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31 July, 2009

‘Suited for teaching’ after all

By Joanne Jacobs

Michele Kerr, who comments here as “Cal,” has earned a master’s degree from Stanford’s Teacher Education Program (STEP), despite threats to declare her “unsuited” for teaching. FIRE has the links.

. . . Stanford tried to revoke Kerr’s admission after she voiced disagreement with “progressive” views held by STEP administrators, but FIRE intervened and resolved the issue. Kerr also was blogging about her thoughts and experiences as a future certified teacher. Stanford School of Education administrators demanded the password to her private blog and threatened to expel her for her opinions and teaching philosophy.

Kerr was told that her problems had nothing to do with her views, that other students found her domineering and intimidating. In an e-mail, she told classmates that “you are all fantastic, passionate, committed people who I think will make outstanding teachers.” But:

. . . if you are sitting in class privately seething because you feel that I or anyone else is derailing a conversation that you wish to go in a different direction, then you should reconsider your own priorities and values as a novice educator. SPEAK UP.

Fight for the education you want. And if you don’t feel you should have to, if you’d rather complain to the powers-that-be in the hopes that the power will take care of an interpersonal problem, then how on earth are you planning on going out in the far more ruthless world of public education and effect any change worth mentioning?

She was told the e-mail was “intimidating” in itself.

WashPost columnist Jay Mathews, often a target of Kerr’s caustic comments, wonders why academics can’t tolerate independent thinkers.

Though the education school has no blogging policy, Kerr was reprimanded for her blog, which mentioned Stanford but not the high school where she was student teaching. She “took down the blog temporarily, renamed it, eliminated all references to Stanford, and gave it password protection so that only she and a few friends could read it,” Mathews writes. That didn’t help.

After filing a complaint, Kerr got a new supervisor with whom she got along very well. She completed the program and was hired by a high school in the area to teach algebra, geometry and humanities.

SOURCE




British schoolchildren now discouraged from skipping



The little girls twirl their skipping ropes while the boys gather round to bash each other's conkers. In the corner, another group of children scramble up a tree. For many parents, it is a picture of the perfect playground scene.

But it is not one they are likely to see today. It lives on only in memories of their childhood, while their own school-age children are more likely to be glued to a computer screen. More than three in four of today's little girls do not play with skipping ropes, a survey has found.

The figure compares with 94 per cent of their mothers who remember skipping to rhymes and songs when they were at school. Little more than 33 per cent of boys play conkers, while 83 per cent of their fathers have fond memories of glorious conker battles at the same age.

A growing appetite for computer games and television is not the only reason that traditional games appear to be passing the present generation by. The survey shows that parents believe today's 'cotton-wool culture', in which children are molly-coddled and not allowed to take any risks, is to blame. Eighty per cent of parents said modern health and safety regulations were behind the demise of traditional playground favourites such as skipping, conkers, hopscotch, British bulldog and climbing trees.

More than 4,000 parents were questioned for the survey on how childhood freedom is being curtailed. They felt children were missing out on exercise and developing social skills by not being encouraged to play traditional games.

There were also concerns that parents themselves can be over-protective of their children, which means fewer are allowed to play outdoors out of school hours.

Overall, 59 per cent of parents said childhood today was worse than when they were young. Independent child psychologist Emma Kenny analysed the results of the survey which was carried out for a soft drink company. 'Many treasured children's activities are becoming rare, but it's the implications of this that are the cause for concern,' she said. 'Traditional children's play activities such as hopscotch, climbing trees or playing tag provide learning experiences based on imagination. 'These all help kids develop key skills such as team playing, counting and creativity that are crucial to their future development.'

Recent research suggests teachers are equally concerned and that almost half believe pupils are negatively affected by the ever-tightening grip of health and safety rules. Under these rules some schools have banned snowball fights, sports-day sack races and even nature walks for fear of injury and the chance of being sued for compensation by parents.

Emma Kenny added: 'This "Big Mothered Britain" mentality is in fact restricting opportunities for our children to learn and play freely. 'Ultimately, we're seeing a gap emerge in today's younger generation in the "fun" skills that we learn through a wide variety of physical and mental activities. 'This in turn, is not giving our kids the best opportunities for their future.'

SOURCE




British teachers put on the spot

A teaching union is to campaign against the new code of conduct for teachers, which it says intrudes on their private lives. The code, which will come into force in October, states that teachers must “demonstrate honesty and integrity and uphold public trust and confidence in the teaching profession”.

Teachers are also expected to “maintain reasonable standards in their own behaviour” or face disciplinary procedures, according to the General Teaching Council, the profession’s watchdog, which drew up the code.

The actions of teachers while off duty will now be under the spotlight — a move that the NASUWT, a teaching union, said set “unreasonable expectations of how people should conduct themselves”.

The teaching council has said that, for example, those who drink heavily and disgrace themselves face discipline for bringing the profession into disrepute, even if it is outside school hours and they have not broken the law.

Chris Keates, chief executive of the NASUWT, said that there was a lot of anger among teachers about the revised code. The union is to ask members to protest against the code in the coming months. “Teachers are entitled to a private life,” Ms Keates said. “It will lead to teachers being put in a position that no other workers are put in. Their conduct outside work is under a scrutiny that no one else’s life would be under.”

The NASUWT is calling for the code to be abandoned because, it says, teachers are already subject to professional standards, capability and disciplinary measures for their conduct in school.

The General Teaching Council said that the code “sets out expectations of reasonable standards of behaviour but does not limit a teacher’s right to a private life”.

SOURCE





30 July, 2009

Special privileges for gypsy children in Britain

More than a thousand gipsy and traveller children have been given laptop computers to help them with their schoolwork. The free equipment and wireless internet access is estimated to be worth up to £750 per pupil, and is costing the taxpayer £300,000 a year. Some children are also being handed printers and digital cameras under a controversial Government-backed scheme aimed at encouraging them to stay in education.

Figures have revealed that free IT equipment has been handed to 1,317 pupils from gipsy and traveller families since 2004. However, ministers have admitted that some of the laptops have been used by parents to buy and sell goods, and book foreign holidays online.

Last night, the Conservatives, who obtained the figures, warned that the scheme risked fuelling resentment among taxpayers. Only days ago it emerged that gipsy and traveller children are being given priority admission to popular state schools. In addition, gipsy and traveller families are getting priority to see GPs and dentists.

The Electronic Learning and Mobility Programme (E-LAMP) is designed to offer 'quality distance learning opportunities' to gipsy and traveller children who regularly change schools and are on the move throughout large parts of the school year. Under the scheme, being run in 330 schools, the children are given laptops with, for example, 3G wireless internet software, which enables them to study while travelling and keep in touch with their 'base' school.

There are an estimated one million children from around 350,000 gipsy and traveller families in the UK, but fewer than 9 per cent obtain five good GCSEs including maths and English.

Studies have shown that children who relocate regularly quickly become demotivated with learning and disengaged with their school friends and school life. In addition, many traveller parents provide little support for their children's academic learning, with a small number believing that formal education offers little or no value to their children's futures.

In a written Parliamentary answer, schools minister Jim Knight said 1,317 laptops were issued from 2004 to 2009. He said: 'The vast majority are still out on loan to the students. There have only been seven incidents of minor accidental damage. One laptop was sold by the family, but recovered quickly as it had been tagged.'

A survey by the National Association of Teachers of Travellers has found adult travellers are using their children's laptops to book holidays, shop and sell goods online. It said: 'Initially the restriction on data transfer allowed, due to shared group tariff packages, caused issues when the students became more confident workers and their parents discovered the joys of Amazon, eBay and booking flights online.'

Tory local government spokesman Bob Neill said: 'However well-meaning, I am concerned the Government's policies on travellers threaten to undermine community cohesion and inflame community tensions. 'The British people believe in fair play - it's not fair that one small group get privileged access to public services, whilst hard-working families who struggle to pay their bills and taxes are pushed to the back of the queue.'

SOURCE




AN EDUCATION ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

The legal threat to Christian schools

I wonder whether Muslim schools will be required to hire teachers hostile to Islam? That should be fun!

What happens when equal rights between men and women are so widely accepted mainstream Australia hardly thinks about it? Surely it is time to acknowledge that anti-discrimination statutes have done their job?

Not according to the Victorian Government. It harbours the view that discrimination has got sophisticated – so hard to find under current law – that we must widen the law to catch more of it.

Its Attorney-General has his sights set on men-only clubs (apparently it is OK to have female-only clubs and it is OK for men-only rules at gay venues). The Government has also put religion on notice it will come under closer scrutiny.

I am actually more worried about indiscriminate behaviour: things like the indiscriminate bashing of innocent people on city streets. Putting an end to that would be a real advance for their human rights. But it’s also hard, so let’s get back to some easier targets.

At present, discrimination statutes don’t apply to religious bodies and their schools on the grounds of freedom of religion. So a parliamentary committee has recommended options to extend the power of the state over the province of religion. One proposed change is to restrict the freedom of religious schools to choose their employees on the basis of their religious faith.

The churches want to continue current practice. But a host of community organisations want to change it. The Federation of Community Legal Services told the parliamentary review the current law should change, saying: "To allow religious organisations a broad exemption for conscience encourages prejudice."

Think about the moral vanity of that statement. According to these lawyers, a religious conscience leads to prejudice. How did the church arouse public conscience over slavery? How did Florence become a haven for the arts and letters to flourish? How did civilisation develop over the past couple of millennia without the Community Legal Services to guide it?

A leading discrimination law expert, Professor Margaret Thornton, wants to narrow the exemption for religious freedom of schools on the grounds that: "If private schools receive money from the state they should be subject to the law of the land." Of course they should be.

The question is whether the law should require them to employ people who are indifferent or hostile to their religion in their schools. At present it doesn’t. Changing that law will affect not only the schools who employ the staff.

Parents who send their children to a Christian school have a reasonable expectation this means the child will get a Christian education. How could the school fulfil its obligation to the parents if it is required by law to employ non-Christian or anti-Christian teachers to provide it? If the law demands this, you might as well close down the concept of a Christian school – which may be what some of the critics intend.

The provisions applying to religion have been operating for more 30 years with no great community outrage. So why is a parliamentary committee reviewing them now? Because, we are told, they have to be assessed for compliance against the 2006 Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. This charter was introduced with the promise it would amplify rights and freedoms.

There is something so predictable about this. The human rights industry begins with grand promises and ends up intervening in non-problems. We are led to believe that the purpose of such charters is to stop arbitrary arrests, guarantee a free press and guard against dictatorship. In practice, what does it do? It complicates the life of religious schools and open lawsuits against the churches.

Another inquiry has been set up by the Federal Government to look at promoting human rights. It is looking at a statutory charter of rights. No one will tell you the purpose of such a Commonwealth charter will be to curtail religious conscience or practice. But it will work out the same way.

The crusading lawyers will use any new federal charter against those institutions to which they are hostile. They will have sympathetic ears in the equal opportunity commissions. After all, experience in the human rights industry will be a qualification for appointment to those bodies.

The churches and Christian schools will be in the firing line. As the community legal services make clear – their view is that religious conscience encourages prejudice. Once the churches and religious conscience are out of the way, lawyers will have a clear run. Lawsuits will be used to decide the great moral questions of the age.

You can see what’s in it for the lawyers. But don’t think it is a step forward for liberty.

SOURCE

Brilliant Education Dept. internet filter blocks education sites, but not porn

The whole idea of web filtering is a crock

An internet filter installed by the NSW education department gave students access to pornographic material - but blocked educational sites. One site a Year 10 student opened while searching for a type of bird contained graphic sexual material and was only barred on Monday after inquiries from The Daily Telegraph.

George Cochrane said his school-aged son and daughter, who study by distance education from their farm in Grenfell, were horrified by the sites they could access. Other educational sites and harmless web pages for the local member of parliament - and even Education Minister Verity Firth's own site - have been blocked by the filter.

The Department of Education and Training confirmed that the filter would be used on thousands of laptops for high school students. It is also currently used on all computers in schools.

"My daughter typed in 'swallow', as in the bird, and it blocked access to a documentary on swallowing toothpaste but gave you access to a male site talking about inappropriate material," Mr Cochrane said. "The system isn't actually protecting anybody, especially isolated kids."

An education department spokesman confirmed that the site had been blocked on Monday. He said some questionable websites escaped the filter but staff responded to each concern and updated it daily. "On rare occasions inappropriate websites are not captured," he said.

Acting Opposition education spokesman Andrew Stoner yesterday labelled the filter flaws a "debacle". "Internet access should be a key component of Kevin Rudd's so-called Education Revolution," he said. "Nathan Rees and Education Minister Verity Firth are quick to claim credit for the good news so they should accept responsibility for this debacle and fix it as soon as possible."

SOURCE

Bullying victim gets $484,766

This OUGHT to make the NSW government sit up and become more active in preventing school bullying but it won't. Why? Because they don't know how. The only thing that would do some good would be a good thrashing for each bully and, since there is no such thing as right and wrong anymore, that cannot be considered. Offenders can only be "helped"

A victim of school bullying in northern NSW has had his damages award increased by more than $16,000 to $484,766. Last month in the NSW Supreme Court, Justice Elizabeth Fullerton awarded $468,736 to David Gregory, who had sued the State of NSW.

The now 30-year-old had complained of years of bullying while attending Farrer Agricultural High School at Tamworth in the 1990s. He said the bullying led to behavioural problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder and symptoms of depression.

Today, the judge ruled he should also have received $6030 for past medical treatment and expenses and $10,000 for future treatment. She also ordered the State of NSW to pay the legal costs of Mr Gregory, who now lives in Mollymook on NSW's South Coast.

SOURCE





29 July, 2009

New York State Spends the Most in U.S. on Education

A breakdown between NYC and upstate could be very instructive

New York led the nation in K-12 education spending per pupil in 2006-07, according to new data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Empire State’s school spending of $15,981 per pupil was 65 percent above the national average of $9,666. New York’s total school spending of nearly $51 billion was exceeded only by California, which has more than twice as many students.

Here are some “takeaways” from the Empire Center’s report:

* New York’s state government paid for 45.2 percent of school spending, slightly below the national state-funded average of 47.6 percent. New York’s 48.4 percent locally funded share was above the national average of 44 percent. But in absolute terms, New York ranked high in both categories — fifth among states in state-supported spending at $8,293 per pupil, and third in local spending at $8,875 per pupil.

* The lion’s share of the $6,315 per-pupil difference between New York and the national average could be attributed to higher spending on salaries and benefits for instructional purposes, the new federal data indicate. In fact, New York’s spending on instructional salaries and benefits alone–which came to $11,042 per pupil, 88 percent above average–exceeded the total per-pupil spending of 37 states.

* Many assume that New York’s high school spending is in part a factor of its unusually large number of local school districts. But if true, this is not reflected in spending on education administration. New York’s per-pupil administrative expenditures were just 18 percent above the national average. If New York had reduced its administrative spending to the national average in 2006-07, the resulting savings would have come to $270 million — just 0.06 percent of the total that year.

* New York’s schools were ranked among the nation’s best in Education Week’s recent annual “Quality Count” report. But two higher-ranked states, Maryland and Massachusetts, spent $4,257 and $3,243 less per pupil, respectively. If New York spent at the Maryland rate, it would have saved $11.7 billion; if it had spent Massachusetts rate, it would have saved $8.9 billion.

SOURCE




British dictate: universities must do more for the working class

One confused man below. How is it going to help the working class by making fees more expensive? The only way is if the universities give more students free tuition. But that would negate what they gained through higher fees. So why bother? Leftist non-logic very much in evidence here -- as is a Nelsonian blind eye to the fact that it is failing schools that are hurting the poor -- not the universites

Universities must recruit more working-class students to justify an increase in tuition fees, Lord Mandelson said yesterday. He also admitted that a long-awaited review of top-up tuition fees, to begin this autumn, would not conclude before the general election. This means neither political party will face the wrath of middle-class voters if the review decides — as expected — that the current £3,000 cap on fees should rise.

Lord Mandelson set out his vision for higher education in his first speech to leading vice-chancellors since taking responsibility for universities as the Business Secretary.

It heralded an end to universities’ reputation as ivory towers catering for full-time, young undergraduates living away from home. The future lies in mature and part-time students taking shorter or alternative degrees, such as two-year honours degrees, part-time degrees and modular programmes that do not result in a degree, he said. This was reflected in his choice of setting for the speech: Birkbeck — which offers only part-time degrees. It is part of the University of London.

Universities’ efforts to attract students from poor backgrounds had not been good enough, Lord Mandelson said. He “intended to turn up the spotlight on university admissions”.

He described a university education as a ticket to the best-paid employment and said access to it would “inevitably define the degree of social mobility in Britain”. He added: “Any institution that wants to use greater costs to the student to fund excellence must face an equal expectation to ensure its services remain accessible to more than just those with the ability to pay.”

Universities are desperately trying to widen access by providing bursaries, setting up summer schools for disadvantaged teenagers and visiting primary schools. While this has improved the breadth of intake, many older institutions, such as Oxford and Cambridge, remain dominated by middle-class and independent school students.

Lord Mandelson had a dig at elite universities, asking: “Why, for all the work in the sector and all the seriousness with which it has tackled this question, are we still making only limited progress in widening access to higher education to young people from poorer backgrounds — especially at our most selective universities? It is not enough for universities simply to confer life advantages from one generation of professionals to their children.”

He wanted going to university to become a “peer group ambition” among pupils, but refused to be drawn on the detail of how he thought universities should widen access — or whether they should accept lower grades from applicants from disadvantaged families.

Rather than operating as remote institutions, universities should be forging links with local business and exploiting their talent for commercial gain, Lord Mandelson said. He accepted that they were not “factories for producing workers”, but said more could set up companies that market the expertise of their postgraduates and professors.

Foreign students — who account for 8 per cent of income earned by universities — are vital to the economy, Lord Mandelson said, although he revealed that several vice-chancellors had contacted him with concerns about a points-based visa system that makes it more difficult for some potential students to come to Britain.

Universities emphasised the key role of schools in widening participation in higher education. Wendy Piatt, of the elite Russell Group of universities, said: “Evidence shows that academic achievement at school continues to be key factor in determining whether a student will go on to university.”

Diana Warwick, of Universities UK, said: “While we recognise the importance of universities having strong links with employers and schools in raising aspiration, we are clear that greater attainment at 16 is still the critical factor in achieving wider participation in higher education.”

Paul Wellings, of the 1994 Group of research intensive universities, said: “It is crucial that universities work in partnership with schools to provide advice and raise aspirations.”

SOURCE




Australian Prime Minister fails economic history lesson

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has got his economic history in his latest exercise in essaying "exactly wrong". That's the view of RMIT University academic Sinclair Davidson, who says it doesn't augur well for our future. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age morphed into something similar to the Pyongyang Post when they ran 6000 words of the PM's most recent deep thoughts over two full pages on Saturday, replete with sub-headings rarely seen outside an election manifesto. The headline across the front page of the SMH read "Rudd's recipe for recovery".

Davidson wants to know how we can trust a bloke who has got the past wrong to lead us into the future.

There's yet more huffing and puffing about those dastardly neo-liberals in the PM's piece. He also takes the novel step of having a go at the 1931 premiers' plan where governments cut expenditure, a bugbear of the ALP since the Scullin Labor government lost power at the end of that year. "It was seen as a very anti-Labor policy," Davidson says. "It was crammed down their throats by Sir Otto Niemeyer and the Bank of England and the Scullin government introduced it and lost the election.

But he adds, "whatever the flaws of the premiers' plan, it certainly did not give rise to catastrophic unemployment". Davidson points to research by RMIT colleague Steven Kates which shows how unemployment in Australia after 1932 fell more swiftly than in the US and Britain. And he pulls out a glittering nugget of trivia -- Niemeyer beat the PM's new hero JM Keynes in their civil service economics exam.

Davidson isn't worried that the PM is channelling Paul Keating channelling Jack Lang. He's worried that Rudd is talking about an entirely different country. "Australia had a v-shaped depression while the US had a big u-shaped depression. The essay shows how ignorant Kevin Rudd is of Australian economic history. He's taking the populist lessons of the Great Depression from the United States. "Americans seem to often think America is the world but the Prime Minister of Australia shouldn't think that American history is Australian history. His advisers either don't know this or don't care enough to tell him."

All up, Davidson describes the background to Rudd's latest essay as extraordinary. "He's put us into debt to the tune of $300 billion having claimed to have learned lessons that he doesn't know."

SOURCE. More on Rudd's warped manifesto here





28 July, 2009

Must not criticize homosexuality at an American university

Thio Li-ann won't be coming to New York University this fall after all. Thio, a professor at the National University of Singapore and a politician in her home country as well, was to have taught a course on human rights law as part of an NYU program that brings scholars from around the world to teach at the law school. But in recent weeks, as students and others have circulated information about her anti-gay statements, some have questioned whether it was appropriate for NYU to hire someone with limited views of human rights to teach the subject. But NYU has defended the hire on academic freedom grounds, and Thio indicated that she was looking forward to debating the issues while teaching on the campus.

Not anymore. While NYU has not changed its position, its law dean issued a statement in which he announced that Thio has decided not to come to NYU. "She explained that she was disappointed by what she called the atmosphere of hostility by some members of our community towards her views and by the low enrollments in her classes," wrote Dean Richard L. Revesz.

In response to a request for comment on the situation, Thio sent Inside Higher Ed her resignation letter to NYU. "As an Asian woman whose legal training has spanned the finest institutions in both East and West, I believe I would have something of value to offer your students. However, the conditions no longer exist to proceed with the visit, given the animus fueled by irresponsible misrepresentation/distortions and/or concerted invective from certain parties. Friends and colleagues have also expressed serious concerns about my safety and well-being."

Thio praised NYU for standing by the job offer, and blamed the critics for making it difficult for her to accept. "I understand that you, too, have been under great pressure to rescind the invitation. I appreciate the commitment NYU has shown towards the principle of academic freedom in resisting this pressure; to yield to politicking would be deleterious to the academic enterprise. Today's heresy can become tomorrow's orthodoxy and vice versa," she wrote to the dean. "Despite this, it has become clear that the fraught atmosphere of hostility towards me is inimical to an effective teaching and learning environment. As you know, the ireful campaign against me has negatively affected class enrollment, a sad commentary on this present noisome state of affairs."

In his statement, Dean Revesz answered one of the questions many have been asking when he said that NYU was unaware of Thio's anti-gay statements when she was hired. But he went on to say that the university makes a practice of not looking for such statements (even her critics say Thio has made no effort to hide her views), and that they wouldn't have changed the hiring decision.

"Of course, an electronic search of her public statements would have produced the text of [an anti-gay speech much cited by critics]," he wrote. "We did not conduct such a search in considering this appointment, and we have not conducted such searches in considering other appointments: We limit our inquiry to the review of academic publications and works in progress, teaching evaluations, and reputation for collegiality. That is the general norm at academic institutions."

The text of the speech becomes important, her critics have said, because it shows her not just to be someone who doesn't endorse gay rights, but someone who espouses views that in some cases have been widely repudiated by scholars (that people can change sexual orientation if they want) and that run counter to what most human rights groups consider basic human rights (she argues for criminalizing sex between people of the same sex). In addition, she has repeatedly mocked gay people, saying for example that anal sex is "like shoving a straw up your nose to drink," and rejected arguments based on a diversity of sexual orientations by saying that "diversity is not license for perversity."

In some disputes over hiring controversial faculty members who are viewed as bigoted, student groups have demanded that individuals be dismissed or not hired in the first place. In this case, however, NYU OUTlaw, the gay student group that spread word of Thio's views, didn't demand that she be kept off campus. The group's board adopted a statement saying that the best way "to fight Dr. Thio's offensive views not by silencing her but by engaging in a respectful and productive dialogue about the boundaries of human rights. This fall, we plan to hold events to explore issues of academic freedom, LGBT rights, and human rights in Asia, and we look forward to Dr. Thio’s participation in the discussion."

Others, however, have called for NYU to withdraw the invitation to Thio. Hundreds have signed an online petition that says she shouldn't be at NYU. "To harbor Dr. Thio under the banner of 'academic freedom' is disingenuous, untenable and unacceptable. The full dignity of LGBT persons is beyond debate and the criminalization of private sexual conduct between consenting same-sex adults is a tool of oppression. While Dr. Thio believes that 'diversity is not a license for perversity,' we believe that academic freedom is not a license for bigotry," says the text of the petition.

In his statement, Revesz wrote that the situation changed for Thio as the controversy continued. E-mail exchanges between NYU students and Thio offended those on both sides of the debate, he wrote.

"In the last few weeks, a number of members of our community wrote to Professor Thio indicating their objection to her appointment as a visiting professor," he wrote. "She considers some of these messages to be offensive. In turn, she replied to them in a manner that many members of our community -- myself included -- consider offensive and hurtful.... Members of our community have questioned whether Professor Thio's statements create an unwelcoming atmosphere, one in which students in her classes would have been unable to participate effectively in the learning experience. Determination of where that point is on the continuum of free speech is a difficult, case-by-case judgment based upon context, history of the relationship, and many other factors. But it would be an extraordinary measure, almost never taken by universities in the United States, to cancel a course on the basis of e-mail exchanges between a faculty member and members of the student body. To do so would eviscerate the concept of academic freedom and chill student-faculty debate."

Revesz also rejected the idea that a scholar "opposed to the recognition of certain important human rights" should be disqualified from teaching a course on human rights: "An academic's views on a substantive issue should be irrelevant to his or her suitability to teach a course in a particular area as long as the opposing views are treated fairly in the classroom: A proponent or opponent of the death penalty can be equally qualified to lead a seminar on capital punishment, for example. The contrary position would be a serious affront to academic freedom, would lead to endless political litmus tests, and would greatly impoverish academic institutions, which gain so much from the robust discussion of controversial legal issues."

SOURCE




A young Australian woman who likes correct grammar

Poor grammar is still unprestigious but finding people with good grammar is becoming harder as it is no longer taught in the schools

It was a Monday morning; he was frothing milk as we chatted idly about the drunken antics of our respective weekends. All the usual stuff - the people we knew in common, the places we had almost run into each other, the quality of the cocktail jugs at various Sydney locations. He might have been carefully watching the temperature gauge rise on that little jug of milk, but we both knew where the real heat was. Just as I was about to casually invite him to a rock gig he dropped a clanger.

‘Yeah I like World Bar. Dave and me were there last Thursday.’ Instinctively, impulsively, STUPIDLY I fired back. “You mean Dave and I were there.” Because nothing says “we should go out” like a grammar check.

He looked at me like I was a three week old sausage roll he’d found wedged into the tread of his shoe, mumbled a ‘“yeah, whatever” and went back to making the coffee. Silently.

It’s a look I get often. As a grammar Nazi I am the irritating friend who corrects Facebook posts from “there” to “their.” The one who has to hold back facial spasms whenever someone says “youse.” I am something of a rarity amongst my peers – a 22 year old who adores a well constructed sentence.

As a card carrying member of Gen Y, I am a product of an education system that is more focussed on alliteration and assonance than the basics of adverbs and adjectives. Somewhere during my schooling (all done at state public schools) we jumped from learning the alphabet, to examining the themes of novels and plays. The participles and pronouns – in truth the finer points of basic grammar - were lost by the wayside.

Now this isn’t to say I had a poor English education. Far from it. I had some wonderful and enthusiastic teachers during my years at school. I learned to love and appreciate good literature, I learned to debate and discuss in my essays and by the end I achieved some very good results in my HSC. To put it bluntly I fulfilled everything that the NSW English curriculum required of me. But where was the grammar? That basic stepping stone schooling that older generations had to go through.

I asked my mother about what her English education was like and she told me all about “parsing,” - basically pulling apart sentences. Examining their structure. Learning exactly what adverbs, verbs, nouns and pronouns were. Getting drilled and tested on it day in, day out. Sure it’s boring, but so is algebra – and at least it’s a sure bet you’ll need to use grammar later in life. I’m struggling to remember the last time I had to work out the value of ‘x,’ but I’m always unsure whether it’s meant to be ‘learned’ or ‘learnt.’ Why are we not still taught grammar like this at school?

What’s scary is that in my first year of a journalism degree at University, my lecturer handed out a basic grammar and punctuation test. Unsurprisingly, the entire class performed dismally. We couldn’t conjugate if our lives depended on it.

And what’s scarier is that to a certain degree they do. Name me an employer who is going to hire a young graduate doesn’t know the difference between ‘it’s’ and ‘its.’ In these times of growing unemployment and job un-security it could be the difference between getting an interview, or having a resume tossed into the reject pile.

I believe it’s time that grammar was brought back into schools, and I believe it should be done quickly – before we start having generations of English teachers who themselves don’t know the difference between a verb and an adverb.

And as for me? I changed coffee spots. The barista might have been hot but I’m hoping there’s someone out there for me that can use prepositions properly as they proposition me.

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British university education for the wealthy only?

That seems to be where Britain is heading -- despite repeated claims that they want more working class kids at university. Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?

STUDENTS face tuition fees of £7,000 a year by 2013 under plans being developed by both Labour and the Conservatives. Both parties are studying an overhaul of the system under which top universities would be allowed to lift fees above the current legal limit of £3,225, while many former polytechnics would offer no-frills degrees for free.

The proposal was handed by John Denham, the former universities secretary, to Lord Mandelson, the business, innovation and skills secretary, who has taken over responsibility for higher education. Vice-chancellors say a £7,000 maximum fee is the “consensus” figure — the minimum to rescue university finances without being so high as to be politically unacceptable.

There is a legal obligation on the government to consider the future of the current fee system, which was introduced in 2006, after its first three years of operation. Mandelson is due to launch the review this autumn. It is thought highly unlikely it will be finished before the next election, which must be held by next June.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are anxious to avoid fees becoming an issue with voters. Labour blamed its loss of marginal seats in university towns at the 2005 election on its recent legislation for the previous increase in fees.

One vice-chancellor said: “A simple rise in the cap to £7,000 could be put through soon after this election and it would have the advantage of letting the government cut the amount it puts into universities.”

It has emerged, however, that Mandelson is also studying options that go far beyond simply deciding whether fees can be increased. Denham’s idea calls for a wholesale restructuring of higher education. Some post-1992 universities and further education colleges could offer free, government-funded “walk to study” degrees, often in vocational subjects, to local students living at home. Elite research institutions, meanwhile, would be allowed to charge far higher fees than at present, with students paying for future earning power.

Denham did not put a figure on fees in his scenario, but experts who worked closely with him said it could eventually mean a ceiling of £15,000, including a £2,000 “levy” to fund bursaries for poorer students.

