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30 June 2005

Give Africa a private schooling

Poor African children benefit more from independent schools than government ones for a fraction of the cost. Why are aid groups and pop stars against them?

"On BBC's Newsnight last week the international development secretary Hilary Benn showcased free primary education (FPE) in Kenya - supported by $55m from the World Bank and 20m pounds from the British government - as the shining example of aid to Africa not being wasted. He's not the only one clutching at this example for reassurance: Bill Clinton told an American television audience that the person he most wanted to meet was President Kibaki of Kenya, "because he has abolished school fees", which "would affect more lives than any president had done or would ever do . . ."

When Gordon Brown visited Olympic primary school, one of the five government schools located on the outskirts of Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya and in Africa, he told the gathered crowds that British parents fully supported their taxpayers' money being used to provide free places at that school. Bob Geldof and Bono rave about how an extra 1m-plus children are now enrolled in primary school in Kenya. All these children, the accepted wisdom goes, have been saved by the benevolence of the international community - which must give $7 to $8 billion per year more so that other countries can emulate Kenya's success.

The accepted wisdom is wrong. It ignores the remarkable reality that the poor in Africa have not been waiting, helplessly, for the munificence of pop stars and western chancellors to ensure that their children get a decent education. Private schools for the poor have emerged in huge numbers in some of the most impoverished slums and villages in Africa. They cater for a majority of poor children and outperform government schools, for a fraction of the cost.

My research has found this in Kenya - where the international community might excuse the inadequacy of state education as a blip while free primary education beds down. But it's as true in Ghana and Nigeria too - where free primary education has been around for a long time, supported by generous handouts from the British government and the World Bank.

In the poor areas of Lagos State, Nigeria - the same is true in poor areas of Ghana - my research teams combed slums and villages and found 70% or more of all schoolchildren in private school, more than half in schools unregistered and therefore unacknowledged in any official statistics. In the teeming shantytown of Makoko alone, where 50,000 people live, many in wooden houses built on stilts sunk into the dark waters of the Lagos lagoon, we found 32 private schools serving some 4,500 children (75% of those in school from Makoko) from families of impoverished fishermen and fish traders, and all off the state's radar.

Parents gave the same litany of complaints about government schools, that teachers don't turn up, or if they do they don't teach. I visited the three government primary schools on the outskirts of Makoko; although my visit was announced, and I came with the commissioner of education's representative, I saw the headmistress beating children to get them into the classrooms, and found one teacher fast asleep at his desk. The welcoming chorus of the children didn't rouse him.

The commissioner's representative, however, described parents who send their children to the mushrooming private schools as "ignoramuses", wanting the status symbol of private education (saying this, without irony, standing by her brand new silver Mercedes), but hoodwinked by unscrupulous businessmen. "They should all be closed down," she told me. At least she admitted that these schools existed - the British government's representative, co-ordinating the Department for International Development's 20m pounds of aid (all to government schools) denied flatly that private schools for the poor exist.

But was the commissioner's representative right about the low quality in the mushrooming schools? We tested 3,000 children in maths and English, from government and private schools, controlled for background family variables, and found that the children in the unregistered private schools, so despised by the government, achieved 14 percentage points higher in maths and 20 percentage points higher in English than children in government schools. Teachers in the government schools were paid at least four times more than those in the unregistered schools. The private schools were far more effective for a fraction of the cost.

More here



Australian parents to receive reports on schools

Over opposition from teachers, of course

A move by one state to issue detailed school reports allowing parents to compare the performance of schools, teachers and students looks set to revolutionise Australian education. The decision by NSW is expected to be followed by Victoria in the next few weeks, while other states are developing plans to enhance school reporting. NSW Premier Bob Carr yesterday unveiled the new school reports which will gauge student performance in statewide tests and attendance as well as teacher qualifications, and will go to every state-school parent. The reports will be trialled next year in 50 schools for implementation across the state in 2007. "This is the biggest ever reform to the way schools report their performance back to parents," Mr Carr said. "These new annual reports will allow parents to compare the performance of their child's school against similar schools and schools across the state. "It will become a vital tool in how parents decide the best school for their children."

NSW state schools have been reporting to the community since 1996, but those documents do not allow parents from different schools to compare school performance and school management. Now, for the first time, parents will be able to see how many teachers are leaving the school as well as how often they attend.

The NSW Teachers Federation immediately opposed the reporting of staff attending, claiming that absent staff in 500 small schools could easily be identified. Federation president Maree O'Halloran described the reports as a breach of the industrial award and an "act of contempt" for the Government's own Industrial Relations Commission.

Sharryn Brownlee, president of the Federation of Parents and Citizens' Associations of NSW, said the reforms had been driven by federal Government demands for better school reporting and would be welcomed by parents and parents' groups. "I really do understand the sensitivity of the teacher unions, especially with respect to privacy," she said. "But I also think the wider community needs to know and understand what happens to staffing in NSW schools and why it is that we do have high staff turnover in some schools. Staffing is a legitimate issue."

A NSW Government spokesman told The Australian that public reports grading individual students on their standing within the class were also under development and would be unveiled soon. The other states and territories are expected to follow NSW's lead and provide more information about student and staff performance in school reports in accordance with a precondition for $33billion in school funding from the federal Government.

Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson asked all states to sign up for a rigorous and accessible system of reporting to parents and agreement was reached last week. The agreement mandates that all schools will need to provide report cards in clear language and traditional grades of A-E.

Ted Brierley, national president of the Australian Secondary Principals' Association, said the states were being compelled to issue more detailed reports "because they want the (federal government) money". The association opposed the move towards individual student rankings, he said. "We're at risk of testing far too much. We're at risk of going down the same bad tracks as the USA and the UK which have caused immense dissatisfaction in the education community without improving students' performance."

Source

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

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

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

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29 June 2005

Lessons Not Learned in Publik Skools

If our modern-day government re-education camps, otherwise known as public schools, actually taught our kids about our nation's founding history, perhaps they would come across this quote by Thomas Jefferson: "A person once surrendering reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous." Government schools, especially those embracing "zero tolerance policies," have completely surrendered reason in their operations. Let me give you just three recent examples of "absurdities the most monstrous."

* In DeKalb County, Georgia, two high school honor roll girls were suspended for ten days for using a kitchen knife to cut a birthday cake brought in for a fellow classmate. They girls posed no threat to anyone, yet a teacher ratted them out for possession. As a result, they were barred from participating in their schools baccalaureate ceremony.

* In Bend, Oregon, a 14-year-old girl was given detention for giving her boyfriend a hug in the hallway of her Middle School. A spokeswoman for the school district assured the world that school officials weren't trying to be "the hug Nazis," but said the school had to be careful that students didn't make other "people uncomfortable."

* And in Frederick, Maryland, an 18-year-old senior was barred from attending her prom for being quoted in a local newspaper as saying she might drink alcoholic beverages at a party after the prom. Note: She wasn't barred for actually drinking; she was barred for thinking about and talking about drinking.

And these are just the tip of the "absurdities most monstrous" iceberg being foisted on our children by education apparatchiks in public schools these days. Everybody knows the public schools suck rotten eggs; however, the biggest problem is that white folks in the 'burbs think it's only the public schools in the ghettos which turn out modern-day Forest Gumps. "Their" public schools are different. Their kids can read and write (sort of). Why, their public school is ranked in the Top Ten compared to all the other schools in the area, don't you know. Well, here are two major problems with that line of thinking, and the republic is in serious jeopardy until parents wake up to these realities.

1.) Like it or not, for better or worse, our kids live in a global community today. Kids in Omaha aren't just competing with kids in Chicago any longer. They're competing with kids in England, Japan, Korea, China, Germany...and maybe even France. And not only are our kids failing to measure up against these developed-nation competitors, they're lagging behind kids coming out of many third-world countries, as well. It's one thing to compare your baseball team to the Bad News Bears. It's another thing altogether to be thrown up against the New York Yankees. Fortunately, our kids still lead the world in one category: self-esteem. They may stink in math and science, but at least they feel really, really good about themselves.

2.) It's not just learning how to read, write and add two-plus-two (the correct answer is four, no matter how good you feel about yourself) which make up an education - though it'd be nice if the government schools could at least reach that level of competence. It's learning HOW to learn. How to think critically and independently. How to use common sense. And dare I say it, how and when to challenge authority - especially government authority when Big Brother gets too big for its britches. But as you can see from just the three examples stated earlier, those are decidedly NOT the lessons being taught to our youth in government schools today. Instead, kids are being indoctrinated to submit willingly and meekly to authority. Not to step out of line, not even one little bit. To follow the rules without question. To forsake any notion of independent thought or action.

Our government schools today aren't about mind development. They're about mind control. Sure, many of the kids coming out of public schools in the 'burbs can right...er, write a complete sentence. But that sentence will likely only express ideas pre-approved my the Ministry of Politically Correct Thought. And that is the true danger of government-run schools - be they in the ghetto or the suburbs.

Private school choice, including home-schooling, is no longer an option. It's an imperative. Perhaps then, and only then, will our kids learn about our founding history and the "radical" ideas held by our Founders which made the United States the greatest and freest nation in history. Perhaps then they'll learn of Thomas Jefferson proudly proclaiming, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." In America today, such tyranny is being perpetrated on our youth by government schools, which more than deserve a little eternal hostility. Perhaps even a revolution.

Source



SCHOOLS ARE RUN FOR THE TEACHERS, NOT THE STUDENTS

Two Los Angeles-based radio talk show hosts almost put their finger on the problem with the public school system and why those who try to reform it run into brick walls. Here's how one of them put it: "It's like the only thing that matters is what's good for the adults, and not what's good for the kids." Bingo. It always comes back to this: the competing interests of the adults who work in the school system with those of the students supposedly served by that system.

The trouble was that the radio jocks – John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou – didn't go far enough in advancing that argument. Instead, they got hung up on what got them talking about education in the first place: a newspaper story about the $250,000 annual salary of a school superintendent in Southern California. It bothered the hosts that the superintendent was pulling down this hefty salary while students were being squeezed into portable classrooms.

Here's what should have bothered them: It's not just money, it's that this habit of putting adults first spills into everything. It helps explain why educators are quick to dig in and fight off any proposed reform, from testing to merit pay to fixing special education. You name it, and the reason that it's creating friction or meeting resistance is because it pits the interests of adults against those of children. And in the public school system, the adults run the show. I heard the same thing about 10 years ago during a frank and honest exchange with a Mexican-American school superintendent in Central California. He told me that the way the educational system was set up, everything is done – or, in case of reform efforts, often not done – to serve the adults who depended on that system for their livelihoods.

And I heard the same thing from departing San Diego Unified School Superintendent Alan Bersin, a hard-charging reformer who resigned recently after losing a shoving match with teachers unions and their allies on the school board. The thing is, Bersin is no pushover. A former U.S. attorney, he's a tough guy who has prosecuted corporate criminals and drug dealers and organized crime figures. You would think that, in him, the unions who barter and trade on what President Bush calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations" would have finally met their match. Think again. The more Bersin tried to hold schools accountable and set performance goals for students, the more the unions made him a target. He drafted a "blueprint" on how to raise student performance, and the unions leveled so much criticism against it – and against him – that before long, he was black and blue. Eventually, he lost favor with a majority of the five-member school board, and then it was only a matter of time before he was forced out.

Now Bersin is headed to Sacramento, having been appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to serve as California secretary of education. Recently, Bersin met with the editorial board of The San Diego Union-Tribune and shared some lessons he picked up from locking horns with those who fight for the status quo. Americans have to decide what they want from schools, he said. "Is public education going to be an enterprise that gives adults what they want for their jobs, or is it to be something that serves children?" he asked.

One thing that helps tip the balance in favor of the first option is the fact that teachers unions have their fingers in school board elections. I first heard about this insidious practice about a year ago when I spoke to a group of school board members about the federal education reform law, No Child Left Behind. After my talk, one of the members approached me and, trying to explain why the reaction had been so hostile, revealed that school board candidates often get contributions from teachers unions, which strongly oppose No Child Left Behind.

Bersin acknowledged that the unions contribute to school board elections in San Diego, though he said they were merely taking advantage of an "opportunity that the system provides them." That is too kind. Here's the drill. The unions scratch the backs of school board members, who reciprocate by scratching the eyes out of reformers like the superintendent – thus easing the pressure on teachers. That part of the education system isn't so complicated. In fact, it's as easy as ABC – as in Absolutely Broken & Corrupted.

Source

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

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

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

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28 June 2005

TIME FOR TEACHER TENURE REFORM

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as an action hero is only getting started. Last week, the top politician from the Golden State scheduled a November special election, giving voters the opportunity to consider a number of proposed ballot initiatives, including an education reform that would require teachers to work for five years, rather than the customary two, before gaining access to the job security of tenure. In addition, the measure would authorize school boards to dismiss even tenured faculty who receive two consecutive unsatisfactory performance evaluations. The reform arrives decades late, but still in time to combat the tyranny of incompetence that governs California public schools.

Tenure guarantees teachers mediation and due process should administrators attempt to fire them. Because of this, dismissals typically require legal proceedings averaging two years in duration and $200,000 in cost. Figures increase if the teacher appeals the judgment, as teacher unions fight tooth and claw to protect their members. Over the ten-year period from 1990 to 1999, Los Angeles Unified School District—the second largest in the nation—dismissed only one teacher.

The tenure practice began in California in the 1920s, the era of the Scopes Monkey Trial and the fight over evolution. At the time, tenure was a natural means of offering much-needed job security in an uncertain academic climate. But now that free speech rights have been expanded to protect the right of teachers to discuss controversial topics in the classroom, the challenge is not how to shield school employees from state politics, but state politics from school employees.

Limiting the protections of teacher tenure would enforce proficiency among both newer, unseasoned teachers and veterans of the system. Sub-par teachers would face longer periods of vulnerability in their early years on the job, translating into more opportunity for local districts to discover and correct inadequacy in their educational workforces. Those teachers who have become ineffective—and, in a few sad cases, senile—with age could be removed before inflicting irreparable harm on their students.

Perhaps most tragic is the disproportionate harm inflicted upon the children of the least privileged. Parents active in their local schools will lobby for the removal of incompetent teachers from their children’s classrooms, but because tenure presents an insurmountable obstacle to dismissal, administrators move these teachers rather than fire them. Eventually, they gravitate to schools in low-income areas, oftentimes populated by immigrant families, where parents are less likely to be vocal about their dissatisfaction with teachers. Those most in need of a quality education become those least likely to receive it.

Ironically, minimizing tenure actually improves the quality of the teacher applicant pool. While critics argue that tenure is necessary to attract new teachers to the profession, talented young people are more likely to become educators if the system rewards merit. When all teachers, good and bad, are treated equally, the mediocre stand to gain the most, and those are precisely the individuals enticed by tenure promises. Quality teachers need not fear for their jobs, but they may be put off by what they see as a misallocation of resources to their unqualified peers.

Defenders of the current tenure system often cite job security as a means of focusing teachers’ attention on their students. Education suffers, they argue, when teachers are concerned about the future of their careers. Such logic ignores the incredible productivity of the private sector, which lacks such safeguards. Were there a link between performance and job security, private businesses would have been issuing tenure to their employees for years simply in order to remain competitive. Unsurprisingly, they do not.

Source



Split Over Schools . . .

Parents want higher standards than teachers

The good news is that the American public values education so highly that it is prepared to support almost any sensible reform that promises to improve the quality of grade schools and high schools.

The bad news is that the people teaching in those schools are deeply opposed to current reform efforts and skeptical of the basic premise that all students should be measured by the same high standards.

Those are the paradoxical lessons I draw from a briefing this week on a comprehensive survey of parents, educators and the general public sponsored by the Educational Testing Service and conducted jointly by the polling firms of Peter D. Hart, a Democrat, and David Winston, a Republican.

As for the value of education, when asked to identify from a list of five options the single greatest source of U.S. success in the world, the public education system edged out our democratic system of government for first place, with our entrepreneurial culture, military strength, and advantages of geography and natural resources far behind.

A plurality of parents gave a B grade to their own children's school and a C to the country's schools. When given a brief description of the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration's school reform program, parents, by 45 percent to 34 percent, viewed it favorably. That may not seem like much of an endorsement, but it came after a year of increased controversy and criticism of the program, from some conservatives and many Democrats, and represented a slight improvement from last year.

But high school teachers were decidedly more negative, rating the legislation unfavorably by a ratio of 75 percent to 19 percent. When asked if the basic approach of that law should be extended to high school by requiring states to set standards and test students in grades nine through 12, more than four out of 10 parents said they strongly favored it, but an equal portion of high school teachers was strongly opposed.

More troubling, from the viewpoint of reformers, is the gap between teachers and the public on the question of performance standards for students. Those polled were asked to choose between the view that all students, teachers and schools should be held to the same standard of performance because it is wrong to have lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the contrary view that they should not be held to the same standard because we should not expect teachers working with disadvantaged students to have them reach the same level of performance on standardized tests as teachers in more affluent schools.

More than half of the parents favored the single standard, but only one-quarter of the high school teachers agreed.

These differences help explain why the two big teachers unions and the Bush administration have been at odds over the implementation of No Child Left Behind.

The implications for the effort to improve the schools are pretty negative. Realistically, change in the classroom depends first and foremost on what teachers are willing and able to do. Change can be coerced only up to a point. If what President Bush has called the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is viewed by most teachers as a realistic appraisal of some students, that negative message will pervade the schools.

Fortunately, there are other findings in the poll that offer more encouragement. Parents agreed with teachers that problems in the broader society affect the schools and cannot be solved entirely within the classroom. While current federal standards rely primarily on achievement tests in evaluating school performance, and some educators argue that it would be better to measure year-to-year progress of students, large majorities of parents and teachers said that both measures were important and should go into the evaluations.

They also agreed that the work of improving elementary schools is far from finished and that reforming those schools should have priority over moving on to the high schools. Fewer than one in five teachers or parents would switch the priority to high schools at this point.

When it comes to high schools, there is broad agreement that real-world, work-related experiences are important and that the problem of dropouts is critical. But parents are much more likely than teachers to believe that expectations and standards are set too low and that students are not sufficiently challenged. An earlier survey by Achieve Inc., a private business group, reported that only 24 percent of recent high school graduates said they faced challenging standards.

Clearly the educators and the public are on different wavelengths when it comes to conditions in our schools. That is a real barrier to progress.

Source

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

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

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

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27 June, 2005

VIRGINIA ACCEPTS TEACHERS WHO CAN'T ADD UP

It doesn't say much for their other skills. The problem, of course, is that only desperates are willing to teach mush in undisciplined schools

The state Board of Education on Wednesday dramatically altered the way teachers are licensed by eliminating a basic skills test and replacing it with a more rigorous reading and comprehension exam. The result is that teachers will have to be more literate and proficient in the subjects they teach, but educators who do not teach math will no longer have to pass a math test. "We're trying to make sure every teacher who walks into a classroom knows their content area and is able to communicate well with students and with parents," said Board of Education President Thomas M. Jackson Jr. "You're losing some potentially excellent teachers in humanities because they're falling short in the math, and they haven't had math in some situations since their first year in college or before."

The board also decided that teachers who have not yet passed the new tests can spend only one year in the classroom on a provisional license. Previously, they were given three years. Teachers already holding a Virginia license or those with two years' experience and a license from another state will not be affected by the new requirements.

The No Child Left Behind law, which requires that every teacher be "highly qualified" by 2006, has prompted states to revisit their requirements to teach. So, too, has a national movement to make sure teachers are well versed in their subject areas and not just in educational techniques.

Essentially, the board voted to drop the requirement that all teachers pass the PRAXIS I exam, a skills test that includes reading, writing and math. Instead, they will have to pass a new "literacy and communications skills" exam that will be introduced in January. The new exam is intended to test reading and comprehension skills more rigorously than does the PRAXIS I, which is estimated to assess skills at an eighth- to 10th-grade level. In addition, teachers will still have to pass a higher-level exam in their subject areas.

Kate Walsh, president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, said she pushed for a new literacy test when she testified before a Virginia panel examining licensure requirements. Research has shown that the ability to read and speak effectively is the most reliable predictor of future success in the classroom, she said.

Sixteen other states require teachers to pass the commercially available PRAXIS I, but each state chooses its own passing grade, and for years, Virginia's has been the highest in the nation. As a result, there have been yearly horror stories from beloved teachers who find themselves unlicensed when they could not pass the test after three years.

Rhea Butler, a physical education and health teacher in Alexandria, was almost one of them. In her third year on the job, she took the PRAXIS I and failed the math section by one point. She raced to take the test over and over again before she would lose her position at Francis C. Hammond Middle School. As her anxiety grew, her score dropped. She finally passed on her sixth attempt last summer, just in time to be rehired for this year.

More here



LEFTIST UNEASE WITH SUCCESS AND EXCELLENCE ON DISPLAY AGAIN

We must pretend that people asre equal even if they are not

Today, San Ysidro Middle School will recognize 516 eighth-graders in a ceremony to promote them to high school, regardless of whether they passed middle school. More than a fourth of them did not. In today's ceremony, 143 students who either flunked classes, didn't earn at least a 2.0 grade-point average, or missed too many days of school will march alongside those who did everything required of them.

Several teachers at the school have protested in staff meetings that students who don't make the grade shouldn't walk in the ceremony. To them, it's a matter of holding students accountable. "If you don't earn it, you stay home," San Ysidro Middle counselor Rosemarie Ponce said. Ponce said she's heard administrators say that all students should be able to walk in today's ceremony because it might be the only graduation ceremony they'll ever have. Such low expectations won't help them earn a diploma four years from now, she said. "We'll never know what they can do unless we raise the bar," Ponce said.

San Ysidro School District board member Paul Randolph agreed. "If you put kids through a ceremony that recognizes and rewards them for attendance, for school performance that is really subpar, what message is that sending them?" he asked.

Principal Carolina Flores agreed that San Ysidro educators need to expect more of their students. The problem is that low expectations are being communicated daily in classrooms, not by universal inclusion in a promotion ceremony, she said. "I see people not really believing in them (students)," Flores said. Part of Flores' rationale in allowing all comers into the ceremony is that they're all being promoted and leaving the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade San Ysidro School District. No teacher at San Ysidro Middle has filed paperwork to hold back a single student.

That isn't unusual. Even in a district as large as San Diego, which in the late 1990s called for an end to social promotion - passing students to the next grade regardless of performance - retentions are relatively rare. In 2003, city schools held back 40 of their 10,253 eighth-graders, although more students were retained in other grades.

Flores said her decision to include everyone is not about excusing students who fail school. It may be, Flores said, that school is failing them. Once San Ysidro Middle students fall behind, their main chances to catch up are two eight-day intersessions during the school year, when other students are on vacation. That's not enough time, Flores said. It's also sometimes the wrong kind of help. A student who's failing math, for example, might get a social studies teacher for two weeks if that's the only teacher who signs on to work intersession. "We have kids that do not meet these requirements who for no fault of their own have not received intervention," Flores said. "Somebody's dropped the ball along the way."

Whether they walk in today's ceremony or not, all 516 students are going to high school next year. And the problem is much worse than the promotion statistics indicate. How many students met promotion criteria and how many walk in the ceremony are irrelevant statistics to Hector Espinoza, principal of San Ysidro High, where today's ceremony will take place. They'll all be his students next year. He just wants to know whether they're ready for ninth grade. He sent a team of teachers out to test middle school students, and they reported back to him that 70 percent of the incoming freshman class at San Ysidro High is not at grade level.

For this year's entering ninth-graders, San Ysidro High will have a small school within a school for struggling freshmen. The students will get extra math and English instruction and won't take an elective class. A team of teachers will concentrate on these ninth-graders to establish solid student-teacher connections.....

Ultimately, Flores said, better teaching at San Ysidro Middle is the way to end social promotion and eliminate dilemmas about who should participate in ceremonies. "There's a lot not happening in the classroom," the principal said. She said she has faced resistance to her policy of demanding that teachers regularly submit lesson plans to her, for instance. Flores is the fourth principal at San Ysidro Middle in five years, and she suspects the holdouts are waiting for her to move on. Flores said an eighth-grader recently asked her if she was going to beat the curse of the one-year principal. "It's been a revolving door and these people have been left on their own for so many years that there's no real accountability here," Flores said.

More here



A VIEW FROM THE UC BERKELEY IVORY TOWER

Post lifted from California Conservative

In an interview with the Contra Costa Times, discussing the topic of ending race-based admissions, UC Berkeley's undergraduate admissions director, Walter Robinson said:

Like Prop. 209 in California, the decision angered college administrators who believed racial considerations were integral to providing student bodies that represented a state's diverse population.

"It was like, `Where were you on 9/11?'" Robinson said of the announcement. "It was the same kind of pain. It cut that deep."

No, Walt. It's not the "same kind of pain" as 9/11, whereby 3,000 Americans lost their lives in the fiery blaze and collapse of WTC. It's not like crashing a commercial airplane to everyone's death. It's not like the horrors of terrorism. It's not like the butchery of civilians, the images of which shall forever be imprinted on the minds of all those who saw it. And New York's skyline will always be a reminder.

Prop. 209 was about ending preferential treatment based on race and gender. Ending reverse discrimination. (The proposition passed with California voters' approval)

Maybe if there'd been an attack and collapse of the ivory tower in which he dwells, Mr. Robinson might understand.

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

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

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

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



26 June 2005

COLLEGE IS A BAD INVESTMENT

Pouring more taxpayer money into universities doesn't lead to prosperity

When university presidents plead for government money, they often make an argument for social investment. Pump funds into higher education and the economy will grow, they claim. After all, this is an information- and skill-based age in which college graduates are far more productive than their less-educated peers. True. But the evidence suggests that increased public funding for universities doesn't lead to greater prosperity-and may even reduce the chances of it.

