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30 June, 2007

Black Activists Applaud Supreme Court Ruling Against Racial Preferences

Today's U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the use of racial preferences in public school admissions is being hailed by members of the Project 21 black leadership network as a necessary step in breaking down existing racial resentment and promoting true equal access to educational opportunity.

"It's refreshing that the Supreme Court decided race-based admission standards are unconstitutional," said Project 21 fellow Deneen Borelli. "Racial quotas are harmful because they reinforce resentment towards minorities and increases racial tensions. Parental judgment and educational needs should be the basis for choosing what schools children should attend."

The ruling combined two cases: Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (Washington) and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education (Louisville, Kentucky). In the Seattle case, school administrators implemented an enrollment quota of 40 percent white and 60 percent minority in each high school to reflect the racial makeup of the overall student body. In Louisville, all schools must have between 15 percent and 50 percent black enrollment, forcing parents to rank which schools they would prefer their children to attend. In both cases, there are students who must travel great distances to get to the schools selected for them.

Source




BRITISH EXAM RESULTS FUDGED

For non-Brits: British government bodies are often accused of "fudging" an issue. We even hear of "a typical British fudge". The term means something like "an evasive compromise", "handling a dilemma by vagueness" or "concealing what is really going on by vague or misleading words". It might not be too unkind to describe the whole of British politics as one big fudge. I doubt that the word is capable of precise definition but precision is, after all, anathema to it. At any event, it is an essential word for those who claim any insight into British affairs

Government claims of improved examination performance are based on lower test standards, according to an end-of-term report on Tony Blair’s education record as Prime Minister. The school curriculum has been narrowed, and teachers are being forced to teach only for the next tests, say Anastasia de Waal and Nicholas Cowen, authors of the study by the right-wing think-tank Civitas.

“Better results in our schools give no assurance of better-educated pupils. They often signify worse educated pupils,” the report concludes. Ms de Waal said that Mr Blair had failed in his aim of closing the gap in achievement between rich and poor children because his emphasis on league tables and targets had broken the link between achievement and learning. The Government had become sidetracked by structural reforms and innovations. “The Government is not allowing teachers to have the autonomy to teach. If we really wanted to see better standards, we would leave the teachers alone — they are suffering from initiative overload,” she added.

The report cited research from Robert Coe, of the University of Durham’s School of Education, that found evidence of grade inflation at A level. Dr Coe compared the A-level results of students with verbal and mathematical reasoning test results, and found that a candidate given an F in A-level mathematics in 1988 would, on average, get a C in 2005. Students of average ability in 1988 gained E grades in geography and biology and Ds in English literature, history and French. In 2005 teenagers of similar ability were awarded C grades in all six subjects.

At GCSE, grades had also been inflated, the Civitas report claimed, largely because of the increasing numbers of students taking vocational qualifications that the Government deemed equivalent to four GCSEs.

The report also questioned the validity of primary school test results. It noted that, in Year Six, for four months normal teaching was discarded for nearly half the time and pupils were coached for national curriculum SATs.

John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, disputed the report’s explanation of A-level grades. “Teachers have got better at coaching students for exams. The modular system of A levels has also helped to raised achievement because it means that pupils don’t have to learn everything for last-minute tests,” he said.

Source

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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29 June, 2007

University reform in France

President Sarkozy is preparing for battle with France’s rebellious students and education establishment over his plan to revamp a crumbling university system. Under threat of a summer student uprising, he told the heads of the country’s 85 universities that he was taking charge of a draft law that lays the groundwork for the first significant reform in decades. He has shunted aside Valerie Pecresse, his Higher Education Minister, and Francois Fillon, the Prime Minister, to direct proceedings himself.

Students’ and teachers’ unions are planning protests of the kind that have repeatedly forced French governments to retreat if Mr Sarkozy tries to promote “un-French” practices in higher education. These include entrance selection, fees, private funding and competition among universities. There is, however, public acceptance that, with their 41 per cent drop-out rate and abysmal world ranking, French universities are in dire need of reform. Laurence Parisot, the head of Medef, the French Employers’ Federation, calls them “the shame of our nation”.

Jean-Robert Pitte, the reform-minded president of the Sorbonne division of Paris University, said: “It is a miracle that France is still the world’s fifth-largest [economic] power considering its weak investment in higher education.”

One of the most flagrant ills is the neglect of the rigorously egalitarian facultes, or universities, in favour of a handful of highly selective grandes ecoles. The lavishly funded grandes ecoles, which include Sciences Po, the political sciences institute in Paris, and the Ecole Polytechnique, groom the brightest 4 per cent of students to run business, industry, the state and the media. Middle-class parents yearn to place their offspring in such colleges and dread their relegation to la fac, including those with old names such as Sorbonne. About 1.5 million students are registered at the universities, which are open to all who hold a baccalaureat school-leavers’ certificate.

Liberation, the newspaper that was founded by Maoists in the 1968 student revolt, noted yesterday that the universities are so decrepit that some academics are ashamed to show foreign colleagues around their premises.

In something of a revolution, Mr Sarkozy and Mr Fillon attended universities and their Cabinet has fewer graduates from the elite grande ecoles than any administration since the early 1960s. Mr Sarkozy regards the revamp of the antiquated education system as one of the most urgent, but also potentially explosive, tasks in his drive to revive France. “You cannot keep on saying that the 21st will be the knowledge century and leave our university system in a state of neglect because it is too politically dangerous to reform,” the President told MPs from his centre-right camp last week.

His Bill, due to be published next week, will grant self-management to universities that wish it. This will enable them to manage assets and budgets, recruit staff and design courses – all of which have long been controlled by the state. Mr Sarkozy wants the universities to create partnerships with research institutions and seek finance in addition to the 50 billion euros that he has promised over five years. Student representation on university boards is to be heavily cut. Most of university chiefs favour the reforms in outline but they have told Mr Sarkozy that they are alarmed over what they see as his haste.

The main unions are furiously opposed, seeing autonymous universities as the “Americanisation” of French traditions. “They want to impose on us an antidemocratic system that will confiscate . . . the values of collegiality and equality,” Jean Fabri, the secretary-general of Snesup-FSU, the biggest lecturers’ union, said yesterday. “The Government wants to set the universities in competition among themselves while relinquishing its responsibilities,” he said. “It’s an aberrant and dangerous vision.” Bruno Julliard, a students’ union leader whose 2005 protest movement ended the political career of Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister, wrote to Mr Sarkozy telling him that he faced an all-out battle. “Do not doubt our determination,” Mr Julliard said.

The Socialist Opposition has been showing confusion, deploring Mr Sarkozy’s methods but accepting the need for reform. Francois Hollande, the party leader, said: “Everyone should get together to put French universities into the category of excellence without rushing and incomprehension.”

Source




Teachers don't want to be assessed in Australia either

People in business prosper or go under according to their performance but any shadow of such constraint is too much for our lordly teachers. "Just give us more money" is their refrain

HUNDREDS of teachers rallied in Brisbane today in protest against federal workplace laws and plans for performance-based salaries. Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) spokesman Steve Ryan said delegates to the union's annual conference were met by teachers on school holidays from across the state. About 500 teachers marched from the Brisbane Exhibition and Convention Centre to nearby South Bank for the rally.

Mr Ryan said members were angry at the Government's industrial relations laws, standardised testing of students and performance-based pay for teachers, which was outlined by Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop in April. They were also angry about what he said was underfunding of state schools and TAFE institutions, saying the issues could have a backlash in the lead-up to the federal election.

"We oppose the mixing of industrial relations policies with education," Mr Ryan said. "We will continue to campaign in the context of the federal election, through an industrial-based viewpoint and in an educational sense opposing the policies of the Federal Government." Mr Ryan said performance-based pay did not take into account the workload issues or professional responsibilities which teachers faced and were not a true reflection of what they were worth.

Ms Bishop has threatened to withhold $3 billion in commonwealth education funding if the states refuse to allow performance-pay for state school teachers from 2009. The Federal Government also wants principals to be able to hire and fire teachers, which the union says will destroy the state-based transfer teacher system.

Source




Australian history students may skip the most hallowed events in Australian history

HIGH school students would be able to avoid studying Gallipoli and the Anzacs under the draft Australian history curriculum prepared as a result of last year's history summit. The draft for high school history, obtained by The Australian, also overlooks the achievements of the Hawke-Keating governments and theeconomic reforms of the past 25 years.

A four-member committee that includes controversial historian Geoffrey Blainey and social commentator Gerard Henderson will now review the curriculum for the federal Government, and develop a national Australian history curriculum for Years9 and 10. The Government's refusal to release the draft curriculum has prompted speculation among historians that John Howard intervened in the process and appointed Dr Henderson to ensure his more traditional view of history teaching prevailed.

Historians questioned Dr Henderson's qualifications for the role, and said his appointment suggested the Prime Minister found the draft curriculum - written by Tony Taylor, Monash University professor and head of the National Centre for History Education - too progressive. "This group might see Professor Taylor's draft as not traditional enough and not prescriptive enough and therefore they have been put into position to force the draft into a shape that is more acceptable to the Prime Minister's office," one historian said. The vice-president of the Australian Historical Association, Martin Lyons, said Dr Henderson's inclusion on the committee was puzzling because "he has no experience for this task and his inclusion looks too much like an ideological statement". "He is there to push a certain political line," he said.

The draft curriculum was intended to provide a model for teaching Australian history in a sequential way through primary and high schools, from Years 3 to 10. For high school students, it is structured around 14 guiding questions based on 29 key dates and milestones covering 10 time periods, from the arrival of the first people in 40,000BC to 60,000BC to the late 20th century. Students would be required to study three of four pre-Federation questions, three of four post-Federation questions and two of six questions covering the entire period.

Of the four post-Federation questions, only one deals with Australia going to war and the nation's experience, leaving it open for teachers and students to choose the other three questions dealing with how Australia became a nation, who could be an Australian and the role governments play in improving the welfare of the people.

In the milestone events identified in the curriculum, the period entitled "Shaping Modern Australia" from 1967 to present names the constitutional referendum on Aborigines and the end of the White Australia policy; the protests against the Vietnam War in 1970-71; the dismissal of the Labor government in 1975; the 1992 Mabo judgment; and the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Wollongong University professor of history and politics Gregory Melleuish - author of one of the background papers for the Australian History Summit - criticised the curriculum as providing a patchy view of the nation's history, particularly after World War II. Professor Melleuish said late 20th-century Australian history was presented as a series of social movements including republicanism, feminism and other rights, but was glaring in some of its omissions. "Why is the fall of the Whitlam government seen as one major event and the achievements of the Hawke-Keating governments not seen as counting for anything?" he said.

Also appointed to the review committee were ANU history fellow Nicholas Brown and the NSW school history inspector Jennifer Lawless. But NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca on Monday refused to allow Ms Lawless to participate further in the process. Mr Della Bosca questioned the suitability of Dr Henderson's appointment to the reference group, saying he was not a professional historian.

But Dr Henderson yesterday defended his inclusion, saying he had a PhD in political history and his "extensive list of publications" included two well-reviewed history books. "Della Bosca seems to hold the view that only tenured academics on taxpayer-subsidised campuses are entitled to be regarded as historians," he writes in The Australian today.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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28 June, 2007

Why has British social mobility declined?

For once I agree with Britain's famously Green/Left "Viewspaper", ironically called "The Independent". Their article below concludes that education is the key to social mobility and that British social mobility has declined from what it once was. They do not however go the extra step and face the fact that Britain's dumbed-down educational system MUST lead to reduced social mobility.

Only a high quality education for all or elite schools where selection is on ability only (which the Grammar schools once were) could give the capable children of the poor roughly equal opportunites to the children of the rich. The children of the rich will always go to good (mostly private) schools but the dumbing down of government schools in recent years has deprived the children of the poor of similar opportunities. The reduced social mobility in Britain in recent years is in fact GOOD EVIDENCE of the decay in British government-provided education.

But the Leftist fervour for equality was the aim of the dumbing down of government schooling in the first place. You cannot make everybody into high achievers so the only way to create some semblance of equality is to dumb everybody down to one low level. So the policy has succeeded in its aims. Those aims are not however consistent with giving full opportunity to the more capable children of the poor. Short of a Soviet-style red revolution, the present policies of equality in fact entrench existing social divisions

Why are we talking about social mobility?

New research confirms the image of Britain as a relatively rigid society. There is proportionately more chance that, if you're born poor in Britain, you'll stay poor. Academics, supported by the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, have been following the changing fortunes of samples of children born in 1958 and in 1970. The group born earlier are doing relatively better in terms of "life chances": "Early indications are that the decline in social mobility for those growing up between the 1970s and 1980s reflects a strong episode of worsening social mobility that was not seen before or since. The trend of worsening has stopped, but the UK remains very low in the developed-world rankings and faces a serious challenge if social mobility is to be promoted."

Gordon Brown has made opportunity one of his themes, declaring in his leadership speech that: "Wherever we find opportunity denied, aspirations unfulfilled, potential unrealised; wherever and whenever we find injustice and unfairness, there we must be also - and it is our duty to act."

In the 1980s, the Conservatives were the party of social mobility; from Essex Man buying his council house and shares in the privatised utilities to the yuppies in the City. The Conservatives have recently become interested in the upwardly mobile again. They controversially changed their policy on grammar schools because they doubted their contribution to mobility. According to front bencher David Willetts, "stark figures" about declining mobility "have exposed our complacent belief that British society is inexorably becoming more socially mobile ... our schools are entrenching social advantage".

Both Tony Blair and the former Conservative prime minister, Michael Howard, talked about a "British dream", a version of the American dream, where a baby born in a log cabin can make it to the White House. The fact that the Conservative leader, David Cameron, is an Old Etonian, and has become popularly thought of as being fond of "hugging hoodies", has also prompted more interest in the issue.

What is social mobility?

Social mobility is the extent to which a child's social status can alter through the course of their life. It also relates to how easy it is for a child born to parents in one social class to wind up in another class. Social mobility, however, can exist side by side with vast differences in wealth (indeed, some claim such disparities amount to an incentive for the diasadvantaged). A society with equality of opportunity can be one where there is little "equality of outcome". In reality, societies that are less unequal in the first place tend to have fewer opportunities for individuals to leap class barriers.

How unequal are we?

In terms of income and wealth, we're more unequal than for decades, with the very rich (average incomes in excess of œ500,000) now pulling further away from the merely prosperous. In terms of equality of opportunity, if you were born in 1970 into the poorest quarter of the population, there's a 37 per cent chance you'll be staying there; for those born in 1958, there was only a 31 per cent chance of remaining in that stratum. But ...

Are we becoming more unequal?

Yes and no. We're no longer feudal, after all; the age of deference has long gone; women and ethnic minorities enjoy legal protections and there is, probably, less snobbery and prejudice around than before the Second World War. Sociologists have found that there has previously been little "long-range" mobility in Britain for people born between 1900 and 1960.

An Oxford University study reported that then only about 10 per cent of boys from working-class backgrounds ended up in the professional classes. Post-Second World War, the rise of the "meritocracy", much hyped in the 1960s, appears to have stalled. Although there was a decline in mobility between those born in 1958 and those born in 1970, matters did not get worse for children born through the rest of the 1970s and 1980s: "it appears that the downward trend in social mobility has halted."

Even so, while for those born in the early 1980s the gap narrowed between those staying on in education at age 16, inequality of access to university education has widened further. The proportion of people from the poorest fifth of families obtaining a degree has increased from 6 per cent to 9 per cent, but the graduation rates for the richest fifth have risen from 20 per cent to 47 per cent.

Measures such as SureStart, reforms in schools and child tax credits might have improved mobility since 1997, but it's too early to tell. Differences in life chances for people from different ethnic origins, reflected in their very different representation in the various social groups, persist strongly.

Immigrants to the UK have historically been downwardly mobile. Many first-generation Commonwealth migrants during the 20th century were forced to take manual jobs in the UK, having held white-collar positions in their country of birth. So most minority ethnic groups show high levels of children moving into a higher class than their parents, consistent with the idea that their parents suffered downward mobility on arrival in Britain.

Ethnic minorities are more likely to be socially mobile (in both directions) than the white population. Whereas 57 per cent of the white population were found not to be mobile in a census study, this dropped to 42 per cent for those of Indian origin and 37 per cent for Pakistanis, both groups seeing broadly equal rates of upward and downward mobility.

How does Britain compare internationally?

The Sutton Trust researchers found that the UK is bottom of the table of advanced countries for which there is data. Although the gap in opportunities between the rich and poor is similar in Britain and the US, in Britain those gaps are getting wider.

Does money matter?

Yes, but not as much as some might think. According to the Sutton Trust researchers, "While it is clear that family income differences between the rich and the poor do have a big impact on children's educational outcome, the estimated impact of income is modest relative to the large differences in attainment between children from richer and poorer families. Consequently, while reducing child poverty can have some benefits, policies to increase intergenerational mobility will need to focus on raising poorer children's attainment through targeted services and access to the best schools.

So what's the key to social mobility?

Education would seem to be the consensual answer, although there is huge disagreement on whether structures, standards or spending make the difference. The Sutton Trust study states: "The strength of the relationship between educational attainment and family income, especially for access to higher education, is at the heart of Britain's low mobility culture and what sets us apart from other European and North American countries." Common sense tell us that if the poorest children in the worst housing are sent to the worst schools then they're unlikely to prosper. On that, the academics and politicians seem to agree.

Source




People born homosexual, say local school officials

Parents, doctors, ex-'gays' protest planned curriculum

The Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland has accomplished what science and medicine have been unable to confirm, simply declaring in its newly approved school curriculum for children that some babies are born homosexual.

Activists are appealing the decision, and former homosexuals are claiming discrimination due to the decision by the school board to pilot a controversial new sex education curriculum - against the advice of hundreds of practicing physicians in the county.

Developed by its own staff, the educational materials were given a test run in six schools in the county district at the 8th and 10th grade levels. Now they are supposed to be implemented in all schools soon. But since its decision on Jan. 9, the school board has drawn a barrage of criticism.

A strong opponent of the curriculum is Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, a non-profit Maryland-based group formed in response to the board's decision. According to its website, the group believes in the parental right to have "ultimate authority to guide the moral direction of their children without interference by an increasingly activist public school system."

Another organization leading the charge against the curriculum, "Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays," recently released a statement that, "According to the American Psychiatric Association, there are no replicated scientific studies supporting any specific biological cause for homosexuality. But now the Montgomery County Board of Education has done what science and medicine could not do by declaring in its newly approved curriculum that homosexuality is 'innate' or inborn."

Unit 8:2 of the new 8th grade textbook includes a definition of innate from the 2006 edition of the Merriam Webster's Dictionary as meaning "determined by factors present in an individual from birth." The curriculum then instructs teachers to "Say to students, 'Sexual orientation is innate and a complex part of one's personality."

But the same text contradicts itself later when asking, "What causes sexual orientation? Almost certainly there is no single reason why some people are homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. According to the American Psychological Association, sexual orientation results from an interaction of cognitive, environmental, and biological factors."

Parents and doctors object to the text as inaccurate, unscientific and discriminatory. The board received an objection to the material signed by more than 270 practicing physicians in Montgomery County, stating the information in the curriculum was inaccurate and possibly dangerous to students on the grounds that it did not disclose health risks associated with minority sexual behavior. The board did not return a WND message requesting comment.

PFOX lodged its complaints on the basis that the newly approved curriculum discriminates against ex-gays and, according to PFOX representative Peter Sprigg, it "fails to tell the students that specific sexual acts can be far more harmful to them than other sexual acts ... it fails to tell students that some individuals experience a change in sexual orientation in the course of their lives."

Legal issues are also involved. According to PFOX Executive Director Regina Griggs, "The board's own policy states that citizen advisory committees are required by Maryland law in order 'to ensure that local school boards will be informed by a variety of opinions from citizens.' The school board placed a PFOX representative on the committee in order to receive viewpoints from all segments of the community, yet our input to the board is continually blocked by gay activist groups and others who serve on this committee and deny equality for ex-gays. The committee has failed to serve its purpose."

WND has documented a number of earlier cases in which educators have been shown to be promoting a homosexual lifestyle to children. Just a week earlier, WND reported California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, under whose supervision hundreds of thousands of children are being educated, has used his state position and taxpayer-funded stationery to praise a "gay" pride event that has been used in the past to expose children to sexually explicit activities. That drew vehement objections from several, including Priscilla Schreiber, the president of the Grossmont Unified High School District governing board. "I am outraged that a person in this high-ranking elected position would advocate an event where diversity is not just being celebrated but where pornography and indecent exposure is being perpetrated on the young and innocent children of our communities," she said.

WND also covered the issue when officials in Boulder, Colo., held a seminar for students where they were told to "have sex," including same-sex experiences, and "take drugs." Another school event promoted homosexuality to students while banning parents, and at still another, WND reported school officials ordered their 14-year-old freshman class into a "gay" indoctrination seminar after having them sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to tell their parents.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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27 June, 2007

Hijacking education in Britain

From global warming alarmism dressed up as Geography to 'happiness teaching' through yoga: the classroom has been hijacked by zealous campaigners who care little for pedagogy

Over the past two decades, the school curriculum in Britain has become estranged from the challenge of educating children. Pedagogic problems still influence official deliberations on the national curriculum, of course. But increasingly, educational matters are being subordinated to the imperative of social engineering and political expediency.

As I write this essay I receive word that the Equal Opportunities Commission has just dispatched 40 pages of guidance to head teachers and governors in England about how they should go about tackling inequality between the sexes. The guideline, The Gender Equality Duty, is the product of an imagination that regards the curriculum as principally a political instrument for changing attitudes and behaviour. `The gender equality duty presents a fantastic opportunity for schools to make a coordinated effort to tackle inequality and ensure that all pupils are able to fully achieve their potential' declares the Commission. (1)

Instructions to schools about how to close the gender gap compete with directives that outline how children should be taught to become more sensitive to cultural differences. Everyone with a fashionable cause wants a piece of the curriculum. The former national chair of the Professional Association of Teachers wants pupils to `learn about nappies' and has demanded the introduction of compulsory parenting classes for 14- to 16-year-olds. (2) Others insist that teachers spend more time talking to their class about sex or relationships or climate change or healthy eating or drugs or homophobia or Islamophobia.

The school curriculum has become a battleground for zealous campaigners and entrepreneurs keen to promote their message. Public health officials constantly demand more compulsory classroom discussions on healthy eating and obesity. Professionals obsessed with young people's sex lives insist that schools introduce yet more sex education initiatives. Others want schools to focus more on black history or gay history. In the recent widespread media outcry over the sordid scenes of moral and cultural illiteracy on Celebrity Big Brother, many demanded that schools should teach Britishness. The government hasn't yet announced any plans for introducing Appropriate Behaviour on Reality TV Shows into the curriculum. But nevertheless, Alan Johnson, the current education secretary, is a very busy man. Not only is he introducing global warming studies, he has also made the instruction of Britain's involvement in the slave trade a compulsory part of the history curriculum.

For Johnson, the subject of history, like that of geography, must be subordinated to the task of transmitting the latest fashionable cause or value. Johnson is indifferent to the slave trade as part of an academic discipline with its own integrity; rather he sees slave trade studies as a vehicle for promoting his version of a multicultural Britain. `This is about ensuring young people understand what it means to be British today' (3), he said in defence of his reorganisation of the history curriculum.

Johnson's title, education secretary, is something of a misnomer. He seems to have no interest in education as such. His preoccupation is with using the classroom to transmit the latest and most fashionable prejudices. He can't even leave school sports alone, recently announcing that PE lessons will now stress the importance of a healthy lifestyle and will raise awareness about the problem of obesity. So after children have received instruction on how to behave as green consumers, learned crucial parenting skills and feel very British, they'll be taught how and why to lose weight. A curriculum devoted to a total makeover has little energy left for dealing with such secondary issues as how to gain children's interest in real education.

Increasingly, the curriculum is regarded as a vehicle for promoting political objectives and for changing the values, attitudes and sensibilities of children. Many advocacy organisations that demand changes to the curriculum do not have the slightest interest in the subject they wish to influence. As far as they are concerned they are making a statement through gaining recognition for their cause in the curriculum. The government, too, is in the business of statement-making. It may lack an effective drugs policy but at least it can claim that schools provide drugs education.

In recent months the politicisation of the curriculum has acquired a powerful momentum. Back in February climate change emerged as the new Big Theme for the curriculum. According to proposals published by the Department of Education, cautionary tales about global warming will become integral to the British school curriculum. This instruction about global warming will masquerade under the title `geography lessons'. As Alex Standish argues in his essay Geography Used To Be About Maps published in the CIVITAS report The Corruption of the Curriculum, this subject has been transformed into a crusade for transmitting `global values'. And global values usually mean the latest Hurrah Causes championed by the cultural elites through the media.

This was the intention behind Alan Johnson's announcement in February 2007 that `we need the next generation to think about their impact on the environment in a different way'. This project, aimed at manipulating how children lead their lives, is justified through appealing to a higher truth. Johnson claims that `if we can instil in the next generation an understanding of how our actions can mitigate or cause global warming, then we lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world' (4). Literally save the world! That looks like a price worth paying for fiddling with the geography curriculum.

This ceaseless attempt to instil in schoolchildren fashionable values is symptomatic of a general state of moral confusion today. Instead of attempting to develop an understanding of what it means to be a good citizen, or articulate a vision of public good, Britain's cultural elites prefer to turn every one of their concerns into a school subject. In the classroom, the unresolved issues of public life can be transformed into simplistic teaching tools. Citizenship education is the clearest example of this corruption of the curriculum by adult prejudices. Time and again, school inspectors have criticised the teaching of citizenship, which is not really surprising considering that leading supporters of citizenship education seem to have little idea what the subject is or ought to be about.

Nick Tate, former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, argued that citizenship education was `about promoting and transmitting values', `participation' and `duties'. But the obvious question, `values about what?', was carefully avoided. Instead, those advocating citizenship education have cobbled together a list of unobjectionable and bland sentiments that have been rebranded as values. Alongside fairness, honesty and community, even participation and voting have been turned into values.

A few years down the road and the meaning of citizenship is even less clear than when schools started teaching it as a subject. Back in January 2007, a review of how schools teach citizenship found that the subject failed to communicate any sense of what it means to be British. Anyone with the slightest grasp of pedagogy will not be surprised by the failure of successive social engineering projects in the classroom. The absence of any moral consensus in Britain today will not be solved through subjecting children to sanctimonious platitudes. Those who are genuinely interested in educating children and inspiring them to become responsible citizens will instead look to real subjects, which represent a genuine body of knowledge. Propaganda campaigns around the latest fashionable `value' only distract children from learning. Values-led education has helped create a situation where children learn that the Holocaust was awful, but do not know which country suffered the greatest number of casualties during the Second World War. It will produce children who know that the slave trade was bad, but who are ignorant about how the right to vote was won in Britain.

The essays by Michele Ledda, Alex Standish, Chris McGovern, Shirley Lawes, Simon Patterson and David Perks in The Corruption of the Curriculum deal with different school subjects. But they all point to similar problems that afflict their area of specialty. Their accusation about the corruption of the school curriculum is not made in the spirit of polemical excess. Corruption in these cases refers to the erosion of the integrity of education through debasing and altering its meaning. As a result some subjects such as geography and history no longer bear any resemblance to what they were in the past. At least the new dumbed-down happy versions of science and mathematics bear some relation to their subjects. But history without chronology is like learning maths through skipping over the multiplication table.

The uniqueness of twenty-first century philistinism

Of course there is nothing new about attempts to influence the values and beliefs transmitted through the school curriculum. Competing claims made on the curriculum reflect confusion and an absence of consensus about how to socialise children. At least in part, the `crisis of education' is symptomatic of an absence of consensus about the basic values of society.