David Willetts, the shadow universities secretary, has also studied Denham’s plan. He said the Conservatives would not decide their policy in advance of the review, and cautioned: “Just putting up fees has a series of problems. Charging more at the bottom of the recession will be tough, and universities would have to show any extra fees were going to help the quality of education — a challenge to which I don’t think they have yet risen.”

Supporters of an increase believe university funding has become an emergency. Cuts of 5%-20% in government funding for higher education are expected whoever wins the next election, despite increasing numbers of students.

Seven universities, including London Metropolitan and Thames Valley, are on a secret official list of institutions at risk of financial failure, a total expected to reach as high as 30 next year.

Paul Wellings, vice-chancellor of Lancaster and incoming chairman of the 1994 Group of research institutions, warned of a “valley of death” over the next few years until fees could be raised, with universities forced into severe cutbacks.

Another source said political considerations were bound to hamper the funding review. “Mandelson is nowhere near knowing how he wants to fund universities,” he said. “This is not a government that believes it will actually be making decisions, but it is thinking about how to box the Tories in.”

He added: “A few months ago I would have thought it inconceivable for any change to come in before 2013. Now I see the possibility of George Osborne [the shadow chancellor] putting it into a ‘days of misery’ package after the election. It would technically be possible to bring in change for 2011.”

A condition of freeing universities to charge higher fees is likely to be that better-off students are charged a levy on fees to subsidise bursaries for those on lower incomes. Further cross-subsidy could be provided by money from overseas students and alumni.

Luke Johnson, the Channel 4 chairman and entrepreneur who is a member of Oxford’s fundraising committee, said: “It is inevitable there will be higher fees and more independence, but it has to go hand in hand with much more for bursaries. There is a disproportionate number of private school undergraduates at Oxford and it is by no means ideal.”

Alan Ryan, retiring warden of New College, Oxford, said his college was drawing up bursary plans to ensure no family on an income of less than £35,000 would be worse off if fees were raised from their current level.

Birmingham University, meanwhile, is one of those planning in the long term to offer “needs-blind” admission, in which bursaries for poor students are provided mainly from a levy on better-off students.

Last week Alan Milburn, the former cabinet minister, wrote in a report commissioned by Gordon Brown that such an arrangement could promote social mobility by drawing more people from poorer families into university.

Tomorrow, in a speech to Universities UK, an association of vice-chancellors, Mandelson is expected to take up Milburn’s theme and warn that institutions need to step up efforts to bring in more students from poor backgrounds through their admission and bursary policies.

Some universities are already making preparations for an increase. Exeter is understood to be one of several preparing an aggressive strategy of charging fees of at least £7,000. It will also offer generous bursaries in addition to non-means-tested awards — including sports and academic scholarships — to lure the best students regardless of income.

The result will be far higher debts for those whose studies are not covered by bursaries. Recent research by Universities UK has found that raising fees to £7,000 would bring average debts of £32,400, compared with the current £20,000.

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27 July, 2009

Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too

Now’s the time to cast off collective bargaining agreements and introduce school choice

‘Am I optimistic that they can avoid it . . . ? I am not.” That’s what retired judge Ray Graves said this week when asked whether the Detroit public schools, which he is advising, would be forced into bankruptcy. Facing violence, a shrinking student body, and graduating just one out of every four students who enter the ninth grade on time, the city’s schools have been stumbling for years. Now they face a seemingly insurmountable deficit and are expected to file for bankruptcy protection at about the time that students should be settling down in a new school year.

As embarrassing as such a filing would be, it also may be the only thing that can force the kinds of changes Detroit schools need—as the financial turmoil is just the latest manifestation of a system in terminal decline.

Detroit is like many urban school districts—large, unwieldy and bureaucratic, with a powerful union that makes the system unable to adapt to changing circumstances and that until very recently had an indulgent political class that insulated it from reform. That insulation came in two forms. The first was neglect. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick spent several years distracted by a scandal stemming from his affair with a staffer. He resigned last year, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and was sentenced to four months in jail. Had he been an effective mayor, he might have also been a powerful advocate for students.

The other insulating force was a conscious decision to wall off Detroit from charter schools. In 1993, Michigan’s legislature made it difficult to create new charters in Detroit by declaring that only community colleges could authorize charters for primary and secondary schools in “First-Class Districts”—defined as those with more than 100,000 students. Detroit was the only First-Class District. In 2003 the state, under pressure from the Detroit Federation of Teachers, turned down a gift of $200 million from philanthropist Robert Thompson that would have established 15 charter schools in the city. Those charters are needed today.

The net result has been a school system that’s been coming apart as the teachers union has dug in its heels. In 2006, the union illegally went on strike, killing a plan to force teachers to take a pay cut to balance the system’s books.

In June, seven students were wounded in a shooting near Cody Ninth Grade Academy just two weeks after 16-year-old Tenecia Walter was shot in the chest shortly after leaving class at Denby High School. Earlier this year a gunfight broke out in Detroit’s Central High School and last year a student was shot and killed walking home from Henry Ford High School. All of this has forced school officials to step up security measures, including increasing the number of police patrols.

Meanwhile, only 16.2% of the city’s 11th graders scored proficient in math this year on the state’s standardized Merit Examination, compared to 49.3% statewide. Detroit reading and science scores are just as bleak. And this in schools that spend $1,700 more per student than the state average.

The school system also has been rocked by corruption. A few years ago, an audit revealed that Detroit’s school system misused more than $46 million on insurance and other contracts and was forced to sue venders to get some of its money back. Two of the system’s employees were recently indicted for allegedly embezzling $400,000 from the school system over the past couple of years.

To clean up the mess, the state took control of the district earlier this year and brought in Robert Bobb as an “emergency financial manager.” In June, to stem pay-check fraud he required that employees pick up their paychecks in person. Paychecks for 257 suspected “ghost” employees—people who had improperly been getting checks—went unclaimed.

Mr. Bobb has been energetic in tackling problems. At the outset, he faced a $306 million shortfall in a $1.3 billion budget. He responded by closing 29 schools, laying off 2,500 employees, and cutting 80% from the budget of the department that draws up the district’s curriculum. He plans to overhaul 40 schools and has hired private companies to run 17 of the district’s 22 high schools. He also tapped Mr. Graves, a bankruptcy expert, for advice.

The Detroit Board of Education has gone along with many of these changes. But it is now seeking a court injunction to block private companies from running district high schools. The board says Mr. Bobb exceeded his authority in hiring the companies. But a court fight will only bog things down at a time when the district still faces a $260 million deficit.

This is why Mr. Graves and others see little alternative to declaring bankruptcy, and why doing so would likely be a net benefit. It would allow the city to tear up union contracts, cut some of its debt, and forge a political consensus for lasting reforms. No one will want to repeat the bankruptcy experience any time soon.

What the city needs is a multitude of charter schools and other school-choice provisions that would give students a means to escape. It also needs to break free of collective-bargaining agreements. Collective bargaining for government employees is not a constitutional right; it is a special privilege, and one that has been abused. Michigan’s education laws could be amended to allow school districts to suspend collective-bargaining agreements when that district fails to meet minimal academic standards, is pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, or when the union goes out on an illegal strike.

Over the past seven years, Detroit schools have lost 60,000 students. Its system is now, according to the state’s attorney general, so small that it no longer qualifies as a First-Class District.

That gives the state legislature and Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm an opportunity to do what they needed to do all along: Treat Detroit like other school districts in the state and hold local officials accountable when the schools fail to perform. Walling off Detroit from the rest of the state may have some appeal and was once the politically easy thing to do, but it’s only given Michigan a larger mess to clean up.

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Estimating the effects of teacher quality

A report from Australia

The Rudd Government's education revolution will amount to little if it fails to lift teacher quality. Computers, libraries, arts centres and well-functioning buildings are vital in improving the learning environment, and the appeal of schools. Only a curmudgeon would quibble over the extra expenditure. But unless teacher quality also improves, the revolution will be half-baked.

With so many baby-boomer teachers retiring over the next seven years - in NSW virtually half the teaching population - there is both opportunity and imperative to raise the standard.

Any parent knows the quality of the child's teacher is critical. That is why the pushier parents lobby to secure the best teacher for their child, and more reticent parents accept with sinking hearts the lost year or lost marks a bad teacher represents.

Now economists have quantified the effect of a good teacher compared to a bad teacher - not only on a child's academic attainment and future earnings but on the health of a national economy. The difference a good teacher makes is large.

Professor Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University, has just visited Australia, bringing a body of research that should focus the minds of politicians on teacher quality. It's not easy. Rolling out laptops is child's play in comparison.

Based on extensive work, conducted partly in the Texas school system, he estimates the students of a bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in a year. The students of a good teacher will learn 1 ½ year's worth of material. That's a whole year's more learning with a quality teacher.

To people who say family background is the most decisive influence on children's academic attainment and that teachers can't compensate, Hanushek says: "Dead wrong." If a disadvantaged student had a good teacher instead of an average one for three or four years in a row, the achievement gains would be dramatic, he says. Put another way, a student who starts at the 50th percentile of the state's distribution on test scores after a year with a good teacher will move up to the 59th percentile.

Teacher effects dwarf school effects, his work shows, so that it is better to be in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher; and better to be in a big class with a great teacher than in a small class with a hopeless one.

In Australia he was talking about the effect of better schooling on economic growth. In a dazzling comparison of 50 countries over four decades, he was able to demonstrate the huge importance of a nation's cognitive skills in explaining economic growth. Countries that have improved their schools - as measured by student scores in international tests of maths, science and literacy ) have also improved their economic growth rates. This applies to developing and developed countries.

Just by getting rid of the bottom 5 per cent to 10 per cent of bad teachers and replacing them with average ones could improve Australia's brainpower, and its economic performance, he says.

Not everyone agrees that teacher quality is so critical. For a start, if this is the main problem it gives governments a handy excuse to minimise expenditure on facilities, or on lower class sizes. A study led by the University of New England that monitored 500 pairs of identical twins through the first three years of school says the "teacher effect" is about 8 per cent, not the 40 per cent other researchers have found. But even if the effect has been overstated in the past, it is still important. Imagine having three talented teachers in a row; even a single gifted teacher can change lives.

Yet improving teacher quality is harder than economists' PowerPoint presentations make out. Good teachers are hard to identify in advance of doing the job - teacher credentials and even years of service are no guide.

It is only when they teach they demonstrate their abilities and, in our system, teachers have virtual tenure for life once they are admitted to a classroom. Little can be done about poor teachers. Even in-service training, Hanushek, claims, has disappointing results.

His own suggestion for attracting and retaining high-quality teachers is the much-lambasted idea of performance pay. Under the single-salary structure that operates here, a bad teacher costs the state as much as a good teacher; across-the-board pay increases give the bad teacher no incentive to leave, and the talented no incentive to stay. The idea is so resisted by teacher unions around the world there is little empirical evidence that performance pay delivers for students.

Thanks partly to the number of bright girls who entered teaching in the 1970s, the baby-boomer teacher generation can boast a high proportion of talented teachers. Australia's respectable international tests scores reflect a reasonable standard of teaching overall. With this generation retiring, it is imperative the replacements are even better teachers. A well-constructed incentive pay scheme deserves consideration, as does better ways to weed out bad teachers. Above all, we have to make schools places where talented people will want to work.

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It’s not pushy parents Britain needs, it’s pushy schools

Education in Britain is bedevilled by social class considerations and the British Left have never been able to decide whether middle-class families should be a model for the workers to aim at or an evil to be avoided. Generally, however, they do their best to destroy the middle class, but tend to destroy the working class even more in the process

With its usual self-serving incoherence, Gordon Brown’s government has come out, in the person of the Blairite MP Alan Milburn, in favour of “pushy parents”. Milburn’s report for Brown on social mobility found that “parental interest has four times more influence on attainment by the age of 16 than does socioeconomic background”. He said last week that he wanted “more pushy parents, not fewer”.

How odd it is to hear such talk from a man authorised by the prime minister to say things that sound just the opposite of what Brown and old Labour have always stood for. It seems only yesterday that Brown’s blue-eyed boy, Ed Balls, the schools secretary, and his people were being sniffy about pushy parents.

It reminds me of Peter Mandelson’s notorious remark that he was “intensely relaxed” about people being “filthy rich”.

Personally I am not only relaxed but rather in favour of pushy parents, up to a point, being one myself. But I think the government should be careful of what it allows itself to say it wishes for. Its members may not all realise what pushy parents are like.

Pushy parents are not just mothers and fathers who show “parental interest”, which is highly to be desired and all too rare. Pushy parents are red in tooth and aspirational in claw; they are social Darwinists to a man and a woman and while I think their struggles are natural and largely unstoppable - pushy parents, like the poor, are always with us – I do not think a socialist-lite government ought to be crying out for more of them.

In any case, it can’t; it won’t work. The soft left culture of the Labour party and of nearly all our national institutions, particularly of our state schools, is entirely at odds with the culture of pushy parents.

Being a pushy parent begins even before parenthood. Pushy parents-to-be, in their quest for the best possible of everything, put their babies down for favoured schools, or move to a good school catchment area, before they are even born. Pushy mothers-to-be eat carefully chosen super-foods to push the embryonic brain to the peak of its potential and listen to carefully chosen music to ensure high-level music appreciation later in life. I admit I myself thought like that.

But then I was the child of a pushy parent - a single mother whose determination ensured that I, like my brothers, did well enough to get scholarships to private schools and full grants to university - something denied to poor but aspiring teenagers today. She even tried to persuade me, years later, to teach my own infant children maths according to some American baby-genius method, when they were still almost too young to speak.

Unusual then, such extremes are now common among hyper-competitive pushy mummies. I am glad to say that I refused; nor did I make my children do Suzuki violin lessons at three or competitive tennis at six, as did so many other mothers of my acquaintance.

That’s because the cost, I know, of such expectations on children can be high; it means forcing them to confront the constant fear of failure, including failing to pass into a school at the age of four when your elder sister did before you - something our politicians seem unable to understand and many teachers seem quite unable to accept.

Is that what Milburn is recommending? In my case it meant going into several exams with a chamber pot, as extreme anxiety regularly made me throw up because I had been encouraged to be so desperate to win. Per ardua ad astra - which, as those who’ve been crammed into elitist schools by pushy parents will know, means the way to the stars, whatever they may be, is pretty damn hard – and, of course, a lot of people fall by the wayside.

Although pushy parents never stop pushing themselves, they also contract out whenever they can to professional pushers in the form of private schools, evening tutors and even live-in holiday tutors.

My day at a good private school in the West Country began about 6am when, under parental pressure, I got out of bed to catch up with homework. I had to be in school by 8.10am and couldn’t go home until 7pm – in that time I had nine 40-minute periods of lessons or study each day (and five on Saturday mornings), one period of compulsory games, one of music practice and some time for eating; at home later I had more homework and reading.

To my astonishment, my daughter’s day at a top London day school was (and is) just as long and much more competitive, as the girls were all much cleverer than those at my school. There are also casualties to match among children at such academic private schools – boys and girls who collapse under the strain, who drop out with addictions and eating disorders.

This is what it means to push a child, for better and for worse. It takes not only a lot of money and effort all round, but also a lot of time. It astonishes me how short the day is, by comparison, at state schools – how can clever state school children hope to accomplish anything like as much as their private school competitors, or foreign competitors from pushy cultures, if they have less than half the amount of teaching or carefully supervised study?

Equally, seeing children come out of state school in the early afternoon, I often wonder how many of their parents would really want to see them studying as hard as private school children - particularly if their children are not bright. Putting such intense demands on the brightest children, even agreeing to select precisely which are the brightest children, is outside the mindset of the state educational establishment. Private schools don’t question it; state schools cannot accept it. It is anathema to the all-shall-have-prizes, all-shall-have-A-levels culture. And while that culture may be beginning to change, even the notion that one child is much more intelligent than another is still widely unacceptable among educationists.

The government should be calling not for pushy parents, but for pushier state schools, and for a system that can find an acceptable way of selecting and teaching all children according to their real aptitudes; the failure of our education system cannot be either blamed on or solved by parents. It is the educational culture that is to blame. And what will save our schools is a recognition, which is indeed characteristic of pushy parents, that the world is a painfully competitive place.

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26 July, 2009

$4.35 billion for U.S. education reform

Obama is a typical simplistic Leftist who thinks that throwing money at a problem will solve it: A strange combination of knowing nothing about money but having huge faith in it. Things that really would help -- such as bringing back discipline, academically selective schooling or offering vouchers -- are against the current Leftist religion so are not considered

President Barack Obama on Friday introduced what was described as the largest-ever federal investment in education reform, including a competition aimed at bringing schools in line with the administration's education goals.

The "Race to the Top" fund would disburse about $4.35 billion in competitive grants, in an incentive for states and local schools to adopt the administration's core agenda: implementing more rigorous standards, improving teacher quality, transforming the lowest-performing schools and embracing data-driven systems to track student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

"This competition will not be based on politics, ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group," Obama said at the Department of Education headquarters in Washington.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former Chicago Public Schools chief, said the program would mark "a new federal partnership" with states, districts and unions. But Duncan said it would also be "a competition" in which states could decrease their odds of winning federal support if, for example, they capped the number of charter schools or prohibited the linkage of student-achievement data to staff evaluations.

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Competition has become a dirty word in British schools, says Dame Kelly

Dame Kelly Holmes yesterday launched a stinging attack on the decline of competitive sport in schools and said it risked spawning a generation of bad losers. The double Olympic champion and former Army physical training instructor blamed a culture of political correctness for making 'competitiveness' a dirty word. Her comments come a year after Gordon Brown admitted Labour had made a 'tragic mistake' by allowing dozens of mainly left-wing councils to scrap competitive sports in schools in the 1980s.

This meant huge numbers of inter- school matches and tournaments were cut from state schools after theorists claimed children on losing teams could end up psychologically traumatised. After the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Government pledged to end a 'medals for all' culture in which sports days have been cancelled and field sports 'dumbed down'.

But Dame Kelly has criticised established policies that continue to allow health and safety concerns to ride roughshod over sporting rivalry. The 39-year-old former middle distance athlete said: 'Too often, in these politically sensitive times, it seems that competitiveness is seen as a dirty word. 'I was surprised by how many schools I came across where sports day had been abandoned. It's very important to learn how to lose. 'What you should do is pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again. If everyone gets a prize, where on earth is the incentive to push yourself to do better next time?'

The retired British recordbreaking athlete, who won two gold medals at the 2004 Athens Olympics, called for competitive sport to play a much larger part in the school curriculum.

Dame Kelly, who was awarded an honorary degree from Brunel University this week, told Heat magazine: 'Competitive sport can increase a child's confidence, develop their social skills and get them fit into the bargain.'

The Prime Minister has promised to reverse the longterm decline in competitive school games in the run-up to the London Olympics. Fixtures between schools dropped 70 per cent in the early 1990s following a steady decade-long decline, according to figures from the Secondary Heads Association. But in 2007, Government figures showed numbers were still falling. One million fewer school children were pitted against their classmates than the previous year.

In total, 3.1million pupils aged five to 16 - equal to more than four in ten school children - did not play any competitive sport, while 438 schools did not hold a sports day, a survey for the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed.

Last year the Football Association banned children under the age of eight from playing in football leagues and cups amid fears they are under too much pressure. Youngsters can still play matches but results must be kept private and no league tables can be compiled. They should not compete in knockout tournaments where trophies or medals are at stake, FA officials said.

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25 July, 2009

Naval Academy Professor Challenges School's Push for Diversity

Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis this week, 435 were members of minority groups. It's the most racially diverse class in the academy's 164-year history. Academy leaders say it is a top priority to build a student body that reflects the racial makeup of the Navy and the nation. The service academy has almost twice as many black, Hispanic and Asian midshipmen as it did a decade ago. Much of the increase has occurred in the past two years, with a blitz of 1,000 outreach and recruitment events across the country.

But during the past two weeks, a faculty member has stirred debate by suggesting that the school's quest for diversity comes at a price. Bruce Fleming, a tenured English professor, said in a June 14 opinion piece in the Capital newspaper of Annapolis that the academy operates a two-tiered admission system that makes it substantially easier for minority applicants to get in. Academy leaders strenuously deny Fleming's assertion. Fleming served on the academy's admissions board several years ago.

The debate, fanned on talk radio and blogs, comes as the Naval Academy and many other colleges and universities are striving to build diversity without resorting to quotas or formulas that might be found unconstitutional. A 2003 Supreme Court decision upheld diversity as a goal but encouraged universities to consider applicants as individuals, a philosophy embraced by the Naval Academy and much of the higher education community.

Fleming says the increase in minority enrollment at the academy has brought in students with lower grades and SAT scores who need more remedial classes and are less capable of the scholarship for which the academy is known. "First of all, we're dumbing down the Naval Academy," Fleming said in an interview. "Second of all, we're dumbing down the officer corps."

Academy leaders say the school has diversified with no loss of scholarship. Incoming freshmen of every race ranked near the top of their senior class in grade-point average and test scores, according to academy records. The academy admitted fewer than 10 percent of the African Americans and Hispanics who applied for admission to the Class of 2013 and a similar share of whites.

This class we inducted yesterday may be the most talented overall that we have ever brought into the Naval Academy," said William Miller, academic dean and provost of the academy. "We have increased the standards, rather than dumbing them down."

Fleming's broadside has lit up military blogs and message boards and prompted inquiries from the academy's governing board about the integrity of the admissions process. The professor has spoken on Laura Ingraham's conservative radio talk show and fielded a steady stream of e-mails from students, most of whom are spending the summer on ships and bases in far-flung locales.

"I think that diversity is a good thing," Erick Meckle, a third-year midshipman, said in an e-mail to The Washington Post from Europe. "However, if the selection process for applicants is based solely on skin color rather than raw talents, then of course it's not fair."

Fleming said he was moved to raise the issue when he saw the dramatic rise in minority first-year students, or plebes, this summer. Fleming served on the academy's admissions board seven years ago and said he participated in a process that blatantly favored minority applicants. To win the admissions board's approval at that time, he said, a white applicant had to present SAT section scores higher than 600 (out of 800); a transcript of A's and B's; and a strong background of leadership in sports and student life, reflected in a four-digit score called the whole-person multiplier. Black and Hispanic students were routinely admitted with SAT scores in the 500s; with B's and C's; and lower whole-person multipliers, he said.

Miller said Fleming's account is "not the way the admissions board works," although he would not speak about "how it worked seven years ago." Admissions Dean Bruce Latta said admissions is "a single process," with every applicant considered as an individual. A star student from a low-income community might get credit for overcoming adversity. "It's a whole-person assessment on every person," Latta said.

Anthony Principi, a former secretary of veterans affairs who is chairman of the academy oversight group known as the Board of Visitors, said he inquired about the constitutionality of the admissions process after reading Fleming's comments. "I think it would survive a constitutional challenge," he said.

Fleming said some academy admission data support his claim. The share of plebes who scored less than 600 on the SAT math test was 22 percent this year, up from 12 percent in the Class of 2008. The number of freshmen coming from the academy's one-year preparatory program, designed for remedial studies, was 244 this year, the highest figure in at least 10 years. The data are not classified by race.

On the other hand, 76 percent of the Class of 2013 came from the top fifth of their high school classes [but which high schools? Being top of a mostly black high school could mean very little], about the same proportion as a decade ago.

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Education is increasingly a road to nowhere in socialist Britain

"Any luck?" I ask my daughter, as she returns from her latest foray into town. Her glum face gives the answer. She is leaving school today and, in October, will be going to university – Oxford, if she gets the grades she needs. In a perfect world, she would get a summer job, earn some money, then go travelling for a few weeks. But not much about the world is perfect these days. That low-paid summer job is proving far more elusive than a place at university.

In the recession-hit Cotswolds, where she lives, the temporary jobs in shops and pubs and cafés are just not there, or have already been taken, probably by someone from Warsaw or Tallinn. She touts around her neatly typed CV, littered with As and A*s, but nobody wants to know. "Sorry, luv. Perhaps at Christmas..."

Friends with children in a similar position have the same story to tell. The son of a friend in Wimbledon is typical. After weeks of rejection, he thought he had finally got lucky when he spotted a vacancy in a Vietnamese restaurant. "I'm sorry, we only recruit Vietnamese." "But I thought that was illegal," he stammered, drawing on his A-level politics and economics. "It's how we do things here," came the reply.

Even at the All England Club, where skilled labour is needed to pour Pimm's into a glass without spilling it, 20 per cent fewer catering staff were recruited this year. Not even the Andy Murray magic can generate jobs in the depths of a recession. If the Scot couldn't play tennis, he would probably be out of work himself.

Youth unemployment is at its highest for 16 years, rising to 726,000 in the three months to the end of May, a quarterly increase of 95,000, according to figures released yesterday. Earlier this month it was reported that, among 16 to 24 year-olds, the Murray generation, the number of Neets in the UK is about to pass a million for the first time. Neets – and it is a term we are going to hear a lot more – is government jargon for young people "not in education, employment or training". The forgotten underclass.

A MILLION? It is a terrifying statistic, when you think about it. That is an awful lot of wasted, stunted, frustration-filled lives. It is hard not to link it to another statistic unveiled this week – that the UK has the worst record of violent crime of any country in the EU. Perhaps David Cameron's talk of a broken society is not so exaggerated after all.

If the plight of children leaving school at 16 without a GCSE to their name is grim, the plight of those like my daughter, armed to the teeth with GCSEs but unable to find the most menial work, is equally depressing – if not more so.

All through their childhoods, they have been sold the same dream – by their parents, by their teachers, by the government. That, if they buckle down at school and take their studies seriously, it will be worth their while in the long run. That their hard work will be rewarded with a place at university and a well-paid job.

The dream may not be in tatters, but it has frayed so badly around the edges that it is not surprising so many young people have become cynical and disaffected. Life is not always fair: we imbibe that lesson in our mother's milk. But if reasonable expectations are consistently and savagely disappointed, why bother to try to better yourself at school and university?

Education, education, education, said Tony Blair. Perhaps he should have said unemployment, unemployment, unemployment. Data from the Higher Education Standards Authority released this week indicates that, of those who graduated last summer, eight per cent were still out of work six months later.

The ones with vocational degrees such as medicine are all right. The poor lambs who thought reading history or philosophy or computer sciences would boost their career prospects have had a rude awakening. They are just itching to get their feet under a desk, any desk, so they can pay off those five-figure student loans, but they are having to wait. And wait. And wait.

Young people have time on their side, of course, and with the recession affecting all sections of society, unemployed graduates are no more deserving of sympathy than carmakers or engineers who have been made redundant in their early 50s. But the souring of young dreams, particularly when those dreams are rooted in legitimate aspirations and backed up by hard work, is particularly corrosive. It jeopardises all our futures. Without the optimism of youth, what hope is there of building a stronger economy or a fairer society?

There is not going to be much youthful optimism on view this summer; in fact, school-leavers will be caught between a rock and a hard place. Jobs are in such short supply that they are applying for university in record numbers; but with only a small increase in the number of places available, an estimated 60,000 teenagers will be turned away from university in September and, in most cases, have to join the dole queue.

Even the lucky ones who get university places are caught in an economic vice of frightening rigidity. Student grants and loans are going to be frozen next year, while tuition fees rise. To make ends meet, the students are going to have to grub around for part-time jobs, which will be in short supply or, in Vietnamese restaurants, zero per cent supply, to paraphrase the Prime Minister.

As summer turns to autumn, the students who have managed to avoid swine flu will find themselves riddled with financial insecurity and self-doubt. What are they doing at university in the first place? Where is it all leading? Will that degree be worth anything in the outside world?

Then, next spring in all likelihood, the final indignity. The first general election at which they can vote. Their first chance to have a say at the ballot box about the sort of Britain they want to live in. But why bother to vote? The sins of New Labour are just part of an age-old malaise: politicians promising a better education for all, then dashing the hopes they have so recklessly raised.

If the young took to the streets, as they have in Iran, their anger might be a harbinger of better times ahead. As it is, they seem, in all too many cases, to have succumbed to disillusion and apathy.

Yesterday afternoon, I was walking along the canal in Oxford when I saw a couple of young men perched on top of a bridge, moodily throwing stones into the water. Their faces were pale and sullen and they scowled at me as I approached. There was a trail of lager cans and cigarette ends beside them.

Town or gown? Town, I would have said, without hesitation, 12 months ago. They had the anger of the long-term unemployed about them. They were not throwing stones into the water for fun: they were throwing them to let off steam. Then I overheard one of them talking about Euripides. So not town, gown. Students at a world-famous university. The top of the educational tree.

And if life at the top of the tree is that bad, what chance for those clinging to the lower branches?

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Revolutionary idea: New policies should be pretested to see how well they actually work

Not that it would matter much in education. Destructive policies (like the enmity to phonics) are clung to even AFTER we know that they are failures

Schools, courts and police forces need a revolution in evidence-based thinking to prevent taxpayers’ money being wasted on unworkable schemes, according to a leading scientist.

Professor Jonathan Shepherd, a surgeon and criminologist, says that the education and criminal justice systems fail to deliver the best results because policies are not researched properly.

All of the public services need to develop a research culture similar to that in medicine, where treatments must be tested for effectiveness and value before they are adopted.

Policing tactics, teaching techniques and sentencing would benefit from a the same kind of rigorous assessment, but are rarely subject to scientific analysis, he told The Times.

Professor Shepherd, of Cardiff University, is calling for more investment in public sector research and advocates a partnership between practitioners and universities so that policy ideas can be put to the test. The looming squeeze on public spending made sound research even more critical to ensure scarce funding is directed towards proven policies.

“All these choices about spending should be based on evidence, rather than relying on opinion and fashion,” he said. “We need to acknowledge in these straitened times that applied science is a national need.”

His approach has won support from senior scientists and MPs, including Sir David King, the Government’s former chief scientific adviser, Phil Willis, the chairman of the Commons Science Select Committee, and Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust. Sir David said: “I’m very supportive. My entire experience of Whitehall could be described as a struggle to try to get an evidence base into policymaking. We have a knowledge base in our universities but no real commitment to push it into public policymaking and delivery.”

Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, agreed but said there were often practical difficulties. “I’m all for having as much evidence-based policy as possible,” he said. “That is something the whole Professional Skills for Government agenda is geared towards.Part of the problem is when you think about the kind of evidence you need about policies, it’s hard to get.” Professor Shepherd, a maxillofacial surgeon, has pioneered the use of health research to reduce crime, for instance, demonstrating that toughened pub glasses lead to fewer injuries because they do not break into sharp pieces if a fight breaks out.

His team has also used accident and emergency admissions data to map violence hotspots in Cardiff and inform targeted policing. Last year he won the Stockholm Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel prize in criminology. He is now campaigning for other public services to learn similar lessons about the value of research and evidence.