Compare the growth in real per capita income in states that spend a lot on higher education with that of states that spend less and a few surprises show up. Over the past 50 years low-support New Hampshire outdistanced neighboring Vermont on nearly any economic measure, though Vermont spent more than twice as much of its population's personal income on higher education (2.37% versus 1.15% in New Hampshire). Missouri, with modest state university appropriations (1.32% of personal income), grew faster than its neighbor to the north, Iowa (at 2.41%). Similar examples abound. Using data for all 50 states from 1977 and 2002, I compared the 10 states with the highest state funding for universities against the 10 states with the lowest. The result: The low-spending states had far better growth in real income per capita, a median growth of 46% compared with 32% for the states with the highest university spending. In 2000 the median per capita income level for the low-spending states was $32,777, 27% higher than the median for the 10 states where higher education got the most state money.

The results were the same when controlling for a state's oilfields or other energy sources, the age distribution of its population, the prevalence of labor unions, the tax climate and other factors that could affect growth-even the proportion of college graduates. This despite the fact that the states that were growing most quickly tended to have a high proportion of college graduates.

How could this be? Colleges have devoted relatively little new funding over the past generation to the core mission of instruction (spending only 21 cents of each new inflation-adjusted dollar per student on it), preferring instead to assist research, hire more nonacademic staff, give generous pay increases, support athletics and build luxurious facilities.

And while in the private sector companies have learned to get more work out of fewer employees, the opposite appears to have happened in higher education. In 1976 American education employed three nonfaculty professional workers (administrators, counselors, librarians, computer experts) for every 100 students; by 2001 that number had doubled.

Another piece of the puzzle: Only the weakest of positive correlations links funding level and enrollment. Even if students enroll, they don't necessarily finish school. Nearly 40% fail to graduate within five or even six years, suggesting that many who attend universities don't much benefit from them.

Yet another explanation is one Forbes readers know all too well. Taxes reduce private-sector activity. People who must pay high taxes tend to work and invest less and also tend to migrate to lower-tax areas. In other words, increasing funding to universities means transferring resources from the relatively productive private sector to higher education, which tends to be less productive and efficient.

So what should we do? College is still a decent individual investment, certifying that the graduate meets minimum standards (often missing in high school) for competence, intelligence, maturity and literacy. But we should rethink the nature and magnitude of public support for universities. State governments, facing rising Medicaid bills and demands for primary and secondary education funding, are already slashing their support. I hope and expect this trend to continue. Big changes are coming to higher education. They are overdue.

Source



PENNSYLVANIA: PROTEST OVER COMPULSORY INDOCTRINATION

The speaker of the state House urged the city school district to reconsider what he called an "unnecessary" requirement that high school students take an African-American history course in order to graduate. "I would like to see them master basic reading, writing and arithmetic," Speaker John Perzel said in a letter Tuesday to James Nevels, chairman of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission. "Once we have them down pat, I don't care what they teach. ... They should understand basic American history before we go into African-American history," he wrote.

Perzel, a Republican, questioned why one ethnic group is singled out in the curriculum. He urged a course of study focusing on "the many cultures" in the district, which is about 67 percent black, 14 percent Hispanic, 14 percent white and 5 percent Asian.

Nevels and Paul Vallas, the district's chief executive, were out of town and weren't available for comment, district spokesman Fernando Gallard said.

National education groups say no other school district they know of requires black studies. The requirement is to apply to the class of students entering high school this fall.

Sandra Dungee Glenn, a black member of the School Reform Commission who proposed the requirement, has said she hopes African-American history and that of other groups eventually could be taught within basic history courses. "What we are doing now in many ways is reacting to the removal of information that has left all of us poorly educated in a lot of ways," Dungee Glenn said. "I would like to think that the end point would be to offer sound courses that were all-inclusive. ... But we're not there yet." The course, already offered as an elective at 11 of the city's 54 high schools, covers topics including African civilizations, civil rights and black nationalism, and teachers say it has captivated students.

Source

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

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

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

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25 June 2005

WACKY STEINER/WALDORF SCHOOL COMES UNDER SCRUTINY

The theories underlying the school's methods are pretty wacky and mystical but that ensures heavy committment to the process by both parents and teachers. And teacher enthusiasm and committment will make almost any system work. So such schools are probably a good thing on balance. But it should be parents deciding that -- not the government

The Sacramento County Office of Education has challenged the "unique" approach to teaching by a Sacramento City Unified school, raising questions about whether unconventional educational methods can fit into a public school system increasingly shaped by state and federal testing programs. The Sacramento City Unified School District put Waldorf teaching methods in place at John Morse school in south Sacramento in 1998, and the district now has before it a plan to create a small high school dedicated to that same educational philosophy. Waldorf's approach is built on theories that say students should begin their education with play and imagination, and build into academic training in later grades. Waldorf schools incorporate music, art and movement into teaching. Students begin learning to read by listening to stories and acting them out - and don't actually start working with letters and sounds until the middle of first grade.

But in a scathing three-page letter to the Sacramento City Unified School District, county education officials say the "unique curriculum and educational philosophy" at John Morse have put it in direct conflict with state laws that dictate how, when and what public-school children learn. John Morse school "provides limited access to textbooks in the early grades and does not use the instructional materials otherwise adopted by the local governing board," county Superintendent David Gordon wrote after a team from his office audited the school. Textbooks required by law were lacking in almost every grade and almost every subject, Gordon said.

And the school teaches California's academic standards at a different pace than the state requires - more than half the state's English standards for kindergarten are not addressed at John Morse until first or second grade, Gordon found. Several standards for fourth grade are not taught until seventh grade. The pattern is evident at each grade.....

The school's principal argues that making John Morse more like most public schools - with a heavy focus on math and reading - would take away the reason parents choose it. "Nobody has ever questioned the issue of whether textbooks are the most effective method of instruction," Principal Cheryl Eining said. "Having spent 30 years in public education, I've seen a lot of children who had textbooks and were still not learning." ....

John Morse is not a charter school. But most public Waldorf schools in California are - about 17 Waldorf charters operate around the state. Maria Lopez, Sacramento City spokeswoman, said the district has not considered transforming John Morse into a charter because parents have not requested it. The district first embraced Waldorf 10 years ago by creating a program at Oak Ridge Elementary School. Some parents objected, saying it was too unorthodox and focused too much on myths and spirituality. It was moved to John Morse in 1998.

The question of whether Waldorf education contains a religious element has not gone away. Sacramento City Unified faces a September trial in federal court defending public funding of Waldorf schools against allegations that the program is religious.

Central to the educational approach formed in 1919 by Rudolf Steiner is the idea that students should not learn academic skills before they are neurologically ready, said Betty Staley, who taught in Waldorf schools for 25 years and now instructs teachers in the method at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks. "We're interested in children being healthy and loving learning," she said. "How we determine which skills should be taught at which age is based on developmental psychology."

Staley said Waldorf students ease into academics in the early grades but face a rigorous program by the time they reach middle and high school. That pattern is clear in test scores at John Morse. In math and English, Morse students score below their peers in Sacramento City Unified and statewide in second and third grade. But by fifth grade, they outperform them in reading and by sixth grade are ahead of other students in math.

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Almost 10,000 pupils expelled as violence against teachers escalates in dysfunctional British schools

Expulsions from schools are running at their highest for five years, government figures showed yesterday. Violence and threats against pupils and teachers accounted for almost half of the 9,880 expulsions last year, the Department for Education and Skills reported. Assaults also resulted in 85,000 suspensions from school in 2003-04. In all, 200,000 pupils were issued with 344,510 suspensions, with a hard core of 1,500 youngsters receiving at least eight each.

Ministers asked schools for the first time this year to say why they had excluded children. Persistent disruptive behaviour was given as the biggest single reason, leading to 3,040 expulsions and almost 91,000 suspensions. Attacks on pupils led to 1,720 expulsions and 69,020 suspensions. Assaults on adults also caused heads to exclude pupils in 17,000 cases. Verbal abuse and threatening behaviour by pupils resulted in 1,500 expulsions and 89,000 suspensions. Bullying led to 150 children being expelled and 6,750 suspended. Drug and alcohol-related incidents led to 610 expulsions, 6 per cent of the total, and 12,250 suspensions. Schools expelled 140 children for sexual misconduct and issued 3,080 suspensions.

The 6 per cent increase in overall expulsions comes at a time of heightened concern among parents and teachers about unruly behaviour. A government task force set up by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, to recommend ways of strengthening discipline met for the first time this week. Jacqui Smith, the School Standards Minister, said that there was no doubt that behaviour was causing concern in some schools. The Government was committed to a “zero-tolerance approach . . . on everything from backchat to bullying or violence”.

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EVEN THE UC CAN'T MAKE A SILK PURSE OUT OF A SOW'S EAR

The nation needs to "move toward another kind of affirmative action, one in which the emphasis is on opportunity and the goal is educational equity in the broadest possible sense," said Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California (UC) system, as he delivered the third annual Nancy Cantor Lecture on Intellectual Diversity May 18 in Rackham Auditorium...

Atkinson described ways in which UC responded to both the resolution by its board of regents in 1995 banning affirmative action in admissions, and Proposition 209 that outlawed its use in employment.

In its effort to maintain a diverse student community, UC reoriented outreach programs once targeted for underrepresented minorities to focus on low-performing high schools in order to qualify more African American, Latino and Native American students who are disproportionately represented in those schools; changed standardized admission test requirements to shift emphasis from aptitude tests to achievement tests; instituted comprehensive review of admissions applications; created a new path to admissions called Eligibility in Local Context, which made the top-performing 4 percent of each high school eligible for UC; and expanded transfer programs from community colleges.

There have been some positive results from these efforts, Atkinson reported. For instance, the percentage of underrepresented minorities in the UC system has begun to recover from a low point after the passage of Proposition 209.

"We have also increased the number and proportion of students from low-performing high schools, and the use of comprehensive review has created an admissions process that is fairer to students. Yet, if we look at enrollment overall, racial and ethnic diversity at the University of California is in great trouble," Atkinson said. "In 1995, UC Berkeley and UCLA enrolled 469 African Americans in a combined freshman class of 7,100. In 2004, the number was 218 out of 7,350.

"Despite enormous efforts, we have failed badly to achieve the goal of a student body that encompasses California's diverse population."

More here

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

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

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

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24 June 2005

California: Just Say No to Educational Failure

The teachers are better at thuggery than they are at teaching -- not that that's saying much

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently gave a fifteen minute commencement address to the graduates of Santa Monica College. He was forced to do so over the noise emanating from hundreds of protestors, an event which purportedly caused him to turn red and which has been amply covered by the news in recent days. Another protest against Schwarzenegger took place last March in San Jose; that one was attended primarily by students of East San Jose high schools. Organizers had to keep asking the students to step back. One woman irately screamed in response, "We've taken too many steps back!" Around the early part of June, one more near-riot against Schwarzenegger took place in the Silicon Valley. The union leaders who organized this particular event had to escort a limousine out of a crowd that was attempting to tip it over. (The crowd's hope was that the governor was inside; he was not).

The violence erupting in California today is reminiscent of the fascist squadrismo violence imposed on Italy during the early part of the 1920's. Led by local fascist leaders known as "ras" (after the Ethiopian word for chieftain), squadrismo sought to bring about political change through political violence and turmoil. In California, chieftains known as "teachers" and "union leaders" are attempting to mirror the Italians' highly effective methods of enacting "social justice."

The offending act of the governor is his backing of three ballot initiatives that call for imposing a cap on state spending, stripping lawmakers of the power to draw their own districts and increasing the time it takes teachers to gain tenure. Unfortunately, teachers in California are so incompetent that they can't get jobs in other fields or industries. They're forced to teach. Their livelihoods are dependent upon how much the government will pay them, and how quickly it will do so. Therefore, they see any proposal that limits their ability to quickly and effectively soak up tax dollars as an offense against humanity.

Currently, about half of California's budget, or $50 billion of $100 billion dollars, is consumed by education in the state. That's more than the entire operating budget of each of the forty-nine other states, including New York. Obviously, it's not enough. As Peter Schrag wrote for the Sacramento Bee, "Given California's substandard school funding, the Democrats' soak-the-rich tax increase proposal for education is amply justified and easily affordable for people who've just gotten the biggest federal tax cuts in history."

Another article, written by Raj Jayadev for AlterNet, reported on the actions of protesters at one demonstration: "First in Spanish, then in English to accommodate non-Hispanic union members, [protestors] stood shoulder to shoulder, chanting to the governor, `Nobody likes you!' It's a line usually aimed at the school bully; in this case, it was aimed at California's governor." Evidently, the union members and teachers who lead these demonstrations are no more mature than school-aged children who taunt each other. And it's a fact they tout with pride.

What are students getting out of all California's current funding, anyway? According to data from 2004, less than half of California students are proficient in English-language arts or math. Just 30% of third-graders were proficient in English, down 3 points from 2003. Only 35% of sixth-graders were proficient in math, up 1 point from 2003. Tenth-graders in 2004 also took the state's high school exit exam of English and math, a graduation requirement for the class of 2006. Seventy-five percent of them passed the English portion and 74% passed the math. (Why the astounding success, you may ask? It's because the test only covers up to 8th grade math and 10th grade English. Thankfully for the 26% who did not pass the exam, students who fail the first time have five more chances to pass between their sophomore and senior years.)

For the good job they're doing, teachers expect more. In St. Helena, for example, teachers are demanding a 6 percent salary increase in 2005-06. The district is only offering 2.5 percent, plus the possibility of another 2 percent.

California is proving what we already know; there is no correlation between funding and output. Paying teachers more "because they deserve it" is not an incentive to become more effective at their jobs.

Of course, incompetent teachers can't account for the entire problem. More than 1.3 million students had to take the annual administration of the California English Language Development Test (CELDT) in 2004. Only 47% of those who took it passed. That may not sound very good, but considering only 25% passed in 2001, it's a great success by the standards of California's educational bureaucracy. Foreigners who don't speak English and other such minor issues can be seen as complementing the educational dilemma.

California taxpayers have been markedly generous to their failed education establishment. Until someone gets around to actually making it work, it doesn't deserve more funding. One should never expect Californians to make good decisions regarding government, of course; but their schools will continue to serve as an example of socialist idealism at its worst.

Source



IF WE NEED GUINEA PIG SCHOOL SYSTEMS, HERE ARE TWO PROMISING ONES

If high per-pupil spending and widespread underachievement are two of the qualities that make a school system an ideal testing ground for vouchers, then Paterson, New Jersey and Baltimore, Maryland are two prime candidates, according to a pair of recently released studies. State Control of Schools Has Failed to Help Paterson, New Jersey Children: Why Not Choice Instead? by Don Soifer and Robert Holland of the Lexington Institute, and A School Voucher Program for Baltimore City by Dan Lips of the Maryland Public Policy Institute show how vouchers could help solve problems in the two towns.

In 1988, New Jersey became the first state to authorize its department of education to take control of failing local schools, Soifer and Holland note. Currently, the state is managing three school districts: Jersey City (since 1989), Paterson (since 1991), and Newark (since 1995). They are three districts that Derrell Bradford, deputy director of New Jersey's Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), describes as a collective "train wreck." "The people who run it know it's a business," Bradford said of the government schools. "It's a hugely unaccountable business that gets bigger and bigger and more powerful at the expense of the people who ultimately fund it and the kids."

In Paterson, the school district is 55 percent Hispanic, 37 percent African-American, 5 percent white, and 2 percent Asian. "Well over half of Hispanic students in many Paterson public schools are failing to reach proficiency in English and math, as shown by testing required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)," the authors write. Being run by the state apparently hasn't helped Paterson's students. The authors note, "while the state standard as part of the No Child Left Behind Act is for 68 percent of students to test at or above proficiency, only a little more than one-third of black children [in Paterson] reached that mark."

High school graduation rates also were found to be lagging in Paterson. At East Side High School, the 2003 graduation rate was 58.5 percent--30 points below the state average. The graduation rate in Paterson, as well as in the other state-controlled school districts, is even worse than the study indicates, Bradford said, thanks to New Jersey's alternative diploma program, known as the Special Review Assessment (SRA). If a student fails the state high school proficiency exam three times, he or she can take the much-easier SRA exam to get a diploma, Bradford said. Forty-two percent of one Paterson high school's graduating class obtained their diplomas through the SRA. Soifer thought school choice would work particularly well in Paterson because per-pupil spending is already high ($12,603 in 2002-03, 10 percent above the state average) and because of its proximity to nearby public school districts as well as a diverse selection of nearby private schools.

In March 1996, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke called for "dramatic" reform in the Baltimore school system and formed a task force to study "widespread choice among public schools or offering vouchers for private schools." Eight months later, the task force issued its final report. While its recommendations fell short of calling for private school vouchers, it did call for public school choice and legislation to create charter schools that would operate independently of Baltimore's school board, according to Lips' study.

Almost nine years later, no action has been taken on the Schmoke task force recommendations. Parents still have "no real school choice" in Baltimore, Lips concludes. The study identified the Baltimore school system's student academic achievement as its "first and most acute" problem. "The sad reality is that by the time a student reaches the tenth grade, he or she is only half as likely to be proficient in reading on the [Maryland State Assessment] if he or she lives in Baltimore City versus Baltimore County or elsewhere in the state," Lips writes. Baltimore is the nation's 17th largest city overall and has the seventh largest black population, said Leon Tucker, director of communications at the Black Alliance for Educational Options. "I think it's a much different conversation when you look at some of the demographics of Baltimore, and when you talk about the level of crisis in the city, you can't have this discussion without looking at the fact that the Baltimore school system is overwhelmingly black," he said. "Baltimore never did a good job of educating black children," Tucker pointed out. "It was just never a priority." The study links Baltimore's low adult literacy rate, low workforce participation, large low-income population, and declining overall population to the inadequacies of its public school system.

"Policymakers considering implementing a school voucher program for Baltimore should look to the long-running programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee, and the pilot program that began in Washington, DC in 2004 as useful examples," Lips wrote. "A growing body of research also suggests that school choice programs have a positive impact on student achievement," Lips noted. "For example, a study conducted by researchers from Harvard and Georgetown universities and the University of Wisconsin released in 2001 found that African-American students receiving private scholarships in Ohio, New York, and Washington, DC scored significantly higher than their peers who remained in public schools."

Tucker agrees with Lips that vouchers could help turn life around for Baltimore students over the next decade. "School choice in Baltimore is a way to provide hope to not only the parents and students," Tucker said, "but also educators who don't have hope."

Source

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

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

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

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23 June 2005

U.S. UNIVERSITIES: A LEGAL FIGHTBACK AGAINST BIAS?

Imagine opening your newspaper one morning and reading a Supreme Court opinion that puts a startling new twist on an old civil rights tactic. The Court declares that some prominent university has violated equal opportunity laws by "engaging in a pattern of employment discrimination...against Republicans and Christian conservatives. Of the university's 1,828 professors, there are only eight Republicans and five Christian conservatives. Such statistical evidence of gross political and ideological imbalance has been taken as a telltale sign of purposeful discrimination in many previous civil rights cases. In this case as well it provides prima facie evidence that individual rights are being systematically violated on arbitrary grounds. Justice demands compensatory action to protect the rights of these groups."

Is this a right-wing pipe dream? It may not be as far-fetched as you think. The Supreme Court has already issued opinions using virtually those same words--only the opinions refer to "underrepresented" racial minorities rather than beleaguered Republicans and Christian conservatives. The simple legal logic underlying much of contemporary civil rights law applies equally to conservative Republicans, who appear to face clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race.

For years, conservatives have complained that universities dominated by left-wing administrators and faculties consistently avoid hiring or tenuring academics with conservative views. Anecdotal evidence of such discrimination abounds. Take John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, an influential and bestselling book published by the University of Chicago Press. At only 26, Lott received his Ph.D. from UCLA and five years later became chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. He has published over 70 scholarly articles, a number that even the most prolific professors rarely match in their entire careers.

Yet Lott has failed to receive a single offer for a tenure-track position from any American university, despite sending his résumé to literally hundreds of schools. He instead became an itinerant academic clinging to one-year research fellowships at various institutions. Last year, he found a home as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Would Lott have been snubbed by the academic world had his research on guns yielded opposite, more politically correct results? Not a chance.

Peter Berkowitz, then an associate professor of political philosophy at Harvard, was denied tenure even though he had authored two critically acclaimed books. The five-member tenure committee, for instance, was suspiciously stacked with two child psychologists, who are presumably more familiar with Saint Nicholas than Saint Thomas Aquinas and other subjects within Berkowitz's expertise.

Despite many such examples--plus obvious evidence from campus culture, politics, and daily practice demonstrating that colleges can be hostile environments for people with conservative views--there was until recently no hard, empirical proof of pervasive left-wing bias in our academies. That has changed. As the data arrayed on the preceding pages illustrate, American universities are demonstrably monotone one-party states where only one set of views flourishes. At prominent colleges across the country, the vast majority of professors are committed liberals. Many humanities and social science departments at leading universities do not have so much as a single registered Republican among their ranks. These stark statistics do more than just confirm what conservatives have always suspected. They potentially may allow Republicans to pursue legal action against universities by using the logic and law of the civil rights movement.

Over the past few decades, studies that show statistical under-representation of minorities have become the cornerstone of civil rights litigation. Plaintiffs invariably cite statistical disparities in work forces, bank loans, arrest rates, application acceptances, housing ownership, and scores of other measures as proof of discrimination. Courts were not always receptive to such statistical claims. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly stated that it did not require the work force to mirror the general population. LBJ's Justice Department assured skeptics that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be used only to combat intentional discrimination against individual members of minority groups, not ever to force numerical "racial balance." But as with so many other laws, administrative agencies and courts gradually transformed the plain language of the statute to mean something very different.

In two landmark decisions in the 1970s, the Supreme Court made it considerably easier for plaintiffs to prove discrimination with simple numbers. First, in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, it allowed plaintiffs to claim "disparate treatment"--that is, intentional discrimination--when statistics showed an under-representation of minorities. While cautioning against relying solely on statistics, the Supreme Court stressed that they are "in many cases the only available avenue...to uncover clandestine and covert discrimination by the employer.... It is ordinarily expected that nondiscriminatory hiring practices will in time result in a work force more or less representative of the racial and ethnic composition of the population in the community from which employees are hired." Though commentators like Thomas Sowell pointed out that the Court's reasoning is questionable--many variables other than discrimination can account for representational disparities-- this thinking has become an established part of the civil rights legal firmament.

In addition to this "disparate treatment" theory of discrimination, the Supreme Court also accepted the novel notion of "disparate impact" in Griggs v. Duke Power Company. According to this theory, even a neutral hiring practice or procedure can be found discriminatory if it results in a disproportionate impact on minority groups. The plaintiff in a disparate impact case need not even allege that the employer has a biased bone in his body. Evidence that minorities are adversely affected by any policy may be sufficient to hold the employer liable for discrimination.

Civil rights groups have challenged the use of standardized tests on these grounds, claiming that since minority students score lower on the SAT it is biased by definition. Laws and enforcement practices that lead to heavy minority arrests are similarly attacked. The legal logic of disparate impact has seeped right down into our everyday political parlance: Activists constantly use this civil rights language to force political changes. Fatimah Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, recently complained that human genome research disproportionately and "opportunistically" benefits whites at the expense of minorities, because most of the genes in the study come from Caucasians.

By simple logic, both disparate treatment and disparate impact theories support a legal case against universities for discriminating against conservative Republicans. Republican academics might protest their lot using disparate impact logic that points to a particular hiring practice or procedure that adversely affects members of the GOP. If a school department relies heavily on the number of articles published in left-leaning journals in hiring professors, Republicans might argue that such a practice disproportionately hurts conservatives whose works are rarely accepted by the left-wing press.

The disparate treatment alternative is even more obvious. The gross under-representation of conservatives in university faculties lends credence to the view that schools have in plain fact discriminated against Republican academics. As the Supreme Court suggested in International Brotherhood, one would expect university faculties to reflect the political and ideological composition of the larger populace, and roughly as many Americans identify themselves as Republicans as Democrats.

Students at Harvard Law School sued the school in the early 1990s with the help of civil rights activists because it had only five black professors of 66 total faculty members. "For years, students have petitioned Harvard Law School to end its discriminatory practices and to make serious commitments toward creating a diverse faculty," one student member of the Harvard Law School Coalition for Civil Rights explained. "We have negotiated. We have protested. We have taken to the streets. Today, we take Harvard to court." If minority professors at Harvard Law School are under-represented in relation to the general population, then Republican professors at places like Harvard are a nearly extinct species.

While these potential legal actions may seem like a logical extension of civil rights precedents, there are several significant hurdles that would hamper such lawsuits. First, Republican academics could not pursue a discrimination lawsuit under federal law because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not outline political affiliation as a protected status. Some states and localities, however, have extended civil rights protection to party membership. The District of Columbia, for instance, bars discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.

Second, under both disparate treatment and disparate impact theories, the employer is at least in theory entitled to explain away the inference of discrimination, though the employee has an opportunity to rebut the employer's explanation as a mere pretext for discriminating. Third, political party affiliation is not always the most accurate proxy for ideology. Some Republicans, like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, hold views to the left of many Democrats. Finally, courts in recent years have slowly swung the pendulum back against innovative extensions of civil rights law, making it more difficult for plaintiffs to pursue discrimination lawsuits.

Yet even if Republicans fail in courts of law, they can triumph in the court of public opinion by establishing the parallel between discrimination by ideology and bias directed toward race or sex. This reality is shrewdly grasped by operators like Jesse Jackson, who regularly bludgeons opponents with the specter of exorbitant legal fees, a potential lawsuit loss, and heaps of negative publicity unless they cave in to his demands, even if the lawsuit itself appears to have little merit. After MCI and WorldCom announced their merger some years ago, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition filed objections to the merger with federal regulators, and Jackson accused the companies of displaying "distaste for black labor." Although Jackson's complaint was highly frivolous in substantive and legal terms, the companies appeased his demands rather than risk negative publicity.

When Jackson led a media charge against Coca-Cola, demanding that "Coke's board of directors must look like its consumer base," he publicly exhorted the company not to fight back legally. "The right thing is to reach an honorable and fair settlement. Those who choose to dance or deny a resolution of the lawsuit are not serving you well. Law bills going up, stock prices going down."