Back in the early 1960s the social philosopher Hannah Arendt recognised the tendency to confuse the lack of moral consensus in society with the problem of schooling. There had to be a measure of consensus about the past before a system of education could affirm its virtues. `The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forego either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition' she wrote in 1961. (5) In other words, the crisis in education is often a symptom of a more fundamental erosion of authority and tradition. The diminishing relevance of the values of the past is a constant theme that underpins debates about education.

Arendt was one of the few observers to note that in a changing world society finds it difficult to establish a creative balance between the achievements and legacy of the past and the provision of answers to new questions and challenges thrown up in the present. It is because it is so difficult to mediate between old and new that educators continually experience their profession as facing a crisis. The challenge of sustaining respect for the past and being open to change can provide important insights about how to go about the business of teaching and learning and developing new knowledge. Unfortunately, in recent decades the British education establishment has become estranged from this challenge. It has distanced itself from the past and devotes itself to searching for and inventing values `appropriate' for our times. Indeed, one of its distinct characteristics is its obsessive search for novelty.

There is nothing unique about the experience of an education system in crisis. What is distinct about our time is the reluctance of educators to attempt to develop a system of schooling that can mediate between the old and the new. The growing tendency to reinvent subjects, modernise them or make them more relevant is driven by the objective of inventing a new tradition. Unfortunately traditions cannot be cobbled together out of thin air. If they lack an organic relationship to people's lived experiences they will lack a capacity to inspire. That is why every initiative taken to improve citizenship education falters and creates a demand for a new idea!

However, it would be wrong to perceive today's crisis of education as simply the contemporary version of an old problem. For a start, education has become far more politicised than at any time during the past two centuries. When Blair made his famous `education, education, education' speech what he really meant was `politics, politics, politics'. In the absence of a consensus of what it means to be British and what are the fundamental values that society wishes to convey to young people, the curriculum has become subject to constant partisan disputes and political experimentation.

The contemporary crisis of education is subject to three destructive influences that are in many ways unique to our time. Firstly contemporary pedagogy has lost faith in the importance of knowledge and the search for the truth. Increasingly educators insist that there is no such thing as the truth and children are instructed that often there are no right or wrong answers. The relativistic turn in pedagogy has important consequences for epistemology and the quality of intellectual life in the west. (6) It also has profound implications for the way that the curriculum is perceived. If the meaning of the truth and the status of knowledge are negotiable, then so is the curriculum.

Studying a subject or body of knowledge is rarely perceived as a good thing in itself. More importantly, the diminished status assigned to knowledge has encouraged a relativistic orientation towards standards. That is why officials have been so pragmatic about the way they wheel and deal about the content of school subjects. From their perspective, lowering standards has become the default position when confronted with a problem. Of course they rarely promote new initiatives through acknowledging that they have made the curriculum easier. Instead they suggest that the changes introduced make the subject more relevant and appropriate for our times. The recent announcement that delivery of education will become more personalised represents the logical outcome of this trend. Personalised learning displaces the idea that there is a coherent body of knowledge that needs to be assimilated in favour of the principle of teaching what works for the individual. Such a promiscuous attitude towards knowledge creates a situation where there are no real pedagogic barriers against pressures to politicise the curriculum.

The second destructive trend haunting education is the enthronement of philistinism in pedagogy. The striving for standards of excellence is frequently condemned as elitist by apparently enlightened educators. Forms of education that really challenge children and which some find difficult are denounced for not being inclusive. There have always been philistine influences in education but it is only in recent times that anti-intellectual ideals are self-consciously promoted by educators. The corrosive effects of anti-elitist sentiments are evident in all the subjects discussed by the authors in Corrupting the Curriculum.

The third important influence that is distinct to our times is a radically new way that educators perceive children. In recent decades it has become common to regard children as fragile, emotionally vulnerable things who cannot be expected to cope with real intellectual challenge. It was in this vein that in April 2007 Alan Johnson instructed teachers to routinely praise their pupils. According to guidelines, teachers ought to reward children five times as often as they punish them for disrupting lessons. (7) That this inane formulation of the relationship between praise and punishment is circulated through the institution of education is a testimony to the impoverished intellectual and moral climate that prevails in this domain. But the exhortation to institutionalise the praising of children is not an isolated attempt to flatter the egos of young people. Increasingly the therapeutic objective of making children feel good about themselves is seen as the primary objective of schooling.

The consequences of this tendency to infantilise children have been enormously destructive. At a time when Britain's schools face serious difficulties in providing children with a good education, they are to be charged with providing happiness lessons. This initiative is the latest technique adopted in a futile attempt to tackle the crisis facing the classroom through the management of children's emotions. Making children feel good about themselves has been one of main objectives of US schools during the past three decades. By the time they are seven or eight years old, American children have internalised the prevailing psychobabble and can proclaim the importance of avoiding negative emotions and of high self-esteem. Yet this has had no perceptible impact on their school performance.

In Britain, too, educators who have drawn the conclusion that it is easier to help children feel good than to teach them maths, reading and science, have embraced the cause of emotional education. During the past decades they have also adopted a variety of gimmicks to improve classroom behaviour through helping children to relax. Some schools have opted for yoga, others use aromatherapy or chill-out music to improve concentration and learning.

Perversely, the more we try to make children feel good about themselves, the more we distract them from engaging in experiences that have the potential for giving them a sense of achievement. These programmes encourage a mood of emotionalism in the school. I can predict with the utmost certainty that an expansion of the resources that schools devote to managing the emotional life of children will encourage pupils to turn inward and become even more preoccupied with themselves. Emotional education will have the unintended consequence of encouraging children to feel that they have a mental health problem. The branding of this therapeutic project as emotional education attempts to convey the impression that new forms of behaviour management possess educational value. They don't.

There are no easy magical solutions to the problems facing education. In one sense the system of education in a modern society will always be subject to new problems and challenges, but there are a number of steps that can be taken to restore a curriculum fit for our children. Firstly, education needs to become depoliticised: politicians need to be discouraged from regarding the curriculum as their platform for making statements. Secondly, society needs to challenge the tendency to downsize the status of knowledge and of standards. Anti-elitist education is in reality a masquerade for social engineering and needs to be exposed for its destructive consequence on school standards. Thirdly, we need to take children more seriously, uphold their capacity to engage with knowledge and provide them with a challenging educational environment. Children do not need to be made to feel good nor praised but to be taken seriously.

Source




The demise of Antioch College

Ten days later than American Thinker, The New York Times takes notice of the demise of Antioch College in a column deliciously titled "Where the arts were too liberal." Too liberal for the New York Times?

The column's author, Michael Goldfarb, attended Antioch in the late 1960s and early 70s, when the college really started going to hell. He mentions a factor omitted in Henry Wickham's AT column on Antioch, but which now that I am reminded of it, I remember quite well.

With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the college increased African-American enrollment to 25 percent in 1968, from virtually nil in previous years. The new students were recruited from the inner city. At around the same time, Antioch created coeducational residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll became the rule, as you might imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be involved in all of them. No member of the faculty or administration, and certainly none of the students, could guess what these sudden changes would mean. They were simply embraced in the spirit of the time.

At the time, I had a couple of friends who were Antioch students, and visited the campus a few times in 1968-69. I remember hearing about the new students who were not exactly the affluent suburbanites that were the Antioch mainstay. I remember being told by people at Antioch that things had gotten downright scary with firearms (something Goldfarb mentions, too). While sympathizing with their plight, I found their tone of shock and horror quite amusing, even at the time. They were struggling with their naïve belief system that held victims not responsible for their actions, yet at the same time their own survival instincts were telling them otherwise.

The most interesting point of the Goldfarb column, however, is his implicit rule that liberalism needs to be balanced with pragmatism, which seems to hint that he (and his NYT editors) understand that liberalism isn't realistic. One can only practice it as long as it doesn't involve something of genuine interest and concern. Liberalism is a luxury for those insulated from it by wealth and privilege.

Antioch not only took liberalism farther than most, it lacked the insulation of prestige and a vast endowment. If you give Harvard another century of liberalism gone wild, it, too, may follow in Antioch's footsteps, though I concede it takes a lot of time to blow through 20 some billion dollars of endowment.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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26 June, 2007

Class Size: Where Belief Trumps Reality

See also earlier posts on this blog here and here and here

Class size can make a difference, based on many variables but perhaps no belief is so expensive or contrary to the facts than that which maintains smaller classes, as determined by some arbitrary number, is beneficial to students. It is to be expected educators will harbor this view because, whatever the impact on students, clearly a teacher with, say, fifteen students per class has less responsibility than one with thirty. But members of the general public, especially parents of school students stubbornly maintain this view, contrary to history, research findings, and current experience.

Those who, such as this writer has done from time to time over the years, take a contrary view are not merely swimming upstream but they are facing upstream while the current rushes them the other way. Nonetheless, let's try this one more time. First, some history.

Class size has been regularly reduced over the years, and is currently smaller than ever. For example, early in the nineteenth century, under the Lancasterian system, a teacher might be responsible for a class of 1000 or more. They handled it by using students as assistants. In New York City schools at the time of the Civil War, relatively untrained young women teachers had classes with as many as 150 students. Even the superintendent agreed that was unreasonable, that no teacher should have more than 100 students per class.

When this writer began teaching in a public high school more than 45 years ago, the school had an 8-period teaching day. Teachers typically had six classes, one period of nonteaching duty, and one free period daily. During the six teaching periods classes commonly had 30-35 students each, giving the teacher a daily student load of 175-200+ students. Interestingly, although he was for several years president of the local teachers' association, class size rarely came up for discussion. Today's classes are typically about 25 students and, as we'll see, often mandated to be fewer, yet class size is a constant complaint.

If smaller classes are a guarantee of better education, why hasn't it happened? Does anyone maintain that public education in New York City today , with many classes of 25 students, and none with 150, is five or six times more effective than was true with the 150 or so in the 1860s?

Then there is research. A decade ago, Eric Hanushek at the University of Rochester reviewed more than 300 studies of class size. Almost without exception they concluded it made no difference. The few positive findings were so minor as to be insignificant. And they were counterbalanced by a few that found negative results - that is, as class size went down so did student achievement. Of course educators quote the few with any good news for them, without noting they are the exceptions and the gains are almost nonexistent.

Then there is the classic current experience in California which ten years ago by a statewide law mandated maximum class size in grades 1-3 (later adding 4th grade) of 20. This cost an additional $1.5 billion the first year. Ten years later more than $15 billion additional has been spent chasing this moonbeam, with miserable results. Even ignoring such frauds as reported in the March 31 Los Angeles Times of a district that "created phantom classes to pull the wool over state officials' eyes," the paper concluded that "There is still no evidence that the multibillion-dollar investment in small primary classes has made more than an incremental difference." Talk about waste! After ten years you would think citizens, particularly irate taxpayers, would be demanding that it's time to give it up. But, no. The program is still popular.

If they continue to defend this obvious failure at least they could stop complaining about school taxes. But don't expect that. This is not a system based on sound research or experience. What is done is done because that's how it is done. But if we insist upon ignoring what research suggests is the way to go, at least we should not do what research suggests doesn't work and, most of all, stop doing those things what clearly do not work.

Don't expect that either. The establishment only demands research findings when they don't like a proposal. They ignore it if it exists; and seek to prevent research if it's lacking. Yet they implement their proposals on class size, bilingualism, whole language teaching, school-to-work, etc., on as wide a basis as possible without research or ignoring hundreds of studies - on building size, certification, etc. -contrary to their views.

Source




School tests: a little bit of stress is good for you

The only thing worse than the UK government's conveyor-belt testing of schoolkids is the anti-testing argument that says exams are evil and children 'can't cope'

There is no need to have one day each year when the `nation's 11-year-olds' are reduced to `a state of panic', argued Keith Bartley, chief executive of the UK General Teaching Council (GTC), last week. SATs tests, he said, must go. SATs, or Standard Assessment Tasks, are carried out when children are seven, 11 and 14 years old, in order to test students' grip of the national curriculum at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3. The results of the tests are used as the basis for school league tables, which show parents and others how a school is performing overall. SATs - along with GCSEs and AS levels - have been under scrutiny for some time. Teachers have been accused of `teaching to test' (focusing on the achievement of `targets' during the examination period to the detriment of encouraging real understanding); `drilling to test' (exerting too much pressure on kids to pass); and even `fiddling tests' (in order to make their school's performance look better on paper). Now, however, the focus has shifted on to the stress and panic that SATs apparently provoke in young people.

`England's pupils are among the most frequently tested in the world', the GTC's Bartley said in an interview with the Observer last Sunday. Apparently, a typical British school pupil will sit 70 tests during his or her time at school, starting in Year 2 and continuing (at the discretion of individual schools) every year thereafter, until they reach Year 10 and begin preparing for their GCSE exams.

Talking to the BBC, John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said: `There are all sorts of malign effects from the current testing regime. There is enormous pressure on youngsters and there's a lot of training to take the tests.' Sarah Teather, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for education, agrees. She says her party has `called for tests to be scrapped for years'. Psychologists, meanwhile, report that they are now `going into schools at unprecedented rates to tackle exam stress, with children as young as six suffering anxiety' (1). `All are affected by the anxiety transmitted by their teachers', said Martin Johnson of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

There are plenty of reasons to attack the culture of testing in schools - but stress isn't one of them. Government testing schemes are part of an educational climate in which teachers are no longer trusted to get on with their jobs. And that is the basis on which the GTC should attack SATs. Teachers should have autonomy in their own classrooms, to teach their pupils unfettered by the educational vogue of the month; to enthuse pupils with their own idiosyncratic love of a subject; and, yes, to set tests in order to monitor children's progress, but when they feel that it is necessary and in an independent way that allows the teacher to tap into the class's abilities.

By contrast, the targets set by the government are often arbitrary. The authorities' externally-imposed tests on all children from seven to 14 come across like abstract hoops that both teachers and children must jump through. These tests bear little relation to actual understanding or enjoyment of a subject. Instead, they are a means of ticking a box to show that each child has achieved the same bland level of rudimentary skills, and thus they can stifle passion, flair and originality in the classroom.

To its credit, the GTC has made some of these points about the `testing culture' - but by choosing to focus mainly on the alleged stress and panic caused by exams it has actually undermined the idea of testing per se. In this sense, its criticisms of SATs, alongside the criticisms made by others, are not a great improvement on the government's testing culture, since they communicate the idea that examination itself is problematic: too elitist; too judgemental; too stressful.

Since New Labour swept to power in 1997, there has been a permanent revolution in education. Every minute facet of education has been held up to the light and found wanting - but no coherent idea of what education should consist of has been put forward. Instead of challenging the degradation of education at the hands of the Blairites - of which the constant government roll-call of ever-changing targets is a symptom - the GTC has seized on a trendy issue: stress. The union doesn't point out how teachers are now regarded, at best, as an impediment to a child's osmosis-like learning and must therefore be monitored closely; instead it claims that the very nature of testing is iniquitous, which it isn't.

Indeed, far from questioning the government's insatiable thirst for statistics, the GTC puts forward its own version of targets, targets, targets. It proposes that a system of `cohort sampling' should replace the current SATs system. Under this scheme, less than one per cent of primary school children and less than three per cent of secondary students would take national tests. The samples would be selected randomly and tested to see how the school overall is performing. `You do not have to test every child every four years to know whether children are making more or less progress than they used to', Bartley said, somewhat ridiculously inferring that the nation's children will progress as one through the education system, and that a one to three per cent sample is perfectly representative of all their collective achievements. And what will `cohort sampling' mean for the little `stressed-out' martyrs selected to take on all the exam stress of the exam-free 97 to 99 per cent of the kids? Six-year-old hara-kiri? Bartley doesn't hypothesise.

Tests for young children and teenagers can be a good thing - when set by teachers and schools rather than imposed from on high. They can sharpen the brain. There's nothing like a bit of independent cramming to ram a principle home - and once principles are rammed home they can be applied throughout a subject, aiding understanding. What would be the point of learning French, for example, if you didn't have to go through all that dull stuff about grammar and vocabulary? (Which simply has to be learned in a laborious, repetitive way; that is, it has to be `drilled' home. And nothing will make a pupil learn better than the threat of a test to pass or fail.) Yet the GTC seems to have absorbed the idea that testing is essentially elitist and bad, and that the worst thing a child can do is fail. In truth, the worst thing for education is the demonisation and fetishisation of its disparate elements: exams are this week's bogeyman; next week it will be something else.

The idea of a classical, liberal education must be reclaimed: an education where teaching is thorough and where free ideas circulate, unbridled by government diktat. A first step to this will be allowing teachers to claw back their independence: and that means allowing them to set their own tests, as a way of aiding a class's learning, as and when they please.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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25 June, 2007

British schools to be dumbed down even further

The Leftists running the show only want the kids to be propagandized. They live in dread of the kids acquiring real knowledge. Facts are fatal to Leftism

STATE secondary schools are being told to ditch lessons in academic subjects and replace them with month-long projects on themes such as global warming. The pressure to scrap the traditional timetable in favour of cross-curricular topics is coming from the government’s teaching advisers, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). It has provoked anger from traditionalists who believe it marks a return to discredited “trendy” techniques.

Schools piloting the new-style lessons for 11-14-year-olds have merged history, geography and citizenship, with teachers drawing up the lessons in teams. Mick Waters, the QCA’s curriculum director, believes the changes will help spur enthusiasm and cut truancy. He said: “The challenge for schools is to create a nourishing and appetising feast that will sustain learners and meet their needs. “Although the national curriculum is organised into subjects, it has never been a requirement to deliver it entirely as discrete subjects.”

Critics, however, have insisted that the project-based approach, which was popular in primary schools until the 1990s, led to pupils failing to master the basics. Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: “This will narrow what children learn. People come with up these ideas for the less academic but they wouldn’t dream of letting their own children be taught in this way.”

The first sign of a backlash from teachers has emerged with a petition on the Downing Street website against the removal of some of the academic content from a science GCSE curriculum launched last September. About 130 science teachers have signed the petition, which calls for the course to be scrapped because it requires pupils to discuss issues such as pollution but not to learn “hard science”, such as the periodic table in chemistry. The petition reads: “Many anticipated it as ‘science fit only for the pub’. Now, at the end of its first year . . . science teachers (particularly physics teachers) are indeed judging it to be overly simplistic, devoid of any real physics and inadequate preparation for further study. This GCSE will remove Britain’s technological base within a decade.” Stuart Billington, head of physics at a large comprehensive, said: “I would never allow my own children to sit in my own classroom and be taught such a shambles masquerading as ‘science’ . . . You can imagine how I feel delivering it to 100 other people’s children every week.”

The QCA last week produced examples of what will be expected from state secondary schools next year when the changes to the timetable for 11-to-14-year-olds are introduced. They include a school that has suggested 16-year-olds could be paid to help teachers in class. Wombwell High, a comprehensive in South Yorkshire, has already dropped single subject lessons for a third of its timetable. Teachers work in teams and the projects begin with four classes working together in the hall. Tolworth girls’ school in Surbiton, Surrey, has reclassified English as “communication”.

The project-led approach took hold in primary schools in the 1970s after a report from a government-appointed education committee. Teachers were told to emphasise soft skills and “learning by doing”. Schools were told to scrap projects in 1992 after an inquiry found pupils were missing out on the basics.

Waters has told schools they need to build the timetable around the “needs” of pupils. He said: “At the moment most schools are in the traditional mindset, which means they take content and divide it up into fragments called timetables. They do it as it has always been done. “The idea [of the new timetable] is to offer less prescription and more opportunity to interpret the curriculum. Cutting across all subjects are curriculum dimensions; a set of themes including creativity, cultural understanding and diversity.”

Source




Australia: School discipline problem greeted with the usual wringing of hands

And expressions of good intentions, of course. No suggestion of bringing back real punishment for misdeeds. A great lesson for kids to learn!

EDUCATION Minister David Bartlett does not support suspension and wants to reduce the use of the discipline tactic in Tasmanian schools. He said research showed long suspensions led to students becoming disconnected and dropping out of school. Last year, 2713 students were suspended, at least once, for an average three days for reasons including drugs, sex, weapons and physical attacks.

Yesterday Mr Bartlett flagged sending students to alternative educational venues in schools or in the community rather than suspending them. "What I believe is that we do need to keep young Tasmanians connected to schooling," he said. "A suspension of three days does not necessarily disconnect them from schooling. "But I do get concerned when students are spending longer times out of schools."

He has ordered an audit of what government and non-government venues already exist and wants to start promoting them to schools. "We need to get the schools using them," he said.

The Australian Education Union is pushing for small separate schools, or behavioural units, to send violent students to. The AEU has argued that suspension does not improve a student's behaviour and has heard reports of students attacking teachers every week. Last week, AEU state manager Chris Lane said teachers' only option was to suspend children who returned to the classroom just as badly behaved.

Mr Bartlett said suspension was not his preference but sometimes it was the "only solution". He said the Government did need to invest in education programs to provide another option to sending students home. These programs included the Keep it Big program at Rosetta High, Chance on Main at Moonah and the Bridgewater Farm School. Schools set their own policies on suspension and Mr Bartlett said a suspendable offence varied from school to school.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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24 June 2007

Academic decay

Blaming the Jews for all the world's ills is about as low as you get intellectually. Primitive ignorance is the best one can say for it, though a need to find objects for chronic hate is a more probable motive. Article below by Hal G. P. Colebatch

It was a hallmark of the Enlightenment civilization of the West that warring countries still shared scientific knowledge, and held scholarship above politics. During the Napoleonic Wars the British and French in the South Seas would often set the war aside and help one another's research ships, providing they proved their scientific credentials.

The community of scholarship was thought to transcend not only national but also religious boundaries, as, one way or another, it had been thought of since the foundation of universities in early medieval times. In 1788, when Catholic priests were banned in England, the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, not merely a Catholic priest but a Professor of Dogmatic Theology in Rome, traveled to England to work with fellow astronomer Nevil Maskelyne, a Protestant minister.

George Orwell, writing in World War II, commented on a British newspaper produced in 1810: "There is an article of about 9,000 words on the publication of the French scientific body known as the Societe d'Areueil. The French scientists ... are treated with the utmost respect." It would, he said, be impossible to discover from this article that there was a war on between the two countries.

However, it seems we have moved on from the values of the enlightenment in Britain, and this is considering a community which Britain is not even at war with: Delegates at the first conference of the new British academics' body, the University and College Union, voted by 158 to 99 to recommend "a comprehensive and consistent boycott" of all Israeli academic institutions to its branches. (Some will be very east to boycott. They are closed because of constant rocket-fire into them from Gaza.)

The UCU resolution includes proposals to "organize a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academics/educational trade unionists." That is to say, not only are Israeli academics and universities to suffer systematic and institutionalized discrimination by being excluded from the community of scholars, and not even allowed to be heard, but the representatives of political movements and organizations committed to their destruction are singled out to be granted favoritism. As British writer Melanie Phillips says, this would be childish if it were not villainous, while the British Minister of State for Higher Education, Bill Rammell, has bleated gently that "I profoundly believe this does nothing to promote the Middle East peace process."

This is only the latest development in a long-term academic attack on Israel and on Israeli academics and researchers in Britain. In July 2003, it was reported that Andrew Wilkie, Nuffield Professor of Pathology and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, had banned a highly qualified Jewish student, Amit Duvshani, from enrolling to work in Wilkie's laboratory towards a Ph.D. thesis. Wilkie was reported to have told Duvshani in a letter: "I have a huge problem with the way the Israelis take the high moral ground ... and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians. I am sure you are perfectly nice at a personal level but no way would I take on somebody who served in the Israeli Army." (Military service in Israel is for obvious reasons universal and compulsory.)

Wilkie later stated: "I accept that I confused my personal beliefs with those of Oxford University," a puzzling statement for several reasons including the fact that it was unclear how a university could have personal beliefs.

Two scholars, Dr. Miriam Shlesinger and Professor Gideon Toury, were sacked from an international journal of translation studies by Monica Baker, a professor at the Manchester University Institute of Science and Technology, because they were Israeli. This was reported in the London Times's "Higher Educational Supplement" but attracted no comment or condemnation in British academic circles until American academics took the matter up.

In 2002 it was reported that the development of life-saving medical treatments in Britain were under threat because of a British boycott of Israeli academics. Baroness Greenfield, a neurologist and director of the Royal Institution, the oldest independent research body in Britain, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, both drew attention to the boycott that was being organized by "left-wing British intellectuals." It aimed at denying Israeli medical researchers and academics platforms. The point that cancer research was being handicapped to the detriment of all humanity as a political gesture was serious but perhaps not the most crucial thing. The most crucial thing was that some Israelis -- or not to be mealy-mouthed about it, some Jews -- were being punished and victimized as a group for what other Jews were alleged to have done. It had a highly familiar ring to it for any student of history. The subtext, of course was, in 1943 -- and is now -- that Jews were and are collectively and racially guilty.

What did the huge and expensive British race-relations industry do about it? Nothing, of course. It was as silent as, apparently, was the Conservative party. The same day that I placed this in my file I received a letter from a retired (non-Jewish) technical college lecturer living in Berwick-on-Tweed who commented on "the vileness of the anti-Semitism sweeping England." In fact, even a cursorily assembled collection of incidents shows how far anti-Semitism has advanced in the last few years, to an extent unthinkable a decade or so ago, or before the multiculturalism, race-relations and anti-discrimination industries really hit their strides in enforcing political correctness and the "celebration of diversity."

On February 15, 2003, nearly one million people marched through the streets of London -- probably the biggest-ever political demonstration in Britain -- under the slogan "Don't Attack Iraq -- Freedom for Palestine." The running together of the two slogans showed how anti-Israeli/anti-Jewish forces had effectively hijacked the anti-war movement, and showed also the alliance between the broad left and Islamicism, with the common bond being hatred of Israel as an outpost and symbol of Western civilization.

This march was organized by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). The STWC was organized originally by the Socialist Workers' Party, which claimed Trotskyite credentials, and the MAB had links with the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of its senior officers publicly defended murder-suicide bomb attacks on Jews. MAB banners on the march read: "Palestine forever from the sea to the river," indicating its real agenda was not peace but a Final Solution along Nazi lines. Dr. Myles Harris described the scene in the following terms in the Salisbury Review:

At the foot of Nelson's column a loud-speaker the size of a bread van gave an electronic grunt and began to chant: "Kill Bush, Kill Bush!" at 150 decibels. Overhead an animated puppet of Bush jerked across a huge plasma screen. A crowd which had been gathering in the square all the afternoon roared enthusiastically. At intervals the sentence "You are being lied to" appeared across the screen. Nobody seemed to think it might have a double meaning....

The whole gamut of the old anti-Semitic, anti-American delusions of the Stalinist left were on display....I looked at the screen again. The jerking Bush puppet was now being occasionally outlined in the cross-hairs of a rifle....A Church of England vicar in a soutane walked past wearing a white and black chequered bandanna used by Palestinian demonstrators you see chanting at the funerals of "martyrs" on TV"

Anglican cleric Canon Paul Ostreicher, former chairman of Amnesty International, equates the Israelis fighting for national survival and the Anglo-American forces in Iraq with Nazis:

Those old enough to remember will recollect that the French resistance were held to be heroes when they killed the German occupiers. I did not rejoice at German deaths then, any more than I rejoice at Israeli, American and, yes, British deaths now. But there is no difference.

A EU survey in November 2003 indicated that 60 percent of British people believed Israel was the major threat to World Peace. This was just above the EU average of 59 percent, though below the figures 65 percent for Germany and 74 percent for the Netherlands. Thus Britain could claim to be less anti-Semitic than Germany, though not by a great margin. The statistics have possibly changed since then.

Among other incidents Lord Triesman, the former general secretary of the Labour Party, was among prominent British Jews targeted for anti-Semitic attacks. The police Special Branch had advised him to have a 10-foot-high fence erected around his house in North London, but the Labour-run Council made him take it down.

The progressive Guardian, meanwhile, published an article under the byline of that well-known journalist and fellow-progressive, Osama bin Laden, urging Moslems to resist the "Zionist-crusader chain of evil."

Source




Single-sex schools the best?