“There’s a huge contrast between health and the other public services in the amount of evidence there is as to what works and what doesn’t,” he said. “We need to ask, what’s the evidence that what this teacher is doing in this primary school is the most effective option and the most cost-effective?”

While hospitals routinely abandon ineffective treatments, such as prophylactic removal of wisdom teeth, he said that this rarely happened in other public services. “I don’t see a similar history of evidence-based disinvestment in the other public services,” Professor Shepherd said. “It’s hard to think of a police intervention that’s been abandoned for this reason.”

A further problem is that academics who investigate education or crime rarely work as teachers or police officers, which creates barriers between research and practice. “When you become a lecturer in a department of education, that’s the day you stop teaching,” he said. “Contrast that with health. If you’re a lecturer in a department of surgery or a dental school, you keep practising. The huge advantage is you have your feet on the ground. Your clinical practice informs your research and research informs your practice.

“I want to see practitioner academics and chief superintendents with a PhD. It’s time for universities to invade the criminal justice and education systems. Innovation stems from practitioners asking ‘Can we do better?’ — and then doing the research.”

Professor Shepherd is calling for a public services research board, which would establish funding mechanisms for research into the public services and oversee training of practitioneracademics. He has presented his ideas to Lord Drayson, the Science Minister, and Adam Afriyie, his Tory shadow.

Mr Willis, whose committee will publish a report on the Government’s use of policy next week, said Professor Shepherd’s ideas were particularly important given the parlous state of the public finances. “Over the next ten years, if things are going to be pared to the bone it’s going to be crucial to base policy on evidence,” he said.

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24 July, 2009

Vast fraud alleged in NYC education statistics

But Hey! It's NYC. What do you expect?

Calling it the "Enron of American education," Comptroller William Thompson Tuesday accused the Education Department of manipulating data to boost graduation rates. The transcripts of 10% of the students his office sampled in an audit showed the kids did not earn enough credits or pass enough courses to graduate. "The Department of Education has become the Enron of American education," said the mayoral candidate, "showing the gains and hiding the losses.

About 18% of the 197 students examined who graduated in 2007 got multiple credit for passing the same courses, the report asserts. About a quarter of the students had grades changed the same month they graduated or even after graduation, allowing them to meet graduation requirements. In one case, a student's failing grades from courses taken in 2005 and 2006 were changed in June of 2007, giving him the required 44 credits.

Thompson also charged that the drop-out rate may be higher than reported. Students who take five or six years to graduate are not considered drop-outs, according to the audit. The audit looked at a group of students who were supposed to graduate in 2007 but were classified as "still enrolled" in 2008. The report found that 15% had not attended school since June 2007. Half of those hadn't even been to class in the spring of June 2007.

The Education Department said in its response contained in the audit that some schools did not use inique codes for classes, giving the impression some were taken twice. They attributed changing transcripts in the month of graduation or afterwards to careful reviews taken without the time pressure that exists during the school year.

Mayor Bloomberg's campaign attacked the report. "Instead of politicizing the comptroller's office with phony attacks, Mr. Thompson should be explaining his own failed record on education," said spokesman Howard Wolfson. "The facts are clear: When Bill Thompson ran the old dysfunctional Board of Education, graduation rates were flat and dropout rates increased." The city's graduation rate has risen to 66% in 2008 from 51% in 2001, city officials say.

Thompson stopped short of accusing the mayor or Schools Chancellor Joel Klein of personally pushing for inflate graduation rates. He said there needed to be improved oversight of the Education Department and argued that the problems could not be chalked up to paperwork mistakes. "These results are disturbing and inexcusable," said Thompson "I don't think it's just sloppy book keeping."

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British schools are the problem, not its elite universities

Alan Milburn's new report into social mobility is not entirely surprising. Those of us who write about education know that social position, the background you come from and what your parents do, all make a huge difference to what you will become when you grow up. And in today's Times, Mr Milburn writes about social mobility and education.

But the new report covers more than our children's schools - and has over 80 recommedations. Certain professions should have a much wider intake, says Mr Milburn, and so should universities.

But here's John O’Leary, author of the Good University Guide, with his take on the report: he's not completely impressed....

"There are many good ideas in Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility, Unleashing Aspiration – not least a proposed network of careers mentors and the extension of financial support beyond full-time undergraduates. But few of them involve universities, which the report considers the key to greater mobility.

Like most of the debates in this area, this one confuses widening participation in higher education as a whole with fair access to the most prestigious universities. Both are important, but they are not the same thing. So by encouraging more students to stay at home and go to their local FE college, for example, you may send out the message that it does not matter where people take a degree.

In fact, as the report acknowledges, it does matter both in terms of the quality of course and subsequent career prospects. What prospective students need - especially those from families and schools with little knowledge of universities – is the best possible advice on their options. These may involve highly selective universities, but the most suitable course might well be elsewhere.

The report assumes that the most highly-qualified students should go to the universities at the top of the league tables, quoting the 13 regarded by the Sutton Trust as the cream of the crop. The fact that there are 13, rather than ten or 20, shows what an arbitrary dividing line this is. Are the tens of thousands who apply to Manchester (the most popular university in terms of applications) or Exeter (which is in the current top ten in The Times Good University Guide) deluded?

Mr Milburn’s panel wants yet more information to be published on the socio-economic background of entrants to university. But there are statistics galore on students’ class, school and home area. A few more will not change anything.

Not surprisingly, there is no flash of inspiration in the report that will transform access to the most selective universities. Many of the proposals, such as partnerships with poor schools and extra leeway for applicants from schools and colleges with low average results, are well established already. If anything, the £392m spent on widening participation over the past five years to limited effect, suggests that there are too many initiatives, rather than too few.

Mr Milburn – and the Government, which commissioned the report – are right to be concerned about access to the professions and, by extension, to the top universities. Indeed, David Willetts, who leads for the Conservatives on universities, raised many of the same concerns in a speech to the Politeia think tank yesterday. But, while the charge of social elitism can still be levelled at a few universities, the focus should be on state schools if real progress is to be made on social mobility."

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Fix Australia's school performance or poor won't get into university

We need to improve schooling in disadvantaged areas if less well-off children are going to get tertiary education

EARLIER this year federal Education Minister Julia Gillard challenged Australian universities to enrol more students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, setting an ambitious student enrolment target of 20 per cent from low SES groups by 2020.

Though more than willing, many universities will struggle to reach that target. An all-too-limited pool of prospective students from low SES backgrounds obtain the school results likely to make higher education a good option. The undergraduates who will enter universities in 2020 are at school now and many in the target groups already underperform. So while universities must engage, it also will require a substantial improvement in school results to meet the Education Minister's targets.

Two years ago, the Education Foundation report Crossing the Bridge described the challenges faced by government schools in low socioeconomic communities and the barriers confronting the young people who attend them.

The story is much the same today. New University of Melbourne research conducted for the Education Foundation confirms there are still too many young Australians missing out on the opportunities provided by a quality education.

Social justice requires an education system that encourages bright, creative and talented individuals, irrespective of the school they attend or their background. These goals -- quality, equity, consistency -- are at the core of a new proposal, A New Federalism in Australian Education, by Jack Keating for the Education Foundation. This proposal argues that the Australian school system faces a raft of challenges as a result of the narrow institutional structures of schooling.

To date, much educational reform policy has focused on teaching quality. This is critically important, yet young people's education outcomes are also shaped by factors beyond their teachers, including early childhood education, family income and occupation, geographical location and the wider community environment. These factors help explain why socioeconomic disadvantage persists in higher education and why students from low SES backgrounds remain substantially under-represented in universities.

Years ago, researchers Buly Cardak of La Trobe University and Chris Ryan of the Australian National University identified school performance as the missing piece of this puzzle. The currency of university admissions is school results, and Cardak and Ryan found that students from low SES families were lost to higher education in the final years of school. They do not convert academic potential evident at year 9 to year 12 results as effectively as students from high SES groups.

We surrender so much potential among students who do not make it to year 12, and are lost to the tertiary sector. Some will find other pathways, such as through vocational training. There are good arguments to consider additional new forms of education, including community colleges. But the key issue remains our schools.

In A New Federalism in Australian Education, Keating calls for widespread educational reform beginning with a multi-level, federalist approach to funding that prioritises schools with low completion rates and offers fee relief for low-income families.

He also calls for church-based schools to be incorporated into the public system and a national regulatory agency for all publicly funded schools, and recommends significant investment in early childhood education; an acceleration of programs in the middle years of secondary school to curb early school leaving; and a strengthening of upper secondary pathways to further education and training that do not rely solely on academic results.

Most important of all is the focus on countering socioeconomic disadvantage. For some time Australian education has been characterised as "high quality, low equity".

Too many students are performing below expectations, most coming from poorer families and communities. Poor results often have lifelong consequences, in fewer opportunities for further education and reduced job prospects. How to make Australia's schools "high quality, high equity" is one of the big policy questions of the coming decade.

The federal government's education reform agenda is already focused on disadvantage, targeting early childhood and inequalities in the quality of instruction across the states and territories, and identifying opportunities to cater better for students' different needs.

Not everyone will agree with Keating's proposals. Controversy over federalism is a constant of Australian politics. The inconsistencies and apparent anomalies of joint federal-state responsibility for education, and the differences between the states, also can be benefits in providing greater scope for experimentation, division of power and democratic options. Citizens dissatisfied with one level of government can appeal to the other for help.

But we also need to take seriously the costs of the present divided structures of regulating and funding education, costs well explained in thisproposal.

Our schooling system structures were not designed to produce the best education outcomes but represent the accumulation of incremental changes through decades. As students of public policy know, incrementalism encourages remarkable innovation but also can produce programmatic incoherence.

These are healthy debates on the means to achieve a high quality, high-equity education system, running from early childhood through to postgraduate university education. If we are going to meet those 2020 equity targets, it's a conversation we must have now.

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23 July, 2009

Charity, private schools and the public benefit in Britain

Private schools in Britain have traditionally been regarded as charities and been given certain tax exemptions as a result. The Labour government hates private schools so is trying to end those concessions. The hatchetwoman is the aptly-named Dame Suzy Leather, who herself had a privileged education but wants to deny that to as many others as possible

It's entirely possible to argue with a straight face that private schools damage the nation. I may disagree with you, think your contention that everyone should be forced into the failing State sector absurd, but that would be my opinion, not an objective fact thrown up by the universe to frustrate you.

However, if we were to try and discuss the costs and benefits of there being a private school sector, we would at least agree that parents paying more money to have their children educated, money over and above the taxes they have already paid the State to educate their children, is a public benefit. No? Saving the State billions which it can spend upon other things is indeed a public benefit? Sure, maybe it's one we might need to offset against other things, but it is a benefit? Not, apparently, if you are the Charities Commission:

David Lyscom, the chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, has tried, without success, to convince Leather that billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money that is saved by schools educating children privately is a “public benefit” in itself.

However, this is not the worst of what the Commission is no doing as it looks at the charitable status of all those private schools. This is:

The commission have not told us what the test we have to pass is.

When a bureaucracy will not tell you what the law is, when they insist that everything is simply to be left to their discretion, then we have left the rule of law far behind. Indeed, I would argue that in this situation we have left the governance methods of a civilised society far behind.

Apologies for my fundamentalism in such matters but just as I'm sure there are both costs and benefits to having a private school system (and on net, benefits) there are also costs and benefits to having a Charities Commission. If such Commission is going to start using Kafka as an operations manual then, on net, we'd be better off without it. Abolish it and force Dame Suzi Leather to work for a living for a change.

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What it is like to teach American blacks

Innumerable articles bewail the educational "gap" between American whites and blacks but it is almost always explained in very general terms. Below is a very rare detailed description of what goes on in black education

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state. The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.

Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock. One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point-something that occurs to even the dimmest white students-blacks just tried to yell over each other.

It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.

Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again- just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”

Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.

They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim-in the crudest terms imaginable-that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”

So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students-there are-but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic. “Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.

“Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?” I ask. Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, “You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson.” “Juicy” is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.

Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike Whites, who tread gingerly around the Subject of race, they can be brutally to The point. Once I needed to send a student To the office to deliver a message. I Asked for volunteers, and suddenly you Would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”

For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?' Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.

It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.

Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.

Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”

My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”

“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said. She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.

Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.

Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.

My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”

There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.

Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all- well-black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.

One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.

How the world looks to blacks: One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”

I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!” One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.

“Do you think I really hate black people?” “Yeah.” “Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?” “You just do.” “Why do you say that?" He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.

My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family. From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.

Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive. Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!” Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.” They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.

My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.

Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.

What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”

There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no. There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls-all too many-actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.

There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks-especially the boys.

Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.

Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.

The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.

There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.

Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don't know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.

Aside from the police officers constantly on campus, security guards are everywhere in black schools-we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.

There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl-black or white-became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs. One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.

One day, I asked him, "Why do you come to school?" He wouldn't answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: "He get dat green and get dem females." "What is the green?" I asked. "Money or dope?" "Both," said Yidarius with a smile.

A very fat student interrupted from across the room: "We get dat lunch," Mr. Jackson. "We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss." He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. "Nigga, we know'd you be lovin' brickfuss!" shouts another student.

Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good and the teachers look good. Many of these children should have been failed but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.

How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist's fantasy-in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers-and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.

One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food-not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll.

Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind. There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level. The solution is more diversity-or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught.

For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work. Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching. Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn't work with blacks.

Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.

Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat's office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group-I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc.-sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task.

The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: "These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?" Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. "That one." The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the question. "No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just as American as you."

This is what happens at predominately white, middle-class, elementary schools everywhere. Elementary school teachers love All of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children's poet Arnold Adoff. These are some of the lines they read to the children: "Mama is chocolate . Daddy is vanilla . Me (sic) is better . It is a new color. It is a new flavor. For love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too sickly pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before people moved and migrated, and mixed and matched . there was one people: one color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to what will be after. All the colors."

Teaching as a career: It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my experiences have given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a stable, middle-class life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives of children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults-especially, or even, with their parents-so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master. A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out.

I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I never had this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white teacher who did.

Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating to map out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to challenge liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I aimed for with my white students I could never achieve with the blacks. There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-class castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is nevertheless almost an angel.

Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the modern world. Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still blush. Try as I might, I could not get the blacks to care one bit about Beethoven or Sherman's march to the sea, or Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or even liberals like John Rawls, or their own history. They cared about nothing I tried to teach them.

When this goes on year after year it chokes the soul out of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and sends him guiltily searching for The Bell Curve on the Internet. Blacks break down the intimacy that can be achieved in the classroom, and leave you convinced that that intimacy is really a form of kinship. Without intending to, they destroy what is most beautiful-whether it be your belief in human equality, your daughter's innocence, or even the state of the hallway. Just last year I read on the bathroom stall the words "F**k Whitey." Not two feet away, on the same stall, was a small swastika.

The National Council for the Social Studies, the leading authority on social science education in the United States, urges teachers to inculcate such values as equality of opportunity, individual property rights, and a democratic form of government. Even if teachers could inculcate this milquetoast ideology into whites, liberalism is doomed because so many non-whites are not receptive to education of any kind beyond the merest basics. It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions as property rights or democratic citizenship. They do not see much further than the fact that you live in a big house and "we in da pro-jek."

Of course, there are a few loutish whites who will never think past their next meal and a few sensitive blacks for whom anything is possible, but no society takes on the characteristics of its exceptions. Once I asked my students, "What do you think of the Constitution?" "It white," one slouching black rang out. The class began to laugh. And I caught myself laughing along with them, laughing while Pompeii's volcano simmers, while the barbarians swell around the Palatine, while the country I love, and the job I love, and the community I love become dimmer by the day.

I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian who visited Zimbabwe not too many years ago. Traveling with a companion, she stopped at a store along the highway. A black man materialized next to her car window. "Job, boss, (I) work good, boss," he pleaded. "You give job." "What happened to your old job?" the expatriate white asked. The man replied in the straightforward manner of his race: "We drove out the whites. No more jobs. You give job."

At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me. "What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?" "We screwed," a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed. I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment. "I cain't do dis," Mr. Jackson. "I black."

The point is that human beings are not always rational. It is in the black man's interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but he drives them out and starves. Most whites do not think black Americans could ever do anything so irrational. They see blacks on television smiling, fighting evil whites, embodying white values. But the real black is not on television, and you pull your purse closer when you see him, and you lock the car doors when he swaggers by with his pants hanging down almost to his knees.

I have been in parent-teacher conferences that broke my heart: the child pleading with his parents to take him out of school; the parents convinced their child's fears are groundless. If you love your child, show her you care- not by giving her fancy vacations or a car, but making her innocent years safe and happy. Give her the gift of a not-heavily black school.

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22 July, 2009

Time to end the monopoly in education

To boost the economy out of the recession, President Obama has chosen to spend an additional $100 billion on public schooling over the next two years. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, is touring the nation to promote this education "stimulus."

However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive. Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing.

Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for nearly 40 years, according to a recent study by the Education Department, while the graduation rate fell over the same period, according to a report by James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist. If the efficiency of U.S. public schooling had merely remained at its 1970 level, the country would enjoy the equivalent of an annual $300 billion tax cut.

The productivity collapse in education is more than staggering; it's unparalleled. Can you name any other service or product that has gotten worse and less affordable over the past two generations? The reason you can't is that no other field is organized as a state-run monopoly. The general argument against monopolies is well understood and accepted. A concrete case study might drive home the point that monopolies are just as harmful in education as in other fields.

Earlier this year, I sifted through the 2008-09 budget for the District of Columbia, summing up all K-12 education spending, not counting charter schools. It comes to just under $1.3 billion. The latest audited enrollment count for the district is 44,681, putting per-pupil spending in the nation's capital at about $29,000. Meanwhile, fewer than half of the students who enter the ninth grade in D.C. go on to graduate four years later.

To put that profligacy in perspective, the private schools serving D.C.'s 1,700 voucher students charge an average tuition of $6,600, according to a recent Education Department. After three years in the program, voucher students read more than two school years ahead of a randomized control group of their public school peers. That is, the voucher program yields substantially better results at less than one-quarter the cost.

For those unfamiliar with the D.C. voucher program, it is the one that President Obama has decided to phase out, despite his stated goal of pursuing education reform that's effective and efficient.

The massive productivity advantage of private-sector education is not unique to Washington, D.C. For the Journal of School Choice, I tabulated the international scientific research comparing public and private-sector schooling. Across time, countries and outcome measures, private provision outshines public in the overwhelming majority of cases. More important, the least regulated, most marketlike education systems show the greatest margin of superiority over monopoly schooling. In literature on education, 59 findings show that markets outperform school monopolies. Not a single study has found a monopoly school system to be as efficient as a market system.

Once upon a time, America could afford to sustain a parasitic school monopoly, fecklessly throwing billions more dollars at it decade after decade despite its failure to improve. That time has passed. Now that the economy is in a deep recession, the perpetuation of that monopoly puts our economic future at unacceptable risk.

Many policy proposals are on the table that could inject market forces back into the field of education, bringing to it the same long-term productivity growth that has been the norm in other fields. Some states already have such programs operating on a tiny scale, such as Illinois' modest tax credits for families' own education costs, and the tax credits in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania for donations to K-12 tuition-assistance organizations serving low-income families.

The first states to combine and expand these programs on a grand scale will become magnets for businesses in search of better-educated workers and lower taxes, leading to an economic and educational boom. The states that don't will continue to burn in the budgetary hell created by monopoly schooling, needlessly jeopardizing their children's economic and educational futures. It's time to bring the field of education into the fold of the free enterprise system.

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A British Leftist advocating vouchers? Sort of

By Alan Milburn (Alan Milburn, MP, is chairman of the British Government’s panel on social mobility)

The motor force of an open society, in which social mobility is extensive, is education. A good school opens the door to a good career. Today I launch the final report of the panel that I have been chairing on how professional careers can be open to people of talent, regardless of background. A huge expansion in professional jobs in the next decade will bring the potential for a new wave of social mobility. But, as our report makes clear, generations of low and middle-income young people will miss out unless we do more to close the educational attainment gap in schools.

In the past decade the Government has done much to improve results, refurbish schools and raise standards. The number of failing schools is falling. City academies, located in the poorest areas, are helping to improve the GCSE results of children who receive free school meals at a faster rate than those who do not.

Despite this progress, the attainment gap by social position is still substantial. The chance of children eligible for free school meals — roughly the poorest 15 per cent by family income — getting good qualifications by the age of 16 is still less than a third that of their better-off classmates. Poor areas are still far too likely to have poor schools. But, as the large number of appeals over school places demonstrates, it is not just the most disadvantaged who can be caught in the gap between the demand for good schools and their supply. It is also many middle-income families.

Better-off parents can sidestep these problems. They can take their children out of state schools and send them to private schools. They can buy extra tuition or move near a good school to guarantee a place.

When affluence buys attainment it restricts mobility. Some believe the answer lies in academic selection — and a return to grammar schools. But there is precious little evidence that schools selecting pupils does anything to close the attainment gap. The evidence from countries such as Denmark, Sweden and the US is that it is not schools selecting pupils, but parents being able to choose schools that raises standards generally and helps the disadvantaged particularly.

There is a lot of good thinking out there, if it can be brought together. The Conservatives say that city academies should be extended in both primary and secondary schools. They also say, rightly, that the supply of education places could be opened up to greater competition, particularly in areas of underperformance. The seeds of this have been sown: under Labour’s existing legislation 19 new schools have been opened and 37 more are due over the next four years. Undoubtedly, however, new impetus could be injected by new partners, such as chains of state schools or schools sponsored by groups of parents, being invited to take over or work with underperforming schools.

The Liberal Democrats have argued that, in poor areas, schools could receive additional funding or each pupil from a disadvantaged background could attract a premium payment to recognise particular needs. They have a good point, but there are already higher levels of funding for deprivation. The problem is that money allocated nationally is not always handed on to schools by local authorities. The Government’s recent White Paper argued that additional funding for each pupil from a disadvantaged background should be passed on. That is why the Government should aim for 100 per cent of deprivation-funding being passed to schools.

Other reforms could close the attainment gap and benefit pupils from middle as well as lower-income families. Schools could be asked to report on pupils’ outcomes as well as examination results. They could assess the progress made between pupils starting school, leaving school and their destination after school. The Government could then consider how schools could be paid according to the progress their pupils make. That could provide a powerful incentive to drive up standards and improve pupils’ outcomes.

And we could give parents who do not at present have access to a good school the power to get it. I have proposed that parents be given a new right of redress to choose a better school for their child if they live in an area where the schools are consistently performing badly. Parents could be given an education credit worth 150 per cent of the cost of the child’s schooling for a state school of their choice. The extra funding would give good schools an incentive to expand pupil numbers and broaden their social intake.

Each of these ideas is controversial and contested. But my panel believes that the Government should examine these and other reforms as part of a sustained drive to close the educational attainment gap.

It is no longer sustainable for our education system to produce a cohort of youngsters who lack the skills to compete in the modern labour market. For reasons of economic progress, we need a second wave of social mobility. But, more than that, this is a question of basic justice. A talent unfulfilled is not just an opportunity cost. It is an opportunity lost.

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Mother banned from British school for confronting bully who used son as 'human punch bag'

School hates to have its failures noted

A mother has been banned from a primary school after confronting a bully who used her five-year- old son as a 'human punch bag'. Christine Hart, 38, calmly asked the pupil to 'please stop hitting' her son Arthur after he endured months of bullying despite several complaints to teachers. But a teaching assistant saw and hauled her off to the headmistress, who told her not to cross the school gates and to attend a hearing with the governors to discuss her conduct.

Miss Hart spoke to the pupil last week when she dropped Arthur off at his classroom at Orleans Infants School, which serves a well-to-do catchment area in Twickenham, South-West London.

She has been warned she could face a further six-month ban for 'verbally abusing' the pupil and interrupting a class. She was also told that causing a 'nuisance' at school could constitute a criminal offence and that any further incidents will be reported to police. 'I am being punished because I stood up for my son when the school appeared to be doing nothing about my complaints,' she said. 'What message does this send to the boy? I don't know if he's ever been told off. Instead, I'm the one who is made to feel in the wrong. 'The message is hit Arthur whenever you like as you cannot be touched. If anyone challenges you, they will be cast out of school and threatened with the police.'

The school issued a statement saying that pupil safety was paramount and all bullying procedures had been followed.

Miss Hart, a journalist, said the bullying began when Arthur started at the school last September. 'He used to come home in tears and say that he didn't want to go back and could I teach him at home,' she added.

Two months ago Miss Hart saw Arthur being set upon by a classmate at a party in the school hall. 'Art was standing alone when one boy ran up to him and started using him as a punch bag, literally hitting him several times on the chest,' she said. 'Other boys then ran up to him grabbed him round the neck and arms and he was being hit. I was rooted to the spot.'

On another occasion Arthur, who suffers from asthma, was jumped on by a group of boys in the playground. 'He was squashed under a pile of them and said he couldn't breathe,' she said.

In an attempt to build bridges, Miss Hart laid on a picnic for her son and one of his tormentors, and they played together. But the bullying began again almost straight away. The night before his mother spoke to the boy in class, Arthur cried and said going to school made him feel scared

Miss Hart said: 'I saw the boy sitting in the classroom so I approached him, knelt by his side, made eye contact and said "please stop hitting Art". 'The boy thought for a moment and said he would stop. I was not in any way aggressive and he seemed to respond positively. 'The next thing I knew was a teacher's assistant came rushing up saying I couldn't do that, and she marched me off to the head teacher's office.'

Miss Hart said that headmistress Pip Utting initially seemed sympathetic. But later she received a phone call saying she was banned from taking Arthur to his classroom, before a letter from the school arrived warning that she could face police action in future.

'I feel I've no choice but to move my child or take him to private martial arts classes himself to fight off this boy and his entourage,' she said.

In a statement, Mrs Utting said: 'We cannot discuss individual cases especially when investigations may be in progress.'

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21 July, 2009

British Parents 'will have no say' over sex education in schools

Parents will be given barely any say in the content of sex education classes under Government plans to make the subject compulsory for children as young as five, a report warns today. Schools are currently free to draw up their own policies on sex education and are obliged to consult parents.

But proposals unveiled by Children's Secretary Ed Balls earlier this year to make the subject mandatory in primary and secondary schools will inevitably limit parents' influence, says a report from the Family Education Trust. Parents would have less power to keep explicit materials out of the classroom and object to the Government's 'misplaced' and 'counterproductive' promotion of contraceptives in lessons.

Norman Wells, the trust's director, said: 'Making personal, social and health education statutory would reduce the influence of parents over what is taught. 'Making it part of the curriculum would inevitably make schools less accountable to parents in what is a particularly sensitive and controversial subject area.' He added: 'There is a definite agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards. The need for parents to be alert and vigilant has never been greater.'

Under the Government's plans, which are open to public consultation until the end of the week, primary schools would be required to teach sex and relationships education for the first time. Currently they do not have to cover the issue at all beyond the basic requirements of the science curriculum.

Draft plans suggest children aged five would learn to name parts of the body while sevenyearolds will learn about physical changes linked to puberty. Nine-year-olds would begin to learn about the facts of life.

In secondary schools sex education would become a statutory part of the national curriculum for the first time. Parents would retain their right to withdraw pupils from lessons. But hardly any exercise this amid concerns about their children being singled out by classmates or discovering the material anyway in the playground.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'Schools have an important role to play in providing effective sex and relationship education, which is essential if young people are to make responsible and well informed decisions about their lives.'

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Giving schoolkids government laptops may send standards backwards

Getting a kid a laptop may lead to them goofing off more with games etc. rather than doing their homework

THE centrepiece of the [Australian] Federal Government's so-called education revolution may be worse than useless, a visiting American researcher says. Before the 2007 election Kevin Rudd vowed to spend $2.3 billion rewarding parents who installed or bought home computers. He later said his decisions would be evidence based.

Jacob Vigdor, of Duke University, North Carolina, has conducted what is probably the world's biggest study on the effect on maths and reading scores of gaining a home computer. He finds "statistically significant" evidence that it sends them backwards. "Children in homes with computers tend to do better than those in homes without - there's no doubt about that," Professor Vigdor told the Herald. "But there could be other reasons. Those homes also have a lot of other things other homes don't have, and often have more educated parents."

He examined the performance of students before and after their home gained a computer. This meant examining students from less well-off homes. The better-off ones already had computers. But Professor Vigdor told a seminar at Australian National University he did not think this was an important limitation.

Professor Vigdor found that acquiring a computer at home made end-of-year results for year 3 to year 8 students in North Carolina "significantly worse" in reading and maths. These results were spread over five years. "The bad effects fade somewhat over time, but even after five years they are still negative. I am not saying go out and burn all the computers.

"If you want to buy junior a computer with your own dollars, that's fine … but it's another thing when we talk about spending public dollars."

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Push by Australia's Institute of Public Affairs (conservative thinktank) to offer school vouchers

THE federal government should introduce a system of school vouchers to bring about a genuine education revolution, according to a report to be published today. The paper, prepared by the Institute of Public Affairs, says vouchers -- under which government funds go to pupils rather than the schools they attend -- encourage more choice in education, improve academic outcomes and are popular with parents.

"The federal government's education revolution perpetuates the waste, inefficiency and perverse incentives that come with funding micromanagement," the IPA says. "The current schools stimulus package is a prime example of this, with a range of ill-suited, cost-padded infrastructure works being laid out across the country. "If Australia wants a real education revolution, it should ensure government funding follows the student and not the preferences of education ministers or bureaucrats."

The Australian understands Malcolm Turnbull has ordered the opposition's education spokesman, Chris Pyne, to examine vouchers as part of Coalition policy. Mr Pyne was unavailable for comment yesterday, but the Opposition Leader has backed a voucher system in the past.

Mr Turnbull clashed with then education minister Brendan Nelson in 2002 as chairman of the Liberal Party's think tank, the Menzies Research Centre, when he supported a paper produced by the centre suggesting a similar voucher system. "This is core Liberal stuff," Mr Turnbull said at the time. "A lot of the themes in this report are absolutely core Liberal Party educational philosophy -- issues of greater accountability, more autonomy, divulging more control to schools and communities." The co-author of that paper, John Roskam, is now executive director of the IPA and a Turnbull confidant.

A voucher system provides parents with government funds to spend at the school of their choice. "By separating government financing of education from the operation of schools, vouchers can help break down monopoly control over school services delivery and promote competition between government and non-government schools," the IPA report says.

"As has been increasingly understood by both sides of the political fence, vouchers represent a powerful tool to tackle educational disadvantage. This is because parents of children with special education needs, or from low-income families, are financially empowered to take their children out of failing schools and into high-quality educational institutions."

