claimed. Key changes to school admissions rules - including a ban on interviewing families - have been introduced despite a lack of real evidence that faith schools discriminate against poor pupils, the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank said.

Earlier this year, the Government caused controversy by claiming a "significant minority" of faith schools were breaking new laws designed to make the admissions system fairer. Jim Knight, the schools minister, said it was "shocking" that schools were using banned policies to weed out children from poor homes, including charging parents up-front fees for free education and failing to give priority to children in care.

But it provoked a furious response from faith schools who accused the Government of basing its claims on flawed evidence. "The witch hunt is on," said the latest study. "A Government obsessed with phoney egalitarianism and control freakery is aligning itself with the strident secularist lobby to threaten the future of faith schools in Britain. "Faith schools know that they are at the mercy of the current administration. They were in with Tony Blair - but they are out with Gordon Brown."

Some 7,000 primaries and secondaries in England - around one-in-three - are faith schools, with many performing above the national average. Two-thirds of the top-rated primaries in recent league tables were Anglican, Roman Catholic and Jewish schools.

The latest report, by the writer and broadcaster Cristina Odone, said parental fears over education standards coupled with concerns over discipline meant they were "sending their children to faith schools in increasing numbers". She also said faith schools are good for Muslim girls as they give their parents the confidence to keep them in school for longer and sharply raise the chances of going on to higher education.

But the report claimed the growing popularity of faith schools had created "suspicion" in Whitehall, inspiring a series of anti-faith school measures. Under a new admissions code, children in the care of social services are given priority places, schools are banned from asking for evidence of parents' employment, marital status or education - and rules prohibit schools asking for voluntary contributions from parents until their child has been accepted.

Richard Gold, of Stone King Solicitors, a firm specialising in education and charities, told researchers: "Over the past four or five years the admissions team of the [Department for Children, Schools and Families] have been steadily whittling back the freedom of faith schools... It is in my mind an attempt to shoe-horn the faith schools into a one size fits-all admissions policy."

The report said that rules banning interviews and application forms had removed the "checks that a faith school relies on to ensure that applicants subscribe to its distinctive ethos". It also said a clampdown on voluntary contributions risked hitting Jewish schools, which saw it as the "only way" to pay for Jewish studies, which are not on the National Curriculum, and additional security.

The study - based on interviews with headteachers and surveys of local councils - also claimed the Government's case against faith schools was flawed. Figures from 80 local authorities showed 1,517 children in social services care made the transition from primary to secondary school last year, but only 15 were turned away by faith schools. It also said rejected claims that faith schools take fewer children eligible for free meals - seen as evidence that they skim off middle-class pupils. The study said that "in tight-knit faith communities parents often turn to extended families or neighbours rather than the state and see free school meals as a loss of face".

But Mr Knight insisted: "The Government agrees that faith schools are inclusive, offer a good education and are popular with parents. "Faith based schools are assured a secure future in the state system under this government, with parents from all backgrounds being offered an equal chance to get their children in to these popular schools. To suggest otherwise is nonsense and a distortion of the truth."

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Australia has the latest school tyranny: Obsessive Principal tries to impose his odor hangups on little kids

Little children do have a faint but distinctive smell. You can smell it if you walk into any primary school. This principal obviously doesn't like it. The school's website makes a point of not giving the Principal's name but the Qld. Education Dept. advises that it is Mr Keith Graham. He should get a job where he does not come in contact with those pesky kids. Kids are harassed enough already with "obesity" campaigns etc without adding this latest hatred of normality to their burdens

Children as young as five have been told to wear deodorant to school -- and re-apply once a day. The edict was in Chatswood Hills State School's June 13 newsletter under the title "personal hygiene".

"Please remind your children that, although it is winter. it is still necessary to apply deodorant in the morning and reapply once during the school-day," the newsletter read. "Aerosols are not permitted but rollon brands are encouraged."

The Albert & Logan News spoke to parents, who found the request "odd" and 'weird", while Queensland University of Technology child psychology lecturer Dr Marilyn Campbell said it was "laughable". Dr Campbell, a teacher for 20 years, was shocked. "I haven't heard of such rubbish in my life," she said. "You have to be joking, asking them to reapply during the day. "I don't need to do that and I doubt children would."

Dr Campbell said she had concerns about anxieties such a request could bring. "Will this lead to pretend shaving for the boys, or make-up for the girls?" she said. "I don't think it is right; totally unnecessary. "It's making (pupils) super clean, restricting them from their normal experience."