So it would seem in the Australian State of Victoria

SINGLE-sex schools are the state's top performers when it comes to university enrolment rates, according to Government data released yesterday. Top of the class of 2006 were the students from Isik College's Broadmeadows campus for girls, with all of last year's year 12 students enrolled at university this year. Most of the students are studying at the University of Melbourne and Monash University. It's a similar story at the school's boys campus at Upfield, with 95 per cent of VCE graduates now at university and 5 per cent opting to defer their study.

Korowa Anglican Girls School in Glen Iris and Presbyterian Ladies College in Burwood tied for second place with an enrolment rate of 96 per cent, followed by Melbourne High and Melbourne Girls Grammar (both 91 per cent). Korowa's principal, Christine Jenkins, said while numerous factors played a part in students' success, many girls preferred learning in a single-sex environment. "They are much more likely to make contributions in classrooms," she said. "They aren't worried about their image and they can be themselves and take risks in a supportive environment."

PLC vice-principal Carolyn Elvins agreed single-sex education made sense because boys and girls learnt differently. "Schools can cater for those (differences) more effectively in a single-sex environment," she said, adding that girls liked to learn collaboratively and tended to be less competitive.

But Isik College principal Mehmet Koca was reluctant to link the school's results to gender. Mr Koca said small class sizes and a mentor program made for a winning combination. Under the mentoring system, graduates volunteer to return to the school to tutor students after hours in specific subjects. "That gives students a role model they can look up to and the tutoring is free of charge," Mr Koca said. "It also helps students believe in themselves and aspire to university." Isik College was set up 10 years ago as a private school for economically and socially disadvantaged Turkish-Australian students. This year's Broadmeadows school captain, Iman Zayegh, 16, said the single-sex environment was supportive and comfortable. "When you're comfortable in the environment, you're more likely to work to your full potential and achieve your goals," she said. Ms Zayegh, who gets tutoring in chemistry and is aiming to study pharmacy at Monash University next year, said the mentoring program was invaluable.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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23 June, 2007

2,300 schools face "No Child" overhaul

The scarlet letter in education these days is an "R." It stands for restructuring - the purgatory that schools are pushed into if they fail to meet testing goals for six straight years under the No Child Left Behind law. Nationwide, about 2,300 schools are either in restructuring or are a year away and planning for such drastic action as firing the principal and moving many of the teachers, according to a database provided to The Associated Press by the Education Department. Those schools are being warily eyed by educators elsewhere as the law's consequences begin to hit home.

Schools fall into this category after smaller changes, such as offering tutoring, fall short. The effort is supposed to amount to a major makeover, and it has created a sense of urgency that in some schools verges on desperation. "This is life and death," says John Deasy, superintendent of schools in Prince George's County, Md., where several schools are coming face to face with the consequences of President Bush's signature education law. "This is very high-stakes work."

The schools bearing the label are often in poor urban areas, like Far Rockaway at the end of the subway line in the New York City borough of Queens. But they're also found in leafy suburbs, rural areas and resort towns.

Only schools that receive federal aid for low-income students - known as Title I - are subject to the law's consequences. But they can be brand-new facilities with luxuries like television studios. "It's not a Hollywood version of a school that's falling down or total chaos," says Kerri Briggs, acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary issues at the Education Department.

The 2002 education law, which is up for renewal in Congress, offers a broad menu of options for restructuring. They include firing principals and moving teachers, and calling in turnaround specialists. At Far Rockaway High School - or Far Rock, as locals say - restructuring has led to a new face in the principal's office and a new teaching force. The new principal, Denise Hallett, came from the district's headquarters about three years ago. She splashed colors like hot pink and sunny yellow on the walls of the grand but neglected century-old building. She painted the library floors tangerine orange and replaced the moldy books with new, grade-appropriate reading material [Action for the sake of action. Pure genius!].

She also replaced three-fourths of the staff. "The instruction wasn't happening," Hallett said, offering an explanation for poor test scores, high dropout rates and gang violence. "You've got to make changes in the teaching, so that you have wonderful things that are happening inside the classroom."

Schools in low-income communities have trouble attracting and keeping sought-after teachers. Working conditions are often thought to be poor, and teachers in failing schools face increased scrutiny. The federal law says schools in restructuring can replace teachers. Local union contracts can make that difficult, but some collective bargaining agreements are starting to permit it. Usually, the teachers transfer to another school or work as substitutes. Hallett says she's giving her brand-new teachers the support they need to thrive - and stay. She has a full-time professional development coach on staff and has promised more lesson planning time.

"When I first came in I had my family saying, 'You're going to Far Rockaway?'" recalls Ronalda McMillian, a new teacher. "But as I've come here, I've found I really like it. ... There's a reputation that precedes the school that is not actually present when you walk through these doors."

Felix Cruz walked purposefully through the halls one afternoon clutching balloons for a senior awards ceremony. The 17-year-old says he's proud to attend Far Rockaway. "People just think if it's in Rockaway, it's a bad school. It's a good school," Cruz said firmly. He is among the students taking architectural drawing courses. Hallett says despite the emphasis that No Child Left Behind places on math and reading - the subjects tested under the law - she tries to offer engaging classes that expose kids to careers and make school fun. The last round of test scores showed Far Rockaway students improved over the previous year in math but were still struggling to make gains in English.

The pressure for principals is real, since principals often are replaced when schools don't make gains quickly enough. Nevertheless, Hallett has a calm, upbeat demeanor - though expressing a flash of anger when talking about the academic years that precede high school. "You should know this: I have students who come into this building and they can't read," she said. "Schools have failed them. ... If I have a kid that can't read at grade level four, they're not going to pass a state examination."

The pressure to prepare kids for high school is clear at Long Branch Middle School, a school in restructuring in a working-class New Jersey shore town. The most obvious sign of the pressure is in a public hallway near the school's main entrance where graphs hang in full view of passing students and teachers. Each bears a teacher's name and shows a growth curve, indicating plainly whether students in a class are making progress on reading and math tests given throughout the year.

Superintendent Joseph Ferraina, a former teacher and principal at the school, acknowledges that such discomforting changes make teachers nervous. "It's difficult to change schools," he said. "What often happens is we talk about change, change, change, and we go back to what we felt comfortable with." Ferraina says the wall charts are helping force his school to rely on testing data throughout the year, not just on the No Child Left Behind spring tests. "There are people working with data every day now," he said. "They're sitting down with people and saying, 'You know what, your class seems to not be doing well in whole numbers. We need to add a lesson in whole numbers.'" The focus on tests worries some who say teachers are focusing too much on preparing kids for exams rather than spending time on important other instruction.

More here




Leftist Jews involved in proposed British academic boycott of Israel

Many of the key players in the escalating British campaign to boycott Israel are Jewish or Israeli, the Jewish Chronicle revealed in an investigation published Thursday. According to the investigation, the Jewish academics justify their stance as part of the struggle for Palestinian rights and ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories. The report stated that a high proportion of the academics were deeply involved in UCU, the University and College Union, which last month sparked an international outcry by voting to facilitate a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Anti-boycott figures suggest that the campaign has been fuelled by a well-organized mix of far-left activists and Islamic organizations, the JC reported. In reality, the main proponents are a loosely knit collection of academics and trade unionists linked to groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Jews for the Boycotting of Israeli Goods, and Bricup, the British Committee for Universities of Palestine.

Israeli Haim Bresheeth, professor of media and culture at the University of East London, seconded the UCU motion, which called for consideration of the morality of ties with Israeli academia and for discussions on boycotting. Prof Bresheeth told the JC that a boycott was not an easy decision. "I am Jewish and an Israeli, and I don't wish harm on either side. But how long can this occupation go on?" Characterizing opposition to a boycott as insincere, he added, "What we are asking for is not violent. It is civil action against a military occupation."

According to the JC, Bricup has a large number of Jewish supporters, among them husband and wife Hilary and Steven Rose. Hilary, a professor of social policy at Bradford University, is Bricup's co-convenor alongside Prof Jonathan Rosenhead. Her husband, an Open University biology professor, is the organization's secretary. They have been active in the boycott movement since 2002. In an online article, Steven Rose wrote, "It really isn't good enough to attack the messenger as anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew rather than deal with the message that Israel's conduct is unacceptable."

Source




Virginia school's no-contact rule is touchy subject

Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office. Among his crimes: hugging. All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

School officials say the rule helps keep crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable. But Hal, 13, and his parents think the school's hands-off approach goes too far, and they are lobbying for a change. "I think hugging is a good thing," said Hal, a seventh-grader, a few days before the end of the school year. "I put my arm around her. It was like for 15 seconds. I didn't think it would be a big deal."

A Fairfax schools spokesman said there is no countywide ban like the one at Kilmer, but many middle schools and some elementary schools have similar "keep your hands to yourself" rules. Officials in Arlington, Loudoun and Prince George's counties said schools in those systems prohibit inappropriate touching and disruptive behavior but don't forbid all contact.

Deborah Hernandez, Kilmer's principal, said the rule makes sense in a school that was built for 850 students but houses 1,100. She said that students should have their personal space protected and that many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome. "You get into shades of gray," Hernandez said. "The kids say, 'If he can high-five, then I can do this.' " She has seen a poke escalate into a fight and a handshake that is a gang sign. Some students -- and these are friends -- play "bloody knuckles," which involves slamming their knuckles together as hard as they can. Counselors have heard from girls who are uncomfortable hugging boys but embarrassed to tell anyone. And in a culturally diverse school, officials say, families might have different views of what is appropriate.

It isn't as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from a teacher or a reminder to move along is enough to stop girls who are holding hands and giggling in a huddle or a boy who pats a buddy on the back. Students won't get busted if they high-five in class after answering a difficult math problem. Typically, she said, only repeat offenders or those breaking other rules are reprimanded. "You have to have an absolute rule with students, and wiggle room and good judgment on behalf of the staff," Hernandez said.

Hal's parents, Donna and Henri, say that they think Kilmer is a good school and that their son is thriving there. He earns A's and B's and, before this incident, hadn't gotten in any trouble. Still, they say they encourage hugging at home and have taught him to shake hands when he meets someone. They agree that teenagers need to have clear limits but don't want their son to get the message that physical contact is bad. "How do kids learn what's right and what's wrong?" Henri Beaulieu asked. "They are all smart kids, and they can draw lines. If they cross them, they can get in trouble. But I don't think it would happen too often." Beaulieu has written a letter to the county School Board asking it to review the rule.

Hal's troubles began one day in March when he got up from his assigned cafeteria table and went to a nearby table where his then-girlfriend was sitting. He admits he broke one rule -- getting up from his assigned table without permission -- and he accepts a reprimand for that. "The table thing, I'm guilty," he said. A school security officer spotted the hug and sent Hal to the office, where he was cited for two infractions. He was warned that a third misstep could lead to in-school suspension or detention. School officials said that the girl didn't complain and that they have no reason to believe the hug was unwelcome.

Hal said that he and his classmates understand when and how it is appropriate to hug or pat someone on the back in school and that most teenagers respect boundaries set by their peers. Today, his seventh-grade year ends as school lets out for the summer. Next fall, he hopes Kilmer officials reconsider the rule. "I think you should be able to shake hands, high-five and maybe a quick hug," he said. "Making out goes too far."

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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22 June, 2007

"Diversity" = racism

Post lifted from Dr Sanity. See the original for links

John Leo has an article "Let the Segregation Commence", in this month's City Journal that talks about the numerous commencement ceremonies that go on at UCLA, my alma mater. Apparently there is a special graduation to accommodate every possible identy group:

Some students are presumably eligible for four or five graduations. A gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino mother could attend the Asian, Filipino, and American Indian ceremonies, plus the mainstream graduation and the Lavender Graduation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students.

That is just so special, I hardly know what to say. However, I will try to come up with something. The usual rationalization of of all this "diversity"--which as Leo notes is actually a form of racial, ethnic, and sexist segregation/discrimination--is that the smaller ceremonies have more meaning for the individuals than the larger one that everyone could attend.

Okay. I might buy into that argument except for the fact that they don't really believe that rationalization themselves. Do you know how I know that last statement to be true?

Just imagine the inarticulate rage; the unbelievable rancor and all the moral indignation that would ensue if Jews demanded their own special graduation ceremony under the auspices of the University? Or if there were a "Caucasian Male" society that held commencement exercises using UCLA facilities? Or say, an "Aryan" graduation?

When it comes out of the mouths of the leftoids, "celebrating diversity" becomes just another way to villify America and Western civilization. Leo goes on to explain what I also think is the real reason why this seemingly innocuous silliness is a cover-up for the PC neo-marxist trendy crowd on campus:

But the core reason for separatist graduations is the obvious one: on campus, assimilation is a hostile force, the domestic version of American imperialism. On many campuses, identity-group training begins with separate freshman orientation programs for nonwhites, who arrive earlier and are encouraged to bond before the first Caucasian freshmen arrive. Some schools have separate orientations for gays as well. Administrations tend to foster separatism by arguing that bias is everywhere, justifying double standards that favor identity groups.

Four years ago Ward Connerly, then a regent of the University of California, tried to pass a resolution to stop funding of ethnic graduations and gay freshman orientations. He changed his mind and asked to withdraw his proposal, but the regents wanted to vote on it and defeated it in committee 6-3.

No major objections to ethnic graduations have emerged since. As in so many areas of American life, the preposterous is now normal.

As for the smaller ceremonies giving student's more meaning (i.e., they feel more special), I am also fairly certain that racism, sexism,homophobia and ethnic bashing have more meaning for the people who engage in those activities, too.

What I think is happening here is that underneath that "do-gooder" PC sensitivity there lurks a profound racist, sexist, and homophobic core. The left has been very successful at camoflauging that core of intellectual and moral bankruptcy with the their gradiose, and so very well-meaning, rationalizations and psychological maneuvers.

Let me quote from an earlier essay I wrote on the subject of this intellectual and moral bankruptcy:

What we have witnessed over the 30- 45 years since the Left ascended to dominate political thought in the mid 20th century, is its rapid and unprecedented decline into wholesale intellectual and moral bankruptcy. The noble values and ideals they once stood for have been abandoned; and almost as if a surreal cosmic joke was being played on them, they have-without even noticing!-- embraced the exact opposite of what they once stood for.

Where once they stood for freedom; they now enable dictatorships and apologize for tyrants. Where once they sought to bring justice to the world; they now defend horrific acts of mass murder and enslavement. Where once they rightly demanded equal opportunity, they have embraced all kinds of racial quotas and discriminatory practices and demand equality of outcome. Where once they sought to empower the weak; they are now instrumental in maintaining and expanding their victimhood.

After all, how can you be a "champion of the oppressed" unless you maintain and nurture an oppressed class that will always require your services to help them?




Teacher training to curb school violence

Wotta lotta ineffectual and irresponsible waffle! The offenders should be prosecuted, jailed and the outcomes publicized

The Education Department has launched a training package for teachers to help them deal with escalating violence in Western Australian schools. State schools have reported 45 incidents of parents or caregivers threatening staff members since July last year. Six involved physical violence.

The package will include strategies on preventing and managing violence in schools and offer information about restraining orders and legal advice.

The Education Minister Mark McGowan says abuse of teachers is not acceptable. "Teachers have been assaulted and teachers have been abused and parents have misbehaved and these sorts of things aren't good enough," he said. "I would encourage parents also to have a look at themselves and accept it when a school tells them their child may not be behaving the best and have a look at ways of improving their child's behaviour rather than blaming the school."

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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21 June, 2007

Liberal groupthink causes conservatives to self-censor

The ideal academic environment on a college campus is one that encourages vigorous debate and builds reasoning skills, all while the student is learning in his or her area of study. Unfortunately, universities too often fall short in the first two categories.

For at least six years now, the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine has made a habit of inviting inflammatory speakers on campus. One speaker declared, "We will bury you in the sand," while implying death to either a nation (Israel) or a group of people (Jews). While another said, "You can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew," when explaining why he believes Jews have a social pathology that makes it impossible for them to live in peace with anyone else.

Such comments elicited not a peep from a university faculty presumably too concerned with tolerance to criticize speech that crossed the line from commentary to hate. What might make the professionals at UCI reluctant to speak up against hate speech? Imagine the uproar if former klansman David Duke showed up at UCI and said, "You can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew" or if Duke referred to African Americans when saying, "We will bury you?"

A study of almost 1,300 academics from more than 700 colleges and universities by Gary A. Tobin, Ph.D., and Aryeh K. Weinberg show an American faculty that is overwhelmingly liberal in the key areas of the humanities and the social sciences — two fields with tremendous influence, as all students, even science and business students, have to take some liberal arts courses to graduate. Further, professors from the humanities and the social sciences are those whose area of expertise is politics and social commentary.

Tobin and Weinberg's 2006 survey, "Political Beliefs and Behavior of College Faculty," showed that 58% of humanities faculty believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East have created the problems we face in the region. Similarly, 56% of humanities professors see the U.S. and Israel as the greatest threat to world peace, while only 41% name China, Russia, and Iran combined.

Further, social science faculty voted for John Kerry over President Bush in 2004 by more than a four-to-one ratio while five times as many humanities professors preferred Kerry over Bush. This has led to liberal groupthink, causing the few conservative professors to engage in self-censorship as a survival mechanism.

For these reasons, condemning hate speech by Muslim Student Union speakers may be too much to expect from a faculty who likely sees Middle Eastern Arabs as victims of the West. Rather, a modest step would be to prohibit the student union and any other group from banning the audio or video recording of events so that all campus speech can be heard and commented on freely. Knowing that their words may come back to haunt them may even make a few hate speakers think twice before spewing.

Source




Zero tolerance runs amok

A long overdue outburst of common-sense. Where zero tolerance is needed is of REAL misbehaviour and indiscipline

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Fifth-graders in California who adorned their mortarboards with tiny toy plastic soldiers last week to support troops in Iraq were forced to cut off their miniature weapons. A Utah boy was suspended for giving his cousin a cold pill prescribed to both students. In Rhode Island, a kindergartner was suspended for bringing a plastic knife to school so he could cut cookies.

It's all part of "zero tolerance" rules, which typically mandate severe punishments for weapon and drug offenses, regardless of the circumstances. Lawmakers in several states say the strict policies in schools have resulted in many punishments that lack common sense, and they are seeking to loosen the restrictions. "A machete is not the same as a butter knife. A water gun is not the same as a gun loaded with bullets," said Rhode Island state Sen. Daniel Issa, a former school board member who worries that no-tolerance rules are applied blindly and too rigidly.

Mr. Issa sponsored a bill requiring school districts to decide punishments for alcohol, drug and non-firearm weapon violations on a case-by-case basis after weighing the circumstances. It passed the Senate and House and is now headed for the governor's desk.

Some have long been aware of the problems of zero tolerance. For the last decade, Mississippi has allowed local school districts to reduce previously mandatory one-year expulsions for violence, weapons and drug offenses. More recently, Texas lawmakers have also moved to tone down their state's zero-tolerance rules. Utah altered its zero-tolerance policy on drugs so asthmatic students could carry inhalers. The American Bar Association has recommended ending zero-tolerance policies, while the American Psychological Association wants the most draconian codes changed.

"It may be a bit of self-correction that you're beginning to see where the pendulum is coming back," said Kathy Christie, vice president of a research clearinghouse for Education Commission of the States in Denver. A decade ago, more than three-quarters of public schools surveyed reported adopting some version of a no-tolerance policy, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

"Zero tolerance" became a popular political buzzword during the waning days of the Reagan administration's "War On Drugs," and the rules spread rapidly after a series of high-profile school shootings, according to a report issued last year by the American Psychological Association. A 1997 survey of more than 1,200 public schools by the U.S. Department of Education found that 79 percent had zero-tolerance policies against violence, 88 percent for drugs, 91 percent for weapons and 94 percent for firearms.

There are some signs that policies could be changing. Texas decided in 2005 that schools can consider students' intent and other mitigating factors before punishing them for any offenses other than those involving firearms, and Texas state Rep. Rob Eissler said he wants the weighing of those factors to be mandatory.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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20 June, 2007

Merit pay at last?

For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.

Here in Minneapolis, for instance, the teachers’ union is cooperating with Minnesota’s Republican governor on a plan in which teachers in some schools work with mentors to improve their instruction and get bonuses for raising student achievement. John Roper-Batker, a science teacher here, said his first reaction was dismay when he heard his school was considering participating in the plan in 2004. “I wanted to get involved just to make sure it wouldn’t happen,” he said. But after learning more, Mr. Roper-Batker said, “I became a salesman for it.” He and his colleagues have voted in favor of the plan twice by large margins.

Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers. “As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”

Scores of similar but mostly smaller teacher-pay experiments are under way nationwide, and union locals are cooperating with some of them, said Allan Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation. A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession. “It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”

Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other. Minnesota’s experience shows, however, that an incentive plan created with union input can draw teacher support.

Merit pay, or compensating teachers for classroom performance rather than their years on the job and coursework completed, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out the bad ones. But teachers saw it as a gimmick used by principals to reward cronies based on favoritism.

How thoroughly unions will embrace merit pay remains unclear, said Chester E. Finn Jr., an education scholar who served in the Reagan administration. In some cities where unions have agreed to participate in merit pay programs, they have consented only after reshaping the programs so thoroughly that student achievement is one of many factors by which teachers are judged, reducing the programs’ effectiveness, Mr. Finn said. The rewards teachers receive for outstanding performance range from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 or more in a few districts.

The Department of Education is encouraging schools and districts to try merit pay. [Last week it awarded 18 new federal grants, building on 16 others distributed last November. That makes a total of $80 million that the Bush administration has given to schools and districts in 19 states that have incentive pay plans.] Private groups are also involved; the Milken Family Foundation of Santa Monica, Calif., for instance, which helped create the Minnesota program, has channeled money and expertise into similar plans that include incentive pay at 130 schools in 14 states and the District of Columbia.

The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”

The American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators alone to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable. But it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and has endorsed arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in New York, said the union was willing to talk further with the city about “schoolwide bonuses for sustained growth in student achievement.”

More here




Australia: Trust your bureaucracy to set intelligent education priorities

Universities are producing thousands of useless graduates in sociology and English literature (etc.) but useful disciplines are being cut back

MINING-RELATED departments in universities are shrinking at the time of the nation's biggest resources boom, with 10 geoscience schools closing or downsizing over the past 10 years and only 30 metallurgists graduating a year. Mining companies are forced to hire graduates trained in similar disciplines, such as chemical engineering and materials science, and train them on the job to meet the shortfall in professions such as metallurgy.

A skills summit organised by the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia in Canberra today will highlight the severe shortages of qualified professionals in geoscience, metallurgy and mining engineering. APESMA chief executive John Vines said public debate over the skills shortage to date had focused on the trades, and the intention of the summit was to highlight the shortage of skilled professionals in the engineering, science and technology sectors. In a discussion paper, APESMA calls for a tax incentive scheme, similar to the one promoting research and development, offering employers a 150 per cent tax rebate for spending more than 2 per cent of labour costs on training development. Mr Vines said the Australian average was 1.3 per cent of a company's payroll, while 4 per cent was considered world-best practice.

In its position paper for the summit, the Australasian Institute of Metals and Metallurgy calls on the federal Government to increase its university funding for mining degrees as part of a strategy to remedy the "dire state of minerals education". It wants the federal Government to increase funding for minerals courses by about $4000 per student, to bring it into the highest cluster of university funding, along with agriculture. Universities receive $13,411 from the Government for every student in science and engineering courses, which are expensive to deliver, compared with $17,870 for agriculture students.

The institute, representing more than 8000 professionals in geoscience, minerals processing and mining engineering, also calls on the Government to commit to a set of national principles for higher education, along the lines of the National Research Priorities, to ensure that "disciplines of national importance" are maintained.

Geosciences professor at Monash University Ray Cas described geosciences as a "nationally endangered species" and AIMM chief executive Don Larkin said at least eight minerals departments had closed since 2000. Mr Larkin said the federal Government had given a commitment to fund disciplines of national importance but, because of the Government's philosophy to move to a user-pays and market-driven tertiary education system, that was not happening.

A survey of almost 2000 members conducted last month by AIMM, and due for release on Friday, found that about two-thirds said the professional skills shortage had left them short-staffed. More than half said the shortage meant more people were working in senior roles outside their experience. And more than 60 per cent believed their employer was paying more for less-experienced personnel, with salaries rising about 18 per cent since 2005. A paper by Professor Cas says at least 10 geoscience departments have "either been closed down or downsized to the point of being ineffectual" over the past 10 years.

The closures include the geoscience department at the University of NSW, once the biggest in Australia; previously significant departments in the universities of La Trobe, RMIT, Bendigo and Deakin in Victoria; Flinders and South Australia in Adelaide; New England and the University of Technology, Sydney, in NSW; as well as smaller, regional schools. Other departments have been amalgamated into other disciplines such as geography and environmental sciences, leading to a rationalisation and decrease in staff at universities including Sydney, Wollongong, Western Australia, Melbourne and Ballarat.

But student enrolments are growing in second and third years. Professor Cas says Monash University has a record number of students, and now the largest in Australia, despite the number of first-year students not growing beyond about 200. The number of graduates at Queensland University is also growing. A 2005 agreement between international mining company Xstrata, which has a number of operations in Australia, and UQ is designed to lift the number of metallurgy graduates at the institution from five in 2004 to 20 next year.

Australian Council of Deans of Science chairman John Rice said it would take 10 years to rebuild the infrastructure, expertise and resources of these departments, with a skills shortage in the industry also translating into a shortage of people able to teach in universities. Professor Rice said the shift by government to funding universities based on student numbers made the low-enrolment schools unviable, but said the removal of the cap on full-fee paying places in the last federal budget left room for industry to step in and pay for mining courses.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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19 June, 2007

Bloomberg's `disinterested' school agenda

The mayor's reorganisation of New York schools - and his attack on 'special interests' - reveals a lot about how politics is conducted today.

In a recent spat over city schools, New York mayor Mike Bloomberg referred to the city's major teaching union as `exactly the NRA' - a reference to the arch-conservative National Rifle Association. While this kind of tough talk is not uncommon in the gritty world of New York's urban politics, the comment was of more than passing significance. What could the nominally Republican Bloomberg find in common between a liberal union and a right-wing lobby group? The comparison reveals much about Bloomberg's vision for the New York school system, but also about political debate in an era when our leaders understand themselves as managers.

Bloomberg's campaign to reorganise city schools is now in its fifth year. A mammoth undertaking given the size of the system (1.1million students, 1,200 schools, 83,000 teachers), Bloomberg's drive was initially popular and is widely credited with the record breaking 20 per cent margin of victory in his 2005 re-election. Resistance from a number of interested groups has been building, however, and has even managed to obstruct some of the mayor's more ambitious proposals.

But the criticism has been constrained by posing the battle over the city's schools in an outdated language of left and right. Opponents attack Bloomberg for being pro-corporate, anti-teacher or anti-principal (head teacher), but critics have not recognised that the central tenet of Bloomberg's education crusade, and perhaps his politics more widely, is not the defence of a particular set of interests, but an attack on the very idea of interest itself. The mayor prefers that individuals do not speak through collectives and groups that represent specific interests or ideals. Instead, Bloomberg's ideal world is one in which everyone expresses their interest in an entirely individualised way `directly' to him.

One way in which this vision is articulated is through the language of accountability, a buzzword that runs through every initiative of the Bloomberg administration. (1) Collective interests are seen as barriers to the goal of accountability. So, for instance, Bloomberg assumed complete control over city schools in 2002, abolishing the erstwhile Board of Education, the bureaucracy which had previously run the system. According to the logic of the reform, this has made Bloomberg directly responsible for the success or failure of city education. Meanwhile, the focus on accountability has led to the search for ways to measure school performance. This has included implementing a city-wide curriculum, decentralising spending decisions to individual principals and introducing a `report-card' on school performance to be sent to parents.