Republicans can learn a lesson or two from this. Armed with the alarming statistics on the preceding pages about the lack of ideological diversity on college campuses, Republicans can browbeat universities into making their faculties more diverse. Americans realize the extent to which liberals and leftists dominate faculties. Exposing universities to the glare of publicity might at least force them to concede that hiring employees from only one side of the political spectrum is a problem to be avoided whenever possible.

And as Jackson does with corporations, Republicans can target universities' pocketbooks. By informing state legislatures as well as fair-minded alumni about the lack of diversity of ideas on the American campus today, conservatives can tighten the cash spigot until schools take affirmative steps to remedy current imbalances. In fact, Republicans should appropriate the language and logic of liberals' most sacred shibboleth: affirmative action. Liberals have increasingly relied on the "diversity" rationale to defend racial preferences. "Lack of diversity harms every white or Asian-American student who is here because their education is without the benefit of the perspectives of those now absent students once brought to classroom discussions," stated UCLA professor Gary Blasi in a typical race-based plaint that could be effortlessly extended to the diversity of ideas and political views.

As a purely legal proposition, the diversity rationale for racial preferences remains questionable. The Supreme Court has never accepted diversity as a compelling reason to impose affirmative action on employers, and federal appellate courts are divided on whether it is permissible in educational contexts. Nevertheless, the diversity-über-alles mindset has gained popularity among policymakers, professors, pundits, and the general public. No one wants to appear opposed to "diversity." But if a mix of perspectives is as important as liberals claim, they should be rushing to recruit a more politically and ideologically diverse faculty.

Sadly, that's not something that will ever happen voluntarily. The American university, which likes to call itself a wide-open marketplace of ideas, is in fact a very narrow world with a near monopoly of viewpoints on central cultural and political questions. That's why college students in history classes are taught that anti-communism was nothing more than jingoistic paranoia, why political science professors lecture to students that Republicans, not Democrats, cynically rely on the race card to win elections, and why impressionable young minds all across the country are drilled to think of Presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as nothing more than amiable dunces, and their issues nothing more than benighted foolishness.

In the seminal case of Regents of University of California v. Bakke, Supreme Court Justice Powell noted that "it is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation." It is time we bring back that sort of openness to America's campuses--and stealing a few pages from the civil rights handbook would be a sensible place to start.

Source



BRITAIN: DUMBING DOWN OF HIGH SCHOOLS TO CONTINUE

A Levels and GCSEs are likely to be swept away despite the Government’s insistence that they are here to stay, the head of Ofsted predicted yesterday. David Bell said that Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, would face growing pressure from schools and colleges to abolish the qualifications in favour of a new diploma. Many were already working together to establish courses that better reflected teenagers’ interests, in line with proposals set out by Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former head of Ofsted, the schools regulator.

Ms Kelly controversially rejected Sir Mike’s report, which had virtually unanimous support in the teaching profession. It recommended a single diploma for students aged 14 to 19 in place of GCSEs, A levels and vocational qualifications.

Schools and further education colleges in many areas are forming partnerships to offer disaffected youngsters a more suitable mix of practical and academic study. But they complain that the qualifications system does not properly reflect students’ achievements in these programmes. Growing numbers of schools are also expressing interest in the International Baccalaureate as a more challenging alternative to A level for bright students. Nearly one in four A levels was awarded an A grade last year.

Ms Kelly reiterated her determination to keep A levels yesterday, telling political journalists at a Westminster lunch that “the education world can sometimes cloud the debate and give the wrong impression”. She added: “A levels and GCSEs are here to stay. But the barrier between academic and vocational qualifications needs to come down. We need to find a way to get more teenagers to stay on past the age of 16 or 17.” Ms Kelly had insisted that GCSEs and A levels would remain, while setting out plans in a White Paper in February to establish 14 vocational diplomas linked with business. She promised a review in 2008, but said that it would only examine “what, if anything ” could improve A levels.

Mr Bell, who backed the Tomlinson reforms, told The Times that the Education Secretary’s view could be overtaken by events on the ground by then. He said: “I just wonder if this is a good example of where practice might outstrip policy. If you go to schools and colleges, they are beginning to do more of the things that were envisaged. “The Secretary of State has quite categorically said GCSE and A level are there, but three years down the line how does the qualifications structure fit with the practice?” He added: “Schools and colleges are getting on with the job. There will come a point where we [ask], ‘Does the qualifications infrastructure now reflect the emerging practice from the ground up?’.”

Sir Mike’s two-year inquiry, which was established by the Government, argued that the present examination system led to disaffection among many teenagers. They saw GCSEs as irrelevant but knew that employers regarded vocational courses as second-class. Huge amounts of money and time were devoted to GCSEs at 16, sending a message that it was acceptable to leave school at that age and giving the UK one of the highest dropout rates at 17 of any large industrialised country. Meanwhile, A levels no longer stretched the most able students, leaving top universities unable to distinguish the best from the rest.

The Tomlinson report said that a single diploma, at four levels of difficulty, would create a greater challenge for bright students, allow all youngsters to study at their own pace and erase the historic divide between academic and vocational qualifications.

Mr Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, said that it had been “the prerogative of the Secretary of State” to concentrate on improving vocational education. He said: “I thought the Tomlinson proposals were more likely to secure that end, but we are looking towards the same end of making sure we do more for all young people.” Mr Bell added: “Those people, myself included, who were arguing for the Tomlinson approach to the diploma were not arguing that none of the content that makes up a GCSE or A level would survive. Much of the content would be encompassed. As that content evolves, which it will, and practice evolves, and schools and colleges are looking to validate performance, then you do have to revisit the question: ‘Are the A level, GCSE and vocational diploma as laid out in the White Paper fit for purpose?’ I think it is worth keeping that under review for 2008 and beyond.”

Mr Bell’s comments come as one million teenagers are sitting examinations in schools and colleges. He acknowledged that uncertainty over their future could dent confidence in the examinations, but said that students could only “do what they have to do”.

Miss Kelly said only last week that "A levels and GCSEs will stay as free-standing qualifications". But she is now being openly contradicted by many of her own officials. Ken Boston, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the government exams watchdog, said this month that A levels “will be out the door and the diploma will take over” within a decade

Source

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

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

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

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22 June 2005

HOME-SCHOOLER SOCIALIZATION

Conventional wisdom can be fickle. Something is "conventional wisdom" until it is shown to be inaccurate and a new conventional wisdom takes its place. The world is full of examples of assumptions people have made that have turned out to be wrong. Perhaps the most famous is that the Earth is flat. Outdated conventional wisdom also affects the home-school community. Despite decades of proven success and rapidly expanding numbers, many people maintain an outdated view of home-schooling. In other words, they still hold the conventional view that home-school families isolate themselves and do not wish to interact with society. People who hold this view also tend to make the seemingly logical leap that home-schoolers must be poorly socialized.

To address home-school socialization, there must be a starting point: determining the characteristics and behaviors a socialized person would exhibit. Many researchers have viewed socialization through the lens of a person's self-concept; the higher a person's self-concept, the better. When measuring for self-concept, the available research has shown that home-schoolers are comparable to their public school counterparts. However, just because someone has a positive feeling about himself or herself does not mean other people will view that person as being well-socialized.

Another way to measure socialization is to see whether home-schoolers are interacting with the community at large. The National Home Education Research Institute published a study in 2004 titled "Homeschooling Grows Up," which surveyed more than 7,000 home-school students to determine how active they were in society. The study showed that home-schoolers were finding employment in all areas. Home-schoolers also were found to be active in their communities and to be participating in the political process at greater rates than their public school counterparts.

Perhaps the best way to evaluate socialization, however, is to focus on social skills. The accusation that home-schoolers lack "social skills" is perhaps the sharpest attack from home-school critics. Examples of social skills would be behaviors such as sharing, helping, giving compliments and having good manners. If someone does well in these areas, most people would agree that he or she is well-socialized because interactions between people are the real test of effective socialization.

Little research has been completed in this area, but two researchers have produced a comparative study on it. David J. Francis, school psychologist with the Saranac Lake Central School District in New York, and Timothy Z. Keith, professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas, presented their socialization study in the 2004 edition of the Homeschool Researcher.

The study compared 34 home-schooled children to 34 public school students. The researchers adopted all the normal procedures to ensure that a minimal amount of bias affected the results. For example, home-school parents were not allowed to select which of their children would be part of the study. In addition, the children all came from the western part of New York state and were matched for demographics and family background to limit the determining factor in the socialization results to home-schooling.

Parents were considered to be the best observers of the behaviors of their children. Therefore, the study relied on the parents' observations. The method used was the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS). Parents of both home-schooled and public school children provided information on the socialization of their children in the areas of self-control, assertiveness, responsibility and cooperation. The SSRS also records problem behaviors such as externalizing, including aggressive acts and poor impulse control; internalizing, which can result in sadness and anxiety; and hyperactivity.

The results showed that home-schoolers were no different from their counterparts in cooperation, assertiveness and responsibility. Both groups scored higher than the national average. Home-schoolers, however, scored above their peers in the area of self-control.

It also should be noted that the authors are not home-schoolers. Mr. Francis is a public school teacher, and Mr. Keith is a public university professor. Neither is a home-school advocate or a fundamentalist Christian, which is a common characteristic in home-schoolers. The fact that the study was conducted by truly independent researchers gives it extra weight because it is impossible to make the accusation that the researchers were biased.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, a lingering question remains in many people's minds on home-school socialization. The "conventional wisdom" remains largely intact. However, in time, the conventional wisdom will be overturned as more and more people come into contact with the burgeoning numbers of home-school graduates. It will be impossible to ignore a new generation of graduates who will be interacting with society with such ease that it may become possible to recognize a home-school graduate because he or she is so well-socialized.

Source



MATHEMATICS UNDER ATTACK

You can now finish High School without being able to read and write properly. Soon you won't be able to add up either. Did I say "soon"? I guess I meant "now"

It seems our math educators no longer believe in the beauty and power of the principles of mathematics. They are continually in search of a fix that will make it easy, relevant, fun, and even politically relevant. In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. The council preferred real life problem solving, using everyday situations. Attempts to solve problems without basic skills caused some critics, especially professional mathematicians, to deride the "new, new math" as "rainforest algebra."

In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 "contemporary mathematics" textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included "factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions, and functions." In the 1998 book, the index listed "families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study, feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises, and fund-raising carnival."

Those were the days of innocent dumbing-down. Now mathematics is being nudged into a specifically political direction by educators who call themselves "critical theorists." They advocate using mathematics as a tool to advance social justice. Social justice math relies on political and cultural relevance to guide math instruction. One of its precepts is "ethnomathematics," that is, the belief that different cultures have evolved different ways of using mathematics, and that students will learn best if taught... mathematics... is inexorably linked with the values of the oppressors and conquerors. The culturally attuned teacher will learn about the counting system of the ancient Mayans, ancient Africans, Papua New Guineans....

Source

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

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

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

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21 June 2005

OUTSOURCE MORE TEACHING TO INDIA (Starting with grading)

Outsourcing hasn't gone far enough: the U.S. should start using Indian-based teachers. Smart, inexpensive, English-speaking Indians already help Americans with software design, computer support and tax preparation. Through satellites and the Internet workers in India can be connected, with mere millisecond delays, to Americans in need. Outsourcing jobs to India has saved Americans billions while actually increasing the quality and competitiveness of many of our industries. We should now apply outsourcing to education, the American industry most in need of improvement.

Like most teachers, I find grading to be the least interesting aspect of my job. I would gladly teach extra classes if I could in return be freed from the drudgery of grading. My employer, Smith College, should hire a few score smart Indians to grade for their faculty and in return Smith should expect its professors to spend more time in the classroom. High schools should similarly outsource their grading to Indians. Because U.S. teachers find grading so mind-numbingly boring, outsourcing grading would make teaching a far more attractive profession, thereby allowing high schools to recruit better teachers without necessarily having to increase salaries.

I suspect that Indians would do a far better job grading than U.S. teachers currently do. Because of their much lower average standard of living, earning a few dollars an hour grading American school assignments would be a fantastic job for many talented Indians. Indians would therefore bring an enthusiasm to grading that most American teachers, including myself, lack.

Indians, moreover, could do more than just grade papers. They could run entire classes. Online college courses such as those offered by the University of Phoenix show the possibility of teaching via the Internet, and teenagers' love of video games proves that students are capable of long-term thoughtful interactions with their computer. High schools and colleges should use the Internet to have some of their classes remotely taught. The teachers would have audio and video connections with their American students. It would be prohibitively expensive to hire one American teacher for every five students. But because wages in India are so much lower than in the U.S., schools could afford, say, 5:1 student: teacher ratios if they outsourced education.

Of course, teachers in India wouldn't be able to discipline their American students, so the outsourcing would only work for well-behaved students. But students with Indian teachers could benefit from large amounts of individual "face" time with their instructors. Low student / teacher ratios would also allow schools to offer a diversity of classes that they couldn't afford without using outsourcing.

High school math and science programs would greatly benefit from outsourcing. Because American adults with strong math and science skills have very good job prospects, it's difficult for high schools to attract strong teachers in these fields. But for wages far below what even high school food service workers make, very talented and technically proficient Indians would love to become teachers.

If Indians weren't permitted to teach entire classes, they could at least act as tutors or teaching assistants. Every high school math teacher, for example, could be given an Indian helper who would be available from 5-10 pm each night to help students with their homework. To prevent any child from being left behind, schools could give students in danger of failing two hours of individual tutoring time with an Indian teacher each weeknight. And at the other end of achievement gifted students could be assigned tutors who would facilitate their exploration of advanced topics.

Outsourcing wouldn't have to be limited to hiring Indians, and indeed foreign language classes could greatly benefit from outsourcing teaching to non-English speaking countries. For example, given the large number of poor people in the world who speak and write Spanish, there is no reason every American taking Spanish shouldn't have his own private instructor. Even earning just $2 an hour would be a fantastic life-changing wage for many Spanish speakers, yet at this low wage schools could afford to hire private teachers for each of their students.

Ironically, outsourcing education would make it easier for parents to home school their children. While staying at home, children could use the Internet to connect with teachers across the world. Parents, furthermore, would have many possible classes and teachers to choose from and so could insure that their children's education reflected their parental values.

Having U.S. students taught by foreigners would increase Americans' knowledge of other cultures. Rather than merely reading about other peoples, our students would get to talk with people throughout the world. Similarly, outsourcing education would allow many foreigners to interact directly with Americans and not base their judgments of us on how Americans are depicted in Hollywood movies.

Some of the best minds on the planet are trapped in poor countries, currently doomed to a miserable standard of living. But through educational outsourcing U.S. schools could directly tap these minds employing them to teach our children. Such outsourcing would not only lift many third world people out of poverty but also help the U.S. grow her 21st century knowledge economy.

Source



TESTING WORKS: SURPRISE, SURPRISE!

High-stakes achievement tests that determine if a child is promoted to the next grade or held back a year are becoming more commonplace, and a growing number of school systems have learned that the threat of retention can be a strong incentive. However, the practice's effect on kids who are held back is still in dispute.

For New York City fifth graders who took a key citywide test in April, it was the first time that their scores counted, and even better students felt the pressure. "There were points when he was not sleeping very well," Kathleen Gomez said of her fifth grade son, Diego, who spent months on test preparation even though he was in no danger of failing. "He had such a sense that every test they take is going to stay with them forever."

For New York kids who did not make the grade, letters will arrive over the next few days inviting them to summer school. The number of fifth graders who tested proficient in reading soared 19.5 percent on this year's citywide exam - the first in which members of their class had to pass to advance a grade. The number proficient in math climbed 15.2 percent, the school district said this month. A year earlier, 14,695 fifth graders failed one or both of the tests, but with promotion on the line that number dropped to 5,636.

Chicago also saw achievement test scores rise in the late 1990s after it began requiring children in the third, sixth and eighth grades to pass in order to advance. Scores also rose in Florida after it began requiring third graders to pass a reading test to advance a grade, and in Texas after it implemented a similar requirement for third and fifth graders. "When you have a tough retention policy, at every grade level, the children get better," said Paul Vallas, who was the schools chief in Chicago when it adopted high-stakes testing and who now leads the public schools in Philadelphia.

What remains in dispute is the long-term effect on the students who are held back. A report by the Consortium on Chicago School Research said that while Chicago's promotion rules led to better overall academic performance in some grades, they hurt the kids who were held back. Many of the children forced to repeat a grade fell further behind, dropped out or languished in special education classes, said University of Chicago researcher Melissa Roderick. Part of the problem, she said, was a lack of remedial help. "These kids were really, really, really far behind," Roderick said. "For the kids who are being left back, retention does not work."

New York City's third graders faced a promotion-retention exam for the first time last year, and of the 2,702 who failed and were held back for a full year, nearly 38 percent failed the test again this spring. "It's heartbreaking to look these kids who have been held back two times," said Jill Chaifetz, executive director of the nonprofit group Advocates for Children of New York. "They are older than everyone else. They are taller than everyone else. They feel like failures."

New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said school officials are still looking for the best ways to help those children. Klein said the answer isn't returning to automatic promotions but devoting more attention to children before they fail. "The level of our intervention is much more sophisticated now than it has ever been," he said.

In the past two years, the city has boosted aid to struggling students, including holding extra classes on Saturdays. The most recent tests showed that pass rates were higher among students who attended that extra day. Other help has come from "intervention" experts like Patrick Kutschke, a reading teacher at Public School 101 in East Harlem, who spends his time working with groups of five or six children who have trouble mastering basic skills. High stakes testing, Kutschke said, has certainly grabbed students' attention. "Some of them come in nauseated," he said. "They say, 'Mr. K, I really didn't sleep at all last night.' They know the test matters."

But, he said, he believes it will be classroom work, not testing pressure, that will raise their scores. "A lot of these kids were getting to third grade without the skills they needed to do well," he said. "Those are the kids we need to work on."

Source

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

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

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

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20 June 2005

CHOICE: LEARNING FROM OTHER COUNTRIES

Debates about how to reform American education seldom consider the experiences of other nations. In the United States, the federal government is trying to force reform on schools through the No Child Left Behind Act. States and teachers unions are in open revolt against the act's requirements. Utah recently passed a law that would place state law above federal guidelines. Meanwhile, many countries have moved ahead of the United States by rejecting the top-down approach to education. Quite a few of these nations are producing promising results.

In the Netherlands, nearly 76 percent of school-age children attend private schools with state money going to the chosen school. Sweden and Denmark also have liberal school choice policies with school funding following children whose parents choose private schools. In all three countries, student performance is higher than in the United States, where 15-year-olds scored twenty-first on mathematics literacy and twelfth in science, according to international performance audits.

School choice also exists in Chile, where 46 percent of students enroll in private schools. Even some former communist countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic allow parents to pay for private schools with public funds.

Whenever school choice programs are proposed in the United States, they face fierce opposition from critics who claim that school choice benefits mostly wealthy parents, drains money from the public system, and segregates students into racial or economic groups. But the experiences of countries that have experimented with school choice indicate that these claims are unfounded. In most cases, the main beneficiaries have been poor families living in inner cities. In Hungary, where vouchers were introduced after the fall of communism, most new private schools have emerged in poor inner-city or rural areas, where access to good public schools is most limited. Although private schools receive public funds on a per-child basis, they typically cost less than what the government pays to educate children in the public system. When more children choose private schools, public schools actually have more money to spend on students.

In Alberta, Canada, where children can attend either a private or public school, public schools have improved the quality and diversity of their programs. They have also focused more attention on parental satisfaction and academic outcomes. As a result, Alberta public schools continue to attract the bulk of local students.

Rather than segregate students into racial, educational, or economic groups, school choice seems to do just the opposite. In Sweden, the share of immigrant students from poor families has increased in the popular inner-city schools that were once predominately upper class. In addition, students with special needs take advantage of school choice on an equal basis with regular students. Many regular independent schools in Sweden educate special needs children, and surveys show that parents like the private schools better. The Swedish system of school choice has led to an impressive expansion of independent schools, resulting in a wider variety of school types and educational programs than had existed previously.

Scholars who have studied the various types of educational systems in Europe conclude that students seem to perform better in countries where more schools are privately managed and where a larger share of the enrollment is in such schools. Americans should learn from these examples and study the evidence before accepting claims that school choice doesn't help poor families, creates segregation, or harms public schools. The experiences of other countries show that choice has beneficial effects all around, especially if public schools are given increased autonomy and flexibility.

Source



Texas Parents call for armed officers on campus

Parents fear violence will run rampant at school now that the Weslaco school district has no police force. One parent started a petition this week, and said she won't send her daughter back to school without armed officers on campus.

This comes after reports that the Weslaco ISD police department was disbanded. The district opted instead for unarmed security guards after funds for the force ran dry. "Because if someone comes into our school district armed with a gun, who's going to take them down?" asked parent Amanda Garza. District superintendent Richard Rivera said a grant that funded the force expired. "The money's gone," Rivera said. "There's no new money." Rivera said the schools are still safe. Now Weslaco city police will respond to on-campus emergencies. "Our schools were safe before the police department," Rivera said. "They were safe with the police department. And they'll be safe without the police department."

But the district's former police chief Ron Cooper disagreed. "No, I don't think the schools will be as safe. Our presence prevents a lot of criminal activity," Cooper said. "I'm not stupid," Cooper continued. "I know what it's all about. I know what just happened." Cooper said his force was eliminated because the superintendent wants to hide the truth about what is happening on campus. "He likes to keep a lot of things `hush-hush,'" Cooper said.....

In the meantime, Amanda Garza is hoping parents will sign her petition to bring the officers back. She said her children's safety depends on it.

More here

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

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

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

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



19 June 2005

MORE TEACHER INVOLVEMENT NEEDED

I think that is what the lady is getting at. And she seems to be talking from experience. But I am also sure that discipline cannot be neglected

One of the country's most successful head teachers is calling for the Government to stop talk of a "zero- tolerance" approach to school discipline. Lady Marie Stubbs, who came out of retirement to turn around St George's School in Westminster - where the head teacher Philip Lawrence was murdered - will argue in a public lecture tonight that the country's best teachers should be lured to work in its toughest schools with higher salaries instead. Lady Stubbs told The Independent yesterday that "zero-tolerance" was "a tired old term", adding: "I'd rather see it tucked away." The best alternative approaches would be better pay in tough schools, better pupil/teacher ratios and the paying of more respect to the views of children. "You need the best teachers in the state and the independent sector, she said, with "a nice staff room and decent food".

Lady Stubbs said she was sceptical about the Government's decision to set up a task force to tackle school discipline. "I think we know enough about what makes a good school work," she said. "Ninety per cent know about discipline. "What we need for the other 10 per cent is to pay teachers more to work in them and give them better staffing levels. Staffing levels should be different in schools with discipline problems. "At St George's we had plenty of advisers and counsellors to help the teachers."

However, Lady Stubbs will advise tonight's audience at a a public lecture on urban education at the University of East Anglia that "head teachers must be their own gurus". "It is no use them trying to be me," she said. "They must be confident in themselves about what they are trying to do."

Source



Missing: Males on College Campuses

I suspect that this mainly shows that boys are more resistant to the crap that passes for education these days.

Some researchers call them the "Lost Boys." They are the students you don't see on college campuses. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) tracks the enrollment in all degree-granting institutions by sex. From 1992 to 2000, the ratio of enrolled males to females fell from 82 to 78 boys for every 100 girls. The NCES projects that in 2007 the ratio will be 75 males for every 100 females; in 2012, 74 per 100. In short, your son is statistically more likely than your daughter to work a blue collar job.

Thomas Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, argues that leaving a generation of boys behind hurts women as well. In a Business Week cover story, Mortenson observed, "My belief is that until women decide that the education of boys is a serious issue, nothing is going to happen."

He believes some women feel threatened by even admitting the problem because "it will take away from the progress of women...What everyone needs to realize is that if boys continue to slide, women will lose too." That realization still seems distant among educational experts, who continue to downplay the NCES statistic as well as other data that indicate schools are hurting boys.

Jacqueline King -- author of the influential study "Gender Equity in Higher Education: Are Male Students at a Disadvantage?" -- is an example. She found that 68 percent of college enrollees from low-income families were female; only 31 percent were male. Yet King insists there is no "boy crisis" in education despite the fact that data from Upward Bound and Talent Search show a comparable gender gap. (These college-preparation programs operate in high schools and received $312.6 million $144.9 million in tax funding, respectively, in 2005.) Of the students who receive benefits from those college-preparation programs, approximately 61 percent are girls; 39 percent are boys.

King's quoted explanation of the gender gaps: "women make up a disproportionate share of low-income students" who go on to college. Since low-income families presumably give birth to boys in the same ratio as the general population-- worldwide the ratio is between 103 to 107 boys for every 100 girls -- why are so few boys applying for assistance? A higher drop-out rate might be partly responsible, or boys may have no interest in higher education. King comments on the latter explanation: "male low-income students have some ability in this strong economy to make a decent living with just a high-school diploma." In particular, she points to the construction industry.

King may be correct. The fact that low-income boys gravitate toward manual labor may account for some of the educational gender disparity. What is striking, however, is her apparent dismissal of that disparity as important. She seems to accept the reality that far fewer men than women enroll in college and that poor boys enter "the trades" while poor girls become professionals. Imagine the gender ratio being reversed, with 78 girls for every 100 boys entering college. Imagine a generation of poor girls being relegated to low social status labor while tax funding assists poor boys. It is difficult to believe King would be similarly unconcerned.

Nevertheless, merely by acknowledging the situation, King shows far more balance than prominent voices, like the American Association of University Women, which still maintains there is a "girl crisis."

Fortunately, researchers like Judith Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska see that boys are in distress. Kleinfeld -- author of "The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls" -- states, "In my own college classes, I see a sea change in the behavior of young men. In the 1980s, the young men talked in my classes about the same as young women. I know because each semester I measured male and female talk. Now so many young men are disengaged that the more articulate, ambitious women dominate the classroom ....and my office hours." Kleinfeld tried to trace the problem backward by interviewing high school students on plans for their future. She states, "The young women almost always have a clear, realistic plan---go to college, have a career, often directed toward an idealistic goals about improving the environment." This clarity of vision and was generally absent in young men.