The report lists options ranging from a universal system to vouchers for students with special needs. "The cost of a universal voucher can be prohibitively expensive," the report's author, IPA research fellow Julie Novak, told The Australian. "If you want to tackle education disadvantage, which is what Education Minister Julia Gillard is keen to do, you may want to bundle up a disability-targeted voucher with an indigenous-targeted voucher. "That would be less expensive than a universal voucher, but has the added benefit that it tackles education disadvantage so students in those groups have the potential to attend high-quality, high-achievement schools."

Ms Novak said bundles of targeted vouchers would "have the most realistic policy potential in Australia." She said this approach would be an effective trial for a broader voucher scheme. Ms Novak acknowledged the proposal would be controversial. "A voucher system threatens the entrenched positions of education unions as government schools in particular have to become more innovative and compete," she said. "It's good for parents, great for students but you can understand why there might be some reluctance among some of the entrenched interests," she claimed.

The report says voucher systems are being pursued in 30 countries around the world, from the US through to developing nations such as Colombia.

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20 July, 2009

How states like Illinois rig school tests to hype phony achievement

When President Obama chose Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, he cited Mr. Duncan's success as head of Chicago's public school system from 2001 to 2008. But a new education study suggests that those academic gains aren't what they seemed. The study also helps explain why big-city education reform is unlikely to occur without school choice.

Mr. Obama noted in December that "in just seven years, Arne's boosted elementary test scores here in Chicago from 38% of students meeting the standard to 67%" and that "the dropout rate has gone down every year he's been in charge." But according to "Still Left Behind," a report by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a majority of Chicago public school students still drop out or fail to graduate with their class. Moreover, "recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests . . . rather than real improvements in student learning."

Our point here isn't to pick on Mr. Duncan, but to illuminate the ease with which tests can give the illusion of achievement. Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test annually in grades 3 through 8 and achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. But the law gives states wide latitude to craft their own exams and to define math and reading proficiency. So state tests vary widely in rigor, and some have lowered passing scores and made other changes that give a false impression of academic success.

The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. "State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state -- and throughout Chicago -- to obtain higher marks," says the report.

Chicago students fared much worse on national exams that weren't designed by state officials. On the 2007 state test, for example, 71% of Chicago's 8th graders met or exceeded state standards in math, up from 32% in 2005. But results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, a federal standardized test sponsored by the Department of Education, show that only 13% of the city's 8th graders were proficient in math in 2007. While that was better than 11% in 2005, it wasn't close to the 39 percentage-point increase reflected on the Illinois state exam.

In Mr. Duncan's defense, he wasn't responsible for the new lower standards, which were authorized by state education officials. In 2006, he responded to a Chicago Tribune editorial headlined, "An 'A' for Everybody!" by noting (correctly) that "this is the test the state provided; this is the state standard our students were asked to meet." But this doesn't change the fact that by defining proficiency downward, states are setting up children to fail in high school and college. We should add that we've praised New York City test results that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute also claims are inflated, but we still favor mayoral control of New York's schools as a way to break through the bureaucracy and drive more charter schools.

And speaking of charters, the Chicago study says they "provide one bright spot in the generally disappointing performance of Chicago's public schools." The city has 30 charters with 67 campuses serving 30,000 students out of a total public school population of 408,000. Another 13,000 kids are on wait lists because the charters are at capacity, and it's no mystery why. Last year 91% of charter elementary schools and 88% of charter high schools had a higher percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards than the neighborhood schools that the students otherwise would have attended.

Similar results have been observed from Los Angeles to Houston to Harlem. The same kids with the same backgrounds tend to do better in charter schools, though they typically receive less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools. In May, the state legislature voted to increase the cap on Chicago charter schools to 70 from 30, though Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has yet to sign the bill.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley deserves credit for hiring Mr. Duncan, a charter proponent. But in deference to teachers unions that oppose school choice, Mr. Daley stayed mostly silent during the debate over the charter cap. That's regrettable, because it's becoming clear that Chicago's claim of reform success among noncharter schools is phony.

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Have British universities taught their students anything?

Higher education used to be exciting and guarantee a good job. Not any more

A broken promise? Or a noble aspiration that ended in disappointment? Of all the targets set by New Labour when it first came to power in 1997, the real headline-grabber – the one we all remember – was the aim of having 50 per cent of school leavers in higher education. That one felt good, emotionally, however half-baked the thinking behind it.

In this brave new 50/50 world, higher education would no longer be the preserve of a privileged minority, but a natural progression from a normal schooling. And the prospect of universities opening their doors to children whose parents and grandparents had missed out on the chance appealed to people across the political divide. It mirrored the kind of Britain we all wanted to live in.

Nobody focused too much on the small print. What would all these new university entrants be studying? How useful would their degrees be to them in later life? Who was going to pay for all this? It was the headline figure that caught the eye: 50 per cent. Half the population. A reasonable target for a modern democracy.

Twelve years on from the Labour landslide of 1997, the 50 per cent target is as remote as ever, like a mirage in a desert. In 2008-9, 39.8 per cent of people aged between 18 and 30 were in higher education, compared with 39.2 per cent 10 years earlier – absolutely minuscule progress, however you crunch the figures. The proportion did rise to 42 per cent in 2005 but that was a freak year, statistically – there was a surge of students wanting to enrol before the introduction of top-up tuition fees.

Hopes of widening access to higher education have also been cruelly disappointed. Research published earlier this year showed that children from the poorest 25 per cent of families make up just 6.5 per cent of the student population. From Wolverhampton to Newcastle, there is an educational underclass that refuses to go away. No target set in Whitehall can shift it one jot. In the very poorest areas, fewer than one in 20 school-leavers go on to university.

This coming autumn, thanks to the economic recession, is going to be a particularly depressing time for apostles of higher education. Millions of British children still aspire to go university. UCAS applications are up eight per cent on last year. But the requisite university places are not there for them. The Government has had to put a cap of 10,000, down from 15,000, on the number of new places which universities can offer.

The problem is not a lack of interest in learning among the young: it is the lack of a structure in which that appetite for learning can be satisfied. There are not enough good, useful, challenging degree courses to go around. And, with increasing numbers of pupils getting good grades at A level, it has become harder and harder for universities to sort the wheat from the chaff at the application stage.

In previous years, because of the clearing system, most school-leavers who were determined to go on to higher education managed to find a course somewhere, even if it was not their first choice. This year, the gap between supply and demand will ensure an awful lot of disappointed youngsters in August and September.

Well, perhaps they should just swallow their disappointment and get on with their lives. It should not take Sir Alan Sugar to remind us that success in life is not achieved by racking up letters after your name but by hard graft, enterprise and a teaspoonful of arrogance.

Yes, a degree can be a passport to a secure career and a comfortable income, but not even that can be taken for granted any more.

Interestingly, a recent survey indicated that only 49 per cent of employers planned to recruit graduates this year. Companies that would normally comb the universities for talent are tightening their belts like everyone else, which can only mean one thing – graduate unemployment on a significant scale.

Not so long ago, the idea that you could go to university, get a good degree, then have to join the dole queue like everyone else, was anathema. I remember, as a student in the late Seventies, staring horrified at a front-page news story about an Oxford graduate with a first-class degree who was still unemployed nine months after graduating. That story would not make the front pages today; in fact, it would hardly be worth reporting at all. The unemployed graduate, with a five-figure student loan to pay off, but not a sniff of a job, is part of the social furniture of our times.

My elder daughter, now 23, is a medical student in London. She should be able to find a job when she graduates: the country needs every doctor it can get. But for her contemporaries who have left good universities with degrees in arts subjects, the outlook is much bleaker. Some of them have found reasonably paid jobs. Others are still doing the sort of non-professional jobs they were doing before they went up to university. Not surprisingly, they are starting to ask themselves; was it worth it?

It is a question which more and more students are asking themselves while they are still at university. They enrol to read geography or film studies or political science, or whatever, go to the odd lecture, attend seminars, take notes, dash off essays at three in the morning. But, deep down, they get no real enjoyment from their studies, which seem too much like hard work. They have been told that higher education will be good for them: they have not been told that it will only be good for them if they want to do it.

A few years back, the daughter of some friends of mine set gaily off to read English at Durham, having got three As in her A-levels, then dropped out after six months. "She's throwing her whole life away," wailed her father, a teacher. Not a bit of it. She was just bored, burnt out academically, and in need of a fresh challenge. In the university of life – in her case, working on a sheep farm in New Zealand – she learnt far more than she would have ever have learnt studying Wordsworth and Conrad.

She is back in England now, working for an IT company. Perhaps, in a few years, she will have rediscovered her appetite for academic study and apply for university again, or get a professional qualification. Or perhaps she won't bother, because she is happy and doing well and forging ahead in the working world, unburdened by the debts of her contemporaries who took out student loans and thought university was the answer to all their prayers.

From a utopian viewpoint, whatever your politics, the fact that higher education remains theoretically open to all but, in practice, is only enjoyed by a minority, will remain a source of disappointment. But we shouldn't get too hung up on statistics, particularly ones like that arbitrary 50 per cent target. A university education can be a joy, a privilege, a stepping stone; but it is not a prerequisite for a happy and successful career.

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Australians Open U.S. Med School

When Australia itself has to import large numbers of Indian doctors, this seems very odd. There is no doubt, however, that the University of Queensland is a highly regarded institution. In American terms, it would be one of the "Ivies". Both I and my son are graduates of it

To produce more physicians for Louisiana, a major academic medical center has joined up with a medical school down under. The University of Queensland School of Medicine, in Australia, has opened a clinical school in New Orleans in cooperation with Louisiana's Ochsner Health System. Under the arrangement, students will travel to Brisbane for the first two years of medical school, then return to the United States to complete their third- and fourth-year clinical training at Queensland's new outpost at Ochsner. Those enrolled in the collaborative program will graduate with an Australian medical degree, a Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS), which is equivalent to an M.D., from Queensland.

This particular program is only open to American students and, while its graduates will be eligible to apply for an internship in Australia, the stated intent is to help address projected physician shortages in the United States, Louisiana especially. “The goal for them is to secure residencies and practice in the United States. Our Ochsner goals are to have our top students stay in Louisiana, and hopefully at Ochsner,” said William W. Pinsky, executive vice president and chief academic officer for the Ochsner Health System. The first 16 students in the program began their training in Australia in January; the goal is to admit 80 students this coming January and the following year, 120 more, “which would be our steady state.”

“This is quite a novel, transnational model of education. We’ve all talked about these sorts of things in the higher education sector for some time but as far as we know, this is the first, certainly the first in Australia, and we’re not aware of any other partnership like this in the United States," said David Wilkinson, dean of medicine and head of the medical school at Queensland

Queensland's medical school, which is positioning itself as "Australia's global medical school," also has a clinical school in Brunei, in Southeast Asia, and is in the early stages of establishing a shared teaching site in Malaysia, Wilkinson said. About half the medical school's students spend a portion of their studies overseas, and they can now come to Ochsner for a clinical rotation. "That's a very important part of this program, that we have mixed student cohorts," said Wilkinson.

Apart from the education component of the collaboration, Pinsky added, "To really make this a home run, we need to extend this further in terms of getting into a collaborative relationship with research."

Australian universities have been active in establishing branch campuses abroad, although, with the exception of Charles Stuart University's campus in Ontario (offering degrees in education and business), not typically in North America. In fact, rather than have their ranks reinforced from abroad, some U.S. medical schools have set up shop elsewhere -- take Cornell University's medical campus in Qatar, for instance, and Duke University's partnership with the National University of Singapore.

And while many university entities have developed joint, dual or otherwise transnational degrees in recent years, it's more complicated terrain in schools of medicine given licensure and accreditation requirements, and extra hurdles that foreign medical school graduates must jump in order to practice medicine in the U.S. -- including Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates certification.

In this case, a graduate of the Queensland/Ochsner program applying for licensure in Louisiana “will be considered an international medical school graduate, and will be required to go through ECFMG and meet the various requirements associated with that. But I imagine that would not be a problem, and that they’ll end up doing post-graduate training here in Louisiana, some of them at Ochsner, some in the growing network of Ochsner facilities,” said Robert Marier, executive director of the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners.

Marier, a former medical school dean, said the Ochsner/Queensland partnership strikes him as pretty unique, “in one respect. There are offshore medical schools, international schools, in the Caribbean, for instance, which have established relationships with hospitals in the United States and they send significant numbers of their students, most of whom are also U.S. citizens, up to these hospitals for clinical training. That’s not new.... I think what’s different about this arrangement is Queensland is a great university, it’s not a for-profit off-shore medical school. It’s a great university and aspires to be a world player, and with good reason…. And Ochsner is a major, major teaching hospital, so I think it’ll be excellent clinical training for these students.”

“It’s very important to understand that this is a very serious and genuine attempt at an exciting transnational collaboration. This is not a, if you will, a Caribbean medical school, run by a bunch of businessmen. This is a very serious transnational collaboration between one of the world's leading universities and one of America’s leading integrated health systems,” said Wilkinson, the head of Queensland’s medical school.

Queensland’s School of Medicine is accredited by the Australian Medical Council, and the school has submitted an application regarding the new arrangement with Ochsner for the council's approval; the accreditor's decision is pending. “We are hopeful but we are also conscious that this is a novel partnership,” said Wilkinson.

As for those students who have already started the joint Queensland/Ochsner program, in the event that the accreditor does not approve it, or does not do so in a timely fashion, "students who enroll will be expected to complete their four year medical education at University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia," as Queensland's Web site for international applicants notes.

John Prescott, chief academic officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges, said that he was struck by the partnership given that Ochsner has had a long history of working with students from the medical schools at Louisiana State and Tulane Universities (Pinsky said the long-standing affiliations with Louisiana-based medical schools are continuing amid the development of its new partnership with Queensland).

“The prime difference is that the LSU students and the Tulane students are from schools accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education," Prescott said. The LCME is sponsored by the AAMC and the American Medical Association, and only accredits medical schools in the U.S. and Canada.

“I re-watched the press announcement where the governor [of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal] and others were talking about helping to meet the needs of Louisiana. If it helps to do that, wonderful, that would be a truly wonderful thing,” Prescott said (the AAMC has been among those calling attention to the projected physician shortage and need to increase medical school capacity). Other than that, Prescott continued, “I know the American system very well. I don’t know the system well for Australia, and would have to wait before I make further comment... I’d have to just see how this would roll out.”

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19 July, 2009

School competition begets greater quality

The June 24 edition of The Commercial Appeal reported that Shelby County Schools Superintendent Bobby Webb, who retired the following week, has been among those “holding back the tide of charter schools.” It also quoted county school board chairman David Pickler, who said that charter schools “are still an unproven entity” and that people should “[b]e aware of the trend generating here.”

Their reservations are not surprising, given that school choice threatens traditional public schools, but evidence suggests that more competition means better schools. Education monopolies restrict dissatisfied parents’ most effective weapon: the exit option. Restrictions on competition reduce pressure on schools to perform, and students lose. Under the current version of the Tennessee charter bill, schools must fail a federal benchmark two years in a row before students are allowed to switch to charter schools. This is two years too long. Parents should not need government permission to try to improve their kids’ education.

Evidence suggests that competition increases quality. In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Urban Economics, economists Keven Booker, Scott Gilpatric, Timothy Gronberg and Dennis Jansen found that Texas charter schools improved educational outcomes for students in traditional public schools.

Competition increased quality: It wasn’t just students who attended charter schools who were better off. Students who remained in the traditional schools improved their test scores as well.

The authors were able to control for possible charter school “cream-skimming” and isolate the effect of competition on quality. This is of particular importance because one criticism of school choice is that privately operated schools will skim off the high-quality students and leave everyone else behind.

The effects the authors estimate are admittedly small, but they suggest that at the very least we can get the same quality at a lower price, or higher quality at the same price.

Webb asked whether we should allow “private entities trying to get their hands on millions and millions of public dollars” to operate schools.

A 2007 study of Arizona charter schools by Kerry A. King published in the Journal of Economic Issues found that students in for-profit charter schools perform no worse than students in nonprofit charter schools (she actually found higher test scores, but the differences were statistically insignificant).

If anything, taxpayers and parents should be concerned about interest groups fighting to protect their privileged access to “millions and millions of public dollars.”

Webb complained that charter schools take resources from traditional public schools. To borrow a phrase from economist David Friedman, however, this is a feature of charter schools, not a bug. When a private firm fails to provide what people want at prices they are willing to pay, it goes out of business (at least it should; politically powerful firms like Chrysler and GM are another story). Resources should go from schools that don’t perform up to parents’ expectations to schools that perform better.

Perhaps governments should subsidize education because of positive spillover benefits from basic literacy and numeracy, but this does not imply that governments should operate the schools themselves. A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that privately operated schools are more productive than government-operated schools, and we are not aware of any evidence that government-operated schools are more productive than privately operated schools.

Economist Thomas Sowell is fond of saying that there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs. There is no way to know which tradeoffs are wise and unwise without the information that only competition provides.

Webb also asked, “If it’s not broken, what needs to be fixed?” That’s a fair question, but we shudder to think about how much progress would have been stopped if government officials could have stifled innovation and competition every time they thought something was “good enough.”

Pickler said charter schools are “unproven,” but the evidence suggests otherwise. In our opinion, the burden of proof is on opponents of choice to show that monopoly is better than competition. Memphis’ history of innovation deserves better. Firms that originated in Memphis—firms like Piggly Wiggly, FedEx and Holiday Inn—have been trailblazers, and Memphis’ place in the history of American popular music speaks for itself. It would be fitting for Memphians to embrace school choice.

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False accusations against teachers in Britain

Pupils are threatening to accuse teachers of abusing them in order to avoid being punished for bad behaviour, MPs warn today. The report from the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee says new guidelines should be published to help head teachers deal with false allegations against their staff. It claims that teachers are often treated as guilty before they are proven innocent and demands that the Government justifies why unsubstantiated allegations are passed on to employers.

Teaching unions report increasing numbers of claims of physical abuse of pupils at the hands of their teachers, but a static number of convictions. “There is an increasingly prevalent attitude of pupils challenging teachers with comments asserting their legal rights and threats that they will make an allegation against the teacher if she seeks to reprimand them for misbehaviour,” the report said. One head was told by a pupil: “I’m going to get you suspended.”

The MPs are concerned at a trend for pupils to use social networking sites to make anonymous, false or malicious allegations against teachers. “Head teachers are still too hasty to suspend when an allegation is made. More use should be made of alternatives, and head teachers should be made aware that the lawfulness of suspension can be challenged and the courts may not view it as a neutral act,” the MPs said.

Jane Watts, 52, was immediately suspended when a five-year-old pupil accused her of hitting her on the hand during a lesson. Despite being cleared by the police, Duke Street Primary School in Chorley, Lancashire, launched its own investigation. Mrs Watts was dismissed for gross misconduct, but was later reinstated with her punishment reduced. The distress caused by the accusation and investigation meant that Mrs Watts was unable to return to school because of ill health and a fear that she would be constantly under suspicion.

Andrew Kidd, head teacher at Duke Street Primary School, confirmed that a member of his staff was dismissed for misconduct, reinstated — and then dismissed again for “non-attendance”. But he said “the original finding of misconduct was correct”. Mrs Watts told The Times that she would never work as a teacher again because the accusation would stay on her record. She described herself as: “Going from someone who would happily take 220 children for hymn practice, meetings for parents and training [sessions], to someone who was afraid to walk around in Chorley and didn’t want to go to the local supermarket. That’s the effect it had.”

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There can be some reasonable alternatives to Britain's top private schools

No wonder demand for places in good state schools is soaring. Many people can no longer pay big bucks for top schools

Where do your children go to school?” I am frequently asked. It might be the social niceties of a business lunch, or the surroundings of a wedding reception. Do they want to check that you are in their league? Or do they want to make sure that you are doing that uniquely British thing — spending every last penny you possess (and many that you don’t) on putting your children through the very best education you can obtain for them?

It is a British thing. The French, for instance, cannot fathom why we pay so much for private secondary schools. In Australia, where the Government gives private schools a subsidy for every child they spare the state having to educate, they wonder at the prices the British will pay for a private education. And the Americans find the concept ever so slightly mad.

We used to be one of those slightly mad families. For years we paid for our three children to attend the very best of Britain’s private schools. We never considered doing anything else; we had both been educated privately and wanted for our children what had been provided for us.

But then the recession arrived, and we had to face the truth; we are not Goldman Sachs partners nor in possession of trust funds set up by munificent grandparents to pay for school fees. Our eldest son was about to start university. But the other two were being educated out of current income. Running a small business in a recession does not yield a lot of cash.

The prospect of using up what savings we had, and/or borrowing money, made us stop and think: why are we doing this? Will these children really be that much worse off in the state sector? We had looked at several private schools for our sons and chosen one that we thought would provide our children not only with an education, but wider skills and a network — membership of a club.

Now we had to challenge our long-held beliefs and go and see what choice was available to us; we were very pleasantly surprised. For secondary education we had a boys-only option, our closest state school, and, almost equidistant, a co-educational comprehensive with a very helpful and supportive headmaster who found another previously privately educated child to show us around. And if we were prepared to venture a little farther there was an 11-16 co-ed cited by Ofsted this year as having “an outstanding quality of education”.

There was also the local private day school, which does not usually admit pupils at 14+, and whose 13+ place we had turned down a while ago in preference for one at one of the grandest public schools in the country. A letter explaining frankly why we had previously spurned them, and why we would be grateful for a further discussion, persuaded them to re-interview and re-examine our son. For £4,500 a term (as opposed to almost £12,000) he now has a place at a school that sends almost a third of its pupils to Oxbridge each year, where the parents are more likely to be our peers, and where he will make local friends rather than ones who live in Moscow or have a second home in Barbados.

The ten-year-old is returning to the local village primary school after a three-year absence; again, a truthful letter to the new headmistress paved the way.

The boys have been brilliant; the younger one is thrilled to be coming home from boarding school, and the older one, while very disappointed at leaving new friends and a school where he was extremely happy, recognises that as a family we will all be better prepared financially if he moves.

We will need to adjust our lives to do more hands-on parenting; that too is no bad thing. They have probably lost their “club membership”; we shall have to compensate. The process has been cathartic, and while we acknowledge that others may not have such high-quality options as we do in Oxfordshire, I would still encourage anyone facing financial challenges to consider something they may previously have considered heresy.

How will it turn out? I have no idea, but I would cite two people who have contacted me since I made our decision public. The first was a banker, whom I know. “I’ve always regarded private secondary education as absurdly expensive and, thank God, managed to put my two children through the grammar school system.” He did, however, pay for one of them, who had good GCSE grades, to do her A levels in the private sector. “Just as I expected, this ended up as simply being an expensive private members’ club and her results would have been just the same . . .”

The other is someone I had never met, a young man in his early twenties. His parents had done the same to him — removed him from one of the country’s grandest establishments and sent him to the local (and very much cheaper) private day school. “I won’t pretend the transition was all that easy. It was very difficult having my parents involved in my day-to-day education ... But I made new and good friends (who lived around the corner, rather than in Paris, New York etc) and found that I really enjoyed the additional freedom I got from going to a day school. I got my As and went to Durham.”

He signed off his e-mail with the reassuring “It’ll be fine.” And do you know what? I suspect it will be. Contrary to long-held beliefs, private education, and especially the most expensive kind, is not necessarily the only option. The psychological barrier for us was, I suspect, much harder than the real one is going to be.

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18 July, 2009

Charter Schools Gain in Stimulus Scramble

Cash-Strapped States, Districts Signal Expansion of Public-Education Alternative Despite Some Teachers' Strong Opposition

Some cash-strapped states and school districts are signaling a major expansion of charter schools to tap $5 billion in federal stimulus funds, despite strong opposition from some teachers unions. Charter schools are typically non-unionized, publicly funded alternative schools that have been widely promoted by conservatives as a needed dose of competition in public education.

Last month, the Louisiana legislature voted to eliminate that state's cap on new charter schools. The Tennessee legislature recently passed a bill expanding charter schools after U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan personally lobbied Democrats who had been blocking it. And the Rhode Island legislature reversed a plan to eliminate funding for new charters after Mr. Duncan warned such a move could hurt the state's chances for grant money.

The most striking example may be in Massachusetts. Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino -- both Democrats with histories of strong labor support -- are proposing new state laws that would give them broader power to overhaul troubled schools, open more charter schools and revamp collective-bargaining agreements. Gov. Patrick Thursday proposed increasing the number of available slots for students in state-sponsored charter schools to 37,000, from 10,000. He also wants to give state officials the explicit power to appoint outside receivers to run chronically underperforming schools. Mr. Duncan came to Boston to join Gov. Patrick and the mayor as they detailed their plans.

Charter schools receive public money but are free from many of the rules and restrictions that govern traditional public schools.

Mr. Menino, who oversees the Boston schools, wants Massachusetts communities to be able to transform traditional public schools into district-controlled charter schools and link teachers' pay to performance. Formerly a charter-school critic, Mr. Menino said he is fed up with opposition from the Boston Teachers Union. "I'm just tired of it," he said. "We're losing kids." Richard Stutman, the Boston Teachers Union president, declined to be interviewed.

Massachusetts public schools have regularly been among the nation's top performers. But officials have struggled to turn around the worst-performing schools and eliminate achievement gaps between white and minority students. "We have been talking about these gaps for years while children wait," Gov. Patrick said Thursday.

The Obama administration created the "Race to the Top Fund" earlier this year to dole out federal money for school innovation. States and school districts nationwide suffering from deep budget cuts are scrambling for a share of the funds.

Mr. Duncan has warned states in recent months that they are unlikely to qualify for the grants if they don't move toward changes such as merit pay for teachers and lifting caps on charter schools -- measures that unions have either opposed or tried to limit.

In a speech earlier this month to a convention of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, Mr. Duncan urged teachers to embrace revamped pay and seniority rules to give schools greater flexibility. "When a Democratic secretary of education goes to the NEA and mentions merit pay explicitly as something that has to happen, the ground has shifted," said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

Teachers are starting to adjust to the new landscape. They are "both feeling the pressure and willing to think about doing new things," said Jane Hannaway, director of education policy at the Urban Institute, a left-leaning research group. "It's a new world."

Some teachers unions have made moves to give administrators greater flexibility. In New York City, for instance, the United Federation of Teachers, which operates two charter schools, has accepted a form of merit pay.

Even so, Randi Weingarten, departing UFT chief and president of the American Federation of Teachers, the national union, said some states are moving too fast. The availability of the new federal grants "is pushing people to say and do things simply because everybody is desperate for resources," said Ms. Weingarten, whose union represents 1.4 million members.

School takeovers and overhauls have a mixed record. While test scores rose in cities like Boston, Chicago and New York after mayors took control of the schools, state takeovers have been less successful. Most state education departments aren't staffed to manage a school district or an individual school. Even bringing in a private school-management concern doesn't ensure improvement.

In 2004, long-troubled Cole Middle School in Denver became the first school to be taken over by the state of Colorado. Management was turned over to KIPP, a large San Francisco-based school-management concern. It ran Cole as a charter school and test scores rose. But KIPP had difficulty finding the right administrator for the long haul, and it eventually withdrew from the effort. The school was closed for several years. Reopened last fall as an arts and sciences academy serving students in preschool through eighth grade, Cole is seeking state approval to undergo yet another transformation and become a so-called "innovation" school, which would give it charter-like status under state law.

In Massachusetts, with its long history of local control of schools, the proposals of the mayor and the governor are likely to face opposition from school boards as well as teachers unions. But with the availability of the new federal funds at stake, some think legislators will have a tough time voting against them. "It would be a political disaster for anybody to be seen as reducing our ability to access that money," said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a right-leaning, Boston-based think tank.

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Children’s authors outraged at British "Big brother" scheme for schools

A prominent group of children’s authors and illustrators have said that they will stop visiting schools in protest against a new vetting scheme which comes into place in the Autumn. Some of the top names in children’s publishing - including Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz, Michael Morpurgo and Quentin Blake - have refused to register their names on a new government database.

Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, described the Home Office policy as “corrosive and poisonous to every kind of healthy social interaction.” He said: "I've been going into schools as an author for 20 years, and on no occasion have I ever been alone with a child. The idea that I have become more of a threat and I need to be vetted is both ludicrous and insulting. “Children have never been in any danger from visiting authors or illustrators, and the idea that they should be is preposterous.”

The Vetting and Barring Scheme is being managed by the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which was set up following the murder of schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells by Ian Huntley, who was a janitor at their school at the time. All individuals working with children in schools will need to sign on to the database, at a cost of £64 per person, from October 12.

Michael Morpurgo, a former children’s laureate and the author of War Horse, said that children would suffer as authors decided to stop visiting schools because of the regulations. “Writers don’t go into schools for the money, they do it because they want to bring their stories to children and make readers of them. “The notion that I should somehow have got myself tested or passed in order to do this is absurd.”

Quentin Blake, who has illustrated said: “You don’t go to the trouble of being the Children’s Laureate to pay £64 to have permission to talk to children. That is bizarre.”

The Home Office said: “The UK already has one of the most advanced systems in the world for carrying out checks [That's a fact] on all those who work in positions of trust with children and vulnerable adults. From October this year the new Vetting and Barring Scheme will ensure these regulations are even more rigorous.”

SOURCE




Shoddy marking of British grade-school exams again

Head teachers angered by the poor quality of marking in this year’s national curriculum tests are sending back thousands of test papers to be marked again. Hundreds of primary schools are expected to write to the government agency responsible for exams to protest about sloppy marking and inconsistent standards.

The most talented children at some schools were penalised because the formulaic marking did not recognise their flair. Other schools discovered that right answers had been given a zero, or that wrong answers were marked as correct. Some pupils were penalised for not dotting the letter i — others were not.

The tests, formerly known as SATs, are a source of contention in schools and many heads and teachers would like them to be abolished. Those taken by 14-year-old pupils were scrapped last year, after the results from millions of papers went missing or were delayed. ETS, the company responsible, had its £156 million, five-year contract terminated, and an investigation found a backlog of 10,000 unanswered e-mails from worried schools.

Ministers insisted that this year’s tests for 11-year-olds would run more smoothly. Government agencies boasted last week that 99.9 per cent of pupils had their results on time. However, two teaching unions, representing the majority of primary school teachers and heads, are planning to boycott the tests for 11-year-olds next year if Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, refuses to get rid of them.

Yesterday one of those unions, the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), which represents 85 per cent of primary heads, said that it was encouraging its members to write to Ofqual, the government agency responsible for exam standards. It said heads had complained of harsh and unfair marking, spellings being marked right when wrong and vice versa, little consistency in the marking of composition, clerical errors and mistakes in adding up marks. The marking scheme was time consuming and weighted to discourage schools from returning papers for review, the union said.