A recent proposal to change the school funding procedure seeks to further this project. Currently, teaching staff are allotted to schools on the basis of student numbers, and money is then allocated on the basis of a number of measures - poverty in the school's neighbourhoods, a city-wide average of the teachers' wages, the number of non-native English speakers etc. Bloomberg, aided and abetted by his loyal schools chancellor, Joel Klein, has proposed a new scheme whereby school funding would be allocated purely on the basis of student numbers.

By equalising funding for each student, Bloomberg furthers his agenda of accountability in two ways. First, it seems to level the playing field, allowing for a more direct comparison between different schools. As the Department of Education puts it: `Schools with comparable students will know they have comparable resources. Not getting a fair share will no longer be an excuse for poor performance.' (2) Second, it would move the school system closer to the mayor's market ideal, whereby students, who would take their funding with them should they decide to change schools, would act as consumers within a market place. In this ideal model, they would gravitate toward stronger schools, rewarding their superior education and encouraging those schools' losing students to improve.

Not that the mayor got his way on this issue. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), a union that represents 74,000 New York City teachers and is therefore a major player in education policy, has opposed the plans. They claim, amongst other things, that these changes will make it harder for senior teachers, who command higher salaries, to be hired. In a victory of sorts for the UFT, the mayor referred the plan to a `task force', which includes UFT representatives, for further consideration. But in the sniping that preceded the deal Bloomberg made a number of interesting statements offering some insight into the thinking that drives his reforms.

Most notable was the bad tempered exchange in which Bloomberg described the UFT as `exactly the NRA' (3). In the political demonology of American liberals, comparing an opponent to the NRA is the equivalent of labelling a rival as `fascist' in an internet debate. Bloomberg's rhetorical gambit reminds us just how far he is from the mainstream of American conservatism. It marked him out as a true coastal liberal, giving the lie to his opportunistic adoption of the Republican Party label in the 2001 election.

More revealing still was Bloomberg's characterisation of the NRA, and his justification for using it as an epithet for the UFT: `You always do have the problem of a very small group of people who are single-issue focused having a disproportionate percentage of power.' For Bloomberg, the NRA, and by extension the UFT, represent exactly the kind of interest-driven politics he defines himself against. In opposition to the UFT he repeatedly condemned `special interests' while claiming that he and his altruistic allies were `standing up for our children's interest, all our children's interests' (4).

This union bashing does not represent a conventional right-wing attack on labour. Bloomberg is not anti-teacher; he regularly refers to teachers as his `partners' in education reform. He has also raised their salaries throughout his administration. He has, however, sought an unconventional relationship with teachers, a direct one that sidesteps their independent articulation of interests through the union.

This is clearest in the Bloomberg administration's treatment of school principals (who Bloomberg often refers to as middle-managers). Principals are invited to regular lunches with Joel Klein while the former head of their union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, reports that she had to beg to get a meeting with Bloomberg. (5) The administration has also set up the `Leadership Academy' to train future principals rather than letting them rise up through the ranks as happened in the past. This measure was understood as allowing the administration a greater influence over the direction of schools. At the same time, it obstructs the organic process whereby veteran teachers develop autonomous leadership that might exercise influence over the direction of school policy. The idea is to substitute bureaucratic management of teacher development for the more conventional standard of seniority.

A similarly managerial approach is apparent in the calls for parental involvement in schools. In a Department of Education (DOE) booklet, parents' `rights and responsibilities' are outlined in detail on the basis that the DOE recognises `parents are the primary educators of their children' (6). And there have been repeated attempts to canvass the opinion of parents, most recently in an enormous survey launched last month. (7) Moreover, parents are courted as watchdogs of the administration, monitoring the progress of their children's schools. Of the plan to issue an annual school report to parents, Bloomberg said: `Personally, I can't think of a better way to hold a principal's feet to the fire than arming mom and dad with the facts about how well or poorly their children's school is performing.' (8)

But the administration's attitude to parental involvement appears, at first glance, to be contradictory. While endlessly encouraging and soliciting parent input, they have dismantled the Community School Boards that once provided a public forum for discussion of education. And when challenged by parents, the administration has been defensive; parent groups who oppose change are lumped in with the UFT as `special interests'. The attitude of the administration is that their apparent `disinterest' - the fact that they claim to have nothing personal at stake in the disputes - is the reason that we should follow their lead on reform. Their supposed position of pure altruism is seen as substantiating their claim to political power and as a way of discrediting their opponents.

Bloomberg does want parental involvement but as guarantors of accountability, not as active citizens. He views parents and students as isolated consumers, their choices providing the ultimate measure of school success. But this market model does not indicate that Bloomberg represents a firmly pro-market position. As noted above, he is no draconian cost cutter. Just as he raised teachers' salaries, the overall education budget has increased substantially under his watch.

It is more that the kind of individual choices that make up the market system are, by default, the methods by which the Bloomberg administration believes it can assess the school system. Lacking any broader agenda for education, the only measure available to the administration is the aggregation of the individual choices that students and their parents make. In fact, Bloomberg's attitude seems to be that there shouldn't be a particular agenda for education. The market mechanisms of adding up consumer preferences, and measuring success or failure through report cards and test scores, is a substitute for the more difficult discussion of what education is all about.

This leads back to the attack on interests. For the Bloomberg administration, any intervening force that disrupts the operation of their market model is corrupting. If individual choice is the ultimate arbiter, we distrust those organisations that might seek to impose their vision on those choices. Margaret Thatcher famously said `there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.' But she did not entirely believe this; rather she was using the market model as a political weapon against those interests with which she disagreed. (9) Lacking her political agenda, Bloomberg attacks all interests in the name of his own, anti-political (or managerial) vision of education. But the perverse consequence of this is that he establishes himself as ultimate arbiter of individual views, the supreme aggregator of all those choices. In the name of `disinterest' he dictates to those who have an actual stake in the system.

Source




Geography revival in Australian schools?

FIRST it was history, then English - now the Federal Government has geography firmly in its sights. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday announced a $45,000 study into the teaching of geography in Australian schools in a bid to ensure the subject is included in the curriculum. The inquiry will look at what is being taught in states, including Queensland, where geography and history have been subsumed into Studies of Society and the Environment in most schools.

The federal inquiry follows lobbying by geography teachers and academics, who yesterday welcomed the move. Ms Bishop said it would investigate the decline in the quality of geography tuition in schools. "The Institute of Australian Geographers and the Australian Geography Teachers Association have raised concerns with me that too little geography is being taught in schools, and that in some cases, environmental and political studies are masquerading as geography," she said.

Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford welcomed the inquiry and said most of the concern centred on how well students were being prepared up to Year 10 to take on the subject at senior level.

Australian Geography Teachers Association President Nick Hutchinson said geography professionals had lobbied hard for the inquiry after geography barely rated a mention when the national curriculum was being mooted. "I think we were really afraid that geography was going to disappear," Mr Hutchinson said. The inquiry will examine the time devoted to geography and determine minimum course requirements and should be completed by August.

Mr Welford, meanwhile, announced yesterday that teaching graduates unable to find jobs would be paid by the State Government to retrain in a bid to tackle the chronic shortage in special education. The Government was offering 35 scholarships worth $4000 each, he said. The scholarships will fund graduate certificate courses in semester two this year and will target primary graduates with good results.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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18 June, 2007

The Diversity Scam

"Diversity," in the academic context, is usually a euphemism for affirmative action, itself a euphemism for discrimination --variously racial, ethnic, gender or sexual preference based-- in favor of groups viewed as disadvantaged. In the employment context, a diversity hire is someone hired in part because he is black, or she is female, or .. .

What I find particularly irritating about this usage is that those who adopt it are typically opponents of actual diversity. In the academic context, what matter are ideas. Two professors with different gender or skin color but the same views provide less relevant diversity than two professors of the same gender or skin color but sharply opposed views.

Supporters of "diversity" try to obscure this by arguing that a different racial or gender background leads to a different viewpoint. There may be cases where this is true, although it is hard to see its relevance to most academic fields. But in such cases, favoring prospective hires whose work shows a different and original viewpoint is surely more sensible than favoring members of minorities in the hope that they will turn out to provide a different viewpoint.

In fact, at least in my observation, the people and departments most inclined to favor "diversity" in the conventional sense are among those least likely to want to hire professors whose viewpoints differ from the consensus. What they want are people of the desired gender or skin color who agree with them. My standard thought experiment to demonstrate this is to imagine that, at some late stage in the search process, it is discovered that a prospective hire regarded as a strong candidate is a supporter, an intelligent supporter, of South African apartheid. Does the probability of hiring him go up or down as a result? I can predict, with little data but some decades of experience of the academy, that in any elite university and almost any department it goes sharply down. Yet that is a viewpoint to which almost no faculty member or student has been, or expects to be, exposed. Someone who actually believes in intellectual diversity should thus regard the additional fact as a plus, not a minus.

When I offer this thought experiment, a common response is that there are no intelligent supporters of apartheid, hence the additional information shows something wrong with the prospective hire. I take that response as evidence in favor of my thesis. Almost nobody who makes it has had the opportunity to argue apartheid with a serious, sophisticated supporter--indeed, I suspect many of them have never met anyone who would admit to supporting it at all. Yet we know that millions of white South Africans did support it for quite a long period; it is a considerable stretch to claim that none of them could have been intelligent and thoughtful. And, in my thought experiment, the supporter of apartheid has already demonstrated sufficient ability to make him a strong candidate before his unfortunate political beliefs are discovered. The confident belief that no reasonable person could support a position that many otherwise reasonable people did support is strong evidence of the failure to be exposed to a sufficiently diverse range of views.

Academic hiring is not the only example of hostility to diversity by people who claim to favor it. Consider the issues of home schooling and education vouchers. It's pretty clear, I think, to anyone involved in the controversy, that one of the main objections to both is that they foster diversity.

The objection is not, of course, put in those terms. It is rather that both make it possible for parents with the wrong views--in particular fundamentalist Christians--to indoctrinate their children with those views. The clear implication is that it is desirable to make sure that all children get exposed to, perhaps even indoctrinated with, the current consensus views--the ones that they will be taught in the public schools.

If one believes that fundamentalists are wrong and the current consensus correct, it's reasonable enough to want all children exposed to the latter. But even given that belief, it is a position directly opposed to diversity--a desire to lessen diversity by stamping out, so far as possible, those particular dissenting views. And in at least some discussions, the hostility to diversity is explicit; the argument is precisely that it is desirable to have a society whose members share a common set of beliefs. That is, I think, a defensible position, but it is bizarre to have it expressed by people who purport to consider intellectual diversity a desirable objective

Source




NAACP shoots the messenger

Earnest Johnson, president of the Louisiana NAACP, and other community leaders and residents convened at Lake Chapel CME Church on Thursday to strategize a "three prong attack" against the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, also know as BESE. The meeting was centered around a protest march, "The March on BESE," set to take place on June 30 at the Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge.

Protesters will rally against the "illegal and unconstitutional" use of the LEAP and GEE exams to determine grade promotion and graduation in the state of Louisiana.

"We will march in order to bring attention to the massive failures of students in the Louisiana public school system," said Johnson. Johnson feels strongly that the high failure rates among Louisiana students are largely due to the standardized exams that are not required by the laws of this state.

LEAP and GEE exams were originally approved by the state Legislature a assessment tools to monitor student performance. It is estimated that at least 16,000 students in the state of Louisiana have failed the state's standardized tests, and have not been promoted to the next grade or graduated from high school.

Source




School discipline revival in Western Australia?

SCHOOL bullies and other disruptive students will be removed from schools and taught in behaviour centres, away from their victims. Education Minister Mark McGowan announced the controversial pilot program yesterday. Three centres for teenagers are expected to be set up in Fremantle-Peel, the City of Canning and Kalgoorlie by October as part of the trial, which will be extended to other areas if successful. Five behaviour centres for primary school students are planned for 2008.

Mr McGowan said yesterday it was unfair for well-behaved students to put up with disruptive and violent classmates. It was also unfair to keep troublemakers in learning environments where they were unhappy. Mr McGowan said many disruptive students had underlying mental-health or emotional problems, learning difficulties or dysfunctional home lives, for which they needed help. "They need specialist help that is not always available in schools so that they can return to a mainstream school, training, employment or a combination of these options,'' Mr McGowan said. "The behaviour centres will offer intensive literacy and numeracy support, a specialised curriculum focusing on problem solving, coping strategies and regulation of behaviour, and individualised school transition plans.''

Yesterday's announcement follows a commitment by Mr McGowan earlier this year to improve the image of public schools. He said he was educated in public schools and believed in them. ``While (troublemakers) make up less than 1 per cent of the total student population, their impact is great,'' he said. ``There is no point expecting teachers to struggle on handling these students because everyone suffers. ``About 25 students are excluded from WA public schools every year, almost all of them secondary students. ``The pressure on teachers, other students and families is intolerable. ``Some kids have a very tough life and they will show behaviour that reflects that. ``I am not targeting them, but I am trying to find an environment that suits them while at the same time making the rest of the school better.''

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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17 June, 2007

Teacher fights on in flap over anti-Islam speaker

The former Enloe High School history teacher who invited a Christian evangelist to speak to his students is not taking his reprimand quietly. Social studies teacher Robert Escamilla said the Wake County school system squelched free speech and academic freedom -- and he is finding a growing group of supporters.

In the days since he was reassigned to Mary E. Phillips High School, 100 of his former students have signed a petition to have him reinstated at Enloe. The chairwoman of the social studies department at Enloe wrote a forceful letter to the school board calling him a "sacrificial lamb." A Web site (www.freeesco.com) is being built and bank account has been set up to help with his legal bills.

Escamilla maintains he did nothing wrong when he invited Kamil Solomon, an Egyptian-born Christian who lives in Raleigh, to speak to 300 or so Enloe students about his persecution at the hands of the Egyptian government. On the contrary, Escamilla said, he thought the visit by the evangelist was an educational exercise that exposed his students to different opinions and challenged them to form their own views.

The question is this, he said: "Are we going to be open to a variety of different perspectives versus are we going to limit and censor and shut down the educational experience and environment to keep out people with certain views?"

Escamilla, who readily avows his own Christian faith, acknowledges that Solomon was not neutral toward Muslims. But he insists that his guest did not denigrate Islam or attempt to convert students to Christianity during the visit.

The school system sees it differently. In a sharply worded release last month, Wake County Schools Superintendent Del Burns said Solomon's primary message was to convey his anti-Muslim and pro-Christian views. Burns has apologized to Muslims for Solomon's visit. And he issued new guidelines that require guest speakers to sign forms saying they will not denigrate any culture, race, gender, national origin or religion....

Source




AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENTS:

Three current articles below that may herald a return to the more realistic practices of the past

Bring back the cane, says Federal Minister

FEDERAL Health Minister Tony Abbott has suggested a return to corporal punishment to ensure discipline returns to schools. The comments came after Mr Abbott watched footage of a vicious attack on a Melbourne schoolgirl. The grainy vision from a mobile phone showed a teenage girl repeatedly kicked in the head and body by two other teenagers.

Mr Abbott was alarmed by the footage and said it showed that current methods of discipline in schools were not working. "I mean, we've taken corporal punishment out of the schools because we think that's brutal and yet our playgrounds seem to be becoming more brutal than ever," the minister told the Nine Network today. "Maybe a little bit more discipline in the schools would prevent some of the ugliness that we've just seen."

Mr Abbott said it was a different situation in his day. "When I was a kid at school, if you got up to mischief you were punished, not severely, but never-the-less you were punished." Victoria Police have cautioned two teenage girls over the assault [Big of them! How much evidence do they need to lay an assault charge?] which took place last year in Melbourne's western suburbs

Source




Violent pupils out of control

TASMANIAN teachers want separate schools for violent children who attack them and other students. Every week the Australian Education Union hears about a teacher who has been hit, punched, stood over or threatened. AEU state manager Chris Lane said teachers' only option was to suspend violent children, who returned to the classroom just as out of control. "They come back after two weeks and just do it again," he said.

AEU welfare officer Barbara Elliot said in one classroom kids had "rioted" and broken legs off chairs to beat each other. She said teachers needed separate education facilities for children to learn how to control their anger. Teachers could work with violent students individually or in small groups in a calm and safe environment where there was nothing to throw. "You would make such a difference," Mrs Elliot said. "A child might only need two or three weeks and they could return to the classroom. You would save so much money because teachers would not be off work on stress leave and the jails would not be so full."

Mrs Elliot said suspending a violent child was like temporarily turning off a machine that had cut off a hand. "You turn it back on in a couple of weeks and nothing has changed," she said. "It is still dangerous."

Mrs Elliot and Education Minister David Bartlett rejected calls from Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott to bring back corporal punishment. Mr Bartlett said he "absolutely" rejected a return to the cane but said teachers needed better support to discipline students. He said he was discussing options with the AEU to protect teachers, including strengthening the law. "We need to provide clarity for our teachers to ensure ... they are strengthened by law and protected by the system to ensure they're not the ones that end up in the firing line," he said.

Mrs Elliot said corporal punishment would only teach students that violence was OK. "The state school system is not overrun with violent children," she said. "But there are violent children and we need a sensible way to deal with them when they can't remain in the classroom. "Teachers have a right to a safe workplace." She said after assaults, teachers found it hard to return to the classroom. "Some sit in their car and cry at the end of the day, others get home and break down," she said.

Source




Professor to take state's schools back to basics



In a further move away from its disastrous foray into outcomes-based education, the West Australian Government has appointed the head of the respected NSW curriculum authority to advise it on newcourses for kindergarten to Year 10. The chairman of the NSW Board of Studies, Gordon Stanley, will head a national advisory panel appointed by the West Australian Government to review proposed content for the reintroduction of school syllabuses. [I know Gordon Stanley, a very conscientious man. I doubt that he would like the label but he is as conservative as you can get in his circles without being marginalized. And the NSW High School curriculum is undoubtedly the nation's most traditional]

The West Australian approach to school curriculums, detailing what students should be able to do rather than the knowledge they should be taught, has been widely criticised for dumbing down school subjects. In the discredited courses, Year 12 English students were asked to study the Big Brother TV show and Mr Men children's books, and music students were not required to read music or play an instrument. By contrast, the NSW syllabuses are renowned for their rigour, and often cited as the gold standard, not only by NSW education ministers, in the debate over a national curriculum.

Professor Stanley's involvement will be viewed as an acknowledgement of the superior quality of the NSW school syllabuses, which West Australian Education Minister Mark McGowan has previously cited as the model for the state. Mr McGowan yesterday said the new syllabuses would dictate that all primary school students spend half their school day studying maths and English.

But the minister said it was too simplistic to interpret the changes as the death of outcomes-based education. "We will never move away from the idea of focusing on student-centred learning; that is, what does the student learn from this?" Mr McGowan said. "But the idea that we don't need a syllabus, and teachers just use their imaginations and experience - particularly for those who have no experience - is just flawed."

The new syllabuses will also allow teachers to use traditional marking methods such as grades or percentages, but they can choose to use the controversial "levels", associated with the outcomes-based education method. Mr McGowan said he was correcting an error by former Liberal education minister Colin Barnett, who in 1998 "scrapped the syllabus from kindergarten to Year 10 and introduced a curriculum framework that did not contain specific course content". He said that while he had full confidence in the state's Curriculum Council, which oversaw the implementation of the ill-fated OBE courses, it made sense to appoint a national panel of experts for the overhaul.

Joining Professor Stanley on the board are foundation chair of mathematics education at Melbourne University Kaye Stacey; associate professor of early childhood at the University of South Australia Susan Hill; associate professor in history at the University of NSW Bruce Scates; and director of the Wesley Research Institute Julie Campbell.

Mr McGowan became Education Minister late last year in an attempt by the Carpenter Government to quell widespread revolt against the state's version of outcomes-based education and the hasty introduction of new courses in Years 11 and 12. His predecessor, Ljiljanna Ravlich, also faced questions over allegations that her department had mishandled claims of sexual misconduct by teachers.

Professor Stanley has been president of the NSW Board of Studies since 1998 and oversaw the introduction of a restructured Higher School Certificate in 2000-01.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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16 June, 2007

HO, HUM! IQ MATTERS IN AMERICA TOO

As in Britain, some researchers in America have just rediscovered some old truths -- that that race, gender and family income affect academic success. That poor people and blacks tend to be dumber makes that exactly what one must expect but we are not allowed to mention that, of course. It's "racism" that produces differences in educational achievement, I tell you!

The slight advantage that females have is also what is to be expected from the gross feminization of education that has happened in recent years. But we must never mention the obvious, of course

Huge gaps in academic success separate students in Milwaukee Public Schools not only by race, but by income and gender, according to an extensive analysis of standardized test scores released Wednesday.

Compared across several demographic features - for example, reading scores of African-American males from low-income homes vs. scores of white females from middle-income homes - some groups of students are, on average, years behind others at the 10th-grade level, the study says.

Conducted for the conservative-oriented Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, the study by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Sammis White calls for strong action by state officials to insist on better results from MPS, but it does not give detailed recommendations. "If measured against the average student in the state of Wisconsin, at eighth grade, the average African-American male in MPS is approximately two years behind in math and almost two years behind in reading," White wrote. "Those are huge gaps that should be totally unacceptable to the citizens of the state."

The analysis of test-score data also shows major gaps involving other groups. White males from low-income homes fared worse than white males from higher income homes by significant amounts, for example. "Low-income whites should be included in the target groups for new initiatives," White recommended.

In general, gaps by race and income, and to a lesser degree by gender, showed up clearly at third grade and increased as students got older. By 10th grade, some of the gaps represented several years of learning. Girls scored better than boys, overall. Whites scored better than Hispanics, whose scores were somewhat better than those of African-Americans, the analysis shows. White analyzed scores on the state's standardized tests in reading and math for more than 13,000 students in the Class of 2008 and the Class of 2011 in MPS as those students moved from grade to grade, starting at third grade.

White recommended steps such as creating more 3-year-old kindergarten programs, offering better training for principals, promoting more parental participation in education and using body-movement exercises every day in school. He called for a greater sense of accountability both within MPS and from outside the school system. "The state must step up and take greater responsibility for the outcomes," White wrote. He called it "irresponsible" that the state provides most of the annual funding for MPS and does not insist on better outcomes.

"The pressure to really succeed has not been sufficient to bring the degree of change and commitment that is necessary for success," White wrote. "The key is to focus on these gaps and take explicit actions to raise both test scores and graduation rates of all minorities." On the Web To read the full text of the study, go to www.wpri.org.

Source




Some realism comes to British High Schools

Coursework [take-home assignments] is to be scrapped from most GCSE examinations in response to fears that it has allowed students to copy from the internet or to get their teachers, siblings or parents to complete projects for them. It will be replaced by work supervised in strict conditions at school, to be known as "controlled assessments".

Pupils will still be able to consult the internet and other source material, but teachers will be on hand to ensure that all work is suitably referenced and not simply "cut and pasted" by students claiming it as their own, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said yesterday.

The QCA said that traditional coursework completed by pupils at home will be scrapped in English literature, foreign languages, history, geography, classical subjects, religious studies, social sciences, business studies and economics for courses starting in 2009.

No final decision about English language and information technology has yet been made. Only practical subjects such as art, music, design and technology and home economics will retain a nonsupervised coursework element, which can be worth 20 to 60 per cent of the marks in certain subjects. Under the new regime controlled assessments will account for 25 per cent of marks in most subjects. [Only 25%? Why not 75%?]

Source




Merit pay for Australian teachers is coming

Schools should trial a new teacher salary system

In the face of near hysterical opposition from teacher unions and state Labor governments, the federal Education Minister Julie Bishop is pushing ahead with a plan to introduce merit-based pay for teachers, and so she should. As The Australian reported yesterday, Ms Bishop has asked teams of expert consultants to develop different models for merit-based pay. It may be that good teachers get a cash bonus for lifting the grades of an entire class; or that the principal recommends a pay rise for a particularly outstanding individual; or that parents and students push for a rise for a teacher who has tamed a particularly unruly bunch of students. With some luck, there will be a host of schools jostling to sign up to trial the new models before the system can be rolled out across the nation.

Merit-based pay is obviously good for teachers, but there is evidence it is good for students, too. In the US, where teachers can get a cash bonus if they lift their student's scores, literacy and numeracy has improved. Australian teacher unions say they would rather use any extra money to hire more teachers and reduce class sizes. But there is no evidence that smaller class sizes automatically or even necessarily lead to better results.

Unions are likewise wary of competition among staff, complaining that it could erode the pleasant, collegial atmosphere of a school. The argument does not make sense. In most workplaces, there are talented high flyers and flat-footed time-wasters. There are juniors, seniors, big bosses and trainees. They get paid on merit, and they are required to work towards common goals. They don't kill each other over the fact that some earn more than others. Also, it is standard practice in most professions that if you work hard, you can ask for a pay rise. If you don't get one, you can take your labour to a different workplace that will give your pay packet a boost.

Recent reports have proved beyond doubt that teaching no longer attracts as many bright students as it did in the 1980s, in part because women, who make up the bulk of teachers, have more career options. But the problem with teacher pay obviously has an impact. In NSW, a teacher reaches the peak salary after nine years, which usually means, by the age of 31 or 32, they are earning as much as they will ever earn. By the age of 50, their morale must be completely shot.

It is often said that nobody goes into teaching for the money. Some go in for the short days and the generous holidays, for a love of children, or to perform public service. But greater financial rewards will make teaching a more attractive profession for smart people, who might otherwise drift to economics, medicine or the law, or indeed any job where their performance is recognised with one thing we all need, money.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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15 June, 2007

More US students go abroad for their MBAs

When Christine Chang was looking to get her MBA, she wanted to take as little time away from her family-run business in Florida and at as little cost as possible. That brought her all the way to London. "I could do it in a year instead of two in the United States," says Chang, 26, of Fort Lauderdale. Plus, she says, "You get an international flavor of business." And the bonus: "You go to school, and you get a vacation." Chang is among a growing number of Americans crossing the Atlantic to get postgraduate business degrees, as the global economy continues to erase borders and as the demand for the degrees and graduates who earn them explodes.

"You're seeing more and more students from the United States studying overseas," says Robert Ludwig of the Graduate Management Admission Council, a McLean, Va.-based organization that tracks business school admissions and enrollments. The reasons for the growth, Ludwig says, are what brought Chang here:

* A master's in business administration usually takes half of the two-year time it traditionally takes at U.S. business schools. One-year programs compress courses into intense quarters or trimesters.

* The compressed study time usually means less cost, despite a higher cost of living aggravated by a weak dollar on international currency exchanges. However, one-year programs can reduce a student's ability to work while going to school.

* Students gain a broader perspective of foreign business culture, not just from professors but from fellow students who come from a more diverse international background.

And if you want a career in a particular country, then getting the degree there is a plus, says Arthur Francis, dean of the Bradford School of Management in northern England.

The number of students around the globe who are applying to schools outside their native country is growing, according to figures from the Graduate Management Admission Council. Three-quarters of the 147 business schools across the world responding to the council's survey last year reported that international admission applications were up. That compares with 33% of the 129 schools that said applications from foreign students were up in 2005.....

Adding to the attraction for U.S. students, he says, is business programs at big foreign schools are offered in the international language of business: English. Well-known U.S. schools have tapped into students' demand for international experience. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, offers students programs through an alliance with Insead, a leading business school in France, and through exchange programs with schools in Beijing and Israel. The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business offers an executive MBA program in London. Even the stodgy English institutions of Oxford and Cambridge now offer programs. "They didn't exist 10 years ago," says Francis, a former chairman of Britain's Association of Business Schools.

Americans like Chang aren't the biggest foreign contingent studying at British business schools. The ranks of students from China, India and even Greece way outnumber Americans studying here now. "If you go to a (British) business school, you will discover that 75% to 90% of the other students are from international backgrounds," Francis says. The international makeup of her classes was a big part of the learning experience for Chang, who attended Huron University of London all of last year. "I could get the German perspective, the Asian perspective and the British perspective from my classmates," she says.