Among those who acknowledge the "boy crisis," explanations are vary and may all be true. Some point to the "feminization" of education over the last decade, which occurred largely in response to a perceived need to encourage girls. But, if boys and girls learn differently, then the changes may be placing boys at a disadvantage. Others point to explicitly anti-male attitudes -- that is, political correctness -- within education. The website Illinois Loop lists "22 School Practices That May Harm Boys." One of them: "'Modern' textbooks and recommended literature often go to extremes to remove male role models as lead characters and examples."

Kleinfeld points speculatively to the impact of increased divorce and fatherless homes on the self-image of boys who lack a positive male role-model. Approximately 40 percent of American children now live in homes without their own biological father.

Ultimately, explanations of and solutions to the "boy crisis" will come from exploring a combination of factors. My solution: privatize education and place it under the control of parents or adult students. The first step to any solution, however, is to acknowledge there is a problem. We are not quite there yet.

Source

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

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

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

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18 June 2005

SOMETIMES EVEN CALIFORNIA'S LOW STANDARDS ARE NOT LOW ENOUGH

The superintendent of Saddleback High School has told teachers to ignore a memo from the school's principal urging them to pass failing seniors so the school could meet federal graduation requirements. "I felt this was a serious violation," Santa Ana Unified School District Superintendent Al Mijares said. "Principals and teachers are expected to hold the line with regards to grades that are necessary to the high school diploma, and under no circumstances will teachers be pressured to change a grade." On June 9, Principal Esther Jones wrote teachers a memo asking them to reconsider the grades of 98 failing seniors. The note asked teachers to "please review your records for these students and determine if they would merit a grade of 'D' instead of a failure."

Jones added in the memo that the school needed 95 percent of its seniors to graduate to meet federal requirements under the No Child Left Behind law. In fact, the school needs a graduation rate of 82.8 percent and will graduate nearly 84 percent of its 500 seniors on Wednesday, school officials said. Jones did not return calls for comment. Teachers said they were outraged by the memo. "We do everything we possibly can to pass them. To be asked to go beyond that is ridiculous," social studies teacher Larry Collier said. "I've never seen anything like that in my 44 years of teaching."

Math teacher Barbara Peimbert said Jones asked her to pass two of the 12 seniors she had failed this semester. Peimbert said one student had a 51 percent in her statistics class, which requires a 60 percent to pass. "I said, '51 is not 60,'" Peimbert said. "She said, 'OK, I respect your decision and thank you.' So I assumed that was the end of it. I found out that his name's not on the non-grad list. ... This is ridiculous. It ruins our credibility."

School board President Audrey Yamagata-Noji said she needed to find out more about Jones, the incident, and her leadership of the school before determining whether discipline was necessary.

Source



Top U.K. Private school opens city academy [Charter school]

Marlborough College - fees 21,000 pounds a year - is giving its expertise and experience to a failing comprehensive[government school]

It is an education that normally sets parents back 21,000 pounds a year but guarantees first-class academic results and a step up the ladder of life. Now one of Britain's leading public schools is offering its ethos and expertise to one of the country's failing comprehensives. Marlborough College is to become the first major independent school to sign up to the Government's programme for replacing failing inner-city comprehensives with city academies costing an average of 25 million pounds each. The boarding school in Wiltshire, which numbers Princess Eugenie among its pupils, is in talks with the Department for Education and Skills about sponsoring an academy in the Home Counties.

Nicholas Sampson, Master of the school, told The Times: "We are involved in preliminary discussions, and very happy to be doing so, which we think could be beneficial both to Marlborough and the national education system." Marlborough would not be investing the 2 million pounds required of sponsors of academies towards the construction costs, but would bring its "educational ethos and experience" to the project. Mr Sampson said: "We have given a guarantee to our parents that we would not divert fee income to any external project. But our community includes some people who are very enthusiastic about this matter and see it as an opportunity for Marlborough to incarnate its traditional view of the importance of service and take it on to a new phase. "Our sole motivation here is that for some children something must be done. We see it as a two-way process, since we are aware of the danger of being patronising. We know we have a great deal to learn from this enterprise. We would seek to gain a great deal of experience and professional development, and a wider understanding for our pupils."

Mr Sampson declined to identify the school that Marlborough will be linked with as an academy, but it is understood to be in talks with the United Learning Trust, which is already involved with six academies and includes Marlborough's former Master, Edward Gould, on its board of directors. The trust, a subsidiary of the United Church Schools Trust, has plans to open ten academies with up to 20 million pounds in sponsorship. Mr Sampson said: "We are looking in one specific area, this is not just vague talk. We are aware of the need to go to an area that is suffering educational deprivation. "These are intricate negotiations, particularly given the understandable sensitivities, but I know people are working very hard on this and progress is being made."

Marlborough's decision to back an academy will delight Mr Blair, who invited heads of dozens of fee-paying schools to No 10 last autumn to try to persuade them to join his crusade to create 200 academies by 2010. Sir Cyril Taylor, a key adviser to the Secretary of State and chairman of the Specialist Schools Trust, has also urged private schools to back academies as a way to protect their charitable status by demonstrating that they provide a public benefit.

The partnership of Marlborough and a failing state school is likely to prove a culture shock for both parties. Marlborough, founded in 1843 by Royal Charter, has three orchestras, a wind band, a chamber orchestra, a brass band, a chapel choir and a choral society. It stages 15 drama productions a year. Sports facilities include an indoor swimming pool, two trout lakes and its own beagle pack. Expeditions are a regular feature of school life, including "challenging adventure trips to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Vietnam, the Andes, northern Canada and the Pyrenees" in recent years.

Princess Eugenie, 15, the younger daughter of the Duke of York, has been at Marlborough for 19 months. Past pupils include the Princess Royal's former husband Captain Mark Phillips and the late novelist Sir Kingsley Amis.

The disclosure comes a day after a report by accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers concluded that academies were beginning to achieve "a break in the past experience of underachievement and low aspirations" in inner-city areas

Source

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

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

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

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17 June 2005

Semi-private "Academies" reverse years of failure in British city schools

A lot like American Charter schools but with a greater business-orientation

The controversial introduction of city academies is starting to reverse decades of educational failure, a report today indicates. Jacqui Smith, the Minister for School Standards, told The Times that the report showed the Government was right to press on with its plan to open 200 academies by 2010 at a cost of 5 billion pounds. She said that children in the most deprived urban areas could not afford to wait "whilst a high-level ideological debate" took place.

The report, by the accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), will boost Tony Blair's mission to reform the education system. He has urged ministers to go on the offensive after an analysis of the first 11 academies showed high levels of parental satisfaction with their children's education, and improvements in discipline and attendance. Most of the new schools are heavily oversubscribed.

The Times has been told that the report also highlights the impact of private sponsors in raising aspirations at academies, many of which replaced failing comprehensives with a history of poor results. Mr Blair is a passionate advocate of the academies and his former chief policy advisor Lord Adonis, now an education minister, attracted unpopularity on the Left for his advocacy of them. The report will be seen as a vindication for his stance.

The report's assessment of academic standards is more mixed, however, noting that while GCSE results since 2002 had improved in six academies, they had not in the other five. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which publishes the study today, is also issuing a response highlighting the academies' record in national curriculum tests of English, mathematics and science for 14-year-olds. This showed that pass rates at the 11 academies were an average nine percentage points better than those of their predecessor schools in English and maths. Nationally, there was an improvement of six percentage points in English and seven in maths over the same period.

The Government's programme has come under intense scrutiny in recent months, with a critical report from the Commons Education and Skills Select Committee and threats from teaching unions to fight proposals for new academies. The Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough was failed by Ofsted inspectors last month. The Labour-dominated committee had urged the Government in March to halt the programme until it could demonstrate that academies represented the best use of public money. It said in a report: "We fail to understand why the DfES is putting such substantial resources into academies when it has not produced the evidence on which to base the expansion of this programme."

Teaching unions also oppose the involvement of private companies as sponsors of academies, which are state-funded schools. Sponsors are handed control of the governing body in return for investing up to 2 million pounds towards the building costs of academies, which cost around 25 million each.

Ms Smith said: "What this report shows is that academies are beginning to have an impact on standards and that the sort of prerequisites that are necessary for greater standards are in place. "They have parental support, high aspirations, a focus on behaviour and are orderly schools, which were problems in the predecessor schools. "Large numbers of parents, pupils and staff believe that academies have high aspirations for their children and are helping to deliver them in contrast to the schools they replaced." Ms Smith acknowledged that "more work needs to be done", adding: "I don't think it will happen overnight but there have been some pretty big transformations in these schools. This reinforces our arguments that we were right to focus on the areas of greatest disadvantage where standards were not good enough."

George Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that he welcomed the initiative. "City academies follow on from the city technology colleges that the Tories set up," he said. "What matters is not just that they receive extra resources but also that they have proper autonomy and devolution of power. They cannot be just old comprehensives with a new lick of paint."

PwC found that 87 per cent of parents were satisfied with the education their children were receiving, and 80 per cent of those with pupils about to start at an academy had made it their first choice. There was no evidence that academies were having an adverse impact on neighbouring schools by creaming off bright pupils, as some teaching unions contended. Ability levels of children at age 11 were lower in academies than in other local schools, yet they were raising standards more quickly. PwC's report is the second of five annual reports commissioned by the DfES to monitor the effectiveness of academies.

Source



PETTINESS UNDERMINES RECOGNITION OF EXCELLENCE

Daniel Kennedy remembers when he still thought that valedictorians were a good thing. Kennedy, a wiry fifty-nine-year-old who has a stern buzz cut, was in 1997 the principal of Sarasota High School, in Sarasota, Florida. Toward the end of the school year, it became apparent that several seniors were deadlocked in the race to become valedictorian. At first, Kennedy saw no particular reason to worry. "My innocent thought was What possible problem could those great kids cause?" he recalled last month, during a drive around Sarasota. "And I went blindly on with my day."

The school had a system in place to break ties. "If the G.P.A.s were the same, the award was supposed to go to the kid with the most credits," Kennedy explained. It turned out that one of the top students, Denny Davies, had learned of this rule, and had quietly arranged to take extra courses during his senior year, including an independent study in algebra. "The independent study was probably a breeze, and he ended up with the most credits," Kennedy said.

Davies was named valedictorian. His chief rivals for the honor were furious-in particular, a girl named Kylie Barker, who told me recently that she had wanted to be valedictorian "pretty much forever."

Kennedy recalled, "Soon, the kids were doing everything they could to battle it out." As we drove past sugary-white beaches, high-rise hotels, and prosperous strip malls, he told me that the ensuing controversy "effectively divided the school and the community." Kennedy took the position that Davies had followed the school's own policy, which he had been resourceful enough to figure out, and whether he should have been allowed to load on an easy extra class was beside the point. He'd done it, and he hadn't broken any rules. Davies's guidance counsellor, Paul Storm, agreed. In an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune at the time, he said of Davies, "He's very clever. He said, `I want to be valedictorian. I've figured out I need to do this and that. Can you help me?' Denny had a good strategy, and this strategy was available to anyone who was a competitor."......

During the final weeks of the school year, Kennedy was meeting with both sets of riled parents, and students were buttonholing him in the hallway. "I'm telling you, it was hostile!" he said. Some teachers considered boycotting graduation; students talked about booing Davies when he walked out onstage. Kylie Barker's mom, Cheryl, said that she recalls getting a call in the middle of the day from Kylie's chemistry teacher, Jim Harshman, who asked her to pick up Kylie from school, saying, "She's in a pressure cooker here, and she's about to burst." .....

Kennedy remembers finally "convincing everybody to agree reluctantly-and I do mean extremely reluctantly-to have co-valedictorians." He went on, "I have been in education basically my whole life, and I've been to a lot of graduations in my time. But I dreaded this one. Sarasota High is a big school-three thousand kids-and there were probably seven thousand people in the audience. At that time, it felt like half of the students in the room hated one of those two valedictorians and half hated the other. The tension was so thick that I was sitting up there in my cap and gown sweating buckets the whole time." In the end, both students got through their speeches-Kylie's was about integrity-without incident. But Kennedy, a likable traditionalist who has been married to his childhood sweetheart for thirty-seven years, concluded that it was time to get rid of valedictorians at Sarasota High.

Kennedy convened a committee to consider various alternatives, and it was decided that from then on all students in the top ten per cent of the class-which at Sarasota means about seventy-five people-would march in first during graduation and have an asterisk printed next to their names on the program. "Students and parents got to see more kids recognized," Kennedy said. "It made everybody feel better."

Stephanie Klotz's academic ambitions made her stand out at Valley View High, in Germantown, Ohio, from which she graduated in 2001..... Several weeks before the school year ended, the principal of Valley View told Klotz that she and four other students would share the valedictorian title. Klotz thought the decision was odd-as she recalled, one of the girls had got a B-but she let it go. "Notices were sent out, relatives notified," her father, Randy Klotz, said. Three of the students had G.P.A.s above 4.0 because they'd taken at least one A.P. course, whereas Stephanie, whose G.P.A. was 4.0, had not. (Instead of taking A.P. history in her junior year, Stephanie, who hoped to become a doctor, had decided to take another chemistry course.) Three weeks before graduation, Stephanie was told that the school was reversing its decision: she and Megan Keener, another girl with a 4.0 G.P.A., wouldn't be valedictorians after all. (Keener, too, lacked A.P. credits, though she had been taking classes at local colleges.) Two students with G.P.A.s above 4.0 would be named co-valedictorians, and a third would be salutatorian. "I would be nothing," Klotz recalled.

When Klotz told her parents, they complained first to the principal, then several times to the school board. Finally, the family hired a lawyer and sued the school district, the superintendent, and the principal of Valley View. A judge in the Common Pleas Court of Montgomery County, Ohio, sided with the Klotzes, and, days before graduation, issued an order reinstating Klotz and Keener as valedictorians...

More here



A summary of an academic liar: Ward Churchill: "This newspaper devoted a great deal of space this past week probing charges of academic misconduct against Ward Churchill, and...we bet you reached the same conclusion we have: There is no way the University of Colorado can permit Churchill to remain on its staff without indicting the scholarship of every other professor. ... His invention of facts surrounding the smallpox epidemic among the Mandan Indians in 1837 is more reprehensible than his misrepresentation of the Dawes Act. His appropriation of Professor Fay Cohen's work for a 1992 essay is more inexcusable than his almost word-for-word use of a paragraph by Professor Rebecca Robbins. His claims of Indian ancestry, although almost certainly bogus, at least may have stemmed from family lore. Churchill should have acknowledged the truth many years ago instead of slyly trying to throw critics off his track."

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

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

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

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16 June 2005

MORE POWER FOR PARENTS

Most Americans embrace the separation of church and state on the grounds that something as important and personal as religion ought to be left to private decision-making. The inviolability of the individual conscience is a cherished American principle. Yet decisions about one's children's education are equally matters of conscience. Nevertheless, government routinely makes all the big decisions about education without regard to the preferences and convictions of parents. Such decisions cannot help but impinge on freedom of conscience. From the beginning, the movement to establish tax-financed government school systems created conflicts among people with different worldviews, starting with Protestants and Catholics.

The debates that have taken place over school curriculums-multiculturalism versus Western orientation, evolution versus creationism, phonics versus whole language, traditional math versus new math-have been grounded in diverging views of how children should learn and think. Government-generated standards and curriculums cannot avoid controversy. A noncontroversial curriculum is as chimerical as a value-free education. Thus the claims that a government-adopted curriculum would create solidarity by inculcating children with a common educational experience are highly suspect. What has caused more social division than "public" education?

Governments operate virtual school monopolies outside the competitive marketplace. That may be taken to mean only that business people do not run the schools for profit. But the competitive marketplace is more than a way to organize production of known products and services according to known methods. In F. A. Hayek's words, it's a "discovery procedure." Competition enables us to learn things we would not learn otherwise from people we might never suspect of being capable of teaching us anything. This is as true for education as for anything else.

The vogue word in education is "accountability." But this is precisely where government solutions fall down. Accountability to whom? The current administration says the states should be accountable to the federal government. But that is just the sort of artificial accountability that has brought education to its present unsatisfactory condition. We are in roughly the 150th year of an experiment in which governments, not parents, are responsible for education. Teachers and administrators are theoretically accountable to school boards, which are theoretically accountable to state governments. Giving a larger role to yet a higher, more distant level of government hardly sounds promising. Real accountability means accountability to parents. But that requires separation of school and state, and parents' control of their own money; in a phrase, Parent Power.

Are there to be no standards for education? It is an unfortunate emblem of our world that alternatives to government services are difficult to imagine-even when there are historical examples to draw on. We do not face a choice between government standards and no standards at all, any more than we face a choice between government standards for computers and no standards at all. The spontaneous, self-adjusting market process is well qualified to generate standards. And it does so in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the political process.

To the extent that parents want similar things with respect to their children's education-a broadening of horizons and preparation for college and for economic self-sufficiency-the market will furnish them because doing so will produce profits for entrepreneurs. Out of that process will emerge standards. We should expect not one set of standards but competing sets with varying degrees of differences.

Different approaches to education in a competitive market will lead to competition. It is precisely the competition among standards-real-world rivalrous activity, not ivory-tower debates-that will teach us things we would not learn otherwise. The market, moreover, will do what governments cannot do: it will avoid the extremes of dogmatism (one imposed standard) and chaos (no stable standards). At any given time, a manageable number of standards will coexist, giving people stability and predictability, yet no standard will be locked in by legislation, which would threaten stagnation....

The entrepreneurial system gives us the greatest hope of having the best educational institutions possible. We can expect it to offer a wide variety of schools, from traditional to innovative, for-profit and nonprofit, secular and sectarian. Homeschooling would thrive also. But entrepreneurship has prerequisites: freedom and private property for both entrepreneurs and parents. The way out of the education morass is Parent Power

More here



DENIAL THAT GIFTED STUDENTS ARE DIFFERENT

Dumbing down tests in search of politically correct results only hurts those the schools are trying to help

Gifted individuals, those with an IQ of 125 or higher, appear in only about five percent of the population, according to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. In nearby Davis, school officials are attempting to boost that percentage by dubious means. Two years ago, the Davis school board, concerned that not enough black and Hispanic children were testing into the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program, lowered the score for GATE identification. That led to 35 percent of third graders in Davis being identified as gifted. Trying to correct the absurd result, the board again tinkered with the identification procedures. This still yielded 26 percent of its students as gifted this year.

The board is due to take up the issue of identifying gifted students again this week. They do so not because 26 percent is still more than three times the state average, but because three of the five board members are concerned that those identified as gifted are predominantly white and Asian. This is an example of a misguided and feel-good insistence that all children are gifted somehow, in their own way. It fails the needs of those brightest young minds that the GATE program is designed to foster.

Laura Vanderkam, co-author of Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds, says, "If only the top one percent of students are in the `gifted' group, then it actually means something. If the top 25 percent are in it, then you've made it so broad as to be meaningless, and not helpful to the highly gifted in the group." That seems to be exactly what several of the Davis trustees have in mind. Trustee Jim Provenza wants classes offered to GATE-identified students also made available to any student whose parents request them. His colleague, Martha West, would prefer to see the GATE program dismantled altogether and the money spent elsewhere.

The brightest minds could go eat cake or, as James Delisle, a Kent State University professor of education and part-time teacher of gifted children in Ohio public schools, more delicately states the obvious: a "schoolwide enrichment plan generally fails to provide the sustenance necessary to fulfill the complex lives of gifted children."

Equally misguided is the attempt to engineer racial parity in the GATE program. The Davis board may succeed in manipulating the racial breakdowns to look more politically correct, but no amount of engineering or quotas will lead to real gains for students. Real gains come only with true education reform. Where that exists, minorities succeed, often in high numbers. From the rough inner city of Oakland, each year students from the American Indian Charter School qualify for the nationally noted talent search program conducted by Johns Hopkins University. This is because principal Ben Chavis maintains a tough curriculum with high expectations for his all-minority student body.

Lowered standards and racial quotas cannot create gifted children. In fact, these policies are a recipe for mediocrity. To boost minority achievement and meet the needs of gifted children, school boards statewide would do better to follow the example of Mr. Chavis.

Source

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

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

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

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15 June 2005

SOME BIG IMPROVEMENTS UNDER PRESSURE IN NYC

Most of what this article has to say could be boiled down to two words. I have highlighted them. You need to be able to read before you can do anything else.

In September, Guy Tantillo stood before his fifth-grade class at Public School 45 in South Ozone Park, Queens, and warned his students that they were about to begin a school year like no other. "Fourth grade was very difficult, but fifth grade is going to be the biggest challenge in your lives," he told Class 5-212. "What got you through fourth grade is not going to get you through fifth grade." As he recalled that ominous pep talk last week, Mr. Tantillo and the giddy students swirling around him in the schoolyard had every reason to bask in the spring sunshine. At P.S. 45, the number of fifth graders at or above grade level in reading nearly doubled from last year, and it more than doubled in math.

Citywide, the gains on this year's standardized reading and math tests were so outsized - particularly among fifth graders, who improved 19.5 percentage points in reading and 15.2 percentage points in math - that they left some education experts, not to mention Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's political opponents, skeptical. That skepticism was only reinforced by opinion polls and teacher surveys in recent months that found relatively little optimism among parents and educators for Mr. Bloomberg's effort to fix the schools, which they said had mostly caused upheaval. But in interviews at P.S. 45 and other schools across the city with large increases in test scores, principals, parents, superintendents, teachers and students offered this most basic explanation: They worked hard.

Even at these schools, educators and parents said the changes of the past three years had been tumultuous. But they also said the efforts had begun to pay off. Principals and teachers described a relentless focus on literacy and math and a ceaseless scrutinizing of tests, quizzes and writing samples to understand which skills the students had mastered and which lessons had somehow fallen short. Educators also said that the intense pressure, which began just before the start of school with Mayor Bloomberg's announcement that his get-tough promotion rules would be extended to fifth graders, had been felt not just by the students, but throughout the school system and by parents.

At P.S. 45, fifth graders were offered an after-school program, classes on Saturdays and classes during vacations. Teachers sent home monthly progress reports listing test results and detailed assessments of class work and homework, including book reports and other writing assignments. To push every class to keep pace with the citywide reading curriculum, the regional superintendent's office sent P.S. 45 and other schools a detailed calendar, specifying a literary genre to focus on each month, like autobiography or mystery, and weekly skills like making inferences.

The principal and assistant principals met at least weekly with teachers to go over student work and trial tests, and to select specialized programs for them, like intensive phonics. A detailed portfolio was kept on each child and two veteran teachers were designated as intervention specialists who moved from class to class to work one on one with struggling students. A school official telephoned parents regularly to keep attendance high, and the school ran workshops to train parents on how to help their children.

Most important, said the principal, Evelyn Terrell, smaller classes, of 18 to 22 children, allowed for more personal instruction. In previous years, fifth-grade classes had had 30 or more students. From school to school, principals and other officials did not agree on any one primary reason for the gains. In part, the sharp increases reflect the way the tests are presented. The results focus on whether students are above or below grade level rather than on their underlying scores. In recent years, thousands of students had scored just below grade level, and this year many of them finally cleared the line.

But even with this year's unprecedented increases, only half the city's students were proficient in reading and math. In Grades 3 to 8, 51.8 percent performed at or above grade level in reading this year - demonstrating how far Mr. Bloomberg still has to go in his effort to fix the schools.

Source



Lessons from the voucher schools

How is Milwaukee's experiment to expand school choice for low-income students faring 15 years later?

Now 15 years old, Milwaukee's school choice program is very much like a teenager - heartwarmingly good at times, disturbingly bad at others, and the subject of myths, misunderstandings and ignorance, even by the adults entrusted with its welfare. And like a teenager, it remains - for all its familiarity - a bit of a mystery. Few people, even state officials, know what is going on inside all 115 schools in the program. Over the last five months, the Journal Sentinel attempted to visit each school and find out. In visits to 106 schools, the newspaper focused not on politics and court battles, but on the classrooms themselves - the experiences of the nearly 14,000 students now served by choice schools at a cost this year to taxpayers of $83 million.

Fifteen years ago, state government created in Milwaukee the biggest lab in the United States for one of the nation's most provocative education ideas: giving low-income parents the chance to send their children to private schools using "vouchers" to pay school costs. Eight years later, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program expanded dramatically, and religious schools of every kind were made available to those parents. Those visits, along with dozens of interviews with parents, students, teachers, principals, administrators and academics, revealed that many of the popular conceptions and politically motivated depictions of the program are incomplete and, in some cases, flat-out wrong. The Journal Sentinel found that:

* The voucher schools feel, and look, surprisingly like schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools district. Both MPS and the voucher schools are struggling in the same battle to educate low-income, minority students. [i.e. you can't make Asians out of blacks]

* About 10% of the choice schools demonstrate alarming deficiencies. The collapse of four schools and the state's limited ability to take action against others have led to some agreement on the need for increased oversight to help shut down bad schools. [Are we going to shut down bad public schools too?]

* The voucher program has brought some fresh energy to the mission of educating low-income youth in the city by fostering and financially supporting several very strong schools that might not exist otherwise. There are at least as many excellent schools as alarming ones.

* The amount of taxpayer money going to pay for religious education in Milwaukee has no parallel in the last century of American life. About 70% of the students in the program attend religious schools. Religion guides the choices that parents make, and the curriculum that a majority of schools choose, and has led to a network of dozens of independent church schools led by African-American ministers throughout the city. [But I guess Christianity is OK if it is African]

* The choice program regenerated parochial schools in the city, including dozens of Catholic and Lutheran schools, which were experiencing declining enrollment. Overall, it has preserved the status quo in terms of schooling options in the city more than it has offered a range of new, innovative or distinctive schools. [Given the constant attacks on Christianity, it is good that there has been some countervailing influence]

* Parental choice by itself does not assure quality. Some parents pick bad schools - and keep their children in them long after it is clear the schools are failing. This has allowed some of the weakest schools in the program to remain in business. [Ditto for government schools?]