An Education Queensland spokeswoman said in a statement that the health and wellbeing of staff and students at all Queensland state schools was the department's priority at all times. "Students wearing deodorant is a parental decision and Education Queensland has no policy enforcing its use," she said. "Schools may become involved if there is an issue related to student hygiene or if the issue is impacting on students' social and emotional development, but this is done at a local level, as the need arises." She said schools may also offer reminders to deal with the issue "holistically and sensitively", so individuals were not singled out.

What did Chatswood Hills State School parents think of the statement requesting them to make sure their children wore deodorant? The Albert & Logan News asked 20 parents if they were "comfortable" or "uncomfortable" with the edict. Fourteen said they were uncomfortable, while six said they were comfortable. Only a few of the parents polled were willing to comment publicly. Mother Ali Richards said she agreed with the advice in the newsletter, but thought the school could have worded it better. "It makes it sound like every kid is smelly -- it is generalising every kid," Ms Richards said. "It is up to the parents to teach kids that stuff, not the school." She said she would not instruct her child to reapply during the day, leaving the decision up to the child.

Parent Mitko Kostovski said he thought the school's request was a "bit weird" "If they (children) do wear it, they won't reapply -- they are too busy playing," Mr Kostovski said. One mother, Jaimie Byrne, said she supported the idea and had no problems with the Chatswood Hills school's request. "It is a good thing I think," Ms Byrne said. "I think it could help the kids to stop some getting bullied if they do have body odour." Ms Byrne said her child, who was in Year 5, was given a hygiene talk, which she understood was more for the comfort of the class.

The article above by DANIEL TANG appeared in the "Albert & Logan News" of Friday, June 27, 2008





2 July, 2008

British school segregation increases over ten years

Schools are now more segregated by poverty than 10 years ago when Labour had just come to power, Government figures indicate. Most areas saw an increase in the division of pupils, by school, depending on whether on not they took free school meals. The data also shows that, by race, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils are the most segregated between schools.

A report released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, analysed statistics on school composition. It found: "Grammar schools have a lower than average incidence of pupils eligible for free school meals and pupils classified as special educational needs. "But they have a higher than average incidence of ethnic minority pupils, largely due to higher than average number of Indian pupils."

Some local authorities which had grammar schools saw a huge influx of secondary school pupils from neighbouring areas, the report said. In four council areas which had selective schools, more than 60 per cent of the secondary school intake came from other authorities. The report added: "On average, selective local authorities gained above-average attaining pupils in Year 7 and lost low-attaining pupils."

The research considered the extent to which children from deprived backgrounds were concentrated in particular schools. It found: "The level of segregation by free school meal, in primary and secondary schools, increased for most local authorities between 1999 and 2007. "Nationally, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils were the most segregated between schools. However black African and black Caribbean pupils were more segregated between local authorities."

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A hostile environment -- for learning how to write well

The recent focus on the AoA lawsuit against Dartmouth (which has been dismissed at the request of the AoA) caused me to neglect reporting on a piece of threatened litigation against the college pertaining to a different, though perhaps not entirely unrelated, matter. A few months ago a former Dartmouth writing instructor, Priya Venkatesan, informed some of her former students that she was planning to sue them, along with Dartmouth.

Dartmouth inflicted Venkatesan on an unlucky set of Writing 5 students (most Dartmouth freshmen are required to take one of the seminars that comprise Writing 5 in order to improve their expository writing). Venkatesan in turn inflicted her post-modern views of science on the students. As Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal reports, she taught them that "scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth," inasmuch as "scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct." Her goal, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. As if we don't have enough problems.

Showing clear signs of life, some of Venkatesan's students reacted by taking issue with her theses during class. Venkatesan deemed this pushback "very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful." She responded by accusing the students of "fascist demagoguery," consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," and canceling classes for a week. Later, as noted, she threatened to sue some of her students for creating a "hostile work environment," and to sue Dartmouth itself for countenancing the "harassment." To her credit, however, Venkatesan has apparently reconsidered her decision to sue.

Venkatesan has moved on to Northwestern. She leaves behind some questions, especially this one: how could Dartmouth have hired her? Dartmouth's answer likely would be that employers make bad hiring decisions from time to time. A good case can be made, however, that this bad hiring decisions was the product to some extent of weaknesses in Dartmouth's approach to the teaching of writing (whether similar weaknesses extend to other courses at Dartmouth is the subject for another day).