The importance of dotting every “i” was brought home to West Hill Primary in Cannock, Staffordshire, where some pupils were marked down for incorrect spelling if they failed to do so, but other children who had made the omission had dots added by the marker and were given a point. One 11-year-old pupil was given 0 out of a possible 2 marks for correctly spelling “stunning” but without dotting the i. Another child received 3 out of 12 in spelling for failing to dot the i in the words remain, various, scorching, distinctive, carrying and magical, all of which were spelt correctly.

Shaun Miles, the head teacher, has sent back eight papers out of 58. He said: “It’s bizarre and petty. The marker had used a red pen and put dots over some letters, and given some children the mark, but not others. Those who were marked as wrong were graded Level 4 instead of Level 5.”

Ian Foster, assistant secretary of the NAHT, said: “The bureaucracy and stress surrounding these outmoded tests, compounded by clear examples of inadequate marking, can be dispiriting for pupils and parents, and potentially put school leaders’ careers on the line . . . There have been comments that maybe the quality has been usurped because of the tight marking deadline.”

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17 July, 2009

Pathetic science examinations in British High Schools: Some exam questions require no scientific knowledge!

Teenagers need only a grasp of grammar and no scientific knowledge to answer GCSE science questions correctly, a report suggests today. It says that the right answers to multiple-choice questions are obvious because they are often the only ones that make grammatical sense. The report is by Science Community Representing Education (Score), which speaks on behalf of organisations including the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Science Council.

A panel of experts reviewed recent changes to GCSE science examinations. It analysed 79 exam papers. The report said that some of the range of answers deemed allowable in marking schemes were not correct. It noted the widespread use of multiple-choice questions, saying: “There were substantial variations between awarding bodies, with some specifications having as few as 2 per cent or 9 per cent of marks available through extended response questions on structured papers. “This is of importance, as extended response questions provide an opportunity for pupils to demonstrate the full extent of their understanding and ability in a deeper sense than is possible in multiple choice or short-response questions.”

It added: “There were a few instances where knowledge of science was not needed to answer some parts of some questions. “Of particular concern were questions which appeared to be general knowledge. “A related finding was that some multiple-choice questions had poorly constructed, incorrect answers. In some cases, only the correct answer made grammatical sense and therefore the incorrect answers were unlikely to be selected by the student, simply on the basis of grammar.”

Sir Alan Wilson, chairman of Score, said: “Science is a quantitative subject yet the amount of maths in the exams varied widely and was generally woefully inadequate. While these general knowledge questions were not widespread, it is astonishing that there are any examples. “The failings outlined in the report must now be addressed as we cannot afford to fail the young people who are working so hard to get their science qualifications.”

Peter Main, director of education and science at the Institute of Physics, said: “Currently, it appears that there is insufficient use of mathematics, the language of science, and that some of the questions do not even require a knowledge of science at all.

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Racial gap in U.S. education narrows a bit

Blacks, whites both improve in math, reading -- suggesting that the slight "improvement" is the product of dumbing down the whole system

Despite unprecedented efforts to improve minority achievement in the past decade, the gap between black and white students remains frustratingly wide, according to an Education Department report released yesterday. There is good news in the report: Reading and math scores improved for black students in public schools nationwide. But because white students also improved, the disparity between blacks and whites lessened only slightly. On average, the gap narrowed by about seven points from 1992 to 2007, so black students scored about 28 points behind white students on a 500-point scale.

The divide between minority and white students is considered one of the most pressing challenges in public education. Experts said it stems from entrenched factors that hinder learning. More black children live in poverty, which is linked to an array of problems – low birth weight, exposure to lead poisoning, hunger, too much TV watching, too little talking and reading at home, less involvement by parents and frequent school-changing.

The gap exists even before children start school. But schools don't mitigate the problem [Because it is inborn, as every IQ test ever given has shown], said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group.

“African-American students are less likely than their white counterparts to be taught by teachers who know their subject matter,” Haycock said. “They are less likely to be exposed to a rich and challenging curriculum,” she said. “And the schools that educate them typically receive less state and local funding than the ones serving mainly white students.” [So that is the reason why the gap excists BEFORE they go to school??]

Scores in reading were especially discouraging. Only three states – New Jersey, Delaware and Florida – narrowed the divide in fourth grade, and no state did so in eighth grade. There was more progress in math among younger children.

Closing the achievement gap was a central element of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which holds schools accountable for progress among every group of children – including minorities, those who have disabilities and those who are learning English. The implications of the disparity reach far beyond school walls. Minority students are also much more likely to drop out of high school – half of minorities drop out, compared with about 30 percent of students overall. The future is bleak for dropouts; they are the only segment of the work force whose income levels shrank over the past 30 years, according to the children's advocacy group America's Promise Alliance.

The findings constitute the first major Education Department report since President Barack Obama took office, although it was done by the agency's nonpartisan research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. The report was based on test results from nationwide assessments from the early 1990s to 2007. A separate report comparing Hispanic and white children is due out next fall.

More here




Australia: Parents charged under seldom-used truanting law after kid constantly skips school

Most probably a black kid. I come from up that way and there were black kids in my school classes -- and they were often absent

POLICE have charged parents of a 15-year-old Queensland teenager who has skipped high school more than 300 times with failing to send their son to school.

The parents, who cannot legally be named, face a $450 fine in a landmark case under the state's new truancy laws. Police and Education Queensland allege the year 10 student has had more than 300 "unexplained absences" since starting at Tully High School two years ago.

Police yesterday described the charges as a "last resort" after the school allegedly made numerous attempts to reach out to the parents. "This is about putting the onus back on the parents and making them responsible for their kids attending school," Tully Detective-Sergeant Scott Moon said.

Yesterday the parents, aged 54 and 53, were issued with a notice to appear in Tully Magistrates Court on August 13. [Getting them to appear should be fun]

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16 July, 2009

The Community (College) Organizer

In his Washington Post op-ed, President Obama announced his intention to graduate “5 million more Americans from community colleges by 2020.” If one sweeps past all the familiar Obama boilerplate, one sees that he is setting the stage for yet another massive government production, with all the aplomb of an early-20th-century Progressive rubbing his hands in glee at the number of youths to be processed. (The irony is that the costly, uneven, cumbersome systems of K-12 and higher education that Obama has pledged to reform are the legacy of those same Progressives.)

Yet absent from his column is any consideration of whether community colleges are generally effective or cost-efficient. Ah, well. Who has time to sort out such distractions? Obama is in a hurry to have the feds start “strengthening our network of community colleges” so that they can serve as “21st-century job training centers.” Is there evidence that most community colleges are equal to this task? Not really. Is there evidence that community colleges are especially well-run, or that they are a better option for prospective students than alternative vendors (such as private companies and distance-learning programs)? Not really. Do we know a lot about what good community colleges look like, or how to reduce waste and promote quality? Again, not really.

These are not picayune concerns. America’s 1,200 community colleges enroll more than 11 million students and account for more than 45 percent of all undergraduate enrollment nationwide. The sprawling enterprise is marked by some terrific institutions but also by broad pockets of mediocrity. Community-college systems were sometimes carefully crafted and sometimes jury-rigged to accommodate the explosion of college enrollment in the mid-20th century. One would think that an administration intent on building the educational infrastructure needed to support 21st-century adult learners might want to start by taking a hard look at what is already in place, rather than by rushing to supersize it. But such is not the Obama way.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has promised that his department’s policies will be guided by empirical evidence and hard data. Let’s hope he treats the community-college issue with far more care than President Obama did in his op-ed.

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D.C. Council Wants Vouchers

It would rather help poor children than unions.

The life and death saga of the D.C. voucher program for low-income families continues. A majority of the members of the D.C. Council recently sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan expressing solid support for continuing the program. "We strongly urge you to stand with us in supporting these children and continuing the District's Opportunity Scholarship Program," says the letter. "We believe we simply cannot turn our backs on these families because doing so will deny their children the quality education they deserve."

Earlier this year Illinois Senator Dick Durbin added language to a spending bill that phases out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program after next year. The program provides 1,700 kids $7,500 per year to use toward tuition at a private school of their parents' choosing. Mr. Durbin's amendment says no federal money can be spent on the program beyond 2010 unless Congress reauthorizes it and the D.C. Council approves.

The D.C. Council's letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level and that the opposition exists mainly at the level of the national Democratic Party. Mr. Durbin has suggested that he included the D.C. Council provision in deference to local control. "The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want it in their school district," he said in March. Well now we know where D.C. stands. We will now see if the national party stands for putting union power and money above the future of poor children.

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VA: Coalition fights Islamic Saudi Academy expansion

A holy war is brewing in Virginia, where a controversial Islamic school is seeking permission to expand its campus and a group of residents is going all out to stop it.

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors held a public hearing Monday night to consider a proposal to expand the campus of the Islamic Saudi Academy, a Saudi-owned college preparatory school. Critics of the plan point to former students of the school who have been convicted in a plot to assassinate former President Bush, and more recently, arrested for trying to board an airplane with a seven-inch kitchen knife.

And others say they oppose the move to expand the school for one reason only: "We're opposed to the operation of the Islamic Saudi Academy because it teaches and practices Shariah law," said James Lafferty, chairman of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST). "Shariah law is anti-constitutional and we feel that it is the ultimate improper land use here in the state where the Constitution was created."

Lafferty said his organization is a coalition with roughly 10 other groups that oppose the land-use expansion. By teaching Shariah law, Lafferty says, the school replaces the U.S. Constitution with a "very backward and barbaric" rule of law. "Shariah law advocates rights via gender and religion," Lafferty told FOXNews.com. "They allocate rights by gender and religion. If you are a male who is Islamic, you have rights. If you're not, you have no rights."

Founded in 1984, the Islamic Saudi Academy seeks to "enable students to excel academically while maintaining the values of Islam and proficiency with the Arabic language," according to its Web site.

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the school's valedictorian in 1999, was convicted in November 2005 of joining Al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President Bush. He was later sentenced to 30 years in prison.

More recently, Raed Abdul-Rahman Al-Saif, who reportedly graduated from the school in 2003, was arrested last month at a Florida airport when he allegedly tried to board a plane while in possession of a seven-inch kitchen knife.

Details of the proposed expansion remained unclear, but the proposal seeks to expand the school's grounds from 20 acres to 34, county officials told FOXNews.com. Calls to the school were not immediately returned.

Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity announced at the beginning of Monday night's hearing that no vote would be taken and that the record would be kept open to allow comment from those not in attendance.

Any vote on the proposal will occur — at the earliest — during the scheduled next board meeting on Aug. 3, Merni Fitzgerald, director of public affairs for Fairfax County, told FOXNews.com late Monday. A total of 46 people have indicated they plan to speak during Monday's hearing, Fitzgerald said.

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15 July, 2009

Chicago schools report contradicts Obama and Duncan

New research from a Chicago civic group takes direct aim at the city's "abysmal" public high school performance — and puts a new spin on the academic gains made during the seven years that Arne Duncan led the Chicago schools before he was named U.S. Education secretary. The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's push for more control of city schools, issued the report June 30. It says city schools have made little progress since 2003. Its key findings stand in stark contrast to assertions President Obama made in December when he nominated Duncan as Education secretary.

And though the findings are by no means as explosive, they're reminiscent of revelations from Houston in 2003, when state investigators found that 15 high schools had underreported dropout rates under former superintendent Rod Paige, who by then was George W. Bush's Education secretary.

In December, Obama said that during a seven-year tenure, Duncan had boosted elementary school test scores "from 38% of students meeting the standards to 67%" — a gain of 29 percentage points. But the new report found that, adjusting for changes in tests and procedures, students' pass rates grew only about 8 percentage points.

Obama also said Chicago's dropout rate "has gone downevery year he's been in charge." Though that's technically true, the committee says it's still unacceptably high: About half of Chicago students drop out of the city's non-selective-enrollment high schools. And more than 70% of 11th-graders fail to meet state standards, a trend that "has remained essentially flat" over the past several years. Even among those who graduate, it says, skills are poor: An analysis of students entering the Chicago City Colleges in fall 2006 showed that 69% were not prepared for college-level reading, 79% were not prepared for writing, and 95% were not prepared for math. "Performance is very bad, very weak," says Civic Committee president Eden Martin.

Obama also said Chicago students' ACT test score gains "have been twice as big as those for students in the rest of the state." Again, technically true — ACT data show that Chicago students' composite score rose 0.9 points from 2002 to 2006, while Illinois' score rose 0.4 points. But Chicago students' composite score of 17.4 was lower than the statewide average of 20.5.

Timothy Knowles, who directs the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, says the report highlights "a highly irresponsible state reaction" to the federal No Child Left Behind law. "In essence," he says, "many states have lowered (passing) scores on standardized tests to create the public appearance they are meeting federal standards. This practice sells children short — and the states that engage in it are, ironically, leaving themselves behind." Knowles says Chicago schools are moving in the right direction, with "some extraordinary new schools" and promising performance from black and Latino students, for instance. "However, the Civic Committee report reminds us these successes are fragile … and there is unambiguous evidence that Chicago has miles to go before it sleeps."

Duncan spokesman Peter Cunningham says Chicago schools "made significant gains across a range of indicators" under Duncan. "While we still have a long way to go, it is absolutely misleading and irresponsible to suggest that there has not been progress."

Blogger Alexander Russo, who writes about Chicago schools, says the findings show that nearly 15 years into mayoral control, the city school system "isn't nearly as improved as many have been led to believe." "What I find particularly appalling is that Duncan and Obama — supposed champions of transparency and using research rather than ideology — have cited Chicago's inflated test scores, even though they knew the increases were exaggerated."

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British government forcing up the costs of private schooling

Hundreds of independent schools could lose their charitable status unless they increase fees for middle-class parents to fund more bursaries, a landmark ruling indicates today. Two of the first five schools to be investigated by the Charity Commission have failed the tough new requirement of providing “public benefit”. The long-awaited decision has ramifications for fee-charging schools with charitable status, which make up the majority of the independent sector. The tax breaks that they receive are worth a collective £100 million.

The independent sector reacted with anger and said it could take legal action against the commission. It said that parents, already struggling in the recession, were likely to end up paying higher school fees to subsidise poorer families. The commission had focused on the financial benefits, it said, while placing little weight on whether less wealthy schools shared their facilities with the community or had forged links with state schools.

The two schools that did not pass the charitable test are relatively small prep schools. Both failed because they did not offer enough bursaries, even though they were praised for running initiatives which helped local children and organisations. One, Highfield Priory School in Fulwood, Lancashire, does not provide bursaries because it keeps fees as low as possible, and does not accrue a surplus. The other, Saint Anselm’s School in Bakewell, Derbyshire, does offer bursaries worth up to 100 per cent of fees to poorer families, but the number was not deemed sufficient by the commission.

Simon Northcott, the head teacher, said: “As a stand-alone prep school, we just don’t have the pot that other schools have. We failed only because we’re not producing enough bursaries. But nowhere in the course of this process has the commission given us a clear idea of what we need to achieve. “It’s like being told you’ve failed a maths exam but without being told what the passmark is.”

A spokesman for Highfield Priory said: “The governors of Highfield Priory are disappointed at the Charity Commission’s conclusion on public benefit. However, the continued success and sustainability of the school is not in doubt. Highfield Priory has served the local community well for nearly 70 years and our aim remains to continue to provide a high-quality education for public benefit, affording pupils many opportunities to succeed academically, creatively, artistically, musically and in a wide range of sports both at local and regional level. “The governors will now consider fully the implications of the Charity Commission report and respond to it after taking professional advice.”

The 2006 Charities Act puts a new onus on charities to prove their public benefit, and the commission has assessed a dozen organisations, including the five schools. Independent schools have been waiting with trepidation for clarification on what constitutes “public benefit”, and were assured that schools would be judged individually.

David Lyscom, head of the Independent Schools Council, said that he was deeply disappointed by the commission’s findings and its focus on the amount of means-tested bursaries provided by each school. He said: “The implication of the commission’s findings appears to be that many schools must now aim to provide a significant — but still unspecified — proportion of their turnover in full bursaries. “This will inevitably lead to fee increases for the vast majority of parents, putting the benefits of an independent education beyond the reach of a greater number of children. “We will be expressing our concerns very loudly and will have to look very carefully at the legal basis of the Charity Commission judgments, and consider whether we need to take further action.” When asked if this could include legal action, Mr Lyscom said: “It is one of a range of options we could take.”

He added that, in focusing on bursaries, the commission had played down the significance of partnerships with state schools and ignored the £3 billion a year that the independent sector saved the public purse in educating children.

Schools which were concerned that they would be judged purely on the money spent on bursaries have been assured that this will not be the case. Dame Suzi Leather, chairwoman of the commission, had previously acknowledged that bursaries may not be an option for some smaller schools. However, the findings are likely to send shivers through low-cost schools that operate near the margins and may be struggling. The recession has already taken its toll on the independent sector, with several small independent schools closing or merging in the past year. The governors of Highfield and Saitn Anselm’s have three months to confirm their intention to address the issues raised by the commission, and a further nine months to provide a plan of how this will happen.

A spokesman for the commission said: “It is not correct to state that the Charity Commission’s initial public benefit assessments of charitable independent schools focused only on the provision of means-tested bursaries. “We have been very clear throughout this process that, although fee reductions are an obvious way of making the services of a fee-charging charity more widely accessible, that is not the only means of achieving this.”

SOURCE




Australia: NSW teachers dead-scared of their failings being exposed

Parents must not be told if their kid is going to a sink school or has dud teacher

TEACHERS in New South Wales have voted to support industrial action if school league tables are published using national assessment data. NSW Teachers Federation president Bob Lipscombe said he hoped that state ministers would scrap plans to publish league tables before teachers walked out. However, up to 70,000 federation members were prepared to strike next year if necessary.

Speaking in Sydney at the federation's annual conference, Mr Lipscombe launched a scathing attack on NSW Education Minister Verity Firth for her support of tables comparing schools' performances. He also criticised sections of the media, saying some newspapers stood to gain financially from their publication. "Verity Firth needs to have a bit of backbone. "The minister needs to stand up for the people of NSW. "She has been prepared to take a stand on other issues and she needs to take a stand on this. "Certain newspapers support league tables because they know parents will be curious about how schools are performing. "Politicians and some newspapers who stand to gain financially are the only ones who support this."

Federation executive member Michael de Wall added: "This is political karaoke - out of tune and disturbing for those of us who have to listen to it."

The conference passed a motion supporting "all appropriate measures, both political and industrial" if 2009 national assessment data was used to publish league tables. It heard from teachers from across NSW who said such tables would damage schools, children and communities and offer inaccurate assessments of educational performance.

Mr Lipscombe told reporters outside the conference he believed the NSW Government, which has not authorised school league tables for 12 years, was being "blackmailed" by the Federal Government over the issue. "The one thing that's changed is that the Federal Government is now saying that if the State Government withholds its data, it will withhold funding. It is essentially a type of blackmail." He said Premier Nathan Rees' support of league tables was "driven by money".

However, the conference voted against a motion calling for Ms Firth's resignation, after Mr Lipscombe said it would divert attention from the core issue.

NSW is pushing ahead with legislation to allow media outlets to publish comparisons of schools' performance, overturning last month's opposition amendment to the Education Act which prohibits their publication. The Education Act allows the State Government to provide detailed information about schools to the Federal Government, in return for increased federal funding.

Under the Opposition amendment, NSW media are not allowed to publish information comparing different schools.

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14 July, 2009

The latest education talk from Obama

See below. Who knows what it means?

In an economy where jobs requiring at least an associate's degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience, it's never been more essential to continue education and training after high school. That's why we've set a goal of leading the world in college degrees by 2020. Part of this goal will be met by helping Americans better afford a college education. But part of it will also be strengthening our network of community colleges.

We believe it's time to reform our community colleges so that they provide Americans of all ages a chance to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to compete for the jobs of the future. Our community colleges can serve as 21st-century job training centers, working with local businesses to help workers learn the skills they need to fill the jobs of the future. We can reallocate funding to help them modernize their facilities, increase the quality of online courses and ultimately meet the goal of graduating 5 million more Americans from community colleges by 2020.

Providing all Americans with the skills they need to compete is a pillar of a stronger economic foundation, and, like health care or energy, we cannot wait to make the necessary changes. We must continue to clean up the wreckage of this recession, but it is time to rebuild something better in its place. It won't be easy, and there will continue to be those who argue that we have to put off hard decisions that we have already deferred for far too long. But earlier generations of Americans didn't build this great country by fearing the future and shrinking our dreams. This generation has to show that same courage and determination. I believe we will.

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British Labour Party fails working class on education

The social mobility czar is to accuse ministers of doing too little to get poor pupils into top universities. Favours aptitude tests (like the American SAT?) as an alternative route to admission! Utter heresy to the modern British Left but it was advocated by the British Left of yesteryear

Gordon Brown's social mobility czar is set to brand Labour’s attempts to bring more working-class pupils into top universities a failure. In a report to be released next week, Alan Milburn, the Blairite former health secretary, is expected to warn that too few bright teenagers from poor families are winning places at leading universities.

The main reason he is likely to identify is the sub-standard education provided by too many state schools, meaning bright pupils are held back from winning good enough A-level grades. Others are deterred by negative advice from staff who guide pupils into low-skilled jobs, assuming they are unsuited to higher education. In addition, much of the £400m spent by the government on schemes to attract more students from deprived backgrounds has been wasted.

Milburn, who has announced he will retire from parliament at the next election, was commissioned by the prime minister in January to report on ways in which more young working-class adults could win jobs in professions such as the law, medicine and teaching. The panel he chairs is likely to conclude that one of the main brakes on social mobility into the professions is slow progress in increasing the number of students from deprived families. Figures released last month showed a slight fall in the proportion from these groups studying at university. The government spends hundreds of millions of pounds on university schemes to attract such candidates and help them through the admissions process. This costs about £10,000 per person, but it is thought many of those who apply would do so regardless of special initiatives.

The report is expected to condemn “positive discrimination” whereby some universities give preferential treatment to any applicant from a poorly performing school. At the same time, however, Milburn is understood to praise more targeted methods. One his panel favours is used by some medical schools - talented pupils from deprived backgrounds can be offered degree places if they achieve lower grades than other candidates, but only if they pass aptitude tests.

Lee Elliot Major, research director of the Sutton Trust, a charity promoting social mobility, said Britain was in the grip of an “education freeze”. “Even when the economy is doing well, children from poorer backgrounds are still only half as likely to attend university as those from more privileged families and even this could understate the problem,” he said.

Milburn’s panel - whose members range from Baroness Shephard, the former Tory education secretary, to Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society - is expected to cite evidence that state school pupils perform at least as well at university as those from independent schools who have scored two grades higher at A-level. This implies that they have been held back by their schools from achieving their full potential.

The findings, which will be seen as an indictment of Labour’s education policies, are likely to anger senior figures such as Ed Balls, the schools secretary. Many in the Labour party have blamed ingrained snobbery at universities for shutting out working-class pupils.

Geoffrey Vos, chairman of the Social Mobility Foundation and a member of Milburn’s panel, said: “Raising the aspirations of pupils ought to be utterly uncontroversial, but it is not always happening.”

Milburn’s report, which has not yet been completed, will focus largely on what the professions themselves can do to widen the social mix of new recruits. It is likely to include steps to pick apart the networking advantages enjoyed by middle-class children. Posts for unpaid work experience and internships, for example, should be filled by formal selection processes rather than word of mouth.

Meanwhile, undergraduates studying for professional degrees should be recruited to a national mentoring network for comprehensive pupils. This would make them more likely to consider going into the professions in a way that those at private and grammar schools instinctively do.

One source said Milburn wants his recommendations to have cross-party support so they have a chance of surviving if the Tories come to power. He is anxious not to alienate middle-class parents worried that children at private and grammar schools will be edged out of leading universities. “Universities have to be carefully nuanced and not attack private schools,” said the source.

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British Pupils need lessons in how to speak properly

Children should be taught to speak more formally in class to improve their written work, according to new research. Teachers need to do more work to improve children's vocabulary and make it clear when the use of slang and colloquialisms are not acceptable, academics have found.

The study from Exeter University, which analysed pupils' writing, discovered that whilst more able writers composed sentences in standard English, weaker writers tended to replicate patterns found in speech.

Researchers concluded that the more opportunities children had in class for developing their speech and distinguishing between styles of language, the better their writing would become. "This is less about correcting their English than making sure that they are aware of what they are saying and giving them access to different repertoires," said Professor Debra Myhill, author of the study. "They need to be aware of what they are saying and when, and be able to make choices about their speech, otherwise they will lose out in areas such as the job market."

The study comes in the wake of growing recognition that the school curriculum has neglected the development of children's speech. The Government's Rose Review, published in May, stressed the "central importance" of speaking and listening as part of literacy. Critics claim that in some schools very young children are being taught to read and write before they can string a sentence together. With older children, chief examiners have revealed a growing tendency for pupils to lapse into the vernacular in exams scripts, using slang and inappropriate expressions.

Pieces of writing from children aged 12 to 15 were analysed as part of the Exeter study, published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. It found that children understood that writing was not simply "talk written down". However, weaker writers used patterns familiar in speech, for instance consistently putting the subject first instead of varying their sentence structure. They also had a more restricted vocabulary reminiscent of the more limited selection of words used in speech.

"In order to develop children's writing more, we need to develop children's talking more," said Prof Myhill. "It is not just about using standard English, it is about having more opportunities in class for children to elaborate, justify their decisions, discuss their ideas and give them access to a broader and richer vocabulary, though reading widely and word searches. "We know that in classrooms that continually provide children with talk opportunities, there will almost certainly be a positive influence on their writing."

The professor said there was a general trend to be less formal in speech and writing. "If you look at the television or newspapers over the past 50 years, the language is less formal. Children's speech and writing is mirroring a much bigger cultural trend. "It is not so much about right and wrong, it is about children having repertoires and judgement. Children need to be able to consciously decide to speak or write in a particular way or not."

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13 July, 2009

Ahmadinejiad's Academics

by Cinnamon Stillwell

What a difference a popular uprising makes.

It seems like just yesterday that the Middle East studies establishment was busy defending Iran's theocratic regime and its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the alleged predations of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. Yet in the wake of the unrest in response to the stolen election, suddenly American academics have succumbed to intellectual honesty and moral clarity. Despite the best efforts of the Iranian regime to drum up conspiracy theories blaming the West for the uprising, the Iranians themselves have taken center stage.

This signals quite a shift. When Ahmadinejad, the supposedly elected leader at the heart of the current crisis in Iran, spoke at Columbia University in September 2007, his appearance was applauded by many academic apologists as a means of "reaching out." Columbia University Islamic studies professor Richard Bulliet went so far as to act as an intermediary between the university and the Iranian regime in arranging the appearance. As reported by the New York Sun in September 2007:

In a meeting of the Columbia faculty senate on December 8, 2006, before the university extended and then rescinded an invitation to the Iranian president to speak on campus, Mr. Bulliet argued in favor of providing him a platform. Mr. Bulliet said he attended a breakfast meeting with the Iranian and found him to be a "very reasonable speaker, a very effective debater."

One would be hard pressed to describe Ahmadinejad's typically inflammatory and conspiratorial tirade at Columbia as reasonable. Yet it was university president Lee Bollinger's harsh introductory remarks that caused outrage. Over 100 faculty members, including a number from Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department (MEALAC), signed an open letter to Bollinger condemning his "disrespectful language." The standard accusations of racism, threats to free speech, and warmongering ensued.

Bulliet painted Ahmadinejad as the victim, describing him as "the slight, relaxed, well-mannered Iranian who sat stolidly through President Bollinger's blistering attack." He complained to the New York Sun that "in a culture where hospitality is venerated, audiences in the Middle East were shocked by Mr. Bollinger's rebuke." But what was truly shocking was Bulliet's blindness towards Ahmadinejad's true nature.

Today, Bulliet seems to have experienced an epiphany. In a recent New York Times op-ed, he likened the young Iranian protesters to America's Baby Boomer generation and used very different terms for Ahmadinejad. As he put it:

The boomers themselves, and particularly the women among them, chafe under the behavioral restrictions enforced by Ahmadinejad's regime. They long to connect with the world and hate seeing their country humiliated by Ahmadinejad's outrageous public pronouncements.

If only Bulliet had applied such insight when he helped broker Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia.

Hamid Dabashi, Columbia's Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature and MEALAC Chair, took a similar route. Dabashi was one Bollinger's most strident critics, penning a lengthy screed in Al-Ahram Weekly in October 2007 in which he accused him of inhabiting "the self-righteous domain of a white man and his civilizing mission" and of acting like "the president of diehard Zionists at Columbia." He was particularly incensed that Bollinger called Ahmadinejad a "cruel and petty dictator," asserting that:

I am against Ahmadinejad and the system over which he presides, but he is an elected official, not a "dictator" in the technical sense of the term. The republic that he represents is a theocracy, but that theocracy works through a very complicated division of power in various official and unofficial, elected and unelected, democratic and despotic, centers of gravity, of which Bollinger seems to know next to nothing.

This was not Dabashi's first defense of Iran's allegedly democratic system. In a 2003 AsiaSource interview, he stated that "within the Islamic Republic, there is a democratically elected government." He also claimed that the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 counterterrorism measures had created "political conditions [in the U.S.] worse than those found in the Islamic Republic [of Iran]."

Yet Dabashi has since changed his tune. As he told CNN last month:

I am absolutely convinced that what we are witnessing is a turning point in the history of the Islamic Republic. We are seeing a rise of a new generation of Iranians who are not taking it anymore. This is no longer just about this election, this is full-fledged civil disobedience.

Now that the emperor is wearing no clothes and crowds in Tehran chanting "Death to the Dictator" have Ahmadinejad in mind, Dabashi isn't so eager to rally to his side.

University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole, who once implied that the Iranian-initiated confrontation between Iranian boats and U.S. Naval ships in the Straits of Hormuz in January 2007 was a GOP-fabricated conspiracy, has finally turned on Tehran. Writing at his blog last month, Cole offered up a compelling list of the "Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen." Summing it up, he noted: "The post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene."

In a rare reference to the Iranian regime's propensity for anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism, Cole, writing last month at Salon.com, pointed out that opposition candidate "Mir-Hossein Moussavi complained that Ahmadinejad's bizarre downplaying of the Holocaust had made Iran a laughingstock." This is the same Juan Cole who steadfastly insisted that Ahmadinejad was mistranslated when he said that Israel should be "wiped off the map" at the World without Zionism conference in October 2005. Perhaps now that masses of Iranians are rejecting him, Ahmadinejad doesn't appear quite so credible.