The different backgrounds really came out when the class worked on business models, says Chang, vice president of Florida Engineering and Testing, a firm her mother started about 30 years ago to provide pre-construction testing to builders. "The Germans expect a return on investment in seven years, the Asians 15 to 30 years," she says. "The Americans want it in two or three."

Chang, who largely runs the company now, says that had she not come to London for her MBA, she'd still probably be studying for it - having to take courses part time while continuing to work. She returned here last month to pick up her degree, which she says cost about $30,000, not including the cost of living, which is high in London. The average cost of an MBA in Britain is 16,000 pounds, just less than $32,000 at current exchange rates, according to Association of MBAs (AMBA) in London. But, she says, that's less than the $70,000 to $120,000 she would have spent on tuition if she had gotten it over two or more years in the USA. "And," she says, "you do get all the advantages of London."

Source




BRITISH SCHOOL CURRICULUM CORRUPTED BY POLITICS

The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.

The contributors to The Corruption of the Curriculum show that no major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference. Michele Ledda shows how issues of race and gender ('external criteria that have more to do with biology than literature') trump the love of language in the works of literature that students are given to study.

The anthology of poetry produced by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) divides poetry into two groups: poetry from different cultures (16 poems) and a further 48 poems from British poets, of which 32 are post-1950: 'The whole tradition of English poetry from its origins to 1914 is represented by 16 poems while modern poetry has three times as many... A British pupil can go through the school system and get the top marks in English and English Literature without knowing that Spenser, Milton or Pope ever existed, but having studied Carol Ann Duffy twice, both at GCSE and A-level. With all due respect to Carol Ann Duffy, she is on the syllabus, not because she is a greater poet than Milton, but because she is more "relevant", dealing as she does with very contemporary issues such as disaffected learners.' (p.18)

Educational apartheid: David Perks reveals, in his chapter 'What Is Science Education For?', that, whilst professing to want to encourage more pupils to study science, the DfES has introduced a new science curriculum that will probably have the opposite effect. The new approach, introduced last September, conflates the three disciplines of chemistry, physics and biology into 'scientific literacy', which has more to do with media studies than hard science. Students are asked to discuss issues such as global warming and GM crops, based on media coverage, and to consider whether or not scientists can be trusted: 'We don't need to flatter young people by asking them what they think about these issues. We do need to help them learn as much as they can about science, so that they can understand what science tells them about the natural world and their place in it... Asking teenagers to make up their minds about anything is pretty daunting. But if you try to ask them to decide if we need to replace the UK's nuclear power stations, you are far more likely to get the question: "Sir, what is nuclear power?"' (p.121)

FULL STORY here

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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14 June, 2007

Connecticut teacher to get retrial over Internet porn popups



A US judge yesterday ordered a retrial of a schoolteacher found guilty of computer porn charges after a sustained campaign by internet specialists proclaiming her innocence. Julie Amero, 40, was convicted in January of being responsible for a series of sex advertisements that popped up on a classroom computer and were seen by pupils, in a case that has caught nationwide attention and raised important questions about content control on computers.

The prosecution at the trial in Connecticut had claimed she must have clicked on the websites for the adverts to begin appearing. But after the trial, 28 computer science academics in the state sought to prove that the rapid-fire sequence of pop-up sex advertisements could have appeared automatically. Sympathetic campaigners argue such pop-ups are one of the scourges of the internet and claim she is the victim of a witchhunt.

Ms Amero appeared in court yesterday for sentencing on charges that carry a 40-year jail sentence. But Judge Hillary Strackbein told the court in New London that she was ordering a retrial. The computer was sent to a state laboratory after the trial, and Judge Strackbein said the lab report might contradict evidence presented by the state computer expert, a police detective. "The jury may have relied, at least in part, on that faulty information," she said. In the face of the nationwide campaign, the prosecution service backed off and did not oppose the defence motion for retrial.

Neither the prosecution nor the jury appear to have been fully aware of the extent to which computers can be infiltrated, especially old ones - as used by the school - which do not have "firewall" protection.

Outside the court, Ms Amero said: "A great weight has been lifted off my back." Her lawyer, William Dow, commended the prosecutors for acting responsibly. "The lesson from this is all of us are subject to the whims of these computers," he said.

Ms Amero, who was pregnant at the time of the incident on October 19 2004, was a supply teacher at the Kew middle school, Norwich, Connecticut. She denied clicking on the sex websites. The defence argued the computer was used by pupils while she was out the class, and that, on her return, the screen began showing the sex scenes. Pupils, some of whom were as young as 12, told the police that the computer was left on for several hours and they had seen men and women engaged in oral sex.

The prosecution said Ms Amero was too slow to close the computer down, though she argued she had been told earlier in the day by another teacher that the computer had to be left on. She was found guilty of four counts of risk of injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child.

Source




No friend of the family

They pose as the chummy cohorts of mums and dads. Yet family liaison officers in British schools are undermining teachers and keeping a suspicious eye on parents.

The first time I heard mention of the school family liaison officer was when, in the morning rush of dropping our children off at school, a close friend tearfully confided that she had been `asked' by the headteacher to `have a chat' with the family liaison officer. Two days later and another friend revealed exactly the same news. Who was this family liaison officer to make two of my friends, both with bright, healthy, much-loved children, somehow feel they had `failed' at being good parents?

British parents are going to have to get used to them. If your local school doesn't have a family liaison officer, it will soon. The exact job description of officers is difficult to pin down; they are often presented in recruitment adverts as neutral mediators between teachers and parents, helping families in `accessing relevant information' (1). Allison Shepherd, the family liaison officer at a school in Thanet, Kent, describes her role as being `to provide support, help, friendship and act as a link between families and school' (2). Jo Green from a primary school in Folkestone is similarly friendly: `My job is to help you. Should you be having personal problems or school related problems I am here as your listening ear.' (3)

Behind the chummy `I just want to be your friend' image, the role of the family liaison officer is to work with the parents of children considered to be at risk due to child protection concerns or at risk of social exclusion. They will work with the parents of children who truant or misbehave as well as parents with poor literacy and numeracy skills.

The aim of providing `parenting and family support' was first raised in the UK government's Green Paper, Every Child Matters, which was published in September 2003 in response to the investigation into the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbi, by her aunt and her aunt's boyfriend in London in 2000 (4). Every Child Matters argues for the need for `specialist parenting support', involving a range of home visiting programmes to teach parents how to best support their child's development, and parent education programmes to provide training in `behavioural techniques'.

The message to emerge from Every Child Matters is that parents need to be monitored and taught how to behave if they are not to be a potential risk to their own children. Rejecting the friendly advances and offers of support from the family liaison officer may be enough to mark your child out as being `at risk' in which case `compulsory action' could be taken in the form of Parenting Orders.

The role of the family liaison officer may be presented as a means of protecting children considered to be at risk through supporting families, but the effect of such liaison serves only to undermine families at every stage. By stressing so emphatically that families need help to carry out the everyday demands of parenting (the word `support' appears 176 times in Every Child Matters), the implication is that families do not do a good enough job when left to their own devices.

Both of my friends were asked to chat with the family liaison officer after their children got into fairly minor playground scraps. The very fact of being asked to discuss these incidents with a professional suggests, firstly, that children kicking each other in the dinner queue is something shockingly bad that requires intervention from at least five adults and, secondly, that it is something parents cannot be trusted to deal with on their own.

Presumably, within the context of much agonising as to why the child should demonstrate such behaviour, the family liaison officer will make some clich,d suggestion such as `reward their good behaviour' or `put them on the naughty step'. At issue is not the value of the advice but the fact that by not allowing parents to work out these things for themselves, their confidence is undermined and the autonomy of the family unit is called into question.

Furthermore, having family liaison officers based in schools undermines the authority of teachers in dealing with unruly pupils. In the not-too-distant past, such a trivial incident as kicking a child in the dinner queue would have been dealt with by the class teacher, if it were actually deemed worthy of being dealt with at all. Go back a couple of years further and any sensible adult would have laughed at the notion of getting involved. Parents trusted teachers to deal with such minor offences.

Parents also trusted teachers to get on with the job of educating their children. Far from family liaison officers freeing up more time for teachers to spend on education, they will require paperwork referrals to be completed and formal mediation meetings to be attended. Teachers are no longer limited to the role of educating children but are expected to extend their responsibilities to an assessment of how well the children in their class are being brought up. The purpose of the school becomes renegotiated away from the academic education of the child to the social (re)education of the whole family.

Family liaison officers suggest teachers cannot sort out minor breaches of discipline by pupils and that parents and teachers cannot communicate with each other without the need for someone else to `mediate'. Formalising relationships between parents and teachers with the presumed necessity for third party mediation does nothing at all to help protect children. Far too much time is taken up with the dinner-queue-kickers who are neither a risk to others or at risk themselves. The informal end-of-the-day conversations in the school playground, where teachers and parents can pass on any concerns to each other, suddenly take on a new complexion if the parent fears anything they say may be reported to the family liaison officer.

Let's not forget that the role of the family liaison officer originated from the police service where their aim is to mediate with families in order to better secure convictions. (5) The introduction of such policing techniques in schools heralds unprecedented interference into the autonomy of families - rather than supporting families this serves only to undermine them. Parents, when asked to meet with the family liaison officer, will only become less confident in their own ability to bring up their children as they see fit. This cannot possibly be to the benefit of the child. The best way for schools to support families is to leave them alone and concentrate on the job of educating their children.

Source




"THE DESTRUCTION OF SCIENCE EDUCATION IN BRITAIN"

The never-ending campaign by the Left to prevent kids acquiring any depth of knowledge (so that voters are less likely to see through their deceptive claims) is very advanced in Britain

I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn't cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with... something else, something nebulous and ill defined.

I worry about this change. I worry about my pupils, I worry about the state of science education in this country, and I worry about the future physics teachers - if there will be any. I graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in physics and pursued a lucrative career in economics which I eventually abandoned to teach. Economics and business, though vastly easier than my subject, and more financially rewarding, bored me. I went into teaching to return to the world of science and to, in what extent I could, convey to pupils why one would love a subject so difficult.

For a time I did. For a time, I was happy. But this past academic year things changed. The Department for Education and the AQA board brought in a new syllabus for the sciences. One which greatly increased the teaching of `how science works.' While my colleagues expressed scepticism, I was hopeful. After all, most pupils will not follow science at a higher level, so we should at least impart them with a sense of what it can tell us about our universe. That did not happen. The result is a fiasco that will destroy physics in England.

The thing that attracts pupils to physics is its precision. Here, at last, is a discipline that gives real answers that apply to the physical world. But that precision is now gone. Calculations - the very soul of physics - are absent from the new GCSE. Physics is a subject unpolluted by a torrent of malleable words, but now everything must be described in words.

In this course, pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power. Debate drives science, but pupils do not learn meaningful information about the topics they debate. Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins. But my pupils now discuss the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power plants, without any real understanding of how they work or what radiation is.

I want to teach my subject, to pass on my love of physics to those few who would appreciate it. But I can't. There is nothing to love in the new course. I see no reason that anyone taking this new GCSE would want to pursue the subject. This is the death of physics.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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13 June, 2007

Frankenstein Finkelstein misses out on tenure

His biased approach to the facts is an insult to every academic virtue

Norman G. Finkelstein, the controversial political scientist who has been engaged in a highly public battle for tenure at DePaul University, learned today that he had lost that fight. In a written statement released to The Chronicle, the university confirmed that Mr. Finkelstein had been denied tenure. Mr. Finkelstein's department and a college-level personnel committee both voted in favor of tenure, but the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences wrote a memorandum against it, and the University Board on Promotion and Tenure voted against granting tenure. The final decision rested with the university's president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, who said in the statement that he had found "no compelling reasons to overturn" the tenure board's recommendation.

"I played by the rules, and it plainly wasn't enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict," Mr. Finkelstein said in an interview. "This decision is not going to deter me from making statements that, so far as I can tell from the judgment of experts in the field, are sound and factually based."

Mr. Finkelstein's case has excited widespread interest, in part because of the involvement of Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard University. The two scholars have sparred repeatedly in public. Last fall, Mr. Dershowitz sent members of DePaul's law and political-science faculties what he described as "a dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions." Informed of the news this evening, Mr. Dershowitz said, "It was the right decision, proving that DePaul University is indeed a first-rate university, not as Finkelstein characterized it, `a third-rate university.' Based on objective standards of scholarship, this should not have even been a close case."

In the DePaul statement, Father Holtschneider decried the outside interest the case had generated. "This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case."

Source




British class divide hits learning by age of three

The heritability and importance of IQ rediscovered (but not admitted): Disadvantaged children lagging a full year behind before they start school

By the age of three, children from disadvantaged families are already lagging a full year behind their middle-class contemporaries in social and educational development, pioneering research by a London university reveals today. A "generation Blair" project, tracking the progress of 15,500 boys and girls born between 2000 and 2002, found a divided nation in which a child's start in life was still determined by the class, education, marital status and ethnic background of the parents. The results are likely to disappoint ministers committed to improving the life chances of disadvantaged children, notably through the Sure Start programme to develop potential in pre-school years. But the research could not establish how much more stark the divisions might have been without Sure Start's introduction in 1998.

In a series of vocabulary tests, the three-year-old sons and daughters of graduate parents were found to be 10 months ahead of those from families with few educational qualifications; they were 12 months ahead in their understanding of colours, letters, numbers, sizes and shapes. Researchers from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education in the University of London found girls were three months ahead of boys on both measures. Less predictably, Scottish children were three months ahead of the UK average in language development and two months ahead in "school readiness".

Mothers in Scotland were more likely than those in the three other countries to have jobs and set clear rules governing the child's behaviour. Similarly, Scottish fathers were more likely to read to their children, perhaps assisting early years development.

The programme - called the millennium cohort study - began tracking the children soon after they were born, recording the circumstances of pregnancy and birth, parental background and progress in the early months of life. Professor Heather Joshi, director of the programme, said previous research had showed that children from deprived homes were less educationally advanced at five and seven years old. The millennium study was the first using a big national sample to measure the attainment gap at three. The results will be used in the government's evaluation of the Sure Start programme to establish whether it is helping working class children narrow the gap.

Prof Joshi said: "Children from poorer homes are less likely to have working mothers and so they do not get so much out-of-home childcare." She could not tell how much wider the attainment gap might have been without Sure Start. She added: "These children are on a marathon. They should not be written off if they come through their early years and are not ahead in the race. The families into which they were born did not provide a level starting point. They are not leaping out of their diverse backgrounds unmarked by their early experiences."

The survey found Bangladeshi children were about a year behind their white contemporaries in "school readiness" tests. Pakistani children did slightly better. A quarter of black children from African and Caribbean backgrounds were delayed in their development, compared with 4% of white children. These results may have been linked to family income. Two-thirds of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani three-year-olds were from families living below the poverty line, compared with 42% of black children and less than 25% of white and Indian children.

Across all ethnic minority communities, 72% of children with single mothers were growing up in poverty. The study set the poverty threshold at 60% of national average family income. A Department for Education spokesman said last night: "Closing attainment gaps between different groups of children is a massive priority for us. We are working hard to provide support such as catch-up lessons, one-to-one tuition and wraparound support for children and families - for example the Sure Start programme." [Translation: Fanatical Leftist belief in equality impels us to keep pissing into the wind despite all the evidence that it does nobody any good. Jensen and Murray gave them the facts on class, IQ and education many years ago but facts are no match for ideology]

Source




DECEITFUL PRE-SCHOOL PROPAGANDA

Post lifted from Taranto. See the original for links

"Thousands of 3- and 4-year-olds in Pittsburgh are at greater risk of eventually becoming criminals because not enough money is being spent on pre-kindergarten programs, according to a report released Thursday by a group urging the Legislature to fund such programs," reports the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

OK, so suppose you've just been convicted of a crime in Pittsburgh. You're facing hard time, and you're hoping to catch a break on the sentence, so you're looking for mitigating factors. But darn it, you went to nursery school! So much for that!

Not so fast. Check out this article from Scotland on Sunday:

Evidence is mounting that young children who spend significant periods of time in daycare while their parents work are more prone to developing aggressive and antisocial behaviour. A new study from the United States suggests that children who went to nursery during their pre-school years rather than staying at home were more likely to be disruptive once formal education began.

This ought to make life easier for parents of toddlers. Since their kids are more likely to turn into criminals whether they to go preschool or not, there's no need to stress out over the decision.

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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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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12 June, 2007

Academic freedom under severe assault in Australia

Conservatives are not allowed to criticize disgusting work emanating from Leftist colleagues???? The critique that was so "offensive" can be read here. On TONGUE-TIED I give more details of what this is about and what you can do about it

TWO QUT academics who objected publicly to a PhD thesis called Laughing At The Disabled have been suspended without pay for six months. Creative industries faculty senior lecturers John Hookham and Gary MacLennan criticised the thesis in a newspaper article in April. Late Friday afternoon they were suspended, had their work emails disconnected and were barred from the university premises. Six months salary effectively amounts to a fine of $35,000 to $40,000 each.

QUT vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake, said yesterday he was responsible for the penalty after a committee, chaired by former Industrial Relations commissioner Barry Nutter, unanimously upheld complaints made against the two men. These had come from thesis author Michael Noonan and two academics.

Professor Coaldrake said controversial research needed to be balanced with legal obligations and ethics. "Academic freedom is a great privilege and it should not be used to denigrate or ridicule people with vastly different ideas," he said.

UQ disability expert Lisa Bridle also criticised the thesis. Dr MacLennan and Dr Hookham were reluctant to speak publicly yesterday, other than to admit they had needed medical help to cope. "I'm gobsmacked at the level of brutality," said Dr MacLennan, 64.

Queensland Advocacy director Kevin Cocks said the penalty "seems quite severe for two people who have tried to express concerns around vulnerable people".

In their article in The Australian, the two academics objected to a film part of the thesis, which put two disabled men in social situations "in which they could only appear as inept".

Dr Bridle, the mother of a 12-year-old boy with Down syndrome, said it appeared the two men were used as "props". Dr Bridle and Mr Cocks wrote to Professor Coaldrake in April that they were alarmed by the project. "This project is a very ethically sensitive one and it should not proceed without external scrutiny," they wrote.

Mr Noonan confirmed yesterday that the name of the project had been changed to Laughing With the Disabled.

Source




California oldsters to be retrained as teachers

If they reintroduced effective discipline, they might retain more of the teachers they already have. Even oldsters are not going to want to deal with student disruption and thuggery

The former head of Paramount Pictures and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled a new program aimed at luring retirees into teaching math and science. The program called EnCorps seeks to recruit those who can fill voids expected to be left by some 100,000 teachers who will retire over the next decade. Education officials said math, science and special education teachers are at a premium and California schools will need more than 33,000 new science and math instructors in that same time period. If funded by the state Legislature, the private-public partnership would provide $12 million on top of the $31.7 million the state allocates to pay tuition and other costs.

Baby boomers "are going to redefine retirement, and they are going to redefine aging," said former Paramount head Sherry Lansing, who helped unveil the program at Roosevelt High School, where she worked as a substitute teacher.

Several corporations have signed on to pay teacher training costs for their retiring employees. The companies will pay up to $15,000 per person in education costs. "The more we have the private sector involved, the faster we can move forward," Schwarzenegger said. "I think that's where the action is."

The emphasis on paying for training is helpful, said Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Association. "But the part about how now these retirees can afford to teach broke my heart," she said. "We need to seriously look at making salaries competitive and making sure schools are a great place to work."

Source




Druze PhD student defends Israel, but bigoted British academics uninterested

As a holder of two degrees from the University of Haifa and a PhD student at the University of London, I traveled to Bournemouth for the meeting of the BritishUniversity and College Union (UCU) as an Israeli delegate on behalf of the Israeli Council for Academic Freedom. The discussions at the meeting regarding the imposition of a boycott on Israeli academia took place in a hostile environment while ignoring all the facts we presented regarding freedom of expression and academic freedom at Israeli institutions of higher learning.

Evidence that Israeli lecturers who hold pro-Palestinian views are able to express their positions uninterrupted both in their research work and lectures, as well as in the media, had no effect whatsoever on the discussions. Even when we presented a list of organizations and research centers that operate in the framework of Israeli universities and boast Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab cooperation, with the promotion of ties between the peoples their top agenda, it did not make a difference.

The same was true when it came to calls by Palestinian lecturers and figures, including al-QudsUniversity President Sari Nusseibah and Minister Raleb Majadele urging the UCU to refrain from boycotting their Israeli colleagues. Boycott leaders in Bournemouth ignored the figures I presented to them regarding the University of Haifa and the fact that close to 20 percent of students there are members of minority groups in Israel - apparently, we will also be subjected to the boycott.

They were uninterested in the fact that Arab students, who view themselves as a national minority in the State of Israel, are represented by a separate student committee and enjoy the freedom to act politically and on the public relations front. They were also uninterested in the fact that Professor Majid al-Haj is the deputy president of the research university, or that the Jewish-Arab center headed by Dr. Faisal Azaiza is considered one of the university's most prestigious bodies.

The truth is that it is clear to this group of lecturers that Israeli academia is least at fault for what is happening in our region, certainly when compared to the freedom of expression at our neighbors' academic institutions. After all, the English know full well that the technological, academic, and cultural achievements in the State of Israel stem first and foremost from the freedom of expression and research in every field in Israel.

Therefore, the figures we presented were futile, because all they cared about was their one and only objective: De-legitimizing the State of Israel with no relation to its academia; presenting it as an apartheid state that deprives its minorities of elementary rights such as education and the freedom of expression.

They were particularly bothered by the fact that a student like me, a member of the Druze community, appeared in the meeting and defended Israeli academia. They protested the fact that I even agreed to study at institutions that are associated with the country's majority population group and teach in its native tongue, Hebrew. I wonder how they would have reacted had I protested the fact that her majesty Queen Elizabeth is the patron of the University of London, and now I am studying in their native tongue, English.

Source




BRITISH RESEARCH FUNDERS TO DISREGARD ISRAEL BOYCOTT

Research councils in the UK said this afternoon that they would still allow collaboration on projects with Israeli institutions despite the decision by the university lecturers' union to back calls for an academic boycott. Research Councils UK, the umbrella organisation for the seven councils, which between them hold the purse strings for œ2.8bn of funding, said it would only get involved in an Israeli academic boycott if it was decided by the government. A spokeswoman said: "We would not stop any collaboration unless it was government policy."

Funding for research from the seven research councils only goes to UK institutions, but does allow for universities to forge collaborative academic links outside the UK.

This afternoon, the impact of an academic boycott on present or future UK and Israeli research remained uncertain. But Research Councils UK was calculating the number of current collaborative projects and how much UK funding it attracted.

Israeli universities have an enviable reputation for research, especially in science, and today the influential Royal Society - the independent academy which promotes natural and applied science - reaffirmed its opposition to blanket academic boycotts. Five years ago, the society's council signed a statement by the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies (IHRNASS), affirming its support for the free exchange of ideas and opinions amongst scientists and scholars in all countries in order to stimulate collaborative educational research. The statement opposed any "moratoria on scientific exchanges based on nationality, race, sex, language, religion, opinion and similar factors", because they thwarted the goals of the network.

Any Israeli academic boycott by the UK could, however, have a damaging impact on academic ties with institutions outside of Israel. It emerged today that on the eve of the UCU's boycott decision, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) wrote to the union expressing concern on behalf of its 160,000 higher education members. According to the higher education website InsideHigherEd.com, the president of the AFT, Edward J McElroy, wrote in a letter to the UCU: "The AFT strongly opposes boycotts of universities and faculty, considering them a grave threat to the democratic values of academic freedom and free speech. "The one-sided nature of the proposed resolution demonstrates that the motivation is to express support for a political position rather than advance the principles of free and open scholarship."

Meanwhile, MPs from across the political divide this afternoon added their voices to the growing opposition to a boycott. Former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith said the boycott decision was a "pathetic attempt by politically motivated people to destroy the balanced ethos on university campuses and use their privileged position to further their own ends." Liberal Democrat MP and panel member of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism, Chris Huhne, said: "Two wrongs do not make a right, and it is wrong in principle to try to make individuals responsible for the actions of their government. This boycott is misconceived and should be dropped."

Labour MP Denis MacShane, who chaired the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism, said the UCU decision was "completely deplorable and counter productive". He said it was "foolish" because "Israeli academics have been amongst the strongest critics of the Israeli government." He said: "The motion will do nothing to help Palestinian students who are keen to study in the relative oasis of Israeli universities and will exacerbate the position of Jewish students in the UK who already feel harassed, intimidated and uncomfortable on campus."

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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11 June, 2007

Commencing Courtesy

If you go to a football game, a rock concert or a fraternity kegger, you will not be surprised to find people screaming, laughing, bumping chests, ringing cowbells, baying at the moon and generally shedding their inhibitions. If you attend a wedding ceremony, a funeral or a confirmation, however, you may expect those around you to comport themselves in a polite and restrained manner.

School commencement exercises used to fall into the latter category, but they have been moving-make that descending-toward the former. The question being addressed in Galesburg, Ill., is whether to surrender to that slide or try to reverse it. And I'm happy to report that school officials there not only favor reversal but have actually managed to bring it about.

A couple of years ago, the graduation ceremony at Galesburg High School had come to resemble a circus, but without the calming influence of elephants. Students crossing the stage were dancing and flashing hand signs; friends in the audience were jumping up, whooping and raising a racket with air horns. Deluged with complaints from parents and others who couldn't see or hear at crucial moments, local officials decided a change was in order.

They adopted several reforms, the most important of which was to establish clear rules and require students and parents to sign forms listing forbidden conduct-such as yelling, dancing, making gestures, using noisemakers and other "disruptive behavior."

The school also spelled out the consequences "should the graduating student and/or family/friends admitted to the ceremony" misbehave: The student would be barred from the school party and would not get an actual diploma (though he or she would still be considered a graduate). An insert went into the commencement program in case anyone needed one last reminder.

Administrators say the new policy produced a huge improvement. But this year, a few recalcitrants had to test the limits, and the school decided to withhold diplomas from five students. They were offered the chance to get their diplomas by performing eight hours of community service. On Wednesday, though, school officials relented, saying it was time "to move on."

In the enforcement phase, the students perceived racial bias, noting that four of them are black and the other is Hispanic. At other schools, there have been complaints that imposing commencement decorum amounts to forcing nonwhites to abide by stuffy white conventions.

There is no infallible way to define and detect "disruptive behavior," but the school did its best by stationing four observers around the auditorium, and all four wrote down the same five names during the ceremony. Are the educators racist? When I called one of the kids who were punished, Nadia Trent, she said that during her student days, she had never encountered racial bias from school officials.

In any event, bad behavior is not a product of skin color. Well-to-do white schools have their share of people who feel entitled to do whatever they want regardless of how it affects others. Back in 1999, an outdoor venue in suburban Chicago banned a local high school from holding commencement exercises there after students and parents threw marshmallows, trampled flowers, ignored no-smoking signs and insulted employees. This is a high school that is less than 1 percent black.

In the aftermath, the superintendent acknowledged the problem in terms that would have worked equally well for Galesburg: "We should talk about these things: civil discourse, courteous demeanor, following and obeying rules, refraining from unnecessary interruptions."

At a typical graduation, most people don't need to be told to show courtesy and respect for others. But there are always some attendees who insist on calling attention to themselves. And all it takes is a handful of the unruly to spoil the experience for everyone else.

Some people think that a commencement is a celebration, and that celebrations by definition should be unrestrained. By that logic, wedding guests should be blowing noisemakers during the recitation of vows. Modern America does not lack for parties. What it increasingly lacks is rituals that treat landmarks in life with a sense of solemnity.

School officials in Galesburg may have fallen short of a perfect solution, but they at least are trying to preserve a tradition their community values. They understand that a society which treats every happy occasion as a frolic is a society in danger of forgetting that some moments are worthy of dignity, respect and even awe.