There were three problems with hiring Venkatesan to teach expository writing. First, learning how to write well is difficult enough without the distraction of a wacky ideology -- i.e., that scientific knowledge is, in essence, a fraud perpetrated by the white male hierarchy -- or indeed any ideology. Second, Venkatesan does not appear to be a good writer. Third, given her over-the-top reaction to disagreement by her students, she does not appear to be very stable.

Dartmouth certainly can be excused for not having anticipated the third of these defects. But unless the missives collected here are an aberration, the college probably should have been able to discern that Venkatesan's writing falls short of what is expected of a college writing instructor. And Venkatesan has made no secret of her bizarre post-modern views.

Unfortunately, these views might have made Venkatsesan more, not less, appealing to Dartmouth. For I'm told that Venkatesan's seminar was hardly the only one in the Writing 5 program with a left-wing ideological bent. I'd like to be able to demonstrate this by sharing the subject matter of past and current seminars with our readers, but this does not seem to be possible because Dartmouth apparently elects not to provide descriptions on its website (or maybe my computer search skills are inadequate; I'll accept help here). One student reports having combed through the Writing 5 offerings several terms ago in the hope of finding an indoctrination-free seminar. According to this student, he thought he had finally succeeded, but once he took the course found himself locking horns with his instructor over politics and making very little progress with his writing.

Nor is this an isolated case. Although my daughter did not take Writing 5, the reports of the students I've spoken to about the course range from lukewarm to strongly negative. In fact, several expressed to me how fortunate my daughter was not to be saddled with it.

In theory, writing about contentious matters may seem like a good way to improve one's expository writing skills. And given an able, fair-minded professor, this theory can be transformed into practice. For example, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong's Philosophy 3 course (Reason and Argument) teaches, in essence, argumentation. Students must write a final paper on a controversial subject, such as race-based preferences for minority group members. Sinnot-Armstrong, moreover, is an unabashed liberal. Yet based on what I've heard, the course is an excellent one in which conservatives freely write what they think about these highly-charged subjects and pay no price for doing. That's because Sinnot-Armstrong apparently brings no agenda to the classroom other than teaching the methodology of argument.

But it seems the same cannot be said consistently about the instructors of Writing 5 (who are not professors). In a course whose subject matter is avowedly ideological (which is not really the case with Philosophy 3), the temptation to exalt the ideology over the writing is inherently difficult to resist. It may even be the case (though I don't know for sure) that some post-modern ideologues view the two things -- ideology and writing -- as inextricably linked. In any case, the prospect for mischief is great; the prospect for improving one's writing is not. And so it too frequently plays out.

The college appears finally to have recognized that its writing program is flawed. Unfortunately, as I'll discuss in a follow-up post, Dean Folt's plan to redress this problem is, to put it kindly, counter-intuitive.

UPDATE: Priya Venkatesan came to Dartmouth from the University of California at San Diego where she was a teaching assistant. UC San Diego is the home of a notorious mandatory freshman program called Dimensions of Culture, which lasts a full year. As I described here, this program is, apart from the underlying "hate whitey" indoctrination, largely incomprehensibe to students. As one student put it:

I had no idea what was going on in that class. And even the TA said she had no idea what it was about. . . .Everyone hated the class, and they know it, and even at the end of the year they gave out these pins that said, "I survived DOC." And the lecturers [asked] "Aren't you so glad it's done?"

Given the scope of DOC at UC San Diego, it must be a magnet for TAs. However, I don't know whether Venkatesan taught in the program. If she did, this would tend to make her hiring less excusable, and to reinforce the view that her odd post-modern leftist views made her more, not less, appealing to Dartmouth.

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A Call to Fund the Young and Risky

A coalition of researchers on Tuesday strongly urged a greater commitment among policy makers, universities and private donors to support scientists early in their careers and encourage potentially "high-risk, high-reward" ventures, offering a series of recommendations that would alter longstanding federal funding and peer review mechanisms.

The recommendations, published in a white paper released by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, are mindful that stagnating funding tends to favor more "conservative," incremental projects that entail lower risk and lower potential rewards. Instead of spending their time as "serial grant writers," said Keith R. Yamamoto, the executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, young scientists are eager - and should be encouraged - to work on bold new ideas.