While these examples provide a ray of hope, it's unlikely they foretell a new era of dispassionate analysis in the field of Middle East studies. In spite of the Iranian regime's blatant corruption and brutality, many of these same professors are urging President Obama to continue his administration's futile plans for negotiation with Ahmadinejad.

Juan Cole has contended that "the outcome of the election…changes little for the Obama administration," while Richard Bulliet told Bloomberg News that "the U.S. and foreign governments will have to resign themselves to dealing with the Ahmadinejad regime." Meanwhile, Columbia University international affairs professor Gary Sick, writing at his blog, fretted that "this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama's plan to conduct negotiations with Iran."

In other words, it's back to business as usual.

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British school pupils told: Sex every day keeps the GP away

And they wonder why Britain has a huge problem of teenage pregnancy and abortion

A National Health Service leaflet is advising school pupils that they have a “right” to an enjoyable sex life and that regular intercourse can be good for their cardiovascular health.

The advice appears in guidance circulated to parents, teachers and youth workers, and is intended to update sex education by telling pupils about the benefits of sexual pleasure. For too long, say its authors, experts have concentrated on the need for “safe sex” and loving relationships while ignoring the main reason that many people have sex, that is, for enjoyment.

The document, called Pleasure, has been drawn up by NHS Sheffield, although it is also being circulated outside the city.

Alongside the slogan “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”, it says: “Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes’ physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?”

Steve Slack, director of the Centre for HIV and Sexual Health at NHS Sheffield, who is one of the authors, argues that, far from promoting teenage sex, it could encourage young people to delay losing their virginity until they are sure they will enjoy the experience.

Slack believes that as long as teenagers are fully informed about sex and are making their decisions free of peer pressure and as part of a caring relationship, they have as much right as an adult to a good sex life.

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, Berkshire, who introduced classes in emotional wellbeing, said the approach was “deplorable”.

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Britain's young generation can now not add up

Huge decline in numeracy

When the Bamberger family opened a haberdashery 65 years ago, they insisted their staff use mental arithmetic to price up customers' purchases. Despite the arrival of calculators, that attitude has remained unchanged over the intervening years. But now the family finds itself facing an unexpected maths problem - most youngsters it would like to employ are incapable of working out sums in their heads.

Colin Bamberger, 82, whose parents founded the Remnant Shop in 1944, said that less than one in ten applicants are now able to solve basic maths problems without turning to a calculator or till. In the past, around eight in ten made the grade. Mr Bamberger, who stills runs one of the family's two stores, yesterday blamed the decline on falling education standards and over-reliance on the pocket calculator. He said: 'Most of the youngsters who come to us for jobs are unemployable because they are not numerate.

'It is a sorry situation and a poor reflection on the academic qualities of young people these days. I think it shows modern teaching methods are sadly lacking. 'It is all very well using calculators but if you have not got some idea what the answer is, how do you know if you have pushed the right button? It's so easy to make a mistake. Around eight out of ten people who came to us for work were capable of doing it in the 1950s and 1960s - but now it is less than one in ten. 'You ask them how much they would charge for nine metres of material at £9.90 a metre and they fiddle about for ages.'

He said that mental arithmetic was essential in his shops because, if customers queried the final bill, staff could scribble their calculations on a piece of paper to show them how they arrived at the sum. With calculators, all customers are presented with is the final figure. 'The problem is people are not taught multiplication tables in school any more,' Mr Bamberger added. 'Paper qualifications these days are just not important to us. 'It is reflected in the fact that many of our staff are a lot older. The modern generation just don't seem to have the skill.'

The Remnant Shop was founded in 1944 by Colin's mother Betty, who sold material and haberdashery from her first-floor flat in Felixstowe, Suffolk. It proved so successful that her husband Sydney soon gave up his job as a commercial traveller to help with the business. A year later, Mr Bamberger joined the family business after studying mathematics and chemistry at Bristol University. The business expanded when his son Robert opened a second shop in Colchester in 1996. The business, which employs 28 staff, stocks 5,500 items of haberdashery, including pins, needles, ribbons and wool as well as 5,000 rolls of fabric used for curtains, crafts and dressmaking.

Robert said that even if applicants were 'massive at marketing, super at sales or even Alan Sugar's next apprentice - if they can't add up quickly in their head we won't have them'. 'My grandfather could add up a column of 50 figures in old pounds, shillings and pennies - including ha'pennies and farthings - in a matter of seconds,' he added. 'He used to insist that any staff we took on could do the same and we have carried on that practice.'

Last year, it emerged more than half of trainee teachers needed multiple attempts to pass a basic numeracy test. Although the exam was originally introduced to drive up standards, it emerged that trainees could take it as many times as they like. One reportedly took the test 28 times before passing.

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12 July, 2009

Georgia's cheating schools: Test scandal more widespread than first reported

A 3.5 SD criterion was indeed VERY lenient

Nearly 20 elementary schools across Georgia would be scrambling to cope with a cheating scandal had the state used a more common standard for spotting problems, according to the head of the investigation. Kathleen Mathers, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement told members of the State Board of Education today that her office only looked at the most extreme instances of scores that were outside the range of statewide averages for improvement, a statistical tool called 3.5 points of standard deviation. Since this was the first cheating investigation, she said she decided to only look at cases where the evidence was overwhelming and that next time her staff would use 2 points of standard deviation.

Had she used the stricter standard in the current investigation, she said about 20 of the state’s 600-plus elementary schools offering the retest would have come under suspicion. As it was, only four did. “In subsequent investigations, I don’t anticipate that our starting point will be as generous,” she said.

State Board member Larry Winter, a forensic accountant by profession, said he often uses such statistical tools in rooting out fraud. “The evidence is extremely compelling,” he said.

Four Georgia elementary schools caught cheating on a 2008 standardized math test will be punished as the result of a decision today by the State Board of Education. The scores will be invalidated, parents will get letters detailing the incident, and educators will tailor a math-instruction plan for each of the students.

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Report: 'White flight' causes growing school segregation in Britain

White parents are pulling their children out of schools where they are outnumbered by ethnic-minority pupils, according to a report that shows increasing segregation in Britain. The Institute of Community Cohesion (iCoCo) studied 13 areas, including Bristol, Bolton, Sunderland and Blackburn, and questioned parents. Middle-class parents — who are usually white — were removing children from schools with growing populations of ethnic minorities because they didn’t want them to stand out, the authors of the report said. “We heard strong evidence of ‘white flight’ in some areas,” the report said.

It concluded: “Despite the fact that most people we spoke to in focus groups wanted their children to have a mixed education, parental choice tended to push people to what they saw as the safe option, where children with similar backgrounds went.” The report also found that in areas where schools were monocultural, parents sent their child to the school dominated by pupils from their own ethnic background.

Nick Johnston, one of the authors and a policy director at the iCoCo, said that parents did not want their child to be odd ones out. “People don’t mind a diverse school but what they do mind is their kid being in a visible minority. This trend has increased in the last few years,” he said.In one school in Blackburn, once the number of non-white pupils rose above 60 per cent, white parents started saying that they did not want their children to feel different.

At another unnamed school, 85 per cent of the pupils were white British at the end of 2005. During the next two terms pupils from 15 to 20 Somali families joined.

Johnston suggested that councils should consider using lotteries to increase school diversity. [i.e. the bastard wants to thwart attempts by the parents to keep their kids safe]

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The dumbing down of British education never stops

Academics condemn the maths A-level made easy

A 'dumbed down' maths A-level which includes questions on personal finance and allows advanced calculators has been criticised by more than 60 leading academics. The new A-level in 'use of maths' could be introduced in schools from 2011 alongside traditional maths courses. Draft papers reveal that pupils will be allowed to use graphical calculators for the first time and have to answer questions about converting pounds to euros while on holiday.

Dozens of top mathematicians fear the exam will 'cannibalise' the existing qualification and end up replacing it in many schools. They are concerned that pupils will be steered towards the 'easier' qualification to help schools meet exam targets, only to find many universities do not accept it. The academics are calling for the Government's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to abandon the exam. Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove has also attacked it as a 'bluffer's guide' to A-level maths.

In a letter to the QCA, the group Educators for Reform warns that the compulsory units covering topics such as algebra and calculus are 'considerably less demanding' than the traditional exam. The optional units are a 'hotch potch' which will not give pupils a solid foundation in the subject, they say. Instead of sketching graphs, pupils will be able to copy them from the screen of a graphical calculator.

Academics say the course also provides pupils with data sheets that lead to a 'sat nav' approach to examining, rather than letting them think for themselves. There is also a greater emphasis on practical activities and personal finance, including, in draft papers, a question on the cost of hiring a car in France. Professor Nick Shepherd-Barron, of Cambridge University, said there was a danger that British youngsters would be less well educated than competitors abroad.

But Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: 'We cannot continue teaching an outdated 19th century curriculum. This is simply turning many children off education because it is completely not relevant to them at all.'

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11 July, 2009

The horror that is many American public schools

Blacks can do no wrong -- with disastrous results for both blacks and whites

I had lunch with a friend of mine on Saturday. She and I hadn’t seen each other in awhile, and we had some real catching up to do. Unfortunately, some of what she had to tell me was more than a little unpleasant to listen to. She wanted to talk - like most mothers - about her children. Though I’m quite a bit fonder of cats than kids, I was happy to listen to what I thought would be a litany of this year’s proud accomplishments by her two school-age children. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Her middle school daughter had, up until this school year, attended a Catholic school. Though the family isn’t Catholic, they believed that the quality of education she’d get at the parochial school was better than she’d receive in a public school classroom. Unfortunately, finances dictated that she’d have to attend a public middle school this year.

Within a few weeks of the start of the school year, her daughter fell ill. It was a strange disease, seemingly harmless in the main but debilitating. She suffered from headaches. Her stomach hurt. She couldn’t possibly go to school! It didn’t take long for my friend to take notice of another of the bizarre symptoms of this particular sickness: her daughter fell ill, almost without fail, on Monday mornings.

Maybe her physical symptoms were just stress from schoolwork that was more difficult this year than last. But, my friend said, she couldn’t figure out why her little girl also stopped playing her flute. She loved that flute! She typically practiced more than she was required to because she enjoyed it, and she had been overjoyed at the idea she’d get to play in her first “real” band this school year. But now she had headaches and stomachaches, and the flute stayed in its case.

After some prodding, the little girl finally told her mother that she was miserable. She’d go to her locker, and a couple of girls who had neighboring lockers would taunt her and pull her hair. If she didn’t leave, they’d physically move her. Once, they “moved” her violently enough that she hit the lockers across the hall. These same girls, as luck (of the worst kind) would have it, sat behind her daughter in band. They’d kick and poke her throughout practice and, if she’d dare to respond, the teacher would shout at her while completely ignoring the other girls.

Being a good and concerned parent, my friend brought the matter to the attention of school authorities. They promptly reassigned her daughter to another locker, one that was directly outside the classroom of a teacher who could keep an eye on things. Administrators told her confidentially that it would be far less trouble to just keep her daughter away from those other girls than to try to discipline them. They were, they told her, concerned with accusations of racism, or worse, a discrimination lawsuit. The girls, it seems, are black. My friend’s daughter is not.

The older of my friend’s children still in the local school system is a boy. She says that her son has wanted to play basketball for the local high school team since he was old enough to go to the games with his father. Because of his desire and his hard work, he was thrilled to make the team in his sophomore year. He was significantly less thrilled when he rarely got to play.

In many cases, yes, that’s unfortunate. But if the kid just doesn’t have the talent, the rest of the team shouldn’t suffer. Besides, lots of boys with even less ability didn’t make the team at all! I would have felt a lot better if I’d learned she was merely unhappy that her boy’s dreams weren’t coming true because he wasn’t a good enough ball player. Instead, the rest of the story spilled out while I grew more and more horrified by the details.

The boy was physically harassed by a select few other team members. He didn’t say a word about it, but he didn’t have to: the coach watched it happen and did nothing. He rarely got the opportunity to play in games. Other boys who weren’t starters sometimes did, but he and a couple of others spent most of their game fidgeting on the bench. They sat there because the coach told other kids, some of them less skilled, to jump into the game instead.

Eventually, though she and her husband didn’t want to make a fuss, they broached the subject with the coach. The coach, far from denying his actions, acknowledged them and even went so far as to explain himself: The boys who were harassing their son, and the boys who got to play instead of their son, were black, and the coach feared retaliation. (The coach, long accused of favoritism by many parents whatever his reasons, was eventually let go in the wake of years of complaints.)

Apparently, the coach was right to fear such a thing. As soon as it became known that his parents had talked with the coach, their son endured threats and taunts day in and day out as he walked the halls of the local high school. As matters escalated, the parents took their very real concerns to the principal. He did nothing. A few days later, their oldest son (currently a college student) was attacked on their own front lawn and badly beaten. The police identified his attackers as three of the boys who had been harassing the other boy at school. School authorities did nothing to discipline the three; various criminal charges remain pending.

Over the course of these many traumatic events, the boy who loved basketball quit the team. The boy who had been an A student began getting C’s and worse. He told his mother, who relayed her story with tears filling her eyes, that he wanted to die. Both her son and daughter have been pulled out of the public schools and are being tutored by a former teacher who has a story all her own.

This woman taught school at the high school level. But when she failed a couple of her students, she was called on the carpet by her bosses and told that she needed to treat all of her students fairly. She defended herself by telling them that anyone who had done so little work and so poorly would have been failed, no matter who he or she was, or what he or she looked like. She was never-the-less let go under a cloud suspicion because - far from treating her students equally - she was expected to give favored treatment to some, namely those students who were black.

Some of our local schools are presently on some sort of academic probation or another by the state. It seems that their students aren’t performing adequately on the tests required of various grade levels. In fact, there are students in high school who are functionally illiterate. But instead of looking first to the teachers to ensure each was qualified, and instead of reviewing curriculums or parental involvement, what did our local schools do? They worked to “dumb down” the tests since they were clearly above and beyond the capabilities of some. Local test scores went up last year, largely because requirements went down.

Meanwhile, the city police officer stationed in the high school (in a program intended to foster good and mutually respectful relationships between students and law enforcement) has posted on his wall dozens of photographs of students with their babies as some sort of a mirror-universe wall of honor. School leaders instituted a program they call “Character Counts,” but yet they refuse to demand responsibility from students on the grounds that doing so might somehow hurt their feelings - or worse, might make somebody accuse them of some kind of discriminatory behavior. Political correctness is placed above all other concerns.

Every year, an African flag flies in front of the school during Black History Month - last year, it actually replaced the American flag for awhile - so perhaps we can at least pretend the students there are learning something. I’m sorry to say that a Mexican flag flying above the US flag at a California high school a few weeks ago taught students much the same lessons.

One math teacher at the high school is quite literally unable to pronounce the word “geometry” (ironically, her focus as an educator was reportedly on English, but the school needed a math teacher); the Spanish teacher doesn’t speak Spanish (no, I’m not kidding). Yet they remain on staff while the woman I mentioned to you earlier now scrambles to make a living as a private tutor. Another woman I know who does still teach regularly regales me with horror stories featuring out of control students, frightened and incompetent administrators, and unions which care more about power for themselves than about education for children.

You can disparage government schools all that you want, and you’ll have plenty of grounds to do so. You can suggest all of the things that might make our schools better, and many of your ideas will probably be good ones. But after an afternoon with a friend this weekend, I’m more and more of the opinion that government schools can’t be fixed.

To truly do so would involve eliminating the Department of Education and letting locals take over. It would mean school choice. It would mean getting rid of the National Education Association and hiring - and firing - based on competence and merit. It would mean holding kids who can’t read back in second grade, not merely failing them in tenth grade or pushing them out into the world with a diploma they can’t understand (or worse, making them such abject failures even in their own minds that they leave school all together). It would mean teaching kids such things as reading, history, writing, math, civics, and science with the knowledge that success breeds character far more reliably than do discussions about character.

Those things aren’t going to happen, thus government schools won’t be fixed. The best that we can do at this point is to hope to “fix” our kids. Of course, that’s going to require some parental character. For the sake of our country - our economy, our technology, our freedom - we had better hope there are more parents than not who are capable of living up to it. My friend and her husband have shown that, whatever it takes, they are. Anybody else?

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Abusive teen causes well-liked teacher to snap in British school

A 14-YEAR-OLD student is in hospital with serious head injuries after a teacher allegedly attacked him in the middle of a lesson as shocked classmates looked on. Jack Waterhouse, 14, was taken to hospital after the incident in a classroom at All Saints' Roman Catholic School in Mansfield, England on Wednesday. Science teacher Peter Harvey, 49, has been arrested on suspicion of attempting to murder the boy and assaulting two other children, police have said. The Sun reported the boy was found in a pool of blood. Police said a weapon was used in the attack and the whole class had been "traumatised" by what they had seen. The Guardian website reported a weight from a set of scales was believed to have been used.

The Daily Mail reported Mr Harvey, a father of two, allegedly snapped after the boy swore at him.

Police said there were initial grave concerns about the boy's condition but he was now said to be stable, although still serious. "I can say that, allegedly as part of the incident, a weapon was used against the child. We are investigating exactly what did happen," Detective Superintendent Adrian Pearson said. "Obviously the whole class is traumatised by what has happened."

The other two children - a boy and a girl - who were allegedly assaulted did not need hospital treatment, he said. "The school have been working very closely with us to cooperate and to gain the full assistance of the children who were witnesses to what took place," Det Supt Pearson said.

Local news site Mansfield Chad reported that the boy's family was at his bedside in hospital. It quoted a parent as saying his son had been in the lesson. "You don't expect something like that to happen in a school," he said. "My son phoned me to tell me what happened and said all the kids in the lesson were just in shock." The school has offered counselling to students.

Other media reports said former pupils and parents had expressed surprise that the teacher, who taught science, was the one suspected of being involved. "I didn't think the pupils would give him stick," ex-pupil Tom Blythe, 19, was quoted as saying. "He was actually a decent bloke and got involved in school plays." On its website, the school said it had been a Performing Arts College since 2002 and had been described as "rapidly improving" in a 2009 Ofsted inspection. "All Saints' School is a lively, Catholic comprehensive school with a very special, warm ethos which is recognised by all who visit," the headteacher said on the website.

Det Supt Pearson said the incident was out of character for the school. "It's a school where people send their children from a wide catchment area. There have been no similar incidents before," he said.

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Good education, made in Taiwan

By Bill Costello

Recently I was invited to observe classes at two public elementary schools in Taiwan — Dan Fong Elementary School and the Affiliated Experimental Elementary School of Taipei Municipal University of Education (ESTMUE). Dan Fong Elementary is located in Taipei County. With more than 2,000 students, it’s considered a middle-sized elementary school...

The Taiwanese education system produces students with some of the highest test scores in the world in science and math. The two primary international assessments that examine the performance of students in science and math are the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

The former assesses science and math performance in grades four and eight, while the latter assesses the science, math and reading literacy of 15-year-olds. In science, Taiwanese fourth graders ranked second in performance when compared with their international peers; eighth graders ranked second; and 15-year-olds ranked fourth. All three ranks represent performances significantly above the international average.

In math, Taiwanese fourth graders ranked third in performance compared with their international peers; eighth graders ranked first; and 15-year-olds ranked first. Again, all three ranks represent performances significantly above the international average.

The high test scores are impressive, but it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions from them because school systems vary significantly by country. For example, the US tests a wider array of students than Taiwan.

At Dan Fong Elementary and ESTMUE, I observed six excellent practices worth adopting by US schools:

1. Serve nutritious lunches: Unlike in the US, Taiwanese school lunches do not consist of processed foods high in fat and sugar. Instead, they generally consist of rice, soup, meat, fruit and vegetables. Studies show that improving nutrition boosts academic performance.

2. Keep students active: While US schools have cut back on or completely eliminated physical education and recess, Taiwanese schools provide physical education classes twice a week and 10-minute recess periods four times a day. Both Taiwanese elementary schools I visited had athletic tracks, which are rare in US elementary schools. Studies show that increased physical activity leads to higher academic performance.

3. Require school uniforms: School uniforms are the norm in Taiwanese public schools. Only 15 percent of US public schools require them. Studies show that school uniforms raise academic performance, while lowering violence, theft and the negative effects of peer pressure.

4. Use hands-on learning: I observed more hands-on learning in the Taiwanese schools than I have in US schools. For example, Taiwanese students went on a field trip to a castle they studied in social studies; they collected local plants and used them to make a dye in science; and they worked with compasses and rulers in math. Studies show that hands-on learning involves students in real-world activities and thereby improves their academic performance.

5. Use interdisciplinary learning: Based on my observations, US teachers tend to teach one curricular discipline at a time, while Taiwanese teachers try to incorporate several into a lesson. For example, I observed a science teacher and art teacher in Taiwan collaborate in guiding students through a science project that involved drawing. Studies show that interdisciplinary learning helps students apply their knowledge in various contexts and thus enhances their academic performance.

6. Instill personal responsibility: In US schools, janitors clean up after the students. In Taiwanese schools, the students clean up after themselves. Cleanup time is a daily ritual wherein Taiwanese students clean the school building, sweep the school grounds and dump trash. Studies show that students who become more responsible tend to improve their academic performance.

While the Taiwanese education system is excellent, it’s not perfect. For example, critics say it favors rote memorization over critical and creative thought, puts too much pressure on students to pass entrance exams and relies too much on buxibans — or cram schools — for educating students.

Nonetheless, US schools could improve by adopting some of the excellent practices used in Taiwanese schools.

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10 July, 2009

Another British exam-marking fiasco

Would you believe that some of the markers knew less than the grade-school kids they were assessing? In Britain, SATs are set during and at the end of grade school, usually at ages 11 and 14

Teachers expressed disgust over 'shocking' marking inconsistencies as SATs results arrived in schools yesterday. They claimed one in five grades could be inaccurate because of glitches in the system. They highlighted problems in vetting examiners and pressure to meet strict marking deadlines. Some pupils were marked down for correctly spelling 'distinctive', it emerged. The marker had written in the margin it should be 'destinctive'.

While 99.9 per cent of results were delivered on time, teachers besieged internet forums with complaints of 'unbelievable' marking errors. The revelation raised the prospect of thousands of scripts once again being sent back for remarking. Almost 40,000 results had to be changed last year, in the wake of an administrative fiasco that led to delayed marks for 1.2million pupils. The year before, fewer than 10,000 grades were changed.

Rachel Ross, head of Woolton Hill Junior School, in Newbury, Berkshire, said: 'There are lots of errors. We feel somebody has rushed.'

Teachers' concerns mainly centre around results in the writing test. One told the Times Educational Supplement online forum they had 'watertight evidence of incompetent marking' after comparing pupils' scripts with the marks awarded. Another said a pupil who is brilliant at creative writing was given the same marks as a classmate who cannot write in sentences. A third said a piece of writing that had impressed an A-level examiner was awarded level three - lower than the expected level for 11-year-olds.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said marking inaccuracies was another reason 'to see an end to high-stakes testing and league tables, which distort the education our children receive'.

But the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said it was confident standards were robust this year. A spokesman said: 'The 2009 mark schemes were carefully designed and test markers received comprehensive training on how to apply them.

Kathleen Tattersall, of exams watchdog Ofqual, said: 'As regulator, Ofqual is continuing to monitor the quality control of the marking of this year's papers.'

Last year SATs descended into chaos as computer problems and administrative failures delayed test marking by several weeks. More than a million 11 to 14-year-olds broke up for summer holidays without knowing results that should have been published on July 8. When the grades did arrive, schools complained that they were wrong or missing, and thousands of pupils were incorrectly marked as 'absent' for tests they actually sat. It emerged that one in three pupils were given the wrong grade.

The Government later banned ETS Europe, the U.S. firm that marked the tests, from checking results. In March 2006 it emerged that some 2005 papers were marked incorrectly because they got wet.

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Australia: Violence rife in Qld. government schools

And nobody knows what to do about it because any real discipline would be labelled as "child abuse"

SHOCKING levels of student suspensions from Queensland's state schools have been revealed, with the Government admitting not enough has been done to combat violent behaviour. The Opposition has labelled the escalating violence "another crisis" the Government had been ignoring.

Education Minister Geoff Wilson yesterday took the unprecedented step of releasing school-by-school discipline data, acknowledging more needs to be done to quell increasing behavioural problems. The Government is now considering longer suspensions and the ability for principals to exclude their own students without departmental input, while asking schools to revise their behavioural plans.

It follows revelations in The Courier-Mail earlier this year of a 20 per cent hike in suspensions from state schools between 2006 and 2008, with more than 55,000 handed out last year.

State government figures released yesterday show total disciplinary actions rose from 47,847 in 2006 to 58,167 in 2008 in Queensland state schools. Nearly one-third of all suspensions in 2008 were for "physical misconduct". Others were for verbal and property misconduct, disruptive behaviour, absences and substance abuse. Dozens of schools had more than one suspension handed out for every three students while one – Normanton State School – issued more suspensions than they had pupils. Meanwhile, 10 state high schools excluded or cancelled the enrolments of 20 or more of their students last year alone.

But Mr Wilson said higher disciplinary action numbers were just as likely to indicate a strict school acting for the benefit of all students. He described the rising levels of violence as "totally unacceptable" and said cyber bullying was the "new frontier of violent behaviour". Mr Wilson will now consult the Statewide Behaviour Committee to consider greater disciplinary powers for principals.

Queensland Association of State School Principals president Norm Hart said he would welcome stronger powers, especially the right to exclude students. Under the current system, principals can suspend students for up to five days, but the department must review any harsher penalties.

Opposition education spokesman Dr Bruce Flegg said the government response had came years too late and only after recent Opposition pressure. "It is emerging as another crisis for the Government that they have ignored over the years," he said.

Both Mr Wilson and Mr Hart urged the public to treat the suspension data cautiously, as one student could be suspended a number of times.

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9 July, 2009

Sociology Turns Up Assessment

I taught in a sociology school for many years and I got the impression that it was acquisition of Leftist attitudes rather than acquisition of knowledge that was the main thing. Marx was certainly always spoken of with reverence and debates over "what Marx really meant" were perennial. I somehow never heard any mention of what Marx said about Jews, though

The question of how to measure learning -- and if it can or should be measured at all -- continues to stir debate. But despite skeptics' grumblings, sociology departments are increasingly using assessment methods to evaluate students' experiences, according to a new study by the American Sociological Association.

The survey, administered in 2008, drew responses from 549 departments or programs that offer a minimum of a bachelor's degree in sociology. Over all, the number of departments that perform some types of assessment of student learning rose by about 10 percent between 2001, the last year the study was conducted, and 2007. Most sociology departments continued to use student surveys, senior theses or projects, and exit interviews, in that order, according to the report.

Other assessment methods saw major increases. Twenty-nine percent of sociology departments reported using externally created exams in 2006-7, up from 18 percent in 2000-1. (In contrast, exams that departments themselves created to measure what their students had learned dropped in usage by about 9 percent.) External exams include the Major Field Test in Sociology, which was offered at nearly 120 institutions between August 2006 and June 2008, according to the Educational Testing Service.

"It's more and more generally considered a norm of higher education that you need to assess the outcomes of the students who go through colleges or universities," said Roberta Spalter-Roth, a co-author of the study and director of the American Sociological Association's research and development department. "On other hand, there appears to certainly be a group -- I'm not positive how substantial -- who think that assessment is an invasion into their professional autonomy, who feel that increasingly teachers have less control over what's happening in the university, who think it's a parody of social science research."

In spite of such criticism, departments reported a 12 percent increase in "other" assessment methods different from those asked about in the surveys. That figure probably includes capstone courses, in which sociology students work on a research project and try to synthesize all they have learned, Spalter-Roth said.

Meanwhile, nearly three-quarters of sociology departments reported either undergoing major curriculum revisions in the last five years or intending to do so within the next two years. These changes include using methods and statistics in every class rather than in separate classes, as well as saving specialized courses for the end of the major program, Spalter-Roth said. The survey did not gather information about the reasons behind these revisions.

The association's report raises interesting questions about how sociology departments are trying to measure their own quality, but stops short of painting a complete picture, said James Sherohman, a sociology professor and university assessment director at St. Cloud State University. He said he would like to learn more about the quality of student work and see how sociology's results stack up against those of other disciplines.

"It's a little disappointing not to see more change from 2001 to 2007, but on the other hand, you can see there's a lot of assessment going on," he said, adding, "I see this as more of something to provoke discussion and possibly some action in the discipline if we see this as a problem or not."

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Leftist discipline phobia brings predictable results in Britain

One teacher a day in hospital after attack

One teacher is hospitalised in England almost every day after being attacked at school, according to new figures. Almost 180 staff were forced to spend three days at home or working outside the classroom following a serious physical assault, it is disclosed. At least one-in-10 attacks involved teachers working in nursery or primary schools. Many resulted in "major injuries", including broken bones, dislocations, burns or even loss of sight.

It is feared the true scale of assaults may be significantly higher amid claims only a fraction are ever reported for fear of harming a school's reputation.

The latest disclosure was made in figures published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Bob Spink, the independent MP, who obtained the data in a Parliamentary question, said: "Teachers can hardly draw breath without being attacked or falling victim to a false allegation. All political parties pay a lot of lip service to the issue of discipline without carrying it through. If head teachers and governors were allowed to focus on getting discipline right then many other problems in our schools would be a lot easier to solve."

According to figures, 176 school staff suffered injuries "involving acts of violence" in 2007/8, the latest available data. The school year is normally 190 days. This included 17 injuries suffered by nursery or primary teachers and 33 staff who worked in special schools. In total, 26 attacks resulted in major injuries and 150 kept staff away from ordinary duties for three days or more. The figures came from data collected by the Health and Safety Executive.

Earlier this year, a teacher was awarded £280,000 in compensation after being attacked by a pupil at a Nottingham special school. The 13-year-old jumped on her back - placing her in a headlock - causing her to fall and injure her back and head. Sharon Lewis, who was 26 at the time of the assault in 2004, was forced to quit the profession after suffering nerve damage and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It came as research by the NASUWT union suggested nine-in-10 physical assaults in schools were never reported.

The Government insisted behaviour in schools was improving. Vernon Coaker, the Schools Minister, said ministers were introducing new requirements on schools to record incidents of bullying between pupils and verbal and physical assaults on staff. "We will also consult on whether schools should also be required to report these records to their local authority, and whether they should be required to record and report these incidents by type where the incident is motivated by a particular form of prejudice [for example] as racist, homophobic bullying incidents," he said. "

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Fruitcake economist teaching at an Australian university

Population increase is going to lead to an increase in demand for housing -- and what does increased demand do in the face of a restricted amount of available housing land? It pushed UP the prices. Real estate values in desirable places ALWAYS increase over the long term. UWS should persuade him to shut up for the sake of their reputation

CONTROVERSIAL economist Steve Keen has refused to back down from his doomsday prediction that house prices in Australia will almost halve over a decade despite growing evidence to the contrary.