Source




Comeback for "progressive" education in England

I once taught at a "progressive" school so I know how little many students learned there

Katie Harris, 11, is telling me that she recently spent a lesson making paper aeroplanes and measuring how far they flew. What did she learn? "It was really enjoyable. It wasn't just about one subject like maths, there was science in there as well," she replied. Katie is a pupil at Bursted Wood primary in Bexley, southeast London, one of eight schools in the borough at the forefront of a stampede back to "creative learning" and progressive teaching methods that were popular more than a decade ago. Despite the bad press such methods got back then, when they were blamed for turning out thousands of children who couldn't read or write properly, a survey of 115 primary schools last week revealed that four out of five are returning to teaching based around "topics" such as chocolate.

At Bursted Wood, traditional secondary-school style classes in subjects such as history, geography and maths have been ditched for topics planned out on "creative learning wheels". I look at one wheel, laid out on a card, with the school's head teacher, Ely Prynne (pictured). The topic is The Groovy Greeks: children are encouraged to learn about maths, for instance, by studying patterns and right angles in Greek art and analysing graphs showing their favourite Greek gods.

Prynne is evangelical about the changes. "I find our children's knowledge is being deepened," she says. "Instead of doing half an hour of history, half an hour of geography, we take a theme. For example, one topic was called Time Travellers. "It took an idea a bit like the Tardis and Dr Who, with the children travelling through time to visit the Tudors. We went to a local building where the children made candles and learnt Tudor dances."

Like thousands of primary school teachers Prynne started her career, 30 years ago, teaching young children through themes and topics. It was all the rage at the time. But in 1992 a report commissioned by the then Tory education secretary, Kenneth Clarke, pinned blame for declining standards on such methods. The report followed the introduction of a national curriculum in primary schools prescribing which subjects had to be taught. Jim Rose, Robin Alexander and Chris Woodhead, dubbed "the three wise men", were the report's authors. They discouraged the "playschool" approach and recommended more traditional teaching methods. Later in the decade a literacy and numeracy hour was introduced and English and maths standards started to rise. Now it seems another wave of reform is taking place and the traditional methods are being jettisoned.

"The national curriculum was very constricting. Teachers felt they did not have ownership, now they do," says Prynne, whose school is held up by government agencies as an example of good practice. The change started, she says, four years ago when teachers were encouraged to break out of the straitjacket of the national curriculum and make lessons more imaginative.

The only problem is that test results for 11-year-olds at Bursted Wood, while still above the national average for maths and English, have fallen since 2003, when Prynne introduced the new timetable. Last week she said that the innovations had "nothing at all" to do with the dip in results, which compared two different groups of children. Meanwhile, 25% of 11-year-olds nationwide are still leaving school unable to read or write properly. "It is not just about results," she says. "It is also about things like confidence and a love of learning." She adds that the "creative wheel" covers the content of the national curriculum and the school also still provides a literacy and numeracy hour.

However, David Hart, a former head of the National Association of Head Teachers, has warned: "Theme-based schooling will disadvantage pupils . . . and make the secondary teacher's task much more difficult." Blair Chandler, 11, has been taught both ways. When he started at Bursted Wood there were separate traditional subject lessons. But in the last four years he has been on a "creative learning journey". "This is much funner," he says. Perhaps. But is it more educational?

How much history or geography do your children know? Go on, ask them. Ruin the family Sunday. It isn't their fault. Our children leave primary school in pitiful ignorance because teachers remain committed to half-baked notions. According to a survey, four-fifths of state primary schools have abandoned traditional subject teaching in favour of what is known as "topic" work. Boring old history and geography have been replaced by exciting projects on, say, "chocolate".

Time and again, back in the 1980s, I'd listen to a primary school teacher tell me that he or she "taught children not subjects". Children don't, the argument went, think in terms of history and geography. They experience the world in all its buzzing confusion, and, if school is to be "fun", the artificial boundaries between subjects must be broken down to allow the child to experience the full interdisciplinary richness of human experience. The fact that the boundaries are not artificial did not seem to cut much ice. Neither did the fact that children are unlikely to make much progress in, for example, science, if they are forever encouraged to think about how chocolate is made.

The national curriculum, improved things for a while, but now teachers seem to be slipping back to their old ideological ways. Prep schools will, of course, still teach history and geography and the gap between standards in state and private schools will widen further.

Source




Foreign doctors to learn Australian

It is a tremendous indictment of Australian medical education that Australia does not train enough of its own doctors -- despite the fact that there is great competition from young Australians to get into medical schools

FOREIGN doctors are having speech lessons in a bid to improve communication with Australian patients and avoid medical mishaps. A pilot program is aiming to make doctors whose first language is not English easier to understand for the average Australian. The 10-week course tackles pronunciation, understanding of slang or colloquial "ocker" expressions, language attitudes and speech patterns.

A growing number of overseas-trained doctors are filling hospital and GP positions in Australia amid a national shortage of medical workers. Many take jobs in rural or remote areas, where they are more likely to struggle with cultural and language barriers.

Gai Rollings, director of speech pathology at Toowoomba Base Hospital, has started the program with doctors from Africa, India and South America. "I don't think they have trouble understanding our accent but they might have trouble understanding some of our expressions," she said. "We are looking at how they are actually pronouncing their sounds and how they put stress on words." She said the doctors' speech would be rated by members of the public before and after the course. "If (a doctor) asks a nurse to help putting this solution into an IVF, that could be a really risky situation if the nurse doesn't understand what he is asking," Ms Rollings said.

Andrew Schwartz, president of the Australian Doctors Trained Overseas Association, said the program was "a fine idea" but would not achieve much in practical terms. "We have got a drastic shortage of doctors so Australian people are going to have to accept they have got to listen and make sure they are getting their message through at the same time."

The above story by CLAIR WEAVER appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on June 10, 2007

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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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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10 June, 2007

Vouchers for the children

Environmentalists want to reduce suburban sprawl. Progressives want to reduce the wealth gap. Conservatives want to teach their children traditional values. Libertarians want to cut taxes. Guess what, we can do all these things at once, using an idea that has already been tested in places like New Zealand and Sweden: school vouchers. School vouchers would have limited impact in rural areas and low-density suburbs. In the inner cities, however, the impact would be huge.

The U.S. public school system was designed for a different era, when people lived on farms or in small communities -- that were often segregated by race, class and/or religion -- and children walked to school. Because children walked and people lived far apart, education was a natural monopoly. And because the schools were small, and the parents of similar backgrounds, democratic management worked well.

Democracy does not work so well as the number of voters grows. The impact of each vote diminishes, so people have less reason to put much effort into making a good decision. Also, it is harder for those running for school board to get to know the parents. Power devolves from the parents and taxpayers to the bureaucrats and teacher’s unions. Furthermore, democracy works poorly where communities are deeply divided. Just look at the history of the Third World countries containing multiple tribes.

One possible solution for America’s cities would be to have more than one school district per city. Let each high school have its own school board, which oversees that school along with its feeder schools. Layers of bureaucracy would be removed, and each neighborhood could set its curriculum and standards of student behavior. Do this, and the city schools would have a chance at being competitive with the suburban schools.

But we can do better. There is no need for the school board approach in cities. Where children live close together, competition works! Implement a program of school vouchers and the inner city schools would become better than the suburban and rural schools. Upper middle class families would move back into the cities in order to have better opportunities for their children. Interstate highway traffic would lessen, as people move closer to work. Pressure to turn farms and wild lands into subdivisions would weaken. Children in the slums could get a good education should they so desire. No longer would a poor family have to afford a nice house in order to qualify for a good education. The wealth gap would narrow substantially over time.

So, why aren’t progressives and environmentalists jumping on board this opportunity? Two problems come to mind: First, vouchers raise the ugly specter of segregation. Some parents would choose schools based upon race, ethnicity, class or religion. This is a legitimate concern, but I think it is way overblown. Many inner city schools are segregated already, since people moved apart after the public schools were desegregated. School vouchers would likely cause a net reduction in segregation, as more people become comfortable living in mixed race neighborhoods. More importantly, ethnic minorities would benefit the most from a system of school vouchers. Giving inner-city minority children a better education would do more to dispel the remaining bits of racism than any amount of propaganda or social engineering.

The second problem is political. The teacher’s unions have been reliable allies to the environmental and progressive movements. Going against their wishes would be hard – just like it has been hard for the Bush Administration to go against the wishes of Halliburton.

Source




Vouchers are the way to go for Australian schools

They are the logical next step in improving education outcomes and would be a winner for the politicians who back them, writes Kevin Donnelly

WHAT is the best way to strengthen schools, raise standards and, in an increasingly competitive and challenging international environment, ensure that more Australian students perform at the top of the league table?

One approach, favoured by those with a vested interest in preserving the status quo, such as the Australian Education Union and the educrats responsible for the present parlous state of Australian education, is centralised and bureaucratic. Schools, especially government schools, are forced to conform to a top-down and inflexible system of command and control management where there is little, if any, room for autonomy at the local level, or flexibility in curriculum and developing more effective ways to meet the demands of parents and the marketplace.

The alternative, based on research identifying the characteristics of "world's best" education systems (as measured by international tests) and overseas innovations such as vouchers and charter schools, is to free schools from provider capture and to increase parental choice. Vouchers involve parents receiving an agreed amount of funding from government that they can then use to send their children to either government or non-government schools. The money follows the child and, as a result, good schools prosper and grow while underperforming schools face the consequences of falling enrolments and reduced demand.

Related to school choice is the need to ensure that how well schools perform, or underperform, is made public. When school effectiveness is clouded in secrecy, it is impossible for parents to make informed decisions about where their children go to school. At the minimum, all schools should be made to release details about educational performance, staff morale, absenteeism, student behaviour and, where relevant, indicators such as Year 12 results and post-school destinations.

Compare this to the present situation in Australia where, notwithstanding the rhetoric about identifying and turning around underperforming government schools, there are few, if any, consequences for failure and, as a result, thousands of students receive a substandard education.

Vouchers can either be universal or targeted at particular disadvantaged groups, such as children with disabilities or children educationally at risk because of their socioeconomic background. Vouchers can also either provide the full cost of educating a child, measured by the per-student cost of educating a child in a government school (about $10,000), or they can be set as a percentage, for example, by being means tested.

However, increasing educational choice by giving parents the right to choose where their children go to school is ineffectual if all schools, government and non-government, are forced to follow the same industrial-age management regime and dumbed-down, politically correct curriculum. The other side of the voucher equation is what in the US are termed charter schools. If schools are to be in a position to respond to community expectations, they need the autonomy and flexibility to meet parental demands. Charter schools, within general guidelines, fashion their own management style and curriculum, freed from the constraints of an intrusive and insensitive government-controlled bureaucracy.

As outlined in a 2006 paper prepared by the Australia Institute, titled School Vouchers: An Evaluation of their Impact on Education Outcomes, those associated with the cultural Left side of politics are staunch critics of freeing up schools and increased parental choice. The authors of the paper argue there is no evidence increased competition and autonomy improve educational outcomes.

An argument is also put that Australian society will become less cohesive as vouchers will lead to "greater segregation on the basis of race, religion, academic ability and socialeconomic status" and, based on the assumption that choice will lead to more parents choosing non-government schools, that state schools will be seen as second-rate and the least preferred option.

As might be expected, given that its continued survival depends on a centrally controlled, compliant state system of education, the AEU is also opposed to vouchers and the existence of non-government schools more generally. After criticising the federal Government's introduction of literacy vouchers, the AEU, at its 2005 federal conference, attacked opening schools to market forces by stating "the introduction of the voucher system of funding ... will ensure that much-needed government funding is directed away from those public schools with the greatest need into private pockets without any accountability requirements whatsoever". According to Pat Byrne, the AEU president, the Howard Government's policy of supporting parental choice is a ruse to destroy the state system.

It's ironic that supporters of state schools, such as the AEU, spend thousands of dollars on campaigns talking up government schools, under slogans such as "state schools are great schools", while arguing that introducing vouchers will lead to increasing numbers of parents fleeing the state system. Logic suggests that if state schools are as successful as their advocates make out, despite the introduction of vouchers many parents will still prefer state schools. The popularity of selective government schools in NSW and the fact that Victorian parents, if they can afford the real estate, are buying into areas with highly regarded state schools, proves that given a choice, parents will not necessarily "flee" the government system.

In his book Education Matters: Government, Markets and New Zealand Schools, Canberra-based economist Mark Harrison, in opposition to arguments about lack of effectiveness, details research showing that voucher-related choice and competition improve educational outcomes. Common sense also suggests this would be the case. If nothing else, the collapse of communism and the success of capitalism proves that the old days of statism have long since died and the most effective approach to government policy is to allow responsibility and decision-making to rest in the hands of those most affected, ie, at the local level. Harrison cites research undertaken at Harvard University into voucher schemes implemented in Washington and New York as concluding that "the academic achievement of voucher students who attended private schools grew faster than the similar students who did not receive a voucher and attended public schools".

Research evaluating the Milwaukee scheme arrives at a similar conclusion about the benefits of vouchers; instead of lowering standards or creating social fragmentation, there is evidence that not only are students' test scores improved, in addition, as Harrison states, "parents are highly satisfied, there was no creaming, parental involvement increased, the program targeted disadvantaged students successfully and reduced segregation".

Caroline Hoxby, a US-based academic and author of School Choice: The Three Essential Elements and Several Policy Options, on examining the results of the Milwaukee scheme, also argues that increasing choice and competition lead to improved results, as measured by improvements in students' mathematics scores.

Those supporting vouchers also make the point that improved standards are not restricted to schools enrolling students with vouchers; nearby government schools, given the reality of competition and the consequent incentive to improve, also register stronger results.

On identifying the characteristics of those education systems that achieve the best results in international mathematics, science and reading tests, Ludger Woessmann, from the University of Munich, reinforces the importance of choice and competition, especially as the result of a strong private school sector and decentralisation of management. Woessmann argues the market provides strong incentives for schools, as institutions, to provide a better service by meeting the expectations of parents and raising standards. If parents are not satisfied, they go elsewhere, and there are clear consequences and rewards for performance. While acknowledging the central role individual teachers play in successful learning, Woessmann also makes the point that those education systems suffering from provider capture, especially where teacher unions have an undue influence, underperform in terms of international test results.

While critics of vouchers, such as the AEU, emphasise that increased diversity and competition will only benefit so-called wealthy, elite, non-government schools, it is significant that American voucher schemes focus on supporting disadvantaged groups such as Hispanics and African-Americans. Such is the success of these schemes in addressing educational disadvantage, as noted by Terry Moe, a researcher at the Hoover Institution, that "in poll after poll, the strongest supporters of publicly financed vouchers are blacks, Hispanics and the poor, especially in urban areas".

As the 30 to 40per cent of Australian parents who send their children to non-government schools are well aware, debates about vouchers are of more than academic interest. Not only do these parents pay taxes for a system they do not use, thus saving state and federal governments millions of dollars each year, hard-earned cash has to be found to pay school fees. The reality is that parents who, as a result of the perceived shortcomings in government schools, choose non-government schools are financially penalised. While state and federal governments support such choice by partially funding students attending non-government schools, the amounts provided are well short of the costs involved and the system lacks the preconditions necessary for an effective voucher system.

On the grounds of equity and social justice, it makes sense if more parents, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are able to choose between government and non-government schools. Ideally, such a voucher would be set at $10,000 and the money would follow the child. Vouchers and charter schools, reflecting a commitment to choice, competition and accountability, present new territory in the education debate. At first glance, such initiatives are a natural fit for the Howard Coalition Government and, given the cultural Left's antagonism, something traditionally opposed by the ALP. As such, vouchers and charter schools provide one policy area where there are clear differences between the two parties and fertile ground for public debate.

Source




Vouchers are the way to go for Australian Universities too

Comment by Steven Schwartz, the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University

The Group of Eight universities has launched a far-reaching higher education policy statement and, again, educational vouchers have been thrust into the spotlight. Ever since the Nobel economics laureate Milton Friedman suggested funding education with vouchers in 1955, the idea has surfaced periodically in Australia only to be met with howls of rage from education unions and yawns of apathy from everyone else.

There are three reasons this time could be different. First, educational vouchers can no longer be dismissed as impractical. School voucher systems operate successfully in several countries and a university voucher system has been introduced in Colorado. Second, both sides of politics are committed to a diverse system of higher education. By forcing universities to find a competitive niche, vouchers foster diversity more effectively, and certainly more efficiently, than the present system of centralised formula funding. Third, it has previously been taken for granted that vouchers would be politically unpopular because they would have to be rationed. It was feared that promising everyone a voucher would lead many extra students to enrol, thereby causing a budget blowout. But times have changed. There is no longer any need to worry about hoards of frustrated students queuing for vouchers because, the Government says, there is no longer any unmet demand.

Everyone who wants to attend university is already being admitted. Unless it decides to be uncharacteristically generous, a universal voucher entitlement would cost the Government no more than the block grant system. Vouchers would overcome anomalies inherent in the present funding arrangements by introducing rudimentary market forces into a system that operates according to Government fiat. At present, universities have little ability to respond to student demand. The quota of Government-subsidised student places at any university each year is determined by history: universities get about the same number they received the previous year, with small adjustments.

We know that students prefer some universities to others. However, even if they wanted to, popular universities are prohibited from expanding their intake to meet student demand. Indeed, like plant managers in the old Soviet Union, university managers are punished if they enrol "too many" students. As a result of quotas, many qualified students are turned away from their university of first choice. They are forced to try their second, third or even fourth choice, until they finally find a university that will admit them. By limiting the number of places in any university, the Government makes it impossible for universities to expand their intake in response to student demand. It is a way to protect less popular institutions whose students might go elsewhere if given the chance.

Giving funding to students in the form of vouchers and eliminating quotas would allow universities to adjust supply to meet demand. But vouchers would not be enough. To ensure the highest levels of excellence, they would need to be combined with the deregulation of university fees.

At present, the amount students pay through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme is largely determined by the Government; universities have limited leeway to charge more. Yet, they are in competition with generously funded competitors from around the world. If we want to compete in the premier league, we have to direct resources to those institutions that achieve the highest standards of excellence. Lifting the cap on student contributions would allow our best universities to raise their fees; this would bring them the additional resources they require to compete with the world's best. To ensure that access to elite higher education institutions is not limited to the rich, universities that raise their fees should be required to spend some of their new wealth on income support for needy students.

In reality, however, only a small number of institutions would be able to charge premium fees and provide exceptional services. Many would go for low price and high volume. Other models would also develop. Some universities would offer vocational and technical types of education. Others would focus on distance learning. Some would deliberately focus on a small number of programs that met student needs.

Under a voucher system, universities would have to be attractive to students because that is the only way they would receive any resources. Students would benefit because they would control the purse strings and would therefore be able to influence what was taught, by whom and when. Institutions would benefit by being able to adjust their offerings to meet student demand. Most of all, Australia would benefit from having stronger world-class universities to produce the graduates we will need to ensure social and economic 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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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9 June, 2007

NCLB not totally hopeless

The nation's students have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since President Bush signed his landmark education initiative into law five years ago, according to a major independent study released yesterday. The study's authors warned that it is difficult to say whether or how much the No Child Left Behind law is driving the achievement gains. But Republican and Democratic supporters of the law said the findings indicate that it has been a success. Some said the findings bolster the odds that Congress will renew the controversial law this year. "This study confirms that No Child Left Behind has struck a chord of success with our nation's schools and students," U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. "We know the law is working, so now is the time to reauthorize."

The report, which experts called the most comprehensive analysis of test data from all 50 states since 2002, concluded that the achievement gap between black and white students is shrinking in many states and that the pace of student gains increased after the law was enacted. The findings were particularly significant because of their source: the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, which in recent years has issued several reports that have found fault with aspects of the law's implementation.

Jack Jennings, president of the District-based center and a former Democratic congressional aide, said a decade of school improvement efforts at local, state and national levels has contributed to achievement gains. "No Child Left Behind, though, is clearly part of the mix of reforms whose fruit we are now seeing," he said.

Some skeptics said the study overstated the extent of academic gains. Others said the law should not be credited for the positive results. "There are a lot of problems with No Child Left Behind that we need to fix because they work against some of the progress that is being noted in this study," said Edward J. McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a 1.3 million-member union.

The law requires all public school students to be tested in reading and math every year from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and it prescribes a series of sanctions on schools that do not make adequate progress. States and the District are allowed to design their own tests and set their own standards.

President Bush and senior Democratic lawmakers are seeking to renew No Child Left Behind this year, despite mounting attacks on the law from the political left and right. Some conservative Republicans call the law an unnecessary expansion of federal government, and some liberal Democrats complain it has placed too much emphasis on high-stakes tests and discouraged creativity.

Key lawmakers worry that if the law is not reauthorized by year's end, it will become next to impossible to do so until a new president takes office in 2009. One crucial sign of progress or stalemate is whether the congressional education committees approve a bill before the August recess. Rep. Dale E. Kildee (D-Mich.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees elementary and secondary education, plans to review the center's study with Jennings in a hearing tomorrow.

Source




Australia: Parents told to make up for school failures

PARENTS have been urged to "do the times table" with their children after almost one in four Queensland Year 7 students failed to meet the national benchmark for numeracy. Education Minister Rod Welford conceded yesterday that numeracy standards in Queensland schools weren't good enough and parents could help to address the problem. "Parents can help by doing tables with their children at home. Nine-year-olds should be learning their tables," he said.

Figures released in this week's State Budget showed just 76.2 per cent of students met the benchmark last year, down from 80.3 per cent the previous year and well short of the 82 per cent target forecast in last year's Budget. The tests, each August, also measure literacy. More than 95 per cent of Year 7 students met the national writing benchmark and 83 per cent met the reading benchmark.

The Australian Council for Educational Research's Ken Rowe said the benchmarks were minimum standards. "You can't get much lower than those benchmarks and in reality, somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of students entering high school from government, Catholic and independent schools lack sufficient skills to engage with the secondary curriculum," Dr Rowe said. "Our priority must be teaching the teachers to teach."

Mr Welford said the "results clearly are not good enough". He said students who failed to master basic numeracy at primary school were more likely to have problems in secondary maths and he wanted the annual tests moved forwards to May to give teachers more time to help children rectify problems. "These tests should also be passed on to the students' secondary schools so that process continues," he said.

This week's Budget included a new $1.5 million numeracy initiative aimed at boosting the results. Mr Welford said the initiative aimed to "help build teacher capacity through professional development programs and the development of teacher resources and training packages".

Opposition Education spokesman Stuart Copeland said the school curriculum was "too overcrowded" for many children who needed more time on the basics. "I am also concerned that we are starting to see the effects of falling OP scores for entry to the teaching profession," Mr Copeland said. "If teachers are not being well-prepared to teach literacy and numeracy this is a damning indictment of the universities."

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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8 June, 2007

British Catholic Schools Targeted For Refusing to Implement School "anti-homophobic" Bullying Policies

Catholic schools in Britain are under attack by the government at the urging of homosexual lobbyists for refusing to bow to pressure to implement "anti-homophobic" bullying policies in schools. A report by a Commons Select Committee to the Department for Education and Skills singles out Catholic schools for refusing to implement regulations.

Education Secretary Alan Johnson told gay activists that the government is preparing guidelines for schools to address what was identified in the report as "faith-based" homophobic bullying. At a meeting with Stonewall, the gay lobby group that brought about the notorious Sexual Orientation Regulations passed earlier this year, Johnson told activists that he hopes to make a presentation at the group's upcoming conference in July.

The report, published March 27, recommends that the Department "introduces a requirement for schools to record all incidents of bullying along with information about the type of bullying incident."

The British government is explicitly collaborating with the homosexual movement in aiming at the Catholic Church's stand against sexual immorality. In preparation for the report that will inform the guidelines, the Department of Skills and Education commissioned research from Stonewall into "faith-based" bullying in schools.

In a committee hearing, Jim Knight, Minister of State for Schools accused the Catholic Church of "faith-based bullying". "Whatever the setting," Knight said, "whatever the ethos, whoever the external partner to a school might be, school might be, if they have got one, be it the Catholic Church or anybody else. We should not tolerate bullying in any from, we should not tolerate people not respecting the difference that people have and I think that applies to homophobic bullying."

The bullying issue is being used openly as a wedge issue to attack Catholic and other faith-based institutions. Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) says, "Such is the level of homophobia in the Catholic Church that its schools should be taken from it and returned to the community sector."

GALHA's secretary George Broadhead said, "We've seen homophobia in Catholic circles rising at a terrifying rate over the past few months. The Pope is almost hysterical on the topic and the British Catholic hierarchy is constantly agitating to retard gay rights. What chance have gay pupils got in schools which are run by an organisation that hates them?"

"For the sake of these children and for the community at large which should be protected from the promotion of bigotry in schools, the Catholic Church should be stripped of its educational establishments."

Stonewall is the UK's most successful homosexual lobby group, having hosted Prime Minister Tony Blair at its victory banquet after the passage of the SOR's.

Source



UK: Alarm at sudden rise in schools failing inspections

The number of schools failing their inspections has shot up five per cent in the past term. Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, revealed that the number of schools "in special measures" - which means they face closure or replacement by a city academy - had risen from 243 to 256.

The findings immediately provoked a political row, with Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrats' education spokeswoman, warning that Labour was "running out of excuses for its inability to sort out failing schools". "Children are being denied a fair start in life," she added. David Willetts, the shadow Education Secretary, said the figures were "yet more evidence of the pressing need to focus on raising standards in our state schools".

However, the figures also show that those served with a notice to improve within a year - or face failure - had gone down from 366 to 352. In addition, the number with serious weaknesses - one stop short of failing their inspections - had also fallen from 82 to 47.

Schools minister Jim Knight said that - overall - the figures showed fewer schools were in categories of concern compared with the previous term. "This is a promising trend despite the fact we raised the bar on inspection in autumn 2005," he added. "The new tougher inspection framework means there is no room for 'coasting schools'."

Meanwhile, the Government announced plans to tackle the number of "invisible children" who fall behind in maths and English between the ages of seven and 11. Ministers are urging teachers not to ask children to put their hands up to answer questions because it means shy pupils are never called upon in class.

A study published by the Department for Education and Skills, published yesterday, suggested instead that teachers should choose who answers the questions. A second theory put forward in the study of 240 children as to why they fall behind is that their homework starts to become too difficult for their parents to help at that age.

Source




Australia: Professor slams leftist curriculum "plan"

A Rudd Labor government risks creating a "noodle federation" as states sign up to different pieces of its education policy rather than developing a cohesive national framework. University of Queensland professor Kenneth Wiltshire described Kevin Rudd's self-described education revolution as "about six dot points in search of a rationale", containing little detail of how the measures would be implemented.

Speaking after giving evidence to the Senate inquiry on the academic standards of school education, Professor Wiltshire said the ALP policy lacked coherence and the only plan for implementation was an assertion that the states would co-operate "by some magical mechanism". "There's no guarantee whatsoever just because the state governments are the same political party Mr Rudd is going to get their co-operation," Professor Wiltshire said. "Public policy by definition should have content, its rationale, the tool of implementation. "But the 'education revolution' has no costing, no delivery mechanism; it needs to be spelt out in far more detail. "I fear Mr Rudd's creating a noodle federation, with some states referring powers to the commonwealth and some states not."

Professor Wiltshire, the JD Story professor of public administration at the university, chaired the review of the Queensland school curriculum under the Goss Labor government. He served as a special adviser to the Australian National Training Authority and was Australia's representative on the executive board of UNESCO, the UN education body, until 2005.

In evidence to the inquiry, Professor Wiltshire described the Queensland education system as the worst in the country. He said the school system forced subject specialisation on students at too young an age, requiring them to choose between being literate or numerate - between the humanities and the sciences - at 12 or 13, and to decide on an academic or vocational pathway at 14 or 15. "We're forcing these choices on kids at far too young an age," he said. "We should be keeping options open and giving them a generalist education for as long as possible."