* There is no evidence that voucher schools have "creamed" the best students from Milwaukee Public Schools, an early concern expressed by some critics. Except for the fact that the public schools are obligated to serve all special education students, the kids in the voucher program appear have the same backgrounds - and bring the same problems - as those in the public schools.

* Creating a new school through the choice program is easier than most people expected. Creating a good new school is harder than most thought it would be......

Even major advocates for the program say they did not realize 15 years ago how hard it was to start good schools from scratch. Consider CEO Leadership Academy, a high school finishing its first year. It has strong support from an influential group of ministers. The school has been given expert advice on how to create both educational and business operations; it benefited from financial boosts to get started; and it is housed in a beautiful new wing of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, 2433 W. Roosevelt Drive.

But Denise Pitchford, a former assistant principal in Milwaukee Public Schools who heads the school, says the first year has been a struggle. Many of the school's 60-plus students came to the school years behind in their basic abilities. Catching up became the top priority.

Instead of diving into project-based learning as they had hoped, teachers had to return to the basics. In one English class this last winter, 15 students tried to label different types of sentences as declarative, interrogative, or exclamatory. In a religion class, the teacher reviewed the story of Adam and Eve. Although the academics started slowly, attendance has been strong, at about 96%. "We see sparks," Pitchford sad. "We see kids actually want to be here.".....

Interviews with dozens of parents made it apparent that families pick schools in idiosyncratic, unexpected and misunderstood ways. Above all else, parents appear to be looking for a feeling of community and safety. They might trade off trained teachers for small class sizes. Or geographic proximity for a feeling of intimacy. Or overall academic success for a school their child likes. Some seek a smaller school after struggling against what they perceive as an impersonal bureaucracy at Milwaukee Public Schools. They might desire education in a particular religious community, or simply among people they feel comfortable around.

Nicole Franklin, a parent and teacher at Blyden Delany Academy, an Afrocentric school, said, "When there's a 'situation' it's like a big family here. It really feels good working with people who feel comfortable with you, who are coming from your world."

Often, the families - and some of the school founders themselves - appeared to be motivated more by a dissatisfaction and personal frustration with MPS than anything else. Indeed, the students at the vast majority of these schools are not high achievers from the public schools. Early critics of the program charged that the schools would "cream" the best and brightest from MPS. While a very small number of schools in the choice program draw more motivated students, and choice schools are not obligated to serve special-education students, many of the schools serve large numbers of at-risk students or even specialize in students who have struggled in MPS.....

If any single factor distinguishes the families and parents at the choice schools from those in MPS, it is religion. Students in the choice program pray together in class. They read the Bible, the Qur'an or the Torah. They attend Mass. Most schools report that even students from families outside of their faith accept - and seek out - religion as part of education. "I wanted (my granddaughter) to get a Catholic education," said Dolores Cooper, a Baptist whose granddaughter, also named Dolores, attends Messmer High School. "It teaches values."

At Dr. Brenda Noach Choice School, middle school students recently were watching Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Pastor Charles Ewing, who runs the school's daily operations, explained afterward that the school, and its curriculum, are centered on God.

On one recent Friday afternoon at Salam School, a Muslim school on the city's south side, the students gathered for a schoolwide prayer service. The girls all wore light-blue scarves covering their heads; rows of sneakers lined the walls of the room. Kneeling on carpets spread across the gym floor, the children listened as an imam prayed: "Allah make us better Muslims; Allah make us proud Muslims."

Not only has choice fostered religious start-ups like Ewing's school, it has preserved many of the existing religious schools in the city. Some, such as Messmer High School, where Dolores Cooper's granddaughter attends, have embraced a new mission, educating a largely non-Catholic student body in a Catholic tradition. Others are uncertain whether they will try to retain their identity as parish schools, serving predominantly Catholic pupils, or stake out a new role.

To Kenneth Marton, the principal of Christ Memorial Lutheran school, choice means one thing above all else: "We can continue our mission to bring Jesus Christ, evangelize, work with the students.".....

The biggest impact of choice may be intangible. It opened the door for the spread of other forms of school choice, including charter schools, which have taken innovative paths and have been growing rapidly in enrollment. The voucher movement elicited soul-searching among educators as to the definition, and nature, of a public school.....

More here

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

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

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

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14 June 2005

TIME FOR AN END TO GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS

Jeff Jacoby says:

Three recent dispatches from the education battlefront:

* Kansans have been debating how the development of life on earth should be taught in public schools -- as the unintended result of random evolution or as the complex product of an evolution shaped by intelligent design. The board of education held hearings in May, and is to decide this summer whether the current science standards should be changed. Kansas is just one of 19 states in which the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design contest is being fought. Emotions have been running high, as they often do when the state takes sides in a clash of fundamental values and beliefs.

* In Massachusetts, the Boston Globe recently reported, a father named David Parker found himself in a war with his local school board when he objected to a kindergarten "diversity" curriculum that depicted gay and lesbian couples raising children. Parker, a Christian opposed to same-sex marriage, showed up at Estabrook elementary school in Lexington to request that he or his wife be notified -- in keeping with state law -- when homosexual themes were going to be brought up in their 6-year-old's class. School officials wouldn't agree to do so and "urged" Parker to leave. When he didn't, they had him arrested.

* Luke Whitson, a 10-year-old at the Karns Elementary School in Knoxville, Tenn., liked reading the Bible with his friends during recess. But when a parent complained, the public school's principal "demanded that they stop their activity at once, put their Bibles away, and . . . cease bringing their Bibles to school." That language is from a lawsuit Luke's parents have filed in federal court, where they are asking a judge to rule that school officials cannot prohibit religious expression during a student's free time.

Once there was a solid consensus about how the nation's public schools should be run. In 1911, the Encyclopedia Britannica could assert with confidence that "the great mass of the American people are in entire agreement as to the principles which should control public education." But as the battles in Kansas, Massachusetts, and Tennessee -- and countless others like them -- make clear, that day is past.

From issues of sexuality and religion to the broad themes of US history and politics, public opinion is fractured. Secular parents square off against believers, supporters of homosexual marriage against traditionalists, those stressing "safe sex" against those who emphasize abstinence. Each wants its views reflected in the classroom. No longer is there a common understanding of the mission of public education. To the extent that one camp's vision prevails, parents in the opposing camp are embittered. And there is no prospect that this will change -- not as long as the government remains in charge of educating American children.

Which is why it's time to put an end to government control of the schools.

There is nothing indispensable about a state role in education. Parents don't expect the government to provide their children's food or clothing or medical care; there is no reason why it must provide their schooling. An educated citizenry is a vital public good, of course. But like most such goods, a competitive and responsive private sector could do a much better job of supplying it than the public sector can.

Imagine how diverse and vital American education could be if it were liberated from government control. There would be schools of every description -- just as there are restaurants, websites, and clothing styles of every description. Parents who wanted their children to be taught Darwinian evolution unsullied by leaps of faith in an Intelligent Designer would be able to choose schools in which religious notions played no role. Those who wanted their children to see God's hand in the miraculous tapestry of life all around them would send them to schools in which faith played a prominent role.

Rather than fight over whether reading should be taught with Phonics or Whole Language, parents who felt strongly either way could choose a school that shared their outlook. Those who wanted their kids to learn in single-sex classes would send them to schools organized on that model; other parents would be free to pick schools in which boys and girls learned together. Some schools might reflect a Christian or Jewish or Muslim philosophy; others would be quite secular. In some, athletics would have a high priority; in others, there might be an emphasis on music, language, technology, or art. And no doubt many parents would stick with schools that resembled the ones their children attend now.

With separation of school and state, the roiling education battles would come to a peaceful end. Robust competition and innovation would dramatically lower costs. Teachers, released from their one-size-fits-all straitjacket, would be happier in their chosen profession. Children would be happier, too -- and, perhaps best of all, better-educated to boot.



PHONICS COMEBACK IN ENGLAND

Beginning in September next year, English grammar school children will again learn to read using "synthetic phonics." They will be taught the sounds and letters of the alphabet within the first 16 weeks of school. In recent years, teachers were told to encourage children to memorize words by their shape and guess at them by their context. The results were disastrous.

As in America, phonics in England was abandoned in the 1960s in favor of "look and say." That this approach produced kids who couldn't read, or read up to their grade levels, seemed not to bother education "experts" and bureaucrats who refused all appeals for returning to the old, successful method.

A recent Scottish study found students taught to read with phonics three years ahead of their peers. Politicians are now mustering the political will to roll back the failed "progressive education" approach to reading. It helps that a prominent figure in the pro-phonics movement, Andrew (now Lord) Adonis, is Prime Minister Tony Blair's junior education minister.

Prince Charles has announced plans to set up his own teacher training institute to "fill the gap many in education believe has existed for too long." School vouchers are now debated here, as in the U.S., because of dysfunctional public schools.

It has always been a peculiarity that human beings seem discontent with what works and feel compelled to change, or "improve," what for centuries produced desired results. The English, as well as Americans, managed to successfully instruct generations of children using proven principles. They also believed it was not enough to feed knowledge into someone's head, unless his or her heart and soul were also nourished.

Were parents surveyed and did those surveys reveal they did not want their children educated the way they and previous generations were taught? Who decided that the basic and classic knowledge taught to William Wordsworth and his classmates was not as good as that acquired in our modern age? Who concluded the wisdom of the ages had expired like a "don't sell" label on perishable food? No one did. It was forced on English and American societies by tiny elites who thought they knew better than everyone else.

More here

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

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

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

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13 June 2005

CAMPUS CONSERVATISM GROWING IN AUSTRALIA

Her Majesty will be agog. Banished for decades from student premises where her portrait, often defaced, doubled as a dart board, the Queen is about to be hung by a mob of conservative heretics. A coterie of pro-Liberal student leaders at the University of New England is bent on ransacking politically correct queer rooms and women's departments with the abandon that brought down communism's Berlin Wall. Earlier this year the student council voted to install an Australian flag and a picture of the Queen. Two weeks ago students at this rural NSW campus voted narrowly in favour of seceding from the National Union of Students, saving themselves $40,000 a year in affiliation fees.

Though not as sexy as another decision - to hold a UNE beauty pageant, with categories for swimwear and evening gowns - it was an inevitable inflammatory step for an executive keen to represent heterosexuals and men in a mischievous dig at the gay and lesbian officers who are part of campus furniture across the country. "They want to go back to the 1950s," fumed UNE education student Tony Maslen, who takes earnest umbrage at this flip, hip parodying of the causes dear to his parents' baby-boomer generation. The spate of sacrilege sits comfortably with a demographic among which moleskins outnumber pierced tongues.

One outbreak does not make a revolution but UNE's charge would be useful proof for US commentator Brian C. Anderson who, after interviewing 50 students in a population of millions, hailed a right-wing insurgency sweeping American colleges in his book South Park Conservatives. Anderson argues that the Left's stranglehold on universities is weakening, even at Berkeley, that Californian crucible of '60s ferment. "Never has the Right flourished among college kids as it does today," he writes.

Young Republican chapters, gun clubs, student newspapers ripe with anti-liberal satire and conservative speakers are in renaissance, Anderson says, while support for abortion, taxing the rich and environmental programs is on the wane. His thesis is that Comedy Central's irreverent television cartoon South Park, which butchers sacred cows, has emboldened a generation of kids sick of moral relativism and family breakdown.

Australia is not America. Our gun lobby is weak, affirmative action for blacks is not mainstream, evangelical religion, while enjoying a growth spurt, is not entrenched. That said, there is change afoot. John Howard's children ate their educational "greens" with a TV diet of Widget the World Watcher, Captain Planet and school projects on recycling, yet last month the Australia Institute reported that 14 to 25-year-olds are least concerned of all age groups about the earth's welfare.

Today's students were born as communism crumbled and seem to lack ideological connections. They took their first steps as the Hawke government reintroduced university fees and they have grown up with the Coalition in power.

Leah Sanderson, student president at the University of Queensland, was dining on fish fingers and Milo at a friend's sleepover the night Howard won office. Ten years on she is struggling to whip up protests over commonwealth legislation for voluntary student unionism, which the Left predicts will be the final nail in activism's coffin. Yet Sanderson does not belong to any party. "I couldn't put words to my political persuasion," she says, echoing her contemporaries' disdain for ideological labels, in contrast to the slavish devotion many show to brand names worn on T-shirts, jeans, shoes and mobile phones.

Paul Donegan, her counterpart at Melbourne University, also shirks alignment with any party. "I can't even articulate why," he says, conceding that one-size-fits-all allegiance is "frowned upon. People see it as uncool." Donegan disagrees that South Park conservatives are taking over Australian universities. This "soft Left" Melbourne undergraduate prefers the term passive conservatives to describe a hyper-individualism forged in the competitive pitch for tertiary places, fee-paying jobs, real estate and a family down the track if you can squeeze children into an increasingly crowded life.

Historian Francis Fukuyama predicted in 1999 that this century would see the return of conservative norms as society corrects for the political extremes of the '60s and '70s, which he labelled "the Great Disruption". Some commentators also theorise that human beings are wired genetically for a preference for stable ways, and even religion. Australian twentysomethings are evidence that the pendulum is swinging. Femininity is back, with girls paying big bucks for pretty dresses and accessories. Boys too spend on cosmetics and hair gel. Fashion is hot. Ditto consumption, a pastime scorned by the free-love values of the communes and caftan crowd.

Students these days are likely to be living at home with parents whom they regard as close friends. According to new data from the Australian Institute of Family Studies' Australian Temperament Project, which has followed 2500 children since 1983, the great majority are working or studying; they rarely argue with parents; most act responsibly, and intend overwhelmingly to marry or settle down with long-term partners. "My impression is one of quite strong traditionalism," says project researcher Diana Smart. They might wear tie-dye T-shirts and decorate rooms with retro lava lamps, but this is not a generation given to rowdy, overt protest. They fill their iPods with Van Morrison and Eminem. They plug in to personalised networks, not social movements. Phones are the most common addiction. They have embraced Gallipoli and Anzac Day, perhaps marching in support of Australian war veterans while also opposing our involvement in Iraq.

"They are so savvy," says Neer Korn, analyst with the Sydney-based social research firm Heartbeat. "There is much more distrust of institutions. You say the word corporation, they think bastard. You say priest, they think pedophile. They are post-sexist, post-racist, post-multiculturalist, truly postmodern." Consider the thorny ethical dilemmas debated by 16-year-olds at a Melbourne school: genetically modified crops, euthanasia, in-vitro fertilisation, cloning, pornography, sterilisation of sex offenders, ordination of women as priests.

Policy prescriptions dictated from a head office have been rendered obsolete by the breadth of contemporary debate and the rapid pace of technological change. "Students may be conservative on one issue and Marxist on another," says Natalie Hepburn, student president at the University of Western Australia. "I would never join a party."

Many of the present crop of student leaders had environmentalism drilled into them at school but arrived on campus not knowing the difference between Liberals and the ALP. Institutional attachment to trade unions and political groups has been in decline since their mothers began feeding them organic baby food. The introduction of voluntary student unionism later this year - if no Coalition senator crosses the floor - and new industrial laws promoting individual contracts will surely accelerate discomfort with collective action.

Rose Jackson, daughter of ABC journalist Liz Jackson and student president at the University of Sydney, believes activism on her campus has shown extraordinary resilience, given these trends. "Young people are not [uncaring] but we're constantly given the impression we can't change anything," she says. "I'm cynical myself about how much impact I can have and disillusioned at times about what I can achieve."

Electronic petitions and email are the invisible modus operandi that suits students these days. Elizabeth Shaw, who edits Pelican, the student paper of the University of Western Australia, says the demonstration against voluntary unionism attracted hundreds while thousands more signed protests against the Government's proposed reform. Schapelle Corby's trial in Bali provoked a flurry of email petitions, according to Shaw, because "we're young, we travel, we think that perhaps this could be me". She says: "Things are quite fluid. There is a reluctance to join parties but people remain active on issues that affect them."

The Australian Temperament Project confirms high personal interest but low collective participation. Eighty-four per cent of the 19 to 20-year-old group made a personal effort to recycle or care for the environment and 81 per cent voted in an election. But numbers dwindled dramatically when it came to attending a meeting (16 per cent), demonstrating in a march (6 per cent), lobbying government (6 per cent) or joining with others to resolve a neighbourhood or local problem (7 per cent). Self-interest and the safer territory of improving facilities increasingly absorbs a leadership that 30 years ago waded boldly into Middle East conflicts, nuclear weapons, apartheid and the Springbok tours. At Melbourne's RMIT University, the politicians who contested last year's student election on opposition to the Iraq war were skewered by those advocating better computers and library resources. RMIT's student president Dinesh Rajalingam says "people are interested in their own life". He predicts a rise in Christianity not yet apparent in the churches' head count.

At Adelaide University, the pro-life Democratic Club is more vocal than ever, with a protest against pro-euthanasia philosopher Peter Singer that matched the Left's disruption of Alexander Downer's visit. The university's student president David Pearson is apologetic for abuse of the Foreign Minister because this fed allegations of feral lefties in a climate of creeping intolerance for extracurricular campaigns. "We get told that student unions should just focus on delivering better computer resources," Pearson says.

Two months ago vandals trashed the George Duncan Room, named after a gay lecturer who died in Adelaide parkland allegedly as a result of police violence. They scrawled homophobic vitriol over the walls. The attack is more likely an aberration than part of a South Park-style campaign to offend minorities, but student orthodoxy is being recast.

Patrick Gorman, president at Perth's Curtin University, typifies the new order. He is a member of the ALP but opposes abortion. While he wants campus office-bearers to represent women, gays, and indigenous students, he bridles at the idea of an environment department. "I can see the need to help students who are oppressed, but a tree does not have difficulty studying," Gorman says.

Conservatism, pragmatism, even derogatory references to individualism, are baby-boomer pigeonholes. Today's rebels might be tamer and more like their grandparents in holding family dearer, but the passionate-hearted among them will reinvent the world. Just wait.

Source



Endangered species -- male teachers

A task force in Maine looking into why boys are falling behind in school - a nationwide phenomenon - recently released this data: Since 1980, the number of male teachers in the state's elementary schools dropped from 30% to 17%. The trends of boys struggling as male teachers disappear may be just a coincidence. But many educators suspect a link.

So far, debate on teacher gender has focused on secondary schools, where men make up a third of teachers, down from half 20 years ago. The National Education Association, which tracks this trend, offers these explanations: dated notions that teaching is women's work; modest salaries that lower the profession's prestige; and the belief that men enter the field to "teach the subject" while women enter as nurturers.

To achieve better balance, some school districts are trying to lure more male mathematicians and scientists into high school teaching careers. On the other hand, there's no parallel effort at the elementary school level, where all-female staffs are becoming the norm. That might not worry most parents, who assume women are a natural fit at that level.

It should, however, worry the parents of the many boys who leave the elementary grades with marginal reading skills. The reading gap between boys and girls widens considerably in middle schools. That's a major problem because nearly every student now encounters a verbally demanding college-prep curriculum in ninth grade.

Boys aren't doing well in this new environment, in part because in elementary school they're not getting the message that reading is a guy thing. And with fewer male role models in the classroom, the likelihood of receiving that message only diminishes.

Source



School choice legislation is all the rage in 2005: "To date, 2005 has been a banner year for school choice legislation, with at least 17 states considering choice proposals. In addition, President George W. Bush's 2005-06 budget calls for expanding the federal school choice plan: The $50 million 'Choice Incentive Fund' would allow cities to receive federal funds to pay for tuition vouchers at private and religious schools. According to the Alliance for School Choice, governors are leading the charge on the state level."

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

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

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

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12 June 2005

MILITARY TRAINING POPULAR IN SCHOOLS

The writer of the article below is frantically anti-military but cannot evade the simple fact that kids like a military environment in many ways

Tarsha Moore stands as tall as her 4-foot 8-inch frame will allow. Staring straight ahead, she yells out an order to a squad of peers lined up in three perfect columns next to her. Having been in the military program for six years, Tarsha has earned the rank of captain and is in charge of the 28 boys and girls in her squad. This is Lavizzo Elementary School. Tarsha is 14.

The Middle School Cadet Corps (MSCC) program at the K-8 school is part of a growing trend to militarize middle schools. Students at Lavizzo are among the more than 850 Chicago students who have enlisted in one of the city's 26 MSCC programs. At Madero Middle School, the MSCC has evolved into a full-time military academy for kids 11 to 14 years old.

Chicago public schools are home to the largest Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program, which oversees the MSCC, in the country. When moving up to high school, Chicago's graduating eighth-graders can choose from 45 JROTC programs, including three full-time Army military academies, five "school-within-a-school" Army JROTC academies and one JROTC Naval academy.

Proponents of the programs tout leadership training and character development. But critics quote former Defense Secretary Gen. William Cohen, who described JROTC as "one of the best recruiting services that we could have." Rick Mills, the director of Military Schools and JROTC for the Chicago Public School system, dismisses these concerns. "These kinds of programs would not be in schools if there weren't kids who wanted it, parents who supported it and administrators who facilitated it," he says.

The elementary school cadet corps is a voluntary after-school program that meets two or three times a week. Programs differ from school to school, but MSCC students generally learn first-aid, civics, "citizenship" and character development. They also learn military history and take field trips to local military bases. Once a week, students wear their uniforms to school for inspections. Tarsha describes buffing her uniform shoes in preparation for inspection days. "Everything has to be perfect," she says. During drill practices they learn how to stand, turn and salute in synchronization. When they disobey an order, they do pushups. "Only 10," says one administrator.

Joanne Young, a sixth-grade teacher at Goethe School in Chicago, recently wrote a letter to the local school council protesting the implementation of the cadet corps in her school. "I was told that it is not a military program, yet every aspect of it is military," she wrote. "This program is training our students, as young as 11-years old, to march in formation and carry guns. ... Students could be suspended for bringing something that appears to be a weapon to our school, yet we are handing them fake guns for this program." Young, like many other teachers, feels that leadership and discipline could easily be taught in other types of after-school programs.

Herman Barnett, director of Lavizzo's award-winning MSCC program, asks the public to give the students the benefit of the doubt. "They don't look at it as getting ready for the army," he says. "They're just doing it for entertainment and fun."

In 2002 the Bush administration passed the No Child Left Behind Act with a small, unpublicized provision: Section 9528, "Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information," requires high schools to give all student contact information to the military. Most students aren't aware they can opt out by filling out a form......

Opponents of the JROTC program also cite ethnic profiling, arguing that the military targets students from minority and low-income areas. The Chicago Public School system is 49.8 percent African American and 38 percent Latino. Students coming from low-income families make up 85.2 percent of Chicago's student population. JROTC director Mills is correct when he says the racial and socioeconomic status of those in Chicago's JROTC program reflects the school system as a whole, but only five schools in all of the more affluent Chicago suburbs have JROTC programs.

Military recruiters are known for their flashy tactics: television ads, omnipresent brochures, recruiting ships, trucks and vans, and even a free Army video game kids can download off the Internet. Yet, the Army hasn't met its recruitment goals in three months. The Marines haven't met their quotas since January. Suspicious recruitment tactics are in the headlines and Army recruiters took off May 20 to retrain in the ethics and laws of recruitment.

Meanwhile, Mills insists the military does not look to JROTC groups for students to boost its numbers. "I get absolutely no pressure from any of the services," he says. "None." Only 18 percent of graduating JROTC seniors are considering joining the service, says Mills. He does not have statistics on how many of the 71 percent that go on to post-secondary school stay with the ROTC program. Lavizzo's Barnett also says that not all of his middle school students move on to JROTC programs in high school. Tarsha, however, has already signed up. While she wants to be a lawyer and is not planning on joining the armed forces when she graduates, the 14-year-old says, "If I were to join the military, I would be ready for it."

More here



ANOTHER LEFTIST ATTACK ON FREE SPEECH

Conservative students have to put up with the most awful and offensive B.S. from Leftist speakers but even a balanced and scholarly presentation from a conservative must be censored

Writer Richard Rodriguez, invited to speak at the California State University East Bay commencement in Hayward on Saturday, has decided to withdraw from the program after some graduating students threatened to boycott the event. Rodriguez, author of the acclaimed memoir "Hunger of Memory," drew criticism from some students for his views against bilingual education and affirmative action. "I'm a bilingual educator," said student Leah Perez, 32, who is graduating with a master's degree in urban teacher leadership and protested Rodriguez's presence at the graduation. "He believes in assimilation and rejection of one's cultural identity, and we don't feel that is what we stand for in our program, and we don't want him representing us."

Views such as Rodriguez's go against the mission of the university, she said, noting that CSU East Bay has an education curriculum that produces bilingual teachers and emphasizes social justice.

Campus spokesman Kim Huggett said Rodriguez was slated to receive an honorary doctorate degree and then speak briefly. But those plans were scuttled by Rodriguez after campus President Norma Rees received several e- mails in the past week threatening a protest boycott. It was unclear Wednesday how many students had threatened to boycott the ceremony. Rees spoke with Rodriguez about the situation, and on Tuesday evening he decided it would be in the best interest of the university if he bowed out of the ceremony entirely, Huggett said. Rees will give the keynote address at the ceremony. "It is a sad situation. You hear about this at other universities," Huggett said. "We are a university that has always prided itself on the expression of free ideas. The sad part is people doing this based on a book they haven't read."

The book was chosen last year as summer reading for freshmen, who then discussed it online. Rodriguez was also the speaker during a campus orientation for new freshmen and their parents last fall. In an e-mail sent Tuesday to a student who was critical about Rodriguez's appearance at the graduation, Rees wrote that she had heard no complaints or concerns about that earlier event. "On the contrary, it was an enormous success. I had not heard that there were differences among the faculty and students regarding Mr. Rodriguez's writings and statements until a few days ago," Rees wrote. Rees said she hoped to hold a forum in the fall to "share opinions and offer suggestions about this and related matters." "It will be a learning experience for all of us, including me," she wrote.