Nine months after his dire prediction that property prices will fall by 40 per cent over 10 years, fellow economists have pronounced Professor Keen - who was held up as one of the few commentators to see the global economic downturn coming - "spectacularly wrong" on his outlook for the housing market.

Professor Keen, an associate professor of economics and finance at the University of Western Sydney, was so convinced the bottom would fall out of the housing market that he sold his two-bedroom apartment in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills in October last year to avoid financial pain from the predicted downturn.

But an analysis of price trends in Surry Hills suggests that had Professor Keen held on to the apartment, he would have realised a capital growth of about 7 per cent, The Australian reports. According to property data agency Residex, the apartment market in Surry Hills experienced an average capital growth rate of 7.08 per cent in the year to May.

But Professor Keen insisted yesterday that Australia was on the cusp of a prolonged depression "in which house prices will fall as collateral damage".

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8 July, 2009

Education secretary Duncan challenges NEA on teacher pay

Education Secretary Arne Duncan challenged members of the National Education Association Thursday to stop resisting the idea of linking teacher pay to student achievement. It was Duncan's first speech at the union's annual meeting, a gathering at which President Obama was booed when he mentioned the idea of performance pay last year. By contrast, Duncan drew raucous applause and only a smattering of boos.

"I came here today to challenge you to think differently about the role of unions in public education," Duncan told the 3.2 million-member union in San Diego. "It's not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation," he said. "You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You must be willing to change."

Unions are an important part of the Democrats' political base of support. Duncan, even as he challenged NEA members, promised to include teachers in his decision-making. "We're asking Congress for more money to develop compensation programs with you and for you, not to you," Duncan said.

Duncan described how, as CEO of Chicago public schools, he negotiated a performance pay program with the Chicago Teachers Union, which is part of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers. An audience member booed the program. "You can boo; just don't throw any shoes, please," Duncan said as the crowd laughed and applauded.

The NEA made an audio feed of the speech available to journalists who did not attend.

The Chicago program is still small; it will be in only about 40 of the city's more than 600 schools next fall. It started with federal dollars from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which the administration wants to drastically expand. The administration asked Congress to boost spending from $97 million this year to $717 million next year.

But Obama may face resistance. Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, challenged Duncan at a hearing last month on whether there is any evidence that performance pay improves student achievement. Critics worry that pay might be based mostly on test scores, even though tests can be flawed and not all subjects are tested. Some states prohibit test scores from being used to evaluate teachers.

Duncan said test scores should never be the driving force. "But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible," he said.

Duncan has made a series of speeches that challenge education groups on Obama's priorities, though Thursday's was the first with a potentially hostile crowd. Duncan may have gotten a warmer response than Obama because teachers are more comfortable now with the administration, said NEA president Dennis Van Roekel. "The real message was that there is far more we agree on than disagree on," Van Roekel said. "Another message he delivered clearly was that he's willing to be in a partnership with us."

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Coverup of bullying at a British government grade school

Dinner lady faces dismissal for telling parents about attack on daughter

A dinner lady is facing the sack for breaching “pupil confidentiality” after she blew the whistle on school bullies. Chloe David, seven, was tied up and whipped with a skipping rope by fellow pupils at Great Tey Primary School in Essex. Her parents, Scott and Claire David, received a letter from the school which said only that Chloe had been hurt by some other children. It did not mention that she had been tied up.

Carol Hill, who serves food at the school, told Mr and Mrs David the full story of their daughter’s ordeal. “She had eight knots around her wrists and had been whipped across the legs with a skipping rope,” she said. “I took her into the school, along with the four boys who had been seen with her. Two admitted it,” she told the Colchester Gazette.

But Mrs Hill, 60, has now been suspended while the school investigates if she is guilty of gross misconduct for discussing a pupil outside of school. Mrs Hill saw Chloe’s mother shortly after the incident. “As I was talking to her I said I was really sorry about what had happened and then it became clear she did not know the whole story. “I had to tell her because she then realised there was more to it.”

Mrs David said she was angry she had not been invited to school to discuss what had happened, especially as the parents of those accused had been called in for a meeting. “The headteacher had written a note saying Chloe had been hurt by some other children and she was sure she would tell me all about it, but I should have been told the full story,” Mrs David said.

Chloe and her brother Cameron, five, have been taken out of the school by her parents. “I could not send her back, as I can only think about her being tied up,” Mrs David said. Her husband has informed police about the incident.

The school says that Mrs Hill should not have discussed a pupil outside school. Debbie Crabb, headteacher at the school, confirmed that an incident took place during the school lunchtime. “The matter is being dealt with internally in accordance with our behavioural policy and all the relevant parties have been informed. “It would not be appropriate to discuss this in any further detail.”

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7 July, 2009

Useless British university graduates

Their education has failed them. Employers forced to leave jobs unfilled as they cannot find competent recruits

Almost one in ten employers will be forced to leave graduate jobs unfilled this year because they cannot find quality recruits, a report reveals today. Dozens will be left with vacant posts despite the recession because of shortages of applicants with the right workplace skills and degree disciplines. In some cases, graduates lack commercial savvy and the high-level communication skills needed to deal with senior directors and clients. In others, bosses struggle to find applicants with specialised engineering or scientific knowledge because not enough students have studied those subjects.

Employers recruiting in less popular industry areas or far-flung locations are particularly affected, said the Association of Graduate Recruiters. Its revelation that 8 per cent of employers expect to have unfilled posts this year emerged as competition for jobs among graduates reached record levels.

The AGR's survey of 225 employers says the overall number of posts available has been cut by a quarter - a squeeze similar in scale to the last slump in 1991. Starting salaries have been frozen and few bosses expect to boost either pay or vacancy numbers in 2010.

On average, 49 graduates are battling it out for each graduate job - up from 30 this time last year. Competition is particularly intense for jobs in investment banks or fund management, with an average of 82 applicants per place. For financial services it is 76 and retail 65. Some employers reported receiving more than 150 applications per place. Investment banking, IT, construction and engineering are among sectors which have squeezed vacancies particularly dramatically.

Yet some employers said they were disappointed by sloppiness in application forms. Others said they were considering introducing 'motivation questionnaires' amid evidence that some applicants are seeking work they have no interest in simply to get a graduate post.

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UK: Parents of unruly schoolchildren to be fined

And so the parent whacks the misbehaving kid and then gets hauled before a court for child abuse!

Parents could be fined or sent to prison if their children misbehave, under powers to be awarded to schools. They form part of a government White Paper on education to be published by the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, tomorrow.

Most schools operate agreements under which parents and pupils undertake to promote good behaviour, but they are not enforceable. The new powers could see parents who fail to abide by them fined or given community sentences. In some cases, they could end up in prison if they did not pay the fines.

Mr Balls said on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC 1 that national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds and exam league tables would stay. The White Paper also spells out entitlements for parents and pupils.

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Throwing good money after bad

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is releasing $2.7 billion in stimulus dollars earlier than planned to help states confront increasingly tighter budgets. Duncan said Wednesday he is distributing $2.7 billion to states that he had planned to distribute in October or November.

The money comes from a fund for state government priorities that has very few strings attached. It doesn't have to be spent on education, although the administration hopes it will be.

Vice President Joe Biden said in a statement: "These Recovery Act funds will enable states to move quickly to protect critical jobs and will help states cope with their immediate budgetary challenges."

The stimulus law passed earlier this year provided about $100 billion for education. The department is releasing the money in stages and has distributed about $38 billion so far, though much of the money has not yet reached schools. "The department has done everything possible to get stimulus funds out the door quickly and effectively," Duncan said in a statement.

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6 July, 2009

College Republicans Banned at Two Religious Universities

Political clubs are a traditional part of college life so this all sounds very craven

It's hard enough to be a Republican on most campuses these days. Now you can't even be a member of the Republican Club at two of America's most conservative colleges -- because the clubs have been banned. Liberty University in Virginia, which banned its College Democratic club in May for holding positions on abortion and gay marriage that were contrary to its conservative Christian values, recently de-listed its College Republican club as well.

And in a similar move, Brigham Young University at Idaho, a school run by the Mormon Church, demoted both its Republican and Democratic clubs to informal status.

While no one questions that a private university has the legal right to ban political speech on campus, the moves have been subject to criticism -- particularly, in these cases, from conservatives who say that campuses that espouse conservative social values should not be barring Republican clubs.

Liberty's chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr., told FOXNews.com in an interview that he did not de-list the school's Republican club in response to pressure he received from booting the Democrats from campus. Rather, he said, he was applying standards equally. He said he decided that both clubs would become "unofficial" -- meaning they receive no student funding but can meet on campus under approved circumstances.

Liberty's Democratic club initially was ordered to shut down entirely because it was deemed contrary to the school's Christian mission and doctrine. But after a month of public skirmishes and what Falwell calls "false statements fed to the press," he decided to recognize the club informally. At the same time, Falwell said, he received "revelations" that the school's College Republicans might have endorsed former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore in the 2008 gubernatorial election, despite Gilmore's opposition to a total ban on abortion. That, Falwell said, caused college officials to de-list the Republicans too.

Both groups can still assemble on campus, he said, but they must clear the content of their meetings with school officials before getting meeting space. "This is so we don't run into problems in the future," he said. "To be consistent, we took the same recourse with the Republican club. Outside pressure was not an issue."

Falwell says "both sides, Democrats and Republicans, are happy with the new policy." But the whole ordeal has generated mixed reviews. Jan Dervish, secretary of Liberty's College Democrats, told the Associated Press he was satisfied with the new arrangement, and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who heads the Democratic National Committee and had been critical of the ban on the Democratic club, was quoted saying the compromise at Liberty "makes a lot of sense."

But conservatives and fellow College Republicans are split. Robert Knight, a senior fellow with the conservative United Civil Rights Council, said Falwell should have stuck to his guns and expelled the Democrats, leaving the Republican students alone. "They had every right to withhold official endorsement of organizations promoting beliefs that are antithetical to theirs," he said. "Giving in to bullies only encourages them -- appeasement doesn't work."

Ashley Barbera, spokeswoman for the College Republican National Committee, sees the compromise as "hurting everybody." She said it further marginalizes political awareness and involvement among a generation that already grapples with apathy on campus. "I don't think anyone's interests are served when universities de-recognize any political organization, Republican or Democrat, for that matter," she said.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.), which typically defends free speech for conservatives on campus, said it doesn't hold a position on Falwell's decision, but it acknowledges that as a private institution offering no illusions about free speech and political and social tolerance on campus, Liberty was probably on firm legal footing from the start.

F.I.R.E. President Robert Shibley pointed out that students have to sign an agreement when they come to Liberty that binds them to the school's Code of Conduct. That code, which dictates everything from a strict dress code, random drug tests and behaving with the "highest ideals of moral virtue and professionalism," does not include free speech guidelines. "You can make the argument that those are rights you agreed to give up when you came," Shibley said.

The story has been similar at BYU-Idaho, which announced in May that it would be de-listing its College Republicans and College Democrats from "official" status. All BYU students must agree to uphold conduct "consistent with the ideals and principles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." The church's Code of Conduct sketches out behavior and standards, including a dress code, but no free speech.

But BYU-Idaho spokesman Andrew Cargal said the decision to ban political clubs was based on an update of the school's political neutrality policy, rather than on its strict religious policies or the university agreeing or disagreeing with any particular party . He insisted the changes had nothing to do with developments occurring at the same time at Liberty University.

The school's College Republicans have been well known for their large numbers and active presence on campus, and particularly for the campaigning they did for Republicans in the last presidential election. In contrast, the group of College Democrats on the campus is relatively small. "That was definitely a talking point," Cargal acknowledged. But he denied that the school might have been pressured to appear less Republican or that the disparity in numbers had anything to do with the school's decision to de-list. "We just shouldn't be a sponsor of any partisan politics at the university," he said.

Some College Republicans at the school said they felt slighted, especially since the main BYU campus in Provo, Utah, and BYU-Hawaii did not de-list their partisan clubs, nor do they have any plans to. "I'm really surprised and disappointed by the decision," said Brandon Johnson, chairman of the Idaho College Republicans.

"Hundreds, maybe thousands, of universities express their 'neutrality,' by allowing any political club to set up, and I think that working with them indicates their neutrality very well," said Johnson, who described the small group of Democrats at BYU as "pretty passionate" and well-meaning.

Others, like Knight, see the current scrutiny of these conservative campuses as the usual double standard. "If observers are worried about censoring political views on campus, they should look at the real egregious cases occurring every day on every state-run campus in America," he said. "They are perfectly comfortable with conservatives being shouted down at these tax-supported institutions. The hypocrisy is monumental."

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If the British Government won’t learn, nor will children

In the new schools White Paper the need to impart basic knowledge has been obfuscated by jargon and dangerous guff

It would be nice if education ministers had take the five-year MoT they propose for teachers — if any stayed long enough in the job. There’s definitely something wrong with the steering in the Education Department. This week’s Schools White Paper left me bewildered. I am a diligent student of bureaucratese, but I couldn’t decide if it was dangerous or anodyne, a U-turn or a bunny hop — until I realised that an important component seemed to have fallen off.

Education, it seems, is no longer primarily about the transfer of knowledge. According to the White Paper, education is about pupils developing a “sense of responsibility for themselves, their health, their environment and society”, a “respect and understanding for those of different backgrounds” and “skills for learning and life”.

There is nothing much wrong with any of these. But it is hard to see how they, or any of the new quangos that litter the document, will make up for our failure to impart basic knowledge to enough children. The guide for children and young people (ugh) with the White Paper opines that “your health and happiness matter as well as maths and English”. There is no suggestion that health and happiness might depend on acquiring basic competence in those subjects.

I dug out the 2005 Schools White Paper, written when Lord Adonis was still driving common sense and ambition into the department. The 2009 paper is called “A commitment from the Children’s Plan: your child, your schools, our future”, and says that it is about “pupil entitlement”. The 2005 model was called simply “Higher Standards: better choice for all”, and aimed “to ensure that every school delivers an excellent education”. It talked about giving schools freedom to innovate, letting parents and others set up new schools, and making local authorities commission, not provide, education. It was written with logic and clarity.

The change is profound. Today’s well-meaning guff is most dangerous to those children whom ministers most want to help: the ones whose families don’t own books and won’t be supplementing their happiness hour with a private tutor. The ones assumed to be capable of “engaging” only with SpiderMan, not Michelangelo. Who, if they have the misfortune to be curious about the world, to want to step beyond the confines of what they already know, may become convinced that school is pointless. And may be right.

Those who feel most strongly about this are those who teach the most deprived. At a conference staged by the Hackney Learning Trust this week, two researchers presented compelling evidence from the US that raising the expectations of poor children is the most important factor in turning low-performing schools into high-performing ones. Hackney, which escaped the dead hand of its local education authority seven years ago, has broken the link between deprivation and poor performance.

Greg Wallace, head of Woodberry Down Community Primary School in Hackney, says that lecturing on emotional development “can do more harm than good”. Most of his pupils are on free school meals and a quarter are refugees. The school overcame hostility to refugees, Mr Wallace says, by teaching inference, deduction, reading and setting texts that helped other pupils to empathise with their plight, not by making them “pass bags around a circle and talk about how they feel”.

In six years the school has gone from being rated very weak to outstanding. The critical factor has been raising expectations. It considers some government measures of achievement, such as Level 4 SATs, are too low. It ditched the national literary strategy for synthetic phonics in 2002, because it wanted all its children, not just 80 per cent, to be able to read.

If such a school can surpass all expectations, why are ministers so keen to entrench failure? In the past two years, most comprehensives have given up offering separate chemistry, physics and biology because the Government endorsed a combined science GCSE. While independent schools increasingly opt for rigorous international exams, state schools get dumbed-down exams and Ed Balls’s new “diploma”.

As new Labour trickles away, it leaves Britain with one in five 11-year olds below the required standard in literacy, more independent school pupils getting three As at A level than in the entire state sector and the country falling back shamefully in many international league tables. But in the new order of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, standards and international scores have apparently risen. And schools offer the hope of solving the myriad social problems that the department thinks as important as education. The department now believes that “no school can meet the needs of all its pupils alone”. To solve social problems they must work in partnership with other schools and agencies, including new children’s boards and multi-agency teams.

I strongly believe that the mania for multi-agency working was central to the death of Baby P and fails other children — the bureaucracy sucks good people into meetings and saps them of responsibility. So I read the new acronyms in this paper with mounting despair. Good teachers do not speak this language, which is essentially the language of failure.

Even the proposed five-year MoT for teachers is a limp measure. Mr Wallace says that good heads do not wait five years to spot a bad teacher — they do it in six weeks. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said yesterday that 13 per cent of trainee primary teachers were being allowed to resit basic literacy and numeracy tests three or more times, an astonishing figure. The Tories will set a higher bar for teacher training — in other words, weed out bad trainees before they enter classrooms. But that kind of ambition and logic has departed this Government.

The new ministers seem to have learnt nothing from the successes of the most disadvantaged schools. The danger is that pupils will learn nothing either.

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Australian schools: More waste of "stimulus" money

Having bureaucrats spend money is a disaster. They don't give a stuff. They deny it where it's needed and grant it where it's not. It sounds like they just roll dice to make their decisions

A school with just one pupil for 2010 has been given a $140,000 government grant to build a covered playground - even though it already has a new one. Another $110,000 grant from the Rudd Government's $14.7 billion education stimulus package will be used for classroom refurbishment at tiny The Lagoon Public School, 20km from Bathurst in New South Wales central west.

But even locals say it is a shocking waste of money. The tiny rural school has one teacher and five pupils, two of whom go to high school next year. The mother of two girls there said she was considering transferring them to a larger school. That would leave just one pupil - the teacher's daughter - as the beneficiary of the federal funds.

The school is one of 1500 to receive Primary Schools for the 21st Century program funds. Government documents show it has been given $140,000 for a covered open learning area (COLA) and $110,000 for "upgraded classrooms".

But a neighbour told The Sunday Telegraph that the school had a new shaded learning area built just two years ago. "This school has been granted $250,000 for a COLA and classroom refurbishment - it already has a COLA, which was built over summer approximately two years ago," he said.

Monica Betts, whose daughters attend the school, said the funds could have been spent attracting more pupils. "It is a lot of money," she said. "They could have spent $50,000 trying to get more people here."

NSW Opposition education spokesman Adrian Piccoli said the program had been flawed. "Small schools need to be maintained, just like larger schools do, but it's the height of incompetence to spend borrowed money on unnecessary projects," he said.

The Opposition cited five new schools that received funding under the 21st Century scheme. One was John Palmer Public School, which got $546,000, despite opening only last year.

Australian Council of State School Organisations president Steve Carter said he was extremely frustrated by the scheme's inequitable allocation. "We would very much prefer a tighter, better thought out, needs-based allocation of funding, managed properly to give local school communities the resources they need," he said.

Arthur Phillip High School, in Parramatta, had sought money to repair its walls, floors, roofs and sewerage, but was rejected. Keira High School missed out on funds from the Science and Language Centres program, despite labs, built in the late 1960s, being below safety standards. Rooty Hill High also missed out, despite mould in its labs and cupboards falling off the wall.

Federal Education Minister Julie Gillard blamed the NSW Government for the funding decision and sought an urgent review of the school's eligibility. "The NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) must have assessed that it was in need of new or refurbished facilities," a spokesman said. "The Deputy Prime Minister has requested her department to hold immediate discussions with the NSW DET to investigate claims that this school may be non-viable in 2010".

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5 July, 2009

It’s the consequences, stupid

President Obama has talked a lot and taken some action on education reform. Careful examination, however, reveals that his sound and fury is virtually all anvil and no hammer, that is, there’s still no effective consequences for failing to reform.

Take the administration’s efforts to expand charter schools, which are public schools less restricted by red tape. Charter schools have improved education by spurring innovation and by putting competitive pressure on traditional public school. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has warned, “States that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application” for $5 billion in discretionary federal funds available to promote better performance and innovation in education. While that sounds good, the reality is that nothing really bad happens to states that ignore Duncan’s call.

If states don’t enact the charter school measures that Duncan wants, no federal education dollars that states already receive is taken away. These states may not get the extra money from Duncan’s discretionary pot, but that’s little consequence compared to taking away, let’s say, federal Title I funds for disadvantaged students that states already receive.

Obama also wants to improve teacher quality in high-poverty schools through the expansion of the Teacher Incentive Fund. The Fund, which is proposed to go from about $100 million in 2009 to nearly $500 million in 2010, would channel federal dollars to support pay-for-performance experiments around the country. Traditional teacher-pay systems base salaries mainly on years of service rather than merit factors. While the president’s efforts to change this ineffective system are praiseworthy, there are no teeth in his proposal.

Teacher Incentive Fund dollars are add-ons for school districts. They offer some financial incentives to change teacher pay systems, but if districts fail to do so then nothing happens to them. Local union contracts that enshrine the old pay rules and protect incompetent teachers would continue to operate. Thus, the Fund will likely have no effect on the 160 bad teachers in Los Angeles and 700 in New York who, according to recent shocking revelations, are being paid by their districts to stay out of the classroom and not teach.

Secretary Duncan has also come out in support of the effort by 46 states to craft a common set of national reading and math standards. Dangling the potential of federal aid, Duncan says, “This is the beginning of a new day for education in our country.” He’s correct that the current patchwork of state standards and testing systems often vary in their level of difficulty, which results in students in some states seeming to be higher achieving when they aren’t.

Even if states agree to national standards that are rigorous, however, what happens if those states and their public education systems fail to live up to them? State school accountability systems have been notoriously lax and the federal No Child Left Behind Act issues penalties only to certain schools and districts. Further, even these penalties are likely to be watered down by the Democrat-controlled Congress as it decides the future of NCLB.

In the marketplace, producers pay an immediate price for producing inferior products through consumer refusal to purchase their goods and services. Failure to heed this market signal usually results in producers going out of business. This all-or-nothing prospect is the greatest incentive available for companies to meet the needs and demands of the consuming public. Because the public education monopoly does not have this incentive – indeed, the stimulus package was crafted mainly to bail out public education and continue the status quo – no immediate systemic change will take place. Only when all education consumers are given the ability to shun the deficient services provided by the public education system will there be real change.

That’s why broad school-choice systems, such as universal voucher programs available to all parents, are so effective. Under these programs parents can pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools, depriving the public schools of the per-pupil funding attached to each child. By doing so, parents impose real consequences on the government-run schools and the adults that run them. Until President Obama is willing to man up and implement such real consequences, don’t expect much improvement.

SOURCE




British schools bar parents from sports day... to keep out paedophiles

Parents were banned from attending an inter-school sports day to protect pupils from kidnappers and paedophiles. The host school said they could not prevent 'unsavoury' characters from sneaking in.

More than 270 pupils from four local primaries took part in the East Beds School Sports Partnership Athletics Day at Sandy Upper School in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire last week. Youngsters aged seven and eight competed in the long jump, hurdles, sprint, 400 metres and relay races. Their parents, many of whom wanted to take time off work to attend, condemned the ban.

One mother, who did not wish to be named, said: 'They said they just could not estimate how many parents were going to be there, and were worried that they couldn't stop someone who shouldn't be there from being there. But I think it's just health and safety gone mad.' Mother-of-three Emma Collett, 33, of Biggleswade, has a child at St Andrew's Lower School in the town. She said: 'I would have taken time off work to support my child. It would have meant a lot to me. 'I'm all for measures to protect the safety of children but lines must be drawn and common sense must prevail.'

Paul Blunt of the East Bedfordshire School Sports Partnership, which ran the event, said the 'ultimate fear' was that a child could be abducted. He said: 'If we let parents into the school they would have been free to roam the grounds. All unsupervised adults must be kept away from children. 'An unsavoury character could have come in and we just can't put the children in the event or the students at the host school at risk like that. 'The ultimate fear is that a child is hurt or abducted, and we must take all measures possible to prevent that.'

Mr Blunt confirmed he had received a complaint from an irate mother but defended his decision. He added: 'None of the children taking part attend the host school so it would've been really hard to police. 'We did a risk assessment and concluded that we couldn't guarantee the children's safety. 'The number of children involved meant it would have been hard to ensure people were who they claimed to be.'

Local councillor Anita Lewis also backed the decision, saying: 'The safety of the children is paramount. 'It was decided that following a risk assessment we could not adequately supervise up to 100 plus adults on the school site.'

However, Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said it was 'totally unreasonable' to ban parents from a sports day. 'It's clearly a serious misjudgement. One of the great pleasures of sports day is that their parents can watch them take part,' he said. 'If you followed the thinking of this ban you wouldn't be able to let you child out of the front door.'

SOURCE




CROOKEDNESS IN AUSTRALIAN ACADEME

Two articles below

Academic fired after unethical manipulation of marks alleged at a major university

This is an old, old problem. Australian universities are merciless to honest academics who expose dumbed-down marking practices. It is designed to suppress whistleblowing by the many others who could do so. I must say I was often tempted to go public over marking practices in my time as an academic at Uni NSW but concluded that I had no hope of cleaning out the Augean stables

A University of Queensland history lecturer has been sacked after telling a class of honours students assessment of their work had been marred by "serious marking violations". Andrew Gentes, who has taught at UQ for the past five years, has also written to the Queensland Ombudsman alleging "unethical manipulation of students' marks" within UQ's School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics.

Dr Gentes told The Courier-Mail yesterday he had intended to finish up at UQ on August 31 but when news of his email to students broke on Wednesday, he was told to leave immediately.

He said the problem arose during the marking moderation process for one of the assignments in his Theory and Method subject. The dual marker, Associate Professor Marion Diamond, increased gradings on eight out of 14 essays Dr Gentes had marked by more than 8 per cent, triggering the need for a third assessment. Dr Gentes said school policy, which required the original and dual markers to confer when there were significant differences before the assignments were referred to a third party, had been ignored.

"The way it's worked out is if you originally got a mark of below 80 per cent by me and you ended up having your paper graded by a third marker, you had a 100 per cent chance of having your mark considerably increased," Dr Gentes said. One student originally given a 55 per cent mark had their grade increased to 67.5, while another was marked up from 71 per cent to 85.

Dr Gentes said in his view it was a "clear attempt to raise the marks of favoured students, at the expense of talented students" and a means of encouraging undeserving students to undertake post-graduate studies lucrative for the university.

Arts Faculty executive dean Richard Fotheringham confirmed Dr Gentes' dismissal. He also confirmed normal procedure was for the dual markers to meet to resolve big disparities and that if a third marker became involved the previous lowest mark was disregarded. "I understood there was an attempted moderation and Dr Gentes refused to meet with the other members of the school involved," Professor Fotheringham said. "We got in Bob Elson as the third marker, who's probably the most distinguished historian we've got . . . he marked all the essays independently, without knowing what the two marks were." [So someone who didn't teach the course knew better than the person who did teach the course what a reasonable mastery of the course material was??]

Dr Gentes said he had elected to "throw caution to the wind" and speak out as he was taking up a post at a university in Japan.

SOURCE

Dithering over research fraud

Universities hate to admit that wrongdoing has happened when one of their academics is accused of fraud or malpractice -- because it reflects on them. All such allegations should be investigated independently under the supervision of a judge

THE Rudd government is considering a specialist independent body to deal with the hardest cases of scientific fraud, according to Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr. "We are considering a research integrity advisory board," said Senator Carr, who said he hoped the details could be settled before the next academic year. "We need to establish the legal framework ... and the appropriate legal indemnity for the chair and panel members ... and the specific revisions to the (Australian Code forthe Responsible Conduct of Research) to take into account any new review mechanism. "This is a sensitive issue, but we've attracted broad support for the program. There is general agreement as to the need for further reform."

Although the code was revised as recently as 2007, Senator Carr argues the present ad-hoc system, whereby institutions handle their own complaints, has failed in a small number of intractable cases. David Vaux, a medical researcher who has lobbied Senator Carr and others for reform, said the code made it too easy for an institution to bury an inconvenient complaint. "There's no oversight to ensure theinvestigations are carried out properly," said Professor Vaux, a National Health and Medical Research Council Australia fellow at LaTrobe University. "Australia should catch up with the rest of the world. In most countries in Europe or the US there's an ombudsman who handles issues of research misconduct or there's an office of research integrity."

Glenn Withers, chief executive of Universities Australia, agreed there was a need to deal with "exceptions and anomalies" in complaint handling, and believed Senator Carr intended the new board to have a "very light touch". However, he said the new system could affect the research autonomy of universities. "This government says it is taking the foot of government off universities. To an extent, this is an exception to that principle," Dr Withers said. "We take our autonomy very seriously."

Talks involving UA, the academic union, the Australian Research Council and the NHMRC have backed reform. But it is not yet clear precisely what would trigger an intervention by the board. The ARC's chief executive Margaret Sheil said: "I think you have to let the institutional processes run their course unless there was a scenario where the institution just wasn't acting."

The term serious misconduct normally called to mind the serious outcome for a wrongdoer - dismissal - but it also could point to the serious consequences flowing from dishonest medical research, Professor Sheil said.

Susan Dodds, philosophy professor at the University of Tasmania and an authority on ethics, said there was a lot at stake. "The public credibility of our own work depends on the public believing that researchers do the right thing," she said. She said the twin benefits of a national board would be more consistency in complaint-handling and less risk of conflicts of interest.

Professor Vaux said the new system should extend beyond universities and projects funded by the ARC and the NHMRC to cover published research bankrolled by the private sector or charities. He said he believed Australia had a serious problem with research misconduct. "I've seen things in published journal articles (for example, suspect images of cell lines in life science reports) where I can conceive of no other explanation," he said. Professor Vaux said tasks for a new research integrity body could include data collection, thereby settling the dispute about the extent of research misconduct, as well as keeping internal complaint handling honest by taking appeals.

Robert Graham, president of the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes, said the proposed board seemed "a step in the right direction". The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, which he directs, had just reviewed its own internal system. "We all worry about (research misconduct). A critical issue is when to refer (a case) outside. From my perspective as director, the sooner you get it outside the better." This was because an institution handling complaints against its own too readily appeared to be like "a fox in the chicken coop," Professor Graham said.

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4 July, 2009

Is a college degree worthless?

The higher incomes that college education brings may not make up for the savings it consumes or the debt it adds early in the life of a typical student

The four-year college degree has come to cost too much and prove too little. It's now a bad deal for the average student, family, employer, professor and taxpayer. A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, as I'll show.

The employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards, you'll see, are slipping.

Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades.

Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education.

I'm not arguing against higher learning but for it -- and against the degree system that stands in its way.