In his evidence, Professor Wiltshire also highlighted the lack of careers guidance in schools and called for "root and branch" reform of the TAFE system, arguing for the introduction of a HECS-style scheme. Professor Wiltshire said the only improvements in educational standards over the past decade had occurred as a result of intervention by the federal Government. He said reforms over the past 10 years - including better reporting on students, greater choice for parents, and moves to a national curriculum - would not have occurred if the federal Government had not taken a stronger role in education. 'State governments obviously haven't been able to properly deliver what people want," he said.

Professor Wiltshire called on the inquiry to recommend a federal-led approach to curriculum, a strong national board for curriculum reintroducing syllabus specifying content, and strong national performance standards and assessment.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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7 June, 2007

The Failure of British schools is a failure to concentrate on the basics

If there is any political party out there flailing around in search of a mission statement to back up its leader's personal charm and cycle clips, here is a free suggestion. Confront the people (grinning, if you insist) and just say this: "We promise to protect your safety and your rights, and provide efficient and fair public services. Until we have achieved these core duties, we will not mess around with any frills, go-faster stripes or luxury fandangles. If this renders us boring, we're sorry. But it is pointless to tackle a pile of shit by spraying gold paint on it, or getting consultants and spin-doctors to dance around it waving dodgy statistics. We will get a shovel and mop, and tackle the basics. Even if it means we don't keep up Mr Blair's record of seven new laws a day for ten years."

This return to my hairy old theme of The Boring Party was sparked off by news that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is drawing up plans to measure whether primary schools are improving children's psychological "wellbeing". They want the poor brats to fill out questionnaires and tick boxes ("I've been feeling good about myself all the time/often/some of the time/rarely/never" etc).

Now, the duty of primary schools to keep an eye on children's happiness is obvious. Some schools' innovations - familiar counsellors, chill-out rooms, and so forth - are useful and kindly extensions of the traditional pastoral role; they are probably needed more than ever today because of the commercial and social stresses on families. More traditional ways of advancing emotional literacy also flourish whenever staff can find a crack in the dry concrete of the curriculum: poetry, stories, music, exercise, outings and school visits got most of us through our schoolday puzzlements and griefs.

But a questionnaire? A self-conscious demand that a child of 6 should look inward rather than outward, and score on a scale of one to five how much it "feels loved"? Nah. For one thing, it is unscientific: small children are volatile and you can't have four quizzes per day. And how insulting is the implication that primary schools must be judged on a wellbeing scale dreamt up by distant academics? The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, points out that any decent teacher knows how a child is feeling without a tickbox checklist; and there is no hard evidence whatsoever that encumbering little children with formal self-awareness makes them happier. Teenagers, just possibly. Eight-year-olds, no.

And - to return to the manifesto of the Boring But Efficient Party (BBEP) - let me point out that many of these children will not, under present conditions, even have an NHS dentist. Many will be in oversized classes. Some will have parents who speak little English, and whose entitlement to free lessons has just ended. Some of the children filling in the forms will, thanks to poor social services communication, be struggling carers for their parents, as exposed recently by the Princess Royal Trust. Many have no safe outdoor space to play in because the streets and parks are dangerous and there is no community policeman. And if they do suffer from serious mental illness later, their parents will have to struggle for proper psychiatric support.

And if, heaven forfend, they get into trouble, they may well end up like poor little Adam Rickwood, aged 14, who was shunted off to a child prison 150 miles from home, and taken off suicide-watch despite a three-year record of mental disturbance. Adam wrote a last despairingly affectionate letter to his mother and hanged himself with his shoelaces. The youth justice system remains a callous, inefficient mess. Many other systems - which should be at the core of governmental duty - are equally moribund.

Yes, it is hard to get everything right. My complaint is not that governments are imperfect, but that in every area of public endeavour there is an unstoppable centrifugal force, pushing effort out to the margins. We need relaxed, well-run schools with trusted teachers - we are given ditzy questionnaires. We need the best cancer treatments and proper care for the elderly, and instead we get a promise of IVF for all - which, to be brutal, frequently fails - and an assurance that smokers will get a cessation drug gratis on the taxpayer (never mind all the money they'll save on not buying fags; or the simple psychological fact that if it's free they won't value it or let it work).

In other realms the same thing happens, sparks flying outward from an ever-less-efficient engine. We need control of house prices, and instead we get misconceived Hips. We need good social services, unhampered by political correctness, and instead we get patronising leaflets telling fathers how to cuddle the baby. We need all children to have their intelligence recognised and fed in orderly schools, and instead we put pressure on universities to take children from bad schools, merely because it isn't fair that they're so bad and because government needs to disguise the fact in its statistics.

Suppose you hired an assistant and he failed to open the post, tidy the office, lock up at night or answer the phone. You'd remonstrate. Even if he brought in orchids, did a daily tap-dance on the desk, juggled bananas and arrived dressed in a different historical costume every morning. But government and - under its influence - public bodies behave like this the whole time. And we go on hiring them.

Source




Surprise! British professors protect Muslim radicals

A union of British academics voted unanimously to reject a government plan to tackle Islamic extremism in universities, likening the initiative to "witch hunts" that would single out Muslim students. The University and College Union, which represents more than 120,000 British academics, agreed to the motion Wednesday at its inaugural conference in Bournemouth in southern England. The motion calls for members to "resist attempts by government to engage colleges and universities in activities which amount to increased surveillance of Muslim or other minority students and to the use of members of staff for such witch hunts."

The Department for Education set guidelines last year urging university staff to contact police to identify and isolate Muslim students suspected of being radicalized. The report included real-life cases, including students watching online bomb-making videos in college libraries and using prayer rooms for radical meetings.

Critics said the plan unfairly singled out Muslims for surveillance and threatened free speech and academic freedom. "Lecturers want to teach students," said Sally Hunt, general secretary of the union. "If they wanted to police them, they would have joined the force."

Bill Rammell, higher education minister, said there is serious but not widespread Islamist extremist activities within universities. "The guidance is not about targeting one particular community," he said. "It is about promoting safety... It is also about protecting vulnerable students from bullying and harassment and other recruiting tactics of violent extremist groups."

But universities trying to implement the guidelines would have trouble forcing professors and staff to comply after the vote, said Dan Ashley, a spokesman for the union. If the university tries to enforce it on the staff, they won't do it, they won't spy on their students," he said. "You want them to be radical. That's the whole point: universities are where you encourage people to think outside the box."

Source




Australia: Teachers quitting over sex inquiries

Given the way they are treated, men who take on a teaching career are a courageous lot

TEACHERS are quitting their jobs. rather than fighting to clear their name of alleged sex offences, because investigations are taking too long. The Queensland Teachers' Union said some investigations were taking several years and teachers refused to stay in the job with suspicion hanging over their head. "The nature of the job is stressful enough without having that on top of it," said union president Steve Ryan. "There have been a number of teachers who have just resigned because they don't want to go through the trauma."

Education Queensland said that most investigations were concluded in case the teacher sought to be re-employed at a later date. An exclusive report in The Sunday Mail last week revealed 82 state school employees, mostly teachers, were being investigated for alleged sex offences involving students. The allegations ranged from serious sexual assaults to showing sexually explicit material to making sexual comments to children in conversations, phone text messages and on the internet.

Education Queensland said there were 414 outstanding cases involving allegations of official misconduct against staff. As of May 1, there were 12 teachers under suspension, eight with pay and four without. The four without had appeared in court on criminal charges and been committed for trial.

One male teacher who contacted the Sunday Mail said he had fought for two years to clear his name after students accused him of indecent behaviour. The teacher, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said charges were thrown out of court because of lack of evidence. But Education Queensland had stalled on giving his job back and allowing him to return to the classroom. "Teachers are easy targets for a lot of cheap shots. A small percentage of the community think male teachers are motivated by a desire to be close to children," he said. I have dedicated my whole life to this career ... hopefully I will get my iob back one day."

Mr Ryan said many of the 82 cases against the teachers would eventually be dropped, and it was unfair that parents and students might assume a teacher was guilty if he or she left the profession because the investigation had been prolonged.

The above story by DARRELL GILES appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on May 3, 2007

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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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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6 June, 2007

Another triumph for homeschooling

Just moments after winning the 80th annual Scripps Spelling bee, eighth grader Evan O'Dorney of Danville found himself on live TV explaining to ESPN anchor Stuart Scott why he actually much prefers doing math and playing piano concertos to spelling. "Spelling is just a bunch of memorization," the 13-year-old boy said.

But it's something the lanky, bespectacled teenager with a big gap-toothed grin has clearly mastered. He beat 285 of the best young spellers in the country by spelling such difficult words as Zoilus, laquear and schuhplattler. The homeschooled spelling phenomenon received a golden loving cup trophy and $20,000 -- money the young college-bound scholar says "I'll probably give to my parents."

He narrowly beat out the Canadian favorite, Nate Gartke, an eighth grader from Edmonton, who misspelled the coryza, a word for the common cold. "I knew it, I'd studied it, I just momentarily forgot it," he said after the competition.

O'Dorney won despite missing what had become his pre-spelling bee ritual: Eating fish. In particular, a tuna fish sandwich from Subway. "Fish is good for the brain," he said. He had to skip his fish protein meal to attend a luncheon in honor of the spelling bee competitors. He's become a seasoned pro at the bee. He first competed in 2005 when he was 11 years old and made a strong showing for a first-timer, reaching the finals before being bounced out in the eighth round. He was disappointed but boasted that he would be back and do even better. "I was born with the gift of spelling," he told the Chronicle at the time. He finished 14th in last year's bee. This year he seemed to almost skate through the competition.

He breezed through a multiple choice test with tough words such as malocclusion, syssarcosis, takt and Bewusstseinslage. In the second round, he lucked out with an easy word: boundary. But the words got tougher in later rounds -- compunctious in round three, corrigenda in round four, affiche in round five and corrine in round six. In round seven, before a live national TV audience, he didn't flinch as he was handed a Spanish word for scorpion fish: rascacio. He drew gasps when he correctly spelled schuhplattler, a Bavarian courtship dance, and then laquear, a Latin word for the recessed panels in a vaulted ceiling.

He only seemed flustered once - when a TV make-up artist dusted his cheeks and forehead with a tan blush. The kids have become so sophisticated - cynics would say obsessive - in their word studying tactics that the judges can no longer throw run-of-the-mill SAT words at them. "We try to make it as difficult as possible while still trying to be fair to everybody at the same time," said Carolyn Andrews, whose son Ned Andrews won the competition in 1994 and who now manages the bee's word list.

O'Dorney finally won with a series of relatively simple words - at least for him: pappardelle, an Italian pasta; yosenabe, a Japanese soup; and his winning word - serrefine, small forceps for clamping a blood vessel. An unusual practice technique may also have paid off for O'Dorney: His mom, Jennifer O'Dorney, quizzes him daily on words out of Merriam-Webster's dictionary as he juggles as many as four balls while walking around his home. He said he sees mathematical patterns while he's juggling and spelling words aloud.

His dad, Michael O'Dorney, a BART train operator, said his son's secret is a combination of mental abilities: "He's got a great memory and he's got a great understanding of how to analyze the structure of words and find root words."

Jennifer O'Dorney homeschools him, and said they generally spent only about an hour or two a day on spelling. She said she had increased the workload in recent weeks. Last week, they spent eight hours locked in a room going over words from the Merriam-Webster's dictionary. "The thing he wanted most was for people to hear his piano concerto on ABC," his mom said. A previously taped recording of O'Dorney at the piano was broadcast by the network during the competition.

O'Dorney's parents are proud that he remains a well-rounded kid. He has a first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, takes piano lessons at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and plays piano to accompany his church's choir. Despite his talent for spelling, his favorite subject is math. He placed 5th in a recent Northern California Mathcounts competition. He earned a perfect score in American Mathematics Competition in a test made for 10th graders. He hopes someday to be a math teacher or a composer.

Source




Muslim students seeking jihad fatwas

AUSTRALIAN Muslim university students eager to become jihadis are regularly seeking advice from Islamic spiritual leaders in the hope of winning religious approval to travel overseas and fight. Leaders have warned that the obsession among some young Muslims to become holy warriors was also driving them to "shop around" for fatwas - religious rulings - should their initial request be turned down.

Moderate Sydney-based Islamic cleric Khalil Shami said young Muslims, "predominantly university students", frequently asked his advice on travelling to war-torn countries to fight in the name of Islam. This comes two years after hardline Islamic university students were involved in the London bombings that killed 52 people and injured 700 others. It also follows The Australian's revelations in January that a 25-year-old Somali Australian, Ahmed Ali, died fighting alongside Islamists in his country of birth in December last year.

Sheik Shami said he always warned aspiring Islamists against fighting because he believed Muslim countries were being run by corrupt leaders who were more interested in making money and advancing their political profiles than liberating their people. "There are some people who would like to go and perform jihad," he told The Australian in an Arabic and English interview. "I say don't go. Because those fighting aren't truly fighting in the path of God. I've been asked numerous times and I've advised against going," added Sheik Shami, an imam at Penshurst Mosque in Sydney's southwest. He said young Muslims interested in jihad either called him anonymously to ask his advice or approached him at the mosque.

Sheik Shami, who is also an Australian Federal Police chaplain, said he had not notified authorities about Muslims interested in jihad because he did not want to betray the trust of people making the inquiries. "If you come to me and tell me about something, it's not nice for me to go and tell the authorities about you because you trust me and I have to just keep your secret," he said. "I know I have enough faith in myself. I'm not going to hurt the person or hurt the authorities."

The federal Attorney-General's department last night said clerics were not obligated under common law to pass on national security information. "A Muslim cleric would have the same obligations as any other member of the community," a department spokesman said. "The Government would expect that any person in receipt of such information, whatever their religious beliefs, would have a duty to prevent terrorist activity and pass the information on."

Sheik Shami's comments follow revelations in The Australian last week that Muslims were refusing to give national security authorities counter-terrorism tip-offs, fearing they might implicate themselves or be labelled traitors by fellow community members. Sheik Shami said young men often became more enthused about seeking advice on jihad after seeing horrific images of fellow Muslims caught up in conflict.

Islamic Friendship Association of Australia president Keysar Trad admitted hearing young Muslims asking their cleric for advice on going to fight jihad overseas. He said some even went to more than one imam in the hope of getting a green light for joining the battle. "Some people will shop around, what you might term as fatwa shopping, and I am yet to meet an imam who would say yes, go," Mr Trad said. "My personal assessment of these kind of people is they want the imam to reassure them that staying here in luxury and comfort is OK, that's all they're doing. But then they go (and say), 'I would've gone only if the imam let me'."

Melbourne cleric Isse Musse said aspiring jihadis do not usually ask for fatwas from their imams to approve their departure for battle. And while the Somalian imam had never been approached by young Muslims wanting to join overseas terror outfits, he said in most cases people would only seek advice about such issues from their clerics.

Source




Radical move in Australia: Catholic schools to teach Catholicism!

The Catholic archdiocese of Sydney wants its 167 school principals, its deputy principals and religious education co-ordinators to publicly commit to a "vow of fidelity" by adhering to church teaching on homosexuality, birth control and women's ordination. In a first for the Australian church, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, is set to extend the oath of fidelity and profession of faith, a requirement of church law for bishops, priests and heads of seminaries, to all senior educational leaders. The oath demands "religious submission of intellect and will" on questions of faith and morals - even if these are inferred but not defined by the pope and his bishops - and an acceptance that everything solemnly taught by church tradition is divinely inspired. It suggests they would be bound not only to impart these teachings but to live by them.

The controversial requirement is contained in a draft pastoral plan circulated to all parishes of the Sydney archdiocese for comment. The plan, at least two years in the drafting, gives a series of priorities, goals and strategies for the archdiocese from 2008 to 2011. Among its other new measures are marriage preparation classes for senior secondary school students, twice-yearly reviews of its educational bodies, and forums so Catholic politicians can be updated on church teachings. There will also be renewed efforts to teach youth about "sexuality and life issues" through formal courses and seminars, and measures to bring in to the fold young people inspired by next year's World Youth Day.

Cardinal Pell has taken an intense interest in Catholic education, ordering the rewriting of the religious education curriculum, and aiming to turn around Catholic thinking that faith is caught, not taught. The oath has symbolic value as a public commitment to the moral teachings and identity of the church and is not an attempt at control, the archdiocese says.

But a recent Vatican push to institute an oath for theologians in the US was greeted as an attack on academic independence and an attempt to impose tighter doctrinal controls over education institutions connected to the church.

One critic of the archdiocese's plan says it contains "shades of the Opus Dei", the Spanish-founded conservative Christian movement that achieved notoriety as the villain of the fictional bestseller The Da Vinci Code.Writing for the online magazine Catholica, a Sydney priest, Father Dan Donovan, said the plan needed a serious rewrite and failed to take note of the "infiltration" of Opus Dei and the Neocatechumenal Way, a lay movement that heads the turbulent Redfern parish. In addition, the plan lacked a suitable process for "critiquing structures and providing just outcomes, and was directed to the needs of clergy and not churchgoers", he said. "There must be developed a listening hierarchy who are able to connect with the broad masses of the faithful and their issues rather than endorsing the agenda of the various movements."

The Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Julian Porteous said the oath would act as a reminder to educational leaders of their role in promoting church teachings. "It's not about control," he said. "The oath gives greater clarity to the importance of the role of principals in schools, that their first responsibility is that the Catholic faith is taught and lived authentically within the school. "Anybody who speaks in a Catholic education institution is meant to be presenting the Catholic faith in its integrity. There can be a place for theologians to make explorations of criticism, but in teaching positions the role is to very much be faithful to the teaching of the church."

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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5 June, 2007

The Muddled Mess of Middle East Studies in American universities

What's ailing contemporary Middle East studies? A symposium earlier this month at Stanford University provided a clue. A paranoid fixation on imagined American and Israeli "empire"; the refusal to accept legitimate criticism; an insulated, elitist worldview; an inability to employ clear, jargon-free English; and a self-defeating hostility towards the West: these vices and more were made clear at "The State of Middle East Studies: Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire."

Professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University Hamid Dabashi captured the symposium's theme by asserting that the "Middle East is under U.S./Israeli imperial domination" and that America is an "empire without hegemony," engaged in a "monopolar imperial project." Yet no one defined this "empire" or "imperialism." Nor did attendees learn what events in the Muslim world precipitated a more expansive U.S. foreign policy in the region after Sept. 11, 2001, or why Israel might have legitimate concerns about its bellicose neighbors.

Only Nur Yalman, professor of social anthropology and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University, made reference to Islamic terrorism. He also reported on the atmosphere of political unease in both Egypt and Turkey from whence he had just returned.

Also popular was equating criticism of Middle East studies with a U.S./Israeli/Jewish plot. Dabashi condemned Middle East scholar and critic Martin Kramer, calling his book, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, an agent of "U.S. and Israeli intelligence." Yalman bemoaned a speech Kramer gave last year on the relatively stable geopolitical situation of Jews today, implying that such a condition represented a threat to Muslims. Dabashi denounced David Horowitz, Stanley Kurtz, Daniel Pipes, and Campus Watch for, as he put it, "helping Bush in his crusading war against Islamic terrorism."

Dabashi also singled out Stanford's Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, accusing them of acting, horror of horrors, in "the service of national security." He was particularly aggrieved that with the ascendance of these think tanks, Middle East studies were no longer under the strict purview of the "academies." He didn't mention that higher education's failure to adequately address the subject has been the cause of this evolution.

The late Columbia University English and comparative literature professor Edward Said was the undisputed godfather of the day, with countless references to his theories on post-colonialism and Orientalism. Like Said, several speakers rejected what they saw as Western condescension and hostility towards the Muslim world. Yet it was they who seemed mired in antagonism.

Discussion about the plight of women in the Muslim world was marred by anti-Western sentiment. Professor of gender and women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Minoo Moallem, dismissed such concerns as being part of an "imperialist narrative."

University of Washington anthropology and law professor Arzoo Osanloo picked up on this theme by decrying "Western, paternalistic attitudes towards Muslim women." Osanloo was concerned that "Islamic liberalism" would be "obscured by Western involvement," particularly in Iran.

Osanloo tried to focus on "Islamic feminism," but her insistence that women had made great strides in post-Islamic revolution Iran through the use of Sharia law was a stretch. It didn't help that she omitted any reference to the Iranian regimes' current crackdown, including brutal beatings, on unveiled women and their arrest and detention of Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Osanloo's stated desire to "move beyond the binarism of East vs. West" was belied by an attitude of stubborn opposition to everything Western. There was no acknowledgement by any of the women present that Western culture has given them lives that would be the envy of their counterparts in the Middle East.

Similarly, the willful blindness of a group of scholars and students denouncing the West from their positions of power and privilege in the favored surroundings of Stanford University came across as utterly hypocritical.

Hamid Dabashi and Minoo Moallem's reliance on academic jargon added to the esoteric nature of the proceedings. Schooled on a philosophical foundation of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the obsession with semantics over objective reality found therein, both speakers were largely incomprehensible.

Expressions such as "diasphoric cultural mediators," "amphibian intellectuals," "contextualization," "performance of the self as its own other," the "inability to handle the otherness of the other," "Eurocentric partriarchy," "imperialist masculinist," "gendered Orientalism," and the obscure statement, "regions are not facts but artifacts," provide just a sampling. It was excruciatingly boring at times, and the fact that they read straight from their own work only made it worse. The young man nodding off in his chair during Moallem's talk was an indication that the audience may not have been entirely engaged.

Thankfully, the other speakers spoke in plain English and Yalman even stated at one point that he was "uneasy with the abstract nature of the conversation." Indeed, those concerned with the negative influence such academics may be having on future generations should be comforted by the very real possibility that their students rarely understand a word they're saying.

Source




British Muslim school teaches antisemitic curriculum

The principal of an Islamic school has admitted that it uses textbooks which describe Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs" and has refused to withdraw them. Dr Sumaya Alyusuf confirmed that the offending books exist after former teacher Colin Cook, 57, alleged that children as young as five are taught from racist materials at the King Fahd Academy in Acton.

In an interview on BBC2's Newsnight, Dr Alyusuf was asked by Jeremy Paxman whether she recognised the books. She said: "Yes, I do recognise these books, of course. We have these books in our school. These books have good chapters that can be used by the teachers. It depends on the objectives the teacher wants to achieve." In another exchange, Dr Alyusuf insisted the books should not be scrapped, saying that allegedly racist sections had been "misinterpreted".

The school is owned, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. Mr Paxman asked: "Will you now remove this nonsense from the Saudi Ministry of Education from your school?" Dr Alyusuf replied: "Just to reiterate what I said earlier, there are chapters from these books that are used and that will serve our objectives. But we don't teach hatred towards Judaism or Christianity - on the contrary."

During the programme Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside and chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, accused the school of inciting racial hatred and hit out at Ofsted inspectors for failing to discover the textbooks. She said: "This whole situation is unacceptable. It is incitement. It is part of a deliberate Saudi initiative to install Wahabbism extremism among Muslims and in the rest of society. If Ofsted has not drawn attention to this, that is a failing of Ofsted. "It is unacceptable and we should look to see if this is happening in other schools as well. This is about teaching children. I think the school should take immediate action and so should the regulatory authorities."

In his employment tribunal claim Mr Cook, who taught English at the school for 19 years, has accused it of poisoning pupils' minds with a curriculum of hate. Arabic translators have found that the books also describe Jews as "repugnant".

Dr Alyusuf initially claimed that the books were "not taught currently", saying: "We teach a different curriculum. We teach an international curriculum." Asked by Mr Paxman, "Would you discipline any teacher who has used these teaching materials?", she replied: "Of course I would." The principal, who has been in the post just under six months, also claimed: "I monitor what is taught in the classrooms. I have developed the curriculum myself."

Asked by Mr Paxman whether she agreed with the suggestion in teaching materials that non-believers in Islam are condemned to "hellfire", she said: "We don't teach that. We teach Islam and it is important for our students to assert their identity."

Mr Cook, of Feltham, was earning 35,000 pounds a year and is seeking 100,000 in compensation. In legal papers submitted to a Watford employment tribunal, he alleged that pupils as young as five are taught that religions including Christianity and Judaism are "worthless". He also alleges that when he questioned whether the curriculum complied with British laws, he was told: "This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia".

Pupils have allegedly been heard saying they want to "kill Americans", praising 9/11 and idolising Osama bin Laden as their "hero". Mr Cook claims he was dismissed last December after blowing the whistle on the school for covering up cheating by children in GCSE exams. He is bringing a tribunal claim for unfair dismissal, race discrimination and victimisation. The school is vigorously defending his claims.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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4 June, 2007

Outlaw Promotion of Natural Marriage in Schools -- Urges UK Teachers and Profs Union

Britain's heavily left-leaning University and College Union (UCU) that represents teachers and professors at the post-secondary level, says the recently passed Sexual Orientation Regulations (SOR's) do not go far enough. The union is calling for British law to be rewritten to prohibit teachers or schools from expressing any moral opposition to homosexuality or from promoting natural marriage in the classroom.

At their annual conference in Bournemouth, members voted unanimously on a motion demanding that laws be changed to prohibit teachers from voicing opposition to homosexuality or the "gay" lifestyle. Members argued that the passage of the Sexual Orientation Regulations meant that "faith schools" ought to be forced to entirely cease teaching religious doctrines on sexual morality.

Alan Whitaker, a gay activist and the UCU's representative of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender members told the delegates, "The regulations actually say that there is nothing to stop teachers proclaiming the superiority of heterosexual marriage." "The regulations say it's unlawful to characterise same-sex relationships as inferior. But to my mind it's rather difficult to see how you can do the one without implying you are doing the other."

Whitaker is a campaigner against "organized religion" that he wrote is "inherently homophobic". As a member of UCU Left, the activist branch of the UCU that openly advocates for socialist and leftist causes, he penned an article in February arguing that Canterbury Christ Church University was a bastion of homophobia because the Anglican college refused to allow civil partnership ceremonies on campus.

Stephen Desmond, a professor in media at Thames Valley University told union members, "We must never allow freedom of religion to be hijacked and used as a pretext to discriminate against gay and lesbian teenagers in schools." Desmond, who serves as the Deputy Director/Director of Communications at the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCRJ), criticised the SOR's, saying, "If a faith school (or indeed any school) teaches that the Christian and Muslim faiths decree that same- sex sexual activity is a sin, then the school will not be acting unlawfully".

The union called for an end to "bigoted" attitudes among teachers, insisting that they be prohibited from promoting natural marriage as a positive social value. Homosexuality, they said, must be given equal status as natural sexuality.

Current rules on education say that children must be taught "the importance of marriage for family life." Under these government guidelines, that predate the passage of the SOR's, teachers are still allowed to express their personal opposition to homosexual lifestyles.

In March, LifeSiteNews.com reported that the passage of the SOR's could spell the end of Christian religious education in Britain. A report on implementation by the Joint Committee on Human Rights said that faith schools would be required to modify their religious instruction. The report said the law will not "prevent pupils from being taught as part of their religious education the fact that certain religions view homosexuality as sinful," but schools may not teach "a particular religion's doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true".

The UCU is Britain's largest trade union and professional association for academics, representing 120,000 lecturers, trainers, researchers and academic-related staff.

Source




British academics express outrage at Israeli boycott

Academics and students today hit back at the decision by university lecturers to support calls for a boycott of Israeli institutions. Yesterday the University and College Union decided by 158 votes to 99 to circulate a motion to all its branches to discuss calls from Palestinian trade unions for a "comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions". The motion is going to branches for "their information and discussion".

But the decision taken at the inaugural UCU national conference in Bournemouth was condemned by the Russell group of research-led universities, the National Union of Students and organisations with an interest in Israel and academic free speech. In a hard-hitting statement, the Russell group "rejected outright" the boycott call. Its chairman, Prof Malcolm Grant, who is also president and provost of University College London, said: "It is a contradiction in terms and in direct conflict with the mission of a university. "It betrays a misunderstanding of the academic mission, which is founded squarely on freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech. "Any institution worthy of the title of university has the responsibility to protect these values, and it is particularly disturbing to find an academic union attacking academic freedom in this way." Prof Grant promised that its universities "will uphold academic freedom by standing firm against any boycott that threatens it".