They "want to do research that's not paradigm-extending but paradigm-breaking," he said at a panel announcing the report, ARISE: Advancing Research in Science and Engineering. Yamamoto is part of the group at the American Academy that finalized the paper's recommendations, the Committee on Alternative Models for the Federal Funding of Science. Its chairman, Thomas R. Cech, recently stepped down as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he spearheaded a new grant program aimed specifically at early-career scientists.

"Taxpayer dollars have already been invested in perhaps 30 to 35 years in education for these scientists, after which they compete with perhaps 100 to 200 others" to obtain faculty positions, Cech said. Once there, he continued, "they instead are squirreled away in their offices serving as" - using the same phrase - "serial grant writers." He called the state of affairs a "waste" and said that instead, funding mechanisms should promote "transformative research."

The report stresses that the two prongs of its policy focus - scientists early in their careers and high-risk research - are tied together. "The experiences of researchers at the beginning of their careers color and shape their subsequent work," it says. "Researchers who achieve success early gain the confidence, professional reputation, and career commitment that enable them to continue to make important scientific and engineering contributions as their knowledge and skills mature."

Two of the major policy proposals put forth in the report target grants and tenure policies. One-time grants of five or six years, similar to the National Science Foundation's CAREER program, the group concludes, would carry young scientists through their tenure decisions, alleviate the pressure to constantly apply for support and encourage longer-term and higher-risk work. Meanwhile, the report urges research universities to revise tenure policies to keep in mind the merits of well-designed research programs that might not necessarily produce expected or immediate results.

At the same time, researchers on the panel noted that peer review processes should sufficiently recognize collaborative work. The report also points out that scientists starting out their careers would benefit from mentoring, and that institutions should "undertake rigorous self-examination" of cultural barriers that could impede women and minorities from advancing in their research careers.

It also suggests boosting support for program officers at funding agencies so that they can better immerse themselves in the scientific fields through conferences, campus visits and in-depth research.

One recommendation is especially likely to attract resistance from research universities: The suggestion that they eventually cover more (or all) of their faculties' salaries, rather than relying on grant funding, further straining federal agencies. Cech called for "a bit of a rebalancing," arguing that universities needed "more institutional buy-in" to support their researchers.

Among the other policy recommendations in the white paper is for federal agencies to improve their data collection procedures so that researchers can track what happens to investigators who do and do not receive funding for specific proposals.

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1 July, 2008

British markers award students for writing obscenities on examination papers

How low Britain has sunk: Write `f*** off' on a GCSE paper and you'll get 7.5%. Add an exclamation mark and it'll go up to 11%

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question. One pupil who wrote "f*** off" was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully. His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points.

Mr Buckroyd, chief examiner of English for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), an examination board, said that he had given the pupil two marks, out of a possible 27, for the expletive.

To gain minimum marks in English, students must demonstrate "some simple sequencing of ideas" and "some words in appropriate order". The phrase had achieved this, according to Mr Buckroyd.

The chief examiner, who is responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 candidates and for training for 3,000 examiners, told The Times: "It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for - like conveying some meaning and some spelling. "It's better than someone that doesn't write anything at all. It shows more skills than somebody who leaves the page blank."

Mr Buckroyd says that he uses the example to teach examiners the finer points of marking. "It elucidates some useful points - it shows some nominal skills but no relevance to the task." He also acknowledged that the language was inappropriate - but added that using the construction "different to" would also be inappropriate language.

The choice phrase, given in answer to the question "Describe the room you're sitting in", on a 2006 GCSE paper, was not punctuated. "If it had had an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more because it would have been showing a little bit of skill," Mr Buckroyd said, "We are trying to give higher marks to the students who show more skills."

The AQA, which as the largest of the three examination boards awards half the full-course GCSEs and 43 per cent of A levels, distanced itself from Mr Buckroyd's comments, saying: "If a candidate's script contains, for example, obscenities, examiners are instructed to contact AQA's offices, which will advise them in accordance with Joint Council for Qualification guidelines. Expletives in a script would either be disregarded, or sanctioned."

Ofqual, the Government's examinations regulator, refused to condemn Mr Buckroyd's approach. "We think it's important that candidates are able to use appropriate language in a variety of situations but it's for awarding bodies to develop their mark scheme and for their markers to award marks in line with that scheme," it said.

Other examining bodies said that their marking schemes would not reward such language. Edexel said: "If the question was `Use a piece of Anglo-Saxon English', they may get a mark, but if they had just written `f*** off', they may get sanctioned. If it was graphic or violent they may get no mark for that paper."