Huggett invited anyone who wanted a free copy of Rodriguez's book to pick one up at the General Education Program Office in Room LM55 in Warren Hall on the Hayward campus. Even though Rodriguez will no longer appear at the main commencement, the protesting students are going ahead with an alternative graduation ceremony on Saturday with a different speaker. The main commencement for the university's 5,000 graduates will be at 9 a. m. in Pioneer Stadium. The alternative ceremony, expected to be attended by at least the 28 graduates of the urban teacher leadership master's program, will be held at 8:30 a.m. on the lawn of Meiklejohn Hall. The speaker will be Edmundo Norte, a lecturer in the program and a supporter of bilingual education.

More here

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

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

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

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



11 June 2005

COMPULSORY PROPAGANDA IN PHILADELPHIA SCHOOLS

They mightn't know how to read and write properly but they will learn that black is beautiful

City high school students will be required to take a class in African and African American history to graduate, a move that education experts believe is unique in the nation. The requirement in the 185,000-student district, which is about two-thirds black, begins with September's freshman class, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday. The yearlong course covers subjects including classical African civilizations, civil rights and black nationalism, said Gregory Thornton, the district's chief academic officer. The other social studies requirements are American history, geography and world history.

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for big city school districts, said Philadelphia appeared to be in the forefront with such a requirement. "Courses on the subjects are offered as electives in other cities," he said.

Some parents opposed requiring the course, including Miriam Foltz, president of the Home and School Association at Baldi Middle School. "There are other races in this city," said Foltz, who is white. "There are other cultures that will be very offended by this. How can you just mandate a course like this?"

While acknowledging it would be better to have courses adequately reflecting all cultures, district officials said African and African American history had been neglected too long. "We have a whole continent that has been absent from most of our textbooks," said Paul Vallas, the district's chief executive officer.

Source



GIULIANI'S ATTACKS ON THE AMAZINGLY CORRUPT NYC SCHOOL SYSTEM

Ramon Cortines had become chancellor only two months before Giuliani won office. He had come from San Francisco, where, as manager of the school system, he had earned a reputation as a low-key and competent, if administratively limited, leader. The system Cortines inherited in New York, however, would very likely have been ungovernable even if he was a great manager. The Bureau of Supplies, for example, was known as the Bureau of Surprise, and contract bid-rigging was a common practice. Local school boards operating with considerable autonomy had control over not only the hiring of everyone from principals to cafeteria workers but over millions of dollars in contracts as well. For the local boards, operating mini-political machines, education became secondary to the patronage and contract possibilities offered by the schools. Even principalships were offered for sale.

The schools chancellor didn't have to answer to the mayor, but rather to the Board of Education. The district superintendents put in place by local boards didn't have to answer to the chancellor. And the school principals, who were tenured, didn't have to answer to the superintendents. Teachers, who were largely tenured and protected by an extremely favorable contract, didn't have to answer to the principals.

Trouble between Giuliani and Cortines began early in the new administration, following an extended meeting between the two men focusing on the city's dire budget problems and the need to cut back the Board of Ed's Byzantine bureaucracy: When Cortines left the meeting, he savaged Giuliani before the waiting press.

Giuliani responded with a withering blast in his State of the City Address. He noted that, from 1980 to 1992, spending on administration grew twice as fast as overall schools spending, and asked to what end. "The Board of Education has countless — thousands of administrators — there are so many that the chancellor has formed a search committee to find and count them," he jibed to laughter and applause. Before the month was out, Giuliani seemed to have won a major victory when Cortines said he had "discovered" a lost continent of more than 3,500 Board of Education employees long hidden within the bureaucracy. It turned out the board had twice as many employees as Cortines had claimed. On the same day, the chairman of the City Council education committee revealed that in the midst of the fiscal crisis, the city's 32 local school boards had spent $2.2 million on conferences in Hawaii, Las Vegas and Puerto Rico.

Dissatisfied with the limited cuts Cortines had been willing to make, Giuliani appointed a political ally, former Rep. Herman Badillo, to investigate the Board of Ed's finances. Seeing that appointment as a vote of no-confidence, Cortines threatened to resign, saying, "My integrity is not for sale." The political establishment that had been shaken by Giuliani saw an opportunity to strike back by rallying around the chancellor's ire. In the words of one experienced Democrat, "Anyone with a hard-on for Giuliani got in their whacks." The mayor's "bullying style," his budget cuts, and even the way he looked, became objects of opprobrium. Parents' organizations and the press turned on Giuliani with a fury; he had few defenders.

His critics assumed they had Giuliani cornered: He could not, they reasoned, begin a politically harrowing search for a new chancellor so soon after the bitter fight required to select Cortines only a half a year earlier. But the mayor got some much-needed help: Gov. Mario Cuomo and City Council Speaker Peter Vallone stepped in and negotiated a compromise, under which Badillo would remain in place to oversee the Board of Ed's finances, and Cortines would rescind his resignation for the time being.

Ultimately, fiscal pressures on Giuliani would make his relationship with Cortines untenable; in September 1995 the chancellor would quit for good. A year earlier, though, he had come around to acknowledging that community school boards were "patronage mills" and that the system for repairing the schools was broken beyond repair. He took to wondering out loud why an $8 billion system was still using textbooks that described the Empire State Building as the tallest in the world.

At least one local politician admitted off the record that Giuliani had been proved right: Almost $2 billion had been cut from the school budget with no discernible effect on students' educational performance. But, he added, there was no way he would make that argument to his constituents, many of whom were convinced that the mayor was a racist who cut the budget to harm black and Latino children. And, in fact, when Cortines quit, polls showed the public backed him over the mayor by two to one.

While hardly helpful to his own cause, Giuliani's attacks on the Board of Education did benefit his successor, Michael Bloomberg, by setting the stage for the board's elimination and for direct mayoral control of the schools.

More here

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

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

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

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10 June 2005

DO IVIES SUCH AS HARVARD MATTER?

Principally a review of two books: "UNIVERSITY, INC: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education" by Jennifer Washburn and "PRIVILEGE: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" by Ross Gregory Douthat. The reviewer is Alan Ryan, Warden of New College, Oxford. He was professor of politics at Princeton University from 1988-96.

We take large, modern research universities so much for granted that it requires an effort to realise how easily we could do without them - even Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford, to take the three that members of the academy themselves recently rated as the best in the world. Consider the higher education of the young. One of university's main functions in the field of tertiary education - pre-professional education - could be performed in schools of law, accountancy, medicine, teacher-training and the like where professional education itself is given. As for liberal education - introducing students to a wide range of disciplines to develop their minds while they are young - it is best provided in small colleges by people who take it seriously. It is not assisted, but threatened, by diversions of time, money, and managerial effort into the research activities of the modern university.

"Blue skies" research could easily be done in publicly funded research institutes by professional researchers unencumbered by the pretence that they are engaged in teaching the young. And the function that increasingly dominates the life of the modern university - doing research and development for the benefit, and often under the control, of multinational pharmaceutical and telecommunications companies - could and perhaps should be done in commercial research parks. The new California Institutes for Science and Innovation described in Jennifer Washburn's University Inc. are to all intents and purposes just that, even though they are one-third funded by the State of California and two-thirds by private corporations, physically housed on the campuses of the University of California system, and staffed in part by academics.

What would be lost, if we disaggregated Berkeley, Harvard and Oxford? One slightly surprising fact is that there would be no problem recruiting the next generation of high-grade research workers; in the US, the best liberal arts colleges, such as Williams, Amherst or Swarthmore, where the focus is on undergraduate education, send a higher proportion of their graduates into research training than do Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale. It is less surprising on second thoughts. The idea that a student gets a deeper insight into Shakespeare by attending a university whose hospital is especially good at transplants is not very plausible; but one has to believe it to suppose that, say, Stanford's excellence in advanced surgical procedures automatically enhances the education in the humanities that it provides.

Since we can imagine a world without research universities, where the disparate things they do are spread among professional schools, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research institutes and research parks, we might wonder whether there is any function that only a research university can perform - and whether it is one that is threatened by co-operation with industry. Those are the questions asked and answered in University Inc.

The book is somewhat sensationally sub-titled, "the corporate corruption of higher education". But it is actually a calm, balanced and careful look at a topic that has exercised many commentators, among them Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard. Bok's exploration of the damage that corporate ties can do was published last year. Universities in the Marketplace was no more reassuring than Washburn's book, but she has more to say than he did about the wider legal and political context in which universities work.

John Dewey provided the received view of the university's unique place in society 90 years ago. A century ago, it was common for trustees to demand the dismissal of professors whose political views they disliked - and to get their own way. Security of tenure was needed, said Dewey, because the university's unique role was to perform "the truth function" - to discover and disseminate the truth so far as it could be known, for its own sake and for no ulterior purpose. That is why "blue skies" research belongs inside a university rather than in a government-funded institute: only inside the university is there the necessary pressure to publish the truth, unvarnished, unadjusted, awkward and embarrassing as that truth may be.

At least, that's the theory. Performing the "truth function" is not easy. Nor is it threatened by only one danger. Ross Gregory Douthat's acerbic Privilege gives so many reasons for disliking Harvard that anyone who reads him alongside Jennifer Washburn may conclude that the damage done to universities by commercialisation is icing on the cake of their self-inflicted intellectual and social corruption. Still, we must not exaggerate; at the end of Privilege, readers will find Douthat succumbing, as everyone does, to the hope that higher education's better self can triumph over all. Nobody ever hoped to see Enron's better self.

University Inc. is built around three ideas that should animate thinking about university relations with commerce and industry. The first is that there is no gainsaying that where research can benefit everyone, it should - whether by making industry more efficient, finding more effective drugs, miniaturising electronic circuits or whatever. The idea that pure research is too pure to be sullied by exploitation is plain foolish.

The second is that whatever legal framework ensures that research can be exploited should not create conflicts of interest dangerous to the functioning of higher education. Many of these conflicts are familiar: too many professors draw a salary for teaching students while they have what amounts to a full-time job running a spinoff company or consulting on the side. Universities have rules limiting the amount of such work their faculty can do; but where someone brings in large sums of money to the university, rigorous enforcement of the rules too often goes by the board.

The third thought is that since the public spends a great deal of money on the research done in universities, the public ought to get a fair share of the benefit. Otherwise, the public pays for the research twice over, first through its taxes and then through the profits made by the companies that exploit the research. The question is what a fair return to the public actually is.

Might the public get a better bargain if the results of research remain available to anyone who wishes to use them, as part of the intellectual "commons"? And might the public have grounds for thinking that, if private sponsors fund research, the quality of what is produced should be more carefully policed than at present? When more than 90 per cent of papers reporting sponsored research into the effectiveness of drugs report positive findings, and only 60 per cent of non-sponsored research do so, anxiety about the corruption of the researcher's judgment - even inadvertent - is not misplaced.

The temptation is to denounce the wickedness of corporate capitalism, university administrators and the other "usual suspects". Washburn is too intelligent to succumb to that temptation. Universities have been starved of public funding over the past two decades and can hardly be expected to pass up the offer of private funds; and the pace of innovation in fields such as bio-technology is such that no company can pass up the chance to be involved in research. What is needed is not a retreat into an ivory tower but better regulation.

Universities Inc. induces two reactions in a British reader. The first is to envy the US its investigative reporters. The other is to wonder what a British version of Washburn might uncover. British universities have lately been encouraged to engage in aggressive patenting and licensing and it is hard to believe that they do not run the dangers she describes. If they do not, it is perhaps less because British universities are full of high-minded, strong-willed academics immune to the attractions of the dollar than because neither government nor business has been signing cheques as large as their American counterparts.

Ross Douthat's entertaining account of undergraduate alienation, on the other hand, induces the usual envy of the young for their fluency and vigour, and a little gratitude not to have been among the Harvard faculty and Douthat's undergraduate contemporaries who get their comeuppance in these pages. He does, however, make a serious argument worth chewing on. The whole point of Harvard, he thinks - and Harvard here stands for the Ivy League, its competitors such as Stanford or Duke, and its liberal arts cousins such as Amherst and Williams - is to reproduce the American ruling class. One might guess that he would have thought the argument over "social engineering" provoked by Steven Schwartz's report into university admissions in England and Wales last year was pretty naive. What else do elite universities engage in if not social engineering?

How indignant Douthat is about this fact is unclear. What he is certainly angry about is the basis on which the elite is selected. Forced to choose between an arbitrarily recruited elite whose rank is a matter of birth and accident - and whose arbitrariness might induce in the fortunate a certain sense of noblesse oblige - and the meritocracy that Harvard has put together on the basis of PSATs, SAT Is, SAT IIs, APs and the assorted extra-curriculars that American high school students engage in, he prefers the former.

This is not entirely irrational. Gordon Brown and Sir Peter Lampl are tremendous fans of the Harvard Admissions Office, but Douthat has done his homework. One hundred out of the 31,700 high schools in America provide more than a fifth of the students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. These high schools are overwhelmingly private and heavily concentrated in the so-called "blue" states - those that vote Democrat. So Harvard is politically and geographically unrepresentative in the extreme. The university's attempt to create a "diverse" student body, meanwhile, amounts to recruiting a small number of black and Asian students who often take the first opportunity to self-segregate and frustrate the university's hope that their presence will do their white contemporaries some rather ill-defined educational good.

Although Harvard gives generous scholarship aid, the campus is no more economically diverse than it is politically diverse. The less well-off half of the American population provides less than 10 per cent of Ivy League students; 75 percent of students come from the top quarter of American families. The elite polished by Harvard is a narrowly recruited group; it may be cosmetically diverse - with enough black, Asian and ethnic minority students to match the American population in skin colour - but economically, ideologically, socially and culturally, it is nothing of the sort.....

More here



The Jihadist Prof at UC-Santa Barbara

The usual high standards of scholarship one expects from the UC

Lisa Hajjar has made an entire academic career out of bashing the United States and Israel for their supposed use of "torture" against Arabs. She spouts off these baseless accusations from her academic home at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she teaches in its "Law and Society" program. In fact she has no credentials at all in law. (She also teaches "Middle East Studies" at UCSB, with even fewer qualifications in that field.) Instead she holds a PhD in sociology from American University. The one in Washington, not Cairo.

Hajjar is among the shrillest voices in the United States trying to chant the accusations over American "abuses of the human rights" of the al-Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. She served on the pretentious "world tribunal," the one that found Saddam's Iraq innocent and the US guilty of war crimes and human rights abuses. Among the "tribunal's" objective findings were that "the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and all other colonized areas is illegal and should be brought to an end immediately."

Lisa Hajjar has written:

"There is no reason to doubt that torture has been systemic and pervasive, or that authorization can be traced up the chain of command, or that this has seriously damaged not only the immediate victims but also our national institutions and America's image abroad. Yet top officials in the Bush Administration are still doing what torturing regimes do: denying the facts and blaming "rogue" officers. Despite the abundant evidence of torture, Congress refuses to challenge these denial tactics in any meaningful way, for example by refusing to confirm for high office those responsible. What we desperately need is public acknowledgment that torture is always and everywhere a crime, and an official policy that reflects this conviction."

Hajjar has tried to define herself academically as a scholar having some expertise on the use of torture. She defines her aim as the debunking the false "popular belief that Western history constitutes a progressive move from more to less torture." The fact that she publishes her "findings" on web sites of the communist party raises questions about her credibility and objectivity. Hajjar gets her kicks out of issuing "warnings" about human rights abuses. She has spent her energies bemoaning the "torture" of the Iraqi Ba'athists being held in the Abu Ghraib prison.

Lisa Hajjar is apparently the daughter of a Finnish mother and a father of Syrian descent. She teaches in the "Law and Society Program" at the University of California at Santa Barbara, but she is in fact nothing more than a third-rate leftist sociologist. She has no training in law or legal studies, is not qualified as a Middle East scholar or researcher, and his extraordinarily few bona fide publications even in sociology. None of this prevented UCSB from granting her tenure as well as its "Pious Award" for her "research". She was among the UCSB faculty members opposing the war against Iraq and defending Saddam as part of "Not in Our Name".

Before coming to Santa Barbara, Hajjar taught "military law" at Swarthmore. There she engaged in partisan one-sided indoctrination in her classroom, as is revealed by the syllabi of her courses there. Her required reading list was a who's who of far leftists, communists, and haters of American and Israel. Among her proclamations at Swarthmore, was: "While the United States voices outrage about Saddam Hussein, it goes on tolerating human rights violations and other misdeeds by regional allies." Her "research" at Swarthmore consisted of little more than serving as a cheerleader for politicized "cause lawyers."

Hajjar does not hide her support for Palestinian violence. She writes: "Because Palestinians are stateless and dispersed, their struggle for national rights has taken 'unconventional' forms, including guerilla warfare. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which emerged in the 1960s to lead this struggle, has been castigated by Israel, and to a lesser extent the US, as nothing but a terrorist organization. This typifies the use of the terrorist label to non-states in their struggles against states.. Since most Palestinians have identified politically with the PLO, it was easy for the Israeli state to relate the repression of Palestinians to the imperatives of Jewish/Israeli national security. Generally speaking, everything connected to Palestinian nationalist activities and especially to the PLO was considered a security threat which (sic) could justify limitations and restrictions of rights."

Those "unconventional" Palestinian forms of protest happen to include blowing up buses full of school children and pregnant mothers.

Hajjar is a radical feminist, but one with little real interest in the position of women in the Arab world and with no concern at all over Israeli women being murdered by her beloved Palestinian terrorists. She has mentioned that in Morocco things are less equitable than at Vassar. She seems to believe that the main cause for Arab feminists should be destroying Israel. She is highly praised by Neve Gordon, a fanatic anti-Israel lecturer in political science at Ben Gurion University in Israel, someone who was arrested for serving as a "human shield" for Palestinian murderers, and someone who wrote a sycophantic piece about Holocaust Denier Norman Finkelstein, comparing Finkelstein ethically to the Prophets in the Bible. Gordon and Hajjar like to cite one another as authoritative sources for the claim that Israel uses torture against Arab prisoners. This is a bit like Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky citing one another's works to prove how that America is more oppressive than Nazi Germany.....

More here

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

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

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

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9 June 2005

THE CHINESE ATTITUDE TO EDUCATION

Across China traffic has been diverted, building work halted and tens of thousands of extra police have been deployed - all to ensure that secondary school children get the peace and quiet they need for this year's university entrance exams. This week more than 8.6 million teenagers will take their seats in hot, stuffy and uncomfortable classrooms for their only chance to gain a degree that will put them on a path to government office or business riches.

Southern Guangdong province ordered traffic away from many exam sites and banned construction work and blaring radios from streets near schools. Similar quiet zones have been set up in towns and cities across China. One Beijing neighbourhood was draped with red banners reading: "Build a quiet testing community". In the capital, more than 1,000 extra police took to the streets to ensure a smooth flow of traffic around schools in a city where cars and buses move at a snail's pace and the hooting of horns is constant. Notices went out to drivers to give way to students dashing across the streets to reach exam rooms in time.

The pressure on children is intense. One 18-year-old student in the western province of Qinghai battered his mother to death with a stone during an argument after he refused to take the exam. In an eastern coastal town, a boy committed suicide by taking poison.

Parents were told not to pile too much pressure on students, most of whom are only children born under China's strict "one couple, one child" policy and carrying the hopes of an entire family.

Source



U OREGON THOUGHT POLICE BLAME BLOGGERS

A diversity plan that sparked a flap at the University of Oregon will get a new review by a panel of faculty members and others in an effort to ease concerns about its scope while still accomplishing its goals. UO President Dave Frohnmayer said he is in the process of appointing an executive working group of eight to 10 people to conduct the review this summer. They will be asked to more clearly define some key terms as well as consider ways to promote diversity that can win broader support. "The direction we're going to take is to work from the basic goals of the document but not regard particular details as set in concrete," Frohnmayer said.

The five-year diversity plan, developed over the past year by a 70-person work group, got a hot reception from some on campus who felt it went too far and offered too few opportunities for debate. Proposals that attracted the most heat were those relating to "cultural competency," a vaguely defined standard that would be considered in everything from hiring to tenure decisions. Some faculty members believed that the proposal threatened academic freedom, noting that it would require a "demonstrable commitment to cultural competency" in tenure and post-tenure reviews. But it said the document included no definition of the term. "We assume that a 'demonstrable commitment to cultural competency' would not be aimed at dictating to faculty what (they) must teach. But it is unclear from the draft what such a phrase means," said a letter from the UO chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Frohnmayer said that while he wasn't disappointed by the reception the proposal received, he felt that some judged it too swiftly without understanding that the document was still a work in progress.... The UO president acknowledged that the plan was deliberately provocative but he said bold steps are needed to ensure that the university community at least reflects the racial makeup of the state and that it also be seen as a place where people of all types can learn and teach without fear.... Frohnmayer agreed on the need for clearer definitions, conceding that without a consensus on key meanings some terms will be seen by some to carry a hidden agenda. But he also said some people's reactions have been "excessively alarmist" because they assume the words are an attempt to force a particular ideology on the university community.

The dust-up over the diversity plan again made headlines around the country and particularly on conservative Web sites and blogs, where the UO has been dubbed the "Berkeley of the north." Conservative commentators cited the plan as further evidence that the school is controlled by liberals and goes too far in the name of political correctness. Frohnmayer brushed off the comments and said the "intensity of the reaction shows we're a community that's not afraid to be engaged." "People can engage in stereotypical thinking if they want, and that is one of the really ugly downsides of the blog-verse," he said, referring to the world of online Web logs. "I guess to that group of people I'd say, what is it you don't understand about the word 'draft?' "The minute you get in the business of censoring people who have serious ideas that want them discussed seriously even if you don't agree with them, the minute you can't do that at a university without someone engaging in character assassination and stereotyping, it's a pretty sad day."

More here. And Joanne Jacobs makes some good comments too. I guess that she is part of the "really ugly downside of the blog-verse" that Frohnmayer is trying to scapegoat.



GOLD-PLATED TEACHERS

Teacher pay levels in Scarsdale, and several other districts in the county, are now high enough to constitute an entry ticket to upper-middle-class income and status. In Scarsdale, 166 teachers - nearly half - have base salaries exceeding $100,000; for more than a dozen, base pay tops $120,000. A study of teacher salaries across New York State found that as administrators and affluent parents compete to give their children every possible advantage, thousands of teachers in the New York suburbs now make six-figure salaries - numbers strongly at variance with the popular stereotype of the poorly paid, altruistic mentor of the young.

The study indicates that only the most experienced teachers, with the most education, earn such salaries - which are the highest in the nation. But the money is arguably substantial enough to affect what it means to be a public school teacher. Consider this, for instance: A family whose parents both teach in Westchester schools can make enough to put it in the top 6 percent of earners in the county. Teachers say the salaries are justified, even necessary, in a place where the cost of living is high. "You can earn $100,000 and not afford to live here," said Susan Taylor, a longtime Scarsdale teacher who heads the district's teacher training institute.

And in fact the rising salaries have not really made waves in Westchester, because in many communities they have arrived in tandem with rising property values - which softens the effect of school district budget increases. The average home in Scarsdale, for instance, sold for $1.4 million in 2004, and the average income per pupil in the schools was more than $500,000 in 2002, five times that in the rest of the state. "Our taxes are high, but our education is superior," said Ellen Cohen, 53, who has a daughter at Scarsdale High School. "It doesn't bother me that teachers do so well."

She is one of many Scarsdale homeowners who, like those in other affluent communities around New York, based their choice of suburb on the reputation of the schools. For these parents, the relationship between good schools and good neighborhoods is symbiotic. "I would not have moved to Hartsdale or Eastchester, because of the reputation of the schools," Ms. Cohen said. "We live in Scarsdale for different reasons, but one of those is the education is excellent."

In Westchester, the study found 1,074 teachers - 1 of every 9 - who made more than $100,000 in the 2003-04 school year, the most recent for which data are available. (That total excludes Yonkers, whose teachers have worked without a contract for the last two years. The state does not collect salary data in districts where salary issues remain unresolved.)

The number of six-figure base salaries tripled between 2001 and 2003; among those in that earning bracket are 223 elementary teachers, 39 kindergarten teachers and 61 physical education teachers. Base salaries do not include stipends for extra duties like coaching and directing plays, which can add thousands.

With combined step and cost-of-living increases, the median salary of a Westchester teacher who had 10 years' experience and a master's degree in 2001 had advanced 5 percent a year by 2003, a time when other salaries in the Northeast went up about 3 percent a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Source

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

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

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

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8 June 2005

COLLEGE VOUCHERS IN COLORADO

Recruiters for Colorado's state colleges are hustling to sign up current students and high school graduates as the nation's first market-oriented tuition-voucher system begins this fall. Colorado is the first state to abandon direct funding to its 13 community colleges, three state universities and six other public colleges — currently, $500 million a year — in favor of a $2,400 tuition voucher to each enrolled college student. "It's going to drive changes and force reform, which is what we want," said Richard F. O'Donnell, executive director of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (CCHE). "Students have ownership over their tax dollars in an explicit way, which we think will motivate those changes."

About 140,000 students have already applied to the College Opportunity Fund for the $2,400 tuition vouchers for the 2005-06 academic year, Mr. O'Donnell said. To make state colleges whole financially under the new funding system, "we need 180,000 [enrolled students]," he said. "High school seniors are now making their final decisions about college."

In the background is vibrant competition among the state's community colleges, attended by more than 117,000 students, and the state's elite four-year universities that also attract thousands of out-of-state undergraduate and graduate students. It's what locals call the "Colorado Paradox." The state ranks No. 1 nationally in the percentage of people over age 25 with college degrees — many having moved to the state to live, work and go to college. But Colorado also ranks 27th among states with just 39 percent of its own high school freshmen eventually going to college, and 41st among states for students of low-income and minority families making it to college.

The University of Colorado, with its main campus in Boulder and two other campuses in Denver and Colorado Springs, has 50,000-plus students. Colorado State University at Fort Collins and Pueblo has 25,000 students, and the Colorado School of Mines at Golden, a renowned engineering and science university, has 3,600 students.