Meanwhile, the executive director of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (IAB), Ofir Frankel, accused the union of allowing itself "to act as a one-sided player in Middle Eastern politics". He said: "The IAB is amazed that the extremists that led their union to such an initiative decided not to discuss the option to pass this initiative to a vote of all 120,000 members, a decision that could have allowed the majority to rescue their union from this discriminatory action by reharnessing the values of academic freedom, discourse and debate, as their own general secretary suggested."

The chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, Jeremy Newmark, described the union's decision as "an assault on academic freedom" that "damages the credibility of British academia as a whole". He called for the union to organise a full membership ballot before introducing any boycott. The decision by the UCU was also condemned by the Academic Friends of Israel, which accused the union of having "failed to support the wishes of its membership".

Criticism of the UCU decision also came from student organisations. The president of the National Union of Students, Gemma Tumelty, said it did not support the principles behind an academic boycott of Israel because it "undermines the Israeli academics who support Palestinian rights". It also "hinders the building of bridges between Israelis and Palestinians". She added: "Retaining dialogue on all sides will be crucial in obtaining a lasting peace in the Middle East. International academics have a lot to offer higher education students in the UK and a boycott of this specific country is extremely worrying. "We will express our concerns to UCU and we are awaiting clarification from them on the exact nature of this policy and its potential impact on students and the academic community."

There were also reservations about the UCU decision from the World Union of Jewish Students. Its chairwoman, Tamar Shchory, a student at Ben Gurion University in south Israel, said: "In campuses abroad the climate of hostility towards the state of Israel and Jewish students is getting stronger. "It seems like the UCU has chosen a one-sided, not constructive, position in a very complex and sensitive matter instead of promoting the basic value of academic freedom and constructive initiatives."

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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3 June, 2007

Attack on free speech at Tufts U

I mentioned this matter on "Tongue Tied" on 13th May

In another instance of what has become a predictable and frequent assault on conservative campus publications, The Committee on Student Life at Tufts has censured the The Primary Source, a student magazine, for running satirical pieces that offended, in two separate instances, some black and Muslim students. Instead of actually functioning as marketplaces of ideas-"a place where controversial expression is embraced," and "an open campus committed to the free exchange of ideas," as described in Tufts' own student handbook-universities continue to punish what they categorize as offensive speech that does not conform to the acceptable, liberal views of politics, race, or sexuality.

While Tufts' official policy extols the merits of unfettered speech, suggesting that students "should cherish the opportunity to be learning in a place where controversial expression is embraced," it turns out that in reality that embrace is a somewhat deadly one for anyone whose controversial comments are aimed at groups perceived to be too vulnerable and sensitive to confront offensive speech with expression of their own views. The offending Primary Source piece, "Islam-Arabic Translation: Submission," which satirized Tufts' "Islamic Awareness Week" with a series of factual points about some of Islam's violent characteristics, "made the Muslim students on campus feel very uncomfortable and unwelcome," according to some of the complainants, and "was uncalled for and demean[ed] all of the work we put into our Islamic Awareness Week." The publication's punishment includes the prospect of being de-funded and the requirement of now having all stories and editorials signed by authors (a requirement that no other Tufts publication has), presumably so victims can henceforth know exactly who to drag before the Committee for any future offenses.

There are troubling issues here, putting aside the basic question of fairness of punishing a student publication with repressive speech control because it exhibited loutish behavior. The publication was sanctioned, not because it displayed actual illegal harassing or intimidating behavior, but because some individuals were `offended' or `intimidated' by speech that they were perfectly free never to read. Students have a right to be offended by the speech-even hate speech-of their fellow students and speak back to that speech with speech of their own, but their fellow students also have a Constitutionally-protected right to be offensive, provided their conduct is within the bounds of the law.

When political correctness first began to engulf our campuses, of course, racist or "hateful" speech was attacked as just that: speech which was unacceptable to those "victim" groups who were perceived as needing protection from freely-spoken opinions-generally members of racial, ethnic or sexual minorities. As a result, speech codes were frequently called for to insulate such individuals from speech that was deemed "hate" speech.

The courts, however, have consistently struck down attempts by public universities to install speech codes, precisely because they deprive students of First Amendment rights they would enjoy without restriction off campus. Universities have therefore had to take a new approach in their attempts to suppress speech whose content they do not approve of: as they did in the current Tufts case, they now deem offensive behavior and speech to be `harassing' and `intimidating,' not merely expressive. But the courts have seen through this strategic misrepresentation. In fact, says attorney Harvey Silverglate, co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses,

"Codes banning pure speech are unconstitutional, and, to the extent that speech-by virtue of the time, place and manner of delivery, or by virtue of its physically threatening nature-is harassing, the society's laws are more than adequate to redress violations. Universities . . . do not have the obligation, nor indeed the power, to ban pure speech, no matter how offensive, on the basis of content or point-of-view."

Moreover, Silvergate notes,

"Speech codes, prohibiting speech that `offends,' protect ideologically or politically favored groups, and, what is more important, insulate these groups' self-appointed spokesmen and spokeswomen from criticism and even from the need to participate in debate."

So it was revealing that at the one-sided hearing of The Committee on Student Life, while Muslim students were allowed ample opportunity to described how they felt "intimidated" and `harassed" by the content of the Primary Source's satire, there was never a discussion of whether the satire was valid, or, if there were inaccuracies or libelous statements, what those were. Instead, the Committee unilaterally determined that this particular and specific speech was unacceptable-and would always be so at Tufts.

For Tara Sweeney, senior program officer at the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Pennsylvania-based advocacy group that defends campus speech controversies and has contacted the Tufts administration on behalf of the Primary Source, "Printing a parody, no matter how objectionable to some, is in no way tantamount to `harassment.'"

In ruling campus speech codes to be unconstitutional, courts have therefore understood the real intent of cases such as the current one at Tufts: not to suppress all speech and attitudes, but merely those ideas with which the moral gatekeepers disagree, those ideas, views, and political beliefs that are unfashionable. Even when speech is seemingly blasphemous, irreverent, or anti-social, the Supreme Court in the 1989 Texas v. Johnson case stressed that the "First Amendment does not recognize exceptions for bigotry, racism, and religious intolerance or matters some deem trivial, vulgar, or profane."

In fact, other groups and individuals at Tufts regularly engage in expression that might cause some people to feel intimidated, harassed, or insulted. One example is the annual "Gaypril" celebration sponsored by the school's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center, replete with such events as "Queer Sex Now," involving "erotic trends, including the explosion of queer porn, the development of public sex spaces, and the growing exploration of alternatives to monogamy," and other sex-obsessed narcissism that may well intimidate or cause harassment to students on campus who do not embrace or have religious or philosophical issues with this lifestyle or level of effusive sexuality. Of course, no one could ever speak in opposition to a month of homosexual festivities on campus, nor obviously could their complaints about how it harassed or intimidated them ever cause the Committee on Student Life to end funding for the event or cancel future celebrations.

Nor were Tufts faculty members and students ever silenced in 2002 when many of them signed a divestment petition to urge economic sanctions on Israel, an effort to destroy the viability of the State because they had decided that it was an apartheid, colonial settler nation that tramples the rights of victimized, long-suffering Palestinians. Could these very public denunciations of the Middle East's single democracy-political speech by Tufts faculty and students-have possibly been intimidating to Jewish students on campus, Israel's supporters, and others who have a different, more positive view of Israel and its role in the world? Yes, of course, they could have had that effect, but no one at Tufts attempted to suppress what David Frum has referred to as the "genocidal liberalism" ingrained in these political statements.

Administrators and some students at Tufts seemingly hold the notion that free speech is only good when it articulates politically correct, seemingly hate-free, views of protected victim or minority groups. But great legal minds, including such jurists as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., have always fought for the protection of unfettered speech, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones. For Holmes, the protection of free speech was of particular importance, not only to allow discourse of popular topics, but, even more importantly, in instances where unpopular or hateful speech is deemed offensive and unworthy of being heard. He observed:

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

Source




Wonderful educational standards in Texas

After Failing Test 38 Times, Dumb Principal Finally Loses Job. Why was she given even a third chance?

A San Antonio school principal tried again to pass the test required for her job. She recently took that test for the 38th time. The results were not good and now she is out of that job.

A spokesperson for the San Antonio Independent School District says Elizabeth Rojas is no longer the principal at Smith Elementary.

She took the state exam required for her job again just a few weeks ago. It was her second attempt since we revealed in February that she'd already failed it 36 times before, more than any other educator in the state. Rojas failed again for the 38th time.

The district has now removed her from that job and given her the position of administrative assistant at Smith. She now makes just slightly less than her nearly $78,000 a year principal's salary.

When we called the school and asked for Rojas Thursday, we were told she was still the principal and in a meeting with teachers. The district says the interim principal is Billy Terrell who retired from the district last year. He told us by phone today, that he is now running the school - not Rojas.

The district declined to comment on camera about Rojas' reassignment but parents at Smith had plenty to say. "If you can't past the test, you don't need to be in that position." "Well, I think she should be removed because she does need that certification to be a principal." "She's a very good principal here at Smith. I'm sorry she's going to leave."

The district says the school will have a new permanent principal next year. Rojas will be moved to some other job inside the district she is certified to do.

Source




Top Australian universities to tackle languages dieback

Hmmm... I am a bit dubious about this. Although I am myself a great dabbler in languages, it is undisputable that acquiring a native command of a foreign language is a rare feat that is usually accomplished only under conditions of total immersion in that language -- and even immersion is often not sufficient. So most students of a foreign language are wasting their time if they expect a useful outcome from it. It is however a good cultural experience. For me, being able to understand Schubert Lieder in the original is sufficient recompense for my studies of German. So I think availablity of foreign language study should be there but I would oppose any compulsion or mandatory requirements

Leading universities are demanding radical action to tackle a crisis in the number of Year 12 students graduating with a foreign language, which has dropped from 40per cent to six per cent over the past four decades. The Group of Eight universities want a second language to be compulsory for all students from primary school to Year 10, more incentives to study languages at university and an advertising campaign promoting the benefits of learning a foreign tongue.

The Group of Eight, consisting of research-intensive institutions such as Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland universities, say the number of foreign languages taught at the tertiary level has almost halved, from 66 to 29, in the past 10 years. "Crisis is not too strong a word to describe the decline in foreign language education in our schools and universities," Group of Eight executive director Michael Gallagher said. "Despite many positive efforts from committed teachers and language experts, the percentage of Year12 students graduating with a second language has fallen from 40per cent in the 1960s to as low as 6per cent in some states in Australia today."

He called for a national approach involving schools, universities and state and federal governments. "Our national deficit in foreign-language capability is something we can no longer afford to ignore," he said. "It is Australia's great unrecognised skills shortage, and the one most directly relevant to our competitiveness and security in an increasingly global environment."

A planning paper released yesterday by the Group of Eight found that most schools, public and private, do not require students to take a second language. It says this lack of emphasis on foreign languages at school put pressure on university language departments. "The number of languages taught at our universities continues to fall," it says. "Of the 29 languages still on offer at tertiary level, nine are offered at only one Australian university and only seven are well represented across the sector."

The Group of Eight found only five universities offered courses in Arabic and fewer than 3per cent of university students studied an Asian language despite Asia representing 70per cent of Australia's largest export markets. The Group of Eight proposals include more funding to strengthen language education, especially at universities. Targeted funding to boost the morale, skills and number of language teachers was also recommended, along with the expansion of bonuses for students who took languages in Year 12.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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2 June, 2007

Bigoted British academics push through boycott of Israel

Post below lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links

An alliance of Islamist and Leftist groups has finally managed to drive through a boycott resolution against Israel's universities in the British faculty union, the University and Colleges Union. Offir Frankel, who directs the anti-boycott efforts at Bar-Ilan University, expressed amazement that

"the extremists who led their union to such an initiative decided not to discuss the option to pass this initiative to a vote of all 120,000 members, a decision that could have allowed the majority to rescue their union from this discriminatory action by re-harnessing the values of academic freedom, discourse and debate..."

But that's of course how the hard Left operates, by infiltrating the top of labor unions. That is an old, old tactic. It is how NOW (National Organization of Women) peddled the fraud that it represented all women in America, and how Jesse Jackson claims to represent all blacks in the country.

British Jews have hidden their heads in the sand. They have not mobilized effectively against the constant barrage of anti-Israel propaganda emerging from the Left (including the Guardian and BBC) and Islamic fascists, who are directly funded by Saudi Wahhabis. They may finally be waking up. Jeremy Newmark, of Jewish Leadership Council, is quoted as pointing out that "The UCU boycott motion is an assault on academic freedom." Indeed.

The United States is hardly immune to the new Left-fascist alliance. The World Union of Jewish Students points out that "In campuses abroad the climate of hostility towards the State of Israel and Jewish students is getting stronger." It is an ominous day for human liberty.




Discipline still problematical in British schools

Tony, a little boy in an oversized uniform, was trembling at the back of the playground. As I approached I could see why. He had fresh bruises on his face and little knife cuts on the back of his hand. At the far corner of the playground, I saw John, a large boy of 13 hovering, watching Tony and me closely. I asked Tony whether he was being picked on. His arm looked like someone had cut him with a knife. With a look of anxiety on his face, Tony denied this.

Wondering why John was hovering so circumspectly, I asked to look in his bag. He refused point-blank. I retreated, knowing that I didn’t have the power to do anything. I decided to fill in a report to Tony’s Year Head instead, voicing my suspicions. It was all I could do in the circumstances. A couple of hours later, John’s father phoned to complain that I had been wanting to look through his “private possessions”.

Thankfully, new powers that came into force just yesterday will give teachers like me the legal right to search pupils if they suspect they may have a weapon. Characters like John will no longer be able to bully kids with knives and get away with it, parents like his father will no longer be able to complain. Teachers will be able to breathe a sigh of relief that for once the Government has given them a little more power to impose order in our chaotic secondary schools. The statistics show that many schools are frenzied places. A recent report by the schools’ inspectorate reporting declining standards of behaviour in secondary schools – a third of lessons are ruined by poor behaviour.

Last year the police had to be called a number of times to avert riots at my local secondary school; one parent told me that her 15-year-old son carried a knife to school for self-defence. She, and many other parents like her throughout the country, are now grateful that the school has the power to search pupils thoroughly – with metal detectors – before they enter the premises. Finally, the school will become a safer place.

But how did we get into this sorry state where schools have to waste precious resources and time on simply checking that pupils are not carrying weapons? Ironically, the law has undoubtedly played a big role in the breakdown of order. With its focus upon children’s rights, it appears to have thrown the pupil out with the bath water. Perhaps most significantly, corporal punishment was made illegal in 1986, with teachers being stripped of many other sanctions that they used to apply. For example, we can’t detain a pupil for more than 20 minutes after school without giving 24 hours’ written notice to a pupil’s parent.

When I first started teaching in a tough comprehensive in the East End in the early 1990s, quite a few teachers would clip miscreants around the ear and expect them to behave. Generally, it worked because the pupils then weren’t fully aware that they could get their teacher sacked for doing this. Being a naive young teacher, I used this technique on a few occasions but I came unstuck when a pupil complained. Luckily, the matter was sorted out amicably – but I have never so much as touched a pupil from that day onwards.

I know that this has been to the detriment of my pupils. In particular, I have never physically attempted to break up fights between pupils or get between them – what if the pupil accuses you of assaulting them rather than stopping the fight? In April this year the law changed and now allows teachers to “use reasonable force” when restraining pupils from fighting or misbehaving.

But the law remains murky: in particular, the Human Rights Act means that children can still sue or sack teachers if they feel their “privacy, dignity and physical integrity” has been compromised. One colleague of mine was suspended for a year before being reinstated after an allegation that he had hit a child while stopping a fight was proved to be false. Often headteachers and governing bodies take the side of the pupils if there are a number of pupils saying that you are in the wrong. It’s not worth the hassle. You’re far better off letting the pupils beat the hell out of each other than intervening.

Much of the time the teacher is not, however, the target of disruption: it’s bullying and squabbling among a peer group that causes the worst problems, because disagreements can rumble on for weeks, months, years, erupting without warning in classrooms and playgrounds. The internet and mobile phones have aggravated the situation: now a nasty rumour, an embarrassing photo, a cutting remark can be spread around about a pupil within seconds and everyone knows about it. Within this climate, pupils seek revenge. Seven teenagers were murdered in London this year essentially over very trivial remarks: it appeared that they “dissed” or disrespected the wrong people.

The truth is that in huge schools teachers are overwhelmed by numbers. Pupil behaviour is much better in primary schools. This isn’t simply because the children are younger, it’s also because the schools are smaller and teachers are better able to form proper relationships with their pupils. A survey in April showed that temporary exclusions are running at nearly 10 per cent of pupils in secondary schools with more than 1,000 pupils, compared with 3 per cent in those with 1,000 or fewer children. We need to look at ways of making schools more “human-sized”.

Simply giving teachers the legal right to search pupils for weapons isn’t enough. We need to break up our larger schools into smaller, more manageable units. Above all, we must tighten the law even further so that teachers know they won’t be sued or sacked if they physically stop fights or challenge misbehaviour that blights Britain’s secondary schools.

Source




Widespread parent dissatisfaction with Australian schools

AUSTRALIAN parents are largely unhappy with the quality of school education, says a new Federal Government report. The survey of 2000 parents, conducted earlier this year, found many believed their children were receiving a substandard education. Only 58 per cent of parents said primary schooling was up to scratch, and less than 40 per cent said secondary schooling was acceptable. Dissatisfaction has jumped since the last Parents' Attitudes to Schooling survey in 2003, where 61 per cent of parents said primary school education was good or very good, and 51 per cent said secondary education was good or very good.

Those with a child in a non-government school were happier with both education and teacher quality than those with a child in a state school.

Just over a third of parents surveyed this year said they believed their child would leave school with adequate literacy and numeracy skills. Only one in five thought their child had learned enough about Australian history, and less then half said they had received adequate science lessons. However, more than 72 per cent were satisfied with the quality of teaching at their child's school.

Premier Steve Bracks yesterday defended the state's schools, saying Victoria has the best-performing education system in the country. "Our completion rates for year 12 education and its equivalent is going up, our literacy and numeracy levels are going up, we have the lowest teacher to student ratios ever in Victoria's history," Mr Bracks said. "Also, we have committed to rebuilding or modernising every school in the state. "The survey was done before the Budget where we committed $1 billion to . . . education."

Australian Education Union Victorian president Mary Bluett said the survey did not accurately reflect parents' attitudes. "In terms of their child's school and teachers, parents say they have high satisfaction; however, when asked . . . how they think education is going, their attitudes change and that reflects a general talking down of schools. "There has been a relentless attack on standards and the quality of teaching from the Federal Government, and parents have picked up on that."

Source

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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1 June, 2007

Students at UCI Fight Back Against Campus Intifada

The University of California at Irvine has earned a reputation as a campus where anti-Semitism and the vilification of Israel is welcome. In the past, for instance, UCI students have attended graduation ceremonies wearing Hamas paraphernalia. Now some pro-Israel and conservative students are fighting back by utilizing the California Whistleblowers Act.

The students' complaint centers around administrators who forced the College Republicans on campus to remove their display in a previously reserved space, in order to make room for yet another anti-Israel display on campus. According to the complaint: "On Thursday May 17, 2007, the College Republicans set up their booth in a location 46 as scheduled at 11 AM, but ten minutes later a university administrator from the UCI scheduling and Conferencing Services Department approached the CR's booth accompanied by a member of the Muslim Students Association on campus demanding the Republicans move their booth and display so the MSU could put in the same previously reserved location two large displays promoting MSU events."

Anteaters for Israel, a group of UC Irvine students who try to counteract the anti-Israel displays and activities on campus, have joined the College Republicans to complain that the MSU displays were set up specifically because they blocked the view of their pro-Israel displays, silencing the College Republicans by moving them to a less visible area on the campus. The MSU display, once assembled, required students and other passersby to walk around it to traverse that area of the campus.

Although complaints were made to the university's communications director, Leslie Millerd, who is also part of the Chancellor's Student Affairs department, she insisted that the College Republicans move -- even after being shown written proof of the advance space reservation made weeks earlier.

The students complaint charges that this is a violation of the US Constitution's First Amendment that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In addition, they say that it violates the school's own policy, listed as Appendix C, which clearly states: "The University of California, in accordance with applicable Federal and State law and University policy, does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy*, disability, age, medical condition (cancer-related), ancestry, marital status, citizenship, sexual orientation, or status as a Vietnam-era veteran or special disabled veteran. The University also prohibits sexual harassment. This nondiscrimination policy covers admission, access, and treatment in University programs and activities."

As the students see it, university administrators overstepped their bounds by restricting the free speech rights of two other conservative and pro-Israel organizations on campus to the benefit of the MSU.

Another legal basis for the complaint is the Unruh Civil Rights Act, California Civil Code, sections 51 to 51.3, which also provides equal protection under the law and "full and equal accommodations, advantage to facilities, privileges or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever." Another UCI Campus Policy #42.20, Section D, Paragraph 1 and other campus rules were also violated prohibiting excessively large displays and using more than one banner of an approved size at the event.

For anyone who has seen anti-Israel displays at UCI, they are enormous and designed to inundate the entire area, forcing students to be surrounded by them. Student leaders from both the College Republicans and Anteaters for Israel are demanding that the campus officials involved be investigated, prosecuted and fired.

At the last Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Georgetown University, in February 2006, seminars were held where attendees were instructed on how to enlist campus administrators in their anti-Israel campaigns. At the University of California at Irvine, they have evidently succeeded.

Still, the question remains: Did UCI officials intentionally hinder conservative and pro-Israel organizations on campus from speaking out? If so, one can only hope that authorities step in to protect the rights that, it seems, some politically motivated faculty will not.

Source




Independent schools are the model to which state schools should aspire

By Joanna Mendelssohn, commenting from Australia

RECENTLY I had a reunion with my very first friend, Anne. Our parents had been neighbours so we were babies together. Anne is blessed with an analytical talent for numbers, yet is a born communicator. She became a maths teacher. For more than 35 years she has taught maths to generations of students in state schools, in the city and the country.

She was able to take this path because, when we left school at the end of 1967, the NSW Education Department gave her a teaching scholarship that paid all fees and a generous allowance in return for her agreement to teach. This used to be the norm across the country; bonded teaching scholarships gave ordinary Australians the opportunity for a financially comfortable university education while ensuring a steady supply of young, qualified teachers for the state system.

In the 1970s, with the baby boom at an end, the system changed. Suddenly there was an oversupply of qualified teachers, so newly qualified teachers were freed of both their bonds and guaranteed jobs. Those who really wanted to teach could find soul-destroying work as casual relief staff until a vacancy occurred, but many left teaching altogether.

Before other avenues were open to us, teaching was often seen as the ideal profession for women, but by the 1980s this was not the case; there were also problems with teacher education. Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan's research at the Australian National University has tracked the entry grades of teaching students during a 20-year period. From 1983 to 2003, the percentile rank of teaching students fell from 74 to 61, while the rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. The drift was to a mediocre middle.

In those years the teaching force in state schools, bulging with teachers who had qualified in the late '60s, became stagnant as few new staff were employed. When, after years of casual teaching, young teachers finally found a job, they were often already burned out by a system that had failed them.

Anne told me of the school she remembers with greatest affection. It was deep in rural NSW. Because this school was so distant from any big town, the staff had no choice. They had to live near the families of the children they taught and they had to relate to the community. Teachers also socialised with each other outside of school hours. The direct result of this physical isolation was a culture of connectedness between the staff, students and community, and they worked together for the common good. Whenever I hear politicians speak of values and education in the same sentence, I think of this country school.

Education has been dragged to the centre stage of the political debate, where it is squabbled over as some kind of trophy in an increasingly infantile battle between politicians, teachers unions and dogma-led lobby groups. Meanwhile, parents are left puzzling their way through the verbiage as they try to decide which school can possibly deliver the most appropriate education for their children.

The problem with Australian schools is not whether they are independent, state or faith-based, but the size of their governing bureaucracy and the nature of the culture within that bureaucracy. State schools, independent schools and faith-based schools all teach to the same curriculum (albeit a different one in each state). The first great advantage of independent schools is not their manicured sports grounds or sandstone buildings (some of the best schools have neither). It is that they are small, discrete entities. The bureaucracy has a human scale and an easily identified chain of command. Parents and children know where to go if they have a problem. Each school employs its own staff and is free to foster their professional development, and promote them when they excel.

It used to be the case that teachers working in independent or faith-based schools tended to be poorly qualified in comparison with those in state schools. They were also paid considerably less. As the salaries and status of state teachers sank, in a kind of seesaw effect, the salaries, status and qualifications of teachers in independent schools rose.

The way this happened is at the heart of the state of school education today. When the state systems would not employ their newly trained teachers, private and faith-based schools leapt at the chance to upgrade their staff, and many state school-trained teachers, once rejected, now hold leadership positions in elite independent schools.

In the '70s and '80s, innovative principals, including Rod West of Sydney's Trinity Grammar, went out of their way to encourage first-class scholars to think of teaching as a career. Thanks to a significant real increase in school fees and increased government support for non-state schools, teachers in these schools are paid the same or more than those in the state system. They do, however, earn their money, as these teachers are faced with far higher expectations. As well as teaching in the classroom, teachers in independent and faith-based schools are expected to become a part of the school community. They need to be available (often by email) out of school hours and, above all, to adopt the ethos of the school where they work. It is amazing what a school can achieve if the entire school community is travelling in the same direction.

The key to developing quality teachers in whatever system comes back to how they are appointed, mentored and promoted. Good schools look after their staff. Smaller, flexible administrative units make it easier for independent schools to identify the talent, mentor new staff to ease them into a career path and then promote staff or redeploy them to where they can be most useful to the school.

By contrast, state systems are still struggling to free themselves from their historic bureaucratic past. Australia's state school systems were established well before Federation, when every state proclaimed itself to be a nation. In other English-speaking countries, where the population was less sparse, schools tended to be run by local authorities. Australia is unique in the immense size and scope of our centralised education administration. There is in any bureaucratic institution a tendency to "team think". In schools, this tendency was exacerbated by a tightly controlled employment structure where, for more than a century, almost all employees had started as school-leavers and risen up a well-defined hierarchy.

Because the dominant group entering this workforce was from an aspirational working-class background, there was from the start a strong union presence. The union presence was embedded within the departmental hierarchy so the junior teacher would often discover that the person supervising her was also the union representative.

Times change, but workplace cultures change slowly. Although there have been some reforms in the way staff are appointed, it is still the case that individual state schools in Australia have less flexibility in appointing and dismissing staff than government-funded schools in equivalent countries.

The Prime Minister has recently declared that he will require a situation where principals alone have the choice to hire and fire staff. At the same time, he has declared a fatwa on bullying in schools. I'm not sure that replacing an unfeeling bureaucracy with an authoritarian hierarchy is going to change school cultures to something inclusive.

A school is a large and complex organisation. Surely the best way to build a team with the school community is to have each school appoint staff, but using a committee that includes parents and colleagues as well as the hierarchy. Bringing the community into the life of the school is a big task. Independent and Catholic schools do this well by co-opting that most effective cultural glue, Saturday sport. All students in these schools are expected to play a team sport and every Saturday, across the country, parents are car pooling and driving to ovals in distant parts of the city. At the ovals parent groups run barbecues, and cheer on their children. The teachers also participate as coaches and wise school principals call by. The schools' sense of community comes from such small weekly acts.

If sporting clubs could liaise with local state schools and be funded so that all state school children could play competitive Saturday sport, and if state teachers could also be involved with supporting their students, then more parents would be involved in the daily life of their schools. It is the kind of cultural glue our schools need to make them strong and help give them a sense of community.

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"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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