Sometimes things we believe for good reason our whole lives turn out one day to no longer be true, because circumstances have changed. In 2007, for example, I argued, to the anger of many, that renting had come to make more financial sense than homeownership. House prices have since fallen 27% nationwide, wiping out recent buyers who had less than that in equity.

With college degrees, I don't want to persuade families not to buy. I want to explain the injustice of the system and introduce a better alternative.

College grads start out behind: Consider two childhood friends, Ernie and Bill. Hard workers with helpful families, each saves exactly $16,594 for college. Ernie doesn't get accepted to a school he likes. Instead, he starts work at 18 and invests his college savings in a mutual fund that tracks the broad stock market.

Throughout his life, he makes average yearly pay for a high school graduate with no college, starting at $15,901 after taxes and peaking at $32,538. Each month, he adds to his stock fund 5% of his after-tax income, close to the nation's current savings rate. It returns 8% a year, typical for stock investors.

Bill has a typical college experience. He gets into a public college and after two years transfers to a private one. He spends $49,286 on tuition and required fees, the average for such a track. I'm not counting room and board, since Bill must pay for his keep whether he goes to college or not. Bill gets average-size grants, adjusted for average probabilities of receiving them, and so pays $34,044 for college.

He leaves school with an average-size student loan and a good interest rate: $17,450 at 5%. The $16,594 he has saved for college, you see, is precisely enough to pay what his loans don't cover.

Bill will have higher pay than Ernie his whole life, starting at $23,505 after taxes and peaking at $56,808. Like Ernie, he sets aside 5%. At that rate, it will take him 12 years to pay off his loan. Debt-free at 34, he starts adding to the same index fund as Ernie, making bigger monthly contributions with his higher pay. But when the two reunite at 65 for a retirement party, Ernie will have grown his savings to nearly $1.3 million. Bill will have less than a third of that.

How can that be? College degrees bring higher income, but at today's cost they can't make up the savings they consume and the debt they add early in the life of a typical student. While Ernie was busy earning, Bill got stuck under his bill.

My example is a crude one. I adjust neither wages nor investment returns for inflation, resulting in something of a wash. I don't take out for investment taxes, since it would take Ernie only a few years to move his starting sum into a tax-shielded retirement account, and both savers could add to such accounts thereafter. I assume 2007's income-tax distribution holds despite pending changes that will shift it in favor of Ernie's lower income. I'm comparing only savings, not living standards. Bill will presumably be able to afford nicer things than Ernie along the way.

But maybe not: I assume that Bill completes college in four years. More than 40% of students who enter a bachelor's program don't have a degree after six years, according to Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, whose book "Going Broke by Degree" sounded an alarm over college costs in 2004.

Crucially, I also assume college-educated Bill will earn what his peers did in bubbly 2005, when bloated real-estate and stock prices stoked consumer spending, producing unusually large corporate profits and loose lending, and sending banks grabbing after grads at premium pay. The bubbles have since popped, and banks have shrunk.

"The economic downturn has worsened the cost problem," Vedder says. "There will be many more people for whom costs will exceed benefits."

More here




British council forced to drop fraud case against mother who 'cheated' to get son in school

Another episode in the battle parents in Britain have to get their kids into a safe school. Sending your kids to a school where other students (particularly blacks) arrive armed with guns and knives (and even machine pistols in some cases) is something most British parents go to great lengths to avoid. But the Leftist British authorities, with their usual hatred of success in others, do their best to force middle-class kids into sink schools. They send their own kids to private schools, of course

A mother accused of using a false address to get her son into a popular state school has escaped prosecution because of a legal loophole, the council who brought the unprecedented case against her said today. Mrinal Patel, 41, applied for a place for her five-year-old son Rhys at Pinner Park First School in Harrow, north London in January last year. She claimed on the form that she lived within walking distance of the school but after she was offered a place Harrow Council discovered that the address she submitted did not match that on her tax records.

Mrs Patel was due to appear in court next week but Harrow Council has dropped their case against her because they were unsure the Fraud Act 2006 would cover school admissions cases. Councillor David Ashton, leader of Harrow Council, said there seemed to be “a loophole” and they had withdrawn their action to avoid potentially hefty legal costs. “While we stand by the substance of our case, subsequent legal advice is that technical legal arguments over the interpretation of the Act could pose a risk to the success of the action,” he said.

The case will cast doubt on the power of councils to tackle the rising number of parents who cheat on their school admissions form to get their children into the best schools. "The difficulty is that there is no clear law of what sanction applies if parents puts false information on their application form,” Mr Ashton said.

Mrs Patel said she was relieved the council had dropped the case. “It’s been an extremely difficult ordeal and I’m happy to put the matter behind me,” she said. “I have from the outset denied the allegations and the council’s unconditional withdrawal of the proceedings confirms my innocence.” Mrs Patel said that when she made the application, she had been living at her mother’s address, within the school’s catchment area. She claims she was separated from her husband and had no intention of going back to her matrimonial home which is further away – but changed her mind four weeks later.

She acknowledged that she had wrongly stated on the application form that she had been living at her mother’s address for 14 years but said she had been under a lot of pressure at the time. "I still don't feel I have done anything wrong," Mrs Patel told Radio 4's Today programme. "My biggest mistake was that I didn't tell the council I had moved out [of her mother's flat] when I did. "When they rang to check with me and asked if I was still living there, I said no. “I totally understand how it may appear. I explained that to the council, I gave them my full circumstances. I was totally honest and truthful about them,” she said.

The school received 411 applications for 90 places available in September 2008. The council says it allocated places to children living closest to the school, up to a maximum distance of 0.685 miles.

Mr Ashton said; “This case was never about persecuting mothers who wish to do the best for their children. It was about defending the integrity of the school system against those who might seek to flout it. “We always seek to resolve issues over school admission by dialogue. However, we will continue to consider court action as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted.”

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3 July, 2009

NY: 700 teachers paid to do nothing

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do. Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year. "You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. "I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.' `I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."

Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules. "It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.

Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the union and the Department of Education reached an agreement last year to try to reduce the amount of time educators spend in reassignment centers, but progress has been slow. "No one wants teachers who don't belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers' rights to due process," Davis said. The union represents more than 228,000 employees, including nearly 90,000 teachers.

Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores. "The principal wants you out, you're gone," said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.

City education officials deny teachers are unfairly targeted but say there has been an effort under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to get incompetents out of the classroom. "There's been a push to report anything that you see wrong," Forte said.

Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing. The Los Angeles district, the nation's second-largest school system with 620,000 students, behind New York's 1.1 million, said it has 178 teachers and other staff members who are being "housed" while they wait for misconduct charges to be resolved.

Similarly, Mimi Shapiro, who is now retired, said she was assigned to sit in what Philadelphia calls a "cluster office." "They just sit you in a room in a hard chair," she said, "and you just sit."

Teacher advocates say New York's rubber rooms are more extensive than anything that exists elsewhere. Teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings around the nation typically are sent home, with or without pay, Karen Horwitz, a former Chicago-area teacher who founded the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse. Some districts find non-classroom work — office duties, for example — for teachers accused of misconduct.

New York City's reassignment centers have existed since the late 1990s, Forte said. But the number of employees assigned to them has ballooned since Bloomberg won more control over the schools in 2002. Most of those sent to rubber rooms are teachers; others are assistant principals, social workers, psychologists and secretaries.

Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six. The nickname refers to the padded cells of old insane asylums. Some teachers say that is fitting, since some of the inhabitants are unstable and don't belong in the classroom. They add that being in a rubber room itself is bad for your mental health. "Most people in that room are depressed," said Jennifer Saunders, a high school teacher who was in a reassignment center from 2005 to 2008. Saunders said she was charged with petty infractions in an effort to get rid of her: "I was charged with having a student sit in my class with a hat on, singing."

The rubber rooms are monitored, some more strictly than others, teachers said. "There was a bar across the street," Saunders said. "Teachers would sneak out and hang out there for hours." Judith Cohen, an art teacher who has been in a rubber room near Madison Square Garden for three years, said she passes the time by painting watercolors of her fellow detainees. "The day just seemed to crawl by until I started painting," Cohen said, adding that others read, play dominoes or sleep. Cohen said she was charged with using abusive language when a girl cut her with scissors.

Some sell real estate, earn graduate degrees or teach each other yoga and tai chi. David Suker, who has been in a Brooklyn reassignment center for three months, said he has used the time to plan summer trips to Alaska, Cape Cod and Costa Rica. Suker said he was falsely accused of throwing a girl's test sign-up form in the garbage during an argument. "It's sort of peaceful knowing that you're going to work to do nothing," he said.

Philip Nobile is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine and the Village Voice and is known for his scathing criticism of public figures. A teacher at Brooklyn's Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Nobile was assigned to a rubber room in 2007, "supposedly for pushing a boy while I was breaking up a fight." He contends the school system is retaliating against him for exposing wrongdoing. He is spending his time working on his case and writing magazine articles and a novel. "This is what happens to political prisoners throughout history," he said, alluding to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "They put us in prison and we write our `Letter From the Birmingham Jail.'"

SOURCE




Trendy British teaching is 'producing a generation of history numbskulls'

A generation of teenagers know almost nothing about the history of Britain because schools are sidelining knowledge in favour of trendy topics and generic skills, a university academic has warned. Professor Derek Matthews, an economics lecturer at Cardiff University, was so concerned at his students' lack of historical knowledge that he decided to investigate by setting them five simple questions. Over three years, 284 UK-educated first-years took the test, which demanded basic knowledge the professor believes 'every 18-year-old should know'.

But just one in six - 17 per cent - knew that the Duke of Wellington led the British army in the battle of Waterloo. And only one in ten could name a single 19th century British prime minister. In total, the students answered just 26.7 per cent of questions correctly - just over one in five. Students with A*s or As in history GCSE fared little better, answering just a third correctly. Those with A-level history got just two in five right.

In a later report on the 'death' of school history teaching, Professor Matthews said levels of ignorance among the young were an 'outrage' that 'should be intolerable'. His finding was highlighted by Tory schools spokesman Michael Gove as he pledged to 'completely overhaul' the curriculum to restore a focus on knowledge and ensure pupils are given a proper grounding in science, maths, British history and literature. This would entail tearing up the Government's planned new curriculum for primary schools that merges stand-alone subjects into six 'areas of learning'.

Mr Gove also pledged a major shake-up of the education watchdog-Ofsted amid fears it is losing focus on academic standards. The body will be ordered to bear down more heavily on weaker schools and move away from inspecting schools for success in promoting 'well-being' and other 'fuzzy, fashion-driven, intangibles'. 'Under this Government we have seen a decisive move away from valuing rigorous subject teaching and education as a good in itself,' Mr Gove told the Prince's Teaching Institute yesterday.

Professor Matthews, who lectures in economic history, tested firstyear undergraduates reading history in 2006, 2007 and 2008. He recounted in his report how students in a typical tutorial had never heard of the Reformation and did not know what was meant by the term Protestant. One thought Martin Luther was an American civil rights leader. His students were probably in the top 15 per cent of their age group for educational success.

'This implies that, all things being equal, 85 per cent of my undergraduates' age group know even less than they do. 'In other words, we are looking at a whole generation that knows almost nothing about the history of their (or anyone else's) country.' He added: 'This is an outrage and should be intolerable.'

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2 July, 2009

British teachers to be fired under new classroom licence plan

A good start -- but expect very weak-kneed enforcement

Teachers will need a licence to enter the classroom and face being banned if they cannot renew it every five years, the Government said yesterday. The radical move, in a White Paper put before the Commons yesterday, will be widely seen as an attempt to weed out incompetent teachers and to stop bad teachers being shunted from school to school. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, indicated that he expected some teachers to fail their renewal. “It may be that we will discover some teachers who do not make the grade, and some who aren’t relicensed,” he said.

Newly qualified teachers would get a licence to teach from September. All teachers returning to the profession will go through the process from September next year, and supply teachers will be targeted after that. Eventually all teachers will need a licence.

Experts have estimated that more than 20,000 teachers are not fit to do their jobs, with one or two in each school. Heads privately complain that it is virtually impossible to sack poorly performing teachers. Only ten teachers, out of a workforce of 500,000, have been fired for incompetence since 2001. Teaching unions attacked the plan for licences, saying that teachers already faced numerous accountability measures.

Mr Balls indicated his intentions in the Children’s Plan published in December 2007, in which he called on the General Teaching Council to root out teachers whose “competence falls to unacceptable low levels”.

Under the licence scheme, head teachers would provide written accreditation for teachers every five years, vouching for their ability, and the General Teaching Council would conduct an annual audit of about 5 to 10 per cent of teachers. The licence would go hand in hand with entitlement to professional development so that teachers could keep up with the latest teaching methods and technology.

Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “Teachers’ capacity and practice are persistently under review. It is not clear to me that head teachers will welcome an additional responsibility to relicense their teachers every five years.”

The licence was one of several radical reforms announced by Mr Balls in the White Paper. These include report cards, which will grade schools from A to F across a range of measures, including academic performance, children’s wellbeing and parental satisfaction.

Local authorities will also be forced to consult parents about whether they are happy with schools, and set out a plan of action if the results are negative. Parents will have to sign up to the school’s behaviour rules and reiterate this commitment each year. If it is breached, they could face a courtimposed parenting order or a fine.

SOURCE




In One Room, Many Advantages

The 'little red schoolhouse' of legend, whatever its flaws, made more sense than the warehouse-schools of today

Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother's one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the "little red schoolhouse" itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of "Small Wonder." Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell "how -- and why -- the little red schoolhouse became an American icon." Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher.

First, the chromatic debunking: One-room schools were often white and seldom red. The teachers were usually young unmarried females, pace the most famous one-room schoolteacher in literature, Ichabod Crane. They swept the floor, stoked the stove, rang the hand-bell and taught their mixed-age students by rote and recitation. The schools could be a "cauldron of chaos," in Mr. Zimmerman's alliteration, as tyro teachers were tormented by Tom Sawyers dipping pigtails in inkwells and carving doggerel into desks.

Yet these one-room schools, Mr. Zimmerman notes, were "a central venue for community life in rural America." They hosted plays and dances and box socials and spelling bees and Christmas pageants.

In 1913, Mr. Zimmerman says, "one-half of the nation's schoolchildren attended one of its 212,000 single-teacher schools." By 1960, progressive educationists, growing cities and the centralizing pressures of two world wars and a Cold War had reduced the total to just 1%.

The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school." Typically, two Delaware school-consolidators informed the hicks that "modern education . . . is less romantic and more businesslike, more formal, more exact, more specialized, done according to tested methods and a standard schedule." Such grim exactitude sounded like prison to parents used to the comparatively anarchic and localized governance of rural schools.

Progressives worshipped "efficiency," Mr. Zimmerman observes, a word that to country people "conjured up a bloodless, impersonal system that buried small-town traditions and idiosyncrasies in a maze of regulations and policies." Big was better than small, asserted the consolidators. Riding the bus to a new school over "good roads" -- the highway and automobile industries lobbied for consolidation -- was superior to walking (how old-fashioned!) to a nearby school. A system in which parents and neighbors had a say in the education of a community's children was judged incapable of keeping up with the ever-accelerating improvement of the human species.

The propaganda mills worked overtime. New Deal photographers snapped pictures of decrepit one-room shacks and contrasted these premodern blights with the spotless (if sterile) multistory consolidated schools. City journalists who knew nothing of rural life (except that it was retrograde) fanned out over the countryside, filing stories suggesting that the young 'uns in Dog Patch were larnin' that the world was flat and toothbrushing was one of Satan's snares.

The one-room school was "neither as rundown as critics claimed nor as bucolic as defenders imagined," Mr. Zimmerman writes. But its champions understood its flaws. They were defending the principles of local autonomy and human-scale democracy. Mr. Zimmerman quotes a "rural mother" who lamented: "Individuality will be lost, the pride taken in 'our' school and 'our' teacher gone. Haven't the parents who bear the children anything to say?"

Not in the consolidated schools they didn't, except in PTA debates over which kind of brownies to sell at the bake sale. "Thousands of rural parents did resist consolidation," Mr. Zimmerman says; they struggled to save the one-room symbols of "their vanishing local communities." But true to Joni Mitchell's lyric, the rest of America didn't know what it had till it was gone.

By World War II, the little red schoolhouse whose razing had been a New Deal project became a symbol of homefront democracy. In the 1960s, some liberals praised the one-room school of yore as "the precursor to group learning" and "open classrooms" -- daily Bible reading not included. At the same time some conservatives extolled its alleged (and exaggerated) hickory-stick discipline.

Decades after consolidation had obliterated one-room schools, researchers discovered their advantages. The child in the small school is not just a statistic on a government chart. She receives "individual attention and recognition." She works at her own pace. She has, most important, a place. As Mr. Zimmerman remarks, recent alternatives to "the large, alienating modern school," from charter schools to homeschooling, have sought to foster "the snug, communal aspects of the one-room school." But the one-room-school model entails community control, which liberals and conservatives alike resist if the "community" sings from the wrong hymnal.

The idealization of the little red schoolhouse, Mr. Zimmerman concludes, reflects a rueful awareness that in modernity Americans "gained the whole world of technological conveniences and lost the soul of their communities."

Even after Mr. Zimmerman's unsentimental accounting of its defects, the one-room school shines in comparison with the over-large and remotely controlled warehouses in which too many children are educated today. Reading "Small Wonder," one wonders if Americans will ever tire of chasing after the gods of Progress and Bigness and rediscover the little things, red schoolhouses among them, that once gave us our soul.

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Australia: "League tables" and NSW school-reporting policy

Below is an article from Jennifer Buckingham of the Centre for Independent Studies. Her line is very much that of the teachers' unions. She supports the covering up of some kinds of information about schools: Very disappointing from a free-market think-tank. At the foot of the article I reproduce a letter from a teacher who is also surprised by her views

The Federal Government confirmed last year that it would be making good on its election promise to introduce transparency measures for all schools, including publicly reporting school-level performance in national tests, year 12 results, and a range of other information.

The main concern the critics of this policy have is the potential for media outlets to mine this information to create and publish "league tables" - lists of schools ranked from "best" to "worst" by a single performance indicator. This has been the experience in other countries, and fears that it may happen here were realised when a Tasmanian newspaper recently published school rankings of the newspaper's own creation.

It is important to make one thing clear: school-performance reporting and league tables are not the same thing. School-performance reporting, done properly, is a way to empower parents and make them informed participants in their child's education.

Under the new federal reporting protocols, people will be able to look up any school and see how it has performed in national tests and get information about teacher and student characteristics, among other things. They can see how that school's performance compares with the state average and "like schools". By looking up several schools they will be able to compare the schools in their area, but this comparison will not be provided to them as a list or ranking. It is up to people to compare individual schools and draw their own conclusions.

League tables, on the other hand, are lists or rankings of schools based on a single indicator, without reference to context or location. They are a potential by-product of providing parents and the public with information. They are often misleading, are not useful and can be harmful to the schools at the bottom of the rankings. Some schools may deserve to be there, but others will not.

Opponents of school-performance reporting have used the spectre of league tables to argue against it, but this did not stop the state and territory education ministers agreeing on the policy. To comply with this federal agreement, NSW had to amend legislation put in place in 1997 that prohibited the publication of information that allowed schools to be compared on academic performance. Last week a bill was passed in the NSW parliament to do just that. The amendment will allow a new national federal agency, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, to publish the academic outcomes of individual schools.

The Greens argued fervently against the amendment, but obviously had already seen the writing on the wall. Knowing that the amendment would pass, the Greens introduced a clause to the amendment in the last half hour of the debate, which they had previously drafted with the help of the Coalition. The clause attempts to prevent the publication of league tables in "a newspaper or other document that is publicly available in this state". The clause also prohibits the identification of schools "in a percentile of less than 90 per cent in relation to school results, except with the permission of the principal of the school".

The Labor MP Penny Sharpe put up little defence, saying the clause was "well-intentioned but utterly futile". Sharpe argued that it was questionable whether print media would comply, and there was no jurisdiction over the internet. She also raised the possibility that it might also have negative consequences for school systems and associations publishing their own comparisons or school profiles.

There was little debate about the clause and it passed with a majority of five votes. This anti-league table clause seems, on the surface, to have discarded the bath water while retaining the baby. It would be nice to think legislation could solve misuse of information, but it is doubtful. In this case the compromise position may be unacceptable. If the clause is ineffective, school league tables will be published anyway.

This will mean a missed opportunity to draft legislation that might have been more effective in protecting schools from spurious claims about their performance by over-zealous media outlets.

Alternatively, the clause may be too effective, preventing any comparative information being produced even for a small audience, undermining the positive effect of the school-reporting policy. If misleading league tables can be avoided they should be, but not at the expense of parents' right to know. Time will tell if, in its haste to pass the amendment, the NSW parliament has betrayed this principle.

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A polite letter to Ms Buckingham from a reader

I read your article in the SMH Online website and I had to look twice to be sure it said you were from the CIS that I subscribe to.

Your point appears to be that while you don't oppose the release of information for parents, you do object to it's publication in newspapers on the basis the information might be presented in a simplistic way. Indeed you quote an example from Tasmania. In my experience of league tables - i.e. Times Education Supplement - such league tables attempt to apply all factors in a weighted manner. I haven't seen an example of a one factor league table although I don't deny that it can happen.

You appeared to be arguing for laws which attempt to legislate against the misuse of information. That would appear to be dangerous ground for a fellow at the CIS whose philosophy I would have thought was that freedom of information is more important than protecting the public from its misuse. Where information is misused it is easily refuted and the source so discredited, I might have thought.

When it comes to education, in my limited experience, parents often do not make rational decisions anyway, but the provision of information on the multilevel performance of schools I would have thought to be a useful anitdote the present atmosphere of enforced egalitarianism that forced me, in 1959, to attend a run-down, indequately set-up junior technical high school with its cadre of motivated and unmotived, professional and incompentant, but generally poorer teachers than the intermediate technical school or even higher level high school that my efforts might have deserved before before Harold Wyndham had his way.

Fortunately, many of my classmates, who will be marking the 50th anniversary of our entrance to Jannali Boys' High School this year, went on to make a mark on our society, despite the handicap.

Encouraging schools to lift their game by publishing outcomes, I believe, can only serve to ensure that there should be no gap between state and private schools, and that they, and their teachers thus deserve the increased funding coming their way in Rudd's Education Revolution. As a profession I believe teachers, of whom I am now one, should have an obligation to use one month of their generous annual leave for upgrading their professional skills in the same way other professional are. But that's another story!

Again thank you for your thoughts on this matter. But I do hope they don't represent the position of the CIS!





1 July, 2009

Too much of a “good thing”

Even if the "stimulus" package doesn't seem to be doing much to stimulate the economy, it is certainly stimulating many potential recipients of government money to start lining up at the trough. All you need is something that sounds like a "good thing" and the ability to sell the idea.

A perennial "good thing" is education. So it is not surprising that leaders of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities have come out with an assertion that "the U.S. should set a goal of college degrees for at least 55 percent of its young adults by 2025."

Nothing is easier in politics than setting some arbitrary goal— preferably based on numbers— and go after it, in utter disregard of the costs or the repercussions. That is how we got into the housing boom and bust, by mindlessly pursuing ever-higher statistics of home ownership. The same political game can be played by making ever higher miles per gallon the goal for automobiles, ever more "open space," ever more— you name it.

Sometimes these open-ended political crusades can be given some semblance of rationality by referring to other countries that have bigger numbers in whatever is the goal du jour.

The representatives of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities point to the fact that, in countries like Canada, Korea and Japan, "more than 50 percent of young adults hold college degrees" while only 41 percent do in the United States.

No reason is given why one of these numbers is better than another. Apparently the implicit assumption is that education is a "good thing" that it is always better to have more of. But, if that is the case, why 55 percent rather than 75 percent, 95 percent or 100 percent?

Even food is not a "good thing" categorically, without limit. We can't live without it but, beyond some point, it causes obesity and shortens our lives.

A certain amount of education is undoubtedly very beneficial for some people but, at some point, enough is enough, even for geniuses. For each individual, depending on that individual's interests and dedication as well as ability, the time comes to leave the classroom and go out into the real world.

It is not just dummies who reach the point when it makes sense for them to "drop out" of education. Michael Dell of Dell computers and Bill Gates of Microsoft both dropped out of college, and neither of them seems to be doing badly.

Given the composition of the population as it is— which is always what we have to start with— what evidence is there that too few or too many are going to college?

As someone who spent years teaching at colleges and universities for students who ranked in the country's top 10 percent, I nevertheless encountered many students whose interest in intellectual matters was less than overwhelming, to put it charitably.

Many were bright enough but often gave the impression that they would rather be somewhere else, doing something else. Some of their teachers also thought that they should be somewhere else, doing something else.

During my first semester of teaching, my grading standards caused most students like that to transfer out by the second semester. Teaching the other students during the second semester was a sheer joy and I continued to get letters from them over the years, even after I had moved on to other institutions. In other words, the departure of the dead wood made the class better.

Far weightier evidence than anecdotal personal experiences, however, are the statistics on how many students actually graduate. The American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank, has recently published statistics on what percent of a given college's students manage to graduate in the course of six years.

There are colleges where at least four-fifths of the students graduate in that time and other colleges where at least four-fifths of the students fail to graduate in that time.

Considering the enormous costs of maintaining a student in college— whether that cost is paid by parents, the taxpayers, or the students themselves— an open-ended call for "more" seems like too many other open-ended commitments that have run up record national debts without any corresponding benefits.

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Tenure and Academic Freedom

College campuses display a striking uniformity of thought.

All over the country, colleges and universities are feeling the financial crunch: Endowments are down, students can't afford to pay tuition, and some state legislatures are even trimming higher-education budgets. Unfortunately, thanks to the recent ruling of a judge in Colorado, some college administrators have just lost one way to keep their costs under control.

In 2003, the board of trustees of the Metropolitan College of Denver -- a public school in Colorado -- changed the school's handbook to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty in case of financial exigency. Under the current system at Metro College and elsewhere, some professors who have been at an institution for a period of about seven years are eligible for a job for life. They can technically be fired for gross misbehavior or incompetence. But once they've been granted tenure, a university is generally stuck with these teachers. And paying the salaries of tenured professors can add up, especially when a professor may no longer be teaching many classes either because of laziness or lack of student interest in his or her field.

In response to the handbook change, five Metro College professors sued. They claimed that the terms of their employment had been significantly altered. The state district court ruled in favor of the trustees. That decision was appealed -- with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) filing an amicus brief -- and in 2007 a state appeals court ordered a new trial. In its brief, the AAUP argued that "depriving the tenured faculty of a preference in retention places the tenured faculty at greater risk of being singled out" because of an administrator's or trustee's dislike for his teaching or research, or for positions taken on public issues.

The results of that new trial came down earlier this month. Rather than simply deciding that the change in the handbook altered what was a "vested right" of the professors, Denver District Judge Norman D. Haglund ruled that "the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor academic freedom over tenure systems that favor flexibility in hiring or firing." He also noted that "by its very nature, tenure promotes a system in which academic freedom is protected."

Talk about judicial overreach. But does tenure, as the judge argues, actually protect academic freedom?

In the AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles, progressive educator John Dewey wrote that "if education is the cornerstone of the structure of society and progress in scientific knowledge is essential to civilization, few things can be more important than to enhance the dignity of the scholar's profession." That dignity, Dewey explained, was to be enhanced by tenure. To protect academics from arbitrary dismissal, as well as to attract smart people to the profession, schools offered a certain amount of job security.

But higher education has changed a lot in the past hundred years. And while there is no doubt that schools like Metro College serve a useful function -- teaching vocational skills and offering remedial classes to students who have failed to get a decent K-12 education -- its faculty is not exactly in the business of passing on knowledge essential to civilization. Some of the courses taught this year by the professors who sued include American Baseball History and Business Statistics. The school even offers a nutrition major. These are all fields of study that have fairly definitive answers. Faculty members don't really need the freedom to ask controversial questions in discussing them.

But what about those teachers who are pursuing higher truths? Has tenure really protected their ability to question and research freely? For the most part, no.

The truth is that tenure has served as an instrument of conformity since tenure votes are often glorified popularity contests. The fact that university professors donated to President Obama's campaign over John McCain's by a margin of eight to one is only the tip of the iceberg. Those professors who want tenure and disagree with the prevailing trends in their field -- or the political fashions outside of it -- know that they must keep their mouths shut for at least the first seven years of their careers.

Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once famously advised a conservative colleague to wait until he had tenure and only then to "hoist the Jolly Roger." But few professors are getting around to hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either they don't have a viewpoint that is different from their colleagues, or they've decided that if they are going to remain at one place for several decades, they'd rather just get along.

Is tenure to blame for the unanimity of thinking in American universities? It's hard to tell. But shouldn't the burden of proof be on the people who want jobs for life?

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Australia: Queensland teachers can fail literacy, numeracy test

Talk about the blind leading the blind! It's bad enough that some kids go right through primary school without learning to read and write but having teachers that bad is really the end of the road. It shows how desperate the government is to find people willing to stand up in front of an undisciplined mob day after day

Graduate teachers will be allowed to repeatedly fail a new test of their literacy and numeracy skills and still be let loose in Queensland classrooms. The State Government will not cap the number of times the test can be taken and will register graduates as teachers as long as they eventually pass. The landmark new test, recommended by education expert Geoff Masters, is being introduced to improve the low standards of Queensland students.

Premier Anna Bligh said it was fair to allow graduates to sit the test repeatedly because they may be sick [Sheet! No matter how sick I am I can still spell!] or have other excuses for their poor showing. "I don't anticipate there would be any limit on the number of times someone can sit, as long as they can ultimately meet the standard," Ms Bligh said. "I think we understand that there are sometimes reasons why people don't do well in tests. They might know the information but might not be well that day. "You would still want to give them the opportunity to demonstrate that, but it wouldn't be the same test."

The Government is yet to figure out what would constitute a pass mark for the tests [It will undoubtedly be low], which will judge proficiency in literacy, numeracy and science. However, a trial will be conducted next year before the official introduction of testing for primary school teaching graduates at the end of 2011 at the earliest. Tests for high-school teaching graduates will be introduced at a later date.

Current teachers will avoid the tests but those transferring from interstate will have to sit the exam before they can practise in Queensland. The Queensland College of Teachers will be responsible for developing and administering the tests.

In his report, Professor Masters found there had been an "absolute decline" in literacy and numeracy between 2004 and 2007. Meanwhile, teachers are ramping up their campaign for higher pay, with a vote today likely to call for further industrial action. The Government has offered teachers a 12.5 per cent pay increase over three years. However, the union has insisted the amount was unacceptable. [The government should fire the lot of them and bring in local retired people to teach. They would know a lot more than the current crop of teachers]

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