State-directed funding to colleges and universities is "nameless, faceless," said Nancy McCallin, president of the Colorado Community College System. "Now you've got a face on all these dollars," and all colleges in the state "will increasingly have to put the focus on students, or they'll leave." Hank Brown, retired U.S. senator and the University of Colorado's incoming president, said the new financing scheme will benefit most of the state's current and potential college students "because it becomes much more apparent" that community colleges "are a more cost-effective alternative" for most Colorado residents to the larger state universities. "Over time, bigger more prestigious universities will go with higher tuition increases" to make up funding shortfalls, Mr. Brown said. "So [the state college voucher legislation] injected some market forces that didn't exist in the past."

More here



CHINA SHOWS THE WAY (?)

Dan Rose, a businessman and philanthropist, recently visited China and became aware of the fact that the Chinese are now graduating 10 million high school students a year who cannot speak English, but who can read and write English. His question was, "I wonder how long it will take the Chinese, at this rate, to end up with more people who can read and write English than we have in the United States?"

Those sorts of education "miracles" are fairly easy within totalitarian systems because an unambiguous decision at the top can lead to successful practice if the necessary components are in place. Those who are not attracted to totalitarian methods in order to achieve success should take heed of what is now happening in the world of American public education, where reform is taking place against the will of the teachers union.

The United Federation of Teachers has said that No Child Left Behind is a measure that has been misapplied since it was enacted. But the recent spike in math and reading scores for states including Delaware, Ohio, Maryland, Illinois and yes, New York, says otherwise. The union is invaluable in terms of representing teachers as a labor group for collective bargaining. But the union also is the greatest enemy of public education. It has far more often than not fallen into the pit where unions can become menaces to society because quality work takes a backseat to keeping its membership employed and increasing its benefits.

What this proves, and what we must learn from the beginnings of success in this arena, is that the only way that ingrained social programs can be effectively handled is by city, state and federal government committing to measurable change. Beyond racism and class contempt, there is the ongoing problem of laziness, the presence of layabouts disguised as teachers who disgrace the profession and bring a bad name to those many serious educators whom they hide behind.

In capitalism, things change as often because of money as they do because of morality and deep thinking, so it is always smart to attach money to morality and vanguard conceptions. Then the choice of profit over deficit can bring about better results. Once the federal government made it clear that no funds would be forthcoming unless there were improvements in student performance - which meant improvements in teacher performance - things began to change.

We have now been freed from a debilitating illusion, which was that those children unfortunate enough to be born the wrong color or in the wrong class were just incapable of learning. When we get rid of that kind of hogwash, we get ever closer to realizing the potential of our richly diverse population and move closer to putting up a good fight for the world markets that places like China and India intend to take as many of as they can.

More here

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

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

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

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7 June 2005

Conservatives see liberal bias in class - and mobilize

Complaints that teachers push liberal ideology are trickling down from college campuses to the K-12 level

Concerned that public schools are becoming sites of liberal indoctrination, activists have generated a wave of efforts to limit what teachers may discuss and to bring more conservative views into the classroom. After all, they say, if related campaigns can help rein in doctrinaire faculty on college campuses, why not in K-12 education as well?

Tyler Whitney, a junior at East Lansing High School in Michigan, says teachers and administrators let him circulate his newspaper, The Right Way, only after a public protest this spring and coverage of the standoff in the local news. Principal Paula Steele says the school permitted distribution of The Right Way as soon as editors deleted submissions by college students, because "we do not want to be a forum for outside speakers." Ideology, she says, was never a factor.

In class, Tyler says, he still keeps his views to himself. When a world history teacher last year characterized the Iraq war as an empire-building bid for oil, he says, "I just shook my head and went along with it because I didn't want to get a bad grade."

Students in primary and secondary schools tend to feel "intimidated," due to the "imbalance of power" in the classroom, says Gerard Balan, managing editor of Republicanvoices.org. "[Students] are not really going to want to rock the boat even if they disagree with what the teacher is saying." And when most of those teachers belong to unions that support Democrats, he and other activists say, the political compass tends to tilt left.

For some, the new assertiveness among parents and students is a response to restrictions at security-conscious schools. One example from the libertarian Rutherford Institute: the use of dogs in drug searches. The institute, based in Charlottesville, Va., also objects to the "uniformity and conformity" required by some schools, says president John Whitehead. It filed suit May 17 against Hudson (Mass.) High School for allegedly tearing down posters for the High School Conservative Clubs of America.

The posters, hung by senior Chris Bowler, were provocative. They touted the clubs' website, which links to footage of beheadings at the hands of Islamic extremists. The site says the images show "the true doctrines of Islam put into action." "Unfortunately, students are treated as semi-inmates in lots of schools," Mr. Whitehead says. "The problem is there aren't many people like Chris Bowler who will stand up and fight back." Hudson High School did not respond to requests for comment.

Some observers envision liberal and conservative families lining up in pursuit of separate educations. Because ideological policing of the classroom may prove impossible, support could grow for vouchers for values-driven education, says Michelle Easton, president of the conservative Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute in Herndon, Va. "Our primary approach is to promote school choice, because then parents can pick little right-wing schools, little left-wing schools, little traditional schools - whatever they want for their children," Mrs. Easton says. "Then you get the government out the business of, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.' "

Source



A CHRISTIAN SCHOOL PROVIDING INDIVIDUAL ATTENTION

There wasn't much money or structure in Faye Capers' home life while she was growing up in the projects of Texarkana, Texas in the 1950s. Both her parents were alcoholics, and they didn't have a high school education between them. But they did one thing right: They made sure Capers and her two sisters never missed a day of school. It was her teachers that made the difference in Faye Capers' life, caring not only for her education, but also for her. "That's where the light came from," she says today. "That's where my structure came from."

That light is now being shed through Capers to nearly 50 students in South Carolina. Two years ago, after a 25-year career teaching in public and private schools, she founded the academy that bears her name: the Capers Preparatory Christian Academy (CPCA) on Jones Island. The school opened its doors to just 12 students in grades 1 through 5; today, 43 first- through ninth-graders cram into a leased suite, while another 25 are on the waiting list. In founding CPCA, Capers knew she couldn't help every student. But like her own teachers, she was determined to help those who needed it. And if that meant a little extra something from her ... well, that was fine. That's what she does, because that's what her teachers did for her. It was Capers' teachers who inspired her to get out of bed when she was their student, and over the next three decades their inspiration helped her earn a bachelor's degree, two masters degrees, and an Ed.S. She will receive her Ph.D. in educational leadership this fall.

After high school, Capers' teachers helped her get a scholarship to a small college in Dallas. Four years later she had a B.A. in business and moved to South Carolina, where she worked in an accounting office. But Capers knew she wanted to instill the same light in children as her teachers had instilled in her. So she enrolled in an education program and began teaching at an elementary school in Charleston in 1979. For the past 25 years, she has taught in various elementary and middle schools throughout the Charleston area. The longer she has taught, Capers says now, the more she understands how individualized education needs to be. Classroom sizes fluctuate, with no concern for how that fluctuation might affect students. Because bureaucrats and elected officials dictate curriculum in public schools, she and her colleagues had little control over how long they could dwell on a given subject. With all this rigidity, she says, "a child could easily fall through the cracks." Having spent all that time in the classroom, both as a graduate student and as a schoolteacher, Capers was determined to prove that something could be done to end the academic failure that claims so many students.

When Capers opened CPCA, some of her students were failing in public schools; others struggled with behavior problems. One student had been suspended 27 times before coming to CPCA. To help identify their needs, each student takes diagnostic tests in reading, writing. and math. For Capers, the most important part of the admission process is the personal interview, where she watches the student's eyes and body language, to see whether he or she really wants to be at CPCA. "I can help them," she says. "I want someone that wants to be here. They have a choice. And when they come, they know this is where they are wanted. "And I know this is where they want to be."

Source

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

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

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

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6 June 2005

Harvard’s Diversity Grovel

In earmarking $50 million for “diversity,” President Summers is throwing away more than money

Harvard University has just pledged $50 million for faculty “diversity” efforts, penance for President Lawrence Summers’s public mention of sex differences in cognition. The university would have been better off hiring a top-notch conjuror, since only magic could produce a trove of previously undiscovered female and minority academic stars suitable for tenuring.

Even Harvard’s bottomless resources cannot buy a miracle, however. So instead of a magician, the university has brought forth the next best thing: a report on “diversity” that, like all such products, possesses the power of shutting down every critical faculty in seemingly intelligent people. For connoisseurs of diversity claptrap, Harvard’s just released “Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty” is a thing of beauty, a peerless example of the destruction of higher learning by identity politics. Because the report will undoubtedly serve as the template for future diversity scams in colleges across the country, it’s worth studying....

Every such “diversity” initiative immediately faces two major obstacles. First, its purpose is to recommend the identical set of actions that the institution, whether academic or corporate, has already been doing. Every college in the country has been frantically pursing “diversity” in hiring and admissions for decades. The task force itself commends the diversity policies of 17 rival colleges—the mere tip of the iceberg—without drawing the obvious conclusion.

The second obstacle follows from the first: there is nothing more that can be done. If untapped pools of highly qualified female and minority candidates existed out there, schools would have snapped them up long ago—if not your college, then its dozens of competitors, just as desperate to placate the quota gods. (The one course of action that might, in the case of black and Hispanic faculty recruitment, bear long-term results is the one that elite college personnel are least likely to choose: intensive mentoring of young students and the jettisoning of all “progressive” pedagogy in the schools.)

Just how repetitive is Harvard’s latest “diversity” push? I asked Harvard spokesman Sarah Friedell if the university had not already been paying considerable attention to “diversity.” She happily trumpeted the school’s efforts. “I will tell you,” she said, “huge attention is paid to diversity in terms of recruiting students and faculty. It is enormously important.” A former top administrator seconded her claims. “The annual numbers of tenure offers to women are etched into my soul,” he said. “Everyone thought about it all the time.” Indeed, the task force report itself alludes to Harvard’s numerous existing efforts to recruit women faculty, from an affirmative action slush fund to a universal drive, at each of Harvard’s faculties and schools, to “retain and promote larger numbers of women faculty.”

By now, however, crafty diversocrats have developed a host of strategies to cover up the essential meaninglessness of their existence.... So your latest diversity effort mimics everything that your institution has been doing for years? No problem! Just play Let’s Pretend: “Let’s pretend that we’ve never had a diversity initiative at our college and that this current proposal to hire more women and minority faculty represents a radical new take on college governance.” Thus, President Summers greeted the report’s release with the sonorous tones that a proposal to end tenure, say, might elicit: “Because [these recommendations] address fundamental issues about the way we conduct our core academic business, they have the power to make Harvard not only more welcoming and diverse, but a stronger and more excellent university overall.” You would think that an economist would know something about diminishing returns....

The only new hires that diversity initiatives generate are in college administrations, already overloaded with sinecures. The Harvard task force demands the creation of a most remarkable new position, a Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development. The provost’s office, mind you, is very high up in the administrative chain—directly beneath the president, in fact—and it is responsible for all aspects of Harvard’s academic life. Within that empyrean realm, the new Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development will occupy a “singular and permanent position,” dictates the task force. The Senior VP for D will sit with the president, the provost, and the deans of faculties on Harvard’s academic advisory group. And just in case the lesser functionaries in the provost’s office still don’t appreciate the exalted status of the new Senior VP for D, the task force provides that “she” (the report’s choice of words) “be given priority in terms of office space.” So much for non-hierarchical, anti-patriarchal collaborative sharing of collective resources. Naturally, the Senior VP for D will “also be supported by a group of dedicated staff.” .....

Diversocrats possess a primitive belief in the totemic power of words. If you can rename something, you have changed its essence. Harvard has already been obsessively compiling data on gender and race: the task force easily obtained faculty data from 1990 to 2005 by rank and gender—and within gender, by race. But the task force renames those data “metrics” and—poof!—it has proposed something new. Collect diversity data? That’s what Harvard did before May 16, 2005, when the task force released its report. After May 16, 2005, it will embark into the uncharted territory of compiling “metrics,” proving that now it’s really doing something about “diversity.”

The task force could have mentioned one more unintended consequence to affirmative action slush funds: peer resentment. A top Harvard science professor says that the preferences given to women and minority scientists in lab-space allocation and other perks do not always make for happy collegial relations. But any resentment that might emerge will just be more fuel for the diversity machine. Pursuant to the task force recommendations, Harvard is busily planning “climate surveys” of faculty to see whether women and minority professors feel “personally safe, listened to, valued.” Ordinarily, one could attribute the suggestion that there might be even a single professor in the warm, fuzzy cocoon of Harvard who does not feel “personally safe” to “diversity’s” solipsistic bathos. But just maybe, if your white male colleagues are grumbling behind your back about your unusual access to the Quadrupole Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer, your new computers, and your troop of lab assistants, you can begin to make out a case, however far-fetched, of not feeling “personally safe.”....

And what does $50 million buy you? This astounding sum, offered by Lawrence Summers as a down payment on his absolution for mentioning the science of sex differences, comes without any explanation as to how he arrived at it or what it will purchase. One would hope that the Senior VP for D, whatever her exalted position and her bevy of dedicated helpers in the provost’s office, doesn’t come near to costing that amount. Given that Harvard and its competitors across the country have already beaten the bushes for years for “diversity” candidates, even $500 million would seem unlikely to produce any major change in Harvard’s “diversity” profile.....

Hiring quotas (Harvard will call them “goals”) might also plausibly have a justification if widespread discrimination prevented qualified women from getting hired, just as construction unions kept out blacks in the 1960s. By imposing such “goals” on itself (enforced by the Senior VP for D’s “metrics”), Harvard is implicitly labeling itself a discriminator of this magnitude. And indeed, in a February 17, 2005, letter to the faculty, Summers took the sexist guilt of his university (and the world) onto his shoulders. “My January remarks,” he wrote, “substantially understated . . . discrimination [against women], including . . . patterns of thought to which all of us are unconsciously subject.” The paradox of an institution simultaneously dedicating $50 million to bringing in more women faculty while declaring itself resistant to women seems entirely lost on the task force. It would be interesting to know which science departments in particular Summers thinks suffer from unconscious bias—presumably, any department without parity of male to female professors.

And that leads to the final inconvenient question: Just how much are you willing to lower your standards to achieve “diversity?” If more women and minority faculty could be had who met Harvard’s standards for Caucasian and Asian males, the university would have hired them years ago. The only way it will achieve increased female and race “diversity” in the foreseeable future is to set a lower standard for female and minority hires. And this President Summers seems prepared to do.

The deconstruction of objective standards into race and gender politics is common throughout the humanities. If Summers acts on his embrace of deconstructive relativism—he called on February 15 for “rethinking our assumptions in [such] areas [as ‘excellence’]”—standards in science will be the next to go. Any department that claims that it cannot find qualified candidates to meet the Senior VP for D’s “metrics” could face the charge that it is using white male “concepts of excellence.” Thank you very much, but I think I’ll stick with those “concepts” in the interest of ensuring that my medicine works and the airplane I’m using stays in the air....

The aristocratic ease with which Harvard has just dumped $50 million down a bureaucratic sinkhole tells you all you need to know about why attending Harvard for eight months costs more than most families earn in a year. Eventually, students and parents may start asking why anyone would want to.

More here



RACIST GRADUATION CEREMONIES

It is graduation season again. Last month, my wife and I happily participated in this privilege by observing our last child graduate from one of California's state universities. Because our daughter is African American, we had the dubious honor of attending two ceremonies — one for African Americans only, and then the next day, one for the general population of graduates. This was our third child to graduate from college, and all three universities — two in California and one in Washington — had these twin exercises.

Personally, I no longer see the need for two graduation ceremonies for the same individuals. I am not so naive that I do not know the original purpose of these "extra" affairs, but I feel that their usefulness has expired. To some, it is questionable if they were ever necessary. During the civil rights era of the 1960s and early 1970s, many minority educators felt these special programs were needed for the morale and well-being of many minority students. Forty years ago, there was a belief in some minority communities that minorities were totally neglected and often not treated fairly in white-dominated colleges and universities. There was a strong belief that school administrators could not care less if these students passed, failed or graduated. Consequently, ethnic specific programs and activities were instituted to make college life more appealing to minority students.

These graduation ceremonies were generally smaller in size and designed to publicly recognize minority students for their academic achievements and to give these students an added sense of pride, importance and belonging — something that may have been absent from the general graduation exercise. In the black community, it was an extension of the "I'm black and I'm proud" theme. However, many changes have occurred in our universities. Minority students are not only represented in much higher numbers on campuses, they also are much more involved in college life and student activities.

Further, minority students are now publicly acknowledged for their accomplishments at graduations like other students. At the African American graduation ceremony I recently attended, the young man acknowledged as "Man of the Year" also received this award in the general graduation exercise.

Not only are these "special" ceremonies obsolete, they are divisive. They promote further separatism and segregation. Should white students have their own private graduation exercise? I don't think most people would appreciate that. Minorities would be the first to label it racist. Would we like to terminate the general graduation programs and let every group have a private ceremony? I don't think that we want this either.

In the general public graduation exercise my wife and I attended, the black and Latino students wore special sashes, which they had received at "their" ceremonies. Could we handle whites having their own "sashes"? The days of "white only" have ended. Great! However, shouldn't the same be true for "black only," "Latino only," "Asian only," etc.?

When we speak of a nation striving for "integration" and "diversity," what does this mean? Are these terms only to apply to some groups and not to others? As we seek freedom and become freer, we segregate more and become more exclusive.

At the African American-only graduation exercise, one of the speakers, after charging the students to be successful in life, concluded by saying, "After all, we are not the racists; they are." I would like to know who "they" are and who "we" are. I think "we" have become "they."

Source

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

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

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

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5 June 2005

HISPANIC SCHOOLS COMING?

Ten school districts statewide and three nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit against the state Wednesday for allegedly testing non-English-speaking students in English and then labeling them and their schools as "failing" under the state's implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind law. The lawsuit, filed in federal Superior Court in San Francisco, demands that the state test its 1.6 million non-English-speaking students in a "language and form" they understand, as mandated in the federal education reform law.

The lawsuit is asking the state to change the way it tests students who do not yet understand English, said Mary Hernandez, an attorney with the Southern California-based law firm Burke, Williams & Sorensen, lawyers for the plaintiffs. "We are asking that the state comply with federal law by testing students in the language and the form that will most likely yield accurate results on what they know and what they've learned," Hernandez said during a telephone press conference out of Los Angeles on Wednesday.

No North County school districts are listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, although Hernandez said the lawsuit represents students statewide and that the outcome of the lawsuit could affect how all school districts gauge skills among thousands of beginner-English students. Several local officials said they had not reviewed the lawsuit and declined to comment. Several others could not be reached.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires schools to show improvement in test scores in all subcategories of students or be labeled as "failing" and subject to sanctions that include forced student transfers, tutoring, and, in extreme cases, government takeovers.

Officials with the four firms involved with the lawsuit said the federal mandate also allows states to test English learners in their primary languages for three to five years after they enroll in schools in the United States, they said.

Spanish is the primary language for 85 percent of California¡s English-learner students. Even so, California requires that all students be tested in English only and has steadfastly refused to reword the tests for English learners to make them easier to understand.

In North County, some school districts, such as Oceanside Unified and Escondido Union, have roughly half of their students enrolled in beginner-English courses.

Currently, those students who do not fully understand English are handed standardized tests in English. Some schools and districts are facing costly federal sanctions because too many students are "falling behind" in academic standards," advocates said. "As a result, thousands of (non-native English-speaking) children are left behind because they cannot demonstrate what they know (on English tests)," Hernandez said.

California's English-only testing system is different from practices in place in 14 states, including Texas, New Mexico and New York, which test students in a language they understand, according to a press statement from four law firms involved in the lawsuit.

The state's take on No Child Left Behind is a violation of both the law and the civil rights for non-English-speaking students, the lawsuit states. The state is also charged with wasting taxpayer money by testing students in a language they do not yet understand, the suit also states.

More here



HOPE FOR CALIFORNIA?

Faced with the difficult task of reviving California's ailing education system, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has turned to perhaps the most controversial reformer in the state - a prosecutor-turned-schools-superintendent whose battles with parents and teachers have divided this city. Critics say that Alan Bersin, one of several outsiders appointed to superintendent positions nationwide in the late 1990s, sapped morale by ignoring his employees and making teacher education a top priority. But supporters, including the local business community, applauded his efforts to bring radical change to one of the nation's largest school districts.

Now Mr. Bersin is heading to a much larger stage. As Mr. Schwarzenegger's education secretary, the Brooklyn native and former Harvard University football player will take on a bully pulpit in a capital roiled by the governor's new brand of politics. Bersin "is probably going to make things even more lively than they have been," says Julian Betts, a professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego who specializes in education issues. "He will not be a wallflower in Sacramento."

The new job will certainly test Bersin's diplomatic skills. He will be taking over an education reform agenda for the governor that is both ambitious and controversial. In San Diego, Bersin didn't have a record of building harmony. Opposing sides warred over his reforms from the moment he took over the school district of more than 140,000 students in 1998. At the outset, teachers complained about the appointment of a noneducator to the superintendent position. Bersin had been serving as US attorney for California's Southern District, a post he was appointed to in 1993 by Bill Clinton, an old Yale Law School buddy. Both Mr. Clinton and Bersin were Rhodes Scholars and attended Oxford University in Britain.

As Bersin's tenure began, union officials balked when he began hiring consultants to educate teachers about better ways to teach subjects like reading. "He blamed teachers for any failure in student achievement and in the school," says Terry Pesta, president of the San Diego teachers union. "He came in and pretty much said that everything had to change, no one was doing it right. It was his way or the highway." Bersin gained a reputation as a staunch advocate of change, unwilling to back down even as the local school board dissolved into acrimony over his reforms. Still, he was hardly without support. Some observers agree that teachers need to be more willing to adopt new approaches to education. "Professional development and teacher learning are absolutely crucial to the success of schools," says Paula Cordeiro, an education dean at the University of San Diego. "There's hardly a week goes by that I'm not reading a study about how to do a better job of teaching a kid from Korea how to speak English. But this is not an idea that's found in the majority of districts in the United States. They have a notion that once a person is prepared, they go into a district, they teach, that's the end."

She thinks his blunt style was a key reason teachers rebelled at his calls for more professional development. "But I honestly believe that no matter how carefully it had been packaged, there would have been great resistance," she adds. "It's a sea change for some people in my profession." The merits of Bersin's reforms draw just as much debate as the way they were implemented. Mr. Pesta, the union chief, says that while some test scores rose during his tenure, others remain "abysmal." Mr. Betts, the economics professor, has a brighter view. "The growing consensus is that his reforms really did boost reading achievement in elementary schools. But it's less clear that there were similar gains elsewhere."

More here

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

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

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

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4 June 2005

UNIVERSITIES IN DECLINE

(Review of Donald Alexander Downs: Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus)

Our universities are ailing. Many, including most of our elite universities, have abandoned the notion that a liberal arts education is constituted by a solid core, that is, a basic knowledge of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that all educated people should possess. Furthermore, for all their earnest words about the beauty and necessity of multicultural education, university administrators and faculty preside over a curriculum that routinely permits students to graduate without acquiring reading, writing, and speaking fluency in any foreign language, let alone competence in Chinese, the language of the most populous country in the world; Hindi, the most widely spoken language in the world's largest democracy; or Arabic, the language of Islam, a religion that commands an estimated 1.4 billion adherents worldwide. And perhaps most alarmingly, those who lead our universities have done little to oppose - often they have caved in to - fellow administrators and faculty who would sacrifice free and open inquiry to tender sensibilities and partisan politics. Unfortunately, an institution that lacks an ideal of an educated person, that fails to teach its students more than platitudes about the world beyond America's shores, and that punishes those who express hypotheses disagreeable to campus majorities makes a mockery of the idea of higher education. Such an institution may confer prestige and ensure handsome incomes after graduation, it may serve as an effective credentialing mechanism for future employers, and it may provide an attractive site for the charitable giving of wealthy alums, but it is hardly worthy of the name university.

Donald Alexander Downs, professor of political science, law, and journalism at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is particularly concerned about the damage that has been done to American universities over the past 20 years by the universities' own assault, in the name of diversity, on free speech and liberty. Grounded in case studies of Columbia, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin (where he played a major role in the ultimately successful movement to abolish speech codes), Downs's book is all the more devastating for the measure and scrupulousness with which he makes his case. Proceeding from an exploration of the ideas underlying the new anti-discrimination and harassment codes, Downs exposes rampant administration self-righteousness and faculty fecklessness in the face of university disciplinary proceedings that dispense with or trample on the most basic elements of procedural fairness. But his tale is also an inspiring one, chronicling the power of a few brave faculty members and students to stand up to the censors, to mobilize support on campus and off, and to defeat the forces that threaten the university from within. Downs's case studies also show that outside our universities free speech sentiment is strong and can serve as a vital resource for those who will continue the struggle in the coming years to teach our disordered universities what our universities should be teaching students and exemplifying for the nation.

Downs is not a First Amendment absolutist or a civil liberties zealot. Nor is he a conservative crusader against the forces of political correctness. He has long studied the question of free speech and has come to his opinions the hard way, by testing them in practice and reflecting on the unexpected and unjust results. As a young scholar in the 1980s, Downs was the author of a book arguing that First Amendment protection should not have covered the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, where they were targeting Holocaust survivors and those whose families and friends had been murdered by the Nazis. And initially he was "firmly committed" to the codes governing students and faculty established in the late 1980s at the University of Wisconsin under then-Chancellor Donna Shalala to promote diversity and to combat race and sex discrimination. Although proponents insisted that these codes governed conduct and not speech, students could be punished "[f]or racist or discriminatory comments, epithets, or other expressive behavior directed at an individual or on separate occasions at different individuals" if such "expressive behavior" was intentional. The code governing faculty turned out to be even broader, not restricting its prohibition to harm intentionally inflicted. It did not take Downs long to grow alarmed by the high-handed manner in which both codes were enforced. The university proved willing to prosecute the expression of opinion, to suspend the most basic requirements of fundamental fairness, and to destroy reputations built up over decades by throwing its full weight behind the prosecution of comments that were clearly neither racist nor discriminatory. But it was not just the abuse of the codes that turned Downs against them. Concessions on free speech in situations not involving direct incitement to physical harm or violence, he concluded, were inimical to the university's central mission, the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth.