The Joint Council for Qualifications, which represents exam boards, said that examiners were required to report instances of "inappropriate, offensive or obscene material" in exam scripts, and the awarding body must investigate. "If malpractice is identified, the awarding body will decide on the appropriate sanction, which could include loss of marks or even disqualification," a spokesman said.

Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said of Mr Buckroyd's strategy: "It's taking the desire for uniformity and consistency to absurd lengths."

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Schools handing over discipline to the police

Sounds very costly and inefficient but buckpassing is constant these days

Denver Public Schools plans to launch a discipline policy that at least one civic group feels will be too broad and bring unnecessary police involvement. The plan, to be introduced tonight to the school board, includes rules that require authorities to be called for specific student-on-student incidents, including those involving sexual behaviors and witness intimidation. "When you think about its application, we think it's frightening," said Marco Nunez, organizing director for Padres y Jovenes Unidos, a parents advocacy group in northwest Denver. "We are advocating there should be a common-sense approach. Calling the police and mandatory reporting should not be the default position."

Last year a middle school principal was taken to court for failing to immediately report a student-on-student incident to authorities. Nicole Veltze, the principal of Skinner Middle School, says she was following district rules when she meted out punishment for two male students who inappropriately touched a female seventh-grader. Veltze did not notify the authorities immediately, which the district attorney's office said violated state law. Veltze was handed a misdemeanor summons. A judge in May threw out the case.

The school district's proposed policy defines rules for student-on-student incidents, saying authorities must be contacted on specific cases of suspected child abuse, unlawful sexual behavior or contact, and witness intimidation or retaliation. The definitions for what constitutes those types of incidents are too broad and will result in confusion and police being called too often, said Jim Freeman of the Washington, D.C.-based Advancement Project, which has worked with Padres y Jovenes Unidos on the discipline policy. "What they are proposing is to codify the status quo in which all these low-level offenses would be reported to law enforcement," he said. Incidents such as bras being snapped and buttocks being pinched will launch a child's inevitable spiral into the legal system, he said.

Not true, said DPS attorney John Kechriotis. Those types of low-level incidents will not warrant calls to police under the new policy, he said. And if there is any confusion on whether a case is a more serious child-abuse offense, officials from the district attorney's office say they will be available for consultation. "The DA doesn't want to be placed in the position to prosecute a DPS administrator. Neither of us want that type of situation, so we are very much aligned to develop a type of discipline policy to make a Veltze case happening again nearly impossible," Kechriotis said.

In 2003-04, there were 1,399 referrals to law enforcement from the district, Freeman said. In 2006-07, with an emphasis on restorative justice and means of discipline other than calling the police, referrals dropped to 504.

District officials and a representative from Denver's district attorney's office say principals and teachers will be trained on what types of incidents fall under mandatory reporting. "First and foremost, we're concerned about the safety of the students," said Steve Siegel, director of the DA's special program unit. "We are not out looking for an increase in cases. Our approach is not about the numbers, it's about the appropriateness of each circumstance. We're very committed to keep kids out of the criminal justice system."

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Australia: Stupid Federal attack on technical colleges

I guess they are not Leftist enough. To attack the most practical part of Australian education is madness

Australian Technical Colleges have urged the Rudd Government to rethink plans to abolish their funding, arguing the states have shown little interest in supporting an apprenticeship program devised by the former Howard government. The colleges claim their model of delivering apprenticeship training to students is more efficient than the federal Government's replacement scheme in which secondary schools can apply for funding to offer their own training centres.

"Our preference would be to remain funded at a commonwealth level because the state response has been less than desired," Nigel Hill, chairman of the Australian Technical College Association told The Australian.

At a time when 40 per cent of first-year trade apprentices are dropping out and exacerbating skills shortages, the Rudd Government has allocated $2.5billion over 10 years for schools to establish trade training centres. The Government is also spending $1.9billion over five years to provide 630,000 new training places, including 85,000 apprenticeships.

But Mr Hill believes the approach of the colleges in attracting students while they are still in school and having them work closely with industry is the key to improving retention rates. An example is the ATC at Sunshine in Melbourne's west, whose chairman Barry McCarthy is also the manager of car giant Toyota's training and development planning centre. Enrolments at Sunshine have this year doubled to 120. "We think this is a good model going forward, but we need to ensure that industry connection," he said.

About 3000 school students are enrolled in the technical colleges, federal funding for which will cease at the end of 2009. The Government is working to integrate the colleges on a case-by-case basis into the existing training education system, which is largely a state responsibility.

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