What forces have driven universities to clamp down on the free play of ideas and to collaborate in the vilification of moral and political opinions that depart from campus orthodoxies? One factor involves a transformation in the idea of the university. The last 25 years have witnessed the return of what Downs calls the "proprietary university," which sees its central mission not as the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth but rather as the inculcation of a specific - in this case ostensibly progressive - moral and political agenda. Another involves a transformation in the progressive sensibility itself. As late as the mid-1960s, the dominant opinion on the left was that free speech and due process were essential to the creation of a more inclusive and just society. But belief in the progressive character of liberal principles has been under intense attack by influential scholars since the glory days of Martin Luther King Jr. Radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon argue that the oppression of women is itself a product of liberal commitments to fair process (notwithstanding that never in history have women enjoyed the freedom and equality achieved in contemporary liberal democracies). Critical legal theorists maintain the same about the oppression of the poor, and critical race theorists press the claim concerning the oppression of minorities (notwithstanding the reduction in the number and poverty of the poor and the unprecedented inclusion of minorities in public life in liberal democracies). At the same time, many campus theorists drew inspiration from Algerian social critic Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth argued that sympathy with those who suffer is a higher priority than respect for individual rights (even though respect for individual rights has proven over time the most successful means for alleviating suffering). Meanwhile, postmodern critics, believing themselves to be following Nietzsche, argued that individual rights were fictions invented by the strong to control the weak (never mind that Nietzsche decried modern liberalism as an invention of the weak to tyrannize the strong). Taken together, these opinions encouraged the idea of "progressive censorship," the policing of speech to ensure that it conformed to standards deemed necessary to lift up and liberate the oppressed.....

Not since A. Bartlett Giamatti stepped down from the presidency of Yale in the mid-1980s has the leader of a major American college or university seen it as part of his or her responsibility to educate students, faculty, and the nation about the true mission of the university. As our understanding of what universities should stand for fades, our need for such leaders to make the case for the university grows more urgent. Liberal democracy depends on citizens who can respect others in their amazing diversity and in their common humanity, who can intelligently question today's conventional wisdom thanks to what they have learned from the past and been inspired to imagine for the future, and who can use their reason both to distinguish justice from injustice and to recognize the ease with which our passions and interests impel us to confuse the two.

The university contributes its part to forming such citizens by opening students' eyes to the treasures (and flaws) of Western civilization and to the treasures (and flaws) of non-Western civilizations. Not the least of the lessons of a well-formed liberal arts education is that our universities can play their crucial political role only by staunchly refusing to politicize the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth.

More here



Bake sales or Bombers? Our schools need both!

Post lifted from the Locker Room

Remember the 1980's hippie slogan that read: "Wouldn't it be great if the schools had all the money they needed and the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?"

More money, buckets of it, that's what they claim will fix our public schools. The message hasn't changed and is bleated each year with more emotion. The Wake County School Board knows the routine.

Some Wake County residents claim they would pay a little more if the money went straight to the classroom, but therein lies the root of the problem. If the money is obviously not making it to the classroom, where is it going? Clearly we all know the answer, but no one wants to lasso that elephant in the room. Instead we keep throwing it more peanuts and try to give it a pedicure.

It's unfortunate that these citizens, despite their reservations, blindly support and accept a bloated system that becomes more cumbersome each year. A public school monopoly has forced them into a corner.

Given more information and choices, I have to believe that these respondents would have answered the reporter differently. If the News and Observer contacts me, I'm ready with my answer, "Let's hold a bake sale, 'cause the public schools have all the money they need and it's gonna take a bomber to clean that house."



BRAIN-DEAD LEFTIST STUDENTS AT UNC

From Mike Adams

University administrators, professors, and student newspapers are becoming so detached from reality that one can hardly write satire about university life. Nor can one muster the sarcasm necessary to give these people the ridicule they deserve. For example, I recently mocked the editors of UNC-Wilmington's student newspaper, The Seahawk, for wanting Christian organizations to sign a non-discrimination clause that would clearly trump constitutionally protected freedoms of religious expression. I jokingly suggested that the paper believes that "students who believe that rape and pedophilia are good must be allowed to join, vote, and hold office in a Christian fraternity."

Unfortunately, The Seahawk missed the sarcasm and gave this serious two-word answer: "They should." They even explained their position: "The one incontrovertible legal point at the center of the Alpha Iota Omega debate is that AIO is an official student organization, funded by student fees. And, thank God - no pun intended - it's University policy that organizations funded by student fees should be open to all students, without discrimination of any kind. End of story."

The quote you just read shows why a university without a journalism school or a law school should not publish a student newspaper offering legal opinions. In the lawsuit filed by AIO against UNC, the Christians won an injunction against the school, just weeks before the Seahawk editorial was published. So much for that "one incontrovertible legal point." The reason the lawsuit is going badly for UNC probably lies in the fact that those student fees came from the students in the first place. In this lawsuit, the federal judge clearly recognizes that the university's policy would require Christians who oppose rape and pedophilia to; first, pay mandatory student fees (another name for tax) to a government-run school, and then, second, agree to allow rapists and pedophiles (or anyone else) to join the group as a condition of getting the money back. Thankfully the federal judge, unlike the UNC administration and these top-notch Seahawk reporters, understands that such a policy is absurd, not to mention totalitarian.

In addition to being bad journalists with a bad sense of humor, the Seahawk writers don't know much about history. This is shown in the following quote: "The bigger question (is): How paranoid do you have to be to believe that a group of neo-Nazis is going to take over your Christian fraternity? Clearly, if the university allows any student to join AIO, it will soon be overrun by baby-eating street thugs who (sic) vote out the Christian leadership."

That statement is problematic for two reasons. The first problem is one of historical ignorance. In 1956, the United States Supreme Court rejected a demand by the State of Alabama that the NAACP make its membership lists public. In its first case to explicitly establish the "freedom of association," the Supreme Court declared: "It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the 'liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech."

This case was necessitated by the efforts of white racists (with beliefs similar to neo-Nazis) to invade and control the NAACP. But now, the "liberal" student newspapers and administrators are on the side of those white racists and segregationists. They are now fighting to undo the work of the Warren Court and the NAACP. Is it possible that they have gone so far left that they are now far right?

But there is a second problem with the position of the UNC system and the Seahawk. The problem is logical, rather than historical. By saying that someone has to be paranoid to believe that anyone hostile to Christianity would ever want to join a Christian group, one is making the best possible case against the non-discrimination clause. Put simply, this is the same as saying that the policy is good because it will never actually have to be implemented. To say that the best idea is the one which has the least application to reality is to understand the source of the problem. It shows that these students are merely parroting the ideas of their professors. Professors like to keep their ideas as far removed from reality as possible.

If that statement seems far-fetched, just image the headlines these students would have to run if they actually tried to eliminate every form of discrimination, rather than merely saying that they oppose every form of discrimination:

"UNC-Wilmington Discriminates Against Whites in Student Admissions"

"UNC-Greensboro Discriminates Against Sex Offenders, Fires Convicted Pedophile"

"Study Shows Athletic Department Discriminates Against the Obese"

"Extra! Extra! Read All About it! Phi Beta Kappa May be Excluding Dummies"

"Dwarves Systematically Overlooked in Basketball Try-outs, Read Our Exclusive Story!"

"Discrimination Against the Handicapped Persists: Blind Bus Driver Fired for Failing Physical"

"Time to Protest University Use of SAT and GPA to Exclude College Applicants!"

"How Grades Discriminate Against the Drunk and Lazy"

Will university liberals ever seek a "solution" to any of these "problems"? Of course not. Today's university liberal is as apathetic about the consequences of his ideas as he is ignorant of their historical origins. But none of that matters to him. In his heart, he knows he's still right.

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

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

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

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3 June 2005

HOMESCHOOLING: AN INTERESTING EMAIL JUST RECEIVED:

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www.TheHomeschoolMagazine.com



FREE SPEECH FOR REPUBLICANS ATTACKED AT CAL STATE

A group of professors interested in preserving academic freedom wants the Cal State San Bernardino administration to consider if the College Republicans are abusing their right to protest. Campus President Albert Karnig held a forum for students and faculty Tuesday night to discuss which First Amendment rights students are allowed to exercise. He said the university would be wrong to censor fliers distributed by the group but said professors might want to consider legal action if they think the College Republicans have slandered or libeled them. The College Republicans are calling for students to boycott the Perspectives on Gender course offered by the university because they say professors promote a liberal, feminist and pro-homosexual agenda and academically punish students with different beliefs.

Ryan Sorba, president of the College Republicans, handed out fliers in the winter quarter asking students to skip the class. Now he is distributing fliers with a "Professor Watch List' of professors that students should boycott. The list has three names the co-instructors for the Perspectives on Gender class. "Basically they give bad grades to students if they don't agree with their opinions,' Sorba said.

"It's been an attack on my integrity,' said associate professor Marcia Marx, one of the named instructors. "I also feel personally threatened. If you talk about someone with respect to ideology, that's one thing. But to discuss grading practices and about unfair distribution of grades based on agreeing or not agreeing with a point of view is another thing entirely.'

Sorba said he gets nearly a dozen e-mails every quarter from students in the class saying the instructors deduct grades from papers if an argument is presented that does not support pro-homosexual views.

Karnig said he took seriously assertions that someone's expressed beliefs would hurt their grades but suggested the students file grievances.

Aurora Wolfgang, Women's Studies coordinator, said only two or three grievances pertaining to the Perspectives in Gender class have been filed in five years. Of those complaints, she said, none has suggested that a difference in ideology contributed to a lower-than-deserved grade, though in one complaint a professor had disregarded some sources in a paper as not credible. The class has a regular enrollment of about 240 students per quarter, she said. "It's a class where we have to turn people away in droves,' Wolfgang said. "If this effort has been affecting us at all, there are people right behind the people dropping out who want to take that spot in the class.'

But professors are not concerned about the enrollment figures. By singling out whichever three instructors teach this course each quarter, the reputation of the individuals and institution suffers, said Nancy Rose, an instructor named in the flier. "Most of this is being perpetuated by someone who hasn't taken the class,' Rose said. "(Sorba) is saying things that are not true. It's much easier to make things up.'

Many students at the forum defended the professors and said the university should stop the attacks. Others said the group's complaints were not being taken seriously enough by the administration. Several asked Sorba about joining the organization.

Psychology professor Gloria Cowan said at the forum Sorba has no right to publicly humiliate instructors.

Sorba said he attended a class last summer to observe the teaching, though instructors said he did more to disrupt lessons. At the class, Sorba said he heard instructor Cindy Paxton say there is no evidence transvestites suffer from a mental disorder, though a Gender Identity Disorder is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Paxton is also named on the flier. Paxton said he had no right to be in the class at all and that his description of the events was not accurate. The named professors say they can handle criticism of their teaching methods, but they said Sorba's attacks reach into slanderous territory. "I don't think libel is free speech,' Marx said.

Source



A SOVIET TEACHER'S COLLEGE IN NEW YORK

Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views. The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance.

Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said, teacher candidates could be ousted from the School of Education if they are found to have the wrong dispositions. "All of these buzz words don't seem to mean anything until you look and see how they're being implemented," a prominent history professor at Brooklyn College, Robert David Johnson, said. "Dispositions is an empty vessel that could be filled with any agenda you want," he said. Critics such as Mr. Johnson say the dangers of the assessment policy became immediately apparent in the fall semester when several students filed complaints against an instructor who they said discriminated against them because of their political beliefs and "denounced white people as the oppressors."

Classroom clashes between the assistant professor, Priya Parmar, and one outspoken student led a sympathetic colleague of the instructor to conduct an informal investigation of the dispositions of the student, who the colleague said exhibited "aggressive and bullying behavior toward his professor." That student and another one were subsequently accused by the dean of the education school of plagiarism and were given lower grades as a result.

Brooklyn College, established in 1930, is a four-year school within the City University of New York. The college enrolls more than 15,000 students, and the School of Education has about 3,200, including 1,000 undergraduates. Driving the new policies at the college and similar ones at other education schools is a mandate set forth by the largest accrediting agency of teacher education programs in America, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. That 51-year-old agency, composed of 33 professional associations, says it accredits 600 colleges of education - about half the country's total. Thirty-nine states have adopted or adapted the council's standards as their own, according to the agency.

In 2000 the council introduced new standards for accrediting education schools. Those standards incorporated the concept of dispositions, which the agency maintains ought to be measured, to sort out teachers who are likeliest to be successful. In a glossary, the council says dispositions "are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice."

To drive home the notion that education schools ought to evaluate teacher candidates on such parameters as attitude toward social justice, the council issued a revision of its accrediting policies in 2002 in a Board of Examiners Update. It encouraged schools to tailor their assessments of dispositions to the schools' guiding principles, which are known in the field as "conceptual frameworks." The council's policies say that if an education school "has described its vision for teacher preparation as 'Teachers as agents of change' and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice."

Brooklyn College's School of Education, which is the only academic unit at the college with the status of school, is among dozens of education schools across the country that incorporate the notion of "social justice" in their guiding principles. At Brooklyn, "social justice" is one of the four main principles in its conceptual framework. The school's conceptual framework states that it develops in its students "a deeper understanding of the quest for social justice." In its explanation of that mission, the school states: "We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism."

Critics of the dispositions standard contend that the idea of "social justice," a term frequently employed in left-wing circles, is open to politicization. "It's political correctness that has insinuated into the criteria for accreditation of teacher education institutions," a noted education theorist in New York, Diane Ravitch, said. "Once that becomes the criteria for institutions as a whole, it gives free rein to those who want to impose it in their classrooms," she said. Ms. Ravitch is the author of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."

A case in point, as Mr. Johnson of Brooklyn College has pointed out, is the way in which the term was incorporated into Ms. Parmar's course, called Language Literacy in Secondary Education, which students said is required of all Brooklyn College education candidates who aspire to become secondary-school teachers. In the fall semester, Ms. Parmar was the only instructor who taught the course, according to students. The course, which instructs students on how to develop lesson plans that teach literacy, is built around themes of "social justice," according to the syllabus, which was obtained by The New York Sun. One such theme is the idea that standard English is the language of oppressors while Ebonics, a term educators use to denote a dialect used by African-Americans, is the language of the oppressed.

A preface to the listed course requirements includes a quotation from a South African scholar, Njabulo Ndebele: "The need to maintain control over English by its native speakers has given birth to a policy of manipulative open-mindedness in which it is held that English belongs to all who use it provided that it is used correctly. This is the art of giving away the bride while insisting that she still belongs to you."

Among the complaints cited by students in letters they delivered in December to the dean of the School of Education, Deborah Shanley, is Ms. Parmar's alleged disapporval of students who defended the ability to speak grammatically correct English.

More here

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

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

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

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2 June 2005

Let's not forget real-world implications

"Are schools preparing students to meet employers' needs?" Only 20% of 450 business and political leaders answered "yes" to the question, according to a survey cited last year in this newspaper.

Unless Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and the Bush administration free the curriculum from the control of academics and the majority of professional educators, changes in the No Child Left Behind high school initiatives are not likely to counter the woeful preparation of our high school students for living in the 21st century. Focusing solely on higher academic standards fails to deal with the reality that most of what is taught, and the way it is taught and tested, does not help students develop the skills they need to pursue successful careers and become responsible citizens.

High schools students spend the bulk of their academic time mastering algebra rather than statistics, interpreting English literature rather than improving written communication, memorizing historical facts rather than developing a civic character, and studying scientific theory and definitions rather than applying scientific thinking and findings to health and environmental problems. Our high school curriculum suffers for political reasons. Not political as in Democrat, Republican or independent. Curricula are produced by a liberal arts elite acting as academic interest groups. These groups, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics or the Modern Language Association, seek to get their subject in the curricula as aggressively as Pepsi and Coca-Cola seek to get their products into school vending machines. Unfortunately, the political inertia is rooted in longevity. For decades, college professors and their disciples who have taken up teaching have dictated curriculum. These individuals occupy positions of power on state government-sponsored curriculum committees that determine what is taught.

The idea of putting workplace and citizenship skills above specific content goals is not new to American education. Ben Franklin saw a similar educational problem more than 250 years ago — students being taught subjects that were in Franklin's word "ornamental" rather than useful to them as workers and citizens. He was particularly agitated by the practice of teaching Latin when it was no longer necessary, since most of the great works were translated into English. Franklin called for a reformed, practical curriculum of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, grammar, literature, history, drawing, handwriting, accounting, geography, morality, logic, natural history, mechanics and gardening.

He started a school in the 1750s for this educational purpose, which eventually became the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, Franklin was forced by the professional educators at the time to allow half of the curriculum to be in Latin. The Latinists took the school over, and Franklin withdrew his support after decades of frustration.

Educators still haven't learned their lessons. Can policies be developed to break the stranglehold that the liberal arts political machine has on our high school curriculum? The question has more urgency today in such a competitive job environment and a time when there are so many challenges to our way of life.

Source



ENVY PLUS BUREAUCRACY DESTROYS GOOD EDUCATION FOR TALENTED STUDENTS

An honors program beset by ethnic tensions and strained relations between parents and administrators at Lincoln Middle School is being eliminated. After three months of public debate, trustees for Vista Unified voted 4-1 late Monday to eliminate the Gifted and Talented Education program, which supporters said promoted Lincoln's brightest students. School administrators, however, said the GATE program was closed to most students. The board's decision will open honors classes that have GATE students to everyone.

School and district officials said putting GATE students in classes with those of mixed abilities would help improve test scores.

Many parents of Latino students and English-learners said they supported the change because their children would be forced to excel. However, some parents said the academic mix would diminish a gifted child's education by watering down class content and pace. "My daughter's worth it," Robb Scheele, who led the pro-GATE side, said before Monday's meeting. "It's what I need to do to make sure she has the best education she can have."

Trustee Jim Gibson said he cast the lone dissenting vote because he wanted to leave the honors program as it is. About 275 people crowded into Lincoln's gymnasium for the three-hour meeting. Those who opposed the change sat on one side of the half-court line; Latino families who wanted GATE opened to all students sat on the other. Children of pro-GATE parents stood toward the front, waving signs that read, "Save honors." Their Latino counterparts, from the back of the room, displayed signs that read, "We want our voices to be heard now!" There was a break in the meeting when someone pulled a fire alarm at 9:15 p.m. The debate resumed 10 minutes later.

"All of the students should have the (honors-class) opportunity," Juan Rojas told the board in Spanish. His son attends Lincoln but is not a GATE student. By the time trustees voted, the crowd had dwindled to about 50. All students will have a chance now to attend classes with groupings of eight to 10 GATE students. They will not have to fill out an application, write an essay and be recommended by a teacher for the honors classes. Meanwhile, the district will study a proposal from Gibson to offer honors classes to all students at all four of Vista Unified's middle schools in two years. "We don't want to have a territory of the elite," said Peter Kuchinsky, a GATE parent who supported the proposal. "It's open access."

Gibson's compromise would require students who want to be in honors classes to have a high grade-point average or parental and teacher support. Lincoln Principal Larrie Hall's plan gives everyone a chance. "The issue for me is, do you provide honors-type classes for all kids or just some kids?" he asked rhetorically. The three other middle schools in Vista Unified previously eliminated their GATE programs, making Lincoln's unique.

Scheele visited state and federal offices last week in search of support. "I support the GATE program," wrote Assemblyman Mark Wyland, R-Vista, in a letter sent Monday to Vista Unified. It "allows individual students to accelerate academically beyond the boundaries of the classroom and reach their fullest academic potential."

Parents of GATE students in February learned from a teacher that Hall intended to break up the GATE classes in an attempt to improve test scores. English-learners and students of poorer households had weighed down Lincoln's academic performance it was said. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act the school was put on "program improvement" status.

More here

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

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

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

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1 June 2005

NCLB IS DOING SOME GOOD

Post lifted from Betsy Newmark

The New York Times has a story about the efforts that schools across the nation have been making to reduce the gap between white and minority students since the passage of No Child Left Behind.

"People all over the country are suddenly scrambling around trying to find ways to close this gap," said Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard professor who for more than a decade has been researching school practices that could help improve minority achievement. He said he recently has received many requests for advice. "Superintendents are calling and saying, 'Can you help us?' "

No Child Left Behind requires schools to bring all students to grade level over the next decade. The law has aroused a backlash from teachers' unions and state lawmakers, who call some of its provisions unreasonable, like one that punishes schools where test scores of disabled students remain lower than other students'. But even critics acknowledge that the requirement that schools release scores categorized by students' race and ethnic group has obliged educators to work harder to narrow the achievement gap.

"I've been very critical of N.C.L.B. on other grounds," said Robert L. Linn, a co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. But he called the law's insistence that test scores be made public by race and ethnic group "one of the things that's been good."

The new stress on raising minority achievement is a direct result on the NCLB requirments on accountability for raising all student groups' performance. Just as advertised.

This has been my own experience. North Carolina was ahead of the nation on accountability requirements. In the 90s NC passed requirements that tied teacher bonuses to student achievement on End of Grade tests in reading and math. There is a complicated formula that measures how students did in a previous year and then measures their improvement. Schools can achieve the bonuses for all their teachers if the students improve by a certain amount. Before these requirements were put in, we'd have faculty meetings that I distinctly remember where we would sit around and brainstorm all sorts of ideas for improving test scores and helping kids with their basic skills. We'd produce a long list, but, as far as I could tell, little of that was ever implemented. We'd talk about all teachers including reading and writing in their curriculum but it was left up to us to carry this out. So, teachers would come up with something that they were already doing and then claim that that was related to reading and writing skills. So, basically, we didn't change anything we actually did. We just changed how we labeled it. Well, if you don't change anything, you're not going to see much improvement.

But after the new law was passed tying bonuses to improvement, things really changed. Suddenly, we implemented some real changes. I was teaching in a magnet school where middle school students could take three electives a quarter. We had talked for years about requiring kids with low reading and writing skills to take targeted electives. Now, finally, this was put into place. The principal moved some money around to hire a couple of teachers whose sole job was to work with those students. We tried new computer-teaching programs that targeted specific weaknesses in reading. We began new math electives to reteach basic skills. An afterschool tutoring program and even some Saturday classes began. And, guess what, our school, which had a mix of academically gifted students and neighborhood kids who had low skills, started to see some nice improvement in the basic reading and math skills of those lower-achieving students. What was so noticeable to me was the difference in the administration's actions from the period of time when the state was just setting goals for improvement with no teeth behind those requirements, and afterwards when a carrot-and-stick approach was implemented. We wanted those bonuses for showing substantial improvement. And the stick was the threat that schools that didn't show improvement would have to have state officials come in and oversee every aspect of our school if we didn't improve.

So, that is why I supported No Child Left Behind. I abhor the idea of the national government getting involved in local issues like education. However, now that NCLB has been implemented, schools across the nation are discovering the inspiration that the carrot-and-stick approach to accountability can have to force administrators to focus on raising the achievement levels of those students who previously were getting left behind.



STUDENT DEBT A BIG TURN-OFF IN BRITAIN

As it should be

As many as one in four teenagers from single-parent families are deterred from thoughts of university by the prospect of getting into debt, a study has found. White working-class boys are worst affected. More than 2,700 schoolchildren aged 11 to 16 from London to Wales and the West Midlands were questioned over two days by Mori pollsters about their desire to go to university. The findings, which come ahead of the introduction of university top-up fees next year, highlight the challenge to the Government and universities in seeking to widen participation in higher education among the worst-off.

Tessa Stone, the director of the education charity the Sutton Trust, said that the findings were significant because while youngsters often aspired to getting a job they were not often aware of the concept of getting into debt. She said that she expected the figure of those not applying to university because of debt to be even higher for 18 year olds, “because for younger children debt is not that meaningful, so the fact that they are worried about it is significant”. She added: “But of course, this is the group (children of single-parent families) for whom debt and financial insecurity will be most real and who will see daily the impact of a constricted budget and lifestyle.”

Seven in ten pupils said that they were likely to go into higher education and, as in previous years, more girls than boys saw themselves studying for a degree. Young people living in cities were more likely to try for university than those in rural areas. Between the ages of 11 and 16, the percentage that said they were unlikely to go to university grew from 9 to 19 per cent. Of those, 48 per cent said that they wanted “to start earning money as soon as possible” and 35 per cent felt that they could get a well-paid job without a degree. For children from single-parent families, earning a crust was key to turning their backs on higher education.

The overall proportion of young people who said that they were unlikely to go into higher education because they were worried about getting into debt remained relatively low at 17 per cent. That figure dropped to 15 per cent in a two-parent household but rose to 25 per cent for those in a single-parent household. At the same time, while 48 per cent of young people declared that they wanted to “start earning money as soon as possible”, that figure climbed to 59 per cent among children from one-parent families.

The figures showed that although degrees were likely to earn a graduate more money in the longer term, that message had failed to get across to the less well-off, Dr Stone said. “This is the group of students that are making important choices at 16 that will affect their futures and have a catastrophically high dropout rate at that age,” she said.

The Sutton Trust survey also disclosed that 79 per cent of ethnic minorities compared with 69 per cent of white teenagers thought it “likely” that they would get a degree. One in four thought it “very likely”. Dr Stone said: “This is partly because they have a much more traditional culture that expects hard work, discipline and respect of teachers, and partly because they have a need to get on. They are still very aspiring in a way that white people in deprived areas are not.” ...

In January the Higher Education Funding Council for England disclosed that despite a rapid expansion of university places the class divide remained “deep and persistent”. Youngsters from the wealthiest 20 per cent of homes were six times more likely to go to university than those from the poorest 20 per cent.

Top-up fees, which are being brought in to help to fund universities, will increase the cost of study from about £3,000 to a maximum of £9,000 for a three-year course. Once a graduate’s salary rises above £15,000, repayments will be 9 per cent of the excess. A student on a three-year course starting next year, who takes out maximum student loans and owes fees of £9,000, will be £20,745 in debt at the end of the degree. However, any debt remaining after 25 years will be written off.

From The Times

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

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

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

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